Switchgrass removes PCBs from soils, engineers find

University of Iowa researchers have found a type of grass that was once a staple of the American prairie can remove soil laden with PCBs, toxic chemicals once used for cooling and other industrial purposes.

The researchers report that switchgrass successfully removed up to 40 percent of the PCBs from contaminated soils in lab experiments. When boosted by a PCB-oxidizing microorganism, the removal rate reached 47 percent.

The finding may lead to a natural, environmentally friendly approach to reducing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which were banned for use by the U.S. Congress in 1979 but still permeate U.S. soils, waterways, and living organisms. In some communities bordering Lake Michigan, for example, residents are advised to limit their consumption of locally caught fish, due to industrial release of thousands of tons of PCBs during the 1950s and 1960s.

The researchers investigated how adding an aerobic PCB-oxidizing microorganism could enhance the oxidation of certain PCB congeners (PCB 52, PCB 77, and PCB 153). "It seems to have worked for at least one of the congeners studied," says Tim Mattes, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and corresponding author on the paper, published in the journal Ecological Engineering.

"One surprising finding was that the presence of the switchgrass seemed to promote the survival and the activity of the added (aerobic PCB-oxidizing microorganism) LB400 bacteria," Mattes adds.

For the current study, researchers spiked soil with a mixture of PCBs at concentrations commonly found in soils and sediments--and which pose a potential risk to human and environmental health. The contaminated soil was aged for two months at 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) in sealed tubs to allow PCBs to fully leach into the soil and thereby better represent real-life conditions.

Plastic containers, each filled with about 5.5 pounds of soil, were planted with switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) seeds. An unplanted reactor and a switchgrass-planted reactor filled with clean soil were used as controls. Soil samples were analyzed at 12 weeks and 24 weeks.

Researchers found that after 24 weeks, about 40 percent of total PCB mass had been removed by the switchgrass-treated soil, significantly higher than the 30 percent removed from untreated soil. Soil applied with a PCB-oxidizing microorganism (Burkholderia strain LB400) was found to remove about 47 percent of one of the PCBs tested. Also, the presence of switchgrass appeared to facilitate the microorganism's survival in the soil.

"Normally, we think that if we can get plants to grow in degraded lands (so-called brownfields) that the proper 'bugs' will grow in the root zone to degrade the contaminants," says Jerry Schnoor, co-author and UI civil and environmental engineering professor. "What's new in this story is that we can actually help the process along by adding the proper bugs (LB400) to the root zone at the time of planting and beyond."

"The possibility of synergistic interactions between the switchgrass and the bioaugmented PCB-degrading bacteria suggests that employing both plants and bacteria in PCB remediation strategies holds promise for enhanced removal of these recalcitrant compounds from contaminated sites," Mattes says.

He notes that he currently is studying which microbes work in the root zone of the plant to transform PCBs by a process called reductive dechlorination.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Iowa . The original article was written by Gary Galluzzo. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Back to the Future of Higher Ed

courosa/Flickr

Every year I look back to see how well I looked ahead. During my time at eCollege and then Pearson, I wrote a trend piece every January. What shiny new thing might capture people’s eyes or what big, over-arching concept was top of mind for educators.

Looking back, I think I have about a 75-80% success rate. Not that I can brag too much as over those twelve years I likely spoke to or with about a quarter of a million educators, at all levels. My “premonitions” were much more about following the patterns presented to me as problems, opportunities, or simple exuberance.

So, for example, I called the trend of “MOOC fever” at the right time (although who didn’t?). I also noted the heavy push toward Competency Based Education (CBE) seemingly on target. But, when you hear first -hand from the Department of Education that CBE will be a strategic and dedicated push, it’s not hard to predict a soon-to-follow trend.

With that back drop, what is in store for 2015? After all, last year was no different. Even though my family and I moved to Florida so I could take the position of Chief Innovation Officer at Saint Leo University, I still spoke to or with 25,000 people at various levels of education, from K-12 to HE to researchers to vendors to faculty to admins and politicians in 2014. But what did they say?

The ironic (and pleasant) surprise to me was that the conversations seemed….well, less about the shiny and new and more about effectiveness and execution. I heard less about acquisition and more about integration than I ever have before. I heard less about the sky falling and more about bridge building than in past years. I think I might characterize it with a single word: Breathe.

I believe that 2015 will be a year of pausing to finally stitch some things together better, if not correctly. Education has seen a ton of initiatives, experiments, and products / services that will “revolutionize” the industry over decades. Yet no real revolution has taken place. At least not yet.

