Introduction & Purpose
Knowledge update and Industry update at Skyline University College (SUC) is an online platform for communicating knowledge with SUC stakeholders, industry, and the outside world about the current trends of business development, technology, and social changes. The platform helps in branding SUC as a leading institution of updated knowledge base and in encouraging faculties, students, and others to create and contribute under different streams of domain and application. The platform also acts as a catalyst for learning and sharing knowledge in various areas.
Super User
From Different Corners
Washington, June 22 (IANS) In a first, astronomers have discovered a vast cloud of high-energy particles called a wind nebula around a rare ultra-magnetic neutron star, or magnetar.
The find offers a unique window into the properties, environment and outburst history of magnetars, which are the strongest magnets in the universe.
A neutron star is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its own weight, and exploded as a supernova.
Neutron stars are most commonly found as pulsars, which produce radio, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays at various locations in their surrounding magnetic fields.
Typical pulsar magnetic fields can be 100 billion to 10 trillion times stronger than Earth's. Magnetar fields reach strengths a thousand times stronger still, and scientists don't know the details of how they are created.
Of about 2,600 neutron stars known, to date only 29 are classified as magnetars.
The newfound nebula surrounds a magnetar known as Swift J1834.9-0846 -- J1834.9 for short -- which was discovered by NASA's Swift satellite in 2011, during a brief X-ray outburst.
"Right now, we don't know how J1834.9 developed and continues to maintain a wind nebula, which until now was a structure only seen around young pulsars," said lead researcher George Younes, postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University in Washington.
"If the process here is similar, then about 10 percent of the magnetar's rotational energy loss is powering the nebula's glow, which would be the highest efficiency ever measured in such a system," Younes said.
A month after the Swift discovery, a team led by Younes took another look at J1834.9 using the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, which revealed an unusual lopsided glow about 15 light-years across centreed on the magnetar.
New XMM-Newton observations coupled with archival data from XMM-Newton and Swift, confirmed this extended glow as the first wind nebula ever identified around a magnetar.
A paper describing the analysis will be published in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
"It represents a unique opportunity to study the magnetar's historical activity, opening a whole new playground for theorists like me," team member Jonathan Granot from Open University in Ra'anana, Israel, said.
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, June 22 (IANS) Older adults experience deficits in inhibition or the ability to do away with the distractions, which can affect how quickly they process information visually, say a study.
It is already known that staying on topic may be more difficult for older adults than it is for younger people because older adults begin to experience a decline in what is known as inhibition -- the ability to inhibit other thoughts in order to pursue the storyline.
The new research showed that decline in inhibition also can affect visual perception.
"There is going to be more or less competition in some of the scenes you look at over the course of the day, so the prediction is that when there is high competition, older adults will take longer to resolve -- to see -- the objects in that scene," said Mary Peterson, Professor of Psychology at University of Arizona in the US.
Inhibition is an important part of neural processing throughout the brain, and it plays a significant role in visual perception.
For example, evidence suggests that when we look at an object or a scene, our brain unconsciously considers alternative possibilities.
These competing alternatives inhibit one another, with the brain effectively weeding out the competition before perceiving what is there, Peterson explained.
With regard to vision, age-related declines in the efficiency of inhibitory processes have been demonstrated in research involving simple perception tasks, such as the ability to detect symmetry and discriminate between shapes.
Peterson and her collaborators set out to see if the same deficits are evident when it comes to more complicated visual tasks.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Vision, suggest that they are.
The findings support and further evidence that older adults experience age-related deficits in inhibition related to vision.
"This is particularly interesting as it suggests that distraction is being processed extremely rapidly, and without conscious awareness, but that older adults are less able to tolerate this ambiguity than younger adults," lead author John AE Anderson from York University in Toronto, Canada, said.
SUC Editing Team
Travel and Tourism
Beijing, June 21 (IANS) The Shanghai Disney Resort, which officially opened last Thursday, is expected to surpass the Palace Museum in Beijing as the top spot for visitors in China.
According to a report by online travel agency Ctrip, the resort is expected to receive at least 15 million visitors a year, more than 40,000 a day, China Daily reported.
Last year, the Palace Museum saw a total of 15 million tourists.
With each visitor expected to spend an average of 2,219 yuan ($340) on a trip to Shanghai Disney, revenue would reach 33 billion yuan a year, the report said.
It also found that tourists from Shanghai are likely to make up 40 per cent of visitors.
Chi Huiguang, a Beijing resident who went to the Disney Resort on a high-speed train, said she has been to Disneyland in Los Angeles and the one in Shanghai was equally good -- especially the smiling staff -- despite the long lines and high prices for tickets and food.
Ctrip said about four out of 10 current visitors are couples and 30 per cent are parents accompanying their kids. But as the summer vacation arrives, more parents are expected to visit the resort with their children, the agency said.
It also forecast that a peak in visitors would appear during the 10 days after the official opening of the resort and in early July. So trying to avoid the peak would be better, the agency suggested.
The resort is expected to receive at least 7.3 million visitors within the year, according to the agency.
SUC Editing Team
Travel and Tourism
New Delhi, June 9 (IANS) Jharkhand's tourism department said on Thursday it is working to develop the closed and abandoned mines in the state into active tourist destinations.
