Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) founder-director P M Bhargava on Wednesday became the first Indian scientist to join the bandwagon of writers and filmmakers returning their awards when he told TOI that he will return his Padma Bhushan to protest against "the government's attack on rationalism, reasoning and science".

Bhargava's decision came hours after 107 senior scientists signed an online statement on Wednesday to join the chorus of protests by other scientists, artists and writers.

"The Padma Bhushan had a special place in my collection of more than 100 awards for science. Now I feel no sentimental attachment to it when the government tries to institutionalise religion and curtail freedom and scientific spirit," said Bhargava, who received the Padma award in 1986. He said it was a personal decision and that he had no idea if other scientists would return their awards.

The Indian Constitution in Article 51 A (h) demands ... that we develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing instead is the active promotion of irrational and sectarian thought.

Declaring solidarity with writers who returned their Sahitya Akademi awards, the statement said, "We scientists now join our voices to theirs, to assert that the Indian people will not accept such attacks on reason, science and our plural culture."We appeal to all other sections of society to raise their voice against the assault on reason and scientific temper we are witnessing in India today. The scientists have not sent their statement to any government agency or minister. Rather, they want the government to take note of their protest after reading what the scientist community feels about the state of affairs. Many of the scientists, who are working in the government institutions, including the Delhi-based Indian National Science Academy (INSA), have similar views.

"We are very much with the fellow scientists who have raised the issue of growing intolerance," said a senior scientist of the INSA .

-Times of India

All our fears are coming true! Yes, now we hear about Plastic Contamination of Table Salt in China. Supermarket products have tiny plastic particles, probably from ocean pollution attached to sea salt.

People in China who season their meals with sea salt may be unwittingly consuming microscopic pieces of plastic pollution.

When researchers analyzed fifteen brands of common table salt bought at supermarkets across China, they found among the grains of seasoning micro-sized particles of the common water bottle plastic polyethylene terephthalate, as well as polyethylene, cellophane, and a wide variety of other plastics (Env. Sci.& Tech. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5b03163).

The highest level of plastic contamination was found in salt sourced from the ocean: The researchers measured more than 1,200 particles of plastic per lb of sea salt. The team, led by Huahong Shi of East China Normal University also found tiny particles of plastic in salt sourced from briny lakes, briny wells, and salt mines, although at lower levels—between 15 and 800 particles/ lb.

Shi and colleagues argue that plastic contamination originates from the vast amount of plastic pollution floating around marine environments where sea salt is sourced. For instance, bits of plastics might abrade from larger objects, such as water bottles, dumped in the water or they might come from cosmetic products, such as face washes, that use plastic microbeads as exfoliants. The researchers add that other points of entry for plastic contamination are also possible, including during salt processing, drying, and packaging.

Given that manufacturers typically extract sea salt from ocean water by evaporation—a process that leaves everything behind but water—microplastic contamination of sea salt is likely prevalent outside China as well.

Feeling Scary? Then stop using plastic and products made from it as much as possible.

A new study from scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) helps explain why cancer metastasis is so hard to stop. The researchers found an additional mechanism explaining how a molecule long linked to cancer progression appears to “seed” the body with metastatic cells long before doctors would typically detect a primary tumor. The molecule, known as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), encourages blood vessel growth early in tumor development—not only feeding the primary tumor, but also providing vehicles for cancer to escape the primary tumor site and travel throughout the body.

“When cancer cells have high levels of EGFR, the tumor has a lot of new, angiogenic blood vessels,” said TSRI Assistant Professor Elena Deryugina, senior author of the new study. “And these vessels are very welcoming for tumor cells and facilitate their dissemination from the very early stages of tumor development.”

The study was published recently in the journal Neoplasia.
When we downregulated EGFR so it wasn’t expressed anymore, the tumor cells were not able to disseminate efficiently,” said TSRI Research Associate Petra Minder, who was first author of the new study. “This gave us a hint that EGFR plays a role in intravasation [an early step of metastatic dissemination during which tumor cells enter angiogenic blood vessels]—we were just not sure how.

The new study shows how EGFR levels make a difference. In experiments using chick embryos, the researchers found that EGFR signaling starts a chain reaction inside tumor cells, ultimately resulting in the release of a molecule called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), known to be active in almost all forms of solid tumors. Released VEGF then binds to endothelial cells, inducing the growth of new blood capillaries and vessels within a developing tumor.

For many years, scientists had seen small blood vessels growing in early-stage tumors, but it was thought these vessels were mostly for supplying tumors with oxygen and nutrients.

“Now we have learned that these newly formed vessels are used by tumor cells for dissemination because of their certain structural properties,” added Deryugina.

The new study shows that these vessels are actually useful for tumors because they are dilated and unusually permeable. Tumor cells can slip into the vessels, escape the primary tumor site and lodge throughout the body. Escaped cells often lie dormant or grow very slowly, not appearing as metastases until after the primary tumor is detected.

The results could also explain why EGFR-inhibiting drugs have had limited success in human patients. While these drugs target EGFR’s effects in primary tumor growth, they don’t address EGFR’s role in blood vessel growth and early metastatic seeding.
The researchers said the findings highlight the urgent need for new methods to diagnose cancers early and new treatments to fight growing metastases.
- http://www.neoplasia.com/article/S1476-5586%2815%2900098-6/abstract

Specialized Cells Help Each Other Survive During Times of Stress
A team led by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the University of Pittsburgh has shown for the first time how one set of specialized cells survives under stress by manipulating the behavior of key immune system cells.

The new study, published recently in the journal Nature Communications, involved mesenchymal stem cells—which live in bone marrow and can differentiate into several different cell types used in bone and connective tissue—and macrophages—immune cells that usually respond to infectious agents or damaged cells by engulfing and devouring them.

“This is the first time anyone has shown how mesenchymal stem cells provide for their own survival by recruiting and then suppressing normal macrophage activity,” said TSRI Professor Donald G. Phinney, who led the study with University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Luis A. Ortiz. “This finally puts the crosstalk between these cells into the context of cell survival.”

The team’s experiments showed that, like all other cells, mesenchymal stem cells experience stress due to tissue injury and inflammation. When this stress results in damage to the mitochondria (the power houses of the cell), the mesenchymal stem cells recruit the immune system’s macrophages—but in an unusual way.

By reengineering macrophage action with secreted microRNA, the stem cells protect themselves from being targeted and instead package their damaged mitochondria into small sacs known as vesicles and send them out to be engulfed by the macrophage.

Once macrophages subsume the damaged mitochondria, the macrophages are able to repurpose the mitochondria for their own use, replenishing their own energy supplies. Blocking the exchange of damaged mitochondrial to macrophages causes death of the stem cells. Therefore, the process is mutually beneficial.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151007/ncomms9472/full/ncomms9472...

