A Crossover Study of Noodle Soup Consumption in Melamine Bowls and Total Melamine Excretion in Urine
People who used melamine-made bowls to consume high-temperature noodle soup can excrete high amounts of melamine into the urine.

Melamine exposure remains common even after the 2008 melamine-tainted baby formula incident in China, which resulted in 6 deaths and approximately 50 000 hospitalizations. A continuous low-dose melamine exposure has been linked to urolithiasis in both children and adults. Another source of melamine exposure is melamine tableware.4 In a pilot study, researchers in China asked 16 healthy volunteers (age range, 20-27 years) to consume 500 mL of hot noodle soup (initial temperature, 90°C) served in melamine bowls in the morning of October 2011. then they collected from each participant 1 spot urine sample immediately before and at 2-hour intervals for 12 hours after consuming the noodle soup. This experiment simulated the natural situation; thus, not all participants provided urine samples at every 2-hour interval. However, all urine samples from all participants were collected after consumption for 12 hours. Postconsumption mean urinary melamine concentrations, corrected for urinary creatinine, initially increased sharply, peaked at 4 to 6 hours, and then declined sharply for 2 hours and then less steeply for the remainder of the monitoring period. The researchers therefore investigated if consumption of hot noodle soup served in melamine bowls would increase total urinary melamine excretion.
Melamine tableware may release large amounts of melamine when used to serve high-temperature foods. The brand of melamine bowls used in this study was chosen from the 5 brands we tested previously.4 The amount of melamine released into food and beverages from melamine tableware varies by brand, so the results of this study of 1 brand may not be generalized to other brands. The use of nonbreakable melamine tableware is common in our daily life. Although the clinical significance of what levels of urinary melamine concentration has not yet been established, the consequences of long-term melamine exposure still should be of concern.
Chronic Exposure To Melamine Through Tableware A simple switch from melamine-containing tableware to stainless steel ones can help reduce environmental exposure to melamine.
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1558449
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b01965

Smart windows that can block heat but allow sunlight!

Yes, you heard it right! By using this material in "smart windows", you could reduce home energy use by taking full advantage of both the heat and the visible light provided by the sun each day. Researchers have developed a material that can do just that.

The material is a type of dual-band electrochromic material. "Dual-band" refers to the two types of nanocrystals contained within the material itself. In this case, the first nanocrystal allows you to block visible light while the second targets heat-producing infrared light. "Electrochromic" means that you can flip between light- and heat-blocking modes using a jolt of electricity.

This material was first described by researchers, including University of Texas Chemical Engineering Prof. Delia Milliron, in an article in Nature in 2013. This month, Milliron and her team published a new article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, which explores how an advanced version of this material could be built into a film for use on windows.

According to this paper, a window coating containing a single component ­— doped titania nanocrystals - can selectively block visible light or infrared radiation. It can also switch from heat- to light-blocking mode using a weak jolt of electricity in a matter of minutes (previous versions of the material could take hours to switch). All told, this material can block up to 80% of visible light or 90% of near-infrared light.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7462/full/nature12398.html

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.5b04933?journalCode=jacsat

Researchers led by Ian Mitchell, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham in England, conducted a meta-analysis, which reveals that both oxytocin and alcohol reduce fear, anxiety and stress while increasing trust, generosity and altruism. Yet both also increase aggression, risk taking and “in-group” bias—favoring people similar to ourselves at the expense of others, according to the paper published in August in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
The scientists posit that these similarities probably exist because oxytocin and alcohol act at different points in the same chemical pathway in the brain. Oxytocin stimulates release of the neurotransmitter GABA, which tends to reduce neural activity. Alcohol binds to GABA receptors and ramps up GABA activity. Oxytocin and alcohol therefore both have the general effect of tamping down brain activity—perhaps explaining why they both lower inhibitions.

Clinical trials have uncovered further interplay between the two in demonstrating that a nasal spray of oxytocin reduces cravings and withdrawal symptoms in alcoholics. These findings inspired a new study, published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, which suggests oxytocin and alcohol do more than just participate in the same neural pathway: they may physically interact.

A natural cooking oil additive, invented by Malaysian scientists and claimed to make palm oil healthier, is not all itclaims to be, other researchers say.

