Humidity | SilverScorpio.Com

A little cooling rain, and maybe more today

June 6, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

New Delhi, June 6 — Light rain on Saturday evening cleared the dust haze and brought much respite to the Capital, which was sizzling at 36.6 degrees Celsius. Despite the rain, the Met department has predicted a hotter Sunday, relieved by cloudy skies and more rain. There was a difference of as much as 10 notches between the maximum temperature (36.6 degrees Celsius) and the minimum at 26 degrees Celsius on Saturday, the weatherman said, adding the maximum temperature on Sunday is predicted to be 38 degrees Celsius. But even as the thunder squall followed by rains brought relief to Delhiites, it was so little that the Met office equipment did not even record it. “There was a trace of light rain after 7.30 pm,” said the Met official. The humidity during the day ranged from 52 per cent (maximum) to 35 per cent (minimum).

Although parts of the capital – particularly south and east Delhi – received only light rain, NCR areas like Faridabad and Noida were luckier, getting heavier showers.

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Changes in humidity, temperature may trigger asthma among kids

September 15, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 15 (ANI): Changes in humidity and temperature may trigger asthma among kids, suggests a report.

Published in the journal Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the report says that such weather changes have been found to result in a rise in Emergency Department (ED) visits for paediatric asthma exacerbations.

“We found a strong relationship between temperature and humidity fluctuations with pediatric asthma exacerbations, but not barometric pressure,” said Dr. Nana A. Mireku, an allergist at Dallas Allergy Immunology private practice in Dallas, formerly at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrated these correlations after controlling for levels of airborne pollutants and common aeroallergens.

“Our study is also one of the few to examine the possibility that the weather one or two days before the asthma exacerbation may be as important as that on the day of admission, as the additional ED visits occur one to two days after the fluctuation,” she added.

The authors of the report write that patients experiencing an asthma attack often complain that weather fluctuations are a major trigger.

Dr. Mireku said: “the latest National Institutes of Health guidelines list ‘change in weather’ as a possible precipitating factor for asthma, but no previous studies have really examined this potential trigger in a rigorous fashion.”

According to the report, the retrospective 2-year study was performed at a large urban hospital of 25,401 children visiting the ED for an asthma exacerbation.

The researchers collected data on climactic factors, pollutants and aeroallergens on a daily basis.

They used time series analysis to evaluate the relationship of daily or between-day changes in climactic factors and asthma ED visits, controlling for seasonality, air pollution and aeroallergen exposure.

The effects of climactic factors were evaluated on the day of admission and up to five days before admission.

The researchers found that a 10 percent daily increase in humidity on a day or two before admission was associated with approximately one additional ED visit for asthma.

The authors write that between-day changes in humidity from two to three days prior to admission were also associated with more ED visits.

Daily changes in temperature on the day of or the day before admission increased ED visits, with a 10 degree F increase being association with 1.8 additional visits.

“Asthma is the most common chronic illness in childhood. Allergists have long known that weather conditions such as extremely dry, wet or windy weather can affect asthma symptoms. This study further defines the role of temperature and humidity on children’s asthma and confirms the importance of working with patients to identify the source of their symptoms and develop treatment plans that help prevent them,” said allergist Richard G. Gower, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI). (ANI)

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Now, a smart home that can alert owner about a stove burner left on

September 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Sep 3 (ANI): Ever thought that your home would tell if you have left a stove burner on after making your breakfast? Well, it is now possible, thanks to the new sensor-stuffed apartment created by researchers at Washington State University in Pullman.

The smart home, known as Casas, developed by Diane Cook and colleagues, can learn the ways of its inhabitants by observing their daily habits and how they use different appliances everyday.

The technology could be used in houses to support people with cognitive difficulties or dementia with their daily living needs, or to make things easier for healthy people.

For example, the apartment can recognise when a person is performing actions associated with making breakfast and can prompt them with audio and video signals to warm them of any anomaly like a stove left burning.

While Casas was developed to analyse the sensors’ output, Graduate student Parisa Rashidi has improved the system, so that it can learn a person’s habits without prior assumptions about what events or patterns to expect.

