Knowledge Update

​New York, April 21 (IANS) In one of the largest studies on the genes involved in human behaviour, a team of over 190 researchers from 140 institutions in 17 countries has found genetic variants associated with our feelings of well-being, depression and neuroticism.

The researchers, however, advise caution when interpreting the results as genetic variants do not determine whether someone develops depressive symptoms, neuroticism or has a poor sense of wellbeing.

“In this paper, we applied advanced statistical analyses and meta-analysed or combined, results across a large number of studies which is the most powerful way to conduct this type of genetics research," said Dr Alexis Frazier-Wood, assistant professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital.

“We found three genetic variants associated with subjective well-being -- how happy a person thinks or feels about his or her life. We also found two genes harboring variants associated with depressive symptoms and 11 genes where variation was associated with neuroticism,” explained Dr Frazier-Wood.

How people think and feel about their lives depends on multiple factors, including genes.

“Genetics is only one factor that influences these psychological traits. The environment is at least as important, and it interacts with the genetic effects,” added Dr Daniel Benjamin, associate professor at University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author.

The information in this report allows researchers to look at possible ways to study these conditions.

“We can start studying the functions of these genes to begin to understand why biologically some people are more predisposed to feel this way than others," said Frazier-Wood in a paper published in the journal Nature Genetics.​

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Exposure to chemicals found in everyday products can lead to an increase in body fat which may pose various health hazards, reveals new research.

“Growing research shows that these chemicals could be harming people's health," said lead author Lei Yin, assistant research scientist at University of Georgia.

Levels of phthalates -- class of industrial chemicals used to make food packaging materials, tubing for dairy products and other items used in the production of fast food -- have been found in human fluids in previous studies.

In the study, the team analysed the presence of a specific phthalate, benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), in the body. 

Phthalate exposure can be closely associated with the rise of different types of disease development. 

Some are known to cause reproductive toxicity at high levels of exposure but the link between low-level exposure and BBP had not yet been thoroughly explored.

"It could be that some chemicals at a very low dose and over a long period time, which is known as chronic exposure, can cause more harmful diseases or effects," Yin explained in the paper published in the journal Toxicology in Vitro.

The team used mouse cells to create in-vitro models to analyse how exposure to BBP affected the way oils and fats, known as lipids, accumulated within the cells.

The results of BBP's effects were compared with bisphenol A or BPA known for its role in development of fat cells.

BBP caused a response in the cells that is similar to BPA. Both chemicals prompted the accumulation of lipid. 

However, the lipids from BBP-treated cells were larger, suggesting that BBP exposure may lead to obesity.

Genetic components can contribute to the development of obesity. "However, environmental exposure may also contribute to obesity," the authors added.​

New York, April 21 (IANS) A team of US scientists has invented a new way to create three-dimensional (3D) human heart tissue from stem cells that offers cheaper and faster method to create heart tissue for testing drugs and modelling disease.

The tissue also opens the door for a precision medicine approach to treating heart disease.

"We have bioengineered micro-scale heart tissues with a method that can easily be reproduced, which will enable scientists in stem cell biology and the drug industry to study heart cells in their proper context," said Nathaniel Huebsch, postdoctoral fellow at San Francisco-based at the Gladstone Institutes.

"In turn, this will enhance our ability to discover treatments for heart disease," Huebsch added.

Creating heart cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that are derived from a patient's skin cells is inadequate for drug testing because they do not properly predict how a drug will affect adult heart cells.

Additionally, heart cells created from iPSCs are challenging to make and work with, so creating large quantities can be difficult.

The micro-heart muscle addresses these concerns. Forcing the cells to organise and stretch into 3D tissue helps spur development and coaxes them into resembling more mature cells that can better predict how a drug will affect adult heart cells.

The new method, published in the journal Scientific Reports, requires a thousand-fold fewer cells to grow the tissue than other tissue engineering techniques.

Using fewer cells allows the scientists to do many more experiments with the same amount of resources.