The additive is an extract derived from plants of the citrus family, and has been developed and patented by researchers at the Institute of Bioscience at the University Putra Malaysia. It is sold under the commercial name Afdhal, and is marketed as a way of reducing oil consumption.

“A better solution would be to find ways to reduce the consumption of fried foods, rather than re-use oil and maintain or increase consumption of fried foods.”
But other scientists say they are sceptical about the product’s properties without seeing the data.
The claims detailed in the product’s patent application are not based on sound scientific research, says Ibrahim, who is also a researcher in medicinal and natural products chemistry at University Kebangsaan Malaysia. “In fact it mentioned that the actual mechanism oil of adsorption by the product was not fully understood,” he says.
Reusing oil is not the solution to protect human health or the environment, says Bronwen Powell, a researcher in forests and food security at the Centre for International Forestry Research in Indonesia.
“A better solution,” she says, “would be to find ways to reduce the consumption of fried foods, rather than re-use oil and maintain or increase consumption of fried foods”.

The studies that back up the claims about Afdhal have not been published in peer-reviewed publications, however. This is in order to keep the information about the plant’s extracts secret, says one of its inventors, Suhaila Mohamed, a research fellow at the Institute of Bioscience.
Reusing oil is not the solution to protect human health or the environment, says Bronwen Powell, a researcher in forests and food security at the Centre for International Forestry Research in Indonesia. “A better solution,” she says, “would be to find ways to reduce the consumption of fried foods, rather than re-use oil and maintain or increase consumption of fried foods”.
-scidev.net

Egyptian method filters seawater in minutes
The technology is based on salt-attracting membranes and vaporising heat

The membranes are made of cellulose acetate powder which is cheap to make

Even remote communities could use the technique – with just membranes and fire
http://www.scidev.net/global/water/news/egyptian-filters-seawater-e...

You see a person on the road and wonder why he or she resembles your friend even though the person doesn't have any close relationship with the latter.

The word doppelgänger is often used in a more general sense to describe any person who physically or behaviorally resembles another person.

According to scientists the concept of having an unrelated identical twin is less a cool mysterious gift this beautiful world gives us and more a boring genetic math probability game.

The idea behind this theory was posed by Michael Sheehan, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, and explained in an interview with LiveScience.

Sheehan says although there are large amounts of aesthetic variables our genetic makeups can churn out, at the end of the day there are only a finite amount of possibilities.

This means while there are billions of ways we can all look different, there are only just that: billions of ways we can look different.

Sheehan told LiveScience,

There is only so much genetic diversity to go around… If you shuffle that deck of cards so many times, at some point, you get the same hand dealt to you twice.

More bluntly, Sheehan believes there is a high probability of people in this world having doppelgängers because there are only so many ways faces can be structured.

Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, told LiveScience because how we look is decided based off of our genetic makeups, doppelgängers could actually be distant relatives, whether the pairs know it or not.

http://www.livescience.com/52103-does-everyone-have-a-look-alike.html

New hominid species discovered in South Africa
Researchers have discovered a brand new species of human ancestor buried deep inside a South African cave system. The fossils uncovered included 15 partial skeletons, making it the biggest single discovery of its kind in Africa.

But what's most exciting is that this new ancestor, named Homo naledi, may have been one of the first members of our genus, and may change our understanding of human evolution forever. The mass discovery also suggests that the species may have been ritualistic - a trait thought to be unique to humans ( I think, this is a controversial statement without evidence - Krishna).
H. naledi could have lived in Africa up to 3 million years ago ( yet to be confirmed).

