Sunday, 31 October 2021

Genetics Discovery Reveals How Legumes Give Oxygen to Symbiotic Bacteria in Their Roots

By JOHN INNES CENTRE OCTOBER 30, 2021

Legume Root nodules colored pink by leghaemoglobin and caused by a symbiotic relationship between the plant and beneficial bacteria. 
Credit: John Innes Centre

Scientists discover the genetics inside legumes that control the production of an oxygen-carrying molecule, crucial to the plant’s close relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

The finding offers the potential to give other plants the ability to produce ammonia from bacteria – reducing the need for the fossil fuel-dependent and polluting practice of applying synthetic fertilizer to crops.

The roots of legume plants are home to symbiotic bacteria. These bacteria can fix nitrogen from the air, turning it into ammonia, a key nutrient for plants.

In return, the plants house the bacteria in root nodules, providing sugars and oxygen. The amount of oxygen needs to be just right to support the symbiosis, the bacteria need oxygen to fuel their chemical reactions, but too much inhibits a key enzyme that turns nitrogen in the air into the ammonia that can be used by the plant.

The plant’s solution to this ‘oxygen paradox of biological nitrogen fixation’ is a molecule called leghemoglobin. Like hemoglobin that carries oxygen in our blood, leghemoglobin binds to oxygen and is red; it gives legume nodules their pink color. Until now it’s been unclear how plants control how much of this molecule is produced.

The research team have identified two transcription factors that control how much leghemoglobin is made in legume nodules.

“This gives a key insight into how legume plants create the microaerobic environment needed for nitrogen-fixation. This knowledge could be useful for improving nitrogen-fixation in legumes and would be essential for transfer of nodulation to non-legume crops, “explains corresponding author Dr. Jeremy Murray, CEPAMS Group Leader.

Dr. Jeremy Murray continues, “While many genes involved in other nodulation processes have been identified, this is the first breakthrough on the gene regulatory network involved directly in control of nitrogen fixation.”

The research was carried out by a collaborative team, led by Dr. Suyu Jiang in Dr Jeremy Murray’s group at the CAS-JIC Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science (CEPAMS), Centre for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences (CEMPS), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, with collaboration from Dr. Pascal Gamas and Dr. Marie-Françoise Jardinaud at LIPME (Université de Toulouse, France).

Using the model legume, Medicago truncatula, the research team looked at a family of proteins in plants which has several members with roles in nodulation. They looked at which proteins in this class are produced in symbiosis-housing nodules and found that there was two – NIN and NLP2, and that when these are inactive, nitrogen fixation is reduced. This suggested that they are involved in nitrogen fixation.

To investigate further, they grew plants in an aeroponic system, without soil, to be able to look at the nodules, and found the plants lacking NIN and NLP2 were smaller in size and had smaller and less-pink nodules. On closer inspection, they had lower levels of leghemoglobin. Further experiments found that NIN and NLP2 directly activate the expression of leghemoglobin genes.

“This research project was purely curiosity-driven, all we knew at the outset was that the transcription factor we were studying was highly and specifically expressed in nitrogen-fixing cells, we were initially not aware of any connection to leghemoglobins,” reflects Dr. Murray.

The research has also given insights into the evolution of this important symbiosis. They found that other members of the transcription factors family regulate the production of non-symbiotic hemoglobins found in plants, which are involved in plant’s response to low oxygen levels.

Jeremy explains further, “This was exciting because it suggests that these transcription factors and their hemoglobin targets were recruited to nodulation as modules to help improve energetics in nitrogen-fixing cells, giving a rare glimpse into how this symbiosis evolved.”




Recommend this post and follow
The Life of Earth
By at No comments:

How the relationships we have with plants contribute to human health in many ways

OCTOBER 29, 2021, by Sarah Elton, The Conversation

Squash plants growing up the side of an urban building. 
Credit: Sarah Elton, Author provided

During the height of the pandemic, people flocked to the park near my home. For those of us who live in neighborhoods where there is access to greenspace, parks allowed us to lounge on the grass and in the shade of the trees, admire flowers, enjoy a walk in the fresh air, or even grow food in a community garden.

These moments offered a health boost and made visible just one of the ways that human health and well-being is supported by our relationships with plants. It's part of what I call relational health—a term that speaks to the ways health is produced through relationships. From a relational health perspective, health is a constantly unfolding process that is produced by encounters between humans and various aspects of non-human nature.