At the same time, people have seen some fantastic ideas come and go, not because the ideas weren’t solid, but because implementation was bad. Whether it’s politics (internal or external), technology limitations, or even a lack of appropriate experimentation options, some of the great education ideas of our time just languish in anonymity or make their amazing difference for only a handful of students.

Take learning analytics, coming from “big data” warehouses. In the past 5 years, I’ve read and heard the phrase, “I don’t believe in big data” from people in very high places numerous times. Why? Because the promise of data leading to transformative change of education process (be it teaching & learning, enrollment, retention, etc) missed the mark for so long. Systems would not (or could not) speak to one another; owners of data were miserly and protective; analytic engines weren’t nearly as smart as marketed; etc. So, while we are likely finally at a place to cash in on those bets, we have a problem. The problem is that the gamblers went home years ago.

And data is not the only initiative fall short of its promise. In the 35 conferences I attended in 2014, I heard regularly that OER is just too hard to edit, technology doesn’t change classroom quality as it never gets above the “Substitution” level of Puentedura’s SAMR model (or the ‘R’ of the RATL model, etc), MOOCs are more trouble than they are worth, etc.

And so it seems that 2015 might finally be the year to put together, fix, build up, or otherwise empower education with solutions of old. This is not to say new initiatives or products won’t emerge. People will certainly keep working on CBE, breaking the $10,000 Baccalaureate, and it excites me greatly to see both acceptance of and usage for gamification. And groups will keep financing initiatives that play to their strengths too. (Will LinkedIn, Mozilla, and others finally put ‘badging’ into a mainstream, significant conversation in 2015?) But generally speaking, I think 2015 and likely some of 2016 will be a year to reset. Educational institutions have spent a lot on solutions that have not hit the appropriate ROI levels yet. But many still have promise.

Take technology in the classroom up to the “Modification” or “Redefinition” stage of SAMR – now you have something transformative to look at. Want your “rigor” initiative to work for all – consistent professional development may be the answer. How about a meaningful OER solution – perhaps it’s time to bolster some middleware or change the instructional design in the first place. And on and on…

So, don’t be surprised when you start hearing about some amazing “leaps” forward for our industry in the next couple of years. Once the infrastructure is finally right, some of these initiatives will revolutionize… OK, not that strong. They will markedly improve some of the big issues education has been dealing with for a long, long time.

Good luck and good teaching.

Dr. Jeff Borden is Chief Innovation Officer at Saint Leo University.

According to Hollywood, the Future of Sex Is Super Awkward

Sex in movies is nothing new—and most of the time, it’s at least somewhat pleasant to watch. Imagining the future in movies is also nothing new, and most of the time it too is at least somewhat pleasant to watch. When the two intersect, though, the results aren’t quite so pleasant. Look, we get it; dystopian predictions feel most dire when they prey on our primal impulses, which are sex and…well, sex. But while it’s obvious why sci-fi delights in giving us creepy looks at our carnal future, what’s slightly less clear is why the execution are always so terrible. Don’t believe us? Take a stroll down cinematic memory lane. From VR shenanigans to Shag Roulette to orgies that feel more like crackhouses than saturnalia, filmmakers have made sex terrifying—but not for the reasons they wanted to.

Barbarella (1968)

In Roger Vadim’s distant future, pictured above, sex has been reduced to popping a molly and playing London Bridge. (And not that kind of London Bridge, either.) It doesn’t stop here, either; things get even campier toward the end of the movie, when Jane Fonda meets (and overpowers) the “Excessive Machine,” which is a) a player piano mixed with a jacuzzi mixed with a Hitachi Magic Wand and b) probably sitting in someone’s garage right now waiting to be funded by Ickstarter.

Logan’s Run (1976)

Careening toward state-mandated death? Relaxing in your sunken living room and looking for company? Just hit The Circuit and dial up a little love! Don’t worry: having too many teeth is a plus, and horrible attire is absolutely mandatory.

Lawnmower Man (1992)

Yes, we realize that things go horribly awry about two minutes into this. But until things get nightmarish and nonconsensual and brain-scrambling, just concentrate on how gloriously ovewrought everything is. Whether it’s the Tron-style haptic-feedback bodysuits, the full-body gyroscopes, or just the fact Jeff Fahey’s secret freakytime pro move is turning into a sexy dragonfly, it’s a perfect Horrible Sex Scene. 10/10, would cringe at again.

