Knowledge Update

​New York, Oct 28 (IANS) Teachers underrating girls' ability to solve problems in Mathematics will likely contribute to the widening of gender gap in the subject, finds a study.

According to the study, published in the journal AERA Open, beginning in early elementary school boys outperform girls in math -- especially among the highest math achievers. 

This leads to teachers giving lower ratings to girls' math skills while both the genders have similar achievement and behaviour towards the subject. 

"Despite changes in the educational landscape, our findings suggest that the gender gaps observed among children who entered kindergarten in 2010 are strikingly similar to what we saw in children who entered kindergarten in 1998," said Joseph Robinson Cimpian, Associate Professor at the New York University.

Data showed that boys and girls began kindergarten with similar math proficiency, but disparities developed by Grade 3 with girls lagging behind. The gap was particularly large among the highest math achievers.

Research also revealed disparities in teacher perceptions of students, with teachers rating the math skill of girls lower than those of similarly behaving and performing boys.

Finally, the researchers examined gendered patterns of learning behaviours to try and explain why boys are more likely to score as high math achievers. 

They found that girls' more studious approaches to learning pay off by boosting them at the bottom of the achievement distribution, but do not help the persistent gap at the top as much.

The researchers explored the early development of gender gaps in math, including when disparities first appear, where in the distribution such gaps develop, and whether the gaps have changed over the years. 

In addition to math achievement, they examined two potential contributors to gender gaps: students' learning behaviours and teacher expectations.

Overall, the researchers found remarkable consistency across both cohorts. They observed that the gender gap at the top of the distribution (among the highest achievers in math) develops before students enter kindergarten, worsens through elementary school, and has not improved over the last decade.

London, Oct 28 (IANS) Researchers have created a three-dimensional mammary gland model that could pave the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of breast cancer.

"Much of how breast tissues respond to external stimuli such as hormones is, as yet, unknown. In order to fully tackle the mechanisms that lie behind breast cancer we first need to understand how healthy breast tissue develops," said one of the researchers Trevor Dale, Professor at Cardiff University School of Biosciences in Britain. 

"This model allows us to really study the basic biology of how the breast develops - how hormones work, what are the genetic influences," Thierry Jarde from Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, added.

The researchers succeeded in creating a three-dimensional mammary gland model that will pave the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of breast cancer.

Using a cocktail of growth factors, the scientists were able to grow mouse mammary cells into three-dimensional mammary tissue.

Known as an 'organoid', the model, reported in the journal Nature Communications, mimics the structure and function of a real mammary gland. 

This would enable researchers to increase their understanding of how breast tissue develops, and provides an active model for the study of disease and drug screening.

As well as determining how to grow these life-like mammary glands, researchers also discovered how to maintain them in culture to allow ongoing experimentation.

​London, Oct 28 (IANS) Male teenagers with a higher resting heart rate and increased level of blood pressure may be at an high risk of developing psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia and other anxiety disorders, a study has found.

The findings showed that men in their late teenage with a resting heart rate above 82 beats per minute had 69 per cent increased risk for OCD, 21 per cent increased risk for schizophrenia and 18 per cent increased risk for anxiety disorders compared with those whose resting heart rates were below 62 beats per minute. 

Besides resting heart rate, changes in blood pressure, regulated by the autonomic nervous system, have been observed in some patients with psychiatric disorders but the results have been inconsistent.

Lower resting heart rate and blood pressure were also associated with substance use disorders and violent behaviour, said Antti Latvala from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

For the study the team used data of more than one million men in Sweden whose resting heart rate and blood pressure were measured at military conscription (average age 18) from 1969 to 2010 to examine whether differences in cardiac autonomic function were associated with psychiatric disorders.

The results were published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Washington, Oct 28 (IANS) It took more than a year but the last bits of science data from New Horizons' Pluto flyby -- stored on the spacecraft's digital recorders since July 2015 -- arrived safely on Earth this week, NASA said.

The final item - a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager - from New Horizons spacecraft travelled over 5.5 billion kilometers to reach earth, the US space agency said in statement on Thursday.

The downlink came via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.

"We have our pot of gold," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

"There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do-after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?" Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, added. 

Because it had only one shot at its target, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could - taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. 
The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015.

Bowman said the team will conduct a final data-verification review before erasing the two onboard recorders, and clearing space for new data to be taken during the New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM).

KEM will include a series of distant Kuiper Belt object observations and a close encounter with a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on January 1, 2019, NASA said.

