Wellington, New Zealand:

New Zealand scientists on Monday began dissecting a whale considered the rarest in the world, a species so elusive that only seven specimens have ever been documented. 

The dead spade-toothed whale washed ashore on New Zealand’s South Island earlier this year, offering a chance to study a deep-sea mammal that has never been seen alive. 

Measuring five metres (16.4 feet) long, the whale was winched off the beach in July and has sat in a special freezer since. 

Whale expert Anton van Helden said it was the first time scientists had been able to dissect a complete spade-toothed specimen, which belongs to the family of beaked whales. 

“This is a remarkable and globally significant opportunity,” he said.

The week-long dissection will help to fill in gaps about the whale’s behaviour, its diet, and even its basic anatomy.

“Beaked whales are the most enigmatic group of large mammals on the planet,” said Van Helden.

“They are deep divers that are rarely seen at sea, which presents real challenges for researching these marine animals. 

“This one is the rarest of the rare — only the seventh specimen known from anywhere in the world, and the first opportunity we have had to undertake a dissection like this.” 

New Zealand’s conservation department said the spade-toothed whale was the “rarest whale in the world”. 

The species was first described in 1874 from just a lower jaw and two teeth collected from the Chatham Islands off the east coast of New Zealand. 

That sample, along with skeletal remains of two other specimens found in New Zealand and Chile, enabled scientists to confirm a new species. 

Because so few specimens have been found and there have been no live sightings, the spade-toothed whale is classified as “data deficient” under the New Zealand Threat Classification System.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A team of UK chemists at the University College London (UCL), have created the world’s thinnest spaghetti, believed to be 200 times thinner than a human hair and narrower than some wavelengths of light. The study, published in Nanoscale Advances, states that the new brand of pasta smashed the previous record for the thinnest pasta lunga by approximately a thousand times. Since each individual strand was too narrow to be clearly captured by any form of visible light camera or microscope, the researchers used a “scanning electron microscope, scanning the mat with a focused beam of electrons and creating an image based on the pattern of electrons that are deflected”.

The ‘near-invisible’ pasta is not intended to be a new food as it will overcook in under a second. It has been created because extremely fine strands in it, called nanofibres, could have significant medical uses.

The team achieved the desired result by using a technique called ‘electrospinning’ to create the nanofibres, with diameters of 372 nanometres (billionths of a metre), from a flour mixture. They used flour and formic acid rather than water as the formic acid breaks up the helices (giant stacks of spirals) that make up starch.

Additionally, they had to warm up the mixture for several hours before slowly cooling it back down to make sure it was the right consistency.

“To make spaghetti, you push a mixture of water and flour through metal holes. In our study, we did the same except we pulled our flour mixture through with an electrical charge. It’s literally spaghetti but much smaller,” said co-author Dr. Adam Clancy.

Also Read | 6 Irresistibly Healthy Pasta Recipes You Must Try

Uses of nanofibres

The formed nanofibres are hydrophilic, and can be used as a cheaper, greener replacement for starch in biodegradable, biosourced nanofiber applications, such as next-generation bandaging, or carbonised supercapacitor electrodes.

“Nanofibers, such as those made of starch, show potential for use in wound dressings as they are very porous. In addition, nanofibers are being explored for use as a scaffold to regrow tissue, as they mimic the extra-cellular matrix – a network of proteins and other molecules that cells build to support themselves,” said co-author Professor Gareth Williams.

National Institute of Animal Biotechnology (NIAB) scientific team, led by Syed Faisal, is focused on developing the next generation vaccine against this important zoonotic infection.
| Photo Credit: The Hindu Graphics | Subyendu Ganguly

Scientists at the National Institute of Animal Biotechnology (NIAB) are working on the next generation vaccine against ‘Leptospirosis’ — a serious disease affecting both animals and people — caused by a bacteria called ‘Leptospira’, which has over 300 different types of strains. This zoonotic (affecting humans and animals) disease remains a public health concern as it has become more of a threat having escalated prevalence due to the impacts of climate change and global warming.

Why effectiveness of antibiotics might become less?

One million cases of human leptospirosis are reported every year resulting in an estimated 60,000 deaths. Despite the availability of a good number of antibiotics, their effectiveness becomes less when the bacteria infiltrates vital organs causing damage, often due to delayed diagnosis, said scientists of the Institute, under the Department of Biotechnology.

While vaccination is a cost-effective and secure preventive measure to combat this disease, the current killed vaccine only provides short-term immunity specific to certain strains of the zoonotic disease and fails to prevent bacterial shedding through urine.

Vaccines

At present, there’s a vaccine for animals only but it doesn’t protect against all strains of these bacteria and there is no vaccine for humans. The existing vaccines, despite inducing robust cross-protection, do not provide sterilizing immunity or a long-lasting protective response, they said.

