Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 16, 2016 at 9:03am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 15, 2016 at 8:13am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 12, 2016 at 9:33am

An Australian artist is the only confirmed tetrachromat in the world.

What does tetrachromat mean?

The human eye is packed with millions of cone-shaped cells that allow for color to be perceived. For those with normal vision, the three types of cones allow vision of about one million distinctive colors. Some animal species including certain birds, insects, fish, and reptiles, have a fourth type of cone cell that extends color perception into the UV range. Though evolution has mostly scrubbed that fourth cone from the mammalian lineage, there is evidence that a small group of humans may have a genetic variant that allows for tetrachromacy.

So, a tetrachromat would be able to see, roughly 100 times more colours than the average human!!

Quoting Concetta, "It’s shocking to me how little color people are seeing."

The fact she is the only person (or one of a few) who sees the world totally differently makes her amazingperson. When she looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a mosaic of color.”
She paints what she sees exactly. http://concettaantico.com/

where Concetta shows the world what she sees.

She conjures masterpieces in one sitting. All her paintings are insanely colorful,and feature shades you wouldn't expect to see."
The fact that we may never be able to see the world the way she does is saddening in a way.

Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying color information, or possessing four types of cone cells in the eye. Organisms with tetrachromacy are called tetrachromats.

In tetrachromatic organisms, the sensory color space is four-dimensional, meaning that to match the sensory effect of arbitrarily chosen spectra of light within their visible spectrum requires mixtures of at least four primary colors.

Tetrachromacy is demonstrated among several species of birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and insects. It was also the normal condition of most mammals in the past; a genetic change made the majority of species of this class eventually lose two of their four cones.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 12, 2016 at 9:23am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 12, 2016 at 9:13am

Why do we change our decisions after taking them?

There are two schools of thought on this problem. One suggestion is that changes of mind happen because we continue to weigh evidence after a choice has been made . This process is called post-decision evidence accumulation. An alternative idea is that the brain uses additional mechanisms to detect and correct previous errors. Support for this theory comes from findings that show that error-related signals are produced in the medial frontal cortex of the human brain. People who have damage to the frontal regions of the brain are also unable to “self-monitor” and identify errors they have made without external feedback. Now a pair of studies in eLife provides the most detailed account yet of the mechanisms underpinning changes of mind – and together, they indicate that both ideas could be right.

Read about the studies here: http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e14790v1?utm_source=content_aler...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 12, 2016 at 8:46am

You think good cholesterol or HDL cholesterol is good for your heart and go for it. You did a wise thing ... unless you have a rare mutation in a protein called SR-BI that binds to HDL cholesterol and triggers its movement from the blood into the liver.

Those who carried the mutations tended to have high HDL cholesterol levels in the blood. But they were also, paradoxically, at higher risk for coronary heart disease!

A study published on March 10 in Science, brought his to light.

The difference between correlation and causation makes for a more complicated conversation. 

 

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 8, 2016 at 8:59am

The widespread use of certain insecticides by farmers is making the chemicals less effective at fighting malaria-spreading mosquitoes, a paper shows.

The paper, which aggregated data on the issue from other studies, found a clear link between the use of pyrethroids as an agricultural pesticide in Africa and the resistance of Anopheles mosquitoes to this insecticide. These mosquitoes are the main malaria vector.

Resistance to pyrethroids was once confined to southern Africa, but had spread to Benin, Cameroon, Kenya and Uganda by 2014, the paper says.

“Whilst there is almost certainly a correlation between agricultural use of insecticides and insecticide resistance... I believe the majority of selection for resistance probably comes from the use of insecticides in vector control.”

Mark Hoppe, International Resistance Action Committee Pyrethroids are among the most common insecticides used for indoor spraying and bed net treatments against malaria mosquitoes, the authors say. The chemicals are valuable because they are considered safe for humans.

But the authors found low “kill rates” being reported from trials with pyrethroid-soaked bed nets in areas affected by pyrethroid resistance.
The paper, which was published in the March issue of Trends in Parasitology, recommends more research into alternative insecticides that rely on substances against which mosquitoes do not yet have resistance.

http://www.cell.com/trends/parasitology/abstract/S1471-4922(15)00254-8?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1471492215002548%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2016 at 9:12am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2016 at 8:35am

Selfishness in science is very bad . It robs the world of great relief, pain, benefits and many more. Here is an example...

