Ambika Mahajan | Page 5 | World Tech Today

Tarantulas become faster but lose coordination under warmer conditions

Apr 6, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

Findings of a new study suggest that tarantulas, a spider species, lose their coordination and start behaving clumsily in warmer conditions. This is uncanny and in total contrast to most spider species which are extremely fast. These findings came to the fore as researchers set forth to investigate into the effect of temperature fluctuations on spiders and robots.

Spiders do not make use of their muscles in order to move their limbs. They move them instead with hemolymph, a blood like fluid, which flows into the legs and causes them to extend. The findings of the nest study reveal that increase in temperature affects the thickness and viscosity of hemolymph, thereby affecting the tarantulas’ walking ability.

For the purpose of this study, the researchers looked at Texas brown tarantulas. Tests were carried out at four different temperatures: 59, 75, 88, and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. They observed that the movements of these eight armed creatures were slower and showed better coordination under colder temperatures while seeing the opposite under warmer conditions.

“Hydraulic extension may allow spiders to save space and mass in their limb, but it may come at the expense of control,” said Anna Ahn from Harvey Mudd College after the series of experiments which lasted three months.

“But at the higher temperatures, and the faster running speed, the two joints were less coupled. The two joints on each leg were a lot less well-controlled at the higher temperatures”, she added.

In the findings of the study which was published in The Journal of Experimental Bilogy, Ahn goes on to add that this lesser coordination at faster speeds might be the reason behind the tarantulas’ preferring to hunt in the wee hours of the evening, after the hottest part of the day is over.

More than 900 tarantula species are found across the globe. The Texas brown tarantulas which were studied by these researchers are amongst the most common species and are found throughout the southern United States.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN restarts after a two year upgrade

Apr 6, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

The largest machine in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), got back into action after a two year upgrade at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), amid great jubilation. With the LHC up and running once again, scientists will renew their efforts to unravel the mysteries regarding the formation of the universe.

“After two years of intense maintenance and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation,” said a statement released by the CERN.

“Today (Sunday) at 10:42 am (0842 GMT) a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring, followed at 12:27 pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction,” it added.

The LHC, which is also called the ‘Big Bang’ LHC, was shut down two years back for a refit. The revamp includes higher energy beams and voltages, new magnets and an overall examination of the wiring of the underground LHC tunnel that runs 27km long. Additionally, the four major detectors and its multiple magnets were also checked comprehensively. The more advanced LHC is now all set to embark on a new journey into discovering ‘dark matter’.

Scientists hope that the upgraded machine will be able to give proofs of what has been called “New Physics”, which includes “dark matter”, the invisible web holding all visible matter together.

In its earlier run, the LHC had produced evidence of the Higgs- Boson particle, known popularly as the ‘God particle.’

The scientists working at the centre situated near Geneva are pleased with the initial performance of the giant sized collider. Simulation of conditions akin to the Big Bang will begin in due course.

“Now we have just managed to do the first turn with the anti-clockwise beam, the beam 2. We have been striding the beam all along the ring and we managed to keep it for 25 turns already without the RF capture, so this is already a big success,” said Laurette Ponce, the engineer in charge of the LHC.

Hubble sends images of massive eerie green clouds

Apr 6, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan 1 Comment

With its ability to capture distinct images of distant objects several light years away, the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed eight massive and unusual looped structures which first flickered and then faded. These enormous green clouds of gas orbit their host galaxies and glow due to the radiation emitted by the quasars.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA are partners in the Hubble project.

These bright and eerie glowing objects which were first described in a paper published in the Astronomical Journal are being said to be ‘immense in size, spanning tens of thousands of light-years.’ The reason behind their unusual glow was a quasar – a very luminous and compact region that surrounds a super massive black hole at the center of a galaxy.

“Galactic material falls inwards towards the central black hole, growing hotter and hotter, forming a bright and brilliant quasar with powerful jets of particles and energy beaming above and below the disc of infalling matter. In each of these objects a quasar beam has caused once-invisible filaments in deep cosmos to glow through photoionization,” explain scientists.

These filaments which contain neon, sulfur, helium and nitrogen absorb light from the quasar and then release it slowly over many thousand years. the emerald green hue of these clouds of gas is caused by ionized oxygen.

