Pollution threat: Vanishing vultures

People talk much about the pollution 
by traffic-fuel-emissions, noises and plastic......

Hardly they are aware that medicines, 
chemical products of many sort 
and new techniques 
are also causing pollution to the extent of human catastrophe at large !!

India looking for an eco-catastrophe:
In last few decades, 90% of vultures in India are dead. 

After reading an article*, it came to mind with a shock that I haven't seen vultures in last many years.

Condor flights and early civilizations: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

We have been listening about this since last many years, but after reading about vultures, I realized the vast stage been set for this catastrophe, vast yet so hidden, as no one notices it often.

Just read this article and think about our kids and their tomorrow: vultures are dying today, the younger generation feeding on these meats....their tomorrow shall bring a future of unpredictable diseases.

Vanishing vultures in India: Biologists from all over the country confirmed that the three dominant species of South Asian vultures—slender-billed (Gyps tenuerostris), white-backed (Gyps bengalensis), and long-billed (Gyps indicus)—were dying across the region. 

By 2000, the World Conservation Union classified all three species as critically endangered, the highest risk category, and the Indian scientific community called out to their international colleagues to help identify the cause of the crash. Initial speculation centered on an infectious disease or bioaccumulation of pesticides, similar to the devastating effects of DDT on predatory birds a half-century earlier in Europe and North America.

Indian vultures

 But it was an American, Lindsay Oaks, a microbiologist at Washington State University working in collaboration with the US-based Peregrine Fund, who finally isolated the cause of the collapse in April 2003 and published the results the following year in Nature. The three species of Gyps vultures were dying from ingesting livestock carcasses treated with diclofenac, a mild painkiller akin to aspirin or ibuprofen. 

2-(2-(2,6-dichlorophenylamino)phenyl)acetic acid Cl
picture courtesy: wikipedia.org

picture courtesy: wikipedia.org

After taking it themselves for decades, Indians began using it in the early 1990s to ease the aches of their farm animals' cracked hooves and swollen udders. For reasons that remain unknown, vultures that feed on animals treated with diclofenac develop visceral gout—untreatable kidney failure that causes a crystallized bloom across their internal organs. Death occurs within weeks.

  

Thus, vulture numbers in the region had plummeted by 97 percent—the most catastrophic avian population decline since buckshot wiped out the passenger pigeon.

 No longer a mystery, the vanishing of India's vultures now presents a still greater challenge. India must find a way to restore its prime scavenger or risk untold human health consequences. Vultures once rid the landscape of diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, and foot-and-mouth. Their strong stomach acids and high body temperatures allow them to ingest an anthrax-infected carcass and suffer no ill effects. The fear is that with vultures gone, and the human handling of dead livestock increasing, that these diseases could spread among both animal and human populations.

 *Meera Subramanian’s article in VQR of spring 2011 issue outlines the problem in much researched way; Can the world's fastest growing nation restore its prime scavenger before there are untold human consequences?

Pollution all around: Indian cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore are having their populace with increasing number of Asthama, cough and allergy cases every year on. 

How can a medicine could cure a disease due to man-made pollution. Now how can a doctor could suggest some patient to visit a village or a hill station for a healthy pollution free climatic change, after the medication.

Air pollution

100,000,000 tons of waste is collected every year in Indian cities. Only 60% is collected, rest 40% is burnt there itself. Some of the waste is used for the land-fill is also burnt there. 50% of the farming land of India is fast loosing the upper fertile crust, 70% of the river water is polluted, India is first in the world in air-pollution.

Indian pollution graphic scenario as by 2004

Economic development, liberalization, foreign multi national companies have resulted in new kind of one-time hybrid/gene altered seeds, new fertilizers, new insecticides....adding to the

Plastics are the menace

pollution menace of land and water to a new level of danger....resulting the mass suicide of farmers in India.

Deadly effects of antibiotics and hormones: While we eat meat, we presume that our body is getting better nutritional food. But, where from  these fish and meats are coming to....? 

