Knowledge Update

​Brasilia, June 22 (IANS) The full Chamber of Deputies of Brazil on Wednesday approved an executive order allowing foreign investors up 100 per cent ownership of Brazilian airlines, compared to the current 20 per cent limit.

​New Delhi, May 23 (IANS) IBM will provide its expertise to help Aditya Birla Group-owned online fashion retailer abof.com target millennials by providing them customised style tips, fashion content and trends, the US tech giant announced on Monday. IBM has delivered customer engagement and order fulfillment capabilities to abof.com that will allow the portal to constantly refresh the e-commerce experience and seamlessly add new content catering to the dynamic demands of the young consumers. In the first three months of operation, IBM-powered solutions have helped abof.com reach more than three million visits. abof.com fashion portal now reaches out to more than 500 cities in India. "We aim to grow our market share by offering a curated range of merchandise that goes beyond conventional boundaries to deliver quality service to our customers," said Prashant Gupta, president and CEO, abof.com, in a statement. "With IBM's global expertise and local experience in eCommerce space, we are optimistic that the company will emerge as the most admired player in online fashion segment," he added. The company needed a well-integrated e-commerce solution that would help it create a dynamic and interactive online platform that could better target consumers and increase brand loyalty. ​

​New York, June 22 (IANS) Ever received a friend request from your mother, father or math teacher? It may sound weird, but adding adults, from teachers to parents, to a teenager's social media can fundamentally shift his or her online behaviour, a new study says.

"Interactions between adults and teenagers, can be opportunities to model appropriate social media behaviour or for teenagers to build beneficial connections with people who are different from themselves," said lead author Andrea Forte, Assistant Professor at Drexel University in the US.

The presence of adults also leads teenagers' to think before they post.

Learning this sort of self-censoring behaviour at a young age could, be just as important as creating better privacy management tools, the researchers said.

Further, establishing healthy relationships with adults on social media can help teenagers understand where the boundary for appropriate interaction lies.

Many of the students consider this to be an awkward melding of social circles, calling interactions with "big brother" "creepy" and "embarrassing." 

However, they recognise the presence of adult authorities in their social media as a sign of caring and compassion.

"When family, friends, teachers, romantic interests and coworkers mix and mingle, the result is social awkwardness," Forte added.

In addition, this uncomfortable mix can also give rise to a level of access to information that might not be achievable within the familiar confines of a tight circle of friends.

"Weak ties are often connections to people who are less like you and who can provide access to diverse kinds of information and resources," Forte noted adding, "in other words, being connected to others who are very similar to yourself can throttle information flow.”

Schools need to take a closer look at their social media policies and allow for positive interactions between teachers, administrators and their students, the researchers suggested.

The findings are based on surveys and interviews of students in two public high schools in the US -- one with a policy that strictly limits social media interaction between teachers and students and one that with a policy that is more leniently enforced and social media interaction is publicly embraced.

The study will be published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP).​

​Sydney, June 22 (IANS) Consuming high-fibre diet consisting of a bowl of bran and some dried apricots in the morning and intake of Vitamin A can help reduce food allergies, finds a new study.

The findings showed that mice allergic to peanuts were protected against the allergy when fed on a high-fibre diet. 

Food products rich in fibre reshapes the gut and colon microbiota and helps to fight against food allergies, said the study, led by Jian Tan, professor at the Monash University in Australia.

The immune system works with the good bacteria in the gut to help protect against life threatening allergic responses, the researchers said.

The microbiota in the gut was found to assist the immune system in resisting allergies through the breaking down of fibre into short-chain fatty acids. 

These short-chain fatty acids boosted a particular subset of the immune system called dendritic cells, which control whether an allergic response against a food allergen happens or not.

Increased levels of short-chain fatty acids switched these cells to stop the allergic response.

Further, deficiency in vitamin A levels could promote food allergies, especially in infants and children, the researchers noted.

The study opens a potential route for drug therapy for allergies by delivering short-chain fatty acids as a treatment, said the paper published in the journal Cell Reports.

Washington, June 22 (IANS) In a first, astronomers have discovered a vast cloud of high-energy particles called a wind nebula around a rare ultra-magnetic neutron star, or magnetar.

The find offers a unique window into the properties, environment and outburst history of magnetars, which are the strongest magnets in the universe.

A neutron star is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its own weight, and exploded as a supernova. 

