Knowledge Update

Washington, Feb 3 (IANS) The dwarf planet Ceres may actually host many "hidden" ice volcanoes, besides the only one discovered recently, a study says.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft discovered Ceres's four-kilometre tall Ahuna Mons cryovolcano in 2015. 

Other icy worlds in our solar system, like Pluto, Europa, Triton, Charon and Titan, may also have such mountains of icy rock -- called cryovolcanoes -- but Ahuna Mons is conspicuously alone on Ceres. 

Now, in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists showed there might have been cryovolcanoes other than Ahuna Mons on Ceres millions or billions of years ago, but these cryovolcanoes might have flattened out over time and become indistinguishable from the planet's surface. 

"We think we have a very good case that there have been lots of cryovolcanoes on Ceres but they have deformed," said lead study author Michael Sori of Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at University of Arizona in Tucson, US.

Ahuna Mons is a prominent feature on Ceres, rising to about half the height of Mount Everest. Its solitary existence has puzzled scientists since they spied it.

Adding to the puzzle are the steep sides and well-defined features of Ahuna Mons -- usually signs of geologic youth, Sori said. 

That leads to two possibilities. Ahuna Mons is just as it appears, inexplicably alone after forming relatively recently on an otherwise inactive world. Or, the cryovolcano is not alone or unusual, and there is some process on Ceres that has destroyed its predecessors and left the young Ahuna Mons as the solitary cryovolcano on the dwarf planet, according to Sori.

Ceres has no atmosphere, so the processes that wear down volcanoes on Earth -- wind, rain and ice -- are not possible on the dwarf planet. 

Sori and his colleagues hypothesised that another process, called viscous relaxation, could be at work.

Viscous relaxation is the idea that just about any solid will flow, given enough time. For example, a cold block of honey appears to be solid. But if given enough time, the block will flatten out until there is no sign left of the original block structure.

On Earth, viscous relaxation is what makes glaciers flow, Sori explained. 

"Ahuna Mons is at most 200 million years old. It just has not had time to deform," Sori said.

The researchers said they would next try and identify the flattened remnants of older cryovolcanoes on Ceres. 

The findings could help scientists better decipher the history of how the dwarf planet formed, Sori added.

​New York, Feb 3 (IANS) Sleep may be regulated in part by several brain-based immune proteins, says a study that could pave the way for new therapies to treat chronic sleep disorders and sleep disturbances secondary to other diseases.

The immune proteins -- collectively called inflammasome NLRP3 -- recruit a sleep-inducing molecule to trigger somnolence following sleep deprivation and exposure to a bacterial toxin, showed results of the study published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

Animals lacking genes for this protective immune complex showed profound sleep aberrations.

"Our research points, for the first time, to the inflammasome acting as a universal sensing mechanism that regulates sleep through the release of immune molecules," said study senior investigator Mark Zielinski from Harvard Medical School. 

In a series of experiments, the scientists demonstrated that following sleep deprivation or exposure to bacteria, the inflammasome activates an inflammatory molecule called interleukin-1 beta, known to induce sleep and promote sleep intensity. 

The brain cells of mice lacking the gene coding for inflammasome NLRP3 showed a marked absence of this sleep-inducing molecule.

Going a step further, the investigators compared the behaviour, sleep patterns and electrical activity in the brains of mice lacking the inflammasome gene to those in a group of mice with intact inflammasome genes.

Mice lacking the inflammasome gene had abnormal sleep responses following sleep deprivation. 

On average, such mice slept less and experienced more sleep interruptions than mice with their genes intact.

The latter group also slept more and harder following bacterial exposure -- the expected physiological response following infection, the researchers said.

Tokyo, Feb 3 (IANS) Examining a molecular cloud with enigmatic motion, a team led by researchers in Japan has found signs of stray black hole hiding in the Milky Way.

It is difficult to find black holes, because they are completely black. In some cases black holes cause effects which can be seen. 

Theoretical studies have predicted that 100 million to one billion black holes should exist in the Milky Way, although only 60 or so have been identified through observations to date. 

"We found a new way of discovering stray black holes," said one of the researchers Tomoharu Oka, Professor at Keio University in Japan.

The researchers used the ASTE Telescope in Chile and the 45-m Radio Telescope at Nobeyama Radio Observatory, both operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, to observe molecular clouds around the supernova remnant W44, located 10,000 light-years away from us. 

A supernova is the explosion of a star -- the largest explosion that takes place in space, according to NASA.

