Monthly Archives: July 2018

Saliva diagnostics? Saliva to replace blood test as a real diagnostic tool?

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Amid new diagnostic methods and treatment options, early detection is an emerging paradigm which seeks to decrease patient morbidity and mortality. And here comes saliva diagnostics with huge potential, possibly replacing the painful pricking on fingers or on wrists.

Saliva diagnostics is emerging as the latest and easiest way to detect disease at a phase where it is easily treatable. It is likely to provide new opportunities to use saliva liquid biopsy for early assessment of lung cancer because of the clinical performance of cancer detection, non-invasive collection process and the ease of collecting, transporting and storing saliva, said researchers.

At the 96th General Session of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR), held in conjunction with the IADR Pan European Regional (PER) Congress, David Wong, University of California, Los Angeles, USA presented his research “Saliva Diagnostics and Salivaomics” as part of the symposium “Will Saliva Translate to a Real Diagnostic Tool?” on Saturday, July 28, 2018 in London.

Research conducted on using saliva to measure stress hormones, enzyme levels, developmental disease biomarkers and even cancer mutations has revealed positive outcome, said researchers. “There are a variety of scenarios with which saliva can be used,” said Wong. “One of the most exciting emerging frontiers of saliva is liquid biopsy, which is a non-invasive means to assess the presence and characteristics of cancer in a patient with an indeterminate pulmonary nodule detected by low dose computerized tomography (LDCT).”

Saliva liquid biopsy delivers the best performance in the detection of circulating tumor DNA of lung cancer. This research was presented as part of the symposium. If validated biomarkers were combined with high-quality detection tools.

saliva would open up a new frontier in high-quality healthcare allowing physicians, dentists and patients to work and together for real-time health monitoring and high-impact personalized preventative medicine, said the study.

Mystery of the 2000-year-old Basel papyrus mirror writing deciphered

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At the papyrus workshop: the conservation of papyrus requires above all craftsmanship, expertise and time. A specialized papyrus conservator was brought to Basel to make this 2,000-year-old document legible again. CREDIT: University of Basel

Since the 16th century, Basel has been home to a mysterious papyrus. With mirror writing on both sides, it has puzzled generations of researchers. A research team from the University of Basel has now discovered that it is an unknown medical document from late antiquity. The text was likely written by the famous Roman physician Galen.

The Basel papyrus collection comprises 65 papers in five languages, which were purchased by the university in 1900 for the purpose of teaching classical studies – with the exception of two papyri. These arrived in Basel back in the 16th century, and likely formed part of Basilius Amerbach’s art collection.

One of these Amerbach papyri was regarded until now as unique in the world of papyrology. With mirror writing on both sides, it has puzzled generations of researchers. It was only through ultraviolet and infrared images produced by the Basel Digital Humanities Lab that it was possible to determine that this 2,000-year-old document was not a single papyrus at all, but rather several layers of papyrus glued together. A specialist papyrus restorer was brought to Basel to separate the sheets, enabling the Greek document to be decoded for the first time.

A literary papyrus

“This is a sensational discovery,” says Sabine Huebner, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Basel. “The majority of papyri are documents such as letters, contracts and receipts. This is a literary text, however, and they are vastly more valuable.”

What’s more, it contains a previously unknown text from antiquity. “We can now say that it’s a medical text from late antiquity that describes the phenomenon of ‘hysterical apnea’,” says Huebner. “We therefore assume that it is either a text from the Roman physician Galen, or an unknown commentary on his work.” After Hippocrates, Galen is regarded as the most important physician of antiquity.

The decisive evidence came from Italy – an expert saw parallels to the famous Ravenna papyri from the chancery of the Archdiocese of Ravenna. These include many antique manuscripts from Galen, which were later used as palimpsests and written over.

The Basel papyrus could be a similar case of medieval recycling, as it consists of multiple sheets glued together and was probably used as a book binding. The other Basel Amerbach papyrus in Latin script is also thought to have come from the Archdiocese of Ravenna. At the end of the 15th century, it was then stolen from the archive and traded by art collectors as a curiosity.

Utilizing digital opportunities in research

Huebner made the discovery in the course of an editing project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For three years, she has been working with an interdisciplinary team in collaboration with the University of Basel’s Digital Humanities Lab to examine the papyrus collection, which in the meantime has been digitalized, transcribed, annotated and translated.

