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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 16, 2014 at 8:40am

The protein titin has been found to be the key to reversible muscle elasticity according to a report by Columbia University biological sciences professor Julio Fernandez and his team in the March 13, 2014, edition of the journal Cell.
Mechanical force exposes cryptic cysteines in titin to allow S-glutathionylation
S-glutathionylation of cryptic cysteines inhibits protein folding
S-glutathionylation of titin reversibly modulates the elasticity of cardiomyocytes
Modification of cryptic cysteines links redox environment to tissue mechanics
The researchers discovered that titin is not a passive muscle structure but plays an active chemical role when the muscles are stretched. Stretching the muscles exposed parts of the titin molecule that are susceptible to oxidation. Oxidation of the reactive parts of the titin molecule confers lasting and reversible muscle elasticity through the process of glutathionylation.
he discovery promises new methods to treat heart disease and muscle disease.

The researchers recommend the yoga position downward-facing dog as a means to extend titin to the greatest extent and therefore produce lasting muscle elasticity.
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674%2814%2900150-0

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 15, 2014 at 8:51am

How Mountains And Rivers Make Life Possible
Favorable conditions for life on Earth are enabled in part by the natural shuttling of carbon dioxide from the planet’s atmosphere to its rocky interior and back again. Now Stanford scientists have devised a pair of math equations that better describe how topography, rock compositions and the movement of water through a landscape affects this vital recycling process.

Scientists have long suspected that the so-called the geologic carbon cycle is responsible for Earth’s clement and life-friendly conditions because it helps regulate atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that acts to trap the sun’s heat. This cycle is also thought to have played an important role in slowly thawing the planet during those rare times in the past when temperatures dipped so low that the globe was plunged into a “snowball-Earth” scenario and glaciers blanketed the equator.

“Our equations suggest that different landscapes have different potentials for regulating the transfer of carbon dioxide,” said Kate Maher, an assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences who developed the equations along with her colleague, Environmental Earth System Science Professor Page Chamberlain. The research, which was supported by the National Research Foundation, is described in the March 14 issue of the journal Science.
- Science news agencies

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 15, 2014 at 8:45am

Innovative solar-powered toilet developed by CU-Boulder ready for India unveiling
University of Colorado Boulder developed a toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.

The self-contained, waterless toilet, designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has the capability of heating human waste to a high enough temperature to sterilize human waste and create biochar, a highly porous charcoal, said project principal investigator Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering. The biochar has a one-two punch in that it can be used to both increase crop yields and sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/03/12/innovative-solar-p...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 15, 2014 at 7:11am

How grapevines got acne bacteria
Microbe is the first known animal pathogen to become dependent on a plant host — and could have helped in its domestication.
A common bacterium on human skin that is partly responsible for acne — has made itself at home in the grapevine. It is the first known instance of a human bacterial pathogen that has become dependent on a host from a different kingdom of life. Italian researchers report that a newly found strain of Propionibacterium acnes seems unable to live anywhere else than within grapevine cells, and speculate that this adaptation helped humans to domesticate the plant.
http://www.nature.com/news/how-grapevines-got-acne-bacteria-1.14812

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 14, 2014 at 8:47am

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2014/03/13/publishers-withdraw-1...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 14, 2014 at 8:43am

A team of British and American scientists have taken an important step toward understanding how life arose on Earth. Their work is published in a new paper in the journal Astrobiology.

The Fuel Cell Model of Abiogenesis: A New Approach to Origin-of-Life Simulations
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2014.1140

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 14, 2014 at 8:40am

The five second rule to pick up food from the floor:

According to researchers,  final-year students at Birmingham’s Aston University, the 'five-second rule' that many of us think is okay is an actual scientific measure of how long your food is safe to eat for.

(But again I have watched a programme on Discovery channel sometime back that said it depends on the state of food. If it is very wet, it picks up lots of microbes from the floor. If it is dry less number of microbes get attached to it regardless of time it spent on the floor.)