While previous smart homes used movie cameras to pre-define key activities before recognising them, the new system was successfully tested in a specially outfitted apartment with a single resident on campus.

It required around a month of training to accurately tease out the resident’s habits from the sea of sensor data, said Rashidi.

Once trained, Casas can identify patterns as complex as “at 6 am the kitchen light comes on, the coffee maker turns on, and the toaster turns on” without any prior knowledge of what to expect.

To maintain a resident’s sense of privacy Casas works without cameras, RFID chips or microphones.

Instead less “invasive” sensors that detect motion, temperature, light, humidity, water, door contact and the use of key items, such as opening a bottle of medication or switching on the toaster.

“We don’t want to give residents the feeling that Big Brother is watching them,” New Scientist quoted Rashidi as saying.

The researchers developed a number of data-mining algorithms to help make sense of the sensor output.

One algorithm uses a grid of motion sensors to map out how a person walks around the home, looking for daily “trajectories”, or routes through the house.

A second algorithm finds patterns in a sequence of events, such as learning to expect the resident to turn on a tap after turning on the oven.

And a third algorithm looks to correlate events it detects with the time of day to identify the pattern, for example, of when the person eats dinner.

Now the researchers are working on upgrades that allow the apartment to decipher the actions of multiple inhabitants and recognise subtle variations in commonly repeated tasks.

The study has been published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics. (ANI)

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Pharaohs’ tombs in Egypt may disappear in 150yrs, warns head of antiquities

August 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, August 19 (ANI): Egypt’s head of antiquities Zahi Hawass has warned that the tombs of the pharaohs in Valley of the Kings may disappear within 150 to 500 years if they remain open to tourists.

The Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, where Ancient Egypt’s royalty was mummified, is home to the tombs of legendary pharaohs such as the boy king Tutenkhamun and Queen Nefertiti.

Hawass said that humidity and fungus were eating into the walls of the royal tombs in the huge necropolis on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor.

Pointing out that several thousand tourists visit the place every day, he said that poor ventilation and the breath of the hordes of visitors were causing damage to the carvings and painted decorations inside the tombs.

He said so while on a tour of the royal necropolis with journalists on Monday. e also revealed that the authorities had decided to close some tombs to tourists, and replace them with replicas, including those of Tutenkhamun, Nefertiti and Seti I.

According to reports, the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities have already taken a series of measures to protect the tombs, including setting up new ventilation systems and restricting the number of visitors.

“The tombs which are open to visitors are facing severe damage to both colours and the engravings,” the Telegraph quoted Hawass as saying.

“The levels of humidity and fungus are increasing because of the breath of visitors and this means that the tombs could disappear between 150 and 500 years,” he added. (ANI)

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Cockroaches can survive climate change by holding their breath to save water

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, August 18 (ANI): A new study has found that cockroaches can hold their breath to save water, a trick that could help them to thrive in the face of climate change.

When cockroaches are resting, they periodically stop breathing for as long as 40 minutes, though why they do so has been unclear.

According to a report in New Scientist, to investigate the mystery, Natalie Schimpf and her colleagues at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, examined whether speckled cockroaches change their breathing pattern in response to changes in carbon dioxide (CO2) or oxygen concentration, or humidity.

They conclude that cockroaches close the spiracles through which they breathe primarily to save water. In dry environments, the insects took shorter breaths than in moist conditions.

“Cockroaches lose water across their respiratory surfaces when they breathe, so taking shorter breaths in dry conditions reduces the amount of water they will lose,” said Schimpf.

The nifty breath-holding adaptation has allowed cockroaches to colonise drier habitats and may allow them to thrive in climate change, according to George McGavin of the University of Oxford.

“Cockroaches have an awesome array of adaptations to life on dry land,” said McGavin.

“Living in the humid conditions of a rainforest, where they evolved, might be plain sailing, but cockroaches are adaptable and can cope in a wide range of environmental conditions,” he added.

According to McGavin, “Two hundred and fifty million years of physiological fine tuning has produced a creature that will be around for a long time to come. Cockroaches, I’m afraid to say, will do well in the face of climate change.”

The study deals a blow to the theory that cockroaches hold their breath to survive underground, where CO2 levels can be poisonous.

