From NASA with love: new bacteria named after Kalam

In great news for India, scientists at NASA have named a new organism discovered by them after the much-loved A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Till date, the new organism — a form of bacteria — has been found only on the International Space Station (ISS) and has not been found on earth!

Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the foremost lab of NASA for work on interplanetary travel, discovered the new bacteria on the filters of the International Space Station (ISS) and named it Solibacillus kalamii to honour the late President, who was a renowned aerospace scientist.

His tryst with NASA

Dr. Kalam had his early training at NASA in 1963 before he set up India’s first rocket-launching facility in the fishing village of Thumba in Kerala.

“The name of the bacterium is Solibacillus kalamii, the species name is after Dr. Abdul Kalam and genus name is Solibacillus which is a spore-forming bacteria,” said Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran, senior research scientist, Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at JPL.

The filter on which the new bug was found remained on board the ISS for 40 months. Called a high-efficiency particulate arrestance filter or HEPA filter, this part is the routine housekeeping and cleaning system on board the international space station.

This filter was later analysed at JPL and only this year did Dr. Venkateswaran publish his discovery in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

Astronauts share space with them

According to Dr. Venkateswaran, even as it orbits the earth some 400 kilometres above, the ISS is home to many types of bacteria and fungi which co-inhabit the station with the astronauts who live and work on the station.

Dr. Venkateswaran said even though Solibacillus kalamii has never been found on earth till date, it is really not an extra-terrestrial life form or ET.

“I am reasonably sure it has hitch-hiked to the space station on board some cargo and then survived the hostile conditions of space,” he explained.

Naming the new microbe after Dr. Kalam was natural to Dr. Venkateswaran and his team. “Being a fellow Tamilian, I am aware of the huge contributions by Dr. Kalam,” he said.

New bacteria are usually named after famous scientists.

Is anybody out there?

Dr. Venkateswaran is part of a team which is asking that eternal question: “Are we alone in the universe?”

Towards that, his responsibilities include monitoring the bug levels on the ISS and he also has to ensure that all spacecraft that fly to other planets are free of terrestrial bugs.

One of his big jobs was to ensure that NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover — the massive car-sized almost 1000 kg buggy — was totally sterile when it left earth.

By international law, this extreme hygiene is required or else other planets could get contaminated by bugs hidden on human satellites.

Today the ISS is the size of a football field and its construction started with a launch in 1998 and as of now it is the largest human-made object orbiting the earth.

Weighing about 419 tonnes, it can house a maximum of six astronauts and has costs roughly USD 150 billion.

With numbers, hygiene is crucial

Till date, 227 astronauts have flown to the space station. This makes the space station actually a very dirty place and maintaining hygiene is critical so that humans can live on it with ease.

On the space station all the air and water is recycled, being a completely closed environment there is a rapid build-up of moulds and bacteria on the station.

These not only have to be cleaned but monitored to ensure that they do not corrode the walls of the space station and do not turn hazardous to the astronauts.

Dr. Venkateswaran’s main job is to monitor the environment of the space station so that harmful bugs do not proliferate.

He heads the ‘Microbial Observatory’ on the ISS projects to measure microorganisms associated with compartments owned by the U.S.

According to NASA, he also directs several research and development tasks for the JPL — Mars Program Office, which enables the cleaning, sterilisation, and validation of spacecraft components. He directs several NASA competitive awards on the microbial monitoring of spacecraft and associated environments for the Exploration System Mission Directorate, closed habitats like ISS or its earth analogues for the Human Exploration and Operation Mission Directorate.

‘Useful bugs’

But is the new bug of some use?

“These spore formers tend to withstand high radiation and also produce some useful compounds protein-wise which will be helpful for biotechnology applications,” Dr. Venkateswaran said.

His team has not characterised the bacteria fully but he hints that the new bug could be a key source for chemicals that can help protect against radiation damage.
 

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Mango tree extract could prevent heart injury

A group of doctors from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, has shown the protective effects of mangiferin (a compound present in the bark of all mango trees) on reperfusion injury in diabetic rats. Reperfusion injury happens in heart tissues when blood supply returns after a heart attack. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Mangiferin, found in the bark, leaves and fruit of mango trees, is known to possess several beneficial properties — antioxidant, antitumour, anticancer, antidiabetic and antibacterial properties.

For the study, the researchers used three groups of rats in which diabetes was induced. While no heart injury was induced in the control group, the second group of rats had a heart injury induced after 28 days but not treated with mangiferin. The third group was given mangiferin for 28 days and then heart injury was induced. All the rats were sacrificed and the heart was surgically removed and studied for various parameters.

