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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 4 hours ago

CERN hails delicate test on transporting antimatter as a scientific success

CERN successfully transported antiprotons by road for the first time, using a cryogenic, magnetically shielded vacuum trap to prevent contact with matter and annihilation. The test demonstrated the feasibility of moving antimatter safely, enabling future high-precision studies of fundamental symmetries outside CERN, though current containment is limited to about four hours.
Manipulating antimatter, like antiprotons, can be tricky business. As scientists understand the universe today, for every type of particle that exists, there is a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with an opposite charge.
If those opposites come into contact, they "annihilate" each other, setting off lots of energy, depending on the masses involved. Any bumps in the road on the test journey that aren't compensated for by the specially-designed box could spoil the whole exercise.

Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin—a very delicate one—in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive that has been deemed a success.
If this so-called antimatter had come into contact with actual matter, even for a fraction of an instant, it would have been annihilated in a quick flash of energy. So experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, had to be extra careful when they took 92 antiprotons on the road for a short ride on Tuesday.

The antiprotons were suspended in a vacuum inside a specially designed box and held in place by supercooled magnets.

In methodical exercise over about three hours, the nearly 1,000-kilogram (2,200-pound) cryogenic box was craned up slowly and moved through a cavernous lab the onto the truck.

The drive on CERN's campus itself lasted only about a half-hour to test how—if at all—the infinitesimal particles could be transported by road without seeping out.
The antiprotons were then placed back in their usual lab area, and the operation was concluded with applause, claims of success

Source: CERN

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 4 hours ago

Severe infections may raise dementia risk

Severe infections increase the risk of dementia independently of other coexisting illnesses, according to a new study published in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine 

In the new study, researchers used nationwide Finnish health registry data covering more than 62,000 individuals aged 65 or older who were diagnosed with late-onset dementia between 2017 and 2020, along with more than 312,000 matched dementia-free controls.
Taking a broad approach, they examined all hospital-treated diseases recorded during the previous twenty years, identifying 29 diseases that were robustly associated with increased dementia risk. Nearly half (47%) of dementia cases had at least one of the 29 identified diseases before their diagnosis.

Of those diseases, two were infections: cystitis (a urinary tract infection) and bacterial infection of an unspecified site. Among the non-infectious diseases, the strongest associations with dementia were seen for mental disorders due to brain damage or physical disease, Parkinson's disease, and alcohol-related mental and behavioral disorders.

When the researchers then adjusted for all 27 non-infectious dementia-related diseases identified, the association between both infections and dementia remained largely intact. Less than one-seventh of the excess dementia risk among individuals with hospital-treated cystitis or bacterial infections was attributable to pre-existing conditions.

The link between infections and dementia was even stronger for early-onset dementia (diagnosed before age 65), where five types of infection—including pneumonia and dental caries—were associated with elevated risk.

The role of noninfectious comorbidities in the association between severe infections and risk of dementia in Finland: A nationwide registry study, PLOS Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004688. plos.io/4qY5nix

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 4 hours ago

Vivid dreaming makes sleep feel deeper, researchers discover

Researchers  have discovered a key relationship between dreaming and the feeling of having had a good night's sleep. Published in PLOS Biology, the study shows that the feeling of deep sleep is not determined solely by slow-wave brain activity. Rather, immersive dreaming that comes with increases in wake-like brain activity leads to a greater feeling of deep sleep.

Why is it that sometimes we sleep eight hours and don't feel rested, while other times we feel like we had a great night's sleep after only five hours? Research has shown that our feeling of deep sleep is related to a shift from high- to low-frequency brain waves, which is thought to drive unconsciousness. At the same time, other reports indicate that dream (REM) sleep is also perceived as deep, despite its wake-like brain waves.

To better characterize the effects of dream sleep on perceived sleep depth, the researchers analyzed EEG recordings from 44 adults who were repeatedly awoken during non-REM sleep over the course of four nights.

Analysis showed that shifts from faster to slower waves were indeed associated with a feeling of deep sleep. However, this relationship weakened when participants reported having had a dream, even if they could not remember the content.

Perceived sleep depth was thus higher after dreaming, even though this state is associated with wake-like brain activity. Specifically, vivid, bizarre, and emotionally intense dreams were all associated with subjectively deeper sleep, while abstract, reflective thought-like dreams with meta-awareness were related to more shallow feeling sleep.

These findings are contrary to the longstanding view that the feeling of deep sleep is governed solely by slow brain waves and the depth of unconsciousness, and suggest that perceptually immersive dreaming is what allows us to feel well rested—even if we can't remember what we dreamed.

This study suggests that dreams may help shape how we experience sleep by immersing us in an internal world that keeps us disconnected from the external environment.

Understanding how dreams contribute to the feeling of deep sleep opens new perspectives on sleep health and mental well-being.

