Knowledge Update

​New York, Jan 4 (IANS) Apart from physical problems, people with an impoverished lifestyle in childhood are also likely to suffer significant psychological damage during adulthood.

The findings showed that impoverished children had more anti-social conduct such as aggression and bullying and increased feeling of helplessness, than kids from middle-income backgrounds.

Poor kids also have more chronic physiological stress and more deficits in short-term spatial memory.

"What this means is, if you're born poor, you're on a trajectory to have more of these kinds of psychological problems," said lead author Gary Evans, Professor and child psychologist at the Cornell University in New York, US.

The reason is stress, researchers said.

"With poverty, you're exposed to lots of stress. Everybody has stress, but low-income families, low-income children, have a lot more of it," Evans said. "And the parents are also under a lot of stress. So for kids, there is a cumulative risk exposure."

For the study, Evans tracked 341 participants over a 15-year period, and tested them at ages 9, 13, 17 and 24.

The results revealed that the adults who grew up in poverty had a diminished ability to recall the sequences, tend to be more helpless and had the tendency to give up easily as well as had a higher level of chronic physical stress throughout childhood and into adulthood.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New York, Jan 4 (IANS) Mothers' early and chronic depression may increase the risk of children developing social-emotional problems as well as impact their brain's empathic response to others' distress, a study has found.

The findings showed that in children of depressed mothers, the neural reaction to pain stops earlier than in controls, in an area related to socio-cognitive processing. 

As a result, these children seem to reduce mentalising-related processing of others' pain, perhaps because of difficulty in regulating the high arousal associated with observing distress in others, said lead author Ruth Feldman, Professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

However, when mother-child interactions were more synchronous, that is, mother and child were better attuned to one another and when mothers were less intrusive, these children showed higher mentalising-related processing in this crucial brain area.

"It is encouraging to see the role of mother-child interactions. Depressed mothers are repeatedly found to show less synchronous and more intrusive interactions with their children and so it might explain some of the differences found between children of depressed mothers and controls," Feldman added. 

Apart from reduced empathy to others, children exposed to maternal depression may also have increased social withdrawal and poor emotion regulation, the researchers said.

For the study, the team followed mother-child pairs -- 27 children of mothers with depression and 45 controls -- from birth to age 11. 

Since 15-18 per cent of women in industrial societies and up to 30 per cent in developing countries suffer from maternal depression, it is of clinical and public health concern to understand the effects of maternal depression on children's development, the researchers noted. 

The study was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP). 

​New York, Jan 4 (IANS) Green innovations must be developed and spread globally 10 times faster than in the past if we are to limit warming to below the Paris Agreement's two degrees Celsius target, says a study.

"Based on our calculations, we won't meet the climate warming goals set by the Paris Agreement unless we speed up the spread of clean technology by a full order of magnitude, or about ten times faster than in the past," said lead researcher Gabriele Manoli from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, US.

"Radically new strategies to implement technological advances on a global scale and at unprecedented rates are needed if current emissions goals are to be achieved," Manoli said.

The study used delayed differential equations to calculate the pace at which global per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide have increased since the Second Industrial Revolution -- a period of rapid industrialisation at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th. 

The analysis showed that per-capita CO2 emissions have increased about 100 per cent every 60 years -- typically in big jumps -- since then. 

The researchers then compared this pace to the speed of new innovations in low-carbon-emitting technologies.

Using these historical trends coupled with projections of future global population growth, Manoli and his colleagues were able to estimate the likely pace of future emissions increases and also determine the speed at which climate-friendly technological innovation and implementation must occur to hold warming below the Paris Agreement's two degrees Celsius target.

"It's no longer enough to have emissions-reducing technologies," Manoli said. 

"We must scale them up and spread them globally at unprecedented speeds," he added.

The findings were published in the journal Earth's Future.

​London, Jan 4 (IANS) Irish scientists have recently identified a new human organ that has existed in the digestive system for hundreds of years.

Named as the mesentery, the organ connects the intestine to the abdomen and had for hundreds of years been considered a fragmented structure made up of multiple separate parts. 

However, researchers led by J Calvin Coffey, Professor at University of Limerick (Ireland), describe the mesentery as an undivided structure and outlined the evidence for categorising the mesentery as an organ in the paper published in the journal The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Mesentery is a fold of the peritoneum which attaches the stomach, small intestine, pancreas, spleen, and other organs to the posterior wall of the abdomen.

