Knowledge Update

London, May 5 (IANS) Researchers from University of Exeter have created an app which can help aid humanitarian rescue work in disaster-struck regions by using geographic data to map landscapes.

​Moscow, May 6 (IANS) Tourism authorities in Russia want customs and immigration officials to brush up on their English, even as they acknowledge that not knowing the language could prove an impediment to increasing tourist inflows from the English-speaking world, especially India. Random delays at immigration counters and a dearth of English signages have emerged as some of the red flags for Russian tourism authorities, who have begun to focus on the outbound market from India, which is expected to grow to $40 billion by 2020. "There is very little excuse for the discomfort caused by the conduct of the customs officers. We regret it. Knowledge of English among customs officials in Russia has to increase, there is no question about it," Rimma Sachunova, deputy chairperson of the St. Petersburg Committee on Tourism Development told IANS after a group of travel agents from India were detained for nearly three hours at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. "We will write an official letter to the customs service because now we have a lot of hope and expectation from the Indian tourist market," Sachunova said. Tourism experts believe that while the need for Russia to open up its locales for tourism is very real and necessary, the transition from being a country that was once "behind the Iron Curtain" to a democracy with open transit norms is not an easy one. "Give us a little bit of time for us to change our borders," said Marina Sokolov of Indigo Tour, which caters to the bulk of the inbound Indian tourists to Russia. Ekaterina Borisova, attached to the Moscow Tourism Office, hoped that the federal government's plan to set up a tourist office at major transit points used by international tourists could help cut down on the delay at Russian immigration and customs counters. "We are trying to make customs (and immigration) more open, but unfortunately it takes time. Hopefully, we will open a tourist office at the airport, railway stations and all places where tourists arrive," she said. Sachunova also said that efforts to include the English language in the city's road and Metro signages were already underway. "We are working at ensuring that there are more signages in English at St. Petersburg. In fact St. Petersburg is the only city in Russia that has English signages in all its Metro stations," she said. While the lack of knowledge of the English language both among officials and amongst the populace is an acknowledged impediment, when it comes to enhancing tourist inflows to Russia from India, Paresh Navani of the Russian Information Centre, India, claimed that visa norms should be tinkered to allow easy access to Indians to visit Russia as tourists. "With the Russian Federation opening up its policies and borders to ease tourism, this gives Indians the opportunity to tour these locations with ease, safety, comfort and at very reasonable costs compared to any other European destination and even in comparison to domestic destinations in India," Navani said. Over 50,000 Indian tourists visit Russia annually, while around 200,000 Russians visit India, especially Goa, every year.​

New York, May 6 (IANS) Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have compiled a comprehensive list of potential gases to guide search for life on exoplanets.

Biosignature gases emitted by exoplanetary life forms could be detected remotely by space telescopes but these gases might have quite different compositions from those in the Earth's atmosphere.

“This work reminds me of Charles Darwin's voyage aboard 'The Beagle', exploring the vast diversity of life by sailing around the world," said Nancy Y Kiang, scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. 

“In the search for life beyond our planet, we are currently at a similarly exciting, early but rapidly evolving stage of exploration as the discovery of exoplanets accelerates,” he added.

Instead of netting strange creatures from the bottom of the sea, the authors searched and found thousands of curious, potentially biogenic gas molecules. 

“These will inspire a new body of research into identifying also larger molecules, investigating their origin and fate here, and their potential expression on exoplanets as signs of life,” Kiang added.

This approach maximises the chances of identifying planets orbiting nearby stars that support life.

According to S Seager, W Bains and J.J. Petkowski from MIT and Rufus Scientific from the University of Cambridge in a paper published in the journal Astrobiology, all stable and potential volatile molecules should be considered as possible biosignature gases.

Beijing, May 6 (IANS) Chinese archaeologists said they have found a paddy field more than 8,000 years old. This could be the earliest wet rice farming site in the world.

The field, covering less than 100 square metres, was discovered at the neolithic ruins of Hanjing in Jiangsu province in November 2015, Xinhua quoted a spokesman with the archaeology institute of Nanjing Museum as saying.

At a seminar held in late April to discuss findings at the Hanjing ruins, 70 scholars from universities, archaeology institutes and museums in China concluded that the wet rice field was the oldest ever discovered.

Researchers with the institute found that the field was divided into parts with different shapes, each covering less than 10 square metres.

They also found carbonised rice that was confirmed to have grown more than 8,000 years ago based on carbon dating as well as evidence that the soil was repeatedly planted with rice.

Lin Liugen, head of the institute, said Chinese people started to cultivate rice about 10,000 years ago and carbonised rice of the age has been found in the past but paddy remnants were quite rare.​

​London, May 6 (IANS) Insulin when taken in conjunction with metformin -- a cheap and common drug that helps control blood sugar levels -- has the potential to reduce mortality risk and heart attacks in people with Type 2 diabetes, a new study has found.

"In this research we found that there was a considerable reduction in deaths and heart problems when this cheap and common drug was used in conjunction with insulin,” said lead author Craig Currie, professor at Cardiff University in Britain.

