Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2015 at 9:19am

All our fears are coming true! Yes, now we hear about Plastic Contamination of Table Salt in China. Supermarket products have tiny plastic particles, probably from ocean pollution attached to sea salt.

People in China who season their meals with sea salt may be unwittingly consuming microscopic pieces of plastic pollution.

When researchers analyzed fifteen brands of common table salt bought at supermarkets across China, they found among the grains of seasoning micro-sized particles of the common water bottle plastic polyethylene terephthalate, as well as polyethylene, cellophane, and a wide variety of other plastics (Env. Sci.& Tech. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5b03163).

The highest level of plastic contamination was found in salt sourced from the ocean: The researchers measured more than 1,200 particles of plastic per lb of sea salt. The team, led by Huahong Shi of East China Normal University also found tiny particles of plastic in salt sourced from briny lakes, briny wells, and salt mines, although at lower levels—between 15 and 800 particles/ lb.

Shi and colleagues argue that plastic contamination originates from the vast amount of plastic pollution floating around marine environments where sea salt is sourced. For instance, bits of plastics might abrade from larger objects, such as water bottles, dumped in the water or they might come from cosmetic products, such as face washes, that use plastic microbeads as exfoliants. The researchers add that other points of entry for plastic contamination are also possible, including during salt processing, drying, and packaging.

Given that manufacturers typically extract sea salt from ocean water by evaporation—a process that leaves everything behind but water—microplastic contamination of sea salt is likely prevalent outside China as well.

Feeling Scary? Then stop using plastic and products made from it as much as possible.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 29, 2015 at 8:42am

Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) founder-director P M Bhargava on Wednesday became the first Indian scientist to join the bandwagon of writers and filmmakers returning their awards when he told TOI that he will return his Padma Bhushan to protest against "the government's attack on rationalism, reasoning and science".

Bhargava's decision came hours after 107 senior scientists signed an online statement on Wednesday to join the chorus of protests by other scientists, artists and writers.

"The Padma Bhushan had a special place in my collection of more than 100 awards for science. Now I feel no sentimental attachment to it when the government tries to institutionalise religion and curtail freedom and scientific spirit," said Bhargava, who received the Padma award in 1986. He said it was a personal decision and that he had no idea if other scientists would return their awards.

The Indian Constitution in Article 51 A (h) demands ... that we develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing instead is the active promotion of irrational and sectarian thought.

Declaring solidarity with writers who returned their Sahitya Akademi awards, the statement said, "We scientists now join our voices to theirs, to assert that the Indian people will not accept such attacks on reason, science and our plural culture."We appeal to all other sections of society to raise their voice against the assault on reason and scientific temper we are witnessing in India today. The scientists have not sent their statement to any government agency or minister. Rather, they want the government to take note of their protest after reading what the scientist community feels about the state of affairs. Many of the scientists, who are working in the government institutions, including the Delhi-based Indian National Science Academy (INSA), have similar views.

"We are very much with the fellow scientists who have raised the issue of growing intolerance," said a senior scientist of the INSA .

-Times of India

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 29, 2015 at 7:43am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 26, 2015 at 8:34am

--
Is it possible for an element 0 to exist? A stable atom with only neutrons and no protons / electrons?
Congratulations! Element zero exists and is a well studied astronomical object. You have just speculated/discovered the existence of the Neutron star. These stars are the densest of stars and exist as a result of Gravitational collapse of a large star after a supernova. The neutron star is about 100,000 times denser than the sun! (The radius of a neutron is about 30,000 times less than that of an atom.) The intense gravitational field is required for neutrons to "clump" together, and the supernova is needed to burn off the protons and electrons.

