Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 14, 2022 at 9:10am

Reusable plastic bottles shown to release hundreds of chemicals

Researchers  have found several hundred different chemical substances in tap water stored in reusable plastic bottles. Several of these substances are potentially harmful to human health. There is a need for better regulation and manufacturing standards for manufacturers, according to the chemists behind the study.

Have you ever experienced the strange taste of water after it has been in a reusable plastic bottle for a while? It appears that there is a solid, yet worrying reason for this.

Chemists  have studied which chemical substances are released into liquids by popular types of soft plastic reusable bottles. The results were quite a surprise.

The researchers were taken aback by the large amount of chemical substances they found in water after 24 hours in the bottles. There were hundreds of substances in the water—including substances never before found in plastic, as well as substances that are potentially harmful to health. After a dishwasher cycle, there were several thousand.

They  detected more than 400 different substances from the bottle plastic and over 3,500 substances derived from dishwasher soap. A large portion of these are unknown substances that the researchers have yet to identify. But even of the identified chemicals, the toxicity of at least 70 % remains unknown.

Photo-initiators are among the toxic substances in the water which worry the researchers. These are known to have potentially harmful effects on health in organisms, such as being endocrine disruptors and carcinogens. Furthermore, the researchers found a variety of plastic softeners, antioxidants and release agents used in the manufacture of the plastic, as well as Diethyltoluamide (DEET), commonly known as the active substance in mosquito spray.

Machine washing adds more substances into the bottled water
In their experiments, the researchers mimicked the ways in which many people typically use plastic drinks bottles. People often drink water that has been kept in bottles for several hours. The researchers left ordinary tap water in both new and used drinking bottles for 24 hours, both before and after machine washing, as well as after the bottles had been in the dishwasher and rinsed thoroughly in tap water.

What is released most after machine washing are the soap substances from the surface. Most of the chemicals that come from the water bottle itself remain after machine washing and extra rinsing. The most toxic substances that we identified actually came after the bottle had been in the dishwasher—presumably because washing wears down the plastic and thereby increases leaching. In new reusable bottles, close to 500 different substances remained in the water after an additional rinse. Over 100 of these substances came from the plastic itself.

Just because these substances are in the water, doesn't mean that the water is toxic and affects us humans. But the problem is, is that we just don't know. And in principle, it isn't all that great to be drinking soap residues or other chemicals.

Part1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 14, 2022 at 8:49am

Space weather took out 40 SpaceX satellites, and it could get worse

SpaceX can mitigate the risk to its satellites my monitoring space weather in real time, but an increasingly active Sun and the large number of satellites in orbit won’t make it easy!

SpaceX just lost 40 of its newest satellites to a geomagnetic storm caused by solar radiation, a hazard that will only increase for Elon Musk’s company and other satellite operators over the coming few years.

SpaceX launched its latest batch of 49 Starlink satellites on 3 February, the latest in a constellation of more than 1900 small satellites providing broadband internet connectivity from low Earth orbit. On 4 February, a mass of charged particles ejected from the sun in late January reached Earth, dumping their energy into the planet’s magnetic field and increasing the density of the upper atmosphere.

Satellites launched into low Earth orbit always contend with some amount of atmospheric drag, but in a statement released 8 February, SpaceX noted the drag produced by the geomagnetic storm was 50% higher than in earlier launches. The company acknowledged that the drag was too much for 40 of the 49 satellites, which have reentered or will soon reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.

https://www.independent.co.uk/space/spacex-satellites-geomagnetic-s...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 12, 2022 at 8:53am

Lifetime of knowledge can clutter memories of older adults, researchers suggest

When a person tries to access a memory, their brain quickly sifts through everything stored in it to find the relevant information. But as we age, many of us have difficulty retrieving memories. In a review publishing in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences on February 11, researchers propose an explanation for why this might be happening: the brains of older adults allocate more space to accumulated knowledge and have more material to navigate when attempting to access memories. While this wealth of prior knowledge can make memory retrieval challenging, the researchers say it has its upsides—this life experience can aid with creativity and decision-making.

