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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 24, 2019 at 8:57am

Infectious bacteria communicate to avoid antibiotics

A bacterial infection is not just an unpleasant experience - it can also be a major health problem. Some bacteria develop resistance to otherwise effective treatment with antibiotics. Therefore, researchers are trying to develop new types of antibiotics that can fight the bacteria, and at the same time trying to make the current treatment with antibiotics more effective.

Researchers are now getting closer to this goal with a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is notorious for infecting patients with the lung disease cystic fibrosis. In a new study, researchers found that the bacteria send out warning signals to their conspecifics when attacked by antibiotics or the viruses called bacteriophages which kill bacteria.

'We can see in the laboratory that the bacteria simply swim around the 'dangerous area' with antibiotics or bacteriophages. When they receive the warning signal from their conspecifics, you can see in the microscope that they are moving in a neat circle around. It is a smart survival mechanism for the bacteria. If it turns out that the bacteria use the same evasive manoeuvre when infecting humans, it may help explain why some bacterial infections cannot be effectively treated with antibiotics', says researcher Nina Molin Høyland-Kroghsbo, Assistant Professor at the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences and part of the research talent programme UCPH-Forward.

One United Organism

In the study, which is a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and the University of California Irvine, researchers have studied the growth and distribution of bacteria in petri dishes. Here, they have created environments that resemble the surface of the mucous membranes where an infection can occur - as is the case with the lungs of a person with cystic fibrosis.

In this environment, researchers can see both how bacteria usually behave and how they behave when they are affected by antibiotics and bacteriophages.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 6, 2019 at 9:09am

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency

A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,” and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.

The study, called the “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency,” marks the first time a large group of scientists has formally come out in favor of labeling climate change an “emergency,” which the study notes is caused by many human trends that are together increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The report, published 5th Nov., 2019 in the journal Bioscience, was spearheaded by the ecologists Bill Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University, along with William Moomaw, a Tufts University climate scientist, and researchers in Australia and South Africa.

The study clearly lays out the huge challenge of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. The paper bases its conclusions on a set of easy-to-understand indicators that show the human influence on climate, such as 40 years of greenhouse gas emissions, economic trends, population growth rates, per capita meat production, and global tree cover loss, as well as consequences, such as global temperature trends and ocean heat content.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 29, 2019 at 6:05am

New light on how bacteria evolves resistance to drugs

Bacterial Evolution: The road to resistance

The way that bacteria grow – either floating in liquid or attached to a surface – affects their ability to evolve antimicrobial resistance and our ability to treat infections.

https://elifesciences.org/articles/52092?utm_source=content_alert&a...

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Why kids may be at risk from vinyl floors and fire-resistant couches

Chemicals called semivolatile organic compounds have been linked to health problems

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chemicals-vinyl-floors-fire-res...

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How Exercise Reprograms the Brain.As researchers unravel the molecular machinery that links exercise and cognition, working out is emerging as a promising neurotherapy.

https://www.the-scientist.com/features/this-is-your-brain-on-exerci...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 25, 2019 at 8:43am

Algae inside blood vessels could act as oxygen factories

An unconventional way to get O₂ to nerve cells might one day aid stroke patients

Using algae as local oxygen factories in the brain might one day lead to therapies for strokes or other damage from too little oxygen, researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich said October 21 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

The researchers injected either green algae (Chlamydomonas reinhardtii) or cyanobacteria (Synechocystis) into tadpoles’ blood vessels, creating an eerie greenish animal. Both algae species make oxygen in response to light shining through the tadpoles’ translucent bodies.

When the researchers depleted the oxygen in the liquid surrounding a disembodied tadpole head, eye nerves fell silent and stopped firing signals. But a few minutes after a flash of algae-activating light, the nerves started firing signals again, the researchers found.

This work does “motivate further exploration of unconventional approaches to advance the treatments for brain hypoxia, including stroke.”

https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/index.html#!/7883/presentation/...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 23, 2019 at 8:39am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 20, 2019 at 7:02am

Sticky mucus may thwart alcohol-based hand sanitizers’ ability to fight the flu.

Flu viruses encased in mucus drops from infected people’s spit can withstand the alcohol in hand sanitizers for more than two minutes, researchers report September 18 in mSphere. Researchers dotted volunteers’ fingers with either mucus or saline solution containing the flu virus, then measured how long it took to inactivate the virus in both wet and dry samples.

A five-microliter drop — about the size of a pinhead — of mucus-coated flu virus took more than half an hour to dry, almost twice as long as saline. Drying time was important because previous studies tested sanitizers’ killing ability on dry viruses, and didn’t account for mucus’s moistening power.

A hand sanitizer containing 31 percent alcohol inactivated flu viruses in saline solution within 20 seconds. And in already dried mucus, that process took just under eight seconds. But moist mucus shielded flu viruses from alcohol, keeping the viruses viable for up to 2 minutes and 39 seconds, Ryohei Hirose, an infectious disease researcher at the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine in Japan, and his colleagues found. That may be long enough for health care workers to unwittingly transfer virus-infected mucus from one person to another.

The team didn’t test whether rubbing the sanitizer over the skin causes the alcohol to penetrate the mucus and kill viruses faster, Hirose says. Rubbing might help, he acknowledged. But there’s already an easy way to kill flu viruses: Washing hands with plain water or with soap killed viruses within 30 seconds, even when the mucus was still wet.

