Knowledge Update

​Singapore, Jan 20 (IANS) Ever wondered why we are not plunged into intermittent darkness when we blink? Researchers in Singapore may have the answer.

It is because our brain works extra hard to stabilise our vision, without which our surroundings would appear shadowy, erratic and jittery after we blink, a study has showed.

Blinking lubricates dry eyes and protects them from irritants. However, when we blink, our eyeballs roll back in their sockets and do not always return to the same spot when we reopen our eyes. 

This misalignment prompts the brain to activate the eye muscles to realign our vision, the researchers said. 

The finding showed that when we blink, our brain repositions our eyeballs so we can stay focused on what we are viewing.

"Our eye muscles are quite sluggish and imprecise, so the brain needs to constantly adapt its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they're supposed to," said lead author Gerrit Maus, Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. 

"Our findings suggest that the brain gauges the difference in what we see before and after a blink and commands the eye muscles to make the needed corrections," Maus added.

For the study, healthy young adults participated where they sat in a dark room for long periods staring at a dot on a screen while infrared cameras tracked their eye movements and eye blinks in real time.

Every time they blinked, the dot was moved one centimetre to the right. While participants failed to notice the subtle shift, the brain's oculomotor system registered the movement and learned to reposition the line of vision squarely on the dot.

After 30 or so blink-synchronised dot movements, participants' eyes adjusted during each blink and shifted automatically to the spot where they predicted the dot to be.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

New York, Jan 19 (IANS) In a ray of hope for those suffering from heart conditions, a team of scientists has developed the world's first soft robotic sleeve that is fitted around the heart, where it twists and compresses the heart's chambers just like healthy cardiac muscle would do.

To create a device that does not come into contact with blood, the team from Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital developed a thin silicone sleeve that uses soft pneumatic actuators placed around the heart to mimic the outer muscle layers of a human heart.

"This research demonstrates that the growing field of soft robotics can be applied to clinical needs and potentially reduce the burden of heart disease and improve the quality of life for patients," said lead author Ellen T Roche, a former PhD student at Harvard and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Ireland.

The actuators twist and compress the sleeve in a similar motion to the beating heart. 

The device is tethered to an external pump, which uses air to power the soft actuators.

Unlike other therapeutic systems known as ventricular assist devices (VADs), the soft robotic sleeve does not directly contact blood, avoiding that risk.

With heart failure affecting 41 million people worldwide, researchers expect the device may be able to bridge a patient to transplant or to aid in cardiac rehabilitation and recovery. 

"The sleeve can be customised for each patient. If a patient has more weakness on the left side of the heart, for example, the actuators can be tuned to give more assistance on that side," Roche noted in a paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The pressure of the actuators can also increase or decrease over time, as the patient's condition evolves. The device is tethered to an external pump, which uses air to power the soft actuators.

According to the researchers, soft robotic devices are ideally suited to interact with soft tissue and give assistance that can help with augmentation of function, and potentially even healing and recovery.

​London, Jan 19 (IANS) Lithium batteries can be charged faster in the near future as scientists have got new insights into why adding charged metal atoms to tunnel structures within batteries improve their performance.

Rechargeable lithium batteries have helped power the 'portable revolution' in mobile phones, laptops and tablet computers. 

"Understanding these processes is important for the future design and development of battery materials and could lead to faster charging batteries that will benefit consumers and industry," said Saiful Islam, Professor at the University of Bath.

The team from the University of Bath and University of Illinois-Chicago also found a way to develop new generations of lithium batteries for electric vehicles that can store energy from wind and solar power.

The study noted that storing electrical energy more quickly than current electrodes is important for future applications in portable electronics and electric vehicles.

"Developing new materials holds the key to lighter, cheaper and safer batteries, including for electric vehicles which will help cut carbon emissions," added Islam in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

New York, Jan 19 (IANS) Scarcity of food or other resources may drive some baboon males to attack and kill infants of their own kind, a study has found.

The findings showed that some baboon males vying for a chance to father their own offspring expedite matters in a gruesome way -- they kill infants sired by other males and attack pregnant females, causing them to miscarry.