"The beauty of this technique is that it is very easy and robust and still allows you to create three-dimensional miniature tissues that function like normal tissues," said senior author Bruce Conklin, senior investigator at Gladstone.

"We think that the micro-heart muscle will provide a superior resource for conducting research and developing therapies for heart disease," he noted.​

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Want to click that perfect selfie with fuller lips for a flawless pout? Get a lip implant. According to a media report, 2015 set a record of one lip surgery every 19 minutes in the US.

The findings, based on a survey of American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), showed that in 2015, a total of 27,449 lip implants on both males and females took place -- a jump of 48 percent since 2000, CNBC reported on Tuesday.

"We live in the age of the selfie and because we see images of ourselves almost constantly on social media, we're much more aware of how our lips look," David Song from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) was quoted as saying.

In Britain, a cosmetic dentistry firm has claimed that selfies have also changed the types of smile that patients are asking for.

People are now asking for a new "selfie smile" which "benefits rather than suffers at the hands of the typically center-widening, periphery-narrowing properties of smartphone cameras," the report stated.

"We have seen a 30 percent rise over 5 years in the number of patients sending in selfies through the website with concerns about the look of their front teeth, yet when the patients come in person, often the teeth don't look too bad at all," Tim Bradstock-Smith, a clinical director and cosmetic dentist, was quoted as saying.

"A patient may not be ready to commit to something as dramatic as a facelift or eyelid surgery, but there are a variety of ways you can change the shape of your lips," explained Robert Houser, a plastic surgeon in Ohio, US.

The ASPS commissioned a national survey of around a thousand women and found that the "subtle and sultry lips" of Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence were the most attractive celebrity lips that women wanted.​

Toronto, April 21 (IANS) While planning a visual task, your brain initially reflects the visual goal accurately but errors accumulate during a memory delay and further escalate during the final action, say scientists from York University.

“Think of all the times you see something and plan to act on it but after only a short delay, you make a mistake," said professor Doug Crawford. 

“For example, before my morning coffee kicks in, I'm great at making silly mistakes like putting the honey away in the fridge instead of the peanut butter,” he added.

For the study, led by Amirsaman Sajad in Crawford's visuomotor neuroscience lab, researchers recorded signals in the frontal cortex area of the brain during the delay between target-related visual activity and intended gaze-related motor activity. 

The visual response and memory activity for the time in between was then analysed.

“We looked at what happens from vision to memory to action and how the spatial code changes through time in the frontal cortex,” said Sajad.

“In the Olympics tennis analogy, when a high degree of accuracy is required, a one-second delay in frontal cortex processing could make the difference between an Olympic gold and silver,” Crawford noted.

The findings, published in the journal eNeuro, are of particular significance to research in diseases affecting frontal cortex function “because if errors accumulate in healthy individuals, the accumulations would be much worse with diseases that affect frontal cortex function,” the authors noted.​

Sydney, April 21 (IANS) Do you feel sleepy during daytime at work? Blame it on your love for oily samosas and cheese-laden pizzas -- not to forget a poor night's sleep -- for this.

According to a study, men who consume diets high in fat and sleep less during night time are more likely to feel sleepy during the day.

"After adjusting for other demographic and lifestyle factors and chronic diseases, we found that those who consumed the highest fat intake were more likely to experience excessive daytime sleepiness," said lead author Yingting Cao, doctoral student at University of Adelaide in Australia.

Higher consumption of food items rich in fat was also strongly associated with sleep apnea, a sleep disorder.

"Poor sleep and feeling sleepy during the day means you have less energy, but this, in turn, is known to increase people's cravings for high-fat, high-carbohydrate foods associated with poor sleep outcomes. So the poor diet-and-sleep pattern can become a vicious cycle," Cao explained in the paper published in the journal Nutrients.

Daytime sleepiness may have significant implications for alertness and concentration, the researchers warned, adding that people need to pay more attention to eat better and have a good sleep.

