One in three adults worldwide, according to the report, has raised blood pressure – a condition that causes around half of all deaths from stroke and heart disease. One in 10 adults has diabetes.

“This report is further evidence of the dramatic increase in the conditions that trigger heart disease and other chronic illnesses, particularly in low- and middle-income countries,” says Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO. “In some African countries, as much as half the adult population has high blood pressure.”

For the first time, the World Health Organization’s annual statistics report includes information from 194 countries on the percentage of men and women with raised blood pressure and blood glucose levels.

In high-income countries, widespread diagnosis and treatment with low-cost medication have significantly reduced mean blood pressure across populations – and this has contributed to a reduction in deaths from heart disease. In Africa, however, more than 40% (and up to 50%) of adults in many countries are estimated to have high blood pressure. Most of these people remain undiagnosed, although many of these cases could be treated with low-cost medications, which would significantly reduce the risk of death and disability from heart disease and stroke.

Also included for the first time in the World health statistics 2012 are data on people with raised blood glucose levels. While the global average prevalence is around 10%, up to one third of populations in some Pacific Island countries have this condition. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to cardiovascular disease, blindness and kidney failure.

Obesity another major issue

“In every region of the world, obesity doubled between 1980 and 2008,” says Dr Ties Boerma, Director of the Department of Health Statistics and Information Systems at WHO. “Today, half a billion people (12% of the world’s population) are considered obese.”

The highest obesity levels are in the WHO Region of the Americas (26% of adults) and the lowest in the WHO South-East Asia Region (3% obese). In all parts of the world, women are more likely to be obese than men, and thus at greater risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

Noncommunicable diseases currently cause almost two thirds of all deaths worldwide. Global concern about the rise in numbers of deaths from heart and lung disease, diabetes and cancer prompted the United Nations to hold a high-level meeting on noncommunicable diseases in New York in September 2011.

The World Health Assembly, to be held in Geneva from 21 to 26 May 2012, will review progress made since that meeting and agree on next steps. Work is currently under way to develop a global monitoring framework and a set of voluntary targets for prevention and control of these diseases.

Published annually by WHO, the World health statistics is the most comprehensive publication of health-related global statistics available. It contains data from 194 countries on a range of mortality, disease and health system indicators including life expectancy, illnesses and deaths from a range of diseases, health services and treatments, financial investment in health, as well as risk factors and behaviours that affect health.

Some key trends in this year’s report are:

• Maternal mortality: In 20 years, the number of maternal deaths has decreased from more than 540 000 deaths in 1990 to less than 290 000 in 2010 – a decline of 47%. One third of these maternal deaths occur in just two countries – India with 20% of the global total and Nigeria with 14%.
• 10 year trends for causes of child death: Data from the years 2000 to 2010 show how public health advancements have helped save children’s lives in the past decade. The world has made significant progress, having reduced the number of child deaths from almost 10 million children aged less than 5 years in 2000 to 7.6 million annual deaths in 2010. Declines in numbers of deaths from diarrhoeal disease and measles have been particularly striking.
• Death registration: Only 34 countries (representing 15% of the world’s population) produce high-quality cause-of-death data. In low and middle-income countries, less than 10% of deaths are registered.

The study conducted at the University of Edinburgh, UK, identifies ways that consumers could also help curb greenhouse gas emissions – by reducing the amount of food they buy, serve and waste. They also suggest the food industry could reduce emissions by seeking more efficient ways to use fertilisers.

For instance, halving the amount of chicken consumed in the UK and other developed countries to levels eaten in Japan could cut greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 10 million cars off the road, the journal Nature Climate Change reports.

“Eating less meat and wasting less food En play a big part in helping to keep a lid on greenhouse gas emissions as the world’s population increases,” said David Reay from Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who led the study, according to an Edinburgh statement.

Figures show that if average chicken consumption in developed countries fell from the current level of 26 kg each per year to the Japanese average of about 12 kg each by 2020, global emissions from poultry would fall below current levels, despite increased output from the developing world.

This would cut the predicted global output of nitrous oxide, a key greenhouse gas, from this source by almost 20 percent, based on current growth rates. Demand for food, particularly meat, is expected to increase over the next few decades as the world’s population continues to grow and emerging countries consume more.

Agriculture is the biggest source of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that is emitted by soil and fertilisers. Producing meat produces more emissions than growing crops, as large amounts of cereals are grown to feed livestock.

Researchers arrived at their findings by examining data for global agricultural production of greenhouse gases together with consumption of food in various regions of the world. The study was carried out in collaboration with the University of Aberdeen and partners in Europe and the US.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School, Boston surveyed 4,000 obese adults and found those who followed the common sense advice were much more likely to lose weight than those who adopted fad slimming regimes, went on liquid diets or bought costly weight-loss supplements.

Christina Wee, who helped compile the study at Harvard, said: “There are lots of fad diets out there as well as expensive over-the-counter medications that have not necessarily been proven to be effective. So it’s very encouraging to find that most of the weight-loss methods associated with success are accessible and inexpensive.”

Researchers found 41 percent of those who cut their fat intake were more likely to have shed five percent of their body weight in under a year than those who went on liquid diets, used non-prescription dieting supplements or followed popular slimming regimes, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported.

And if they exercised more than usual, they were almost 30 percent more likely to lose the weight. Although five percent weight loss may not sound significant, experts say it is enough to delay the onset of diabetes in an obese person, according to the Daily Mail.

And the ‘Not Rocket Science’ diet helped many volunteers shed more weight, with 37 percent of those who cut down on fat more likely to lose a tenth of their body weight, while exercising boosted their chances by 6 percent.

G. Richard Scott, associate professor of anthropology at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Nevada, Reno, obtained samples of dental plaque from 58 skeletons buried in the Cathedral of Santa Maria in northern Spain dating from the 11th to 19th centuries to conduct research on the diet of this ancient population.

After his initial findings met with mixed results, he decided to send five samples to Simon R. Poulson at the Nevada University’s Stable Isotope Lab, in the expectation they might contain enough carbon and nitrogen to allow them to estimate stable isotope ratios, said a university statement.

“It’s chemistry and is pretty complex,” Scott explained. “But basically, since only protein has nitrogen, the more nitrogen that is present, the more animal products were consumed as part of the diet. Carbon provides information on the types of plants consumed.”

Scott said that once at the lab, the material was crushed, and then an instrument called a mass spectrometer was used to obtain stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios.

“It was a long shot,” he said. “No one really thought there would be enough carbon and nitrogen in these tiny, five to 10 mg samples to be measurable, but Dr. Poulson’s work revealed there was,” added Scott.

Researchers at the Emory University have developed a new method to scan the brains of alert dogs and explore the minds of the oldest domesticated species, the journal Public library of Science ONE reports.

The technique relies on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain, according to an Emory statement.

“It was amazing to see the first brain images of a fully awake, unrestrained dog. As far as we know, no one has been able to do this previously,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Centre for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project.

Key members of the team include Andrew Brooks, graduate student at the Între for Neuropolicy and Mark Spivak, professional dog trainer and owner of Comprehensive Pet Therapy in Atlanta.

Two dogs were involved in the project’s first phase. Callie is a two-year-old Feist, or southern squirrel-hunting dog. Berns adopted her from a shelter. McKenzie is a three-year-old Border Collie, who was already well-trained in agility competition by her owner, Melissa Cate.

Both dogs were trained over several months to walk into an fMRI scanner and hold completely still while researchers measured their neural activity.

In the first experiment, the dogs were trained to respond to hand signals. One signal meant the dog would receive a hot dog treat, and another signal meant it would not receive one.

The caudate region of the brain, associated with rewards in humans, showed activation in both dogs when they saw the signal for the treat, but not for the no-treat signal.

“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals,” Berns says. “And these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system.”

Giving further details in reply to a question in Lok Sabha today the Minister of State in PMO Shri V. Narayansamy said that in the last three years, three nuclear power reactors (3×220 MS) have been commissioned successfully. Construction of 4 indigenously designed Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors of 700 MW each have been started. Bilateral cooperation agreements have been signed with several countries.

The Minister stated that as per the provisions of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 foreign equity investment in nuclear power projects is not permitted. Therefore, foreign funding can only be in the form of debt. Currently, the Kudankulam project is being set up with Russian state credit of Rs. 6416 crore. In respect of future projects, foreign debt either as state credit, banks or multilateral funding agencies is envisaged.

Revealing further on the matter Shri Narayansamy said that the Central Government has signed fuel supply contracts with Russian Federation, Kazakhsthan and France.

He said France has completed supply of the contracted quantity. With Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, there are long term fuel supply agreements. Supplies are being received regularly.

The land acquisition at Fatehabad, Haryana is progressing in accordance with the Land Acquisition Act. It has reached to an advanced stage of conclusion. Of the 1313 acres to be acquired for the plant site, land holders of 1109 acres have already expressed their consent. Currently compensation for land to be acquired is being discussed with the state government. The apprehensions about safety of nuclear power, particularly post Fukushima are being addressed through sustained public outreach programs.

The star attractions will be a “Missile Interceptor Simulator” and a “3D Virtual Reality Theatre”. In this edition of DEFEXPO, DRDO has given special focus to Autonomous Vehicles. The outdoor exhibits include Muntra – Unmanned Tracked Ground Vehicle, Remotely Operated Vehicle Daksh, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Nishant, Rustom and Netra, Light Weight Sensor Integrated Composite Bridge, the Long Range Solid State Electronically Scanned Active Phased Array Radar LSTAR, Disha EW system, Scorpio Jammer, Heavy Weight Torpedo Varunastra, Pinaka Multi Barrel Rocket System, Prahar Tactical range Ballistic Missile System and Arjun Main Battle Tank.

The indoor exhibits and models will cover nearly the entire gamut of R&D in DRDO. Prominent will be models of missiles Nag, Akash, Brahmos, Aerostat System, AEW&C System, BMP Survival Kit (BUSK), Sarvatra and other bridges. Different types of Parachutes, the family of Small Arms, Torpedoes and Decoys, Military Communication Equipment, Electronic Warfare systems, Night Vision Devices, Microwave Devices, NBC protective systems and Soldier Support systems will also be seen.

Product Launch: 

The Explosive Detection Kit (EDK), and the Swine Flu diagnostic kit are among over 70 products and technologies developed for defence applications with potential civilian applications that have been identified for commercialization under the DRDO-FICCI ATAC (Accelerated Technology Assessment Commercialization) programme. These two products will be launched during a function at Hall No 7G, during 1100-1150 hrs on Saturday March 31, 2012. The Explosive Detection Kit (EDK), developed by Pune based High Energy Materials Research Laboratory, can quickly detect and identify even traces of explosives. The handy kit is ideally suited to be carried and used everywhere. The Swine Flu diagnostic kit, developed by Defence Research and Development Establishment, Gwalior, can detect H1N1 virus within an hour. The kit does not need sophisticated instruments and can even be used in villages where electricity is not available.

