Knowledge Update

​Seoul, Oct 27 (IANS) LG Electronics Inc said on Thursday its third-quarter operating profit fell 3.7 percent from a year earlier, hit by sluggish sales in its money-losing smartphone business.

​Seoul, Oct 27 (IANS) South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics' net profits in the third quarter dropped by a massive 16.8 per cent, primarily due to the Galaxy Note 7 discontinuation, the company announced on Thursday as the shareholders approved the nomination of Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong to the electronics giant's board of

​Bangkok, Oct 27 (IANS) Thai firms are set to export insects for human consumption to the European Union (EU), authorities said on Thursday.

Thailand, among the world's largest consumers of insects, has some 20,000 insect farms, and products made from these invertebrates are also sold in processed forms such as

San Francisco, Oct 27 (IANS) IBM Business-owned The Weather Company announced on Thursday that it has launched weather bot for Facebook Messenger.

Leveraging "IBM Watson" technology, new bot for Messenger will learn user preferences to provide personalised weather conditions, forecasts, news content and more.

​New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Want to exercise more? Start competing with your peers on online health programmes, researchers say.

Their study found that social media competition can dramatically increase people's fitness.

"Framing the social interaction as a competition can create positive social norms for exercising," said lead author Jingwen Zhang, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis.

Social competition among people may go beyond exercise, to encouraging healthy behaviours such as medication compliance, diabetes control, smoking cessation, flu vaccinations, weight loss, and preventative screening, as well as pro-social behaviours like voting, recycling, and lowering power consumption.

On the other hand, friendly support make people less likely to go to the gym less than simply leaving them alone, the study said.

"Supportive groups can backfire because they draw attention to members who are less active, which can create a downward spiral of participation," added Damon Centola, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

In the competitive groups, people frame relationships in terms of goal-setting by the most active members.

"These relationships help to motivate exercise because they give people higher expectations for their own levels of performance," Centola said.

In a competitive setting, each person's activity raises the bar for everyone else. Social support is the opposite: a ratcheting-down can happen. If people stop exercising, it gives permission for others to stop, too, and the whole thing can unravel fairly quickly, the researchers explained.

For this study, the team recruited nearly 800 graduate and professional students from the University of Pennsylvania to sign up for an 11-week exercise programme all managed through a website the researchers built.

Competition motivated participants to exercise the most, with attendance rates 90 per cent higher in the competitive groups than in the control group.

The study was published in the journal Preventative Medicine Reports.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) US scientists have in a breakthrough research found that realistic sensations of touch can be restored in human amputees by directly stimulating the nervous system.

In the study, neuroscientists from the University of Chicago used neuroprosthetic devices to turn the pressure "felt" by a prosthetic hand into a signal that feeds directly into the parts of the brain that deal with hand movement and touch.

"If you want to create a dexterous hand for use in an amputee or a quadriplegic patient, you need to not only be able to move it, but have sensory feedback from it," said Sliman Bensmaia, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.

"The idea is that if we can reproduce natural-feeling sensations exactly, the amputee won't have to think about it, he can just interact with objects naturally and automatically," Bensmaia added.

The team worked with two male subjects who each lost an arm after traumatic injuries. 

Both subjects were implanted with neural interfaces, devices embedded with electrodes that were attached to the median, ulnar and radial nerves of the arm. 

Those are the same nerves that would carry signals from the hand were still intact, the researchers said.

The results showed that a single feature of electrical stimulation -- dubbed the activation charge rate -- can determine the strength of the sensation -- such as intensity discrimination, magnitude scaling, and intensity matching. 

By changing the activation charge rate, the team could change sensory magnitude in a highly predictable way. 

By modulating the number of nerve fibres stimulated and the frequency of stimulation, sensory information could be transmitted such that the amputees could distinguish distinct levels of tactile intensity, that is, the difference between a seven and a 10 on a scale of intensity.

However, these artificial touch will only be as good as the devices providing input, the researchers stated. 

The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Researchers have come up with a new wearable patch for skin that claims to treat children and young adults with peanut allergy, finds a study.

The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, suggested that small amounts of peanut protein through the skin showed promising benefits for younger children. 

The treatment, called epicutaneous immunotherapy or EPIT, was safe and well-tolerated, and nearly all participants used the skin patch daily as directed.

"To avoid potentially life-threatening allergic reactions, people with peanut allergy must be vigilant about the foods they eat and the environments they enter, which can be very stressful," said Anthony S. Fauci, Managing Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). 

The researchers randomly assigned 74 peanut-allergic volunteers aged 4 to 25 years to treatment with either a high-dose (250 micrograms peanut protein), low-dose (100 micrograms peanut protein), or placebo patch. 

Each day, study participants applied a new patch to their arm or between their shoulder blades.

After one year, researchers assessed each participant's ability to consume at least 10 times more peanut protein than he or she was able to consume before starting EPIT. 

The low-dose and high-dose regimens offered similar benefits, with 46 per cent of the low-dose group and 48 per cent of the high-dose group achieving treatment success, compared with 12 per cent of the placebo group. 

