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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 10:40am

Countering Science Misinformation through sci-com

Myths, false claims and reports of bad science can spread like wildfire on social media and by word of mouth, but scientists affiliated with AAAS programs are working strategically to combat science misinformation. In the video series “AAAS Voices: Countering Science Misinformation,” experts explain the challenges of misinformation on addressing timely topics such as climate change, technology and health, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists share how they combat misinformation and offer strategies for how their fellow scientists can productively address and correct the inaccuracies they encounter. As a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, Astrid Caldas communicates the facts about climate change to a wide range of audiences in person, on social media and through media appearances. To get the facts across and effectively clarify misinformation, Caldas recommended several strategies to fellow climate change communicators who want to best connect with their audience. For instance, tie your message to your particular audience’s values and encourage listeners to challenge their own assumptions by asking questions, said Caldas, a 2013-2014 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow. “It’s never a lecture. It’s a conversation,” said Caldas.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/astrid-caldas/dont-let-them-fool-you-disinf...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 10:28am

A few simple tricks make fake news stories stick in the brain

People are more likely to buy in if the misinformation is surprising, emotional or on repeat

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/misinformation-fake-news-storie...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 10:19am

A cold soak lowers the risk of salmonella growth on 'sprouted' foods

Soaking "sprouted" foods in cold water, rather than the more common practice of soaking at ambient temperature, lowers the risk of salmonella growth on these increasingly popular healthy snack foods, according to a new study.

Making these foods involves soaking raw ingredients—usually grains, nuts or seeds—in water overnight, often at room temperature. Soaking softens the hulls and leads to swelling that initiates the activation of enzymes and reduction of antinutrients, which are plant compounds that reduce the body's ability to absorb essential nutrients.

Following soaking, these ingredients are typically dried under low temperature and low humidity to maintain their "raw" label, then packaged as either single-ingredient snacks, incorporated into a complex snack—such as granola, bars or trail mix—or pureed into nut or seed butters or as a base for fermented non-dairy "cheeses."

The study, published in Food Protection Trends, demonstrates the risk of "sprouting" practices and presents practical strategies to improve safety of these raw foods

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-cold-lowers-salmonella-growth-foods.h...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 10:08am

The anterior insular cortex (AIC) is implicated in a wide range of conditions and behaviours, from bowel distension and orgasm, to cigarette craving and maternal love, to decision making and sudden insight. Its function in the re-representation of interoception offers one possible basis for its involvement in all subjective feelings. New findings suggest a fundamental role for the AIC (and the von Economo neurons it contains) in awareness, and thus it needs to be considered as a potential neural correlate of consciousness.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2555

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 10:02am

 The gateway to conscious awareness

During our waking hours, the brain is receiving a near-constant influx of sensory signals of various strengths. For decades, scientists have wondered why some signals rise to the light of conscious awareness while other signals of a similar strength remain in the dark shadows of unconsciousness. What controls the gate that separates the shadows and the light?

In a new study  published in  Cell Reports, researchers identify a key area in the cortex that appears to be the gate of conscious awareness.

Information processing in the brain has two dimensions: sensory processing of the environment without awareness and the type that occurs when a stimulus reaches a certain level of importance and enters conscious awareness.

Researchers attempted to confirm that this switch occurs in a part of the brain called the anterior insular cortex, acting as a type of gate between low level sensory information and higher level awareness.

Looking for the correlation across different states of consciousness revealed activation of the anterior insular cortex played a role in the successful switch between these activations and deactivations.

Anterior insular cortex has continuously fluctuating activity. Whether you can detect a stimulus depends upon the state of the anterior insula when the information arrives in your brain: if the insula's activity is high at the point of stimulus, you will see the image. Based on evidence from the present  experiments, researchers concluded that the anterior insular cortex could be a gate for conscious awareness. 

"Anterior insula regulates brain network transitions that gate conscious access," Cell Reports (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109081

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-05-reveals-gateway-conscious-aw...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 9:39am

'Last resort' antibiotic pops bacteria like balloons

Scientists have revealed how an antibiotic of 'last resort' kills bacteria. The findings may also reveal a potential way to make the antibiotic more powerful.

The antibiotic colistin has become a last resort treatment for infections caused by some of the world's nastiest superbugs. However, despite being discovered over 70 years ago, the process by which this antibiotic kills bacteria has, until now, been something of a mystery.

Now, researchers have revealed that colistin punches holes in bacteria, causing them to pop like balloons.

Colistin was first described in 1947, and is one of the very few antibiotics that is active against many of the most deadly superbugs, including E. coli, which causes potentially lethal infections of the bloodstream, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii, which frequently infect the lungs of people receiving mechanical ventilation in intensive care units.

These superbugs have two 'skins', called membranes. Colistin punctures both membranes, killing the bacteria. However, whilst it was known that colistin damaged the outer membrane by targeting a chemical called lipopolysaccharide (LPS), it was unclear how the inner membranewas pierced.

This work has shown that colistin also targets LPS in the inner membrane, even though there's very little of it present.

Akshay Sabnis, Katheryn LH Hagart, Anna Klöckner, Michele Becce, Lindsay E Evans, R Christopher D Furniss, Despoina AI Mavridou, Ronan Murphy, Molly M Stevens, Jane C Davies, Gérald J Larrouy-Maumus, Thomas B Clarke, Andrew M Edwards. Colistin kills bacteria by targeting lipopolysaccharide in the cytoplasmic membrane. eLife, 2021; 10 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.65836

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-resort-antibiotic-bacteria-balloons.h...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 5, 2021 at 9:23am

Bats found to have innate sense of speed of sound

A pair of researchers with Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology has found that bats have an innate sense of the speed of sound. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Eran Amichai and Yossi Yovel describe experiments they conducted with both wild and lab raised bats and what they learned from them.

