Knowledge Update

New York, July 12 (IANS) In a major breakthrough, scientists have successfully restored vision in mice affected by glaucoma-like condition.

The unprecedented, if partial, restoration could pave the way to future work that enables blind people to see, the study said.

Cataracts can often be surgically removed, but there's no cure for glaucoma, said the study's senior author Andrew Huberman, Associate Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine

Glaucoma, caused by excessive pressure on the optic nerve, affects nearly 70 million people worldwide. 

Vision loss due to optic-nerve damage can also accrue from injuries, retinal detachment, pituitary tumors, various brain cancers and other sources.

In experiments with mice described in a study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the scientists reported regenerating severed nerves responsible for conveying visual information from the eye to the brain, thereby re-establishing the connection between their eyes and brain.

The mice were tested three weeks later after the experiment for their ability to respond to certain visual stimuli.

However, even mice whose behaviour showed restored vision on some tests failed other tests that probably required finer visual discrimination, Huberman said, suggesting the the restoration of vision in the animals was only partial.

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at University of California-San Diego, Harvard University and Utah State University.​

​New York, July 10 (IANS) Prosocial behaviours, such as willingness to help others, may be linked to specific personalities, revealed a study.

According to the research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), agreeableness is one of the better predictors of prosocial behaviour.

The studies focused on one aspect of prosocial behaviors that can vary widely including volunteering, co-operation within groups, and participating in community actions

The motivations behind a person's prosocial behaviour, whether helping a stranger passed out on the street or volunteering time for someone who has recently lost their parents, are extremely complex, suggested the study.

"It is common for persons to experience distress on seeing a victim in need of help. That distress can lead some people to escape and run away from the victim," said Meara Habashi from University of Iowa.

According to the research, one major path linking personality to help runs through empathy.

By experimentally manipulating empathy, the researchers showed that agreeableness is a dimension of personality, most closely associated with emotional reactions towards victims in need of help and people's willingness to help.

In the first set of experiments, the researchers applied two different vignettes for their studies. In one, college students listened to a radio story about another college student who recently lost her parents and was now taking care of her siblings.

In the second, researchers asked 233 participants, over half of whom were women, to imagine going to a friend's speech and while running late to the talk they encounter someone slumped on the ground and not moving.

To manipulate empathy, the follow-up studies focused on how people responded when they took or ignored the perspective of the victim in the case of the college student who lost her parents.

Of 233 college students, the researchers found correlations with empathy in those having high agreeableness or neuroticism.

However, only those high in agreeableness would volunteer their time for the victim, the study revealed.

Based on these results, people who are low in agreeableness are not necessarily less empathetic than others, they simply may need more reminders when it comes to generating empathic concern, suggested the study.​

​New York, July 10 (IANS) Aerobic exercises such as brisk walking, running, jogging or swimming is likely to restore the cardiac protein quality control system in heart failure, suggests a research conducted on rats.

Heart failure is a common end-point for many cardiovascular diseases. This syndrome is characterised by reduced cardiac output that leads to dyspnea, exercise intolerance and later death.

Despite heart failure seems to be a multi-factorial syndrome, a common point observed by several studies was the accumulation of "bad" (or misfolded) proteins in cardiac cells of both humans and animals with heart failure, the researchers said.

Proteins are like workers responsible for many chemical reactions required in keeping our cells healthy.

Proteins are constituted by a sequence of amino acids that determines the protein "shape" (structure), which is critical for proteins to function.

During the evolution process, our cells developed a protein quality control system that refolds or degrades misfolded proteins, allowing them to keep only the "good" proteins, said Luiz H. M. Bozi from University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

The findings showed that misfolded protein accumulation in a rat model of heart failure was related to disruption of the cardiac protein quality control system.

No pharmacology therapy targeting the protein quality control system.

Further, aerobic exercise training was found to restore the cardiac protein quality control system, which was related to reduced misfolded protein accumulation.

Aerobic exercise training also improved cardiac function in heart failure animals, said the paper published in Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.

