Soya-wheat mix can help protect immunity of HIV patients: Study

CHENNAI: Adding a soya-wheat mix fortified with vitamins to the diet of HIV-positive people, along with regular treatment, can safeguard their immunity and general health, a new study has found.

The study by National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis had about 282 patients getting macronutrient supplement at Tuberculosis Research Centre clinics in Chennai and Madurai for six months. It showed not just significant improvement in nutritional parameters, but also that the CD4 cell count of these patients remained stable, indicating their immunity was being maintained. The patients who took part in the study were were not on antiretroviral therapy (ART).

CD4 cells are a type of white blood cells that protect the body from infection. Once infected with HIV, the cells are attacked and destroyed by the virus. However, at the time of the study, the guideline recommended initiation of ART before CD4 cell counts decrease below 250 cells while the recent guidelines suggest 350 cells.

Malnutrition in HIV-positive adults is an issue that requires special attention as it leads to faster disease progression, high mortality rate and suboptimal response to anti-retroviral therapy. And if they are the bread winners, it could affect the whole family.

The nutritional parameters that were observed to have significantly increased among the group that received macronutrient supplement are body weight, body mass index, mid-arm circumference, fat-free mass, and body cell mass. The observation was compared with that of a control group of 79 patients who received only standard care. This group did not show any improvement, and their CD4 count dropped.

While the standard care involved treatment to prevent other diseases and treating common infections, by providing multivitamin tablets, nutritional counselling and psychosocial support. The supplement group, meanwhile, also got a mixture of whole wheat and soya bean flour fortified with vitamins and folic acid, providing a high-calorie, high-protein diet.

NIRT director Dr Soumya Swaminathan said that though an increase in nutrition levels were observed, they may not be statistically significant. That was partly due to the study design and other biological and behaviourial factors.

Scientist C Padmapriyadarsini says that the patients in the 'beneficiary' group were also given interesting recipes to try out new ways to cook and eat. "M Being a catabolic illness, HIV requires high-protein content to build muscle mass," she said. The study also recalled a macronutrient supplementation programme in TN for all HIV-positive patients initiating ART at government centres, which showed weight gain in treated patients. The programme was discontinued after the funding was stopped.

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New blood test predicts breast cancer years ahead

LONDON: A new blood test can predict if a woman would get breast cancer in the next two to five years and could create a "paradigm shift" in early diagnosis of the disease, reports a new study.

"The method is better than mammography, which can only be used when the disease has already occurred," said Rasmus Bro, professor of chemometrics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

"It is not perfect, but it is truly amazing that we can predict breast cancer years into the future," Bro stressed.

While a mammography can detect newly developed breast cancer with a sensitivity of 75 percent, the new metabolic blood profile is able to predict the likelihood of a woman developing breast cancer within the next two to five years with a sensitivity of 80 percent, the study noted.

The research was based on a population study of 57,000 people followed by the Danish Cancer Society over 20 years.

Inspired by research in food science, the researchers analysed all compounds a blood sample contains instead of - as is often done in health and medical science - examining what a single biomarker means in relation to a specific disease.

"When a huge amount of relevant measurements from many individuals is used to assess health risks - here breast cancer - it creates very high quality information. The more measurements our analyses contain, the better the model handles complex problems," continued professor Bro.

The model does not reveal anything about the importance of the single biomarkers in relation to breast cancer, but it does reveal the importance of a set of biomarkers and their interactions, the researchers said.

"No single part of the pattern is actually necessary nor sufficient. It is the whole pattern that predicts the cancer," noted Lars Ove Dragsted from the University of Copenhagen.

The study was published in the journal Metabolomics.

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NASA reveals first-ever colour image of Pluto

WASHINGTON: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, set to fly by the Pluto system on July 14, has sent its first colour image of the dwarf planet and its largest moon Charon.

"The image reveals tantalising glimpses of this system," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said in a statement.

Charon is seen dimmer than Pluto in the image taken from a distance of 115 million km.

"The contrast may be due to a difference in composition of the two bodies or it could even be caused by a previously unseen atmosphere on Charon," Green added.

The uncertainty should clear up this summer when New Horizons gets history's first good look at the two frigid, faraway objects.

"We are going to Pluto because it is the human race's first opportunity to study an entirely new class of world," added William McKinnon, New Horizons co-investigator from the Washington University in St. Louis.

Till date, astronomers knew about only one moon of Pluto called Charon which is nearly 50 percent as wide as the dwarf planet.

Exactly 85 years after Pluto's discovery, New Horizons has now spotted small moons orbiting Pluto.

The moons, Nix and Hydra, are visible in a series of images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft at distances ranging from about 201 to 186 million km.

The long-exposure images offer New Horizons' best view yet of these two small moons circling Pluto which professor Clyde Tombaugh discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona Feb 18, 1930.

Nix and Hydra were discovered by New Horizons team members in Hubble Space Telescope images taken in 2005.

Hydra, Pluto's outermost known moon, orbits Pluto every 38 days at a distance of approximately 64,700 km while Nix orbits every 25 days at a distance of 48,700 km.

Pluto's two other small moons, Styx and Kerberos, are still smaller and too faint to be seen by New Horizons at its current range to Pluto.

There may be yet more moons waiting to be discovered, as well as a ring system or debris fields around Pluto.

Such features could present a collision risk to New Horizons but mission team members are not too concerned, Space.com reported.

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Now, herbal tea that fights malaria

WASHINGTON: A new study has revealed about the journey of the antimalarial tea from herbal remedy to licensed phytomedicine.

The herbal remedy derived from the roots of a weed, which was traditionally used to alleviate malarial symptoms, was combined with leaves and aerial portions from two other plants with antimalarial activity, formulated as a tea, and eventually licensed and sold as an antimalarial phytomedicine.

The authors have presented the fascinating story and challenges behind the development of this plant-based treatment.

Merlin Willcox (University of Oxford, UK), Zephirin Dakuyo (Phytofla, Banfora, Burkina Faso) and coauthors discuss the antimalarial and pharmacological properties of the herbal medication derived from Cochlospermum planchonii (a shrubby weed known as N'Dribala), Phyllanthus amarus, and Cassia alata.

The authors provide a unique historical perspective in describing the early evaluation, development, and production of this phytomedicine.

They present the ongoing research and challenges in scaling up cultivation and harvesting of the plants and in production of the final product.

The article also describes other traditional uses of the medication, such as to treat hepatitis.

The study appears in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

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Turn corpses into compost and let life bloom

By: Catrin Einhorn

CULLOWHEE (North Carolina): The body of the tiny 78-year-old woman was brought to a hillside at Western Carolina University still clad in a blue hospital gown. She was laid on a bed of wood chips, and then more were heaped atop her. If all goes as hoped, the body will turn into compost. It is a startling next step in the natural burial movement.

Armed with an environmental fellowship, Katrina Spade, 37, Seattle resident with a degree in architecture, has proposed an alternative: a facility for human composting. The woman laid to rest in wood chips is a first step in testing how it would work. "Composting makes people think of banana peels and coffee grounds," Spade said. But "our bodies have nutrients. What if we could grow new life after we've died?" Scientists agree that human beings can be composted. Already countless farms across the country compost the bodies of dead livestock. "I'm absolutely sure that it can work," said Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a soil scientist at Washington State University who is on the advisory board of the Urban Death Project, a nonprofit that Spade founded.

The process is surprisingly simple: Place nitrogen-rich material, like dead animals, inside a mound of carbon-rich material, like wood chips and sawdust, adding moisture or extra nitrogen and making other adjustments as needed. Microbial activity will start the pile cooking. Bacteria release enzymes that break down tissue into component parts like amino acids, and eventually, the nitrogen-rich molecules bind with the carbon-rich ones, creating a soil-like substance. Temperatures reach around 140 degrees, often higher, and the heat kills common pathogens. Done correctly, there should be no smell. Bones also compost, though they take longer than tissue.

Spade has designed a building for human composting that aims to marry the efficiency of this biological process with the ritual and symbolism that mourners crave. Each Urban Death facility would be centered around a three-storey vault that she calls "the core". Loved ones would carry their deceased, wrapped in a shroud, up a circular ramp to the top.

There, during a "laying in" ceremony, mourners would place the body inside the core, which could hold perhaps 30 corpses at a time. Over the next several weeks, each body would move down the core until the first stage of composting was complete.

In a second stage, material would be screened, along with any remaining bones, and the compost would be cured. Spade estimates that each body, combined with the necessary materials such as wood chips and sawdust, would yield enough compost to fill a cube three feet by three feet.

