Knowledge Update

​New York, July 5 (IANS) Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new type of easily customisable vaccine that can be manufactured in one week, allowing it to be rapidly deployed in response to disease outbreaks.

So far, they have designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were 100 per cent effective in tests in mice, said a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. 

These molecules are then packaged into a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells, where it is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host.

"This nanoformulation approach allows us to make vaccines against new diseases in only seven days, allowing the potential to deal with sudden outbreaks or make rapid modifications and improvements," said Daniel Anderson, Associate Professor at MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and senior author of the study.

The ability to rapidly design and manufacture these vaccines could be especially beneficial for fighting influenza, because the most common flu vaccine manufacturing method, which requires the viruses to be grown inside chicken eggs, takes months. 

This means that when an unexpected flu strain appears, such as the 2009 pandemic-causing H1N1 virus, there is no way to rapidly produce a vaccine against it.

"Typically a vaccine becomes available long after the outbreak is over," one of the lead researchers Jasdave Chahal explained.

"We think we can become interventional over the course of a real outbreak," Chahal noted.

The vaccine is designed to be delivered by intramuscular injection, making it easy to administer. 

Once the particles get into cells, the RNA is translated into proteins that are released and stimulate the immune system. 

Significantly, the vaccines were able to stimulate both arms of the immune system -- a T cell response and an antibody response.

In tests in mice, animals that received a single dose of one of the vaccines showed no symptoms following exposure to the real pathogen -- Ebola, H1N1 influenza, or Toxoplasma gondii.

"No matter what antigen we picked, we were able to drive the full antibody and T cell responses," one of the first authors Omar Khan said.

In addition to targeting infectious diseases, the researchers are using this approach to create cancer vaccines that would teach the immune system to recognise and destroy tumours.​

​New York, July 6 (IANS) Replacing animal fats in your diet with a variety of liquid vegetable oils can help you live longer as researchers have confirmed that higher consumption of saturated and trans fats is linked with higher mortality.

In a large study population that included 126,233 participants who were followed for more than three decades, researchers found that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats conferred substantial health benefits.

The study suggests that replacing saturated fats like butter, lard, and fat in red meat with unsaturated fats from plant-based foods like olive oil, canola oil, and soybean oil can confer substantial health benefits.

"There has been widespread confusion in the biomedical community and the general public in the last couple of years about the health effects of specific types of fat in the diet," said Dong Wang, doctoral candidate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and lead author of the study.

Trans fats had the most significant adverse impact on health. Every two per cent higher intake of trans fat was associated with a 16 per cent higher chance of premature death during the study period. Higher consumption of saturated fats was also linked with greater mortality risk.

Conversely, intake of high amounts of unsaturated fats, both polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, was associated with between 11 per cent and 19 per cent lower overall mortality compared with the same number of calories from carbohydrates.

The study was published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

The health effects of specific types of fats depended on what people were replacing them with, the researchers found.

People who replaced saturated fats with carbohydrates had only slightly lower mortality risk.

Among the polyunsaturated fats, both omega-6 -- found in most plant oils -- and omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and soy and canola oils, were associated with lower risk of premature death.

"Our study shows the importance of eliminating trans fat and replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats, including both omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids. In practice, this can be achieved by replacing animal fats with a variety of liquid vegetable oils," Frank Hu, Professor at Harvard Medical School, said.​

​New York, July 5 (IANS) Influencing kids to make the right food choice could be a lot easier for parents as researchers have found that children exposed to animated cartoon characters that take the shapes of healthy vegetables such as carrots or cucumber are more likely to eat salad on their own.

Marketing vegetables in school lunchrooms using the Super Sprowtz -- a team of fun-loving characters with super powers -- almost tripled the percentage of elementary school students choosing items from the salad bar,the findings showed.

"If we put the time and good resources into marketing healthy choices to kids, it can work," said lead researcher Andrew Hanks, Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University in the US.

Further, such interventions were found to improve nutrition, behaviour as well as performance in school.

For the study, published in the journal Pediatrics, the team analysed the behaviour of children from 10 public elementary schools in urban New York State.

In some schools, they wrapped the bottom portion of the salad bar with a vinyl banner depicting the cartoon characters as super veggies.

In others, they played cartoon videos in the lunch room. And in others, they tried both tactics.

According to researchers, in schools with the salad bar banners, 24 per cent of kids took vegetables from the salad bars.

In those schools that had characters on the salad bar and video, the vegetable selection jumped from 10 per cent to almost 35 per cent.

"If we can encourage kids to take vegetables of their own accord, rather than have someone put it there for them, they're much more likely to eat them," Hanks noted.

No significant improvement was found in schools with videos alone.

However, the researchers said that it is unlikely such a technique would work with older students.

"It's important to be strategic. If you use these characters in a middle or high school I doubt they will have much of an impact," Hanks said adding, "our study is best generalised to an urban elementary school setting."​

London, July 5 (IANS) If you cannot resist pasta, go order another red-sauced one as contrary to popular belief, eating pasta does not add fat but actually help shed extra kilos.

