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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."

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2017 at 11:18am

A team in China has taken a new approach to fixing disease genes in human embryos. The researchers created cloned embryos with a genetic mutation for a potentially fatal blood disorder, and then precisely corrected the DNA to show how the condition might be prevented at the earliest stages of development.

The report, published on 23 September in Protein & Cell, is the latest in a series of experiments to edit genes in human embryos. And it employs an impressive series of innovations, scientists say. Rather than replacing entire sections of genes, the team, led by Junjiu Huang at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, tweaked individual DNA letters, or bases, using a precision gene-editing technology developed in the United States.

Liang, P. et al. Protein Cell https://doi.org/10.1007/s13238-017-0475–6 (2017)

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2017 at 10:54am

Quantum video chat links scientists

Ultrasecure quantum video chats are now possible across the globe.

In a demonstration of the world’s first intercontinental quantum link, scientists held a long-distance videoconference on September 29 between Austria and China. To secure the communication, a Chinese satellite distributed a quantum key, a secret string of numbers used to encrypt the video transmission so that no one could eavesdrop on the conversation. In the call, chemist Chunli Bai, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, spoke with quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

“It’s a huge achievement,” says quantum physicist Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Canada, who was not involved with the project. “It’s a major step to show that this approach could be viable.”

Using a technique known as quantum key distribution, scientists share secret strings of numbers while ensuring that no eavesdroppers can intercept the code undetected. Those quantum keys are then used to encrypt information sent via traditional internet connections. Decoding the transmission requires the same key used for encryption, foiling would-be snoops.

- Science news.org

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 30, 2017 at 7:08am

Tropical forests have flipped from sponges to sources of carbon dioxide

The world’s tropical forests are exhaling — and it’s not a sigh of relief. Instead of soaking up climate-warming gases on balance, these so-called “lungs of the planet” are beginning to release them.

A new study based on analyses of satellite imagery of tropical Asia, Africa and the Americas suggests that tropical forests contribute more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than they remove. Much of that carbon contribution is due to deforestation, the conversion of forests to urban spaces such as farms or roads. But more than two-thirds comes from a less visible source: a decline in the number and diversity of trees in remaining forests, researchers report online September 28 in Science.

Intact forests can be degraded or disturbed by selective logging, environmental change, wildfires or disease.

In total, the researchers found, tropical forests emit 862 teragrams of carbon to the atmosphere annually — more than all cars in the United States did in 2015 — and absorb only 436 teragrams of carbon each year. Of that net loss of carbon to the atmosphere, 69 percent is from degraded forests and the rest from deforestation.

Some 60 percent of those carbon emissions came from tropical America, including the Amazon Basin. Africa’s tropical forests were responsible for about 24 percent of the carbon loss, and Asia’s forests for 16 percent.

The results are a wake-up call that there is an opportunity for improvement.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 23, 2017 at 11:36am

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