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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 23, 2021 at 2:09pm

Tree pollen carries SARS-CoV-2 particles farther, facilitates virus spread

Most models explaining how viruses are transmitted focus on viral particles escaping one person to infect a nearby person. A study on the role of microscopic particles in how viruses are transmitted suggests pollen is nothing to sneeze at.

Researchers investigated how pollen facilitates the spread of an RNA virus like the COVID-19 virus. The study draws on cutting-edge computational approaches for analyzing fluid dynamics to mimic the pollen movement from a willow tree, a prototypical pollen emitter. Airborne pollen grains contribute to the spread of airborne viruses, especially in crowded environments.

This is the first time researchers have  shown through modeling and simulation how airborne pollen micrograins are transported in a light breeze, contributing to airborne virus transmission in crowds outdoors

"On pollen and airborne virus transmission," Physics of Fluids (2021). aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0055845

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-tree-pollen-sars-cov-particles-virus....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 22, 2021 at 12:11pm

UFOs, Aliens & Science

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 21, 2021 at 8:40am

Universal coronavirus vaccine is highly effective in monkeys

SARS-CoV-2 is not the first coronavirus to hop from animals to humans — and it will not be the last.

Current coronavirus vaccines are humanity's lethal weapon against a single virus, SARS-CoV-2. But SARS-CoV-2 is not the first coronavirus to hop from animals to humans — and it will not be the last.

To prevent a future coronavirus pandemic, a group of researchers recently developed a "pan-coronavirus" vaccine, designed to protect against many different strains of coronaviruses known to infect humans and bats. Their vaccine turned out to be very effective in monkeys, but it's not yet known if it will confer the same protection in people, according to the study published May 10 in the journal Nature.

Researchers designed the novel coronavirus vaccine, which they hope could elicit an immune response across different coronaviruses that use the RBD to enter human cells. They started with an antibody that was taken from a person infected with SARS-CoV-1, which disarmed multiple different coronaviruses. 

They designed a vaccine that uses nanoparticles with bits of RBD attached to its surface in such a way that "you get a molecule that looks like a virus," which the immune system can then recognize and respond to. (Most current vaccines target the full-length spike protein whereas this vaccine specifically targets the RBD). They included an adjuvant, a substance that boosts the immune response. 

In monkeys, the vaccine stopped all infections with SARS-CoV-2 and spurred more neutralizing antibodies than either current vaccines or natural infection spurs in humans. Four out of five monkeys did not have any trace of the virus; one monkey had a very low level of virus that could only be detected with very sensitive tests and that went away in two days.

Current mRNA vaccines — developed by Modern and Pfizer — also elicit antibodies that react against multiple different coronaviruses, but at lower levels.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03594-0?utm_medium=affil...

https://www.livescience.com/pan-coronavirus-vaccine-future-pandemic...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 19, 2021 at 9:35am

Bacteria can recover precious metals from electric vehicle batteries

Bioleaching, also called biomining, employs microbes which can oxidise metal as part of their metabolism. It has been widely used in the mining industry, where microorganisms are used to extract valuable metals from ores. More recently, this technique has been used to clean up and recover materials from electronic waste, particularly the printed circuit boards of computers, solar panels, contaminated water and even uranium dumps.

All metals present in EV batteries can be recovered using bioleaching. Bacteria like Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans and other non-toxic species target and recover the metals individually without the need for high temperatures or toxic chemicals. These purified metals constitute chemical elements, and so can be recycled indefinitely into multiple supply chains.

Scaling up bioleaching involves growing bacteria in incubators at 37°C, often using carbon dioxide. Not a lot of energy is needed, so the process has a much smaller carbon footprint than typical recycling plants, while also contributing less pollution. While reducing EV battery waste, bioleaching facilities mean manufacturers can recover these precious metals locally, and rely less on the few producer countries.

EV batteries are a technology still in their infancy. The reuse of their components should be considered as part of their design. Rather than remaining an afterthought, recycling can become both the beginning and end of an EV battery’s life cycle with bioleaching, producing high-quality raw materials for new batteries at low environmental cost.

https://theconversation.com/bacteria-can-recover-precious-metals-fr...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 18, 2021 at 11:22am

Giant spider webs blanket Australian landscape after heavy rainfall

Stunning photographs of vast, ghostly spider webs blanketing the flood-affected region of Gippsland in Victoria have gone viral online, prompting many to muse on the wonder of nature.

But what's going on here? Why do spiders do this after floods and does it happen everywhere?

The answer is: these webs have nothing to do with spiders trying to catch food. Spiders often use silk to move around and in this case are using long strands of web to escape from waterlogged soil.

When these flood events happen, they need evacuate quickly up out of holes they live in underground. They come out en masse and use their silk to help them do that.

