Plan to Send Probes to the Nearest Star
Funded by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and with the blessing of Stephen Hawking, Breakthrough Starshot aims to send probes to Alpha Centauri in a generation
For Yuri Milner, the Russian Internet entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist who funds the world’s richest science prizes and searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, the sky is not the limit—and neither is the solar system. Flanked by physicist Stephen Hawking and other high-profile supporters today in New York, Milner announced his most ambitious investment yet: $100 million toward a research program to send robotic probes to nearby stars within a generation.
- Scientific American

The sugar, cyclodextrin, removed cholesterol that had built up in the arteries of mice fed a high-fat diet, researchers report April 6 in Science Translational Medicine. The sugar enhances a natural cholesterol-removal process and persuades immune cells to soothe inflammation instead of provoking it, say immunologist Eicke Latz and colleagues.

Cyclodextrin, more formally known as 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin, is the active ingredient in the air freshener Febreze. It is also used in a wide variety of drugs; it helps make hormones, antifungal chemicals, steroids and other compounds soluble. If the new results hold up in human studies, the sugar may also one day be used to liquefy cholesterol that clogs arteries.

Other researchers say the approach is promising, but must be tested in clinical trials. The sweet molecule is generally considered safe, but injecting it may raise the risk of liver damage or hearing loss.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/333/333ra50

A new particle?!

Why can anyone easily shot down a helicopter?
The reason they are so prone to being shot down according to experts is two fold... they rely on the tail rotor (or boom in the case of a NOTAR design) to produce the anti-torque to counter act the torque that needs to be applied to the main rotor. Take out that tail rotor and you can no longer power or even generate lift at all from the main rotor without spinning out of control (due to induced drag of the rotor blades). This is of course not applicable to co-axial helicopters which use two main rotor blades counter spinning to counteract torque. A shrouded tail rotor is less likely to strike objects and suffer catastrophic failure but is still susceptible to bullets and other projectiles hitting it. A NOTAR design using the Coanda effect has an extremely resilient anti torque mechanism but gives up maneuverability.

Secondly, the main rotor hub is an extremely complex piece of machinery. It must control collective pitch, cyclical pitch, spin extremely fast ( typically around 5 - 10 revs per second) which causing huge forces pulling it apart and essentially hold the weight plus maneuvering load of the helicopter. A great number of things can go wrong.

Losing power to the main rotor means certain death, but it is actually fairly easy to recover from and helicopter pilots actually practice it pretty regularly. They perform what's called an autorotation in which they immediately (upon sensing engine failure) lower the collective pitch to maintain rotor momentum, which will cause the helicopter to start to descent. They then push the nose forward to gain a forward momentum and start picking out a place to land (or crash depending on the rest of how the scenario plays out). The forward momentum allows the rotor to continue generating lift and the rotational momentum of the rotor will be used as a last second flare to slow descent and hopefully land smoothly. The most dangerous thing for a helicopter to do is to hover (no horizontal movement) at a low height above ground because there will be little that can be done to recover from a loss of power to the main rotor.

Also - 

1. They can't fly that fast, or at least not as fast as airplanes. This makes it easier to engage them with all kinds of AA weapons, even including small weapon fire.
2. They have to fly low, especially when they are supposed to give ground support, unload troop, or extract them from the battlefield. Once again, this makes them vulnerable to all kinds of weapons.
3. They have to be stationary during critical moments, such as unloading and loading personnel, or once again proving air support (sometimes). Not only are they easier to shoot at, but they also have less "energy" to perform evasive maneuvers, or get out of there.

To summarise it all together, helicopters have less "energy" when they are being shot at, in the sense that they are lower in altitude, and usually slower, if not standing perfectly still. This makes them vulnerable to small weapons fire, and basically does not allow the pilot to perform any kind of evasive maneuver.

These trained African Giant Pouched Rats can detect TB in a short span of time! It takes about nine months to fully train a TB detection rat, but once trained they can screen thousands of sputum samples every month. The idea was spurred by the superb sense of smell of these rats which had been used to detect land mines after the Mozambican civil war.

The rats pick up in their smell a group of chemicals collectively called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and the rats alert an observer that there are TB-associated VOCs in a sample.

The same principle has been used to develop machines called electronic noses.

In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a pair of researchers at the INSERM–CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in France reported that the brain areas involved in math are different from those engaged in equally complex nonmathematical thinking.
The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 15 professional mathematicians and 15 nonmathematicians of the same academic standing. While in the scanner the subjects listened to a series of 72 high-level mathematical statements, divided evenly among algebra, analysis, geometry and topology, as well as 18 high-level nonmathematical (mostly historical) statements. They had four seconds to reflect on each proposition and determine whether it was true, false or meaningless.
The researchers found that in the mathematicians only, listening to math-related statements activated a network involving bilateral intraparietal, dorsal prefrontal, and inferior temporal regions of the brain. This circuitry is usually not associated with areas involved in language processing and semantics, which were activated in both mathematicians and nonmathematicians when they were presented with the nonmathematical statements. “On the contrary,” says study co-author and graduate student Marie Amalric, “our results show that high-level mathematical reflection recycles brain regions associated with an evolutionarily ancient knowledge of number and space.”
How Does a Mathematician's Brain Differ from That of a Mere Mortal?
Processing high-level math concepts uses the same neural networks as the basic math skills a child is born with

Explosive cell lysis as a mechanism for the biogenesis of bacterial membrane vesicles and biofilms
A recent study by an international team of researchers has identified a phenomenon called explosive cell lysis as crucial to the production of membrane vesicles and biofilm formation, two processes that are key to how bacteria form and attack healthy cells. The study was published in Nature Communications. Membrane vesicles are tiny spheres that develop from bacterial membranes and contain a mixture of proteins, DNA, and RNA. They are important to bacteria’s ability to cause disease as they play vital roles in invasion, secretion, and signaling. They also contribute to the formation of biofilms, the slimy three-dimensional structures that form when bacteria adhere to moist surfaces such as teeth or wounds. Extracellular DNA (eDNA) is key to the structural organization of biofilms, yet it was not previously known how certain structural proteins or eDNA are released. To answer this question, the researchers used live cell microscopy of the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa to reveal that bacterial cells quickly changed from rod- to round-shaped, and then explode.
Using super-resolution microscopy to follow the explosions, they found a surprising observation. The membrane fragments produced by exploding bacteria curled up to form membrane vesicles that captured eDNA and other cellular components released by the explosion.
The team found that the explosions are caused by an enzyme (Lys) used by bacteria-infecting viruses (phages) and phage-like elements to disrupt the cell wall of their hosts. Using a mutant bacterial strain incapable of producing Lys, they discovered that the enzyme was needed to produce eDNA and membrane vesicles. Through a range of experiments, the team also demonstrated that exposure of cells to different forms of stress, such as antibiotics or DNA damaging agents, stimulated expression of the gene encoding Lys and induced explosive cell lysis. This shows that the bacterial ‘SOS’ response triggers explosive cell lysis in response to unfavorable environmental conditions, according to the researchers. This mechanism may enable bacteria to release important cellular factors for use by bacterial communities as public goods, and knowledge of its control could be used to interfere with biofilm formation of pathogenic bacteria.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160414/ncomms11220/full/ncomms112...

Ice-nucleating bacteria control the order and dynamics of interfacial water
Scientists recently have uncovered how tiny bacteria — nature’s ice machines — create ice crystals. Though the new study, published today in the journal Science Advances, doesn’t confirm whether these are rain-making bacteria, it points to how exactly they turn water into ice.

