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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.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 15, 2016 at 6:36am

Meeting humanity’s increasing demand for freshwater and protecting ecosystems at the same time, thus maintaining blue water footprints within maximum sustainable levels per catchment, will be one of the most difficult and important challenges of this century

                                               *************

Air Pollution Kills Over 5.5 Million People Worldwide Annually

More than 5.5 million people worldwide die prematurely every year due to household and outdoor air pollution, and India and China together account for 55 per cent of these deaths, new research has found.

About 1.6 million people died of air pollution in China and 1.4 million died in India in 2013, the researchers said.

The international team of researchers from India, China, Canada and the US estimated that despite efforts to limit future emissions, the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution will climb over the next two decades unless more aggressive targets are set.

The findings were presented on Friday at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC.

Power plants, industrial manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and burning coal and wood all release small particles into the air that are dangerous to a person's health.

In India, a major contributor to poor air quality is the practice of burning wood, dung and similar sources of biomass for cooking and heating.

Millions of families, among the poorest in India, are regularly exposed to high levels of particulate matter in their own homes.

India needs a three-pronged mitigation approach to address industrial coal burning, open burning for agriculture, and household air pollution sources.

The study highlights the urgent need for even more aggressive strategies to reduce emissions from coal and from other sectors.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2016 at 8:25am

Honda Motor India has announced the ninth Young Engineers and Scientists’ (Y-E-S) awards for 2015 in India. The Young Engineers and Scientists’ Award were presented to 14 students from India’s premier institutes for science and technology – the Indian Institute of Technology. The Y-E-S awards were instituted by Honda Foundation in India in 2008 to encourage and support young Indian engineers and scientists.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2016 at 8:22am

Reducing drug experiments with human beings with the help of Robots...
Researchers, including an Indian-origin scientist, have created a robotically-driven experimentation system to determine the effects of a large number of drugs on many proteins, reducing the number of necessary experiments by as much as 70 percent.

"Biomedical scientists have invested a lot of effort in making it easier to perform numerous experiments quickly and cheaply," said lead author Armaghan Naik from Carnegie Mellon University's computational biology department.

"However, we simply cannot perform an experiment for every possible combination of biological conditions, such as genetic mutation and cell type. Researchers have, therefore, had to choose a few conditions or targets to test exhaustively, or pick experiments themselves. The question is which experiments do you pick," Naik added.

For this, Naik's team previously described the application of a machine learning approach called "active learning".

This involved a computer repeatedly choosing which experiments to do, in order to learn efficiently from the patterns it observed in the data.

While their approach had only been tested using synthetic or previously acquired data, the team's current model builds on this by letting the computer choose which experiments to do.

The experiments were then carried out using liquid-handling robots and an automated microscope. As the system progressively performed the experiments, it identified more phenotypes and more patterns in how sets of proteins were affected by sets of drugs.

The model was recently presented in the journal eLife.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10047v1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 13, 2016 at 7:15am

There are 100,000 chemicals in products we use every day but we are missing 90 percent of the safety information we need! All that is going to change now.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have created a map of the world's chemical landscape, a catalogue of 10,000 chemicals for which there is available safety data that they say can predict the toxicity of many of the 90,000 or more other substances in consumer products for which there is no such information.
The map, described online Feb. 12 in the journal Alternatives to Animal Experiments and being presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference the same day in Washington, DC, was designed to help regulators, manufacturers and scientists get a good idea about whether chemicals for which there is little research are harmful or not. The research was done by creating a searchable database of the 816,000 research studies conducted on 10,000 chemicals registered in Europe, which includes information about whether they pose a hazard to humans and what type.
It would take billions of dollars to test every one of them which is very cost prohibitive. To address this, scientists have come up with a computer model that can tell us which chemicals are similar to untested ones to give us an idea of what types of hazards they are likely to pose.
http://caat.jhsph.edu/

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 12, 2016 at 7:24am

Gravitational Waves:

Indian astrophysicist has challenged LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration's theory that the gravitational waves it recorded was from two black holes merging.
Abhas Mitra, former head of theoretical astrophysics, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, said `true' black holes do not exist.
He said gravitational waves that the LIGO team detected must be from the collision of two quasi-black holes or some other massive compact object. "I have communicated this to the LIGO team," Mitra said.
Mainstream astrophysicists believe that black holes of stellar mass form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Their gravitational field is so powerful that even light cannot escape from their boundary , the event horizon.
Referring to his years of research on the subject, Mitra said that black holes are just "point mass" surrounded by vacuum.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 12, 2016 at 7:16am

WORLD, WE HAVE DETECTED GRAVITATIONAL WAVES! 

After 100 years of searching, an international team of physicists has confirmed the existence of Einstein's gravitational waves, marking one of the biggest astrophysical discoveries of the past century. It's a huge deal, because it not only improves our understanding of how the Universe works, it also opens up a whole new way of studying it.

The gravitational wave signal was detected by physicists at LIGO on September 14 last year, and the historic announcement was made at a press conference on 11th Feb., 2016.

Gravitational waves are so exciting because they were the last major prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity that had to be confirmed, and discovering them will help us understand how the Universe is shaped by mass.

Gravitational waves are akin to sound waves that travelled through space at the speed of light. What does that mean for us? Now that we can detect gravitational waves, we're going to have a whole new way to see and study the Universe. 

According to Einstein's theory, the fabric of space-time can become curved by anything massive in the Universe. When cataclysmic events happen, such as black holes merging or stars exploding, these curves can ripple out elsewhere as gravitational waves, just like if someone had dropped a stone in a pond.

