Knowledge Update

​Moscow, June 2 (IANS) This part of the season is generally marked by slight drizzles but on Thursday as the Russian capital readied itself to the fourth edition of the 'Start Up Village -2016', a concept aimed at showcasing the start-up ability of the Russians as also to provide a competitive platform, the sun shone bright and clear.

​New York, June 2 (IANS) While Apple devices still remain the preferred choices for the US citizens, it is Samsung Galaxy Note 5 that has topped the 2016 American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) poll. According to the annual poll comprising 12,710 people, Samsung Galaxy Note 5 phablet has a rating of 86 out of 100, 9to5mac.com reported on Thursday. iPhone 6 Plus is one notch behind at 85. In last year's satisfaction index, Apple and Samsung were neck-to-neck at 80. This year, Samsung retained last year's score while Apple just edged past Samsung at 81 rating. Lenovo's Motorola receded 3 percent to 77 as did HTC at 75. LG remained at 74 while Microsoft Mobile came down to 74. According to the index, smartphones scored well on the satisfaction levels with battery life the main exception where satisfaction levels fell to 75. A latest study by market research firm Counterpoint Research revealed this month that Samsung reclaimed the top spot in the US market that it lost to Apple 11 months ago. In March, Samsung had 28.8 percent share of the US market riding on the success of Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge devices while Apple slipped down to 23 percent.​

Dubai, June 3 (IANS) Emirates’ flag carrier Etihad on Friday introduced a London-Melbourne round trip ticket costing more than $80,000.

The carrier offers passengers travel in a luxury three-room suite aboard its Airbus A380 named "The Residence". The plane, described as a “penthouse in the sky”, has all the amenities of a five-star hotel.

The 125 square foot suite was available for single or double occupancy with its own Savoy-trained butler and onboard chef.

It is equipped with a flat double bed instead of confining seats as well as a bathroom where guests may freshen up.

The living room has a 32-inch flat screen LCD TV, as well as two fold-away dining tables and a leather double sofa.

The Residence, according to RT online, makes one stop in Abu Dhabi, where Etihad’s customers are ushered into the first class lounge.

The ticket cost includes private transfer to and from the airport, separate check-in, VIP lounge and a personal travel concierge able to book tickets to sporting event or a concert and reserve a table at a restaurant.

The price is about $4,500 more than the previous most expensive ticket -- a return journey in the Residence from New York to Mumbai.

The Airbus A380 with The Residence on board was launched at the end of 2014 together with Etihad’s revamped first and business class and an upgraded economy cabin.

“Etihad Airways currently operates three daily A380 services from London Heathrow to Abu Dhabi, so our guests can now enjoy the convenience and class-leading comfort of an all-A380 service all the way to Melbourne,” said the carrier’s senior vice-president of marketing Shane O’Hare.​

Sydney, June 2 (IANS) Eating the right amount of fibre from breads, cereals, and fruits can help us avoid disease and disability into old age -- a benchmark of successful ageing, says a study led by an Indian-origin researcher.

Using data compiled from the Blue Mountains Eye Study, a population-based study that examined a cohort of more than 1,600 adults aged 50 years and older for long-term sensory loss risk factors and systemic diseases, the researchers explored the relationship between carbohydrate nutrition and healthy aging.

They found that out of all the factors they examined -- which included a person's total carbohydrate intake, total fibre intake, glycemic index, glycemic load, and sugar intake -- it was the fibre that made the biggest difference to what the researchers termed "successful aging."

Successful ageing was defined as including an absence of disability, depressive symptoms, cognitive impairment, respiratory symptoms, and chronic diseases including cancer, coronary artery disease, and stroke.

"Out of all the variables that we looked at, fiber intake -- which is a type of carbohydrate that the body can't digest -- had the strongest influence," said lead author Bamini Gopinath, Associate Professor at The Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Australia.

The findings were published in the journal The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

"Essentially, we found that those who had the highest intake of fiber or total fiber actually had an almost 80 percent greater likelihood of living a long and healthy life over a 10-year follow-up. That is, they were less likely to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, dementia, depression, and functional disability," she explained.​

​London, June 2 (IANS) In a first, an international team of scientists has detected a faint signal emitted by hydrogen gas in a galaxy more than five billion light years away -- almost double the previous record.

Using the Very Large Array radio telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US, the team observed radio emission from hydrogen in a distant galaxy and found that it would have contained billions of young, massive stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas.

As the most abundant element in the universe and the raw fuel for creating stars, hydrogen is used by radio astronomers to detect and understand the makeup of other galaxies.

However, until now, radio telescopes have only been able to detect the emission signature of hydrogen from relatively nearby galaxies.

"Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we've been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth," said lead author, Dr Ximena Fernández from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

"These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after five billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they've fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time,” he added.

The success for the team comes after the first 178 hours of observing time with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope for a new survey of the sky called the 'COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey' or CHILES.

Once completed, the CHILES survey will have collected data from more than 1,000 hours of observing time.

In a new approach, members of the team including Dr Attila Popping from International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the ARC Centre of All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) in Australia are working with Amazon Web Services to process and move the large volumes of data via the “cloud”.

“For this project, we took tens of terabytes of data from the Very Large Array and then processed it using Amazon's cloud-based servers to create an enormous image cube, ready for our team to analyse and explore," Dr Popping added.

Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of the Data Intensive Astronomy team at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the limiting factor for radio astronomers used to be the size of the telescope and the hardware behind it.

"It's fast becoming more about the data and how you move, store and analyse vast volumes of information," he said in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) Asthma patients may soon do away with their inhalers as researchers, including one of Indian origin, have developed an integrated, wearable system that monitors a user's environment, heart rate and other physical attributes with the goal of predicting and preventing asthma attacks.

