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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2023 at 12:08pm

Water is getting scarce. And experts are advising to conserve it ane reduce your water footprint. 

Steps to reduce your water footprint

Meriano offers the following tips for saving water inside and outside the home:

• Fix leakages or dripping immediately from toilets, hot water heaters or other pipes and make sure to turn taps off all the way.
• Showers use less water than baths but if you need to take a soak, don't fill the tub all the way.
• When opportunity arises, choose a new washing machine, toilet, showerhead or dishwasher that uses less water.
• Rainwater that flows down gutters can be collected and used to water plants and gardens.
• Water lawns when it's not hot so water doesn't evaporate, and don't water them on windy days.
• Keeping blades of grass longer can also shelter the roots and cause lawns to need less water.

All health is reliant and dependent on clean water. "You can't have healthy populations without having access to clean water."

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2023 at 12:03pm

Can a solid be a superfluid? Engineering a novel supersolid state from layered 2D materials

A collaboration of Australian and European physicists predict that layered electronic 2D semiconductors can host a curious quantum phase of matter called the "supersolid."

The supersolid is a very counterintuitive phase indeed. It is made up of particles that simultaneously form a rigid crystal and yet at the same time flow without friction since all the particles belong to the same single quantum state.

A solid becomes "super" when its quantum properties match the well-known quantum properties of superconductors. A supersolid simultaneously has two orders, solid and super:

• Solid because of the spatially repeating pattern of particles.
• Super because the particles can flow without resistance.

Although a supersolid is rigid, it can flow like a liquid without resistance.

The new Australia-Europe study predicts that a state could  be engineered in two-dimensional (2D) electronic materials in a semiconductor structure, fabricated with two conducting layers separated by an insulating barrier of thickness d.

One layer is doped with negatively-charged electrons and the other with positively-charged holes. The particles forming the supersolid are interlayer excitons, bound states of an electron and hole tied together by their strong electrical attraction. The insulating barrier prevents fast self-annihilation of the exciton bound pairs. Voltages applied to top and bottom metal "gates" tune the average separation r0 between excitons. The research team predicts that excitons in this structure will form a supersolid over a wide range of layer separations and average separations between the excitons. The electrical repulsion between the excitons can constrain them into a fixed crystalline lattice. "A key novelty is that a supersolid phase with Bose-Einstein quantum coherence appears at layer separations much smaller than the separation predicted for the non-super exciton solid that is driven by the same electrical repulsion between excitons.

In this way, the supersolid pre-empts the non-super exciton solid. At still larger separations, the non-super exciton solid eventually wins, and the quantum coherence collapses.

This is an extremely robust state, readily achievable in experimental setups.

Sara Conti et al, Chester Supersolid of Spatially Indirect Excitons in Double-Layer Semiconductor Heterostructures, Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.057001

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2023 at 11:12am

In further tests in mice, the researchers showed that they could use the particles to deliver mRNA encoding CRISPR/Cas9 components designed to cut out a stop signal that was genetically encoded into the animals' lung cells. When that stop signal is removed, a gene for a fluorescent protein turns on. Measuring this fluorescent signal allows the researchers to determine what percentage of the cells successfully expressed the mRNA.

After one dose of mRNA, about 40 percent of lung epithelial cells were transfected, the researchers found. Two doses brought the level to more than 50 percent, and three doses up to 60 percent. The most important targets for treating lung disease are two types of epithelial cells called club cells and ciliated cells, and each of these was transfected at about 15 percent.

This means that the cells we were able to edit are really the cells of interest for lung disease. This lipid can enable us to deliver mRNA to the lung much more efficiently than any other delivery system that has been reported so far.

Wen Xue, Combinatorial design of nanoparticles for pulmonary mRNA delivery and genome editing, Nature Biotechnology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41587-023-01679-x. www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01679-x

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2023 at 11:11am

New nanoparticles can perform gene-editing in the lungs

Chemical Engineers have designed a new type of nanoparticle that can be administered to the lungs, where it can deliver messenger RNA encoding useful proteins.

With further development, these particles could offer an inhalable treatment for cystic fibrosis and other diseases of the lung, the researchers say.

This is the first demonstration of highly efficient delivery of RNA to the lungs in mice. Scientists are hopeful that it can be used to treat or repair a range of genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis.

This is the first demonstration of highly efficient delivery of RNA to the lungs in mice. Researchers are hopeful that it can be used to treat or repair a range of genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis.

Messenger RNA holds great potential as a therapeutic for treating a variety of diseases caused by faulty genes. One obstacle to its deployment thus far has been difficulty in delivering it to the right part of the body, without off-target effects. Injected nanoparticles often accumulate in the liver, so several clinical trials evaluating potential mRNA treatments for diseases of the liver are now underway. RNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, which are injected directly into muscle tissue, have also proven effective. In many of those cases, mRNA is encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticle—a fatty sphere that protects mRNA from being broken down prematurely and helps it enter target cells.

In their new study, the researchers set out to develop lipid nanoparticles that could target the lungs. The particles are made up of molecules that contain two parts: a positively charged headgroup and a long lipid tail. The positive charge of the headgroup helps the particles to interact with negatively charged mRNA, and it also help mRNA to escape from the cellular structures that engulf the particles once they enter cells.

