Introduction & Purpose
Knowledge update and Industry update at Skyline University College (SUC) is an online platform for communicating knowledge with SUC stakeholders, industry, and the outside world about the current trends of business development, technology, and social changes. The platform helps in branding SUC as a leading institution of updated knowledge base and in encouraging faculties, students, and others to create and contribute under different streams of domain and application. The platform also acts as a catalyst for learning and sharing knowledge in various areas.
Super User
Lifestyle and Trends
New York, May 11 (IANS) Far from being rejuvenating, a peaceful walk in nature after a difficult day at work can make people prone to anxiety more stressed, new research suggests.
They should instead take a walk in a busy, urban environment, the study said.
What should you do after a difficult day at work? Many people would take a peaceful walk in nature, but this may not be a wise choice for everyone.
A study found evidence that people who are more prone to anxiety should instead take a walk in a busy, urban environment.
"Previous literature says that natural environments tend to restore cognitive abilities better than urban environments, but we questioned whether this one-sided perspective was accurate," said study lead author Kevin Newman, assistant professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, US.
The researchers started by asking participants to perform tasks that drained them mentally, such as writing sentences without using the letters "A" or "N."
Then participants answered questions that revealed their level of neuroticism, such as whether they were a worrier, irritable, highly strung or experienced moods that often go up and down.
Then all the participants performed tasks that exposed them to words or pictures associated with either a natural or urban environment.
Surprisingly, the results revealed that people with neurotic personalities had more success restoring their cognitive abilities after they viewed words related to a busy urban environment.
In fact, nature could provide frenetic, stressful cues when the participants were exposed to words like "bear," "cliff" and "thunder."
The nature-related words, however, were more beneficial for people who were not generally neurotic.
The findings appeared in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
"People tended to do better in environments that fit with their personality," Newman said.
"Imagine someone with a neurotic personality like Woody Allen. If you put him in a forest it could be very off-putting rather than rejuvenating," he said.
Super User
Lifestyle and Trends
London, May 10 (IANS) Decisions are best taken when you are full. Researchers have found that the hormone ghrelin -- that is released before meals and is known to increase the appetite -- has a negative effect on both decision making and impulse control.
"For the first time, we have been able to show that increasing ghrelin levels that are seen prior to meals or during fasting, causes the brain to act impulsively and also affects the ability to make rational decisions," said one of the researchers Karolina Skibicka from Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
When hungry, the hormone ghrelin is produced in the stomach. In the new study conducted on rats, the hormone has been shown to have a negative effect on decision making capabilities and impulse control.
The rats can be trained to be rewarded (with sugar) when they execute an action such as pressing a lever ("go") -- or instead they can be rewarded only when they resist pressing the lever ("no-go") when an appropriate signal is given.
They learn this by repeatedly being given a signal, for example, a flash of light or a buzzing sound that tells them which action should be executed for them to receive their reward.
An inability to resist pressing the lever, when the "no-go" signal is given, is a sign of impulsivity.
Researchers found that rats given ghrelin directly into the brain, which mimics how the stomach would notify us of a need to eat, were more likely to press the lever instead of waiting, despite it causing them lose their reward.
Higher levels of ghrelin prevented the rats from being able to wait for the greater reward, said the study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
Washington, May 10 (IANS) A team led by an Indian-origin computer engineer from University of Washington has built a five-fingered robotic hand that can not only perform dexterous in-hand manipulation but also learn from its own experience without depending on humans to direct it.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
New York, May 10 (IANS) The additional "Reaction" buttons that social media giant Facebook introduced next to the "Like" button this year have failed to charm users, a study has found.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
New York, May 10 (IANS) Micro-blogging website Twitter will soon roll out an update of its Periscope live video app that will enable users broadcast live directly from a drone and to save broadcasts beyond 24 hours.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
New York, May 10 (IANS) In an upgrade to the human-computer interaction platforms, voice controlled assistance touched a new high when Viv -- an artificial intelligence (AI) virtual system -- was presented at the "TechCrunch Disrupt" event here on Monday.
SUC Editing Team
Information Systems
Las Vegas (US), May 9 (IANS) The world's largest IT storage company is in the race for developing smart cities in India, offering their services to the central and state governments, according to senior officials of the company.
