Knowledge Update

​Washington, Oct 7 (IANS) Using NASA's Hubble space telescope data, scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star.

The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon, NASA said in a statement on Thursday.

Astronomers have estimated that this stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

"We knew this object had a high-speed outflow from previous data, but this is the first time we are seeing this process in action," said lead author of the study Raghvendra Sahai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The fireballs present a puzzle to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, called V Hydrae. 

The star is a bloated red giant, residing 1,200 light years away and which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes. 

Red giants are dying stars in the late stages of life that are exhausting their nuclear fuel that makes them shine. They have expanded in size and are shedding their outer layers into space.

The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star. 

According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years. 

As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.

This star system could be the archetype to explain a dazzling variety of glowing shapes uncovered by Hubble that are seen around dying stars, called planetary nebulae, the researchers said. 

A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gas expelled by a star late in its life.

"We suggest that these gaseous blobs produced during this late phase of a star's life help make the structures seen in planetary nebulae," Sahai noted.

Sahai's team used Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to conduct observations of V Hydrae and its surrounding region over an 11-year period, first from 2002 to 2004, and then from 2011 to 2013. 

The results appeared in The Astrophysical Journal.

​New York, Oct 8 (IANS) Mother's milk may boost the immunity of a newborn in such a way that it may work against certain diseases like tuberculosis (TB) just as vaccination does, suggests new research.

"Some vaccines are not safe to give a newborn baby and others just don't work very well in newborns," said lead researcher Ameae Walker, Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine in the US. 

"If we can instead vaccinate mom or boost her vaccination shortly before she becomes pregnant, transferred immune cells during breastfeeding will ensure that the baby is protected early on," Walker explained.

Scientists have long understood that mother's milk provides immune protection against some infectious agents through the transfer of antibodies, a process referred to as "passive immunity." 

The new research, published in the Journal of Immunology, showed that mother's milk also contributes to the development of the baby's own immune system by a process the team calls "maternal educational immunity."

Specific maternal immune cells in the milk cross the wall of the baby's intestine to enter an immune organ called the thymus. Once there, they "educate" developing cells to attack the same infectious organisms to which the mother has been exposed.

"While our work has used mouse models because we can study the process in detail this way, we do know that milk cells cross into human babies as well," Walker pointed out.

The researchers showed that you can vaccinate the mother and this results in vaccination of the baby through this process.

One of the infectious agents the research team studied was the organism that causes tuberculosis. Generally, babies directly vaccinated against TB do not have a very good response. 

"We hope that by vaccinating the mother, who will eventually nurse the baby, we will improve infant immunity against TB," Walker said. 

"It's like vaccinating the baby without actually vaccinating the baby. In some instances, our work has shown that immunity against TB is far more effective if acquired through the milk than if acquired through direct vaccination of the baby," Walker noted.

"Of course, clinical trials will need to be conducted to test whether this is the case in humans," Walker said.

​New York, Oct 8 (IANS) Some fungicides, often regarded as safe for bees, could be a major contributor to honey bee colony losses, and the number of different pesticides within a colony -- regardless of dose -- closely correlates with colony deaths, suggests new research.

"Our results fly in the face of one of the basic tenets of toxicology: that the dose makes the poison," said senior author of the study Dennis van Engelsdorp, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland in the US.

"We found that the number of different compounds was highly predictive of colony deaths, which suggests that the addition of more compounds somehow overwhelms the bees' ability to detoxify themselves," van Engelsdorp noted.

The researchers followed 91 honey bee colonies in the US, owned by three different migratory commercial beekeepers, for an entire agricultural season. 

The colonies began their journey in Florida and moved up the East Coast, providing pollination services for different crops along the way. 

A total of 93 different pesticide compounds found their way into the colonies over the course of the season, accumulating in the wax, in processed pollen known as bee bread and in the bodies of nurse bees. 

The study, published online in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that colonies with very low pesticide contamination in the wax experienced no queen events or colony death, while all colonies with high pesticide contamination in the wax lost a queen during the beekeeping season.

The study results also suggest that some fungicides, which have led to the mortality of honey bee larvae in lab studies, could have toxic effects on colony survival in the field. 

In the current study, pesticides with a particular mode of action also corresponded to higher colony mortality. 

For example, the fungicides most closely linked to queen deaths and colony mortality disrupted sterols -- compounds that are essential for fungal development and survival.

