Knowledge Update

​New York, Feb 28 (IANS) Researchers have developed a computer method called ZeitZeiger that uses a sample of human blood to accurately predict circadian time -- the time of day according to a person's body clock.

Barcelona, Feb 28 (IANS) With the aim to provide great video quality while using less bandwidth, global video streaming service Netflix will soon support HDR technology on mobile devices.

​New York, Feb 28 (IANS) An increasing number of teenagers get discouraged to talk to their parents about potentially risky online experiences, such as cyberbullying, sexual exchanges and viewing inappropriate content online, because parents tend to emote much stronger feelings and tend to freak out, become angry or scared, researchers have found. The study showed that parents and children often have much different perceptions of and reactions to the same online situations. "There seems to be a disconnect between what types of situations teenagers experience every day and what types of experiences parents have online," said Pamela Wisniewski, Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the US. "Teenagers tended to be more nonchalant and say that the incident made them embarrassed, while parents, even though they were reporting more low-risk events, emoted much stronger feelings, becoming angry and scared. "For teenagers, some felt these types of experiences were just par for the course," Wisniewski added, in the study, presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in Oregon. Parents who overreact, when their children report any such events, are likely to curb communication as when risky situation are reported to parents, they tend to freak out and make things worse, causing teenagers to refrain from talking about situations that may upset their parents. "When teenagers actually talked to their parents about what had happened, they often wanted help understanding or navigating the situation, but parents tended to misinterpret their intent, not realising that their teenagers were trying to open lines of communication," Wisniewski said. Parental reactions -- both over or under reactions -- may not just thwart teenagers from seeking their parents' help with a current problem, but also diminish the teenagers' ability to successfully navigate future online encounters that may be even more risky, the researchers revealed.

New York, Feb 28 (IANS) A sedentary lifestyle can take a huge toll on your heart. Researchers have found that lack of exercise and excessive weight are strongly associated with a type of heart failure that is very hard to treat. Heart failure is a chronic condition in which the heart is unable to supply enough oxygenated blood to meet the demands of the body. "Previous studies have consistently found an association between low levels of physical activity, high BMI (body mass index), and overall risk of heart failure, but this study shows that the association is more pronounced for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, the type of heart failure that is the most challenging to treat," said the study's senior author Jarett Berry, Associate Professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the US. Heart failure is approximately equally divided between two subtypes -- heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HfrEF). Ejection fraction refers to the percentage of the blood that exits the heart with each contraction. Many treatments have been developed for treating heart failure with reduced ejection fraction but there are no evidence-based treatments for the other type. The pooled analysis looked at data from 51,000 participants in three cohort studies, the Women's Health Initiative, the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), and the Cardiovascular Health Study. Among the 51,000 participants, there were 3,180 individuals who developed heart failure. Of these, 39 per cent were heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, 29 per cent were heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, and 32 per cent had not been classified when the data was gathered. The incidence of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction was 19 per cent lower for individuals who exercised at recommended levels, showed the findings published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Similarly, body mass index (BMI) had an inverse relationship with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Higher BMI levels were more strongly associated with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction than with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.

​Barcelona, Feb 28 (IANS) Smartphone manufacturer Meizu on Tuesday unveiled its latest fast-charging solution "Super mCharge" at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 here. "Super mCharge" is a major breakthrough among existing direct charging solutions that enable batteries to top up at a much faster rate, the company said in a statement. The charging connector has a maximum power of 55W for an accelerated full charge time of 20 minutes, providing a significant enhancement in user experience. "'Super mCharge' is not only the fastest charging technology, but the safest one of all," said Li Tao, Supervisor of Meizu's R&D team in a statement.

​Washington, Feb 28 (IANS) US aerospace major SpaceX has announced plans to fly two private citizens on a week-long trip around the moon next year.

The two individuals approached SpaceX for the trip and they have "already paid a significant deposit" to do a moon mission, the company said in a statement on Monday.

"Fly me to the moon ... Ok," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted after the announcement was made. 

Lift-off will be from the Kennedy Space Center's historic Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral in Florida -- the same launch pad used by the Apollo programme for its lunar missions.

"Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind," SpaceX said.

