Knowledge Update

New Delhi, March 21 (IANS) Chinese smartphone maker Gionee on Tuesday launched a new selfie-focused smartphone in India that comes with a 16MP front camera with selfie flash and houses a 4,010mAh battery. While the pre-booking for A1 starts from March 3, the price of the device is yet to be announced. "Today's generation views the world from their front camera and they live for creating and celebrating experiences out of moments," said Arvind R Vohra, Country CEO and MD, Gionee India, in a statement. The device is powered by 2GHz octa-core P10 Helios processor paired with 4GB RAM, has 64GB internal memory that can be expanded up to 256GB and runs on Amigo 4.0 on top of Android 7.0 Nougat. A1 is equipped with a fingerprint sensor and claims to unlock the phone in just 0.2 seconds. For humid conditions, the sensor unlocks the device even with moist fingers. A1 has a full-metal body made out of "A6000 aircraft grade material" that is used in making premium cars and aircraft. The 4G and VOLTE enabled smartphone also offers a host of amazing features such as Split Screen, Maxx Audio and Virus detection among other key features.

​London, March 21 (IANS) London has become the cheapest of the worlds major global centres, with the cost of living falling behind that of New York, Paris and Tokyo to its lowest level for two decades, figures revealed on Tuesday.

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) world rankings, the fall is almost entirely due to the Brexit-inspired 15 per cent fall in the pound's fall since last June's referendum to leave the European Union (EU), the Guardian reported. 

The pound's fall has made prices in London much cheaper for foreign visitors, although not for local residents who earn their incomes in sterling.

The EIU said London is cheaper than New York for the first time in 15 years, and that relative prices in Manchester have fallen so far that the cost of living in the city is now on a par with Bangkok.

Meanwhile, the world's most expensive city is Singapore, where average prices are 20 per cent higher than in New York and one-third more than in London. The city-state has long been the most expensive place in the world to buy and run a car, but the EIU said it is also the second-priciest destination in which to buy clothes.

Australia and New Zealand are also pricing themselves out of the price bracket of budget-conscious travellers, the Guardian quoted the EIU as saying. 

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Wellington all now feature in the world's top 20 most expensive cities and each of them are pricier than London.

Almaty in Kazakhstan ranked as the cheapest city in the world.

London's new-found bargain-basement status has encouraged a flood of international shoppers to the city. Even low-cost clothing store Primark has reported strong sales to foreign tourists, joining luxury brands such as Burberry in enjoying a boost in sales from visitors drawn by the cheap pound.

​Colombo, March 21 (IANS) Sri Lanka is looking to increase international air connectivity in an effort to boost tourism, a statement said here on Tuesday.

With the tourism industry recording a positive growth since 2009, officials said they now hope to have more direct flights, open skies policy, competitive landing and parking fees, incentivising low-cost airlines and smoother immigration and check-in procedures, Xinhua news agency reported.

Sri Lanka is also hoping, with public and private stakeholders, to create a "Colombo Calendar" of events which tourists can access across multiple channels.

"The main goal is to ensure Sri Lanka doubles its tourism sector earnings from the present $3.5 billion in 2016 to $7 billion by 2020," the Tourism Ministry statement said.

Last year, 2.05 million tourists arrived in Sri Lanka, taking the island's tourism earnings to a record of $346.98 million in July 2016.

India and China have been the leading markets with the most number of tourist arrivals.

Over 270,000 Chinese tourists arrived in Sri Lanka in 2016, with China recording the strongest growth of 26.4 per cent compared to the previous year.

This year, Sri Lanka has set a target of 2.5 million tourists. 

​Washington, March 21 (IANS) The last volcanic activity on the Red Planet ceased about 50 million years ago -- around the time when our planet's plant and animal species, including dinosaurs, went extinct, reveals new research.

The giant Martian shield volcano Arsia Mons produced one new lava flow at its summit every one to 3 million years during the final peak of activity. 

The last volcanic activity there ceased about 50 million years ago around the time of the Earth's Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.

"We estimate that the peak activity for the volcanic field at the summit of Arsia Mons probably occurred approximately 150 million years ago -- the late Jurassic period on Earth -- and then died out around the same time as the Earth's dinosaurs," said Jacob Richardson, a post-doctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. 

