Knowledge Update

Kathmandu, Nov 24 (IANS) The Patanjali Group, owned by Indian yoga guru Ramdev, opened its new factory in Nepal on Thursday, aiming to produce various fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) in a bid to expand its business across the border.

​Riyadh, Nov 24 (IANS) World's top crude oil producer Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, said it made a major advancement in its POWERS technology that will simulate oil migration problems in the Kingdom in a fraction of the time it once took and help discover new oil and gas fields.

Washington, Nov 23 (IANS) Using a 8.2-meter telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, an international team of researchers has found what could be the faintest dwarf satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

Called Virgo I, the new dwarf satellite galaxy lies in the direction of the constellation Virgo at a distance of 280,000 light years from our Sun, Xinhua news agency reported.

It has an absolute luminosity of -0.8 in the optical waveband and such a remote galaxy with faint brightness has not been identified in previous sky surveys.

Its discovery suggested the presence of a large number of yet-undetected dwarf satellites in the halo of the Milky Way, according to the study published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.

"This discovery implies hundreds of faint dwarf satellites waiting to be discovered in the halo of the Milky Way," study leader Masashi Chiba, a professor from the Tohoku University in Japan, said in a statement.

"How many satellites are indeed there and what properties they have, will give us an important clue of understanding how the Milky Way formed and how dark matter contributed to it."

So far, some 50 satellite galaxies to the Milky Way have been identified.

​London, Nov 24 (IANS) With the onset of Christmas season, millions of parents will lie to their children about the existence of Santa Claus or Christmas Father. A new study has suggested that this lie may damage their bond.

The study, published in Lancet Psychiatry, showed that the children's trust in their parents may be undermined by the Santa lie.

"The morality of making children believe in such myths has to be questioned. All children will eventually find out they've been consistently lied to for years, and this might make them wonder what other lies they've been told," asked Christopher Boyle, Professor at the University of Exeter in Britain.

But, according to the authors, the Christmas father fantasy may not be purely for the children.

Parents may not be motivated by purely creating magic for their children, but by a desire to return to the joy of childhood themselves.

For adults, it's a chance to go back to a time when they believed in magic.

"Many people may yearn for a time when imagination was accepted and encouraged, which may not be the case in adult life," Boyle said.

"The persistence of fandom in stories like Harry Potter, Star Wars and Doctor Who well into adulthood demonstrates this desire to briefly re-enter childhood," added Kathy McKay from the University of New England, Australia. 

However, the study contended that lying to children may sometimes be right.

"An adult comforting a child and telling them that their recently deceased pet will go to a special place (animal heaven) is arguably nicer than telling graphic truths about its imminent re-entry into the carbon cycle," Boyle observed.

​New York, Nov 23 (IANS) Meditation can help alleviate severe depression in people who do not fully respond to drugs, reports a new study. Researchers found significant improvement in symptoms of depression and anxiety in medicated patients with major depressive disorder who participated in the yogic breathing technique. The Sudarshan Kriya yoga helped those suffering from depression and on medication when compared to those who took medicines but did not do any breathing exercise. "The study found a promising, lower-cost therapy that could potentially serve as an effective, non-drug approach for patients battling depression," said Anup Sharma, doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, in the US. The meditation technique, which is practiced in both groups and at home, includes a series of sequential, rhythm-specific breathing exercises that bring people into a deep, restful and meditative state. It involves slow and calm breaths alternated with fast and stimulating breaths. Patients, who practised Sudarshan Kriya yoga, also showed a significantly greater improvement in mood, interest in activities, energy levels. It also brought down suicidal thoughts and feelings of guilt among other symptoms of depression. "Sudarshan Kriya yoga gives people an active method to experience a deep meditative state that's easy to learn and incorporate in diverse settings," Sharma added. Past studies suggest that yoga and other controlled breathing techniques can potentially adjust the nervous system to reduce stress hormones. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

​New York, Nov 23 (IANS) In the largest study of its kind, researchers have discovered rare genetic variations linked to schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder that often includes psychotic experiences, such as delusions or hearing voices that are not there.

The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, an international team led by Jonathan Sebat from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine in the US analysed the genomes of more than 41,000 people.

Their study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, revealed several regions of the genome where mutations increase schizophrenia risk between four- and 60-fold.

These mutations, known as copy number variants, are deletions or duplications of the DNA sequence. 

A copy number variant may affect dozens of genes, or it can disrupt or duplicate a single gene. 

"This type of variation can cause significant alterations to the genome and lead to psychiatric disorders," said Sebat.