These days most of the chicken birds are Broiler chicken, they are born in a cage, grown there itself, fed specially prepared food and in a three months of time a young bird get ready to be served  on our dining table. These are the 'chicken factories' where hundreds of thousand chickens are getting ready every day. Their cost is also kept in a normal range so that most people could afford to purchase them. As hundreds of thousand birds are kept together in a common cage, it's easy to manage them with the prepared feeds, but danger of infectious disease looms at large. So antibiotics and hormones are administered frequently, which makes them bigger and fattier beside protecting them from diseases. Higher the weight of animal, higher shall be the profit.

The meat industry could well be called meat factories which relies on antibiotics, arsenic, pesticides, hormones of various kinds to get maximum output in shorter span of time.

Antibiotics, arsenic, pesticides, and hormones are many other organic compounds which are used in animal feeding operations and may pose risks if they enter the environment. For example, chronic toxicity may result from low-level discharges of antibiotics and pesticides. Estrogen hormones have been implicated in the reduction in sperm counts among Western men (Sharpe and Skakkebaek, 1993) and reproductive disorders in a variety of wildlife (Colburn et al., 1993). Other sources of antibiotics and hormones include municipal waste waters, septic tank leachate, and runoff from land-applied sewage sludge. Sources of pesticides include crop runoff and urban runoff.

Little information is available regarding the concentrations of these compounds in animal wastes, or their fate/transport behavior and bioavailability in waste-amended soils. These compounds may reach surface waters via runoff from land-application sites.

Environmental and water pollution, chemicals and insecticides mixed in food, altered seeds and crops.

These are the changes happening below the ground, invisible from outside, but grazing our future like a big monster....to which we ourselves  have created like the one, Frankenstein. 

Vegetarian food is more nutritional with no Cholesterol and Fat. Cancer possibilities is less by 40%. Non-vegetarians are 9 times more susceptible for obesity. Soya, milk, cereals, fruits, vegetables, almond, juice fulfills our daily requirement of Vitamins, Calcium, Folic  Acid and Proteins; protecting from infections like common Flu.

Politicians and industrialists are selling future for the sake of man-made-money or due to ignorance in the name of development and modernization; but this devil shall not spare them too. 

As they have to breathe in the same air and eat food grown in the same soil. 

Acknowledgements: 

1. *Meera Subramanian, VQR of spring 2011

2. Sunil Deepak, Nav Bharat, Chhattisgarh,17 Feb 2013

3. American Geophysical Union survey of Indian pollution 

4. Wikipedia.org 

#Chicken lovers beware: Breeders in India use antibiotics to make birds fatter !! http://www.firstpost.com/living/chicken-lovers-beware-breeders-in-india-use-antibiotics-to-make-birds-fatter-1642335.html

Viruses are cellular organisms

It has been realized that viral particles are by far the most abundant biological entities on our planet.

A typical virus replication cycle
picture thankfully shared from wikipedia.org

Some bacteriophages inject their
genomes into bacterial cells (not to scale)
*picture thankfully shared from wikipedia.org

If you get sick with the flu, for example, every infected cell in your airway produces about 10,000 new viruses. The total number of flu viruses in your body can rise to 100 trillion within a few days. That’s over 10,000 times more viruses than people on Earth.

If there can be so many viruses in a single person, how many viruses are there in total on our planet? I’ve hunted around for a number, and the one I’ve seen most often is 10³¹. As in, 10000000000000000000000000000000. As in over 10 million times more viruses than there are stars in the universe. As in, if you were to stack one virus on top of another, you’d create a tower that would stretch beyond the moon, beyond the sun, beyond Alpha Centauri, out past the edge of the Milky Way, past neighboring galaxies, to reach a height of 200 million light years.  

*by Carl Zimmer

Noroviruses. Photo by Charles D. Humphrey,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Times are changing and viruses, once only considered as side-products of cellular evolution, are now at the center of many debates on the early evolution of life on our planet

The recent studies have confirmed that:

• Viruses have played and still playing a major innovative role in cellular organisms.
• Their position in the universal tree of life.
• Viruses are no more confused with their virions, but can be viewed as a complex living entities that transform the infected cell into a novel organism - the virus - producing virions.

Viruses and their relation to cellular organism:

Now living organisms are divided into three primary lineage (Woese and Fox 1977);

Three cellular domain concept          Old dichotomy of virus

from the virus perspective                  1. Prokaryotes
1. Bacteria (Eubacteria)                                       (Bacteriophages)

(Bacterioviruses)                                              2. Eukaryotes           

2. Archaea (Archaebacteria)                                 (Viruses)
(Archaeoviruses)
3. Eukarya (Eukaryotes)
(Eukaryoviruses)

This trinity concept has now been corroborated by comparative biochemistry and comparative genomics.

