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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 2, 2021 at 8:36am

For the study, the research team applied a method called hyperalignment, which creates a common representational space for understanding how brain activity is similar between participants. The team used data obtained from three fMRI tasks with 14 graduate students who had known each other for at least two years. In two of the tasks, participants were presented with images of four other personally familiar graduate students and four other visually familiar persons, who were previously unknown. In the third task, participants watched parts of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The movie data, which is publicly available, was used to apply hyperalignment and align participants' brain responses into a common representational space. This allowed the researchers to use machine learning classifiers to predict what stimuli a participant was looking at based on the brain activity of the other participants.

The results showed that the identity of visually familiar and personally familiar faces was decoded with accuracy across the brain in areas that are mostly involved in visual processing of faces. Outside of the visual areas however, there was not a lot of decoding. For visually familiar identities, participants only knew what the stimuli looked like; they did not know who these people were or have any other information about them.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-familiar-neural-code-brains....

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 2, 2021 at 8:31am

Recognizing familiar faces relies on a neural code shared across brains

The ability to recognize familiar faces is fundamental to social interaction. This process provides visual information and activates social and personal knowledge about a person who is familiar. But how the brain processes this information across participants has long been a question. Distinct information about familiar faces is encoded in a neural code that is shared across brains, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Within visual processing areas, researchers found that information about personally familiar and visually familiar faces is shared across the brains of people who have the same friends and acquaintances. The surprising part of these findings was that the shared information about personally familiar faces also extends to areas that are non-visual and important for social processing, suggesting that there is shared social information across brains.

In decoding personally familiar identities, the findings demonstrated that there was much more shared information across the brains of the participants. There was high decoding accuracy in four other areas outside of the visual system: the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which is known to be involved in social processing (processing other people's intentions and traits); the precuneus, an area which has been shown to be more active when processing personally familiar faces; the insula, which is known to be involved in emotional processing; and the temporal parietal junction, which plays an important role in social cognition and in representing the mental states of others (also known as the "theory of the mind").

This shared conceptual space for the personal knowledge of others allows us to communicate with people that we know in common.

Shared neural codes for visual and semantic information about familiar faces in a common representational space, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110474118.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 1, 2021 at 10:54am

Using immunotherapeutics to tackle the threat of superbugs

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 1, 2021 at 10:10am

Experts name new species of human ancestor

An international team of researchers, led by University of Winnipeg palaeoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, has announced the naming of a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. This species lived in Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, around half a million years ago, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans.

The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000–129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our closest relatives, and the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe.

However, human evolution during this age is poorly understood, a problem which paleoanthropologists call "the muddle in the middle." The announcement of Homo bodoensis hopes to bring some clarity to this puzzling, but important chapter in human evolution.

 Resolving the "muddle in the middle": The case for Homo bodoensis sp. nov, Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews, DOI: 10.1002/EVAN.21929

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-experts-species-human-ancestor.html?u...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2021 at 12:03pm

Vascular disease in COVID-19 is not caused by viral infection of blood vessels

The SARS-CoV-2 virus does not infect blood vessels, despite the high risk of blood clots to COVID-19 patients, researchers have found.

The researchers found that the cardiovascular complications of COVID-19 are triggered by inflammation caused by infected airway cells. At least 40 per cent of patients that are hospitalised with COVID-19 are at high risk of blood clots, and anti-coagulation therapies are now being routinely used.

There have been many studies attempting to prove whether the virus is infecting cells of the inner blood vessel wall or not.

By conducting the experiments using real, infectious virus rather than fragments of the virus’s spike protein,researchers now can definitively say it is not.

The researchers used UQ’s sophisticated microscopy facilities to track where the virus travelled in the cells and visualise how blood vessels respond to the live virus.
The body’s inflammatory response had a big effect on the cardiovascular system because they work together to fight infection – the blood delivers the immune cells to the site of infection and makes blood clots if the blood vessel is damaged.

When our immune system works well, it clears the virus from our bodies. But sometimes it goes into overdrive and we get an overblown inflammatory response causing complications –in the case of COVID-19, this is often blood clots, when there shouldn’t be any.

