Knowledge Update

New York, March 9 (IANS) The preliminary results of an experiment confirm what the 2015 Hollywood science fiction film "The Martian" showed: potatoes can grow on Mars.

The International Potato Centre (CIP) in Lima, Peru, launched a series of experiments to discover if potatoes can grow under Mars atmospheric conditions and thereby prove they are also able to grow in extreme climates on Earth. 

The new phase of CIP's experiment to grow potatoes in simulated Martian conditions began on February 14 last year.

Based upon designs and advice provided by the NASA's Ames Research Centre in California, a tuber was planted in a specially constructed CubeSat contained environment built by engineers from the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima.

"If the crops can tolerate the extreme conditions that we are exposing them to in our CubeSat, they have a good chance to grow on Mars. We will do several rounds of experiments to find out which potato varieties do best," said Julio Valdivia-Silva from UTEC. 

"We want to know what the minimum conditions are that a potato needs to survive," he said in a statement released by CIP.

The CubeSat houses a container holding soil and the tuber. Inside this hermetically sealed environment, the CubeSat delivers nutrient-rich water, controls the temperature for Mars day and night conditions, and mimics Mars air pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. 

Live streaming cameras recording the soil showed potato sprouting in the simulated Martian conditions.

The results so far have been positive, the researchers said.

​London, March 9 (IANS) Far from being limited to a gifted few, the ability to perform astonishing feats of memory, such as remembering lists of several dozen words, can be learned, say researchers.

In a study published in the journal Neuron, the researchers showed that after 40 days of daily 30-minute training sessions using a strategic memory improvement technique, individuals who had typical memory skills at the start and no previous memory training more than doubled their memory capacity.

From recalling an average of 26 words from a list of 72, the participants were able to remember on an average 62 words, the findings showed. 

Brain scans before and after training showed that strategic memory training altered the brain functions of the trainees, making them more similar to those of memory champions. 

"After training we see massively increased performance on memory tests," said study first author Martin Dresler, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 

"Not only can you induce a behavioural change, the training also induces similar brain connectivity patterns as those seen in memory athletes," Dresler said.

To explore the effects of training on the brain, Dresler and his colleagues recruited 51 individuals with typical memory skills and no previous memory training. 

They were split into three groups -- two training groups and one group that did not train. The researchers scanned participants' brains before and after training.

The two training methods were short-term memory training and strategic memory training. 

During short-term memory training, an individual practices remembering sequences, a bit like playing the game Concentration. 

Strategic memory training provides trainees with a systematic way to remember lists.

In this study, the strategy Dresler chose was memory of loci training, which is employed by most world champion memory athletes. 

Using this strategy, items on a list are associated with a remembered place, and users navigate that remembered place as they recall the list. 

Those who trained using method of loci showed substantial improvement in their ability to recall lists of words. 

Before training, individuals could recall on average between 26 and 30 words. 

Afterwards, those with strategic memory training could recall 35 more words on average. 

Those who trained short-term memory could recall 11 more words. Those with no training recalled seven more words.

A day later, those who had trained still showed improvements in recall. 

Four months later, only those with strategic training continued to show substantial gains, still recalling over 22 more words than prior to training. 

"Once you are familiar with these strategies and know how to apply them, you can keep your performance high without much further training," Dresler said.

​New York, March 9 (IANS) Eating yogurt rich in lactobacillus -- a probiotic bacteria -- may help alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety, a finding that could lead to new strategies for treating psychiatric conditions, researchers have found.

Depression is a huge problem and the treatments are not very good, because they come with huge side effects.

"The study will help us not to bother with complex drugs and side effects when we can just play with the microbiome. It would be magical just to change your diet, to change the bacteria you take, and fix your health -- and your mood," said lead researcher Alban Gaultier from the University of Virginia in the US.

In the study, conducted on mice, the researchers have discovered a specific mechanism for how the lactobacillus bacteria affect mood, providing a direct link between the health of the gut microbiome and mental health. 

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the team induced depression symptoms in mice to analyse their composition of the gut microbiome and found that the major change was the loss of lactobacillus. 

With the loss of lactobacillus came the onset of depression symptoms. Conversely, feeding the mice lactobacillus with their food returned them to almost normal, the researchers said. 

"A single strain of lactobacillus, is able to influence mood," Gaultier observed. 

In addition, the study found that the amount of lactobacillus in the gut affects the level of a metabolite in the blood -- called kynurenine -- which has been shown to drive depression.

When lactobacillus was diminished in the gut, the levels of kynurenine went up -- and depression symptoms set in.

While there is no harm in people with depression eating yogurt, people receiving treatment for depression should not stop taking their medications without consulting their physicians, the researchers suggested.

Based on the findings, the researchers plan to begin studying the effect in humans as soon as possible.

​New York, March 8 (IANS) Micro-blogging website Twitter has introduced Moments analytics for all its users on web that allows to see how favourite Moments are performing.

"This will allow Moments' creators to track how well their content is working on Twitter, by offering details on opens, likes, shares and more," tech website techcrunh.com

​New York, March 8 (IANS) In yet another copycatting of Snapchat, photo-sharing app Instagram now allows users to use geostickers to tag images and videos in its Stories feature just like Snapchat Stories, media reported on Wednesday.

​Geneva, March 7 (IANS/MAP) Morocco organised a debate in Geneva to discuss possibilities for a global human rights-based climate change agenda.

