Knowledge Update

New York, March 9 (IANS) The preliminary results of an experiment confirm what the 2015 Hollywood science fiction film "The Martian" showed: potatoes can grow on Mars.

The International Potato Centre (CIP) in Lima, Peru, launched a series of experiments to discover if potatoes can grow under Mars atmospheric conditions and thereby prove they are also able to grow in extreme climates on Earth. 

The new phase of CIP's experiment to grow potatoes in simulated Martian conditions began on February 14 last year.

Based upon designs and advice provided by the NASA's Ames Research Centre in California, a tuber was planted in a specially constructed CubeSat contained environment built by engineers from the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima.

"If the crops can tolerate the extreme conditions that we are exposing them to in our CubeSat, they have a good chance to grow on Mars. We will do several rounds of experiments to find out which potato varieties do best," said Julio Valdivia-Silva from UTEC. 

"We want to know what the minimum conditions are that a potato needs to survive," he said in a statement released by CIP.

The CubeSat houses a container holding soil and the tuber. Inside this hermetically sealed environment, the CubeSat delivers nutrient-rich water, controls the temperature for Mars day and night conditions, and mimics Mars air pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. 

Live streaming cameras recording the soil showed potato sprouting in the simulated Martian conditions.

The results so far have been positive, the researchers said.

​London, March 9 (IANS) Far from being limited to a gifted few, the ability to perform astonishing feats of memory, such as remembering lists of several dozen words, can be learned, say researchers.

In a study published in the journal Neuron, the researchers showed that after 40 days of daily 30-minute training sessions using a strategic memory improvement technique, individuals who had typical memory skills at the start and no previous memory training more than doubled their memory capacity.

From recalling an average of 26 words from a list of 72, the participants were able to remember on an average 62 words, the findings showed. 

Brain scans before and after training showed that strategic memory training altered the brain functions of the trainees, making them more similar to those of memory champions. 

"After training we see massively increased performance on memory tests," said study first author Martin Dresler, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 

"Not only can you induce a behavioural change, the training also induces similar brain connectivity patterns as those seen in memory athletes," Dresler said.

To explore the effects of training on the brain, Dresler and his colleagues recruited 51 individuals with typical memory skills and no previous memory training. 

They were split into three groups -- two training groups and one group that did not train. The researchers scanned participants' brains before and after training.

The two training methods were short-term memory training and strategic memory training. 

During short-term memory training, an individual practices remembering sequences, a bit like playing the game Concentration. 

Strategic memory training provides trainees with a systematic way to remember lists.

In this study, the strategy Dresler chose was memory of loci training, which is employed by most world champion memory athletes. 

Using this strategy, items on a list are associated with a remembered place, and users navigate that remembered place as they recall the list. 

Those who trained using method of loci showed substantial improvement in their ability to recall lists of words. 

Before training, individuals could recall on average between 26 and 30 words. 

Afterwards, those with strategic memory training could recall 35 more words on average. 

Those who trained short-term memory could recall 11 more words. Those with no training recalled seven more words.

A day later, those who had trained still showed improvements in recall. 

Four months later, only those with strategic training continued to show substantial gains, still recalling over 22 more words than prior to training. 

"Once you are familiar with these strategies and know how to apply them, you can keep your performance high without much further training," Dresler said.

​New York, March 9 (IANS) Eating yogurt rich in lactobacillus -- a probiotic bacteria -- may help alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety, a finding that could lead to new strategies for treating psychiatric conditions, researchers have found.

Depression is a huge problem and the treatments are not very good, because they come with huge side effects.

"The study will help us not to bother with complex drugs and side effects when we can just play with the microbiome. It would be magical just to change your diet, to change the bacteria you take, and fix your health -- and your mood," said lead researcher Alban Gaultier from the University of Virginia in the US.

In the study, conducted on mice, the researchers have discovered a specific mechanism for how the lactobacillus bacteria affect mood, providing a direct link between the health of the gut microbiome and mental health. 

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the team induced depression symptoms in mice to analyse their composition of the gut microbiome and found that the major change was the loss of lactobacillus. 

With the loss of lactobacillus came the onset of depression symptoms. Conversely, feeding the mice lactobacillus with their food returned them to almost normal, the researchers said. 

"A single strain of lactobacillus, is able to influence mood," Gaultier observed. 

In addition, the study found that the amount of lactobacillus in the gut affects the level of a metabolite in the blood -- called kynurenine -- which has been shown to drive depression.

When lactobacillus was diminished in the gut, the levels of kynurenine went up -- and depression symptoms set in.

While there is no harm in people with depression eating yogurt, people receiving treatment for depression should not stop taking their medications without consulting their physicians, the researchers suggested.

Based on the findings, the researchers plan to begin studying the effect in humans as soon as possible.

New York, March 7 (IANS) Tires of the future could come from the farm as much as the factory as researchers have found a way to turn waste tomato peels and eggshells into sustainable rubber.

The researchers discovered that food waste can partially replace carbon black, the petroleum-based filler that has been used in manufacturing tires for more than a century.

In tests, rubber made with the new fillers exceeds industrial standards for performance, which may ultimately open up new applications for rubber.

The method for turning eggshells and tomato peels into viable - and locally sourced--replacements for carbon black was developed by Katrina Cornish and colleagues from The Ohio State University in the US.

"We found that replacing different portions of carbon black with ground eggshells and tomato peels caused synergistic effects - for instance, enabling strong rubber to retain flexibility," Cindy Barrera, a postdoctoral researcher in Cornish's lab, said in a statement. 

While the findings could make the manufacture of rubber products more sustainable and also keep waste out of landfills.

The researchers found in tests that eggshells have porous microstructures that provide larger surface area for contact with the rubber, and give rubber-based materials unusual properties. 

Tomato peels, on the other hand, are highly stable at high temperatures and can also be used to generate material with good performance.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) Head injuries can harm hundreds of genes in the brain in a way that increases people's risk for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, says a study.

"Very little is known about how people with brain trauma -- like football players and soldiers -- develop neurological disorders later in life," said study co-senior author Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

"We hope to learn much more about how this occurs," Gomez-Pinilla said.

For the study, the researchers trained 20 rats to escape from a maze. They then used a fluid to produce a concussion-like brain injury in 10 of the rats; the 10 others did not receive brain injuries.

When the rats were placed in the maze again, those that had been injured took approximately 25 per cent longer than the non-injured rats to solve it.

To learn how the rats' genes had changed in response to the brain injury, the researchers analyzed genes from five animals in each group. 

Specifically, they drew RNA from the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that helps regulate learning and memory, and from leukocytes, white blood cells that play a key role in the immune system.

In the rats that had sustained brain injuries, there was a core group of 268 genes in the hippocampus that the researchers found had been altered, and a core group of 1,215 genes in the leukocytes that they found to have been changed.

More than 100 of the genes that changed after the brain injury have counterparts in humans that have been linked to neurological and psychiatric disorders, the researchers reported in the study published in the journal EbioMedicine.

As a number of the affected genes are present in both the hippocampus and blood, the findings could pave the way for a gene-based blood test to determine whether a brain injury has occurred.

Measuring some of those genes could help doctors predict whether a person is likely to develop neurological disorders later in life, the study said.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) NASA is all set to send an ice chest-sized box to the International Space Station to create the coolest spot in the universe.

The suite of instruments developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is set to be sent on a SpaceX cargo delivery to the space station in August, the US space agency said on Monday.

The ice box called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is in the final stages of assembly at JPL.

"Its instruments are designed to freeze gas atoms to a mere billionth of a degree above absolute zero. That's more than 100 million times colder than the depths of space," NASA said in a statement.

"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," said CAL Project Scientist Robert Thompson of JPL. 

"The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy -- some of the most pervasive forces in the universe," Thompson said.

When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL, they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. 

In this state, familiar rules of physics recede and quantum physics begins to take over. 

Matter can be observed behaving less like particles and more like waves. 

NASA has never before created or observed Bose-Einstein condensates in space. On Earth, the pull of gravity causes atoms to continually settle towards the ground, meaning they are typically only observable for fractions of a second.

But on the International Space Station, ultra-cold atoms can hold their wave-like forms longer while in freefall. That offers scientists a longer window to understand physics at its most basic level. 

Thompson estimated that CAL will allow Bose-Einstein condensates to be observable for up to five to 10 seconds and future development of the technologies used on CAL could allow them to last for hundreds of seconds.

Five scientific teams plan to conduct experiments using the Cold Atom Lab. 

The results of these experiments could potentially lead to a number of improved technologies, including sensors, quantum computers and atomic clocks used in spacecraft navigation, NASA said.

New York, March 7 (IANS) Lungs tend to quickly lose their function outside the body. But this may soon change as researchers have found a method that could help maintain a fully functional lung outside the body for up to a week or even longer.

Lengthening the time to keep lungs functional outside the body could boost transplantation as a vast majority of donor lungs get rejected during transplantation due to delay in transport. It could also allow doctors to repair damaged donor lungs and make them suitable for transplant.

