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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 5, 2019 at 6:38am

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a tiny robot which looks like a thread or a worm and is designed to crawl through the blood vessels inside the brain. The robot is magnetically controlled and it is made for gliding through the narrow, winding pathways, such as the labyrinthine vasculature of the brain.


The aim of this robotic thread is to create a tool by which the doctors can deliver clot reducing therapies to patients who have blockages and lesions, such as the ones that occur in aneurysms and stroke.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 26, 2019 at 10:03am

Diabetes can increase cancer risk
For years, scientists have been trying to solve a medical mystery: Why do people with type 1 or type 2 diabetes have an increased risk of developing some forms of cancer? Today, researchers report a possible explanation for this double whammy. They found that DNA sustains more damage and gets fixed less often when blood sugar levels are high compared to when blood sugar is at a normal, healthy level, thereby increasing one's cancer risk.

The researchers will present their results at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition.
According to researchers, "As the incidence of diabetes continues to rise, the cancer rate will likely increase, as well."Scientists have suspected that the elevated cancer risk for diabetics arises from hormonal dysregulation. "In people with type 2 diabetes, their insulin is not effectively carrying glucose into cells," they explain. "So the pancreas makes more and more insulin, and they get what's called hyperinsulinemia." In addition to controlling blood glucose levels, the hormone insulin can stimulate cell growth, possibly leading to cancer. Also, most people with type 2 diabetes are overweight, and their excess fat tissue produces higher levels of adipokines than those at a healthy weight. These hormones promote chronic inflammation, which is linked to cancer. "The most common idea is that the increased cancer risk has to do with hormones" . "That's probably part of it, but there hasn't been a lot of solid evidence."

Now they looked for a specific type of damage in the form of chemically modified DNA bases, known as adducts, in tissue culture and rodent models of diabetes. Indeed, they found a DNA adduct, called N^2-(1-carboxyethyl)-2'-deoxyguanosine, or CEdG, that occurred more frequently in the diabetic models than in normal cells or mice. What's more, high glucose levels interfered with the cells' process for fixing it. "Exposure to high glucose levels leads to both DNA adducts and the suppression of their repair, which in combination could cause genome instability and cancer". 

They even found evidence for it.  http://bit.ly/acs2019sandiego

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 10, 2019 at 10:27am

Scientists are worried about social media driven pseudo-science. Myths about the international climate crisis are part of a growing trend for 'pseudoscience' spread on social media sites like Youtube.

A new report from a German university academic has revealed that the algorithm which drives how people find content on the internet is spreading misinformation. It was found that d more than half (107) of the clips claimed climate change was a conspiracy or denied humans were causing it. Those videos received the highest number of views.

Youtube is an important information source for many people when they want to find information about science and research.

He explained that conspiracy theorists latched onto scientific-style language such as ‘climate engineering’, ‘geoengineering’ or in another example of pseudoscience, ‘chemtrails’.

This strategy could be identified as an attempt to manufacture internet bias in favour of the worldview of ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theorists.

Dr Allgaier added that social media platforms which do not exercise editorial control provide fertile ground for opponents of mainstream science because there are no ‘gatekeepers and hence no quality control’.

The pseudoscience issue goes beyond the climate crisis and chemtrails. Infectios diseases and vaccines are a prominent area of misinformation both online and in print.

Perhaps the best-known example is the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine which some have claimed has harmful effects on children.

In another health conspiracy, rumours that chicken meat spread a bout of Nipah virus in the Indian state of Kerala in 2018 which killed 17 people were spread virally on WhatsApp.

Scientists believe the incident was sparked by fruit bats but the unfounded rumour chicken was to blame spread when one person duplicated the letterhead of the District Medical officer and spread the story online.

The effects of misinformation surrounding the MMR vaccine and Nipah virus on human behaviour should not be surprising given we know that our memory is malleable.

Our recollection of original facts can be replaced with new, false ones.

We also know conspiracy theories have a powerful appeal as they can help people make sense of events or issues they feel they have no control over.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 7, 2019 at 9:17am

We are  marching for science on August 9th, 2019.

Science is under attack all over the world. And we are fighting anti-science sentiments and pseudo-science propaganda. The March for Science  is an international series of rallies and marches held on Earth Day. The march is a non-partisan movement to celebrate science and the role it plays in everyday lives. The goals of the marches and rallies were to emphasize that science upholds the common good and to call for evidence-based policy in the public's best interest.

The Indian scientific community too takes part in these global rallies every year and marches are held in about 60 cities and towns across India.

Scientific community of India  makes the following demands

1. Promote scientific temper, human values and spirit of inquiry in conformity with Article 51A of the Constitution and stop the propagation of unscientific ideas

2. Allocate at least 10% of the Central Budget and 30% of the State budgets to Education

3. Ensure that at least 3% of the country's GDP is used to support scientific and technological research.

4. Ensure that the education system does not impart ideas that are not based on or contradict scientific evidence.

5. Ensure that public policies are based on scientific evidence.

We request everybody to join us and support these rallies and science and make these marches a great success.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 20, 2019 at 8:06am

In some of the world’s least-developed countries, spacing births two years apart, instead of one, can nearly halve infant mortality rates, a study finds.

Short birth intervals have been linked to poor health outcomes for moms and infants for decades, though the exact causes aren’t clear. Research has shown that the mothers’ bodies can struggle to recover and provide nutrients to children. In addition, siblings that are close in age may compete for the same resources, crucially breast milk, and are exposed to similar diseases.  

