Knowledge Update

London, June 12 (IANS) An analysis of microscopic aquatic creatures called planktonic foraminifera, whose fossil remains now resemble miniaturised popcorn, has provided the first statistical evidence that the number of species that can exist on the Earth depends on how the environment changes.

"While the idea of infinite species on a finite Earth is clearly fanciful, the relevance of upper limits to diversity is still a fractious debate amongst evolutionary biologists, ecologists and palaeontologists," said study lead author Thomas Ezard from the University of Southampton.

"We are the first to show statistically that this upper limit is environmentally dependent. It's intuitive that a changing environment alters how many species we see -- the spatial gradient of more species in the tropics than at the poles is pervasive evidence for its large-scale impact," Ezard added.

While previous research typically focused individually on either biological, climate change or geological explanations, this new study -- published recently in the journal Ecology Letters -- examined the co-dependence of these factors on how species interact.

Looking at the fossil history of 210 evolutionary species of macroperforate planktonic foraminifera in the Cenozoic Era from 65 million years ago to the present, the researchers found that the number of species was almost certainly controlled by competition among themselves and probably kept within a finite upper limit.

"We used mathematical models to reveal how environmental changes influence both the rate of diversification among species and how many species can co-exist at once. Our results suggest that the world is full of species, but that the precise fullness varies through time as environmental changes alter the outcome of competition among species," Ezard said. ​

​New York, June 10 (IANS) While people might think that stopping to take photographs during their vacation could make it less pleasurable, a new study suggests that people who take photos of their experiences usually enjoy the events more than people who do not.

Conducted by a joint team of psychologists from the University of Southern California, Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, the research is the first extensive investigation examining how taking photos affects people's enjoyment of their experiences.

"We show that, relative to not taking photos, photography can heighten enjoyment of positive experiences by increasing engagement," wrote study co-authors Kristin Diehl, Gal Zauberman and Alixandra Barasch in an article published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The researchers outlined a series of nine experiments involving over 2,000 participants in the field and the lab designed to examine the effect of taking photographs of an experience on people's enjoyment of an activity.

In each experiment, individuals were asked to participate in an activity and were either instructed to take photos during the activity or not. 

Afterward, participants completed a survey designed to measure not only their enjoyment but their engagement in the experience. In almost every case, people who took photographs reported higher levels of enjoyment.

"One critical factor that has been shown to affect enjoyment is the extent to which people are engaged with the experience," the authors wrote. Photo-taking naturally draws people more into the experience, they found.

In one experiment, individuals were instructed to take a self-guided tour of a museum exhibit while wearing glasses that tracked their eye movements. 

The researchers found that those who took photos spent more time examining the artefacts in the exhibit than those who simply observed.

There were some conditions, though, where picture-taking did not have a positive effect, such as when the participant was already actively engaged in the experience. 

For example, in one experiment, individuals were asked either to participate in an arts and crafts project or to observe one. While taking photos increased the enjoyment of observers, it did not affect enjoyment of those actively taking part in the experience.

Another instance where photo-taking did not appear to increase enjoyment was when taking photos interfered with the experience itself, such as having to handle bulky and unwieldy camera equipment.​

​Beijing, June 11 (IANS) Beijing has recorded the highest ever number of requests for electric vehicle (EV) registration in a third round of applications that ended on June 8.

A total of 17,600 individual and company applicants submitted applications for EVs, about 5,000 more than the previous round, according to bjhjyd.gov.cn, which announces

​Toronto, June 11 (IANS) A Canadian researcher has created an app that uses a method that essentially "scrambles" one's thoughts and keeps the mind off issues that may prevent sleep.

"A racing mind, worries and uncontrollable thoughts are common bedtime complaints among poor sleepers," said Luc Beaudoin of Canada's Simon Fraser University, who has created the mySleepButton app that uses what Beaudoin calls a "cognitive shuffle," or Serial Diverse Imagining (SDI) method.

It was tested among 154 university students who complained of excessive cognitive pre-sleep arousal. The study employed SDI tasks, which occur at bedtime, and also used a standard treatment of structured problem solving (SP), which is done prior to bedtime and takes about 15 minutes. 

According to the study to be presented on June 14 at SLEEP 2016 -- a joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society, in Denver, Colorado -- SDI was found to be effective in reducing pre-sleep arousal, sleep effort and poor sleep quality with the added advantage of being done while in bed.

However SDI is not without its challenges. "The human brain is a 'meaning maker' or a sense-making machine," said Beaudoin. 

"It is actually very difficult for people to conjure up random images unaided. However according to my theory, while it may be difficult to engage in SDI, it is not only a consequence of sleep onset; SDI facilitates it," he added.

Beaudoin has also invented a "do-it-yourself" version of SDI. The technique provides a sequence of letters that cue a series of relatively unrelated words, which could potentially be customised to individuals.

"My hope is that popular culture will absorb the notion that counting sheep is not effective, whereas SDI is," Beaudoin said.​

​New York, June 9 (IANS) In a major shake-up, technology giants Google and Apple have reportedly been testing a new revenue sharing model for developers that would give them more money when users subscribe to a service via their apps.

​London, June 8 (IANS) An experiment by the European Space Agency (ESA) has passed a series of crucial tests with flying colours -- paving the way for gravitational wave observatory scheduled for launch in 2034.

A crucial component of the experiment is a two-kg cube made up of a high-purity gold and platinum alloy, which is currently sailing through space almost completely free of any force other than gravity. 

The project has proved in principle that a formation of such cubes flown in space will be able to function as a space-based gravitational wave observatory, which will be able to detect signals from supermassive black hole collisions and other violent events that would be impossible to see on Earth. 

Details of the experiment -- Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Pathfinder mission -- was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters. 

