Knowledge Update

​New York, Dec 5 (IANS) Frequent casino goers probably know it already, but a new study has found evidence that our decisions tend to be quicker and less accurate as the day wears on.

The findings based on decisions taken by chess players hold true irrespective of whether someone is in the habit of waking up early in the morning or later in the day.

"During the morning, players adopt a prevention focus policy (slower and more accurate decisions) which is later modified to a promotion focus (faster but less accurate decisions), without daily changes in performance," the study said.

Diego Golombek from the National University of Quilmes in Argentina and colleagues said that human behaviour and physiology exhibit fluctuations in a single day. 

The researchers examined the quality of moves in more than one million games of chess in an online database. They charted the decisions of 99 prolific players by gauging the time they took for each move and its usefulness in leading to a victory, Science magazine reported.

Understanding whether decision-making in real-life situations depends on the relation between time of the day and an individual's diurnal preferences has both practical and theoretical implications. 

However, answering this question has remained elusive because of the difficulty of measuring precisely the quality of a decision in real-life scenarios. 

The researchers choose chess players for the study, as in a chess game, every player has to make around 40 decisions using a finite time budget and both the time and quality of each decision can be accurately determined. 

The researchers were not surprised to find that early risers preferred to play more games in the morning, whereas night owls, or those who generally stay up late at night, were active at dusk and beyond. 

But regardless of their diurnal preferences, the players took longer but better decisions in their early games. Their decisions became quicker and less effective by evening, said the study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Cognition.

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) Researchers have found that the vapours which are produced after e-liquid flavourings are heated inside e-cigarettes, are toxic.

According to a study, reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science and Technology, when e-liquid flavourings are heated inside electronic nicotine-delivery systems, the flavourings break down into toxic compounds at levels that exceed occupational safety standards.

The researchers analysed vapours created from both unflavoured and flavoured e-liquids loaded into three popular types of e-cigarettes. 

The results showed that in general, one puff of flavoured vapour contained levels of aldehydes exceeding the safe thresholds for occupational exposure -- set by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists -- by factors of 1.5 to 270. Vapours from unflavoured e-liquids contained aldehydes at significantly lower levels.

Electronic cigarettes were first introduced to the market in 2003 and health officials have been tracking usage and studying potential health effects.

A 2015 survey by the National Centre for Health Statistics reported that 3.7 per cent of adults used the devices regularly and 12.6 per cent had tried them at least once.

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) A team of researchers has created a new method to analyse big data that better predicts outcomes in health care, politics and other fields.

In an effort to reduce the error rate with methods like using a significance-based criterion for evaluating variables to find highly predictive variables, researchers at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard universities in the US proposed a new measure called the influence score, or I-score, to better measure a variable's ability to predict.

In their study, to be published in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that the I-score is effective in differentiating between noisy and predictive variables in big data and can significantly improve the prediction rate.

"The practical implications are what drove the project, so they are quite broad," lead author Adeline Lo said.

"That the I-score fares especially well in high dimensional data and with many complex interactions between variables is an extra boon for the researcher or policy expert interested in predicting something with large dimensional data," Lo, who is a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton's Department of Politics, added.

The I-score improved the prediction rate in breast cancer data from 70 per cent to 92 per cent. 

The I-score can be applied in a variety of fields, including terrorism, civil war, elections and financial markets, the researchers said.

​London, Nov 24 (IANS) For all dog owners out there, your canine friends are paying attention to what you say and do and they'll remember too.

A new study has suggested that just like humans, dogs too have "episodic memory" -- the ability to remember and recall events from the past. 

The study revealed that dogs can recall a person's complex actions even when they don't expect to have their memory tested.

"The results of our study can be considered as a further step to break down artificially erected barriers between animals and humans," said Claudia Fugazza from Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary. 

For the study, the team first trained 17 dogs to imitate human actions with the "Do as I Do" training method, in which dogs watch a person perform an action and then do the action themselves. 

For example, if their owner jumps in the air and then gives the "Do it!" command, the dog would jump in the air too.

Next, the dogs were trained to lie down after watching the human action, no matter what it was.

After the dogs had learned to lie down reliably, the researchers surprised them by saying "Do It" and the dogs did. 

The dogs were then tested in that way after one minute and after one hour. 

