Knowledge Update

​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.

​London, Feb 28 (IANS) In a first, researchers have found evidence of planetary debris surrounding a double sun that resembles Tatooine -- Luke Skywalker's home world in the "Star Wars" film.

A scene in "Star Wars", where Skywalker looks at the horizon with the setting of two suns is regarded as one of the most iconic images in cinema.

In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers described the remains of shattered asteroids orbiting a double sun consisting of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf roughly 1000 light-years away in a system called SDSS 1557.

The debris appears to be rocky and suggests that terrestrial planets like Tatooine might exist in the system, according to the researchers.

"With the discovery of asteroid debris in the SDSS 1557 system, we see clear signatures of rocky planet assembly via large asteroids that formed, helping us understand how rocky exoplanets are made in double star systems," said lead study author Jay Farihi from University College London.

To date, all exoplanets discovered in orbit around double stars are gas giants, similar to Jupiter, and are thought to form in the icy regions of their systems.

In contrast to the carbon-rich icy material found in other double star systems, the planetary material identified in the SDSS 1557 system has a high metal content, including silicon and magnesium. 

These elements were identified as the debris flowed from its orbit onto the surface of the star, polluting it temporarily with at least 1.1 trillion tonnes of matter, equating it to an asteroid at least four km in size.

"Building rocky planets around two suns is a challenge because the gravity of both stars can push and pull tremendously, preventing bits of rock and dust from sticking together and growing into full-fledged planets," Farihi said.

The team studied the binary system and the chemical composition of the debris by measuring the absorption of different wavelengths of light or 'spectra', using the Gemini Observatory South telescope and the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope, both located in Chile.

​New York, Feb 27 (IANS) Paying attention to overnight returns -- between the time the stock market closes and re-opens the next day -- may help investors develop profitable trading strategies, according to a new study.

​Beijing, Feb 27 (IANS) China on Monday said its domestic railway railway system is expected to grow by 30,000 kilometres before 2020.

Minister of Transport Li Xiaopeng said one-third of the increased network will consist of high-speed rail, People's Daily reported.

​Barcelona, Feb 27 (IANS) At the ongoing Mobile World Congress here, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Monday announced that it was working with Tata Communications to support the rollout of India's first LoRaWAN (LoRa)-based network.

​Beijing, Feb 27 (IANS) The amount of smuggled ivory tracked down in China fell 80 percent in 2016 from previous peak years, China's forest department has said.

Liu Dongsheng, deputy head of the State Forestry Administration, made the remarks at the opening ceremony of a wildlife protection campaign, without specifying detailed