Knowledge Update

​New York, July 20 (IANS) A child's brain should get enough and healthy activation even before they enter pre-school for the proper development of learning as well as memory functions, suggests a study.

The research reveals the significance of learning experiences over the first two-to-four years of human life, also known as "critical periods". 

In these periods memories are believed to be quickly forgotten in a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia -- the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories that took place during the first two-to-four years of life.

"Our findings reveal us that children's brains need to get enough and healthy activation even before they enter pre-school," said lead author Cristina Alberini, Professor at New York University in the US.

"Without this, the neurological system runs the risk of not properly developing learning and memory functions," Alberini added.

Focussing on the brain's hippocampus -- a region of the brain necessary for encoding new episodic memories, the researchers found that the mechanisms of "critical periods" are fundamental for establishing these infantile memories.

During this critical period the hippocampus learns to become able to efficiently process and store memories for long-term.

If the hippocampus was inactive, the ability of younger rats to form latent memories and recall them later by reminders as they got older was diminished. 

"Early in life, while the brain cannot efficiently form long-term memories, it is 'learning' how to do so, making it possible to establish the abilities to memorise long-term," Alberini explained. 

"However, the brain needs stimulation through learning so that it can get in the practice of memory formation -- without these experiences, the ability of the neurological system to learn will be impaired," Alberini noted.

In the study, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team compared rats' infantile memory with that when they reached 24-days-old -- when they are capable of forming and retaining long-term memories and at an age that roughly corresponded to humans at six to nine years old.

The infantile memory formation in rats pointed out to the importance of critical periods in early-life learning on functional development of the brain.

Using learning and environmental interventions during a critical period in life may significantly help to address learning disabilities, the researchers concluded.

​Washington, July 17 (IANS) A malicious gaming app called Pokemon Go Ultimate, the first "lockscreen" app has made its way onto the Google Play store, said software security company ESET. The app when downloaded and run is not installed as Pokemon Go but as "PI Network", a report published in the Fortune said. Anyone who ran that app would find their phone completely frozen, forcing them to restart the phone by removing the battery. After rebooting, the PI Network app seemed to disappear, but in fact continued running in the background and generating fake ad clicks, stated Fortune. The Pokemon Go gaming app uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities of the device in conjunction with Google Maps to place virtual creatures in real world locations, which one then tries to find using your device as a guide. Once in proximity to the placed creature, one then needs to use device's camera to view the creature and try to capture it. ESET also spotted several other malicious apps, including Install Pokemongo and Guide & Cheats for Pokemon Go. The plague of malicious tricks surrounding the augmented-reality game highlights the security risk posed by Android's relatively open app ecosystem. Though the specific apps highlighted by ESET seem to have been removed from Google Play Store, a search found several apps named with variations on Install Pokemon Go. The app, however, has been pulled off from Google Play, ESET reported. One can uninstall the app manually by going to their phone's application manager. The Pokemon Go is available on Google Playstore and Apple's App Store in the US, Japan and Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Britain and Germany and is coming soon to India, Singapore, Taiwan and Indonesia.

​Tokyo, July 19 (IANS) The 'Pokemon Go' fever that has gripped smartphone users across the globe has led Japanese videogame giant Nintendo to double its value at the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

​New York, July 19 (IANS) Combining tissues from a sea slug with flexible 3D printed components, researchers have built a "cyborg" robot that may one day help them probe the depths of fresh and saltwater with ease.

New York, July 17 (IANS) Is your kid finding it difficult to memorise lessons at school? Worry not, as feeding cinnamons, a delicious addition to toast, coffee and breakfast rolls might help improve learning ability, says a study led by an Indian-origin researcher.

The findings showed that the poor learning mice had improved memory and learning at a level found in good learning mice.

"This would be one of the safest and the easiest approaches to convert poor learners to good learners," said lead researcher Kalipada Pahan, professor at Rush University in Chicago, US.

Some people are born naturally good learners, some become good learners by effort, and some find it hard to learn new tasks even with effort.

"Understanding brain mechanisms that lead to poor learning is important to developing effective strategies to improve memory and learning ability," Pahan added.

However, the study did not find any significant improvement among good learners by cinnamon.

"Individual difference in learning and educational performance is a global issue," Pahan said adding, "we need to further test this approach in poor learners. If these results are replicated in poor learning students, it would be a remarkable advance."

The key to gaining that understanding lies in the hippocampus, a small part in the brain that generates, organises and stores memory, the researchers said in the work published online in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology.

