Knowledge Update

​Lhasa, Jan 7 (IANS) China is working to set up the world's highest altitude gravitational wave telescopes in Tibet Autonomous Region to detect the faintest echoes resonating from the universe, which may reveal more about the Big Bang.

Construction has started for the first telescope, code-named Ngari No.1, 30 km south of Shiquanhe town in Ngari Prefecture, said Yao Yongqiang, chief researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinhua news agency reported. 

The telescope, located 5,250 meters above sea level, will detect and gather precise data on primordial gravitational waves in the Northern Hemisphere. 

It is expected to be operational by 2021.

Yao said the second phase involves a series of telescopes, code-named Ngari No. 2, to be located about 6,000 meters above sea level. He did not give a time frame for construction of Ngari No. 2.

The budget for the two-phase Ngari gravitational wave observatory is an estimated 130 million yuan ($18.8 million). The project was initiated by the Institute of High Energy Physics, National Astronomical Observatories, and Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, among others.

Ngari, with its high altitude, clear sky, and minimal human activity, is said to be one of the world's best spots to detect tiny twists in cosmic light.

Yao said the Ngari observatory will be among the world's top primordial gravitational wave observation bases, alongside the South Pole Telescope and the facility in Chile's Atacama Desert.

Gravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity 100 years ago, but it wasn't until 2016 that scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory announced proof of the waves' existence, spurring fresh research interest among the world's scientists.

China has announced its own gravitational wave research plans, which include the launch of satellites and setting up FAST, a 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope in southwest China's Guizhou Province.

​London, Jan 6 (IANS) It's lonely life for the elderly in Britain. Half a million people in the isles over the age of 60 usually spend each day alone, with no interaction with others, a poll said.

It also said that nearly half a million more commonly do not see or speak to anyone for five or six days a week, the Guardian reported on Friday.

Age UK, which commissioned the research, said the results highlighted a growing number of chronically lonely older people. This was placing increasing demand on Britain's health services.

The charity has been running a pilot programme in eight areas where Age UK groups were actively trying to identify lonely older people and offer them companionship.

Caroline Abrahams, Age UK's charity director, said: "This new analysis shows that about a million older people in our country (Britain) are profoundly alone, many of whom are likely to be enduring the pain and suffering of loneliness."

"That's why the early results of our pilot programme into tackling loneliness in later life are so important: nine in 10 older people who were often lonely when they started the programme were less lonely six to 12 weeks later," she said. 

Many even said that they felt generally happier, more confident and more independent as a result, the poll showed.

"Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for loneliness, but our pilot programme shows we really can make a difference and provide crucial insights into how the problem can be successfully overcome," Abrahams said.

The Age UK groups worked with local people such as hairdressers, shopkeepers and faith groups to help identify older people experiencing or at risk of loneliness.

They developed networks with professionals in voluntary and statutory services, such as community nurses, social workers and police community support officers, and others. 

Age UK has also developed a loneliness heat-mapping tool, which assesses risk factors such as age, marital status and number of household members.

People identified as lonely by Age UK groups were provided with telephone support and short-term, face-to-face companionship.

The results of the poll would feed into Age UK's submissions to the 'commission on loneliness', devised by late Labour MP Jo Cox, before she was murdered in 2016. 

The research agency TNS polled British residents aged over 60, asking them how many days a week they usually spent alone with no visits or telephone calls. 

Out of 2,241 people, 498 said they spent seven days on their own and 464 said five or six days. 

The results were then extrapolated to reach the national figures.

Washington, Jan 7 (IANS) NASA has said two of its astronauts -- Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson -- have completed the first of two power upgrade spacewalks at 1:55 p.m. EST (12:25 a.m. Saturday, India time).

During the six-hour-and-thirty-two-minute spacewalk, the two NASA astronauts successfully installed three new adapter plates and hooked up electrical connections for three of the six new lithium-ion batteries on the International Space Station, NASA scientists wrote in a blog post.

They also accomplished several get-ahead tasks, including a photo survey of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

The new lithium-ion batteries and adapter plates replace the nickel-hydrogen batteries currently used on the station to store electrical energy generated by the station's solar arrays.

Robotic work to update the batteries began in January. 

This was the first of two spacewalks planned to finalise the installation, NASA said.

Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) are scheduled to conduct the second spacewalk on January 13.

Space station crew members have conducted 196 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. 

Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,224 hours and six minutes working outside the station.

​Washington, Jan 6 (IANS) By combining data from several telescopes around the world including India's Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in Pune, astronomers have discovered a cosmic double whammy unlike any ever seen before.

Two of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe, a supermassive black hole, and the collision of giant galaxy clusters, have combined to create a stupendous cosmic particle accelerator, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"We have seen each of these spectacular phenomena separately in many places," said lead researcher Reinout van Weeren of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

"This is the first time, however, that we seen them clearly linked together in the same system," Weeren noted.

This cosmic double whammy is found in a pair of colliding galaxy clusters called Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 located about two billion light years from Earth. 

