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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 15, 2021 at 9:46am

Never Google Your Symptoms

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 14, 2021 at 11:56am

Protein behind corona’s slow Asia spread: Study

Deficiency in a particular human protein, which is more common in Europe and the United States than in Asia, could explain why coronavirus is not spreading as fast in Asian countries. The team has explained how higher levels of a human protein — neutrophil elastase — helps the virus to enter the human cell, multiply and also spread faster from infected individuals.

Deficiency in a particular human protein, which is more common in Europe and the United States than in Asia, could explain why coronavirus is not spreading as fast in Asian countries.

A team of scientists from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in WB, have found a biological reason for the slower spread of a mutant of coronavirus in Asia compared to the West. The team has explained how higher levels of a human protein — neutrophil elastase — helps the virus to enter the human cell, multiply and also spread faster from infected individuals.

However, this protein is kept in check by the biological system, which produces another protein called alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT). AAT deficiency leads to higher levels of neutrophil elastase in the cells, which in turn helps in faster spread of the virus. This deficiency is known to be much higher in Europe and America than among Asians. The study has been published in the journal, Infection, Genetics and Evolution

As per their data, AAT deficiency is the least in East Asian countries — 8 per 1,000 individuals in Malaysia, 5.4 per 1,000 in South Korea, 2.5 in Singapore. On the other hand, 67.3 in per 1,000 individuals in Spain are AAT deficient, 34.6 in the UK and 51.9 in France and in the US it is prevalent in 29 individuals among 1,000.

The numbers are representative of other Asian regions too, including India.

The researchers emphasized that this finding along with other social factors may explain the differential geographical/ethnic spread of the mutant virus.

https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/protein-b...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 10:21am

World First BMW Self Driving Motorbike Demo Live Video 2019 BMW Vision R1200 Autonomous Motorbike V

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 10:05am

Tiny Crustacean Redefines Ultrafast Movement

A new study from Duke University describes how the amphipod Dulichiella cf. appendiculata sets a new standard for achieving high acceleration and repeatable movements at small sizes. Males will snap their relatively huge claws 10,000 faster than the blink of an eye. These ultrafast movements make an audible snap, create water jets, and sometimes produce small bubbles due to rapid changes in water pressure. The potential behind these ultrafast movements is so great that even the Army is paying attention to these small animals. Even the world’s most technologically advanced robots would lose in a competition with this tiny crustacean.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 9:59am

Discovery of naturally occurring protein that could reverse severe muscle wasting in disease, aging and trauma

An exciting discovery by scientists may lead to faster recovery from muscle injury and wasting diseases.

When we tear a muscle – stem cells within it repair the problem. We can see this occurring not only in severe muscle wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy and in war veterans who survive catastrophic limb injuries, but also in our day to day lives when we “pull” a muscle. Also when we age and become frail we lose much of our muscle and our stem cells don’t seem to be able to work as well as we age.

These muscle stem cells are invisible engines that drive the tissue's growth and repair after such injuries. But growing these cells in the lab and then using them to therapeutically replace damaged muscle has been frustratingly difficult.

Researchers  have discovered a factor that triggers these muscle stem cells to proliferate and heal. In a mouse model of severe muscle damage, injections of this naturally occurring protein led to the complete regeneration of muscle and the return of normal movement after severe muscle trauma.

The scientists studied the regeneration of skeletal muscle in zebrafish, fast becoming the go-to animal model for the study of stem cell regeneration because the fish are quick to reproduce, easier to experimentally manipulate, and share at least 70 percent of their genes with humans. It is also transparent which allows the scientists to witness the actual regeneration in living muscle.

By studying the cells that migrated to a muscle injury in these fish the scientists identified a group of immune cells, called macrophages, which appeared to have a role in triggering the muscle stem cells to regenerate.

Macrophages are the cells that flock to any injury or infection site in the body, removing debris and promoting healing. They are the clean up crew of the immune system.

It has long been thought that two types of macrophages exist in the body: those that move to the injury rapidly and remove debris, and those that come in slower and stick around doing the longer term clean-up.

The research team, however, found that there were in fact eight genetically different types of macrophages in the injury site, and that one type, in particular, was the “cuddler”. Further investigation revealed that this affectionate macrophage released a substance called NAMPT. By removing these macrophages from the zebrafish and adding the NAMPT to the aquarium water the scientists found they could stimulate the muscle stem cells to grow and heal – effectively replacing the need for the macrophages.

The researchers are now trying to conduct clinical trials for the use of this compound in the treatment of muscle disease and injury.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03199-7

https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/discovery-of-naturally-occurri...

https://researchnews.cc/news/5097/Discovery-of-naturally-occurring-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 9:39am

Why is there water on Earth?

