Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 4, 2022 at 11:52am

Researchers discover new form of antimicrobial resistance

Researchers have uncovered a new form of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), undetectable using traditional laboratory testing methods, in a discovery set to challenge existing efforts to monitor and tackle one of the world's greatest health threats.

In research published today in Nature Communications, the researchers revealed a new mechanism that enables bacteria to take up nutrients from their human host and bypass antibiotic treatment. The researchers made the discovery while investigating antibiotic susceptibility of group A. streptococcus—a potentially deadly bacteria often found in the throat and on the skin.

Bacteria need to make their own folates to grow, and in turn, cause disease. Some antibiotics work by blocking this folate production to stop bacteria growing and treat the infection. When looking at an antibiotic commonly prescribed to treat group A. strep skin infections, researchers found a mechanism of resistance, where for the first time ever, the bacteria demonstrated the ability to take folates directly from its human host when blocked from producing their own. This makes the antibiotic ineffective and the infection would likely worsen when the patient should be getting better.

This new form of resistance is undetectable under conditions routinely used in pathology laboratories, making it very hard for clinicians to prescribe antibiotics that will effectively treat the infection, potentially leading to very poor outcomes and even premature death.

Researchers  suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg—they have identified this mechanism in group A. strep but it's likely it will be a broader issue across other bacterial pathogens.

Host-dependent resistance of Group A Streptococcus to sulfamethoxazolemediated by a horizontally-acquired reduced folate transporter, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34243-3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 9:43am

Wormhole inside a quantum computer

Physicists have sent quantum information through a simulated wormhole in a ‘toy’ universe that exists only inside a quantum computer. The tunnel is analogous to passages through space-time that might connect the centres of black holes in the real Universe. “The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” write the authors of an analysis published alongside the study in Nature. Some scientists think that such experiments could help to unite the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity in the simplified realm of toy universes, leading ultimately to the answer to one of the biggest problems in physics: a real-world quantum theory of gravity.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 9:09am

Astronomers See Stellar Self-Control in Action

Stars can regulate their growth when they are part of a bigger group called a cluster. Once stars get very big and bright, they can blow most of the gas out of the cluster. This prevents too many new stars from forming, controlling the stellar family’s size. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes examined a large gas cloud for this finding.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 8:32am

Short term memory problems can be improved with laser therapy, according to new study

Laser light therapy has been shown to be effective in improving short term memory in a study published in Science Advances.

Scientists 

demonstrated that the therapy, which is non-invasive, could improve short term, or working memory in people by up to 25%.

The treatment, called transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM), is applied to an area of the brain known as the right prefrontal cortex. This area is widely recognized as important for working memory. In their experiment, the team showed how working memory improved among research participants after several minutes of treatment. They were also able to track the changes in brain activity using electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring during treatment and testing.

Previous studies have shown that laser light treatment will improve working memory in mice, and human studies have shown tPBM treatment can improve accuracy, speed up reaction time and improve high-order functions such as attention and emotion.

This is the first study, however, to confirm a link between tPBM and working memory in humans.

Chenguang Zhao et al, Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3211. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3211

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 7:36am

An architecture that gives users full control of their smartphones

In recent years, many smartphone users have become concerned about the privacy of their data and the extent to which companies might have access to this data. As things stand today, the applications that users can run on their phone and what they can do with these applications is determined by a few big tech companies.

Researchers have recently set out on a quest to change this current trend, through the development of a new smartphone architecture called TEEtime. This architecture, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows users to flexibly choose what resources on their smartphone they will dedicate to legacy operating systems, such as Android or iOS, and which they wish to keep for their own proprietary software and data.

Essentially, TEEtime isolates different domains, allowing users to decide the extent to which each of these domains has access to resources on their phone. This means that users could, for instance, run a navigation application in their own isolated domain, giving GPS access only to this domain and thus preventing Android/iOS from accessing their GPS data. The same could also be done with other peripherals, such as Bluetooth or the phone's in-built microphone and camera.

