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Climate change is an emerging global health crisis, disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where health outcomes are increasingly compromised by environmental stressors such as pollution, natural disasters, and human migration. With a focus on promoting health equity, Global Surgery advocates for expanding access to surgical care and enhancing health outcomes, particularly in resource-limited and disaster-affected areas like LMICs. The healthcare industry—and more specifically, surgical care—significantly contributes to the global carbon footprint, primarily through resource-intensive settings, i.e. operating rooms that generate greenhouse gases and substantial medical waste. Therefore, Global Surgery efforts aimed at improving surgical access through an increase in surgical volumes may inadvertently exacerbate health challenges for vulnerable populations by further contributing to environmental degradation. This predicament is particularly pronounced in LMICs, who already suffer from a disproportionate share of the global burden of disease, and where the demand for surgery is rising without corresponding resilient infrastructure. LMICs face a double jeopardy of health inequity coupled with climate vulnerability. As a movement positioned to improve health around the world, Global Surgery has an increasingly significant role in envisioning and ensuring a sustainable future. Global Surgery initiatives must prioritise sustainable infrastructure in both high-income countries (HICs) and LMICs, all while accounting for the unequal polluting contributions between HICs and LMICs and, consequently, moral responsibilities moving forward. Moreover, through targeting upstream causes of poor health at urban and perioperative levels, Global Surgery’s interventions may help to reduce the global burden of disease—avoiding preventable surgeries and their carbon footprints from the outset. Altogether, Global Surgery and climate change are two matters of social justice whose solutions must synergistically centralise the health of both the planet and its most vulnerable people.

Science is now in a new era of exposome research that strives to build a more all-inclusive, panoramic view in the quest for answers; this is especially true in the field of toxicology. Alcohol exposure researchers have been examining the multivariate co-exposures that may either exacerbate or initiate alcohol-related tissue/organ injuries. This manuscript presents selected key variables that represent the Alcohol Exposome. The primary variables that make up the Alcohol Exposome can include comorbidities such as cigarettes, poor diet, occupational hazards, environmental hazards, infectious agents, and aging. In addition to representing multiple factors, the Alcohol Exposome examines the various types of intercellular communications that are carried from one organ system to another and may greatly impact the types of injuries and metabolites caused by alcohol exposure. The intent of defining the Alcohol Exposome is to bring the newly expanded definition of Exposomics, meaning the study of the exposome, to the field of alcohol research and to emphasize the need for examining research results in a non-isolated environment representing a more relevant manner in which all human physiology exists.

AbstractClimate change will affect both the mean and the variability in environmental conditions and may have major negative impacts on population densities in the future. For annual plants that already live in an extreme environment like the Sonoran Desert, keeping a fraction of their seeds dormant underground (for possibly years at a time) is critical to survive. Here, we consider how this form of bet hedging (i.e., delayed germination) for 10 Sonoran Desert annuals mediates responses to precipitation shifts. We use a demographic model parameterized with long-term field and precipitation data to explore how forecasted changes in precipitation impact annual plant species' population densities. We then examine how instantaneous evolution of optimal germination fractions in the shifted precipitation regimes bolsters population densities. Our results indicate that overall less rainfall and, to a lesser extent, increased variance in rainfall drive population levels down. Instantaneous evolution of optimal germination fractions in new regimes benefited species' populations only marginally, and only for small to moderate shifts in precipitation. Thus, even rapid evolution is unlikely to save populations experiencing larger shifts in precipitation. Finally, we predict that specialists that can capitalize on wet-year bonanzas or are water use efficient will be the most resilient to precipitation shifts as long as their seed survivorships are sufficiently high.

Slurry transportation is an essential process in numerous industrial applications, widely studied for its efficiency in material conveyance. Despite substantial research, the impact of pipe wall roughness on critical metrics such as pressure drop, specific energy consumption (SEC), and the Nusselt number remains relatively underexplored. This study provides a detailed analysis using a three-dimensional computational model of a slurry pipeline, with a 0.0549 m diameter and 3.8 m length. The model employs an Eulerian multiphase approach coupled with the RNG k-ε turbulence model, assessing slurry concentrations Cw = 40–60% (by weight). Simulations were conducted at flow velocities Vm = 1–5 m/s, with pipe roughness (Rh) ranging between 10 and 50 µm. Computational findings indicate that both pressure drop and SEC increase proportionally with roughness height, Vm, and Cw. Interestingly, the Nusselt number appears unaffected by roughness height, although it rises corresponds to Vm, and Cw. These insights offer a deeper understanding of slurry pipeline dynamics, informing strategies to enhance operational efficiency and performance across various industrial contexts.

For decades, Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated plant transformation has played an integral role in advancing fundamental and applied plant biology. The recent omnipresent emergence of synthetic biology, which relies on plant transformation to manipulate plant DNA and gene expression for novel product biosynthesis, has further propelled basic as well as applied interests in plant transformation technologies. The strong demand for a faster design-build-test-learn cycle, the essence of synthetic biology, is, however, still ill-matched with the long-standing issues of high tissue culture recalcitrance and low transformation efficiency of a wide range of plant species especially food, fiber and energy crops. To maximize the utility of plant material and improve the transformation productivity per unit plant form, we studied the regeneration and transformation efficiency of different types of explants, including leaf, stem, petiole, and root from Populus, a woody perennial bioenergy crop. Our results show that root explants, in addition to the above-ground tissues, have considerable regeneration capacity and amenability to A. tumefaciens and, the resulting transformants have largely comparable morphology, reporter gene expression, and transcriptome profile, independent of the explant source tissue. Transcriptome analyses mapped to regeneration stages and transformation efficiencies further revealed the expression of the auxin and cytokinin signaling and various developmental pathway genes in leaf and root explants undergoing early organogenesis. We further report high-potential candidate genes that may potentially be associated with higher regeneration and transformation efficiency. Overall, our study shows that explants from above- and belowground organs of a Populus plant are suitable for genetic transformation and tissue culture regeneration, and together with the underlying transcriptome data open new routes to maximize plant explant utilization, stable transformation productivity, and plant transformation efficiency.

Abstract To thrive in extreme conditions, organisms have evolved a diverse arsenal of adaptations that confer resilience. These species, their traits, and the mechanisms underlying them comprise a valuable resource that can be mined for numerous conceptual insights and applied objectives. One of the most dramatic adaptations to water limitation is desiccation tolerance. Understanding the mechanisms underlying desiccation tolerance has important potential implications for medicine, biotechnology, agriculture, and conservation. However, progress has been hindered by a lack of standardization across sub-disciplines, complicating the integration of data and slowing the translation of basic discoveries into practical applications. Here, we synthesize current knowledge on desiccation tolerance across evolutionary, ecological, physiological, and cellular scales to provide a roadmap for advancing desiccation tolerance research. We also address critical gaps and technical roadblocks, highlighting the need for standardized experimental practices, improved taxonomic sampling, and the development of new tools for studying biology in a dry state. We hope that this perspective can serve as a roadmap to accelerating research breakthroughs and unlocking the potential of desiccation tolerance to address global challenges related to climate change, food security, and health.