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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 17, 2021 at 8:36am

Sweat sensor could alert doctors, patients to looming COVID cytokine storm

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors recognized that patients who developed a "cytokine storm"—a surge of pro-inflammatory immune proteins—were often the sickest and at highest risk of dying. But a cytokine storm can also occur in other illnesses, such as influenza. Today, scientists report preliminary results on a sweat sensor that acts as an early warning system for an impending cytokine storm, which could help doctors more effectively treat patients.

COVID Sweat Sensor Catches Your Immune System Before It Goes Berserk

Abstract Title [American Chemical Society (ACS)].: SWEATSENSER DX an enabling technology for on demand profiling of cytokines on passively expressed eccrine sweat

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-sensor-doctors-patients-loom...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 17, 2021 at 7:18am

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00869-2/fulltext

Corona is an airborne disease: evidence

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 3:07pm

what happens when you turn off a light in a room made completely out of mirrors!

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 1:39pm

Is a calorie always a calorie? Not when it comes to almonds,  researchers find

Researchers have found that a calorie labelled is not the same as a calorie digested and absorbed when the food source is almonds.

The findings, published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, should help alleviate concerns that almonds contribute to weight gain, which persist despite the widely recognized benefits of nuts as a plant-based source of protein, vitamins and minerals.

Nuts have generally been thought of as healthy the last two decades, but the messaging around nuts has often come with a disclaimer that they are high in fat and energy. We still see that caveat in the media and on the internet today, and it has been part of many clinical guidelines, although that is changing.

Other researchers have shown that there is a bioaccessibility issue with nuts – that a calorie labelled may not be a calorie absorbed. This study quantifies that effect with almonds in a relevant population.

The researchers found that after digestion, about 20 per cent of calories derived largely from fat in almonds remained unabsorbed, which they observed in stool samples. That translated to about two per cent less energy absorbed from the diet overall among study participants.

A person eating the same amount of almonds in a daily diet of 2,000 to 3,000 calories would absorb 40 to 60 calories less than would be predicted by Atwater factors, on which many food labels are based. That could result in weight loss up to 2.9 kilograms, or 6.3 pounds, over a year, assuming no compensation in the form of increased intake or decreased energy expenditure.

Participants in the study did not gain weight, which is consistent with the majority of high-quality trials that measure nut consumption and weight gain – some of which show an association with weight loss.

The researchers used a randomized crossover trial to study 22 women and men with high cholesterol who underwent a series of three, month-long dietary interventions separated by a week-long washout period.

All study participants consumed an NCEP Step-2 diet (low in saturated fat and cholesterol, part of the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program). The three dietary interventions were full-dose almonds (75 grams per day or three quarters of a cup); half-dose almonds plus half-dose muffins; and full-dose muffins as a study control. The nutritional makeup of the muffins matched the almonds in amount of protein, fibre and fats.

One unique aspect of this study is that it assessed people with high cholesterol, who are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease.

https://researchnews.cc/news/6171/Is-a-calorie-always-a-calorie--No...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 1:28pm

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 12:54pm

Coronavirus variants

How mRNA Vaccines Work - Simply Explained

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 12:44pm

How the humble woodchip is cleaning up water worldwide

Australian pineapple, Danish trout, and Midwestern U.S. corn farmers are not often lumped together under the same agricultural umbrella. But they and many others who raise crops and animals face a common problem: excess nitrogen in drainage water. Whether it flows out to the Great Barrier Reef or the Gulf of Mexico, the nutrient contributes to harmful algal blooms that starve fish and other organisms of oxygen.

But there's a simple solution that significantly reduces the amount of nitrogen in drainage water, regardless of the production system or location: denitrifying bioreactors.

Denitrifying bioreactors come in many shapes and sizes, but in their simplest form, they're trenches filled with wood chips. Water from fields or aquaculture facilities flows through the trench, where bacteria living in wood chip crevices turn nitrate into a harmless gas that escapes into the air.

After gathering all the data, the message is bioreactors work.

, "Effectiveness of denitrifying bioreactors on water pollutant reduction from agricultural areas," is published in Transactions of the ASABE [DOI: 10.13031/trans.14011].

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/uoic-hth041521.php

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 12:23pm

Ants shrink their brains for motherhood — but can enlarge them when egg-laying ends

Brain volume plummets in ‘gamergate’ ants that gain the ability to reproduce, but rises again with a fall in fertility.

Ants might be small, but they have superhuman abilities, such as lifting objects that are many times their body weight. Now, researchers have found that some ants can even shrink and regrow their brains.