DefExpo will also provide a platform for the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to identify areas for collaboration and initiate dialogue with DRDO in areas of mutual interest for joint development as partners.

DRDO has amply demonstrated capability to design, develop and realize highly complex multidisciplinary weapon platforms for Army, Navy and Air force. These systems are among the most extensively evaluated systems in harsh environmental conditions, meeting stringent quality requirements of our services. The production value of products inducted / under induction is more than Rupees 1,40,000 crores, effectively translating to creation of about two million jobs in the country. The figures will see a sharp rise in near future once the systems in advanced stages of User acceptance are inducted. Further, DRDO has enabled a number of Small and Medium industries from the private sector in the design, development, manufacture of Defence related products apart from DPSUs and Ordnance Factories. No doubt, the indigenous production of these systems at a fraction of cost of imported systems is significant contribution to Nation’s economy, besides ensuring freedom from possible blockades in the times of need.

Press Conference: 

Dr. Vijay Kumar Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to Raksha Mantri, Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and DG, DRDO will address a Press Conference at 1200 hrs on Saturday, March 31, 2012 at Hall 7F.

The report is the first comparative study of international press councils designed to inform the Leveson Inquiry and stimulate wider debate on UK press reform. It highlights the case of Richard Desmond, co-owner of The Irish Daily Star, who famously pulled his titles out of the Press Complaints Commission, the UK’s self-regulatory body, yet joined the Irish Press Council.

The report suggests that Desmond’s decision stemmed from the fact that membership of the Irish Press Council offered tangible benefits in contrast to the UK’s Press Complaints Commission. Publications that join the Irish Press Council are legally recognised if they maintain a record of compliance. It also highlights the fact that this statutory recognition helps members to defend themselves in any future defamation proceedings, and suggests that this encourages news outlets to comply with the standards set by the Irish Press Council.

Report author Lara Fielden is a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and was formerly a BBC journalist before working for the regulator Ofcom. Her report, ‘Regulating the Press: a comparative study of international press councils’, suggests that more emphasis should be placed on the commercial incentives which encourage greater compliance with a voluntary code of press regulation. She argues that this approach has considerable advantages over what she calls a ‘narrow focus on penalties and enforcement’.

She said: ‘After comparing a range of press regulatory frameworks, I have concluded that the UK would do well to build on the Irish model where voluntary ethical incentives are intertwined with legal and therefore commercial advantages. This could transform those sections of the UK’s newsroom culture which have regarded regulation as a bit of an irrelevance.

‘I believe this historic view of regulation has gone hand in hand with phone-hacking in the UK. We need to move towards a model where there are robust incentives to ensure that ethical compliance is viewed as a commercial selling point.’

The study argues that the ultimate sanction for those newspapers that fail to comply with a voluntary code of press regulation should be suspension or expulsion from the regulatory body. This would also mean that such news outlets would have to give up the advantages and privileges associated with being members.

The study analyses different degrees of press regulation, from mandatory statutory regulation through to voluntary frameworks, across a range of countries. In Denmark, press council membership is required by law and is accompanied by the threat of a fine or prison sentence for editors that fail to publish a press council decision when required. Yet despite this ‘strong-arm approach’, the study points out that a parliamentary scrutiny has just been set up in Denmark to address a lack of active compliance.

At the other end of the regulatory scale, there are codes that are entirely voluntary: the report reveals that where news outlets are able to withdraw their membership of a regulatory body without suffering any consequences, press councils in those countries have experienced a haemorrhaging of members. The study highlights Canada as a country where the voluntary approach is clearly not working. Meanwhile in Germany, publications have been challenging the press council and refusing to publish adjudications.

Lara Fielden said: ‘The merits of an incentivised middle way should not be underestimated. Too often the history of press councils overseas and in the UK reveals cycles of threats of state intervention, followed by expedient industry accommodation, with the public left out of the conversation. The public’s interest must be at the heart of the conversation about better press regulation.’

Overseas, the report notes, press councils have started to launch kite-marking and membership badge requirements. This is so the public can recognise news outlets that are ethically regulated as opposed to those that are unregulated.

Lara Fielden concluded: ‘It is currently impossible for the public to differentiate in any meaningful way between titles that are members of the UK’s Press Complaints Commission and those that are not, whether in print or online.

‘A system that required members to display a standards mark would give consumers a clearer idea about the practices of different news outlets. It would also give members the opportunity to promote their credentials as an ethical operator, which should give them a competitive edge over those outlets that did not carry the standards mark of compliance.’

“Silkworm cocoons have evolved a remarkable range of optimal structures and properties to protect moth pupae from many different natural threats,” Porter and Chen said in their paper. These structures are lightweight, strong and porous and therefore “ideal for the development of bio-inspired composite materials.”

FOR MORE READING. . 

Among college-educated women, childlessness peaked in the late 1990s,
when about 30 percent had no children, according to the new analysis of
U.S.
data. But childlessness declined about 5 percentage points between 1998
and 2008.

“We may be seeing the beginning of a new trend,” said Bruce Weinberg,
co-author of the study and professor of economics at Ohio State
University.

“One of the major economic stories of the second half of the 20th
century was that highly educated women were working more and having
fewer children.
It is too early to definitively say that trend is over, but there is no
doubt we have seen fertility rise among older, highly educated women.”

The turnaround in fertility is especially surprising because other
trends – particularly lower rates of marriage – would tend to keep fewer
women from becoming mothers.

The study shows that college-graduate women born in the late 1950s were
the turning point. They were less likely to have children than previous
cohorts up until their late 30s, when they reversed the trend and showed
large increases in fertility.

Highly educated women born since then have continued the trend, being
more likely to have children, and starting to have children at earlier
ages.

It is not clear from this research whether older, highly educated women
are dropping out of the labor market to have children, or are continuing
to work.

“We don’t have the data in this study to say whether they are opting out
of the labor market. But we can say they are increasingly opting for
families,”
Weinberg said.

The first author on the study is Qingyan Shang, an assistant professor
at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Their study
appears online in the Journal of Population Economics, and will be
published in a future print edition.

This study is a considerably more comprehensive analysis of highly
educated women’s fertility than several other recent studies of the
subject that came to contradictory results, according to the authors.

The researchers used two major data sets: the June Current Population
Survey for 1980 to 2008, which is a joint effort between the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau; and the Vital Statistics
Birth Data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Findings on women’s fertility were very different depending on education
level, Weinberg said.

“For the less educated women, it is more a story about the timing of
their fertility. They are having their children earlier now than they
used to, but they are not having any more children overall,” he said.

“For the highly educated women born after the late 50s, they are more
likely to have children than did previous cohorts, and they are having
them near the end of their childbearing years.”

For women with graduate education, cumulative fertility is flat among
25-29 year olds in recent years. It increases somewhat among 30-34 year
olds and considerably more among older women.

The results for women with bachelor’s degrees (and no advanced degrees)
are not as dramatic. There are no discernible trends for women aged 25
to 34, but there are increases at older ages. For women who have some
college, but did not graduate, cumulative fertility increases at all
ages, with the increase starting earlier at younger ages.

The study notes that one possible reason that women in their late 30s
and 40s are now deciding to have children could be that fertility
treatments have become more accessible and affordable in recent years.

With the data available, there is no completely accurate way to
calculate how many older women are using fertility treatments. But one
way to make a rough estimate is to see how many women are having
multiple births – more than one baby at a time. That’s because fertility
treatments are known to be associated with high rates of multiple
births.

In their analysis, the researchers found that multiple birth rates began
increasing around 1990 – especially among highly educated older women,
who would probably be most likely to be using fertility treatments.

Among college-graduate women in their early 40s, the multiple birth rate
more than tripled from 1990 to 2006.

That suggests the use of fertility treatments played a role in the
increasing number of educated older women having children. But it is not
the only cause, according to the researchers.

“Although our estimates are not exact, it is clear that there was an
increase in older women having children even after taking into account
the fact that fertility treatments are more accessible and affordable,”
Weinberg said.

“Fertility treatments contributed, but it isn’t the only factor.”

INSAT-2E carried 14 C-band and 5 lower extended C-band transponders for various communication services. The satellite also carried a Very High Resolution Radiometer and a Charge Coupled Device camera for meteorological observation. It may be recalled that 11 communication transponders of 36 MHz bandwidth onboard INSAT-2E satellite were leased to International Telecommunication Satellite Organisation (INTELSAT), the first such lease from an Indian satellite. INSAT-2E was controlled from Master Control Facility at Hassan

It may be recalled that PSLV-C19 had placed RISAT-1 in a polar orbit of 470 km X 480 km. As planned, on April 27-28, 2012, the satellite propulsion system was used in four orbital maneuvers to raise height of the orbit of RISAT-1 to 536 km. The satellite is now in its final orbital configuration and in good health. In the coming days, various elements of the C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar will be tested and calibrated as a prelude to payload operations.

As compared to the optical remote sensing satellites that depend upon sunlight, the Synthetic Aperture Radar of RISAT-1 transmits its own radar pulses (at 5.35 GHz) to study the objects on Earth. This facilitates

1. cloud penetration and
2. imaging even without sunlight.

For RISAT-1, imaging sessions around both 6 AM and 6 PM have been chosen.

The indigenous Radar Imaging Satellite (Risat-1) with a life-span of five years would be used for disaster prediction and agriculture forestry, and the high resolution pictures and microwave imaging could also be used for defence purposes, an ISRO official told IANS not wanting to be named in the report.

Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) is all set on the launch pad at Sriharikota, 80-km from here, to blast off at 5.47 a.m on April 26 ferrying the 1,858 kg Risat-1, a wholly Indian-built spy/surveillance satellite.

“The countdown for the Thursday launch started at 6.47 a.m Monday. The filling up of the propellant (2.5 tonne) for the fourth stage/engine is progressing smoothly. The same propellant but in small quantities (600 kg) will also be filled for the powering the rocket control systems,” an ISRO official preferring anonymity told IANS.

Remote sensing satellites send back pictures and other data for use. India has the largest constellation of remote sensing satellites in the world providing imagery in a variety of spatial resolutions, from more than a metre ranging up to 500 metres, and is a major player in vending such data in the global market.

With 11 remote sensing/earth observation satellites orbiting in the space, India is a world leader in the remote sensing data market. The 11 satellites are TES, Resourcesat 1, Cartosat 1, 2, 2A and 2B, IMS 1, Risat-2, Oceansat 2, Resourcesat-2, Megha-Tropiques.

The satellite’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can acquire data at C-band. In 2009, ISRO had launched 300 kg Risat-2 with an Israeli built SAR enabling earth observation on all weather, day and night conditions.

According to an ISRO official, Tuesday the rocket systems will be charged with gases and fuelling of the rocket’s second stage with liquid propellant would happen.

Also, charging of batteries and pressurisation of propellant tanks on-board the satellite will be performed. Readiness of various ground systems such as tracking radar systems and communication networks will also be checked.

