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Deep beneath the Earth’s surface, an extraordinary discovery has been made. Microbes – alive and thriving – have been found sealed within a fracture of 2-billion-year-old rock.

This finding pushes the boundaries of our understanding of life’s resilience and longevity.

Lead researcher Yohey Suzuki, an associate professor from the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo, couldn’t hide his excitement.

“We didn’t know if 2-billion-year-old rocks were habitable,” Suzuki explained. “Until now, the oldest geological layer in which living microorganisms had been found was a 100-million-year-old deposit beneath the ocean floor, so this is a very exciting discovery.”

By studying the DNA and genomes of microbes like these, scientists may be able to understand the evolution of very early life on Earth.

August 9, 2023 4:18 PM EDT

The more typical form of kidney disease is either genetic or a consequence of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or hypertension, and it largely affects an older population.

CKDnt is closely tied to heat stress, and is more prevalent among outdoor laborers or miners who work in high heat conditions. While the causes are still debated, it appears to be triggered by an incidence of acute kidney injury—think extreme heat stress or heat stroke—and is exacerbated by continued exposure and dehydration. Studies in mice show that daily heat exposure and dehydration “can cause chronic tubulointerstitial disease with fibrosis and inflammation [scarring in the kidney’s small tubes], similar to what is observed in renal biopsies of subjects with Mesoamerican nephropathy,”

First published: 10 November 2020

Silica exposure causes many other adverse health effects, including silicosis, cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis, autoimmune disease, and various kidney disorders. Together with the increase in mortality, these findings make silica exposure a priority concern for public health, in addition to urban air pollution.

The exposure to ventilated quartz dust, silica sand, and stone dust occurred over the years from opening bags with and pouring and mixing raw materials, necessary steps in the production of paints, which appears to be the cause of the onset of silicosis. 

2 CASE PRESENTATION

49-year-old man, a former smoker for approximately 12 years of approximately 20 cigarettes/d, was a specialized worker in charge of the production of paints and employed by a company in Southern Italy that supplied water-based paints, quartz paints, and wall paints and coatings for the building industry from 1994 to 2018. The work performed by the patient for 8 h/d consisted of opening bags containing the raw paint materials in powder form (calcium carbonate, micronized talc, titanium dioxide, sand, ventilated quartz flour, silica sand, stone dust, colored pigments, etc) and pouring them manually into tanks and cisterns to mix them with water by a rotating blade placed on the bottom. After this phase, the final product is verified and packaged. In addition, the operator was tasked with carefully monitoring the evolution of the production cycle and eventually completing the composition of the final product by introducing other dusty materials. The worker reported that his company provided him with FFP2 masks but that he only used them occasionally. Furthermore, the work environment first installed workplace dust extractors only in 2008.

Silica-Related Diseases

Silica dust exposure may contribute to several serious, debilitating and life-altering health conditions. Lung cancer and silicosis are among the more severe conditions caused by silica dust.

Health Conditions Related to Silica Dust

Autoimmune disorders

Bronchitis

Cardiovascular impairment

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Emphysema

Kidney disease

Lung cancer

Silicosis

Pulmonary silicosis is a debilitating condition that causes the formation of silicotic nodules in the lungs. These lesions tend to group in the upper lobes. They can lead to impaired lung function and eventually death. Silica dust exposure is the only cause of silicosis.

From Sasquatch to Nessie to Chupacabra, mythical creatures have long fascinated us. We look at the latest Bigfoot news and a beloved hoax with a surprising connection to a medical breakthrough.

Bigfoot could get official status if proposed legislation passes making it the state cryptid of California. If nothing else, the effort shows that fascination with cryptids has an outsized footprint on our culture. We look at why mythical creatures continue to capture imaginations - as well as passions - of die-hard believers, despite no evidence for their existence. An author uncovers the origin of a beloved hoax in the American West and its unexpected ties to a real animal and historical medical breakthrough. But are we looking for creature delights in all the wrong places? A tally of Earth’s species reveals that far more remain unidentified than are currently known. Newly discovered critters such as the Yeti crab and an organism dubbed the Flying Spaghetti Monster are so strange, it challenges us to separate fauna fact from folktale.