More than 20 million persons worldwide are estimated to have heart failure and this situation will get worse since the prevalence of heart failure will rise as the mean age of the population increases, the researchers concluded.​

​Shanghai, July 10 (IANS) The G20 economies agreed to improve global trade governance to arrest the slowdown of global trade growth, said a statement released on Sunday after the two-day G20 Trade Ministers' Meeting in Shanghai.

​New York, July 9 (IANS) Scientists may finally have an explanation for why some galaxies stop creating stars after a team of astrophysicists painstakingly analysed around 70,000 galaxies to understand the forces influencing star formation activity in them.

The international research team, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside, combed through available data from the COSMOS UltraVISTA survey that give accurate distance estimates for galaxies over the past 11 billion years, and focused on the effects of external and internal processes that influence star creation in galaxies.

The processes that cause galaxies to "quench", that is, cease star formation, are not well understood and constitute an outstanding problem in the study of the evolution of galaxies. 

"By using the observable properties of the galaxies and sophisticated statistical methods, we show that, on average, external processes are only relevant to quenching galaxies during the last eight billion years," said study lead author Behnam Darvish from the University of California.

"On the other hand, internal processes are the dominant mechanism for shutting off star-formation before this time, and closer to the beginning of the universe," he added.

External processes include drag generated from an infalling galaxy within a cluster of galaxies, multiple gravitational encounters with other galaxies and the dense surrounding environment and the halting of the supply of cold gas to the galaxy.

Internal mechanisms include the presence of a black hole and "stellar outflow" (for example, high-velocity winds produced by massive young stars and supernovae that push the gas out of the host galaxy).

The finding, published recently in the Astrophysical Journal, gives astronomers an important clue towards understanding which process dominates quenching at various cosmic times. 

As astronomers detect quenched non-star-forming galaxies at different distances (and therefore times after the Big Bang), they now can more easily pinpoint what quenching mechanism was at work.​

​London, July 10 (IANS) Immunotherapy has the potential to reduce the risk of heart disease in patients suffering with rheumatoid arthritis, finds a study.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease in which cytokines such as tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNFI) and interfero-gamma (IFN), which normally protect the body, attack healthy cells

The findings showed that the combination of two anticytokines containing extra-low doses of antibodies against TNFI and IFN could improve the efficacy of standard rheumatoid arthritis therapy and decrease heart disease risk.

"In rheumatoid arthritis, patients have painful and inflamed joints. They are also at increased cardiovascular risk, particularly if their rheumatoid arthritis is not controlled," said Aida Babaeva, Professor at Volgograd State Medical University in Russia.

Further, the patients taking the combination of anticytokines had a lower rheumatoid arthritis disease activity score, as measured by the DAS28,2 and more dramatic decreases in IL-1, IL-6 and TNF alpha than the group on standard therapy alone.

The incidence of cardiovascular events (unstable angina, severe hypertensive crisis, and deterioration of chronic heart failure) was more than double in the group on conventional disease-modifying drugs alone (37 per cent) compared to those also taking the combination of anticytokines (13 per cent).

"Our findings suggest that the decreased rheumatoid arthritis disease activity with the combination of anticytokines translates into decreased cardiovascular risk," Babaeva said.

Rheumatoid arthritis is also associated with dysfunction of the blood vessel lining (called endothelium), which leads to lipid accumulation in the artery wall, plaque formation and atherosclerosis.

"Thus, decreasing disease activity may also reduce cardiovascular risk by slowing down or halting these processes," Babaeva added.

For the study, the team included 68 patients who had suffered from active rheumatoid arthritis for at least five years.

Patients were randomised to receive the combination of anti-TNF alpha and anti-IFN gamma plus standard disease-modifying therapy (38 patients) or placebo plus standard therapy (30 patients).

We recommend this new approach for preventing cardiovascular events in patients with moderate disease activity who are not receiving the standard biologics and who do not have severe complications."

The research was presented at the Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology (FCVB) 2016 in Italy, recently.​

​London, July 10 (IANS) Humans and other terrestrial animals learn how to walk in similar ways, finds an interesting study.

"We look at the emergence of walking behaviours in both human babies and infant animals, as they develop," said lead author Nadia Dominici from VU University in Netherlands.

