Knowledge Update

London, Sep 8 (IANS) Before buying a product, consumers are often likely to search and review online hundreds of available items in any category for up to a month. However, what they purchase tends to be remarkably close to the items they searched and found in their very first search, says a study. "Consumers don't explore anywhere close to full range of products and attributes in the category. The final product they purchase is very close in terms of the attributes to the products they discovered on the first day," said Bart Bronnenberg of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The study finds that about 25 per cent of consumers search and purchase in just one online session. The average purchase takes much longer -- around 15 days and over six sessions. The vast majority of purchases happen in under a month. Further, about 40 per cent of consumers search only one brand and 20 per cent only one model, while the average consumer will search about three brands and six models. "People differ in their search behaviour a lot. Some make up their mind right away but others search for long periods - often up to a month and review many products," added Carl Mela of Duke University in North Carolina, US. This suggests that consumers have a rough idea of the quality and type of features they want as they begin search. The search helps them merely to refine the right combination of features within the narrow range of features of the products they found on the first day. For marketers, a long period of search can be a great opportunity to influence the exploration and discovery of new products during search and purchase. "The fact that what people buy is close to what they initially found means that the advertising targeting and product recommendations can use this information effectively and recommend close variants of what the consumer initially searched and found," explained Jun Kim of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The study focussed on online search and purchase behaviour of consumers in the digital camera category. The team combined detailed consumer online browsing and purchase data for digital cameras from the online measurement firm comScore, with scraped camera product pages from the three largest online retailers - Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart - to uncover a variety of insights about online consumer search behaviour. They used a sample of more than 1,000 digital camera purchases with full browsing histories over a three-month period. The article is forthcoming in the journal Marketing Science

​New York, Sep 8 (IANS) How a car looks can go a long way in determine how much it sells and researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have now found what design elements prime a car's popularity. By combining data on aesthetic design and sales, the researchers showed that while customers do not like cars to look too different from the market average, they also do not want something that looks too similar. When buying a luxury car, it is more important that the car looks consistent with the brand, and less important that it looks like other cars in the market segment. Cars in the economy segment can gain in popularity by mimicking the aesthetics of their luxury counterparts, the study said. The findings will help marketing professionals make better decisions on aesthetic design, and can be applied to a wide range of product categories including electronics, wearable technologies and household appliances, said Subramanian "Bala" Balachander, Professor at University of California, Riverside, in the US. "Using our quantitative design model, product design managers in all sectors can forecast sales and profits of alternative aesthetic designs," Balachander said. Although quantifying the physical appearance of real products is challenging, the researchers used a recently developed morphing technique to construct the "average" car in a particular market segment or brand from a series of individual pictures. Once developed, the researchers determined the similarity of more than 200 car models from 33 brands sold in the US between 2003 and 2010 to that average, examining their segment prototypicality (how typical a product is compared to other products in the same market), brand consistency (how much a product looks like the average product in a brand's product lineup) and cross-segment mimicry (how much the design of an economy product mimics a luxury product), while controlling for other variables such as price and advertising. Their results, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing, showed that the aesthetic design of a product can have a significant effect on consumer preference, with consumers preferring products that are neither too similar to the average product nor drastically different.

​New York, Sep 8 (IANS) The sophisticated gadgetry in smartphones makes them ideal tools to steal sensitive data from 3-D printers, says a study.

That's according to a new University at Buffalo study that explores security vulnerabilities of 3-D printing, also called additive manufacturing, which analysts say will become a

​London, Sep 8 (IANS) An international team of researchers has found that a stellar system classified as a globular cluster for the 40-odd years since its detection actually has properties uncommon for a globular cluster that make it the ideal candidate for a living fossil from the early days of the Milky Way.

The cluster, known as Terzan 5 -- 19,000 light-years from Earth -- harbours stars of hugely different ages -- an age-gap of roughly seven billion years -- and bridges the gap in understanding between our galaxy's past and its present, the study said.

"Such galactic fossils allow astronomers to reconstruct an important piece of the history of our Milky Way," explained lead author of the study Francesco Ferraro from University of Bologna in Italy.

While the properties of Terzan 5 are uncommon for a globular cluster, they are very similar to the stellar population which can be found in the galactic bulge, the tightly packed central region of the Milky Way. 

These similarities could make Terzan 5 a fossilised relic of galaxy formation, representing one of the earliest building blocks of the Milky Way.

"Terzan 5 could represent an intriguing link between the local and the distant Universe, a surviving witness of the Galactic bulge assembly process," Ferraro said.

The team scoured data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 on board Hubble, as well as from a suite of other ground-based telescopes. 

