Knowledge Update

​London, March 29 (IANS) In a first, researchers in Scotland are using smartphone-based technology to find the reason behind plummeting numbers of harbour seals in the country.

Part of a three-year study by researchers at Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) at University of St Andrews in Scotland, the smartphone-based technology is being used to monitor the well-being of marine mammals, The National reported.

"Over the last 15 years, many of the harbour seal populations in the Northern Isles and on the north and east coasts of Scotland have been declining. Marine data collected during this project on Orkney will help to assess the causes, management and mitigation options in relation to the harbour seals' decline and to prioritise future research directions," Bernie McConnell, SMRU's deputy director, was quoted as saying. 

For the study, marine telemetry tags will be attached to the fur at the back of the heads of a number of harbour seals in Orkney Archipelago of Scotland. 

Small and light, the tags work like smartphones, sending information back to scientists and will eventually drop off when the seal moults, the report explained.

The study is being carried out at the request of the Scottish Government and Scottish Natural Heritage after concerns were raised about the survival of harbour seals in the country.

"This exciting, collaborative study is vital to help us to better understand the drivers of population change in Scottish harbour seals, and to evaluate the potential conservation and management options open to us," professor John Baxter from Scottish Natural Heritage was quoted as saying.

Harbour seals - one of two seal species in Britain - have declined by up to 90 percent in some areas in and around the north and east coast of Scotland, including Orkney, since 2000.​

New York, March 29 (IANS) Ever wondered why we remember certain scenes from films or books without much effort while forgetting others despite paying attention? New research suggests that people tend to remember only those things better that they expect to have future relevance.

Much of what a person can remember is based on their expectation of the information they will need to recall, the study said.

"What we're showing is that attention is not enough to ensure accurate memory," said one of the researchers Brad Wyble, assistant professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the US. 

"You need some kind of expectation that attributing certain features to the object is important," Wyble noted.

The findings were published in the journal Cognition.

The researchers tested 60 participants and asked them to watch videos in which two balls were thrown between multiple people. 

The first ball thrown was the target ball. Participants counted the number of times the ball was passed. The second ball was the distractor ball. Each participant watched 36 trials, recording their counts of the target ball after each. The balls in each video were red, green, blue or purple. 

For the first 31 trials, participants chose only the number of passes made with the target ball.

After the thirty-second trial, a message popped up on the participant's screen that read, "This is a surprise memory test! Here we test the “colour” of the target ball. Press a corresponding number to indicate the 'colour' of the target ball."

To this question, 37 percent of participants -- 22 of 60 -- responded with the incorrect colour of the ball, and 16 of these 22 incorrect responses selected the colour of the distractor ball.

In further experiments, the researchers found that once participants realised they would need to report the colour of the ball, they were able to do so with high accuracy.

This indicates that much of what a person can remember is based on their expectation of the information they will need to recall.

"The key discovery was that attending an object for an extended period of time does not ensure that all of the features of that object will be correctly associated with it in memory," Wyble noted.​

​New York, March 29 (IANS) An international team of scientists has identified a key protein that has the potential to reverse established cardiac fibrosis, the abnormal thickening of the heart valves, which progresses to heart failure.

Cardiac fibrosis occurs when healthy cardiac cells are replaced with fibrous connective tissue, causing scarring and a stiffer and less compliant cardiac muscle. 

The researchers found that CCN5, a matricellular protein, can potentially be used for the development of new anti-cardiac fibrosis therapies.

"Our research is the first to demonstrate the ability to reverse cardiac fibrosis in heart failure models by targeting a specific gene," said lead researcher Roger Hajjar, professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, US.

The findings, detailed online in the Journal of American College of Cardiology (JACC), demonstrated that CCN5 might provide a novel platform for the development of targeted anti-cardiac fibrosis therapies, which could benefit many patients with previously untreatable heart failure and other cardiovascular diseases.

"Since CCN5 is a secreted protein, we may be able to deliver the CCN5 protein itself rather than the CCN5 gene in the form of recombinant virus or stem cells that are engineered to express CCN5," one of the researchers Woo Jin Park, professor at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) in South Korea, said.

The team induced extensive cardiac fibrosis in experimental animal models of heart failure, and then proceeded to transfer CCN5 to the hearts. 

Eight weeks later, they examined the cellular and molecular effects. The results revealed that CCN5 reversed cardiac fibrosis in the animals. 

The therapeutic efficacy of CCN5 is now being investigated in pre-clinical models of heart failure with extensive fibrosis, the researchers said.​

​New Delhi, March 29 (IANS) The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday urged the Southeast Asian countries to promote educational campaigns regarding self-management of diabetes and make its treatment cost effective.

"Diabetes is of particular concern in the South East Asian Region. More than one out of every four of the 3.7 million diabetes-related deaths globally occur in this region," said Poonam Khetrapal, director for WHO South East Asian region.

"If diabetes prevalence continues to rise, the personal, social and economic consequences will deepen," Khetrapal said.

The South East Asian Region is generally considered to be made up of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Singapore, and East Timor.

