Knowledge Update

​New York, March 22 (IANS) Researchers have developed a new map of Mars' gravity with three NASA spacecraft that is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet.

“Gravity maps allow us to see inside a planet, just as a doctor uses an X-ray to see inside a patient," said Antonio Genova from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The new gravity map will be helpful for future Mars exploration, because better knowledge of the planet's gravity anomalies helps mission controllers insert spacecraft more precisely into orbit about Mars.

“Furthermore, the improved resolution of our gravity map will help us understand the still-mysterious formation of specific regions of the planet,” Genova added.

The improved resolution of the new gravity map suggests a new explanation for how some features formed across the boundary that divides the relatively smooth northern lowlands from heavily cratered southern highlands.

Also, the team confirmed that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock by analysing tides in the Martian crust and mantle caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the two moons of Mars.

Finally, by observing how Mars' gravity changed over 11 years - the period of an entire cycle of solar activity - the team inferred the massive amount of carbon dioxide that freezes out of the atmosphere onto a Martian polar ice cap when it experiences winter.

They also observed how that mass moves between the south pole and the north pole with the change of season in each hemisphere.

The map was derived using data collected by NASA's Deep Space Network from three NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey (ODY), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Like all planets, Mars is lumpy, which causes the gravitational pull felt by spacecraft in orbit around it to change.

For example, the pull will be a bit stronger over a mountain, and slightly weaker over a canyon.

The gravity field was recovered using about 16 years of data that were continuously collected in orbit around Mars.

"With this new map, we've been able to see gravity anomalies as small as about 100 kms across and we've determined the crustal thickness of Mars with a resolution of around 120 kms,” said Genova in a paper published in the journal Icarus.

The better resolution of the new map helps interpret how the crust of the planet changed over Mars' history in many regions.​

​New York, March 22 (IANS) The jokes about "dumb blondes" are, well, just jokes! Researchers have found that the average IQ of blondes may actually be slightly higher than those with other hair colours.

While jokes about blondes may seem harmless to some, they can have real-world implications, said study author Jay Zagorsky from The Ohio State University in the US.

"Research shows that stereotypes often have an impact on hiring, promotions and other social experiences," Zagorsky said.

"This study provides compelling evidence that there shouldn't be any discrimination against blondes based on their intelligence," Zagorsky pointed out.

The study involved 10,878 US women. Data from the study came from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), a national survey of people who were between 14 and 21 years old when they were first interviewed in 1979.

In 1980, participants in the NLSY79 took the Armed Forces Qualification Test, or AFQT, which is used by the Pentagon to determine the intelligence of all recruits. 

The overall AFQT score is based on word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, math knowledge and arithmetic reasoning.

The resulting findings showed that blonde-haired White women had an average IQ of 103.2, compared to 102.7 for those with brown hair, 101.2 for those with red hair and 100.5 for those with black hair.

Blonde women were slightly more likely to be in the highest IQ category than those with other hair colors, and slightly less likely to be in the lowest IQ category, the findings showed.

The study, published in the journal Economics Bulletin, could not say whether there are any genetic relationships between hair colour and intelligence, but Zagorsky did find one fact that could at least partially explain why blondes showed slightly higher intelligence -- they grew up in homes with more reading material than did those with any other hair colour.

"If blondes have any slight advantage, it may simply be that they were more likely to grow up in homes with more intellectual stimulation," he said.

"I don't think you can say with certainty that blondes are smarter than others, but you can definitely say they are not any dumber," Zagorsky pointed out.​

New York, March 22 (IANS) Researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have created a new molecule for prostate cancer that has shown great efficacy when tested in mice.

The findings suggest that the new therapeutic might be a viable treatment for prostate cancer in humans too if it is found effective the future clinical trials.

The treatment was designed to inhibit the activity of a protein called PAK-1, which contributes to the development of highly invasive prostate cancer cells.

"PAK-1 is kind of like an on/off switch," said study co-author Somanath Shenoy, associate professor at University of Georgia College of Pharmacy in the US.

