Knowledge Update

​New York, April 30 (IANS) Feeding premature babies mostly breast milk - irrespective of whether that came from the babies' own mothers or donated by other women - during the first month of life appears to spur more robust brain growth, compared with babies given little or no breast milk, says a study.

"The brains of babies born before their due dates usually are not fully developed," said senior investigator Cynthia Rogers from St. Louis Children's Hospital in the US. 

"But breast milk has been shown to be helpful in other areas of development, so we looked to see what effect it might have on the brain,” Rogers said.

"With MRI scans, we found that babies fed more breast milk had larger brain volumes. This is important because several other studies have shown a correlation between brain volume and cognitive development," Rogers explained.

The findings are scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, in Baltimore on May 3.

The study included 77 preterm infants. The researchers retrospectively looked to see how much breast milk those babies had received while being cared for in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at St. Louis Children's Hospital in the US. 

Then, the researchers conducted brain scans on those infants at about the time each would have been born had the babies not arrived early. 

All of the babies were born at least 10 weeks early, with an average gestation of 26 weeks, or about 14 weeks premature. Because they are still developing, preemies typically have smaller brains than full-term infants.

In gauging the effects of breast milk on the babies' brains, the researchers did not distinguish between milk that came from the babies' own mothers and breast milk donated by other women. Rather, they focused on the influence of breast milk in general, first author Erin Reynolds, aresearch technician in Rogers' laboratory, said.

"As the amount of breast milk increased, so did a baby's chances of having a larger cortical surface area," Reynolds said. 

"The cortex is the part of the brain associated with cognition, so we assume that more cortex will help improve cognition as the babies grow and develop," Reynolds said.

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​Port Moresby, April 29 (IANS) India and Papua New Guinea signed four agreements, including in the areas of healthcare and information technology (IT), on Friday, the second and concluding day of President Pranab Mukherjee's visit to this Pacific island-nation.

​London, April 29 (IANS) Words like "gent" instead of "man" and "authentic" for products in place of "genuine" can fetch up to fifty percent more money on eBay, revealed a research conducted by a British university Researchers from Birmingham City University trawled more than 68,000 items sold on eBay and spanned more than 15 million words to find out how online sellers choose to describe their products and revealed patterns in language which significantly changes the price. Results showed that items like watches labelled as "men's" word are sold for an average of 30 pounds while "gents" went for 70 pounds, and fragrances labelled "genuine" fetched 21 pounds but "authentic" ones set buyers back 34 pounds. 'What's also interesting is that on eBay, unlike other online stores, sellers write their own descriptions, so we find a lot of language variation between sellers too. The variation between those categories is really interesting from a linguistic perspective,' said Amdrew Kehoe, researcher from Birmingham City University's School of English. Grammatical errors such as missing apostrophes and internet speak were also found to have a negative impact on the price products sold for. Used car sellers were found to shy away from the term "second-hand" with only nine instances of the phrase found among nearly 1,000 sold. Instead traditional car sales speak was found with phrases like "honest", "reliable", "clean" and "reluctant" all among the top terms. "The term 'second-hand' seems to have a stigma attached when it comes to cars, but people will happily use it to sell smaller items like books or DVDs. We've found that the language used in eBay descriptions really does have an impact on whether items sell and for how much," added Kehoe.​

​Colombo, April 29 (IANS) Sri Lanka will borrow $1.5 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the government's economic reform agenda, the IMF said on Friday.

Todd Schneider, IMF mission chief for Sri Lanka, said a staff-level agreement was reached on a three-year programme to be supported by the IMF's Extended Fund Facility

​New York, April 29 (IANS) Taking a break from the tradition where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin shared the company's progress and vision every year, this time it was Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai who updated the world with some of Google's achievements and key highlights.

London, April 29 (IANS) Researchers have discovered that vitamin nicotinamide riboside, which is a source of vitamn B3, has the potential to revitalise certain organs that lose the regenerative capacity with age.

By administering nicotinamide riboside (NR) to elderly mice, the researchers restored their organs' ability to regenerate and prolonged their lives. 

The findings, published in the journal Science, have implications for treating a number of degenerative diseases.

"This work could have very important implications in the field of regenerative medicine," said one of the researchers, Johan Auwerx from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). 

"We are not talking about introducing foreign substances into the body but rather restoring the body's ability to repair itself with a product that can be taken with food," Auwerx explained.

