Knowledge Update

Paris, May 3 (IANS) French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday said he was "at this stage" opposed to the free trade accord between the European Union and the US -- the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) -- unless rules to protect domestic businesses were respected.

Munich, May 4 (IANS) German car producer BMW Group reported here on Tuesday that its sales have reached a new record in the first quarter of the year. According to the group's statistics, sales volume in its automotive segment for the Bavarian company rose by 5.9 percent to a total of 557,605 units in the first three months of the year. A total of 127,167 units were sold on the Chinese mainland in the first quarter, representing an increase of 10.5 percent, Xinhua reported. "Our first-quarter performance is further proof of our ability to generate positive earnings with our core business, despite a volatile environment," Harald Krueger, chairman of the board of management, was quoted as saying. "We forecast slight increases and thus new record figures for sales volume in the automotive segment and group profit before tax in 2016," Krueger added. In addition, BMW reported that its size of the workforce increased by 4.4 percent to 122,692 people compared with the same period last year.​

​Washington, May 4 (IANS) Babies are much less likely to get the flu during their first six months of life, if their moms get flu vaccinations while pregnant, a US study said.

Infants six months and younger, whose mothers were vaccinated when pregnant, had a 70 percent reduction in laboratory-confirmed flu cases and an 80 percent reduction in flu-related hospitalisations, compared with babies whose moms were not immunised, according to the study published online in the US journal Pediatrics on Tuesday.

"Babies cannot be immunised during their first six months, so they must rely on others for protection from the flu during that time," Xinhua news agency quoted lead author Julie Shakib, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, as saying.

"When pregnant women get the flu vaccine there are clear benefits for their infants."

Shakib and colleagues examined more than 245,000 de-identified health records of pregnant women and more than 249,000 infant records for nine flu seasons from December 2005 through March 2014.

About 10 percent of the women -- 23,383 -- reported being vaccinated while pregnant compared with 222,003 who said they were not vaccinated, they found.

Over the study's course, laboratory-confirmed flu cases were reported among 658 infants. Of these cases, 638, or 97 percent, occurred in babies whose moms were not immunised.

A total of 151 of the 658 infants were hospitalised, with 148 being born to non-immunised pregnant women.

In order to confirm that the benefits observed in infants born to mothers who received flu vaccinations were not related to chance, the researchers also examined health records for the incidence of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a respiratory infection that also occurs in infants and young children during the winter months.

The analysis found that the vaccine had no effect on the incidence of RSV among infants, strengthening the findings that the benefits seen in the infants were actually due to the flu vaccine their mothers received.

The results led the researchers to declare that the need for getting more pregnant women immunised is a public health priority.

"We just really hope more pregnant women get the vaccine," Shakib said. "That's the take-home message of the study."​

New York, May 3 (IANS) To identify precisely where severe winds, hail or tornadoes are more likely to occur within storm clouds, NASA scientists have developed a new hazardous thunderstorm forecast method by combining satellite images with novel algorithms.

"We are able to analyse the locations where severe storms most frequently occur and when they occur with unprecedented detail using commonly available satellite imagery,” Kristopher Bedka, physical scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, said in an official statement on Tuesday. 

Forecasts play key roles in many people’s lives, from planning picnics at the park, to cancelling flights and avoiding weather-related tragedies. Because weather can be a life-or-death matter, researchers work hard to develop new technology and ways to provide earlier and more accurate forecasts.

Thunderstorms form when warm, moist air rises rapidly into the atmosphere. These air currents produce cloud formations known as cumulonimbus incus, or anvil clouds, which look similar to an atomic bomb explosion with a flat and wide top. 

Forecasters have known for years that anvil clouds indicate thunderstorms. But anvil tops can be miles wide, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish where within those clouds hazardous weather may be occurring. 

Bedka said it is crucial to figure out what is a hazardous storm and what isn’t within anvil clouds, especially because strong updrafts pose serious risks for things like flying aircraft.

To really target the action, Bedka focuses on updrafts that are strong enough to punch into the stratosphere. That penetration creates lumpy clouds, which look almost like the top of a cauliflower sticking out from an anvil top. 

Known as overshooting tops, these lumps indicate areas where strong thunderstorms ? sometimes hail and tornadoes ? usually occur.

