Knowledge Update

Bangkok, June 3 (IANS) The discovery of more than 40 dead tiger cubs in Thailand's Tiger Temple represents only a "tiny proportion" of the enormous extent of an illegal trade in wildlife that is "pushing species to the brink of extinction", the UNEP-UNODC said on Friday.

"While circumstances of their death remain unclear, sadly, those tiger cubs represent only a tiny proportion of the enormous extent of an illegal trade in wildlife that is pushing species to the brink of extinction. Indeed, only around 4,000 tigers are left in the wild," United Nations Environment Programme-United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a statement.

"Until the illegal trade in wildlife is stopped, we are only likely to see more of these types of situations," the statement added.

The theme for World Environment Day on June 5 this year is the illegal trade in wildlife to raise awareness of this severe problem. Tigers are one of the key species in the campaign.

The illegal trade in wildlife, estimated to profit criminals to the tune of billions of dollars annually worldwide, comprises everything from the lucrative trade in Tiger parts in East Asia to ivory from African elephants, the organisations said.

"It undermines our environment, economies, communities and security."

"The commendable action by Thailanda's authorities, coordinated by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, highlights the need for constant vigilance by wildlife law enforcement authorities to the threat posed by traffickers."

"Given the extent of the illegal wildlife market in Asia it is important for all countries to unite and eradicate these illegal practices," the statement said.

Officials had recovered 40 dead tiger cubs, just one to two days old, from a freezer at Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua temple, known as the "Tiger Temple", on Wednesday, EFE news reported.

The cubs were not recorded in the register for wild animals the temple has to maintain by law and that means the protection department will press charges for illegal possession, besides other possible offences.​

​New York, June 3 (IANS) By fabricating tiny lasers directly on silicon, an international group of scientists has found a way that could make microprocessors run faster without consuming more power.

The group of scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University grew tiny high-performance lasers directly on silicon wafers.

Reported in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the group said integrating subwavelength cavities -- the essential building blocks of tiny lasers -- onto silicon enabled them to create and demonstrate high-density on-chip light-emitting elements.

"Putting lasers on microprocessors boosts their capabilities and allows them to run at much lower powers, which is a big step toward photonics and electronics integration on the silicon platform," said professor Kei May Lau from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The scientists used "tiny whispering gallery mode lasers -- only 1 micron in diameter -- that are 1,000 times shorter in length and 1 million times smaller in area than those currently used."

In terms of applications, the group's tiny lasers on silicon are ideally suited for high-speed data communications.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) Some periodic comets -- objects that orbit the Sun in 200 years or less -- may regularly split in two and then reunite down the road, a new study has found.

According to a team from Purdue University and University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder), this may be a repeating process fundamental to comet evolution.

Led by Purdue postdoctoral fellow Masatoshi Hirabayashi and CU-Boulder Professor Daniel Scheeres, the team studied a rubber duck-shaped comet known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). 

Images of 67P show two cracks on the comet's neck that connects its two larger lobes.

In order to reconstruct the past life of 67P, the team used numerical models in which the spin rate was cranked up from its roughly one rotation every 12 hours today to one rotation every seven to nine hours.

The models showed the faster spin would lead to more stress and the formation of two similar cracks on the neck of 67P in the same location.

"Our spin analysis predicted exactly where these cracks would form," Scheeres said, adding that "we now have a new understanding of how some comets may evolve over time".

The models run by the team showed that if 67P's spin is increased to less than seven hours per rotation, the head will pop off.

"The head and body aren't going to be able to escape from each other," he said. 

"They will begin orbiting each other, and in weeks, days or even hours they will come together again during a slow collision, creating a new comet nucleus configuration," Scheeres noted.

This pattern could go on for the life of the comet, said Scheeres in a paper published in the journal Nature.​

Washington, June 3 (IANS) A wearable artificial kidney could be developed as a viable, new dialysis technology that allows patients to be mobile and untethered during treatment, results of a US Food and Drug Administration-authorised clinical trial suggest.

The technology may become an alternative to conventional hemodialysis for people with end-stage kidney disease. 

Present-day treatment generally requires three sessions a week on a stationary machine that restricts patients' ability to walk around while it is attached and running.