They found compelling evidence that there are two distinct kinds of stars in Terzan 5 which not only differ in the elements they contain, but have an age-gap of roughly seven billion years.

The ages of the two populations indicate that the star formation process in Terzan 5 was not continuous, but was dominated by two distinct bursts of star formation. 

"This requires the Terzan 5 ancestor to have large amounts of gas for a second generation of stars and to be quite massive. At least 100 million times the mass of the Sun," co-author of the study Davide Massari from National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) , Italy.

Its unusual properties make Terzan 5 the ideal candidate for a living fossil from the early days of the Milky Way, said the study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Somehow Terzan 5 has managed to survive being disrupted for billions of years, and has been preserved as a remnant of the distant past of the Milky Way.

The researchers believe that this discovery paves the way for a better and more complete understanding of galaxy assembly. 

New York, Sep 8 (IANS) Activities like playing video games or tennis may help enhance your memory, a study has found.

Attention-grabbing experiences release memory-enhancing chemicals in brain, helping to store memories that occur just before or soon after the experience, the study mentioned.

"Activation of the locus coeruleus (part of the brainstem) increases our memory of events that happen at the time of activation and may also increase the recall of those memories at a later time," said Robert Greene, Professor at the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center's Texas Institute for Brain Injury and Repair, at Dallas in Texas.

The study, published in the journal Nature explains at the molecular level why people tend to remember certain events in their lives with particular clarity as well as unrelated details surrounding those events.

The latest study established that dopamine in the brain can be naturally activated through behavioural actions and that these actions enhance memory retention.

The study tested 120 mice to establish a link between locus coeruleus (LC) neurons and neuronal circuits of the hippocampus -- the region of the brain responsible for recording memories -- that receive dopamine from the LC.

One part of the research involved putting the mice in an arena to search for food hidden in sand that changed location each day. 

The study found that the mice that were given a chance to explore an unfamiliar floor surface 30 minutes after being trained to remember the food location did better in remembering where to find the food the next day.

Researchers correlated this memory enhancement to a molecular process in the brain by injecting the mice with a genetically encoded light-sensitive activator called channelrhodopsin. 

This sensor allowed them to selectively activate dopamine-carrying neurons of the locus coeruleus that go to the hippocampus and to see first-hand which neurons were responsible for the memory enhancement.

They found that selectively activating the channelrhodopsin-labeled neurons with blue light (a technique called optogenetics) could substitute for the novelty experience as a memory enhancer in mice. 

They also found that this activation could cause a direct, long-lasting synaptic strengthening -- an enhancement of memory-relevant communication occurring at the junctions between neurons in the hippocampus. This process can mediate improvement of learning and memory.

"Some next steps include investigating how big an impact this finding can have on human learning, whether it can eventually lead to an understanding of how patients can develop failing memories, and how to better target effective therapies for these patients," Greene added.

New York, Sep 8 (IANS) Risk of death from sudden loss of heart function is significantly greater in patients with high thyroid hormone levels, according to a study.

"Our results indicate that thyroid hormone levels may be useful for assessing risk to prevent sudden cardiac death," said Layal Chaker, researcher at the Erasmus University Medical Center, at Rotterdam in the Netherland, in the study, published in the journal Circulation.

Although the link between abnormal levels of thyroid hormone and cardiovascular disease is well established, the hormone's relationship with sudden cardiac death is unclear.

Researchers analysed 10,318 patients with an average age of 65 and more than half were women for the study and linked the association of thyroid-stimulating hormone and free thyroxine thyroid hormone levels in blood samples with sudden cardiac deaths listed on medical records and death certificates.

They found that participants with free thyroxine hormone levels at the high end of the normal range were 2.5 times more likely to die of sudden cardiac death, compared to patients with levels at the lower end.

The ten-year risk of sudden cardiac death was four times greater among patients with higher free thyroxine levels compared to those with lower levels.

The increased risk persisted even after controlling for other risk factors such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

"The study suggests more caution is warranted in the treatment of thyroid hormone replacement. Replacement therapy is often aimed at the high normal range which carries a risk of over-treatment," Chaker added. 

