Why some animals, especially those people consume contain mercury?

Here is the answer...

It is advisable for children and pregnant women not to eat too much fish. Why? Because they might contain harmful mercury!

Mercury pollution, from sources such as gold mining and power generation, ends up in the atmosphere and then the oceans, where it is transformed into methylmercury, which is as toxic as the element. Methylmercury accumulates in ocean creatures, and animals higher up in the food chain, such as tuna, tend to have higher levels of mercury. People who eat enough of those fish can experience health problems; mercury can impair development in children, infants and fetuses.

In 2012, researchers reported that methylmercury could be found in fog water along the central Californian coast. Now researchers are finding that the mercury, picked up from ocean water, is being deposited on land and accumulating in animals, from spiders to mountain lions. Starting with arthropods, wolf spiders, camel crickets and pill bugs all contained mercury. The researchers found mercury in all the arthropods, but the highest levels were in the wolf spiders, the team reported in the April Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. Wolf spiders are carnivorous, and they appeared to be acquiring more mercury through bioaccumulation. Other species, bigger ones, may also be affected.

Preliminary data shows high levels of mercury in deer in central California and in the mountain lions that eat them. A couple of mountain lions had mercury levels high enough that they could be experiencing health problems.

Researchers are  still working to trace the path of toxic mercury from ocean waters to fog to land to animals, and on up the food chain.

But this research is a worrying sign that mercury pollution may be a much bigger problem than we realize, and one that can’t be solved by simply limiting the amount of tuna you eat.

- Science News. org

HIV antibody infusion safely suppresses virus in infected people

A single infusion of a powerful antibody called VRC01 can suppress the level of HIV in the blood of infected people who are not taking antiretroviral therapy (ART), scientists at the US National Institutes of Health report in a paper published on 23rd Dec, 2015. The researchers also found that giving HIV-infected people VRC01 antibodies by infusing them into a vein or under the skin is safe and well tolerated, and the antibodies remain in the blood for an extended period.

The researchers found that while antibody infusions did not reduce the amount of HIV in blood cells, they reduced plasma viral load more than 10-fold in six of the eight people who were not on ART. In the two people in this group who began the study with the lowest viral loads, the antibody suppressed HIV to extremely low levels for approximately 3 weeks--as long as VRC01 was present at therapeutic concentrations. In the other four people whose HIV levels declined, their viral load fell substantially but did not reach undetectable levels. In the two people not on ART whose viral loads remained steady despite the antibody infusion, it was subsequently found that the predominant HIV strain in their bodies had been resistant to VRC01 at the outset. The antibody also did not appear to have any effect in people taking ART, whose virus was already suppressed.

- Sciencecodex.com

Which hemisphere of the brain does what? Here is the explanation with proof!

New medicine to fight drug -resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for causing tuberculosis (TB). Scientists from India and the US say they have discovered a group of compounds that can kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis by disabling a major defense mechanism it uses to survive in the human body.
The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, India’s ministry of science and technology and the Wellcome Trust-Department of Biotechnology alliance was published in ACS Chemical Biology.
These plant based compounds show tremendous promise as lead scaffolds for the development of new, anti-TB treatments. Specifically, these compounds inhibit the function of a critical enzyme responsible for survival of M. tuberculosis .
The new compounds belong to the ellipticine plant alkaloid family, which also is active in targeting cancerous cells. The active compounds have exerted a very high activity against drug-resistant M. tuberculosis strains isolated from patients of Indian origin. The new compounds have shown potent bactericidal activity against active as well as dormant form of drug-susceptible and MDR/XDR strains.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acschembio.5b00517

Bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, causes dramatic mood shifts – often called episodes – in which the person is overly excited, extremely sad or depressed, or a mixed state of both, including irritable or explosive behavior, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Causes of bipolar disorder (BP) are thought to be both genetic and environmental, and researchers have long suspected that disruption in normal daily circadian rhythms, including sleep and wake cycles, can precede mood shifts.
Researchers in a recent study found that those with bipolar disorder awoke later and slept longer, on average were awake fewer minutes overall, and were active for shorter periods than those without the disorder. Researchers also found that those with bipolar disorder displayed lower activity levels while awake and had greater variations in sleep and wake cycles. The findings are reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A team of international scientists led by UT Southwestern Medical Center and UCLA researchers have identified a dozen inherited traits related to sleep, wake, and activity cycles that are associated with severe bipolar disorder. Researchers also were able to tie the traits to specific chromosomes, providing important clues to the genetic nature of the disorder, as well as potential new avenues for prevention and treatment.
The 13 endophenotypes (biological or behavioral markers found more commonly in those with a certain disease than without) are: mean of awake duration, amplitude, Hill acrophase, interdaily stability, interdaily variability, median activity, relative amplitude, mean length of sleep bouts during the sleep period, mean number of sleep bouts during awake period, time of sleep offset, time of sleep onset, mean total minutes scored awake, and WASO (total minutes in awake bouts after sleep onset).
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/23/1513525113.abstract