The bacteria, Pseudomonas syringae, have equipped themselves to cause the cold with proteins that create ice crystals at temperatures that don't normally freeze water. P. syringae live on agricultural crops, plants, and trees and use their ice-making abilities to cause frost damage. The ice crystals they produce basically shatter plants’ tissues so the bacteria can access the plants’ nutrients. We’ve even harnessed these organisms for our own purposes: P. syringae are routinely used to make artificial snow in ski resorts around the world.
In past decades, P. syringae have been found in the atmosphere, as well as in (real) snow from all over the world, from the US to Europe and even Antarctica. This study now study is the first one to show in an experiment how the ice-making mechanism actually works.
Pure water doesn’t freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). It actually stays liquid until about - 40 degrees Fahrenheit (- 40 degrees Celsius). To freeze at higher temperatures, water needs a fleck of dust, soot, or sea salt — something to serve as a center that water molecules can latch onto. Most scientists believe that P. syringae are swept by wind from the ground to the sky. In the atmosphere, these high-flying, ice-making bacteria lower the freezing temperature to around 25 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (- 4 to - 8 degrees Celsius) and form ice crystals. That creates clouds, which are basically agglomerations of water droplets and ice crystals.
To make rain, your clouds have to form first an ice crystal, even in the Sahara desert. As the ice crystals fall down, they turn into rain if it’s warm and snow if it’s cold. The theory that bacteria like P. syringae have a role in causing precipitation, however, has never been proved. "Intuitively it feels right, circumstantial evidence says yes, but that final link has not been done yet.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/4/e1501630

Scientists have succeeded in decoding one of the secrets related to breast cells. According to science, breast cells develop two nuclei as the lactation process to nurture the newborn begins, uncovering one of the secrets to rich milk production. This change begins to occur in late pregnancy with the generation of vast numbers of cells with two nuclei, researchers have said.
Using unique three-dimensional (3-D) imaging technology, they found huge numbers of cells became binucleated (developed a second nucleus) - a process that is critical to milk production. The process - which lasts only for the duration of lactation - is important for the newborn to thrive when breast milk was the sole nutrient.
“We know that these cells are milk-producing factories. What is interesting to find is they change according to a very tightly regulated regime - they develop two nuclei, not three or four and then return to one nucleus after lactation".
Presumably this is important to avoid mishaps. The study showed how mammals, including humans, wallabies and seals, were primed to adapt to pregnancy in ways that best supported the survival of their babies, researchers said.
Based on their presence in five different species, these findings suggest that this process has evolved in mammals as a mechanism to maximise milk production, which is essential for nourishing the newborn and the survival of mammalian species. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.  

A New State of the Water Molecule found

Neutron scattering and computational modeling have revealed unique and unexpected behavior of water molecules under extreme confinement that is unmatched by any known gas, liquid or solid states.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory describe a new tunneling state of water molecules confined in hexagonal ultra-small channels - 5 angstrom across - of the mineral beryl. An angstrom is 1/10-billionth of a meter, and individual atoms are typically about 1 angstrom in diameter.

The discovery, made possible with experiments at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, demonstrates features of water under ultra confinement in rocks, soil and cell walls, which scientists predict will be of interest across many disciplines.

At low temperatures, this tunneling water exhibits quantum motion through the separating potential walls, which is forbidden in the classical world, according to the scientists. This means that the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are 'delocalized' and therefore simultaneously present in all six symmetrically equivalent positions in the channel at the same time. It's one of those phenomena that only occur in quantum mechanics and has no parallel in our everyday experience.

The existence of the tunneling state of water shown in ORNL's study should help scientists better describe the thermodynamic properties and behavior of water in highly confined environments such as water diffusion and transport in the channels of cell membranes, in carbon nanotubes and along grain boundaries and at mineral interfaces in a host of geological environments.

This discovery represents a new fundamental understanding of the behavior of water and the way water utilizes energy.

The experiments showed that, in the tunneling state, the water molecules are delocalized around a ring so the water molecule assumes an unusual double top-like shape.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.167802

Q: Why can't we send the satellites whose tenure is over into deep space instead of burning them up in the atmosphere?

A: Climbing out of a gravity well is tough.  It takes a lot of energy and that means it takes a lot of propellant.

It took about 40 Space Shuttle flights and several Russian Proton rockets to lift all of the hardware of ISS into low Earth orbit.  Lifting the assembled stack from LEO to beyond geosynchronous orbit would require about half as much energy again.

That much energy cannot be stored within the ISS.  It would have to be provided by a series of Russian Progress vehicles.  The problem with that is that each mile or kilometer the ISS rises makes it harder for a Progress to get to the ISS.  The Progress is only certified to fly to an altitude of 460 km (286 miles).

That means we simply don't have the technology, today, to move the ISS that high.

And if we did move it that high, it would become an out of control hunk of metal.  The ISS was designed for low Earth orbit.  Its  communication and navigation equipment  depend on being able to look up at satellites.  It would serve no value other than being preserved so that people a few hundred years from now could visit it.

The cost to develop the technology to accomplish the move and the cost of executing the move would be great.  It is not realistic to expect our legislatures to pay for such a thing.  And if they did, it would likely be in lieu of going to Mars or returning to the Moon or whatever the next great adventure will be.  Preserving the past would prevent the future.

Reasons for dry mouth feeling
The origin of astringent mouthfeel when we eat unripe fruits, drink coffee or tea, from the perspective of lubrication by simulating the dynamic weak interaction on the tongue with model protein (mucoprotein, MP) and polyphenolic compounds (tannic acid, TA). Astringency was due to the protein-mediated lubrication failure when encountering polyphenolic molecules that normally exist, for example in unripe fruits, coffee, tea. The underlying molecular mechanism of oral tribology is widely present in nature and enables us to engineer a tongue-like polyacrylamide composite hydrogel that exhibits high TA sensitivity and to develop a scientific strategy for catching slippery fish using TA-containing gloves. These results provide novel and useful insights into the failure of biological boundary lubrication on soft tissue surface with the adsorbed proteins.
( That strange feeling in the mouth after a sip of red wine or tea, or a bite of unripe fruit. It has been described as dry, leathery or even furry. This astringent effect is caused by tannins or polyphenolic compounds that bind to mucins, lubricating proteins in the mucus membranes of the mouth. Now, in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a Chinese and Korean research team has described the relationship between astringency and this disrupted oral lubrication. Mucins consist of a central protein chain with side chains made of sugar compounds that can bind a large amount of water. Mucins form a barrier and protect sensitive mucus membranes from drying out and from chemical and mechanical interactions. They provide adequate lubrication and correspondingly low friction. This lubricating film in the oral cavity fails when tannins come in: a sip of wine causes the tongue to feel less slippery).
They found that when the tannic acid binds to the mucin, their interactions reduce the solubility of the protein in water. The mucins consequently aggregate and may precipitate, leading to a failure of the mucin lubrication film. Under a miscroscope, a substrate coated in mucin showed a flat, dense, film. After addition of tannic acid, many “defects” could be seen in the film and the surface was significantly rougher. In comparison to a glass surface coated only with water, mucin-coated glass had much lower friction when coming into contact with a soft plastic ball. Addition of tannic acid caused the friction to rise substantially. An extract of coffee beans, which also contain tannins, had a similar effect. Finally, in order to mimic a tongue, the scientists produced a mucin-containing plastic hydrogel. When wet, this elastic but barely tear-resistant material had very low friction, slipping easily through the fingers. A weight placed on an inclined surface of this hydrogel slides right off. Addition of a tannic acid solution makes the gel sticky and it begins to shrink as a result of losing water. The mechanical strength increases significantly and the elasticity decreases; the weight no longer slides off.
This finding may guide people to change their eating habits. For example, protein-rich and polyphenol-rich foods can’t be eaten together.
Astringent Mouthfeel as a Consequence of Lubrication Failure
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201601667/abstract;...

Recent research by scientists at University of Florida and Union College in Lincoln, found that bed bugs strongly prefer harbourages (places of shelter) that are red and black, and they seemed to avoid colours like green and yellow. The researchers also found that the bed bugs prefer different colours depending on their sex, appetite and whether they were alone or not. These colour preferences could potentially be used in the future to help to develop more intricate and effective traps.

Chromophobia is the fear of, or aversion to, certain colours.
http://jme.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/04/20/jme.tjw033

--

The standard model of particle physics, the quantum-theory-based melange that bundles up our knowledge of all the forces of nature besides gravity. One of its revelations is that every fundamental matter particle has an antimatter twin – a particle identical in every way apart from having the opposite electric charge. For the familiar negatively charged electron there is a positively charged “positron”, and so on.

The big bang should have made equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But here’s the thing: when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate in a puff of energy. So neither should have survived the early days of the universe.

