Knowledge Update

​New York, July 8 (IANS) If you find it hard to set aside time specifically for exercise, riding an electrically-powered bicycle on a regular basis can provide you with an effective workout while improving some aspects of cardiovascular health, suggests new research.

Electric-assist bicycles (pedelecs) are equipped with a built-in electric motor that provides modest assistance while the rider is actively pedalling, making it easier to cover greater distances and hilly terrain.

"Commuting with a pedelec can help individuals incorporate physical activity into their day without requiring them to set aside time specifically for exercise," said lead author of the study James Peterman at University of Colorado Boulder in the US.

Pedelecs have steadily grown more popular with consumers over the past decade, especially in Europe and Asia.

While an assist from an electric motor would get a rider disqualified from a competitive cycling competition such as the Tour de France, the researchers wanted to find out whether or not pedelecs could help physically inactive non-cyclists achieve recommended daily fitness levels.

To conduct the study, they recruited 20 non-exercising volunteers who were sedentary commuters (car commuters).

The researchers tested various aspects of their health, including blood glucose regulation and fitness.

The volunteers were then asked to substitute their sedentary commute for riding their pedelec at the speed and intensity of their choice for a minimum of 40 minutes three times per week while wearing a heart monitor and a GPS device.

After a month, the volunteers came back to the lab and had their health tested again. The researchers noticed improvements in the riders' cardiovascular health, including increased aerobic capacity and improved blood sugar control.

The findings were published online in the European Journal of Applied Physiology.

Pedelec bicycles are designed to provide motorised assistance up to speeds of 32 km per hour.

Above that speed, riders must provide all the pedalling power themselves. ​

New York, July 9 (IANS) Social media giant Facebook has said that it has begun offering an option to encrypt messages -- a way to have secret conversations with other users -- to some of 900 million users of Messenger, its messaging app.

​Toronto, July 9 (IANS) An international team of scientists has created a massive open-access database on human cultures to help answer long-standing questions about the forces that shaped human cultural diversity.

Singapore, July 8 (IANS) Prominent wealth funds of Singapore have shown keen interest in investing in India, a senior Indian official said on Friday.

"Lot of interest and deep appreciation in Singapore about reforms and policy initiatives in India," Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das said in a tweet about his ongoing

New York, July 8 (IANS) A study of numerous seasonal dark streaks called "recurring slope lineae" or RSLs found at a canyon network on Mars has offered important clues that liquid water could be present on the Red Planet.

Water pulled from the atmosphere by salts, or mechanisms with no flowing water involved, remain possible explanations for the occurrence of RSLs in part of the Valles Marineris region near Mars' equator.

"There are so many of them, it's hard to keep track," said study led author Matthew Chojnacki from the University of Arizona.

"The occurrence of recurring slope lineae in these canyons is much more widespread than previously recognised. As far as we can tell, this is the densest population of them on the planet, so if they are indeed associated with contemporary aqueous activity, that makes this canyon system an even more interesting area than it is just from the spectacular geology alone," he added.

The team examined the geological context of canyonland RSL sites and also calculated how much water would need to be present if the streaks are due to liquid water seeping through a thin surface layer to darken the ground.

Many of the sites where RSLs were previously identified are on inner walls of impact craters. At that type of site, a conceivable explanation could be that an extensive underground layer holding water was punctured by the crater-forming impact long ago and still feeds warm-season flows.

If it is seeping water that darkens RSLs, the amount of liquid water required each year to form the streaks in the studied portion of Valles Marineris would total about 10 to 40 Olympic-size swimming pools (about 30,000 to 100,000 cubic metres), the researchers estimate. 

However, no such underground layer fits the ridge or peak shapes at several of the RSL sites in the new study.

Another possible mechanism previously proposed for RSLs is that some types of salts so strongly pull water vapour out of the Martian atmosphere that liquid brine forms at the ground surface. 

The new study results, reported recently by NASA, bolsters the link between RSL and salts. Some sites bear bright, persistent streaks near the dark, seasonal ones. The bright streaks might result from salt left behind after evaporation of brine.

