Knowledge Update

​London, April 5 (IANS) A common antibiotic which is used to treat a wide range of diseases, from acne to urinary tract infections, may also help treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by suppressing fear memory, suggest results of a trial conducted in a group of health volunteers.

PTSD is a term for a broad range of psychological symptoms that can develop after someone experiences or witnesses a traumatic event. 

The disorder is caused by an overactive fear memory, and the new research, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, showed that a common antibiotic, doxycycline, can reduce the fear memory response in healthy volunteers.

"We have demonstrated a proof-of-principle for an entirely new treatment strategy for PTSD," said lead author Dominik Bach from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

The theory is based on the recent discovery that our brains need proteins outside nerve cells, called matrix enzymes, to form memories. 

"Matrix enzymes are found throughout the body, and their over-activity is involved in certain immune diseases and cancers. To treat such diseases, we already have clinically approved drugs that block these enzymes, including the antibiotic doxycycline, so we wanted to see if they could help to prevent fear memories from forming in the brain," Bach, who is also affiliated to University College London, added.

"Our results support this theory, opening up an exciting avenue of research that might help us to find treatments for PTSD," Bach noted.

In the study involving 76 healthy volunteers, participants were given either doxycycline or a placebo and learnt to associate a certain colour with an electric shock. 

The screen would flash either blue or red, and one of the colours was associated with a 50 per cent chance of receiving a painful electric shock. 

A week later they were shown the colours again, accompanied by a loud sound but no shocks, and their fear responses were measured.

The fear response was 60 per cent lower in participants who had doxycycline in the first session compared to those who had the placebo, suggesting that the fear memory was significantly suppressed by the drug. 

Other cognitive measures including sensory memory and attention were not affected.

"When we talk about reducing fear memory, we are not talking about deleting the memory of what actually happened," Bach said.

"The participants may not forget that they received a shock when the screen was red, but they 'forget' to be instinctively scared when they next see a red screen," Bach said.

The findings suggest that doxycycline can disrupt the formation of negative associations in the brain.

Los Angeles, March 30 (IANS) A group of US scientists have predicted that 31 to 67 percent of Southern California beaches could be severely damaged due to rising sea levels by 2100, a new study has revealed.

The study was published online on Wednesday by the American Geophysical Union in their Journal of Geophysical Research, Xinhua news agency reported.

"Beaches are perhaps the most iconic feature of California, and the potential for losing this identity is real. The effect of California losing its beaches is not just a matter of affecting the tourism economy," Sean Vitousek, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

"Losing the protecting swath of beach sand between us and the pounding surf exposes critical infrastructure, businesses and homes to damage. Beaches are natural resources, and it is likely that human management efforts must increase in order to preserve them," said Vitousek.

Scientists applied the "CoSMoS-COAST", a newly-developed shoreline change computer modelling system for coastal hazard assessment and management planning, to simulate sandy shoreline evolution along 500 km of coastline in Southern California, which hosts complex mixtures of beach settings variably backed by dunes, cliffs, estuaries, river mouths, and urban infrastructure, providing applicability of the model to virtually any coastal setting.

"Beaches in Southern California are a crucial feature of the economy, and the first line of defence against coastal storm impacts for the 18 million residents in the region. This study indicates that we will have to perform massive and costly interventions to preserve these beaches in the future under the erosive pressures of anticipated sea level rise, or risk losing many of the economic and protective benefits beaches provide," said US Geological Survey (USGS) geologist and co-author, Patrick Barnard.

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the window to limit global warming below 2 degrees Celsius appears to be closing. Associated projections for sea-level rise generally range near or below 1 metre by 2100.

Toronto, March 30 (IANS) For at least a million years, an asteroid orbiting the "wrong" way around the Sun has been playing a cosmic game of chicken to avoid collision with Jupiter and with about 6,000 other asteroids sharing the giant planet's space, a study says.

The findings published in the journal Nature showed that the orbit has been stable for at least a million years and will be stable for at least a million years more. 

The asteroid, nicknamed Bee-Zed, is the only one in this solar system that is known both to have an opposite, retrograde orbit around the Sun while at the same time sharing a planet's orbital space, said researcher and co-author Paul Wiegert from University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Most of the known asteroids in our solar system travel around the Sun in what is called a prograde motion -- that is, counter-clockwise when visualised from above. 

But asteroid 2015 BZ509 ("Bee-Zed" for short) circles clockwise, in a retrograde motion -- moving against the flow of all other asteroids in the giant planet's orbital entourage.

Put another way, it is as if Jupiter is a monster truck on a track circling the sun, and the asteroids in Jupiter's orbit are sub-compact cars all whizzing along in the same direction. 

Bee-Zed is the rogue -- driving around the track in the wrong direction -- steering between the 6,000 other cars and swerving around the monster truck. 

And it does so every single lap, and has done so for thousands of laps for a million years or more.

So how does it avoid colliding with Jupiter? Jupiter's gravity actually deflects the asteroid's path at each pass so as to allow both to continue safely on their way, Wiegert said.

