New Material Makes N-Fuel Recycling Cleaner, Cheaper

                Scientists have found a new material that may help recycle and reduce wastage of nuclear fuels as well as save energy, making the reprocessing of radioactive materials cleaner and less expensive. Conventional technologies to remove these radioactive gases operate at extremely low, energy-intensive temperatures. By working at ambient temperature, the new material – known as metal-organic frameworks – can save energy, make reprocessing cleaner and less expensive. The reclaimed materials can also be reused commercially.

A New DNA Treatment As The Future Of Cancer Treatment

                A revolutionary new DNA treatment technique makes you six times more likely to beat cancer. The new technique involves having a simple £200(Rs 19,386) DNA test of your tumour first. This them tells doctors precisely which drugs or therapies are most suited to you, rather than relying on the standard treatment.

                Precision medicine studies presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting are expected to show unprecedented results. One study of 13,000 patients taking part in early clinical trials of drugs found those undergoing genetic testing of their tumours before any treatment – so that they could then be given targeted therapies instead of standard drugs were six times more likely to see their tumours shrink or disappear altogether. It is the first analysis of precision medicine treatments.

                It is a very different way to treatment. It’s the most exciting thing since chemotherapy. It was about using reliable technology to better treat patients and giving them the most appropriate choice. Precision medicine was about finding the right key for the lock, finding out what it is that is driving the tumour, what make it tick. At the moment, it is informed guesswork, so that treatment often doesn’t work for large numbers of patients. I believe the potential of precision medicine is huge.

Universal Cancer Vaccine Gets a Step Closer

                Scientists have inched closer towards creating a universal vaccine against cancer that makes the body’s immune system attack tumours as if they were a virus. An international team of researchers described how they had taken pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles of fat and then injected the mixture into the blood streams of three patients in the advanced stages of the disease. The patients’ immune systems responded by producing “killer” T-cells designed to attack cancer. The vaccine was also found to be effective in fighting “aggressively growing” tumours in mice.

Such vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumour antigen (a protein attacked by the immune system) can be encoded by RNA. Thus, the nonoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy. The aim of trial was not to test how well the vaccine worked. While the patients’ immune systems seemed to react, there was no evidence that their cancers went away as a result. In one patient, a suspected tumour on a lymph node got smaller. Another patient, whose tumours had been surgically removed, was cancer-free seven months after vaccination. The third patient had eight tumours that had spread from the initial skin cancer into lungs. These tumours remained “clinically stable”.

The vaccine, which used different pieces of RNA, activated dendritic cells that select target for the immune system to attack, the vaccine also produced limited flu-like side effects in contrast to the extreme sickness caused by chemotherapy. Cancer immunotherapy is currently causing significant excitement in the medical community. It is already being used to treat some cancers with a number of patients still in remission more than 10 years after treatment. While traditional cancer treatment for testicular and other form of the disease can lead to a complete cure, lung cancer, melanoma, and some brain and neck cancers have proved difficult to treat.

Immunotherapy for cancer is a rapidly evolving and exciting field. This new study shows that an immune response against the antigens within a cancer can be triggered by a new type of cancer vaccine. There is uncertainty around whether the therapeutic benefit seen in the mice will also apply to humans, and the practical challenge of manufacturing nanoparticles for widespread clinical application.

Scientists Discovered a Gigantic Exoplanet, HATS-18b

                On 2 June 2016, International team of astronomers found an alien world named HATS-18b. It is a giant hot Jupiter exoplanet tidally spinning up its parent star. The team led by Kaloyan Penev of Princeton University carried out the observation campaign between April 2011 and July 2013.

About Exoplanet, HATS-18b:

•          The newly discovered planetary system could be a great laboratory for to test the theories of planet-star interactions.
•          The research team used the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network-South (HATSouth) to obtain over 1000 images of this sun-like star while finding the exoplanets orbiting HATS-18

Scientists Identified a Process to Remove DNA Molecules from X-Files

                On 6 June 2016, Scientists of the University of Sheffield identified the process of removal of DNA molecules from the iconic double-helical structure. Scientists were trying to unlock the mystery for over 20 years. The research has unlocked a crucial part of the mystery as to how the human DNA can replicate and repair itself. It is essential for all life forms. Jon Sayers, the Professor of Functional Genomics at the University of Sheffield is the lead author of the study.

NASA Successfully Deploys Bigelow Expandable Activity Module

                On 28 May 2016, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Bigelow Aerospace successfully deployed the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) on the International Space Station. It is the first experimental inflatable room attached to the space station.

Highlights:

•          It is an expandable habitat technology demonstration for the International Space Station.
•          Expandable habitats greatly decrease the amount of transport volume for future space missions.
•          These expendables are light-weight and require minimal payload volume on a rocket, but expand after being deployed in space to potentially provide a comfortable area for astronauts to live and work.
•          They also provide a varying degree of protection from solar ad cosmic radiation, space debris, atomic oxygen, ultraviolet radiation and other elements of the space environment.

New Elements on Periodic Table get Names

                Time to rewrite the science textbooks: The periodic table has new names for four elements. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the gatekeeper to the periodic table, announced on 8 June the proposed names for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson. The new names for the four super-heavy radioactive elements will replace the seventh row’s placeholders of ununtarium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium.

                IUPAC officially recognized the elements in December and gave naming rights to teams of scientists from the US, Russia and Japan, who made the discoveries. The proposed names had to follow IUPAC rules and are available for public review. People have until November to object to the proposals. Nihonium, symbol Nh, was discovered by scientists at the Riken Institute in Japan. They are the first from Asia to earn the right to propose and addition to the table. The name comes from “Nihon,” which is one of the two Japanese words for Japan.

                A trio of research Institutions – the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Russia; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California – were given the right to propose names for elements 115 and 117. Moscovium, symbol Mc, is named for Moscow, which is near the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.

                Tennessine, symbol Ts, gets its name from the state of Tennessee, where Oak Ridge National Laboratory is. After californium, it is second element named for one of the 50 states. Naming rights for element 118 went to the same Russian researchers and the Americans from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They selected Oganeson, symbol Og, for Yuri Oganessian, who helped discover several super-heavy elements.