Venus, Volcanoes & Virtual Clothing

Decision making that will decisively influence the coming decade of biodiversity preservation efforts is on the horizon, and conservationists know it. The 2020 CBD (Convention of Biological Diversity) was placed on hold, like many other events, due to the coronavirus pandemic, so many in the field are awaiting the announcement of its go ahead later this year. As such there has been a recent glut of research published in scientific journals, made up of what you could call big picture global analyses. Scientists are aware their findings could make a real difference at the convention, and with previous targets not being met, such as the 2020 goal of protecting 17% of terrestrial areas which we fell short of by 2%, the very latest research is vital. Harry Lewis pulled together three of the biggest authors from this past week, David Williams, lecturer in Sustainability and the Environment at the University of Leeds, Angela Brennan, Conservation Scientist at the University of British Columbia and James Allan, researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, to find out if the new speculated target of protecting 30% of land coverage by 2030 will be enough to safehouse species across the globe…

James - Our analysis shows that 44% of terrestrial area is an absolute minimum, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a protected area. And I think it's really important to make that nuance clear. When we think about how much lands at risk from conversion to human land uses the numbers become much more manageable. We're looking at an area about the size of South Africa spread across the world. You know, that's big, but it's not too big. And so we can target that. We don't need to think about half the planet, you know, 60% of the planet, et cetera...

Harry - Angela.

Angela - These numbers, they don't really address the fragmentation when habitat loss results in discrete patches of habitat and animals can move through non-habit habitat. But the data that we used in our analysis shows that movement declines with increasing pressures. So we really need to mitigate the factors that are limiting or preventing them from moving in those spaces. More than 75% of the land has been modified in some way by humans and more than 90% of the world's protected areas are embedded in that matrix of human dominated land.

Harry - And James, back to your 44% of land that requires some sort of protection. Did you look at the locations that required such protection?

James - Yeah, so we overlaid sort of maps of land use projections for 2030 and 2050 and saw where's at risk. Most of that's in Africa, sadly, which is my home continent, but that's very much the front line of the next decade. And we also tracked this under different development scenarios. So if we followed a more green trajectory in line with meeting Paris agreement 1.5 degree style targets, we actually could have sort of a sevenfold decrease there. So we've got a huge window of opportunity to do something good here. We just need to act quickly.

Harry - Yeah, David.

David - Sorry, just to comment on that as well. That's a fantastic point. So I think it it's really important that we don't just focus on this active protection if you like, putting fences up around things or managing the land in some way, but also think about kind of more passive protection. If we can stop the underlying drivers of habitat loss of deforestation, of all of these pressures, then our whole job just gets so much easier. So looking at the root causes of why we have problems is potentially even more important than actually the protection.

Harry - And again, what are those root causes?

David - James highlights, Africa, as where a lot of things are going to happen in the future. And that's really a combination of massive population growth and quite rapid increases in or projective increases in GDP. And those two things combined mean that we're gonna need to produce a lot more food with really low agricultural yields, very slowly increasing. So you need a big area to produce that food.

Harry - James.

James - Often the people living on the ground in the conservation areas around them are also losing their livelihoods, their land to these bigger, you know, forces of change such as commercial agriculture. And so conservation is a very clear win-win if you partner with them in the right way and empower local people like that.

Harry - All in all with negotiations coming up for the CBD this year, what is it that you want to see? Or what is it that you're hoping to see David?

David - The paper that I had out this week looks at whether the protected areas that we have, basically, whether they're big enough to support populations of target species of mammals in particular. And what we found is that about half of the world's mammals, we don't have big enough protected areas or well connected enough areas to actually support a population that's gonna survive in the long term. So from a protected area point of view, what I would like to see is trying to get a measure of actually keeping populations alive, not just setting land aside.

Harry - James, you got anything to add.

James - I think the targets themselves are shaping up very nicely. And whether you have a number like 25%, 30%, 40%, I don't think that matters. It's big and it's in the right direction. And one of the tragedies of the last 10 years of targets was governments sign this, and then no one does anything until they get near the deadline. And we just don't have time for that anymore. We can't sign an agreement, you know, this year and wait until five years down the track to act, it'll be too late. That's my biggest push.

Harry - Angela

Angela - From a connectivity perspective, I hope that the CBD can go big and take on the issue of connecting ecosystems and protected areas. Currently, I believe they're discussing some global connectivity indicators and there's a few that are on the table. And in our analysis we kind of put forth this indicator that describes how connected protected areas are from the perspective of moving mammals. And that's an aspect of connectivity that hasn't been captured before. In other global indicators.

