Hey there, welcome to my blog Mufawad. In this weekly writeup, wherein I cover the current science, I will try to delve into the new scientific research that happened in the past week or so and explore the latest technologies and breakthroughs/events that were achieved in this domain.
Whether you
are a student, a professional, or simply a science enthusiast, this article
will provide you an engaging and informative insights and updates. Plus, as a
compliment, you will get a peep into pretty quirky AI generated images by me
related to those particular topics.
Researchers prepare first 3D structure of human odour
receptors
OpenAI unveils GPT 4, What it
means for science
What actually is poisoning
the Iranian schoolgirls
A new disease that occurs due
to plastics discovered
Our Heart rate influence the perception of Time
Scientists found huge Volcanic
activities on Venus
Sweeteners used in food
suppress our Immune system
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| ChatGPT 4 unveiled, What is Poisoning Iranian school girls, New diseases due to plastics discovered and other Science news of the Week; Pic: Mufawad |
Researchers prepare first 3D structure of human odour
receptors
Researchers
have mapped the precise 3D structure of a human odour receptor, taking a further
step forward in understanding the most enigmatic of our senses i.e the sense of
Smell.
The study,
published in Nature last week, describes an olfactory receptor called OR51E2
and shows how it 'recognizes' the smell of cheese through specific
molecular interactions that switch the receptor on.
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| Image generated by Mufawad using AI |
The human
genome contains 400 olfactory receptors that can detect many odours, but little
is known about how these receptors detect molecules and translate them into
scents.
Technical
challenges in producing mammalian olfactory-receptor proteins have made it
difficult to study how these receptors bind to odorants. This means that they
cannot be grown or stabilized in commonly used cell lines.
Now Manglik and
his colleagues from University of California, San Francisco focused on the
OR51E2 receptor, which has functions beyond odorant recognition and is found not
only in olfactory neurons but also in gut, kidney and prostate tissues.
The team
purified the receptor and analysed the structure of particularly propionate-bound
and unbound OR51E2 using cryo-electron microscopy and computer-aided
simulations.
They found that
propionate binds the receptor through specific ionic and hydrogen bonds that
anchor the propionate's carboxylic acid to an amino acid, arginine, in a region
of the receptor called the binding pocket.
These molecular
interactions are crucial for understanding how pushing on one side of the
receptor turns the other side on, and scientists have long dreamed of building
a molecular atlas of olfactory receptors that maps their chemical structures
and which combinations of receptors correspond to particular odours.
OpenAI unveils GPT 4, What it
means for Science
The famous AI
company Open-AI last week unveiled GPT-4, the latest incarnation of the large
language model that powers its popular chat bot ChatGPT.
It has already
stunned people with its ability to create human-like text and generate images
and computer code from almost any prompt, but some are frustrated that they
cannot yet access the technology, its underlying code or information on how it
was trained.
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| P.C: Open AI |
This raises
concern about the technology's safety and makes it less useful for research,
say scientists. OpenAI's secrecy around how and what data the model was trained
on, and how it actually works, has become an Achilles heel for the science
community.
As reported in
Scientific America, Andrew White, a chemical engineer at University of
Rochester, has had privileged access to the platform as a 'red-teamer': a
person paid by OpenAI to test the platform to try and make it do something bad.
As part of his
red-team work, OpenAI engineers gave GPT-4 access to scientific papers,
allowing it to gain new abilities. However, these abilities come with concerns,
such as allowing dangerous chemicals to be made and outputting false
information.
OpenAI says
that it has improved safety in the latest version, but without access to the
data used for training, it is impossible to do scientific work with a model
like this.
Some
researchers in the field of AI are concerned about how GPT-4 was trained, as it
could allegedly be biased. They are also concerned that increasingly these AI
systems are owned by big tech companies, and that any legislation around AI
technologies will struggle to keep up with the pace of development.
To address such
concerns, an invitational summit is supposed to be organized at the University
of Amsterdam on 11 April to discuss these concerns, with representatives from
organizations including UNESCO's science-ethics committee, Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Economic Forum.
