Marriage linked to lower heart risks: US study

MUMBAI: Marriage is good for the heart. People who are married have lower rates of several cardiovascular diseases compared with those who are single, divorced or widowed, said a research paper to be presented at the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session in Washington. The healthy heart benefits of marriage is more pronounced before the age of 50.

"These findings certainly shouldn't drive people to get married, but it's important to know that decisions regarding who one is with, why, and why not may have important implications for vascular health," said Carlos L Alviar from New York University Langone Medical Center.

The study considered four vascular diseases - peripheral artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, abdominal aortic aneurysm and coronary artery disease — among 3.5 million people across the United States. Overall, 69.1 % (2.4 million) were married, 13 % (477,577) were widowed, 8.3 % (292,670) were single; 9 % (319,321) were divorced.

The researchers found married people were 5 % less likely to have any vascular disease compared with singles. They also had 8 %, 9 % and 19 % lower odds of abdominal aortic aneurysm, cerebrovascular disease and peripheral arterial disease respectively. The odds of coronary disease were lower in married subjects compared with those who were widowed and divorced, but this was not statistically significant when compared to single subjects.

"The association between marriage and a lower likelihood of vascular disease is stronger among younger subjects," Alviar said. For people aged 50 and younger, marriage is associated with 12 % lower odds of any vascular disease. This number drops to 7 % for people ages 51 to 60 and only 4 % for those 61 and older.

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Reservoirs of ice 'still hidden' below surface of Mars, new study shows

LONDON: As scientists the world over are excited about the presence of water on Mars, a new research on meteorites reveals how the water vanished from the Martian surface.

The large amounts of water escaped into space within the first half-billion years of Mars's existence while remaining water froze and may have formed reservoirs of ice still hidden below the surface, a promising study shows.

"The new study now strengthens the case that huge amounts of ice remain hidden on Mars," lead author Hiroyuki Kurokawa of Nagoya University in Japan was quoted as saying.

According to the scientists, most of the water on Mars probably escaped because the planet's gravity was not sufficient to hold onto its atmosphere.

Over time, the water on Mars evaporated and drifted away into space.

To estimate this, the researchers analysed three different meteorites from 4.5 billion years ago, 4.1 billion years ago, and sometime between 170 million and 180 million years ago.

They created a timeline of water loss. It showed that Mars may have lost several times more water between 4.5 billion and 4.1 billion years ago than the past four billion years.

"There must be a lot of water still on Mars today — several times more than the water frozen at the poles," Kurokawa suggested in the paper that is scheduled to be published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

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Underweight people at as high risk of dying as obese people: Study

MUMBAI: At a time when the world is concentrating on the obesity epidemic, Canadian researchers have found that people who are underweight have the highest risk of dying. If the risk of dying for obese people (vis a vis normal weight people) is 1.2 times then the risk for the underweight is almost 1.8 times, said the study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health.

The study, led by Dr Joel Ray of St Michael's Hospital, looked at 51 studies on the links between BMI (bady mass index) and deaths from any cause, plus data on newborn weight and stillbirths in Ontario. He found that adults who are underweight - with a BMI under 18.5 or less - have a 1.8 times higher risk of dying than those with a "normal" BMI of 18.5 to 24.9.

The risk of dying is 1.2 times higher for people who are obese (BMI of 30-34.9) and 1.3 times higher for those who are severely obese (a BMI of 35 or higher).

Common causes for being underweight include malnourishment, heavy alcohol or drug use, smoking, low-income status, mental health or poor self-care. "BMI reflects not only body fat, but also muscle mass. If we want to continue to use BMI in health care and public health initiatives, we must realize that a robust and healthy individual is someone who has a reasonable amount of body fat and also sufficient bone and muscle," Dr Ray said. He feels waist circumference is a better indicator of health than BMI.

Dr Ray also said that as society aims to curb the obesity epidemic, "we have obligation to ensure that we avoid creating an epidemic of underweight adults and fetuses who are otherwise at the correct weight. We are, therefore, obliged to use the right measurement tool."

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Chronic stress in early life causes anxiety, aggression in adulthood: Study

MUMBAI: Exposure to chronic stress in early life could bring out anxiety and aggression in later life, believe scientists from the New York-based Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Researchers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have just published a study in the PLoS One journal to show that young mice who were exposed to chronic stress exhibited aggressive behavior on growing up.

The research team led by Dr Grigori Enikolopov assessed the impacts of social stress upon adolescent mice, both at the time they are experienced and during adulthood. A press release sent by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory showed, The tests began with 1-month-old male mice — the equivalent, in human terms of adolescents — each placed for 2 weeks in a cage shared with an aggressive adult male. The animals were separated by a transparent perforated partition, but the young males were exposed daily to short attacks by the adult males.'' This chronic activity produced social-defeat stress in the young mice.

The young mice with chronic social defeat had high levels of anxiety helplessness, diminished social interaction, and diminished ability to communicate with other young animals.

Another group of young mice was also exposed to social stress, but was then placed for several weeks in an unstressful environment. In this second, now-adult group, most of the behaviors impacted by social defeat returned to normal. "This shows that young mice, exposed to adult aggressors, were largely resilient biologically and behaviorally," said Dr Enikolopov.

However, in these resilient mice, the team measured two latent impacts on behavior. As adults they were abnormally anxious, and were observed to be more aggressive in their social interactions.

"The exposure to a hostile environment during their adolescence had profound consequences in terms of emotional state and the ability to interact with peers," the release quoted Dr Enikolopov as saying.

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One in 68 children has autism: CDC

MUMBAI: The number of children identified with autism is growing, with the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, US, suggesting that one in 68 children falls into the spectrum. April 2 is observed throughout the world as Autism Awareness Day.

The Autism Spectrum Disorder is the term to used describe children with neuro-developmental disorders that impairs social skills. Autism is called a spectrum disorder because no two children is similar: if one child has high IQ and low social skills, the other may have low IQ and severe sensitivity to touch.

On Thursday, CDC released figures from its surveillance report named, "Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder among Children Aged 8 Years - Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2010." It found roughly 30 % higher incidence than previous estimates reported in 2012 of 1 in 88 children being identified with an autism spectrum disorder.

The number of children identified with ASD ranged from 1 in 175 children in Alabama to 1 in 45 children in New Jersey.

The CDC study showed that autism is five times more common among boys than girls: 1 in 42 boys versus 1 in 189 girls.

The study found that almost half of children identified with ASD have average or above average intellectual ability (an IQ above 85) compared to a third of children a decade ago.

"Community leaders, health professionals, educators and childcare providers should use these data to ensure children with ASD are identified as early as possible and connected to the services they need," said Coleen Boyle, director of CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. Long-term research has shown that children with autism can manage better if they undergo therapies such as behavior or occupational.

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Scientists unveil giant leap towards synthetic life

Scientists have made the first artificial chromosome which is both complete and functional in a milestone development in synthetic biology, which promises to revolutionize medical and industrial biotechnology in the coming century.

The researchers built the artificial chromosome from scratch by stitching synthetic strands of DNA together in a sequence based on the known genome of brewer's yeast. They predict that a completely synthetic yeast genome comprised of its entire complement of 16 chromosomes could be made within four years.

"Our research moves the needle in synthetic biology from theory to reality. This work represents the biggest step yet in an international effort to construct the full genome of synthetic yeast," said Jef Boeke of the New York University School of Medicine, a lead author of the study published in the journal Science.

"It is the most extensively altered chromosome ever built. But the milestone that really counts is integrating it into a living yeast cell. We have shown that yeast cells carrying this synthetic chromosome are remarkably normal," Dr Boeke said.

"They behave almost identically to wild yeast cells, only they now possess new capabilities and can do things that wild yeast cannot [do]," he said.

"Not only can we make designer changes on a computer, but we can make hundreds of changes through a chromosome and we can put that chromosome into yeast and have a yeast that looks, smells and behaves like a regular yeast, but this yeast is endowed with special properties that normal yeasts don't have," he explained.

The synthetic yeast chromosome was based on chromosome number 3, but scientists deleted large parts of it that were considered redundant and introduced further subtle changes to its sequence - yet the chromosome still functioned normally and replicated itself in living yeast cells, they said.

"We took tiny snippets of synthetic DNA and fused them together in a complex series of steps to build an essentially computer-designed chromosome 3, one of the 16 chromosomes of yeast. We call it 'synIII' because it's a completely synthetic derivative that has been engineered in a variety of interesting ways to make it different from the normal chromosome," Dr Boeke said.

The achievement was compared to climbing Mount Everest in its labour-intensive complexity, as it involved stitching together 273,871 individual building blocks of DNA — the nucleotide bases of the yeast's genes — in the right order, and removing about 50,000 repeating sequences of the chromosome that were considered redundant.

"When you change the genome you're gambling. One wrong change can kill the cell. We have made over 50,000 changes to the DNA code in the chromosome and our yeast still lived. That is remarkable, it shows that our synthetic chromosome is hardy, and it endows the yeast with new properties," Dr Boeke said.

Britain is one of several countries involved in the international effort to synthesise all 16 yeast chromosomes. Last year, the Government announced that it will spend £1 million on the yeast project out of a total budget of £60 million it has dedicated to synthetic biology.

Paul Freemont of Imperial College London said that the first complete and functional synthetic yeast chromosome is "a big deal" and significant step forward from the work by DNA scientist Craig Venter, who synthesised the much simpler genome of a bacterium in 2010.