The project team has already presented the history of the papyrus collection through an exhibition in the University Library last year. They plan to publish all their findings at the start of 2019.

With the end of the editing project, the research on the Basel papyri will enter into a new phase. Huebner hopes to provide additional impetus to papyrus research, particularly through sharing the digitalized collection with international databases. As papyri frequently only survive in fragments or pieces, exchanges with other papyrus collections are essential. ”

The papyri are all part of a larger context. People mentioned in a Basel papyrus text may appear again in other papyri, housed for example in Strasbourg, London, Berlin or other locations. It is digital opportunities that enable us to put these mosaic pieces together again to form a larger picture.”

At the papyrus workshop: the conservation of papyrus requires above all craftsmanship, expertise and time. A specialized papyrus conservator was brought to Basel to make this 2,000-year-old document legible again.CREDIT:University of Basel

The Basel Papyrus Collection

In 1900, the University of Basel was one of the first German-speaking universities and the first in German-speaking Switzerland to procure a papyrus collection. At that time, papyrology was booming – people hoped to discover more about the development of early Christendom and to rediscover works of ancient authors believed to be lost. The Voluntary Museum Association of Basel provided CHF 500 to purchase the papyri, an amount equivalent to around CHF 5,000 today.

The current value of such a papyrus collection, however, would be in the hundreds of thousands. The Basel collection contains 65 documents in five languages from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods and late antiquity. Most of the collection is made up of documentary papyri, which are primarily of social, cultural and religious historical interest as they record the daily life of ordinary people 2,000 years ago. Most of the Basel papyri have not been published and remained largely ignored by research until now.

35-year solar power contract enables lower prices

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The world’s first 35-year day or night solar contract (ACWA Power’s with DEWA in Dubai) also had a record-low price for solar with storage – of just 7.3 cents per kWh.

Energy developers always look to find ways to structure deals to reduce their costs. A key task in developing utility-scale renewable energy projects is finding every possible way to reduce the price at which you must sell power to make a project pencil out financially.

The advantage of any renewable energy like solar and wind is that with no future fuel purchases, there is no uncertain future expense, so being able to guarantee a set price over as long as possible would seem to leverage that advantage.

Normally solar contracts are only for 20 to 25 years. But in 2017, ACWA Power, a developer that is no stranger to innovative deal structures, applied out-of-the-box thinking on contract design to bid a record low price for solar with storage of just 7.3 cents per kilowatt hour for DEWA, in Dubai.

This ACWA Power PPA marked the first-ever 35-year contract for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), the thermal form of solar that can operate a power block from its energy storage.

With a longer contract, the costs incurred in developing and permitting any new income-generating projects can be put off while revenue continues, so there are more years of income generation to amortize the upfront costs. But how much did it actually reduce the price?

ETH Zürich Professor of Renewable Energy Policy Johan Lilliestam has calculated, in a paper online at Renewable Energy Focus, that as much as 2 cents per kWh was knocked off the bid in ACWA Power’s DEWA bid in Dubai.

In Concentrating solar power for less than USD 0.07 per kWh: finally the breakthrough? Lilliestam together with co-author Robert Pitz-Paal, co-director of the Institute of Solar Research at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) attribute the cost reduction in part to the unusually long 35-year contract.

The paper states: “…with a more standard 20-year PPA, the LCOE would be USD 0.106 per kWh, which is about the same as declared by many Chinese stations under construction [7]. The long PPA duration thus directly reduces the LCOE by some 2 cents per kWh; in addition, it could help de-risking the investment by giving a very long-term perspective for investors, thus reducing the cost of capital.”

But what additional costs might be incurred over a longer operating life?

In all energy-generating technologies, engineers must design components for a specific lifespan and have to prove that components will not fail within that time. Insurers guarantee components for a set time. The agreed 20-year design lifetime means engineers can design to meet one consistent requirement, ensuring that new components can be guaranteed to work reliably – and be insured – for that period.

Would the cost of replacing components outweigh the benefit of a 35-year contract? SENER knows what’s involved in designing a project for greater longevity, as the engineering and construction firm for the 510 MW ACWA Power CSP project in Morocco, NOOR I,II and III.

