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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2020 at 7:05am

New neuron type discovered only in primate brains

Neuropsychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia and autism are a complex interplay of brain chemicals, environment, and genetics that requires careful study to understand the root causes. Scientists have traditionally relied on samples taken from mice and non-human primates to study how these diseases develop. But the question has lingered: are the brains of these subjects similar enough to humans to yield useful insights?

Now work from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is pointing towards an answer. In a study published in Nature, researchers from the Broad's Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research report several key differences in the brains of ferrets, mice, nonhuman primates, and humans, all focused on a type of neuron called interneurons. Most surprisingly, the team found a new type of interneuron only in primates, located in a part of the brain called the striatum, which is associated with Huntington's disease and potentially schizophrenia.

The findings could help accelerate research into causes of and treatments for neuropsychiatric illnesses, by helping scientists choose the lab model that best mimics features of the human brain that may be involved in these diseases.

 Fenna M. Krienen et al. Innovations present in the primate interneuron repertoire, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2781-z

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-neuron-primate-brains.html?u...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2020 at 6:54am

Study suggests wisdom can protect against loneliness

Over the last few decades, there has been growing concern about loneliness across all ages, particularly in middle-aged and older adults. Loneliness, defined as feeling isolated or not having an adequate number of meaningful personal connections, is consistently associated with unhealthy aging and has been identified as a major risk factor for overall adverse health outcomes.

In a recent cross-cultural study, researchers examined middle-aged and older adults and found loneliness and wisdom had a strong negative correlation. The study suggests that wisdom may be a protective factor against loneliness.

An important finding from the study was a significant inverse correlation between loneliness and wisdom. People with higher scores on a measure of wisdom were less lonely and vice versa.

Loneliness was consistently associated with poor general health, worse quality of sleep and less happiness, whereas the reverse was generally true for wisdom.

Both loneliness and wisdom are personality traits. Most personality traits are partially inherited and partially determined by environment.

Wisdom has several components, such as empathy, compassion, self-reflection and emotional regulation. Researchers found that empathy and compassion had the strongest inverse correlation with loneliness. People who were more compassionate were less lonely.

"If we can increase someone's compassion, wisdom  is likely to go up and loneliness is likely to go down. studies that examine how to decrease loneliness as people age will be critical for effective interventions and the future of health care.

Aging and Mental Health, DOI: 10.1080/13607863.2020.1821170

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-san-diego-italy-wisdom-lonel...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2020 at 6:42am

Nights warming faster than days across much of the planet

Global warming is affecting daytime and night-time temperatures differently—and greater night-time warming is more common than greater daytime warming worldwide—new research shows.

Days warmed more quickly in some locations, and nights did in others—but the total area of disproportionately greater night-time warming was more than twice as large.

The study shows this "warming asymmetry" has been driven primarily by changing levels of cloud cover.

Increased cloud cover cools the surface during the day and retains the warmth during the night, leading to greater night-time warming. Whereas, decreasing cloud cover allows more warmth to reach the surface during the day, but that warmth is lost at night.

Warming asymmetry has potentially significant implications for the natural world.

Researchers also  demonstrate that greater night-time warming is associated with the climate becoming wetter, and this has been shown to have important consequences for plant growth and how species, such as insects and mammals, interact.

They also show that greater daytime warming is associated with drier conditions, combined with greater levels of overall warming, which increases species vulnerability to heat stress and dehydration.

Species that are only active at night or during the day will be particularly affected.

 Daniel T. C. Cox et al, Global variation in diurnal asymmetry in temperature, cloud cover, specific humidity and precipitation and its association with leaf area index, Global Change Biology (2020). DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15336

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-nights-faster-days-planet.html?utm_so...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2020 at 6:14am

Key control mechanism allows cells to form tissues and anatomical structures in the developing embryo

Under a microscope, the first few hours of every multicellular organism's life seem incongruously chaotic. After fertilization, a once tranquil single-celled egg divides again and again, quickly becoming a visually tumultuous mosh pit of cells jockeying for position inside the rapidly growing embryo. amid this apparent pandemonium, cells begin to self-organize. Soon, spatial patterns emerge, serving as the foundation for the construction of tissues, organs and elaborate anatomical structures from brains to toes and everything in between. For decades, scientists have intensively studied this process, called morphogenesis, but it remains in many ways enigmatic.

Now researchers have discovered a key control mechanism that cells use to self-organize in early embryonic development. 

Studying spinal cord formation in zebrafish embryos, a team revealed that different cell types express unique combinations of adhesion molecules in order to self-sort during morphogenesis. These "adhesion codes" determine which cells prefer to stay connected, and how strongly they do so, even as widespread cellular rearrangements occur in the developing embryo.

The researchers found that adhesion codes are regulated by morphogens, master signaling molecules long known to govern cell fate and pattern formation in development. The results suggest that the interplay of morphogens and adhesion properties allows cells to organize with the precision and consistency required to construct an organism.

Three genes—N-cadherin, cadherin 11 and protocadherin 19—emerged as essential for normal patterning. The expression of different combinations and different levels of these genes was responsible for differences in adhesion preference, representing what the team dubbed an adhesion code. This code was unique to each of the cell types and determined which other cells each cell type stays connected to during morphogenesis.

The analyses revealed that both cell type and adhesion-molecule gene expression were highly correlated, both in level and spatial position. This held true across the entire nascent spinal cord, where patterns of gene expression for cell type and adhesion molecule changed together in response to differences in Shh activity.

What they found is that this morphogen not only controls cell fate, it controls cell adhesion

Insights into how cells self-organize in early development could also aid efforts to engineer tissues and organs for clinical uses such as transplantation.

