Knowledge Update

Toronto, March 30 (IANS) For at least a million years, an asteroid orbiting the "wrong" way around the Sun has been playing a cosmic game of chicken to avoid collision with Jupiter and with about 6,000 other asteroids sharing the giant planet's space, a study says.

The findings published in the journal Nature showed that the orbit has been stable for at least a million years and will be stable for at least a million years more. 

The asteroid, nicknamed Bee-Zed, is the only one in this solar system that is known both to have an opposite, retrograde orbit around the Sun while at the same time sharing a planet's orbital space, said researcher and co-author Paul Wiegert from University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Most of the known asteroids in our solar system travel around the Sun in what is called a prograde motion -- that is, counter-clockwise when visualised from above. 

But asteroid 2015 BZ509 ("Bee-Zed" for short) circles clockwise, in a retrograde motion -- moving against the flow of all other asteroids in the giant planet's orbital entourage.

Put another way, it is as if Jupiter is a monster truck on a track circling the sun, and the asteroids in Jupiter's orbit are sub-compact cars all whizzing along in the same direction. 

Bee-Zed is the rogue -- driving around the track in the wrong direction -- steering between the 6,000 other cars and swerving around the monster truck. 

And it does so every single lap, and has done so for thousands of laps for a million years or more.

So how does it avoid colliding with Jupiter? Jupiter's gravity actually deflects the asteroid's path at each pass so as to allow both to continue safely on their way, Wiegert said.

Little is known about the asteroid, which was discovered in January, 2015. It has a diametre of about three kilometres and it may have originated from the same place as Halley's comet, which also has a retrograde orbit. 

The team has not been able to determine yet if Bee-Zed is an icy comet or a rocky asteroid.

But their analysis -- based on complex calculations and on observations through the Large Binocular Camera on the Large Binocular Telescope in Mt. Graham, Arizona, during a span of 300 days -- show Bee-Zed is somehow able to maintain a stable orbit even as an outlier.

The researchers believe that learning more about the asteroid provides another intriguing glimpse into previously unknown and unmapped features of our solar system. 

"The detective work has just begun," Wiegert said.

​New York, March 29 (IANS) It is easy to try to carry on a conversation with Siri, the virtual assistant on your iPhone, or Amazon's Alexa device from your living room. But if you are doing it more lately, please beware. Researchers suggest that frequent interactions with human-like products may indicate loneliness. "If someone notices they are talking more to Siri lately, maybe that has something to do with feeling lonely," said one of the researchers Jenny Olson, Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas School of Business in the US. "From that standpoint, it's important to be aware of it," Olson said. While these humanlike products do keep people from seeking out normal human interaction, which is typically how people try to recover from loneliness, there are limits to this phenomenon, and the long-term consequences are unclear, the researchers warned in a study published online in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Generally, when people feel socially excluded, they seek out other ways of compensating, like exaggerating their number of Facebook friends or engaging in pro-social behaviour to seek out interaction with other people," Olson said. "When you introduce a human-like product, those compensatory behaviours stop," Olson noted. In four experiments, the researchers found evidence that people who felt socially excluded would exhibit those compensating behaviours unless they were given the opportunity to interact with a human-like product. "Alexa isn't a perfect replacement for your friend Alexis," lead author James Mourey of DePaul University in Chicago said. "But the virtual assistant can affect your social needs," Mourey added.

New York, March 29 (IANS) After much speculation over its built and specifications over past few months, South Korean giant Samsung on Wednesday launched its flagship device, Galaxy S8, that has a voice assistant. The device comes in two variants with different screen sizes -- the 5.8-inch Galaxy S8 and 6.2-inch Galaxy S8 Plus - and will be available from April 21. Registrations begin from March 30. The device might be priced from $720 (approximately Rs 47,000). Samsung will release these devices in India in the coming months. Samsung also revealed Bixby, a smart voice assistant to rival Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant. With a perfect amalgam of voice, vision and touch, Bixby can search restaurants, take screenshots and even book a cab for you. The technology giant has used the best hardware and provided the best features available to date in the device. The device has a bezel-less curved edge "infinity display" covered with pristine glass and a 12MP rear camera with multi-frame processing and optical image stabilisation. It has an 8MP auto-focus front shooter. The device is IP68 rated, meaning it is water and dust resistant. The company has also upped the security feature with iris scanner, face recognition and fingerprint scanner - moved to the back of the device - to unlock the device. The home button has been shifted beneath the "infinity display". Available in five different colours, the device has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Octa core (2.35 GHz Quad + 1.7 GHZ Quad) processor. For models that will be available in countries other than the US, Samsung has used Exynos Octa core (2.35 GHz Quad + 1.9 GHZ Quad) processor. According to The Verge, while Galaxy S8 comes with a 3,000 mAh battery, the Galaxy S8 Plus is fitted with 3,500 mAh battery pack. The devices run on Android 7.0 Nougat and have USB-C and 3.5mm headphone jacks. The company also launched Samsung Connect app that would allow users to control a number of internet-connected home devices such as TVs or refrigerators. It also unveiled new Gear 360 camera. There's a lot riding on Samsung S8 devices due to the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. Samsung ultimately killed that smartphone after two recalls, both related to issues with faulty batteries. Earlier this month, Samsung launched two new smartphones in 'Galaxy A' series -- 5.7-inch Galaxy A7 and 5.2-inch Galaxy A5 in India which were priced at Rs 33,490 and Rs 28,990, respectively. Samsung also joined the 'go digital' bandwagon, and last week unveiled Samsung Pay, the company's flagship mobile payments service, in India. At MWC in Barcelona this year, Samsung announced its innovative "I&G (Infill & Growth) Project" for Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd that will help expand both the current network capacity as well as network coverage.

