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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:55am

Protein-based COVID vaccines

Some people can’t get current COVID-19 vaccines for health reasons, but protein-based vaccines offer hope that they might soon be immunized. To elicit a protective immune response, these shots deliver proteins, along with immunity-stimulating adjuvants, directly to a person’s cells, rather than sending in a fragment of genetic code that the cells must read to synthesize the proteins themselves. After months of quality-control setbacks and manufacturing delays, the protein-based jab from US biotechnology firm Novavax has just received its first emergency-use authorization, in Indonesia. Meanwhile, Clover Biopharmaceuticals, based in China, and Biological E in India are on track to file for authorization in various countries in the coming weeks and months.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:52am

The team looked at 145 datasets, in total covering 41,966 participants who did the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. The five facets are observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging inner experience and non-reactivity to inner experience.

What the team found was that there was little 'convergence' across these facets across participants in non-clinical settings. Put simply, we're not embracing the whole package.

Researchers found that people seem to conceptually understand that mindfulness involves engagement, the general public is not walking the talk. Our results suggest that laypeople may understand what awareness is, but the next step of acceptance may not be well understood – limiting potential for engaging with problems.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027273582100...

Part 2

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:51am

We're Doing Mindfulness Wrong, Psychologists Say

What does mindfulness mean to you? Is it about being aware of what comes your way without distraction? Or is it engaging with life's challenges without judgement, and responding as required?

A new meta-analysis of almost 150 studies has found that most of us understand that mindfulness is about both being aware and engaging with whatever comes our way. Unfortunately, we're much worse at putting this 'engaging' part into action.

Scientific understanding of mindfulness goes beyond mere stress-relief and requires a willingness to engage with stressors. It is, in fact, the engagement with stressors that ultimately results in stress relief. More specifically, mindfulness includes two main dimensions: awareness and acceptance.

Mindfulness derives from Buddhist traditions, and has become used in Western settings since the 1970s as part of psychiatry and psychology. It has been shown to help reduce depression, stress, anxiety, and even drug addiction, and is regularly recommended as a coping mechanism as part of therapy. 

In terms of regular people's understanding of mindfulness, we're really good at the 'awareness' part, the researchers say – where we take stock of what's around us, and any potential issues coming our way.

But the team found that we then tend to use mindfulness as a passive endorsement of the experience: the mindfulness equivalent of a shrug emoji. 

What we should do to get the full benefits of mindfulness is engage with our experiences, finding solutions and responses to our environment – something that the researchers found that we're aware of, but we just don't do.

"These modern applications of mindfulness have recently faced substantial criticism. Scholars suggest that popular definitions cast mindfulness as a 'quick fix' for suffering rather than a longitudinal practice of re-orienting, re-framing, and engaging with daily experience," the team writes in their paper.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:47am

Bioengineers find new way heart valves grow – and go wrong

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:30am

Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly

Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.

Radio waves and mobile phone signals relies on electromagnetic radiation for communication but in a new development, engineers from Lancaster University in the UK, working with the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, transferred digitally encoded information using "fast neutrons" instead.

The researchers measured the spontaneous emission of fast neutrons from californium-252, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors.

Modulated emissions were measured using a detector and recorded on a laptop.

Several examples of information, i.e., a word, the alphabet and a random number selected blindly, were encoded serially into the modulation of the neutron field and the output decoded on a laptop which recovered the encoded information on screen.

A double-blind test was performed in which a number derived from a random number generator was encoded without prior knowledge of those uploading it, and then transmitted and decoded. 

All transmission tests attempted proved to be 100% successful.

Malcolm J. Joyce et al, Wireless information transfer with fast neutrons, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2021.165946

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-nuclear-transmit-digital-wirelessly.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 11, 2021 at 8:24am

Humans are guilty of breaking an oceanic law of nature: study

A new international study has examined the distribution of biomass across all life in the oceans, from bacteria to whales. Their quantification of human impact reveals a fundamental alteration to one of life's largest scale patterns.

Scientists have used advances in ocean observation and large meta-analyses to show that human impacts have already had major consequences for the larger oceanic species, and have dramatically changed one of life's largest scale patterns—a pattern encompassing the entire ocean's biodiversity, from bacteria to whales.

Early samples of marine plankton biomass from 50 years ago led researchers to hypothesize that roughly equal amounts of biomass occur at all sizes. For example, although bacteria are 23 orders of magnitude smaller than a blue whale, they are also 23 orders of magnitude more abundant. This size-spectrum hypothesis has since remained unchallenged, even though it was never verified globally from bacteria to whales. The authors of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, sought to test this hypothesis on a global scale for the first time. They used historical reconstructions and marine ecosystem models to estimate biomass before industrial scale fishing got underway (pre-1850) and compared this data to the present-day.

One of the biggest challenges to comparing organisms spanning bacteria to whales is the enormous differences in scale.

The ratio of their masses is equivalent to that between a human being and the entire Earth. Researchers estimated organisms at the small end of the scale from more than 200,000 water samples collected globally, but larger marine life required completely different methods.

Their approach focused on 12 major groups of aquatic life over roughly 33,000 grid points of the ocean. Evaluating the pre-industrial ocean conditions (pre-1850) largely confirmed the original hypothesis: There is a remarkably constant biomass across size classes.

Researchers were amazed to see that each order of magnitude size class contains approximately 1 gigaton of biomass globally.

While bacteria are over-represented in the cold, dark regions of the ocean, the largest whales are relatively rare, thus highlighting exceptions from the original hypothesis.

In contrast with an even biomass spectrum in the pre-1850 ocean, an investigation of the spectrum at present revealed human impacts on ocean biomass through a new lens. While fishing and whaling only account for less than 3 percent of human food consumption, their effect on the biomass spectrum is devastating: large fish and marine mammals such as dolphins have experienced a biomass loss of 2 Gt (60% reduction), with the largest whales suffering an unsettling almost 90% decimation. The authors estimate that these losses already outpace potentialbiomass losses even under extreme climate change scenarios.

