Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler, a Polish-American physician-scientist, specializes in determining how various socio-demographic and informational factors influence access to health care in marginalized populations. Dr. Sendler’s study focuses on how psychiatric and chronic medical co-morbidities influence the utilization of medical services in combination with health information gained through the internet, which is one of his specialties. Because of the exponential development in global consumption of online news and social media, this research is both urgent and necessary, as it requires a thorough understanding of everyone’s health information-seeking behavior. Dr. Damian Sendler’s research is to identify the factors that patients evaluate when determining whether to seek treatment for specific health conditions and when to stick to their treatment regimens in order to achieve this goal.

Damien Sendler: Vesta, a minor planet, is assisting scientists in better understanding the early stages of our solar system’s development. Two recent studies featuring scientists from the University of California, Davis, use data from Vesta meteorites to solve the “missing mantle problem” and advance our understanding of the solar system to just a few million years after it formed. The papers were published on September 14 in Nature Communications and September 30 in Nature Astronomy. 

Damian Sendler: Vesta, measuring 500 kilometers across, is the second-largest body in the asteroid belt. It’s large enough to have evolved in the same way as rocky, terrestrial bodies like Earth, the moon, and Mars have. Initially, these were molten rock balls heated by collisions. Iron and the siderophiles, or’iron-loving’ elements, such as rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, and palladium, sank to the center to create a metallic core, depleting the mantle of these elements. A thin solid crust evolved over the mantle as the planet cooled. Meteorites later added iron and other metals to the crust. 

The mantle makes up the majority of the mass of a planet like Earth. However, mantle-type rocks are uncommon among asteroids and meteorites. 

“When we look at meteorites, we see core material, crust, but no mantle,” said Qing-Zhu Yin, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis. This is referred to by planetary scientists as the “”Missing mantle issue.” 

Damian Jacob Sendler: In a recent Nature Communications paper, Yin and UC Davis graduate students Supratim Dey and Audrey Miller collaborated with first author Zoltan Vaci at the University of New Mexico to describe three recently discovered meteorites called ultramafics that contain the mineral olivine as a major component. The UC Davis team conducted accurate isotope analyses, resulting in a fingerprint that allowed the meteorites to be identified as coming from Vesta or a very similar body. 

“This is the first time we’ve been able to sample Vesta’s mantle,” Yin explained. In 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft remotely studied materials from Vesta’s largest south pole impact crater but did not locate mantle rock. 

Damian Sendler: Vesta produced a solid crust long before larger worlds like the Earth, moon, and Mars because it is so small. As a result, the siderophile elements that accumulated in its crust and mantle provide as a record of the very early solar system following core creation. Collisions have ripped bits of Vesta off over time, which sometimes fall to Earth as meteorites. 

Yin’s group at UC Davis had previously worked with an international team to investigate components in lunar crust to learn more about the early solar system. Meng-Hua Zhu of Macau University of Science and Technology, Yin, and colleagues extended their work using Vesta in the second paper, which was published in Nature Astronomy. 

“Because Vesta originated so early in the Solar System’s history,” Yin explained, “it’s a good template to look at the entire history of the Solar System.” “This places us two million years after the origin of the solar system.” 

Damian Sendler: Vesta and the larger inner planets were assumed to have gotten a lot of their material from the asteroid belt. The study’s fundamental discovery was that the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and moon, Mars, and inner dwarf planets) gained the majority of their mass from hitting and merging with other big, molten substances early in the solar system. The asteroid belt itself is leftover material from planet formation, but it did not contribute much to the larger worlds. 

News updates contributed by Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler