Science & TechnologyS


Eye 1

Bioengineered cornea can restore sight to the blind and visually impaired

Karin Söderlund Leifler
Linköping University
Thu, 11 Aug 2022 19:37 UTC
Researchers and entrepreneurs have developed an implant made of collagen protein from pig's skin, which resembles the human cornea. In a pilot study, the implant restored vision to 20 people with diseased corneas, most of whom were blind prior to receiving the implant.
Lens Surgery
© Thor BalkhedThe researchers have developed a new, minimally invasive method. A small incision is made, through which the implant is inserted into the existing cornea. The incision can be made with an advanced laser (as in the photo), but also, when needed, by hand with simple surgical instruments.
The study jointly led by researchers at Linköping University (LiU) and LinkoCare Life Sciences AB has been published in Nature Biotechnology. The promising results bring hope to those suffering from corneal blindness and low vision by providing a bioengineered implant as an alternative to the transplantation of donated human corneas, which are scarce in countries where the need for them is greatest.

"The results show that it is possible to develop a biomaterial that meets all the criteria for being used as human implants, which can be mass-produced and stored up to two years and thereby reach even more people with vision problems. This gets us around the problem of shortage of donated corneal tissue and access to other treatments for eye diseases", says Neil Lagali, professor at the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at LiU, one of the researchers behind the study.
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Microscope 2

Beyond genes: Individual cells found to be smarter than originally thought

David Coppedge
Evolution News
Mon, 08 Aug 2022 08:07 UTC
Brassica rapa plant
The success of intelligent design predictions about codes and functions should inspire biologists to keep looking for purpose in unknown substances and processes in life. Rather than dismissing them outright, they might find good reasons for them. In some labs, that is happening.

Not All Functions Are in Proteins

The surprise of the non-coding RNAs is a good example. We all remember how non-coding regions seemed to confirm the "junk DNA" hypothesis in the first decade of the 21st century. But then, functions were found for some of them, and the tune began to change. In hindsight, why would molecular biologists assume that function must be restricted to a protein form? RNA molecules can fold and persist in cells. They can do more than simply carry DNA information to protein function.

Molecular biologists classified unknown RNA transcripts into long and short forms at first: the short noncoding RNAs (sncRNAs) and the long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), sometimes dubbed long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs, pronounced the same). Kyle Palos from the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell, under the guidance of Assistant Professor Andrew Nelson, decided to look deeper into what some of them were doing in plant cells. A news item, "The Missing Links: Finding Function in lincRNAs," tells how Palos and Nelson went on a hunt to find functions within these "enigmatic" and "cryptic" parts of the genome.

Comment: See also:

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Cassiopaea

Secrets of most powerful 'gigantic jet' ever observed revealed in new study

John Toon
Phys.org
Mon, 08 Aug 2022 20:09 UTC
gigantic jet
© Chris HolmesThis image series, taken from a video, shows the formation of a gigantic jet over Oklahoma in May 2018.
A detailed 3D study of a massive electrical discharge that rose 50 miles into space above an Oklahoma thunderstorm has provided new information about an elusive atmospheric phenomenon known as gigantic jets. The Oklahoma discharge was the most powerful gigantic jet studied so far, carrying 100 times as much electrical charge as a typical thunderstorm lightning bolt.

The gigantic jet moved an estimated 300 coulombs of electrical charge into the ionosphere — the lower edge of space — from the thunderstorm. Typical lightning bolts carry less than five coulombs between the cloud and ground or within clouds. The upward discharge included relatively cool (approximately 400 degrees Fahrenheit) streamers of plasma, as well as structures called leaders that are very hot — more than 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Comment: The recency of the observations, along with the apparently increasing magnitude and variation of location seem to hint that these 'rare' Transluminous Events (TLE's) reveal changes occurring with 'Earth's global electrical circuit': Rare blue jet atmospheric phenomenon photographed over Texas, several sighted in one night

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Syringe

New study finds COVID-19 vaccines did not reduce mortality in the U.S.

Drea Humphrey
Rebelnews.com
Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00 UTC
Professeur Denis Rancourt
© InconnuLe professeur Denis Rancourt
Shocking statistics shown in a new epidemiological study on all-cause mortality in the United States reveal the COVID shots did nothing to reduce overall deaths.

Mortality in the U.S.
Denis Rancourt (study paper screen shot)
In today's report we sit down to interview Dr. Denis Rancourt, a Canadian scientist whose work has been published in over 100 peer-reviewed journals and whose work in more recent years has taken close looks at death rates during the existence of COVID-19.

