Knowledge Update

​London, April 11 (IANS) Assessing the relationship between gender, BMI and notion of 'attractiveness', a new study finds that weight is intrinsically linked to attractiveness and women are the harshest judges and most harshly judged.

The findings showed that females perceive men and women with higher body mass index (BMI) as less attractive and judge other women harshly about weight in relation to beauty.

Conversely, men do not judge another man with a higher weight negatively, but still see overweight women as less attractive.

"This is the first study that looks at the relationship between BMI and attractiveness, from both gender's perspective" explained Sonia Oreffice, professor of University of Surrey in Britain.

Further, the anthropometric attributes -- physical measures of a person's size, form, and functional capacities, play a significant role in wage regressions in addition to attractiveness, showing that body size cannot be dismissed as a simple component of beauty.

The study, published in the journal Economics and Human Biology, provides insight into the relationship between body size and beauty and the wage inequality associated with it.

Body size -- height for both men and women and BMI only for men -- explains wages above and beyond beauty.

This contributes to bridge the gap between studies on the economics of anthropometric measures (including height and BMI), on one hand, and the economics of beauty, on the other, estimating the relevance of body size and beauty, the researchers concluded.​

​London, April 10 (IANS) Instead of reading a label, consumers could soon be interacting with an electronic screen on packages in the future. Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed a new way of attaching electronic screens to paper-based packaging where screens can display simple messages to customers -- a move that can revolutionise the packaging industry. "Labels on packaging can become much more innovative and allow customers to interact with and explore new products. The use of displays or light emitting panels on packaging will also allow companies to communicate brand awareness in a more sophisticated manner," said led researcher and professor David Lidzey. The team collaborated with technology company Novalia to create a new way of displaying information on packaging. It can be used in greeting cards or products where a customer could receive a simple message. Further developments can include a countdown timer on the side of a packet to indicate when a timed product was ready -- such as hair-dye, pregnancy tests or home-baking using a 'traffic lights' system. The process involves printing electronic tracks onto paper and then fixing low-cost electronics and a polymer LED display to the paper using an adhesive that conducts electricity. Scientists also designed and constructed a touch-pad keyboard on the paper that allows a user to selectively "drive" the LEDs in the display. The team's next steps are to create fully flexible organic displays on a plastic substrate that then fix onto the electronic tracks. The LED devices need to be low-cost and flexible enough to be used on all packaging. "The paper-based packaging industry is worth billions of dollars. This innovative system could give manufacturers a way to gain market share by being able to distinguish its products from competitors," noted Chris Jones from Novalia said in a paper published in the IEEE Journal of Display Technology.​

​Munich, April 12 (IANS) German car producer Audi AG on Tuesday announced that its sales in the Chinese market in the first quarter rose by 4.7 percent to 139,540 units. "Following a year of consolidation in 2015, Audi is once again on track for growth in China," Xinhua news agency cited Audi as saying its website. Statistics show that 50,986 cars were sold in March to customers in China, an increase of 5.4 percent and gains were seen particularly in the compact class. In addition, the four rings company also announced that it has achieved the best first quarter in the company's history along with the most successful sales month. The Ingolstadt-based company increased global sales by 4.6 percent to a monthly high of around 186,100 units in March, which brings cumulative deliveries since January to around 455,750 cars, four percent more than in the same quarter last year, according to a statement. "The strong demand in the first quarter confirms that we are on the right track to achieve another sales record for the full year in 2016," said Dietmar Voggenreiter, member of the board of management for sales and marketing.​

Dubai, April 11 (IANS) India-UAE trade has increased phenomenally in the last half century and at $60 billion per annum currently, has made the Gulf nation India's third largest trading partner since the last couple of years, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Monday.

​Beijing, April 11 (IANS) China will invest around $1.5 billion to upgrade Beijing's Zhongguancun district or the "Silicon Valley of China", an area with a strong presence of technology companies.

​Beijing, April 11 (IANS) The World Bank expects the Chinese economy to grow 6.7 percent in 2016, the bank said in a report on Monday.

The projection is on par with its last estimate in January. The bank has kept its projection for 2017 at 6.5 percent, Xinhua reported.

​Abu Dhabi, April 11 (IANS/WAM) The overall growth of foreign direct investment in Abu Dhabi in 2014 grew by 12.8 percent, figures revealed on Monday.

The figures came as part of the final findings of the field foreign investment survey carried out by the Statistics Centre - Abu Dhabi (SCAD).

​Nairobi, April 11 (IANS) Kenya is fast tracking the development of disease free zones in order to boost livestock exports, an official said on Sunday.

Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Principal Secretary Dr Andrew Tuimur told Xinhua in Nairobi that two disease free zones will be operational by the end of the year.

​London, April 11 (IANS) Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, astrophysicists from the University of Birmingham have discovered extra-solar planets whose atmospheres have been stripped away by their host stars.

According to them, planets with gaseous atmospheres that lie very close to their host stars are bombarded by a torrent of high-energy radiation. 

Due to their proximity to the star, the heat that the planets suffer means that their "envelopes" have been blown away by intense radiation. 

This violent "stripping" occurs in planets that are made up of a rocky core with a gaseous outer layer.

"The results show that planets of a certain size that lie close to their stars are likely to have been much larger at the beginning of their lives. Those planets will have looked very different," said Dr Guy Davies from the University of Birmingham's school of physics and astronomy. 

The findings have important implications for understanding how stellar systems, like our own solar system, and their planets, evolve over time and the crucial role played by the host star.

Scientists expect to discover many such "stripped systems" using a new generation of satellites including the NASA TESS Mission which will be launched next year. 

The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications. ​

​London, April 11 (IANS) How to determine that a person is trustworthy? According to researchers, people who hold onto moral absolutes are more trusted and more valued as social partners, suggesting that people gauge others' trustworthiness based on their moral judgments.

The findings help explain that snap judgements about morality tend to be based on a set of absolute moral rules even if a person makes different decisions when given more time.

"If people who stick to moral absolutes are preferred as social partners, expressing this view will reap benefits for oneself," said lead researcher Jim AC Everett from the University of Oxford.

The team used several variations of moral dilemmas where a person must decide whether or not to sacrifice an innocent person in order to save the lives of many others. 

The results indicate that across nine experiments, more than 2,400 participants who took an absolute approach to the dilemmas (like refusing to kill an innocent person, even when this maximised the greater good) were seen as more trustworthy than those who advocated a more flexible approach. 

When asked to entrust a person with a sum of money, participants handed over more money and were more confident of getting it back, when dealing with someone who refused to sacrifice one to save many. 

"This explains why we appear to like people who stick to these intuitive moral rules -- not because they are sticklers for the letter of the law, but because the rules themselves tend to emphasize the absolute importance of respecting the wishes and desires of others," added David Pizarro from Cornell University in the US.

Our day-to-day moral decisions don't fit into the neat categories defined by moral philosophers. Instead, real life morality is suited to the complexity of real life situations, the researchers suggested in a paper that appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. ​