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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Wieringa, French Research Institute for Development

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

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

Cyanobacteria use micro-optics to sense light direction

Biologists say they have solved the riddle of how a tiny bacterium senses light and moves towards it: the entire organism acts like an eyeball.
In a single-celled pond slime, they observed how incoming rays are bent by the bug's spherical surface and focused in a spot on the far side of the cell.
By shuffling along in the opposite direction to that bright spot, the microbe then moves towards the light.
Other scientists were surprised and impressed by this "elegant" discovery.
Despite being just three micrometres (0.003mm) in diameter, the bacteria in the study use the same physical principles as the eye of a camera or a human.
This makes them "probably the world's smallest and oldest example" of such a lens, the researchers write in the journal eLife.
Cyanobacteria, including the Synechocystis species used in the study, are an ancient and abundant lifeform. They live in water and get their energy from photosynthesis - which explains their enthusiasm for bright light.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e12620

http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e14169?utm_source=content_alert&...

Steady streams of tiny plastic pieces making their way into the ocean give microbial squatters a place to take up residence. Each plastic home comes equipped with a solid surface to live on in an otherwise watery world. These floating synthetic dwellings and their microbial inhabitants have a name: the plastisphere.
Plastic particles, in concentrations averaging 3500 pieces and 290 grams per square kilometer, are widespread in the western Sargasso Sea. Pieces are brittle, apparently due to the weathering of the plasticizers, and many are in a pellet shape about 0.25 to 0.5 centimeters in diameter. The particles are surfaces for the attachment of diatoms and hydroids. Increasing production of plastics, combined with present waste-disposal practices, will undoubtedly lead to increases in the concentration of these particles. Plastics could be a source of some of the polychlorinated biphenyls recently observed in oceanic organisms.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/175/4027/1240.abstract

Microbes of the plastisphere live in waters from Australia to Europe. They differ by location, are as varied as the plastic they live on and can be a tasty food option for other creatures. What impact — good or bad — the microbe-covered plastic has on the oceans is still in question. Early hints suggest that there may be climate effects and unexpected movement of harmful microbes or other creatures to new destinations. Each study sparks new ideas and new theories.
More recent estimates put the amount of plastic floating in the world’s oceans at more than 5.25 trillion pieces, weighing more than 268,000 metric tons (SN: 1/24/15, p. 4). That translates to as much as 100,000 pieces per square kilometer in some areas of the ocean.
These microplastics are no bigger than 5 millimeters across and come from many sources. Some are broken bits of larger plastic pieces. Others, such as synthetic fibers from clothing and plastic beads from toothpastes and face washes, escape cleaning filters at wastewater treatment plants and end up in the ocean.
- Science News

Vinegar is the perfect ingredient for making tangy sauces and dressings. Now, researchers report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that the popular liquid could also help fight ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that research suggests is related to the gut microbiome. They found that vinegar suppressed inflammation-inducing proteins while improving the gut's bacterial makeup in mice.
Ulcerative colitis is a chronic condition that affects millions of people around the world. Although its cause isn't completely understood, research suggests that bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract play an important part. People with the condition experience repeated inflammation of the large intestine's lining, which can cause ulcers, abdominal pain, diarrhea and other symptoms. At least one recent study suggested that vinegar, which has been used in traditional medicine for centuries, might be effective against ulcerative colitis.
The researchers tested vinegar and its main ingredient, acetic acid, in a mouse model of ulcerative colitis. Giving the mice either substance by adding it in small amounts to their drinking water significantly reduced symptoms of the condition. An analysis of mouse stool samples showed that treated animals had higher levels of bacteria, such as Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria. Other studies have found these bacteria to be beneficial to mice with colitis-like symptoms. Treatment also lowered the levels of proteins that induce potentially damaging inflammation in the gut. The researchers say further work would be needed to determine vinegar's effects on ulcerative colitis in humans.

WORLD, WE HAVE DETECTED GRAVITATIONAL WAVES! 

After 100 years of searching, an international team of physicists has confirmed the existence of Einstein's gravitational waves, marking one of the biggest astrophysical discoveries of the past century. It's a huge deal, because it not only improves our understanding of how the Universe works, it also opens up a whole new way of studying it.

The gravitational wave signal was detected by physicists at LIGO on September 14 last year, and the historic announcement was made at a press conference on 11th Feb., 2016.

Gravitational waves are so exciting because they were the last major prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity that had to be confirmed, and discovering them will help us understand how the Universe is shaped by mass.

Gravitational waves are akin to sound waves that travelled through space at the speed of light. What does that mean for us? Now that we can detect gravitational waves, we're going to have a whole new way to see and study the Universe. 

According to Einstein's theory, the fabric of space-time can become curved by anything massive in the Universe. When cataclysmic events happen, such as black holes merging or stars exploding, these curves can ripple out elsewhere as gravitational waves, just like if someone had dropped a stone in a pond.

By the time those ripples get to us on Earth, they're tiny (around a billionth of the diameter of an atom), which is why scientists have struggled for so many years to find them.

But thanks to LIGO - the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory - we've finally been able to detect them. The LIGO laboratory works by bouncing lasers back and forth in two 4-km-long pipes, allowing physicists to measure incredibly small changes in spacetime.

One 14 September 2015, they picked up a relatively big change in their Livingston lab in Louisiana, what you'd call a blip in the system. Then, 7 milliseconds later, they detected the same blip with their lab in Hanford, Washington, 4,000 km away, suggesting that it had been caused by a gravitational wave passing through Earth. 