Water is essential to life as we know it and it seems completely normal to have water all around us. Yet Earth is the only known planet to be covered by oceans. Do we know exactly where its water came from?

This is not a simple question: it was long thought that Earth formed dry—without water, because of its proximity to the Sun and the high temperatures when the solar system formed. In this model, water could have been brought to Earth by comets or asteroids colliding with the Earth. Such a complex origin for water would likely mean that our planet is unique in the universe.

However, in a 2020 study, researchers showed that water—or at least its components, hydrogen and oxygen—may have been present in the rocks that initially formed the Earth. If that is so indeed, other "blue planets" with liquid water are more likely to exist elsewhere.

Liquid water covers more than 70% of Earth's surface, with about about 95.6% of it in oceans and seas, and the remaining 4% in glaciers, ice caps, groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil humidity, and the atmosphere.

But most of Earth's water is deep underground: between one and ten times the volume of the oceans are contained in the mantle.

At the surface of the Earth, "water" means two hydrogens for each oxygen (H₂0), whereas what we call "water" in the mantle corresponds to hydrogen incorporated in minerals, magmas and fluids. This hydrogen can bond with surrounding oxygen to form water at the appropriate temperature and pressure conditions.

While water represents less than 0.5% of the mass of the Earth, it is key to the evolution of the planet itself and to life at its surface.

In the early solar system, there was a lot of hydrogen, mainly in the form of dihydrogen gas (H₂), or bonded with oxygen atoms to form water (H₂O). However, Earth and the other rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) formed near the Sun, where it was too hot for water to incorporate into rock as ice: it just would have evaporated. So why does the Earth now have so much water, both in its mantle and on its surface?

https://sciencex.com/news/2021-02-earth.html?utm_source=nwletter&am...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 9:21am

Electron refrigerator: Ultrafast cooling mechanism discovered in novel plasma

Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence "CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter" have achieved a breakthrough—creating a completely new type of plasma by combining state-of-the-art technologies using ultrashort laser pulses and ultracold atomic gases. They report on a novel electron cooling mechanism occurring in such plasmas in the journal Nature Communications.

Matter exists in four states—solid, gas, liquid, and plasma—with plasma being the most abundant state in the visible universe. It consists of free charged particles such as ions and electrons. Plasmas can exist over a tremendous range of temperatures and densities, from the sun's core to lightning or flames. The challenges to understand plasma dynamics are first to identify universal mechanisms and then compare them to a controlled laboratory experiment. 

the researchers cool and trap atoms with laser light. They use the intense light field of an ultrashort laser pulse to break up atoms into electrons and ions within 200 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second. Because of the extremely low initial temperature of the atoms, the ions have temperatures lower than 40 millikelvin, which is only a fraction above the lowest possible temperature in the universe (0 Kelvin or minus 273 degree on the Celsius scale). In contrast, the electrons are initially very hot with temperatures of 5250 Kelvin, close to the ones found at the surface of the sun.

Hot electrons directly created by the ultrashort laser pulse begin to escape and leave behind a positively charged region that traps some of the electrons in an ultracold plasma. Such a plasma state has never been observed before.

The researchers  also observed that the trapped electrons in the plasma are cooled on ultrafast timescales and measured the final electronic temperature. In addition, they observed that the plasma is stable over a few hundred nanoseconds, which is a very long time for such systems.

Such ultracold plasmas provide benchmarks for theoretical models and can shed light on extreme conditions present in inertial confinement fusion or astronomical objects such as white dwarfs. Furthermore, the resulting ultracold electrons are interesting by themselves as a bright source for imaging biological samples.

Tobias Kroker et al. Ultrafast electron cooling in an expanding ultracold plasma, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20815-8

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-electron-refrigerator-ultrafast-cooli...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 9:15am

Tuning the circadian clock, boosting rhythms may be key to future treatments and medicines

Subconsciously, our bodies keep time for us through an ancient means—the circadian clock. A new  article reviews how the clock controls various aspects of homeostasis, and how organs coordinate their function over the course of a day.

What is fascinating is that nearly every cell that makes up our organs has its own clock, and thus timing is a crucial aspect of biology. Understanding how daily timing is integrated with function across organs has implications for human health, as disruption of the clock and circadian rhythms can be both a cause and effect of diseases from diabetes to cancer.

The circadian clock generates a ~24 hour rhythm that controls behavior, hormones, the immune system and metabolism. Using human cells and mice, researchers  aim to uncover the physiological circuits, for example between the brain and liver, whereby biological clocks achieve coherence. Their work, titled, "Communicating clocks shape circadian homeostasis," was published recently in Science.