The behaviour reduces their waiting time to breed with pregnant and nursing females, who otherwise would not become sexually available again for up to a year.

"In situations where males have few opportunities, they resort to violence to achieve what's necessary to survive and reproduce. When reproductive opportunities abound, this behaviour is less frequent," said lead author Matthew Zipple, graduate student at Duke University in North Carolina, US.

Shortages of fertile females were particularly common in times of food scarcity, when baboon troops distance themselves from each other and females take 15 per cent longer between successive births -- which means males who don't kill have even longer to wait.

The perpetrators are more prone to commit domestic violence when forced to move into a group with few fertile females, Zipple added.

It was also more common when the incoming male achieved high social status very quickly, when he stayed in the group for three months or more or when there were many infants and pregnant females in the group.

"It's not just who they are, it's the circumstances they find themselves in that makes the difference," Zipple said.

In addition, the researchers found that immigrant males were responsible for roughly 2 per cent of infant deaths and 6 per cent of miscarriages between 1978 and 2015. 

But when cycling females were few, the death rates more than tripled.

The findings come from a long-term study of wild baboons monitored on a near-daily basis since 1971 at Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya.

The study appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

​The relationship between gender and language had been one of the most debated topics since the beginning of women`s movement in the late 1960s. The movement that had tried to look at the representation of gender in different fields. More specifically, the concept of gender and language is always associated with the differences between women and men in terms of the way the speech is structured and the way language is used. Thus, and because of the social norms and what every society dictates on its individuals, these differences between men and women`s speech were omnipresent across a range of languages. In this article an attempt will be made to inspect some of the gender differences common in men`s and women`s speeches.

​New York, Jan 18 (IANS) Vision deterioration in astronauts is likely owing to the lack of a day-night cycle in intracranial pressure, say scientists, adding that using a vacuum device to lower pressure for part of each day might prevent the problem.

To study how zero-gravity conditions affect intracranial pressure, researchers from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre recruited volunteer patients who had had a port permanently placed in their head as part of treatment for cancer. 

The ports provided a way for researchers to measure intracranial pressure. 

NASA flights then flew the eight volunteers one by one on steep up-and-down maneuvers (parabolic flights) that created 20-second intervals of weightlessness. 

The researchers measured intracranial pressure during the zero-gravity intervals and compared these with intracranial pressure during standard times of sitting, lying face upward (supine), and lying with head inclined downward.

The findings showed that intracranial pressure in zero-gravity conditions, such as exists in space, is higher than when people are standing or sitting on Earth, but lower than when people are sleeping on Earth. 

"These challenging experiments were among the most ambitious human studies ever attempted and changed the way we think about the effect of gravity - and its absence - on pressure inside the brain," said senior author Dr Benjamin Levine, Professor of Internal Medicine.

It suggests that the constancy of pressure on the back of the eye causes the vision problems astronauts experience over time.

"The information from these studies is already leading to novel partnerships with companies to develop tools to simulate the upright posture in space while astronauts sleep, thereby normalising the circadian variability in intracranial pressure," added Dr Levine.

"The idea is that the astronauts would wear negative pressure clothing or a negative pressure device while they sleep, creating lower intracranial pressure for part of each 24 hours," noted first author Dr Justin Lawley in a paper appeared in the Journal of Physiology.

​New York, Jan 18 (IANS) Fungal infections that are often poorly diagnosed worldwide causes doctors to over-prescribe antibiotics, increasing harmful resistance to antimicrobial drugs, resulting in 1.5 million deaths a year, according to a study.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, according to the World Health Organization. 

The study showed that inadequate attention by physicians to fungal infection is the major cause failure of antibacterial treatment. 

"If we're trying to deliver globally on a comprehensive plan to prevent antimicrobial resistance and we're treating blindly for fungal infections that we don't know are present with antibiotics, then we may inadvertently be creating greater antibiotic resistance," said lead author David Perlin, Rutgers University in New Jersey, US.

