Knowledge Update

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) Even though the online social platforms are offering several privacy controls to users, it depends on the user how to use them making privacy a debatable issue, a new study has found.

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) Researchers have found that the vapours which are produced after e-liquid flavourings are heated inside e-cigarettes, are toxic.

According to a study, reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science and Technology, when e-liquid flavourings are heated inside electronic nicotine-delivery systems, the flavourings break down into toxic compounds at levels that exceed occupational safety standards.

The researchers analysed vapours created from both unflavoured and flavoured e-liquids loaded into three popular types of e-cigarettes. 

The results showed that in general, one puff of flavoured vapour contained levels of aldehydes exceeding the safe thresholds for occupational exposure -- set by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists -- by factors of 1.5 to 270. Vapours from unflavoured e-liquids contained aldehydes at significantly lower levels.

Electronic cigarettes were first introduced to the market in 2003 and health officials have been tracking usage and studying potential health effects.

A 2015 survey by the National Centre for Health Statistics reported that 3.7 per cent of adults used the devices regularly and 12.6 per cent had tried them at least once.

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) A team of researchers has created a new method to analyse big data that better predicts outcomes in health care, politics and other fields.

In an effort to reduce the error rate with methods like using a significance-based criterion for evaluating variables to find highly predictive variables, researchers at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard universities in the US proposed a new measure called the influence score, or I-score, to better measure a variable's ability to predict.

In their study, to be published in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that the I-score is effective in differentiating between noisy and predictive variables in big data and can significantly improve the prediction rate.

"The practical implications are what drove the project, so they are quite broad," lead author Adeline Lo said.

"That the I-score fares especially well in high dimensional data and with many complex interactions between variables is an extra boon for the researcher or policy expert interested in predicting something with large dimensional data," Lo, who is a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton's Department of Politics, added.

The I-score improved the prediction rate in breast cancer data from 70 per cent to 92 per cent. 

The I-score can be applied in a variety of fields, including terrorism, civil war, elections and financial markets, the researchers said.

​London, Nov 24 (IANS) For all dog owners out there, your canine friends are paying attention to what you say and do and they'll remember too.

A new study has suggested that just like humans, dogs too have "episodic memory" -- the ability to remember and recall events from the past. 

The study revealed that dogs can recall a person's complex actions even when they don't expect to have their memory tested.

"The results of our study can be considered as a further step to break down artificially erected barriers between animals and humans," said Claudia Fugazza from Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary. 

For the study, the team first trained 17 dogs to imitate human actions with the "Do as I Do" training method, in which dogs watch a person perform an action and then do the action themselves. 

For example, if their owner jumps in the air and then gives the "Do it!" command, the dog would jump in the air too.

Next, the dogs were trained to lie down after watching the human action, no matter what it was.

After the dogs had learned to lie down reliably, the researchers surprised them by saying "Do It" and the dogs did. 

The dogs were then tested in that way after one minute and after one hour. 

The results showed they were able to recall the demonstrated actions after both short and long time intervals. However, their memory faded somewhat over time, the researchers observed.

The same approach can most likely be used and adapted in a wide range of animal species, to better understand how animals' minds process their own actions and that of others around them, the researchers noted, in the study published in the journal Current Biology.

​New York, Dec 4 (IANS) While buying toys, parents and grandparents should consider the child's interests, not their gender because limiting choice of toys according to gender can fuel stereotypes, suggests new research.

Clues to the continued dominance of men in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields -- and the reason nurturing often comes more easily to women -- can be found in the children's toy department, said sociologist Elizabeth Sweet from California State University, Sacramento, US.

"When we wall off the toys that develop spatial skills or are devoted to science and say, 'These are only for boys,' and we wall off the toys that develop empathy and verbal skills and say, 'These are only for girls,' it severely limits how children develop," Sweet said in a university statement.

"If kids aren't exposed to the kinds of toys and play that help them develop those skills, they may not be as good at them over time. But even more insidious is that it reinforces the stereotype that boys are good at science and math, and girls are not. It pushes women and girls out of that field, because they think it's not for them," she explained.

Sweet believes that making STEM toys pink, as proposed by some toy manufacturers, would not help much.

"I think that's the wrong approach," Sweet said.

"I think that plays up the stereotype that girls are so different that they need a special kind of STEM toys," noted.

