Knowledge Update

New York, June 15 (IANS) South Korean smartphone giant Samsung sold the most number of smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of the year and is expected to sell 320 million smartphones by the end of the year, a new report said on Wednesday. According to US-based market research company IC Insights, buoyed by the strong sales growth of Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, Samsung sold 81.5 million smartphones, followed by Apple with 51.6 million smartphones -- in the first quarter. Although the list of top 12 smartphone makers is dominated by China-based smartphone suppliers -- taking eight spots in the list -- Indian smartphone supplier Micromax broke into the list for the first time. It sold five million devices in the first quarter of the year and is projected to sell 25 million smartphones by the end of the year -- 74 per cent increase from last year. “Among the Chinese players, Huawei is at number three, OPPO at number four, Xiaomi at number five, Vivo at number six, ZTE at number eight, Lenovo at number nine and TCL and Meizu are at spots 10 and 11, respectively,” androidheadlines.com said, quoting the report. Sony, Microsoft and Coolpad who were in the top 12 list dropped out this year. Lenovo, which was at fourth spot last year, dropped to ninth place this year - selling only 10.9 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2016. Their sales for the year are expected to drop 26 per cent from 2015. According to IC Insights, total global smartphone sales will increase by 5 percent from 1.43 billions units in 2015 to 1.5 billion in 2016. Samsung Galaxy Note 5 device has also topped the 2016 American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) poll. According to the annual poll comprising 12,710 people, Samsung Galaxy Note 5 phablet has a rating of 86 out of 100, 9to5mac.com reported recently. iPhone 6 Plus is one notch behind at 85. In last year's satisfaction index, Apple and Samsung were neck-to-neck at 80.​

​New Delhi, June 15 (IANS) Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry has been named a leader in the "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management" (EMM) Suites, research and advisory firm Gartner announced on Wednesday. The "Magic Quadrant" market research report aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. "We believe our positioning in the 'Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites' is proof that we are delivering on our enterprise roadmap and providing the most complete EMM solution on the market," said Billy Ho, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Products, BlackBerry, in a statement. "Our leading productivity apps combined with our enterprise-level mobile security provides organizations the ability to optimise their mobile journey while protecting both corporate and private data across multiple endpoints," he added. The new "Good Secure" EMM Suites from BlackBerry provide simple and flexible options for customers to deploy security across devices, apps, content and data.​

​New Delhi, June 15 (IANS) E-commerce major Flipkart on Tuesday announced the launch of laptop sale event "Lap it Up!" on its website in collaboration with Intel India. The campaign will offer latest laptop brands at some exciting prices with EMI option. “Around 50 per cent of our demand comes from tier II and III cities as a lot of the new models are not available in these cities. Our latest campaign has been designed in line with this trend to make latest laptops and technology accessible to our customers across geographies,” Adarsh K. Menon, Vice President (electronic and auto) Flipkart, said in a statement. “Our endeavour has always been to make technology affordable and accessible, especially for the first-time buyers,” added Anand Ramamoorthy, Director (consumption sales) South Asia, Intel.​

​New York, June 15 (IANS) Micro-blogging website Twitter has invested $70 million in popular music streaming service SoundCloud, a move that may push Twitter's stalled growth and engagement with its over 300 million users.

New York, June 15 (IANS) Older people struggle to remember important details because their brains cannot resist the irrelevant "stuff" they soak up subconsciously, thereby making them less confident in their memories, a study says.

Using bio-sensors to look at brain activity, the researchers saw that older participants wandered into a brief "mental time travel" when trying to recall details. 

This journey into their subconscious veered them into a cluttered space that was filled with both relevant and irrelevant information. 

This clutter led to less confidence, even when their recollections were correct, the study said.

Cluttering of the brain is one reason older people are more susceptible to manipulation, the researchers said. 

"This memory clutter that's causing low confidence could be a reason why older adults are often victims of financial scams, which typically occur when someone tries to trick them about prior conversations that didn't take place at all," said lead researcher Audrey Duarte, associate professor of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.

The findings appeared online in the journal Neuropsychologia.

For the study, the researchers showed that older adults (60 years and up) and college students a series of pictures of everyday objects while electroencephalography (EEG) sensors were connected to their heads. 

Each photo was accompanied by a colour and scene. Participants were told to focus on one and ignore the other. An hour later, they were asked if the object was new or old, and if it matched the colour and the scene.

Neither age group was very good at recalling what they were told to ignore. Both did well remembering the object and what they were supposed to focus on.

"But when we asked if they were sure, older people backed off their answers a bit. They weren't as sure," Duarte said.

