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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 7:47am

Where You Sit in a Room Can Influence Your Risk of Catching COVID-19

https://www.sciencealert.com/where-you-sit-in-a-classroom-might-inf...

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Non-Concussive Head Hits Influence the Brain’s Microstructure

Comparing the brain scans of high-impact rugby players with those of athletes in noncontact sports, such as rowing and swimming, revealed tiny, yet significant, differences in the brain’s white matter.

https://www.the-scientist.com/the-literature/non-concussive-head-hi...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 6:42am

New Type of Immunotherapy Helps Mice with Hard-to-Treat Breast Cancer Survive Longer

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 6:40am

**Oral cancer pain predicts likelihood of cancer spreading

 Oral cancer is more likely to spread in patients experiencing high levels of pain, according to a team of researchers at New York University College of Dentistry that found genetic and cellular clues as to why metastatic oral cancers are so painful.

The findings—which appear in Scientific Reports, a journal published by Nature—may ultimately be used to alleviate oral cancer pain and refine surgical decision making when treating oral cancer.

Oral cancer can cause severe pain during everyday activities, including talking and eating. Previous research by Brian L. Schmidt, DDS, MD, PhD, director of the NYU Oral Cancer Center and one of the study’s authors, suggests that patients with metastatic oral cancer—cancer that spreads beyond the mouth—experience more pain than those whose cancer has not spread. The new study helps researchers understand why.

https://researchnews.cc/news/3000/Oral-cancer-pain-predicts-likelih...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 6:24am

Carnivores living near people feast on human food, threatening ecosystems

Ecologists  have found that carnivores living near people can get more than half of their diets from human food sources, a major lifestyle disruption that could put North America's carnivore-dominated ecosystems at risk. The researchers studied the diets of seven predator species across the Great Lakes region of the U.S. They gathered bone and fur samples for chemical analysis from areas as remote as national parks to major metropolitan regions like Albany, New York. They found that the closer carnivores lived to cities and farms, the more human food they ate.

 Philip J. Manlick el al., "Human disturbance increases trophic niche overlap in terrestrial carnivore communities," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2012774117

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-carnivores-people-feast-human-food.ht...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 6:20am

Scientists engineer bacteria-killing molecules from wasp venom

A team led by scientists  has engineered powerful new antimicrobial molecules from toxic proteins found in wasp venom. The team hopes to develop the molecules into new bacteria-killing drugs, an important advancement considering increasing numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria which can cause illness such as sepsis and tuberculosis.

The  researchers altered a highly toxic small protein from a common Asian wasp species, Vespula lewisii, the Korean yellow-jacket wasp. The alterations enhanced the molecule's ability to kill bacterial cells while greatly reducing its ability to harm human cells. In animal models, the scientists showed that this family of new antimicrobial molecules made with these alterations could protect mice from otherwise lethal bacterial infections.

 Osmar N. Silva el al., "Repurposing a peptide toxin from wasp venom into antiinfectives with dual antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2012379117

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-scientists-bacteria-killing-molecules...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 5:57am

Dueling proteins give shape to plants

In an elegant choreography, plants take cues from their environment and channel them into flowers, roots, or branches.

Researchers have been studying two key groups of proteins that influence plant form and timing of developmental transitions. Terminal Flower 1 (TLF1) proteins promote branch formation. When it is repressed, flowers grow. Flowering Locus T (FT) proteins, on the other hand, promote flowering in response to seasonal cues like day length. Strangely enough, the two proteins are almost identical.

These two elements have significance galore. Besides flowering, they're involved in tuberization in potatoes, bulb formation in onions, tendril formation in grapes, growth cessation in trees, lots of things.

Manipulating these genes, some have argued, could lead to the next "green revolution" as one could theoretically "trick" a plant that normally only flowers in the long days of summer to flower quickly, and thus produce fruit or seed, in the short days of winter with a deft genetic edit of TFL1. Or, in an area with a longer growing season, a clever manipulation of growth architecture via FT could encourage increased branching and then a later, and more abundant, flowering and fruit development on the many branches.

Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18782

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Plants have already been bred to have reduced TFL1 activity. Tomato gardeners may know these as determinant plants, which set all their flowers at the same time, as opposed to the indeterminant variety, which continue to branch, flower, and fruit over a period of months. Determinant plants make commercial agriculture more efficient, as fruits can be harvested in one go as opposed to repeated passes.

