Science
Coronavirus can destroy the placenta and lead to stillbirths
New research suggests the coronavirus can invade and destroy the placenta and lead to stillbirths in infected women.
It’s an uncommon outcome for any pregnancy but women with COVID-19 face an elevated risk. Authorities believe vaccination can help prevent these cases.
Researchers in 12 countries, including the United States, analyzed placental and autopsy tissue from 64 stillbirths and four newborns who died shortly after birth. The cases all involved unvaccinated women who had COVID-19 during their pregnancy.
The study bolsters evidence from small case reports and it confirms that placenta damage rather than an infection of the fetus is the likely cause of many COVID-19-related stillbirths, said Dr. Jeffery Goldstein, a pathologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
He was not involved in the study, which was published Thursday in Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine.
Also read: Can you get long COVID after an infection with omicron?
Previous evidence suggests the chances of stillbirth are higher than usual for pregnant women with COVID-19, particularly from the delta variant. Vaccination recommendations include pregnant women and note their higher risk for complications when infected.
Lead author Dr. David Schwartz, an Atlanta pathologist, said other infections can infiltrate the placenta and cause stillbirth, typically by infecting and damaging the fetus. A recent example is Zika virus.
He and his colleagues wanted to see if that was the case with stillbirths in women with COVID-19. But what they found was almost the opposite: it was the placenta that was infected and extensively destroyed.
“Many of these cases had over 90% of the placenta destroyed — very scary,” said Schwartz.
Normal placenta tissue is a healthy reddish hue and spongy. The specimens they studied were stiff, with dark discolorations of dead tissue. While other infections can sometimes damage the placenta, Schwartz said he’d never seen them cause such consistent, extensive destruction.
The placenta is an organ that forms and attaches to the womb during pregnancy. It connects with the umbilical cord, providing oxygen and nourishment from the mother’s bloodstream.
The virus likely reached the placenta through the bloodstream, attaching to susceptible cells and causing protein deposits and an unusual form of inflammation that blocked blood flow and oxygen. That in turn led to placenta tissue death and suffocation, the researchers said.
Also read: India logs 71,365 new COVID-19 cases, total rises to 42,410,976
Coronavirus was also detected in some of the fetuses, but evidence of suffocation in the womb points to placenta damage as the more likely cause of death, they said.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report in November found that among pregnant U.S. women infected with COVID-19, about 1 in 80 deliveries was a stillbirth — the loss of a fetus anytime after 20 weeks. That’s compared with 1 in 155 among uninfected women.
The study stillbirths occurred on average at 30 weeks; normal pregnancies last about 40 weeks.
High blood pressure, certain chronic illnesses and fetal abnormalities are among conditions that can increase chances for stillbirths, including in women with COVID-19.
It is unclear whether omicron infections also increase chances for stillbirths; the study was done before that highly infectious variant emerged.
How Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Healthcare?
Artificial Intelligence has been playing an important role in the globe over the last several decades. Artificial intelligence algorithms are used to enhance the user experience while logging into social media, e-mail, and online retail platforms. Because the risk of Artificial Intelligence implementation could transcend human jobs and abilities, there is a lot of study going on to see how AI might help with healthcare judgments, support human judgment, and boost treatment efficiency.
Growing Impact of AI in Healthcare Industry
AI in healthcare brings on a variety of benefits. AI often makes use of an online database that gives physicians and practitioners access to hundreds of diagnostic materials. Because physicians have a thorough understanding of their area and are upgraded based on current research, AI makes it faster to get these results that can be demonstrated with their clinical expertise.
Many people have become concerned that artificial intelligence will someday replace or reduce the necessity for human doctors, particularly in the clinical context. However, new studies and statistics suggest that rather than reducing physician necessity, this tool will likely help and enhance clinical diagnoses and decision making.
Read: How to Become an Astronaut ?
Many times, patients exhibit many symptoms that might be linked to a variety of disorders based on both hereditary and physical traits, causing a diagnosis to be delayed. AI benefits a practitioner not only in terms of efficiency, but it also gives quantitative and qualitative data based on input feedback, enhancing accuracy in diagnosis, treatment planning, and result prediction.
