Knowledge Update

​New York, Jan 3 (IANS) Seven Zika virus proteins, believed to cause conditions, including birth defects such as microcephaly and neurological problems such as Guillain-Barre syndrome, have been identified.

"The mechanism of Zika virus has been a real mystery," said lead researcher Richard Zhao, Professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM). 

"These results give us crucial insight into how Zika affects cells. We now have some really valuable clues for future research," Zhao added.

Zika virus infected hundreds of thousands of people around the world, mostly in the Americas. No vaccines or treatments to prevent or treat the symptoms of Zika infection has been developed yet.

To test the virus, Zhao used fission yeast -- a species that in recent years has become a relatively common way to test how pathogens affect cells. 

For the experiment, Zhao separated each of the virus's 14 proteins and small peptides from the overall virus. He then exposed yeast cells to each of the 14 proteins, to see how the cells responded. 

Seven of the 14 proteins harmed or damaged the yeast cells in some way, inhibiting their growth, damaging them or killing them.

The next step is to understand more about how these seven proteins work in humans. It may be that some of them are more damaging than others, or perhaps all of them work in concert to cause harm, the researchers said. 

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

​London, Jan 2 (IANS) New garden villages and towns will be built across England in an attempt to alleviate the housing crisis, the government said.

The villages will not be extensions of existing small towns or villages, but "distinct new places with their own community facilities," the Guardian quoted authorities as saying on Monday.

Sites from Cornwall to Cumbria have been identified in the first round of approved locations, making them eligible for a share of a £6 million ($7,39,6440) government technical and financial support fund. 

After completion, the villages may vary in size from 1,500 homes up to 10,000.

The development of the villages would be locally led by communities rather than central government, said Housing Minister Gavin Barwell. 

"New communities not only deliver homes, they also bring new jobs and facilities and a big boost to local economies," he said.

The 600-acre former Deenethorpe airfield near Corby, Northamptonshire, is one of the sites that has been approved for a village. The plans include a village green, shops and community hall, as well as more than 1,000 homes.

Dunton Hills, a garden village set to be built near Brentwood, Essex, will have at least 2,500 homes, as well as new Gypsy and Traveller pitches.

Three new garden towns have also been announced near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, Taunton in Somerset, and Harlow and Gilston in Hertfordshire.

Announcing the scheme, the Housing Minister said the villages will create almost 50,000 new homes from Cheshire down to Devon, while the towns will take the total to 200,000 new homes.

Other planned villages include Long Marston in Warwickshire, Spitalgate Heath in Lincolnshire, Bailrigg in Lancaster and the Infinity garden village in Derbyshire.

The final six are Oxfordshire Cotswold, Culm in Devon, Welborne in Hampshire, Halsnead in Merseyside, Longcross in Surrey and St Cuthberts near Carlisle.

The garden village initiative was announced by the then chancellor George Osborne last year.

The government has announced seven garden towns and cities to date but the 14 new villages are the first of a new kind of development designed to alleviate concerns about large-scale schemes swamping existing towns.

​Beijing, Jan 2 (IANS) China has launched its first freight train to London, railway officials said.

Departing from Yiwu West Railway Station in eastern Zhejiang province on Sunday, the train will travel for about 18 days and more than 12,000 km before reaching its

London, Jan 2 (IANS) The British government will launch a new one pound coin at the end of March and scrap the current one by October.

An announcement from the British Treasury on Sunday said the new 12-sided one pound coin would become legal tender on March 28 and the new coin would be produced by

​Singapore, Jan 1 (IANS) The threat of breaching the Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that help automated identification of your mobile phone, passport, credit cards, access passes and others could soon be mitigated, thanks to the new security features researchers are developing.

​New York, Jan 2 (IANS) As an earlier statement said WhatsApp will stop working on certain phones by the end of 2016, many users of older versions of iPhones and Android handsets are about to find themselves cut off from using the chat app, media has reported.

​Seoul, Jan 2 (IANS) Samsung Electronics on Monday launched the latest Galaxy A series smartphones with the enhanced front and rear 16-megapixel cameras. The device is encased in a metal frame and 3D glass back and offers IP68 water and dust resistance, allowing it to withstand the elements, including rain, sweat, sand and dust. "We integrated our unique approach to design as well as the features Galaxy customers have come to love to provide added performance without compromising on style," said D.J. Koh, President of Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics, in a statement. Of the new series, Galaxy A7 and A5 come with 3GB RAM and an on-board memory of 32GB that can be extended up to 256GB. The Galaxy A3 comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage, extendable up to 256GB. The new A series runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow supported by 1.9GHz Octa Core processor, except Galaxy A3 that is powered by 1.6GHz Octa Core processor. The new A series is equipped with reversible USB Type-C port for easy connectivity. The device comes with Samsung Pay that allows users to make safe and secure mobile payments through Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) and Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, and easily back up data and images through Samsung Cloud. Users can separate private data and keep the contents safe in a Secure Folder which supports biometric authentication. The Galaxy A comes in four colour variants and will be available in Russia in early January and will be later expanded to the global market.