"It opens up a whole new way of thinking about chromosome and genome engineering as it provides a proof of concept that complicated chromosomes can be redesigned, synthesised and made to work in a living cell," Dr Freemont said.

Artificial chromosomes designed by computer will be vital for the synthetic life-forms that scientists hope to design for a range of applications, such as the breakdown of persistent pollutants in the environment or the industrial manufacture of new kinds of drugs and vaccines for human and animal medicine.

"It could have a lot of practical applications because yeast is used in the biotechnology industry to produce everything from alcohol, which has been produced for centuries, to biofuels and speciality chemicals to nutrients," Dr Boeke said.

"Yeast is a really interesting microorganism to work on because it has an ancient industrial relationship with man. We've domesticated it since the days of the Fertile Crescent and we've had this fantastic collaboration to make wine, break and beer," he said.

"That relationship persists today in a wide range of products that are made with yeast such as vaccines, fuels and specialty chemicals and it's only going to be growing. Yeast is one of the few microbes that packages its genetic material in a nucleus just like human cells. So it serves as a better model for how human cells work in health and disease," Dr Boeke added.

Synthetic microbes: Possible uses

Medicines

Being able to make synthetic chromosomes for yeast cells would allow scientists to speed up the rate of yeast evolution in order to produce strains specifically tailored for making certain difficult medicines.

Biofuels

Designing new kinds of yeast chromosomes could improve the efficiency of producing alcohol-based biofuels through fermentation.

Pollutants

Natural microbes already have an ability to degrade environmental toxins, but creating synthetic-biology versions could improve the speed at which they work.

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Sugary drinks cause for teenage obesity: Study

MUMBAI: A Canadian research has squarely put the blame for teenage obesity on sugary drinks. It has asked schools to take steps to reduce consumption.

Teenage obesity has been growing rapidly, with India reporting almost 30% incidence of overweight and obesity among urban children.

Data from the 2008 Adolescent Health survey among 11,000 grade seven to 12 students in British Columbia schools indicates sugary drinks like soda increased the odds of obesity more than other foods such as pizza, french fries, chips and candies, said the study conducted by the University of British Columbia.

The study, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, found that students in schools where sugary drinks were available consumed them more often and were more likely to be obese on the BMI scale.""This study adds to the mounting literature that shows the high concentration of sugar in soft drinks contributes to obesity in adolescents,"" said lead author Louise Masse from the University of British Columbia's School of Population and Public Health.

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Cooking meat with beer may protect you from cancer

WASHINGTON: Beer, when used as a marinade, can help reduce the formation of potentially harmful cancer-causing substances in grilled meats, scientists have found.

Previous studies have shown an association between consumption of grilled meats and a high incidence of colorectal cancer.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are substances that can form when meats are cooked at very high temperatures, like on a backyard grill.

High levels of PAHs, which are also in cigarette smoke and car exhaust, are associated with cancers in laboratory animals, although it is uncertain if that is true for people.

Beer, wine or tea marinades can reduce the levels of some potential carcinogens in cooked meat, but little was known about how different beer marinades affect PAH levels, until now.

The researchers, from the University of Vigo in Spain and University of Porto in Portugal, grilled samples of pork marinated for four hours in Pilsner beer, non-alcoholic Pilsner beer or a black beer ale, to well-done on a charcoal grill.

Black beer had the strongest effect, reducing the levels of eight major PAHs by more than half compared with unmarinated pork.

"Thus, the intake of beer marinated meat can be a suitable mitigation strategy," researchers said.

The study appears in American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. RCL AKJ RCL

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Autism may begin in the womb: Study

WASHINGTON: Scientists have found clear and direct new evidence that autism begins during pregnancy.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Allen Institute for Brain Science analysed 25 genes in post-mortem brain tissue of children with and without autism.

These included genes that serve as biomarkers for brain cell types in different layers of the cortex, genes implicated in autism and several control genes.

"Building a baby's brain during pregnancy involves creating a cortex that contains six layers," said Eric Courchesne, professor of neurosciences and director of the Autism Center of Excellence at UC San Diego.

"We discovered focal patches of disrupted development of these cortical layers in the majority of children with autism," he said.

First author of the study Rich Stoner, of the UC San Diego Autism Center of Excellence created the first three-dimensional model visualising brain locations where patches of cortex had failed to develop the normal cell-layering pattern.

During early brain development, each cortical layer develops its own specific types of brain cells, each with specific patterns of brain connectivity that perform unique and important roles in processing information.

As a brain cell develops into a specific type in a specific layer with specific connections, it acquires a distinct genetic signature or "marker" that can be observed.

The study found that in the brains of children with autism, key genetic markers were absent in brain cells in multiple layers.

"This defect indicates that the crucial early developmental step of creating six distinct layers with specific types of brain cells - something that begins in prenatal life - had been disrupted," Courchesne said.

Equally important, said the scientists, these early developmental defects were present in focal patches of cortex, suggesting the defect is not uniform throughout the cortex.

The brain regions most affected by focal patches of absent gene markers were the frontal and the temporal cortex, possibly illuminating why different functional systems are impacted across individuals with the disorder.

The frontal cortex is associated with higher-order brain function, such as complex communication and comprehension of social cues. The temporal cortex is associated with language.

The disruptions of frontal and temporal cortical layers seen in the study may underlie symptoms most often displayed in autistic spectrum disorders, researchers said.

The visual cortex - an area of the brain associated with perception that tends to be spared in autism - displayed no abnormalities.

The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Snag delays arrival of crew at International Space Station, Nasa reveals

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan: An engine snag has delayed the arrival of a Russian spacecraft carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station until Thursday, Nasa said on Wednesday.

A rocket carrying Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and American Steve Swanson to the space station blasted off successfully early on Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz booster rocket lifted off as scheduled at 3.17am local time on Wednesday (2117 GMT on Tuesday), lighting up the night skies over the steppe with a giant fiery tail. It entered a designated orbit about 10 minutes after the launch and was expected to reach the space station in six hours. All onboard systems were working flawlessly, and the crew was feeling fine.

But Nasa, in a statement on its website, said that the arrival was delayed after a 24-second engine burn that was necessary to adjust the Soyuz spacecraft's orbiting path "did not occur as planned".

The crew is in good spirits and is in no danger, but will have to wait until Thursday for the Soyuz TMA-12M to arrive and dock at the space station, Nasa said. The arrival is now scheduled for 7.58 EDT (2358 GMT) Thursday.

Russian spacecraft used to routinely travel two days to reach the orbiting laboratory before last year. Wednesday would have been only the fifth time that a crew would have taken the six-hour "fast track" route to the station.

Nasa said that Moscow flight control has yet to determine why the engine burn did not occur.

The three astronauts travelling in the Soyuz will be greeted by Japan's Koichi Wakata, Nasa's Rick Mastracchio and Russia's Mikhail Tyurin, who have been at the station since November. Wakata is the first Japanese astronaut to lead the station. The new crew is scheduled to stay in orbit for six months.

The joint mission is taking place at a time when US-Russian relations on Earth are at their lowest ebb in decades, but US and Russia haven't allowed their disagreements over Ukraine to get in the way of their cooperation in space.

Swanson is a veteran of two US space shuttle missions, and Skvortsov spent six months at the space outpost in 2010. Artemyev is on his first flight to space.

So far, the tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine have been kept at bay. Since the retirement of the US space shuttle fleet in 2011, Nasa has relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft as the only means to ferry crew to the orbiting outpost and back.

The US is paying Russia nearly $71 million per seat to fly astronauts to the space lab through 2017. It's doing that at a time when Washington has led calls for sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine following a hastily-arranged referendum. So far the sanctions have been limited and haven't directly targeted the wider Russian economy.

Earlier this month, Nasa administrator Charles Bolden repeatedly said the conflict in Ukraine would have no effect on what's going on in space between the US and Russia, saying that the "partnership in space remains intact and normal".

He said there's a long history of countries cooperating in orbit, while clashing on terra firma, which is why he said some people have nominated the 16-nation International Space Station for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the same time, Bolden said on his blog on Tuesday that while Nasa continues to cooperate successfully with Russia, it wants to quickly get its own capacity to launch crews. Nasa is trying to speed up private American companies' efforts to launch crews into orbit, but it needs extra funding to do so.

"But even as the 'space race' has evolved over the past 50 years from competition to collaboration with Russia, Nasa is rightfully focused now more than ever on returning our astronauts to space aboard American rockets — launched from US soil — as soon as possible," he said.

Nasa spokesman David Weaver said that, "Nasa is working aggressively to return human spaceflight launch to American soil, and end our sole reliance on Russia to get into space." He added that later this year the agency plans to select the American companies that will transport its astronauts to the space station beginning in 2017.

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Its official: Goats are brainy, and how

Move over chimps and crows, there is a new brainy creature on the block — the common goat. In a first, researchers from Queen Mary University of London thought of training a group of goats to see their problem solving abilities and memory capacity. They were in for a surprise.

They found that their goats quickly learnt how to solve complicated tasks quickly and could recall how to perform them for at least 10 months. The data was collected at Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats in Kent. The scientists have reported their findings in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.

The experiment consisted of training the goats to retrieve food from a box using a linked sequence of steps; first by pulling a lever with their mouths and then by lifting it to release the reward.

The goats' ability to remember the task was tested after one month and again at 10 months. They learned the task within 12 trials and took less than two minutes to remember the challenge.

