Knowledge Update

Dubai, Jan 23 (IANS) UAE's Emirates Airline will launch a new daily service from Dubai to the US, via Greece, from March 12, an official said here on Monday.

The new route to Newark Liberty International Airport complements Emirates' existing four daily flights between Dubai and New York's John F. Kennedy airport, by offering passengers with another access to the New York Metropolitan area, Xinhua news agency reported citing an airline statement.

The airline will operate a wide-body Boeing 777-300ER on the route.

"After careful review, Emirates concluded that extending one of our Dubai-Athens flights to Newark would be commercially and operationally feasible," said Tim Clark, Emirates Airline president.

Beijing, Jan 23 (IANS) The second-child policy implemented in China increased the number of births to 17.86 million in 2016, an increase of 7.9 per cent and the highest annual number since since 2000, according to health authorities.

The number of newborns has increased by 1.31 million compared with 2015, the National Health and Family Planning Commission revealed on Sunday.

The portion of the births to couples who already had at least one child rose quickly to at least 45 per cent last year, Yang Wenzhuang, a division director of the commission, said. 

The proportion was around 30 per cent before 2013, the China Daily reported.

"It demonstrates that the universal second-child policy (implemented early last year) came in time and worked effectively," Yang said.

"Some regions, mostly large cities in eastern areas, began recording second children as comprising more than half of local newborns," he added.

Yang expected that by 2020, the number of new births each year would stand between 17 to 20 million in China.

The top decision makers intensified efforts in late 2013 to adjust birth policies in place for three decades that limited most couples to just one child, aiming at addressing major demographic challenges such as an aging population and a looming labour shortage.

Starting in early 2014, couples in which one was an only child could have a second child. The universal second-child policy was implemented at the start of 2016.

By 2050, the policy is expected to bring about an extra 30 million working age people and reduce the nation's aging rate by 2 per cent, commission projections showed.

A 2015 survey by the commission found nearly 75 per cent of respondents were reluctant to have a second baby, largely due to economic burdens, the China Daily said.

Other major concerns were age, parents' career development, and a lack of caregivers, it showed. 

In the mid-1950s, the average number of annual births in China was around 18 million, almost the same as in 2016. But the fertility rate (the average number of children a woman will have during her life) has dropped from more than six then to less than two.

​Canberra, Jan 22 (IANS) Australia on Sunday announced an overhaul of security at all its international airports, with technology set to replace passports as means of identifying passengers by 2020.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection is seeking tenders for a self-processing system to be introduced later this year, Australia's ABC News reported.

The system will use fingerprints, iris or facial structure recognition at major air and sea ports.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said the aim was for more than 90 per cent of passengers to avoid paperwork or manual processing by staff.

"In many cases that will mean people, whilst they'll still have to carry their passport, may not have to present their passport at all in the long term," Dutton said on Sunday.

"But in the immediate term, this will make it easier, it will make it quicker, for people going in and out of our airports."

Under the new system, the existing SmartGates that scan passports electronically - introduced less than 10 years ago - would be retired.

Dutton said the $78 million upgrade would also boost security at the nation's borders by making it easier to detect threats, ABC News reported.

He said cutting down processing times for travellers was also likely to boost tourism.

Forty-million air and sea travellers were processed by the Australian Border Force in the 2015-16 year, the Guardian reported citing an official report.

​New York, Jan 22 (IANS) Non-invasive brain stimulations can work like a scalpel to improve the precise memory of a human and can also be used as a treatment for those who have memory problem because of brain injury, a new study has found.

Precise memory is critical for knowing details such as the specific colour, shape and location of a building you are looking for, rather than simply knowing the part of town it is in.

Researchers from the Northwestern University found that by stimulating the brain network responsible for spatial memory with powerful electromagnets, the precision of people's memory for identifying locations improved.

"We show that it is possible to target the portion of the brain responsible for this type of memory and to improve it," said Joel Voss, assistant professor.

The scientists used MRI to identify memory-related brain networks then stimulated them with non-invasive electromagnetic stimulation.

