Knowledge Update

New York, Oct 19 (IANS) Something must be going on in the brains of older adults that causes them to struggle to follow speech amid background noise, even when their hearing would be considered normal, researchers from University of Maryland have determined.

Researchers Samira Anderson, Jonathan Z. Simon and Alessandro Presacco found that adults aged 61-73 with normal hearing scored significantly worse on speech understanding in noisy environments than adults aged 18-30 with normal hearing.

The researchers studied two areas of the brain. They looked at the more 'ancestral' midbrain area which does basic processing of all sounds.

They also looked at the cortex which is particularly large in humans and part of which specialises in speech processing.

In the young group, the midbrain generated a signal that matched its task in each case - looking like speech in the quiet environment, and speech clearly discernable against a noisy background in the noise environment.

But in the older group, the quality of the response to the speech signal was degraded even when in the quiet environment, and the response was even worse in the noisy environment.

"For older listeners, even when there isn't any noise, the brain is already having trouble processing the speech," said Simon.

Neural signals recorded from cortex showed that younger adults could process speech well in a relatively short amount of time.

But the auditory cortex of older test subjects took longer to represent the same amount of information.

"Part of the comprehension problems experienced by older adults in both quiet and noise conditions could be linked to age-related imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory neural processes in the brain," Presacco added.

This imbalance could impair the brain's ability to correctly process auditory stimuli and could be the main cause of the abnormally high cortical response observed in the study.

"Older people need more time to figure out what a speaker is saying. They are dedicating more of their resources and exerting more effort than younger adults when they are listening to speech," Simon noted in a paper published by the Journal of Neurophysiology.

This eroding of brain function appears to be typical for older adults and a natural part of the ageing process.

The researchers are now looking into whether brain training techniques may be able to help older adults improve their speech comprehension.

​Washington, Oct 19 (IANS) In a major step towards faster and convenient delivery of medical tests, Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone that can analyse several samples at once to catch a cancer biomarker, producing lab quality results.

At a time when patients and medical professionals expect always faster results, researchers are trying to translate biodetection technologies used in laboratories to the field and clinic, so patients can get nearly instant diagnoses in a physician's office, an ambulance or the emergency room.

The research team created an eight channel smartphone spectrometer that can detect human interleukin-6 (IL-6), a known biomarker for lung, prostate, liver, breast and epithelial cancers.

A spectrometer analyses the amount and type of chemicals in a sample by measuring the light spectrum.

"The spectrometer would be especially useful in clinics and hospitals that have a large number of samples without on-site labs, or for doctors who practice abroad or in remote areas," said lead researcher Lei Li, Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

"They can't carry a whole lab with them. They need a portable and efficient device," Li noted.

Although smartphone spectrometers exist, they only monitor or measure a single sample at a time, making them inefficient for real world applications. 

The multichannel spectrometer can measure up to eight different samples at once using a common test called ELISA that identifies antibodies and colour change as disease markers, according to a study published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

"With our eight channel spectrometer, we can put eight different samples to do the same test, or one sample in eight different wells to do eight different tests. This increases our device's efficiency," said Li, who has filed a provisional patent for the work.

Although the system currently works with an iPhone 5, the researchers said they are creating an adjustable design that will be compatible with any smartphone.

​London, Oct 16 (IANS) Swedish scientists in a breakthrough research have found a highly cost-effective technology which can examine individual cells in leukemia and can eventually transform treatment for patients suffering from the cancer.

The new method helped researchers to examine individual tumour cells in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) -- a cancer of blood-forming tissues, hindering the body's ability to fight infection. 

The finding showed that leukemia tumours are comprised of cells having entirely different gene expressions.

"The study found that CLL cells do not consist of a single cell type, but of a number of sub-clones that exhibit entirely different gene expression," said Joakim Lundeberg, Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Typically, RNA sequencing will provide information about what RNA molecules are present in a biological sample, but not where or in which cells they are active, the researcher said.

"With this new, highly cost-effective technology, we can now get a whole new view of this complexity within the blood cancer sample. Molecular resolution of single cells is likely to become a more widely-used therapy option," Lundeberg observed.