Because AI can "learn" from data, it has the potential to enhance accuracy depending on feedback replies. Many back-end database sources, as well as information from practitioners, physicians, and research institutes, are included in this feedback.
Assembled data is made up of a variety of medical notes, electronic recordings from medical equipment, laboratory imaging, physical exams, and demographic information. Practitioners have almost infinite resources to enhance their therapeutic skills because of this collection of constantly updated knowledge.
Read Successful transplant of pig's heart into a human body for the first time
Keeping Health Well
One of AI's significant advantages is that it helps people stay in good shape and health. So people don't need to call for a doctor as frequently, and if at all. People are already benefiting from the usage of AI and the Internet of Medical Things in health applications.
Many individuals have been encouraged to adopt the habits by using different technologies, tools and apps to aid in the proper maintenance of a healthy lifestyle. It also gives customers control over their health.
Also, AI improves healthcare providers' capacity to better perceive the regular patterns of cared individuals, allowing them to give greater feedback and support to help them remain healthy.
Read Jute Sanitary Napkins: Bangladeshi scientist Farhana Sultana got awarded for eco-friendly innovation
Early end Effective Detection
AI is being used to diagnose illnesses more precisely in their early stages. According to research, a large percentage of mammograms provide misleading findings. AI is allowing mammograms to be reviewed and translated 30 times quicker with 99% accuracy, decreasing the need for unneeded biopsies.
Consumer wearables are also being used in conjunction with AI to monitor and diagnose early-stage cardiac disease, allowing physicians and other caregivers to monitor and detect life-threatening incidents at earlier, more curable stages.
Systemic Diagnosis
Watson for Health from IBM is a digital tool that enables healthcare businesses to use cognitive technologies to access massive volumes of health data and improve diagnostic accuracy. Watson can examine and retain exponentially more medical knowledge than any person — every medical article, symptom, and case study of therapy and reaction worldwide.
Read Telangana's 'Medicines From The Sky' project utilizes drones in health care
Different organizations collaborate with physicians, academics, and critical patients to address practical healthcare issues. The approach blends machine learning, artificial intelligence and neuroscience in order to incorporate sophisticated general-purpose cognitive algorithms into human neural networks that simulate the human brain.
Proper Decision Making
Improving treatment involves aligning massive health data with appropriate and timely judgments, and predictive yet near-perfect analytics can both enhance clinical decision-making and following actions and prioritize administrative duties.
Using different pattern recognition techniques to identify patients at risk of getting a disorder – or having one worsen – as a result of lifestyle, environmental, genetic, or other variables is another area where AI is gaining traction in healthcare.
Read Soborno Isaac Bari: Bangladeshi Descent Child Prodigy Becomes World’s Youngest Professor
Unachievable Treatment
Apart from scanning records to assist providers in identifying chronically ill patients at risk of adverse episodes, AI can assist clinicians in taking a more comprehensive comprehension of disease management, better-coordinating care plans, and assisting patients in managing and adhering to their long-term treatment regimens.
For more than three decades, robots have been utilized in medicine. They vary in complexity from small laboratory robots to very complicated surgical robots capable of assisting a human surgeon or doing surgeries on their own. They are also utilized in hospitals and laboratories for repetitive jobs, rehabilitation, therapy, and to assist persons with chronic diseases.
The Necessities of Life Care Becomes Obsolete
An average human has a longer living capacity than past generations, and as we near the end of our lives, we are dying differently and more slowly from illnesses such as dementia, heart failure, and osteoporosis. Additionally, it is a stage of life that is often marked by loneliness.
Read Top 10 Greatest Science Breakthroughs of 2021
Robots possess the potential to transform end-of-life care by enabling patients to stay independent for longer periods of time and so lowering the need for hospitalization and care facilities. AI, in conjunction with developments in humanoid design, enables robots to go even farther and engage in 'conversations' and other social activities with humans, therefore maintaining the sharpness of aging brains.
