Science Innovations

Deepak Kumar    FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST 2014 Human trials of the surprisingly simple vaccine are now planned. If successful, it could be taken as a probiotic-like drink. A new oral vaccine has been found to completely stop rhesus macaque monkeys from being infected with SIV, the monkey equivalent of HIV. The vaccine also reduced the number of SIV particles that were present in monkeys who were already infected with SIV. The international research team, involving scientists from the Paris-Descartes University in France and the University of Chinese Medicine in Guangzhou, China, described the success of the vaccine as “surprising” and “unexpected”, mainly because it's so simple. The new vaccine works in the opposite way to most vaccines - by suppressing, rather than triggering, an immune response. This is because HIV and SIV actually require immune cells known as CD4 T-cells in order to proliferate and establish an infection in the body. So one of the goals in HIV preventio...

The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Centre on a Public Interest Litigation seeking immediate steps for proper screening of international flyers coming to India from Ebola virus-affected countries to prevent the deadly virus from spreading. A bench of Chief Justice R M Lodha, justices Kurian Joseph and R F Nariman also issued notice to ministries of Health, Home Affairs, Civil Aviation and External Affairs and the governments of Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal and sought their response on the PIL filed by an advocate. The petition by advocate Vineet Dhanda sought the court's direction to the Centre and state governments to take adequate steps to prevent the deadly epidemic of Ebola Virus Disease from spreading. It sought the government "to ensure proper facilities at the airports to isolate and cure the possibly infected travellers to avoid infection to other citizens and patients". The petition said that the gov...

Cobbe portrait of William Shakespeare 1. Shakespeare’s father held a lot of different jobs, and at one point got paid to drink beer. The son of a tenant farmer, John Shakespeare was nothing if not upwardly mobile. He arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1551 and began dabbling in various trades, selling leather goods, wool, malt and corn. In 1556 he was appointed the borough’s official “ale taster,” meaning he was responsible for inspecting bread and malt liquors. The next year he took another big step up the social ladder by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic farmer who happened to be his father’s former boss. John later became a moneylender and held a series of municipal positions, serving for some time as the mayor of Stratford. In the 1570s he fell into debt and ran into legal problems for reasons that remain unclear. 2. Shakespeare married an older woman who was three months pregnant at the time. In November 1582,...

Last week two American aid workers who had contracted Ebola while working in west Africa were released from a U.S. hospital and pronounced “recovered.” They had been flown to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta from Liberia earlier this month to receive care in the hospital’s specialized infectious disease unit. Kent Brantly, a physician with the humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse, and missionary Nancy Writebol, of SIM USA, beat the strain of the disease they had contracted, which kills 52 percent of its victims. Bruce Ribner, medical director of the hospital's Infectious Disease Unit, sat down with Scientific American to explain how the two Americans were cared for, the lessons that could be applied to help patients across Africa and why the hysteria over flying the two individuals back to the U.S. was unfounded. [An edited transcript of the interview follows .] Are Brantly and Writebol now immune to the Zaire strain of Ebola? In ...

The field of astrophysics has a stubborn problem and it’s called lithium. The quantities of lithium predicted to have resulted from the Big Bang are not actually present in stars. But the calculations are correct – a fact which has now been confirmed for the first time in experiments conducted at the underground laboratory in the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. As part of an international team, researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) studied how much lithium forms under Big Bang conditions. The results were published in “Physical Review Letters ” Lithium, aside from hydrogen and helium, is one of the three elements that are created before the first stars form. These three elements were – according to the theory – already created early on, through what is known as “primordial nucleosynthesis.” That means that when the universe was only a few minutes old, neutrons and protons merged to form the nucl...

This multitasking spice fights cramps, soothes sore muscles, and calms cranky winter skin. Achy muscle aid Ginger’s warming essential oil improves circulation and blood flow, making it an ace at relieving tired muscles. Try this soak, from Leah Sherman, a naturopathic physician in Portland, Oregon: Grate 4 tablespoons fresh ginger, and seal it in a cotton bag; place bag under running bathwater.