"It's possible, though, that the last volcanic vent or two might have been active in the past 50 million years, which is very recent in geological terms," Richardson added.

Located just south of Mars' equator, Arsia Mons is the southernmost member of a trio of broad, gently sloping shield volcanoes collectively known as Tharsis Montes. 

Richardson presented the findings, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, on Monday. 

The high-resolution imaging was provided by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

A better understanding of when volcanic activity on Mars took place is important because it helps researchers understand the Red Planet's history and interior structure.

​New York, March 21 (IANS) Chimpanzees living in the wild -- with favourable ecological factors, abundant supply of high-energy and nutritious foods and low predation levels -- can have long life spans, a study has found.

"Our findings show how ecological factors, including variation in food supplies and predation levels, drive variation in life expectancy among wild chimpanzee populations," said lead author of the study Brian Wood, Assistant Professor at Yale University.

In the study, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the team analysed a sample of 306 chimpanzees of a community, called Ngogo, at Kibale National Park in Uganda.

They found that these chimpanzees had an average life expectancy of about 33 years, nearly twice as high as that of other chimpanzee communities and within the 27 to 37-year range of life expectancy at birth of human hunter-gatherers.

According to the study, favourable ecological conditions largely account for the Ngogo community's high life expectancy -- the highest on record for any group of wild chimpanzees.

The forest in Ngogo provides a relatively consistent and abundant supply of high-energy and nutritious foods, including easily digestible figs.

This rich food supply helps buffer the Ngogo chimpanzees against periods of hunger, and helps fuel their ability to stave off diseases that would otherwise lead to higher mortality, the research said.

Further, the Ngogo chimpanzees also benefit from a low risk of predation, no major disease epidemics, either introduced by humans or due to other causes, like those that have affected wild chimpanzees at several other research sites.

The study is important for understanding the evolution of chimpanzees and hominin life histories as they help us to imagine the conditions that could have changed mortality rates among our early hominin populations, Wood said.

"It has long been proposed that there are extreme differences in the life expectancies of human hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees," said David Watts, Professor at Yale University.

"In fact, the Ngogo community's pattern of survivorship more closely resembles that of human hunter-gatherers than those documented for other chimpanzee communities," he said.

​London, March 21 (IANS) The record-breaking heat that made 2016 the hottest year recorded so far has continued into 2017, pushing the world into "truly uncharted territory", according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

The WMO's assessment of the climate in 2016, published on Tuesday, reports unprecedented heat across the globe, exceptionally low ice at both poles and surging rise in sea levels, the Guardian reported.

Global warming is largely being driven by emissions from human activities, but a strong El Nino -- a natural climate cycle -- has added to the heat in 2016. 

The El Nino is now waning, but the extremes continue to be seen, with temperature records tumbling in the US in February and polar heatwaves pushing ice cover to new lows, the WMO report said.

"Even without a strong El Nino in 2017, we are seeing other remarkable changes across the planet that are challenging the limits of our understanding of the climate system. We are now in truly uncharted territory," said David Carlson, director of the WMO's world climate research programme.

Last year saw the hottest global average among thermometer measurements stretching back to 1880, reports the Guardian. 

But scientific research indicates the world was last this warm about 115,000 years ago and that the planet has not experienced such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 4 million years.

This year already saw temperature records continue to tumble, in the US where February was exceptionally warm, and in Australia, where prolonged and extreme heat struck many states. 

According to the report, global sea level rise surged between November 2014 and February 2016, with the El Nino event helping the oceans rise by by 15mm. 

That jump would have taken five years under the steady rise seen in recent decades, as ice caps melt and oceans get warmer and expand in volume. 

​New York, March 21 (IANS) A team of researchers has developed a cheap, portable camera that can photograph the retina without the need for pupil-dilating eye drops.

Made out of simple parts mostly available online, the camera's total cost is about $185.

"As residents seeing patients in the hospital, there are often times when we are not allowed to dilate patients -- neurosurgery patients for example," said Dr Bailey Shen, an ophthalmology resident at University of Illinois' Chicago College of Medicine.

"There are times when we find something abnormal in the back of the eye but it is not practical to wheel the patient all the way over to the outpatient eye clinic just for a photograph," Shen added.

