Citrus Fruits cause Melanoma Skin Cancer

 Study finds Citrus Fruits may cause Melanoma Skin Cancer

A team of researchers are suggesting from past studies that a link appears to exist between citrus fruits consumption and malignant melanoma, a skin condition that manifests as an abnormal mass of tissue growth on the skin.

However, the researchers did not really tell if the study revealed that citrus fruits caused skin cancers, but other assessors have called for more research into this possibility before a definite conclusion is reached.

Dr. Abrar Qureshi of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital noted that an observational study was not sufficient to draw any conclusions about everyone in the United States. Gureshi together with the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collaborated to work on the study through.

Qureshi stated that cutaneous malignant melanoma may turn out to be a fatal form of skin cancer, and that regardless of the fact that medical treatments are available for the condition, people should prevent it by screening themselves from the sun and going periodical skin cancer examinations.

In the study that lasted from the mid-1980s to 2010, the researchers analyzed data from 63,000 women and 41,000 men; and these were checked every 2-4 years to determine their dietary pattern as well as self-reported melanoma observations among other things.

The participants reported that they ate grapefruit and oranges, but they did not report whether they consumed lemons and limes which were all citrus.

However, over a 20-year-period, about 1,840 of the participants development melanoma. Further analyses showed that those who consumed citrus fruits 2-4 times within a week had a 10% higher chances of developing melanoma than people who ate it once or twice in any week.

The researchers noted that the more people ate citrus the more risks they run with melanoma, and those who consumed it for over 1.5 times daily had 36% higher risks than those who do not. Funny enough, the link is found more with grapefruit than other citrus fruits.

While more studies need to be done, Qureshi warned that people should not quit eating fruits and vegetables on account of the study because these are important for overall health, but people engaging in prolonged outdoor activities should protect themselves from the sun in all means possible.
Source : pulseheadlines



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Methane on Pluto confirmed: NASA

Methane on Pluto confirmed: NASA

IANS

Washington, July 1 (IANS) NASA's New Horizon probe -- set for a Pluto flyby on July 14 -- has confirmed that there is frozen methane on Pluto's surface.

The Earth-based astronomers first observed Methane on Pluto in 1976.

"We already knew there was methane on Pluto but these are our first detections," said Will Grundy, team leader with the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Soon, we will know if there are differences in the presence of methane ice from one part of Pluto to another, he added in a statement.

New Horizons is now about 16 million km from the Pluto system - around 4.75 billion km from the Earth.
Methane was detected by a team of ground-based astronomers led by New Horizons team member Dale Cruikshank of NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California.

The detection was made possible by the help from the infrared spectrometer on New Horizons spacecraft.
Methane is an odourless, colourless gas that is present underground and in the atmosphere on the Earth.
On Pluto, methane may be primordial, inherited from the solar nebula from which the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Just hours after its flyby of Pluto on July 14, the spacecraft will observe sunlight passing through the planet's atmosphere, to help scientists determine the atmosphere's composition.

"It will be as if Pluto were illuminated from behind by a trillion-watt light bulb," noted New Horizons scientist Randy Gladstone.

The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.

"We are really on the final path. It just gets better and more exciting every day," said project manager Glen Fountain.
Source : ianslive



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New Antibody Protect Marburg and Ebola viruses

New antibody treatment may protect against Marburg and Ebola viruses

New immune molecules have been identified that offer protection against Marburg virus - a deadly relative of Ebola virus.

The above antibodies identify and neutralize Marburg virus, which inflicts a mortality rate of up to 90%.
Image credit: The Scripps Research Institute

 
Identified in 1967 among laboratory workers in Uganda who had handled infected animals, Marburg virus was the first of the class of viruses known as filoviruses - which also includes Ebola - to be identified.
The most lethal strain of Marburg emerged in 2004, resulting in an outbreak with a catastrophic fatality rate of 88%. The virus is known to have a mortality rate of up to 90%.

With the world still reeling from the Ebola epidemic of 2014, there is renewed interest in the deadly potential of filoviruses and what treatments may be effective against them.

Previously, researchers from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, had discovered the molecular structure used by the Marburg virus to attach itself to and enter host cells.

Key to defeating the virus is identifying vulnerable sites on the surface of the virus that antibodies can bind to. Studies have found that certain "cocktails" of antibodies can raise an alarm to the immune system and block Ebola virus from entering new cells, so scientists have been investigating similar approaches to tackle Marburg virus.

Earlier this year, the Scripps team reported some success at identifying antibodies effective against one site on Marburg in a study conducted in association with Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. In the new study, the Scripps team designed proteins that elicited new antibodies effective against other sites on the virus.

One of these targets was a site that had not been seen in previous studies of the virus. This new site is described as "a wing-like feature" attached to the virus at its base. The antibodies targeting this site were found to be effective at protecting 90-100% of the mice in the study from lethal infection. 
 
The researchers report that the antibodies investigated in the study are also effective against Ebola virus and its four viral relatives.

