Knowledge Update

​New York, Nov 20 (IANS) In a breakthrough research, US scientists have identified that early signs of Alzheimer's disease can be detected by looking at the back of patients' eyes.

The researchers found that the retina tissue shows evidence of toxic tau and inflammation -- crucial for the onset of the neurodegenerative disease.

"Using the retina for detecting Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases would be non-invasive, inexpensive and could become a part of a normal screening done at patient checkups," said lead author Ashley Nilson, graduate student at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The study demonstrated that the toxic tau, which spreads between connected brain regions, may initiate inflammation in brain regions.

In Alzheimer's, the tau protein changes into a toxic form called tau oligomers and begins clumping into neurofibrillary tangles, which can leading to the eventual death of the brain cells.

"Our findings suggest that the degeneration of nerve cells due to chronic inflammation induced by the tau oligomers may be combated through the combination of anti-tau oligomer and anti-inflammatory therapeutics for the treatment of Alzheimer's and related diseases," added Rakez Kayed, Associate Professor at The University of Texas Medical Branch.

This situation can create a cycle of toxic tau, inflammation and cell death throughout the brain over time.

For the study, the team performed a systematic analyses of brain and retina samples from people with Alzheimer's and a mouse model of Alzheimer's.

"Early detection of Alzheimer's warning signs would allow for early intervention and prevention of neurodegeneration before major brain cell loss and cognitive decline occurs," Nilson said.

Beyond determining eye health and corrective lens prescriptions, having an eye exam can alert health care professionals of several different health conditions including diabetic complications, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the researchers suggested, in the paper in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

New York, Nov 19 (IANS) Increased sensitivity to uncertain threat, or fear of the unknown, is common to many anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, social anxiety disorder and specific phobias, says a study.

The finding could help steer treatment of these disorders away from diagnosis-based therapies to treating their common characteristics.

"Knowing that sensitivity to uncertain threat underlies all of the fear-based anxiety disorders also suggests that drugs that help specifically target this sensitivity could be used or developed to treat these disorders," said senior author on the study K. Luan Phan, Professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

"A treatment, or set of treatments, focused on sensitivity to uncertain threat could result in a more impactful and efficient way of treating a variety of anxiety disorders and symptoms," Stephanie Gorka from the University of Illinois College of Medicine, added. 

Uncertain threat is unpredictable in its timing, intensity, frequency or duration and elicits a generalised feeling of apprehension and hypervigilance.

When a person is sensitive to uncertain threat, they can spend the entire day anxious and concerned that something bad could happen to them, Gorka said.

Panic disorder is one example -- patients are constantly anxious over the fact that they could have a panic attack at any moment, she said.

Predictable threat, on the other hand, produces a discreet fight-or-flight response that has a clear trigger and it abates once the threat has resolved.

For the study, the researchers looked at data from participants who underwent a task in two different studies performed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

The two studies, of participants aged 18 to 65, included 25 participants with major depressive disorder; 29 with generalised anxiety disorder; 41 with social anxiety disorder; and 24 with a specific phobia. 

Forty one control participants had no current or prior diagnoses of psychopathology.

The researchers measured the participants' eye-blink responses to predictable and unpredictable mild electric shocks to the wrist. To elicit blinking during the shock-task, the participants heard short, acoustic tones via headphones.

The study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, found that participants with social anxiety disorder or a specific phobia blinked much more strongly during the unpredictable shocks, when compared to participants without a mental health diagnosis.

​London, Nov 18 (IANS) Although well associated with lowering cardiovascular disease risk high-density lipoprotein (HDL) -- known as good cholesterol -- may not always be able to protect against heart disease.

A new study has suggested that it increases the inflammatory response of certain immune cells called macrophages.

This can potentially counteract its well-established anti-inflammatory effect in various other cell types, the study said.

"Good cholesterol's functions are not as simple as initially thought, and appear to critically depend on the target tissue and cell type," said Marjo Donners of Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

"In the end, it is the balance between its pro- and anti-inflammatory effects that determines clinical outcome," Donners added.

