Knowledge Update

London, May 28 (IANS) Is your toddler struggling to learn a language? If so, using words that have repetitive syllables rather than mixed sounds may help him or her to learn language faster, a study suggests.

The findings showed that children are better at grasping the names of objects with repeated syllables, over words with non-identical syllables.

"This is the first evidence to show that infants have a repetition bias in learning new words,” said lead researcher Mitsuhiko Ota from University of Edinburgh in Britain. 

This may be the reason why words or phrases, such as 'train' and 'good night', have given rise to versions with repeated syllables, such as choo-choo and night-night

Such words are easier for infants to learn, and may provide them with a starter point for vocabulary learning.

“The study also shows that there may be a good reason why in so many cultures across the world, existing adult words and expressions are replaced by words with repeated syllables in baby-talk vocabulary. Some examples could be tum-tum, mama, dada, din-din and wee-wee," Ota added.

For the study, published in the journal Language Learning and Development, the team assessed language learning behaviour among 18-month-olds in a series of visual and attention tests using pictures on a computer screen of two unfamiliar objects.

The two objects were named with made-up words, which were communicated to the infants by a recorded voice - one with two identical syllables, for example neenee, and the other without repeated syllables, such as bolay.

The infants were then tested for their recognition of each made-up word. 

Recordings of their eye movements showed they looked more reliably at the object labelled with repeated syllables, than the other object.​

​New York, May 26 (IANS) Final preparations were underway on Thursday for the expansion of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) -- an expandable habitat for astronauts crucial for future deep space exploration -- which was installed at the International Space Station (ISS) in April.

NASA astronaut Jeff Williams performed leak checks and installed hardware to monitor and support BEAM expansion set to begin at 6.30 p.m. (India time). The expansion could potentially start earlier, NASA said in a statement.

Meanwhile, a new trio of ISS crew members is ready in Russia for final qualification exams for a mission set for launch on June 24. 

Cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin will command the new Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi. 

NASA Television will broadcast the expansion activities live. Crew entry into BEAM, which has an expanded habitable volume of 565 cubic feet (16 cubic meters), is planned for June 2.

Recently, carrying over 3,700 pounds of NASA cargo, science and technology demonstration samples from the ISS, a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

The Dragon spacecraft was taken by ship to Long Beach where some cargo was removed and returned to NASA for processing.

On April 17, engineers at NASA Johnson Space Centre in Houston used the ISS's high-tech robotic arm to pluck BEAM from the back of the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship that reached the space station on April 11 and added it onto the orbiting laboratory complex.

At the time of installation, the space station was moving over the Southern Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 350 km from the Earth's surface. It will remain attached to the station for the two-year test period, US space agency NASA had written in a blog.

NASA is investigating concepts for habitats that can keep astronauts healthy during space exploration and BEAM will be the first test of such a module attached to the space station. 

It will allow investigators to gauge how well it performs overall and how it protects against solar radiation, space debris and the temperature extremes of space.

Expandable habitats require less payload volume on the rocket than traditional rigid structures and expand after being deployed in space to provide additional room for astronauts to live and work inside.

After the testing period is completed, BEAM will be released from the space station to eventually burn up harmlessly in the earth's atmosphere.

The 1,400 kg BEAM is a 17.8 million dollar project to test the use of an inflatable space habitat in micro-gravity. 

A total of six astronauts are already on-board the ISS along with another US commercial cargo ship called Cygnus that has been attached to the station since March 26. ​

​New York, May 26 (IANS) Researchers have shed new light on the ageing process in sea urchins -- remarkable organisms with the ability to quickly re-grow damaged organs and live to extraordinary old ages without showing any signs of poor health.

James A. Coffman from the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and Andrea G. Bodnar from the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies found that regenerative capacity in three species of sea urchins they studied was not affected by age.

"We wanted to find out why the species with short and intermediate life expectancies aged and the long-lived species didn't," said Coffman. 