The rocket would inject Risat-1 satellite into an orbit of 480 km altitude at an inclination of 97.552 degree. The satellite will be put in its final orbital configuration at 536 km altitude using thrusters onboard the satellite.

The rocket that would sling Risat-1 will be the four staged PSLV’s upgraded variant called PSLV-XL which would weigh 320 tonnes at lift-off.

The letters XL stand for extra large as the six strap-on motors hugging the rocket at the bottom can carry 12 tonnes of solid fuel as against the base version that has a fuel capacity of nine tonnes.

The PSLV’s four stages are fuelled with solid and liquid propellants. The first and third stages are fuelled by solid fuel while the second and fourth stages are powered by liquid fuel.

ISRO had used the PSLV-XL variant (rocket with extended strap-on motors than what the base model has) for its moon mission (Chandrayaan-1) in 2008 and for launching its communication satellite GSAT-12 in 2011.

According to ISRO officials the rocket launch will be controlled by space scientists at the new mission control centre inaugurated by President Pratibha Patil this January.

The new mission control centre is modern and has larger area to accommodate more space scientists, officials, VIPs and others.

Such ethical questions are now emerging as advanced militaries develop autonomous robotic warriors to replace humans on the battlefield.

Some argue that robots do not have free will and therefore cannot be held morally accountable for their actions.

But psychologists at the University of Washington (UW) are finding that people don’t have such a clear-cut view of humanoid robots.

“We’re moving toward a world where robots will be capable of harming humans,” said Peter Kahn, a UW associate professor of psychology who led the study. The paper was recently published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

“With this study, we’re asking whether a robotic entity is conceptualized as just a tool, or as some form of a technological being that can be held responsible for its actions,” said Kahn, according to a UW statement.

Kahn and his team had 40 undergraduate students play a scavenger hunt with a humanlike robot, Robovie. The robot appeared autonomous, but it was remotely controlled by a researcher concealed in another room.

After a bit of small talk with the robot, each participant had two minutes to locate objects from a list of items in the room. They all found the minimum, seven, to claim the $20 prize.

But when their time was up, Robovie claimed they had found only five objects. Then came the crux of the experiment: participants’ reactions to the robot’s miscount.

“Most argued with Robovie,” said co-author Heather Gary, doctoral student in developmental psychology at Washington. “Some accused Robovie of lying or cheating.”

When interviewed, 65 percent of participants said Robovie was to blame – at least to a certain degree – for wrongly scoring the scavenger hunt and unfairly denying the participants the $20 prize.

This suggests that as robots gain capabilities in language and social interactions, “it is likely that many people will hold a humanoid robot as partially accountable for a harm that it causes,” the researchers wrote.

Researchers at Dartmouth College, found activity levels in a part of the brain known as the the nucleus accumbens allowed them to accurately predict people’s eating and sexual behaviour, the Daily Mail reported.

Women volunteers were shown pictures of food as well as erotic images and landscapes while their brains were scanned using MRI imaging to monitor their reactions.

The 48 women, who had no idea what the study was about, returned six months later and were weighed and asked to fill out a questionnaire.

Subjects whose whose brains reacted strongly to the food pictures were found to have gained more weight while those who reacted to sexual images were more likely to have had sex and report stronger sexual urges.

Bill Kelley, associate professor of Dartmouth’s department of psychological and brain sciences, says the study demonstrated that the stronger the response to a stimulus, the less able the subject is to say ‘no’.

Kathryn Demos, who led the study believes the way different women reacted to the stimulus was a combination of nurture and nature.

She said the idea that all people are equally capable of self-control is naïve and claims the brain’s reward centre ‘is a very powerful system’.

These findings show that coronary (heart related) blood flow actually increases in men during mental stress, but remains unchanged in women, explaining why they could be more susceptible to adverse cardiac events.

Charity L. Sauder, Alison E. Thompson, Terrell Myers and Chester A. Ray, from Penn State College of Medicine, investigated the effects of mental stress on blood flow through the heart, said a university statement.

They recruited a group of healthy adults, both men and women. Each volunteer had his or her heart rate and blood pressure measured at rest, as well as coronary vascular conductance, a Doppler ultrasound measure of blood flow through the heart.

These volunteers then underwent the same tests while participating in three minutes of mental arithmetic, in which the researchers had them sequentially subtract 7 starting with a random number.

To increase the stress load, researchers badgered the volunteers during the task, urging them to hurry up or telling them they were wrong even when they gave the correct number. At the end of the task, they underwent the same three heart function tests again.

Results showed that at rest, men and women showed little differences between the three tests. During the mental arithmetic task, all the volunteers showed an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, regardless of sex.

However, while the men showed an increase in coronary vascular conductance under stress, the women showed no change.

This differing characteristic could potentially predispose women to heart problems while under stress, said study leader Chester Ray.

“Stress reduction is important for anyone, regardless of gender,” he explained, “but this study shines a light on how stress differently affects the hearts of women, potentially putting them at greater risk of a coronary event,” added Ray.

These findings were presented at Experimental Biology 2012, at the San Diego Convention Centre.

The 71-hour countdown commenced at 06:47 hours from April 23, 2012. During the Countdown, propellant-filling operations of the liquid propellant second stage (PS2) and fourth stage (PS4) of the launch vehicle will be carried out. Besides, mandatory checks on the launch vehicle and spacecraft will be carried out. Also, charging of batteries and pressurisation of propellant tanks onboard the satellite will be performed. Readiness of various ground systems such as tracking radar systems and communication networks will also be checked.

PSLV-C19 will inject RISAT-1 satellite into an orbit of 480 km altitude at an inclination of 97.552^o. The satellite will be put in its final orbital configuration at 536 km altitude using thrusters onboard the satellite.

FOR MORE READING. . .

The 17-metre-long surface-to-surface ballistic missile lifted off majestically from a rail mobile launcher at 8.04 a.m. After a flight time of 20 minutes, the missile re-entry vehicle impacted the pre-designated target point more than 5,000 kms away in the Indian Ocean with a high degree of accuracy.

V. K. Sarawat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister told The Hindu immediately after the success of the mission, “With this missile launch, India has emerged as a major missile power. We have joined a select group of countries possessing technology to design, develop, build and manufacture long range missiles of this class and technological complexity.”

FOR MORE READING. . 

Claire Rhodes, a 34-year-old mother-of-four, has a disorder called Trimethylaminuria — also known as “fish odour syndrome” — where the body cannot break down trimethylamine, which is found in certain foods like milk and eggs.

The disorder causes the chemical to build up in her system before it is released in her sweat, urine and breath, giving off a strong fishy odour, the Daily Mail reported.

She has now been able to control the condition with a special diet of fruit and vegetables for two years.

“You’re supposed to have other things in small amounts but they still make me stink. So I only eat fruit and vegetables. It’s made me lose six stone (38 kg). The diet does get me down but I have got to stick to it. I wouldn’t be able to go out if I didn’t. I’d be too embarrassed,” said Claire, a resident of York.

Claire was having up to 10 showers a day after friends started commenting on her fishy odour.

When she went to see a doctor, they did various tests, which all came back negative.

“I thought it was coming from my teeth so I lied to my dentist and said I was in pain so he removed some of them. I was brushing my teeth 20 times a day. I was brushing so hard my gums were receding,” she said.

She started having panic attacks and for a year, she only left the house when she had to go to work.

Claire even contemplated suicide, and was put on anti-depressants as well as counselling.

However, after watching a programme about someone with fish odour syndrome, Claire was finally diagnosed with the disorder.

A dietician put Claire on a strict diet and warned her to cut out any foods that make her disorder worse.

Most foods cause her to stink. So Claire limited her diet to strawberries, pears, carrots, turnips, potatoes and salad.

She can eat honey and rice in small amounts as well as bread, but only if it is freshly baked.

The research paper to be published online this month by the journal, European Economic Review, is based on data from the Multinational Time Use Study, which is central to the activities of the Centre for Time Use Research at Oxford University. The study found that better educated women did 24 hours of paid work a week, on average, in the 2000s – four hours more than women of a similar educational background 30 years ago.

In contrast, less educated women and men of all educational backgrounds did less paid work overall in the 2000s when their time diaries were compared with the sample from the 1970s.

In the 1970s men who had not gone to university or college did 47 hours of paid work a week, on average, but by the 2000s men who had not gone on to take further qualifications did 31 hours of paid work a week, on average.

Men who had gone to college or university also spent less time in paid work than similar men in the 1970s. Thirty years ago men educated at a higher level worked an average of 44 hours a week, but by the 2000s this had gone down to 35 hours a week, on average – nine hours less than their counterparts 30 years ago.

Lesser educated women did an hour less paid work a week compared with similarly educated women 30 years ago. Time spent in paid work went down from an average 18 hours to 17 hours a week in the 2000s.

Study author Dr Almudena Sevilla-Sanz, an economist from the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford, said: ‘When you add up the total of hours spent in paid work, doing housework or looking after the children, men and women who went to college or university have less free time than people of a similar educational background in the 1970s.The gap in leisure time between the highly educated and the less educated has also widened over the last 30 years. Although we don’t go as far as establishing a causal link in this paper, it is interesting that the widened gap in leisure time coincided with a pay gap that developed after the second half of the 1980s between those with higher qualifications and the less qualified.

More highly educated women spent five hours less a week doing housework than similarly educated women in the 1970s, says the study. Time spent doing household chores went down from 29 hours a week to 24 hours a week, on average. Meanwhile, the amount of time spent doing housework did not change for less educated women who continued to spend 31 hours a week, on average, in the 2000s.

Meanwhile, men of all educational backgrounds spent far more time doing housework in the 2000s compared with men in the 1970s. More highly educated men did 16 hours of housework a week, on average – 12 hours more than their counterparts in the 1970s. Lesser educated men spent 17 hours a week, on average, doing the household chores.

Dr Sevilla-Sanz said: ‘The amount of work that women do in looking after the home has gone down compared with the 1970s. Despite the fact that men are doing more jobs around the house, they still haven’t equalled the amount that women do. There is some way to go as women in the 2000s did 29 hours of housework whereas men did around 16 hours of housework per week, on average.

‘The study also found that’ parents of all backgrounds also spent more time looking after their children in the 2000s compared with parents in the 1970s, and there were universal increases in the amount of time spent watching television. The UK findings are part of a larger study tracking around 20,000 working age men and women from seven industrialised nations. The UK trends were also reflected in most of the other countries surveyed.

‘Dr Sevilla-Sanz notes: ‘This study highlights the trade-offs that workers have to make. It is relevant for policy makers and employers who might want to consider new ways of incentivising their workforce or to look at how the work-life balance compares across different countries.’

The study by Oxford University researchers is the first to look at the speech of new fathers with depression in their early interactions with their babies.

The Wellcome Trust-funded research is published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

‘We found there were differences in the way depressed dads talked to their babies compared to fathers without depression,’ says Dr Vaheshta Sethna, first author of the study at the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University. ‘They tended to be more negative and be more focused on themselves.

