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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 9, 2021 at 12:31pm

Ways to spot if someone is trying to mislead you  in science 

It’s not a new thing for people to try to mislead you when it comes to science.

The challenge is to be able to identify when this may be happening. Sometimes it’s easy, as often even the most basic fact-checking and logic can be potent weapons against misinformation.

But often, it can be hard. People who are trying either to make you believe something that isn’t true, or to doubt something that is true, use a variety of strategies that can manipulate you very effectively.

These red flags can alert you ....

1.The ‘us versus them’ narrative: This is one of the most common tactics used to mislead. It taps into our intrinsic distrust of authority and paints those with evidence-based views as part of some other group that’s not be trusted.

2.  ‘I’m not a scientist, but…’: People tend to use the phrase “I’m not a scientist, but…” as a sort of universal disclaimer which they feel allows them to say whatever they want, regardless of scientific accuracy.

3. Reference to ‘the science not being settled’

This is perhaps one of the most powerful strategies used to mislead.

There are of course times when the science is not settled, and when this is the case, scientists openly argue different points of view based on the evidence available.

4. Overly simplistic explanations

Oversimplifications and generalisations are where many conspiracy theories are born.

Science is often messy, complex and full of nuance. The truth can be much harder to explain, and can sometimes sound less plausible, than a simple but incorrect explanation.

We’re naturally drawn to simple explanations. And if they tap into our fears and exploit our cognitive biases — systematic errors we make when we interpret information — they can be extremely seductive.

5. Cherry-picking

People who use this approach treat scientific studies like individual chocolates in a gift box, where you can choose the ones you like and disregard the ones you don’t. Of course, this isn’t how science works.

It’s important to understand not all studies are equal; some provide much stronger evidence than others. You can’t just conveniently put all your faith in the studies that align with your views, and ignore those that don’t.

When scientists evaluate evidence, they go through a systematic process to assess the whole body of evidence. This is a crucial task that requires expertise.

The cherry-picking tactic can be hard to counter because unless you’re across all the evidence, you’re not likely to know whether the studies being presented have been deliberately curated to mislead you.

This is yet another reason to rely on the experts who understand the full breadth of the evidence and can interpret it sensibly.

https://theconversation.com/5-ways-to-spot-if-someone-is-trying-to-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 9, 2021 at 9:50am

At Dubai airport, travelers' eyes become their passports

Dubai's airport, the world's busiest for international travel, can already feel surreal, with its cavernous duty-free stores, artificial palm trees, gleaming terminals, water cascades and near-Arctic levels of air conditioning.

Now, the key east-west transit hub is rolling out another addition from the realm of science fiction—an iris-scanner that verifies one's identity and eliminates the need for any human interaction when entering or leaving the country.

That's because the airport debuted a new "smart tunnel" that uses biometric technology, instead of human checks, to allow some air travelers to complete passport control in just 15 seconds.

It's the latest artificial intelligence program the United Arab Emirates has launched amid the surging coronavirus pandemic, contact-less technology the government promotes as helping to stem the spread of the virus. But the efforts also have renewed questions about mass surveillance in the federation of seven sheikhdoms, which experts believe has among the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world.

Dubai's airport started offering the program to all passengers last month. On Sunday, travelers stepped up to an iris scanner after checking in, gave it a good look and breezed through passport control within seconds. Gone were the days of paper tickets or unwieldy phone apps.

In recent years, airports across the world have accelerated their use of timesaving facial recognition technology to move passengers to their flights. But Dubai's iris scan improves on the more commonplace automated gates seen elsewhere, authorities said, connecting the iris data to the country's facial recognition databases so the passenger needs no identifying documents or boarding pass.

Now, all the procedures have become 'smart,' around five to six seconds

 Iris biometrics are considered more reliable than surveillance cameras that scan people's faces from a distance without their knowledge or consent.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-dubai-airport-eyes-passports.ht...

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-dubai-airport-biometric-tech.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 9, 2021 at 9:31am

Do photosynthetic complexes use quantum coherence to increase their...

In a new report now published on Science Advances, Elinor Zerah Harush and Yonatan Dubi in the departments of chemistry and nanoscale science and technology, at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, discussed a direct evaluation of the effects of quantum coherence on the efficiency of three natural photosynthetic complexes. The open quantum systems approach allowed the researchers to simultaneously identify the quantum-nature and efficiency under natural physiological conditions. These systems resided in a mixed quantum-classical regime, which they characterized using dephasing-assisted transport. The efficiency was minimal at best therefore the presence of quantum coherence did not play a substantial role in the process. The efficiency was also independent of any structural parameters, suggesting the role of evolution during structural design for other uses.

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How the growth of ice depends on the fluid dynamics underneath

Researchers of the Toschi group of Eindhoven University of Technology think the water phase change problem with considering the water density anomaly is of great importance relating to common natural phenomena. Their research plan is firstly to understand the physics fundamentals, that is, the coupled problem of the stably and unstably stratified layers with considering the density anomaly.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 9, 2021 at 8:39am

Economic benefits of protecting nature now outweigh those of exploiting it, global data reveal

The economic benefits of conserving or restoring natural sites "outweigh" the profit potential of converting them for intensive human use, according to the largest-ever study comparing the value of protecting nature at particular locations with that of exploiting it.

A research team  analysed dozens of sites—from Kenya to Fiji and China to the UK—across six continents. A previous breakthrough study in 2002 only had information for five sites.