The introduction of domains has two main advantages in terms of giving users control over their devices. Firstly, it gives users full control of the privacy of their data, for instance allowing them to store their photos in a separate domain, where the user can make sure that no client-side scanning is performed. Note that in current phone ecosystems these features can be silently introduced without the user even noticing or having the possibility to opt-out.

The second advantage of the TEEtime architecture is that it can prevent censorship or increase resistance to it. In other words, if their operating service providers blocks an application or prevents them from installing it, they can still run it in a separate domain.

So far, the researchers tested a prototype of their architecture on an ARM emulator, a software tool often used to test operating systems and other smartphone software. These initial evaluations were promising, as they suggested that TEEtime works well and does not impact a system's security.

Friederike Groschupp et al, It's TEEtime: Bringing User Sovereignty to Smartphones, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2211.05206

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 2, 2022 at 11:49am

 Let’s stand up for life:Scientists in rebellion

The members of the movement Scientist Rebellion, call on life scien...

Our current economic and political structures have an increasingly devastating impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems: we are facing a biospheric emergency, with catastrophic consequences for both humans and the natural world on which we depend. Life scientists – including biologists, medical scientists, psychologists and public health experts – have had a crucial role in documenting the impacts of this emergency, but they have failed to drive governments to take action in order to prevent the situation from getting worse. Here we, as members of the movement Scientist Rebellion, call on life scientists to re-embrace advocacy and activism – which were once hallmarks of academia – in order to highlight the urgency and necessity of systemic change across our societies. We particularly emphasise the need for scientists to engage in nonviolent civil resistance, a form of public engagement which has proven to be highly effective in social struggles throughout history.

The consequences of the failure of scientific engagement

Whether we talk about threats to food security, global health or biodiversity, scientific messaging is either not getting through to the public  or is being drowned out by sophisticated misinformation campaigns . There are now entire think tanks dedicated to occluding or misinterpreting scientific findings related to the biospheric emergency , and recent research highlights that accurate information about climate and ecology can easily be eroded by misinformation . To make matters worse, scientific responses to misinformation campaigns tend to be dispassionate and directed at those in power (who are keen to maintain the status quo), rather than passionate and directed at the people being misinformed: in short, a recipe for disaster 

https://elifesciences.org/articles/83292?utm_source=Nature+Briefing...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 2, 2022 at 11:41am

Two new minerals discovered in meteorite

Researchers have identified two, possibly even three, new minerals in a huge iron-ba.... The minerals have been named elaliite, after the meteorite’s location near the town of El Ali, and elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, lead investigator of a NASA mission to a metal-rich asteroid. The 2-metre-wide meteorite has been well known to generations of people who live in the area, where it was named Nightfall.

--

Pupating ants make milk for baby ants

During their pupal stage, between larva and adult, ants are immobile and were previously thought to be pretty much useless to the rest of the colony. Now researchers have discovered that they have a pivotal role, secreting a nutritious fluid that is drunk by adult ants and fed to.... Analogous to mammalian milk, the secretion seems to be essential for young larvae to grow strong and healthy. The pupae also receive parental care: if the secretion is not removed, it can hurt them. “It is really surprising that nobody else noticed this before,” says ethologist Patrizia d’Ettorre.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 2, 2022 at 11:36am

Scientists Prepare to Set Sail for NASA’s S-MODE Mission

In early October, the research vessel Bold Horizon set sail from Newport, Oregon, and joined a small fleet of planes, drones, and other high-tech craft chasing the ocean’s shapeshifting physics. NASA’s Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) looks at whirlpools, currents, and other dynamics at the air-sea boundary. The goal is to understand how these dynamics drive the give-and-take of nutrients and energy between the ocean and atmosphere and, ultimately, help shape Earth’s climate.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 2, 2022 at 11:19am

Gut microbes influence binge-eating of sweet treats in mice

You just meant to have a single Oreo as a snack, but then you find yourself going back for another, and another, and before you know it, you have finished off the entire package even though you were not all that hungry to begin with.

