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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2022 at 9:34am

World-Record 'Megaflash' of Lightning Stretched for Almost 500 Miles

A jaw-dropping lightning megaflash that snaked across three states in the southern US just won a world record.

A megaflash is not your standard cloud-to-ground lightning bolt. It's an enormous electric zigzag that travels from one electrified cloud to the next, almost instantaneously.

https://www.sciencealert.com/space-images-show-700-km-lightning-meg...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2022 at 9:23am

Almost No Coral Reefs in The World Will Be Safe at 1.5°C Warming, Scientists Warn

Coral reefs have long been regarded as one of the earliest and most significant ecological casualties of global warming.

In new research published in the journal PLOS Climate, we found that the future of these tropical ecosystems – thought to harbor more species than any other – is probably worse than anticipated.

Climate change is causing more frequent marine heatwaves worldwide. Corals have adapted to live in a specific temperature range, so when ocean temperatures are too hot for a prolonged period, corals can bleach – losing the colorful algae that live within their tissue and nourish them via photosynthesis – and may eventually die.

Across the tropics, mass bleaching and die-offs have gone from being rare to a somewhat regular occurrence as the climate has warmed. More frequent heatwaves mean that the time corals have to recover is getting shorter.

In a 2018 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that 1.5°C of global warming would cause between 70 and 90 percent of the world's coral reefs to disappear.

Now, with models capable of examining temperature differences between coral reefs one kilometer apart, our team found that at 1.5°C of warming, which the world is predicted to reach in the early 2030s without drastic action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, 99 percent of the world's reefs will experience heatwaves that are too frequent for them to recover.

That would spell catastrophe for the thousands of species that depend on coral reefs, as well as the roughly one billion people whose livelihoods and food supply benefits from coral reef biodiversity.

Climate change is already degrading coral reefs globally. Now we know that protecting the last remaining temperature refuges will not work on its own. Slashing greenhouse gas emissions this decade is the best hope for saving what remains. 

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0...

https://theconversation.com/safe-havens-for-coral-reefs-will-be-alm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2022 at 9:15am

Uranus And Neptune Aren't The Same Color. A New Study Could Finally Explain Why

Uranus and Neptune are the most twin-like of all the planets in the Solar System. They are almost the same size and mass, have similar compositions and structures, even similar rotation rates.

Which makes one glaring difference quite perplexing. Neptune is a fetching shade of azure, with visible swirling storms. Uranus is more of a featureless, delicate pale teal. If the two planets are so similar, whence the difference in their methane-based blues?

New research, uploaded to preprint server arXiv and awaiting peer review, claims to have found an answer. According to a team led by planetary physicist Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford in the UK, an extended layer of haze dilutes the hue of Uranus, resulting in a paler orb compared to its more distant twin; fraternal, not identical.

Uranus and Neptune, according to our measurements of the two planets, are structured very similarly. A small, rocky core is surrounded by a mantle of water, ammonia, and methane ices; next, a gaseous atmosphere consisting primarily of hydrogen, helium and methane; and finally the upper atmosphere, including cloud tops. But that atmosphere isn't homogeneous; rather, it is thought to be layered, like every other atmosphere in the Solar System.

Researchers analyzed visible and near-infrared observations of the two planets to generate new models of the atmospheric layers. They managed to find models that replicate the observations very well, including the storms on Neptune and the paler shade of Uranus.

In their models, both planets have a layer of photochemical haze. This occurs when ultraviolet radiation from the Sun breaks down aerosol particles in the atmosphere, producing haze particles. It's a common process, seen on Venus, Earth, Saturn, Jupiter, dwarf planet Pluto, and moons Titan and Triton.

