Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 9:28am

Sci-com: What a link between chocolate and Nobel prizes reveals

https://theconversation.com/what-a-link-between-chocolate-and-nobel...

--

**Mouth Bacteria Have Been Linked to Severe Forms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

A genetic analysis of more than a dozen strains of one common bacterium, Campylobacter concisus, has uncovered a short sequence of DNA that might explain why this guy is a law-abiding citizen when at home in the mouth, but a potential terrorist in the gut.

"Oral bacteria enter the digestive system every day when we swallow food or saliva. Most of the bacteria are killed by acids in the stomach, but some can survive and colonise in the intestines. The bacteria might not have colonised for long, but the mouth keeps bringing a constant supply of new bacteria – that's the problem.

Generally speaking, many microbes in the genus Campylobacter are bad news for the human digestive system. If you've ever had a gut-wrenching stomach bug that's sent you running for the bathroom while on an overseas holiday, there's a good chance this tiny horror was behind it.

Since such disease-causing species are typically at home in other animals' intestines, we tend to pick them up by consuming contaminated meat or water.

C. concisus isn't quite like its more pathogenic cousins. This species we can call our own, living happily under an ocean of spit in virtually all healthy humans.

But in recent years, medical researchers have suspected C. concisus might not always be the peaceful citizen we'd expected it to be. Bacterial markers associated with the microbe are suspiciously linked with active incidences of the intestinal condition Crohn's disease, for example.

Together with ulcerative colitis, Crohn's falls into a category of IBD characterised by a serious inflammation of the gut wall and surrounding tissue. The result is anything from diarrhoea and discomfort to blood in the stool, agonising pain, and weight loss.

In the cases where drugs or lifestyle changes do little to help, surgical 

intervention can be necessary, making it one serious illness to contend with.

Exactly what sets these inflammatory bowel diseases off in the first place isn't entirely clear. Diet and stress are thought to merely aggravate symptoms, with genetics, medications, and environment all playing a potential role in their development.

https://www.sciencealert.com/your-mouth-bacteria-might-be-behind-se...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 9:20am

A color-changing material inspired by chameleon skin

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 9:18am

Paracetamol poisonings up

Paracetamol is the most widely used painkiller in the world. “It is a very safe drug, but only for short-​term pain relief and as long as the daily dosage does not go above the recommended range. For adults, the recommended maximum daily dosage is 4,000 milligrams (4 grams), which equates to a maximum of four of the high-​dose tablets or eight of the lower-​dose tablets. When overdosed, paracetamol can cause severe poisoning, even resulting in liver failure with fatal outcomes or the need for liver transplantation.

One problem with paracetamol is that it is not effective for all patients or against all forms of pain. If the drug doesn’t help to ease someone’s symptoms, they may be tempted to increase the dosage without consulting a medical professional. That’s the real problem. This is also where the size of the tablets comes into play. It’s very easy to exceed the maximum daily dosage by taking just a few extra of the 1,000 milligram tablets, whereas, with the lower-​dose 500 milligram tablets, the risk of accidental overdose isn’t as great.

Experts advocate for a critical review of how the 1,000 milligram tablets are prescribed and dispensed. At the very least, packs of the 1,000 milligram tablets should contain a smaller number of tablets. As evidence grows that paracetamol is not suitable for chronic pain management, there is little need to have pack-​sizes of 40 or 100 tablets.  Physicians should prescribe the lower 500 milligram dose, which can be dose adjusted to reach the 1,000 milligrams by taking two tablets when necessary. This could minimize the risk of accidentally exceeding the daily limit.

By reducing the availability of the high-​dose formulation, experts think that some of the poisoning cases could be avoided. In the meantime, she says pharmacists can help draw attention to the dangers of exceeding the daily maximum when providing these the high-​dose tablets to patients.

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2020/10/paracetamo...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3306/Paracetamol-poisonings-up#.X5zxQY...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 8:54am

GaToroid: revolutionizing the future of cancer treatment?

Hadron therapy is of great interest to the medical community as a pioneering radiation therapy that makes use of charged particles to deliver a highly localized dose to a tumor. Unlike traditional radiotherapy, because it minimizes radiation to any neighboring tissue, it may cause fewer side effects and avoid the generation of secondary tumors.

However, because a hadron is made up of charged particles, a magnetic field is needed to ensure that it goes to exactly the right place in the patient. This requires a complex assembly of magnets in giant machines. It also needs to rotate around the patient with 0.5 mm (5 human hairs!) of precision, making it an incredibly complex piece of engineering. Currently, there are only two facilities in the world, at Heidelberg in Germany where the machine is around 13 meters tall, 25 meters in length and weighing more than 600 tons, and Chiba in Japan, where it is 11 meters tall, 13 meters in length and 250 tons in weight, because it is superconductive.

Enter GaToroid, which aims not just to reduce the size of hadron therapy machines but also their complexity, using toroidal superconducting magnets, the idea of GaToroid is to have a machine that looks like an MRI, so instead of a gigantic rotating magnetic arm that moves around the patient, we have something circular that is in a steady state with the patient inside. This has enabled us to make the machine much smaller. However, unlike an MRI, the patient is not immersed in the magnetic field, but it is confined by the coils around them. The idea is that this technology will make hadron therapy far more accessible as it won’t require machines the size of a four-story building.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/gatoroid-revolutionizing-the-future-of-ca...

https://researchnews.cc/news/3310/GaToroid--revolutionizing-the-fut...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 8:46am

Mapping extreme microbes in the Amazon’s Boiling River

Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, biochemist Rosa Vásquez Espinoza investigates the medicinal properties of microbes flowing in a sacred boiling river.

