Knowledge Update

London, April 29 (IANS) Researchers have discovered that vitamin nicotinamide riboside, which is a source of vitamn B3, has the potential to revitalise certain organs that lose the regenerative capacity with age.

By administering nicotinamide riboside (NR) to elderly mice, the researchers restored their organs' ability to regenerate and prolonged their lives. 

The findings, published in the journal Science, have implications for treating a number of degenerative diseases.

"This work could have very important implications in the field of regenerative medicine," said one of the researchers, Johan Auwerx from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). 

"We are not talking about introducing foreign substances into the body but rather restoring the body's ability to repair itself with a product that can be taken with food," Auwerx explained.

The researchers believe this work on the ageing process also has potential for treating diseases that can affect -- and be fatal -- in young people, like muscular dystrophy.Under normal conditions, cetain stem cells, reacting to signals sent by the body, regenerate damaged organs by producing new specific cells, at least in young bodies. "We demonstrated that fatigue in stem cells was one of the main causes of poor regeneration or even degeneration in certain tissues or organs," Hongbo Zhang from EPFL noted.This is why the researchers wanted to "revitalise" stem cells in the muscles of elderly mice.

"We gave nicotinamide riboside to two-year-old mice, which is an advanced age for them," Hongbo Zhang said.

"And our results are extremely promising: muscular regeneration is much better in mice that received NR, and they lived longer than the mice that didn't get it," Hongbo Zhang pointed out.​

London, April 29 (IANS) Fancy eating chocolates every day? You may soon have the recommendation of doctors to indulge a little as researchers have found that a dark chocolate bar daily could reduces the risk of developing diabetes and heart diseases.

For the study, the researchers analysed data of 1,153 people aged 18-69 years old who were part of the Observation of Cardiovascular Risk in Luxembourg study.

It was found that those who ate 100 g of chocolate a day -- equivalent to a bar -- had reduced insulin resistance and improved liver enzymes. 

Insulin sensitivity is a well-established risk factor to cardiovascular disease.

The findings were published in the British Journal of Nutrition.

The analysis took into account lifestyle and dietary factors, including the simultaneous consumption of tea and coffee. 

This is because both drinks can be high in polyphenol, the substance which may provide chocolate with its beneficial cardiometabolic effects.

"Given the growing body of evidence, including our own study, cocoa-based products may represent an additional dietary recommendation to improve cardio-metabolic health; however, observational results need to be supported by robust trial evidence," said Saverio Stranges, visiting academic at the University of Warwick Medical School in England.

"Potential applications of this knowledge include recommendations by healthcare professionals to encourage individuals to consume a wide range of phytochemical-rich foods, which can include dark chocolate in moderate amounts," Stranges said.

However, it is important to differentiate between the natural product cocoa and the processed product chocolate, which is an energy-dense food. 

Therefore, physical activity, diet and other lifestyle factors must be carefully balanced to avoid detrimental weight gain over time, the researchers warned.​

​London, April 29 (IANS) Recent discoveries of exoplanets have rekindled hope for other advanced technological civilisations that may have ever existed near us, researchers have found.

A new paper shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe's first technological or advanced civilisation.

“We have known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We didn't know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbour life or how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings,” explained Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at University of Rochester.

“Thanks to NASA's Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in "habitable zones," where temperatures could support life as we know it. So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained,” he added.

The big question - how long civilisations might survive - is still unknown. 

“The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly 10,000 years doesn't really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer," Frand noted in a paper to be published in Astrobiology.

Using a novel approach, Frank and Woodruff Sullivan from University of Washington calculate how unlikely advanced life must be if there has never been another example among the universe's ten billion trillion stars, or even among our own Milky Way galaxy's hundred billion.

The result? By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, the team found that human civilisation is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilisation developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

Another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it are better than one chance in 60 billion.

The universe is more than 13 billion years old.

That means that even if there have been a thousand civilisations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around -- roughly 10,000 years -- then all of them are likely already extinct. 

“And others won't evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another "contemporary" active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime,” the author noted.​

​London, April 29 (IANS) If you get cravings for chips, sweets and fast-food whenever you are bored, do not blame the situation alone. According to British researchers, people eat more to boost low levels of brain chemical dopamine as they cannot alleviate the boredom in any other way.

The results showed that people were more likely to express a preference for unhealthy foods like crisps, sweets and fast food after completing the boring task.