""The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory,"" said co-author Dr Elodie Briefer, now based at ETH Zurich.

Before each learning session, some of the goats had the opportunity to watch another goat to demonstrate the task.

Dr Briefer added: ""We found that those without a demonstrator were just as fast at learning as those that had seen demonstrations. This shows that goats prefer to learn on their own rather than by watching others.""

This is the first time that scientists have investigated how goats learn complex physical cognition tasks, which could explain why they are so adaptable to harsh environments and good at foraging for plants in the wild, for example.

Co-author Dr Alan McElligott from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, commented: ""Our results challenge the common misconception that goats aren't intelligent animals - they have the ability to learn complex tasks and remember them for a long time.

""This could explain why they are so successful in colonising new environments, though we would need to perform a similar study with wild goats to be sure.""

The research was supported through a Swiss Federal Veterinary Office grant and Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship.

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Scientists discover how to avoid a speeding ticket

LONDON: British researchers have found that there may be a way to avoid getting a dreaded speeding ticket - but only if you can travel at a sixth of the speed of light.

University of Leicester students found it would be possible to become invisible to speed cameras if you could travel at a sixth of the speed of light.

A group of four students found that drivers could escape detection by driving so fast that their number plates would appear invisible to speed cameras.

But the car would need to be travelling at about 192 million km per hour to make the number plate invisible.

This speed equates to one sixth of the speed of light - and no man-made vehicle is capable of going anywhere near this speed, researchers said.

The researchers made the calculations in their final year paper for the Journal of Physics Special Topics, a peer-reviewed student journal run by the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The calculation is based on the Doppler Effect - the physical effect where the frequencies of light or sound waves emanating from an object increase or decrease when it moves towards or away from you.

This effect is at work when you hear an ambulance - its siren will appear to lower in pitch as it drives past you.

With light, this process creates 'red shift' - where the frequency of light from an object travelling away from the observer is shifted towards the red end of the colour spectrum. The faster an object is travelling, the bigger the shift in frequency.

This means it would theoretically be possible for the light from a fast-moving car number plate to be shifted out of the frequency range which speed cameras are able to detect.

The group assumed the camera would be able to detect a similar frequency range as the human eye - roughly 400 terahertz at the 'red' end of the spectrum to 790 terahertz at the violet end.

Car number plates are generally yellow - which has a frequency of around 515 terahertz, researchers said.

To work out the necessary speed of the car for the number plate to be 'shifted' past the 400 terahertz boundary of the visible spectrum, the group utilised the equation used by astronomers to calculate how fast stars are travelling away from the Earth.

They found the car would need to be travelling at 53 million metres per second - equal to one sixth of the speed of light.

"The Doppler Effect is something most people learn in GCSE physics, but we thought it would be good to look at what day-to-day effects it could have," said student Dan Worthy, 21, from Chelmsford, Essex.

"Our message to drivers is that it would be completely pointless to try to use this method to avoid a speeding ticket," Worthy said.

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2013 sixth warmest year on record

LONDON: The year 2013 has now been confirmed to have been the sixth warmest year on record.

Thirteen of the fourteen warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century, and each of the last three decades has been warmer than the previous one, culminating with 2001-2010 as the warmest decade on record.

The average global land and ocean surface temperature in 2013 was 14.5°C - 0.50°C above the 1961-1990 average and 0.03°C higher than the 2001-2010 decadal average. Temperatures in many parts of the southern hemisphere were especially warm, with Australia having its hottest year on record and Argentina it's second hottest.

The year 2013 once again demonstrated the dramatic impact of droughts, heat waves, floods and tropical cyclones in all parts of the planet, according to the World Meteorological Organization's Annual Statement on the Status of the Climate released late on Monday.

Scientists have predicted that in another 87 years, planet earth will be the warmest ever.

Scientists for the first time reconstructed Earth's temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age using data from 73 sites around the world and found that the planet today is warmer than it has been during 70 to 80% of the time over the last 11,300 years.

What was most worrying are projections of global temperature for the year 2100, when virtually every climate model evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that temperatures will exceed the warmest temperatures during that 11,300-year period known as the Holocene - under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

Highlighting the key climate events of 2013, WMO said Typhoon Haiyan was one of the strongest storms to ever make landfall, devastated parts of the central Philippines. Surface air temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were very warm, with widespread heat waves; Australia saw record warmth for the year, Argentina its second warmest year and New Zealand it's third warmest.

Frigid polar air plummeted into parts of Europe and the southeast United States while Angola, Botswana and Namibia were gripped by severe drought.

Heavy monsoon rains led to severe floods on the India-Nepal border besides causing devastation in northeast China and the eastern Russian Federation. Northeastern Brazil experienced its worst drought in the past 50 years while the widest tornado ever observed struck El Reno, Oklahoma in the US.

Extreme precipitation led to severe floods in Europe's Alpine region and in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland while Israel, Jordan and Syria were struck by unprecedented snowfall. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached record highs and global oceans reached new record high sea levels. The Antarctic sea ice extent also reached a record daily maximum in 2013.

"Naturally occurring phenomena such as volcanic eruptions or El Nino and La Nina events have always contributed to frame our climate, influenced temperatures or caused disasters like droughts and floods. But many of the extreme events of 2013 were consistent with what we would expect as a result of human-induced climate change. We saw heavier precipitation, more intense heat, and more damage from storm surges and coastal flooding as a result of sea level rise — as Typhoon Haiyan so tragically demonstrated in the Philippines," said WMO secretary-general, Michel Jarraud.

"There is no standstill in global warming," said Jarraud. "The warming of our oceans has accelerated, and at lower depths. More than 90% of the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans. Levels of these greenhouse gases are at record levels, meaning that our atmosphere and oceans will continue to warm for centuries to come. The laws of physics are non-negotiable."

IPCC has predicted that by the year 2100, glacial volume would decline by as much as 35-85%.

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Hawking's black hole puzzle solved, claims US physicist

LONDON: An American physicist may have finally plugged the hole in Stephen Hawking's black hole theory.

For decades physicists across the globe have been trying to figure out the mysteries of black holes - fascinating monstrous entities that have such intense gravitational pull that nothing - not even light - can escape from them.

The debate about the behaviour of black holes, which has been ongoing since 1975, was reignited when Hawking posted a blog on January 22, 2014, stating that event horizons - the invisible boundaries of black holes - do not exist.

Hawking, considered to be the foremost expert on black holes, has over the years revised his theory and continues to work on understanding these cosmic puzzles.

But now, Professor Chris Adami from Michigan State University says he may have the answer to the elusive question.

"According to the laws of quantum physics, information can't disappear," Adami said. "A loss of information would imply that the universe itself would suddenly become unpredictable every time the black hole swallows a particle. That is just inconceivable. No law of physics that we know allows this to happen."

So if the black hole sucks in information with its intense gravitational pull, then later disappears entirely, information and all, how can the laws of quantum physics be preserved?

The solution, Adami says, is that the information is contained in the stimulated emission of radiation, which must accompany the Hawking radiation - the glow that makes a black hole not so black.

Stimulated emission makes the black hole glow in the information that it swallowed.

"Stimulated emission is the physical process behind LASERS (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). Basically, it works like a copy machine: you throw something into the machine, and two identical somethings come out. If you throw information at a black hole, just before it is swallowed, the black hole first makes a copy that is left outside. This copying mechanism was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1917, and without it, physics cannot be consistent," Adami said.

One of the many perplexities is a decades-old debate about what happens to information - matter or energy and their characteristics at the atomic and subatomic level - in black holes.

"In 1975, Hawking discovered that black holes aren't all black. They actually radiate a featureless glow, now called Hawking radiation," Adami said. "In his original theory, Hawking stated that the radiation slowly consumes the black hole and it eventually evaporates and disappears, concluding that information and anything that enters the black hole would be irretrievably lost."

With so many researchers trying to fix Hawking's theory, why did it take so long if it was hiding in plain sight?

"While a few people did realize that the stimulated emission effect was missing in Hawking's calculation, they could not resolve the paradox without a deep understanding of quantum communication theory," Adami said. Quantum communication theory was designed to understand how information interacts with quantum systems, and Adami was one of the pioneers of quantum information theory back in the '90s.

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New maps for navigating human genome unveiled

LONDON: Scientists have built the clearest picture yet of how our genetic material is regulated in order to make the human body work.

They have mapped how a network of switches, built into our DNA, controls where and when our genes are turned on and off.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh led the international project - called FANTOM5 - which has been examining how our genome holds the code for creating the fantastic diversity of cell types that make up a human.
The three year project, steered by the RIKEN Centre for Life Science Technologies in Japan, has involved more than 250 scientists in more than 20 countries and regions.

The study is a step change in our understanding of the human genome, which contains the genetic instructions needed to build and maintain all the many different cell types in the body, researchers said.

All of our cells contain the same instructions, but genes are turned on and off at different times in different cells.

This process is controlled by switches - called promoters and enhancers - found within the genome.

It is the flicking of these switches that makes a muscle cell different to a liver or skin cell.

The team studied the largest ever set of cell types and tissues from human and mouse in order to identify the location of these switches within the genome.

They also mapped where and when the switches are active in different cell types and how they interact with each other.

In a separate study, researchers used information from the atlas to investigate the regulation of an important set of genes that are required to build muscle and bone.

Another study has used the atlas to investigate the regulation of genes in cells of the immune system.

