Knowledge Update

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Increased exposure to gaseous air pollutants such as Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Ozone (O3) can impair the function of blood vessels in the lungs and raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a study.

The findings showed that air pollution is a major public health issue for people living in polluted urban areas where exercise could damage the lungs and potentially lead to decompensated heart failure.

"Air pollution is associated with increased pulmonary vascular tone which makes it more difficult for blood to flow to the lungs. Longer exposure to air pollution exposure seems necessary to impair right ventricular systolic function," said lead author Jean-Francois Argacha, cardiologist at the University Hospital (UZ) in Brussels.

According to researchers, if air pollution causes narrowing of the blood vessels in the lungs -- vasoconstriction -- this combined with the systemic effects of air pollution, which consists of particulate matter of different sizes and gases such as nitrogen dioxide and ozone, could cause decompensated heart failure.

The study showed a negative effect of particulate matter -- PM10, PM2.5 and ozone on pulmonary circulation.

Increase in PM10 and PM2.5 over ten days were associated with worse right ventricle function.

Specifically, increases in these pollutants were associated with reduced pulmonary acceleration time and increased pulmonary acceleration slope.

The negative impact of PM10 on pulmonary circulation was more pronounced in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea.

In addition, the study showed that exposure to diesel exhaust did not modify the pulmonary circulation compared to ambient air when the volunteers were resting but did when dobutamine was administered.

"This suggests that pollution is more harmful to the lung circulation during exercise," Argacha said.

"Our main advice is to limit physical activities during heavy air pollution," Argacha suggested in the study presented at annual meeting EuroEcho-Imaging 2016 in Leipzig, Germany.

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Ever wondered why you can't simply resist that mouth-watering chicken or delicious chocolate cake made by your mother?

According to researchers, food that is perceived to have been "made with love" tastes more delicious.

The emotional perception of taste can be enhanced or diminished by the amount of time, love and care that goes into meals, which ultimately can increase people's enjoyment of food, a Britain-based food psychologist, Christy Fergusson, was quoted as saying by dailymail.co.uk.

"We set out to prove that food made with love tastes better and demonstrates how the power of intention impacts people's perception of food enjoyment," Fergusson said.

The findings revealed that 58 per cent of people enjoy food more when it has been prepared with a certain level of time and love, said research led by Birds Eye -- frozen food firm in Britain.

For the study, the team fed two groups of people with an identical Christmas dinner.

The first group ate their meal in a festively decorated room after being told the food had been lovingly prepared by a team of chefs using family-favourite recipes.

In contrast, the second group ate in conditions where little effort was made to make the participants feel welcome and the room was sparingly decorated.

The results showed that the first group believed their meal tasted better.

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Some groups killifish are up to 8,000 times more resistant than others to highly toxic industrial pollutants such as dioxins, heavy metals and hydrocarbons, thanks to their high levels of genetic variation, a study says.

"The Atlantic killifish seem particularly well-positioned to evolve the necessary adaptations to survive in radically altered habitats, because of their large population sizes and the relatively high level of DNA diversity seen in their populations," said one of the researchers John Colbourne, Professor at University of Birmingham in Britain.

The researchers wanted to explore the genetic mechanism responsible for evolutionary adaptation to toxic pollution observed in wild Atlantic killifish populations.

The Atlantic killifish is renowned for its ability to tolerate large fluctuations in temperature, salinity and oxygen levels. 

However, its rapid adaptation to the normally lethal levels of toxic pollution found in some urban estuaries in the US is unusual, even for such a hardy species.

The team analysed the genomes of four wild populations of pollution-tolerant killifish compared with four non-tolerant populations, to identify the mechanism behind this adaptation. 

"This report highlights the complexity of the processes involved in the adaptation of wild fish to lethal levels of environmental pollution," Colbourne said.

"It also demonstrates how the DNA of populations that differ in their susceptibility to pollutants can reveal 'signatures' of the adverse effects of chemicals in the environment," Colbourne noted.

The researchers warned that these findings -- published today in the journal Science -- should not be used to justify the harm caused by human pollution of the natural environment.

"Unfortunately, most species we care about preserving probably can't adapt to these rapid changes because they don't have the high levels of genetic variation that allow them to evolve quickly," lead author Andrew Whitehead, Associate Professor at University of California, Davis in the US.

​Tokyo, Dec 10 (IANS) Japan on Friday successfully launched a rocket carrying the unmanned cargo spaceship Kounotori 6 to deliver supplies for astronauts living in the International Space Station (ISS).

The H-2B rocket carrying the spaceship lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, at 10:26 p.m. local time (GMT 1326), Xinhua news agency reported.

The spaceship, sixth of its kind, carries some 5.9 tonnes of supplies, including food, drinking water and other necessities, as well as some batteries and ultrasmall satellites.

It is expected to dock with the ISS on Tuesday, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

After the supplies are unloaded to the ISS, the spaceship will then be loaded with waste materials, including used experiment equipment or used clothes and then undock.

Before re-entering the atmosphere, the Kounotori 6 will also conduct experiment on an electrodynamic tether, called the Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiment (KITE).

The launch, originally scheduled for September 2016, was postponed due to piping leakage.