Viruses are ancient:

The ubiquitous existence of viruses infecting members of the three cellular domains strongly suggests that viruses originated before LUCA, when cells still had genomes made of RNA and not DNA (DNA, which is a chemically modified form of RNA, could have appeared only after the emergence of complex proteins capable of modifying RNA,

Some archaeoviruses, bacterioviruses and eukaryoviruses share homologous capsid proteins and/or ATPases for protein packaging, suggesting that they all evolved from a common virus that existed at the time of LUCA of even before.

Viruses are therefore very ancient.

Major role in biological evolution: 

The idea that viruses are very ancient and have co-evolved with the three cellular lineages from the time of LUCA and even before has recently led to several hypotheses posing that viruses have played a major role in several critical evolutionary transitions. For instance:

it has been suggested that DNA and DNA replication machineries first originated in the viral world (Forterre 1999; Villarreal and DeFilippis 2000; Forterre 2002), that virus-induced transition of cells with RNA genomes into cells with DNA genomes triggered the emergence of the three cellular domains (Forterre 2006), that the nucleus of eukaryotic cells originated from a large DNA virus (Takemura 2001; Bell 2001), or even that the selection pressure to prevent the entry of virions promoted the evolution of cell walls (Jalasvuori and Bamford 2008). All these hypotheses are not easily testable, but recent findings make them reasonable. Indeed, it has been shown that cellular proteins playing very important roles in modern organisms may have a viral origin. For instance, phylogenetic analyses have revealed that the RNA polymerase, DNA polymerase and DNA helicase that transcribe and replicate DNA in modern mitochondria were recruited from a virus that was originally integrated into the genome of the bacterium at the origin of the mitochondria (Filée and Forterre 2005). More recently, it has been shown that placentation in mammals is initiated by a protein, syncitin, encoded by a retrovirus integrated in mammalian chromosomes (De Parseval and Heidmann 2005; Prudhomme et al. 2005). There are many other examples of the role that viruses have played in recent cellular evolution (for reviews, see Ryan 2007; Brosius 2003; Villarreal 2005). Brosius wrote, for instance, that “the interaction of hosts with retroviruses, retrotransposons and retroelements is one of the eternal conflicts that drive the evolution of life” (Brosius 2003). Prangishvili and myself have recently extended his argument, concluding that the conflict between cells and viruses has been (and still is) the major engine of life evolution (Forterre and Prangishvili 2009).

*thankfully shared from: Defining life: The virus viewpoint by Patrick Forterre in NCBI article: Published online 2010 March 3

Nature of virus:

the intracellular phase of the virus life cycle is the ontogenetically mature phase of viruses, where it shows the major physiological properties of oher organisms: metabolism, growth and reproduction. 

Eukaryotic viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm form complex localized viral factories to replicate their genome and produce virion. The viral factory corresponds to the real viral organism, whereas the virion corresponds to the mechanism used by the virus to spread from one cell to others.

If infected archaea and bacteria are indeed transformed into bona fide viruses, one can conclude that infected eukaryotic cells in which viral factories have taken control of the cellular machinery became viruses themselves, the viral factory being in that case the equivalent of the nucleus. By adopting this viewpoint, one should finally consider viruses as cellular organisms. They are of course a particular form of cellular organism, since they do not encode their own ribosomes and cell membranes, but borrow those from the cells in which they live.

To take into account the idea that viruses represent a bona fide form of life, Didier Raoult and myself have recently proposed to divide the living world into two major groups of organisms, ribosome encoding-organisms (the descendants of LUCA, archaea, bacteria and eukarya) and capsid-encoding organisms (the viruses) (Raoult and Forterre 2008).

Now newer perspective in defining:  

Life: Mode of existence of ribosomes encoding organisms (cells) and capsid encoding organisms (viruses) and their ancestors.

Organism: An ensemble of integrated organs (molecular and cellular) producing individuals evolving through natural selection.

