Knowledge Update

London, May 28 (IANS) Is your toddler struggling to learn a language? If so, using words that have repetitive syllables rather than mixed sounds may help him or her to learn language faster, a study suggests.

The findings showed that children are better at grasping the names of objects with repeated syllables, over words with non-identical syllables.

"This is the first evidence to show that infants have a repetition bias in learning new words,” said lead researcher Mitsuhiko Ota from University of Edinburgh in Britain. 

This may be the reason why words or phrases, such as 'train' and 'good night', have given rise to versions with repeated syllables, such as choo-choo and night-night

Such words are easier for infants to learn, and may provide them with a starter point for vocabulary learning.

“The study also shows that there may be a good reason why in so many cultures across the world, existing adult words and expressions are replaced by words with repeated syllables in baby-talk vocabulary. Some examples could be tum-tum, mama, dada, din-din and wee-wee," Ota added.

For the study, published in the journal Language Learning and Development, the team assessed language learning behaviour among 18-month-olds in a series of visual and attention tests using pictures on a computer screen of two unfamiliar objects.

The two objects were named with made-up words, which were communicated to the infants by a recorded voice - one with two identical syllables, for example neenee, and the other without repeated syllables, such as bolay.

The infants were then tested for their recognition of each made-up word. 

Recordings of their eye movements showed they looked more reliably at the object labelled with repeated syllables, than the other object.​

​New York, May 27 (IANS) A new method developed by two Indian-origin engineers can provide important insights into how exactly a machine-learning algorithm comes to a decision to either accept or reject your loan application - something that usually remains a mystery.

​New York, May 26 (IANS) A team of researchers has listed some web apps that help people work collaboratively and complete shared tasks online, often over long distances.

The results noted the evaluation of 20 popular apps for usability, including Google Drive, Skype, Doodle Poll, Gmail, Windows Hotmail, CoSketch and DropBox.

​Tokyo, May 26 (IANS) The world's first robotic mobile phone RoBoHon, a pocket-size walking and dancing robot, started sale on Thursday in Japan.

The human-shaped smartphone, developed by Japanese electronics company, Sharp and engineer Tomotaka Takahashi, inventor of the first robot astronaut 'Kirobo', went on

​Singapore, May 28 (IANS) Imagine if you could combine the myriad of pills you need to take for your ailment in just one tablet and release the drug in a timely manner or if doctors could easily make tablets on the spot that are tailored to each patient's needs. All these could become a reality with a new method of tablet fabrication designed by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS). The novel system can make customisable pills that release drugs with any desired release profiles. "For a long time, personalised tablets has been a mere concept as it was far too complex or expensive to be realised. This new tablet fabrication method is a game changer -- it is technically simple, relatively inexpensive and versatile,” said assistant professor Siow Ling Soh. "It can be applied at individualised settings where physicians could produce customised pills on the spot for patients, or in mass production settings by pharmaceutical companies," he noted in a statement released by National University of Singapore. Instead of manufacturing the drug tablet by printing layer by layer, the drug tablet designed by the Singapore scientists consists of three distinct components, including a polymer containing the drug in a specifically designed shape that will determine the rate of release of the drug. Using the new system, a doctor only needs to draw the desired release profile in a computer software to generate a template for making tablets specific to a patient's treatment, which can then be used to easily produce the desired pills using a 3D printer. The system is easy to use and does not involve any complex mathematical computation whenever a new release profile is needed. The fully customisable system is able to create a template to print tablets for any release profile, the researchers said. . In drug delivery, it is also often important to administer more than one type of drug into the human body simultaneously to treat an illness. The new fabrication method can be modified to include multiple types of drugs loaded within the same tablet -- and more importantly, each drug can be customised to release at different rates even within the same tablet, the study noted.​

​London, May 26 (IANS) Are you a workaholic? If so, you may be at an increased risk of having psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression, warns a new study, suggesting that taking work to the extreme may be a sign of deeper psychological or emotional issues.

The findings showed that workaholics are at greater risk of anxiety, depression and disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), -- a chronic condition including attention difficulty, hyperactivity and impulsiveness -- obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) -- excessive thoughts that lead to repetitive behaviours.

"Workaholics scored higher on all the psychiatric symptoms than non-workaholics," said Cecilie Schou Andreassen, researcher and clinical psychologist specialistat the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway.

Among the study participants, 32.7 percent workaholics met criteria for ADHD in contrast to 12.7 percent non-workaholics.

While 25.6 percent workaholics fulfilled the criteria for OCD, only 8.7 percent among non-workaholics were found at risk.

Anxiety was seen in 33.8 percent workaholics and 11.9 percent in non-workaholics.

8.9 percent people met criteria for depression among workaholics and only 2.6 per cent among non-workaholics.

"Whether this reflects overlapping genetic vulnerabilities, disorders leading to workaholism or, conversely, workaholism causing such disorders, remain uncertain," Andreassen explained

For the study, published in the journal PLOS One, the team examined the associations between workaholism and psychiatric disorders among 16,426 working adults.

The results clearly highlight the importance of further investigating neurobiological deviations related to workaholic behaviour, the researchers concluded.​

​New York, May 26 (IANS) Final preparations were underway on Thursday for the expansion of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) -- an expandable habitat for astronauts crucial for future deep space exploration -- which was installed at the International Space Station (ISS) in April.