Michalak A, et al. Immersive NREM2 dreaming preserves subjective sleep depth against declining sleep pressure. PLOS Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003683

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

Researchers found that a cluster of genetic variants near the AS3MT gene that strongly influenced how the body processes arsenic. These variants were far more common in people from San Antonio de los Cobres than in genetically similar populations in Peru and Colombia.

The variants appear to make the body more efficient at converting arsenic into forms that can be safely excreted in urine, reducing the buildup of the most toxic intermediate compounds – a result that neatly aligns with earlier studies of arsenic metabolites in urine.
While arsenic contamination is common around the world, very few communities have lived with such high levels of exposure for long periods of time.

In San Antonio de los Cobres, people have lived with arsenic in their groundwater for thousands of years – long enough for natural selection to favor traits that reduce vulnerability to arsenic's toxic effects.
Research suggests similar genetic signals may also appear in other Andean populations exposed to arsenic for generations, supporting the findings that long-term exposure can drive genetic tolerance, and hinting that the adaptation may be more widespread across the region.

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/32/6/1544/1074042?login=false

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

Humans in The Andes Appear to Have Evolved a Strange Genetic Ability

For thousands of years, humans living high in the Argentinian Andes have relied on drinking water that would make most people deathly ill.
There, naturally occurring arsenic in volcanic bedrock leaches into the groundwater, contaminating the local water supply with levels of the toxic metalloid that would pose serious health risks to most human populations.

But for one group in northern Argentina, natural selection may have provided an unusual genetic advantage.

According to a DNA analysis of people across western South America, a population in the Argentinian Andes carries a gene variant that likely helps them metabolize arsenic more safely.
Scientific data show that adaptation to tolerate the environmental stressor arsenic has likely driven an increase in the frequencies of protective variants of AS3MT, providing the first evidence of human adaptation to a toxic chemical.

In 1995, scientists noted that women from the Argentinian Andes had a "unique" ability to metabolize arsenic, as evidenced by metabolites in their urine.
When arsenic enters the body, enzymes convert it through several chemical forms. One of these intermediate forms, called monomethylated arsenic (MMA), is particularly toxic. A later form, dimethylated arsenic (DMA), is easier for the body to excrete in urine.

People in San Antonio de los Cobres tended to produce less of the toxic intermediate and more of the easily excreted form, suggesting their bodies were unusually efficient at processing arsenic.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks, bolstering origin-of-life theories

Samples from asteroid Ryugu contain all nucleobases required for DNA and RNA, including uracil, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, supporting the idea that such molecules are widespread in the solar system. The study also found a unique correlation between nucleobase ratios and ammonia concentration, suggesting a previously unrecognized formation pathway in early solar system materials.

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said last week.
The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.
The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.

In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer (185-million-mile) mission to land on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide (2,950-feet-wide) asteroid.

It successfully managed to collect two samples of rocks weighing 5.4 grams (under a fifth of an ounce) each and bring them back to Earth in 2020.

Research in 2023 showed that these samples contained uracil, which is one of the four bases that make up RNA.
While DNA, the famed double helix, functions as a genetic blueprint, single-strand RNA is an all-important messenger, converting the instructions contained in DNA for implementation.

Last Monday, a new study by a Japanese team of researchers in Nature Astronomy demonstrated that the samples contained all the "nucleobases" for both DNA and RNA.

These included uracil as well as adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.

This means their presence indicates that primitive asteroids could produce and preserve molecules that are important for the chemistry related to the origin of life.
The discovery also "demonstrates their widespread presence throughout the solar system and reinforces the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids contributed to the prebiotic chemical inventory of early Earth," according to the study.
With this and the results from Bennu, we now have a very clear idea of which organic materials can form under prebiotic conditions anywhere in the universe.
Last year, the same building blocks were found in fragments brought back to Earth by NASA from the asteroid Bennu.

Scientists have also detected their presence in the meteorites Orgueil and Murchison, which were part of asteroids that fell to Earth.
Scientists also identified a correlation between the ratios of the building blocks and the concentration of another important chemical for life: ammonia.

Because no known formation mechanism predicts such a relationship, this finding may point to a previously unrecognized pathway for nucleobase formation in early solar system materials.
This discovery has important implications for how biologically important molecules may have originally formed and promoted the genesis of life on Earth.

Toshiki Koga et al, A complete set of canonical nucleobases in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu, Nature Astronomy (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02791-z

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Birds are spreading plastic pollution

Gulls and other birds feeding at landfills ingest plastics and other debris, which they later regurgitate at roosting sites, including ecologically sensitive wetlands. In southern Spain, lesser black-backed gulls deposit an estimated 400 kg of plastics and over two tons of other waste annually into key habitats, contributing to microplastic pollution that threatens wildlife and can enter the human food chain.

https://theconversation.com/how-birds-are-spreading-plastic-polluti...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

This indeed turned out to be the case for Cnidarian body shape diversity. Based on experimental observations in six different species—two corals, two anemones, and two hydrozoans—the team came up with a list of three "mechanical modules." These modules can be combined to explain two important features of body shape—elongation and polarity.