"The FANTOM5 project is a tremendous achievement. To use the analogy of an aeroplane, we have made a leap in understanding the function of all of the parts," Professor David Hume, Director of The Roslin Institute and a lead researcher on the project, said.

"And we have gone well beyond that, to understanding how they are connected and control the structures that enable flight," said Hume.

"The FANTOM5 project has identified new elements in the genome that are the targets of functional genetic variations in human populations, and also have obvious applications to other species," Hume said.

"The research gives us an insight as to why humans are different from other animals, even though we share many genes in common," Dr Martin Taylor, from the MRC Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the university, said.

"Comparing the mouse and human atlases reveals extensive rewiring of gene switches that has occurred over time, helping us to understand more about how we have evolved," said Taylor.

The findings were reported in a series of papers published in the journal Nature.

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Tuberculosis affects 1 million children annually: Study

MUMBAI: Harvard researchers believe that over one million children suffer from tuberculosis annually — twice the number previously thought to have TB.

Experts from the university and Brigham and Women's Hospital fear that one-third of these children may be suffering from drug-resistant tuberculosis that is extremely difficult to treat. The study was published in The Lancet on Sunday.

Pediatric TB is emerging as one of the most neglected areas in tuberculosis; there isn't even special drugs meant for the pediatric population.

In fact, the World Health Organization's Tuberculosis Report 2013 had noted that a child with TB is as likely as an adult with TB to have MDR-TB (multi-drug resistant TB). India too has very little information about the spread of the disease among the pediatric population.

The Harvard study's author Dr Ted Cohen said, "Despite children comprising approximately one-quarter of the world's population, there have been no previous estimates of how many suffer from MDR-TB disease."

He said that the estimate of the total number of new cases of childhood TB is twice that estimated by the WHO in 2011 and three times the number of child TB cases notified globally each year.

Pediatric tuberculosis is one of the most neglected aspects of the TB epidemic.

The researchers used several sources of publicly available data and devised a new method to correct for the chronic under-diagnosis that occurs in children, using conventional TB tests which were designed for and work best on adults. The researchers used two models to estimate both the regional and global annual incidence of MDR-TB in children.

Their findings indicate that around 1,000,000 children developed TB disease in 2010 and of those, 32,000 had MDR-TB.

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Too much worry lowers chances of pregnancy: Study

NEW DELHI: Too much stress and worry may lower the chances of getting pregnant and cause infertility, a new study by researchers of the Ohio University has found. They found that stressed women are nearly 30 percent less likely to get pregnant and twice more likely to be diagnosed as 'infertile'. Stress was indicated by measuring a marker that is found in saliva.

Extending and corroborating their earlier study conducted in the UK that demonstrated an association between high levels of stress and a reduced probability of pregnancy, this work adds new insight by suggesting that stress is associated with an increased risk of infertility. The study findings appear online in the journal Human Reproduction.

Courtney Denning-Johnson Lynch, director of reproductive epidemiology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, and colleagues found that women with high levels of alpha-amylase — a biological indicator of stress measured in saliva — are 29 percent less likely to get pregnant each month and are more than twice as likely to meet the clinical definition of infertility (remaining not pregnant despite 12 months of regular unprotected intercourse), compared to women with low levels of this protein enzyme.

Researchers tracked 501 American women ages 18 to 40 years who were free from known fertility problems and had just started trying to conceive, and followed them for 12 months or until they became pregnant as part of the Longitudinal Investigation of Fertility and the Environment (LIFE) Study. Saliva samples were collected from participants the morning following enrollment and again the morning following the first day of their first study-observed menstrual cycle. Specimens were available for 373 women and were measured for the presence of salivary alpha-amylase and cortisol, two biomarkers of stress.

""This is now the second study in which we have demonstrated that women with high levels of the stress biomarker salivary alpha-amylase have a lower probability of becoming pregnant, compared to women with low levels of this biomarker. For the first time, we've shown that this effect is potentially clinically meaningful, as it's associated with a greater than two-fold increased risk of infertility among these women,"" said Lynch, the principal investigator of the LIFE Study's psychological stress protocol.

Lynch said results of this research should encourage women who are experiencing difficulty getting pregnant to consider managing their stress using stress reduction techniques such as yoga, meditation and mindfulness. However, she said that couples should not blame themselves if they are experiencing fertility problems, as stress is not the only or most important factor involved in a woman's ability to get pregnant.

Germaine Buck Louis, director of the Division of Intramural Population Health Research of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the LIFE Study's principal investigator, said, "Eliminating stressors before trying to become pregnant might shorten the time couples need to become pregnant in comparison to ignoring stress. The good news is that women most likely will know which stress reduction strategy works best for them, since a one-size-fits-all solution is not likely."

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Gene linked to intellectual disability critical to brain development in humans

WASHINGTON: A latest research from the University of Adelaide has confirmed that a gene linked to intellectual disability is critical to the earliest stages of the development of human brains.

The gene known as USP9X, has been investigated by Adelaide researchers for more than a decade, however, in recent years scientists have begun to understand its particular importance to brain development.

An international research team led by the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute has explained how mutations in USP9X are associated with intellectual disability. These mutations, which can be inherited from one generation to the next, have been shown to cause disruptions to normal brain cell functioning.

Senior co-author Dr Lachlan Jolly from the University of Adelaide's Neurogenetics Research Program said that disorders that cause changes to this network of cells, such as intellectual disabilities, epilepsy and autism, were hard to understand, and treat.

Dr Jolly added that the gene was discovered while looking at the patients with severe learning and memory problems, asserting that USP9X apparently controls both the initial generation of the nerve cells from stem cells, and also their ability to connect with one another and form the proper networks.

The report has been published by American Journal of Human Genetics.

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Anti-anxiety drugs could help 'balance' the autistic brain

Low doses of anti-anxiety drugs could hold the cure for autism. New research in mice suggests that autism is characterized by reduced activity of inhibitory neurons and increased activity of excitatory neurons in the brain, but balance can be restored with low doses of benzodiazepines.

Autism is a complex neuro-developmental disorder which is characterised by poor social skills and an obsession with sameness. It roughly affects one in 88 children -- mainly boys -- according to the US Centers for Diseases Control in Atlanta.

The study, which has been funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US, has been published in Cell Press journal Neuron. "These are very exciting results because they suggest that existing drugs might be useful in treatment of the core deficits in autism," said senior author Dr William Catterall of the University of Washington, Seattle.

His team also found that reducing the effectiveness of inhibitory neurons in normal mice also induced some autism-related deficits. "Benzodiazepine drugs had the opposite effect, increasing the activity of inhibitory neurons and diminishing autistic behaviors,'' said a press release put out by the University of Washington.

"Our results provide strong evidence that increasing inhibitory neurotransmission is an effective approach to improvement of social interactions, repetitive behaviors, and cognitive deficits in a well-established animal model of autism," said Dr Catterall.

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Genetic clues to irritable bowel syndrome found

WASHINGTON: For the first time, scientists have identified a genetic defect that causes a subset of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a finding that may help pave way for therapies for the disorder.

Researchers estimate that approximately 15 to 20 per cent of the western world has IBS, a common disorder that affects the large intestine.

Most patients with the disorder commonly experience symptoms of cramping, abdominal pain, bloating gas, diarrhoea and constipation. Most treatments for IBS target these symptoms.

Researchers found that patients with a subset of IBS have a specific genetic defect, a mutation of the SCN5A gene.

This defect causes patients to have a disruption in bowel function, by affecting the Nav1.5 channel, a sodium channel in the gastrointestinal smooth muscle and pacemaker cells.

The research is in early stages, but the results of this study give researchers hope of finding therapies for these patients.

"This gives us hope that from only treating symptoms of the disease, we can now work to find disease-modifying agents, which is where we really want to be to affect long-term treatment of IBS," said Gianrico Farrugia, a study author, Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualised Medicine.

Researchers studied the sodium channel of 584 people with IBS and 1,380 control subjects. The analysis demonstrated that a defect in the SCN5A gene was found in 2.2 per cent of IBS patients.

The results were confirmed in a genome-wide association study and replicated in 1,745 patients in four independent cohorts of patients with IBS and control subjects.

Additionally, researchers were able to restore function to a patient with constipation predominant IBS with a defective SCN5A gene and resulting abnormally functioning sodium channel.

Researchers used a drug called mexiletine, which restored the function of the channel and reversed the patient's symptoms of constipation and abdominal pain.

The study was published in the journal Gastroenterology.

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Nasa searches for ideas to bring asteroids closer to Earth

WASHINGTON: US space agency Nasa has announced a formal proposal worth $6 million for projects that would help robots and astronauts grab an asteroid from deep space and bring it closer to Earth for further study.

In support of Nasa's Asteroid Redirect Mission — a key part of the agency's stepping stone path to send humans to Mars — agency officials are seeking proposals for studies on advanced technology development.

Nasa envisages spending up to $6 million on over 25 proposals this year.

The proposal should focus on technologies that can be used to identify potential targets like sending robotic spacecraft to capture the selected asteroid and put it in a stable orbit beyond the moon.

The technology should also help astronauts get to the space rock and bring back samples in the mid-2020s, Nasa said in a statement.

"We are reaching out to seek new and innovative ideas as we extend the frontier of space exploration," said Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa's associate administrator for human exploration and operations.

"To reach Mars, we would rely on new technologies and advanced capabilities proven through the Asteroid Initiative. We are looking forward to exciting ideas from outside Nasa as well to help realise that vision," he added.