Weeks or months later, survivors could collect some of the compost to use as they saw fit, perhaps in their garden or to plant a tree. Spade foresees the rest going to nearby parks or conservation lands. Each human composting would cost about $2,500, a fraction of the price of conventional burial, Spade estimates. She hopes to build the first facility in Seattle, then to develop a template that other communities can use for locally designed facilities.

First, though, she and her supporters will have to navigate an array of obstacles. Many Americans find the idea of composting human bodies repulsive. Then there are legal barriers. State laws vary: In the last few years, several have legalized water cremation. But in many other states, bodies must be buried, entombed, cremated or donated to science. Questions remain about how human compost should be used. Certain pathogens can survive composting, and livestock that have died from diseases are banned from composting.

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NASA telescope finds planet deep within our galaxy

WASHINGTON: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.

"We do not know if planets are more common in our galaxy's central bulge or the disk of the galaxy which is why these observations are so important," said Jennifer Yee of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The discovery demonstrates that Spitzer -- from its unique perch in space -- can be used to help solve the puzzle of how planets are distributed throughout our flat, spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy.

Spitzer circles our Sun and is currently about 207 million km away from Earth. When Spitzer watches a microlensing event simultaneously with a telescope on Earth, it sees the star brighten at a different time, due to the large distance between the two telescopes and their unique vantage points.

A microlensing event occurs when one star happens to pass in front of another and its gravity acts as a lens to magnify and brighten the more distant star's light.

If that foreground star happens to have a planet in orbit around it, the planet might cause a blip in the magnification. This technique is generally referred to as parallax.

"Spitzer is the first space telescope to make a microlens parallax measurement for a planet," Yee added.

In the case of the newfound planet, the duration of the microlensing event happened to be unusually long -- about 150 days. Knowing the distance allowed the scientists to also determine the mass of the planet, which is about half that of Jupiter.

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Killer robots worry United Nations

LONDON: Robots which can decide what to kill are all set to change the face of modern warfare but has left the United Nations seriously worried.

A major multilateral meeting on "lethal autonomous weapons systems" (LAWS) is taking place in Geneva at present to discuss the legality and moral issues surrounding killer robots.

Being attended by around 117 members of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), the meeting will discuss the military rationale for pursuing autonomy in specific functions of weapons systems and in what situations are distinctively human traits, such as fear, hate, sense of honour and dignity, compassion and love, desirable in combat. Experts are also deliberating on what situations do machines that lack emotions offer distinct advantages over human combatants?

Britain has already made it clear that it opposes international ban on "killer robots" while Pakistan has vehemently called on the UN to clamp down on killer bots as it would lead to "one-sided killing". Robots that can locate and kill enemies on their own are becoming a reality.

Several nations including the US, UK, South Korea, Russia and Israel are at an advanced stage of developing killer robots.

Pakistan said at the meeting on Tuesday that "In the absence of any human intervention, as is implied by the term 'autonomous', such weapons are by nature unethical - delegating power to machines, which inherently lack any compassion and intuition, to make life and death decisions. LAWS would not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, they lack morality and judgement. The use of LAWS will make war even more inhumane".

The Pakistani delegation said that states employing LAWS would lower the threshold of going to war, resulting in armed conflict no longer being a measure of last resort, but a recurrent "low-cost" affair instead.

Sri Lanka too opposed killer robots by saying they can escalate the "pace of war and undermine existing arms controls and regulations to aggravate dangers of asymmetric warfare The possibility of having access to LAWS by non-state actors and terrorists or their ability to alter the command of the targets could gravely endanger the security of the world".

The meeting is being chaired by a German diplomat Michael Biontino.

Britain said it does not support a ban on LAWS for the time being "as international humanitarian law already provides sufficient regulation for this area".

UK confirmed it isn't developing killer robots with weapons systems being used under constant armed forces supervision.

Earlier, Michael Moller, acting director-general of the UN told countries that bold action was needed "to take pre-emptive action and ensure that the ultimate decision to end life remains firmly under human control".

One of the examples of killer robots is SGR-A 1 - a military robot designed to police the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. The all-weather robot fitted with a 5.56 mm automatic machine gun is deadly as it tracks multiple moving targets via infrared sensors and can identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles away.

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'Dwarf planet' Ceres spawns giant mystery

VIENNA: First classified a planet, then an asteroid and then a "dwarf planet" with some traits of a moon -- the more scientists learn about Ceres, the weirder it becomes.

And new observations of the sphere of rock and ice circling our Sun between Mars and Jupiter have added to the mystery, researchers said Monday.

Astrophysicists have been looking to a $473-million (446-million-euro) mission to test theories that Ceres is a water-rich planetary "embryo" -- a relic from the birth of the Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago.

But an early batch of data from NASA's Dawn probe, unveiled at a conference of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), may have made the Ceres riddle even greater.

In orbit around Ceres since March 6 after a seven-and-a-half-year trek, Dawn peered at two bright spots on its surface deemed to be telltales of its chemical and physical ID.

But instead of explaining the spots, analysis found the two seemed to "behave distinctly differently," said Federico Tosi, who works on Dawn's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIR).

While Spot 1 is colder than its immediate surroundings, Spot 5 is not. The spots are two of a known dozen or so which on photographs taken by Dawn resemble lights shining on a dull grey surface.

Ceres travels at some 414 million kilometres (260 million miles) from the Sun, taking 4.61 Earth years to complete one orbit.

About 950 km (590 miles) wide, it is the biggest object in the asteroid belt -- large enough for gravity to have moulded its shape into a ball.

With VIR, the Dawn team have been able to put together images at different wavelengths of light, Tosi told journalists.

One picture, as seen by the human eye, shows Ceres as a "dark and brownish" ball with both white spots clearly visible.

But in thermal images, Spot 1 becomes a dark spot on a reddish ball, indicating it was cooler than the rest of the surface, said Tosi.

The "biggest surprise", he added, was that Spot 5 simply disappeared on the thermal image.

"For sure, we have bright spots on the surface of Ceres which, at least from a thermal perspective, seem to behave in different ways."

Theories about what the spots are range from ice to "hydrated minerals" -- water not in pure ice form but absorbed by minerals.

Ice would be difficult to explain, though, as Ceres inhabits a zone not quite distant enough from the Sun to allow "stable ice" on the surface, said Tosi of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome.

Just as intriguing is that Ceres is very unlike its near neighbour Vesta, an asteroid which Dawn studied in 2011 and 2012.

Vesta is bright and reflects much of the Sun's light, while Ceres is dark -- a contrast that says these bodies have experienced very different space odysseys.

The team also found fewer large craters on Ceres than observations of Vesta suggested they should.

"When we compared the size of the craters on Ceres with those on Vesta, we're missing a number of large craters, the number we would expect," said Christopher Russell, Dawn's principal investigator.

Pockmarks on the surface did, however, suggest Ceres had a "violent collisional history," said team member Martin Hoffman from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Goettingen, Germany.

Put together, the case for Ceres as a baby planet that never made it to adulthood remains, for now, in limbo.

More may become clear in the coming months when Dawn, which until now has been on Ceres' dark side, moves closer to probe its surface composition and temperature.

The first object in the main asteroid belt to be discovered, Ceres was observed in 1801 by a Sicilian astronomer, Father Giuseppe Piazzi.

Believing he had seen a planet, Piazzi named his after the Roman goddess of harvests and Sicily's patron saint.

After more, but smaller objects turned up, Ceres was downgraded to an asteroid only to get a status boost in 2006, becoming a "dwarf planet."

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Muscle-building supplements may up testicular cancer risk

WASHINGTON: Men who take muscle-building supplements are at a higher risk of developing testicular cancer, a new study has warned.

Researchers found that men who use muscle-building supplements, such as pills and powders with creatine or androstenedione, are more likely to develop testicular cancer than those who do not, especially if they start before age 25, take more than one supplement, or use the supplements for three or more years.

"The observed relationship was strong," said study senior author Tongzhang Zheng, who led the study at Yale University before joining the Brown University School of Public Health as a professor of epidemiology.

"If you used at earlier age, you had a higher risk. If you used them longer, you had a higher risk. If you used multiple types, you had a higher risk," Zheng said.

The study is the first analytical epidemiological study of the possible link between supplements and testicular cancer, the authors wrote in the British Journal of Cancer.

"Our study found that supplement use was related to a higher risk of developing testicular cancer. These results are important because there are few identified modifiable risk factors for testicular cancer," said Russ Hauser, professor of environmental health science at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

In the study, Zheng's research team conducted detailed interviews of nearly 900 men from Massachusetts and Connecticut - 356 of whom had been diagnosed with testicular germ cell cancer, and 513 who had not.

In the interviews, researchers asked the men not only about their supplement use but also about a wide variety of other possible factors such as smoking, drinking, exercise habits, family history of testicular cancer, and prior injury to their testes or groin.