SENER has been technology provider and contractor for 29 CSP projects and in three of those, it provided – roughly – all the technology and half the EPC (Engineering, procurement, and construction).

SENER’s Gemasolar CSP project in Spain, the world’s first commercial solar tower, has operated with its day and night solar successfully since being grid-connected in 2011.

“I wouldn’t say there is a major problem for designing a plant for 35 years,” SENER Performance Guarantee Manager Sergio Relloso said. “In our plants we designed the components to last for 25 years and it is completely possible to last 35 years without a problem.”

Most of the expenses would fall under normal O&M costs. However, Relloso cautioned that higher O&M costs would be expected towards the end, for example in major equipment like the steam generators in the power block. But many of the expenses he described would be the normal O&M expenses, such as in the thermal energy storage system that enables CSP to generate solar at night.

“The HTF for example; we normally replace a small quantity year-by-year in a trough project just because with HTF there is some degradation,” he pointed out. ??”This is not the case with the salts in a tower project, because there you don’t have such a high temperature near the degradation limit for the salts which top out at 565°C, while their limit is 600ºC.”

ACWA Power’s 35-year DEWA project will combine both trough (600 MW) and tower (100 MW) technologies. In overall durability, mirrors, or heliostats – in both technologies – would see negligible degradation, Relloso said.

“We are not seeing any measurable degradation in our plants in mirrors; they have operated very well and normally the mirrors last a long time,” Relloso said, referencing SEGS.

“Mirrors have had a really good track record at SEGS. You would replace year by year the small number of mirrors that are broken maybe in a high wind event or during maintenance tasks. But the percentage of breakage of mirrors is in the range of .1% to .3% of mirrors in a year – it is a very normal operation to replace mirrors in a CSP plant.”

In a trough project, the receiver tubes that run along the length of the parabolic mirrors would have a higher replacement rate, he said, because “the receiver tubes in a trough plant are not as simple as the mirrors. They could be subjected to more degradation.”

But in both tower and trough technologies, Relloso said that all the metal components themselves would last – from the heliostat structures in the solar field to the pipe racks in the power block, as everything is adequately protected and designed for 35 years.

With the longer period at a known price, ACWA Power’s interesting contract design leverages the advantage of solar power generation; that its costs are more predictable over the long term than fossil energy, as the fuel is free.

With its ability to dispatch its power whenever needed, solar thermal energy competes directly with natural gas which is also a dispatchable form of thermal generation. Since CSP seems well suited to a 35-year lifespan, if the benefits outweigh the costs, longer contracts could enable lower costs going forward.

China archeo-tools suggest Man left Africa earlier than previously thought

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Ancient tools and bones discovered in Shangchen in the southern Chinese Loess Plateau by archaeologists suggest early humans left Africa and arrived in Asia earlier than previously thought.

The artefacts show that our earliest human ancestors colonised East Asia over two million years ago. They were found by a Chinese team that was led by Professor Zhaoyu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and included Professor Robin Dennell of Exeter University.

The tools were discovered at a locality called Shangchen in the southern Chinese Loess Plateau. The oldest are ca. 2.12 million years old, and are c. 270,000 years older than the 1.85 million year old skeletal remains and stone tools from Dmanisi, Georgia, which were previously the earliest evidence of humanity outside Africa.

The artefacts include a notch, scrapers, cobble, hammer stones and pointed pieces. All show signs of use – the stone had been intentionally flaked. Most were made of quartzite and quartz that probably came from the foothills of the Qinling Mountains 5 to 10 km to the south of the site, and the streams flowing from them. Fragments of animal bones 2.12 million years old were also found.

The Chinese Loess Plateau covers about 270,000 square kilometres, and during the past 2.6m years between 100 and 300m of wind-blown dust – known as loess – has been deposited in the area.  “Our discovery means it is necessary now to reconsider the timing of when early humans left Africa,” said Professor Dennell.

The 80 stone artefacts were found predominantly in 11 different layers of fossil soils which developed in a warm and wet climate. A further 16 items were found in six layers of loess that developed under colder and drier conditions. These 17 different layers of loess and fossil soils were formed during a period spanning almost a million years. This shows that early types of humans occupied the Chinese Loess Plateau under different climatic conditions between 1.2 and 2.12 million years ago.

The layers containing these stone tools were dated by linking the magnetic properties of the layers to known and dated changes in the earth’s magnetic field.