“They held their breath no longer in high-CO2 than in low-CO2 conditions,” said Schimpf. (ANI)

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‘Bullet fingerprinting’ technique improves recovery rate of prints

July 13, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 13 (ANI): A team of scientists has developed ‘Bullet fingerprinting’ technology, which is a simple but effective method to visualize fingerprints even after the print itself has been removed.

The technology has been developed by Dr John Bond, from Northamptonshire Police Scientific Support Unit and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leicester’s Forensic Research Centre, in collaboration with University scientists.

Continuing work exploring this forensic technique in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leicester is uncovering new ways of recovering fingerprints from metal surfaces.

Researcher Alex Goddard has uncovered a natural technique that he believes is so simple, which can explain why it has been overlooked until now.

The technique involves studying the chemical and physical interactions occurring between the metal and the fingerprint sweat deposit.

Using advanced surface imaging techniques, such as an Atomic Force Microscope, nanoscale observations of fingerprinted brass samples can identify optimum conditions to promote the natural enhancement of the fingerprint, vastly improving their recovery rate.

It has also proven that components of the sweat deposit survive washing and wiping of the surface.

According to Goddard, “Once a finger has touched the metal surface, a residue remains behind. This starts to react with the metal and an image of the fingerprint can be developed by use of elevated temperature and humidity, with the resultant image becoming a permanent feature on the surface of the metal.”

“Currently, fingerprint recovery from bullets is very low; less than 1 percent. This uses a natural process and even if it only leads to small increase in success rate, then that would be significant,” he said.

“Previous recovery methods include applying powder to the material which can actually damage the evidence,” said Goddard.

“This new technique promotes a naturally occurring process which does not involve adding anything to, or damaging, the evidence. Instead, it employs heat and humidity to promote the enhancement of the fingerprint image.

There are also indications that it could be used after other techniques have failed, perhaps as a last resort,” he added. (ANI)

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Dust mites indulge in 24hr sex marathons

July 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Sydney, July 10 (ANI): Sydney mattresses are home to thousands of dust mites, who indulge in sex marathons lasting as long as 24 hours, says an expert.

Dr. Matt Colloff, a CSIRO Entomology scientist who has spent 25 years studying mites, has described their bizarre sexual behaviour in his 600-page, 150 dollars book, ‘Dust Mites’, which was launched on July 9.

“You can’t see them and you can’t feel them. But almost every house has them. A lot of Sydney mattresses would have over a million,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Colloff as saying.

Thanks to its warm, moist climate, “Sydney is one of the world’s top 10 dust mite capitals,” he added.

These less than half a millimetre long organisms inhabit beds, carpets, upholstered furniture, clothes, and curtains as they thrive on skin scales that have fallen from their human housemates.

“Their sexual behaviour is absolutely bizarre. They mate back-to-back. The male has a penis shaped liked an old-fashioned coffee-pot spout and locks onto the female with a pair of suckers,” said Colloff.

As the dust mite’s penis is so narrow, compared with its sperm, “the sperm has to travel in single file,’ thus making mating slower than other organisms.

“They remain in that position for 24 hours. She continues on with everyday life and the little male hangs on,” said Colloff.

The mites are often found in beds because the heat of human bodies between the sheets triggers sweating, creating the humidity and warmth the mites crave.

They spend their days “eating and copulating and defecating,” said Colloff. (ANI)

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Cell phone towers can help predict the next big flood

July 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Tel Aviv, July 7 (ANI): Researchers from Tel Aviv University, Israel, have said that they can predict the intensity of the next big flood by using common cell phone towers across the United States.

Their model, which analyzes cell phone signals, adds a critical component to weather forecasting never before available.

“By monitoring the specific and fluctuating atmospheric moisture around cell phone towers throughout America, we can cheaply, effectively and reliably provide a more accurate ‘critical moisture distribution’ level for fine-tuning model predictions of big floods,” said Professor Pinhas Alpert, a geophysicist and head of Tel Aviv University’s Porter School for Environmental Education.

Cell phone towers emit radio waves that are diminished by moisture in the air, a factor that can be used to improve model warnings on flood levels.