In direct current electrons flow in one and only one direction (zero frequency). So if you happen to close the circuit by any kind of physical contact forming a low resistance path, the current would start flowing through you. In other words you will be stuck to the conductor as if you just held onto a super.... duper glue. In the meanwhile all your muscles would contract and the heart would stop beating because of the contraction plus there would be other major burns. Eventually you'll die!!
In DC the body just contracts once touched, but in AC the power is made up of frequencies of currents with highs and lows. Thus the body if touched would experience series of contractions depending on the frequency of power. That is like multiple dc shocks in a small gap, and that too the current flows in both directions alternatively. So yes, this kind of shock would totally destroy your muscles. But yeah, if you are lucky enough you can detach yourself from the circuit when the current reaches its 0 and changes direction.

But both AC and DC are lethal.

Effects of an AC or DC Currents on the Human Body

The three basic factors that determine what kind of shock you experience are the amplitude of the current, the duration of the current passing through the body, and the frequency.
Direct Currents actually have zero frequency, as the current is constant. However, there are physiological effects during electrocution no matter what type of current.
The factor deciding the effects of the AC and DC current is the path the current takes through the body. If it is from the hand to the foot, it does not pass through the heart, and then the effects are not so lethal.
However DC current will make a single continuous contraction of the muscles compared to AC current, which will make a series of contractions depending on the frequency it is supplied at. In terms of fatalities, both kill but more milliamps are required of DC current than AC current at the same voltage.
If the current takes the path from hand to hand thus passing through the heart it can result in fibrillation of the heart. Fibrillation is a condition when all the heart muscles start moving independently in a disorganized manner rather than in a state of coordination. It affects the ability of the heart to pump blood, resulting in brain damage and eventual cardiac arrest.
Either AC or DC currents can cause fibrillation of the heart at high enough levels. This typically takes place at 30 mA of AC (rms, 60 Hz) or 300 – 500 mA of DC.
Though both AC and DC currents and shock are lethal, more DC current is required to have the same effect as AC current. For example, if you are being electrocuted or shocked 0.5 to 1.5 milliamps of AC 60 Hz current is required and up to 4 mA of DC current is required. For the let-go threshold in AC a current of 3 to 22 mA is required against 15 to 88 of DC current.

Controlling mosquitoes the natural way: Insect-control experts are now hoping that deploying the laboratory mosquitoes will eventually slash the number of wild mosquitoes in people’s neighbourhoods.
A new plan to release thousands of mosquitoes in people's backyards in Los Angeles is underway. The bugs—all males—would not bite humans like females do, and area officials hoped these particular insects would block further reproduction of their kind. To some local residents the approach seemed a bit counterintuitive at first. Yet they were told the method would help curb pesticide use while simultaneously beating back their mosquito population.

The bugs to be released were not genetically modified. But they were not exactly garden-variety mosquitoes, either. The male mosquitoes were raised in a laboratory where they were infected with Wolbachia, a natural bacterium that would effectively sterilize them. When the males are released into people’s backyards and mate with wild females, the resulting eggs—for reasons not yet fully understood—simply will not hatch, leading to fewer mosquitoes.
The biology of how Wolbachia interact with their hosts is a bit complex. If a male mosquito with Wolbachia mates with an uninfected female, then their eggs will not hatch. That is the key to Dobson’s approach. Yet if two mosquitoes that both have Wolbachia mate, then their resulting eggs will hatch as normal, although the offspring will potentially harbor Wolbachia. Basically, their lives will go on as usual and they will be able to reproduce. Similarly, if an infected female mates with an uninfected male, then their resulting eggs will also hatch as normal—although again, the offspring will potentially also be infected.

This is not the first time Wolbachia has been auditioned as a way to hamper the spread of mosquito-borne diseases—scientists have previously used a strain of the bacterium to curb the spread of dengue.
- Scientific American

183 scientists sign letter asking BMJ to retract its bogus nutrition investigation

The investigation has 'no place in the pages of a prominent scientific journal'
More than 180 scientists from around the world have signed a letter urging the British Medical Journal to retract its bogus investigation of the 2015 US dietary guidelines report. As The Verge previously reported, the investigation contains multiple misleading statements and factual inaccuracies. But today's letter, which was sent to the BMJ this morning, doesn't mince words. It outlines the many problems with the article, and states that the investigation is "so riddled with errors" that it has "no place in the pages of a prominent scientific journal."
The US government publishes a revised set of dietary guidelines every five years. These guidelines are very important; they affect how companies label food, what scientists focus on in their research, and what students eat in school. But in September, the BMJ published an investigation that went after the report that informs those guidelines; it was written by Nina Teicholz, author of a book entitled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. The article suggested that the committee responsible for the report "abandoned established methods for most of its analyses," overlooking a number of important studies in the process. The article also stated that the committee had "deleted meat" from its list of recommended foods. However, both these statements are untrue.

Unless the BMJ retracts the investigation, many of these errors will likely still be used by the meat industry to suppress the committee's advice on lowering the consumption of red meat.
A number of scientists have told me that it's mind-boggling that the BMJ would publish this article critiquing a report by a panel by well-respected scientists without even asking the panel to respond," says Bonnie Liebman, the director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the person spearheading the effort to get the journal to retract the investigation. It took the BMJ two days to publish a response from the panel.
In September, a number of news outlets — including Time, Newsweek, and Mother Jones — reported the story without questioning the investigation's faulty reporting. The fact that both the BMJ and Teicholz said that they stood by the article surely did not help.
http://cspinet.org/bmj-retraction-letter.html
http://www.theverge.com/science/2015/11/5/9675598/bmj-183-scientist...

Scientists tinker with evolution to save Hawaii coral reefs
Hawaii researchers accelerate evolution in attempt to save Hawaii's coral reefs
Scientists at a research center on Hawaii's Coconut Island have embarked on an experiment to grow "super coral" that they hope can withstand the hotter and more acidic oceans that are expected with global warming.
When coral is stressed by changing environmental conditions, it expels the symbiotic algae that live within it and the animal turns white or bright yellow, a process called bleaching.
If the organisms are unable to recover from these bleaching events, especially when they recur over several consecutive years, the coral will die.
The researchers are taking the coral to their center on the 29-acre isle, once a retreat for the rich and famous and home to television's Gilligan's Island, and slowly exposing them to slightly more stressful water.

They bathe chunks of coral that they've already identified as having strong genes in water that mimics the warmer and more acidic oceans. They are also taking resilient strains and breeding them with one another, helping perpetuate those stronger traits. They have given them experiences that we think are going to raise their ability to survive stress.

