The rise of human populations and the growth of cities contribute to the depletion of natural resources, increase their cost, and create potential climatic changes. To overcome difficulties in supplying populations and reducing the resource cost, a search for alternative pharmaceutical, nanotechnology, and energy sources has begun. Among the alternative sources, microalgae are the most promising because they use carbon dioxide (CO₂) to produce biomass and/or valuable compounds. Once produced, the biomass is ordinarily harvested and processed (downstream program). Drying, grinding, and extraction steps are destructive to the microalgal biomass that then needs to be renewed. The extraction and purification processes generate organic wastes and require substantial energy inputs. Altogether, it is urgent to develop alternative downstream processes. Among the possibilities, milking invokes the concept that the extraction should not kill the algal cells. Therefore, it does not require growing the algae anew. In this review, we discuss research on milking of diatoms. The main themes are (a) development of alternative methods to extract and harvest high added value compounds; (b) design of photobioreactors; (c) biodiversity and (d) stress physiology, illustrated with original results dealing with oleaginous diatoms.

Diatoms are nature's nanobot because they can be described as cells in a glass house. Three-dimensional nanobio-engineered frustules of diatoms have vast applications in nanomaterials and bio-photonics. The amorphous silica of diatom frustules is not a good semiconductor, but when coated with titanium dioxide (TiO₂), the semiconducting efficiency of the frustules becomes adequate for use in numerous device applications, including solar cells. The metabolic incorporation of titanium dioxide nanoparticles in the diatom frustules is primarily used for the construction of titanium nanotubes. In the present study, TiO₂ was metabolically inserted by a two-stage cultivation process and its incorporation in the diatom frustules was studied by spectroscopic and atomic force microscopic methods. It was found that diatom frustules metabolically inserted with nanostructured TiO₂ by a two-stage cultivation in f/2 medium could replace nanostructured surface doping with titanium in dye-sensitized solar cells for heat and electricity production. The DSSC made from the titanium-doped diatom frustule has a power efficiency almost double (9.45%) that of the simple DSSC (4.20%) without any diatom frustule metabolically inserted with TiO₂. Alternatively, these nanoarray diatom containing tubes may also be used for the construction of novel dye-sensitized solar cells, which may help in oozing lipids from living diatom cells, such as in algal cells, for the generation of an electric current.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography Pier has been the site of daily temperature measurements since the original structure was built in 1916. The time series is the longest continuous record of temperature on the Pacific Rim and is frequently cited as an indicator of ocean temperature trends in the region. The over 100‐year long record of daily surface temperature and slightly shorter bottom temperature data are presented here, with adjustment for bias owing to changes in sampling time of day. Data were generally collected near 8:00 a.m. in the early years, when water temperatures are cooler, and gradually shifted later in the day, when temperatures are warmer. In addition, cold surges from irregular internal tidal bores complicated attempts to estimate daily heating‐cooling cycles solely as a function of time of day. To isolate the effect of the solar heating cycle, adjustments were calculated based on seasonally variable diurnal solar heating using a surface ocean heating model and locally measured insolation data. Although the observed warming trends in nearshore temperatures are reduced by about 0.2 °C per century in the adjusted data, they still retain a significant increase of 1.24 °C per century at the surface and 1.67 °C per century in bottom waters.

The cell state splitter is a membraneless organelle at the apical end of each epithelial cell in a developing embryo. It consists of a microfilament ring and an intermediate filament ring subtending a microtubule mat. The microtubules and microfilament ring are in mechanical opposition as in a tensegrity structure. The cell state splitter is bistable, perturbations causing it to contract or expand radially. The intermediate filament ring provides metastability against small perturbations. Once this snap-through organelle is triggered, it initiates signal transduction to the nucleus, which changes gene expression in one of two readied manners, causing its cell to undergo a step of determination and subsequent differentiation. The cell state splitter also triggers the cell state splitters of adjacent cells to respond, resulting in a differentiation wave. Embryogenesis may be represented then as a bifurcating differentiation tree, each edge representing one cell type. In combination with the differentiation waves they propagate, cell state splitters explain the spatiotemporal course of differentiation in the developing embryo. This review is excerpted from and elaborates on “Embryogenesis Explained” (World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2016).

Review of the concept of "the vanishing physician-scientist" shows: 1) medical school admissions reject most students wanting medical research careers; 2) college years before medical school are the best time for students to begin research; 3) efforts to entice admitted medical students and residents to do research are too little too late, yielding people not equipped to compete for grants with PhD track peers and less motivated because they have clinical careers to fall back on; 4) the MD/PhD could be replaced by the PhD/MD with uninterrupted research: a full PhD in parallel with part-time medical school followed by part-time residencies. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Accountability in Research to view the free supplemental file.