Despite the concern, researchers believe that AI and its future iterations will shake up science, as they can connect papers, data programmes, libraries and computational work.
What actually is poisoning the Iranian schoolgirls
Iran's government has arrested more than 100 people that it says are responsible for an unknown sickness that has affected potentially thousands of schoolgirls.
Human-rights
activists say one of the earliest cases reported in the media was at a school
in the northern city of Qom as early as November 2022. Hundreds of videos have
since been posted on social media of girls and young women reporting symptoms
including fatigue, burning throats, nausea, headaches and numbness, that sometimes
are usually experienced after smelling a variety of odours.
The overwhelming majority of the victims are from girls-only high schools aged between 12 to 18. Although the cases are being reported across the country, however the epicentre seems to be the capital Tehran and Qom, which is the centre for the study of Islamic theology and philosophy.
Toxicologists
have seen the results of blood tests from young people who have been
hospitalized, but it is not always possible to detect poisoning in this way. A
comprehensive toxicological screen and a representative number of cases would
be needed.
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| Image generated by Mufawad using AI |
According to
NYT science, Keith Ward, a chemist at George Mason University in Fairfax,
Virginia, and Dan Kaszeta, a toxicologist at the Royal United Services
Institute, a think tank in London working on military issues, are not ruling
out the possibility of an episode of mass psychogenic illness, which arises
from anxiety in response to fears of a threat or knowledge that a threat could
be imminent.
Other
researchers say it is too soon to be searching for psychogenic causes.
Researchers, human-rights groups and some governments say that an independent
investigation should be carried into the events in Iran.
It could be
carried out through the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), which is part of the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention and
based in The Hague, the Netherlands. A thorough investigation would include
interviews with victims, toxicological tests, analyses of clinical histories,
an epidemiological study and environmental sampling.
Iran has enough
trained experts and equipment to carry out toxicological investigations, and if
the cause is poison, who might be responsible.
A new disease that occurs due to plastics discovered
A new disease caused solely by
plastics has been discovered in seabirds, named as plasticosis. It is the first
recorded instance of specifically plastic-induced fibrosis in wild animals, and
is widespread across different species of birds.
Scientists studied flesh-footed
shearwaters from Australia's Lord Howe Island and found that the more plastic a
bird had ingested, the more scarring it had. The disease can lead to the
gradual breakdown of tubular glands in the proventriculus, which can cause the
birds to become more vulnerable to infection and parasites and affect their
ability to digest food and absorb vitamins.
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| Image generated by Mufawad using AI |
When birds ingest small pieces
of plastic, it inflames the digestive tract and causes tissue to become scarred
and disfigured, affecting digestion, growth and survival.
This is the first time that
stomach tissue has been investigated in this way and shows that plastic
consumption can cause serious damage to these birds' digestive system.
Although the scientists studied
only one species of bird in one part of the world, but believe it is likely
that more species are affected. They say the exposure of all organisms to
plastic is inevitable, because plastic emissions are increasing and plastic
pollution is becoming prevalent in all environments globally.
The ingestion of plastic has far-reaching and severe consequences, many of which we are only just beginning to fully understand, including damage to health and reproductive viability.
Our Heart rate influence the perception of Time
A study published this month in
the journal Psychophysiology by psychologists at Cornell University found that
time can be distorted by heartbeats, whose length is variable from moment to
moment.
The study fitted undergraduates
with electrocardiograms to measure the length of each heartbeat precisely, and
then asked them to estimate the length of brief audio tones. The results showed
that after a longer heartbeat interval, subjects tended to perceive the tone as
longer; shorter intervals led subjects to assess the tone as shorter.
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| Image generated by Mufawad using AI |
As reported in Nature, Saeedeh
Sadeghi, a doctoral candidate at Cornell and the study's lead author, said that
a lower heart rate appeared to assist with perception, as the beats of the
heart are noise to the cortex.
