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New isotopic analysis of Apollo-era Moon rocks shows that the water locked inside them likely came from our planet . Image via Wikimedia Commons/Gregory H. Revera

In September 2009, after decades of speculation, evidence of water on the surface of the Moon was discovered for the first time. Chandrayaan-1, a lunar probe launched by India’s space agency, had created a detailed map of the minerals that make up the Moon’s surface and analysts determined that, in several places, the characteristics of lunar rocks indicated that they bore as much 600 million metric tonnes of water.

In the years since, we’ve seen further evidence of water both on the surface and within the interior of the Moon, locked within the pore space of rocks and perhaps even frozen in ice sheets. All this has gotten space exploration enthusiasts pretty excited, as the presence of frozen water could someday make permanent human habitation of the Moon much more feasible.

For planetary scientists, though, it’s raised a knotty question: How did water arrive on the Moon in the first place?

A new paper published today in Science suggests that, unlikely as it may seem, the Moon’s water originated from the same source as the water that comes out of the faucet when you open a tap. Just as many scientists believe the Earth’s entire supply of water was initially delivered via water-bearing meteorites that traveled from the asteroid belt billions of years ago, a new analysis of lunar volcanic rocks brought back during the Apollo missions indicates the Moon’s water has its roots in these same meteorites. But there’s a twist: Before reaching the Moon, this lunar water was first on Earth.

A closeup of a melt inclusion inside lunar rocks. These inclusions reveal clues about the water content trapped within the Moon. Image via John Armstrong, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington

The research team, led by Alberto Saal of Brown University, analyzed the isotopic composition of hydrogen found in water within tiny bubbles of volcanic glass (supercooled lava) as well as melt inclusions (blobs of melted material trapped in slowly cooling magma that later solidified) in the Apollo-era rocks, as shown in the image above. Specifically, they looked at the ratio of deuterium isotopes (“heavy” hydrogen atoms that contain an added neutron) to normal hydrogen atoms.

Previously, scientists have found that in water, this ratio changes depending on where in the solar system the water molecules initially formed, as water that originated closer to the Sun has less deuterium than water formed further away. The water locked in the lunar glass and melt inclusions was found to have deuterium levels similar to that found in a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites, which scientists believe to be the most unaltered remnants of the nebula from which the solar system formed. Carbonaceous chondrites that fall to Earth originate in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Higher deuterium levels would have suggested that water was first brought on to the Moon by comets—as many scientists have hypothesized—because comets largely come from the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud, remote regions far beyond Neptune where deuterium is more plentiful. But if the water in these samples represents lunar water as a whole, the findings indicate that the water came from a much closer source—in fact, the same source as the water on Earth.

The simplest explanation for this similarity would be a scenario in which, when a massive collision between a young Earth and a Mars-sized proto-planet formed the Moon some 4.5 billion years ago, some of the liquid water on our planet was somehow preserved from vaporization and transferred along with the solid material that would become the Moon.

Our current understanding of massive impacts, though, doesn’t allow for this possibility: The heat we believe would be generated by such an enormous collision would theoretically vaporize all lunar water and send it off into space in a gaseous form. But there are a few other scenarios that might explain how water was transferred from our proto-Earth to the Moon in other forms.

One possibility, the researchers speculate, is that the early Moon borrowed a bit of Earth’s high-temperature atmosphere the instant it formed, so any water that had been locked in the chemical composition of Earth rocks pre-impact would have vaporized along with the rock into this shared atmosphere after impact; this vapor would have then coalesced into a solid lunar blob, binding the water into the chemical composition of lunar material. Another possibility is that the rocky chunk of Earth was kicked off to form the Moon retained the water molecules locked inside its chemical composition, and later on, these were released as a result of radioactive heating inside the Moon’s interior.

Evidence from recent lunar missions suggests that lunar rocks—not just craters at the poles—indeed contain substantial amounts of water, and this new analysis suggests that water originally came from Earth. So the findings will force scientists to rethink models of how the Moon could have formed, given that it clearly didn’t dry out completely.

