Knowledge Update

​New York, Dec 22 (IANS) Social media giant Facebook has roped in 17 US universities to help it speed up technology projects by collaborating with faculties and labs.

Regina Dugan, Vice President of Engineering and Head of the social network's Building 8 (B8) group announced a Sponsored Academic Research Agreement (SARA) designed to

Tokyo, Dec 22 (IANS) Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun negotiations with Waymo, a Google subsidiary that builds self-driven vehicles, to collaborate on developing the technology further, the company said on Thursday.

​New York, Dec 22 (IANS) Researchers have created a bacteria-powered battery on a single sheet of paper that can power disposable electronics.

The manufacturing technique reduces fabrication time and cost, and the design could revolutionise the use of bio-batteries as a power source in remote, dangerous and

New York, Dec 22 (IANS) Disney's television arm will produce several original shows for Snapchat photo-sharing and mobile service starting with "Watch Party: The Bachelor" show from January 3, 2017. According to a report in the Variety on Wednesday, the episodes are expected to be three to five minutes long and will be available for 24 hours on Snapchat. Users can watch the series in the Snapchat Discover section and the season finale will be produced as a Snapchat Live Story. "We have been exploring ways to tell stories on mobile, and Snapchat was a very exciting canvas for us to work on," said John Frelinghuysen, Executive Vice President of digital media strategy and business development for Disney-ABC TV. It is expected that over the next few months, Disney-ABC TV will produce more shows on Snapchat. The deal entails that Disney-ABC will produce and sell advertising packages incorporating Snapchat's 10-second full screen video ads. "Snapchat inventory may be sold in a bundle with linear TV ad buys, or separately to digital-only sponsors," added Frelinghuysen. Earlier, Disney's subsidary, ABC had tied up with the Snapchat to curate Live Stories around its broadcast of the Academy Awards this February. "Disney-ABC have rewritten the rules for how to develop daring, fun and adventurous series for TV, mastering formats ranging from scripted to reality and from drama to comedy," said Nick Bell, Snap Inc.'s VP of content.

London, Dec 22 (IANS) Researchers have shown that instead of expensive equipment, smartphones can be used to make movies of living cells and observe their response to different treatments.

Live imaging of cells is a very powerful tool for the study of cells, to learn about how cells respond to different treatments such as drugs or toxins.

The study published in the journal PLOS ONE showed that a simple smartphone can replace expensive equipment used for the process.

"The technology presented here can readily be adapted and modified according to the specific need of researchers, at a low cost," said Johan Kreuger from Uppsala University in Sweden.

"Indeed, in the future, it will be much more common that scientists create and modify their own research equipment, and this should greatly propel technology development," Kreuger said.

In the present study, old standard inverted microscopes that are very abundant at universities and hospitals were upgraded to high quality live imaging stations using a few 3D-printed parts, off-the-shelf electronics, and a smartphone. 

It was shown that the resultant upgraded systems provided excellent cell culture conditions and enabled high-resolution imaging of living cells.

London, Dec 22 (IANS) British researchers have developed a breakthrough technique that uses sound rather than light to see inside live cells, a finding that has potential application in stem-cell transplants and cancer diagnosis.

The new sub-optical phonon (sound) imaging technique uses shorter-than-optical wavelengths of sound and could even rival the optical super-resolution techniques. 

It provides invaluable information about the structure, mechanical properties and behaviour of individual living cells at a scale not achieved before.

"Like ultrasound on the body, ultrasound in the cells causes no damage and requires no toxic chemicals to work. Because of this, we can see inside cells that one day might be put back into the body, for instance as stem-cell transplants," said Matt Clark, Professor at the University of Nottingham in Britain.

In optical microscopy, which uses light (photons), the size of the smallest object you can see or the resolution is limited by the wavelength.

For biological specimens, the wavelength cannot go smaller than that of blue light because the energy carried on photons of light in the ultraviolet and shorter wavelengths is so high it can destroy the bonds that hold biological molecules together damaging the cells.