Neutron stars are most commonly found as pulsars, which produce radio, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays at various locations in their surrounding magnetic fields. 

Typical pulsar magnetic fields can be 100 billion to 10 trillion times stronger than Earth's. Magnetar fields reach strengths a thousand times stronger still, and scientists don't know the details of how they are created. 

Of about 2,600 neutron stars known, to date only 29 are classified as magnetars.

The newfound nebula surrounds a magnetar known as Swift J1834.9-0846 -- J1834.9 for short -- which was discovered by NASA's Swift satellite in 2011, during a brief X-ray outburst. 

"Right now, we don't know how J1834.9 developed and continues to maintain a wind nebula, which until now was a structure only seen around young pulsars," said lead researcher George Younes, postdoctoral researcher at George Washington University in Washington. 

"If the process here is similar, then about 10 percent of the magnetar's rotational energy loss is powering the nebula's glow, which would be the highest efficiency ever measured in such a system," Younes said.

A month after the Swift discovery, a team led by Younes took another look at J1834.9 using the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, which revealed an unusual lopsided glow about 15 light-years across centreed on the magnetar. 

New XMM-Newton observations coupled with archival data from XMM-Newton and Swift, confirmed this extended glow as the first wind nebula ever identified around a magnetar. 

A paper describing the analysis will be published in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

"It represents a unique opportunity to study the magnetar's historical activity, opening a whole new playground for theorists like me," team member Jonathan Granot from Open University in Ra'anana, Israel, said.​

​Beijing, June 21 (IANS) The Shanghai Disney Resort, which officially opened last Thursday, is expected to surpass the Palace Museum in Beijing as the top spot for visitors in China.

According to a report by online travel agency Ctrip, the resort is expected to receive at least 15 million visitors a year, more than 40,000 a day, China Daily reported.

Last year, the Palace Museum saw a total of 15 million tourists.

With each visitor expected to spend an average of 2,219 yuan ($340) on a trip to Shanghai Disney, revenue would reach 33 billion yuan a year, the report said.

It also found that tourists from Shanghai are likely to make up 40 per cent of visitors.

Chi Huiguang, a Beijing resident who went to the Disney Resort on a high-speed train, said she has been to Disneyland in Los Angeles and the one in Shanghai was equally good -- especially the smiling staff -- despite the long lines and high prices for tickets and food.

Ctrip said about four out of 10 current visitors are couples and 30 per cent are parents accompanying their kids. But as the summer vacation arrives, more parents are expected to visit the resort with their children, the agency said.

It also forecast that a peak in visitors would appear during the 10 days after the official opening of the resort and in early July. So trying to avoid the peak would be better, the agency suggested.

The resort is expected to receive at least 7.3 million visitors within the year, according to the agency.​

​New Delhi, June 9 (IANS) Jharkhand's tourism department said on Thursday it is working to develop the closed and abandoned mines in the state into active tourist destinations.

"Mining tourism is to be developed following best practices from other parts of the world," said a statement from the department, citing Director (tourism) Prasad Krishna Waghmare.

"The state government intends to develop closed mines and transform the abandoned mines as a tourist destination."

The move comes after the department studied mining tourism in Australia, Chile, Canada, Norway and other countries.

"This could be a different experience for the visitors and tourists who visit the state. The government is already in talks with several mine operators for the same," Waghmare said. 

He said his department has also been working on temple tourism as well as biodiversity tourism as part of a new policy. 

There is going to be a development of the medieval terracotta temples of 'Maluti' as a tourist hotspot.

Maluti temples are a group of 78 terracotta temples built between the 17th and 19th centuries in the Maluti village of Jharkhand's Dumka district.

According to officials, Jharkhand has seen a rising graph of visitors from outside the state, from 23,991 tourists in the year 2000 when the state was formed to 33,179,530 (including 1,67,855 foreigners) in 2015. 

Jharkhand currently holds ninth rank in the country in terms of visitors, and the state government is committed to take the state to the top of the country's tourist table, Waghmare said.​

San Francisco, June 21 (IANS) To help customers make a smooth transition to the Cloud with proven enterprise applications, Oracle Partner Network (OPN) on Tuesday unveiled Oracle Cloud platform ready for the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).

New York, June 21 (IANS) In order to reportedly finance its $67 billion acquisition of IT storage company EMC, US tech giant Dell has sold Dell Software Group to Francisco Partners, a US-based private equity firm and Elliott Management, an American hedge fund management firm.