"We were surprised to find such an abundance of fungicides inside the hives, but it was even more surprising to find that fungicides are linked to imminent colony mortality," lead author on the study Kirsten Traynor from the University of Maryland said.

"These compounds have long been thought to be safe for bees," Traynor noted

​Washington, Oct 7 (IANS) Globally, life expectancy increased from about 62 years to nearly 72 from 1980 to 2015, thanks to improvements in sanitation, immunisations, indoor air quality and nutrition in poor countries, and several nations in sub-Saharan Africa rebounding from high death rates due to HIV/AIDS, says a new report.

However, such progress is threatened by increasing numbers of people suffering serious health challenges related to obesity, high blood sugar, and alcohol and drug abuse, said the Global Burden of Disease 2015 study published in The Lancet.

The study analysed 249 causes of death, 315 diseases and injuries, and 79 risk factors in 195 countries and territories between 1990 and 2015. 

The progress in India, however, has not been very impressive, according to the report.

All countries in the South Asian region did much worse than expected at reducing deaths in children under five, with India recording the largest number of under-five deaths of any country in 2015, at 1.3 million.

Globally, 5.8 million children under age five died in 2015, representing a 52 per cent decline in the number of under-five deaths since 1990. 

"Over the past 25 years, there have been important and impressive gains in the number of children surviving past their fifth birthdays, a significant milestone," said one of the study authors Haidong Wang, Associate Professor at Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"Regrettably, many nations -- especially those low on the Socio-demographic Index -- have not made such gains and need to hasten the pace of progress, including availability of cost-effective vaccines, expanded access to clean water, and other interventions," Wang noted.

The study draws on the work of more than 1,800 collaborators in over 120 countries.

Bangladesh has improved maternal survival much faster than expected, while India and Nepal fared poorly.

Most countries in the South Asian region -- including India and Pakistan -- did better than expected at reducing health loss from stroke and lower respiratory infections. India also performed much worse than expected on tuberculosis, the report said.

The number of maternal deaths globally dropped by roughly 29 per cent since 1990, and the ratio of maternal deaths fell 30 per cent, from 282 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 196 in 2015.

Between 2005 and 2015, death rates from HIV/AIDS decreased 42 per cent, malaria 43 per cent, preterm birth complications 30 per cent, and maternal disorders 29 per cent, according to the study.

Washington, Oct 7 (IANS) A research team led by US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created the world's smallest transistor with a working one-nanometre gate.

In a study published in the journal Science, the researchers described the novel transistor made with a new combination of materials that is even smaller than the smallest possible silicon-based transistor.

"We made the smallest transistor reported to date," said lead researcher Ali Javey from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Instead of using silicon, the researchers built their prototype device with a class of semiconductor materials called transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs. 

Specifically, their experimental device structure used molybdenum disulfide for the channel material and a single-walled carbon nanotube for the gate.

"Silicon transistors are approaching their size limit," said one of the study authors, Moon Kim, Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas.

"Our research provides new insight into the feasibility to go beyond the ultimate scaling limit of silicon-based transistor technology," Kim explained.

As current flows through a transistor, the stream of electrons travels through a channel, like tap water flowing through a faucet out into a sink. 

A "gate" in the transistor controls the flow of electrons, shutting the flow off and on in a fraction of second.

"As of today, the best/smallest silicon transistor devices commercially available have a gate length larger than 10 nanometres," Kim said.

"The theoretical lower limit for silicon transistors is about five nanometres. The device we demonstrate in this article has a gate size of one nanometre, about one order of magnitude smaller," he added.

"It should be possible to reduce the size of a computer chip significantly utilising this configuration," Kim noted.

One of the challenges in designing such small transistors is that electrons can randomly tunnel through a gate when the current is supposed to be shut off. Reducing this current leakage is a priority.

"The device we demonstrated shows more than two orders of magnitude reduction in leakage current compared to its silicon counterpart, which results in reduced power consumption," Kim said. 

"What this means, for example, is that a cellphone with this technology built in would not have to be recharged as often," he explained.

New York, Oct 7 (IANS) Just like us, apes can grasp complex mental states and have the ability to guess what others might be thinking, suggests new research.

Apes can correctly anticipate that humans will look for a hidden item in a specific location, even if the apes know that item is no longer there, a new study revealed. 

The results, which show that apes can grasp what others know even when it differs from their own knowledge, demonstrate that nonhuman primates can recognise others' beliefs, desires, and intentions -- a phenomenon called "theory of mind" (ToM), and one that has generally been believed as unique to humans. 

