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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 22, 2019 at 9:17am

Using sticky plastic models with differently painted surfaces, researchers showed that zebra stripes painted onto the body can protect against biting insects. 

Relative to a striped mannequin, a brown painted model attracted 10 times more horseflies, while a beige one lured in twice the number as the striped figure. 

The stripes likely make the skin less attractive to horseflies, the researchers reported January 16 in Royal Society Open Science. Some indigenous people paint their bodies, and those markings could provide some protection from the bloodsuckers and diseases they carry, according to the authors. 

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A sign that aliens could stink

A molecule that’s known for its smelly and poisonous nature on Earth may be a sure-fire sign of extraterrestrial life.

Phosphine is among the stinkiest, most toxic gases on Earth, found in some of the foulest of places, including penguin dung heaps, the depths of swamps and bogs, and even in the bowels of some badgers and fish. This putrid “swamp gas” is also highly flammable and reactive with particles in our atmosphere.

Most life on Earth, specifically all aerobic, oxygen-breathing life, wants nothing to do with phosphine, neither producing it nor relying on it for survival.

Now MIT researchers have found that phosphine is produced by another, less abundant life form: anaerobic organisms, such as bacteria and microbes, that don’t require oxygen to thrive. The team found that phosphine cannot be produced in any other way except by these extreme, oxygen-averse organisms, making phosphine a pure biosignature — a sign of life (at least of a certain kind).

In a paper recently published in the journal Astrobiology, the researchers report that if phosphine were produced in quantities similar to methane on Earth, the gas would generate a signature pattern of light in a planet’s atmosphere. This pattern would be clear enough to detect from as far as 16 light years away by a telescope such as the planned James Webb Space Telescope. If phosphine is detected from a rocky planet, it would be an unmistakable sign of extraterrestrial life.

http://news.mit.edu/2019/phosphine-aliens-stink-1218

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 20, 2019 at 9:45am

Immunity Isn’t the Body’s Only Defense System
Symbiotic bacteria, metabolism, and stress pathways can all help animals tolerate, rather than succumb, to disease.

https://www.the-scientist.com/infographics/infographic--immunity-is...

https://www.the-scientist.com/features/could-tolerating-disease-be-...

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We have vaccination problems where people try to cheat healthcare workers. So scientists now are trying invisible ink to know whether kids have been vaccinated or not. Technology to beat the cheaters!

“Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.

Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.” 

There may be other concerns that patients have about being ‘tattooed,’ carrying around personal medical information on their bodies or other aspects of this unfamiliar approach to storing medical records.  Different people and different cultures will probably feel differently about having an invisible medical tattoo.”

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How about using beauty to communicate science? Miss America 2020 not only won the beauty contest by conducting a science experiment on stage,  but also will spend a year advocating for Mind Your Meds, a drug safety and prevention programme. Ummm!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50862408

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Personalized Nutrition Companies’ Claims Overhyped: Scientists

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/personalized-nutrition-c...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 17, 2019 at 10:12am

Most People don't trust women with science. If I SAY MY NETWORK IS NOVEL AND UNIQUE DO YOU AGREE? Why don't people trust science with women?Because men are more likely than women to call their science ‘excellent’ and most people agree with them! Should women too do what men do? This network is my answer to all of them, whether anybody agree with em or not. 

Gender disparities in science and medicine have been studied by task forces and committees that have identified problems and possible solutions, but stark gaps remain — at the highest levels and down the ladder. On average, female researchers still earn less, receive less funding at the crucial start of their careers and are cited less often than their male counterparts.

A new study adds to a growing body of research that suggests subtle differences in how women describe their discoveries may affect their career trajectories. Male authors were more likely to sprinkle words like “novel,” “unique” and “excellent” into the abstracts that summarize their scientific papers, compared to female authors. Such positively framed findings were more likely to be cited by peers later on, a key measure of the influence of a person’s research, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal.

Should women start to overhype their research? They should to succeed!

Because communication style matters in grant proposals, it was found.

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A chip made with carbon nanotubes, not silicon, marks a computing milestone

The prototype could give rise to a new generation of faster, more energy-efficient electronics

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chip-carbon-nanotubes-not-silic...

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 17, 2019 at 7:11am

Hyper-authorship where more than 1000 people contribute to a single research paper is increasing proving that research now reflects the increasingly global nature of research across several fields. Between 2009 and 2013, 573 manuscripts listing 1,000 co-authors or more were published, according to a report released on 4 December by the Institute for Scientific Information  (ISI).

The number of research papers with more than 1,000 authors has more than doubled in the past 5 years, a study of millions of articles indexed by the Web of Science (WoS) database has found.

Between 2009 and 2013, 573 manuscripts listing 1,000 co-authors or more were published, according to a report released on 4 December by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which is part of Clarivate Analytics, the firm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that runs the WoS. But that figure has risen to 1,315 papers over the past 5 years.

