Knowledge Update

​Singapore, Jan 20 (IANS) Ever wondered why we are not plunged into intermittent darkness when we blink? Researchers in Singapore may have the answer.

It is because our brain works extra hard to stabilise our vision, without which our surroundings would appear shadowy, erratic and jittery after we blink, a study has showed.

Blinking lubricates dry eyes and protects them from irritants. However, when we blink, our eyeballs roll back in their sockets and do not always return to the same spot when we reopen our eyes. 

This misalignment prompts the brain to activate the eye muscles to realign our vision, the researchers said. 

The finding showed that when we blink, our brain repositions our eyeballs so we can stay focused on what we are viewing.

"Our eye muscles are quite sluggish and imprecise, so the brain needs to constantly adapt its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they're supposed to," said lead author Gerrit Maus, Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. 

"Our findings suggest that the brain gauges the difference in what we see before and after a blink and commands the eye muscles to make the needed corrections," Maus added.

For the study, healthy young adults participated where they sat in a dark room for long periods staring at a dot on a screen while infrared cameras tracked their eye movements and eye blinks in real time.

Every time they blinked, the dot was moved one centimetre to the right. While participants failed to notice the subtle shift, the brain's oculomotor system registered the movement and learned to reposition the line of vision squarely on the dot.

After 30 or so blink-synchronised dot movements, participants' eyes adjusted during each blink and shifted automatically to the spot where they predicted the dot to be.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

​Seoul, Jan 19 (IANS) South Korean currency's volatility to the US dollar hit the highest in six years in 2016 on external uncertainties including the presidential election and the expected rate hike in the US, central bank data showed on Thursday.

​New York, Jan 19 (IANS) Apple has updated its music creation apps -- GarageBand -- for iOS 2.2 and Logic Pro X 10.3 -- with new features for music makers on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

​New York, Jan 19 (IANS) In a bid to help developers build better apps and grow their business, Google has acquired micro-blogging platform Twitter's mobile app developer platform called Fabric.

San Francisco, Jan 19 (IANS) Retailers remain in the early phases of digital transformation and are missing a $187 billion opportunity by not prioritising investments in employee productivity, global networking giant Cisco said on Thursday. Six per cent of retailers' investment priorities are focused on employee productivity use cases despite the fact these use cases deliver the greatest return on investment for retailers, the company estimated. "The shakeup caused by digital disruption is already underway with major retailers announcing the closure of hundreds of their brick and mortar stores in recent months in order to better compete in a landscape where physical and digital channels are increasingly converging," said Kathryn Howe, Director, US Commercial Digital Transformation, Retail and Hospitality Industries, Cisco, in a statement. In an effort to help retailers achieve digital transformation, Cisco has released "A Roadmap to Digital Value in the Retail Industry" which guides retailers through three phases -- enable digital capabilities, differentiate their brand through new digital capabilities and define new business models through digital disruption. Only 29 per cent of retailers' investment priorities are currently focused on the "differentiate" phase and only 22 per cent in the "define" phase, the second and third phases of the roadmap, respectively. The findings indicate that most retailers have not made enough progress when it comes to digital transformation and may be at risk of being out-performed by faster moving, more innovative retail ventures. Retailers are prioritising the majority of their digital technology investments in customer experience use cases (37 per cent) that aim to improve personal engagement with consumers. "Retailers need to make more progress in digitising their workforce and their core operations in order to execute on the innovative customer experiences they want to deliver, and to position themselves for success in the new retail landscape," added Howe.

​Beijing, Jan 19 (IANS) The number of outbound cruise passengers in China topped 2 million for the first time in 2016, according to a report by China Cruise & Yacht Industry Association (CCYIA) on Thursday.

A total of 2.12 million Chinese holiday-makers departed from China's 10 major port cities, including Tianjin, Dalian, Yantai, Shanghai, Guanghzou and Haikou, to travel overseas last year, up 91 per cent year-on-year, Xinhua news agency reported.

In the meantime, the number of overseas cruise tourists visiting the 10 Chinese ports rose 8 per cent to 138,715 in 2016.

Shanghai, Tianjin and Guanghzou were the top three ports to welcome passengers last year, taking up 65 per cent, 16.3 per cent and 7.2 per cent of total inbound and outbound travellers respectively, according to the report.

China has become the world's eighth biggest cruise market, with domestic tourists planning more diverse travel experiences in recent years.