In the months since, researchers have been rigorously studying this signal to see if it could have been caused by anything else. But the overwhelming conclusion is that the blip was caused by gravitational waves - the discovery has statistical significant of 5.1 sigma, which means there's only a 1 in 6 million chance that the result is a fluke.

In fact, the signal almost perfectly matches up with what scientists predicted gravitational waves would look like, based on Einstein's theory. 

So where did this gravitational wave come from? The physicists were able to trace the signal back to the merging of two black holes around 1.3 billion years ago. 

This event - which in itself is a big deal, seeing as no one had ever spotted a binary black hole merger before - was so massive that it significantly warped the fabric of space time, creating ripples that spread out across the Universe... finally reaching us last year.

But this is just the beginning of what gravitational waves can teach us - several other gravitational wave observatories and detectors are scheduled to come online in the next five years, and they'll allow us to more sensitively detect gravitational radiation.

This initiates a new phase in the exploration of the universe and in our search for the physical laws that govern it.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/17

Gravitational Waves:

There are 100,000 chemicals in products we use every day but we are missing 90 percent of the safety information we need! All that is going to change now.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have created a map of the world's chemical landscape, a catalogue of 10,000 chemicals for which there is available safety data that they say can predict the toxicity of many of the 90,000 or more other substances in consumer products for which there is no such information.
The map, described online Feb. 12 in the journal Alternatives to Animal Experiments and being presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference the same day in Washington, DC, was designed to help regulators, manufacturers and scientists get a good idea about whether chemicals for which there is little research are harmful or not. The research was done by creating a searchable database of the 816,000 research studies conducted on 10,000 chemicals registered in Europe, which includes information about whether they pose a hazard to humans and what type.
It would take billions of dollars to test every one of them which is very cost prohibitive. To address this, scientists have come up with a computer model that can tell us which chemicals are similar to untested ones to give us an idea of what types of hazards they are likely to pose.
http://caat.jhsph.edu/

Reducing drug experiments with human beings with the help of Robots...
Researchers, including an Indian-origin scientist, have created a robotically-driven experimentation system to determine the effects of a large number of drugs on many proteins, reducing the number of necessary experiments by as much as 70 percent.

"Biomedical scientists have invested a lot of effort in making it easier to perform numerous experiments quickly and cheaply," said lead author Armaghan Naik from Carnegie Mellon University's computational biology department.

"However, we simply cannot perform an experiment for every possible combination of biological conditions, such as genetic mutation and cell type. Researchers have, therefore, had to choose a few conditions or targets to test exhaustively, or pick experiments themselves. The question is which experiments do you pick," Naik added.

For this, Naik's team previously described the application of a machine learning approach called "active learning".

This involved a computer repeatedly choosing which experiments to do, in order to learn efficiently from the patterns it observed in the data.

While their approach had only been tested using synthetic or previously acquired data, the team's current model builds on this by letting the computer choose which experiments to do.

The experiments were then carried out using liquid-handling robots and an automated microscope. As the system progressively performed the experiments, it identified more phenotypes and more patterns in how sets of proteins were affected by sets of drugs.

The model was recently presented in the journal eLife.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10047v1

Honda Motor India has announced the ninth Young Engineers and Scientists’ (Y-E-S) awards for 2015 in India. The Young Engineers and Scientists’ Award were presented to 14 students from India’s premier institutes for science and technology – the Indian Institute of Technology. The Y-E-S awards were instituted by Honda Foundation in India in 2008 to encourage and support young Indian engineers and scientists.

Meeting humanity’s increasing demand for freshwater and protecting ecosystems at the same time, thus maintaining blue water footprints within maximum sustainable levels per catchment, will be one of the most difficult and important challenges of this century

                                               *************

IRRI scientists' breakthrough may usher 'green revolution'
Rice-growing techniques learned through thousands of years of trial and error are about to be charged with DNA technology in a breakthrough hailed by scientists as a potential second "green revolution".
Over the next few years farmers are expected to have new genome sequencing technology at their disposal, helping to offset a myriad of problems that threaten to curtail production of the grain that feeds half of humanity.
Drawing on a massive bank of varieties stored in the Philippines and state-of-the-art Chinese technology, scientists recently completed the DNA sequencing of more than 3,000 of the world's most significant types of rice.
With the huge pool of data unlocked, rice breeders will soon be able to produce higher-yielding varieties much more quickly and under increasingly stressful conditions, scientists involved with the project said.
Since rice was first domesticated thousands of years ago, farmers have improved yields through various planting techniques.
For the past century breeders have isolated traits, such as high yields and disease resistance, then developed them through cross breeding.
However, they did not know which genes controlled which traits, leaving much of the effort to lengthy guesswork.
The latest breakthroughs in molecular genetics promise to fast-track the process, eliminating much of the mystery, according to scientists involved in the project.
Better rice varieties can now be expected to be developed and passed on to farmers' hands in less than three years, compared with 12 without the guidance of DNA sequencing.
Genome sequencing involves decoding DNA, the hereditary material of all living cells and organisms. The process roughly compares with solving a giant jigsaw puzzle made up of billions of microscopic pieces.
A multinational team undertook the four-year project with the DNA decoding primarily in China by BGI, the world's biggest genome sequencing firm.

