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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Tuesday

Indian scientists are marching for science...

Scientists and science activists will take out a 'March for Science' in several states in India on August 9. The march is being organized in protest against the Centre's move to slash funds for science and technology research institutes. The scientists are demanding that at least three percent of the country's GDP be set apart for scientific growth and for government policy to promote scientific research instead of promoting superstitious beliefs.

Ahead of the march, a reception committee of 'India March for Science' will be constituted at the Library hall of Kerala State Science and Technology Museum here on July 14, said Rajeevan P P, faculty, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and secretariat member of Breakthrough Science Society (BSS). The march is being organized on the lines of the previous  March for science taken out in 160 cities across the world on April 22 this year.

"Science in India is facing the danger of being eclipsed by a rising wave of unscientific beliefs and religious bigotry. Scientific research is suffering serious setback due to dwindling governmental support," Rajeevan said. This is despite the fact that scientists from India have played a commendable role in developing science.

The organizers said financial support to even premier institutions like Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), National Institute of Technology, and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISERs) were slashed. Universities are facing shortage of funds to adequately support scientific research. Research funding agencies like DST, DBT and CSIR are reportedly impacted by reduced governmental support. Scientists in government laboratories are being asked to generate a part of their salary by commercialising their scientific output and from other sources.

IISER Kolkata faculty Soumitra Banerjee said after the march on August 9, a delegation of scientists and science faculties will submit memorandums to state governors. The governors would forward them to the Union minister for science and technology, he said.

The scientists have made an appeal for participation in the march by all who agree to four demands raised by them. They are allocation of at least 3% of GDP to scientific research and 10% towards education; stopping the propagation of unscientific, obscurantist ideas and religious intolerance and developing scientific temper, human values and spirit of inquiry in conformance with Article 51A of the Constitution; ensuring that the education system imparts only ideas that are supported by scientific evidence and enactment of policies based on evidence-based science.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 14, 2017 at 10:08am

Motivational switch in the brain identified!

A research team in China may have done just that. The group isolated a small group of neurons in the brains of mice that play a critical role in persistent behavior, according to a study published today in Science. This handful of brain cells is known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, or dmPFC, and it sits in a region integral for learning appropriate social behavior. When the team fired up the neurons using light, the dmPFC motivated the mice to win competitions in which they had previously lacked the will to succeed. In other words, “this might provide a new biological basis for what people call ‘grit,’” says Hailan Hu, a neuroscientist at Zhejiang University who led the research.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/162

Mental strength and history of winning play an important role in the determination of social dominance. However, the neural circuits mediating these intrinsic and extrinsic factors have remained unclear. Working in mice, we identified a dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) neural population showing “effort”-related firing during moment-to-moment competition in the dominance tube test. Activation or inhibition of the dmPFC induces instant winning or losing, respectively. In vivo optogenetic-based long-term potentiation and depression experiments establish that the mediodorsal thalamic input to the dmPFC mediates long-lasting changes in the social dominance status that are affected by history of winning. The same neural circuit also underlies transfer of dominance between different social contests. These results provide a framework for understanding the circuit basis of adaptive and pathological social behaviors.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 14, 2017 at 8:24am

A solution to reverse the worrying antibiotic resistance crisis may have been found...

 Salford University scientists claim they may have stumbled across a very simple way forward – even though they weren't looking for antibiotics.

They were looking into ways of inhibiting mitochondria, the 'powerhouse' of cells which fuel fatal tumours, when they made the discovery. 

The team sorted through 45,000 compounds, using a three-dimensional structure of the mitochondria. 

Using it, they identified 800 small molecules which may inhibit mitochondria based on their structural characteristics.

This was then whittled down into the most promising 10 compounds, according to the research published in the journal Oncotarget.

Their results showed that these synthetic compounds - without any additional chemical engineering - inhibited a broad spectrum of five types of common bacteria.

This included Streptococcus, Pseudomonas, E. coli and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). They also killed the pathogenic yeast, Candida albicans. 

Dubbed as 'mito-riboscins', they are equally, if not more, potent than standard antibiotics, the researchers said. 

http://www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/index.php?journal=oncotarg...[]=19084&path[]=61161

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 14, 2017 at 8:13am

How climate change impacts flying...

Rising temperatures due to global warming will make it harder for many aircraft around the world to take off in coming decades, says a new study. During the hottest parts of the day, 10 to 30 percent of fully loaded planes may have to remove some fuel, cargo or passengers, or else wait for cooler hours to fly, the study concludes. The study, which is the first such global analysis, appeared recently in the journal Climatic Change.

