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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 23, 2024 at 8:39am

What is a Viral Vector Vaccine?

Vaccines have revolutionized modern medicine by helping a person's immune system prevent diseases. There are many kinds of vaccines that have different benefits based on how they are made. A Viral Vector vaccine is a new, revolutionary type of vaccine the uses RNA in a shell made of... Viruses??

What is mRNA, and how does it work?

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 23, 2024 at 8:30am

Repurposed drugs have already passed important (and expensive) human safety testing and are therefore much cheaper (about US$40-80 million or £32-64 million) to develop for additional medical issues versus creating a new drug (about US$1-2 billion), making drug repurposing an attractive way to find new treatments.

Many drugs have been tried as potential treatments for severe frostbite. However, iloprost is the first to be put through a clinical trial where patients with severe frostbite were randomly allocated to receive iloprost or not.

The study found that 60 percent of the patients who did not receive iloprost had injuries sufficiently severe to warrant amputation, versus 0 percent of the patients who received iloprost.
While the total number of patients tested in this study was small at 47, the combined facts that there are no other approved pharmaceutical treatments for frostbite and the impressive digit-saving results found in this randomised human trial were sufficient to convince the FDA to approve this repurposed therapy for severe frostbite.
Iloprost works by expanding the blood vessels (called a vasodilator) of patients and stopping blood clots from forming. As frostbite causes constriction of blood vessels, this suggests one mechanism through which iloprost helps heal frostbitten tissue is by reversing this constriction.
However, whenever blood flow is reintroduced in such tissue, it can paradoxically worsen the injury and cause more damage. This is called "reperfusion injury" and is largely caused by a sudden influx of oxygen causing oxidative stress.

Interestingly, iloprost is not only a vasodilator but also reduces oxidative stress, suggesting this dual mechanism of action could help explain its impressive potential as a frostbite treatment.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-fi...

https://theconversation.com/a-drug-to-treat-frostbite-is-finally-av...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 23, 2024 at 8:28am

First Ever Drug For Frostbite

Frostbite can occur at temperatures just below freezing (-0.55°C or 31.01°F), though at such temperatures frostbite is typically mild and no permanent damage will result.
But what happens if you live and work somewhere where it gets much colder?
Until now, there have been no approved therapies for severe frostbite. But on February 14 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had approved the very first drug to treat frostbite.

Frostbite is evolution's response to prolonged or extreme cold, causing blood vessels to constrict and blood flow to slow in the extremities. This keeps blood flowing in the vital organs warm, increasing the chance of surviving in the extreme cold.
The downside is this can result in permanent damage to the fingers, toes and parts of the face, sometimes requiring amputation of the affected body parts.
The new drug, called iloprost (brand name Aurlumyn), is repurposed. This means that it was not originally developed to treat frostbite. In this case, it is used to treat high blood pressure within the lungs.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 23, 2024 at 7:01am

The Global Importance of Tipping Points in Antarctica

This video summarises the latest science on tipping points in Antarctica, as discovered by the research from the EU project TiPACCs. Listen to our scientists explaining the importance of studying the Antarctic Ice Sheet and surrounding ocean, the latest knowledge on changes in the continental shelf seas around Antarctica, whether the Antarctic Ice Sheet has already crossed a tipping point, what will happen when this tipping point is crossed, and what the latest developments are in coupled ocean - ice sheet modelling. Background: The Antarctic Ice Sheet covers about 98% of the Antarctic continent and is the largest single mass of ice on Earth. If the entire ice sheet were to disappear, this would cause sea levels globally to rise by nearly 60 meters on average. Ice loss from Antarctica has been increasing over the recent decades, and small changes in ocean conditions in the future could lead to long-lasting or even irreversible changes – with important implications for global sea-level rise.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 23, 2024 at 6:47am

How Did an Aquarium Stingray Get Pregnant without a Mate?

Charlotte, a stingray at a North Carolina aquarium is pregnant—without a male stingray in her tank to impregnate her. Speculation is running wild that cohabitating sharks may be Charlotte’s mate. Here’s why that’s unlikely—and how the spontaneous pregnancy known as parthenogenesis is much, much cooler.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 22, 2024 at 12:20pm

Button batteries pose 'deadly' risk to toddlers

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 22, 2024 at 7:35am

Scientists invent ultra-thin, minimally-invasive pacemaker controlled by light

Millions of people around the world rely on pacemakers—small devices that regulate the electrical impulses of the heart in order to keep it beating smoothly. But to reduce complications, researchers would like to make these devices even smaller and less intrusive.