Yet one of them did. Various experiments have tried to find some mismatch between processes involving matter and antimatter to explain this. The latest is LHCb at the CERN particle physics lab, which is looking for an imbalance in decays of particles known as mesons, made up of a quark and an antiquark.

Biomechanics of the Peacock’s Display: How Feather Structure and Resonance Influence Multimodal Signaling
Courtship displays may serve as signals of the quality of motor performance, but little is known about the underlying biomechanics that determines both their signal content and costs. Peacocks (Pavo cristatus) perform a complex, multimodal “train-rattling” display in which they court females by vibrating the iridescent feathers in their elaborate train ornament. Here we study how feather biomechanics influences the performance of this display using a combination of field recordings and laboratory experiments. Using high-speed video, we find that train-rattling peacocks stridulate their tail feathers against the train at 25.6 Hz, on average, generating a broadband, pulsating mechanical sound at that frequency. Laboratory measurements demonstrate that arrays of peacock tail and train feathers have a broad resonant peak in their vibrational spectra at the range of frequencies used for train-rattling during the display, and the motion of feathers is just as expected for feathers shaking near resonance. This indicates that peacocks are able to drive feather vibrations energetically efficiently over a relatively broad range of frequencies, enabling them to modulate the feather vibration frequency of their displays. Using our field data, we show that peacocks with longer trains use slightly higher vibration frequencies on average, even though longer train feathers are heavier and have lower resonant frequencies. Based on these results, we propose hypotheses for future studies of the function and energetics of this display that ask why its dynamic elements might attract and maintain female attention. Finally, we demonstrate how the mechanical structure of the train feathers affects the peacock’s visual display by allowing the colorful iridescent eyespots–which strongly influence female mate choice–to remain nearly stationary against a dynamic iridescent background.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.01...

Plastics in Food - Bisphenol A and food safety: Lessons from developed to developing countries

BPA is used to make certain plastics or resins. It can seep into food or drinks from food containers or the protective linings of cans -  
Modern lifestyles and changes in the socio-economic characteristics of households have stimulated current developments in food technology, processing and packaging. Chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPA) are known to migrate from food packaging into the food, resulting in human exposure to these chemicals. Similarly, BPA can migrate from baby feeding bottles into milk. BPA has been associated with adverse effects attributed to its estrogenic properties in various animal models. This review analyzed peer-reviewed publications in the English literature on human BPA exposure and regulations in developing countries compared to developed countries. BPA has been reduced or eliminated from food packaging and contact materials such as baby bottles in developed countries either voluntarily or by legislation. The meager data from developing countries shows that human BPA exposure in developing countries is similar to that in developed countries. With minor exceptions, BPA restriction, voluntary or legal, is virtually absent in developing countries of Africa, SE Asia, and South and Central America.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691516300898

Why are Itches contagious? 

Itching can be "caught" just by watching someone else having a good scratch, scientists have confirmed.

Itching becomes contagious because the brain becomes hypersensitive when someone nearby scratches and so misinterprets any kind of physical sensation on our skin as an itch.

The researchers found empathy (a willingness to take another's viewpoint) did not correlate with the phenomenon. Participants who scored high on neuroticism were significantly more likely than others to experience itch contagion, the researchers found. 

There is an evolutionary basis for this mundane behavior.
The world of our Paleolithic ancestors was a pruritogenic wilderness, full of plants and bugs that posed more of a threat than mere skin irritation. So a scratch is a preemptive strike against the more noxious aftereffects if that relatively innocuous warning signal is ignored.

Growing sensitive to itching when one member of the group is scratching could help to identify parasite infestations early and help to stop them spreading.

Medical error—the third leading cause of death! That too in developed countries!
Medical errors the third leading cause of death, only after heart disease and cancer.

Lab test failures contribute to delayed or wrong diagnoses and unnecessary costs and care. Most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their life. Errors related to lab tests are more common than you might think.

Misperceptions that diagnostic laboratory tests are always correct and useful exist even though experts say ‘no test performs perfectly’.

Whether due to misuse or a failure mode, all lab tests have limitations. Some of the most common reasons include mistakes in ordering lab tests—meaning the right tests are not ordered at the right time—and problems with the accuracy, availability, and interpretation of their results.

From a patient’s perspective the best thing you can do to overcome lab test-related errors is be informed about the possible problems that could arise and what to ask to try to avoid them.

http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/353/bmj.i2139.full.pdf

                                         0099--0099

The cost of poor blood specimen quality and errors in preanalytical processes

Preanalytical phase errors may account for 75% of total laboratory errors.

•

One failure can affect patient treatment and multiply into significant costs.

•

A model can estimate the cost of poor specimen quality on total operating costs.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009912013002786

Climate change may contribute to rising rates of chronic kidney disease
Chronic kidney disease that is not associated with traditional risk factors appears to be increasing in rural hot communities as worldwide temperature progressively rises. The condition has likely increased due to global warming and an increase in extreme heat waves, and it is having a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, say investigators.
Climate change may be accelerating rates of chronic kidney disease caused by dehydration and heat stress, according to research appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). The findings suggest that a condition called heat stress nephropathy may represent a disease of neglected populations, but one that may emerge as a major cause of poor kidney health in the near future.
Over the next century, climate change and resulting water shortages are likely to affect a wide variety of health issues related to dehydration and heat stress -- with risks increasing for cognitive dysfunction, malnutrition, water-borne infectious diseases, chronic kidney disease, and other conditions.
Reports of heat stress nephropathy -- or chronic kidney disease consistent with heat stress -- that are already occurring throughout the world.

The investigators found that chronic kidney disease that is not associated with traditional risk factors appears to be increasing in rural hot communities as worldwide temperature progressively rises. They believe the risk for heat stress nephropathy has increased due to global warming and an increase in extreme heat waves, and it is having a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, such as agricultural workers. Decreasing precipitation exacerbates this epidemic by reducing the water supply and water quality as temperatures climbs.

The researchers recommend that governments and scientists work together to conduct epidemiological and clinical studies to document the presence of these epidemics and their magnitude. Interventions are also needed to improve worksite conditions and ensure adequate hydration.

Climate change has led to significant rise of 0.8°C–0.9°C in global mean temperature over the last century and has been linked with significant increases in the frequency and severity of heat waves (extreme heat events). Climate change has also been increasingly connected to detrimental human health. One of the consequences of climate-related extreme heat exposure is dehydration and volume loss, leading to acute mortality from exacerbations of pre-existing chronic disease, as well as from outright heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Recent studies have also shown that recurrent heat exposure with physical exertion and inadequate hydration can lead to CKD that is distinct from that caused by diabetes, hypertension, or GN. Epidemics of CKD consistent with heat stress nephropathy are now occurring across the world. Here, we describe this disease, discuss the locations where it appears to be manifesting, link it with increasing temperatures, and discuss ongoing attempts to prevent the disease. Heat stress nephropathy may represent one of the first epidemics due to global warming. Government, industry, and health policy makers in the impacted regions should place greater emphasis on occupational and community interventions.
http://cjasn.asnjournals.org/content/early/2016/05/04/CJN.13841215

Dust storms: Dust is a powerful, but invisible, force. It shapes Earth’s environment in ways that few people realize. Every year, three to four billion tons of dust is lifted into the air around the world by wind. That’s enough to cover a city of moderate area to a depth of 5 meters (16 feet).
Once airborne, this dust can travel thousands of kilometers. It nourishes some of our planet’s largest and lushest forests — allowing them to grow where otherwise they could not. It triggers rain and snowfall. It may even ferry diseases across oceans.

British and American Scientists have been trying to figure this out for half a century, ever since someone accidentally discovered how far dust can travel. Researchers are finding tiny amounts of several elements — sodium, potassium and calcium — in the air just above the ocean. They thought it came from tiny bits of salt lofted up from seawater as bubbles burst on the ocean’s surface.

But soon discovered the elements didn’t come from salt.The mud was from the bottom of the ocean, often from a depth of more than 3,000 meters (about 10,000 feet). Some samples had come from parts of the ocean that were thousands of kilometers from land. They were all cluttered with tiny flecks of crystals — minerals known as quartz and mica. These minerals were known to form on land, not in the sea. The minerals on the sea floor and the sodium, potassium and calcium in the air above the water were coming from the same source: tiny grains of dust. That dust might ride the winds for thousands of kilometers before finally settling down onto the ocean. If true, it would mean that 30 to 80 percent of the mud on the sea floor actually came from distant lands!