‘It is possible that babies will pick up on this negativity, that they will pick up on these cues even early in life. For example, the baby may have to respond differently to get attention,’ adds Dr Sethna, who has since moved to the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London.

Around 4% or 5% of dads are thought to get depressed in the postnatal period, that’s about half the rate for mums. And as with postnatal depression in mums, it has been shown that their children are at increased risk of developing emotional and behavioural problems.

One way that depression could affect the children is in changing the way dads interact with their babies. So the Oxford research team set out to compare the speech of depressed fathers to their three-month-old children with fathers who were not depressed.

38 fathers, half of whom were depressed, were asked to play with and speak to their three-month-olds for 3 minutes. The babies were sat in their infant seats, and the face-to-face interaction videoed.

The fathers were all recruited in maternity units in Oxford and Milton Keynes and were matched in education level and age. The dads’ words were transcribed and scored by researchers who didn’t know which fathers were depressed. The results did not change when controlling for baby fretfulness.

The researchers found that dads with depression were more negative about themselves and their infants in their speech in comparison to fathers who weren’t depressed. Their words also focused more on themselves and their experiences, and less on the infants.Examples included: ‘I’m not able to make you smile’; ‘Daddy’s not as good as Mummy’; ‘Are you tired?’; ‘Oh-oh, Daddy hasn’t lasted very long, has he?’ and ‘Can’t think of anything to do all of a sudden’.

The proportion of comments showing some negativity rose from an average of 11% among dads without depression to 19% in dads with depression. The proportion of the dads’ comments that were focused on the baby dropped from 72% to 60%, while the proportion that focused on themselves rose from 14% to 24%.

Lead researcher Dr Paul Ramchandani of Oxford University says: ‘We want to try and work out the processes that lead to poorer outcomes in the children so we can work out where parents can be helped out.

‘More research has been done with mums with postnatal depression and there are a range of early interventions to help them in the way they talk and play with their babies. Depression in fathers is less well recognised and fewer fathers tend to come forward for help.

‘Interventions are often based on playing parents video feedback on how they are with their babies. We can show parents how their children are communicating back, helping them recognise this and respond.’

Dr Ramchandani notes that: ‘This was a small study and we have not yet investigated whether differences in the way fathers talk to their babies leads to poorer emotional development and behavioural problems later. That’s the next step.

‘He adds: ‘It’s important to remember that depression among parents doesn’t mean that the children are going to have problems. Most do not.’

Brin said the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.

He pointed out that the bid to suppress net access, along with the rise of the increasingly ‘restrictive’ Facebook and Apple, are threatening freedom of information online.

Brin said increasing efforts by governments to control access and communication by their citizens also affect Internet freedom. “There are very powerful forces that have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world. It’s scary,” he added.

Attempts by the entertainment industry to crack down on piracy, and the rise of ‘restrictive’ walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms, were creating greater restrictions, said Brin.

He said he was concerned by efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the Internet, the Daily Mail reports.

The 38-year-old said that he and Google co-founder Larry Page could not have created their search engine if the internet was dominated by Facebook. The increasingly closed nature of the web risked stifling future innovation, he said, with data stored on Facebook apps not searchable and inaccessible to entrepreneurs.

“Governments are realising the power of this medium to organise people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world,” said Ricken Patel, co-founder of Aavaz, the 14-million strong activist network which has help train and equip Syrian activists.

Now, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have determined precisely how leaves tell stems to grow when a plant is caught in a shady place.

The findings may offer new ways of developing crops which would produce higher yields of foods and biofuels than existing strains, said Joanne Chory, professor and director at the Salk’s Plant Biology Lab, who led the study.

A protein known as phytochrome interacting factor 7 (PIF7) serves as the key messenger between a plant’s cellular light sensors and the production of auxins, hormones that stimulate stem growth, the journal Genes and Development reported.

“Now that we know PIF7 is the relay, we have a new tool to develop crops that optimize field space and thus produce more food or feedstock for biofuels and bio-renewable chemicals,” said Chory, according to a university statement.

Plants gather intelligence about their light situation — including whether they are surrounded by other light-thieving plants — through photosensitive molecules in their leaves.

These sensors determine whether a plant is in full sunlight or in the shade of other plants, based on the wavelength of red light striking the leaves.

If a sun-loving plant, such as thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), the species Chory studies, finds itself in a shady place, the sensors will tell cells in the stem to elongate, causing the plant to grow upwards towards sunlight.

It is looking at new technology developed by University of Michigan, where ‘pulses’ of gas will be fired into the path of debris, increasing the ‘drag’ on orbiting junk and practically sucking them downwards.

Pieces of space junk travel at speeds up to eight km per second, fast enough to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There’s also a danger of ‘cascading collisions’, where space debris impact with one another creating more, smaller pieces of space junk.

Debris belts have already made many orbits unusable. The pulses themselves would leave no trace – and the new method also leaves no solid material in orbit, the Daily Mail reported.

The satellite will ‘grab’ lumps of orbiting debris and throw them back into Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up on re-entry.

The proposed new system would be known as the Space Debris Elimination (SpaDE) system – and would aim to remove debris from orbit by firing focused pulses of atmospheric gases into the path of targeted debris.

The mayor of Irkutsk region and emergency expert groups set out for the scene of the sighting near Vitim village, but a severe snowstorm impeded the search operation, an official said.

A spokesman for the Mamsko-Chuisky district administration said the object might have been a meteorite.

Two spacecraft that landed on the Red Planet in 1976 are now thought to have detected microbes in Martian soil. But scientists at the time failed to spot the signs of life – and cooked the bugs at 160 degrees Centigrade during experiments, The Sun reported.

Now an international team has used modern techniques to re-examine data collected by the two unmanned Viking probes.

Biologist Joseph Miller, of the University of Southern California, said: “I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there. To paraphrase an old saying, if it looks like a microbe and acts like a microbe – then it probably is a microbe.”

During the 1976 mission, nutrients were added to the Martian soil. It would have a similar effect to putting plant food on a garden. The soil gave off a gas, believed to be mainly carbon dioxide.

Experts dismissed the possibility that the gas came from bugs. But new tests indicate it did. Unfortunately, the soil was heated in the original tests, killing any microbes, the newspaper added.

Alcohol clouds analytical thinking or so it is thought, but frees stifled ‘creative’ thoughts to well up, allowing subjects to come up with more imaginative insights or solutions.

University of Illinois psychologists set 40 healthy young men a series of brain teasers. They were given three words, such as coin, quick and spoon, and coming up with a fourth word that links the three – in this case silver, the journal of Consciousness and Cognition reports.

Half the group drank the equivalent of two pints of beer before doing the tests, while the rest carried them out sober, according to The Telegraph.

The drinking group solved nearly 40 percent more problems than the others, and took an average of 12 seconds compared to the 15.5 seconds needed by sober subjects.

The researchers said: “The current research represents the first demonstration of alcohol’s effect on creative problem solving.”

Study author Jennifer Wiley said: “The bottom line is that we think being too focused can blind you to novel possibilities, and a broader, more flexible state of attention is needed for creative solutions to emerge.”

In the first three months of 2012, 11.3 million paperbacks were sold, compared to 14.9 million during the corresponding period last year, thanks to the rise of Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader and tablets such as the iPad.

These digital books can hold up to 1,400 novels on a single device making them more convenient and lighter to carry around than a book.

A paperback weighs 300 grams on average, as compared to both the Kindle and Sony’s Reader’s weight at 170 grams. Overall, total book sales are down by around 11 percent, according to figures from industry analysts Nielsen BookScan, reported the Daily Mail.

But hardback sales have remained steady with figures of around 1.2 million.

Best-selling author G.P. Taylor said: “I believe we are seeing the death of the paperback and I would say that by 2020 it will be a little seen commodity.”

But “hardbacks will always sell. They are the ‘vinyl copies’ of the book industry,” added Taylor.

Publishing trade magazine The Bookseller estimates that one in eight adult fiction books now purchased is in a digital format.

It is predicted that downloading novels will soon become as regular as downloading music, but hardbacks are expected to remain popular in physical form because people like to collect and to keep them.

The Harry Potter franchise was launched in eBook form last week and sales topped £1 million within days. Fans spent £231-a-minute buying digital versions of the stories by JK Rowling.

Bapat is one of the associate scientists of the newly formed International Earthquake and Volcano Prediction Center (IEVPC) based in Orlando, Florida in the United States.

Asked why the IEVPC failed to predict Wednesday’s 8.6 Richter earthquake that triggered tsunami fears in Indian Ocean countries, Bapat said they did suspect an impending quake on April 5 itself.

In an email to IANS Bapat said: “We were expecting occurrence of a large magnitude earthquake in Indonesia…. We were debating it and the expected time window was about 10 to 15 days.” But it has occurred earlier, he said.

Bapat said he sensed the possible occurrence of the earthquake first on March 21 itself after having observed the satellite picture of the Total Electron Content (TEC). The TEC is the total number of electrons present between any two points in the Earth’s ionosphere and is measured as the number of electrons per square meter.

“I kept thinking,” Bapat said. “Subsequently on April 5 I had two more satellite photos of TEC. We have been monitoring the TEC every day. We get inputs from Russia.”

According to Bapat, it is known that there is a statistical association between large earthquakes and TEC anomalies as changes in the electron concentration occur a few days before earthquake. “It was found during the recent Tohoku (Fukushima) Japan earthquake that the TEC had increased very high,” Bapat said. It was about three to four times the normal electron concentration.

Similarly, Kyushu earthquake of March 20, 2005 (M = 6.6) had revealed an earthquake-associated TEC anomaly 11 days before that quake.

Bapat said that from the TEC pictures he obtained (on March 21 and April 5) “it would be seen that the area of potential earthquake epicentre had very high concentration of electrons”, suggesting that the Sumatra earthquake was imminent. However, the earthquake came before any warning could be issued.

According to Bapat, the IEVPC warned earlier this week that a major earthquake and possible tsunami will strike Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia between now and the end of June 2012.

FOR MORE READING. . .

Adam Radomsky, professor of psychology at the Concordia University, is now testing a new way to treat OCD, a debilitating behaviour that could just substantially improve the quality of life for many.

“For years, the best way to treat compulsive checking in OCD sufferers has been through a difficult therapeutic process known as exposure and response prevention, or ERP,” explains Radomsky, the journal Cognitive and Behavioural Practice reports.

“By facing their worst fears repeatedly until their anxiety declines, patients learn to diffuse their hypervigilant checking responses – in theory.”

But practically speaking this type of treatment often results in patients quickly discontinuing the therapy, according to a Concordia statement.

Radomsky’s treatment builds on previous research which found that OCD afflicted people compulsively checked certain aspects of their surroundings out of an inflated sense of perceived responsibility.

By placing emphasis on how people think rather than on what they do, Radomsky’s new approach targets people’s faulty beliefs about how responsible they think they are, about their own memories, and about the dangers that they perceive.

