According to the Vice-Chairman of the Climate and Political Council of Sweden, Johan Kuylensherna, global warming and the melting of permafrost can have a serious impact on the life of cities and villages in Siberia.
In an interview with Svenska Dagbladet, Kuylensherna noted that actively thawing permafrost would have a major impact on infrastructure. “Cities and dams will be affected, and the soil will lose stability. There are real risks of the destruction of villages and cities that will directly affect people,” he said.
The scientist commented on a new temperature record of +38 degrees, which was recorded in the city of Eastern Siberia Verkhoyansk. He recalled that the last record of 37.3 degrees lasted 32 years. “This is one of the links in a large chain, it is rather difficult to interpret each individually,” the expert added.
Cloving hospital on the basis of the Medical Scientific and Educational Center (ISSC) Moscow State University named after M.V.Lomonosov took the first patients on April 21 and completed his work on June 13. It turned out that it was possible to achieve the best treatment results for COVID-19 in Moscow. Over the entire period, 4 patients died, and among severe patients who got mechanical ventilation, the mortality rate was less than 14% (for comparison, the average for the city and the world was up to 70 – 80%). Eighteen doctors out of 220 employees of the hospital were infected with coronavirus, there were no deaths among the medical staff.
What approaches were used at the University Hospital of Moscow State University to achieve such results? We continue the conversation with the head. Department of Therapy, Faculty of Fundamental Medicine, Moscow State University, Head of the Department of Age-Associated Diseases, Medical Scientific and Educational Center, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Cardiologist Yana Orlova.
MEDICINE FOR COUGH FOR 80 RUBLES
– Most of those who are ill or are afraid to get sick are worried about fibrotic changes in their lungs. They say that you have developed special therapy that can reduce the risk of developing fibrosis. Is it possible?!
– Yes, we launched an appropriate clinical study. There are no final results yet, but we have developed clinical practice.
“What did you do to save the lungs?”
– We used a combination of bromhexine and spironolactone (both are long-known very cheap drugs. – Ed.). Bromhexine is an expectorant that has been prescribed to patients with pneumonia and cough for many years. At the same time, experimental data showed that this drug can block a specific enzyme and impede the penetration of coronavirus into cells. True, it was on this effect that we counted to a lesser extent in inpatients, since such an effect is important mainly in the early stages of the disease. But the expectorant effect of bromhexine really helps patients with COVID. I heard that our colleagues in Peter launched a study of bromhexine for prophylactic purposes. We will wait for the results.
Coronavirus infected 18 doctors from 220 employees of the hospital, there were no deaths among the medical staffPhoto: Ivan MAKEEV
FIBROSIS OBSTACLE
– The second drug – spironolactone – is traditionally widely used in cardiology for the treatment of heart failure, severe hypertension. It has a small diuretic, magnesium and potassium-preserving effect, continues Yana. Orlova. – It has several mechanisms through which it can be useful in coronavirus infection.
Firstly, a mechanism that prevents the development of fibrosis in general in the body. There are works that, in particular, show that spironolactone reduces fibrosis in the heart. At the same time, it is known that the tendency to fibrosis is not local, but systemic – where there is more inflammation, there will certainly be fibrosis. And we see, of course, fibrotic changes in the “covide” in our patients. Therefore, we prescribed spironolactone as a drug for the prevention of this process.
Secondly, this drug blocks sex hormone receptors, in particular testosterone. Some published studies suggest that “high-testosterone” men suffer from “covid” more often and develop more severe fibrotic changes. Therefore, blocking these receptors for several weeks during COVID treatment may be useful in reducing the severity of complications. We are not talking about a longer intake, since male patients are unlikely to agree with a decrease in testosterone levels in the long term.
And perhaps the most important point. In almost all of our patients, we observed hypokalemia (a decrease in potassium levels. – Ed.). With coronavirus infection, potassium is intensely excreted from the body, and scientific articles even suggest that hypokalemia serves as the trigger for a cytokine storm. So spironolactone has a real chance to reduce the risk of this dangerous complication. But the main thing, in my opinion, is that lowering the level of potassium in the body is extremely harmful to the heart and triggers life-threatening rhythm disturbances, increasing the risk of sudden death. We, like all others, replenished potassium with droppers, but it was more effective to retain it in the body with the help of spironolactone.