The paper, published in the journal Current Biology, paves the way for developing new treatments for people who have problems with precise memory because of brain injury.

Toronto, Jan 22 (IANS) Scanning the brain of a premature baby shortly after birth to map the location and volume of lesions -- small areas of injury in the brain's white matter -- may help doctors better predict whether the baby will have disabilities later, researchers say.

Lack of oxygen to the brain is the most common form of brain injury in premature infants, resulting in damage to the white matter - which contains nerve fibers that maintain contact between various parts of the brain.

Damage to white matter can interfere with communication in the brain and the signals it sends to other parts of the body.

"In general, babies who are born before 31 weeks gestation have a higher risk of thinking, language and movement problems throughout their lives, so being able to better predict which infants will face certain developmental problems is important so they get the best early interventions possible," said Steven P. Miller from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, Canada.

For the study, the team looked at a group of A58 premature babies with white matter injury who had an MRI brain scan at an average of 32 weeks after gestation. These babies were then evaluated for motor, thinking and language skills when they were 18 months old.

The findings showed that a greater volume of small areas of injury, no matter where they were located in the brain, could predict movement problems at 18 months.

A greater volume of these small areas of injury in the frontal lobe -- area of the brain that regulates problem solving, memory, language skills and voluntary movement skills -- could predict thinking problems.

On the other hand, premature infants with larger frontal lobe injuries had a 79 fold greater odds of developing thinking problems than infants without such injuries, as well as a 64 fold greater odds of problems with movement development.

Future studies should evaluate premature infants not just at 18 months, but at various points throughout childhood to determine the long-term consequences of early injuries in the brain, Miller added.

The study was published in the journal Neurology.

​New York, Jan 21 (IANS) You will no longer miss the tweets from your best friend as Twitter is testing a new feature that highlights tweets from a select, single person it thinks you should not miss.

​Seoul, Jan 21 (IANS) After launching its modular device G5 this year, South Korean electronics conglomerate LG will launch its G6 smartphone with Google voice assistant service next month, media reported. According to Yonhap news agency, LG agreed with Google last year to feature the assistant and is in the final stage of stabilising the software before unveiling the model just ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) scheduled to take place from February 27 to March 2 in Barcelona. iPhone already has its voice assistant Siri and Samsung is reportedly working on its own smart assistant for Galaxy S8 called Bixby. "Google Assistant will be very helpful for LG Electronics when all other tech firms are showcasing their voice assistant service. The difficult task for LG is whether the service will recognize the Korean language," a source was quoted as saying. An LG official said the company "cannot confirm the speculation at the moment" and Google also declined to comment on the matter at the moment, the report said. LG G6 will be equipped with "heat pipes" for better cooling as part of its efforts to strengthen product safety. This technology lowers the temperature of the processor by some 6-10 per cent by dispersing heat and helping prevent it from reaching the battery cell.

​London, Jan 21 (IANS) When people start becoming delirious, it may have a long-lasting impact on their brains, accelerating the dementia process among them, a new study has found.

A research conducted in the University College London and the University of Cambridge found that episodes of delirium in people who are not known to have dementia, might also reveal dementia at its earliest stages.

"If delirium is causing brain injury in the short and long-term, then we must increase our efforts to diagnose, prevent and treat delirium. Ultimately, targeting delirium could be a chance to delay or reduce dementia," said Daniel Davis from the University of Cambridge.

The study noted that while both delirium and dementia are important factors in cognitive decline among the elderly, delirium is preventable and treatable through dedicated geriatric care.

"Unfortunately, most delirium goes unrecognised. In busy hospitals, a sudden change in confusion is not noticed by hospital staff. Patients can be transferred several times and staff often switch over -- it requires everyone to 'think delirium' and identify that a patient's brain function has changed," Davis noted in a paper published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

​New York, Jan 20 (IANS) If you think that going incognito online will save you from being seen or noticed, you are wrong. According to researchers including two of Indian-origin, online behaviour can be identified by linking anonymous web browsing histories with your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles.