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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 12, 2021 at 12:25pm

'Dancing molecules' successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries in mice

Researchers have developed a new injectable therapy that harnesses "dancing molecules" to reverse paralysis and repair tissue after severe spinal cord injuries.

In a new study, researchers administered a single injection to tissues surrounding the spinal cords of paralyzed mice. Just four weeks later, the animals regained the ability to walk.

The research will be published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal Science.

By sending bioactive signals to trigger cells to repair and regenerate, the breakthrough therapy dramatically improved severely injured spinal cords in five key ways: (1) The severed extensions of neurons, called axons, regenerated; (2) scar tissue, which can create a physical barrier to regeneration and repair, significantly diminished; (3) myelin, the insulating layer of axons that is important in transmitting electrical signals efficiently, reformed around cells; (4) functional blood vessels formed to deliver nutrients to cells at the injury site; and (5) more motor neurons survived.

After the therapy performs its function, the materials biodegrade into nutrients for the cells within 12 weeks and then completely disappear from the body without noticeable side effects. This is the first study in which researchers controlled the collective motion of molecules through changes in chemical structure to increase a therapeutic's efficacy.

The secret behind Stupp's new breakthrough therapeutic is tuning the motion of molecules, so they can find and properly engage constantly moving cellular receptors. Injected as a liquid, the therapy immediately gels into a complex network of nanofibers that mimic the extracellular matrix of the spinal cord. By matching the matrix's structure, mimicking the motion of biological molecules and incorporating signals for receptors, the synthetic materials are able to communicate with cells.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 12, 2021 at 12:18pm

Sustainable, biodegradable, vegan glitter

Glitter is a bane of modern living. But beyond its general annoyance factor, it's also made of toxic and unsustainable materials, and contributes to plastic pollution.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found a way to make sustainable, non-toxic, vegan, and biodegradable glitter from cellulose—the main building block of cell walls in plants, fruits and vegetables—and that's just as sparkly as the original.

The glitter is made from cellulose nanocrystals, which can bend light in such a way to create vivid colors through a process called structural color. The same phenomenon produces some of the brightest colors in nature—such as those of butterfly wings and peacock feathers—and results in hues which do not fade, even after a century.

Using self-assembly techniques which allow the cellulose to produce intensely-colored films, the researchers say their materials could be used to replace the plastic glitter particles and tiny mineral effect pigments which are widely used in cosmetics.

The films of cellulose nanocrystals prepared by the team can be made at scale using roll-to-roll processes like those used to make paper from wood pulp, and this is the first time these materials have been fabricated at industrial scale. The results are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

Silvia Vignolini, Large-scale fabrication of structurally coloured cellulose nanocrystal films and effect pigments, Nature Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-01135-8. www.nature.com/articles/s41563-021-01135-8

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-sustainable-biodegradable-vegan-glitt...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 9:21am

Giant Study Identifies The Best Time to Fall Asleep to Lower Risk of Heart Problems

While the link between sleep and a healthy heart is well established, researchers are still sussing out the details. A new study suggests there might even be an optimal time, within our 24-hour body clock, for falling asleep.

Of course, the reasons for not obtaining the right sleep, whether it's the best amount or right timing are not always within our control. So anyone struggling with their sleep should seek medical advice and focus on whatever they need to do that works for them – as dictating a specific bedtime may be counterproductive for some.

But for the rest of us it may be helpful to know that falling asleep between 10-11 pm seems to hit the sweet spot for a healthy cardiovascular system.

The body has a 24-hour internal clock, called circadian rhythm, that helps regulate physical and mental functioning. While we cannot conclude causation from our study, the results suggest that early or late bedtimes may be more likely to disrupt the body clock, with adverse consequences for cardiovascular health.

The team found falling asleep after midnight or before 10 pm both was associated with around a 25 percent increase in risk of cardiovascular disease, compared to falling asleep between 10-11 pm. This increase in risk dropped to 12 percent for those who fell asleep between 11-12 pm.

"The riskiest time was after midnight, potentially because it may reduce the likelihood of seeing morning light, which resets the body clock.

This trend remained when taking into account age, gender, sleep duration, being an early bird or night owl, smoking status, weight, diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol level, and socioeconomic status. It was also more pronounced for women, but the researchers aren't yet sure why.

https://academic.oup.com/ehjdh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ehjdh/zt...

https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-accelerometer-study-suggests-the-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:56am

https://mcusercontent.com/2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d/images/eadad212..." alt="Protein vaccines 101: An infographic that shows how COVID-19 protein-based vaccines are made, and how the body reacts to them."/>

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:55am

Protein-based COVID vaccines

Some people can’t get current COVID-19 vaccines for health reasons, but protein-based vaccines offer hope that they might soon be immunized. To elicit a protective immune response, these shots deliver proteins, along with immunity-stimulating adjuvants, directly to a person’s cells, rather than sending in a fragment of genetic code that the cells must read to synthesize the proteins themselves. After months of quality-control setbacks and manufacturing delays, the protein-based jab from US biotechnology firm Novavax has just received its first emergency-use authorization, in Indonesia. Meanwhile, Clover Biopharmaceuticals, based in China, and Biological E in India are on track to file for authorization in various countries in the coming weeks and months.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:52am

The team looked at 145 datasets, in total covering 41,966 participants who did the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. The five facets are observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging inner experience and non-reactivity to inner experience.

What the team found was that there was little 'convergence' across these facets across participants in non-clinical settings. Put simply, we're not embracing the whole package.