The researchers called this the Aerosol-2 layer, and on both planets it seems to be a source of the cloud seeds that condense into methane ice at the lower boundary and snows deeper into the atmosphere. And on Uranus, this layer seems to be twice as opaque as it is on Neptune – and this is why the two planets look different.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04516

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-might-finally-know-why-uranus-and-n...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2022 at 8:54am

Plant flowering also influences animals for which pollen, nectar, fruits and seeds are important resources… "

The effects of an early flowering season could therefore ripple through ecosystems, causing what scientists call ecological (or phenological) mismatch – when the lifecycles of species that have evolved together and depend on each other fall out of sync.

This can lead to disrupted migration patterns, species starvation, outbreaks of pests and disease, and even extinction.

England isn't the only nation that has to worry about its flowering season. Earlier spring temperatures are being recorded throughout the world, both in the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere.

Last year, in Japan, cherry blossoms bloomed the earliest they have in 1,200 years.

Even with just a few centuries of data, however, the result of our emissions is clear to see. Climate change is winding up our Spring clock, and we don't know if we can wind it back again.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.2456

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2022 at 8:52am

Flowers in The UK Are Blooming a Whole Month Earlier Than They Did in The 1980s

For centuries, British flowers have been blooming like clockwork. A few months into spring, sometime around May or June, the nation bursts into color.

Since the early 1980s, however, hundreds of plants have grown out of sync with the seasons, which means they're also unraveling from the complicated tapestry of interactions that keep ecosystems sustainably functioning.

When analyzing the first blooms of 406 plant species from 1753 to 2019, researchers found a clear and worrisome shift.

On average, flowers in the UK are blooming almost a whole month earlier than they were before 1986. In 2019, the first mean flowering date was as early as April 2.

Obviously, not all plants bloom at the same time. Herbs and trees are the first to flower, sometime in mid-April. While shrubs take about a month longer to open up.

The whole timeline, however, has been pushed forward as the climate changes.

Today, human-caused global warming is progressing at a rapid and unprecedented rate, and it's impacting the very function of Earth's ecosystems.

Something as dependable as the changing of the seasons is no longer so. 

Early spring warming in the UK appears to be changing the amount of rain that falls and the snow that melts, and both of these factors are important when it comes to a budding flower.

If temperatures continue to rise, the authors worry there will be a further shift in first flowering dates, possibly starting March or even earlier.

This transition could lead some plants, including crops, to bud far too early, causing them to freeze or suffer frost damage.

"We do not know whether adaptive evolution will allow populations to reach new [optimum flowering timing] rapidly enough to keep pace with climate change.

Researchers fear these changes will lead to agricultural losses and extend the allergy season. But it's not just humans that will be impacted.

"The timing of plant flowering can affect their pollination, especially when insect pollinators are themselves seasonal, and determine the timing of seed ripening and dispersal.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 12:41pm

The Astounding Physics of N95 Masks

https://www.wired.com/story/the-physics-of-the-n95-face-mask/?utm_s...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 12:34pm

World hits ten billion COVID vaccinations In little more than a year, ten billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally, in what has become the largest vaccination programme in history. Many nations began rolling out vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021. Since then, more than 60% of the world’s population — 4.8 billion people — is at least partially vaccinated with one of the more than 20 approved COVID-19 vaccines. “The world has never seen such rapid scale-up of a new life-saving technology,” says Amanda Glassman, with the Center for Global Development. But — as researchers warned last year when the first one billion doses had been administered — there are still huge inequities in access, with just 5.5% of people in low-income nations having received 2 doses. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00285-2?utm_source=Natur...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 12:24pm

WHO warns of COVID medical waste threat

The World Health Organization warned recently that the vast amount of waste produced in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic posed a threat to human and environmental health.

The tens of thousands of tonnes of extra medical waste had put a huge strain on healthcare waste management systems, the WHO said in a report.

The extra waste is "threatening human and environmental health and exposing a dire need to improve waste management practices", the UN health agency said.

As countries scrambled to get personal protective equipment (PPE) to cope with the crisis, less attention was paid to disposing of COVID-19 health care waste safely and sustainably, the WHO said.

The latest available data, from 2019, suggested that one in three healthcare facilities globally did not safely manage healthcare waste—and in the 46 least-developed countries, more than two in three facilities did not have a basic healthcare waste management service.