According to researchers, eating pasta -- the fundamental component of Italian Mediterranean tradition -- can lead to a decrease in the body mass index (BMI) as well as decrease the likelihood of both general and abdominal obesity.

"Our data show that enjoying pasta according to individuals' needs contributes to a healthy body mass index, lower waist circumference and better waist-hip ratio," said lead author George Pounis from IRCCS Neuromed Institute in Italy.

Mediterranean diets have always been known as one of the healthiest nutritional regimes.

Hhowever, in recent years, pasta gained a bad reputation and was shunned from diets on the grounds that it leads to obesity.

"Mediterranean diet, consumed in moderation and respecting the variety of all its elements (pasta in the first place), is good to your health," added Licia Iacoviello from Neuromed Institute.

Pasta consumption is associated with better weight management in part because it often occurs as part of a healthy Mediterranean diet, said the paper published in the journal Nutrition and Diabetes.

For the study, the team examined over 23,000 people recruited in two large epidemiological studies.

"By analysing data of the participants and their eating habits, we have seen that consumption of pasta, contrary to what many think, is not associated with an increase in body weight, rather the opposite," explained Pounis.​

​Washington, July 5 (IANS) Cheers erupted at NASA's California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday as its solar-powered Juno spacecraft entered the orbit around Jupiter -- ending its nearly five-year journey to study the gas giant like never before.

According to Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, the spacecraft is now in orbit around Jupiter.

“You’re the best team ever! We just did the hardest thing NASA has ever done,” shouted Bolton as scientists hugged each other after the successful completion of a seemingly tough mission.

“Success! Engine burn complete. #Juno is now orbiting #Jupiter, poised to unlock the planet's secrets,” NASA tweeted.

At 8.48 am on Tuesday (India time), Juno fired its main engine to begin a 35-minute burn to get into orbit around Jupiter. The burn time was within one second of the predicted time, placing it in the orbit it needed.

Juno’s main engine has now been switched off and will be turned on in couple of days.

Once in Jupiter's orbit, the 1,600 kg spacecraft will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 5,000 km above the cloud tops.

This is the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet's core, composition and magnetic fields.

"As Juno barrels down on Jupiter, the scientists are busy looking at the amazing approach science the spacecraft has already returned to Earth. Jupiter is spectacular from afar and will be absolutely breathtaking from close up," Bolton earlier said in a NASA statement.

During the flybys, Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its auroras to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

Juno's name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The mythical god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife -- the goddess Juno -- was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.

The four largest moons of Jupiter are named the Galilean moons because they were discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1609.​

​London, July 5 (IANS) A team of Swedish astronomers has discovered a growing supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy located 70 million light years from Earth.

The team, led by astronomers from Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology, discovered the black hole in the centre of galaxy named "NGC 1377" with the help of Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. 

"We were curious about this galaxy because of its bright, dust-enshrouded centre. What we weren't expecting was this: a long, narrow jet streaming out from the galaxy nucleus," said researcher Susanne Aalto from Chalmers.

The observations revealed a jet which is 500 light years long and less than 60 light years across, travelling at a speed of nearly 800,000 km per hour. 

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole in their centres. 

These black holes can have masses of between a few million to a billion solar masses. 

How they grew to be so massive is a long-standing mystery for scientists.

"The jets we usually see emerging from galaxy nuclei are very narrow tubes of hot plasma. This jet is very different. Instead, it's extremely cool and its light comes from dense gas composed of molecules," said study co-author Francesco Costagliola.

According to the researchers, the jet has ejected molecular gas equivalent to two million times the mass of the Sun over a period of only around half a million years -- a very short time in the life of a galaxy. 

The motion of the gas in the jet also surprised the astronomers. 

"The jet's unusual swirling could be due to an uneven flow of gas towards the central black hole. Another possibility is that the galaxy's centre contains two supermassive black holes in orbit around each other," said Sebastien Muller from Chalmers.​

London, July 5 (IANS) Have you ever wondered why some healthy people cannot defend themselves well against bacteria or fungi while others may get away with mild symptoms? Researchers, including one of Indian-origin, believe that genetic factors that control the immune cell response to pathogens could partly explain this varied response.

The team investigated the response of immune cells from 200 healthy volunteers when stimulated with a comprehensive list of pathogens outside the human body, and has correlated these responses with four million genetic variants (SNPs). 

The study was performed by scientists from University Medical Centre Groningen, Radboud University Medical Centre (both in the Netherlands) and Harvard Medical School (Boston, US). 

"We all encounter pathogens on a daily basis, but we don't all defend ourselves against bacteria or fungi, for example, in the same way. Some people experience mild symptoms, others may become violently ill or even die,” said Vinod Kumar, Assistant Professor of functional genomics and infectious diseases at University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG).

"We wanted to discover how much individual genetic differences determine this variable response,” Kumar, who is one of the senior authors of the study, said.

The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, focused on the role of cytokines, small peptides used by immune cells as signals to guide their response to an infectious agent. 

"We observed large differences in cytokine production between individuals,” explained Kumar.

"Their responses were also specific to the different pathogens,” Kumar noted.

