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.

                                                 ------------

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.

--

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.

Monsoon forecast is becoming a difficult process. With more than 70% of India’s 1.25 billion citizens engaged in agriculture and relying on weather predictions to decide when they will sow their seeds and harvest their crops.
But getting the forecast right remains a challenge, thanks to the complex — and still poorly understood — ways in which South Asia’s monsoon rains are influenced by everything from atmospheric and ocean temperatures to air quality and global climate trends. Even the amount of ice in Antarctica is suspected to have an impact.

And it’s only getting harder to figure out, scientists say, as the monsoon becomes increasingly erratic.

A new study released Friday in the journal Science Advances helps clear up a bit of the mystery, by showing that man-made climate change is responsible for most of the change seen in ocean surface temperatures near the equator across Asia, which in turn affect regional rainfall patterns including the Indian monsoon.

By showing that link, the study indicates future ocean warming in the region, which could in turn increase the amount of rainfall during monsoons, strengthen cyclones and increase precipitation over East Asia.

“This has important implications for understanding changes in rainfall patterns for a large, and vulnerable population across Asia,” said oceanographer Evan Weller, who led the research team while he was at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, before recently shifting to Monash University in Australia.

The study looks specifically at a mid-oceanic body called the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, which holds some of the world’s warmest seawaters and spans the western Pacific to the eastern Indian Ocean.

Scientists have long known that India’s monsoons are partly influenced by that warm pool. And they’ve known that the pool has been expanding — and warming — for decades. That expansion and warming have already caused some sea rise around islands in Asia.

It wasn’t entirely clear why the pool was changing, until now.

Weller and his team compared data observations with several climate models, and deduced that rising greenhouse gases along with aerosols and other atmospheric pollutants were the dominant cause of the pool’s warming and expansion over the past 60 years, though regional climate variations also had some effect.

But one thing is clear: If climate change trends continue, and by most indications they will, forecasters will have to consider the warm pool in their monsoon predictions. And by demonstrating how greenhouse gases are the dominant driver of changes in the warm pool, the team has added another dimension that can help improve climate models.

Soy diesel found to be less toxic than other fuels
Unlike conventional diesel, fuel made from soybeans does not directly damage lung cells, a lab study has shown.

“Some of the soybean biodiesel presently being used in Brazil does not exhibit direct adverse effects on human lung cells nor [does it] induce inflammatory response,” says the paper, published in the August issue of the journal Toxicology in Vitro.

To assess the fuels’ toxic effects, researchers from Brazil and Puerto Rico exposed lung cell cultures to particles emitted by the combustion of four types of fuel: commercial diesel from fossil fuel sources, pure soy-based biodiesel, soy-based biodiesel with additives and ethanol with additives.

After exposure, the scientists counted the proportion of cells that survived to assess the fuels’ toxicity, and measured the quantity of cytokines the cells produced. Cytokines are proteins secreted by certain cells, including lung cells, involved in the regulation of inflammatory processes. An increase in their production can cause damage to the cells.

Adriana Gioda, a chemist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and co-author of the paper, says this study is the first demonstration that soy-based biodiesel does not cause a significant toxic reaction in lung cells.

However, the authors warn that these results should not be “considered as an absolute positive outcome” and should pave the way for further studies in live animals.
 

Viral hepatitis kills as many as malaria, TB or HIV/AIDS, finds study
Viral hepatitis has become one of the leading causes of death and disability across the globe – killing at least as many people annually as TB, malaria or HIV/AIDS. This is the finding of new research from scientists at Imperial College London and University of Washington, who analysed data from 183 countries collected between 1990 and 2013.


Viral hepatitis exists in five forms – A, B, C, D and E and is transmitted through bodily fluids, or, in the case of A and E, through food or drink contaminated with faeces.

A majority of the deaths – 96 per cent - were due to hepatitis B and C which cause liver damage (cirrhosis), and liver cancer. Symptoms include fatigue, jaundice and nausea, however in many people the infection is symptomless - and so an individual may not know they are infected until they develop serious complications.

