Knowledge Update

London, April 13 (IANS) If you drink five-six cups of coffee daily, here come some good news. According to researchers, increase in coffee consumption can provide protective effect against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Daily dose of coffee can check non-alcoholic fatty liver disease by reducing permeability of the gut, the team reported after conducting the research on mice.

They found that a daily dose of coffee (equivalent to six cups of espresso coffee for humans) improved several key markers of the disease in mice who were fed a high-fat diet. 

The mice also gained less weight than others fed the same diet without the dose of caffeine.

“Previous studies have confirmed how coffee can reverse the damage of NAFLD but this is the first to demonstrate that it can influence the permeability of the intestine,” said Vincenzo Lembo from the University of Napoli, Italy.

The results also show that coffee can reverse NAFLD-related problems such as ballooning degeneration, a form of liver cell degeneration.

The scientists showed how coffee protects against NAFLD by raising levels of a protein called Zonulin (ZO)-1 which lessens the permeability of the gut. 

Experts believe that increased gut permeability contributes to liver injury and worsens NAFLD. 

People suffering from NAFLD can develop scarring of the liver - also known as fibrosis - which can progress to a potentially life threatening condition known as cirrhosis.

The results suggest that coffee supplementation could cause variations in the intestinal tight junctions which regulate the permeability of the intestine.

“The study offers insights that can help future research into and understanding of the therapeutic role coffee can play in combating NAFLD,” added professor Laurent Castera, secretary general of The European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL).

The findings were presented at the International Liver Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, recently.​

​London, April 13 (IANS) Researchers have for the first time found it possible to generate simultaneous immune response against diseases such as Hepatitis C virus and HIV, raising the possibility of a combined vaccination.

An estimated 2.3 million people globally are co-infected with HIV and HCV. HCV is the leading cause of non-AIDS deaths in co-infected individuals.

"While we have drugs to treat both HIV and HCV, these are out of reach for many and do not prevent reinfection," said lead researcher Lucy Dorrell, professor at University of Oxford in London. 

“Knowing that it may be possible to vaccinate a single individual against both diseases opens up huge possibilities for rolling back epidemics of disease and co-infection," added one of the researchers Ellie Barnes, professor. 

The findings showed that vaccine priming against HCV and HIV induced immune response in the body, measured by the number of HIV and HCV specific T-cells found in a sample of blood. 

These immune responses were further increased following the boost vaccination.

In addition, co-administration of HCV and HIV components of the boost did not impair the magnitude or breadth of either HCV or HIV specific T-cell responses compared to each alone. 

All vaccines were given as an intramuscular injection and both were well tolerated.

The study showed that the 'prime boost' approach is compatible with co-administration of vectors encoding for HIV and HCV antigens -- molecules capable of inducing an immune response to the immune system.

Following this, booster vaccinations are given with the same combination of HCV and HIV fragments.

The Phase 1 study enrolled 32 healthy volunteers in three groups. Group one received only HCV investigational vaccines at weeks 0 and 8. 

The second group received only HIV investigational vaccines following the same dosing schedule. 

The final group received both HCV and HIV investigational vaccines that were co-administered.

The study was presented at The International Liver Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.​

New York, April 13 (IANS) Not just youngsters, senior citizens are turning out to be Facebook's fastest growing community, say researchers including an Indian-origin team member, suggesting that the elderly are joining Facebook for the same reasons that prompted teenagers to join it over a decade ago.

According to S Shyam Sundar, professor at Pennsylvania State University, older adults who are motivated by social bonding and curiosity tend to use Facebook as a form of social surveillance. 

"Surveillance is the idea that you're checking out what people are up to. This is something that many older adults do. They want to see how their kids are doing and, especially, what their grand children are doing," said Sundar.

Earlier studies suggest a positive relationship between bonding and bridging social capital and Facebook use among college students. 

"Our study extends this finding to senior citizens," added Eun Hwa Jung, mass communication researcher at Penn State.

The researchers found that the desire to stay connected to family and keep in touch with old friends or social bonding was the best predictor of Facebook adoption and use, followed closely by the desire to find and communicate with like-minded people or social bridging.

Curiosity is another motivation for senior Facebook users, Jung added.

The study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour, found that senior citizens were not motivated to actively participate on Facebook when family and friends prod them to use the website.