Following the announcement about the private space mission around the moon, NASA said it "commends its industry partners for reaching higher".

"For more than a decade, NASA has invested in private industry to develop capabilities for the American people and seed commercial innovation to advance humanity's future in space," the US space agency said in a statement on Tuesday.

The two tourists would be sent on a SpaceX's Dragon 2 capsule, launched on the company's Falcon Heavy rocket.

"NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission," SpaceX said while thanking the US space agency "without whom this would not be possible".

"Falcon Heavy is due to launch its first test flight this summer and, once successful, will be the most powerful vehicle to reach orbit after the Saturn V moon rocket," the company said.

SpaceX said the space shuttle Dragon was designed from the beginning to carry humans and already has "a long flight heritage".

For the Hawthorne, California-headquartered company, the private trip around the moon is one step on the way to their goal of transporting humans to Mars.

Later this year, as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, SpaceX will launch its Crew Dragon (Dragon Version 2) spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).

This first demonstration mission will be in automatic mode, without people on board. 

A subsequent mission with crew is expected to fly in the second quarter of 2018. 

SpaceX is currently contracted to perform an average of four Dragon 2 missions to the ISS per year, three carrying cargo and one carrying crew. 

"By also flying privately crewed missions, which NASA has encouraged, long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions," SpaceX said.

SpaceX said it will conduct health and fitness tests of the two individuals who have expressed interest in a trip around moon. Initial training for the two will begin later this year. 

"This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the solar system than any before them," SpaceX said in the statement.

"Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow," SpaceX said.

New York, Feb 28 (IANS) Exoplanets with hydrogen pouring from volcanic sources may have a warmer surface and provide a better target for scientists to find signs of life outside our home planet, says a study.

"On frozen planets, any potential life would be buried under layers of ice, which would make it really hard to spot with telescopes," said lead author Ramses Ramirez from Cornell University in the US.

"But if the surface is warm enough -- thanks to volcanic hydrogen and atmospheric warming -- you could have life on the surface, generating a slew of detectable signatures," Ramirez said.

Combining the greenhouse warming effect from hydrogen, water and carbon dioxide on planets sprinkled throughout the cosmos, distant stars could expand their habitable zones by 30 to 60 per cent, according to this new research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Where we thought you would only find icy wastelands, planets can be nice and warm - as long as volcanoes are in view," Lisa Kaltenegger, Professor at Cornell University, said. 

The idea that hydrogen can warm a planet is not new, but an Earth-like planet cannot hold onto its hydrogen for more than a few million years. Volcanoes change the concept. 

"You get a nice big warming effect from volcanic hydrogen, which is sustainable as long as the volcanoes are intense enough," said Ramirez, who suggested the possibility that these planets may sustain detectable life on their surface.

A very light gas, hydrogen also "puffs up" planetary atmospheres, which will likely help scientists detect signs of life. 

"Adding hydrogen to the air of an exoplanet is a good thing if you're an astronomer trying to observe potential life from a telescope or a space mission. It increases your signal, making it easier to spot the makeup of the atmosphere as compared to planets without hydrogen," Ramirez said.

In our solar system, the habitable zone extends to 1.67 times the Earth-sun distance, just beyond the orbit of Mars. 

With volcanically sourced hydrogen on planets, this could extend the solar system's habitable zone reach to 2.4 times the Earth-sun distance -- about where the asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter. 

This research places a lot of planets that scientists previously thought to be too cold to support detectable life back into play.

"We just increased the width of the habitable zone by about half, adding a lot more planets to our 'search here' target list," Ramirez said.

​London, Feb 28 (IANS) If you are using a pacemaker to regulate your heartbeat, be careful about the proximity to your body of everyday household appliances and electrical tools as these may affect the functioning of the device, warns new research.

A pacemaker is a small device that is placed in the chest or abdomen to help control abnormal heart rhythms. This device uses low-energy electrical pulses to prompt the heart to beat at a normal rate and is used to treat problems relating to the rate or rhythm of the heartbeat.

The findings showed that pacemakers are susceptible to electric and magnetic fields (EMF) generated from powerlines, household appliances, electrical tools and entertainment electronics, in particular when programmed to maximum sensitivity or so-called unipolar sensing mode. 