Analysing the genomes of 21,094 people with schizophrenia and 20,227 people without schizophrenia, the team of more than 260 researchers found eight locations in the genome with copy number variants associated with schizophrenia risk. 

The researchers also found that these copy number variants occurred more frequently in genes involved in the function of synapses, the connections between brain cells that transmit chemical messages.

"We're confident that applying this same approach to a lot of new data will help us discover additional genomic variations and identify specific genes that play a role in schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions," Sebat said.

Washington, Nov 23 (IANS) Aiming to understanding why the roundworm that causes river blindness has started developing resistance to the drug used as the first-line treatment for the disease, a new study sheds light on the genetic makeup of the parasite.

The drug ivermectin remains the first-line treatment to target the parasite. The drug's discoverers were honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine just last year.

But after several decades of exposure to ivermectin, these parasites are beginning to show resistance.

"We want to understand the origin of this resistance," said senior study author Makedonka Mitreva, Associate Professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The parasite that causes river blindness infects about 37 million people in parts of Africa and Latin America, causing blindness and other major eye and skin diseases in about five million of them. 

The parasite is a roundworm called Onchocerca volvulus and is carried by black flies that thrive near rivers and streams. 

"Are these parasites evolving to survive the treatment, or are the surviving worms actually new strains that have been introduced due to migration of the black flies or of the parasite itself?" Mitreva asked.

To find out, Mitreva and her colleagues studied samples of the roundworms that have been stored since the early 1990s, before large-scale ivermectin treatment programmes began. 

They also are sequencing present-day strains for comparison. The current study, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, reports data only from the historical samples.

"We worked hard to find samples of the parasite that had not been exposed to the drug because we needed to establish an ancestral baseline," Mitreva said. 

The new study included 27 roundworm samples taken in the early 1990s from four distinct regions -- West African forest, West African savanna, Uganda and Ecuador.

"In West Africa, there are two separate strains of this parasite based on geographic areas -- the savanna strain and the forest strain," Mitreva said.

"The severity of the disease caused by each strain is very different. The savanna strains are much more virulent and have been associated with higher rates of blindness. The forest strains cause a mild skin disease. That's why we wanted to see how they differ genetically," she added.

According to Mitreva, the Uganda strains, collected in central Africa, could not be classified as either the forest or savanna strain. Similarly, the strains from Ecuador, in South America, were also very different from the African strains.

In general, Mitreva said, large-scale control efforts -- including mass treatment with ivermectin and the use of insecticides to reduce black fly populations -- have been very effective over the past 30 years. 

But since pockets of drug resistance are showing up, she said studies such as this one are important if the World Health Organisation's goal of eliminating the parasite by 2025 is to be met

​Washington, Nov 23 (IANS) NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the agencys April 2021 mission designed to make the first-ever global survey of Earths surface water.

The mission is likely to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The total cost for NASA to launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is approximately $112 million, which includes the launch service; spacecraft processing; payload integration; and tracking, data and telemetry support, the US space agency said on Wednesday.

Designed to make the first-ever global survey of Earth's surface water, in addition to high-resolution ocean measurements, the SWOT mission will collect detailed measurements of how water bodies on Earth change over time.

The satellite will survey at least 90 per cent of the globe, studying Earth's lakes, rivers, reservoirs and oceans, at least twice every 21 days, aid in freshwater management around the world, to improve ocean circulation models and weather and climate predictions. 

The SWOT spacecraft will be jointly developed and managed by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES).

NASA said its launch services programme at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will manage the SpaceX launch service. 

SpaceX currently has nine NASA missions on its planned launch manifest for upcoming contracts, but it still hasn't provided a definite date for resuming launches following the explosion of a SpaceX rocket during pre-flight checks on a launch pad in September, Techcrunch.com reported.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket exploded on September 1 at Cape Canaveral, Florida during a pre-launch test, destroying the rocket itself and a $200-million communications satellite that was set to play a key role in Facebook's plans to provide internet access to remote villages in Africa. No one was injured in the explosion.

In a series of tweets in September, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk termed the launch pad accident as the "the most difficult and complex failure" in the company's 14-year history.

​Beijing, Nov 15 (IANS) Chinese internet and technology conglomerate LeEco on Tuesday announced receiving $600 million in funding from Chinese institutional investors and that it has appointed Anthony Gao (Gao Jun) as new President for its Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

Beijing, Nov 15 (IANS) The Chinese yuan on Tuesday fell sharply to an almost eight-year low against the US dollar.

The central parity rate of the yuan weakened 204 basis points to 6.8495 against the dollar, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trading System (CFETS).