The two clusters are both very massive, each weighing about a quadrillion or a billion times the mass of the Sun.

This discovery solves a long-standing mystery in galaxy cluster research about the origin of beautiful swirls of radio emission stretching for millions of light years, detected in Abell 3411 and Abell 3412 with the GMRT.

The team determined that as the shock waves travel across the cluster for hundreds of millions of years, the doubly accelerated particles produce giant swirls of radio emission.

"This result shows that a remarkable combination of powerful events generate these particle acceleration factories, which are the largest and most powerful in the Universe," co-author William Dawson of Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore, California, said. 

Besides GMRT, the researchers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the US National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, and other telescopes to find out what happens when matter ejected by a giant black hole is swept up in the merger of two enormous galaxy clusters.

"It is a bit poetic that it took a combination of the world's biggest observatories to understand this," Dawson noted.

"It's almost like launching a rocket into low-Earth orbit and then getting shot out of the Solar System by a second rocket blast," co-author Felipe Andrade-Santos, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

"These particles are among the most energetic particles observed in the Universe, thanks to the double injection of energy," Andrade-Santos explained.

​New York, Jan 6 (IANS) Cancer death has seen a steady decline in US, with the toll dropping to 25 per cent -- or 2.1 million fewer -- between 1991 and 2014, owing to steady reductions in smoking, advances in early detection and treatment, says a report.

According to 'Cancer Statistics 2017' annual report of the American Cancer Society, the cancer death rate dropped from its peak of 215.1 (per 100,000 population) in 1991 to 161.2 (per 100,000 population) in 2014. 

The death rates decreased for the four major cancer sites: lung (-43 per cent between 1990 and 2014 among males and -17 per cent between 2002 and 2014 among females), breast (-38 per cent from 1989 to 2014), prostate (-51 per cent from 1993 to 2014) and colorectal (-51 per cent from 1976 to 2014).

"The continuing drops in the cancer death rate are a powerful sign of the potential we have to reduce cancer's deadly toll," said Otis W. Brawley, Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society.

While the overall cancer incidence rate was stable in women and declined by about two per cent per year in men, the cancer death rate decreased by about 1.5 per cent annually in both men and women.

In addition, the report found significant gender disparities -- the cancer incidence rate is 20 per cent higher in men than in women, while the cancer death rate is 40 per cent higher in men.

Liver cancer -- a highly fatal cancer -- was found to be three times more common in men than in women. 

While the incidence and death rates of cancers of the esophagus, larynx and bladder, were found to be about four-fold higher in men, the incidence rates of melanoma -- skin cancer -- were about 60 per cent higher in men than in women and death rates were more than double in men compared with women, the researchers stated.

The report was published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. 

​New York, Jan 6 (IANS) Feeling depressed? Take heart, a novel suite of 13 speedy mini interactive-apps may help you de-stress and lower anxiety and depression, suggests a study.

The apps -- called IntelliCare -- offer exercises to de-stress, reduce self-criticism and worrying, methods to help your life feel more meaningful, mantras to highlight your strengths, strategies for a good night's sleep and more.

"We designed these apps so they fit easily into people's lives and could be used as simply as apps to find a restaurant or directions," said lead author David Mohr, Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Illinois, US.

In the study, 96 participants robustly used the IntelliCare interactive apps as many as four times daily -- or an average of 195 times -- for eight weeks. They spent an average of one minute using each app, with longer times for apps with relaxation videos.

The participants reported that they experienced about a 50 per cent decrease in the severity of depressive and anxiety symptoms. 

The short-term study-related reductions are comparable to results expected in clinical practice using psychotherapy or with that seen using antidepressant medication, the researchers said.

"Using digital tools for mental health is emerging as an important part of our future. These are designed to help the millions of people who want support but can't get to a therapist's office," Mohr said.

The study will be published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

​New York, Jan 6 (IANS) By transforming the most common type of cells found in wounds into fat cells, researchers have reported finding a way to manipulate wounds to heal as regenerated skin rather than scar tissue.

"Essentially, we can manipulate wound healing so that it leads to skin regeneration rather than scarring," said principal investigator George Cotsarelis, Professor of Dermatology at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, US.

Fat cells called adipocytes are normally found in the skin, but they are lost when wounds heal as scars. The most common cells found in healing wounds are myofibroblasts, which were thought to only form a scar. 

Scar tissue also does not have any hair follicles associated with it, which is another factor that gives it an abnormal appearance from the rest of the skin.

Researchers used these characteristics as the basis for their work -- changing the already present myofibroblasts into fat cells that do not cause scarring.

"The secret is to regenerate hair follicles first. After that, the fat will regenerate in response to the signals from those follicles," Cotsarelis said.

The study showed hair and fat develop separately but not independently. Hair follicles form first, and the Cotsarelis lab previously discovered factors necessary for their formation. 

The new study - published online in the journal Science - details additional factors actually produced by the regenerating hair follicle to convert the surrounding myofibroblasts to regenerate as fat instead of forming a scar. 

As they examined the question of what was sending the signal from the hair to the fat cells, researchers identified a factor called Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP). It instructs the myofibroblasts to become fat. 

