Knowledge Update

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Researchers have found why at around the age of four children suddenly do what three-year-olds are unable to do -- put themselves in someone else's shoes.

This enormous developmental step occurs as a critical fibre connection in the brain matures, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

For the study, the research team from Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig, Germany and Leiden University in the Netherlands analysed MRI data and behavioural data of 43 normally developing 3- and 4-year-old children.

"Our findings show that the emergence of mental state representation is related to the maturation of core belief processing regions and their connection to the prefrontal cortex," said the researchers.

The study showed that maturation of fibres of a brain structure called the arcuate fascicle between the ages of three and four years establishes a connection between two critical brain regions.

One region is at the back of the temporal lobe that supports adult thinking about others and their thoughts, and the other is in the frontal lobe that is involved in keeping things at different levels of abstraction and, therefore, helps us to understand what the real world is and what the thoughts of others are. 

Only when these two brain regions are connected through the arcuate fascicle can children start to understand what other people think, the study said.

Interestingly, this new connection in the brain supports this ability independently of other cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, language ability or impulse control, according to the researcher.

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Parents who regularly play "Pokemon GO" with their children report a number of side benefits including increased exercise, more time spent outdoors and opportunities for family bonding, says a study.

Pokemon GO is a location-based augmented reality game in which players capture fictional creatures from the Japanese Pokemon franchise on smartphones and other mobile devices by "finding" them in real-world locations.

"Location-based augmented reality games are pretty different than sitting in front of a TV or playing a typical video game, so we were interested in the way kids and their parents were sharing those experiences together," said lead author Kiley Sobel from University of Washington.

"People still don't really know how to build tech that works well for families, so when this game came out of the blue and really caught on, we wanted to look at what its ingredients for success were," Sobel said.

The results, taken from a qualitative survey of 67 parents and interviews with 20 additional parents playing "Pokémon GO" with their families in the US, are detailed in a paper to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI 2017 conference to be held at Denver, Colorado in May.

Some parents said the interactive and mobile nature of the game made them feel better about engaging in that type of gameplay, as opposed to more sedentary forms of "screen time", according to the study.

The study did not include perspectives of parents who do not allow their children to play Pokemon GO. 

Many parents -- particularly moms of boys, fathers of girls and parents of teenaged children -- reported spending more quality time with their children as a result of playing "Pokémon GO" together and talking more than usual, both about the game itself and about other things in their lives, the researchers said.

Parents also appreciated how the game motivated both them and their children to go outside and exercise in ways that were convenient and fit into their lives, as their children displayed newfound enthusiasm for walking the dog or walking rather than driving to dinner or playgrounds. 

For some participants, these "Poké-walks" led to walking thousands more steps per day, the study said.

​Beijing, March 28 (IANS) The cloud-computing arm of Amazon on Tuesday launched its first joint innovation service centre in China's Qingdao.

The Qingdao-Amazon Web Services (AWS) centre aims to provide cloud-computing services -- including web services, new technologies such as cloud-computing and big data,

​Beijing, March 28 (IANS) Beijing plans to meet the national air quality standard by 2030, according to a blueprint for the city's overall planning 2016-2030.

The blueprint was submitted to the standing committee of the municipal People's Congress for deliberation on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

​In today's era of stiff competition, when companies are looking for marketing opportunities everywhere, and trying to market their products even in started markets through innovative ideas, rural market presents a huge opportunity. Rural market is large both in terms of number of potential buyers and demand for products and services. Rural markets are growing very rapidly in emerging econoimies.

New York, March 27 (IANS) Apple has won a trial against a Chinese phone maker in Beijing as a court overturned a ruling against Apple Inc. over iPhone patents, a media report said on Monday.

​New York, March 25 (IANS) A US-based company has designed a portable device that lets you turn any smartphone into a 3D printer using the light from the touchscreen to process your plastic creations, a media report said.

Shanghai, March 27 (IANS) A China-made wearable robot, which can help disabled people walk, is expected to enter the market in one to two years, the developer has said. The Fourier X1, developed by Chinese technology start-up Fourier Intelligence, was unveiled in Shanghai earlier this month, Xinhua news agency reported. Gu Jie, CEO of Fourier, said the Fourier X1 weighed 20 kg and applied industrial design into the exoskeleton. It can assist with walking for people who have had a stroke or spinal cord injuries. He said the company aimed to make the robot more affordable than foreign models such as Israel-made ReWalk and Japanese-made Cyberdyne currently on the market. Prices of the Fourier X1 robots are expected to be a third cheaper than similar foreign models, which are sold between 600,000 yuan ($87,000) and 1 million yuan ($1,45000) each. Gu said the company was working to test and improve the robot's various functions such as sitting, standing, walking and climbing stairs. The Fourier X1 has four motors, two for the hips and two for the knees, as well as four batteries inside that enable it to work for seven hours. China has 80 million disabled people, many of them unable to walk. The global market for walk-assisting exoskeleton robots is estimated to exceed $1.8 billion by 2020.

Brisbane, March 27 (IANS) A team of palaeontologists has identified 150 tracks from 21 dinosaur species in Australia, the University of Queensland announced on Monday.

The discovery includes five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at least six types of tracks from long-necked herbivorous sauropods, four types of tracks from two-legged herbivorous ornithopods, and six types of tracks from armoured dinosaurs, the university said in a press release.

The diversity of the tracks is unparalleled, said Australian paleontologist Steve Salisbury, lead author of the study that was published in the 2016 Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Efe news reported.

"Among the tracks is the only confirmed evidence for stegosaurus in Australia. There are also some of the largest dinosaur tracks ever recorded. Some of the sauropod tracks are around 1.7 metres long," he said in the statement.

Salisbury called the discovery "extremely significant" as it forms the primary record of non-avian dinosaurs in the western half of the continent and provides the only glimpse of Australia's dinosaur fauna during the first half of the Early Cretaceous Period.

The footprints were found in a rocky area, 127 to 140 million years old, in Walmadany, a region in western Australia containing thousands of dinosaur tracks, and which was listed as a National Heritage in 2011.

The newly-identified 150 tracks are older than most dinosaur fossils unearthed in the eastern part of Australia and which are thought to be between 90 and 115 million years old, added the release.

Members of the aboriginal group Goolarabooloo, traditional inhabitants of Walmadany, approached Salisbury and his team to research the tracks in the region after authorities chose the area to build a liquid natural gas processing plant.

These dinosaur tracks also form part of the Goolarabooloo's songs about Marella, also known as Emu Man, a creator being whose ancient footprints they believe appear and disappear along the coastline.

Washington, March 27 (IANS) NASA has partnered with real-time visualisation platform Epic Games' Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space Station (ISS) that can provide an 'out of this world' environment for its astronauts and engineers, a media report said on Monday.

Unreal Engine's applications are designed to allow people to work in environments that are practically impossible to access for training and development.

The mixed reality ISS app sweeps astronauts-in-training off their feet with an "active response gravity offload system" techcruch.com reported. 

It works in conjunction with a robotic crane that makes the trainee feel like he or she would in micro-, lunar- or Martian gravity. 

Besides using the mixed reality system to train astronauts and engineers for life and work in orbit, NASA will use it to design new habitats, the techcruch.com report said.

Previously, astronaut training meant dives in a "neutral buoyancy lab," a giant pool that holds 6.2 million gallons of water and spending time at NASA's "space vehicle mock-up facility," a life-sized model of the space shuttle orbiter and parts of the ISS. 

These physical facilities have limited capacity, thus adding a mixed reality mock-up, alongside the physical facility, could allow astronauts-in-training a lot more time to hone their skills in a convincing simulator, the report said.