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-dueling-proteins.html?utm_source=nwle...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 5:26am

Experimental COVID-19 treatment given to Trump found to relieve symptoms in macaques and hamsters

A team of researchers with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., working with the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, has found that the antibody cocktail given to President Trump was effective in reducing COVID-19 symptoms in rhesus macaques and golden hamsters. 

The US president had received an experimental antibody cocktail along with doses of vitamin D, zinc and a heartburn medicine. The experimental antibody cocktail he was given was provided courtesy of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company that has been conducting research into the use of such antibody cocktails as therapies for a host of viral infections, including COVID-19. In this new effort, the researchers tested the antibody cocktail with rhesus macaques and golden hamsters.

In the first part of the study, the researchers administered the cocktail (which they call REGN-COV2) to healthy rhesus macaques. Prior research had shown that they can infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but typically exhibit only mild symptoms. Three days after receiving the cocktail, the monkeys were injected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and then monitored to see if the treatment had any impact. They found that monkeys who had received the treatment prior to infection exhibited far fewer symptoms than a control group and had a much lower viral load.

The researchers also injected some of the monkeys with the cocktail after they were infected and found that doing so also reduced symptoms and resulted in faster viral clearance. The researchers next repeated the same experiments with golden hamsters. They, too, have been found to be susceptible to COVID-19, but have much more severe symptoms, including major weight loss. They found that giving it to them two days before they were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus resulted in greatly reduced symptoms and they did not suffer weight loss. And giving it to the hamsters after an infection had set in also resulted in reduced symptoms and faster viral clearance.

The researchers suggest that REGN-COV2 may offer therapeutic benefits both as a treatment and as a preventative measure for COVID-19.

Alina Baum et al. REGN-COV2 antibodies prevent and treat SARS-CoV-2 infection in rhesus macaques and hamsters, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abe2402

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-experimental-covid-treatment...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 13, 2020 at 5:18am

New virtual reality software allows scientists to 'walk' inside cells

Virtual reality software which allows researchers to 'walk' inside and analyse individual cells could be used to understand fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for disease. The software, called vLUME, was created by scientists. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells.

Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.

vLUME is revolutionary imaging software that brings humans into the nanoscale. It allows scientists to visualise, question and interact with 3-D biological data, in real time all within a virtual reality environment, to find answers to biological questions faster. It's a new tool for new discoveries. Viewing data in this way can stimulate new initiatives and ideas.

vLUME: 3D virtual reality for single-molecule localization microscopy, Nature Methods (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-020-0962-1

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-virtual-reality-software-scient...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 12, 2020 at 5:49am

Scientists May Be Able to Treat Tinnitus With Electronic Music And Tongue Buzzing

People who experience tinnitus (the perception of noise or ringing in the ears) might finally have some hope for alleviating their symptoms, after an experimental device that stimulates the tongue was found to ease the condition in a sample of 273 volunteers with a chronic case of it.The tongue buzzing is combined with a carefully prepared audio stream fed through headphones, sounding a little like ambient electronic music. The combined treatment caused an improvement in symptoms for 86 percent of the participants, with an average drop of around 14 points on a tinnitus severity ranking scored from 1 to 100. Even better, the improvements lasted for up to a year for many of the individuals involved. These are promising signs for the 10-15 percent of people worldwide who live with the phantom sounds and ringing ears caused by tinnitus.

A  device – called the Lenire – aims to heighten the sensitivity of the brain, effectively crowding out the overactive parts of the brain that would otherwise cause tinnitus symptoms.

https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/564/eabb2830

https://www.sciencealert.com/audible-tones-and-tongue-buzzing-could...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 11, 2020 at 9:07am

 Fertiliser use is fuelling climate-warming nitrous oxide emissions: study

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-no2-idUSKBN26S35W

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Life in the Clouds

High above our heads, even beyond 120,000 feet up, scientists have found tiny organisms called microbes. These high-flyers were swept up from the ground by winds and storms, or spewed out through volcanic processes. While most of these high-altitude microbes are dead, some are still alive, or have produced material called spores that could activate in the future. David J. Smith, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, uses airplanes to collect these microbes, analyze them in the laboratory, and expose them to even higher altitudes with balloon experiments to see how they will respond. If microbes can inhabit our clouds, what about other planets? While more research is needed, Smith and others are fascinated by the possibility that airborne microbes could also be found elsewhere in the solar system, and beyond.

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