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Researchers have found why at around the age of four children suddenly do what three-year-olds are unable to do -- put themselves in someone else's shoes.

This enormous developmental step occurs as a critical fibre connection in the brain matures, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

For the study, the research team from Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig, Germany and Leiden University in the Netherlands analysed MRI data and behavioural data of 43 normally developing 3- and 4-year-old children.

"Our findings show that the emergence of mental state representation is related to the maturation of core belief processing regions and their connection to the prefrontal cortex," said the researchers.

The study showed that maturation of fibres of a brain structure called the arcuate fascicle between the ages of three and four years establishes a connection between two critical brain regions.

One region is at the back of the temporal lobe that supports adult thinking about others and their thoughts, and the other is in the frontal lobe that is involved in keeping things at different levels of abstraction and, therefore, helps us to understand what the real world is and what the thoughts of others are. 

Only when these two brain regions are connected through the arcuate fascicle can children start to understand what other people think, the study said.

Interestingly, this new connection in the brain supports this ability independently of other cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, language ability or impulse control, according to the researcher.

​New York, March 29 (IANS) Parents who regularly play "Pokemon GO" with their children report a number of side benefits including increased exercise, more time spent outdoors and opportunities for family bonding, says a study.

Pokemon GO is a location-based augmented reality game in which players capture fictional creatures from the Japanese Pokemon franchise on smartphones and other mobile devices by "finding" them in real-world locations.

"Location-based augmented reality games are pretty different than sitting in front of a TV or playing a typical video game, so we were interested in the way kids and their parents were sharing those experiences together," said lead author Kiley Sobel from University of Washington.

"People still don't really know how to build tech that works well for families, so when this game came out of the blue and really caught on, we wanted to look at what its ingredients for success were," Sobel said.

The results, taken from a qualitative survey of 67 parents and interviews with 20 additional parents playing "Pokémon GO" with their families in the US, are detailed in a paper to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI 2017 conference to be held at Denver, Colorado in May.

Some parents said the interactive and mobile nature of the game made them feel better about engaging in that type of gameplay, as opposed to more sedentary forms of "screen time", according to the study.

The study did not include perspectives of parents who do not allow their children to play Pokemon GO. 

Many parents -- particularly moms of boys, fathers of girls and parents of teenaged children -- reported spending more quality time with their children as a result of playing "Pokémon GO" together and talking more than usual, both about the game itself and about other things in their lives, the researchers said.

Parents also appreciated how the game motivated both them and their children to go outside and exercise in ways that were convenient and fit into their lives, as their children displayed newfound enthusiasm for walking the dog or walking rather than driving to dinner or playgrounds. 

For some participants, these "Poké-walks" led to walking thousands more steps per day, the study said.

​Beijing, March 28 (IANS) The cloud-computing arm of Amazon on Tuesday launched its first joint innovation service centre in China's Qingdao.

The Qingdao-Amazon Web Services (AWS) centre aims to provide cloud-computing services -- including web services, new technologies such as cloud-computing and big data,

​Beijing, March 28 (IANS) Beijing plans to meet the national air quality standard by 2030, according to a blueprint for the city's overall planning 2016-2030.

The blueprint was submitted to the standing committee of the municipal People's Congress for deliberation on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

​In today's era of stiff competition, when companies are looking for marketing opportunities everywhere, and trying to market their products even in started markets through innovative ideas, rural market presents a huge opportunity. Rural market is large both in terms of number of potential buyers and demand for products and services. Rural markets are growing very rapidly in emerging econoimies.

New York, March 27 (IANS) Apple has won a trial against a Chinese phone maker in Beijing as a court overturned a ruling against Apple Inc. over iPhone patents, a media report said on Monday.

​New York, March 25 (IANS) A US-based company has designed a portable device that lets you turn any smartphone into a 3D printer using the light from the touchscreen to process your plastic creations, a media report said.