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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 13, 2024 at 11:22am

Some Snakes Fake Their Own Deaths, And They Even Use Special Effects!

Playing dead is a common defense strategy in the animal kingdom, but some especially melodramatic snakes have now been seen dialing it up to 11. In addition to flopping inert, mouths agape, dice snakes (Natrix tessellata) add some amazingly gross special effects. They'll defecate and smear themselves in feces, excrete stinky musk, and even start bleeding from the mouth, for what might be the most realistic deaths ever feigned in nature.

Scientists studying these top-tier acting skills found that adding a little something more allows the snake to escape more quickly, evading predation more adroitly than snakes that don't go the extra mile.

A behaviour known as apparent death – or tonic immobility – is actually quite common in nature, across a wide range of taxa. Its ubiquity suggests that it's an effective defense against predators, although exactly why is unclear. Some research suggests that it's often a last-ditch effort to escape after predator-prey contact has already occurred.

it works, some snakes seem to have found a way to tip the odds even further in their favor. Eastern hog-nosed snakes (Heterodon platirhinos), for example, flip onto their backs, convulse, puke, and excrete musk. This is a foul-smelling substance produced in glands near the snake's cloaca, like the anal glands of skunks.

Dice snakes – a non-venomous species that mainly eats fish – are known to have feces and musk among in their defensive toolkit; when alarmed, they struggle, hiss, and coat themselves in stench. They also play dead, and have been seen bleeding from the mouth using an ability known as autohemorrhaging.

These snakes are considered as tasty  to quite a number of predators, including reptiles, birds, and mammals.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0058

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 13, 2024 at 9:26am

Their findings support previous studies that led scientists to suspect that the smaller the plastic fragment, the more likely it is to penetrate deeper into the lung, possibly infiltrating the alveolar sacs where crucial gas exchange occurs.

It's not just degraded plastic products, like drink bottles, that are causing this threat, either. Common cosmetic products, like gritty toothpaste, are made purposefully with these tiny fragments. Some reports estimate that in India, toothpaste is responsible for emitting 1.4 billion grams of microplastic particles each year.

When breathed in, experimental evidence strongly suggests that such tiny plastics have the capacity to trigger inflammation, oxidative stress, lung tissue damage, or systemic dysfunction in the respiratory tract. So far, however, research on the potential health outcomes of microplastics is mostly confined to animal models and human cells.
One recent exception was a study among surgery patients, which found that those who had more plastic in a main artery of their body had a higher chance of heart attack, stroke, or death in the following years. Given the ramifications, associations between cardiac health and plastic pollutants needs to be further explored.

"Plastic particle air pollution is now pervasive and inhalation ranks as the second most likely pathway for human exposure.
For the health of humans everywhere, it is crucial that toxicologists fully understand where these ubiquitous particles are going when we breathe them in and what they are doing to our bodies.
Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 13, 2024 at 9:25am

How Far Can Plastic  Reach Into Your Lungs?

Miniscule fragments of plastic pollution invade the human body every day without our knowing it, not just from eating and drinking but from simply breathing.
By some estimates, the average person inhales a credit card's worth of plastic every week with unknown health effects. In 2022, scientists found microplastics hiding in the deepest parts of the human lung for the first time.
The worldwide spread of plastic has not only crept up on us, it has crept up in us, and scientists are now rushing to figure out where these pollutants go when we breathe them in, how long they stick around for, and if they have toxic effects.

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have now tracked the passage of plastic as it flows through the respiratory system. Their model builds on a pioneering attempt in 2023 to identify hotspots where microplastics and nanoplastics might gather in our airways.

That prior study focused mostly on modeling the upper airway tract, but the new study considers how air and particles flow through the entire tract, "from the nasal cavity down to the 13th generation of the bronchial tree".

It also models three different breathing rates – slow, medium, and fast – and three different sizes of plastic fragments; large microplastics, microplastics, and nanoplastics.

