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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 6:51am

Do I really need this crown? Dentists admit feeling pressured to offer unnecessary treatments

https://theconversation.com/do-i-really-need-this-crown-dentists-ad...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 6:40am

Put the baking soda back in the bottle: banned sodium bicarbonate ‘milkshakes’ don’t make racehorses faster

The controversial and banned practice of giving horses baking soda “milkshakes” before a race doesn’t work, according to our analysis of the available research.

Racing folklore says sodium bicarbonate milkshakes can boost racehorses’ endurance because the alkalinity of the baking soda helps counter the buildup of lactic acid in the blood when running.

But our systematic research review, recently published in the Journal of Equine Veterinary Science reveals milkshakes don’t boost horses’ athletic performance.

This means any trainer still tempted to flout the ban on this tactic would be endangering their horses’ welfare and risking heavy sanctions over a practice that is basically snake oil.

https://theconversation.com/put-the-baking-soda-back-in-the-bottle-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 6:28am

**Using radar to detect foreign objects in foods

Foreign objects—glass splinters, for example—that find their way into foods can be hazardous to consumers. Established X-ray techniques detect primarily metals—glass, plastic and wood pose a challenge. SAMMI, a new prototype, fills this gap: using radar, it has already detected glass splinters in sandwich cookies, as well as missing pieces of chocolate in advent calendars.

Any number of things can go awry during manufacture and cause glass splinters, metal shavings, wood splinters or plastic pieces to end up in the product. Product recalls not only damage companies financially, they also result in a loss of consumer confidence. Manufacturers therefore have a keen interest in inspecting their products for foreign objects. Currently, they do this primarily with X-ray machines, but these do not reliably detect all foreign objects. While they can easily identify metals, they often have difficulty with plastics, wood and glass. This means that, despite inspections, there is still a certain residual risk for manufacturers.

SAMMI, a prototype developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR, can now close this gap and provide greater security in food production. "Our system is based on millimeter waves and can augment established X-ray techniques," says Daniel Behrendt, business unit spokesperson at Fraunhofer FHR. "It detects the foreign matter that X-ray techniques can easily overlook—that is, glass splinters, plastics and wood. However, it is not able to penetrate metals, which in return is detected by X-ray techniques." Another advantage of the technology is that the millimeter waves used to inspect the foods pose no health risk.

The inspection works as follows: the food is placed on a conveyor belt and transported through the machine. Above the conveyor, the transmitting antenna rotates and transmits its waves through the product; below it, the receiving antenna receives these waves. The millimeter waves are uniquely attenuated by each of the different food materials and undergo a specific delay in their transit time. This makes it possible to identify not only the structure and composition of the food, but also the slightest deviations from those—such as are caused by foreign objects, for instance. Assigning a pixel to each measurement point and encoding the changes with different colors produces an image of the investigated object on which the foreign matter is immediately evident. Even packaged goods can be inspected in this way, non-destructively and without physical contact.

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-radar-foreign-foods.html?utm_so...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 6:20am

New way of cooking rice removes arsenic and retains mineral nutrients, study shows

Cooking rice in a certain way removes over 50 percent of the naturally occurring arsenic in brown rice, and 74 percent in white rice, according to new research. Importantly, this new method does not reduce micronutrients in the rice.

This way of cooking rice ( called the "parboiling with absorption method" (PBA)), removes most of the arsenic, while keeping most nutrients in the cooked rice.

The PBA method involves parboiling the rice in pre-boiled water for five minutes before draining and refreshing the water, then cooking it on a lower heat to absorb all the water.

Manoj Menon et al. Improved rice cooking approach to maximize arsenic removal while preserving nutrient elements, Science of The Total Environment (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.143341

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-cooking-rice-arsenic-retains-mineral....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 6:13am

Scientists identify specific brain region and circuits controlling attention

The attentional control that organisms need to succeed in their goals comes from two abilities: the focus to ignore distractions and the discipline to curb impulses. A new study  neuroscientists shows that these abilities are independent, but that the activity of norepinephrine-producing neurons in a single brain region, the locus coeruleus, controls both by targeting two distinct areas of the prefrontal cortex.

 Andrea Bari el al., "Differential attentional control mechanisms by two distinct noradrenergic coeruleo-frontal cortical pathways," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015635117

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-scientists-specific-brain-re...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 6:07am

Bats can predict the future, researchers discover

Bats are quite skilled at predicting one thing: where to find dinner ( in the future). 

Bats calculate where their prey is headed by building on-the-fly predictive models of target motion from echoes researchers find. The models are so robust, bats can continue to track prey even when it temporarily vanishes behind echo-blocking obstacles like trees.

Although predicting object motion paths through vision has been extensively studied, these findings, published today in the journal PNAS, are the first to examine the comparable process in hearing. The work enhances the understanding of auditory-guided behaviours in animals and humans, including sight-impaired people who use listen to sounds to track objects in their surroundings.

Just the way a tennis player needs to find out when and where they will hit the ball, a bat needs to anticipate when and where it will make contact with the insect it's hunting. The insect is flying. The bat is also flying. In this very rapidly changing environment, if the bat were to just rely on the information it got from the most recent echo, it would miss the insect.

