Science News
Headlines
. Are vaccines needed for those who got Covid and recovered?
. A beautiful flower turns out to be a carnivore!
. Jupiter superheats its atmosphere
Read more below.

. Are vaccines needed for those who got Covid and recovered?
In India, large numbers of people seem to have been already infected by the SARS-2 coronavirus and have recovered. (The picture shows the schematic of  the virus, with 2 DNA strands in the background). Many such people wonder whether they need to get vaccinated. It is true that once you have been infected, you have some antibodies in the system. Some laboratory studies (as opposed to tests among the general population) show that even one dose of vaccine may be sufficient to protect people who have already had Covid. Yet, vaccines give you extra protection, so vaccination is recommended for everyone.
This is mainly because we do not precisely know how long immunity lasts after an infection. Studies have shown that antibodies are present in the blood for at least eight months after getting sick, but some recovered patients have gotten reinfected. The Delta variant, which has caused much havoc in India, seems to spread among not only those already infected, but also among those vaccinated. So the extra layer of protection is recommended.
Antibodies are not the only part of the immune response that benefit from the vaccine, although the immune proteins are crucial to prevent infection. Vaccines help patients to reach high levels of a subset of immune cells called T cells, according to studies. T cells help coordinate and ramp up the immune response when a person is exposed to the virus again.
A study in Kentucky, USA, showed that who had recovered from a coronavirus infection but were not vaccinated were around twice as likely to get infected again as their vaccinated counterparts. People who had got only one dose, or had got the second dose less than two weeks ago, were 1.5 times as likely to be reinfected as fully vaccinated people. So all this suggests is that full vaccination is the best option.
Another study showed that those who have got one round of vaccine but also got Covid and recovered (in whichever order) had more antibodies than those who had only got one or two rounds of vaccine but never got Covid, and also than those who had recovered but did not get vaccinated.
What about new variants? Will the vaccines help against yet-to-be-seen variants as well? One recent experiment offers even more evidence of vaccine-induced antibodies' ability to recognize emerging variants. Antibodies from recovered patients who had been vaccinated stopped a version of coronavirus with 20 changes in its spike protein. (Current "variants of concern" like beta and delta have around 10 spike mutations.) The spike protein acts as a key to unlock and infect cells, but even with all the changes, antibodies still prevented the virus from infecting cells, researchers reported recently. (This study has not yet been reviewed by other scientists, so it is not "official". In science, results are accepted only after "peer review" by other scientists.)

. A beautiful flower turns out to be a carnivore!
A recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigous science journal from the USA, says that a beautiful wildflower is actually a carnivore.
The wildflower, Triantha occidentalis, growing in Cypress Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada, has sticky hairs on its stem that it uses to trap and digest small insects. Scientists have known about T. occidentalis since the 19th century, but its taste for insects has gone undetected until now.
Many noncarnivorous plants use sticky hairs to defend against pests. But T. occidentalis has qualities that some meat-eating plants share: a love of bright, nutrient-poor habitats which are marshy, and the absence of a gene that fine-tunes how plants get energy from light. Together, those features felt like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to scientists. To solve the puzzle, they needed to know if the wildflower pulls nutrients from insect corpses.
The team attached fruit flies fed with nitrogen-15, an isotope that can be used to track changes in nitrogen levels, to the flowering stems of T. occidentalis plants. Over half of the wildflowers' nitrogen came from the fruit flies, the team found. Those levels are comparable to known carnivorous plants. What is more, the wildflowers' sticky hairs oozed phosphatase, a digestive enzyme that many carnivorous plants secrete to consume prey.
T. occidentalis' sticky hairs might also hint at how some meat-eating plants evolved. In nutrient-poor soils, it may have been advantageous for some plants to co-opt hairs for this.

. Jupiter superheats its atmosphere
Jupiter's upper atmosphere is hundreds of degrees warmer than expected. Scientists have been puzzled about this for decades. A recent study suggests that the culprit is the planet's intense *auroras*. We know the Earth's auroras, the northern and southern lights, formed when the solar wind disturbs Earth's magnetosphere. It appears Jupiter has them too.
Jupiter’s magnetic field lines (shown blue in the picture) direct charged particles in the solar wind toward the planet’s poles, generating auroras (white) similar to Earth’s. High-altitude winds then carry heat (red) from the auroras toward Jupiter’s equator, warming the planet’s upper atmosphere, as shown in this artist’s illustration, which overlays a visible light image of the planet.
Jupiter's orbit is roughly 778 million kilometers from the sun. Since the sun's illumination is so feeble there,  it gets less than 4 percent of the energy per square metre that hits the Earth's atmosphere. So we would expect the temperature of the upper atmosphere to be about –73 degrees Celsius. Instead we find that  the region several hundred kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops has an average temperature of about 426 degrees C.
Scientists noticed this almost 40 years ago and many theories have been proposed. Recently, the 10 metre telescope in Hawaii has given valuable data that may explain this phenomenon.  (Interestingly, do you know where this telescope is placed? It sits on top of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano!)
The study, reported in the journal Nature, in August 2021, found infrared emissions from Jupiter that contained positively charged Hydrogen molecules. These molecules are created when charged particles in the solar wind, among other sources, slam into the planet's atmosphere at a speed of hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second, painting auroras at its poles. 
The team measured the intensities of these molecules and prepared a heat map, which shows a maximum temperature of 725 degrees Celsius at the poles, which drops to about 325 degrees Celsius near the equator (of Jupiter). This is used to explain that Jupiter's auroras are the source of heat in the upper atmosphere and that winds disperse that heat from its polar regions.
Scientists add that these ideas are preliminary and that more detailed simulations of Jupiter's atmospheric circulation will be needed to get more precise answers.
Source including images: https://www.sciencenews.org