Amazing Universe - Random Knowledge

Cows don't get HIV, but after researchers injected them with a protein that's very similar to the virus's envelope, their bodies produced antibodies to block it. The proteins were then extracted, and tested against multiple strains of HIV as it attempted to infect cells in a petri dish. Devin Sok, director for antibody discovery and development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative,  told STAT News that the epiphany was like "an alignment of the stars, where we had veterinarians, cow antibody scientists, and HIV scientists all talking and came up with this." Researchers have long been looking for ways to help HIV-infected individuals produce more broadly neutralising antibodies (Bnabs) — antibodies which are known to combat multiple forms of virus. Bnabs are an important topic in HIV research, because the virus alters slightly with every cell division — meaning that a single, specific antibody can't keep up. A new study has found that cows may pr...

In a world where miniaturisation of technology means quantum oddities are becoming physical obstacles , it's important to understand how particles behave. Practical applications aside, it's just one more example of how weird and wonderful the Universe is on the tiniest scale.  This is the first time the property has been theoretically mapped out to show how it persists even when particles aren't isolated. While the discovery could potentially have some application in future quantum technologies, for now it's just another dot point in the weird stuff tiny particles do. A team of mathematicians from the Universities of York, Munich, and Cardiff combined analytical and computational techniques to study whether backflow remains stable when kinetic energy is taken into account. One of the most famous pairings is momentum and position – the better we know a particle's momentum, the more vague its position is. And vice versa. It's this ambiguity that causes ...

According to wiki:"Eye color is a polygenic phenotypic character determined by two distinct factors: the pigmentation of the eye iris and the frequency-dependence of the scattering light by the turbid medium in the stroma of the iris." Eye color often is the genetic trait that fascinates parents the most as a child develops. Will the child's eyes be black, brown, blue, gray, green, hazel or some combination of colors?  Human eye color originates with three genes, two of which are well understood. These genes account for the most common colors — green, brown, and blue. Other colors, such as gray, hazel and multiple combinations are not fully understood or explainable at this time. The pigmentation of the iris depends on the concentration of melanin in the iris pigment epithelium(located on the back of the iris), the melanin content within the iris stroma (located at the front of the iris), and the cellular density of the stroma.The appearance of blue and green, a...

A new study by an international team of researchers has found the consequences of these colder and drier winters go beyond a need to rug up – they're reducing the productivity of crops in lower latitudes. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plus warmer conditions should by many accounts be good news for plants, especially as melting permafrost frees up new terrain. But this isn't entirely incorrect, at least as far as northern climates go. When it comes to more distant regions, the impact of the Arctic's changing climate on temperate plant growth isn't as well studied. Separated by thousands of kilometres, it might not seem all that important. But researchers know all too well that doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to climate. El Niño is a classic example of what climatologists call teleconnection, where an anomaly in one part of the world, such as a change in air pressure around the Pacific island of Tahiti, can be linked with an anomaly ...

Even if planets capable of sustaining life are exceedingly rare, on the numbers alone there should be intelligent life somewhere in the universe. For example,  according to  Business Insider , if a mere 0.1 percent of planets in our galaxy that might be habitable harboured life, that would mean there were about a million planets with life on them.  There are probably at least two trillion galaxies like ours in the observable universe, each one populated by trillions of planets orbiting hundreds of billions of stars.The Milky Way Galaxy alone is home to between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, and each is potentially orbited by planets. These numbers prompted Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi to ask in regard to alien life forms: "Where are they?" This question has come to be known as thi  e Fermi paradox,  and most possible answers to it would be concerning for humans. Of particular concern is the "Great Filter" hypothesis, wh...

We can now officially add a new kind of baryon to the zoo of particles, one that was already predicted to exist but never before seen.Baryons are effectively triplets of smaller particles called quarks, which are elementary particles meaning they aren't made up of anything smaller payricles. Mist common ones are the protons and neutrons. This new baryon – made when two charm quarks and a single up bound together –  named Xi cc++.. It's four times heavier than a proton and could help challenge some ideas about how this kind of matter sticks together. "Finding a doubly heavy-quark baryon is of great interest as it will provide a unique tool to further probe quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces," said Giovanni Passaleva , the spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration. Being made of two heavy quarks should give Xi cc++ a slightly different structure to protons and neutrons. "In contrast to ...

 India's nuclear scientists have been working on a gigantic nuclear facility in Kalpakkam, a city on the shores of the Bay of Bengal near Chennai, for 15 years now. This one is a fast breeder nuclear reactor, a technology India has been working to perfect for 27 years now, beginning with an experimental facility called a Fast-Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR). Fast breeder reactors are different from conventional nuclear plants because the neutrons that sustain the atomic chain reaction travel at higher velocities. This type of reactor is capable of generating more fuel that it consumes, a behavior typically made possible by elemental uranium. Uranium isn't common in India, but the country has the second largest store of thorium, so the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) in Kalpakkam uses rods of that element. Prior to India's PFBR, the only commercially operating fast breeder nuclear reactor was Russia's Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant , located in the Ural Mounta...

Gorillas are one of our closest relatives in animal world.Human gene sequences differ only 1.6% on average from the sequences of corresponding gorilla genes, but there is further difference in how many copies each gene has.Until recently, gorillas were considered to be a single species, with three subspecies: the western lowland gorilla, the eastern lowland gorilla and the mountain gorilla.There is now agreement that there are two species, each with two subspecies.More recently, a third subspecies has been claimed to exist in one of the species. The separate species and subspecies developed from a single type of gorilla during the Ice Age, when their forest habitats shrank and became isolated from each other.  Despite the chimpanzees being the closest extant relatives of humans, 15% of the human genome was found to be more like that of the gorilla.In addition, 30% of the gorilla genome "is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other; this is rarer aroun...