On the basis of quotes of the writers it is reported that the “The series ‘Stephen Hawking: Riddles Of Time & Space’ would provide a glimpse into, “the man, the myth and the legend.”

Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neurone disease that attacks the nerves controlling voluntary movement.He had spent most of his time on a wheel chair and communicated through Computer.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s Director Anthony S.Fauci today congratulated the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), Bharat Biotech International, Ltd., and the scientists, government and people of India on the important results from the ROTAVAC rotavirus vaccine study.

He said that contagious rotaviruses are the leading cause of severe diarrheal illnesses among infants and young children in both developed and resource-limited countries. Each year, rotavirus-induced diarrheal disease kills roughly 435,000 children younger than 5 years old and hospitalizes an estimated two million children worldwide, largely in developing countries. The youngest children — those between 6 months and 2 years of age — are most vulnerable,he added.

In fact,since 2006, two oral rotavirus vaccines have been licensed and available in North and South American, European and Eastern Mediterranean countries, where they have significantly reduced the burden of rotavirus-induced diarrhea,said Fauci.

“Based on that success, the World Health Organization recommended in 2009 the inclusion of rotavirus vaccine in all national immunization programs. However, access to vaccines can be slow and limited in the areas of the world where they are needed most”,he said.

He said:“ROTAVAC is a new rotavirus vaccine that consists of a strain of the virus that was isolated, manufactured and tested in India. The ROTAVAC trial represents a significant victory for India’s scientific community. Based on the study’s successful findings, infants in India will gain access to a licensed vaccine and its significant protection against severe rotavirus-induced gastroenteritis.”

Further he said that NIAID had provided the 116E vaccine strain — the particular strain tested in the ROTAVAC vaccine trial — to Bharat Biotech through a technology transfer agreement in 2000. The company adapted the strain and produced the investigational vaccines for both animal and human clinical studies.

“NIAID, with gift funds from PATH, further sponsored Indian investigators and their U.S. collaborators for three Phase I studies in India involving the live, attenuated (weakened) 116E rotavirus vaccine and provided clinical site monitoring for these trials. The results of these studies, which were conducted among adults, children ages 2 to 12 years, and infants ages 6 to 9 weeks, provided the basis for Bharat to further develop the vaccine. NIAID provided biostatistical vaccine development, regulatory affairs and clinical operations support for the later-stage clinical trials and sequenced the 116E strain’s genome in 2008”,he said.

He said:”We are deeply gratified to have played a role in establishing the safety and efficacy of the ROTAVAC vaccine. No infant or child should die as the result of rotavirus-induced severe diarrhea. NIAID is proud to be among the scientific partners who have worked over the past decades to potentially make that affliction a thing of the past for the children of India.”

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Nirmal Purty,a 21- year old student doing MBA course at the Ranchi University,smoked a hookah at a party. He liked the exotic water pipe so much that he bought a hookah for himself and kept it in his hostel room.

Like many other students who are embracing hookahs on campuses across India,there is a belief that hookah smoke is less dangerous than cigarette smoke because it “is filtered through water, so you get fewer solid particles.”

“Just think for a while. I don’t do it that often.I smoke once a month if that, I’m not really concerned with the health effects,” says Purty.

But in fact, hookahs are far from safe.This is established now by research,says Nathan Seppa in sciencenews.org.”The tobacco and fruit mixture smoked in public hookah bars might be considerably more dangerous than its pleasant scent would suggest. An analysis of people who smoked from water pipes three times a day finds that the pipes deliver more carbon monoxide and benzene, a carcinogen, than does smoking half a pack of cigarettes daily”,says the story in Science News.

In an upcoming issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers document those and several other cancer-causing compounds that showed up in urine tests of the water-pipe smokers. The research calls into question a common assumption: that hookahs are safe.

“This is a great addition to the literature,” says Thomas Eissenberg, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He and his colleagues had previously found toxic substances in hookah smoke. The new paper extends his findings by detecting carcinogens and other bad actors in water-pipe smokers themselves, he says.

