Knowledge Update

​London, July 7 (IANS) Grouping young tennis players according to their physical maturity rather than their chronological age could help us develop future tennis champions, suggests new research.

Boys and girls can vastly vary in their rates of growth and maturity during adolescence.

Those who mature early are taller, quicker, bigger and stronger, giving them a significant advantage over their late maturing peers. 

"Tennis is a sport that favours youth who are taller and mature earlier than their peers. Our data show that this selection bias impacts girls from the age of 10 and boys from the age of 12,” said Sean Cumming, Senior Lecturer in Health at University of Bath in England.

"Every extra inch in height of a player increases the velocity of their serve by five per cent. At the elite level, it is quite common to find junior players, especially adolescent boys, who are six foot or greater in height," Cumming noted.

This means that later maturing players are often overlooked in the elite tennis selection process.

"While early maturing boys and girls have initial advantages, the pressure to win can lead them to play to their physical strengths at the expense of their technical development,” Cumming said.

"In contrast, talented, yet late maturing players might be excluded or overlooked by talent spotters on the basis of physical characteristics that are not fully realised until adulthood," Cumming explained.

The research team, which includes mathematicians from Bath's Institute for Mathematical Innovation, is developing new statistical methods to allow practitioners to better assess and account for individual differences in biological maturity and help ensure players are evaluated on the basis of their physical development, and not just their chronological age.

The team published its research in the journal Pediatric Exercise Science.

"The challenge for those working with young tennis players is to look beyond differences in maturity, and recognise those players who may have the greatest potential for success as an adult,” Cumming said.

Now the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), the governing body for the game of tennis in Great Britain, is collaborating with scientists at the University of Bath to use statistics to avoid selection bias towards early maturing players, a university statement said.

Gill Myburgh, a Strength and Conditioning coach at the LTA also sees potential benefits in periodically matching players by maturity status, rather than age, in training and competition.​

​New York, July 13 (IANS) The micro-blogging website Twitter and Bloomberg Media have signed a deal to live stream several media company's TV news shows on Twitter platform.

​London, July 10 (IANS) Scientists at Finland's Aalto University have set a new world record in microwave detection, breaking the old record by fourteen-fold -- a feat that may lead to manufacturing of ultrasensitive cameras and accessories for the emerging quantum computer.

The record was made using a partially superconducting microwave detector. The first of the two key enabling developments is the new detector design consisting of tiny pieces of superconducting aluminum and a golden nanowire.

This design guarantees both efficient absorption of incoming photons and very sensitive readout. The whole detector is smaller than a single human blood cell, according to the scientists.

"For us size matters. The smaller the better. With smaller detectors, we get more signal and cheaper price in mass production," said Mikko Mottonen, the leader of the record-breaking Quantum Computing and Devices research group.

The European Research Council (ERC) has recently awarded Mottonen a prestigious proof of concept grant to develop the detector towards commercial applications.

The new detector works at a hundredth of a degree above absolute zero temperature. Thermal disturbances at such low temperatures are so weak that the research team could detect energy packets of only a single zeptojoule. That is the energy needed to lift a red blood cell by just a single nanometre.

The second key development concerns the amplification of the signal arising from the tiny the energy packets. To this end, the scientists used something called positive feedback, which means that there is an external energy source that amplifies the temperature change arising from the absorbed photons.

Microwaves are currently used in mobile phone communications and satellite televisions, thanks to their ability to pass through the walls. 

More sensitive microwave detectors may lead to great improvements of the present communication systems and measurement techniques.

"Existing superconducting technology can produce single microwave photons. However, detection of such travelling photons efficiently is a major outstanding challenge. Our results provide a leap towards solving this problem using thermal detection," said Joonas Govenius, the first author of the work.​

​New York, July 12 (IANS) Micro-blogging website Twitter has increased its animated GIF (graphics interchange format) size limit from 5MB to 15MB if uploaded on the web from a desktop, a media report said on Tuesday.

​New Delhi, July 11 (IANS) India has the most transparent companies because of a strong regulation system firmly in place, a new report revealed on Monday, adding that China on the other hand has weak or non-existent anti-corruption policies and has the most opaque firms.

​New York, July 10 (IANS) Rats, humans and cockroaches have a system similar to the Global Positioning System (GPS) in their heads that allows them to navigate new surroundings, researchers have discovered.

A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University in the US recorded the activity in the brain of a restrained cockroach and found that insects use sight and a vestibular-like system to track direction and angle.

The finding, published in journal Current Biology, is an example of convergent evolution -- distinct animals developed similar systems to manage the same problems.

"We've known that a mammal can come into a new area and, after a short period of being disoriented, find its way around," said Roy Ritzmann, a Biology Professor at Case Western Reserve and an author of the new study.

Humans and other mammals rely on head-direction, place and grid cells in their brains to process, integrate and update sensory information. The cues come from the direction they look, what they see and motion, he said.

"Orienting contributes to spatial memory, so they can return to point A or navigate to something they like or away from something they don't like," said PhD student Adrienn G. Varga, lead author of the study.

By repeating experiments that uncovered head-direction cells in rats, Ritzmann and Varga found head-direction-like activity and evidence of contextual cue processing in cockroaches.

When the researchers closely examined the activity of central complex cells, they found that some neurons appear to encode head direction like a compass, while others appeared to encode the relative direction of the rotation after each stop, storing navigational context.

"The fact we found these cell activities that are very similar to those in mice and rats and us strongly indicates insects rely on the same sensory inputs we need to orient ourselves and their brains process these inputs in a similar manner," Varga said.