Circadian clocks align internal processes with external time, which enables diverse lifeforms to anticipate daily environmental changes such as the light-dark cycle. In complex organisms, clock function starts with the genetically encoded molecular clock or oscillator within each cell and builds upward anatomically into an organism-wide system. Circadian misalignment, often imposed in modern society, can disrupt this system and induce adverse effects on health if prolonged.

Strategies to tune our clocks and boost rhythms have been promising in pre-clinical studies, which illustrates the importance of unraveling this aspect of our biology and unlocking the potential it holds for treatments and medicines of the future.

Without electrical light, high-speed travel, constant food availability and around the clock work-life schedules, our ancestors' clocks were in constant harmony with the environment. However, due to these pressures of modern society, aligning our internal time with geophysical time has become a challenge in today's world. Chronic misalignment—when eating and sleeping patterns conflict with the natural light-dark cycle—is associated with an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, neurological conditions, and cancer. A large portion of the global workforce has atypical hours and may be particularly vulnerable.

It has become urgent that we uncover the molecular underpinnings of the relationship between the circadian clock and disease. Deciphering the means by which clocks communicate across metabolic organs has the potential to transform our understanding of metabolism, and it may hold therapeutic promise for innovative, noninvasive strategies to promote health.

 Kevin B. Koronowski et al, Communicating clocks shape circadian homeostasis, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abd0951

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-tuning-circadian-clock-boost...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 8:59am

Women better at reading minds than men, new study finds

Psychologists  have developed the first ever 'mind-reading questionnaire' to assess how well people understand what others are really thinking.

A new approach to 'mind-reading' has been developed by researchers at the University of Bath, Cardiff, and London to improve how well we understand what others are thinking. And it transpires that women are much better than men at putting themselves in someone else's shoes.

Mind-reading, sometimes referred to in psychology as 'mentalising', is an important ability enabling us to pick-up on subtle behavioural cues that might indicate that someone we are speaking to is thinking something that they are not saying (e.g. being sarcastic or even lying).

The researchers say that we all have different mind-reading abilities, with some of us inherently better than others. The fact that not all of us are good at mind-reading can cause challenges—in particular for people with autism where it can lead to social struggles in building or maintaining relationships.

Rachel A. Clutterbuck et al, Development and validation of the Four-Item Mentalising Index., Psychological Assessment (2021). DOI: 10.1037/pas0001004

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-women-minds-men.html?utm_sou...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2021 at 8:56am

Birds can 'read' the Earth's magnetic signature well enough to get back on course

Birdwatchers get very excited when a 'rare' migratory bird makes landfall having been blown off-course and flown beyond its normal range. But these are rare for a reason; most birds that have made the journey before are able to correct for large displacements and find their final destination.

Now, new research by an international team shows for the first time, how birds displaced in this way are able to navigate back to their migratory route and gives us an insight into how they accomplish this feat. They describe how reed warblers can navigate from a 'magnetic position' beyond what they have experienced in their normal migration route, back towards that correct route.

Different parts of the Earth have a distinct 'geomagnetic signature' according to their location. This is a combination of the strength of the geomagnetic field, the magnetic inclination or the dip angle between magnetic field lines and the horizon and the magnetic declination, or the angle between directions to the geographic and magnetic North poles.

Adult birds already familiar with their migration route, and its general magnetic signatures, were held in captivity for a short period before being released back into the wild, and exposed to a simulation of the earth's magnetic signature at a location thousands of miles beyond the birds' natural migratory corridor. Despite remaining physically located at their capture site and experiencing all other sensory clues about their location, including starlight and the sights, smell and sounds of their actual location, the birds still showed the urge to begin their journey as though they were in the location suggested by the magnetic signal they were experiencing.

They oriented themselves to fly in a direction which would lead them 'back' to their migratory path from the location suggested to them by the magnetic signals they were experiencing.

This shows that the earth's magnetic field is the key factor in guiding reed warblers when they are blown off course. The overriding impulse was to respond to the magnetic information they were receiving. current work shows is that birds are able to sense that they are beyond the bounds of the magnetic fields that are familiar to them from their year-round movements, and are able to extrapolate their position sufficiently from the signals. This fascinating ability enables bird to navigate towards their normal migration route.

What these birds are achieving is "true navigation". In other words, they are able to return to a known goal after displacement to a completely unknown location without relying on familiar surroundings, cues that emanate from the destination, or information collected during the outward journey.

But questions remain about whether the birds have an accurate 'map' or are just using a 'rule of thumb' measurement to judge the general direction of travel needed to get back on course.

"Navigation by extrapolation of geomagnetic cues in a migratory songbird" Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.051

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-birds-earth-magnetic-signature.html?u...

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