Conclusion
The largest hurdle for AI in healthcare is not determining if the technologies will be sufficiently competent to be beneficial but rather guaranteeing their widespread acceptance in everyday clinical practice. Clinicians may eventually gravitate toward work requiring unique human abilities, activities requiring the greatest degree of cognitive function. Perhaps the only healthcare practitioners who will miss out on AI's potential are people who refuse to collaborate with it.
Read Top 7 Statistical Software to Learn for Data Analysis in Research Works
How to Become an Astronaut?
Being an astronaut is an ambition you should not set out to achieve without first knowing the hard work needed. It takes years of education and training before you can even apply to become an astronaut. Once you are accepted into the program, you will go through rigorous classes that teach engineering, biology, chemistry, geology, math, and physics. It also takes physical strength to be an astronaut; there is no other way around it. If you are interested in becoming an astronaut, keep reading.
What does astronaut mean?
Astronaut is an English word that came from a Greek word which means ‘Star Sailor.’ And naturally, we can call astronauts the star sailors. Because all their work is in the land of the stars, they have to go on a ship (spaceship) and do research there.
How to become an astronaut?
It is a question that has been asked by many over the years. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to become an astronaut as you need to go through some steps. You need to be in excellent shape, have a college degree in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and pass a rigorous selection process. There are many different ways to prepare for a career as an astronaut, but the ultimate goal is the same. Hence, the requirements remain the same.
Read Meet the man who won a trip to space and gave it to a friend
When it comes to recruiting astronauts, NASA doesn’t employ a massive workforce. At present NASA has 48 active astronauts and so far, around 600 people went to space in the last 50 years. So, you can understand how hard it is to land your career as an astronaut.
Anyone, civilian or military, can apply to become an astronaut. However, some qualifications are required to apply. These are described one by one below:
Educational requirement
First of all, the person has to be a US citizen. In the case of education, NASA is very strict and the person should have a master’s degree with an excellent result in a STEM field. The degree can be in engineering, computer science, biological science, mathematics, or physical science. Candidates may also possess a Ph.D. degree in the related field, a completed doctor of medicine or medical degree in doctor of osteopathic, or completion of a nationally recognized test pilot school program.
Read New space telescope reaches final stop million miles out
Physical fitness
In addition to a strong educational background, your physical fitness should be NASA standard. Your height cannot be too short or too high. The candidate must stand between 5’2” and 6’3” in height which is between 62 and 75 inches.
For eyesight, 20/20 vision is needed and this cannot exceed 140/90 in the normal sitting position. The prospective astronauts should also pass the swimming test. The selected candidate will have to go through military water survival training and the person will also need scuba certification. Therefore, strong swimming skills are also necessary.
Flight experience
According to NASA, the candidate needs to have professional flight test experience, which will help them to launch the aircraft. The person might require 1,000 hours of jet aircraft pilot-in-command time. However, commercial pilots may also be eligible to apply if they have 1,500 hours of flight time.
Read Successful transplant of pig's heart into a human body for the first time
Selection process and Training
All civilian and military candidates have to go through a week-long process, where they have to face personal interviews, medical examinations, orientations.
Training
The selected applicants enter into an agreement with the organization concerned. (In the case of NASA, it is the astronaut's office at the Johnson Space Station in Houston, Texas.) This was followed by two years of continuous training. It teaches everything about the space exploration mission. Military candidates, on the other hand, continue to improve their experience with NASA aircraft.
Candidates have to pass the swimming test in the first month of the training. They have to finish the swimming syllabus before starting the flying syllabus. They also need to be SCUBA qualified for spacewalk training. SCUBA is an underwater swimming pool with a supply of compressed air. Candidates have to swim 3 times in a 25-meter-long pool without stopping.
Read The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record
Then they have to do the same thing again wearing spacesuits and tennis suits; However, in the second case, there is no set time for completion of the work. Candidates are exposed to high and low atmospheric pressure in a high chamber so that they can get an idea of the problems that may arise in such situations and apply them in the mission.