In addition, the researchers measured the rainfall distributions and were able to accurately estimate the size of impending floods before they struck.

This was demonstrated in post-analysis of two case-studies of floods in the Judean Desert in Israel, where cell phone towers and flash floods are abundant.

Using real data measurements collected from the towers, the researchers demonstrated how microwave links in a cellular network correlated with surface station humidity measurements.

The data provided by cell phone towers is the missing link weather forecasters need to improve the accuracy of flood forecasting.

“Our method provides reliable measurement of moisture fields near the flood zone for the first time,” said Professor Alpert. “This new tool can add to the bigger picture of understanding climate change patterns in general,” he added.

“Accurate predictions of flooding were difficult before because there haven’t been enough reliable measurements of moisture fields in remote locations,” Professor Alpert further added.

Using the signals collected from cell phone towers as they communicate with base stations and our handsets, weather forecasters will now have a crucial missing piece of information for flood prediction that they never had before.

It will permit forecasters and residents alike to more accurately gauge the danger they face from an impending flood. (ANI)

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ICC T20 win to herald new era in Pakistan cricket : Alam

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Karachi, June, 25 (ANI): Joyous by his team’s brilliant performance to win the ICC World Twenty20 Championship, Pakistan cricket coach Intikhab Alam has expressed the hope that the win would propel Pakistan on the international stage, and mark the start of a new era in the game’s history in the country.

Alam said the win has helped Pakistan regain the lost glory, and proved to be a shot in the arm for Pakistan cricket.

“The World Cup should be a beginning of a bright era in our cricket and we should translate that success into more such results in the future,” The News quoted Alam, as saying.

Alam said winning the coveted title has boosted the morale and confidence of the players, and hoped that Pakistan would continue its winning streak during the forthcoming Sri Lanka tour.

Pakistan is scheduled to play three Tests, five One-day Internationals and a Twenty20 game against Sri Lanka during a six-wee-long tour.

The tour would be Pakistan’s first full overseas visit since the 2007 India series.

Alam admitted that Sri Lanka are a tough side to beat in their own backyard, but said that his players are ready to give the islanders a tough fight.

“It’s very important that we carry on winning. Sri Lanka is always a tough assignment. The playing conditions and the weather with all the heat and humidity can make things really difficult,” he said.

Referring to the return of experienced middle-order batsman Mohammad Yousuf in the national team, Alam said his return has ‘balanced’ the team.

“Yousuf’s return is certainly good news for us.He will strengthen our batting line-up,” he added. (ANI)

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Iran’s 4 salt mummies placed in vacuum chamber for preservation

May 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Tehran, May 12 (ANI): Iran’s four saltmen, unique salt mummies, have been placed in one of the most advanced display cases in the world, in an attempt to maintain and preserve them.

According to Payvand Iran News, the vacuum chamber in Zanjan, where the mummies have been kept, can precisely control humidity and airflow and is provided with a nitrogen-rich mixture deadly to known bacteria and mold.

Iranian, British, German and Austrian researchers declared air and humidity the main enemies of salt mummies at the 2nd International Seminar on the Archeology and Pathology of Saltmen in October, 2007.

The experts examined the saltmen’s condition to make the final decision on carrying out further studies on the Chehrabad salt mine, where the saltmen were found.

The Chehrabad Salt Mine is located in the Hamzehlou region of Zanjan province in northwestern Iran.

The saltmen, also known as the Iranian salt mummies, were accidentally discovered by miners in 1993.

Three of the saltmen date to the Parthian (247 BCE – 224 CE) and the Sassanid (224 – 651 CE) eras, while all other human remains discovered at the site go back to the Achaemenid Dynasty (550 – 330 BCE).

Artifacts have been discovered alongside the skeletons, including leather shoes, a leather bag, a terracotta lamp and two cow horns, most of which remain intact.

Salt at the mine worked to preserve the artifacts, as well as the internal organs of the salt men themselves.

Fingernails and hair have also been found undamaged, which will enable scientific testing to be carried out that could reveal further clues about these ancient people. (ANI)

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Cyclones can feed global warming by spurting ice into stratosphere

April 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 21 (ANI): Scientists at Harvard University, US, have found that tropical cyclones readily inject ice far into the stratosphere, possibly feeding global warming.

