Knowledge Update

​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.​

​Toronto, May 23 (IANS) A constantly crying baby can not only hamper your peace, it can also rattles your brain functions and alter the way you think and act to make daily decisions, a study has found.

The brain data revealed that the infant cries reduced attention to the task and triggered greater cognitive conflict processing than infant laughs.

"Parental instinct appears to be hardwired yet no one talks about how this instinct might include cognition," said David Haley from the University of Toronto.

The team looked at infant vocalisations -- in this case, audio clips of a baby laughing or crying -- and its effect on adults who completed a cognitive conflict task. 

They asked participants to rapidly identify the colour of a printed word while ignoring the meaning of the word itself. 

Brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG), which took place immediately after a two-second audio clip of an infant vocalisation. 

Cognitive conflict processing is important because it controls attention -- one of the most basic executive functions needed to complete a task or make a decision. 

A baby's cry has been shown to cause aversion in adults but it could also be creating an adaptive response, "switching on" the cognitive control parents use in effectively responding to their child's emotional needs while also addressing other demands in everyday life, Haley added in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. 

"If an infant's cry activates cognitive conflict in the brain, it could also be teaching parents how to focus their attention more selectively," he added.

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that infants occupy a privileged status in our neurobiological programming, one deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. 

But, as Haley noted, it also reveals an important adaptive cognitive function in the human brain.​

​New York, May 21 (IANS) Harvard researchers have created a new, simplified, platform for antibiotic discovery that may go a long way in solving the crisis of antibiotic resistance.

This is "a platform where we assemble eight (chemical) building blocks by a simple process to make macrolide antibiotics" without using erythromycin, the original macrolide antibiotic, and the drug upon which all others in the class have been based since the early 1950s,” the researchers said.

Erythromycin, which was discovered in a soil sample from the Philippines in 1949, has been on the market as a drug by 1953. 

"For 60 years chemists have been very, very creative, finding clever ways to 'decorate' this molecule, making changes around its periphery to produce antibiotics that are safer, more effective, and overcome the resistance bacteria have developed," said Andrew Myers, professor of chemistry at Harvard University.

"That process is semisynthesis, modifying the naturally occurring substance," Myers noted.

In contrast, the process described in the new study involves using eight industrial chemicals, or substances derived from them, and manipulating them in various combinations and then testing the products against panels of disease causing bacteria. 

This allows us to make new "new compounds in fewer steps than was previously possible," Myers explained.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

"One of the things that's quite encouraging about the data in our paper is that some of the structures we've made are active against clinical bacterial strains that are resistant to every known macrolide," Myers said. 

In fact, he added, two of the 350 compounds reported on in the paper have, in initial testing, shown efficacy against a bacterium that has become resistant to vancomycin, "which is known as the antibiotic of last resort. And if you have a bug that's resistant to vancomycin, you're in trouble," Myers added.​

​London, May 21 (IANS) A European company has developed a set of thin, stick-on lenses that can turn your mobile phone into a portable, digital microscope, a media report said.

The BLIPS lenses, which come in a pack for both micro and macro shots, come with reusable adhesive, and are slim enough (between 0.5 mm and 1.2 mms thick) to fit into your wallet, technology website The Verge reported on Friday. 

According to BLIPS' creators SmartMicroOptics, the lenses were developed in the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy. 

The exact amount of magnification depends on the smartphone, but with the right digital zoom it's possible to magnify images up to 100 times, the company added.

The lenses are available on Kickstarter -- an American public-benefit corporation based in New York which has built a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity.

According to SmartMicroOptics, BLIPS lenses can be used by hobbyists as well as professionals.​

​London, May 21 (IANS) A team of scientists has genetically modified microalgae to produce valuable chemicals to be used in drugs for deadly diseases like cancer by harnessing energy from the sun.

According to researchers, the method basically allows sunlight being transformed into everything ranging from chemotherapy or bioplastics to valuable flavour and fragrance compounds.

"Our study shows that it is possible to optimise the enzymatic processes in the cells using only sunlight, water and carbon dioxide (CO2) by growing them in transparent plastic bags in a greenhouse," said Thiyagarajan Gnanasekaran, post-doctoral researcher at University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The method can be run sustainably and may also pave way for an efficient, inexpensive and environmentally friendly process of producing a variety of chemicals, such as pharmaceutical compounds.

"The idea is that we hijack a portion of the energy produced by the microalgae from their photosynthetic systems. By redirecting that energy to a genetically modified part of the cell capable of producing various complex chemical materials, we induce the light driven biosynthesis of these compounds," added Agnieszka Janina Zygadlo Nielsen, post-doctoral researcher at University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The findings are detailed in the journal Metabolic Engineering.

However, the team noted that the microalgae use much of the harnessed sunlight to keep their own metabolic processes running.

