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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 22, 2021 at 10:05am

Sci-COM : Storytelling can be a powerful tool for science

Credible science communication and storytelling are not mutually exclusive — they can be great allies.

In contrast with straight communication of experimental results, telling individual research stories portrays science as a human-driven endeavour, full of successes, uncertainties, missteps and failures, which in turn promotes transparency. What really matters is what story is being told and by whom.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00108-w?utm_source=Natur...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 22, 2021 at 9:31am

Bubble micro-robots!

Lasers create miniature robots from bubbles

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 22, 2021 at 9:26am

Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificia...

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men. Patients are determined to have prostate cancer primarily based on PSA, a cancer factor in blood. However, as diagnostic accuracy is as low as 30%, a considerable number of patients undergo additional invasive biopsy and thus suffer from resultant side effects, such as bleeding and pain.

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Scientists shine new light on heat-damaged hair

A new technique allowed researchers to observe in greater detail how heat alters keratin proteins, helping in their search for ingredients that can prevent heat-damaged hair.

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As more bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics, scientists are figh...

Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin, the world's first antibiotic, saved countless lives. But even as the bacteria killer first hit the U.S. market—in the closing months of World War II—Fleming warned the world about what penicillin might unleash.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 22, 2021 at 9:25am

Antibiotic resistance may spread even more easily than expected

Pathogenic bacteria in humans are developing resistance to antibiotics much faster than expected. Now, computational research shows that one reason could be significant genetic transfer between bacteria in our ecosystems and to humans. This work has also led to new tools for resistance researchers.

Completely different species of bacteria can spread resistance genes to each other through plasmids—small DNA molecules where bacteria store some of their genes outside the chromosome. When two bacterial cells come into contact, they can copy plasmids to each other. This is called conjugation, and it is the most important mechanism for spreading antibiotic resistance.

In recent years, we've seen that resistance genes spread to human pathogens to a much greater degree than anyone expected.

Many of the genes appear to have originated in a wide array of bacterial species and environments, such as soil, water and plant bacteria. This has been difficult to explain, because although conjugation is very common, we've thought that there was a distinct limitation for which bacterial species can transfer plasmids to each other. Plasmids belong to different mobility groups, or MOB groups, so they can't transfer between just any bacterial species.

The results show, among other things, that:

• The number of oriT regions may be almost eight times higher than those found with the standard method used today.
• The number of mobile plasmids may be twice as high as previously known.
• The number of bacterial species that have mobile plasmids may be almost twice as high as previously known.
• Over half of these plasmids have oriT regions that match a conjugation enzyme from another plasmid that has previously been classified in a different MOB group. This means that they could be transferred by one of these plasmids that happens to be in the same bacterial cell.

The last part means that there may be transfer mechanisms between large numbers of bacterial species and environments where we previously believed there were barriers.

Jan Zrimec, Multiple plasmid origin‐of‐transfer regions might aid the spread of antimicrobial resistance to human pathogens, MicrobiologyOpen (2020). DOI: 10.1002/mbo3.1129

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-antibiotic-resistance-easily.html?utm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 22, 2021 at 9:11am

Some COVID-19 mutations may dampen vaccine effectiveness

Scientists are reporting troubling signs that some recent mutations of the virus that causes COVID-19 may modestly curb the effectiveness of two current vaccines, although they stress that the shots still protect against the disease.

Researchers expressed concern Wednesday about the preliminary findings, in large part because they suggest that future mutations could undermine vaccines.

A different, more limited study out Wednesday gave encouraging news about one vaccine's protection against some of the mutations.

One way vaccines work is to prompt the immune system to make antibodies that block the virus from infecting cells. The Rockefeller researchers got blood samples from 20 people who had received either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine and tested their antibodies against various virus mutations in the lab.

With some, the antibodies didn't work as well against the virus—activity was one-to-threefold less, depending on the mutation. It's a small difference but it is definitely a difference. The antibody response is "not as good" at blocking the virus.

Earlier research established that the two vaccines are about 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 illness.

The latest findings were posted late Tuesday on an online website for researchers.

We don't want people thinking that the current vaccine is already outdated. That's absolutely not true. There's still immunity here ... a good level of protection but the mutations "do in fact reduce how well our immune response is recognizing the virus."

We've got an arms race between the vaccines and the virus. The slower we roll out vaccine around the world, the more opportunities we give this virus to escape" and develop mutations

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.426911v1

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-covid-mutations-dampen-vacci...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 22, 2021 at 9:07am

Some COVID-19 mutations may dampen vaccine effectiveness

Scientists are reporting troubling signs that some recent mutations of the virus that causes COVID-19 may modestly curb the effectiveness of two current vaccines, although they stress that the shots still protect against the disease.

Researchers expressed concern Wednesday about the preliminary findings, in large part because they suggest that future mutations could undermine vaccines. The research tested coronaviruses from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil, and was led by Rockefeller University in New York with scientists from the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere.

