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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 6, 2016 at 8:35am

Selfishness in science is very bad . It robs the world of great relief, pain, benefits and many more. Here is an example...

Starlite is a material claimed to be able to withstand and insulate from extreme heat. It was invented by amateur chemist Maurice Ward.

Starlite looks like a thick white paint. Just like regular paint, it can be applied to most of the surfaces. When you apply a coat of starlite on any material, the material becomes extreme heat-proof.

In BBC TV show Tomorrow's world, Maurice Ward demonstrated this by applying a coat of Starlite on a regular chicken's egg. Then he used a blowtorch to heat the egg for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes when he turned off the blowtorch, the egg was immediately touchable with bare hands. Mind that a blowtorch flame generates a temperature of about 2000 degrees Celsius. He also cracked the egg to demonstrate that the inside of the egg is still liquid.

You can see the video of the demonstration...

The British atomic weapons establishment got a sample of Starlite, and their experiment showed that the material can withstood heat blast of even a 900 Kiloton nuke. (75 times more powerful blast than the Hiroshima bomb).

Just think about the application of this miracle paint. It could have used to make fire proof houses and cloths, it could have helped creating new age space capsules, it could be used to make heat insulating car engines. It could have revolutionized industrial sectors. The applications could have been limitless.

Unfortunately, the inventor did not want to make his formula a commercial product and wanted a 51% ownership of the product. Many interested parties including NASA approached him but could not make him agree on licensing of his invention.

Maurice Ward died in May 2011, and the formula was lost with him, forever. So far all attempts to re-create the formula have failed.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 5, 2016 at 8:25am

Big and small numbers are processed in different sides of the brain
Small numbers are processed in the right side of the brain, while large numbers are processed in the left side of the brain, new research suggests.The study, from scientists at Imperial College London, offers new insights into the mystery of how our brains handle numbers. The findings of the research, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, could in the future help to tailor rehabilitation techniques for patients who have suffered brain damage, such as stroke patients, and inform treatments for conditions such as dyscalculia, which causes difficulty in processing numbers.
The findings from the current study may help inform treatments for individuals who struggle to process numbers.

“The findings offer a starting point for unravelling how the brain handles and represents numbers – so-called numerical cognition. If we understand how numbers are processed we may be able to target treatments and rehabilitation therapies. The next stage is to examine how the brain handles large, complex calculations.”

Bidirectional Modulation of Numerical Magnitude. Qadeer Arshad, Yuliya Nigmatullina, Ramil Nigmatullin Paladd Asavarut, Usman Goga, Sarah Khan, Kaija Sander, Shuaib Siddiqui, R. E. Roberts, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Adolfo M. Bronstein and Paresh A. Malhotra. Cerebral Cortex, 2016, 1–14. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhv344

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Ageing begins even before you are born

 3rd March, 2016

London, March 3 : The process of ageing begins even before we are born, says a new study, which used rats to model pregnancy and foetal development.

The study showed that providing mothers with a diet loaded with antioxidants during pregnancy meant that their offspring aged more slowly during adulthood.

The offspring of mothers with lower levels of oxygen in the womb can age more quickly in adulthood.

"Antioxidants are known to reduce ageing, but here, we show for the first time that giving them to pregnant mothers can slow down the ageing clock of their offspring," said first author Beth Allison from the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The study, published in The FASEB Journal, also emphasised that the environment we're exposed to in the womb may be just as, if not more, important in programming a risk of adult-onset of heart disease.

The researchers found that adult rats born from mothers who had less oxygen during pregnancy had shorter telomeres -- essential part of human cells that affects the age of cells -- than rats born from normal pregnancies.

The offsprings' also experienced problems with the inner lining of their blood vessels - revealing signs that they had aged more quickly and were prone to developing heart disease earlier than normal.

However, when pregnant mothers in the group were given antioxidant supplements, this lowered the risk among their offspring of developing heart disease, the researchers noted.

The foetus, which received appropriate levels of oxygen - benefiting from a maternal diet of antioxidants displayed longer telomeres than those rats whose mothers did not receive the antioxidant supplements during pregnancy.

Although conducted in rats, the research suggests that it might be applicable in humans and focuses the need for pregnant mothers to maintain a healthy lifestyle for the sake of their baby's future heart health, the researchers noted.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 5, 2016 at 7:40am

Science is Universal. But people working in the field come from different countries. And when they try to publish papers in journals from the English-speaking areas using translators? Sometimes the matter get incorrect translation. And what if it raises a storm? That's what has happened when some Chinese researchers tried to publish a paper in #PLOSONE journal. 