The progress of the proposed treatment takes the patient from exercises in normalizing inflated responsibility, through restoring confidence in memory, all the way to reducing self-doubt and guilt, hopefully leaving patients with new insights into how they perceive themselves, and the world around them.

Developed in the lab, Radomsky’s research is set to show real promise in the field. “For me and my team,” says Radomsky, “this work will capitalize on all of our previous experimental research and lead us to testing a new intervention based on our previous findings.”

The study, co-authored by Anneke Buffone of University at Buffalo and E. Alison Holman, University of California, Irvine, looked at the behaviour of subjects who have versions of receptor genes for two hormones that, in lab and close relationship research, are linked with being nice.

Previous lab studies have linked the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin to the way we treat one another, says Michel Poulin, assistant professor of psychology at Buffalo, who led the study, the journal Psychological Science reports.

In fact, they are known to make us nicer people, at least in close relationships. Oxytocin promotes maternal behaviour, for example, and in the lab, subjects exposed to the hormone demonstrate greater sociability, according to a Buffalo statement.

Of those surveyed, 711 subjects provided a sample of saliva for DNA analysis, which showed what form they had of the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.

“Specifically, study participants who found the world threatening were less likely to help others — unless they had versions of the receptor genes that are generally associated with niceness,” Poulin says..

These “nicer” versions of the genes, says Poulin, “allow you to overcome feelings of the world being threatening and help other people in spite of those fears.

“So if one of your neighbours seems really generous, caring, civic-minded kind of person, while another seems more selfish, tight-fisted and not as interested in pitching in, their DNA may help explain why one of them is nicer than the other,” Poulin concludes.

The ground-breaking research, carried out at Industrial Research Ltd (IRL), Plant & Food Research and Massey University, found that different varieties of New Zealand honey appear to trigger different immune responses.

IRL’s role was to provide its world-class expertise in the extraction, analysis, and purification of complex molecules that play an important role in biological systems, the journal Food Chemistry reports.

“We know a lot about the anti-microbial properties of manuka honey but had much less scientific information about the immune system-related effects of honey in wound healing,” says Ralf Schlothauer, chief technology officer of Comvita, which is linked with the research, according to a Massey statement.

Comvita, a New Zealand company, is the world’s largest manufacturer and marketer of Manuka honey and produces natural health products for the wound care, healthcare, personal care and functional foods markets.

“The findings suggest there could be a number of honeys to consider if you want to stimulate the immune system. Ultimately, it might mean we produce medical honey products that are specifically tailored for certain treatments or that we select a range of honeys for their particular properties to include in a specific blend,” adds Schlothauer.

Pinpointing the cause of the problem is crucial because bees, beyond producing honey, are prime pollinators of roughly one-third of the crop species, including fruits, vegetables, nuts and livestock feed such as alfalfa and clover.

“The significance of bees to agriculture cannot be underestimated,” Alex Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology, Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study, was quoted as saying in the journal Bulletin of Insectology.

“And it apparently doesn’t take much of the pesticide to affect the bees. Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment,” Alex was quoted as saying in a university statement.

Researchers led by Alex say that their study provides “convincing evidence” of the link between imidacloprid and ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.

Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses, experts estimate. Alex and co-authors hypothesized that the uptick in CCD resulted from the presence of imidacloprid, introduced in the early 1990s.

Bees can be exposed in two ways: through nectar from plants or through high-fructose corn syrup beekeepers use to feed their bees. (Since most US-grown corn has been treated with imidacloprid, it’s also found in corn syrup.)

In the summer of 2010, researchers conducted an on the spot study in Worcester County, aimed at replicating how imidacloprid may have caused the CCD outbreak.

Strikingly, it took only low levels of imidacloprid to cause hive collapse — less than what is typically used in crops or in areas where bees forage, said Alex.

Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, led by Ronald M. Evans, professor in its Gene Expression Lab, showed that two cellular switches found on the nucleus of mouse cells, known as REV-ERBa and REV-ERBß, are essential for maintaining normal sleeping and eating cycles and for metabolism of nutrients from food.

The findings describe a powerful link between circadian rhythms and metabolism and suggest a new avenue for treating disorders of both systems, including jet lag, sleep disorders, obesity and diabetes, the journal Nature reported.

“This fundamentally changes our knowledge about the workings of the circadian clock and how it orchestrates our sleep-wake cycles, when we eat and even the times our bodies metabolize nutrients,” said Evans, according to a university statement.

“Nuclear (pertaining to nucleus) receptors can be targeted with drugs, which suggests we might be able to target REV-ERBa and ß to treat disorders of sleep and metabolism,” added Evans.

Nurses, emergency personnel and others who work shifts that alter the normal 24-hour cycle of waking and sleeping are at much higher risk for a number of diseases, including metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

In mammals, the circadian timing system is orchestrated by a central clock in the brain and subsidiary clocks in most other organs. The master clock in the brain is set by light and determines the overall diurnal or nocturnal preference of an animal, including sleep-wake cycles and feeding behaviour.

However, a new technology developed by Rensselaer Institute’s nuclear engineering expert X. George Xu could help overcome this problem.

George research shows the internal organs of obese men receive 62 percent more radiation during a CT scan than those of normal weight men. For obese women, it was an increase of 59 percent, the journal Physics in Medicine & Biology reported.

George’s research team created ultra-realistic 3-D computer models of overweight and obese men and women, and used computer simulations to determine how X-rays interact with the different body types, according to a university statement.

These models, known as “phantoms”, can help empower physicians to configure and optimize CT scanning devices in such a way that minimizes how much radiation a patient receives.

“The risk associated with a radiation dose from a single CT scan is relatively small when compared with the clinical benefit of the procedure,” said George, professor of mechanical, aerospace and nuclear engineering (MANE) at Rensselaer, who led the study.

But patients are increasingly undergoing multiple CT scans and other radiation-based procedures, which can lead to unnecessary radiation risk. “Our new study brings us one step closer to minimizing radiation exposure and mitigating this risk to patients,” said George.

Currently, if technicians use normal equipment settings to perform a CT scan on an obese patient, the resulting images are blurry as the X-ray photons have to travel further and make their way through layers of fat.

As a result, technicians generally adjust the equipment to a more powerful setting, which produces a better image but exposes the obese patient to additional radiation.

Another study, also by Texas Biomedical Research Institute and their Thai collaborators has indentified a major region of the malaria parasite genome tied to artemisinin resistance, raising hope that there may soon be effective molecular markers for monitoring the spread of resistance.

Malaria killed 655,000 people or over one per minute in 2010. Malaria deaths have declined by 30 percent over the past decade, because of effective control using treatment with combination therapies containing artemisinin, a plant-derived antimalarial drug developed in China, the journal Lancet reported.

Patients infected with malaria parasites who respond poorly to treatment have been observed in Cambodia, bringing forth a coordinated World Health Organization effort to eliminate the disease in this region, said a university statement.

From 2001 until 2010, the Texas Biomed team and collaborators studied 3,202 patients in clinics in Northwestern Thailand, 500 miles from the Cambodian focus, according to the journal Lancet.

Researchers observed a dramatic decline in the drug potency over that period. Further, by measuring drug potency in patients infected with genetically identical malaria parasites, they were able to show that the decline in potency results from the spread of resistance genes.

“Spread of drug resistant malaria parasites within Southeast Asia and overspill into sub-Saharan Africa, where most malaria deaths occur, would be a public health disaster resulting in millions of deaths,” said Texas Biomed’s Standwell Nkhoma, who led the study.

“The problem we have is that treatment with artemisinin-based drugs will promote spread of resistance, but there are no viable alternative treatment options in Southeast Asia,” said Nkhoma.

“Our group wanted to understand what genetic changes have occurred in these parasites,” said Texas Biomed’s Ian Cheeseman, who led the companion study, the journal Science reported.

“This study narrows the search to a region of the parasite genome containing around 10 genes. We haven’t yet found the precise changes involved, but we are getting close,” said Cheeseman.

The Minister further said that according to the UNESCO Science Report 2010, the expenditure on R&D as percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in India is about 0.9%. Public expenditure on R&D as percentage of GDP in most countries is in the range of 0.7 – 1.0 % which is similar to the public investment in India. However, the private investment on R&D as percentage of DGP in India is 0.23 % which has not kept pace with the developed countries including China where it is 1.05%.

            During Annual Plan 2007-08, 2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 Plan Expenditure under S&T Programme is given below:

(Rs. in crore)

This information was given by the Minister of State for Chemicals and Fertilisers, Shri Srikant Kumar Jena in a written reply in the Lok Sabha

This futuristic creation is made of smart fabrics which become clear when the heart rate increases.

Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde is in talks to produce a high street version. He said: “It explores the relationship between intimacy and technology.”

The dress, called Intimacy 2.0, has been on display in London and has won design awards.

About 7.12 million Internet-capable smartphones were infected with malicious programmes in 2011, and the number has been increasing rapidly, according to the China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team.

The team found and terminated 6,249 malicious programmes last year, more than twice as many as in 2010, China Daily reported Friday.

Hackers often designed software and applications to destroy mobile phone systems to get users’ personal information, taking remote control of them and stealing bank account information or passwords, the report said.

More than 1,317 of the malicious programme were used to charge cell phone users fraudulent fees, the report said, adding that it was hackers’ source of money.

According to the report, Nokia’s Symbian and Google’s Android mobile phone systems were targeted by hackers last year. The number of malicious applications aimed at the latter continues to grow.

China Daily said that aside from mobile phones, social websites and online forums, which collect significant user information, have also become easy prey for hackers.

According to Manchester University’s Sarah Haigh, the invention could make waste water from toilets safe to drink, the Daily Mail reported.

She believes a new range of materials could extract energy from human waste.

The innovation could transform the lives of millions of people in the Third World.

The researcher says, even if the result may not be bottled mineral water but it could be the difference between life-and-death in regions without clean water.

She said: “I get a lot of comments about the research I do. I don’t mind people making jokes as long as they’re clean ones.

“There has been a lot of research into biofuels. There is a lot of energy already present in human waste. Nano-scale materials mean that you can harvest the hydrogen and turn it into hydrozene – which is basically rocket fuel.”

You can experience all these through a built-in screen in front of your eyes.

The glasses are a product of Google’s “Google X” blue-sky ideas lab – and the search giant is looking for ideas to improve them, the Daily Mail reported Thursday.

“We think technology should work for you-to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t,” says Google.

The glasses appear to run a variant of the Android operating system, using the same microphone icon and other recognisable parts of Google’s mobile OS.

The glasses layer information “over” the world, and offer directions – as well as allowing users to “locate” one another in the real world, as with Google’s current Latitude system.

“A group of us from Google X started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world,” Google said.

Various leaks had hinted that Google wanted to move into wearable computing.

However, no release date has been confirmed for the glasses – nor has Google explained exactly how the glasses work.

Far from being empty, space is made up of tonnes of dust caused in part by collisions between asteroids. It is thought that if all the material between the Sun and Jupiter were compressed, it could form a moon stretching 25 km across, Daily Mail reported Thursday.

