Tag: Science & Technology

LONDON (TIP): Researchers have found that nasal drops of a “good” bacterial strain can help prevent the deadly disease meningitis. The findings could lead to a new approach that could help suppress meningitis outbreaks.

“It is the first time that anyone has taken a bug — a friendly bacterium — and has shown that it changes the way that you can become colonised by the meningitis bacterium, Neisseria meningitidis,” said study author Robert Read from University of Southampton.

Meningitis can be life threatening and the first symptoms of the disease are usually fever, vomiting, headache and feeling unwell.

In the study, published online in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers placed drops containing low doses of Neisseria lactamica, a related but harmless bacterial strain, into the noses of 149 healthy university students in Britain.

A control group of 161 students received drops of saline instead. Nose swabs were taken at regular intervals over six months and tested for both types of bacteria.

Among students who received the N lactamica drops and became colonised, the harmless bacteria appeared to prevent N meningitidis from colonising the students’ throats.

The “good” bacteria also displaced the worrisome pathogen in those who were already carrying it when the study began.

The effect was seen after just two weeks, when the number of students carrying N. meningitidis in their upper airway dropped by 9.5 percent among those who were also colonised by N lactamica using the drops. The effect lasted for at least four months, the researchers noted.

The findings suggest that N lactamica may one day be used as a bacterial medicine to help suppress meningococcal outbreaks.

BEIJING (TIP): A new Ebola vaccine has been found to be safe in the first phase one trial based on the 2014 strain of the virus.

The experimental vaccine, developed by the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and the Tianjin CanSino Biotechnology, also provokes an immune response in recipients, noted the study published in the journal The Lancet.

Until now, all tested Ebola virus vaccines have been based on the virus strain from the Zaire outbreak in 1976.

“On the basis of our findings, we believe that the Ebola vaccine we assessed has some potential,” said lead lead researcher Fengcai Zhu from the Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Prevention and Control in China.

“A significant advantage of this type of vaccine is that stable and much easier to store or transport in tropical areas with inadequate cold-chain capacity, such as Africa,” Zhu added.

The researchers tested the safety and immunogenicity of a novel Ebola vaccine, based on the 2014 Zaire Guinea Ebola strain, and delivered by a virus-like structure (known as a recombinant adenovirus type-5 vaccine).

For the trial, 120 healthy Chinese adults were randomly assigned in equal numbers to receive placebo, a low dose, or high dose of the vaccine.

The randomised trial took place at one site in Taizhou County, Jiangsu Province, China.

The researchers found that 28 days after vaccination, 38 out of 40 participants in the low-dose group and all 40 of those in the high-dose group had a positive immune response to the vaccine, with participants in the high-dose group producing higher quantities of antibodies than those in the low-dose group.No specific immune response was recorded in the placebo group.However, the researchers noted that the study does not show whether the level of immune response observed might ultimately be able to offer protection against Ebola virus.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Scientists have detected a possible Saturn-like ring system around the minor planet Chiron, making it the sixth such object in our solar system.

There are only five bodies in our solar system that are known to bear rings. The most obvious is Saturn; to a lesser extent, rings of gas and dust also encircle Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

Scientists recently detected a ring system around Chariklo, one of a class of minor planets called centaurs.

Now scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elsewhere have detected a possible ring system around a second centaur, Chiron.

In November 2011, the group observed a stellar occultation in which Chiron passed in front of a bright star, briefly blocking its light.

The researchers analysed the star’s light emissions, and the momentary shadow created by Chiron, and identified optical features that suggest the centaur may possess a circulating disk of debris.

The team believes the features may signify a ring system, a circular shell of gas and dust, or symmetric jets of material shooting out from the centaur’s surface.

“It’s interesting, because Chiron is a centaur – part of that middle section of the solar system, between Jupiter and Pluto, where we originally weren’t thinking things would be active, but it’s turning out things are quite active,” said Amanda Bosh, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Chiron, discovered in 1977, was the first planetary body categorised as a centaur, after the mythological Greek creature – a hybrid of man and beast.

Like their mythological counterparts, centaurs are hybrids, embodying traits of both asteroids and comets. Researchers obtained precise observations of Chiron, using two large telescopes in Hawaii.