For some people, one of the signs that summer has well and truly arrived is the start of the new series of hit reality TV show Love Island. Another couple of months worth of the usual sun, secrecy and scandal commenced last week, but with an added twist. Instead of being kitted out in clothes from fast fashion brands, this year’s contestants are wearing garments garnered from eBay, meaning that they are all second hand. The show has previously signed brand deals with fashion companies with a pile them high and sell them cheap strategy, which has catastrophic consequences for the environment. As fast fashion brands have shrugged off their Covid slump and begun reaping the rewards from customers with an insatiable desire for new things to wear, environmentalists are extremely concerned about the already massive problem of waste in the fashion industry. James Tytko with this report...

James - Synthetic polymers like nylon, polyester and polystyrene are very durable materials, and that's what makes them so useful in manufacturing cheap clothes. But it also leaves us with a big problem when we are done wearing them. These long polymer chains are difficult to break down and if they end up in landfill, which an entire rubbish truck full of clothes do every second, they degrade extremely slowly. So what can we do about the problem? Well, one option is to try and find a quicker way to degrade the microplastics present in clothes headed for landfill. Research from the University of Queensland in Australia has been observing the ability of the larvae of darkling Beatles, dubbed "super worms", to eat their way through polystyrene, survive on it and even gain weight. I spoke to Dr. Chris Rinke about how studying these tiny creatures can help us to find the solution to the issue of plastic pollution...

Chris R - The way we understand it is that the larvae, known as superworms, eat the polystyrene and mechanically degrades it into smaller particles. Ingests it.

James - By mechanical degradation, do you mean chewing?

Chris R - Yeah. The worm does the chewing, exactly (insect larvae very good mouth parts) and then feeds it to its microbiome, the bacteria in the gut. We were especially interested in those bacteria and we found several encoded enzymes for the degradation of polystyrene and then also for styrene, which is a breakdown product of polystyrene.

James - And now you've observed this going on, what's the potential? What's the long term plan here? Are we going to have maybe massive farms full of worms breaking down polystyrene?

Chris R - We really want to scale that process and what we think actually scales way better is if we focus on the enzymes in the gut. We know of some of them, we know what kind of enzymes we are looking for, we have the sequences, but the next step is we really have to prove in the test tube that those enzymes are degrading the polystyrene, and especially under what conditions they're doing it.

James - So far today, we've been talking about polystyrene and that's what you've been studying with the larvae. Is there potential, do you think for what you're coming to understand here, to be applicable to other plastics? Other thermoplastics? Other polymers? Some of the bigger polluters are materials like polyester and nylon.

Chris R - You mentioned polyester, right? That's a term for a category of synthetic polymers that contain a functional ester group. And there are actually enzymes out there, natural enzymes, that can target this ester group. So even some of the enzymes we found in the polystyrene-degrading super worms, they actually act later in the process and they can attack this ester group.

James - Using naturally occurring enzymes to biodegrade synthetic plastic is certainly a promising field in trying to mitigate the fast fashion waste problem, but it could take some years for an overhaul of the way we treat plastic waste to fully take shape. Instead, what we may be able to do more quickly is change people's habits when it comes to consuming fashion, simply buying fewer items or wearing pre-loved clothes are some of the most obvious ways, but a new branch of the fashion industry, which seeks to keep up with the insatiable demand of fast fashion consumers without harming the planet is developing. I spoke to Maghan McDowell, senior innovation editor at Vogue business magazine...

Maghan - It's a really complex problem to solve, but one that has been really interesting to cover in my career, and in the past three years has been this idea of digital fashion; designing digitally, creating clothes digitally, to actually consumers wearing them, which is kind of unexpected and interesting.

James - And I'm sure there are people who first hear that idea and think who on earth would want to buy a garment or something that they could only wear digitally?

Maghan - I think there actually is quite an audience that spans ages and especially I think in the pandemic, it was quite clear that the number of people who might have seen you wear a cool outfit going to the store or going to a restaurant, is pretty minimal compared to hypothetically the number of people who see you on Instagram or see you on Snapchat. We're starting to think about what is the value of clothing? Does it give you that dopamine hit to wear something really cool on the internet? And I think it does.

James - I suppose this is the potential future where you're going to be scrolling on Instagram or tapping through Snapchat and not knowing anymore whether the clothes people are wearing on the screen are real or not.

Maghan - Yes. Like, I have a number of images of digital fashion on my Instagram where, throughout the pandemic, I posted all these fantastical outfits that I didn't wear physically, but I got to wear them on Instagram. And I think now brands are seeing it, not just as a marketing opportunity, but as a real way of doing business.