It is believed that an accurate estimate of dust would also help in understanding how particles are transported through different layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

An international team led by John Plane of the University of Leeds is conducting the research, the Mail said.

The main sources of dust in the solar system are collisions between asteroids and material evaporating off comets as they approach the Sun. Satellite observations suggest that 100-300 tonnes of cosmic dust enter the atmosphere each day.

With the help of computer software like Photoshop, a couple’s ordinary photo can be added with wedding dresses, flowers or even a tropical island setting to create faux wedding images.

He Wen, a bride-to-be, happens to be one such individual who has opted for this service. She discovered it from friends after many an anxious moment over photography cost, reported China Daily citing Chongqing Morning News.

Instead of paying several thousand yuan for a professional photo shoot, the would-be bride has sought professional help.

She and her fiance have relied upon online websites that would manipulate ordinary cell phone snaps into faked images for their wedding photo album.

“The cost of a wedding shoot in a studio is normally 5,000 to 6,000 yuan (up to $950), but I only paid around 300 yuan (about $50) online to make my wedding photos,” she said.

In China, contrary to the West, most couples get their wedding photos taken ahead of the actual marriage day.

He Wen sent several pictures taken by cell phone to an online service provider.

“It is a surprise to see the pictures,” she said. “They are very professional, even better than studio photography,” she added.

China Daily said the website Zhubajie.com is one such online platform that offers bids of PS (Photoshop) and design services. It has signed over 8,000 orders worth 420,000 yuan ($66,580) since last year.

The room is located in Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis.

The recording studios where “Funkytown”, a 1980 disco hit song by the band Lipps Inc., and Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” were recorded are also in this building.

A typical quiet room you sleep in at night measures about 30 decibels. A normal conversation is about 60 decibels. This room has been measured at -9 decibels, the Minnesota Public Radio reported.

Orfield Labs uses the room to test products, including switches that go on car dashboards and the sound an LED display makes on a cell phone to make sure they’re not too loud.

To get into the Anechoic Chamber, which holds a Guinness World Record, you go through two bank vault-like doors. The floor in the room is mesh like a trampoline so there’s nothing on the floor for the sound to bounce off of. The walls are lined with sound-proofing wedges that are a meter long so they absorb the sound.

“When you sit in any rooms a person normally sits in, you hear the sound and all its reflections,” said Steven Orfield, president of Orfield Labs.

“When you go into an Anechoic Chamber, there are zero reflections. So if you listen to me talk and hear my voice, you’re hearing my voice exactly. And if I turn around and talk, the only thing you’ll hear is the sound bending around my head,” the Minnesota radio quoted him as saying.

The Minister said that India has vast reserves of Thorium. Total estimated reserves of monazite in India are about 10.7 million tones (containing about 0.84 million tones of thorium metal) occurring in beach and river sands in association with other heavy minerals. Out of nearly 100 deposits of the heavy minerals at present only 17 deposits containing about ~ 4 million tones of monazite have been identified as exploitable. Mineable reserves are ~70 % of identified exploitable resources. Therefore, about 2,25,000 tonnes of thorium metal is available for nuclear power program.

Stating further on the question Shri V Narayansamy revealed that the third stage of Indian nuclear power program contemplates making use of Uranium-233 to fuel Uranium-233 –Thorium based rectors, which can provide energy independence to the country for several centuries. This will avoid the dependency on coal and natural gas.

The Minister informed the members that the use of Thorium as an energy source has been contemplated during the third phase of our nuclear power program. Right from the inception of Indian nuclear power program, work has been carried on various aspects of thorium utilization-mining and extraction of thorium, fuel fabrication, irradiation in reactors, reprocessing and refabrication. In addition, studies are underway for utilization of thorium in different types of reactors.

The Minister said that as part of the preparation of the Project Report of the Human Spaceflight Program, a study has been conducted on absorbing the program into the overall plans of ISRO without de-emphasizing other commitments.

The Government is aware of the nature of the threats in Cyber Space and accordingly, an integrated approach is being followed with a series of legal, technical and administrative steps to ensure that necessary systems are in place to address the challenge. Specific steps in this regard relate to actions such as periodic scanning of cyber space, close watch on critical infrastructure networks & variety of threats and imminent attacks; training of manpower engaged in operation of critical networks to protect their systems and networks; carrying out periodic security audits on sample basis; conducting mock cyber security drills involving critical sector organisations and providing a platform for the personnel of critical sector organisations to share their experiences.

In support of this approach, the Information Technology Act 2000 has adequate provisions for protection of critical information infrastructure and cyber security incident response in the country.

Science awareness organisation, SPACE (Science Popularization Association of Communicators and Educators) will set up telescopes at India Gate Saturday evening between 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. for people to observe how the sky looks in absence of light pollution.

SPACE will also conduct the Great Indian Star Count, a programme to measure light pollution. In this programme, people across the world look at the same constellation – ‘Orion’ (The Hunter) and count the stars.

Orion is a constellation of seven main stars. But due to light pollution in big cities, some of the stars cannot be seen. The number of stars seen in different parts of the world, creates a global light pollution map.

The star count will be conducted before and during Earth Hour to point out the difference in the number of stars seen when the ambient lights are turned off.

Every year, during Earth Hour, lights at major monuments like India Gate or the Qutub Minar are turned off as a token step towards energy and environmental conservation.

“The results suggest non-invasive brain stimulation could assist people in solving tasks that appear straightforward but are inherently difficult,” said Allan Snyder, professor at the University of Sydney.

Our minds have evolved to solve certain problems effortlessly, yet we struggle to solve others that appear simple but require us to apply an unfamiliar paradigm, to ‘think outside the box,’ the journal Neuroscience Letters reported.

“As an example we have taken the famous nine dots problem, where you are asked to join all the dots with four straight lines without taking the pen off the page,” Snyder said. “Surprisingly, investigations over the last century show that almost no one can do this.”

Now the researchers have shown that more than 40 percent of the people they tested were able to solve the nine dots problem after receiving 10 minutes of safe, non-invasive brain stimulation, said a university statement.

They used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which delivers a constant, low current directly to a brain area on the right side while inhibiting its counterpart on the left, with the help of small electrodes. With its help researchers have previously reported success in amplifying insight and memory.

Snyder suggest that their unique brain stimulation protocol could ultimately enable people to “escape the tricks our minds impose on us,” and solve tasks that appear deceptively simple.

A comparative analysis of titanium from the moon, Earth and meteorites indicates the moon’s material came from Earth alone, says a new study conducted by University of Chicago researchers.

If two objects had created moon, “just like in humans, the moon would have inherited some of the material from the Earth and some of the material from the impactor, approximately half and half,” argued Nicolas Dauphas, associate professor of geophysical sciences at Chicago, study co-author.

“What we found is that the child does not look any different compared to the Earth,” Dauphas said. “It’s a child with only one parent, as far as we can tell,” added Dauphas, the journal Nature Geoscience reports.

The research team based their analysis on titanium isotopes – forms of titanium that contain only slight subatomic variations, according to a Chicago statement.

“When we look at different bodies, different asteroids, there are different isotopic signatures. It’s like their different DNAs,” Dauphas said.

“We thought that the moon had two parents, but when we look at the composition of the moon, it looks like it has only one parent,” said study co-author Junjun Zhang, researcher in geophysical sciences at Chicago.

Hydro power is obtained from the potential energy of water flowing from a height. The energy is converted into electricity by using a turbine coupled to a generator. The hydro power potential of a site is dependent on the discharge and head of water. These projects can be set up on rivers, canals or at dams. They are classified as Micro hydro (up to 100kW), Mini hydro (101-2000kW i.e. 2MW) and Small hydro (above 2MW up to 25MW).

SHP is economical and at the same time is compatible with use of water for other purposes like drinking, irrigation etc. It can also provide electricity in a decentralized manner. It gives the flexibility of installation and operation in a distributed mode. The power generation is environmentally friendly because it causes negligible or no submergence; minimal deforestation and hence reduced impact on flora, fauna and biodiversity. The standard indigenous technologies for the SHP are available and hence only minor adaptation to specific site conditions is required.

While SHP projects on rivers involve higher costs of civil works than those on canals, the cost of equipments for canal based projects is relatively higher. SHP projects generally cost between Rs.7-8.5 crore per MW. SHP projects generally have a pay-back period of 5-7 years depending upon the capacity utilization factor.

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) supports SHP development throughout the country, both in government and private sectors. Apart from providing financial subsidy to new ventures, the government provides assistance for renovation and modernization (R&M) of existing stations. The subsidy is utilized by the promoter towards repayment of the term loan availed from a financial institution. However, the subsidy is released after the project performance parameters are achieved. The equipment too used is commensurate with the standards laid down by the International Electro-technical Commission and Bureau of Indian Standards. A special incentive package has been developed for the promotion of the SHP programme in the North-Eastern states, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. A number of states have announced policies to attract private sector entrepreneurs to set up SHP projects. The State Electricity Regulatory Commissions are now determining tariffs for these projects.

Water mills also known as gharats in the northern part of the country are traditionally used for mechanical energy. The Himalayan region alone is the house for about 100,000 water mills and are used for mechanical applications like grain grinding and oil extraction. Water mills have, generally, low conversion efficiency and hence improved water mills have been developed for mechanical applications as well as electricity generation. The scheme of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy for development of water mills is being operated with the help of local organizations such as Water Mills Associations, cooperative societies, registered NGOs, local bodies and state nodal agencies. Under the scheme, subsidy up to Rs.30,000 in mechanical mode and Rs.1 lakh in electrical/ electrical plus mechanical mode. The state of Uttarakhand has the distinction of already setting up over 500 such water mills in its remote and isolated areas.

While about 3342 MW capacity has been installed in the small hydro power sector, 2025 water mills/micro hydel projects were also functional at the end of February, 2012. The small hydro power sector is expected to get further boost in the Twelfth Plan. (PIB Feature.)

“These new chips are really big for the electronics industry because they are now looking for replacements for flash memory,” said James M. Tour, from Rice Univeristy’s Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, who led the research team.

“These new memory chips have numerous advantages over the chips today that are workhorses for data storage in hundreds of millions of flash, or thumb drives, smart phones, computers and other products.

“Flash has about another six or seven years in which it can be built smaller, but then developers hit fundamental barriers,” Tour was quoted as saying in a Rice statement.

Because of the way that the new memory chips are configured, namely with two terminals per bit of information rather than the standard three terminals per bit, they are much better suited for the next revolution in electronics – 3-D memory – than flash drives.

“In order to put more memory into a smaller area, you have to stack components beyond two dimensions, which is what is currently available,” he said. “You have to go to 3-D.”

The work was done by Tour’s group in collaboration with Douglas Natelson, professor of physics and Lin Zhong, electrical and computer engineer. The main students on the project were Jun Yao and Javen Lin.

The transparency and small size of the new chips enables them to be used in a wide range of potential applications. Manufacturers could embed them in glass for see-through windshield displays for everyday driving, military and space uses so that not only is the display in the windshield, but also the memory.

