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

Researchers have established that variation of a gene may help protect cancer patients from developing chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment, commonly known as ‘chemofog’ or ‘chemobrain.’ Early-stage breast cancer patients who carry a specific variation of the brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene are less likely to develop cognitive impairment after undergoing chemotherapy, according to the findings published in Neuro-Oncology. The BDNF gene is responsible for producing a protein that controls the growth and function of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Studies have shown that a reduction in blood level of BDNF—due to variation in the BDNF gene—is associated with cognitive impairment in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other neuropsychological disorders. The finding, from a recent study led by Associate Professor Alexandre Chan and PhD candidate Mr. Terence Ng from the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Department of Pharmacy, is the first time that the BDNF gene has been associated with cognitive changes in cancer patients.
The discovery can help researchers better understand the underlying mechanisms that lead to the development of this chemotherapy-induced side effect.
Background Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a neurotrophin that regulates neuronal function and development, is implicated in several neurodegenerative conditions. Preliminary data suggest that a reduction of BDNF concentrations may lead to postchemotherapy cognitive impairment. The researchers hypothesized that a single nucleotide polymorphism (rs6265) of the BDNF gene may predispose patients to cognitive impairment. This study was aimed to evaluate the effect of BDNF gene polymorphism on chemotherapy-associated cognitive impairment.
http://neuro-oncology.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/08/18/n...

Pesticide In Milk Associated With Parkinson’s Disease: Exposure to a pineapple pesticide via milk intake has been linked to an increased incidence of Parkinson’s in Japanese men.
A pesticide used prior to the early 1980s and found in milk at that time may be associated with signs of Parkinson's disease in the brain, according to a study published in Neurology.
For the study, 449 Japanese-American men with an average age of 54 who participated in the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study were followed for more than 30 years and until death, after which autopsies were performed. Tests looked at whether participants had lost brain cells in the substantia nigra area of the brain, which occurs in Parkinson's disease and can start decades before any symptoms begin. Researchers also measured in 116 brains the amount of residue of a pesticide called heptachlor epoxide. The pesticide was found at very high levels in the milk supply in the early 1980s in Hawaii, where it was used in the pineapple industry. It was used to kill insects and was removed from use in the US around that time. The pesticide may also be found in well water. The study found that non-smokers who drank more than two cups of milk per day had 40 percent fewer brain cells in that area of the brain than people who drank less than two cups of milk per day. For those who were smokers at any point, there was no association between milk intake and loss of brain cells. Previous studies have shown that people who smoke have a lower risk of developing Parkinson's disease. Residues of heptachlor epoxide were found in 90 percent of people who drank the most milk, compared to 63 percent of those who did not drink any milk. Abbott noted that the researchers do not have evidence that the milk participants drank contained heptachlor epoxide. He also stated that the study does not show that the pesticide or milk intake cause Parkinson's disease; it only shows an association.
http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2015/12/09/WNL.0000000000002254

Arsenic release metabolically limited to permanently water-saturated soil
Scientists have solved the mystery of where the microbes responsible for releasing dangerous arsenic into groundwater in Southeast Asia get their food. Their findings, published Nature Geosciences, could guide future land management and future development. Groundwater in South and Southeast Asia commonly contains concentrations of arsenic 20 to 100 times greater than the World Health Organization's recommended limit, resulting in more than 100 million people being poisoned by drinking arsenic-laced water in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Vietnam and China. Arsenic is bound to iron oxide compounds in rocks from the Himalayas, and gets washed down the major rivers and deposited in the lowland basins and deltas. Scientists know that in the absence of oxygen, some bacteria living in those deposited sediments can use arsenic and iron oxide particles as an alternative means of respiration. When they do this, however, the microbes separate the arsenic and iron oxides and transfer the toxin into underlying groundwater. The mystery in this system, though, is an obvious source of energy that the microbes can tap to fuel the separation process.
The scientists hypothesized that bacteria residing in the shallow layers of seasonal wetlands were eating all of the digestible plant material during dry periods, when sediments are exposed to air and the microbes have access to oxygen. As a result, no food is left for the microbes when the floods returned, rendering them unable to cleave arsenic particles from iron oxides.
The same experiment repeated with samples taken from about 100 feet underground—the depth of most drinking wells in Asia—showed that bacteria living deep beneath permanent and seasonal wetlands are similarly limited and and do not release arsenic into groundwater under normal conditions. The careful sleuthing has identified the bacteria in the permanent wetlands as the primary culprit of arsenic release. The work suggests that, under normal conditions, microbes in seasonal wetlands don't pose a significant threat for adding arsenic to groundwater. But what if the conditions changed ?
To answer this question, the team conducted a second type of experiment, in which they simulated the conversion of a small, remote seasonal wetland into a permanent one by digging out a seasonal wetland plot and keeping it permanently filled with water. As predicted, this resulted in the release of arsenic. (The amount was small and transient and people were never threatened by the experiment.) The findings have large-scale implications for projecting changes in arsenic concentrations with land development in South and Southeast Asia and for the terrestrial carbon cycle.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2589.html