The lipid tail structure, meanwhile, helps the particles to pass through the cell membrane. The researchers came up with 10 different chemical structures for the lipid tails, along with 72 different headgroups. By screening different combinations of these structures in mice, the researchers were able to identify those that were most likely to reach the lungs.

Part1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2023 at 10:21am

Severe hepatitis outbreak linked to common childhood viruses

A new  study brings scientists closer to understanding the causes of a mysterious rash of cases of acute severe hepatitis that began appearing in otherwise healthy children after COVID-19 lockdowns eased in several countries in the spring of 2022.

Pediatric hepatitis  is rare, and doctors were alarmed when they started seeing outbreaks of severe unexplained hepatitis. There have been about 1,000 cases to date; 50 of these children needed liver transplants and at least 22 have died.

In the study, published on March 30 in Nature, researchers linked the disease to co-infections from multiple common viruses, in particular a strain of adeno-associated virus type2 (AAV2). AAVs are not known to cause hepatitis on their own. They need "helper" viruses, such as adenoviruses that cause colds and flus, to replicate in the liver.

Once they returned to school, children were more susceptible to infections with these common pathogens. The study suggests that for a small subset of these children, getting more than one infection at the same time may have made them more vulnerable to severe hepatitis.

 The infections researchers detected in these children were caused not by an unusual, emerging virus, but by common childhood viral pathogens. 

Charles Chiu, Adeno-associated virus type 2 in US children with acute severe hepatitis, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05949-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05949-1

Emma Thomson, Adeno-associated virus 2 infection in children with non-A-E hepatitis, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05948-2. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05948-2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 30, 2023 at 9:49am

Light-bending gravity reveals one of the biggest black holes ever found

A video showing how Astronomers used gravitational lensing to discover a black hole 30 billion times the mass of the sun in a galaxy 2 billion light years away. 

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 29, 2023 at 12:20pm

Using bacteria to convert CO2 in the air into a polyester

A team of chemical and biomolecular engineers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has developed a scalable way to use bacteria to convert CO2 in the air into a polyester. In their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their technique and outline its performance when tested over a several-hour period.

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How scientists cut their carbon footprints

As the effects of climate change grow, scientists from fields spanning astronomy to biology are trying to decarbonize their research. They say that the time for carbon-footprint assessments is over — we must take action, and that needs institutional support. “The situation is not that different from the one you can experience as a citizen,” says Pierrick Martin, an astrophysicist at an institute that is trying to reduce the heavy toll of its observatory. “There are things you can do yourself, at your level, in your local environment, that are worth something. But this has limits, and you can’t escape from political decisions at some point.”

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'Too comfortable in our own comfort': Expert on why we shouldn't wa... It's common knowledge that reducing our carbon footprint is important, but what about our

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 29, 2023 at 12:17pm

Researchers identify specific regions of the brain damaged by high blood pressure, involved in mental decline, dementia

For the first time, researchers have identified specific regions of the brain that are damaged by high blood pressure and may contribute to a decline in mental processes and the development of dementia.

High blood pressure is known to be involved in causing dementia and damage to brain function. The study, which is published in the European Heart Journal recently, shows how this happens. It gathered information from a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brains, genetic analyses and observational data from thousands of patients to look at the effect of high blood pressure on cognitive function.

The researchers then checked their findings in a separate, large group of patients in Italy who had high blood pressure, and found that the parts of the brain the researchers had identified were indeed affected. Further research also found that genes that cause high BP and other factors are not involved in these changes.

The researchers found changes to nine parts of the brain were related to higher blood pressure and worse cognitive function. These included the putamen, which is a round structure in the base of the front of the brain, responsible for regulating movement and influencing various types of learning. Other areas affected were the anterior thalamic radiation, anterior corona radiata and anterior limb of the internal capsule, which are regions of white matter that connect and enable signaling between different parts of the brain. The anterior thalamic radiation is involved in executive functions, such as the planning of simple and complex daily tasks, while the other two regions are involved in decision-making and the management of emotions.

The changes to these areas included decreases in brain volume and the amount of surface area on the brain cortex, changes to connections between different parts of the brain, and changes in measures of brain activity.

Tomasz J Guzik et al, Genetic analyses identify brain structures related to cognitive impairment associated with elevated blood pressure, European Heart Journal (2023). DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehad101

Ernesto L. Schiffrin et al, Hypertension, brain imaging phenotypes and cognitive impairment: lessons from Mendelian randomisation, European Heart Journal (2023). DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehad187

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 29, 2023 at 8:14am

Are Air Fryers Healthy For Us?

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 28, 2023 at 12:28pm

Methane changes this equation. By holding on to energy from the sun, methane is introducing heat the atmosphere no longer needs to get from precipitation.

Additionally, methane shortwave absorption decreases the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth's surface. This in turn reduces the amount of water that evaporates. Generally, precipitation and evaporation are equal, so a decrease in evaporation leads to a decrease in precipitation.

This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system. Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.

Robert J. Allen et al, Surface warming and wetting due to methane's long-wave radiative effects muted by short-wave absorption, Nature Geoscience (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-023-01144-z

Part 2

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