When their queen dies, the female workers in a colony of Indian jumping ants (Harpegnathos saltator) engage in weeks-long battles to establish new leadership. The winners, called gamergates, start to reproduce. Their ovaries become more active — but their brains shrink by about 20%, according to new  research.

To determine whether some of these changes are reversible, the scientists suppressed fertility in H. saltator gamergates. In response, most gamergates began hunting for food, a behaviour typical of worker ants devoted to foraging, and their brains expanded to reach a size roughly equal to that of foragers’ brains. Because foraging requires advanced cognitive abilities, brain re-expansion could help workers to return to forager status after they lose the battle over reproduction.

This is the first time that reversible changes in brain size on this scale have been observed in an insect, the researchers say.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00992-2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 16, 2021 at 12:16pm

Starving tuberculosis of sugars may be a new way to fight it

Tuberculosis is a devastating disease that claims over 1.5 million lives each year. The increase in TB cases that are resistant to the current antibiotics means that novel drugs to kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) are urgently needed. Researchers now have successfully discovered how Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses an essential sugar called trehalose, which provides a platform to design new and improved TB drugs and diagnostic agents.

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Tuberculosis (TB), caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent world-wide claiming over 1.5 million lives each year.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is a very unique pathogen and is able to survive in the human body for decades. One way that Mtb survives is by 'eating' scarce energy sources for nutrition, whilst at the same time the human host attempts to limit the food that is available.

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However, we need a better understanding of Mtb's intracellular diet because inhibiting the pathways that allow Mtb to access and use essential food sources could be good targets for the development of new anti-tubercular agents.

One source of energy that Mtb uses is a sugar that is found in its own cell wall, called trehalose. It appears that Mtb has evolved a unique strategy to recycle and reuse this sugar to ensure that it does not waste any potential energy sources, which are in short supply.

The transport protein, which is responsible for the uptake of trehalose, called LpqY, is essential for Mtb to establish infection. If the LpqY protein is deleted and no longer able to function then Mtb can no longer supply itself with trehalose and becomes less pathogenic.

In the paper, "Structural basis of trehalose recognition by the mycobacterial LpqY-SugABC transporter," published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, researchers from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, have unraveled the molecular basis of how Mtb uses and transports trehalose, a process which is specific to Mtb and does not occur in humans.

The team used X-ray crystallography to determine the 3-dimensional structure of LpqY and analyzed how this important transport protein is able to bind and recognize trehalose. They then went on to use a number of experimental techniques which showed that LpqY is highly specific for trehalose, is also able to recognize sugars that are similar to trehalose with small modifications and map key recognition features.

 Christopher M. Furze et al. Structural basis of trehalose recognition by the mycobacterial LpqY-SugABC transporter, Journal of Biological Chemistry (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.jbc.2021.100307

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-starving-tuberculosis-sugars.html?utm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 15, 2021 at 7:33am

Plastic Is Falling From the Sky. But Where’s It Coming From?

plastic rain is the new acid rain. But where is it all coming from?

New modeling published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 84 percent of airborne microplastics in the American West actually comes from the roads outside of major cities. Another 11 percent could be blowing all the way in from the ocean. (The researchers who built the model reckon that microplastic particles stay airborne for nearly a week, and that’s more than enough time for them to cross continents and oceans.)

Microplastics—particles smaller than 5 millimeters—come from a number of sources. Plastic bags and bottles released into the environment break down into smaller and smaller bits. Your washing machine is another major source: When you launder synthetic clothing, tiny microfibers slough off and get flushed to a wastewater treatment plant. That facility filters out some of the microfibers, trapping them in “sludge,” the treated human waste that’s then applied to agricultural fields as fertilizer. That loads the soil with microplastic. A wastewater plant will then flush the remaining microfibers out to sea in the treated water. This has been happening for decades, and because plastics disintegrate but don’t ever really disappear, the amount in the ocean has been skyrocketing.

In fact, this new research shows there may now be more microplastic blowing out of the ocean at any given time than there is going into it. Put another way: So much has accumulated in the ocean that the land may now be a net importer of microplastic from the sea. These microplastics aren’t just washing ashore and accumulating on beaches. When waves crash and winds scour the ocean, they launch seawater droplets into the air. These obviously contain salt, but also organic matter and microplastics. Then the water evaporates, and you're left just with the aerosols or tiny floating bits of particulate matter.  last year, a group of researchers demonstrated this phenomenon with microplastics, showing that they turn up in sea breezes.

https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-is-falling-from-the-sky/?utm_so...

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