Reusable launch vehicle trial in 2016 - ISRO
India’s reusable launch vehicle being developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is slated for trials in 2016 and will help reduce the cost of access to space in the long run, said ISRO Chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar.
The project was still in the experimental stage and the demonstration vehicle will have a range of 100 km, though eventually it will be like a space shuttle. The ISRO uses multi-stage rockets for satellite launch, but the reusable vehicle will be a single-stage rocket to start with. The single-stage rocket will have a solid propellant stored in casing. For a reusable vehicle, the casings have to be re-used or rebuilt and its evolution will hinge on cost benefits, said the ISRO chairman.

How much would you weigh on another star? The timescale of turbulence and vibration at a star's surface, based on its brightness variations, tells you its surface gravity. If stars had solid surfaces on which you could stand, then your weight would change from star to star. Here we show how much a 75-kg adult would tip the bathroom scale in the surface gravities of three stars. The sun is hotter than a sauna, but don't expect to lose weight there. You'd weigh 20 times more than on Earth. A red giant star (the far-future fate of our Sun, with a diameter about 35 times larger) has a much weaker pull at its surface, so you'd be 50 times lighter.

103rd version of Indian Science congress was inaugurated by Indian PM, Mr. Narendra Modi in Mysore on 3rd Jan., 2016.
On Sunday, the opening day of the 103rd Indian Science Congress on the verdant campus of Mysore University, top foreign and Indian scientists again highlighted India’s particle physics research initiatives.
After playing a key role in international research initiatives like the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN to find the Higgs Boson, India is participating in several mega initiatives — a global nuclear fusion experiment called International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO-India) and a world-class, underground India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO).

“Nearly 10 per cent of the contribution in the ITER project is from India. This will help in leapfrogging India’s nuclear fusion programme,’’ former ISRO chairman K Kasturirangan said Sunday during a talk on mega science projects being taken up by India.
The ITER project, which involves the European Union, the United States, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea apart from India, will create the world’s largest confined plasma physics experiment facility in an effort to move towards full-fledged nuclear fusion plants for power generation. The reactor is scheduled to begin basic experiments by 2020 and will produce 500 MW using nominal energy inputs, Kasturirangan said.

The Rs 1,500-crore observatory for neutrinos (a subatomic particle) is planned near Theni in Tamil Nadu.
LIGO-India is an international collaboration to study gravitational waves, which were incidentally first theorised in Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Scientists from the US, UK, Germany and Australia, under the aegis of an Indian Initiative for Gravitational Observations (IndIGO), will help Indian scientists set up and operate a world-class observatory.

Reason for frothing lake...
Phosphates in detergents is what causes frothing Bellandur lake in Bangalore.
Based on a report by researchers from Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Thursday he would consider restrictions on detergents which were considered the primary reason for the froth that has engulfed the nearly 700-acre lake.

“I will take it up with the department concerned, to check if an alternative that is environmentally friendly and cost-effective to phosphates can be used. If we can ban diclofenac (a painkiller for cattle which was found to be the reason for the mass deaths of endangered vultures), then we can surely consult and think of a better alternative,” he said at a seminar on climate change here.

The Minister was briefed about the problems of Bellandur lake, where froth started to rise alarmingly in April 2015, and within a month, a portion of froth was even seen catching fire.

A recent report by researcher T.V. Ramachandra on the pollution in the lake, submitted to the Minister, conclusively shows that the froth appeared because of higher concentration of phosphates in the lake.

Phosphates form a major component in household detergents, and make their way to the lake through the estimated 500 million litres of sewage that flows into Bellandur and Vathur lakes. Phosphates do not disintegrate, and continue to remain in the water, which ends up being used for agriculture further downstream of the lake.