The researchers, who published their findings in journal The Lancet, found that viral hepatitis deaths increased by 63 per cent over the 23-year period. The study, which was co-led by scientists at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, found deaths from viral hepatitis were higher in high and middle-income countries than lower income countries. The authors say the overall disease burden is now more evenly divided between higher and lower income nations.
The team say we now urgently need international measures to address this crisis.
Although there are effective treatments and vaccines for viral hepatitis, there is very little money invested in getting these to patients –especially compared to malaria, HIV/AIDS and TB. We now have a viral hepatitis global action plan approved in May by the World Health Assembly, and we now need to implement it.
The researchers found deaths from acute infection, cirrhosis and liver disease caused by viral hepatitis had increased by 63 per cent from 890,000 in 1990 to 1.45 million in 2013.

By comparison, in 2013, 1.3 million people worldwide died from AIDS, 1.4 million from TB, and 855,000 from malaria, according to a 2015 study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
In the current study, most hepatitis deaths were found to occur in East Asia, and the majority of global deaths were due to hepatitis B and C. One potential reason for the high number of deaths from hepatitis B and C is these strains cause long-term infections with very few immediate symptoms. They can therefore progress silently until they trigger serious liver damage or cancer. Although we have had an effective hepatitis B vaccine for some years, there is still a large proportion of the world which is unvaccinated. We have no similar vaccine for hepatitis C.

Source: Imperial College London

Big Bang or Big Bounce?

Perfect Quantum Cosmological Bounce

A new study of the early universe reveals how it could have been formed from an older collapsing universe, rather than being brand new.

The universe is currently expanding and it is a common theory that this is the result of the 'Big Bang' - the universe bursting into existence from a point of infinitely dense and hot material.

However, physicists have long debated this idea as it means the universe began in a state of complete breakdown of physics as we know it. Instead, some have suggested that the universe has alternated between periods of expansion and contraction, and the current expansion is just one phase of this.

This so-called 'Big Bounce' idea has been around since 1922, but has been held back by an inability to explain how the universe transitions from a contracting to an expanding state, and vice versa, without leading to an infinite point.

Now, in a new study published today in Physical Review Letters, Dr Steffen Gielen from Imperial College London and Dr Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, have shown how the Big Bounce might be possible.

Cosmological observations suggest that during its very early life, the universe may have looked the same at all scales - meaning that the physical laws that that worked for the whole structure of the universe also worked at the scale of the very small, smaller than individual atoms. This phenomenon is known as conformal symmetry.

In today's universe, this is not the case - particles smaller than atoms behave very differently to larger matter and the symmetry is broken. Subatomic particle behaviour is governed by what is called quantum mechanics, which produces different rules of physics for the very small.

For example, without quantum mechanics, atoms would not exist. The electrons, as they whizz around the nucleus, would lose energy and collapse into the centre, destroying the atom. However, quantum mechanics prevents this from happening.

In the early universe, as everything was incredibly small, it may have been governed solely by the principles of quantum mechanics, rather than the large-scale physics we also see today.

In the new study, the researchers suggest that the effects of quantum mechanics could prevent the universe from collapsing and destroying itself at end of a period of contraction, known as the Big Crunch. Instead, the universe would transition from a contracting state to an expanding one without collapsing completely.

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.021301

Malaria teamwork makes it more dangerous to humans
Getting infected by two malaria species can improve conditions for the second species, making the disease more dangerous and persistent than lone infections, a mouse study shows.

According to a paper made public on 5 July, being infected with both Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax can provide this second parasite species with more of the resources it needs to prosper.

This is because P. falciparum attacks red blood cells of all ages but when the blood regenerates it offers more subsistence for P. vivax, which prefers to attack young red blood cells, the researchers say.

'The findings challenge ideas that one species will outcompete the other', says coauthor Sarah Reece, a biologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. “This explains why infections involving two parasite species can pose a greater health risk to patients.”

Humans are a bit more complicated than mice, because the nature of the immune response actually leads over time to protection from disease severity.

In their paper, the authors admit it will be hard to translate their research into applicable knowledge for human treatment. They write that previous infections and the ability of P. vivax to remain in the body at a dormant stage can complicate the picture of coinfections. 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12639/abstract;jsess...

Improving climate predictions with the help of cluster satellites
A team of small, shoebox-sized satellites, flying in formation around the Earth, could estimate the planet’s reflected energy with twice the accuracy of traditional monolith satellites, according to an MIT-led study published online in Acta Astronautica. If done right, such satellite swarms could also be cheaper to build, launch, and maintain.

