Category Archives: Science

Health, Medical, Research, Science

Blood test that can detect Alzheimer’s 15 years before onset

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

A SIMPLE blood test can detect Alzheimer’s disease up to 15 years before symptoms begin, a major trial has found. It paves the way for a national screening programme.

The trial found that the test was as accurate as the current gold standard for diagnosing the condition.

For the first time, doctors were able to say if a person had a high, medium, or low chance, of having the disease – ruling out further invasive procedures.

Experts have said it would “revolutionise” diagnosis, making Alzheimer’s as easy to test and detect as for other routine health conditions such as high cholesterol.

Patients could expect results within days of visiting their GP, rather than the years it currently takes to get a diagnosis. This could have huge implications for future treatments, removing the barriers for a diagnosis – such as long waits for spinal taps or brain scans – and speeding up trials.

It could also pave the way for screening over-50s once more effective treatments become available.

Made by diagnostics company ALZpath, it was found to be 97 per cent accurate at detecting traces of the “tau” protein, which was linked to developing Alzheimer’s disease during the eight-year trials. These proteins start to build up on the brain 10 to 15 years before symptoms start showing.

Researchers in Sweden found high levels of the “tau” protein in the blood test corresponded to high levels of Alzheimer markers seen in expensive diagnostic brain scans and painful lumbar punctures.

The more of this leaked “tau” brain protein in the blood, the more likely or advanced the Alzheimer’s disease was in the tests involving 786 people. Growing evidence suggests biomarker changes like these can be detected in the blood years before other signs of the disease appear in the brain.

It means if scientists can find a way to stop these protein levels from rising, they could effectively halt Alzheimer’s in its tracks.

With breakthrough treatments such as donanemab and lecanemab on the horizon, experts say it is vital to have quick and reliable diagnoses. Professor David Curtis of University College London Genetics Institute said this was “one half of the solution”, while we await effective treatments.

He added: “This potentially could have huge implications. Everybody over 50 could be routinely screened every few years, in much the same way as they are now screened for high cholesterol.”

Around 900,000 people in the UK live with dementia – with Alzheimer’s the most common form. The growing ageing population means numbers are expected to rise to 1.6million by 2040, making a cheap screening tool vital to get to grips with the challenge.

Alzheimer’s Research UK analysis found 74,261 people died from dementia in 2022 compared with 69,178 a year earlier, making it the country’s biggest killer. While previous blood tests have shown promise, these findings have caused particular excitement given the high accuracy levels, large study size, and because the test already exists commercially.

It is also the first time a blood test has been found to be at least as good as a painful lumbar puncture or spinal tap for detecting elevated levels of the tau protein, according to the research team at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Lumbar punctures involve taking fluid from the patient’s spinal cord. The inexpensive tests – priced at around £150 – could also be used to monitor a patient’s condition, allowing more tailored trials or treatment in future.

Dr Richard Oakley, of the Alzheimer’s Society, urged that more research would be needed, but said: “This study is a huge welcome step in the right direction as it shows that blood tests can be just as accurate as more invasive and expensive tests.

“It suggests results from these tests could be clear enough to not require follow-up investigations for some people living with Alzheimer’s disease, which could speed up diagnosis.”

The tests would need regulatory approval before widespread use. But they could form part of NHS trials starting imminently and looking to roll out blood tests for Alzheimer’s within the next five years.

The scientists’ findings were first published in JAMA Neurology.

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Environment, Science, Technology, United States

Ammonia is being developed as a low-carbon fuel

ENVIRONMENT

Intro: A start-up in America is developing world’s first ammonia-powered ships

THE Brooklyn Navy Yard’s sprawling industrial complex once employed 70,000 workers to build US battleships and aircraft carriers during the second world war. Almost 80 years later, it has become home to a New York city firm with a very different maritime mission – harnessing ammonia as a low-carbon fuel for the global shipping industry.

The start-up Amogy has already shown how ammonia-powered technology can work in a flying drone, a John Deere tractor and most recently a truck. Now, it is working on an ammonia-powered ship.

Most ships currently run on fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, accounting for 3 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. One alternative involves converting vehicles to hydrogen power that would only emit water. But hydrogen gas needs to be compressed and liquified at -253°C for storage and transportation.