World Health Day this year focuses on diabetes and calls for scaling up efforts to prevent, care for and detect the disease to arrest the global epidemic which is hitting the low and middle income countries the most.

According to WHO records, over 96 million people in the world do not know that they are suffering from diabetes.

"Diabetes rarely makes headlines, and yet it will be the world's seventh largest killer by 2030 unless intense and focused efforts are made by governments, communities and individuals," said Khetrapal.

Nearly 90 percent of all diabetes cases are of Type 2 diabetes, largely the result of excess bodyweight and physical inactivity, she said.

"Diabetes is both preventable and treatable if detected early. If not properly managed the disease causes serious damage to every major organ in the body, resulting in heart attacks, strokes, blindness and nerve damage," said Khetrapal. 

World Health Day is celebrated on April 7 every year to mark the anniversary of the founding of WHO in 1948. ​

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Researchers have identified an enzyme that is likely to lower the risk of heart related diseases caused by antiviral medicines used for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Approximately 37 million people are living with HIV, according to the World Health Organisation.

Antiviral medications are used to control HIV and prevent its progression to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). 

"The use of antivirals in HIV patients is very important to control the virus, suppress symptoms and improve quality of life," said lead author William Durante, professor at the University of Missouri in the US.

However, these antivirals are linked to the development of metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity, and they are also known to increase the risk of heart diseases. 

The study, published in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine, focused on protease inhibitors -- a common antiviral used to treat HIV, which disrupts HIV's ability to replicate and infect cells. 

But, this inhibitor causes malfunctioning in the endothelial cells, which make up the inner lining of blood vessels, and can lead to cardiovascular disease.

Using a cell-based model of cultured human endothelial cells, the team increased the amount of the enzyme heme oxygenase-1, or HO-1 within the cells.

"Increasing the presence of HO-1 in our model before exposing it to a protease inhibitor allowed the medication to do its job without causing endothelial dysfunction," Durante noted.

"HO-1 shows great promise as a defender of endothelial cells in patients being treated for HIV," he added.

More research is needed to verify that HO-1 will prevent endothelial cell dysfunction with all antiviral medications, the researchers maintained. ​

New York, March 29 (IANS) Using a nanoparticle that delivers a drug and then glows green when cancer cells begin dying, Indian origin researchers have found a way to detect the effectiveness of cancer treatment much sooner than currently available clinical methods.

Being able to detect early on whether a cancer therapy is working for a patient can influence the course of treatment and improve outcomes and quality of life. 

However, conventional detection methods -- such as PET scans, CT and MRI -- usually cannot detect whether a tumour is shrinking until a patient has received multiple cycles of therapy. 

The new approach can read out on the effectiveness of chemotherapy in as few as eight hours after treatment, and can also be used for monitoring the effectiveness of immunotherapy, the study said.

"Using this approach, the cells light up the moment a cancer drug starts working. We can determine if a cancer therapy is effective within hours of treatment," said co-corresponding author Shiladitya Sengupta from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, US.

"Our long-term goal is to find a way to monitor outcomes very early so that we don't give a chemotherapy drug to patients who are not responding to it," Sengupta noted.

The findings were published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new technique takes advantage of the fact that when cells die, a particular enzyme known as caspase is activated. 

The researchers designed a 'reporter element' that, when in the presence of activated caspase, glows green. 

The team then tested whether they could use the reporter nanoparticles to distinguish between drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tumours. 

Using nanoparticles loaded with anti-cancer drugs, the team tested a common chemotherapeutic agent, paclitaxel, in a pre-clinical model of prostate cancer and, separately, an immunotherapy in a pre-clinical model of melanoma. 

In the tumours that were sensitive to paclitaxel, the team saw an approximately 400 percent increase in fluorescence compared to tumours that were not sensitive to the drug. 

The team also saw a significant increase in the fluorescent signal in tumours treated with the anti-PD-L1 nanoparticles after five days.

"We've demonstrated that this technique can help us directly visualise and measure the responsiveness of tumours to both types of drugs," co-corresponding author Ashish Kulkarni, BWH, noted.

​New York, March 30 (IANS) Do you have a workplace atmosphere sans motivation and constant cribbing from your boss about performance? The negative feedback from seniors may lead to endorsement of immoral behaviour in employees, warns a study.

"Strongly held professional goals, when combined with public criticism of our potential in that field, can have unintended effects on ethical behaviour for some," said lead researcher Ana Gantman from New York University.

For the study, researchers conducted three experiments with students intending to enter business, law and STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.

In the first study, business students took a mock aptitude test which purported to measure their potential in the field, with some told they performed well on the exam and others informed they did poorly. 

The results, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that those highly motivated to enter the business world and who were told they did poorly on the test were more likely to endorse the immoral act -- breaking the contract -- than were those who were informed they did well.

Similarly, in the second research, students who were determined to enter the legal field and told they performed poorly on the test, were comparatively more likely to say they performed these "immoral" behaviours.

The researchers conducted a third experiment involving students, who were told they were taking a test measuring their potential to successfully major in business or STEM fields.