The meeting was held on Monday on the sidelines of the main sessions of the UN Human Rights Council.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) Are you annoyed with your smartphone's relentless stream of text messages, push alerts, social media messages and other noisy notifications? Take heart, experts at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, have developed a new model that allows the smartphones to learn automatically like a "human secretary" and predict the user's receptiveness to distractions by the notifications. "Ideally, a smartphone notification management system should be like an excellent human secretary who knows when you want to be interrupted or left alone," said Janne Lindqvist, assistant professor at Rutgers University. Currently, the notification management system is not smart or only depends on a user's setting, such as turning on or off certain notifications. The model can help to better manage smartphone notifications using a sense of personality type and work patterns of individuals. The study will be published in May at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Denver, Colorado. In the study, the researchers collected more than 5,000 smartphone records from 22 participants over four weeks. The participants took a test to see how their personalities aligned with traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness, to help predict how interruptible people were. The results showed that when participants were in a pleasant mood, they were likely to be more interruptible than if they were in an unpleasant mood. It also varied based on their location. But participants were reluctant to be interrupted when they were studying and were less interruptible when exercising. "Preferably, your smartphone would recognise your patterns of use and behaviour and schedule notifications to minimise interruptions," Lindqvist added. The findings could help phone makers and app developers build offerings that are more useful and less annoying, the researchers said. "We know that people struggle with time management all the time, so a smartphone, instead of being a nuisance, could actually help with things," Lindqvist added.

​Geneva, March 7 (IANS) India's auto major Tata Motors on Tuesday showcased its first sports car, the Tamo Racemo, at the Geneva Motor Show 2017. It also unveiled its next generation car in the compact category, sedan Tigor as well as SUV Nexon. "Symbolising the change that is taking place" in the auto maker, the two-seater sports coupe, the first product under its new sub-brand Tamo, is the India's first connected car. Unveiling the car, company's MD and CEO Guenter Butschek said: "We launched our sub-brand as our answer to new technologies, business models and partnerships. The sports car is the first innovation from the sub-brand, and our emotional, unexpected leap to the future. It will drive the future of India's connected generation." The sports car, equipped with advanced navigation, predictive maintenance, remote monitoring and over-the-air updates using Microsoft cloud-based technologies, is expected to hit the market in 2017-18. "From styling and design to driver experience and technology, the car is an extension of customers' personality, as part of their digital ecosystem and will break the ice with a radical new presence and pique the interest in the parent brand," he added. The car is built on its patented MOFlex Multi-Material Sandwich (MMS) structure - a structural technology, enabling greater freedom in surface design, efficient large-scale part integration leading to modularity and faster time to market. The new sports car was unveiled in the presence of new Chairman N. Chandrasekaran and Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata. According to company officials, after a successful launch of HEXA early this year, the car maker is speeding towards the launch of styleback, Tata Tigor, this month. Tata Nexon, will mark its entry in the rapidly growing SUV segment later this year.

New York, March 7 (IANS) Tires of the future could come from the farm as much as the factory as researchers have found a way to turn waste tomato peels and eggshells into sustainable rubber.

The researchers discovered that food waste can partially replace carbon black, the petroleum-based filler that has been used in manufacturing tires for more than a century.

In tests, rubber made with the new fillers exceeds industrial standards for performance, which may ultimately open up new applications for rubber.

The method for turning eggshells and tomato peels into viable - and locally sourced--replacements for carbon black was developed by Katrina Cornish and colleagues from The Ohio State University in the US.

"We found that replacing different portions of carbon black with ground eggshells and tomato peels caused synergistic effects - for instance, enabling strong rubber to retain flexibility," Cindy Barrera, a postdoctoral researcher in Cornish's lab, said in a statement. 

While the findings could make the manufacture of rubber products more sustainable and also keep waste out of landfills.

The researchers found in tests that eggshells have porous microstructures that provide larger surface area for contact with the rubber, and give rubber-based materials unusual properties. 

Tomato peels, on the other hand, are highly stable at high temperatures and can also be used to generate material with good performance.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) Head injuries can harm hundreds of genes in the brain in a way that increases people's risk for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, says a study.

"Very little is known about how people with brain trauma -- like football players and soldiers -- develop neurological disorders later in life," said study co-senior author Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

"We hope to learn much more about how this occurs," Gomez-Pinilla said.

For the study, the researchers trained 20 rats to escape from a maze. They then used a fluid to produce a concussion-like brain injury in 10 of the rats; the 10 others did not receive brain injuries.

When the rats were placed in the maze again, those that had been injured took approximately 25 per cent longer than the non-injured rats to solve it.

To learn how the rats' genes had changed in response to the brain injury, the researchers analyzed genes from five animals in each group. 

Specifically, they drew RNA from the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that helps regulate learning and memory, and from leukocytes, white blood cells that play a key role in the immune system.

In the rats that had sustained brain injuries, there was a core group of 268 genes in the hippocampus that the researchers found had been altered, and a core group of 1,215 genes in the leukocytes that they found to have been changed.

More than 100 of the genes that changed after the brain injury have counterparts in humans that have been linked to neurological and psychiatric disorders, the researchers reported in the study published in the journal EbioMedicine.

As a number of the affected genes are present in both the hippocampus and blood, the findings could pave the way for a gene-based blood test to determine whether a brain injury has occurred.

Measuring some of those genes could help doctors predict whether a person is likely to develop neurological disorders later in life, the study said.