The prototype camera can be carried in your pocket and can take pictures of the back of the eye without eye drops. The pictures can be shared with other doctors, or attached to the patient's medical record.

The camera is based on the Raspberry Pi 2 computer, a low-cost, single-board computer designed to teach children how to build and programme computers. 

A handful of other components -- a lens, a small display screen and several cables -- make up the rest of the camera.

Shen and his co-author Dr Shizuo Mukai, associate professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and a retina surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, describe their camera and provide a shopping list of parts, instructions for assembly and the code needed to programme the camera in the Journal of Ophthalmology.

"This is an open-source device that is cheap and easy to build," said Mukai. "We expect that others who build our camera will add their own improvements and innovations."

"The device is currently just a prototype, but it shows that it is possible to build a cheap camera capable of taking quality pictures of the retina without dilating eye drops, " Shen said. 

Mumbai, March 19 (IANS) In a development that could transform the management of cancer patients, a Bengaluru-based laboratory has claimed to have cracked the difficulties related to tracing malignant cells and avoid repeated biopsies.

Doctors often are forced to conduct repeated biopsy tests to detect certain types of cancers related to skin, lung and colon. 

But with the new method -- liquid biopsy test -- developed for the first time in India by MedGenome, a genomics-based research and diagnostics company, physicians can identify genetic alterations, interpret, assess and treat various forms of cancer, the company said.

The test has also been validated in a scientific study, in academic collaboration with Tata Memorial Centre Hospital (TMH), Mumbai, and its state-of-the-art R&D satellite Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC).

The test facilitates detection of mutation where there is difficulty of obtaining biopsy or in the event of a damaged biopsy material and non-availability of tissue biopsy.

The development assumes significance in view of the fact that by 2020 India may have an estimated 1.73 million new cases of cancer and over 880,000 cancer deaths. Around 70 per cent of all cancer patients approach the doctor only when the symptoms noticeably appear and the chances of cure are very low as the by then disease has advanced.

"Management of cancer will undergo a massive transformation in India with NGS (next generation sequencing)-based liquid biopsies. We are constantly striving to get the most advanced genetic testing technology/technique at affordable prices to the patients and Oncotrack is one such offering," said Sam Santhosh, MedGenome Chairman.

Dr. Kumar Prabhash, Medical Oncologist at TMH, opines: "As the care gets more personalised, doctors will be equipped to make correct diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of diseases. Cell-free tumour DNA (ctDNA) analysis will help in avoiding repeat biopsies of difficult-to-get tumours and also in monitoring the overall response to treatment on real time basis."

In medical terms, the liquid biopsy-based test is a non-invasive screening that analyses cell-free DNA that is isolated from the patients' blood. Using high-end sequencing technology, the screening process identifies specific gene mutations that are linked with melanoma, lung and colon cancers. 

This empowers cancer specialists, the oncologists, to look for actionable alterations in a patient's treatment and management, without having to do an invasive biopsy or where biopsy is not an option, Medgenome said.

"Liquid biopsy has the capacity to interpret infinite mutations which will pave the way for new drug discovery, research and therapies. Over 35 oncologists in India have already screened patients using our Oncotrack. Further, since it has a very patient-friendly approach, we are confident it will be very well accepted by the doctors and patients," said Dr V.L. Ramprasad, COO, MedGenome.

Oncotrack is a proven molecular tool after histopathology diagnosis and detecting molecular changes at baseline and at the time of relapse in lung and colon cancer for deciding the right treatment. 

MedGenome is a market leader for genomic diagnostics in South Asia and a leading provider of genomics research services globally. MedGenome offers genomics solutions in cancer immunotherapy, diabetes etc., and works with various commercial and academic researchers globally on genomic research projects. It is also a founding member of GenomeAsia 100K initiative to sequence 100,000 genomes in South, North and East Asia, Ramprasad said.

​Moscow, March 20 (IANS) Increased digital clutter, owing to an explosion in the usage of apps, is leaving smartphones vulnerable to security threats, a new survey said on Monday.

​Beijing, March 20 (IANS) The Chinese government on Monday reported several companies and local administrations that have breached environmental protection measures within the country.