Knowledge Update

Geneva, July 22 (IANS) The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on Thursday warned global temperatures for the first six months of this year shattered more records, meaning 2016 is on track to be the world's hottest year on record.

WMO noted June marked the 14th consecutive month of record heat for land and oceans and the 378th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th century average. The last month with temperatures below the 20th century average was December 1984, Xinhua reported.

"Another month, another record. And another. And another. Decades-long trends of climate change are reaching new climaxes, fuelled by the strong 2015-2016 El Nino," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas was quoted as saying.

"The El Nino event, which turned up the Earth's thermostat, has now disappeared. Climate change, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will not. This means we face more heatwaves, more extreme rainfall and potential for higher impact tropical cyclones," Taalas added.

Meanwhile, carbon dioxide concentrations have passed the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere so far this year. Carbon dioxide levels vary according to the season, but the underlying trend is upwards. They showed a surprising increase for the first half of 2016, rising in June 2016 to nearly 407 ppm, four ppm greater than in June 2015.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited leaders to a special event on September 21 to deposit their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession to the Paris Agreement on climate change. 

It will also provide an opportunity for other countries to publicly commit to the agreement before the end of 2016.

London, July 20 (IANS) Greater fluctuations in "bad" cholesterol levels are likely to cause worse cognitive function like acute memory loss in elderly adults, says a research.

The findings showed that greater fluctuations in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), or "bad" cholesterol can affect blood flow to the brain -- a process which could lead to memory loss and even Alzheimer's, according to American Heart Association. 

The study participants with the highest LDL cholesterol variability took 2.7 seconds longer on average to finish a cognitive test to name ink colours of colour words written in different ink (for example, the word blue written in red ink), compared to individuals with the lowest variability.

"While this might seem like a small effect, it is significant at a population level," said lead author Roelof Smit, doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The link between variability and declining cognitive function was found regardless of average bad cholesterol levels or use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.

In addition, greater fluctuations in bad cholesterol can lead to greater white matter hyper-intensity load -- which has been linked to dysfunctioning in endothelial cells that make up the inner lining of blood vessels, and can further lead to a cardiovascular disease.

LDL cholesterol variability may also be important to neurocognitive function, said the paper published in the journal Circulation.

"These results add an important puzzle piece to the emerging evidence that heart risk factors are closely related to brain health," Smit added.

Measurements fluctuate because of diet, exercise, frequency of cholesterol-lowering statins and other factors.

However, these fluctuations might also reflect an increasingly impaired homeostasis -- the balance between food intake and energy expenditure -- for example, due to age or underlying disease, added J. Wouter Jukema, Professor at the Leiden University.

For the study, the team involved 4,428 elderly participants from Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands. The participants either had pre-existing heart disease or were at a higher risk for developing the condition because of histories of hypertension, cigarette smoking or diabetes.

They examined associations between LDL cholesterol variability and four cognitive measures: colour-word test for selective attention, letter-digit coding to assess information processing speed and picture-word learning to test verbal memory in two ways -- immediate recall and delayed recall after 20 minutes.​

​New York, July 20 (IANS) Researchers from Facebook's Connectivity Lab have developed a new technology that can one day make light-based wireless communications -- a far superior technology than the ones based on radio frequencies or microwaves -- a reality in the future.

The new technology can pave the way for fast optical wireless networks capable of delivering internet service to far-flung places.

"A large fraction of people don't connect to the internet because the wireless communications infrastructure is not available where they live, mostly in very rural areas of the world," said Tobias Tiecke, who led the research team. 

Light-based wireless communication, also called free-space optical communications, offers a promising way to bring the internet to areas where optical fibres and cell towers can be challenging to deploy in a cost-effective way. 

Using laser light to carry information across the atmosphere can potentially offer very high bandwidths and data capacity, but one of the primary challenges has been how to precisely point a very small laser beam carrying the data at a tiny light detector that is some distance away.

The Facebook researchers used fluorescent materials instead of traditional optics to collect light and concentrated it onto a small photodetector. 