Fungal infections, often undiagnosed, result in 1.5 million deaths a year, said researchers from the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections (GAFFI) - a Britain-based organisation to promote global awareness of fungal disease.

"Fungal disease diagnostics are critical in the AMR fight and will improve survival from fungal disease across the world," added David Denning, Professor at the University of Manchester.

Inexpensive, rapid diagnostic tests are available for important fungal infections but are not being widely used.

Better training is needed to encourage health care practitioners to test for fungal infections so the correct drugs are administered.

Paying closer attention to underlying fungal infections is necessary to reduce drug resistance, Perlin said.

The study was published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

New York, Jan 17 (IANS) At a time when existing LEDs are helping to keep electricity bills low, a group of scientists has developed a more efficient and low-cost alternative to the materials used in traditional LEDs.

Princeton engineering researchers refined the manufacturing of light sources made with crystalline substances known as perovskites that provide more efficiency, lower-cost and long life to the new LEDs.

In this technique, nanoscale perovskite particles self-assemble to produce more efficient, stable and durable perovskite-based LEDs and the working was published in journal Nature Photonics.

"Our new technique allows these nanoparticles to self-assemble to create ultra-fine grained films, an advance in fabrication that makes perovskite LEDs look more like a viable alternative to existing technologies," said lead researcher Barry Rand. 

Rand's team and others researchers are exploring perovskites as a potential lower-cost alternative to gallium nitride (GaN) and other materials used in LED manufacturing. Lower-cost LEDs would speed the acceptance of the bulbs, reducing energy use and environmental impacts.

Perovskite is a mineral originally discovered in the mid-1800s in Russia and named in honour of the Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski. 

Sydney, Jan 17 (IANS) Australian astrophysicists have come a step closer to solving a galactic murder mystery on Tuesday when they studied the effects of dark matter in 11,000 galaxies, a media report said.

They saw that when gas was rapidly stripped from a galaxy, the building block of stars was lost and the galaxy was "effectively killed", said study leader Toby Brown of Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology.

The study was conducted by researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, a joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western Australia, Xinhua news agency reported. 

"Galaxies are embedded in clouds of dark matter that we call dark matter halos. During their lifetimes, galaxies can inhabit halos of different sizes, ranging from masses typical of our own Milky Way to halos thousands of times more massive," Brown said.

"As galaxies fall through these larger halos, the superheated intergalactic plasma between them removes their gas in a fast-acting process called ram-pressure stripping. 

"You can think of it like a giant cosmic broom that comes through and physically sweeps the gas from the galaxies," Brown explained.

The study combined the world's largest galaxy survey -- the Sloan Digital Sky Survey -- with the largest ever set of radio observations for atomic gas -- the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey in order to solve the case.

But according to Brown, ram-pressure stripping is not the only way a galaxy can die, galaxies can also be "strangled."

"Strangulation occurs when the gas is consumed to make stars faster than it's being replenished, so the galaxy starves to death," he said.

"It's a slow-acting process. On the contrary, what ram-pressure stripping does is bop the galaxy on the head and remove its gas very quickly -- of the order of tens of millions of years -- and astronomically speaking that's very fast." 

​Beijing, Jan 17 (IANS) China will launch a satellite this year to gather electromagnetic data which may be used in monitoring and forecasting earthquakes.

According to China's earthquake administrative agencies on Tuesday, the satellite will be launched in the latter half of this year, Xinhua news agency reported. 

Movements of the Earth's crust generate electromagnetic radiation which can be observed from space.

By collecting data on the Earth's electromagnetic field, ionosphere plasma and high-energy particles, the satellite will be used in real-time monitoring of earthquakes and possible seismic precursors in China and neighbouring regions.

The satellite will be China's first space-based platform for earthquake monitoring, providing a new approach for research.

According to Shen Xuhui, deputy chief of the mission, it is designed to remain in orbit for five years and record the electromagnetic situation of earthquakes above 6 magnitude in China and quakes above 7 magnitude all over the world.

Scientists are expecting to find common factors that may be used to develop earthquake forecasting technology, Shen said.