"We have already completed a health project for a state government to make hospitals smart and to provide real time information to the government for taking appropriate decision," Rajesh Janey, President, EMC India and Saarc, told visiting Indian journalists to the EMC world annual conference here.
SUC Editing Team
Travel and Tourism
Cairo, May 10 (IANS/AKI) The number of tourists visiting Egypt fell by 47.2 percent between March 2015 and the same month this year, according to official statistics cited by state-run daily Al-Ahram.
A total of 440,700 tourists visited Egypt in March, compared with 834,600 in the same month last year, said the country's central statistics office, quoted by Al-Ahram.
Egypt's authorities blame the slump in tourist bookings on fears caused by the downing of a Russian passenger jet over Sinai in October which killed all 224 people on board.
The Islamic State jihadist group claimed it brought down the flight which was travelling from the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh to St Petersburg.
Western Europeans formed the biggest group of visitors to Egypt (slightly over one-third) followed by tourists from the Middle East and eastern Europe.
Egypt was most popular with Germans, Saudi Arabians and Ukrainians.
Super User
From Different Corners
New York, May 10 (IANS) Researchers including one of Indian origin from the US Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab have engineered a strain of bacteria that enables a "one-pot" method for producing advanced biofuels from a slurry of pre-treated plant material.
The Escherichia coli (E coli) is able to tolerate the liquid salt used to break apart plant biomass into sugary polymers.
Developing ionic-liquid-tolerant bacteria eliminates the need to wash away the residual ionic liquid.
The achievement is a critical step in making biofuels a viable competitor to fossil fuels because it helps streamline the production process.
Being able to put everything together at one point, walk away, come back and then get your fuel, is a necessary step in moving forward with a biofuel economy," said principal investigator Aindrila Mukhopadhyay, vice president of the fuels' synthesis division at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), Berkeley Lab.
"The E coli we've developed gets us closer to that goal. It is like a chassis that we build other things onto, like the chassis of a car. It can be used to integrate multiple recent technologies to convert a renewable carbon source like switchgrass to an advanced jet fuel," he added.
The basic steps of biofuel production start with deconstructing, or taking apart, the cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin that are bound together in the complex plant structure.
Enzymes are then added to release the sugars from that gooey mixture of cellulose and hemicellulose, a step called saccharification.
Bacteria can then take that sugar and churn out the desired biofuel.
The multiple steps are all done in separate pots.
Researchers pioneered the use of ionic liquids - salts that are liquid at room temperature - to tackle the deconstruction of plant material because of the efficiency with which the solvent works.
E. coli remains the workhorse microbial host in synthetic biology and in the new study, using the ionic-liquid-tolerant E. coli strain, we can combine many earlier discoveries to create an advanced biofuel in a single pot," the authors noted.
"Ultimately, we hope to develop processes that are robust and simple where one can directly convert any renewable plant material to a final fuel in a single pot," Mukhopadhyay noted in a paper published in the journal Green Chemistry.
Super User
Lifestyle and Trends
Washington, May 10 (IANS) Researchers have discovered how a small brain structure plays a central role in the many decisions that we make each day such as what to order for lunch or whether to go with the hearty red wine or the lighter white.
Studying how monkeys choose between juice drinks, the researchers found that some of the neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) assign value to the options, while other neurons are related to making final choices.
All of these neurons can re-map to make different decisions when circumstances change.
"When we choose between an apple and a banana, some neurons assign a value to the apple, some neurons assign a value to the banana, and other neurons represent the choice outcome," said the study's senior investigator Camillo Padoa-Schioppa from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
"Taken together, these different groups of cells seem to form a neural circuit that generates economic decisions," Padoa-Schioppa said.
In this study, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers examined how this neural circuit reorganises when decisions are made in different circumstances.
During the experiments, the researchers used a dozen different juice drinks. In each tasting session, the monkeys chose between two different drinks. Subsequently, they chose between two other juice drinks.
"If we look at individual cells, neurons are very flexible," Padoa-Schioppa said.
"However, if we consider the whole network, the decision circuit is remarkably stable. This combination of circuit stability and neuronal flexibility makes it possible for the same brain region to generate decisions between any two goods," Padoa-Schioppa noted.