Knowledge Update

​New York, April 14 (IANS) Love to binge on burgers, pizzas and French fries? Beware, as consuming fast food can expose you to higher levels of potentially harmful chemicals known as phthalates, which are used in food packaging, warns a new study.

Phthalates belong to a class of industrial chemicals used to make food packaging materials, tubing for dairy products, and other items used in the production of fast food.

The findings showed that people who ate the most fast food had phthalate levels in their urine that was 24 percent to 40 percent higher than those who rarely ate junk food.

"Our findings raise concerns because phthalates have been linked to a number of serious health problems in children and adults," said lead author Ami Zota, assistant professor at George Washington University in US.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, analysed the effect of two phthalates di(2-ethylexyl) phthalate (DEHP) and diisononyl phthalate (DiNP) in use despite concerns that they leach out of products and get into the human body.

Exposure to these chemicals can damage the reproductive system and may even lead to infertility, the authors warned.

They also discovered that grain and meat items were the most significant contributors to phthalate exposure.

The grain category contained a wide variety of items including bread, cake, pizza, burritos, rice dishes and noodles.

The team looked at data on 8,877 participants who had answered detailed questions about their diet in the past 24 hours, including consumption of fast food.

They also took urinary samples that could be tested for the breakdown products of two specific phthalates -- DEHP and DiNP.

In addition, the researchers also looked for exposure to another chemical found in plastic food packaging -- Bisphenol A or BPA.

Exposure to BPA can lead to health and behaviour problems, especially for young children, but the study found no association between total fast food intake and BPA.

However, the result so revealed that people who ate fast food meat products had higher levels of BPA than people who reported no fast food consumption​

New York, April 14 (IANS) Imagine shirts that act as antennas for smartphones or tablets, workout clothes that monitor fitness level or even a flexible fabric cap that senses activity in the brain!

All this will soon be possible as the researchers working on wearable electronics have been able to embroider circuits into fabric with super precision -- a key step toward the design of clothes that gather, store or transmit digital information.

"A revolution is happening in the textile industry. We believe that functional textiles are an enabling technology for communications and sensing and one day, even for medical applications like imaging and health monitoring," said lead researcher John Volakis from Ohio State University.

The milestone achieved by the Ohio researchers has the potential to allow integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing with 0.1 mm precision.

With further development, the technology could also lead to sports equipment that monitor athletes' performance or a bandage that tells doctors how well the tissue beneath it is healing.

Volakis' team created the functional textiles, also called "e-textiles," on a typical tabletop sewing machine. 

Like other modern sewing machines, it embroiders thread into fabric automatically based on a pattern loaded via a computer file. 

The researchers substituted the thread with fine silver metal wires that, once embroidered, feel the same as traditional thread to the touch.

"For the first time, we've achieved the accuracy of printed metal circuit boards, so our new goal is to take advantage of the precision to incorporate receivers and other electronic components," added Volakis in a paper published in the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.

The shape of the embroidery determines the frequency of operation of the antenna or circuit.

"Shape determines function. And you never really know what shape you will need from one application to the next. So we wanted to have a technology that could embroider any shape for any application," noted Asimina Kiourti, co-author of the study.

She also incorporated some techniques common to microelectronics manufacturing to add parts to embroidered antennas and circuits.​

​New York, April 14 (IANS) In a fresh bid to connect the world better, Facebook has announced a new research lab to build hardware products based on its software and has hired a former top Google executive to achieve its goal.

Beijing, April 12 (IANS) Over 80 percent of groundwater in China is polluted and not fit for human consumption.

In its most recent monthly report, published on Monday, the water resources ministry said that of 2,103 monitored wells, water from 691, or 32.9 percent, was defined as Class

​London, April 12 (IANS) A team of scientists led by Oxford University has made a discovery that can improve chances of developing an effective vaccine against Tuberculosis (TB).

The researchers identified new biomarkers for TB which have shown for the first time why immunity from the widely used BCG vaccine is so variable. 

The biomarkers will also provide valuable clues to assess whether potential new vaccines could be effective, the team said.

TB remains one of the world's major killer diseases. The only available BCG vaccine works well (estimated 50 percent effective) to prevent severe disease in children but is very variable (0 percent to 80 percent effective) in adults.

With a pressing need for a TB vaccine that is more effective than BCG, the Oxford team working with colleagues from the University of Cape Town and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine set out to identify immune correlates that could facilitate TB vaccine development. 