Little is known about the asteroid, which was discovered in January, 2015. It has a diametre of about three kilometres and it may have originated from the same place as Halley's comet, which also has a retrograde orbit. 

The team has not been able to determine yet if Bee-Zed is an icy comet or a rocky asteroid.

But their analysis -- based on complex calculations and on observations through the Large Binocular Camera on the Large Binocular Telescope in Mt. Graham, Arizona, during a span of 300 days -- show Bee-Zed is somehow able to maintain a stable orbit even as an outlier.

The researchers believe that learning more about the asteroid provides another intriguing glimpse into previously unknown and unmapped features of our solar system. 

"The detective work has just begun," Wiegert said.

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Researchers have found why at around the age of four children suddenly do what three-year-olds are unable to do -- put themselves in someone else's shoes.

This enormous developmental step occurs as a critical fibre connection in the brain matures, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

For the study, the research team from Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig, Germany and Leiden University in the Netherlands analysed MRI data and behavioural data of 43 normally developing 3- and 4-year-old children.

"Our findings show that the emergence of mental state representation is related to the maturation of core belief processing regions and their connection to the prefrontal cortex," said the researchers.

The study showed that maturation of fibres of a brain structure called the arcuate fascicle between the ages of three and four years establishes a connection between two critical brain regions.

One region is at the back of the temporal lobe that supports adult thinking about others and their thoughts, and the other is in the frontal lobe that is involved in keeping things at different levels of abstraction and, therefore, helps us to understand what the real world is and what the thoughts of others are. 

Only when these two brain regions are connected through the arcuate fascicle can children start to understand what other people think, the study said.

Interestingly, this new connection in the brain supports this ability independently of other cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, language ability or impulse control, according to the researcher.

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Parents who regularly play "Pokemon GO" with their children report a number of side benefits including increased exercise, more time spent outdoors and opportunities for family bonding, says a study.

Pokemon GO is a location-based augmented reality game in which players capture fictional creatures from the Japanese Pokemon franchise on smartphones and other mobile devices by "finding" them in real-world locations.

"Location-based augmented reality games are pretty different than sitting in front of a TV or playing a typical video game, so we were interested in the way kids and their parents were sharing those experiences together," said lead author Kiley Sobel from University of Washington.

"People still don't really know how to build tech that works well for families, so when this game came out of the blue and really caught on, we wanted to look at what its ingredients for success were," Sobel said.

The results, taken from a qualitative survey of 67 parents and interviews with 20 additional parents playing "Pokémon GO" with their families in the US, are detailed in a paper to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI 2017 conference to be held at Denver, Colorado in May.

Some parents said the interactive and mobile nature of the game made them feel better about engaging in that type of gameplay, as opposed to more sedentary forms of "screen time", according to the study.

The study did not include perspectives of parents who do not allow their children to play Pokemon GO. 

Many parents -- particularly moms of boys, fathers of girls and parents of teenaged children -- reported spending more quality time with their children as a result of playing "Pokémon GO" together and talking more than usual, both about the game itself and about other things in their lives, the researchers said.

Parents also appreciated how the game motivated both them and their children to go outside and exercise in ways that were convenient and fit into their lives, as their children displayed newfound enthusiasm for walking the dog or walking rather than driving to dinner or playgrounds. 

For some participants, these "Poké-walks" led to walking thousands more steps per day, the study said.

Brisbane, March 27 (IANS) A team of palaeontologists has identified 150 tracks from 21 dinosaur species in Australia, the University of Queensland announced on Monday.

The discovery includes five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at least six types of tracks from long-necked herbivorous sauropods, four types of tracks from two-legged herbivorous ornithopods, and six types of tracks from armoured dinosaurs, the university said in a press release.

The diversity of the tracks is unparalleled, said Australian paleontologist Steve Salisbury, lead author of the study that was published in the 2016 Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Efe news reported.

"Among the tracks is the only confirmed evidence for stegosaurus in Australia. There are also some of the largest dinosaur tracks ever recorded. Some of the sauropod tracks are around 1.7 metres long," he said in the statement.

Salisbury called the discovery "extremely significant" as it forms the primary record of non-avian dinosaurs in the western half of the continent and provides the only glimpse of Australia's dinosaur fauna during the first half of the Early Cretaceous Period.

The footprints were found in a rocky area, 127 to 140 million years old, in Walmadany, a region in western Australia containing thousands of dinosaur tracks, and which was listed as a National Heritage in 2011.

The newly-identified 150 tracks are older than most dinosaur fossils unearthed in the eastern part of Australia and which are thought to be between 90 and 115 million years old, added the release.

Members of the aboriginal group Goolarabooloo, traditional inhabitants of Walmadany, approached Salisbury and his team to research the tracks in the region after authorities chose the area to build a liquid natural gas processing plant.

These dinosaur tracks also form part of the Goolarabooloo's songs about Marella, also known as Emu Man, a creator being whose ancient footprints they believe appear and disappear along the coastline.

Washington, March 27 (IANS) NASA has partnered with real-time visualisation platform Epic Games' Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space Station (ISS) that can provide an 'out of this world' environment for its astronauts and engineers, a media report said on Monday.