"When senior citizens respond to requests to join Facebook, that tends to be a negative predictor of use," Sundar said. "In other words, they are not intrinsically motivated to participate when someone else requests that they join."

Older adults also tend to use Facebook features that their younger counterparts favour.

According to the findings, seniors visited Facebook 2.46 times a day and stayed on it for a little over 35 minutes each day.

"This isn't just a fast-growing market, but also a lucrative one. Older adults have much more disposable income than teens and college students and would be more desirable for advertising," Sundar noted. 

The team suggests that designers of social media sites should emphasise on simple and convenient interface tools to attract older adult users. 

​New York, April 13 (IANS) A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras.

"Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. 

"We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984.

Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. 

This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide range of sheet deformations.

If such an imaging system could be manufactured cheaply -- like a roll of plastic or fabric -- it could be wrapped around all kinds of things, from street poles to furniture, cars, and even people's clothing, to capture wide, seamless images with unusual fields of view. 

"The adaptive lens array we have developed is an important step towards making the concept of flexible sheet cameras viable," Nayar noted. 

"The next step will be to develop large-format detector arrays to go with the deformable lens array. The amalgamation of the two technologies will lay the foundation for a new class of cameras that expand the range of applications that benefit from imaging," he said.

The novel technology is set to be presented at the international conference on computational photography (ICCP) at Northwestern University, in Illinois from May 13 to 15.​

​New York, April 14 (IANS) Love to binge on burgers, pizzas and French fries? Beware, as consuming fast food can expose you to higher levels of potentially harmful chemicals known as phthalates, which are used in food packaging, warns a new study.

Phthalates belong to a class of industrial chemicals used to make food packaging materials, tubing for dairy products, and other items used in the production of fast food.

The findings showed that people who ate the most fast food had phthalate levels in their urine that was 24 percent to 40 percent higher than those who rarely ate junk food.

"Our findings raise concerns because phthalates have been linked to a number of serious health problems in children and adults," said lead author Ami Zota, assistant professor at George Washington University in US.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, analysed the effect of two phthalates di(2-ethylexyl) phthalate (DEHP) and diisononyl phthalate (DiNP) in use despite concerns that they leach out of products and get into the human body.

Exposure to these chemicals can damage the reproductive system and may even lead to infertility, the authors warned.

They also discovered that grain and meat items were the most significant contributors to phthalate exposure.

The grain category contained a wide variety of items including bread, cake, pizza, burritos, rice dishes and noodles.

The team looked at data on 8,877 participants who had answered detailed questions about their diet in the past 24 hours, including consumption of fast food.

They also took urinary samples that could be tested for the breakdown products of two specific phthalates -- DEHP and DiNP.

In addition, the researchers also looked for exposure to another chemical found in plastic food packaging -- Bisphenol A or BPA.

Exposure to BPA can lead to health and behaviour problems, especially for young children, but the study found no association between total fast food intake and BPA.

However, the result so revealed that people who ate fast food meat products had higher levels of BPA than people who reported no fast food consumption​

New York, April 14 (IANS) Imagine shirts that act as antennas for smartphones or tablets, workout clothes that monitor fitness level or even a flexible fabric cap that senses activity in the brain!

All this will soon be possible as the researchers working on wearable electronics have been able to embroider circuits into fabric with super precision -- a key step toward the design of clothes that gather, store or transmit digital information.

"A revolution is happening in the textile industry. We believe that functional textiles are an enabling technology for communications and sensing and one day, even for medical applications like imaging and health monitoring," said lead researcher John Volakis from Ohio State University.

The milestone achieved by the Ohio researchers has the potential to allow integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing with 0.1 mm precision.

With further development, the technology could also lead to sports equipment that monitor athletes' performance or a bandage that tells doctors how well the tissue beneath it is healing.

Volakis' team created the functional textiles, also called "e-textiles," on a typical tabletop sewing machine. 

Like other modern sewing machines, it embroiders thread into fabric automatically based on a pattern loaded via a computer file. 

The researchers substituted the thread with fine silver metal wires that, once embroidered, feel the same as traditional thread to the touch.

"For the first time, we've achieved the accuracy of printed metal circuit boards, so our new goal is to take advantage of the precision to incorporate receivers and other electronic components," added Volakis in a paper published in the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.

The shape of the embroidery determines the frequency of operation of the antenna or circuit.

"Shape determines function. And you never really know what shape you will need from one application to the next. So we wanted to have a technology that could embroider any shape for any application," noted Asimina Kiourti, co-author of the study.