The theory they are testing is called assisted evolution, and while it has been used for thousands of years on other plants and animals, the concept has not been applied to coral living in the wild.
-AP

A parasite's cancerous cells can give human beings cancer! Yes, true. This really has happened!
In a rare case, a patient’s weakened immune system may have let tapeworm spread disease
A 41-year-old man in Medellín, Columbia, went to the doctor complaining of fever, cough, fatigue and weight loss that had lasted several months. He had been already infected with AIDS and had a very weak immune system by then. Scans revealed tumors in his lungs, liver, adrenal glands, lymph nodes and other spots in his body. The disease looked like cancer, but it puzzled doctors: the small cells in the growths weren’t human cancer cells. They were much smaller!

DNA analysis revealed a shock: The cancer cells came from dwarf tapeworms (Hymenolepiasis nana), pathologist Atis Muehlenbachs of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and colleagues report in the Nov. 5 New England Journal of Medicine. Contagious cancers affect dogs, Tasmanian devils and clams, but this is the first time researchers have found a parasite living in him giving a person cancer.

HIV infection had weakened the man’s immune system so that tapeworm stem cells could grow unchecked, the researchers speculate. Mutations then turned the stem cells into cancer. The case raises concerns that people with weakened immune systems may be in danger of contracting similar tapeworm cancers. “This is a rare disease,” Muehlenbachs says, but “we don’t know how rare.”

A new confinement state for plasma was discovered

The National Institutes of Natural Sciences National Institute for Fusion Science applied the "Momentary Heating Propagation Method" to the DIII-D tokamak device operated for the United States Office of Science, Department of Energy, by the General Atomics and made the important discovery of a new plasma confinement state. This discovery was introduced in the November 4, 2015, issue of Scientific Reports, a journal of the British science journal Nature group, in an article titled "Self-regulated oscillation of transport and topology of magnetic islands in toroidal plasmas." Seeking to achieve fusion energy, research on high-temperature and high-density plasma confinement by magnetic fields is being conducted around the world. In a magnetically confined plasma, as the core temperature of the plasma increases, the flow of disturbed plasma called turbulence emerges. Turbulence does not stop at the place of its generation, and moves circumferentially like a surge of waves.

In magnetically confined plasmas twofold confinement areas called magnetic islands exist. In these areas there is no temperature gradient that results in the source of turbulence. For that reason turbulence generated outside the magnetic island where a temperature gradient exists enters into the magnetic island, and the confinement state inside the magnetic island will be determined depending upon the intensity of turbulence. In future fusion plasma, too, it will be extremely important to improve the magnetic island's confinement state. Further, even in solar plasmas, it has been indicated from solar flare emissions that magnetic islands may exist. Thus, research on turbulence in magnetic islands is an extremely important topic.

Professor Katsumi Ida, Assistant professor Tatsuya Kobayashi, and the LHD experiment group, together with Professor Shigeru Inagaki at Kyushu University, have, together with Dr. T. Evans, a DIII-D senior researcher, discovered for the first time in the world a new confinement state inside a magnetic island by applying the "momentary heating propagation method" to the DIII-D plasma. The "momentary heating propagation method" allows the plasma confinement performance (adiabaticity) to be diagnosed from the amplitude of temperature variations and the propagation speed caused by the momentary heating.

This discovery, because it is essential for improving the confinement of the fusion reactor plasma, will be an important compass pointing in the direction of future fusion research.

These research results were published in the British academic science journal Scientific Reports (online edition) of the Nature group on November 4, 2015, and is widely available.

Brain Too Can Get Fossilised

Scientists have long maintained that brains do not fossilise but new research has provided the strongest evidence yet that it is possible. In fact, the brains of a set of 520-million-year-old arthropods did just that.

The species, Fuxianhuia protensa, is an extinct arthropod that roamed the seafloor about 520 million years ago. It would have looked something like a very simple shrimp.

“Each of the fossils found at Chengjiang Shales fossil-rich sites in southwest China revealed F protensa’s ancient brain looked a lot like a modern crustacean’s,” said Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents’ professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Arizona.

He and his team found that the brains were preserved as flattened carbon films.

This led the research team to a convincing explanation as to how and why neural tissue fossilises.

The only way for an object to be fossilised is for it to be rapidly buried.

Hungry scavengers cannot eat a carcass if the brain is buried faster and as long as the water lacks in oxygen so a buried creature’s tissues escapes being consumed by bacteria as well.

Strausfeld and his collaborators suspect F. protensa was buried by rapid, underwater mudslides a scenario they experimentally recreated by burying sandworms and cockroaches in mud.

According to Strausfeld, the brain withstood the pressure from being rapidly buried under thick mud because the nervous system must have been remarkably dense.

In fact, tissues of nervous systems, including brains, are densest in living arthropods.

In the paper, Strausfeld and Xiaoya Ma from China’s Yunnan University and Gregory Edgecombe from the Natural History Museum in London analysed seven newly discovered fossils of the same species to find, in each, traces of what was undoubtedly a brain.

Strausfeld is now working to elucidate the origin and evolution of brains over half a billion years in the past.

“People, especially scientists, make assumptions. The fun thing about science, actually, is to demolish them,” Strausfeld noted in the paper published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists breach brain barrier to treat sick patient
For the first time, doctors have breached the human brain's protective layer to deliver cancer-fighting drugs.

The Canadian team used tiny gas-filled bubbles, injected into the bloodstream of a patient, to punch temporary holes in the blood-brain barrier.

A beam of focused ultrasound waves applied to the skull made the bubbles vibrate and push their way through, along with chemotherapy drugs.

Six to 10 more patients will undergo the same procedure as part of a trial.

Experts said the experimental technique used at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre was exciting because it meant doctors might be able to give cancer patients potent drugs that otherwise would not work.
The same non-invasive method could also be used for other brain diseases, such as dementia and Parkinson's.
Blood-brain barrier

The blood-brain barrier keeps pathogens and toxins away from the central nervous system. But this tightly packed layer of cells, which separates the brain from its blood vessels, can be a hindrance if you want to deliver drugs into the brain.

The Sunnybrook team temporarily ripped holes in the barrier to allow chemotherapy a safe passage through.
The patient was given an intravenous infusion of chemotherapy followed by a small dose of the micro-bubbles that would punch a way through once they reached the target area of the brain and the ultrasound beam was switched on.

Brain scans suggest the treatment went to plan, and the researchers will soon examine a small part Ms Hall's tumour (removed surgically the day after the therapy) to confirm how much of the chemotherapy penetrated.
"Opening the blood-brain barrier using focused ultrasound beams has been a goal of researchers for about a decade, with the Toronto group being at its forefront, and it is exciting to see this reaching the clinic at last.

"The use of ultrasound for enhancing the local delivery of drugs to a number of different targets in the body is being investigated by a number of centres around the world, including the UK, and shows particular promise in the field of cancer chemotherapy."

Turning the tide ... using the worst thing happened to your work to do your best... How scientists use out of control satellites to test a theory...

Two satellites that were accidentally launched into the wrong orbit will be repurposed to make the most stringent test to date of a prediction made by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity—that clocks run more slowly the closer they are to heavy objects.