Sometimes the encounters are not good—we only need to think of emerging infectious diseases to be reminded of this. But mostly, interactions between humans and non-human nature are positive, health-producing and sustaining. Our relationships with plants offer a good example.

Plant blindness

Euro-western culture largely ignores the many roles that plants play in society. It's been called "plant blindness," an "inability to see or notice plants in one's environment." Plants are not much more than background foliage in our busy lives—or worse, expendable.

At the local level, trees are killed as homeowners renovate and infrastructure expands. At the global level, we demonstrate an ignorance of the health-supporting role of plants when we accept, in the name of development, the destruction of forests for palm oil plantations or the paving of wetlands, where all sorts of plants flourish.

The lack of awareness of the role of plants in supporting human health is particularly striking if you consider that plants produce oxygen. We can't breathe without them. They clean our water, they provide us with food and medicine, fiber for our clothes, material for our homes.

The roles of plants

Botanists and ecologists study the natural science of plants. As social scientists, my colleagues and I consider the various roles that plants play in our social and political worlds.

Plants can be considered to be social participants and players in society. So I look at the ways that plants support our health, not only in terms of the food they provide us or the oxygen and shade they offer, but the ways that our relationships with plants facilitate political decisions and actions that support health in the city.

That non-human nature is part of society is foreign to Euro-western thought. Ever since the Enlightenment, the dominant Euro-western worldview has seen the human as the supreme species, leaving the rest of the world as resources to exploit, as writer and philosopher Silvia Wynter explores in her work.

To view a plant as a participant requires a shift in worldview, for some. Indigenous ontologies have understood and valued the contributions of non-humans to world-making. People in other parts of the world, including on the Indian subcontinent, understand that humans are not the only actors on planet earth. Also, the knowledge that health is produced through relationships between humans and non-human nature has long been part of Indigenous ways of knowing. It's only in Euro-western society that has ignored and tried to erase other worldviews.

Plants as social participants

So what does it look like when plants are social participants? Plants are evidently not like us—they don't act with intent. Rather, their agency as health actors emerges from relationships.

I conducted fieldwork in the Regent Park neighborhood of Toronto that is being redeveloped from a social housing community to a mixed-income area. The redevelopment has involved building on land where residents have grown food for decades. Locals did not want to lose their growing space, so they advocated for gardens in the new neighborhood. They wanted continued access to homegrown vegetables, and the mental peace and exercise that gardening provided them. They didn't want to lose their relationships with plants.

Very simply, the relationships between people and plants facilitated the advocacy, and residents were able to secure at least some space for gardens in the new design.

At first glance, it might look like humans did the advocacy. They are the ones who spoke up and asked that plants be included in the design. But if you recognize the agency of non-human nature, it shifts the analysis.

If you consider plants as participants in society, then the plants' agency in the advocacy becomes visible. Their agency arises from the relationships they have with humans. When their needs are considered by humans in decision-making, they play a role. The plants partner with the people and their physical presence in gardens stakes a claim to the land. This shift in worldview opens up many possibilities in better understanding the role of non-human nature in contemporary society.

This scenario also sheds light on how health is produced through relationships between humans and non-human nature in the city. Health is not something that one possesses in one's body, but rather for the gardeners who depend on the garden for food and well-being, health is produced in part by their relationships with the plants in their gardens.

To promote human health during this time of climate change and global pandemic requires scrutiny of the relationships we have with non-human nature in ways that may not be familiar to the Euro-western worldview.


Recommend this post and follow
The Life of Earth
By at No comments:

Researchers Are Figuring Out Why Some People Can 'Hear' The Voices of The Dead

MICHELLE STARR, 31 OCTOBER 2021

Scientists have identified the traits that may make a person more likely to claim they hear the voices of the dead.

According to research published earlier this year, a predisposition to high levels of absorption in tasks, unusual auditory experiences in childhood, and a high susceptibility to auditory hallucinations all occur more strongly in self-described clairaudient mediums than the general population.

The finding could help us to better understand the upsetting auditory hallucinations that accompany mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, the researchers say.

