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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

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 10:33am

Quantum leap on film

 In order to better understand (and possibly control) fast chemical reactions, it is necessary to study the behaviour of electrons as precisely as possible – in both space and time. However, up to now, microscopy methods have delivered only either spatially or temporally sharp images. By cleverly combining established techniques of tunnelling microscopy and laser spectroscopy, a team of researchers has now overcome these obstacles. Using their atomic quantum microscope, they can make the movement of electrons in individual molecules visible.

It is essential not only for understanding biological processes (e.g. plant photosynthesis) to map the electron dynamics in molecules but also for many technical applications such as the development of solar cells or new types of electronic components. Until now, imaging methods have sometimes delivered images that are difficult to reproduce – or even contradictory. This is because they cannot map the fast electrons directly but rather must resort to techniques that can only reconstruct the behaviour of the electrons.

Although modern microscopy techniques offer almost unlimited possibilities, certain compromises must be made. For example, scanning tunnelling microscopy with a resolution of one tenth of a picometre (1 × 10−12 m) allows extremely sharp images of individual atoms to be taken. However, this is slow and cannot capture the electron dynamics in a material. On the other hand, optical methods with ultra-fast laser pulses can detect electron movements in the attosecond (1 × 10−18 of a second) range. However, they can provide only coarse, washed-out spatial images – far removed from the atomic resolution possible with scanning tunnelling microscopes. The typical electron dynamics and laser pulses are in the range of a few hundred attoseconds.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 2, 2022 at 10:30am

Key growth factor protects gut from inflammatory bowel disease

IBD, a disease category including ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, features chronic gut inflammation and many potential follow-on effects including arthritis and colorectal cancer.

 A growth factor protein produced by rare immune cells in the intestine can protect against the effects of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), according to a new discovery. 

In their study, published in Nature Immunology, the researchers found that the growth factor, HB-EGF, is produced in response to gut inflammation by a set of immune-regulating cells called ILC3s. These immune cells reside in many organs including the intestines, though their numbers are known to be depleted in the inflamed intestines of IBD patients.

The researchers showed in experiments in mice that this growth factor can powerfully counter the harmful effects of a key driver of intestinal inflammation called TNF. In doing so, ILC3s protect gut-lining cells when they would otherwise die and cause a breach in the intestinal barrier. 

Lei Zhou, Wenqing Zhou, Ann M. Joseph, Coco Chu, Gregory G. Putzel, Beibei Fang, Fei Teng, Mengze Lyu, Hiroshi Yano, Katrin I. Andreasson, Eisuke Mekada, Gerard Eberl, Gregory F. Sonnenberg. Group 3 innate lymphoid cells produce the growth factor HB-EGF to protect the intestine from TNF-mediated inflammation. Nature Immunology, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41590-021-01110-0

https://researchnews.cc/news/11380/Key-growth-factor-protects-gut-f...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 1, 2022 at 1:07pm

Missing ear bone helps bats to echolocate

Some bats have an anatomical quirk in their ears that could explain how they evolved to hunt in specialized ways, from sensing small fish to catching insects midflight. In 2015, researchers took 3D images of the inner ear of a bat skull but couldn’t find a feature shared by almost all mammals: a bony tube that connects the ear to the brain and encases nerve cells. A more thorough search revealed many more bat species in which this bony nerve channel was missing or poked with large holes. Researchers suspect the loss of this bony channel gave the bats new hearing capabilities because the nerves are less confined.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 1, 2022 at 12:41pm

How  Climate Change is Affecting Hibernation?

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