The result is a delicate balance, the researchers say, between the way that gravity drags plastics onto a surface and the way that wind blows them along a passageway.
At a normal breathing rate, the model suggests microplastics in the air can come to cover half the surface area of a nasal cavity. At slower breathing rates, medium-sized pollutants were largely deposited in the upper airway, including the nasal cavity, the voice box, and the junction where the windpipe connects to the throat. Meanwhile, smaller, dust-like particles were distributed more evenly throughout the upper and lower respiratory tract.
Larger microplastics displayed a tendency for rapid deposition in the upper airways, whereas smaller nanoplastics exhibited a higher likelihood of escape or reaching deeper airway generations," the researchers conclude.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666765724000437...

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 11, 2024 at 12:52pm

GoT-ChA: New tool reveals how gene mutations affect cells

A team co-led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center has developed an advanced method for revealing how gene mutations disrupt the normal packaging of DNA. These structural changes, which alter patterns of gene activity in a cell, are known as epigenetic changes and can lead to malignancy.

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Why evolution often favors small animals and other organisms

Small really does seem to be beautiful in evolutionary terms. The largest dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammals may look impressive but these giants are vastly outnumbered by microscopic bacteria and single-celled algae and fungi. Small organisms are also ancient and incredibly resilient.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 11, 2024 at 12:40pm

Sky-high vanity: Constructing the world's tallest buildings creates high emissions, researchers say

Since ancient times, people have built structures that reach for the skies—from the steep spires of medieval towers to the grand domes of ancient cathedrals and mosques. Today the quest is to build the world's tallest skyscrapers, such as Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Soaring above the rest, its decorative spire accounts for 29% of its total height—4,000 tons of structural steel just for aesthetics.

Burj Khalifa isn't unique in this respect. "Vanity height"—the extra height from a skyscraper's highest occupied floor to its architectural top—shapes city skylines around the globe.
In a world where environmental concerns are paramount, is such architectural vanity justifiable?
Research shows the pursuit of "vanity height" makes this a pressing issue. Even a modest spire increases the carbon emissions from the production of materials for a skyscraper's structure by about 15%.

The hidden cost of vanity height
Sixty years ago, the renowned Bangladeshi-American architect and engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan demonstrated the exponential impact of a building's height on the amount of material needed to build it. Indeed, doubling the height of a building could triple the structural materials required. A stronger structure, using more materials, is needed to withstand greater wind and earthquake loads on taller buildings. This means there's a large "embodied carbon premium for height." This premium is the additional greenhouse gas emissions from producing the extra materials needed for a taller skyscraper. A telling example from our study shows that even a modest spire, making up 16% of a building's total height, can increase the embodied carbon of a 90-story skyscraper by 14%. In maximizing the building's height for aesthetic, status or financial reasons, designers are prioritizing these concerns over environmental sustainability.

In light of these findings, researchers call on the council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to remove the incentive for vanity height. They propose the “height to highest occupied floor” be adopted as the main standard for ranking skyscrapers by height.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652624017827...

https://theconversation.com/sky-high-vanity-constructing-the-worlds...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 11, 2024 at 12:32pm

AI systems are already skilled at deceiving and manipulating humans, study shows

Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems have already learned how to deceive humans, even systems that have been trained to be helpful and honest. In a review article published in the journal Patterns on May 10, researchers describe the risks of deception by AI systems and call for governments to develop strong regulations to address this issue as soon as possible.

AI developers do not have a confident understanding of what causes undesirable AI behaviors like deception. But generally speaking, researchers think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI's training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals.

The most striking example of AI deception the researchers uncovered in their analysis was Meta's CICERO, an AI system designed to play the game Diplomacy, which is a world-conquest game that involves building alliances. Even though Meta claims it trained CICERO to be "largely honest and helpful" and to "never intentionally backstab" its human allies while playing the game, the data the company published along with its Science paper revealed that CICERO didn't play fair.

They  found that Meta's AI had learned to be a master of deception.

Other AI systems demonstrated the ability to bluff in a game of Texas hold 'em poker against professional human players, to fake attacks during the strategy game Starcraft II in order to defeat opponents, and to misrepresent their preferences in order to gain the upper hand in economic negotiations.

While it may seem harmless if AI systems cheat at games, it can lead to "breakthroughs in deceptive AI capabilities" that can spiral into more advanced forms of AI deception in the future.