They combined this light collector, which featured 126 sq cm of surface that can collect light from any direction, with existing telecommunications technology to achieve data rates of more than 2 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

"We demonstrated the use of fluorescent optical fibres that absorb one colour of light and emit another colour," Tiecke said. 

"The optical fibres absorb light coming from any direction over a large area, and the emitted light travels inside the optical fibre, which funnels the light to a small, very fast photodetector," he added in a paper described in the journal Optica.

The new light collector uses plastic optical fibres containing organic dye molecules that absorb blue light and emit green light. 

This setup replaces the classical optics and motion platform typically required to point the light to the collection area.

The fast speeds are possible because less than two nanoseconds lapse between the blue light absorption and the green light emission. 

In addition, by incorporating a signal modulation method called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, or OFDM, the researchers transmitted more than 2 Gbps despite the system's bandwidth of 100 MHz.

Toronto, July 20 (IANS) Reading fiction might be good for your mental health but exploring inner lives of characters like Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina can form ideas about others' emotions, motives and ideas, suggested a study.

According to the study published in journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a psychologist-novelist shows that reading or watching narratives may encourage empathy. 

"This intersection between literature and psychology has only taken off in the last few years. In part, because researchers are recognising that there is something important about imagination," said Keith Oatley, Professor, the University of Toronto Department.

Reading fiction and perhaps especially literary fiction simulates a kind of social world, prompting understanding and empathy in the reader, revealed the study. 

According to the research, people were asked to imagine phrases like "a dark blue carpet" and "an orange striped pencil" while staying in an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. 

Three such phrases were enough activate the hippocampus -- brain region associated with learning and memory, suggested the study.

"This points to the power of the reader's own mind, writers don't need to describe scenarios exhaustively to draw out the reader's imagination -- they only need to suggest a scene," added Oatley. 

To measure this empathetic response the researchers were the first to use the "Mind of the Eyes Test", in which participants view 36 photographs of people's eyes and for each choose among four terms to indicate what the person is thinking or feeling. 

The researchers found that reading narrative fiction gave rise to significantly higher scores than it did while reading non-fictional books.

Similar empathy-boosting effects have been found when participants watched the fictional television drama - The West Wing or played a video game with a narrative storyline, suggested the study.

Further studies have shown that narratives can even generate empathy for a race or culture that is dissimilar to one's own.

New York, July 20 (IANS) Ants belonging to a South American group switched from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to subsistence farming of fungi that grew on decomposing, woody plant matter some 55 to 60 million years ago, shortly after the dinosaurs died out, new research has found.

By contrast, humans began subsistence farming around 10,000 years ago, progressing to industrialised agriculture only in the past century. 

The genes of the ant farmers and their fungal crops revealed a surprisingly ancient history of mutual adaptations, said the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

This evolutionary give-and-take led to some species -- the leafcutter ants, for example -- developing industrial-scale farming that surpasses human agriculture in its efficiency, the researchers said.

Much of the research on fungus-farming ants came from scientists working in Panama through the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, during the past 25 years. 

The key chapters of the history of ant agriculture were written into the genes of both the insects and their crop fungi. 

"The ants lost many genes when they committed to farming fungi," said Jacobus Boomsma, Research Associate at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

This tied the fate of the ants to their food -- with the insects depending on the fungi for nutrients, and the fungi increasing their likelihood of survival if they produced more nutritious crop. 

"It led to an evolutionary cascade of changes, unmatched by any other animal lineage studied so far," Boomsma, who is also a biology professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The researchers found that leafcutter ant species cut and sow their underground farms daily with fresh, green plant matter, cultivating a fully domesticated species of fungus on an industrial scale that can sustain colonies with up to millions of ants.

Put in human terms, Boomsma said, the leafcutter ants' success is akin to people figuring out how to grow a single, all-purpose, disease-, pest- and drought-resistant superfood at an industrial scale, "by the time of the ancient Greek civilisation."

