Fermented chocolate, noxious bubbles, estrogen, and making m(ore) of ore

🎶 Tiny Bubbles … in the Air

Are fast-moving rivers self-cleaning? Not necessarily, according to new research. The very motion of flowing water, once thought to disperse pollutants and lessen their threat, can actually send them airborne in tiny, polluted aerosols, scientists say. As Science News’s Erin Garcia de Jesús reports, this discovery adds a new wrinkle to the complex challenge of environmental cleanup.

🔬 The Dirty Details

By combining mobile air quality labs with input from community members about foul-smelling stenches near a major river, scientists have shown how poor water quality can contribute to air pollution. This process, a miniature version of how ocean spray creates sea salt aerosols, means that pollution isn’t just a downstream problem—it’s an airborne one. The implications are significant, suggesting that we may need to protect the air spaces near bodies of contaminated water.

💧 A Clearer Vision

This new understanding underscores the importance of advanced environmental monitoring. Instead of reactive, post-mortem analysis, communities are calling for more real-time, in-the-moment data on water and air quality. Monitoring current standards for air quality and wastewater safety may also be in order. While federal environmental protections have been rolled back in recent months, some proactive startups are stepping up to fill the void.

🫧 Sensing the Opportunity

The market for innovative water and soil quality technology is bursting with potential. Here are a few notable ventures whose work is addressing this very challenge.

• KETOS, based in Milpitas, Calif., provides an automated water quality monitoring platform for industrial, agricultural, and municipal applications, with real-time data and predictive analytics. They’ve raised over $48 million, most recently from a $10 million private equity round in November 2024 led by Tenfore Holdings.
  
• Aclarity: This Massachusetts-based cleantech startup develops and sells water treatment systems to clean drinking water and wastewater, with a focus on eliminating per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a.k.a. “forever chemicals” using electrochemical oxidation technology. They have raised over $20 million, most recently through a $15.9 million Series A round in November 2023.
  
• AquaRealTime, based in Boulder, Colo., provides early warning and mitigation of harmful algal blooms and other water contamination using solar-powered sensors that stream data to a web dashboard. They’ve raised almost $1 million from seed and grant funding, most recently through a $175,000 grant in August of 2024.

Here’s to getting the future of clean air off the ground.

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🍫 Fine Chocolate Starter Packs: Microbes for Big Flavor

While many joyfully consume chocolate without pondering its flavor profile beyond “tasty,” this confection merits as much consideration as a fine wine or cheese. It turns out that the unique microbes involved in producing a bar are what give different chocolates their distinct essence, SN’s Tina Hesman Saey reports.

🦠 Chocolate’s Secret Ingredient

Different chocolates might taste fruity and floral, smoky and woody, or have other flavor notes. These characteristics arise from factors like the soil, rain and temperature of its originating cacao—the tree-grown fruit whose seeds, when dried, fermented and roasted, become cocoa beans that eventually create chocolate products. But researchers in England, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago have mapped out another secret ingredient that influences every bar’s flavor. Wild microbial communities present when harvested cocoa beans sit out to ferment help various bouquets bloom, the team meticulously described in a paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Looking at three Colombian cocoa farms — two producing fine chocolate and one bulk — the team cataloged microbes present throughout fermentation. They then assembled a yeast and bacteria community that can recreate the flavors of some fine chocolate. Crucially, this lab-made microbial recipe serves as a starter culture that could help cocoa farmers ferment more consistently, creating a more reliable taste. However, chocolate makers warn that such a microbial starter culture could result in less variety among chocolate flavors.

🥥 Cultures, Cocoa and Climate

This starter culture comes in the midst of a climate-induced cacao decline that has led to an increase in cocoa prices. Cacao is a finicky plant that can only thrive in tropical climates. West Africa produces 70 percent of the world’s cocoa, and a more erratic climate has stalled production, in part because it alters the product’s flavor entirely. A cocoa shortage has inflated its price significantly; for decades it cost about $2,000 per ton, but in 2024 it peaked at over $12,000. But investing in alternate ways to produce chocolate can ease strain on the market. From chocolate-like products to novel forms of production, innovations to the chocolate industry offer a sustainable future for this delicacy as the climate continues to change.

🏭 Real-Life Willy Wonkas

• California Cultured: Founded in 2020, this Series A startup based in Davis, California creates lab-grown cocoa fermented and cultured from cells selected from premium cacao varieties. Over 7 funding rounds, they’ve raised $4 million.
  
• Circe: Headquartered in Boston, this seed-stage company harnesses gas fermentation. Their technology programs microbes to metabolize gases like carbon dioxide, like plants do, producing a yield of molecules to harvest and incorporate into food products. For example, with molecules called triglycerides that make up natural fats and oils, the company has created cocoa butter for what they call the world’s first gas fermentation-derived chocolate. Since its founding in 2021, Circe has raised a total of $14.5 million, most recently garnering $5 million in September 2024.
  