The researcher had previously said that more than 70 per cent reduction in phosphates was needed to reduce eutrophication (excessive nutrients in the lake that cause dense growth of plants, including water hyacinth) in the lake. This sort of reduction has been seen in lakes of developed countries where stringent measures on phosphates were imposed to preserve waterbodies.

On May 16, 2015, Pockets of froth on the lake caught fire, which is believed to have been caused by built-up methane in the bubbles.

High phosphate regions are when the limit reaches 4.22 to 5.76 parts per million (for drinking water, less than 0.1 ppm prescribed by the WHO)

Enhanced biological oxygen demand is when 119 to 140 parts per million (should be 30 ppm or less)

Decreased dissolved oxygen is 0 to 1.06 parts per million

Excessive phosphate encourages wild growth of algae and aquatic plants which sucks up oxygen from the lake and chokes inlets. This in turn adversely affects flora and fauna of the lake.

The periodic table has been given four new elements, changing one of science’s most fundamental pieces of knowledge.

Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 will now be added to the table’s seventh row and make it complete, after they were verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry on 30 December,2015. But they are yet to receive their final names or symbols.

The new elements were discovered by team from Japan, Russia and the USA, who will all get to name their own new elements.
Read more

All of the four new admissions are man-made. The super-heavy elements are created by shoving lighter nuclei into each other and are found in the radioactive decay — which only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before they decay into other elements.

Graphene shows promise to efficiently filter nuclear waste

Membranes made from graphene can act as a sieve, separating protons from heavier nuclei of hydrogen isotope deuterium
graphene can be used to clean up nuclear waste by filtering different isotopes of hydrogen, a new study has found.

Researchers led by Andre Geim from University of Manchester in UK demonstrated that using membranes made from graphene can act as a sieve, separating protons — nuclei of hydrogen — from heavier nuclei of hydrogen isotope deuterium.

The process could mean producing heavy water for nuclear power plants could be ten times less energy intensive, simpler and cheaper using graphene.

One of the hydrogen isotopes, deuterium, is widely used in analytical and chemical tracing technologies and, also, as heavy water required in thousands of tonnes for operation of nuclear power stations.

The heaviest isotope, tritium, is radioactive and needs to be safely removed as a byproduct of electricity generation at nuclear fission plants. Future nuclear technology is based on fusion of the two heavy isotopes.
The researchers found that deuterons were not only effectively sieved out by their one atom thick membranes, but were sieved with a high separation efficiency. The discovery makes monolayers of graphene and boron nitride attractive as separation membranes to enrich mixtures of deuterium and tritium.

Furthermore, the researchers showed that the separation is fully scalable. Using chemical-vapour-deposited (CVD) graphene, they built centimetre-sized devices to effectively pump out hydrogen from a mixture of deuterium and hydrogen.
The study was published in the journal Science.

A new half-solid, half-liquid material can heal itself ...
A new half-solid, half-liquid adaptive material created by scientists in the US displays a number of amazing properties, including the ability to self-heal – stitching itself back together once divided – and self-stiffen back into its original shape after being compressed.

The material, called SAC – which stands for self-adaptive composite – is composed of a mass of sticky, micron-scale rubber balls that cling together to create a solid matrix. The composite is capable of healing itself repeatedly when cracked, and behaves kind of like a sponge, regaining its original form after being disturbed.

http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/109/12/2195.pdf

Astronomers have discovered the brightest star explosion ever, a super supernova that easily outshines our entire Milky Way. An international team revealed “the most powerful supernova observed in human history” Thursday in the latest Science journal. The astronomers used a network of telescopes around the world to spot the record-breaking supernova last year.

How can plants grow in space?

Yes, they have a problem in space...Zero Gravity!

The complication that needs to be overcome is that plants make use of gravity when planted to orient themselves (as they can't rely on being planted the right way up), so that their roots go down and their sprouts go up. Without gravity, they will tend to just stay at around the same depth and not sprout. One astronaut reported that this was simple enough to fix, however, just by plucking the ends out of the soil, pulling them to the surface, when they first sprout. From this point, the plant can orient itself using light and will continue to grow. Roots don't suffer as much, as they just grow away from the seed and avoid light (the surface), so develop relatively normally.