"We hope our work could help to inform future intervention studies, enabling people to achieve healthy weight loss while also improving their quality of sleep," Cao added.

The results were based on data of more than 1800 Australian men aged 35-80 and included their dietary habits over a 12-month period.

Among those with available dietary and sleep data, 41 percent of the men surveyed had reported experiencing daytime sleepiness, while 47 percent of them had poor sleep quality at night.

About 54 percent had mild-to-moderate sleep apnea, and 25 percent had moderate-to-severe sleep apnea.​

​Washington, April 21 (IANS) The International Space Station (ISS) is providing researchers a unique opportunity to study muscle loss and to investigate means for muscle preservation for people on the Earth.

"Rodent Research-3", a study sponsored by US-based pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company and the Centre for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), focuses on assessing the ability of a novel compound to prevent skeletal muscle wasting and weakness in mice exposed to long-duration spaceflight.

The investigation was launched aboard the eighth SpaceX resupply mission to the space station this month.

The astronauts on the space station follow rigorous exercise programmes that apply forces to their musculoskeletal systems and help them stay strong throughout their missions.

Mice exposed to spaceflight have proved to be valuable research models to understand, target and treat causes of human muscle atrophy.

"This includes modelling serious diseases that involve muscle wasting such as muscular dystrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cancer cachexia and even ageing-related musculoskeletal frailty," said Rosamund Smith, research fellow at Eli Lilly and Company.

The ability to expose all muscles of an organism to conditions that induce muscle atrophy is not easily achieved on Earth.

"Lilly is excited to have the opportunity to conduct this investigation in space," Smith added in a NASA statement.

Loss of muscle function, rather than just a decrease in muscle size, is the critical aspect that leads to problems with physical performance in patients suffering from muscle-wasting conditions.

"The 'Rodent Research-3' study is unique not only in the experimental compound that will be tested but also because, for the first time, muscle function of the mice will be assessed during spaceflight," noted Janet Beegle, Rodent Research-3 project manager at NASA.

Although the primary research focus of "Rodent Research-3" is skeletal muscle, the investigators are studying other organ systems such as bone, both at the tissue and molecular levels.

The goal is to characterise tissue responses to spaceflight and observe how these changes vary with the length of time spent in microgravity.

"The findings will advance our understanding of the risks that long-term space exploration poses to astronauts, and can be applied towards the development of countermeasures to protect astronaut health," the researchers pointed out.

Results will be applied to ongoing discovery efforts at Eli Lilly and Company, seeking treatments for serious muscle-wasting diseases and conditions that may potentially help patients afflicted with degenerative diseases to stay strong.​

Washington, April 20 (IANS) Three solar observatories have captured the most comprehensive observations of an electromagnetic phenomenon called a "current sheet", strengthening the evidence that the understanding of solar flares is correct.

A "current sheet" is a very fast and flat flow of electrically-charged material, defined in part by its extreme thinness compared to its length and width.

"Current sheets" form when two oppositely-aligned magnetic fields come in close contact, creating very high magnetic pressure.

The multi-faceted view of the December 2013 flare was made possible by three solar-watching missions: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and Hinode, a collaboration between the space agencies of Japan, the US, Britain and Europe.

Solar flares are intense bursts of light from the sun. They are created when complicated magnetic fields suddenly and explosively rearrange themselves, converting magnetic energy into light.

"The existence of a 'current sheet' is crucial in all our models of solar flares," said James McAteer, astrophysicist at New Mexico State University.

"These observations make us much more comfortable that our models are good," he added.

The strongest solar flares can impact the Earth's atmosphere and interfere with our communications systems and also disrupt onboard satellite electronics.

Unlike other space weather events, solar flares travel at the speed of light, meaning we get no warning that they are coming.

Better models lead to better forecasting, said Michael Kirk, space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"These complementary observations allowed unprecedented measurements of magnetic reconnection in three dimensions. This will help refine how we model and predict the evolution of solar flares," Kirk added.