After tallying their data and accounting for all those possible confounders, as well as age, race, and other demographics, the researchers found that the men who used supplements had a 1.65 odds ratio (65 per cent greater risk) of having developed testicular cancer compared to the men who did not use supplements.

The researchers defined "use" as consuming one or more supplements at least once a week for four consecutive weeks or more.

The odds ratios increased to 2.77 (a 177 per cent greater risk) among men who used more than one kind of supplement, and to 2.56 among men who used supplements three years or longer.

Men who started using supplements at age 25 or younger also had an elevated associated odds ratio of 2.21, the researchers calculated.

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Tail bone reveals dinosaur's sex

TORONTO: Differences in size and shape of tail bones can differentiate fossils of male dinosaurs from those of females -- at least for some small feathered species, researchers report.

The key differences between the sexes lie in bones near the base of the tail. For the study, the team examined a pair of fossils unearthed in Mongolia in the mid-1990s and first described in 2012.

Because the turkey-sized oviraptorosaurs ("egg-thief lizards") were found mere centimetres from each other in a 75-million-year-old rock layer, some scientists have nicknamed the pair "Romeo and Juliet".

"The joints in the creatures' vertebrae were fused, so we think that the dinosaurs had stopped growing -- meaning they were adults," informed Scott Persons, vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada in the journal called Scientific Reports.

But determining whether the pair were indeed male and female was tricky, because, as with most fossils, no trace of soft tissue remains: only the bones are preserved.

One fossil is a complete skeleton, whereas the other is missing the middle and end of its tail. But that was enough to reveal distinct differences in the length and shape of blade-like bones called "chevrons", which jut down from the vertebrae near the base of the tail and provide attachments for muscles and tendons.

A number of chevrons in one of the fossils were longer and had broader tips than those in the other specimen. The variations are a sign of sex differences. The bones might be shorter in females to ease the process of laying eggs.

"In males, a set of longer, broad-tipped "chevrons" could have offered a better anchor for a penis-retracting muscle that the creatures are presumed to have had," the authors noted.

But the most tantalising explanation might be that males needed larger "chevrons" to anchor the muscles that controlled their flexible, feather-tipped tails.

The researchers suspect that male oviraptorosaurs shook their tail feathers in intricate displays to woo potential mates, akin the the behaviour of modern-day peacocks.

Confirmation of the findings could allow researchers to use chevron comparisons to determine sex in other small dinosaurs that might have used feathers for display.

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5-year-old boy finds rare dinosaur fossil in US

WASHINGTON: A five-year-old boy has discovered the fossil of what scientists believe could be a 100-million-year-old dinosaur behind a shopping centre in Texas.

Wylie Brys found the fossil with his father Tim, who works at the Dallas Zoo, on a patch of land behind a shopping centre in Mansfield last Sepetember.

The rare fossil find was made last year when Brys Tim and his son were digging to find some remnants of marine life in the area, which was underwater during the Jurassic period.

"He (Wylie) walked up ahead of me and found a piece of bone. It was a pretty good size and I knew I had something interesting," Tim Brys said.

This week, scientists from Southern Methodist University helped extract the fossil and believe it could be that of a land-dwelling Nodosaur, a pony-sized creature. SMU paleontologist Michael Polcyn has found more fossilized bones at the site from the Nodosaur: a femur and what could be its toes.

Polcyn said it was quite rare to find a dinosaur in this area.

The fossils were placed in burlap and plaster to create a protective shell around the bones. They will be transported to SMU for further cleaning. There scientists will clean and try to assemble the bones and begin to study it, Dallas Morning News reported.

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Cannabis can cure cancer and even shrink brain tumours

LONDON: A new study has examined that Marijuana can kill cancer cells and even shrink brain tumours.

The study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded by the US government showed extracts from the plants can help enhance the impact of radiation therapy, the Mirror reported.

According to the reports, recent animal studies have shown that marijuana can kill certain cancer cells and reduce the size of others and evidence from one animal study suggests that extracts from whole-plant marijuana can shrink one of the most serious types of brain tumors.

Research in mice showed that these extracts, when used with radiation, increased the cancer-killing effects of the radiation.

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Signs of alien life will be found by 2025: NASA scientists

WASHINGTON: Signs of alien life will be detected by 2025, while "definitive evidence" of extra-terrestrial beings may be found within the next 20 to 30 years, top NASA scientists say.

"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years," NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said.

Stofan was speaking at a panel discussion that focused on NASA's efforts to search for habitable worlds and extra-terrestrial life.

"We know where to look. We know how to look. In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road," Stofan added.

John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, also predicted that signs of life will be found relatively soon both in our own solar system and beyond, 'Space.com' reported.

"I think we're one generation away in our solar system, whether it's on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star," Grunsfeld said.

According to Grunsfeld, recent discoveries suggest that the solar system and broader Milky Way galaxy teem with environments that could support life as we know it.

Oceans of liquid water, for example, slosh beneath the icy shells of the Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede, as well as that of the Saturn satellite Enceladus.

Researchers have found that oceans covered much of Mars in the ancient past, and seasonal dark streaks observed on the Red Planet's surface today may be caused by salty flowing water.

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Man's best friend can detect prostate cancer: Study

LONDON: A new study suggests that trained German shepherd dogs can sniff out the chemicals linked to prostate cancer from urine samples with more than 90 percent accuracy, a leading British daily reported on Saturday.

The findings of the study, carried out by a team from Italy's Humanitas Clinical and Research Centre in Milan and other institutes, were published in the Journal of Urology, The Guardian reported.

The team used two female dogs to sniff urine samples from 900 men, 360 with prostate cancer and 540 without. The canines were right in more than 90 percent of the cases, it added.

The reliability rate comes from several studies stretching back decades.

However, the study authors said that further work was needed to determine the dogs' skill in identifying prostate cancer.

Unanswered questions included what it was the dogs actually smelled and whether this was a single odour or those from a mixture of chemicals, the daily added.

A blood test known as the PSA test is currently used to detect prostate cancer. Physical examination and biopsy is also recommended by doctors. The PSA test is not routinely offered because it is not considered reliable enough for screening.

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Orange glasses for better sleep?

Most evenings, before watching TV or reading emails on his phone, Matt Nicoletti puts on a pair of orange-coloured glasses."My girlfriend thinks I look ridiculous in them," he said. But Nicoletti, 30, a hospitality consultant, says the glasses, which can block certain wavelengths of light emitted by electronic screens, make it easier to sleep.

Studies have shown that such light, especially from the blue part of the spectrum, inhibits the body's production of melatonin, a hormone that helps people fall asleep. Options are growing for block ing blue light, though experts caution that few have been tested for effectiveness and the best solution is to avoid brightly lit electronics at night.

A study of A study of 13 teenagers, published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, showed that when they donned orange-tinted glasses, known as blue blockers and shown to prevent melatonin suppression, in the evening for a week, they felt "significantly more sleepy" than when they wore clear glasses. The teenagers looked at their screens for a few hours on average before bed, and were monitored in the lab.

Older adults may be less affected by blue light, experts say, since the yellowing of the lens and other changes in the aging eye filter out increasing amounts of blue light. But blue light remains a problem for most people, and an earlier study of 20 adults aged 18 to 68 found that those who wore amber-tinted glasses for three hours before bed improved their sleep quality as against the control group that wore yellow-tinted lenses, which blocked only ultraviolet light.

Devices such as smartphones and tablets are often illuminated by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, that tend to emit more blue light than incandescent products. Televisions with LED backlighting are another source of blue light, though because they are typically viewed from much farther away than small screens like phones, they may have less of an effect, said Debra Skene, a professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of Surrey. "Anything that decreases blue light exposure at night will be helpful," said Christopher Colwell, neuroscientist at the University of California."Some gamers swear by those orange-tinted goggles." But orange glasses are not a panacea, Skene said. "It isn't just get rid of the blue and everything's fine," she said.

The intensity of light, in addition to colour, can affect sleep, and not all brands of orange-tinted glasses have undergone independent testing for their ability to aid sleep. Nicoletti says he also uses applications designed to alter the blue light impact of his devices depending on the time of day: an app called f.lux for his computer and Twilight for his mobile phone. Other ideas are proliferating. An Ohio company , for example, offers filters to block blue light by covering the screens of electronic devices like the iPhone or iPad. Other company products include "low blue" LED lights and orange eyewear.

During the daytime, experts say , exposure to blue light is good. Sunlight, which contains different wavelengths of light, is the best. "That's what our brain knows," said Kenneth P Wright Jr., director of the sleep & chronobiology lab at the University of Colorado. A 2013 study he led, showed just how different things can be without nighttime lights: After participants had camped in the mountains for a week, their bodies began to prepare for sleep about two hours earlier than normal.