Demolition Man (1993)

What happens when you’re a ’90s cop who finds himself in a future when “fluid transfers” have been outlawed but you still need to communicate your yo-Adrian earthiness? You reach for the greatest collection of sexual euphemisms ever devised, that’s what. Sure, you’ve heard “boning,” but what about “the wild mambo”? What about—wait for it—“the hunka chunka”? WHAT ABOUT THE HUNKA CHUNKA?

Wild Palms (1993)

Okay, yes, this was an ABC miniseries and not a feature film. But we’re willing to overlook that for a few reasons. First, because its pharmaceutically induced erotica essentially rips off the central concept of Digital Underground’s debut album, Sex Packets . Second, because Jim Belushi’s raw magnetism is far too outsized for anything on the small screen. And third, because Jim’s buddy Charles Hallahan hams it up so hard that we have a feeling he chewed the color right off the scenery.

Surrogates (2009)

INT. DAY — SURROGATES SCRIPT MEETING

SCRIPT DOCTOR 1: We’re almost done, but this scene where we’re trying to make sexual pleasure seem illusory and outmoded still isn’t hamfisted enough.

SCRIPT DOCTOR 2: I know! We should make sex seem like a drug.

SCRIPT DOCTOR 1: Dunno, hasn’t that been done before?

SCRIPT DOCTOR 2: Sure, but not this badly!

SCRIPT DOCTOR 1: YOU’RE ON!

Her (2013)

Props to Spike Jonze for creating a world in which a human-OS relationship is not only plausible, but something you root for. And double props for coming up with a plot device that turns the very idea of cybersex inside out: having AI enlist a human to be the corporeal avatar of non-corporeal desire. But doesn’t stop it from being so awkward that you can’t look directly at it.

Mutant bacteria that keep on growing

The typical Escherichia coli, the laboratory rat of microbiology, is a tiny 1-2 thousandths of a millimeter long. Now, by blocking cell division, two researchers at Concordia University in Montreal have grown E. coli that stretch three quarters of a millimeter. That's up to 750 times their normal length. The research has potential applications in nanoscale industry, and may lead to a better understanding of how pathogens work. The study is published ahead of print on February 17 in the Journal of Bacteriology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

Normally, an E. coli grows until its length doubles, and then it divides. Many previous studies had shown that if cell division were blocked, the bacterium would grow still longer. However, such cells would presumably die within a few hours, said first author Ziad El-Hajj, a post-doctoral fellow, because the mutations that blocked cell division also interfered with some other aspect of physiology that was necessary for a cell's survival. "Our hypothesis was if the block in cell division were so specific that it would not affect any of the cell's other processes, the cells would simply keep elongating," he said.

Once they isolated a viable mutant where, presumably, physiological processes besides cell division were unaffected, that's what happened. El-Hajj noted that even the longest mutant cells had no subdivisions and all the normal cellular material was spread along the microbe's entire length. Remarkably, he said, when they allowed the cells to resume cell division, prior to dividing anew, the cells formed loops at multiple points along their length, and then divided at or near these loops.

The investigators have not yet figured out why this mutant is unable to divide. "We know that they have reduced levels of a protein called FtsZ, which is almost ubiquitous in bacteria and is essential for their division," said El-Hajj. "Why it is reduced remains uncertain."

New industrial tubes, that straddle the interface of biology, materials science, and nanotechnology could be made from the cell walls of the hyper-elongated E. coli, said El-Hajj, noting that such technology was already being developed on a much shorter scale. Franziska Lederer of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany has already demonstrated the use of "filamentous" E. coli cell structures, which range up to 50-70 micrometers, to create conductive metallic wires, which he writes could be used in electronic devices, or as novel catalysts.

El-Hajj also suggests that such tubes might be used as gene therapy delivery devices. Additionally, he speculates that creating such lengthy bacteria might be useful for achieving a greater understanding of pathogenic species. The advantage: using tiny needles--perhaps made from elongated E. coli--one could extract enough cytoplasm to study it in isolation from membrane materials, in order to illuminate their biochemistry. Currently, there is no way to separate cytoplasm from membrane that offers certainty of purity.

