Introduction & Purpose
Knowledge update and Industry update at Skyline University College (SUC) is an online platform for communicating knowledge with SUC stakeholders, industry, and the outside world about the current trends of business development, technology, and social changes. The platform helps in branding SUC as a leading institution of updated knowledge base and in encouraging faculties, students, and others to create and contribute under different streams of domain and application. The platform also acts as a catalyst for learning and sharing knowledge in various areas.
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, March 28 (IANS) Scientists have developed a new way to make "polymer nanobrush" -- bristly materials which prevent dust from accumulating on various surfaces.
Polymer brushes have been used to coat everything from eyeglass lenses, boats and medical devices -- where they keep away smudges, damaging chemicals and germs -- to artificial joints and mechanical components in vehicles where they act as a lubricant.
Developed by a team of engineers led by Christopher Li, professor at Drexel University's college of engineering in Philadelphia, it gives scientists a higher degree of control over the shape of the brush and bristles and is much more efficient.
"The past few decades witnessed exciting progresses in studies on polymer brushes, and they show great promises in various fields, including coating, biomedical, sensing, catalysis to name just a few," Li said.
His approach involves growing a functional two-dimensional sheet of polymer crystals -- similar to a nanoscale piece of double-sided tape. When the sheet is stuck to an existing substrate, and the crystals are dissolved, the remaining polymer chains spring up, forming the bristles of the brush.
"We believe that our discovery of a new way to make polymer brushes is a significant advance in the field and will enable use of the brushes in exciting new ways," added Li in the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
The new brush is the most densely packed polymer brushes to date, with bristles less than a nanometre apart.
Polymer brush materials are especially useful in situations where pieces need to fit tightly together but need to be able to move without friction throwing a wrench in the works.
These are also effective for keeping important surfaces free of particles, chemicals, proteins and other fouling agents.
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, March 27 (IANS) Researchers have developed a way to make a magnetic material that could lead to lighter and smaller, cheaper and better-performing high-frequency transformers, needed for more flexible energy storage systems and widespread adoption of renewable energy.
Transportable energy storage and power conversion systems, which can fit inside a single semi-trailer, could make it cost effective to rapidly install solar, wind and geothermal energy systems in even the most remote locations.
"Such modular systems could be deployed quickly to multiple sites with much less assembly and validation time," said one of the researchers Todd Monson from Sandia National Laboratories in the US.
The new manufacturing method enables the creation of transformer cores from raw starting materials in minutes, without decomposing the required iron nitrides, as could happen at the higher temperatures used in conventional method, the researchers said.
Using this method could make transformers up to 10 times smaller than they are currently, Monson said in a statement.
Due to its magnetic properties, iron nitride transformers can be made much more compact and lighter than traditional transformers, with better power-handling capability and greater efficiency.
They will require only air cooling, another important space saver. Iron nitride also could serve as a more robust, high-performance transformer core material for the electrical grid.
So far, Monson and his colleagues have demonstrated the fabrication of iron nitride transformer cores with good physical and magnetic characteristics and now are refining their process and preparing to test the transformers in power-conversion test beds.
SUC Editing Team
Accounting & Finance
Beijing, March 27 (IANS) China will change the tax rules on online retail goods from April 8 to level the playing field for e-commerce platforms and traditional retailers and importers, a media report said on Sunday.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
London, March 26 (IANS) Exploring new pose for selfies? Thighbrows and duckface poses are things of the past. The new Tyrannosaurus rex (T.rex) hands pose is the latest trend, the media reported on Thursday.
Super User
From Different Corners
London, March 27 (IANS) Just one session of a non-invasive brain stimulation technique can reduce core symptoms of anorexia nervosa, including the urge to restrict food intake and feeling fat, says a study.
The researchers assessed whether repetitive transcranial stimulation (rTMS), already an approved treatment for depression, is also effective in reducing symptoms of anorexia.
Up to 20 percent of people with anorexia die prematurely from the disorder and treatments in adults are moderately effective, with only 20-30 per cent of people recovering from the best
"With rTMS we targeted the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain thought to be involved in some of the self-regulation difficulties associated with anorexia. This technique alters neural activity by delivering magnetic pulses to specific regions of the brain, which feels like a gentle tapping sensation on the side of the head," said first author of the study Jessica McClelland from King's College London.
"We found that one session of rTMS reduced the urge to restrict food intake, levels of feeling full and levels of feeling fat, as well as encouraging more prudent decision-making. Taken together, these findings suggest that brain stimulation may reduce symptoms of anorexia by improving cognitive control over compulsive features of the disorder," McClelland noted.
The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
In the study, 49 people completed food exposure and decision-making tasks, both before and after a session of either real or placebo rTMS. Symptoms of anorexia were measured immediately prior to and following rTMS, as well as 20 minutes and 24 hours after the session.
Compared to the placebo group, they found that participants who had real rTMS showed a tendency for more prudent decision-making.
SUC Editing Team
International Business
Seoul, March 25 (IANS) South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics has been given the green light by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung to build a $300 million research and development centre in the capital Hanoi, the media reported on Friday.
Super User
From Different Corners
London, March 25 (IANS) Scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) have developed a new lip-reading technology that can help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments.
The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and professor Richard Harvey, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying."
Unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available such as on CCTV footage or if the audio is inadequate and there are no clues to give the context of a conversation.
“We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers,” Dr Bear explained.
Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations from criminal investigations to entertainment.
Lip-reading has been used to pinpoint words footballers have shouted in heated moments on the pitch, but is likely to be of most practical use in situations where are there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits.