Short of cutting out all evening electronics, experts say , it's advisable to use a small screen; dim the screen and keep it as far away from the eyes as possible; and reduce the amount of time spent reading the device. "If you can look at the iPhone for 10 minutes rather than three hours, that makes a lot of difference," Dr Skene said.

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Acidic oceans led to Earth’s worst mass extinction

LONDON: Ocean acidification triggered Earth's greatest extinction of all time, wiping out more than 90% of marine species and over two-thirds of land animals some 250 million years ago, a new study has found. Researchers found that oceans absorbed huge amounts of carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions which changed their chemical composition — making them more acidic — with catastrophic consequences for life on the planet.

The amount of carbon added to the atmosphere that triggered the mass extinction was probably greater than today's fossil fuel reserves, according to the study published in the journal Science. However, the carbon was released at a rate similar to modern emissions. This fast rate of release was a critical factor driving ocean acidification, the study found.

The researchers analysed rocks unearthed in the UAE — which were on the ocean floor at the time — to develop a climate model to work out what drove the extinction. "The Permian-Triassic Boundary extinction took place over a 60,000 year period. Acidification of the oceans lasted for around 10,000 years," researchers said. Ocean acidification was the driving force behind the deadliest phase of the extinction.

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Astronomer names asteroid after Malala

ISLAMABAD: The youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner and girls' education campaigner Malala Yousafzai now has an asteroid named after her, media reported.

Amy Mainzer, astronomer at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, named Asteroid 316201 after Malala, Dawn online reported on Friday.

He said, "It is a great honour to be able to name an asteroid after Malala. My postdoctoral fellow Dr Carrie Nugent brought to my attention the fact that although many asteroids have been named, very few have been named to honor the contributions of women (and particularly women of color)."

Mainzer discovered the asteroid in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter which gives her the right to name it. It orbits the Sun every 5.5 years.

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Mother's gene can nourish baby's gut bacteria

NEW YORK: A gene helps some mothers produce breast milk sugars that are not digested by the infant, but instead nourish specific bacteria that colonise the babies' guts soon after birth, says a new study.

The gene, which is not active in some mothers, produces a breast milk sugar called "secretors".

Mothers known as "non-secretors" have a non-functional fucosyltransferase 2 (FUT2) gene, which alters the composition of their breast milk sugars and changes how the microbial community, or microbiota, of their infants' guts develop, the study said.

"In no way is the nonsecretor mother's milk less healthy, and their babies are at no greater risk," said senior study author David Mills from the University of California, Davis.

"What this work does show us is that the mother's genotype matters, and that it influences the breast milk, which clearly drives the establishment of microbes in the intestines of their babies," Mills said.

The research may have applications in a clinical setting for protecting premature infants from a range of intestinal diseases including necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), a condition that is the second most common cause of death among premature infants in the US.

The research examined the differences in infant gut microbial populations arising from differences in human milk sugars.

The research was conducted using milk samples from 44 mothers.

The study appeared in the journal Microbiome.

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Life beyond solar system possible: New study

BERLIN: A team of scientists has found, for the first time, complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star, reinforcing the theory of life beyond the solar system, Efe news agency reported.

In an article published on Thursday in the journal Nature, the team said it detected "large amounts of methyl cyanide (CH3CN)" in "the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star MWC 480".

The discovery is key, according to the experts participating in the research project, since that molecule contains links between carbon and nitrogen atoms.

These chemical links "are essential" to the formation of amino acids which, in turn, are basic components of proteins and therefore "are essential for building life".

Both the methyl cyanide molecule and its simpler cousin, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), were found "in the cold outer reaches of the star's newly formed disc around MWC 480, a star 10 times bigger than the Sun and about 455 light years from Earth in the Tauro star-spawning formation".

The discovery, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, "reaffirms that the conditions that spawned the Earth and Sun are not unique in the universe", the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a statement.

"We now have even better evidence that this same chemistry exists elsewhere in the universe, in regions that could form solar systems not unlike our own," Karin Oberg, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lead author of the new paper, said.

Oberg noted that the molecules found in MWC 480 are also found in similar concentrations in the Solar System's comets, which is intriguing since these objects "preserve, since the time when planets were forming, the original information of the early Solar System's chemistry".

If the chemical environment that spawned Earth and other planets made possible the appearance of life and these conditions are present in other parts of the universe, it is logical to think that there may be life beyond the Solar System, the study said.

"Once more," Oberg said, "we have learned that we're not special. From a life in the universe point of view, this is great news."

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Pluck 200 hair to grow 1,200 new ones!

NEW YORK: In a good news for men facing incessant hair loss, researchers have discovered that by plucking 200 hair strands in a specific pattern and density, they can induce up to 1,200 replacement hairs to grow!

Scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated this on a mouse. "It is a good example of how basic research can lead to a work with potential translational value," said lead researcher Cheng-Ming Chuong.

"The work leads to potential new targets for treating alopecia, a form of hair loss," he added.

The study began a couple of years ago on the premise that hair follicle injury affects its adjacent environment, and that this environment in turn can influence hair regeneration.

Based on this knowledge, the researchers reasoned that they might be able to use the environment to activate more follicles.

To test this concept, they plucked 200 hair follicles, one by one, in different configurations on the back of a mouse.

When plucking the hair in a low-density pattern from an area exceeding 6 mm in diameter, no hair regenerated.

However, higher-density plucking from circular areas with diameters between 3-5 mm triggered the regeneration of between 450 and 1,300 hair strands, including ones outside of the plucked region.

The team showed that this regenerative process relies on the principle of "quorum sensing", which defines how a system responds to stimuli that affect some, but not all members.

In this case, quorum sensing underlies how the hair follicle system responds to the plucking of some, but not all hair.

Through molecular analyses, the team showed that these plucked follicles signal distress by releasing inflammatory proteins, which recruit immune cells to rush to the site of the injury.

These immune cells then secrete signalling molecules such as tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-I), which, at a certain concentration, communicate to both plucked and un-plucked follicles that it's time to grow hair.

The results were published in the journal Cell.

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Sun missed star-boom in Milky Way by 5 billion years

NEW DELHI: Most of the Milky Way's stars were formed in a star-birthing frenzy that peaked 10 billion years ago, but our Sun was late for the party, not forming until roughly 5 billion years ago, a new study has found. The study involved a multi-observatory galaxy census, one of the most comprehensive yet.

Missing the party, however, may not have been so bad for the Sun. Its late appearance may actually have fostered the growth of our solar system's planets. Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were more abundant later in the star-forming boom as more massive stars ended their lives early and enriched the galaxy with material that served as the building blocks of planets and even life on Earth.

The new census provides the most complete picture yet of how galaxies like the Milky Way grew over the past 10 billion years into today's majestic spiral galaxies. The multi-wavelength study spans ultraviolet to far-infrared light, combining observations from Nasa's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, and ground-based telescopes, including the Magellan Baada Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

Astronomers compiled the story our Milky Way's formative years from studying galaxies similar in mass, found in these deep surveys of the universe. The farther into the universe astronomers look, the further back in time they are seeing, because starlight from long ago is just arriving at Earth now. From those surveys, stretching back in time more than 10 billion years, researchers assembled an album of images containing nearly 2,000 snapshots of Milky Way-like galaxies.

"This study allows us to see what the Milky Way may have looked like in the past," said Casey Papovich of Texas A&M University in College Station, lead author on the paper that describes the study's results. "It shows that these galaxies underwent a big change in the mass of its stars over the past 10 billion years, bulking up by a factor of 10, which confirms theories about their growth. And most of that stellar-mass growth happened within the first 5 billion years of their birth."

The team's results will appear in the April 9 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The new analysis reinforces earlier research that showed Milky Way-like galaxies began as small clumps of stars. The diminutive galaxies built themselves up by swallowing large amounts of gas that ignited a firestorm of star birth. The study reveals a strong correlation between the galaxies' star formation and their growth in stellar mass. Observations revealed that as the star-making factories slowed down, the galaxies' growth decreased as well. "I think the evidence suggests that we can account for the majority of the buildup of a galaxy like our Milky Way through its star formation," Papovich said. "When we calculate the star-formation rate of a Milky Way galaxy and add up all the stars it would have produced, it is pretty consistent with the mass growth we expected. To me, that means we're able to understand the growth of the 'average' galaxy with the mass of a Milky Way galaxy."

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The desire to rape is in our genes, says study on sex offences

LONDON: The desire to commit rape could actually be genetic.

The largest study on sex offences that looked at data over 37 years (1973 and 2009) involving 21,566 men has confirmed that brothers and fathers of men convicted of sexual offences are up to five times more likely to commit a rape or assault than the general public.