"Typically, myofibroblasts were thought to be incapable of becoming a different type of cell," Cotsarelis said. 

"But our work shows we have the ability to influence these cells, and that they can be efficiently converted into adipocytes," Cotsarelis noted.

This was shown in both the mouse and in human keloid cells grown in culture.

"The findings show we have a window of opportunity after wounding to influence the tissue to regenerate rather than scar," said the study's lead author Maksim Plikus, Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine. 

The findings could lead to new therapies to help wounds heal without scarring.

​London, Jan 6 (IANS) Global warming is replicating conditions that triggered an abrupt sea level rise of several meters in the ocean around Antarctica some 15,000 years ago, warns a study.

"The changes that are currently taking place in a disturbing manner resemble those 14,700 years ago," said one of the researchers Michael Weber from University of Bonn in Germany.

At that time, changes in atmospheric-oceanic circulation led to a stratification in the ocean with a cold layer at the surface and a warm layer below. 

Under such conditions, ice sheets melt more strongly than when the surrounding ocean is thoroughly mixed. 

This is exactly what is presently happening around the Antarctic, said the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"The reason for the layering is that global warming in parts of Antarctica is causing land based ice to melt, adding massive amounts of freshwater to the ocean surface," Chris Fogwill from the Climate Change Research Center in Sydney explained.

"At the same time as the surface is cooling, the deeper ocean is warming, which has already accelerated the decline of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment (in West Antarctic ice sheet)," Fogwill added.

To investigate the climate changes of the past, the scientists studied the frozen "climate archive" - drill cores from the Antarctic ice sheet. 

"The largest melt occurred 14,700 years ago. During this time the Antarctic contributed to a sea level rise of at least three meters within a few centuries," Weber noted.

The research team used isotopic analyses of ice cores from the Weddell Sea region -- southernmost tip of the Atlantic Ocean - which now flows into the ocean about a quarter of the Antarctic melt.

Through a combination of ice sheet and climate modelling, the isotopic data showed that the waters around the Antarctic were heavily layered at the time of the melting events, so that the ice sheets melted at a faster rate. 

"The big question is whether the ice sheet will react to these changing ocean conditions as rapidly as it did 14,700 years ago," co-author Nick Golledge from Antarctic Research Centre in Wellington, New Zealand, said.

​London, Jan 6 (IANS) Consuming foods such as bananas, potatoes, grains and legumes that are rich in resistant starch may help check blood sugar, enhance satiety as well as improve gut health, a study has found.

Resistant starch is a form of starch that is not digested in the small intestine and is therefore considered a type of dietary fibre.

"We know that adequate fibre intake -- at least 30 grams per day -- is important for achieving a healthy, balanced diet, which reduces the risk of developing a range of chronic diseases," said Stacey Lockyer, Nutrition Scientist at British Nutrition Foundation, a Britain-based charity. 

Apart from occurring naturally in foods, resistant starch is also produced or modified commercially and incorporated into food products.

Unlike the typical starch, resistant starch acts like a type of fibre in the body as it does not get digested in your small intestine, but is is fermented in the large intestine.

This dietary fibre then increases the production of short chain fatty acids in the gut, which act as an energy source for the colonic cells, thus improving the gut health and increasing satiety.

According to the researchers, there is consistent evidence that consumption of resistant starch can aid blood sugar control. It has also been suggested that resistant starch can support gut health and enhance satiety via increased production of short chain fatty acids.

"Whilst findings support positive effects on some markers, further research is needed in most areas to establish whether consuming resistant starch can confer significant benefits that are relevant to the general population. However, this is definitely an exciting area of nutritional research for the future," Lockyer said.

The study was published in the journal Nutrition Bulletin.

Washington, Jan 6 (IANS) Humans likely established permanent settlements on the high-altitude Tibetan plateau at least 7,400 years ago, much before the advent of agriculture 5,200 years ago, says a study.

The findings are based on an extensive analysis of human handprints and footprints found in 1998 in fossilised hot spring mud near the village of Chusang on Tibet's central plateau, at an elevation of 14,000 feet above sea level. 

Analysis of the archaeological site indicated that the prints were made by people at least 7,400 years ago, and possibly as early as 13,000 years ago. 

The findings, published in the journal Science, challenge the previously held view that permanent human occupation of the Tibetan Plateau began no earlier than development of an agricultural economy between 5,200-3,600 years ago.

"Although an agropastoral lifeway may have enabled substantial population growth after 5,000 years, it by no means was required for the early, likely permanent, occupation of the high central valleys of the Tibetan Plateau," the researchers wrote.

The research sheds new light on human colonisation of high-elevation environments, said one of the researchers, Randy Haas from University of Wyoming in the US.

For example, researchers have been puzzled by the striking differences in how Tibetans and Andean highlanders adapted physiologically to the rigors of life at high elevations.

"High-elevation environments were some of the last places in the world that humans colonised, and so they offer something of a natural laboratory for studying human adaptation," Haas said.