After this, growth is mostly normal. The resulting plants can look a little unusual because they don't have the usual drooping from gravity, so will tend to be more upright.
Crew members aboard the International Space Station have been growing  plants and vegetables for years in their "space garden." A space station study is helping investigators develop procedures and methods that allow astronauts to grow and safely eat space-grown vegetables.

Surprises in microgravity research are not unusual, though, and it turned out that overwatered traditional module sprouted and developed leaves about twice as fast.

The second surprising result was discovered when the root modules were unpacked on the ground. The new fertilizer being tested had a slower and more even release rate, which had helped lower the plants' accumulation of salts during ground studies. Investigators expected to see higher salt accumulation in the space modules, but the opposite occurred.

The current theory is that the extra water and larger plant uptake of fertilizer caused the root modules to remove nutrients faster and release fertilizer faster, thus preventing the salt accumulations that were observed in the slower-growing ground studies.

The space station's ability to provide on-the-spot adjustments to experiment conditions or opportunities to quickly repeat microgravity experiments with new conditions are a big plus for researchers.

Read more here:
Growing Plants and Vegetables in a Space Garden

Q:How can we receive digital imagery of Pluto so quickly from across the solar system?

Answer: Pluto is about 4.9 billion kilometers away from earth. The digital imagery is transmitted via wireless communication, which is based on electromagnetic radiation which travels with light speed, e.g. about 300.000 kilometers per second in the vacuum of space. Which means signals need about 4 1/2 hours to earth. It takes additional time to actually transmit all the data, but probably not too much. Five hours all in all are enough.

More than 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gas pollution since the 1970s has wound up in the oceans, and research published Monday revealed that a little more than a third of that seafaring heat has worked its way down to depths greater than 2,300 feet (700 meters).
Plunged to ocean depths by winds and currents, that trapped heat has eluded surface temperature measurements, fueling claims of a “hiatus” or “pause” in global warming from 1998 to 2013. But by expanding cool water, the deep-sea heat’s impacts have been indirectly visible in coastal regions by pushing up sea levels, contributing to worsening high-tide flooding.
The research, published in Nature Climate Change, was led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2...

Adding pollinators could boost small-farm yields
Analysis shows bees, bugs could significantly increase crop production in poor-performing farms.
Coaxing more bees, beetles and other pollinators to buzz around small fields could on average boost crop yields enough to close the gap between the worst and the best of these farms by almost a quarter, says agroecologist Lucas Alejandro Garibaldi of the National University of Río Negro and Argentina’s CONICET research network.
To see whether improving pollination could make a noticeable difference, Garibaldi and an international network of researchers carefully used the same sampling protocols to observe 344 fields on large and small farms in Africa, Asia and South America over the course of five years. Looking at 33 crops that need pollinators — raspberries, apples, coffee and so on — the researchers monitored pollinator visits and diversity as well as the ultimate yields.

The low-yielding farms on average produced only 47 percent of the yield that the best did, a notable gap. On the small operations, the sheer density of pollinators visiting crop flowers made a bigger difference in the amount of food produced, the researchers found. On larger farms, pollinator diversity mattered more: Those farms with a greater variety of pollinators produced more food.
Analyzing the way yields responded to the number of pollinators shows that improving pollination could help close the yield gap, Garibaldi and his colleagues say in the Jan. 22 Science.

When you see a bad moon rising, expect an ever-so-slightly wetter day. The lunar gravitational pull imperceptibly boosts rainfall when the moon is on the horizon and somewhat reduces rainfall when the moon is overhead or on the opposite side of the Earth, a new analysis of global rainfall concludes.

The cause is the atmospheric equivalent of ocean tides, researchers propose in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters. Air gathers on Earth’s moon-facing side and on the opposite end of the globe. Scientists noticed that this pileup increases atmospheric pressure and predicted that atmospheric tides could alter precipitation rates as well. Scouring 15 years of global precipitation data, the researchers have discovered that the effect is present, but tiny: an approximately one micrometer per hour change in rainfall rate.
The moon’s gravitational pull, which is responsible for ocean tides, also creates atmospheric tides. As more air gathers during atmospheric high tide, atmospheric pressure increases. Satellites now offer global coverage of where and when rain falls.
The data revealed that during atmospheric high tide, rising air pressure slightly increases air temperature. That temperature boost allows the air to hold more water vapor, lowering the relative humidity and making rain less likely. During low tide, pressures drop slightly, cooling the air, raising the relative humidity and making rain more likely. This effect amounts to about a hundredth that of the typical background weather variability.
Understanding the lunar influence on rainfall won’t change how we predict the weather. The effect is so small that it quickly disappears into the background noise with time.
- Science News.Org

How planet X was found...

