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
London, April 25 (IANS) Researchers have for the first time visually depicted the movement of dinosaurs around the world during the Mesozoic Era -- from about 252 to 66 million years ago -- including a curious exodus from Europe.
The analysis -- based on "network theory" used to gather internet data -- also reaffirms previous studies that have found that dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after Pangaea -- a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras -- split into landmasses that are separated by oceans.
The findings revealed that although continental splitting undoubtedly reduced intercontinental migration of dinosaurs, it did not completely inhibit it.
While "network theory" is commonly used in computer science for quantifying internet data, such as friend connections on Facebook, it has only recently been applied to biology research and this is the first study to use it to on dinosaur research
The analysis also showed that all connections between Europe and other continents during the Early Cretaceous period -- 125-100 million years ago -- were out-going.
While dinosaur families were leaving Europe, no new families were migrating into Europe.
"This is a curious result that has no concrete explanation. It might be a real migratory pattern or it may be an artefact of the incomplete and sporadic nature of the dinosaur fossil record," said lead researcher Alex Dunhill at University of Leeds in Britain.
For the study, published in the Journal of Biogeography, the team used the Paleobiology database that contains every documented and accessible dinosaur fossil from around the world.
Fossil records for the same dinosaur families from different continents were then cross-mapped for different periods of time, revealing connections that show how they have migrated.
Super User
Lifestyle and Trends
New York, April 24 (IANS) Older adults who meet twice in a week for strength training can boost their stamina and live longer, thus lowering the odds of cardiac death and cancer, finds a study.
The findings showed that older adults who trained for strength at least twice a week had 46 percent lower odds of dying soon. They also had 41 percent lower odds of cardiac death and 19 percent lower odds of dying from cancer.
But although the health rewards of physical activity and aerobic exercise are well established, less data have been collected on strength training.
"This doesn't mean that strength training wasn't a part of what people had been doing for a long time as exercise, but it wasn't until recently that it was solidified in this way as a recommendation," said Jennifer L. Kraschnewski from Penn State College of Medicine in the US.
Over the past decade, researchers have demonstrated benefits of strength training for strength, muscle mass and physical function, as well as for improvements in chronic conditions such as diabetes, osteoporosis, low back pain and obesity.
Researchers examined data of more than 30,000 adults of age 65 and older from the 1997-2001 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) linked to death certificate data through 2011.
Researchers published their results in Preventive Medicine.
During the survey period, more than 9 percent of older adults reported strength training at least twice a week.
They were also more likely to have normal body weight, to engage in aerobic exercise and to abstain from alcohol and tobacco.
After the researchers controlled for physical activity level, people who reported strength exercises appeared to see a greater mortality benefit than those who reported physical activity alone.
The study is strong evidence that strength training in older adults is beneficial beyond improving muscle strength and physical function, the researchers said.
"We need to identify more ways that we can help get people engaged in strength training so we can increase the number from just under 10 percent to a much higher percentage of our older adults who are engaged in these activities," Kraschnewski said.
Super User
From Different Corners
Washington, April 25 (IANS) In one of its most ambitious projects in deep space, a team of NASA researchers are proposing to send robots at the centre of icy moons to explore the subsurface ocean for presence of life.
The two possible candidates are: the icy moons of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn which harbour sub-surface oceans perfect for hosting life.
According to a recent study, Jupiter’s moon Europa is creating a strong gravitational pull which is creating more heat on the moon's ice-sheet that is enough to support a sub-surface ocean.
But it is Saturn's icy moon Enceladus -- 500 km in diameter and 1.272 billion km away from the Earth - that serves as a leading candidate for extra-terrestrial life.
This year, one of most promising proposals that NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Programme (NIAC) has received is from the researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena, California - proposing robots to explore the icy moons.
The Icy-Moon Cryovolcano Explorer (ICE) project aims to land on these moons and send a robotic explorer down the ice volcano to deploy a submersible to explore the ocean.
With a thick icy crust, Europa may be tough for a drilling robot to reach the subsurface ocean so the researchers have now turned their eyes on Enceladus.
The data from NASA's Cassini probe has strongly indicated that the cryovolcanic plumes of Enceladus probably originate in a biomolecule-friendly oceanic environment.
Enceladus, which probably has an ocean underlying its icy surface, has somehow managed to sprout multiple fissures along its south pole.
