Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 27, 2017 at 9:29am

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have announced the development of the first stable semisynthetic organism. Building on their 2014 study in which they synthesized a DNA base pair, the researchers created a new bacterium that uses the four natural bases (called A, T, C and G), which every living organism possesses, but that also holds as a pair two synthetic bases called X and Y in its genetic code.

TSRI Professor Floyd Romesberg and his colleagues have now shown that their single-celled organism can hold on indefinitely to the synthetic base pair as it divides. Their research was published January 23, 2017, online ahead of print in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 27, 2017 at 9:21am

Scientists to oppose Donald Trump in huge ‘March for Science’ in Washington

The demonstration will be in opposition to the administration’s plans to delete climate change data and gag scientists

Scientists are going to march on the White House to try and force Donald Trump to recognise climate change.

Following the Women’s Marches held around the world on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration – and widely thought to be the biggest mobilisation in the history of the US – various groups are now organising a “March for Science”. Tens of thousands of people have indicated that they will attend the protest, which is set to happen both in Washington DC and across the United States.

The event will not be restricted specifically to scientists but to “anyone who values empirical science”, and not specifically to professional scientists.

The group behind it intends to announce a date and a platform as soon as it can, and is expected to do so before the end of the month. 

https://www.facebook.com/marchforscience/

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 25, 2017 at 7:07am

Scientists have discovered 'smart cancer cells' - and realized why a type of breast cancer drug stops working in some patients. The early-stage findings, from an international team led by Imperial College London and the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, reveal some breast tumours evolve to make their own 'fuel supply', rendering treatments powerless.

The team, whose findings are published in the journal Nature Genetics, hope their work will increase treatment options for patients whose cancer has returned.

Around 70 per cent of breast cancers are so-called ER positive, which means the cancer cells contain a receptor for the hormone oestrogen. It is this hormone that fuels the tumours.

Patients with this type of cancer are offered one of two drugs after surgery to prevent the cancer coming back.

One of these drugs, called tamoxifen, prevents oestrogen from binding to DNA in cancer cells, while the second type of treatment, called aromatase inhibitors, prevents residual oestrogen from being produced in other tissues.

However both tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors stop working in around one in three patients.

Scientists assumed the tumours developed resistance in some way.

in the latest study, the team discovered that in one in four patients taking aromatase inhibitors, the tumours had increased production of aromatase in the cancer cells. The tumours appear to do this by increasing the number of aromatase genes, in a process called amplification.

This allowed the cancer cells to effectively make their own oestrogen, without relying on external sources of the hormone, explained Dr Luca Magnani, co-lead author of the research from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial: “For the first time we have seen how breast cancer tumours become resistant to aromatase inhibitors. The treatments work by cutting off the tumour’s fuel supply – oestrogen – but the cancer adapts to this by making its own fuel supply.”

The researchers also discovered that tumours become resistant in different ways, depending on whether tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors are used.

Almost none of the tumours in patients taking tamoxifen had increased production of aromatase to boost their oestrogen supply - and the team are now planning further studies into how cancer cells become resistant to tamoxifen.

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3773.html?WT...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 25, 2017 at 6:47am

Cities eating into world’s farm lands

• By 2030 the world could lose 30 million hectares of farm lands to cities

• Asia and Africa accounts for 80 per cent of the losses with China as worst hit

• Forest lands will likely be converted to replace the losses in agricultural lands

By 2030, the world could lose millions of fertile agricultural lands to expanding cities with Asia and Africa accounting for 80 per cent of the total farm losses, a study finds.
 
Analysing satellite data on croplands and their productivity using year 2000 as the reference point and comparing it with urban area projections for 2030, international researchers found that 30 million hectares of crop lands will be lost to growing cities – an area equivalent to the Philippines. Of this, Asia and Africa will lose 24 million hectares of prime agricultural land.

With cities becoming hubs of economic activity, large-scale changes are expected. However, the authors say this is the first study to quantify the effect of urbanisation on crop lands at global, continental, and country levels. The study was carried out by researchers from Austria, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, and United States.
 
The croplands that are going to disappear by 2030 have productivity that is almost twice the global average and accounted for about 3—4 per cent of global crop production in 2000.
 
China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the US top countries set to lose cropland to urbanisation. The productivity of rice, wheat, maize, and soybean are most likely to be affected, though there are significant variations at regional levels.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/12/20/1606036114

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 25, 2017 at 6:41am

Scientists are considering psychological fake news vaccine

The appearance of fake news on websites and social media has inspired scientists to develop a "vaccine" to immunise people against the problem.

A University of Cambridge study devised psychological tools to target fact distortion.

Researchers suggest "pre-emptively exposing" readers to a small "dose" of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims.

Stories on the US election and Syria are among those to have caused concern.

"Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus," said the University of Cambridge study's lead author Dr Sander van der Linden.

"The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible."

The study, published in the journal Global Challenges, was conducted as a disguised experiment.

More than 2,000 US residents were presented with two claims about global warming.

The researchers say when presented consecutively, the influence well-established facts had on people were cancelled out by bogus claims made by campaigners.

But when information was combined with misinformation, in the form of a warning, the fake news had less resonance.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 25, 2017 at 6:35am

How Ants Use Vision When Homing Backward

Ants can navigate over long distances between their nest and food sites using visual cues. Recent studies show that this capacity is undiminished when walking backward while dragging a heavy food item. This challenges the idea that ants use egocentric visual memories of the scene for guidance. Can ants use their visual memories of the terrestrial cues when going backward? Recent research results suggest that ants do not adjust their direction of travel based on the perceived scene while going backward. Instead, they maintain a straight direction using their celestial compass. This direction can be dictated by their path integrator  but can also be set using terrestrial visual cues after a forward peek. If the food item is too heavy to enable body rotations, ants moving backward drop their food on occasion, rotate and walk a few steps forward, return to the food, and drag it backward in a now-corrected direction defined by terrestrial cues. Furthermore, ants can maintain their direction of travel independently of their body orientation. It thus appears that egocentric retinal alignment is required for visual scene recognition, but ants can translate this acquired directional information into a holonomic frame of reference, which enables them to decouple their travel direction from their body orientation and hence navigate backward. This reveals substantial flexibility and communication between different types of navigational information: from terrestrial to celestial cues and from egocentric to holonomic directional memories.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)31466-X

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 18, 2017 at 8:16am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 18, 2017 at 8:07am

World's main list of 'predatory' science publishers vanishes

In 2012, a librarian from the University of Colorado presented research in a field so new he had to name it himself: predatory publishing.

Jeffrey Beall discovered thousands of online science journals that were either willing to publish fake research for cash, or just so inept that they couldn’t tell the good from the bad and published it all.

Beall, who became an assistant professor, drew up a list of the known and suspected bad apples, known simply as Beall’s List. Since 2012, this list has been world’s main source of information on journals that publish conspiracy theories and incompetent research, making them appear real.

But on Sunday, his website went blank. Only the headline, Scholarly Open Access, remains.

Beall is a regular on Twitter, but he hasn’t posted anything there in days. He isn’t answering email (including a message from the Citizen) or telling anyone what happened. Beall’s List had just been updated for 2017.

A Texas firm called Cabell’s, which also works with academic publishers, hinted that Beall was threatened somehow.

Beall has been a polarizing figure, praised for rooting out fakes but sometimes criticized by people who felt he was too broad in his attacks on “open access” journals.  These offer their contents free to readers, and instead charge researchers to publish their work. Most predators use the open access approach, but there are also top-quality open access journals.

He has also been threatened with legal action by publishers he named on his list.

There are cached copies of Beall’s List for both publishers and individual journals, but these are not being updated. As well, Beall kept busy answering questions from confused researchers around the world almost daily.

In his 2017 update, Beall had identified 1,155 suspicious or fake publishers, most of them putting out dozens or even hundreds of online journals.

- Retractionwatch.com

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 15, 2017 at 10:51am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 14, 2017 at 11:34am

Nightmare realized: Woman Killed by a Superbug Resistant to Every Available Antibiotic. The bacteria could fend off 26 different drugs!

Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.

“It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States … and was not effective,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of health care quality promotion.

The case involved a woman who had spent considerable time in India, yes, you heard it right, and get alarmed, where multi-drug-resistant bacteria are more common than they are in the US. She had broken her right femur — the big bone in the thigh — while in India a couple of years back. She later developed a bone infection in her femur and her hip and was hospitalized a number of times in India in the two years that followed. Her last admission to a hospital in India was in June of last year.

The unnamed woman — described as a resident of Washoe County who was in her 70s — went into hospital in Reno for care in mid-August, where it was discovered she was infected with what is called a CRE — carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae. That’s a general name to describe bacteria that commonly live in the gut that have developed resistance to the class of antibiotics called carbapenems — an important last-line of defense used when other antibiotics fail. CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden has called CREs “nightmare bacteria” because of the danger they pose for spreading antibiotic resistance.

In the woman’s case, the specific bacteria attacking her was called Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bug that often causes of urinary tract infections.

Testing at the hospital showed resistance to 14 drugs — all the drug options the hospital had. A sample was sent to the CDC in Atlanta for further testing, which revealed that nothing available to US doctors would have cured this infection.

The woman in Nevada was cared for in isolation; the staff who treated her used infection control precautions to prevent spread of the superbug in the hospital.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 841
• 842
• 843
• 844
• 845
• …
• 1053
• Next ›
• Page