You'll often see juvenile spiders let out a long strand of silk which is caught by the wind and lifted up. The web catches onto another object such as a tree and allows the spider to climb up. 

That's how baby spiders (spiderlings!) disperse when they emerge from their egg sacs – it's called ballooning. They have to disperse as quickly as possible because they are highly cannibalistic so they need to move away from each other swiftly and find their own sites to hunt or build their webs.

https://www.sciencealert.com/spiders-have-cloaked-an-australian-cou...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 18, 2021 at 10:18am

Physicists bring human-scale object to near standstill, reaching a quantum state

To the human eye, most stationary objects appear to be just that—still, and completely at rest. Yet if we were handed a quantum lens, allowing us to see objects at the scale of individual atoms, what was an apple sitting idly on our desk would appear as a teeming collection of vibrating particles, very much in motion.

In the last few decades, physicists have found ways to super-cool objects so that their atoms are at a near standstill, or in their "motional ground state." To date, physicists have wrestled small objects such as clouds of millions of atoms, or nanogram-scale objects, into such pure quantum states.

Now for the first time, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have cooled a large, human-scale object to close to its motional ground state. The object isn't tangible in the sense of being situated at one location, but is the combined motion of four separate objects, each weighing about 40 kilograms. The "object" that the researchers cooled has an estimated mass of about 10 kilograms, and comprises about 1x10²⁶, or nearly 1 octillion, atoms.

The researchers took advantage of the ability of the Laser Interfrometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) to measure the motion of the masses with extreme precision and super-cool the collective motion of the masses to 77 nanokelvins, just shy of the object's predicted ground state of 10 nanokelvins.

Their results, appearing today in Science, represent the largest object to be cooled to close to its motional ground state. The scientists say they now have a chance to observe the effect of gravity on a massive quantum object.

C. Whittle el al., "Approaching the motional ground state of a 10-kg object," Science (2021). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.abh2634

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-physicists-human-scale-standstill-qua...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 18, 2021 at 8:56am

Giant Rats Are Sniffing Out Landmines and Tuberculosis

These 2-foot giant pouched rats are giving rats a good name. Referred to as 'Hero Rats', they have a superpower that's saving thousands of lives: a powerful nose that can detect unexploded landmines and Tuberculosis. And now, they're being trained to sniff out just about anything, from illegal wildlife trafficking to humans trapped under rubble after a natural disaster.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 17, 2021 at 11:18am

Genetically engineered nanoparticle delivers dexamethasone directly to inflamed lungs

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed immune cell-mimicking nanoparticles that target inflammation in the lungs and deliver drugs directly where they're needed. As a proof of concept, the researchers filled the nanoparticles with the drug dexamethasone and administered them to mice with inflamed lung tissue. Inflammation was completely treated in mice given the nanoparticles, at a drug concentration where standard delivery methods did not have any efficacy.

What's special about these nanoparticles is that they are coated in a cell membrane that's been genetically engineered to look for and bind to inflamed lung cells. They are the latest in the line of so-called cell membrane-coated nanoparticles.

But while these previous cell membranes were naturally derived from the body's cells, the cell membranes used to coat this dexamethasone-filled nanoparticle were not.

"In this paper, researchers used a genetic engineering approach to edit the surface proteins on the cells before we collected the membranes. This significantly advanced our technology by allowing us to precisely overexpress certain functional proteins on the membranes or knockout some undesirable proteins.

"Genetically engineered cell membrane–coated nanoparticles for targeted delivery of dexamethasone to inflamed lungs" Science Advances (2021). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup … .1126/sciadv.abf7820

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-genetically-nanoparticle-dexamethason...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 17, 2021 at 10:59am

New material could remove respiratory droplets from air

Although plexiglass barriers are seemingly everywhere these days—between grocery store lanes, around restaurant tables and towering above office cubicles—they are an imperfect solution to blocking virus transmission.

Instead of capturing virus-laden respiratory droplets and aerosols, plexiglass dividers merely deflect droplets, causing them to bounce away but remain in the air. To enhance the function of these protective barriers, Northwestern University researchers have developed a new transparent material that can capture droplets and aerosols, effectively removing them from air.

The material is a clear, viscous liquid that can be painted onto any surface, including plastic, glass, wood, metal, stainless steel, concrete and textiles. When droplets collide with the coated surface, they stick to it, get absorbed and dry up. The coating also is compatible with antiviral and antimicrobial materials, so sanitizing agents, such as copper, could be added to the formula.

Chem, Huang et al.: "Droplet-capturing Coatings on Environmental Surfaces Based on Cosmetic Ingredients" DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2021.05.017 , www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451-9294(21)00266-7

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-material-respiratory-droplets-air.htm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 16, 2021 at 9:24am

Surprise volcanic eruption: Lessons from Kilauea 2018

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