Scientists have known for some time that many species of bats use echolocation to determine how far away an object is from them. They send out a signal and then measure its distance by the amount of time that it takes for the signal to bounce back to them. What is not known is whether this ability is something they are born with or if it is learned. To answer that question, the researchers conducted two kinds of experiments—one with bats reared in the lab, the other with captured wild bats.

The first experiment involved raising bats from when they were pups until they were old enough to find food on their own. Each was trained to eat from a certain target placed 130 cm away from a starting perch. Some of the bats were raised in an environment with added helium in the air—helium is thinner than air, thus sound travels faster when passing through it. Each of the bats were then tested under two scenarios. In the first, the bats were tested on their ability to reach the target under normal conditions—they were also timed. In the second scenario, the bats were tested in the same ways as they flew in helium-enriched air.

The researchers found that those flying in helium-enhanced air tended to underestimate the distance to the target—and it did not matter if they were raised in a helium-rich environment or not.

In the second experiment, the researchers caught and trained several wild bats and taught them to eat from the same target as the bats in the first experiment. They then ran the same tests as they did in the first experiment and obtained the same results. The bats flying in helium-enriched air tended to underestimate the distance to the target. The researchers therefore suggest that bats have an innate sense of the speed of sound.

Eran Amichai et al. Echolocating bats rely on an innate speed-of-sound reference, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2024352118

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-innate.html?utm_source=nwletter&u...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 4, 2021 at 10:31am

SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alone may cause lung damage

Using a newly developed mouse model of acute lung injury, researchers found that exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alone was enough to induce COVID-19-like symptoms including severe inflammation of the lungs.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is covered in tiny spike proteins. These proteins bind with receptors on our cells, starting a process that allows the virus to release its genetic material  into a healthy cell. The study findings show that the SARS-CoV2 spike protein causes lung injury even without the presence of intact virus.

The researchers found that the genetically modified mice injected with the spike protein exhibited COVID-19-like symptoms that included severe inflammation, an influx of white blood cells into their lungs and evidence of a cytokine storm—an immune response in which the body starts to attack its own cells and tissues rather than just fighting off the virus. The mice that only received saline (control group) remained normal.

https://www.eventscribe.net/2021/EB2021/index.asp?presTarget=1644160

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-sars-cov-spike-protein-lung....

And the spike protein in vaccines is not dangerous. Read here why:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/04/spike-pro...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 2, 2021 at 12:42pm

'Wolf Packs' of Predatory Bacteria Lurk in Our Soil, And They Play a Crucial Role

You might not have given much thought to predatory bacteria before, but a new study reveals that the behavior of these microorganisms plays a crucial part in the balance of nutrients and carbon capture in soil.

These predatory bacteria – bacteria that eat other bacteria – grow at a faster rate and consume more resources than non-predatory bacteria, and have more of an influence on their surroundings than scientists have previously realized.

In fact, the team behind the study describes the actions of the predatory bacteria as being very much like a wolf pack: They use enzymes and even fang-like filaments to devour other types of bacteria, giving them an outsized influence on their environment.

https://mbio.asm.org/content/12/2/e00466-21

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 2, 2021 at 12:14pm

In long-awaited breakthrough,  scientists harness molecules into single quantum state

 Researchers have big ideas for the potential of quantum technology, from unhackable networks to earthquake sensors. But all these things depend on a major technological feat: being able to build and control systems of quantum particles, which are among the smallest objects in the universe.

That goal is now a step closer with the publication of a new method by  scientists. Published April 28 in Nature, the paper shows how to bring multiple molecules at once into a single quantum state—one of the most important goals in quantum physics.

One of the essential states of matter is called a Bose-Einstein condensate: When a group of particles cooled to nearly absolute zero share a quantum state, the entire group starts behaving as though it were a single atom. It’s a bit like coaxing an entire band to march entirely in step while playing in tune—difficult to achieve, but when it happens, a whole new world of possibilities can open up.

Scientists have been able to do this with atoms for a few decades, but what they’d really like to do is to be able to do it with molecules. Such a breakthrough could serve as the underpinning for many forms of quantum technology.

But because molecules are larger than atoms and have many more moving parts, most attempts to harness them have dissolved into chaos. “Atoms are simple spherical objects, whereas molecules can vibrate, rotate, carry small magnets. Because molecules can do so many different things, it makes them more useful, and at the same time much harder to control.

So the scientists first  cooled the entire system down —down to 10 nanokelvins, a split hair above absolute zero. Then they packed the molecules into a crawl space so that they were pinned flat. Typically, molecules want to move in all directions, and if you allow that, they are much less stable. The researchers confined the molecules so that they are on a 2D surface and can only move in two directions.

The result was a set of virtually identical molecules—lined up with exactly the same orientation, the same vibrational frequency, in the same quantum state.

The scientists described this molecular condensate as like a pristine sheet of new drawing paper for quantum engineering. So far, they’ve been able to link up to a few thousand molecules together in such a state, and are beginning to explore its potential.

Zhang, Chen, Yao and Chin. Atomic Bose-Einstein condensate to molecular Bose-Einstein condensate transition. Nature, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03443-0

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