Knowledge Update

New York, May 10 (IANS) An experimental malaria vaccine has been found to protect a small number of healthy people from infection for more than one year after immunisation, says a study.

The vaccine, known as the PfSPZ Vaccine, was developed and produced by US-based biotechnology firm Sanaria.

"It is now clear that administering the PfSPZ Vaccine intravenously confers long-term, sterile protection in a small number of participants, which has not been achieved with other current vaccine approaches," said principal investigator of the trial Robert Seder from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the US National Institutes of Health.

NIAID researchers and collaborators at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore conducted the clinical evaluation of the vaccine, which involved immunisation and exposing willing healthy adults to the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) in a controlled setting.

The parasites that cause malaria are transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito. 

The PfSPZ Vaccine is composed of live, but weakened P. falciparum sporozoites -- the early developmental form of the parasite.

Previous research showed the PfSPZ Vaccine to be highly protective three weeks after immunisation. In this trial, researchers assessed if protection could last for five months to a year.

For the phase one clinical trial, the researchers enrolled 101 healthy adults aged 18 to 45 years who had never had malaria. 

Of these volunteers, 59 received the vaccine and 32 participants served as controls and were not vaccinated. 

Vaccine recipients were divided into several groups to assess the roles of the route of administration, dose, and number of immunisations in conferring short- and long-term protection against malaria.

To evaluate how well the vaccine prevented malaria infection, all participants - including the control participants who were not vaccinated - were exposed at varying times to the bites of mosquitoes carrying the same P. falciparum strain from which the vaccine was derived. 

The researchers found that the vaccine provided malaria protection for more than one year in 55 percent of people without prior malaria infection. 

The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine.

In those individuals, the vaccine appeared to confer sterile protection, meaning the individuals would be protected against disease and could not further transmit malaria. 

The vaccinations were also well-tolerated among participants, and there were no serious adverse events attributed to vaccination, said the study.​

Washington, May 10 (IANS) Presence of warm water in the Pacific Ocean due to a stalled El Nino in 2014 stacked the deck for a monstrous version of the warming climate cycle to occur in 2015, a study says.

Easterly winds in the tropical Pacific Ocean stalled a potential El Nino in 2014 and left a swath of warm water in the central Pacific. This left over warm water gave the current El Nino a head start, the researchers explained.

El Nino and La Nina are the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean called the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. 

The warm and cool phases shift back and forth every two to seven years, and each phase triggers predictable disruptions in temperature, wind, and rain across the globe. 

During El Nino events, water temperatures at the sea surface are higher than normal. Low-level surface winds, which normally blow east to west along the equator, or easterly winds, start blowing the other direction, west to east, or westerly.

In the spring of 2014, strong westerly winds near the equator in the western and central Pacific Ocean created a buzz among scientists - they saw the winds as a sign of a large El Nino event to come in the winter of 2014, said lead author of the study Aaron Levine, a climate scientist at US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington.

But as the summer progressed, El Niño did not form the way scientists expected it to. Sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific never warmed enough to truly be called an El Nino, and the buzz fizzled out.

But then, in the spring of 2015, episodes of very strong westerly wind bursts occurred and became more frequent throughout the summer. 

Following a pattern set by previous large El Ninos, 2015 to 2016 became one of the three strongest El Ninos on record, along with 1982 to 1983 and 1997 to 1998, Levine said.

The findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

​Washington, May 10 (IANS) Turning the traditional knowledge on its head that young Earth had a thicker atmosphere, scientists, including an Indian-origin researcher, have found that air at that time exerted at most half the pressure of today's atmosphere.

The new finding reverses the commonly accepted idea that the early Earth had a thicker atmosphere to compensate for weaker sunlight.

The finding also has implications for which gases were in that atmosphere and how biology and climate worked on the early planet.

"For the longest time, people have been thinking the atmospheric pressure might have been higher back then, because the sun was fainter," said lead author Sanjoy Som, who did the work as part of his doctorate in earth and space sciences at University of Washington.

The team used bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old rocks to reach this conclusion.

"Our result is the opposite of what we were expecting," he added in a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Som is currently doing astrobiology research at NASA's Ames Research Centre in California.

The idea of using bubbles trapped in cooling lava as a "paleobarometer" to determine the weight of air in our planet's youth occurred decades ago to co-author Roger Buick, professor of earth and space sciences.

A potential site in western Australia was discovered by co-author Tim Blake of University of western Australia.

There, the Beasley River has exposed 2.7 billion-year-old basalt lava.

A stream of molten rock quickly cools from top and bottom, and bubbles trapped at the bottom are smaller than those at the top.

The size difference records the air pressure pushing down on the lava as it cooled, 2.7 billion years ago.