The candidates are then made to feel artificial weightlessness on a jet aircraft, which lasts about 20 seconds. And the process continues about 40 times a day for 20 seconds each time. Further, NASA uses Zero G flight to give a feel of the actual weightlessness.
Training in Zero G flight training
And the selection of astronauts for space missions is based on the successful completion of these tests or training. However, successful completion of some other training such as International Space Station systems training, Russian Language training, Extravehicular Activity skills training, Aircraft Flight readiness training, and Robotics skills training is required for final selection. Civilian candidates who cannot be selected as astronauts are appointed to the respective institutions according to their qualifications, subject to vacancies.
Read Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
Special training
After being finally selected, the astronauts have to face the most difficult training. Spacecraft trainers teach them every detail of Aircraft Systems including operating spacecraft. So that they can come over any kind of problem on the mission.
Challenges faced by the Astronauts
Astronauts in space have to deal with a number of problems. Lack of gravity can cause headaches, nausea, and loss of appetite. Many people sometimes feel as if a subatomic bullet is coming through their eyeballs.
Some people feel that there is an abnormal flash of light coming out of their eyes. None of this is good for the human eye. About three-quarters of astronauts have suffered eye problems after the mission.
Read Meet the man who won a trip to space and gave it to a friend
Due to the absence of gravitational force, it is sometimes the case that some of the astronauts continue to feel that their body is leaning forward. The astronaut may not even feel exactly where his limbs are. About half the astronauts suffer from this problem; This is called "Space Adaptation Syndrome."
Career prospects and salary
No matter how you prepare, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to become an astronaut. But, if you have the passion and determination, then you can achieve your dream of becoming an astronaut!
The NASA astronauts make around $24,079 to $640,817 a year which is around BDT 26 lakhs to BDT 5.5 crore a year. The median salary is $116,165 equivalent to BDT 99 lakhs. However, the top 86% of NASA astronauts make $640,817 or BDT 5.5 crore a year.
Read Four station astronauts catch ride with SpaceX back home
Final Words
Many people have a misguided view of astronauts as being just pilots that have been lucky enough to have been chosen for their dream job. Hopefully, this article will work as a brief guide for people who want to be astronauts.
Longest lightning bolt record: 477 miles over 3 US states
A bolt of lightning that stretched nearly 500 miles across three U.S. states is the new world record holder for longest flash.
The single flash extended 477.2 miles (768 kilometers) across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in April 2020, the World Meteorological Organization said Monday. That beat the old record set in 2018 in Brazil of 440.6 miles (709 kilometers).
Also in 2020, a single lightning flash over Uruguay and northern Argentina lasted 17.1 seconds, nipping the old time record of 16.7 seconds.
Also read: 2,800 lost lives in lightning strikes in 10 years: Dr Enamur
Normally lightning doesn’t stretch farther than 10 miles and lasts less than a second, said Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, who is the chief of records confirmation for the meteorological organization.
“These two lightning flash records are absolutely extraordinary,” Cerveny said in an email.
Both were cloud-to-cloud, several thousand feet above the ground, so no one was in danger, he said.
Also read: Solar eclipse on the longest day of the year
These records, which are not linked to climate change, were spotted and confirmed thanks to new satellite tracking technology. Both regions are two of the few places in the world prone to the type of intense storms that can produce what are called “megaflashes, ” Cerveny said.
Meet the man who won a trip to space and gave it to a friend
He told his family and a few friends. He dropped hints to a couple of colleagues. So hardly anyone knew that the airline pilot could have — should have — been on board when SpaceX launched its first tourists into orbit last year.
Meet Kyle Hippchen, the real winner of a first-of-its-kind sweepstakes, who gave his seat to his college roommate.
Though Hippchen’s secret is finally out, that doesn’t make it any easier knowing he missed his chance to orbit Earth because he exceeded the weight limit. He still hasn’t watched the Netflix series on the three-day flight purchased by a tech entrepreneur for himself and three guests last September.
“It hurts too much,” he said. “I’m insanely disappointed. But it is what it is.”