The satellites, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), were mislaunched last year by a Russian Soyuz rocket that put them into elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. This left them unfit for their intended use as part of a European global-navigation system called Galileo.

But the two crafts still have atomic clocks on board. According to general relativity, the clocks' 'ticking' should slow down as the satellites move closer to Earth in their wonky orbits, because the heavy planet’s gravity bends the fabric of space-time. The clocks should then speed up as the crafts recede.

On November 9, ESA announced that teams at Germany's Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) in Bremen and the department of Time–Space Reference Systems at the Paris Observatory will now track this rise and fall. By comparing the speed of the clocks’ ticking with the crafts’ known altitudes—pinpointed within a few centimetres by monitoring stations on the ground, which bounce lasers off the satellites—the teams can test the accuracy of Einstein's theory.

http://www.nature.com/news/wayward-satellites-repurposed-to-test-ge...

Truth here and now...1

Q: What Really Causes Autism?

The human brain facts:
The human brain has 86 billion neurons in all: 69 billion in the cerebellum, a dense lump at the back of the brain that helps orchestrate basic bodily functions and movement; 16 billion in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s thick corona and the seat of our most sophisticated mental talents, such as self-awareness, language, problem solving and abstract thought; and 1 billion in the brain stem and its extensions into the core of the brain.
The human brain is also unique in its unsurpassed gluttony. Although it makes up only 2 percent of body weight, the human brain consumes a whopping 20 percent of the body’s total energy at rest.

Human brain evolution likely required a metabolic trade-off. In order for the brain to grow, other organs, namely the gut, had to shrink, and energy that would typically have gone to the latter was redirected to the former. For evidence, they pointed to data showing that primates with larger brains have smaller intestines. The invention of cooking was crucial to human brain evolution. Soft, cooked foods are much easier to digest than tough raw ones, yielding more calories for less gastrointestinal work. Perhaps, then, learning to cook permitted a bloating of the human brain at the expense of the gut. Other researchers have proposed that similar trade-offs might have occurred between brain and muscle, given how much stronger chimps are than humans.

Again and again, researchers have cited the evolutionary surge in human brain size as the key reason for our exceptionally high degree of intelligence compared to other animals. Yes, a large brain packed with neurons is essential to what we consider high intelligence.

For the first time scientists correctly predicted the trajectory of space junk
WT1190F, which burned up in Earth's atmosphere Friday, November 13 off the coast of Sri Lanka, as imaged by scientists measuring the re-entry from an airplane. Measuring 3 to 6 feet, the junk was believed to be man-made spacecraft that could have gone off course and turned into space junk orbiting the earth before it entered the atmosphere. In 2013, WT1190F was initially observed by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey. This event is also an ideal opportunity to test the readiness of space agencies for a possible atmospheric entry and even strong impacts in the future that involve the asteroids and comets which is the highly similar to this WT1190F event. This is the first time that experts have calculated the exact time and location a piece of space junk will collide with Earth. The object's mass was not substantial enough to present a risk to the area, especially given its trajectory into the Indian Ocean. "A piece of a solar panel, for instance, would behave differently than a booster tank", Lowell Observatory planetary astronomer Nick Moskovitz said in a statement before the object's re-entry. The scientists who orchestrated a rapid response to the recently discovered object declared their effort to be a smashing success. NASA scientists were able to forecast the accurate date and time for the re-entry of the space debris. A team from the worldwide Astronomy Center and the UAE Space Agency may be the only people to have seen its final moments in real time. Astronomers had speculated it could be a spent Apollo rocket stage from 1960's or part of a more recent lunar mission. According to EarthSky.org, it was the "first-ever precisely predicted fall of space debris".

Special eye drops raise the hopes for nearsightedness cure
In a five-year clinical trial conducted in Singapore, drops of a drug called atropine seemed to slow the progression of nearsightedness in children. Intriguingly, researchers found that a lower dose of the drug was more effective than higher dosages, in addition to risking fewer side effects. The research was presented Nov. 16, 2015 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology in Las Vegas and will appear in the February 2016 edition of the journal Ophthalmology.
In high myopia — where the eyeball stretches and becomes too long — isn’t just an inconvenience: It raises the raises the risk of other, more serious eye conditions, such as retinal detachment, macular degeneration, premature cataracts and glaucoma. So the scientists have been trying to find out if there’s any way to reduce the progression of myopia.
tropine drops are approved for use in the United States at a higher concentration than that used in the study. The drops (which are currently used to treat lazy eye in children) can cause light sensitivity and blurry vision up close at higher doses, so researchers set out to determine whether a smaller dose could still be effective without producing side effects. And it did!

Scientists at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) have determined how the body responds during times of emergency when it needs more blood cells. In a study published in Nature, researchers report that when tissue damage occurs, in times of excessive bleeding, or during pregnancy, a secondary, emergency blood-formation system is activated in the spleen.

“Hematopoietic, or blood-forming, stem cells reside mainly in the bone marrow, and most newblood cell formation occurs within the bone marrow under normal circumstances. But when there is hematopoietic stress, blood cell formation expands to thespleen,” said Dr. Sean Morrison, CRI Director and Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics at UT Southwestern Medical Center. “Blood-forming stem cells migrate from the bone marrow to the spleen, which becomes a hematopoietic organ where blood formation then occurs.”

Normally, there are very few blood-forming stem cells in the spleen. But the cells that create the supporting environment for these stem cells are present in the spleen, ready to respond during times of hematopoietic stress and to receive an influx of blood-forming stem cells from the bone marrow.

In characterizing the microenvironment, or niche, which supports blood formation in the spleen, the CRI research team used mouse models to examine the expression patterns of two known niche cell factors, stem cell factor (SCF) and CXCL12. The researchers found that the blood-forming microenvironment in the spleen is found near sinusoidal blood vessels and is created by endothelialcells and perivascular stromal cells – just like the microenvironment in the bone marrow.

“Under emergency conditions, the endothelial cells and perivascular stromal cells that reside in the spleen are induced to proliferate, so they can sustain all the new blood-forming stem cells that migrate into the spleen,” said Dr. Morrison, who is also a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “We determined that this process in the spleen is physiologically important for responding to hematopoietic stress; without it, the mice we studied could not maintain normal blood cell counts during pregnancy or quickly regenerate blood cell counts after bleeding or chemotherapy.”

Based on this new information about the spleen’s emergency backup role for blood cell formation, therapeutic interventions could be developed in the future to enhance blood formation following chemotherapy or bone marrow transplantation and thus accelerate the recovery of blood cell counts.

What makes life impossible on exoplanets?

A team of scientists has suggested that vast amounts of radiation may be making life impossible on some of them like Kepler-438b planet.

As per the University of Warwick research, the atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438.

Regularly occurring every few hundred days, the superflares are approximately ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.

While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b’s atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render it uninhabitable.