NASA astronaut Jeff Williams performed leak checks and installed hardware to monitor and support BEAM expansion set to begin at 6.30 p.m. (India time). The expansion could potentially start earlier, NASA said in a statement.

Meanwhile, a new trio of ISS crew members is ready in Russia for final qualification exams for a mission set for launch on June 24. 

Cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin will command the new Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi. 

NASA Television will broadcast the expansion activities live. Crew entry into BEAM, which has an expanded habitable volume of 565 cubic feet (16 cubic meters), is planned for June 2.

Recently, carrying over 3,700 pounds of NASA cargo, science and technology demonstration samples from the ISS, a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

The Dragon spacecraft was taken by ship to Long Beach where some cargo was removed and returned to NASA for processing.

On April 17, engineers at NASA Johnson Space Centre in Houston used the ISS's high-tech robotic arm to pluck BEAM from the back of the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship that reached the space station on April 11 and added it onto the orbiting laboratory complex.

At the time of installation, the space station was moving over the Southern Pacific Ocean at an altitude of about 350 km from the Earth's surface. It will remain attached to the station for the two-year test period, US space agency NASA had written in a blog.

NASA is investigating concepts for habitats that can keep astronauts healthy during space exploration and BEAM will be the first test of such a module attached to the space station. 

It will allow investigators to gauge how well it performs overall and how it protects against solar radiation, space debris and the temperature extremes of space.

Expandable habitats require less payload volume on the rocket than traditional rigid structures and expand after being deployed in space to provide additional room for astronauts to live and work inside.

After the testing period is completed, BEAM will be released from the space station to eventually burn up harmlessly in the earth's atmosphere.

The 1,400 kg BEAM is a 17.8 million dollar project to test the use of an inflatable space habitat in micro-gravity. 

A total of six astronauts are already on-board the ISS along with another US commercial cargo ship called Cygnus that has been attached to the station since March 26. ​

​New York, May 26 (IANS) Researchers have shed new light on the ageing process in sea urchins -- remarkable organisms with the ability to quickly re-grow damaged organs and live to extraordinary old ages without showing any signs of poor health.

James A. Coffman from the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and Andrea G. Bodnar from the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies found that regenerative capacity in three species of sea urchins they studied was not affected by age.

"We wanted to find out why the species with short and intermediate life expectancies aged and the long-lived species didn't," said Coffman. 

"But what we found is that ageing is not inevitable: sea urchins don't appear to age even when they are short-lived. Because these findings were unexpected in light of the prevailing theories about the evolution of ageing, we may have to rethink theories on why ageing occurs," he explained.

The prevailing theory of the evolution of ageing holds that it is a side effect of genes that promote growth and development of organisms that have a low likelihood of continued survival in the wild once they have reproduced. 

Many organisms with a low expectation of survival in the wild experience rapid decline once they have reached reproductive maturity.

But the findings, published in the journal Aging Cell, contradict the prevailing theory. 

The researchers studied the red sea urchin Mesocentrotus franciscanus, which has a life expectancy of more than 100 years; the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a life expectancy of more than 50 years; and the variegated sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus, with a life expectancy of only four years.

The scientists found that although the variegated sea urchin, L. variegatus, has a much lower life expectancy in the wild than the other two species they studied, it displayed no evidence of a decline in regenerative capacity with age, which suggests that senescence (to grow old) may not be tied to a short life expectancy in the wild.​

​New York, May 27 (IANS) The discovery of a giant planet orbiting a very young star some 450 million light years from the Earth has forced astronomers to rethink their long-held view that larger planets take longer to form.

"CI Tau b" is at least eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits a two million-year-old star in the constellation Taurus. 

"For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form," said lead author Christopher Johns-Krull from Rice University in Texas. 

"That's been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation," he added.

The study, involving a dozen researchers from Rice, Lowell Observatory, University of Texas at Austin, NASA and Northern Arizona University, made the peer-reviewed study available online this week.

"CI Tau b" orbits the star CI Tau once every nine days. 

The planet was found with the radial velocity method -- a planet-hunting technique that relies upon slight variations in the velocity of a star to determine the gravitational pull exerted by nearby planets that are too faint to observe directly with a telescope. 

"This result is unique because it demonstrates that a giant planet can form so rapidly that the remnant gas and dust from which the young star formed, surrounding the system in a Frisbee-like disk, is still present," said co-author Lisa Prato of Lowell Observatory. 

"Giant planet formation in the inner part of this disk, where CI Tau b is located, will have a profound impact on the region where smaller terrestrial planets are also potentially forming," she added.​

​London, May 25 (IANS) Christie's sold the first four folios of well-known British playwright William Shakespeare on Wednesday, the first four editions of his collected works.

The folios were offered in a four-lot auction in London to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death. The sale began at 3.00 p.m. (local time) on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

Christie's said the sale was led by an unrecorded copy of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, widely considered the most important literary publication in the English language.

The First Folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which, including Macbeth and The Tempest, might have been lost without this edition. It is estimated to sell for 800,000 to 1.2 million pounds.

Prior to the auction, the four folios have been displayed in New York and London. The second Folio is estimated to sell for 180,000 to 250,000 pounds, the third is between 300,000 and 400,000 pounds, and the fourth one is between 15,000 and 20,000.

The First Folio, published in 1623, was a commercial success and was followed only nine years later by the Second Folio, providing a page-by-page reprint of the First.​