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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 12, 2018 at 6:35am

Einstein proved wrong!

Physicists announced on Wednesday (9th May, 2018) the results of their unique global experiment that appear to contradict a key worldview embraced by Albert Einstein, a universe independent of human observations in which nothing can travel faster than light.

The experiment, relying on over 100,000 participants with smartphones and other Internet-linked devices, put to test and detected strong violations of Einstein's principle of "local realism," as expected from quantum physics, the laws that govern the subatomic realm.

In the test, scientists generated pairs of "entangled" atoms and photons that were sent to different locations where their properties were measured. The participants contributed to the process of how these particles were measured in 12 laboratories around the world.

If the results of the measurements on the particles agree, scientists say, the implications would be that the measurement of one particle instantly affects the other particle, irrespective of their distance, thus appearing to violate Einstein's speed-of-light barrier.

The other way to explain the results would be to assume that the properties of the particles did not exist at all until the scientists actually measured them - a bizarre idea that challenges common-sensical notions of reality.

Either way, the results contradict Einstein's worldview. The findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

In the new test, conducted for 12 hours on November 30, 2016, Morgan and his colleagues recruited over 100,000 participants who produced a large supply or random number sequences through a browser-based game called the "Big Bell Quest."

The players were challenged to create unpredictable strings of zeroes and ones that were supplied to the scientists conducting measurements in the 12 labs. The measurements' results "strongly disagree" with Einstein's worldview and once again corroborate violations of local realism.

Physicists from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US were part of the experimental consortium. Each of the 12 laboratories designed different experiments to test local realism in different ways.

In this experiment,  different people located at faraway places made random choices and fed them to a network connecting the experimental arrangements. "The choice of each human being ensures randomness, which was not possible earlier with instrumental detectors."

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2018 at 9:04am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 2, 2018 at 5:55am

Thousands boycott new Nature journal about machine learning

More than two thousand researchers have signed a petitionto boycott a new Nature journal over the fact it will be available only by subscription.

Free and open access to knowledge is important in all fields. It is particularly important for students and faculty whose universities cannot afford the subscription fees for closed-access journals or cannot afford to pay (as authors) for their papers to be open access. Open access speeds up scientific progress by enabling anyone anywhere on earth to read the latest research and make their own contributions.

Source: Retraction Watch

We, the people associated with Sci-Art Lab, completely support this initiative. People in the developing countries cannot afford papers behind paywalls. Scientific Knowledge should be provided free of cost and should have open access. 

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 20, 2018 at 8:41am

Plants repair their Sun -damaged DNA: If the ultraviolet radiation from the sun damages human DNA to cause health problems, does UV radiation also damage plant DNA? The answer is yes, but because plants can’t come in from the sun or slather on sunblock, they have a super robust DNA repair kit.

Research finds that this powerful DNA repair system in plants closely resembles a repair system found in humans and other animals.

The study, which appears in Nature Communications, is the first repair map of an entire multicellular organism. It revealed that the “nucleotide excision repair” system works much more efficiently in the active genes of plants as compared to humans. And this efficiency depends on the day/night cycle.

Excision repair,  is now widely viewed as the major mechanism of DNA repair—including repair of UV damage—in living organisms. 

The researchers performed XR-seq scans on cells from UV-exposed plants—Arabidopsis thaliana, the “lab rat” of plant research also known as thale cress or mouse-ear cress. The resulting repair maps revealed that excision repair in Arabidopsis works faster on genes that are active. Genes when active are transcribed into strands of RNA that may then be translated into proteins, the main machinery of cells. Prior studies from the Sancar lab showed that excision repair works more efficiently for actively transcribed genes in animals and bacteria. The phenomenon, called transcription-coupled repair, is thought to have evolved as a way to direct DNA repair where it is most acutely needed.

The researchers performed XR-seq on UV-exposed Arabidopsis over 24-hour periods to discover that the efficiency of transcription-coupled repair also varies according to the “circadian” day/night cycle for 10 to 30 percent of Arabidopsis‘s genes. This reflects the normal daily variations of transcription activity in these genes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03922-5

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 20, 2018 at 6:58am

Plants repair their Sun -damaged DNA: If the ultraviolet radiation from the sun damages human DNA to cause health problems, does UV radiation also damage plant DNA? The answer is yes, but because plants can’t come in from the sun or slather on sunblock, they have a super robust DNA repair kit.