As air warms, it spreads out, and its density declines. In thinner air, wings generate less lift as a plane races along a runway. Thus, depending on aircraft model, runway length and other factors, at some point a packed plane may be unable to take off safely if the temperature gets too high. Weight must be dumped, or else the flight delayed or canceled.

Average global temperatures have gone up nearly 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 Fahrenheit) since about 1980, and this may already be having an effect.

"This points to the unexplored risks of changing climate on aviation

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 11, 2017 at 12:33pm

Canadian researchers reconstituted an extinct poxvirus for $100,000 using mail-order DNA

A group led by virologist David Evans of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says it has synthesized the horsepox virus, a relative of smallpox, from genetic pieces ordered in the mail. Horsepox is not known to harm humans—and like smallpox, researchers believe it no longer exists in nature; nor is it seen as a major agricultural threat. But the technique Evans used could be used to recreate smallpox, a horrific disease that was declared eradicated in 1980. 

Scientifically, the achievement isn't a big surprise. Researchers had assumed it would one day be possible to synthesize poxviruses since virologists assembled the much smaller poliovirus from scratch in 2002. But the new work—like the poliovirus reconstitutions before it—is raising troubling questions about how terrorists or rogue states could use modern biotechnology. Given that backdrop, the study marks an important milestone, a proof of concept of what can be done with viral synthesis.

- Sciencemag.org

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 5, 2017 at 8:28am

Role of uterine fluid: New light...

Once considered a simple medium for sperm and embryo transport, the functional spectrum of uterine fluid is now expanding. Novel molecular players, such as extracellular vesicles and mobile RNAs, have been detected in the uterine fluid of livestock, rodents, and humans. These novel molecules, together with previously known ions and proteins, ensure uterine fluid homeostasis and facilitate embryo–maternal interactions. 

These molecules may also carry information that mirrors maternal environmental exposure and possibly relay such information to the embryo via uterine fluid, generating long-term epigenetic effects on the offspring via embryonic and placental programming. Moreover, the development of systematic profiling of uterine fluid molecular signatures may now hold promise, relying on high-throughput methods and non-invasive biomarkers for clinical use.

http://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S1471-4914(17)30080-1?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1471491417300801%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 5, 2017 at 7:10am

Praying mantises are posing threat  to small birds...

A study by zoologists from Switzerland and the US shows: praying mantises all over the globe also include birds in their diet. The Wilson Journal of Ornithology has just published the results.

he researchers gathered and documented numerous examples of bird-eating mantises. In a systematic review, they were able to show that praying mantises from twelve species and nine genera have been observed preying on small birds in the wild. This remarkable feeding behavior has been documented in 13 different countries, on all continents except Antarctica. There is also great diversity in the victims: birds from 24 different species and 14 families were found to be the prey of mantises. "The fact that eating of birds is so widespread in praying mantises, both taxonomically as well as geographically speaking, is a spectacular discovery," comments Martin Nyffeler from the University of Basel and lead author of the study.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.1676/16-100.1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 5, 2017 at 7:06am

Researchers have found material that removes synthetic pollutant dyes from water...

Researchers from Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University, U.K hold the key to the problem in the form of a novel, non-hazardous photocatalytic material.

The said material effectively removes dye pollutants from water, adsorbing more than 90 % of the dye and enhancing the rate of dye breakdown by almost ten times using visible light. The composite material as a combination of tungsten oxide and tantalum nitride, also provides a huge surface area for dye capture, being less than 40 billionths of a metre in diameter. The material was synthesized by heating the reaction mixture at high pressures inside a sealed container which involved growing ultra-thin “nanowires” of tungsten oxide on the surface of tiny particles of tantalum nitride. It further proceeded to break the dye down into smaller, harmless molecules using the energy provided by sunlight, in a process known as ‘photocatalytic degradation’. 

Having removed the harmful dyes, the catalyst can be simply filtered from the cleaned water and reused. Due to the exchange of electrons between the two materials, the test dye used within the study was broken down by the composite at around double the rate achieved by tantalum nitride on its own, while tungsten oxide alone was shown to be incapable of dye degradation.

The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 28, 2017 at 6:37am

Bad news for coral reef lovers...the 3 successive years of bleaching conditions damaged all but three of the 29 reefs that are or are contained within United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites. And the prognosis is grim: Without dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, all these reefs "will cease to host functioning coral reef ecosystems by the end of the century," predicts the report from UNESCO’s World Heritage Center in Paris.

Feel sad, because I love corals :(

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2017 at 7:30am

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