The Spiritualist experiences of clairvoyance and clairaudience – the experience of seeing or hearing something in the absence of an external stimulus, and attributed to the spirits of the dead – is of great scientific interest, both for anthropologists studying religious and spiritual experiences, and scientists studying pathological hallucinatory experiences.

In particular, researchers would like to better understand why some people with auditory experiences report a Spiritualist experience, while others find them more distressing, and receive a mental health diagnosis.

"Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they are often then able to control," explained psychologist Peter Moseley of Northumbria University in the UK when the study first came out.

"Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too."

He and his colleague psychologist Adam Powell of Durham University in the UK recruited and surveyed 65 clairaudient mediums from the UK's Spiritualists' National Union, and 143 members of the general population recruited through social media, to determine what differentiated Spiritualists from the general public, who don't (usually) report hearing the voices of the dead.

Overall, 44.6 percent of the Spiritualists reported hearing voices daily, and 79 percent said the experiences were part of their daily lives. And while most reported hearing the voices inside their head, 31.7 percent reported that the voices were external, too.

The results of the survey were striking.

Compared to the general population, the Spiritualists reported much higher belief in the paranormal and were less likely to care what other people thought of them.

The Spiritualists on the whole had their first auditory experience young, at an average age of 21.7 years, and reported a high level of absorption. That's a term that describes total immersion in mental tasks and activities or altered states, and how effective the individual is at tuning out the world around them.

In addition, they reported that they were more prone to hallucination-like experiences. The researchers noted that they hadn't usually heard of Spiritualism prior to their experiences; rather, they had come across it while looking for answers.

In the general population, high levels of absorption were also strongly correlated with belief in the paranormal - but little or no susceptibility to auditory hallucinations. And in both groups, there were no differences in the levels of belief in the paranormal and susceptibility to visual hallucinations.

These results, the researchers say, suggest that experiencing the 'voices of the dead' is therefore unlikely to be a result of peer pressure, a positive social context, or suggestibility due to belief in the paranormal. Instead, these individuals adopt Spiritualism because it aligns with their experience and is personally meaningful to them.

"Our findings say a lot about 'learning and yearning'. For our participants, the tenets of Spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums," Powell said when the study was published.

"But all of those experiences may result more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough."

Future research, they concluded, should explore a variety of cultural contexts to better understand the relationship between absorption, belief, and the strange, spiritual experience of ghosts whispering in one's ear.

The research has been published in Mental Health, Religion and Culture.

A version of this article was first published in January 2021.


Recommend this post and follow
The birth of modern Man
https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/
By at No comments:

Saturday, 30 October 2021

Science & Nature News: Honeybees use social distancing when hive is under threat from parasite

 

Honeybees use social distancing when hive is under threat from parasite

The study demonstrated how honeybees respond to an infestation from a harmful mite by modifying their interactions, much as humans were asked to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.


By Sky News, Friday 29 October 2021

https://news.sky.com/story/honeybees-use-social-distancing-when-hive-is-under-threat-from-parasite-12454295


Scientists have discovered that honey bees practise social distancing. Pic: Dr Michelina Pusceddu


Scientists have discovered that honeybees use social distancing to protect their hive when the colony is under threat from parasites.

The study demonstrated how honeybees respond to an infestation from a harmful mite by modifying their interactions, much as humans were asked to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In particular the bees were found to increase the distance between young bees in the innermost part of the colony and older forager bees who occupy the outermost compartment.



Low-temperature scanning electron micrograph of Varroa destructor on a honey bee host


"Honeybees are a social animal, as they benefit from dividing up responsibilities and interactions such as mutual grooming, but when those social activities can increase the risk of infection, the bees appear to have evolved to balance the risks and benefits by adopting social distancing," said co-author Dr Alessandro Cini.

In response to the presence of the Varroa mite in a colony, the hive began to increase the segregation between the inner and outer compartments - a change that reduced the spread of the parasite.

The Varroa mite, also known as the Varroa destructor, is a vector for spreading at least five viruses which can destroy a honey bee colony and is considered to be one of the factors contributing to the loss of bee colonies globally.

An international team involving researchers at UCL and the University of Sassari in Italy compared colonies that were infested with those that were not and published their results in the journal Science Advances.

They found how one of the bees' behaviours - foraging dances - that can increase mite transmission, occurred much less frequently in central parts of the hive if it was infested.

