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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 10, 2024 at 8:35am

Microbial marvels: Study finds 'untapped biodiversity' in the bathroom, on your toothbrush and showerhead

The latest hotspot to offer awe-inspiring biodiversity lies no further than your bathroom.

In a new study, microbiologists found that showerheads and toothbrushes are teeming with an extremely diverse collection of viruses—most of which have never been seen before.

Although this might sound ominous, the good news is these viruses don't target people. They target bacteria.

The microorganisms collected in the study are bacteriophage, or "phage," a type of virus that infects and replicates inside of bacteria. Although researchers know little about them, phages have recently garnered attention for their potential use in treating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. And the previously unknown viruses lurking in our bathrooms could become a treasure trove of materials for exploring those applications.

The study, "Phage communities in household-related biofilms correlate with bacterial hosts but do not associate with other environmental factors," was published recently (Oct. 9) in the journal Frontiers in Microbiomes.

Researchers  found many viruses that we know very little about and many others that we have never seen before. It's amazing how much untapped biodiversity is all around us. And you don't even have to go far to find it; it's right under our noses.

After characterizing bacteria,the researchers then used DNA sequencing to examine the viruses living on those same samples. Altogether, the samples comprised more than 600 different viruses—and no two samples were alike.

They saw basically no overlap in virus types between showerheads and toothbrushes.  They also saw very little overlap between any two samples at all. Each showerhead and each toothbrush is like its own little island. It just underscores the incredible diversity of viruses out there.

The researchers caution people not to fret about the invisible wildlife living within our bathrooms. Instead of grabbing for bleach, people can soak their showerheads in vinegar to remove calcium buildup or simply wash them with plain soap and water. And people should regularly replace toothbrush heads.

Microbes are everywhere, and the vast majority of them will not make us sick. The more you attack them with disinfectants, the more they are likely to develop resistance or become more difficult to treat. We should all just learn to live with them, the researchers  say.

Phage communities in household-related biofilms correlate with bacterial hosts but do not associate with other environmental factors, Frontiers in Microbiomes (2024). www.frontiersin.org/journals/m … 024.1396560/abstract

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 8:00am

Asthma and allergies may be caused by changes in the placenta, suggests study

Changes in the placenta may increase the risk of children developing asthma and allergies, as shown in new research. The study is published in the journal Pediatric Allergy and Immunology.

This study is based on a review of 19 previous studies involving around 13,000 children.

The study shows that children born prematurely have a three times increased risk of suffering from asthma-related problems if there is inflammation in the fetal membranes and placenta. This risk is in addition to the increased risk of lung disease linked to premature birth. 

Researchers also saw a link between unusually heavy placentas and increased asthma medication prescriptions in full-term children during their first year of life.

Although these links are statistically significant, the researchers emphasize that the they do not yet know for sure whether changes in the placenta directly or indirectly cause asthma or allergies in children.

It's almost impossible to conduct the kind of studies needed to prove a causal relation in pregnant women. But given these results, they think pediatricians ought to focus more on the potential significance of the placenta for the child after birth.

It has been known for some time that atopic diseases such as asthma and allergies can begin to develop during the fetal stage. A plausible explanation for the new findings could be that inflammation in the placenta and fetal membranes triggers an inflammation in the fetus that persists and risks damaging the child's lungs or affecting the immune system even after birth.

This new knowledge is something from which health care can already benefit.

The placenta is a temporary organ that develops in the uterus during pregnancy. It supplies the fetus with oxygen and nutrients, removes waste products, and acts as a barrier against certain infections. The placenta also produces vital hormones for the pregnancy, the mother, and the fetus.

Zaki Bakoyan et al, Childhood atopic disorders in relation to placental changes—A systematic review and meta‐analysis, Pediatric Allergy and Immunology (2024). DOI: 10.1111/pai.14141

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 7:43am

"Global human-induced emissions, which are dominated by nitrogen additions to croplands, increased by 30 percent over the past four decades," concluded a major study in the journal Nature in 2020.
The key to the problem lies in more efficient use of fertilizers.

Two-thirds of the climate change mitigation potential of N2O could be realized by reducing fertilizers on just 20 percent of the world's cropland, particularly in humid subtropical agricultural regions.
Fluorinated greenhouse gases (PFCs, HFCs and SF6) are found in fridges and freezers, heat pumps, air conditioners and electrical networks.

Even when in small quantities, they stand out for their extremely high warming capacity.

For example, SF6, which is found in electrical transformers, has a greenhouse effect 24,000 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.

The Montreal Protocol signed in 1987, and ratified by 195 countries, has already significantly reduced the atmospheric presence of CFCs, another ozone-depleting fluorinated gas.

In 2016 the Kigali agreement also provided for the phasing out of HFCs.
Last year the EU sealed a pact to progressively ban the sale of equipment containing fluorinated gases, in particular HFCs, with the aim of eliminating them completely by 2050.
Source: Environmental Research Letters.
Part 2
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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 7:40am

The other greenhouse gases warming the planet

While carbon dioxide, or CO₂, is the best known greenhouse gas, several others, including methane and nitrous oxide, are also driving global warming and altering the Earth's climate.

CO₂ accounts for about two-thirds of the warming attributed to greenhouse gases.

Methane, or CH4, is the second most important greenhouse gas linked to human activity after CO2.

Around 40 percent of methane comes from natural sources, notably wetlands, but the majority (around 60 percent) is linked to human activities such as agriculture (ruminant breeding and rice cultivation), fossil fuels and waste. Its warming power is more than 80 times greater over 20 years than that of CO2, but its lifespan is shorter, making it an important lever in attempts to limit global warming in the short term.