Unreal Engine's applications are designed to allow people to work in environments that are practically impossible to access for training and development.

The mixed reality ISS app sweeps astronauts-in-training off their feet with an "active response gravity offload system" techcruch.com reported. 

It works in conjunction with a robotic crane that makes the trainee feel like he or she would in micro-, lunar- or Martian gravity. 

Besides using the mixed reality system to train astronauts and engineers for life and work in orbit, NASA will use it to design new habitats, the techcruch.com report said.

Previously, astronaut training meant dives in a "neutral buoyancy lab," a giant pool that holds 6.2 million gallons of water and spending time at NASA's "space vehicle mock-up facility," a life-sized model of the space shuttle orbiter and parts of the ISS. 

These physical facilities have limited capacity, thus adding a mixed reality mock-up, alongside the physical facility, could allow astronauts-in-training a lot more time to hone their skills in a convincing simulator, the report said.

​London, March 26 (IANS) A group of researchers has demonstrated that both humans and smartphones show a degree of error in distinguishing face morph photos from their 'real' faces on fraudulent identity cards.

Researchers at the University of York in Britain investigated what the success rate would be like if two faces were morphed together to create a "new" face.

"We use photo ID all the time, not just at borders, and we know that people are not very accurate when matching the photo to the real face," said Professor Mike Burton from University of York's Department of Psychology.

"In recent years, we have seen more examples of photo IDs that have been created by morphing two faces together, which can be used as fraudulent ID by both parties. Our research is important in highlighting the potential security problem with this and quantifying the risk of this type of fraud being missed," Burton added.

In their study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers found that initially human viewers were 68 per cent of the time unable to distinguish a 50/50 morph photo from its contributing photos.

However, after simply briefing the viewers to look out for manipulated, "fraudulent" images, the error rate dropped greatly to 21 per cent.

The team also looked at smartphone software, which achieved similar results to briefed human viewers, with an error rate of 27 per cent.

These rates, however, are still significantly higher than error rates when comparing two photos of entirely different people.

"Raising awareness of this type of fraud and including it in training schemes for frontline staff can help overcome these issues and with new technologies coming on line, it should be a challenge that can be tackled with some success," Burton added.

​London, March 25 (IANS) Stem cell therapy can potentially reduce lung damage caused by chronic inflammation in conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cystic fibrosis, research from a pre-clinical trial has revealed.

In the study, the researchers investigated the effectiveness of Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy in a mouse model of chronic inflammatory lung disease, which can lead to reduced lung function and eventually respiratory failure. 

The results showed that inflammation was significantly reduced in the group receiving MSC therapy. 

"The preliminary findings demonstrate the potential effectiveness of MSC treatment as a means of repairing the damage caused by chronic lung diseases such as COPD," said Declan Doherty from Queens University Belfast in Britain.

The study was presented at the European Respiratory Society's Lung Science Conference in Portugal.

Further, the cell counts for both monocytic cells and neutrophils -- both signs of inflammation -- were significantly reduced after MSC therapy. 

Analysis of lung tissue revealed reduction in inflammation in the lung and significant improvements in lung structure, suggesting that this form of treatment has the potential to repair the damaged lung, the researchers said.

"The ability to counteract inflammation in the lungs by utilising the combined anti-inflammatory and reparative properties of MSCs could potentially reduce the inflammatory response in individuals with chronic lung disease whilst also restoring lung function in these patients," Doherty added. 

Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy is currently being investigated as a promising therapeutic approach for a number of incurable, degenerative lung diseases.

​London, March 25 (IANS) A record breaking brown dwarf -- a star too small for nuclear fusion -- with the purest composition and the highest mass yet known has been identified by an international team of astronomers.

The object, known as SDSS J0104+1535, is a member of the so-called halo - the outermost reaches of our Galaxy -- and is made up of the most ancient stars, the scientists reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"We really didn't expect to see brown dwarfs that are this pure. Having found one though often suggests a much larger hitherto undiscovered population - I'd be very surprised if there aren't many more similar objects out there waiting to be found," said lead authors ZengHua Zhang from the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands in Spain.

Located 750 light years away in the constellation of Pisces, SDSS J0104+1535 is made of gas that is around 250 times purer than the Sun, so consists of more than 99.99 per cent hydrogen and helium. 

It is estimated to have formed about 10 billion years ago and measurements also suggest it has a mass equivalent to 90 times that of Jupiter, making it the most massive brown dwarf found to date.

SDSS J0104+1535 has been classified as an L type ultra-subdwarf using its optical and near-infrared spectrum, measured using the European Southern Observatory's "Very Large Telescope" (VLT). This classification was based on a scheme very recently established by Zhang.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate between planets and fully-fledged stars. Their mass is too small for full nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium (with a consequent release of energy) to take place, but they are usually significantly more massive than planets.

It was previously not known if brown dwarfs could form from such primordial gas, and the discovery points the way to a larger undiscovered population of extremely pure brown dwarfs from our Galaxy's ancient past.