The reason for hair loss identified
Hair follicle aging is driven by transepidermal elimination of stem cells...
Japanese researchers have identified that DNA damage to stem cells in the hair follicles turns them into skin cells which subsequently leave the scalp. These findings, published in Science, could potentially lead to new treatments for hair loss and other aging-associated diseases. The hair follicle is an epithelial mini-organ of the skin. As it ages, it naturally shrinks or miniaturizes, and its functions and regenerative ability decline. Hair follicles contain hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs) that activate in cyclical growth phases; the longer the growth phase, the longer the hair. While aging in organisms has been explained by various theories, not much is known about the role of stem cells in the organ aging process. Studying hair follicles as mini-organs, Professor Emi K. Nishimura and colleagues from the Department of Stem Cell Biology, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, set out to investigate the impact of aging on HFSCs, and if there was any link to aging-associated hair loss. In a study of wild-type mice models, they found that HFSCs accumulate DNA damage as they renew during repetitive hair cycles, leading to a breakdown of type XVII collagen (COL17A1) which is crucial for the maintenance of HFSCs. Once these aged HFSCs are activated during the hair cycle, they eventually leave the follicle, turn into epidermal keratinocytes and are then eliminated from the skin surface. Then, to see if this was the same for humans as well, the team analyzed healthy human scalp skin from women at ages ranging from 22 to 70 years old. They found that human female scalps from the aged group (55 to 70 years old) contain significantly more miniaturized hair follicles compared with the younger group (35 to 45 years old). The team’s findings show that hair follicle aging is initially caused by DNA damage that accumulates in renewing HFSCs as they age. This thus leads to hair follicles in mammals miniaturizing and even disappearing from the skin, regardless of gender, in both mice and humans. It is worth noting that hair follicle aging is also linked to intrinsic genomic instability, as in the case of the genetic disorders such as progeria. Indeed, this dynamic hair follicle aging program is a good model of how different organs and tissue miniaturize and become less functional with age, the authors wrote.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6273/aad4395

Sex difference in pathology of the ageing gut mediates the greater response of female lifespan to dietary restriction
Women live on average longer than men, but have greater levels of late-life morbidity. Scientists have uncovered a substantial sex difference in the pathology of the ageing gut in Drosophila. The intestinal epithelium of the ageing female undergoes major deterioration, driven by intestinal stem cell (ISC) division, while lower ISC activity in males associates with delay or absence of pathology, and better barrier function, even at old ages. Males succumb to intestinal challenges to which females are resistant, associated with fewer proliferating ISCs, suggesting a trade-off between highly active repair mechanisms and late-life pathology in females. Dietary restriction reduces gut pathology in ageing females, and extends female lifespan more than male. By genetic sex reversal of a specific gut region, we induced female-like ageing pathologies in males, associated with decreased lifespan, but also with a greater increase in longevity in response to dietary restriction.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10956v1?utm_source=content_aler...

If you are highly goal oriented, your perception of the world changes to suit you! That is what  Dr. Jessica Witt of Colorado State University explained - how well you're performing affects your visual perception of the world around you, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

  According to her the ball actually looks bigger to higher hitters in baseball and the hole looks bigger to good golfers!! To see if athletes performing better really do perceive their environment differently, she went to softball games.

In her experiments with sports persons, she found that people who hit better selected a larger circle fromt eh circle she showed them, meaning the batters who were hitting better saw the ball as bigger. Which means not everyone sees the ball the same way. And it also means that what we see is affected by our ability to act. Performance impacts vision.

In other studies she found that golfers who putted better saw the hole as bigger than did poor putters. Faster swimmers saw targets underwater as being closer than did slower swimmers. And she had athletes who were not placekickers try to make field goals. The ones who did better saw the space between the uprights as wider. Bottom line:

“You don’t see the world the same as each other. You see the world in a way that’s unique to you, and it’s unique to your abilities.”

 ----

when traveling abroad, people often find local residents’ body odor particularly offensive. And mothers tend to believe that other infants smell far less appealing than their own. Now, in a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers has shown that the degree of disgust people find in others’ sweat may vary with group identification. In other words, disgust may depend on whether one considers the person they smell to be a member of their “in-group” or “out-group.”

Bad DNA can flout rules of inheritance :

R2d2 can quickly spread to an entire mouse population despite its evolutionary disadvantage

In living animals, a selfish bit of DNA called R2d2 is an outright lawbreaker. It violates laws of both genetic inheritance and Darwinian evolution. R2d2 can sweep through mouse populations by mimicking helpful mutations while actually damaging fertility, researchers report online February 15 inMolecular Biology and Evolution.

The new findings suggest that even genes that hurt an organism’s evolutionary chances can cheat their way to the top. That could be good news for researchers hoping to use engineered “gene drives” to eliminate mosquito-borne diseases and invasive species. But it’s also a cautionary tale for scientists looking for signs that natural selection has picked certain genes because they offer an evolutionary benefit.

If researchers aren’t careful, they may be hoodwinked into thinking that a selfish gene is one that has some evolutionary advantage. The genetic signatures are the same. But what looks like survival of the fittest may actually be a cheater prospering. The selfish DNA could blaze through populations. The proportion of mice with the selfish gene more than tripled in one laboratory population from 18 percent to 62 percent within 13 generations, the researchers found. In another breeding population, R2d2 shot from being in 50 percent of the lab mice to 85 percent in 10 generations. By 15 generations, the selfish element reached “fixation” — all the mice in the population carried it.