Specifically, in a supernova the energy is so huge that the atoms are ripped apart, whereupon protons and electrons repel separately and across species move at such different speeds, at a given thermal level, that they dissipate. This leaves neutrons that are pressed closer and closer as they have no electron clouds (which are comprised of mostly vaccum) to keep them apart. Gravity pulls them in tighter and tighter until they are forced to no longer collapse. The prohibition to further collapse is that neutrons are, like electrons, fermions, and thus cannot collapse further than the wavefunction of each particle. Note that atoms are Bosons, so they can collapse further. Stars that are not made only of neutrons can collapse into black holes. Remarkable is it not that quantum theory is needed to explain these very very hot dense mysterious astronomical objects!
**
A single, free neutron cannot form a chemical bond with any element, so I don't know if you could consider it an element, then.

A single, free neutron has a half-life of about 10 minutes. It decays into a proton, electron, and an anti-neutrino. So I don't know if you could consider it stable.

Neutrons have no bonding force to bond any of them together. A neutron star is NOT just a big ball of neutrons, it is much more complicated and in fact has quite a lot of protons and electrons inside it.
*the only chance a neutron will be considered as an element is if it comes for the decay of H+Since H+ (a proton) then it should also decay in a particle? Should it? Otherwise, forget it, a neutron is a particle and not an element.

Applying Lavoisier's principle, nothing is gained, nothing is lost in a chemical reaction, if we start with an element (a proton or H+) and it decays in a neutron they should we have still an element?

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 26, 2015 at 7:55am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 26, 2015 at 5:40am

Deep-sea bacteria could help neutralize greenhouse gas

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 23, 2015 at 7:10am

Sunscreen Is Killing Coral Reefs Around The World
Sunscreen may protect against skin cancer and sunburn, but it is killing coral reefs across the world, according to a team of international scientists based out of the University of Central Florida.
The researchers found high concentrations of oxybenzone, a common UV-filtering compound, in the waters around popular coral reefs in Hawaii and the Caribbean. In addition to killing the coral, the chemical also damages the DNA in adults and deforms the DNA in corals that are in the larval stage, which reduces corals' chances of proper development, according to a news release.
The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue. We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment.
The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue. We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean.  Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 23, 2015 at 6:57am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 22, 2015 at 8:27am

--

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 17, 2015 at 6:21am

Do you think you are getting less sleep because of modern day lifestyles? But did you know you are not getting lesser sleep than hunter-gatherers, I mean our ancestors?

New evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 15 shows that three ancient groups of hunter-gatherers--living in different parts of the world without any of those trappings of modern life--don't get any more sleep than we do.

Those traditional people sleep a little under 6.5 hours a night on average. They don't take regular naps. They don't go to sleep at dark, either. In other words, their sleep habits don't look so different from ours, although they usually do wake up before the sun rises.

The short sleep in these populations challenges the belief that sleep has been greatly reduced in the 'modern world. This has important implications for the idea that we need to take sleeping pills because sleep has been reduced from its 'natural level' by the widespread use of electricity, TV, the Internet, and so on.

To get a handle on how people slept before the modern era, Siegel and his colleagues looked to three traditional human hunter-gatherer societies: the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Bolivia. The researchers recorded the sleeping habits of 94 individuals around the clock to collect data representing 1,165 days in all.

What they found was a surprising similarity across those three groups. "Despite varying genetics, histories, and environments, we find that all three groups show a similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express core human sleep patterns, probably characteristic of pre-modern-era Homo sapiens.

Group sleep time averaged between 5.7 and 7.1 hours, with between 6.9 and 8.5 hours between the beginning and end of the sleep period. Those amounts are at the low end of durations reported in "industrial societies."

Hunter-gatherers sleep an hour more in the winter than they do in the summer. Although they lack electric lights, none of the groups went to sleep with the sun. On average, they stayed up a little over three hours after the sun went down and woke up before sunrise.

It appears that their sleep time may have more to do with temperature than with light. Those ancient groups all went to sleep as the temperature fell and slept through the coldest part of the night.

There is one important way in which hunter-gatherers aren't like us: very few of them suffer from chronic insomnia.

Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies. Yetish et al. Current Biology, 2015.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2901157-4

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 1033
• 1034
• 1035
• 1036
• 1037
• …
• 1216
• Next ›
• Page