The editors of the leading medical journals around the world made a proposal recently that could change medical science forever. They said that researchers would have to publicly share the data gathered in their clinical studies as a condition of publishing the results in the journals. This idea is now out for public comment.

As it stands now, medical scientists can publish their findings without ever making available the data upon which their conclusions were based.

Only some of the top journals, such as The BMJ, have tried to make data sharing a condition of publication. But authors who didn't want to comply could just go elsewhere.

Think about it. The scientists who generate the data, with the participation of the people being studied and often with public funding, control it and most often don't share. By holding the data tight, researchers who ran a study are the only ones who can conduct additional analysis and studies.

If the proposed change is adopted it would make sharing more compelling. Inaccessible data is a problem rife throughout medical science. Industry traditionally held its data close — but so did academics.

These researchers have felt that they deserved the right to future papers for all their hard work gathering the original data. And maybe they didn't want others examining their work.

But this practice shields data from scrutiny. It forgoes an opportunity to crowdsource knowledge from scientists who weren't associated with the original study. It also violates the sensible practice of showing your work, not just the presumed answer.
The editors who made the proposal sought to be sensitive to the rights of researchers, funders and participants. But their intent is clear: It's time to share.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/01/26/464010931/journ...

Tenacious proteins similar to those implicated in Alzheimer’s disease could help purify polluted water.

A newly designed membrane uses thin amyloid protein fibers to pull heavy metals and radioactive wastes out of water. The membranes can capture more than their own weight in some contaminants, scientists in Switzerland report January 25 in Nature Nanotechnology.
Specifically, the team converted milk proteins into fibers of durable amyloid protein. Other amyloids are infamous for building up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, but the team put their amyloids’ sticky tendrils to different use.
When paired with strong, porous carbon in a membrane, the lab-made amyloids successfully filtered over 99 percent of toxic materials out of solutions that mimicked severely polluted waters, the scientists report. The amyloids trapped particles of lead and mercury at a molecular site that is involved in turning the original milk protein into its pasty form. Radioactive waste particles also got tangled in the membranes. And the membranes snagged gold contaminants, which the team found could later be recovered and purified. A membrane with less than 6 milligrams of amyloids could trap 100 milligrams of gold, the scientists report.
The membranes could be developed for small- or large-scale water purification units, says study coauthor Raffaele Mezzenga, a physicist at ETH Zurich. Mezzenga estimates the technology would cost roughly one dollar per every thousand liters of water filtered. And a membrane can recover hundreds of times its own value in precious metals, Mezzenga says. The membrane design is simple and flexible, and could be adjusted to optimize cleanup or metal recovery, he says.
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2015.3...

A new global analysis of seafood found that fish populations throughout the world's oceans are contaminated with industrial and agricultural pollutants, collectively known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The study from researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego also uncovered some good news?concentrations of these pollutants have been consistently dropping over the last 30 years. The findings, reported in the Jan. 28, 2016 issue of the journal PeerJ, were based on an analysis by Scripps researchers Lindsay Bonito, Amro Hamdoun, and Stuart Sandin of hundreds of peer-reviewed articles from 1969-2012. The pollutants studied included older 'legacy' chemicals, such as DDT and mercury, as well as newer industrial chemicals, such as flame retardants and coolants.
Although POPs were found in fish in all of the world's oceans, the researchers say that concentrations in the consumable meat of marine fish are highly variable, where one region or group of fish may find concentrations of POPs that vary by 1,000-fold. The analysis revealed that average concentrations of each class of POP were significantly higher in the 1980s than is found today, with a drop in concentration of 15-30 percent per decade.

"This means that the typical fish that you consume today can have approximately 50 percent of the concentration of most POPs when compared to the same fish eaten by your parents at your age," said Bonito, the lead author of the study. "But there still remains a chance of getting a fillet as contaminated as what your parents ate.
The authors caution that although pollutant concentrations in marine fish are steadily declining, they still remain quite high, and that understanding the cumulative effects of numerous exposures to pollutants in seafood is necessary to determine the specific risk to consumers.
Source: University of California - San Diego
and Science news

Electrons do not orbit around an atomic nucleus like planets around a star. This outdated model of the atom (called the Bohr-Rutherford model) is still taught in schools, but only as an introduction to modern ideas about the atom.