"Ironically, the research originally focused on a different topic, an E. coli strain that failed to make a compound that is essential to all types of cells," said El-Hajj. The strain unexpectedly lacked another compound, the amino acid methionine, and so in order to understand why, El-Hajj and coauthor Elaine B. Newman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Biology, created many mutants that did not require methionine, said El-Hajj. "One shocked us when we saw that it made extremely long cells, and we decided to focus on the biology of long E. coli."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by American Society for Microbiology . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

In a warmer world, ticks that spread disease are arriving earlier, expanding their ranges

In the northeastern United States, warmer spring temperatures are leading to shifts in the emergence of the blacklegged ticks that carry Lyme disease and other tick-borne pathogens. At the same time, milder weather is allowing ticks to spread into new geographic regions. Findings were published this week in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B dedicated to climate change and vector-borne diseases.

Conclusions on blacklegged tick emergence were based on nineteen years of data collected at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY. Located in Dutchess County, the 2,000-acre research campus sits at an epicenter for tick-borne disease. Cary Institute ecologist Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld and his team have amassed one of the most comprehensive field studies on how environmental conditions influence vector-borne disease risk.

Ostfeld, a co-author on the paper, comments, "Nearly two decades of data revealed climate warming trends correlated with earlier spring feeding by nymphal ticks, sometimes by as much as three weeks. If this persists, we will need to move Lyme Disease Awareness Month from May to April."

Risk of tick-borne illness is shaped by complex interactions among pathogens, ticks, and host animals. Take the case of Lyme disease: blacklegged ticks acquire the bacterium that causes Lyme when they feed on small mammals that harbor Borrelia burgdorferi. Ticks seek a single blood meal at each life stage: larva, nymph, and adult. Larval ticks are born free of the Borrelia bacterium. Tiny infected nymphs pose the greatest threat to people.

Dr. Taal Levi of Oregon State University led the emergence analysis; he performed the work while a Postdoctoral Associate at the Cary Institute. Levi explains, "Understanding when ticks are active, and at what life stage, is essential to predicting tick-borne disease spread. Pathogens that cause a lasting host infection, such as the Lyme disease bacterium, benefit from a lag between nymphal and larval feeing. The same might not be true of other pathogens, like Powassan virus, that are transmitted when larvae and nymphs feed simultaneously."

Using observations on more than 53,000 mice, 12,000 chipmunks, 403,000 larval ticks and 44,000 nymphal ticks collected in the Cary Institute's forests, Levi, Ostfeld, Dr. Felicia Keesing of Bard College, and Cary Institute Senior Research Specialist Kelly Oggenfuss unraveled how climate shaped the timing of tick lifecycle events. Nymphs peaked in the spring and larvae in the summer. Both larval and nymphal ticks were found to emerge nearly three weeks earlier in warmer years, but there was little evidence of larval and nymphal peaks either converging or diverging.

When fall temperatures were mild, a smaller percentage of larval ticks entered dormancy and waited until spring to feed. If these trends continue as the climate warms, asynchronous patterns of larval and nymphal tick emergence in northeastern North America are likely to persist.

Levi notes, "Results suggest that significant climate warming may reduce risk of anaplasmosis and the Powassan virus, but increase Lyme disease risk, particularly in the Upper Midwest where tick feeding patterns are likely to become more asynchronous." With Ostfeld emphasizing, "Here in the Northeast, warming is already having an effect, and people need to be tick-vigilant before May, as potentially infected nymphal ticks are searching for their blood meals earlier and earlier."

The second study, co-authored by Ostfeld and Dr. Jesse L. Brunner of Washington State University, reviewed scientific studies of how climate warming influenced the distribution of ticks. Efforts focused on Ixodes ticks, which are vectors of many human pathogens in addition to Lyme disease bacteria. These ticks spend much of their lives on or near the ground and appear limited by cold winter temperatures.

Clear evidence was found that warming is expanding Ixodes populations to higher latitudes and altitudes, but more work is needed to understand why ticks in different regions appear to be constrained by different environmental influences.

Ostfeld concludes: "Forecasting how climate change shapes tick-borne disease risk requires taking a suite of factors into consideration, among them habitat loss, urbanization, and movement of people and animals. We are making inroads, but protecting public health will require investment in multidisciplinary, collaborative work that takes advantage of new technology and modeling approaches."

Kirby Is Nintendo’s Triumphant Return to Touchscreen Gaming

Nintendo

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse is a great new Wii U game. It also represents Nintendo’s return to touchscreen gaming.

“But Chris,” you might be writing right now if you are the sort of person who comments without reading the story, “Nintendo has been making touchscreen games all this time. In fact, it has touchscreens on both its portable and home consoles.” Indeed it does, but unlike the original Nintendo DS from which both of these designs sprang, the 3DS and Wii U’s hardware designs disincentivize the creation of touchscreen-only gaming.