The surge in this practice, dubbed hyperauthorship, reflects the increasingly global nature of research across several fields. 

In particle and nuclear physics, papers with hundreds or even thousands of authors have been common for some time, largely because of massive collaborative research projects at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The ISI study found that papers involving authors in dozens of countries — although rare — are also being published more often. Between 2009 to 2013, just one manuscript authored by researchers from more than 60 countries was listed in the WoS. Between 2014 and 2018, there were 49 such papers — and nearly two-thirds of these had authors from more than 80 nations.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03862-0?utm_source=Natur...

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https://phys.org/news/2020-01-occurrence-treatment-spaceflight-medi...

First reported occurrence and treatment of spaceflight medical risk 200+ miles above earth

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2019 at 11:07am

Salt Could Play a Role in Allergies

High salt concentrations are present in the affected skin of people with atopic dermatitis and promote the differentiation of the T helper cells involved in the development of allergic diseases.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/salt-could-play-a-role-i...

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An Acoustic Password Enhances Auditory Learning in Juvenile Brood Parasitic Cowbirds

Most songbirds learn to sing by copying songs they hear around them. But young brown-headed cowbirds face a problem: they aren't raised by their own kind. Female cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of more than 100 different kinds of birds, foisting the work of chick-rearing onto unwitting foster-parents. a new paper describes how the cowbird chicks may learn to recognize and sing their own species’ songs. Researchers 

found that part of the answer appears to be a "password" -- a simple call that the birds know innately. This password activates learning mechanisms in young cowbirds' brains, prompting them to remember other vocalizations they hear at the same time.  Males raised in isolation will develop something that resembles a cowbird song, but with important differences. In the wild, young males change their developing songs to match the songs of other cowbirds in their vicinity, leading to regional differences or "accents."

Females don't sing, but they have a simple "chatter call" that develops normally regardless of what a female hears growing up. They use it in a variety of contexts, including immediately after hearing a song they like. Because the chatter call is innate and is often paired with songs, the researchers suspected it might function as a password to help young cowbirds learn.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31237-0

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 11, 2019 at 11:13am

Researchers find over 40 new species of fish in one lake

There are many thousands of species of fish inhabiting the world's waters. Recently, researchers have uncovered around 40 new species in a lake in Africa. The number is impressive, but the investigators explain how these new varieties came to be.

In a study paper published in NatureTrusted Source, Meier and colleagues say that the body of water they focused on — Lake Mweru, which lies at the border between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — houses "a spectacular diversity" of fish, most of which zoologists had never encountered before.

"We found a dazzling variety of ecologically diverse new species — called radiations — that were previously unknown," says Meier.

How did the new species evolve? The researchers explain that most of the species present in the lake are hybrid — meaning that they are the product of interspecies breeding.

Yet this is not as straightforward as it may seem. Members of different species do not typically choose to mate with each other. For interspecies breeding to occur, certain special conditions must be in place, and the females are key in this equation.

When the researchers conducted tests on cichlids in captivity, they noticed that females from one species would only choose to mate with a male from a different species if its scales were of a similar color to that of males of their species.

Additionally, the investigators saw that when visibility was poor, female cichlids were unable to differentiate between males belonging to their species and those belonging to other species, thus making interbreeding more likely.

Meier and colleagues believe that these scenarios took place around 1 million years ago at Lake Mweru's formation.

"To diversify into different species, the cichlid fish needed the ecological opportunity provided by the new habitats of Lake Mweru, formed 1 million years ago.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 6, 2019 at 8:44am

Scientists’ brains shrank a bit after an extended stay in Antarctica. The effects of isolation and a monotonous environment may be to blame

Socially isolated and faced with a persistently white polar landscape, a long-term crew of an Antarctic research station saw a portion of their brains shrink during their stay, a small study finds.

“It’s very exciting to see the white desert at the beginning,” says physiologist Alexander Stahn, who began the research while at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “But then it’s always the same.”

The crew of eight scientists and researchers and a cook lived and worked at the German research station Neumayer III for 14 months. Although joined by other scientists during the summer, the crew alone endured the long darkness of the polar winter, when temperatures can plummet as low as –50° Celsius and evacuation is impossible. That social isolation and monotonous environment is the closest thing on Earth to what a space explorer on a long mission may experience, says Stahn, who is interested in researching what effect such travel would have on the brain.

Animal studies have revealed that similar conditions can harm the hippocampus, a brain area crucial for memory and navigation . For example, rats are better at learning when the animals are housed with companions or in an enriched environment than when alone or in a bare cage, Stahn says. But whether this is true for a person’s brain is unknown.