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.01...

Instead of using the word "Nature" , the translator used the word "Creator". And English-speaking scientists objected to the word. This has turned into a tornado within no time on social media. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/paper-claiming-human-han...

https://twitter.com/search?q=creatorgate&src=typd

As a non-English-speaking person, I can understand correctly the entire drama of #creatorgate . Feel sorry for the authors and #PLOSONE.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 3, 2016 at 8:27am

Scientists telling politicians in the US why science is important...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 26, 2016 at 7:29am

Bad DNA can flout rules of inheritance :

R2d2 can quickly spread to an entire mouse population despite its evolutionary disadvantage

In living animals, a selfish bit of DNA called R2d2 is an outright lawbreaker. It violates laws of both genetic inheritance and Darwinian evolution. R2d2 can sweep through mouse populations by mimicking helpful mutations while actually damaging fertility, researchers report online February 15 inMolecular Biology and Evolution.

The new findings suggest that even genes that hurt an organism’s evolutionary chances can cheat their way to the top. That could be good news for researchers hoping to use engineered “gene drives” to eliminate mosquito-borne diseases and invasive species. But it’s also a cautionary tale for scientists looking for signs that natural selection has picked certain genes because they offer an evolutionary benefit.

If researchers aren’t careful, they may be hoodwinked into thinking that a selfish gene is one that has some evolutionary advantage. The genetic signatures are the same. But what looks like survival of the fittest may actually be a cheater prospering. The selfish DNA could blaze through populations. The proportion of mice with the selfish gene more than tripled in one laboratory population from 18 percent to 62 percent within 13 generations, the researchers found. In another breeding population, R2d2 shot from being in 50 percent of the lab mice to 85 percent in 10 generations. By 15 generations, the selfish element reached “fixation” — all the mice in the population carried it.

Such wildfire spread of a gene variant that eventually wipes out all other versions is known as a selective sweep. Sweeps are hallmarks of a gene that helps an organism adapt to its environment. But this study suggests that what looks like adaptation may actually be selfish genetics at work.

R2d2 is a “selfish element,” a gene or other piece of DNA that causes itself to be inherited preferentially.

The droid’s namesake is a stretch of DNA on mouse chromosome 2 that contains multiple copies of the Cwc22 gene. When seven or more copies of that gene build up on the chromosome, R2d2 gets selfish. In female mice, it elbows aside the chromosome that doesn’t contain the selfish version of the gene and is preferentially incorporated into eggs. That’s a violation of the laws of inheritance spelled out by Gregor Mendel in which each gene or chromosome is supposed to have a fifty-fifty chance of being passed on to the next generation. But there is a cost to R2d2’s selfishness: Female mice that carry one copy of the selfish element have small litter sizes compared with mice that don’t carry the greedy DNA.

Under evolutionary laws, that loss of fertility should cause natural selection to weed outR2d2. But the selfish element’s greed is greater than the power of natural selection to combat it, the lab experiments show.

 The relatively low proportion of wild mice carrying R2d2 could mean that some mice have developed ways to suppress the gene’s selfishness.

- Sciencenews.org

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 24, 2016 at 8:50am

If you are highly goal oriented, your perception of the world changes to suit you! That is what  Dr. Jessica Witt of Colorado State University explained - how well you're performing affects your visual perception of the world around you, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

  According to her the ball actually looks bigger to higher hitters in baseball and the hole looks bigger to good golfers!! To see if athletes performing better really do perceive their environment differently, she went to softball games.

In her experiments with sports persons, she found that people who hit better selected a larger circle fromt eh circle she showed them, meaning the batters who were hitting better saw the ball as bigger. Which means not everyone sees the ball the same way. And it also means that what we see is affected by our ability to act. Performance impacts vision.

In other studies she found that golfers who putted better saw the hole as bigger than did poor putters. Faster swimmers saw targets underwater as being closer than did slower swimmers. And she had athletes who were not placekickers try to make field goals. The ones who did better saw the space between the uprights as wider. Bottom line:

“You don’t see the world the same as each other. You see the world in a way that’s unique to you, and it’s unique to your abilities.”

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when traveling abroad, people often find local residents’ body odor particularly offensive. And mothers tend to believe that other infants smell far less appealing than their own. Now, in a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers has shown that the degree of disgust people find in others’ sweat may vary with group identification. In other words, disgust may depend on whether one considers the person they smell to be a member of their “in-group” or “out-group.”