Researchers found that people seem to conceptually understand that mindfulness involves engagement, the general public is not walking the talk. Our results suggest that laypeople may understand what awareness is, but the next step of acceptance may not be well understood – limiting potential for engaging with problems.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027273582100...

Part 2

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:51am

We're Doing Mindfulness Wrong, Psychologists Say

What does mindfulness mean to you? Is it about being aware of what comes your way without distraction? Or is it engaging with life's challenges without judgement, and responding as required?

A new meta-analysis of almost 150 studies has found that most of us understand that mindfulness is about both being aware and engaging with whatever comes our way. Unfortunately, we're much worse at putting this 'engaging' part into action.

Scientific understanding of mindfulness goes beyond mere stress-relief and requires a willingness to engage with stressors. It is, in fact, the engagement with stressors that ultimately results in stress relief. More specifically, mindfulness includes two main dimensions: awareness and acceptance.

Mindfulness derives from Buddhist traditions, and has become used in Western settings since the 1970s as part of psychiatry and psychology. It has been shown to help reduce depression, stress, anxiety, and even drug addiction, and is regularly recommended as a coping mechanism as part of therapy. 

In terms of regular people's understanding of mindfulness, we're really good at the 'awareness' part, the researchers say – where we take stock of what's around us, and any potential issues coming our way.

But the team found that we then tend to use mindfulness as a passive endorsement of the experience: the mindfulness equivalent of a shrug emoji. 

What we should do to get the full benefits of mindfulness is engage with our experiences, finding solutions and responses to our environment – something that the researchers found that we're aware of, but we just don't do.

"These modern applications of mindfulness have recently faced substantial criticism. Scholars suggest that popular definitions cast mindfulness as a 'quick fix' for suffering rather than a longitudinal practice of re-orienting, re-framing, and engaging with daily experience," the team writes in their paper.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:47am

Bioengineers find new way heart valves grow – and go wrong

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:30am

Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly

Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.

Radio waves and mobile phone signals relies on electromagnetic radiation for communication but in a new development, engineers from Lancaster University in the UK, working with the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, transferred digitally encoded information using "fast neutrons" instead.

The researchers measured the spontaneous emission of fast neutrons from californium-252, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors.

Modulated emissions were measured using a detector and recorded on a laptop.

Several examples of information, i.e., a word, the alphabet and a random number selected blindly, were encoded serially into the modulation of the neutron field and the output decoded on a laptop which recovered the encoded information on screen.

A double-blind test was performed in which a number derived from a random number generator was encoded without prior knowledge of those uploading it, and then transmitted and decoded. 

All transmission tests attempted proved to be 100% successful.

Malcolm J. Joyce et al, Wireless information transfer with fast neutrons, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2021.165946

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-nuclear-transmit-digital-wirelessly.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:24am

Humans are guilty of breaking an oceanic law of nature: study

A new international study has examined the distribution of biomass across all life in the oceans, from bacteria to whales. Their quantification of human impact reveals a fundamental alteration to one of life's largest scale patterns.

Scientists have used advances in ocean observation and large meta-analyses to show that human impacts have already had major consequences for the larger oceanic species, and have dramatically changed one of life's largest scale patterns—a pattern encompassing the entire ocean's biodiversity, from bacteria to whales.

Early samples of marine plankton biomass from 50 years ago led researchers to hypothesize that roughly equal amounts of biomass occur at all sizes. For example, although bacteria are 23 orders of magnitude smaller than a blue whale, they are also 23 orders of magnitude more abundant. This size-spectrum hypothesis has since remained unchallenged, even though it was never verified globally from bacteria to whales. The authors of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, sought to test this hypothesis on a global scale for the first time. They used historical reconstructions and marine ecosystem models to estimate biomass before industrial scale fishing got underway (pre-1850) and compared this data to the present-day.

One of the biggest challenges to comparing organisms spanning bacteria to whales is the enormous differences in scale.

The ratio of their masses is equivalent to that between a human being and the entire Earth. Researchers estimated organisms at the small end of the scale from more than 200,000 water samples collected globally, but larger marine life required completely different methods.

Their approach focused on 12 major groups of aquatic life over roughly 33,000 grid points of the ocean. Evaluating the pre-industrial ocean conditions (pre-1850) largely confirmed the original hypothesis: There is a remarkably constant biomass across size classes.

Researchers were amazed to see that each order of magnitude size class contains approximately 1 gigaton of biomass globally.

While bacteria are over-represented in the cold, dark regions of the ocean, the largest whales are relatively rare, thus highlighting exceptions from the original hypothesis.

In contrast with an even biomass spectrum in the pre-1850 ocean, an investigation of the spectrum at present revealed human impacts on ocean biomass through a new lens. While fishing and whaling only account for less than 3 percent of human food consumption, their effect on the biomass spectrum is devastating: large fish and marine mammals such as dolphins have experienced a biomass loss of 2 Gt (60% reduction), with the largest whales suffering an unsettling almost 90% decimation. The authors estimate that these losses already outpace potentialbiomass losses even under extreme climate change scenarios.

Humans have impacted the ocean in a more dramatic fashion than merely capturing fish. It seems that we have broken the size spectrum—one of the largest power law distributions known in nature.  These results provide a new quantitative perspective on the extent to which anthropogenic activities have altered life at the global scale. 

Ian A. Hatton et al, The global ocean size spectrum from bacteria to whales, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh3732

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-humans-guilty-oceanic-law-nature.html

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