Hookah smoking goes back hundreds of years in India, the Middle East and North Africa, but it is newer in parts of Europe and North America. The substances heated in a hookah vary. In the study, researchers used pastes chosen by the participants that were 5 to 10 percent tobacco combined with honey, molasses and bits of fruit. This paste goes in the bowl of the pipe, which is covered with a perforated piece of aluminum foil and topped with a burning piece of charcoal, says study coauthor Peyton Jacob III, a research chemist at the University of California, San Francisco. The smoker then inhales.

Now in an article based on the Keays lab at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna has added some important pieces to this puzzle.

“Their work, published in Current Biology, reports the discovery of iron balls in sensory neurons. These cells, called hair cells, are found in the ear and are responsible for detecting sound and gravity”,says an article carried by Science Daily.

It adds:” Remarkably, each cell has just one iron ball, and it is in the same place in every cell.

“It’s very exciting. We find these iron balls in every bird, whether it’s a pigeon or an ostrich” adds Mattias Lauwers who discovered them “but not in humans.” It is an astonishing finding, despite decades of research these conspicuous balls of iron had not been discovered.

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Texonomy- the practice and science of classification(read giving name to a biological-zoolological entity) is a dynamic swirling science.

To give name to such an entity,there is International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature(ICZN).Normally,each of the 40 or so naming disputes the commission considers in a year.

But in case of a tortoise found in the Indian Ocean,dispute generated 80 responses prompting ICZN to study and take a final decision.Now,after 200 years of ambiguity,years of debate and discussions,ICZN has named this tortoise gigantean, term for the Aldabra giant tortoises.

“That species descriptor will be used as part of a two-word Latin name that puts the species into a genus with its near relatives. MeetAldabrachelys gigantean”,reports Science News.

“The issue came to a head in 2009, when Ecuador-based zoologist Jack Frazier, with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, asked the commission to recognize gigantea as the valid species descriptor for the tortoise and to use the specimen he described in 2006 for the Smithsonian as the benchmark.

Frazier argued that the term gigantea is now the most commonly used Latin term for the species. At Frazier’s urging, conservationists and other nontaxonomists who use the species name chimed in”,says the report in Science News.

Pics courtesy:tgdaily.com

In the arms bazar,another brand has arrived.This is laser weapon.

According to New York Times,the U.S. Navy is going to deploy for the first time a laser weapon on its ship that has been shown in tests to disable patrol boats and blind or destroy surveillance drones.

“A prototype shipboard laser will be deployed on a converted amphibious transport and docking ship in the Persian Gulf, where Iranian fast-attack boats have approached American warships and where the government in Tehran is building remotely piloted aircraft carrying surveillance pods”,reports TYehran Times.

“The laser will not be operational until next year, but the announcement on Monday by Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, seemed meant as a warning to Iran not to step up activity in the Persian Gulf in the next few months if tensions increase because of sanctions and the impasse in negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. The Navy released video and still images of the laser weapon burning through a drone during a test firing”,said the Tehran Times.

It adds:“The laser is designed to carry out a graduated scale of missions, from burning through a fast-attack boat or a drone to producing a nonlethal burst to “dazzle” an adversary’s sensors and render them useless without causing any other physical damage.

U.S. Navy officials acknowledge that the first prototype weapon to be deployed is not powerful enough to take on jet fighters or missiles on their approach.

Pics courtesy:tgdaily.com

Rear Adm. Matthew L. Klunder, the chief of naval research, said the high-energy laser system was developed as part of the Navy’s search for “new, innovative, disruptive technologies.” In essence, the Navy is trying to harness technological advances in battling adversaries that are thinking of inventive ways to counter American power.

Admiral Klunder said the weapon had destroyed targets in all 12 of its field tests.”

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 In a bid to reduce the need of animals for testing cosmetics and other chemical formulation for skin allergies, scientists have found a new method that does not require the use of animals to test skin sensitizers.

The European Union quite recently banned the sale of all animal tested cosmetics regardless of where in the world the tests were carried on.