The proposals have to be submitted before May 5 and the space agency would reward the winners around July 1 for projects that would wrap up in six months.

According to Greg Williams, Nasa's deputy associate administrator for plans and policy, the selection process would build on a workshop that generated hundreds of ideas for asteroid exploration last year.

Nasa is already supporting projects such as the Asteroid Data Hunter contest, which is offering $35,000 in awards over the next six months to citizen scientists who come up with improved algorithms for identifying asteroids.

Next year, the space agency would review mission concepts for redirecting an asteroid up to 10 metre wide — or breaking off a piece of a bigger asteroid and bringing it back.

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Cambridge University scientists develop diagnostic app

LONDON: In what could be a great boon for countries like India, scientists from the Cambridge University have developed a mobile phone application that can accurately measure colour-based or colorimetric tests for use in home, clinical or remote settings.

The app would enable transmission of medical data from patients directly to health professionals. It has been shown to accurately report glucose, protein and pH concentrations from commercially-available urine test strips without requiring any external hardware. This is the first time a mobile phone app has been used in this way in a laboratory setting.

Decentralization of healthcare through low-cost and highly portable point-of-care diagnostics has the potential to revolutionize current limitations in patient screening. At present, diagnosis is hindered by inadequate infrastructure and shortages in skilled healthcare workers in the developing world.

Overcoming such challenges by developing accessible diagnostics could reduce the burden of disease on health care workers.

Due to their portability, compact size and ease of use, colorimetric tests are widely used for medical monitoring, drug testing and environmental analysis in a range of different settings throughout the world.

The tests, typically in the form of small strips, work by producing colour change in a solution. The intensity of the colour which is produced determines the concentration of that solution. Especially when used in a home or remote setting. But these tests can be difficult to read accurately.

False readings are very common, which can result in erroneous diagnosis or treatment. Specialized laboratory equipment such as spectrophotometers or test-specific readers can be used to automate the readouts with high sensitivity. But these are costly and bulky.

The new app makes accurate reading of colorimetric tests much easier, using nothing more than a mobile phone. The app uses the phone's camera and an algorithm to convert data from colorimetric tests into a numerical concentration value on the phone's screen within a few seconds.

After testing urine, saliva or other bodily fluid with a colorimetric test, the user simply takes a picture of the test with their phone's camera. The app analyses the colours of the test, compares them with a pre-recorded calibration, and displays a numerical result on the phone's screen. The result can then be stored, sent to a healthcare professional, or directly analyzed by the phone for diagnosis.

Beyond laboratory applications, the app could also be used by patients to monitor chronic conditions such as diabetes, or as a public health tool, by enabling the transmission of medical data to health professionals in real time.

Ali Yetisen, a PhD student, who led the app research said, "By quickly getting medical data from the field to doctors or centralized laboratories, it may help slow or limit the spread of pandemics."

In addition to medical applications, the researchers are planning to publicly release the app so that it can be used for other colorimetric tests such as laboratory kits, veterinary diagnostics and environmental screening tools.

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Hunt for habitable planets from 2024

LONDON: A massive search for habitable planets orbiting alien stars will be launched in 2024. The European Space Agency mission will identify and study thousands of exoplanetary systems (those orbiting a star other than the Sun) with stress on discovering Earthsized planets and super-Earths in the habitable zone of their parent star — the distance from the star where liquid water could exist.

Britain will play a leading role in the search with the planet-hunting mission will seeing strong involvement from several UK institutes , with Don Pollacco from the University of Warwick heading the consortium . PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) will address two themes — the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life and how does the solar system work.

It will monitor nearby stars, searching for dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out starlight . By using 34 telescopes and cameras, PLATO will search for planets around up to a million stars.

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Humans can detect 1 trillion smells

NEW DELHI: New research has found that humans are capable of differenciating between at least one trillion different odours and not a mere 10,000 as is popularly thought. Scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) reached this estimate after concocting various smells in the lab and testing individuals' ability to recognize the differences.

"Our analysis shows that the human capacity for discriminating smells is much larger than anyone anticipated," said Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator Leslie Vosshall, who studies olfaction at the Rockefeller University.

Vosshall and her colleagues published their findings March 21, 2014, in the journal Science. "I hope our paper will overturn this terrible reputation that humans have for not being good smellers," she says.

The 10,000 odours smelling capacity was estimated back in the 1920s without any data and it has bothered scientists like Vosshall. For one thing, it didn't make sense that humans should sense far fewer smells than colours. In the human eye, Vosshall explains, three light receptors work together to see up to 10 million colours. In contrast, the typical person's nose has 400 olfactory receptors.

But no one had tested humans' olfactory capacity.

Vosshall and Andreas Keller, a senior scientist in her lab at Rockefeller University, knew they couldn't test people's reactions to 10,000 or more odours, but they knew they could come up with a better estimate. They devised a strategy to present their research subjects with complex mixtures of different odours, and then ask whether their subjects could tell them apart.

They used 128 different odorant molecules to concoct their mixtures. The scientists presented their volunteers with three vials of scents at a time: two matched, and one different. Volunteers were asked to identify the one scent that was different from the others. Each volunteer made 264 such comparisons.

Afterwards, the scientists tallied how often their 26 subjects were able to correctly identify the odd-man-out. From there, they extrapolated how many different scents the average person would be able to discriminate if they were presented with all the possible mixtures that could be made from their 128 odorants. In this way, they estimated that the average person can discriminate between at least one trillion different doors.

"I think we were all surprised at how ridiculously high even the most conservative lower estimate is," Vosshall says. "But in fact, there are many more than 128 odorants, and so the actual number will be much, much bigger."

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'Chicken from hell': Bird-like dinosaur discovered

LONDON: A 12 feet long, 500 pound sharp clawed dinosaur - a killing machine dubbed as "chicken from hell" have been found by scientists to have roamed the earth along with Tyrannosaurus Rex around 66 million years ago.

A team of scientists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the University of Utah has described an unusual bird-like dinosaur previously unknown to science, resembling a cross between a modern emu and a reptile.

The new species called Anzu Wyliei was a giant raptor but with a chicken-like head and feathers.

It is believed to have lived 68 to 66 million years ago and was identified from three partial skeletons collected from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota.

The species belongs to Oviraptorosauria, a group of dinosaurs mostly known from fossils found in Central and East Asia.

The fossils of Anzu provide, for the first time, a detailed picture of the anatomy, biology and evolutionary relationships of Oviraptorosaurs.

The study's lead author Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History said "We jokingly call this thing the chicken from hell, and I think that's pretty appropriate. The beaked dinosaur's formal name is Anzu wyliei - Anzu after a bird-like demon in Mesopotamian mythology, and wyliei after a boy named Wylie, the dinosaur-loving grandson of a Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh trustee".

Three partial skeletons of the dinosaur — almost making up a full skeleton - were excavated from South Dakota - a formation known for abundant fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops.

The new dinosaur was nearly feet long, almost 5 feet tall at the hip and weighed an estimated 440 to 660 pounds.

Lamanna said "I am really excited about this discovery because Anzu is the largest oviraptorosaur found in North America. Oviraptorosaurs are a group of dinosaurs that are closely related to birds and often have strange, cassowary-like crests on their heads. The cassowary is a flightless bird in New Guinea and Australia related to emus and ostriches. Anzu is also one of the youngest oviraptorosaurs known, meaning it lived very close to the dinosaur extinction event blamed on an asteroid striking Earth 65 million years ago".

The researchers believe Anzu, with large sharp claws, was an omnivore, eating vegetation, small animals and perhaps eggs while living on a wet flood plain.

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12 feet long, 500 pound sharp clawed dinosaur discovered

LONDON: A 12 feet long, 500 pound sharp clawed dinosaur - a killing machine dubbed as "chicken from hell" have been found by scientists to have roamed the earth along with Tyrannosaurus Rex around 66 million years ago.

A team of scientists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the University of Utah has described an unusual bird-like dinosaur previously unknown to science, resembling a cross between a modern emu and a reptile.

The new species called Anzu Wyliei was a giant raptor but with a chicken-like head and feathers.

It is believed to have lived 68 to 66 million years ago and was identified from three partial skeletons collected from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation in North and South Dakota.

The species belongs to Oviraptorosauria, a group of dinosaurs mostly known from fossils found in Central and East Asia.

The fossils of Anzu provide, for the first time, a detailed picture of the anatomy, biology and evolutionary relationships of Oviraptorosaurs.

The study's lead author Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History said "We jokingly call this thing the chicken from hell, and I think that's pretty appropriate. The beaked dinosaur's formal name is Anzu wyliei - Anzu after a bird-like demon in Mesopotamian mythology, and wyliei after a boy named Wylie, the dinosaur-loving grandson of a Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh trustee".

Three partial skeletons of the dinosaur — almost making up a full skeleton - were excavated from South Dakota - a formation known for abundant fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops.

The new dinosaur was nearly feet long, almost 5 feet tall at the hip and weighed an estimated 440 to 660 pounds.

Lamanna said "I am really excited about this discovery because Anzu is the largest oviraptorosaur found in North America. Oviraptorosaurs are a group of dinosaurs that are closely related to birds and often have strange, cassowary-like crests on their heads. The cassowary is a flightless bird in New Guinea and Australia related to emus and ostriches. Anzu is also one of the youngest oviraptorosaurs known, meaning it lived very close to the dinosaur extinction event blamed on an asteroid striking Earth 65 million years ago".