A surface-to-subsurface robotic system, the ICE will land on the surface of an icy moon, traverse to a cryovolcano, descend into its opening, perform in-situ science in the vent or crevasse and ultimately deploy underwater vehicles to explore a subsurface ocean.
ICE involves three modules: Descent Module (DM), Surface Module (SM) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs_.
DM will carry AUVs and descend into a vent by using a combination of roving, climbing and hopping, like an experienced human alpinist.
SM will stay on the surface, generating power and communicating with the Earth.
DM will rely on the power and communication link provided by SM through a cable to minimise the size and weight.
Once DM reach the subsurface ocean, it will launch the AUVs to explore the exotic environment that potentially harbours life.
ICE brings three unique benefits. First, it enables in-situ science in a cryovolcano vent.
Although orbiters can perform in-situ science of plumes, relatively large dust grains are hard to reach orbital altitude. Yet it is those mineral grains that carry rich information about the habitability of the subsurface ocean.
Second, ICE enables the exploration of subsurface oceans by providing an access to it.
Third, it enables the operation of AUVs in subsurface ocean by providing three essential services: communication, localisation and power.
"A successful completion of the project will mature this exciting concept into a credible element of the growing outer planets and icy moons exploration portfolio,” the US space agency said in a statement.
SUC Editing Team
Accounting & Finance
London, April 22 (IANS) After logging a higher growth, India has emerged as the top-ranked nation in the flow of foreign direct investment in 2015, beating China on the very turf it has dominated for a few decades, says the think tank of the Financial Times.
Super User
Retail and Marketing
New York, April 22 (IANS) Ad buying on Facebook has got more easier with the social media website introducing a familiar terminology for broadcast advertisers, making the purchase easy and more TV-like.
Target rating point video buys on Facebook or photo-sharing website Instagram can now leverage day-parting and Nielsen Designated Market Area (DMA) targeting -- two features that were previously unavailable -- www.adage.com reported.
DMAs are defined by Nielsen Media Research and are used to identify specific media markets for those interested in buying and selling television, advertising and programming.
DMA targeting allows marketers to home in on a specific local television market area while day-parting delivers advertisements during specific parts of the day.
The move will provide marketers further brand building capabilities on mobile as well as flexibility to extend TV and video campaigns on Facebook with a currency broadcast advertisers are familiar with.
"At the same time, the company is telling advertisers to rethink the way they deliver video on Facebook -- particularly on mobile -- as opposed to TV," the report said.
Facebook said that broadcast advertisers should consider various factors when implementing TV ads on its mobile News Feed.
"The mobile feed has fundamentally changed the way people view and absorb information, and this is especially true with video," Matt Idema, vice president of monetisation product marketing at Facebook was quoted as saying.
"For marketers, this shift makes it essential to take new creative considerations into account when designing effective video ads," Idema added.
According to data released by Facebook this week, on Facebook's mobile News Feed, for example, users spend on average 1.7 seconds with a piece of content versus 2.5 seconds on desktop.
Super User
Retail and Marketing
London, April 22 (IANS) A Britain-based technology company has claimed to have developed a smartphone-sized handheld DNA analyser that may diagnose infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB) in flat 15-20 minutes.
Running on a solar-powered battery, the low-cost handheld device called "Q-Poc" may analyse biological samples submitted via a small-sized cartridge, the Guardian reported.
Swabs can be used to detect sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) while sputum is used to detect TB, its makers claimed.
"We are now at the point that we have a working prototype that can perform a highly sensitive tuberculosis test from a sample through to results in 15-20 minutes," Jonathan O’Halloran, the company’s co-founder, was quoted as saying.
According to its developers, “Q-Poc” analyses the DNA of pathogens rather than proteins within the sample.
The device uses microfluidic technology that allows fluids to pass through various microscopic channels.
A chemical process then breaks down the sample into a molecular soup. It is then sent through a nanoscale-based filter system that isolates the DNA for analysis.
The company plans to launch the product for the use by health care providers by as early as 2018.
The device will initially be used to detect TB. It has built-in smartlphone technology, enabling the results to be shared in real time.
“It sounds simple, but it is absolutely groundbreaking,” O’Halloran added. Clinical trials of the device are planned in South Africa later this year.
Super User
Lifestyle and Trends
London, April 22 (IANS) Lack of sleep will not only alter your mood and make your days drowsy, sleep loss can also influence cholesterol metabolism (good cholesterol), affecting blood vessels in your body.
According to University of Helsinki researchers, genes which participate in the regulation of cholesterol transport are less active in persons suffering from sleep loss than with those getting sufficient sleep.