• Nukoko: This British seed-stage startup founded in 2022 produces a chocolate alternative made from fermented fava beans. Soon to offer dark, milk and vegan bars as well as powder, Nukoko has raised $1.9 million over 6 rounds.

The future of chocolate looks exciting and sweet.

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👩🏼‍🔬 Estrogen: Bone up on the latest

Good news for postmenopausal women undergoing or considering hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Researchers have uncovered more information about how the risk of bone fractures evolves with time, long after treatments have ceased. This revelation is a game-changer for a demographic that faces a high risk of osteoporosis, a condition in which the bones become brittle and fragile from loss of tissue. Sofia Caetano Avritzer offers a deep dive into the clinical research.

🦴 An Unbreakable Case for Estrogen

A prescription to HRT, for all its benefits, often comes with a warning and an expiration date. Since the early 2000s, some physicians have discouraged long-term use, citing findings from an early 2000s clinical trial tying estrogen and progesterone to the risk of breast cancer, blood clots, stroke and heart disease in women over 60. Now, new evidence suggests that discontinuing treatment can lead to a rapid increase in the risk of a bone fracture — which may lead physicians to pay more attention to protecting older women’s bones.

More than one in four women over the age of 65 suffer from osteoporosis. Bones weakened by osteoporosis are more likely to fracture, which can be debilitating and lead to poor quality of life, as only 40 to 60 percent of survivors are likely to regain their pre-fracture mobility. Despite these unsettling statistics, women under the age of 65 are not typically screened for bone density, so the benefits from HRT feel like an under-the-radar bonus. The study’s key finding is that the long-term effects of estrogen replacement dramatically reduce fracture risk for decades after the treatment has ceased. To sum up: it could be important to track some women’s bone health in the years after stopping hormone therapy.

🌞 A New Horizon for Women’s Health

The FemTech space is shifting from a narrow focus on fertility and menstruation to a more holistic approach that includes everything from managing perimenopause symptoms to addressing hormonal imbalances that affect mood, sleep, and metabolic function. As drug research and marketing has developed in tandem with aging populations with better access to healthcare, the demand for personalized, data-driven solutions is surging.

🏗️ The Builders in the Market

Venture capital is flowing into companies focused on women’s health. Here are a few of the most successful:

• Evernow, a San Francisco-based telehealth platform dedicated to perimenopause and menopause care, has raised $52.5 million in total funding, including a $28.5 million Series A in April 2022.
  
• FemmePharma, a pharmaceutical company focused on women’s health therapeutics, has raised $9.2 million, including a venture funding round closing at $1.82 million in April 2018.
  
• Women’s health platform Maven Clinic: While not exclusively focused on menopause care, has raised over $400 million with over $1 billion valuation. These companies exemplify the growing investor confidence in a market that is just beginning to realize its full potential.

With a renewed focus on long-term health, the future of women’s wellness is looking stronger than ever.

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⛏ Make the Most of Mining: Recovering By-Product Elements

Mining metals like platinum often surfaces other elements, like the nickel and cobalt so crucial for electric vehicles, that go unused. SN’s Nikk Ogasa reports on a new study that found recovering these secondary metals could substantially reduce U.S. dependence on imported metals.

🗑 Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water

From consumer electronics to defense technology, metals figure into an array of products. But it turns out that in mining for metals that we rely on, we’re also discarding a number of other materials, called tailings, that could be just as useful.

A team of researchers from the Colorado School of Mines examined production data from mining productions on federal land, plus data from over 26,000 ore samples, each analyzed for 70 elements. The U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year to import the very materials that American mining operations discard. For some elements, recovering even one percent of what’s currently mined, processed and discarded could compensate for annual overseas purchases, the team wrote in the journal Science. These materials are much harder to extract once they hit a waste site.

♻ Mine, All Mine

If you have a cellphone or laptop, then you have these oft-wasted metals in your life. As demand increases for cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements and other materials, it’s imperative to consider all potential sources for these commodities. And their uses reach far beyond consumer electronics, pervading energy production and semiconductors. It’s only common sense to consider how to use what’s produced through the mining already done.

🌏 Waste Not, Want Not

• Phoenix Tailings: Founded in 2019, this Series B startup based in Woburn, Massachusetts aims to extract valuable metals and rare earth elements from tailings with clean energy sources and zero waste, utilizing all the ore. Over 11 funding rounds they’ve raised $102.6 million, most recently amassing $33 million this past April.
  
• Tersa Earth: This Vancouver, Canada–based company, founded in 2021, has developed a carbon-neutral solution for recovering metals from mining waste. By using ore more efficiently, they also envision eliminating artificial reservoirs of water and mining waste called tailings ponds. Over 2 funding rounds, they’ve raised over $433,000.

Mining and processing ore more efficiently could make a world of difference.

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