The study has been jointly done by researchers from Oxford University and the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) involving men convicted of sexual offences.

READ ALSO: One rape every 30 minutes in India

Speaking to TOI, lead author Professor Seena Fazel - an expert on forensic psychology at Oxford University - said around 40% of the risk of committing a sex crime is genetic with the remaining 60% due to personal and environmental factors.

"I am aware of the recent of rapes in India and I would love to carry out a similar study there over the relation between mental health and crime. Genetic factors have been found to be behind sexual crimes. It leads to increased impulses or a high sex drive among men in the same family. What needs to be seen is whether a similar pattern emerges in other countries like India," Professor Fazel told TOI.

Fazel added "Most times, those needing professional help from psychiatrists are women whose male relatives have been convicted of sexual crimes. Our study now tells these experts that maybe they need to take a look at the male relatives of such offenders and analyze if they are at increased risk of perpetrating a similar crime".

According to the study, those with a brother who is convicted of a sexual offence are five times higher of being convicted of a sexual offence compared to a man whose brother had not been convicted of this type of crime.

Meanwhile, being a father of a man convicted of a sexual offence led to almost four times the risk of being convicted of a sexual offence.

Evidence on the difference in risk between maternal and paternal half-brothers (presumably reared in separate family environments) supports the idea that genetics makes a substantial contribution to increased risk.

Fazel however pointed to the fact that only around 2.5% of brothers or fathers of convicted sex offenders are themselves convicted of sexual offences. This compares to convicted sex offenders making up about 0.5% of men in the general population.

"Experts offering families of sex offenders help should now also look at how to identify other male members of the same family with similar heightened impulses and teach them skills to cope with it," Fazel said.

Niklas Langstrom, professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institute however warned that the world should not start viewing all male family members of sex offenders as a potential risk.

"We are definitely not saying that we have 'found a gene for sexual offending'. What we have found is high quality evidence from a large population study that genetic factors have a substantial influence on an increased risk of being convicted of sexual offences," said professor Fazel.

According to the study, sexual aggression has become a substantial social threat with one-quarter of women and one-tenth of men report being sexually victimized in their lifetime.

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First objects 3D printed in space come to Earth

WASHINGTON: The first objects manufactured in space with a 3D printer have been delivered to Earth and will now undergo a series of tests, Nasa has said.

Engineers at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, unboxed the special cargo from the International Space Station (ISS) on April 6.

The items were sent to Earth in February on the SpaceX Dragon. The scientists will now compare the ground controls to the flight parts.

Before the 3D printer was launched to the space station, it made an identical set of parts.

Engineers will put both the space samples and ground control samples under a microscope and through a series of tests.

Project engineers will perform durability, strength and structural tests on both sets of printed items and even put them under an electron microscope to scan for differences in the objects.

The items in space were manufactured as part of the 3D Printing in Zero-G Technology Demonstration on the space station to show that additive manufacturing can make a variety of parts and tools in space.

These early in-space 3D printing demonstrations are the first steps toward realising an additive manufacturing, print-on-demand "machine shop" for long-duration missions and sustaining human exploration of other planets.

In-space manufacturing technologies like 3D printing will help Nasa explore Mars, asteroids, and other locations.

Nasa astronaut Barry Wilmore installed the printer in the station's Microgravity Science Glovebox in November 2014. Before the end of the year, the crew manufactured 21 items including a ratchet wrench, the first tool built in space.

To make the items, the printer heated a relatively low-temperature plastic filament to build parts, layer on top of layer, in designs supplied to the machine.

The printer remains on aboard the ISS for continued use later this year.

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HIV breakthrough: Antibody therapy manages to reduce 300-fold HIV’s viral load

LONDON: For the first time ever, an antibody - a magic bullet found from within the human body has managed to reduce 300-fold HIV's viral load - the amount of HIV circulating in the blood of those infected.

Antibody is an infection-fighting protein produced by our immune system when it detects harmful substances.

In what is a major breakthrough and a welcome news amidst a string of failed attempts to combat the virus that causes AIDS, scientists have reported the first successful human study using antibody therapy which has been specifically designed to block the key viral protein receptor needed to infect human blood cells.

HIV antibodies previously tested in humans had shown disappointing results.

But 3BNC117 belongs to a new generation of broadly neutralizing antibodies that potently fight a wide range of HIV strains.

"What's special about these antibodies is that they have activity against over 80% of HIV strains and they are extremely potent," says Marina Caskey from the Rockefeller University.

Scientists say 3BNC117 shows activity against 195 out of 237 HIV strains.

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) recently discovered 17 antibodies which blocked HIV infection of cells. These HIV neutralizing antibodies are produced naturally by a minority infected with HIV, but who show no symptoms. The new antibodies that target the CD4 binding site on HIV — the site where the virus engages the T cells to initiate its infection — was isolated from blood serum samples across the world.

There is a global hunt for 'broadly neutralizing antibody' (bNab) from the blood of HIV patients. These antibodies are capable of stopping the HIV virus from entering blood cells and replicating, thereby arresting an HIV-infected person's progression to AIDS. Scientists are isolating and then cloning these antibodies to harness them as therapeutic agents.

In the latest study, uninfected and HIV-infected individuals were intravenously given a single dose of the antibody and monitored for 56 days. At the highest dosage levels, 30 milligrams per kilogram of weight, all eight infected individuals treated showed up to 300-fold decreases in the amount of virus measured in their blood, with most reaching their lowest viral load one week after treatment.

Finding a vaccine against HIV has been a daunting challenge.

Scientists say these antibodies would ultimately reveal the Achilles heel of HIV and help create the elusive vaccine. There are around 30 million people living with HIV.

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Signs of alien life will be found by 2025: Nasa scientists

WASHINGTON: Signs of alien life will be detected by 2025, while "definitive evidence" of extra-terrestrial beings may be found within the next 20 to 30 years, top Nasa scientists say.

"I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years," Nasa chief scientist Ellen Stofan said.

READ ALSO: Are aliens sending those radio signals?

Stofan was speaking at a panel discussion that focused on Nasa's efforts to search for habitable worlds and extra-terrestrial life.

"We know where to look. We know how to look. In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road," Stofan added.

John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate, also predicted that signs of life will be found relatively soon both in our own solar system and beyond, 'Space.com' reported.

"I think we're one generation away in our solar system, whether it's on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation (away) on a planet around a nearby star," Grunsfeld said.

According to Grunsfeld, recent discoveries suggest that the solar system and broader Milky Way galaxy teem with environments that could support life as we know it.

Oceans of liquid water, for example, slosh beneath the icy shells of the Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede, as well as that of the Saturn satellite Enceladus.

Researchers have found that oceans covered much of Mars in the ancient past, and seasonal dark streaks observed on the Red Planet's surface today may be caused by salty flowing water.

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Seasonal changes on Sun can better predict solar storms

WASHINGTON: Not just planet Earth but the Sun too experiences seasonal changes, finds a significant research. By better understanding how these seasonal instabilities are formed one can greatly improve forecasts of space weather events.

According to a team of researchers led by the Colorado-based National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Sun undergoes a type of seasonal variability with its activity waxing and waning over the course of nearly two years.

This behaviour affects the peaks and valleys in the approximately 11-year solar cycle, sometimes amplifying and sometimes weakening the solar storms that can buffet the Earth's atmosphere.

The quasi-annual variations appear to be driven by changes in the bands of strong magnetic fields in each solar hemisphere.

These bands also help shape the approximately 11-year solar cycle that is part of a longer cycle that lasts about 22 years.

"What we are looking at here is a massive driver of solar storms," said Scott McIntosh, lead author and director of the NCAR's high altitude observatory.

The overlapping bands are fueled by the rotation of the Sun's deep interior, according to observations by the research team.

As the bands move within the Sun's northern and southern hemispheres, activity rises to a peak over a period of about 11 months and then begins to wane.

"The quasi-annual variations can be likened to regions on Earth that have two seasons, such as a rainy season and a dry season," McIntosh added.

McIntosh and his team detected the twisted, ring-shaped bands by drawing on a host of NASA satellites and ground-based observatories that gather information on the structure of the Sun and the nature of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Researchers can turn to advanced computer simulations and more detailed observations to learn more about the profound influence of the bands on solar activity.

The findings can help lead to better predictions of massive geomagnetic storms in Earth's outer atmosphere that sometimes disrupt satellite operations, communications, power grids, and other technologies, concluded the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Mummies reveal how TB ravaged 18th century Europe

LONDON: Samples from mummies in a 200-year-old crypt in Hungary have revealed that infections by multiple strains of tuberculosis (TB) gripped 18th century Europe when the disease was at its peak.

