Monthly report – May 2025

Welcome, one and all, to our fifth issue! We bring you an announcement: apart from our regularly published newsletter, look to our Instagram @project_biological for more opportunities brought to you from our partnerships and fresh content on our story to keep you entertained on the daily.

In this monthly report, we’ll be bringing you up to speed on three more developments in the biological world through late April and early May, plus a special teaser for an article coming soon on three very fluffy innovations…

Builder bacteria

Ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut and colonising Mars? While childhood dreams may often be disappointing, we’ve at least come far enough that we’re considering building our own settlements on the surface of our nearest neighbour: the Moon.

In short, the problem with building a base on the Moon is that there is great difficulty in transporting building material about 384400 kilometres across space. Fortunately for us, another substance is in great abundance when we reach the Moon. Lunar soil is malleable, easily extracted, and decently solid for building with, and indeed scientists have already managed to achieve the creation of bricks with lunar soil as well as repairing them with purely organic methods.

How? The bacterium Sporosarcina pasteurii is the secret weapon that engineers are counting on to maintain lunar bases. These microorganisms produce calcium carbonate, more famously known as limestone, and when paired with guar gum they’ve proven an ability to hold together lunar soil in the shape of a brick, which can then be heated or “sintered” to make a solid, hardy building block.

On the moon, though, temperatures can swing from above boiling to more than a hundred degrees celsius below freezing, not to mention the lack of atmosphere and the intense radiation that hits the surface. These sintered bricks would suffer a great deal of damage much more quickly than on Earth.

However, S. pasteurii has proven that with the right mixture of gum, lunar soil and calcium lactate, it can bind successfully to sintered bricks with simulated damage and repair them, making them good as new and ready to be incorporated into the lunar habitat.

Are we a step closer to colonising the moon? We’re still far from being able to conclude this. After all, would the low-gravity extraterrestrial environment change the behavior of S. pasteurii? Would they be able to survive on the moon, or be able to continue producing calcium carbonate for brick-making? While it’s hard to answer these questions, the team from the Indian Institute of Science plans to send a sample of the bacteria with the Gaganyaan moon mission to find out.  Until then, perhaps the dreams of colonising outer space still remain as dreams.

Heart disease and gender

15 millimetres is the magic number. This has been the case for decades when it comes to diagnosing hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Though there is no universal standard, most countries follow the lead of the US in this metric. If your left ventricle wall (the main muscle pumping blood in your heart) measures more than 15 millimetres, a diagnosis may be considered for this dangerous inheritable condition.

But the problem lies in the fact that a flat standard is being used to judge the likelihood of inflammation in the heart, failing to account for other factors that could influence the thickness of the heart wall like body size, ethnicity, age and gender. While some flexibility is given to doctors for the diagnosis of children, a frustratingly stubborn standard is the use of 15 millimetres for all adults based on studies in the mid-1900s that made use of dated scanning technology and failed to account for variations in heart wall thickness based on gender. Because of this, women weren’t considered in the creation of the standard for diagnosis, even if their heart walls are usually thinner.

Why is this dangerous? Because female heart walls have a lower normal thickness, even when inflammation occurs it may not cross the threshold of 15 millimetres that is mainly applicable to men. It takes something much more serious – scarring in the heart, swelling of the heart chambers – for doctors to take notice. And by then, it may be too late to avoid potentially fatal long-term consequences. In clinics, twice as many men are diagnosed with HCM compared with women. This doesn’t mean that women are half as likely to develop it, but rather that they are far more vulnerable to being overlooked.

What can we do about it? Asian doctors already have modified rates for their (typically smaller) patients – 12 cm thickness as the threshold for men and a 10 cm thickness for women. These, however, are still flat rates that can’t possibly account for all body sizes.

A team at UCL have been working on another possible solution: using AI to analyse what makes a healthy heart wall for people of various builds and testing it against databanks of patients that have or have not been diagnosed with HCM. What was discovered? Women are represented up to 20% more than before, and there were fewer diagnoses overall. Fewer false positives resulted, in other words, reducing the number of lives affected by incorrect diagnoses that would cause insurance and jobseeking to become much harder.

Of course, we still have a long way to go before the medical gap in gender is eliminated entirely. Nonetheless, it’s vital to recognise how dangerous this problem can be and to find new ways to mitigate it.

A doctor for trees

For our Singaporean readers, you must be very familiar with roadside greenery. However, have you ever thought about the effort it takes to maintain those lush sidewalks?

Typically, it takes a team of botanists and a great deal of labour to keep the landscape well taken care of. Urban greenery has a great number of positive effects such as reducing heat and holding floods at bay, but the amount of resource consumption it demands to monitor plants for damage and disease to eliminate possible sources of infection and rot.

Japanese researchers have taken to using AI to solve this problem, creating the AI model Plant Doctor to analyse footage of foliage in cities. Combining three existing AI models – one to identify leaves of interest, one to identify the best photos to process, and one to identify damage – this model can analyse leaves regardless of shape and lighting unless they are so heavily damaged they cannot be recognised. In the training of the model, the researchers had deliberately annotated the leaves as thoroughly as they could to ensure the doctor could recognise a great diversity of plants, including plants that are mainly found in the Tokyo region.

Attached to trucks, drones and lampposts around a city, the plant doctor can save a great deal of man-hours and money. Instead of spending a great deal of time and resources on gathering, processing and analysing samples, all a botanist needs is recording software placed in strategic areas around the city.

What do you think? Should Singapore make use of this AI too?

Teaser…

On the first of October, 2024, a sound that disappeared from the surface of the Earth 10000 years ago was heard again for the first time… in the middle of a lab.

Three babies had been born, but not just any babies – they were Remus, Romulus and Khaleesi, the first “Dire Wolf” pups born ever since they went extinct millennia ago, revived from the genetic abyss by the wonders of modern science.

Or were they?

Find out in issue 6…

References:

1. https://www.asianscientist.com/2025/04/general/scientists-use-bacteria-to-repair-bricks-in-space/

2. https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/major-study-reveals-why-more-men-than-women-are-diagnosed-with-deadly-heart-disease/

3. https://www.asianscientist.com/2025/05/environment/this-ai-plant-doctor-can-monitor-urban-plant-health/

4. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/dire-wolves-return-to-earth-meet-romulus-remus-and-khaleesi-the-first-dire-wolves-to-walk-the-earth-in-13000-years/articleshow/120080697.cms?from=mdr