This EMF interference, depending on factors such as the settings of the implant or strength of the field source with pacemakers, can result in bradycardia, or a slow heart rate. 

"Electromagnetic interferences with pacemakers in everyday life can cause harmful interferences," said Andreas Napp, cardiologist at RWTH Aachen University Hospital in Germany.

In many cases, holding the appliance, tool or other EMF source at a forearm's length distance -- greater than 12 inches -- limits the risk of electromagnetic interference. 

Thus, "in occupational environments, such as the manufacturing industry, an individual risk assessment for workers with a pacemaker is required due to the presence of a strong EMF," Napp added, in the paper appearing in the journal Circulation.

However, using dedicated device programming can effectively measure to reduce the individual risk of interference. For example, doctors can reprogramme pacemakers to a lower sensitivity to reduce EMF susceptibility, Napp said.

For the study, the team tested under different conditions the impacts of EMF exposure on 119 patients with pacemakers.

New York, Feb 28 (IANS) Dogs and two-year-old children show similar patterns in social intelligence, much more than one of our closest relatives -- chimpanzees, says a study.

The researchers looked at how two-year-olds, dogs and chimpanzees performed on comparable tests designed to measure various types of cognition. 

While chimpanzees performed well on tests involving their physical environment and spatial reasoning, they did not do as well when it came to tests of cooperative communication skills, such as the ability to follow a pointing finger or human gaze.

Dogs and children outperformed chimpanzees on cooperative communication tasks, and researchers observed similar patterns of variation in performance between individual dogs and between individual children.

"What we found is that there's this pattern, where dogs who are good at one of these social things tend to be good at lots of the related social things, and that's the same thing you find in kids, but you don't find it in chimpanzees," said Evan MacLean, Director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona in the US.

The findings, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, could help scientists better understand how humans evolved socially.

One explanation for the similarities between dogs and humans is that the two species may have evolved under similar pressures that favoured "survival of the friendliest", with benefits and rewards for more cooperative social behaviour.

"Our working hypothesis is that dogs and humans probably evolved some of these skills as a result of similar evolutionary processes, so probably some things that happened in human evolution were very similar to processes that happened in dog domestication," MacLean said. 

"So, potentially, by studying dogs and domestication we can learn something about human evolution," he added.

The research could even have the potential to help researchers better understand human disabilities, such as autism, that may involve deficits in social skills, MacLean said.

New York, Feb 28 (IANS) Shortly after te Earth formed and began to cool, the planet's first outer layer was a single, solid but deformable shell which later began to fold and crack more widely, giving rise to modern plate tectonics, suggests new research.

The research is the latest salvo in a long-standing debate in the geological research community: Did plate tectonics start right away -- a theory known as uniformitarianism, or did the Earth first go through a long phase with a solid shell covering the entire planet? 

"Models for how the first continental crust formed generally fall into two groups: Those that invoke modern-style plate tectonics and those that do not," said study co-author Michael Brown, Professor at the University of Maryland in the US. 

"Our research supports the latter -- a 'stagnant lid' forming the planet's outer shell early in Earth's history," Brown said.

Today's Earth is a dynamic planet with an outer layer composed of giant plates that grind together, sliding past or dipping beneath one another, giving rise to earthquakes and volcanoes. 

Others separate at undersea mountain ridges, where molten rock spreads out from the centers of major ocean basins.

The new research, published in the journal Nature, suggests that plate tectonics began later in the Earth's history.

To reach these conclusions, Brown and his colleagues from Curtin University and the Geological Survey of Western Australia studied rocks collected from the East Pilbara Terrane, a large area of ancient granitic crust located in the state of Western Australia. 

The area is known for having some of the oldest known rocks, ranging from 3.5 to about 2.5 billion years of age. The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old.

The researchers specifically selected granites with a chemical composition usually associated with volcanic arcs -- a telltale sign of plate tectonic activity.

Based on their analysis, the researchers concluded that the Earth probably began with a solid outer shell.

"We conclude that a multi-stage process produced Earth's first continents in a 'stagnant lid' scenario before plate tectonics began," Brown said.