Knowledge Update

​London, June 4 (IANS) What archaeologists earlier thought to be ancient underwater remains of a long lost Greek city were in fact created by a naturally occurring phenomenon, suggests new research.

When underwater divers discovered what looked like paved floors, courtyards and colonnades, they thought they had found the ruins of a long-forgotten civilisation that perished when tidal waves hit the shores of the Greek holiday island Zakynthos.

But new research published in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology reveals that the site discovered a few years ago was created by a natural geological phenomenon that took place in the Pliocene era - up to five million years ago.

"The site was discovered by snorkelers and first thought to be an ancient city port, lost to the sea. There were what superficially looked like circular column bases, and paved floors. But mysteriously no other signs of life - such as pottery," said lead author Julian Andrews , professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

The research team went on to investigate in detail the mineral content and texture of the underwater formation in minute detail, using microscopy, X-ray and stable isotope techniques.

"We investigated the site, which is between two and five meters under water, and found that it is actually a natural geologically occurring phenomenon,” Andrews said.

"The disk and doughnut morphology, which looked a bit like circular column bases, is typical of mineralisation at hydrocarbon seeps - seen both in modern seafloor and palaeo settings,” Andrews noted.

Microbes in the sediment use the carbon in methane as fuel. Microbe-driven oxidation of the methane then changes the chemistry of the sediment forming a kind of natural cement, known to geologists as concretion.

"In this case the cement was an unusual mineral called dolomite which rarely forms in seawater, but can be quite common in microbe-rich sediments,” Andrews explained.​

​Toronto, June 4 (IANS) Factors such as whether you are alone or with friends can affect how wisely you reason, says a study that suggests that our level of wisdom varies depending on the situation.

The study defines wise reasoning as a combination of such abilities as intellectual humility, consideration of others' perspective and looking for compromise. 

"This research does not dismiss that there is a personality component to wisdom, but that's not the whole picture," said lead author of the study Igor Grossmann, Professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. 

"Situations in daily life affect our personality and ability to reason wisely," Grossmann said.

The observation that wise reasoning varies dramatically across situations in daily life suggests that while it fluctuates, wisdom may not be as rare as we think. 

Further, for different individuals, only certain situations may promote this quality.

"There are many examples where people known for their critical acumen or expertise in ethics seem to fall prey to lack of such acumen or morals. The present findings suggest that those examples are not an anomaly," Grossmann said.

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

"We cannot always be at the top of our game in terms of wisdom-related tendencies, and it can be dangerous to generalise based on whether people show wisdom in their personal life or when teaching others in the classroom," Grossmann noted.

By examining conditions and situations under which people may or may not show wisdom in their lives, researchers and practitioners may learn more about situations promoting wisdom in daily life and recreating those situations. 

For the next stage of this work, Grossmann and his team are preparing a tool to assess wisdom according to the situation. ​

London, June 4 (IANS) Researchers have found a new test that can detect changes in the levels of metabolites in the blood and help identify whether a cancer drug is working as designed or not.

According to researchers, cancer drugs affect the amount of metabolites -- the building blocks of fats and proteins -- present in the blood of patients with the deadly disease. 

“Our study is an important step in the development of new precision cancer therapies and is the first to show that blood metabolites have real potential to monitor the effects of novel agents,” said Florence Raynaud from The Institute of Cancer Research in Britain. 

The study investigated the metabolic markers that could accurately assess how cancers were responding to the targeted drug pictilisib.

Pictilisib is designed to specifically target a molecular pathway in cancer cells, called PI3 kinase, which has key a role in cell metabolism and is defective in a range of cancer types.

As cancers with PI3K defects grow, they cause a decrease in the levels of metabolites in the bloodstream.

For the study, published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, the team measured the levels of 180 blood markers in 41 patients with advanced cancers in a phase I clinical trial conducted both in preclinical mouse models and also in humans.

In the mice study, the findings showed an increase in the presence of 26 different metabolites in the bloodstream of mice that were given pictilisib, which were low prior to the therapy.

This indicated that the drug was hitting its target as well as reversing the effects of the cancer on mouse metabolites.

In the trial conducted on humans, 22 out of the 26 metabolites increased in response to the pictilisib therapy.

A single dose of pictilisib increased the blood levels of the metabolites, however, when the treatment stopped a resultant decrease was noted, suggesting that the effect was directly related to the introduction of pictilisib.

"Our method could eventually be used to monitor patients routinely during the course of treatment, as a quick and easy way of assessing whether a drug is still working, or whether treatment needs to be adapted," added one of the researchers Paul Workman, Professor at The Institute of Cancer Research.

The new way of monitoring cancer therapy could speed up the development of new-targeted drugs - which exploit specific genetic weaknesses in cancer cells - and help in modifying treatment for patients, the researchers concluded.

New York, June 4 (IANS) Software giant Google, in its Self-Driving Car Project's latest monthly report, has said that it has been experimenting with horn algorithms in the vehicle.

San Francisco, June 3 (IANS) China will constantly boost green and low-carbon development in an effort to promote harmony between human and nature, according to a congratulatory letter sent by President Xi Jinping to the 7th Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) and inaugural Mission Innovation Ministerial on Thursday.

​Dubai, June 2 (IANS) The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) on Thursday said it will launch concentrated solar po

​New York, June 2 (IANS) The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of “likes” on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, new research has found.

For the study, the researchers from the University of California - Los Angeles observed activation in the brain’s reward regions when teenagers saw their photos with a large number of likes, 

The 32 teenagers, ages 13-18, were told they were participating in a small social network similar to the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram. 

In an experiment, the researchers showed them 148 photographs on a computer screen for 12 minutes, including 40 photos that each teenager submitted, and analysed their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. 

