March News in brief

ENVIRONMENT

March

MATERIALS

An end to plastic pollution? New fabric can hear sounds

Plastic Pollution in Kanapou Bay, Kaho‘olawe, Hawaii

It isn't news to us that the world has a problem with plastic. Each year eight million tonnes of plastic enter the world's oceans, destroying habitats, disrupting wildlife and contaminating the food chain, all on a global scale.

Considering plastic takes hundreds of years to break down, its persistence as a problem will only worsen alongside its widespread use in society. Such implications were discussed during the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) on the 2nd of March in Kenya. From production and use to their disposal, the full life cycle of plastics was placed at the forefront of the assembly, shedding light on the impacts of the crisis: in addition to the negative impacts on marine life, there are fears it may affect our health too. Most plastic originates from lower and middle-income countries with less capacity to burn or recycle it, further perpetuating these adversities. agreement to enable us to deal with the widespread challenges that plastic gives us as a society. " advised Professor Steve Fletcher from the University of Portsmouth. Indeed, a global crisis calls for a global solution: as a result, 175 countries signed a legally binding treaty to end plastic pollution. Importantly, the treaty acknowledges lowerincome countries that suffer the most from plastic and pollution, calling for the need of an additional financing model to overcome plastic reliance. With the treaty comes substantial pressure, being described as one of the world's most ambitious since the 1989 Montreal protocol which phased out ozone-depleting substances. Environmental groups mirror such expectations, calling for clear global standards that incentivise nations to reinforce new rules and regulations concerning plastic, while penalising harmful products and practices. Considering the unfathomable harm our use of plastic has inflicted on the environment in the space of a decade, it's about time we move towards putting things right again. Lily Pfaffenzeller Vanessa Yip

5 trillion

pieces of plastic

are in the world's oceans

Researchers sewed in two panels of acoustic fabric in the back of a dress shirt. Courtesy of the Finke Lab

A new fabric created by Wei Yan and his colleagues as part of a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rhode Island School of Design unlocks another avenue in wearable technology. The new fabric converts sound vibrations into electrical signals, which can detect a wide range of noise levels like a microphone. These researchers modelled the fabric after the human ear: sound travels in pressure waves causing the eardrum to vibrate, which the cochlea translates into electrical signals. Similarly, they created a fibre containing cotton fibres and Twaron (a stiff material) which convert sound into vibrations. They wove piezoelectric materials into the fibre as well, which are materials that generate a voltage when mechanical stress, in this case from the vibrations, is applied. To test the fibre, it was incorporated into a shirt. The researchers clapped at different angles from the garment, and the fibre accurately matched the distance and direction of the sound’s source. They further investigated the fibre’s ability to monitor the heart through this wearable technology, listening for heart murmurs analogous to the use of a stethoscope. The successful proof-of-concept could have exciting implications for nonintrusive monitoring and diagnostic tools “this fabric can imperceptibly interface with the human skin, enabling wearers to monitor their heart and respiratory condition in a comfortable, continuous, realtime, and long-term manner” , says Yan.

Apart from that, the new fibre could be used in many ways. If embedded into buildings, it could be used to detect cracks. Its ability to distinguish the direction of sounds could be used to aid those with visual impairments. And, of course, there is the cool futuristic possibility of us being able to answer phone calls through our acoustic garments, a foolproof way to confuse other pedestrians.

The fabric was able to detect the angle of sound 3 metres

away

to within 1 degree

Things to look out for…

GEOLOGY

Are we in a new geological epoch?

Since the last major ice age, we have been living in the Holocene epoch, also known as the Anthropogene epoch which translates to “Age of Man'' . For the past 11,650 years or so, the Holocene epoch has seen everything from the evolution of civilisation and recorded history, to the expansion of human knowledge and technology. This all comes at a price, however, and we are increasingly seeing the effects of human activity on the environment. This has singlehandedly led scientists to conjecture over the possibility of us having entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene era (“Anthropo” is Greek for “ man” and “ cene” for “ new ”). Humanity ’s impact has left many key markers in our environment - nuclear weapons have created radionuclides, ice cores

GENETICS

represent a record of methane emissions, and so on. In the second half of this year, a group of 34 researchers in the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) will agree on the primary marker most representative of human activity, considering both the clarity of this marker and its impact worldwide. They will also choose a site that provides the clearest evidence of a significant change to the Earth’s biosphere requisite for a new epoch to exist, with 12 candidate sites currently in the running (Figure 1). This will act as the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), an official boundary that separates geological units of time. After voting for the site, this will go through further voting to confirm the existence of the new epoch itself. While we wait for announcements

The first full human genome has been sequenced

Human genetics has its own dark matter equivalent: 20 years ago, the first sequenced human genome left a mysterious 8% of the genome undeciphered. The quest to produce a complete genome from “telomere to telomere” , in the words of Adam Phillippy, bioinformatician at the National Human Genome Research Institute, persisted throughout the last few decades, leading to a recent breakthrough. Endowed by advancements in technology that notably include long-read sequencing technology, which allows long stretches of DNA to be read, scientists have filled in many gaps left in the human genome puzzle. They were able to sequence repetitive DNA segments, a major obstacle scientists encountered when the first draft of the human genome was published. This is because technology then meant these repetitive sequences could easily be skipped or read incorrectly. These newly-added DNA segments reside in the centre of chromosomes (centromeres) and at the ends (telomeres - think of them like the protective caps at the ends of your shoelaces). Vanessa Yip

Human impact shown on a global scale, taken from NewScientist

that may come in 2024, there is increasing controversy surrounding both the year that marks the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch, and its existence itself. AWG proposes the epoch started in the 1950s with the Great Acceleration which saw environmental impacts from human activity surge dramatically, while some posit it started in the 1800s due to the Industrial Revolution. In the meantime, there is no doubt we can agree the current debate is more jarring evidence of our deleterious relationship with our planet. Vanessa Yip

PHYSICS

Will the Standard Model break?

Physicists normally use 5 sigma as the level of significance to count something as a ‘discovery ’ , where sigma represents the divergence between the value you can and the mean, but the difference between the W boson mass measurement and that predicted by the standard model is even higher, at the significance level of 7 sigma. The mass of W boson is calculated by analysing the particles, electrons and neutrinos, that it decays into. If the discrepancy is not affected by systematic errors, the result will suggest the breakage of the Standard Model which hints at exciting new physics. The deviation may provide evidence for the physics not included in the Standard Model – the interaction between graviton with dark matter or the existence of a new type of neutrino. The disparity may also break the ‘Model Dream’ that exists in most of the physicists’ minds and reveal the real side of the UniverseMa– chaorgaret s.Liu