Knowledge Update

​Johannesburg, Sep 7 (IANS) Scientists, including researchers from India, have predicted the existence of a new boson that might aid in the understanding of dark matter in the universe.

Using data from a series of experiments that led to the discovery of Higgs boson at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 2012, the team led by the High Energy Physics Group (HEP) of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg established what they call "Madala boson".

The experiment was repeated in 2015 and 2016, after a two-and-half years' shut-down of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The data reported by the LHC experiments in 2016 have corroborated the features in the data that triggered the Madala hypothesis in the first place.

The Wits Madala project team consists of approximately 35 young South African and African students and researchers, along with theorists such as Professor Alan Cornell and Dr Mukesh Kumar.

Some of these scientists include Dr Deepak Kar and Dr Xifeng Ruan, two new academic staff in the group, who have years of expertise at the LHC.

"Based on a number of features and peculiarities of the data reported by the experiments at the LHC and collected up to the end of 2012, the Wits HEP group in collaboration with scientists in India and Sweden formulated the Madala hypothesis," says Professor Bruce Mellado, team leader of the HEP group at Wits, in a statement.

The hypothesis describes the existence of a new boson and field, similar to the Higgs boson.

Boson is a subatomic particle, such as a photon, which has zero or integral spin and follows the statistical description given by theoretical physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein.

However, where the Higgs boson in the Standard Model of Physics only interacts with known matter, the Madala boson interacts with dark matter, which makes about 27 per cent of the universe.

The theory that underpins the understanding of fundamental interactions in nature in modern physics is referred to as the Standard Model of Physics.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012, for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2013, the Standard Model of Physics is now complete.

However, this model is insufficient to describe a number of phenomena such as dark matter.

"With the Madala hypothesis predictions of striking signatures are made, that is being pursued by the young scientists of the Wits HEP group," the authors noted.

Hanoi, Sep 7 (IANS) The Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi is considering the construction of a software park with a total investment of over $1 billion, which will create over 40,000 jobs, officials said on Wednesday.

San Francisco, Sep 7 (IANS) Google has started bringing online a new high-speed fibre optic undersea cable to speed up its services in Asia.

​Colombo, Sep 7 (IANS) Yoga can contribute to resilience against non-communicable diseases and can be used for preventing and controlling many other lifestyle diseases, Health Minister J.P. Nadda said on Wednesday.

"Major non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, stroke and chronic obstructive lung disease are to a great extent due to unhealthy lifestyle. If the body is a temple of the mind, yoga creates a beautiful temple," said Nadda, who is leading the yoga session at 69th World Health Organisation (WHO) Southeast Asia region office (SEARO) summit.

According to the minister, yoga can bring together body, soul and mind for a holistic approach to health and wellbeing, including the physical, mental and spiritual realms of the human being.

"Yoga is not just a set of exercises. Rather, yoga is a philosophy of discipline and meditation that transforms the spirit and makes the individual a better person in thought, action, knowledge and devotion."

Nadda, at the session here, articulated the vision of the Indian government in the area of universal health care and its road map for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

The minister also received the certificate for Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus Elimination (MNTE) and Yaws-free India from the WHO.

India was declared MNTE-free country in August last year and Yaws-free in May this year.

​New York, Sep 7 (IANS) As commercial speech recognition systems are derived largely from adult speech, Disney researchers have developed a new speech technology system that could make playing certain video games or interactions with robots more fun for kids.

The new technology sorts through the overlapping speech, social side talk and creative pronunciations of young children to help them better control a video game called Mole Madness that require kids to say say just two words - "jump" and "go".

The multi-keyword-spotting system, developed by Disney Research, could make it possible to design any number of speech-based game or entertainment applications for children, including interactions with robots, the study said.

"Speech recognition applications have become increasingly commonplace as the technology has matured, but understanding what kids say when they play remains difficult," said Jessica Hodgins, vice president at Disney Research - an international network of research labs in US.

"Kids don't necessarily pronounce words quite like adults and when they are playing together, as they like to do, they often engage in side banter, or exclamations of excitement, or simply talk over each other," Lehman said. 

In the cooperative Mole Madness - a two-player video game, kids needed to say just two words - "jump" and "go" while moving an animated mole through its environment, gathering rewards as they avoid obstacles. 

During game play, the players often say their commands simultaneously. In other cases, they make statements to each other, such as "Don't say 'go' yet," that can be misinterpreted by the system. 

"This technology can be reproduced with other vocabulary, allowing designers and developers to build novel children's applications that use limited speech as an input method," Lehman said.

The findings were presented at the Workshop on Child Computer Interaction in San Francisco.

​Canberra, Sep 7 (IANS) Australia and Britain have established a bilateral Trade Working Group to act as a stepping stone towards signing a free trade deal (FTA) once UK exits the European Union (EU).

