Knowledge Update

​Toronto, May 23 (IANS) A constantly crying baby can not only hamper your peace, it can also rattles your brain functions and alter the way you think and act to make daily decisions, a study has found.

The brain data revealed that the infant cries reduced attention to the task and triggered greater cognitive conflict processing than infant laughs.

"Parental instinct appears to be hardwired yet no one talks about how this instinct might include cognition," said David Haley from the University of Toronto.

The team looked at infant vocalisations -- in this case, audio clips of a baby laughing or crying -- and its effect on adults who completed a cognitive conflict task. 

They asked participants to rapidly identify the colour of a printed word while ignoring the meaning of the word itself. 

Brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG), which took place immediately after a two-second audio clip of an infant vocalisation. 

Cognitive conflict processing is important because it controls attention -- one of the most basic executive functions needed to complete a task or make a decision. 

A baby's cry has been shown to cause aversion in adults but it could also be creating an adaptive response, "switching on" the cognitive control parents use in effectively responding to their child's emotional needs while also addressing other demands in everyday life, Haley added in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. 

"If an infant's cry activates cognitive conflict in the brain, it could also be teaching parents how to focus their attention more selectively," he added.

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that infants occupy a privileged status in our neurobiological programming, one deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. 

But, as Haley noted, it also reveals an important adaptive cognitive function in the human brain.​

New York, May 21 (IANS) Google plans to start selling its mobile phones with modular, replaceable parts - the first phone ever that the tech giant is manufacturing - by next year, according to a media report. The Project Ara team, involved in developing the product, confirmed that the modular phones would be available to consumers next year, technology website The Verge reported on Friday. The Google modular phones will work on a simple concept - once a basic model is bought all the bits can be pulled off and swapped as the consumer sees fit. For instance, if a user fancies a more powerful camera module he can buy one through Google's dedicated store and replace the existing one with it. The same can be done with other components as well including memory, battery, display panels, keyboards, sensors and scanners. "It's a system that will allow more space for modules," The Verge reported after taking a look at the prototype of the modular mobile at Google headquarters in California. "They let me try saying 'Okay Google, eject the camera module' and it straight-up worked: a tiny latch inside the phone body moved when I set the phone on the table (face down) and the module released," the report said quoting the website's executive editor Dieter Bohn. "There's still work to do here - Google needs to ship, it needs to get module partners on board, it needs to make the whole thing a little thinner and nicer looking," he added

​New York, May 21 (IANS) Just adopting a healthy lifestyle by refraining from drinking alcohol and smoking, maintaining a healthy body weight and exercising regularly can help you keep deadly cancer at bay, new research reaffirms.

About 20-40 percent of cancer cases could potentially be prevented through modifications to adopt a healthy lifestyle, the study found.

A large proportion of cancer cases and deaths can be prevented if people quit smoking, avoided heavy drinking, maintained a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 27.5, and got moderate weekly exercise for at least 150 minutes or vigorous exercise for at least 75 minutes, the study said.

The research, published online in the journal JAMA Oncology, analysed data from two study groups of White individuals to examine the associations between a "healthy lifestyle pattern" and cancer incidence and death.

Mingyang Song and Edward Giovannucci from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, conducted the study that included 89,571 women and 46,399 men.

A "healthy lifestyle pattern" was defined as never or past smoking; no or moderate drinking of alcohol -- one or less drink a day for women, two or less drinks a day for men; BMI of at least 18.5 but lower than 27.5; and weekly aerobic physical activity of at least 150 minutes moderate intensity or 75 minutes vigorous intensity.

Individuals who met all four criteria were considered low risk and everyone else was high risk, the researchers advised.

The results revealed that 16,531 women and 11,731 had a healthy lifestyle pattern (low-risk group) and the remaining 73,040 women and 34,608 men were high risk.

The researcehrs estimated that about 20 percent to 40 percent of cancer cases and about half of cancer deaths could potentially be prevented through modifications to adopt the healthy lifestyle pattern of the low-risk group.

"These findings reinforce the predominate importance of lifestyle factors in determining cancer risk. Therefore, primary prevention should remain a priority for cancer control," the authors noted.​

​New York, May 22 (IANS) A team of US scientists has created a new material, called "rewritable magnetic charge ice", that permits an unprecedented degree of control over local magnetic fields and could pave the way for new computing technologies.

​Tokyo, May 21 (IANS) Finance chiefs of the Group of Seven (G7) remained apart over the foreign exchange rate and coordinated steps to boost public spending to improve world economic growth after their two-day meeting in Sendai in northeast Japan ended on Saturday.

​New York, May 21 (IANS) Harvard researchers have created a new, simplified, platform for antibiotic discovery that may go a long way in solving the crisis of antibiotic resistance.

This is "a platform where we assemble eight (chemical) building blocks by a simple process to make macrolide antibiotics" without using erythromycin, the original macrolide antibiotic, and the drug upon which all others in the class have been based since the early 1950s,” the researchers said.

Erythromycin, which was discovered in a soil sample from the Philippines in 1949, has been on the market as a drug by 1953. 

"For 60 years chemists have been very, very creative, finding clever ways to 'decorate' this molecule, making changes around its periphery to produce antibiotics that are safer, more effective, and overcome the resistance bacteria have developed," said Andrew Myers, professor of chemistry at Harvard University.

"That process is semisynthesis, modifying the naturally occurring substance," Myers noted.

In contrast, the process described in the new study involves using eight industrial chemicals, or substances derived from them, and manipulating them in various combinations and then testing the products against panels of disease causing bacteria. 

This allows us to make new "new compounds in fewer steps than was previously possible," Myers explained.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

"One of the things that's quite encouraging about the data in our paper is that some of the structures we've made are active against clinical bacterial strains that are resistant to every known macrolide," Myers said. 