The team, led by professor Helen McShane and Dr Helen Fletcher, studied immune responses in infants in South Africa who were taking part in a TB vaccine trial.

The team carried out tests for 22 possible factors. 

“These are useful results. They show that antigen-specific T cells are important in protection against TB but that activated T cells increase the risk,” explained professor McShane from Oxford in a paper that appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time we have some evidence of how BCG might work and also what could block it from working. Although there is still much work to do, these findings may bring us a step closer to developing a more effective vaccine for TB,” added Dr Fletcher from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The team is working to develop an effective TB vaccine aimed at protecting more people from the disease.​

​New York, April 13 (IANS) World-renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a $100 million effort to make tiny spaceships capable of interstellar space travel.

Hawking and Milner made the joint announcement at a press conference held at One World Observatory in New York City on Tuesday, Xinhua reported.

The project, dubbed "Breakthrough Starshot," is a research and engineering programme that aims to build laser beam propelled "nanocrafts" that can travel at 20 percent of lightspeed -- more than 1,000 times faster than current fastest spacecraft.

According to Milner, once the "nanocrafts" are built, they could reach Alpha Centauri, a star 4.37 light-years away, approximately 20 years in a fly-by mission.

Alpha Centauri is one of the closest star systems to the solar system and the current fastest spacecraft would have to spend 30,000 years to get there.

The "nanocrafts" are gram-scale robotic spacecrafts consisting of two main parts: a computer CPU sized "StarChip" and a "Lightsail" made with metamaterials no more than a few hundred atoms thick.

Although weighing just a few grams, the "StarChip" is a fully functional space probe, which carries various equipment including cameras, navigation and communication.

"The 'StarChip' can be mass-produced at the cost of an iPhone," Milner said.

The "nanocrafts" can then be propelled into space by a powerful laser beam, which according to Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist and panelist at the news conference, will carry a power of 100 gigawatt.

"This is the power needed to lift off a space shuttle," Loeb said.

Milner and the scientists believe that with the rising power and falling costs of lasers, the entire process is practical within a couple of years.

"Fifteen years ago, it would not have made sense to make this investment. Now we have looked at the numbers, and it does," Milner said.

The project was part of the Breakthrough Initiatives first launched in July 2015 by Hawking and Milner, including a series of research plans to scan the 100 galaxies closest to the Milky Way in search for aliens. "Starshot" is its newest endeavor.

Hawking believes that human's innate sense to transcend limits is the driving force behind the project. "Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America."

While one cannot hear the joking tone through Hawking's voice synthesizer, his humour had been easily received.

What the scientists are looking for is not just reaching Alpha Centauri, but what can be learned during the efforts.

"A lot of science will be learned by the process of going through this, making this happen," said panelist Mae Jemison, a former NASA astronaut. 

"There is big task ahead, there's a big leap in getting something of a micro size to go at some percentage of the speed of light. That will have all kinds of reverberations."

Tuesday also marked the 55th anniversary of the first human space flight by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

"Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we are human and our nature is to fly," Hawking said.​

New York, April 13 (IANS) An image taken in 1917 and kept on an astronomical glass plate with the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS) has revealed the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun.

The unexpected find was recognised in the process of researching an article about planetary systems surrounding white dwarf stars in the journal New Astronomy Reviews.

The Review's author Jay Farihi from University College London and Carnegie Observatories' director John Mulchaey were looking for a plate in the Carnegie archive that contained a spectrum of van Maanen's star.

It is a white dwarf discovered by Dutch-American astronomer Adriaan van Maanen in the very year the plate was made.

Stellar spectra images allowed 19th century astronomers to develop a system for classifying stars that is still used today. 

Modern astronomers use digital tools to image stars but for decades, they would use glass photographic plates both to take images of the sky, and to record stellar spectra.

When Farihi examined the spectrum, he found something quite extraordinary.

Carnegie's 1917 spectrum of van Maanen's star revealed the presence of heavier elements such as calcium, magnesium, and iron, which should have long since disappeared into the star's interior due to their weight.

Astronomers now know that that van Maanen's star and other white dwarfs with heavy elements in their spectra represent a type of planetary system featuring vast rings of rocky planetary remnants that deposit debris into the stellar atmosphere. 

“The unexpected realisation that this 1917 plate from our archive contains the earliest recorded evidence of a polluted white dwarf system is just incredible,” said Mulchaey. 