Increased dosage of insulin has been previously known to raise the risk of cancer, heart attacks and mortality. 

But the findings have shown that metformin can attenuate the risks associated with insulin.

However, according to researchers, there was no difference in the risk of cancer between people treated with insulin as a single therapy or in combination with metformin.

The retrospective research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at people with Type 2 diabetes who were treated with insulin with or without metformin from the year 2000 onwards. 

12,020 people were identified from a general practice data source, and the research team tracked them for three-and-a-half years on average, from the time they were first prescribed insulin.

"While this research indicates the potential of using these treatments together, further studies are needed to determine the risks and benefits of insulin in Type 2 diabetes and the possible benefits associated with the administration of metformin alongside insulin," Currie concluded.

New York, May 6 (IANS) It is possible for us to intentionally forget past experiences by changing how we think about the context of those memories, says a study.

The findings have a range of potential applications centred on enhancing desired memories, such as developing new educational tools, or diminishing harmful memories, including treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Memory theorists have known for long that we use context -- or the situation we are in, including sights, sounds, smells, where we are, who we are with -- to organise and retrieve our memories. 

But this study wanted to explore whether and how people can intentionally forget past experiences. 

The researchers showed participants images of outdoor scenes, such as forests, mountains and beaches, as they studied two lists of random words.

The study's participants were told to either forget or remember the random words presented to them interspersed between scene images. 

"We used fMRI ( functional magnetic resonance imaging) to track how much people were thinking of scene-related things at each moment during our experiment. That allowed us to track, on a moment-by-moment basis, how those scene or context representations faded in and out of people's thoughts over time," said study lead author Jeremy Manning, assistant professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US.

Right after they were told to forget, the fMRI showed that they "flushed out" the scene-related activity from their brains.

"It's like intentionally pushing thoughts of your grandmother's cooking out of your mind if you don't want to think about your grandmother at that moment," Manning said. 

"We were able to physically measure and quantify that process using brain data," Manning noted.

But when the researchers told participants to remember the studied list rather than forget it, this flushing out of scene-related thoughts did not occur. 

Further, the amount that people flushed out scene-related thoughts predicted how many of the studied words they would later remember, which shows the process is effective at facilitating forgetting.

The study appeared in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.​

New York, May 6 (IANS) Your favourite strawberries and bananas can stay fresh for more than a week without refrigeration if they are coated in a thin, odourless, biocompatible silk solution, says a study.

Silk's unique crystalline structure makes it one of nature's toughest materials. Fibroin, an insoluble protein found in silk, has a remarkable ability to stabilise and protect other materials while being fully biocompatible and biodegradable.

For the study, the researchers dipped freshly picked strawberries in a solution of one percent silk fibroin protein. The coating process was repeated up to four times. 

The silk fibroin-coated fruits were then treated for varying amounts of time with water vapour under vacuum (water annealed) to create varying percentages of crystalline beta-sheets in the coating. 

The strawberries were then stored at room temperature. Uncoated berries were compared over time with berries dipped in varying numbers of coats of silk that had been annealed for different periods of time. 

At seven days, the berries coated with the higher beta-sheet silk were still juicy and firm while the uncoated berries were dehydrated and discoloured.

Tests showed that the silk coating prolonged the freshness of the fruits by slowing fruit respiration, extending fruit firmness and preventing decay.

"The beta-sheet content of the edible silk fibroin coatings made the strawberries less permeable to carbon dioxide and oxygen. We saw a statistically significant delay in the decay of the fruit," said senior study author Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts, US.

Similar experiments were performed on bananas, which, unlike strawberries, are able to ripen after they are harvested. 

The silk coating decreased the bananas' ripening rate compared with uncoated controls and added firmness to the fruit by preventing softening of the peel.

The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Half of the world's fruit and vegetable crops are lost during the food supply chain, due mostly to premature deterioration of these perishable foods, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.​

London, May 6 (IANS) Banking on new research and modern detective technologies including DNA science, a team of specialists has come together to create new insights into the life of Italian genius Leonardo da Vinci.

The “Leonardo Project” is in pursuit of several possible physical connections to Leonardo - beaming radar, for example, at an ancient Italian church floor to help corroborate extensive research to pinpoint the likely location of the tomb of his father and other relatives. 

A collaborating scholar also recently announced the successful tracing of several likely DNA relatives of Leonardo living today in Italy.

If granted the necessary approvals, the “Leonardo Project” will compare DNA from Leonardo's relatives past and present with physical remnants -- hair, bones, fingerprints and skin cells -- associated with the Renaissance figure whose life marked the rebirth of western civilisation.

“Everyone in the group believes that Leonardo, who devoted himself to advancing art and science, who delighted in puzzles and whose diverse talents and insights continue to enrich society five centuries after his passing, would welcome the initiative of this team -- indeed would likely wish to lead it were he alive today,” explained Jesse Ausubel, vice chairman of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and sponsor of the project's meetings.