Antibodies could be used to diagnose Marburg and Ebola mutations

The study's first author, Marnie Fusco, says that as both Marburg and Ebola are likely to acquire new mutations, "the cross-reactive antibodies could be used as diagnostics for newly emerging strains."
Cory Nykiforuk, director of pipeline research of Emergent BioSolutions - who initiated the study with the Scripps team 6 years ago - says:

"Understanding where and how the antibodies interact with the virus tells us which regions can be targeted and helps us develop lead candidates for clinical development.
There are multiple filoviruses that threaten our communities, frontline medical workers and defense personnel, and bringing new technologies to the forefront could potentially help meet future requirements."

Nykiforuk's predecessor at Emergent BioSolutions, Jody Berry, adds that the "high cost of creating independent vaccines or treatments for each of the different viruses in this family necessitates intelligent design of immunogens (antibody-inducing molecules). The molecular images used to design the molecules and evaluate the antibodies point the way forward."

Last year, a study published in the open-access journal mBio found that filoviruses such as Marburg and Ebola edit genetic material as they infect their hosts.

Written by David McNamee
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Brain will predict OCD treatment

Doctors may be able to predict how people with obsessive-compulsive disorder will respond to therapy using a simple brain scan, according to the findings of a new study.
 

Obsessive-compulsive disorder often causes people to perform certain rituals and behaviors repetitively to relieve anxiety.

The study, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, is the first to use brain connectivity to predict the progression of a condition after treatment, as well as being the first to assess the impact of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) on brain network connectivity.

"The efficiency of brain network connectivity before treatment predicts the worsening of symptoms after treatment," states study author Jamie Feusner, an associate professor psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Between 1-2% of the American population is estimated to have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The disorder is characterized by frequent upsetting thoughts that patients will try to control through the repetition of certain rituals and behaviors.

Not only can OCD be a profoundly distressing condition but it can also severely disrupt the everyday routines of those who experience it, adversely affecting the ability to learn, work or maintain relationships.
CBT is frequently used as a form of treatment for OCD, teaching patients different ways of reacting to situations that cause distress without having obsessive thoughts or acting compulsively.

Unfortunately, CBT is not effective for every patient. In fact, the authors of the study state that in an estimated 20% of patients, the symptoms of OCD eventually return after a course of CBT has finished.
Understanding what factors help predict who will relapse after CBT has long been a goal for psychiatry researchers. The new study, conducted by researchers at UCLA and colleagues, indicates that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could help.

For the study, the researchers examined the brains of 17 participants with OCD aged 21-50. Each participant received a 4-week course of CBT, and fMRI scans were taken of their brains both before and after the therapy. Over the following 12 months, doctors monitored their clinical symptoms.

"We found that cognitive behavioral therapy itself results in more densely connected local brain networks, which likely reflects more efficient brain activity," says Feusner.

Scans showing functional network efficiency found to predict OCD relapse

The participants whose scans revealed more efficient brain connectivity before CBT fared worse during the follow-up period than those whose connectivity was less efficient before receiving therapy.

In contrast, the severity of symptoms prior to CBT and how well the symptoms improved following CBT did not predict how well the participants would fare during the follow-up period.

This clue to how patients will respond to CBT in the long term could prove to be beneficial to both doctors and patients in the future if the results can be confirmed in larger studies.

"Cognitive-behavioral therapy is in many cases very effective, at least in the short term. But it is costly, time-consuming, difficult for patients and, in many areas, not available," Feusner explains. "Thus, if someone will end up having their symptoms return, it would be useful to know before they get treatment."
 
For those who might find a 4-week course of CBT ineffective, Feusner is keen to point out that alternative forms of treatment exist. Anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants are commonly prescribed by doctors, and longer courses of CBT could be beneficial.

The researchers now aim to validate their findings by conducting a study with a larger number of patients. While doing so, they will also look at other measures of brain function and structure in the hope of identifying further predictors of the clinical course of OCD post-treatment.

"We are now starting to translate knowledge of the brain into useful information that in the future could be used by doctors and patients to make clinical decisions," Feusner concludes.
"Although a brain scan may seem expensive, these scans only took about 15 minutes and thus the cost is not exceptionally high, particularly in comparison to medication or cognitive-behavioral therapy treatments, which over time can cost many thousands of dollars."

Previously, Medical News Today reported on a study that found CBT used to reduce chronic tics in people with Tourette syndrome can also alter the functioning in specific areas of the patients' brains.

Written by James McIntosh
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Graphene flexes its electronic muscles

Rice-led researchers calculate electrical properties of carbon cones, other shapes

Flexing graphene may be the most basic way to control its electrical properties, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at Rice University and in Russia.

The Rice lab of Boris Yakobson in collaboration with researchers in Moscow found the effect is pronounced and predictable in nanocones and should apply equally to other forms of graphene.

The researchers discovered it may be possible to access what they call an electronic flexoelectric effect in which the electronic properties of a sheet of graphene can be manipulated simply by twisting it a certain way.
The work will be of interest to those considering graphene elements in flexible touchscreens or memories that store bits by controlling electric dipole moments of carbon atoms, the researchers said.

Perfect graphene - an atom-thick sheet of carbon - is a conductor, as its atoms' electrical charges balance each other out across the plane. But curvature in graphene compresses the electron clouds of the bonds on the concave side and stretches them on the convex side, thus altering their electric dipole moments, the characteristic that controls how polarized atoms interact with external electric fields.