"This strengthens the theory that boredom is related to low levels of the stimulating brain chemical dopamine and people try to boost this by eating fat and sugar if they cannot alleviate their boredom in some other way," said Dr Sandi Mann from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).

Mann and colleagues Faye Ibbitson and Ben Edwards conducted two studies of boredom and food choices.

In the first study, the team asked 52 participants to complete a questionnaire on their food preferences before and after completing the boredom-inducing task of repeatedly copying the same group of letters.

In the second study, they asked 45 participants to watch either a boring or a funny video, during which a range of healthy and unhealthy snacks were available.

They found that the participants who had watched the boring video ate significantly more unhealthy food.

"Health education campaigns can encourage us to make healthier food choices need to take boredom, including boredom in the workplace, into account. Bored people do not eat nuts," Mann stated.

The study was scheduled to be presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society this week.​

London, April 29 (IANS) When medication is used to shut off the oxygen supply to tumours, the cells adapt their metabolism in the medium term -- by switching over to producing energy without oxygen, new research has found.

Medicines can initially slow or even stop tumour growth. However, as the treatment goes on, the tumours begin to develop resistance to these therapies -- and they start to grow again.

The new findings, reported in the journal Cell Reports, could be used for treatments that can inhibit tumour growth in the long term.

Today, it is common knowledge that the disease develops in a series of stages. One of these stages, tumor angiogenesis, involves the formation of new blood vessels to supply oxygen and nutrients to the growing tumour.

Now, the research team has shown that, although the latest medications are effective at preventing blood vessel formation, the tumours can continue growing even without a supply of new blood vessels.

Analysis of this finding from a biochemical and molecular genetic perspective revealed that the tumour cells convert to a different type of metabolism. They no longer produce energy using oxygen delivered via the blood vessels -- but instead switch over to glycolysis, a form of anaerobic energy production. 

The lactic acid formed as a result is delivered to cells that are still receiving sufficient oxygen and that can use the lactic acid, together with the oxygen, to produce energy.

The research group also showed that this specific mode of metabolism -- and therefore the tumour's growth -- can be interrupted, namely by inhibiting anaerobic energy production or transport of the lactic acid. 

"Our findings open up new approaches for the optimisation of anti-angiogenic therapies and for inhibiting tumor growth effectively in the long term," said lead researcher Gerhard Christofori, professor at University of Basel in Switzerland.​

New York, April 29 (IANS) Retweeting or sharing information on the micro-blogging site can actually make things worse for you as it creates a “cognitive overload” that interferes with learning and retaining what you've just seen, researchers report.

According to the team from Cornell University in the US, that “overload” can spill over and diminish performance in the real world."Most people don't post original ideas any more. You just share what you read with your friends," said Qi Wang, professor of human development at Cornell.“But they don't realise that sharing has a downside. It may interfere with other things we do,” he warned.

Wang and colleagues in China conducted experiments showing that "retweeting" interfered with learning and memory, both online and off.The experiments were conducted at Beijing University, with a group of Chinese college students as subjects.At computers in a laboratory setting, two groups were presented with a series of messages from Weibo - the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

After reading each message, members of one group had options either to repost or go on to the next message. The other group was given only the "next" option.After finishing a series of messages, the students were given an online test on the content of those messages.Those in the repost group offered almost twice as many wrong answers and often demonstrated poor comprehension.What they did remember they often remembered poorly, Wang reported. "For things that they reposted, they remembered especially worse," she added.

The researchers found that reposters were suffering from "cognitive overload."“When there is a choice to share or not share, the decision itself consumes cognitive resources,” Wang explained.After viewing a series of Weibo messages, the students were given an unrelated paper test on their comprehension of a “New Scientist” article.

Again, participants in the no-feedback group outperformed the reposters. The results confirmed a higher cognitive drain for the repost group."The sharing leads to cognitive overload, and that interferes with the subsequent task," Wang said.“In real life when students are surfing online and exchanging information and right after that they go to take a test, they may perform worse," she suggested in a paper described in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.The researchers suggest that web interfaces should be designed to promote rather than interfere with cognitive processing."Online design should be simple and task-relevant," Wang noted.​

​London, April 29 (IANS) The very oldest pieces of rock on Earth -- zircon crystals -- are likely to have formed in the craters left by violent asteroid impacts that peppered our nascent planet rather than via plate tectonics as previously believed, researchers report.

The tiny crystals probably formed in huge impact craters not long after Earth formed, some four billion years ago.

