Top Scientific Achievements (October 4th week)

Apologies: In Bangalore, the rains had come. Cold mornings made the climate more enjoyable. Enjoying the chillness, enjoying the rain... I completely forgot about this child of mine (I know you will be laughing... I know that you know the reason... Ok you can call me lazy...). So apologies.. I am back...

Think Before You Drive in a City

Emily Elliott, at the University of Pittsburgh has been studying nitrogen oxides, which is the byproduct of fossil fuel burning, for the last three years. The primary culprits of acid rain, nitrogen oxides can come into the atmosphere through two paths - one from the stationary sources like power plants which throw away the emissions high into the atmosphere and can be transported to long distances and the second from the movable sources like vehicles, which puff their contribution close to the ground and would be transported to short distances. The amount of nitrates pouring over the cities finds its way to the neighboring water sources, like lakes and rivers thereby polluting them. In aquatic ecosystems, excess nitrates promote the overgrowth of oxygen-consuming algae, which would lead to oxygen deficiency in the water known as hypoxia. Hypoxia kills the marine creatures, by suffocating them. I know your thought now: "These are all known facts. What did the study by Emily reveal?" The study says that the data given by the monitoring projects, which track the deposition of nitrates, are not sufficient. The actual values would be more than that given by the monitoring systems. The study recommends that we need more monitoring stations located in urban areas to know exactly how the villainy of nitrates work.

Your genes and the HIV

When people get affected by HIV, some of them progress very quickly to AIDS, some others progress relatively slowly towards it. Why is this difference? Scientists have been thinking that "viral load" would be the man playing the game. Viral load is the amount of virus in the blood of an HIV-infected person. If the numbers of viruses are more, the more likely he is to reach AIDS. Research lead by Sunil Ahuja of the University of Texas has found that the viral load contributes only 9 percent to the variability in rate of progression to AIDS. Genes (or more precisely combination of genes CCR5 and CCL3L1) are the new factors they found that control the variability. Their control is only 6 percent. What about the remaining? - Maybe further research would give more insights into it.

Are the oceans fed up?

The Industrial revolution had triggered the emission of CO2 in abundance to the atmosphere. The oceans have been since then the most important sink, which takes up this load of CO2 and had played a crucial role in removing the CO2 from the air, thus slowing the climate change. A decade long study conducted by Ute Schuster and Andrew Watson of University of East Anglia, says that the oceans are fed up now. The uptake of CO2 by the oceans has slowed down dramatically between the mid-nineties and the early 2000s. The study was done by mounting instruments for measuring CO2 in water in a container ship carrying bananas from West Indies to UK, making a round trip of the Atlantic Ocean every month. The speed and size of the change show that we cannot take for granted the ocean sink for the carbon dioxide.

Think Optimistic

Researchers at the New York University have identified regions in the neural network which are activated when we think optimistically. This happens to be the same area which malfunctions when there is depression. Participants of the study were subjected to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they thought of future things like the possibility of winning an award, or possibility of ending a romantic relationship. When participants imagined positive future events relative to negative ones, enhanced activation was detected in the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala, which are the same brain areas that seem to malfunction in depression. The research suggests that while the past is constrained, the future is open to interpretation, allowing people to distance themselves from possible negative events and move closer toward positive ones.

Let’s welcome the new born babies

Researchers at Michigan State University’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, NSCL, have created three never-before-observed isotopes of magnesium and aluminum. Particles that comprise atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons, are held together by the nuclear force. Despite much progress in nuclear physics, understanding of how the nuclear force and other effects play out inside nuclei is far from complete. For example, even today scientists aren’t sure exactly what combinations of protons and neutrons can make up most atomic nuclei. Elements can exist as different isotopes, which contain the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. As an example, the most abundant stable isotope of carbon has six protons and six neutrons. However, trace amounts of carbon-13 and carbon-14 – with seven and eight neutrons respectively – also can be found on Earth. The neutron-limit, referred to as the neutron-dripline, is a basic property of matter. Yet remarkably, despite more than a half-century of inquiry, scientists know the dripline location only for the eight lightest elements, hydrogen to oxygen. So one very basic question – what’s the heaviest isotope of a given element that can exist – remains unanswered for all but eight of the hundred or so elements on the Periodic Table. Let’s hope that the newcomers would show the scientists a path leading to the neutron-dripline, thus revealing some of the secrets of nature.

Behind the beauty of the Butterfly

When many of us are wondering what makes the butterfly beautiful, Bob Reed of the University of California may not wonder. He has found the secret behind them or maybe he has reached near to the truth behind them. The genes that make a fruit fly’s eyes red also produce red wing patterns in the Heliconius butterfly, says his study. His study throws light into the genetic causes of pigmentation in wings and the patterns of wings. The study says that evolution is achieved primarily through recycling old genes, rather than evolving entirely new genes from scratch.