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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 5, 2020 at 6:12am

“I keep a series of Post-it notes at my desk, which I update each day with the number of lives lost to Covid… When I’m feeling drained, I look at that number.”
How scientists are working selflessly to help the world … and how they are getting motivated to work day and night …

In their own words : “I keep a series of Post-it notes at my desk, which I update each day with the number of lives lost to Covid … When I’m feeling drained, I look at that number.”

And get back to work - Virologist Katherine McMahan who is working on a potential vaccine for covid 19

“I keep a series of Post-it notes at my desk, which I update each d...

Virologist Katherine McMahan is working on a potential vaccine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts (with Dutch Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica), that has shown promise in monkeys. (The New York Times | 13 min read)
Reference: Nature paper

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 5, 2020 at 6:03am

Indian vaccine producer Bet Big on Head Start in Coronavirus Vaccine Race

The world’s largest vaccine producer, the Serum Institute, announced a plan to make hundreds of millions of doses of an unproven inoculation. It’s a gamble with a huge upside. And huge risks.

The Serum Institute of India makes 1.5 billion doses of vaccines every year. It has put its might behind the coronavirus-vaccine candidate being develo..., UK, and is preparing to produce 500 doses each minute in the hopes that trials will prove the vaccine’s efficacy. The company’s output will be split 50–50 between India and the rest of the world, with a focus on poorer countries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/world/asia/coronavirus-vaccine-i...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 5, 2020 at 5:43am

Casimir force used to control and manipulate objects

The weirdness of quantum physics. In reality a perfect vacuum does not exist—even in empty space at zero temperature, virtual particles, like photons, flicker in and out of existence.

"These fluctuations interact with objects placed in vacuum and are actually enhanced in magnitude as temperature is increased, causing a measurable force from "nothing"—otherwise known as the Casimir force.

This is handy because we live at room temperature. We have now shown it's also possible to use the force to do cool things. But to do that, we need to develop precision technology that allows us control and manipulate objects with this force.

Researchers were able to measure the Casimir force and manipulate the objects through a precision microwave photonic cavity, known as a re-entrant cavity, at room-temperature, using a setup with a thin metallic membrane separated from the re-entrant cavity, exquisitely controlled to roughly the width of a grain of dust.

"Because of the Casimir force between the objects, the metallic membrane, which flexed back and forth, had its spring-like oscillations significantly modified and was used to manipulate the properties of the membrane and re-entrant cavity system in a unique way.

"This allowed orders of magnitudes of improvement in force sensitivity and the ability to control the mechanical state of the membrane."

J. M. Pate et al. Casimir spring and dilution in macroscopic cavity optomechanics, Nature Physics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-0975-9

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-casimir.html?utm_source=nwletter&...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 5, 2020 at 5:36am

Droplet spread from humans doesn't always follow airflow

The flow physics of someone coughing is complex, involving turbulent jets and droplet evaporation.

And the rise of COVID-19 has revealed the gaps in our knowledge of the physics of transmission and mitigation strategies."

One such gap in the physics is a clear, simple description of where individual droplets go when ejected.

As a person breathes, they emit droplets of various sizes that don't necessarily follow the airflow faithfully.

"We represent breathing as a point source of both air and droplets and include a point sink to model the effect of extraction of air and droplets. 

To take their size and density differences into account, we use the Maxey-Riley equation, which describes the motion of a small but finite-sized rigid sphere through a fluid."

This work gives researchers a general framework to understand the droplet dispersion. The model simplicity demonstrates that bimodality could actually be a property of the droplets themselves, and the group provides formulas to predict when such droplets will have short ranges.

"Our study shows there isn't a linear relation between droplet size and displacement—with both small and large droplets traveling further than medium-sized ones

We can't afford to be complacent about small droplets. PPE is an effective barrier to large droplets but may be less effective for small ones."

As a solution, Mehendale came up with the idea of creating an aerosol extractor device. The team is working on plans to manufacture the aerosol extractor to keep clinicians safe during a wide range of aerosol-generating procedures routinely performed in medicine and dentistry. Extraction units placed near the droplet sources can effectively trap droplets, if their diameters fall below that of a human hair.