Analysis of the samples taken from the naturally mummified bodies found in the Dominican church of VAic in Hungary yielded 14 tuberculosis genomes, suggesting that mixed infections were common at that point of time.

"Microbiological analyses of samples from contemporary TB patients usually report a single strain of tuberculosis per patient," said lead author Mark Pallen, professor at the Warwick Medical School in Britain.

"By contrast, five of the eight bodies in our study yielded more than one type of tuberculosis - remarkably from one individual we obtained evidence of three distinct strains," he noted.

Pallen said the discovery was significant for current and future infection control and diagnosis.

The researchers also used the 18th century sequences to date the origin of the lineage of TB strains commonly found in Europe and the US to the late Roman period, suggesting that the most recent common ancestor of all TB strains occurred as recently as 6,000 years ago.

The team used a technique called "metagenomics" to identify TB DNA in the historical specimens.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Scientists regenerate cardiac muscles through hormone stimulation

SYDNEY: A group of scientists has reactivated cell growth in the cardiac muscles of a mouse through hormone stimulation, opening the possibility of new treatments following cardiac arrest, Efe news agency reported citing a study published on Tuesday.

"What the research team has been able to do is boost heart muscle cell numbers by as much as 45 percent after a heart attack," said Richard Harvey of the University of New South Wales and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Australia.

Harvey claims the team's success is an important step towards repairing damaged hearts, since heart cells do not self-regenerate, unlike human blood cells, skin and hair.

"Cell division in the heart virtually comes to a standstill shortly after birth, which means the heart can't fully regenerate if it is damaged later in life," Harvey said in a statement released by the University of New South Wales.

Other studies previously conducted in this field showed heart cells being regenerated but only at trivial levels, he added.

The scientists focused on the heart's signalling system and the intervention of the neuregulin hormone.

The pathway of this hormone was modified to "turbo-charging mode" so that cardiac muscle cells would continue to divide.

Stimulation of the neuregulin hormone's pathway after a cardiac arrest contributed to the replacement of affected heart muscles, the statement said.

"This big achievement will focus the attention of the field on heart muscle cell replacement as a therapeutic option for ischemic heart disease," said the lead researcher.

The study was conducted by the Weizmann Institute of Science in collaboration with the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and published in Nature Cell Biology magazine.

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Images with text on cigarette packs more effective in discouraging smoking: Study

NEW DELHI: While Indian law makers are still debating whether putting pictures on cigarette packets is necessary or not and what size should such pictures be, a new study by a Washington State University, Vancouver, psychologist has found that young adults are more likely to understand the dangers of smoking when warnings are presented in images as well as text.

While a growing body of evidence supports the effectiveness of graphic warnings in motivating smokers to quit, less research has been done to show how much individuals actually learn from these labels. Usual graphic warnings show people dying in hospital beds, facial scars, rotting teeth and diseased body parts.

"Our outcomes suggest that focusing on enhancing understanding and knowledge from smoking warning labels that convey true consequences of smoking may not only influence motivation directly--both in terms of quitting and prevention of smoking--but may actually drive the emotional experience of the label, which we know is an important predictor of motivation," said Renee Magnan an assistant professor of psychology, whose study is published online in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

In the study, smoking and non-smoking people between the ages of 18 and 25 took an online survey asking how much they learned about the dangers of smoking from cigarette warning labels. The labels used in the study emphasized negative consequences of smoking associated with lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, impotence, eye disease, neck, throat and mouth cancers, and vascular disease.

After responding to measures of smoking behavior and background information, participants rated each label on perceived understandability, perceived knowledge gained, the extent to which the label evoked worry, and perceived discouragement from smoking.

Overwhelmingly, participants in both groups reported the combination of images and text as providing significantly better personal understanding and more new knowledge, aroused more worry about the consequences of smoking, and discouraged smoking more than the corresponding text-only label.

Only two of the image-and-text labels evoked results similar to text-only labels: a limp cigarette in hand, meant to convey impotence, and an image of an IV needle in skin, implying prolonged illness.

The results suggest that the more understandable and informative the labels, the more likely people will worry about the consequences of smoking and, ultimately, be discouraged from doing it.

"Although this is a preliminary investigation, from a policy perspective, these outcomes suggest that focusing on deriving greater understanding and knowledge from such labels may have more impact in terms of both motivational and emotional responses," Magnan said. "Importantly, however, these labels are only a small piece of what should be a larger campaign to educate the public on the dangers of smoking."

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Zapping the brain with electricity may treat dementia

SINGAPORE: Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have found a new way to treat dementia by sending electrical impulses to specific areas of the brain to enhance the growth of new brain cells.

The therapeutic procedure, known as deep brain stimulation, is already used in some parts of the world to treat various neurological conditions such as tremors or Dystonia, which is characterised by involuntary muscle contractions and spasms, researchers said.

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University have discovered that deep brain stimulation could also be used to enhance the growth of brain cells which mitigates the harmful effects of dementia-related conditions and improves short and long-term memory.

Their research has shown that new brain cells, or neurons, can be formed by stimulating the front part of the brain which is involved in memory retention using minute amounts of electricity.

The increase in brain cells reduces anxiety and depression, and promotes improved learning, and boosts overall memory formation and retention.

The research findings open new opportunities for developing novel treatment solutions for patients suffering from memory loss due to dementia-related conditions such as Alzheimer's and even Parkinson's disease.

"The findings from the research clearly show the potential of enhancing the growth of brain cells using deep brain stimulation," said assistant professor Ajai Vyas from NTU's School of Biological Sciences.

"Around 60 per cent of patients do not respond to regular anti-depressant treatments and our research opens new doors for more effective treatment options," Vyas said.

The research was conducted using middle-aged rats, where electrodes which send out minute micro-electrical impulses were implanted in the brains.

The rats underwent a few memory tests before and after stimulation, and displayed positive results in memory retention, even after 24 hours.

"Extensive studies have shown that rats' brains and memory systems are very similar to humans," said Vyas.

"The electrodes are harmless to the rats, as they go on to live normally and fulfil their regular (adult) lifespan of around 22 months," he said.

The study was published in the journal eLife.

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Most people on anti-depressants don't need them

LONDON: More than two-thirds of people taking anti-depressant drugs may not actually suffer from depression, claims a new study.

The US-based study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that 69 per cent of people taking anti-depressants did not meet the criteria for major depressive disorder, also known as clinical depression.

"Many individuals prescribed anti-depressants may not have met the criteria for mental disorders," the researchers were quoted as saying.

"Our data indicates that anti-depressants are commonly used in the absence of clear evidence-based indications," the researchers noted.

Anti-depressants are also prescribed for other psychiatric disorders. But the researchers found 38 per cent of those taking the drugs did not meet the criteria for obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, social phobia or generalised anxiety disorder either, Daily Mail reported.

The researchers used data from the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Study Wave 1 (1981) through Wave 4 (2004-2005) and assessed lifetime prevalence of common mood and anxiety disorders among participants who reported current anti-depressant use.

They also examined factors associated with current anti-depressant use.

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Brain protein can help curb binge drinking

WASHINGTON: A new study has proposed that a naturally-occurring protein in the brain can act to suppress binge alcohol drinking.

The researchers at University of North Carolina School used a series of genetic and pharmacological approaches where they identified how a compound in the brain, Neuropeptide Y (NPY), could suppress this dangerous behavior.

Thomas L Kash, PhD, assistant professor in the departments of pharmacology and psychology and a member of UNC's Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, asserted that they found that NPY acted in a part of the brain known as the extended amygdala (or bed nucleus of the stria terminalis) that they know is linked to both stress and reward. This anti-drinking effect was due to increasing inhibition (the brakes) on a specific population of cells that produce a 'pro-drinking' molecule called corticotropin releasing factor (CRF).

Study co-author Todd E Thiele, PhD, professor of psychology at UNC and a member of the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies said that identification of where in the brain and how NPY blunts binge drinking, and the observation that the NPY system was compromised during early binge drinking prior to the transition to dependence, were novel and important observations.

Thiele added that what particularly exciting was that these findings suggested that restoring NPY may not only be useful for treating alcohol use disorders, but may also protect some individuals from becoming alcohol dependent.

The study is published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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Depression, obesity affect corporate employees most: Study

BENGALURU: Demanding schedules, high stress levels and performance linked perquisites in private sectors, nearly 42.5% of employees in private sectors are afflicted from depression or general anxiety disorder, a study by industry body Assocham has claimed.

The study, titled "Preventive Healthcare: Impact on Corporate Sector" claims that depression is the first hard hit disease that was observed among the respondents, with 42.5 per cent of the corporate employees suffering from this lifestyle disease.

"The rate of emotional problems such as anxiety and depression has increased by 45-50% among corporate employees in the last eight years," it said.