During the initial research, the researchers found that the mesentery, which connects the gut to the body, was one continuous organ. 

"Up till then it was regarded as fragmented, present here, absent elsewhere and a very complex structure. The anatomic description that had been laid down over 100 years of anatomy was incorrect. This organ is far from fragmented and complex. It is simply one continuous structure," Coffey explained.

Better understanding and further scientific study of the mesentery could lead to less invasive surgeries, fewer complications, faster patient recovery and lower overall costs.

"When we approach it like every other organ...we can categorise abdominal disease in terms of this organ," Coffey said.

According to Coffey, mesenteric science is a separate field of medical study in the same way as gastroenterology and others.

"Up to now there was no such field as mesenteric science. Now we have established anatomy and the structure," Coffey noted.

​Beijing, Jan 4 (IANS) China plans to conduct some 30 space launch missions in 2017, a record-breaking number in the country's space history, said China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

Long March-5 and Long March-7 rockets would be used to carry out most of the space missions, the China News Service reported.

Long March-5 is China's largest carrier rocket. The successful test launch of the vehicle in November in Hainan would pave the way for space station construction, analysts said.

Wang Yu, general director of the Long March-5 program, said 2017 is a critical year for China's new generation of carrier rockets and the Long March-5 rockets would carry Chang'e-5 probe to space. 

The probe would land on the moon, collect samples and return to Earth.

On the other hand, Long March-7, the more powerful version of Long March-2, would send China's first cargo spacecraft Tianzhou-1 into the space in the first half of 2017, according to Wang Zhaoyao, director of China Manned Space Engineering Office. 

Tianzhou-1 was expected to dock with Tiangong-2 space lab and conduct experiments on propellant supplement, People's Daily reported.

China conducted 22 launch missions in 2016 and 19 in 2015. The country successfully tested its Long March-7 rocket in June 2016, and has gradually shifted to new generation rockets that reduce the use of toxic rocket fuels.

​New York, Jan 3 (IANS) Researchers have developed a new non-invasive retinal imaging technique that could prevent vision loss in diseases like glaucoma -- the second leading cause of acquired blindness worldwide.

The new technique called multi-offset detection, which images the human retina -- a layer of cells at the back of the eye that are essential for vision -- was able to distinguish individual retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which bear most of the responsibility of relaying visual information to the brain. The death of these RGCs causes vision loss in glaucoma, the researchers said.

Glaucoma is currently diagnosed by assessing the thickness of the nerve fibres projecting from the RGCs to the brain.

However, by the time retinal nerve fibre thickness has changed detectably, a patient may have lost 100,000 RGCs or more.

"You only have 1.2 million RGCs in the whole eye, so a loss of 100,000 is significant," said David Williams from the University of Rochester in New York, US.

"The sooner we can catch the loss, the better our chances of halting the disease and preventing vision loss," Williams added.

For the study, the team modified an existing technology -- known as confocal adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscopy (AOSLO). They collected multiple images, varying the size and location of the detector they used to gather light scattered out of the retina for each image, and then combined those images.

The results showed that the technique not only enabled to visualise individual RGCs, but even the structures within the cells like nuclei could also be distinguished in animals.

If this level of resolution can be achieved in humans, it may be possible to assess glaucoma before the retinal nerve fibre thins -- and even before any RGCs die -- by detecting size and structure changes in RGC cell bodies.

"This technique offers the opportunity to evaluate many cell classes that have previously remained inaccessible to imaging in the living eye," Ethan Rossi, Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburg in the US, noted in the paper appearing in the journal PNAS.

​New York, Jan 3 (IANS) People who can notice misinformation that is inconsistent with the original event may have better memory compared with people who never saw the misinformation, a study has found.

The findings showed that although exposure to misinformation seemed to impair memory for the correct detail, detecting and remembering misinformation in the narrative seemed to improve participants' recognition later on.

Details that were less memorable, relatively speaking, were more vulnerable to the misinformation effect, the researchers said.

"Our study shows that misinformation can sometimes enhance memory rather than harm it," said lead author Adam Putnam.

"These findings are important because they help explain why misinformation effects occur sometimes but not at other times -- if people notice that the misinformation isn't accurate then they won't have a false memory," Putnam, who is a psychological scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota, US added.

The study suggests that the relationship between misinformation and memory is more complex than we might have thought -- mere exposure to misinformation does not automatically cue the misinformation effect, the researchers noted.