The free-falling test mass, as the gold and platinum cube is known, is nestled inside the shell-like LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, and has been orbiting a location in space called Lagrangian Point 1 (L1) since February 2016. 

At L1, the gravitational pull of the Earth and Sun are such that objects near the point execute orbits around L1 in much the same way that a satellite orbits the Earth.

The LISA Pathfinder mission is a crucial test of systems that will be incorporated in three spacecraft that will comprise the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) gravitational wave observatory scheduled to commence in 2034. 

Each LISA spacecraft will contain two test masses like the one currently in the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft. The LISA Pathfinder mission's extraordinary success is a crucial step on the way to launching the LISA observatory.​

​New York, June 10 (IANS) Clouds or haze enveloping the atmosphere of exoplanets, including "hot Jupiters", could be preventing a substantial amount of water from being detected by space telescopes, says a study led by an Indian-origin scientist.

Astronomers have found many hot Jupiters -- whose mass are similar to that of Jupiter but are much closer to their parent star than Jupiter is to the Sun -- with water in their atmosphere, but others appear to have none.

"The motivation of our study was to see what these planets would be like if they were grouped together, and to see whether they share any atmospheric properties," said lead author Aishwarya Iyer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Pasadena, California.

"Clouds or haze seem to be on almost every planet we studied," Iyer said. "You have to be careful to take clouds or haze into account, or else you could underestimate the amount of water in an exoplanet's atmosphere by a factor of two," he added.

The clouds themselves are likely not made of water, as the planets taken into account can reach a scorching 1,100 degrees Celsius, meaning any water they host would take the form of water vapour.

In the study, published recently in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists looked at a set of 19 hot Jupiters previously observed by Hubble. The telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 had detected water vapor in the atmospheres of 10 of these planets, and no water on the other nine. 

But that information was spread across more than a dozen studies. The methods of analysing and interpretation varied because the studies were conducted separately. There had not been one overarching analysis of all these planets.

Iyer's team combined the datasets for all 19 hot Jupiters to create an average overall light spectrum for the group of planets. They then compared these data to models of clear, cloud-free atmospheres and those with various cloud thicknesses.

The scientists determined that, for almost every planet they studied, haze or clouds were blocking half of the atmosphere, on average.

"In some of these planets, you can see water peeking its head up above the clouds or haze, and there could still be more water below," Iyer said.

Scientists do not yet know the nature of these clouds or hazes, including what they are they made of.​

​London, June 11 (IANS) The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a mysterious solitary dwarf galaxy - a type that is smaller and messier than its cosmic cousins, lacking the majestic swirl of a spiral or the coherence of an elliptical.

This galaxy is known as UGC 4879. There are about 2.3 million light years between UGC 4879 and its closest neighbor, Leo A, which is about the same distance as that between the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way, the European Space Agency said in a statement.

Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency.

This galaxyÂ’s isolation means that it has not interacted with any surrounding galaxies, making it an ideal laboratory for studying star formation uncomplicated by interactions with other galaxies, the statement added.

Studies of UGC 4879 have revealed a significant amount of star formation in the first four billion years after the Big Bang, followed by a strange nine-billion-year lull in star formation that ended one billion years ago by a more recent re-ignition. 

The reason for this behaviour, however, remains mysterious, and the solitary galaxy continues to provide ample study material for astronomers looking to understand the complex mysteries of star birth throughout the universe.​

​London, June 11 (IANS) Human and non-human primates can learn an astonishing variety of novel behaviours that could not have been directly anticipated by evolution. This ability to cope with new situations is due to the "pre-adapted" nature of the primate brain, says a study.

The brain anticipates all of the new situations that it may encounter in a lifetime by creating a special kind of neural network, the study said.

The findings appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

For the study, researchers from French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) investigated one of the most noteworthy properties of primate behavior, its diversity and adaptability. 

This study showed that our seemingly miraculous pre-adaptation comes from connections between neurons that form recurrent loops where inputs can rebound and mix in the network, like waves in a pond, thus called "reservoir" computing. 

This mix of the inputs allows a potentially universal representation of combinations of the inputs that can then be used to learn the right behaviour for a new situation.

The authors demonstrated this by training a reservoir network to perform a novel problem-solving task. 

They then compared the activity of neurons in the model with activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex of a primate that was trained to perform the same task.

Remarkably, there were striking similarities in the activation of neurons in both the reservoir model and the primate.

The findings showed that by allowing essentially unlimited combinations of internal representations in the network of the brain, one of them is always on hand for the given situation.​

​London, June 11 (IANS) Scientists have developed a new tool to determine the inherent biological differences between individuals -- paving the way for personalised medicine tailored to the specific profile of individual patients.

Johan Auwerx of Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Ruedi Aebersold of ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, set out to overcome one of the biggest obstacles in successfully treating metabolic disorders such as diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, which depends on the variation in the way patients respond to medication.

Working with mouse models, the researchers successfully connected the variation between individuals' genomes to the variation between their proteomes -- their full set of proteins. In this way, they took a giant leap in profiling the biology of a particular individual.

"There is a black box between a patient's genome and their disease," said Auwerx, whose lab handled the genome side of the study published recently in the journal Science.

"What we have done here is find a way to fill the black box by obtaining information on the patient's proteome," he added.

The study enabled the researchers to better understand the role several proteins play when it comes to metabolising fat and producing energy from it.

"Like the mouse strains in this study, each patient with a disease is genetically different," said Aebersold. 

"The approach we used in the mouse cohort can now be applied one-for-one in research on human diseases, and particularly for personalised medicine," he added.

The researchers now aim to be able to customise medical intervention for human patients based on their individual biological makeup.​