Developed and built in Japan, the Kounotori spacecraft, also known as H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), has been used to deliver supplies to the space station.

The first mission of the HTV, or Kounotori 1, was launched in 2009.

​Toronto, Dec 9 (IANS) Smallpox, a pathogen that caused millions of deaths worldwide, may not be an ancient disease but a much more modern killer that went on to become the first human disease eradicated by vaccination, suggests genetic research.

Smallpox, one of the most devastating viral diseases ever to strike humankind, had long been thought to have appeared in human populations thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, India and China, with some historical accounts suggesting that Pharaoh Ramses V - who died in 1145 BC -- suffered from smallpox.

The new findings, published in the journal Current Biology, fuel a longstanding debate over when the virus that causes smallpox, variola, first emerged and later evolved in response to inoculation and vaccination.

"This study sets the clock of smallpox evolution to a much more recent time-scale" said Eddie Holmes, Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia.

In an attempt to better understand its evolutionary history, and after obtaining clearance from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the team of scientists extracted the heavily fragmented DNA from the partially mummified remains of a Lithuanian child.

The child is believed to have died between 1643 A.D. and 1665 A.D., a period in which several smallpox outbreaks were documented throughout Europe with increasing levels of mortality. 

The smallpox DNA was captured, sequenced and the ancient genome, one of the oldest viral genomes to date, was completely reconstructed. 

Researchers compared and contrasted the 17th century strain with those from a modern databank of samples dating from 1940 up to its eradication in 1977. 

Strikingly, the research showed that the evolution of smallpox virus occurred far more recently than previously thought, with all the available strains of the virus having an ancestor no older than 1580.

"So now that we have a timeline, we have to ask whether the earlier documented historical evidence of smallpox, which goes back to Ramses V and includes everything up to the 1500s, is real," senior author of the study Hendrik Poinar from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, said.

"Are these indeed real cases of smallpox, or are these misidentifications, which we know is very easy to do, because it is likely possible to mistake smallpox for chicken pox and measles," Poinar pointed out.

"It is still unclear what animal is the true reservoir of smallpox virus and when the virus first jumped into humans," Holmes noted.

​Nay Pyi Taw, Dec 9 (IANS) In one-of-a-kind discovery, a tail of a feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber in Myanmar, opening a new window on the biology of a group that dominated earth for more than 160 million years, a media reported on Friday.

Described in the journal Current Biology, the examination of the specimen suggests the tail was chestnut brown on top and white on its underside.

"This is the first time we've found dinosaur material preserved in amber," co-author Ryan McKellar, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told the BBC news.

The study's first author, Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, discovered the remarkable fossil at an amber market in Myitkina, Myanmar.

The 99-million-year-old amber had already been polished for jewellery and the seller had thought it was plant material. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be the tail of a feathered dinosaur about the size of a sparrow.

McKellar said examination of the tail's anatomy showed it definitely belonged to a feathered dinosaur and not an ancient bird.

"We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained.

"Instead, the tail is long and flexible, with keels of feathers running down each side."

McKellar said there are signs the dinosaur still contained fluids when it was incorporated into the tree resin that eventually formed the amber. This indicates that it could even have become trapped in the sticky substance while it was still alive.

Co-author Prof Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, added: "It's amazing to see all the details of a dinosaur tail - the bones, flesh, skin, and feathers - and to imagine how this little fellow got his tail caught in the resin, and then presumably died because he could not wrestle free."

The findings also shed light on how feathers were arranged on these dinosaurs, because 3D features are often lost due to the compression that occurs when corpses become fossils in sedimentary rocks.

The feathers lack the well-developed central shaft - a rachis - known from modern birds. Their structure suggests that the two finest tiers of branching in modern feathers, known as barbs and barbules, arose before the rachis formed.

Paul Barrett, from London's Natural History Museum, called the specimen a "beautiful fossil", describing it as a "really rare occurrence of vertebrate material in amber".

He told BBC news: "Feathers have been recovered in amber before, so that aspect isn't new, but what this new specimen shows is the 3D arrangement of feathers in a Mesozoic dinosaur/bird for the first time, as almost all of the other feathered dinosaur fossils and Mesozoic bird skeletons that we have are flattened and 2D only, which has obscured some important features of their anatomy."

​Washington, Dec 9 (IANS) US researchers said on Thursday they have discovered a tumour in a 255-million-year-old mammalian ancestor called a gorgonopsian.

The tumour, found in the extinct species's fossilised jaw, is a benign one made up of miniature, tooth-like structures, they reported in the latest issue of Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.

Known as a compound odontoma, this type of tumour is common to mammals today. Before this discovery, the earliest known evidence of odontomas came from Ice Age-era fossils, Xinhua reported.

"We think this is by far the oldest known instance of a compound odontoma," said senior author Christian Sidor, a University of Washington (UW) professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. "It would indicate that this is an ancient type of tumour."

According to the study, gorgonopsians were distant mammal relatives and the top predators the apex predator during its pre-dinosaur era about 255 million years ago. 

These animals are part of a larger group of animals called synapsids, which includes modern mammals as its only living member.

