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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

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2021 at 12:21pm

This is a fact!

Many women complain that they 're not being considered or overlooked for awards and prizes including the Nobel prize (1) in science just because of their gender. I recently found an interesting thing. I got a national award for science communication. During the award giving ceremony, Indian science and Tech secretary told us an interesting story.

Department of Science and Technology, India, gives prizes for the best PhD write up to train and make the budding scientists better at science communication. This year, they removed the names before sending the articles for assessment. And magic, magic, magic, magic. All the prize winners are women! Not even a single man got it.

What did we learn from it? Patriarchal mindsets are definitely impeding womens' chances of winning awards and prizes in science! Once you change the situation where there is no way to learn for the judge whether the person who is being judged is male or female, there is a better chance for women to win!

Footnotes:

1. Why more women don’t win Nobel prizes in science

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2021 at 11:12am

An intelligent soft material that curls under pressure or expands when stretched

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2021 at 10:20am

'Fungal ghosts' protect skin, fabric from toxins, radiation

The idea of creating selectively porous materials has captured the attention of chemists for decades. Now, new research from Northwestern University shows that fungi may have been doing exactly this for millions of years.

When scientists set out to synthesize melanin that would mimic that which was formed by certain fungi known to inhabit unusual, hostile environments including spaceships, dishwashers and even Chernobyl, they did not initially expect the materials would prove highly porous— a property that enables the material to store and capture molecules.

 Journal of the American Chemical Society 

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-fungal-ghosts-skin-fabric-toxins.html...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2021 at 8:02am

Researchers discover new way to halt excessive inflammation

Researchers have discovered a new way to 'put the brakes' on excessive inflammation by regulating a type of white blood cell that is critical for our immune system. The discovery has the potential to protect the body from unchecked damage caused by inflammatory diseases.

Excessive inflammation is a prominent feature of many diseases such as multiple sclerosis, arthritis and inflammatory bowel diseases.

When immune cells (white blood cells) in our body called macrophages are exposed to potent infectious agents, powerful inflammatory proteins known as cytokines are produced to fight the invading infection. However, if these cytokine levels get out of control, significant tissue damage can occur.

The researchers have found that a protein called Arginase-2 works through the energy source of macrophage cells, known as mitochondria, to limit inflammation. Specifically they have shown for the first time that Arginase-2 is critical for decreasing a potent inflammatory cytokine called IL-1.

This discovery could allow researchers to develop new treatments that target the Arginase-2 protein and protect the body from unchecked damage caused by inflammatory diseases.

Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21617-2

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-halt-excessive-inflammation....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 5, 2021 at 10:07am

Velcro-like cellular proteins key to tissue strength

 Where do bodily tissues get their strength? New CU Boulder research provides important new clues to this long-standing mystery, identifying how specialized proteins called cadherins join forces to make cells stick and stay stuck together. The findings, publishing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to more life-like artificial tissues and tumor busting drugs. Better understanding these proteins allows for the design of more effective engineered tissues that better mimic biological materials as well as cancer therapeutics that are more efficient and target-specific.

For example: If a cancer treatment could block a specific interaction of these cadherin proteins, it could potentially slow tumor growth by stopping or slowing the formation of new blood vessels in tumors.

Cadherin proteins are important in our bodies because they facilitate the binding and adhesion of cells in neural, cardiac, placental and skin tissues, among others, helping them maintain their function and shape.

These large, rod-like proteins in the cell membrane mediate information between the inside and outside of the cell. Where they stick out, they can bond with other cadherin proteins from the same cell, as well as those from other cells.

Like Velcro, the study found, the more pieces stick together, the stronger the bond and the longer it lasts. This amplified strength not only between proteins which exist on the same cell, but between proteins located on different cells—creating bonds 30 times stronger than the sum of their individual strengths. And once the bonding begins, these bonds become progressively stronger and stronger.

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/10/e2019845118

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/03/01/velcro-cellular-proteins-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 4, 2021 at 1:00pm

Coronavirus: what happens when a person is simultaneously infected with two variants?