All the diabetic rats treated with mangiferin showed improved blood-pumping ability, restored antioxidants, reduced swelling and death of cells. The architecture of the myocardium was maintained despite the injury and the heart muscle fibre remained intact.

Glucose present in the blood of patients with diabetes leads to the formation of certain proteins (advanced glycation end products or AGE), which causes various complications of diabetes. Mangiferin favourably reduced this protein, thus preventing stress, swelling and cell death after the heart injury. The study on the heart tissue revealed how mangiferin reduced cell death — it increased the expression of proteins which act against cell death and decreased the proteins causing cell death. Mangiferin also decreased the level of inflammatory and stress proteins.

“This is our third module of study. We have already studied effects of mangiferin on isoproterenol and ischemia-reperfusion induced myocardial injury in rats. Now we have found that mangiferin can prevent myocardial injury in diabetic rats,” says Dr. Salma Malik, who is a research associate at the Department of Pharmacology, AIIMS and a co-author of the paper. However, the conclusion of this study needs to be further validated to establish its clinical usefulness in patients of myocardial ischemia with coexisting diabetes.
 

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Moon orbiting solar system’s third largest dwarf planet found

Scientists have discovered a new moon orbiting the third largest dwarf planet, that resides in the frigid outskirts in our solar system. With this discovery, it appears that most of the known dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt larger than 965 kilometers across have companions. These bodies can provide some insight into how moons formed in the young solar system.

The combined power of three space observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has helped uncover the moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10 in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from our solar system’s formation, which is believed to have happened about 4.6 billion years ago.

Collisions and moons

“The discovery of satellites around all of the known large dwarf planets, except for Sedna, means that at the time these bodies formed, billions of years ago, collisions must have been more frequent, and that’s a constraint on the formation models,” said Csaba Kiss of the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary.“If there were frequent collisions, then it was quite easy to form these satellites,” said Dr. Kiss, lead author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.The objects most likely slammed into each other more often because they inhabited a crowded region.

The team uncovered the moon in archival images of 2007 OR10 taken by the Hubble Telescope.

Observations taken of the dwarf planet by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope first tipped off the astronomers of the possibility of a moon circling it. Kepler revealed that 2007 OR10 has a slow rotation period of 45 hours. “Typical rotation periods for Kuiper Belt Objects are under 24 hours,” Dr. Kiss said.

“We looked in the Hubble archive because the slower rotation period could have been caused by the gravitational tug of a moon. The initial investigator missed the moon in the Hubble images because it is very faint,” he said. The astronomers spotted the moon in two separate Hubble observations spaced a year apart. The images show that the moon is gravitationally bound to 2007 OR10 because it moves with the dwarf planet, as seen against a background of stars. The astronomers calculated the diameters of both objects based on observations in far-infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory, which measured the thermal emission of the distant worlds.
 
Exclusive club

The dwarf planet is about 1,528 kilometres across, and the moon is estimated to be 240 kilometres to 400 kilometres in diameter. 2007 OR10, like Pluto, follows an eccentric orbit, but it is currently three times further than Pluto is from the sun. 2007 OR10 is a member of an exclusive club of nine dwarf planets. Of those bodies, only Pluto and Eris are larger than 2007 OR10. It was discovered in 2007 by astronomers Meg Schwamb, Mike Brown, and David Rabinowitz as part of a survey to search for distant solar system bodies using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in the US.
 

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Indian researchers use a novel route to kill TB bacteria

A team of Indian researchers has been able to achieve 100-fold reduction in TB bacterial load in lungs of mice after 60 days of treatment using bergenin — a phytochemical isolated from tender leaves of sakhua or shala tree (Shorea robusta). Unlike the regularly used antibiotic drugs that target the TB bacteria, the bergenin compound modulates the immune system to kill the bacteria found inside the macrophages (a type of white blood cells). The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.

“Our studies show that the bergenin compound can be used to clear the bacteria, and when used in combination with other TB drugs can produce good results,” says Gobardhan Das from the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a corresponding author of the paper. “Since the compound does not target the bacteria directly but modulates the immune system to kill the bacteria, it can be used in patients with drug-resistant TB too.”

The researchers undertook several studies to understand the mode of action of the compound. The compound was unable to directly kill TB bacteria when treated with the compound. However, in the case of in vitro studies, the compound was able to kill the bacteria found inside infected cells. In mice infected with TB and treated with the compound, there was significant reduction in the bacterial load in the lungs. Unlike in the case of in vitro studies, in mice the compound was found to activate not only the macrophages but also other cell types (T cells) that led to effective killing of the bacteria. A significant reduction in the number of granulomatic lesions was seen in animals treated with the compound. Also, the bacterial load was 100-fold lower in mice treated with the compound compared with controls (animals that were not treated with bergenin). “These findings strongly suggest that the immune response enhanced by the compound is able to increase the capacity to clear the TB bacteria,” Prof. Das says.