Viruses encode two different "organs": 
1. replicon: allowing genome replication,
2. capsid

Virus structure:

*pictures thankfully shared from; http://www.twiv.tv/virus-structure/

Helical Symmetry

Icosahedral Symmetry

Enveloped with helical nucleocapsid (influenza virus)

Enveloped with icosahedral nucleocapsid (herpesvirus)

Complex symmetry (poxvirus)

Vedic insight: Poetry of creation

"The Song of Creation" hymns called as in Rig-veda, 

is a piece of marvelous thought of such an earlier age of known human civilization: 

almost a theory of creation has been put forward in the distinctive Vedic style 

of raising deeper questions 

and then putting possible answer to that; 

which clearly states that the emergence of all stellar and life forms 

must have followed a sequence that could be seen 

in following seven verses: 

which runs very much parallel to-date's 

scientific theories/hypothesis of creation and origin of some primordial life forms in water, 

before the advent of God any ..

Hymns of the Rig-veda are said to date from 1500 BC. The oldest MSS of the Rig-veda, known to us at present, date not from 1500 BC but from about 1500 AD.
We have therefore a gap of three thousand years. Rig-veda alone, contains a collection of ten books of hymns addressed to various deities, consists of 1017 (1028) poems, 10580 verses, and about 153,826 words.
They were handed down from 1500 before Christ to 1500 after Christ entirely by memory.
(F. Max Muller)

The Rigveda is conscious of the number of gods as 33, divided into three groups of eleven each. The traditional classification of the gods according to their place is terrestrial, aerial and celestial.

   

The Creation Hymn of Rig Veda

 (Rig Veda Book 10 Hymn 129)

*

Then there was not non-existent nor existent:
there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.

What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter?

was water there , unfathomed depth of water?

**

Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal:
no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
That one thing, breathless, breathed by it's own nature:
apart from it was nothing whatsoever.

***

Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness,
this all was undiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and formless:
by the great power of warmth was born that unit.

****

Thereafter rose desire in the beginning, desire the primal seed and germ of spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.

*****

Transversely was their severing line extended:
what was above it then, and what below it?
There was begetters, there was mighty forces, free action here and energy of yonder.

******

Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The gods are later than this world's production.
Who knows, then, whence it first came into being.
 
*******

He, the first origin of this creation, 

whether he formed it all or did not form it.

Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, 

he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not.

('Hindu Scriptures.' Everyman's Library. Dent, London.)

#For those interested in the original text:

nāsadāsīn no sadāsīt tadānīṃ nāsīd rajo no vyomāparo yat |
kimāvarīvaḥ kuha kasya śarmannambhaḥ kimāsīd ghahanaṃ ghabhīram ||
na mṛtyurāsīdamṛtaṃ na tarhi na rātryā ahna āsītpraketaḥ |
ānīdavātaṃ svadhayā tadekaṃ tasmāddhānyan na paraḥ kiṃ canāsa ||
tama āsīt tamasā ghūḷamaghre.apraketaṃ salilaṃ sarvamāidam |
tuchyenābhvapihitaṃ yadāsīt tapasastanmahinājāyataikam ||
kāmastadaghre samavartatādhi manaso retaḥ prathamaṃ yadāsīt |
sato bandhumasati niravindan hṛdi pratīṣyākavayo manīṣā ||
tiraścīno vitato raśmireṣāmadhaḥ svidāsī.a.a.at |
retodhāāsan mahimāna āsan svadhā avastāt prayatiḥ parastāt ||
ko addhā veda ka iha pra vocat kuta ājātā kuta iyaṃvisṛṣṭiḥ |
arvāgh devā asya visarjanenāthā ko veda yataābabhūva ||
iyaṃ visṛṣṭiryata ābabhūva yadi vā dadhe yadi vā na |
yo asyādhyakṣaḥ parame vyoman so aṅgha veda yadi vā naveda ||

#For those interested in the original text from the book with each word separated from the complex formation, first in Sanskrit then meaning of each word in Hindi; Hindi translation and then English translation--exactly the way word stands for, so that reader may have his/her own perspective .

The first Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

The second Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

The third Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

The fourth Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

The fifth Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

The sixth Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

The seventh Richa (Rig Vedic poem)

# text reference thankfully shared from: The discovery of India by Jawahar Lal Nehru, Oxford University Press, 1946; India-What can it teach us by F. Max Muller, Oxford, 1882; The new vedic selection by KNS Telang and BB Chaubey, Prachya Bharati Prakashan, Varanasi, 1965.