Stahn, now at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging to capture views of the team members’ brains before their polar stay and after their return. On average, an area of the hippocampus in the crew’s brains shrank by 7 percent over the course of the expedition, compared with healthy people matched for age and gender who didn’t stay at the station, the researchers report online December 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

But there are good reasons to believe that this change is reversible, Stahn says. While the hippocampus is highly vulnerable to stressors like isolation, he says, it is also very responsive to stimulation that comes from a life filled with social interactions and a variety of landscapes to explore.

A.C. Stahn et al. Brain changes in response to long Antarctic expeditions. New England Journal of Medicine. Published online December 4, 2019. doi:10.1056/NEJMc1904905.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 6, 2019 at 7:40am

Biomimicry - the process of mimicing nature for our benefit. Plants serve as the inspiration for new energy technologies — and more efficient agriculture. So scientists are now looking to hack photosynthesis for a greener planet.

Photosynthesis comes as naturally to plants as breathing does to people. This process converts the simple ingredients of carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into energy. Photosynthesis allows plants to grow. In turn, we rely on photosynthesis as the foundation for our life on Earth.  

When sunlight touches the leaves of a plant it does more. It powers a chemical reaction that converts one type of energy into another. Those plant leaves contain plenty of water. That water is made of oxygen atoms bonded to hydrogen atoms. The sun’s energy can excite electrons inside the water molecule enough that the bonds split.

This triggers a reaction “that takes the oxygen away from the water. And that becomes the oxygen in the air that we all breathe. Meanwhile, Hydrogen from the water gets smushed together with the carbon dioxide [in air], and that makes sugar. People and all other animals use this sugar — glucose — as an energy source from food. Plants become the food that our bodies can convert into energy. Essentially, photosynthesis is the reason we can exist.

Artificial photosynthesis: 

Scientists have already begun copying, or mimicking, photosynthesis. Their artificial processes also use light to split oxygen and hydrogen — for energy. The dream is to eventually replace fossil fuels. If people could make energy from sun, air and water — as plants do — it would cut down on planet-warming releases of carbon dioxide. It also could create a huge new source of renewable energy.

Many researchers look to solar fuels — fuels made from sunlight — as “green” replacements for today’s carbon-based fossil fuels. These include oil, gas and coal.

Scientists around the world are experimenting with devices — think of them as artificial leaves.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2019 at 6:48am

We heard the consequences of AGW ( human-caused change of global warming). Like wildfires, hurricanes and floods that forced thousands of people to evacuate, damage property, and erase tangible reminders of our past.

Like more ubiquitous, but less publicized, are the millions of people who are exposed to heat waves, long-term droughts, rising sea levels, and eroding coastlines, forcing them to move elsewhere or spend large sums of money building communities that are habitable.

Each of these responses represent a challenge to our mental health. For instance, people exposed to life-threatening extreme weather events are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

People exposed to prolonged heat waves are more likely to make poor decisions that place them at risk for death or severe injury. People exposed to long-term drought are more likely to experience depression, interpersonal violence and thoughts of suicide. People exposed to sea level rise and coastal erosion are more likely to experience anxiety and interpersonal conflict with others in their community.

These mental health challenges are perhaps the most overlooked consequences of climate change and need a thorough understanding to deal with them.

Increasing temperatures and heatwaves, the spread of emerging infectious illnesses, and the widespread concerns about food security in drought-plagued regions of the world all threaten our physical health.

Environmental changes that threaten our livelihoods, access to food, and habitability of our communities lead to widespread unemployment and poverty, civil conflict, and dislocation.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on November 24, 2019 at 9:10am

Chinese scientists programme stem cells to ‘fight and destroy’ cancer

• Team from Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health says technique was successful in treatment of mice
• Technique represents another step forward in field of immune therapy, researchers say

Chinese scientists claim to have made a major step towards a breakthrough in cancer treatment by programming stem cells to “seek and destroy” the disease.

Professor Wang Jinyong and a team from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, say that the technique was successfully used to treat mice with cancer of the thymus, an organ central to the body’s immune system.

According to a paper published last week in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Cell Research, the team used stem cells to create infant immune cells that would later develop into T cells, which are produced in the thymus and play a central role in the body’s immune response.

After a period of time, the tumours disappeared. And because the new T cells had memory, the mice were immune from this type of cancer for life, the report said.

In a statement on the academy’s website, the team said the method could lead to a breakthrough in cancer treatment.

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http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/laser-ultrasound-imaging-07945.html

Novel Laser Ultrasound Technique Doesn’t Require Contact with Patient’s Body

The noncontact laser ultrasound technique, developed by a team of MIT engineers, leverages an eye- and skin-safe laser system to remotely image the inside of a patient: when trained on a patient’s skin, one laser remotely generates sound waves that bounce through the body; a second laser remotely detects the reflected waves, which researchers then translate into an image similar to conventional ultrasound.

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