The team also found grooming behaviours became more concentrated in the central part of the hive, meaning that the young nurse and groomer bees were driven towards the centre in response to an infestation while the older foragers were pushed outwards, increasing the distance between the groups.

Lead author Dr Michelina Pusceddu of the University of Sassari said: "The observed increase in social distancing between the two groups of bees within the same parasite-infested colony represents a new and, in some ways, surprising aspect of how honeybees have evolved to combat pathogens and parasites.

"Their ability to adapt their social structure and reduce contact between individuals in response to a disease threat allows them to maximise the benefits of social interactions where possible, and to minimise the risk of infectious disease when needed.

"Honeybee colonies provide an ideal model for studying social distancing and for fully understanding the value and effectiveness of this behaviour," Dr Pusceddu added.


THIS PAGE WAS POSTED BY SPUTNIK ONE OF THE SPUTNIKS ORBIT BLOG

PLEASE RECOMMEND THIS PAGE AND FOLLOW US AT:




By at No comments:

Scientists join international push to ban harmful fisheries subsidies

OCTOBER 29, 2021, by University of Western Australia

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Three hundred scientists from 255 institutions in 46 countries, including Professor Dirk Zeller and Ph.D. candidate Lincoln Hood from The University of Western Australia, are asking members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to ban harmful fisheries subsidies at the 12th Ministerial Conference to be held in Geneva, Switzerland next month.

In an open letter published in Science and spearheaded by Professor Rashid Sumaila, Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics at the University of British Columbia, the researchers say that the WTO has a unique opportunity to pass an effective agreement that eliminates subsidies for fuel, distant-water and destructive fishing fleets, and illegal and unregulated vessels.

Citing a comprehensive body of research, the signatories explain that government payments that lower the cost of fuel and vessel construction, support fleets that plunder the high seas, incentivise overcapacity and lead to overfishing. As a result, they contravene the aims of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14.6.

In their view, the 164 states represented at the WTO can use the upcoming meeting to sign an agreement that forbids such harmful practices, while allowing special and differential treatments for small-scale, sustainably managed wild fisheries that support food and nutritional security, livelihoods and cultures, particularly in low-income countries.

Underpinned by transparent data documentation and enforcement measures, the researchers say the deal should also foster accountability by supporting low-income countries' efforts to meet their commitments and transition to sustainable management.

Professor of Marine Conservation and Director Sea Around Us—Indian Ocean, Professor Zeller said the researchers hoped the letter would urge the WTO members to take a bold step and pass the motion to ban harmful subsidies.

"After years of concerted efforts in various international fora, we now have an opportunity to address the most important cause of global overfishing and social inequity in marine resource use. Let's grab this chance for real and effective change," Professor Zeller said.


Recommend this post and follow
The birth of modern Man
By at No comments:

For effective weight maintenance, eat breakfast and stop late-night snacking

OCTOBER 28, 2021, by Aran Sullivan, Vanderbilt University

Eating when activity levels are high enhances lipid oxidation, thereby reducing fat accumulation. 
Credit: Kelly, Ellacott, et al.

Researchers have confirmed that due to daily circadian rhythms regulating metabolism, when you eat is as important as the how much and what you eat when trying to gain, lose or maintain weight.

Carl Johnson, professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, collaborated with graduate student Kevin P. Kelly to test how the timing of daily meals and snacks throughout the day affects weight maintenance.

With 24-hour access to some food, those eating the biggest meal of the day in the morning gained less weight than those who ate their biggest meal at the end of the day and before sleep. "These differences are mostly due to natural differences in circadian metabolic regulation throughout the day," Johnson said. "We found that the timing of meals changes the proportion of fat the body is burning while sleeping, regardless of fasting."

Studies before this one have not isolated the variable of meal time because they have always included mandatory fasting periods. While past studies have demonstrated the importance of timing meals by periods of feeding and fasting, Johnson and Kelly found that even without fasting, the timing of large, high-fat meals still has a significant effect on weight gain.

These results, along with those from a previous study Johnson conducted, suggest that eating a larger, protein-filled breakfast is one of the best ways to maintain a healthy weight. A smaller but still significant change would be to avoid late-night snacking. Optimally, it is best to avoid snacking between supper and bedtime so that when you fall asleep, your stomach is empty, Johnson said.

