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SMU’s ‘Titans in a Jar’ could answer key questions ahead of NASA’s space exploration

NASA headed to Saturn’s ‘Titan’ moon in 2026 to look for signs of past or present life 

DALLAS (SMU) – Researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) could help determine if Saturn’s icy moon – Titan – has ever been home to life long before NASA completes an exploratory visit to its surface by a drone helicopter.

This illustration shows NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft-lander approaching a site on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Credits: NASA/JHU-APL

NASA announced in late June that its “Dragonfly” mission would launch toward Saturn’s largest moon in 2026, expecting to arrive in 2034. The goal of the mission is to use a rotorcraft to visit dozens of promising locations on Titan to investigate the chemistry, atmospheric and surface properties that could lead to life.

SMU was awarded a $195,000 grant, also in June, to reproduce what is happening on Titan in a laboratory setting. The project, funded by the Houston-based Welch Foundation, will be led by Tom Runčevski, an assistant professor of chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. SMU graduate student Christina McConville was also awarded a fellowship by the Texas Space Grant Consortium to help with the project.

Before the rotorcraft lands on Titan, chemists from SMU will be recreating the conditions on Titan in multiple glass cylinders — each the size of a needle top — so they can learn about what kind of chemical structures could form on Titan’s surface. The knowledge on these structures can ultimately help assess the possibility of life on Titan — whether in the past, present or future.

Scientists have long considered Titan to be very similar to pre-biotic Earth, even though it is a frigid world much farther from the sun than our planet. Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere like Earth, and is also the only world other than Earth to have standing bodies of liquids, including lakes, rivers and seas, on its surface. In addition, NASA scientists believe Titan may have a subsurface ocean of water.

“Titan is a hostile place, with lakes and seas of liquid methane, and rains and storms of methane. The storms carry organic molecules produced in the atmosphere to the surface, and at the surface conditions, only methane, ethane and propane are liquids. All other organic molecules are in their solid form – or, as we would call them on Earth, minerals,” Runčevski explained.

“We are interested in the chemical composition and crystal structure of these organic minerals, because it is believed that minerals played a key role in the origins of life on Earth,” he said. “Hence, our research may help assess these possibilities for strange “methanogenic” Titanean life.”

Runčevski added that any information that they get about the structure of Titan’s upper layer crust, which is made of organic minerals, could prove very useful to NASA’s Dragonfly mission.

In order to create these “Titans in a jar” at SMU, Runčevski said they will use information about the conditions on Titan that were obtained during the mission Cassini-Huygens, which ended two years ago.

“We can recreate this world step by step in a cylinder made of glass,” he said. “First, we will introduce water, which freezes into ice. Second, we will top that layer of ice with ethane that liquidizes as a ‘lake.’ Then we will fill the remaining cylinder with nitrogen.”

After that, they can introduce different molecules into the system, mimicking the rainfall. Lastly, they will “dry” the lakes by slightly raising the temperature and produce the surface of the moon. The cylinder that this moon will be created inside is specifically designed, so that multiple state-of-the-art experiments can be done and they can learn from the structure of the real Titan. Large parts of these experiments will be performed at research facilities that provide modern synchrotron and neutron radiation, such as Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the National Institute and Technology in Maryland.

Several media outlets have covered the news, including:

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

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Inside Higher Ed: The truth about bias response teams is more complex than often thought

DALLAS (SMU) – Are bias response teams political correctness police on college campuses? Or are they a quick fix for dealing with prejudice and bias?

In an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed, a team of professors, including Southern Methodist University’s S. Kiersten Ferguson, argues that the truth is more complex.

They note that bias response teams — which handle reports of incidents that may involve prejudice from students, faculty or staff — are well-intentioned but often lack sufficient resources and time to carry out their charges. And they often get caught in the middle of demands from two different groups, neither of which they are typically able to fully satisfy.

Read the story here.

EXCERPT:

By Ryan A. Miller, Tonia Guida, Stella Smith, S. Kiersten Ferguson and Elizabeth Medina   

Inside Higher Ed

“University of Michigan brings back the Soviet Union with its bias response team,” the conservative-libertarian website The College Fix announced last spring. Similar headlines have warned that such teams punish free speech and are the latest example of political correctness run amok in higher education.

Claims that bias response teams function as the thought police on campuses are false. The truth about these teams is more complex, and less nefarious, than headlines acknowledge. Through our research, including an article we published in The Review of Higher Education, we’ve sought to understand the purpose and functions of bias response teams from the perspectives of administrators who run them at 19 colleges throughout the nation.

Misconceptions about bias response teams abound. What do these teams generally do? They:

  • Receive reports of incidents that may involve prejudice from students, faculty and staff;
  • Reach out and seek to support those who file reports;
  • Engage those who were the subjects of reports in voluntary, educational conversations; and
  • Monitor trends in the campus climate to inform educational efforts.