Research finds that this powerful DNA repair system in plants closely resembles a repair system found in humans and other animals.

The study, which appears in Nature Communications, is the first repair map of an entire multicellular organism. It revealed that the “nucleotide excision repair” system works much more efficiently in the active genes of plants as compared to humans. And this efficiency depends on the day/night cycle.

Excision repair,  is now widely viewed as the major mechanism of DNA repair—including repair of UV damage—in living organisms. 

The researchers performed XR-seq scans on cells from UV-exposed plants—Arabidopsis thaliana, the “lab rat” of plant research also known as thale cress or mouse-ear cress. The resulting repair maps revealed that excision repair in Arabidopsis works faster on genes that are active. Genes when active are transcribed into strands of RNA that may then be translated into proteins, the main machinery of cells. Prior studies from the Sancar lab showed that excision repair works more efficiently for actively transcribed genes in animals and bacteria. The phenomenon, called transcription-coupled repair, is thought to have evolved as a way to direct DNA repair where it is most acutely needed.

The researchers performed XR-seq on UV-exposed Arabidopsis over 24-hour periods to discover that the efficiency of transcription-coupled repair also varies according to the “circadian” day/night cycle for 10 to 30 percent of Arabidopsis‘s genes. This reflects the normal daily variations of transcription activity in these genes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03922-5

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 19, 2018 at 8:25am

Evidence of a planet getting destroyed in our solar system...

An asteroid that slammed into the Sudan desert on Oct. 7, 2008, shot out lots of little space rocks holding a precious secret: diamonds that likely formed billions of years ago inside the embryo of a now-decimated planet.

That lost planet was the size of Mercury or perhaps Mars, researchers now say.

An asteroid that slammed into the Sudan desert on Oct. 7, 2008, shot out lots of little space rocks holding a precious secret: diamonds that likely formed billions of years ago inside the embryo of a now-decimated planet.

That lost planet was the size of Mercury or perhaps Mars, researchers now say.

In the space rocks, which are also called meteorites, researchers found compounds common to diamonds on Earth, such as chromite, phosphate and iron-nickel sulfides. It's the first time these diamond components have been found in an extraterrestrial body, the researchers said in a new study describing the findings.

The finding provides more information on the early days of our solar system about 4.4 billion years ago, when the zone near the sun had several planetary embryos. Many of them coalesced into the planets we see today. Others fell into the sun or were ejected into interstellar space.

The meteorites were formed after an asteroid slammed into Earth's atmosphere — making it technically a meteor — exploding 23 miles (37 kilometers) above the Nubian Desert in Sudan. The explosion from the 13-foot-wide (4 meters) body shot fragments all over the desert below. Researchers picked up 50 of these pieces, which ranged in size from 0.4 to 4 inches (1 to 10 centimeters).

Researchers collected these tiny meteorites into a collection called "Almahata Sitta"; this is the Arabic word for "Station Six," a train station nearby the meteorite fall and between Wadi Halfa and Khartoum. After collecting the tiny meteorites, researchers discovered nano-size diamonds inside them. But at first, the origins of the diamonds eluded researchers.

Nanodiamonds can form from "normal" static pressure inside a large parent body like Earth, but there are other origin theories as well. High-energy collisions between worlds in space can leave such diamonds behind, as can deposition by chemical vapor,according to a statement from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland.

The new study, however, revealed that the diamonds in the meteorite could form only under pressures higher than 20 gigapascals. This is an extremely high form of pressure that humans can generate with certain explosives.

"This level of internal pressure can only be explained if the planetary parent body was a Mercury- to Mars-sized planetary 'embryo,' depending on the layer in which the diamonds were formed," the researchers said 

That planetary embryo would have then been destroyed through violent collisions, the researchers noted.

The research was published online (April 17) in the journal Nature Communications.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 17, 2018 at 9:43am

Plastic degrading  enzyme created by scientists...

Scientists have created a substance capable of “eating” plastic that could help tackle the world’s pollution problem.

The substance is based on an enzyme – a “biological catalyst” – first produced by bacteria living in a Japanese recycling centre that researchers suggested had evolved it in order to eat plastic.

Dubbed PETase for its ability to break down the PET plastic used to make drinks bottles, the enzyme accelerated a degradation process that would normally take hundreds of years.

