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Beijing, June 26 (IANS) China will send its second orbiting space lab Tiangong-2 into space in mid September, said a senior official with the country's manned space programme.
The Shenzhou-11 manned spacecraft will be launched in mid September and its re-entry module will return in November, said Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, at a press conference on Saturday after the successful launch of the Long March-7, a new generation carrier rocket, at Wenchang, Hainan province.
As part of the country's space lab programme, the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft will carry two astronauts on board and dock with Tiangong-2.
The two astronauts have been chosen and currently under intense training, Wu said.
The Tiangong-2 and Shenzhou-11 will be carried by Long March-2F carrier rocket, she said.
In April 2017, the country's first cargo spaceship, Tianzhou-1, will be launched and carried by the Long March-7, Wu said.
"With the improvement of the rocket's technological performance, the Long March-7 will step by step replace the current carrier rockets and become the main carrier for space launches," she added.
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Kuala Lumpur, June 26 (IANS) Dried sewage sludge could be recycled by adding it to cement to make concrete, researchers in Malaysia have discovered.
Disposing sludge left over from treating sewage water is a major challenge for wastewater plants.
Meanwhile, the construction sector seeks economic and ecological cement replacement materials in order to meet an increasing demand for concrete.
Researchers from Universiti Teknologi MARA investigated the potential to replace various quantities of cement with processed sewage sludge to create a concrete mixture.
The researchers first produced domestic waste sludge powder (DWSP). They dried and burnt wet sludge cake to remove moisture, and then ground and sieved the dried sludge cake to make the sludge powder.
Using varying proportions of the powder, ranging from three-fifteen per cent, the researchers mixed the material with cement to produce normal strength and two higher strength grades of concrete.
They then compared the domestic waste sludge powder concrete mixture of each proportion with normal concrete in terms of their compressive strength, water absorption, water permeability and permeability to salt.
Overall, the researchers found that while domestic waste sludge powder has a potential role in the manufacture of concrete, the performance of the concrete blends tends to decline with increasing concentrations of the powder.
The findings were published in the Pertanika Journal of Science and Technology.
"Overall, there is potential for using DWSP as a partial cement replacement," the researchers said.
"However, more detailed research should be conducted to yield better quality powder," they added.
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London, June 27 (IANS) Space-based detector can spot at least two gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time -- each year caused by collisions between supermassive black holes, revealing the initial mass of the seeds from which the first black holes grew 13 billion years ago.
A space-based instrument called the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) detector is set to be launched in 2034.
As eLISA will be in space - and will be at least 250,000 times larger than detectors on Earth - it should be able to detect the much lower frequency gravitational waves caused by collisions between supermassive black holes that are up to a million times the mass of our sun.
Scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology ran the huge cosmological simulations that can be used to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by collisions between the monster black holes might be detected.
The study combined simulations from the EAGLE project - which aims to create a realistic simulation of the known Universe inside a computer - with a model to calculate gravitational wave signals.
“Understanding more about gravitational waves means that we can study the universe in an entirely different way. These waves are caused by massive collisions between objects with a mass far greater than our Sun," said lead author Jaime Salcido, PhD student in Durham University.
"By combining the detection of gravitational waves with simulations we could ultimately work out when and how the first seeds of supermassive black holes formed,” Salcido added.
In February, the international LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced that they had detected gravitational waves for the first time using ground-based instruments and in June reported a second detection.
Current theories suggest that the seeds of these black holes were the result of either the growth and collapse of the first generation of stars in the Universe; collisions between stars in dense stellar clusters; or the direct collapse of extremely massive stars in the early Universe.
As each of these theories predicts different initial masses for the seeds of supermassive black hole seeds, the collisions would produce different gravitational wave signals.
This means that the potential detections by eLISA could help pinpoint the mechanism that helped create supermassive black holes and when in the history of the Universe they formed.
“Black holes are fundamental to galaxy formation and are thought to sit at the centre of most galaxies, including our very own Milky Way,” noted co-author professor Richard Bower.
“Our research has shown how space-based detectors will provide new insights into the nature of supermassive black holes,” he added.
Gravitational waves were first predicted 100 years ago by Albert Einstein as part of his Theory of General Relativity.
The research was set to be presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's national astronomy meeting in Nottingham on Monday.
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Washington, June 24 (IANS) Researchers have developed a new technology that aims to make the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) even more sensitive to gravitational waves -- faint ripples in space-time.
The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Australian National University report on improvements to what is called a squeezed vacuum source.
Although not part of the original Advanced LIGO design, injecting the new squeezed vacuum source into the LIGO detector could help double its sensitivity.
This will allow detection of gravitational waves that are far weaker or that originate from farther away than is possible now.