But before you start feeling too guilty for your gluttony, consider this: It might not be entirely your fault. Now, new research in mice shows that specific gut bacteria may suppress binge eating behavior.

Oreos and other desserts are examples of so-called "palatable foods"—food consumed for hedonistic pleasure, not simply out of hunger or nutritional need. Humans are not alone in enjoying this kind of hedonism: Mice like to eat dessert, too. Even when they have just eaten, they will still consume sugary snacks if available.

The new  study shows that the absence of certain gut bacteria causes mice to binge eat palatable foods: Mice with microbiotas disrupted by oral antibiotics consumed 50 percent more sugar pellets over two hours than mice with gut bacteria. When their microbiotas were restored through fecal transplants, the mice returned to normal feeding behavior. Further, not all bacteria in the gut are able to suppress hedonic feeding, but rather specific species appear to alter the behavior. Bingeing only applies to palatable foods; mice with or without gut microbiota both still eat the same amount of their regular diet. The findings show that the gut microbiota has important influences on behavior and that these effects can be modulated when the microbiota is manipulated.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01750-X

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 2, 2022 at 11:11am

To track disease-carrying mosquitoes, researchers tag them with DNA barcodes

West Nile, Zika, dengue and malaria are all diseases spread by bites from infected mosquitoes. To track the threat of such diseases over large populations, scientists need to know where the mosquitoes are, where they've been, and where they might go.

But  tracking mosquitoes is no easy task. The capture, tagging and release of single mosquitoes—as is commonly done with bats and other disease carriers—would be ridiculous, if not impossible. A common mosquito-tracking technique involves dousing the insects in fluorescent powder and letting them fly away, but the practice is error-prone and unreliable.

So scientists are now introducing a better way to perform mosquito-tracking for disease applications. Their new method, which involves getting larval mosquitoes to eat harmless particles made entirely of DNA and proteins, has the potential to revolutionize how people study mosquito-borne diseases.

The edible mosquito marker particles are porous protein crystals that self-assemble from a protein originally found in Camplyobacter jejuni bacteria. Since inventing these very small, non-toxic protein crystals that feature highly precise arrays of pores, researchers have been exploring diverse applications for them, like capturing virus particles to facilitate wastewater testing. They discovered they could insert fluorescent dyes or synthetic DNA into their crystals very easily, and the DNA wouldn't budge even after multiple washes and exposure to solvents.

They also performed a series of experiments that demonstrate the utility of these barcodes as tags capable of labeling millions of individual mosquitoes. So far, results are promising.

Here's how they do it: mosquito larvae ingest tasty biomass that's pre-loaded with the DNA crystals in solution. As the mosquitoes grow into adults, the DNA crystals remain intact in their guts, creating a code that can be later read through laboratory techniques like quantitative polymerase chain reaction.

The method the researchers are demonstrating is unique in one important way: Unlike conventional mosquito-tagging in which adult mosquitoes are extracted from traps and analyzed for disease, the DNA barcodes are ingested by the mosquitoes in their larval states, persisting with them as they become adults. In this way, researchers can not only track where the mosquitoes ended up, but where they started, and how they moved. Such insights could prove critical for disease-surveillance applications in the future.

Julius D Stuart, Daniel A Hartman, Lyndsey I Gray, Alec A Jones, Natalie R Wickenkamp, Christine Hirt, Aya Safira, April R Regas, Therese M Kondash, Margaret L Yates, Sergei Driga, Christopher D Snow, Rebekah C Kading. Mosquito tagging using DNA-barcoded nanoporous protein microcrystals. PNAS Nexus, 2022; 1 (4) DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac190

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 219
• 220
• 221
• 222
• 223
• …
• 855
• Next ›
• Page