The route followed by Hepatitis C to escape our Immune System :
A high proportion of hepatitis C-infected individuals develop chronic infections, suggesting that hepatitis C can subvert host antiviral responses.
The innate immune system, the body's first line of defence, is known to depend on the transcription factor nuclear factor κB (NF-κB). Its activation requires the ubiquitylation of upstream proteins including the adaptor protein NEMO (NF-κB essential modulator). Hepatitis C is one of many infectious pathogens that survive by inhibiting NF-κB signaling in host cells. Normally, the inflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) induces antiviral innate immune responses by stimulating NF-κB through a cascade of signaling events. However patients with chronic hepatitis C infections have increased serum amounts of TNF-α, but have ineffective immune responses due to the inhibited NF-κB activation. The researchers hypothesized that the inhibition of TNF-α–induced NF-κB activation might be mediated by a viral protein expressed during hepatitis C infection. They used a luciferase reporter assay to screen which viral protein suppresses TNF-α–induced NF-κB activation and found that NS3 was sufficient to block NF-κB signaling in cells. Co-immunoprecipitation and immunofluorescence staining experiments showed that NS3 directly interacted with the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex (LUBAC). More detailed domain mapping experiments showed that NS3 is bound to the ZnF-RBZ domain of HOIP (HOIL-1L–interacting protein; also known as RNF31), which is the same domain in LUBAC that binds to NEMO. To investigate the role of NS3 binding to HOIP, the researchers performed competitive coimmunoprecipitation experiments. They found that overexpression NS3 disrupted the interaction between HOIP and NEMO in a concentration-dependent manner. NS3 directly interacted with LUBAC, competed with NEMO for binding to LUBAC, and inhibited the LUBAC-mediated linear ubiquitylation of NEMO as well as the subsequent activation of NF-κB. The results highlight a novel immune evasion strategy adopted by hepatitis C to modulate host antiviral responses and enhance virus survival and persistence.
http://stke.sciencemag.org/content/8/403/ra118

Dead people tell no tales — but dead people’s microbes do.

Bacteria, fungi and worms living in the soil beneath a decomposing body can help reveal the time — and place — of death, scientists report December 10 in Science.

Researchers have tracked the comings and goings of cadaver microbes before, but the new study is the most comprehensive survey yet. For months, microbial ecologist Jessica Metcalf of the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues tallied up microbes on and near dead mice and humans.

As bodies decayed, similar microbes cropped up like clockwork, even on different soil types and during different seasons of the year, the team found. The microbes were so predictable that researchers could estimate the time of death (within a few days) of a body that had been dead for about a month.

And because telltale microbes stayed in the soil long after a body had been moved, they could offer investigators clues about potential crime scenes, the team suggests.

 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/12/09/science.aad2646

What causes changes in speed of Earth's rotation? Rising sea levels!

The connection is through the change in the speed of Earth’s rotation. Meltwater from glaciers not only causes sea levels to rise, but also shifts mass from the pole to the equator, which slows down the rotation. (Picture the Earth as a spinning figure skater. The skater moves his or her arms in to spin more quickly or out to slow down.) The gravity pull from the Moon also contributes to the slowdown, acting a little like a lever brake. However, the combination of these effects is not enough to explain the observations of the slowing down of Earth’s rotation: a contribution from Earth’s core must be added.

Over the past 3,000 years, the core of the Earth has been speeding up a little, and the mantle-crust on which we stand is slowing down. As a consequence of Earth rotating more slowly, the length of our days is slowly increasing. In fact, a century from now, the length of a day will have increased by 1.7 milliseconds. This may not seem like much, but  note that this is a cumulative effect that adds up over time.

Based on their work reconciling these discrepancies, the scientists involved in the study are confident in predicting sea levels to the end of the 21^st century. This can help to better prepare coastal towns, for example, to cope with climate change.

