Knowledge Update

Researchers in the US have created a digital map to track the changing racial diversity of every neighbourhood in the country.

The map shows which neighbourhoods have become less homogenous over the last two decades and which have not.

Tomasz Stepinski from University of Cincinnati applied NASA mapmaking techniques to 20 years of data collected by the US Census Bureau to build one of the most detailed racial-diversity maps ever created.

The zoomable map, a paper about which was published in the journal PLOS One, shows at a glance how the racial composition of neighbourhoods changed between 1990 and 2010.

"People don't realise that the United States is a diverse country but at the same time is still very segregated," Stepinski, who created the map in collaboration with his postdoctoral researcher Anna Dmowska, said.

The researchers think that the map will have broad appeal to journalists, policymakers and researchers.

"The maps can tell us much more about racial composition and can be used by everyone," Dmowska, who now works at the Institute of Geoecology and Geoinformation of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, said.

"They don't require expert knowledge to understand the results, so I think maps can be used by a broader community," Dmowska said.

Updating the maps in future census years will be relatively simple, she said.

"Our grids are ready to use for multiyear comparison," Dmowska added.

The maps allow users to create their own smaller study area and then glean data from it.

In some cities, they tell the story of recent immigration in America. For example, the maps demonstrate the influx of Asian immigrants in San Francisco over the last 20 years.

Many of these newcomers are Southeast Asians who were drawn to the area by the Silicon Valley boom, Stepinski said.

And in Cincinnati, too, the census maps track the changing racial composition of the city.

Neighbourhoods that were predominantly White or Black in 1990 are far more diverse now.

But they also show the way that racial segregation has defined some cities.

For example, in the Detroit neighbourhoods popularised by the movie "8 Mile," the map from 1990 clearly shows the segregation of Black and White communities on either side of 8 Mile Road.

​New York, April 22 (IANS)

Dhaka, April 21 (IANS) The World Bank has pledged to give $6 billion in credit to Bangladesh over the next three years.

The announcement came after Finance Minister AMA Muhith held a meeting with the global bank's Vice President for South Asia Region, Annette Dixon, at its Washington D.C.

Beijing, April 21 (IANS) China on Friday launched a new freight train service linking Xiamen city with Moscow.

The train with 40 containers left the station carrying goods worth $363,000 including granite, lighting supplies, artificial flowers and shoes, Xinhua news agency repored.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Google Home, a voice-activated speaker powered by the Google Assistant for home automation now has the ability for up to six people to connect their account to one speaker and can recognise who is talking to it.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) If you thought switching to diet soda can help you avoid the ill effects associated with sugary soft drinks, think again! Researchers have found that while drinking sugary beverages frequently may lead to poorer memory, daily intake of diet soda may increase the risk of stroke and dementia. Both sugary and diet drinks correlated with accelerated brain ageing, according to the findings published in two separate studies. People who drink sugary beverages frequently are more likely to have poorer memory, smaller overall brain volume, and a significantly smaller hippocampus -- an area of the brain important for learning and memory, said the study published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia. A follow-up study, published in the journal Stroke, found that people who drank diet soda daily were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia when compared to those who did not. Scientists have put forth various hypotheses about how artificial sweeteners may cause harm, from transforming gut bacteria to altering the brain's perception of "sweet," but "we need more work to figure out the underlying mechanisms", said Boston University's Matthew Pase, who is lead author on the two studies. For the studies, researchers used data from the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a study that aims to identify common factors or characteristics that contribute to cardiovascular disease (CVD). "These studies are not the be-all and end-all, but it's strong data and a very strong suggestion," said Sudha Seshadri, Professor at Boston University School of Medicine (MED) in the US. "It looks like there is not very much of an upside to having sugary drinks, and substituting the sugar with artificial sweeteners doesn't seem to help," Seshadri, who is senior author on both papers, said. Excess sugar has long been associated with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases like obesity, heart disease and Type-2 diabetes, but little is known about its long-term effects on the human brain. He chose to study sugary drinks as a way of examining overall sugar consumption. "It's difficult to measure overall sugar intake in the diet," he says, "so we used sugary beverages as a proxy." For the first study, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, researchers examined data, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and cognitive testing results, from about 4,000 people enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study's Offspring and Third-Generation cohorts. The researchers looked at people who consumed more than two sugary drinks a day of any type -- soda, fruit juice and other soft drinks -- or more than three per week of soda alone. Among that "high intake" group, they found multiple signs of accelerated brain ageing, including smaller overall brain volume, poorer episodic memory, and a shrunken hippocampus, all risk factors for early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Researchers also found that higher intake of diet soda--at least one per day--was associated with smaller brain volume. In the second study, published in the journal Stroke, the researchers, using data only from the older Offspring cohort, looked specifically at whether participants had suffered a stroke or been diagnosed with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. They found that people who drank at least one diet soda per day were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Taiwanese consumer electronics company HTC has announced that its next flagship squeezable smartphone called 'HTC U' will be officially unveiled on May 16. The company has also tweeted on its official Twitter account that reads "Squeeze for the Brilliant U. 05.16.2017 http://www.htc.com/launch." "The device is rumoured fo sport 'Edge Sense' technology that lets users control many features with gestures that users will perform on the device's metal frame," GSMArena.com reported on Friday. 'HTC U' is expected to come with 5.5-inch 2560 x 1440 display, a Snapdragon 835 processor, 12MP rear and 16MP front-facing cameras and Android Nougat 7.1.