A different, more limited study out Wednesday gave encouraging news about one vaccine's protection against some of the mutations.

One way vaccines work is to prompt the immune system to make antibodies that block the virus from infecting cells. The Rockefeller researchers got blood samples from 20 people who had received either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine and tested their antibodies against various virus mutations in the lab.

With some, the antibodies didn't work as well against the virus—activity was one-to-threefold less, depending on the mutation.

It's a small difference but it is definitely a difference. The antibody response is "not as good" at blocking the virus.

Earlier research established that the two vaccines are about 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 illness.

The latest findings were posted late Tuesday on an online website for researchers 

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-covid-mutations-dampen-vacci...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 21, 2021 at 8:59am

New antifungal compound from ant farms

Attine ants are farmers, and they grow fungus as food. Pseudonocardia and Streptomyces bacteria are their farmhands, producing metabolites that protect the crop from pathogens. Surprisingly, these metabolites lack common structural features across bacteria from different geographic locations, even though the ants share a common ancestor. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Science they have identified the first shared antifungal compound among many of these bacteria across Brazil. The compound could someday have medical applications.

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When a story is breaking, AI can help consumers identify fake news

Warnings about misinformation are now regularly posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, but not all of these cautions are created equal. New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that artificial intelligence can help form accurate news assessments—but only when a news story is first emerging.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 21, 2021 at 8:56am

Genesis of blue lightning into the stratosphere detected from ISS

We know that there are many things left to discover, such as blue jets, elves and red sprites. These bizarre-sounding things are very difficult to observe from the surface of the Earth. As a new Nature paper reports, however, the European Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) observatory on the International Space Station is helping scientists find answers.

Looking down on Earth's weather from the International Space Station 400 km above, ASIM's enhanced perspective is shedding new light on weather phenomena and their characteristics.

The collection of optical cameras, photometers and an X- and gamma-ray detector was installed on the Space Station in 2018. It is designed to look for electrical discharges originating in stormy weather conditions that extend above thunderstorms into the upper atmosphere.

And now, for the first time for an ESA International Space Station experiment, ASIM's findings have been published in Nature as front-page article. The paper describes a sighting of five intense blue flashes in a cloud top, one generating a 'blue jet' into the stratosphere.

A blue jet is a form of lightning that shoots upwards from thunderstorm clouds. They can reach as far 50 km into the stratosphere and last less than a second. The space storm-hunter measured a blue jet that was kicked off with and intense five 10-microsecond flash in a cloud near the island of Naru in the Pacific Ocean.

The flash also generated equally fantastic-sounding 'elves'. Elves are rapidly expanding rings of optical and UV emissions at the bottom of the ionosphere. Here, electrons, radio waves and the atmosphere interact to form these emissions.

Capturing these phenomena using ASIM's highly sensitive tools is vital for scientists researching weather systems on Earth.

 Observation of the onset of a blue jet into the stratosphere, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03122-6 , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03122-6

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-genesis-blue-lightning-stratosphere-i...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 21, 2021 at 8:46am

Storing information with light

New photo-ferroelectric materials allow storage of information in a non-volatile way using light stimulus. The idea is to create energy efficient memory devices with high performance and versatility to face current challenges. The study has been published in Nature Communications by Josep Fontcuberta and co-workers and opens a path towards further investigations on this phenomenon and to neuromorphic computing applications. 

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Saturn's tilt caused by its moons

Two scientists from CNRS and Sorbonne University working at the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculation (Paris Observatory—PSL/CNRS) have just shown that the influence of Saturn's satellites can explain the tilt of the rotation axis of the gas giant. Their work, published on 18 January 2021 in the journal Nature Astronomy, also predicts that the tilt will increase even further over the next few billion years.

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Deep sleep takes out the trash

A new Northwestern University study reaffirms the importance of getting a good night's sleep.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on January 21, 2021 at 8:44am

Designer DNA therapeutic wipes out cancer stem cells, treats multiple myeloma in mice

Many patients with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, eventually develop resistance to one treatment after another. That's in part because cancer stem cells drive the disease—cells that continually self-renew. If a therapy can't completely destroy these malignant stem cells, the cancer is likely to keep coming back.

Researchers are taking a new, targeted approach to myeloma treatment—silencing IRF4, a gene that allows myeloma stem cells and tumour cells to proliferate and survive. Past studies have shown that high IRF4 levels are associated with lower overall survival rates for patients with the disease.

The team details their successes inhibiting IRF4 with an antisense oligonucleotide, an engineered piece of DNA specifically designed to bind the genetic material coding for IRF4, causing it to degrade. The oligonucleotide—an investigational antisense medicine developed by Ionis and known as ION251—lowered disease burden, reduced myeloma stem cell abundance and increased survival of mice bearing human myeloma, according to preclinical study data.

Cell Stem Cell (2021). www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fu … 1934-5909(20)30601-9

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-dna-therapeutic-cancer-stem-...

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