The study provides more evidence
that "there is no single part of the brain or body that keeps time"
and that it is all a network. Interest in the perception of time has exploded
since the Covid pandemic, when activity outside the home came to an abrupt halt
for many and people faced stretches of undifferentiated time.
A study of time perception
conducted during the first year of a lockdown in Britain found that 80 percent
of participants reported distortions in time, in different directions. Older,
more socially isolated people reported that time slowed, and younger, more
active people reported that it sped up.
According to The Nature, Ruth S.
Ogden, a psychology professor at Liverpool John Moores University and the
author of the lockdown study, said that people with depression experience a
slowing of time, and that slowing of time is experienced as being a worsening
factor of the depression.
The new Cornell study addresses
something different: how we perceive the passage of milliseconds. Understanding
those mechanisms may help us to manage trauma, in which instantaneous
experiences are remembered as drawn out.
Scientists found huge Volcanic activities on Venus
Scientists have found some of the strongest evidence yet that there is strong volcanic activity on Venus, which is a close neighbour to Earth and originally had water on its surface.
By examining radar images of the planet's surface collected
by NASA's Magellan spacecraft between 1990 and 1992, researchers have
determined that a volcanic vent located in Venus's Atla Regio area changed
shape between two images taken eight months apart, suggesting an eruption or
flow of magma beneath the vent.
As reported in The Science, the scientists presented the
Paper at The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in the Woodlands, Texas. The
study will brings the astronomy community one step closer to figuring out how
Venus works.
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| Image generated by Mufawad using AI |
Gathering evidence that the planet is volcanically active
wasn't easy, as Venus's thick atmosphere and high temperatures make it
difficult for rovers and other probes to explore the surface.
Robert Herrick, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks, and Scott Hensley, a radar scientist at JPL, analysed
full-resolution radar images captured by Magellan of areas with suspected
volcanic activity.
Magellan imaged Venus in three cycles over a 24-month
period, and the scientists had to superimpose the images at various angles and
find overlaps in the terrain to line them up.
The upcoming missions to Venus, VERITAS, could help
researchers understand more about how the Venus works and also learn more about
exoplanets beyond the Solar System. However, VERITAS which was supposed to be
launched in 2028 has been delayed, and even if NASA restores funding, the
mission would launch no earlier than 2031.
This could cause problems for other missions, as VERITAS
would have provided NASA's DAVINCI and the European Space Agency's EnVision
missions with information to help them target the areas they're planning to
explore in next decade.
The researchers believe that the latest findings will
motivate people to turn their eyes towards Venus and prompt NASA to launch
VERITAS on time.
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| Image generated by Mufawad using AI |
To test whether the effect was the same in living animals,
the researchers gave mice water bottles containing a dose of sucralose that is
the rodent equivalent of the maximum safe intake in humans. These mice showed
impaired T cell responses, compared with mice in control groups that were given
either water or other sweeteners.
The authors call for more research to better understand any
impacts of the molecule on people's health, but suggest that it could be used
to tamp down conditions that cause a hyperactive immune system.
Sucralose has been found to have a positive effect on the
immune system, impairing only T cells and not other immune cells, and it
doesn't accumulate inside the T cells. Previous research has shown that
sucralose can affect the fluidity of cell membranes, which might make it more
difficult for T cells to communicate.
To test this theory in animals, the researchers gave high
doses of the sweetener to mice that were bred to be predisposed to type 1
diabetes, an autoimmune condition that causes T cells to attack pancreatic
cells.
After 30 weeks, only about one-third of the mice that were
given the sweetener developed diabetes, while all the mice given only water had
developed the condition. The results highlight the possibility that the
sweetener could one day be used therapeutically to treat autoimmune conditions,
and if future research were to find a similar effect in humans, it could be
administered alongside more-conventional immunosuppressive drugs.
This avenue of research is promising, especially because
sucralose is cheap to manufacture and would have fewer unwanted side effects.
