Knowledge Update

New York, June 7 (IANS) Consuming a Mediterranean diet rich in vegetable fats such as olive oil or nuts does not lead to significant weight gain compared to a low-fat diet, finds a new research.

The findings showed that fats from nuts, fish and phenolic-rich vegetable oils found in the Mediterranean diet are healthier than fats from meat and processed foods.

"Our study shows that a Mediterranean diet rich in vegetable fats had little effect on bodyweight or waist circumference compared to people on a low-fat diet,” said lead author Ramon Estruch from the University of Barcelona, Spain. 

A Mediterranean diet has been known to reduce mortality, heart diseases as well as cancer.

However, the fear of eating an all fat diet means that a low-fat diet continues to be recommended as a means of weight loss, the researchers said.

"The study certainly does not imply that unrestricted diets with high levels of unhealthy fats such as butter, processed meat, sweetened beverages, deserts or fast foods are beneficial," Estruch added.

For the study, published in 'The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology' journal, the team included 7447 participants (men and women) aged 55-80 who were randomly assigned to one of three groups - an unrestricted calorie Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil (2543), an unrestricted calorie Mediterranean diet rich in nuts (2454), or a low-fat diet where the advice was to avoid all dietary fat (2450). 

After five years, the low-fat diet group (from 40 per cent to 37.4 per cent) showed a decrease in the total fat intake and both Mediterranean diet groups (40 per cent to 41.8 per cent in olive oil; 40.4 per cent to 42.2 per cent in nuts) showed slight increase. 

The percentage of energy intake from protein and carbohydrate decreased in both Mediterranean diet groups.

On average, participants in all three groups lost some weight with the greatest weight loss seen in the Mediterranean diet with olive oil group (0.88 kg weight reduction in the olive oil group, compared to 0.60 kg for the low-fat diet group and 0.40 kg for the nuts group). 

"Calorie-obsessed caveats and warnings about healthier, higher-fat choices such as nuts, phenolic-rich vegetable oils, yoghurt should also be dropped. We must abandon the myth that lower-fat, lower-calorie products lead to less weight gain," commented Dariush Mozaffarian, Professor at Tufts University in the US, in a linked article.​

​New York, June 7 (IANS) Further burnishing copper's reputation as an essential nutrient for human health, researchers have found that the metal plays a key role in metabolising fat.

"We find that copper is essential for breaking down fat cells so that they can be used for energy," said lead researcher Chris Chang, professor at the University of California - Berkeley.

"It acts as a regulator. The more copper there is, the more the fat is broken down,” Chang noted.

The nutrient is plentiful in foods such as oysters and other shellfish, leafy greens, mushrooms, seeds, nuts and beans.

“We think it would be worthwhile to study whether a deficiency in this nutrient could be linked to obesity and obesity-related diseases," Chang said.

"Copper is not something the body can make, so we need to get it through our diet," he pointed out.

But the researchers caution against ingesting copper supplements as a result of these study results.

Too much copper can lead to imbalances with other essential minerals, including zinc.

An adult's estimated average dietary requirement for copper is about 700 micrograms per day, according to Food and Nutrition Board, Institute of Medicine, National Academies of Sciences in the US.

The researchers made the copper-fat link using mice with a genetic mutation that causes the accumulation of copper in the liver. 

The findings appeared online in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

The connection between copper and fat metabolism is not altogether surprising. The researchers actually found hints of the link in the field of animal husbandry.

"It had been noted in cattle that levels of copper in the feed would affect how fatty the meat was," Chang said. 

"This effect on fat deposits in animals was in the agricultural literature, but it hadn't been clear what the biochemical mechanisms were linking copper and fat," he noted.​

​Beijing, June 7 (IANS) China has begun establishing quantum communications networks in several cities, and is currently building a 1,000-km quantum communications line connecting Beijing and Shanghai.

New York, June 7 (IANS) Pandas do not like it hot and rising temperatures can also put pressure on their food supply by eliminating vast amounts of bamboo plants, researchers say.

"Higher climate temperatures would upset the entire system in the panda reserves and the wild, eliminating vast amounts of bamboo," said one of the researchers James Spotila, Professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.

But burning out food sources is not the only problem when it comes to climate change. Rising temperatures are bad for pandas themselves, the researchers noted.

Giant pandas experience heat stress when temperatures climb above 25 degrees Celsius.

"They have to live at temperatures below that to stay healthy," Spotila said. 

"In nature, they actively seek out cool areas (microhabitats) in summer and move to higher elevations to avoid heat," he noted.

