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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 1, 2022 at 9:50am

Air pollution dims India's solar energy potential

Prospects for India achieving the target of generating 100 gigawatts of solar power in 2022 have waned because of high levels of atmospheric pollution.

Atmospheric pollution reduces solar power generation in two main ways: by absorbing and scattering the sun's rays and by soiling solar panels.

A study carried out by IIT Delhi and published March in Environmental Research Letters, calculates that between 2001 and 2018 India lost 29 percent of its solar energy potential as a result of atmospheric pollution—equivalent to an annual loss of US$835 million. As of March this year, India had only reached the halfway mark of 50 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, according to the research group, Mercom India.

Put simply, aerosols, which include fine particulate matter, dust, mist and fumes suspended in the air, significantly reduce incoming solar radiation in what we call the 'atmospheric attenuation effect. This needs to be factored in when undertaking large solar energy projects.

Such projects are also failing to account for the "soiling effect" of aerosols depositing on solar panels, blocking solar radiation from reaching the photovoltaic cells. Since air pollution over South Asia has been on the rise, both effects need to be addressed and mitigation steps taken to maximize benefits from solar power installations.

In heavily polluted regions particulate matter can cause a drop in photovoltaic solar power generation by more than 50 percent, most of it caused the soiling of panels, according to a previous study. Aerosols in the atmosphere also work against solar power generation by increasing cloudiness and interfering with rainfall which could wash out particles.

Acid rain can also corrode solar power equipment and support structures, adding to maintenance costs.

Sushovan Ghosh et al, Cleaner air would enhance India's annual solar energy production by 6-28 TWh, Environmental Research Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac5d9a

Xiaoyuan Li et al, Global reduction of solar power generation efficiency due to aerosols and panel soiling, Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-0553-2

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-air-pollution-dims-india-solar.html?u...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2022 at 10:26am

Metformin Prescriptions Linked to Sons’ Birth Defects

A new cohort study finds that boys whose fathers took the type 2 diabetes drug metformin three months before their conception were more likely to have a birth defect.

Men who took the type 2 diabetes drug metformin three months before conceiving their children seem to have an increased risk of having sons with birth defects, new research finds.

The study, a retroactive analysis of Denmark’s federal registry of healthcare data that was published Tuesday (March 29) in Annals of Internal Medicine, found a significantly increased risk of genital birth defects among boys whose fathers had filled a prescription for metformin—commonly branded as Glucophage, Riomet, and Glumetza—about three months prior to conception, roughly the duration of time it takes for sperm to mature. A correlation between birth defects and paternal metformin prescriptions was not seen in girls, according to the study.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4389

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/metformin-prescriptions-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2022 at 8:51am

Concert hall acoustics for non-invasive ultrasound brain treatments

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2022 at 8:40am

Oxytocin treatment can take lions from ferocious to friendly

Lions typically aren't keen on making new friends. The giant cats guard their territory fiercely and can mortally wound a foe with a single swipe. While aggression is an advantage for apex predators in the wild, it poses real challenges for lions on reserves or in captivity, a number that is growing due to habitat loss. Researchers working on a wildlife reserve in Dinokeng, South Africa found that an intranasal application of the "love hormone" oxytocin could make lion meet-cutes less life-threatening. Their work appears March 30 in the journal iScience.

By spraying the oxytocin directly up the nose, we know it can travel up the trigeminal nerve and the olfactory nerve straight up into the brain. Otherwise the blood brain barrier could filter it out.

After these treatments researchers observed that the 23 lions who were given oxytocin were more tolerant of other lions in their space and displayed less vigilance towards intruders. 

The hope is that this will translate to animals being relocated in the wild, helping them to become more inclined to their new social environment so they're more curious and less fearful, leading to more successful bonding.

Jessica C. Burkhart, Oxytocin promotes social proximity and decreases vigilance in groups of African lions, iScience (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104049. www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext … 2589-0042(22)00319-4

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-oxytocin-treatment-lions-ferocious-fr...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 31, 2022 at 8:09am

Hubble spots most distant single star ever seen, at a record distance of 28 billion lightyears

With a fortuitous lineup of a massive cluster of galaxies, astronomers discovered a single star across most of the entire observable Universe. This is the farthest detection of a single star ever. The star may be up to 500 times more massive than the Sun. The discovery has been published recently in the journal Nature.