Each photo also displayed the number of likes it had supposedly received from other teenage participants -- in reality, the number of likes was assigned by the researchers. 

"When the teenagers saw their own photos with a large number of likes, we saw activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain,” said lead author Lauren Sherman.

A region that was especially active is a part of the striatum called the nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain’s reward circuitry, she said. 

This reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive during adolescence. 

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.​

​London, June 2 (IANS) A part of the Antarctica coastline has been losing ice to the ocean for over four decades, far longer than had been expected, finds a new study of satellite images.

The images of 2,000 km of west Antarctica's coastline showed a loss of about 1,000 km of ice, the researchers said.

"We knew that ice had been retreating from this region recently but now, thanks to a wealth of freely available satellite data, we know this has been occurring pervasively along the coastline for almost half a century," said lead researcher Frazer Christie, doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences in Britain.

The findings showed that ice has been retreating consistently along almost the entire coastline of Antarctica's Bellingshausen Sea since satellite records began.

Warmer ocean waters reaching Antarctica's coast, rather than rising air temperatures, are the reason behind the loss of ice, the scientists suggest. 

For the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, the team analysed hundreds of satellite photographs of the ice margin captured by NASA, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The team also monitored ice thickness and thinning rates using data taken from satellites and the air. 

This showed that some of the largest changes, where ice has rapidly thinned and retreated several miles since 1975, correspond to where the ice front is deepest.

"This study provides important context for our understanding of what is causing ice to retreat around the continent," said Robert Bingham from School of GeoSciences. 

The results will help improve estimates of global sea level rise caused by ice melt, the researchers noted adding that further satellite monitoring is needed to track progress of the ice sheet.

"We now know change to West Antarctica has been longstanding, and the challenge ahead is to determine what has been causing these ice losses for so long," Bingham said.​

Washington, June 3 (IANS) In a significant find, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the universe is expanding five percent to nine percent faster than expected.

There are a few possible explanations for the universe's excessive speed. One possibility is that dark energy, already known to be accelerating the universe, may be shoving galaxies away from each other with even greater -- or growing -- strength.

"This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the universe that make up 95 per cent of everything and don't emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter and dark radiation," explained study leader and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess from the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University.

Riess' team made the discovery by refining the universe's current expansion rate to unprecedented accuracy, reducing the uncertainty to only 2.4 per cent.

For the results, the team looked for galaxies containing both Cepheid stars and Type Ia supernova.

Cepheid stars pulsate at rates that correspond to their true brightness, which can be compared with their apparent brightness as seen from Earth to accurately determine their distance.

Type Ia supernovae are exploding stars that flare with the same brightness and are brilliant enough to be seen from relatively longer distances.

By measuring about 2,400 Cepheid stars in 19 galaxies and comparing the observed brightness of both types of stars, they accurately measured their true brightness and calculated distances to roughly 300 Type Ia supernovae in far-flung galaxies.

The team compared those distances with the expansion of space as measured by the stretching of light from receding galaxies.

They used these two values to calculate how fast the universe expands with time, or the Hubble constant.

The improved Hubble constant value 45.5 miles per second per megaparsec. (A megaparsec equals 3.26 million light-years.)

The new value means the distance between cosmic objects will double in another 9.8 billion years.

Measurements of the afterglow from the Big Bang by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency's Planck satellite mission yield predictions which are 5 percent and 9 percent smaller for the Hubble constant, respectively.

"Comparing the universe's expansion rate with WMAP, Planck, and Hubble is like building a bridge," Riess added.

Another possibility of this expansion is that the cosmos contained a new subatomic particle in its early history that travelled close to the speed of light.

Such speedy particles are collectively referred to as "dark radiation" and include previously known particles like neutrinos.

More energy from additional dark radiation could be throwing off the best efforts to predict today's expansion rate from its post-Big Bang trajectory.

The speedier universe may be telling astronomers that Albert Einstein's theory of gravity is incomplete.

"We know so little about the dark parts of the universe, it's important to measure how they push and pull on space over cosmic history," said Lucas Macri from Texas A&M University in College Station.

The results are forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal.​​

​New York, June 3 (IANS) A team of scientists from Harvard University has co-created a unique "bionic leaf" that uses solar energy to split water molecules and hydrogen-eating bacteria to produce liquid fuels.

Dubbed “bionic leaf 2.0,” the new system can convert solar energy to biomass with 10 percent efficiency -- far above the one per cent seen in the fastest growing plants.

"This is a true artificial photosynthesis system. Before this, people were using artificial photosynthesis for water-splitting but this is a true A-to-Z system and we've gone well over the efficiency of photosynthesis in nature,” said Daniel Nocera, the Patterson Rockwood professor of energy at Harvard University.

While the study shows the system can be used to generate usable fuels, its potential doesn't end there.

"In principle, we have a platform that can make any downstream carbon-based molecule. So this has the potential to be incredibly versatile,” added co-author Pamela Silver, the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology.

For this paper, the team designed a new cobalt-phosphorous alloy catalyst which, “we showed does not make reactive oxygen species. That allowed us to lower the voltage, and that led to a dramatic increase in efficiency”, Nocera noted in a paper published in the journal Science.

The new catalyst also came with another advantage. Its chemical design allows it to "self-heal" -- meaning it wouldn't leech material into solution.

The new system is already effective enough to consider possible commercial applications but within a different model for technology translation.

"It's an important discovery -- it says we can do better than photosynthesis," Nocera said. "But I also want to bring this technology to the developing world as well."

In many ways, the new system marks the fulfillment of the promise of his “artificial leaf” which used solar power to split water and make hydrogen fuel.​