They observed symmetrical, sharp features near the start and end of the stellar occultation – a sign that material such as dust might be blocking a fraction of the starlight.

The researchers observed two such features, each about 300 kilometres from the centre of the centaur.

In light of these new observations, the researchers said that Chiron may possess symmetrical jets of gas and dust.

However, other interpretations may be equally valid, including the
“intriguing possibility,” Bosh said, of a shell or ring of gas and dust.

Researchers said it is possible to imagine a scenario in which centaurs may form rings: For example, when a body breaks up, the resulting debris can be captured gravitationally around another body, such as Chiron.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Inadequate exposure to natural light during the day and overexposure to artificial light at night can actually mess up our body’s natural sleep/wake cycle, researchers say. “It’s become clear that typical lighting is affecting our physiology,” said Richard Stevens, cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut. “But lighting can be improved. We’re learning that better lighting can reduce these physiological effects. By that we mean dimmer and longer wavelengths in the evening, and avoiding the bright blue of e-readers, tablets or smartphones,” said Stevens.

Those devices emit enough blue light when used in the evening to suppress the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin and disrupt the body’s circadian rhythm, the biological mechanism that enables restful sleep. Stevens and co-author Yong Zhu from Yale University explained the known short-term and suspected long-term impacts of circadian disruption in an article in journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. He said a study comparing people who used e-readers to those who read old-fashioned books in the evening showed a clear difference — the e-readers showed delayed melatonin onset.

VANCOUVER (TIP): A terrifying killer liquid metal robot portrayed in the movie ‘Terminator’, has inspired what was heralded here as a revolution in 3D printing. At the TED conference on Tuesday, chemist Joseph DeSimone displayed a 3D printer that let creations rise from pools of molten liquid in much the way the dreaded T-1000 robot from the second ‘Terminator’ film rose from a silvery puddle. “We were inspired by the ‘Terminator 2’ scene for the T-1000,” DeSimone said.

DeSimone and co-inventors developed a technology they call Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) that harnesses powers of light and oxygen in a printer that brings designed objects quickly into existence from small reservoirs of elastic material with sophisticated properties. “We have a reservoir that holds the puddle like the T-1000,” DeSimone said. Printing finished parts at speeds competitive with current manufacturing processes is “a game changer,” he said. Current 3D printers rely on spraying layer upon layer of material, slowly building objects which takes hours. The time taken by such printers means it is not feasible to use resins that change chemically before the printing is finished. CLIP is 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3D printers, and uses synthetic resins with mechanical properties strong enough to make them finished parts, said DeSimone. He saw the technology transforming manufacturing from cars, planes, and turbines to dental or surgical implants.

In case of fire, use elevators.” It sounds like apostasy, as if a lifetime’s indoctrination had suddenly been invalidated. But it is exactly the instruction that office workers in New York’s tallest skyscrapers may receive in coming years. The fire department, buildings and city planning departments are planning occupant-evacuation elevators — cars that can, in special circumstances, be used to move people down in an emergency.

That would upend the decade-old notion that elevators are perilous and undependable in fires or other emergencies. Experts also believe that building evacuations have become outmoded as extremely tall skyscrapers increasingly pierce the New York skyline. “We have to find a better way to evacuate people from high-rise buildings, including people with disabilities,” Edward T Ferrier, the deputy assistant chief of fire prevention, said.

BEIJING (TIP): A ‘green’ material derived from natural silk can boost the performance of lithium-ion batteries used in portable gadgets and electric cars, scientists say.

Carbon is a key component in commercial lithium-ion energy storage devices, including batteries and super capacitors. Most commonly, graphite fills that role, but it has a limited energy capacity, researchers said.

Lithium-ion batteries have enabled many of today’s electronics, from portable gadgets to electric cars, but much to the frustration of consumers, none of these batteries last long without a recharge.

To improve the energy storage, manufacturers are looking for an alternative material to replace graphite.

Chuanbao Cao and colleagues at the Beijing Institute of Technology wanted to see if they could develop such a material using a sustainable source. The researchers found a way to process natural silk to create carbon-based nanosheets that could potentially be used in energy storage devices.