The results showed they were able to recall the demonstrated actions after both short and long time intervals. However, their memory faded somewhat over time, the researchers observed.

The same approach can most likely be used and adapted in a wide range of animal species, to better understand how animals' minds process their own actions and that of others around them, the researchers noted, in the study published in the journal Current Biology.

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) While buying toys, parents and grandparents should consider the child's interests, not their gender because limiting choice of toys according to gender can fuel stereotypes, suggests new research.

Clues to the continued dominance of men in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields -- and the reason nurturing often comes more easily to women -- can be found in the children's toy department, said sociologist Elizabeth Sweet from California State University, Sacramento, US.

"When we wall off the toys that develop spatial skills or are devoted to science and say, 'These are only for boys,' and we wall off the toys that develop empathy and verbal skills and say, 'These are only for girls,' it severely limits how children develop," Sweet said in a university statement.

"If kids aren't exposed to the kinds of toys and play that help them develop those skills, they may not be as good at them over time. But even more insidious is that it reinforces the stereotype that boys are good at science and math, and girls are not. It pushes women and girls out of that field, because they think it's not for them," she explained.

Sweet believes that making STEM toys pink, as proposed by some toy manufacturers, would not help much.

"I think that's the wrong approach," Sweet said.

"I think that plays up the stereotype that girls are so different that they need a special kind of STEM toys," noted.

"Research shows that different kinds of toys help children to develop different kinds of skills," she said.

"For instance, building blocks are great for building spatial skills. Playing with dolls is really good for developing language skills and nurturing abilities. All of those skills are essential for a fully functioning human," Sweet pointed out.

New York, Dec 3 (IANS) Jardiance, a prescription medicine used along with diet and exercise to lower blood sugar, can now be prescribed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death in adult patients with Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled.

"Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death in adults with Type-2 diabetes mellitus," Jean-Marc Guettier from FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement on Friday.

"Availability of antidiabetes therapies that can help people live longer by reducing the risk of cardiovascular death is an important advance for adults with Type-2 diabetes," Guettier said.

The FDA's decision is based on a postmarketing study required by the agency when it approved Jardiance in 2014 as an adjunct to diet and exercise to improve glycemic control in adults with Type-2 diabetes mellitus. 

Jardiance, also known as empagliflozin, was studied in a postmarket clinical trial of more than 7,000 patients with Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 

In the trial, Jardiance was shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death compared to a placebo when added to standard of care therapies for diabetes and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, death from cardiovascular disease is 70 per cent higher in adults with diabetes compared to those without diabetes, and patients with diabetes have a decreased life expectancy driven in large part by premature cardiovascular death.

The most common side effects of Jardiance, distributed by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, are urinary tract infections and female genital infections.

New York, Dec 3 (IANS) Researchers have identified a critical cellular "off" switch for the inflammatory immune response that contributes to asthma attacks.

The switch is composed of regulatory proteins that control an immune signalling mechanism in cells, the study said.

"Asthma patients are constantly firing through this pathway because those proteins are stuck in the 'on' position, without proper control by other proteins that shut down this reaction," said Nicola Heller, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US.

Asthma has been correlated with an overabundance of one type of immune cell called M2 macrophages in the lungs. 

In a non-asthmatic person, the M2 macrophages activate to clean up inhaled allergens and foreign particles, and then deactivate when the irritant is broken down.

However, in people with asthma, the M2 cells and the chemical signals they emit linger and call in other cells that cause inflammation that can trigger an asthma attack with the classic symptoms of difficulty breathing, wheezing and shortness of breath. 

Over time, the lung is changed by secretions from the M2 cells, which cause the lung tissue to remodel itself, contributing to irreversible obstruction and poor lung function. 

"If you prevent these cells from becoming the M2 type, you can potentially stop the continued inflammation and long-term structural changes," Heller said.

The researchers believe that the findings, reported in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, also have implications for treatment of cancer and other disorders, such as obesity, in which M2 macrophage cells play a regulatory role in tumour growth and fat deposition.

​Beijing, Dec 3 (IANS) Older adults with cataracts -- clouding of the normally clear lens of the eye -- are more likely to have symptoms of depression, independent of lifestyle factors and visual acuity, a study has found.

The vision loss might cause older adults to become isolated and withdrawn and delve deeper into depression, which might make them less likely to seek treatment for cataracts, the study said.

The findings showed that symptoms of depression were more common in women than men.

