Knowledge Update

​New Delhi, April 11 (IANS) Alibaba Group's news app UC News has crossed 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India and Indonesia, the company said on Tuesday.

UC News was launched in June 2016 and since then it has grown rapidly in the Indian and Indonesian markets.

​Gurugram, April 11 (IANS) Global networking giant Cisco and leading fashion retailer Shoppers Stop on Tuesday announced to implement Cisco wireless solution across 80 Shoppers Stop stores in India.

​Accra, April 11 (IANS) Falling crude oil prices hit trade between India and Nigeria last year as imports from the African nation dwindled to $9.94 billion from the previous year's $13.68 billion, down by 27 per cent, the Indian High Commission said.

New York, April 11 (IANS) Astronomers have discovered a faint, incredibly distant galaxy, about 13.1 billion years in the past, just about 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The new object, named MACS1423-z7p64, was detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The researchers used the Hubble space telescope to find the galaxy and confirmed its age and distance with instruments at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

"Other most distant objects are extremely bright and probably rare compared to other galaxies," said lead author Austin Hoag from University of California, Davis in the US. 

"We think this is much more representative of galaxies of the time," Hoag said.

These ultra-distant galaxies, seen as they were close to the beginning of the universe, are interesting because they fall within the "Epoch of Reionisation," a period about a billion years after the Big Bang when the universe became transparent.

After the Big Bang, the universe was a cloud of cold atomic hydrogen, which blocks light. 

The first stars and galaxies condensed out of the cloud and started to emit light and ionising radiation. 

This radiation melted away the atomic hydrogen like a hot sun clearing fog, and the first galaxies spread their light through the universe. But much remains lost in the fog of reionisation.

To find the faint faint, distant object, the astronomers took advantage of a giant lens in the sky.

As light passes by a massive object such as a galaxy cluster, its path gets bent by gravity, just as light gets bent passing through a lens. 

When the object is big enough, it can act as a lens that magnifies the image of objects behind it.

While it is similar to millions of other galaxies of its time, z7p64 just happened to fall into the "sweet spot" behind a giant galaxy cluster that magnified its brightness ten-fold and made it visible to the team, using the Hubble space telescope. 

They were then able to confirm its distance by analysing its spectrum with the Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii.

The team plans to continue their survey of candidate galaxies with the Hubble and Keck telescopes, and later with James Webb space telescope, set for launch in 2018.

It is expected that the Webb telescope, which is bigger than Hubble, will allow astronomers to look at even more distant parts of the universe, which will help astronomers answer the question of where did we come from.

​New York, April 11 (IANS) Scientists have found a way to create an HIV-resistant cell population which can quickly replace diseased cells, thereby potentially curing the disease in an infected person.

"This protection would be long-term," said Jia Xie, senior staff scientist at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in the US and first author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found a way to tether HIV-fighting antibodies to immune cells, thereby creating a cell population resistant to the virus. 

Their experiments under lab conditions showed that these resistant cells can replace diseased cells.

The new technique offers a significant advantage over therapies where antibodies float freely in the bloodstream at a relatively low concentration, the researchers said.

Instead, antibodies in the new study hang on to a cell's surface, blocking HIV from accessing a crucial cell receptor and spreading infection.

The researchers said they plan to collaborate with investigators at City of Hope -- an independent research and treatment centre for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases in the US -- to evaluate this new therapy in efficacy and safety tests, as required by federal regulations, prior to testing in patients.

​New York, April 11 (IANS) The delicate marine predators called comb jellies were the earliest animals -- not sponges as had long been thought, claims a new genetic analysis.

One of the longest-running controversies in evolutionary biology has been: 'What was the oldest branch of the animal family tree? Was it the sponges or was it the comb jellies?'

The new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggests that comb jellies were the first branch of the animal family tree.

With their analysis involving hundreds to thousands of genes, the researchers determined that comb jellies have considerably more genes which support their "first to diverge" status in the animal lineage than do sponges.

The researchers believe that the findings could have a major impact on scientists' thinking about how the nervous system, digestive tract and other basic organs in modern animals evolved.

For nearly a century, scientists organised the animal family tree based in large part on their judgement of the relative complexity of various organisms.

Because of their comparative simplicity, sponges were considered to be the earliest members of the animal lineage. 

This paradigm began to shift when the revolution in genomics began providing vast quantities of information about the DNA of an increasing number of species. 

Evolutionary biologists started to apply this wealth of information to refine and redefine evolutionary relationships, creating a new field called phylogenomics. 

In most cases, the DNA data helped clarify these relationships. In a number of instances, however, it gave rise to controversies that intensified as more and more data accumulated.

The researchers decided to focus on 18 of these controversial relationships (seven from animals, five from plants and six from fungi) in an attempt to figure out why the studies have produced such strongly contradictory results. 

To do so, they got down into the weeds, genetically speaking, and began comparing the individual genes of the leading contenders in each relationship.