The species walked upright at a height of around 150 centimetres.
Despite their height, they also had a tiny brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee's, with a volume of around 450 to 550 cubic centimetres.
The skeletons suggest that H. naledi wasn't carrying much body weight, with researchers estimating an average weight of around 45 kg. Their bodies also appear to have been built to walk long distances.
H. naledi had small, modern-looking teeth and feet similar to humans, but more primitive fingers.
It's believed ( but there is no evidence) the bodies of these individuals were buried in the chamber intentionally, possibly as some type of burial ritual. No evidence of that kind of behaviour has been seen in such a primitive human ancestor before.
The fossils exhibit a combination of primitive features that bring to mind our ancient australopithecine predecessors (including Lucy and her ilk) and features that are associated with Homo. For instance, the pelvis has a flared shape like that seen in Australopithecus, whereas the leg and foot resemble those of Homo sapiens. Likewise, the skull combines a small braincase with a cranium that is otherwise built like that of early Homo. The teeth, meanwhile, are small like those of modern humans, yet the third molar is larger than the other molars—a pattern associated with australopithecines. And the upper limb pairs an Australopithecus-like shoulder and fingers with a Homo-like wrist and palm. Standing about 1.5 meters tall, with a small brain, clever hands and a body built for upright-walking as well as climbing, this creature possessed a unique mosaic of traits that Berger and his co-authors think reveals a new species of human. Given the many Homo-like traits evident in the bones—particularly in those regions that contact the environment (namely, feet, hands and teeth)—the team put the creature in the genus Homo, rather than Australopithecus, calling it H. naledi.

The fossils were discovered inside the Rising Star cave system, 48 km northwest of Johannesburg. They were named after the Dinaledi chamber where they were found.
Currently the researchers believe that H. naledi may sit between Homo habilis and Homo erectus on the family tree.
The species could be thought of as a "bridge" between primates and modern humans.
http://elifesciences.org/content/4/e09560

More than three million people around the world die prematurely because of air pollution, scientists have estimated.

Most of the deaths occur in Asia, where large numbers of people in countries such as India and China use highly polluting methods of heating and cooking in their homes.

In the US, traffic pollution made the biggest contribution to global death rates while in Europe, Russia and eastern Asia, agricultural sources had the greatest impact.

Outdoor air pollution includes ozone, a toxic form of oxygen, and tiny sooty particles that lodge in the lungs.

The study, published in the journal Nature, was conducted by combining a global atmospheric chemistry model with population data and health statistics.

Scientists predict that premature mortality from air pollution could double by 2050 with a death toll of 6.6 million lives per year.

Relationship between nitrates in Beetroot and muscle power

Funny side of science: Ig Nobel Prizes.
A 17th century Moroccan sultan had 888 children in 30 years.

All mammals take about 21 seconds to urinate, give or take 13 seconds.

When you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, it walks like dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

Scientists actually studied this stuff.

Seriously.

And they got tongue in cheek awards for their efforts Thursday night at Harvard University.

They are known as the "Anti-Nobel" awards and are also called the Ig Nobel Prizes.

They are for "achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK," the ceremony`s slogan says.

For instance, the physics award went to the three Georgia Tech University scientists who concluded that all mammals take about the same time to relieve themselves.

The award: a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill. It is worth a few cents. In Zimbabwe, inflation is rampant.

The winner of the group received the award from an actual Nobel winner, the 2007 economics laureate, American Eric Maskin.

In mathematics, the committee chose two Austrians who used statistical analysis to study whether -- as legend claims -- Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed during the years from 1697 through 1727 to father 888 children.

With four wives and a harem of 500 other women the answer was yes, the researchers concluded.

On other areas, aside from research, the committee gave an economics award to police in Bangkok for offering to pay policemen extra cash if they refuse to take bribes.

'Tree of life' encompassing all of life created
Tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, scientists have created the first "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes.

Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been built over the years for select branches of the tree of life--some containing upwards of 100,000 species--but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life, the study said.

A collaborative effort among 11 institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time.

Understanding how the millions of species on Earth are related to one another helps scientists discover new drugs, increase crop and livestock yields, and trace the origins and spread of infectious diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Ebola and influenza.
Rather than build the tree of life from scratch, the researchers pieced it together by compiling thousands of smaller chunks that had already been published online and merging them into a gigantic "supertree" that encompasses all named species.
"Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life," study first author Cody Hinchliff from University of Idaho in the US.

Combining the 484 trees was a painstaking process that took three years to complete, Stephen Smith, assistant professor at University of Michigan in the US, pointed out.

The end result is a digital resource that is available free online for anyone to use or edit, much like a "Wikipedia" for evolutionary trees.

The findings were published on 18th Sept., 2015 in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A newly invented and ultra-cheap water cleaning process is looks promising.