"If you do an enforced fast, the subjects did gain a little less weight, but not restricting access to food does not cause as much extra weight gain as we originally thought," Johnson said. "About 80 percent of the benefit of eating larger meals at the beginning of the day is present even if you do not have an enforced fast."

This novel research shows that timing of meals is important for weight maintenance regardless of fasting. "This is important because as humans, most of us have access to food 24/7," Johnson said.

Johnson plans to maintain his focus on circadian metabolism by looking into how it may affect those with the neurodevelopmental disorder Angelman syndrome.

The article, "Time-optimized feeding is beneficial without enforced fasting." was published in the journal Open Biology on Oct. 6. Former Vanderbilt psychology professor Martin Katahn pioneered the rotation diet that has been critical for this research, and researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School and Vanderbilt University Medical Center collaborated on this study.

Johnson has conducted additional research relevant to this topic in recent years. The article entitled "Eating breakfast and avoiding late-evening snacking sustains lipid oxidation" was published in the journal PLoS Biology in February 2020.

In that research, Johnson described the metabolic effects of eating the biggest meal of the day in the morning, compared with snacking before bed. "If you eat a large meal at the end of the day, your metabolism preferentially digests those carbohydrates instead of the fat reserves in your body, which can lead to weight gain," Johnson said. "Our circadian rhythm wants to burn fat during the night when we are sleeping, but if you give your digestive system carbohydrates to burn by snacking between supper and bedtime, it will burn those easily digestible carbohydrates instead." The results from this informed some of the questions answered in his most recent work.


Recommend this post and follow
The birth of modern Man
By at No comments:

How foodborne diseases protect the gut's nervous system

OCTOBER 29, 2021, by Rockefeller University




Macrophages (green) surrounding enteric neurons (red). 
Credit: Laboratory of Mucosal Immunology at The Rockefeller University




A simple stomach bug could do a lot of damage. There are 100 million neurons scattered along the gastrointestinal tract—directly in the line of fire—that can be stamped out by gut infections, potentially leading to long-term GI disease.

But there may be an upside to enteric infection. A new study finds that mice infected with bacteria or parasites develop a unique form of tolerance quite unlike the textbook immune response. The research, published in Cell, describes how gut macrophages respond to prior insult by shielding enteric neurons, preventing them from dying off when future pathogens strike. These findings may ultimately have clinical implications for conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, which have been linked to the runaway death of intestinal neurons.

"We're describing a sort of innate memory that persists after the primary infection is gone," says Rockefeller's Daniel Mucida. "This tolerance does not exist to kill future pathogens, but to deal with the damage that infection causes—preserving the number of neurons in the intestine."

Neuronal cause of death

Known as the body's "second brain," the enteric nervous system is houses the largest depot of neurons and glia outside of the brain itself. The GI tract's own nervous system exists more or less autonomously, without significant input from the brain. It controls the movement of nutrients and waste by fiat, coordinating local fluid exchange and blood flow with authority not seen anywhere else in the peripheral nervous system.

If enough of those neurons die, the GI tract spirals out of control.

Mucida and colleagues reported last year that gut infections in mice can kill the rodents' enteric neurons, with disastrous consequences for gut motility. At the time, the researchers noted that the symptoms of IBS closely mirror what one might expect to see when enteric neurons die en masse—raising the possibility that otherwise minor gut infections might be decimating enteric neurons in some people more than others, leading to constipation and other unexplained GI conditions.

The researchers wondered whether the body has some mechanism of preventing neuronal loss following infection. In previous work, the lab had indeed demonstrated that macrophages in the gut produce specialized molecules that prevent neurons from dying in response to stress.

A hypothesis began to take shape. "We knew that enteric infections cause neuronal loss, and we knew that macrophages prevent neuronal cell death," Mucida says. "We wondered whether we were really looking at a single pathway. Does a prior infection activate these macrophages to protect the neurons in future infections?"

Bacteria versus parasites

Postdoctoral fellow Tomasz Ahrends and additional lab members first infected mice with a non-lethal strain of Salmonella, a standard bacterial source of food poisoning. The mice cleared the infection in about a week, losing a number of enteric neurons along the way. They then infected those same mice with another comparable foodborne bacterium. This time, the mice suffered no further loss of enteric neurons, suggesting that the first infection had created a tolerance mechanism that prevented neuronal loss.