Such wildfire spread of a gene variant that eventually wipes out all other versions is known as a selective sweep. Sweeps are hallmarks of a gene that helps an organism adapt to its environment. But this study suggests that what looks like adaptation may actually be selfish genetics at work.

R2d2 is a “selfish element,” a gene or other piece of DNA that causes itself to be inherited preferentially.

The droid’s namesake is a stretch of DNA on mouse chromosome 2 that contains multiple copies of the Cwc22 gene. When seven or more copies of that gene build up on the chromosome, R2d2 gets selfish. In female mice, it elbows aside the chromosome that doesn’t contain the selfish version of the gene and is preferentially incorporated into eggs. That’s a violation of the laws of inheritance spelled out by Gregor Mendel in which each gene or chromosome is supposed to have a fifty-fifty chance of being passed on to the next generation. But there is a cost to R2d2’s selfishness: Female mice that carry one copy of the selfish element have small litter sizes compared with mice that don’t carry the greedy DNA.

Under evolutionary laws, that loss of fertility should cause natural selection to weed outR2d2. But the selfish element’s greed is greater than the power of natural selection to combat it, the lab experiments show.

 The relatively low proportion of wild mice carrying R2d2 could mean that some mice have developed ways to suppress the gene’s selfishness.

- Sciencenews.org

Scientists telling politicians in the US why science is important...

Science is Universal. But people working in the field come from different countries. And when they try to publish papers in journals from the English-speaking areas using translators? Sometimes the matter get incorrect translation. And what if it raises a storm? That's what has happened when some Chinese researchers tried to publish a paper in #PLOSONE journal. 

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.01...

Instead of using the word "Nature" , the translator used the word "Creator". And English-speaking scientists objected to the word. This has turned into a tornado within no time on social media. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/paper-claiming-human-han...

https://twitter.com/search?q=creatorgate&src=typd

Big and small numbers are processed in different sides of the brain
Small numbers are processed in the right side of the brain, while large numbers are processed in the left side of the brain, new research suggests.The study, from scientists at Imperial College London, offers new insights into the mystery of how our brains handle numbers. The findings of the research, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, could in the future help to tailor rehabilitation techniques for patients who have suffered brain damage, such as stroke patients, and inform treatments for conditions such as dyscalculia, which causes difficulty in processing numbers.
The findings from the current study may help inform treatments for individuals who struggle to process numbers.

“The findings offer a starting point for unravelling how the brain handles and represents numbers – so-called numerical cognition. If we understand how numbers are processed we may be able to target treatments and rehabilitation therapies. The next stage is to examine how the brain handles large, complex calculations.”

Bidirectional Modulation of Numerical Magnitude. Qadeer Arshad, Yuliya Nigmatullina, Ramil Nigmatullin Paladd Asavarut, Usman Goga, Sarah Khan, Kaija Sander, Shuaib Siddiqui, R. E. Roberts, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Adolfo M. Bronstein and Paresh A. Malhotra. Cerebral Cortex, 2016, 1–14. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhv344

--

Ageing begins even before you are born

 3rd March, 2016

London, March 3 : The process of ageing begins even before we are born, says a new study, which used rats to model pregnancy and foetal development.

The study showed that providing mothers with a diet loaded with antioxidants during pregnancy meant that their offspring aged more slowly during adulthood.

The offspring of mothers with lower levels of oxygen in the womb can age more quickly in adulthood.

"Antioxidants are known to reduce ageing, but here, we show for the first time that giving them to pregnant mothers can slow down the ageing clock of their offspring," said first author Beth Allison from the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The study, published in The FASEB Journal, also emphasised that the environment we're exposed to in the womb may be just as, if not more, important in programming a risk of adult-onset of heart disease.

The researchers found that adult rats born from mothers who had less oxygen during pregnancy had shorter telomeres -- essential part of human cells that affects the age of cells -- than rats born from normal pregnancies.

The offsprings' also experienced problems with the inner lining of their blood vessels - revealing signs that they had aged more quickly and were prone to developing heart disease earlier than normal.

However, when pregnant mothers in the group were given antioxidant supplements, this lowered the risk among their offspring of developing heart disease, the researchers noted.

The foetus, which received appropriate levels of oxygen - benefiting from a maternal diet of antioxidants displayed longer telomeres than those rats whose mothers did not receive the antioxidant supplements during pregnancy.

Although conducted in rats, the research suggests that it might be applicable in humans and focuses the need for pregnant mothers to maintain a healthy lifestyle for the sake of their baby's future heart health, the researchers noted.

Selfishness in science is very bad . It robs the world of great relief, pain, benefits and many more. Here is an example...

The British atomic weapons establishment got a sample of Starlite, and their experiment showed that the material can withstood heat blast of even a 900 Kiloton nuke. (75 times more powerful blast than the Hiroshima bomb).

Just think about the application of this miracle paint. It could have used to make fire proof houses and cloths, it could have helped creating new age space capsules, it could be used to make heat insulating car engines. It could have revolutionized industrial sectors. The applications could have been limitless.

Unfortunately, the inventor did not want to make his formula a commercial product and wanted a 51% ownership of the product. Many interested parties including NASA approached him but could not make him agree on licensing of his invention.

Maurice Ward died in May 2011, and the formula was lost with him, forever. So far all attempts to re-create the formula have failed.

The widespread use of certain insecticides by farmers is making the chemicals less effective at fighting malaria-spreading mosquitoes, a paper shows.

