Knowledge Update

​London, May 23 (IANS) A team of international researchers has evaluated the pivotal relationship that exists between mankind and fire, hoping it would help policymakers "reassess their attitudes" towards how to deal with fire in the natural world.

The study explores both the natural and human face of fire.

It delves into the complex relationship that fire has had with our planet and humans over millennia, from the first fires through to its role in the industrial revolutions worldwide.

"It is imperative that we consider this complex interaction between fire and humankind on a global scale and not just imagine it is a localised, or of far away, concern," said Claire Belcher from University of Exeter in Britain, who led the research team. 

"What we have shown is that understanding fire is a broader and more complex issue than it is perhaps treated now -- it encompasses physical, biological and social sciences as well as engineering, and the humanities -- and it needs to be seen as such by policymakers, both home and abroad," Belcher added.

The study suggests that a combination of factors, including the problem of invasive plants, landscape change, climate change, population growth, human health and economic, social and cultural attitude, make a re-evaluation of the relationship between fire and man necessary. 

"Imagining that we could live without fire is both folly and impossible. Importantly, our combustion habits -- both fossil fuels combustion and landscape burning -- ensure that we are building new dynamism into our social-ecological relationship with fire through climate change," the researchers said.​

New York, May 23 (IANS) A study into the significance of the plant microbiomes has found the first direct evidence that nitrogen fixation can occur in the branches of trees with no root nodule required.

The study has significant implications for common agricultural crop plants as there is a strongly held belief that only plants with root nodules can benefit from the symbiotic relationship with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. 

Led by plant microbiologist Sharon Doty from University of Washington, the team demonstrated that poplar trees growing in rocky, inhospitable terrain contain bacteria within them that could provide valuable nutrients to help the plant grow.

The researchers found that microbial communities are highly diverse, varying dramatically even in cuttings next to each other.

"This variability made it especially difficult to quantify the activity but is the key to the biology since it is probably only specific groupings of microorganisms that are working together to provide this nutrient to the host," said Doty.

The microbes the team isolated from wild poplar and willow plants have helped corn, tomatoes and peppers, as well as turf grasses and forest trees to grow with less fertiliser.

"Having access to the key microbial strains that help wild plants thrive on just rocks and sand will be crucial for moving agriculture, bioenergy and forestry away from a dependence on chemical fertilizers and towards a more natural way of boosting plant productivity," Doty noted in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Nitrogen fixation is a natural process that is essential to sustain all forms of life. 

In naturally occurring low-nutrient environments such as rocky, barren terrain, plants associate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria to acquire this essential nutrient.​

Brasilia, May 23 (IANS) Researchers have developed a biosensor that has been proven capable of detecting molecules that lead to some types of cancer as well as neurodegenerative diseases.

The device is basically a single-layer organic nanometer-scale transistor on a glass slide.

The biosensor contains the reduced form of the peptide glutathione (GSH), which reacts in a specific way when it comes into contact with the enzyme glutathione S-transferase (GST), linked to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and breast cancer, among other diseases. 

The findings showed that the device could detect such molecules even when they're present at very low levels in the examined material, because of its nanometric sensitivity. 

"This is the first time organic transistor technology has been used in detecting the pair GSH-GST, which is important in diagnosing degenerative diseases,” said Carlos Cesar Bof Bufon from National Nanotechnology Laboratory (LNNano) in Campinas, Brazil.

In addition to being portable and of low cost, the system can also be adapted to detect other substances, such as molecules linked to different diseases and elements present in contaminated material, among other applications. 

This requires replacing the molecules in the sensor with others that react with the chemicals targeted by the test.

The project focuses on the development of point-of-care devices by researchers in a range of knowledge areas, using functional materials to produce simple sensors and microfluidic systems for rapid diagnosis.

"Platforms like this one can be deployed to diagnose complex diseases quickly, safely and relatively cheaply, using nanometer-scale systems to identify molecules of interest in the material analysed," Bufon explained in the paper published in the journal Organic Electronics.

Future works include paper-based biosensors to lower the cost even further and to improve portability and facilitate fabrication as well as disposal, the researchers said.​

​San Francisco, May 20 (IANS) In its bid to stop Google employees from leaving the company and begin their own ventures, Indian-born top executive Sundar Pichai has announced the company plans to set up a startup incubator within Google.

​New York, May 19 (IANS) Scientists including an Indian-origin professor have developed a new software which helps robots efficiently cope with challenges like grabbing a milk jug from the back of the refrigerator while boosting their creativity in solving problems.

​London, May 19 (IANS) Taking aspirin immediately after minor strokes could substantially reduce the risk of major strokes in patients who have minor 'warning' events, a team of European researchers has found.

Writing in the journal Lancet, the researchers said that immediate self-treatment with aspirin when patients experience stroke-like symptoms would considerably reduce the risk of major stroke over the next few days.

Aspirin is already given to people who have had a stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA -- often called a 'mini-stroke') to prevent further strokes after they have been assessed in hospital and in the longer-term, reducing the subsequent stroke risk by about 15 percent. 

However, based on a previous study, the team suspected that the benefits of more immediate treatment with aspirin could be much greater.

"The risk of a major stroke is very high immediately after a TIA or a minor stroke (about 1,000 times higher than the background rate), but only for a few days,” said lead researcher Peter Rothwell, stroke expert from the University of Oxford.

The team revisited the individual patient data from twelve trials (about 16,000 people) of aspirin for long-term secondary prevention -- that is, to prevent a further stroke -- and data on about 40,000 people from three trials of aspirin in treatment of acute stroke.