Ritzmann said either humans and cockroaches have a common ancestor and this capability was retained or, more likely, represents convergent evolution.​

​New York, July 8 (IANS) Micro-blogging website Twitter started streaming from Wimbledon, one of the most-watched tennis tournaments of the year, a media report said.

Wimbledon's official Twitter account tweeted the live feed early Wednesday morning, opening up Twitter plans to stream live sports more broadly.

​New York, July 10 (IANS) If you are having problems at work then there is a likelihood that your parents might be responsible to some extent for your troubles, a new research has startlingly revealed.

According to the study published in the journal Human Relations, the researchers studied manager-employee relationships in the workplace and found a link between parenting styles and workplace behaviours.

"It seems cliché, but, once again, we end up blaming mom for everything in life. It really is about both parents, but because mothers are typically the primary caregivers of the children, they usually have more influence on their children," said Peter Harms, Researcher, University of Alabama.

A mother or father figure later in life can provide that needed love and support, even in the context of the workplace, suggested the study.

The research was based on the work of John Bowlby, an early psychoanalyst, who argued that the way parents treat their offspring could have long-term implications for how their children approach relationships.

Babies learn over time that when they feel abandoned or threatened they can either count on their parent to come to their rescue right away or they need to escalate to high levels of distress in order to get attention.

Individuals with reliable parents view others as potential sources of support. Those individuals with unreliable parents tend not to see them as sources of support. These people are often categorized as having anxious or avoidant attachment depending on the style they adopted to cope with distress.

"Essentially, we figured that bosses would matter less to individuals with secure or avoidant attachment styles. Avoidant individuals just simply don't care. It was the anxiously attached individuals we were most interested in," added Harns.

The researchers speculated that individuals may transfer this pattern of thinking into the workplace and in particular that it may influence one's relationship with one's boss.

The research also finds that the way bosses treated their subordinates impacted some, but not all, employees.

The study showed that when anxious followers were paired with supportive leaders, they were perfectly fine. But when they were paired with distant, unsupportive leaders, the anxiously attached employees reported higher levels of stress and lower levels of performance.​

​Toronto, July 11 (IANS) Is your toddler addicted to "bad habits" such as thumb-sucking or nail-biting? Worry not, as according to a study, she or he is less likely to develop allergic sensitivities in the long run.

The findings showed that children with both thumb-sucking or nail-biting habits were less likely to be allergic to things such as house dust mites, grass, cats, dogs, horses or airborne fungi.

"Our findings are consistent with the hygiene theory that early exposure to dirt or germs reduces the risk of developing allergies," said Malcolm Sears, professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

"While we don't recommend that these habits should be encouraged, there does appear to be a positive side to these habits," Sears added in the work published in the journal Pediatrics.

In the study, the researchers tested the idea that these common childhood habits would increase microbial exposures, affecting the immune system and reducing the development of allergic reactions also known as atopic sensitisation -- the tendency to be "hyperallergi”.

The habits were measured in a longitudinal birth cohort of more than 1,000 New Zealand children at ages 5, 7, 9 and 11. Atopic sensitisation was measured by skin-prick testing at 13 and 32 years old.

The researchers found 31 per cent of children were frequent thumb suckers or nail biters.

Among all children at 13 years old, 45 per cent showed atopic sensitisation but among those with one oral habit, only 40 per cent had allergies. 

Among those with both habits, only 31 per cent had allergies. 

This trend was sustained into adulthood and showed no difference depending on smoking in the household, ownership of cats or dogs or exposure to house dust mites.

However, the study did not find associations between the oral habits and development of asthma or hay fever, the researchers noted.

​Washington, July 12 (IANS) Scientists have discovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy possibly formed from the parts of other galaxies about 718,000 light-years away in an otherwise quiet neighbourhood.

More than seven times wider than the Milky Way, UGC 1382 is a "Frankenstein" galaxy that had originally been thought to be old, small and typical.

Instead, scientists using data from NASA telescopes and other observatories have discovered that the galaxy is 10 times bigger than previously thought and, unlike most galaxies, its insides are younger than its outsides, almost as if it had been built using spare parts.

“This rare, 'Frankenstein' galaxy formed and is able to survive because it lies in a quiet little suburban neighbourhood of the universe, where none of the hubbub of the more crowded parts can bother it," said study co-author Mark Seibert from Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

It is so delicate that a slight nudge from a neighbour would cause it to disintegrate.

Seibert and Lea Hagen, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, came upon this galaxy by accident.

While looking at images of galaxies in ultraviolet light through data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), a behemoth began to emerge from the darkness.

"We saw spiral arms extending far outside this galaxy, which no one had noticed before, and which elliptical galaxies should not have," said Hagen who led the study appeared in the Astrophysical Journal.

It is one of the three largest isolated disk galaxies ever discovered.

But the biggest surprise was how the relative ages of the galaxy's components appear backwards.

In most galaxies, the innermost portion forms first and contains the oldest stars.

As the galaxy grows, its outer, newer regions have the youngest stars. Not so with UGC 1382.

"The centre of UGC 1382 is actually younger than the spiral disk surrounding it," Seibert said. "It's old on the outside and young on the inside. This is like finding a tree whose inner growth rings are younger than the outer rings."

More galaxies like this may exist, but more research is needed to look for them.

"By understanding this galaxy, we can get clues to how galaxies form on a larger scale, and uncover more galactic neighborhood surprises," Hagen noted.​