Can AI Let Us Chat with Dolphins?

Dolphins are renowned for their intelligence and social skills. These large-brained marine mammals communicate using individualized signature clicks and whistles and even seem to recognize their own “names.” Big advances in artificial intelligence have renewed some scientists’ dream of eventually understanding what dolphins are saying. But what if we humans could also respond?

Now a few researchers think a form of two-way communication with dolphins could be on the horizon. In collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the nonprofit Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), Google has announced progress on what the team has as the first large language model (LLM) for dolphin vocalizations, called DolphinGemma.

Painted ladies are the ultramarathoners of the butterfly world—even more so than monarchs. Scientists have long known about their globetrotting tendencies, but only recently have their exact migratory routes come into focus.

Over several generations the butterflies can fly up to 9,300 miles annually from Scandinavia to equatorial Africa and back.

Although not every painted lady travels widely, researchers recently detailed in PNAS Nexus that certain individuals fly up to 2,500 miles from Europe to overwintering grounds in the African Sahel, journeying over the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert on the way.

A few even inadvertently cross the Atlantic Ocean to South America, other researchers found.

In North America, meanwhile, painted ladies flutter between Mexico and Canada.

In Asia, they’ve even been spotted cutting through the Himalayas.

Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.

For decades, the nation has been trying to send it all to one secure location.

A 1987 federal law named Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, as a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste – but political and legal challenges led to construction delays. Work on the site had barely started before Congress ended the project’s funding altogether in 2011.

The 94 nuclear reactors currently operating at 54 power plants continue to generate more radioactive waste. Public and commercial interest in nuclear power is rising because of concerns regarding emissions from fossil fuel power plants and the possibility of new applications for smaller-scale nuclear plants to power data centers and manufacturing. This renewed interest gives new urgency to the effort to find a place to put the waste.

In March 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments related to the effort to find a temporary storage location for the nation’s nuclear waste – a ruling is expected by late June. No matter the outcome, the decades-long struggle to find a permanent place to dispose of nuclear waste will probably continue for many years to come.

A sandstorm in central and southern Iraq sent more than 1,800 people to hospitals with respiratory problems on Monday, health officials said.

Authorities temporarily shut the airports in the southern provinces of Najaf and Basra as the sandstorm—the biggest this year—obscured visibility in an eerie orange cloud.

Iraq, which endures blistering summer heat and regular sandstorms, is one of the five countries most impacted by some effects of climate change, says the United Nations.

Hospitals in Muthanna province in southern Iraq received at least "700 cases of suffocation," local health official Mazen al-Egeili said.

"One of the weird things to wrap your brain around with these deep space missions is how slow the speed of light is," continued Vincent. "Lucy is 12.5 light minutes away from Earth, meaning it takes that long for any signal we send to reach the spacecraft. Then it takes another 12.5 minutes before we get Lucy's response telling us we were heard. So, when we command the data playback after closest approach, it takes 25 minutes from when we ask to see the pictures before we get any of them to the ground."

A team of researchers at UM have developed an innovative new tool that could transform how kidney disease is detected—especially in under-served and remote communities.

The device, called the uCR-Chip, is a low-cost, portable diagnostic tool that makes kidney function testing faster, easier and more accessible. It delivers results in under seven minutes and doesn't require advanced lab equipment.

Our findings show that adsorbed glycine at the alumina surface prefers specific surface sites and adopts preferred orientations following the lattice direction of surface oxygen atoms, particularly in long chains with high n. Water also plays an important role. Glycine in long chains has fewer coordinated water molecules than it does as an isolated monomer in solution, indicating the necessity of water removal to form long chains during the assembly of adsorbed glycine. Although questions pertaining to the thermodynamics and kinetics of interfacial peptide condensation reactions necessitate further investigations using quantum mechanical approaches, this work reveals how oxide surfaces promote pre-reaction assembly and accelerate the prebiotic formation of life’s building blocks because of high local density and surface templating effects.