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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 6, 2014 at 6:19am

Science behind Fireworks:
https://news.yahoo.com/video/science-behind-fireworks-090620867.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 6, 2014 at 6:08am

In the past, scientists concluded many of man’s defining qualities, such as legs made for walking upright and a large brain, evolved all at once. But according to a new study in the journal Science, shifts in climate caused these qualities to evolve separately.
''Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective ''
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/1236828.abstract

Based on analyses of fossil evidence, the study researchers said the shrinking of forests and expansion of savannas in East Africa led to walking upright, which freed our forebears’ hands up for the creation and use of stone tools.

“Unstable climate conditions favored the evolution of the roots of human flexibility in our ancestors,” said study author Richard Potts, curator of anthropology and director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “The narrative of human evolution that arises from our analyses stresses the importance of adaptability to changing environments, rather than adaptation to any one environment, in the early success of the genus Homo.”

The study team found the predecessors of Homo erectus didn’t evolve in a series of progressively advanced iterations. Instead, a patchwork of at least three species lived alongside each other and the evolution of these species was driven by long-term climate factors in the region.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 4, 2014 at 6:42am

Tibetans live high life thanks to extinct human relatives
Modern people’s DNA adaptation to altitude passed down from ancient Denisovans
Tibetans inherited a genetic adaptation to high altitudes from an extinct group of human relatives called Denisovans, a new study finds.

Researchers have known for years that Tibetans carry a genetic variant in the EPAS1 gene that allows them to survive at extreme altitudes where oxygen is scarce. But how that variant arose has been mysterious. Now researchers report July 2 in Nature that the high-altitude version of EPAS1 almost certainly came from Denisovans or from a related group of extinct humans.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/tibetans-live-high-life-thanks-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 4, 2014 at 6:19am

BRAIN BASICS: ATTENTION

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 4, 2014 at 5:46am

Elastic Cloaking Material Makes Objects “Unfeelable”
Move over, invisibility cloaks. There's a structure that can keep objects from being felt or jostled
Scientists have developed an "unfeelability cloak," a material that hides objects within it from being felt or touched. The researchers suggest that in the future such cloaks might find help protect objects from bumps and pokes that might otherwise harm them.
Invisibility cloaks work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to block them. Scientists have designed cloaking materials that work against other kinds of waves as well—for example, inaudibility cloaks hide objects from the acoustic waves used in sonar.
The unfeelability cloak is a so-called pentamode metamaterial, an artificial structure that, despite being a solid, can behave like a fluid; although difficult to compress, its shape is otherwise easy to shift. The specific material the researchers devised is a three-dimensional hexagonal lattice reminiscent of a honeycomb, with the rods making up this lattice wider at their middles than at their ends.
The scientists built the cloak around the object they intended to hide, a rigid hollow cylinder that itself could hide anything big enough to fit within it. To simultaneously create both the cloak and the cylinder, the researchers shone an infrared laser beam into a vat of light-sensitive fluid, with plastic shapes hardening where the laser beam had focused. The resulting cloak was made of rods only about 40 microns long and 10 microns thick at their widest points, built around a cylinder 750 microns in diameter with walls 125 microns wide.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140619/ncomms5130/full/ncomms5130...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 3, 2014 at 9:37am

Studies that claimed simple way to make stem cells withdrawn after 'extensive' errors found
The scientists who reported in January that they'd found a startlingly simple way to make stem cells have withdrawn that claim, following accusations of falsified data. On Wednesday, July 2, 2014, the journal Nature released a statement from the scientists who acknowledged "extensive" errors and said they couldn't say "without a doubt" that their method works.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 3, 2014 at 9:29am

Controversial American scientist slammed for irresponsible flu research

Senior scientists have criticised an American university for allowing controversial research on enhancing a pandemic strain of flu virus to be undertaken in a laboratory with a relatively low level of biosecurity.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison was labelled irresponsible and negligent for allowing one of its scientists, Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka, to genetically manipulate pandemic H1N1 flu virus in a laboratory categorised as biosafety level-2
Professor Kawaoka has for the past four years been working on ways of mutating the 2009 pandemic strain of H1N1 flu so that it is no longer neutralised by the antibodies that provide immunity for the wider population.
Biosafety level-1 (BSL-1)

For work on bacteria and viruses that do not generally cause disease in healthy adults. Precautions, such as washing hands with anti-bacterial soaps, are minimal and the work can be done on an open bench-top.

Biosafety level-2 (BSL-2)

For infectious agents with a moderate hazard to health or the environment, such as viruses or bacteria that cause mild disease in humans or are difficult to contract by airborne transmission. Gloves and gowns.

Biosafety level-3 (BSL-3)

This is for agents that can cause severe or fatal diseases in humans, such as plague, yellow fever and West Nile virus. Requires protective clothing and fume cupboards where the work is carried out.

Biosafety level-4 (BSL-4)

The highest level of safety for the most dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola, Marburg and Lassa viruses. Measures include high-security buildings, multiple showers, positive-pressure personnel suits and air filters.
- The Independent

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 3, 2014 at 5:26am

Depression Makes Time Estimates More Accurate
Depressed people gauge time more accurately
When you are depressed, in which case your time-gauging abilities are pretty accurate reports PLOS ONE.
researchers in England and Ireland asked 39 students—18 with mild depression—to estimate the duration of tones lasting between two and 65 seconds and to produce tones of specified lengths of time.
Their results suggest that depressive realism, a phenomenon in which depressed people perceive themselves more accurately (and less positively) than typical individuals, may extend to aspects of thought beyond self-perception—in this case, time. They speculate that mindfulness treatments may be effective for depression, partly because they help depressed people focus on the moment, rather than its passing.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 2, 2014 at 6:55am

One lichen is actually 126 species and counting
Well-known tropical fungal partnership could be several hundred different kinds
A kind of lichen that biologists thought they knew well has turned out to consist of at least 126 distinct species — and maybe more than 400 — lumped under a single name.

Dictyonema glabratum isn’t some obscure, tiny organism.
A single macrolichen constitutes hundreds of unrecognized species
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/26/1403517111

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on July 2, 2014 at 6:19am

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