Knowledge Update

​New York, April 3 (IANS) A team of US researchers has found that monetary rewards for healthy behaviour can pay off both in the pocketbook and in positive psychological factors like internal motivation to eat fruits and vegetables.

The study, which encouraged daily consumption of fruits and vegetables in exchange for payment, not only showed monetary incentives worked, but that participants increased their internal motivation to eat fruits and vegetables over time.

Increased fruit and vegetable consumption by participants is linked to more positive attitudes and self efficacy - the confidence in one's own ability to succeed

"While programs involving monetary incentives to encourage healthy behaviour have become more popular in recent years, the evidence has been mixed as to how they can be most effective and how participants fare once the incentives stop," said lead author Casey Gardiner from University of Colorado Boulder in US.

"Some psychological research and theories suggest that if individuals have external motivations like payment to perform tasks, their internal, or intrinsic motivation can be undermined," said Gardiner of the psychology and neuroscience department.

The findings showed that participants who were assigned to receive payment for eating fruits and vegetables were still consuming more than usual two weeks after the study ended.

In the study, 60 adults were randomly assigned to three different groups.

Individuals in one group received $1 for every serving of fruits and vegetables they reported consuming daily over a three-week period.

People in the second group accrued $1 for every serving of fruits and vegetables eaten, with the lump sum money delivered at the end of the study.

Participants in the third group reported their fruit and vegetable consumption daily for three weeks with no incentives.

The participants who received daily monetary incentives had the greatest increase in their fruit and vegetable consumption.

"This finding highlights the importance of incentive design in health programs and differences in the timing or type of incentive can alter their effectiveness," Gardiner stated.

We essentially showed that incentives may be able to help people to 'jumpstart' behaviour changes, but that changes in key psychological factors help people maintain the behaviour when the incentives end, Gardiner noted.​

A new explanation of how gypsum forms may change the way we process this important building material, as well as allowing us to interpret past water availability on other planets such as Mars.

FUTURE EDUCATION

Dr. ROBINSON JOSEPH

SKYLINE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE,SHARJAH,UAE

Education is one of the basic human rights. Parents strive to ensure good education that would help their children better equipped in this competitive world and gain a decent livelihood. However, good intentions alone do not make it suffice, as children will have to take moral decisions at every turn in their lives. In the long run, only that which is morally right will prevail. During the years of their development, young people need to think of values of life, which should enable them to take appropriate moral decisions.   

Our society can boast of many intellectuals with technical expertise. Many successful doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, and educationists make us proud and fill us with joy. Nevertheless, how many of them deserve the attribute of a "good person"? This is some veritable subject for thought. World is benefited only through such individuals who can be rightly called good human beings. In many areas of our society we are facing the evil fall out of an education which do not integrate the program of learning with the process of evolving good individuals. A value based educational system is of paramount importance installing the negative possibility as we see that knowledge in itself runs the risk of being misused if it is not backed by value based standards.

As English writer G.K. Chesterton once said, "Every education teaches a philosophy of life, if not explicitly, then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. If the different parts of the education do not cohere or connect with each other; if, in the end, it does not empower and transform, then, it is not education at all" A transformative education is one in which the student is incrementally invited to engage life, to reflect upon it and, then, to be of service to our world.

Education is one that helps students name their gifts, formulate their conviction, and ultimately take full ownership of their own lives. An education, then, is one that transforms students in order that they transform the world. A transformative pedagogy trains students for dialogue and conversation, providing a way to tackle the root of so many crises that face humanity today. It is also a way of bridging the divide of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class.

There are clear moral dimensions to the economic, political, social, and environmental crises our world is currently facing. Many professional – lawyers, bankers, accountants, politicians, academics, and the entire chain of intermediaries, including religious leaders – have failed to detect the wrongdoing of our institutions; instead of exercising their moral duty, many chose the path of silence, convenience, and complicity. It is more important than ever that our students receive a strong foundation in moral discernment in order that they can act responsibly in all their relationships and pursue the common good

One of the main goals of an education is learning to live in right relationship: right relationship with oneself, right relationship with others, right relationship with God, and right relationship with our environment. Each of these fundamental relationships requires sensitivity, understanding, and care.