The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun.

Lead researcher David Armstrong explained that if the planet, Kepler-438b, has a magnetic field like the Earth, it may be shielded from some of the effects, but if it does not, or the flares are strong enough, it could have lost its atmosphere, be irradiated by extra dangerous radiation and be a much harsher place for life to exist.

The study appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Truffles are not dangerously radioactive now after Chernobyl disaster.

After analyzing 82 specimens of Burgundy truffle (Tuber aestivum) from across Europe, researchers report online November 10 in Biogeosciences Discussions that all of the sought-after delicacies contained insignificant concentrations of radioactive cesium-137.

Some fungi species, including certain mushrooms, sop up radioactive elements from dirt. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster contaminated large swaths of European soils with cesium-137 and prompted concerns that truffles could become radioactive.

The work provides an all clear for Burgundy truffle hunters and connoisseurs around the world, the researchers write. While not radioactive, at more than $400 per kilogram, Burgundy truffles still may not be safe.

Horror.. .. of horrors E. coli has developed resistance to last-line of antibiotics, warn scientists.
Bacteria like E. Coli have mutated to be resistant to our last-line of antibiotics and untreateable bugs may already be circulating in several parts of the world, scientists have warned.

Health experts have warned for years that antibiotic resistance could send medicine back to the dark ages, with even the smallest infections proving lethal.

Currently, when all other drugs fail, doctors use polymyxins – such as colistin - as a last resort to treat bacterial infections like E. coli and those which cause pneumonia.
But British scientists have discovered that pigs and meat sold in China are infected with bacteria carrying a new gene which makes them resistant to these rearguard antibiotics.

The MCR-1 gene is in a part of the DNA which can be easily copied and transferred between bacteria leading experts to conclude that ‘pandemic resistance is inevitable.’ The mutated forms were also found in 1322 hospitalised patients in China and is thought to have already spread to Laos and Malaysia.

British scientists and health experts described the discovery as ‘worrying,’ ‘disturbing’ and ‘alarming.’

The emergence of the MCR-1 gene in China heralds a disturbing breach of the last group of antibiotics and an end to our last line of defence against infection, according to Microbiologists.

The effect on human health posed by this new gene cannot be underestimated. The rapid spread of similar antibiotic-resistant genes suggests that all antibiotics will soon be futile in the face of previously treatable gram-negative bacterial infections such as E. coli and salmonella.

“Our investigations in China found that MCR-1 is already prevalent in E. coli samples found in live animals and meat products, and in a small number of human cases.

“MCR-1 is likely to spread to the rest of the world at an alarming rate unless we take a globally coordinated approach to combat it.
The team from Cardiff University and the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, China, were first alerted to a possible new deadly strain of  E. coli after a pig at a farm in Shanghai showed resistance to colistin in 2011.

Over the next four years the team took samples from pigs at slaughter across four provinces, and meat sold in markets in Guangzhou. They found a high prevalence of the MCR-1 gene in E coli, with the proportion of positive samples increasing each year.

The researchers also found that the MCR-1 gene has the potential to spread into other epidemic strains such as K. pneumoniae and P. aeruginosa which can cause a variety of diseases from pneumonia to serious blood infections. K pneumonia strains found in hospital patients also carried the mutation.
“The emergence of MCR-1 heralds the breach of the last group of antibiotics. The polymyxins were the last class of antibiotics in which resistance was incapable of spreading from cell to cell.

“Our results reveal the emergence of the first resistance gene that is readily passed between common bacteria, suggesting that the progression from extensive drug resistance to pandemic resistance is inevitable.”

China is one of the world’s largest users and producers of colistin for agriculture and veterinary use. The Chinese Government has already banned vets from using colistin and the researchers are hoping the same prohibition will be applied globally.

Prof Nigel Brown, President of the Microbiology Society, said: “This discovery that resistance to colistin can be transferred between bacteria is alarming.
The new research was published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

People here argue that herbal medicines are based on wise knowledge originated in ancient times and spread from generation to generation and therefore cannot have any side effects. This is quite contrary to what has been observed several times by medical practitioners. Here is another proof...

A good diet for you may be bad for me
Eating the same foods can lead to different blood sugar spikes in different people
A sweet can give one person a sugar rush while barely affecting another person, a new study finds, indicating that a food’s glycemic index is in the eater.

People’s blood sugar rises or falls differently even when they eat the exact same fruit, bread, deserts, pizza and many other foods, researchers in Israel report November 19 in Cell. That suggests that diets should be tailored to individuals’ personal characteristics.

The researchers made the discovery after fitting 800 people with blood glucose monitors for a week. The people ate standard breakfasts supplied by the researchers. Although the volunteers all ate the same food, their blood glucose levels after eating those foods varied dramatically. Traits and behaviors such as body mass index, sleep, exercise, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and the kinds of microbes living in people’s intestines are associated with blood glucose responses to food, the researchers conclude.

Those findings indicate that blood sugar spikes after eating depend “not only on what you eat, but how your system processes that food,” says Clay Marsh, an epigenetics researcher at West Virginia University in Morgantown.
Similarly, eating bread produced a post-meal blood sugar level rise of 44 milligrams per deciliter on average in other studies. But some people’s blood sugar rose as little as 15 mg/dl, while others had a spike as high as 79 mg/dl after eating the same amount of bread.
A team led by Elinav and Weizmann computational biologist Eran Segal created a computer algorithm that used 137 personal measurements to predict how much a person’s blood sugar would rise or fall after eating a certain food. When tested on a new group of 100 people, the algorithm correctly predicted the response about 70 percent of the time.

A third group of 26 participants were then given personalized meals. The computer algorithm analyzed each person and then picked diets for 12 of them. A nutritionist chose a “good” and “bad” diet for the remaining participants. Good diets were ones that that minimized blood sugar spikes after eating. Bad diets sent blood sugar skyrocketing. The diets contained the same amount of calories.

It turned out that foods on the “good” diet for one person were sometimes on another participant’s “bad” list, Segal says. For instance, one woman’s blood sugar spiked when she ate tomatoes. But tomatoes were on other people’s healthy list.
The data suggest is that relying on population averages is not only inaccurate, but may even be dangerous in some cases.
For 10 of the 12 people, the computer algorithm correctly predicted responses to the good and bad foods. Nutritionists were equally good at predicting how a person would fare on a given diet, the team found. But the computerized approach could reach more people, the researchers say.

Mixes of microbes living in people’s guts, known as the gut microbiome, also changed with the good and bad diets. Bacteria help break down food and have been implicated in causing obesity and diabetes. This study can’t distinguish whether the microbiome is causing differences in blood sugar responses or being influenced by how a person responds to certain foods, says Peter Turnbaugh, a microbiome researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

While Turnbaugh agrees that personalized diets would be better than blanket recommendations for improving health, he sees some caveats. “The frustrating thing about all this is that we can learn how to optimize the diet for a given person, but ultimately, you have to stick to that diet.”
http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674%2815%2901481-6?_return...