Max Born showed us that electrons do not have a definite position, but instead exist as probability wave functions that describe how likely it is that the electron would be at a particular point in its atomic orbit. That is to say, the electron exists in a superposition of all possible locations around the atom. Werner Heisenberg discovered that it isn't until an electron is observed (detected by an instrument) that its wave function collapses and it takes on a discrete location.

So, really, electrons do not orbit around a nucleus; they exist in all possible locations around that nucleus simultaneously. Quantum mechanics!

Electrons don't orbit around atomic nucleuses like planets around a star. But that doesn't mean that they aren't moving.

The probability density for an electron is symmetric around the nucleus, so the average velocity would cancel out to zero. So let's calculate a typical speed from the square-root of the average velocity squared instead. (This is the referred to as root-mean-squared or r.m.s. for short.)

It's actually pretty easy to figure out the r.m.s. velocity for a typical electron from a few physics facts.

First, we need to the know the binding energy of the electron to the nucleus. We might as well assume it's in hydrogen, the simplest atom, so it has total binding energy of E = -13.6 eV (electron-volts):

Next, we need to know what part of the energy is kinetic (moving) instead of potential (due to the electric force holding the atom together). For closed orbits (electrons or planets), there is very handy relationship known as the Virial Theorem [1]. The Virial Theorem tells us that for particles experiencing an attractive 1/r21/r2 force like that between opposite charges, the average kinetic energy is equal to the negative of the total energy:
⟨T⟩=−E⟨T⟩=−E.

To calculate the r.m.s. velocity, we just need the non-relativistic [2] formula relating kinetic energy T and velocity v:
T=12mv2T=12mv2,
where m is the mass of the object.

Solving the above equations, we find:
vrms=−2Em−−−−√.vrms=−2Em.
Plugging in the binding energy and mass of an electron, we see that our hypothetical electron is moving at 2.2*10^6 m/s [3] or just shy of 5 million mph. Fast, but still about a factor of 100 times slower than the limit, the speed of light.

Till now we are under the impression that earthworms are highly beneficial to plants. But listen to this:  Earthworms not always beneficial, may threaten plant diversity!

A new study suggests that an abundance of earthworms in soils could lead to reductions in the number of trees and and other plant species.

Contrary to the popular belief that these creatures and beneficial to the natural ecosystem, the scarcity of these invertebrates can be a threat to certain plant species, causing adverse effects on the ecosystem.

Researchers from Canada's Université Laval and Université de Sherbrooke visited sugar maple forests in Quebec province where they found half of which were populated by earthworms.

Their analysis revealed a correlation between the number of earthworms and the abundance and diversity of certain understory species as they found that new shoots of red maple, striped maple, American beech, and two fern species became rarer as populations of these invertebrates increased.

"The most likely explanation is that the earthworms consume organic matter in forest litter," said Line Lapointe, a professor at Université Laval's faculty of science and engineering and the study's lead author.

"This results in soils that can't hold as much moisture, and that in turn interferes with seed germination and the ability of some species' plantlets to survive," she added.

Earthworms have started to change plant composition in sugar maple forests, according to the researchers.

Researchers suggest that earthworms used for bait should never be released in the forest, instead they be thrown into the lake to avoid overpopulation in the ecosystem.

The study has been published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

New evidence emerges for 'transmissible Alzheimer's' theory:
Autopsies reveal plaques in the brains of people who died after receiving grafts from cadavers.

For the second time in four months, researchers have reported autopsy results that suggest Alzheimer’s disease might occasionally be transmitted to people during certain medical treatments — although scientists say that neither set of findings is conclusive.
The latest autopsies, described in the Swiss Medical Weekly1 on 26 January, were conducted on the brains of seven people who died of the rare, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater — the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord. These grafts had been prepared from human cadavers and were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD.

