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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 7:25am

First-in-humans discovery reveals brain chemicals at work influencing social behaviour

In a study in Nature Human Behavior, scientists delve into the world of chemical neuromodulators in the human brain, specifically dopamine and serotonin, to reveal their role in social behaviour.

The research, conducted in Parkinson's disease patients undergoing brain surgery while awake, homed in on the brain's substantia nigra, a crucial area associated with motor control and reward processing.

 The international team of scientists revealed a previously unknown neurochemical mechanism for a well-known human tendency to make decisions based on social context—people are more likely to accept offers from computers while rejecting identical offers from human players.

The idea that people make decisions based on social context is not a new one in neural economic games. But now, for the first time, researchers show the impact of the social context may spring from the dynamic interactions of dopamine and serotonin.

When people make decisions, dopamine seems to closely follow and react to whether the current offer is better or worse than the previous one, as if it were a continuous tracking system. Serotonin, meanwhile, appears to focus only on the current value of the specific offer at hand, suggesting a more case-by-case evaluation.

This fast dance happens against a slower backdrop, where dopamine is overall higher when people play other human beings—in other words when fairness comes into play. Together, these signals contribute to our brain's overall assessment of value during social interactions.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 24, 2024 at 1:15pm

A type of cyberattack that could set your smartphone on fire using its wireless charger

A team of security experts at the University of Florida working with security audit company CertiK has found that a certain class of cyberattacks could cause a smartphone to catch fire via its wireless charger. The team has posted a paper describing their research and results on the arXiv preprint server.

Inductive chargers are devices that can be used to charge a smartphone or other device without the need for plugging in a cable. Such devices work by making use of electromagnetic fields to transfer energy from one device to another through induction. In order for a smartphone to be charged properly on such a device, it must communicate with the charger through a Qi communication-based feedback control system. And in order for a wireless charger to work, it must be connected to an AC outlet.
But the charger, like a phone, cannot plug directly into the wall; it plugs instead into an adapter. And this, the researchers suggest, is where the system's vulnerabilities lie. They have found through testing that by attaching an intermediary device to the adapter, disruptions can be made to the Qi communication-based feedback control system, resulting in signals that can override controls that stop overcharging, which can lead to overheating, and in some cases a fire. They call such an attack a "VoltSchemer."
The research team has come up with three types of attacks that can occur with a VoltSchemer. According to the researchers, "A charger can be manipulated to control voice assistants via inaudible voice commands, damage devices being charged through overcharging or overheating, and bypass Qi-standard specified foreign-object-detection mechanism to damage valuable items exposed to intense magnetic fields."

The researchers tested multiple types of wireless chargers and phones and found they were all vulnerable. They have notified manufacturers and expect that changes will be made to overcome these vulnerabilities to protect consumers from VoltSchemer attacks.

Zihao Zhan et al, VoltSchemer: Use Voltage Noise to Manipulate Your Wireless Charger, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.11423

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

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