Knowledge Update

​Geneva, March 7 (IANS/MAP) Morocco organised a debate in Geneva to discuss possibilities for a global human rights-based climate change agenda.

The meeting was held on Monday on the sidelines of the main sessions of the UN Human Rights Council.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) Are you annoyed with your smartphone's relentless stream of text messages, push alerts, social media messages and other noisy notifications? Take heart, experts at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, have developed a new model that allows the smartphones to learn automatically like a "human secretary" and predict the user's receptiveness to distractions by the notifications. "Ideally, a smartphone notification management system should be like an excellent human secretary who knows when you want to be interrupted or left alone," said Janne Lindqvist, assistant professor at Rutgers University. Currently, the notification management system is not smart or only depends on a user's setting, such as turning on or off certain notifications. The model can help to better manage smartphone notifications using a sense of personality type and work patterns of individuals. The study will be published in May at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Denver, Colorado. In the study, the researchers collected more than 5,000 smartphone records from 22 participants over four weeks. The participants took a test to see how their personalities aligned with traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness, to help predict how interruptible people were. The results showed that when participants were in a pleasant mood, they were likely to be more interruptible than if they were in an unpleasant mood. It also varied based on their location. But participants were reluctant to be interrupted when they were studying and were less interruptible when exercising. "Preferably, your smartphone would recognise your patterns of use and behaviour and schedule notifications to minimise interruptions," Lindqvist added. The findings could help phone makers and app developers build offerings that are more useful and less annoying, the researchers said. "We know that people struggle with time management all the time, so a smartphone, instead of being a nuisance, could actually help with things," Lindqvist added.

​Geneva, March 7 (IANS) India's auto major Tata Motors on Tuesday showcased its first sports car, the Tamo Racemo, at the Geneva Motor Show 2017. It also unveiled its next generation car in the compact category, sedan Tigor as well as SUV Nexon. "Symbolising the change that is taking place" in the auto maker, the two-seater sports coupe, the first product under its new sub-brand Tamo, is the India's first connected car. Unveiling the car, company's MD and CEO Guenter Butschek said: "We launched our sub-brand as our answer to new technologies, business models and partnerships. The sports car is the first innovation from the sub-brand, and our emotional, unexpected leap to the future. It will drive the future of India's connected generation." The sports car, equipped with advanced navigation, predictive maintenance, remote monitoring and over-the-air updates using Microsoft cloud-based technologies, is expected to hit the market in 2017-18. "From styling and design to driver experience and technology, the car is an extension of customers' personality, as part of their digital ecosystem and will break the ice with a radical new presence and pique the interest in the parent brand," he added. The car is built on its patented MOFlex Multi-Material Sandwich (MMS) structure - a structural technology, enabling greater freedom in surface design, efficient large-scale part integration leading to modularity and faster time to market. The new sports car was unveiled in the presence of new Chairman N. Chandrasekaran and Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata. According to company officials, after a successful launch of HEXA early this year, the car maker is speeding towards the launch of styleback, Tata Tigor, this month. Tata Nexon, will mark its entry in the rapidly growing SUV segment later this year.

New York, March 7 (IANS) Tires of the future could come from the farm as much as the factory as researchers have found a way to turn waste tomato peels and eggshells into sustainable rubber.

The researchers discovered that food waste can partially replace carbon black, the petroleum-based filler that has been used in manufacturing tires for more than a century.

In tests, rubber made with the new fillers exceeds industrial standards for performance, which may ultimately open up new applications for rubber.

The method for turning eggshells and tomato peels into viable - and locally sourced--replacements for carbon black was developed by Katrina Cornish and colleagues from The Ohio State University in the US.

"We found that replacing different portions of carbon black with ground eggshells and tomato peels caused synergistic effects - for instance, enabling strong rubber to retain flexibility," Cindy Barrera, a postdoctoral researcher in Cornish's lab, said in a statement. 

While the findings could make the manufacture of rubber products more sustainable and also keep waste out of landfills.

