Knowledge Update

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Traditional clinical hearing tests often fail to detect patients with a common form of inner ear damage that might otherwise be detected by more challenging behavioural tests, new research has found.

Such tests may not be able to diagnose those facing problems in certain situations, like hearing speech in a noisy room, said the study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

This type of "hidden hearing loss" presents itself as essentially normal hearing in the clinic, where audiograms -- the gold-standard for measuring hearing thresholds -- are typically conducted in a quiet room.

The reason some forms of hearing loss may go unrecognised in the clinic is that hearing involves a complex partnership between the ear and the brain. 

It turns out that the central auditory system can compensate for significant damage to the inner ear by turning up its volume control, partially overcoming the deficiency, said the study's lead author Richard Salvi, Director, Centre for Hearing and Deafness at University at Buffalo, New York.

"You can have tremendous damage to inner hair cells in the ear that transmit information to the brain and still have a normal audiogram," he said. 

"But people with this type of damage have difficulty hearing in certain situations, like hearing speech in a noisy room. Their thresholds appear normal. So they're sent home," Salvi said.

Ear damage reduces the signal that goes the brain. That results in trouble hearing, but that's not what's happening here, because the brain "has a central gain control, like a radio, the listener can turn up the volume control to better hear a distant station", Salvi added.

​New York, April 20 (IANS) Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool and Facebook is leveraging it to build amazing visual experiences for people, including an AI-infused camera across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

​New York, April 20 (IANS) Giving a glimpse of what is going on at its secret "Building 8" research group, Facebook has said it is working on a way to let people type with their brains -- at speeds faster than physical typing -- via a brain-computer interface.

New York, April 20 (IANS) With an aim to help put an end to mining on earth, Apple has said it is planning to use 100 per cent recycled material to manufacture its products.

Citing concern for the planet's future, the tech titan made this announcement on Wednesday, just ahead of the annual Earth Day celebration in its "2017 Environment

​Canberra, April 20 (IANS) Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced major changes to citizenship laws, making it tougher for foreign nationals to become Australian citizens.

​Tokyo, April 20 (IANS) Japan achieved a trade surplus of $5.638 billion in March, its second consecutive month of surplus since the beginning of the year, the government reported on Thursday.

​New York, April 20 (IANS) Facebook aims to develop technology that will help everyone build a global community, the social media giant's Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said at the annual F8 developers conference at San Jose.

Colombo, April 20 (IANS) Sri Lanka will upgrade the standards of its Adventure Tourism in accordance with international levels, a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office said here on Thursday.

​Geneva, April 20 (IANS) Remarkable achievements have been made in tackling neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) since 2007 with one billion people receiving treatment in 2015 alone, World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday in a report.

"WHO has observed record-breaking progress towards bringing ancient scourges like sleeping sickness and elephantiasis to their knees," Xinhua news agency quoted WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, as saying.

The WHO report, Integrating Neglected Tropical Diseases in Global Health and Development, demonstrates how strong political support, generous donations of medicines, improvements in living conditions, have led to sustained expansion of disease control programmes in countries where these diseases are most prevalent.

The report documented one billion people treated for at least one neglected tropical disease in 2015 alone as one of key achievements against NTDs.

However, the report highlighted the need to further scale up action in other areas.

"Further gains in the fight against neglected tropical diseases will depend on wider progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals," said Dirk Engels, Director of the Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases.

WHO estimated that 2.4 billion people still lack basic sanitation facilities such as toilets and latrines, while more than 660 million continue to drink water from "unimproved" sources, such as surface water.

​London, April 20 (IANS) An international team of astronomers has discovered a so-called "super-Earth" that could contain liquid water, a situation that would make it a very good candidate for harbouring life.

Super-Earth is a rocky, temperate planet orbiting a red dwarf star, Efe news agency reported.

In an article published on Wednesday in Nature magazine, the scientists say that the distant planet, dubbed LHS 1140b, is orbiting an M class red dwarf star a little smaller and dimmer than the Sun but the most common type of star in our galaxy.

The super-Earth and its parent star are located in the constellation Cetus, the Whale, 39 light years from the Sun, thus -- relatively speaking -- putting it in our galactic "neighbourhood," according to Felipe Murgas, the coauthor of the study and a researcher with Spain's Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics.

The study's main author, Jason Dittmann, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, said that this is the "most interesting" exoplanet that he's seen in the last decade.

The new planet was discovered thanks to the MEarth-South telescope network devoted exclusively to seeking out exo-planets.

The MEarth-South instruments enabled scientists to measure the planet's diameter and, using the HARPS spectrograph at the LaSilla ESO Observatory in Chile, they also were able to measure its mass, density and orbital period.

According to the measurements, LHS 1140b has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth and a mass 6.6 times that of our own planet.

But more important than that are the climatological conditions, and its orbital distance from its star puts LHS 1140b in the "habitable zone" - thus meaning that the planet's surface temperature allows water to exist in all three of its states: liquid, solid and as a gas.

Whether there is actually water on the planet or not depends on the composition of its atmosphere and other factors, including the presence of a magnetic field, such as the one Earth has, but the most important thing is for the planet to "fulfil the requirements to have water," which means that it must be in its star's habitable zone, Murgas said.

Regarding the age of the planet, the authors of the study said that it probably formed in a manner similar to Earth and its star is probably 5 billion years old, about the same age as the Sun, although the age of M-class stars is hard to determine for a variety of factors, the Spanish researcher added.

In the coming decades, LHS 1140b is sure to be investigated much more intensively, an ongoing project for the powerful next-generation telescopes, including the James Webb instrument and the E-ELT device, which will be installed in Chile and -- within a few years -- will be able to study the system and try to detect its atmosphere, along with other characteristics.