“There are many processes in the universe that are inherently dark; they don't give off light of any colour,” said Nergis Mavalvala from MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
"Since many of those processes involve gravity, we want to observe the universe using gravity as a messenger,” Mavalvala said in a paper that appeared in the Optica.
Scientists at Advanced LIGO announced the first-ever observation of gravitational waves earlier this year -- a century after Albert Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity.
Studying gravitational waves can reveal important information about cataclysmic astrophysical events involving black holes and neutron stars.
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and MIT conceived, built, and operate identical Advanced LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.
Each observatory uses a 2.5-mile-long optical device known as an interferometer to detect gravitational waves coming from distant events, such as the collision of two black holes detected last year.
The researchers are planning to add their new squeezed vacuum source to Advanced LIGO in the next year or so.
Once implemented, it will improve the sensitivity of the gravitational detectors, particularly at the higher frequencies important for understanding the composition of neutron stars.
These extremely dense stars contain the mass of the sun, which has a radius of 700,000 km, within just a 10-km diameter.
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New York, June 24 (IANS) A team of researchers has developed the first scalable method to identify different subtypes of neurons in the human brain.
The research lays the groundwork for "mapping" the gene activity in the human brain and could help provide a better understanding of brain functions and disorders, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and depression.
By isolating and analysing individual human brain cells, researchers identified 16 neuronal subtypes in the cerebral cortex -- the brain's outer layer of neural tissue responsible for cognitive functions including memory, attention and decision making.
"We are providing a unified framework to look at and compare individual neurons, which can help us find out how many unique types of neurons exist," said Kun Zhang, bioengineering professor at University of California-San Diego.
Researchers can use these different neuronal subtypes to build what Zhang calls a "reference map" of the human brain -- a foundation to understand the differences between a healthy brain and a diseased brain.
"In the future, patients with brain disorders or abnormalities could be diagnosed and treated based on how they differ from the reference map. This is analogous to what's being done with the reference human genome map," Zhang noted.
The team, led by University of California-San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and US-based life science research company Illumina, published their findings in the journal Science.
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New York, June 25 (IANS) The US space agency is planning to drive the Curiosity Rover towards water sites on the Martian surface to further investigate the long, seasonally changing dark streaks briny water in the hope of finding evidence of life.
"It is not as simple as driving a rover to a potential site and taking a scoop of soil," said Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science.
"Not only are these on steep slopes, we need to ensure that planetary protection concerns are met. In other words, how can we search for evidence of life without contaminating the sites with bugs from Earth?," he added in a NASA statement.
After approval of mission extension, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover would continue to climb to higher and younger strata on Mount Sharp -- mountain in Gale crater -- to investigate how the ancient, water-rich environments found till now persisted as the red planet dried out.
A stroll on these destinations would help the one-tonne rover closer to locations where dark streaks are present on slopes and allow it to capture images of the potential water sites from miles away and see if any are the seasonally changing type.
NASA's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has observed many features of interest. They appear as dark lines that appear to ebb and flow over time.
"Planetary scientists think these gullies or recurring slope lineae (RSLs) may appear seasonally as a form of briny water at or near the surface of the Red Planet under warmer conditions," NASA said.
NASA is also worried about how close could the rover safely get to an RSL?
"In terms of coming much closer, we need to understand well in advance the potential for Earth organisms to come off the rover and that will tell us how far away the rover should stay," said Catharine Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer.
The darkish streaks are considered "special regions" on Mars, where extra precautions must be taken to prevent contamination because of the suspected presence of liquid water, considered a prerequisite for life.
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London, June 25 (IANS) Some individuals appear to be genetically programmed to help others whilst living side-by-side with others who tend to exploit their generosity, say researchers who produced an innovative model of social evolution to understand the concept of genetic polymorphism.
Behaviours of humans are very flexible and they tend to base their perception on what they see after processing information about the world.
"However, some species rely on inherited instructions on what to do - individuals behave differently according to which specific genetic variants they are born with," said one of the researchers Sasha Dall, Senior Lecturer at University of Exeter in Britain.
The findings showed that people are likely to be influenced by conditioning or the surrounding environment rather than what they sense or experience.
The behaviour of individuals can often evolve to be determined by a set of inherited genetic tendencies that accurately predict social relationships, including their likely relatedness to other members of their community, and their surroundings rather than in direct response to what they sense or experience.
The study, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, aims to explore why some individuals evolve to be genetically programmed to be nice, while others stay nasty.
The theory of kin selection explains the evolution of helping when relatives interact. It can be used when individuals in a social group have different sexes, ages or phenotypic qualities, but the theory has not been worked out for situations where there is genetic polymorphism in helping, the researchers said.
