Category: Bulletins - Sci-Tech Bulletin

Multivitamins Improve Brain Health and Promote Healthy Aging

A randomised clinical trial carried on ~3500 patients for 3 years, shows that daily supplement of multivitamin like ‘Centrum Silver’ modestly improves cognitive abilities in older adults. The multivitamins are easily accessible, safe, low-cost strategy to maintain cognitive health in high-risk individuals suffering from lifestyle diseases. Daily supplements of multivitamins thus, has meaningful potential for population-level impact in promoting healthy cognitive aging.

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Community Service Boosts Preventive Care, Reduces Hospital Stays, and Supports Healthy Aging

Study conducted with ~7000 adults aged over 51, for 2 years found that volunteering for any social cause have least health risks and have better physical and mental health behaviours. Volunteers show greater use of preventive health services as they are more likely to undergo screenings such as flu shots and cancer tests, suggesting more proactive health behaviour. At the same time, they spent fewer nights in the hospital, indicating better overall health or reduced severity of illness. These findings suggest that volunteering may promote healthier lifestyles and potentially lower health care costs, most likely due to involvement of both psychological and social factors.

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School-based Gamified Therapy supports student mental health and prevent depression

SPARX-R is a gamified online cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) intervention, designed to prevent the development of exacerbation depressive symptoms in adolescents. Delivered in 7 modules, the tool covers key skills like relaxation, activity scheduling and behavioural activation, emotion regulation, interpersonal skills, problem solving, cognitive restructuring, and distress tolerance. Timely intervention of such CBT programs, before a major stressor like final exams, can reduce depressive symptoms in adolescents, particularly in the short to medium term.

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How Hot and Humid Weather Could Be Fuelling Influenza Pandemics

Study conducted on mice at various hydrothermal environments influences influenza H1N1 pandemics. The warm–wet environments supress our immune responses to influenza by reduction in cytokine production, suppressed T-cells differentiation, weakened T-cell activity, and impaired viral recognition RLH signalling pathway. As a result, infected hosts cannot effectively clear the virus, leading to persistent infections. These findings have implication in public health planning, highlighting the need to consider climate factors in disease prediction, surveillance, and early vaccine manufacture, especially in regions prone to warm and humid conditions.

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LEA, an AI model, can decode the microbial environments all the way from the gut to the ocean

An AI model, termed as LEA (Latent Environment Allocation) has been developed to evaluate the heterogeneity of microbial communities. This study is based on the idea that the microbial ecosystem reflects environments as continuous mixtures. LEA is a machine learning model that predicts the environmental composition of a new sample by placing it on a global microbiome map and comparing it with thousands of existing samples. The model can be applied for environmental monitoring, health diagnostics, and microbiome research, enabling classification of new samples, detection of contamination or dysbiosis, and semantic searching across large datasets without relying on rigid environmental labels.

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Natural environment could restore your ability to concentrate using attention Restoration Therapy (ART)

Attention Restoration Therapy (ART) as termed, is a psychological theory that suggests that spending time in natural environments helps to restore an individual’s focus and attention. ART states that nature engages the mind in a gentle way known as “soft fascination” that allows the brain to rest from effortful thinking, recover attention capacity and improve concentration afterward. Activities such walking in parks, spending time by the lake-side or daily morning jogging around natural surrounding improves attention, especially for demanding tasks like working memory and executive function.

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Scientists Discover New Paths to Antiviral Therapies Against Nipah Virus

Scientists mapped the interaction network between Nipah virus and human proteins using affinity purification and mass spectrometry. The study highlights strong nuclear colocalization of viral W protein with PRP19 complex, altering p53 activity and host gene expression while its matrix protein M interacts with the DICER1–TARBP2 complex linked to RNA interference. 101 such human–Nipah virus protein interactions were studied that revealed how Nipah virus interferes with cellular pathways and highlight potential host targets and existing drugs that could guide the development of new antiviral therapies.

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Our Stress Beliefs are linked to the Physical Health Problems

Study conducted at German University found that students who held negative beliefs about stress like “stress is bad for health”, were more likely to report somatic symptoms like muscular tension, back pain, headache, migraine, chest pain, fatigue during stressful periods like academic examinations. Even after controlling for factors such as existing health status, neuroticism, and optimism, negative stress beliefs still predicted higher symptom reporting. This is because chronic stress may involve a wear and tear of stress responsive bodily hypothalamic pituitary-adrenal axis and the autonomic nervous system.

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AIRVIC: The web-based AI Tool, automating viral detection in cell cultures

AIRVIC (AI Recognition of Viral CPE) is an AI-powered automated system specifically designed to detect and classify cytopathic effects caused by animal viruses like SARS-CoV-2, BAdV-1, BPIV3, BoAHV-1, and two strains of BoGHV-4 in Vero and MDBK cell lines. Generated using ResNet50-based convolutional neural network, AIRVIC achieved high detection performance with 100% accuracy for BoGHV-4 DN-599 in MDBK cells. AIRVIC demonstrates strong potential for viral isolation and antiviral efficacy testing through its accessible web-based platform, allowing global researchers to leverage its capabilities in viral diagnostics and beyond.

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A Simpler Way to Harvest Skin Stem Cells with Microfluidic Technology in 45 Minutes

Isolation and enrichment of skin stem cells, especially CD34+cells along with dermal and epidermal cells, using two-stage microfluidic technology can now generate significant levels of hair follicles and sebaceous glands. The microfluidic devices coated with degradable antibody-functionalized hydrogels enables direct isolation and injection of CD34+ skin stem cells without prior labelling, completing the process in about 45 minutes. This technology, when scaled & multiplexed to rapidly separate large amounts of cell mixture, may improve the practicality and efficiency of regenerative therapies and future hair transplantation procedures.

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