A new study from researchers at the Nanjing University in China and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology found that cooking with chloraminated tap water and iodized table salt can produce harmful toxins in food. To disinfect the water, people add chlorine (chlorination) or chloramines (chloramination), if ammonia is added, too. These processes affect the water's chemical make-up.
When iodized table salt is added to tap water containing chloramines or chlorine during cooking, it reacts and creates hypoiodous acid. When this acid reacts to other organic matters in the tap water and food, it creates iodinated disinfection byproducts (I-DBPs). Some of these molecules have not been discovered yet and are completely new to engineers, toxicologists and environmental chemists. In the study, the researchers tested the toxicity of the molecules by simulating the cooking process and adding iodized salt and wheat flour to the various types of tap water heated at various lengths and temperatures.
The team identified 14 new molecules, nine of which got toxicity level test, and found that several of them are 50 to 200 times more toxic compared to others. The presence of molecules during the simulated cooking ranged between 0.72 to 7.63 micrograms per liter.
"Considering that these molecules could have an adverse effect on our health, we need to study them more to determine exactly what effects they might have," said study author and Nanjing University assistant professor Dr. Yang Pan.
The research team suggested that reducing the time and changing the type of salt and water used in cooking can limit the formation of molecules. Using chlorinated tap water instead of chloraminated tap water can also limit the formations, added associate professor and co-author Dr. Xiangru Zhang from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Switching to potassium iodate-fortified table salt, cooking at lower temperature and reducing cooking time can also reduce I-DBP formation.
Zhang added that the discovery is relevant not just researchers who study drinking water, but also to the general public. If people are worried about the quality of water they drink every day, they should also worry about the quality of water we use for cooking.

The study was published in the Water Research journal.

Rain forests create their own rain clouds, replete with microscopic spores, pollen and fungi, or “smells”. How?
On a typical sunny day in the Amazon, 20 billion metric tons of water flow upward through the trees and pour into the air, an invisible river that flows through the sky across a continent.
“This river of vapor that comes up from the forest and goes into the atmosphere is greater than the Amazon River.
Every tree is a silent geyser. Through a process called transpiration, a large tree in the Amazon can release 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere in a single day. There is a frantic evaporation taking place there.
trees only need to bask in the sunlight to release their invisible steam. Plus, they have the sheer force of numbers; hundreds of billions of trees in the jungle release as many as 20 billion metric tons of water into the atmosphere every day. That means that while the Amazon, which pours 17 billion tons of water into the Atlantic Ocean a day, may be the largest river on earth — it’s still exceeded by the airborne river drifting above the canopy of the trees.
The airborne river turns into rain, which replenishes the forest.
These smells are critical for the lifecycle of the jungle, as the steam from the trees condenses around these microscopic particles, forming clouds, which eventually release torrential rain. This process is unique to the jungle; oceans, for instance, rarely create heavy clouds like the Amazon’s, because sea air is not so richly seeded with plant life. “This relation between a living thing, which is the forest, and a nonliving thing, which is the atmosphere, is ingenious in the Amazon.
Without the Amazon, much of South America would likely have been a desert.

Non-Human Primates Harbor Diverse Mammalian and Avian Astroviruses Including Those Associated with Human Infections.
A new study of nearly 900 nonhuman primates in Bangladesh and Cambodia shows that macaques harbor diverse astroviruses, which can cause infectious gastroenteritis or diarrhea in humans. The research is the first to show evidence of human astroviruses in animals, and among the earliest to demonstrate that astroviruses can move between mammalian species, according to the report, published in PLOS Pathogens. “If you are a bat, you have bat astrovirus, but if you are a monkey, you could have everything,” said Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, a research scientist at the University of Washington National Primate Research Primate Center and a co-author of the study. Astroviruses from a number of species, including human, bovine, bird, cow and dog, were detected in monkeys, “challenging the paradigm that AstV (astrovirus) infection is species-specific,” the authors wrote. It is still unknown whether these viruses are two-way and can be transmitted to humans. They did find evidence that, in monkeys, two species of astrovirus recombined.
Astroviruses are most commonly associated with diarrhea. They can also cause clinical diseases such as nephritis, hepatitis and encephalitis. However, astroviruses also can be asymptomatic, depending on the species. Currently, the only treatment is oral rehydration.
The researchers said more study is needed to determine if astrovirus infections in nonhuman primates are associated with clinical disease, or whether such infections are asymptomatic. They said none of monkeys sampled in the study appeared to have clinical disease (e.g., diarrhea) at the time of sampling.
http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.p...

Mysteries solved with the help of science and experts in the field...

Zika virus, which first appeared in Brazil in May, causes fever, rash, vomiting, red eyes and, in some cases, death. Brazilian health officials believe that a Zika infection during pregnancy harms growing fetuses. Pregnant women hit by the virus may be more likely to give birth to babies with the rare birth defect microcephaly, a congenital condition marked by a small head and abnormal brain development.

Over recent months, Brazilian health officials have noted an unusually high number of babies born with microcephaly. From 2010 to 2014, on average, 156 Brazilian babies were born with the birth defect each year. This year, health officials have already recorded 1,248 suspected cases of microcephaly. On November 28, government health officials reported that Zika virus had been found in tissue from a baby born with microcephaly, a find that links the birth defect to the virus.

Zika virus also has been documented in Africa, Southeast Asia and islands in the Pacific including the Cook Islands, French Polynesia and the Federated States of Micronesia. Because the Aedes mosquitoes that carry the virus live around the world, the virus will probably spread to previously unaffected areas.

https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/emerging-diseases-other-health-...

Quantum entanglement of multiple particles! Heard it before?
A first-of-its-kind measurement has quantified a mysterious quantum bond shared by several particles rather than just two. The experiment, reported in the Dec. 3 Nature, brings physicists closer to understanding the true scope of this link, known as quantum entanglement.

Entanglement interweaves particles’ fates so that some of each particle’s properties, which are inherently uncertain according to quantum mechanics, are tied to those of its partners. Each particle essentially sacrifices its individuality to become part of an umbrella entangled state. While physicists have developed reliable methods for detecting entanglement between pairs of particles, the measurements get tricky when three or more particles are involved.

A team of quantum physicists from Harvard University measured a property called entanglement entropy, which quantifies the apparent randomness that comes with observing just a portion of an entangled whole. Markus Greiner and colleagues used lasers to create an optical cage with four compartments, each of which held a rubidium atom chilled to nearly absolute zero. The researchers could tweak the laser settings to adjust the height of the walls between compartments. If the walls were low enough, atoms could exploit their strange quantum ability to occupy multiple compartments at once. As the four atoms jumped around, they interacted and established a state of entanglement.