"It is difficult to produce large quantities of the desired compounds in microalgae because they have to use a large amount of the produced energy for themselves, since they are fully photosynthetic organisms,” Gnanasekaran said.​

New York, May 21 (IANS) The Earth could contain nearly one trillion species, of which 99.999 percent are yet to be discovered, says a study based on the largest analysis of microbial data.

The findings suggest that only one-thousandth of one percent of all the species have been identified till now.

"Estimating the number of species on Earth is among the great challenges in biology," said one of the study authors Jay Lennon from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

The scientists combined microbial, plant and animal datasets from government, academic and citizen science sources, resulting in the largest compilation of its kind.

Altogether, these data represent more than 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world's oceans and continents, except Antarctica.

"Our study combines the largest available datasets with ecological models and new ecological rules for how biodiversity relates to abundance. This gave us a new and rigorous estimate for the number of microbial species on Earth," Lennon explained.

The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The report's authors are Jay Lennon and Kenneth Locey of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

"Until recently, we've lacked the tools to truly estimate the number of microbial species in the natural environment. The advent of new genetic sequencing technology provides a large pool of new information," Lennon added.

Microbial species are forms of life too small to be seen with the naked eye, including single-celled organisms such as bacteria and archaea, as well as certain fungi.

The study's results also suggest that identifying every microbial species on Earth presents a huge challenge.

"Of those species cataloged, only about 10,000 have ever been grown in a lab, and fewer than 100,000 have classified genetic sequences," Lennon said. 

"Our results show that this leaves 100,000 times more microorganisms awaiting discovery -- and 100 million to be fully explored,” he added.

"Microbial biodiversity, it appears, is greater than we ever imagined," Lennon pointed out.​

​New York, May 23 (IANS) A lipid nano-carrier that can get past the blood-brain barrier could be targeted to deliver a chemotherapeutic drug more efficiently to tumour cells in the brain, a study has found.

"I was very surprised by how efficiently and well it worked once we got the nanocarrier to those cells," said study author Ann-Marie Broome from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

The study, published in the journal Nanomedicine-Future Medicine, showed specific uptake and increased killing in glial cells, so much so that Broome initially questioned the results. She had her team keep repeating the experiments, using different cell lines, dosage amounts and treatment times.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) -- a form of brain tumour -- is a devastating disease with no curative options due to several challenges, said Broome. 

The tumour has a significant overall mortality, in part due to its location, difficulty of surgical treatment and the inability to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier, a protective barrier designed to keep a stable environment within and surrounding the brain.

Broome and her team took what they know about the cancer's biology and of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), one of numerous growth factor proteins that regulates cell growth and division and is also over expressed on tumour cells in the brain. 

With that in mind, they engineered a micelle that is a phospholipid nanocarrier, "a bit of fat globule", to deliver a concentrated dose of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) to the GBM tumour cells.

"Micelles of a certain size will cross the blood-brain barrier carrying a concentrated amount of TMZ," Broome explained about how the nanotechnology works. "The PDGF is used much like a postal address. The micelle gets it to the street, and the PDGF gets it to the house," she added. 

The team is excited about the new research because it potentially points the way to a new treatment option for patients with GBM.

"This paper is exciting because it demonstrates a novel approach to treating brain tumours, combining nanotechnology targeting to a marker of brain tumours with a specialised delivery system," said researcher and clinician Amy Lee Bredlau, director of MUSC Health's Pediatric Brain Tumour Programme. 

"It will allow us eventually to target aggressive childhood and adult brain tumours," she added. ​

​London, May 23 (IANS) A team of international researchers has evaluated the pivotal relationship that exists between mankind and fire, hoping it would help policymakers "reassess their attitudes" towards how to deal with fire in the natural world.

The study explores both the natural and human face of fire.

It delves into the complex relationship that fire has had with our planet and humans over millennia, from the first fires through to its role in the industrial revolutions worldwide.

"It is imperative that we consider this complex interaction between fire and humankind on a global scale and not just imagine it is a localised, or of far away, concern," said Claire Belcher from University of Exeter in Britain, who led the research team. 

"What we have shown is that understanding fire is a broader and more complex issue than it is perhaps treated now -- it encompasses physical, biological and social sciences as well as engineering, and the humanities -- and it needs to be seen as such by policymakers, both home and abroad," Belcher added.

The study suggests that a combination of factors, including the problem of invasive plants, landscape change, climate change, population growth, human health and economic, social and cultural attitude, make a re-evaluation of the relationship between fire and man necessary. 

"Imagining that we could live without fire is both folly and impossible. Importantly, our combustion habits -- both fossil fuels combustion and landscape burning -- ensure that we are building new dynamism into our social-ecological relationship with fire through climate change," the researchers said.​