"Mining tourism is to be developed following best practices from other parts of the world," said a statement from the department, citing Director (tourism) Prasad Krishna Waghmare.
"The state government intends to develop closed mines and transform the abandoned mines as a tourist destination."
The move comes after the department studied mining tourism in Australia, Chile, Canada, Norway and other countries.
"This could be a different experience for the visitors and tourists who visit the state. The government is already in talks with several mine operators for the same," Waghmare said.
He said his department has also been working on temple tourism as well as biodiversity tourism as part of a new policy.
There is going to be a development of the medieval terracotta temples of 'Maluti' as a tourist hotspot.
Maluti temples are a group of 78 terracotta temples built between the 17th and 19th centuries in the Maluti village of Jharkhand's Dumka district.
According to officials, Jharkhand has seen a rising graph of visitors from outside the state, from 23,991 tourists in the year 2000 when the state was formed to 33,179,530 (including 1,67,855 foreigners) in 2015.
Jharkhand currently holds ninth rank in the country in terms of visitors, and the state government is committed to take the state to the top of the country's tourist table, Waghmare said.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
San Francisco, June 21 (IANS) To help customers make a smooth transition to the Cloud with proven enterprise applications, Oracle Partner Network (OPN) on Tuesday unveiled Oracle Cloud platform ready for the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).
SUC Editing Team
International Business
New York, June 21 (IANS) In order to reportedly finance its $67 billion acquisition of IT storage company EMC, US tech giant Dell has sold Dell Software Group to Francisco Partners, a US-based private equity firm and Elliott Management, an American hedge fund management firm.
Super User
From Different Corners
Seoul, June 21 (IANS) Scientists have made ultra-thin photovoltaic cells flexible enough to wrap around the average pencil that could power wearable electronics like fitness trackers and smart glasses.
"Our photovoltaic is about 1 micrometre, thinner than an average human hair," said Jongho Lee, an engineer at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. Standard photovoltaics are usually hundreds of times thicker and even most other thin photovoltaics are two to four times thicker.
The researchers made the ultra-thin solar cells from the semiconductor gallium arsenide.
They stamped the cells directly onto a flexible substrate without using an adhesive that would add to the material's thickness. The cells were then "cold welded" to the electrode on the substrate.
The researchers tested the efficiency of the device at converting sunlight to electricity and found that it was comparable to similar thicker photovoltaics. They performed bending tests and found the cells could wrap around a radius as small as 1.4 millimetres.
The team also performed numerical analysis of the cells, finding that they experience one-fourth the amount of strain of similar cells that are 3.5 micrometres thick.
"The thinner cells are less fragile under bending, but perform similarly or even slightly better," Lee said in a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
These thin cells can be integrated onto glasses frames or fabric and might power the next wave of wearable electronics, Lee noted.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
New York, June 21 (IANS) A US-based video game peripherals company has designed a kit that can turn your Android smartphone into hand-held consoles that can play "Game Boy" and "Game Boy Color" games, a media report said.
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, June 21 (IANS) Silencing a specific gene may affect human social behaviour, including a person's ability to form healthy relationships or to recognise the emotional states of others, says a study.
The scientists examined how a process known as methylation, which can reduce the expression of specific genes, affects a gene called OXT.
This gene is responsible for the production of a hormone called oxytocin, which is linked to a wide range of social behaviours in humans and other mammals.
"Methylation restricts how much a gene is expressed," said the study's lead author Brian Haas, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia in the US.
"An increase in methylation typically corresponds to a decrease in the expression of a gene, so it affects how much a particular gene is functioning,” Haas explained.
"When methylation increases on the OXT gene, this may correspond to a reduction in this gene's activity. Our study shows that this can have a profound impact on social behaviours," he added.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Haas and his collaborators collected saliva samples from more than 120 study participants to perform genetic tests that show the levels of methylation on the OXT gene.
The participants went through a battery of tests to evaluate their social skills as well as their brain structure and function.
What they found is that participants with greater methylation of the OXT gene - likely corresponding to lower levels of OXT expression - had more difficulty recognising emotional facial expressions, and they tended to have more anxiety about their relationships with loved ones.
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, June 21 (IANS) Children who often go hungry are more than twice as likely to develop impulse control problems and engage in violence later in life, new research has found.
Thirty-seven percent of the study's participants who had frequent hunger as children reported that they had been involved in interpersonal violence.
Of those who experienced little to no childhood hunger, 15 percent said they were involved in interpersonal violence.
Previous research has shown that childhood hunger contributes to a variety of other negative outcomes, including poor academic performance.
The current study is among the first to find a correlation between childhood hunger, low self-control and interpersonal violence.
"Good nutrition is not only critical for academic success, but now we're showing that it links to behavioral patterns. When kids start to fail in school, they start to fail in other domains of life," said Alex Piquero, Professor of Criminology at University of Texas at Dallas.
The study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
The researchers used data from the US National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions to examine the relationship between childhood hunger, impulsivity and interpersonal violence.
Participants in that study responded to a variety of questions including how often they went hungry as a child, whether they have problems controlling their temper, and if they had physically injured another person on purpose.
The findings suggest that strategies aimed at alleviating hunger may also help reduce violence, Piquero said.