The scientists found that common parasitic infections also have a similar impact. "In contrast to pathogenic bacteria, some parasites like helminths have learned to live within us without causing excessive harm to the tissue," he says. Indeed this family of parasites, which includes flukes, tapeworms, and nematodes, infect in a way that is more subtle than highly hostile bacteria. But they also induce even greater, and more far-reaching, protection.

During a primary bacterial infection, Mucida found, neurons call out to macrophages, which rush to the area and protect its vulnerable cells from future attacks. When a helminth insinuates itself into the gut, however, it is T cells that recruit the macrophages, sending them to even distant parts of the intestine to ensure that the whole gamut of enteric neurons are shielded from future harm.

At the end of the day, through different routes, bacterial and helminth infections were both leading to protection of enteric neurons.

Next, Ahrends repeated the experiments in mice from a pet store. "Animals in the wild have likely had some of these infections already," he says. "We would expect a pre-set tolerance to neuronal loss." Indeed, these animals suffered no neuronal loss from any infection. "They had a lot of helminths in general," Mucida says. "The parasitic infections were doing their jobs, preventing the neuronal losses that we have seen in isolated animals in the lab."

A gut feeling

Mucida is now hoping to determine the precise impact of neuronal loss in the GI tract. "We've observed that animals consume more calories without gaining more weight after neuronal loss," he says. "This may mean that the loss of enteric neurons is also impacting the absorption of nutrients, metabolic and caloric intake."

There may be more consequences of neuronal loss than we expected," he adds.

Mucida believes that this research could contribute to a more complete understanding of the underlying causes of IBS and related conditions. "One speculation is that the number of enteric neurons throughout your life is set by early childhood infections, which prevent you from losing neurons after every subsequent infection," Mucida explains.

People who for some reason do not develop tolerance may continue to lose enteric neurons throughout their life with every subsequent infection. Future studies will explore alternative methods of protecting enteric neurons, hopefully paving the way for therapies.


Recommend this post and follow
The Life of Earth
By at No comments:

No Tricks, Only Treats: Huge Solar Flare May Mean Super-Charged Auroras For Halloween

NANCY ATKINSON, UNIVERSE TODAY 29 OCTOBER 2021


Auroral fireworks for Halloween? It just might happen, depending on where you live.

On October 28, 2021, the Sun blasted a "significant" X1 solar flare – the most intense class of flares. While the flare itself hit Earth eight and a half minutes later, an accompanying Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was also released.

The slower-moving CME arrives on October 30, and when it hits Earth's magnetic field, a strong geomagnetic storm is possible on the 30th and possibly into the 31st as Earth continues to pass through the CME's wake.

This should make for spectacular auroras in both hemispheres, aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the south.


https://twitter.com/i/status/1453858090684723214
(screen shot only CiC and link to gif on twitter)

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G3 (Strong) geomagnetic storm watch for October 30th.

In the past, this type of flare has produced auroras visible to the unaided eye as far south as Illinois and Oregon in the US, typically 50° geomagnetic latitude, according to SpaceWeather.com.

X-class denotes the most intense flares (smallest flares are A-class) and the number provides more information about its strength.

An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc. Flares that are classified X10 or stronger are considered unusually intense, but X1 is still considered a major flare.

The Sun has been active lately (see aurora imagery from the CME that reached Earth in mid-October) as you can see from this movie from SDO data, processed by Seán Doran.

(screen shot CiC)

Have questions about the various classes of solar flares and what they mean for Earth? Here's an excellent guide to solar flares from NASA:

https://youtu.be/oOXVZo7KikE

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is an added video from one of my fav. citizen scientists Suspicious 0bserver
This narrated vid was published within hours of the event.

https://youtu.be/KIvHrwVg7uA



Recommend this post and follow 
The Life of Earth
https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/
By at No comments:

Friday, 29 October 2021

Health & Wellness : Innovative Israeli ‘copper’ dressing helps cure diabetic wounds

 

Innovative Israeli ‘copper’ dressing helps cure diabetic wounds

Herzliya-based MedCu’s product have already been approved by the US FDA.