The report is based on the views of 1,250 corporate employees from 150 companies across 18 broad sectors like media, telecom and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) etc.

The report included major cities like Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabd, Pune, Chandigarh, Dehradun et al.

"A little over 200 employees were selected from each city on an average. Delhi ranks first among cities afflicted from depression or general anxiety disorder followed by Bangalore (2nd), Mumbai (3rd), Ahemdabad (4th) Chandigarh (5th), Hyderbad (6th ) and Pune (7th ).

And, obesity is the second hard hit disease that was observed among the respondents, with 23% of the sample corporate employees suffering from it. High blood pressure (B.P) and diabetes are the third and fourth largest disease with a share of 9 per cent and 8 per cent respectively as suffered among the corporate employees.

Spondylosis (5.5 per cent), heart disease (4 per cent), cervical (3.0 per cent), asthma (2.5 per cent), slip disk (1 per cent) and arthritis (1.5 per cent) are the diseases that are mostly suffered by corporate employees. Nearly 38.5% of corporate employees sleep less than 6 hours a day due to high stressed levels that arise out of tough targets set for themselves by employers and cause diseases like depression, hypertension, diabetes etc.,

In terms of the physical fitness, it was found that around 57% of the employees in the private organization said they 'do not exercise at all', 23% do physical workout devoting less than 1 hour/week, 12% of the employees exercise for 1-3 hours/week, 8% of employees exercise for 3-6 hours/week and merely 7% stay fit by exercising for more than 6 hours/week.

Around 55 per cent of the survey respondents' fall under the age bracket of 20-29 years, followed by 30-39 years (26 per cent), 40-49 years (16 per cent), 50-59 years (2 per cent) and 60-69 years (approximately 1 per cent).

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Reach Mars in 39 days with plasma rocket

WASHINGTON: A US-based rocket propulsion company is developing an engine that could take humans to the Red Planet in just 39 days and it has got funding from Nasa to accomplish the task.

A spacecraft normally takes several months to reach Mars. According to Franklin Chang-Diaz, CEO of the Ad Astra Rocket Company from Texas, new rocket engine technology has the potential to be revolutionary.

"This is like no other rocket that you may have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket. The Vasimr rocket is not used for launching things. It is used for things already there, which we call 'in space propulsion'," said Chang-Diaz, also a former astronaut, in a promotional video.

The Vasimr engine works by heating plasma, an electrically charged gas, to extreme temperatures using radio waves. Strong magnetic fields then funnel this plasma out of the back of the engine.

This, in turn, creates thrust, helping to propel the engine at extreme speeds, RT.com reported.

Nasa liked what it saw this technology and offered a grant to the Ad Astra Rocket Company as part of its 12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextStep) programme.

"The partnership [with Nasa] will advance the Vasimr engine to a technology readiness level (TRL) greater than 5 - a step closer to space flight," the company announced in a statement.

Over a three-year period, Nasa will give the Texas-based company in the region of $10 million to fully develop a new version of the Vasimr engine.

According to the company, they could save thousands of gallons of rocket fuel by using the Vasimr engine, which would save around $20 million in one year.

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Why do pilots hide mental disorders?

An intense focus on the role of the co-pilot's mental illness in the Germanwings jetliner crash has raised concerns that it risks unfairly stigmatizing millions of people with mental disorders and making it less likely they will seek treatment. That, in turn, could make it even harder to identify people working in high-risk professions who pose a threat to public safety.

The co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, would not be the first aviator to hide the fact that he had psychiatric problems or that he'd received mental health treatment.

The reluctance to come forward means that airlines, health professionals and regulators must strike a delicate balance, trying to decrease stigma to encourage pilots to be honest about their problems, while drawing a firm line beyond which pilots are grounded to protect the public's safety.

Such issues surrounding mental health are familiar territory in the US, where a series of mass shootings, riveted the public's attention on responsibilities of therapists treating the mentally ill.

After the Newtown massacre in 2012, several states changed their laws, broadening the circumstances under which mental health professionals can report a potentially violent patient without fear of legal repercussions. Under the New York law, they are required to report to local health officials those who are "likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to themselves or others."

But those laws remain controversial. And mental health experts say the tendency to link mass violence and mental disorders has a negative effect, discouraging people from seeking treatment. "These kind of stories reinforce the anxiety, doubts, concerns people have that 'I have to keep my symptoms concealed at all costs,' and that doesn't benefit anyone," said Ron Honberg, director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

There is little question that in the field of aviation, as in many other professions, acknowledging having a mental illness is a dicey business. "The stigma is enormous," said Dr William Hurt Sledge, a professor of psychiatry at Yale. "And of course, none of them wants that to be known, nor do they want to confess it or believe that they have it."

Pilots' fears about the consequences of being honest about their mental health was one reason the Federal Aviation Administration in 2010 loosened its policy, allowing them to take certain antidepressants and still fly if the illness was mild. Before the policy changed, some pilots received mental health treatment and antidepressants from private doctors but concealed that information from airlines and regulators, said doctors.

If the rate of antidepressant use in the general population is any indication, some pilots may still be concealing their use of the medications: Government surveys have found that 1 in 10 American adults takes an antidepressant, but only a small number of pilots are currently taking the drugs with the agency's approval, according to the Air Line Pilots Association. Any pilot who takes such medications and continues to fly must follow a rigorous treatment plan that includes regular evaluations and often therapy.

Even if laws were changed, screening procedures tightened and stigma lessened, people who are bent on suicide or mass murder might still go undetected.

Depression is among the most common of mental disorders. But, Dr Paul Summergrad, president of the American Psychiatric Association said the vast majority of them "neither commit suicide or pose a risk to others." And no screening process or psychological test can infallibly detect those who will. "It's usually extremely difficult to predict suicide," said David Clark, a professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "There are those patients who are very unguarded and explicit about not only their suicidal thoughts but how compelling they are. And for every one of those are those who are very concealing about what's going through their minds."

Much remains unknown about Lubitz's condition and what his motivation might have been. Prosecutors have said that he had a mental health diagnosis and had talked to a psychotherapist about suicide before applying for a pilot's license. But the precise diagnosis has not been made public. And although the authorities said antidepressants were found in his apartment in Germany, the drugs can be prescribed for a variety of illnesses other than depression. "The little bit of information leaking out right now makes people slap their heads and say, 'Someone should have known,'" Dr Clark said. "But based on the information we have so far, it isn't clear that it was a slam dunk to put the pieces of the puzzle together."

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Cern restarts ‘Big Bang’ collider after 2-year refit

ZURICH/GENEVA: Scientists at Europe's particle physics research centre Cern on Sunday restarted their "Big Bang" Large Hadron Collider (LHC), embarking on a new bid to resolve some mysteries of the universe and look for "dark matter".

The machine had been shut for two years for a refit. Hopes for the second run lie in breaking out of what is known as the "Standard Model" of how the universe works at the level of elementary particles, and into "New Physics".

That includes searching for the dark matter that makes up about 96 per cent of the stuff of the universe but can only be detected by its influence on visible matter like galaxies and planets.

READ ALSO: God particle — the big 5 questions

Scientists are preparing for particle-smashing collisions expected to start in June, though any new discoveries made are unlikely to emerge until mid-2016.

In this March 30, 2010 file picture the globe of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) is illuminated outside Geneva, Switzerland. (AP photo)

The overhaul included new magnets, much higher energy beams and voltages and a complete check of all wiring around the underground 27km (17-mile) LHC tunnel and its four major detectors and multiple magnets.

"It's fantastic to see it going so well after two years and such a major overhaul," Cern director general Rolf Heuer said on the research organization's live blog for the restart.

READ ALSO: Cern scientists create antihydrogen atoms

During the last run, from 2010 to 2013, physicists tracked down the legendary Higgs boson particle after years of searching in the recorded debris from particle collisions at Cern and in other smaller colliders.

Scientists working on computer models at Cern.

In two months, Cern will start smashing particles into each other in the LHC with nearly twice the energy compared with that first run from 2010-2013, and as before at close to the speed of light.

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Stem cell implant shows promise for Parkinson's treatment

NEW YORK: An implant of stem cells treated with an anti-cancer drug has been found to be effective against Parkinson's symptoms in mice.

The findings published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience could be an important step toward using the implantation of stem cell-generated neurons as a treatment for Parkinson's disease in humans.

Using a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved anti-cancer drug, the researchers were able to grow dopamine-producing neurons derived from embryonic stem cells that remained healthy and functional for as long as 15 months after implantation into mice, restoring motor function without forming tumours.

"This simple strategy of shortly exposing pluripotent stem cells to an anti-cancer drug turned the transplant safer, by eliminating the risk of tumour formation", said the leader of the study Stevens Rehen, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil.

