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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 11:38am

Microplastics Found in Every Human Placenta Tested, Study Finds

It's been over three years since scientists first found microplastics swimming in four different human placentas, and as it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg. A few years later, at the start of 2023, researchers announced they had found microscopic particles of plastic waste in no fewer than 17 different placentas. By the end of 2023, a local study in Hawai'i analyzed 30 placentas that were donated between 2006 and 2021 only to find plastic contamination had increased significantly over time. Using a new technique, researchers have now identified tiny particles and fibers of plastic less than a micron in size in the largest sample of placentas yet. In all 62 tissue samples studied, the team found microplastics of various concentrations in every single one. These concentrations ranged from 6.5 to 685 micrograms per gram of tissue, which is much higher than levels found in the human bloodstream. No one yet knows what this plastic pollution is doing – if anything – to the health of the fetus or the mother. While microplastics have been found in every major organ of the human body, including the brain, it's unknown if these pollutants are temporary visitors or permanent and accumulating threats to health. As environmental plastic pollution continues to worsen, contamination of the placenta is on track to only increase, as humans breathe in and ingest more plastic than ever before.

And dose makes the poison!

https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.109...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 10:28am

Cosmic dust could have helped get life going on Earth

Life on our planet appeared early in Earth's history. Surprisingly early, since in its early youth our planet didn't have much of the chemical ingredients necessary for life to evolve. Since prebiotic chemicals such as sugars and amino acids are known to appear in asteroids and comets, one idea is that Earth was seeded with the building blocks of life by early cometary and asteroid impacts. While this likely played a role, a new study published in Nature Astronomy shows that cosmic dust also seeded young Earth, and it may have made all the difference.

Craig R. Walton et al, Cosmic dust fertilization of glacial prebiotic chemistry on early Earth, Nature Astronomy (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02212-z

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 10:10am

Rural communities face greater risks of radon exposure compared to urban areas: Study

Researchers have found a link between radon exposure in rural homes based on how close they are to drilled groundwater wells. The transdisciplinary team was investigating why homes in rural communities often have a much higher concentration of radon compared with homes in urban areas.

The researchers from the faculties of medicine, science, and architecture looked at the geophysical makeup of areas, the style of home, as well as unique features on or near the property.

For years now all across the world, people have documented higher radon levels in homes in more rural communities compared to homes in urban communities.

It's the water wells—not the water, but the wells themselves appear to be acting as unintended straws for radon gas deep in the ground. Thankfully, lowering radon levels in a home is fixable.

Many rural properties and communities rely on well water. The researchers also tested the water for radon and found there is not enough radon in the well water to significantly contribute to the high radon being observed in indoor air. Instead, the problem appears to result from the drill hole space existing around water well pipes.

Radon is an invisible, odorless, tasteless, and radioactive gas. Naturally rising from under the ground and diluting to virtually nothing in outdoor air, radon gas is often drawn up and concentrated inside modern buildings to unnaturally high and cancer-causing levels. Prolonged radon gas exposure is the leading cause of lung cancer among non-tobacco users.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, found, on average, individuals living in rural communities were exposed to 30 percent higher residential radon levels than people living in urban communities.

 Selim M. Khan et al, Rural communities experience higher radon exposure versus urban areas, potentially due to drilled groundwater well annuli acting as unintended radon gas migration conduits, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-53458-6

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 9:11am

Blindness from some inherited eye diseases may be caused by gut bacteria, news study suggests

Sight loss in certain inherited eye diseases may be caused by gut bacteria, and is potentially treatable by antimicrobials, finds a new study in mice.

 The international study observed that in eyes with sight loss caused by a particular genetic mutation, known to cause eye diseases that lead to blindness, gut bacteria were found within the damaged areas of the eye.

The authors of the new paper, published  in Cell say their findings suggest that the genetic mutation may relax the body's defenses, thus allowing harmful bacteria to reach the eye and cause blindness.

The gut contains trillions of bacteria, many of which are key to healthy digestion. However, they can also be potentially harmful.

The findings of this study suggest that simply using antimicrobials might help prevent deterioration in CRB1-associated inherited eye diseases. Future work will investigate whether this applies in humans.

CRB1-associated retinal degeneration is dependent on bacterial translocation from the gut, Cell (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.01.040. www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00108-9

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 9:05am

Drug limits dangerous reactions to allergy-triggering foods, pediatric study finds

A drug can make life safer for children with food allergies by preventing dangerous allergic responses to small quantities of allergy-triggering foods, according to a new study by scientists.

 The research published on Feb. 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The findings suggest that regular use of the drug, omalizumab,  could protect people from severe allergic responses, such as difficulty breathing, if they accidentally eat a small amount of a food they are allergic to.

This is a  promising new treatment for multi-food allergic patients.

Omalizumab, which the Food and Drug Administration originally approved to treat diseases such as allergic asthma and chronic hives, binds to and inactivates the antibodies that cause many kinds of allergic disease. Based on the data collected in the new study, the FDA approved omalizumab for reducing risk of allergic reactions to foods on Feb. 16.

Omalizumab was safe and did not cause side effects, other than some instances of minor reactions at the site of injection. This study marks the first time its safety has been assessed in children as young as 1.