For the latest study, scientists calculated the monetary worth of each site's "ecosystem services", such as carbon storage and flood protection, as well as likely dividends from converting it for production of goods such as crops and timber.

The team initially concentrated on 24 sites and compared their "nature-focused" and "alternative" states by working out the annual net value of a range of goods and services for each site under each state, then projected the data over the next 50 years.

A major economic benefit of natural habitats comes from their regulation of the greenhouse gases driving climate change, including the sequestration of carbon.

 The economic consequences of conserving or restoring sites for nature, Nature Sustainability (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-021-00692-9 , dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00692-9

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-economic-benefits-nature-outweigh-exp...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 8, 2021 at 12:18pm

Researchers have captured the first detailed images of newborn babies’ lungs as they take their first breaths.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 8, 2021 at 10:48am

Artificial ‘brain’ reveals why we can’t always believe our eyes

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 8, 2021 at 10:18am

Astrocytes derived from patients with bipolar disorder malfunction

Brain cells called astrocytes derived from the induced pluripotent stem cells of patients with bipolar disorder offer suboptimal support for neuronal activity. In a paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports, researchers show that this malfunction can be traced to an inflammation-promoting molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is secreted by astrocytes. The results highlight the potential role of astrocyte-mediated inflammatory signaling in the psychiatric disease, although further investigation is needed.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 8, 2021 at 10:05am

Scientists discover why blood type may matter for COVID infection

A new study provides further evidence that people with certain blood types may be more likely to contract COVID-19.

Specifically, it found that the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is particularly attracted to the blood group A antigen found on respiratory cells.

The researchers focused on a protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the receptor binding domain (RBD), which is the part of the virus that attaches to the host cells. That makes it an important target for scientists trying to learn how the virus infects people.

In this laboratory study, the team assessed how the SARS-CoV-2 RBD interacted with respiratory and red blood cells in A, B and O blood types.

The results showed that the SARS-CoV-2 RBD had a strong preference for binding to blood group A found on respiratory cells, but had no preference for blood group A red blood cells, or other blood groups found on respiratory or red cells.

The SARS-CoV-2 RBD's preference to recognize and attach to the blood type A antigen found in the lungs of people with blood type A may provide insight into the potential link between blood group A and COVID-19 infection, according to the authors of the study. It was published March 3 in the journal Blood Advances.

https://ashpublications.org/bloodadvances/article/5/5/1305/475250/T...

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-scientists-blood-covid-infec...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 8, 2021 at 9:17am

Scientists read 300-year-old letters without opening them

The letters had been folded using a mysterious technique.

Unopened letters more than 300 years old that were folded using mysterious techniques have now been read for the first time without opening them, a new study finds.

For centuries, before mass-produced envelopes started proliferating in the 1830s, most letters across the globe were sent using letterlocking, a method of folding letters to become their own envelopes. These intricate techniques also often served to help recipients detect if mail had been tampered with.

For example, during research in the Vatican Secret Archives, conservator Jana Dambrogio at the MIT Libraries unearthed Renaissance letters with odd slits and sliced-off corners. She discovered these were signs these documents were originally locked with a slice of paper slid through a slit and closed with a wax seal. Such letters could not be opened without ripping the paper, which would reveal to intended recipients if someone else had read the letters first.

After studying 250,000 historical letters, Dambrogio and her colleagues devised the first system to categorize letterlocking techniques, a kind of periodic table based on how these strategies creased sheets. "Letterlocking is a 10,000-year-old technology -- as long as people have tried to build security into their correspondences, you've had letterlocking, from cuneiform tablets all the way to bitcoin paper wallets.

Until now, scientists could only read these "letterpackets" by cutting them open, often damaging the documents. Although such work naturally focused on the letter's contents, this came at the cost of research into letterlocking itself, about which much remains unknown. "These folding sequences, they're just like a sneeze -- they're ephemeral. The minute you open them, you lose evidence of them.

Now scientists have devised a way to both read letterlocked texts without opening them and reconstruct the complex folds, tucks and slits used to secure them. 

The scientists investigated the Brienne Collection, a postmaster's trunk holding more than 3,000 undelivered letters, including 577 letterpackets that were never opened. The letters were sent from all over Europe to The Hague between 1680 and 1706, the era that saw the Salem witch trials unfold, Newton reveal his laws of motion and gravitation, and Louis XIV move his court to Versailles.

The researchers first analyzed four letterpackets with high-resolution X-ray scans to generate 3D models of the documents. Next, they used a new computational algorithm to identify and separate different layers of the folded letters and recognize text written on them. Finally, the algorithm virtually unfolded the letters, not only making the writing visible, but also recording the crease patterns so the researchers could re-create the letterlocking process step by step.

This new strategy helped the scientists read unopened letterlocked text for the first time. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21326-w

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 7, 2021 at 8:32am

Eyeless roundworms sense color
Roundworms don't have eyes or the light-absorbing molecules required to see. Yet, new research shows they can somehow sense color. The study, published on March 5 in the journal Science, suggests worms use this ability to assess the risk of feasting on potentially dangerous bacteria that secrete blue toxins. The researchers pinpointed two genes that contribute to this spectral sensitivity and are conserved across many organisms, including humans.
So a 1 mm tiny worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, with neither eyes nor the molecular machinery used by eyes to detect colors can identify and avoid a toxic bacterium based, in part, on its blue color! They can smell, taste, sense touch, react to temperature, and even escape or change their feeding patterns in response to bright, blue light.

https://news.mit.edu/2021/eyeless-roundworms-sense-color-0304

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