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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 24, 2020 at 6:43am

Have you ever seen an atom? See it now!

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 24, 2020 at 6:20am

https://theconversation.com/8-ways-the-coronavirus-can-affect-your-...
8 ways the coronavirus can affect your skin, from COVID toes, to rashes and hair loss

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There Are Mysterious Wrinkles Inside Our Hearts. This Might Be What They're For

https://www.sciencealert.com/da-vinci-was-curious-about-the-wrinkle...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 24, 2020 at 6:18am

A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question  

https://theconversation.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the-founda...  

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 23, 2020 at 10:00am

Weaponised Disinformation Could Unleash City-Wide Blackouts, Researchers Warn

https://www.sciencealert.com/weaponised-disinformation-could-unleas...

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What's Actually in Wildfire Smoke, And Why Is It So Damaging For Your Lungs?

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-s-actually-in-wildfire-smoke-and-...

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https://theconversation.com/9-reasons-you-can-be-optimistic-that-a-...

9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 22, 2020 at 7:37am

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You don’t see as much color as you think

When scientists drained most color from a virtual world, people never noticed

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/color-perception-bra...

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These Hairworms Eat a Cricket Alive and Control Its Mind | Deep Look

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When is a leaf not a leaf? When a ‘leaf’ is an insect? Confused? Find the answer in this video ….

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 22, 2020 at 6:54am

Nine COVID-19 Myths That Just Won’t Go Away

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nine-covid-19-myths-that...

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In a Lab on Earth, Scientists Just Replicated Pressures Found on White Dwarf Stars

https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-lab-here-on-earth-scientists-have...

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Security Researchers Found a New Way to Pick Locks, Using Only The Sound of The Key

The sound of a key sliding into a lock could be enough information to potentially create a copy of that key and open the lock – that's the conclusion of researchers who've been investigating "acoustics-based physical key inference".

https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-can-break-locks-just-from-...

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Scientists are trying to find out exactly how much plastic is in ou...

We know we’re ingesting plastic every day. But what happens to it is still a mystery. Scientists are now trying to figure out how much is staying in our organs, and what the long-term health effects might be.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90540118/scientists-are-trying-to-find-...

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** Math of the Penguins

Emperor penguins display rigorously geometric spacing and mathematical efficiency when they huddle together for warmth, which may reveal secrets to their overall health.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/math-of-the-penguins-20200817/

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Strange Numbers Found in Particle Collisions

An unexpected connection has emerged between the results of physics experiments and an important, seemingly unrelated set of numbers in pure mathematics.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/strange-numbers-found-in-particle-co...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 22, 2020 at 6:09am

Researchers create bioluminescent tag to detect DNA break repair

A new bioluminescent reporter that tracks DNA double stranded break (DSB) repair in cells has been developed by researchers . The international team's novel bioluminescent repair reporter (BLRR)-based system can be used to monitor DNA repair pathways directly in animals as well as cell lines. No such system previously existed for in vivo studies. These pathways play a crucial role in multiple conditions, including cancer.

Jasper Che-Yung Chien et al, A multiplexed bioluminescent reporter for sensitive and non-invasive tracking of DNA double strand break repair dynamics in vitro and in vivo, Nucleic Acids Research (2020). DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkaa669

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-bioluminescent-tag-dna.html?utm_sourc...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 22, 2020 at 6:00am

Researchers discover first 'open-charm' tetraquark

The LHCb experiment at CERN has developed a penchant for finding exotic combinations of quarks, the elementary particles that come together to give us composite particles such as the more familiar proton and neutron. In particular, LHCb has observed several tetraquarks, which, as the name suggests, are made of four quarks (or rather two quarks and two antiquarks). Observing these unusual particles helps scientists advance our knowledge of the strong force, one of the four known fundamental forces in the universe. At a CERN seminar held virtually on 12 August, LHCb announced the first signs of an entirely new kind of tetraquark with a mass of 2.9 GeV/c²:  the first such particle with only one charm quark.

indico.cern.ch/event/900975/at … ug-11_DanJohnson.pdf

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-open-charm-tetraquark.html?utm_source...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 22, 2020 at 5:49am

Scientists discover a social cue of safety

When people think about social communication of danger, they normally think about alarm calls.

