Eliminating dead-but-toxic cells occurring naturally in the brains of mice designed to mimic Alzheimer’s slowed neuron damage and memory loss associated with the disease, according to a study published Wednesday that could open a new front in the fight against dementia.

The accumulation in the body of “zombie cells” that can no longer divide but still cause harm to other healthy cells, a process called senescence, is common to all mammals.

Scientists have long known that these dead-beat cells gather in regions of the brain linked to old age diseases ranging from osteoarthritis and atherosclerosis to Parkinson’s and dementia.

Prior research had also shown that the elimination of senescent cells in ageing mice extended their healthy lifespan.

But the new results, published in Nature, are the first to demonstrate a cause-and-effect link with a specific disease, Alzheimer’s, the scientists said.

But any treatments that might emerge from the research are many years down the road, they cautioned.

In experiments, a team led by Tyler Bussian of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota used mice genetically modified to produce the destructive, cobweb-like tangles of tau protein that form in the neurons of Alzheimer’s patients.

The mice were also programmed to allow for the elimination of “zombie” cells in the same region.

“When senescent cells were removed, we found that the diseased animals retained the ability to form memories, and eliminated signs of inflammation,” said senior author Darren Baker, also from the Mayo Clinic.

The mice likewise failed to develop Alzheimer’s signature protein “tangles”, and retained normal brain mass.

Keeping zombies at bay

A closer look revealed that the “zombies” belonged to a class of cells in the brain and spinal cord, called glia, that provide crucial support and insulation to neurons.

“Preventing the build-up of senescent glia can block the cognitive decline and neuro-degeneration normally experienced by these mice,” Jay Penney and Li-Huei Tsai, both from MIT, wrote in a comment, also in Nature.

Bussian and his team duplicated the results with pharmaceuticals, suggesting that drugs could one day slow or block the emergence of Alzheimer’s by keeping these zombie cells at bay.

“There hasn’t been a new dementia drug in 15 years, so it’s exciting to see the results of this promising study in mice,” said James Pickett, head of research at Alzheimer’s Society in London.

For Lawrence Rajendran, deputy director of the Dementia Research Institute at King’s College London, the findings “open up new vistas for both diagnosis and therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s.”

Up to now, dementia research has been mostly focused on the diseased neurons rather than their neighboring cells.

“It is increasingly becoming clear that other brains cells play a defining role,” Rajendran added.

Several barriers remain before the breakthrough can be translated into a “safe, effective treatment in people,” Pickett and other said.

The elderly often have lots of harmless brain cells that look like the dangerous senescent cells a drug would target, so the molecule would have to be good at telling the two apart.

Worldwide, about seven percent of people over 65 suffer from Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia, a percentage that rises to 40 percent above the age of 85.

The number afflicted is expected to triple by 2050 to 152 million, according to the World Health Organization, posing a huge challenge to healthcare systems.

 
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Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, says his government will assist municipalities struggling to fight a cholera outbreak that has killed 32 people and affected more than 3,000 during the past three weeks.

After visiting the epicenter of the cholera outbreak in Harare, President Emmerson Mnangagwa vowed to help the Harare City Council with financial assistance and called on the corporate world to donate toward fighting the epidemic.

“We are raising money, which has been coming in daily, so that we fix the burst pipes at Morton Jeffery Waterworks and the Central Business District, as well as the suburbs… we have been told that most of these pipes are old and are bursting at any given time, so we have found some well-wishers who are helping us. We will continue to support the Harare City Council In its programs meant to sanitize Harare, because the council does not have enough powers to be doing all the work alone,” he said.

Nearby, David Shonhiwa, a vendor in Glen View, the suburban epicenter of Harare’s cholera epidemic, says there have been improvements in the area’s hygiene since cholera was detected, but more are needed.

“The situation is better now. We have been receiving clean water and we got buckets, but it has not been possible for everyone to get something because there are difficulties which others have been encountering,” he said.

Tuesday, a U.N. spokesperson in Zimbabwe, Sirak Gebrehiwot, said a U.N. emergency response fund may be activated as the cholera outbreak spreads to other parts of the country.

“In light of the appeal announced by the government of Zimbabwe to respond to the cholera, the U.N. has scaled up its support,” said Gebrehiwot. “The regional office of the U.N. Humanitarian Affairs has already deployed three U.N. emergency humanitarian specialists in the ongoing response. This is in addition to our colleagues from UNICEF and the WHO, are already engaged on the ground in this emergency response.”

In 2008 and 2009, a cholera epidemic killed nearly 5,000 people. It only stopped after international organizations such as USAID, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross and U.N. agencies including UNICEF and the World Health Organization provided medicine and water treatment chemicals.

 
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Researchers are using genetic analysis to connect the dots in the illegal ivory trade, linking multiple seizures of the valuable tusks to a common set of traffickers.

Targeting these ivory-smuggling cartels could have a major impact on the elephant poaching that is driving the animals to extinction, according to the authors of a new study.

