Knowledge Update

Dubai, April 11 (IANS) India-UAE trade has increased phenomenally in the last half century and at $60 billion per annum currently, has made the Gulf nation India's third largest trading partner since the last couple of years, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Monday.

​Beijing, April 11 (IANS) China will invest around $1.5 billion to upgrade Beijing's Zhongguancun district or the "Silicon Valley of China", an area with a strong presence of technology companies.

​Beijing, April 11 (IANS) The World Bank expects the Chinese economy to grow 6.7 percent in 2016, the bank said in a report on Monday.

The projection is on par with its last estimate in January. The bank has kept its projection for 2017 at 6.5 percent, Xinhua reported.

​Abu Dhabi, April 11 (IANS/WAM) The overall growth of foreign direct investment in Abu Dhabi in 2014 grew by 12.8 percent, figures revealed on Monday.

The figures came as part of the final findings of the field foreign investment survey carried out by the Statistics Centre - Abu Dhabi (SCAD).

​Nairobi, April 11 (IANS) Kenya is fast tracking the development of disease free zones in order to boost livestock exports, an official said on Sunday.

Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Principal Secretary Dr Andrew Tuimur told Xinhua in Nairobi that two disease free zones will be operational by the end of the year.

​London, April 11 (IANS) Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, astrophysicists from the University of Birmingham have discovered extra-solar planets whose atmospheres have been stripped away by their host stars.

According to them, planets with gaseous atmospheres that lie very close to their host stars are bombarded by a torrent of high-energy radiation. 

Due to their proximity to the star, the heat that the planets suffer means that their "envelopes" have been blown away by intense radiation. 

This violent "stripping" occurs in planets that are made up of a rocky core with a gaseous outer layer.

"The results show that planets of a certain size that lie close to their stars are likely to have been much larger at the beginning of their lives. Those planets will have looked very different," said Dr Guy Davies from the University of Birmingham's school of physics and astronomy. 

The findings have important implications for understanding how stellar systems, like our own solar system, and their planets, evolve over time and the crucial role played by the host star.

Scientists expect to discover many such "stripped systems" using a new generation of satellites including the NASA TESS Mission which will be launched next year. 

The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications. ​

​London, April 11 (IANS) How to determine that a person is trustworthy? According to researchers, people who hold onto moral absolutes are more trusted and more valued as social partners, suggesting that people gauge others' trustworthiness based on their moral judgments.

The findings help explain that snap judgements about morality tend to be based on a set of absolute moral rules even if a person makes different decisions when given more time.

"If people who stick to moral absolutes are preferred as social partners, expressing this view will reap benefits for oneself," said lead researcher Jim AC Everett from the University of Oxford.

The team used several variations of moral dilemmas where a person must decide whether or not to sacrifice an innocent person in order to save the lives of many others. 

The results indicate that across nine experiments, more than 2,400 participants who took an absolute approach to the dilemmas (like refusing to kill an innocent person, even when this maximised the greater good) were seen as more trustworthy than those who advocated a more flexible approach. 

When asked to entrust a person with a sum of money, participants handed over more money and were more confident of getting it back, when dealing with someone who refused to sacrifice one to save many. 

"This explains why we appear to like people who stick to these intuitive moral rules -- not because they are sticklers for the letter of the law, but because the rules themselves tend to emphasize the absolute importance of respecting the wishes and desires of others," added David Pizarro from Cornell University in the US.

Our day-to-day moral decisions don't fit into the neat categories defined by moral philosophers. Instead, real life morality is suited to the complexity of real life situations, the researchers suggested in a paper that appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. ​

​Sydney, April 10 (IANS) An Australia-based digital health solution provider has developed an app that can diagnose respiratory diseases like pneumonia, croup and asthma with high accuracy through a cough into a smartphone, a media report said.

Tehran, April 10 (IANS) Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh has said Tehran mulls joining refinery projects in India, the country's Petro-Energy Information Network, SHANA, reported on Sunday.

New York, April 11 (IANS) Scientists have invented a “smart” paint spray can that robotically reproduces photographs as giant murals.

The computerised technique which basically spray paints a photo is not likely to spawn a wave of giant graffiti but it can be used in digital fabrication, digital and visual arts, artistic stylisation and other applications, said the team from Dartmouth college and colleagues.

The system uses an ordinary paint spray can, tracks the can's position relative to the wall or canvas and recognises what image it "wants" to paint. 

As the person waves the pre-programmed spray can around the canvas, the system automatically operates the spray on and off button to reproduce the specific image as a spray painting.

“We show that by combining computer graphics and computer vision techniques, we can bring such assistance technology to the physical world even for this very traditional painting medium, creating a somewhat unconventional form of digital fabrication,” said study co-author Wojciech Jarosz who worked as senior research scientist at Disney Research Zurich. 

“We wanted to maintain the aesthetic aspects of physical spray painting and the tactile experience of holding and waving a physical spray can while enabling unskilled users to create a physical piece of art,” he added.

The prototype includes two webcams and QR-coded cubes for tracking and a small actuation device for the spray can 00 attached via a 3D-printed mount. 

Paint commands are transmitted via radio directly connected to a servo-motor operating the spray nozzle. 

Running on a nearby computer, the real-time algorithm determines the optimal amount of paint of the current colour to spray at the spray can's tracked location. 

“The end result is that the painting reveals itself as the user waves the can around, without the user necessarily needing to know the image beforehand,” the team noted in a paper that appeared in the journal Computer & Graphics. ​