Researchers have found currency notes in developed countries to have fewer bacteria than money in poorer countries.

Led by University of Ballarat’s food microbiologist Frank Vriesekoop, a global research team analysed banknotes from at least 10 nations, including Australia, China, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain and the US.

“The richer and more developed countries had fewer bacteria on their money than poorer countries,” Vriesekoop said, according to the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease.

See more

The world’s phytoplankton appear to have been disappearing at a rate of about 1% a year for the last century, researchers announced Wednesday, a disturbing long-term trend for the microscopic algae that form the basis of the marine food chain and produce much of the world’s oxygen.

In reporting their findings in the journal Nature, the Canadian team said that, since 1950, phytoplankton biomass has shrunk about 40%. Scientists had known the population was shrinking, but the long-term nature of that reduction came as a surprise.

See more

Ocean experts at the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System, a multi-agency science team, said algae-tinged water is harmless even if it is a little slimy.

Some forms of algae are toxic but there are no documented health hazards related to swimming or fishing in areas with Tetraselmis, the microscopic algae blamed for the discoloration, scientists said. It has been found in concentrations of 15 million cells per liter of seawater.

“The foam has persisted this week, though its patchy distribution make it visible only at some beaches and the foam becomes more apparent in the afternoon when the wind and waves mix the surface waters,” said an alert on the coastal observing network’s website.

It’s not uncommon for Tetraselmis algae to be in ocean water but such noticeable blooms are infrequent, said Melissa Carter, a research associate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is part of the University of California San Diego. The last time she saw such an explosion was in August 2009, leading to conjecture about what conditions might cause a repeat event.

See more

Yehonatan Bar-Yosef, a PhD student in Prof. Aaron Kaplan’s group at the Hebrew University’s Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, suggests a novel mechanism in a paper published online on Thursday in Current Biology.

A toxic cyanobacterial blue-green alga known as Aphanizomenon ovalisporum was first detected in Lake Kinneret in 1994, and its presence has been noted each summer since. However, how the toxic algae bloomed has remained a mystery.

Bar-Yosef has discovered that Aphanizomenon is known to produce the toxin cylindrospermopsin (CYN). Secretion of the CYN, Bar-Yosef found, induces phosphate-limitation responses in other microorganisms in the ecosystem, even in the presence of ample phosphate in the water. Phosphate is an essential nutrient for growth in many organisms.

By blocking other organisms from absorbing phosphate, Aphanizomenon reserves more of the mineral for itself.

See more

Researchers from Italy and the United States who worked with mouse and human cancer cells in laboratories said their work might help in developing a new drug in a class of cancer treatments called immunotherapies or therapeutic vaccines, which harness the body’s immune system to fight disease.

“We did experiments first in mice and then in cancer cells and immune cells from human patients, and found that the salmonella was doing exactly the same job,” Maria Rescigno of European Institute of Oncology in Milan, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. “Now we are ready to go into (testing on) humans, but we are waiting for authorization.”

The scientists said they thought the salmonella bacteria, which they used in a safe form that did not cause illness itself, helped to flag up cancer cells to the body’s immune system, which was then able to find and kill them.

See more

According to the  New Scientist , Paolo Lionetti of the University of Florence, Italy, said that short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) are generated by bugs associated with diets containing a very high proportion of vegetables and cereals.

SCFAs kill harmful gut bacteria such as salmonella and help protect against inflammation.

Lionetti compared the gut bacteria of children in Burkina Faso and Italy.

The stools of the African children contained almost three times as many short-chain fatty acids.

Breastfed infants in both countries had the same gut bacteria profiles, so diet rather than other environmental factors or genes seems to dictate which bacteria colonise the gut.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more

A hospital in London and another in Nottingham have confirmed they have treated patients with the new ’superbug’, which is resistant to the most powerful antibiotics.

There are fears that without vigilance the enzyme that allows any bacteria to become a superbug could become widespread in NHS hospitals.

It has infected around 50 Britons so far, many of whom returned to the UK after undergoing surgery in India or Pakistan.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) yesterday stepped up its warnings about the new gene called NDM-1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamose after the place where it was first identified.

North America’s most common bat, the little brown myotis, may be all but extinct in the northeastern United States in 16 years, due to a rapidly-spreading fungal infection,  according to a story in Live Science.

The fungus, called the white-nosed syndrome grows on the exposed skin of bats as they hibernate.

If infection continues at current rates, the researchers reported in the journal Science, there is a 99-percent chance the little brown myotis population will drop below 0.01 percent of its current numbers by 2026.

See more

The ‘jellylike fungus,’ a mushroom known as cordyceps sinensis, which grows inside the bodies of dead insect lavae.

It grows at high altitude on remote Himalayan peaks along the border areas of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and India and has been prized as a herbal medicine in Tibet and China since the 15th century.

Indian officials said troops from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are sneaking across the disputed MacMahon Line border.

While the fungus, which has been dubbed the ‘love flower,’ is not particularly valued in India, its value has soared in China as an aphrodisiac.

See more

Ordinary fungi can safely break down polycarbonate plastic — an omnipresent material that contains the worry-inducing chemical bisphenol A, or BPA.

BPA, which has been linked to a growing number of reproductive, developmental and other health issues, appears in a huge variety of plastic products, including CDs, screwdriver handles, eyeglasses frames, water bottles and toys. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of polycarbonate plastic is produced each year.

In experiments, three types of fungi were able to break down about 5 percent of the plastic in their lab dishes over the course a year, as long as the plastic was first zapped with ultraviolet light.

See more