Knowledge Update

Geneva, July 22 (IANS) The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on Thursday warned global temperatures for the first six months of this year shattered more records, meaning 2016 is on track to be the world's hottest year on record.

WMO noted June marked the 14th consecutive month of record heat for land and oceans and the 378th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th century average. The last month with temperatures below the 20th century average was December 1984, Xinhua reported.

"Another month, another record. And another. And another. Decades-long trends of climate change are reaching new climaxes, fuelled by the strong 2015-2016 El Nino," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas was quoted as saying.

"The El Nino event, which turned up the Earth's thermostat, has now disappeared. Climate change, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will not. This means we face more heatwaves, more extreme rainfall and potential for higher impact tropical cyclones," Taalas added.

Meanwhile, carbon dioxide concentrations have passed the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere so far this year. Carbon dioxide levels vary according to the season, but the underlying trend is upwards. They showed a surprising increase for the first half of 2016, rising in June 2016 to nearly 407 ppm, four ppm greater than in June 2015.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited leaders to a special event on September 21 to deposit their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession to the Paris Agreement on climate change. 

It will also provide an opportunity for other countries to publicly commit to the agreement before the end of 2016.

London, July 20 (IANS) Greater fluctuations in "bad" cholesterol levels are likely to cause worse cognitive function like acute memory loss in elderly adults, says a research.

The findings showed that greater fluctuations in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), or "bad" cholesterol can affect blood flow to the brain -- a process which could lead to memory loss and even Alzheimer's, according to American Heart Association. 

The study participants with the highest LDL cholesterol variability took 2.7 seconds longer on average to finish a cognitive test to name ink colours of colour words written in different ink (for example, the word blue written in red ink), compared to individuals with the lowest variability.

"While this might seem like a small effect, it is significant at a population level," said lead author Roelof Smit, doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The link between variability and declining cognitive function was found regardless of average bad cholesterol levels or use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.

In addition, greater fluctuations in bad cholesterol can lead to greater white matter hyper-intensity load -- which has been linked to dysfunctioning in endothelial cells that make up the inner lining of blood vessels, and can further lead to a cardiovascular disease.

LDL cholesterol variability may also be important to neurocognitive function, said the paper published in the journal Circulation.

"These results add an important puzzle piece to the emerging evidence that heart risk factors are closely related to brain health," Smit added.

Measurements fluctuate because of diet, exercise, frequency of cholesterol-lowering statins and other factors.

However, these fluctuations might also reflect an increasingly impaired homeostasis -- the balance between food intake and energy expenditure -- for example, due to age or underlying disease, added J. Wouter Jukema, Professor at the Leiden University.

For the study, the team involved 4,428 elderly participants from Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands. The participants either had pre-existing heart disease or were at a higher risk for developing the condition because of histories of hypertension, cigarette smoking or diabetes.

They examined associations between LDL cholesterol variability and four cognitive measures: colour-word test for selective attention, letter-digit coding to assess information processing speed and picture-word learning to test verbal memory in two ways -- immediate recall and delayed recall after 20 minutes.​

​New York, July 20 (IANS) Researchers from Facebook's Connectivity Lab have developed a new technology that can one day make light-based wireless communications -- a far superior technology than the ones based on radio frequencies or microwaves -- a reality in the future.

The new technology can pave the way for fast optical wireless networks capable of delivering internet service to far-flung places.

"A large fraction of people don't connect to the internet because the wireless communications infrastructure is not available where they live, mostly in very rural areas of the world," said Tobias Tiecke, who led the research team. 

Light-based wireless communication, also called free-space optical communications, offers a promising way to bring the internet to areas where optical fibres and cell towers can be challenging to deploy in a cost-effective way. 

Using laser light to carry information across the atmosphere can potentially offer very high bandwidths and data capacity, but one of the primary challenges has been how to precisely point a very small laser beam carrying the data at a tiny light detector that is some distance away.

The Facebook researchers used fluorescent materials instead of traditional optics to collect light and concentrated it onto a small photodetector. 