This suggests that cytokines contribute to the varied responses to pathogens, and that each infection triggers a specific cytokine response pathway. Previous studies on unstimulated immune cells had shown little variation between individuals.

The next step was to investigate if the responses were under genetic control.

They identified six genomic regions that influence cytokine responses, suggesting that cytokine production is at least partly genetically determined

​London, July 5 (IANS) Two complimentary studies have for the first time revealed how two natural satellites of Mars -- Phobos and Deimos -- originated millions of years ago, rejecting the long-held hypothesis that the two Martian moons were asteroids captured by the Red Planet.

The first study was conducted by researchers from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University. It ruled out the capture of asteroids and showed that the only scenario compatible with the surface properties of Phobos and Deimos was that of a giant collision.

In the second study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of international researchers used cutting-edge digital simulations to show how these satellites were able to form from the debris of a gigantic collision between Mars and a protoplanet one-third its size.

Due to their small size and irregular shape, Phobos and Deimos strongly resembled asteroids but no one understood how Mars could have "captured" them and made them into satellites with almost circular and equatorial orbits. 

In the first study, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, CNRS researchers ruled out the possibility of a capture on the grounds of statistical arguments based on the compositional diversity of the asteroid belt. 

They showed that the light signature emitted by Phobos and Deimos is incompatible with that of the primordial matter that formed Mars.

According to the second study, the Martian moons would have been created following a collision between the Red Planet and a primordial body one-third its size, 100 to 800 million years after the beginning of the planet's formation. 

The debris from this collision formed a very wide disk around Mars, made up of a dense inner part composed of matter in fusion, and a very thin outer part primarily of gas. 

In the inner part of this disk formed a moon one thousand times the size of Phobos which has since disappeared. 

After a few thousand years, Mars was surrounded by a group of approximately 10 small moons and one enormous moon. 

A few million years later, once the debris disk had dissipated, the tidal effects of Mars brought most of these satellites back down onto the planet, including the very large moon. 

Only the two most distant small moons, Phobos and Deimos, remained, the authors noted.​

Toronto, July 5 (IANS) Canadian researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new screening tool that could help emergency physicians uncover the sometimes dangerous hidden conditions that cause some people to faint.

The findings showed that syncope, or fainting, accounts for between 1 per cent and 3 per cent of all emergency department visits. 

In most cases, it is benign, but for about 10 per cent of people who visit the emergency room for fainting it can be a symptom of a potentially life-threatening condition like arrhythmia, or heart rhythm disturbance.

The nine-question Canadian Syncope Risk Score helps emergency doctors predict the risk of a patient experiencing an adverse event, such as potentially fatal irregular heart rhythm, heart attack and other cardiac events, gastrointestinal bleeding, and even death within a month after fainting.

"Fainting is a big problem. The way fainting patients are examined in emergency rooms varies greatly between physicians and hospitals," said Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamoorthy, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. 

"We hope that this screening tool will make the process more consistent and improve the detection of serious conditions related to fainting," Thiruganasambandamoorthy added.

For the study, the team looked at 4030 patients. Of the total patients, 147 experienced a serious event in the month following discharge.

Signs of a common and harmless variety of fainting, such as being in a warm or crowded place, standing for a long time, or feeling intense fear, emotion or pain; a history of heart disease; abnormal electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements; higher levels of troponin, a protein specific to heart muscle are some of the factors that physicians can plug in to a screening tool.

When combined, these factors give the patient's total risk of an adverse event, from very low to very high.

Most fainting patients admitted to hospital do not need to be there. These patients can spend four to seven hours in the emergency department before a decision to discharge them is made, the researchers noted.

"If our tool can discharge low-risk patients quickly and safely, then I think we can reduce emergency room wait times and open up those resources to other patients," Thiruganasambandamoorthy noted.​

​New York, July 5 (IANS) Scientists have found that three-dimensional paper-based microbial fuel cells can create power in an environmentally-friendly way without the use of any outside power.

"All power created in this device is usable because no electricity is needed to run the fluids through the device. This is crucial in the advancement of these devices and the expansion of their applications," said senior author Nastaran Hashemi from the Iowa State University in Ames.

The team demonstrated a proof-of-concept, published in the journal TECHNOLOGY, that 3D paper-based microbial fuel cell (MFC) could take advantage of capillary action to guide the liquids through the MFC system and eliminate the need for external power. 

In the study, the paper-based MFC ran for five days and showed the production of current as a result of biofilm formation on anode. 

The system produced 1.3 µW (microwatt) of power and 52.25 µA (microampere) of current yielding a power density of approximately 25 W/m3. 

The biofilm formation on the carbon cloth during the test provided further evidence that the current measured was the result of the bio-chemical reaction taking place. 

This was important because the biofilm play a vital role in current production of a microbial fuel cell. 

According to the researchers, increased biofilm size and thickness ultimately leads to increased current production. 

The device for the first time demonstrated the longer duration of use and ability to operate individually, a development that could help increase the number of situations where microbial fuel cells can be applied.

The researchers are now exploring options to better control the voltage output and create constant current.