Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 1:20pm

Mammal mightier than the Dinos

An ancient fossil discovered in China shows a Cretaceous-period mammal preying on a dinosaur. The two animals were locked in combat when lava from a nearby volcanic eruption flowed over them, pristinely preserving the 125 million-year-old scene. The mammal, a Repenomamus roughly the size of an opossum, is clearly the aggressor as it bites into the ribs of a Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur nearly three times its size. 

Why this is cool: This is the first glimpse back in time of a mammal actively hunting a much larger dinosaur. “It’s like watching the coyote catch the roadrunner,” says Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. 

What the experts say: This mammal was something of an anomaly for its time—it would take tens of millions of years and an asteroid strike to give mammals the evolutionary advantage on Earth.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 1:05pm

May I have your Attention please, this is very important. (And my AI is going to post this very frequently). The fights here are increasing global warming. Each of the activities you perform online comes with a small cost – a few grams of carbon dioxide are emitted due to the energy needed to run your devices and power the wireless networks you access. Less obvious, but perhaps even more energy intensive, are the data centres and vast servers needed to support the internet and store the content we access over it. Although the energy needed for a single internet search or email is small, approximately 4.1 billion people, or 53.6% of the global population, now use the internet. Those scraps of energy, and the associated greenhouse gases emitted with each online activity, can add up. The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to expert estimates. If we were to rather crudely divide the 1.7 billion tonnes (1.6 billion tons) of greenhouse gas emissions estimated to be produced in the manufacture and running of digital technologies between all internet users around the world, it means each of us is responsible for 414kg (912lbs) of carbon dioxide a year. Internet users in some parts of the globe will have a disproportionately large footprint. If we were to rather crudely divide the 1.7 billion tonnes (1.6 billion tons) of greenhouse gas emissions estimated to be produced in the manufacture and running of digital technologies between all internet users around the world, it means each of us is responsible for 414kg (912lbs) of carbon dioxide a year. We can also alter the way we use our gadgets to cut our digital carbon footprints. It is okay if we use the net for the benefit of mankind. But for fighting? Over serial chars? This fighting is contributing to global warming. Now don't complain if the heat wave persists, if the crops fail, if your energy bill or food bill exceeds your budget capabilities. Girls, you yourself are responsible for it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTySL9pHqUc&lc=UgzH8CLgVwRcrcUg...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 1:03pm

Researchers Prove We Hear the Sound of Silence

Silence might not be deafening, but it's something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people's perception of time.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 12:14pm

What is making 2023 likely the hottest year recorded

Human-made climate change is supercharging natural weather phenomena to drive heatwaves roasting Asia, Europe and North America that could make 2023 the hottest year since records began, scientists say.

Here experts explain how 2023 has got so hot, warning these record temperatures will get worse even if humanity sharply cuts its planet-warming gas emissions.

El Nino: After a record hot summer in 2022, this year the Pacific warming phenomenon known as El Nino has returned, heating up the oceans.

This may have provided some additional warmth to the North Atlantic, though because the El Nino event is only just beginning, this is likely only a small portion of the effect.

Scientists calculated that there was an 81-percent chance that 2023 would become the warmest year since thermometer records began in the mid-19th century.

Dust and sulphur: The warming of the Atlantic may also have been sharpened by a decrease of two substances that typically reflect sunlight away from the ocean: dust blowing off the Sahara desert and sulfur aerosols from shipping fuel.

Stagnant Anticyclones: Warming oceans affect land weather patterns, prompting heatwaves and droughts in some places and storms in others. The hotter atmosphere sucks up moisture and dumps it elsewhere.

Scientists highlighted the length and intensity of the lingering anticyclone systems bringing the heatwaves.

Where stagnant high-pressure areas persist over continents, the air sinks and warms, melting away clouds, causing intense summer sunshine to parch the soils, heating the ground and air above," with heatwaves "lodged in place" for weeks.

Climate change: 

Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in their global summary report this year that climate change had made deadly heatwaves "more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s".

This month's heatwaves are "not one single phenomenon but several acting at the same time. But they are all strengthened by one factor: climate change.

