By ZMEscience
Here are four excellent news stories about how science is making our lives better.
Scientists have found how to create nano diamonds from PET plastics.
A universal and future-proofed COVID-19 vaccine is close to be tested on humans.
There are new findings on the facility of carrying out random acts of kindness.
A woman with a keen sense of smell has helped create a simple test to diagnose Parkinson’s.
1. Scientists have found how to create nano diamonds from PET plastics.
Turning plastic into diamonds seems like something from a modern fairy tale, but an experiment that was originally designed to raised understand the planets known as ice giants – such as Uranus and Neptune – has led to an unexpected discovery.
Scientists were investigating a phenomenon called 'diamond rain', which is assumed to form because of the unique mix of elements within these planets.
They ran the experiments using PET plastic, the polymer found in packaging like water bottles, which consists of a mix of hydrogen and carbon. The team managed to mimic the method that takes place within the ice giants, by creating high-pressure shock waves with an optical laser on the plastic.
If you imagine between 1,000,000 and two million elephants jumping on an object at once, that’s the type of pressure we’re talking about.
Researchers were excited when this produced tiny synthetic diamonds.
What is really extraordinary is the clarity of the results they saw in the results, says Prof. Dr Dominik Kraus, from the University of Rostock, who participated within the experiments. “A large fraction of the carbon atoms are became diamonds, very quickly during a few nanoseconds,”
“Also when the pressure is released, the diamonds remain. which means that there are ways to recover these and make them applicable and use them maybe for other things,” he told Euro news.
Man-made diamonds share many of the foremost important properties of natural diamonds, so – also as being very pretty – these nano diamonds have potential applications for quantum technology and medicine.
The experiments were founded to get a better understanding of the planets in our solar system. “This could again be one among the many examples in the history of science where such curiosity and something that looks very distant could then result in some real-world applications,” says Prof. Kraus.
If this is, because it seems, a replacement and efficient way to produce nano diamonds using the same plastic that goes into landfill every year, this might be great news for our planet.
2. A universal and future-proofed COVID-19 vaccine is close to be tested on humans.
For years, public health figures and scientists had been complaining a few lack of funding to develop vaccines to protect us against present and future viruses. But COVID-19 changed everything.
After the pandemic started, tens of many dollars were allocated to research groups looking into universal coronavirus vaccines, which we now need urgently if we’re ever visiting be sure of a future without COVID.
A universal COVID-19 vaccine would defeat any variants which may appear in the future, also as any future illnesses caused by entirely new types of coronaviruses.
The good news is that people had already started work on this long before we’d ever heard of alpha, delta, omicron and therefore the rest of them.
One of these scientists was Alexander Cohen, a PhD student at the California Institute of Technology, and researchers at Cohen’s lab are becoming very close to their objective.The initial results seem really promising, because the antibodies produced in the lab’s vaccine identified not just all eight coronaviruses included in the vaccine, but also four additional coronaviruses that weren't included. In March of this year, the group reported that the vaccine seemed to protect mice and monkeys that had been exposed to an array of coronaviruses. In July, they published the leads to Science.
The next step is to test the vaccine in humans, and therefore the funding for that is already in place. If it’s successful, it could save us from ever having to place up with another COVID-related lock down again.
3. There are new findings on the facility of carrying out random acts of kindness.
Carrying out small gestures of kindness makes everyone happy – those who give, and people who receive. The strange thing is, though, that the great Samaritans of the world tend not to realist just how happy they are making people, consistent with a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Researchers believe this might be holding many of us back from doing nice things for others more often, which suggests people are missing out on opportunities to feel good and make others feel good.
They ran experiments with many people, who performed and received random acts of kindness, like buying a stranger a coffee or a cup of hot chocolate, and altogether of them, those completing the kind acts consistently underestimated how positive it would make other people feel.
The idea that kindness can boost well-being isn’t really new. Many studies have already shown how voluntarily helping others generates positive emotions for both parties.
But experts say that every new finding strengthens the idea, making it a stronger scientific argument, and not just something that seems logical.
4. A Scottish woman with a keen sense of smell has helped create an easy test to diagnose Parkinson’s.
72-year-old Joy Milne has accidentally provided a serious breakthrough in the detection of Parkinson’s disease.
She had noticed that her husband's smell changed 12 years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, noting he had developed a musky scent, different from his normal scent.
“Strangely enough once I wake up in the morning I don't open my eyes, I smell what's around me,” she said.
Joy Milne has hereditary hyperosmia; people with this condition are referred to as ‘super smellers’.
A team at the University of Manchester harnessed her power and discovered that Parkinson’s disease does indeed have a specific odour.
With the assistance of Mme Milne, they need developed a test that could determine in just three minutes whether someone has Parkinson’s disease.
“We swab people's backs a bit like that, then we take it to the mass spectrometer where we analyse the compounds on the skin, and from those we will find out whether someone has Parkinson's or not,” explains Professor Perdita Barran, who led the research, to Euro news.
“Our focus is to form what's called a confirmatory diagnostic for the specialist to help them to get the right treatment.”
Until now there has been no specific test for Parkinson’s, and therefore the diagnosis was based on a patient’s symptoms and medical history. All of that's about to change, with an easy cotton swab.
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