Further, the hippocampus of poor learners showed less CREB -- a protein involved in memory and learning -- and more GABRA5 -- a protein that generates tonic inhibitory conductance in the brain -- than good learners.

The mice in the study were fed ground cinnamon, which their bodies metabolised into sodium benzoate -- a chemical used as a drug treatment for brain damage.

When this sodium benzoate entered their brains, it showed an increased in the levels CREB and decrease in GABRA5 leveld. This, then stimulated the plasticity -- the ability to change -- of hippocampal neurons.

These changes in turn led to improved memory and learning among the mice, the researchers said.

"We have successfully used cinnamon to reverse biochemical, cellular and anatomical changes that occur in the brains of mice with poor learning," Pahan added.​

​London, July 20 (IANS) Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and the 14th straight month that global heat records were broken, scientists say.

Global sea temperatures were fractionally higher than for June last year while land temperatures tied, BBC quoted the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as saying.

Its global temperature records date back 137 years, to 1880.

Most scientists attribute the increases to greenhouse gas emissions.

They also say climate change is at least partially to blame for a number of environmental disasters around the world.

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June was 0.9 C above the 20th Century average of 15.5 C, the NOAA said in its monthly report.

Last year was the hottest on record, beating 2014, which had previously held the title.​

​New York, July 18 (IANS) As the GPS-based Pokemon Go mobile game takes the world by storm, an expert in the US has found that there are health benefits from playing the augmented Reality (AR) smartphone game.

According to Matt Hoffman, clinical assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Nursing, this quest to "catch 'em all" is great as it pokes people to travel across the land, searching far and wide for a pokemon resulting in regular exercising.

To progress in the game, players known as "trainers" must walk around to find and catch Pokemon and access specific locations called Pokestops -- where Pokéballs and other useful items are collected. Poke eggs are among the things that can be collected at these locations.

Getting to Pokestops, catching different Pokemon and hatching the Poke eggs requires a lot of walking.

"What began as just playing the game has now become a hobby for me that provides certain health benefits," Hoffman said in a university statement.

"I've spent an hour or two at a time venturing around the community to find Pokestops. And, to hatch one egg, a trainer must walk anywhere from one-six miles. There's no doubt about it, I am exercising more as a result of playing the game, and I am enjoying it," added Hoffman who has been affectionately dubbed the "Pokémon Professor" by co-workers.

Hoffman said the game also brings trainers at a certain place in search of Pokemon at Pokestops.

"The game is bringing people together, providing opportunity for social interaction and increasing our sense of belonging which can have a positive impact on our emotional and mental health," Hoffman noted.

Since Pokemon Go is a non-violent game, it also pushes families to walk around playing the game together.

"It encourages parents to go outside with their children while they play. Pokemon Go has the ability to transport families away from an evening on the couch to walking around the neighbourhood," the author added.

Playing the game has also helped people discover new experiences and areas.

Hoffman emphasised players to watch where they walk and be aware of surroundings when playing. "Remember, you should never play Pokemon Go while driving. It's also important to avoid playing in dark, isolated areas -- there have been reports of trainers being robbed and attacked," he noted.​

​​​London, July 20 (IANS) Home-cooked meals specifically made for infants and young children, are not always healthier than commercially available baby foods, new research suggests.

The findings indicated that home cooked meals, which are often perceived as the best option, usually exceed energy density and dietary fat recommendations.

Home cooked meals also provided 26 per cent more energy and 44 per cent more protein and total fat, including saturated fat, than commercial products.

"Unlike adult recommendations, which encourage reducing energy density and fats, it is important in infants that food is suitably energy dense in appropriately sized meals to aid growth and development," said Sharon A. Carstair from the University of Aberdeen in Britain.

In addition, home cooked meals were found to be around half the price of commercially available ready made meals.

While almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of commercial products met dietary recommendations on energy density, only just over a third of home cooked meals did so, and over half (52 per cent) exceeded the maximum range.

Home cooked meals contained more protein as well as included a greater variety of vegetables than ready-made meals, but commercial products contained a greater vegetable variety per meal, averaging three compared with two for home cooked recipes.

Ready-made meals are a convenient alternative, but any parent looking to provide their child with a varied diet, should probably not rely solely on ready-made meals, the researchers said.

"Dietary fats contribute essential fatty acids and fat soluble vitamins together with energy and sensory qualities, thus are vital for the growing child, however, excessive intakes may impact on childhood obesity and health," Carstair added.

For the study, the team compared the nutrient content, price, and food group variety of 278 ready-made savoury meals, 174 of which were organic, and 408 home cooked meals, made using recipes from 55 bestselling cookbooks designed for the diets of infants and young children.