Parkinson's, which affects as many as 10 million people in the world, is caused by a depletion of dopamine-producing neurons in the brain.

Several studies have indicated that the transplantation of embryonic stem cells improves motor functions in animal models. However, until now, the procedure was shown to be unsafe because of the risk of tumours upon transplantation.

To address this issue, the researchers for the first time pre-treated undifferentiated mouse embryonic stem cells with mitomycin C, a drug already prescribed to treat cancer.

The substance blocks the DNA replication and prevents the cells from multiplying out of control.

The researchers used mice modelled for Parkinson's. Unlike the control group, animals receiving the treated stem cells showed improvement in Parkinson's symptoms and survived until the end of the observation period of 12 weeks post-transplant with no tumours detected.

Four of these mice were monitored for as long as 15 months with no signs of pathology.

Furthermore, the scientists have also shown that treating the stem cells with mitomycin C induced a four-fold increase in the release of dopamine after in vitro differentiation.

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Unusually short total lunar eclipse dazzles skywatchers

LOS ANGELES: The total eclipse of Moon lasted only a short time, but it still dazzled.

Early risers in the western US and Canada should have been able to catch a glimpse before dawn on Saturday. The moment when Moon was completely obscured by Earth's shadow lasted only a few minutes, making it the shortest lunar eclipse of the century.

Some skygazers complained that clouds prevented them from seeing any of the lunar show.

READ ALSO: Lunar eclipse on April 4 to be visible all over India

A partial lunar eclipse is seen behind fully bloomed cherry blossoms in Utsunomiya in Tochigi prefecture, 100km north of Tokyo, on April 4, 2015. (AFP photo)

People in eastern Australia, New Zealand and Japan viewed the eclipse at night.

The total eclipse was unusually brief because the moon passed through the upper part of Earth's shadow. Longer eclipses occur when the moon passes through the middle of the shadow.

The next total lunar eclipse occurs in September.

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Vaccine boosts immune response in cancer patients

WASHINGTON: A new vaccine improves the immune system's response to cancer by using altered forms of proteins from the patient, according to a study published by the journal Science.

"Vaccines against cancer tend to be generalised," said the study's lead author, Beatriz CarreA±o.

"This is one of the first personalised vaccines," the Venezuelan researcher said. "General vaccines employ normal, non-altered proteins and for that reason the immune response is not very strong."

"In our vaccine we have used altered proteins from the patient with a tumour and proved that they caused a stronger reaction in T cells, increasing in number and frequency their ability to recognise isolated substances in tumours," she said.

T-cells detect abnormal substances on the surface of other cells and kill them by producing soluble substances that act on tumours and virus-infected cells.

"The use of altered proteins has proved to have an increased capacity to activate the immune system," CarreA±o said, based on clinical trials involving three patients.

The researchers say this type of vaccine would be more effective for patients with types of cancer with a high immunological and mutational component, such as melanoma and cancer of the lung, bladder and colon.

"The higher the number of mutations, the more altered proteins we find that can be used to trigger the immune system," said CarreA±o, a researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

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Brain can 'see' beyond five senses, finds study

NEW DELHI: Yet another proof of the incredible power and adaptability of the brain was provided by a recent study in which Japanese researchers connected the brains of blind rats to a geomagnetic compass - and found that the rats spontaneously learnt to use new information about their location and to navigate through a maze nearly as well as normally sighted rats. The findings are reported in the journal Current Biology on April 2.

Researchers say the findings suggest that a similar kind of neuroprosthesis might also help blind people walk freely through the world. "The most remarkable point of this paper is to show the potential, or the latent ability, of the brain," says Yuji Ikegaya of the University of Tokyo. "That is, we demonstrated that the mammalian brain is flexible even in adulthood--enough to adaptively incorporate a novel, never-experienced, non-inherent modality into the pre-existing information sources."

In other words, he says, the brains of the animals they studied were ready and willing to fill in "the 'world' drawn by the five senses" with a new sensory input.

What Ikegaya and his colleague Hiroaki Norimoto set out to do was to restore not vision per se, but the blind rats' allocentric sense. That sense is what allows animals and people to recognize the position of their body within the environment. What would happen, the researchers asked, if the animals could "see" a geomagnetic signal? Could that signal fill in for the animals' lost sight? Would the animals know what to do with the information?

The head-mountable geomagnetic sensor device the researchers devised allowed them to connect a digital compass (the kind you'd find in any smart phone) to two tungsten microelectrodes for stimulating the visual cortex of the brain. The very lightweight device also allowed the researchers to turn the brain stimulation up or down and included a rechargeable battery. Once attached, the sensor automatically detected the animal's head direction and generated electrical stimulation pulses indicating which direction they were facing--north or south, for instance.

The "blind" rats were then trained to seek food pellets in a T-shaped or a more complicated maze. Within tens of trials, the researchers report, the animals learned to use the geomagnetic information to solve the mazes. In fact, their performance levels and navigation strategies were similar to those of normally sighted rats. The animals' allocentric sense was restored.

"We were surprised that rats can comprehend a new sense that had never been experienced or 'explained by anybody' and can learn to use it in behavioral tasks within only two to three days," Ikegaya says.

The findings suggest one very simple application: to attach geomagnetic sensors to the canes used by some blind people to get around. More broadly, the researchers expect, based on the findings, that humans could expand their senses through artificial sensors that detect geomagnetic input, ultraviolet radiation, ultrasound waves, and more. Our brains, it appears, are capable of much more than our limited senses allow.

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DNA can't explain all inherited traits

LONDON: Characteristics passed between generations are not decided solely by DNA, but can be brought about by other material in cells, new research has shown for the first time.

Scientists studied proteins found in cells, known as histones, which are not part of the genetic code, but act as spools around which DNA is wound. Histones are known to control whether or not genes are switched on.

Researchers found that naturally occurring changes to these proteins, which affect how they control genes, can be sustained from one generation to the next and so influence which traits are passed on.

The finding demonstrates for the first time that DNA is not solely responsible for how characteristics are inherited.

It paves the way for research into how and when this method of inheritance occurs in nature, and if it is linked to particular traits or health conditions.

It may also inform research into whether changes to the histone proteins that are caused by environmental conditions - such as stress or diet - can influence the function of genes passed on to offspring.

The research confirms a long-held expectation among scientists that genes could be controlled across generations by such changes. However, it remains to be seen how common the process is, researchers said.

Scientists tested the theory by carrying out experiments in a yeast with similar gene control mechanisms to human cells.

They introduced changes to a histone protein, mimicking those that occur naturally, causing it to switch off nearby genes. The effect was inherited by subsequent generations of yeast cells.

"We've shown without doubt that changes in the histone spools that make up chromosomes can be copied and passed through generations," Professor Robin Allshire, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Biological Sciences, who led the study, said.

"Our finding settles the idea that inherited traits can be epigenetic, meaning that they are not solely down to changes in a gene's DNA," said Allshire.

The study was published in the journal Science.

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Common cholesterol drug stimulates same receptors as marijuana

LONDON: Researchers have identified a cholesterol drug that may be the starting point for a new class of cannabis-like drugs to treat pain, nausea and various psychiatric and neurological conditions.

Fenofibrate, also known by the brand name Tricor, is used to treat high cholesterol and high triglyceride levels.

The drug may also benefit a wide range of health issues, such as pain, appetite stimulation, nausea, as well as immune and various psychiatric and neurological conditions, researchers said.

The research suggests fenofibrate may be the starting point for a new class of cannabis-like drugs to treat these types of conditions.

"By illustrating the relationship between fenofibrate and the cannabinoid system, we aim to improve our understanding of this clinically important drug," said Richard S Priestley, a researcher from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham Medical School in Nottingham, UK.

"Our study provides the basis for the investigation of new drugs targeting these important receptors," Priestley said.

Priestly and colleagues cultured cells containing cannabinoid receptors and exposed them to a tracer compound, which binds to cannabinoid receptors.

They found that fenofibrate was able to displace the tracer, suggesting that it also binds to the receptors.

Furthermore, they discovered that fenofibrate actually switched the cannabinoid receptors "on," not only in these cells, but also in sections of intestine.

This led to the relaxation of the tissue in a way that mimicked what marijuana does.

Despite the fact that fenofibrate has been used for many years, and its mechanism of action was presumed to be through a completely different family of receptors, this suggests that at least some of the effects of fenofibrate may be controlled by cannabinoid receptors.

Furthermore, these cannabinoid receptors may be a future target for drugs used to treat pain and a variety of immune and psychiatric diseases.

"There are people who do not want to get stoned just to get the relief that marijuana brings. This new work suggests that possibility," said Gerald Weissmann, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal in which the study was published.

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