"There do seem to be more ways atmosphere and surface interact in the canyons than in blander topography, such as clouds trailing out of the canyons and low-lying haze in the canyons," Chojnacki said.

Another factor added by the new study is that RSLs not only darken the surface, but are also associated with material moving downslope. The research documents slumping and other three-dimensional changes at some RSL sites, occurring seasonally in tandem with the streaks.​

New York, July 8 (IANS) A team of astronomers has discovered a strange world with its three suns in the sky, witnessing either constant daylight or triple sunrises and sunsets each day depending on the seasons that may last longer than human lifetimes.

Using direct imaging, the team led by the University of Arizona researchers found that the giant planet HD 131399Ab is unlike any other known world with the widest known orbit within a multi-star system. 

Located about 340 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, HD 131399Ab is believed to be about 16 million years old, making it one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date. 

"HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that have been directly imaged, and it's the first one in such an interesting dynamical configuration," said Daniel Apai from the University of Arizona. 

According to study lead author Kevin Wagner, a doctoral student in Apai's research group, for about half of the planet’s orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky, the fainter two always much closer together, and changing in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year.

"For much of the planet’s year the stars appear close together, giving it a familiar night-side and day-side with a unique triple-sunset and sunrise each day," Wagner said.

"As the planet orbits and the stars grow farther apart each day, they reach a point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of the other - at which point the planet is in near-constant daytime for about one-quarter of its orbit, or roughly 140 Earth-years," he added.

The study was recently published in the journal Science.

The researchers used the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research Instrument (SPHERE) installed on the Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile to make the discovery.

Planets in multi-star systems are of special interest to astronomers and planetary scientists because they provide an example of how planet formation functions in these extreme scenarios. 

While multi-star systems seem exotic to us in our orbit around our solitary star - multi-star systems are in fact just as common as single stars.​

​London, July 9 (IANS) Living near the highway could cost your heart dear as researchers have found that risk of heart attack goes up with the amount of traffic noise to which you are exposed.

The increase in risk - though slight - is greatest with road and rail traffic noise, less with aircraft noise, researchers said.

For the study Andreas Seidler from Germany's Dresden University of Technology and his co-authors evaluated information from statutory health insurers on over a million Germans over the age of 40.

In this case-control study of secondary data, the addresses of persons living in the Rhine-Main region were matched precisely to road, rail, and traffic noise exposure measurements for 2005. 

When the analysis was restricted to patients who died of heart attack up to 2014/2015, a statistically significant association was found between noise exposure and the risk of heart attack. 

The authors believe the lower risk from aircraft noise can be explained by the fact that, unlike road and rail traffic noise, aircraft noise never remains continuously above 65 dB (decibel). 

They also see indications from their analysis that exposure to traffic noise influences not just the genesis, but the course of a heart attack.

The findings appeared in the journal Deutsches Arzteblatt International.

Although strictly speaking these results show only an association between traffic noise and heart attack, the authors believe that the sheer numbers of people affected by noise pollution mean that it is now right to start intensive efforts towards effective prevention of traffic noise. 

This study is part of the Europe-wide NORAH (Noise-Related Annoyance, Cognition, and Health) study investigating the health consequences of traffic noise.​

​London, July 9 (IANS) A team of scientists has demonstrated how the natural movement of bacteria could be harnessed to assemble and power microscopic 'windfarms' - or other man-made micro-machines such as smartphone components.

Using computer simulations, the scientists from Oxford University demonstrated that the chaotic swarming effect of dense active matter such as bacteria can be organised to turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source. 

"Many of society's energy challenges are on the gigawatt scale, but some are downright microscopic. One potential way to generate tiny amounts of power for micromachines might be to harvest it directly from biological systems such as bacteria suspensions," said study co-author Tyler Shendruk.

The study results were published recently in the journal 'Science Advances'.