Ammonia could serve as an alternative hydrogen-bearing fuel that is more easily stored and transported in a stable liquid form at room temperature.

Hydrogen can be extracted by heating ammonia to high temperatures, which is a process that comes with its own energy cost. This is where Amogy’s technology comes in. To make ammonia power more viable, the company has developed what it describes as a more efficient and miniaturised “ammonia cracking” method that can chemically extract hydrogen from ammonia at a lower temperature. It uses a proprietary catalyst to speed up the process inside a chemical reactor that feeds into a hydrogen fuel cell.

A leading chemist at Saint Mary’s College of California says that what Amogy was able to bring to the table is that by having better catalytic technologies (all proprietary) they were able to miniaturise their ammonia cracking units and put them on board vehicles.

It was in July 2021 when Amogy first showed that its system could supply 5 kilowatts of power to a drone. By comparison, a standard ammonia cracking system for extracting that amount of hydrogen power is usually the size of a large shipping container. It also paved the way for a 100-kilowatt tractor demonstration in May 2022. That was followed by a 300-kilowatt truck demonstration in January 2023. The firm is now working towards demonstrating a 1-megawatt system in a tugboat.

Many countries already have pipelines and port facilities for handling ammonia that is produced industrially as fertiliser for agriculture. The US alone has more than 5000 kilometres of ammonia pipelines compared with 2500 kilometres of pipeline for transporting hydrogen – though it will need more to support ammonia-powered vehicles.

Another challenge is that ammonia still “has a carbon footprint associated with the production” because the standard industrial process uses natural gas. Low-carbon ammonia production would require use of carbon capture.

Cleaner alternative methods could ideally use electricity from renewable power sources to split water into hydrogen for conversion to ammonia.

. Science Book: Chemistry

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Research, Science

Scientists reveal that the proton’s size is moveable

PARTICLE PHYSICS

Intro: The radius of the proton, a subatomic particle, seems to vary depending on how you look at it

THE proton, one of the building blocks for all matter, is proving to be an awkward customer to size up. If you look at its charge, it will have one radius, but if you look at its mass, you will see a different, smaller radius.

A new picture of the proton is emerging. In the 1960s, experiments that fired electrons at protons revealed that the latter contained point-like, electrically charged particles that we now call quarks. A proton has two up quarks and a down one. Quarks were later found to be bound together by particles called gluons.

We now know more about quarks and how far their electric field extends in space, which is sometimes called the radius of the proton. But we know less about gluons, which contain most of the mass of the proton in the form of energy, because they are chargeless, and so much harder to investigate. Seeing how they are distributed can tell us about how the proton’s mass is arranged and its structure.

Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have probed the proton’s gluons with particles called J/psi mesons. This is possible because even though gluons don’t have electric charge, they have a property called colour charge, which comes from the strong nuclear force, one of the universe’s four fundamental forces. J/psi mesons are made up of a charm quark and its antiquark, which also have colour charge and so are capable of interacting with gluons.

The researchers fired a beam of photons at liquid hydrogen, which is comprised mainly of just protons, and the photons interacted with the protons. These collisions produced short-lived J/psi mesons. By measuring how many of these were produced, the research team could calculate the proton’s mass distribution using quantum mechanical models that describe gluon-quark interactions.

Their results suggest that the gluons’ mass is confined to a dense core in the proton’s centre, while the charge from the quarks extends to a second, larger radius.

They also compared their results with predictions from another model of the proton, which agreed in some places and diverged at others, suggesting that the new figures need validating with more precise experiments or one that probe proton structure in a different way.

If it is confirmed, it will be a very interesting finding because it tells us something quite deep about how the proton’s constituents behave from a spatial point of view.

A different internal structure could have implications for calculating other proton properties, such as spin, angular momentum and energy distribution, which many sensitive experiments rely on. But some of the new proton findings rest on models used to calculate them, which haven’t proved entirely reliable in the past.

The results follow another revelation about the proton’s internal structure. Last year, a research team found that the proton can contain a much heavier charm quark, in addition to the three regular quarks, but asked: ‘Does the mass radius become larger or smaller?’

. Further understanding on quarks can be found:

Science Book: Physics

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