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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 hours ago

Scientist captures tiny particles for clues on what sparks lightning

Using lasers as tweezers to understand cloud electrification might sound like science fiction, but at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) it is a reality. By trapping and charging micron-sized particles with lasers, researchers can now observe their charging and discharging dynamics over time.

This method, published in Physical Review Letters, could provide key insights into what sparks lightning.

Aerosols are liquid or solid particles that float in the air. They are all around us. Some are large and visible, such as pollen in spring, while others, such as viruses that spread during flu season, cannot be detected by the naked eye. Some we can even taste, like the airborne salt crystals we breathe in at the seaside.

In the new work researchers focused on ice crystals within clouds. The  scientists used model aerosols—tiny, transparent silica particles—to explore how these ice crystals accumulate and interact with electrical charge.

They developed a way to catch, hold, and electrically charge a single silica particle using two laser beams. This approach holds potential for application in different areas, including demystifying how clouds become electrified and what sparks lightning.

The scientists discovered that lasers charge the particle through a "two-photon process."

Typically, aerosol particles are close to neutrally charged, with electrons (negatively charged entities) swirling around in every atom of the particle.

The laser beams consist of photons (particles of light traveling at the speed of light), and when two of these photons are absorbed simultaneously, they can "kick out" one electron from the particle. In this way, the particle gains one elemental positive charge. Step by step, it becomes increasingly positively charged.

The researchers can now precisely observe the evolution of one aerosol particle as it charges up from neutral to highly charged and adjust the laser power to control the rate.

This observation also reveals that, as the particle becomes positively charged, it begins to discharge, meaning that it occasionally releases charge in spontaneous bursts.

Way above our heads, something similar might also be happening in clouds.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 23 hours ago

Blink to the beat: Scientists discover that when we listen to music, we unconsciously blink our eyes
Spontaneous eye blinks synchronize with the beat of music, reflecting involuntary auditory-motor synchronization even in non-musicians. This effect disappears when attention is diverted, indicating that focus on music is required. The findings suggest a link between auditory processing and oculomotor control, offering potential for non-invasive rhythm assessment and therapeutic applications.

Wu Y, et al. Eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during music listening, PLOS Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003456

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 23 hours ago

Oregano oil shows promise as natural fire ant repellent
Oregano essential oil, particularly its compound carvacrol, effectively repels invasive fire ants and disrupts their nest-building behavior. Carvacrol and related plant-derived compounds are biodegradable, less toxic to humans and beneficial insects, and may offer a sustainable alternative to synthetic pesticides for fire ant management.

Ginson George et al, Repellent effect of oregano essential oil and carvacrol analogs against imported fire ants, Pest Management Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/ps.70297

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Why do we fear snakes?

Fear of snakes is common. In most polls conducted in some parts of the world, respondents listed snakes as their top fear, outranking public speaking and heights.

Why are so many of us afraid of snakes? And more curiously, why does our unconscious mind recognize them as a threat before our conscious mind?

This is what the experts say:

Our relationship with snakes is an ancient one that reaches back to the evolutionary origins of primates. Primates are really differentiated from other mammals by their heavy reliance on vision as the primary sensory modality with the environment. If you want to understand why primates evolved, you have to address why they have such good vision.

The predator-prey relationship between snakes and primates across tens of millions of years enhanced our visual acuity. 

Avoiding predators and getting food are the two main selective pressures operating on organisms. The idea is that the unique conditions under which primates were living, that is, being active at night like other mammals but resting during the day in trees where sunlight penetrates, instead of in caves or burrows, allowed them to expand their visual sense as a way to avoid being eaten by snakes.

Molecular evidence bolsters the idea of ancient snake predation on primates. Researchers have found that primates in Africa and Asia, where cobras live, have evolved some immunity toward cobra venom. But primates in Madagascar and South America, where there are no cobras, have no immunity.

Even today, there seems to be a biological tendency for primates to perceive snakes as a threat.

If a young, naïve monkey watches a video of older monkeys reacting carefully to a snake, they will learn to do that. But if you splice in a flower where the snake was, they don't learn to react carefully toward the flower.