"An adhesion code ensures robust pattern formation during tissue morphogenesis" Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/lookup/ … 1126/science.aba6637

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-key-mechanism-cells-tissues-anatomica...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 2, 2020 at 5:51am

Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

Einstein's theory of general relativity—the idea that gravity is matter warping spacetime—has withstood over 100 years of scrutiny and testing, including the newest test from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration which  is a brand-new way to test general relativity using supermassive black holes.

According to the findings, Einstein's theory just got 500 times harder to beat.

Despite its successes, Einstein's robust theory remains mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics, the scientific understanding of the subatomic world. Testing general relativity is important because the ultimate theory of the universe must encompass both gravity and quantum mechanics.

To perform the test, the team used the first image ever taken of the supermassive black hole at the center of nearby galaxy M87 obtained with the EHT last year. The first results had shown that the size of the black-hole shadow was consistent with the size predicted by general relativity.

The team did a very broad analysis of many modifications to the theory of general relativity to identify the unique characteristic of a theory of gravity that determines the size of a black hole shadow.

In this way, scientists can now pinpoint whether some alternative to general relativity is in agreement with the Event Horizon Telescope observations, without worrying about any other details. The team focused on the range of alternatives that had passed all the previous tests in the solar system.

Using the gauge they developed, they showed that the measured size of the black hole shadow in M87 tightens the wiggle room for modifications to Einstein's theory of general relativity by almost a factor of 500, compared to previous tests in the solar system. Many ways to modify general relativity fail at this new and tighter black hole shadow test.

Black hole images provide a completely new angle for testing Einstein's theory of general relativity

Dimitrios Psaltis et al. Gravitational Test beyond the First Post-Newtonian Order with the Shadow of the M87 Black Hole, Physical Review Letters (2020). dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.141104

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-einstein-description-gravity-harder.h...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2020 at 10:07am

Smart Underwear Prevents Back Stress with just a Double Tap

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Inside mitochondria and their fascinating genome

EPFL scientists have observed – for the first time in living cells – the way mitochondria distribute their transcriptome throughout the cell, and it involves RNA granules that turn out to be highly fluid.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2020 at 9:37am

Science and scientists highly regarded across globe: survey

As citizens across the world await a vaccine to end the coronavirus pandemic, a survey by Pew Research Center published Tuesday has good news: scientists and their research are widely viewed positively across much of the globe.

Majorities said the media does a good job covering science, but also said the public often doesn't know enough to understand news on scientific research.

Around two-thirds or more said the news media do a very or somewhat good job covering science topics, while far fewer said the media do a bad job covering science -- medians of 68 percent against 28 percent across the 20 countries.

But across the countries surveyed, 74 percent considered limited public understanding of science to be a problem for media coverage of science research.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/29/science-and-scientis...

https://researchnews.cc/news/2788/Science-and-scientists-highly-reg...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2020 at 9:16am

Gene expression altered by direction of forces acting on cell

Tissues and cells in the human body are subjected to a constant push and pull – strained by other cells, blood pressure and fluid flow, to name a few. The type and direction of the force on a cell alters gene expression by stretching different regions of DNA, researchers found in a new study.

The findings could provide insights into physiology and diseases such as fibrosis, cardiovascular disease and malignant cancer, the researchers said.

Force is everywhere in the human body, and both external and internal forces can influence your body far more than you may have thought. These strains profoundly influence cellular behaviours and physiological functions, which are initiated at the level of gene expression.

They found that the force from the magnetic bead caused a rapid increase in expression for certain genes, but the amount of the increase depended on the direction the bead moved. When the bead rolled along the long axis of the cell, the increase was the lowest, but when the force was applied perpendicularly – across the short axis of the cell – gene activity increased the most. When the bead was moved at a 45-degree angle or rotated in the same plane as the cell to induce shear stress, the response was intermediate.
These observations show that gene upregulation and activation are very sensitive to the mode of the applied force, when the magnitude of the force remains unchanged.

In further experiments, the researchers found that the reason for the difference lies in the method that the forces are relayed to the cell’s nucleus, where DNA is housed. Cells have a network of support structures called the cytoskeleton, and the main force-bearing elements are long fibers of the protein actin. When they bend due to a force, they relay that force to the nucleus and stretch the chromosomes.

These actin fibers run lengthwise along the cell. So when the force strains them widthwise, they deform more, stretching the chromosomes more and causing greater gene activity, the researchers found.

https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/385931150

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2020 at 8:55am

Pregnancy Loss: A possible link between olfaction and miscarriage

Unexplained repeated pregnancy loss is associated with an altered perception of male odors and differences in brain regions that process smells.

Exposing female rodents to the smell of adult males can lead to synchronized menstrual cycling  and accelerated sexual maturation, as well as to embryos failing to implant in the uterus . Olfactory cues might also play a role in human reproduction: for instance, the menstrual cycle phase may influence preferences for male odors . This presents the possibility that altered neural processing of socially relevant odors, such as the scent of a partner, may be linked to pregnancy loss and other reproductive disorders. Now researchers report that women who have experienced unexplained repeated pregnancy loss process the odors of males differently.

https://elifesciences.org/articles/62534?utm_source=content_alert&a...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 1, 2020 at 8:39am

India pushes bold ‘one nation, one subscription’ journal-access plan

Researchers will also recommend an open-access policy that promotes research being shared in online repositories.The Indian government is pushing a bold proposal that would make scholarly literature accessible for free to everyone in the country. The government wants to negotiate with the world’s biggest scientific publishers to set up nationwide subscriptions, rather than many agreements with individual institutions that only scholars can use, say researchers consulting for the government.

The proposal is expected to be part of the government’s latest science, technology and innovation policy.

If successful, India would become the largest country to strike deals that give access to paywalled articles to all citizens — more than 1.3 billion people — say researchers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02708-4

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