Greiner’s team created a pair of four-compartment systems and confirmed that they were identical using a technique developed for comparing photons. Then the researchers compared portions of the two cages — say, two of the four compartments where atoms could reside. The partial system of one cage differed from the corresponding partial system of the other cage. A difference between parts when the wholes are indistinguishable “only happens if there is entanglement within each system,” Greiner says.

While studying entangled particle pairs is interesting, the real world is dominated by entangled states that encompass much larger sets of particles. Analyzing particles in collections similar to those in Greiner’s experiment could help physicists understand the complex entanglement-rich interactions between electrons in superconductors, which conduct electrical current with no resistance.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v528/n7580/full/nature15750.html

The supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are more like cosmic engines, converting energy from infalling matter into intense radiation that can outshine the combined light from all surrounding stars. If the black hole is spinning, it can generate strong jets that blast across thousands of light-years and shape entire galaxies. These black hole engines are thought to be powered by magnetic fields. For the first time, astronomers have detected magnetic fields just outside the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
A new study results appear in the Dec. 4th issue of the journal Science.
These magnetic fields have been predicted to exist, but no one has seen them before.
This feat was achieved using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) – a global network of radio telescopes that link together to function as one giant telescope the size of Earth. Since larger telescopes can provide greater detail, the EHT ultimately will resolve features as small as 15 micro-arcseconds. (An arcsecond is 1/3600 of a degree, and 15 micro-arcseconds is the angular equivalent of seeing a golf ball on the moon.)
The Event Horizon Telescope made observations at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. The team measured how that light is linearly polarized. On Earth, sunlight becomes linearly polarized by reflections, which is why sunglasses are polarized to block light and reduce glare. In the case of Sgr A*, polarized light is emitted by electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines. As a result, this light directly traces the structure of the magnetic field.

Sgr A* is surrounded by an accretion disk of material orbiting the black hole. The team found that magnetic fields in some regions near the black hole are disorderly, with jumbled loops and whorls resembling intertwined spaghetti. In contrast, other regions showed a much more organized pattern, possibly in the region where jets would be generated.

They also found that the magnetic fields fluctuated on short time scales of only 15 minutes or so.

“Once again, the galactic center is proving to be a more dynamic place than we might have guessed. Those magnetic fields are dancing all over the place.”

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2015-28

How scientists are trying to protect coral reefs

Rattan wood — the stems of a climbing palm that grows in South-East Asian and West African forests — could be the source of next-generation bone implants, with the first products planned for release in 2019.

Italian firm GreenBone announced last month that trials on sheep prove that its technology works. It found that rattan can be used to build a scaffold to support damaged bones by turning rattan into a material with the same strength, flexibility and porosity as bones.

“Rattan is totally biocompatible and absorbable, and structurally organised like natural bone... it induces bone regeneration.”

The chemical process that turns rattan into a bone-like material was developed by a team at the Institute of Science and Technology for Ceramics (Istec) of the Italian National Research Council. Through this process, plant materials such as lignin and cellulose are removed from pieces of rattan wood, which are then treated to create hydroxyapatite, the same mineral that makes up human bones.

“The advantages offered by rattan-derived bone-like material over other bone substitutes like ceramics, polymers and titanium are great,” says Anna Tampieri, a researcher with the Istec project and chief scientist at GreenBone “Unlike these solutions, rattan is totally biocompatible and absorbable, and structurally organised like natural bone. We also already had evidence that it induces bone regeneration. With time, it will completely fuse with the real bone.”

Bone replacement is crucial for treating various conditions when bones cannot self-repair. These include severe breaks, bone cancer and degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis.

Rattan bones could be especially important for replacing large chunks of bone — three centimetres or more — for which existing bone substitutes are unsuitable, the team found. In time, rattan grafts are replaced with newly formed bone without needing further surgery, making it a cheaper and less-invasive choice for long-term treatment, the researchers say.

Pilot studies by Tampieri’s team showed evidence of full integration with real bone and no signs of rattan bones being rejected or leading to infection.
http://www.scidev.net/global/r-d/news/rattan-wood-bone-implants-nea...

http://www.inbar.int/forest-femur

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446637.stm

The 2014 hypertension guidelines: implications for patients and practitioners in Asia
Hypertension is a global public health issue and a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Because of population growth and ageing, the number of people with uncontrolled hypertension rose from 600 million in 1980 to nearly 1 billion in 2008. Furthermore, the number of adults with hypertension in 2025 has also been predicted to increase by about 60% to a total of 1.56 billion. The prevalence of hypertension in most Asian countries has increased over the last 30 years and more dramatically in the last 10 years. Several factors contributed to such changes in Asia, but acculturation to Western lifestyle, modernisation and urbanisation are considered key contributing factors. There are some unique features in regards to cardiovascular risk in Asia. Specifically, Asian regions have disproportionately higher mortality and morbidity from stroke compared with Western countries. Furthermore, the relationship between blood pressure level and risk of stroke is stronger in Asia than in Western regions. Although evidence-based and qualified guidelines for hypertension diagnosis and management have been released recently from Europe and North America, the unique features of Asian patients with hypertension raise concerns in regards to the real clinical applicability of Western guidelines in Asian populations. Specifically, it is not yet clear to what extent the new blood pressure target proposed by Western guidelines for high risk and elderly hypertensive individuals apply to Asian populations.
European and North American blood pressure guidelines, issued last year, may actually boost the stroke risk if used for Asian patients, particularly the elderly, suggested an expert opinion published online in Heart Asia. High blood pressure is a key risk factor for stroke, but the link between the two is much stronger in Asians than it is in Europeans or North Americans, said the experts. The global number of people with poorly controlled high blood pressure has risen from 600 million in 1980 to almost 1 billion in 2008, and predicted to rise a further 60 percent to 1.56 billion by 2025. The prevalence of high blood pressure in Asian countries has risen sharply in the past 30 years, and particularly over the past decade, as a result of increasing urbanization and the adoption of a Western lifestyle. High blood pressure among Asian populations has unique features in terms of the response to drug treatment, risk of complications, and outcomes, say the authors. This leads to disproportionately high rates of death and ill health from stroke compared with Western populations. “Although evidence-based and qualified guidelines have been recently released from Europe and North America, the unique features of Asian hypertensive patients raise concerns on the real clinical applicability of these guidelines to Asian populations,” wrote the authors. The latest Western guidelines increased target blood pressure to 140/90 mmHg for patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease and renal failure, but this may be too high for Asian populations warn, the authors. Some Asian guidelines have recommended more stringent targets in these patients, they said. Treating high blood pressure in elderly Asian patients is particularly challenging, they said. And the threshold for systolic blood pressure recommended by Western guidelines could boost the risk of stroke in these patients. A threshold below 140/90 mmHg might be more appropriate, they suggest. “The paucity of data on the correct definition of the most appropriate [blood pressure] target in elderly patients, highlighted by the few available trials, should be perceived as a stimulus for future research in Asia, not as an argument for questioning the benefit of treatment,” the researchers wrote.
http://heartasia.bmj.com/content/7/2/21

Molecule that improves learning capabilities has been identified

Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific Director at the Imagination Ins... from Quiet on Vimeo.