New York, July 20 (IANS) In addition to environmental benefits, shifting away from inefficient and polluting fuel-based lighting -- such as candles, firewood, and kerosene lanterns -- to solar-LED systems can spur economic development as well -- to the tune of two million potential new jobs, a study says.

The researchers analysed how the transition from polluting fuel-based lighting to solar-LED lighting would impact employment and job creation.

"People like to talk about making jobs with solar energy, but it's rare that the flip side of the question is asked -- how many people will lose jobs who are selling the fuels that solar will replace," said researcher Evan Mills from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the US Department of Energy's Office of Science.

"We set out to quantify the net job creation. The good news is, we found that we will see many more jobs created than we lose," Mills noted.

The findings were published in the journal Energy for Sustainable Development.

There are about 274 million households worldwide that lack access to electricity.

But Mills' study focused on the "poorest of the poor", or about 112 million households, largely in Africa and Asia, that cannot afford even a mini solar home system, which might power a fan, a few lights, a phone charger, and a small TV.

Mills found that fuel-based lighting today provides 150,000 jobs worldwide. 

Because there is very little data in this area, his analysis is based on estimating the employment intensity of specific markets and applying it to the broader non-electrified population. He also drew on field observations in several countries to validate his estimates.

He did a similar analysis for the emerging solar-LED industry and found that every one million of these lanterns provides an estimated 17,000 jobs.

These values include employees of these companies based in developing countries but exclude upstream jobs in primary manufacturing by third parties such as those in factories in China. 

Assuming a three-year product life and a target of three lanterns per household, this corresponded to about two million jobs globally, more than compensating for the 150,000 jobs that would be lost in the fuel-based lighting marke, the study said.

Furthermore, Mills' research found that the quality of the jobs would be much improved. 

"With fuel-based lighting a lot of these people are involved in the black market and smuggling kerosene over international borders, and child labour is often involved in selling the fuel," he said. 

"These new solar jobs will be much better jobs -- they're legal, healthy, and more stable and regular," he added.

The new jobs span the gamut, from designing and manufacturing products to marketing and distributing them.

​New York, July 20 (IANS) A child's brain should get enough and healthy activation even before they enter pre-school for the proper development of learning as well as memory functions, suggests a study.

The research reveals the significance of learning experiences over the first two-to-four years of human life, also known as "critical periods". 

In these periods memories are believed to be quickly forgotten in a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia -- the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories that took place during the first two-to-four years of life.

"Our findings reveal us that children's brains need to get enough and healthy activation even before they enter pre-school," said lead author Cristina Alberini, Professor at New York University in the US.

"Without this, the neurological system runs the risk of not properly developing learning and memory functions," Alberini added.

Focussing on the brain's hippocampus -- a region of the brain necessary for encoding new episodic memories, the researchers found that the mechanisms of "critical periods" are fundamental for establishing these infantile memories.

During this critical period the hippocampus learns to become able to efficiently process and store memories for long-term.

If the hippocampus was inactive, the ability of younger rats to form latent memories and recall them later by reminders as they got older was diminished. 

"Early in life, while the brain cannot efficiently form long-term memories, it is 'learning' how to do so, making it possible to establish the abilities to memorise long-term," Alberini explained. 

"However, the brain needs stimulation through learning so that it can get in the practice of memory formation -- without these experiences, the ability of the neurological system to learn will be impaired," Alberini noted.

In the study, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team compared rats' infantile memory with that when they reached 24-days-old -- when they are capable of forming and retaining long-term memories and at an age that roughly corresponded to humans at six to nine years old.

The infantile memory formation in rats pointed out to the importance of critical periods in early-life learning on functional development of the brain.

Using learning and environmental interventions during a critical period in life may significantly help to address learning disabilities, the researchers concluded.

​London, July 20 (IANS) Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and the 14th straight month that global heat records were broken, scientists say.

Global sea temperatures were fractionally higher than for June last year while land temperatures tied, BBC quoted the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as saying.

Its global temperature records date back 137 years, to 1880.

Most scientists attribute the increases to greenhouse gas emissions.

They also say climate change is at least partially to blame for a number of environmental disasters around the world.