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 23, 2016 at 7:54am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 19, 2016 at 6:51am

Sex difference in pathology of the ageing gut mediates the greater response of female lifespan to dietary restriction
Women live on average longer than men, but have greater levels of late-life morbidity. Scientists have uncovered a substantial sex difference in the pathology of the ageing gut in Drosophila. The intestinal epithelium of the ageing female undergoes major deterioration, driven by intestinal stem cell (ISC) division, while lower ISC activity in males associates with delay or absence of pathology, and better barrier function, even at old ages. Males succumb to intestinal challenges to which females are resistant, associated with fewer proliferating ISCs, suggesting a trade-off between highly active repair mechanisms and late-life pathology in females. Dietary restriction reduces gut pathology in ageing females, and extends female lifespan more than male. By genetic sex reversal of a specific gut region, we induced female-like ageing pathologies in males, associated with decreased lifespan, but also with a greater increase in longevity in response to dietary restriction.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10956v1?utm_source=content_aler...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 18, 2016 at 8:52am

The reason for hair loss identified
Hair follicle aging is driven by transepidermal elimination of stem cells...
Japanese researchers have identified that DNA damage to stem cells in the hair follicles turns them into skin cells which subsequently leave the scalp. These findings, published in Science, could potentially lead to new treatments for hair loss and other aging-associated diseases. The hair follicle is an epithelial mini-organ of the skin. As it ages, it naturally shrinks or miniaturizes, and its functions and regenerative ability decline. Hair follicles contain hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs) that activate in cyclical growth phases; the longer the growth phase, the longer the hair. While aging in organisms has been explained by various theories, not much is known about the role of stem cells in the organ aging process. Studying hair follicles as mini-organs, Professor Emi K. Nishimura and colleagues from the Department of Stem Cell Biology, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, set out to investigate the impact of aging on HFSCs, and if there was any link to aging-associated hair loss. In a study of wild-type mice models, they found that HFSCs accumulate DNA damage as they renew during repetitive hair cycles, leading to a breakdown of type XVII collagen (COL17A1) which is crucial for the maintenance of HFSCs. Once these aged HFSCs are activated during the hair cycle, they eventually leave the follicle, turn into epidermal keratinocytes and are then eliminated from the skin surface. Then, to see if this was the same for humans as well, the team analyzed healthy human scalp skin from women at ages ranging from 22 to 70 years old. They found that human female scalps from the aged group (55 to 70 years old) contain significantly more miniaturized hair follicles compared with the younger group (35 to 45 years old). The team’s findings show that hair follicle aging is initially caused by DNA damage that accumulates in renewing HFSCs as they age. This thus leads to hair follicles in mammals miniaturizing and even disappearing from the skin, regardless of gender, in both mice and humans. It is worth noting that hair follicle aging is also linked to intrinsic genomic instability, as in the case of the genetic disorders such as progeria. Indeed, this dynamic hair follicle aging program is a good model of how different organs and tissue miniaturize and become less functional with age, the authors wrote.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6273/aad4395

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 16, 2016 at 7:55am

IRRI scientists' breakthrough may usher 'green revolution'
Rice-growing techniques learned through thousands of years of trial and error are about to be charged with DNA technology in a breakthrough hailed by scientists as a potential second "green revolution".
Over the next few years farmers are expected to have new genome sequencing technology at their disposal, helping to offset a myriad of problems that threaten to curtail production of the grain that feeds half of humanity.
Drawing on a massive bank of varieties stored in the Philippines and state-of-the-art Chinese technology, scientists recently completed the DNA sequencing of more than 3,000 of the world's most significant types of rice.
With the huge pool of data unlocked, rice breeders will soon be able to produce higher-yielding varieties much more quickly and under increasingly stressful conditions, scientists involved with the project said.
Since rice was first domesticated thousands of years ago, farmers have improved yields through various planting techniques.
For the past century breeders have isolated traits, such as high yields and disease resistance, then developed them through cross breeding.
However, they did not know which genes controlled which traits, leaving much of the effort to lengthy guesswork.
The latest breakthroughs in molecular genetics promise to fast-track the process, eliminating much of the mystery, according to scientists involved in the project.
Better rice varieties can now be expected to be developed and passed on to farmers' hands in less than three years, compared with 12 without the guidance of DNA sequencing.
Genome sequencing involves decoding DNA, the hereditary material of all living cells and organisms. The process roughly compares with solving a giant jigsaw puzzle made up of billions of microscopic pieces.
A multinational team undertook the four-year project with the DNA decoding primarily in China by BGI, the world's biggest genome sequencing firm.

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