Knowledge Update

New York, Feb 2 (IANS) If you feel constrained to share multiple photos on Instagram, a new feature will soon make your vacation look beautiful in a single album. According to a report in Droid Life on Thursday, Instagram is testing a new feature, now in beta stage, that lets users share multiple photos as a gallery. Only advertisers are able to share the gallery currently which users can swipe through horizontally, but the beta release of Instagram may make its way to all 600 million users soon. "Users can select up to 10 photos from their galley, slap on filters to each photo they choose, then upload the photos as an album to your timeline. From your followers' perspective, they will see the album and can then slide through the various shots, liking photos as they go," the report noted. However, beta users are currently not able to post the album on their timelines.

​New York, Feb 2 (IANS) Defying the massive fake news scandal that hit the social networking giant during the US presidential election as well as analysts, Facebook has registered strong growth in its mobile advertising business, with total revenue reaching $8.8 billion from $5.84 billion last year. It means $1.41 profit per share instead of the $1.31 that Wall Street was expecting. The quarterly profit was $3.57 billion -- more than double ($1.56 billion) the company reported last year, Fortune reported on Thursday. For the full year, Facebook's revenue climbed by $10 billion or 54 per cent to just over $27.5 billion compared with $17.9 billion in 2015 and the company's net income for the year more than doubled to $10 billion. Mired in controversies like "fake news" and inaccurate advertising, Facebook itself expected a slowdown in the growth rate of its advertising revenue. The one way by which the Menlo Park, California-based company registered the growth was by adding more than 265 million new monthly active users in 2016 -- almost as many users as the micro-blogging website Twitter has in total. Facebook now has more than 1.8 billion users who log on every month and more than 1.2 billion users who do so every day. Daily active users hit 1.23 billion, up from 1.18 billion last quarter and up 18 percent (Year-on-Year), compared to 17 percent last quarter. Another major growth engine for the social media giant was mobile. Over 1 billion of Facebook's daily users access the site primarily on their phones or tablets and that number grew by 23 per cent in the latest quarter. Mobile ad revenue made up about 84 per cent of the company's total ad revenue. Facebook also said it earned $12.4 billion in income from operations last year, nearly double the total from 2015 ($6.2 billion). Mobile now makes up 84 percent of its ad revenue -- the same as last quarter -- signalling that Facebook has successfully shifted to mobile. "During the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was repeatedly asked about Facebook's video content strategy. He explained that "we're focusing on shorter form content to start", and that the company needs to build a sustainable ad revenue sharing business model to pay professional creators to bring that content to Facebook, Tech Crunch reported.

​New York, Feb 1 (IANS) It is true that money does not grow on trees but electricity might someday, as scientists have developed a prototype biomimetic tree that mimics the branches and leaves of a cottonwood tree and generates electricity when its artificial leaves sway in the wind.

Researchers from Iowa State University found that the technology could spawn a niche market for small and visually unobtrusive machines that turn wind into electricity.

"The possible advantages here are aesthetics and its smaller scale, which may allow off-grid energy harvesting. We set out to answer the question of whether you can get useful amounts of electrical power out of something that looks like a plant," said Michael McCloskey, associate professor at Iowa University.

Cell phone towers in some urban locations, such as Las Vegas, have been camouflaged as trees, complete with leaves that serve only to improve the tower's aesthetic appeal. 

"Tapping energy from those leaves would increase their functionality," McCloskey said.

This prototype device features a metallic trellis, from which hang a dozen plastic flaps in the shape of cottonwood leaves.

"It's definitely doable, but the trick is accomplishing it without compromising efficiency. More work is necessary, but there are paths available," said Curtis Mosher of Iowa State University. 

In a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers explained that small strips of specialised plastic inside the leaf stalks release an electrical charge when bent by wind.

​London, Feb 2 (IANS) Scientists have identified new ways to provide vaccines against polio which do not require the growth of live virus for their manufacture, thereby reducing risk of virus escaping into the environment.

Polio is on the verge of being eradicated world-wide, but even when it has been officially declared as extinct as a disease, governments will need to continue to vaccinate to ensure against it recurring.

Using current technology, the production of vaccine requires the growth of enormous quantities of live virus, which is then chemically killed, thus presenting a dangerous security risk of virus escaping into the environment.

"Continuing to vaccinate after polio has been eradicated is essential to ensure against the disease recurring, but there are significant biosafety concerns about current production methods," said co-leader of the study David Rowlands, Professor of Molecular Virology at University of Leeds in Britain.

"Our new method of creating the vaccine has been proven to work in lab conditions and on top of that we've proved it's actually more stable than existing vaccines," Rowlands said.

Despite the success of vaccines produced from 'virus-like particles' (VLPs) for hepatitis B and human papilloma viruses, poliovirus VLPs have proved to be too unstable to make practical vaccines.

The research team found a new way to modify these VLPs, also known as 'empty capsids' by identifying mutations which make their structures sufficiently stable to act as vaccines.

The empty capsids change shape when warmed and become unusable as vaccines, but the mutations identified in this research prevent these damaging changes.

These new stabilised VLPs are suitable as replacements for the current killed poliovirus vaccines and can be produced in ways that do not require the growth of live virus, said the study published in the Journal of Virology.

Using the newly developed stabilised VLPs would be best used after the virus has been eradicated, the researchers said.

This study was a lab experiment, which shows stabilised VLPs to be effective in a controlled environment. 

Further research using animals (rats and mice) is planned, as part of the essential process of making sure the new VLPs are safe and effective for use in humans, the researchers said.

​Tokyo, Feb 2 (IANS) Electronics giant Panasonic has urged its employees to leave office by 8 p.m., during a time when Japan is reviewing its long working hours following the 2015 suicide by a young woman who had put in more than 100 hours of overtime per month.

Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga personally took charge of e-mailing its 100,000 employees in Japan about the decision, a company spokeswoman confirmed to Efe news on Thursday.

The regulation that came into force on February 1, also applies to executive posts, but does not affect the board of directors.

The idea of work-life balance has been gaining momentum in Japan in the light of the suicide case from 2015.

For example, Daiwa Securities Group recently approved a campaign urging employees to leave the office at 7 p.m., while Unicharm, a hygiene products manufacturer, has prohibited overtime after 10 p.m.

Historically, Panasonic has been among those Japanese firms which have paid more attention to such moves; in 1965, it prohibited the 6-day working week amidst the Japanese economic boom, something which most other firms did not change until the 1980s.

The suicide by Matsuri Takahashi in December 2015, after just seven months employment with advertising giant Dentsu, has put the spotlight back on Japanese companies' working hours and "karoshi", or death by excessive work.

The labour ministry has decided to take Takahashi's case to court on the grounds that Dentsu did not comply with labour norms, systematically tampering with their employees' overtime records.

​New York, Feb 2 (IANS) Examining a Martian meteorite found in Africa, scientists have uncovered evidence of at least two billion years of volcanic activity on Mars.

The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, offer new clues to how the planet evolved and insight into the history of volcanic activity on Mars, said lead author of the study Tom Lapen, Professor at University of Houston in the US.

Much of what we know about the composition of rocks from volcanoes on Mars comes from meteorites found on Earth. 

The meteorite, known as Northwest Africa 7635 and discovered in 2012, was found to be a type of volcanic rock called a shergottite. 

Eleven of these Martian meteorites, with similar chemical composition and ejection time, have been found.

"We see that they came from a similar volcanic source," Lapen said. 

"Given that they also have the same ejection time, we can conclude that these come from the same location on Mars," Lapen noted.

Together, these meteorites provide information about a single location on Mars. Previously analysed meteorites range in age from 327 million to 600 million years old. 

In contrast, the meteorite analysed by Lapen's research team was formed 2.4 billion years ago and suggests that it was ejected from one of the longest-lived volcanic centers in the solar system.

The finding confirms that some of the longest-lived volcanoes in the solar system may be found on the Red Planet.

London, Feb 2 (IANS) Do you chronically spend sleepless nights, have poor sleep quality or face difficulties initiating or maintaining sleep? Beware, you may be more than thrice at risk of developing asthma in adulthood, researchers have warned.

Asthma affects approximately 300 million people worldwide, with major risk factors including smoking, obesity and air pollution.

"The study found that those people with chronic insomnia had more than three times the risk of developing asthma, suggesting that any changes in the body due to insomnia may accumulate and result in more severe harmful effects on the airways," said lead author Ben Brumpton from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Norway.

More recently, symptoms of depression and anxiety have also been associated with a risk of developing asthma in adulthood, the researchers said.

For the study, published in the European Respiratory Journal, the team used statistical analysis to assess the risk of asthma among 17,927 participants aged between 20 and 65 years in Norway. 

The results showed that those participants reporting difficulty falling asleep "often" or "almost every night" during the last month had a 65 per cent and 108 per cent increased risk of developing asthma over the following 11 years, respectively.

Similarly, those who reported waking too early without being able to go back to sleep "often" or "almost every night" had a 92 per cent and 36 per cent increased risk of developing asthma. 

For people who reported poor quality sleep more than once a week, the risk of developing asthma increased by 94 per cent.

"As insomnia is a manageable condition, an increased focus on the adverse health effects of insomnia could be helpful in the prevention of asthma," suggested Linn Beate Strand from NTNU.

Beijing, Feb 1 (IANS) In a first, Chinese scientists have used a novel version of the CRISPR gene-editing technology to successfully produce live cows with increased resistance to bovine tuberculosis (TB).

The researchers from Northwest A&F University in China used a modified version of the CRISPR system called CRISPR/Cas9n to insert a new TB resistance gene -- NRAMP1 -- into the genome of bovine foetal fibroblasts -- a cell derived from female dairy cows.

"We used a novel version of the CRISPR system to successfully insert a TB resistance gene into the cow genome. We were then able to successfully develop live cows carrying increased resistance to TB," said led author Yong Zhang.

These cells were then used as donor cells in a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the nucleus of a donor cell carrying the new gene is inserted into an egg cell, known as an ovum, from a female cow.

These ovum were then nurtured in the lab into embryos before being transferred into mother cows for a normal pregnancy cycle, in which cows were produced with no off target effects on the animals' genetics -- a common problem when creating transgenic animals using CRISPR.

"Importantly, our method produced no off target effects on the cow genetics meaning the CRISPR technology we employed may be better suited to producing transgenic livestock with purposefully manipulated genetics," Zhang added in the study published in the journal Genome Biology.

For the study, the team used CRISPR to insert the new gene in 11 calves.

The results revealed that NRAMP1 had successfully integrated into the genetic code at the targeted region in all of the calves. 

When exposed to Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis) -- the bacterium that causes bovine TB -- the transgenic animals showed an increased resistance to the bacteria measured by standard markers of infection in a blood sample.

Further, white blood cells taken from the calves also showed much resistance to M. bovis exposure in laboratory tests.

​Mumbai, Jan 31 (IANS) Liqvd Asia, a digital marketing agency recognised by Google as a Premier Partner, has launched a one of its kind online exhibition gateway titled ExFirst.com, an open platform where an exhibition from any industry can be conducted by any organisation.

New Delhi, Feb 1 (IANS) Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry on Wednesday updated its crisis communication platform "AtHoc" with enhanced mobile alert functionality, upgraded map-based experiences for emergency operators and other performance improvements.