Higher global temperatures make heatwaves longer and more intense. Despite being the main driver, climate change is one variable that humans can influence by reducing emissions from fossil fuels.

"We are moving out of the usual and well-known natural oscillations of the climate to unchartered and more extreme territory.

However, we have the ability to reduce our human influence on the climate and weather and to not create more extreme and long-lasting heatwaves.

The IPCC has said heatwaves risk getting more frequent and intense, though governments can limit climate change by reducing countries' greenhouse gas emissions.

Deep, rapid and sustained cuts in carbon emissions to net zero can halt the warming, but humanity will have to adapt to even more severe heatwaves in the future, Scientists warn.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 11:54am

Biology behind new drug used to treat triple-negative breast cancer uncovered

How TTP488 (azeliragon), an experimental drug, impairs aggressive, triple-negative breast cancer from metastasizing has been uncovered at the cellular level, according to researchers.

Triple-negative breast cancers (TNBCs) account for about 10–15% of all diagnosed breast cancers and are comprised of cancer cells that don't have estrogen or progesterone receptors, nor do they produce a protein called HER2 in significant quantities. TNBC's are more common in women younger than age 40 or those who are Black; for those cancers that metastasize, the five-year survival rate is only 12%. TNBCs have eluded effective treatment for decades. This discovery pinpoints some of the signaling pathways and cellular mechanisms through which a receptor that sits on the surface of TNBC cells, called the receptor for advanced glycation end-products (RAGE), regulates its deadly metastatic spread. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers were able to test the effectiveness of TTP488 in both the lab and in mice to show that the drug could be helpful in people.

Melinda Magna et al, RAGE inhibitor TTP488 (Azeliragon) suppresses metastasis in triple-negative breast cancer, npj Breast Cancer (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41523-023-00564-9

**

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 11:35am

Toothpaste containing synthetic tooth minerals can prevent cavities as effectively as fluoride: Clinical trial

Brushing twice a day keeps the dentist away—but can we improve on the toothpaste we use to maintain clean teeth, preventing medical issues that spiral from poor dental health? Most toothpastes use fluoride, a powerful tool for oral hygiene. However, fluoride can pose health problems in some cases, especially for children who consume too much fluoride by swallowing most of their toothpaste: children normally use only a tiny dose of toothpaste to avoid these problems, but that reduces toothbrushing efficacy.

In the search for alternatives, a team of international scientists and  clinicians have identified a hydroxyapatite toothpaste that works just as well as fluoride toothpaste to protect against cavities.

Hydroxyapatite is a safe and effective alternative to fluoride in caries prevention for daily use.

Hydroxyapatite is a calcium phosphate mineral found in the skeleton. It's known to be very safe for human consumption and has previously been shown to help with oral conditions like periodontitis. It can both inhibit the demineralization of teeth, a key step towards a cavity, and contribute to remineralization, which reinforces damaged tooth surfaces.

In a trial study  scientists found that nearly 90% of patients in both groups had no new cavities. There was no statistical difference in efficacy between the patients using a hydroxyapatite toothpaste and the control group using a fluoride tooth paste: both worked equally well.

Caries-preventing effect of a hydroxyapatite-toothpaste in adults: A 18 months double-blinded randomized clinical trial, Frontiers in Public Health (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1199728. www.frontiersin.org/articles/1 … bh.2023.1199728/full

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 11:25am

What's more, the fact that both the freshwater and marine hairworm species had lost the genes for cilia indicates that this evolutionary change happened in the deep past to the two species' common ancestor. "It is likely that the loss happened early on in the evolution of the group, and they just have been carrying on like that.

The finding opens the door to several new questions. It's not clear how the lack of cilia have affected hairworms, or if the hairworms' parasitic behavior could be related to the missing cilia. There are plenty of other parasitic organisms that aren't missing these specific genes, so we cannot say that the genes are missing because of their parasitic lifestyle. 

 Tauana J Cunha, Rampant loss of universal metazoan genes revealed by a chromosome-level genome assembly of the parasitic Nematomorpha, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.07.003. www.cell.com/current-biology/f … 0960-9822(23)00908-9

Part 2

**

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 19, 2023 at 11:23am

'Mind controlling' parasitic worms are missing genes found in every other animal, researchers find

In a world full of bizarre animals, hairworms are some of the strangest. Hairworms are parasitic worms that manipulate the behavior of their hosts in what's sometimes called "mind control."