Canberra, Oct 28 (IANS) Life expectancy in Australia has hit a new high, with babies born in 2015 expected to live two years longer than those born in 2005, according to a report issued on Friday.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report showed that life expectancy had hit 84.5 years for females and 80.4 years for males, but demographics expert Peter McDonald of the University of Melbourne said that the statistics assume no improvements in healthcare and were therefore conservative estimates.

"They are not any individual's lifetime; they are just telling you the expectation of life you would get if life expectancy didn' t change... and for the last 200 years it has been going up," he said.

ABS Director of Demography Beidar Cho said the life expectancy for Australians in 2015 was comparable for other first-world nations.

"Babies born today have the highest estimated life expectancy ever recorded in Australia," Cho said in a statement.

"Male life expectancy at birth reached 80.4 years in 2015, increasing from 80.3 in 2014. Female life expectancy also increased to 84.5 years in 2015 from 84.4 in the previous year."

"For both men and women, Australia has a higher life expectancy than similar countries such as Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US."

Meanwhile in 2005, the life expectancy of Australians was at 83.3 years for women and 78.5 years for men.

"In 2013-2015, the male and female combined life expectancy at birth estimate for Australia was 82.4 years. This was 11.9 years higher than the world average of 70.5 years in 2010-2015," Cho added.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) US scientists have in a breakthrough research found that realistic sensations of touch can be restored in human amputees by directly stimulating the nervous system.

In the study, neuroscientists from the University of Chicago used neuroprosthetic devices to turn the pressure "felt" by a prosthetic hand into a signal that feeds directly into the parts of the brain that deal with hand movement and touch.

"If you want to create a dexterous hand for use in an amputee or a quadriplegic patient, you need to not only be able to move it, but have sensory feedback from it," said Sliman Bensmaia, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.

"The idea is that if we can reproduce natural-feeling sensations exactly, the amputee won't have to think about it, he can just interact with objects naturally and automatically," Bensmaia added.

The team worked with two male subjects who each lost an arm after traumatic injuries. 

Both subjects were implanted with neural interfaces, devices embedded with electrodes that were attached to the median, ulnar and radial nerves of the arm. 

Those are the same nerves that would carry signals from the hand were still intact, the researchers said.

The results showed that a single feature of electrical stimulation -- dubbed the activation charge rate -- can determine the strength of the sensation -- such as intensity discrimination, magnitude scaling, and intensity matching. 

By changing the activation charge rate, the team could change sensory magnitude in a highly predictable way. 

By modulating the number of nerve fibres stimulated and the frequency of stimulation, sensory information could be transmitted such that the amputees could distinguish distinct levels of tactile intensity, that is, the difference between a seven and a 10 on a scale of intensity.

However, these artificial touch will only be as good as the devices providing input, the researchers stated. 

The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Researchers have come up with a new wearable patch for skin that claims to treat children and young adults with peanut allergy, finds a study.

The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, suggested that small amounts of peanut protein through the skin showed promising benefits for younger children. 

The treatment, called epicutaneous immunotherapy or EPIT, was safe and well-tolerated, and nearly all participants used the skin patch daily as directed.

"To avoid potentially life-threatening allergic reactions, people with peanut allergy must be vigilant about the foods they eat and the environments they enter, which can be very stressful," said Anthony S. Fauci, Managing Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). 

The researchers randomly assigned 74 peanut-allergic volunteers aged 4 to 25 years to treatment with either a high-dose (250 micrograms peanut protein), low-dose (100 micrograms peanut protein), or placebo patch. 

Each day, study participants applied a new patch to their arm or between their shoulder blades.

After one year, researchers assessed each participant's ability to consume at least 10 times more peanut protein than he or she was able to consume before starting EPIT. 

The low-dose and high-dose regimens offered similar benefits, with 46 per cent of the low-dose group and 48 per cent of the high-dose group achieving treatment success, compared with 12 per cent of the placebo group. 

In addition, the peanut patches induced immune responses similar to those seen with other investigational forms of immunotherapy for food allergy. Investigators observed greater treatment effects among children aged 4 to 11 years, with significantly less effect in participants aged 12 years and older.

"Epicutaneous immunotherapy aims to engage the immune system in the skin to train the body to tolerate small amounts of allergen, whereas other recent advances have relied on an oral route that appears difficult for approximately 10 to 15 per cent of children and adults to tolerate," said Daniel Rotrosen, Director, Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at the of NIAID. 

