Science Simplified!

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 6, 2014 at 6:59am

Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist who garnered global attention 2 years ago when she and another physicist announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, has been named the next director-general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, where that momentous discovery was made. Gianotti will take over for current director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer on 1 January 2016, the laboratory announced.
CERN boasts the world's biggest atom smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and an annual budget equal to $1.1 billion, making it the de facto global center of particle physics. Gianotti will be the 16th director-general in the laboratory's 60-year history. She will also be the first woman, which has some leading female particle physicists cheering.

Gianotti's rise to lead one of the top global scientific institutions in the world was not always a role she saw in her future. Her initial education in Milan focused on literature, art history, ancient languages and music, the latter inspiring her to pursue a possible career in piano performance at the Milan Conservatory. But the big questions raised by her studies moved her to find answers through other disciplines.
“I thought that physics, the little bit I knew of it, would allow me to address those questions in a more practical way,” she says. “I mean, being able to give answers.”

At age 25, with a PhD in particle physics from the University of Milan, Gianotti joined CERN where the Large Hadron Collider is housed. In 2009, she became project leader of the Atlas collaboration, one of two teams working separately to find the Higgs in the collider data. As the group's spokesperson and coordinator, Gianotti had the honor of announcing the discovery of the elusive particle on July 4, 2012
As part of her new role, Gianotti not only intends to spearhead new discoveries using CERN's 16.7 mile-long Large Hadron Collider, but also promote the sciences as something that can be harmonized with the arts.

She developed a passion for cooking that remains with her today, while at school she devoured Greek, Latin and philosophy. She also took up classical dance with the aim, she once decided, of becoming a ballerina – though not any old ballerina. She had to be a star of the Bolshoi Ballet. Music remains a fundamental influence and taught her a rigorous approach to life.

"Art and physics are much closer than you would think," she told MyHero.com "Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy."

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 5, 2014 at 9:12am

Mechanism for spontaneous HIV 'cure'
French scientists said on Tuesday they had found the genetic mechanism by which two HIV-infected men may have experienced a "spontaneous cure", and said it offered a new strategy in the fight against AIDS.

Both men were infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), one of them 30 years ago, but never developed AIDS symptoms.

The AIDS-causing virus remained in their immune cells but was inactivated because its genetic code had been altered, the scientists said.

The change appeared to be linked to increased activity of a common enzyme named APOBEC, they theorized.

The "apparent spontaneous cure" throws up an intriguing avenue for drug engineers, the team said in a statement.

The work, published in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection, was carried out by scientists at France's Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm).

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 5, 2014 at 7:19am

Evaluation of mycotoxins, mycobiota, and toxigenic fungi in selected medicinal plants of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
Herbal medicines such as licorice, Indian rennet and opium poppy, are at risk of contamination with toxic mould, according to a new study published in Fungal Biology. The authors of the study, from the University of Peshawar, Pakistan say it’s time for regulators to control mold contamination.
Medicinal plant samples were analyzed for mycotoxin and mould contamination.
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Natural occurrence of aflatoxins and ochratoxin A was detected in the samples.
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Exceeding levels of mould contamination mainly Aspergillus and Penicillium were shown.
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Contamination might be due to poor storage, transport, and handling conditions.
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Isolated fungal spp. revealed toxigenic potential after culturing on synthetic media.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878614614000981

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 4, 2014 at 6:15am

Scientists step up work to find and contain 'the Ebolas of the future'

scientists are stepping up efforts to prevent the next pandemic.Teams of researchers have fanned out across the globe, trapping bats in China, rats in Vietnam and monkeys in West Africa in an effort to identify dangerous viruses before they cross into humans. Others are working in labs, screening hundreds of thousands of compounds to disarm the pathogens.

“Instead of chasing the last epidemic, which is how we practiced historically, we want to be proactive, to get ahead of the curve,” said Dr. Jonna Mazet, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, and director of PREDICT, a government-funded network of scientists who hunt viruses in disease hotspots around the world.

In the last five years, PREDICT researchers, who work in 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, have identified 800 new viruses.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 2, 2014 at 6:36am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 1, 2014 at 8:31am

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/5-questions-about-the-hi...