But in addition to the damage caused by the prions, five of the brains displayed some of the pathological signs that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers from Switzerland and Austria report. Plaques formed from amyloid-β protein were discovered in the grey matter and blood vessels. The individuals, aged between 28 and 63, were unusually young to have developed such plaques. A set of 21 controls, who had not had surgical grafts of dura mater but died of sporadic CJD at similar ages, did not have this amyloid signature.
According to the authors, it is possible that the transplanted dura mater was contaminated with small ‘seeds’ of amyloid-β protein — which some scientists think could be a trigger for Alzheimer’s — along with the prion protein that gave the recipients CJD.
http://www.smw.ch/content/smw-2016-14287/
http://www.nature.com/news/autopsies-reveal-signs-of-alzheimer-s-in...

UK scientists just got approval to edit human embryos
Scientists in Britain just got approval to conduct research that involves editing the genetic material of healthy human embryos.

This is a big deal: The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is the first government agency in the world to endorse research that involves altering the human genome for research — a move that could signal broader acceptance for a promising (but controversial) new area of science.

The research team, led by Dr. Kathy Niakan at the UK's Francis Crick Institute, is trying to better understand which genes allow a healthy human embryo to develop. Niakan’s team will use a promising new technique, known as CRISPR/Cas9, to edit genes that are active following conception. They'll then stop the experiments at day seven and destroy the embryos (so that they can't be used to start a pregnancy).

The hope is that this gene hacking could help researchers better understand what causes miscarriages and infertility — and perhaps one day lead to better treatments for infertility.

Small ponds produce an outsized share of greenhouse gases
Tiny ponds play a disproportionately large role in global greenhouse gas emissions from inland waters, according to a new study by Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
The reason has to do with the physical makeup of very small ponds and the way they cycle carbon. Small ponds have a high perimeter-to-surface-area ratio, for example, and accumulate a higher load of terrestrial carbon -- so-called "leaf litter," sediment particles and other material. Small ponds also tend to be shallow, which means their terrestrial carbon loads are highly concentrated compared to larger lakes. Lastly, gases produced at the bottom of these ponds are able to reach the top more often than what occurs in larger lakes, due to greater water mixing and shallower waters. Because of this, CO2 and CH4 generated in sediments affects the entire pond.

That makes small ponds an important player in the carbon cycle.
The carbon cycling that happens in freshwater systems needs to be accounted for in estimates of terrestrial production. These numbers are important to quantifying the global carbon cycle and making predictions about future stocks and flows of carbon.

Although ponds less than a quarter of an acre in size make up only 8.6% of the surface area of the world's lakes and ponds, they account for 15.1% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and 40.6% of diffusive methane (CH4) emissions. The findings appear in the Feb. 1 online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Chromosomes must be accurately segregated during the production of sex cells to ensure that the next generation inherits an intact copy of the genome. However, this process is particularly error-prone in women and gets worse as they get older. Errors in chromosome segregation produce egg cells with the wrong number of chromosomes, which can lead to infertility and Down syndrome .
New eggs develop from immature egg cells (or oocytes) via meiosis: this process involves the original cell’s DNA being replicated once before it divides twice to produce four new cells, each with half the original number of chromosomes. Most errors in the number of chromosomes in human eggs come from mistakes made when the oocyte divides for the first time in a process commonly called meiosis I. Multiple factors can contribute to these errors, but it is not clear which are most significant in human oocytes.
Human oocytes start with 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes, which are split during the anaphase stage of meiosis I so that the egg contains one from each pair. There are two main requirements that must be met during meiosis I. First, each pair of homologous chromosomes must be physically connected to form a “bivalent”. Second, the two sister kinetochores on each chromosome must be functionally fused together so that both sisters connect to the same spindle pole. These two requirements are both compromised in human oocytes. This provides a plausible mechanism to explain the errors often seen in meiosis I in women.
-elifesciences.org

http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e13788?utm_source=content_alert&...

Occupational exposure to textile dust increases the risk of rheumatoid arthritis: results from a Malaysian population-based case–control study
Lung exposures including cigarette smoking and silica exposure are associated with the risk of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Now scientists say association between textile dust exposure and the risk of RA in the Malaysian population is real whose correctness has been established with a focus on women who rarely smoke.
Results of the study: Occupational exposure to textile dust was significantly associated with an increased risk of developing RA in the Malaysian female population (OR 2.8, 95% CI 1.6 to 5.2). The association between occupational exposure to textile dust and risk of RA was uniformly observed for the ACPA-positive RA (OR 2.5, 95% CI 1.3 to 4.8) and ACPA-negative RA (OR 3.5, 95% CI 1.7 to 7.0) subsets, respectively. We observed a significant interaction between exposure to occupational textile dust and HLA-DRB1 SE alleles regarding the risk of ACPA-positive RA (OR for double exposed: 39.1, 95% CI 5.1 to 297.5; AP: 0.8, 95% CI 0.5 to 1.2).

