Knowledge Update

Los Angeles, March 29 (IANS) Fungi will be sent for the first time to the International Space Station for the development of medicine, said researchers at the University of Southern California (USC).

The experiments, to be conducted jointly by scientists from the university and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will put specimen of Aspergillus nidulans in the high-radiation and micro-gravity conditions in space to develop new medicines for use in space and on the Earth, USC researchers announced on Monday.

The specimen will be carried by the SpaceX CRS-8 mission scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral on April 8. The launch will be the Hawthorne-based company's first cargo resupply service mission since CRS-7 exploded shortly after launch on June 28, 2015, Xinhua reported.

"Certain types of fungi produce very important molecules called secondary metabolites that are not essential for their growth or reproduction but can be used to make beneficial pharmaceuticals. Examples of secondary metabolites include the antibiotic penicillin and the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin," said a USC statement.

Researchers said the environment of space could trigger physiological changes in the fungi.

"The high-radiation, micro-gravity environment in space could prompt Aspergillus nidulans to produce molecules it doesn't create in Earth's less stressful conditions," Clay Wang, professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at the USC school of pharmacy, was quoted as saying by the media.

"We've done extensive genetic analysis of this fungus and found that it could potentially produce 40 different types of drugs," Wang said.

"The organism is known to produce osteoporosis drugs, which is very important from an astronaut's perspective because we know that in space travel, astronauts experience bone loss."

Scientists also said that molecules from Aspergillus nidulans potentially may be useful in anti-cancer and Alzheimer's disease research.​

New York, April 29 (IANS) Researchers have identified four previously unknown genetic diseases that can be brought under the umbrella diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Cases associated with changes in each of the four genes were different from each other in terms of symptoms, intelligence level and other disease features, the researchers said.

"A common fallacy is that schizophrenia can be treated as a single disease," explained lead study author Dolores Malaspina from NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York.

"Our biologically driven study begins to answer longstanding questions in the field about why any two people diagnosed with schizophrenia may have drastically different symptoms. For the first time, we have defined four syndromes mechanistically,” Malaspina noted.

Patients with schizophrenia struggle to interpret reality, typically suffering from hallucinations, learning disabilities, emotional withdrawal and lack of motivation. 

In the current study, researchers analysed 48 ethnically diverse patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, looking at symptom sets in patients found to have rare or previously unknown changes in the DNA code of the four genes that disrupted brain function.

The four influential genes now tied by the study to specific conditions are all involved in the growth or regulation of nerve circuits. 

"Our results argue that new treatments should -- while addressing core psychoses -- also focus on processing speed in TGM5 cases, working memory in PTPRG, zinc augmentation in SLC39A13, and nerve cell protection in patients with ARMS/KIDINS220 mutations," first study author Thorsten Kranz, postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone, said.

The findings appeared online in the journal EbioMedicine.

"Perhaps as many as 30 percent of schizophrenic patients may now become candidates for more precise treatment based on the individual characteristics of these four genes, with the remaining cases becoming less mysterious as we pull these groups out of the mix," Malaspina said.​

New York, March 28 (IANS) If you are not saving enough for your retirement, you may not be alone. A new study has shown that a large number of people avoid saving for their old age because they are afraid to think of their own death.

New York, March 28 (IANS) Looking for friends but unable to find them on Instagram? To solve this problem, Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram has launched a new feature Discover People that enables the user to "discover" other users easily.

Beijing, March 28 (IANS) China's pension fund may begin investing in the nation's share markets, a move that will channel approximately 600 billion yuan ($92 billion) into the equity market and likely improve its liquidity, the media reported on Monday.

​Brasilia, March 28 (IANS) Brazilian researchers have improved delivery of a medication to fight Alzheimer's by using a nanofibre to regulate the compound's release, the media reported on Monday.

The project is being led by doctoral student Geisa Salles and professor Anderson Lobo, coordinator of Vale do Paraiba University's Research and Development Institute in Sao Jose dos Campos.

"We developed this nanomaterial that contains the drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's and we already tested it in vitro with cells mimicking the disease's behaviour. The results have been quite promising, and we believe we could make a great contribution in the treatment of this chronic pathology," Salles told Efe news.

The process, called nanotreatment, depends on a combination of polymers and proteins in nanomaterials to make a fibre that, once implanted under the skin, releases the medication into the blood stream continuously for quick and lasting absorption.

The fibre - 800 nanometers thick and almost invisible to the human eye - is filled with a medication imported from Britain.

The electro-wiring technique, in which a needle with the drug receives energy and light to release bits of the fibre, is used to make the nanodevice for implanting in patients.

