Knowledge Update

​Washington, April 2 (IANS) Hyundai Motor Co. and its smaller affiliate, Kia Motors Corp., have reported their best US performances in the first quarter of 2016, industry data showed. Combined with January and February sales, their performances marked the best ever for the first quarter, Yonhap cited the companies as saying on Friday. Hyundai's sales rose 0.4 percent to 75,310 units on the strong demand for the Tucson sport utility vehicle, whose sales rose 85 percent to 7,830 units from last year, as well as for the Sonata mid-size sedan whose sales rose 57 percent to an all-time high of 28,778 units, the company said. Kia's sales fell slightly to 58,279 units from last year's 58,771, but the company said the figure included the best-ever single month sales for the Forte line of compact cars, and together with January and February figures, marked a new first quarter record of 146,321 vehicles. The record was led by the Sportage sport utility vehicle, whose first-quarter sales rose 50 percent to 17,467 units from last year.​

Melbourne, April 1 (IANS) Annoyed by long selfie sticks in public? An Australian technology company has a solution -- a "selfie drone". This lets you click selfie without stretching the hand and gives you a perfect photo too. Built by Australian technology company IoT Group, the "ROAM-" drone opened for pre-sale on Thursday and will begin shipping internationally in June, Mashable website reported. According to Ian Duffell, executive director of the IoT Group, the company's vision was to build "a selfie stick on steroids". "The selfie stick's problem is it's confined by the length of the stick. The thought was, let's get the thing taking the picture flying with you," he was quoted as saying. After being tethered to a smartphone, the two rotor "ROAM-e" can be programmed using facial recognition technology to follow the user at a distance of up to 25 metres. The device can take 360-degree panoramas and can even stream a live video for up to 20 minutes of flight time. The $267 device has a 5-megapixel CMOS sensor camera and runs on Quadcore ARM Cortex A7 processor. Its rotors can be folded. "We wanted it to be small enough to fit into a bag or pocket. We modelled it on not being bigger than a 600-millilitre water bottle," Duffell explained. "We all know drones fly around and take pictures, but because we've tailored it to be portable and in your space, it fits into a different category," he said. IoT Group said they will an extra capability that is the ability of the drone to drop a pin on a map application, instructing the ROAM-e to travel to that point and return.​

San Jose, April 1 (IANS) Luxury electric car maker Tesla Motors, the facility of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited in Silicon Valley last year, has identified India as a market for one of its most affordable models that has a price tag of $35,000, said a top company official. "Adding several more countries to Model 3 order page tonight. Check for details, but will include India, Brazil, SA, SK, NZ, Sing (Singapore) & Ireland," Tesla Motor CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. Unveiling the model's prototype on Thursday, Musk said the car would go into production in 2017. According to him, the car would accelerate from 0-60 kmph in less than 60 seconds and can go up to 345 km on a single charge. Musk said the car will be on sale by 2017-end and has a pre-order level of around 117,000 units. The company said once the production starts, deliveries will begin in North America. When the production is ramped up, deliveries in Europe, Asia-Pacific region and right-hand drive markets will happen. Last year, on September 27, Modi visited Tesla Motors facility. According to Musk, he and Modi talked about electricity generation and the way to skip ahead as it happened in the cell phones where it skipped ahead of landlines. Musk then said rural areas can have solar panels with battery packs which means there need not be electricity lines and skip ahead to next generation to power generation.​

New York, April 1 (IANS) Asia, the continent that houses roughly half the world's population, will face a "high risk of severe water stress" by 2050 if the current environmental, economical and population growth persists, warns a new study.

The study points out that water shortages are not simply the results of climate change and environmental stress. 

"It's not just a climate change issue. We simply cannot ignore that economic and population growth in society can have a very strong influence on our demand for resources and how we manage them," said one of the researchers Adam Schlosser, a senior research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in US.

"And climate, on top of that, can lead to substantial magnifications to those stresses," Schlosser added.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, showed that the median amounts of projected growth and climate change in the next 35 years in Asia would lead to about 1 billion more people becoming "water-stressed" compared to the present time.

To conduct the study, the scientists built upon an existing model developed previously at MIT, the Integrated Global Systems Model (IGSM), which contains probabilistic projections of population growth, economic expansion, climate, and carbon emissions from human activity. 

They then linked the IGSM model to detailed models of water use for a large portion of Asia encompassing China, India, and many smaller nations.

The scientists then ran an extensive series of repeated projections using varying conditions. 

In what they call the "just growth" scenario, they held climate conditions constant and evaluated the effects of economic and population growth on the water supply. 

In an alternate "just climate" scenario, the scientists held growth constant and evaluated climate-change effects alone. And in a "climate and growth" scenario, they studied the impact of rising economic activity, growing populations, and climate change.

The study gave the researchers a "unique ability to tease out the human (economic) and environmental" factors leading to water shortages and to assess their relative significance, Schlosser said.