Working at the Chengdu Research Base in China, home of roughly 150 giant pandas, the researchers discovered that they have bigger appetites than originally believed.

Metabolism of pandas was actually just a little below what would be expected for a mammal of their size. Their rates were on-par for bears and came in just a little below seals, kangaroos and deer, the findings showed.

But past research placed the pandas' metabolism at a much lower rate.

The researchers believe that although the metabolism of giant pandas is higher than previously reported, there is more than enough bamboo in nature to keep pandas healthy and happy for years. That is, until rising global temperatures kill the plants off.

The findings were reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

"Unchecked climate change will undo all of the years of hard work by the Chinese to save their national icon," Spotila said.​

​New York, June 7 (IANS) Scientists have discovered a ‘third gene' that leads to the development of the common neurodegenerative disease, a study said.

The study provided evidence that mutations in gene TMEM230 caused Parkinson's disease -- a disorder of the central nervous system that affects movement, often including tremors.

“The study showed that mutations in this new gene lead to pathologically and clinically proven cases of the disease," said led researcher Teepu Siddique, Professor at Northwestern University in the US.

The findings showed that the gene is responsible for producing a protein involved in packaging the neurotransmitter dopamine in neurons. Loss of dopamine-producing neurons is a defining characteristic of Parkinson's disease.

Also, individuals with this gene mutation showed both clinical characteristics of the disease -- symptoms like tremors, slow movement and stiffness -- as well as pathological evidence in the brain -- loss of dopamine neurons and abnormal accumulations of proteins inside surviving neurons.

"This particular gene causing Parkinson's disease is not just limited to one population in North America," Siddique said.

"It's worldwide, found in very different ethnic and environmental conditions. These mutations are that strong."

Further, TMEM230 was also found to encode a protein that extends across the membrane of tiny sacks inside neurons called synaptic vesicles, which store neurotransmitters before they are released from one cell to another.

The scientists hypothesised that the protein is involved in the movement of these vesicles.

"We believe that vesicle trafficking defects are a key mechanism of Parkinson's disease, not just for cases with this mutation, but a common pathway for the majority of cases," added Han-Xiang Deng, Professor at Northwestern University. 

"Our new findings suggest normalising synaptic vesicle trafficking may be a strategy for future therapeutic development. We can develop drugs to promote this critical pathway," Deng noted in the paper detailed in the journal Nature Genetics.

In the study, which stretched for 20 long years, the researchers performed genome-wide analysis on 65 members of a family, including 13 with the disease, in hopes of finding a common mutation that could explain the prevalence.​

​Beijing, June 7 (IANS) Concerned over increasing health problems, China has decided to provide 'family doctors' to every household in the country by 2020.

The State Council's Medical Reform Office said 200 cities will come under the service in 2016. In the following year, it plans to provide the facility to about 30 percent of China's population.

With a population of about 1.4 billion, of which 9 percent is elderly, China is faced with rising health problems such as cancer and obesity among others.

The problems have to do with various factors which range from pollution to sedentary lifestyle.

In 2015, over four million people were diagnosed with cancer and nearly three million died from it.

Family doctors are expected to serve as health guards for Chinese people, Xinhua news agency reported, quoting the National Health and Family Planning Commission.

A health official said the move will reduce healthcare costs and make it more accessible to public.

The doctors, to be put into services, will be from local hospitals and clinics and rural areas.

The public healthcare system is overburdened in China, which is faced with a shortage of doctors. The burgeoning middle class has given rise to growing privatization in the health sector.

According to state-run newspaper Global Times, there was an acute shortage of pediatrician in China: an average of 0.53 doctors for every 1,000 children.

According to WHO, China had 1.9 physicians per 1,000 people.

China ranked 95th globally in health expenditure per capita in 2013, according to the most recent World Bank data.​

​London, June 7 (IANS) Despite having a much simpler and smaller brain than that of primates, fish have the remarkable ability to distinguish between human faces, new research has found.

“Being able to distinguish between a large number of human faces is a surprisingly difficult task, mainly due to the fact that all human faces share the same basic features,” said first author Cait Newport from Oxford University.

“It has been hypothesised that this task is so difficult that it can only be accomplished by primates, which have a large and complex brain,” Newport noted.

To test this idea, the researchers wanted to determine if another animal with a smaller and simpler brain, and with no evolutionary need to recognise human faces, was still able to do so.

In the study, archerfish -- a species of tropical fish well known for its ability to spit jets of water to knock down aerial prey -- were presented with two images of human faces and trained to choose one of them using their jets. 

The fish were then presented with the learned face and a series of new faces and were able to correctly choose the face they had initially learned to recognise. 