The researchers believe Anzu, with large sharp claws, was an omnivore, eating vegetation, small animals and perhaps eggs while living on a wet flood plain.

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Nasa finds ‘zebra stripes’ in Earth's radiation belt

WASHINGTON: Earth's inner radiation belt displays a persistent zebra striped pattern generated by our planet's rotation, Nasa's twin Van Allen Probes spacecraft have found.

The high-energy electrons in the inner radiation belt display a persistent pattern that resembles slanted zebra stripes, researchers said.

Surprisingly, this structure is produced by the slow rotation of Earth, previously considered incapable of affecting the motion of radiation belt particles, which have velocities approaching the speed of light.

Scientists had previously believed that increased solar wind activity was the primary force behind any structures in our planet's radiation belts.

However, these zebra stripes were shown to be visible even during low solar wind activity, which prompted a new search for how they were generated.

That quest led to the unexpected discovery that the stripes are caused by the rotation of Earth.

"It is because of the unprecedented resolution of our energetic particle experiment, RBSPICE, that we now understand that the inner belt electrons are, in fact, always organized in zebra patterns," said Aleksandr Ukhorskiy, lead author of the paper at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

"Furthermore, our modelling clearly identifies Earth's rotation as the mechanism creating these patterns. It is truly humbling, as a theoretician, to see how quickly new data can change our understanding of physical properties," said Ukhorskiy.

Because of the tilt in Earth's magnetic field axis, the planet's rotation generates an oscillating, weak electric field that permeates through the entire inner radiation belt.

To understand how that field affects the electrons, Ukhorskiy suggested imagining that the electrons are like a viscous fluid.

The global oscillations slowly stretch and fold the fluid, much like taffy is stretched and folded in a candy store machine.

The stretching and folding process results in the striped pattern observed across the entire inner belt, extending from above Earth's atmosphere, about 800km above the planet's surface up to roughly 13,000km.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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Eat less, live long, scientists confirm

LONDON: Cutting down how much you eat and consuming smaller portions can greatly increase your lifespan.

An evolutionary biologist has now confirmed why the well fed die early.

She says eating less can boost healthier ageing by protecting the body's cells from harmful deterioration and the risk of cancer.

Dr Margo Adler, who led the research from the University of New South Wales in Australia said that cutting back on food leads to increased rates of "cellular recycling" and repair mechanisms in the body.

Scientists have developed a new evolutionary theory on why consuming a diet that is very low in nutrients extends lifespan in laboratory animals — research that could hold clues to promoting healthier ageing in humans.

Scientists have known for decades that severely restricted food intake reduces the incidence of diseases of old age, such as cancer and increases lifespan.

"This effect has been demonstrated in laboratories around the world, in species ranging from yeast to flies to mice. There is also some evidence that it occurs in primates," says lead author Dr Adler.

The most widely accepted theory is that this effect evolved to improve survival during times of famine. "But we think that lifespan extension from dietary restriction is more likely to be a laboratory artefact," says Dr Adler.

Lifespan extension is unlikely to occur in the wild, because dietary restriction compromises the immune system's ability to fight off disease and reduces the muscle strength necessary to flee a predator.

"Unlike in the benign conditions of the lab, most animals in the wild are killed young by parasites or predators," says Dr Adler.

"Since dietary restriction appears to extend lifespan in the lab by reducing old-age diseases, it is unlikely to have the same effect on wild animals, which generally don't live long enough to be affected by cancer and other late-life pathologies."

Dietary restriction, however, also leads to increased rates of cellular recycling and repair mechanisms in the body.

The UNSW researchers' new theory is that this effect evolved to help animals continue to reproduce when food is scarce; they require less food to survive because stored nutrients in the cells can be recycled and reused.

It is this effect that could account for the increased lifespan of laboratory animals on very low nutrient diets, because increased cellular recycling reduces deterioration and the risk of cancer.

"This is the most intriguing aspect, from a human health stand point. Although extended lifespan may simply be a side effect of dietary restriction, a better understanding of these cellular recycling mechanisms that drive the effect may hold the promise of longer, healthier lives for humans," Dr Adler says.

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Unique GPS system onboard airplanes to precisely monitor bad weather

LONDON: GPS on-board airplanes will now help detect precise conditions in the atmosphere and better predict weather conditions and improve hurricane forecasting across the globe.

Current measurement systems that use GPS satellite signals as a source to probe the atmosphere rely on GPS receivers that are fixed to ground and can't measure over the ocean or they rely on GPS receivers that are also on satellites that are expensive to launch and only occasionally measure in regions near storms.

The new system, led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography geophysicist Jennifer Haase and her colleagues captures detailed meteorological readings at different elevations at targeted areas of interest, such as over the Atlantic Ocean in regions where hurricanes might develop.

A paper published on Wednesday details a 2010 flight campaign aboard NSF aircraft and subsequent data analysis that demonstrated for the first time that atmospheric information could be captured by an airborne GPS device.

The instrumentation, which the scientists labelled "GISMOS" (Global Navigation Satellite System Instrument System for Multistatic and Occultation Sensing), increased the number of atmospheric profiles for studying the evolution of tropical storms by more than 50%.

GPS technology has broadly advanced science and society's ability to pinpoint precise information, from driving directions to tracking ground motions during earthquakes. A new technique led by a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego stands to improve weather models and hurricane forecasting by detecting through a new GPS system aboard airplanes.

The first demonstration of the technique is pushing towards a goal of broadly implementing the technology in the near future on commercial aircraft.

"This field campaign demonstrated the potential for creating an entirely new operational atmospheric observing system for precise moisture profiling from commercial aircraft," said Haase from the Ida M Green Institute of Physics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at Scripps. "Having dense, detailed information about the vertical moisture distribution close to the storms is an important advancement, so if you put this information into a weather model it will actually have an impact and improve the forecast."

"These are exciting results, especially given the complications involved in working from an airplane," says Eric DeWeaver, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences.

"Satellite-based measurements are now regularly used for weather forecasting and have a big impact, but airplanes can go beyond satellites in making observations that are targeted right where you want them."

"We're looking at how moisture evolves so when we see tropical waves moving across the Atlantic, we can learn more about which one is going to turn into a hurricane," said Haase. "So being able to look at what happens in these events at the early stages will give us a lot longer lead time for hurricane warnings."

"This is another case where the effective use of GPS has the potential to improve the forecast and therefore save lives," said Richard Anthes, president emeritus of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which currently runs the satellite based GPS measurements system called COSMIC (Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate).

While the current GISMOS design occupies a refrigerator's worth of space, Haase and her colleagues are working to miniaturize the technology to shoe box size.

From there, the system can more feasibly fit onto commercial aircraft, with hundreds of daily flights and a potential flood of new atmospheric data to greatly improve hurricane forecasting and weather models.

The technology also could improve interpretation of long-term climate models by advancing scientists'understanding of factors such as the moisture conditions that are favorable for hurricane development.

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Scientists create world's first 3D printed beating heart muscles and tissues

LONDON: Heart muscles that actually beat, created artificially in the lab, have for the first time become a reality.

In a major breakthrough that could repair millions of human hearts damaged after massive heart attack, scientists have for the first time successfully implanted artificial heart tissues that actually beat in animals.
When a heart gets damaged during a major heart attack, the result can be deadly.

But scientists working on a way to repair the vital organ have now engineered tissue that closely mimics natural heart muscle that beats, not only in a lab dish but also when implanted into animals.

"Repairing damaged hearts could help millions of people around the world live longer, healthier lives," said Nasim Annabi.

Researchers at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and the University of Sydney in Australia have been able to combine a novel elastic hydrogel with micro scale technologies to create an artificial cardiac tissue that mimics the mechanical and biological properties of the native heart.

Right now, the best treatment option for patients with major heart damage — which can be caused by severe heart failure, for example — is an organ transplant.

But there are far more patients on waitlists for a transplant than there are donated hearts. Even if a patient receives a new heart, complications can arise.

The ideal solution would be to somehow repair the tissue, which can get damaged over time when arteries are clogged and starve a part of the heart of oxygen.

Scientists have been searching for years for the best fix.

The quest has been confounded by a number of factors that come into play when designing a complex organ or tissue.

Simple applications, such as engineered skin are already in use or in clinical trials. But building tissue for an organ as complicated as the heart requires a lot more research. "Our hearts are more than just a pile of cells," said Ali Khademhosseini from Harvard Medical School. "They're very organized in their architecture".

To tackle the challenge of engineering heart muscle, Khademhosseini and Annabi have been working with natural proteins that form gelatin-like materials called hydrogels.

"The reason we like these materials is because in many ways they mimic aspects of our own body's matrix," Khademhosseini said. They're soft and contain a lot of water, like many human tissues.

His group has found that they can tune these hydrogels to have the chemical, biological, mechanical and electrical properties they want for the regeneration of various tissues in the body. But there was one way in which the materials didn't resemble human tissue.

Like gelatin, early versions of the hydrogels would fall apart, whereas human hearts are elastic. The elasticity of the heart tissue plays a key role for the proper function of heart muscles such as contractile activity during beating.

So, the researchers developed a new family of gels using a stretchy human protein aptly called tropoelastin. That did the trick, giving the materials much needed resilience and strength.