R. Hirose et al. Situations leading to reduced effectiveness of current hand hygiene.... mSphere. Published online September 18, 2019. doi: 10.1128/mSphere.00474-19

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on September 5, 2019 at 6:38am

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a tiny robot which looks like a thread or a worm and is designed to crawl through the blood vessels inside the brain. The robot is magnetically controlled and it is made for gliding through the narrow, winding pathways, such as the labyrinthine vasculature of the brain.


The aim of this robotic thread is to create a tool by which the doctors can deliver clot reducing therapies to patients who have blockages and lesions, such as the ones that occur in aneurysms and stroke.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 26, 2019 at 10:03am

Diabetes can increase cancer risk
For years, scientists have been trying to solve a medical mystery: Why do people with type 1 or type 2 diabetes have an increased risk of developing some forms of cancer? Today, researchers report a possible explanation for this double whammy. They found that DNA sustains more damage and gets fixed less often when blood sugar levels are high compared to when blood sugar is at a normal, healthy level, thereby increasing one's cancer risk.

The researchers will present their results at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition.
According to researchers, "As the incidence of diabetes continues to rise, the cancer rate will likely increase, as well."Scientists have suspected that the elevated cancer risk for diabetics arises from hormonal dysregulation. "In people with type 2 diabetes, their insulin is not effectively carrying glucose into cells," they explain. "So the pancreas makes more and more insulin, and they get what's called hyperinsulinemia." In addition to controlling blood glucose levels, the hormone insulin can stimulate cell growth, possibly leading to cancer. Also, most people with type 2 diabetes are overweight, and their excess fat tissue produces higher levels of adipokines than those at a healthy weight. These hormones promote chronic inflammation, which is linked to cancer. "The most common idea is that the increased cancer risk has to do with hormones" . "That's probably part of it, but there hasn't been a lot of solid evidence."

Now they looked for a specific type of damage in the form of chemically modified DNA bases, known as adducts, in tissue culture and rodent models of diabetes. Indeed, they found a DNA adduct, called N^2-(1-carboxyethyl)-2'-deoxyguanosine, or CEdG, that occurred more frequently in the diabetic models than in normal cells or mice. What's more, high glucose levels interfered with the cells' process for fixing it. "Exposure to high glucose levels leads to both DNA adducts and the suppression of their repair, which in combination could cause genome instability and cancer". 

They even found evidence for it.  http://bit.ly/acs2019sandiego

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 10, 2019 at 10:27am

Scientists are worried about social media driven pseudo-science. Myths about the international climate crisis are part of a growing trend for 'pseudoscience' spread on social media sites like Youtube.

A new report from a German university academic has revealed that the algorithm which drives how people find content on the internet is spreading misinformation. It was found that d more than half (107) of the clips claimed climate change was a conspiracy or denied humans were causing it. Those videos received the highest number of views.

Youtube is an important information source for many people when they want to find information about science and research.

He explained that conspiracy theorists latched onto scientific-style language such as ‘climate engineering’, ‘geoengineering’ or in another example of pseudoscience, ‘chemtrails’.

This strategy could be identified as an attempt to manufacture internet bias in favour of the worldview of ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theorists.

Dr Allgaier added that social media platforms which do not exercise editorial control provide fertile ground for opponents of mainstream science because there are no ‘gatekeepers and hence no quality control’.

The pseudoscience issue goes beyond the climate crisis and chemtrails. Infectios diseases and vaccines are a prominent area of misinformation both online and in print.

Perhaps the best-known example is the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine which some have claimed has harmful effects on children.

In another health conspiracy, rumours that chicken meat spread a bout of Nipah virus in the Indian state of Kerala in 2018 which killed 17 people were spread virally on WhatsApp.

Scientists believe the incident was sparked by fruit bats but the unfounded rumour chicken was to blame spread when one person duplicated the letterhead of the District Medical officer and spread the story online.

The effects of misinformation surrounding the MMR vaccine and Nipah virus on human behaviour should not be surprising given we know that our memory is malleable.

Our recollection of original facts can be replaced with new, false ones.

We also know conspiracy theories have a powerful appeal as they can help people make sense of events or issues they feel they have no control over.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on August 7, 2019 at 9:17am

We are  marching for science on August 9th, 2019.

Science is under attack all over the world. And we are fighting anti-science sentiments and pseudo-science propaganda. The March for Science  is an international series of rallies and marches held on Earth Day. The march is a non-partisan movement to celebrate science and the role it plays in everyday lives. The goals of the marches and rallies were to emphasize that science upholds the common good and to call for evidence-based policy in the public's best interest.

The Indian scientific community too takes part in these global rallies every year and marches are held in about 60 cities and towns across India.

Scientific community of India  makes the following demands

1. Promote scientific temper, human values and spirit of inquiry in conformity with Article 51A of the Constitution and stop the propagation of unscientific ideas

2. Allocate at least 10% of the Central Budget and 30% of the State budgets to Education

3. Ensure that at least 3% of the country's GDP is used to support scientific and technological research.

4. Ensure that the education system does not impart ideas that are not based on or contradict scientific evidence.

5. Ensure that public policies are based on scientific evidence.

We request everybody to join us and support these rallies and science and make these marches a great success.

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