In the study, the researchers found that HDL treatment enhanced inflammation in macrophages, in contrast to its effects in other cell types. Similarly, macrophages taken from mice with elevated HDL levels showed clear signs of inflammation.

This pro-inflammatory effect induced by HDL showed enhanced pathogen protection, the researchers said.

Lung macrophages ingested disease-causing bacteria upon exposure to HDL. On the other hand, mice with low HDL levels were impaired at clearing these bacteria from the lungs. 

The results demonstrate that HDL's pro-inflammatory activity supports the proper functioning of macrophage immune responses.

According to Donners, these findings suggest that patients with persistent infections or specific immune disorders might benefit from HDL-raising therapies.

The research could also lead to the development of cell-specific therapies that exploit the benefits of HDL-targeted therapies while avoiding the side effects, the researchers noted.

The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

​New Delhi, Nov 18 (IANS) Leveraging India's growing importance as a resource hub, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has launched a unique 'Diya' (light initiative to catalyse higher education in this country and to forge sustainable partnerships with Indian institutions in the field.

The initiative is symbolic of the illumination that higher education can bring in the lives of people, UNSW President and Vice Chancellor Professor Ian Jacobs said during a lecture on 'Education, Technology and Transformational Change', adding that through it, the university aims to provide degree education at and through UNSW for as many as 1 lakh Indian students across the next decade.

"We plan to facilitate this with investment in educational technology, including online teaching and learning, through mutually beneficial partnerships across India's higher education system and with India's national and state governments," Jacobs explained.

He added that the UNSW Diya initiative will demonstrate the varsity's commitment to building much-needed capacity in India's higher education system, to expanding the skills needed to drive India's development agenda and to power its economy. It will also in a large way contribute to the government's ambitious plans including Make in India, Startup India and Digital India.

Jacobs also announced the launch of UNSW's scholarship programmes for Indian students which aim at helping them achieve their potential, and enhance the experience of individuals who might otherwise struggle financially to maintain a place at university. He pointed out that in addition to UNSW Diya, these new India Scholarships too will bring the transformative power of a UNSW education to outstanding Indian students at the undergraduate, postgraduate and research levels.

UNSW is also actively partnering with the Indian government on a series of initiatives that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unveiled in the recent past. One of them is SWAYAM - an Information Technology platform which will host a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and provide high quality education on various subjects from school level -- class 9-12 to undergraduate and postgraduate students -- covering all disciplines.

"Increasingly, the future will depend on non-traditional forms of education, especially on digital delivery, which offers incredible opportunities for providing educational opportunities to millions who would otherwise have no access to the best teachers and resources. Online learning will prove transformational in making India competitive with the world," he said.

Meanwhile, UNSW is also actively partnering with the Indian government on its Smart Cities agenda by working on a major symposium for next year. 

"We will be bringing our expertise on Low Carbon Living, Built Environment, Materials Science and Computer Science and Engineering. Discussions are currently underway between the Ministry of Electronics and IT and the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at UNSW on a series of programmes related to creating greater awareness on cyber security," Jacobs stated.

He also touched upon the point of how given the current global political scenario, Australia could well be a good option as an academic destination for Indian students. 

"While it's perhaps too early to assess the impacts of the Brexit vote in the UK or the Trump vote in America, I believe that the relative stability of Australia in an uncertain world makes it a highly attractive option for Indian students seeking an international education. Many young Indian students will in future see Australia as at least as an attractive option as the USA and UK."

To bolster its partnership with India, the university had in July appointed former Indian Consul General, career diplomat and educator Amit Dasgupta as its inaugural India Country Director. The appointment is aimed at helping UNSW work across the highest levels of government and industry to ensure India becomes one of its flagship partnerships.

Jacobs was on a three-city tour to India which included visits to Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai. He and his team held a series of meetings and talks with government officials and corporate heads during the visit to enhance relations between the two countries. Strengthening education, research and knowledge exchange in India has been on top of the agenda during the Vice Chancellor's entire stay in India.

​Moscow, Nov 18 (IANS) Multitasking is harder for men because they need to mobilise additional areas of their brain and use more energy than women when switching attention between tasks, says a study.