"Social evolution theory hasn't previously addressed genetic polymorphism. We have developed a model that allows us to explore this within a general framework alongside other behavioural influences,” added lead author Olof Leimar, Professor at Stockholm University.
Thus, for the study, the team used colony-living microbes as inspiration to explore why some individuals are by nature generous and others less so.
Using a mathematical model, they examined the social behaviour in a range of different species to understand the evolution of sociality.
“What we have been able to show is how you can get a situation where you end up with distinct levels of genetically determined niceness coexisting within populations," Dall noted.
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London, June 25 (IANS) Researchers have found that high-tech scans can spare patients suffering from cancer of the lymphatic system of the serious side effects of chemotherapy as well as predict the outcome of treatment.
In the study, using positron emission tomography (PET) -- a type of imaging test that uses a tiny amount of radioactive glucose to look for disease in the body -- the doctors scanned more than 1,200 patients with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma after they had been given two cycles of standard chemotherapy.
Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer that starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes.
“Personalising treatment based on how well it works is a major development for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma and sets a new standard of care,” said Peter Johnson, Professor at University of Southampton in Britain.
The patients were divided into two groups - the first group that continued chemotherapy with bleomycin -- an important drug used to treat Hodgkin lymphoma -- and the second group had chemotherapy without the drug.
Bleomycin comes with potential risks of severely affecting the lungs leading to serious breathing problems.
The results showed that patients who stopped having bleomycin had the same survival rates as those who continued it. But, importantly, they were spared of the side effects.
"The good news is that the majority of people diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma can be cured - in this trial more than 95 per cent of patients are alive after three years,” Johnson added.
Three year progression-free survival was seen in patients who underwent chemotherapy without bleomycin was 84.4 per cent.
Further, 85.7 per cent patients who underwent chemotherapy with bleomycin had three-year progression-free survival
For patients with a good outlook stopping bleomycin did not have any negative effects.
However, patients who had a more resistant form of the disease were given more intense chemotherapy treatment, the study said.
“Getting to know the patients that have a more difficult form of the disease means we can select those who need stronger chemotherapy, while sparing everyone else the severe side effects such as infertility,” Johnson said in the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“This approach, along with a reduction in the need for radiotherapy, should substantially reduce damage to healthy tissues and the risk of second cancers caused by treatments,” he concluded.
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Panama City, June 26 (IANS) The Panama Canal is getting ready for expansion that will take traffic through the inter-oceanic passage to a new level, officials said.
With the expansion of the canal's width and depth, the volume of traffic will double, as Panamax-class vessels will now be able to pass through, carrying up to 14,000 cargo containers, Xinhua news agency reported.
Jorge Luis Quijano, administrator of the Panama Canal, said at a press conference on Saturday that this expansion, which will be inaugurated on Sunday, will open up new opportunities in sectors such as logistics and ship repairs.
The main contractor for the expansion was the consortium Grupo Unidos por el Canal.
Espino de Marotta said the project had gone very smoothly, considering the complexity of the works involved. "The expansion of the Panama Canal is one of those projects that happens once every 100 years," he said.
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New York, June 24 (IANS) An international team of researchers has discovered a simple, accurate new blood test that can predict the chances of Type 2 diabetes in women with gestational diabetes.
Gestational diabetes occurs in three to 13 per cent of all pregnant women and increases a woman's risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 20 to 50 per cent within five years after pregnancy, the study said.
Using the novel technique called targeted metabolomics, the scientists tested the fasting blood samples of 1,035 women diagnosed with gestational diabetes, within two months after delivery.
Typically, diabetes is diagnosed by measuring blood sugar levels in the form of glucose, an important fuel used by cells in the body.
However, the metabolomics test identified several other metabolites that indicate early changes that signify future diabetes risk long before changes in glucose levels occur.
The method showed 83 per cent accuracy in predicting women who would develop Type 2 diabetes.
Further, the technique predicted the development of Type 2 diabetes significantly better than the conventional methods of a fasting blood test followed by the time-consuming and inconvenient oral glucose tolerance test.
Once diabetes has developed, it's very difficult to reverse, thus "early prevention is the key to minimising the devastating effects of diabetes on health outcomes," said Erica Gunderson, Research Scientist with the Kaiser Permanente - a health care company, in the US.
"By identifying women soon after delivery, we can focus our resources on those at greatest risk who may benefit most from concerted early prevention efforts," Gunderson added.
The new method may also be able to predict individuals who may develop Type 2 diabetes in the general population, the authors noted.
The findings, published in the journal Diabetes, would allow health care providers to identify women at greatest risk and help motivate women to make early lifestyle changes and follow other strategies that could prevent them from developing the disease later in life.