Men certainly get worse than women; the elderly are heavier than the young; overweight people are heavier than overweight patientsPhoto: Ivan MAKEEV
WHEN PRESCRIBED PATIENTS
– Yana Arturovna, how many patients did you have on average?
– About 10 – 14 days. But someone and 50 days.
– Have you noticed signs by which it can be assumed that the disease in the person brought is likely to go the hard way?
– Such studies were carried out in the world, our clinical practice confirmed them. Men certainly get worse than women; the elderly are heavier than the young; overweight people are heavier than overweight patients. Men with a classic male type of baldness, a lot of facial hair, we can say brutal men get sick harder.
– Under what conditions did you discharge patients?
– We acted as close as possible to the recommendations Ministry of Health: so that the temperature for three days was not higher than 37.5 degrees; so that C-reactive protein (an indicator of inflammation) is lower than 10 mg / l, and saturation, that is, the level of oxygen in the blood, is higher than 96%.
“HEAD OF EPIDEMIOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF ITSELF WORKED AT SANPROPUSNIK”
– How often do you get sick doctors and nurses?
– In the first month no one got sick at all. We have a very powerful epidemiological service. The head of the sanitary-epidemiological department, a senior researcher, correctly organized the whole process, and for the first two weeks she personally worked in the sanitary inspection room at the exit from the “red zone” and helped doctors and nurses who were exhausted after the shift safely remove protective clothing.
Then both people’s fatigue and viral load accumulated. By the middle of the second month, sick people began to appear. There were no seriously ill patients. We treated part of the staff in our observation, part of it was treated at home. In total, 18 people were infected from the medical staff (less than 10%).
– Doctors take something for prevention? Vitamins C, D, Zinc?
– I saw the recommendations of American nutritionists, they speak out positively about taking zinc, melatonin and vitamin C. There were somewhat conflicting data on vitamin D. But we did not give any such recommendations to our employees. We have all the prevention was associated with minimizing contacts and other measures of epidemiological safety.
Physicians are the heroes of our time.“If you think that you are special and that a pandemic will not affect you, you are deeply mistaken,” listen to what the doctors who are fighting with coronavirus say
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California scientists have found a new mechanism of infection COVID-19
Scientists examined infected cells under a microscope and saw sprouting tentacle-like spikes on them. Stuffed, like the cell itself with viral particles, these spikes reach the neighboring healthy cells to infect them.
“It’s so ominous that the virus, before killing cells, first uses them to infect healthy ones,” says Krogan.
According to scientists, the resulting “zombie cells” with the help of tentacles, apparently, penetrate the bodies of cells and inject viral poison directly into their genetic command centers.
– Until now, researchers believed that COVID-19 uses one mechanism of infection of the human body, says Alexei Zarubin, a geneticist at the Tomsk Institute of Medical Genetics. – Like most other viruses, the classical way of their penetration into the human body lies through the cellular receptor. Then inside the cell it multiplies, and when there are a lot of viral particles, it destroys the cell, breaks out and sets off in search of the next victim. In the case of COVID-19, according to the University of California, the virus, in addition to the main method, uses an additional one: by penetrating the cell in the traditional way, it causes it to grow with tentacles, which are also called filopodia, and with their help penetrate other cells. With this distribution method, it is no longer necessary to have a virus-specific receptor on the infected cell, you just need contact, the physical proximity of a healthy cell to the infected one. And so the virus can infect cells that are usually resistant to the virus. The “insidiousness” of SARS-CoV-2 here is that healthy cells have the same membrane with infected cells, communication is easier and faster.
The virus seemed to have developed an additional way to bypass a strong immune system that can fight most viruses. Perhaps this explains the fact that completely healthy young people sometimes get coronavirus.
– Were similar filopodia seen in other viruses?