Even captive-born-and-raised rhesus macaques, who likely haven't been harmed by snakes, respond with "fearful fascination" to them.

Primate vision is highly snake-sensitive.

This fact is beyond primatology and enhanced by the fields like neuroscience, evolutionary theory, genetics and molecular biology, to name a few.

While constricting snakes were instrumental in the origin of primates and the initial changes in their vision, venomous snakes, appearing later, were very important in facilitating the changes in vision that led to anthropoid primates.

Two mammalian visual systems are key to this idea: the superior colliculus-pulvinar visual system and the lateral geniculate nucleus visual system. The first system enables our unconscious detection of an object in our environment. The second, slightly slower, system allows for conscious recognition of the object and the ability to assign intent to it. Both visual systems are more developed in primates than in other mammals, and even more so in anthropoids.

If you've ever had the experience of walking on a trail and coming across something that could be a snake, you might suddenly freeze or jump away before you actually recognize that there is a snake in front of you. The recognition taps into the conscious visual system, but the unconscious visual system gives you the ability to get out of danger more quickly.

Evolution at its best!

https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/why-do-we-fear-snakes#:~:text=Both...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Given the pace of technological and environmental change, biological evolution cannot keep up. Biological adaptation is very slow. Longer-term genetic adaptations are multigenerational—tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

That means the mismatch between our evolved physiology and modern conditions is unlikely to resolve itself naturally. Instead, the researchers argue, societies need to mitigate these effects by rethinking their relationship with nature and designing healthier, more sustainable environments.

Addressing the mismatch requires both cultural and environmental solutions.

One approach is to fundamentally rethink our relationship with nature—treating it as a key health factor and protecting or regenerating spaces that resemble those from our hunter-gatherer past.
Another is to design healthier, more resilient cities that take human physiology into account.
This new research based thinking can identify which stimuli most affect blood pressure, heart rate or immune function, for example, and pass that knowledge on to decision-makers.
We need to get our cities right—and at the same time regenerate, value and spend more time in natural spaces, say the researchers.

 Daniel P. Longman et al, Homo sapiens, industrialisation and the environmental mismatch hypothesis, Biological Reviews (2025). DOI: 10.1111/brv.70094

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Humans are evolved for nature, not cities, say anthropologists

A new paper by evolutionary anthropologists argues that modern life has outpaced human evolution. The study suggests that chronic stress and many modern health issues are the result of an evolutionary mismatch between our primarily nature-adapted biology and the industrialized environments we now inhabit.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, humans adapted to the demands of hunter-gatherer life—high mobility, intermittent stress and close interaction with natural surroundings.

Industrialization, by contrast, has transformed the human environment in only a few centuries, by introducing noise, air and light pollution, microplastics, pesticides, constant sensory stimulation, artificial light, processed foods and sedentary lifestyles.

In our ancestral environments, we were well adapted to deal with acute stress to evade or confront predators. 

The lion would come around occasionally, and you had to be ready to defend yourself—or run. The key is that the lion goes away again.

Today's stressors—traffic, work demands, social media and noise, to name just a few—trigger the same biological systems, but without resolution or recovery. Our body reacts as though all these stressors were lion, say the researchers.

Whether it's a difficult discussion with your boss or traffic noise, your stress response system is still the same as if you were facing lion after lion. As a result, you have a very powerful response from your nervous system, but no recovery.

This stress is becoming constant.

In their review, the researchers synthesize evidence suggesting that industrialization and urbanization are undermining human evolutionary fitness. From an evolutionary standpoint, the success of a species depends on survival and reproduction. According to the authors, both have been adversely affected since the Industrial Revolution.

They point to declining global fertility rates and rising levels of chronic inflammatory conditions such as autoimmune diseases as signs that industrial environments are taking a biological toll.

There's a paradox where, on the one hand, we've created tremendous wealth, comfort and health care for a lot of people on the planet, but on the other hand, some of these industrial achievements are having detrimental effects on our immune, cognitive, physical and reproductive functions.