Gazing at the night sky, all the stars that you see lie within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Even with the most powerful telescopes, under normal circumstances individual stars can only be resolved in our most nearby galactic neighbors. In general, distant galaxies are seen as the blended light from billions of stars.

But with the marvelous natural phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing," astronomers  were nevertheless able to detect a distance where even detecting entire galaxies is challenging.

Among the wonders predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity is the ability of mass to "curve" space itself. As light passes close to massive objects, its path follows the curved space and changes direction. If a massive object happens to lie between us and a distant background source of light, the object may deflect and focus the light toward us as a lens, magnifying the intensity.

Galaxies magnified several times are routinely discovered by way of this method. But in an astounding cosmic coincidence, the galaxies in a cluster named WHL0137-08 happened to line up in such a way as to focus the light of a single star toward us, magnifying its light thousands of times.

A combination of this gravitational lens and nine hours of exposure time with the Hubble Space Telescope enabled an international team of astronomers to detect the star.

The astronomers nicknamed the star Earendel, from the Old English word meaning "morning star," or "rising light." They calculate that the star it at least 50 times as massive as our Sun, possibly up to 500, and millions of times as bright.

Brian Welch, A highly magnified star at redshift 6.2, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04449-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04449-y

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-hubble-distant-star-distance-billion....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 30, 2022 at 9:13am

If this title is funny, will you cite me? Citation impacts of humour and other features of article titles in ecology and evolution

Titles of scientific papers pay a key role in their discovery, and “good” titles engage and recruit readers. A particularly interesting aspect of title construction is the use of humour, but little is known about whether funny titles boost or limit readership and citation of papers. We used a panel of volunteer scorers to assess title humour for 2,439 papers in ecology and evolution, and measured associations between humour scores and subsequent citation (both self-citation and citation by others). Papers with funnier titles were cited less often, but this appears to result from a confound with paper importance. Self-citation data suggest that authors give funnier titles to papers they consider less important. After correction for this confound, papers with funny titles have significantly higher citation rates, suggesting that humour recruits readers. We also examined associations between citation rates and several other features of titles. Inclusion of acronyms and taxonomic names was associated with lower citation rates, while assertive-statement phrasing and presence of colons, question marks, and political regions were associated with somewhat higher citation rates. Title length had no effect on citation. Our results suggest that scientists can use creativity with titles without having their work condemned to obscurity.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.18.484880v1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 30, 2022 at 9:01am

The new method devised now  uses a sequential combination of organic solvents and water-based detergents, and makes use of water-based hydrogels to protect those molecules within the tissue that need to be preserved. It often does not require the pumping of solvents through the sample.In many cases, you can just put the whole thing in a jar and keep it in a shaker on your benchtop until it's done.

Victoria Nudell et al, HYBRiD: hydrogel-reinforced DISCO for clearing mammalian bodies, Nature Methods (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-022-01427-0

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-method-tissue-transparent-diseases.ht...

Part 2

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 30, 2022 at 8:59am

New method for making tissue transparent could speed the study of many diseases

Scientists have unveiled a new tissue-clearing method for rendering large biological samples transparent. The method makes it easier than ever for scientists to visualize and study healthy and disease-related biological processes occurring across multiple organ systems.

Described in a paper in Nature Methods on March 28, 2022, and dubbed HYBRiD, the new method combines elements of the two main prior approaches to tissue-clearing technology, and should be more practical and scalable than either for large-sample applications.

This is a simple and universal tissue-clearing technique for studies of large body parts or even entire animals.

Tissue-clearing involves the use of solvents to remove molecules that make tissue opaque (such as fat), rendering the tissue optically transparent—while keeping most proteins and structures in place. Scientists commonly use genetically encoded or antibody-linked fluorescent beacons to mark active genes or other molecules of interest in a lab animal, and tissue-clearing in principle allows these beacons to be imaged all at once across the entire animal.

Scientists started developing tissue-clearing methods about 15 years ago, mainly for the purpose of tracing nerve connections within whole brains. While the methods work well for brains, they don't work so well when applied to other body parts or whole bodies, which contain harder-to-dissolve structures.

These methods until now have used either organic solvents or water-based solvents. The former generally work more quickly and powerfully but tend to diminish fluorescent signals. Methods using water-based solvents are better at preserving fluorescence but are impractically weak for clearing non-brain tissue. In addition, both types of method require burdensome, labor-intensive procedures, often using hazardous chemicals.