This was found both in the laboratory-induced sleep loss experiment and on the population level.
The experimental study proved that just one week of insufficient sleep begins to change the body's immune response and metabolism.
“We examined what changes sleep loss caused to the functions of the body and which of these changes could be partially responsible for the elevated risk for illness," explained Vilma Aho, researcher from the “Sleep Team Helsinki” research group, in a university statement.
The study examined the impact of cumulative sleep deprivation on cholesterol metabolism in terms of both gene expression and blood lipoprotein levels.
With state-of-the-art methods, a small blood sample can simultaneously yield information about the activation of all genes as well as the amounts of hundreds of different metabolites.
This means it is possible to seek new regulating factors and metabolic pathways which participate in a particular function of the body.
The researchers found that in the population-level data, persons suffering from sleep loss had fewer high-density HDL lipoproteins, commonly known as the good cholesterol, than people who slept sufficiently.
Together with other risk factors, these results help explain higher risk of cardiovascular disease observed in sleep-deprived people and help understand the mechanisms through which lack of sleep increases this risk.
The researchers emphasise that health education should focus on the significance of good, sufficient sleep in preventing common diseases in addition to healthy food and exercise.
The team's next goal is to determine how minor the sleep deficiency can be while still causing such changes.
Sleep loss has previously been found to impact the activation of the immune system, inflammation, carbohydrate metabolism and the hormones that regulate appetite.
Super User
Lifestyle and Trends
New York, April 22 (IANS) Do you know why it becomes difficult to say decline ice-cream or cupcakes even when you have become a father yourself? According to researchers, media plays a major role in influencing attitudes of kids toward different foods.
What kids read about food when they were young translates to eating habits they maintain through adulthood.
"Toddlers do not have independent opinions of food being desirable or not until media -- television and books tell them what to like and not like," www.elle.com reported on Friday.
When nutrient-poor foods are presented not only frequently but positively, they likely contribute to children's view of them as both normative and desirable.
The study, published in the journal Appetite, examined how media influences attitudes towards different foods items in kids aged between two and four.
"Kids will basically eat anything unless we allow them to be picky. Shortly after introducing solid foods at around six months, children's palates are in the exploration mode and behaviour is not generally tied to their food yet," Dr Tricia Gold from Tribeca Pediatrics in US was quoted as saying in the New York Magazine.
Since books follow television as the most popular media source for kids, the researchers surveyed 100 fiction and non-fiction children's books to see how often food was depicted.
In children's books, ice cream stood out because it was often painted as "offered as a treat to celebrate an occasion, making someone feel better, and/or to indicate a happy ending.”
No other food enjoyed such a specific status with such a privileged connotation.
Parents can guide kids to love vegetables by introducing books that "emphasise depictions of healthy foods" as well, the researchers noted
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, April 23 (IANS) Researchers have developed a new method to map and track the function of brain circuits affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially in boys and identify the most effective treatment for an individual.
The functional biomarker physically measures the progress of patients with behavioural problems -- a tool that has been elusive in autism treatment.
"This is significant because biomarkers give us a 'why' for understanding autism in boys that we haven't had before," said one of the researchers Kevin Pelphrey, professor and director of the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at the George Washington University in the US.
The team found that the brain scan data could be an effective indicator of the function of the circuit in younger children and older patients alike.
It is particularly relevant for ASD patients who are difficult to diagnose and treat by providing a more definitive diagnosis and in developing a treatment programme when it is not clear if behavioural, drug or a combination of the treatments will be most effective.
"The behavioural symptoms of ASD are so complex and varied it is difficult to determine whether a new treatment is effective, especially within a realistic time frame," said led author Malin Bjornsdotter, assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
"Brain function markers may provide the specific and objective measures required to bridge this gap," she added in the paper published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
In addition, the study also provides evidence that brain imaging is an important intervention tool for autism than the currently used functional MRI.
The team analysed a series of 164 images from each of 114 individuals and discovered the brain scans of the social perception circuits only indicated ASD in boys.
As the method only works for boys with autism, the researchers are leading a large-scale, nationwide study of girls with autism to identify equivalent techniques that will work for them.
SUC Editing Team
International Business
United Nations, April 22 (IANS) More than 165 UN member states are expected to attend a high-level signing ceremony for Paris climate agreement, including an estimated 60 heads of state and heads of government, a UN spokesman said here on Thursday.