The method provides analysis of all mRNA molecules in individual cells by binding a location tag to the molecules.

Individual cells are sorted on a specially-made glass surface and using analysis of RNA molecules with next-generation sequencing, one can tell which genes are active. 

"With the new method we can study thousands of cells in a day," Lundeberg said, in the paper reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Washington, Oct 10 (IANS) The US space agency has successfully maneuvered its spacecraft on way to asteroid Bennu, fine-tuning its trajectory to reach it and bring back samples from a potentially dangerous asteroid that could collide with the Earth.

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is on a journey that could revolutionise our understanding of the early solar system.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft fired its Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM) thrusters for the first time last weekend in order to adjust its trajectory on the outbound journey.

"We're very excited about what this mission can tell us about the origin of our solar system, and we celebrate the bigger picture of science that is helping us make discoveries and accomplish milestones that might have been science fiction yesterday, but are science facts today," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

The $800 million mission's main goal is to collect a small sample of rocks and surface soil from Bennu that finds a place in NASA's list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids.

Asteroids like Bennu are remnants from the formation of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists suspect that asteroids may have been a source of the water and organic molecules for the early Earth and other planetary bodies.

Although the odds are low, scientist have calculated that Bennu -- which is the size of a small mountain -- may impact Earth sometime between 2175 and 2199.

If all goes according to plan, OSIRIS-REx will arrive in August 2018 and spend the next two years photographing and mapping the asteroid's surface to better understand its chemical and mineralogical composition, including selecting the sample site.

Then, in July 2020, the spacecraft will touch the asteroid for only three seconds to collect at least 60 grams of loose rocks and dust using a device called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism and store the material in a sample return capsule.

OSIRIS-REx will return the sample to Earth in September 2023, when it will then be transported to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for examination.

​Beijing, Oct 7 (IANS) China may be the only space station in service when the International Space Station (ISS) retires in 2024, an official of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said on Friday.

China plans to launch the experimental core module of its space station around 2018 with a Long March-5 heavyload carrier rocket, and the 20 tonne combination space station will be sent into orbit around 2022, Xinhua news agency quoted Chairman of CASC Lei Fanpei as saying.

CASC is a major space developer.

When the International Space Station, China's space station may be the only one left in service, Lei said.

China's space station will include a core module and two lab modules, with ports that will allow multiple spacecraft to dock, according to Lei.

Following this, a manned spacecraft and cargo spacecraft will travel between the space station and the Earth to provide supplies. Taikonauts -- Chinese astronaut -- can stay at the space station for over one year.

The space station has a designed life of 10 years in orbit which is 400 km above the Earth's surface.

With this space station, China will become the second country after Russia to have developed a space station, Lei said.

China in 1992 made a three-step strategy for its manned space program, the large-scale manned space station being the last step.

In mid October, the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft would transport two taikonauts to Tiangong-2. They would stay there for 30 days.

​New York, Oct 6 (IANS) Researchers at Stanford University have developed a smartphone microscope that allows kids to play games or make more serious observations with miniature light-seeking microbes called Euglena.

"Many subject areas like engineering or programming have neat toys that get kids into it, but microbiology does not have that to the same degree," said Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering. 

"The initial idea for this project was to play games with living cells on your phone. And then it developed much beyond that to enable self-driven inquiry, measurement and building your own instrument," Riedel-Kruse noted.

Riedel-Kruse named his device the LudusScope after the Latin word "Ludus," which means "play," "game" or "elementary school". 

The LudusScope consists of a platform for the microscope slide where the Euglena swim freely, surrounded by four LEDs. 

Kids can influence the swimming direction of these light-responsive microbes with a joystick that activates the LEDs.

Above the platform, a smartphone holder positions the phone's camera over a microscope eyepiece, providing a view of the cells below.

On the phone, children can run a variety of software that overlay on top of the image of the cells. 

One looks like the 1980s video game Pac-Man, with a maze containing small white dots. Kids can select one cell to track, then use the LED lights to control which direction the cell swims in an attempt to guide it around the maze and collect the dots. 