"Such a system could be adapted for use for a range of purposes like for people with hearing or speech impairments. Alternatively, a good lip-reading machine could be part of an audio-visual recognition system,” Dr Bear added.
Lip-reading is one of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence so it's great to make progress on one of the trickier aspects “which is how to train machines to recognise the appearance and shape of human lips,” Harvey noted.
The findings were scheduled to be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai on Friday.
The paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 2016.
Super User
From Different Corners
London, March 25 (IANS) Opening a new window for development of medical approaches to prevent cleft lip and palate, scientists have identified an important gene that is associated with the disfiguring condition.
Increased activity of a gene called GREM1 (Gremlin1) significantly ups the risk for cleft lip and palate, the findings showed.
"The findings reveal a link between GREM1 and specific clinical characteristics that arise in the formation of a cleft lip and palate,” said senior author of the study Heiko Peters from Newcastle University in Britain.
"This is very important in this research area as it helps to decipher the complex interplay between genes required for the different steps and in different tissues during lip and palate development,” Peters noted.
The findings were published in the journal PLoS Genetics.
A cleft is a gap in the upper lip, the roof of the mouth, or sometimes both. Each year, approximately 250,000 babies worldwide are born with a cleft, the study pointed out.
"A cleft lip can occur with or without a cleft palate and the genetic factors that predispose to palate involvement are largely unknown," Peters said.
The research team carried out analyses on genetic and clinical data from three large patient cohorts and identified a strong association between a region on chromosome 15 and cleft lip and palate.
They also carried out studies on mice to investigate where GREM1 is normally active in the development of the face and how alterations in the gene's activity may affect the lip and palate.
Results indicated that it is not the loss of GREM1 function but rather its increased activity that causes the condition.
"These findings provide a framework for further analyses of GREM1 in human cell systems and model organisms, broadening our understanding of the processes that regulate the face's shape," Peters noted.
Super User
From Different Corners
Washington, March 26 (IANS) NASA is sending scientists around the world this year - from the edge of the Greenland ice sheet to the coral reefs of the South Pacific - to delve into challenging questions about how our planet is changing and what impact humans are having on it.
While Earth science field experiments are nothing new for NASA, the next six months will be a particularly active period with eight major new campaigns taking researchers around the world on a wide range of science investigations, the US space agency said in a statement.
"Combining the long-term global view from space with detailed measurements from field experiments is a powerful way of deciphering what’s happening in our world,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in Washington.
The first of the new projects, currently in the field, is an examination of the extent to which the oceans around Greenland are melting the edges of the ice sheet from below.
Air quality is the focus of the Korea US-Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) campaign in South Korea, which begins in May. This joint study between NASA and the Republic of Korea is aimed at advancing the ability to monitor air pollution from space, with coordinated observations from aircraft, ground sites, ships and satellites.
Also in May, the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) takes to the sea and air for the second year to study how the world’s largest plankton bloom gives rise to small organic particles that influence clouds and climate.
Throughout much of this year, teams of scientists working on the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will be in the tundra and forests of Alaska and northwestern Canada investigating the role of climate in wild fires, thawing permafrost, wildlife migration habits and insect outbreaks, NASA said.
In June, the Coral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) project team will begin testing airborne and in-water instruments in Hawaii to assess the condition of threatened coral-based ecosystems. CORAL’s next stop will be Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Three airborne research campaigns will take to the skies this summer, focusing on critical climate-related components of the atmosphere. Flying tracks over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans thousands of miles long, the team of the Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission will gather measurements on more than 200 different chemical species from the ocean surface up to approximately seven miles in the atmosphere to understand how the movement and transformation of short-lived greenhouse gases, such as ozone and methane, contribute to climate change.
Focusing on the skies over the eastern half of the United States, the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport - America (ACT-America) research team will track the movement of atmospheric carbon to better understand the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases. Flights will originate from Louisiana, Nebraska and Virginia.
The Observations of Clouds above Aerosols and their Interactions (ORACLES) study will use airborne instruments to probe the impact on climate and rainfall of the interaction between clouds over the southeastern Atlantic Ocean and smoke from massive vegetation burning in southern Africa.
NASA believes that a better understanding of how the smoke particles alter stratocumulus clouds that play a key role in regional and global surface temperatures and precipitation will help improve current climate models.
Super User
From Different Corners
An international team of researchers has identified biological markers in the blood that can help doctors predict who is at high risk of developing active tuberculosis (TB).
One-third of the world's population is thought to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, but just a small fraction ever develops symptomatic illness.
If validated through additional clinical trials, a test based on these blood biomarkers that the researchers have now identified would allow doctors to target therapies to at-risk people, thus preventing them from getting sick.
The decade-long research effort was led by investigators from the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and the Center for Infectious Disease Research, Seattle, US.
The findings were published in the journal The Lancet.
The biomarkers were identified in two stages. First, researchers collected blood samples for two years from more than 6,000 Mtb-infected but otherwise healthy adolescent volunteers in South Africa.
Analysis of the samples revealed patterns of gene expression that differed between volunteers who eventually developed TB and those who remained healthy.
This risk "signature," confined to a set of 16 genes, could be detected in a blood sample as early as 18 months before the infected person developed active TB.
Next, the team confirmed the genetic risk signature's predictive ability in a study of more than 4,500 volunteers in South Africa and The Gambia.
The second study group was more varied in age, health status, ethnicity and exposure to locally common strains of Mtb than volunteers in the first study.
Despite the differences, the same risk signature found in the first study was detected in the people who eventually developed active TB during the second trial.
New York, March 26 (IANS)
