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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 26, 2015 at 5:40am

Deep-sea bacteria could help neutralize greenhouse gas

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 23, 2015 at 7:10am

Sunscreen Is Killing Coral Reefs Around The World
Sunscreen may protect against skin cancer and sunburn, but it is killing coral reefs across the world, according to a team of international scientists based out of the University of Central Florida.
The researchers found high concentrations of oxybenzone, a common UV-filtering compound, in the waters around popular coral reefs in Hawaii and the Caribbean. In addition to killing the coral, the chemical also damages the DNA in adults and deforms the DNA in corals that are in the larval stage, which reduces corals' chances of proper development, according to a news release.
The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue. We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment.
The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue. We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean.  Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 23, 2015 at 6:57am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 22, 2015 at 8:27am

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 17, 2015 at 6:21am

Do you think you are getting less sleep because of modern day lifestyles? But did you know you are not getting lesser sleep than hunter-gatherers, I mean our ancestors?

New evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 15 shows that three ancient groups of hunter-gatherers--living in different parts of the world without any of those trappings of modern life--don't get any more sleep than we do.

Those traditional people sleep a little under 6.5 hours a night on average. They don't take regular naps. They don't go to sleep at dark, either. In other words, their sleep habits don't look so different from ours, although they usually do wake up before the sun rises.

The short sleep in these populations challenges the belief that sleep has been greatly reduced in the 'modern world. This has important implications for the idea that we need to take sleeping pills because sleep has been reduced from its 'natural level' by the widespread use of electricity, TV, the Internet, and so on.

To get a handle on how people slept before the modern era, Siegel and his colleagues looked to three traditional human hunter-gatherer societies: the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Bolivia. The researchers recorded the sleeping habits of 94 individuals around the clock to collect data representing 1,165 days in all.

What they found was a surprising similarity across those three groups. "Despite varying genetics, histories, and environments, we find that all three groups show a similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express core human sleep patterns, probably characteristic of pre-modern-era Homo sapiens.

Group sleep time averaged between 5.7 and 7.1 hours, with between 6.9 and 8.5 hours between the beginning and end of the sleep period. Those amounts are at the low end of durations reported in "industrial societies."

Hunter-gatherers sleep an hour more in the winter than they do in the summer. Although they lack electric lights, none of the groups went to sleep with the sun. On average, they stayed up a little over three hours after the sun went down and woke up before sunrise.

It appears that their sleep time may have more to do with temperature than with light. Those ancient groups all went to sleep as the temperature fell and slept through the coldest part of the night.

There is one important way in which hunter-gatherers aren't like us: very few of them suffer from chronic insomnia.

Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies. Yetish et al. Current Biology, 2015.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2901157-4

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 16, 2015 at 6:39am

A person’s brain activity appears to be as unique as his or her fingerprints, a new Yale-led imaging study shows. These brain “connectivity profiles” alone allow researchers to identify individuals from the fMRI images of brain activity of more than 100 people, according to the study published Oct. 12 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Finn and co-first author Xilin Shen, under the direction of R. Todd Constable, professor of diagnostic radiology and neurosurgery at Yale, compiled fMRI data from 126 subjects who underwent six scan sessions over two days. Subjects performed different cognitive tasks during four of the sessions. In the other two, they simply rested. Researchers looked at activity in 268 brain regions: specifically, coordinated activity between pairs of regions. Highly coordinated activity implies two regions are functionally connected. Using the strength of these connections across the whole brain, the researchers were able to identify individuals from fMRI data alone, whether the subject was at rest or engaged in a task. They were also able to predict how subjects would perform on tasks.

Finn said she hopes that this ability might one day help clinicians predict or even treat neuropsychiatric diseases based on individual brain connectivity profiles.

Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4135.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 16, 2015 at 6:11am

Dietary supplements send 23,000 people, many of them children, to the emergency room in the U.S. each year, according to a new estimate reported in a new study based on a federal database of adverse events reported at 63 hospitals over a 10-year period., released online October 14 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Just over 9% require hospitalization. Many patients report heart symptoms.
According to doctors who treated them the supplements include herbal products, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other complementary nutrition products hawked for a wide range of uses, often with little or no testing to back up claims.

