Knowledge Update

​New York, Oct 28 (IANS) Teachers underrating girls' ability to solve problems in Mathematics will likely contribute to the widening of gender gap in the subject, finds a study.

According to the study, published in the journal AERA Open, beginning in early elementary school boys outperform girls in math -- especially among the highest math achievers. 

This leads to teachers giving lower ratings to girls' math skills while both the genders have similar achievement and behaviour towards the subject. 

"Despite changes in the educational landscape, our findings suggest that the gender gaps observed among children who entered kindergarten in 2010 are strikingly similar to what we saw in children who entered kindergarten in 1998," said Joseph Robinson Cimpian, Associate Professor at the New York University.

Data showed that boys and girls began kindergarten with similar math proficiency, but disparities developed by Grade 3 with girls lagging behind. The gap was particularly large among the highest math achievers.

Research also revealed disparities in teacher perceptions of students, with teachers rating the math skill of girls lower than those of similarly behaving and performing boys.

Finally, the researchers examined gendered patterns of learning behaviours to try and explain why boys are more likely to score as high math achievers. 

They found that girls' more studious approaches to learning pay off by boosting them at the bottom of the achievement distribution, but do not help the persistent gap at the top as much.

The researchers explored the early development of gender gaps in math, including when disparities first appear, where in the distribution such gaps develop, and whether the gaps have changed over the years. 

In addition to math achievement, they examined two potential contributors to gender gaps: students' learning behaviours and teacher expectations.

Overall, the researchers found remarkable consistency across both cohorts. They observed that the gender gap at the top of the distribution (among the highest achievers in math) develops before students enter kindergarten, worsens through elementary school, and has not improved over the last decade.

London, Oct 28 (IANS) Researchers have created a three-dimensional mammary gland model that could pave the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of breast cancer.

"Much of how breast tissues respond to external stimuli such as hormones is, as yet, unknown. In order to fully tackle the mechanisms that lie behind breast cancer we first need to understand how healthy breast tissue develops," said one of the researchers Trevor Dale, Professor at Cardiff University School of Biosciences in Britain. 

"This model allows us to really study the basic biology of how the breast develops - how hormones work, what are the genetic influences," Thierry Jarde from Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, added.

The researchers succeeded in creating a three-dimensional mammary gland model that will pave the way for a better understanding of the mechanisms of breast cancer.

Using a cocktail of growth factors, the scientists were able to grow mouse mammary cells into three-dimensional mammary tissue.

Known as an 'organoid', the model, reported in the journal Nature Communications, mimics the structure and function of a real mammary gland. 

This would enable researchers to increase their understanding of how breast tissue develops, and provides an active model for the study of disease and drug screening.

As well as determining how to grow these life-like mammary glands, researchers also discovered how to maintain them in culture to allow ongoing experimentation.

​London, Oct 28 (IANS) Male teenagers with a higher resting heart rate and increased level of blood pressure may be at an high risk of developing psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia and other anxiety disorders, a study has found.

The findings showed that men in their late teenage with a resting heart rate above 82 beats per minute had 69 per cent increased risk for OCD, 21 per cent increased risk for schizophrenia and 18 per cent increased risk for anxiety disorders compared with those whose resting heart rates were below 62 beats per minute. 

Besides resting heart rate, changes in blood pressure, regulated by the autonomic nervous system, have been observed in some patients with psychiatric disorders but the results have been inconsistent.

Lower resting heart rate and blood pressure were also associated with substance use disorders and violent behaviour, said Antti Latvala from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

For the study the team used data of more than one million men in Sweden whose resting heart rate and blood pressure were measured at military conscription (average age 18) from 1969 to 2010 to examine whether differences in cardiac autonomic function were associated with psychiatric disorders.

The results were published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Washington, Oct 28 (IANS) It took more than a year but the last bits of science data from New Horizons' Pluto flyby -- stored on the spacecraft's digital recorders since July 2015 -- arrived safely on Earth this week, NASA said.

The final item - a segment of a Pluto-Charon observation sequence taken by the Ralph/LEISA imager - from New Horizons spacecraft travelled over 5.5 billion kilometers to reach earth, the US space agency said in statement on Thursday.

The downlink came via NASA's Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. It was the last of the 50-plus total gigabits of Pluto system data transmitted to Earth by New Horizons over the past 15 months.

"We have our pot of gold," said Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

"There's a great deal of work ahead for us to understand the 400-plus scientific observations that have all been sent to Earth. And that's exactly what we're going to do-after all, who knows when the next data from a spacecraft visiting Pluto will be sent?" Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, added. 