Rough measurements in the field suggested a surprisingly lightweight atmosphere.

More rigorous x-ray scans from several lava flows confirmed the result: The bubbles indicate that the atmospheric pressure at that time was less than half of today's.

Earth 2.7 billion years ago was home only to single-celled microbes, sunlight was about one-fifth weaker and the atmosphere contained no oxygen.

But this finding points to conditions being even more otherworldly than previously thought.

A lighter atmosphere could affect wind strength and other climate patterns and would even alter the boiling point of liquids.

Other geological evidence clearly shows liquid water on Earth at that time so the early atmosphere must have contained more heat-trapping greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide and less nitrogen.

The result also reinforces Buick's 2015 finding that microbes were pulling nitrogen out of Earth's atmosphere some three billion years ago.

"People will need to rewrite the textbooks," the authors noted.

The researchers will now look for other suitable rocks to confirm the findings and learn how atmospheric pressure might have varied through time.​

London, May 10 (IANS) In a finding that could change the way the most common form of stroke is treated globally, researchers have shown that modified dosage of a clot-busting drug can reduce risk of serious bleeding in the brain and improve survival rates.

Intravenous rtPA (or alteplase) is given to people suffering acute ischaemic stroke and works by breaking up clots blocking the flow of blood to the brain.

However, it can cause serious bleeding in the brain in around five per cent of cases, with many of these proving fatal.

Compared to standard dose (0.9mg/kg body weight), the lower dose (0.6mg/kg) of rtPA reduced rates of serious bleeding in the brain, known as intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH), by two thirds, showed the results of the trial of more than 3,000 patients in 100 hospitals worldwide.

"Most patients who have a major stroke want to know they will survive but without being seriously dependent on their family. We have shown this to be the case with the lower dose of the drug,” said one of the researchers Tom Robinson, professor at University of Leicester in Britain.

The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"At the moment you could have a stroke but end up dying from a bleed in the brain. It's largely unpredictable as to who will respond and who is at risk with rtPA,” lead author of the study Craig Anderson, professor at Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney in Australia.

"What we have shown is that if we reduce the dose level, we maintain most of the clot busting benefits of the higher dose but with significantly less major bleeds and improved survival rates. On a global scale, this approach could save the lives of many tens of thousands of people,” Anderson noted.​

Washington, May 9 (IANS) In a move that could immensely benefit private space technology companies, NASA has released 56 formerly patented agency technologies into the public domain, making its government-developed technologies freely available for unrestricted commercial use.

​London, May 8 (IANS) A spurt in number of billionaires and increasing wealth creation by any means have made India rank ninth among the crony capitalist countries, said a study in "The Economist" latest issue.

​Beijing, May 8 (IANS) China's exports rose 4.1 percent year on year in April while imports dipped 5.7 percent, customs data showed on Sunday.

It led to a monthly trade surplus of 298 billion yuan ($45 billion), up from March's 194.6 billion yuan, according to figures from the General Administration of Customs, reports

​London, May 8 (IANS) Researchers have developed a set of algorithms that could help teach computers to process and understand human languages better.

While mastering natural language is easier for humans, it is something that computers have not yet been able to achieve. Humans understand language through a variety of

​Rome, May 6 (IANS) World food prices rose slightly in April, marking a third consecutive monthly increase after four years of decline, but they remained almost 10 percent lower than a year earlier, the UN food agency said.

​Beijing, May 6 (IANS) China's annual luxury goods trade show opened in Beijing on Friday with dancing robots, porcelain cream-and-marigold British high tea sets and classic handbuilt roadster automobiles. Held at the Beijing Exhibition Centre and anticipated to draw a crowd of 50,000 people, the three-day fair features a range of globally-renowned luxury brands for technology, fashion and leisure, according to organisers from the Beijing Zhenwei Exhibition Company. "Luxury China 2016 will also specially invite entrepreneurs of large enterprises, high-end consumer groups from specific cities to pay a special visit to the exhibitions, offering various enterprises the greatest opportunity of meeting supply and demand," said Beijing Zhenwei on the event-listing site China Exhibition. With a middle class that has surged to some 109 million people last year, adding 43.4 million new urban middle class arrivals since 2000, according to financial services company Credit Suisse, the appetite for luxury goods has surged, EFE news reported. Globally, Chinese buyers now account for some 20 percent of the total consumers of the luxury goods market, says global management firm McKinsey and Company. The interest in robotics has also gained momentum in 2016 with the unveiling of security robot AnBot earlier this week, last month's creation of the lifelike humanoid robot 'Jia Jia' and Friday's mini-bot synchronised dance show to the tune of Michael Jackson's 1982 Grammy-nominated song, "Beat it". The trade show runs until Sunday.​