They found that almost all of the benefit of aspirin in reducing the risk of another stroke was in the first few weeks, and that aspirin also reduced the severity of these early strokes.

Rather than the 15 percent overall reduction in longer-term risk reported previously in these trials, aspirin reduced the early risk of a fatal or disabling stroke by about 70-80 percent over the first few days and weeks.

"Our findings confirm the effectiveness of urgent treatment after TIA and minor stroke - and show that aspirin is the most important component. Immediate treatment with aspirin can substantially reduce the risk and severity of early recurrent stroke,” Rothwell said.

"This finding has implications for doctors, who should give aspirin immediately if a TIA or minor stroke is suspected, rather than waiting for specialist assessment and investigations,” Rothwell noted.​

Toronto, May 19 (IANS) People with anxiety disorders often refuse or drop out of therapies as it makes them weak and infirm, says a study, suggesting that making mental health treatments easy may be really helpful and beneficial to them.

Anxiety disorders and related problems such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are among the most common mental health conditions and although effective therapies for these often debilitating disorders exist, many sufferers find them very difficult to engage with or complete. 

Canadian researchers decided to look for ways to make treatment easier to handle for those who need it most.

The team focused on safety behaviours -- things people do to make themselves feel less anxious.

“Giving patients greater agency is much more effective," said Adam Radomsky from Concordia University in a paper published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders.

The team followed 157 participants -- ranging from people with low-level anxieties to those diagnosed with OCD -- as they adapted old habits with new ones that they could use to avoid anxiety during exposure therapy.

The therapist exposed the participants to feared objects or situations without any danger.

The findings showed that using new safety behaviours during exposure therapy was slightly more helpful to participants than their usual or typical safety behaviours.

“Under the right conditions, safety behaviours have the potential to make the therapy more effective and more acceptable," added another researcher Hannah Levy.

The findings will help reduce the number of people who refuse or drop out of cognitive behavioural therapies and should result in more people getting the help that they need, the authors noted. ​

Toronto, May 19 (IANS) Parents, please take note! Researchers have found that the more time teenagers spend splitting their attention between various devices such as their phones, video games or TV, the lower their test scores in maths and English tend to be.

More time spent multitasking between different types of media is also associated with greater impulsivity and a poorer working memory in adolescents, said one of the study authors Amy Finn from the University of Toronto. 

The term "media multitasking" describes the act of using multiple media simultaneously, such as having the television on in the background while texting on a smartphone, Finn explained.

While it has been on the rise over the past two decades, especially among adolescents, its influence on cognition, performance at school, and personality has not been assessed before.

For the study the researchers surveyed 73 eighth grade students.

Overall, participants reported consuming a great deal of media, and on average watched 12 hours of television per week. They tended to multitask between mediums 25 percent of the time.

The results show how participants' media consumption patterns outside of school are related to their performance in school tests. 

The researchers found that teenagers who spent more time media multitasking fared significantly worse academically than others. 

They scored lower in certain aspects of their working memory, tended to be more impulsive and were more likely to believe that intelligence is not malleable. 

The study was published in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

"We found a link between greater media multitasking and worse academic outcomes in adolescents. This relationship may be due to decreased executive functions and increased impulsiveness - both previously associated with both greater media multitasking and worse academic outcomes," Finn explained.​

​Wellington, May 19 (IANS) To conduct near-space scientific investigations, NASA recently launched a super pressure balloon from Wanaka Airport in New Zealand.

As the balloon travels around the Earth, it may be visible from the ground, particularly at sunrise and sunset, to those who live in the southern hemisphere's mid-latitudes, such as Argentina and South Africa, NASA said in a statement. 

The successful launch of the scientific balloon on Tuesday was the fifth launch attempt for the team. Previous attempts were scrubbed due to weather conditions not conducive for launch.

The purpose of the flight is to test and validate the super pressure balloon technology with the goal of long duration flight at mid-latitudes, NASA said.

The team expects the balloon to be airborne for more than 100 days. The current record for a NASA super pressure balloon flight is 54 days

The science and engineering communities have identified long duration balloon flights at constant altitudes as playing an important role in providing inexpensive access to the near-space environment for science and technology. 

"The balloon is pressurised, healthy, and well on its way for this important test mission,” said Debbie Fairbrother, NASA's balloon program office chief.

NASA estimates the balloon will circumnavigate the globe about the southern hemisphere's mid-latitudes once every one to three weeks, depending on wind speeds in the stratosphere.​

​London, May 19 (IANS) Scientists have found evidence of icy comets orbiting a nearby Sun-like star, which may give a glimpse into how our own solar system developed.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, detected very low levels of carbon monoxide gas around HD 181327, which is located around 160 light years away in the Painter constellation.

The amounts of carbon monoxide detected using data from the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) -- an astronomical interferometre of radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile -- are consistent with the comets in our own solar system.

The results of the study were presented at the recently-held 'Resolving Planet Formation in the era of ALMA and extreme AO' conference in Santiago, Chile. They have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The young star system is about 23 million years old and the study is the first step in establishing the properties of comet clouds around Sun-like stars just after the time of their birth.

"Young systems such as this one are very active, with comets and asteroids slamming into each other and into planets," said led author Sebastian Marino from Cambridge.

"The system has a similar ice composition to our own, so it's a good one to study in order to learn what our solar system looked like early in its existence," Marino added.

Using ALMA, the astronomers observed the star, which is surrounded by a ring of dust caused by the collisions of comets, asteroids and other bodies.

It's likely that this star has planets in orbit around it, but they are impossible to detect using current telescopes.

HD 181327 has a mass about 30 percent greater than the Sun. ​