To Combat Global Warming, Carbon Dioxide is Turned Into Stone

                Scientists have found a quick way – but not a cheap one – to turn heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas into harmless rock. Experts say the results of a two-year, $10 million experiment called CarbFix, conducted about 540m deep in the rocks of Iceland, offer new hope for an effective weapon to help fight man-made global warming. When an international team of scientists pumped a carbon dioxide and water mix into underground basalt rocks, basic chemistry took over. The acidic mixture dissolved the rocks’ calcium magnesium and formed limestone, a permanent natural jail for the heat-trapping gas.

                Scientists, who had done this before in the lab, thought the process could take thousands or even hundreds of years. But after just two years, 95% of the gas, was captured and converted. One of the methods to battle climate change, in addition to reducing fossil fuel emissions, is to capture carbon dioxide from the air or powerplants. Carbon capture is not the silver bullet, but it can contribute significantly to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

                Carbon capture however can be expensive – especially the capturing part. Once the gas is grabbed from the air, storage is another issue. It can be stored underground, injected in depleted oil wells, but there are concerns about monitoring it and preventing it from escaping. Injecting it into basalt and letting nature take its course can solve that problem. But at $17 per tonne of carbon dioxide, it can cost a couple times more than injecting it into old wells. There’s basalt all over the world, in places like the Pacific Northwest, India and South America. But even more promising is the ocean floor, which is full of basalt and a good place to store the carbon dioxide.

Astrophysicists Discover Canarias Einstein Ring in Space

                On 16 May 2016, an international team of astrophysicists  discovered a new optical Einstein ring called Canarias Einstein Ring. Einstein Ring is a distorted image of a galaxy, the source, which is very distant from the Earth. The results of the discovery were published in the international journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The discovery was made by a team comprising of doctoral student Margherita Bettinelli from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) of Spain. The rare phenomenon was discovered in the Sculptor constellation, IAC J010127-334319, in the vicinity of the Sculptor Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

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.