 

Growing a dinosaur’s dinner, the way it was 150 million years ago

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Scientists have measured the nutritional value of herbivore dinosaurs’ diet by growing their food in atmospheric conditions similar to those found roughly 150 million years ago.

Previously, many scientists believed that plants grown in an atmosphere with high carbon dioxide levels had low nutritional value. But a new experimental approach led by Dr Fiona Gill at the University of Leeds has shown this is not necessarily true.

The team grew dinosaur food plants, such as horsetail and ginkgo, under high levels of carbon dioxide mimicking atmospheric conditions similar to when sauropod dinosaurs, the largest animals ever to roam Earth, would have been widespread.

An artificial fermentation system was used to simulate digestion of the plant leaves in the sauropods’ stomachs, allowing the researchers to determine the leaves’ nutritional value. The findings, published in Palaeontology, showed many of the plants had significantly higher energy and nutrient levels than previously believed.

This suggests that the megaherbivores would have needed to eat much less per day and the ecosystem could potentially have supported a significantly higher dinosaur population density, possibly as much as 20% greater than previously estimated.

Dr Gill, a palaeontologist and geochemist from the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: “The climate was very different in the Mesozoic era – when the huge brachiosaurus and diplodocus lived – with possibly much higher carbon dioxide levels. There has been the assumption that as plants grow faster and/or bigger under higher CO2 levels, their nutritional value decreases. Our results show this isn’t the case for all plant species.

“The large body size of sauropods at that time would suggest they needed huge quantities of energy to sustain them. When the available food source has higher nutrient and energy levels it means less food needs to be consumed to provide sufficient energy, which in turn can affect population size and density.

“Our research doesn’t give the whole picture of dinosaur diet or cover the breadth of the plants that existed at this time, but a clearer understanding of how the dinosaurs ate can help scientists understand how they lived.”

“The exciting thing about our approach to growing plants in prehistoric atmospheric conditions is that it can used to simulate other ecosystems and diets of other ancient megaherbivores, such as Miocene mammals – the ancestors of many modern mammals.”

Deaths from heart-related disease rising in India, study finds

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Death due to heart-related disease is on the rise in India, causing more than one-fourth of all deaths in the country in 2015 and affecting significantly rural populations and young adults the most, suggests a study.

This work is the first nationally representative study to measure cardiovascular mortality in India, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada. The study found that rates of dying from ischaemic heart disease – cardiac issues caused by a narrowing of the heart’s arteries – in populations aged 30 to 69 increased rapidly in rural areas of India and surpassed those in urban areas between the year 2000 and 2015.

In contrast, the probability of dying from stroke decreased overall, but increased in India’s northeastern states, where a third of premature stroke deaths occurred and only one sixth of the population lives, said the study. In these states, deaths due to stroke were about 3 times higher than the country’s average.

“The finding that cardiac disease rose nationally in India and that stroke rose in some states was surprising,” said Dr. Jha, who is also a professor at the University of Toronto. “This study also unearthed an important fact for prevention of death due to cardiovascular disease. Most deaths were among people with previously known cardiac disease, and at least half were not taking any regular medications.”

Led by Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, a new study found that rates of dying from ischemic heart disease — cardiac issues caused by a narrowing of the heart’s arteries — in populations aged 30 to 69 increased rapidly in rural areas of India and surpassed those in urban areas between the year 2000 and 2015.CREDIT: St. Michael’s Hospital

Dr. Jha and his team also showed that younger adults, born after 1970, have the highest rate of death due to heart problems caused by narrowing of the heart’s arteries, leading to ischaemic heart failure and stroke. Until now, most of the evidence of cardiovascular mortality in India has come from local studies and the new study has more detailed information that “we couldn’t have predicted based on earlier studies,” said Dr. Jha.

This research is part of the Million Death Study, one of the largest studies of premature deaths in the world. In India, most deaths occur at home and without medical attention. Hundreds of specially trained census staff in India knocked on doors to interview household members about deaths. Two physicians independently examined these “verbal autopsies” to establish the most likely cause of death.

“Making progress in fighting the leading cause of death in India is necessary for making progress at the global level,” Dr. Jha said. “We demonstrated the unexpected patterns of heart attack and stroke deaths. Both conditions need research and action if the world is going to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of reducing cardiovascular mortality by 2030.”