Swimming bacteria are normally too disordered to extract any useful power from. But when the team immersed a lattice of 64 symmetric microrotors into a dense bacterial suspension, the bacteria spontaneously organised itself in such a way that neighbouring rotors began to spin in opposite directions - a simple structural organisation reminiscent of a windfarm.

"The amazing thing is that we didn't have to pre-design microscopic gear-shaped turbines. The rotors just self-assembled into a sort of bacterial windfarm," Shendruk said.

"When we did the simulation with a single rotor in the bacterial turbulence, it just got kicked around randomly. But when we put an array of rotors in the living fluid, they suddenly formed a regular pattern, with neighbouring rotors spinning in opposite directions," he added.

At micro scales, the simulations show that the flow generated by biological assemblies is capable of reorganising itself in such a way as to generate a persistent mechanical power for rotating an array of microrotors, which could be harnessed to power micro-machines​

​New York, July 9 (IANS) Researchers have discovered a new gene that controls blood vessel formation -- presenting a possible new drug target for cancer and heart disease.

The joint team from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) and the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) uncovered a role for the gene, Wars2, in the process of angiogenesis - a process controlling formation of a network of blood vessels that enables the body to deliver the nutrients necessary to keep the tissues and organs alive and healthy.

"Using different genetic techniques, we inhibited Wars2 function in both rats and zebrafish, and the resulting animals showed impairment of blood vessel formation within the heart and in the rest of the body," said Mao Wang from Duke-NUS, the co-first author of the study.

To confirm the involvement of Wars2 in angiogenesis, the researchers increased the effect of Wars2 and showed that blood vessel formation was enhanced. 

Specifically, they were able to determine that Wars2 plays an important role in supplying sufficient endothelial cells, the building blocks of blood vessels, for angiogenesis, according to the study published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

"Finding a way to control angiogenesis not only provides a target for the development of anti-cancer therapies, but may also prove useful in similarly starving abnormal blood vessel growth elsewhere in the body, like in diabetic eye disease," said Stuart Cook of Duke-NUS.​

London, July 9 (IANS) Cholesterol lowering statins have the potential to significantly reduce mortality and improve survival rates of patients with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancer, says a study involving an Indian-origin researcher.

"Statins have some of the best mortality evidence amongst all cardiovascular medications and statin use in patients with a diagnosis of high cholesterol is possibly the main reason that this diagnosis appears to be protective against death in patients with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancer," said Rahul Potluri from Aston University.

High cholesterol is strongly associated with obesity, which in turn, is associated with a higher risk of a number of forms of cancer.

The 14-year study of one million people has found that patients with cancer were less likely to die if they had a diagnosis of high cholesterol than if they did not. 

Having a diagnosis of high cholesterol was associated with a 22 per cent lower risk of death in patients with lung cancer, 43 per cent lower risk of death in breast cancer, 47 per cent lower risk of death in prostate cancer and 30 per cent lower risk of death in bowel cancer.

Previous studies found an association between having high cholesterol and developing breast cancer. Animal studies showed that giving statins for high cholesterol could reduce the risk of breast cancer. 

"Our research suggests that there's something about having a high cholesterol diagnosis that improves survival and the extent to which it did that was quite striking in the four cancers studied," added lead author Paul Carter from Aston University in Birmingham, Britain. 

"The results of this study strengthens the argument for a clinical trial evaluating the possible protective effect of statins and other routinely used cardiovascular medications such as aspirin, blood pressure medications, beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors in patients with cancer," Potluri noted.

In the new study, the team investigated the association between high cholesterol and mortality with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancer patients, between 1 January 2000 and 31 March 2013. 

Out of a total of 9,29,552 patients, 7997 had lung cancer, 5481 had breast cancer, 4629 had prostate cancer and 4570 had bowel cancer.

"Patients with cancer who are at high risk or have established cardiovascular disease should be given statins as per current guidelines. I don't think at the moment we can give statins for cancer per se. But this could change if there was a positive result in the clinical trial,” Potluri concluded.

The findings were presented at Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology (FCVB) 2016 in Italy, recently.​