And they found that this dust is coming from deserts like Sahara! Around 30 billion kilograms (33 million tons) of Saharan dust flew over the Atlantic Ocean toward Barbados each year. For much of the year, dust from the Sahara drifts toward the Caribbean and southeastern United States. But winds shift during the winter. Then they began carrying Bodélé dust a different way over the Atlantic Ocean. When it reaches South America, on the other side, it does something truly amazing.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), usually diagnosed in children, may show up for the first time in adulthood, two recent studies suggest.
And not only can ADHD appear for the first time after childhood, but the symptoms for adult-onset ADHD may be different from symptoms experienced by kids, the researchers found.
Although the nature of symptoms differs somewhat between children and adults, all age groups show impairments in multiple domains – school, family and friendships for kids and school, occupation, marriage and driving for adults.
However, some newly diagnosed adults might have had undetected ADHD as children. Support from parents and teachers or high intelligence, for example, might prevent ADHD symptoms from emerging earlier in life.

And these people should take immediate medical assistance to alleviate their problems.

According to new calculations, Earth’s center is more than two years younger than its surface!
How is this possible?
In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, massive objects warp the fabric of spacetime, creating a gravitational pull and slowing time nearby. So a clock placed at Earth’s center will tick ever-so-slightly slower than a clock at its surface. Such time shifts are determined by the gravitational potential, a measure of the amount of work it would take to move an object from one place to another. Since climbing up from Earth’s center would be a struggle against gravity, clocks down deep would run slow relative to surface timepieces.

Over the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, the gradual shaving off of fractions of a second adds up to a core that’s 2.5 years younger than the planet’s crust, researchers estimate in the May European Journal of Physics.

The new calculation neglects geological processes, which have a larger impact on the planet’s age. For example, Earth’s core probably formed earlier than its crust. Instead, says study author Ulrik Uggerhøj of Aarhus University in Denmark, the calculation serves as an illustration of gravity’s influence on time — very close to home.

U. I. Uggerhoj, R. E. Mikkelsen, and J. Faye. The young centre of the Earth. European Journal of Physics. Vol. 37 May 2016, p. 035602. doi: 10.1088/0143-0807/37/3/035602.

The young centre of the Earth

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0143-0807/37/3/035602

A Fifth Force of Nature?
A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say—if the finding holds up.
Attila Krasznahorkay at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’s Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, and his colleagues reported their surprising result in 2015 on the arXiv preprint server, and this January in the journal Physical Review Letters. But the report – which posited the existence of a new, light boson only 34 times heavier than the electron—was largely overlooked.
Again on April 25, a group of US theoretical physicists brought the finding to wider attention by publishing its own analysis of the result on arXiv. The theorists showed that the data didn’t conflict with any previous experiments—and concluded that it could be evidence for a fifth fundamental force. Researchers there were sceptical but excited about the idea.
Gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are the four fundamental forces known to physics—but researchers have made many as-yet unsubstantiated claims of a fifth. Over the past decade, the search for new forces has ramped up because of the inability of the standard model of particle physics to explain dark matter—an invisible substance thought to make up more than 80% of the Universe’s mass. Theorists have proposed various exotic-matter particles and force-carriers, including “dark photons”, by analogy to conventional photons that carry the electromagnetic force.
Krasznahorkay says his group was searching for evidence of just such a dark photon – but Feng’s team think they found something different. The Hungarian team fired protons at thin targets of lithium-7, which created unstable beryllium-8 nuclei that then decayed and spat out pairs of electrons and positrons. According to the standard model, physicists should see that the number of observed pairs drops as the angle separating the trajectory of the electron and positron increases. But the team reported that at about 140º, the number of such emissions jumps—creating a ‘bump’ when the number of pairs are plotted against the angle—before dropping off again at higher angles.

Krasznahorkay says that the bump is strong evidence that a minute fraction of the unstable beryllium-8 nuclei shed their excess energy in the form of a new particle, which then decays into an electron–positron pair. He and his colleagues calculate the particle’s mass to be about 17 megaelectronvolts (MeV).

 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01527

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.042501

There is a fight between cell phone lobby and other scientists working in the area. While the former say cell phones are safe, the latter have a different view on it.
Now a new study reignites the question and says ... Exposure to radio-frequency radiation of cell phones are responsible for tumor formation in rats in their experiments.

 http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055699.full.pdf

US Federal scientists released partial findings Friday from a $25-million animal study that tested the possibility of links between cancer and chronic exposure to the type of radiation emitted from cell phones and wireless devices. The findings, which chronicle an unprecedented number of rodents subjected to a lifetime of electromagnetic radiation starting in utero, present some of the strongest evidence to date that such exposure is associated with the formation of rare cancers in at least two cell types in the brains and hearts of rats.

They chronically exposed rodents to carefully calibrated radio-frequency (RF) radiation levels designed to roughly emulate what humans with heavy cell phone use or exposure could theoretically experience in their daily lives. The animals were placed in specially built chambers that dosed their whole bodies with varying amounts and types of this radiation for approximately nine hours per day throughout their two-year life spans. “This is by far—far and away—the most carefully done cell phone bioassay, a biological assessment. This is a classic study that is done for trying to understand cancers in humans.

The researchers found that as the thousands of rats in the new study were exposed to greater intensities of RF radiation, more of them developed rare forms of brain and heart cancer that could not be easily explained away, exhibiting a direct dose–response relationship. Overall, the incidence of these rare tumors was still relatively low, which would be expected with rare tumors in general, but the incidence grew with greater levels of exposure to the radiation. Some of the rats had glioma—a tumor of the glial cells in the brain—or schwannoma  of the heart. Furthering concern about the findings: In prior epidemiological studies of humans and cell phone exposure, both types of tumors have also cropped up as associations.

In contrast, none of the control rats—those not exposed to the radiation—developed such tumors. But complicating matters was the fact that the findings were mixed across sexes: More such lesions were found in male rats than in female rats. The tumors in the male rats “are considered likely the result of whole-body exposure” to this radiation, the study authors wrote. And the data suggests the relationship was strongest between the RF exposure and the lesions in the heart, rather than the brain: Cardiac schwannomas were observed in male rats at all exposed groups, the authors note. But no “biologically significant effects were observed in the brain or heart of female rats regardless of modulation.” 

Now what should you do? Take a few precautions...here are safety steps individuals can take: Using the speakerphone, keeping the phone on the desk instead of on the body and using a wired headset whenever possible would help limit RF exposure. Reduce the exposure as much as possible.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-premature-to-co...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/do-cell-phones-cause...

Alzheimer’s and Infection connection?
New research by a team of investigators at Harvard leads to a startling hypothesis, which could explain the origins of plaque, the mysterious hard little balls that pockmark the brains of people with Alzheimer’s.
The idea that infections, including ones that are too mild to elicit symptoms, may produce a fierce reaction that leaves debris in the brain, causing Alzheimer’s. If it holds up, the hypothesis has major implications for preventing and treating this degenerative brain disease.
This is how it happens...
virus, fungus or bacterium gets into the brain, passing through a membrane — the blood-brain barrier — that becomes leaky as people age. The brain’s defense system rushes in to stop the invader by making a sticky cage out of proteins, called beta amyloid. The microbe, like a fly in a spider web, becomes trapped in the cage and dies. What is left behind is the cage — a plaque that is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s.

So far, the group has confirmed this hypothesis in neurons growing in petri dishes as well as in yeast, roundworms, fruit flies and mice. There is much more work to be done to determine if a similar sequence happens in humans, but plans — and funding — are in place to start those studies, involving a multicenter project that will examine human brains.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/340/340ra72

Invisible waves move materials within aquatic ecosystems
Garbage, nutrients and tiny animals are pushed around, suspended in the world's oceans by waves invisible to the naked eye according to a new 3-D model developed by mathematicians at the University of Waterloo.

David Deepwell, a graduate student, and Professor Marek Stastna in Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics have created a 3-D simulation that showcases how materials such phytoplankton, contaminants, and nutrients move within aquatic ecosystems via underwater bulges called mode-2 internal waves.