They combined this light collector, which featured 126 sq cm of surface that can collect light from any direction, with existing telecommunications technology to achieve data rates of more than 2 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

"We demonstrated the use of fluorescent optical fibres that absorb one colour of light and emit another colour," Tiecke said. 

"The optical fibres absorb light coming from any direction over a large area, and the emitted light travels inside the optical fibre, which funnels the light to a small, very fast photodetector," he added in a paper described in the journal Optica.

The new light collector uses plastic optical fibres containing organic dye molecules that absorb blue light and emit green light. 

This setup replaces the classical optics and motion platform typically required to point the light to the collection area.

The fast speeds are possible because less than two nanoseconds lapse between the blue light absorption and the green light emission. 

In addition, by incorporating a signal modulation method called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, or OFDM, the researchers transmitted more than 2 Gbps despite the system's bandwidth of 100 MHz.

Toronto, July 20 (IANS) Reading fiction might be good for your mental health but exploring inner lives of characters like Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina can form ideas about others' emotions, motives and ideas, suggested a study.

According to the study published in journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a psychologist-novelist shows that reading or watching narratives may encourage empathy. 

"This intersection between literature and psychology has only taken off in the last few years. In part, because researchers are recognising that there is something important about imagination," said Keith Oatley, Professor, the University of Toronto Department.

Reading fiction and perhaps especially literary fiction simulates a kind of social world, prompting understanding and empathy in the reader, revealed the study. 

According to the research, people were asked to imagine phrases like "a dark blue carpet" and "an orange striped pencil" while staying in an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. 

Three such phrases were enough activate the hippocampus -- brain region associated with learning and memory, suggested the study.

"This points to the power of the reader's own mind, writers don't need to describe scenarios exhaustively to draw out the reader's imagination -- they only need to suggest a scene," added Oatley. 

To measure this empathetic response the researchers were the first to use the "Mind of the Eyes Test", in which participants view 36 photographs of people's eyes and for each choose among four terms to indicate what the person is thinking or feeling. 

The researchers found that reading narrative fiction gave rise to significantly higher scores than it did while reading non-fictional books.

Similar empathy-boosting effects have been found when participants watched the fictional television drama - The West Wing or played a video game with a narrative storyline, suggested the study.

Further studies have shown that narratives can even generate empathy for a race or culture that is dissimilar to one's own.

New York, July 20 (IANS) Ants belonging to a South American group switched from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to subsistence farming of fungi that grew on decomposing, woody plant matter some 55 to 60 million years ago, shortly after the dinosaurs died out, new research has found.

By contrast, humans began subsistence farming around 10,000 years ago, progressing to industrialised agriculture only in the past century. 

The genes of the ant farmers and their fungal crops revealed a surprisingly ancient history of mutual adaptations, said the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

This evolutionary give-and-take led to some species -- the leafcutter ants, for example -- developing industrial-scale farming that surpasses human agriculture in its efficiency, the researchers said.

Much of the research on fungus-farming ants came from scientists working in Panama through the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, during the past 25 years. 

The key chapters of the history of ant agriculture were written into the genes of both the insects and their crop fungi. 

"The ants lost many genes when they committed to farming fungi," said Jacobus Boomsma, Research Associate at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

This tied the fate of the ants to their food -- with the insects depending on the fungi for nutrients, and the fungi increasing their likelihood of survival if they produced more nutritious crop. 

"It led to an evolutionary cascade of changes, unmatched by any other animal lineage studied so far," Boomsma, who is also a biology professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The researchers found that leafcutter ant species cut and sow their underground farms daily with fresh, green plant matter, cultivating a fully domesticated species of fungus on an industrial scale that can sustain colonies with up to millions of ants.

Put in human terms, Boomsma said, the leafcutter ants' success is akin to people figuring out how to grow a single, all-purpose, disease-, pest- and drought-resistant superfood at an industrial scale, "by the time of the ancient Greek civilisation."

New York, July 21 (IANS) People and Page administrators on Facebook will now be able to broadcast up to four hours of video with Facebook Live -- in both fullscreen and video-only mode, a media report said on Thursday.

