Knowledge Update

New York, March 29 (IANS) Using a nanoparticle that delivers a drug and then glows green when cancer cells begin dying, Indian origin researchers have found a way to detect the effectiveness of cancer treatment much sooner than currently available clinical methods.

Being able to detect early on whether a cancer therapy is working for a patient can influence the course of treatment and improve outcomes and quality of life. 

However, conventional detection methods -- such as PET scans, CT and MRI -- usually cannot detect whether a tumour is shrinking until a patient has received multiple cycles of therapy. 

The new approach can read out on the effectiveness of chemotherapy in as few as eight hours after treatment, and can also be used for monitoring the effectiveness of immunotherapy, the study said.

"Using this approach, the cells light up the moment a cancer drug starts working. We can determine if a cancer therapy is effective within hours of treatment," said co-corresponding author Shiladitya Sengupta from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, US.

"Our long-term goal is to find a way to monitor outcomes very early so that we don't give a chemotherapy drug to patients who are not responding to it," Sengupta noted.

The findings were published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new technique takes advantage of the fact that when cells die, a particular enzyme known as caspase is activated. 

The researchers designed a 'reporter element' that, when in the presence of activated caspase, glows green. 

The team then tested whether they could use the reporter nanoparticles to distinguish between drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tumours. 

Using nanoparticles loaded with anti-cancer drugs, the team tested a common chemotherapeutic agent, paclitaxel, in a pre-clinical model of prostate cancer and, separately, an immunotherapy in a pre-clinical model of melanoma. 

In the tumours that were sensitive to paclitaxel, the team saw an approximately 400 percent increase in fluorescence compared to tumours that were not sensitive to the drug. 

The team also saw a significant increase in the fluorescent signal in tumours treated with the anti-PD-L1 nanoparticles after five days.

"We've demonstrated that this technique can help us directly visualise and measure the responsiveness of tumours to both types of drugs," co-corresponding author Ashish Kulkarni, BWH, noted.

​New York, March 30 (IANS) Do you have a workplace atmosphere sans motivation and constant cribbing from your boss about performance? The negative feedback from seniors may lead to endorsement of immoral behaviour in employees, warns a study.

"Strongly held professional goals, when combined with public criticism of our potential in that field, can have unintended effects on ethical behaviour for some," said lead researcher Ana Gantman from New York University.

For the study, researchers conducted three experiments with students intending to enter business, law and STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.

In the first study, business students took a mock aptitude test which purported to measure their potential in the field, with some told they performed well on the exam and others informed they did poorly. 

The results, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that those highly motivated to enter the business world and who were told they did poorly on the test were more likely to endorse the immoral act -- breaking the contract -- than were those who were informed they did well.

Similarly, in the second research, students who were determined to enter the legal field and told they performed poorly on the test, were comparatively more likely to say they performed these "immoral" behaviours.

The researchers conducted a third experiment involving students, who were told they were taking a test measuring their potential to successfully major in business or STEM fields.

Similar to the results for the first two experiments, those highly motivated to pursue business or STEM majors -- and informed that they lacked the potential to excel in these majors -- indicated that their personality was very similar to the successful example -- in this case, possessing personality traits associated with immoral behaviour.

"If we can better understand the triggers of these behaviours such as when negative professional feedback leads to the compensatory endorsement of immoral behaviour, we might even prevent incidents of large-scale fraud in the future," Gantman noted.​

We spend one third of our life sleeping. There must be a good reason why nature makes us sleep for this long. Large number of studies all over the world has shown the beneficial effects of good sleep.

Sleep deprivation, on the other hand, results in impairment of judgement, depression, heart problems, obesity and drastic reduction in general well-being of an individual. In an extreme case, sleep deprivation has also resulted in death through heart failure. In fact, the first sign of sickness is fretful sleep. 

How lack of sleep produces ill health has remained a mystery. Now, slowly, scientific investigations are solving this puzzle.

One of the accepted theories so far has been that sleep helps in both consolidation and removal of memories. We perceive the world during the day through our senses and it results in memory formation both shallow and deep. Sleep, it seems, helps in consolidating and removing some of these memories uncluttering the brain.

Another recent, but fascinating, theory (backed with experiments) has shown that sleep helps in flushing out toxic protein waste and biological debris from the brain, formed during waking hours. It seems that during sleep the relaxation of brain helps in opening up the channels through which the debris flows into the blood streams and is removed from it. 