​Phnom Penh, Jan 2 (IANS) The National Museum of Cambodia in January will exhibit what is considered by some experts to be the world's oldest zero symbol, a dot in a set of script from the Khmer civilisation carved into a sandstone surface.

"The Chaka era has reached the year 605 on the fifth day of the waning moon," says the restored inscription discovered during the end of the 19th century at the Trapang Prei archaeological site in Kratie province, in northeastern Cambodia.

Archaeologists date this phrase to 687 AD, in pre-Angkor Cambodia, Efe news reported on Monday.

This Khmer inscription was discovered by French archaeologist Adhemard Leclere (1853-1917) in 1891, but his colleague and compatriot George Coedes (1886-1969) later classified it with the name K-127.

The same historian Coedes subsequently divulged the importance of the discovery in the article "About the Origin of Arabic Numbers", published in 1931.

Coedes and American mathematician Amir Aczel (1950-2015) defended the significance of K-127 as it strengthens the idea that the zero symbol's origin in the decimal number system comes from India or, in his word, other "Indianized" East Asian cultures.

The oldest zero that is known of and in the form of a circle, rather than a dot, comes from India and from the year 876 AD, almost two hundred years earlier than the one at the National Museum of Cambodia.

The Indian manuscript Bakhshali also contains zeros that could be prior to K-127, but the experts are unable to determine their antiquity with current technology due to the fragility of the object.

A civilization influenced by the Indian culture that existed in the south of the Indonesian island of Sumatra has also passed on another stone-carved dot equivalent to a zero to us, but it is from the year 688 AD, a few years before the aforementioned Khmer inscription.

The Maya and other pre-Columbian cultures knew this figure and used it in their hieroglyphs and calendars, but their numeral system did not survive the passage of time.

Cambodia has many inscriptions with the zero symbol, "but this one (K-127) is the oldest one," Chea Socheat, deputy director of the restoration department at the National Museum of Cambodia, told Efe news.

Representing the absolute lack of quantity or a null value and being of paramount importance in mathematics, this number entered Europe through the Arabs, who called it "sirf" (void).

The popularization of the Hindu-Arabic numerical system among the Europeans corresponds to the Italian mathematician Leonardo de Pisa (1170-1250), better known as Fibonacci.

"Zero is not just a concept of nothingness, which allows us to do arithmetic efficiently, but is also a place-holding device that enables our base-10 number system to work," Aczel said in his book "Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers."

According to anthropologist Miriam Stark from the University of Hawaii and an expert on Cambodia, the numeral system was fundamental for constructing temples during the Khmer empire or Angkor Empire (802-1431), such as the famous Unesco World Heritage site, Angkor Wat complex, in the city of Siem Reap.

The capital of this empire, Angkor, was the largest urban complex in the pre-industrial world, with a population of about 1 million people living in 1,000 sq.km of territory, according to Damian Evans, Christophe Pottier and other anthropologists.

Inscriptions like the K-127 help us learn about the past, according to Socheat, and the history of the numbers. 

New York, Jan 2 (IANS) Feeling too lazy to hit the gym or follow an exercise routine? Your altered dopamine receptors -- critical for movement -- may be the reason behind your lack of motivation rather than excess body weight, a new study has suggested. The study challenged a common belief that obese animals do less physical activity, because carrying extra body weight is physically disabling. "We know that physical activity is linked to overall good health, but not much is known about why people or animals with obesity are less active," said Alexxai V. Kravitz from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)- a part of the National Institutes of Health in the US. For the study, mice were fed either a standard or a high-fat diet for 18 weeks. Beginning in the second week, the mice on the unhealthy diet had higher body weight. By the fourth week, these mice spent less time moving and got around much more slowly when they did move. The results showed that the high-fat diet mice slowed down their activity, but they did it before they actually got fat instead of after, suggesting that the excess weight alone was not responsible for the reduced movements. The reason the mice were inactive was due to dysfunction in their dopamine systems. They had deficits in the D2 dopamine receptors, the researchers said. "There are probably other factors involved as well, but the deficit in D2 is sufficient to explain the lack of activity," said Danielle Friend, postdoctoral student at NIDDK. The study appeared in the journal Cell Metabolism.

Sydney, Jan 2 (IANS) The rapid growth in wing length of a common Western Australian bird may be related to climate change, according to a study released on Monday.

Scientists from the University of Notre Dame in Sydney linked the growth in wing length of the Australian ringneck parrot, or Barnardius zonarius, to climate change as the limbs of animals in warm climates tend to be longer, Efe news reported.

The wings of the parrot lengthened 4 to 5 cm in the last 45 years.

As temperatures rise, the increase in the length of wings can help these birds release excess heat and adapt better to their environment, said one of the study's scientists, Dylan Korczynskyj.

Korczynskyj explained that the biggest changes in wing length have occurred since the 1970s, a period that coincides with temperature changes of more than 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius and deforestation carried out in the state of Western Australia.

Although temperature variation appears minimal, the impact on the environment is significant, as evidenced by research on the bird species, he added.

The study examined several specimens from the museum of Western Australia, which has a collection of birds dating back to the early 19th century and includes a ringneck parrot specimen from 1904.