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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2021 at 3:05pm

How engineered bacteria could clean up oilsands pollution and minin...

Rampant industrialization has caused our planet to warm at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers are melting away and sea levels are rising. Droughts last longer and are more devastating. Forest fires are more intense. Extreme, once-in-a-generation weather events—such as Category 5 hurricanes—seem to be occurring on an annual basis.

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Cosmic dawn occurred 250 to 350 million years after Big Bang

Cosmic dawn, when stars formed for the first time, occurred 250 million to 350 million years after the beginning of the universe, according to a new study led by researchers at University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 24, 2021 at 3:01pm

Low-cost imaging technique shows how smartphone batteries could charge in minutes

Researchers have developed a simple lab-based technique that allows them to look inside lithium-ion batteries and follow lithium ions moving in real time as the batteries charge and discharge, something which has not been possible until now.

Using the low-cost technique, the researchers identified the speed-limiting processes which, if addressed, could enable the batteries in most smartphones and laptops to charge in as little as five minutes.

Operando optical tracking of single-particle ion dynamics in batteries, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03584-2 , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03584-2

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-low-cost-imaging-technique-smar...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 23, 2021 at 2:24pm

Birthdays might have helped to spread COVID

Assessing the Association Between Social Gatherings and COVID-19 Risk Using Birthdays

Birthday celebrations might have boosted the spread of COVID-19. Researchers looked at data from almost three million households in the United States, where public-health mandates did not ban people from meeting up at home. In areas with a lot of cases, households in which someone had a birthday saw a 31% increase in the prevalence of infection in the following two weeks, compared with households that did not have a birthday. If it was a child’s birthday, that went up to 57%. “It is a big endorsement, in retrospect, of the gains among those who skipped all sorts of social gatherings.

Researchers conclude:

“During a pandemic, it is okay to be a party pooper.”( Party Pooper: a person who refuses to join in the fun of a party broadly : one who refuses to go along with everyone else.)

 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2...

Scientific American | 5 min read

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 23, 2021 at 2:18pm

Memory helps us evaluate situations on the fly, not just recall the past

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 23, 2021 at 2:12pm

Worrying insights into the chemicals in plastics

Plastic is practical, cheap and incredibly popular. Every year, more than 350 million tons are produced worldwide. These plastics contain a huge variety of chemicals that may be released during their lifecycles—including substances that pose a significant risk to people and the environment. However, only a small proportion of the chemicals contained in plastic are publicly known or have been extensively studied.

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Is dark matter real, or have we misunderstood gravity?

For many years now, astronomers and physicists have been in a conflict. Is the mysterious dark matter that we observe deep in the Universe real, or is what we see the result of subtle deviations from the laws of gravity as we know them? In 2016, Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde proposed a theory of the second kind: emergent gravity. New research, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics this week, pushes the limits of dark matter observations to the unknown outer regions of galaxies, and in doing so re-evaluates several dark matter models and alternative theories of gravity. Measurements of the gravity of 259,000 isolated galaxies show a very close relation between the contributions of dark matter and those of ordinary matter, as predicted in Verlinde's theory of emergent gravity and an alternative model called Modified Newtonian Dynamics. However, the results also appear to agree with a computer simulation of the Universe that assumes that dark matter is 'real stuff'.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 23, 2021 at 2:09pm

Tree pollen carries SARS-CoV-2 particles farther, facilitates virus spread

Most models explaining how viruses are transmitted focus on viral particles escaping one person to infect a nearby person. A study on the role of microscopic particles in how viruses are transmitted suggests pollen is nothing to sneeze at.

Researchers investigated how pollen facilitates the spread of an RNA virus like the COVID-19 virus. The study draws on cutting-edge computational approaches for analyzing fluid dynamics to mimic the pollen movement from a willow tree, a prototypical pollen emitter. Airborne pollen grains contribute to the spread of airborne viruses, especially in crowded environments.

This is the first time researchers have  shown through modeling and simulation how airborne pollen micrograins are transported in a light breeze, contributing to airborne virus transmission in crowds outdoors

"On pollen and airborne virus transmission," Physics of Fluids (2021). aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0055845

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-tree-pollen-sars-cov-particles-virus....