They also refer incidents that go beyond the scope of the team’s purview — crucially, those that involve institutional policy violations or criminal acts — to the professionals on the campus who are already designated to handle them, such as student conduct offices or campus police.

What do bias response teams not do? In the vast majority of cases, they do not have the power to discipline or sanction any campus community member. Bias response teams generally adopt a nonregulatory approach. They do not shut down free speech or charge into classrooms to stop offensive statements from faculty members or students. A federal judge in the University of Michigan case brought by Speech First affirmed as much, remarking “The university considers this voluntary and the student has no obligation to come in.”

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature

New power generation technology using waste heat from geothermal plants tested by SMU

The Geothermal Laboratory at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has just completed a research project that aims to use ultra-low-grade heat (150 °F to 250 °F) normally discarded by geothermal facilities to generate additional electricity. A central component of this project was the proprietary bottoming cycle technology of PwrCor, Inc., an advanced technology company that focuses on renewable energy solutions for Waste-to-Heat Power, Geothermal, and Solar markets.

Maria Richards

SMU’s Geothermal Laboratory, which is a research facility devoted to broadening the understanding and use of geothermal energy, compiled information such as ambient air temperature, injection temperature, and injection flow rate to quantify the total thermal energy within the spent geothermal fluids already being produced, but not utilized, by 31 of 73 U.S.-based geothermal sites for which data was available. What they found was that roughly 427 MWe can be generated from the spent geothermal fluids of currently existing facilities. This represents about 15% of the capacity of the sites looked at in the study.

“Geothermal energy is the work-horse of green power production.  Unlike various others, it operates 24/7, is suitable for baseload power supply, occupies a small footprint, and is designed to last,” noted Maria Richards, Geothermal Lab Coordinator for the Geothermal Laboratory. “PwrCor is working to improve the efficiency of our geothermal power infrastructure, and we commend their efforts.”

PwrCor is currently working with companies in the fuel cell and reciprocating engines industries, but they are also involved in initiatives in geothermal, oil and gas, and solar thermal. Their technology that allows for the cost-effective conversion of low-grade and ultra-low-grade heat to mechanical power and electricity could be revolutionary for businesses that could convert wasted heat to additional electrical power.

Joe Batir, a research geologist for the Geothermal Laboratory at SMU, said, “There is a great deal of heat being underutilized in geothermal power generating facilities around the United States.  Technology that can convert even a small portion of this underutilized heat into additional power has the potential of bringing major benefits to both geothermal power producers and to the environment.”– Globe News Wire and SMU

SMU’s research was featured in Think Geoenergy.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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Earth & Climate Researcher news SMU In The News

SMU’s catalog of North Texas earthquakes confirms continuing effects of wastewater disposal

A comprehensive catalog of earthquake sequences in Texas’s Fort Worth Basin, from 2008 to 2018, provides a closer look at how wastewater disposal from oil and gas exploration has changed the seismic landscape in the basin.

In their report published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Louis Quinones and Heather DeShon of Southern Methodist University (SMU) and colleagues confirmed that seismicity rates in the basin have decreased since 2014, a trend that appears to correspond with a decrease in wastewater injection.

However, their analysis also noted that new faults have become active during this period, and that seismicity continues at a greater distance from injection wells over time, suggesting that “far-field” changes in seismic stress will be important for understanding the basin’s future earthquake hazard potential.

“One thing we have come to appreciate is how broadly injection in the basin has modified stress within entire basin,” said DeShon.

The first thing researchers noted with wastewater injection into the basin “was the reactivation of individual faults,” she added, “and what we’re now starting to see is essentially the leftover energy on all sorts of little faults being released by the cumulative volume that’s been put into the basin.”

The earthquake catalog published in BSSA reported all seismicity recorded by networks operated by SMU between 2008 and 2018. Some seismic sequences in the catalog–such as the 2008 Dallas Fort Worth Airport earthquakes–are well-known and well-studied, while others such as the 2018 west Cleburne sequence are reported in the paper for the first time.

DeShon said publishing the complete catalog was important in part to help people recognize that “there are earthquakes throughout the basin, not just on these three or four sequences that have garnered a lot of press attention.”

The researchers found that overall seismicity in the Fort Worth Basin has been strongly correlated in time and space with wastewater injection activities, with most seismicity occurring within 15 kilometers of disposal wells.

Wastewater disposal volume began to decrease from its peak in 2014, mostly as a result of lower oil and gas prices, and the study showed “tapering off of seismicity along the faults that were near high-injection wells,” said Quinones.

There are exceptions to this pattern, including the 2015 Irving-Dallas and 2017 Lake Lewisville sequences that have no wells within 15 kilometers.

Induced earthquakes occur when wastewater injected back into the ground increases the pore pressure within the rocks and affects stress along faults in surrounding rock layers. In the Fort Worth Basin, these stress changes may propagate far–more than 10 kilometers–from the injection wells, the researchers suggested.