By the time those ripples get to us on Earth, they're tiny (around a billionth of the diameter of an atom), which is why scientists have struggled for so many years to find them.

But thanks to LIGO - the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory - we've finally been able to detect them. The LIGO laboratory works by bouncing lasers back and forth in two 4-km-long pipes, allowing physicists to measure incredibly small changes in spacetime.

One 14 September 2015, they picked up a relatively big change in their Livingston lab in Louisiana, what you'd call a blip in the system. Then, 7 milliseconds later, they detected the same blip with their lab in Hanford, Washington, 4,000 km away, suggesting that it had been caused by a gravitational wave passing through Earth. 

In the months since, researchers have been rigorously studying this signal to see if it could have been caused by anything else. But the overwhelming conclusion is that the blip was caused by gravitational waves - the discovery has statistical significant of 5.1 sigma, which means there's only a 1 in 6 million chance that the result is a fluke.

In fact, the signal almost perfectly matches up with what scientists predicted gravitational waves would look like, based on Einstein's theory. 

So where did this gravitational wave come from? The physicists were able to trace the signal back to the merging of two black holes around 1.3 billion years ago. 

This event - which in itself is a big deal, seeing as no one had ever spotted a binary black hole merger before - was so massive that it significantly warped the fabric of space time, creating ripples that spread out across the Universe... finally reaching us last year.

But this is just the beginning of what gravitational waves can teach us - several other gravitational wave observatories and detectors are scheduled to come online in the next five years, and they'll allow us to more sensitively detect gravitational radiation.

This initiates a new phase in the exploration of the universe and in our search for the physical laws that govern it.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/17

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2016 at 8:19am

Vinegar is the perfect ingredient for making tangy sauces and dressings. Now, researchers report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that the popular liquid could also help fight ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that research suggests is related to the gut microbiome. They found that vinegar suppressed inflammation-inducing proteins while improving the gut's bacterial makeup in mice.
Ulcerative colitis is a chronic condition that affects millions of people around the world. Although its cause isn't completely understood, research suggests that bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract play an important part. People with the condition experience repeated inflammation of the large intestine's lining, which can cause ulcers, abdominal pain, diarrhea and other symptoms. At least one recent study suggested that vinegar, which has been used in traditional medicine for centuries, might be effective against ulcerative colitis.
The researchers tested vinegar and its main ingredient, acetic acid, in a mouse model of ulcerative colitis. Giving the mice either substance by adding it in small amounts to their drinking water significantly reduced symptoms of the condition. An analysis of mouse stool samples showed that treated animals had higher levels of bacteria, such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria. Other studies have found these bacteria to be beneficial to mice with colitis-like symptoms. Treatment also lowered the levels of proteins that induce potentially damaging inflammation in the gut. The researchers say further work would be needed to determine vinegar's effects on ulcerative colitis in humans.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 10, 2016 at 11:55am

Steady streams of tiny plastic pieces making their way into the ocean give microbial squatters a place to take up residence. Each plastic home comes equipped with a solid surface to live on in an otherwise watery world. These floating synthetic dwellings and their microbial inhabitants have a name: the plastisphere.
Plastic particles, in concentrations averaging 3500 pieces and 290 grams per square kilometer, are widespread in the western Sargasso Sea. Pieces are brittle, apparently due to the weathering of the plasticizers, and many are in a pellet shape about 0.25 to 0.5 centimeters in diameter. The particles are surfaces for the attachment of diatoms and hydroids. Increasing production of plastics, combined with present waste-disposal practices, will undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentration of these particles. Plastics could be a source of some of the polychlorinated biphenyls recently observed in oceanic organisms.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/175/4027/1240.abstract

Microbes of the plastisphere live in waters from Australia to Europe. They differ by location, are as varied as the plastic they live on and can be a tasty food option for other creatures. What impact — good or bad — the microbe-covered plastic has on the oceans is still in question. Early hints suggest that there may be climate effects and unexpected movement of harmful microbes or other creatures to new destinations. Each study sparks new ideas and new theories.
More recent estimates put the amount of plastic floating in the world’s oceans at more than 5.25 trillion pieces, weighing more than 268,000 metric tons (SN: 1/24/15, p. 4). That translates to as much as 100,000 pieces per square kilometer in some areas of the ocean.
These microplastics are no bigger than 5 millimeters across and come from many sources. Some are broken bits of larger plastic pieces. Others, such as synthetic fibers from clothing and plastic beads from toothpastes and face washes, escape cleaning filters at wastewater treatment plants and end up in the ocean.
- Science News

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 10, 2016 at 11:06am

Cyanobacteria use micro-optics to sense light direction

Biologists say they have solved the riddle of how a tiny bacterium senses light and moves towards it: the entire organism acts like an eyeball.
In a single-celled pond slime, they observed how incoming rays are bent by the bug's spherical surface and focused in a spot on the far side of the cell.
By shuffling along in the opposite direction to that bright spot, the microbe then moves towards the light.
Other scientists were surprised and impressed by this "elegant" discovery.
Despite being just three micrometres (0.003mm) in diameter, the bacteria in the study use the same physical principles as the eye of a camera or a human.
This makes them "probably the world's smallest and oldest example" of such a lens, the researchers write in the journal eLife.
Cyanobacteria, including the Synechocystis species used in the study, are an ancient and abundant lifeform. They live in water and get their energy from photosynthesis - which explains their enthusiasm for bright light.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e12620

http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e14169?utm_source=content_alert&...

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