Knowledge Update

Kathmandu, Oct 28 (IANS) State-owned Nepal Airline Corporation (NAC) said it has initiated steps to bring four of the six Chinese aircraft it has contracted for, having received two.

​London, Oct 28 (IANS) Smartphone applications could offer patients with Type 2 diabetes a highly effective method of self-managing their condition, researchers have found in a study.

San Francisco, Oct 28 (IANS) Cupertino-based Apple has introduced the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro ever, along with a breakthrough interface that replaces the traditional row of function keys with a Retina-quality multi-touch display called the Touch Bar. The MacBook Pro features sixth-generation quad-core and dual-core processors, up to 2.3 times the graphics performance over the previous generation, super-fast SSDs and up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports. The new MacBook Pro sports Apple's brightest and most colourful Retina display yet, the security and convenience of Touch ID, a more responsive keyboard, a larger Force Touch trackpad and an audio system with double the dynamic range. "This week marks the 25th anniversary of Apple's first notebook, through the years each generation has introduced new innovations and capabilities, and it is fitting that this all-new generation of MacBook Pro is the biggest leap forward yet," said Philip Schiller, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Apple, in a statement. As thin as a MacBook display at 0.88 mm, the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro at 500 nits of brightness, is 67 per cent brighter than the previous generation, features 67 per cent more contrast and is the first Mac notebook display to support wide colour gamut. And with power-saving technologies like a larger pixel aperture, a variable refresh rate and power-efficient LEDs, the display consumes 30 per cent less energy than before. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro, at just 15.5 mm thin, is 14 per cent thinner and has 20 per cent less volume than before, and weighing just 1.83 kg is nearly half a pound lighter. The 13-inch MacBook Pro features a 2.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.1GHz, 8GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar and Touch ID features a 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.3GHz, 8GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. The 15-inch MacBook Pro, also features Touch Bar and Touch ID, a 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.5GHz, 16GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. All the devices will soon be available in the market, the company said.

New York, Oct 28 (IANS) Your smartphone may soon be able to help you avoid an unnecessary trip to the hospital in case of a dental emergency, thanks to a new app developed by researchers in the US.

The novel mobile application enables smartphones to capture and transmit images from inside the mouth, along with details on the dental emergency, to provide the information dentists need to make a decision on what -- and how urgently -- care is needed.

The new app, called DentaCom, guides individuals with real or suspected dental emergencies through a series of questions designed to capture clinically meaningful data via familiar smartphone functions.

"There are many challenges here that our app can help with," said study senior author Thankam Thyvalikakath from Indiana University.

"It is a challenge for the patient to get the dental emergency appropriately managed, and not just treated by painkillers in a busy hospital ER by a clinician who is not a dental specialist. It is also a challenge for the dentist to get details of the problem," said Thyvalikakath, who was at the University of Pittsburgh at the time of the study.

In the study, all participants were able to complete a guided report on their dental emergency and take photos of the problem region within four minutes.

All clinical information was successfully entered by prospective patients via DentaCom, said the study published in The Journal of the American Dental Association.

Dental emergencies frequently occur when dental offices are closed. Patients often turn to hospital emergency departments or urgent care centres.

But most patients who go to these facilities are simply treated for their pain and referred to their dentist for proper care during office hours. Valuable time may be lost before actual treatment is received, and the patient is billed for the emergency or urgent care visit in addition to whatever dental fees will be incurred.

The new app can help patients avoid these problems.

​London, Oct 28 (IANS) Patients could soon be diagnosed with early-stage arthritis several years before the onset of physical and irreversible symptoms, thanks to a new test developed by researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain.

The test can provide an early diagnosis of osteoarthritis (OA) and also distinguish this from early-stage rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other self-resolving inflammatory joint disease.

"For the first time we measured small fragments from damaged proteins that leak from the joint into blood," said lead researcher Naila Rabbani of Warwick Medical School.

The test, which could be available to patients within two years, identifies the chemical signatures found in the plasma of blood joint proteins damaged by oxidation, nitration and glycation; the modification of proteins with oxygen, nitrogen and sugar molecules.

"The combination of changes in oxidised, nitrated and sugar-modified amino acids in blood enabled early stage detection and classification of arthritis - osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis or other self-resolving inflammatory joint disease," Rabbani noted.

By diagnosing which type of arthritis a patient will develop at an early-stage will allow for appropriate treatment that will provide the best chance for effective treatment and potential prevention, the researchers said.

Patients with early-stage and advanced OA, RA or other inflammatory joint disease were recruited for the study alongside a control group of those with good skeletal health.

The researchers analysed plasma and synovial fluid samples from both groups.

Through their analysis, published in the journal Arthritis Research and Therapy, the researchers detected damaged proteins in characteristic patterns in the samples of those patients with early and advanced OA and RA.

These damages proteins were found at markedly lower levels in the samples of those in the control group -- providing the researchers with the identifiable biomarkers necessary for early detection and diagnosis.

​New York, Oct 28 (IANS) Teachers underrating girls' ability to solve problems in Mathematics will likely contribute to the widening of gender gap in the subject, finds a study.

According to the study, published in the journal AERA Open, beginning in early elementary school boys outperform girls in math -- especially among the highest math achievers. 

This leads to teachers giving lower ratings to girls' math skills while both the genders have similar achievement and behaviour towards the subject. 