The research team found that "cross circulation" -- an abandoned surgical procedure used in the 1960s to exchange blood flow between two patients -- could enable long-term support of living organs outside the body by providing critical systemic and metabolic factors that are missing from all current technologies. 

Taking a cue from this procedure, the researchers developed a new technology to support fully functional lung outside the body for several days, according to a study published online in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

"Our cross-circulation platform will likely allow us to extend the duration of support to a week or longer if needed, potentially enabling the recovery of severely damaged organs," said one of the lead researchers John O'Neill from Columbia University Medical Centre in the US. 

"Beyond prolonging support time, we also demonstrated several therapeutic interventions that vastly improve and accelerate recovery," O'Neill noted.

The researchers said that their new platform could be readily extended to recover other organs that are in high demand for transplant or in need of repair, including livers and kidneys, and they have already begun studies in these directions.

​Toronto, March 6 (IANS) Researchers have shown that synthetic DNA motors can work in living cells and help early detection of deadly diseases such as cancer and also make drug delivery more precise.

"This is really big because of the diverse potential applications," said one of the researchers Chris Le, Professor at University of Alberta in Canada.

"One outcome of this will be to provide better and earlier disease detection. Another is the controllable release of targeted drug molecules within patients, resulting in fewer side effects," Le said.

The process -- previously only successful in test tubes -- was described in a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

The team created the nanomachine from compartments made up of DNA enzyme molecules and substrates. 

"This nanomachine has the required fuels, DNA tracks, and a molecular switch," said Hongquan Zhang, Assistant Professor at University of Alberta, Canada.

For the study, it was 'tuned' to detect a specific microRNA sequence found in breast cancer cells. 

When it came into contact with the targetted molecules, the DNA motor was turned on and produced fluorescence as part of a reaction. 

The researchers were able to monitor the fluorescence, detecting which cells were cancerous. 

"We want to be able to detect cancer or disease markers in very minute amounts before the disease gets out of hand. That way physicians can attack it very early," Le said. 

"The trace amount of the target molecules that may be missed by other techniques can now be detected with this one," Le noted.

In addition to the potential for improved disease diagnosis, the researchers said DNA motors could also be used for precision drug delivery in patients. 

Conventional targetted drug therapy delivers medicine to a selectively targeted site of action, yet it still affects a large number of molecules that are not diseased. 

With the DNA motor, a drug payload can be delivered and then released only when triggered by disease specific molecules, the researchers said.

Rome, March 6 (IANS/AKI) The number of babies born in Italy hit a new historic low of 474,000 last year, 12,000 fewer than the 486,000 born in 2015, national statistics agency Istat said on Monday.

The total fertility rate fell to 1.34 children per woman in 2016 from 1.35 the previous year, while the average age at which women gave birth was nearly 32 (31.7 years), confirming the trend towards having children later, Istat data showed.

The drop in fertility "was due to the reduction of women of childbearing age (for national women) 
and to the aging process (for non national women)", Istat said.

Italy's population shrank to 60,579,000 in 2016, 86,000 less people than in the previous year, according to Istat figures.

A total of 134,000 more people died than were born in 2016, the second worse result ever, Istat said. 

There were more than 13.5 million people aged over 65 (22.3 percent of Italy's population) last year, 4.1 million over 80 and 17,000 people aged 100 and above, according to Istat.

Life expectancy rose in 2016 to 80.6 years for men and 85.1 years for women - a six-month increase for both sexes compared to last year, Istat figures showed.

New York, March 5 (IANS) Plants could be a renewable and biodegradable alternative to the polymers currently used in 3-D printing materials, researchers have found.

A new paper, published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies, found that cellulose might become an abundant material to print with.

"Cellulose is the most important component in giving wood its mechanical properties. And because it is so inexpensive, it is biorenewable, biodegradable and also very chemically versatile, it is used in a lot of products," said Sebastian Pattinson, lead author of a paper, from Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT).

"Cellulose and its derivatives are used in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, as food additives, building materials, clothing -- all sorts of different areas. And a lot of these kinds of products would benefit from the kind of customisation that additive manufacturing [3-D printing] enables," Pattinson added.

When heated, cellulose thermally decomposes before it becomes flowable, partly because of the hydrogen bonds that exist between the cellulose molecules. The intermolecular bonding also makes high-concentration cellulose solutions too viscous to easily extrude.

"We found that the strength and toughness of the parts we got... was greater than many commonly used materials for 3-D printing, including acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polylactic acid (PLA)," he said.

Cellulose acetate is already widely available as a commodity product. In bulk, the material is comparable in price to that of thermoplastics used for injection molding and it's much less expensive than the typical filament materials used for 3-D printing.