Education is the quest for truth. Truth is Omnipotent. The world supports itself in the strength of this Omnipresent. The denial of this truth leads to the destruction and corruption we see around the world. Value based education is the solution for this sad state of our life and world.

Education seeks to address the world in which we actually live as well as the hopes and challenges of that world. Indeed, one can view the current situation in the world against a backdrop of a whole range of key desires, really, "hungers" of the contemporary world for wholeness and peace.

 Students today appreciate having so much information at their fingertips, and yet, they long for a more robust formation that integrates their intellectual, affective and volition capacities and helps them to appreciate how the varied subjects and disciplines fit together.

Students today experience the limitation of a moral discourse that focuses almost exclusively on individual rights while almost ignoring the responsibilities we have to each other; not looking for recipes, our students display desire to acquire an ethical foundation and a method for moral discernment

The educational mission lies precisely in the study; debate, conversation, and discovery that help students identify these hungers, form their own assessment of them, and decide how they might address them for themselves and the world they seek to shape. 

We should know that the crisis our society faces in all walks of life can be related to the disorientation our educators feel in the field of Value based education. The educational system is primarily concerned with "How to make a living". It ignores the more fundamental question "How to live". Most of the innovations in educational field are concerned with acquiring knowledge and skills. But knowledge and skills, in the absence of an integrated system of values can be dangerous and suicidal. It is obvious that a sound awareness of the need for healthy components of value education in our schools and universities curriculum is an imperative if we want to bring up a generation of young people with character.  

Education, if it doesn't happen to be values based, will serve no purpose because the primary objective of education itself is and has to be nothing but value based education. Values are, indeed, certain orientations which will help one to distinguish between the right and the wrong and a capacity to accept and follow the right, while rejecting and dismissing the wrong from one's life. In this process, it is the teachers who can and who should play the key role, capturing the minds of the learners while they are young. "Catch them young" is an accepted motto.     

The four pillars of education are 1.Learning to know, 2.Learning to do, 3.Learning to live together and 4.Learning to be. Value based approach to education is embedded in all these aspects. In this context, it becomes crucial to implement values rich education in schools and colleges to guide the young's behavior and to assign meaning to their existence. The future educational system requires revamping to bring out the best in terms of superior character in the young generation.

A Chinese proverb says: "If there is nobility in heart, there will be beauty in character; if there is beauty in character, there will be harmony at home; if there is harmony at home, there will be order in the nation; if there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world."

​New York, April 3 (IANS) Researchers have developed a portable and affordable balance machine that is about twice as effective as the most widely used balance test for concussion.

When athletes gets their bell rung on the field or court, there is often tension between their desire to keep playing and a trainer's responsibility to prevent them from further harming themselves.

The problem with standard on-field concussion protocols is that several of their components are subjective and prone to human error.

The new inexpensive, ultraportable balance board called BtrackS, developed by researchers at San Diego State University, provides fast, objective feedback on an athlete's balance disruption following a suspected concussion, according to a study published in the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy.

Impaired balance is one of the major symptoms of a recent concussion. Most governing bodies in sports recommend three testing components in a concussion protocol: physical symptoms, cognitive function and balance.

For the balance portion, most sports organisations use what is known as the BESS (Balance Error Scoring System) test.

"The problem with the BESS is that it's really unreliable," said Dann Goble, inventor of BTrackS and author on the study.

You can measure balance objectively using force plates that track precisely how much a person sways, but most of these devices are either very large, very expensive, or both, making them unlikely to gain traction in sports.

Goble has adapted this technology into a balance board about the size of a suitcase that plugs into a computer or laptop, all for under $1,000.

To test whether the technology could accurately detect concussions in a real-world environment, Goble and colleagues took baseline balance measurements from more than 500 student athletes.

Then they followed those athletes over the course of their season.

Of 25 athletes determined by a team physician to have received concussions, BTrackS detected 16 of them, giving Goble's technology a success rate of 64 percent -- more than twice that of the BESS test, the study said.​

New York, April 3 (IANS) US researchers have identified DNA of two distinct strains of the virus that causes cold sores and fever blisters within an individual, which can unravel the history of a person.