Hippchen, 43, a Florida-based captain for Delta’s regional carrier Endeavor Air, recently shared his story with The Associated Press during his first visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center since his lost rocket ride.
Also read: New space telescope reaches final stop million miles out
He opened up about his out-of-the-blue, dream-come-true windfall, the letdown when he realized he topped SpaceX’s weight restrictions of 250 pounds (113 kilograms) and his offer to the one person he knew would treasure the flight as much as himself. Four months later, he figures probably fewer than 50 people know he was the actual winner.
“It was their show, and I didn’t want to be distracting too much from what they were doing,” said Hippchen, who watched the launch from a VIP balcony.
His seat went to Chris Sembroski, 42, a data engineer in Everett, Washington. The pair roomed together starting in the late 1990s while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. They’d pile into cars with other student space geeks and make the hourlong drive south for NASA’s shuttles launches. They also belonged to a space advocacy group, going to Washington to push commercial space travel.
Despite living on opposite coasts, Hippchen and Sembroski continued to swap space news and champion the cause. Neither could resist when Shift4 Payments founder and CEO Jared Isaacman raffled off a seat on the flight he purchased from SpaceX’s Elon Musk. The beneficiary was St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Hippchen snapped up $600 worth of entries. Sembroski, about to start a new job at Lockheed Martin, shelled out $50. With 72,000 entries in the random drawing last February, neither figured he’d win and didn’t bother telling the other.
By early March, Hippchen started receiving vague emails seeking details about himself. That’s when he read the contest’s small print: The winner had to be under 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds (2 meters and 113 kilograms).
Hippchen was 5-foot-10 and 330 pounds (1.8 meters and 150 kilograms).
He told organizers he was pulling out, figuring he was only one of many finalists. In the flurry of emails and calls that followed, Hippchen was stunned to learn he’d won.
With a September launch planned, the timeline was tight. Still new at flying people, SpaceX needed to start measuring its first private passengers for their custom-fitted flight suits and capsule seats. As an aerospace engineer and pilot, Hippchen knew the weight limit was a safety issue involving the seats, and could not be exceeded.
Also read: Japanese space tourists safely return to Earth
“I was trying to figure how I could drop 80 pounds in six months, which, I mean, it’s possible, but it’s not the most healthy thing in the world to do,” Hippchen said.
Isaacman, the spaceflight’s sponsor, allowed Hippchen to pick a stand-in.
“Kyle’s willingness to gift his seat to Chris was an incredible act of generosity,” he said in an email this week.
Isaacman introduced his passengers at the end of March: a St. Jude physician assistant who beat cancer there as a child; a community college educator who was Shift4 Payments’ winning business client; and Sembroski.
Hippchen joined them in April to watch SpaceX launch astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, the company’s last crew flight before their own.
In gratitude, Sembroski offered to take personal items into space for Hippchen. He gathered his high school and college rings, airline captain epaulets, a great-uncle’s World War I Purple Heart and odds and ends from his best friends from high school, warning, “Don’t ask any details.”
By launch day on Sept. 15, word had gotten around. As friends and families gathered for the liftoff, Hippchen said the conversation went like this: “My name’s Kyle. Are you The Kyle? Yeah, I’m The Kyle.”
Before climbing into SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, Sembroski followed tradition and used the phone atop the launch tower to make his one allotted call. He called Hippchen and thanked him one more time.
“I’m forever grateful,” Sembroski said.
And while Hippchen didn’t get to see Earth from orbit, he did get to experience about 10 minutes of weightlessness. During Sembroski’s flight, he joined friends and family of the crew on a special zero-gravity plane.
“It was a blast.”
New space telescope reaches final stop million miles out
The world’s biggest, most powerful space telescope arrived at its observation post 1 million miles from Earth on Monday, a month after it lifted off on a quest to behold the dawn of the universe.
On command, the James Webb Space Telescope fired its rocket thrusters for nearly five minutes to go into orbit around the sun at its designated location, and NASA confirmed the operation went as planned.
