Knowledge Update

​London, April 24 (IANS) A consortium of British companies on Monday unveiled a plan to test driverless cars on UK roads and motorways in 2019, the media reported.

The Driven consortium led by Oxbotica, which makes software for driverless vehicles, also plans to try out a fleet of autonomous vehicles between London and Oxford, the BBC reported.

The cars will communicate with one another about any hazards and should operate with almost full autonomy -- but will have a human on board as well.

Previous tests of driverless vehicles in the UK have mainly taken place at slow speeds and not on public roads.

"We're moving from the singleton autonomous vehicle to fleets of autonomous vehicles -- and what's interesting is what data the vehicles share with one another, when, and why," the BBC quoted founder Paul Newman, a professor from Oxford University, as saying. 

The project is backed by a government grant of 8.6 million pounds ($11 million) and involves an insurance company which will assess the risks involved at each stage of the journey.

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson breaks US spaceflight record

Beijing, April 23 (IANS) A set of bamboo slips dating back more than 2,300 years were officially recognised on Sunday by the Guinness World Records as the world's earliest decimal calculation tool.

"The significance is that it's decimal, not duodecimal as seen in other countries. Decimal did not appear in Europe until the 15th century," Xinhua news agency quoted head of the Research and Conservation Centre for Excavated Texts of Beijing-based Tsinghua University Li Xueqin as saying.

The 21 slips, crafted around 305 BC during the Warring States period, are each 43.5 centimetres long and 1.2 centimetres wide.

When arranged together as a multiplication table, the slips can perform multiplication and division of any two whole numbers under 100 and numbers containing the fraction 0.5.

The slips have inscribed numbers and holes, where threads used to go. A user would pull the threads corresponding to numbers needed to be calculated in order to see the result.

The owner of the slips remains unknown, according to Li. "Our guess is that the tool might be used in trade, or measurement of land in the kingdom of Chu."

In July 2008, Tsinghua acquired a rare collection of 2,500 bamboo slip items from the late Warring States period, which had been smuggled out of China, including the multiplication table.

​New York, April 23 (IANS) Researchers have developed thin carbon nanotube (CNT) textiles that exhibit high electrical conductivity and a level of toughness about 50 times higher than copper films, currently being used in electronics.

"The structural robustness of thin metal films has significant importance for the reliable operation of smart skin and flexible electronics, including biological and structural health monitoring sensors," said Sameh Tawfick from the College of Engineering at University of Illinois. 

Aligned carbon nanotube sheets are suitable for a wide range of application spanning from the micro to the macro-scales, Tawfick noted in the study published in the journal Advanced Engineering Materials. 

"The study of the fracture energy of CNT textiles led us to design these extremely tough films. Tough nano-architectured conductive textile made by capillary plicing of Ccrbon nanotubes," said lead author Yue Liang. 

Beginning with catalyst deposited on a silicon oxide substrate, vertically aligned carbon nanotubes were synthesised via chemical vapour deposition in the form of parallel lines of 5 micrometre wide, 10 micrometre in length, and 20-60 micrometre in heights.

"Looking for ways to staple the CNTs together, we were inspired by the splicing process developed by ancient Egyptians 5,000 years ago to make linen textiles," Liang added.

The new CNT textile, with simple flexible encapsulation in an elastomer matrix, can be used in smart textiles, smart skins and a variety of flexible electronics. 

Owing to their extremely high toughness, they represent an attractive material, which can replace thin metal films to enhance device reliability.

​London, April 23 (IANS) A team of engineers has developed a process by which it is now possible to 3D print complex forms of glass.

The scientists at the Germany-based Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) mixed nanoparticles of high-purity quartz glass and a small quantity of liquid polymer and allow this mixture to be cured by light at specific points by means of stereolithography.

The material, which has remained liquid, is washed out in a solvent bath, leaving only the desired cured structure. The polymer still mixed in this glass structure is subsequently removed by heating.

"The shape initially resembles that of a pound cake; it is still unstable, and therefore the glass is sintered in a final step, that is, heated so that the glass particles are fused," said Bastian E. Rapp from KIT Institute of Microstructure Technology.