– There were articles about the appearance of filopodia in SARS-1 in 2014, and they were also found in some other viruses (herpes, smallpox, HIV), but in the case of the new coronavirus, scientists note a much larger size and branched, tree structure of these tentacles. According to their assumption, this makes the virus more active and contagious compared to the previous ones.
Photo: freepik.com
– The article says that knowledge about the new property of the virus will help in the future to find drugs against it.
– If we find proteins that trigger the growth of filopodia, then with the help of drugs we can block this growth and thereby significantly slow down the spread of the virus in the body. Thus, we will give the immune system time to cope with the “foreign agent” on our own.
A resident of the village of Yastrovo, 280 km from Warsaw, photographed a strange flying object, surprisingly reminiscent of a UFO, LadBible reports. Moreover, as experts admit, these are the first photos in a fairly high quality. Now experts are analyzing them for authenticity, but certain conclusions have already been made.
The man was riding his bicycle on the road when he heard a strange sound from the side. He turned and saw something. He managed to capture it on a cell phone camera before the object disappeared.
This photo was taken in Poland: https://t.co/VZu2EBYLtQ pic.twitter.com/kfLDUTadAW
— Spacecowboy78 (@Spacecowboy781) June 27, 2020
A total of 5 pictures were taken. The man shared them with the Polish ufologist Robert Bernatovich. A man is afraid to give his name, because he does not want to be known as “crazy.”
The photo was also received by the former head of the investigation department of the British UFO Research Association Philip Mantle. He talked to former Airbus specialist Jason Glive, and they concluded that the photos were real. Moreover, this can not be something suspended, as some skeptics believed. However, what exactly is it, experts still can not give an answer.
Argentine scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a frog that lived in the center of this South American country about two million years ago, according to the Science Publishing Agency at the National University of Matanza.
“We don’t know much about prehistoric frogs,” said Federico Aniolan, a researcher with the Argentine Institute of Natural Sciences. “Frogs and toads are affected greatly by climatic and environmental changes, so they are an important source of information to understand past climates,” he added.
The discovery took place at a depth of 44 meters during the drilling of a water well in San Pedro, 180 km north of Buenos Aires.
The researcher stressed that the paleontologists found “the bone of the humerus is a very small amphibian being different from the hulls and frogs of trees.”
He emphasized that the small fossil was identified despite its size because the petroats, which are a group of braids that include frogs and alagalam, have a special structure at the tip of the humerus in the elbow joint.
“The find makes a huge contribution to paleontology in Argentina,” said Federico Aniolan.
Today, science is looking for ways to stop global warming, the danger of which is becoming increasingly apparent. Even the hardest opponents of the theory of warming are beginning to recognize this.
An unexpected option was found by scientists who studied the causes of the famous Ordovician extinction. It happened about 466 million years ago and destroyed 85% of the species and 60% of the genera of marine invertebrates.
Recall that for the entire life of the earth there were six major mass extinctions. The latter happened approximately 65.5 million years ago, after which the dinosaurs disappeared. Scientists call it the cause of the fall of a huge meteorite to Earth. This explosion lifted a huge amount of dust into the air, causing an almost instantaneous sharp drop in temperature, which radically changed the climate. The planet has turned into an ice ball.
Ordovician extinction took place quite differently. It was not instantaneous, but gradual, lasting about two million years, which allowed representatives of the flora and fauna to adapt to climate change. This was the conclusion of a group of scientists who studied rocks about 466 million years old. They searched for elements that were almost never found in terrestrial rocks, as well as isotopes indicating signs that their carrier had arrived from space. And such “evidence” was discovered. This is extraterrestrial helium; it differs from ours in just one neutron. It would seem a trifle, but for science this is an obvious sign of cosmic origin.
What caused this “mild” climate change scenario? According to scientists, this is a collision of two giant asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, which occurred about 466 million years ago. It threw out a huge amount of dust, which, reaching Earth, polluted the atmosphere of our planet, lowering the temperature by about ten degrees Celsius in two million years. But unlike the variant with the asteroid falling to the Earth, it gradually accumulated for millions of years.