Humid air causes hydrogen bonds to form between the proteins in your hair, triggering curls and frizz. Image via Flickr user Simon Gotz

If you have long hair, you probably don’t need to look up a weather report to get an idea of how much humidity’s in the air: You can simply grab a fistful of hair and see how it feels. Human hair is extremely sensitive to humidity—so much that some hygrometers (devices that indicate humidity) use a hair as the measuring mechanism, because it changes in length based on the amount of moisture in the air.

Straight hair goes wavy. If you have curly hair, humidity turns it frizzy or even curlier. Taming the frizz has become a mega industry, with different hair smoothing serums promising to “transform” and nourish hair “without weighing hair down.” But just why does humidity have this strange effect on human hair?

Bundles of keratin proteins (the middle layer of black dots above) are susceptible to changing shape on a humid day. Image from Gray’s Anatomy

Hair’s chemical structure, it turns out, makes it unusually susceptible to changes in the amount of hydrogen present in the air, which is directly linked to humidity. Most of a hair’s bulk is made up of bundles of long keratin proteins, represented as the middle layer of black dots tightly packed together in the cross-section at right.

These keratin proteins can be chemically bonded together in two different ways. Molecules on neighboring keratin strands can form a disulfide bond, in which two sulfur atoms are covalently bonded together. This type of bond is permanent—it’s responsible for the hair’s strength—and isn’t affected by the level of humidity in the air.

But the other type of connection that can form between adjacent keratin proteins, a hydrogen bond, is much weaker and temporary, with hydrogen bonds breaking and new ones forming each time your hair gets wet and dries again. (This is the reason why, if your hair dries in one shape, it tends to remain in roughly that same shape over time.)

Hydrogen bonds occur when molecules on neighboring keratin strands each form a weak attraction with the same water molecule, thereby indirectly bonding the two keratin proteins together. Because humid air has much higher numbers of water molecules than dry air, a given strand of hair can form much higher numbers of hydrogen bonds on a humid day. When many such bonds are formed between the keratin proteins in a strand of hair, it causes the hair to fold back on itself at the molecular level at a greater rate.

On the macro level, this means that naturally curly hair as a whole becomes curlier or frizzier due to humidity. As an analogy, imagine the metal coil of a spring. If you straighten and dry your hair, it’ll be like the metal spring, completely straightened out into a rod. But if it’s a humid day, and your hair is prone to curling, water molecules will steadily be absorbed and incorporated into hydrogen bonds, inevitably pulling the metal rod back into a coiled shape.

What can’t a 3D printer build? The number of possible answers to this question has shrunk exponentially in recent years, as the high-tech machines continue to churn out solid object after object from computer designs.

The last few months alone saw countless new products and prototypes spanning an array of industries, from football cleats and pens to steel rocket parts and guns. Last month, the technology helped replace 75 percent of a person’s damaged skull, and this week it restored a man’s face after he lost half of it to cancer four years ago.

Today, a new study suggests 3D-printed material could one day mimic the behavior of cells in human tissue. Graduate student Gabriel Villar and his colleagues at the University of Oxford developed tiny solids that behave as biological tissue would. The delicate material physically resembles brain and fat tissue, and has the consistency of soft rubber.

To create this material, a specially designed 3D printing machine followed a computer programmed diagram and ejected tens of thousands of individual droplets according to a specified three-dimensional network. As seen in the video above, its nozzles moved in various angles to establish the position of each tiny bead. Each droplet weighs in at about one picoliter—that’s one trillionth of a liter—a unit used to measure the size of droplets of inkjet printers, whose nozzle technology works much the same way to consolidate tiny dots of liquid into complete images and words on paper.

The droplets of liquid contained biochemicals found in tissue cells. Coated in lipids—fats and oils—the tiny aqueous compartments stuck together, forming a cohesive and self-supporting shape, with each bead partitioned by a thin, single membrane similar to the lipid bilayers that protect our cells.

Several 3D-printed droplet networks. Image courtesy of Gabriel Villar, Alexander D. Graham and Hagan Bayley (University of Oxford)

The shapes that the printed droplets formed remained stable for several weeks. If researchers shook the material slightly, droplets could become displaced, but only temporarily. The engineered tissue quickly sprung back into its original shape, a level of elasticity the researchers say is comparable to soft tissue cells in humans. The intricate latticework of a network’s lipid bilayers appeared to hold the “cells” together.