“Quasars are not bright enough now to account for what we’re seeing; this is a record of something that happened in the past. The glowing filaments are telling us that the quasars were once emitting more energy, or they are changing very rapidly, which they were not supposed to do” said team member Dr Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

“We see these twisting dust lanes connecting to the gas, and there’s a mathematical model for how that material wraps around in the galaxy. Potentially, you can say we’re seeing it 1.5 billion years after a smaller gas-rich galaxy fell into a bigger galaxy,” he added.

These images sent by Hubble show that these objects are like the remnants of collisions of galaxies.

Astronomers observe massive star formation over 18 years

Apr 6, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

A team of astronomers led by Carlos Carrasco-Gonzalez (from the Center of Radioastronomy and Astrophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico) has been able to observe the formation of a massive star over an 18 year period. The beginning and ending images of the star, called W75N(B)-VLA 2, which are almost two decades apart show a dramatic difference enabling the observers get a unique, “real-time’ look into the development of massive stars in the earliest stages of their formation.

The images of the massive star which is 4200 light years away from our own planet were taken with the help of National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). They then compared the images taken in 2014 with an earlier VLA image dated 1996.

“The comparison is remarkable,” said Gonzalez who was leading the research team. While the 1996 image shows a ‘compact region of a hot, ionized wind ejected from the young star’ the more recent image of it shows ‘that ejected wind deformed into an distinctly elongated outflow.’

“We’re seeing this dramatic change in real time, so this object is providing us an exciting opportunity to watch over the next few years as a very young star goes through the early stages of its formation,” he added.

“In the span of only 18 years, we’ve seen exactly what we predicted.”

The scientists believed that the young star was forming in a dense, gaseous environment, and was surrounded by a doughnut-shaped, dusty torus. The star, believes the team, has episodes during which it ejects a hot, ionized wind for several years. In the initial years, the wind which can expand in any direction forms a spherical shape around the star. With the passage of time, the wind hits the dusty torus, slowing it down.

‘Wind expanding outward along the poles of the torus, where there was less resistance, moves more quickly, resulting in an elongated shape for the outflow,’ said the paper which was published in the journal Science.

“Our understanding of how massive young stars develop is much less complete than our understanding of how Sun-like stars develop” Carrasco-Gonzalez says. “It’s going to be really great to be able to watch one as it changes.”

“We expect to learn a lot from this object.”

The enormously sized star is believed to be almost eight times as massive than our own sun.

CDC says 77% of packaged and processed foods contain high level of Sodium

Apr 6, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan 9 Comments

A recent study conducted by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) holds packaged and processed foods as the main culprits behind the Americans’ consuming salt in excess of the daily recommended allowance. Almost 80% of the excessive salt intake was attributed to packaged grocery store food.

The CDC stated that precisely 77% of the excessive salt consumption was due to restaurant meals, take-out food and other packaged foods which were all found to contain very highly laden with salt. Home cooked meals, with lesser amount of salt, were found to be the lesser devils.

This startling fact came to the fore while the CDC was investigating the main causes of high blood pressure. High salt intake has long been associated with high blood pressure and also many other health related complications because of which public health authorities have been promoting on cutting down its intake in packaged food products over the last few decades.

“Americans consume an average of 3,500 milligrams (mg) of sodium each day (excluding salt added at the table). But the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, recommend limiting sodium to less than 2,300 mg a day. About six in 10 adults should further limit sodium to 1,500 mg a day,” states CDC in its official report.

The CDC was looking into the possible correlation of geographical location of an individual and chances of likelihood of him suffering from high blood pressure as a part of their effort to find out if the salt content in packaged foods differed based on the area in which they were sold.

The health agency could not find any links between high salt levels and the products manufactured in those areas with higher levels of hypertension than the national average from their present observations.

“Although most of the regional differences found did not have a clear direction or contributor, some may relate to regional variations in the popularity of specific types of products within a food category,” CDC said.

The worst offenders, according to the CDC, were pasta and meat. Both of these were found to contain extremely high levels of sodium, far overstepping the safe levels laid down by the federal body.

House cleaning with bleach may raise risk of kids’ infections

Apr 5, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

The findings of a new study published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine go on to suggest that passive exposure to bleach at home puts kids at greater risk of childhood respiratory and other infections like flu, tonsillitis, etc. It is now being suggested that while a small quantity of the widely used cleaning agent could help kill umpteen germs, it could also expose children living in homes or going to schools where bleaching agents are used to a higher risk of infection as compared to their counterparts who were not exposed to the deadly chemical.