Because it had only one shot at its target, New Horizons was designed to gather as much data as it could, as quickly as it could - taking about 100 times more data on close approach to Pluto and its moons than it could have sent home before flying onward. 
The spacecraft was programmed to send select, high-priority datasets home in the days just before and after close approach, and began returning the vast amount of remaining stored data in September 2015.

Bowman said the team will conduct a final data-verification review before erasing the two onboard recorders, and clearing space for new data to be taken during the New Horizons Kuiper Belt Extended Mission (KEM).

KEM will include a series of distant Kuiper Belt object observations and a close encounter with a small Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on January 1, 2019, NASA said.

Canberra, Oct 28 (IANS) Life expectancy in Australia has hit a new high, with babies born in 2015 expected to live two years longer than those born in 2005, according to a report issued on Friday.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report showed that life expectancy had hit 84.5 years for females and 80.4 years for males, but demographics expert Peter McDonald of the University of Melbourne said that the statistics assume no improvements in healthcare and were therefore conservative estimates.

"They are not any individual's lifetime; they are just telling you the expectation of life you would get if life expectancy didn' t change... and for the last 200 years it has been going up," he said.

ABS Director of Demography Beidar Cho said the life expectancy for Australians in 2015 was comparable for other first-world nations.

"Babies born today have the highest estimated life expectancy ever recorded in Australia," Cho said in a statement.

"Male life expectancy at birth reached 80.4 years in 2015, increasing from 80.3 in 2014. Female life expectancy also increased to 84.5 years in 2015 from 84.4 in the previous year."

"For both men and women, Australia has a higher life expectancy than similar countries such as Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US."

Meanwhile in 2005, the life expectancy of Australians was at 83.3 years for women and 78.5 years for men.

"In 2013-2015, the male and female combined life expectancy at birth estimate for Australia was 82.4 years. This was 11.9 years higher than the world average of 70.5 years in 2010-2015," Cho added.

​Seoul, Oct 27 (IANS) LG Electronics Inc said on Thursday its third-quarter operating profit fell 3.7 percent from a year earlier, hit by sluggish sales in its money-losing smartphone business.

​Seoul, Oct 27 (IANS) South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics' net profits in the third quarter dropped by a massive 16.8 per cent, primarily due to the Galaxy Note 7 discontinuation, the company announced on Thursday as the shareholders approved the nomination of Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong to the electronics giant's board of

​Bangkok, Oct 27 (IANS) Thai firms are set to export insects for human consumption to the European Union (EU), authorities said on Thursday.

Thailand, among the world's largest consumers of insects, has some 20,000 insect farms, and products made from these invertebrates are also sold in processed forms such as

San Francisco, Oct 27 (IANS) IBM Business-owned The Weather Company announced on Thursday that it has launched weather bot for Facebook Messenger.

Leveraging "IBM Watson" technology, new bot for Messenger will learn user preferences to provide personalised weather conditions, forecasts, news content and more.

​New York, Oct 27 (IANS) Want to exercise more? Start competing with your peers on online health programmes, researchers say.

Their study found that social media competition can dramatically increase people's fitness.

"Framing the social interaction as a competition can create positive social norms for exercising," said lead author Jingwen Zhang, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis.

Social competition among people may go beyond exercise, to encouraging healthy behaviours such as medication compliance, diabetes control, smoking cessation, flu vaccinations, weight loss, and preventative screening, as well as pro-social behaviours like voting, recycling, and lowering power consumption.

On the other hand, friendly support make people less likely to go to the gym less than simply leaving them alone, the study said.

"Supportive groups can backfire because they draw attention to members who are less active, which can create a downward spiral of participation," added Damon Centola, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

In the competitive groups, people frame relationships in terms of goal-setting by the most active members.

"These relationships help to motivate exercise because they give people higher expectations for their own levels of performance," Centola said.

In a competitive setting, each person's activity raises the bar for everyone else. Social support is the opposite: a ratcheting-down can happen. If people stop exercising, it gives permission for others to stop, too, and the whole thing can unravel fairly quickly, the researchers explained.

For this study, the team recruited nearly 800 graduate and professional students from the University of Pennsylvania to sign up for an 11-week exercise programme all managed through a website the researchers built.

Competition motivated participants to exercise the most, with attendance rates 90 per cent higher in the competitive groups than in the control group.

The study was published in the journal Preventative Medicine Reports.