"But what we found is that ageing is not inevitable: sea urchins don't appear to age even when they are short-lived. Because these findings were unexpected in light of the prevailing theories about the evolution of ageing, we may have to rethink theories on why ageing occurs," he explained.

The prevailing theory of the evolution of ageing holds that it is a side effect of genes that promote growth and development of organisms that have a low likelihood of continued survival in the wild once they have reproduced. 

Many organisms with a low expectation of survival in the wild experience rapid decline once they have reached reproductive maturity.

But the findings, published in the journal Aging Cell, contradict the prevailing theory. 

The researchers studied the red sea urchin Mesocentrotus franciscanus, which has a life expectancy of more than 100 years; the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a life expectancy of more than 50 years; and the variegated sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus, with a life expectancy of only four years.

The scientists found that although the variegated sea urchin, L. variegatus, has a much lower life expectancy in the wild than the other two species they studied, it displayed no evidence of a decline in regenerative capacity with age, which suggests that senescence (to grow old) may not be tied to a short life expectancy in the wild.​

​New York, May 27 (IANS) The discovery of a giant planet orbiting a very young star some 450 million light years from the Earth has forced astronomers to rethink their long-held view that larger planets take longer to form.

"CI Tau b" is at least eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits a two million-year-old star in the constellation Taurus. 

"For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form," said lead author Christopher Johns-Krull from Rice University in Texas. 

"That's been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation," he added.

The study, involving a dozen researchers from Rice, Lowell Observatory, University of Texas at Austin, NASA and Northern Arizona University, made the peer-reviewed study available online this week.

"CI Tau b" orbits the star CI Tau once every nine days. 

The planet was found with the radial velocity method -- a planet-hunting technique that relies upon slight variations in the velocity of a star to determine the gravitational pull exerted by nearby planets that are too faint to observe directly with a telescope. 

"This result is unique because it demonstrates that a giant planet can form so rapidly that the remnant gas and dust from which the young star formed, surrounding the system in a Frisbee-like disk, is still present," said co-author Lisa Prato of Lowell Observatory. 

"Giant planet formation in the inner part of this disk, where CI Tau b is located, will have a profound impact on the region where smaller terrestrial planets are also potentially forming," she added.​

​London, May 25 (IANS) Christie's sold the first four folios of well-known British playwright William Shakespeare on Wednesday, the first four editions of his collected works.

The folios were offered in a four-lot auction in London to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death. The sale began at 3.00 p.m. (local time) on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

Christie's said the sale was led by an unrecorded copy of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, widely considered the most important literary publication in the English language.

The First Folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which, including Macbeth and The Tempest, might have been lost without this edition. It is estimated to sell for 800,000 to 1.2 million pounds.

Prior to the auction, the four folios have been displayed in New York and London. The second Folio is estimated to sell for 180,000 to 250,000 pounds, the third is between 300,000 and 400,000 pounds, and the fourth one is between 15,000 and 20,000.

The First Folio, published in 1623, was a commercial success and was followed only nine years later by the Second Folio, providing a page-by-page reprint of the First.​

​London, May 25 (IANS) The communicative exchanges in bonobos and chimpanzees closely resemble human communication -- which is one of the most sophisticated signalling systems in the animal kingdom -- being highly cooperative and including fast interactions.

The team of Marlen Frohlich and Simone Pika from Germany's Max Planck Institute conducted the first systematic comparison of communicative interactions in mother-infant group of two different bonobo and two different chimpanzee communities in their natural environments.

The study showed that communicative exchanges in both species resemble cooperative turn-taking sequences in human conversation. However, bonobos and chimpanzees differ in their communication styles. 

"For bonobos, gaze plays a more important role and they seem to anticipate signals before they have been fully articulated," said Marlen Froehlich in the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

In contrast, chimpanzees engage in more time-consuming communicative negotiations and use clearly recognizable units such as signal, pause and response. 