"This has important implications for the COVID-19 pandemic," said Cummins. "Larger droplets would be easily captured by PPE, such as masks and face shields. But smaller droplets may penetrate some forms of PPE, so an extractor could help reduce the weakness in our current defense against COVID-19 and future pandemics."

Mehendale said a better understanding of the droplet behavior will help "inform the safety guidelines for aerosol-generating procedures, and it will be relevant during the current and future pandemics, as well as for other infectious diseases. This mathematical model may also serve as the basis of modeling the impact on droplet dispersion of ventilation systems existing within a range of clinical spaces."

 "The dispersion of spherical droplets in source-sink flows and their relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic," Physics of Fluids, aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0021427

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-droplet-humans-doesnt-airflow.html?ut...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 5, 2020 at 5:30am

Why microwaving liquids is different from other heating techniques, and how this issue can be resolved

Water heated in a microwave just isn't the same. 

Typically, when a liquid is being warmed, the heating source—a stove, for example—heats the container from below. By a process called convection, as the liquid toward the bottom of the container warms up, it becomes less dense and moves to the top, allowing a cooler section of the liquid to contact the source. This ultimately results in a uniform temperature throughout the glass.

Inside a microwave, however, the electric field acting as the heating source exists everywhere. Because the entire glass itself is also warming up, the convection process does not occur, and the liquid at the top of the container ends up being much hotter than the liquid at the bottom.

By designing a silver plating to go along the rim of a glass, the group was able to shield the effects of the microwave at the surface of the liquid. The silver acts as a guide for the waves, reducing the electric field at the top and effectively blocking the heating. This creates a convection process similar to traditional approaches, resulting in a more uniform temperature.

Placing silver in the microwave may seem like a dangerous idea, but similar metal structures with finely tuned geometry to avoid ignition have already been safely used for microwave steam pots and rice cookers.

"After carefully designing the metal structure at the appropriate size, the metal edge, which is prone to ignition, is located at weak field strength, where it can completely avoid ignition, so it is still safe. 

Solids don't undergo convection, so getting your leftovers to warm up uniformly is a completely different challenge.

"For solids, there is no simple way to design a bowl or plate in order to achieve a much better heating result. 

We can change the field distribution, but the change is very small, so the improvement is limited."

The group is considering other ways to improve nonuniformity in solid foods

"Multiphysics analysis for unusual heat convection in microwave heating liquid," AIP Advances (2020). aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0013295

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-microwaving-liquids-techniques-issue....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 5, 2020 at 5:20am

Malignant bone cancer diagnosed in a dinosaur for the first time

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-malignant-cancer-dinosaur.html?utm_so...

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https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-blood-baby-brain-hours-birth...

Blood test could diagnose baby brain damage just hours after birth

An early blood test could detect which babies deprived of oxygen at birth are at risk of serious neurodisabilities like cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

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Large study confirms vitamin D does not reduce risk of depression in adults

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-large-vitamin-d-depression-a...

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https://phys.org/news/2020-08-cern-indications-rare-higgs-boson.htm...

CERN experiments announce first indications of a rare Higgs boson process

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https://techxplore.com/news/2020-08-windows-thumbs-ccleaner.html?ut...

Windows 10 turns thumbs down on CCleaner

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https://theconversation.com/these-dogs-are-trained-to-sniff-out-the...

Dogs are being trained to sniff out the coronavirus. Most have a 100% success rate

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 4, 2020 at 6:18am

Does Coronavirus Linger? What We Know About How Viruses Hide in The Brain And Testes

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-we-know-so-far-about-chron...

A chronic or persistent infection continues for months or even years, during which time virus is being continually produced, albeit in many cases at low levels. Frequently these infections occur in a so-called immune privileged site.

There are a few places in the body that are less accessible to the immune system and where it is difficult to eradicate all viral infections. These include the central nervous system, the testes and the eye.

It is thought that the evolutionary advantage to having an immune privileged region is that it protects a site like the brain, for example, from being damaged by the inflammation that results when the immune system battles an infection.

An immune privileged site not only is difficult for the immune system to enter, it also limits proteins that increase inflammation. The reason is that while inflammation helps kill a pathogen, it can also damage an organ such as the eye, brain or testes.