Why Scientists Make Promises They Can't Keep
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/scientists-make-pr...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2014 at 8:17am

Aircraft that are propelled by beams of light and not fuel...

A new method for improving the thrust-generated by laser-propulsion systems may bring people one step closer to practical use, scientists say. The method, developed by physicists Yuri Rezunkov of the Institute of Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering, Russia and Alexander Schmidt of the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia has been described in The Optical Society's (OSA) journal Applied Optics.
Currently, the maximum speed of a spacecraft is limited by the amount of fuel that it can carry. Achieving higher speeds means that more fuel must be burned — fuel that has to be carried by the craft, researchers said. These burdensome loads can be reduced, however, if a laser — located at a remote location and not on the spacecraft — were used to provide additional propulsive force. A number of systems have been proposed that can produce such laser propulsion. One of the most promising systems involves a process called laser ablation, in which a pulsed laser beam strikes a surface, heats it up, and burns off material to create a plasma plume — a column of charged particles that flow off the surface.

The outflowing of plasma plume generates additional thrust to propel the craft.

Rezunkov and Schmidt describe a new system that integrates a laser-ablation propulsion system with the gas blasting nozzles of a spacecraft.

Combining the two systems, researchers found, can increase the speed of the gas flow out of the system to supersonic speeds while reducing the amount of burned fuel.

The researchers show that the effectiveness of current laser-propulsion techniques is limited by instability of supersonic gases as they flow through the gas nozzle, as well as production of shock waves that "choke" the nozzle. But those effects can be reduced with the help of a laser-ablation plasma plume. Coupling ablation jet with supersonic gas flow through the nozzle, they found, significantly improves the overall thrust. "These techniques can be used not only for launching small satellites but also for additional acceleration of supersonic aircrafts to achieve Mach 10 and more," Rezunkov said.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 31, 2014 at 7:14am

Mental Leaps Cued by Memory’s Ripples

The same mental processes that organize memories may also coordinate how we make decisions.
http://www.quantamagazine.org/20141022-mental-leaps-cued-by-memorys...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2014 at 9:09am

Using a naturally occurring protein, scientists have designed a drug nanocarrier that can deliver high doses of cancer drugs to tumors.
Harnessing Nature’s Design To Reduce Chemo Side-Effects
Using a naturally-occurring protein, researchers have designed a nanocarrier that can deliver a high concentration of drugs specifically to tumors. These results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help reduce the side effect of chemotherapy drugs.

In recent years, nanotechnology has been applied to develop drug nanocarriers that can precisely target and kill tumor cells, reducing damages to normal tissue. An ideal nanocarrier for drug delivery should be able to carry high doses of therapeutic drugs, target at tumor cells specifically and have favorable physicochemical properties and biocompatibility.

However, integrating all these characteristics into a single carrier has been complicated. So far, no targeted nanoparticle system has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, reflecting in part the complexity of designing particles that meet all of the criteria required for accurate drug delivery.

Professor Yan Xiyun and her colleagues at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences have recently discovered a nanocarrier ideal for efficient anti-tumor drug delivery. They used a naturally-occurring protein, H-ferritin, to form a nanocage that does not require any surface functionalization or property modulation. The new nanocarrier specifically delivers high doses of the therapeutic drug doxorubicin to tumor cells and completely inhibits tumor growth with only a single dose treatment, while exhibiting excellent safety profiles and biocompatibility.

The idea of employing naturally existed materials for targeted drug delivery, instead of focusing on complex particle engineering is a shift in the design concept of drug carriers. The authors hope that it will lead to new directions and methodologies in developing new safe and biocompatible nanomaterials in vivo.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/41/14900

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 30, 2014 at 8:41am

Bio-mimicry!

Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are among nature’s most skillful camouflage artists, able to change both the color and texture of their skin within seconds to blend into their surroundings — a capability that engineers have long struggled to duplicate in synthetic materials. (Learn more: http://mitsha.re/1o3Ensl)

Now, a team of researchers has come closer than ever to achieving that goal, creating a flexible material that can change its color or fluorescence and its texture at the same time, on demand, under remote control.

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