The mirrors on the $10 billion observatory still must be meticulously aligned, the infrared detectors sufficiently chilled and the scientific instruments calibrated before observations can begin in June.
Also read: Space telescope launched on daring quest to behold 1st stars
But flight controllers in Baltimore were euphoric after chalking up another success.
“We’re one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. And I can’t wait to see Webb’s first new views of the universe this summer!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
The telescope will enable astronomers to peer back further in time than ever before, all the way back to when the first stars and galaxies were forming 13.7 billion years ago. That’s a mere 100 million years from the Big Bang, when the universe was created.
Besides making stellar observations, Webb will scan the atmospheres of alien worlds for possible signs of life.
Also read: Four station astronauts catch ride with SpaceX back home
Rare, pristine coral reef found off Tahiti coast
Deep in the South Pacific, scientists have explored a rare stretch of pristine corals shaped like roses off the coast of Tahiti. The reef is thought to be one of the largest found at such depths and seems untouched by climate change or human activities.
Laetitia Hédouin said she first saw the corals during a recreational dive with a local diving club months earlier.
“When I went there for the first time, I thought, ‘Wow — we need to study that reef. There’s something special about that reef,” said Hédouin, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Moorea, French Polynesia.
Read:The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record
What struck Hédouin was that the corals looked healthy and weren't affected by a bleaching event in 2019. Corals are tiny animals that grow and form reefs in oceans around the world.
Globally, coral reefs have been depleted from overfishing and pollution. Climate change is also harming delicate corals — including those in areas neighboring the newly discovered reef — with severe bleaching caused by warmer waters. Between 2009 and 2018, 14% of the world's corals were killed, according to a 2020 report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Project.
The newfound reef, stretching 2 miles (3 kilometers), was studied late last year during a dive expedition supported by UNESCO. Unlike most of the world’s mapped corals, which are found in relatively shallow waters, this one was deeper — between 115 feet (35 meters) to 230 feet (70 meters).
Exploring such depths posed a challenge: the deeper a diver goes underwater, the shorter amount of time can be safely spent at each depth. The team was equipped with special tanks and did 200 hours of diving to study the reef, including taking photographs, measurements and samples of the coral.
The reef is in a spot where many researchers haven't spent a lot of time in, said former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer Mark Eakin.
“We’ll be seeing more of these discoveries as the technology is applied to these locations,” said Eakin. “We may find some bigger ones somewhere, but I think this is always going to be an unusual reef.”
Read:Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
The recent volcanic eruption in Tonga that triggered tsunami waves across the Pacific has not affected the reef off Tahiti, said Hédouin.
Hédouin hopes the research can help experts understand how the reef has been resilient to climate change and human pressures, and what role these deeper corals might play in the ocean ecosystem. More dives are planned in the coming months.
“We know very little about the ocean, and there’s still so much that needs to be recorded, needs to be measured,” said Julian Barbière, the head of UNESCO’s marine policy and regional coordination.
Successful transplant of pig's heart into a human body for the first time
With the development of science and technology, now everybody is getting used to the issue of organ transplantation between animals and humans. Earlier, pig kidneys were transplanted into the human body through genetic engineering. And this time the pig heart transplantation took place in a human body. Physicians at the University of Maryland Medical School in the United States have finally done this revolutionary surgery. Let's get to know the details of this groundbreaking addition to the medical sciences.
Transplantation of pig heart in the human body
The organ transplants between different species (called xenotransplantation in medical science) began in the 18th century. Preliminary research was focused on primates. But all such attempts have repeatedly failed because the organs of those animals are incompatible with the internal structure of the human body. The incident of baby Fae can be the nearest example. In 1984, the baby survived for 21 days with a baboon's heart.
Then at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, the surgery by Bertley Griffith and his team based set a pathbreaking example in Maryland. It took about eight hours to transplant the pig's heart into the chest of 57-year-old David Bennett. Not to mention, Friday, January 7, 2022, was a very breath-taking day for Bennett's family as well as his doctors.
