Knowledge Update

​New York, Oct 15 (IANS) Move over milk, soy protein isolate early in life might be what's needed for strong, healthy bones in adulthood, researchers say.

The findings showed that giving children a diet high in soy protein isolate can protect against serious bone loss during adulthood as well as help ensure overall better bone quality.

"Appropriate early-life nutrition can optimise peak bone mass," said Jin-Ran Chen, researcher at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

"Consumption of soy foods has a variety of health benefits, including amelioration of bone loss during adulthood," Chen added.

For the study, Chen and colleagues used a very young female rat model. 

One group of rats was fed a soy protein isolate diet for 30 days (from postnatal day 24 to 55), and then was switched to a regular standard rodent diet until six months of age. 

The rats were altered to mimic postmenopausal bone loss in women to determine the amount of bone loss. The second group of rats was fed a regular standard rodent diet throughout life. 

"The centuries-old mantra that children need milk to 'grow strong bones' remains true, but the study shows evidence that the protein components of soy 'milk' have key osteogenic effects," said Thoru Pederson, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. 

"The study could ultimately have major pediatric health impacts throughout various parts of the world," he said.

The research was published online in The FASEB Journal.

​London, Oct 15 (IANS) Patients who knowingly took a placebo in combination with traditional treatment for chronic lower back pain had a significant reduction in pain and disability, a study has found.

Conventional medical wisdom has long held that placebo effects depend on patients' belief they are getting pharmacologically active medication, the study said. 

"Our findings demonstrate the placebo effect can be elicited without deception," said lead author Claudia Carvalho from Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA) in Lisbon, Portugal. 

For the study, they examined 97 patients with chronic lower back pain (cLBP), which causes more disability than any other medical condition worldwide. 

The researchers gave all patients a 15-minute explanation of the placebo effect. 

The group was then randomised into one of two groups; the treatment-as-usual (TAU) group or the open-label placebo (OLP) group.

The vast majority of participants in both groups (between 85 and 88 per cent) were already taking medications -- mostly non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDS) -- for their pain. 

Participants in both the TAU and OLP groups were allowed to continue taking these drugs.

At the end of their three-week course of pills, the OLP group overall reported 30 per cent reductions in both usual pain and maximum pain, compared to 9 per cent and 16 per cent reductions, respectively, for the TAU group. 

The group taking placebo pills also saw a 29 per cent drop in pain-related disability. Those receiving treatment as usual saw almost no improvement by that measure.

"This new research demonstrates that the placebo effect is not necessarily elicited by patients' conscious expectation that they are getting an active medicine, as long thought," explained Ted Kaptchuk, Associate Professor at the Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts. 

Although, one can never shrink a tumour or unclog an artery with placebo intervention, but it can make people feel better, the researchers observed, adding that the placebo intervention cannot be trashed. 

"It has clinical meaning, it's statically significant, and it relieves patients. It's essential to what medicine means," Kaptchuk said, in the paper published in the journal Pain.

​New York, Oct 15 (IANS) A team of researchers has developed a smartwatch prototype that uses the wrist wearing the watch as an always-available joystick to perform touchscreen gestures with one-handed continuous input.

Checking email, tracking fitness and listening to music, are just a few things that a smartwatch can do but what if your hands aren't free? 

WristWhirl is the answer.

While other studies have explored the use of one-handed continuous gestures using smartwatches, WristWhirl is the first to explore gestural input.

"This shows what smartwatches may be able to do in the future, by allowing users to interact with the device using one hand (the one that the watch is worn on) while freeing up the other hand for other tasks," said Xing-Dong Yang, assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College.

To develop the WristWhirl prototype, researchers investigated the biomechanical ability of the wrist by tasking a small group of participants to conduct eight joystick-like gestures while standing and walking.

Participants wore the watch on their left wrist and were asked to use their wrist to make four directional marks similar to flicking a touch screen, and four free-form shapes, such as a triangle.

They were asked to make these gestures with their hand-up in front of their body during which they could see the gesture being drawn on the watch's screen, and with their hand-down alongside their body.

They were able to make directional marks at an average rate of half a second and free-form shapes at an average rate of approximately 1.5 seconds.

WristWhirl was built from a 2-inch TFT display and a plastic watch strap augmented with 12 infrared proximity sensors and a Piezo vibration sensor placed inside the wrist strap.

The project will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Tokyo on October 19.

​Washington, Oct 15 (IANS) Mission managers for Juno probe to Jupiter have decided to delay the upcoming burn of its main rocket motor - designed to put the spacecraft closer to the largest planet in our solar system - until December, the US space agency said on Saturday.

The decision was made in order to further study the performance of a set of valves that are part of the spacecraft's fuel pressurisation system.

This burn, originally scheduled for October 19, called the period reduction maneuver (PRM), was to reduce Juno's orbital period around Jupiter from 53.4 to 14 days. 

"It is important to note that the orbital period does not affect the quality of the science that takes place during one of Juno's close flybys of Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. 

"The mission is very flexible that way. The data we collected during our first flyby on August 27th was a revelation, and I fully anticipate a similar result from Juno's October 19th flyby," Bolton noted.