James - I get it. And instead of trying to curb people's desire for access to new clothes at more regular intervals, this is a way to keep up with that demand, as you say, to look cool, to stand out, but in a way that isn't harmful for the planet.

Maghan - Yeah. I think that's the premise. And that's the promise beyond just when you look at the consumer uses, there's even potentially more value in the back end before it gets to the consumer standpoint. And I think a big turning point in the industry for me was in late 2019 PVH corp, which owns Tommy Hilfiger, said that by this year, 2022, they aimed to design all of their products digitally, which means when they design, sample, fit on model, send to production, all of this process ideally would happen digitally. That is a huge point of savings, both cost time and just waste. It reduces waste. And you don't even realise that it's not a physical garment that was photographed on a model. And I think that's really interesting.

Is there life on Mars? David Bowie and a host of space scientists have asked this question for many, many years. But what about our other neighbouring planet, Venus? Studies of our morning star have led to some strange observations about Venus’ atmosphere, which have led to speculation that maybe life might inhabit the clouds. A study published this week in Nature put this hypothesis to the test, using what we know about digestion and a computer. Sean Jordan, from the University of Cambridge, who conducted this research, first gave Julia Ravey an idea about what it might be like to live on Venus…

Sean - Venus is very, very hot and high pressure at its surface. The atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide. So when we talk about greenhouse gases on earth, like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we're talking about hundreds of parts per million. But on Venus, the whole atmosphere is made of CO2. So it's really, really hot. And it's also got this really thick cloud layer that's made of sulphuric acid and this cloud layer acts like an insulating blanket across the whole planet. While the surface is completely uninhabitable, we have conditions in the cloud layer that are suitable for life, as far as we know on Earth, in terms of pressure and temperature.

Julia - And so what are the hypotheses for why there are such high levels of sulfur in Venus' atmosphere?

Sean - Venus is in a regime called a stagnant-lid regime; whilst earth has plate tectonics, which helps to recycle materials from the surface and atmosphere back into the interior, all of these mechanisms for drawing down gases from the atmosphere back into the interior, Venus doesn't have this. So that means that when you have volcanoes releasing gases into the atmosphere, these gases just build up and build up and build up until they become really high pressure.

Julia - And these conditions, as you mentioned before, are potentially life-permitting. If there were to be life up in the clouds of Venus, what would that life be?

Sean - Well, that would be microbial life. Nothing like you or me., not even things like birds flying around, it would just be tiny little microbes and they would be living inside of the cloud droplets. And basically the whole biosphere would have to be in this permanently aerial regime where you have microbial life in the droplets, replicating, metabolising, doing all of its processes that it needs. And then when they fall to the hotter region at the base of the cloud deck, the cloud droplets would evaporate, the microbes would turn into spores and then some proportion of those spores would get uplifted back up to the cloud layer. And it would repeat this cycle.

Julia - If life was in Venus' atmosphere, what would we expect to see in terms of alterations to the gases that are present there?

Sean - It would have to use the chemicals in the atmosphere in order to generate energy via some sort of energy metabolism. And then if that life is sufficiently abundant, it would have to be altering the chemistry of the atmosphere via that energy metabolism, by the loss and gain of different chemicals from the atmosphere. So what we would expect to see is some depletion or some release of gases in the atmosphere that isn't otherwise consistent with an atmosphere without life.

Julia - And are there any models which you can use to test if there is life out there and it's changing the atmosphere in this way?

Sean - There have been energy metabolisms proposed that life on Venus, if it exists, would be able to use based on what we know is in the atmosphere and based on known terrestrial metabolisms that some microbes on earth use. So what we can do is we can test whether life is there and altering the atmosphere via these metabolisms by doing computer simulations, where we couple the metabolism occurring due to a biosphere in the crowd layer with the full atmosphere of Venus. And we can see what effects that biosphere would have on the atmosphere.

Julia - And you've done this. So what did you find?

Sean - We found that the main feature in the sulphur chemistry in the clouds of Venus that currently is not fully explained, where sulfur dioxide is kind of sucked out of the atmosphere in the cloud layer; this is exactly the kind of feature that could potentially be indicative of a biosphere using the suggested metabolisms. And when we ran the models, we found that actually whilst each metabolism that was proposed could, in principle, reproduce the observations of this sulphur dioxide being sucked out of the atmosphere, what it meant was that other species in the atmosphere would then be violating their observational constraints. And so we can rule out the hypothesis that life is responsible for sucking this SO2 out of the atmosphere in the cloud layer.

Julia - Does this mean that there isn't any life on Venus?