​Washington, July 20 (IANS) Eating more unsaturated fats like walnuts and soybean in place of dietary carbohydrate can lowers blood sugar level and improve in the prevention and management of type-2 diabetes, according to a new study.

The study provides evidence for the effects of dietary fats and carbohydrate on the regulation of glucose and insulin levels and several other metrics linked to type 2 diabetes.

"Our findings support preventing and treating these diseases by eating more fat-rich foods like walnuts, sunflower seeds, soybeans, flaxseed, fish, and other vegetable oils and spreads, in place of refined grains, starches, sugars, and animal fats," said Dariush Mozaffarian, Researcher, Tufts University in the study published in the journal PLOS Medicine.

The researchers performed the first systematic evaluation of all available evidence from trials to quantify the effects of different types of dietary fat (saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) and carbohydrate on key biological markers of glucose and insulin control that are linked to development of type 2 diabetes.

The researchers summarised findings from 102 randomised controlled trials, involving a total of 4,660 adult participants, which provided meals that varied in the types and amounts of fat and carbohydrate.

They then evaluated how such variations in diet affected measures of metabolic health, including blood sugar, blood insulin, insulin resistance and sensitivity and ability to produce insulin in response to blood sugar.

The researchers found that exchanging dietary carbohydrate or saturated fat with a diet rich in monounsaturated fat or polyunsaturated fat had a beneficial effect on key markers of blood glucose control.

"Among different fats, the most consistent benefits were seen for increasing polyunsaturated fats, in place of either carbohydrates or saturated fat," said Fumiaki Imamura, Researcher, University of Cambridge.​

New York, July 20 (IANS) In addition to environmental benefits, shifting away from inefficient and polluting fuel-based lighting -- such as candles, firewood, and kerosene lanterns -- to solar-LED systems can spur economic development as well -- to the tune of two million potential new jobs, a study says.

The researchers analysed how the transition from polluting fuel-based lighting to solar-LED lighting would impact employment and job creation.

"People like to talk about making jobs with solar energy, but it's rare that the flip side of the question is asked -- how many people will lose jobs who are selling the fuels that solar will replace," said researcher Evan Mills from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the US Department of Energy's Office of Science.

"We set out to quantify the net job creation. The good news is, we found that we will see many more jobs created than we lose," Mills noted.

The findings were published in the journal Energy for Sustainable Development.

There are about 274 million households worldwide that lack access to electricity.

But Mills' study focused on the "poorest of the poor", or about 112 million households, largely in Africa and Asia, that cannot afford even a mini solar home system, which might power a fan, a few lights, a phone charger, and a small TV.

Mills found that fuel-based lighting today provides 150,000 jobs worldwide. 

Because there is very little data in this area, his analysis is based on estimating the employment intensity of specific markets and applying it to the broader non-electrified population. He also drew on field observations in several countries to validate his estimates.

He did a similar analysis for the emerging solar-LED industry and found that every one million of these lanterns provides an estimated 17,000 jobs.

These values include employees of these companies based in developing countries but exclude upstream jobs in primary manufacturing by third parties such as those in factories in China. 

Assuming a three-year product life and a target of three lanterns per household, this corresponded to about two million jobs globally, more than compensating for the 150,000 jobs that would be lost in the fuel-based lighting marke, the study said.

Furthermore, Mills' research found that the quality of the jobs would be much improved. 

"With fuel-based lighting a lot of these people are involved in the black market and smuggling kerosene over international borders, and child labour is often involved in selling the fuel," he said. 

"These new solar jobs will be much better jobs -- they're legal, healthy, and more stable and regular," he added.

The new jobs span the gamut, from designing and manufacturing products to marketing and distributing them.

​Beijing, July 20 (IANS) China will expand its rail network to 150,000 km, including 30,000 km of high speed rail, by 2020, the country's top economic planner said on Wednesday.

​New York, July 20 (IANS) People are 1.3 times more likely to interact with celebrities on photo and video sharing website Instagram than its parent social media platform Facebook, suggests a new survey.