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Disinfecting Gel Produced Locally
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New gel can be used in operating rooms for disinfecting the hands of surgeons and their assistants.
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Iranian researchers have produced a gel for disinfecting hands by utilizing the anti-bacterial properties of silver nano particles, project manager, Mehran Haj-Rasouliha said.
Speaking to Mehr News Agency, Haj-Rasouliha added, “This gel can be used in hospitals. Nurses can disinfect their hands by using this gel without harming their skin.“
Haj-Rasouliha, who is managing director of Nano Pak Persia Company, also said that the gel can be used in operating rooms for disinfecting the hands of surgeons and their assistants.
He noted that the company is awaiting issuance of the necessary permit by the Health Ministry and said his company has distribution offices in Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Products of the company have many customers in the region.
“However, our products have not yet been received enthusiastically in the domestic industrial sector,“ he complained.
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Apples Beat Pears on Crunch Issue
Just why pears rot faster than apples can now be explained by science.
It has all to do with how oxygen is able to find its way to the center of the fruit after it has been picked, BBC said.
Belgian researchers used one of the world’s most powerful X-ray machines to image the tiny pores and channels that carry air through the two foods.
Pieter Verboven’s team was able to show how the structures in pears meant they got “out of breath“ quicker than apples--key information for growers.
The results of the study will improve the models used to determine optimal storage conditions.
“If we know how the pears get into storage, we can better predict how they will behave,“ the Catholic University of Leuven scientist said.
“From season to season, from batch to batch, even from orchard to orchard--we can give advice to the grower, saying well, for these pears, you may have to elevate the oxygen concentration in your storage room because there is the potential for problems.“
The latest research illuminated the microscopically small structures for oxygen supply that exist in fruit. In apples, the pathways appear as irregular cavities between cells, whilst in pears they have the shape of tiny interconnected channels.
“We already knew that different apple varieties have a different density which means they have a different fraction of air spaces; but we didn’t know the structures,“ Dr. Verboven told BBC News.
“We also knew that pears have a much lower amount of void spaces inside because pears sink to the bottom if you drop them in water whereas apples float, which indicates that one has more air than the other one.
“But also in pears, no one knew what the structure of those air voids was.“
Now, the scientists understand not only what the cavities and micro-channels look like but also how they perform. The Verboven team was able to describe the complex mechanisms of gas exchange, respiration and fermentation that take place in the different fruits.
There is much less water in apples to slow the penetration of the gas, and although the channels in pears are connected they just do not work as efficiently as the big pores in apples in allowing oxygen to pass through the core.
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Empathy Comes
Naturally to Children
When children see others in pain, their brains respond as if it were happening to them, US researchers said.
According to Reuters, this response, which has also been shown in adults, suggests that normal school-age children may be naturally prone to empathy, they said.
“What it shows us is that we have this inborn capacity to resonate with the pain of others. That’s probably a very important step toward empathy,“ said Jean Decety of the University of Chicago, whose study appears in the Neuropsychologia journal.
For the study, the researchers showed 17 children aged seven to 12 animated images of people experiencing pain while they were undergoing a type of imaging known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI.
The series of images depicted accidents, such as a heavy bowl falling on a pair of hands and situations in which pain was inflicted purposefully, such as someone slamming a car door on a person’s hand. They also were shown images without painful encounters.
The study showed that when pain was accidental, brain circuits involved in the processing pain first-hand came into play.
Decety said these same areas have been shown to become active in studies in adults and are thought to be part of the empathy response.
“We can say children are like adults when they see people in pain,“ Decety said in a telephone interview.
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Good Diet, Exercise Keep Brain Healthy
A balanced diet and regular exercise can protect the brain and ward off mental disorders, a new review of research states.
“Food is like a pharmaceutical compound that affects the brain,“ said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a UCLA professor of neurosurgery and physiological science, who has spent years studying the effects of food, exercise and sleep on the brain. His roundup of the scientific truth behind the brain-food connection confirms a lot of what has been suggested before, LiveScience said.
“Diet, exercise and sleep have the potential to alter our brain health and mental function,“ he said. “This raises the exciting possibility that changes in diet are a viable strategy for enhancing cognitive abilities, protecting the brain from damage, and counteracting the effects of aging.“
Gomez-Pinilla analyzed more than 160 studies about food’s affect on the brain, an analysis published in the July issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Omega-3 fatty acids--found in salmon, walnuts and kiwi fruit--provide many benefits, including improving learning and memory and helping to fight such mental disorders as depression and mood disorders, schizophrenia and dementia, said Gomez-Pinilla, a member of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute and the Brain Injury Research Center.
