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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 11, 2025 at 9:50am

Earth breaks yearly heat record and lurches past dangerous warming threshold

Earth recorded its hottest year ever in 2024, with such a big jump that the planet temporarily passed a major climate threshold, weather monitoring agencies announced this week. 

It's the first time in recorded history that the planet was above a hoped-for limit to warming for an entire year, according to measurements from four of the six teams. Scientists say if Earth stays above the threshold long-term, it will mean increased deaths, destruction, species loss and sea level rise from the extreme weather that accompanies warming.

And that would come on top of a year of deadly climate catastrophes— billions of -dollar disasters in 2024—and as 2025 begins with devastating wildfires raging across most parts of the developed world. 

Last year's global average temperature easily passed 2023's record heat and kept going. It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact.

The primary reason for these record temperatures is the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, temperatures continue to increase, including in the ocean, sea levels continue to rise, and glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt.

And there's nothing to indicate that it won't continue unless the world realizes its mistakes.

By far the biggest contributor to record warming is the burning of fossil fuels, several scientists say. 

Climate-change-related alarm bells have been ringing almost constantly, which may be causing the public to become numb to the urgency, like police sirens in the cities. In the case of the climate, though, the alarms are getting louder, and the emergencies are now way beyond just temperature.

Source: News Agencies

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 11, 2025 at 9:40am

Ocean temperatures hit record highs in 2024, study finds

A study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences has found that ocean warming in 2024 has led to new record high temperatures. The ocean is the hottest it has ever been recorded by humans, not only at the surface temperature but also for the upper 2000 meters.

A team of 54 scientists from seven countries had discussed in the paper how a hotter ocean affects our lives on land and what this means for our future.

The ocean is a critical part of the Earth's climate—most of the excess heat from global warming is stored in the ocean (90%) and the ocean covers 70% of the Earth's surface. Because of this, the ocean dictates our weather patterns by transferring heat and moisture into the atmosphere. The ocean also controls how fast climate change happens.

To know what is happening to the climate, the answer is in the ocean.

Results from three international teams who collaborated on this project were consistent—the ocean is warming, and 2024 was a record.

From 2023 to 2024, the global upper 2000 m ocean heat content increase is 16 zettajoules (10²¹ Joules), ~140 times the world's total electricity generation in 2023.

OHC has increased steadily by 15–20 ZJ over the past five years despite the La Niña and El Niño cycles.

The ocean surface temperature is also setting records. The surface temperature refers to temperatures just at the surface, where the ocean waters and atmosphere commute. Surface temperatures are important because they dictate how fast heat and moisture (humidity) can transfer from the ocean to the air and thus affect weather. The rise in surface temperatures since the late 1950s has been staggering.

The changes are not uniform; regional variations can be substantial. The Atlantic is warming along with the Mediterranean Sea, and across the mid-latitude Southern Ocean. While parts of the Northern Pacific Ocean have warmed very rapidly, other areas (the tropical region) have not, mostly due to the La Niña/El Niño cycle in that area. The heat has even accumulated near both the North and South Poles.

A warmer ocean affects marine life and results in huge damage in many ways. The main way the ocean continues to influence the climate is through accompanying increases in water vapor in the atmosphere that leads to the damaging increases in extremes in the hydrological cycle.

Water vapor is also a powerful greenhouse gas and increased heating leads to drying and risk of drought and wildfire. But it also fuels storms of all sorts and leads to risk of flooding. That includes hurricanes and typhoons.

The heat in the ocean is the best measurement for monitoring the changing climate. The ocean is our sentinel for planetary warming, acting as the major sink of surplus heat accumulating in the Earth's climate system as a result of anthropogenic emissions.

If there continues to be a failure to take action to slow climate change, the disruption, unprecedented change and its implications, costs and loss and damage will continue to increase, the scientists warn.

Sea Surface Temperatures and Deeper Water Temperatures Reached a New Record High in 2024, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s00376-025-4541-3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 11:50am

For exercise to have a meaningful contribution, pain would need to improve by 12 points, physical function by 13 points, and quality of life by 15 points.

"The benefits were of uncertain clinical importance, meaning that they may not result in a change in symptoms that makes a noticeable difference to patients," the research team wrote.

The review team also noted that many of the studies in their review included small groups or were not well-designed.

"Many studies are of poor quality with small sample sizes," the researchers wrote. "Therefore, some studies may have made the benefits of exercise seem greater than they are."

What?!

Belinda J Lawford et al. Exercise for osteoarthritis of the knee, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2024). DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD004376.pub4

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 11:49am

Can exercise really ease knee pain?

Movement is medicine, or so they tell people with knee osteoarthritis—but are they right?

A recent evidence review calls into question just how helpful exercise can be for easing the pain of knee arthritis.

"Exercise probably results in an improvement in pain, physical function, and quality of life in the short‐term," concluded the research team who tested this theory.