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 22, 2021 at 12:11pm

UFOs, Aliens & Science

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 21, 2021 at 8:40am

Universal coronavirus vaccine is highly effective in monkeys

SARS-CoV-2 is not the first coronavirus to hop from animals to humans — and it will not be the last.

Current coronavirus vaccines are humanity's lethal weapon against a single virus, SARS-CoV-2. But SARS-CoV-2 is not the first coronavirus to hop from animals to humans — and it will not be the last.

To prevent a future coronavirus pandemic, a group of researchers recently developed a "pan-coronavirus" vaccine, designed to protect against many different strains of coronaviruses known to infect humans and bats. Their vaccine turned out to be very effective in monkeys, but it's not yet known if it will confer the same protection in people, according to the study published May 10 in the journal Nature.

Researchers designed the novel coronavirus vaccine, which they hope could elicit an immune response across different coronaviruses that use the RBD to enter human cells. They started with an antibody that was taken from a person infected with SARS-CoV-1, which disarmed multiple different coronaviruses. 

They designed a vaccine that uses nanoparticles with bits of RBD attached to its surface in such a way that "you get a molecule that looks like a virus," which the immune system can then recognize and respond to. (Most current vaccines target the full-length spike protein whereas this vaccine specifically targets the RBD). They included an adjuvant, a substance that boosts the immune response. 

In monkeys, the vaccine stopped all infections with SARS-CoV-2 and spurred more neutralizing antibodies than either current vaccines or natural infection spurs in humans. Four out of five monkeys did not have any trace of the virus; one monkey had a very low level of virus that could only be detected with very sensitive tests and that went away in two days.

Current mRNA vaccines — developed by Modern and Pfizer — also elicit antibodies that react against multiple different coronaviruses, but at lower levels.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03594-0?utm_medium=affil...

https://www.livescience.com/pan-coronavirus-vaccine-future-pandemic...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 19, 2021 at 9:35am

Bacteria can recover precious metals from electric vehicle batteries

Bioleaching, also called biomining, employs microbes which can oxidise metal as part of their metabolism. It has been widely used in the mining industry, where microorganisms are used to extract valuable metals from ores. More recently, this technique has been used to clean up and recover materials from electronic waste, particularly the printed circuit boards of computers, solar panels, contaminated water and even uranium dumps.

All metals present in EV batteries can be recovered using bioleaching. Bacteria like Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans and other non-toxic species target and recover the metals individually without the need for high temperatures or toxic chemicals. These purified metals constitute chemical elements, and so can be recycled indefinitely into multiple supply chains.

Scaling up bioleaching involves growing bacteria in incubators at 37°C, often using carbon dioxide. Not a lot of energy is needed, so the process has a much smaller carbon footprint than typical recycling plants, while also contributing less pollution. While reducing EV battery waste, bioleaching facilities mean manufacturers can recover these precious metals locally, and rely less on the few producer countries.

EV batteries are a technology still in their infancy. The reuse of their components should be considered as part of their design. Rather than remaining an afterthought, recycling can become both the beginning and end of an EV battery’s life cycle with bioleaching, producing high-quality raw materials for new batteries at low environmental cost.

https://theconversation.com/bacteria-can-recover-precious-metals-fr...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on June 18, 2021 at 11:22am

Giant spider webs blanket Australian landscape after heavy rainfall

Stunning photographs of vast, ghostly spider webs blanketing the flood-affected region of Gippsland in Victoria have gone viral online, prompting many to muse on the wonder of nature.

But what's going on here? Why do spiders do this after floods and does it happen everywhere?

The answer is: these webs have nothing to do with spiders trying to catch food. Spiders often use silk to move around and in this case are using long strands of web to escape from waterlogged soil.

When these flood events happen, they need evacuate quickly up out of holes they live in underground. They come out en masse and use their silk to help them do that.

You'll often see juvenile spiders let out a long strand of silk which is caught by the wind and lifted up. The web catches onto another object such as a tree and allows the spider to climb up. 

That's how baby spiders (spiderlings!) disperse when they emerge from their egg sacs – it's called ballooning. They have to disperse as quickly as possible because they are highly cannibalistic so they need to move away from each other swiftly and find their own sites to hunt or build their webs.

https://www.sciencealert.com/spiders-have-cloaked-an-australian-cou...

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