The findings revealed that most people harbour HSV-1 virus, also known as oral herpes, frequently as a strain acquired from their mothers shortly after birth and carried for the rest of their lives.

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Virology.

Using the technique similar to genetic fingerprinting, HSV-1 could help flesh out a person's life story, adding an extra layer of genetic information not provided by our genomes alone.

The results could help forensic scientists to trace a person's history as well as understand how a patient's viruses influences the course of disease.

"Deep sequencing of viruses like HSV-1 will provide a better view of the viral genetic diversity that individuals harbour, and will provide valuable information about how that influences the course of disease," said lead researcher Moriah L. Szpara, assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University in US.

The new discovery was made with the help of a volunteer from US.

The study revealed that one strain of the HSV-1 virus harboured by this individual is of a European/North American variety and the other is an Asian variety -- likely acquired during the volunteer's military service in the Korean War in the 1950s.

Earlier research has demonstrated that the geographical origin of HSV-1 can be predicted and also implied that a personal strain of HSV-1 can reflect a person's origin.

"We're working on better ways to sequence viral genomes from ever-smaller amounts of starting material, to allow identification and comparison of samples from diverse sources," Szpara added.​

New York, April 3 (IANS) In a first, a team of Indian-origin researchers cast an improved titanium alloy that can improve vehicle's fuel economy and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

An improved titanium alloy -- stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market -- gets its strength from the novel way atoms are arranged to form a special nanostructure, the researchers noted in their study.

The researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the US examined this alignment and then manipulated it to make the strongest titanium alloy ever developed and with a lower cost process to boot.

The note in a paper published in journal Nature Communications said that the material is an excellent candidate for producing lighter vehicle parts, and that this newfound understanding may lead to creation of other high strength alloys.

Researchers used powerful electron microscopes and a unique atom probe imaging approach to examine the structure and once they understood the nanostructure, they created the strongest titanium alloy ever made.

This nanostructure of the alloy would help the auto industry build lighter vehicles that use less fuel and put out less carbon dioxide that contributes to climate warming, the researchers said.

The team optimised the heat-treating process that makes alloy stronger to tailor the nanostructure and achieve very high strength.

"We found that if you heat treat it first with a higher temperature before a low temperature heat treatment step, you could create a titanium alloy 10-15 percent stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market and that it has roughly double the strength of steel," Arun Devaraj, a material scientist, said.

"This alloy is still more expensive than steel but with its strength-to-cost ratio, it becomes much more affordable with greater potential for lightweight automotive applications," Vineet Joshi, a metallurgist, added.​

​London, April 3 (IANS) Light can put active materials into motion and humans can use this movement for development of new programmable materials which can be used for environment protection and deliver pharmaceutical substances, a study said.

Light of a certain wavelength can be used to put so-called active materials into motion and control their movement.

In future, this discovery can become significant in widely different areas such as environmental protection, medicine and the development of new materials that can be programmed.

Joakim Stenhammar from Lund University in Sweden led a study in which his team of international researchers developed a model in which patterns of light control the movement of active particles.

The results of the study were published in journal Science Advances.

The light makes synthetically produced particles as well as microorganisms, such as bacteria and algae, spontaneously form into something that can be compared to a pump.

The light makes active particles construct their own pump to move themselves around. By adjusting the light, it is possible to steer the particles in a different direction.

"Our strategy has the potential of developing into an inexpensive and simple way to pump and control bacteria and other active materials," Stenhammar said.

One possible application is to have active particles deliver pharmaceutical substances or nanosensors to specific parts of the body. Within environmental science, the active particles could be compared to targeted robots that can locate oil spills and then release chemicals to break down any contamination.

"Our results show how the properties of active particles can be used to design new materials that we are unable to produce today," Stenhammar added.​

​London, April 3 (IANS) The Moon plays a major role in maintaining the Earth's magnetic field, say researchers, adding that the lunar action, overlooked till now, is thought to have kept the geodynamo active.