So in fact, if you look at the history of Nintendo’s games since the launch of 3DS in 2011, we’ve seen very few games like Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, in which the main action of the game is controlled by directly touching the characters or environments. This is ironic, since mobile games, following on the success of the touch interface in the original DS, have now entirely shifted to exactly this sort of direct-touching control while Nintendo has moved away from it.

If you were to create a touchscreen game on the 3DS, you’d be missing out on one of the system’s most striking features, the glasses-free 3-D display. Any game developer would want the main action of the game to take place on the 3-D screen, not the 2-D touchscreen. But this means that touch controls end up relegated to selecting options in menus, or used for more abstract control: For example, you used to interact with the Professor Layton games by directly tapping on the environment. Now, the touchscreen is used as a sort of trackpad-type pointing device to control a cursor on the 3-D screen.

Same thing with the Wii U: Your television screen might not be 3-D, but can you imagine a game console having you play a game in which you never once look at the television? But that’s exactly what Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, available February 20, asks of you. In this game featuring one of Nintendo’s many second-fiddle mascots, you don’t move Kirby around the screen directly. Instead, you use the stylus to draw pathways on the touchscreen, which he rolls along. You can tap Kirby to give him a little acceleration boost, but you can’t control his direction—he goes where gravity and momentum are pointing him, and if you want to manipulate that, all you can do is draw hills, valleys and loops in front of him.

It’s a design that simply could never be pulled off without a touchscreen. Fittingly, it’s the long-awaited sequel to one of the first games that really showed how different and innovative touchscreen gameplay could be on the original Nintendo DS. It was just a hair under 10 years ago that Kirby: Canvas Curse appeared on the then-unproven DS platform. This sequel doesn’t radically differ from the gameplay of the original, but it’s great to have it back. (And it’s worth noting that you can still pop in a Canvas Curse cartridge and play it on your New Nintendo 3DS, 10 years and many hardware iterations later.)

Nintendo

Kirby‘s cutesy, sugary aesthetic hides the fact that it can be a remarkably challenging, even difficult, game. Since you don’t have direct control of Kirby, you can’t just stop him on a dime when he’s heading into danger. You’ve got to be precise with your line-drawing, which can be difficult under pressure. It’s not a strategy game, and it’s not a twitch game either. It occupies an intriguing, unique position somewhere in the middle of the two; you have to plan your moves out a second or two in advance.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Rainbow Curse has a drop-dead gorgeous graphic presentation straight out of a Will Vinton Claymation special. Nintendo’s designers nailed every aspect of the faux-clay style, from the jerky frame-skippy animation to the thumbprinted hand-made look of the character models. Pity that the game’s main player has to spend all of their time looking at the small touchscreen on the Wii U’s controller. If there’s someone else in the room watching the TV as you play, they’ll get the full impact of the beautiful graphics.

Unlike most other Kirby games, our pink protagonist cannot absorb enemies’ special abilities in Rainbow Curse. In lieu of that, there are a few levels in which Kirby is permanently transfigured into a type of transport vehicle (tank, submarine, rocket ship). In this way, Nintendo’s designers explore even more concepts for touch-only gameplay controls. The submarine, for example, doesn’t follow along the lines that you draw—you just tap a location to set a waypoint, and it automatically travels there.

Drawing lines isn’t just to move Kirby along, either. You might have to draw walls to repel enemy fire, divert a waterfall (or a lava flow), or any number of different things. Simple controls give way to more complex actions.

If I have one caveat it is that Kirby is fairly short. I finished it in a few play sessions over the course of one evening and the subsequent day. You can go back and get the collectible doodads you missed out on, but I find myself fairly reluctant to actually do that for a few reasons: The levels themselves are pretty lengthy, and many of them auto-scroll at a fixed pace. So going back in to find hidden treasures would mean 99 percent of my time would be spent doing things I’ve already done, and 1 percent completing the tough little mini-challenges that the collectibles are locked behind.

So you probably won’t spend a whole lot of time playing on the Wii U’s touchscreen. But as a proof of concept, Rainbow Curse works great for me. I don’t even need to look at the TV when the game is this good. It’s a little strange that the best home for touchscreen gameplay is now the Wii U, rather than the 3DS. But I’ll take it where I can get it.