The researchers believe this work on the ageing process also has potential for treating diseases that can affect -- and be fatal -- in young people, like muscular dystrophy.Under normal conditions, cetain stem cells, reacting to signals sent by the body, regenerate damaged organs by producing new specific cells, at least in young bodies. "We demonstrated that fatigue in stem cells was one of the main causes of poor regeneration or even degeneration in certain tissues or organs," Hongbo Zhang from EPFL noted.This is why the researchers wanted to "revitalise" stem cells in the muscles of elderly mice.

"We gave nicotinamide riboside to two-year-old mice, which is an advanced age for them," Hongbo Zhang said.

"And our results are extremely promising: muscular regeneration is much better in mice that received NR, and they lived longer than the mice that didn't get it," Hongbo Zhang pointed out.​

London, April 29 (IANS) Fancy eating chocolates every day? You may soon have the recommendation of doctors to indulge a little as researchers have found that a dark chocolate bar daily could reduces the risk of developing diabetes and heart diseases.

For the study, the researchers analysed data of 1,153 people aged 18-69 years old who were part of the Observation of Cardiovascular Risk in Luxembourg study.

It was found that those who ate 100 g of chocolate a day -- equivalent to a bar -- had reduced insulin resistance and improved liver enzymes. 

Insulin sensitivity is a well-established risk factor to cardiovascular disease.

The findings were published in the British Journal of Nutrition.

The analysis took into account lifestyle and dietary factors, including the simultaneous consumption of tea and coffee. 

This is because both drinks can be high in polyphenol, the substance which may provide chocolate with its beneficial cardiometabolic effects.

"Given the growing body of evidence, including our own study, cocoa-based products may represent an additional dietary recommendation to improve cardio-metabolic health; however, observational results need to be supported by robust trial evidence," said Saverio Stranges, visiting academic at the University of Warwick Medical School in England.

"Potential applications of this knowledge include recommendations by healthcare professionals to encourage individuals to consume a wide range of phytochemical-rich foods, which can include dark chocolate in moderate amounts," Stranges said.

However, it is important to differentiate between the natural product cocoa and the processed product chocolate, which is an energy-dense food. 

Therefore, physical activity, diet and other lifestyle factors must be carefully balanced to avoid detrimental weight gain over time, the researchers warned.​

​London, April 29 (IANS) Recent discoveries of exoplanets have rekindled hope for other advanced technological civilisations that may have ever existed near us, researchers have found.

A new paper shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe's first technological or advanced civilisation.

“We have known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We didn't know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbour life or how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings,” explained Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at University of Rochester.

“Thanks to NASA's Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in "habitable zones," where temperatures could support life as we know it. So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained,” he added.

The big question - how long civilisations might survive - is still unknown. 

“The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly 10,000 years doesn't really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer," Frand noted in a paper to be published in Astrobiology.

Using a novel approach, Frank and Woodruff Sullivan from University of Washington calculate how unlikely advanced life must be if there has never been another example among the universe's ten billion trillion stars, or even among our own Milky Way galaxy's hundred billion.

The result? By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe's 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, the team found that human civilisation is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilisation developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22th power.

Another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it are better than one chance in 60 billion.

The universe is more than 13 billion years old.

That means that even if there have been a thousand civilisations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around -- roughly 10,000 years -- then all of them are likely already extinct. 

“And others won't evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another "contemporary" active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime,” the author noted.​

​London, April 29 (IANS) If you get cravings for chips, sweets and fast-food whenever you are bored, do not blame the situation alone. According to British researchers, people eat more to boost low levels of brain chemical dopamine as they cannot alleviate the boredom in any other way.

The results showed that people were more likely to express a preference for unhealthy foods like crisps, sweets and fast food after completing the boring task.

"This strengthens the theory that boredom is related to low levels of the stimulating brain chemical dopamine and people try to boost this by eating fat and sugar if they cannot alleviate their boredom in some other way," said Dr Sandi Mann from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).

Mann and colleagues Faye Ibbitson and Ben Edwards conducted two studies of boredom and food choices.

In the first study, the team asked 52 participants to complete a questionnaire on their food preferences before and after completing the boredom-inducing task of repeatedly copying the same group of letters.

In the second study, they asked 45 participants to watch either a boring or a funny video, during which a range of healthy and unhealthy snacks were available.

They found that the participants who had watched the boring video ate significantly more unhealthy food.

"Health education campaigns can encourage us to make healthier food choices need to take boredom, including boredom in the workplace, into account. Bored people do not eat nuts," Mann stated.

The study was scheduled to be presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society this week.​