"We have tested the system in the benchtop and on a limited number of human subjects for proof of concept demonstration and have confirmed that all of the sensors work, and that the system accurately compiles the data," said study co-author Veena Misra, professor at North Carolina State University in the US.

The system, called the Health and Environmental Tracker (HET), incorporates a host of novel sensing devices, which are incorporated into a wristband and a patch that adheres to the chest.

The patch includes sensors that track a patient's movement, heart rate, respiratory rate, the amount of oxygen in the blood, skin impedance and wheezing in the lungs.

The wristband focuses largely on environmental factors, monitoring volatile organic compounds and ozone in the air, as well as ambient humidity and temperature. 

The wristband also includes additional sensors to monitor motion, heart rate and the amount of oxygen in the blood.

The system also has one nonwearable component: a spirometer, which patients breathe into several times a day to measure lung function.

Data from all of these sensors is transmitted wirelessly to a computer, where custom software collects and records the data.

"This summer, we plan to begin testing HET in a controlled environment with subjects suffering from asthma and a control group, in order to identify which environmental and physiological variables are effective at predicting asthma attacks," Misra noted.

Asthma patients currently rely on inhalers to deal with their symptoms, which can include often-debilitating asthma attacks.

"Our goal was to design a wearable system that could track the wellness of the subjects and in particular provide the infrastructure to predict asthma attacks, so that the users could take steps to prevent them by changing their activities or environment," principal investigator Alper Bozkurt, Assistant Professor at NC State, noted. 

A paper describing the work was published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

"Preventing an attack could be as simple as going indoors or taking a break from an exercise routine," lead author James Dieffenderfer, PhD student in the joint biomedical engineering programme at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explained.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) If you like to observe whether the person sitting next to you is rhythmically drumming his fingers because he's anxious or if someone is preoccupied because she's gazing off into the distance, make sure to use this talent at the workplace.

According to an interesting study, such “observing” people are high in mind-reading motivation (MRM) which can lead to many social benefits, including better teamwork.

MRM is a newly coined term for the practice of observing and interpreting bits of social information. It is the tendency to engage with the mental states and perspectives of others.

“We're not talking about the psychic phenomenon or anything like that but simply using cues from other people's behaviour, their non-verbal signals, to try to figure out what they're thinking," said Melanie Green, associate professor in University at Buffalo.

Individuals high in MRM enjoy speculating on others' thoughts based on the potentially hundreds of social cues they might receive.

Those low in MRM dislike or have no interest in doing so.

MRM is about the motivation to engage with other minds, and is distinct from the ability to accurately interpret others' cues.

“We didn't measure ability directly in our study of teamwork but the research suggests that just the motivation to understand others, and presumably the behaviours that go along with that motivation, appear to lead to benefits," Green added.

In addition to facilitating cooperation and better teamwork, people high in MRM also consider people in great detail and have a nuanced understanding of those around them.

Those high in MRM seem to develop richer psychological portraits of those around them.

“High MRM people are more drawn to and pay more attention to messages with an identifiable source - a spokesperson or an ad focusing on company values - that is, someone whose perspective they can try to understand,” Green noted.

On the other hand, low MRM people seem to pay more attention to ads that are more impersonal, like those that just discuss the product - a message that does not appear to come from a particular person or group.

Green and her colleagues think there might be a difference in how much people enjoy or were motivated to speculate on people's thoughts in situations where there was no situational need or institutional pressure.
It could be as simple as a bus passenger considering the thoughts of those across the aisle.

"This hadn't been previously considered from the standpoint of individual differences," Green stated in a paper published in the journal Motivation and Emotion.

The concept of MRM has been developed by Green and her coauthors Jordan M. Carpenter at the University of Pennsylvania and Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.​

New York, June 2 (IANS) A new software developed by scientists at the Brown University in the US can help website owners and developers to determine which page or content a visitor is looking at.

​New York, June 1 (IANS) Researchers from Duke University have discovered a potential new class of small-molecule drugs that simultaneously block key targets in the treatment of pain.

The findings could lead to the development of a new drug to treat conditions including skin irritation and itching, headaches, jaw pain, and abdominal pain stemming from the pancreas and colon.

"We are very pleased with what is a first chapter in a highly promising story," said Wolfgang Liedtke, Professor at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham.

"We hope to be able to develop these compounds for clinical use in humans or animals," Liedtke noted.

In the new study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers initially aimed to develop more effective blockers of TRPV4, a molecule their previous research had shown transmits skin irritation elicited by sunburn, and painful sensations coming from the head and face. 

The researchers used a prototype TRPV4 blocker in a 2009 study and then set out to develop more potent versions.

Compared to the prototype, one of the new candidate drugs, called "16-8," worked 10 times more effectively in cells with active TRPV4 that are key for the development of osteoarthritis.

It also worked well in another cell type involved in nerve cell injury, stroke and epilepsy.

But to their surprise, when assessing the specificity of 16-8, the scientists discovered that it also blocked TRPA1, which is a promising target in pain and itch research.

"As a physician, I soon realised the enormous potential that these compounds might have, given how beneficial dual-target molecules can be in clinical medicine," Liedtke said.

In this study, the drug 16-8 also quelled pain in living animals, including abdominal aches in mice with pancreas inflammation. 

Liedtke sees potential for the 16-8 drug to treat osteoarthritis and other types of joint pain as well as head, face and jaw pain. 

In general, it might also treat aches radiating from internal organs or resulting from nerve cell injury, the study said.​