Their material stores five times more lithium than graphite can – a capacity that is critical to improving battery performance.

It also worked for over 10,000 cycles with only a 9% loss in stability. The researchers successfully incorporated their material in prototype batteries and su8percapacitors in a one-step method that could easily be scaled up.

Air in Delhi is world’s worst, 13 other Indian cities aren’t far behind
India is ending years of denial about its air quality, while the US Embassy in New Delhi plans to give daily accurate measures of air quality for tourists and expatriates.

China’s dirty air often grabs global headlines with photos of its cities swathed in smog.

But it is India where air quality has been plummeting for years and is now the worst in the world. The cost of India’s economic growth is partly recorded in the fact that 13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India, according to the World Health Organization. New Dehli, India’s capital, is now number one on the list of the most polluted.

For many Indians, that news comes as a surprise. For years the Indian government has not shared data on air quality and has not initiated any serious public awareness about the rising problem. Debates on air pollution were largely dismissed as Western propaganda aimed at curtailing India’s growth.

Few Indian cities have purchased or deployed the kind of monitoring equipment necessary to measure the levels of air quality, says Delhi-based environmentalist Sunita Narain. “We just don’t know how bad is the air we breathe,” he says.

Nor is the news getting better. A recently released joint study from the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale found that air pollution and attendant nasty chemical particulate matter, especially one called PM2.5, are significantly reducing life expectancies.

India recently crept into third place in the world for greenhouse gas emissions, as well. Yet unlike the deal forged this fall between President Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on greenhouse gas reduction, Mr. Obama was unable to find the same kind of common ground with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his January visit to Delhi.

A nationwide problem

So grim is the current situation that Delhi has six times the level of airborne particulate matter identified by the US study as most likely to harm humans.

While Delhi may be newly awakening to its problems, the issue is a national one. Indian cities like Gwalior, Raipur, Lucknow, Firozabad, Kanpur, Amritsar, and Ludhiana are also being described as needing to more fully recognize the man-made conditions of bad air.

Delhi now records some 153 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter. (The WHO’s safe standard for PM2.5 is below 10 micrograms.)

But other Indian cities also record woeful figures. Patna has 149 micrograms. Gwalior has 144 and Raipur 134 micrograms. The other cities where the PM2.5 level is 10 times higher than WHO standard are Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Kanpur, Firozabad, Amritsar and Ludhiana. These figures are based on a spring 2014 WHO study and may not be the same today.

India hasn’t made it simple to find out such information. Some 22 monitoring stations across the country check pollution in real time. But of these, only 12 are functional, and none check for PM2.5.

Factories and other industrial units in India are required to send air pollution data to state government agencies. But it is an open secret that the figures are fudged or hidden. Most states simply report data in terms of “average figures” rather than giving real-time data about air quality.

What’s more is that state governments don’t always update the figures. One official at the federal environment ministry points out that most data is more than two years old. The latest pollution data on the website of the state of Odisha is from 2006.

Clearing the air
Perhaps partly because of Mr. Obama’s evident displeasure at not getting a deal, and the witness of his delegation at the poor air, India’s air quality has received wider attention in the past month. The country’s regulators appear emboldened after years of official denial.

Prakash Javedekar, India’s environment minister, says that air monitors have been installed on thousands of industrial units and in theory will send in accurate figures.

“We are facing a real crisis in as many cities and the world is seeing. I am not bothered about who describes me the baldest or worst,” Mr Javedekar said in an interview on Headline Today, an Indian news broadcast. “We are the worst.”

To improve air quality, India plans to initially track eight pollutants in 46 cities with populations exceeding a million people. After five years, the rest of the country will slowly be brought into the system.

But US Secretary of State John Kerry recently announced what some analysts took as a spur to the monitoring project. He said the US Embassy in Delhi would employ its own monitoring device and release daily data on a website, including figures on PM2.5.

The US launched a similar program in Beijing, following complaints from American tourists and expatriates.

Source – The Christian Science Monitor

LONDON: A simple paper strip similar to a pregnancy test can now diagnose Ebola in less than 10 minutes besides viral haemorrhagic fevers like yellow fever and dengue.

