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Robots smaller than human hair to deliver drugs inside body & raging cyclone on north pole of Uranus

ScientiFix, our weekly feature, offers you a summary of the top global science stories of the week, with links to their sources.

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New Delhi: Researchers have designed tiny robots that can swim through liquid at amazing speeds and may someday deliver medicine to hard-to-reach areas inside the human body. The “microrobots”, which are smaller than human hair and can move very fast relative to their size, travel in the presence of sound waves. 

They can also carry drugs and release them in specific places, such as the bladder.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder in the US say they have taken the next big step in microbot design, creating a tiny, self-propelled microbot that can deliver drugs quickly and effectively.

Their findings, published in a study in the peer-reviewed journal Smallsuggest that microrobots may be a useful tool for treating bladder diseases and other illnesses in people. In the future, these could be designed to perform certain tasks in the body, such as non-invasive surgeries or delivering drugs. 

Each robot measures 20 micrometres wide — several times smaller than the width of human hair — and is capable of travelling at speeds of about three millimetres per second, or roughly 9,000 times their own length per minute.

That’s several times faster than a cheetah, in relative terms. 

Researchers deployed fleets of these machines to transport doses of dexamethasone, a common steroid medication, to the bladders of lab mice. Read More


Also Read: Discovered, an Earth-sized exoplanet outside our solar system that could be ‘covered in volcanoes’


Vitamin D deficiency & its risks

The deficiency of Vitamin D in an expecting mother can increase the risks of brain development disorders, such as schizophrenia, in the offspring. 

In a new study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Neurochemistry, neuroscientists at The University of Queensland have uncovered how maternal Vitamin D deficiency affects developing the baby’s dopamine-producing brain cells.

Schizophrenia is associated with many developmental risk factors, both genetic and environmental. 

While the precise neurological causes of the disorder are unknown, what is known is that schizophrenia is associated with a pronounced change in the way the brain uses dopamine — the neurotransmitter often referred to as the brain’s “reward molecule”.   

Researchers discovered that maternal Vitamin D deficiency affects the early development and later, the differentiation of dopaminergic neurons.

The team developed dopamine-like cells to replicate the process of differentiation into early-stage neurons that usually takes place during embryonic development.

They cultured the neurons both in the presence and absence of the active Vitamin D hormone. They found that the presence of Vitamin D makes the cells grow differently. Read More

Polar cyclone on Uranus

For the first time, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists have found strong evidence of a raging cyclone on the north pole of Uranus. 

Researchers examined radio waves emitted from the ice giant. Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, confirm that planets with substantial atmospheres in our solar system show signs of a swirling vortex at the poles, irrespective of whether the planets are composed mainly of rock or gas

Scientists have long known that Uranus’s south pole has a swirling feature. NASA’s Voyager 2 imaging of a methane cloud at the top of the pole revealed that the polar centre had winds that were faster than those over the rest of the pole.

However, Voyager 2’s infrared measurements observed no temperature changes.

Using huge radio antenna dishes of the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope in New Mexico, researchers peered below the ice giant’s clouds and determined that the circulating air at the north pole seems to be warmer and drier — the hallmarks of a strong cyclone. 

Collected in 2015, 2021, and 2022, the observations went deeper into Uranus’s atmosphere than any before. Read More


Also Read: Mars could have been watery world 400,000 yrs ago — Chinese rover finds signs of water activity


Microbe transplants can help plants 

Underground microbes could help make it easier for trees to adapt to the stresses related to climate change, a new study has found. 

Plants live across wide ranges of heat, cold, rain and drought, but they are never alone. Along with animals and insects that live on and around a tree, innumerable microbes live in the soil, including various fungi, that grow alongside tree roots. 

These microbes can blunt the normal stresses of life by helping trees draw in more nutrients and water or influencing the time they leaf out or flower to best match seasonal conditions. That relationship could play an important role in climate adaptation.

To test the way communities of microbes from different locales affected stressed trees, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US planted trees of deciduous species — oak, elm, hickory, maple and more — at distant edges of their current ranges. 

Before the trees were moved to the distant plots, they were sprouted from seeds in greenhouses in different soil samples collected from 12 sites in Illinois and Wisconsin, establishing distinct microbial relationships. 

The seedlings exposed to microbes from closer sites were much more likely to survive the winter than those pre-inoculated with microbes from warmer parts, where the trees are normally found. 

Trees grown with microbes sampled from the coldest sites were at least 50 per cent more likely to survive through three cold winters in what might be the new, leading edge of the climate-shifted range, according to the researchers’ results published in the peer-reviewed journal Science. Read More


Also Read: Stellar crew of NASA’s Artemis moon voyage named & a possible ‘Himalayan’ error in glacier watch


New size of black hole

The search for black holes has found only two types of them – either small or humongous. Now, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence for the long-sought missing link — an intermediate-mass black hole. 

The rare class of intermediate-sized black holes was found to be lurking at the heart of the closest globular star cluster to Earth, located 6,000 light-years away. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Two of the best candidates — 3XMM J215022.4-055108, which Hubble helped discover in 2020, and HLX-1, identified in 2009 — reside in the outskirts of other galaxies. 

Each of these possible black holes has the mass of tens of thousands of suns and may have once been at the centres of dwarf galaxies.

Looking much closer to home, there have been a number of suspected intermediate-mass black holes detected in dense globular star clusters orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. 

For example, in 2008, Hubble astronomers announced the suspected presence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. 

For a number of reasons, including the need for more data, these and other intermediate-mass black hole findings still remain inconclusive and do not rule out alternative theories.

However, the space telescope has now been used to zero in on the core of the globular star cluster Messier 4 (M4) to go black-hole hunting with higher precision than in previous searches. 

The team has detected a possible intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 800 times the mass of the sun. The suspected object can’t be seen, but its mass is calculated by studying the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field. 

Measuring their motion takes time and a lot of precision. Astronomers looked at 12 years’ worth of M4 observations from Hubble and resolved pinpoint stars. Read More

(Edited by Richa Mishra)


Also Read: NASA reveals new spacesuit for human mission to Moon & traces of glacier found near Mars’s equator


 

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