The paper, which aggregated data on the issue from other studies, found a clear link between the use of pyrethroids as an agricultural pesticide in Africa and the resistance of Anopheles mosquitoes to this insecticide. These mosquitoes are the main malaria vector.

Resistance to pyrethroids was once confined to southern Africa, but had spread to Benin, Cameroon, Kenya and Uganda by 2014, the paper says.

“Whilst there is almost certainly a correlation between agricultural use of insecticides and insecticide resistance... I believe the majority of selection for resistance probably comes from the use of insecticides in vector control.”

Mark Hoppe, International Resistance Action Committee Pyrethroids are among the most common insecticides used for indoor spraying and bed net treatments against malaria mosquitoes, the authors say. The chemicals are valuable because they are considered safe for humans.

But the authors found low “kill rates” being reported from trials with pyrethroid-soaked bed nets in areas affected by pyrethroid resistance.
The paper, which was published in the March issue of Trends in Parasitology, recommends more research into alternative insecticides that rely on substances against which mosquitoes do not yet have resistance.

http://www.cell.com/trends/parasitology/abstract/S1471-4922(15)00254-8?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1471492215002548%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

You think good cholesterol or HDL cholesterol is good for your heart and go for it. You did a wise thing ... unless you have a rare mutation in a protein called SR-BI that binds to HDL cholesterol and triggers its movement from the blood into the liver.

Those who carried the mutations tended to have high HDL cholesterol levels in the blood. But they were also, paradoxically, at higher risk for coronary heart disease!

A study published on March 10 in Science, brought his to light.

The difference between correlation and causation makes for a more complicated conversation. 

Why do we change our decisions after taking them?

There are two schools of thought on this problem. One suggestion is that changes of mind happen because we continue to weigh evidence after a choice has been made . This process is called post-decision evidence accumulation. An alternative idea is that the brain uses additional mechanisms to detect and correct previous errors. Support for this theory comes from findings that show that error-related signals are produced in the medial frontal cortex of the human brain. People who have damage to the frontal regions of the brain are also unable to “self-monitor” and identify errors they have made without external feedback. Now a pair of studies in eLife provides the most detailed account yet of the mechanisms underpinning changes of mind – and together, they indicate that both ideas could be right.

Read about the studies here: http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e14790v1?utm_source=content_aler...

An Australian artist is the only confirmed tetrachromat in the world.

What does tetrachromat mean?

The human eye is packed with millions of cone-shaped cells that allow for color to be perceived. For those with normal vision, the three types of cones allow vision of about one million distinctive colors. Some animal species including certain birds, insects, fish, and reptiles, have a fourth type of cone cell that extends color perception into the UV range. Though evolution has mostly scrubbed that fourth cone from the mammalian lineage, there is evidence that a small group of humans may have a genetic variant that allows for tetrachromacy.

So, a tetrachromat would be able to see, roughly 100 times more colours than the average human!!

Quoting Concetta, "It’s shocking to me how little color people are seeing."

The fact she is the only person (or one of a few) who sees the world totally differently makes her amazingperson. When she looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a mosaic of color.”
She paints what she sees exactly. http://concettaantico.com/

where Concetta shows the world what she sees.

She conjures masterpieces in one sitting. All her paintings are insanely colorful,and feature shades you wouldn't expect to see."
The fact that we may never be able to see the world the way she does is saddening in a way.

Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying color information, or possessing four types of cone cells in the eye. Organisms with tetrachromacy are called tetrachromats.

In tetrachromatic organisms, the sensory color space is four-dimensional, meaning that to match the sensory effect of arbitrarily chosen spectra of light within their visible spectrum requires mixtures of at least four primary colors.

Tetrachromacy is demonstrated among several species of birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and insects. It was also the normal condition of most mammals in the past; a genetic change made the majority of species of this class eventually lose two of their four cones.

Using flashes of blue light, scientists have pulled forgotten memories out of the foggy brains of mice engineered to have signs of early Alzheimer’s disease. This memory rehab feat, described online March 16 in Nature, offers new clues about how the brain handles memories, and how that process can go awry.
To recover a lost memory, scientists first had to mark it. Neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa of MIT and colleagues devised a system that tagged the specific nerve cells that stored a memory — in this case, an association between a particular cage and a shock. A virus delivered a gene for a protein that allowed researchers to control this collection of memory-holding nerve cells. The genetic tweak caused these cells to fire off signals in response to blue laser light, letting Tonegawa and colleagues call up the memory with light delivered by an optic fiber implanted in the brain.

A day after receiving a shock in a particular cage, mice carrying two genes associated with Alzheimer’s seemed to have forgotten their ordeal; when put back in that cage, these mice didn’t seem as frightened as mice without the Alzheimer’s-related genes. But when the researchers used light to restore this frightening memory, it caused the mice to freeze in place in a different cage. (Freezing in a new venue showed that laser activation of the memory cells, and not environmental cues, caused the fear reaction.)

The fact that this memory could be pulled out with light helps clarify the source of memory trouble for people with Alzheimer’s. People in the early stages of the disease seem able to create new memories, but then rapidly forget them, he says. Memories can sometimes be strengthened with reminders and clues from the environment, suggesting that they are “somewhere in there,” but not retrievable.
Further experiments with the mice showed that the fear memory could be strengthened by forcing it to appear multiple times. This memory boot camp worked because it boosted the number of docking sites on memory-holding nerve cells in the mice with Alzheimer’s-related genes. Usually, these docking sites — knobs called dendritic spines that receive messages from other nerve cells — become scarcer with age. To counter that, Tonegawa and colleagues used light to repeatedly activate nerve cells that in turn activate the memory-holding cells. Compared with mice that didn’t get this strengthening treatment, mice with the Alzheimer’s genes that underwent this process were more fearful of the cage where they had received a shock, even six days later.
The results are only experimental but several insights have been gained on how memory works.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature17172...