Nearly all of the study participants followed the EPIT regimen as directed. None reported serious reactions to the patch, although most experienced mild skin reactions, such as itching or rash at the site of patch application.

The patches were developed and provided by the biopharmaceutical company DBV Technologies under the trade name Viaskin.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Personal values of students are often influenced by school Principals and become more similar to those of them with time, a new study has found.

The findings indicate that principals' values are linked with aspects of school climate which are, in turn, linked with students' own values.

"Given the vast amount of time children spend in school, it is important to assess the impact that schools have on children, beyond their impact on children's academic skills. Our findings show that schools contribute to the formation of children's values," said Yair Berson, Researcher at the New York University.

For the study published in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers collected data from 252 school Principals, over 3,600 teachers and almost 50,000 students in public elementary and secondary schools.

Focusing on four categories of values -- self-enhancement, self-transcendence, openness to change, and conservation -- school Principals filled out a questionnaire in which they read statements about a hypothetical individual and rated how closely they aligned with their own values.

At the same time, students completed age-appropriate measures that tapped into the same values. The students completed values measures again two-years later.

Teachers also rated the degree to which students in their homeroom displayed various behaviours that reflected the same values.

The researchers found that students' values became more similar to those of their Principal over the two-year study period.

"Principals' personal outlook on life is reflected in the overall school atmosphere, which over time becomes reflected in school children's personal outlook and eventual behaviour," said Shaul Oreg, Researcher at the Cornell University.

This pattern was consistent for all of the values except for one: conservation values.

"Values that have to do with maintaining the status quo -- emphasising tradition, conformity and security - showed a different pattern, whereby Principals' values are associated with children's values, but without the mediating role of the school climate," Oreg added.

Ultimately, determining whether Principals' influence on students' values is good or bad will be up to the individual observer, the study suggests.

New Delhi, Oct 27 (IANS) The global wildlife population could fall by an average of 67 per cent between 1970 and 2020 as a result of human activities, according to World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report 2016.

The report indicated that the global populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have already declined by 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012.

"This places the world on a trajectory of a potential two-thirds decline within a span of the half-century ending in 2020," said the report.

The report also highlights the magnitude of human impact on the planet and highlights the changes needed in the way society is fed and fuelled. 

According to the report, the top threats to species were directly linked to human activities including habitat loss, degradation and over exploitation of wildlife. 

The report's findings provide additional evidence that the planet was entering completely unchartered territory, including a possible sixth mass extinction. 

"Researchers are already calling this period the Anthropocene -- an era in which human activities are influencing changes in the climate and the environment," said the report.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Political decisions taken at the highest level, not economics, are to blame for rising inequality in the US, sociologists suggest.

Political factors, along with increases in college-educated adults, provided the best explanations for the rise in income inequality in the US between 1978 and 2011, said the study published in the American Journal of Sociology.

But even higher education levels became less important after the 1980s, lead author of the study David Jacobs, Professor at The Ohio State University, pointed out.

The study found that presidential administrations that were sympathetic to employers but unfavourable to labour drove up levels of income inequality.

"Political decisions, especially at the presidential level, help determine the rewards that Americans get from the economy," Jacobs explained.

The study suggests that researchers need to look beyond economic causes in trying to explain the growth of income inequality in the US.

"You can't explain income inequality without looking at political factors," Jacobs said.

The study used a variety of sources to analyse political and economic factors that could be tied to inequality at the state level for each of the 33 years in the study. 

"The gap between the top earners and the rest of Americans has really been growing and our study was able to capture that change," Jacobs said.

The study found that the presidential administration in power was far and away the biggest political factor linked to economic inequality in each year of the study.

The importance of the presidential administration remained even after the researchers took into account more than 20 other possible explanatory variables, such as stock market values, poverty levels, the number of people employed in finance careers, and the number of people employed in rural occupations. 

Many of these factors, among others controlled for in this study, have been cited by economists in the past as possible causes of growing inequality, Jacobs said.

After all these and other factors are held constant, the Ronald Reagan administration's policies led to an 18 per cent increase in inequality, the study found.

The Reagan administration made tax codes more favorable to the affluent, deregulated many industries including finance, weakened unions and reduced spending on programmes for the poor.

"I believe it was a lot of policies that each contributed a little bit to growing inequality, and when you added them all up the results were large," Jacobs said.

Other than the presidential administration, the remaining parts of government had little or no effect on inequality, the study showed.