Similar to the results for the first two experiments, those highly motivated to pursue business or STEM majors -- and informed that they lacked the potential to excel in these majors -- indicated that their personality was very similar to the successful example -- in this case, possessing personality traits associated with immoral behaviour.

"If we can better understand the triggers of these behaviours such as when negative professional feedback leads to the compensatory endorsement of immoral behaviour, we might even prevent incidents of large-scale fraud in the future," Gantman noted.​

​New York, March 30 (IANS) Astronomers have created a virtual Earth-space radio telescope more than 100,000 miles across -- a super-high resolution that reveals new details of a quasar and our Milky Way.

The researchers were surprised when their Earth-space system revealed a temperature hotter then 10 trillion degrees.

“Only this space-Earth system could reveal this temperature, and now we have to figure out how that environment can reach such temperatures," said Yuri Kovalev, the RadioAstron project scientist.

“This result is a significant challenge to our current understanding of quasar jets,” he added.

Using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes, the team achieved the highest resolution of any astronomical observation ever made.

The feat produced a pair of scientific surprises that promise to advance the understanding of quasars, supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

The scientists combined the Russian RadioAstron satellite with the ground-based telescopes to produce a virtual radio telescope.

They pointed this system at a quasar called 3C 273, more than two billion light-years from Earth.

Quasars like 3C 273 propel huge jets of material outward at speeds nearly that of light. These powerful jets emit radio waves.

The observations also showed, for the first time, substructure caused by scattering of the radio waves by the tenuous interstellar material in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

“This is like looking through the hot, turbulent air above a candle flame,” added Michael Johnson from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“We had never been able to see such distortion of an extragalactic object before,” he noted in a paper appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The amazing resolution from RadioAstron working with the ground-based telescopes gives scientists a powerful new tool to explore not only the extreme physics near the distant supermassive black holes but also the diffuse material in our home galaxy.

The RadioAstron satellite was combined with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, The Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Effelsberg Telescope in Germany, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Signals received by the orbiting radio telescope were transmitted to an antenna in Green Bank where they were recorded and then sent over the internet to Russia.

Here, they were combined with the data received by the ground-based radio telescopes to form the high resolution image of 3C 273.​

Los Angeles, March 29 (IANS) Fungi will be sent for the first time to the International Space Station for the development of medicine, said researchers at the University of Southern California (USC).

The experiments, to be conducted jointly by scientists from the university and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will put specimen of Aspergillus nidulans in the high-radiation and micro-gravity conditions in space to develop new medicines for use in space and on the Earth, USC researchers announced on Monday.

The specimen will be carried by the SpaceX CRS-8 mission scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral on April 8. The launch will be the Hawthorne-based company's first cargo resupply service mission since CRS-7 exploded shortly after launch on June 28, 2015, Xinhua reported.

"Certain types of fungi produce very important molecules called secondary metabolites that are not essential for their growth or reproduction but can be used to make beneficial pharmaceuticals. Examples of secondary metabolites include the antibiotic penicillin and the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin," said a USC statement.

Researchers said the environment of space could trigger physiological changes in the fungi.

"The high-radiation, micro-gravity environment in space could prompt Aspergillus nidulans to produce molecules it doesn't create in Earth's less stressful conditions," Clay Wang, professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at the USC school of pharmacy, was quoted as saying by the media.

"We've done extensive genetic analysis of this fungus and found that it could potentially produce 40 different types of drugs," Wang said.

"The organism is known to produce osteoporosis drugs, which is very important from an astronaut's perspective because we know that in space travel, astronauts experience bone loss."

Scientists also said that molecules from Aspergillus nidulans potentially may be useful in anti-cancer and Alzheimer's disease research.​

New York, April 29 (IANS) Researchers have identified four previously unknown genetic diseases that can be brought under the umbrella diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Cases associated with changes in each of the four genes were different from each other in terms of symptoms, intelligence level and other disease features, the researchers said.

"A common fallacy is that schizophrenia can be treated as a single disease," explained lead study author Dolores Malaspina from NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York.

"Our biologically driven study begins to answer longstanding questions in the field about why any two people diagnosed with schizophrenia may have drastically different symptoms. For the first time, we have defined four syndromes mechanistically,” Malaspina noted.

Patients with schizophrenia struggle to interpret reality, typically suffering from hallucinations, learning disabilities, emotional withdrawal and lack of motivation. 

In the current study, researchers analysed 48 ethnically diverse patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, looking at symptom sets in patients found to have rare or previously unknown changes in the DNA code of the four genes that disrupted brain function.

The four influential genes now tied by the study to specific conditions are all involved in the growth or regulation of nerve circuits. 

"Our results argue that new treatments should -- while addressing core psychoses -- also focus on processing speed in TGM5 cases, working memory in PTPRG, zinc augmentation in SLC39A13, and nerve cell protection in patients with ARMS/KIDINS220 mutations," first study author Thorsten Kranz, postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone, said.

The findings appeared online in the journal EbioMedicine.

"Perhaps as many as 30 percent of schizophrenic patients may now become candidates for more precise treatment based on the individual characteristics of these four genes, with the remaining cases becoming less mysterious as we pull these groups out of the mix," Malaspina said.​