Conclusions of the study: This is the first study demonstrating that textile dust exposure is associated with an increased risk for RA. In addition, a gene–environment interaction between HLA-DRB1 SE and textile dust exposure provides a high risk for ACPA-positive RA.
http://ard.bmj.com/content/early/2015/11/08/annrheumdis-2015-208278...

Ocean acidification and warming could affect the culturing of pearls
Pearl aquaculture is big business, particularly in Asia and Australia. But much of it takes place in oceans, which are susceptible to the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide human activity releases into the atmosphere. CO2 from the air gets absorbed by the oceans, which become more acidic as a result. Research has found that pearl oysters produce weaker shells under these conditions, and this could hurt their chances of survival. But in addition to acidity, rising water temperature could also play a role in oyster health.
- Environmental Science & Technology

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-ocean-acidification-affect-culturing-p...

Model of Sun's magnetic field:

Mothers who are obese during pregnancy have almost twice the odds of having a child with autism as women who weigh less, a U.S. study suggests.
When women are both obese and have diabetes, the autism risk for their child is at least quadrupled, researchers reported online January 29 in Pediatrics.

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An interesting observation about common people's grasp of the words "Antibiotic Resistance".
Researchers found that most people, if they had heard of antibiotic resistance at all, thought that it was their body which becomes resistant to antibiotics, rather than the bacteria that cause drug-resistant infections. This misconception often makes people feel like antibiotic resistance is someone else's problem!

The misconception could help to explain why many people who are prescribed antibiotics fail to complete the course, believing that this will prevent their bodies from becoming resistant!!

So experts are recommending that  “doctors, the media and other communicators talk about ‘drug-resistant infections’ or ‘antibiotic-resistant germs’, rather than ‘antibiotic resistance’. This makes it easier to understand that it is bacteria that acquire resistance, not people's bodies".

A multi-disciplinary group of researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) have for the first time determined the genetic makeup of various strains of E. coli, which every year kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
The researchers analyzed the genetic differences between the strains and mapped them onto disease outcome. Then, they divided the strains into categories, based on genetic content and clinical outcome.
The paper, which appears in a recent issue of Nature Microbiology, analyzed the DNA of Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC), which are the strains of the bacteria that cause diarrhea.

The scientists, led by David Rasko, PhD, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at UM SOM and Michael Donnenberg, MD, Professor of Medicine at UM SOM, identified certain strains that are typically much more lethal than others. The results will help researchers focus efforts to identify, treat and potentially control these more dangerous versions. This could lead to a better understanding of exactly how the bacteria causes damage, and eventually, more effective treatments that could significantly lower the death rate for diarrheal diseases, which are a leading cause of child mortality around the world. It is also is a leading cause of malnutrition in children under five years old.

Eating fortified rice increases the risk of hookworm infections, if you don't practice good hygiene and don't provide clean sanitary conditions for children, a study in Cambodian schoolchildren shows, suggesting that the rice’s added nutrients inadvertently help parasites grow.

The study’s authors warn that the overall health benefits of fortified rice should be weighed against possible health risks.

The researchers analysed faecal samples from about 2,000 children at 16 primary schools that participate in a UN World Food Programme initiative that provides daily meals to schoolchildren. The schools were randomly split into four groups: children in one group ate plain, ‘placebo’ rice, while the other groups received three different types of rice fortified with micronutrients including iron, zinc, folate and different vitamins.
“There is absolutely an important role to play for fortified rice, but it should be tailor-made to the local situation.”

Frank Wieringa, French Research Institute for Development

After three and seven months, the researchers measured levels of intestinal parasite infections. “Micronutrient-fortified rice significantly increased risk of new hookworm infection,” the team writes in a paper published in PLOS One last month (6 January).

The paper rightly emphasises the need for improved hygiene and sanitation “for nutritional intervention to be effective and produce desirable nutritional and health benefits."
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.01...

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&...

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

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.

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

Gravitational Waves:

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/

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

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.

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

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