The primary goal of the researchers was to examine how much energy was transferred from the supernova explosion to the surrounding molecular gas, but they happened to find signs of a hidden black hole at the edge of W44, said the study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

During the survey, the team found a compact molecular cloud with enigmatic motion. 

To investigate the origin of this cloud, named the "Bullet", the team performed intensive observations of the gas cloud.

The data indicated that the Bullet seems to jump out from the edge of the supernova remnant with immense kinetic energy. 

"Most of the Bullet has an expanding motion with a speed of 50 km/s, but the tip of the Bullet has a speed of 120 km/s," Masaya Yamada, a graduate student at Keio University, said.

"Its kinetic energy is a few tens of times larger than that injected by the W44 supernova. It seems impossible to generate such an energetic cloud under ordinary environments," Yamada added.

The researchers believe that a dark and compact gravity source, possibly a black hole, has an important role in the formation of the Bullet.

Washington, Feb 2 (IANS) US Federal Reserve on Wednesday left the benchmark interest rates unchanged and offered no hint on when it might move.

The central bank painted a relatively upbeat picture for the economy. "Labour market continued to strengthen and... economic activity has continued to expand at a moderate

​Tokyo, Feb 2 (IANS) The online payment service for Nintendo Switch, the new console from the Japanese video game giant, will cost between 2,000 and 3,000 yen ($17-$26), company president Tatsumi Kimishima said on Thursday.

Juba, Feb 2 (IANS/MAP) Morocco King Mohammed VI and South Sudan President Salva Kiir Mayardit chaired the signing ceremony of nine bilateral agreements in different areas of cooperation between the two countries at the presidential palace in capital Juba.

Los Angeles, Feb 2 (IANS) Facebook reported net income of $10.2 billion in 2016, up 177 per cent from the previous year's total of $3.7 billion.

The online social media giant headed by Mark Zuckerberg, whose businesses include its signature social networking service and apps such as Messenger, Instagram and

New York, Feb 2 (IANS) If you feel constrained to share multiple photos on Instagram, a new feature will soon make your vacation look beautiful in a single album. According to a report in Droid Life on Thursday, Instagram is testing a new feature, now in beta stage, that lets users share multiple photos as a gallery. Only advertisers are able to share the gallery currently which users can swipe through horizontally, but the beta release of Instagram may make its way to all 600 million users soon. "Users can select up to 10 photos from their galley, slap on filters to each photo they choose, then upload the photos as an album to your timeline. From your followers' perspective, they will see the album and can then slide through the various shots, liking photos as they go," the report noted. However, beta users are currently not able to post the album on their timelines.

​New York, Feb 2 (IANS) Defying the massive fake news scandal that hit the social networking giant during the US presidential election as well as analysts, Facebook has registered strong growth in its mobile advertising business, with total revenue reaching $8.8 billion from $5.84 billion last year. It means $1.41 profit per share instead of the $1.31 that Wall Street was expecting. The quarterly profit was $3.57 billion -- more than double ($1.56 billion) the company reported last year, Fortune reported on Thursday. For the full year, Facebook's revenue climbed by $10 billion or 54 per cent to just over $27.5 billion compared with $17.9 billion in 2015 and the company's net income for the year more than doubled to $10 billion. Mired in controversies like "fake news" and inaccurate advertising, Facebook itself expected a slowdown in the growth rate of its advertising revenue. The one way by which the Menlo Park, California-based company registered the growth was by adding more than 265 million new monthly active users in 2016 -- almost as many users as the micro-blogging website Twitter has in total. Facebook now has more than 1.8 billion users who log on every month and more than 1.2 billion users who do so every day. Daily active users hit 1.23 billion, up from 1.18 billion last quarter and up 18 percent (Year-on-Year), compared to 17 percent last quarter. Another major growth engine for the social media giant was mobile. Over 1 billion of Facebook's daily users access the site primarily on their phones or tablets and that number grew by 23 per cent in the latest quarter. Mobile ad revenue made up about 84 per cent of the company's total ad revenue. Facebook also said it earned $12.4 billion in income from operations last year, nearly double the total from 2015 ($6.2 billion). Mobile now makes up 84 percent of its ad revenue -- the same as last quarter -- signalling that Facebook has successfully shifted to mobile. "During the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was repeatedly asked about Facebook's video content strategy. He explained that "we're focusing on shorter form content to start", and that the company needs to build a sustainable ad revenue sharing business model to pay professional creators to bring that content to Facebook, Tech Crunch reported.