The simulation can help researchers understand how internal waves can carry materials over long distances. Their model was presented in the American Institute of Physics' journal Physics of Fluids earlier this week.

In the simulation, fluids of different densities are layered like the layers of a cake, creating an environment similar to that found in large aquatic bodies such as oceans and lakes. A middle layer of fluid, known as a pycnocline, over which the layers are closely packed together is created, and it is in this layer that materials tend to be caught.
When the fluid behind the gate is mixed and then the gate is removed, the mixed fluid collapses into the stratification because it is both heavier than the top layer and lighter than the bottom one.

Adding dye to the mixed fluid while the gate is in place simulates the material we want the mode-2 waves - the bulges in the pycnocline formed once the gate is taken away - to transport. We can then measure the size of the wave, how much dye remains trapped within it, and how well the wave carries its captured material.

It was found that the larger the bulge within the pycnocline, the larger the amount of material carried by the mode-2 wave.

While the researchers have discovered an optimal scenario in which the mode-2 internal wave survives and then transports material for as long a distance as possible, the internal waves can also break down due to small regions of instability, called lee instabilities, that form behind the wave. When the mode-2 wave breaks down, material is lost behind the wave. Ongoing experimental work and simulations are exploring how this type of wave interacts with underwater topography like sea mounts.

New 'Einstein ring' discovered
The PhD student Margherita Bettinelli, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), together with an international team of astrophysicists has recently discovered an unusual astronomical object: an Einstein ring. These phenomena, predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity, are quite rare but scientifically interesting. The interest is sufficiently strong that this object has been given its own name: the "The Canarias Einstein ring". The research was carried out by the Stellar Populations group at the IAC, led by Antonio Aparicio and Sebastian Hidalgo. The results were published in the international journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
An Einstein ring is a distorted image of a verydistant galaxy, which is termed "the source". The distortion is produced by the bending of the light rays from the source due to amassive galaxy, termed "the lens", lying between it and the observer. The stronggravitational field produced by the lens galaxy distorts the structure of space-time in its neighbourhood, and this does not only attract objects which have a mass, but also bends the paths of light. When the two galaxies are exactly aligned, the image of the more distant galaxy is converted into an almost perfect circle which surrounds the lens galaxy. The irregularities in the circle are due to asymmetries in the source galaxy.
This "Canarias Einstein ring" is one of the most symmetrical discovered until now and is almost circular, showing that the two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned, with a separation on the sky of only 0.2 arcseconds. The source galaxy is 10,000 million light years away from us. Due to the expansion of the Universe, this distance was smaller when its light started on its journey to us, and has taken 8,500 million years to reach us. We observe it as it was then: a blue galaxy which is beginning to evolve, populated by young stars which are forming at a high rate. The lens galaxy is nearer to us, 6,000 million light years away, and is more evolved. Its stars have almost stopped forming, and its population is old.

New 3-Parent IVF Technique found Safe in Lab
A study of a new 3-parent IVF technique designed to reduce the risk of mothers passing hereditary diseases to their babies has found it is likely to work well and lead to normal pregnancies, British scientists said.
Having completed pre-clinical tests involving more than 500 eggs from 64 donor women, researchers from Britain's Newcastle University said the technique, called “early pronuclear transfer”, does not harm early embryonic development.
The technique also showed promise in being able to "greatly reduce" the level of faulty mitochondria in the embryo, the researchers said - confirming hopes that it is likely to reduce the risk of mothers passing on debilitating and often life-limiting mitochondrial disease to their children.
"The key message is that we have found no evidence the technique is unsafe. Embryos created by this technique have all the characteristics to lead to a pregnancy," said Doug Turnbull, director of Newcastle's Center for Mitochondrial Research, who co-led the study.
"This study using normal human eggs is a major advance in our work towards preventing transmission of mitochondrial DNA disease," he added.
Pronuclear transfer involves intervening in the fertilization process to remove mitochondria, which act as tiny energy-generating batteries inside cells, and which, if faulty, can cause inherited fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.
The treatment is known as "three-parent" in vitro fertilization (IVF) because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos, would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor.
The results of this study are published on 8th June, 2016 in the journal Nature.

Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? How do you tackle it? Scientists found a new and very promising solution!

Carbon dioxide emissions from an electric power plant have been captured, pumped underground and solidified—the first step toward safe carbon capture and storage, according to a paper published on 9th June, 2016, in the journal Science.

( Rapid carbon mineralization for permanent disposal of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6291/1312 )

Scientists working at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant near Reykjavik, Iceland, were able to pump the plant’s carbon dioxide-rich volcanic gases into deep underground basalt formations, mix them with water and chemically solidify the carbon dioxide.

When basalt—a volcanic rock that makes up roughly 70 percent of the earth’s surface—is exposed to carbon dioxide and water, a chemical reaction occurs, converting the gas to a chalk-like solid material. Scientists previously thought it wasn’t possible to capture and store carbon this way because earlier studies suggested it could take thousands of years for large amounts of carbon dioxide to be converted to chalk.

But Scientists, working on a project called CarbFix, were able to do it in two years.

Turning Carbon Emissions to Stone from Earth Institute on Vimeo.

Risks that carbon dioxide will escape into the atmosphere while it is being stored underground are greatly diminished because the solidification process occurs so quickly.

In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there’s a lot of basalt—and there are many such places.

Scientists need to do more research into how different kinds of basalt affect the way carbon dioxide solidifies before the CarbFix process can be used worldwide.

4 New Elements Get Names
The proposed names for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 are nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson respectively, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (Iupac) has announced.
The criteria states an element may be named after a mythological figure or concept, geological place, scientist, elemental property, or mineral.
Nihonium (elemental symbol Nh) is the proposed name for element-113. The element was synthesised by Kosuke Morita’s group at RIKEN in Japan after they bombarded a bismuth target with zinc-70 nuclei in 2004 and 2012. Named after Japan, the element will be the first East Asian name to appear on the periodic table if ratified.
Scientists based in Russia and the US who discovered elements 115 and 117 have put forward the names moscovium (Mc) and tennessine (Ts), respectively. A collaboration between the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Russia and the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, US, elements 115 and 117 were both created in 2010. Both element names take their cues from geographical regions. Moscovium is named after Moscow, where the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research is based. Named after Tennessee, tennessine is a tribute to the region where a large amount of superheavy element research is conducted in the US.
The same group has also named element-118 oganesson (Og), in honour of the Russian nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian who led the team that synthesised element-117.

According to a new study, the primate brain is "pre-adapted" to face any situation!

A new neuroscience study has shown how the brain anticipates all of the new situations that it may encounter in a lifetime by creating a special kind of neural network that is "pre-adapted" to face any eventuality.

Enel et al at the INSERM in France investigate one of the most noteworthy properties of primate behavior, its diversity and adaptability. Human and non-human primates can learn an astonishing variety of novel behaviors that could not have been directly anticipated by evolution - we now understand that this ability to cope with new situations is due to the "pre-adapted" nature of the primate brain.

This study shows that this seemingly miraculous pre-adaptation comes from connections between neurons that form recurrent loops where inputs can rebound and mix in the network, like waves in a pond, thus called "reservoir" computing. This mix of the inputs allows a potentially universal representation of combinations of the inputs that can then be used to learn the right behaviour for a new situation.

The authors demonstrate this by training a reservoir network to perform a novel problem solving task. They then compared the activity of neurons in the model with activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex of a research primate that was trained to perform the same task. Remarkably, there were striking similarities in the activation of neurons in both the reservoir model and the primate.

This breakthrough shows that we have taken big step towards understanding the local recurrent connectivity in the brain that prepares primates to face unlimited situations. This research shows that by allowing essentially unlimited combinations of internal representations in the network of the brain, one of them is always on hand for the given situation.

The study is published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Now honeybees have to fight another adversity! Climate change.

Spring's bloom may not smell so sweet anymore, as pollutants from power plants and automobiles destroy flowers' aromas, a new study suggests. The finding could help explain why some pollinators, particularly bees, are declining in certain parts of the world. 

Researchers at the University of Virginia created a mathematical model of how the scents of flowers travel with the wind. The scent molecules produced by the flowers readily bond with pollutants such as ozone, which destroys the aromas they produce.