Also, the fluorescent dyes used in optical super-resolution imaging are often toxic and it requires huge amounts of light and time to observe and reconstruct an image which is damaging to cells.

However, sound does not have a high-energy payload. This uses smaller wavelengths and enables to see smaller things and get higher resolution images without damaging the cell biology, the researchers noted.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

New York, Dec 22 (IANS) A distinctive neural signature found in the brains of people with dyslexia may explain why they have difficulty in learning to read and adapting to sensory inputs, according to a new study.

The brain typically adapts rapidly to sensory input, such as the sound of a person's voice or images of faces and objects, as a way to make processing more efficient. 

But, the study found that for individuals with dyslexia, the adaptation was on average nearly half.

In dyslexic people, the brain has a diminished ability to acclimate to a repeated input -- a trait known as neural adaptation. 

For example, when dyslexic students see the same word repeatedly, brain regions involved in reading do not show the same adaptation seen in typical readers.

This suggests that the brain's plasticity, which underpins its ability to learn new things, is reduced, said John Gabrieli, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

"It's a difference in the brain that's not about reading per se, but it's a difference in perceptual learning that's pretty broad," Gabrieli added.

For the study, the team used MRI technique where the brains of young adults with and without reading difficulties were scanned as they listened to a series of words read by either four different speakers or a single speaker.

The results revealed that the dyslexic participants showed much less adaptation to hearing words said by a single speaker.

Further, for dyslexics the brain activity remained high while listening to a consistent voice and not to multiple voices, suggesting that they did not adapt as much. 

Again, when researchers looked at adaptation to visual stimuli, they saw much less adaptation in participants with dyslexia.

"This suggests that adaptation deficits in dyslexia are general, across the whole brain," noted Tyler Perrachione, assistant professor at Boston University in Massachusetts, US. 

The study appears in the journal Neuron.

​Washington, Dec 22 (IANS) A NASA satellite instrument orbiting Earth that can see through fog, clouds and darkness has given scientists their first continuous look at the boom-and-bust, or peak and decline, cycles of phytoplankton - foundation of the ocean's food web vital for life to exist on earth.

The results showed that small, environmental changes in polar food webs significantly influence the boom-and-bust cycles of phytoplankton. 

The researchers believe that the findings - published in the journal Nature Geoscience - will supply important data for ecosystem management, commercial fisheries and our understanding of the interactions between Earth's climate and key ocean ecosystems.

"It's really important for us to understand what controls these boom-and-bust cycles, and how they might change in the future so we can better evaluate the implications on all other parts of the food web," said Michael Behrenfeld, a marine plankton expert at Oregon State University in Corvallis, US.

Coastal economies and wildlife depend on what happens to tiny green plants, or phytoplankton, at the base of the ocean food chain. Commercial fisheries, marine mammals and birds all depend on phytoplankton blooms.

Phytoplankton also influence Earth's carbon cycle. Through photosynthesis, they absorb a great deal of the carbon dioxide dissolved in the upper ocean and produce oxygen, which is vital for life on Earth. This reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

NASA's Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP), an instrument aboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite launched in 2006, uses a laser to take measurements. 

Scientists used the instrument to continuously monitor plankton in polar regions from 2006 to 2015.

"CALIOP was a game-changer in our thinking about ocean remote sensing from space," said Chris Hostetler, a research scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

"We were able to study the workings of the high-latitude ocean ecosystem during times of year when we were previously completely blind," Hostetler noted.

​New Delhi, Dec 20 (IANS) Flock, a team messenger for businesses, on Tuesday launched world's first chat operating system "FlockOS" which allows developers to build customised apps, bots and integrations on Flock.

​Mumbai, Dec 20 (IANS) Volatility in the equity markets notwithstanding, the mutual funds industry is confident of attracting new investors and hopes to benefit from the macro-changes post-demonetisation, said a leading industry player.