Knowledge Update

​New York, Jan 5 (IANS) Scientists have developed a new drug compound that has the potential to stop the spread of melanoma -- the most deadly form of skin cancer -- by up to 90 per cent.

About 10,000 people are estimated to die each year from melanoma, which spreads throughout the body quickly and attacks distant organs such as the brain and lungs. 

"The majority of people die from melanoma because of the disease spreading. Our compound can block cancer migration and potentially increase patient survival," said Richard Neubig, Professor at the Michigan State University. 

The study showed that the compound reduced the migration of melanoma cells by 85-90 per cent. 

The new drug also reduced tumours, specifically in the lungs of mice that had been injected with human melanoma cells, the researchers said.

The findings are an early discovery that could be highly effective in battling the deadly skin cancer, added Kate Appleton, a postdoctoral student at Michigan State University. 

The man-made small-molecule drug compound goes after a gene's ability to produce RNA molecules and certain proteins in melanoma tumours. 

This gene activity, or transcription process, causes the disease to spread but the compound can shut it down.Until now, few other compounds of this kind have been able to accomplish this, the researchers stated.

The compounds were able to stop proteins, known as Myocardin-related transcription factors, or MRTFs, from initiating the gene transcription process in melanoma cells. 

These triggering proteins are initially turned on by another protein called RhoC, or Ras homology C, which is found in a signalling pathway that can cause the disease to spread in the body aggressively.

"The effect of our compounds on turning off this melanoma cell growth and progression is much stronger when the pathway is activated. We could look for the activation of the MRTF proteins as a biomarker to determine risk, especially for those in early-stage melanoma," Appleton said, in the paper published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

​Beijing, Jan 5 (IANS) Chinese scientists are drawing a 1:2.5 million scale geological map of the Moon, a media report said on Thursday.

Ouyang Ziyuan, first chief scientist of China's lunar exploration programme, said five universities and research institutes have set standards for digital mapping and drawing of the Moon's geological structure.

A sketch version of the map, 4.36 metres by 2.2 metres, would be finished by 2018, and released by 2020, Xinhua news agency reported.

The map would provide information on geology, structure and rock types and would reflect the timeline of the Moon's evolution.

Chen Shengbo, a geologist with Jilin University in China, and his team are responsible for drawing the lunar structure outline, which was just one part of the work. 

He said the map would clearly show lunar geography, such as geographic fractures and the size, appearance, and the structure of craters.

Chen said mapping depends on data and images sent by circumlunar satellites from home and abroad. 

Lunar map making was not like drawing a map of the Earth, where scientists can go to the scene in person if they were not sure of their information.

China's satellites have captured images of the Moon, which contribute to the precision of lunar maps. 

​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.