"Our findings suggest that women might find it easier than men to switch attention and their brains do not need to mobilise extra resources in doing so, as opposed to male brains," said one of the researchers, Svetlana Kuptsova from National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.

Such differences are typical of younger men and women aged 20 to 45, according to findings published in the journal Human Physiology.

Regardless of gender and age, task switching always involves activation in certain areas of the brain, more specifically, bilateral activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal areas, inferior parietal lobes and inferior occipital gyrus.

However, experiments conducted in this study demonstrated that in women, task switching appears to require less brain power compared to men, who showed greater activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal areas as well as the involvement of supplementary motor areas and insula, which was not observed in women.

The experiments involved 140 healthy volunteers, including 69 men and 71 women aged between 20 and 65. 

The participants were asked to perform a variety of tasks. In one of the experiments using functional MRI, they were asked to perform a test that required switching attention between sorting objects according to shape (round or square) and number (one or two).

The use of functional MRI allowed the researchers not only to observe the participants' behaviour, but also to see what was going on in the brain as the participants switched between tasks and detect differences in brain activation between men and women.

The researchers found that the gender differences in the extent of brain activation when switching between tasks only occurred in participants younger than those aged 45 to 50, while those aged 50 and older showed no gender differences either in brain activation or speed of task switching.

​New York, Nov 18 (IANS) There has been a decline in the percentage of women working at Microsoft, said the company's diversity report, adding that the technology giant saw "modest gains" in the representation of African Americans, Black and Hispanic/Latino(a) employees.

By the end of September 2016, women made up 25.8 percent of Microsoft's global workforce which is a one percent drop from previous year's 26.8 percent, said the report release on Thursday. 

In 2014, 29 percent of Microsoft's global workforce comprised of women.

"This decline was largely due to the business decision we shared last year to restructure our phone hardware business (Nokia), which resulted in the closure of some factories outside the U.S. The workforce at these factories had a higher representation of women, so their closure impacted our total representation of women," said Gwen Houston, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Microsoft.

The diversity repport provides a glimpse of the gender and racial composition of Microsoft's employee population as of September 30, 2016.

Microsoft is creating and delivering compelling career development offerings for women and racial/ethnic minorities, Houston said.

New York, Nov 18 (IANS) People who show strong curiosity traits on personality tests perform better on creative tasks, according to a new study.

This is especially true for those with a strong diversive curiosity trait, or curiosity associated with the interest in exploring unfamiliar topics and learning something new, the study said.

The findings contribute to a growing body of evidence suggesting that testing for curiosity traits may be useful for employers, especially those seeking to fill complex jobs, said lead author of the study Jay Hardy, Assistant Professor College of Business, the Oregon State University, US.

"This research suggests it may be useful for employers to measure curiosity, and, in particular, diversive curiosity, when hiring new employees," Hardy said.

Diversive curiosity is a trait well-suited to early stage problem-solving because it leads to gathering a large amount of information relevant to the problem. That information can be used to generate and evaluate new ideas in later stages of creative problem-solving.

On the other hand, people with strong specific curiosity traits, or the curiosity that reduces anxiety and fills gaps in understanding, tend to be more problem-focused.

While diversive curiosity tends to be a more positive force, specific curiosity tends to be a negative force.

For the study, researchers asked 122 undergraduate college students, to take personality tests that measured their diversive and specific curiosity traits.

They then asked the students to complete an experimental task involving the development of a marketing plan for a retailer. 

Researchers evaluated the students' early-stage and late-stage creative problem-solving processes, including the number of ideas generated. 

The students' ideas were also evaluated based on their quality and originality.

The findings, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, indicated that the participants' diversive curiosity scores related strongly to their performance scores. 

Those with stronger diversive curiosity traits spent more time and developed more ideas in the early stages of the task. 

Stronger specific curiosity traits did not significantly relate to the participants' idea generation and did not affect their creative performance.

​New York, Nov 18 (IANS) Cuts or bruises in older adults take a longer time to heal as compared to youngsters as a result of a disruption in communication between their skin cells and immune system, researchers have found.