They were able to perform this task even when more obvious features, such as head shape and colour, were removed from the images.

The fish were highly accurate when selecting the correct face, reaching an average peak performance of 81 per cent in the first experiment (picking the previously learned face from 44 new faces) and 86 per cent in the second experiment (in which facial features such as brightness and colour were standardised).

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Once the fish had learned to recognize a face, we then showed them the same face, as well as a series of new ones. In all cases, the fish continued to spit at the face they had been trained to recognize, proving that they were capable of telling the two apart,” Newport said.

“The fact that archerfish can learn this task suggests that complicated brains are not necessarily needed to recognise human faces,” Newport noted.​

​London, June 7 (IANS) Astrophysicists from the University of Birmingham have captured the sounds of some of the oldest stars in our Milky Way galaxy, a study says.

The findings could help researchers understand how our galaxy formed and evolved.

"We were thrilled to be able to listen to some of the stellar relics of the early universe,” said lead researcher Andrea Miglio.

The researchers reported the detection of resonant acoustic oscillations of stars in 'M4', one of the oldest known clusters of stars in the galaxy, some 13 billion years old.

"The stars we have studied really are living fossils from the time of the formation of our Galaxy, and we now hope be able to unlock the secrets of how spiral galaxies, like our own, formed and evolved,” Miglio noted.

Using data from the NASA Kepler/K2 mission, the team studied the resonant oscillations of stars using a technique called asteroseismology. 

These oscillations lead to miniscule changes or pulses in brightness, and are caused by sound trapped inside the stars. By measuring the tones in this 'stellar music', it is possible to determine the mass and age of individual stars.

The findings published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society open the door to using asteroseismology to study the very early history of our galaxy.

"Just as archaeologists can reveal the past by excavating the earth, so we can use sound inside the stars to perform Galactic archaeology,” Professor Bill Chaplin said.​

New York, June 7 (IANS) Scientists have developed a new tool to modify brain activity and memory in targeted ways, without the help of any drugs or chemicals.

The new tool is a protein that can be encoded in animal genomes to effectively switch off their inhibitory synapses -- connections between neurons -- increasing their electrical activity.

The GFE3 protein may help researchers map the brain's connections and better understand how inhibitory synapses modulate brain function, said lead author Don Arnold, Professor at University of Southern California.

It also may enable them to control neural activity and lead to advancements in research for diseases or conditions ranging from schizophrenia to cocaine addiction, Arnold said.

"GFE3 harnesses a little known and remarkable property of proteins within the brain," Arnold said.

The protein takes advantage of an intrinsic process -- the brain's cycle of degrading and replacing proteins.

Most brain proteins last only a couple of days before they are actively degraded and replaced by new proteins. GFE3 targets proteins that hold inhibitory synapses together to this degradation system and as a result, the synapses fall apart.

"Rather than a cell deciding when a protein needs to be degraded, we sort of hijack the process," Arnold explained.

For the study, published in the journal Nature Methods, the team of scientists studied the protein's effect in both mice and zebrafish. 

The researchers found that GFE3 protein triggered the neurons on the two sides of the spine to work in opposition, generating uncoordinated movements.

Drugs could be used to inhibit inhibitory synapses in the brain, for instance benzodiazapines, which treat anxiety, insomnia or seizures. 

"Unfortunately, cells that have very different, even opposite functions tend to be right next to each other in the brain," Arnold said. 

"Thus, pharmacological experiments are especially difficult to interpret. By encoding GFE3 within the genome, we can target and modulate the inhibitory synapses of specific cells without affecting other cells that have different functions," Arnold noted.​

New Delhi, June 7 (IANS) US-based tech giant InFocus on Tuesday launched Buddy, a portable notebook, that runs on Windows 10 and will be available exclusively on Snapdeal for Rs 14,999. "InFocus Buddy is our endeavour to cater to the core needs of youth - Internet browsing, multimedia and portability. The laptop delivers high performance, superior build quality of Foxconn, and a high design quotient while being low on budget," said InFocus India team in a statement. "We are confident that it will be well received by our customers who are looking to upgrade to a sleek notebook experience at an affordable price," said Tony Navin, Senior Vice President, Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives, Snapdeal, in a statement. The InFocus Buddy features a 13.3-inch HD display and is powered by 2.6 GHz Intel Celeron processor paired up with 2 GB RAM. It comes with a 32 GB eMMC storage and allows users to add up to 256 GB SSD internal storage. The battery in InFocus Buddy provides a backup of 8 hours. It supports a micro-SD card slot, two USB 3.0 ports and a HDMI port.