There’s only so much brainpower to go around, and when the eyes hog it all, the ears suffer. When challenged with a tough visual task, people are less likely to perceive a tone, scientists report in the Dec. 9 Journal of Neuroscience. The results help explain what parents of screen-obsessed teenagers already know. For the study, people heard a tone while searching for a letter on a computer screen. When the letter was easy to find, participants were pretty good at identifying a tone. But when the search got harder, people were less likely to report hearing the sound, a phenomenon called inattentional deafness. Neural responses to the tone were blunted when people worked on a hard visual task, but not when the visual task was easy, researchers found. By showing that a demanding visual job can siphon resources away from hearing, the results suggest that perceptual overload can jump between senses.

We welcome climate pact to battle global warming at Paris.

The new accord, embraced by 195 nations, aims to cap warming to "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, and to "pursue efforts" to limit the increase to 1.5C.

But according to scientists ... this ambitious temperature goal is not matched by an equally ambitious mitigation goal - the scientific term for the drawing-down of heat-trapping gases.

To have a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to two degrees, emissions would have to fall by 40-70 percent by mid-century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN`s climate science body.

And to reach the 1.5C target also embraced in the newborn pact, those mid-century cuts would have to be even deeper: 70 to 95 percent.

Without these hard numbers -- dropped from an earlier draft -- the climate pact does not send a clear signal about the level and timing of emissions cuts.

Many scientists highlighted the imbalance created by boosting the ambition of the temperature target on the one hand, while removing the yardsticks against which progress toward that goal could be measured, on the other. How are we going to reach our objective unless we set out in the right direction? What matters more is how to get to the target.

Until governments accept this, we should restrain our optimism.

Scientific reality is unyielding. Stabilising greenhouse gases "in the second half of this century will require net carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced, in effect, to zero! scientists voiced concern about the fact that the new accord allows several years to pass before ramping up emissions reduction efforts.

We can`t wait until 2020 -- acting before then is essential, we have to be very pro-active, according to climate scientists.

Here is some interesting news: We all know that female mosquitoes spread diseases while having their meals. But you can avoid them in certain conditions. One of is to understand and follow their behaviour ...

A temperature-sensitive receptor prevents mosquitoes from being attracted to targets that are hotter than a potential host. Yes, true!

From warm summer days to cold winter nights, temperature is a ubiquitous sensory stimulus. All animals rely on their ability to detect environmental temperatures to avoid harm and to seek out more optimal conditions. Some animals, such as mosquitoes, also use their temperature sensors for a more nefarious purpose: to locate warm prey for a blood meal. Roman Corfas and Leslie Vosshall (e-Life) from Rockefeller University recently reported on the molecular basis of temperature-sensing behavior in Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads yellow fever. They have shown how avoiding high temperatures can stop these insects from being attracted to targets that are too hot to represent a suitable host: in other words, while these mosquitoes like it hot, they don’t like it too hot.

Molecular receptors  guide the movements of some in the animal world like fruit flies and mosquitoes. In the malaria-spreading mosquito Anopheles gambiae, TRPA1 is expressed at the tips of the antennae. The tip of a mosquito antenna houses very sensitive thermoreceptors that could help drive host-seeking behavior.

Female mosquitoes normally prefer temperatures around 23°C. However, a puff of carbon dioxide (which could indicate that a metabolically active host is nearby) drives the mosquitoes to seek out temperatures that are closer to the body temperature of a mammal or bird (that is, between about 37°C and 43°C).  Corfas and Vosshall started by further characterizing this heat-seeking behavior. They found that mosquitoes were strongly attracted to a target when it was heated to temperatures above ambient, but only up to ~50°C. When it got hotter, this attraction declined strongly.

To probe the molecular mechanisms that might control this response, Corfas and Vosshall exploited genome-editing techniques to knock out the genes for GR19 and TRPA1 in A. aegypti. They found that mosquitoes lacking GR19 behaved like wild type mosquitoes and showed normal responses to heat. However, mosquitoes without TRPA1 continued to be attracted to the target even when its temperature reached potentially harmful levels (> 50°C).

The ability of animals to avoid high temperatures is commonly viewed from the perspective of damage avoidance. This response could also help a heat-seeking mosquito to choose among multiple potential targets.

As mosquito-borne illnesses kill more than a million people every year, interventions that can reduce the spread of such diseases are crucial. It is hoped that an increased understanding of how mosquitoes target their hosts can help accelerate the development of new control strategies.

Source: eLife Sciences

The questions and problems climate meet threw at science...

Climate agreement reached by various Governments in Paris raises some interesting questions for scientists as to how we can achieve this: how much do we need to cut global greenhouse gas emissions? How quickly do we need to make those cuts? What else might we need to do to be able to keep warming to 1.5 °C – for example, would we need to develop technologies that actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere? If temperatures overshot 1.5 °C and then reduced to 1.5 °C, would sea level also overshoot and then reduce?

To answer these questions more precisely will require scientists to get an even more detailed understanding of how sensitive our climate is to CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Key to this will be improving understanding of what we call ‘Earth system feedbacks’. These are natural feedback processes which could either increase or decrease the amount of warming we might expect in response to a given amount of greenhouse gases. For example, we know that there are stores of greenhouse gases ‘locked away’ under frozen ground (permafrost) in some parts of the world, such as northern  Russia. If that permafrost melts due to climate change, the gases would be released – which could further increase warming.

Scientists around the world are already working on providing answers to these questions by developing a new breed of ‘Earth System Models’ (essentially complex simulations of our planet run on powerful supercomputers), which take more of these feedback processes into account, and so will help inform planning of emissions to achieve the warming targets agreed in Paris.

Whether we limit warming to 2 °C or 1.5 °C, it’s clear we can expect some further change to our global climate over the coming decades. Research shows us that this will lead to some impacts and it’s vital that we understand in more detail what this means at a regional and local level.

For example, research tells us that some parts of the world can expect more extreme weather – including heat waves and increases in extreme rainfall. For those planning everything from future homes, to flood defences, to vital infrastructure, the detail on what to expect is essential.

Again, these are questions which science is already working to answer by harnessing new research and ever more powerful supercomputing technology. 

There’s still much more work to do in this area and it will be vital that the information generated by this research is presented in a way that allows everyone to make informed decisions about how we can become more resilient to our climate – whatever changes we can expect.

*There’s a lot of scientific debate about exactly what ‘pre-industrial levels’ means and how you would measure that, but here we use the average of temperatures during the period 1850-1899 as our representation.

- blog.metoffice.gov.uk