Updates In Science This Week (August 1st week)

Santhosh had asked me to categorize the contents. So I have divided them into two categories – the natural world and the physical world. Here you go...

Highlights:

Natural World:

A Braking mechanism found for Cellular Energy Production.
Coffee and Exercise would prevent skin cancer by exposure to UV
What a pregnant mother eats can make her offspring more susceptible to disease later in life
Mathematics explains the evolution of HIV to AIDS.
Do you think people have sex for fun?
Understanding a joke is tough as you get old.
Music and the Brain

Physical World:

Electronic voting machines are not defect free
Pink Solar cell developed.
Teach a robot to laugh at the joke you cracked.
Fingerprints can tell the criminal’s diet, race and sex.
Split personality in the world of molecules

The Natural World

What makes you warm? - The energy produced by the mitochondria. How does the mitochondrion produce energy? - By producing ATP, the energy currency of the cell, through the process called cellular respiration. The answers to these questions are known to all. But the next question had been puzzling scientists for years. If the mitochondria produced energy indefinitely, then it would be a death warrant. There should be some braking mechanism to stop energy production, when the required energy has been produced. How does the mitochondrion know, when to stop the energy production? Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have now identified the first known factor that acts as a brake on cellular energy production. The factor called MTERF3 would inhibit the expression of mitochondrial DNA and thus slow down the cells energy production.

I have good news for coffee: The team of researchers at Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research divided some hairless mice to four groups. One group was given caffeinated water (equivalent to two cups of coffee); the second group was made to exercise on a running wheel (A day will come when a mouse makes the researchers run. Just kidding); the third group was made to exercise and drink caffeinated water; and the last group did not do both. These groups were exposed to ultraviolet rays that damaged the DNA in skin cells. The comparison of the four groups has revealed that exercise along with coffee would prevent skin cancer arising due to sun exposure.

What a pregnant mother eats can make her offspring more susceptible to disease later in life, says a study by the investigators of Duke University Medical Center. Epigenetics - referring to the changes happening over and above the gene sequence without altering its code - is a new avenue of genetic research. Experiments on animals prove that exposure within the womb to bisphenol A (BPA), an ubiquitous chemical used in the production of plastics, caused noticeable changes in the offspring without altering any of the offspring’s genes. Additionally, the researchers discovered that administration of folic acid or genistein during pregnancy protected the offspring from the negative effects of BPA.

Mathematics comes to rescue to explain the evolution of HIV into AIDS. HIV develops in three stages. During the first few weeks, the virus grows to very high levels and can cause symptoms similar to a general viral infection such as the flu. The virus then drops to lower levels and the patient enters the asymptomatic phase that lasts on average 8-10 years. During the last stage, AIDS develops and the immune system collapses. Without an immune system, the patient cannot survive. It is not well understood how the asymptomatic phase transitions into AIDS. The common notion is that HIV evolves to grow better over time, more efficiently over time, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection, eventually killing the patient. UCI biologist Dominik Wodarz has shown with the help of his mathematical model, for the first time that the development of AIDS might require HIV to evolve within a patient into a state where it spreads less efficiently from cell to cell. It also predicts that if a cell is affected by a single cell, HIV may not evolve to AIDS. Multiple viruses should attack the same cell, called co-infection, in order to efficiently evolve into AIDS. If this model is tested experimentally and found that it is true, this may lead to the development of drugs that would prevent co-infection, thereby preventing HIV evolution to AIDS.

Why do people have sex - A question seldom asked and less studied. If you think having sex is either for pleasure or to reproduce, I beg to differ. After a comprehensive study of the question, David Buss and Cindy Meston of the University of Texas came up with a list of reasons for having sex. They say that there are 237 reasons for having sex. They identified four major factors and 13 sub factors as the reasons for having sex. The four major reasons are physical, goal based, emotional and insecurity based.