"Amid the burgeoning cruise industry, issues such as poor service should also be highlighted," said Zheng Weihang, Executive Vice Chairman and Secretary General of CCYIA.

"China will make more efforts in enhancing the manufacturing of cruise liners and improving the capacity and efficiency of its ports."

New York, Jan 19 (IANS) In a ray of hope for those suffering from heart conditions, a team of scientists has developed the world's first soft robotic sleeve that is fitted around the heart, where it twists and compresses the heart's chambers just like healthy cardiac muscle would do.

To create a device that does not come into contact with blood, the team from Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital developed a thin silicone sleeve that uses soft pneumatic actuators placed around the heart to mimic the outer muscle layers of a human heart.

"This research demonstrates that the growing field of soft robotics can be applied to clinical needs and potentially reduce the burden of heart disease and improve the quality of life for patients," said lead author Ellen T Roche, a former PhD student at Harvard and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Ireland.

The actuators twist and compress the sleeve in a similar motion to the beating heart. 

The device is tethered to an external pump, which uses air to power the soft actuators.

Unlike other therapeutic systems known as ventricular assist devices (VADs), the soft robotic sleeve does not directly contact blood, avoiding that risk.

With heart failure affecting 41 million people worldwide, researchers expect the device may be able to bridge a patient to transplant or to aid in cardiac rehabilitation and recovery. 

"The sleeve can be customised for each patient. If a patient has more weakness on the left side of the heart, for example, the actuators can be tuned to give more assistance on that side," Roche noted in a paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The pressure of the actuators can also increase or decrease over time, as the patient's condition evolves. The device is tethered to an external pump, which uses air to power the soft actuators.

According to the researchers, soft robotic devices are ideally suited to interact with soft tissue and give assistance that can help with augmentation of function, and potentially even healing and recovery.

​London, Jan 19 (IANS) Lithium batteries can be charged faster in the near future as scientists have got new insights into why adding charged metal atoms to tunnel structures within batteries improve their performance.

Rechargeable lithium batteries have helped power the 'portable revolution' in mobile phones, laptops and tablet computers. 

"Understanding these processes is important for the future design and development of battery materials and could lead to faster charging batteries that will benefit consumers and industry," said Saiful Islam, Professor at the University of Bath.

The team from the University of Bath and University of Illinois-Chicago also found a way to develop new generations of lithium batteries for electric vehicles that can store energy from wind and solar power.

The study noted that storing electrical energy more quickly than current electrodes is important for future applications in portable electronics and electric vehicles.

"Developing new materials holds the key to lighter, cheaper and safer batteries, including for electric vehicles which will help cut carbon emissions," added Islam in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

New York, Jan 19 (IANS) Scarcity of food or other resources may drive some baboon males to attack and kill infants of their own kind, a study has found.

The findings showed that some baboon males vying for a chance to father their own offspring expedite matters in a gruesome way -- they kill infants sired by other males and attack pregnant females, causing them to miscarry.

The behaviour reduces their waiting time to breed with pregnant and nursing females, who otherwise would not become sexually available again for up to a year.

"In situations where males have few opportunities, they resort to violence to achieve what's necessary to survive and reproduce. When reproductive opportunities abound, this behaviour is less frequent," said lead author Matthew Zipple, graduate student at Duke University in North Carolina, US.

Shortages of fertile females were particularly common in times of food scarcity, when baboon troops distance themselves from each other and females take 15 per cent longer between successive births -- which means males who don't kill have even longer to wait.

The perpetrators are more prone to commit domestic violence when forced to move into a group with few fertile females, Zipple added.

It was also more common when the incoming male achieved high social status very quickly, when he stayed in the group for three months or more or when there were many infants and pregnant females in the group.

"It's not just who they are, it's the circumstances they find themselves in that makes the difference," Zipple said.

In addition, the researchers found that immigrant males were responsible for roughly 2 per cent of infant deaths and 6 per cent of miscarriages between 1978 and 2015. 

But when cycling females were few, the death rates more than tripled.

The findings come from a long-term study of wild baboons monitored on a near-daily basis since 1971 at Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya.

The study appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

​Mumbai, Jan 17 (IANS) By 2020, 20 per cent of organisations will use smartphones in place of traditional physical access cards globally, market research firm Gartner has predicted.