Knowledge Update

​Chicago, July 8 (IANS) How do you build rapport with a new employer or someone on a first date? Eat the same food as your companion, a study has revealed.

According to the study published online in Journal of Consumer Psychology, researchers from the University of Chicago launched a series of experiments to determine whether similar food consumption facilitates a sense of closeness and trust between adults.

The researchers tested the influence of food in a study in which pairs were assigned to opposing sides of a labour negotiation. 

Some pairs ate similar foods during the negotiations while others ate different foods. The pairs that had eaten similar foods reached an agreement almost twice as quickly as the groups that ate dissimilar foods.

"People tend to think that they use logic to make decisions, and they are largely unaware that food preferences can influence their thinking. On a very basic level, food can be used strategically to help people work together and build trust," said Ayelet Fishbach, Professor, University of Chicago.

At large group meetings, organisers could limit the number of food options in order to encourage similar food consumption, which could lead to increased trust and collaboration, suggested the study.

The researchers also discovered that these findings applied to marketing products. Participants trusted information from advertisers when consumers ate the same type of food as advertisers giving a testimonial about the product.​

​Vienna, July 8 (IANS) Weight loss from bariatric surgery appears to reverse the premature ageing associated with obesity, according to a research.

The study revealed whether bariatric surgery -- a procedure that bypasses the gastrointestinal tract and leaves only a pouch of stomach and the resulting weight loss could reverse the premature ageing in obese patients.

The study included 76 patients who were 40 years old on average and had a body mass index (BMI) of at least 35 kg/m2. The average BMI was 44.5 kg/m2. All patients had been unable to lose weight through lifestyle changes and were referred for bariatric surgery.

The researchers collected blood samples before surgery and one and two years afterwards. They compared the levels of premature ageing markers in the blood before and after surgery.

One year after surgery BMI had significantly dropped to an average of 27.5 kg/m2, which amounts to a 38 per cent reduction.

This was accompanied by decreases in the pro-inflammatory cytokines plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 and interleukin-6 and an increase in the anti-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-10.

"Obese people are prematurely old. Bariatric surgery drastically reduces the amount of food patients can eat. People lose around 30 to 40 per cent of their whole body weight in the first year," said Philipp Hohensinner, Researcher at the Medical University of Vienna.

Patients had longer telomeres and less inflammation two years later. Telomeres are the internal clock of each cell. Telomeres get shorter when a cell divides or when oxidative stress causes them to break. 

When the telomeres get very short the cell can no longer divide and is replenished or stays in the body as an aged cell. Previous research found that obese women had shorter telomeres compared to women with a healthy weight, which amounted to an added eight years of life.

Two years after surgery, patients had telomeres that were 80 per cent longer than they had been before the procedure. The researchers also evaluated telomere oxidation which causes the telomeres to break and get shorter.​

Toronto, July 8 (IANS) Recent public education campaigns recommending home blood pressure monitoring may have inadvertently contributed to the rise in emergency visits for hypertension, a study says.

The findings do not suggest that home blood pressure monitoring should be discouraged. What it says is that high blood pressure in itself is not necessarily an emergency.

But aggressive home monitoring of blood pressure may be driving patients to emergency departments despite the lack of other emergency conditions, such as stroke.

"We encourage patients to monitor their blood pressure at home if they have been diagnosed with hypertension, but not every high blood pressure reading is an emergency," explained lead study author Clare Atzema from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

During the study period, between 2002 and 2012, in which visits to Ontario emergency departments for hypertension increased from 15,793 to 25,950 per year, the proportion of patients admitted to the hospital as a result decreased from 9.9 per cent to 7.1 per cent. 

Among the patients whose emergency department visit ended in admission to the hospital, the most frequent hospital diagnoses were stroke, renal failure and heart failure. 

"Stroke remains a huge killer and we do appreciate patients with hypertension being so conscientious about monitoring their readings," Atzema noted. 

The study was published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine, journal for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

"Patients should be aware that unless their high blood pressure coincides with symptoms of a medical emergency, such as chest pain, severe headache, nausea or shortness of breath, they probably do not need to visit the ER emergency room),” Atzema said.