"Despite changes in the educational landscape, our findings suggest that the gender gaps observed among children who entered kindergarten in 2010 are strikingly similar to what we saw in children who entered kindergarten in 1998," said Joseph Robinson Cimpian, Associate Professor at the New York University.

Data showed that boys and girls began kindergarten with similar math proficiency, but disparities developed by Grade 3 with girls lagging behind. The gap was particularly large among the highest math achievers.

Research also revealed disparities in teacher perceptions of students, with teachers rating the math skill of girls lower than those of similarly behaving and performing boys.

Finally, the researchers examined gendered patterns of learning behaviours to try and explain why boys are more likely to score as high math achievers. 

They found that girls' more studious approaches to learning pay off by boosting them at the bottom of the achievement distribution, but do not help the persistent gap at the top as much.

The researchers explored the early development of gender gaps in math, including when disparities first appear, where in the distribution such gaps develop, and whether the gaps have changed over the years. 

In addition to math achievement, they examined two potential contributors to gender gaps: students' learning behaviours and teacher expectations.

Overall, the researchers found remarkable consistency across both cohorts. They observed that the gender gap at the top of the distribution (among the highest achievers in math) develops before students enter kindergarten, worsens through elementary school, and has not improved over the last decade.

London, Oct 28 (IANS) Researchers have created a three-dimensional mammary gland model that could pave the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of breast cancer.

"Much of how breast tissues respond to external stimuli such as hormones is, as yet, unknown. In order to fully tackle the mechanisms that lie behind breast cancer we first need to understand how healthy breast tissue develops," said one of the researchers Trevor Dale, Professor at Cardiff University School of Biosciences in Britain. 

"This model allows us to really study the basic biology of how the breast develops - how hormones work, what are the genetic influences," Thierry Jarde from Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, added.

The researchers succeeded in creating a three-dimensional mammary gland model that will pave the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of breast cancer.

Using a cocktail of growth factors, the scientists were able to grow mouse mammary cells into three-dimensional mammary tissue.

Known as an 'organoid', the model, reported in the journal Nature Communications, mimics the structure and function of a real mammary gland. 

This would enable researchers to increase their understanding of how breast tissue develops, and provides an active model for the study of disease and drug screening.

As well as determining how to grow these life-like mammary glands, researchers also discovered how to maintain them in culture to allow ongoing experimentation.

​London, Oct 28 (IANS) Male teenagers with a higher resting heart rate and increased level of blood pressure may be at an high risk of developing psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia and other anxiety disorders, a study has found.

The findings showed that men in their late teenage with a resting heart rate above 82 beats per minute had 69 per cent increased risk for OCD, 21 per cent increased risk for schizophrenia and 18 per cent increased risk for anxiety disorders compared with those whose resting heart rates were below 62 beats per minute. 

Besides resting heart rate, changes in blood pressure, regulated by the autonomic nervous system, have been observed in some patients with psychiatric disorders but the results have been inconsistent.

Lower resting heart rate and blood pressure were also associated with substance use disorders and violent behaviour, said Antti Latvala from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

For the study the team used data of more than one million men in Sweden whose resting heart rate and blood pressure were measured at military conscription (average age 18) from 1969 to 2010 to examine whether differences in cardiac autonomic function were associated with psychiatric disorders.

The results were published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Washington, Oct 28 (IANS) It took more than a year but the last bits of science data from New Horizons' Pluto flyby -- stored on the spacecraft's digital recorders since July 2015 -- arrived safely on Earth this week, NASA said.

The final item - a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager - from New Horizons spacecraft travelled over 5.5 billion kilometers to reach earth, the US space agency said in statement on Thursday.

The downlink came via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.

"We have our pot of gold," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

"There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do-after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?" Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, added. 

Because it had only one shot at its target, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could - taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. 
The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015.

Bowman said the team will conduct a final data-verification review before erasing the two onboard recorders, and clearing space for new data to be taken during the New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM).

KEM will include a series of distant Kuiper Belt object observations and a close encounter with a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on January 1, 2019, NASA said.

Canberra, Oct 28 (IANS) Life expectancy in Australia has hit a new high, with babies born in 2015 expected to live two years longer than those born in 2005, according to a report issued on Friday.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report showed that life expectancy had hit 84.5 years for females and 80.4 years for males, but demographics expert Peter McDonald of the University of Melbourne said that the statistics assume no improvements in healthcare and were therefore conservative estimates.

"They are not any individual's lifetime; they are just telling you the expectation of life you would get if life expectancy didn' t change... and for the last 200 years it has been going up," he said.

ABS Director of Demography Beidar Cho said the life expectancy for Australians in 2015 was comparable for other first-world nations.

"Babies born today have the highest estimated life expectancy ever recorded in Australia," Cho said in a statement.

"Male life expectancy at birth reached 80.4 years in 2015, increasing from 80.3 in 2014. Female life expectancy also increased to 84.5 years in 2015 from 84.4 in the previous year."

"For both men and women, Australia has a higher life expectancy than similar countries such as Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US."

Meanwhile in 2005, the life expectancy of Australians was at 83.3 years for women and 78.5 years for men.

"In 2013-2015, the male and female combined life expectancy at birth estimate for Australia was 82.4 years. This was 11.9 years higher than the world average of 70.5 years in 2010-2015," Cho added.