The levels of nitric oxide and a cytokine (TNF-alpha) were found to be enhanced. “We found the bergenin compound was selectively enhancing the frequency of interferon-gamma and interleukin-17-producing T cells in the TB infected animals,” says Dhiraj K. Singh from ICGEB and a co-author of the paper. Interferon-gamma promotes bacteria-killing nitric oxide inside macrophages thus promoting the generation of protective immune responses against TB bacteria.

Previous studies have shown that T helper 1 (Th1) cells play a key role in protecting the host against TB bacteria, while Th2 cells oppose the protection offered by Th1 cells. “There is a dynamic balance between the Th1 and Th2,” says Ved P. Dwivedi from ICGEB and the first author of the paper. “While TB bacteria prevents Th1 response and facilitates Th2 response, the bergenin compound promotes the expression of Th1 and Th17 responses.”

Beats conventional drugs

The compound has been shown to heal wounds faster than conventional drugs. Dr. Debprasad Chattopadhyay, Director of the ICMR-National Institute of Traditional Medicine (ICMR-NITM) in Belgaum, Karanataka, and the other corresponding author of the paper, had isolated the compound. He had seen tribals using the leaves of shala tree for wound-healing.

“Our study, in a limited way, tries to correct the misinformation regarding Ayurveda. The stage is now set to test many more Ayurvedic and plant-derived natural products for their potency against pathogenic diseases,” says Dr. Anand Ranganathan from the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine at JNU and one of the authors of the paper.

Prof. Das with the help of ICMR-NITM plans to carry out further tests in larger animals. If used in combination with other TB drugs the compound can shorten the duration of treatment and prevent the emergence of drug-resistance, the authors write.

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What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a form of malicious software that locks up the files on your computer, encrypts them, and demands that you pay to get your files back. Wanna Decryptor, or WannaCry, is a form of ransomware that affects Microsoft’s Windows operating system. When a system is infected, a pop up window appears, prompting you to pay to recover all your files within three days, with a countdown timer on the left of the window. It adds that if you fail to pay within that time, the fee will be doubled, and if you don’t pay within seven days, you will lose the files forever. Payment is accepted only with Bitcoin.

How does it spread?

According to the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (USCRT), under the Department of Homeland Security, ransomware spreads easily when it encounters unpatched or outdated software. Experts say that WannaCry is spread by an internet worm -- software that spreads copies of itself by hacking into other computers on a network, rather than the usual case of prompting unsuspecting users to open attachments. It is believe that the cyber attack was carried out with the help of tools stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States.

Some forms of malware can lock the computer entirely, or set off a series of pop-ups that are nearly impossible to close, thereby hindering your work.

What can be done to prevent this?

The best way to protect your computer is to create regular backups of your files. The malware only affects files that exist in the computer. If you have created a thorough backup and your machine is infected with ransomware, you can reset your machine to begin on a clean slate, reinstall the software and restore your files from the backup. According to Microsoft’s Malware Protection Centre, other precautions include regularly updating your anti-virus program; enabling pop-up blockers; updating all software periodically; ensure the smart screen (in Internet Explorer) is turned on, which helps identify reported phishing and malware websites; avoid opening attachments that may appear suspicious.

Who has it affected so far?

It was first reported from Sweden, Britain and France, but Russia and Taiwan are said to be the worst hit, according to US media. Over 75,000 systems have been affected. Major companies that have reported attacks are FedEx, Telefonica and National Health Service (UK).

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About Ransomware virus

What is ransomware?
Malicious software that locks a device, such as a computer, tablet or smartphone and then demands a ransom to unlock it

Where did ransomware originate?
 The first documented case appeared in 2005 in the United States, but quickly spread around the world

How does it affect a computer?
 The software is normally contained within an attachment to an email that masquerades as something innocent. Once opened it encrypts the hard drive, making it impossible to access or retrieve anything stored on there – such as photographs, documents or music

How can you protect yourself?

 Anti-virus software can protect your machine, although cybercriminals are constantly working on new ways to override such protection

How much are victims expected to pay?
 The ransom demanded varies. Victims of a 2014 attack in the UK were charged £500. However, there’s no guarantee that paying will get your data back

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IT expert who saved the world from ransomware virus is working with GCHQ to prevent repeat

The young cyber expert who saved the NHS from hackers is working with GCHQ to head off another attack, it has been claimed.

Marcus Hutchins has been credited with stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack from spreading across the globe by accidentally triggering a "kill switch".