New England Journal of Medicine (2024). DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2312382

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 7:35am

Scientists made active measurements of neurotransmitters multiple times in different brain regions, and they have now reached the point where they are touching on crucial elements of what makes us human beings.

Dopamine and serotonin in human substantia nigra track social context and value signals during economic exchange, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01831-w. www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01831-w

Part 4

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 7:34am

Psychiatry is an example of a medical field that could benefit from this approach, according to the researchers.

Enormous number of people in the world suffer from a variety of psychiatric conditions, and, in many cases, the pharmacological solutions do not work very well.
Dopamine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters are in some ways intimately involved with those disorders. This effort adds real precision and quantitation to understand those problems. The one thing scientists can be sure of is this work is going to be extremely important in the future for developing treatments.

In first-of-their-kind observations in the human brain the scientists published in Neuron in 2020, researchers revealed dopamine and serotonin are at work at sub-second speeds to shape how people perceive the world and take action based on their perception.

More recently, in a study published in October in the journal Current Biology, the researchers used their method of recording chemical changes in awake humans to gain insight into the brain's noradrenaline system, which has been a longtime target for medications to treat psychiatric disorders.

And, in December, in the journal Science Advances, the team revealed that fast changes in dopamine levels reflect a specific computation related to how humans learn from rewards and punishments.

Part 3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 7:30am

Dopamine levels are higher when people interact with another human as opposed to a computer. And here it was important that the scientists also measured serotonin to give them confidence that the overall response to social context is specific to dopamine.
Scientists have seen these signaling molecules before, but this is the first time they have seen them dance. No one has ever seen this dance of dopamine and serotonin in a social context before.
--
Teasing out the meaning of the electrochemical signals recorded from patients in surgery was a major challenge that took years to solve. The raw data that they're collecting from patients isn't specific to dopamine, serotonin, or norepinephrine—it's a mixture of those. They 're essentially using machine-learning type tools to separate what's in the raw data, understand the signature, and decode what's going on with dopamine and serotonin.
In the new Nature Human Behavior study, researchers showed how the rise and fall of dopamine and serotonin are intertwined with human cognition and behaviour.
In Parkinson's disease, a significant loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the brainstem is a key characteristic that usually coincides with the onset of symptoms.

This loss impacts the striatum, a brain region heavily influenced by dopamine. As dopamine diminishes, serotonin terminals begin to sprout, revealing a complex interaction, as observed in rodent models.
Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 27, 2024 at 7:25am

First-in-humans discovery reveals brain chemicals at work influencing social behaviour

In a study in Nature Human Behavior, scientists delve into the world of chemical neuromodulators in the human brain, specifically dopamine and serotonin, to reveal their role in social behaviour.

The research, conducted in Parkinson's disease patients undergoing brain surgery while awake, homed in on the brain's substantia nigra, a crucial area associated with motor control and reward processing.

 The international team of scientists revealed a previously unknown neurochemical mechanism for a well-known human tendency to make decisions based on social context—people are more likely to accept offers from computers while rejecting identical offers from human players.

The idea that people make decisions based on social context is not a new one in neural economic games. But now, for the first time, researchers show the impact of the social context may spring from the dynamic interactions of dopamine and serotonin.

When people make decisions, dopamine seems to closely follow and react to whether the current offer is better or worse than the previous one, as if it were a continuous tracking system. Serotonin, meanwhile, appears to focus only on the current value of the specific offer at hand, suggesting a more case-by-case evaluation.

This fast dance happens against a slower backdrop, where dopamine is overall higher when people play other human beings—in other words when fairness comes into play. Together, these signals contribute to our brain's overall assessment of value during social interactions.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 24, 2024 at 1:15pm

A type of cyberattack that could set your smartphone on fire using its wireless charger

A team of security experts at the University of Florida working with security audit company CertiK has found that a certain class of cyberattacks could cause a smartphone to catch fire via its wireless charger. The team has posted a paper describing their research and results on the arXiv preprint server.

Inductive chargers are devices that can be used to charge a smartphone or other device without the need for plugging in a cable. Such devices work by making use of electromagnetic fields to transfer energy from one device to another through induction. In order for a smartphone to be charged properly on such a device, it must communicate with the charger through a Qi communication-based feedback control system. And in order for a wireless charger to work, it must be connected to an AC outlet.
But the charger, like a phone, cannot plug directly into the wall; it plugs instead into an adapter. And this, the researchers suggest, is where the system's vulnerabilities lie. They have found through testing that by attaching an intermediary device to the adapter, disruptions can be made to the Qi communication-based feedback control system, resulting in signals that can override controls that stop overcharging, which can lead to overheating, and in some cases a fire. They call such an attack a "VoltSchemer."
The research team has come up with three types of attacks that can occur with a VoltSchemer. According to the researchers, "A charger can be manipulated to control voice assistants via inaudible voice commands, damage devices being charged through overcharging or overheating, and bypass Qi-standard specified foreign-object-detection mechanism to damage valuable items exposed to intense magnetic fields."

The researchers tested multiple types of wireless chargers and phones and found they were all vulnerable. They have notified manufacturers and expect that changes will be made to overcome these vulnerabilities to protect consumers from VoltSchemer attacks.

Zihao Zhan et al, VoltSchemer: Use Voltage Noise to Manipulate Your Wireless Charger, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.11423

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