A parallel realm of carbon-polluting activity - ranging from email exchanges to social network chatter (tweets, posts etc) to streaming movies on smartphones - has slipped largely unnoticed under the climate change radar. In isolation, these discrete units of our virtual existence seem weightless and without cost.
A short email, for example, is estimated to add about four grams of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.
By comparison, humanity emits some 40 billion tonnes of CO2 every year.
But as the digital era deepens, the accumulated volume of virtual messages has become a significant part of humanity's carbon footprint.
"Electricity consumption related to the growth of digital technologies is exploding," notes Alain Anglade of the French Environment and Energy Management Agency. In France it already accounts for more than 10% of total electricity use, he said, a percentage that holds for many developed countries. To see the big picture, it helps to break it down.
Sending five dozen of those four-gram emails in a day from your smartphone or laptop, for example, is the equivalent of driving an average-size car a kilometre. AFP

Role of bacteria in platinum formation...
Australian scientists have uncovered the important role of specialist bacteria in the formation and movement of platinum and related metals in surface environments. Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the research has important implications for the future exploration of platinum group metals.
These platinum group elements are strategically important metals, but finding new deposits is becoming increasingly difficult due to our limited understanding of the processes that affect the way they are cycled through surface environments.
This research reveals the key role of bacteria in these processes. This improved bio geochemical understanding is not only important from a scientific perspective but scientists hope will also lead to new and better ways of exploring for these metal.
Traditionally it was thought that these platinum group metals only formed under high pressure and temperature systems deep underground, and that when they were brought to the surface through weathering and uplift, they just sat there and nothing further happened to them.

Now scientists have shown that that is far from the case. They have linked specialised bacterial communities, found in biofilms on the grains of platinum group minerals at three separate locations around the world, with the dispersion and re-concentration of these elements in surface environments.

They've shown that nuggets of platinum and related metals can be reformed at the surface through bacterial processes.
Source: University of Adelaide

If you have a very small circle of friends and you are happy about it, then it might be a sign that you are intelligent as a new study has revealed that loners tend to be more intellectual than others.
The research is published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Scientists find ancient viral strands hiding in human DNA
"This is a thrilling discovery"
Researchers have discovered 19 unique fragments and stands of viral DNA in the genomes of modern humans.

Scientists analyzed the genomes of some 2,500 people from around the world. The viral fragments were identified by comparing the genomes to a "reference" human genome, an average of sorts. The comparative analysis allowed researchers to hone in on unique segments and locate foreign code.

Human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs, are ancient viruses that succeeded in depositing DNA-based copies of their RNA genetic material into the genomes of early humans.
"Discovery of unfixed endogenous retrovirus insertions in diverse human populations"
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/03/16/1602336113
The scientists say...this is because...

The human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) group HERV-K contains nearly intact and insertionally polymorphic integrations among humans, many of which code for viral proteins. Expression of such HERV-K proviruses occurs in tissues associated with cancers and autoimmune diseases, and in HIV-infected individuals, suggesting possible pathogenic effects. Proper characterization of these elements necessitates the discrimination of individual HERV-K loci; such studies are hampered by our incomplete catalog of HERV-K insertions, motivating the identification of additional HERV-K copies in humans. By examining >2,500 sequenced genomes, they have discovered 19 previously unidentified HERV-K insertions, including an intact provirus without apparent substitutions that would alter viral function, only the second such provirus described. Their results provide a basis for future studies of HERV evolution and implication for disease.

AI to Devise Unthinkable Experiments
Quantum mechanics predicts a number of, at first sight, counterintuitive phenomena. It therefore remains a question whether our intuition is the best way to find new experiments. Here, we report the development of the computer algorithm Melvin which is able to find new experimental implementations for the creation and manipulation of complex quantum states. Indeed, the discovered experiments extensively use unfamiliar and asymmetric techniques which are challenging to understand intuitively. The results range from the first implementation of a high-dimensional Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state, to a vast variety of experiments for asymmetrically entangled quantum states—a feature that can only exist when both the number of involved parties and dimensions is larger than 2. Additionally, new types of high-dimensional transformations are found that perform cyclic operations. Melvin autonomously learns from solutions for simpler systems, which significantly speeds up the discovery rate of more complex experiments. The ability to automate the design of a quantum experiment can be applied to many quantum systems and allows the physical realization of quantum states previously thought of only on paper.
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.090405