The most efficient time to perform such a burn is when the spacecraft is at the part of its orbit which is closest to the planet. 

The next opportunity for the burn would be during its close flyby of Jupiter on December 11, NASA said.

Mission designers had originally planned to limit the number of science instruments on during Juno's October 19 close flyby of Jupiter. 

Now, with the period reduction maneuver postponed, all of the spacecraft's science instruments will be gathering data during the upcoming flyby.

The Juno spacecraft launched on August 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016.

New York, Oct 14 (IANS) Men with prostate cancer who are treated with testosterone-lowering drugs are twice as likely to develop dementia within five years as compared to prostate cancer patients whose testosterone levels are not tampered with, say researchers including one of Indian-origin.

"The risk is real and, depending on the prior dementia history of the patient, we may want to consider alternative treatment," said senior author of the study Nigam Shah, Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Testosterone can promote the growth of prostate tumors, and so clinicians have used androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) to lower testosterone and other androgens in prostate cancer patients since the 1940s.

The team looked at records from Stanford Medicine's clinical-research data warehouse for nearly 10,000 patients with prostate cancer. 

Of the 1,829 who received androgen deprivation therapy, 7.9 percent developed dementia within five years, compared with 3.5 percent of those not treated with androgen deprivation therapy, said the study published in the journal JAMA Oncology.

The researchers, however, cautioned that prostate cancer patients who are receiving ADT should not make changes to their medications without talking to their physicians.

The new retrospective study of patient records took only a few weeks, Shah said. 

But retrospective studies of patient medical records are not meant to replace randomised clinical trials, he added.

New York, Oct 14 (IANS) Offering new hope for an alternative treatment of brain cancer, researchers have found that depriving the deadly tumour cells of cholesterol, which they import from neighbouring healthy cells, kills tumour cells and causes their regression.

"Disrupting cholesterol import by GBM (glioblastoma) cells caused dramatic cancer cell death and shrank tumours significantly, prolonging the survival of the mice," said senior author Paul Mischel, Professor at University of California San Diego School of Medicine in the US.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and most aggressive form of brain cancer, which is extremely difficult to treat. The median survival rate is just over 14 months, with few treated patients living five years or more past diagnosis.

"The strategy worked with every single GBM tumour we looked at and even on other types of tumours that had metastasised to the brain," Mischel noted.

Adult brain cancers are almost universally fatal, in part because of the biochemical composition of the central nervous system (CNS) and the blood-brain barrier, which selectively and protectively limits the passage of molecules from the body into the brain, but which also blocks most existing chemotherapies, contributing to treatment failure.

"Researchers have been thinking about ways to deal with this problem," Mischel said.

In previous research, Mischel and others had noted GBM cells cannot synthesise cholesterol, which is vital to cell structure and function, particularly in the brain. 

Instead, GBM cells derive what they need from brain cells called astrocytes, which produce cholesterol in abundance.

The researchers found that the experimental metabolic disease drug candidate named LXR-623 can help disrupt cholesterol import by GBM cells in mice.

The study published online in the journal Cancer Cell found no effect of the treatment upon healthy neurons and other brain cells, but GBM cells were deprived of vital cholesterol, resulting in cell death and tumour regression.

Mischel suggested the GBM strategy could be implemented in clinical trials using drug-candidates under development or in early trials.

​Washington, Oct 14 (IANS) There are at least 10 times more galaxies in the observable universe than previously thought, said astronomers.

One of the most fundamental questions in astronomy is that of just how many galaxies the universe contains, and astronomers earlier estimated that the observable universe contained about 200 billion galaxies.

The new research - to be published in The Astrophysical Journal -- shows that this estimate is at least 10 times too low.

The researchers led by Christopher Conselice of University of Nottingham in Britain reached this conclusion using deep-space images from NASA's Hubble space telescope and the already published data from other teams. 

They converted the images into 3-D, in order to make accurate measurements of the number of galaxies at different epochs in the universe's history. 

In addition, they used new mathematical models, which allowed them to infer the existence of galaxies that the current generation of telescopes cannot observe. 

This led to the surprising conclusion that in order for the numbers of galaxies we now see and their masses to add up, there must be a further 90 per cent of galaxies in the observable universe that are too faint and too far away to be seen with present-day telescopes. 

These myriad small faint galaxies from the early universe merged over time into the larger galaxies we can now observe.

"It boggles the mind that over 90 per cent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied. Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we discover these galaxies with future generations of telescopes? In the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study these ultra-faint galaxies," Conselice said.

"These results are powerful evidence that a significant galaxy evolution has taken place throughout the universe's history, which dramatically reduced the number of galaxies through mergers between them - thus reducing their total number," Conselice explained.

The decreasing number of galaxies as time progresses also contributes to the solution for Olbers' paradox (first formulated in the early 1800s by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers): Why is the sky dark at night if the universe contains an infinity of stars? 

The team came to the conclusion that indeed there actually is such an abundance of galaxies that, in principle, every patch in the sky contains part of a galaxy.

However, starlight from the galaxies is invisible to the human eye and most modern telescopes due to other known factors that reduce visible and ultraviolet light in the universe.