Scientists gravitate towards microbes living in extreme environments, like the Boiling River, due to their medicinal value. 

Extremophiles are not exclusive to the Boiling River. They exist in other extreme environments, like in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. But Yellowstone’s hot springs are highly acidic. The Boiling River has a different geochemical profile, and the mineral composition is also constantly changing—which makes the microbial ecology unique.

https://massivesci.com/articles/amazon-boiling-river-peru-microbes-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 7:37am

Research shows whipping horses doesn’t make them run faster, straighter or safe

the use of the whip to “encourage” horses to run faster and straighter has been shown to potentially be both painful and dangerous. It was found whips make no difference to horse steering, jockey safety, or even a horse’s speed.

https://theconversation.com/research-shows-whipping-horses-doesnt-m...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 6:20am

First night bees recorded foraging in darkness

 A new study has identified two species of bees that have adapted their vision for night-time conditions for the first time.

The study by a team of ecology researchers has observed night time foraging behaviour by a nomiine (Reepenia bituberculata) and masked (Meroglossa gemmata) bee species, with both developing enlarged compound and simple eyes which allow more light to be gathered when compared to their daytime kin.

James B. Dorey et al, Morphometric comparisons and novel observations of diurnal and low-light-foraging bees, Journal of Hymenoptera Research (2020). DOI: 10.3897/jhr.79.57308

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-australian-night-bees-foraging-darkne...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 6:11am

Mothers pass on allergies to offspring, preclinical study shows

Mothers can pass allergies to offspring while they are developing in the womb, researchers  reported this week .

The research on mice shows that the key antibody responsible for triggering allergic reactions, immunoglobulin E (IgE), can cross the placenta and enter the fetus. When inside the fetus, the antibody binds to fetal mast cells, a type of immune cell that releases chemicals that trigger allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma. After birth, newborn mice develop allergic reactions to the same type of allergen as their mothers at the time of first exposure—unlike adult mice, which require two exposures. Studies in the laboratory also showed that maternal IgE can bind to human fetal mast cells, indicating they might cross the placenta in humans in a similar way.

Rasha Msallam et al. Fetal mast cells mediate postnatal allergic responses dependent on maternal IgE, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aba0864

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-mothers-allergies-offspring-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 6:05am

Researchers develop a new way to create a spectrum of natural-looking hair colours

We been warned of the risks of dyeing hair at home and in salons. Products used can cause allergies and skin irritation—an estimated 1% of people have an allergy to dye. Furthermore, repeated use of some dyes has been linked to cancer.

But there soon may be a solution for the growing list of salons and hair colour enthusiasts searching for natural alternatives to dyes and cosmetics.

Researchers have developed a new way to create a spectrum of natural-looking hair colours, ranging from blond to black, by using enzymes to catalyze synthetic melanin.

Melanin is an enigmatic and ubiquitous material often found in the form of brown or black pigment. 

In the new process,  researchers dye hair by combining mushroom enzymes with an amino acid, causing a process that mimics reactions that naturally occur in the body. Preliminary studies revealed potential for the coloured layer to persist through several washes.

The research  identifies four key advantages to using synthetic melanin instead of traditional dyes:

• Synthetic melanin avoids the use of ammonia as a base layer.
• The precursors to treating hair with melanin are less toxic.
• The process uses safer, more scalable chemicals.
• There is vast potential in future cosmetic translations of synthetic melanin.

Claudia Battistella et al. Bioinspired Chemoenzymatic Route to Artificial Melanin for Hair Pigmentation, Chemistry of Materials (2020). pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.0c02790

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-spectrum-natural-looking-hair.html?ut...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2020 at 5:57am

To survive asteroid impact, algae adopted Mixotrophy

Modern relatives of the ancient algae also have chloroplasts, which enable them to use sunlight to make food from carbon dioxide and water. This ability to survive both by feeding on other organisms and through photosynthesis is called mixotrophy. Examples of the few land plants with this ability include Venus flytraps and sundews.

Mixotrophy was both the means of initial survival and then an advantage after the post-asteroid darkness lifted because of the abundant small pretty cells, likely survivor cyanobacteria. Tiny, seemingly harmless ocean plants survived the darkness of the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs by learning a ghoulish behaviour—eating other living creatures.

--

Vast amounts of debris, soot, and aerosols shot into the atmosphere when an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, plunging the planet into darkness, cooling the climate, and acidifying the oceans. Along with the dinosaurs on the land and giant reptiles in the ocean, the dominant species of marine algae were instantly wiped out—except for one rare type.

Researchers found that once the post-asteroid darkness cleared, these mixotrophic algae expanded from coastal shelf areas into the open ocean where they became a dominant life form for the next million years, helping to quickly rebuild the food chain. It also helped that larger creatures who would normally feed on these algae were initially absent in the post-extinction oceans.

Only much later did the algae evolve, losing the ability to eat other creatures and re-establishing themselves to become one of the dominant species of algae in today's ocean.

"Algal plankton turn to hunting to survive and recover from end-Cretaceous impact darkness" Science Advances (2020). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup … .1126/sciadv.abc9123

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-survive-asteroid-impact-algae.html?ut...

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 793
• 794
• 795
• 796
• 797
• …
• 1142
• Next ›
• Page