The finding provides more evidence of the intertwining of severe weather and global warming by demonstrating a mechanism by which storms could drive climate change.

Many scientists now believe that global warming, in turn, is likely to increase the severity of tropical cyclones.

“Since water vapor is an important greenhouse gas, an increase of water vapor in the stratosphere would warm the Earth’s surface,” said David M. Romps, a research associate in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science.

“Our finding that tropical cyclones are responsible for many of the clouds in the stratosphere opens up the possibility that these storms could affect global climate, in addition to the oft-mentioned possibility of climate change affecting the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones,” he added.

Romps and co-author Zhiming Kuang, assistant professor of climate science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, were intrigued by earlier data suggesting that the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere has grown by roughly 50 percent over the past 50 years.

Scientists are currently unsure why this increase has occurred.

The Harvard researchers sought to examine the possibility that tropical cyclones might have contributed by sending a large fraction of their clouds into the stratosphere.

Using infrared satellite data gathered from 1983 to 2006, Romps and Kuang analyzed towering cloud tops associated with thousands of tropical cyclones, many of them near the Philippines, Mexico, and Central America.

Their analysis demonstrated that in a cyclone, narrow plumes of miles-tall storm clouds can rise so explosively through the atmosphere that they often push into the stratosphere.

Romps and Kuang found that tropical cyclones are twice as likely as other storms to punch into the normally cloud-free stratosphere, and four times as likely to inject ice deep into the stratosphere.

According to the researchers, if very deep clouds, such as those in a tropical cyclone that can rise through the atmosphere at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour, can punch through the tropopause, they can deposit their ice in the warmer overlying stratosphere, where it then evaporates.

“This suggests that tropical cyclones could play an important role in setting the humidity of the stratosphere,” said Romps and Kuang. (ANI)

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Robot to dig for historic treasures in China

April 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, April 9 (ANI): Archaeologists in China are taking the help of a robot specially designed for underground exploration, which is opening up a lost world of historic treasures.

The robot completed a successful trial probe in July last year, when it revealed hidden fresco paintings in a narrow shaft inside a 1,300-year old tomb in Xi’an, China’s ancient capital in the northwestern Shaanxi Province.

The cylinder-shaped robot, 27 centimeters long and 9 centimeters in diameter, is the first robot ever used by Chinese archaeologists to explore ancient tombs, according to Tie Fude, a researcher at the National Museum.

It was the culmination of a two-year project jointly run by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the National Museum, the Science and Technology University of Hong Kong, and the Harbin Institute of Technology, Tie added.

“The project runs the gamut from tomb excavation, culture relics preservation, to intelligent control,” said Tie.

Equipped with infrared lights and a digital camera, the robot could “see” clearly underground, and with help of a sensor, it could identify gases in the environment, and send back data, including temperature and humidity readings, according to the project’s chief designer of intelligent control systems, Zhu Xiaorui, of the Harbin Institute of Technology.

“Archaeologists can then plan excavations on this data,” said Zhu.

She said that the challenge was not the robotics technology, but its adaptation to archeology.

“We only need to input the approximate size of the tomb entrance, the gradient, and the categories of the gases there, so the robot can work,” said Zhu.

“With the robot, we can get some basic data and thus give out amore tailor-made digging plan,” she added. (ANI)

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Mumbaikars sweat it out on weekend

April 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

MUMBAI: Mumbaikars continue to sweat it out over the weekend, with humidity shooting up to 89% and 82% in Colaba and Santa Cruz on Saturday morning,
even as the mercury hovered around the 35 degrees-Celsius mark.

“I was soaked in sweat by the time I reached work,” complained an office-goer, capturing the sentiment of most citizens had to step out on Saturday.

Maximum daytime temperatures recorded by the weather bureau stood at 33.3 degrees Celsius and 35.1 degrees Celsius at Colaba and Santa Cruz. This was marginally lower than April 1 when the temperature had skyrocketed to 41 degrees Celsius but humidity levels on Saturday were much higher than that day’s 70% and 40% (Colaba and Sanata Cruz).