"We of course encourage them to follow up as soon as possible with their regular physician. If there is any doubt, come to the emergency department: we would rather have you come without an emergency than stay home with one," Atzema pointed out.​

Tokyo, July 8 (IANS) A dead Japanese X-ray satellite has offered astronomers, including an Indian researcher, the capability to measure detailed dynamics of extremely hot gas in a distant cluster of galaxies -- allowing them to explore how galaxies form and evolve over time.

“Hitomi has revealed the tremendous scientific potential of next generation X-ray astronomy. This is only the first peek into a universe of discoveries. For instance, Hitomi was supposed to observe all kinds of growing black holes in order to learn how these ultra-dense objects grow and evolve," said Poshak Gandhi from the University of Southampton. 

However, the satellite suffered a fatal anomaly in March just one month after its launch. But before its untimely demise, its X-ray spectrometre was able to peer into the Perseus cluster of galaxies -- a collection of thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity located about 240 million light-years away.

Measurements of unprecedented data revealed that superheated gas at the cluster’s heart flows much more calmly than expected, given the amount of astrophysical action in the region.

The astronomers discovered that the hot gas was moving in the cluster at 164 km per second - enormous by human standards but surprisingly modest on cosmic scales. 

The results were recently published in the journal Nature. 

The study also indicated that turbulence is responsible for just four per cent of the energy stored in the gas as heat.

“Of course we had a programme planned to look at more clusters, and we would have carried on for the next few years had it only lived,” said Andrew Fabian from the University of Cambridge and a member of the Hitomi team. 

“It feels like the door has been briefly opened, showing us a new and exciting landscape - and it’s been slammed in our face again,” he added.

Led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Hitomi was launched on February 17 and made the Perseus observations on February 25 and March 4, weeks before suffering a mission-ending spacecraft anomaly on March 26.

The satellite's revolutionary Soft X-ray Spectrometre (SXS) provided 30 times the detail of the best previous observation. Hitomi’s SXS could measure the turbulence in the cluster to a precision of 10 km/second, whereas previous observations could only constrain the speed to be lower than 500 km/second.​

​Washington, July 8 (IANS) NASA is set to launch a new airborne mission to map the contours of the atmosphere as carefully as explorers once traced the land and oceans below.

The Atmospheric Tomography, or ATom, is the first to survey the atmosphere over the oceans, the US space agency said in a statement.

Scientists aboard NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory will journey from the North Pole south over the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand and then across to the tip of South America and north up the Atlantic Ocean to Greenland. 

ATom will discover how much pollution survives to the most remote corners of the earth and assess how the environment has changed as a result, the statement added.

"We've had many airborne measurements of the atmosphere over land, where most pollutants are emitted, but land is only a small fraction of the planet," said Michael Prather, an atmospheric scientist and ATom's deputy project scientist at University of California Irvine.

"The oceans are where a lot of chemical reactions take place, and some of the least well understood parts are hard to get to because they are so remote. With ATom we're going to measure a wide range of chemically distinct parts of the atmosphere over the most remote areas of the ocean that have not been measured before," Prather noted.

While the majority of the flight path takes the DC-8 over the ocean, the science team expects to see influence from human pollution that originates on land.

ATom's first flight is planned for July 28, a there-and-back trip over the tropics between Palmdale, California and the equator. 

On July 31, the mission begins its around-the-world trip lasting 26 days. It's the first of four deployments that will take place over the next three years in different seasons. 

The data collected will be used to improve atmospheric computer models used to predict future climate conditions into the 21st century as well as to provide checks and calibration in otherwise unreachable areas for several major satellite systems, NASA said.

The suite of 20 instruments aboard the DC-8 will measure airborne particles called aerosols and more than 200 gases in each sampled air patch, documenting their locations and allowing scientists to determine interactions. 

The science team will use ATom's collected data on the air's chemical signatures to understand where pollutants originate, and where and how quickly these climate gases react chemically and eventually disappear from the atmosphere.​

​London, July 7 (IANS) Sending low-frequency acoustic shock waves to injured muscles could speed up the healing process in the tissues, says an interesting study.