"When it turns on, it makes cancerous cells turn into metastatic cells that spread throughout the body," Shenoy noted.

The researchers developed a way to package and administer a small molecule called IPA-3, which limits the activity of PAK-1 proteins.

The findings were published in the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine.

The researchers enveloped the IPA-3 molecule in a bubble-like structure called a liposome and injected it intravenously. 

The liposome shell surrounding IPA-3 ensures that it is not metabolised by the body too quickly, allowing the inhibitor enough time to disrupt the PAK-1 protein.

The researchers found that this molecule significantly slowed the progression of cancer in mice, and it also forced the cancerous cells to undergo apoptosis - a kind of programmed cell death.

"The results of our experiments are promising, and we hope to move toward clinical trials soon, but we must figure out what side effects this treatment may have before we can think about using it in humans," Shenoy said.

New York, March 22 (IANS) Many of the species now perishing due to the ongoing sixth mass-extinction event -- especially the smaller ones -- may vanish without a permanent trace, says researchers.

The fossil record is much more durable than any human record, said one of the researchers Roy Plotnick, professor of earth and environmental sciences at University of Illinois at Chicago, US.

"There are species going extinct today that have never been described," Plotnick said.

"Others are going extinct that are known only because someone wrote it down," Plotnick noted.

All such species would thus be unknown in the far future, he said, if the written historical record is lost -- as it might well be.

Animals least likely to be found as fossils are "the small, cute and fuzzy ones, like rodents and bats", Plotnick said. 

"Body size is an obvious factor -- bigger things tend to leave a fossil record, as do things with larger geographical ranges," he pointed out.

For the study, the researchers compared the "Red List" of endangered species with several ecological databases of living species and three paleontological databases of catalogued fossils. 

"Comparing the current biodiversity crisis, often called the 'sixth extinction,' with those of the geological past requires equivalent data," Plotnick pointed out.

They ran a statistical analysis to indicate which threatened species were most likely to disappear with no mark of their existence.

The researchers were shocked to find that more than 85 percent of the mammal species at high risk of extinction lack a fossil record. 

And those at highest risk have about half the probability of being incorporated into the fossil record compared to those at lower risk, the researchers said.​

​London, March 22 (IANS) An international team of archaeologists have revealed that culture played a major role in the significant increase of pottery production at the end of the last Ice Age.

Invented in Japan around 16,000 years ago, production of pottery increased vastly 11,500 years before, coinciding with a shift to a warmer climate. 

Increase in production of pottery was previously attributed to changing climate, resurgence in forests and increase in vegetation and animals, which led to new food sources becoming available.

As a result, ancient Japanese developed different cooking and storage techniques for the wider variety of foodstuffs available. The thinking goes that their shifting eating habits demanded new pottery.

However, the results of the study showed that the pottery was used largely for cooking marine and freshwater animal species - a routine that remained constant despite climate warming and new resources becoming available.

"Here, we are starting to acquire some idea of why pottery was invented and became such a successful technology. Interestingly, the reason seems to be little to do with subsistence and more to do with the adoption of a cultural tradition, linked to celebratory occasions and competitive feasting, especially involving the preparation of fish and shellfish,” said one of the researchers Oliver Craig, director at University of York in Britain.

This functional resilience in pottery use, in the face of climatic changes, suggested that cultural influences rather than environmental factors are more important in the widespread uptake of pottery, the researchers maintained in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team analysed 143 ceramic vessels from Torihama, an ancient site in western Japan and performed molecular and isotopic analysis of lipids extracted from these vessels, which spanned a 9000-year period.

The findings showed that the hunter-gatherer survived mostly on different types of marine and freshwater animal species -- fish and shellfish.

Only a little evidence of plant processing in pottery, or cooking of animals such as deer was found.

"The preservation of lipids on ceramic material of this antiquity is remarkable. The analysis provides the first insights into how pottery use changed during massive climate change at the end of the last Ice Age," said first author Alexandre Lucquin, research associate at the York University.

