Heena Sharma Blog

Scientists have caught a female python in the US state of Florida that was more than 17-feet-long, weighed 140 pounds and contained 73 developing eggs, the media reported. The snake is the largest python ever removed from Big Cypress National Preserve, a 729,000-acre expanse of swampland west of Miami in South Florida, CNN reported on Sunday citing a statement on the preserve's Facebook page. The post was accompanied by a picture that showed a team of four researchers, standing apart from one another, holding up the gigantic reptile. While pythons of all sizes have been found in the Everglades, most of them are between six and 10 feet long. The largest one was over 18 feet long and weighed more than 100 pounds, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. This latest find was possible after the Big Cypress' rangers used new tracking technology. "Using male pythons with radio transmitters allows the team to track the ma...

Chickens that have been genetically modified to produce human proteins in eggs can offer a cost-effective method of producing certain types of drugs. The study which initially focused on producing high quality proteins for use in scientific research, found the drugs work at least as well as the same proteins produced using existing methods. The study was carried out at the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute and Roslin Technologies, a company set up to commercialise research at The Roslin Institute and is published in BMC Biotechnology. High quantities of the proteins can be recovered from each egg using a simple purification system and there are no adverse effects on the chickens themselves, which lay eggs as normal. According to researchers, the findings provide sound evidence for using chickens as a cheap method of producing high quality drugs for use in research studies and, potentially one day, in patients. Notably, eggs are already used for growing vi...

Eating an egg daily can have a beneficial effect on the blood metabolite profile that is related to a lower risk of Type-2 diabetes , a new study shows. The findings showed that the blood samples of men who ate more eggs included certain lipid molecules that positively correlated with the blood profile of men who remained free of Type-2 diabetes . "The study explored potential compounds that could explain this association using non-targeted metabolomics, a technique that enables a broad profiling of chemicals in a sample," said lead author Stefania Noerman from the University of Eastern Finland. Eggs remain one of the most controversial food items. High intake of eggs has traditionally been discouraged, mainly due to their high cholesterol content. However, eggs are also a rich source of many bioactive compounds that can have beneficial effects on health. This means that the health effects of consuming eggs are difficult to determine based solely on thei...