The Extracorporeal Shock Wave Therapy (ESWT) works by mechanically stimulating the tissue, which prompts stem cells to kick-start repair work.

"Our study indicates that shock waves increase the levels of chemical signalling factors in muscle tissue. These factors wake up "satellite" progenitor cells which gradually becomes new muscle fibres," said Angela Zissler, at the University of Salzburg in Austria.

For injuries like ligament and tendon damage, applying the low-frequency shock waves in ESWT has already proved to be a promising technique.

In the study, the team tested ESWT on rats and discovered that the procedure triggered muscle tissue to kick-start the self-healing process.

ESWT has good potential as a non-invasive therapy complementing or supplementing existing recovery regimes, said the paper published in the journal Society for Experimental Biology.

"This therapy only needs sessions of around 15 minutes, so easily complements traditional practices such as physiotherapy. Another bonus is that there are no side-effects to low-energy ESWT, unlike some other methods," Zissler explained.

In an ESWT session, shock waves are applied on the patient's damaged area at a low frequency (roughly 1 pulse per second).

These waves then focus a small amount of energy (less than 0.2 mJ/mm2) on the damaged area, without the need for using local anaesthetics.

This technique could also help injured athletes to return to training and be able to compete more quickly than just with traditional methods, the researchers concluded.​

​New York, July 7 (IANS) Combined impacts of volcanic eruptions in India and an asteroid impact in Mexico brought about one of the Earth's biggest mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, confirms a new study.

"It's quite likely both the volcanism and the asteroid were to blame for the ultimate mass extinction,” said one of the researchers, Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida.

"The Deccan Traps weakened the ecosystems before the asteroid slammed into the Earth -- it's consistent with an idea called the press-pulse hypothesis: a 'one-two punch' that proved devastating for life on Earth," Dutton noted.

Located in India, the Deccan Traps are one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world.

Dutton and her colleagues at the University of Michigan utilised a new technique of analysis to reconstruct Antarctic Ocean temperatures that support the idea that the combined impacts of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact brought about the mass extinctions 66 million years ago.

Their research, published in the journal Nature Communications, used a recently developed technique called the carbonate clumped isotope paleothermometer to analyse the chemical composition of fossil shells in the Antarctic Ocean. 

This analysis showed that ocean temperatures rose significantly.

The researchers linked these findings to two previously documented warming events that occurred near the end of the Cretaceous Period - one related to volcanic eruptions in India, and the other, tied to the impact of an asteroid or comet on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

To create their new temperature record, which spans 3.5 million years at the end of the Cretaceous and the start of the Paleogene Period, the researchers analysed the isotopic composition of 29 remarkably well-preserved shells of clam-like bivalves collected on Antarctica's Seymour Island.

The data showed two significant temperature spikes. 

The first corresponds to the eruption of the Deccan traps flood basalts. The other lines up exactly with the asteroid impact, which, in turn, may have sparked a renewed phase of volcanism in India. 

Intriguingly, both events are associated with extinction events of nearly equal magnitude on Seymour Island, Antarctica, the study said.​

​New York, July 7 (IANS) Genetics, effects on early development and social learning are some factors that can increase the risk of chronic pain transmitting from parent to children, researchers suggest.

According to a report in the journal PAIN, the researchers identified some plausible mechanisms to explain the transmission of chronic pain from parent to child. 

Genetic is a factor, which the research suggests, may account for roughly half of the risk of chronic pain in adults.

The study, conducted by Amanda Stone of Vanderbilt University and Anna Wilson of Oregon Health & Science University in the US also revealed that having a parent with chronic pain may affect the features and functioning of the nervous system during critical periods in early development.

"The outlined mechanisms, moderators, and vulnerabilities likely interact over time to influence the development of chronic pain and related outcomes in offspring of parents with chronic pain," the researchers said.

Parents' physical activity level and adverse effects from growing up in stressful circumstances are also related to increase in transfer of chronic pain, the study said

​London, July 7 (IANS) The pound sterling on Thursday continued to hover around 31-year lows in Asian trading as more UK property funds suspended withdrawals in the wake of Britain voting to exit the European Union (EU).