In the laboratory, the technique adds a second efficiency testing phase that may extend the drug's duration by 30 percent.

"Hypothetically, it would be like a patch to stop smoking, but we still need more research to determine how to use it, and in which stage of Alzheimer's disease we should start fighting the action of amyloid beta, the protein, or peptide, found in the brains of patients with the disease," Lobo added.​

​London, March 28 (IANS) Shoppers should bring a list with them to minimise the chances of returning home only to find they forgot something, say researchers. A list is especially helpful while shopping for things that you do not buy regularly, while you can generally rely on memory while buying familiar items, the findings suggest. Although this may seem like an intuitive solution, statistics show that only about half of shoppers use lists, the study pointed out. The findings were published online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. For the study, the researchers observed more than 700 consumers in different scenarios. The investigators were eager to find out if people could predict how many items on the list they would remember to buy once they started shopping after they spent 10 minutes reading a story. "One of our key findings is that people don't correctly anticipate when they are more likely to forget items," said Daniel Fernandes, assistant professor of marketing at Catholic University of Portugal. "When we have something in our mind, it is hard to imagine that we will forget it," Fernandes noted. This failure to predict our forgetfulness suggests that people should always bring a shopping list, he explained. These findings could also have broader implications for performance at work. "We often rely on our memories to perform familiar tasks at work, and those tasks will come easily to mind, but unfamiliar tasks are hard to recall," Fernandes said. "To maximise our effectiveness on the job, it's important to pay special attention to those less familiar tasks and put them on the agenda," Fernandes noted.​

New York, March 28 (IANS) The disappearance of Arctic Sea ice due to massive climate change is causing the surface of Greenland's melt area to increase, thereby fuelling a steep rise in the sea-level, finds a study.

During summers, melting Arctic Sea ice favours stronger and more frequent "blocking-high" pressure systems.

The high pressure tends to enhance the flow of warm, moist air over Greenland, contributing to an increased extreme heat events and surface ice melting, which in turn fuels sea-level rise, a monstrous issue for coastal communities around the world. 

"Whenever there's a big melt year in Greenland, on the surface anyway, it's usually because there's either a blocking high or a large northward swing in the jet stream and both of those things tend to be long-lived features in the circulation," said one of the researchers, Jennifer Francis, professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. 

Both transport a lot of heat, moisture and clouds over the Greenland ice sheet, leading to more melting, the researchers pointed out.

The study was published online in the Journal of Climate. 

The Greenland ice sheet holds an enormous volume of frozen water, and the global sea level would rise about 20 to 23 feet if it all melted. Surface melting of the ice sheet has increased dramatically since the relative stability and modest snow accumulation in the 1970s, the study said.

Sea-level rise is already "becoming very conspicuous and it's going to be bad. It's happening faster and faster," Francis said adding that the change is accelerating.​

New York, March 29 (IANS) Individuals who suffer from stiffening of the arteries and are in their 40s may experience subtle and structural damages in their brains, finds a new study.

The condition is also likely to advance towards cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease later in life.

The findings showed that among young healthy adults, higher aortic "stiffness" was associated with reduced white matter volume and decreased integrity of the gray matter, and in ages much younger than previously described.

"This study shows for the first time that increasing arterial stiffness is detrimental to the brain, and that increasing stiffness and brain injury begin in early middle life, before we commonly think of prevalent diseases such as atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease or stroke having an impact," said lead author of the study Pauline Maillard, from University of California, Davis in the US.

The study, published online in the American Heart Association journal Stroke, also noted that elevated arterial stiffness is the earliest manifestation of systolic hypertension and added that the results may be a new avenue of treatment to sustain brain health.

"Measures of arterial stiffness may actually be a better measure of vascular health, and should be identified, treated and monitored throughout the lifespan," Maillard said.

The large study involved approximately 1,900 diverse participants in the Framingham Heart Study in the US, who underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as well as arterial tonometry.

The tests measured the force of arterial blood flow, the carotid femoral pulse wave velocity or CFPWV -- the reference standard for noninvasive measurement of aortic stiffness -- and its association with subtle injury to the brain's white and gray matter. 

The research found that increased CFPWV was associated with greater injury to the brain.

However, with age high blood pressure causes the arteries to stiffen, further increasing blood pressure as well as increasing calcium and collagen deposits, which promotes atrophy, inflammation and further stiffening, decreasing blood flow to vital organs including the brain and promoting brain atrophy.

The study emphasises the need for primary and secondary prevention of vascular stiffness and remodelling as a way to protect brain health, early in life, the researchers concluded​