In some of the droplet networks, the 3D printer built pores into the lipid membrane. The holes mimicked protein channels inside the barriers that protect real cells, filtering molecules important for cell function in and out. The researchers injected into the pores a type of molecule important for cell-to-cell communication, one that delivers signals to numerous cells so that they function together as a group. While the 3D-printed material couldn’t exactly replicate how cells propagate signals, researchers say the movement of the molecule through defined pathways resembled the electrical communication of neurons in brain tissue

Water readily permeated the network’s membranes, even when pores were not built into its structure. The droplets swelled and shrank by the process of osmosis, trying to establish equilibrium between the amount of water they contained and the amount surrounding them on the outside. The movement of water was enough to lift the droplets against gravity, pulling and folding them, imitating muscle-like activity in human tissue.

The researchers hope that these droplet networks could be programmed to release drugs following a physiological signal. Printed cells could someday also be integrated into damaged or failing tissue, providing extra scaffolding or even replacing malfunctioning cells, perhaps even supplanting some of the 1.5 million tissue transplants that take place in the United States each year. The potential seems greatest for brain tissue transplants, as medical engineers are currently trying to grow brain cells in the lab to treat progressive diseases like Huntington’s disease, which slowly destroys nerve cells.

Whether it’s growing human tissue or entire ears, 3D printing technology is in full swing in the field of medicine, and countless researchers will no doubt jump on the bandwagon in the coming years.

A mixture of plant oils, bacterial spores and ozone is responsible for the powerful scent of fresh rain. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Juni

Step outside after the first storm after a dry spell and it invariably hits you: the sweet, fresh, powerfully evocative smell of fresh rain.

If you’ve ever noticed this mysterious scent and wondered what’s responsible for it, you’re not alone.

Back in 1964, a pair of Australian scientists (Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas) began the scientific study of rain’s aroma in earnest with an article in Nature titled “Nature of Agrillaceous Odor.” In it, they coined the term petrichor to help explain the phenomenon, combining a pair of Greek roots: petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of gods in ancient myth).

In that study and subsequent research, they determined that one of the main causes of this distinctive smell is a blend of oils secreted by some plants during arid periods. When a rainstorm comes after a drought, compounds from the oils—which accumulate over time in dry rocks and soil—are mixed and released into the air. The duo also observed that the oils inhibit seed germination, and speculated that plants produce them to limit competition for scarce water supplies during dry times.

These airborne oils combine with other compounds to produce the smell. In moist, forested areas in particular, a common substance is geosmin, a chemical produced by a soil-dwelling bacteria known as actinomycetes. The bacteria secrete the compound when they produce spores, then the force of rain landing on the ground sends these spores up into the air, and the moist air conveys the chemical into our noses.

“It’s a very pleasant aroma, sort of a musky smell,” soil specialist Bill Ypsilantis told NPR during an interview on the topic. “You’ll also smell that when you are in your garden and you’re turning over your soil.”

Because these bacteria thrive in wet conditions and produce spores during dry spells, the smell of geosmin is often most pronounced when it rains for the first time in a while, because the largest supply of spores has collected in the soil. Studies have revealed that the human nose is extremely sensitive to geosmin in particular—some people can detect it at concentrations as low as 5 parts per trillion. (Coincidentally, it’s also responsible for the distinctively earthy taste in beets.)

Ozone—O_3, the molecule made up of three oxygen atoms bonded together—also plays a role in the smell, especially after thunderstorms. A lightning bolt’s electrical charge can split oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, and they often recombine into nitric oxide (NO), which then interacts with other chemicals in the atmosphere to produce ozone. Sometimes, you can even smell ozone in the air (it has a sharp scent reminiscent of chlorine) before a storm arrives because it can be carried over long distances from high altitudes.

But apart from the specific chemicals responsible, there’s also the deeper question of why we find the smell of rain pleasant in the first place. Some scientists have speculated that it’s a product of evolution.