The bat uses the time delay between each echolocation call and the resulting echoes to determine how far away prey is. They tilt their heads to catch the changing intensity of echoes to figure out where the prey is in the horizontal plane. Bats must put together echo information about object distance and direction to successfully track an erratic moving insect.

But because bats are such good hunters, the research team thought that in addition, the bats must also be somehow using this information to predict where they prey is headed.

Researchers hypothesized that bats use both the velocity information from the timing of the echoes and further adjust their head aim. When they tested this model with their data, they saw it fit very well.

The question of prediction is important because an animal must plan ahead to decide what it's going to do next. A visual animal or a human has a stream of information coming in, but for bats it's remarkable because they're doing this with only brief acoustic snapshots.

Although bats are studied here, the findings apply to any animals that track moving sounds, and even to people, like the blind, who use clicks and cane taps to help them navigate while avoiding obstacles.

Angeles Salles el al., "Echolocating bats accumulate information from acoustic snapshots to predict auditory object motion," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2011719117

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-future.html?utm_source=nwletter&u...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 5:53am

New insight into how brain neurons influence choices

When you are faced with a choice—say, whether to have ice cream or chocolate cake for dessert—sets of brain cells just above your eyes fire as you weigh your options. Animal studies have shown that each option activates a distinct set of neurons in the brain. The more enticing the offer, the faster the corresponding neurons fire.

Now, a study in monkeys by researchers has shown that the activity of these neurons encodes the value of the options and determines the final decision. In the experiments, researchers let animals choose between different juice flavours. By changing the neurons' activity, the researchers changed how appealing the monkeys found each option, leading the animals to make different choices.

A detailed understanding of how options are valued and choices are made in the brain will help us understand how decision-making goes wrong in people with conditions such as addiction, eating disorders, depression and schizophrenia.

Values encoded in orbitofrontal cortex are causally related to economic choices, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2880-x , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2880-x

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-11-insight-brain-neurons-choice...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 3, 2020 at 5:50am

**Nylon finally takes its place as a piezoelectric textile

Saleem Anwar et al. Piezoelectric Nylon‐11 Fibers for Electronic Textiles, Energy Harvesting and Sensing, Advanced Functional Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202004326

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-nylon-piezoelectric-textile.html?utm_...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 2, 2020 at 6:19am

Doubts over a ‘possible sign of life’ on Venus show how science works

Further searches for reported hints of phosphine have been turning up empty

It was one of those “big, if true” stories. In September, scientists reported that Venus’ atmosphere seems to be laced with phosphine, a possible sign of life.

Now there’s increasing emphasis on the “if.” As scientists take fresh looks at the data behind the Venus announcement, and add other datasets to the mix, the original claim of inexplicable amounts of phosphine is being called into doubt. And that’s a good thing, many scientists say.

It’s exactly how science should work.

On September 14, astronomer Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales and colleagues reported that they had seen signs of phosphine in Venus’ clouds using two different telescopes (SN: 9/14/20). The phosphine seemed to be too abundant to exist without some kind of source replenishing it. That source could be strange microbes living in the clouds, or some weird unknown Venusian chemistry, the team said.

Greaves and colleagues first spotted phosphine with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and followed up with the powerful ALMA telescope array in Chile. But those ALMA data, and particularly the way they were handled, are now being called into question.

The key Venus observations were spectra, or plots of the light coming from the planet in a range of wavelengths. Different molecules block or absorb light at specific wavelengths, so searching for dips in a spectrum can reveal the chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere.

Phosphine showed up as a dip in Venus’ spectrum at about 1.12 millimeters, a wavelength of light that the molecule was thought to be absorbing. If Venus’ spectrum could be drawn as a straight line across all wavelengths of light, phosphine would make a deep valley at that wavelength.

But real data are never that easy to read. In real life, other sources — from Earth’s atmosphere to the inner workings of the telescope itself — introduce wiggles, or “noise,” into that nice straight line. The bigger the wiggles, the less scientists believe that the dips represent interesting molecules. Any particular dip might instead be just a random, extra-large wiggle.

That problem gets even worse when looking at a bright object such as Venus with a powerful telescope like ALMA

“The reason those bumps and wiggles are here at all is because of the intrinsic brightness of Venus, which makes it difficult to get a reliable measurement,” Cordiner says. “You could think of it as being dazzled by a bright light: If there’s a bright light in your vision, then your ability to pick out fainter details becomes diminished.”

So astronomers do a few different things to smooth out the data and let real signals shine through.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/venus-phosphine-possible-sign-l...

I.A.G. Snellen et al. Re-analysis of the 267-GHz ALMA observations of Venus: No statistic.... arXiv:2010.09761. Posted October 19, 2020.

T. Encrenaz et al. A stringent upper limit on the PH₃ abundance at the cloud top of Venus. Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press, 2020. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202039559.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 2, 2020 at 6:02am

The Mystery of The Platypus Deepens With The Discovery of Its Biofluorescent Fur

Scientists are seeing the  platypus in a whole new light. Under an ultraviolet lamp, this bizarre-looking creature appears even more peculiar than normal, glowing a soft, greenish-blue hue instead of the typical brown we're used to seeing.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-australian-platypus-is-the-latest-...

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