By ROSSELLA TERCATIN  , Jerusalem Post, OCTOBER 28, 2021
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/innovative-israeli-copper-dressing-helps-cure-diabetic-wounds-683375

Feet (illustrative) (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Feet (illustrative) (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

An innovative Israeli-made wound dressing has been found to drastically stimulate the healing of diabetic wounds, a new study by physicians at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa has found.

Copper Oxide Impregnated Wound Dressings, developed by Herzliya-based MedCu Technologies, have already received clearance by the major international regulatory bodies – including the United States’ FDA – for use in acute and chronic wounds.

“What is special about our dressing is that it contains particles of copper oxide,” said Dr. Gadi Borkow, MedCu’s co-founder and chief medical officer, who co-authored the study with the Rambam researchers.

Borkow noted that the advantage of copper is two-fold.

“Copper has a very powerful antimicrobial efficacy, it kills a wide-spectrum of pathogens, bacteria, fungi and viruses and therefore it helps clear the wound and protect it from infections,” he said.

COPPER ORE (credit: University of Maryland) 
COPPER ORE (credit: University of Maryland)

“In addition, many do not know that copper is an essential element in human physiology, including in healing wounds,” he remarked.

Foot wounds or ulcers are very common among individuals who suffer from diabetes: About 15% of such patients experience them. They are commonly located at the bottom of the foot and have a high chance of infection or hospitalization. A high level of glucose in the blood can interfere in the healing.

Some 13 diabetic patients took part in the study. By the end of the treatment, the size of their wounds showed an average reduction of 65%. Improvement was registered in all wounds regardless of their initial size or other interfering factors, other than weight-bearing pressure.


MedCu - A New Standard in Advanced Wound Dressings, Mar 17, 2021


The findings were published in the academic journal Medicina.

“The most frequent reason chronic wounds do not heal is that there is no production of new blood capillaries,” Borkow said. “Without new blood reaching the wound, there is a problem of lack of oxygen, no activation of the immune system, no removal of toxic waste.”

“Copper is essential for the production of new capillaries,” he added. “With our wound dressing, we are stimulating the process.”

Other forms of treatment currently available for diabetic wounds are often burdensome and painful, and sometimes require hospitalization.

MedCu wound dressings are already available and in use.

For the future Borkow said that they hope to launch a larger study, also with the goal of comparing the results between different forms of treatments.



THIS PAGE WAS POSTED BY SPUTNIK ONE OF THE SPUTNIKS ORBIT BLOG

PLEASE RECOMMEND THIS PAGE AND FOLLOW US AT:

“This past one was a small clinical trial, but our goal is to show the efficacy of our dressings in a larger, randomized one,” he said.

By at No comments:

Extremely Rare Shelley’s Eagle Owl Photographed in Wild for First Time

Oct 28, 2021 by News Staff / Source

The Shelley’s eagle owl (Bubo shelleyi). Image credit: Robert Williams.

Extremely Rare Shelley’s Eagle Owl Photographed in Wild for First Time

The Shelley’s eagle owl is a large species of owl found in the rainforests of Central and Western Africa.

This nocturnal bird is among the largest owls and the less studied bird species in the world.

It measures between 53 and 61 cm (21-24 inches) in length and weighs over 1 kg.

The Shelley’s eagle owl was first described in 1872 from a specimen obtained from a local hunter in Ghana by Richard Bowdler Sharpe, curator of the bird collection at the Natural History Museum in London and founder of the British Ornithologists’ Club.

There have been no confirmed sightings from Ghana since the 1870s, and very few glimpses elsewhere.

The only photographs in existence were grainy images taken in 1975 of a captive individual behind bars at Antwerp Zoo and a pixelated blob from Congo in 2005 that is not certainly the right species.

There have been occasional reports over recent decades from people believing they have heard or briefly seen Shelley’s Eagle Owl from a few different localities across West and Central Africa from Liberia to Angola.

Most of these sightings are unconfirmed, and the species has become a holy grail for birdwatchers in Africa and beyond.

This all changed on October 16, 2021, when Dr. Tobias and Dr. Williams visited Atewa forest in Ghana and disturbed a huge bird from its daytime roost.

“It was so large, at first we thought it was an eagle. Luckily it perched on a low branch and when we lifted our binoculars our jaws dropped. There is no other owl in Africa’s rainforests that big,” Dr. Tobias said.