Born in Vinci, Italy, da Vinci died in 1519 at age 67 and was buried in Amboise, southwest of Paris. 

His creative imagination foresaw and described innovations hundreds of years before their invention, such as the helicopter and armoured tank. His artistic legacy includes the iconic “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper”.

If DNA and other analyses yield a definitive identification, conventional and computerised techniques might reconstruct the face of da Vinci from models of the skull.

In addition to Leonardo's physical appearance, information potentially revealed from the work includes his ancestry and additional insight into his diet, state of health, personal habits and places of residence.

It may also make a lasting contribution to the art world, within which forgery is a multi-billion dollar industry, by advancing a technique for extracting and sequencing DNA from other centuries-old works of art, and associated methods of attribution.

One objective is to verify whether fingerprints on Leonardo's paintings, drawings and notebooks can yield DNA consistent with that extracted from identified remains.

If human DNA can one day be obtained from da Vinci's work and sequenced, the genetic material could then be compared with genetic information from skeletal or other remains that may be exhumed in the future.

“The fact that a team of eminent scholars from different academic disciplines and parts of the world has united with the common objective of furthering investigation into one of the greatest geniuses is positive and very important,” added Eugenio Giani, president of the Regional Council of Tuscany.

The idea behind the project has united anthropologists, art historians, genealogists, microbiologists, and other experts from leading universities and institutes in France, Italy, Spain, Canada and the US, including specialists from the J. Craig Venter Institute of California which pioneered the sequencing of the human genome.

The project's objectives, motives, methods and work to date are detailed in a special issue of the journal Human Evolution​

New York, May 6 (IANS) A team of astronomers has for the first time derived a highly precise measurement of the mass of a black hole -- calculating its mass to be 660 million times greater than that of the Sun.

Working with high-resolution data from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array in Chile, the scientists determined the speed of a disk of cold molecular gas and dust orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of a nearby giant elliptical galaxy named "NGC 1332".

"This is the first time that ALMA has probed the orbital motion of cold molecular gas well inside the gravitational sphere of influence of a supermassive black hole," said Aaron Barth, professor of physics and astronomy from the University of California-Irvine.

"We're directly viewing the region where the cold gas is responding to the black hole's gravitational pull. This is an exciting milestone for ALMA and a great demonstration of its high-resolution capability," added Barth in a paper appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

To calculate the mass of a black hole in a galaxy's centre, astronomers must be able to measure the speed of something orbiting around it.

Barth and his group trained ALMA's observational powers on NGC 1332, a giant elliptical galaxy in the southern sky 73 million light-years from the Earth.

Elliptical galaxies are known to contain massive central black holes.

About one in 10 elliptical galaxies contain disks of cold molecular gas and dust that orbit their centres. 

In visible light, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, these disks appear as dark silhouettes against the bright background of starlight in a galaxy's core. 

But ALMA can observe radio-wavelength light emitted by molecules in these structures. 

In this case, Barth's team focused on radio-wave emissions from carbon monoxide (CO) molecules as the CO signal is bright and readily detected with ALMA.

By mapping the disk's rotation with the high-resolution data, Barth's group determined that the black hole in NGC 1332 has a mass that is 660 million times greater than the Sun -- with a measurement uncertainty of just 10 percent. 

This is among the most precise measurements for the mass of a galaxy's central black hole.

"This observation demonstrates a technique that can be applied to many other galaxies to measure the masses of supermassive black holes to remarkable precision," added study co-author Benjamin Boizelle.

The findings can help shed light on how galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

The team included astronomers from the University of California, Irvine, University of Colorado, Rutgers University, the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing, China, and Texas A&M University.​

London, May 5 (IANS) Long-eared bats are assisted in flight by their ears and body, say scientists, adding that this knowledge into the bats' flying technique can help develop better drones.

Contrary to what researchers previously assumed, Christoffer Johansson Westheim and his colleagues from Lund University in Sweden show that long-eared bats are helped in flight by their large ears.

They show how the air behind the body of a long-eared bat accelerates downwards, which means that the body and ears provide lift.

“This distinguishes the long-eared bats from other species that have been studied and indicates that the large ears do not merely create strong resistance, but also assist the animal in staying aloft", said Westheim.

The findings also highlight the evolutionary conflict between flying as efficiently as possible and eco-locating - discovering objects by sending out soundwaves and perceiving the resulting echoes.

Another discovery made during the experiments and never previously described in research is how the bats generate forward motion when flying slowly.

The forward motion is generated when the wings are held high and away from the body at the end of each beat.

"This specific way of generating power could lead to new aerodynamic control mechanisms for drones in the future, inspired by flying animals", Westheim added in a university statement.

The experiments were conducted in a wind tunnel in which trained bats flew through thin smoke to reach a stick with food on it.

Meanwhile the researchers aimed a laser beam at the smoke behind the bats and took pictures of the illuminated smoke particles.

The researchers then measured how the smoke moved to calculate the forces generated by each beat of the bats' wings.​