Last time I interviewed Dr. Rancourt we discussed a statistical analysis he worked on reviewing Canada's all cause mortality during the first year of life with COVID-19, which showed the country's total deaths were not statistically consistent with that of a pandemic.
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Magnify

99% of Florida's turtles being born female

Maria Alejandra Cardona
Yahoo
Tue, 02 Aug 2022 12:32 UTC
Loggerhead turtle
© Maria Alejandra CardonaLoggerhead turtle is held at the Turtle Hospital in Marathon
Florida's sea turtles are grappling with a gender imbalance made worse by climate change. Recent heat waves have caused the sand on some beaches to get so hot that nearly every turtle born was female.

"The frightening thing is the last four summers in Florida have been the hottest summers on record," said Bette Zirkelbach, manager of the Turtle Hospital in Marathon, a city in the Florida Keys, a string of tropical islands stretching from the southern end of the state.

"Scientists that are studying sea turtle hatchlings and eggs have found no boy sea turtles, so only female sea turtles for the past four years," Zirkelbach said, whose turtle center has operated since 1986.

Comment: If the world was really warming, as the sold out scientific community claim, why isn't this an issue for turtles everywhere? Could it instead be that there's an issue of pollution? Particularly since this glut of females has only appeared very recently, and we know that industrial chemicals can have a wide variety of detrimental effects on animals, and humans.

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Galaxy

A new James Webb telescope image reveals a galactic collision's aftermath

Lisa Grossman
Science News
Wed, 03 Aug 2022 17:11 UTC
cartwheel galaxy james webb telescope JWST
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and Webb ERO Production TeamBright, dusty spokes connect the inner and outer rings of the Cartwheel Galaxy in this new James Webb Space Telescope image, giving fresh insight into rare double-ringed galaxies. The two galaxies to the left are neighbors.
It's not easy being ringed. A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy 400 million years ago.

The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers think it used to be a large spiral like the Milky Way, until a smaller galaxy smashed through it. In earlier observations with other telescopes, the space between the rings appeared shrouded in dust.

Comment: There's enough information coming in from the JWST to keep the astronomy community busy for the next century. And to think the cretins in Congress nearly killed the project in 2011:

U.S. Lawmakers Vote to Kill Hubble Telescope Successor

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Fireball

Asteroid wider than 2 football fields is barreling toward Earth tonight

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Wed, 03 Aug 2022 20:12 UTC
Asteroid 2022 OE2
© ShutterstockThis artistic concept image shows an asteroid flying by Earth.
An asteroid wider than two football fields will zoom past Earth in the wee hours of Thursday (Aug. 4). The asteroid is set to pass at 12:23 a.m. (ET).

NASA astronomers discovered the asteroid, known as 2022 OE2, just days ago, on July 26. The meaty space rock is estimated to measure between 557 and 1,246 feet (170 to 380 meters) wide, which is about twice as wide as an American football field is long. Astronomers also confirmed that 2022 OE2 is an Apollo-class asteroid, which means it orbits the sun and crosses the path of Earth's orbit, Live Science previously reported. (Astronomers know of about 15,000 such asteroids.)

The impact from an asteroid this large would release more energy than 1,000 nuclear bombs. However, this one will miss Earth by a wide margin, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Asteroid 2022 OE2 is predicted to pass Earth at a distance of roughly 3.2 million miles (5.1 million kilometers) — more than 13 times the average distance between Earth and the moon. For context, this is significantly farther than the asteroid 2022 NF, which came within a mere 56,000 miles (90,000 km) — or about 23% the average distance between Earth and the moon — on July 7.
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Microscope 1

Scientists revived the cells of pigs an hour after death, a potential organ transplant breakthrough


ABC7
Thu, 04 Aug 2022 16:59 UTC
organex yale organ transplant revive dead pig cells
© Sestan Laboratory/Yale School of MedicineResearchers at Yale University say they have been able to restore blood circulation and other cellular functions in pigs a full hour after the animals' deaths.
The tech could someday be used in human organs.

Researchers at Yale University say they have been able to restore blood circulation and other cellular functions in pigs a full hour after the animals' deaths, suggesting that cells don't die as quickly as scientists had assumed.

With more research, the cutting-edge technique could someday potentially help preserve human organs for longer, allowing more people to receive transplants.