"This potentially exposes health workers to needle stick injuries, burns and pathogenic microorganisms, while also impacting communities living near poorly-managed landfills and waste disposal sites through contaminated air from burning waste, poor water quality or disease-carrying pests," the WHO said.

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-covid-medical-threat.html?utm_source=...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 12:18pm

Scientists discover link between high blood pressure and diabetes

The long-standing enigma of why so many patients suffering with high blood pressure (known as hypertension) also have diabetes (high blood sugar) has finally been cracked by an international team of researchers.

The important new discovery has shown that a small protein cell glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) couples the body's control of blood sugar and blood pressure.

GLP-1 is released from the wall of the gut after eating and acts to stimulate insulin from the pancreas to control blood sugar levels. This was known but what has now been unearthed is that GLP-1 also stimulates a small sensory organ called the carotid body located in the neck. Locating the link required genetic profiling and multiple steps of validation. 

The research group used an unbiased, high-throughput genomics technique called RNA sequencing to read all the messages of the expressed genes in the carotid body in rats with and without high BP. This led to the finding that the receptor that senses GLP-1 is located in the carotid body, but less so in hypertensive rats.

The carotid body is the convergent point where GLP-1 acts to control both blood sugar and blood pressure simultaneously; this is coordinated by the nervous system which is instructed by the carotid body.

People with hypertension and/or diabetes are at high risk of life-threatening cardiovascular disease. Even when receiving medication, a large number of patients will remain at high risk. This is because most medications only treat symptoms and not causes of high blood pressure and high sugar.

It is known that blood pressure is notoriously difficult to control in patients with high blood sugar, so these findings are really important because by giving GLP-1 we might be able to reduce both sugar and pressure together, and these two factors are major contributors to cardiovascular risk.

GLP1R attenuates sympathetic response to high glucose via carotid body inhibition, Circulation Research (2022). DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.121.319874

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-02-sweet-pressurescientists-lin...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 10:36am

To do this, the researchers had to couple tried and tested scanning tunnelling microscopy with state-of-the-art laser technology. In a scanning tunnelling microscope, a wafer-thin, atomically thin tip travels just above a conductive surface. Thanks to the quantum-physical tunnel effect, electrons can flow between the surface and the microscope tip – even if there is no direct contact. For example, a molecule on a surface can gradually be shaved off atom by atom.

The new microscopy technique uses laser pulses in order to modulate the tunnel current by selectively exciting the electrons in the material. “This must be done extremely quickly. Otherwise, thermal effects come into play and make the measurements impossible. 

Thanks to the rapid development of laser technology in recent years, researchers have now been able to generate precisely the right pulses. Two years ago, Garg and Kern demonstrated the function of such an atomic quantum microscope for the first time.

They have now been able to directly observe electron movement in molecules with this one-of-a-kind instrument. With the help of the ultra-short pulses, the electrons in the molecule can be excited to jump between the different orbitals. This was noticeable in the tunnel flow. The highlight of the new technique is being able to fire two minimally time-delayed pulses in quick succession at the molecule to be investigated with an exact time interval and scan it in the process. If this procedure is repeated several times and the time interval between the pulses varied, an image series that reproduces the behaviour of the electrons in this molecule with atomic accuracy is obtained. The fast laser pulses thus provide the information about the electron dynamics whilst the scanning tunnelling microscope precisely scans the molecule.

This allowed the researchers to directly map the dynamics of electrons in molecules – how they jump from one orbital to another – for the first time. This basic technology provides completely new possibilities for directly observing quantum mechanical processes such as charge transfer in individual molecules and thus better understanding them. It is still not possible to predict the possible areas of application for such a quantum microscope. Especially in charge transfer processes, which play a crucial role in many biophysical reactions as well as in solar cells and transistors, it could provide crucial new insights.

https://www.mpg.de/18173993/quantum-leap-electron-film

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