Read Jute Sanitary Napkins: Bangladeshi scientist Farhana Sultana got awarded for eco-friendly innovation
Six human genes were inserted into the genome to work on a total of 10 unique genes. This genetic engineering was performed in September 2021 by the biotech firm Revivicor of Virginia. They temporarily attached a pig's kidney to a brain-dead human body and it started working.
And the Maryland transplant took that test to the next level. They used the heart of a pig that was undergoing genetic engineering to remove sugar from its cells. These pigs are made as ideal donors due to their size, rapid growth, and rapid breeding characteristics.
This heart was provided by the biotech firm Revivicor. The organ was preserved in a special machine to keep it healthy until surgery. It also uses an experimental new anti-rejection drug developed by Kinixa Pharmaceuticals.
Read Top 10 Health and Medicine Breakthroughs of 2021
The most difficult part of this experimental surgery was to tell the patient the whole story. And Dr. Bertley Griffith, the chief physician of this surgery, has done this very wisely. Since the first treatment, the whole matter from beginning to end was full of uncertainty. Earlier, Dr. Grifith transplanted pig hearts into about 50 baboons in five years.
American David Bennett: First human to get pig heart transplantation
Throughout his life, David Bennett has been involved in a variety of activities, including pool repair, car maintenance, and painting. About a decade ago he fitted a pig's valve.
He went on a rampage several times looking for a heart donor, and he was devastated after failing a few heart transplant tests. Physical condition, heart failure, and irregular heartbeat made him ineligible for an artificial heart pump. In this way, even trying for two months to save his heart did not work.
Read Top 10 Greatest Science Breakthroughs of 2021
After thinking about all this, Dr. Bennett decided to go with Griffith's proposal.
The patient's current condition after complex surgery
The first 48 hours after the surgery was spent without any serious incident. The situation has improved considerably since last Monday. Bennett was still attached to the heart-lung bypass machine and was able to breathe on his own. However, this is not uncommon in patients with new heart transplants.
Yet the response of every part of his body is being closely monitored. Although the risk is low, the risk of infection with the pig virus or porcine retrovirus is still being monitored.
Also read: Chinese doctors complete lung transplant for COVID-19 patient
However, more time is needed to explore whether such early-stage replacement can work in the end. Even then, Bennett hopes it will work out eventually and that he will be able to have a human heart into his chest later.
Wrap up
Today, many patients are dying around the world of the unavailability of matched organs. The successful transplantation of a pig's heart into a human body is a futuristic invention. This initiative's ultimate practical success will raise the hopes of millions of other physically challenged patients, including those with congenital disabilities. We can hope that, in the future, the supply of organs will surmount the number of patients. The pig's heart, which was placed on Bennett's chest, contained life-saving properties as a by-product dut to genetic engineering. Therefore, revolutionary changes in heart transplantation can be expected in near future.
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The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record
Earth simmered to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements.
And scientists say the exceptionally hot year is part of a long-term warming trend that shows hints of accelerating.
Two U.S. science agencies — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and a private measuring group released their calculations for last year’s global temperature on Thursday, and all said it wasn’t far behind ultra-hot 2016 and 2020.
Six different calculations found 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest year since the late 1800s. NASA said 2021 tied with 2018 for sixth warmest, while NOAA puts last year in sixth place by itself.
Scientists say a La Nina — natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns globally and brings chilly deep ocean water to the surface — dampened global temperatures just as its flip side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.
Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.
Also read: Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
“So it’s not quite as headline-dominating as being the warmest on record, but give it another few years and we’ll see another one of those” records, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth monitoring group that also ranked 2021 the sixth hottest. “It’s the long-term trend, and it’s an indomitable march upward.”
Gavin Schmidt, the climate scientist who heads NASA’s temperature team, said “the long-term trend is very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record, NASA and NOAA data agree. Global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than 140 years ago, their data shows.
The other 2021 measurements came from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and satellite measurements by Copernicus Climate Change Service i n Europe and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
There was such a distinctive jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago that scientists have started looking at whether the rise in temperatures is speeding up. Both Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to that but it’s hard to know for sure.