Developed by a team of researchers at Alexandria University in Egypt, the procedure uses a desalination technique called pervaporation to remove the salt from sea water and make it drinkable. Specially made synthetic membranes are used to filter out large salt particles and impurities so they can be evaporated away, and then the rest is heated up, vapourised, and condensed back into clean water.
Crucially, the membranes can be made in any lab using cheap materials that are available locally, and the vaporisation part of the process doesn't require any electricity. This means the new method is both inexpensive and suitable for areas without a regular power supply - both factors that are very important for developing countries.

The technique not only desalinates the seawater, it's capable of removing sewage and dirt from it too. The researchers combined expertise in oceanography, chemical engineering, agricultural engineering and biosystems engineering to come up with the solution, and their work has now been published in the journal Water Science and Technology.
The technology implemented in the study is much better than reverse osmosis, the technology currently used in Egypt and most of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Unfortunately for those who are waiting for this type of technology, a lot of work is required before it can be put into action: the academics working on the project have to set up a pilot test that proves their theories correct on a large scale. There's also the issue of how to deal with the waste produced from the process.

What's certain is that a new procedure like this could have a huge impact on the lives of millions of people - according to Water.org

Quantum teleportation over 100  km of fiber using highly efficient superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors
Quantum teleportation is an essential quantum operation by which we can transfer an unknown quantum state to a remote location with the help of quantum entanglement and classical communication. Since the first experimental demonstrations using photonic qubits and continuous variables, the distance of photonic quantum teleportation over free-space channels has continued to increase and has reached >100  km. On the other hand, quantum teleportation over optical fiber has been challenging, mainly because the multifold photon detection that inevitably accompanies quantum teleportation experiments has been very inefficient due to the relatively low detection efficiencies of typical telecom-band single-photon detectors. Here, we report on quantum teleportation over optical fiber using four high-detection-efficiency superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs). These SNSPDs make it possible to perform highly efficient multifold photon measurements, allowing us to confirm that the quantum states of input photons were successfully teleported over 100 km of fiber with an average fidelity of 83.7±2.0%.
https://www.osapublishing.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-2-10-832

Washing your hands with antibacterial soap containing triclosan – the most common microbe-killing ingredient used in these soaps – may be no better than ordinary plain soap, according to South Korean researchers. This confirms previous studies which have reached similar conclusions and could help settle the controversy of triclosan use.
Triclosan is widely known for its antimicrobial properties, and was first introduced in hospital scrub soap in the 1970s. Currently, 0.3% triclosan is the maximum amount permitted in consumer soaps in most countries and several studies under lab conditions have shown that soaps containing this amount tend to be no more effective at killing bacteria on hands than plain soap.

Furthermore, triclosan remains controversial with reports of various adverse effects, including allergies and carcinogenic impurities.

Min-Suk Rhee and colleagues at Korea University, Seoul, say they have found compelling evidence that triclosan-containing soap is no better than plain soap. They believe their study is more accurate than previous work because they only used one variable – the presence or absence of 0.3% triclosan – and fixed all of the other factors which can affect the results.

The team exposed 20 bacterial strains to plain and triclosan-containing soaps for 20s at room temperature and then slightly warmer temperatures – conditions that were chosen to simulate home hand washing. They also contaminated the hands of volunteers with Serratia marcescens bacteria to test how well each soap removed bacteria.

The results revealed there was no significant difference in bactericidal activity between plain soap and antibacterial soap at either test temperature, although after 9 hours the soap containing triclosan showed significantly greater bactericidal effects.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/09/antibacterial-soap-triclo...

Why a simple definition of species is hard to come by.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150924-species-definition-video/?u...