In contrast, a wearable device would allow patients to be mobile and untethered. It could also provide additional treatment benefits from longer sessions or more frequent days of dialysis.

The trial of a prototype for such a device was performed with seven patients at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.

Those leading the trial included the inventor of the device, Wearable Artificial Kidney prototype, Victor Gura of Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The findings were reported in the journal JCI Insights.

The trial was conducted to determine the safety and efficacy of the device - its ability to take over some functions of failed kidneys. 

The researchers also wanted to ask the participants about their impressions of the experimental treatment, and to compare those with standard dialysis treatment.

The patients were treated with the device for up to 24 hours.

In the patients studied, the device was shown to effectively clear the blood of waste products, like urea, creatinine and and phosphorus, while also removing excess water and salt. These are normally filtered out and removed by working kidneys.

While the usual diet for patients on standard dialysis is highly limited, their blood fluid volume of those on the wearable device remained balanced during the test, even without any diet restrictions.

Regulating the volume and composition of body fluids is another job of normal kidneys.

During the trial, the participants tolerated the treatment well and did not have any serious, adverse effects. 

However, this trial of the device was stopped after the seventh patient because of technical problems with the device. These included the excessive formation of carbon dioxide gas bubbles in the dialysis solution, and intermittent variations in solution and blood flow.

Nevertheless, the findings provide proof of concept that a wearable devise along these lines could be developed as a viable, novel dialysis technology, the researchers said​

​London, June 2 (IANS) In a first, an international team of scientists has detected a faint signal emitted by hydrogen gas in a galaxy more than five billion light years away -- almost double the previous record.

Using the Very Large Array radio telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US, the team observed radio emission from hydrogen in a distant galaxy and found that it would have contained billions of young, massive stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas.

As the most abundant element in the universe and the raw fuel for creating stars, hydrogen is used by radio astronomers to detect and understand the makeup of other galaxies.

However, until now, radio telescopes have only been able to detect the emission signature of hydrogen from relatively nearby galaxies.

"Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we've been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth," said lead author, Dr Ximena Fernández from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

"These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after five billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they've fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time,” he added.

The success for the team comes after the first 178 hours of observing time with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope for a new survey of the sky called the 'COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey' or CHILES.

Once completed, the CHILES survey will have collected data from more than 1,000 hours of observing time.

In a new approach, members of the team including Dr Attila Popping from International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the ARC Centre of All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) in Australia are working with Amazon Web Services to process and move the large volumes of data via the “cloud”.

“For this project, we took tens of terabytes of data from the Very Large Array and then processed it using Amazon's cloud-based servers to create an enormous image cube, ready for our team to analyse and explore," Dr Popping added.

Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of the Data Intensive Astronomy team at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the limiting factor for radio astronomers used to be the size of the telescope and the hardware behind it.

"It's fast becoming more about the data and how you move, store and analyse vast volumes of information," he said in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) Asthma patients may soon do away with their inhalers as researchers, including one of Indian origin, have developed an integrated, wearable system that monitors a user's environment, heart rate and other physical attributes with the goal of predicting and preventing asthma attacks.

"We have tested the system in the benchtop and on a limited number of human subjects for proof of concept demonstration and have confirmed that all of the sensors work, and that the system accurately compiles the data," said study co-author Veena Misra, professor at North Carolina State University in the US.

The system, called the Health and Environmental Tracker (HET), incorporates a host of novel sensing devices, which are incorporated into a wristband and a patch that adheres to the chest.

The patch includes sensors that track a patient's movement, heart rate, respiratory rate, the amount of oxygen in the blood, skin impedance and wheezing in the lungs.

The wristband focuses largely on environmental factors, monitoring volatile organic compounds and ozone in the air, as well as ambient humidity and temperature. 

The wristband also includes additional sensors to monitor motion, heart rate and the amount of oxygen in the blood.

The system also has one nonwearable component: a spirometer, which patients breathe into several times a day to measure lung function.

Data from all of these sensors is transmitted wirelessly to a computer, where custom software collects and records the data.

"This summer, we plan to begin testing HET in a controlled environment with subjects suffering from asthma and a control group, in order to identify which environmental and physiological variables are effective at predicting asthma attacks," Misra noted.