Freezing is one of the three universal defense responses, together with fight and flight. This response is the best course of action in situations where escape is either impossible or less advantageous than just staying still with the hope of remaining unnoticed.

Freezing may actually be a safer way of conveying the existence of danger to others. This manner of social communication does not require the active production of a signal that may result in drawing unwelcome attention. Also, freezing may constitute a public cue that can be used by any surrounding animal regardless of species

individual fruit flies freeze in response to an inescapable threat. The researchers wondered if this behavior would change if there other flies were around.

placed the flies in a transparent closed chamber and repeatedly exposed them to an expanding dark disk, which mimics an object on a collision course. Just imagine the visual effect of an approaching open palm. Many visual animals that are exposed to such a stimulus respond defensively, including humans. If they freeze, they often stay motionless for quite some time, even after the threat is gone."

Their results revealed that group size matters. All groups—from two to 10—froze less than individual flies. However, we were surprised to find a complex effect of group size on the flies' behavior

In groups of six and more, the flies froze transiently when the threat appeared and then resumed movement once it was gone. On the other hand, the flies' response pattern in groups of five or less was more similar to that of individual flies

Flies in those groups still froze less than single flies. However, their freezing time increased as the experiment progressed. The more repetitions of the threatening stimulus they experienced, the longer they would remain motionless when it reappeared. These results were very intriguing. "This was the first time the effect of group size on freezing was systematically characterized in any species, and it revealed a fascinating and intricate relation."

These findings clearly demonstrated that flies change their defensive responses when others are present. This novel observation raised a pressing question—what social cues were the flies responding to? To find the answer, Ferreira and Moita meticulously analyzed their previous results and conducted additional experiments using blind flies and controllable magnetic "dummy flies."

The results revealed a two-part answer. "The first part describes the flies' response to the appearance of the threat. "We learned that an individual fly was more likely to enter freezing if its peers (magnetic or otherwise) froze in response to the threat. We were somewhat expecting to see this. Previous studies in the lab showed that in specific situations, freezing is a social cue of danger in rats. Here, we witnessed a similar behavior in flies."

The second part of the answer: Flies were more likely to stop freezing if others began to move. "This means that flies were using the resumption of movement as a social cue of safety"

Clara H. Ferreira et al. Behavioral and neuronal underpinnings of safety in numbers in fruit flies, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17856-4

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-scientists-social-cue-safety.html?utm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 22, 2020 at 5:39am

In times of ecological uncertainty, brood parasites change their hosts

Some birds lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species and let the host parents raise their young. A new study finds that in times of environmental flux, these brood parasites "diversify their portfolios," minimizing the risks of their unorthodox lifestyle by increasing the number and variety of hosts they select as adoptive parents.

Researchers found that, in unstable environments, brood parasites choose to not put all their eggs in one basket. These results  are consistent with the idea that brood parasites diversify their reproductive risk in areas that are ecologically, behaviorally or environmentally unpredictable.

Brood parasite success depends on the host's acceptance of the outsider's eggs and its ability to raise the young. Some birds learn to recognize that the foreign eggs are different and eject them or build new nests. Others seem not to notice. They incubate, hatch and care for the parasitic offspring as if they were their own.

Several other factors could influence how many hosts and which host species a brood parasite targets. The host must be in egg-laying mode when the interloper comes to call. If only one foster parent is involved in taking care of the young, its nest might not succeed as well as one with two parents present. But having two parents around makes it more difficult for parasites to get into the nest to lay their eggs.

Similarly, if the host returns from a long migratory trip and begins to nest right away, the parasite might have fewer chances to locate its nest for sneaking in the extra egg. Variability in temperature and precipitation during the breeding season is another potential influence.

in unpredictable environments, brood parasites target more—and more diverse—hosts. The parasites take advantage of as many host species as possible when opportunity allows. The team found a particularly pronounced relationship between temperature variability and bet-hedging.

"In areas where temperatures are stable, brood parasites tend to specialize on fewer and less diverse host species. Those hosts also tend to build more complex and potentially safer nests," Antonson said. "But as the thermal environment becomes more uncertain, the evolutionary pattern that we see is that they spread around the risk of offspring survival by drawing from a larger and more diverse pool of host species."

"Ecological uncertainty favours the diversification of host use in avian brood parasites" Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18038-y

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-ecological-uncertainty-brood-parasite...

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