Movements such as walking are created from the flexible combination of a small set of groups of muscles that simplify the control of locomotion, called "locomotor primitives".

The findings showed that human babies are born with just two walking primitives: the first directs the legs to bend and extend; the second commands the baby's legs to alternate -- left, right, left, right -- in order to move forward.

To walk independently, babies learn two more primitives, which is to handle balance control -- step timing and weight shifting.

These primitives are unexpectedly alike across different animals -- including rats that the study explored.

"Despite all of the differences in body structure and evolution, locomotion in several animal species could start from common primitives, maybe even stemming from a common ancestral neural network," Dominici added.

Babies are born with an instinct for walking and these are reflected when the child is held near to the floor.

The primitive stepping reflex displayed by the child shows the natural "walking" instinct, which becomes the foundation on which children build an independent walking motion, said the paper.

Understanding these first steps can improve the rehabilitation of patients recovering from spinal cord injury, and children with cerebral palsy, the researchers concluded.​

​London, July 10 (IANS) Norwegian researchers have ventured to delve into why people tend to perceive affinities between sound and body motion when experiencing music -- and agreed that it is all rooted in human cognition.

Researchers from the University of Oslo explored the theory behind the relationship between musical sound and body movement -- the so-called 'motor theory of perception'. 

They explored the relationship between musical sound and body movement -- and came up with results that showed these similarity relationships are deeply rooted in human cognition. 

The results indicated a fair amount of similarity among the participants' gestures, particularly between the vertical positioning of their hands and the pitch of the sound, according to the study published by the Journal of New Music Research.

For the study, the participants were played three-second sounds that varied in pitch and other musical qualities and were asked to trace the sounds in the air using motion capture technology. 

"Music-related motion -- both sound producing and sound accompanying -- leaves a trace in our minds and could be thought of as a kind of shape representation, one intimately linked to our experience of the salient features of musical sound," said Professor Rolf Inge Godoy of the University of Oslo.

In general, some sound features such as rhythm and texture seem to be strongly related to movement while others, such as dissonance, have a weaker sound-motion relationship. 

As a result, the researchers intend to focus their future work on researching large-scale statistical sound-motion feature correlations, providing us with more data on sound-motion similarity relationships in all kinds of musical experience.

"The basic notion here is that images of sound-producing and other sound-related motion are actively re-created in listening and in musical imagery, hence the idea that motor theory could be the basis for the similarities between sound and body movement when we experience music,” added Godoy.

Although links between musical sound and motion can be readily observed, the researchers argue that a more systematic knowledge of them is required.

In order to perceive something, one must actively simulate the motion associated with the sensory impressions.

So, when one listens to music, the person tends to mentally simulate the body movements that have gone into producing the sound. Thus the experience of a sound entails a mental image of a body motion.​

​Ottawa, July 10 (IANS) Coffee lovers who like to attend rock music concerts or work at airports should be cautious as a recent study indicates that caffeine has a serious impact on hearing.

According to a research by the McGill University in Canada, regular caffeine consumption can greatly impede hearing recovery from loud noise, even making the damage permanent, Xinhua news agency reported.

"When the ear is exposed to loud noise, it can suffer from a temporary hearing reduction, also called auditory temporary threshold shift. This disorder is usually reversible in the first 72 hours after the exposure, but if symptoms persist, the damage could become permanent," said Dr Faisal Zawawi, an otolaryngologist at McGill.

The researchers found this impact through an experiment on guinea pigs. They grouped the pigs and tested them in environments of noise without coffee, and noise with coffee.

The noise the animals were exposed to for one hour per day is similar as what people hear at a rock concert. After eight days, significant difference of hearing loss is recorded between the two groups, according to the research team.

In 2015, the European Food Safety Authority published an advice that caffeine intakes from all sources up to 400 mg per day and single doses of 200 mg might be safe for adults in the general population.

But the McGill research suggests that exposure to loud noises coupled with daily consumption of 25 mg of caffeine may have a clear negative impact on hearing recovery.​

​Beijing, July 9 (IANS) The World Trade Organisation has launched a new indicator designed to predict short-term trends in global trade ahead of a meeting of G20 trade ministers.