The scientists presented the method in the journal Nature.

"We present a new method, an innovation in materials processing, in which the material of the piece manufactured is high-purity quartz glass with the respective chemical and physical properties," added Rapp.

The glass structures made by the KIT scientists show resolutions in the range of a few micrometers -- one micrometer corresponding to one thousandth of a millimeter.

3D-formed glass can be used in data technology.

​Sydney, April 22 (IANS) Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, most likely evolved from an ancestor in Africa and not from Homo erectus - an ancestor to modern humans - as has been widely believed, a study says.

The researchers believe that their findings, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, should help put to rest a hotly contested debate about the origin of Homo floresiensis.

"We can be 99 per cent sure it's not related to Homo erectus and nearly 100 per cent chance it isn't a malformed Homo sapiens," said Mike Lee of Australia's Flinders University and the South Australian Museum.

Homo floresiensis, dubbed "the hobbits" due to their small stature, were most likely a sister species of Homo habilis -- one of the earliest known species of human found in Africa 1.75 million years ago, the study said.

Data from the study concluded there was no evidence for the popular theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from the much larger Homo erectus, the only other early hominid known to have lived in the region with fossils discovered on the Indonesian mainland of Java.

"The analyses show that on the family tree, Homo floresiensis was likely a sister species of Homo habilis. It means these two shared a common ancestor," said study leader Debbie Argue of the Australian National University.

"It's possible that Homo floresiensis evolved in Africa and migrated, or the common ancestor moved from Africa then evolved into Homo floresiensis somewhere," Argue said.

Homo floresiensis is known to have lived on Flores until as recently as 54,000 years ago.

Where previous research had focused mostly on the skull and lower jaw, this study used 133 data points ranging across the skull, jaws, teeth, arms, legs and shoulders.

None of the data supported the theory that Homo floresiensis evolved from Homo erectus, Argue said.

"We looked at whether Homo floresiensis could be descended from Homo erectus," she said.

"We found that if you try and link them on the family tree, you get a very unsupported result. All the tests say it doesn't fit -- it's just not a viable theory," Argue said.

This was supported by the fact that in many features, such as the structure of the jaw, Homo floresiensis was more primitive than Homo erectus, she added.

​New York, April 22 (IANS) A team of scientists has developed a method to increase the performance of high-power electrical storage devices and, at the same time, decrease their size.

The researchers from Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences describe a mathematical model for designing new materials for energy storage to reduce carbon emissions in the transportation and electricity sectors.

"The potential here is that you could build batteries that last much longer and make them much smaller," said study co-author Daniel Tartakovsky. 

"If you could engineer a material with a far superior storage capacity than what we have today, then you could dramatically improve the performance of batteries," added Tartakovsky.

One of the primary obstacles to transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is the ability to store energy for later use, such as during hours when the sun is not shining in the case of solar power. 

Demand for cheap, efficient storage has increased as more companies turn to renewable energy sources, which offer significant public health benefits.

Tartakovsky hopes the new materials developed through this model will improve supercapacitors, a type of next-generation energy storage that could replace rechargeable batteries in high-tech devices like cellphones and electric vehicles. 

"We developed a model that would allow materials chemists to know what to expect in terms of performance if the grains are arranged in a certain way, without going through these experiments," Tartakovsky said in a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters. 

"This framework also shows that if you arrange your grains like the model suggests, then you will get the maximum performance," Tartakovsky added.

Beijing, April 22 (IANS) China's first spacecraft, the Tianzhou-1, docked successfully with the orbiting Tiangong-2 space lab on Saturday, according to Beijing Aerospace Control Centre.

Tianzhou-1, which was launched on Thursday evening from Wenchang Space Launch Centre in Hainan province, began to approach Tiangong-2 automatically at 10.02 a.m., and made contact with at 12.16 p.m., the People's Daily reported.

The Tianzhou-1 cargo ship and Tiangong-2 space lab will have another two dockings.

The second docking will be conducted from a different direction, which aims to test the ability of the cargo ship to dock with a future space station from different directions.

In the third docking, Tianzhou-1 will use fast-docking technology. 