Bleach is a widely used cleaning agent in most American homes. Though a clear cause and effect relation has not been established, the findings published online on April 2 are sure to lead to further research into the health effects of the cleaning agent.

“The high frequency of use of disinfecting cleaning products — caused by erroneous belief, reinforced by advertising, that our homes should be free of microbes — makes the modest effects reported in our study of public health concern,” the researchers wrote in the study.

As a part of their research, the team looking into it surveyed parents of more than 9,100 children ages 6 to 12 living in the Netherlands, Finland and Spain. Their parents were asked about the frequency of their children getting infections, including sinusitis, tonsillitis, flu, otitis, pneumonia and bronchitis during the previous year. They were also asked whether they had mold at home and whether they used bleach for cleaning at least once a week, elaborated the research team.

Use of bleach was seen to most widespread in Spain with 72% of the respondents using it and all their schools also deploying it to kill germs.

The use was found to be least prevalent in Finland, where only 7% of the respondents said they used it. None of their schools used it either.

Based on their findings, scientists have suggested the existence of a correlation between the usage of bleach as a cleaning agent and the number and frequency of infections among children whose parents use it and where it is used in schools.

The American Cleaning Institute (ACI) however is not convinced about the veracity of the results.

The body which represents makers of bleach and products containing bleach, took issue with the study.

“Since there was no data presented on the children’s actual exposure to bleach — nor any diagnoses of actual diseases — the authors are merely speculating,” they said in a statement.

Brain compass implant enables blind rats to see, using psychic GPS

Apr 4, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

Hiroaki Norimoto and Yuji Ikegaya, researchers from the University of Tokyo, have helped blind rats to see, thanks to the geomagnetic prosthetics applied on them. Making use of this technology, several rats whose eyelids had been sealed shut in order to feed spatial information directly into their brains, the visually impaired rodents started behaving as if they could see.

Infact, the neuroprosthesis that fed geomagnetic signals into the brains of these rats incapable of seeing things around them even enabled them to navigate about a maze. The device consists of a geomagnetic compass, a version of the microchip located in smartphones and two electrodes that match into the animals’ visual cortices, the regions of the brain that approach visual info.

The two were trying to demonstrate that the brains of mammals are capable of learning to adapt to new data well into their adulthood.

Ikegaya says: “The most remarkable point of this paper is to show the potential, or the latent ability, of the brain. That is, we demonstrated that the mammalian brain is flexible even in adulthood – enough to adaptively incorporate a novel, never-experienced, non-inherent modality into the pre-existing information sources.”

Seeing the rodents develop a fully natural sense in no time at all, scientists are considering a similar possibility in humans, wondering if this could potentially open up new methods used to treat blindness, or even to offer healthy people with extra senses.

“I am dreaming that humans can expand their senses by way of artificial sensors for geomagnetism, ultraviolet, radio waves, ultrasonic waves and so on,” says Yuji Ikegaya of the University of Tokyo in Japan, head of the group that installed and tested the two.five-gram implant. “Ultrasonic and radio-wave sensors might allow the next generation of human-to-human communication,” he says.

The findings of this study titled “Visual Cortical Prosthesis with a Geomagnetic Compass Restores Spatial Navigation in Blind Rats” were published in the journal Current Biology.

Ants living on footpath develop taste for human food: New study

Apr 4, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

The findings of a research into the eating habits of ants conducted by researchers from the North Carolina State University point out that some of these insects in the streets of New York are developing a taste for junk food. The results were published Wednesday in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The study was carried out under the aegis of Clint Penick, a postdoctoral researcher from NC State and the lead author of the paper, who together with his team wanted to find out why some species of ants preferred to live alongside humans while others were interested in less urban environments. Knowing this, the team believed, could help find out which of the ant species contribute most significantly towards cleaning up trash.

As a part of their experiments, the team picked up more than 100 ant samples from sidewalks, parks and street medians in Manhattan. The samples, representing 21 different species, were then examined to detect isotope levels in their bodies. Isotope content of ant body will help examining the diet of the ant.

The team found out that ants that living on the footpath and other paved areas in New York City had carbon isotope levels similar to that of humans, indicating that they were consuming foods similar to humans living in that area. Ants living in parks, on the other hand, were found to have lower levels of carbon contents.

“Human foods clearly make up a significant portion of the diet in urban species, these are the ants eating our garbage, and this may explain why pavement ants are able to achieve such large populations in cities,” said Penick.