Fine-tuning this naturally produced enzyme allowed a research team to produce something capable of digesting plastic more effectively than anything found in nature.

By breaking down plastic into manageable chunks, the scientists suggest their new substances could help recycle millions of tonnes of plastic bottles.

Plastic is notoriously resistant to natural degradation, and the discovery of the Japanese plastic-eating bacteria in 2016 was heralded by experts and commentators alike as a potential natural solution to plastic pollution.

While attempting to verify these claims, University of Portsmouth biologist Professor John McGeehan and his colleagues accidentally created a super-powered version of the plastic-eating enzyme.

During an investigation of the enzyme’s structure, the scientists made a slight tweak to the part thought to be involved with plastic digestion.

Doing so ramped up the ability of the enzyme to degrade PET, and also gave it the ability to degrade an alternative form of PET known as PEF.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 14, 2018 at 5:42am

European Space Agency maps second magnetic field around Earth.

A second layer of the magnetic field has been found  around the earth. According to the reports, the magnetic field was discovered by the trio of satellites which were used to study the magnetic fields.

The mission was named “Swarm” which was launched in the year 2013. Four years of continuous efforts have proved fruitful, a lot of data was collected and as a result, it contributed to the mapping of the latest discovery in the world of space technology. The satellites revolve around the earth at 300-530 km.

 The newly discovered magnetic field is about 2-2.5 nanotesla at the satellite altitude which is about 20,000 times weaker than the earth’s existing magnetic field. The scientist stated that they have used Swarm to measure the magnetic signals of the tides from the ocean surface to the seabed.

Getting on the practical aspect of the newly discovered magnetic field it could be used to hone the models of global warming by naming the monitoring patterns of the heat energy as they change their positions globally. But in addition to this, the tidal magnetic signal also induces a weak magnetic response under the deep seabed. The findings will be further used to study the electrical properties of the earth lithosphere as well as the upper mantle.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 13, 2018 at 9:10am

WE ARE MARCHING FOR SCIENCE ON 14th  APRIL, 2018.

( We are part of Global March For Science)

Come join us and make it a great success

Hyderabad venue: Press club, Basheerbagh

Starts at 10 am.

Our demands...

• 1. Allocate at least 3% of GDP to scientific and technological research and 10% towards education
• 2. Stop propagation of unscientific, obscurantist outdated ideas, and develop scientific temper, human values and spirit of inquiry in conformance with Article 51A of the Constitution.
• 3. Ensure that the education system does not impart ideas that contradict scientific evidence.
• 4. Enact policies based on scientific evidence.

https://www.marchforscience.com/

http://breakthrough-india.org/MFS2018/

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 12, 2018 at 8:17am

Scientists here say Dog is a biodiversity enemy

According to a new study, Canis lupus familiaris (dog, for short) is  an ‘invasive’ species in many ecosystems! Like the Japanese kudzu vine or the infamous Lantana, dogs are a non-native introduced species that are wreaking havoc on the ecological balance of many sensitive ecosystems. Now, a study by researchers from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment explores the effect of free-ranging dogs, or strays, on their surroundings in India.

Previous studies have shown that domesticated dogs have imperilled 188 threatened species of animals and caused 11 mass extinctions, globally! Domestic dogs have been considered as invasive mammalian predators. After cats and rodents, they are the third most damaging invasive predators.

In countries like India, where the population of stray dogs are surging by the day without checks and bounds by a governing body, these dogs turn feral—a state in which they are neither truly wild not truly domesticated. “Unlike cats and rats which perhaps target smaller sized animals, feral dogs can target a larger range of prey size as predators as they can hunt in packs. Their impacts are as detrimental as cats and rats, though cats and rats have reported higher extinction for biodiversity.

The study shows that the threat from dogs on wildlife is real and could come in the way of conservational efforts. So, what can we do to curb this conflict? Managing dog population is the key, say the researchers.

 The researchers opine that in order to protect local wildlife and ensure a good quality of life for dogs, carefully planned population control programs should be implemented near protected forest areas.

Domesticated dogs are adding a new dimension to the threats many species of wildlife are already facing due to habitat loss, deforestation, encroachment, etc. Man’s best friend is turning out to be biodiversity’s biggest enemy, as this research shows.

https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acv...

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