So instead of wafting for long distances with the wind, the flowery scents are chemically altered. Essentially, the flowers no longer smell like flowers.

"The scent molecules produced by flowers in a less polluted environment, such as in the 1800s, could travel for roughly 1,000 to 1,200 meters [3,300 to 4,000 feet]; but in today's polluted environment downwind of major cities, they may travel only 200 to 300 meters [650 to 980 feet]," said study team member Jose D. Fuentes.

With flowers no longer advertising their presence over as large an area, pollinators are forced to search farther and longer to pick up the hint of their scent. They may also have to rely more on their sight than what they smell.

Bees depend on flower nectar for food, and if they have a hard time finding the flowers, they can't sustain their populations. Other studies, along with the experiences of farmers, have indicated that bee populations are dropping in places such as California and the Netherlands. Fuentes and his team think air pollution may be the reason.

The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, is detailed online in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

When we watch and listen to someone speak, our brain combines the visual information of the movement of the speaker’s mouth with the speech sounds that are produced by this movement.
A part of the continuous speech stream called the envelope, which is the slow rising and falling in the amplitude of the speech, was tracked in auditory areas of the brain. Conversely, the visual cortex tracked mouth movements. So what role does tracking the lip movements of a speaker play in speech perception?
Two areas of the brain actively track lip movements during speech. The first area was the visual cortex. This presumably tracks the lips as a visual signal. The second area was the left motor cortex. The ability of the motor cortex to track lip movements is important for understanding audiovisual speech. Some scientists suggest that the motor system helps to predict the upcoming sound signal by simulating the speaker’s intended mouth movement.
- eLifesciences

Tiny fossils show how environment affects species
Fossils resembling miniaturised popcorn that date back millions of years provide the first statistical evidence that number of species on Earth depends on how the environment changes, according to a new study.
By analysing the fossil record of microscopic aquatic creatures called planktonic foraminifera, the research from University of Southampton in the UK shows that environmental changes put a cap on species richness.
A changing environment alters how many species we see - the spatial gradient of more species in the tropics than at the poles is pervasive evidence for its large-scale impact.
Analyses of how species numbers have changed over time have assumed that any limit has always been the same, even through periods of massive climate upheaval.
New data reject this idea of fixed rules for competition among species and instead show that the limit to the number of species that can co-exist on Earth is much more dynamic. Climate and geology are always changing, and the limit changes with them.
While previous research typically focused individually on either biological, climate change or geological explanations, this new research examined the co-dependence of these factors on how species interact.
Looking at the fossil history of 210 evolutionary species of macroperforate planktonic foraminifera in the Cenozoic Era from 65 million years ago to the present, the study found that the number of species was almost certainly controlled by competition among themselves and probably kept within a finite upper limit.
Scientists used mathematical models to reveal how environmental changes influence both the rate of diversification among species and how many species can co-exist at once.
New results suggest that the world is full of species, but that the precise fullness varies through time as environmental changes alter the outcome of competition among species.
Scientists have long argued that environmental changes are likely to impact the number of species that can co-exist on Earth, but the fossil record is usually too incomplete for powerful statistical testing.
"Microfossils - especially planktonic foraminifera - give us a record with almost no gaps".
The study was published in the journal Ecology Letters.

Laser-Scanning Tech Reveals Hidden Cities in Cambodia
Archaeologists in Cambodia say they uncovered previously unknown hidden cities near the Temples of Angkor Wat, which is part of one of the most important archaeological sites in Southeast Asia.

Using airborne laser scanning technology and covering an area of more than 734 square miles, experts revealed multiple cities that are around 900 to 1,400 years old. Some are so large that they rival the size of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.

“We have entire cities discovered beneath the forest that no one knew were there,” said Dr. Damian Evans, an Australian archaeologist with the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar (light detection and ranging) Initiative (CALI), which has been mapping the country.

This study, one of the largest of its kind, was an extension of a previous survey in 2012 that uncovered a large, interconnected system between cities. The results of the 2015 study, were released in full on 13th June, 2016, in the Journal of Archaeological Science, show the full scale of the city and subsequently the Khmer Empire, which at its peak in the 12th century, may have been the largest empire on Earth.

The discoveries not only expand on the collective history of the region, but also might give researchers clues into the empire’s collapse around the 15th century.

“There’s an idea that somehow the Thais invaded and everyone fled down south–that didn’t happen, there are no cities [revealed by the aerial survey] that they fled to,” Evans said. “It calls into question the whole notion of an Angkorian collapse.”

                                                          ------

Air Pollution Gives Storm Clouds a Stronger, Longer Life

More particulate matter in the air can build stronger, longer-lasting thunderstorms over the tropics, leading to more extreme storms. 

Clouds are built of tiny aerosol particles of dust or pollution from fossil fuel burning that suck up water vapor. Now these cloud particles with time they combine with each other, and become big. And when they become big, due to gravity, they fall out, and we call it rain.

When more aerosols seed the air, like in places with lots of industrial or agricultural pollution, the same amount of water vapor gets absorbed by a larger number of aerosols… meaning tinier-than-usual cloud particle size.

That's important, because it makes the cloud bigger and larger and stronger and live longer. Three to 24 hours longer. And it can produce more extreme storms when the rain finally comes. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Sudip Chakraborty et al., Relative influence of meteorological conditions and aerosols on the...]

A silver lining:  longer-lasting clouds also reflect more light back into space, which could end up somewhat cooling the planet!

A nanomaterial-based, wide-color-varying fluorescent test paper much like classical pH test paper, has been developed to detect arsenic in water. The paper describing it was published in Analytical Chemistry.
To develop this test paper, the team used modified red quantum dots to obtain super-sensitivity to arsenic(III), or As(III). A small amount of cyan carbon dots with spectral blue-green components were added to produce a composited red fluorescence. The sensory solution was then printed onto a piece of filter paper.

In the presence of As(III), a range of colors is displayed—from red to cyan—clearly detecting a dosage scale as low as 5 parts per billion (ppb). According to World Health Organization’s guidelines, 10 ppb of As(III) in drinking water is considered safe.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.analchem.6b01248

Life-forming molecule found in interstellar space!
For the first time ever, scientists have detected a complex organic molecule called a chiral molecule in the reaches of interstellar space, and the discovery could greatly enhance our understanding of how biological life came to be on Earth – and maybe even life's prospects for evolving elsewhere in the galaxy.

The molecule in question, propylene oxide, was discovered in a gigantic gas cloud called Sagittarius B2, located about 390 light-years from the centre of the Milky Way. Sagittarius B2 has a mass around 3 million times the mass of the Sun, and now we know that this huge conglomeration contains chiral molecules in its midst, which had never previously been detected outside our Solar System.
This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the Universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life.
Chirality is a geometric property of molecules, where asymmetric molecules display an almost identical chemical composition, but in an altered configuration – much like a mirror image – in what are called left-handed or right-handed versions.

It's a key chemical property of life on Earth, where every molecule that helps to form living things – such as amino acids, proteins, enzymes, and sugars – appears in only the left- or right-handed version of itself. This is called homochirality, and while it gives a biological benefit – as the matching molecules can fit better with one another to make larger organic structures – nobody knows how this 'chiral bias' came about.

As such, the discovery that chirality exists well outside our Solar System – with the detection of a 'handed' molecule in Sagittarius B2 – is a pretty big deal. Why? Because it could help explain why life essentially picks one molecular orientation over another.

"Propylene oxide is among the most complex and structurally intricate molecules detected so far in space."
Detecting this molecule opens the door for further experiments determining how and where molecular handedness emerges, and why one form may be slightly more abundant than the other."

The researchers identified the molecular signature of propylene oxide using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, with supporting observations coming from the CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in Australia.
The team thinks complex molecules like this could form in the gas cloud from thin mantles of ice that develop on extremely tiny dust grains floating in space. These ice mantles would enable the molecules to form larger molecular structures, and help produce other chemical reactions within the cloud should the ice evaporate.