One well-documented example is the global decline in sperm count and motility observed since the 1950s, which the researchers  link to environmental factors. This is thought to be tied to pesticides and herbicides in food, but also to microplastics.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Could atoms be reordered to enhance electronic devices?
Reordering atoms in SiGeSn barriers surrounding GeSn quantum wells unexpectedly increases charge carrier mobility, contrary to prior assumptions. This enhancement is likely due to atomic short-range ordering, suggesting that manipulating atomic arrangements could significantly improve electronic device performance and miniaturization, with implications for neuromorphic and quantum computing.

 Christopher R. Allemang et al, High Mobility and Electrostatics in GeSn Quantum Wells With SiGeSn Barriers, Advanced Electronic Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202500460. advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.c … .1002/aelm.202500460

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Investigations, comparing experiment with theory, demonstrate conclusively that dressed quarks with dynamically generated masses are the active degrees of freedom underlying the structure of the proton and its excited states. They also solidify the case that experimental results can be used to assess the mechanisms responsible for EHM.

Patrick Achenbach et al, Electroexcitation of Nucleon Resonances and Emergence of Hadron Mass, Symmetry (2025). DOI: 10.3390/sym17071106. www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/17/7/1106

Part 3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in understanding the dominant portion of the universe's visible mass. This is driven by studies of the distance (or momentum) dependence of the strong interaction within a QCD-based approach known as the continuum Schwinger method (CSM).

Bridging CSM and experiments via phenomenology, physicists analyzed nearly 30 years of data collected. The comprehensive effort has given scientists the most detailed look yet at the mechanisms responsible for EHM.

 The comprehensive effort has given scientists the most detailed look yet at the mechanisms responsible for EHM.

QCD describes the dynamics of the most elementary constituents of matter known so far: quarks and gluons. Through QCD processes, all hadronic matter is generated. This includes protons, neutrons, other bound quark-gluon systems and, ultimately, all atomic nuclei. A distinctive feature of the strong force is gluon self-interaction.

Without gluon self-interaction, the universe would be completely different.

It creates beauty through different particle properties and makes real-world hadron phenomena through emergent physics.

Because of this property, the strong interaction evolves rapidly with distance. This evolution of strong-interaction dynamics is described within the CSM approach. At distances comparable to the size of a hadron, ~10^-13 cm, its relevant constituents are no longer the bare quarks and gluons of QCD.

Instead, dressed quarks and dressed gluons emerge when bare quarks and gluons are surrounded by clouds of strongly coupled quarks and gluons undergoing continual creation and annihilation.

In this regime, dressed quarks acquire dynamically generated masses that evolve with distance. This provides a natural explanation for EHM: a transition from the nearly massless bare quarks (with masses of only a few MeV) to fully dressed quarks of approximately 400 MeV mass. Strong interactions among the three dressed quarks of the proton generate its mass of about 1 GeV, as well as the masses of its excited states in the range of 1.0–3.0 GeV.

This raises the question: Can EHM be elucidated by mapping the momentum dependence of the dressed-quark mass from experimental studies of the proton and its excited states?

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa yesterday

How most of the universe's visible mass is generated: Experiments explore emergence of hadron mass

Deep in the heart of the matter, some numbers don't add up. For example, while protons and neutrons are made of quarks, nature's fundamental building blocks bound together by gluons, their masses are much larger than the individual quarks from which they are formed.

This leads to a central puzzle … why? In the theory of the strong interaction, known as quantum chromodynamics or QCD, quarks acquire their bare mass through the Higgs mechanism. The long-hypothesized process was confirmed by experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and led to the Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs in 2013.

Yet the inescapable issue remains that this mechanism contributes to the measured proton and neutron masses at the level of less than 2%. This clearly demonstrates that the dominant part of the mass of real-world matter is generated through another mechanism, not through the Higgs. The rest arises from emergent phenomena.

The unaccounted mass and how it arises have long been open problems in nuclear physics, but scientists  are now getting a more detailed understanding of this mass-generating process than ever before.

So, what gives protons and other strongly interacting particles (together called hadrons) their added "heft?" The answer lies in the dynamics of QCD. Through QCD, the strong interaction generates mass from the energy stored in the fields of the strongly interacting quarks and gluons. This is termed the emergence of hadron mass, or EHM.

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