Sean - Well, not necessarily. It just means that we can place an upper limit on how much life could potentially be there using the suggested metabolisms before violating the observational constraints. And that upper limit turns out to be quite small. So it's only possible that a relatively small biosphere or low biomas biosphere could be there in the clouds, but you could never rule out the possibility that there's any life there. The other implication is that even if our own Venus in the solar system turns out to not have life in the clouds, if it's possible, even in principle that you could have this kind of life that lives permanently within a cloud layer, then that also has enormous implications on life elsewhere in the universe, because that means that we might be able to find life on planets whose surfaces are too hot to be habitable, but which will also have cloud layers that could be at the right pressures and temperatures.

Crohn’s and Ulcerative colitis - the two main types of inflammatory bowel disease - Infliximab is the first-choice biologic treatment to control the disease. This therapy is usually administered by intravenous infusion, requiring 2 hours in hospital each time, which can be painful, invasive, and cause adverse effects. Now, non-for-profit organisation CPI are working with Intact Pharma to successfully repackage the biologic drug infliximab into a more effective and more convenient oral capsule. Julia Ravey spoke with Dr Vipul Yadav, CEO of Intract Pharma, and Louise Barker from CPI, who lives with Crohn’s herself…

Louise - There's a saying that no two people experience Crohn's or colitis in the same way. In essence, it does affect you on a day-to-day basis. It can affect pain levels, fatigue, and other common symptoms that come through with Crohn's and colitis is bleeding, having things like abscesses, fissure, fistulas, which can be life threatening, because they cause severe infection and the cause damage through the bowel and into other areas of the body as well. You need injections of certain vitamins. There is no cure. So one of the key things is trying to get your body into remission and that's through different techniques through tablets, biologic treatment or surgery.

Julia - What are the current treatment options that you have if you have Crohn's or colitis?

Louise - For myself at the moment, I take an immunosuppressant in addition to a drug called infliximab, which is currently given intravenously in hospital. And I have the two drugs together as a dual therapy, which in essence, when you take the infliximab intravenously, your body can actually build up antibodies to it, which makes it less effective and your body doesn't respond to it. I take immunosuppressants, a drug called azathioprine, which then suppresses my immune system so my immune system doesn't end up actually creating that antibody to it. The idea is that will make it more effective. However, there are consequences of doing that, unfortunately, because what that means is that your body is severely compromised in terms of an immune system.

Julia - It sounds like a complex form of treatment that not only impacts your health in other ways, but also it's potentially quite invasive if you're having to have intravenous treatment. So Vipul, how are we trying to revolutionise this treatment?

Vipul - Our company's focused on developing a pill-based form for these drugs that currently patients like Louise have to go to a hospital and take an infusion for hours. We are trying to develop a pill-based technology that takes that drug out of that injection into a pill that you can take at home. Our technology is designed to release this potent medicine directly at the site of your intestine where the disease is, and it prevents the drug from getting into your circulation, so you don't get all the adverse effects and potentially, your immune system creating antibodies against the drug. We completely prevent that.

Julia - How do you target it to the disease site?

Vipul - It's like a film quoting that you can apply on the outside of a tablet or a capsule and that film quoting will prevent this drug from being released in your stomach and your upper small intestine where you digest food and absorb nutrients. We bypass that entire region with the help of that film coating and that coating only dissolves in your large bowel, where you have the right conditions like the pH and the bugs, and that's where the drug is released and gets taken up.

Julia - Where are we at with this drug?

Vipul - So we are still at the testing stages, but what we as a company have done is partnered with another big company who is already manufacturing this drug in the form of an injection. So we are partnering with them to take that already effective drug as an injection to then apply that into our pill form. So we are currently scaling this technology up and that's where we collaborated with CPI, the consortium who really helped us in optimising the formulation of this capsule and developed the manufacturing processes that will help us to take this product quicker into clinical trials.

Louise - For me personally, I just think this treatment could absolutely be revolutionary for patients like me. The key things for me is the travel to and from hospital to have the IV treatment. And that's quite an invasive process to actually have IV treatment as well. You need dedicated IBD specialist nurses with you when you’re having that treatment. We go for a blood test before we're about to have that as well to make sure that there's no infection in the body. On top of that, as I said earlier, I'm on immunosuppressants, which means that I actually do alter my behaviour because of those immunosuppressants. Going on holiday, for example, I was just explaining that I tend to look for where would the nearest hospital be if I did get an infection, what kind of travel routes I want to take to minimise contact and things like that. You do alter your behaviour with the treatment that you are on. So the thought for me of just being able to have a tablet, which means I don't need immunosuppressants, I don't need to travel into hospital and I can literally just wake up on a morning, go downstairs and take my tablet for me, could actually be life-changing, as corny as that might sound, but it is actually quite a life-changing treatment for people like me