Blood plasma from Ebola survivors fails to significantly increase odds of recovering from deadly virus

According to a field test of experimental treatment, treating Ebola victims using blood plasma donated by Ebola survivors has failed to notably raise the odds of recovering from the deadly virus.

The finding is based on the cases of 84 people, who had undergone treatment with plasma in Conakry, Guinea, with a hope that the antibodies in the fluid would aid patients fight off the virus the way they performed in the surviving donors.

The results published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that the death rate was 31% when plasma was used in comparison to 38% in a control group of 418 sufferers, who had undergone treatment in the same medical center and did not receive survivor plasma.

Chipotle has been served Federal Subpoena over Norovirus Outbreak at California Restaurant

Chipotle Mexican Grill has been given a federal subpoena last month as part of criminal investigation linked to an outbreak at a restaurant of the company. The legal document asks Chipotle to provide documents of its Simi Valley restaurant where outbreak was reported a few months ago.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California and the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations have been investigating the case. The office has demanded documents from his office regarding the Denver based Chipotle’s case, said Doug Beach from Ventura County’s Environmental Health Division.

Crop production suffered badly due to extreme weather events between 1964 and 2007, study finds

A new study suggested that droughts and heat waves cleared roughly a tenth of the corn, rice, wheat, corn and other cereal crops in nations hit by extreme weather disasters in the period between 1964 and 2007.

Published on Wednesday in Nature, the paper has examined data on the effects, over 50 years, of extreme temperatures, droughts and floods on national crop harvests.

Navin Ramankutty, a geographer from the University of British Columbia and an author of the report, said, “People already knew that these extreme weather events had impacts on crop production. But we didn’t know by how much, and we didn’t have a basis for how that might change in the future”.

Olfaction appears to contribute to shark ocean navigation, concludes Study

There are a lot of mysterious in the world and one of them is how sharks manage to navigate a straight path between far-away locations in the ocean. It turned out that a few sharks could be using their noses for pointing out the way. Or, it might be the case that they use their keen sense of smell that is so critical in prey hunting.

On Wednesday, PLOS ONE carried a study, which concluded that olfaction seems to contribute to shark ocean navigation, probably on the basis of their ability to sense chemical changes in the water when they swim. For the first time ever, that smell has been identified, though such a thing was earlier hypothesized with sharks and other species like birds and turtles.

Infra-red telescopes capture movement of Runaway Stars

Moving at a speed of more than 54,000 mph (24 km per second) relative to their surroundings, runaway stars can be a spectacle for anybody to watch in the night sky. A special type of star, they move alone and the nature of their “bow shock” can reveal some information about their origin. These bow waves lend the speedy stars a significant signpost, which enables their spotting.

A scientist likened the star’s movement to a boat cruising through the ocean and the bow of the vessel being pushed against water flowing in the opposite direction. The resulting wave, known as a "bow wave", is somewhat similar to the manner in which these speedsters travel, the phenomenon called “bow shocks”.

NASA Captures Black Hole’s Burp

NASA space agency has revealed that it has captured the burp of a black hole in the Messier 51 galaxy system that is located 26 million light years away from Earth.

Astronomers discovered the supermassive black hole’s burp with its Chandra X-ray Observatory, which captured two arcs of X-ray emissions close to the black hole. The arcs are likely to be the space fossils that were generated from two massive blasts, which would have occurred when the material was thrown out in the galaxy by the black hole.

The black hole is located in the center of the NGC 5195 galaxy that is currently going through a merger with a smaller galaxy known as NGC 5194 or the Whirlpool. This major merger of two galaxies is also facing some issues like all such mergers.

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