The researchers, led by Sreeja Nag, a former graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), simulated the performance of a single large, orbiting satellite with nine sensors, compared with a cluster of three to eight small, single-sensor satellites flying together around the Earth. In particular, the team looked at how each satellite formation measures albedo, or the amount of light reflected from the Earth — an indication of how much heat the planet reflects.
The team found that clusters of four or more small satellites were able to look at a single location on Earth from multiple angles, and measure that location’s total reflectance with an error that is half that of single satellites in operation today. Nag says such a correction in estimation error could significantly improve scientists’ climate projections.
“Total outgoing radiation is actually one of the biggest uncertainties in climate change, because it is a complex function of where on Earth you are, what season it is, what time of day it is, and it’s very difficult to ascertain how much heat leaves the Earth,” Nag says. “If we can estimate the reflectance of different surface types, globally, frequently, and more accurately, which a cluster of satellites would let you do, then at least you’ve solved one part of the climate puzzle.”
“The Earth does not reflect equally in all directions,” Nag says. “If you don’t get these multiple angles, you might under- or overestimate how much it’s reflecting, if you have to extrapolate from just one direction.”

Today, satellites that measure the Earth’s albedo typically do so with multiple cameras, arranged on a single satellite. For example, NASA’s Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on the Terra satellite houses nine cameras that take images of the Earth from a fan-like arrangement of angles. Nag says the drawback of this design is that the cameras have a limited view, as they are not designed to change angles and can only observe within a single plane.

Instead, the team proposes a cluster of small satellites that travel around the Earth in a loose formation, close enough to each other to be able to image the same spot on the ground from their various vantage points. Each satellite can move within the formation, taking pictures of the same spot at the same time from different angles.

“Over time, the cluster would cover the whole Earth, and you’d have a multiangular, 3-D view of the entire planet from space, which has not been done before with multiple satellites,” Nag says. “Moreover, we can use multiple clusters for more frequent coverage of the Earth.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576516303149

Astronomers find a freak Frankenstein galaxy made of parts of other galaxies
The unassuming galaxy turns out to have a lot of parts taken from galaxies that came before.
About 250 million light-years away, there's a neighborhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy possibly formed from the parts of other galaxies.

A new study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal reveals the secret of UGC 1382, a galaxy that had originally been thought to be old, small and typical. Instead, scientists using data from NASA telescopes and other observatories have discovered that the galaxy is 10 times bigger than previously thought and, unlike most galaxies, its insides are younger than its outsides, almost as if it had been built using spare parts.
"This rare, 'Frankenstein' galaxy formed and is able to survive because it lies in a quiet little suburban neighborhood of the universe, where none of the hubbub of the more crowded parts can bother it," said study co-author Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, California. "It is so delicate that a slight nudge from a neighbor would cause it to disintegrate."
As it turns out, UGC 1382, at about 718,000 light-years across, is more than seven times wider than the Milky Way. It is also one of the three largest isolated disk galaxies ever discovered, according to the study. This galaxy is a rotating disk of low-density gas. Stars don't form here very quickly because the gas is so spread out.

But the biggest surprise was how the relative ages of the galaxy's components appear backwards. In most galaxies, the innermost portion forms first and contains the oldest stars. As the galaxy grows, its outer, newer regions have the youngest stars. Not so with UGC 1382. By combining observations from many different telescopes, astronomers were able to piece together the historical record of when stars formed in this galaxy -- and the result was bizarre.

"The center of UGC 1382 is actually younger than the spiral disk surrounding it," Seibert said. "It's old on the outside and young on the inside. This is like finding a tree whose inner growth rings are younger than the outer rings."

The unique galactic structure may have resulted from separate entities coming together, rather than a single entity that grew outward. In other words, two parts of the galaxy seem to have evolved independently before merging -- each with its own history.
More galaxies like this may exist, but more research is needed to look for them.

"By understanding this galaxy, we can get clues to how galaxies form on a larger scale, and uncover more galactic neighborhood surprises".
- Astronomy.com

Bright light accelerates ageing in mice

Exposure to artificial light weakens rodent’ muscles and bones, but risks to humans are not clear 

Lucassen and Johanna Meijer, a neuroscientist at Leiden, report  in Current Biology that a constant barrage of bright light prematurely ages mice, playing havoc with their circadian clocksand causing a cascade of health problems.