The Earth's magnetic field permanently protects us from the charged particles and radiation that originate in the Sun.

This shield is produced by the geodynamo, the rapid motion of huge quantities of liquid iron alloy in the Earth's outer core.

To maintain this magnetic field till the present day, the classical model required the Earth's core to have cooled by around 3,000 degrees Celsius over the past 4.3 billion years.

Now, a team of researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research and Universite Blaise Pascal in France suggests that on the contrary, its temperature has fallen by only 300 degrees Celsius.

According to the researchers, the Earth has a slightly flattened shape and rotates about an inclined axis that wobbles around the poles.

The Earth continuously receives 3,700 billion watts of power through the transfer of the gravitational and rotational energy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system and over 1,000 billion watts is thought to be available to bring about this type of motion in the outer core.

This energy is enough to generate the Earth's magnetic field, which together with the Moon resolves the major paradox in the classical theory.

The effect of gravitational forces on a planet's magnetic field has already been well documented for two of Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa, and for a number of exoplanets.

This new model shows that the Moon's effect on the Earth goes well beyond merely causing tides.

The work was published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.​

​New York, April 4 (IANS) Testosterone therapy can help the elderly - suffering from low testosterone levels and pre-existing heart condition - reduce their risks of stroke, heart attacks and death, researchers report.

The study from the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City showed that patients who received testosterone as part of their follow-up treatment fared much better than patients who didn't.

Non-testosterone-therapy patients were 80 percent more likely to suffer an adverse event.

"The study shows that using testosterone replacement therapy to increase testosterone to normal levels in androgen-deficient men doesn't increase their risk of a serious heart attack or stroke,” said cardiologist Brent Muhlestein.

That was the case even in the highest-risk men -- those with known pre-existing heart disease.

The research team studied 755 male patients between the ages of 58 and 78 at Intermountain Medical Center who had severe coronary artery disease.

They were split into three different groups which received varied doses of testosterone administered either by injection or gel.

After one year, 64 patients who weren't taking testosterone supplements suffered major adverse cardiovascular events while only 12 who were taking medium doses of testosterone and nine who were taking high doses did.

After three years, 125 non-testosterone-therapy patients suffered major adverse cardiovascular events, while only 38 medium-dose and 22 high-dose patients did.

“Although this is an observational study, it does, however, substantiate the need for a randomised clinical trial that can confirm or refute the results,” Muhlestein noted.

The team presented the results at the American College of Cardiology's 65th annual scientific session in Chicago last weekend.​

​New York, April 4 (IANS) Companies appear to structure compensation contracts and incentive pay based on seniors' personality traits and not just firm characteristics, a team of US researchers, including an Indian-origin scientist, has found.

Companies offer incentive-heavy compensation contracts to overconfident CEOs to "exploit" their positively biased views of the firms' prospects, the researchers noted.

"There are divergent views on the use of options and stock in CEO compensation contracts: Do they appropriately incentivise managers and enhance shareholder value and if so, why is there much variation in their use across firms?" said Vikram Nanda from Naveen Jindal School of Management in the US.

The notion is that if managers and shareholders -- represented by the board -- have a different take on a firm's prospects and CEO talent, there will be greater use of incentive pay that the managers value highly but the board regards as less costly.

"When you think about incentive contracts, you don't usually think about the personality of the individual being a factor in the contract," Nanda added in the paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics. 

Using the compensation data of CEOs between 1992 and 2011, the researchers identified managers who were exhibiting behaviour that was overconfident compared to other CEOs. 

"You don't usually hear about how two profit-sharing agreements are going to look different because the personalities and the beliefs of the individuals are coming into play," Nanda stated.

The team conducted empirical tests to explore the relationship between CEO overconfidence and incentive compensation.

The researchers found that CEO overconfidence increases the proportions of total compensation that comes from both option grants and equity grants, compared to other executives.

Overconfident CEOs receive even greater option and equity intensity in innovative and risky firms.

"Overconfident CEOs are prone to overestimate returns to investments and underestimate risks. They may use extremely positive words in the media or tend to invest more than a typical manager in the industry," Nanda stated.​