Although researchers know that overshooting tops indicate thunderstorms, Bedka said it is sometimes difficult to spot them quickly enough to provide warnings for severe weather. 

To deliver almost instant forecasts, the researchers combine their satellite observations with powerful software engineering.

"We can process an image that covers the entire United States in less than two minutes,” Bedka said.

Overshooting tops research could make a difference for thousands of people worldwide under various situations, Bedka said.

"In the US we are fortunate in that we can track hazardous storms using weather radar data,” he said.

"But many regions in the world do not have these radars, so satellite imagery and hazardous storm detection products like mine are often the only data that forecasters can use to warn the public," Bedka noted.​

​New York, May 4 (IANS) Micro-blogging site Twitter on Wednesday launched a "Connect" tab -- a new feature to help you figure out which relevant accounts you would like to follow.

​Toronto, May 4 (IANS) Apart from the usual jet lag, the stress associated with air travel also includes air rage -- aggressive behaviour provoked in a passenger on board an aircraft. Initially thought as the result of long flight delays, shrinking seats and a general decline in civility, a new research claims that air rage occurs because of class inequality, that is, the division between business and economy class in the aircraft. "Air rage incidents are more likely when the plane has a first class cabin," said lead researcher Katy DeCelles, associate professor at the University of Toronto in Canada. The findings showed that simply having a first-class compartment made an air rage incident nearly four times more likely, equivalent to the effect of a nine-hour flight delay. Also, the odds increase when economy passengers have to pass through first class to get to their seats, reinforcing the inequality. In addition, the bad behaviour was higher not only for economy passengers, but for those in first class too. Other factors such as crowdedness, alcohol consumption and long flights can also contribute to disruptive incidents, the researchers said, but added that their impact was smaller than one might expect. The study, published in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have implications for any physical environment where differences in class or status are apparent -- such as a tiered stadium or a workplace where lower-level employees have to pass by executive offices to get to their cubicles. Further, it also shows that even temporary experiences of inequality can have negative effects. The team used a database of thousands of documented disruptive flight incidents over several years for a large international airline. The incidents were serious enough to be considered a threat to onboard safety, such as passengers refusing to sit down, yelling obscenities at a flight attendant or interfering with smoke sensors so they could sneak a cigarette. Airlines can reconsider ways to reduce negative behaviour between different passenger groups by using a dual gating system, the researchers suggested. "The more you can use those dual gates to board airplanes, separating the first-class cabin from the economy cabin, you're going to have less air rage in both cabins," DeCelles concluded. ​

​Toronto, May 3 (IANS) A healthy intake of vitamin D in the first year of life can build up more muscle mass and reduce body fat in toddlers, finds a new study.

"We were very intrigued by the higher lean mass, the possibility that vitamin D can help infants to not only grow healthy skeletons but also healthy amounts of muscle and less fat," said one of the researcher Hope Weiler, director of the Mary Emily Clinical Nutrition Research Unit at McGill University in Canada.

The team analysed 132 infants in Quebec who were given a vitamin D3 supplement at one of four different dosages between the ages of one month and 12 months.

Using body scans they assessed bone density to measure the children's muscle and fat mass. 

Vitamin D supplementation is routinely recommended for babies until they can get an adequate amount through their diet. 

Children who had higher stores of vitamin D in their body averaged around 450 grams less body fat at three years of age, the study found.

The findings confirmed the importance of a vitamin D supplement of 400 international units per day during a baby's first year for the development of strong bones.

However, higher doses did not show any additional benefit -- at least not in terms of bone development.

The study, published in the journal Pediatric Obesity, indicated a correlation between lean muscle mass and the average level of vitamin D in the body over the first three years of a child's life.

The only other factor found to make a significant difference to the children's amount of body fat was their level of physical activity, the researchers stated.​

​Washington, May 3 (IANS) Indian-origin researchers have developed a new health sensing tool that can accurately measure lung function over a simple phone call made with any phone -- not just smartphone -- from anywhere in the world.

The findings could be of special help for people in the developing world -- who have asthma, cystic fibrosis or other chronic lung diseases -- know how well their lungs are functioning without visiting a doctor or a clinic, which in some places can take days of travel.

"We wanted to be able to measure lung function on any type of phone you might encounter around the world -- smartphones, dumb phones, landlines, pay phones," said Shwetak Patel, professor at the University of Washington. 