Reasons some scientists gave why most of the scientists and innovators are professors:
Self-education: You learn the most by explaining to others. I know more about MOS-transistors after teaching a class on MOS transistors last semester than I ever did by taking three classes taught by three different teachers on this subject during my graduate and undergraduate studies.
Cheap-labor: in form of graduate students. In a research lab setting, it is really hard to find collaborators, but who needs collaborators when you can have really smart people working for you for practically free?
Control on information: How many scientists do you know who work at Microsoft Research or IBM Research? Even if you know them, these companies keep most of their research secret, so you probably don't know about their work. But, professors have complete control over how much information they want to release to public.
Recognition: One has to be a really great scientist to be known. But, professors get recognition quite easily through teaching so many students and open nature of universities.
Posterity: A professor's Ph.D. students keep his name and field alive even after he retires or dies.
Opportunity to pursue long-term research: academic setting provides the opportunity to conduct focused research, which may not have an immediate payoff, but will have great long-term impact. Most "real" breakthroughs are made after long term research - over several years, or even decades. With very few notable exceptions, industry is currently focused on short term research which has immediate payoff. Enterprises like Bell Labs that reported fundamental research have collapsed. Majority of companies are interested only in incrementally modifying ideas and algorithms that already exist. On the contrary, academicians focus on knowledge creation that produces a ripple effect - eventually creating value for all stakeholders.
Encapsulation from economics risk: In academia, you can work on ideas that may have a small chance of working, but if they do, they will produce a huge impact. In other words, academia is more forgiving in allowing your projects to fail. One can keep trying new ideas over and over again - attacking the problem with multiple strategies until success is achieved! If you work in a commercially driven enterprise, you may be fired if you are not able to produce something viable over a short time. This is expected - a manager is unlikely to fund your work on a project that has a small chance to workout, or will bring revenue after a hiatus of a decade! On the other hand, several examples exist where academic scientists have focused on a single important problem for decades, solved it successfully and were then awarded a Nobel prize (or at least found immense intellectual satisfaction). I must mention, however, that these days funding for academic research is getting scarce, which is discouraging scientists from thinking big.

But I think complete independence is the right answer if this assumption  is really true!- Krishna

Children who acquire four kinds of gut bacteria in the first three months of their lives can be protected from developing asthma, according to new research.

The four bacteria, called FLVR (Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella, and Rothia), are naturally acquired by most babies through exposure in their home surroundings. However, some infants miss out, and it’s those children who are at most risk of developing asthma, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada.
This research supports the hygiene hypothesis that we’re making our environment too clean. It shows that gut bacteria play a role in asthma, but it is early in life when the baby’s immune system is being established.
The researchers looked at faecal samples from 319 children who took part in the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development Study. The samples revealed that the three-month-old infants at high risk of developing asthma – determined by allergy tests to see if the children demonstrated wheezing – had lower amounts of FLVR bacteria than the kids who didn’t show such signs of developing the disease.

The researchers also found that by one year of age, the differences in gut bacteria between the high-risk and low-risk children had significantly lessened, suggesting that early exposure to FLVR bacteria in those first three months of life could be crucial in warding off asthma later on. The study emphasises that in that first 100 days the structure of the gut microbiome seems to be very important in influencing the immune responses that cause or protect us from asthma.
" Early infancy microbial and metabolic alterations affect risk of childhood asthma"
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/7/307/307ra152

http://allergen-nce.ca/research/strategy/child/

Good News: India Pledges to Curb Greenhouse Gas Growth
India has pledged to slash its emissions intensity relative to economic growth and make a massive push on clean energy by 2030 as part of its formal submission to the United Nations ahead of landmark global warming negotiations in Paris.

India’s vow to unconditionally cut emissions intensity 33 to 35 percent below 2005 levels and boost the share of non-fossil-fuel energy sources more than threefold as long as it receives assistance from Western countries was widely praised by the environmental community.

Jennifer Doudna, who invented a gene-editing tool that has taken the research world by storm, was named one of five laureates of the 2016 L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards in the field of life sciences.
The awards, given annually to one female scientist from each of five continents, were announced Oct. 2 in Paris by the L’Oréal Foundation and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, which partner on the award.
Doudna and the other laureates will be honored at a ceremony on March 24, 2016, at the Sorbonne University’s Grand Amphitheatre in Paris. Each laureate will receive €100,000.

Doudna, the laureate from North America, is joined by European laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier. Doudna and Charpentier together discovered a unique technique used by bacteria to cut and kill viral DNA, and reengineered this system to cut any type of DNA, including human. First reported in 2012, the technology is being used worldwide to create potential genetic therapies for inherited disease, and in basic research to discover the causes of disease.
In the 18 years since the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards were founded, 92 women have been recognized and two have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, including Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for work conducted at UC Berkeley.
http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/10/02/doudna-receives-women-in-scienc...

