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    Flu virus’ best friend: Low Humidity

    May 15, 2019, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology


    Low humidity increases influenza disease through caspase-1/11 activation. WT Mx1 mice or caspase-1/11 KO Mx1 mice were preconditioned at 10% and 50% RH for 5 d and challenged with aerosolized hvPR8 at 2 × 105pfu/mL for 15 min (n = 6 mice per group). (A and B) Weight loss was monitored for 14 d. Data are representative of four experiments and means ± SEM *P < 0.05; one-way ANOVA; Student’s t test.

    Yale researchers have pinpointed a key reason why people are more likely to get sick and even die from flu during winter months: low humidity. While experts know that cold temperatures and low humidity promote transmission of the flu virus, less is understood about the effect of decreased humidity on the immune system’s defenses against flu infection.

    The Yale research team, led by Ak...

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    Quantum world-first: Researchers reveal accuracy of Two-Qubit calculations in Silicon

    May 15, 2019, Categories  Physics

    Professor Andrew Dzurak and team
    Wister Huang, a final-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering; Professor Andrew Dzurak; and Dr Henry Yang, a senior research fellow.

    The research, carried out by Professor Andrew Dzurak’s team in UNSW Engineering, was published in the journal Nature. The experiments were performed by Wister Huang, a final-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering, and Dr Henry Yang, a senior research fellow at UNSW.

    “All quantum computations can be made up of one-qubit operations and two-qubit operations – they’re the central building blocks of quantum computing,” says Professor Dzurak.

    “Once you’ve got those, you can perform any computation you want – but the accuracy of both operations needs to be very high.”

    In 2015 Dzurak’s team was the first to build a quantum logic gate in silicon,...

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    Shrinking Moon may be Generating Moonquakes

    May 15, 2019, Categories  Uncategorized

    Evidence for moonquakes on Lee-Lincoln fault scarp
    The Taurus-Littrow valley is the location of the Apollo 17 landing site (asterisk). Cutting across the valley, just above the landing site, is the Lee-Lincoln fault scarp. Movement on the fault was the likely source of numerous moonquakes that triggered events in the valley. 1) Large landslides on of slopes of South Massif draped relatively bright rocks and dust (regolith) on and over the Lee-Lincoln scarp. 2) Boulders rolled down the slopes of North Massif leaving tracks or narrow troughs in the regolith on the slopes of North Massif. 3) Landslides on southeastern slopes of the Sculptured Hills.
    Credits: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian

    A new analysis suggests that the moon is actively shrinking and producing moonquakes along thousands of cliffs called thrust faults spr...

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    Common Food Additive Found to Affect Gut Microbiota

    May 14, 2019, Categories  Health/Medical, Chemistry/Nanotechnology, Biology/Biotechnology


    Impact of the food additive titanium dioxide (E171) on gut microbiota-host interaction. Frontiers in Nutrition, 2019

    Titanium dioxide nanoparticles E171 may impact human health. University of Sydney research provides new evidence that nanoparticles, which are present in many food items, may have a substantial and harmful influence on human health. E171 is commonly used in high quantities in foods and some medicines as a whitening agent. Found in more than 900 food products such as chewing gum and mayonnaise, E171 is consumed in high proportion everyday by the general population.

    Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, the mice study found that consumption of food containing E171 has an impact on the gut microbiota (defined by the trillions of bacteria that inhabit the gut) which coul...

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