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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 6:22am

How airplanes counteract St. Elmo's Fire during thunderstorms -1

At the height of a thunderstorm, the tips of cell towers, telephone poles, and other tall, electrically conductive structures can spontaneously emit a flash of blue light. This electric glow, known as a corona discharge, is produced when the air surrounding a conductive object is briefly ionized by an electrically charged environment.

For centuries, sailors observed corona discharges at the tips of ship masts during storms at sea. They coined the phenomenon St. Elmo's fire, after the patron saint of sailors.

Scientists have found that a corona discharge can strengthen in windy conditions, glowing more brightly as the wind further electrifies the air. This wind-induced intensification has been observed mostly in electrically grounded structures, such as trees and towers. Now aerospace engineers at MIT have found that wind has an opposite effect on ungrounded objects, such as airplanes and some wind turbine blades.

In some of the last experiments performed in MIT's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel before it was dismantled in 2019, the researchers exposed an electrically ungrounded model of an airplane wing to increasingly strong wind gusts. They found that the stronger the wind, the weaker the corona discharge, and the dimmer the glow that was produced.

Within a storm cloud, friction can build up to produce extra electrons, creating an electric field that can reach all the way to the ground. If that field is strong enough, it can break apart surrounding air molecules, turning neutral air into a charged gas, or plasma. This process most often occurs around sharp, conductive objects such as cell towers and wing tips, as these pointed structures tend to concentrate the electric field in a way that electrons are pulled from surrounding air molecules toward the pointed structures, leaving behind a veil of positively charged plasma immediately around the sharp object.

Once a plasma has formed, the molecules within it can begin to glow via the process of corona discharge, where excess electrons in the electric field ping-pong against the molecules, knocking them into excited states. In order to come down from those excited states, the molecules emit a photon of energy, at a wavelength that, for oxygen and nitrogen, corresponds to the characteristic blueish glow of St. Elmo's fire.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 6:15am

Scientists create compact particle accelerators that drive electron beams nearer speed of light

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-scientists-compact-particle-electron-...

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**  X-rays indicate that water can behave like a liquid crystal

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-x-rays-liquid-crystal.html?utm_source...

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** Ultraviolet communication to transform Army networks

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-ultraviolet-army-networks.html?utm_so...

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Laser beams reflected between Earth and moon boost science

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-laser-earth-moon-boost-science.html?u...

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** Researchers identify a protein that may help SARS-CoV-2 spread rapidly through cells

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-protein-sars-cov-rapidly-cells.html?u...

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** How Breastfeeding Protects Mothers

Breastfeeding reduces type 2 diabetes risk by boosting beta cells.

https://www.the-scientist.com/infographics/infographic-how-breastfe...

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Male Flies’ Y Chromosome May Contribute to Earlier Deaths

As male Drosophila grow old, selfish genetic elements that are abundant on the Y chromosome become more active, which appears to reduce longevity.

https://www.the-scientist.com/the-literature/male-flies-y-chromosom...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 5:47am

**Malaria discovery could expedite antiviral treatment for COVID-19

A new study  outlines a strategy that could save years of drug discovery research and millions of dollars in drug development by repurposing existing treatments designed for other diseases such as cancer.The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrated that the parasites that cause malaria are heavily dependent on enzymes in red blood cells where the parasites hide and proliferate.It also revealed that drugs developed for cancer, and which inactivate these human enzymes, known as protein kinases, are highly effective in killing the parasite and represent an alternative to drugs that target the parasite itself.These host enzymes are in many instances the same as those activated in cancer cells, so we can now jump on the back of existing cancer drug discovery and look to repurpose a drug that is already available or close to completion of the drug development process 

 Analysis of erythrocyte signalling pathways during Plasmodium falciparum infection identifies targets for host-directed antimalarial intervention, Nature Communications (2020).  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17829-7
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-malaria-discovery-antiviral-...  

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 5:43am

Enzyme discovered in the gut could lead to new disease biomarker

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-enzyme-gut-disease-biomarker.html?utm...

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Immunotherapy-resistant cancers eliminated in mouse study

Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment by stimulating the patient's own immune system to attack cancer cells, yielding remarkably quick and complete remission in some cases. But such drugs work for less than a quarter of patients because tumors are notoriously adept at evading immune assault.

A new study in mice by researchers  has shown that the effects of a standard immunotherapy drug can be enhanced by blocking the protein TREM2, resulting in complete elimination of tumors. The findings, which are published Aug. 11 in the journal Cell, point to a potential new way to unlock the power of immunotherapy for more cancer patients.