In addition, the peanut patches induced immune responses similar to those seen with other investigational forms of immunotherapy for food allergy. Investigators observed greater treatment effects among children aged 4 to 11 years, with significantly less effect in participants aged 12 years and older.

"Epicutaneous immunotherapy aims to engage the immune system in the skin to train the body to tolerate small amounts of allergen, whereas other recent advances have relied on an oral route that appears difficult for approximately 10 to 15 per cent of children and adults to tolerate," said Daniel Rotrosen, Director, Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at the of NIAID. 

Nearly all of the study participants followed the EPIT regimen as directed. None reported serious reactions to the patch, although most experienced mild skin reactions, such as itching or rash at the site of patch application.

The patches were developed and provided by the biopharmaceutical company DBV Technologies under the trade name Viaskin.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Personal values of students are often influenced by school Principals and become more similar to those of them with time, a new study has found.

The findings indicate that principals' values are linked with aspects of school climate which are, in turn, linked with students' own values.

"Given the vast amount of time children spend in school, it is important to assess the impact that schools have on children, beyond their impact on children's academic skills. Our findings show that schools contribute to the formation of children's values," said Yair Berson, Researcher at the New York University.

For the study published in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers collected data from 252 school Principals, over 3,600 teachers and almost 50,000 students in public elementary and secondary schools.

Focusing on four categories of values -- self-enhancement, self-transcendence, openness to change, and conservation -- school Principals filled out a questionnaire in which they read statements about a hypothetical individual and rated how closely they aligned with their own values.

At the same time, students completed age-appropriate measures that tapped into the same values. The students completed values measures again two-years later.

Teachers also rated the degree to which students in their homeroom displayed various behaviours that reflected the same values.

The researchers found that students' values became more similar to those of their Principal over the two-year study period.

"Principals' personal outlook on life is reflected in the overall school atmosphere, which over time becomes reflected in school children's personal outlook and eventual behaviour," said Shaul Oreg, Researcher at the Cornell University.

This pattern was consistent for all of the values except for one: conservation values.

"Values that have to do with maintaining the status quo -- emphasising tradition, conformity and security - showed a different pattern, whereby Principals' values are associated with children's values, but without the mediating role of the school climate," Oreg added.

Ultimately, determining whether Principals' influence on students' values is good or bad will be up to the individual observer, the study suggests.

New Delhi, Oct 27 (IANS) The global wildlife population could fall by an average of 67 per cent between 1970 and 2020 as a result of human activities, according to World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report 2016.

The report indicated that the global populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have already declined by 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012.

"This places the world on a trajectory of a potential two-thirds decline within a span of the half-century ending in 2020," said the report.

The report also highlights the magnitude of human impact on the planet and highlights the changes needed in the way society is fed and fuelled. 

According to the report, the top threats to species were directly linked to human activities including habitat loss, degradation and over exploitation of wildlife. 

The report's findings provide additional evidence that the planet was entering completely unchartered territory, including a possible sixth mass extinction. 

"Researchers are already calling this period the Anthropocene -- an era in which human activities are influencing changes in the climate and the environment," said the report.

New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Political decisions taken at the highest level, not economics, are to blame for rising inequality in the US, sociologists suggest.

Political factors, along with increases in college-educated adults, provided the best explanations for the rise in income inequality in the US between 1978 and 2011, said the study published in the American Journal of Sociology.

But even higher education levels became less important after the 1980s, lead author of the study David Jacobs, Professor at The Ohio State University, pointed out.

The study found that presidential administrations that were sympathetic to employers but unfavourable to labour drove up levels of income inequality.

"Political decisions, especially at the presidential level, help determine the rewards that Americans get from the economy," Jacobs explained.

The study suggests that researchers need to look beyond economic causes in trying to explain the growth of income inequality in the US.

"You can't explain income inequality without looking at political factors," Jacobs said.

The study used a variety of sources to analyse political and economic factors that could be tied to inequality at the state level for each of the 33 years in the study. 

"The gap between the top earners and the rest of Americans has really been growing and our study was able to capture that change," Jacobs said.

The study found that the presidential administration in power was far and away the biggest political factor linked to economic inequality in each year of the study.

The importance of the presidential administration remained even after the researchers took into account more than 20 other possible explanatory variables, such as stock market values, poverty levels, the number of people employed in finance careers, and the number of people employed in rural occupations. 

Many of these factors, among others controlled for in this study, have been cited by economists in the past as possible causes of growing inequality, Jacobs said.

After all these and other factors are held constant, the Ronald Reagan administration's policies led to an 18 per cent increase in inequality, the study found.

The Reagan administration made tax codes more favorable to the affluent, deregulated many industries including finance, weakened unions and reduced spending on programmes for the poor.

"I believe it was a lot of policies that each contributed a little bit to growing inequality, and when you added them all up the results were large," Jacobs said.

Other than the presidential administration, the remaining parts of government had little or no effect on inequality, the study showed.