The new study illustrates the idea that something that's 'natural' is not necessarily safe, and these products do not come without risk.
At these hospitals, the research team identified 3,667 emergency room visits linked to the supplements. That extrapolates to 23,005 adverse events nationwide each year, including an estimated 2,154 hospitalizations.

Unsupervised children under age 5 accounted for 21.6% of the visits.
Adults ages 20 to 34 made up an even bigger proportion of victims - 28%.

Weight-loss products accounted for an estimated 3,339 emergency room visits each year by women, nearly three times the number for men.

Among males, an estimated 567 visits were attributed to products designed for sexual enhancement and 368 were for body-building products. Comparable numbers for women were so small the researchers couldn't come up with a reliable estimate.

Heart symptoms were the chief complaint in 43% of people taking weight-loss products, 46% of patients taking energy products, 50% taking body-building products, and 37% taking sexual-enhancement products.

What's most concerning is the age of people coming in with cardiovascular complications or symptoms. They are in their 20s to 30s, which shows there are risks to these products.
Among older adults, swallowing problems caused nearly 40% of emergency department visits for supplement-related adverse events, with micronutrients implicated in more than 80% of these visits, the researchers said.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 16, 2015 at 6:04am

Update on Ebola: 15th Oct., 2015

U.K. Ebola “Relapse” Case Takes Virus Specialists to Uncharted Waters according to Reuters

Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey is in critical condition following "totally unprecedented" return of symptoms
The case of Pauline Cafferkey, the first person known to have recovered from Ebola and then suffer an apparently life-threatening relapse, is taking scientists into uncharted territory.

The Scottish nurse's critically ill situation, described as "staggering" by one British virologist, signals just how complex and formidable a foe the Ebola virus may turn out to be now that scientists have the chance to study its survivors.

Previous studies and preliminary data from research in survivors of the vast West African outbreak have detected Ebola virus in semen, breast milk, vaginal secretions, spinal fluid and fluids around the eyes.

But scientific literature has never documented an Ebola relapse case before, meaning Cafferkey's is likely to generate great fear and anxiety for the 17,000 or so other Ebola survivors across West Africa.
This has never been observed before. Is this a one off? A very rare event? Or is this going to be quite common? The honest answer is we don't know!
Until researchers can study in detail and in large numbers of people the virus's long-term effects, each survivor, be they healthy or sickly, will be able to teach virologists more.
Preliminary data published this week has already forced a re-think on how long male survivors should be advised to abstain from sex or use condoms, with a study showing traces of Ebola can be found in semen of some men at least nine months after they first became ill.

Even if you don't have the virus in your bloodstream it can be hiding out. And we need to be aware of that because it's setting up the stage for potentially new outbreaks.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 14, 2015 at 6:05am

Laos is facing again vaccine-derived polio, the World Health Organization said on 12th Oct., 2015.
The WHO said an 8-year-old boy died of the disease on Sept. 11, and genetic sequencing suggested the virus strain has been circulating in the area of Bolikhamxay province, which has low immunization rates, for more than two years.
A global vaccination campaign has all but beaten the wild polio virus, with only Pakistan and Afghanistan reporting cases of wild polio virus infection this year.

Specialists have warned that vaccine-derived cases - such as this one in Laos and previous ones in Ukraine and Mali - could hamper progress towards global eradication.
Ending polio requires eliminating both wild and vaccine-derived polio.

It added, however, that because of relatively limited travel to and from this area, and because of extra immunization campaigns planned in response, the risk of international spread of this polio strain from Laos is low.

Laos has been free of the wild polio virus since 1993, but poor immunization rates mean people are at risk of infection with strains of the virus that can mutate in sewage after being excreted by immunized children.

The risk of vaccine-derived polio cases can be avoided by switching from using live oral polio vaccines (OPV) - which are highly effective, cheap, easy to deliver but contain live virus, - to "inactivated" vaccines (IPV), which are not effective for fighting endemic disease but contain no live virus.

The WHO said the use of OPV is being scaled down in a phased manner as countries eliminate circulating wild polio virus strains.
- Reuters

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 11, 2015 at 11:57am

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