These distant events prompted scientists to the unexpected idea of combating impending global warming. They propose to place several asteroid analogs in the orbit of our planet, which will continuously release fine dust and partially block sunlight. According to the authors of the idea, this soft version is good because it has already been tested by nature. So, we already know what we are preparing for. Unlike those offered by other researchers today. The work was published in Science Advances.
Dolphins not only teach their children how to hunt, they also teach each other new tricks to get food. Biologists write this in the journal Current Biology. The trick in question is to use a shell as a safety net for fish, and then shake out the prey.
In general, toothed whales (such as dolphins) learn from their mothers. However, research on bottlenose dolphins in Australia’s Shark Bay shows that the dolphins can also teach each other things outside of the mother-child bond.
Several bottlenose dolphins were seen catching food in a shell and then fishing it out. They chased a fish and chased it into a large shell.
The dolphins then put their snouts into the opening of the shell and took the object to the surface of the water. There they shake the shell back and forth until their prey fell out, directly into their mouths.
Passing on knowledge mutually helps with survival
Biologists analyzed which dolphins in a population used the trick with the conch and kept this in addition to the social networks within the bottlenose dolphin populations. From this they could conclude that the trick was not mainly passed on from generation to generation, but by a generation among themselves.
When animal species can transfer knowledge among themselves, rather than just from mother to child, for example, they can better adapt to their environment, the authors state in this study. This increases their chances of survival.
Few cases are known of the use of tools in dolphins
The researchers believe that it is not only interesting how the dolphins learn from each other. The hunting trick in question is also unique because it is one of the few examples of dolphins using tools to catch food.
Another example of dolphin use of tools is catching prey with sponge animals.
Penguins living in the South Pole appear to benefit if less ice floats on the water. In periods with less ice in Antarctica, the birds seem to be able to eat better. Japanese scientists write this in the journal Science Advances.
Biologists have been researching Adelie penguins for a long time. In addition, they noticed that penguin populations grow very much in periods with little sea ice. In addition, the chicks grow faster and the adult birds have more body mass. In times of ice at sea, breeding periods are problematic.
It was unknown for a long time why this was the case. Until Japanese scientists decided to provide sensors to 175 penguins. Those sensors included speedometers, cameras and GPS systems. This allowed the behavior of the birds to be accurately measured.
The research shows that little sea ice leads to population growth, because the birds have more space to find food in the water. In periods with a lot of sea ice, the birds have to waddle around and look for a break in the ice to dive in.
When there is less ice on the water, the penguins are free to dive where they want. They then have much more space to find food and they also have to compete less with others for food.
Less ice also means more food
Finally, penguins eat krill, a shrimp-like animal that feeds on plankton. When there is less ice on the water, more sunlight enters the water, which in turn increases plankton growth. Then the krill can eat more and the penguin in turn also has more krill to feast on.
However, the researchers add that Adélie penguins live in mainland Antarctica. Penguin species that live on islands near the South Pole seem to thrive less with less sea ice. Why this and the difference between the two species remains to be seen in subsequent research.
Inhale through your nose and exhale from the mouth: it is not only an exercise to perform during a yoga lesson. Breathe in this manner presents a great advantage from the point of view of the doctor that can help you fight a viral infection.
The nasal cavity, in fact, produces nitrogen monoxide, is a molecule abbreviated by the chemical NO, that increases the blood flow in the lungs and increases the levels of oxygen in the blood. Breathing in from the nose we carry the NO directly into the lungs, where it can help fight infection by coronavirus, blocking the cycle and replication machinery of the virus in the lungs. Also, many yoga devotees benefit from the inhalation nasal rather than oral: the high oxygen saturation of the blood can make us feel more refreshed and increase our resistance.
I am one of the three pharmacologists who received the Nobel prize in 1998 for having discovered the way in which the nitrogen monoxide is produced by the human body and its functioning.