Cell (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.07.013

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-immunotherapy-resistant-canc...

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 Using physics to improve root canal efficiency

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-physics-root-canal-efficiency.html?ut...

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Research exposes new vulnerability for SARS-CoV-2

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-exposes-vulnerability-sars-cov-.html?...

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 Making masks and PPE with hydrophilic surfaces, could reduce infection risk

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-masks-ppe-hydrophilic-surfaces-infect...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 5:41am

How boundaries become bridges in evolution

There's a paradox within the theory of evolution: The life forms that exist today are here because they were able to change when past environments disappeared. Yet, organisms evolve to fit into specific environmental niches.

Ever-increasing specialization and precision should be an evolutionary dead end, but that is not the case. How the ability to fit precisely into a current setting is reconciled with the ability to change is the most fundamental question in evolutionary biology. There are two general possible solutions, according to researchers. First, the mechanisms that enable organisms to fit well into their current environment and the mechanisms that enable change in adaptations are distinct—the latter are suppressed as organisms fit better and better into their current setting and activated only when the environment changes. The second is that the mechanisms that make organisms fit into current environments are themselves modified during evolution.

Distinguishing between these possibilities is challenging because in evolutionary biology we necessarily study processes that occurred in the past, the events that we missed. So, instead, we infer what we missed from comparisons of species that exist today. Although this approach can tell us how well the current organisms fit into their current environment, it cannot tell us how they got here."

Ultimately, the first scenario was supported by the researchers' work. The mechanisms that make organisms locally fit and those responsible for change are distinct and occur sequentially in evolution.

 Ahva L. Potticary et al, Turning induced plasticity into refined adaptations during range expansion, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16938-7

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-boundaries-bridges-evolution.html?utm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 5:37am

Storing energy in red bricks

Red bricks—some of the world's cheapest and most familiar building materials—can be converted into energy storage units that can be charged to hold electricity, like a battery, according to new research

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-08-energy-red-bricks.html?utm_sour...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 12, 2020 at 5:34am

Digital content on track to equal half Earth's mass by 2245

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-digital-content-track-equal-earth.htm...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 11, 2020 at 7:19am

How Our Exhalations Help Spread Pathogens Such as SARS-CoV-2

Lydia Bourouiba, an expert in fluid dynamics and disease transmission at MIT, explains how the physics of sneezes and coughs leads to the spread of respiratory pathogens such as COVID-19.  

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/how-our-exhalations-help...

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Self-Experimentation in the Time of COVID-19: Scientists are taking their own vaccines

Confidence in their abilities? Or proving their trust-worthyness?

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/self-experimentation-in-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 11, 2020 at 6:19am

How pulse oxytometer works and how it discriminates ...

How a Popular Medical Device Encodes Racial Bias

Pulse oximeters give biased results for people with darker skin. The consequences could be serious.

To picture what’s happening inside a pulse ox—as health care providers call it—start by thinking about what’s happening inside your body. Blood saturated with oxygen is bright crimson thanks to iron-containing hemoglobin, which picks up the gas molecules from your lungs to deliver them to your organs. In the absence of oxygen, the same hemoglobin dims to a cold purple-red. The oximeter detects this chromatic chemistry by shining two lights—one infrared, one red—through your finger and sensing how much comes through on the other side. Oxygen-saturated hemoglobin absorbs more infrared light and also allows more red light to pass through than its deoxygenated counterpart. Adjusting for certain technicalities using your pulse, the device reads out the color of your blood several times a second.

To “see” your blood, though, the light must pass through your skin. This should give us pause, since a range of technologies based on color sensing are known to reproduce racial bias. Photographic film calibrated for white skin, for example, often created distorted images of nonwhite people until its built-in assumptions started to be acknowledged and reworked in the 1970s; traces of racial biases remain in photography still today. Similar disparities have surfaced around several health devices, including Fitbits. How had designers managed to avoid such problems in the case of the oximeter, I wondered? As I dug deeper, I couldn’t find any record that the problem ever was fully fixed. Most oximeters on the market today were initially calibrated primarily for light skin, and they still often reproduce subtle errors for nonwhite people.

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/amy-moran-thomas-how-p...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 11, 2020 at 6:07am

The Tragic Physics of the Deadly Explosion in Beirut 

A blast injury specialist explores the chemistry—and history—of explosions like the one captured in videos that swept across the world.

https://www.wired.com/story/tragic-physics-deadly-explosion-beirut/...

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