The researchers used a system they developed called OrganEx which enables oxygen to be recirculated throughout a dead pig's body, preserving cells and some organs after a cardiac arrest.

"These cells are functioning hours after they should not be," said Dr. Nenad Sestan, the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neuroscience and professor of comparative medicine, genetics and psychiatry at Yale, who led the study.

"And what this tells us is that the demise of cells can be halted. And their functionality restored in multiple vital organs. Even one hour after death," he told a news briefing.

Comment: More from Live Science:
How OrganEx works

The new research builds upon a previous study, published in 2019 in the journal Nature (opens in new tab), in which the researchers used a smaller version of the same system to restore some cellular and metabolic activity in the brain of a pig that had been decapitated during food production.

This smaller system, called BrainEx, pumped a liquid chock-full of Hemopure — a synthetic form of the protein hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in red blood cells — through the brain's blood vessels. The liquid also contained chemical compounds intended to prevent blood clots from forming and cells from self-destructing through a process called "apoptosis." Pumping this fluid through the brain prevented the organ from swelling, as it usually would after death, and allowed certain cellular functions to continue up to four hours post-decapitation. (Importantly, the treated brain did not produce any electrical signals associated with normal brain function or "remnant awareness," the authors confirmed.)

"Cells actually don't die as quickly as we assume that they do, which basically opens up a possibility for intervention," Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja, an associate research scientist in neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine and co-first author of the study, said at Tuesday's press briefing. In other words, if scientists can step in soon enough, they can save some cells from certain doom.

In their latest work, the team essentially scaled up their BrainEx system to perfuse a whole pig body at once.

The scaled-up system uses a device similar to a heart-lung machine, which takes over the role of the heart and lungs during surgeries by pumping blood and oxygen through the body. The team used this device to pump both pig blood and a modified version of their synthetic, cell-saving liquid through the deceased pigs' bodies. Their synthetic solution contained 13 compounds intended to suppress inflammation, stop blood clot formation, prevent cell death and correct electrolyte imbalances that arise when ischemia sets in.


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Sun

Solar storm from hole in the sun will hit Earth on Wednesday (Aug. 3)

Ben Turner
Live Science
Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00 UTC
solar flare solar storm
© SDO/NASA
High-speed solar winds from a "hole" in the sun's atmosphere are set to hit Earth's magnetic field on Wednesday (Aug 3.), triggering a minor G-1 geomagnetic storm.

Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) made the prediction after observing that "gaseous material is flowing from a southern hole in the sun's atmosphere," according to spaceweather.com.

Coronal holes are areas in the sun's upper atmosphere where our star's electrified gas (or plasma) is cooler and less dense. Such holes are also where the sun's magnetic field lines, instead of looping back in on themselves, beam outward into space. This enables solar material to surge out in a torrent that travels at speeds up to 1.8 million miles per hour (2.9 million kilometers per hour), according to the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco.

Comment: See also: Surprise solar storm with 'disruptive potential' slams into Earth

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Info

Midnight comes a fraction sooner as Earth spins faster


TallBloke's Talkshop
Mon, 01 Aug 2022 21:44 UTC
As Nasa is reported as suggesting that 'stronger winds in El Niño years can slow down the planet's spin', can we - on the basis of no research at all - nominate La Niña as a suspect here? Just trying to be helpful, as MSN claims: Experts confused after earth spins faster.

Analysis: Reflecting a recent trend, 29 June was the shortest day on our planet since the 1960s. What's going on? - wonders The Guardian.
Earth from Space
© TallBloke Wordpress
If time feels tighter than ever of late, blame it on the revolution. On 29 June this year, Earth racked up an unusual record: its shortest day since the 1960s, when scientists began measuring the planet's rotation with high-precision atomic clocks.

Broadly speaking, Earth completes one full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years.

But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected.

The past few years have seen a flurry of records fall, with shorter days being notched up ever more frequently. In 2020, the Earth turned out 28 of the shortest days in the past 50 years, with the shortest of those, on 19 July, shaving 1.47 milliseconds off the 86,400 seconds that make up 24 hours. The 29 June record came close to being broken again last month, when 26 July came in 1.5 milliseconds short.

So is the world speeding up? Over the longer term - the geological timescales that compress the rise and fall of the dinosaurs into the blink of an eye - the Earth is actually spinning more slowly than it used to. Wind the clock back 1.4bn years and a day would pass in less than 19 hours.
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