According to Wikipedia, testing on animals dates back to 2nd to 4th century BCE and Aristotle and Erasistratus were said to be among the first to perform experiments on live animals. Most of the medical breakthroughts in the 20th century have utilised living animals as experimental subjects. During the 1880s, Louis Pasteur demonstrated ‘Germ theory’ by introducing anthrax into sheep. And Insulin was first isolated from dogs in 1922.

The new study by Bruno Miguel Neves and his colleagues is to be published in the journal, “Chemical Research n Toxicology”. The method described by them involves the utilization of genes and cell signalling pathways present in the mouse skin cells that have been grown in the laboratory. This process involves the study of signalling pathways and characteristic responses by genes that have been activated in presence of certain chemicals that are being tested.
According to the study, this test has not provided false positive results and has been able to identify the tested sensitizers with 92% accuracy.

The creators are Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers.They have come up with a life-like, autonomous robotic jellyfish the size and weight of a grown man, 5 foot 7 inches in length and weighing 170 pounds,according to the Science Daily’s report- Large Robotic Jellyfish Could One Day Patrol Oceans.

The same report states that the prototype robot, nicknamed Cyro, is a larger model of a robotic jellyfish the same team — headed by Shashank Priya of Blacksburg, Va., and professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech — unveiled in 2012.”The earlier robot, dubbed RoboJelly, is roughly the size of a man’s hand, and typical of jellyfish found along beaches”,said the report.

The report quotes Alex Villanueva of St-Jacques, New-Brunswick, Canada, and a doctoral student in mechanical engineering working under Priya,saying :”A larger vehicle will allow for more payload, longer duration and longer range of operation.”

“Biological and engineering results show that larger vehicles have a lower cost of transport, which is a metric used to determine how much energy is spent for traveling.”

Further the report says:”Both robots are part of a multi-university, nationwide $5 million project funded by U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research. The goal is to place self-powering, autonomous machines in waters for the purposes of surveillance and monitoring the environment, in addition to other uses such as studying aquatic life, mapping ocean floors, and monitoring ocean currents.”

Pic courtesy Science Daily stating”Student team members from the Virginia Tech’s National Science Foundation Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems test a five-foot wide jellyfish-like robot under water at War Memorial Hall. (Credit: Amanda Loman, Virginia Tech).”

The studies that are being carried on the Higgs Boson and related particles might throw light on how the universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and how it is likely going to end.

According to Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois,”If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news.”

Lykeen is also a member of the team at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator in Europe. He further continued, “This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there’ll be a catastrophe.A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative’ universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us.” This event will unfold at the speed of light, he told reporters before he presented his research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.

But, also, according to the scientists, the Earth will be destroyed by the sun burning itself out,about 4.5 billion years from now,and turning into a red giant and engulfing the planets long before the Higgs Boson shows any catastrophic effects over the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider. Pic source: www.boston.com

A genetically modified organism is an organism whose genetic material has been modified using certain techniques to incorporate certain desiable characters in it (like pathogen resistance in case od crop plants) or to remove certain undesiable characters (like pathogenecity etc. in case of microbes).

So far, among the patients with an advanced stage of cancer, 16 had been given high doses of the vaccine Pexa-Vec or JX-594 and 14 had been given low doses and this increased their life span by a few months to over a year.

“For the first time in medical history, we have shown that a genetically-engineered virus can improve survival of cancer patients,” said David Kirn, the co-author of the study.

This trial with the new vaccine was reported in the Nature Medicine and is said to be a promising field in the treatment of the advanced stages of cancer. As mentioned in the report, according to the authors, “Despite advances in cancer treatment over the past 30 years with chemotherapy and biologics, the majority of solid tumours remain incurable once they are metastatic (have spread to other organs).”

Pexa-Vec, that has been genetically engineered from the vaccinia virus,a virus used for the eradication of smallpox, is designed in a way that it boosts the host’s immune response in addition to targetting and killing tumor cells itself. It is now being tested for other kinds of cancers as well.

Pic Courtsey : topnews.in