The 5 Comics You Need to Read Right Now

Fabio Moon

With dozens of titles hitting the print (and digital) stands each month, deciding which comics to read isn’t always easy. So we’ll keep it simple: If you’re only going to pick up a couple of comics or graphic novels right now, here are a handful that are worth your time and money. Of course, there’s no way to cover every worthwhile title, so consider this a monthly sampler—and leave your own suggestions in the comments.

Casanova: Acedia

Matt Fraction’s inter-dimensional superspy returns for the long-awaited fourth volume of this series, where an amnesiac Casanova Quinn walks out of a fire in the Hollywood Hills with no memory of the past, and no fear of the future. As he makes a new life in the heady, forgetful glow of Los Angeles, where he finds a way to put his specialized skills to use for a fatherly criminal figure. Indeed, he seems happier than he’s been—maybe ever? Maybe it’s better to forget. His past starts to catch up with him, however, when beautiful occult assassin starts trying to murder him in swimming pools wearing nothing but Louboutins. The art is a sumptuous delight, as always, and since cartoonists (and identical twins) Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon have been trading off for each volume this time around it’s Moon’s chance to shine. Throw in a backup story written by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and you’ve got yourself a party.

Price: $3.99

Where to Buy It: Image Comics (DRM-free digital) or your local comic shop

Jason Shiga

Demon

A pure mathematics major turned cartoonist, Jason Shiga has a tendency to make stories that feel like puzzles, from his superbly mind-bending choose your own adventure-style time travel comic, Meanwhile , to the amnesiac mystery of Fleep . This time around Shiga introduces us to Jimmy Yee, a down-on-his-luck man who kills himself in a motel room, only to wake up in bed the next morning no worse for the experience. After several more failed suicide attempts, things start to get weird—he finds bullets lodged in the wall and his own headless body on the floor, but somehow never ends up any deader. After stepping in front of a trailer truck, he wakes up in the hospital to find a daughter he doesn’t know and a life he never lived waiting for him. Half the fun of Demon is unraveling the mystery, and the other half is watching things go wild when Yee finally learns the truth. Although you can read the ongoing story for free at Shiga’s website, print or DRM-free digital versions are available for a modest Patreon contribution. And you should seriously consider the latter option.

Price: The webcomic is free, but PDFs cost $1/month, print editions $4.99/month

Where to Get It: Shiga’s website and store, Patreon

Michael DeForge

Michael DeForge’s Patreon Comics

Michael DeForge makes some of the most excellent and unnerving comics currently in print (see: his highly-acclaimed anthology series Lose and the drone body horror of Ant Colony ). He’s currently making original monthly comics for Patreon subscribers, which means that for three dollars a month you can watch a modern master of sequential art do weird, wonderful experiments. December’s “Wet Animals” explores the lingering heartbreak of love (and cruel fish) while January’s “Mars Is My Last Hope” follows refugees from Earth as they try to adapt to the red planet and get infiltrated by its native flora. These monthly comics are a bit of a limited-time offer, however: He’s only promised to continue them through May, so get on board while you can.

Price: $3.00 a month

Where to Buy It: Patreon

First Second Books

The Sculptor

Scott McCloud wrote the book on comics. Or more accurately, he wrote three of them: Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics. Now, he’s finally released what he considers his magnum opus, an original graphic novel about an ambitious young sculptor who makes a Faustian bargain for an unusual superpower: the ability to sculpt anything in his imagination with little more than a thought. Decades in the making, it explores some pretty ambitious ideas: nothing less than the meaning of art, love, and being human. It’s a high bar to clear—especially with the sky-high expectations that accompany his publication history—but McCloud delivers a solid, mature work worthy of the countless “best of 2015″ lists it will no doubt populate later this year. (Check out WIRED’s profile of McCloud here.)

Price: $29.99 print, $14.99 Kindle

Where to Buy It: Macmillan/First Second

And Then Emily Was Gone

Chances are you missed this offbeat comic about a detective who sees terrifying visions of monsters, travels to the remote Orkney Islands in Scotland to find a missing girl, and finds hell instead. Published by a very small indie press, And Then Emily Is Gone is written by John Lees with art with by Iain Laurie, and it’s scary as hell. Readers with more conventional tastes might be put off the misshapen faces and thick-lined monsters of Laurie’s atypical art style, but that’s exactly what will make it irresistible to everyone else. Horror fans take note: This might be the best creepy comic of the last year to slip under your radar.

Price: $7.99

Where to Buy It: ComiXology (digital)