A Korean research team has engineered gut bacteria to create non-natural polymers in a biorefinery—allowing various plastics to be made in an environmentally-friendly and sustainable manner. The research was published in Nature Biotechnology.
biorefineries which transform non-edible biomass into fuel, heat, power, chemicals and materials have received a great deal of attention as a sustainable alternative to decreasing the reliance on fossil fuels. Renewable non-food biomass could potentially replace petrochemical raw materials to produce energy sources, useful chemicals, or a vast array of petroleum-based end products such as plastics, lubricants, paints, fertilizers and vitamin capsules. In the present study, a team headed by Distinguished Professor Lee Sang Yup of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) adopted a systems metabolic engineering approach to develop a microorganism that can produce various non-natural polymers which have biomedical applications. According to the researchers, this approach is the first successful example of biological production of poly(lactate-co-glycolate) (PLGA) and several novel copolymers from renewable biomass by one-step direct fermentation of metabolically engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The researchers drew inspiration from the biosynthesis process for polyhydroxyalkanoates, biologically-derived polyesters produced in nature by the bacterial fermentation of sugar or lipid. From there, they designed a metabolic pathway for the biosynthesis of PLGA through microbial fermentation directly from carbohydrates in E. coli strains. PLGA is a biodegradable, biocompatible and non-toxic polymer. PLGA has been widely used in biomedical and therapeutic applications such as surgical sutures, prosthetic devices, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. In order to produce PLGA by microbial fermentation directly from carbohydrates, the team incorporated external and engineered enzymes as catalysts to co-polymerize PLGA while establishing a few additional metabolic pathways for the biosynthesis to produce a range of different non-natural polymers. This bio-based synthetic process for PLGA and other polymers could substitute for existing complicated chemical production methods. Lee and his team has also managed to produce a variety of PLGA copolymers with different monomer compositions such as the US Food and Drug Administration-approved monomers 3-hydroxyburate, 4-hydroxyburate, and 6-hydroxyhexanoate. Newly applied bioplastics such as 5-hydroxyvalerate and 2-hydroxyisovalerate were also made.http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3485.html

South Asians share ancestry with a mysterious population...
Many bloodlines around the world, particularly of South Asian descent, may actually be a bit more Denisovan- a mysterious population of hominids.
Denisovans lived around the same time as the Neanderthals - scientists have revealed. The team from Harvard Medical School and University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) has created a world map and also used comparative genomics to make predictions about where Denisovan and Neanderthal genes may be impacting modern human biology. The analysis also proposes that modern humans interbred with Denisovans about 100 generations after their trysts with the Neanderthals.
Denisovan genes can potentially be linked to a more subtle sense of smell in Papua New Guineans and high-altitude adoptions in Tibetans.
Meanwhile, Neanderthal genes found in people around the world most likely contribute to tougher skin and hair. Most non-Africans possess at least a little bit Neanderthal DNA.
There was also negative selection to systematically remove ancestry that may have been problematic from modern humans. We can document this removal over the 40,000 years since these admixtures occurred.
They found evidence that both Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry has been lost from the X chromosome as well as genes expressed in the male testes.
The team theorises that this has contributed to reduced fertility in males, which is commonly observed in other hybrids between two highly divergent groups of the same species.
The researchers collected their data by comparing known Neanderthal and Denisovan gene sequences across more than 250 genomes from 120 non-African populations publicly available through the Simons Genome Diversity Project.
The new map of archaic ancestry was published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists have built a bacterium that contains the minimal genetic ingredients needed for free living.

This bacterium’s entire set of genetic blueprints, its genome, consists of only 473 genes, including 149 whose precise biological function is unknown, researchers report in the March 25 Science.

The newly-created bacterium contains a minimalist version of the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides. Mycoplasma already have some of the smallest known genomes. M. mycoides used in the experiments started with 901 genes. In comparison, other bacteria, including E. coli, may have 4,000 to 5,000 genes. Humans have more than 22,000 genes, although not all are necessary.

In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., replicated the entire genome of M. mycoides and popped it into a cell of a different species, Mycoplasma capricolum, creating what some people called the first synthetic organism. The new work strips the M. mycoides genome down to its essential elements before transplanting it to the M. capricolum shell, producing a minimal bacteria dubbed syn3.0.

Researchers hope syn3.0’s uncluttered genome will teach them more about the basics of biology. Such minimal genome bacteria also may be chassis on which to build custom-made microbes for producing drugs or chemicals.

Somebody asked this Q...Would scientists go off into panic if something unusual happens like stars alongside everything else except the Sun mysteriously vanished without reason?
A: On the contrary, scientists would be the last ones to panic, because they would have something to do. Which would be to grab every appropriate instrument they could find, and science the hell out of the problem while everybody else fan around panicking.
in general scientists would not see this as a panic event. There's a tendency for scientists to ignore personal risk when faced with mystery, and this would be a large mystery. The phenomenun is similar to that of photographers faced with disasters or riots; they act as though the camera makes them immune to whatever is on the other side of the lens.
Scientists would probably be one of the few NOT going into a panic.

Most people would be like "What the hell is going on? It's the apocalypse repent your sins satan is upon us ahhrghhhg!"

A scientists would be like "Whoa, that's interesting. Let's try to figure out what just happened!"
Not all of them. A good number will be busy trying to take measurements of the darkness surrounding us and figure out what is causing it. I myself can already think of several hypotheses for explaining the phenomenon you described.

Then they would use their data to figure out if this darkness is dangerous to us, and what we can do to protect ourselves from it, or how we can use it to our benefit. Meanwhile they will continue to study it and collect more data. Eventually they will be able to make pretty good predictions about what the darkness will do in the next few years, or whether it will stay around or go away.

Good scientists don't have the time to freak out and panic. There's always something better to do or think about.

On the other hand, what would superstitious people do?

It's a rhetorical question, I don't really need to know.
No, it could have a very simple reason.

It could be something like a nebula we are passing through that blotted the Stars out and was charged and the charge damaged the spacecraft and satellites.

Until we found out what exactly happened most scientists would be busy trying to understand it and would not make any announcements.

