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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 14, 2017 at 8:13am

How climate change impacts flying...

Rising temperatures due to global warming will make it harder for many aircraft around the world to take off in coming decades, says a new study. During the hottest parts of the day, 10 to 30 percent of fully loaded planes may have to remove some fuel, cargo or passengers, or else wait for cooler hours to fly, the study concludes. The study, which is the first such global analysis, appeared recently in the journal Climatic Change.

As air warms, it spreads out, and its density declines. In thinner air, wings generate less lift as a plane races along a runway. Thus, depending on aircraft model, runway length and other factors, at some point a packed plane may be unable to take off safely if the temperature gets too high. Weight must be dumped, or else the flight delayed or canceled.

Average global temperatures have gone up nearly 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 Fahrenheit) since about 1980, and this may already be having an effect.

"This points to the unexplored risks of changing climate on aviation

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 11, 2017 at 12:33pm

Canadian researchers reconstituted an extinct poxvirus for $100,000 using mail-order DNA

A group led by virologist David Evans of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says it has synthesized the horsepox virus, a relative of smallpox, from genetic pieces ordered in the mail. Horsepox is not known to harm humans—and like smallpox, researchers believe it no longer exists in nature; nor is it seen as a major agricultural threat. But the technique Evans used could be used to recreate smallpox, a horrific disease that was declared eradicated in 1980. 

Scientifically, the achievement isn't a big surprise. Researchers had assumed it would one day be possible to synthesize poxviruses since virologists assembled the much smaller poliovirus from scratch in 2002. But the new work—like the poliovirus reconstitutions before it—is raising troubling questions about how terrorists or rogue states could use modern biotechnology. Given that backdrop, the study marks an important milestone, a proof of concept of what can be done with viral synthesis.

- Sciencemag.org

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 5, 2017 at 8:28am

Role of uterine fluid: New light...

Once considered a simple medium for sperm and embryo transport, the functional spectrum of uterine fluid is now expanding. Novel molecular players, such as extracellular vesicles and mobile RNAs, have been detected in the uterine fluid of livestock, rodents, and humans. These novel molecules, together with previously known ions and proteins, ensure uterine fluid homeostasis and facilitate embryo–maternal interactions. 

These molecules may also carry information that mirrors maternal environmental exposure and possibly relay such information to the embryo via uterine fluid, generating long-term epigenetic effects on the offspring via embryonic and placental programming. Moreover, the development of systematic profiling of uterine fluid molecular signatures may now hold promise, relying on high-throughput methods and non-invasive biomarkers for clinical use.

http://www.cell.com/trends/molecular-medicine/fulltext/S1471-4914(17)30080-1?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1471491417300801%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 5, 2017 at 7:10am

Praying mantises are posing threat  to small birds...

A study by zoologists from Switzerland and the US shows: praying mantises all over the globe also include birds in their diet. The Wilson Journal of Ornithology has just published the results.

he researchers gathered and documented numerous examples of bird-eating mantises. In a systematic review, they were able to show that praying mantises from twelve species and nine genera have been observed preying on small birds in the wild. This remarkable feeding behavior has been documented in 13 different countries, on all continents except Antarctica. There is also great diversity in the victims: birds from 24 different species and 14 families were found to be the prey of mantises. "The fact that eating of birds is so widespread in praying mantises, both taxonomically as well as geographically speaking, is a spectacular discovery," comments Martin Nyffeler from the University of Basel and lead author of the study.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.1676/16-100.1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 5, 2017 at 7:06am

Researchers have found material that removes synthetic pollutant dyes from water...

Researchers from Energy Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at Swansea University, U.K hold the key to the problem in the form of a novel, non-hazardous photocatalytic material.

The said material effectively removes dye pollutants from water, adsorbing more than 90 % of the dye and enhancing the rate of dye breakdown by almost ten times using visible light. The composite material as a combination of tungsten oxide and tantalum nitride, also provides a huge surface area for dye capture, being less than 40 billionths of a metre in diameter. The material was synthesized by heating the reaction mixture at high pressures inside a sealed container which involved growing ultra-thin “nanowires” of tungsten oxide on the surface of tiny particles of tantalum nitride. It further proceeded to break the dye down into smaller, harmless molecules using the energy provided by sunlight, in a process known as ‘photocatalytic degradation’. 

Having removed the harmful dyes, the catalyst can be simply filtered from the cleaned water and reused. Due to the exchange of electrons between the two materials, the test dye used within the study was broken down by the composite at around double the rate achieved by tantalum nitride on its own, while tungsten oxide alone was shown to be incapable of dye degradation.

The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 28, 2017 at 6:37am

Bad news for coral reef lovers...the 3 successive years of bleaching conditions damaged all but three of the 29 reefs that are or are contained within United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites. And the prognosis is grim: Without dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, all these reefs "will cease to host functioning coral reef ecosystems by the end of the century," predicts the report from UNESCO’s World Heritage Center in Paris.

Feel sad, because I love corals :(

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2017 at 7:30am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2017 at 7:00am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2017 at 6:01am

Hormones made by brain...

Bones give us structural support to out bodies. We all know that. Apart from that function, bones also make hormones. Do you know this fact?

Yes, there’s so much going on between bone and brain and all the other organs, it has become one of the most prominent tissues being studied at the moment.

At least four bone hormones found working in living systems, recent studies show, and there could be more. Scientists have only just begun to decipher what this messaging means for health. But cataloging and investigating the hormones should offer a more nuanced understanding of how the body regulates sugar, energy and fat, among other things.

Of the hormones on the list of bones’ messengers — osteocalcin, sclerostin, fibroblast growth factor 23 and lipocalin 2 — the last is the latest to attract attention. Lipocalin 2, which bones unleash to stem bacterial infections, also works in the brain to control appetite, physiologist Stavroula Kousteni of Columbia University Medical Center and colleagues reported in the March 16 Nature.

After mice eat, their bone-forming cells absorb nutrients and release a hormone called lipocalin 2 (LCN2) into the blood. LCN2 travels to the brain, where it gloms on to appetite-regulating nerve cells, which tell the brain to stop eating, a recent study suggests.

Geneticist Gerard Karsenty of Columbia University Medical Center found that osteocalcin — made by osteoblasts — helps regulate blood sugar. Osteocalcin circulates through the blood, collecting calcium and other minerals that bones need. When the hormone reaches the pancreas, it signals insulin-making cells to ramp up production, mouse experiments showed. Osteocalcin also signals fat cells to release a hormone that increases the body’s sensitivity to insulin, the body’s blood sugar moderator, Karsenty and colleagues reported in Cell in 2007. If it works the same way in people, Karsenty says, osteocalcin could be developed as a potential diabetes or obesity treatment.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 23, 2017 at 7:13am

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