It sounds like a glacial process, but the fact that chiral molecules are doing this at all in deep space could help explain how they later make their way onto asteroids and comets – which might end up seeding the molecules on the surface of planets in the event of an impact.
In other words, these molecules – and the chance we now have to study them in isolation – could tell us a lot about where life comes from and how it evolves the way it does, including why it's so choosey about being a lefty or a righty.
The findings are published in Science.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/06/13/science.aae0328

Correction: Drinking very hot beverages can cause cancer of oesophagus says WHO
Researchers from the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently announced that coffee and herbal tea consumed at normal serving temperatures do not cause cancer and should not be labelled as carcinogenic.

The findings have knocked the cancer risk of these drinks down to zero, some 25 years after the WHO classified coffee as a possible carcinogen that could lead to bladder cancer. But the scientists still say that drinking extremely hot beverages might cause cancer of the oesophagus.
The conclusion was drawn after 23 scientists from the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed more than 1,000 studies on coffee’s link to cancer. They report that, "there was inadequate evidence for the carcinogenicity of coffee drinking overall".
While the team didn’t go into detail about what "extremely hot" actually means, they do say that coffee consumed at "serving temperature" is fine. That means somewhere around 65 degrees Celsius (150 degrees Fahrenheit).

It’s not that the coffee suddenly becomes a carcinogen when heated to a high temperature, though. The researchers instead think that repeated scalding of the throat might lead to the formation of tumours, though evidence of this is currently limited.

These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of oesophagal cancer and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible.
To make a good cup of coffee, the water temperature while brewing should be somewhere between 90.5 degrees Celsius (195 degrees Fahrenheit) and 96 degrees Celsius (205 degrees Fahrenheit). When served, that temperature drops rather quickly. If it didn’t, the coffee would be too hot to comfortably drink, which is what you should avoid.

The basic rule of thumb here is that if the coffee burns you, wait a few minutes. Not only will this possibly reduce your risk of oesophageal cancer, it will make for a better coffee drinking experience, because who wants a side of pain with their morning cup of coffee?
The American Institute for Cancer Research says:

"Coffee’s possible link to cancer is a well-studied one, with over 1,000 studies on the topic. Early in the research, some studies hinted that coffee might increase cancer risk. Larger and more well-designed studies now suggest the opposite: it may be protective for some cancers."

Cancer isn’t the only disease that coffee could reduce. Earlier this year, researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK found positive results with liver disease, concluding that "having two cups of coffee a day appears to reduce the chances of developing the disease by 44 percent, based on data from 430,000 individuals spread over nine studies.
Let's be clear though - despite the wealth of research into the potential health benefits of coffee, nothing definitive has yet been found. It could be that we're trying really hard to find something beneficial in drinking coffee, because that would be very convenient, given how many of us do it. So we have to remain skeptical for now.

As the research continues, we might find real health benefits in our coffee drinking, but we really don’t need more of an excuse other than it tastes delicious and we're all really, really tired.

A summary of the IARC's findings was published in The Lancet Oncology.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(16)30239-X/fulltext

The cells lining blood vessels in the brain form tight, tough-to-penetrate junctions that prevent toxic molecules from slipping into the brain.
The blood-brain barrier blocks cancer drugs from reaching tumor cells in the brain, creating a significant drug-delivery problem.
Now, preliminary results from a Phase I/II clinical trial suggest that a small implant that emits ultrasound waves can safely open the blood-brain barrier in people, potentially allowing drugs in (Sci. Transl. Med. 2016).
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/8/343/343re2
A sound attack on brain tumors

Brain tumors are difficult to treat with chemotherapy because the blood-brain barrier greatly limits the delivery of drugs into the brain. Carpentier et al. have developed a pulsed ultrasound device, which they implanted into the skull of patients with glioblastoma, an aggressive and difficult to treat brain tumor, in a first-in-human trial. At regularly scheduled treatment sessions, the researchers activated the ultrasound device by connecting it to a power source, disrupting the blood-brain barrier long enough for subsequent chemotherapy to reach the brain. The authors confirmed that this approach was well tolerated and showed evidence of effectiveness to disrupt the blood-brain barrier, paving the way for further development of this therapeutic approach.

Host Inflammatory Response to Mosquito Bites Enhances the Severity of Arbovirus Infection
Some mosquito-borne viruses appear to benefit from their victims’ immune responses to bug bites. Simply put, the body’s defensive reaction to pathogens, including dengue or West Nile, acts as a handmaiden for the viruses themselves. The first glimpses into exactly how these pathogens manage to hijack the body’s defense systems to enhance disease were revealed recently in a new mouse study.
When immune cells travel to the itchy, red site of a mosquito bite, they may inadvertently be infected with a mosquito-borne virus and then help spread the infection throughout the body. The resulting higher viral loads make the recipient sicker than would be the case if the virus were introduced without a bite. This revelation points to a potential new target for combating mosquito-borne diseases: the bite site itself.
The research team found that neutrophils, white blood cells that act as the body’s first line of defense against invaders, fuel inflammation at the bite site—thus trapping the virus there. A few hours later immune system responders called myeloid cells show up and become infected, and their cellular machinery is hijacked to replicate the virus. The immune-system soldiers then help spread the virus in the body, ultimately increasing morbidity and mortality.
Within a day, most mice that received a bite and subsequent virus-jab showed a 10-fold increase in virus numbers at the site of infection, compared with mice that had only been inoculated with virus. Such high viral loads allow the virus to more readily spread to remote tissues—and may also boost chances of transmitting the disease to other carriers. The higher virus count also proved lethal for many bite victims.
To confirm that neutrophils and myeloid cells help the virus thrive, the researchers conducted separate experiments that depleted the neutrophils or blocked myeloid cells from deploying. In both altered states the mice actually had lower viral loads and got less sick.
The new findings are particularly alluring for researchers because they may point to one target—the bite site—for fighting disease formation more effectively. “If you can inhibit bite inflammation, you could have a way of stopping viruses before they establish infection.

http://www.cell.com/immunity/fulltext/S1074-7613(16)30205-9

Right use of hand sanitizers:
Q: How much time should we spend on cleaning our hands with sanitizers?
A scientific answer: To kill bacteria, rub for at least 15 to 30 seconds. After 45 seconds, you’re not doing much more good!
To provide more evidence-based guidance on hand sanitizer use, scientists from Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland used E. coli bacteria to contaminate the hands of 23 health care workers. Then each person received a 3-milliliter squeeze of hand sanitizer. Participants were instructed to rub for different amounts of time, ranging from 10 to 60 seconds. The concentration of bacteria plunged after 10 and 15 seconds of friction, and then dropped slightly more after 30 seconds. But significant reductions in bacteria stopped at the 45-second mark — a curious finding that researcher Daniela Pires says she and her colleagues cannot explain.

The research was presented June 18 at ASM Microbe 2016, a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology and the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

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Q: Where do kids get their tooth decay microbes?

Scientific reply: Very little from mothers! Very limited quantity from the kisses mom's present their children!

New data show that the most common cause of tooth decay, the bacterium Streptococcus mutans (that cause dental caries), doesn’t always come from mother-to-child transmission.

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham studied 119 children in rural Alabama and 414 of their household contacts, tracking the path of S. mutans. Contrary to expectation, 40 percent of the children did not share any strains with their mothers. Instead, those strains usually overlapped with those of siblings and cousins. And 72 percent of children carried a strain of S. mutans that no one else in the family had, probably picked up from other children at school, day care or other locations. The research was presented June 17 at ASM Microbe 2016, a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology and the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

These findings indicate the importance of considering horizontal, as well as vertical, acquisition of S. mutans in prevention strategies for dental caries.

Why is life not possible without water?
According to scientists...
Water is the basic unit of life and it is impossible to live without it. Ever wondered why? A new study has an explanation that may answer many such questions.

Ohio State University lead researcher Dongping Zhong along with his team shed new light on how and why water is essential to life. Zhong called the study a ‘major step forward’ in the understanding of water-protein interactions.

The study finds the strongest evidence that proteins can't fold themselves, but can fold into particular shapes to enable biological reactions.

Zhong, who is also a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and his team used ultra-fast laser pulses to take snapshots of water molecules moving around a DNA polymerase, the kind of protein that helps DNA reproduce.
The findings showed how water molecules typically flow around each other at picosecond speeds, while proteins fold at nanosecond speeds, 1,000 times slower.
Previously, Zhong’s group demonstrated that the water molecules slow down when they encounter a protein. Water molecules are still moving 100 times faster than a protein when they connect with it.