Studies have also shown that sleep helps flush out harmful protein plaque (beta amyloid) which is responsible for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Thus good sleep is extremely essential for a healthy brain and body.

The build-up of toxins in the brain due to inadequate sleep also affects the body. Though there is very little understanding of how this happens, a probable cause is the passage of this information by the vagus nerve to different parts of the body. 

Scientific investigations have also shown that information of any slight change in the brain chemistry is transmitted to various organs by the vagus nerve, which plays an important part in keeping the brain and body in unison.

As the brain starts getting affected by the debris build-up, the message via vagus nerve to various organs might be to slow them down, resulting in their lethargic action.

Just like deep sleep, meditation also enables dissolution of memories. In fact, deep sleep and meditation have similar characteristics and it is quite possible that during meditation the flushing of toxins from the brain may also take place. 

A possible mechanism could be that since meditation results in the relaxation of brain, it may help in opening up the channels for flushing off the chemical debris.

Memory is formed both by producing new neural pathways and certain chemical changes in the brain. Memory removal therefore is affected by changes in both these mechanisms. 

In deep meditation (where the focus is on a single thought for a long time, also called Sanyam) new neural pathways are formed and the old ones get dissolved. This dissolution may have a chemical signature thereby producing toxic debris which needs to be flushed out.

How can we induce good sleep? Generally when the body is healthy and the person follows a good exercise regime, then this helps to produce deep sleep. Production of deep sleep can also be helped by meditation. Studies world over have shown that long term practice of meditation helps in toning both the mind and body. 

A good meditation practice to follow for quickly falling asleep is to close the eyes and focus attention onto the center of forehead. This can be done just before going to sleep and also when one wakes up at night and has difficulty in falling asleep again. ​

​New York, March 30 (IANS) Astronomers have created a virtual Earth-space radio telescope more than 100,000 miles across -- a super-high resolution that reveals new details of a quasar and our Milky Way.

The researchers were surprised when their Earth-space system revealed a temperature hotter then 10 trillion degrees.

“Only this space-Earth system could reveal this temperature, and now we have to figure out how that environment can reach such temperatures," said Yuri Kovalev, the RadioAstron project scientist.

“This result is a significant challenge to our current understanding of quasar jets,” he added.

Using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes, the team achieved the highest resolution of any astronomical observation ever made.

The feat produced a pair of scientific surprises that promise to advance the understanding of quasars, supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

The scientists combined the Russian RadioAstron satellite with the ground-based telescopes to produce a virtual radio telescope.

They pointed this system at a quasar called 3C 273, more than two billion light-years from Earth.

Quasars like 3C 273 propel huge jets of material outward at speeds nearly that of light. These powerful jets emit radio waves.

The observations also showed, for the first time, substructure caused by scattering of the radio waves by the tenuous interstellar material in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

“This is like looking through the hot, turbulent air above a candle flame,” added Michael Johnson from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“We had never been able to see such distortion of an extragalactic object before,” he noted in a paper appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The amazing resolution from RadioAstron working with the ground-based telescopes gives scientists a powerful new tool to explore not only the extreme physics near the distant supermassive black holes but also the diffuse material in our home galaxy.

The RadioAstron satellite was combined with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, The Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Effelsberg Telescope in Germany, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Signals received by the orbiting radio telescope were transmitted to an antenna in Green Bank where they were recorded and then sent over the internet to Russia.

Here, they were combined with the data received by the ground-based radio telescopes to form the high resolution image of 3C 273.​

​New Delhi, March 29 (IANS) With summer around the corner, sweat is a major problem and it is just no fun. Though it is a natural phenomenon, it can be quite embarrassing and problematic when you are out with someone or have to go for an important meeting.

Home hacks like putting potatoes slices under your arms and drinking a glass of tomato juice every day will help you in getting rid of this excessive sweat. 

Rahul Aggarwal, CEO, Organic Harvest, an organic beauty care range company, has shared some easy tips on how to keep sweat at bay this summer season.

* Coconut oil: Infuse about 10 grams of camphor in a bowl of coconut oil and apply on the sweat prone areas after bath. Leave it on for 45-60 minutes. Wash it off with clean water to give you desired results.

* Salt: To cure excessive sweating this summer, mix a tablespoon of salt with lime juice. Massaging your hands with this mix will decelerate the activities of sweat glands.

