Knowledge Update

Colombo, April 20 (IANS) Sri Lanka will upgrade the standards of its Adventure Tourism in accordance with international levels, a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office said here on Thursday.

​Geneva, April 20 (IANS) Remarkable achievements have been made in tackling neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) since 2007 with one billion people receiving treatment in 2015 alone, World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday in a report.

"WHO has observed record-breaking progress towards bringing ancient scourges like sleeping sickness and elephantiasis to their knees," Xinhua news agency quoted WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, as saying.

The WHO report, Integrating Neglected Tropical Diseases in Global Health and Development, demonstrates how strong political support, generous donations of medicines, improvements in living conditions, have led to sustained expansion of disease control programmes in countries where these diseases are most prevalent.

The report documented one billion people treated for at least one neglected tropical disease in 2015 alone as one of key achievements against NTDs.

However, the report highlighted the need to further scale up action in other areas.

"Further gains in the fight against neglected tropical diseases will depend on wider progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals," said Dirk Engels, Director of the Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases.

WHO estimated that 2.4 billion people still lack basic sanitation facilities such as toilets and latrines, while more than 660 million continue to drink water from "unimproved" sources, such as surface water.

​London, April 20 (IANS) An international team of astronomers has discovered a so-called "super-Earth" that could contain liquid water, a situation that would make it a very good candidate for harbouring life.

Super-Earth is a rocky, temperate planet orbiting a red dwarf star, Efe news agency reported.

In an article published on Wednesday in Nature magazine, the scientists say that the distant planet, dubbed LHS 1140b, is orbiting an M class red dwarf star a little smaller and dimmer than the Sun but the most common type of star in our galaxy.

The super-Earth and its parent star are located in the constellation Cetus, the Whale, 39 light years from the Sun, thus -- relatively speaking -- putting it in our galactic "neighbourhood," according to Felipe Murgas, the coauthor of the study and a researcher with Spain's Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics.

The study's main author, Jason Dittmann, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, said that this is the "most interesting" exoplanet that he's seen in the last decade.

The new planet was discovered thanks to the MEarth-South telescope network devoted exclusively to seeking out exo-planets.

The MEarth-South instruments enabled scientists to measure the planet's diameter and, using the HARPS spectrograph at the LaSilla ESO Observatory in Chile, they also were able to measure its mass, density and orbital period.

According to the measurements, LHS 1140b has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth and a mass 6.6 times that of our own planet.

But more important than that are the climatological conditions, and its orbital distance from its star puts LHS 1140b in the "habitable zone" - thus meaning that the planet's surface temperature allows water to exist in all three of its states: liquid, solid and as a gas.

Whether there is actually water on the planet or not depends on the composition of its atmosphere and other factors, including the presence of a magnetic field, such as the one Earth has, but the most important thing is for the planet to "fulfil the requirements to have water," which means that it must be in its star's habitable zone, Murgas said.

Regarding the age of the planet, the authors of the study said that it probably formed in a manner similar to Earth and its star is probably 5 billion years old, about the same age as the Sun, although the age of M-class stars is hard to determine for a variety of factors, the Spanish researcher added.

In the coming decades, LHS 1140b is sure to be investigated much more intensively, an ongoing project for the powerful next-generation telescopes, including the James Webb instrument and the E-ELT device, which will be installed in Chile and -- within a few years -- will be able to study the system and try to detect its atmosphere, along with other characteristics.

San Francisco, April 19 (IANS) Ahead of the sale of its core internet business to US wireless communications service provider Verizon, Yahoo on Tuesday reported 22.1 percent increase in revenue for the 2017 first quarter ending March.

​San Francisco, April 19 (IANS) As Facebook goes after Snapchat with slowly adopting Snapchat features into its bouquet of apps, the popular image messaging app has rolled out New World lenses as part of its augmented reality (AR) drive.

​New York, April 19 (IANS) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the two-day annual F8 developer conference launched a platform for developers to encourage augmented reality (AR) camera effects.

Tokyo, April 19 (IANS) The Japanese conglomerate Toshiba plans to split most of its main business branches, in addition to its memory chip unit, in order to improve its financial health, media reports said on Wednesday.

​Washington, April 18 (IANS) Citing the impact of demonetisation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday cut Indias 2017 GDP growth forecast by 0.4 percentage points to 7.2 per cent.

​Thiruvananthapuram, April 19 (IANS) A component of the skin mucus secreted by a frog species found in India can be harnessed to kill influenza viruses, new research has found.

In their experiment, the researchers found that when delivered intranasally, one of the antiviral peptides found in skin secretions from the Indian frog Hydrophylax bahuvistara can kill H1 variety of influenza viruses that can affect humans.

The research, carried out by researchers from Emory University in the US and Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology in Thiruvananthapuram, also showed that the compound can protect unvaccinated mice against a lethal dose of some flu viruses. 

The researchers believe that the compound has the potential to contribute to first-line anti-viral treatments during influenza outbreaks.

Frogs' skins were known to secrete "host defense peptides" that defend them against bacteria. 

The new finding, published in the journal Immunity, suggests that the peptides represent a resource for antiviral drug discovery as well.

Anti-flu peptides could become handy when vaccines are unavailable, in the case of a new pandemic strain, or when circulating strains become resistant to current drugs, said senior author Joshy Jacob, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory Vaccine Center and Emory University School of Medicine in in Atlanta, Georgia, US.

Jacob and his colleagues named the antiviral peptide they identified urumin, after a whip-like sword called "urumi" used in southern India centuries ago. 

Urumin was collected for the study after mild electrical stimulation of the frog.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Some anti-bacterial peptides work by punching holes in cell membranes, and are thus toxic to mammalian cells, but urumin was not.

Instead, urumin appeared to only disrupt the integrity of flu virus, as seen through electron microscopy. 

It binds the stalk of hemagglutinin, a less variable region of the flu virus that is also the target of proposed universal vaccines, the study said.

This specificity could be valuable because current anti-influenza drugs target other parts of the virus, Jacob said.

Urumin was specific for H1 strains of flu, such as the 2009 pandemic strain, and was not effective against other current strains such as H3N2, the study pointed out.