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June was 0.9 C above the 20th Century average of 15.5 C, the NOAA said in its monthly report.

Last year was the hottest on record, beating 2014, which had previously held the title.​

New York, July 17 (IANS) Researchers have created a comprehensive molecular atlas of brain development in non-human primate that could shed crucial light on what makes human brain development distinct.

This analysis uncovered features of the genetic code underlying brain development in our close evolutionary relative, while revealing distinct features of human brain development by comparison.

"This is the most complete spatiotemporal map we have for any mammal's development, and we have it in a model system that provides directly meaningful insight into human brain development, structure, and function," said Ed Lein, investigator at Allen Institute for Brain Science, a US-based non-profit medical research organisation.

"This exceptional dataset is useful for exploring precisely where and when genes are active in relation to the events of brain development and the onset of brain disorders," Lein noted in an analysis of the atlas published in the journal Nature.

The study is based on the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Blueprint Non-Human Primate (NHP) Atlas, a publicly available resource created by the Allen Institute and colleagues at the University of California, Davis and the California National Primate Research Centre.

The goal of the NHP atlas was to marry the techniques of modern transcriptomics with the rich history of anatomical developmental studies by measuring gene activity at a series of ten important stages in prenatal and postnatal brain development.

At each stage, a technique called laser microdissection was used to precisely isolate fine layers and nuclei of cortical and subcortical brain regions associated with human psychiatric disease, thereby creating a high resolution time series of the generation and maturation of these brain regions and their underlying cell types.

The authors collaborated with colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine to use this molecular map to pinpoint when and where candidate genes for diseases like autism and schizophrenia become active.

"This tremendous resource is freely available to the research community and will guide important research into the etiology of many developmental disorders for years to come," Michelle Freund, programme officer at National Institute of Mental Health, noted.​

Washington, July 18 (IANS) As we wait for Juno's first close-up images of Jupiter on August 27, NASA continues to explore our solar system to help answer fundamental questions about how we came to be, where we are going and whether we are alone in the universe.

“Juno is the latest example of the extraordinary science we have to look forward to right in our own solar system,” said Jim Green, Director of NASA Planetary Division.

“There are many uncharted, promising worlds and objects we are eager to explore with our current and future missions,” he added in a statement.

In September, NASA will launch OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) - the first US mission to a near-Earth asteroid (Bennu) to collect a sample for return to Earth in 2023.

OSIRIS-REx will help unlock secrets of the history of our solar system, and shed light on how life may have come to be on our planet.

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope), set to launch in 2018, can observe not only faint objects across the universe but also our neighbouring planets and their moons within our solar system.

Webb’s angular and spectral resolution will allow us to observe these targets with unprecedented sensitivity and even follow geologic activity.

With Juno exploring Jupiter, NASA is also intrigued by its largest moons.

Io’s intense geological activity makes it the most volcanically active world in the solar system, something Webb could potentially follow-up with.

The US space agency has selected nine science instruments for a future mission to investigate whether Europa -- a mysterious moon that scientists believe to have a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface -- hosts habitable environments.

Hubble, with its suite of upgraded instruments, has captured Jupiter’s auroras and found evidence of saltwater on Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.

The mission has been extended another five years, and NASA expects it to continue to provide excellent science.

“NASA’s Cassini spacecraft continues exploring Saturn, its rings and moons, as it has since 2004. In 2017, during the final phase of its long mission, Cassini will complete 22 dives through the narrow gap between Saturn's outer atmosphere and its rings,” the statement read.

Titan is one of the major satellites of Saturn, with a rich atmosphere and surface chemistry that has been observed extensively by Cassini and ESA's Huygens Probe.

After Cassini's mission ends, Webb will begin operations, providing an excellent platform for continuing studies of Titan with its unique new capabilities.

“On our journey to Mars, we are closer than ever before to sending American astronauts to our neighbouring Red Planet,” Green noted.

The next Mars rover scheduled for launch in 2020 is under construction and NASA’s InSight Mission to study the interior of the Red Planet is scheduled to launch in 2018.​