A team of researchers  has developed a wireless device, powered by light, that can be implanted to regulate cardiovascular or neural activity in the body. The featherlight membranes, thinner than human hair, can be inserted with minimally invasive surgery and contain no moving parts.

Published Feb. 21 in Nature, the results could help reduce complications in heart surgery and offer new horizons for future devices.

Bozhi Tian, Monolithic silicon for high-spatiotemporal translational photostimulation, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07016-9. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07016-9

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 22, 2024 at 7:28am

Electrons become fractions of themselves in graphene, study finds

The electron is the basic unit of electricity, as it carries a single negative charge. This is what we're taught in high school physics, and it is overwhelmingly the case in most materials in nature.

But in very special states of matter, electrons can splinter into fractions of their whole. This phenomenon, known as "fractional charge," is exceedingly rare, and if it can be corralled and controlled, the exotic electronic state could help to build resilient, fault-tolerant quantum computers.

To date, this effect, known to physicists as the "fractional quantum Hall effect," has been observed a handful of times, and mostly under very high, carefully maintained magnetic fields. Only recently have scientists seen the effect in a material that did not require such powerful magnetic manipulation.

Now, physicists have observed the elusive fractional charge effect, this time in a simpler material: five layers of graphene—an atom-thin layer of carbon that stems from graphite and common pencil lead. They report their results in Nature.

The fractional quantum Hall effect is an example of the weird phenomena that can arise when particles shift from behaving as individual units to acting together as a whole. This collective "correlated" behavior emerges in special states, for instance when electrons are slowed from their normally frenetic pace to a crawl that enables the particles to sense each other and interact. These interactions can produce rare electronic states, such as the seemingly unorthodox splitting of an electron's charge.

Researchers found that when five sheets of graphene are stacked like steps on a staircase, the resulting structure inherently provides just the right conditions for electrons to pass through as fractions of their total charge, with no need for any external magnetic field.

The results are the first evidence of the "fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect" (the term "anomalous" refers to the absence of a magnetic field) in crystalline graphene, a material that physicists did not expect to exhibit this effect.

 Long Ju, Fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in multilayer graphene, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-07010-7. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-07010-7

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 22, 2024 at 7:23am

Neanderthals' usage of complex adhesives reveals higher cognitive abilities, scientists discover

Neanderthals created stone tools held together by a multi-component adhesive, a team of scientists has discovered. Its findings, which are the earliest evidence of a complex adhesive in Europe, suggest these predecessors to modern humans had a higher level of cognition and cultural development than previously thought.

These astonishingly well-preserved tools showcase a technical solution broadly similar to examples of tools made by early modern humans in Africa, but the exact recipe reflects a Neanderthal 'spin,' which is the production of grips for handheld tools.

The researchers discovered traces of a mixture of ocher and bitumen on several stone tools, such as scrapers, flakes, and blades. Ocher is a naturally occurring earth pigment; bitumen is a component of asphalt and can be produced from crude oil, but also occurs naturally in the soil.

Overall, the development of adhesives and their use in the manufacture of tools is considered to be some of the best material evidence of the cultural evolution and cognitive abilities of early humans. Compound adhesives are considered to be among the first expressions of the modern cognitive processes that are still active today.

 Patrick Schmidt, Ochre-based compound adhesives at the Mousterian type-site document complex cognition and high investment, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adl0822. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl0822

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 21, 2024 at 10:59am

Decimal point is older than thought
The decimal point was invented by Italian merchant and astronomer Giovanni Bianchini some 150 years before what was considered to be its first appearance. “I remember running up and down the hallways of the dorm with my computer trying to find anybody who was awake, shouting ‘look at this, this guy is doing decimal points in the 1440s!’” recalls historian Glen Van Brummelen, who discovered Bianchini’s number “with a dot in the middle” while teaching at a maths camp for kids. Bianchini’s training in economics might have given him a perspective different to that of his astronomer peers — who would have exclusively been using the sexagesimal (base 60) system — and his approach was perhaps too revolutionary to catch on until much later.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00473-2?utm_source=Live+...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086024000016...

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