Mice exposed to constant light experienced bone-density loss, skeletal-muscle weakness and inflammation; restoring their health was as simple as turning the lights off. The findings are preliminary, but they suggest that people living in cities flooded with artificial light may face similar health risks.

Many previous studies have hinted at a connection between artificial light exposure and health problems in animals and people. Epidemiological analyses have found that shift workers have an increased risk of breast cancer, metabolic syndrom and osteoporosis. People exposed to bright light at night are more likely to have cardiovascular disease and often don’t get enough sleep.

And disruption of the biological clock alone might not cause the health effects reported in the study, says Steven Lockley, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Poor sleep and light itself can each affect health, so an altered circadian clock may not be to blame.

The study should be a warning to people who work in intensive-care facilities or long-term care facilities, and to shift workers.

http://www.nature.com/news/bright-light-accelerates-ageing-in-mice-...

Species Biodiversity has fallen below 'safe' level on majority of land on Earth, a recent study reported in Science  says. 

Each year humans use more land for buildings, roads, industries and agriculture purposes. That may not always cause extinctions, it does reduce the number of species within specific ecosystems. When bio-diversity drops too low ecosystems can loose their resilience and even stop functioning.

 In many parts of the world, we are approaching a situation where human intervention might be needed to sustain ecosystem function, according to the study. 

Biodiversity intactness within most biomes (especially grassland biomes), most biodiversity hotspots, and even some wilderness areas is inferred to be beyond the boundary. Such widespread transgression of safe limits suggests that biodiversity loss, if unchecked, will undermine efforts toward long-term sustainable development.

The greatest changes have happened in those places where most people live, which might affect physical and psychological wellbeing. To address this, we will have to preserve the remaining areas of natural vegetation and restore human-used lands

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6296/288

A research project led by The Australian National University (ANU) has closed an important gap in the understanding of a fundamental process of life -- the creation of proteins based on recipes called RNA.

RNAs are short-lived copies of genetic information stored in DNA. They are read by cellular ribosomes, which translate the recipes into proteins to become the main building blocks of life.

Lead researcher Professor Thomas Preiss from The John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) at ANU, said the new understanding would open up avenues for treatment of a wide range of diseases including cancer, heart disease and a spectrum of rarer genetic diseases.
The research team took snapshots of how ribosomes distribute along the RNA strings, paying particular attention to how ribosomes make sure they read the recipe from the correct starting point.

Cells throughout the body contain the same complete blueprint for life in their DNA.

"To create and maintain cells as diverse as those in the brain, bone or liver requires great precision in terms of which RNA recipes are made available, where and when.
How efficiently and accurately ribosomes read and translate the recipes is also critical.

For example, ribosomes are known to become over-active in cancer.
The research confirms a 40-year-old theory that explains how the ribosome correctly picks up the beginning of the code, even though the code usually only begins some distance inside the RNA string.
Research team member Dr Nikolay Shirokikh from ANU said the project examined where the two components of the ribosome started to attach to RNA strings.

"The theory was that the smaller half of the ribosome attaches itself to the very beginning of the RNA and then scans along the string until it finds the start signal of the recipe. There, the larger half joins and the whole ribosome begins to manufacture a protein," Dr Shirokikh said.

"Our ribosome snapshot approach has finally provided proof that the scanning model is correct. We also gained new insight into how fast the ribosome can complete the different tasks and how other cellular components come in to help it along."
The ribosome snapshot data generated with the new technique was made available to scientists globally via an app for high-content data visualisation developed at the Monash Bioinformatics Platform.
The research has been published in the journal Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18647...

Scientists explain Why the turtle got its shell
Burrowing power, not protection may have triggered carapace evolution
Turtle shells didn’t get their start as natural armor, it seems. The reptiles’ ancestors might have evolved partial shells to help them burrow instead, new research suggests. Only later did the hard body covering become useful for protection.

The findings might also help explain how turtles’ ancestors survived a mass extinction 250 million years ago that wiped out most plants and animals on earth, scientists report online July 14 in Current Biology.

Most shelled animals, like armadillos, get their shells by adding bony scales all over their bodies. Turtles, though, form shells by gradually broadening their ribs until the bones fuse together. Fossils from ancient reptiles with partial shells made from thickened ribs suggest that turtles’ ancestors began to suit up in the same way.