But building tissue is not just about developing the right materials. Making the right hydrogels is only the first step. They serve as the tissue scaffold. On it, the researchers grow actual heart cells.
To make sure the cells form the right structure, Khademhosseini's lab uses 3-D printing and micro engineering techniques to create patterns in the gels. These patterns coax the cells to grow the way the researchers want them to.

The result: small patches of heart muscle cells neatly lined up that beat in synchrony within the grooves formed on these elastic substrates.

These micro patterned elastic hydrogels can one day be used as cardiac patches. Khademhosseini's group is now moving into tests with large animals. They are also using these elastic natural hydrogels for the regeneration of other tissues such as blood vessels, skeletal muscle, heart valves and vascularized skin.

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Antarctic moss, frozen for 1,500 years, springs back to life

LONDON: A specimen of moss that has been buried frozen in the Antarctic permafrost for over 1,500 years has suddenly sprung back to life. Interestingly, getting them to grow didn't even take any coaxing.

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University found that this moss specimen came back to life and grow once again in what is the longest period of time that frozen plants have been able to survive.

Mosses are an important part of the biology of both the polar areas. They are the dominant plants and are the major store houses of fixed carbon.

Previously, moss was known to survive being frozen for about 20 years — surviving for a millennium or more suggests the plants may be able to survive an ice age.

For the first time, this vital part of the ecosystem has been shown to have the ability to survive century to millennial scale ice ages.

Professor Peter Convey from the British Antarctic Survey explains: "What mosses do in the ecosystem is far more important than we would generally realize when we look at a moss on a wall here for instance. Understanding what controls their growth and distribution, particularly in a fast-changing part of the world such as the Antarctic Peninsula region, is therefore of much wider significance."

The team took cores of moss from deep in a frozen moss bank in the Antarctic. This moss would already have been at least decades old when it was first frozen. They sliced the frozen moss cores very carefully, keeping them free from contamination and placed them in an incubator at a normal growth temperature and light level.

After only a few weeks, the moss began to grow.

Using carbon dating, the team identified the moss to be at least 1,530 years of age and possibly even older, at the depth where the new growth was seen.

"We actually did very little other than slice the moss core very carefully," Convey said, adding that they also make sure not to accidentally get any other life forms in the mix. They placed the sliced and seemingly lifeless mosses in an incubator environment at a normal growth temperature and light level, and voila, new shoots of the parent species began to appear.

While 1,500 years on ice is impressive to say the least, the findings suggest that it may be possible for mosses to persist for even longer.

According to Professor Convey: "This experiment shows that multicellular organisms, plants in this case, can survive over far longer timescales than previously thought. If they can survive in this way, then decolonization following an ice age, once the ice retreats, would be a lot easier than migrating transoceanic distances from warmer regions. It also maintains diversity in an area that would otherwise be wiped clean of life by the ice advance."

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Scientists track evolution of a superbug

MUMBAI: American scientists have tracked the evolution of one of the deadliest superbugs called Klebsiella pneumoniae. They hope it will pave the way for discovery of drugs that would be effective against the superbug, said the study which appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While researchers had previously thought that ST258 K pneumoniae strains spread from a single ancestor, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) team showed that the strains arose from at least two different lineages. The key difference between the two groups lies in the genes involved in production of the bacterium's outer coat, which interacts with the human immune system.

ST258 K pneumoniae causes infections which kill approximately 600 people annually in the United States. It is resistant to most antibiotics, making treatment a difficult process.

Scientists from various organizations working for the NIAID team sequenced the complete genomes of ST258 K pneumoniae strains collected from two patients in New Jersey hospitals. By comparing these genomes with gene sequences from an additional 83 clinical ST258 K pneumoniae isolates, the scientists found that the strains divided broadly into two distinct groups, each with its own evolutionary history.

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Blood test may help spot, monitor concussions

MUMBAI: Swedish scientists have discovered a biomarker test to predict how serious or how long it will take for a person to recover from brain injuries.

At present, it is difficult for doctors to say when a patient suffering from concussion will recover. But doctors from Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Molndal, Sweden, have found a way to test blood for a protein called total tau (T-tau), which is released when the brain is injured. The amount of T-tau is apparently the key to diagnosing a concussion and predicting when people can get back into the game,'' said the study which is published in last week's JAMA Neurology journal.

The study was conducted in 28 hockey players. "We have a biomarker [indicator] that is elevated in the blood of players with a concussion," said lead researcher Dr Pashtun Shahiml. The level of T-tau within the first hour after concussion correlates with the number of days you have symptoms. Concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury.

The researchers found that players who suffered a concussion had higher blood levels of T-tau compared with levels measured before the hockey season began. The highest levels of T-tau were seen in the first hour after a concussion and these levels declined over the next 12 hours, yet they were still elevated six days later.

"We can use this biomarker to both diagnose concussion and to monitor the course of concussion until the patient is free of symptoms," he said.

Shahim added that by watching the level of T-tau drop over time, it is possible to predict when symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, trouble concentrating, memory problems and headaches will disappear.

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There's a link between diabetes, pancreatic cancer: Study

MUMBAI: The sugar imbalance disease — diabetes — can lead to pancreatic cancer, shows a research from the University of Melbourne.

In a new study published on Friday in the Annals of Surgical Oncology journal, doctors and mathematicians reviewed data from 1973 to 2013 and concluded there is a time-dependent link between being diagnosed with diabetes and pancreatic cancer.

Dr Mehrdad Nikfarjam from the University of Melbourne said pancreatic cancer was often diagnosed at an advanced, incurable stage of diabetes. Diabetes is basically the body's inability to produce insulin to manage sugar levels in blood. In some patients, sugar levels are a problem even though the pancreas produce adequate amount of the insulin.

"This is an important paper that highlights for doctors and in patients with newly diagnosed diabetes without an obvious cause, a diagnosis of underlying pancreatic cancer should be considered," the university press release quoted Dr Nikfarjam as saying. Incidentally, the presence of diabetes is considered a modest risk factor for the development of a cancer later in life.

While the numbers of pancreatic cancer in the population are relatively low, the study suggests a screening program should be considered. "The priority on screening should be on patients with new-onset diabetes but can later be expanded to long-standing diabetic patients," said Dr Nikfarjam.

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'Little Foot' may have been humans' forefather: Study

PARIS: A short, hairy "ape man" who tumbled into a pit in South Africa millions of years ago is back in the running as a candidate ancestor for humans, scientists said on Friday.

A painstaking 13-year probe has "convincingly shown", they said, that the strange-looking creature named Little Foot lived some three million years ago - almost a million years earlier than calculated by rival teams.

If so, it would make Little Foot - so named for the diminutive size of the bones - one of the oldest members of the Australopithecus hominid family ever found.

And it would bolster the status of South Africa's Sterkfontein cave complex as part of the "Cradle of Humankind", a UN-recognized World Heritage Site.

"Some have said South Africa is too young" to have given rise to modern man, said Laurent Bruxelles from France's National Institute for Archaeological Research (Inrap), who took part in the study.

"We are putting Little Foot and South Africa back in the running."

Another challenger for the title of human ancestor was "Lucy," a specimen of a different strand of Australopithecus - the genus that had both ape and human features, walked upright, and is believed to have given rise to Homo sapiens, or anatomically modern Man, via Homo habilis.

Lucy's skeleton, uncovered in Ethiopia in 1974, has been dated to about three million years, although as always in fossils, there is a big margin of uncertainty.

"No longer are the Australopithecus of East Africa, like Lucy, the sole candidates" to have been our ancestors, said Bruxelles.

Little Foot's age has been a controversial topic. The Sterkfontein caves, northwest of Johannesburg, do not contain volcanic sediment, as do the east African fossil sites, which is easier to date.

This has caused estimates of Little Foot's age to fluctuate quite drastically -- anything from 1.5 to 4.0 million years, though the most extreme estimates have long been ruled out.

Little Foot's skeleton is the most complete of an Australopithecus ever found.

In 2006, a paper in the journal Science estimated its age at 2.2 million years, based on chemical dating of the layers of stone around the fossil.

Now Bruxelles and a team of French and South African scientists said calcite deposits dubbed "flowstones" that enveloped Little Foot were much younger than the fossil itself.

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'Genes may reduce exercise gains for some senior citizens'

MUMBAI: There is no longer any doubt that exercises hold the key to good health, especially among the elderly.

Daily physical regimen — be it walking, yoga or doctor-guided exercises — has been chronicled to help control various diseases ranging from diabetes to cancer. But a new study in Physiological Genomics says that a particular gene in some of the aged people may prevent them from reaping the full health benefits of exercises.

"The ACE I/D gene and its variations — the ID, DD, and II genotypes — cause some seniors' to lose out on the benefits of exercise,'' said a press release sent by the American Physiological Society. The study's findings suggest that the ACE I/D genotype may be a significant factor in how well seniors respond to exercise.

The researchers followed 424 sedentary, mobility-limited seniors aged 70-89 for a year. The participants were placed in groups that focused on either health education or physical activity. The health education group received presentations on eating right, proper use medication, and tips on maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but they did not perform exercise as part of the study. The other physical activity group was taught a variety of strength (example, squats and leg raises) and balance exercises and a walking program.

The researchers found that the physical activity intervention led to greater improvements in walking speed among ID and DD genotype carriers (29.9% and 13.7% respectively).

"However, among II genotype carriers, health education alone led to more improvements in walking speed than physical activity intervention (20% vs. 18.5%). II carriers in the physical activity group also experienced smaller gains in lower body performance than those in the health education group,'' said the release.