The findings mean some suspects already facing charges from single arrests could face additional charges and stiffer penalties if convicted.

Ivory trafficking is a multibillion dollar transnational criminal enterprise with links to other illegal activities, including drug trafficking. Poaching claims an estimated 40,000 elephants each year.

Missing tusks

University of Washington biologist Samuel Wasser and colleagues have been analyzing tusks seized in ivory busts to track where poached elephants came from.  They previously identified hotspots in Tanzania and Mozambique from where nearly all the ivory seized between 2006 and 2014 came.

The new findings emerged from the case of the missing tusks.

Wasser and colleagues noticed that when ivory shipments were confiscated, they often only contained one of an elephant’s pair of tusks.

When they searched through genetic data taken from large-scale ivory busts between 2006 and 2015, they found 26 cases in which a tusk from one seizure matched one from a separate shipment.

In each case, the two shipments passed through the same port within a few months of each other.  Wasser said that “suggest[s] that the same major trafficking cartel was actually responsible for shipping both.”

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, traces the ivory back to three major cartels based in Lome, Togo; Mombasa, Kenya; and Entebbe, Uganda.

When traffickers are caught, they typically only face charges for one shipment.

The methods Wasser’s group developed can link individual cartels to multiple shipments, and to each other.

For example, a key figure in the Uganda cartel currently is awaiting trial for one seizure. The new study links him to two others. One of those includes tusks from a 2012 incident in which poachers in a Ugandan helicopter shot 22 elephants across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“You can imagine, if this evidence is used, how much stronger a case we can build against him,” Wasser said.

International links found

The new study also finds links between the Togo and Kenyan cartels.  East African and West African tusks were found in a shipment seized in Malaysia.  Ivory from this shipment matched tusks from separate seizures linked to Lome and Mombasa.

East African drug-smuggling suspects facing charges in the United States have been linked to the Kenyan ivory trafficking ring.

“The stories that emerge (from the research) are fascinating and important,” said CEO Frank Pope of the nonprofit Save the Elephants.  “Wasser’s work is helping us to close in on those networks by telling the story of the connections between the different shipments.”

Wasser’s methods have already helped investigators disrupt international trafficking operations, according to Special Agent John Brown with the Department of Homeland Security Investigations.

But Brown notes that few countries are complying with a directive to send samples from ivory busts for DNA analysis. That makes it harder for law enforcement to get to the root of the problem, he added.

“A seizure of three tons of ivory looks very good on the front page of the local newspaper,” Brown said.  “But if we don’t attack the transnational criminal organizations behind it, then the problem will continue.”

 
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With climate-changing emissions still inching higher — and resulting threats from extreme weather surging — sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere must become an urgent priority, backers of “carbon removal” efforts say.

“The math is quite simple,” Manish Bapna, executive vice president of the Washington-based World Resources Institute, told a panel discussion on the fledgling approach this week.

If the world overshoots the temperature goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, as looks increasingly likely, “carbon removal gets us back on track,” he said.

“The first imperative is to reduce emissions as quickly and deeply as possible,” Bapna said. “But there is now a second imperative… to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a large scale.”

Proposals to suck carbon out of the atmosphere range from planting many more trees, which absorb carbon dioxide to grow, to installing devices that capture carbon directly from the air.

Changing farming practices to store more carbon in soils, or producing energy by growing trees or crops, burning them and pumping underground the carbon released also could play a role, scientists say.

Interest in carbon removal technologies is growing, not least because countries from Britain to the United States have included some of them in their plans to curb climate change.

They also feature in a report, due out next month, by the world’s leading climate scientists, who say governments may have to find ways to extract vast amounts of carbon from the air if warming overshoots the lower Paris pact limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). That overshoot is expected to happen by about 2040, according to a draft copy of the report.

“Carbon removal is really about creating options,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute. “If you fast forward 20 or 30 years, we want to keep options open.”

Growing urgency

The surging scale of losses to extreme weather — including the storms that smashed into the eastern United States and the Philippines this month — means more people now believe climate change needs to be curbed, said Klaus Lackner, director of the U.S.-based Center for Negative Carbon Emissions.

“I believe we are at a turning point where people are starting to see the problem needs to be solved,” said Lackner, a proponent of technology to capture carbon from the air.

Right now, the costs of carbon removal may be too high but as climate impacts worsen “eventually it will hurt, and then we will pay whatever it takes,” he predicted.

“Show me technologies that didn’t get six times cheaper in a decade when they were actually used,” he added.

Carbon removal faces many other challenges including low government spending, competition for land, and a need to move faster than finance and technology may allow, experts admitted.

For instance, capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air, while possible, also requires a lot of energy, said James Mulligan, a World Resources Institute researcher on carbon removal.

Capturing just 15 percent of U.S. annual emissions would use 7 percent of projected U.S. energy production in 2050, he said.

Avoiding the worst

Farming differently to store more carbon in soils, by comparison, could be cheaper and provide extra benefits, boosting harvests, water conservation and wildlife habitats, said Betsy Taylor, president of consulting firm Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions.