Starlite is a material claimed to be able to withstand and insulate from extreme heat. It was invented by amateur chemist Maurice Ward.

Starlite looks like a thick white paint. Just like regular paint, it can be applied to most of the surfaces. When you apply a coat of starlite on any material, the material becomes extreme heat-proof.

In BBC TV show Tomorrow's world, Maurice Ward demonstrated this by applying a coat of Starlite on a regular chicken's egg. Then he used a blowtorch to heat the egg for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes when he turned off the blowtorch, the egg was immediately touchable with bare hands. Mind that a blowtorch flame generates a temperature of about 2000 degrees Celsius. He also cracked the egg to demonstrate that the inside of the egg is still liquid.

You can see the video of the demonstration...

The British atomic weapons establishment got a sample of Starlite, and their experiment showed that the material can withstood heat blast of even a 900 Kiloton nuke. (75 times more powerful blast than the Hiroshima bomb).

Just think about the application of this miracle paint. It could have used to make fire proof houses and cloths, it could have helped creating new age space capsules, it could be used to make heat insulating car engines. It could have revolutionized industrial sectors. The applications could have been limitless.

Unfortunately, the inventor did not want to make his formula a commercial product and wanted a 51% ownership of the product. Many interested parties including NASA approached him but could not make him agree on licensing of his invention.

Maurice Ward died in May 2011, and the formula was lost with him, forever. So far all attempts to re-create the formula have failed.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 5, 2016 at 8:25am

Big and small numbers are processed in different sides of the brain
Small numbers are processed in the right side of the brain, while large numbers are processed in the left side of the brain, new research suggests.The study, from scientists at Imperial College London, offers new insights into the mystery of how our brains handle numbers. The findings of the research, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, could in the future help to tailor rehabilitation techniques for patients who have suffered brain damage, such as stroke patients, and inform treatments for conditions such as dyscalculia, which causes difficulty in processing numbers.
The findings from the current study may help inform treatments for individuals who struggle to process numbers.

“The findings offer a starting point for unravelling how the brain handles and represents numbers – so-called numerical cognition. If we understand how numbers are processed we may be able to target treatments and rehabilitation therapies. The next stage is to examine how the brain handles large, complex calculations.”

Bidirectional Modulation of Numerical Magnitude. Qadeer Arshad, Yuliya Nigmatullina, Ramil Nigmatullin Paladd Asavarut, Usman Goga, Sarah Khan, Kaija Sander, Shuaib Siddiqui, R. E. Roberts, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Adolfo M. Bronstein and Paresh A. Malhotra. Cerebral Cortex, 2016, 1–14. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhv344

--

Ageing begins even before you are born

 3rd March, 2016

London, March 3 : The process of ageing begins even before we are born, says a new study, which used rats to model pregnancy and foetal development.

The study showed that providing mothers with a diet loaded with antioxidants during pregnancy meant that their offspring aged more slowly during adulthood.

The offspring of mothers with lower levels of oxygen in the womb can age more quickly in adulthood.

"Antioxidants are known to reduce ageing, but here, we show for the first time that giving them to pregnant mothers can slow down the ageing clock of their offspring," said first author Beth Allison from the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The study, published in The FASEB Journal, also emphasised that the environment we're exposed to in the womb may be just as, if not more, important in programming a risk of adult-onset of heart disease.

The researchers found that adult rats born from mothers who had less oxygen during pregnancy had shorter telomeres -- essential part of human cells that affects the age of cells -- than rats born from normal pregnancies.

The offsprings' also experienced problems with the inner lining of their blood vessels - revealing signs that they had aged more quickly and were prone to developing heart disease earlier than normal.

However, when pregnant mothers in the group were given antioxidant supplements, this lowered the risk among their offspring of developing heart disease, the researchers noted.

The foetus, which received appropriate levels of oxygen - benefiting from a maternal diet of antioxidants displayed longer telomeres than those rats whose mothers did not receive the antioxidant supplements during pregnancy.

Although conducted in rats, the research suggests that it might be applicable in humans and focuses the need for pregnant mothers to maintain a healthy lifestyle for the sake of their baby's future heart health, the researchers noted.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 883
• 884
• 885
• 886
• 887
• …
• 1079
• Next ›
• Page