Wound healing is one of the most complex processes to occur in the human body. Both skin cells and immune cells contribute to this elaborate process, which begins with the formation of a scab. 

The new skin cells -- known as keratinocytes -- gather under the scab to fill in the wound, the study said. 

"Within days of an injury, skin cells migrate in and close the wound, a process that requires coordination with nearby immune cells. Our experiments have shown that, with ageing, disruptions to communication between skin cells and their immune cells slow down this step," said Elaine Fuchs, Professor at The Rockefeller University, New York.

The researchers found that in older mice keratinocytes were much slower in their travels, while in younger mice they sent a signalling protein to immune cells which increased the healing speed. 

When the same protein was applied to old mouse skin tissue, it boosted the communication.

"This discovery suggests new approaches to developing treatments that could speed healing among older people," Fuchs added.

In the study, the team focused on healing in two-month-old versus 24-month-old mice -- roughly equivalent to 20- and 70-year-old humans. 

They found that among the older mice, keratinocytes were much slower to migrate into the skin gap under the scab, and, as a result, wounds often took days longer to close.

The study will help to develop drugs to activate pathways that help ageing skin cells to communicate better with their immune cell neighbours, Fuchs said, in the paper described in the journal Cell.

Sydney, Nov 18 (IANS) A brief burst of radiation that travelled at least a billion light years through space to reach an Australian radio telescope contains detailed information about the cosmic web - the swirling gases and magnetic fields between galaxies -- regarded as the fabric of the universe, say scientists.

The flash, known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), was one of the brightest seen since FRBs were first detected in 2001, the researchers said.

All FRBs contained crucial information but this FRB, the 18th detected so far, was unique in the amount of information it contained about the cosmic web, said one of the researchers Ryan Shannon from International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Curtin University, Bentley, Australia.

"FRBs are extremely short but intense pulses of radio waves, each only lasting about a millisecond. Some are discovered by accident and no two bursts look the same," Shannon said.

This particular flash described in a new paper in the journal Science, reached CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in Australia mid-last year.

"This particular FRB is the first detected to date to contain detailed information about the cosmic web -- regarded as the fabric of the Universe -- but it is also unique because its travel path can be reconstructed to a precise line of sight and back to an area of space about a billion light years away that contains only a small number of possible home galaxies," Shannon added.

Shannon explained that the vast spaces between objects in the Universe contain nearly invisible gas and a plasma of ionised particles that used to be almost impossible to map, until this pulse was detected.

"This FRB, like others detected, is thought to originate from outside of Earth's own Milky Way galaxy, which means their signal has travelled over many hundreds of millions of light years, through a medium that -- while invisible to our eyes -- can be turbulent and affected by magnetic fields," Shannon said.

​Melbourne, Nov 18 (IANS) Australian researchers have developed a revolutionary blood test to diagnose skin cancer much more quickly and efficiently than conventional methods.

The ground-breaking "liquid biopsy" test will be made available at Melbourne's Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI), Victoria state's Health Minister Jill Hennessy said on Friday.

Prior to the development of the new test, melanomas could only be identified by a complex and invasive surgery, results from which could take weeks to be obtained, Xinhua news agency reported.

The blood test can provide the same information in a matter of hours from a simple blood test, potentially saving millions of lives worldwide.

Once the skin cancer has been identified via the new test, oncologists can quickly tailor the most appropriate treatment for each individual patient, potentially preventing the cancer from spreading to the bloodstream.

"We're putting cancer patients first and investing in world-leading cancer research and future technologies that have the power to save lives," Hennessy told reporters in Melbourne.

"It will mean patients can get diagnosed and treated sooner, without having to endure long and anxious waits and invasive and painful surgery."

Frank McGuire, Parliamentary Secretary for Medical Research, said the development was the latest example of Victoria's commitment to cancer research.

"This new blood test is a great example of how we are rapidly turning around breakthroughs in cancer research into clinical practice with real benefits for cancer patients," McGuire said.

In addition to diagnosing the cancer quicker the blood test can also tell doctors when a treatment will stop working, allowing them to change medications before a patient's condition starts to decline.