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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 10, 2017 at 8:31am

Nov. 10th: World Science Day for Peace and Development
An internationally celebrated day to highlight the importance of science in and for society and that science, peace and development are interlinked

Celebrated every 10 November, World Science Day for Peace and Development highlights the important role of science in society and the need to engage the wider public in debates on emerging scientific issues. It also underlines the importance and relevance of science in our daily lives.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 8, 2017 at 6:44am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2017 at 7:30am

Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity Catalogue

A meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24621

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 28, 2017 at 5:31am

The time of day of your surgery could have long-term impacts on your health. That’s according to researchers who looked at the way circadian rhythm—the body’s internal clock—affects  the outcomes of a patient recovering from a complex heart procedure.

Patients who underwent open-heart surgery in the afternoon experienced better health outcomes compared to those who got operated on in the morning, study authors found after six years of observing nearly 600 patients who underwent heart valve replacement. In the subsequent 500 days after surgery, researchers found, those patients who had surgery after noon had half the risk of a major cardiac event—for instance myocardial infarction, acute heart failure, or death—as those who had surgeries before then.

University of Lille-France professor David Montaigne, the study’s lead author, suggests that the study’s findings indicate that scheduling changes could decrease injury or death.

“There are few other surgical options to reduce the risk of post-surgery heart damage, meaning new techniques to protect patients are needed,” Montaigne said in a statement. “Our findings suggest this is because part of the biological mechanism behind the damage is affected by a person’s circadian clock and the underlying genes that control it.”

The findings are the latest in a growing body of evidence suggesting that time of day plays an important role in how well various medical treatments work. Studies show that the efficacy of some vaccines and cancer treatments may be affected by the time of day when a therapy is administered or medicine is taken. For example, research has found that patients who received a seasonal flu vaccination before 11 a.m. produced more antibodies than those who had one after 3 p.m.

“This study underscores the importance of the circadian rhythm biology that’s finally starting to gain recognition in science. This could potentially save a lot of lives. 

http://www.thelancet-press.com/embargo/heartsurgery.pdf

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 21, 2017 at 6:53am

When the courts here banned bursting of Diwali fire crackers, several people , criticized it protested and disregarded the ban. But at what cost? Read this:

Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and death in the world today, responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths according to The Lancet Commission on pollution and health.

The new study, published in the journal The Lancet and written by more than 40 international health and environmental experts, uses data from the the Global Burden of Disease, an international study that examines trends across populations and estimates mortality from major diseases and their causes. It i t looked at the effects of air pollution, or air contaminated with things like gases and the burning of wood, charcoal and coal; water pollution, which includes contamination by things like unhygienic sanitation; and workplace pollution, where employees are exposed to toxins and carcinogens like coal or asbestos.

Air pollution was linked to 6.5 million deaths in 2015, water pollution was linked to 1.8 million deaths and workplace pollution was linked to nearly one million deaths. Deaths from pollution-linked diseases, like heart disease and cancer, were three times higher than deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, the researchers found.

The authors also found that 92% of pollution-related deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries. In growing countries like India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Madagascar and Kenya, the researchers say that up to one in four deaths can be tied to pollution. China and India had the greatest number of pollution-related deaths in 2015. That year, pollution in China was linked to 1.8 million deaths, and pollution in India was linked to 2.5 million deaths. 

The researchers note that their data are likely underestimates and do not reflect the entire burden of disease from pollution. For instance, the researchers didn't look at other contaminants, like the effects of endocrine disruptors, flame retardants and pesticides on human health and early deaths. Fuller says there isn't data of high enough quality or quantity on those health issues.

 

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 10, 2017 at 11:06am

5000 years of science development in India is being shown in an exhibition in London, UK

• First written zero on a 1700-year-old birch bark manuscript

• Oldest artefact is set of weights that standardised mud brick production

• Exhibition at UK’s Science Museum in London

      

A light scattering technique invented in the early 20th century and a fragile manuscript documenting the earliest known symbol for a numerical zero are among achievements of Indian science highlighted in an exhibition that opened this week at the Science Museum in London, UK.

Illuminating India, which runs until 31 March 2018, marks 70 years from the country’s independence by celebrating global contributions to scientific advancement, as well as photography, from 3000 BC to the present day.

Mainstream views of science and technology tend to be Eurocentric, according to the curator, and the aim of the exhibition is to “redress that balance” by bringing India’s contribution to the centre.

He pointed to a set of standardised weights, the oldest artefact on display, as an example of how early scientific thought made it possible – through the production of mud bricks of standardized sizes – for the Indus Valley Civilisation to build large cities comparable to those later built by the Romans.

The scientific achievements on show range from space exploration – through early astronomy and India’s modern space programme – to the Great Trigonometrical Survey that mapped the subcontinent in the nineteenth century, and to the study of nature through technology such as Raman spectrometry, a light-scattering technique still used today to analyse the make-up of different materials.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 7, 2017 at 9:14am

Pesticides in natural honey!

WHEN researchers collected honey samples from around the world, they found that three-quarters of them had a common type of pesticide suspected of playing a role in the decline of bees.

Even honey from the island paradise of Tahiti had the chemical.

That demonstrates how pervasive a problem the much-debated pesticide is for honeybees, said authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

They said it is not a health problem for people because levels were far below governments’ thresholds on what’s safe to eat.

“What this shows is the magnitude of the contamination,” said study lead author Edward Mitchell, a biology professor at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, adding that there are “relatively few places where we did not find any”.

Over the past few years, several studies — in the lab and the field — link insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics, to reduced and weakened honeybee hives, although pesticide makers dispute those studies.

Neonics work by attacking an insect’s central nervous system; bees and other pollinators have been on the decline for more than a decade and experts blame a combination of factors: neonics, parasites, disease, climate change and lack of a diverse food supply.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2017 at 9:31am

Three scientists who laid the groundwork for the first direct detection of gravitational waves have won the Nobel Prize in physics. Rainer Weiss of MIT, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of Caltech, will share the 9-million-Swedish-kronor (about $1.1 million) prize, with half going to Weiss and the remainder split between Thorne and Barish.

Weiss, Thorne and Barish are pioneers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO. On February 11, 2016, LIGO scientists announced they had spotted gravitational waves produced by a pair of merging black holes. This first-ever detection generated a frenzy of excitement among physicists and garnered front-page headlines around the world.

LIGO’s observation of gravitational waves directly confirmed a 100-year-old prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — that rapidly accelerating massive objects stretch and squeeze spacetime, producing ripples  that travel outward from the source.

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An imaging technique that freezes tiny biological objects such as proteins and viruses in place so that scientists can peer into their structures at the scale of atoms has won its developers the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Jacques Dubochet of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joachim Frank of Columbia University and Richard Henderson of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, won for their contributions to the development of the technique, called cryo-electron microscopy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 4. 

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 3, 2017 at 6:50am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 3, 2017 at 6:26am

Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young are the joint winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, winning for their discoveries about how internal clocks and biological rhythms govern human life.

The three Americans won "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm," the Nobel Foundation says

    "Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year's Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm. They showed that this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day. Subsequently, they identified additional protein components of this machinery, exposing the mechanism governing the self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell. We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

    "With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day. The clock regulates critical functions such as behavior, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism."

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