Asthma patients currently rely on inhalers to deal with their symptoms, which can include often-debilitating asthma attacks.

"Our goal was to design a wearable system that could track the wellness of the subjects and in particular provide the infrastructure to predict asthma attacks, so that the users could take steps to prevent them by changing their activities or environment," principal investigator Alper Bozkurt, Assistant Professor at NC State, noted. 

A paper describing the work was published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

"Preventing an attack could be as simple as going indoors or taking a break from an exercise routine," lead author James Dieffenderfer, PhD student in the joint biomedical engineering programme at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explained.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) If you like to observe whether the person sitting next to you is rhythmically drumming his fingers because he's anxious or if someone is preoccupied because she's gazing off into the distance, make sure to use this talent at the workplace.

According to an interesting study, such “observing” people are high in mind-reading motivation (MRM) which can lead to many social benefits, including better teamwork.

MRM is a newly coined term for the practice of observing and interpreting bits of social information. It is the tendency to engage with the mental states and perspectives of others.

“We're not talking about the psychic phenomenon or anything like that but simply using cues from other people's behaviour, their non-verbal signals, to try to figure out what they're thinking," said Melanie Green, associate professor in University at Buffalo.

Individuals high in MRM enjoy speculating on others' thoughts based on the potentially hundreds of social cues they might receive.

Those low in MRM dislike or have no interest in doing so.

MRM is about the motivation to engage with other minds, and is distinct from the ability to accurately interpret others' cues.

“We didn't measure ability directly in our study of teamwork but the research suggests that just the motivation to understand others, and presumably the behaviours that go along with that motivation, appear to lead to benefits," Green added.

In addition to facilitating cooperation and better teamwork, people high in MRM also consider people in great detail and have a nuanced understanding of those around them.

Those high in MRM seem to develop richer psychological portraits of those around them.

“High MRM people are more drawn to and pay more attention to messages with an identifiable source - a spokesperson or an ad focusing on company values - that is, someone whose perspective they can try to understand,” Green noted.

On the other hand, low MRM people seem to pay more attention to ads that are more impersonal, like those that just discuss the product - a message that does not appear to come from a particular person or group.

Green and her colleagues think there might be a difference in how much people enjoy or were motivated to speculate on people's thoughts in situations where there was no situational need or institutional pressure.
It could be as simple as a bus passenger considering the thoughts of those across the aisle.

"This hadn't been previously considered from the standpoint of individual differences," Green stated in a paper published in the journal Motivation and Emotion.

The concept of MRM has been developed by Green and her coauthors Jordan M. Carpenter at the University of Pennsylvania and Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.​

​New York, June 1 (IANS) Researchers from Duke University have discovered a potential new class of small-molecule drugs that simultaneously block key targets in the treatment of pain.

The findings could lead to the development of a new drug to treat conditions including skin irritation and itching, headaches, jaw pain, and abdominal pain stemming from the pancreas and colon.

"We are very pleased with what is a first chapter in a highly promising story," said Wolfgang Liedtke, Professor at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham.

"We hope to be able to develop these compounds for clinical use in humans or animals," Liedtke noted.

In the new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers initially aimed to develop more effective blockers of TRPV4, a molecule their previous research had shown transmits skin irritation elicited by sunburn, and painful sensations coming from the head and face. 

The researchers used a prototype TRPV4 blocker in a 2009 study and then set out to develop more potent versions.

Compared to the prototype, one of the new candidate drugs, called "16-8," worked 10 times more effectively in cells with active TRPV4 that are key for the development of osteoarthritis.

It also worked well in another cell type involved in nerve cell injury, stroke and epilepsy.

But to their surprise, when assessing the specificity of 16-8, the scientists discovered that it also blocked TRPA1, which is a promising target in pain and itch research.

"As a physician, I soon realised the enormous potential that these compounds might have, given how beneficial dual-target molecules can be in clinical medicine," Liedtke said.

In this study, the drug 16-8 also quelled pain in living animals, including abdominal aches in mice with pancreas inflammation. 

Liedtke sees potential for the 16-8 drug to treat osteoarthritis and other types of joint pain as well as head, face and jaw pain. 

In general, it might also treat aches radiating from internal organs or resulting from nerve cell injury, the study said.​