Achilles’ Heel of Flu Virus Revealed

New images of the influenza A virus, whose strains cause the seasonal flu and the H1N1 ‘swine’ flu, have revealed its Achilles’ heel, researchers say, and the finding could lead to a targeted drug that can fight all strains of the virus.
The weakness stems from a basic structure in all flu viruses, called the M2 channel, which is key in helping the virus reproduce, LiveScience said.
About four years ago, a tiny change occurred in this channel, the researchers said, making flu drugs such as amantadine and rimantadine ineffective. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending the drugs to fight the flu.
“We think we can pin down the types of changes that could occur, and find drugs for all” strains of flu, said study researcher David Busath, a biophysicist at Brigham Young University in Utah.
The finding helps researchers understand why the virus isn’t susceptible to the old influenza drugs anymore, Busath said.
With a drug developed to target this particular channel, “you could be safe tomorrow”, Busath said.
The flu virus is mutating and changing all the time, which is why there must be a new flu vaccine every year to accommodate the new mutations, he said. But every flu virus has an M2 channel, and it must work properly for the virus to infect a host.
“It turns out there’s only a small handful of changes, in the heart of the channel, that still allow the virus to work well,” Busath said. “And if it can’t work, the virus can’t reproduce. And we know all of the possible changes that allow it to work.”

Gene Therapy Could Treat Depression

Gene therapy could become a powerful new weapon in the fight against severe depression that does not respond to traditional drug treatments, US researchers said on Wednesday.
Restoring a key gene that activates a specific protein in the tiny part of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens reversed depression-like behavior in mice, the researchers said in the latest issue of Science Translational Medicine, AFP said.
“Given our findings, we potentially have a novel therapy to target what we now believe is one root cause of human depression,” said lead researcher Michael Kaplitt, a neurosurgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
“Current therapies for depression treat symptoms but not underlying causes, and while that works for many patients, those with advanced depression, or depression that does not respond to medication, could hopefully benefit from our new approach,” he added.
The research found that a particular protein known as p11 in the nucleus accumbens was associated with experiencing pleasure and a sense of satisfaction that is often absent in severe depression.
Postmortem analysis on human subjects revealed that people with severe depression had low levels of the p11 protein compared to more normal subjects.
In their studies, mice without p11 all exhibited depression-like behaviors, researchers said, leading the team to suggest that restoring this function and the availability of p11 was critical to alleviating depressive symptoms.
“In the absence of p11, a neuron can produce all the serotonin receptors it needs, but they will not be transported to the cell surface,” said Kaplitt.

Iranians Produce Nickel-Bohr Nano Alloy

Researchers at Malek Ashtar University of Technology in the city of Shahin Shahr in Iran’s central province of Isfahan succeeded in producing a nickel-Bohr nano-alloy on a semi-industrial scale by using a mechanical alloying method.
Nickel-Bohr based metallic compounds have wide applications in alloying, welding, coating and fabricating thin or thick layers. In addition, they are cheaper than the compounds made of noble metals, Fars News Agency reported.
“Alloy-making materials based on nickel, especially nickel-Bohr, have many applications in the production of steel and various types of super alloys in Iran,” Massoud Nazariyan Samani, a researcher on this project, said.
“However, the import of such strategic materials is very costly and difficult due to numerous sanctions. Therefore, we produced such materials to fulfill the needs of domestic industries and overcome the country’s need for export.”
Explaining the procedure, Samani said, “We milled highly-pure powders of Ni and B elements with an average particle size of 10 and 3 micrometers in a ball mill for 10 hours. Then we heated them at 200, 400, 600 and 800 degrees centigrade for an hour. At the end, we used XRD and heat analysis on the obtained nanopowders.”
“The Ni3B inter-metallic compound was formed at 350°C, and Ni2B compound at 700°C. Since mechanical alloying process significantly reduces the activation energy of the formation of such compounds, Ni3B and Ni2B inter-metallic compounds were created faster by increasing the time of mechanical alloying process during the heating,” he added.

Plants Clean Air Pollution Better Than Expected

Plants, especially some trees under stress, are even better than expected at scrubbing certain chemical pollutants out of the air, researchers reported on Thursday.
“Plants clean our air to a greater extent than we had realized,” Thomas Karl of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded research center based in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement reported by Reuters.
“They actively consume certain types of air pollution,” he said.
Scientists have long known that plants take in carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas that can build up in the atmosphere and trap heat beneath it. But they did not know that some plants excel at sucking up a class of chemicals known as oxygenated volatile organic compounds, or oVOCs.
These compounds, which can have long-term health and environmental impacts, form in the atmosphere from hydrocarbons and other chemicals from natural and human-made sources, including plants, vehicles and construction materials.
Because oVOCs can combine with nitrogen oxides to form ozone, they can contribute to lung inflammation, swelling and asthma attacks, according to the American Lung Association.
Karl, lead author of the study published in the journal Science, worked with other scientists to determine that deciduous plants--those that seasonally shed their leaves--appear to take in these compounds as much as four times more quickly than was previously thought.
Plants are especially good at doing this in dense forests, and this process is most evident at the top of the forest canopy, where as much as 97 percent of the uptake of oVOCs was observed, the researchers said.
Looking specifically at poplar trees, the researchers found that when these trees were under stress--due to a physical wound or exposure to an irritant like ozone pollution--they sharply increased their uptake of oVOCs.

