Knowledge Update

New York, April 22 (IANS) In celebration of Earth Day 2017, Apple has released a new video series featuring candid interviews with employees leading Apples efforts to address climate change, conserve resources and pioneer safer materials.

New York, April 22 (IANS) With an estimated 10 per cent of people worldwide having chronic kidney disease (CKD), and about nine in 10 of them being unaware of their condition, health experts have called for making kidney health a priority in both developed and developing countries. Presenting a new global report - The Global Kidney Health Atlas - presented at this week's World Congress of Nephrology in Mexico City being held from April 21-25, the researchers highlighted the huge gaps in kidney disease care and prevention, with many countries not prioritising kidney health. Globally, estimated CKD prevalence varies from seven per cent in South Asia and eight per cent in Africa to as high as 11 per cent in North America and 12 per cent in Europe, The Middle East, and East Asia, and Latin America, according to the report. Among high-income countries, Saudi Arabia and Belgium have the highest estimated CKD prevalence (24 per cent), followed by Poland (18 per cent), Germany (17 per cent) and Britain and Singapore (16 per cent). Norway and the Netherlands have the lowest estimates at five per cent, the report, which was also published in the journal JAMA, said. "Our Atlas shows that, across countries of all incomes, many governments are not making kidney disease a priority. This makes no sense, as the costs for treating people with end stage kidney disease are enormous, along with the devastating effect it has on patients and their families," said Adeera Levin, President of the International Society of Nephrology which produced the Atlas. "A diagnosis of CKD does not mean that you will need dialysis or a transplant, but does signal that you are at risk for many health problems, including heart disease, strokes, and infections," Levin, who is also a Professor of Medicine at the University of British Colombia in Canada, added. While CKD can affect anyone, people are at higher risk if they have any one or more of a number of risk factors: these include high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity smoking, being aged 60 years or over, having established cardiovascular disease, having a family history of kidney failure, and being from a high-risk ethnic group or having a history of acute kidney injury. Acute kidney injury can be caused by infections, dehydration or damage from medications or ingesting toxic drugs. "A general lack of awareness of CKD, among patients and family doctors alike, and a lack of symptoms in the early stages, means that kidney function is usually hugely reduced by the time symptoms arise," said Professor David Johnson, co-chair of the Global Kidney Health Atlas, and Professor at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. The kidneys are vital organs in our bodies, removing waste and excess water and controlling the acidity balance of our blood. Chronic kidney disease is the gradual loss of the kidneys' abilities to perform these essential functions, and can be caused by high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, smoking and other risk factors.

​New York, April 22 (IANS) A team of scientists has developed a method to increase the performance of high-power electrical storage devices and, at the same time, decrease their size.

The researchers from Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences describe a mathematical model for designing new materials for energy storage to reduce carbon emissions in the transportation and electricity sectors.

"The potential here is that you could build batteries that last much longer and make them much smaller," said study co-author Daniel Tartakovsky. 

"If you could engineer a material with a far superior storage capacity than what we have today, then you could dramatically improve the performance of batteries," added Tartakovsky.

One of the primary obstacles to transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is the ability to store energy for later use, such as during hours when the sun is not shining in the case of solar power. 

Demand for cheap, efficient storage has increased as more companies turn to renewable energy sources, which offer significant public health benefits.

Tartakovsky hopes the new materials developed through this model will improve supercapacitors, a type of next-generation energy storage that could replace rechargeable batteries in high-tech devices like cellphones and electric vehicles. 

"We developed a model that would allow materials chemists to know what to expect in terms of performance if the grains are arranged in a certain way, without going through these experiments," Tartakovsky said in a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters. 

"This framework also shows that if you arrange your grains like the model suggests, then you will get the maximum performance," Tartakovsky added.

Beijing, April 22 (IANS) China's first spacecraft, the Tianzhou-1, docked successfully with the orbiting Tiangong-2 space lab on Saturday, according to Beijing Aerospace Control Centre.

Tianzhou-1, which was launched on Thursday evening from Wenchang Space Launch Centre in Hainan province, began to approach Tiangong-2 automatically at 10.02 a.m., and made contact with at 12.16 p.m., the People's Daily reported.

The Tianzhou-1 cargo ship and Tiangong-2 space lab will have another two dockings.

The second docking will be conducted from a different direction, which aims to test the ability of the cargo ship to dock with a future space station from different directions.

In the third docking, Tianzhou-1 will use fast-docking technology. 

It normally takes about two days to dock, while fast docking will take only six hours.

Refuelling will also be conducted, a process with 29 steps that takes several days.

Tiangong-2, which went into space on September 15, 2016, is China's first space lab "in the strict sense" and a key step in building a permanent space station by 2022.

Cargo ships play a crucial role maintaining a space station and carrying supplies and fuel into orbit.

Researchers in the US have created a digital map to track the changing racial diversity of every neighbourhood in the country.

The map shows which neighbourhoods have become less homogenous over the last two decades and which have not.

Tomasz Stepinski from University of Cincinnati applied NASA mapmaking techniques to 20 years of data collected by the US Census Bureau to build one of the most detailed racial-diversity maps ever created.