Most scientists, however not creationists or ID supporters who would probably reinterpret one of the biblical prophecies of signs for Armageddon. It states the stars will fall to Earth. Obviously that is impossible but the ignorant power crazed priests were not aware that stars are Suns (they thought they were decorations or lights in the 'Dome of the sky' that is supposed to separate water on Earth and water above the Earth letting God make rain (they didn't know about evaporation and condensation), it's why they are called stars and not Suns by the general population.

Other possibilities:
A super dense concentration of dark matter.
If the sun was also gone, a possible effect on the upper atmosphere that made it opaque (not see through).
I don't think there would be "panic" exactly - but you can bet that a lot of scientists would be dropping everything to investigate it. Scientists love nothing more than to find things that don't fit with current theory because it's an opportunity to learn more and fix whatever problem that theory has. So generally, "excitement" would probably be the first emotion.

How scientists can reduce their carbon footprint
Cutting down on long-distance air travel is the best way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases by the scientific community.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e15928v1?utm_source=content_aler...

New state of matter detected in a two-dimensional material

A team of quantum physicists has discovered a mysterious new state of matter in a two-dimensional material. Scientists are calling the state "quantum spin liquid."

The novel state was predicted 40 years ago. Now, researchers have direct evidence.

Quantum spin liquid is characterized by the breaking apart of electrons. The electron fragments are called Majorana fermions. While observing particle behavior inside a graphene-like 2D material, scientists at the University of Cambridge recorded the signatures of these fractional particles.

What they saw matched the predictions of theoretical models for a quantum spin liquid.

The mysterious state explains anomalies inside magnetic materials. Electrons in magnetic materials each behave like miniature bar magnets. As a material is cooled, the electrons each line up in accordance with magnetic north -- all pointing the same direction.

This doesn't happen in magnetic materials boasting quantum spin liquid, where electrons refuse to align. Instead, their quantum fluctuations result in a soup of entangled electrons.
This is a new addition to a short list of known quantum states of matter.
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4604.html

Stop wasting food to manage climate change to good levels - scientists

Reducing food waste around the world would help curb emissions of planet-warming gases, lessening some of the impacts of climate change such as more extreme weather and rising seas, scientists said on 7th April, 2016.
Up to 14 percent of emissions from agriculture in 2050 could be avoided by managing food use and distribution better, according to a new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
"Agriculture is a major driver of climate change, accounting for more than 20 percent of overall global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010".
"Avoiding food loss and waste would therefore avoid unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and help mitigate climate change."
Between 30 and 40 percent of food produced around the world is never eaten, because it is spoiled after harvest and during transportation, or thrown away by shops and consumers.
The share of food wasted is expected to increase drastically if emerging economies like China and India adopt Western food habits, including a shift to eating more meat, the researchers warned.
Richer countries tend to consume more food than is healthy or simply waste it, they noted.

Food loss and waste hurts people, costs money and harms the planet. Cutting (it) is a no-brainer, according to these scientists.

Melanesians are the only people known to have DNA from two ancient human ‘cousins’ - i.e., they got a double dose of Stone Age DNA!
Unlike people in the rest of world, some modern-day Pacific Islanders have inherited genes from two different groups of Stone Age relatives. That’s the conclusion of new research. And the ancient DNA they carry still affects their health and well-being — in a good way.

Melanesians live in a group of islands northeast of Papua New Guinea. Their ancestors mated with Neandertals, the new data show. They also mated with mysterious Neandertal relatives, known as Denisovans.

Population geneticist Benjamin Vernot and his colleagues made the discovery. At the time, Vernot was working at the University of Washington in Seattle. His group published its findings online March 17 in Science.

The new study looked at DNA that both parents pass to their children. (Other DNA is typically passed down only by moms.) As earlier studies had shown, non-African people have a little bit of Neandertal DNA.

This includes the Melanesians. On average, they inherited 1.5 to 4 percent of their DNA from Neandertals. But Melanesians have DNA from Denisovans too. This makes up 1.9 to 3.4 percent of their DNA, the new study finds. (Today’s Africans have little to no Neandertal or Denisovan DNA.)

In modern Melanesians, the bits of Neandertal and Denisovan DNA include genes involved in metabolism and immunity. That means mating with other hominids — other species of human ancestors — may have helped ancient humans thrive, the scientists say.

Scientists blast comet-like ice with radiation like that in space, creating RNA - a key building block for life!
Scientists have produced the first formation of a key sugar required for life as we know it. By creating ices similar to those detected by the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which made the first landing on a comet, scientists were able to produce ribose, a sugar that serves as an important ingredient in RNA, an essential ingredient for life.
Cornelia Meinert, an associate scientist at the University Nice Sophia Antipolis led experiments that dosed icy materials produced in a laboratory with radiation similar to what comets would have received in the early life of the solar system, resulting in the creation of ribose.
Meinert and her colleagues recreated ices detected by Rosetta's Philae lander when it touched down on Comet 67P in 2014. In a lab, they created interstellar ices under what Meinert called "realistic astrophysical conditions" — in other words, within a vacuum, surrounded by low temperatures. Then, they blasted the samples with radiation simulating energy from the young sun, which was far more active than today's star, along with cosmic rays from the rest of the galaxy. Some of the material from the ices evaporated, while the leftover material created an organic residue. Sampling this residue revealed not only sugars but also amino acids, alcohols and other material.

The research was published online today (April 7) in the journal Science. - 
Source: http://www.space.com