NIAB team focused on next gen vaccine

The NIAB scientific team led by Syed Faisal focused on developing the next generation vaccine against this important zoonotic infection against multiple strains, have already characterized a Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) which is one the most important protective antigen and defines the strains specificity, said the Institute Director G. Taru Sharma.

The team has also demonstrated that the initial immune response against LPS may decide whether the host will develop mild infection or succumb to severe infection associated with multi-organ dysfunction. This work has further highlighted that a component of LPS, called Lipid A, is less toxic, can boost the immune response and make vaccines more effective, a significant step in developing a new type of vaccine, she said.

Various antigens, such as Leptospira immunoglobulin-like proteins called ‘LigA and LigB’, have been identified as potential subunit vaccine candidates, these antigens require potent adjuvants for effectiveness. Experiments conducted on mice and hamsters showed these proteins combined with alum and Leptospira Lipid A as adjuvant exhibited significantly higher levels of cellular immune responses and provided sterilizing immunity against Leptospirosis.

“Overall, this research study, supported by Department of Science & Technology (DST) sheds light on the adjuvant properties of Leptospira Lipid A and offers promising avenues for developing LPS-based vaccines against this devastating zoonotic disease. The potent adjuvant activates the innate immune system enhancing a sustained, antigen-specific protective immune response,” said Dr. Faisal. The work has been published in ‘Open Biology and Vaccines’, an international Journal of repute.

An illustrative photograph showing the new Twitter logo rebranded as X (L) and the previous bird logo reflected in smartphone screens, July 27, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AFP

A survey conducted recently by the journal Nature found that researchers are leaving the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), a place they used frequently to promote their work, interact with the larger scientific community, and share their insights.

In 2016, Emilia Jarochowska, a PhD candidate, reportedly joined X with to boost her career in palaeontology. It was a platform where she could connect with colleagues, look for job opportunities and share her work. But after Elon Musk took over the platform in late 2022, sweeping changes to the platform’s management marred opportunities.

The findings, published by Nature in an article, stated that there are several reasons for the exodus, starting with the direction in which the platform seems to be headed since the takeover. Together with rolling back rules on content moderation, doing away with the blue-tick verification system, shifting to a subscription model where paying members get extra privileges, limiting the number of tweets users can see, and changing the names and logo has caused discomfort and uncertainty, leading to scholars to avoid using the platform.

Also Read | Elon Musk wants to remove the block feature on X

The survey contacted 170,000 scientists who are or have been using the platform, of which nearly 9,200 responded. At least half of them reported that they have reduced the amount of time they spend on X in the last six months. At least 7% of respondents have stopped using it completely while some 46% have joined other social media platforms.

The platform also seems to have also accrued an increasing number of fake accounts, trolls, and hate speech since the change of ownership, the survey noted. The transition from a platform facilitating scientific discourse to one fostering controversy and misinformation has prompted a wave of migration to alternative social media platforms such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and TikTok. 

Despite Mr. Musk’s claims to the contrary, a study revealed an increase in hate speech since his takeover

Also Read | Musk plans to change how news is shared on X

Ziga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, told Nature he started noticing the presence of far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism that he had to keep blocking. “X has always been not so nice let’s say, but it is a mess right now,” he said.

Mastodon, established in 2016, has become a popular alternative to X after the takeover for its decentralised and open-access regulations. But the fragmented landscape resulting from a migration has posed challenges to science communication. Previously, X served as a ‘hub’ for scholars to access information through specific hashtags. But with a diaspora across multiple platforms, it has become challenging to say where researchers are congregating, hindering access to their insights.

The impact of these changes extends beyond personal connections. The sense of community fostered on X, particularly for marginalised groups like scientists of colour and female researchers, has been a driving force in addressing issues such as harassment, unequal pay, and inequity. It provided a platform for scientists to collaborate, discuss research fraud, and spotlight topics like scientific colonialism and diversity, the Nature article said.

Also Read | The problem with X? Meta, Microsoft, hundreds more own trademarks to new Twitter name

One change, introduced in February, was the closure of the platform’s application programming interface (API), which allowed scientists to observe how users interacted with one another on the platform. This would feed studies of how people were discussing climate change, how people with autism were making their voices heard, and the platform’s response to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, etc. Research on such topics has suffered a blow ever since access to API was revoked for the general public. 

According to the survey, LinkedIn was the second most popular place to open new accounts followed by Instagram and finally Threads, both of which are owned by Meta.

Even as some scientists feel that with the changing paradigm of X, the sense of community is slipping away, others are sure researchers will come up with unique ways to overcome the challenge. Ms. Jarochowska suggested webinars and other methods of networking might be more fruitful to promote scientific work. “If you appear with your scientific content between videos of cats,” she told Nature, “it’s not a particularly good medium for promotion yourself professionally, anyway.”

Mark Carrigan, a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education, U.K., said that the void left behind by X can be used to diversify science and democratise academia.