There are certain people in my locality who laughs very late when they hear a joke. They are called as "tube lights" (remember that a tube light or a fluorescent bulb has some flicker before it attains a steady state). They have a time lag in comprehending a joke. Sometimes they don't even get the humor element in it. The researchers at the Washington University say that age contributes a lot to this "tube light" syndrome. Older adults have a tougher time in understanding a basic joke than younger adults. Understanding the relationship between humor comprehension and cognition may eventually facilitate the way humor is integrated into programs or therapies for older adults.

A research team from Stanford University School of Medicine has conducted a study to understand the process of listening to music. The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening. Different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested. This is the moment when the brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner. This is the first study directly addressing event segmentation - the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates.

The Physical world

The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has been doubled over the last century - the suspect is now global warming. Statistical analysis of storm data of the century by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology reveals that warmer sea surface temperatures (SST) (which is about 1.3 degrees per year) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are the driving factors for this increase.

How many games should be played in a League match so that we are pretty sure that the best team emerges out? Physicists at the Los Alamos national laboratory has come up with a rough figure - almost the cube of the number of teams involved. If there are 10 teams involved then almost 1000 games are to be played in the League so that the best team gets the best record. Hopefully the organizers of world cups come across this study.

For the last couple of elections we have been using the electronic voting systems, which are considered as faster and reliable. The team called the Red Team lead by Matt Bishopp begs to differ. They were appointed as reviewers for a couple of electronic voting machines by various manufacturers for the California elections. They have found various security breaches in all the machines. They could "hack" the memory cards of the machines by bypassing the tamper resistant seals and locks. They say that an experienced person could even switch off the memory card of the system without the knowledge of the invigilator in less than a minute if there are curtains blocking the view of the voter. It is high time that all the countries set up review teams for the electronic voting systems.

Have you seen the solar cell? They are invariably blue in color. This is because they have a reflective coating which enables them to absorb the green portion of visible light. Scientists at Ohio State University have now developed a solar cell which is pink in color. They achieved this by developing a new dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) material using zinc stannate. This is the first time to use a material other than an oxide for DSSC. Right now, even though the efficiency of DSSC is almost half that of the conventional solar cell, the scientists are optimistic to increase the efficiency and thus commercializing the use of these materials.

"Robots are inert. They cannot have emotions and feelings". Before making these statements think again. The day may come when a robot can laugh at a joke you cracked. Julia Taylor and Lawrence Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio have built a computer program or “bot” that is able to get a specific type of joke - one whose crux is a simple pun. To teach the program to spot jokes, the researchers first gave it a database of words, extracted from a children’s dictionary to keep things simple, and then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings. When presented with a new passage, the program uses that knowledge to work out how those new words relate to each other and what they likely mean. When it finds a word that doesn’t seem to fit with its surroundings, it searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words. If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke. The result is a “bot” that “gets” jokes that turn on a simple pun. The next step is to program the robot and make the robot to laugh based on the output of the program.

Do you want to be a detective? Make sure of your knowledge of chemistry is superb. Professor Sergei Kazarian from Imperial College London’s Department of Chemical Engineering, has devised a new fingerprinting technique along with chemical residue which contains a few millionths of a gram of fluid and can be found on all fingerprints. The fingerprint is taken by the use of commercialized gelatine based tape and analyzed in a spectroscopic microscope to identify the chemical composition. This can potentially tell the forensic scientist the diet, race and sex of the suspected criminal.

We have heard of split personality or dual personality through the cinema. The same person behaving as two individuals. Now hear about split personality in the world of molecules. An aromatic compound is a nearly planar ring (or ring system) with bonding, yet freely mobile electron pairs from double bonds. These electrons reside in a kind of “electron cloud” with a part above and a part below the plane of the ring. This is the classic Huckel topology. Even rings that are twisted into a figure eight can have this topology. If the ring system is twisted by 180°, the result is a Mobius topology; there is no longer a difference between the upper and lower “electron cloud”. The two clouds merge together to form a single continuous surface. Polish researchers have now synthesised a large molecular ring, which can be classified as an expanded porphyrin analogue, which can switch between the Huckel and Mobius topologies without breaking even a single bond. Which topology the molecule prefers depends on the type of solvent and the temperature.