The zoomable map, a paper about which was published in the journal PLOS One, shows at a glance how the racial composition of neighbourhoods changed between 1990 and 2010.

"People don't realise that the United States is a diverse country but at the same time is still very segregated," Stepinski, who created the map in collaboration with his postdoctoral researcher Anna Dmowska, said.

The researchers think that the map will have broad appeal to journalists, policymakers and researchers.

"The maps can tell us much more about racial composition and can be used by everyone," Dmowska, who now works at the Institute of Geoecology and Geoinformation of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, said.

"They don't require expert knowledge to understand the results, so I think maps can be used by a broader community," Dmowska said.

Updating the maps in future census years will be relatively simple, she said.

"Our grids are ready to use for multiyear comparison," Dmowska added.

The maps allow users to create their own smaller study area and then glean data from it.

In some cities, they tell the story of recent immigration in America. For example, the maps demonstrate the influx of Asian immigrants in San Francisco over the last 20 years.

Many of these newcomers are Southeast Asians who were drawn to the area by the Silicon Valley boom, Stepinski said.

And in Cincinnati, too, the census maps track the changing racial composition of the city.

Neighbourhoods that were predominantly White or Black in 1990 are far more diverse now.

But they also show the way that racial segregation has defined some cities.

For example, in the Detroit neighbourhoods popularised by the movie "8 Mile," the map from 1990 clearly shows the segregation of Black and White communities on either side of 8 Mile Road.

​New York, April 22 (IANS)

Dhaka, April 21 (IANS) The World Bank has pledged to give $6 billion in credit to Bangladesh over the next three years.

The announcement came after Finance Minister AMA Muhith held a meeting with the global bank's Vice President for South Asia Region, Annette Dixon, at its Washington D.C.

Beijing, April 21 (IANS) China on Friday launched a new freight train service linking Xiamen city with Moscow.

The train with 40 containers left the station carrying goods worth $363,000 including granite, lighting supplies, artificial flowers and shoes, Xinhua news agency repored.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Google Home, a voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant for home automation now has the ability for up to six people to connect their account to one speaker and can recognise who is talking to it.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) If you thought switching to diet soda can help you avoid the ill effects associated with sugary soft drinks, think again! Researchers have found that while drinking sugary beverages frequently may lead to poorer memory, daily intake of diet soda may increase the risk of stroke and dementia. Both sugary and diet drinks correlated with accelerated brain ageing, according to the findings published in two separate studies. People who drink sugary beverages frequently are more likely to have poorer memory, smaller overall brain volume, and a significantly smaller hippocampus -- an area of the brain important for learning and memory, said the study published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia. A follow-up study, published in the journal Stroke, found that people who drank diet soda daily were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia when compared to those who did not. Scientists have put forth various hypotheses about how artificial sweeteners may cause harm, from transforming gut bacteria to altering the brain's perception of "sweet," but "we need more work to figure out the underlying mechanisms", said Boston University's Matthew Pase, who is lead author on the two studies. For the studies, researchers used data from the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a study that aims to identify common factors or characteristics that contribute to cardiovascular disease (CVD). "These studies are not the be-all and end-all, but it's strong data and a very strong suggestion," said Sudha Seshadri, Professor at Boston University School of Medicine (MED) in the US. "It looks like there is not very much of an upside to having sugary drinks, and substituting the sugar with artificial sweeteners doesn't seem to help," Seshadri, who is senior author on both papers, said. Excess sugar has long been associated with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases like obesity, heart disease and Type-2 diabetes, but little is known about its long-term effects on the human brain. He chose to study sugary drinks as a way of examining overall sugar consumption. "It's difficult to measure overall sugar intake in the diet," he says, "so we used sugary beverages as a proxy." For the first study, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, researchers examined data, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and cognitive testing results, from about 4,000 people enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study's Offspring and Third-Generation cohorts. The researchers looked at people who consumed more than two sugary drinks a day of any type -- soda, fruit juice and other soft drinks -- or more than three per week of soda alone. Among that "high intake" group, they found multiple signs of accelerated brain ageing, including smaller overall brain volume, poorer episodic memory, and a shrunken hippocampus, all risk factors for early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Researchers also found that higher intake of diet soda--at least one per day--was associated with smaller brain volume. In the second study, published in the journal Stroke, the researchers, using data only from the older Offspring cohort, looked specifically at whether participants had suffered a stroke or been diagnosed with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. They found that people who drank at least one diet soda per day were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Taiwanese consumer electronics company HTC has announced that its next flagship squeezable smartphone called 'HTC U' will be officially unveiled on May 16. The company has also tweeted on its official Twitter account that reads "Squeeze for the Brilliant U. 05.16.2017 http://www.htc.com/launch." "The device is rumoured fo sport 'Edge Sense' technology that lets users control many features with gestures that users will perform on the device's metal frame," GSMArena.com reported on Friday. 'HTC U' is expected to come with 5.5-inch 2560 x 1440 display, a Snapdragon 835 processor, 12MP rear and 16MP front-facing cameras and Android Nougat 7.1.