These findings suggest that the ACE I/D genotype may be a significant factor in how well seniors respond to exercise. This insight could be used to develop more effective, individualized, and senior-friendly exercise recommendations for improving physical function and preventing in disability.

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What should you do first: Cardio or resistance training?

MUMBAI: Should you begin with cardio exercises and then follow it up with resistance training? A group of researchers from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland studied 200 endurance athletes to find an answer.

The researchers concluded that the training order of combined cardio- and resistance training does not seem to have an effect. But, in the early days of training, the recovery of the group starting with cardio was longer. The researchers hence said that care should be taken while performing high amounts and/or a high frequency of training.

In a press release put out by the Academy of Finland, the researchers set a limit for the combine exercise regimen: performing 2-3 combined cardio- and resistance training sessions per week, of 90 to 120 min each, does not lead to differences in the adaptations of overall fitness and body composition between the two training orders.

The participants of these studies were 18-40 years old men and performed either supervised cardio- immediately followed by strength training or vice versa for 24 weeks (2-3 combined cardio- and resistance sessions per week). "As prolonged aerobic performance may 'weaken' the exercised muscles and essentially reduce the ability to lift heavy loads during the subsequent resistance training session, the researchers expected to observe less favorable anabolic effects resulting in compromised adaptations in muscle strength and mass in the "cardio first" group compared to the group which started each session with resistance training," said the release.

The study expectedly revealed that the anabolic responses of one single training session seemed to be less favorable in the training group starting with cardio. However, this initial difference was no longer observed after the 24-week training period and both groups actually increased physical performance and muscle size to about a similar extent.

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Ultrasound misses heart defects in fetuses if mother is overweight: Study

MUMBAI: It is important for pregnant women to undergo ultrasound scans to detect heart defects, if any, in fetuses. But a study from Sweden says that over six in every ten serious heart defects in fetuses go undetected in the ultrasound scans. The reason? The mother-to-be is too overweight or overweight for the scan to be effective.

"The lives of children born with serious heart defects are in constant danger; some of them need immediate operations or medical treatment," said Eric Hildebrand of the Linkoping University Hospital Women's Clinic. If the defect is serious, parents can plan the delivery is such a manner that the child gets the needed medical attention immediately at birth. If living in an area with inadequate pediatric heart care, the parents to-be can plan the delivery in a better city, for instance.

Hildebrand said one reason for missing malformations is that the ultrasound image is affected by the body of the mother. For example diagnosis is made more difficult by obesity - a BMI over 30 - which is the case for 13% of the mothers in the Swedish study.

"Subcutaneous fat detracts from the quality of the image, making it more difficult for us to see malformations," said Dr Hildebrand.

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Scientists create world's first super rat that will help study diseases

LONDON: Scientists have created the world's first super rat — a mouse that expresses a fluorescing 'biosensor' in every cell of its body, allowing diseased cells and drugs to be tracked and evaluated in real time and in three dimensions, raising hope that it will give humans a peek into diseases like never before.

Scientists from the UK and Australia have created a mouse that expresses a fluorescing biosensor which mimics the action of a target molecule, in this case a protein known as 'Rac', which drives cell movement in many types of cancer.

This is the first time a mouse has been genetically modified successfully to express the molecule throughout the body without affecting cell function.

The mouse can be used to study any cancer type by crossing it with other models, limiting expression of a specific cell or tissue type.

The mouse can also easily be adapted to study diseases other than cancer by expressing the biosensor in different disease models.

Rac behaves like a switch, oscillating on the molecular level between two states — active or inactive. When Rac is active, the biosensor picks up chemical cues and glows blue. When Rac is inactive the biosensor glows yellow.

Using sophisticated imaging techniques, it is possible to follow Rac activation in any organ at any time, or watch moment-by-moment oscillation of Rac activity at the front or back of cells as they move in the body.

This technology has been used to monitor Rac activity in many organs in response to drug treatment.

Scientists said it allowed them to watch and map, in real time, parts of a cell or organ where Rac is active and driving invasion. In cancers, a lot of blue indicates an aggressive tumour that is in the process of spreading.

You can literally watch parts of a tumour turn from blue to yellow as a drug hits its target.

This can be an hour or more after the drug is administered, and the effect can wane quickly or slowly.

Drug companies need to know these details — specifically how much, how often and how long to administer drugs.

Dr Paul Timpson who began the study with colleagues from the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow and completed it at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research collaborated closely throughout the process with Dr Heidi Welch from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge — the creator of the mouse — who uses it to study the movement of immune cells, known as neutrophils.

"The great thing about this mouse is its flexibility and potential for looking at a broad range of diseases and molecular targets," said Dr Paul Timpson.

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Volcanoes helped species survive ice ages: Study

SYDNEY: The steam and heat from volcanoes allowed species of plants and animals to survive past ice ages, a study showed on Tuesday, offering help for scientists dealing with climate change.

An international team of researchers said their analysis helped explain a long-running mystery about how some species thrived in areas covered by glaciers, with volcanoes acting as an oasis of life during long cold periods.

"Volcanic steam can melt large ice caves under the glaciers, and it can be tens of degrees warmer in there than outside," said Ceridwen Fraser, the joint team leader from the Australian National University.

"Caves and warm steam fields would have been great places for species to hang out during ice ages.

"We can learn a lot from looking at the impacts of past climate change as we try to deal with the accelerated change that humans are now causing."

The team studied tens of thousands of records of Antarctic mosses, lichens and bugs, collected over decades by hundreds of researchers, and found there were more species close to volcanoes, and fewer further away.

While the study was based on Antarctica, the findings will also help scientists understand how species survived past ice ages in other frigid regions, including in periods when it is thought there was little or no ice-free land on the planet.

Antarctica has at least 16 volcanoes which have been active since the last ice age 20,000 years ago with around 60 percent of Antarctic invertebrate species found nowhere else in the world.

"The closer you get to volcanoes, the more species you find," said Aleks Terauds from the Australian Antarctic Division, which ran the analysis that was published by the US-based journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This pattern supports our hypothesis that species have been expanding their ranges and gradually moving out from volcanic areas since the last ice age."

Another team member Steven Chown, from Monash University in Melbourne, said the research findings could help guide conservation efforts in Antarctica.

"Knowing where the 'hotspots' of diversity are will help us to protect them as human-induced environmental changes continue to affect Antarctica," he said.

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Elephants can tell difference between human languages

WASHINGTON: African elephants can differentiate between human languages and move away from those considered a threat, a skill they have honed to survive in the wild, researchers said on Monday.

The study suggests elephants, already known to be intelligent creatures, are even more sophisticated than previously believed when it comes to understanding human dangers.

African elephants ( Loxodonta africana) are the largest land animals on Earth and are considered a vulnerable species due to habitat loss and illegal hunting for their ivory tusks.

Researchers played recordings of human voices for elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya to see how they would respond, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of the voices were from local Maasai men, a group that herds cattle and sometimes comes into conflict with elephants over access to water and grazing space. Occasionally, elephants are killed in clashes with Maasai men, and vice-versa.

Other recorded voices were from Kamba men, who tend to be farmers or employees of the national park, and who rarely represent a danger to elephants.

Still other voices tested on the elephants included female Maasai speakers and young boys.

All were saying the same phrase: "Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming."

The recorded voices were played for hundreds of elephants across 47 family groups during daylight hours.

When elephants heard the adult male Maasai voices, they tended to gather together, start investigative smelling with their trunks, and move cautiously away.

But when elephants heard females, boys, or adult male Kamba speakers, they did not show concern.

"The ability to distinguish between Maasai and Kamba men delivering the same phrase in their own language suggests that elephants can discriminate between different languages," said co-author Graeme Shannon, a visiting fellow in psychology at the University of Sussex.

That is not the same as understanding what the words mean, but still shows that elephants can decipher the more sing-songy Maasai language from the Kamba tongue, perhaps based on inflections, use of vowels, and other cues.

"It is very sophisticated what the elephants are doing," said Keith Lindsay, a conservation biologist and member of the scientific advisory committee of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project.

"A lot of animals will take flight at just the general threat posed by people, but a smart animal doesn't do that," he told AFP.

"Their response to hearing Maasai men talking was to be alert, to move away, but not to run away in total fear," added Lindsay, who was not involved in the study.

"It is suggesting that elephants are capable of thinking, (of) recognizing that if Maasai men are talking, they are not likely to be hunting because if they were hunting, they would be quiet."

Elephant groups with older matriarchs in their midst did best at assessing the threat from different speakers, further bolstering the presumed role of learning in the animals' behavior.

The elephants also did not act the same way as they did when recordings of lions were played, as was shown in a previous study.

In those scenarios, they bunched together so that juveniles — those most at risk from a lion attack — were in the center, and moved toward the sounds as if to scare the lion away.

When it comes to recognizing people, elephants may not be alone in this ability. Other research has suggested that wild bottlenose dolphins in Brazil have become so familiar with humans that they engage in cooperative hunting with artisanal fisherman.

Great apes, crows and even prairie dogs have also been shown to differentiate between humans on some level.

A separate study published last month in the journal PLoS ONE showed elephants even have specific alarm calls for when humans are near, suggesting the relationship between people and elephants has reached a troubling point and that conservation efforts are more important than ever.

"We have become a formal enemy of the elephants," said Lori Marino, an expert on animal intelligence at Emory University.

"They can not only make some distinctions between us, but we are now on their list of species to watch out for."

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