Nitrogen monoxide is a molecule that signal very widespread that triggers a variety of physiological effects. Clinically it is used as a gas to dilate selectively the pulmonary arteries of infants with pulmonary hypertension. Unlike many signal molecules, the natural state of NO is a gas.
Relax the muscles The nitrogen monoxide is produced in a continuous cycle from the thousand billion cells that form the endothelial tissue of the over one hundred thousand miles of blood vessels that wind up in our body, especially in the lungs. The nitrogen monoxide produced by the endothelial tissue serves to relax the smooth muscle tissue of the arteries to prevent excessive pressure and promote the flow of blood towards all the organs. Another essential role of NO is to prevent the formation of thrombi in the arterial vessels.
In addition to the muscle tissue, vascular, nitrogen monoxide also relaxes the airway (the trachea and bronchioles) and facilitates breathing. Another type of relaxation of the smooth muscle tissue linked to the NO occurs in the corpus cavernosum, creating the erection. The nitrogen monoxide is the main mediator responsible for erection and sexual arousal. This discovery has led to the development and marketing of the sildenafil (known as Viagra), a drug that acts by potentiating the action of NO.
Other cell types, including circulating cells, white blood cells and macrophages, produce nitrogen monoxide to purpose antimicrobial. The NO interacts with other molecules produced by the same cells to form antimicrobial agents which destroy the micro-organisms in the interior, including bacteria, parasites, and viruses. As you can see, the nitrogen monoxide is a molecule that is extraordinary.
Since NO is a gas, may be administered with the help of special devices that allow patients to inhale. The nitrogen monoxide inhalation is used to treat children born with pulmonary hypertension, persistent, a condition in which narrowed arteries restrict the blood flow and the uptake of oxygen.
The nitrogen monoxide inhaled dilates the narrowed arteries and increases the blood flow in the lungs. Thanks to this process, the hemoglobin contained in the red blood cells can pick up oxygen and release it into the circulatory system. The NO inhaled has literally transformed the complexion of many infants from “blue” to “pink”, allowing it to heal and go back home with the parents. Before this treatment, most children suffering from pulmonary hypertension not survived.
The studies on Sars Currently, the nitrogen monoxide inhalation is also used in some clinical trials on patients suffering from covid-19. The researchers hope to fight the virus, also thanks to the three main actions of the molecule: the dilatation of the pulmonary arteries with increased blood flow, dilation of airways with increased release of oxygen in the lungs and in the blood and the ability to stop or at least slow down the growth and spread of the virus in the lungs.
In one In vitro study conducted in 2004, during the outbreak of Sars, the experimental compounds that release NO have increased the survival rate of eukaryotic cells of mammals infected with the Sars-cov. These results suggested that the nitrogen monoxide has an antiviral effect directed. The study found that NO inhibited significantly the cycle and replication machinery of the virus by blocking the production of viral proteins and genetic material, Rna.
In a small clinical study conducted in 2004, the nitrogen monoxide that is inhaled has been shown to be effective against the Sars-cov in patients with pneumonia and in a serious condition.
The Sars-cov responsible for the epidemic of 2003-2004, it shares most of its genome with the Sars-cov-2, the virus that causes the covid-19. Consequently, it is possible that therapy based on the NO inhalation may be effective for patients suffering from covid-19. At the moment several institutions are conducting clinical trials with the administration of NO to patients with moderate or severe forms of covid-19 and forced to depend on a respirator. The hope is that the inhalation of nitrogen monoxide to be effective and reduce the need for ventilators and beds in intensive care.
Unlike the mouth, the nasal cavities produce NO in a continuous cycle. The nitrogen monoxide produced in the nasal cavity is chemically identical to the one used in the therapy for inhalation. Therefore, inhaling from the nose allows us to bring the NO directly into the lungs, where it increases the flow of the respiratory and blood as well as counteract microorganisms and viral particles.
While we look forward to the results of clinical studies on the inhalation of NO and the development of a vaccine against the covid-19, we should try to breathe in a proper way, maximizing the inhalation of nitrogen monoxide. Remember: inhale through your nose, exhale from the mouth.