The researchers who published their results this month in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters discovered they could calculate the flexoelectric effect of graphene rolled into a cone of any size and length.

The researchers used density functional theory to compute dipole moments for individual atoms in a graphene lattice and then figure out their cumulative effect. They suggested their technique could be used to calculate the effect for graphene in other more complex shapes, like wrinkled sheets or distorted fullerenes, several of which they also analyzed.

"While the dipole moment is zero for flat graphene or cylindrical nanotubes, in between there is a family of cones, actually produced in laboratories, whose dipole moments are significant and scale linearly with cone length," Yakobson said.

Carbon nanotubes, seamless cylinders of graphene, do not display a total dipole moment, he said. While not zero, the vector-induced moments cancel each other out.

That's not so with a cone, in which the balance of positive and negative charges differ from one atom to the next, due to slightly different stresses on the bonds as the diameter changes. The researchers noted atoms along the edge also contribute electrically, but analyzing two cones docked edge-to-edge allowed them to cancel out, simplifying the calculations.

Yakobson sees potential uses for the newly found characteristic. "One possibly far-reaching characteristic is in the voltage drop across a curved sheet," he said. "It can permit one to locally vary the work function and to engineer the band-structure stacking in bilayers or multiple layers by their bending. It may also allow the creation of partitions and cavities with varying electrochemical potential, more 'acidic' or 'basic,' depending on the curvature in the 3-D carbon architecture."

###

Co-authors are Alexander Kvashnin, a graduate student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a researcher at the Technological Institute of Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials, and Pavel Sorokin, who has appointments at the Technological Institute of Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials and the National University of Science and Technology, Moscow. Both are former members of the Yakobson Group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, a professor of chemistry and a member of Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

The Russian Federation, Moscow State University, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative supported the research. Work at Rice was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.
Source : eurekalert

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Tips For Starting Your SEO Journey

Tips For Starting Your SEO Journey

If you’ve recently founded or taken over a small business, it’s time to start learning how to optimize your new website for both search engines and viewers. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of four SEO tips that can be used to establish a firm foundation for your company’s future search engine optimization campaigns:

1. It’s good to be unique

Search engines favour content that is completely original and unique. Content that you have reposted or copied from other sites will not help you reach the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). In fact, it will see you penalised, and you’ll drop down quite far in the rankings. As the founder of a new business or the new owner of an existing one, you have a golden opportunity to create a new website with bold, original content that viewers and search engines alike will love. Because you don’t have to work with a pre-existing website, you don’t have to worry about it being weighed down with copied, generic content. With just a little work, your new site can be a beacon of original, high-quality content – with no ‘filler’ that might drag down its position in the SERPs. Of course, climbing to the first page of a search engine’s results takes time, but the process will be a lot quicker for sites that start out with fresh content and new ideas.

2. Variety is the spice of life

Search engines are no longer confined to performing general searches for web pages. Today’s engines allow web-users to search for specific content-types, such as images and videos. Naturally, you want your website to show up in every type of search, as this will increase the number of web-users who will come across your site. You shouldn’t risk potential customers missing your website simply because they were performing an image or video search, rather than a general search! Make sure your site contains a wide variety of different content-types to make sure you attract viewers from every type of web-search. It’s also worth bearing in mind that viewers tend to prefer sites that have multiple forms of content to offer – nobody likes being confronted with an unbroken wall of text, after all!

3. Keywords require care

Everyone knows that keywords are a vital part of any SEO strategy. They are the primary tool that search engines use to determine how relevant a web page is to the search a customer entered. Working keywords and long-chain key phrases into your site’s content is therefore essential. However, you may not realise that it’s possible to overuse keywords. Today’s search engine algorithms can spot when keywords have been awkwardly and inorganically ‘stuffed’ into content, and will penalise sites for it. Regardless of what keywords you want to rank for in the SERPs, you need to make sure that they appear in your content as naturally as possible and aren’t used excessively or in a way that suggests they have been ‘shoe-horned in’.

4. Your site is never ‘done’

When you’ve put together an effective, engaging website, it might be tempting to lean back, admire your work and call it a day. However, the SEO landscape is constantly shifting and changing. What’s more, search engines favour sites that regularly change or update their content. As such, you should never think of your website as being 100% complete – it can always be tweaked, updated and improved. Obviously, it doesn’t need to be completely overhauled every other day, but it pays to devote a few hours a week to making minor adjustments or adding fresh blog posts.

5. Keep an eye on your stats

These days search engines use a number of user signals to rank your page, these determine whether visitors are engaging with your site and content. Search engines are out there to make money at the end of the day so they want to send their users to the most relevant content for their search, otherwise people would stop using them. Metrics to keep an eye out for include bounce rate – or more specifically reducing your bounce rate as much as possible, dwell time and SERP click through rate. The best place to get this data is from Google Analytics and Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).

Regardless of what kind of business you run, the SEO advice we’ve provided here can help you put it on the map or, quite literally, on the first page of the SERPs!
Source : business2community

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