“The high humidity is because there are some western disturbance affecting Jammu and Kashmir, which have been moving southwards as a humid air mass,” said forecasting officer Ajay Kumar.

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Warm weather can trigger migraines

March 10, 2009 By admin 1 Comment

Washington, Mar 10 (ANI): If you blame changes in the weather for your headaches, well, then you’re absolutely right. According to a new study, high temperatures and low air pressure trigger migraines.

A study of more than 7,000 patients, led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), provides some of the first large-scale data on how environmental conditions.

According to the study, which has been published in journal Neurology, higher temperatures, and to a lesser degree, lower barometric pressure, contribute to severe headaches.

“Migraine headaches affect a large proportion of the population,” notes Kenneth Mukamal, MD, MPH, the study’s first author and a physician in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC.

Knowing that migraines can be set off by “triggers,” including certain foods, alcohol, stress and hormones, Mukamal and his coauthors decided to study whether environmental factors were also acting as headache triggers.

“Air temperature, humidity and barometric pressure are among the most frequent reasons that people give for their headache pain,” explains Mukamal, who is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“But none of these reasons have been consistently verified. We wanted to find out if we could verify this ‘clinical folklore.’ We also wanted to determine whether air pollutants trigger headaches, much as they have been found to trigger strokes,” the expert added.

To reach the conclusion, Mukamal and his coauthors designed a “case crossover” study, which directly compares levels of pollutants and meterological variables at the time of the patient’s hospital visit with corresponding levels on preceding days and subsequent weeks.

The study looked at 7,054 patients who went to the emergency room of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between May 2000 and December 2007 and were discharged with a primary diagnosis of headache (2,250 diagnosed with migraine; 4,803 diagnosed with tension or unspecified headache).

Using meterological and pollutant monitors, they then compared measurements of a number of environmental factors – air temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, fine particulate matter, black carbon, and nitrogen and sulfur dioxides-during the three days previous to patients’ hospital visits and then again at corresponding dates to determine whether these factors trigger severe headaches.

The findings showed that of all of the environmental factors considered, higher air temperature in the 24 hours prior to the patient’s hospital visit was most closely associated with headache symptoms, with a 7.5 percent higher risk of severe headache reported for each temperature increase of 5 degrees Celsius (approximately 9 degrees Fahrenheit).

To a lesser degree, lower barometric pressure 48 to 72 hours prior to patients’ emergency room visits also appeared to trigger headache.

The researchers found no evidence that air pollutants influenced the onset of headache, but could not rule out a smaller effect similar to that previously seen for stroke. (ANI)

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Influenza outbreaks linked to low “absolute” humidity levels

February 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 10 (ANI): Ever wondered why we catch flu mostly in the winters? Well, Oregon researchers claim to have found the answer.

They have found that influenza virus survives and travels best when “absolute” humidity is low.

According to lead author Jeffrey Shaman, an Oregon State University, It has long been suspected that there is a link between humidity and flu transmission and prevalence; however, these efforts have focused on relative humidity.

During the study the researchers analysed data from a 2007 study published in PLoS Pathogens, which found a tenuous relationship between influenza transmission and relative humidity.

Shaman used the team’s research data and substituted absolute humidity for relative humidity in analysing potential correlations with flu transmission.

“The correlations were surprisingly strong,” Shaman said.

“When absolute humidity is low, influenza virus survival is prolonged and transmission rates go up,” he added.

The researchers showed that relative humidity only explains about 36 percent of influenza virus survival.

The Oregon researchers retested the data using absolute humidity and found a dramatic rise in accounting for both transmission (50 percent, up from 12 percent) and survival (90 percent, up from 36 percent).

The transmission rates increased from 12 pct to 50 pct while the survival increased to 90 percent from 36 percent.

The potential explanations for influenza peaks during the winter in temperate regions are that people spend more time indoors and thus transmit the virus more easily;

Moreover, less sunlight may have a chemical effect on the virus and/or people’s immune response or there might be an unknown environmental control.

“In some areas of the country, a typical summer day can have four times as much water vapour as a typical winter day – a difference that exists both indoors and outdoors,” Shaman said.