A diet high in processed fructose sabotages rats’ brains’ ability to heal after head trauma, UCLA neuroscientists report. Revealing a link between nutrition and brain health, the finding offers implications for the 5.3 million Americans living with a traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
Americans consume most of their fructose from processed foods sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. The researchers found that processed fructose inflicts surprisingly harmful effects on the brain’s ability to repair itself after a head trauma.

Fructose also occurs naturally in fruit, which contains antioxidants, fiber and other nutrients that prevent the same damage.
The UCLA team found that fructose altered a wealth of biological processes in the animals’ brains after trauma. The sweetener interfered with the ability of neurons to communicate with each other, rewire connections after injury, record memories and produce enough energy to fuel basic functions. The findings suggest that fructose disrupts plasticity — the creation of fresh pathways between brain cells that occurs when we learn or experience something new.
Earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in contributing to cancer, diabetes, obesity and fatty liver.
Sources of fructose in the western diet include honey, cane sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid sweetener. Made from cornstarch, the liquid syrup is widely added as a sweetener and preservative to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments, applesauce and baby food.
source: University of California Los Angeles

In the UCLA study, is published on 2nd Oct., 2015, in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.

Medicine Nobel 2015 prizes were given to William Campbell (Ireland), Satoshi Omura (Japan) and  Youyou Tu (China) for their discoveries of treatments against parasites.

In the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was given to Youyou Tu, who consulted traditional texts on herbs to help isolate and purify the malaria drug artemisinin. The medication saves some 100,000 lives each year in Africa as well as restoring the health of countless others around the world. The other half of the Nobel prize was awarded to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura for their discovery of Avermectin, whose many derivatives were first used as veterinary treatments before being developed into a drug that has stopped the spread of river blindness in many parts of western Africa.

--

Discoverers of Shape-Shifting Particles Win the Nobel Physics Prize

Malaria in pregnancy linked to brain damage in babies
Babies whose mothers contract malaria during pregnancy could suffer later problems, including depression and learning difficulties, according to a study done in mice.

The study found that unborn babies whose mothers were infected with malaria had lower levels of the substances needed for normal brain development and function. It was published in the journal PLOS Pathogens last week (24 September). This still has to be confirmed in human beings.

These neurocognitive impairments were associated with decreased tissue levels of neurotransmitters in regions of the brain linked to the observed deficits. Disruption of maternal C5a complement receptor signaling restored the levels of neurotransmitters and rescued the associated cognitive phenotype observed in malaria-exposed offspring.
The reduction was thought to be caused by excess activation of an immune response in the mother that is used to tackle malaria, but that also appears to interfere with the production of these substances, the researchers say.

As a result of their mothers’ malaria infection, the mice developed symptoms of depression and cognitive impairment after birth, such as memory problems and reduced social interaction, the study says.
The research was carried out to investigate how malaria might affect unborn children. This is particularly important as pregnant women have a higher risk than other women of being infected with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and of developing a severe form of the infection. This is because pregnancy reduces their immunity to malaria.
The research team also tried to stop malaria from harming unborn baby mice by blocking the immune response that had become excessively activated. This restored the key brain substances to their normal levels, so the baby mice no longer developed symptoms of depression and mental impairments after birth.

This treatment would be too expensive to roll out on a large scale in humans.
http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.p...

DNA Repair Methods gets 2015 Chemistry Nobel Prize

Three scientists who found ways that cells fix damaged DNA—staving off cancer and other diseases—have won this year's prize
The coveted prize has gone to Tomas Lindahl from the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in Hertfordshire, England; Paul Modrich from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina in the United States; and Aziz Sancar from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, also in the U.S.
All the researchers, working independently over the last 40 years, described three different mechanisms that create errors in DNA—the molecule that controls cell behavior—and the different ways that chemical and biological processes fix many of these problems.

