Science Simplified!

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 7, 2014 at 5:23am

The Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine 2014 was given to three people this time-divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".
The brain has a GPS-like function that enables people to produce mental maps and navigate the world — a discovery for which three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine this year. The findings might help scientists design tests that can pick up the very earliest signs of the mind-robbing disease, whose victims lose their spatial memory and get easily lost.

O'Keefe discovered the first component of the brain's positioning system in 1971. He found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rat moved to another place. He demonstrated that these "place cells" were building up a map, not just registering visual input.
In 2005, the Mosers identified another type of nerve cell — the "grid cell" — that generates a coordinate system for precise "positioning and path-finding".
The laureates' discoveries marked a shift in scientists' understanding of how specialized cells work together to perform complex cognitive tasks. They have also opened new avenues for understanding cognitive functions such as memory, thinking and planning.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 6, 2014 at 5:37am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2014 at 8:54am

Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota
What makes life sweet for those of us who are counting calories is artificial sweeteners. Diet soda gives a sweet carbonated fix. A packet of artificial sweetener in your coffee or tea makes it a delicious morning dose.

But a new study, published September 17 in Nature, found that the artificial sweetener saccharin has an unintended side effect: It alters the bacterial composition of the gut in mice and humans. The new bacterial neighborhood brings with it higher blood glucose levels, putting the humans and the murine counterparts at risk for diabetes.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13793...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2014 at 8:42am

Rabies can be eliminated from around the world, say Scots scientists
“Vaccinating dogs is the single-most effective way of eliminating rabies."
If you can vaccinate more than 70% of dogs through sustained campaigns, it is enough to interrupt transmission in the reservoir population so that the disease if eliminated.
That is how rabies has been purged from most industrialised countries and why South America is so close to eradicating dog-transmitted rabies from the whole American continent.
http://news.stv.tv/scotland/294128-glasgow-university-scientists-sa...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2014 at 6:19am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2014 at 6:11am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2014 at 6:09am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2014 at 7:52am

Lower IQ in Children Linked to Chemical in Water
Babies born to mothers with high levels of perchlorate during their first trimester are more likely to have lower IQs later in life, according to a new study
Maternal perchlorate levels in women with borderline thyroid function during pregnancy and the cognitive development of their offspring; Data from the Controlled Antenatal Thyroid Study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25057878

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2014 at 5:19am

Cancer: How the immune system spots tumors
The receptor protein Dectin-1 recognizes structures found on cancerous cells, and then triggers an anti-tumor immune response. http://elifesciences.org/content/3/e04476#sthash.I8siNatR.dpuf

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2014 at 9:22am

Automating Scientific Discovery
The power of computers to juggle vast quantities of data has proved invaluable to science. In the early days, machines performed calculations that would have taken humans far too long to perform by hand. More recently, data mining has found relationships that were not known to exist—noticing, for instance, a correlation between use of a painkiller and incidence of heart attacks. Now some computer scientists are working on the next logical step—teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to perform new experiments. In essence, they wish to automate the scientific process.

One team of researchers, from Cornell and Vanderbilt universities and CFD Research Corporation, took a significant step in that direction when they reported last year that a program of theirs had been able to solve a complex biological problem. They focused on glycolysis, the metabolic process by which cells—yeast, in this case—break down sugars to produce energy. The team fed their algorithm with experimental data about yeast metabolism, along with theoretical models in the form of sets of equations that could fit the data.

The team seeded the program with approximately 1,000 equations, all of which had the correct mathematical syntax but were otherwise random. The computer changed and recombined the equations and ranked the results according to which produced answers that fit the data—an evolutionary technique that has been used since the early 1990s. The key step, explains Hod Lipson, associate professor of computing and information science at Cornell, was to not only rank how the equations fit the data at any given point in the dataset, but also at points where competing models disagreed.
Read more here:
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148614-automating-scientific-d...

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