"In these analyses, we only use genes that are shared across all organisms," said one of the researchers Antonis Rokas, Professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, US.

"The trick is to examine the gene sequences from different organisms to figure out who they identify as their closest relatives. When you look at a particular gene in an organism, let's call it A, we ask if it is most closely related to its counterpart in organism B? Or to its counterpart in organism C? And by how much," Rokas added.

Their analysis showed that comb jellies have considerably more genes which support their "first to diverge" status in the animal lineage than do sponges.

New York, April 11 (IANS) Although children are thought of being deficient in many skills when compared to adults, a new study has shown that this limitation in kids can actually be their strength as they can see what adults tend to miss.

"We often think of children as deficient in many skills when compared to adults. But some times what seems like a deficiency can actually be an advantage," said Vladimir Sloutsky, Professor at the Ohio State University in the US.

The findings revealed that while adults are very good at remembering information they are told to focus on, they tend to ignore the rest. 

Conversely, 4- to 5-year-olds tend to pay attention to all the information that was presented to them -- even when they were told to focus on one particular item. 

Thus, children noticed things that adults did not catch because of the grownups' selective attention.

Children are extremely curious and they tend to explore everything, which means their attention is spread out and they end up noticing and remembering more than the adults, Sloutsky noted, in the paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

However, the ability of adults to focus their attention helps them to sit in two-hour meetings and maintain long conversations, while ignoring distractions. 

"But young children's use of distributed attention allows them to learn more in new and unfamiliar settings by taking in a lot of information," Sloutsky explained.

The fact that children don't always do as well at focusing attention also shows the importance of designing the right learning environment in classrooms.

"Children can't handle a lot of distractions. They are always taking in information, even if it is not what you're trying to teach them. We need to make sure that we are aware of that and design our classrooms, textbooks and educational materials to help students succeed," Sloutsky said.

London, April 11 (IANS) People with higher scores on life skills -- such as emotional stability, determination, control, optimism and conscientiousness -- are more likely to experience a broad range of health benefits and positive social outcomes in their old age, a study suggests.

The findings showed that people who have more life skills enjoy a range of benefits, including greater financial stability, less depression, low social isolation, better health and fewer chronic diseases.

"No single attribute was more important than others. Rather, the effects depended on the accumulation of life skills," said Andrew Steptoe, Professor at the University College London.

In the study, published in the journal PNAS, the academics looked at the impact of these attributes in over 8,000 men and women aged 52 and older.

People with more life skills benefitted from favourable objective biomarkers in the blood, including lower levels of cholesterol and of C-reactive protein -- a marker of inflammation relevant to a number of different diseases. 

They had smaller waistlines, where fat accumulation is particularly relevant to metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, than people with a few life skills.

People with more skills also walked significantly faster than those with fewer -- walking speed is an objective measure predicting future mortality in older population samples, the researchers said.

"We were surprised by the range of processes -- economic, social, psychological, biological, and health and disability related -- that seem to be related to these life skills. Our research suggests that fostering and maintaining these skills in adult life may be relevant to health and well-being at older ages," Steptoe said.

​New Delhi, April 10 (IANS) Samsung, Intex and Rising Star are the top three Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in India, market research firm CyberMedia Research (CMR) said on Monday.

​New York, April 10 (IANS) If you have been wondering whether it is better to eat or fast before a workout, researchers now have an answer. A new study has found that exercise on empty stomach is better for your health in the long term. The study analysed effects of eating versus fasting on gene expression in adipose (fat) tissue in response to exercise. After eating, adipose tissue "is busy responding to the meal and a bout of exercise at this time will not stimulate the same (beneficial) changes in adipose tissue", explained corresponding author of the study Dylan Thompson from University of Bath in Britain. "This means that exercise in a fasted state might provoke more favourable changes in adipose tissue, and this could be beneficial for health in the long term," Thompson added. "We propose that feeding is likely to blunt long-term adipose tissue adaptation to regular exercise," the researchers noted in the study published in the American Journal of Physiology -- Endocrinology and Metabolism. The study participants were a group of overweight males who walked for 60 minutes at 60 per cent maximum oxygen consumption on an empty stomach and, on another occasion, two hours after consuming a high-calorie carbohydrate-rich breakfast. The research team took multiple blood samples after eating or fasting and after exercising. The researchers also collected fat tissue samples immediately before and one hour after walking. Gene expression in the adipose tissue differed significantly in the two trials. The expression of two genes, PDK4 and HSL, increased when the men fasted and exercised and decreased when they ate before exercising. The rise in PDK4 likely indicates that stored fat was used to fuel metabolism during exercise instead of carbohydrates from the recent meal. HSL typically increases when adipose tissue uses stored energy to support increased activity, such as during exercise, Thompson said. These results reinforce the view that "adipose tissue often faces competing challenges," Thompson wrote. "This is the first study to show that feeding prior to acute exercise affects post-exercise adipose tissue gene expression," the study said.