All forms of cancer start with DNA damage. If you do not have DNA repair, we would have a lot more cancer. That’s how important this is.
The understanding that we have of these mechanisms help us design drugs to repair all sorts of DNA errors. There are also several genetic diseases caused by the inability of cells to fix DNA properly, for instance, and work on the repair methods aids understanding of these ailments and how to treat them.
Scientists used to believe that DNA molecules were extremely stable. After all, they had to reliably transmit genetic information from generation down to generation. Then in the 1970s Lindahl demonstrated that the neat double helix and its components constantly decays. Every day, hundreds of those components, the DNA building block chemicals abbreviated as A, T, C, and G, get knocked out of their places. If the process continued unabated, the development of life on Earth would have been impossible. This insight led Lindahl to discover a series of enzymes and reactions, called base excision repair, which constantly works to fight this decay. The C building block, for instance, is repeatedly broken down into another molecule that should not be in DNA. The enzymes Lindahl found identify that broken molecule and rebuild it into a C.

Sancar found that cells use another technique to repair damage to DNA caused by ultraviolet light, the same thing that gives you a sunburn. This DNA fix is called nucleotide excision repair. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. Excision enzymes cut out the DNA lesions. The cell also uses this repair system to correct DNA damage people get after they are born, when they encounter mutagenic substances.

Finally, Modrich found out how a cell corrects errors that occur during a vital biological process: Cell division, when DNA is replicated. This copying process is supposed to produce identical strands of DNA but often there are stretches of the new stand that do not match up. The set of cellular chemicals that Modrich found, a complex called mismatch repair, scans the strands and fixes them, reducing the error frequency during replication by about a thousand times during each replication cycle.

Without all of these repair mechanisms, we would not be long-lived.

This year’s prize is about the cell’s toolbox for repairing DNA.

Researchers modify more than 60 genes with gene editing techniques in an effort to enable organ transplants from pigs into humans.
A steady supply of human organs for transplantation by growing them in pigs is what scientists always wanted to do. But concerns about rejection by the human immune system and infection by viruses embedded in the pig genome have put breaks on this research. Bymodifying more than 60 genes from pig embryos—ten times more than have been edited in any other animal—researchers believe they may have produced a suitable non-human organ donor now.
The work was presented on 5 October at a meeting of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington DC on human gene editing. Geneticist George Church of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, announced that he and colleagues had used the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to inactivate 62 porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) in pig embryos. These viruses are embedded in all pigs’ genomes and cannot be treated or neutralized. It is feared that they could cause disease in human transplant recipients.
Church’s group also modified more than 20 genes in a separate set of pig embryos, including genes that encode proteins that sit on the surface of pig cells and are known to trigger a human immune response or cause blood clotting. Church declined to reveal the exact genes, however, because the work is as yet unpublished. Eventually, pigs intended for organ transplants would need both these modifications and the PERV deletions.
Cutting multiple genes will also be useful for human therapies because many diseases with a genetic component involve more than one gene.
http://www.nature.com/news/gene-editing-record-smashed-in-pigs-1.18525

Do you know that elephants rarely get cancer? And science may have found a part of the answer to this question 'why'!

According to a pair of papers independently published this week. Elephants have 20 copies of a gene called p53 (or, more properly, TP53), in their genome, where humans and other mammals have only one. The gene is known as a tumour suppressor, and it snaps to action when cells suffer DNA damage, churning out copies of its associated p53 protein and either repairing the damage or killing off the cell.

Joshua Schiffman, a paediatric oncologist and scientist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, first heard about Peto’s paradox three years ago at an evolution conference, when Carlo Maley, an evolutionary biologist now at Arizona State University in Tempe, revealed he had found multiple copies of TP53 in the African elephant's genome.

The researchers found that elephants produce extra copies of the p53 protein, and that elephant blood cells seem exquisitely sensitive to DNA damage from ionizing radiation. The animals' cells carry out a controlled self-destruction called apoptosis in response to DNA damage at much higher rates than do human cells. Schiffman suggests that, instead of repairing the DNA damage, compromised elephant cells have evolved to kill themselves to nip nascent tumours in the bud. “This is a brilliant solution to Peto’s paradox,” he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/how-elephants-avoid-cancer-1.18534

Schiffman and Lynch’s teams have now independently revealed their findings — Schiffman's in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Lynch's in a paper posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint site, but which is in review at the journal eLife.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Deep-sea bacteria could help neutralize greenhouse gas