“Consequently, outbreaks of influenza typically occur in winter when low absolute humidity conditions strongly favour influenza survival and transmission,” he added.

The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).(ANI)

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Scientists team with curators to stem decay of humanity’s greatest art and cultural treasures

February 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 9 (ANI): Biotechnology scientists have teamed up with curators and heritage experts to find innovative ways to stem the decay of some of humanity’s greatest art and cultural treasures.

This move is part of a 4-day, UN-affiliated international conference in Caracas, Venezuela.

“With the world financial crisis and the advent of climate change effects, there is a state of emergency at the museums of several tropical countries: entire collections are compromised,” said Alvaro Gonzalez, a researcher at the Caracas-based Institute of Advanced Studies (IDEA) and Director of Venezuela’s Cultural Heritage Conservation Foundation, the host of the event.

According to Jose-Luis Ramirez, Director of the United Nations University’s Programme for Biotechnology for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNU-BIOLAC), an event sponsor, “The normal concern about single artifacts is no longer paramount.”

“Storing and protecting entire collections safely has become a priority and scientists have a key role: developing techniques and procedures that are fundamental to heritage conservation,” Ramirez added.

Many of the world’s cultural treasures are creations made of organic materials such as paper, canvas, wood and leather, which, in prolonged warmth and dampness, attract mold, micro-organisms and insects, causing decay and disintegration.

New biotechnology techniques to be described include the use of micro-organisms to remove fungus and other problems on artwork, photos, documents, masonry and more.

In addition to biotechnologies, experts will revisit ancient ideas such as the Japanese technique of preserving frail items within multiple boxes.

They will highlight the potential use of Styrofoam packaging to economically protect items from rising heat, humidity and other environmental hazards.

Information to be shared includes how temperature, relative humidity, and dew point risk or benefit collections, the new technologies available to measure and analyze museum environment data, how to manage environments with minimal or no mechanical equipment and non-toxic, non-destructive treatments of cultural heritage items.

According to UN Under Secretary-General Konrad Osterwalder, Rector of UNU, “The items in museum collections have timeless cultural, scientific and aesthetic values that we hold in trust for future generations. They also have great commercial value derived from exhibitions, souvenirs, tours and publications.”

“Despite the current economic downturn, we all have a great responsibility to ensure historic objects are managed and used in a sound and sustainable way and to safeguard them from the potential effects of a warming planet,” he added. (ANI)

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Computer model to make ‘safer salamis with longer shelf lives’

January 12, 2009 By Rajesh Leave a Comment

London, January 12 (ANI): You may soon get to gorge upon salamis that are safer to eat, and have longer shelf lives, thanks to a novel computer model that can help tackle the growth of dangerous bacteria in food.

Alessandro Giuffrida, a food safety specialist at the University of Messina in Italy, has revealed that he and his colleagues have developed a model for bacterial growth that includes both competition and environmental influences.

He revealed that his team focused on the way bacteria grows in traditional Sicilian salami during the fermentation stage of its preparation, a period of curing in which the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes competes with a population of harmless lactic acid bacteria.

The researcher said that his model could simulate that competition for resources as well as the effects of fluctuations in environmental factors like temperature, and accurately reproduce experimental data on the growth of L. monocytogenes.

He insisted that the model could be useful for devising ways to control the bacterial growth during the fermentation process.

According to the new model, fluctuations of temperature, pH or humidity could be used to limit bacterial growth.

Giuffrida said that greater fluctuations in such conditions led to slower growth of L. monocytogenes in the fermentation stage, though his team have yet to work out why.

Based on his team’s observations, he came to the conclusion that controlling such bacterial battles could produce food with a longer shelf life.

Software is on the market for predicting the shelf life of various foods based on the growth rates of single species of bacteria, but the ability to model two species is a step towards better prediction.

“This is the first detailed look at the interplay of environmental noise and interactions between bacterial species. It’s an important advance in predictive microbiology,” New Scientist magazine quoted Fabio Marchesoni at the University of Perugia, as saying.

A research article describing this work will be published in the journal European Food Research and Technology. (ANI)

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