Knowledge Update

Washington, Oct 13 (IANS) An iPad app, designed specifically for use in space, simplifies the way astronauts track their dietary intake and offers greater insight for physicians and researchers on the Earth looking to keep crews healthy and fit, NASA said.

The International Space Station Food Intake Tracker (ISS FIT) iPad app, recently delivered to the space station, gives astronauts real-time feedback about their dietary habits.

"Understanding the relationship of diet with crew health is critical for future exploration missions, where nutrition will be a key countermeasure in mitigating the negative effects of spaceflight on the body," Scott M. Smith, nutritionist at NASA, said in a statement.

"We've recently documented that astronauts can protect their bones with good nutrition and exercise," Smith said. 

"This app puts the tools in their hands to track this information in real time," Smith explained.

The app does not require internet access to sync with the food database - that includes foods available on the space station, including those from international partner agencies - as many of the apps available on Earth require, NASA said.

The app reports nutrients specifically of concern for astronauts (and often terrestrial beings), ensuring adequate calorie consumption, minimising sodium intake and maintaining hydration to reduce kidney stone risk.

The app, developed through NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, used crowdsourcing techniques hosted by TopCoder. 

Designed for use on the space station, the solution had to meet strict criteria, offer multiple user options and work without internet connectivity. 

The app allows crew members to record foods available on the space station. It gives astronauts options to record foods from a checklist, search tool, using audio recording, taking photos or scanning barcodes, if available.

The app provides real-time information on key nutrients including calories, sodium and fluid, allowing crew members to see at lunch that they need to consume more water later in the day, for example. 

The app replaces a weekly computer questionnaire, which provided an estimate of dietary intake over the week. 

The detailed data not only helps crews in real time each day, but also will allow for more detailed assessments of dietary intake during flight and relating these to other crew health concerns like bone loss and vision changes, NASA said.

​New York, Oct 13 (IANS) Children of mothers who used anti-depressants during pregnancy are at increased risk of having speech or language disorders, warns a new study.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between maternal anti-depressant use and speech/language, scholastic, and motor disorders in offspring," said one of the researchers Alan Brown, Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

Mothers who purchased anti-depressants at least twice during pregnancy had a 37-percent increased risk of speech and/or language disorders among their offspring compared to mothers with depression and other psychiatric disorders who were not treated with anti-depressants, the findings showed.

"We believe that our finding about children of mothers who purchased at least two SSRI prescriptions during pregnancy is particularly meaningful because these women are more likely to have taken these medications, and more likely to have been exposed for a longer period and to larger amounts of the SSRI in pregnancy, compared to women who filled only one prescription," Brown noted. 

The speech/language disorders included expressive and receptive language disorders and those involving articulation of sounds.

"The study benefited from large sample population and followed the children beyond age three," Brown said.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) -- most commonly prescribed anti-depressants -- such as fluoxetine, citalopram, paroxetine, sertraline, fluvoxamine, and escitalopram may cross the placenta and enter the fetal circulation. 

The researchers examined a sample of 845,345 single, live births between 1996 and 2010 taken from national registries in Finland.

The exposure groups were classified as mothers who purchased SSRIs once or more before or during pregnancy; those diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder one year before or during pregnancy but did not purchase anti-depressants; and mothers who neither purchased anti-depressants nor were given depression-related diagnoses.

In the whole sample, the risk of speech/language disorders was increased among offspring of mothers who used SSRI during pregnancy, showed the study published online in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

​Sydney, Oct 12 (IANS) Australia's economy is continuing to display resilience to commodity price declines, however external financing risks do linger, global ratings agency Moody's Investor Services said on Wednesday.

​Beijing, Oct 12 (IANS) In a fresh move to bolster its ties with China, Apple has announced it would open a research and development centre in Shenzhen -- the hardware manufacturing hub for the world, media reported on Wednesday.

​New York, Oct 12 (IANS) A drug commonly used for the prevention of allergies and asthma has shown promise in preventing liver disease and reducing the need for transplants, says a study.

The study, conducted in mice, found that cromolyn sodium successfully blocked a series of cells that trigger liver scarring (known as fibrosis), which in advanced cases can lead to cirrhosis. 

The research was a direct outgrowth of previous published works involving the same drug for bile duct damage and liver cancer.

"If you base it off these studies, the possibility of reducing or preventing fibrosis in patients could be very high," said one of the researchers, Heather Francis from Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas, US.

The finding, published in the journal Hepatology, could most impact patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a chronic disease that damages bile ducts and causes serious liver damage.

The disease has no effective treatments and leaves patients with few options beyond a liver transplant.

In particular, the study evaluated mast cells (MCs), which are known to infiltrate and multiply after liver injury and release histamine, which causes fibrosis. 

Using a model that mimics human primary sclerosing cholangitis, researchers found that the drug successfully blocked that histamine, which in turn reduced fibrosis.