The findings, “Reconciling past changes in Earth’s rotation with 20^th century global sea-level rise: Resolving Munk’s enigma,” were published in the Dec. 11 issue of the journal Science Advances.

The lead author of the study is Mathieu Dumberry, a professor in the Dept. of Physics  at the University of Alberta.

Confirmation bias is bad for science. For example consider this conversation between an alchemist and  a scientist:

Alchemist: "Hoo doo woodoo doo!" (Mixes an element to form a compound while waving his hands mystically)

Scientist: "What're you doing?"

Alchemist: "I'm making a healing salve."

Scientist: "You don't need to wave your arms about, mixing those chemicals is all you need to do to make a local anaesthetic."

Alchemist: "But I waved my arms and it worked!"

Scientist: "Really?"

Alchemist: "Yes, my waving hands has magical influence that makes the drug work!"

Scientist: This is ignorance at its best!

This is what we call confirmation bias. We look for the things that fit our idea of how things work.

This year's top science stories:

1. Gene-editing; why? Read it here:

http://kkartlab.in/group/some-science/forum/topics/crispr-cas9-gene...

2. Biological aging; why?

A study, out of Duke University, analyzed the health of nearly one thousand 38-year-olds and found that some resembled people a decade older while others appeared years younger. Researchers determined this “biological age” based on health indicators such as body mass index, blood pressure and cholesterol level. The finding tapped into a mystery that has long captivated scientists and the public alike — “why some people can live to 120 with no disease, and others are already in bad shape at age 70”.

3. Irreproducibility problem; why?

Because scientists understood the problem and are trying to rectify it.

Experimental results that don’t hold up to replication have caused consternation among scientists for years, especially in the life and social sciences. In 2015 several research groups examining the issue reported on the magnitude of the irreproducibility problem. The news was not good.

Results from only 35 of 97 psychology experiments published in three major journals in 2008 could be replicated, researchers reported in August. The tumor-shrinking ability of the cancer drug sunitinib was overestimated by 45 percent on average, an analysis published in October showed . And a report in June found that, in the United States alone, an estimated $28 billion is spent annually on life sciences research that can’t be reproduced .

There are many possible reasons for the problem, including pressure to publish, data omission and contamination of cell cultures. Faulty statistics are another major source of irreproducibility, and several prominent scientific journals have set guidelines for how statistical analyses should be conducted. Very large datasets, which have become common in genetics and other fields, present their own challenges: Different analytic methods can produce widely different results, and the sheer size of big data studies makes replication difficult.

Perfect reproductions might never be possible in biology and psychology, where variability among and between people, lab animals and cells, as well as unknown variables, influences the results. But several groups, including the Science Exchange and the Center for Open Science, are leading efforts to replicate psychology and cancer studies to pinpoint major sources of irreproducibility.

Although there is no consensus on how to solve the problem, suggestions include improving training for young scientists, describing methods more completely in published papers and making all data and reagents available for repeat experiments.

This year's top science stories:

4. Understanding why life got so complicated; why?

Microbes discovered in Arctic mud could be the closest relatives yet found to the single-celled ancestor that swallowed a bacterium and made life so complicated. Biologists have proposed that this swallowing event, perhaps 1.8 billion years ago, led to complex cells with membrane-wrapped organelles, the hallmark of all eukaryotes from amoebas to zebras.

Researchers discovered the new phylum of microbes, dubbed Lokiarchaeota, by screening DNA from sediment . Though no one has identified an actual cell yet, the new phylum appears to mingle genes similar to those in modern eukaryotes and genes from archaea, the sister group to bacteria. Analyses suggest the cells have dynamic structures that could have engulfed bacteria long ago. (Biologists have proposed representing that merger as a ring of life, rather than a tree.) What happened next in the tale is clearer but still a puzzle.

5. New light on Quantum Spookiness; Why?

Some loopholes no longer plague a crucial test for assessing the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Experiments reported in 2015 definitively demonstrate that the quantum world violates locality, the principle that events sufficiently separated in spacetime must be independent.

European researchers this year performed an experiment with electrons on opposite sides of a university campus, nearly 1.3 kilometers apart. In trials lasting 18 days, the team coaxed the electrons into an entangled state 245 times, reliably measuring the electrons’ spins every time. The results showed a clear nonlocal connection.

6. Epigenome effect; Why?

This yea,r Researchers cataloged how chemical modifications fold, compress and unwind the static DNA over time and how those modifications control when genes are on or off. The researchers cataloged epigenetic marks — chemical modifications either of DNA itself or proteins called histones — in more than 100 types of human cells. The epic effort revealed that gene variants associated with Alzheimer’s disease are more active in immune cells in the brain than in nerve cells as researchers had assumed. Another interesting aspect of this research:Tightly packed areas of the genome are more vulnerable to cancer-causing mutations.