​London, Sep 6 (IANS) Genetic factors are responsible for prompting individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to develop alcohol dependence as well as indulge in binge eating, finds a study.

Apart from children, nearly five per cent of the global adult population is also suffering from ADHD, the study said, adding that both alcohol dependence and binge eating are more common in adults with ADHD than in the general population. 

The research suggests that certain individuals inherit a susceptibility for both ADHD symptoms and dependency disorders or binge eating, thus these problems must be treated in parallel, said Andrea Johansson Capusan from Linkoping University in Sweden.

"When treating adults who come with dependency disorder or substance-abuse behaviour, it's important to remember that ADHD is very common in these patients. And conversely-it's important to treat ADHD early in order to prevent alcohol dependence and binge eating later in life," Capusan added.

For the study, the researchers examined more than 18,000 twin pairs aged between 20 and 46 years.

They compared identical twins, who share 100 per cent of their genes, with fraternal twins, whose genetic makeups are no more similar to each other than any pair of siblings. 

Twin pairs grow up in the same environment, but are affected by individual environmental factors, such as diseases and their circles of friends, the researchers said. 

For ADHD symptoms and alcohol dependence, 64 per cent of the overlap was explained by common genetic factors. 

The remaining variance was accounted for by environmental factors specific for each twin with no sex differences for the overlap. 

Similarly, 91 per cent of the association between ADHD symptoms and binge-eating behaviour was explained by common genetic factors. 

The study helped researchers to determine whether the correlation between different conditions can best be explained by a person's genetic background giving higher susceptibility to a condition, or whether environmental factors are significant. 

Since heredity plays such a large role, it is important that ADHD is treated at an early stage, and that measures are taken to prevent individuals developing these disorders later in life, the researchers concluded.​

New York, Sep 7 (IANS) While electric fans keep young adults cooler by increasing the evaporation of sweat, they may, surprisingly, have the opposite effect for those above the age of 60, suggests new research.

The heart rate and internal temperature of seniors exposed to 41.6 degree Celsius temperatures and increasing humidity levels climbed even higher when they tried to cool off with fans -- instead of falling as expected, according to study findings reported in the journal JAMA.

"Although differences were small, the cumulative effect could become clinically important during prolonged heat exposure, such as during extreme heat waves," said Craig Crandall, Professor of Internal Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the US.

"We know that fans keep young adults cooler by increasing the evaporation of sweat," Crandall said. 

"We surmise that age-related impairments in sweating capacity make fans an ineffective means of cooling for the elderly during exceptionally hot days, and may, in fact, increase thermal and cardiac strain," Crandall noted.

Researchers studied the physiological responses of a small group of elderly patients in a high-heat, high-humidity environment. 

Participants between the ages of 60 and 80 were observed for approximately two hours in a room with the temperature set at a sweltering 41.6 degrees Celsius and a humidity level that was gradually increased from 30 per cent to 70 per cent. 

Not surprisingly, both heart rate and internal body temperature rose as the humidity level in the room rose. 

The eight individuals in the study were tested under those conditions without a fan and, on a separate occasion, with an electric fan. 

Unexpectedly, the participants' heart rates were 10 beats per minute higher and their internal temperatures marginally higher when a fan was part of the experimental environment. 

Although these findings suggest that fan use may be counterproductive for seniors during heat waves, the investigators propose that fan use may still be beneficial under less extreme environmental conditions, though this needs to be confirmed.

​London, July 31 (IANS) It seems that Google and Tesla have a new competitor in their driverless car projects -- FiveAI, a Britain-based startup that is working on a technology that is data light and fully autonomous.

New York, July 31 (IANS) In their bid to design new bio-materials that promote tissue regeneration, scientists have identified how inflammation, when precisely controlled, is crucial for bone repair.

The findings showed that a new type of ceramic scaffold causes inflammatory cells to behave in a way that is more regenerative than scaffolds that are currently used clinically.

The reason can be attributed to macrophages -- swallowing white blood cells that digest foreign particles, the researchers said.

"We wanted to know why these scaffolds were successful and to understand the contributions of macrophages to that process," said Kara Spiller, Associate Professor Drexel University, in Pennsylvania, the US.

The findings showed that the new ceramic scaffolds caused macrophages to transform into an M2c phenotype, meaning they express genes associated with re-modelling.

This behaviour was not seen in the scaffolds that have been approved to be used in humans.

Further, the study also found that macrophages must be in direct contact with the scaffold in order to regenerate tissue.

"The macrophages degrade the scaffolds and shape them into something new," Spiller said.

Determining why certain scaffolds are successful in re-growing bone will ultimately help biomedical engineers design other types of scaffolds and new drug delivery strategies to promote healing in other areas of the body, the researchers concluded in the paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.​