"Classic interference theory in memory suggests that change is almost always bad for memory, but our study is one really clear example of how change can help memory in the right circumstances," Putnam explained.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.

​Washington, Jan 3 (IANS) Contradicting a prevalent perception, a new study says that our brain enlargement and dental reduction did not happen in lockstep.

The findings suggest that evolution of brain and tooth size in humans were likely influenced by different ecological and behavioural factors.

"Once something becomes conventional wisdom, in no time at all it becomes dogma," said study co-author Bernard Wood, Professor at George Washington University, US.

"The co-evolution of brains and teeth was on a fast-track to dogma status, but we caught it in the nick of time," Wood noted.

This research challenges the common view that reduction of tooth size in hominins is linked with having a larger brain. 

The reasoning is that larger brains allowed hominins to start making stone tools and that the use of these tools reduced the need to have such large chewing teeth. 

But recent studies by other authors found that hominins had larger brains before chewing teeth became smaller, and they made and used stone tools when brains were still quite small, which challenges this relationship.

The new study -- published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- evaluated this issue by measuring and comparing the rates at which teeth and brains have evolved along the different branches of the human evolutionary tree.

"The findings of the study indicate that simple causal relationships between the evolution of brain size, tool use and tooth size are unlikely to hold true when considering the complex scenarios of hominin evolution and the extended time periods during which evolutionary change has occurred," lead author Aida Gomez-Robles from George Washington University noted.

For the study, the researchers analysed eight different hominin species. 

They identified fast-evolving species by comparing differences between groups with those obtained when simulating evolution at a constant rate across all lineages, and they found clear differences between tooth evolution and brain evolution. 

New York, Jan 3 (IANS) The eggs of non-avian dinosaurs took nearly between three to six months to hatch, similar to crocodiles and lizards, which explains the reason behind the extinction of the dinosaur species, scientists have found.

It was long assumed that the duration of dinosaur incubation was similar to birds, whose eggs hatch within 11 to 85 days, but they are more like of reptiles whose eggs take weeks to months to hatch.

"Some of the greatest riddles about dinosaurs pertain to their embryology -- virtually nothing is known. Did their eggs incubate slowly like their reptilian cousins? Or rapidly like living dinosaurs -- the birds," asked lead author Gregory Erickson, Professor at Florida State University. 

For the study, the team examined the fossilised teeth of two extremely well-preserved ornithischian dinosaur embryos: Protoceratops -- a pig-sized dinosaur, whose eggs weighed 194 grams -- and Hypacrosaurus -- a very large duck-billed dinosaur, with eggs weighing more than 4-kg.

Analysing the pattern of "von Ebner" lines -- the growth lines that are present in the teeth of all animals, as well as humans --, the researchers found that the Protoceratops embryos were about three months old when they died and the Hypacrosaurus embryos were about six months old. 

"These are the lines that are laid down when any animal's teeth develops. They're kind of like tree rings, but they are put down daily. And so we could literally count them to see how long each dinosaur had been developing," Erickson added.

In addition, the study found that the prolonged incubation may have affected dinosaurs' ability to compete with more rapidly generating populations of birds, reptiles, and mammals following the mass extinction event that occurred 65 million years ago. 

The long incubation period also exposed the non-avian dinosaur eggs and attending parents to predators, starvation, and environmental disruptions such as flooding, the researchers stated, in the paper published in the journal PNAS.

​New York, Jan 3 (IANS) Seven Zika virus proteins, believed to cause conditions, including birth defects such as microcephaly and neurological problems such as Guillain-Barre syndrome, have been identified.

"The mechanism of Zika virus has been a real mystery," said lead researcher Richard Zhao, Professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM). 

"These results give us crucial insight into how Zika affects cells. We now have some really valuable clues for future research," Zhao added.

Zika virus infected hundreds of thousands of people around the world, mostly in the Americas. No vaccines or treatments to prevent or treat the symptoms of Zika infection has been developed yet.

To test the virus, Zhao used fission yeast -- a species that in recent years has become a relatively common way to test how pathogens affect cells. 

For the experiment, Zhao separated each of the virus's 14 proteins and small peptides from the overall virus. He then exposed yeast cells to each of the 14 proteins, to see how the cells responded. 

Seven of the 14 proteins harmed or damaged the yeast cells in some way, inhibiting their growth, damaging them or killing them.

The next step is to understand more about how these seven proteins work in humans. It may be that some of them are more damaging than others, or perhaps all of them work in concert to cause harm, the researchers said. 

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).