Babies born in the shortest birth intervals to uneducated mothers living in countries with high infant mortality — at least 100 babies dying for every 1,000 births — were in the greatest danger. (The researchers used infant mortality rate as a proxy for a country’s level of development.) In those circumstances, babies born within one year of an older sibling had around a 22 percent chance of dying before age 1. That chance dropped to about 13 percent when the birth interval increased to two years.

J. Molitoris, K. Barclay and M. Kolk. When and where birth intervals matter for child survival: An intern.... Demography. Published online July 3, 2019. doi: 10.1007%2Fs13524-019-00798-y.

E. Rogers and R. Stephenson. Examining temporal shifts in the proximate determinants of fertilit... Journal of Biosocial Science. Vol. 50, July 2018, p. 551. doi: 10.1017/S0021932017000529

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2019 at 9:09am

Combination Strategy Nearly Eliminates Invasive Mosquitoes in Field

Researchers use two techniques—Wolbachia infection and irradiation—to suppress reproduction in populations of Asian tiger mosquitoes at two study sites in China.

Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) are among the world’s most invasive mosquito species and can spread dengue and Zika viruses. In a study published on July 17 in Nature, an international team of researchers has virtually eradicated populations of the insects from two residential areas in China.

The researchers infected the insects with the bacterium Wolbachia to limit embryo viability and, as an added precaution, irradiated mosquitoes to induce sterility, and then released millions of male mosquitoes, which don’t bite, at their test sites. The males mated with local females, resulting in a drastic reduction in the populations of A. albopictus. 

This work is promising for control of these mosquitoes in local populations.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 17, 2019 at 11:29am

Machine learning has helped scientists identify bat species which could host Nipah virus, the cause of lethal outbreaks afflicting people in South and Southeast Asia. These results, published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, also flagged four new bat species as surveillance priorities. Nipah virus is a highly lethal, emerging henipavirus that can be transmitted to people from the body fluids of infected bats. Eating fruit or drinking date palm sap that has been contaminated by bats has been flagged as a transmission pathway. Once infected, people can spread the virus directly to other people, sparking an outbreak. Domestic pigs are also bridging hosts that can infect people. There is no vaccine and the virus has a high mortality rate. 

India is home to an estimated 113 bat species. Just 31 of these species have been sampled for Nipah virus, with 11 found to have antibodies that signal host potential. The team compiled published data on bat species known to carry Nipah and other henipaviruses globally. Data included 48 traits of 523 bat species, including information on foraging methods, diet, migration behaviors, geographic ranges and reproduction. They also looked at the environmental conditions in which reported spillovers occurred. Then they applied a trait-based machine learning approach to a subset of species that occur in Asia, Australia, and Oceana. Their algorithm identified known Nipah-positive bat species with 83 percent accuracy. It also identified six bat species that occur in Asia, Australia and Oceana that have traits that could make them competent hosts and should be prioritized for surveillance. Four of these species occur in India, two of which are found in Kerala.

The study is a starting point for the research needed to contain Nipah at its source.

https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 9, 2019 at 8:54am

A common gut virus that maps our travels

A San Diego State University researcher has found evidence that a virus nicknamed crAssphage, found in the guts of about 70 percent of the world's population, has a country-specific biomarker that changes rapidly as humans travel from one location to another.

Bioinformatics researcher and professor Rob Edwards' study is the first to examine the global similarity of viruses in the human microbiome. His research also suggests that a relative of this crAssphage was living in primates and may have evolved alongside humans for millions of years. The research will be published in Nature Microbiology July 8th.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-07/sdsu-acg070519.php

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 30, 2019 at 11:34am

Cleaning water and then producing electricity by using bacteria!

Sounds unbelievable but true!

Sewage treatment plants use bacteria to metabolise the organic material in waste water now.  At the end of the process, the microbes can make up a third by weight of the leftovers to be disposed of. Before being put in landfill, this “microbe cake” itself needs to be heat-sterilised and chemically treated, which uses a lot of energy.

Microbial fuel cells have long been touted as the way forward. The idea is that the biochemistry involved in metabolising the contaminants can yield electricity to help power the process. But fuel cells of this kind have been very difficult to scale up outside the lab.

Some companies use strains of Geobacter and another microbe called Shewanella oneidensis   to process the sludge. Its proprietary mix of organisms has one key advantage – the bacteria liberate some electrons as they respire, effectively turning the whole set-up into a battery. This has the added benefit of slowing bacterial growth, so that at the end of the process you have electricity and no microbe cake.

“The bacteria that purify the water also liberate electrons, turning the set-up into a battery“

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2019 at 7:06am

Alternative to plastics: Seafood shells

We are facing plastic pollution like hell. 

Some scientists think it’s possible to tackle the  problem at once. Crustaceans’ hardy shells contain chitin, a material that, along with its derivative chitosan, offers many of plastic’s desirable properties and takes only weeks or months to biodegrade, rather than centuries.

The challenge is getting enough pure chitin and chitosan from the shells to make bio-based “plastic” in cost-effective ways. 

Chitin is one of the most abundant organic materials in the world, after cellulose, which gives woody plants their structure. In addition to crustaceans, chitin is found in insects, fish scales, mollusks and fungi. Like plastic, chitin is a polymer, a molecular chain made from repeating units. The building block in chitin, N-acetyl-D-glucosamine, is a sugar related to glucose. Chitin and chitosan are antibacterial, nontoxic and used in cosmetics, wound dressings and pool-water treatments, among other applications.

Only thing that stands in between using it and plastic is viable and green technology to obtain chitin. Right now scientists are trying various methods - using microbes to obtain chitin is one of them.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/seafood-shells-chitin-plastic-f...

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