Bonobos may, therefore, represent the most representative model for understanding the prerequisites of human communication. 

"Communicative interactions of great apes thus show the hallmarks of human social action during conversation and suggest that cooperative communication arose as a way of coordinating collaborative activities more efficiently," noted lead researcher Simone Pika.​

Washington, May 24 (IANS) Solar storms four billion years ago may have provided the crucial energy needed to warm Earth and seed life despite the Sun's faintness, new research has revealed.

Some four billion years ago, the sun shone with only about three-quarters the brightness we see today, but its surface roiled with giant eruptions spewing enormous amounts of solar material and radiation out into space. 

The eruptions also may have furnished the energy needed to turn simple molecules into the complex molecules such as RNA and DNA that were necessary for life, said NASA researchers.

“Back then, Earth received only about 70 percent of the energy from the Sun than it does today,” said Vladimir Airapetian, solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

That means Earth should have been an icy ball.

“Instead, geological evidence says it was a warm globe with liquid water. We call this the 'Faint Young Sun Paradox'. Our new research shows that solar storms could have been central to warming Earth,” he added.

Understanding what conditions were necessary for life on our planet helps us both trace the origins of life on Earth and guide the search for life on other planets.

Until now, however, fully mapping Earth's evolution has been hindered by the simple fact that the young Sun wasn't luminous enough to warm Earth.

Scientists are able to piece together the history of the sun by searching for similar stars in our galaxy.

By placing these sun-like stars in order according to their age, the stars appear as a functional timeline of how our own Sun evolved.

It is from this kind of data that scientists know the sun was fainter four billion years ago.

Such studies also show that young stars frequently produce powerful flares - giant bursts of light and radiation -- similar to the flares we see on our own Sun today.

Such flares are often accompanied by huge clouds of solar material, called coronal mass ejections or CMEs which erupt out into space.

NASA's Kepler mission has found stars that resemble our sun about a few million years after its birth.

The Kepler data showed many examples of what are called "superflares" - enormous explosions so rare today that we only experience them once every 100 years or so.

Yet the Kepler data also show these youngsters producing as many as 10 superflares a day.

While our sun still produces flares and CMEs, they are not so frequent or intense.

What's more, Earth today has a strong magnetic field that helps keep the bulk of the energy from such space weather from reaching Earth, the authors said.

Our young Earth, however, had a weaker magnetic field, with a much wider footprint near the poles.

This newly discovered constant influx of solar particles to early Earth may have done more than just warm the atmosphere; it may also have provided the energy needed to make complex chemicals.

In a planet scattered evenly with simple molecules, it takes a huge amount of incoming energy to create the complex molecules such as RNA and DNA that eventually seeded life.

While enough energy appears to be hugely important for a growing planet, too much would also be an issue -- a constant chain of solar eruptions producing showers of particle radiation can be quite detrimental.

Such an onslaught of magnetic clouds can rip off a planet's atmosphere if the magnetosphere is too weak.

Understanding these kinds of balances help scientists determine what kinds of stars and what kinds of planets could be hospitable for life.

The research was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.​

​Sydney, May 24 (IANS) Unlike the declining populations of many fish species, the number of cephalopods - octopus, cuttlefish and squid -- has increased in the world's oceans over the past 60 years, new research has found.

To investigate long-term trends in its abundance, the international team of researchers compiled a global database of cephalopod catch rates 

"Our analyses showed that cephalopod abundance has increased since the 1950s, a result that was remarkably consistent across three distinct groups," said study lead author Zoe Doubleday from University of Adelaide in Australia.

"Cephalopods are often called 'weeds of the sea' as they have a unique set of biological traits, including rapid growth, short lifespans and flexible development. These allow them to adapt to changing environmental conditions (such as temperature) more quickly than many other marine species, which suggests that they may be benefiting from a changing ocean environment," Doubleday said.