In the new study, the researchers were able to determine that the water molecules directly touched the protein’s ‘side chains,’ the portions of the protein molecule that bind and unbind with each other to enable folding and function. The researchers were also able to note the timing of movement in the molecules.

Water can’t arbitrarily shape a protein, Zhong explained. Proteins can only fold and unfold in a few different ways depending on the amino acids they’re made of.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New Way To Create Fuel From Waste Plastics
Scientists have found a way to use plastic trash to create a cleaner diesel-like fuel that could power vehicles, an advance that may turn landfills into potential energy sources in future.

The researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of California in the US hope to scale up the technique to allow for it to be used in actually reducing plastic trash.

Plastics break down very slowly causing them to pile up in landfills and serving as the source material in artificial island creation in oceans.

Scientists have been looking for ways to degrade plastics, particularly polyethylene, the most common kind produced, but until now have not been able to find inexpensive and scalable means.

The new method involves mixing the plastics with an organometallic catalyst, made from readily available molecules that were then doped with metal iridium, 'Phys.org' reported.

The reaction caused the bonds holding the plastic together to weaken, allowing them to be more easily torn apart.

Researchers were able to use the broken down material to create a diesel-like fuel which they claim could be used to power vehicles and other motors.

Burning the fuel is also cleaner than burning other combustible materials, they said.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Warning: Looking at your smartphone while lying in bed at night could wreak havoc on your vision.
Two women went temporarily blind from constantly checking their phones in the dark, say doctors who are now alerting others to the unusual phenomenon.
The solution: Make sure to use both eyes when looking at your smartphone screen in the dark.
In Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, doctors detailed the cases of the two women, ages 22 and 40, who experienced "transient smartphone blindness" for months.
The women complained of recurring episodes of temporary vision loss for up to 15 minutes. They were subjected to variety of medical exams, MRI scans and heart tests. Yet doctors couldn't find anything wrong with them to explain the problem.
But minutes after walking into an eye specialist's office, the mystery was solved.
"I simply asked them, 'What exactly were you doing when this happened?'" recalled Dr. Gordon Plant of Moorfield's Eye Hospital in London.
He explained that both women typically looked at their smartphones with only one eye while resting on their side in bed in the dark—their other eye was covered by the pillow.
"So you have one eye adapted to the light because it's looking at the phone and the other eye is adapted to the dark," he said.
When they put their phone down, they couldn't see with the phone eye. That's because "it's taking many minutes to catch up to the other eye that's adapted to the dark," Plant said.
He said the temporary blindness was ultimately harmless, and easily avoidable, if people stuck to looking at their smartphones with both eyes.
One of the women was relieved the short-term blindness didn't signal a more serious problem like an imminent stroke. He said the second woman was more skeptical and kept a rigorous monthslong diary tracking her fleeting vision loss before she finally believed him. But she couldn't stop checking her phone for messages from bed, he said.
Dr. Rahul Khurana, a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, called it a fascinating hypothesis but said two cases weren't enough to prove that one-eyed smartphone use in the dark caused the problem. He also doubted whether many smartphone users would experience the phenomenon.
Khurana, who acknowledged that he's an avid cellphone user, said that he and his wife tried to recreate the scenario on a recent evening, but had difficulty checking their phones with only one eye. "It was very odd," he said.
Source: New England Journal of Medicine

Life-saving news: New Helium deposits found in Tanzania

Using a new technique, scientists have discovered reserves of helium in Tanzania said to be equivalent to seven times the amount of the noble gas consumed worldwide each year. The new source could alleviate recurrent shortages of helium that have plagued users of scientific instruments and medical imaging equipment.

Working with the start-up firm Helium One, scientists at Oxford and Durham universities uncovered the reserves in Tanzania’s East African Rift Valley. The researchers theorize that intense heat from volcanic activity in the Rift Valley releases helium in ancient crustal rock. The gas then accumulated in underground reservoirs.

The scientist say they have combined methods used in oil exploration with seismic images of gas-trapping structures and calculations from independent experts to estimate helium reserves of 1.5 billion m3 in just one part of the Rift Valley.

Today, helium is recovered as a by-product of natural gas extraction. But with prices of helium now about four times higher than they were a decade ago, prospectors are looking for new sources. The Tanzania helium reserve would be the first to be discovered and developed intentionally

The scientists presented the findings on June 28 at the Goldschmidt Conference, a gathering of geochemistry experts in Yokohama, Japan.

- Chemical and Engineering News

Good News: Ozone hole in Antarctica is recovering!

Global regulation of chlorine compounds is giving the atmosphere time to heal, even as volcanic eruptions interfere.

A new analysis shows that, on average, the hole — which forms every Southern Hemisphere spring, letting in dangerous ultraviolet light — is smaller and appears later in the year than it did in 2000.

The 1987 global treaty called the Montreal Protocol sought to reduce the ozone hole by banning chlorofluorocarbons, chlorine-containing chemicals — used as refrigerants in products such as air conditioners — that accelerated ozone loss in the stratosphere. The study shows that it worked.

The finding was reported on June 30th in Science.

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STING Operation Against Pathogens Researchers have shed light on how STING, an innate immune sensor that triggers inflammation, is activated to eliminate viruses or bacteria. 

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have revealed the mechanism underlying the activation of STING, an innate immune sensor that triggers inflammation to remove foreign pathogens. This discovery, published in Nature Communications, provides therapeutic targets for treating infections and inflammatory diseases. When cells are infected with foreign matter such as DNA viruses or bacteria, the foreign DNA is sensed by STING, which is embedded in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), an important site of protein production in a cell. STING then triggers the release of type I interferon and other inflammatory responses to eliminate the foreign substance. This essential basic cellular response is part of the innate immune system that recognizes and eliminates pathogens from our bodies. However, it was unclear why STING responded to foreign DNA. Additionally, although it is known that STING translocates from the ER to a location close to the nucleus when it detects foreign DNA, the role of this translocation remained unknown. In the present study, the research group of Assistant Professor Kojiro Mukai, Associate Professor Tomohiko Taguchi and Professor Hiroyuki Arai at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences found that STING is activated at the Golgi, a part of the cell that is involved in protein transport, as opposed to the ER. Furthermore, the activation of STING requires palmitoylation, a type of protein modification, at the Golgi. The unique lipid environment of the Golgi is also essential for the activation of STING. In various inflammatory diseases such as autoimmune disease and cancer, STING is often activated, causing an abnormal inflammatory response. Thus, the findings offer new opportunities to treat such diseases by suppressing the palmitoylation of STING or the manipulation of the Golgi lipid composition.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160621/ncomms11932/full/ncomms119...

Bacteria block mosquitoes from transmitting Zika, chikungunya viruses!
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that a benign bacterium called Wolbachia pipientis can completely block transmission of Zika virus in Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species responsible for passing the virus to humans.

Matthew Aliota, a scientist at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM) and first author of the paper -- published today (July 1, 2016) in the journal Scientific Reports -- says the bacteria could present a "novel biological control mechanism," aiding efforts to stop the spread of Zika virus.
Researchers led by Jorge Osorio, a UW-Madison professor of pathobiological sciences, and Scott O'Neill of the the Eliminate Dengue Program (EDP) and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, are already releasing mosquitoes harboring the Wolbachia bacterium in pilot studies in Colombia, Brazil, Australia, Vietnam and Indonesia to help control the spread of dengue virus. Their work is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

An important feature of Wolbachia is that it is self-sustainable, making it a very low-cost approach for controlling mosquito-borne viral diseases that are affecting many tropical countries around the world.

In two of researchers initial study sites in Australia, approximately 90 percent of the mosquitoes continue to be infected with Wolbachia after initial release more than six years ago.
Wolbachia can be found in up to 60 percent of insects around the world, including butterflies and bees. While not typically found in the Aedes aegypti mosquito -- the species that also transmits dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever viruses -- scientists discovered in the early 1990s that Wolbachia could be introduced to the mosquito in the lab and would prevent the mosquitoes from transmitting dengue virus.

Zika virus belongs to the same family as dengue virus and Aliota and Osorio.