Rocks that formed over the course of Earth's history allow geologists to infer things such as when water first appeared on the planet, how our climate has varied, and even where life came from.

Ten years ago, a team of researchers in the US argued that the ancient zircon crystals probably formed when tectonic plates moving around on the Earth's surface collided with each other in a similar fashion to the disruption taking place in the Andes Mountains today.

However, current evidence suggests that plate tectonics -- as we know it today -- was not occurring on the early Earth.

So, the question remained: Where did the crystals come from?

Recently, geologists suggested these grains may have formed in huge impact craters produced as chunks of rock from space, up to several km in diameter, slammed into a young Earth.

To test this idea, researchers from Trinity College Dublin decided to study a much younger impact crater to see if zircon crystals similar to the very old ones could possibly have formed in these violent settings.

With the support of the Irish Reseach Council (IRC) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the team collected thousands of zircons from the Sudbury impact crater in Ontario, Canada.

After analysing these crystals at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, they discovered that the crystal compositions were indistinguishable from the ancient set.

“What we found was quite surprising. Many people thought the very ancient zircon crystals couldn't have formed in impact craters, but we now know they could have,” said Gavin Kenny from Trinity's school of natural sciences in a paper published in the journal Geology.

“There's a lot we still don't fully understand about these little guys but it looks like we may now be able to form a more coherent story of Earth's early years,” he added.

Kenny recently presented the findings at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, Texas.​

​London, April 29 (IANS) Serious gamers generally avoid touchscreens because these devices lack physical buttons due to which the key press timing in touchscreen input is unpredictable, a team of Finnish researchers has found.

When timing is made more predictable, performance improves, said the group from Aalto University.

"The common view was that the lack of physical buttons is critical but you also have tactile feedback from the surface of a touchscreen. Another false belief was that touchscreens are slower but that is not the case anymore," said Byungjoo Lee, one of the researchers. 

The team conducted experiments where participants were asked to tap a display when a target would appear. 

The data showed large differences between physical keys and touchscreens in how reliably users could time their presses.

The researchers proposed a new theory explaining that there are three sources of error that make timing very hard with touchscreens.

First, people are not able to keep the finger at a constant distance above the surface. The finger is always moving, and even the slightest movement hampers our ability to time precisely. 

By contrast, when using physical keys, the finger rests on the key, eliminating this source of error.

"Second, when the finger touches the surface, it is hard for the neural system to predict when the input event has been registered. Typically software detects the touch when the finger first touches the display. But users cannot sense this event so it is not predictable for them," the authors explained.

Third, when the event has been registered on the touchscreen, it still needs to be processed in the application and in some cases the time that it takes is longer than in other ones, creating another source of latency.

The new theory implies that users' performance can be improved by making touch events more predictable. 

The paper is scheduled to be presented at the "Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2016" (CHI16 conference) in San Jose, California, in May.​

Washington, April 29 (IANS) Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other optical telescopes, astronomers have developed a powerful new method for investigating dark energy - the mysterious energy that is currently driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The technique takes advantage of the observation that the outer reaches of galaxy clusters, the largest structures in the universe held together by gravity, show similarity in their X-ray emission profiles and sizes.

More massive clusters are simply scaled up versions of less massive ones.

“In this sense, galaxy clusters are like 'Russian dolls', with smaller ones having a similar shape to the larger ones,” said Andrea Morandi from University of Alabama in Huntsville.

“Knowing this lets us compare them and accurately determine their distances across billions of light years,” he added.

By using these galaxy clusters as distance markers, astronomers can measure how quickly the universe was expanding at different times since the Big Bang.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the rate of expansion is determined by the properties of dark energy plus the amount of matter in the Universe, where the latter is mostly made up of unseen material called dark matter.

The latest results confirm earlier studies that the properties of dark energy have not changed over billions of years.

They also support the idea that dark energy is best explained by the “cosmological constant,” which Einstein first proposed and is equivalent to the energy of empty space.

“Although we’ve looked hard at other explanations, it still appears that dark energy behaves just like Einstein's cosmological constant,” added study co-author Ming Sun.

To reach this conclusion, the researchers studied 320 galaxy clusters with distances from Earth that ranged from about 760 million light years to about 8.7 billion light years.

“We think this new technique has the ability to provide a big leap forward in our understanding of dark energy,” the authors noted in a paper appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.​

​Washington, April 28 (IANS) The US economy grew at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, pulled back by slowing consumption, the commerce department said on Thursday.