“Synapses in the brain connect neurons, and provide critical functions; much learning and memory occur at synapses,“ Gomez-Pinilla said.
He added that Omega-3 fatty acids support synaptic plasticity and seem to positively affect the expression of several molecules related to learning and memory that are found on synapses.
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Special Infant Formulas
Hypoallergenic infant formulas may help lower the long-term risk of allergies in children. Like standard formula, hydrolyzed products contain cow milk proteins; the difference is that the proteins are broken down so that they are less allergenic than the whole proteins in regular formula.
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Dyes Turn Windows Into Solar Panels
Harvesting sunlight before turning it into electricity could become easier thanks to an exotic organic dye developed in the US.
Coated onto an ordinary sheet of glass, the dye traps light inside the glass allowing it to be channeled to photovoltaic cells placed along the edges of the sheet, NewScientist said.
The technique, say its inventors, could turn up to 20 percent of incident light into electricity at a fraction of the cost of conventional photovoltaic cells.
One way to reduce the cost of photovoltaic power is to focus light from a large area onto a small cell. In that way, a small cell can harvest light from a larger area. But the collecting optics must track the Sun’s path across the sky, requiring expensive machinery and control systems.
The dye-covered glass works differently. The dye molecules absorb sunlight over a wide range of visible wavelengths and then emit light at a longer wavelength.
About 80 percent of the emitted light then becomes trapped within the glass by an effect called total internal reflection, which guides the light within the sheet in the same way it guides light through optical fibers.
Solar cells along the edges of the glass that are designed to work most efficiently at the longer wavelength then convert this trapped light into electricity.
New Scans Show Evidence of Water on Moon
Tiny green and orange glass balls brought back from the moon nearly 40 years ago by astronauts show evidence that water existed there from the very beginning, scientists reported.
They used a new method of analyzing elements in the lunar sand samples to show strong evidence of water, dating back three billion years, Reuters wrote.
Their study could support evidence that water persists in shadowed craters on the moon’s surface--and that the water could be native to the moon and not carried there by comets.
Most scientists believe the moon was formed when a Mars-size body collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago.
The giant impact would have melted both proto-planets and sent molten debris into orbit around the Earth.
Some of this would have eventually coalesced into the moon, but the heat of the impact would have vaporized light elements such as the hydrogen and oxygen needed to make water--theoretically, anyway.
Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington had developed a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry or SIMS, which could detect minute amounts of elements in samples. His team was using it to find evidence of water in the Earth’s molten mantle.
Contact Lenses Go Green
Even contact lenses are joining the trend to go green. Chemical engineering researchers at McMaster University have shown that a common fluid found in our bodies can be used as a natural moisturizing agent in contact lenses.
This is a step up from the current wave of self-moisturizing contact lenses that use synthetic materials as a wetting agent to prevent eye dryness and increase wearer comfort, Physorg reported.
It is estimated that more than 50 percent of people who stop wearing contact lenses do so because of discomfort caused by dryness, which is particularly high at the end of the day.
The research from McMaster showed that hyaluronic acid can be entrapped in existing contact lens material without affecting optical properties.
It was also found that using hyaluronic acid considerably reduces the build up of proteins which can cloudy contact lens material, the cause of up to 30 percent of all after-care visits by contact lens wearers to optometrists.
Hyaluronic acid is a natural polymer that acts to reduce friction.
The body uses hyaluronic acid to repair skin, provide resiliency in cartilage, and contribute to the growth and movement of cells, among other things. It is also used by the medical profession to treat patients with dry eyes, in cataract surgery, and for other eye-related procedures.
Referees Award More Points When They See Red
Referees try to be fair, but on occasion even the best make bad calls. Now it would seem that sometimes they cannot help it. Researchers reveal that colors worn by competitors can shape referee decisions.
According to NewScientist, Norbert Hagemann and colleagues at the University of Munster, Germany, suggest the color worn by an athlete might affect the decisions made by referees.
To test their theory, they showed 42 referees of the martial art taekwondo video excerpts from sparring rounds between similarly skilled athletes. In each video, one athlete wore blue protective gear and one wore red.
Each referee individually judged each clip, assigning points for the attacks made. They then watched the same bouts, in a different order, but this time with the color of the protective gear digitally reversed, so that combatants wearing blue now appeared to wear red, and vice versa.
The team found that referees gave 13 percent more points to red competitors, even when the performances were exactly the same.
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