​San Francisco, Sep 8 (IANS) Ending round-the-clock rumours that had sent the world of technology into a tizzy for quite some time now, Apple CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday unveiled stunning iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus along with next-generation 'Apple Watch Series 2' at the jam-packed Bill Graham Civic Auditorium here. iPhone 7 will cost the same as iPhone 6s, starting at $649 (US price) and comes in three variants: 32GB, 128GB, and 256GB (16 GB variant no more). iPhone 7 Plus will start at $769. Pre-orders for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus begins from September 9 and the shipping will start from September 16 at first in 28 countries, with 30 more countries one week later, Tech Crunch reported. So, this is what iPhone 7 finally has: Water and dust resistance, dual-lens camera (in iPhone 7 Plus), 4.6-inch retina HD display, a new home button, 7 MP HD front camera and 12 MP rear main camera, no traditional 3.5 mm headphone jack, iOS 10, A10 fusion chip and and longest battery life to date. The phone will come in rose gold, gold, silver, black, and jet black colours. "Optical image stabilisation in all new iPhones, allowing for up to 3x longer exposure," Tech Crunch said. Apple's twin lens setup is wide angle and telephoto in the iPhone 7 Plus. For actual, optical zoom, one lens handles 1x zoom; the other handles 2x, the report added. iPhone 7 Plus now has 10x zoom. The camera app is getting a "portrait" mode that'll use the dual-lenses and depth mapping to simulate the DSLR visual quality. "We're not saying that iPhone replaces your DSLR. We're saying this is the best camera we've ever built in any iPhone. For many customers, it'll be the best camera they've ever owned," said Philip W. Schiller, Senior Vice President (Worldwide Marketing) at Apple. Starting at $369, the 'Apple Watch Series 2' will be water resistant to 50 metres and the speaker will literally repel the water like a piston. Pre-orders for 'Series 2' will open on September 9 and the shipment will start from September 16. The device will have a dual core processor with GPU that is up to two times faster. The second generation watch will have the brightest display ever (1,000 nits so that users can see it in full sunlight) and runs watchOS 3. "If you've used a GPS Watch before, you know that sometimes it can take a while to connect to satellites. With Apple Watch, you just hit start and it's ready," Jeff Williams, Apple's Chief Operating Officer, told the gathering. The company also launched wireless headphones called Airpods that will cost $159. Infrared sensors will detect when the AirPods are in your ear. It comes with a compact charging case with 24 hours of additional battery charge. Apple also unveiled Apple Watch Nike+ -- a watch built with runners in mind. "Selling in just eight months of 2015, we became the second most popular watch brand [behind Rolex]," Williams said earlier. "Since its launch, Apple Music has grown to 17 million subscribers. Seventeen million Apple Music subscribers compared to 39 million for digital music service Spotify," Apple CEO Tim Cook announced. "140 billion apps have been downloaded from the iOS App Store till date. In the last two months, we've seen [downloads] grow by 106 per cent year over year," Cook told the audience, adding that Apple App Store has seen two times as much revenue as our closest competitor. Apple also debuted a 'Notify' option on the App Store for a brand new "Super Mario Run" game. The GPS-powered Pokemon Go game has also arrived on Apple Watch. Apple has sold over one billion iPhones till date.

​New Delhi, Sep 7 (IANS) As the world's largest technology merger between EMC and Dell formally came into being on Wednesday, the driving force behind the $67 billion marriage, Michael Dell, said that this was just the beginning and "the real show is just getting started," in the coming digital revolution.

​New York, Sep 7 (IANS) Imagine being greeted by a humanoid robot which answers your queries and tells you directions. Chihira Junco, a robot, does that when it welcomes and meets tourists at a shopping mall in Tokyo.

​London, Sep 7 (IANS) Aimed at making the task of predicting renewable output easier for the industry, researchers have created an interactive web tool to estimate the quantum of energy that could be generated by wind or solar farms at any location.

The researchers have already used the tool, called Renewables.ninja, to estimate current Europe-wide solar and wind output.

"Renewables.ninja has already allowed us to answer important questions about the current and future renewable energy infrastructure across Europe and in the UK, and we hope others will use it to further examine the opportunities and challenges for renewables in the future," said Stefan Pfenninger from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

To test the model, Pfenninger and Iain Staffell from College London used the tool to estimate the productivity of all wind farms planned or under construction in Europe for the next 20 years. 

Wind and solar energies have a strong dependence on weather conditions, and these can be difficult to integrate into national power systems that requires consistency. If there is excess power generated by all energy sources, then some supplies have to be turned off.

Currently, wind and solar power generators are the easiest to switch on and off, so they are often the first to go, meaning the power they generate can be wasted.

Renewables.ninja uses 30 years of observed and modelled weather data from organisations such as NASA to predict the wind speed likely to influence turbines and the sunlight likely to strike solar panels at any point on the Earth during the year, the researchers said in a paper published in the journal Energy.

These figures are combined with manufacturer's specifications for wind turbines and solar panels to give an estimate of the power output that could be generated by a farm placed at any location.