Scientists in Brazil recently reported that two people were simultaneously infected with two different variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This co-infection seemed to have no effect on the severity of patients’ illness, and both recovered without needing to be hospitalised.

Although this is one of the few such cases recorded with SARS-CoV-2 – and the study is yet to be published in a scientific journal – scientists have observed infections with multiple strains with other respiratory viruses, such as influenza. This has raised questions about how these viruses may interact in an infected person, and what it could mean for generating new variants.

The detection of multiple variants in a person could be the result of co-infection by the different variants, or the generation of mutations within the patient after the initial infection. One way to discriminate these two scenarios is by comparing the sequences of the variants circulating in the population with those in the patient. In the Brazilian study mentioned above, the variants identified corresponded to different lineages that had been previously detected in the population, implying co-infection by the two variants.

It is important to note that this requires the two viruses to infect the same cell. Even if a person is infected with several variants, if they replicate in different parts of the body, they will not interact with each other. Indeed, this was seen in patients, where different quasi-species of coronaviruses were found in the upper and lower respiratory tracts, suggesting that viruses in these sites were not directly mixing with each other.

The evidence so far does not suggest that infection with more than one variant leads to more severe disease. And although possible, very few cases of co-infection have been reported. More than 90% of the infections in the UK currently are by B117 – the so-called Kent variant. With such a high prevalence of one variant in the population, co-infections are not likely to occur. Still, monitoring this landscape allows scientists to track the emergence of these new variants of concern and understand and respond to any changes in their transmission or vaccine efficacy.

https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-happens-when-a-person-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 4, 2021 at 12:28pm

Think all your plastic is being recycled? New research shows it can end up in the ocean

Some plastic waste ends up in the environment, even when we thought it was being recycled. Plastic waste most commonly leaks into the environment at the country to which it's shipped. Plastics which are of low value to recyclers, such as lids and polystyrene foam containers, are most likely to end up polluting the environment.

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Plastic waste collected for recycling is often sold for reprocessing in Asia. There, the plastics are sorted, washed, chopped, melted and turned into flakes or pellets. These can be sold to manufacturers to create new products.

The global recycled plastics market is dominated by two major plastic types:

polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which in 2017 comprised 55% of the recyclable plastics market. It's used in beverage bottles and takeaway food containers and features a "1" on the packaging

high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which comprises about 33% of the recyclable plastics market. HDPE is used to create pipes and packaging such as milk and shampoo bottles, and is identified by a "2."

The next two most commonly traded types of plastics, each with 4% of the market, are:

• polypropylene or "5," used in containers for yoghurt and spreads
• low-density polyethylene known as "4," used in clear plastic films on packaging.

The remaining plastic types comprise polyvinyl chloride (3), polystyrene (6), other mixed plastics (7), unmarked plastics and "composites." Composite plastic packaging is made from several materials not easily separated, such as long-life milk containers with layers of foil, plastic and paper.

This final group of plastics is not generally sought after as a raw material in manufacturing, so has little value to recyclers.

https://theconversation.com/think-all-your-plastic-is-being-recycle...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 4, 2021 at 12:23pm

Expect more extreme short-duration thunderstorms caused by global w...

Climate experts have revealed that rising temperatures will intensify future rainfall extremes at a much greater rate than average rainfall, with largest increases to short thunderstorms.

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How do you know where volcanic ash will end up?

When the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted in April 2010, air traffic was interrupted for six days and then disrupted until May. Until then, models from the nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres (VAACs) around the world, which aimed at predicting when the ash cloud interfered with aircraft routes, were based on the tracking of the clouds in the atmosphere.

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New approach to removing toxins from wastewater

The New York State Center for Clean Water Technology (CCWT) at Stony Brook University has made a series of critical discoveries regarding a new approach to protecting Long Island's drinking water, groundwater, and surface waters. Some of the discoveries involve the likely human carcinogen, 1,4-dioxane, which has been found at higher levels in Long Island drinking water than anywhere else in the U.S.

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Think all your plastic is being recycled? New research shows it can...

We all know it's wrong to toss your rubbish into the ocean or another natural place. But it might surprise you to learn some plastic waste ends up in the environment, even when we thought it was being recycled.

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