The self-taught 22-year-old took just a few hours to stop the breach, which had already spread to more than 200,000 victims - including the NHS - across 150 countries.

He is now working with the government's National Cyber Security Centre to prevent a new strain of the malicious software, it was reported.

He is believed to have stopped the attack from a small bedroom in his parents' house. Last night, pictures emerged of his self-made IT hub, crammed with takeaway pizza boxes, video games and computer servers.

Others showed the security expert, who did not go to university, in Las Vegas as part of a trip to DEFCON, the world's largest annual convention for internet hackers.


Kurtis Baron, the founder of Fidus Information Security who travelled with Mr Hutchins to Las Vegas last year, said his friend was just doing his job when he stopped the attack.

Speaking to The Telegraph, he said he had known him a "reasonably long time". "He is a really nice friend and also a business colleague. He was just doing his job," he said. "If we could make him work for us then we would employ him in a heartbeat, but he won't move."
He added: "It is not a job to him, more a passion that he happens to get paid for."



Andrew Mabbitt, the co-founder of Fidus, described Mr Hutchins as "one of the most intelligent and talented people I know".

"He gets paid to do his hobby which is most people's dream in life," he added.


Mr Hutchins - who is known only as Malware Tech - is believed to live in a popular seaside resort on the north Devon coast. His mother and father work in the medical industry and he also has a younger brother.

His social media accounts are peppered with tweets about his love of surfing and views of the waves along the coast. In one tweet, he wrote: "I could move to a city but where in a city would I get this view?"

Around a year ago, he joined a "private intel threat firm" based in Los Angeles. He later made a number of references to travelling to America, including admitting being "super worried" he was "too nerdy" for Las Vegas.

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Defying warnings, North Korea fires yet another missile

North Korea, defying calls to rein in its weapons programme, fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday, days after a new leader in South Korea came to power pledging to engage Pyongyang in dialogue.

The U.S. military’s Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile that was fired but it was “not consistent with an intercontinental ballistic missile”. The U.S. threat assessment has not changed from a national security standpoint, a U.S. official said.

Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said the missile could be a new type. It flew for 30 minutes before dropping into the sea between North Korea’s east coast and Japan. North Korea has consistently test-fired missiles in that direction.

Call for sanctions

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the missile landed 97 km south of Russia’s Vladivostok region, prompting the White House to reference Moscow in a statement about the incident. “With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased,” the White House said, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The launch served as a call for all nations to implement stronger sanctions against North Korea, it added.

North Korea is widely believed to be developing an intercontinental missile tipped with a nuclear weapon that is capable of reaching the United States. Mr. Trump has vowed not to let that happen.

The missile flew 700 km and reached an altitude of more than 2,000 km, according to officials in South Korea and Japan, further and higher than an intermediate-range missile North Korea successfully tested in February from the same region of Kusong, northwest of its capital, Pyongyang.

An intercontinental ballistic missile is considered to have a range of more than 6,000 km.

Experts said the altitude reached by the missile tested on Sunday meant it was launched at a high trajectory, which would limit the lateral distance it travelled. But if it was fired at a standard trajectory, it would have a range of at least 4,000 km, experts said. Kim Dong-yub of Kyungnam University’s Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul said he estimated a standard trajectory would give it a range of 6,000 km. “The launch may indeed represent a new missile with a long range,” said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, referring to the estimated altitude of more than 2,000 km. “It is definitely concerning.”
 

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NASA missions on solar system

 A new mission to Saturn’s moons Titan or Enceladus to find signs of life beyond Earth cannot be ruled out as NASA says it is reviewing 12 proposals for future unmanned solar system mission to be launched in the mid-2020s.

The proposed missions of discovery — submitted under NASA’s New Frontiers programme —will undergo scientific and technical review over the next seven months, the US space agency said in a statement on Friday. Selection of one or more concepts for Phase A study will be announced in November. At the conclusion of Phase A concept studies, it is planned that one New Frontiers investigation will be selected to continue into subsequent mission phases.

Investigations for this announcement of opportunity were limited to six mission themes — comet surface sample return; lunar South Pole-Aitken basin sample return; ocean worlds (Titan and/or Enceladus); Saturn probe; Trojan tour and rendezvous; and Venus in situ explorer

“New Frontiers is about answering the biggest questions in our solar system today, building on previous missions to continue to push the frontiers of exploration,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

“We’re looking forward to reviewing these exciting investigations and moving forward with our next bold mission of discovery,” Zurbuchen said.

The New Frontiers Programme conducts principal investigator (PI)-led space science investigations under a development cost cap of approximately $1 billion.

This would be the fourth mission in the New Frontiers portfolio. Its predecessors are the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and OSIRIS

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