It’s an unusual mechanism, says Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who led the study. Thicker ribs don’t offer much in the way of protection until they’re fully fused, as they are in modern turtles. And the modification makes critical functions like moving and breathing much harder — a steep price for an animal to pay. So Lyson suspected there was some advantage other than protection to the partial shells.

It’s a very plausible idea, although many other animals burrow but don’t have these specializations.

T. Lyson et al. Fossorial origin of the turtle shell. Current Biology. Vol. 26, July 25, 2016, p. 1. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.020.

A family of related, exotic particles, each made up of four quarks, has been discovered. The finding could hold clues about the evolution of the universe, the researchers said.

The four newfound tetraquarks, now called X(4140), X(4274), X(4500) and X(4700), each are composed of two quarks and two antiquarks (the antimatter partners of quarks). Yet each of the newfound particles has a different mass and different subatomic properties. They are considered a family of tetraquark siblings because of having the same quark composition and arrangement.

Quarks are elementary particles, the building blocks of protons and neutrons. Until the recent discoveries of tetra and even pentaquarks, physicists thought quarks grouped only into pairs or triplets. The newfound tetraquark family is even more distinct because the family members are made up of heavy, exotic types of quarks — known as charm quarks and strange quarks — which are not found in everyday materials.
Skwarnicki and Britton detailed their discoveries in the June issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07898

How bees cool their homes...
When a honeybee colony gets hot and bothered, the crisis sets tongues wagging. Middle-aged bees stick their tongues into the mouths of their elders, launching these special drinker bees to go collect water. That’s just one detail uncovered during a new study of how a colony superorganism cools in hot weather.
Honeybees communicate about collecting water and work together in deploying it as air-conditioning. The tests show just how important water is for protecting a colony from overheating.
Bees often get as much water as they need in the nectar they sip. But they do need extra water at times, such as during overheating in the center of the nest where eggs and young are coddled. When researchers artificially heated that zone in two colonies confined in a greenhouse, worker bees fought back. They used their wings to fan hot air out of the hive. “You can put your hand in the opening of a hive on a hot day and feel the blast of air that’s being pushed out.
Several hundred bees also move out of the nest to cluster in a beardlike mass nearby. Their evacuation reduces body heat within the nest and opens up passageways for greater airflow.
The bees also had a Plan C — evaporative cooling. Middle-aged bees inside a hive walked toward the nest entrance to where a small number of elderly bees, less than 1 percent of the colony, hang out and wait until water is needed.
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/219/14/2156.abstract

Researchers in China and the UK have attempted to define and measure human intelligence and discover how intellect works. The research team, which includes researchers from Fudan University, quantified the brain’s dynamic functions and identified how different parts of the brain interact with each other at different times. The work was published in Brain. Using resting-state magnetic resonance imaging analysis on thousands of people’s brains around the world, the research has found that the areas of the brain that are associated with learning and development show high levels of variability, meaning that they change their neural connections with other parts of the brain more frequently—over a matter of minutes or seconds. On the other hand, regions of the brain that aren’t associated with intelligence—the visual, auditory, and sensory-motor areas—show small variability and adaptability. What the researchers found was that the more variable a brain is, and the more its different parts frequently connect with each other, the higher a person’s IQ and creativity are.
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/139/8/2307

Open-source drug discovery a success
Researchers from around the world collaborate
In what is being called the first-ever test of open-source drug-discovery, researchers from around the world have successfully identified compounds to pursue in treating and preventing parasite-borne illnesses such as malaria as well as cancer.

Starting in late 2011, the Medicines for Malaria Venture, based in Geneva, Switzerland, distributed 400 diverse compounds with antimalarial activity free of charge to 200 labs in 30 countries. One-third of the labs reported their results in a paper published today in PLOS Pathogens, "Open source drug discovery with the Malaria Box compound collection for neglected diseases and beyond."

The results have ignited more a dozen drug-development projects for a variety of diseases.

"The trial was successful not only in identifying compounds to pursue for anti-malarials, but it also identified compounds to treat other parasites and cancer," said lead author Wesley Van Voorhis. To help lead the project, Van Voorhis took a sabbatical from his roles as a University of Washington professor of medicine (allergy and infectious diseases) and director of the Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases.