The researchers found in tests that eggshells have porous microstructures that provide larger surface area for contact with the rubber, and give rubber-based materials unusual properties. 

Tomato peels, on the other hand, are highly stable at high temperatures and can also be used to generate material with good performance.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) Head injuries can harm hundreds of genes in the brain in a way that increases people's risk for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, says a study.

"Very little is known about how people with brain trauma -- like football players and soldiers -- develop neurological disorders later in life," said study co-senior author Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, Professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

"We hope to learn much more about how this occurs," Gomez-Pinilla said.

For the study, the researchers trained 20 rats to escape from a maze. They then used a fluid to produce a concussion-like brain injury in 10 of the rats; the 10 others did not receive brain injuries.

When the rats were placed in the maze again, those that had been injured took approximately 25 per cent longer than the non-injured rats to solve it.

To learn how the rats' genes had changed in response to the brain injury, the researchers analyzed genes from five animals in each group. 

Specifically, they drew RNA from the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that helps regulate learning and memory, and from leukocytes, white blood cells that play a key role in the immune system.

In the rats that had sustained brain injuries, there was a core group of 268 genes in the hippocampus that the researchers found had been altered, and a core group of 1,215 genes in the leukocytes that they found to have been changed.

More than 100 of the genes that changed after the brain injury have counterparts in humans that have been linked to neurological and psychiatric disorders, the researchers reported in the study published in the journal EbioMedicine.

As a number of the affected genes are present in both the hippocampus and blood, the findings could pave the way for a gene-based blood test to determine whether a brain injury has occurred.

Measuring some of those genes could help doctors predict whether a person is likely to develop neurological disorders later in life, the study said.

​New York, March 7 (IANS) NASA is all set to send an ice chest-sized box to the International Space Station to create the coolest spot in the universe.

The suite of instruments developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, is set to be sent on a SpaceX cargo delivery to the space station in August, the US space agency said on Monday.

The ice box called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is in the final stages of assembly at JPL.

"Its instruments are designed to freeze gas atoms to a mere billionth of a degree above absolute zero. That's more than 100 million times colder than the depths of space," NASA said in a statement.

"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," said CAL Project Scientist Robert Thompson of JPL. 

"The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy -- some of the most pervasive forces in the universe," Thompson said.

When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL, they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. 

In this state, familiar rules of physics recede and quantum physics begins to take over. 

Matter can be observed behaving less like particles and more like waves. 

NASA has never before created or observed Bose-Einstein condensates in space. On Earth, the pull of gravity causes atoms to continually settle towards the ground, meaning they are typically only observable for fractions of a second.

But on the International Space Station, ultra-cold atoms can hold their wave-like forms longer while in freefall. That offers scientists a longer window to understand physics at its most basic level. 

Thompson estimated that CAL will allow Bose-Einstein condensates to be observable for up to five to 10 seconds and future development of the technologies used on CAL could allow them to last for hundreds of seconds.

Five scientific teams plan to conduct experiments using the Cold Atom Lab. 

The results of these experiments could potentially lead to a number of improved technologies, including sensors, quantum computers and atomic clocks used in spacecraft navigation, NASA said.

New York, March 7 (IANS) Lungs tend to quickly lose their function outside the body. But this may soon change as researchers have found a method that could help maintain a fully functional lung outside the body for up to a week or even longer.

Lengthening the time to keep lungs functional outside the body could boost transplantation as a vast majority of donor lungs get rejected during transplantation due to delay in transport. It could also allow doctors to repair damaged donor lungs and make them suitable for transplant.

The research team found that "cross circulation" -- an abandoned surgical procedure used in the 1960s to exchange blood flow between two patients -- could enable long-term support of living organs outside the body by providing critical systemic and metabolic factors that are missing from all current technologies. 

Taking a cue from this procedure, the researchers developed a new technology to support fully functional lung outside the body for several days, according to a study published online in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

"Our cross-circulation platform will likely allow us to extend the duration of support to a week or longer if needed, potentially enabling the recovery of severely damaged organs," said one of the lead researchers John O'Neill from Columbia University Medical Centre in the US. 