“Injection rates peaked in 2014, but we still don’t understand how spatially extensive the modification of pore pressure is at depth, so we still don’t understand how the hazard is going to reduce with time,” said DeShon.

There are still far fewer induced earthquakes in the Fort Worth Basin compared to regions such as Oklahoma, which also has experienced a dramatic increase in seismicity in the past decade as the result of wastewater disposal from oil and gas production. The volumes of injected wastewater are much higher in Oklahoma, and the faults there tend to be much closer together, DeShon said.

By contrast, Quinones said, faults in the Fort Worth Basin are more widely spaced, and there are few instances of earthquakes jumping between faults.

However, the dense population of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area makes it critical to continue monitoring the region’s induced earthquake risk, comparing seismic data with more information on wastewater injection.

For the moment, DeShon said, researchers only have access to monthly cumulative volume and average pressure at injection wellheads, in a report that is updated once a year.

“It would be best if injection data were provided in a more timely fashion in Texas, and if more detailed daily information on injection rates and  volumes and some measurements of downhole pressure were provided,” she said.–Seismological Society of America

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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Health & Medicine Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature

Long exposure to protein inhibitor may be the key to more effective chemotherapy for treatment-resistant cancers, SMU finds

SMU researchers find success in treating drug-resistant prostate cancer cells in the lab

DALLAS (SMU) – Researchers at SMU’s Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery (CD4) have succeeded in lab testing the use of chemotherapy with a specific protein inhibitor so that the chemotherapeutic medication is better absorbed by drug-resistant cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The approach could pave the way for a more effective way to treat cancers that are resistant to treatment.

A mix of drugs is frequently used to shrink cancer tumors or keep tumor cells from spreading to other parts of the body. But chemotherapy is so toxic that the mix often kills healthy cells, too, causing dreadful side effects for cancer patients. And eventually, many cancers learn how to resist chemotherapy, making it less effective over time.

“When multidrug resistance evolves, this leaves the patient with a very poor prognosis for survival and the oncologist with few, if any, effective tools, such as chemotherapy medicines, to treat what is very likely an aggressive and/or metastatic cancer at this point,” said John Wise, associate professor in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences and co-author of a study on the findings published Friday in PLOS One.

Much of the research led by CD4 director Pia Vogel and Wise is centered on a class of proteins called ABC transporters, a key factor in why many cancers resist chemotherapy.

Long exposure to P-gp inhibitor and chemotherapy decreased cancer cell survival, as assessed by colony formation. Credit: SMU

“These transporters are defensive proteins and are normally very, very good for us. They protect us from toxic chemicals by literally pumping them out of the cell, almost like a sump pump removes water from one’s cellar,” Vogel said.

But when someone has cancer, these proteins do more harm than good.

“One protein, P-glycoprotein, can pump nearly all chemotherapeutics out of the cancer cell, thereby making the cancer resistant to many drugs and untreatable,” Wise noted.

For this reason, SMU researchers tested the combination of using an inhibitor that temporarily shuts down P-glycoprotein’s ability to remove drugs from the cancer cells along with chemotherapeutics on prostate cancer cells grown in the lab, which have been shown to be resistant to multiple chemotherapeutic drugs.

The SMU team was able to show that if inhibitors of P-glycoprotein are used during and after the multidrug resistant cancer cells have been exposed to the chemotherapy drugs, then the cancer cells become much more sensitive to the chemotherapeutics.

The recipe for success was giving cancer cells a dose of both chemotherapy drugs and the P-gp inhibitor for two hours. Researchers then washed the prostate cancer cells to get rid of any residual chemotherapy drugs before giving the cells another dose of just P-gp inhibitor for 22 hours, lead author and SMU Ph.D. doctoral candidate Amila K. Nanayakkara explained.

Pia Vogel and John Wise

Prostate cancer cells that were given this treatment were shown to retain chemotherapy drugs at a much higher level compared to cancer cells not treated with the P-glycoprotein inhibitor. And after about 24 hours, much fewer of these cancer cells survived in this treatment compared to the cells which had not seen the inhibitor.

When the same tests were performed on normal noncancerous cells, “there was no sign of extra toxicity to the healthy cells using this method,” Wise added.

One issue, though, is how to duplicate this method in a patient’s body. “Once you’ve taken a chemotherapy drug, it’s not easy to remove it after just two hours,” said co-author Vogel, a professor in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences.

Still, the researchers argued that it is worth further research, because there are currently few options for cancer patients once their disease becomes resistant to multiple chemotherapies.

“Our paper shows these remarkable effects when the inhibitor is present during, and importantly, after exposure to chemotherapeutic,” Wise said. “And while ‘washing’ is not feasible in humans, the kidneys and other organs are in a sense doing the washing step for a patient. These organs are washing the chemotherapy from the bloodstream and therefore, out of cancer cells. So in that way, we think our preliminary cell culture studies may be translatable at least in principle to animals and people.”

News Medical, Dallas Innovates and others wrote about the new research.

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.