The National Cancer Institute is now working on a colon cancer drug that emerged from the testing, Van Voorhis said. Several European labs are working on anti-worm compounds, and numerous U.S. labs are investigating drugs to combat other parasites. Medicines for Malaria Venture is also working with pharmaceutical companies GSK and Novartis on related anti-malarials, he added.

In their paper, researchers cited the lack of interaction between academia and industry as a major curb to innovation in drug discovery.
Much of the global resource in biology is present in universities, whereas the focus of medicinal chemistry is still largely within industry. Open-source drug discovery, with sharing of information, is clearly a first step towards overcoming that gap," they wrote.

The Malaria Box distributed 400 diverse druglike molecules that were most often found in industry collections, helping to bridge the gap between industry and academia.

This open-access effort was so successful that Medicines for Malaria Venture has begun to distribute another set of compounds with broader potential applicability, called the Pathogen Box. The box is available now to scientific labs globally.
Source: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON HEALTH SCIENCES/UW MEDICINE

Graphene-based sheets make dirty water drinkable simply and cheaply!
Engineers at the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) have developed graphene-based biofoam sheets that can be laid on dirty or salty dams and ponds to produce clean drinking water, using the power of the sun. This new technique could be a cheap and simple way to help provide fresh water in countries where large areas of water are contaminated with suspended particles of dirt and other floating matter.

The biofilm is created as a two-layered structure consisting of two nanocellulose layers produced by bacteria. The lower layer contains pristine cellulose, while the top layer also contains graphene oxide, which absorbs sunlight and produces heat. The system works by drawing up water from underneath like a sponge where it then evaporates in the topmost layer, leaving behind any suspended particulates or salts. Fresh water then condenses on the top, where it can be drawn off and used.

The results of this research were recently published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Source: Washington University in St.Louis

What factors affect contact lens discomfort? Optometry and Vision Science presents research update.

up to 50 percent of contact lens wearers experience dryness or discomfort at least occasionally. New research aimed at understanding and managing this common and complex problem is presented in the special August issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/wkh-wfa080116.php

Io’s Atmosphere Collapses
Jupiter's shadow makes this volcanic moon's atmosphere freeze solid once per day
Jupiter's active moon Io has a collapsible atmosphere: New views show the satellite's shroud of sulfur dioxide freezing when Io enters its planet's shadow each day and converting back to gas when the moon emerges.
Io, Jupiter's fifth moon, is the solar system's most volcanically active body; plumes of the sulfur dioxide gas bursts from multiple active volcanoes, reaching up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) above the moon's surface at a scalding 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius). The Jupiter moon's surface, on the other hand, is frigidly cold, and gets even colder when Jupiter blocks out the sun—which prompts the atmospheric collapse.

Io's atmosphere is in a constant state of collapse and repair, and shows that a large fraction of the atmosphere is supported by sublimation of sulfur dioxide ice

Neonicotinoid insecticides become inadvertent insect contraceptives!

Over the last year, beekeepers in some parts of the world  lost nearly half of their honeybee hives. And there are a lot of suspected culprits for this so-called beepocalypse—from parasitic mites, to viruses, to simple land use changes. But a recent study pointed to another possibility: poor sperm quality among the drone bees, leading to colony crashes. And now another group of researchers may have found a reason for the subpar sperm: neonicotinoid pesticides. These substances contain chemicals similar to nicotine and affect insect nervous systems. 

"So for the drones that were exposed to pesticides during development, it appears there were more dead sperm in their reproductive tracts." 

Williams and his colleagues studied the effects of two neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybee drones, genetically assigned to mate with queens. 

But in 20 honeybee hives Williams and his collaborators found that those drones exposed to standard environmental levels of the pesticides were shorter-lived, thus having fewer opportunities to mate. And even if the drones did survive, they had nearly 40 percent fewer living sperm than did control bees—meaning the pesticides were acting like honeybee contraceptives. 

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1835/20160506

Transfer of mitochondria from astrocytes to neurons after stroke

Under duress, nerve cells get a little help from their friends. Brain cells called astrocytes send their own energy-producing mitochondria to struggling nerve cells. Those gifts may help the neurons rebound after injuries such as strokes, scientists propose in the July 28 Nature.