"However, based on the thresholds for minimal important differences that we used, these benefits were of uncertain clinical importance," the team added in its report published previously in the Cochrane Library.

The review casts a slight shadow on what has been considered an integral part of therapy for knee pain.

Movement is an essential part of an osteoarthritis treatment plan," the Arthritis Foundation says on its website, recommending that people take part in  strength training, stretching, aerobics, and balance exercises.

For the new review, the team evaluated data from 139 prior clinical trials involving nearly 12,500 participants that occurred up through early Jan. 2024.

On a 100-point scale, exercise for knee arthritis improved:

• Pain by 8.7 to 13.1 points
• Physical function by 9.7 to 12.5 points
• Quality of life by 4.2 to 6.1 points

But while those were significant improvements, they did not always meet established scores for making a minimal important difference in a patient's life, researchers noted.

part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 11:22am

There was also a double layer of gravitational lensing. Serendipitously, smaller objects––free-floating stars that had been set loose by the forces of the galaxy cluster––just so happened to be moving past the light coming from these stars. This phenomenon of smaller, moving objects causing a small gravitational lensing effect is known as microlensing.

When those stars pass in front of the image of this background Dragon Arc galaxy, they introduce an additional lensing effect and then magnify the galaxy even more and allow us to discern individual stars toward the edge of the disk of this galaxy.

This double lensing effect has been used before too.

It actually unlocks a whole new "line of investigation" for astrophysicists interested in looking back even further into the universe's history.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/01/08/gravitational-lensing-anci...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 11:18am

Astronomers discovered 44 ancient stars using gravitational lensing

A group of astronomers have made history by capturing an image of a record number of stars from a time when the universe was half its age.

The astronomers detected 44 stars in the "Dragon Arc" galaxy, located 6.5 billion light years away from our own Milky Way, using NASA's ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope.

However, the discovery was also only possible because of a well-known concept in the world of physics: gravitational lensing. First developed as part of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, its use here could help chart new interstellar territory.

What exactly is gravitational lensing and how did it help capture an image 6.5 billion years in the making?

Gravitational lensing is the distortion effect that massive objects sitting in space-time, like galaxies and even galaxy clusters, have on rays of light. 

Imagine a large, stretched out rubber sheet. If a heavy object is placed on the sheet, it creates a dip or a well, distorting the surface. If you try to roll an object like a marble from one end of the sheet to another, it can still make it to the other side but it will be deflected from its normal path.

That's exactly what's happening but with light rays instead of marbles. It's called gravitational lensing because in this case gravity … is acting as a lens distorting light, or focusing beams of light, in the same way that glass alters the path of light from the sun or a light bulb and leads it to focus differently on your retina.

Usually, the farther away a galaxy is, the harder it is to capture it with any level of fine detail. Astronomers have been observing individual stars in our own Milky Way and in nearby galaxies like Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds. But "anything beyond our little cosmic backyard, the galaxies are too far away for us to distinguish individual stars". 

However, in this case, the astronomers were able to detect the light from 44 stars in the distant Dragon Arc galaxy using the distortion caused by the massive galaxy cluster Abell 370. The cluster essentially served as a massive magnifying glass, sitting between Earth and the Dragon Arc.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 10:31am

To next see how cells can reconfigure themselves internally in response to change, the team exposed the cells to OC43, a coronavirus that causes the common cold, then repeated the Organelle Profiling analysis. This revealed two distinct shifts: 633 kinds of proteins relocated, meaning that their relationships with other proteins in the cellular map changed significantly. Meanwhile, the overall abundance of 429 kinds of proteins increased or decreased. But, to the team's surprise, only 54 underwent both types of changes.
The shifts in location after OC43 infection provided new clues to the underlying biology. In particular, the relocation of proteins involved in a form of programmed cell death called ferroptosis led the researchers to show that increasing ferroptosis promoted infection, while decreasing it inhibited the virus. This shows that ferroptosis plays a central role in controlling infection, and could be a target for the development of new antiviral therapies.

The researchers are continuing to look for other examples of telltale protein shuffling, both in other viral infections and in Alzheimer's disease.
The group has made the data they have generated via Organelle Profiling freely available to other scientists. The team at CZ Biohub SF is also planning to offer the tools they used, including cells and reagents, to the scientific community. A streamlined software program they are developing will allow other researchers to more readily map the compartmentalization of proteins in the scenarios they study. In return, the team hopes others will contribute their data openly to build better models of how our cells are internally organized.

 Marco Y. Hein et al, Global organelle profiling reveals subcellular localization and remodeling at proteome scale, Cell (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.11.028

Part 3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 10:26am

Earlier the researchers developed a platform called OpenCell that used microscopy to map the precise cellular location of more than 1,300 kinds of proteins under baseline conditions.
Now rather than focus on precisely pinpointing the location of particular proteins one at a time, their new approach, Organelle Profiling, considers them as constituents of a cell's organelles, its liquid interior (the cytosol), and other internal structures. In the new study, they attached unique molecular tags to 19 such compartments that collectively account for the entire cell.