"Given the limited treatment options for PSC patients, we are thrilled with these study insights," Gianfranco Alpini, Director of the Digestive Disease Research Center at Baylor Scott & White, said.

"We need to perform additional experiments to ensure that we are giving a dose that would be tolerable to humans," Francis pointed out.

San Francisco, Oct 11 (IANS) Buoyed by the positive response from over 1,000 companies that are currently using Workplace (formerly known as Facebook at Work), the company has announced to make the app available to all.

​Kigali (Rwanda), Oct 11 (IANS) A British charity on Tuesday warned that if the nearly 200 countries participating in a climate change conference here don't agree on an ambitious date for ending the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), their pledges contained in the Paris Agreement will be broken.

​Canberra, Oct 10 (IANS) An Australian researcher has devised a new high-tech UV-sensitive patch that changes colour when it is time to reapply sunscreen.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT's) Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation lead researcher Dr Elke Hacker said on Monday in a statement that the research aims to help 75 per cent of young Australians who get sunburned every year that possibly contracts skin cancer, Xinhua news agency reported.

"Sunscreen when applied at the correct concentration (2mg/cm2) is effective at blocking the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. However, the concentration applied in real life conditions is usually less, which provides inadequate protection," Hacker said.

"Currently the most common way to assist people to determine how long they can safely stay in the sun after sunscreen application is time-based on the two hour reapply recommendation."

"However, what we are seeing is despite doing their best to stay sun safe and sunburn-free, people get either the concentration or the timing wrong resulting in a damaging dose of ultraviolet radiation," she said.

Hacker will lead a pilot study looking at the usability of a newly developed wearable UV indicator that takes away the guesswork in how much sunscreen to apply and when to reapply by changing colour to warn wearers their sunscreen is no longer effective.

"As part of our study we are looking for Brisbane-based volunteers to test a patch before we undertake a larger trial to determine if it can reduce the incidence of sunburn," Hacker said.

"Participants will be asked to test the patch for a seven day period and attend two focus groups sessions at the start and end of the study," she said.

Hacker said UV radiation or sunlight exposure was the main environmental risk factor for skin cancer.

"What we know is that sunburn rates are high, especially among younger people, with more than 72 per cent of Queenslanders aged 18 to 24 years admitting to getting sunburnt," she said.

"The sun-smart messages are getting through to Queenslanders but the concern is that high rates of sunburn are caused because people are unaware when dangerous UV levels have been reached."

"This device seeks to give real-time information that can help change unhealthy sun exposure habits," she said.

​London, Oct 10 (IANS) While working on a project, have you noticed someone who does not align with the team and remains obstructive throughout?

According to a recent research, greed and fear are the basic reasons with such people's underlying problems with teamwork. 

"People are afraid that their contribution will mainly benefit those people who themselves contribute nothing. That's why people hold back and invest in self-protection rather than cooperation," said Carsten de Dreu, Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, in a statement. 

The findings showed that people devise strategies to maximise the benefits for themselves and to reduce the risk of being exploited. 

"Fear is almost always present as a brake on cooperation, but it's more difficult to predict when greed will crop up," De Dreu added.

When motivated by greed, people seem to invest mainly in self-protection and less in attacks on others. 

The paradox is that fear among rival groups tends to result in people working better together. 

The fear of something or some people within the group can cause people within a group to work better together. 

It seems to happen almost automatically, often without it even being discussed, the researchers said.

In further studies, De Dreu wants to examine what human brain looks like when people are working together, and whether oxytocin - the cuddle hormone - plays a role in cooperation.

He also intends to investigate the effect of 'institutions' such as religion and legislation which has an obvious influence on human behaviour, especially in the matter of cooperation. 

London, Oct 11 (IANS) A well-known rheumatoid arthritis medication may be effective for treating non-infectious uveitis, a rare eye disease that can lead to loss of vision, new research has found.

Uveitis is the name used for inflammatory conditions of the inner eye, in particular the uvea, which consists of the iris and the ciliary body in the front section and the choroid in the back section. Inflammation can also affect other parts of the eye, such as the retina and the vitreous body.

"We were able to prospectively demonstrate for the very first time that non-infectious uveitis can also be successfully treated with a cortisol-free medication," said one of the researchers Talin Barisani-Asenbauer from Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

The biologic medication adalimumab has long been used to treat rheumatic diseases and has to be injected subcutaneously every two weeks. 

For sufferers, steroid-free means there are fewer side-effects, so that it can be used over a longer period of time.

"That will significantly improve the management of uveitis patients who have only partially responded to corticosteroids, need a corticosteroid sparing therapy or who are unsuitable for treatment with corticosteroids," Barisani-Asenbauer explained.

The first symptoms of the disease are floaters in the visual field, blurred vision, visual disturbances and photosensitivity. 

Potential complications of uveitis are macular oedema (accumulation of fluid in the retina), glaucoma or cataracts, for example. Uveitis can even lead to loss of vision.

The results of the multinational phase-three trial were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.