A new study in the journal Current Biology reveals another strange trait shared by different hairworm species—they're missing about 30% of the genes that researchers expected them to have. What's more, the missing genes are responsible for the development of cilia, the hair-like structures present in at least some of the cells of every other animal known.

Hairworms are found all over the world, and they look like skinny strands of spaghetti, a couple inches long. Their simple bodies hint at their parasitic lifestyle— they have no excretory, respiratory, or circulatory systems, and they spend almost their entire lives inside the bodies of other animals.

One of the coolest things, maybe the thing that they are most known for, is that they can affect the behavior of their hosts and make them do things that they wouldn't do otherwise.

There are a few hundred species of freshwater hairworms. Their eggs hatch in water, and the hairworm larvae get eaten by tiny water-dwelling predators like mayfly larvae, which in turn get eaten by bigger, land-dwelling predators like crickets.

After growing into adulthood inside of their new hosts' bodies, the hairworms manipulate the hosts' behavior, causing them to jump into water. There, the worms swim out of their hosts' butts and seek out mates, knotting themselves together, to begin the cycle anew.

There are also five species of hairworms that live in marine environments and parasitize water-dwelling creatures like lobsters, but it's not clear if those ones also have host manipulation capabilities— there's no pressure for the worms to get back to the water, since the hosts already live there.

Researchers d sequenced them. But when they compared the hairworms' genetic codes to those of other animals, they found something striking.

"What they found was very surprising: both hairworm genomes were missing about 30% of a set of genes that are expected to be present across basically all groups of animals.

The large majority of the missing genes were exactly the same between the two species. This was just implausible by chance.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 18, 2023 at 11:11am

Policymakers need to win public support for energy demand reduction mechanisms. The reality is decarbonization on the supply side, where energy is generated and distributed, will not be enough to deliver the emission reductions that are needed.

"So, energy demand will have to be reduced. That is the inescapable reality. Experts on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimate that reducing energy demand could produce between 40% and 70% of the emissions reductions that need to be found by 2050.

This research is indicating that public support for energy demand reduction is possible if the public see the schemes as being fair and deliver climate justice.

Milena Büchs, Emissions savings from equitable energy demand reduction, Nature Energy (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-023-01283-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01283-y

Part 2

**

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 18, 2023 at 11:11am

Cap top 20% of energy users to reduce carbon emissions, say scientists

Consumers in the richer, developed nations will have to accept restrictions on their energy use if international climate change targets are to be met, warn researchers.

The big challenge is to identify the fairest and most equitable way that governments can curtail energy use, a process known as energy demand reduction. In the paper, "Emissions savings from equitable energy demand reduction," in the journal Nature Energy, the research team analyzed several scenarios to identify a potential solution.

One option is to cap the top 20% of energy users while allowing those people who use little energy and have poverty-level incomes to be able to increase their consumption levels and improve their quality of life.

Across any population there will be a range—or distribution—of values for how much energy individuals use. The values are sorted into 100 percentiles—for example, the 50th percentile represents the value that is exactly in the middle of the energy distribution, which half the population fail to reach and the other half exceeds.

Under the energy demand reduction scheme, the top-level energy users would see their energy use restricted to the value of energy use at the 80th percentile. In the scenario modeled, that would be 170.2 gigajoules (GJ) per person per year, compared to the mean energy use of the top 20% of consumers of 196.8 GJ per person per year.

Using data from 27 European states, the researchers modeled how effective this energy demand reduction strategy would be. They found it would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 11.4% from domestic energy sources; 16.8% from transport and 9.7% from total energy consumption.

Allowing people in poverty to increase their energy use would reduce these emissions savings by relatively small amounts—1.2 percentage points for domestic energy; 0.9 for transport; and 1.4 for total energy consumption. It would enable the less well-off to meet unmet needs, perhaps where they may have been unable to adequately heat their home.

Part 1

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 462
• 463
• 464
• 465
• 466
• …
• 1185
• Next ›
• Page