After tagging, they forced cells through a narrow syringe, gently breaking them open while keeping internal structures intact. Using antibodies designed to recognize the tags, they extracted the individual compartments before determining their protein composition with mass spectrometry, an analytical technique that identifies compounds based on their electrical charge and mass.
From within these compartments, they identified and analyzed the relative location of more than 8,000 unique kinds of proteins.
The same kind of protein could appear in multiple compartments, in some cases showing up faintly when a bit of an organelle was extracted along with a neighboring compartment. The team then looked for proteins with similar profiles. In their analysis, they built a network that treats similar proteins as connected, leading to the appearance of well-delineated clusters of proteins that define individual compartments — endoplasmic reticulum, cytosol, mitochondria, and so on.

Some proteins had significant connections that straddled compartments. These proteins, which the researchers interpreted as being located at compartment boundaries, help the compartments work together to support the cell.

In the end, the team generated a map that organizes proteins according to their relationships with one another — a high-resolution view that spans the entire cell. When they compared this map to previously collected data about the proteins, they found it matched up very well.
Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 10:22am

Scientists create comprehensive map of protein locations within human cells

 Each of our cells is built from a collection of about 10,000 kinds of proteins. Researchers have long had the ability to track the positions of small numbers of these proteins under the lens of a microscope. However, capturing the full scope of their locations in the cell has remained more challenging, let alone following how they change locations as a cell adapts to different conditions.

Proteins in a cell must be in the right department to do their jobs. Scientists  are trying to fully map the cell's organization and  determine how these cellular proteins may be reassigned in a time of crisis or change. A hostile takeover by a virus, for example, can send a cell's proteins to new stations, from which they may either serve the pathogen's aims or help the cell as it attempts to resist the infection.

A new method, described Dec. 31 in Cell and devised by a multidisciplinary team captures spatial organization across the entire cell at an unprecedented level of detail. Their approach maps the majority of a human cell's roughly 10,000 kinds of proteins according to the organelles and other compartments containing them, providing a crucial reference to understand how our cells are built. The team also applied their method to characterize how a portion of these proteins relocate during viral infection.

The new work is an example of "spatial proteomics," a burgeoning field that was named the 2024 "Method of the Year" by the journal Nature Methods. Spatial proteomics aims to increase our understanding of how proteins function by building detailed maps of their locations in cells and tissues.

Researchers typically study cellular responses by looking for increases or decreases in the quantity of particular proteins or their precursor mRNA molecules, as the cell "hires" or "fires" proteins to adapt to changing circumstances. In the experiments reported in the article, however, changes in proteins' location occurred largely independently from changes in their abundance — suggesting this conventional approach captures only a portion of a cell's response.

If we want to get the full picture of what's going on in cells during disease, we need to think not only about measuring abundance, but also changes in spatial organization.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 10, 2025 at 10:03am

Mining dust is suffocating nearby forests in India, study shows

Dust from open cast mining suffocates surrounding forests and inhibits trees' ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere more than previously thought, according to new research by scientists in India and the UK.

Researchers  have assessed the impact of mining dust on forests in Eastern India, which is home to some of the world's major open-pit coal mines. The work is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.

Focusing on the coal mining region of Eastern India, the research team studied detailed satellite images to inform its findings. They also collected 300 leaf samples from 30 different sites in Jharsuguda, and found dust deposits containing aluminum, silica and iron on them.

"Pollution from open cast mines creates a layer of dust that settles on the leaves of trees, making them increasingly less productive and less healthy. We knew this was the case, but we have learned that it is unfortunately worse—and more far spread—than we thought", say the scientists.

The dust affects trees' complex physiological processes, hindering their ability to capture carbon dioxide and damaging their overall health.

Dust from mines that settles on leaves impacts their function, impeding photosynthesis, light interception, nutrient availability, gas-energy exchange, plant-pathogen interactions, and causing physical damage.

Dust particles obstruct the leaves' stomata, the tiny openings through which plants exchange gases with the atmosphere. This reduces the plant's ability to capture carbon and release oxygen.

Mining dust is also impacting trees in a wide geographical area, reaching far beyond the immediate vicinity of the mines—up to 30km away from the mines. The highest concentration of negative impact is along transportation routes to and from the mines.

 This research should provide a solid foundation to inform future environmental management, as well as demonstrate the need for ongoing research to fully understand and mitigate the negative impact of mining on the delicate surrounding ecosystems.

Avinash Kumar Ranjan et al, A New Approach for Prediction of Foliar Dust in a Coal Mining Region and Its Impacts on Vegetation Physiological Processes Using Multi‐Source Satellite Data Sets, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2024JG008298

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