The first transplant surgery to combine a mechanical (机械的) heart pump as well as a gene-edited pig kidney has recently been completed at NYU Langone Health.

The subject, 54-year-old Lisa Pisano of New Jersey, had heart failure and end-stage kidney disease. But she couldn’t have a standard heart or kidney transplant because of certain medical conditions and an overall lack of donor organs in the US. According to the Organ Transplantation Network, roughly 27,000 kidneys were transplanted last year, but nearly 89,000 people were on the waiting list for those organs.

Pisano got the heart pump on April 4 and then, on April 12, received a pig kidney, which was gene-edited to help keep the human body from recognizing the animal’s organ as foreign and rejecting it. “The editing process was to disrupt a gene responsible for the production of a sugar found on the surface of animal cells called alpha-gal, which can be recognized by human antibodies (抗体) and attacked,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who led the surgery.

Montgomery noted that the gene edits used in the pig in this case are much simpler than those used in other transplants. “We’re going to have an opportunity to really address the problem that we’re trying to address, which is the scarcity of organs, and the more complex the gene edits, the less likely it is that you’ll be able to produce those edits into a pig group. You would have to clone every pig for each organ. That is not something that can be easily achieved. So, we feel like less is more in this case.”

“Pisano has a long way to go and we are watching out for rejections,” he said, “but her kidney is functioning beautifully, and her heart is in much better shape. What previously existed in science fiction is now a reality.” Doctors expect that she might be discharged within a month.

Researchers in China have developed a robotic chemist powered by AI that might be able to obtain oxygen from water on Mars. The robot uses materials found on the red planet to produce catalysts (催化剂) that break down water, releasing oxygen.

“If you think about the challenge of going to Mars, you have to work with local material,” says Andy Cooper, a chemist at the University of Liverpool. “So I can see the logic behind it.”

The study was led by Jun Jiang at the University of Science and Technology of China Jiang and his team used a mobile machine the size of a refrigerator with a robotic arm to analyse five meteorites (陨石) that had come from Mars. The team’s goal was to investigate whether the machine could produce useful catalysts from the material.

The AI-powered system used some chemicals to dissolve (溶解) and separate the material, then analysed the resulting substances that consists of two or more elements. These then formed the basis of a search of more than 3.7 million formulae (公式) for a chemical that could break down water—known to exist as ice at Mars’ poles and under the planet’s surface-a process the team said would have taken a human researcher 2, 000 years. The result was a catalyst that could release oxygen from water, with the potential for use on a future Mars mission.

If a catalyst that can produce oxygen from water can be made on Mars, this would remove the need for missions to carry such a catalyst from Earth. Jiang says that for every square metre of Martian material, his group’s system could make nearly 60 grams of oxygen per hour, potentially removing the need for astronauts on future missions to the planet to carry oxygen from Earth to use when they get there. “The robot can work continuously for years, ” says Jiang.

Jiang points out that his group’s robotic chemist could also be used to produce other useful catalysts on Mars, for processes like fertilizing (施肥) plants. “Different chemicals can be made by this robot,” he says. And Mars isn’t the only place where it could be used. “Maybe lunar soil is another direction,” Jiang says.

Working out is great for your skin. It increases blood flow to all your organs — skin included — delivering oxygen and nutrients along with it. But if you exercise in a full face of makeup, you might be hurting your skin health, not helping it.

To find out what makeup does to skin during exercise, researchers applied a drug-store-brand cream foundation (粉底霜) to the foreheads and under-eye areas of 43 university students. They left the bottom halves of everyone’s faces makeup-free. All of the students then ran for 20 minutes.

“Our hypothesis was that makeup can block pores (毛孔) partially or completely, and because pores are important for evaporation and sweating, makeup would negatively impact skin health,” says Sukho Lee, a professor in the department of health, and kinesiology at Texas A&M University. Skin plays an important role in helping the body to regulate temperature, especially during exercise. Allowing pores to expand so that sweat can escape is just one of the ways that the skin releases excess heat from the body.

Using a device that can scan the skin for moisture (水分) levels, oil amounts, and pore size, the researchers compared people’s made-up and makeup-free parts of the face Moisture levels on the makeup side were higher than those on the bare side, which actually indicates a negative effect of the foundation. “Moisture on the skin is evidence of poor evaporation,” says Lee. People’s pores were also smaller on the areas where they wore makeup, which indicates that the skin wasn’t able to open up and properly regulate moisture and remove oil as it normally does, Lee says. Oil levels were lower on the makeup side, but it’s not clear why, says Lee. It’s possible that the foundation was interfering with the skin’s ability to regulate its oil levels.

The findings also raise questions about other products people apply to the face, such as sunscreen, designed to form a barrier on the skin against UV rays, Lee says.