<< Country name and Capital name are same >> Mexico – Mexico City Kuwait – Kuwait City Panama – Panama City Vatican City – Vatican City Guatemala – Guatemala City Djibouti – Djibouti City Singapore - Singapore Monaco – Monaco Luxembourg - Luxembourg Tunisia - Tunis Andorra – Andorra la Vella << Capital Names Ending with “Town” >> South Africa - CapeTown Guyana - Gorege Town Sierra Leone - FreeTown Barbados – BridgeTown << For Korea’s Family >> 1) South Korea – Seoul Seoul looks like “Soul” Mind Trick : South Korea’s Soul 2) North Korea – Pyongyang Pyongyang sounds like “Young-yang” Mind Trick : North People are “Young” Sweden – Stockholm Sweden( sounds like ” Sweat-den”) Stockholm(sounds like “Stock +Home”) Mind Trick : Sweats are in Stock in our Home.. Jamaica –Ki...

The meaning of "term" pregnancy has changed. "Term" has been replaced by more specific definitions that communicate the importance of the last few weeks of pregnancy in infant development. Learn why the new term pregnancy definitions are important to ensuring the best outcomes for mom and baby.

A team of scientists in China is working on a new project to highlight the beauty of chemistry through different forms of technology. This stunning video is just the beginning. Created as part of a collaboration between the Institute of Advanced Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and Tsinghua University Press, this video is a taste of things to come in an upcoming project known simply as Beautiful Chemistry. While the team has so far given out very little information about their project, other than this video and a follow-up posted below, all will no doubt be revealed next month when it’s scheduled to launch. The project includes several chemistry professors and experts in digital and interactive technology, and is being led by Yan Liang from USTC, who in 2012 was one of the scientific animators for E. O. Wilson’s revolutionary digital textbook, Life on Earth . Through advanced computer graphics, animations and interac...

The automated, fact-harvesting bot will build up a collection of all human knowledge. Google has decided to create the largest store of knowledge in human history and it is going to create it without using human brainpower. Google's Knowledge Vault is a massive database of facts, built up by an algorithm that autonomously trawls the web and transforms data into useable, bite-sized pieces of information. The predecessor of Knowlege Vault, known as Knowledge Graph, used crowdsourcing techniques but Google realised that humans could only take the project so far; computers could drastically speed up the process. To date the Knowledge Vault contains over 1.6 billion facts. This huge fact reservoir will be the basis of future search engines. Google is currently racing Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM, who are all attempting to build the same kind of database. The Knowledge Vault will be the foundation for smartphone and robot intelligence. Siri is going to get a...

Young adult women who read “Fifty Shades of Grey” are more likely than nonreaders to exhibit signs of eating disorders and have a verbally abusive partner, finds a new study led by a Michigan State University researcher. Further, women who read all three books in the blockbuster “Fifty Shades” erotic romance series are at increased risk of engaging in binge drinking and having multiple sex partners. All are known risks associated with being in an abusive relationship, much like the lead character, Anastasia, is in “Fifty Shades,” said Amy Bonomi, the study’s lead investigator. And while the study did not distinguish whether women experienced the health behaviors before or after reading the books, it’s a potential problem either way, she said. “If women experienced adverse health behaviors such as disordered eating first, reading ‘Fifty Shades’ might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate ...

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New research has shown that the way a child draws at four years old is an indictor of how intelligent they’ll be at age 14. Researchers from King’s College London in the UK have discovered a link between a child’s drawing and their later intelligence, and they've traced it back to genetics. The study, which has been published in Psychological Science, looked at 7,752 pairs of identical and non-identical twins. The scientists asked the children at age four to draw a picture of a child, and the researchers then scored each figure between 0 and 12, depending on how anatomically correct they were. The children also had their intelligence measured both at ages four and 14, and the scientists found that higher scores on the Draw-a-Child test were moderately linked to high intelligence scores at both ages. "The Draw-a-Child test was devised in the 1920s to assess children's intelligence, so the fact that the test correlated with intelligence at age four ...