“If you just look at the last the last 10 years, how many of them are way above the trend line from the previous 10 years? Almost all of them,” Schmidt said in an interview.
There’s a 99% chance that 2022 will be among the 10 warmest years on record and a 10% chance it will be the hottest on record, said NOAA climate analysis chief Russell Vose in a Thursday press conference.
Vose said chances are 50-50 that at least one year in the 2020s will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times — the level of warming nations agreed to try to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
While that threshold is important, extreme weather from climate change is hurting people now in their daily lives with about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming, Vose and Schmidt said.
Also read: Darwin in a lab: Coral evolution tweaked for global warming
The global average temperature last year was 58.5 degrees (14.7 Celsius), according to NOAA. In 1988, NASA’s then-chief climate scientist James Hansen grabbed headlines when he testified to Congress about global warming in a year that was the hottest on record at the time. Now, the 57.7 degrees (14.3 Celsius) of 1988 ranks as the 28th hottest year on record.
Last year, 1.8 billion people in 25 Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations had their hottest years on record, including China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Myanmar and South Korea, according to Berkeley Earth.
The deep ocean, where most heat is stored in the seas, also set a record for warmth in 2021, according to a separate new study.
“Ocean warming, aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations, ... is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive ... sea level rise if we don’t act,” said study co-author Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist.
The last time Earth had a cooler than normal year by NOAA or NASA calculations was 1976. That means 69% of the people on the planet — more than 5 billion people under age 45 — have never experienced such a year, based on United Nations data.
North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, 39, who wasn’t part of the new reports but said they make sense, said, “I’ve only lived in a warming world and I wish that the younger generations did not have to say the same. It didn’t have to be this way.”
Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
A team of scientists are sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.
Thirty-two scientists on Thursday are starting a more than two-month mission aboard an American research ship to investigate the crucial area where the massive but melting Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts — more than two feet (65 centimeters) over hundreds of years.
Because of its importance, the United States and the United Kingdom are in the midst of a joint $50 million mission to study Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world by land and sea. Not near any of the continent's research stations, Thwaites is on Antarctica's western half, east of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula, which used to be the area scientists worried most about.
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“Thwaites is the main reason I would say that we have so large an uncertainty in the projections of future sea level rise and that is because it’s a very remote area, difficult to reach,” Anna Wahlin, an oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said Wednesday in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was scheduled to leave its port in Chile hours later. “It is configured in a way so that it’s potentially unstable. And that is why we are worried about this.”
Thwaites is putting about 50 billion tons of ice into the water a year. The British Antarctic Survey says the glacier is responsible for 4% of global sea rise, and the conditions leading to it to lose more ice are accelerating, University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from the McMurdo land station last month.
Oregon State University ice scientist Erin Pettit said Thwaites appears to be collapsing in three ways:
— Melting from below by ocean water.
— The land part of the glacier “is losing its grip” to the place it attaches to the seabed, so a large chunk can come off into the ocean and later melt.
— The glacier’s ice shelf is breaking into hundreds of fractures like a damaged car windshield. This is what Pettit said she fears will be the most troublesome with six-mile (10-kilometer) long cracks forming in just a year.
No one has stepped foot before on the key ice-water interface at Thwaites before. In 2019, Wahlin was on a team that explored the area from a ship using a robotic ship but never went ashore.
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Wahlin’s team will use two robot ships — her own large one called Ran which she used in 2019 and the more agile Boaty McBoatface, the crowdsource named drone that could go further under the area of Thwaites that protrudes over the ocean — to get under Thwaites.
The ship-bound scientists will be measuring water temperature, the sea floor and ice thickness. They'll look at cracks in the ice, how the ice is structured and tag seals on islands off the glacier.
Thwaites “looks different from other ice shelves,” Wahlin said. “It almost looks like a jumble of icebergs that have been pressed together. So it’s increasingly clear that this is not a solid piece of ice like the other ice shelves are, nice smooth solid ice. This was much more jagged and scarred.”