The study was published in The Lancet Global Health.

84 endangered Amur leopards found in China, Russia

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In a good and bad news to tiger conservationists, scientists estimate that 84 highly endangered Amur leopards are roaming in the wild across its current range along the southernmost border of Primorskii Province in Russia and Jilin Province of China.

This new estimate of the Amur leopard population was recently reported in the scientific journal, Conservation Letters by scientists from China, Russia, and the United States. The scientists combined forces to collate information from camera traps on both sides of the border of China and Russia to derive the estimate. Because there are no records of leopards in other parts of its former range, this estimate represents the total global population of this subspecies in the wild.

Although numbers are small, previous estimates in Russia were even less, ranging from 25 to 50 individuals. However, those surveys, based on tracks left in the snow, were extremely difficult to interpret due to the unclear relationship between numbers of tracks and number of individuals. With camera traps, each individual can be identified by its unique spot pattern, providing a much more precise estimate.

Combining data from both countries increased precision of the estimate, and provided greater accuracy. Surprisingly, about one-third of the leopards were photographed on both sides of the Sino-Russian border.

Anya Vitkalova, a biologist at Land of the Leopard National Park in Russia, and one of the two lead authors of the publication said: “We knew that leopards moved across the border, but only by combining data were we able to understand how much movement there really is.”

Despite the movement, there were differences in population dynamics in Russia versus China. Leopards are currently recolonizing habitat in China by dispersing from the Russian side, where leopard numbers appear to be close to the maximum that can be supported.

Because of these transboundary movements of leopards, simply adding results from both sides would have greatly exaggerated the estimate.

Dale Miquelle, a co-author and Tiger Program Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society noted: “This first rigorous estimate of the global population of the Amur leopard represents an excellent example of the value of international collaboration. The trust and goodwill generated by this joint effort lays the foundation for future transboundary conservation actions.”

JEE, NEET go GMAT way, to hold entrance test twice a year

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The Joint Entrance Examination (Mains) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) will be conducted twice a year instead of just once, and the best score will be taken into account for admissions.

Union Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar announced it on Saturday that the National Testing Agency (NTA) would conduct of these exams and not the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). In addition, the NTA will also conduct UGC NET, CMAT and GPAT examinations from this year itself.

A senior official said the tests will be made foolproof as they have to be downloaded at the test centres just before the exam and then distributed to all candidates through a local server on computers. The whole system will be encrypted.

“There would be no examiners and the answers would be fed into the system. So, a candidate would know her raw score immediately. The result would come out after some days to address any possible complaints,” the official told the Hindu.

Those who did not have a computer at home can practise at authorised centres which will start functioning from August this year.

Out of 10.5 lakh students who took the JEE this year, two lakh took it online, he noted. “If schools consider holding some Class-11 exams mandatorily online, students will catch up faster,” former CBSE Chairman Ashok Ganguly told The Hindu.

Where’s world’s largest mobile manufacturing unit? It’s here in NOIDA, India

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 for re-sale in refurbished shape and price

Samsung India will open its new manufacturing in India that would be the largest mobile manufacturing unit in the world, beginning Monday, July 9, 2018. With this, China’s lead in making mobile phones will come down.

Built in a 35-acre complex at Sector 81 in Noida, Uttar Pradesh but almost in Delhi, the new factory will be inaugurated by the visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday.

The first Samsung’s manufacturing facility was set up way back in 1997 and upgraded in 2005 with mobiles, which will emerge the largest in the world with the addition of new complex in Noida.

In June 2017, South Korean company Samsung said it would invest Rs.4,915 crore investment to expand the Noida plant to double its production, which is likely by 2019. From the current production of 67 million smartphone units being manufactured in India, the company is expecting to produce 120 million mobile phones by the end of next year.

Samsung is already a house name in India with many home appliances like refrigerators and flat-panel televisions being made here. The NOIDA unit will be nearer to the capital and the entire northern market, giving the company lee way in terms of distribution.

In the south, Samsung has its facility in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, where some key R&D centre is currently in existence. Samsung India employs over 70,000 people. Once the new unit in NOIDA comes up, the company will be manufacturing its 50% of world production in India alone.

With over Rs 50,000 crore sales annually, Samsung India is likely to triple its sales figures in India by the end of 2020.