Unlike most existing paper diagnostics, which test for only one disease, the new strips are color-coded so they can be used to distinguish among several diseases.

The researchers used triangular nanoparticles, made of silver, that can take on different colors depending on their size. They created red, orange and green nanoparticles and linked them to antibodies that recognize Ebola, dengue fever and yellow fever. As a patient’s blood serum flows along the strip, any viral proteins that match the antibodies painted on the stripes will get caught and those nanoparticles will become visible. This can be seen by the naked eye; for those who are colour-blind, a cell phone camera could be used to distinguish the colours.

Scientists from MIT say that when diagnosing a case of Ebola, time is of the essence. However, existing diagnostic tests take at least a day or two to yield results, preventing health care workers from quickly determining whether a patient needs immediate treatment and isolation.

Currently, the only way to diagnose Ebola is to send patient blood samples to a lab that can perform advanced techniques such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which can detect genetic material from the Ebola virus.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Nasa is planning a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa to search for signs of alien life on the icy, ocean-harbouring world.

Nasa has asked scientists to consider ways that a Europa mission could search for evidence of alien life in the plumes of water vapour that apparently blast into space from Europa’s south polar region.

These plumes, which Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted in December 2012, provide a possible way to sample Europa’s ocean of liquid water, which is buried beneath the moon’s icy shell, researchers said.

Nasa is zeroing in on a flyby mission design, something along the lines of a long-studied concept called the Europa Clipper.

As currently envisioned, Clipper would travel to Jupiter orbit, then make 45 flybys of Europa over 3.5 years, at altitudes ranging from 25km to 2,700km.

The $2.1 billion mission would study Europa’s subsurface ocean, giving researchers a better understanding of the water’s depth, salinity and other characteristics.

Nasa also wants to add plume sampling to the Europa mission’s task list, if possible.

During a Europa plume workshop at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley earlier this week, Nasa science chief John Grunsfeld urged attendees to “think outside the box” and come up with feasible ways to study the moon’s plumes.

Researchers would want to analyse bits of Europa material in well-equipped labs here on Earth, but bringing samples back is likely beyond the scope of the flyby mission currently under consideration.

However, it may be possible to detect biomolecules onsite, using gear aboard a Clipper-like probe, researchers said.

Spotting a set of amino acids that all display the same chirality, or handedness, in plume material would be strong evidence of Europan life, astrobiologist Chris McKay, of Nasa Ames, said at the workshop.

Collecting enough plume material to perform such analyses will likely prove extremely challenging, ‘SPACE.com’ reported.

It may require flying so low and so slowly that it makes more sense to send a lander down to the Europa surface through the plume, said astrobiologist Kevin Hand of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

LONDON (TIP): In a breakthrough, researchers led by an Indian-origin scientist, have shown that stem cells from the skin of two adults of the same sex can be used to make human egg and sperm cells.

Scientists at Cambridge University collaborated with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and used stem cell lines from embryos as well as from the skin of five different adults. Researchers have previously created live baby mice using engineered eggs and sperm, but until now have struggled to create a human version of these ‘primordial germ’ or stem cells.

Ten different donor sources have been used so far and new germ-cell lines have been created from all of them, researchers said.

The team has compared the engineered germ cells with natural human stem cells taken from aborted human fetuses to check that the artificially created versions of the cells had identical characteristics, The Times reported. A gene called SOX17, previously considered to be unimportant in mice, has turned out to be critical in the process of ‘reprogramming’ human cells, researchers said. “We have succeeded in the first and most important step of this process, which is to show we can make these very early human stem cells in a dish,” said Azim Surani, professor of physiology and reproduction at Cambridge, who heads the project. “We have also discovered that one of the things that happens in these germ cells is that epigenetic mutations, the cell mistakes that occur with age, are wiped out,” said Surani, who was involved in research that led to the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, in 1978.

Jacob Hanna, the specialist leading the project’s Israeli arm, said it may be possible to use the technique to create a baby in just two years. “It has already caused interest from gay groups because of the possibility of making egg and sperm cells from parents of the same sex,” he said. The details of the technique were published in the journal Cell.