Anthropologist Diana Young of the University of Queensland in Australia, for example, who studied the culture of Western Australia’s Pitjantjatjara people, has observed that they associate the smell of rain with the color green, hinting at the deep-seated link between a season’s first rain and the expectation of growth and associated game animals, both crucial for their diet. She calls this “cultural synesthesia”—the blending of different sensory experiences on a society-wide scale due to evolutionary history.

It’s not a major leap to imagine how other cultures might similarly have positive associations of rain embedded in their collective consciousness—humans around the world, after all, require either plants or animals to eat, and both are more plentiful in rainy times than during drought. If this hypothesis is correct, then the next time you relish the scent of fresh rain, think of it as a cultural imprint, derived from your ancestors.

At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly eight miles below the ocean’s surface, abundant communities of bacteria thrive. Image via PNAS/Yayanos et. al.

The Challenger Deep, the deepest point on the entire seafloor, lies in the Mariana Trench off the coast of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Islands. It is nearly 36,000 feet—6.8 miles—below the ocean’s surface. If you were to stand at this remarkable depth, the column of water above your head would exert 1000 times the amount of pressure you normally experience at the surface, crushing you instantly.

Even in this extreme environment, though, organisms can survive. One type, it turns out, can even prosper: bacteria. A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, finds that unexpectedly abundant bacteria communities grow in the depths of the Mariana Trench, with organisms living at densities ten times greater than in the much shallower ocean floor at the trench’s rim.

To probe the ultra-deep ecosystem, the international research team, led by Ronnie Glud of the University of Southern Denmark, sent a specially-designed, 1300-pound robot down to the bottom of the trench in 2010. The robot was equipped with thin sensors that can slice into the seafloor sediments to help measure the organic consumption of oxygen. Because living things consume oxygen as they respire, tallies on how much ambient oxygen is missing from the sediments can be used as a proxy for the amount of microorganisms living in that area.

The research team’s specialized robot, designed to take samples under extremely high pressure. Photo by Anni Glud

When the team used the device to sample the sediments at a pair of sites with depths of 35,476 and 35,488 feet, they found surprisingly high amounts of oxygen consumption—levels that indicated there were ten times more bacteria present at the ultra-deep site than at another, shallower site they sampled for reference about 37 miles away, at a depth of just 19,626 feet.

The robot also collected a total of 21 sediment cores from the two sites, and these cores were hauled up and analyzed in the lab. Although many of the microorganisms died when they were brought up to the surface—after all, the creatures are adapted for the high pressure and low temperature of the ocean floor—the finding was confirmed: Cores from the Mariana Trench had much higher densities of bacterial cells than those from the reference site.

The team also remotely recorded video of the ocean floor, using lights to illuminate the pitch-black environment, and found a few life forms much larger than bacteria scurrying around on top of the sediment. When they used baited traps to recover a few of the specimens and bring them to the surface, they determined they were Hirondellea gigas, a species of amphipods—small crustaceans typically less than an inch in length.

A video still from the seafloor reveals an amphipod (left) scurrying across the bacteria-filled sediment. Image via Nature Geoscience/Glud et. al.

The discovery of such abundant bacterial life is particularly surprising because conventional wisdom would suggest that not enough nutrients are present at such depths to support much growth. Photosynthetic plankton serve as the nutrient base for nearly any ocean food chain, but they’re unable to survive on the lightless seafloor. The waste products (such as dead animals and microorganisms) of ecosystems higher up in the shallow light-filled waters do filter down and feed deeper food webs, but typically, less and less organic matter makes it down as depths increase.

In this case, though, the scientists seem to have found an exception to the rule, since the ultra-deep trench was home to so much more bacterial activity than the nearby shallower reference site. Their explanation is that the trench acts as a natural sediment trap, gradually collecting nutrients that filter down and land at shallower locations on the ocean floor nearby, then are dislodged by earthquakes or other perturbations.

In the years since the 2010 exploration, the research team has sent the same robot down to sample the Japan Trench (roughly 29,500 feet deep) and plans to sample the Kermadec-Tonga Trench (35,430 feet deep) later this year. “The deep sea trenches are some of the last remaining ‘white spots’ on the world map,” Glud, the lead author, said in a press statement. “We know very little about what is going on down there.”