Researchers using data from this project and other efforts to view the genome in 3-D have made startling discoveries . For instance, researchers found that a gene called FTO, thought to be a major genetic contributor to obesity, isn’t involved in fat production. Instead, a genetic variant hiding in the gene’s vicinity actually determines what type of fat the body builds . Disorganized DNA may be a cause of aging, researchers also discovered .

This year's top science stories:

7. The discovery that Alzheimer's protein behaves like a prion; Why?

Under some conditions, an Alzheimer’s-related protein may have jumped between people, scientists reported this year. If true, that observation, the first of its kind, could recast the way scientists view the disease.

Scientists already had hints that the protein in question, amyloid-beta, behaves like an infectious prion, a misshapen protein that coaxes other proteins to misfold and spread from cell to cell. In a study reported in Nature, Collinge and colleagues found A-beta buildup in four of eight postmortem brains from people who had received growth hormone injections derived from cadavers. Because A-beta buildup is rare in relatively young people — all were between the ages of 36 and 51 — the finding suggests that the buildup might have been seeded by growth hormone contaminated with A-beta.

This result adds to evidence that prions may be behind Alzheimer’s disease as well as other neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. But some scientists caution that it’s too soon to label these disorders as prion diseases.

8. The genetics of cancer; Why?

Personalized genomics has been heralded as the next big weapon in the war on cancer. But researchers analyzing various tissue types this year, looking for mutations linked to the disease, have found that not all genetic alterations should be targeted equally.

Genetic profiles of tumors offer unprecedented opportunities for both cancer diagnostics and for doctors planning treatment. Bowel cancer tumors with mutations in the KRAS gene, for example, respond poorly to the drug cetuximab; the skin cancer drug vemurafenib works only if melanomas have a particular mutation in the BRAF gene.

But such genetic testing can be misleading if it isn’t conducted alongside tests of healthy cells from the same person. A vast analysis comparing the genetic profiles of tumors and normal tissue of more than 800 cancer patients  found that nearly two-thirds of mutations in the studied tumors — many of which might be used to guide treatment — also showed up in patients’ healthy tissues . For those patients, the mutations were probably just benign variants unrelated to the cancer. Analyzing healthy tissue can also reveal whether mutations found in tumors are heritable or not, scientists say, which is important for deciding whether a cancer patient’s family should receive genetic counseling.

Complicating matters further is the fact that even mutations that have been linked to cancer will not always manifest as cancer. A study published in May examining eyelid skin discovered numerous cancer-associated mutations in normal, healthy patches of the skin . Detecting these mutations might lead to great anxiety and unnecessary, sometimes invasive treatments.As genetic testing of tumors becomes more widespread, best practices will emerge, as will a better understanding of the disease. Therefore, scientists working in the field are trying to change the way we look at cancer.

Here is some good news for science communicators:

Stephen Hawking launches medal for science communication

Renowned British cosmologist Stephen Hawking on Wednesday launched an award for science communication that will bear his name.

The "Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication" will be awarded to those who help promote science to the public through media such as cinema, music, writing and art.

"People worldwide display an incredible appetite of scientific information... The public want to know, they want to understand."

The first medals will be awarded next summer in three different categories: the scientific, artistic and film communities.

The winners will be announced at the Starmus Festival, a gathering celebrating art and science in Spain's Canary Islands that will take place from June 27 to July 2 next year.

Microbial community assembly and metabolic function during mammalian corpse decomposition

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/12/09/science.aad2646

You are filled with bacteria, and you are covered in them. And a whole lot of them are just waiting for you to drop dead.

As soon as you die, they’ll swoop in. This week, we learned exactly how microbes chow down on us. A brave and strong-stomached team of scientists spent months watching dead bodies decompose, tracking all the bacteria, fungi, and worms, day by day. Forensic scientists can use this timeline, published in Science, to help determine time—and even place—of death.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/12/youre-surrounded...

Why some animals, especially those people consume contain mercury?

Here is the answer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Science News. org

HIV antibody infusion safely suppresses virus in infected people

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

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

- Sciencecodex.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decreased dissolved oxygen is 0 to 1.06 parts per million

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

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

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

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

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

Graphene shows promise to efficiently filter nuclear waste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can plants grow in space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How planet X was found...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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