* Tea tree oil: Tea tree oil can be applied to the high perspiring areas. Desired results can be seen if regularly used. It is also excellent for oily skin.

* Potato: These will help in getting rid of sweat. Simply cut slices of potato and rub them under your arms and the areas prone to sweat. Allow the slices to dry before wearing your clothes.

* Tomato juice: Drinking a glass of tomato juice every day will help you in getting rid of this excessive sweat during summer.

* Grapes: A natural anti-oxidant, grapes help you balance the temperature of the body. So eating grapes daily can help you soothe out the problem of this excessive sweating.

* Vinegar: Intake of two teaspoons of natural vinegar and one teaspoon of apple cider vinegar is an excellent remedy to cure the excessive sweating. Taking this mixture thrice a day on an empty stomach half an hour before or after meals will give you the desired results.

* Cornstarch and baking soda: If you sweat profusely, applying the mixture of cornstarch and baking soda under the arms will help you get rid of this problem. After applying the mixture let it stay for half an hour till it dries up and later wash it off with clean water.​

Los Angeles, March 29 (IANS) Fungi will be sent for the first time to the International Space Station for the development of medicine, said researchers at the University of Southern California (USC).

The experiments, to be conducted jointly by scientists from the university and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will put specimen of Aspergillus nidulans in the high-radiation and micro-gravity conditions in space to develop new medicines for use in space and on the Earth, USC researchers announced on Monday.

The specimen will be carried by the SpaceX CRS-8 mission scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral on April 8. The launch will be the Hawthorne-based company's first cargo resupply service mission since CRS-7 exploded shortly after launch on June 28, 2015, Xinhua reported.

"Certain types of fungi produce very important molecules called secondary metabolites that are not essential for their growth or reproduction but can be used to make beneficial pharmaceuticals. Examples of secondary metabolites include the antibiotic penicillin and the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin," said a USC statement.

Researchers said the environment of space could trigger physiological changes in the fungi.

"The high-radiation, micro-gravity environment in space could prompt Aspergillus nidulans to produce molecules it doesn't create in Earth's less stressful conditions," Clay Wang, professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at the USC school of pharmacy, was quoted as saying by the media.

"We've done extensive genetic analysis of this fungus and found that it could potentially produce 40 different types of drugs," Wang said.

"The organism is known to produce osteoporosis drugs, which is very important from an astronaut's perspective because we know that in space travel, astronauts experience bone loss."

Scientists also said that molecules from Aspergillus nidulans potentially may be useful in anti-cancer and Alzheimer's disease research.​

New York, April 29 (IANS) Researchers have identified four previously unknown genetic diseases that can be brought under the umbrella diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Cases associated with changes in each of the four genes were different from each other in terms of symptoms, intelligence level and other disease features, the researchers said.

"A common fallacy is that schizophrenia can be treated as a single disease," explained lead study author Dolores Malaspina from NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York.

"Our biologically driven study begins to answer longstanding questions in the field about why any two people diagnosed with schizophrenia may have drastically different symptoms. For the first time, we have defined four syndromes mechanistically,” Malaspina noted.

Patients with schizophrenia struggle to interpret reality, typically suffering from hallucinations, learning disabilities, emotional withdrawal and lack of motivation. 

In the current study, researchers analysed 48 ethnically diverse patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, looking at symptom sets in patients found to have rare or previously unknown changes in the DNA code of the four genes that disrupted brain function.

The four influential genes now tied by the study to specific conditions are all involved in the growth or regulation of nerve circuits. 

"Our results argue that new treatments should -- while addressing core psychoses -- also focus on processing speed in TGM5 cases, working memory in PTPRG, zinc augmentation in SLC39A13, and nerve cell protection in patients with ARMS/KIDINS220 mutations," first study author Thorsten Kranz, postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone, said.

The findings appeared online in the journal EbioMedicine.

"Perhaps as many as 30 percent of schizophrenic patients may now become candidates for more precise treatment based on the individual characteristics of these four genes, with the remaining cases becoming less mysterious as we pull these groups out of the mix," Malaspina said.​

New York, March 28 (IANS) If you are not saving enough for your retirement, you may not be alone. A new study has shown that a large number of people avoid saving for their old age because they are afraid to think of their own death.

New York, March 28 (IANS) Looking for friends but unable to find them on Instagram? To solve this problem, Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram has launched a new feature Discover People that enables the user to "discover" other users easily.