"An ordinary lab generally can't use these methods routinely and at scale

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 29, 2022 at 12:42pm

Deleting a protein might reduce cardiovascular disease

Macrophages travel through our arteries, gobbling fat . But fat-filled macrophages can narrow blood vessels and cause heart disease. Now, researchers describe in Nature Cardiovascular Research how deleting a protein could prevent this and potentially prevent heart attacks and strokes in humans.

Macrophages are large white blood cells that cruise through our body as a kind of clean-up crew, clearing hazardous debris. But in people with atherosclerosis—fatty deposits and inflammation in their blood vessels— macrophages can cause trouble. They eat excess fat inside artery walls, but that fat causes them to become foamy. And foamy macrophages tend to encourage inflammation in the arteries and sometimes bust apart plaques, freeing clots that can cause heart attack, stroke or embolisms elsewhere in the body.

Changing how macrophages express a certain protein could prevent that kind of bad behaviour, reports a team of researchers.

They found that the protein, called TRPM2, is activated by inflammation. It signals macrophages to start eating fat. Since inflammation of the blood vessels is one of the primary causes of atherosclerosis, TRPM2 gets activated quite a bit. All that TRPM2 activation pushes macrophage activity, which leads to more foamy macrophages and potentially more inflamed arteries. They form a vicious cycle promoting the development of atherosclerosis. 

Researchers now demonstrated one way to stop the cycle, at least in mice. They deleted TRPM2 from a type of lab mouse that tends to get atherosclerosis. Deleting that protein didn't seem to hurt the mice, and it prevented the macrophages from getting foamy. It also alleviated the animals' atherosclerosis.

The team is now looking at whether increased TRPM2 expression in monocytes (precursors of macrophages) in the blood correlates with severity of cardiovascular disease in humans. If they find that there is a correlation, high levels of TRPM2 might be a risk marker for heart attack and stroke.

TRPM2 deficiency in mice protects against atherosclerosis by inhibiting TRPM2–CD36 inflammatory axis in macrophages, Nature Cardiovascular Research, 2022. 10.1038/s44161-022-00027-7 , www.nature.com/articles/s44161-022-00027-7

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-deleting-protein-cardiovascu...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 29, 2022 at 12:32pm

New technology could make biopsies a thing of the past

An engineering team has developed a technology that could replace conventional biopsies and histology with real-time imaging within the living body. Described in a new paper published recently in Nature Biomedical Engineering, MediSCAPE is a high-speed 3D microscope capable of capturing images of tissue structures that could guide surgeons to navigate tumors and their boundaries without needing to remove tissues and wait for pathology results.

For many medical procedures, particularly cancer surgery and screening, it is common for doctors to take a biopsy, cutting out small pieces of tissue to be able to take a closer look at them with a microscope. The way that biopsy samples are processed hasn't changed in 100 years, they are cut out, fixed, embedded, sliced, stained with dyes, positioned on a glass slide, and viewed by a pathologist using a simple microscope. This is why it can take days to hear news back about your diagnosis after a biopsy.

Another major benefit of the approach is that cutting tissue out, just to figure out what it is, is a hard decision for doctors, especially for precious tissues such as the brain, spinal cord, nerves, the eye, and areas of the face. Although some microscopes for surgical guidance are already available, they only give doctors an image of a small, single 2D plane, making it difficult to quickly survey larger areas of tissue and interpret results. These microscopes also generally require a fluorescent dye to be injected into the patient, which takes time and can limit their use for certain patients.

Researchers have been developing new kinds of microscopes for neuroscience research that can capture very fast 3D images of living samples like tiny worms, fish, and flies to see how neurons throughout their brains and bodies fire when they move. Now they decided to test whether their technology, termed SCAPE (for Swept Confocally Aligned Planar Excitation microscopy) could see anything useful in tissues from other parts of the body.

The researchers demonstrated the power of MediSCAPE for a wide range of applications, from analysis of pancreatic cancer in a mouse, to Coley's interest in non-destructive, rapid evaluation of human transplant organs such as kidneys.

They also realized that by imaging tissues while they are alive in the body, they could get even more information than from lifeless excised biopsies. They found that they could actually visualize blood flow through tissues, and see the cellular-level effects of ischemia and reperfusion (cutting off the blood supply to the kidney and then letting it flow back in).

High-speed light-sheet microscopy for the in-situ acquisition of volumetric histological images of living tissue, Nature Biomedical Engineering (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41551-022-00849-7

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-technology-biopsies.html?utm...

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