In fact, he added, two of the 350 compounds reported on in the paper have, in initial testing, shown efficacy against a bacterium that has become resistant to vancomycin, "which is known as the antibiotic of last resort. And if you have a bug that's resistant to vancomycin, you're in trouble," Myers added.​

​London, May 21 (IANS) A European company has developed a set of thin, stick-on lenses that can turn your mobile phone into a portable, digital microscope, a media report said.

The BLIPS lenses, which come in a pack for both micro and macro shots, come with reusable adhesive, and are slim enough (between 0.5 mm and 1.2 mms thick) to fit into your wallet, technology website The Verge reported on Friday. 

According to BLIPS' creators SmartMicroOptics, the lenses were developed in the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy. 

The exact amount of magnification depends on the smartphone, but with the right digital zoom it's possible to magnify images up to 100 times, the company added.

The lenses are available on Kickstarter -- an American public-benefit corporation based in New York which has built a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity.

According to SmartMicroOptics, BLIPS lenses can be used by hobbyists as well as professionals.​

​London, May 21 (IANS) A team of scientists has genetically modified microalgae to produce valuable chemicals to be used in drugs for deadly diseases like cancer by harnessing energy from the sun.

According to researchers, the method basically allows sunlight being transformed into everything ranging from chemotherapy or bioplastics to valuable flavour and fragrance compounds.

"Our study shows that it is possible to optimise the enzymatic processes in the cells using only sunlight, water and carbon dioxide (CO2) by growing them in transparent plastic bags in a greenhouse," said Thiyagarajan Gnanasekaran, post-doctoral researcher at University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The method can be run sustainably and may also pave way for an efficient, inexpensive and environmentally friendly process of producing a variety of chemicals, such as pharmaceutical compounds.

"The idea is that we hijack a portion of the energy produced by the microalgae from their photosynthetic systems. By redirecting that energy to a genetically modified part of the cell capable of producing various complex chemical materials, we induce the light driven biosynthesis of these compounds," added Agnieszka Janina Zygadlo Nielsen, post-doctoral researcher at University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The findings are detailed in the journal Metabolic Engineering.

However, the team noted that the microalgae use much of the harnessed sunlight to keep their own metabolic processes running.

"It is difficult to produce large quantities of the desired compounds in microalgae because they have to use a large amount of the produced energy for themselves, since they are fully photosynthetic organisms,” Gnanasekaran said.​

New York, May 21 (IANS) The Earth could contain nearly one trillion species, of which 99.999 percent are yet to be discovered, says a study based on the largest analysis of microbial data.

The findings suggest that only one-thousandth of one percent of all the species have been identified till now.

"Estimating the number of species on Earth is among the great challenges in biology," said one of the study authors Jay Lennon from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

The scientists combined microbial, plant and animal datasets from government, academic and citizen science sources, resulting in the largest compilation of its kind.

Altogether, these data represent more than 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world's oceans and continents, except Antarctica.

"Our study combines the largest available datasets with ecological models and new ecological rules for how biodiversity relates to abundance. This gave us a new and rigorous estimate for the number of microbial species on Earth," Lennon explained.

The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The report's authors are Jay Lennon and Kenneth Locey of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

"Until recently, we've lacked the tools to truly estimate the number of microbial species in the natural environment. The advent of new genetic sequencing technology provides a large pool of new information," Lennon added.

Microbial species are forms of life too small to be seen with the naked eye, including single-celled organisms such as bacteria and archaea, as well as certain fungi.

The study's results also suggest that identifying every microbial species on Earth presents a huge challenge.

"Of those species cataloged, only about 10,000 have ever been grown in a lab, and fewer than 100,000 have classified genetic sequences," Lennon said. 

"Our results show that this leaves 100,000 times more microorganisms awaiting discovery -- and 100 million to be fully explored,” he added.

"Microbial biodiversity, it appears, is greater than we ever imagined," Lennon pointed out.​

​New York, May 23 (IANS) A lipid nano-carrier that can get past the blood-brain barrier could be targeted to deliver a chemotherapeutic drug more efficiently to tumour cells in the brain, a study has found.

"I was very surprised by how efficiently and well it worked once we got the nanocarrier to those cells," said study author Ann-Marie Broome from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

The study, published in the journal Nanomedicine-Future Medicine, showed specific uptake and increased killing in glial cells, so much so that Broome initially questioned the results. She had her team keep repeating the experiments, using different cell lines, dosage amounts and treatment times.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) -- a form of brain tumour -- is a devastating disease with no curative options due to several challenges, said Broome. 

The tumour has a significant overall mortality, in part due to its location, difficulty of surgical treatment and the inability to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier, a protective barrier designed to keep a stable environment within and surrounding the brain.

Broome and her team took what they know about the cancer's biology and of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), one of numerous growth factor proteins that regulates cell growth and division and is also over expressed on tumour cells in the brain. 

With that in mind, they engineered a micelle that is a phospholipid nanocarrier, "a bit of fat globule", to deliver a concentrated dose of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) to the GBM tumour cells.

"Micelles of a certain size will cross the blood-brain barrier carrying a concentrated amount of TMZ," Broome explained about how the nanotechnology works. "The PDGF is used much like a postal address. The micelle gets it to the street, and the PDGF gets it to the house," she added. 

The team is excited about the new research because it potentially points the way to a new treatment option for patients with GBM.

"This paper is exciting because it demonstrates a novel approach to treating brain tumours, combining nanotechnology targeting to a marker of brain tumours with a specialised delivery system," said researcher and clinician Amy Lee Bredlau, director of MUSC Health's Pediatric Brain Tumour Programme. 

"It will allow us eventually to target aggressive childhood and adult brain tumours," she added. ​