"The findings prompt a new phase of ceramic research in East Asia, highlighting the need for widespread organic analysis of our long, rich and varied pottery records," said Shinya Shoda, a visiting research fellow from Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties who participated in the study. 

The last Ice Age peaked about 21,000 years ago and ended around 11,500 years ago.​

​London, March 22 (IANS) Using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook can be beneficial for helping people to exchange knowledge with rare medical diseases and build communities, says a new study.

According to researchers, people often seek medical knowledge from social media platforms rather than traditional medical sources to find information on and discuss health issues -- particularly where patient experiences and medical advice are both equally valued.

"This project shows the potential of online communication tools for isolated patient communities and the extent to which patients' experiential knowledge is becoming a point of reference for other patients, together with - or sometimes in isolation from - traditional medical sources,” said Stefania Vicari from University of Leicester's department of media and communication in the Britain.

"These forms of organisationally enabled connective action can help to build personal narratives that strengthen patient communities, the bottom-up production of health knowledge relevant to a wider public and the development of an informational and eventually cultural context that eases patients' political action,” added Vicari in the paper published in the journal Information, Communication and Society.

The study examined online interactions in rare disease patient organisations in order to interpret how and to what extent patient organisations exploit online networking structures to provide alternative platforms for people to find information on and discuss health issues.

The findings suggests that digital media eases one-way, two-way and crowd-sourced process of health knowledge sharing -- provides personalised routes to health-related public engagement, creates new ways to access health information - particularly where patient experiences and medical advice are both equally valued.

"Not only is patients' knowledge valuable for peer support within patient communities, it has the potential to add to traditional medical knowledge, especially in cases where this is limited - such as in the case of rare diseases," Vicari stated.​

Toronto, March 22 (IANS) Life in the city changes cognition, behaviour and physiology of birds to their advantage, making those living in urban environments far more superior than the ones from rural environments.

City birds have adapted to their urban environments enabling them to exploit new resources more favourably then their rural counterparts, the researchers said. 

The study that aimed to find clear cognitive differences in birds from urbanised compared to rural areas, reported key differences in problem-solving abilities such as opening drawers to access food, and temperament (bolder) among city birds versus country birds.

The team tested the two groups of birds using not only associative learning tasks, but innovative problem solving tasks. 

Innovativeness is considered to be useful in the "real life" of animals in the wild, more so than associative learning.

"We found that not only were birds from urbanised areas better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that surprisingly urban birds also had a better immunity than rural birds," said first author of the study Jean-Nicolas Audet from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

The work was conducted using bullfinches captured from various parts of the Caribbean island.

The findings were published in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

"Since urban birds were better at problem-solving, we expected that there would be a trade-off and that the immunity would be lower, just because we assumed that you can't be good at everything' (in fact, both traits are costly). It seems that in this case, the urban birds have it all," Audet said.​

London, March 22 (IANS) If you have been diagnosed with diabetes for 10 years or even longer than that, don't give up hope as major improvement in blood sugar control is possible!

According to a new study, individuals who suffer from diabetes and successfully lose weight through a very low calorie diet, can reverse their condition and remain free of diabetes for the long term. 

In addition, even patients who had type 2 diabetes for up to 10 years can also reverse their condition.

The findings showed that the fat, which accumulated in their pancreas, gets removed as a result of a low calorie diet and thus leads to the normal production of insulin.

"What we have shown is that it is possible to reverse your diabetes, even if you have had the condition for a long time, up to around 10 years," said lead researcher Roy Taylor, professor at Newcastle University in Britain.

Individuals vary in how much weight they can carry without it seeming to affect their metabolism.

If a person gains more weight than what he or she personally can tolerate, then diabetes is triggered, but if they then lose that amount of weight then they go back to normal.

"The bottom line is that if a person really wants to get rid of their type 2 diabetes, they can lose weight, keep it off and return to normal," Taylor maintained.