Some AI systems have even learned to cheat tests designed to evaluate their safety, the researchers found. In one study, AI organisms in a digital simulator "played dead" in order to trick a test built to eliminate AI systems that rapidly replicate.

By systematically cheating the safety tests imposed on it by human developers and regulators, a deceptive AI can lead us humans into a false sense of security.

The major near-term risks of deceptive AI include making it easier for hostile actors to commit fraud and tamper with elections, warn experts. Eventually, if these systems can refine this unsettling skill set, humans could lose control of them.

As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious.

AI deception: A survey of examples, risks, and potential solutions, Patterns (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2024.100988

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 11, 2024 at 12:22pm

The research team noted that rumblings and gestures were often combined. Behaviors during greetings also sometimes involved urination, defecation and secreting sweat in the temporal gland, which emits odors into the air.

The researchers also found that the type of behaviors differed depending on whether the two elephants were looking at one another—most were more likely to engage in gestures when they knew the other elephant was looking at them. To get the attention of elephants who hadn't noticed them, they were also seen to engage in ear-flapping, which generates a lot of noise.

The research team concludes that the gestures and vocalizations used by the elephants appear to be part of a complicated system of communication used by the elephants to convey information during encounters.

Vesta Eleuteri et al, Multimodal communication and audience directedness in the greeting behaviour of semi-captive African savannah elephants, Communications Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-06133-5

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 11, 2024 at 12:19pm

Elephants use gestures and vocal cues when greeting each other, study reports

A team of animal behaviourists has found that elephants use gestures and vocal cues when they greet one another.

In their study, published in the journal Communications Biology, the group observed a month's worth of greetings between African elephants living in the Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe in 2021.

Prior research has shown that elephants are highly intelligent, ranking close to dolphins. They also have complex matriarchal social structures. For this new study, the research team wondered if elephants have ways to communicate with one another that had not been observed during prior research efforts. They embarked on an observational study focused on elephant greetings.
The researchers ventured into the field at the reserve in Zimbabwe and watched and recorded encounters between elephants for one month in 2021. They observed 1,014 physical actions taken by elephants engaged in a greeting and 268 vocalizations.

The researchers found that elephants place importance on greeting one another. When two elephants who have not seen each other for a while meet, they both engage in apparently meaningful behavior. Gestures included swinging the trunk or using it to touch, ear-flapping and ear-spreading. Vocalizations tended to be rumbles of different sorts.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 10, 2024 at 11:24am

How to illuminate the ‘ugly’ side of science
Data repositories, workshops and alternative journals allow scientists to share and discuss negative results, which could help to solve the reproducibility crisis and give machine learning a boost. Publishing negative-result studies is often seen as not worth the time and effort, yet “understanding the reasons for null results can really test and expand our theoretical understanding”, says psychologist Wendy Ross. And highlighting negative results can help students to see that “you are not a bad researcher because you fail”, adds computer scientist Ella Peltonen.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01389-7?utm_source=Live+...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 10, 2024 at 10:16am

Scientists pinpoint new vaccine adjuvant that promotes potent anti-tumor immunity

Scientists  have made an important breakthrough that offers promise for developing new immune therapies for cancer. They have discovered that a vaccine adjuvant called C100 promotes potent anti-tumor immunity when it is injected directly into tumors in an animal model.

The scientists found that C100, derived from chitin—one of the most common building materials in nature, and which gives strength to the exoskeletons of crustaceans, insects, and the cell walls of fungi—is highly effective at stimulating a key sensing and signaling molecule which regulates anti-tumor immune responses.

Their work has been published in Cell Reports Medicine.

The scientists now know how C100 exclusively activates one arm of a specific signaling pathway (cGAS-STING) without causing inflammatory responses that could interfere with anti-tumor immunity and which may otherwise prevent therapies from achieving clinical success.

Additionally, the research team discovered that injecting C100 led to synergistic therapeutic effects with a "checkpoint blocker," which can release the brakes on the immune response.

 Intratumoural delivery of the chitin-derived C100 adjuvant promotes robust STING, IFNAR and CD8+ T cell dependant anti-tumour immunity, Cell Reports Medicine (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2024.101560. www.cell.com/cell-reports-medi … 2666-3791(24)00252-0

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