She also incorporated some techniques common to microelectronics manufacturing to add parts to embroidered antennas and circuits.​

​New York, April 14 (IANS) In a fresh bid to connect the world better, Facebook has announced a new research lab to build hardware products based on its software and has hired a former top Google executive to achieve its goal.

Beijing, April 12 (IANS) Over 80 percent of groundwater in China is polluted and not fit for human consumption.

In its most recent monthly report, published on Monday, the water resources ministry said that of 2,103 monitored wells, water from 691, or 32.9 percent, was defined as Class

​London, April 12 (IANS) A team of scientists led by Oxford University has made a discovery that can improve chances of developing an effective vaccine against Tuberculosis (TB).

The researchers identified new biomarkers for TB which have shown for the first time why immunity from the widely used BCG vaccine is so variable. 

The biomarkers will also provide valuable clues to assess whether potential new vaccines could be effective, the team said.

TB remains one of the world's major killer diseases. The only available BCG vaccine works well (estimated 50 percent effective) to prevent severe disease in children but is very variable (0 percent to 80 percent effective) in adults.

With a pressing need for a TB vaccine that is more effective than BCG, the Oxford team working with colleagues from the University of Cape Town and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine set out to identify immune correlates that could facilitate TB vaccine development. 

The team, led by professor Helen McShane and Dr Helen Fletcher, studied immune responses in infants in South Africa who were taking part in a TB vaccine trial.

The team carried out tests for 22 possible factors. 

“These are useful results. They show that antigen-specific T cells are important in protection against TB but that activated T cells increase the risk,” explained professor McShane from Oxford in a paper that appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time we have some evidence of how BCG might work and also what could block it from working. Although there is still much work to do, these findings may bring us a step closer to developing a more effective vaccine for TB,” added Dr Fletcher from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The team is working to develop an effective TB vaccine aimed at protecting more people from the disease.​

​New York, April 13 (IANS) World-renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a $100 million effort to make tiny spaceships capable of interstellar space travel.

Hawking and Milner made the joint announcement at a press conference held at One World Observatory in New York City on Tuesday, Xinhua reported.

The project, dubbed "Breakthrough Starshot," is a research and engineering programme that aims to build laser beam propelled "nanocrafts" that can travel at 20 percent of lightspeed -- more than 1,000 times faster than current fastest spacecraft.

According to Milner, once the "nanocrafts" are built, they could reach Alpha Centauri, a star 4.37 light-years away, approximately 20 years in a fly-by mission.

Alpha Centauri is one of the closest star systems to the solar system and the current fastest spacecraft would have to spend 30,000 years to get there.

The "nanocrafts" are gram-scale robotic spacecrafts consisting of two main parts: a computer CPU sized "StarChip" and a "Lightsail" made with metamaterials no more than a few hundred atoms thick.

Although weighing just a few grams, the "StarChip" is a fully functional space probe, which carries various equipment including cameras, navigation and communication.

"The 'StarChip' can be mass-produced at the cost of an iPhone," Milner said.

The "nanocrafts" can then be propelled into space by a powerful laser beam, which according to Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist and panelist at the news conference, will carry a power of 100 gigawatt.

"This is the power needed to lift off a space shuttle," Loeb said.

Milner and the scientists believe that with the rising power and falling costs of lasers, the entire process is practical within a couple of years.

"Fifteen years ago, it would not have made sense to make this investment. Now we have looked at the numbers, and it does," Milner said.

The project was part of the Breakthrough Initiatives first launched in July 2015 by Hawking and Milner, including a series of research plans to scan the 100 galaxies closest to the Milky Way in search for aliens. "Starshot" is its newest endeavor.

Hawking believes that human's innate sense to transcend limits is the driving force behind the project. "Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America."

While one cannot hear the joking tone through Hawking's voice synthesizer, his humour had been easily received.

What the scientists are looking for is not just reaching Alpha Centauri, but what can be learned during the efforts.

"A lot of science will be learned by the process of going through this, making this happen," said panelist Mae Jemison, a former NASA astronaut. 

"There is big task ahead, there's a big leap in getting something of a micro size to go at some percentage of the speed of light. That will have all kinds of reverberations."

Tuesday also marked the 55th anniversary of the first human space flight by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

"Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we are human and our nature is to fly," Hawking said.​