Planets themselves have not yet been detected orbiting van Maanen's star, nor around similar systems, but Farihi is confident it is only a matter of time.

Carnegie has one of the world's largest collections of astronomical plates with an archive that includes about 250,000 plates from three different observatories.

“We have a ton of history sitting in our basement and who knows what other finds we might unearth in the future?” asked Mulchaey.

New York, April 12 (IANS) Infants' brains can understand what they are observing and thus can copy other people's action, finds a new study providing the first evidence that directly links neural responses from the motor system to overt social behaviour in infants.

Babies understand what they are observing. There is a direct connection between observing others, understanding what others are doing, and learning how to act -- abilities which are often disrupted in developmental disabilities, including autism, the researchers said.

Like adults, infants show this response when acting themselves and when watching others' actions, suggesting that the motor system of babies may play a role in the perception of others' actions, the researchers pointed out. 

"Our research provides initial evidence that motor system recruitment is contingently linked to infants' social interactive behaviour," said lead author Courtney Filippi, doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago in the US. 

The findings showed that recruiting the motor system during action encoding predicts infants' subsequent social interactive behaviour, the researchers stated.

"This understanding on the part of a baby involves not just seeing the other person's action, but also involves the baby's own motor system, which is recruited when he or she chooses the same toy," said Helen Tager-Flusberg, professor at Boston University in the US, who was not involved in the research. 

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that by the middle of their first year of life, babies begin to understand that people act intentionally.

"Here we looked at the development of social cognition, social behaviour, and the motor system, all of which are critical for human development and are often disrupted in developmental disabilities, including autism," explained co-author Amanda Woodward, professor at the Chicago University.

For the study, the team involved 36 seven-month-old infants, whose brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG), during an experiment, where each infant had to observe a person reaching out to a toy. 

Babies' brain activity predicted how they would respond to the person's behaviour.

When the infants recruited their motor system while observing the person grasp the toy, they subsequently imitated him. 

When they didn't imitate the person, there was no detectable engagement of the motor system in their brain activity as they watched him.​

Washington, April 13 (IANS) The first expandable habitats for astronauts that may help set the design of deep space habitats including on Mars is set to be installed to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 16.

Expandable habitats are designed to take up less room on a rocket but provide greater volume for living and working in space once expanded.

This first test of an expandable module will allow investigators to gauge how well the habitat performs overall and how well it protects against solar radiation, space debris and the temperature extremes of space.

Once the test period is over, BEAM will be released from the space station and will burn up during its descent through Earth's atmosphere.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be attached to the station's Tranquility module over a period of about four hours, the US space agency said in a statement.

Using the robotic arm, ground controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will remove BEAM from the unpressurised trunk of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.

NASA astronauts aboard the station will secure BEAM using common berthing mechanism controls.

BEAM was launched aboard Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on April 8.

At the end of May, the module will be expanded to nearly five times its compressed size of 7 feet in diameter by 8 feet in length to roughly 10 feet in diameter and 13 feet in length.

Astronauts will first enter the habitat about a week after expansion and, during a two-year test mission, will return to the module for a few hours several times a year to retrieve sensor data and assess conditions.

The BEAM project is co-sponsored by NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems Division and Bigelow Aerospace.​

Sydney, April 12 (IANS) A team of researchers has demonstrated that a new plant-derived drug can block the progression of multiple sclerosis.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a disease that affects the brain and spinal cord and is also a chronic incurable condition marked by attacks that bring gradual deterioration in the patient's health. It has affected nearly 2.5 million people worldwide.

The new drug -- named T20K -- was extracted from a traditional medicinal plant, the Oldenlandia affinis.

"This is a really exciting discovery because it may offer a whole new quality of life for people with this debilitating disease," said Christian Gruber, researcher at University of Queensland in Australia. 

The findings demonstrated in an animal model showed that T20K stopped progression in the normal clinical symptoms of MS.

The new treatment arose from a synthesised plant peptide, a class of drugs known as cyclotides.

"Cyclotides are present in a range of common plants, and they show significant potential for the treatment of auto immune diseases," Gruber noted in the paper published in the journal PNAS.

The new drug is to be taken by mouth, in contrast to some current MS treatments where patients need to have frequent injections.

"The T20K peptides exhibit extraordinary stability and chemical features that are ideally what you want in an oral drug candidate," Gruber stated.

The breakthrough could be a step forward in preventing and treating MS and other autoimmune diseases, the researchers concluded.​