Knowledge Update

​Toronto, Feb 10 (IANS) Researchers have found a way to create three dimensional (3-D) heart tissue that beats in synchronised harmony which could lead to better understanding of cardiac health and improved treatments.

"This breakthrough will allow better and earlier drug testing, and potentially eliminate harmful or toxic medications sooner," said one of the researchers Muhammad Yousaf, Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Until now, most 2-D and 3-D in-vitro tissue did not beat in harmony and required scaffolding for the cells to hold onto and grow, causing limitations. 

In this research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, Yousaf and his team made a scaffold free beating tissue out of three cell types found in the heart -- contractile cardiac muscle cells, connective tissue cells and vascular cells.

The researchers believe this is the first 3-D in vitro cardiac tissue with three cell types that can beat together as one entity rather than at different intervals.

In addition, the substance used to stick cells together (ViaGlue) could provide researchers with tools to create and test 3D in vitro cardiac tissue in their own laboratories to study heart disease and issues with transplantation. 

Cardiovascular associated diseases are the leading cause of death globally.

"Making in vitro 3-D cardiac tissue has long presented a challenge to scientists because of the high density of cells and muscularity of the heart," Dmitry Rogozhnikov, a chemistry PhD student at York University. 

"For 2-D or 3-D cardiac tissue to be functional it needs the same high cellular density and the cells must be in contact to facilitate synchronised beating," Rogozhnikov explained.

Although the 3-D cardiac tissue was created at a millimetre scale, larger versions could be made, said Yousaf, who has created a start-up company OrganoLinX to commercialise the ViaGlue reagent and to provide custom 3D tissues on demand.

Sydney, Feb 10 (IANS) A new ultra-low dose four-in-one pill that is 100 per cent effective in lowering high blood pressure has been developed by Australian researchers.

Hypertension or high blood pressure -- which affects around 1.1 billion people worldwide -- is one of the major risk factors for heart attack, stroke, dementia and kidney disease.

Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia, prescribed a quadpill -- a single capsule containing four of the most commonly used blood pressure-lowering drugs each at a quarter dose (irbesartan 37·5 mg, amlodipine 1·25 mg, hydrochlorothiazide 6·25 mg, and atenolol 12·5 mg) -- or a placebo to 18 patients in Sydney over four weeks. 

The results, published in The Lancet medical journal, revealed that 100 per cent of patients on trial saw their blood levels dropping below 140 over 90, whereas just 33 per cent of patients on the placebo could achieve this rate.

"Most people receive one medicine at a normal dose but that only controls blood pressure about half the time. In this small trial, blood pressure control was achieved for everyone," said Clara Chow, Professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. 

Patients who consume the commonly available hypertension-lowering drugs experience side-effects which can vary from swollen ankles to kidney abnormalities depending on the type of class of the drug.

However, the new pill has no such side-effects, the researchers said.

"We know that high blood pressure is a precursor to stroke, diabetes and heart attack. The need for even lower blood pressure levels has been widely accepted in the last few years. So this could be an incredibly important step in helping to reduce the burden of disease globally," Chow added.

New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) WhatsApp on Friday rolled out a two-step verification process for all devices to enhance the security of users' accounts.

WhatsApp has been working on two-step verification for the past several months.

​New York, Feb 10 (IANS) Twitter has grown by two million monthly active users in the fourth quarter, finishing the year with 319 million worldwide, media reports said.

According to a report in Recode on Thursday, the spectacle of the US presidential election was Twitter's best material in years, and made the service a crucial source for direct

Mexico City, Feb 10 (IANS) Mexico's central bank raised the benchmark interest rate to 6.25 per cent, the highest since April 2009, to curb inflation, the media reported.

Inflation began to rise in October to close 2016 at 3.36 per cent, and rose to 4.72 per cent in January, Xinhua news agency reported.

New York, Feb 10 (IANS) Scientists using NASA's Hubble space telescope have discovered a white dwarf star whose atmosphere is rich in materials that are the basic building blocks for life -- carbon, nitrogen, as well as oxygen and hydrogen, the components of water.

The white dwarf is approximately 200 light years from the Earth and is located in the constellation Bootes, said the study.

White dwarf stars are dense, burned-out remnants of normal stars.

The study presents evidence that the planetary system associated with the white dwarf contains materials that are the basic building blocks for life, said study co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, Professor at University of California, Los Angeles. 

And although the study focused on this particular star -- known as WD 1425+540 -- the fact that its planetary system shares characteristics with our solar system strongly suggests that other planetary systems would also.

"The findings indicate that some of life's important preconditions are common in the universe," Zuckerman said.

Many scientists believe the Earth was dry when it first formed, and that the building blocks for life on our planet -- carbon, nitrogen and water -- appeared only later as a result of collisions with other objects in our solar system that had those elements.

The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, described how the white dwarf came to obtain carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. 

The scientists reported that a minor planet in the planetary system was orbiting around the white dwarf, and its trajectory was somehow altered, perhaps by the gravitational pull of a planet in the same system. 

That change caused the minor planet to travel very close to the white dwarf, where the star's strong gravitational field ripped the minor planet apart into gas and dust. 

Those remnants went into orbit around the white dwarf -- much like the rings around Saturn, Zuckerman said -- before eventually spiraling onto the star itself, bringing with them the building blocks for life.

The researchers think these events occurred relatively recently, perhaps in the past 100,000 years or so.

This was the first time that nitrogen was detected in the planetary debris that falls onto a white dwarf, said Siyi Xu of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

"Nitrogen is a very important element for life as we know it," Xu, who led the team that made the discovery, explained. 

"This particular object is quite rich in nitrogen, more so than any object observed in our solar system," Xu said.

​New York, Feb 9 (IANS) Social media giant Facebook has announced an update to Safety Check, called Community Help, that lets people find and give help such as food, shelter and transportation after a crisis.

​New York, Feb 9 (IANS) Facebook has rolled out a new feature that shows full weather forecast on its mobile app and desktop site.

According to a report in TechCrunch, within the new Weather section, users can view a full forecast for a week ahead, powered by data from Weather.com.

Washington, Feb 9 (IANS) International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde said that greater data transparency could help increase the resiliency of the economy.

"Greater data transparency -- promoted through the IMF data standard initiatives-leads to a 15 percent reduction in the spreads on emerging market sovereign bonds," Lagarde