Knowing that it is inflammation causing these cardiovascular complications arising from COVID-19 rather than the virus itself will help us develop the right treatments, and a better understanding of how and why these complications arise.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cti2.1350

https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2021/10/vascular-disease-covid-1...

https://researchnews.cc/news/9726/Vascular-disease-in-COVID-19-is-n...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2021 at 12:03pm

The search for people who never get COVID

Scientists have launched a global hunt for people who are genetically resistant to infection with SARS-CoV-2. They hope that identifying the genes protecting these individuals could lead to the development of virus-blocking drugs that not only protect people from COVID-19, but also prevent them from passing on the infection.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2021 at 10:22am

What is net-zero?

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2021 at 9:11am

Researchers invent chemical reaction that could accelerate drug discovery

Medicines come from chemical reactions, and better chemical reactions lead to better medicines.

Yet, the most popular reaction used in drug discovery, called the amide coupling, makes an inherently unstable amide bond. Because the body excels at metabolizing medication, one of the most important and difficult goals of drug research is to invent metabolically stable molecules, so we can take one pill a day instead of every 15 minutes.

To that end, researchers at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy hacked the popular amide coupling to produce a carbon-carbon bond instead of an amide. The carbon-carbon bond is the most prevalent bond arrangement in nature and in synthetic drugs, and it's also typically more stable than the amide bond, the study appears online in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

The discovery of the carbon-carbon bond-forming reaction opens the door to more stable medicines, and is particularly applicable to biological probes and new medical imaging agents.

The common amide bond is formed by coupling an amine and a carboxylic acid. To form a carbon-carbon bond, researchers identified a catalyst that deaminates the amine and decarboxylates the carboxylic acid, forming a carbon-carbon bond in the process.

Joining an amine and a  carboxylic acid to make a carbon-carbon bond is also advantageous because these reagents are available in the highest diversity, and are typically less expensive than other raw ingredients that could be used to make a carbon-carbon bond.

Timothy Cernak et al, The Formal Cross‐Coupling of Amines and Carboxylic Acids to Form sp3–sp3 Carbon–Carbon Bonds, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2021). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202112454

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-chemical-reaction-drug-discovery.html...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2021 at 8:54am

Study finds the SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect the inner ear

Many COVID-19 patients have reported symptoms affecting the ears, including hearing loss and tinnitus. Dizziness and balance problems can also occur, suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be able to infect the inner ear.

A new study from MIT and Massachusetts Eye and Ear provides evidence that the virus can indeed infect cells of the inner ear, including hair cells, which are critical for both hearing and balance. The researchers also found that the pattern of infection seen in human inner ear tissue is consistent with the symptoms seen in a study of 10 COVID-19 patients who reported a variety of ear-related symptoms.

The researchers used novel cellular models of the human inner ear that they developed, as well as hard-to-obtain adult human inner ear tissue, for their studies. The limited availability of such tissue has hindered previous studies of COVID-19 and other viruses that can cause hearing loss.

Direct SARS-CoV-2 infection of the human inner ear may underlie COVID-19-associated audiovestibular dysfunction, Communications Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/s43856-021-00044-w

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-10-sars-cov-virus-infect-ear.ht...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2021 at 8:46am

Study finds California condors can have 'virgin births'

 Condors can have "'virgin births," according to a study released recently. 

Researchers with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance said genetic testing confirmed that two male chicks hatched in 2001 and 2009 from unfertilized eggs were related to their mothers. Neither was related to a male.

The study was published Thursday in the the Journal of Heredity. It's the first report of asexual reproduction in California condors, although parthenogenesis can occur in other species ranging from sharks to honey bees to Komodo dragons.

But in birds, it usually only occurs when females don't have access to males. In this case, each mother condor had previously bred with males, producing 34 chicks, and each was housed with a fertile male at the time they produced the eggs through parthenogenesis.

The researchers said they believe it is the first case of asexual reproduction in any avian species where the female had access to a mate.

These findings now raise questions about whether this might occur undetected in other species too. 

OUP accepted manuscript, Journal Of Heredity (2021). DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esab052

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-california-condors-virgin-births.html...

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