Reducing methane emissions "would have a strong short-term cooling effect, because atmospheric methane concentrations would drop quickly.

Policies should "focus on capturing the low hanging fruit, so the very low-cost measures such as reducing natural gas leaks", say the experts.

Despite a global commitment to reduce planet-heating emissions signed by many countries, including the European Union and the United States, the trend is not positive.

Methane is rising faster in relative terms than any major greenhouse gas and is now 2.6-fold higher than in pre-industrial times.

Nitrous oxide, or nitrous protoxide (N2O), is the third major greenhouse gas and almost 300 times more potent than CO2.
It is mainly emitted by synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and manure used in agriculture.

Other emissions come from human activities (the chemical industry, wastewater, fossil fuels) or natural sources (the soil and oceans).
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 6:59am

Using the toolkit of non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics, the team has successfully bridged the gap between Aristotle's observations from two millennia ago and our modern understanding of quantum mechanics.

And it now opens the door to many research and applications-related questions.
The question forced the researchers to ask several fundamental questions about the relationship between the laws of thermodynamics that describe cooling, and the quantum mechanics, which describe reality at the fundamental level. We are currently developing a geometrical approach to the problem, which will hopefully allow us to understand different types of Mpemba effect in the same mathematical framework.
What you actually have in this really 'cool' Mpemba effect is a way to speed up cooling—and the cooling of quantum systems is absolutely vital for applications in quantum technologies.
Some of the tools the researchers are developing to investigate this fundamental effect will be of paramount importance for understanding things like heat flows, and how to minimize dissipation in future technologies.

Mattia Moroder et al, Thermodynamics of the Quantum Mpemba Effect, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.140404. On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.16959

Part 3

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 6:56am

The 'Mpemba effect' gets its name from Erasto Mpemba who, as a school kid in 1963, was making ice cream in his home economics class in Tanzania. Mpemba did not wait for his hot ice cream mixture to cool before putting it directly in the fridge and was unsurprisingly puzzled to find that it froze before all the colder samples of his classmates.
He pointed this out to his teacher, who ridiculed him for not knowing his physics—Newton's law of cooling, for example, tells us that the rate at which an object cools is proportional to the temperature difference between the object and its surroundings. However, Mpemba convinced a visiting professor—Denis Osoborne from the University of Dar es Salaam—to test what he had seen and the pair published a paper that indeed evidenced the strange effect.
While the Mpemba effect is still not wholly understood—its presence is hotly debated at the macroscopic scale—it is much more apparent on the microscopic scale, where physicists use the theory of quantum mechanics to describe nature.

The quantum Mpemba effect has recently become a trending topic, but myriad questions hung in the air; for example, how does the quantum effect relate to the original effect? And can we construct a thermodynamic framework to understand the phenomenon better?
The QuSys research group's breakthrough answers some of the key questions.
Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 6:55am

Physics team uncovers a quantum Mpemba effect with a host of 'cool' implications

Initially investigating out of pure curiosity, researchers have made a discovery that bridges the gap between Aristotle's observations two millennia ago and modern-day understanding, while opening the door to a whole host of "cool"—and "cooling"—implications.

The Mpemba effect is best known as a perplexing phenomenon, where hot water freezes faster than cold water. Observations of the counter-intuitive effect date back to Aristotle who, over 2,000 years ago, noted that the Greeks of Pontus were exploiting the effect in their fishing practices.

And now, we can say that this strange effect is much more ubiquitous than we previously expected. Researchers have  just published a research paper in the journal Physical Review Letters  on the subject. The paper outlines their breakthrough in understanding the effect in the very different—and extremely complex—world of quantum physics.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 6:47am

When it comes to emergency care, ChatGPT overprescribes!

If ChatGPT were cut loose in the Emergency Department, it might suggest unneeded X-rays and antibiotics for some patients and admit others who didn't require hospital treatment, a new study from  has found.

The researchers said that, while the model could be prompted in ways that make its responses more accurate, it's still no match for the clinical judgment of a human doctor.

This is a valuable message to clinicians not to blindly trust these models.

ChatGPT can answer medical exam questions and help draft clinical notes, but it's not currently designed for situations that call for multiple considerations, like the situations in an emergency department.

 Chris Williams et al, Nature Communications (2024). www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52415-1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2024 at 6:29am

Nobel Prize in physics awarded to 2 scientists for discoveries that enabled machine learning

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence—John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton—won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live.

 These two gentlemen were really the pioneers. The artificial neural networks—interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain—the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and "have also become part of our daily lives.

There are enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind, the Nobel committee says.

 www.nobelprize.org/prizes/phys … dvanced-information/

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 8, 2024 at 12:55pm

Researchers found fuel-producing microbes that eat carbon monoxide—a highly toxic, flammable gas that is generated, among other things, during steel production. Currently, the steel industry produces approximately 2 billion tons of steel per year, and carbon monoxide comprises between 20% and 30% of their waste gases. That waste carbon monoxide is currently burned to produce carbon dioxide. It is less toxic, but still quite harmful. However, carbon monoxide-consuming microbes could turn these vast quantities of waste gas into green fuel.
Some carbon monoxide-consuming microbes can produce ethanol, a biofuel that has already been blended into normal fuels for several decades to make them a bit greener.

https://theconversation.com/meet-the-microbes-that-transform-toxic-...

Part 2

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