The researchers only saw the Shelley’s eagle owl perched for 10-15 seconds but in that time managed to take photographs that confirm the identification due to its distinctive black eyes, yellow bill, and huge size, which in combination rule out all other African forest owls.

The fact that a predator of such massive size had become essentially invisible over a large swathe of Africa fuelled speculation as to its current whereabouts and reasons for its apparent rarity.

“This is a sensational discovery. We’ve been searching for this mysterious bird for years in the western lowlands, so to find it here in ridgetop forests of Eastern Region is a huge surprise,” said Dr. Nathaniel Annorbah, a researcher at the University of Environment and Sustainable Development in Ghana.

“We hope this sighting draws attention to Atewa forest and its importance for conserving local biodiversity,” Dr. Williams said.

“Hopefully, the discovery of such a rare and magnificent owl will boost these efforts to save one of the last wild forests in Ghana.”


Recommend this post and follow 
The Life of Earth
By at No comments:

Expedition completes deep sea exploration of hydrothermal vents, 4 km under ice

OCTOBER 28, 2021, by University of Southampton




Credit: University of Southampton





An international research team, including Dr. Maria Baker from the University of Southampton, has taken a major step forward in deep-sea exploration by sampling and filming one of Earth's last truly remote and inaccessible environments: hydrothermal vents lying four kilometers beneath the Arctic ice.

At 82.5N latitude, this is the first-time hydrothermal vents, also known as underwater volcanoes, have been successfully investigated so far north. The analysis of the samples retrieved—rocks, fluids, sediments and fauna—will allow researchers to understand more about how fauna has been able to survive and evolve in such an inhospitable environment and could provide insight into how early life formed on Earth.

The HACON 2021 expedition took place over a three-week period in September and October 2021, led by CAGE/UiT (The Arctic University of Norway) and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). A team of 28 scientists, engineers and communication experts came together on board the icebreaker RV Kronprins Haakon to explore 'black smoker' hydrothermal vents in one of the most inaccessible vent fields on the planet, the Aurora vent field on the Gakkel Ridge at 4000m depth. The vents are called black smokers because of the dark hot liquid (over 300 degrees Cecius) that has a smoke-like appearance as it is emitted from under water chimneys.

The Aurora vent field was first detected 20 years ago, when hydrothermal rock material was dredged from the seafloor. It remained unexplored until 2014, when the first visual confirmation of the active black smokers was obtained. The HACON team revisited this site in 2019 providing additional high-resolution images of the hydrothermal vent field obtained with a towed camera. The team was unable to directly sample the site with an ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle) due to the technical challenges of working in thick, drifting ice conditions.

Credit: University of Southampton

This time it was different. For this latest visit, the team deployed a new ROV named "Aurora", provided by REV Ocean. This was the first expedition for the ROV and resulted in the first detailed visual survey and mapping of the Aurora Vent Field and collection of more than 100 visual, geological, geochemical, and biological samples.

The samples taken of high-temperature fluids, chimney rock, sediments and fauna will now be analyzed at laboratories in the partner institutes to get a better understanding of the composition and functioning of the vents.

Forty years after the first discovery of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the HACON21 cruise has added a wealth of visual material and physical samples of the first hydrothermal vents ever studied in the Arctic Ocean under ice. These data help to complete one of the missing pieces of the global biogeographic puzzle of vents around the globe.

Dr. Maria Baker, University of Southampton took part in the expedition. She currently works at the interface of science and policy as co-lead for the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI) and has also helped to develop a new UN Ocean Decade program, Challenger 150. HACON 2021 was the 4th expedition associated with this ambitious program. Dr. Baker said, "I was thrilled to be invited to contribute to this 'high risk—high gain' expedition that we had discussed many years previously as part of the Census of Marine Life program. To feel the excitement of historic discovery, meet many fabulous people and learn so much from deep-sea scientists from disciplines other than my own was just wonderful". Dr. Baker will work with colleagues in Norway, Portugal and Southampton on the life-history of some of the fauna sampled from the Aurora vent field.

A key goal going forward is to use the results to work together on challenges and solutions related to Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems and Marine Protected Areas. This will result in new science provided to intergovernmental initiatives such as the UN conference on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Decade for Ocean Science, in particular the Challenger 150 program.


Recommend this post and follow 
The Life of Earth
By at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)