Moon Crash Kicks Up Ice, Silver, Mercury

A rocket sent crashing into the moon last year kicked up several hundred pounds (kg) of water, silver, mercury and other surprising chemicals, scientists reported.
According to Reuters, the US space agency NASA sent the rocket to the permanently shadowed moon crater Cabeus last October to see what would, literally, pop up.
Several reports published in the journal Science show some surprising findings, including a large amount of water in the form of ice, carbon monoxide, ammonia and the silvery metals.
“This place looks like it’s a treasure chest of elements, of compounds that have been released all over the moon and they’ve been put in this bucket in the permanent shadows,” planetary geologist Peter Schultz of Brown University in Rhode Island said.
During the mission, called LCROSS for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, the rocket was sent crashing into the dark and freezing crater, and instruments on the satellite measured the spectra of light in the dust kicked up.
Anthony Colaprete of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and his colleagues estimated that 5.6 percent of the total mass inside Cabeus crater is made up of frozen water.

Batteries Smaller Than Grain of Salt

As development of micro- and nano-scale devices continues to advance, so does the need for an equally tiny method of powering them. There’s not much point in developing a surveillance micro air vehicle the size of a housefly, for instance, if it requires a watch battery to fly.
That’s why DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is funding a project to create really tiny batteries. They’re aiming for something smaller than a grain of salt, Gizmag reported.
Jane Chang, an engineer from the University of California, Los Angeles, is designing the electrolyte that will allow the charge to flow between electrodes in such batteries.
“We’re trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller,” she said.
In order to do so, Chang coated well-ordered micro-pillars or nano-wires with lithium aluminosilicate, an electrolyte material.
The structures are fabricated to maximize their surface-to-volume ratio, for maximum energy density. The lithium was applied through a process of atomic layer deposition, in which one-atom-thick layers of a material can be sprayed onto a surface.

Age Impacts Old Bees

New research shows that not just human memories fade. Scientists from Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences examined how aging impacts the ability of honey bees to find their way home.
While bees are typically impressive navigators, able to wend their way home through complex landscapes after visits to flowers far removed from their nests, aging impairs the bees’ ability to extinguish the memory of an unsuitable nest site even after the colony has settled in a new home, ScienceDaily wrote.
“From previous studies, we knew that old bees are characterized by poor learning when trained to floral odors in the laboratory,” says Gro Amdam, an associate professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “So, we wanted to test whether aging also affects learning behavior that is important for a bee’s survival in the wild.”
A bee is very well-trained as a forager after three to four days of flight time, Amdam says.
This is while mature bees have piloted their way to and from the hive for five to 11 days and old bees have had more than two weeks of flight time.

Energy-Producing Floor Tiles

Czech auto manufacturer, Skoda, has developed a glass-like floor tile that uses human footsteps to produce energy.
According to IdeaConnection, the tiles are capable of producing 6 to 8 watts of energy just from one person walking across them.
Debuting the tiles at the 2010 Paris Motorshow, Skoda installed a gauge on their showcase that displayed the real-time wattage produced by visitors walking across the tiles, showing the floor could generate 100 watts per hour on a busy day.

Dramatic Solar Eclipse Pictured

This spectacular space image of the moon cutting across the sun was captured from high orbit by NASA’s state-of-the-art Solar Dynamics Observatory.
On October 7, the observatory’s path around the earth brought it in perfect alignment with the new moon as it arced in front of the sun, Telegraph reported.
The image was taken 22,000 miles (36,000 km) above the earth using an onboard telescope to dramatically capture the stormy fury of the sun’s magnetic field.
Tendrils of super-heated plasma--known as solar flares--can be seen reaching far out into space. Plasma loops like these can heat up to a blistering 20 million degrees Celsius.
Observers reckon the bright plasma loop streaking out on the far left of the image is 860,000 miles (1.4 million km) across.
By comparison, the diameter of planet earth is less than one-hundredth the length of the colossal arm of fire.

Bubble-Shaped Plates

Imagine the delight on your guests’ faces when you serve an elegant salad or delicate desert on these icy, modern plates?
Each one is handmade in Thailand using recycled window glass, and the air that gets trapped during the melting process is what creates the frothy pattern of bubbles, Inhabitat wrote.
Choose from appetizer, salad, dinner or buffet sizes in sea or smoke.

Warmer Arctic

The signs of climate change were all over the Arctic this year--warmer air, less sea ice, melting glaciers--which probably means this weather-making region will not return to its former, colder state, scientists reported.