While 16 per cent of the home cooked meals were poultry based compared with 27 per cent of the ready-made meals, nearly one in five (19 per cent) were seafood-based versus seven per cent of the ready-made meals.

On the other hand, a similar proportion (21 per cent) were meat based compared with 35 per cent of the commercial products and almost half (44 per cent) were vegetable based compared with around a third (31 per cent) of the ready-made meals.

However, "the high proportion of red meat-based meals and recipes and low seafood meals are of concern when dietary recommendations encourage an increase in oil-rich fish consumption and limitation of red and processed meats," said the paper published online in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.​

New York, July 17 (IANS) Researchers have created a comprehensive molecular atlas of brain development in non-human primate that could shed crucial light on what makes human brain development distinct.

This analysis uncovered features of the genetic code underlying brain development in our close evolutionary relative, while revealing distinct features of human brain development by comparison.

"This is the most complete spatiotemporal map we have for any mammal's development, and we have it in a model system that provides directly meaningful insight into human brain development, structure, and function," said Ed Lein, investigator at Allen Institute for Brain Science, a US-based non-profit medical research organisation.

"This exceptional dataset is useful for exploring precisely where and when genes are active in relation to the events of brain development and the onset of brain disorders," Lein noted in an analysis of the atlas published in the journal Nature.

The study is based on the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Blueprint Non-Human Primate (NHP) Atlas, a publicly available resource created by the Allen Institute and colleagues at the University of California, Davis and the California National Primate Research Centre.

The goal of the NHP atlas was to marry the techniques of modern transcriptomics with the rich history of anatomical developmental studies by measuring gene activity at a series of ten important stages in prenatal and postnatal brain development.

At each stage, a technique called laser microdissection was used to precisely isolate fine layers and nuclei of cortical and subcortical brain regions associated with human psychiatric disease, thereby creating a high resolution time series of the generation and maturation of these brain regions and their underlying cell types.

The authors collaborated with colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine to use this molecular map to pinpoint when and where candidate genes for diseases like autism and schizophrenia become active.

"This tremendous resource is freely available to the research community and will guide important research into the etiology of many developmental disorders for years to come," Michelle Freund, programme officer at National Institute of Mental Health, noted.​

Washington, July 18 (IANS) As we wait for Juno's first close-up images of Jupiter on August 27, NASA continues to explore our solar system to help answer fundamental questions about how we came to be, where we are going and whether we are alone in the universe.

“Juno is the latest example of the extraordinary science we have to look forward to right in our own solar system,” said Jim Green, Director of NASA Planetary Division.

“There are many uncharted, promising worlds and objects we are eager to explore with our current and future missions,” he added in a statement.

In September, NASA will launch OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) - the first US mission to a near-Earth asteroid (Bennu) to collect a sample for return to Earth in 2023.

OSIRIS-REx will help unlock secrets of the history of our solar system, and shed light on how life may have come to be on our planet.

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb telescope), set to launch in 2018, can observe not only faint objects across the universe but also our neighbouring planets and their moons within our solar system.

Webb’s angular and spectral resolution will allow us to observe these targets with unprecedented sensitivity and even follow geologic activity.

With Juno exploring Jupiter, NASA is also intrigued by its largest moons.

Io’s intense geological activity makes it the most volcanically active world in the solar system, something Webb could potentially follow-up with.

The US space agency has selected nine science instruments for a future mission to investigate whether Europa -- a mysterious moon that scientists believe to have a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface -- hosts habitable environments.

Hubble, with its suite of upgraded instruments, has captured Jupiter’s auroras and found evidence of saltwater on Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.

The mission has been extended another five years, and NASA expects it to continue to provide excellent science.

“NASA’s Cassini spacecraft continues exploring Saturn, its rings and moons, as it has since 2004. In 2017, during the final phase of its long mission, Cassini will complete 22 dives through the narrow gap between Saturn's outer atmosphere and its rings,” the statement read.

Titan is one of the major satellites of Saturn, with a rich atmosphere and surface chemistry that has been observed extensively by Cassini and ESA's Huygens Probe.

After Cassini's mission ends, Webb will begin operations, providing an excellent platform for continuing studies of Titan with its unique new capabilities.

“On our journey to Mars, we are closer than ever before to sending American astronauts to our neighbouring Red Planet,” Green noted.

The next Mars rover scheduled for launch in 2020 is under construction and NASA’s InSight Mission to study the interior of the Red Planet is scheduled to launch in 2018.​