The new tool is called SpiroCall.

"With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone and use the telephone network to test your lung function," Patel said.

The patients take a deep breath in and exhale as hard and fast as they can until they can't exhale any more. The phone's microphone senses sound and pressure from that exhalation and sends the data to a central server, which uses machine learning algorithms to convert the data into standard measurements of lung function.

"People have to manage chronic lung diseases for their entire lives," lead author Mayank Goel, computer science and engineering doctoral student at University of Washington, said.

"So there's a real need to have a device that allows patients to accurately monitor their condition at home without having to constantly visit a medical clinic, which in some places requires hours or days of travel," Goel noted.

SpiroCall is an advancement over SpiroSmart which the researchers introduced in 2012 to let people monitor their lung function by blowing into their smartphones.

Over the last four years, the team has collected data from more than 4,000 patients who have visited clinics in Seattle and Tacoma as well as in India and Bangladesh, where clinicians have measured lung function using both SpiroSmart and a commercial spirometer. 

In surveying patients from India and Bangladesh, though, the team realised that a significant percentage did not own smartphones and would be unable to use SpiroSmart in their own homes -- which was a key goal of the project.

The team realised that the only sensor they were using was a microphone, which all phones have. 

So the researchers decided to develop a system that would work with any phone anywhere in the world by having the patient use a call-in service.

How the tool meets the medical community’s standards for accuracy will be described in a paper to be presented in May at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI 2016 conference in San Jose, California.​

​New York, May 3 (IANS) Newly discovered genetic switches that increase lifespan and boost fitness in worms are also linked to increased lifespan in mammals, says a study that offers hope that drugs to flip these switches could improve human metabolic function and increase longevity.

These so-called epigenetic switches are enzymes that are ramped up after mild stress during early development and continue to affect the expression of genes throughout the animal's life.

When the researchers looked at strains of inbred mice that have radically different lifespans, those with the longest lifespans had significantly higher expression of these enzymes than did the short-lived mice.

"Two of the enzymes we discovered are highly, highly correlated with lifespan; it is the biggest genetic correlation that has ever been found for lifespan in mice, and they're both naturally occurring variants," said one of the researchers Andrew Dillin, professor at University of California, Berkeley in the US.

"Based on what we see in worms, boosting these enzymes could reprogramme your metabolism to create better health, with a possible side effect of altering lifespan," Dillin said.

The discoveries were reported online in the journal Cell. 

The findings suggest that the reversal of ageing by epigenetic enzymes could also take place in humans.

"It seems that, while extreme metabolic stress can lead to problems later in life, mild stress early in development says to the body, 'Whoa, things are a little bit off-kilter here, let's try to repair this and make it better.' These epigenetic switches keep this up for the rest of the animal's life," Dillin pointed out.​

New York, May 3 (IANS) Inspired by the sea urchin's intricate mouth and teeth, a team of engineers and marine biologists from the University of California-San Diego has developed a claw-like device to sample sediments on other planets such as Mars.

Bio-inspiration for the study came from pink sea urchins which live off the west coast of North America.

Researchers extracted the urchins' mouthpieces, scanned them and analysed the structures at school of medicine at UC San Diego.

This allowed engineers to build a highly accurate model of the mouthpiece's geometry.

Led by mechanical engineering professor Joanna McKittrick, the team also used finite element analysis to investigate the structure of the teeth.

"The urchin's extraordinary ability to rip through rock could translate to a good sediment sampler for space vehicles like the Mars rovers, which currently use shovels to collect ground samples,” said Michael Frank, PhD candidate at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

"Our goal was a bio-inspired device that's more precise and efficient at grabbing ground samples from different areas and won't disturb the surrounding area like a shovel would," he added.

On the third iteration, they connected the teeth differently to the rest of the device, which allowed it to open much easier.

The students were able to quickly modify each prototype by using 3D printers. The device was then attached to a remote-controlled small rover.

The researchers first tested the claw on beach sand where it performed well.

They then used the claw on sand that simulates Martian soil in density and humidity. The device was able to scoop up sand efficiently.

Researchers envision a fleet of mini rovers equipped with the claw that could be deployed to collect samples and bring them back to a main rover.

Frank hopes that this design will be of interest to NASA and space exploration company SpaceX.

The researchers detailed their work in the Journal of Visualized Experiments.​