Sidor and colleagues spotted the tumour when they examined wafer-thin slices of the fossilised gorgonopsian jaw, collected in southern Tanzani, to see how the tooth was nestled within its socket.

They immediately noticed irregular clusters of up to eight tiny, round objects embedded next to the root of a canine tooth. The objects within each cluster resembled small, poorly differentiated teeth, or toothlets, that harboured distinct layers of dentin and enamel.

"At first we did not know what to make of it," said Megan Whitney, lead author and UW biology graduate student. "But after some investigation we realized this gorgonopsian had what looks like a textbook compound odontoma."

In humans and other mammals, the tumour's toothlets grow within the gums or other soft tissues of the jaw and can cause pain and swelling, as well as disrupt the position of teeth and other tissues, the researchers said.

Odontomas are considered benign tumours because they do not metastasize and spread throughout the body. But given the disruptions they cause, surgeons often opt to remove them.

"Until now, the earliest known occurrence of this tumour was about one million years ago, in fossil mammals," said Judy Skog, programme director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

"These researchers have found an example in the ancestors of mammals that lived 255 million years ago. The discovery suggests that the suspected cause of an odontoma is not tied solely to traits in modern species, as had been thought," Skog added.

​London, Dec 8 (IANS) Repeatedly hearing fake events of the past such as taking a hot air balloon ride, playing a prank on a teacher or creating havoc at a family wedding during childhood, may push people into imagining them and believing that which never happened, researchers say.

In a study conducted on false memories, more than 400 participants were suggested fictitious autobiographical events, nearly 50 per cent believed, to some degree, that they had experienced those events.

Thirty per cent of participants appeared to 'remember' the event, they accepted the suggested event, elaborated on how the event occurred, and even described images of what the event was like.

Another 23 per cent showed signs that they accepted the suggested event to some degree and believed it really happened.

It can be very difficult to determine when a person is recollecting actual past events, as opposed to false memories, even in a controlled research environment and more so in real life situations, said Kimberley Wade from University of Warwick in Britain. 

The study may have significance in many areas such as raising questions around the authenticity of memories used in forensic investigations, court rooms and therapy treatments.

However, misinformation in the news can create incorrect collective memories that can affect behaviour and attitudes of society, the researchers explained.

"The finding that a large portion of people are prone to developing false beliefs is important. We know from other research that distorted beliefs can influence people's behaviours, intentions and attitudes," Wade said.

The study was published in the journal Memory.

New York, Dec 8 (IANS) A team of University of Illinois researchers has discovered the existence of hot atomic hydrogen (H) atoms in an upper layer of Earth's atmosphere known as thermosphere.

This finding significantly changes current understanding of the H distribution and its interaction with other atmospheric constituents.

Because H atoms are very light, they can easily overcome a planet's gravitational force and permanently escape into interplanetary space.

The ongoing atmospheric escape of H atoms is one reason why Earth's sister planet, Mars, has lost the majority of its water.

In addition, H atoms play a critical role in the physics governing the Earth's upper atmosphere and also serve as an important shield for satellites in low-earth orbit against the harsh space environment.

"Hot H atoms had been theorized to exist at very high altitudes, above several thousand km, but our discovery that they exist as low as 250 km was truly surprising," said Lara Waldrop, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and principle investigator of the project.

The result suggests that current atmospheric models are missing some key physics that impacts many different studies, ranging from atmospheric escape to the thermal structure of the upper atmosphere.

The results also show that the presence of such hot H atoms in the thermosphere significantly affects the distribution of the H atoms throughout the entire atmosphere.

The origin of such hot H atoms, previously thought not to be able to exist in the thermosphere, is still a mystery.

"We know that there must be a source of hot H atoms, either in the local thermosphere or in more distant layers of the atmosphere, but we do not have a solid answer yet," said Waldrop in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

​New York, Dec 8 (IANS) Want to live longer? Try to maintain an optimistic outlook towards life -- a general expectation that good things will happen.

In the study, the researchers have found that women who were optimistic had a significantly reduced risk of dying from several major causes of death -- including cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and infection, compared with women who were less optimistic.

"While most medical and public health efforts today focus on reducing risk factors for diseases, evidence has been mounting that enhancing psychological resilience may also make a difference," said Eric Kim, research student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, US.

"Our new findings suggest that we should make efforts to boost optimism, which has been shown to be associated with healthier behaviours and healthier ways of coping with life challenges," Kim added.

The study also found that healthy behaviours only partially explain the link between optimism and reduced mortality risk. 

One other possibility is that higher optimism directly impacts our biological systems, Kim said.

For the study, the team analysed 70,000 women's levels of optimism and other factors that might play a role in how optimism may affect mortality risk, such as race, high blood pressure, diet and physical activity.

The results showed that most optimistic women had a nearly 30 per cent lower risk of dying from any of the diseases analysed in the study compared with the least optimistic women.

Previous studies have shown that optimism can be altered with relatively uncomplicated and low-cost interventions, even something as simple as having people write down and think about the best possible outcomes for various areas of their lives, such as careers or friendships, the researchers said, adding that encouraging the use of such interventions could be an innovative way to enhance health in the future.

The study appeared online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.