This false-color electron microscope image catches the fungus Cryptococcus gattii in the act of producing its infectious spores. The club- shaped blue structure is a reproductive organ called the basidium, which projects off the fungus body like an apple off a tree. The spores are colored yellow, and are like seeds that can give rise to a new organism. Credit: Center for Microbial Pathogenesis, Duke University Researchers have pinpointed the environmental source of fungal infections that have been sickening HIV/AIDS patients in Southern California for decades. It literally grows on trees. The discovery is based on the science project of a 13-year-old girl, who spent the summer gathering soil and tree samples from areas around Los Angeles hardest hit by infections of the fungus named Cryptococcus gattii (CRIP- to-cock-us GAT-ee-eye). Cryptococcus , which encompasses a number of species including C. gattii , causes life- threatening infections of the lungs and brain ...

Children with autism have extra synapses in their brain due to a slowdown in the normal brain "pruning" process during development, say US neuroscientists. They found a drug that restores synaptic pruning also reverses autistic-like behaviours in mice, they report in the journal Neuron. "We were able to treat mice after the [disorder] had appeared," says study co-author neurobiologist David Sulzer of Columbia University Medical Center . The findings suggest the condition could one day be treated in teenagers and adults, "though there is a lot of work to be done," he says. The work is "extremely exciting", says Professor Ralph-Axel Mueller of San Diego State University, who was not involved in the research. A synapse is where one neurone communicates with another. With too many synapses, a "brain region that should be talking only to a select number of other regions is receiving irrelevant information from many others,...

Efforts Accelerated to Push Untested Ebola Drugs into Clinical Trials     Vaccine developed by Canadian government could be mass produced within months. While the Ebola-related death toll in West Africa continues to rise, drug manufacturers are stepping up their efforts to advance experimental treatments for the disease into the clinical trial phase. A vaccine called VSV-EBOV that was developed by the Government of Canada and licensed for further development to American firm NewLink Genetics Corp through subsidiary BioProtection Systems Corp has shown promise in animal testing, but it has yet to be used in humans. Earlier this week, Canada announced it will donate up to 1000 doses of VSV-EBOV to the World Health Organization (WHO) to aid in halting the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 1000 people, with more than 1800 confirmed and suspected cases. Last week, BioProtection Systems received a $1 million contract with the US Defense T...

Vaccine alternative protects mice against malaria A study led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers found that injecting a vaccine-like compound into mice was effective in protecting them from malaria. The findings suggest a potential new path toward the elusive goal of malaria immunization. Mice, injected with a virus genetically altered to help the rodents create an antibody designed to fight the malaria parasite, produced high levels of the anti-malaria antibody. The approach, known as Vector immunoprophylaxis, or VIP, has shown promise in HIV studies but has never been tested with malaria, for which no licensed vaccine exists. A report on the research appears online Aug. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Malaria is one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases, killing as many as 1 million people per year, the majority of them children in Africa. Malaria patients get the disease from infected mosquitoes. Of the four...

Share webpage:Contraceptive pills can halve the size of women's ovaries (ScienceAlert) http://pda.sciencealert.com.au/news/20141108-26001.html ——by @UC Browser

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Scientists think they've found Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak A new study suggests the origin of the worldwide Ebola outbreak was a two-year-old African boy who passed away last year. Image: Festa/Shutterstock A toddler in Africa may have started the Ebola outbreak, which the World Health Organisation has now delcared an international public health emergency, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine . The two-year-old boy identified as Patient Zero died on 6 December 2013 in a village in Guéckédou in southeastern Guinea in Africa. The region borders Sierra Leone and Liberia, making it an ideal entry point for an epidemic. There have since been at least 1,779 cases of the disease, as Denise Grady and Sheri Fink explain in The New York Times, and 961 deaths - including the boy's mother, sister and grandmother. At the time of their deaths, no one was sure what had sickened the family, despite the fever, vomiting and diarrho...

Top 8 Most Dangerous Animal in the World                                                                                  Posted By- Tarun 8. Sea Wasp Box Jellyfish Lethally Venomous in the Sea                 Everyone is always asking what animal packs the deadliest venom in the world. Here, once and for all, are the two answers. Sea life has abounded for about 3 billion years longer than life on land, and the longer nature has to evolve its animals, the nastier, deadlier, more perfect (see #4) they get. There are many species of box jellies, but Chironex fleckeri, also called the sea wasp, is by far the most notorious. It can weigh up to 4 and half pounds (2 kgs), with a bell that can reach the siz...