The IGSM model also allowed the team to look at how, under the same variables, scenarios change according to countries. This is particularly useful to come up with country-specific strategies, in order to avoid water stress.

"For China, it looks like industrial growth (has the greatest impact) as people get wealthier. In India, population growth has a huge effect. It varies by region," explained lead author Charle Fant, researcher at MIT.

Other variables, such as water supply networks into and out of the different areas, and the way population is distributed around said supplies should be examined, the researchers said. 

"We are assessing the extent to which climate mitigation and adaptation practices - such as more efficient irrigation technologies - can reduce the future risk of nations under high water stress," Schlosser said.​

Washington, April 1 (IANS) Delving deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars at its core.

Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster - the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. 

So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbour Alpha Centauri. 

At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole which is about four million times the mass of our sun.

Astronomers used Hubble's infrared vision to pierce through the dust in the disk of our galaxy that obscures the star cluster. 

Hubble's sharp vision allowed astronomers to measure the movements of the stars over four years. 

Using this information, scientists were able to infer important properties such as the mass and structure of the nuclear star cluster. 

The motion of the stars may also offer a glimpse into how the star cluster was formed -- whether it was built up over time by globular star clusters that happen to fall into the galaxy's centre, or from gas spiraling in from the Milky Way's disk to form stars at the core.

The picture, spanning 50 light-years across, is a mosaic stitched from nine separate images from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. 

The centre of the Milky Way is located 27,000 light-years away. 

Astronomers estimate that about 10 million stars in this cluster are too faint to be captured in this image.​

​London, April 1 (IANS) Forgetting can be the result of an active deletion process in the brain rather than a failure to remember -- a mechanism that helps us adapt our behaviour according to the surroundings, says a new study.

The findings could point towards new ways of tackling memory loss associated with conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.

"Our study looks at the biological processes that happen in the brain when we forget something,” said Oliver Hardt from University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

"The next step is to work out why some memories survive whilst others are erased. If we can understand how these memories are protected, it could one-day lead to new therapies that stop or slow pathological memory loss," Hardt said.

The findings were published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The study conducted in rats could also help scientists to understand why some unwanted memories are so long-lasting - such as those of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders.

Memories are maintained by chemical signalling between brain cells that relies on specialised receptors called AMPA receptors. 

The more AMPA receptors there are on the surface where brain cells connect, the stronger the memory.

The team found that the process of actively wiping memories happens when brain cells remove AMPA receptors from the connections between brain cells.

Over time, if the memory is not recalled, the AMPA receptors may fall in number and the memory is gradually erased.

Blocking the removal of AMPA receptors with a drug that keeps them at the surface of the cell stopped the natural forgetting of memories, the study found.​

​New York, April 1 (IANS) Drinking black, decaf or even instant coffee daily can lower the risk of developing colorectal cancer, finds a study.

Moderate coffee consumption, between one to two servings a day, was associated with a 26 percent reduction in the odds of developing colorectal cancer after adjusting for known risk factors.

Moreover, the risk of developing colorectal cancer continued to decrease to up to 50 percent when participants drank more than 2.5 servings of coffee each day. 

"We found that drinking coffee is associated with lower risk of colorectal cancer and the more coffee consumed, the lower the risk," said lead researcher Stephen Gruber from University Of Southern California.

The study, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, examined over 5,100 participants who had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer within the past six months, along with an additional 4,000 participants with no history of colorectal cancer to serve as a control group. 

A questionnaire also gathered information about many other factors that influence the risk of colorectal cancer, including family history of cancer, diet, physical activity and smoking.

The indication of decreased risk was seen across all types of coffee, both caffeinated and decaffeinated.

Caffeine and polyphenol compounds present in coffee can act as antioxidants, limiting the growth of potential colon cancer cells. 

"The good news is that our data presents a decreased risk of colorectal cancer regardless of what flavor or form of coffee you prefer," said study co-author Stephanie Schmit. 

"While the evidence certainly suggests this to be the case, we need additional research before advocating for coffee consumption as a preventive measure," said Gad Rennert from Clalit National Israeli Cancer Control Center in Haifa, Isreal.​

​Beijing, March 31 (IANS) The Chinese central bank on Thursday injected liquidity of $15.4 billion into its financial system to boost lending.

The People's Bank of China (PBOC) carried out the operation through seven-day reverse repurchase agreements, or repos, at an interest rate of 2.25 percent, Xinhua news

​New Delhi, March 29 (IANS) The global real estate market is pegged to cross $1 trillion in 2016 - 6 percent higher than in 2015 - and India's property sector is likely to benefit out of it too, a survey said on Tuesday.

​Hyderabad, March 29 (IANS) German luxury car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz on Tuesday launched the S400, a new variant of its flagship luxury model, the S-Class.

It also plans to launch nine more models in India during the current year.