“Humans bring a ton of general resources,” he added. “The species that can take advantage of these resources the best, sort of wins.”

The scientists therefore concluded that ants living on pavements take to human food in their quest for survival, as they run out of other sources of food. The researchers now plan to investigate further whether these ants would prefer to turn to human food when not suffering from any shortage of natural diet.

Polar bears cannot rely on land based sources of food alone anymore: New study

Apr 3, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

The adorable looking furry polar bears found in the Arctic ice caps might not be able to survive on land based food sources alone, points out a new study. As global warming continues to affect oceans and cause melting and thinning of ice caps, the polar bears have found it increasingly difficult to get to their main food source, namely seals. Consequently, they have been seen to be looking for prey in areas hitherto dominated by grizzly bears.

Unable to find enough food to replace the seals which they like to feast upon, the polar bears will now have to compete with the grizzlies which are seasoned land predators. The findings of this new study are in sharp contrast to some previous findings which suggested that that they might instead be subsisting on berries, bird and some other land food sources.

The terrestrial sources of food which are richer in protein and vegetation are, however, lower in fat which these huge animals need in abundant quantities to be able to survive. Besides, they cannot digest plants properly making things doubly difficult for them.

Says Karne Rode, co-author of the new study, “Although some polar bears could eat terrestrial foods, there is no proof the behavior is widespread. In the regions where terrestrial feeding of polar bears has been documented, the body conditions of the polar bear and survival rates have declined.”

“The reports of terrestrial feeding by polar bears give necessary insights into the ecology of bears toward land,” Rode says. “In this paper, we have a tendency to try to place those observations into a broader context. targeted analysis can ease North American nation verifies whether or not terrestrial foods may contribute to polar bears, nutrition despite the physiological and organic process limitations and therefore the low accessibility of most terrestrial food resources. However, the proof to date suggests that redoubled consumption of terrestrial foods by polar bears is unlikely to offset declines in body condition and survival ensuing from ocean ice loss.”

However, all experts who have studied polar bears do not seem to agree with the findings of Rode and other authors at Washington State University and Polar Bear International. An eminent ecologist at City College of New York, Robert Rockwell, has watched polar bears for more than four decades. He says he has seen the animals move on from seals to eating goose eggs and caribou calves in the recent years.

Personalized skin cancer vaccine shows impressive results in initial clinical trial

Apr 3, 2015 by Ambika Mahajan Leave a Comment

Early clinical trials of personalized skin cancer vaccine have produced highly promising results. The results of the first “tailor-made” vaccines against melanoma skin cancer have been seen to show a “very strong” immune response with no adverse side effects being observed in three patients in addition to boosting the number and diversity of immune system “killer T-cells” that typically attack tumors.

The researchers in this study, which was the first of its kind ever, tried customized vaccines on melanoma patients whose survival rates were as low as 10%, because of their cancer having spread to the lymph nodes.

The findings of the Phase I trial which were published in the journal Science have led the scientists following the developments to believe that customized immunotherapy could pave the way not only for melanoma but also other cancers.

“This proof-of-principle study shows that these custom-designed vaccines can elicit a very strong immune response,” said Dr Gerald Linette, from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, US, who led the trial.

“The tumor antigens (proteins) we inserted into the vaccines provoked a broad response among the immune system’s killer T-cells responsible for destroying tumors.

“Our results are preliminary, but we think the vaccines have therapeutic potential based on the breadth and remarkable diversity of the T-cell response.”

The new approach entailed mapping the DNA of individual patients’ tumors and the samples of their healthy tissue so as to pinpoint the proteins unique to cancer cells. This was in total contrast to previous cancer vaccines which were focused on normal proteins commonly present at high levels in particular kinds of tumor. The same proteins, however, are also found in healthy cells. And this made it difficult for these old school vaccines to trigger a potent immune response.

“This exciting but very early stage trial shows that it may be possible to create vaccines that are tailored to the specific genetic mistakes in a patient’s cancer,” said Dr Alan Worsley, senior science communications officer at Cancer Research UK.

“At the moment it’s not clear how effective this immunotherapy would be at killing cancer cells in the body and improving survival, but this promising study sets the stage for creating vaccines that are designed to target each patient’s individual tumor in the future.”

However, encouraged by the initial observations, the team hopes that the same approach could be used to treat lung, bladder and certain colorectal cancers in future.

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