It was known that astrocytes — star-shaped glial cells that, among other jobs, support neurons — take in and dispose of neurons’ discarded mitochondria. Now it turns out that mitochondria can move the other way, too. This astrocyte-to-neuron transfer is surprising.
Mitochondria produce the energy that powers cells in the body. Scientists have spotted the organelles moving into damaged cells in other parts of the body, including the lungs, heart and liver. The new study turns up signs of this mitochondrial generosity in the brain.

Not only do the mitochondria make it into neurons, they actually help. Neurons with donated mitochondria better survived their starvation diet. When grown in dishes without extra mitochondria floating around, neurons were less able to weather the poor conditions, the researchers found.

Further experiments suggest that the transfer happens not just in lab dishes, but in the brains of mice. A day after mice received a strokelike injury, astrocyte-produced mitochondria showed up inside their neurons. The gift giving seems to depend on a protein called CD38, which sits on the outside of astrocytes and may detect distress signals. When CD38 wasn’t functioning, the mice had fewer mitochondria in their neurons. What’s more, the mice were worse at balancing on wires than mice with normal CD38 behavior, a deficit that may be linked to having too few mitochondria in neurons.

The results bolster the idea that mitochondria donations between cells may have tremendous therapeutic potential

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7613/full/nature18928.html

Carbon Nanotubes: Ultrabreathable and Protective Membranes with Sub-5 nm Carbon Nanotube Pores 

to protect soldiers from biological and chemical threats, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists has created a material that is highly breathable yet protective from biological agents.

This material is the first key component of futuristic smart uniforms that also will respond to and protect from environmental chemical hazards. The research appears in the July 27 edition of the journal,Advanced Materials 

The LLNL team fabricated flexible polymeric membranes with aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) channels as moisture conductive pores. The size of these pores (less than 5 nanometers, nm) is 5,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

To provide high breathability, the new composite material takes advantage of the unique transport properties of carbon nanotube pores. By quantifying the membrane permeability to water vapor, the team found for the first time that, when a concentration gradient is used as a driving force, CNT nanochannels can sustain gas-transport rates exceeding that of a well-known diffusion theory by more than one order of magnitude.

These membranes also provide protection from biological agents due to their very small pore size — less than 5 nanometers (nm) wide. Biological threats like bacteria or viruses are much larger and typically more than 10-nm in size. 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201670197/full

The stimulation hypothesis

The mighty monsoon winds that periodically bring rains that drench India first billowed around 12.9 million years ago, new research shows. The work provides the best look yet at the conditions that fostered the modern monsoon.

By examining sediments piled up around Indian Ocean islands, researchers uncovered a geologic history of the South Asian monsoon stretching back tens of millions of years. The monsoon winds began abruptly, researchers report online July 20 in Scientific Reports. That speedy start-up suggests that factors such as global cooling were at play in addition to the rise of the Himalayan mountain range, which scientists typically blame for the monsoon’s inception.

Rainfall during the summer monsoon season accounts for more than 70 percent of India’s annual precipitation. The temperature difference between the continent and the adjacent Indian Ocean drives the winds. During winter, warm air over the ocean rises and draws in cool air from the land to the north. In summer, the land becomes warmer and the winds flip direction.

The snow and high elevation of the Himalayas drive the temperature difference between the land and sea. But the mountains grew over tens of millions of years, making it difficult to determine exactly when conditions favorable to the monsoon began. Previous estimates ranged from around 28.7 million to 7 million years ago.

Monsoon winds drive currents in the ocean, which in turn carry ocean sediments across the sea. Sediment accumulates in mounds similar to snowdrifts when currents are strong. The strong currents also pull nutrients from the seafloor toward the surface, boosting biological activity that in turn draws oxygen from the water. That lower oxygen supply leaves a chemical trace in the sediments.

The researchers drilled around 500 meters into the seafloor and extracted sediments dating back roughly 25 million years. A weaker precursor to the modern monsoon existed roughly 25 million years ago, the sediment data suggest. Around 12.9 million years ago, however, the winds revved up to their modern strength over the course of about 300,000 years, a relatively short time compared with the formation of the Himalayas.

The strengthening of the monsoon lines up with a period of global cooling and the growth of the polar ice caps. That climate shift may have boosted the temperature difference between the land and sea, supercharging the winds, the researchers propose.

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep29838