Older adults with low levels of education were likely to have a 50 per cent increase in depressive symptoms than those who were highly educated.

There was no difference in depressive symptoms between the elderly with cataracts in one eye versus both eyes.

"Our study sheds further light on the complex relationship between ageing, vision loss, cataract, and depression and suggests that there may be a role for cataract surgery in improving mental health in the elderly," said Haifang Wang, from Soochow University in Suzhou, China.

Age-related cataracts are the leading cause of visual impairment worldwide and are expected to increase as population demographics shift towards advancing age. 

For the study, the team included nearly 4,600 older adults (60 years or older) from China. 

The participants also underwent a clinical eye examination to rate the presence and severity of cataracts.

"These results suggest that optometrists and vision care professionals should think beyond the direct effects of cataracts on visual impairment. We should also consider the broader impact that vision loss may have on mental health and well-being," the researchers said.

The study is published in the journal Optometry and Vision Science. 

​London, Dec 3 (IANS) Using radio telescopes in Australia and the US, an international team of scientists has discovered that the biggest galaxies in the universe develop in cosmic clouds of cold gas.

Until now scientists believed that these "supergalaxies" formed from smaller galaxies that grow closer and closer together until they merge, due to gravitational attraction.

"In the local universe, we see galaxies merging and we expected to observe that the formation of supergalaxies took place in the same way, in the early (now distant) universe," said first author Bjorn Emonts, researcher at Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA) in Madrid. 

To investigate this, telescopes were pointed towards an embryonic galaxy cluster 10 thousand million light years away, in whose interior the giant Spiderweb galaxy is forming, and the scientists discovered a cloud of very cold gas where the galaxies were merging.

This enormous cloud, with some 100 thousand million times the mass of the Sun, is mainly composed of molecular hydrogen, the basic material from which the stars and the galaxies are formed.

Previous studies had discovered the mysterious appearance of thousands of millions of young stars throughout the Spiderweb, and for this reason it is now thought that this supergalaxy condensed directly from the cold gas cloud.

Instead of observing the hydrogen directly, the researchers traced carbon monoxide, which is much easier to detect.

"It is surprising how cold this gas is, at some 200 degrees below zero Celsius," said the study's second author Matthew Lehnert, a researcher at the Astrophysics Institute of Paris.

For the study, the researchers combined the interferometers VLA (Very Large Array) in New Mexico (US) and the ATCA (Australia Telescope Compact Array) in Australia.

"Using sensitive observations of carbon monoxide, we show that the Spiderweb galaxy -- a massive galaxy in a distant protocluster -- is forming from a large reservoir of molecular gas," said the study published in the journal Science.

New York, Dec 2 (IANS) In a step aimed at preventing future outbreak of diseases such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya, researchers in Brazil have developed a test that analyses clinical samples from patients to diagnose infection by 416 viruses found in the world's tropical regions.

The tool can be used by reference laboratories to assist epidemiological surveillance by detecting pathogens with the potential to cause epidemics in humans.

"The number of patients with suspected dengue, Zika or chikungunya infection will increase when summer arrives," said lead author of the study Victor Hugo Aquino, Professor at University of Sao Paulo at Ribeirao Preto.

"Conventional methods are frequently unable to confirm diagnosis of these diseases, so we don't know which viruses are circulating," Aquino noted.

If a tool like this had been available when Zika began circulating in Brazil, it might have been possible to restrict its spread to the initial outbreak location, he said.

"We took a long time to realise an epidemic was under way because no one was thinking of Zika at the time," he said.

In addition to the pathogens, the platform detects others that as yet have been identified only sporadically but could become epidemics.

Examples include Mayaro, an alphavirus related to chikungunya that is transmitted by wild mosquitoes such as Haemagogus janthinomys, and Oropouche, which to date has caused epidemics confined to riverine communities in the Amazon region and is transmitted mainly by midges of the species Culicoides paraensis.

"There are several other viruses that haven't yet caused problems in humans but may do so one day," Aquino said. 

"They're evolving all the time, and with the degradation of natural environments infectious agents once confined to natural niches could spread farther afield," Aquino pointed out.

Although the platform is designed above all to detect pathogens transmitted by arthropods such as mosquitoes and ticks, it can also diagnose infectious agents transmitted by small mammals, like hantavirus, said the study published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.