Existing as antibeing in anticosmos of antimatter

Sometime I too think that death is not the end of all my being

perhaps I shall pass through the mercurial mirror of life 

into another existence beyond.

In this composite image of the Crab Nebula, matter and antimatter are propelled nearly to the speed of light by the Crab pulsar. 
The images came from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Photo by NASA

Antimatter: Mirror of the universe

At the very beginning of the Universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter existed. If matter and antimatter were exact mirror images of each other, they would have completely annihilated to leave only energy.

picture share courtesy: atlas.ch

Perhaps there is already 

an anti-being representing my shadow in 

an anti-spacefield in an anti-cosmos. 

 But more often I think that death is 

a total annihilation of a set pattern. 

 One day I will go 

and in my place 

may be

a cactus will grow !!

 Who knows ? 

And what does it matter ? 

For none will recognize me !!

Existence is not by itself. 

Existence is by recognition.

**

http://sciencedoing.blogspot.in/2012/03/multiple-worlds-physics-vs-metaphysics.html

http://sciencedoing.blogspot.in/2012/02/hugh-everett-man-much-before-of-his.htm

http://sciencedoing.blogspot.in/2012/02/einsteins-quantum-mechanics-everetts.html

Electron Orbiting Charge Model Antimatter.gif,  

thankfully shared from: wikipedia

Some more scientific insights on Antimatter and particles related from the world of science:

# It was the Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac who derived the equation that discovered antimatter in 1928. 

# Antimatter: it’s matter—only different.  It’s different because it’s made of bizzaro particles that have the opposite electric charge from what we observe in ordinary matter. In other words, the atoms inside of antimatter have positive electrons, called positrons, hovering in an excited cloud above a nucleus composed of negatively charged protons called antiprotons.

# For some reason, in our neighborhood of the universe, matter edged out antimatter during the primordial era of the universe.

# Annihilation: When a particle and its antiparticle meet their masses are converted into a photon with the amount of energy given by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc².

# These anti-particles are, literally, mirror images of normal matter. Each anti-particle has the same mass as its corresponding particle, but the electrical charges are reversed. Here are some antimatter discoveries of the 20th century:

Hydrogen's electron and proton have oppositely charged antimatter counterparts in the antihydrogen: 
the positron and antiproton. Picture credit: nsf.gov

Antiproton and positron trap used by the ATRAP team to get the first glimpse inside cold antihydrogen atoms. Picture credit: nsf.gov

• Positrons - Electrons with a positive instead of negative charge. Discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932, positrons were the first evidence that antimatter existed.
• Anti-protons - Protons that have a negative instead of the usual positive charge. In 1955, researchers at the Berkeley Bevatron produced an antiproton.
• Anti-atoms - Pairing together positrons and antiprotons, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, created the first anti-atom. Nine anti-hydrogen atoms were created, each lasting only 40 nanoseconds. As of 1998, CERN researchers were pushing the production of anti-hydrogen atoms to 2,000 per hour.

CERN is indeed a real-life lab located in Geneva, Switzerland. Protons circulate in opposite directions and collide inside experimental areas. Picture courtesy: atlas.ch

share courtesy: cern.ch

# Matter and antimatter are perfect opposites. So perfect, in fact, that when the meet they annihilate leaving behind a flash of pure energy. Nothing else remains. That's why science fiction writers like antimatter so much. To them, antimatter annihilation is the ultimate clean source of energy. It is the perfect conversion of mass (m) into energy (E) according to Einstein's famous prescription E= mc², where c is the speed of light. The problem is, however, that antimatter cannot simply be harvested or mined. It has to be made, and making it requires vastly more energy than annihilating it produces. All the antimatter produced at CERN in a year would provide barely enough energy to power a light bulb for a few seconds.

# CERN's new research machine, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD), allows scientists to trap antimatter in electromagnetic cages where it can not come into contact with matter. There they can study it at leisure, finding out, for example, whether antihydrogen spectroscopy is the same as that of hydrogen. Now that we know nature favours matter over antimatter, research at the AD will help us to understand why.

share courtesy: cern.ch