For the research, published in the journal Diabetes Care, 30 volunteers having type 2 diabetes for between six months and 23 years embarked on a diet of 600 to 700 calories a day. 

Participants lost on average 14 kg. Over the next six months they did not regain any weight.

Overall 12 patients, who were having diabetes for less than 10 years, reversed their condition. Six months later they remained diabetes free.

Though the volunteers lost weight they remained overweight or obese but they had lost enough weight to remove the fat out of the pancreas and allow normal insulin production, the researchers pointed out.

The team was also able to identify in advance participants who would not respond to adequate weight loss by reversing their diabetes as at the start they had almost absent insulin production from the pancreas.

"This is good news for people who are very motivated to get rid of their diabetes. But it is too early to regard this as suitable for everyone," Taylor concluded.​

​New York, March 23 (IANS) By looking at the physics behind the speeding up or slowing down of a stars rotation, its x-ray activity, and magnetic field generation, researchers have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding how stars similar to our Sun evolve.

The work could "ultimately help to determine the age of stars more precisely than is currently possible", said study first author Eric Blackman, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York, US.

The new model, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, helps explain how stellar rotation, activity, magnetic field, and mass loss all mutually evolve with age, the researchers explained.

Using our Sun as the calibration point, the model accurately described the likely behaviour of the Sun in the past, and how it would be expected to behave in the future. 

"Our model shows that stars younger than our Sun can vary quite significantly in the intensity of their x-ray emission and mass loss," Blackman said. 

"But there is a convergence in the activity of the stars after a certain age, so you could say that our Sun is very typical for stars of its mass, radius, and its age. They get more predictable as they age," Blackman noted.

"We're not yet at the point where we can accurately predict a star's precise age, because there are simplifying assumptions that go into the model," Blackman said. 

"But in principle, by extending the work to relax some of these assumptions we could predict the age of for a wide range of stars based on their x-ray luminosity," Blackman explained.

At the moment, empirically determining the age of stars is most easily accomplished if a star is among a cluster of stars, from whose mutual properties astronomers can estimate the age.

But its age can then be estimated "to an accuracy not better than a factor of 25 percent of its actual age, which is typically billions of years", Blackman explained. 

The problem is worse for "field stars," alone in space such that the cluster method of dating cannot be used. 

The new model provides a physics explanation for how stellar rotation, activity, magnetic field, and mass loss all mutually evolve with age.

"Only by tackling the entire problem of how stellar rotation, x-ray activity, magnetic field and mass-loss mutually affect each other could we build a complete picture," study co-author James Owen, NASA Hubble fellow at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, explained.​

​New York, March 23 (IANS) Many people endlessly treat themselves with medications for their low-back pain. A team of US researchers has found mindfulness meditation as an effective alternative that may help reduce chronic low-back pain.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBRS) involved training in observing, acknowledging and accepting thoughts and feelings including pain. The training also includes some easy yoga poses to help participants become more aware of their bodies. 

"The results were encouraging and we're constantly looking for new and innovative ways to help our patients," said study author Daniel Cherkin from Group Health Research Institute in the US.

"The research suggests that training the brain to respond differently to pain signals may be more effective -- and last longer -- than traditional physical therapy and medication," Cherkin added in the paper published in the journal JAMA.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a kind of talk therapy that helped people reframe how they think about their pain, so that they can manage it more successfully and change their behaviours.

Researchers compared MBSR along with CBT to see if these interventions might ease pain.

The study enrolled 342 participants aged 20 to 70 with low-back pain that had lasted at least three months and could not be attributed to a specific cause. 

The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. One of these groups received training in MBSR and the other in CBT. The third group received only their usual care.

Training in MBSR led to meaningful improvements in functioning and chronic low-back pain at six months.

The results showed that compared to the group receiving usual care, participants in both the MBSR and CBT groups were significantly more likely to experience clinically meaningful (at least 30 percent) improvements. 

"We found that these approaches were as helpful for people with chronic back pain as are other effective treatments for back pain. They also had longer-lasting benefits and were safer than many other treatment options," the authors said.​