"Research shows that different kinds of toys help children to develop different kinds of skills," she said.

"For instance, building blocks are great for building spatial skills. Playing with dolls is really good for developing language skills and nurturing abilities. All of those skills are essential for a fully functioning human," Sweet pointed out.

​New York, Dec 3 (IANS) Short-term sleep loss due to long working hours may adversely affect your heart function, a study has warned. People who work in fire and emergency medical services, medical residencies and other high-stress jobs are often called upon to work 24-hour shifts with little opportunity for sleep. "For the first time, we have shown that short-term sleep deprivation in the context of 24-hour shifts can lead to a significant increase in cardiac contractility, blood pressure and heart rate," said study author Daniel Kuetting from University of Bonn in Germany. For the study, Kuetting and colleagues recruited 20 healthy radiologists, including 19 men and one woman, with a mean age of 31.6 years. Each of the study participants underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging with strain analysis before and after a 24-hour shift with an average of three hours of sleep. The researchers also collected blood and urine samples from the participants and measured blood pressure and heart rate. Following short-term sleep deprivation, the participants showed significant increases in blood pressure and heart rate. "The study was designed to investigate real-life work-related sleep deprivation," Kuetting said. As people continue to work longer hours or work at more than one job to make ends meet, it is critical to investigate the detrimental effects of too much work and not enough sleep. The results of this pilot study are transferable to other professions in which long periods of uninterrupted labour are common, Kuetting said. "These findings may help us better understand how workload and shift duration affect public health," he noted. The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago.

​New York, Dec 3 (IANS) It is time to look at your smartphone, not to check amy message or email but how old it is. According to media reports, popular messaging app WhatsApp will stop working on millions of smartphones by the end of 2016 unless they are upgraded.

​Abu Dhabi, Dec 3 (IANS/WAM) The foreign ministers of UAE and Japan discussed ways of bolstering strategic relations between the two countries in all spheres, and exchanged views about the latest regional and international developments here on Saturday.

New York, Dec 3 (IANS) Jardiance, a prescription medicine used along with diet and exercise to lower blood sugar, can now be prescribed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death in adult patients with Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled.

"Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death in adults with Type-2 diabetes mellitus," Jean-Marc Guettier from FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement on Friday.

"Availability of antidiabetes therapies that can help people live longer by reducing the risk of cardiovascular death is an important advance for adults with Type-2 diabetes," Guettier said.

The FDA's decision is based on a postmarketing study required by the agency when it approved Jardiance in 2014 as an adjunct to diet and exercise to improve glycemic control in adults with Type-2 diabetes mellitus. 

Jardiance, also known as empagliflozin, was studied in a postmarket clinical trial of more than 7,000 patients with Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 

In the trial, Jardiance was shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death compared to a placebo when added to standard of care therapies for diabetes and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, death from cardiovascular disease is 70 per cent higher in adults with diabetes compared to those without diabetes, and patients with diabetes have a decreased life expectancy driven in large part by premature cardiovascular death.

The most common side effects of Jardiance, distributed by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, are urinary tract infections and female genital infections.

New York, Dec 3 (IANS) Researchers have identified a critical cellular "off" switch for the inflammatory immune response that contributes to asthma attacks.

The switch is composed of regulatory proteins that control an immune signalling mechanism in cells, the study said.

"Asthma patients are constantly firing through this pathway because those proteins are stuck in the 'on' position, without proper control by other proteins that shut down this reaction," said Nicola Heller, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US.

Asthma has been correlated with an overabundance of one type of immune cell called M2 macrophages in the lungs. 

In a non-asthmatic person, the M2 macrophages activate to clean up inhaled allergens and foreign particles, and then deactivate when the irritant is broken down.

However, in people with asthma, the M2 cells and the chemical signals they emit linger and call in other cells that cause inflammation that can trigger an asthma attack with the classic symptoms of difficulty breathing, wheezing and shortness of breath. 

Over time, the lung is changed by secretions from the M2 cells, which cause the lung tissue to remodel itself, contributing to irreversible obstruction and poor lung function. 

"If you prevent these cells from becoming the M2 type, you can potentially stop the continued inflammation and long-term structural changes," Heller said.

The researchers believe that the findings, reported in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, also have implications for treatment of cancer and other disorders, such as obesity, in which M2 macrophage cells play a regulatory role in tumour growth and fat deposition.