Those factors are the reddening of light due to the expansion of space, the universe's dynamic nature, and the absorption of light by intergalactic dust and gas. 

All combined, this keeps the night sky dark to our vision, the researchers said.

Wellington, Oct 14 (IANS) Vitamins A and C could improve the conversion of adult cells into stem cells, opening the way to advances in biomedical treatments for human diseases, according to a New Zealand-led study released on Friday.

The research team discovered that the two vitamins complemented each other in erasing "memory" associated with DNA, an important effect for improving technologies geared towards regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy, Xinhua news agency reported.

Ordinary adult cells, such as those in the skin or blood, could be artificially coerced in a culture dish to resemble embryos only a few days old, said study co-author Tim Hore of the University of Otago.

Since the 2006 discovery that reprogramming was possible, there had been much interest in using induced embryonic stem cells to cure human disease.

"However, hampering these efforts is the reality that adult cells are resistant to changes in their identity, partly because of chemical alterations to their DNA," Hore said in a statement.

These alterations, known as "DNA methylation", were acquired during development and provided a form of cellular memory that helped cells faithfully maintain a specialised function.

Removal of this memory was critical in order to create a developmentally potent stem cell, or to change one kind of adult cell to another.

With collaborators in Britain and Germany, Hore determined that adding vitamins A and C to culture dishes removed DNA methylation from embryonic stem cells.

When applied to cells during the reprogramming process, those with the desired "naive" embryonic characteristics were created in much greater numbers, he said.

"We found that both vitamins affect the same family of enzymes which actively remove DNA methylation. It turns out that vitamin A increases the number of these enzymes within the cell and vitamin C enhances their activity," he said.

In addition to regenerative medicine, the work could have implications for other areas of biomedical importance.

Loss of DNA methylation and cellular memory were a hallmark of certain cancers, so a better understanding of how this process occurred could prove significant.

New York, Oct 14 (IANS) Combining the tools of Big Data analysis and visualisation with the vast amounts of data generated by social media, a group of scientists from Indiana University has started to tackle new areas of health research.

"We try to find the commonality between biological, social, and technological networks, and the internet. Previous studies -- whether in hospitals or by sociologists -- could handle only 20, 30 or 40 patients in a study," said Luis Rocha, principal investigator of the Complex Adaptive Systems and Computational Intelligence (CASCI) group at Indiana University.

"Software is now driving our research, so through social media we can plug into millions and millions of people worldwide with very different types of conditions. This helps us tap into the psychological and social elements of healthcare, making this a major game changer," Rocha said.

The researchers partnered with Pune-based Persistent Systems, a provider of large-scale software-driven healthcare solutions, to develop sophisticated algorithms to analyse the connection between medicine and social behaviour in health issues, particularly how they are discussed across social media. 

For example, in looking at the analysis of depression, millions of posts are first analysed based on defined hashtags with the relevant drug names across social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. 

The algorithms find connections on how drugs interact with each other, and how people are describing them, while also looking for clusters of symptoms at a scale not previously possible. 

Identifying and validating new clusters of drugs, natural products and symptoms can act as an early warning system for adverse drug effects and interactions.

The methodology also allows the study of multiple health issues with distinct social attitudes, such as depression and epilepsy.

Another goal is to allow health specialists to visualize and interact with the data in three dimensions, allowing them to study cohort and individual behaviours in much detail in a virtual reality setting. 

"Tapping into the scale of social networks offers an incredible source of consumer and patient data, opening up a whole new type of software-driven solution," Sid Chatterjee, Chief Technology Officer at Persistent Systems, said.

​New York, Oct 14 (IANS) A team of US researchers has developed a reliable and accurate navigation system that exploits existing environmental signals such as cellular and Wi-Fi rather than the Global Positioning System (GPS).

The technology can be used as a stand-alone alternative to GPS or complement current GPS-based systems to enable highly reliable, consistent and tamper-proof navigation. 

The technology could also be used to develop navigation systems that meet the stringent requirements of fully autonomous vehicles, such as driverless cars and unmanned drones, said the team from University of California, Riverside. 

"Our goal is to get autonomous vehicles operate with no human-in-the loop for prolonged periods of time, performing missions such as search, rescue, surveillance, mapping, farming, firefighting, package delivery and transportation," said Zak Kassas, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Most navigation systems in cars and portable electronics use the space-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). 

For precision technologies, such as aerospace and missiles, navigation systems typically combine GPS with a high-quality on-board Inertial Navigation System (INS).

Despite advances in this technology, current GPS/INS systems will not meet the demands of future autonomous vehicles for several reasons. 

GPS signals alone are extremely weak and unusable in certain environments like deep canyons.

"Civilian GPS signals are unencrypted, unauthenticated, and specified in publicly available documents, making them hackable," the researchers noted.

Instead of adding more internal sensors, Kassas and his team have been developing autonomous vehicles that could tap into the hundreds of signals around us at any point in time, like cellular, radio, television, Wi-Fi and other satellite signals.

The system can be used to supplement INS data in the event that GPS fails. 

The team presented its research at the 2016 Institute of Navigation Global Navigation Satellite System Conference (ION GNSS+), in Portland, Oregon recently.