Elongation is a measure of how stretched or compact a body is along its main axis. Polarity, on the other hand, describes how asymmetric the animal is—whether the top part of the animal, which contains the mouth, is wider or narrower than its base. By adjusting the values of the mechanical modules in their model, like tuning knobs, scientists arrived at different predictions for elongation and polarity. They called this combination, unique for each species, an organism's "mechanotype."

Mechanical changes ultimately arise from molecular changes, but the mechanotype is where that information becomes predictive of form.
Scientists think evolution acts on these modules to generate new forms.
Does this mean that changing the mechanotype would change the shape of the organism? To test this, the scientists performed a series of experiments using the sea anemone Nematostella. Nematostella larvae tend to be elongated and have a narrow oral end. When the scientists introduced genetic changes that affected one of the mechanical modules—nematic order—the larvae ended up being round instead of elongated.

Changing polarity was more difficult though; scientists had to perturb multiple modules simultaneously to get Nematostella to change its polarity to something that resembled another species, Aiptasia.

Together, these "reshaping" experiments showed it is possible to quantitatively predict and manipulate shape using mechanotypes and active surface models. They also demonstrated that different aspects of shape can be more or less complex in how they are determined by combinations of such mechanical modules.

Deciphering mechanical determinants of morphological evolution, Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.02.010. www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(26)00175-3

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Sea creatures reveal the physics behind animal body shape diversity
Variation in animal body shapes is determined by differences in mechanical tissue properties, termed "mechanotypes." In Cnidarians, three mechanical modules explain key shape features—elongation and polarity. Experimental manipulation of these modules in sea anemones confirmed that altering mechanotypes can predictably reshape organisms, highlighting the role of physical forces in morphological diversity.

Animals come in an extraordinary range of body shapes. A starfish looks nothing like an earthworm, a mouse, or a human. Yet even closely related species can appear radically different: corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones all belong to the same biological phylum, but their bodies take strikingly different forms. A new study by EMBL researchers appearing in Cell, shows how such shape diversity is determined by variation in mechanical tissue properties—an idea they termed "mechanotypes."
Genotype—the genetic composition of organisms—plays a central role during growth and development. But genes alone cannot fully explain how tissues bend, stretch, and reorganize to generate body shape—a process called morphogenesis.
Comparing genomes can reveal genetic differences linked to shape diversity, but genes cannot tell us how morphogenesis unfolds.
Even with a genome in hand, we still cannot yet predict the final shape of an organism.
Researchers drew on insights from mechanobiology—the study of how physical forces shape biological processes. During development, morphogenesis is often driven not by individual cells but by forces generated collectively within tissues. They hypothesized that this is the level where different body shapes arise across species.
What matters is how cells work together as a tissue to generate forces and mechanical constraints. If this is where morphogenesis operates, it may also be where shape diversity emerges across evolution, the researchers argue.
Connecting modern biological understanding of morphogenesis to Thompson's ideas of mechanical influences on diversity required cross-disciplinary collaboration. However, to build a framework that explains the physical underpinnings of this process, the study required expertise in theoretical physics and mathematics.
An important idea in physics is that when described on the right scale, emergent features of complex systems can be understood through models involving only a few key parameters.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Microbes make microplastics more likely to form ice in clouds, research reveals

Microplastics coated with microbial biofilms significantly increase the temperature at which ice forms in clouds by about 6.5 °C, enhancing ice nucleation more than microbes or plastics alone. This effect could alter cloud formation, precipitation patterns, and climate by changing how clouds interact with sunlight and heat, highlighting an unexpected link between plastic pollution and atmospheric processes.

Tiny pieces of plastic, called microplastics, are showing up everywhere, even in the water in clouds, rain, and snow—and they may be affecting our weather and temperatures. A study published in Environmental Science & Technology  found that microbes living on microplastics dramatically boost their ability to trigger ice formation in clouds.

In laboratory experiments, the microbial coating increased the temperature at which ice formed by about 6.5 degrees Celsius—a major shift in cloud physics.

To understand this effect, the researchers recreated what happens in nature. They placed microscopic plastic particles in controlled laboratory conditions and allowed naturally occurring bacteria to attach and grow on their surfaces. Over several days, the microbes formed a thin layer called a biofilm—a sticky coating that helps microbes anchor themselves and survive.

Team members then tested how easily these particles could trigger freezing using a specialized set up that slowly cooled tiny droplets of water containing microplastics. By monitoring when each droplet froze, they could measure how effective the particles were at initiating ice formation.

The results revealed something especially surprising. Microbes attached to microplastics were even more effective at forming ice than the same microbes floating freely in water. In other words, the plastic surface enhanced the microbes' ice-making ability.

This suggests that microplastics don't just carry microbes through the atmosphere—they help amplify their environmental effects, highlighting a surprising link between human pollution and natural systems.

Lingzhi Chu et al, Finer Particulate Matter Exposure Disparities Exist but Vary across Pollution Concentrations, Environmental Science & Technology (2026). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5c06203

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