The research stemmed from an investigation of declining numbers of the iconic Giant Australian cuttlefish, Doubleday said.

"Surprisingly, analyses revealed that cephalopods, as a whole, are in fact increasing; and since this study, cuttlefish numbers from this iconic population near Whyalla are luckily bouncing back," Doubleday noted.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

Cephalopods are found in all marine habitats and, as well as being voracious predators, they are also an important source of food for many marine species, as well as humans.

"As such, the increase in abundance has significant and complex implications for both the marine food web and us," Doubleday said.​

​London, May 24 (IANS) The rise of user-generated content (UGC) - information submitted by members of the public or posted on social media - has made journalists harness a variety of new skills, thereby bringing in a sea change in the profession, a study says.

"As more news organisations move towards becoming 'digital first', the skills journalists are expected to possess have changed,” said study author Lisette Johnston from London's City University.

"They must become more "tech-savvy" … In turn, the role of the journalist itself is being redefined, as are the skills needed by newsroom staff," Johnston noted.

The study was published in the journal Digital Journalism.

To understand the evolution of journalism in the age of social media, Johnston studied how journalists from BBC World News integrated user-generated content into their reports on the conflict in Syria. She studied hours of video as well as interviewed reporters and newsroom staff.

As expected, user-generated content formed a large part of the material she studied. More than half the 35 reports or 'news packages' on Syria she analysed opened with a social media clip. 

She also found that the amount of user-generated content integrated by BBC journalists increased as the conflict wore on and reporters found access to the country more challenging.

But the increasing amount of social media content used by BBC journalists was only part of the story. The journalists to whom Johnson spoke said they felt “they had to harness a variety of new skills to enable them to "harvest" content uploaded to digital platforms”. 

They also found themselves actively engaged in "social media newsgathering" -- for images, contacts and eyewitnesses -- across multiple platforms, a practice encouraged by their managers.

Johnston's contacts also admitted that shifting through the immense volume of UGC posted online posed a huge challenge, as did verifying what was chosen -- a task made even more difficult in a war zone, where contacting the uploader of the footage could put his or her life at risk. 

Journalists had to become 'detective-like' when verifying footage found online; but even if they weren't responsible for the actual verification themselves, they had to learn how to use social media content appropriately in terms of attribution, labelling and caveats.

As for the future, “being capable of processing user-generated content and being able to navigate social media platforms which audiences inhabit are becoming core skills which journalists need to possess and maintain”, Johnston concluded.​

New York, May 24 (IANS) An international team of scientists has detected and confirmed the faintest early-universe galaxy ever -- a finding that can help explain how the "cosmic dark ages" ended.

Using the WM Keck Observatory on the summit on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the researchers detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago.

According to Tommaso Treu, professor of physics and astronomy at University of California-Los Angeles, the discovery could be a step toward unraveling one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy -- how a period known as the "cosmic dark ages" ended.

According to the Big Bang theory, the universe cooled as it expanded. As that happened, Treu said, protons captured electrons to form hydrogen atoms, which in turn made the universe opaque to radiation -- giving rise to the cosmic dark ages.

“At some point, a few hundred million years later, the first stars formed and they started to produce ultraviolet light capable of ionizing hydrogen," Treu said.

"Eventually, when there were enough stars, they might have been able to ionize all of the intergalactic hydrogen and create the universe as we see it now,” he added.

That process, called cosmic reionization, happened about 13 billion years ago but scientists have so far been unable to determine whether there were enough stars to do it or whether more exotic sources, like gas falling onto supermassive black holes, might have been responsible.
“Currently, the most likely suspect is stars within faint galaxies that are too faint to see with our telescopes without gravitational lensing magnification," Treu said.

The new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, exploits gravitational lensing to demonstrate that such galaxies exist, and is thus an important step toward solving this mystery.

Gravitational lensing was first predicted by famous theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

The effect is similar to that of an image behind a glass lens appearing distorted because of how the lens bends light.​