The result is an uneasy truce where inflammation is limited but infection continues to fester.

But there is another way that a virus can hide in the body and reemerge later.

A latent viral infection occurs when the virus is present within an infected cell but dormant and not multiplying. In a latent virus, the entire viral genome is present, and infectious virus can be produced if latency ends and the infections becomes active.

The latent virus may integrate into the human genome – as does HIV, for example – or exist in the nucleus as a self-replicating piece of DNA called an episome.

A latent virus can reactivate and produce infectious viruses, and this can occur months to decades after the initial infection. Perhaps the best example of this is chickenpox, which although seemingly eradicated by the immune system can reactivate and cause herpes zoster decades later.

Fortunately, chickenpox and zoster are now prevented by vaccination. To be infected with a virus capable of producing a latent infection is to be infected for the rest of your life.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 4, 2020 at 6:08am

Antioxidant-rich foods like black tea, chocolate, and berries may increase risk for certain cancers, new study finds

Cancer in the small intestine is quite rare, whereas colo-rectal cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death for men and women. What is it about the colon that seems to attract cancer?

Cancer mutations are not necessarily bad actors in and of themselves. In fact, in certain micro-environments like the gut, these mutations can actually help the body to fight cancer, not spread it. However, if the gut microbiome produces high levels of metabolites, like those found in certain bacteria and antioxidant-rich foods like black tea and hot cocoa, then it acts as a particularly hospitable environment to mutated genes and will accelerate the growth of bowel cancers.

Researchers kept gut microbiomes in mind as they took a closer look at gastrointestinal cancers, and may have found the reason why only 2% of cancers take root in the small intestine, whereas a whopping 98% of cancers take place in the colon. One major difference between these two organs is their levels of gut bacteria: the small intestine contains few, whereas the colon contains multitudes.

Scientists are beginning to pay more and more attention to the role gut microbiomes play in our health: both their positive effects and, in this case, their sometimes pernicious role in aiding and abetting disease

TP53 is a gene found in every cell. It produces a protein called p53 which acts as the cell's barrier, suppressing genetic mutations in the cell. However, when p53 becomes damaged, it no longer protects the cell; quite the opposite: It drives the cancer, helping tumors spread and grow.

What's in this flora that makes colon cancer spread so quickly? A close analysis identified the culprit: gut flora that produces metabolites, aka "antioxidants", which are found in high concentrations in foods such as black tea, hot chocolate, nuts and berries. Tellingly, when the scientists fed mice an antioxidant-rich diet, their gut flora accelerated p53's cancer-driver mode. This finding is of particular concern to those patients with a family history of colorectal cancer.

The extent to which microbiomes affect cancer mutations—in some cases, entirely changing their nature is quite alarming.

The gut microbiome switches mutant p53 from tumor-suppressive to oncogenic, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2541-0 , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2541-0

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 4, 2020 at 6:03am

Add fresh air to our coronavirus arsenal **  We Need to Talk About Ventilation How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we are still doing so little to mitigate airborne transmission? Evidence is mounting that SARS-CoV-2 can pass from person to person through exhaled air. If there is potential for airborne transmission, some scientists argue that we should prioritize good ventilation alongside hand-washing, social distanci.... This could mean moving more activities, such as school, outdoors, opening doors and windows wherever possible and identifying locations where recirculated air could be filtered. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-tal...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 4, 2020 at 5:57am

Protection against terrorist attacks with homemade explosives

Terrorist attacks often feature the use of homemade explosives. For the police and security forces to be able to take appropriate precautions and assess the damage after an attack, they need access to the right kind of tools. A research team from the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach-Institut, EMI, has now developed a sophisticated risk-analysis system to help prevent such attacks. At the same time, the software-based system assists with the forensic investigation of such incidents. It can therefore support the police to foil attacks with homemade explosives and protect the public at major gatherings and other events.

Researchers developed a software tool that analyzes and quantifies the expected damage from a homemade bomb with almost no need for reconstruction. This gives the police a system that helps not only with the prevention of an attack but also with the forensic assessment of the potential damage. 

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-08-terrorist-homemade-explosives.h...

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