It normally takes about two days to dock, while fast docking will take only six hours.

Refuelling will also be conducted, a process with 29 steps that takes several days.

Tiangong-2, which went into space on September 15, 2016, is China's first space lab "in the strict sense" and a key step in building a permanent space station by 2022.

Cargo ships play a crucial role maintaining a space station and carrying supplies and fuel into orbit.

Researchers in the US have created a digital map to track the changing racial diversity of every neighbourhood in the country.

The map shows which neighbourhoods have become less homogenous over the last two decades and which have not.

Tomasz Stepinski from University of Cincinnati applied NASA mapmaking techniques to 20 years of data collected by the US Census Bureau to build one of the most detailed racial-diversity maps ever created.

The zoomable map, a paper about which was published in the journal PLOS One, shows at a glance how the racial composition of neighbourhoods changed between 1990 and 2010.

"People don't realise that the United States is a diverse country but at the same time is still very segregated," Stepinski, who created the map in collaboration with his postdoctoral researcher Anna Dmowska, said.

The researchers think that the map will have broad appeal to journalists, policymakers and researchers.

"The maps can tell us much more about racial composition and can be used by everyone," Dmowska, who now works at the Institute of Geoecology and Geoinformation of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, said.

"They don't require expert knowledge to understand the results, so I think maps can be used by a broader community," Dmowska said.

Updating the maps in future census years will be relatively simple, she said.

"Our grids are ready to use for multiyear comparison," Dmowska added.

The maps allow users to create their own smaller study area and then glean data from it.

In some cities, they tell the story of recent immigration in America. For example, the maps demonstrate the influx of Asian immigrants in San Francisco over the last 20 years.

Many of these newcomers are Southeast Asians who were drawn to the area by the Silicon Valley boom, Stepinski said.

And in Cincinnati, too, the census maps track the changing racial composition of the city.

Neighbourhoods that were predominantly White or Black in 1990 are far more diverse now.

But they also show the way that racial segregation has defined some cities.

For example, in the Detroit neighbourhoods popularised by the movie "8 Mile," the map from 1990 clearly shows the segregation of Black and White communities on either side of 8 Mile Road.

​New York, April 22 (IANS)

​New York, April 21 (IANS) New genetic evidence confirms a long-held hypothesis that our earliest mammalian ancestors indeed had powerful night-time vision.

The findings published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that adapting to life in the dark helped the early mammals find food and avoid reptilian predators that hunted by day. 

The research team examined genes involved in night vision in animals throughout the evolutionary tree, looking for places where those genes became enhanced.

"This method is like using the genome as a fossil record, and with it we've shown when genes involved in night vision appear," said lead researcher Liz Hadly, Professor of Biology at Stanford University in the US.

"It's a very powerful way of corroborating a story that has been, up to now, only hypothesized," Hadly said.

Mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor, with the earliest mammal-like animals appearing in the Late Triassic about 200 million years ago. 

Fossil evidence suggests that early mammals had excellent hearing and sense of smell and were likely also warm-blooded. 

All of these features are common in their descendants, the living mammals, most of whom are nocturnal. 

Therefore, experts have hypothesised that early mammals were also nocturnal. 

This study offers direct, genetic evidence for that hypothesis.

To trace the evolution of nocturnality, the researchers studied genes that the researchers had previously found associated with night vision in certain birds, such as owls. 

The team members examined those night-vision genes in many mammals and reptiles, including snakes, alligators, mice, platypuses and humans.

Using what they know about how those animals are related, they figured out when in their evolutionary histories, if ever, the function of these genes was enhanced.

From this, they deduced that the earliest common ancestor did not have good night vision and was instead active during the day. 

However, soon after the split, mammals began enhancing their night vision genes, allowing them to begin to roam at night, thus avoiding the reptiles that hunted during the day, the study said.

The researchers said thatr in the millions of years that have elapsed since mammals and reptiles diverged, natural selection and evolution haven't stopped. 

Not all mammals are still nocturnal. Some groups of mammals have reoccupied the day, adapting in various ways to daylight activity. 

These animals include cheetahs, camels, elephants, and, of course, humans.