"Beyond prolonging support time, we also demonstrated several therapeutic interventions that vastly improve and accelerate recovery," O'Neill noted.

The researchers said that their new platform could be readily extended to recover other organs that are in high demand for transplant or in need of repair, including livers and kidneys, and they have already begun studies in these directions.

​New York, March 6 (IANS) The 5.8-inch iPhone 8 with an OLED display -- that may be called 'iPhone X' -- is reportedly being launched along two other devices -- updated iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus (with brand names as iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus), a media report said. According to the financial newspaper Nikkei, Apple will shrink the top and bottom bezels to make iPhone 8 smaller than the iPhone 7 Plus. The report also claimed that priced at $1,000, iPhone 8 will be the most expensive smartphone Apple has ever released. In February, a report claimed that out of the a 5.8-inch display, only 5.15-inch would be usable. The rest of the space would feature a "function area". Apple's upcoming iPhone 8 would also come with wireless charging. The company was also planning to introduce a new connector type for accessories for the iPhone, iPad and other devices through its official Made-for-iPhone (MFi) licensing programme. Called 'Ultra Accessory Connector' (UAC), the eight-pin connector is slightly less thick than USB-C and near half as wide as both USB-C and Lightning.

​Toronto, March 6 (IANS) Researchers have shown that synthetic DNA motors can work in living cells and help early detection of deadly diseases such as cancer and also make drug delivery more precise.

"This is really big because of the diverse potential applications," said one of the researchers Chris Le, Professor at University of Alberta in Canada.

"One outcome of this will be to provide better and earlier disease detection. Another is the controllable release of targeted drug molecules within patients, resulting in fewer side effects," Le said.

The process -- previously only successful in test tubes -- was described in a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

The team created the nanomachine from compartments made up of DNA enzyme molecules and substrates. 

"This nanomachine has the required fuels, DNA tracks, and a molecular switch," said Hongquan Zhang, Assistant Professor at University of Alberta, Canada.

For the study, it was 'tuned' to detect a specific microRNA sequence found in breast cancer cells. 

When it came into contact with the targetted molecules, the DNA motor was turned on and produced fluorescence as part of a reaction. 

The researchers were able to monitor the fluorescence, detecting which cells were cancerous. 

"We want to be able to detect cancer or disease markers in very minute amounts before the disease gets out of hand. That way physicians can attack it very early," Le said. 

"The trace amount of the target molecules that may be missed by other techniques can now be detected with this one," Le noted.

In addition to the potential for improved disease diagnosis, the researchers said DNA motors could also be used for precision drug delivery in patients. 

Conventional targetted drug therapy delivers medicine to a selectively targeted site of action, yet it still affects a large number of molecules that are not diseased. 

With the DNA motor, a drug payload can be delivered and then released only when triggered by disease specific molecules, the researchers said.

Rome, March 6 (IANS/AKI) The number of babies born in Italy hit a new historic low of 474,000 last year, 12,000 fewer than the 486,000 born in 2015, national statistics agency Istat said on Monday.

The total fertility rate fell to 1.34 children per woman in 2016 from 1.35 the previous year, while the average age at which women gave birth was nearly 32 (31.7 years), confirming the trend towards having children later, Istat data showed.

The drop in fertility "was due to the reduction of women of childbearing age (for national women) 
and to the aging process (for non national women)", Istat said.

Italy's population shrank to 60,579,000 in 2016, 86,000 less people than in the previous year, according to Istat figures.

A total of 134,000 more people died than were born in 2016, the second worse result ever, Istat said. 

There were more than 13.5 million people aged over 65 (22.3 percent of Italy's population) last year, 4.1 million over 80 and 17,000 people aged 100 and above, according to Istat.

Life expectancy rose in 2016 to 80.6 years for men and 85.1 years for women - a six-month increase for both sexes compared to last year, Istat figures showed.