"This is the first time that any nonhuman animals have passed a version of the false belief test," said one of the lead researchers Christopher Krupenye from Duke University in Durham, US.

The capacity to tell when others hold mistaken beliefs is seen as a key milestone in human cognitive development. Such skills are essential for getting along with other people and predicting what they might do. 

The new findings, published in the journal Science, suggest the ability is not unique to humans, but has existed in the primate family tree for at least 13 to 18 million years, since the last common ancestors of chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and humans.

"If future experiments confirm these findings, they could lead scientists to rethink how deeply apes understand each other," Krupenye said.

In the study, the apes watched two short videos. In one, a person in a King Kong suit hides himself in one of two large haystacks while a man watches. Then the man disappears through a door, and while no one is looking the King Kong runs away. In the final scene, the man reappears and tries to find King Kong.

The second video is similar, except that the man returns to the scene to retrieve a stone he saw King Kong hide in one of two boxes. But King Kong has stolen it behind the man's back and made a getaway.

The researchers teased out what the apes were thinking while they watched the movies by following their gaze with an infrared eye-tracker installed outside their enclosures.

To pass the test, the apes must predict that when the man returns, he will mistakenly look for the object where he last saw it, even though they themselves know it is no longer there.

In both cases, the apes stared first and longest at the location where the man last saw the object, suggesting they expected him to believe it was still hidden in that spot.

Their results mirror those from similar experiments with human infants under the age of two.

The apes' correct anticipation of where the human expected the object to be suggests that they understand that person's perspective.

​New York, Oct 6 (IANS) Leisure time spent at home with family may not only satisfy individuals but also become a more effective route to happiness, says a study.

The best predictor of happiness for families may be spending quality time together in familiar activities inside the home, the researchers said.

"That may be because when the brain is focused on processing new information -- such as taking part in an unfamiliar activity with unfamiliar people in a new location -- less 'brain power' is available to focus on the family relationships," said lead author Karen K. Melton, Assistant Professor at Baylor University in Texas, US.

On the other hand, while quality time together contributes to satisfaction with family life, "all family leisure is not equal", Melton added. 

Melton also said the catchy expression, "The family that plays together, stays together!" carries two misconceptions: that all family leisure brings positive results and that all family activities are equal.

"Family members can also express stress and conflict as well as pleasure during leisure time. The activities alone will not heal the scars of hurting families," she noted. 

While stating that one-size may not fit all families, Melton said: "for some families, quality togetherness is having dinner together or playing games; for others, it may be hobbies, videos or TV, music," Melton said. 

For the study, researchers used a sample of 1,502 individuals in 884 families in Britain. Each family unit taking part in the online research had at least one child between the age of 11 and 15. 

Participants answered questions about whether they took part in family leisure in the past years, and if so, what activities they did, how much time they spent doing them and how frequently they did so.

The study was published in World Leisure Journal.

London, Oct 6 (IANS) Researchers have developed a simple device that can act as a virtual physiotherapist and improve the ability of patients with arm disability to exercise using physiotherapy-like computer games.

Arm weaknesses impairs people's ability to carry out daily activities and requires expensive long-term care.

The low-cost device, with the trade name gripAble, consists of a lightweight electronic handgrip, which interacts wirelessly with a standard PC tablet to enable the user to play arm-training games. 

"The use of mobile-gaming could provide a cost-effective and easily available means to improve the arm movements of stroke patients," said lead researcher Paul Bentley, senior lecturer at Imperial College, London. 

To use it, patients squeeze, turn or lift the handgrip, and it vibrates in response to their performance whilst playing. 

The device uses a novel mechanism, which can detect the tiny flicker movements of severely paralysed patients and channel them into controlling a computer game, the researchers said.

The device improves arm and cognitive function of patients who have mild to severe arm weaknesses and can also be used unsupervised in hospitals and independently by patients at home, Bentley added. 

Researchers have shown that the device enabled more than half of the severely disabled patients in the study to engage with the arm-training software, whereas none of the patients were able to use conventional control methods such as swiping and tapping on tablets and smartphones.

Using the device increased the proportion of paralysed stroke patients able to direct movements on a tablet screen by 50 per cent compared to standard methods. 

Further, the study showed that 93 per cent of patients were able to make meaningful movements to direct the cursor as a result of using gripAble. 

The potential of gripAble as a means of delivering cost-effective physiotherapy was also recognised by a NHS England Innovation Challenge Prize in early 2016.

The findings appear in the paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.