“This pathway is the most affordable, technologically ready and it is a no-regrets option,” particularly as about a third of the world’s soils are now considered degraded, she said.

Experimenting with carbon removal deserves “a newfound sense of urgency” not least because more intrusive “geoengineering” ideas, such as blocking some of the sun’s rays from reaching the planet, are “coming down the pike,” she said.

But getting millions of farmers and ranchers to alter how they work would require significant investment — and monitoring carbon reductions from soil use remains an inexact science, experts admitted.

Most carbon removal technologies would get the world only a fraction of the way to solving its climate problem, they said — and the prospect of having the technologies available might be seized as an excuse to stall action to cut emissions.

“We need to be clear-eyed about the challenges,” Mulligan said.

The key, said Levin of the World Resources Institute, is ensuring both emissions cuts and carbon removal efforts move ahead fast enough to ward off the worst anticipated impacts of climate change, from worsening hunger to extreme heatwaves.

“If you look at the science, we have to pull out all the stops on mitigation and carbon removal at a scale that is completely unprecedented,” she said.

 
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For many Vietnamese people, it is a ritual as circadian as the sunrise: On the way to work, they pull over their motorbikes to grab an iced coffee from a street vendor, complete with a plastic cup, plastic lid, plastic straw, and plastic case to hang from the bikes as they drive.

The coffee, with four separate pieces of plastic for a single drink, exemplifies how this packaging has became such a common and wasteful scourge on Vietnam’s environment. But some citizens have become alarmed by the trend and begun fighting back against the pollution.

More Vietnamese than ever are looking for alternatives to plastic, from metal bottles to cloth tote bags, just as many communities around the world are starting to believe they have relied for too long on cheap and versatile — but ecologically disastrous — plastic. Rwanda was remarkably efficient at banning plastic bags, while Durham, North Carolina has a volunteer program to distribute reusable takeout containers, and an Amsterdam grocer introduced an aisle of products with no plastic.

What makes Vietnam special, to the chagrin of environmentalists, is that it ranks among the top five countries in the world that send plastic trash into the ocean, according to the Ocean Conservancy. To have become a top polluter is staggering for the Southeast Asian nation, especially when there are dozens of countries with much larger economies but far less plastic waste.

“Everyone, every country should be responsible, it doesn’t matter the size,” said Tran An, a volunteer at Precious Plastic Saigon. “In Vietnam we should do what we can to solve the plastic problem.”

Her green advocacy group has taught Vietnamese how to make their own straws out of bamboo, as well as how to distinguish between different kinds of plastic to facilitate recycling.

Locals are getting creative with the ways they are cutting plastic out of their daily diets. It seems each week another restaurant in Vietnam is switching to paper straws, while supermarkets have started giving shoppers cardboard boxes in which to take home their groceries, similar to Costco in the United States.

Plastic water bottles are a popular target. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has swapped them out in favor of metal bottles at meetings. One business chamber is encouraging members to replace them at the office, providing water coolers for employees instead. A coalition of foreign consulates in Ho Chi Minh City signed a pledge this year to do the same. And at conferences, one hotel puts out glasses that guests can refill from dispensers.

“One of my favorite examples is that, you know, the youngsters in Vietnam, we are so gaga over bubble tea. And all that is plastic,” An said. “But now if you go to those shops you will see that they started getting the carriers made by canvas, or something else instead of a plastic carrier.”

The carriers are similar to those used by motorbike drivers to transport their iced coffee. Straws and carriers are small change, though, compared to the macroeconomic change needed to cut down on plastic, which will take up more space in the ocean than do fish, if nothing is done, by 2050, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The “industries responsible for the major plastic wastes must be targeted with specific industry agreements and producer liability arrangements, with requirements for handling, collection and reuse of waste and broken plastic equipment,” Nina Jensen, CEO of the environmental group REV Ocean, wrote in a blog post.

Vu Thinh, who works at a trading company in Ho Chi Minh City, thinks the growing interest in eco-friendly consumption could be good for business.

“One of my special products is to make a plastic bag, so I think this is interesting, this topic, because in the next year we will produce this product,” he said.

His bags would be made of potato starch and other natural ingredients that can decompose within two years, unlike plastic, one of the least biodegradable materials.

But this would cost more than single-use plastic bags, demonstrating the difficulty of finding a new business model for companies that depend on plastic.

“Of course we want to export to Europe or America because this is more expensive,” Thinh said. “You know in Vietnam now [we] have some companies produce that product but it is not good, the market is not good, the price is high. We will research the market more.”

With the waste already blanketing the streets and seas, and with the cost of alternatives still pricey, plastic can seem like a mountain of a problem. But An said she has reason to be optimistic because the next generation is more idealistic.

Older Vietnamese think, “why go an extra step for something if it won’t make a difference?” she said. “But for the youngsters I think they feel that one action counts anyway.”
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