Because "current sheets" are so closely associated with magnetic reconnection, observing a "current sheet" in such detail backs up the idea that magnetic reconnection is the force behind solar flares.

"You have to be watching at the right time, at the right angle, with the right instruments to see a current sheet," said McAteer in the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The new study is unique in that several measurements of the current sheet -- such as speed, temperature, density and size -- were observed from more than one angle or derived from more than method.​

​London, April 20 (IANS) As the world gets prepared to build smart cities, new research led by an Indian-origin scientist has highlighted the dangerous effects of indoor pollution on human health and has called for policies to ensure closer monitoring of air quality.

According to Prashant Kumar from the University of Surrey, the research offers insight into "Sick Building Syndrome" and how new smart cities could help combat air quality issues.

When we think of the term "air pollution", we tend to think of car exhausts or factory fumes expelling grey smoke.

"However, there are actually various sources of pollution that have a negative effect on air quality, many of which are found inside our homes and offices. From cooking residue to paints, varnishes and fungal spores the air we breathe indoors is often more polluted than that outside," explained Kumar.

In 2012, indoor air pollution was linked to 4.3 million deaths globally, compared with 3.7 million for outdoor air pollution.

Urban dwellers typically spend 90 percent of their time indoors and this has been linked to "Sick Building Syndrome" where people exhibit a range of ill-health effects related to breathing indoor air.

"It is essential that we are able to effectively monitor indoor air pollution so that we can better understand when and where levels are worst, and in turn offer solutions to make our air healthier," added Kumar in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

"Our work looks at the use of small, low-energy monitoring sensors that would be able to gather real-time data and tell families or workers when levels of pollutants are too high," he continued.

With this research, we are calling for greater importance to be placed on ensuring buildings are built with indoor pollution monitoring in mind. As we enter the age of smart cities this is one way in which technology will actively benefit health, the authors noted.

A collaborative effort of European, Australian and British researchers led by the University of Surrey, the study assesses the harmful effects of indoor pollution in order to make recommendations on how best to monitor and negate these outcomes.

In another paper published earlier in the journal Environmental Pollution, Kumar and PhD student Anju Goel also found that outdoor air pollution was at a high where buildings were located at traffic intersections.

Even where there was low traffic volume, traffic intersections with densely built up surroundings showed twice the concentration than at open junctions.

Exposure to these concentrations showed that ground floor dwellings in these areas were exposed to twice as many harmful particles.

"This has important implications for town planning and we should consider whether we really want schools, offices or hospitals to be built within these environments," Kumar noted.​

​New York, April 20 (IANS) Using the low-tech material coal, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a simple electrical heating device that can be used for defrosting car windows or airplane wings or as part of a biomedical implant.

They have also for the first time characterised in detail the chemical, electrical and optical properties of thin films of four different kinds of coal - anthracite, lignite, and two bituminous types. 

“When you look at coal as a material and not just as something to burn, the chemistry is extremely rich," said lead researcher Jeffrey Grossman from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) at MIT. 

The question he wanted to ask is: "Could we leverage the wealth of chemistry in things like coal to make devices that have useful functionality?" 

The answer, he says, is a resounding yes.

Part of the challenge was to figure out how to process coal.

The researchers developed a series of steps to crush the material to a powder put it in solution then deposit it in thin uniform films on a substrate -- a necessary step in fabricating many electronic devices - from transistors to photovoltaics.

Even though coal has been one of the most widely used substances by human beings for centuries, its bulk electronic and optical properties had never really been studied for the purpose of advanced devices.

The simple heating device the team made provides an end-to-end demonstration of how to use the material - from grinding the coal to depositing it as a thin film and making it into a functional electronic device. 

The doors are now opened for a wide variety of potential applications through further research.

The big potential advantage of the new material, Grossman says, is its low cost stemming from the inherently cheap base material, combined with simple solution processing that enables low fabrication costs. 

The findings were reported in the journal Nano Letters.​