Knowledge Update

​New York, Nov 4 (IANS) An increase in muscle size with exercise may not be directly related to an increase in muscle strength, suggests a recent study.

Researchers suggested that size and muscle strength may actually be separate phenomena.

The researchers in the study published in the journal Muscle and Nerve, noted that there is a weak correlation between change in muscle size and change in muscle strength following training.

Also, there is a loss of muscle mass with detraining, yet often a maintaining muscle strength. Furthermore, similar muscle growth can occur with low load or high load resistance training, yet there are divergent results in strength.

"Neural adaptations are contributing first with muscle growth playing a more prominent role in the latter portion of a training program: however, there is little direct evidence that this is actually true in an adult partaking in a resistance training program," said Jeremy Loenneke, Researcher at the University of Mississippi, Mississippi.

New York, Nov 4 (IANS) Neural activation patterns in the brain remain same when we read different languages like English or Portuguese, finds a study.

"This tells us that, for the most part, the language we happen to learn to speak does not change the organisation of the brain," said Marcel Just, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in the US, in the study published in the journal NeuroImage. 

"Semantic information is represented in the same place in the brain and the same pattern of intensities for everyone. Knowing this means that brain-to-brain or brain-to-computer interface can probably be the same for speakers of all languages," Just added.

For the study, 15 native Portuguese speakers -- eight were bilingual in Portuguese and English -- read 60 sentences in Portuguese while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. 

The university developed computational model was able to predict which sentences the participants were reading in Portuguese, based only on activation patterns.

The resulting brain images showed that the activation patterns for the 60 sentences were in the same brain locations and at similar intensity levels for both English and Portuguese sentences.

Additionally, the results revealed the activation patterns could be grouped into four semantic categories, depending on the sentence's focus: people, places, actions and feelings.

"The cross-language prediction model demonstrated a meta-language prediction capability from neural signals across people, languages and bilingual status," said Ying Yang, researcher at the Carnegie Mellon University.

New York, Nov 4 (IANS) Soaking up sun may help you to keep level of emotional distress stable, finds a new study.

"When it comes to your mental and emotional health, the amount of time between sunrise and sunset is the weather variable that matters most. This applies to the clinical population at large, not just those diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder," said Mark Beecher, Professor at the Brigham Young University, US.

The study analysed many meteorological variables such as wind chill, rainfall, solar irradiance, wind speed, temperature and more. The weather data could be analysed down to the minute in the exact area where the clients lived. 

The study focused on a clinical population instead of a general population and used a mental health treatment outcome measure to examine several aspects of psychological distress, rather than relying on suicide attempts or online diaries.

According to the study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, one thing that was really significant was the amount of time between sunrise and sunset.

"On a rainy day or a more polluted day, people assume that they'd have more distress. But we didn't see that. We looked at solar irradiance, or the amount of sunlight that actually hits the ground. We tried to take into account cloudy days, rainy days, pollution but they washed out," Beecher added.

​London, Nov 4 (IANS) British scientists have identified the reason behind what makes a song so catchy that it gets stuck in our head and goes on playing in an endless loop -- known as experiencing involuntary musical imagery or earworms.

Findings of a study, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, showed that songs that are usually faster and have a fairly generic and easy-to-remember melody but have some unique intervals such as leaps or repetitions that set them apart from the "average pop song" get stuck in our head.

"Our findings show that you can, to some extent, predict which songs are going to get stuck in people's heads based on the song's melodic content," said lead author Kelly Jakubowski from Durham University in Britain.

In addition to a common melodic shape, the other crucial ingredient in the earworm formula is an unusual interval structure in the song such as some unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than you would expect to hear in the "average pop song". 

"The study could help aspiring song-writers or advertisers write a jingle that everyone will remember for days or months afterwards," Jakubowski added.

In the study, the team asked 3,000 people for their most frequent earworm tunes and compared these to tunes which had never been named as earworms in the database but were a match in terms of popularity and how recently they had been in Britain's music charts.

The melodic features of the earworm and non-earworm tunes were then analysed and compared. Songs were limited to popular music genres, such as pop, rock, rap, rhythm and blues.

New York, Nov 4 (IANS) Genetically removing a protein or using drug to target it can help reverse diabetic insulin resistance and glucose intolerance, suggests new research.

By binding to insulin receptors on cells, the protein Galectin-3 (Gal3) prevents insulin from attaching to the receptors, resulting in cellular insulin resistance. 

"This study puts Gal3 on the map for insulin resistance and diabetes in mouse model," said senior author of the study Jerrold Olefsky, Professor at University of California - San Diego School of Medicine.

When people have insulin resistance, glucose builds up in the blood instead of being absorbed by the cells, leading to Type-2 diabetes or prediabetes, according to National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"Our findings suggest that Gal3 inhibition in people could be an effective anti-diabetic approach," Olefsky said.

The team showed that by genetically removing Gal3 or using pharmaceutical inhibitors to target it, insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance could be returned to normal, even among older mice. 

Olefsky and other researchers have been studying how chronic tissue inflammation leads to insulin resistance in Type-2 diabetes. 

In the current study, published in the journal Cell, researchers explained that inflammation requires macrophages -- specialised cells that destroy targeted cells. 

In obese adipose tissue (fat), for example, 40 per cent of cells are macrophages.

Macrophages in turn secrete Gal3, which then acts as a signaling protein attracting more macrophages, thus resulting in the production of even more Gal3.

Furthermore, investigators identified bone marrow-derived macrophages as the source of Gal3 that leads to insulin resistance. 

​London, Nov 3 (IANS) Larger violation of social norms in public spaces may not lead to stronger reaction from public than smaller violations, finds a new study.

The research team investigated how people respond to large and small violations of social norms in public spaces. 

The study published in the journal Nature Communications refutes the assumption that larger violations tend to be punished more severely than smaller offences. 

The researchers staged small violations (littering a coffee cup) and large violations (littering a coffee cup and bag of trash) at train stations in Germany and recorded how travellers responded in more than 800 trials. 

The implicit assumption was that bystanders would react more strongly if more garbage was littered, hence the norm violation was greater. 

However, the size of the violation did not affect the likelihood that the litterer would be reprimanded -- nor did it affect the intensity of the reprimand.

Travellers have more negative emotions toward the larger violation and felt that it should be reprimanded more severely. 

Despite these emotional responses, however, the surveyed individuals admitted that they would be reluctant to confront or punish such violations in real-life settings.

The scientists explain this reluctance with the perceived risk of retaliation by the norm violator. The greater the norm violation, the greater the retaliation might be. 

Bystanders feared that in cases of a more severe social norm violation, the person's reaction would be stronger when confronted or reprimanded. 

"The study shows that social self-regulation has its limits. Up to a certain point, we reprimand each other for bad behaviour. But in cases of more extreme norm violations, social self-regulation no longer works and we need authorities, police and security personnel," said Bettina Rockenbach, Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany.