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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 10, 2014 at 9:20am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 10, 2014 at 7:06am

''Morning glory clouds'' are long bands of cigar-shaped formations can stretch up to 1,000 kilometres in length. And they can only be seen reliably in one place in the world - Australia’s Gulf Country township around the Gulf of Carpenteria in northwestern Queensland, each spring.

They look like some kind of alien wormhole, but the iconic roll shape of the cloud is actually caused by a drop in temperature, a spike in pressure and strong sea breezes. Because of these conditions, air at the front edge of the cloud is moving up rapidly, while the air at the back is dropping, rolling the cloud into a neat little cylinder. It’s been reported that up to 10 of these clouds can appear across the sky at one time, up to 2 kilometres off the ground.

The morning glory clouds can travel at an incredible speed of 10 to 20 metres per second - that’s around 60 kilometres per hour - with new cloud continuously being formed at the leading edge while being eroded from behind. While scientists still don’t fully understand the weather conditions that lead to the clouds, they’re associated with humidity in the area and strong sea breezes across the Gulf of Carpenteria, which are the conditions that occur here each spring between late Spetember and early November.
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20140810-26303.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2014 at 6:25am

In India several farmers commit suicide each year. People blame this trend on failed crops, loan payment failure, multinational seeds that don't yield good results here etc. But a recent research work shows the problem from another angle .
Pesticide use by farmers linked to high rates of depression and suicides.
Experts say that some of the chemicals used to control pests may make matters worse by changing farmers’ brain chemistry. Recent research has linked long-term use of pesticides to higher rates of depression and suicide. Evidence also suggests that pesticide poisoning – a heavy dose in a short amount of time – doubles the risk of depression.
The causes are complex. There “are millions, even billions, of chemical reactions that make up the dynamic system that is responsible for your mood, perceptions, and how you experience life”. Some research suggests that the chemicals that farmers and their workers spread on fields may alter some of these brain chemicals. The studies don’t prove that pesticides cause depression, but animal testing indicates that it’s possible, said Cheryl Beseler, an environmental health researcher at Colorado State University. In rat tests pesticides have altered brain cells, neurotransmitters and production of a protective acid. In France, farmers who used herbicides were nearly twice as likely to have been treated for depression than those who didn’t use herbicides, according to a study published last year. Most insecticides work by disrupting insects' nerve cells. At high enough doses, they can alter human nerve cells as well.
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2014/oct/pesticides...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 9, 2014 at 6:13am

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy"/ for making "an optical microscope into a nanoscope"/ Ability to See Single Molecules .

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that for a long time, optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light.

Helped by fluorescent molecules, the Nobel laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nano dimension.

The prize was given "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".

The techniques they developed enabled extremely high resolution images to be produced using optical microscopy. Their work circumvented the problem of the ‘diffraction limit’ – the inability of light microscopy to distinguish between structures smaller than half the wavelength of visible light or about 200nm. This advance allowed nanoscale structures – including individual molecules – to be visualised within cells while they are still alive, something that isn’t possible with techniques such as electron microscopy.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 8, 2014 at 8:04am

"Why Mental Rehearsals Work."
A common theory is that mental imagery activates some of the same neural pathways involved in the actual experience, and a recent study in Psychological Science lends support to that idea. The finding helps to explain why imagined rehearsals can improve your game. The mental picture activates and strengthens the very neural circuits—even subconscious ones that control automated processes like pupil dilation—that you will need to recruit when it is time to perform.
http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/scientificamericanmind0914...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 8, 2014 at 7:57am

If you are one of those who supports organic farming this news is for you to have a rethink :

Manure fertilizer increases antibiotic resistance

Faeces from antibiotic-free cows helps resistant bacteria to flourish in soil, puzzling researchers.

Treating dairy cows and other farm animals with antibiotics and then laying their manure in soil can cause the bacteria in the dirt to grow resistant to the drugs. But a study now suggests that the manure itself could be contributing to resistance, even when it comes from cows that are free of antibiotics.

The mechanism at work is not yet clear, but the finding — published on October 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — suggests a complex link between antibiotic use in agriculture and resistance in human pathogens.

“Before we say anything about ‘nitrogen treatment is terrible and organic is wonderful’, we need to see what the downsides are.”

http://www.nature.com/news/manure-fertilizer-increases-antibiotic-r...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 8, 2014 at 7:13am

‘Virological Penicillin’ Found In Chinese Traditional Medicine
Researchers have isolated the first compound that can directly act on viral infectious agents, an miRNA found in honeysuckle used in traditional Chinese medicine.
Research has validated the use of honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) to treat viral infections, showing that it contains a plant microRNA (miRNA) which directly targets influenza A viruses (IAV) including H1N1, H5N1 and H7N9. This research has been published in Cell Research.
http://www.nature.com/cr/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/cr2014130a.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 8, 2014 at 5:37am

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources".
The invention of an energy source that lights up our computer and/or mobile phone screens and holds promise to brighten up the quality of life of over 1.5 billion people around the world.
The laureates were rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source — the blue light-emitting diode (LED).

According to the committee, the laureates' inventions revolutionized the field of illumination technology.

New, more efficient, cheaper and smarter lamps are developed all the time. White LED lamps can be created in two different ways. One way is to use blue light to excite a phosphor so that it shines in red and green. When all colours come together, white light is produced.

The laureates were rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source — the blue light-emitting diode (LED).

According to the committee, the laureates' inventions revolutionized the field of illumination technology.

New, more efficient, cheaper and smarter lamps are developed all the time. White LED lamps can be created in two different ways. One way is to use blue light to excite a phosphor so that it shines in red and green. When all colours come together, white light is produced.

The other way is to construct the lamp out of three LEDs, red, green and blue, and let the eye do the work of combining the three colours into white.

LED lamps are thus flexible light sources, already with several applications in the field of illumination — millions of different colours can be produced.
The invention of the LED however will be highly beneficial and safer than older light sources. For example, fluorescent light has mercury whereas LEDs doesn't. In future, it can be used to sterilise water as we know that UV light can kill bacteria and viruses. It has been known since 1671 that to get white light, we have to combine red, green and blue light. Red and green light has been around for half a century. Now we have blue which we can effectively mix and create new white light sources.
The LED lamp holds great promise: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 7, 2014 at 5:23am

The Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine 2014 was given to three people this time-divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".
The brain has a GPS-like function that enables people to produce mental maps and navigate the world — a discovery for which three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine this year. The findings might help scientists design tests that can pick up the very earliest signs of the mind-robbing disease, whose victims lose their spatial memory and get easily lost.

O'Keefe discovered the first component of the brain's positioning system in 1971. He found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rat moved to another place. He demonstrated that these "place cells" were building up a map, not just registering visual input.
In 2005, the Mosers identified another type of nerve cell — the "grid cell" — that generates a coordinate system for precise "positioning and path-finding".
The laureates' discoveries marked a shift in scientists' understanding of how specialized cells work together to perform complex cognitive tasks. They have also opened new avenues for understanding cognitive functions such as memory, thinking and planning.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 6, 2014 at 5:37am

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