 Apple and Nike are working to expand their smartwatch series partnership for the Apple Watch 2 with a new limited edition NikeLab offering.

"NikeLab will feature a simple face to focus on fitness and will go on sale April 27, but will only be available through Nike's website and at an Apple pop up shop in Tokyo," US-based new service thestreet.com reported on Friday.

Last year, Apple released Apple Watch Nike+ that features built-in GPS to track users' pace, distance and route -- even if they don't have iPhone with them.

Apple Watch Nike+ is water resistant (50 metres). Training data including pace, distance and heart rate are available at a glance and through shared run summaries.

​San Francisco, April 21 (IANS)

Jakarta, April 21 (IANS) US-based travel reviewer website TripAdvisor presented its 2017 "World's Best Destination" Award to Indonesia's resort island of Bali.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) New genetic evidence confirms a long-held hypothesis that our earliest mammalian ancestors indeed had powerful night-time vision.

The findings published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that adapting to life in the dark helped the early mammals find food and avoid reptilian predators that hunted by day. 

The research team examined genes involved in night vision in animals throughout the evolutionary tree, looking for places where those genes became enhanced.

"This method is like using the genome as a fossil record, and with it we've shown when genes involved in night vision appear," said lead researcher Liz Hadly, Professor of Biology at Stanford University in the US.

"It's a very powerful way of corroborating a story that has been, up to now, only hypothesized," Hadly said.

Mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor, with the earliest mammal-like animals appearing in the Late Triassic about 200 million years ago. 

Fossil evidence suggests that early mammals had excellent hearing and sense of smell and were likely also warm-blooded. 

All of these features are common in their descendants, the living mammals, most of whom are nocturnal. 

Therefore, experts have hypothesised that early mammals were also nocturnal. 

This study offers direct, genetic evidence for that hypothesis.

To trace the evolution of nocturnality, the researchers studied genes that the researchers had previously found associated with night vision in certain birds, such as owls. 

The team members examined those night-vision genes in many mammals and reptiles, including snakes, alligators, mice, platypuses and humans.

Using what they know about how those animals are related, they figured out when in their evolutionary histories, if ever, the function of these genes was enhanced.

From this, they deduced that the earliest common ancestor did not have good night vision and was instead active during the day. 

However, soon after the split, mammals began enhancing their night vision genes, allowing them to begin to roam at night, thus avoiding the reptiles that hunted during the day, the study said.

The researchers said thatr in the millions of years that have elapsed since mammals and reptiles diverged, natural selection and evolution haven't stopped. 

Not all mammals are still nocturnal. Some groups of mammals have reoccupied the day, adapting in various ways to daylight activity. 

These animals include cheetahs, camels, elephants, and, of course, humans.

​New York, April 21 (IANS) Traditional clinical hearing tests often fail to detect patients with a common form of inner ear damage that might otherwise be detected by more challenging behavioural tests, new research has found.

Such tests may not be able to diagnose those facing problems in certain situations, like hearing speech in a noisy room, said the study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

This type of "hidden hearing loss" presents itself as essentially normal hearing in the clinic, where audiograms -- the gold-standard for measuring hearing thresholds -- are typically conducted in a quiet room.

The reason some forms of hearing loss may go unrecognised in the clinic is that hearing involves a complex partnership between the ear and the brain. 

It turns out that the central auditory system can compensate for significant damage to the inner ear by turning up its volume control, partially overcoming the deficiency, said the study's lead author Richard Salvi, Director, Centre for Hearing and Deafness at University at Buffalo, New York.

"You can have tremendous damage to inner hair cells in the ear that transmit information to the brain and still have a normal audiogram," he said. 

"But people with this type of damage have difficulty hearing in certain situations, like hearing speech in a noisy room. Their thresholds appear normal. So they're sent home," Salvi said.

Ear damage reduces the signal that goes the brain. That results in trouble hearing, but that's not what's happening here, because the brain "has a central gain control, like a radio, the listener can turn up the volume control to better hear a distant station", Salvi added.