The application of the Comet assay in environmental monitoring remains challenging in face of the complexity of environmental stressors, e.g., when dealing with estuarine sediments, that hampers the drawing of cause-effect relationships. Although the in vitro Comet assay may circumvent confounding factors, its application in environmental risk assessment (ERA) still needs validation. As such, t...

Background: Cadmium is one of the most toxic heavy metals in our environment having a very strong ability to accumulate in body organs, especially in kidney. The present study was done to determine the genotoxicity and cytotoxicity in kidneys of rats exposed to cadmium. Methods: Male rats (n=30), kept in standard conditions were used in this study. The animals were randomly divided into 2 group...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the frequency of echogenic foci with comet-tail artifact in histologically proven thyroid nodules, and to determine the types of echogenic foci with comet-tail artifact that are associated with malignancy. We retrospectively analyzed the sonographic findings of echogenic foci with comet-tail artifact, present in thyroid nodules in 63 patients who underw...

There is a hypothesis that fragments of a body from outer space fell to Earth as a result of the Tunguska event. During decades of investigations at the site of the disaster, stone or iron pieces from a cosmic body were not found. In spite of this, the number of adherents of this hypothesis is growing. For one thing, it was determined that the formation of swamp craters at the epicentre of the ...

Discovered in August of 1994, periodic comet Machholz 2 consisted of five condensations, A–E, of which D later became double. They were lined up along their common heliocentric orbit (with A being the leading and brightest component) and connected by a trail of material, suggesting that the comet’s nuclear fragmentation was accompanied by a copious release of large dust particles. The earliest ...

Staphylococcus aureus is historically regarded as a non-motile organism. More recently it has been shown that S. aureus can passively move across agar surfaces in a process called spreading. We re-analysed spreading motility using a modified assay and focused on observing the formation of dendrites: branching structures that emerge from the central colony. We discovered that S. aureus can sprea...

Spacewatch has carried out a full-time digital survey of the opposition region since September 1990. 129 Near-Earth asteroids have been discovered through the April 1996 observing run. Other discoveries include an average of about 2000 main-belt asteroids each lunation, 3 new Cenataur asteroids, and 5 comets (including a re-discovery of a long-lost comet). The present reduction methods and capa...

We have calculated the thermal emission spectrum of the dust of comet P/Borrelly (1994l), a short-period comet (Jupiter family), from 3 μm to 14 μm as well as the 10 μm silicate feature in terms of the comet dust model as porous aggregates of interstellar grains. Compared to comet P/Halley dust, the dust grains of P/Borrelly appear to be relatively more processed (more carbonized), less fluffy,...

Some water bodies in the Sinos River Basin (SRB) have been suffering the effects of pollution by residential, industrial and agroindustrial wastewater. The presence of cytotoxic and genotoxic compounds could compromise the water quality and the balance of these ecosystems. In this context, the research aimed to evaluate the genotoxicity and cytotoxicity of the water at four sites along the SRB ...

Multiple non-resonance fluorescence lines of water (H2O) were detected in Comet 153/P Ikeya–Zhang (2002 C1) between UT 2002 March 21.9 (Rh = 0.51 AU) and April 13.9 (Rh = 0.78 AU), using the Cryogenic Echelle Spectrometer (CSHELL) at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. Analysis of 2.9-μm water lines enabled accurate determination of rotational temperatures on three dates. The derived H2O rota...