Researchers looked at several behavioral and neuroimaging studies, which show that older adults have difficulty suppressing information that is no longer relevant and that when searching for a specific memory, they often retrieve other, irrelevant memories along with it. The studies also showed that when given a cognitive task, older adults rely more heavily on previous knowledge than younger adults do.

While the researchers focus primarily on the difficulties that these cluttered memories may pose, they also highlight a few situations in which these crowded memoryscapes may be useful. "Evidence suggests that older adults show preserved, and at times enhanced, creativity as a function of enriched memories," the researchers write. They further hypothesize that older adults may be well served by their prior knowledge when it comes to decision-making, where they can pull on their accumulated wisdom.

With continued study and increased understanding of how memory works in older adults, researchers are hopeful that they may be able to find new ways to help them. It is possible that the increased binding and richer encodings of older adults can even be leveraged to improve older adults' learning and memory.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Amer: "Cluttered memory representations shape cognition in old age" www.cell.com/trends/cognitive- … 1364-6613(21)00310-7 , DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.12.002

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-02-lifetime-knowledge-clutter-m...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2022 at 11:17am

The chronic growing pains of communicating science online

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo0668

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2022 at 11:11am

Making installed train windows permeable to mobile-phone signals

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2022 at 10:41am

Less powerful black hole blows environment clean 

Until now, astronomers have always assumed that only blackholes with strong radiation stop star formation from within the galaxy. This is because these black holes blow away gas, which is the building block for stars. The question, however, is whether galaxies without strongly radiating black holes are also inhibited in their growth.

An international team of astronomers has discovered that even a weak jet stream from a low-active black hole can be a kind of leaf blower to clean parts of a galaxy. The observed black hole removes about 75% of the cold gas in the central regions of the galaxy in a few million years. This probably stops the formation of stars. The researchers publish their findings on Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This low-power black hole is found in the galaxy B2 0258+35 in the constellation of Perseus. It does not emit strong radiation but has radio plasma jets that are bright, as opposed to black holes that emit visible light, ultraviolet or X-rays.

The gas at B2 0258+35 is blown away steadily at a speed of about 500 kilometers per second. It is roughly five to ten solar masses per year and takes a few million years. The gas is not moving fast enough to escape from the reach of the galaxy. It eventually falls back and ends up at the edges of the galaxy. From there, it cannot properly form new stars.

Suma Murthy, Cold gas removal from the centre of a galaxy by a low-luminosity jet, Nature Astronomy (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01596-6. www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01596-6

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-powerful-black-hole-environment.html?...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2022 at 8:42am

Just 14 cases: Guinea worm disease nears eradication

A scourge that once infected millions of the world’s poorest people is close to being wiped out in humans — but infections in animals complicates the picture.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00385-z

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2022 at 8:32am

 

Happy women scientists day!

The United Nations General Assembly declared 11 February as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science in 2015.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 10, 2022 at 1:42pm

As seed-hauling animals decline, some plants can’t keep up with climate change

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 9, 2022 at 12:37pm

Mysterious Link Between Vitamin D And COVID-19 Reaffirmed in 'Striking' New Findings

Scientists found "striking" differences in the chances of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 when they compared patients who had sufficient vitamin D levels prior to contracting the disease, with those who didn't.

A study published recently  in research journal PLOS One found that about half of people who were vitamin D deficient before getting COVID-19 developed severe illness, compared to less than 10 percent of people who had sufficient levels of the vitamin in their blood.

We know vitamin D is vital for bone health, but its role in protecting against severe COVID-19 is less-well established. 

The latest research was the first to examine vitamin D levels in individuals prior to them contracting COVID-19, the study authors said.

The findings suggested vitamin D helped bolster the immune system to deal with viruses that attack the respiratory system.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0...

**

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 510
• 511
• 512
• 513
• 514
• …
• 1070
• Next ›
• Page