Humans have impacted the ocean in a more dramatic fashion than merely capturing fish. It seems that we have broken the size spectrum—one of the largest power law distributions known in nature.  These results provide a new quantitative perspective on the extent to which anthropogenic activities have altered life at the global scale. 

Ian A. Hatton et al, The global ocean size spectrum from bacteria to whales, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh3732

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-humans-guilty-oceanic-law-nature.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 10, 2021 at 11:54am

White-tailed deer found to be huge reservoir of coronavirus infection

New research from the US has shown that white-tailed deer are being infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans. Antibodies were found in 40% of deer that were tested from January to March 2021 across Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New York state. A second unpublished study has detected the virus in 80% of deer sampled in Iowa between November 2020 and January 2021.

Such high levels of infection led the researchers to conclude that deer are actively transmitting the virus to one another. The scientists also identified different SARS-CoV-2 variants, suggesting there have been many human-to-deer infections.

The large numbers of white-tailed deer in North America and the fact that they often live close to people provide several opportunities for the disease to move between the two species. This can include wildlife management operations, field research, recreation, tourism and hunting. In fact, hunters are likely to be one of the most obvious sources of potential reinfection as they regularly handle dead animals. It has also been suggested that water sources contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 might provide a pathway for transmission, although this has yet to be proved.

Human-to-deer and deer-to-deer transmission are believed to be driving the rapid spread of the disease within white-tailed deer populations across the US. This is particularly apparent during the early months of 2021 when COVID infections were spiking in the human population. Previous studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 can be passed from humans to domestic and captive animals including cats, dogs, zoo animals and, most notably, farmed mink. But, until now, the disease had not been shown to spread in wildlife species.

There is the possibility that viral mutation in a reservoir host, such as white-tailed deer, could lead to new variants of the disease. These variants may lead to greater infection rates, increased virulence (severity of symptoms) and prove more effective at evading the human immune system. Likewise, any reinfection from wildlife reservoirs could also complicate our long-term efforts to fight and suppress the disease.

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/47/e2114828118

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.31.466677v1

https://theconversation.com/white-tailed-deer-found-to-be-huge-rese...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 10, 2021 at 11:42am

Modified silk cloth keeps skin cooler than cotton

A team of researchers has developed a modified textile that can keep skin cooler than materials made of cotton. In their paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the group describes their approach to developing garments that are cooler when worn in outdoor conditions.

The researchers noted that silk does a good job of reflecting sunlight in the mid-infrared range, which suggests it could be suitable as a cooling garment material. But because it is made by spiders, it contains a protein component that tends to absorb ultraviolet radiation, making the material and its wearer grow hotter under direct sunlight.

To make the silk material UV reflective, the researchers dipped a standard piece of silk fabric into a liquid solution containing highly refractive inorganic oxide nanoparticles. These adhered to the silk fabric, allowing it to become evenly saturated throughout the material. They allowed the fabric to dry and then tested it to see if the addition of the nanoparticles made the material more UV reflective. They found that under peak sunlight conditions, the temperature under the material was approximately 3.5 degrees Celsius cooler than the ambient air temperature. Next, they placed the material on a patch of simulated skin and found the skin temperature was approximately 8 degrees Celsius cooler than the same type of simulated skin without the material covering. They also found that it kept the artificial skin approximately 12.5 degrees Celsius cooler than standard cotton material. Further testing showed that the material was able to reflect approximately 95% of sunlight, preventing it from passing through to the skin underneath.

Bin Zhu et al, Subambient daytime radiative cooling textile based on nanoprocessed silk, Nature Nanotechnology (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-021-00987-0

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-silk-skin-cooler-cotton.html?utm_sour...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 10, 2021 at 11:28am

How are epilepsy and autism linked?

Epilepsy and autism spectrum disorders, or ASD, show a remarkable degree of comorbidity and may share pathological mechanisms. Questions that have bogged down scientists about these disorders include: Does autism lead to an increase in epilepsy? Or does epilepsy alter the brain circuit, which then leads to autism?

One hypothesis is that during brain development, inhibitory neurons,  which regulate brain rhythms, develop in an abnormal manner. If this is true, then how the brain circuit gets set up is abnormal, which may lead to both autism and epilepsy. 

unlike excitatory neurons that lead to a forward propagation of information, inhibitory neurons work like a brake by suppressing and sculpting the activity of downstream neurons.

The researchers generated mice with a global mutation in all cells that prevented the inhibitory neurons from migrating to their normal location in mature brain circuits. Not surprisingly, they found a reduction in inhibitory currents in the hippocampus, a region of the brain known for memory function. Notably, the mutant mice showed behavioral traits associated with ASD and were more prone to seizures.

Results of the study suggest that a common underlying defect in circuit formation could contribute to both ASD and epilepsy.

Carol Eisenberg et al, Reduced hippocampal inhibition and enhanced autism-epilepsy comorbidity in mice lacking neuropilin 2, Translational Psychiatry (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41398-021-01655-6

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-epilepsy-autism-linked.html?...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 10, 2021 at 8:11am

We don’t ‘believe in’ Newton’s laws. We trust them and accepted them because there is genuine evidence that they work.

Newton's laws of motion are three laws of classical mechanics that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws can be paraphrased as follows (1):

Law 1. A body continues in its state of rest, or in uniform motion in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force.

Law 2. A body acted upon by a force moves in such a manner that the time rate of change of momentum equals the force.

Law 3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Newton's laws were verified by experiment and observation for over 200 years, and they are excellent approximations at the scales and speeds of everyday life. 

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion

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