According to this one there is a "significant time factor" on the transfer of bacteria from the floor to food - basically, you have five second window to pick it up before it stops being safe to eat.

The students placed toast, pasta, biscuits and a sweet on the floor to determine that food picked-up straight after being dropped is less likely to contain common bacteria such as E. coli.

They also determined that bacteria is least likely to transfer from carpeted surfaces, and most likely to transfer from laminate or tiled surfaces to moist foods which made contact with the floor for more than five seconds.

"Consuming food dropped on the floor still carries an infection risk as it very much depends on which bacteria are present on the floor at the time; however the findings of this study will bring some light relief to those who have been employing the “five-second rule” for years, despite a general consensus that it is purely a myth," Professor Anthony, who led the study, said.

"We have found evidence that transfer from indoor flooring surfaces is incredibly poor with carpet actually posing the lowest risk of bacterial transfer onto dropped food."

- News Agencies

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 14, 2014 at 8:13am

Earth's mantle holds an ocean's worth of water. Scientists have found the first terrestrial sample of a water-rich gem which suggests that large volumes of water exist deep beneath the Earth.

An international team of scientists led by Graham Pearson, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic Resources at the University of Alberta, has discovered the first-ever sample of a mineral called 'ringwoodite'. Analysis of the mineral shows it contains a significant amount of water — 1.5% of its weight — a finding that confirms scientific theories about vast volumes of water trapped 410 to 660 kilometres beneath the Earth, between the upper and lower mantle.

"This sample really provides extremely strong confirmation that there are local wet spots deep in the Earth in this area," said Pearson, a professor in the faculty of science. "That particular zone in the Earth, the transition zone, might have as much water as all the world's oceans put together," Pearson said.

Ringwoodite is a form of the mineral peridot, believed to exist in large quantities under high pressures in the transition zone.

Ringwoodite has been found in meteorites but, until now, no terrestrial sample has ever been unearthed because scientists have not been able to conduct fieldwork at extreme depths. Pearson's sample was found in 2008 in the Juina area of Mato Grosso, Brazil, where artisan miners unearthed the host diamond from shallow river gravels.

The diamond had been brought to the Earth's surface by a volcanic rock known as kimberlite — the most deeply derived of all volcanic rocks. Pearson said the discovery was almost accidental in that his team had been looking for another mineral when they found a three-millimetre-wide, dirty-looking, commercially worthless brown diamond.

- News Agencies

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 13, 2014 at 9:24am

Zombie virus discovered
After lying dormant in Siberian permafrost for 30,000 years, the largest virus ever discovered is just as deadly as it was when mammoths roamed the Earth.
The virus targets amoebas rather than humans. But thawing, drilling and mining of ancient permafrost could potentially unleash viruses that infect people, say the scientists who discovered the giant virus.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 13, 2014 at 9:21am

Spontaneous fluctuations in neural responses to heartbeats predict visual detection
Each heartbeat creates a blip of neural activity in the brain, and that blip may help people better sense their world.

People were more likely to spot a flash of a hard-to-see ring when the image was presented right after a heartbeat, researchers report March 9 in Nature Neuroscience. The neural jolt produced by a heartbeat primes the brain to better detect the ring.

The results are an example of how bodily functions can have a big effect on the brain.
Spontaneous fluctuations of ongoing neural activity substantially affect sensory and cognitive performance. Because bodily signals are constantly relayed up to the neocortex, neural responses to bodily signals are likely to shape ongoing activity.
Using magnetoencephalography, scientists show that in humans, neural events locked to heartbeats before stimulus onset predict the detection of a faint visual grating in the posterior right inferior parietal lobule and the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, two regions that have multiple functional correlates and that belong to the same resting-state network. Neither fluctuations in measured bodily parameters nor overall cortical excitability could account for this finding. Neural events locked to heartbeats therefore shape visual conscious experience, potentially by contributing to the neural maps of the organism that might underlie subjectivity. Beyond conscious vision, the results show that neural events locked to a basic physiological input such as heartbeats underlie behaviorally relevant differential activation in multifunctional cortical areas.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3671.html

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