The researchers noticed differences in brain activity between the young and old. Older adults' brains spent more time and effort trying to reconstruct their memories.

"While trying to remember, their brains would spend more time going back in time in an attempt to piece together what was previously seen," she said. 

"But not just what they were focused on -- some of what they were told to ignore got stuck in their minds," Duarte said.​

​Canberra, June 15 (IANS) Australia's Parkes Observatory telescope has discovered a molecule which displays key attributes associated with life, in a breakthrough set to help scientists solve the mystery of biology in space.

Chirality, or "handedness" is a key attribute related closely with life, but homochirality, or being exclusively either "left or right handed", has never been discovered outside of Earth, until the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO's) Parkes telescope found the 'handed' molecule propylene oxide.

Dr John Reynolds, Director of Operations at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, said the discovery will give scientists the chance to further research how the Universe can contribute to sustaining life, Xinhua reported.

"This discovery gives us a window into how an incredibly important type of molecule is made in space, and gives us the chance to understand the impact that process may have on life in the universe," Reynolds said in a statement on Wednesday.

Typically, many molecules exist in forms that are mirror images of each other, but molecules associated with life, such as proteins, enzymes, amino acids and sugars are found to be made up of a single handedness.

Propylene oxide is a common homochiral compound used in making polyurethane plastics, and was discovered by the radio telescope in an interstellar cloud near the center of the Milky Way.

The cloud, known as Sagittarius B2, is actively forming stars, and Reynolds said scientists would follow the developments in the region to see if the Universe divulges any further secrets about the potential of life in outer space.

"Understanding how this came about is a major puzzle in biology, " he said.​

​Washington, June 15 (IANS) For the first time, an instrument onboard an orbiting NASA spacecraft has measured the methane emissions from a single, specific leaking facility on the Earth’s surface, the US space agency has said.

The observation -- by the Hyperion spectrometer on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) -- is an important breakthrough in our ability to eventually measure and monitor emissions of this potent greenhouse gas from space.

"This is the first time the methane emissions from a single facility have been observed from space,” said one of the researchers, David Thompson from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

In a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a research team detailed the observation, which occurred over Aliso Canyon, near Porter Ranch, California. 

The Hyperion instrument successfully detected the methane leak on three separate overpasses during the winter of 2015-16. 

The research was part of an investigation of the large accidental Aliso Canyon methane release last fall and winter.

The orbital observations from Hyperion were consistent with airborne measurements made by NASA’s Airborne/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) imager flying onboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft.​

Canberra/Washington, June 15 (IANS) In a first, a team of scientists using highly sensitive radio telescopes has discovered the first complex organic “chiral” molecule in interstellar space near the centre of our galaxy.

Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality.

These so-called "handed" molecules are essential for biology and have intriguingly been found in meteorites that have hit the Earth and comets in our solar system.

The molecule, propylene oxide (CH3CHOCH2), was found in an enormous star-forming cloud of dust and gas known as Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2).

“This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life," explained Brett McGuire, Jansky post-doctoral Fellow with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Propylene oxide is among the most complex and structurally intricate molecules detected so far in space," added Brandon Carroll, chemistry graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.

Detecting this molecule opens the door for further experiments determining how and where molecular handedness emerges and why one form may be slightly more abundant than the other.

Complex organic molecules form in interstellar clouds like Sgr B2 in several ways.

The most basic pathway is through gas-phase chemistry, in which particles collide and merge to produce ever more complex molecules.

To form more complex molecules like propylene oxide, astronomers believe thin mantles of ice on dust grains help link small molecules into longer and larger structures.

These molecules can then evaporate from the surface of the grains and further react in the gas of the surrounding cloud.

To date, more than 180 smaller molecules have been detected in space.

“Meteorites in our solar system contain chiral molecules that predate the Earth itself, and chiral molecules have recently been discovered in comets," noted Carroll. "Such small bodies may be what pushed life to the handedness we see today."

"By discovering a chiral molecule in space, we finally have a way to study where and how these molecules form before they find their way into meteorites and comets, and to understand the role they play in the origins of homochirality and life," McGuire said in a paper published in the journal Science.

The research was undertaken with the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia as part of the Prebiotic Interstellar Molecular Survey. Additional supporting observations were taken with the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.​

​Beijing, June 13 (IANS) The indicators of industrial production and retail sales maintained their growth in May, while investments in fixed assets slowed down, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) on Monday.

Beijing, June 14 (IANS) Encouraging data points to stabilisation of China's economy but challenges ranging from tepid private investment to sluggish global economy suggest a strong recovery is unlikely.