Knowledge Update

Tokyo, Jan 25 (IANS) Japan in 2016 recorded a trade surplus for the first time in six years, thanks to the low price of oil, according to figures released by the Japanese Finance Ministry on Wednesday.

​New York, Jan 25 (IANS) Google Home, a voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant for home automation, now lets you control Belkin Wemo and Honeywell products.

​San Francisco, Jan 25 (IANS) To help accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises, global networking giant Cisco is set to acquire AppDynamics Inc, a US-based application performance management and IT operations analytics company, for $3.7 billion.

​New Delhi, Jan 25 (IANS) Apple has started rolling out iOS 10.3 beta update for those who have signed up for the change where voice assistant Siri will finally get cricket scores and statistics from the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the International Cricket Council (ICC).

New York, Jan 25 (IANS) If you are impulsive in making decisions, chances are that you may become obese, say researchers who found a link between having an impulsive personality and a high body mass index (BMI).

The findings demonstrate that having an impulsive personality -- the tendency to consistently react with little forethought -- is the key factor that links brain patterns of impulsivity and a high BMI.

"Our research points to impulsive personality as a risk factor for weight gain," said lead researcher Francesca Filbey, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Overweight and obesity are known to increase blood pressure -- the leading cause of strokes.

Excess weight also increases your chances of developing other problems linked to strokes, including high cholesterol, high blood sugar and heart disease.

Thus, "treatments that provide coping skills or cognitive strategies for individuals to overcome impulsive behaviours associated with having an impulsive personality could be an essential component for effective weight-loss programmes", Filbey said.

For the self-report, researchers used an impulsive sensation-seeking scale to gauge innate personality characteristics.

The neuro-psychological measure sought to assess whether an individual's decision-making style was more impulsive or cautious.

An fMRI was used to examine brain activation and connectivity during an impulse control task.

The results showed that "individuals with a high BMI exhibited altered neural function compared to normal weight individuals", Filbey noted.

​New York, Jan 25 (IANS) Early Mars was warmed intermittently by a powerful greenhouse effect caused by methane gas, researchers have revealed.

The team from Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) found that interactions between methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen in the early Martian atmosphere may have created warm periods when the planet could support liquid water on the surface.

In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, first author Robin Wordsworth wrote that if humans understand how early Mars operated, it could tell something about the potential for finding life on other planets outside the solar system.

Four billion years ago, the Sun was about 30 per cent fainter than today and significantly less solar radiation reached the Martian surface, the paper said, adding that the scant radiation that did reach the planet was trapped by the atmosphere, resulting in warm, wet periods.

As carbon dioxide makes up 95 per cent of today's Martian atmosphere, it alone does not account for Mars' early temperatures.

"You can do climate calculations where you add carbon dioxide and build up to hundreds of times the present day atmospheric pressure on Mars and you still never get to temperatures that are even close to the melting point," said Wordsworth.

Wordsworth and his collaborators looked to these long-lost gases -- known as reducing gases -- and found that billions of years ago geological processes could have released significantly more methane into the atmosphere. 

This methane would have been slowly converted to hydrogen and other gases, in a process similar to that occurring today on Saturn's moon, Titan, the research found.

Wordsworth and his team experimented to see what happens when methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide collide and how they interact with photons. The team found that this combination resulted in very strong absorption of radiation.

"We discovered that methane and hydrogen and their interaction with carbon dioxide, were much better at warming early Mars than had previously been believed," Wordsworth said.

​London, Jan 25 (IANS) People are more likely to get affected by superbugs due to over use of antibiotics rather than dirty hospitals, a study has found.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, showed that the widespread prescription of fluoroquinolone antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin was the reason behind a serious stomach bug Clostridium difficile (C. diff), that caused a diarrhoea outbreak in Britain in 2006.

In 2007, a programme of deep cleaning aimed at combating lack of hygiene in hospitals was announced by the National Health Services.

However, the cases of C. difficile fell only when fluoroquinolone use was restricted and used in a more targeted way as one part of many efforts to control the outbreak, the researchers said.

The restricted use of fluoroquinolones resulted in the disappearance in the vast majority of cases and lead to around an 80 per cent fall in the number of these infections.

"Our study shows that the C. difficile epidemic was an unintended consequence of intensive use of an antibiotic class, fluoroquinolones and control was achieved by specifically reducing use of this antibiotic class, because only the C. difficile bugs that were resistant to fluoroquinolones went away," said Derrick Crook, Professor at University of Oxford.

Meanwhile, the smaller number of cases caused by C. diff bugs not resistant to fluoroquinolone antibiotics remained the same.

Infection prevention and control measures such as better handwashing had no impact on the number of C.diff bugs transmitted between people in hospital, the researchers noted.

Ensuring antibiotics are used appropriately is the most important way to control the C. difficile superbug. 

For the study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the team analysed data on the numbers of C. diff infections and amounts of antibiotics used in hospitals and by doctors in Britain.

​Dhaka, Jan 24 (IANS) The Bangladeshi government has made jute bags mandatory for packaging of 11 more products to boost domestic use of the golden fiber, in wake of the imposition of anti-dumping duty on jute goods imported from Bangladesh by the Indian government.

​Tokyo, Jan 24 (IANS) Shares of Japanese automobile firms fell at the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Tuesday after the US exited from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, the media reported.

​Beijing, Jan 24 (IANS) China's central bank on Tuesday announced that it had lent 245.5 billion yuan ($36 billion) to 22 financial institutions through medium-term lending facility (MLF) to keep liquidity basically stable.