Another game looks like a soccer stadium. 

Kids earn points by guiding the Euglena through the goal posts.

Other non-game applications provide microscope scale-bars, real-time displays of swimming speed or zoomed-in views of individual cells. 

These let kids collect data on Euglena behaviour, swimming speed and natural biological variability. 

The details of the LudusScope were published in the journal PLOS ONE

​Toronto, Oct 6 (IANS) Children have no difficulty and can easily distinguish between truth and lies, regardless of age. However, as they age, they get confused around particular kinds of truths and lies, a study has found.

Younger children see things more starkly. For them, truths are good and lies are bad.

But, by the time the children are 10-12 years old, they become more aware that truth and lies are less binary. 

"Children get a lot of messages from their parents saying that lying is always bad, but at the same time they see their parents telling 'white' lies to make life easier. Depending on their age, this is likely to be a bit confusing for children," said Victoria Talwar from the McGill University in Quebec, Canada. 

As children get older, their moral evaluations of both lies and truths increasingly gets influenced by whether they think this behaviour will cause harm to either others or themselves.

Younger children saw false confessions to help someone else as being more negative than older ones did.

Younger children are less concerned by truth-telling that had negative consequences for someone else, whereas older children were more conflicted about tattling. 

"The older they are, the more interested children are in the consequences of these actions. They are also more able to start looking at the intentions behind the speech," added Shanna Mary Williams, doctoral student at the McGill University. 

Further, the study showed that both young and old children had different views when it came to the skill of deciding which behaviours to reward or condemn. 

While younger children may be reflecting what is taught by parents and caregivers when it comes to tattling (i.e. that honesty in all forms is virtuous), the older children may be less likely to reward tattling because they are concerned with how their peers will perceive this behaviour, the researchers observed. 

In both cases, parents and teachers need to have a much more involved conversation about truth-telling or lie-telling with children starting as early as the age six, the researchers suggested. 

For the study, the team assessed how a child's moral understanding develops. They studied the behaviour of close to 100 children, aged six to 12.

"Looking at how children see honesty and deceit is a way of gaining insight into different stages of moral and social development," Talwar said.

The study was published in the journal International Review of Pragmatics.

​New York, Oct 18 (IANS) If you find your teenage son indulging in alcohol or drugs, do not just blame his peers. A specific imbalance in the functioning of his brain may put him at risk-taking behaviour risk, a study has found.

The study conducted on animals showed that the adolescent-specific behaviour may be driven by an imbalance in activity between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) -- an area of the brain involved in cognitive control and inhibition -- and the nucleus accumbens (NAC) which plays a central role in reward-seeking and addiction. 

Researchers from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the US said that the low activity in PFC with concurrent high activity in NAC -- an imbalance which appears to exist only during adolescence -- is essentially at odds with each other.

This imbalance is behind the tendency that could lead to potentially dangerous behaviour, including drug use, harmful drinking, addiction, unsafe sex and risky driving, which may result in unintended injuries, violence and/or even premature death.

"Understanding how specific changes in brain function during development relate to behaviour is critically important for determining why some individuals engage in excessive risk-taking behaviour during adolescence," said David J Bucci, professor at Dartmouth College.

For the study, researchers used adult rats, which normally have balanced activity in these areas and used a novel approach to decrease the activity in PFC and simultaneously increase activity in NAC while the rats learned an inhibition task. 

The rats that were treated with the new approach exhibited a dramatic delay in learning to inhibit and required twice the amount of training to learn the behaviour. 

The delay in learning this inhibitory response matched the delay that the researchers observed in normal adolescent rats during an earlier study. 

"Our hope is that these findings will inform new means to minimise the potential for engaging in drug use and other harmful behaviours during this important period of development," Bucci added in the paper published in the journal Current Biology. 

New York, Oct 18 (IANS) What if your smartwatch can help tune a guitar, displaying the note transmitted as you pluck and adjust each string? This is the future with a software upgrade that repurposes a smartwatch's existing accelerometer.