These findings were presented at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

The technique hinges on a flotilla of smaller satellites simultaneously firing solar-powered lasers at an asteroid, overcoming difficulties linked with current methods relying on large unwieldy spacecraft.

Massimiliano Vasile, mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, who is heading the project, said: “The approach we are developing would involve sending small satellites, capable of flying in formation with the asteroid and firing their lasers targeting the asteroid at close range.

“The use of high power lasers in space for civil and commercial applications is in its infancy and one of the main challenges is to have high power, high efficiency and high beam quality all at the same time,” he said, according to a Strathclyde statement.

“The additional problem with asteroid deflection is that when the laser begins to break down the surface of the object, the plume of gas and debris impinges the spacecraft and contaminates the laser,” added Vasile.

“However, our lab tests have proven that the level of contamination is less than expected and the laser could continue to function for longer than anticipated,” concluded Vasile.

In 1908, a small asteroid 30 to 50 metres across exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, obliterating 2,000 sq km of vegetation. Even though the likelihood of a similar threat remains low, developing preventative measures cannot be overstressed.

Vasile added: “The Tunguska class of events is expected to occur within a period of a few centuries.” He is investigating how space-borne lasers could be used to lower the original orbit of the space debris and reduce congestion.

These findings were presented at the Planetary Society in UK

University of Michigan Health System and MIT scientists captured these contorting images in 3-D for the first time, by aiming intense beams of X-rays at crystallized forms of the protein complex and painstakingly determining the position of every atom inside.

Methyl-transfer is a reaction vital both in human cells and in a slightly different way, in the cells of bugs that consume carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, the journal Nature reports, citing a statement from the varsity and MIT.

“Without this transfer of single carbon units involving B12, and its partner B9 (otherwise known as folic acid), heart disease and birth defects might be far more common,” explained Stephen W. Ragsdale, Michigan professor of biological chemistry, who led the study.

“Similarly, the bacteria that rely on this reaction would be unable to consume carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide to stay alive – and to remove gas from our guts or our atmosphere. So it’s important on many levels,” he added.

Researchers used B12 complexes from another type of CO2-munching bugs found in the murky pond bottoms for experiments.

These 3-D images show the intricate molecular juggling needed for B12 to serve its biologically essential function. Ragsdale notes that this methyl-transfer reaction is crucial to human health.

Vitamin B12, also called cobalamine and one of the eight B vitamins, is water-soluble, playing a key role in the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system and for blood formation.

In a study of 40 videotaped conversations, an automated system that analyzed eye movements correctly identified whether subjects were lying or telling the truth 82.5 percent of the time.

That’s a better accuracy rate than expert human interrogators typically achieve in lie-detection experiments, said Ifeoma Nwogu, research assistant professor at University of Buffalo’s Centre for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS) who helped develop the system.

“What we wanted to understand was whether there are signal changes emitted by people when they are lying, and can machines detect them? The answer was yes, and yes,” said Nwogu, according to a Buffalo statement.

The automated system tracked a different trait – eye movement. The system employed a statistical technique to model how people moved their eyes in two distinct situations: during regular conversation, and while fielding a question designed to prompt a lie.

Nwogu’s colleagues included CUBS scientists Nisha Bhaskaran and Venu Govindaraju, and Buffalo communication professor Mark G. Frank, behavioural scientist whose primary area of research has been facial expressions and deception.

People whose pattern of eye movements changed between the first and second scenario were assumed to be lying, while those who maintained consistent eye movement were assumed to be telling the truth.

In other words, when the critical question was asked, a strong deviation from normal eye movement patterns suggested a lie.

The research was presented as part of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.

Backhaul technology is used in telecom and information technology sector including mobile and broad band services. It uses optical cable, radio and satellite system.

The backhaul technology using radio and satellite system, presently operates in different frequency bands such as, 6,7,11,13,15,18 & 22 GHz etc. These technologies are extensively deployed by various service providers.

This information was given in Lok Sabha today by Shri Milind Deora, the Minister of State, Communication and Information Technology in response to a question.

The Government is aware of the nature of the threats in Cyber Space and accordingly, an integrated approach is being followed with a series of legal, technical and administrative steps to ensure that necessary systems are in place to address the challenge. Specific steps in this regard relate to actions such as periodic scanning of cyber space, close watch on critical infrastructure networks & variety of threats and imminent attacks; training of manpower engaged in operation of critical networks to protect their systems and networks; carrying out periodic security audits on sample basis; conducting mock cyber security drills involving critical sector organisations and providing a platform for the personnel of critical sector organisations to share their experiences.

In support of this approach, the Information Technology Act 2000 has adequate provisions for protection of critical information infrastructure and cyber security incident response in the country.

This information was given in Lok Sabha today by Shri Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State, Communication and Information Technology in response to a question.

The research institutes of ICAR and SAUs have taken several steps to enhance their capacity to develop new varieties of different crops. All the institutes are upgraded in their infrastructure facilities particularly for biotech research, specific area of research, specific facilities have been developed for evaluation of germplasm for different traits including biotic and abiotic stresses and their seed quality research has been strengthened. Besides this, the major emphasis is to develop the hybrids particularly in rice and pigeonpea.

This information was given by Shri Sharad Pawar, Minister of Agriculture and Food Processing Industries in written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha

The ICARUS experiment at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory has today reported a new measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso. The ICARUS measurement, using last year’s short pulsed beam from CERN, indicates that the neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light on their journey between the two laboratories. This is at odds with the initial measurement reported by OPERA last September.

“The evidence is beginning to point towards the OPERA result being an artefact of the measurement,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci, “but it’s important to be rigorous, and the Gran Sasso experiments, BOREXINO, ICARUS, LVD and OPERA will be making new measurements with pulsed beams from CERN in May to give us the final verdict. In addition, cross-checks are underway at Gran Sasso to compare the timings of cosmic ray particles between the two experiments, OPERA and LVD. Whatever the result, the OPERA experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny, and inviting independent measurements. This is how science works.” 

The ICARUS experiment has independent timing from OPERA and measured seven neutrinos in the beam from CERN last year. These all arrived in a time consistent with the speed of light.

“The ICARUS experiment has provided an important cross check of the anomalous result reports from OPERA last year,” said Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Prize winner and spokesperson of the ICARUS experiment. ”ICARUS measures the neutrino’s velocity to be no faster than the speed of light. These are difficult and sensitive measurements to make and they underline the importance of the scientific process. The ICARUS Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber is a novel detector which allows an accurate reconstruction of the neutrino interactions comparable with the old bubble chambers with fully electronics acquisition systems. The fast associated scintillation pulse provides the precise  timing of each event, and has been exploited for the neutrino time-of-flight measurement. This technique is now recognized world wide as the most appropriate for future large volume neutrino detectors”.

The partnership is working to establish a sustainable European cloud computing infrastructure, supported by industrial partners, which will provide stable computing capacities and services that elastically meet demand.

This pan-European partnership across academia and industry is in line with the Digital Agenda of the European Commission and will foster innovation for science and create new commercial markets.

During a two-year pilot phase, Helix Nebula will be deployed and tested based on three flagship projects proposed by CERN, EMBL and ESA: to accelerate the search for the elusive Higgs particle, to boost large-scale genomic analyses in biomedical research, and support research into natural disasters.

First, CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, will have access to more computing power to process data from the international ATLAS experiment at its Large Hadron Collider accelerator.

“CERN’s computing capacity needs to keep-up with the enormous amount of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider and we see Helix Nebula- the Science Cloud as a great way of working with industry to meet this challenge,” said Frédéric Hemmer, head of CERN’s IT department.

Second, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is setting up a new service to simplify the analysis of large genomes, such as those from mammals, allowing a deeper insight into evolution and biodiversity across a range of organisms.

“The quantities of genomic sequence data are vast and the needs for high performance computing infrastructures and bioinformatics expertise to analyse these data pose a challenge for many laboratories. EMBL’s novel cloud-based whole-genome-assembly and annotation pipeline involves expertise from the Genomics Core facility in Germany, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Instituteand EMBL Heidelberg’s IT Services. It will allow scientists, at EMBL and around the world, to overcome these hurdles and provide the right infrastructure on demand,” said Rupert Lueck, head of IT services at EMBL.

Third, the European Space Agency (ESA), in partnership with the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is collaborating with the National Research Council (CNR)in Italy, to create an Earth observation platform focusing on earthquake and volcano research.

This undertaking is done in the framework of the Group on Earth Observations(GEO), a voluntary partnership of governments and international organisations. Volker Liebig, ESA Director for Earth observation programmes, said, “Helix Nebula- the Science Cloud is a partnership with the potential to support an utmost exploitation of ESA satellite data, as well as to bring other communities on board to better understand the geophysical phenomena of our planet.”

The commercial partners are Atos, Capgemini, CloudSigma, Interoute, Logica,Orange Business Services, SAP, SixSq, Telefonica, Terradue, Thales, The Server Labs and T-Systems, along with the Cloud Security Alliance, the OpenNebula Project and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI.eu). They are working together to establish a federated and secure high-performance computing cloud platform.

More scientific organisations and service providers are welcome to join Helix Nebula- the Science Cloud. For more details and updates about Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud, please visit us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or send an email to contact@helix-nebula.eu.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can probe the internal structure of the antihydrogen atom,” said ALPHA collaboration spokesman, Jeffrey Hangst, “and we’re very excited about that. We now know that it’s possible to design experiments to make detailed measurements of antiatoms.”

Today, we live in a Universe that appears to be made entirely of matter, yet at the Big Bang, matter and antimatter would have existed in equal amounts. The mystery is that all the antimatter seams to have gone, leading to the conclusion that nature must have a slight preference for matter over antimatter. If antihydrogen atoms can be studied in detail, as ALPHA’s latest result suggests, they may provide a powerful tool for investigating this preference.

Hydrogen atoms consist of an electron orbiting a nucleus. By firing light at them the atoms can be excited, with the electrons jumping to higher orbits, and eventually relaxing back to their so-called ground state by emitting light. The frequency distribution of the light emitted forms a very precisely measured spectrum that, in the matter world, is unique to hydrogen. Basic principles of physics say that antihydrogen should have an identical spectrum to hydrogen, and measuring this spectrum is the ultimate goal of the ALPHA collaboration.

“Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and we understand its structure extremely well,” said Hangst. “Now we can finally begin to coax the truth out of antihydrogen. Are they different?  We can confidently say that time will tell.”

In the paper published today, ALPHA reports the first, albeit modest, measurement of the antihydrogen spectrum. In the ALPHA apparatus, antihydrogen atoms are trapped by a sophisticated arrangement of magnetic fields acting on the magnetic orientation of the antihydrogen atoms. By shining microwaves with a precisely tuned frequency on the antihydrogen atoms, the collaboration flips the antiatoms’ magnetic orientation, thereby liberating antihydrogen from the trap. When this happens, the antihydrogen meets ordinary matter and annihilates, leaving a characteristic pattern in particle detectors surrounding the trap. This measurement shows that it is possible to set up experiments in which the internal properties of antihydrogen atoms can be changed by shining microwaves on them. In the near future, ALPHA will work at improving the precision of the microwave measurements, and undertake complementary measurements of the antihydrogen spectrum using lasers.

Leslie Citrome, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences and Amy Weiss-Citrome from New York Medical College, analysed the latest clinical evidence on duloxetine, an antidepressant approved by the FDA for use in chronic musculoskeletal pain, including osteoarthritis.

“It is not uncommon to treat osteoarthritis with a combination of drugs that work in different ways,” explained Citrome, the International Journal of Clinical Practice reported.

“Our review supports this approach and confirms that antidepressants are not just for depression and can play a key role in relieving this painful condition,” Citrome adds, according to a university statement.

The authors looked at studies exploring the effects of duloxetine being used on its own or in combination with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

NSAIDs are used to treat inflammation, mild to moderate pain, and fever. Specific uses include the treatment of headaches, arthritis, sports injuries, and menstrual cramps.

These included the two randomised double-blind, placebo controlled clinical trials that formed the basis of FDA approval for duloxetine for the treatment of chronic pain linked with osteoarthritis.

When the side-effects of the various drugs were taken into account, this showed that when duloxetine was used on its own for 13 weeks it provided a number of advantages over NSAIDs, which can lead to gastrointestinal bleeding, and opiates (pain killers) such as morphine, which can cause constipation.

The most common side effects of duloxetine – nausea, fatigue and constipation – were small when compared to the placebo. The studies used to gain FDA approval also showed that pain reduction using duloxetine on its own was not dependent on an improvement in depressive symptoms.

The sense of smell is an essential tool to detect, locate and identify predators in the animal world. The mere presence of predator odours can evoke potent fear and anxiety responses among different species. Smells also evoke powerful emotional responses in humans.

Elizabeth Krusemark and Wen Li from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hypothesized that in humans, detection of a particular bad smell may signal presence of a noxious airborne substance, or a decaying object that carries disease, the journal Chemosensory Perception reported.

They exposed a group of young adult participants to three types of odours: neutral pure odour, neutral odour mixture, and negative odour mixture. They asked them to detect the presence or absence of an odour in an MRI scanner.

During scanning, the researchers also measured the skin’s ability to conduct electricity (a measure of arousal level) and monitored the subjects’ breathing patterns, according to a university statement.

They found that as anxiety levels rose, so did the subjects’ ability to discriminate negative odours accurately – suggesting a ‘remarkable’ olfactory acuity to threat in anxious subjects. The skin tests showed that anxiety also heightened emotional arousal to smell-induced threats.

The authors uncovered amplified communication between the sensory and emotional areas of the brain in response to negative odours, particularly in anxiety. This increased connectivity could be responsible for the heightened arousal to threats.

Krusemark and Li concluded: “This enhanced sensory-emotional coupling could serve as a critical mechanism to arouse adequate physiological alertness to potential insults.”

The gas is crucial for scientists because it’s used to cool atoms to -270C to stop them vibrating, which makes investigating their nature far more straightforward.

It’s also widely used in medical scanners and exotic machines such as the Large Hadron Collider.

Last week researcher Oleg Kirichek had to postpone an experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot when helium stocks ran out, Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

He was hoping to study the structure of matter, but had to wait three days to run tests – at a huge cost – while helium was found.

Now, its scarcity is causing alarm bells in the scientific community.

“We wasted 90,000 pounds because we couldn’t get any helium. Yet we put the stuff into party balloons and let them float off into the upper atmosphere, or we use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It makes me really angry,” Kirichek told The Guardian.

Although helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe, Earth only has a limited supply – and the US National Research Council believes that we will run out of the gas in less than 30 years.

Although sinus infections are the fifth leading reason for antibiotics prescriptions, 90 to 98 percent of cases are caused by viruses, which are not affected by antibiotics. Nearly one in seven people are diagnosed with a sinus infection each year.

The guidelines – the first developed by IDSA on this topic – provide specific characteristics of the illness to help doctors distinguish between viral and bacterial sinus infections.

Most sinus infections develop during or after a cold or other upper respiratory infection, but other factors such as allergens and environmental irritants may play a role, the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases reported.

Used inappropriately, antibiotics foster the development of drug-resistant superbugs, said university statement.

“There is no simple test that will easily and quickly determine whether a sinus infection is viral or bacterial, so many physicians prescribe antibiotics ‘just in case,’” said Anthony W. Chow, professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who led the study.

“However, if the infection turns out to be viral – as most are – the antibiotics won’t help and in fact can cause harm by increasing antibiotic resistance, exposing patients to drug side effects unnecessarily and adding costs,” said Chow.

The guidelines recommend treating bacterial sinus infections with amoxicillin -clavulanate versus the current standard, amoxicillin. The addition of clavulanate helps to overcome antibiotic resistance by inhibiting an enzyme that breaks down the antibiotic.

The guidelines also recommend against using other commonly used antibiotics, including azithromycin, clarithromycin and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, due to increasing drug resistance.

The recommendation to use amoxicillin-clavulanate instead of amoxicillin is a major shift from older guidelines developed by other organizations.

Astronomers from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Finland discovered the rectangular shaped galaxy within a group of 250 galaxies some 70 million light years away.

“In the universe around us, most galaxies exist in one of three forms: spheroidal, disc-like or lumpy and irregular in appearance,” said Alister Graham, associate professor of astrophysics from Swinburne University of Technology, The Astrophysical Journal reported.

He said the rare rectangular-shaped galaxy was a very unusual object. “It’s one of those things that just makes you smile because it shouldn’t exist, or rather you don’t expect it to exist.”

“It’s a little like the precarious Leaning Tower of Pisa or the discovery of some exotic new species which at first glance appears to defy the laws of nature,” added Graham, according to a university statement.

The unusually shaped galaxy was detected in a wide field-of-view image taken with the Japanese Subaru Telescope for an unrelated programme by Swinburne astrophysicist Lee Spitler.

The astronomers suspect it is unlikely that this galaxy is shaped like a cube. Instead, they believe that it may resemble an inflated disc seen side on, like a short cylinder.

Support for this scenario comes from observations with the giant Keck Telescope in Hawaii, which revealed a rapidly spinning, thin disc with a side on orientation lurking at the centre of the galaxy.

The outermost measured edge of this galactic disc is rotating at a speed in excess of 100,000 kmph.

“One possibility is that the galaxy may have formed out of the collision of two spiral galaxies,” said Duncan Forbes, study co-author and Swinburne professor.

Rural Development Minister Nitish Mishra said Bihar will be the first state to employ such technology.

Mishra told IANS that the census will be a paperless exercise as it will be done on hand-held electronic devices developed by the Bharat Electronic Development Corp.

It will drastically reduce data entry errors and enumerator discretion.

The caste census is being conducted after eight decades. In the general census undertaken every 10 years, only religious groups as well as Dalits and tribals are counted.

Such noise may be harmful to some plants because of the long-term impact it has on animals that pollinate flowers and disperse seeds.

Scientists made the findings in tests near the noisy gas wells of New Mexico, which have compressors running 24 hours a day, The Independent reported Wednesday.

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, probed the noise preferences of different animals that feed on the seeds of the pinon pine tree.

It found that certain species, such as western scrub jays, tended to avoid noise, while other seed-eaters, such as mice, appeared to prefer foraging in noisy areas.

This difference in noise tolerance would affect the likely germination of pinon seeds because the natural instinct of jays is to hide many of the seeds they collect by burying them, the newspaper quoted Clinton Francis, lead researcher at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre in North Carolina, as saying.

Tests were carried out on tissue from the scalps of a group of men with male pattern baldness, known as androgenic alopecia (AGA).

The results showed bald areas had levels of the protein PGD2 three times higher than hairy areas, the journal Science Translational Medicine reports.

There are already 10 drugs available that can block the receptor that allowed PGD2 to work, which could help researchers develop a treatment in the form of a cream or ointment, according to the Telegraph.

George Cotsarelis, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study, said: “Our findings should lead directly to new treatments for the most common cause of hair loss in men, AGA.

“The potential for developing these compounds into topical formulations for treating AGA should elicit great interest moving forward.”

NPCIL chairman and managing director S.K. Jain also heartily welcomed the Tamil Nadu cabinet’s decision Monday to take all steps in support of the two 1,000 MW reactors being set up at Kudankulam in Tirunelveli, around 650 km from here.

“We are very happy at the Tamil Nadu government’s decision. We want to thank the honourable chief minister (J. Jayalalithaa) for guiding us,” Jain told IANS over phone from Mumbai.

Queried about the time that NPCIL would need to start the plant, he said: “It is expected to take around two months to complete the works so that the reactor is ready for the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) to consider and decide on loading of the fuel.”

According to Jain, all the reports needed by AERB relating to the first unit and the fuel loading are ready.

“When the work at the plant got stopped due to the protests, only two/three weeks’ work was remaining for the fuel to be loaded into the reactor,” he said.

Jain said NPCIL would also move people from its other stations to restart the work at the KNPP’s first unit.

“In three to four days additional workforce would reach Kudankulam. It will take sometime for the contractors to mobilise their workforce. Due to the protests, the workforce of the contractors had left Kudankulam,” he said.

Meanwhile employees of KNPP numbering around 500 have entered the project site after a gap of nearly six months.

“We are going to office now,” an official told IANS with enthusiasm bubbling in his voice.

Last year the state government had asked the central government to stop all work at KNPP till the fears of the local people about the nuclear plant are allayed.

Villagers feared for their lives and safety in case of any nuclear accident and the long-term impact the nuclear plant would have on the population.

Their agitation had put a stop to the project work, thereby delaying the commissioning of the first unit by several months.

“The varying edges, or keels, not only enabled T.rex’s very strong teeth to cut through flesh and bone, the placement and angle of the teeth also directed food into its mouth,” said Miriam Reichel, paleontologist at University of Alberta.

Reichel analyzed the teeth of the entire tyrannosaurid family and found T.rex had the greatest variation in tooth structure, the Canadian Journal of Earth Science reported.

The dental specialization was a great benefit for a dinosaur whose preoccupation was ripping other dinosaurs apart, according to a university statement.

Reichel’s research shows that the T.rex’s front teeth gripped and pulled, while the teeth along the side of the jaw punctured and tore flesh. The teeth at the back of the mouth did double duty: not only could they slice and dice chunks of prey, they forced food to the back of the throat.

Reichel says her findings add strength to the classification of tyrannosaurids as heterodont animals, which are animals with teeth adapted for different functions depending on their position in the mouth.

One surprising aspect of T.rex teeth, common to all tyrannosaurid’s, is that they weren’t sharp and dagger-like. “They were fairly dull and wide, almost like bananas,” said Reichel.

“If the teeth were flat, knife-like and sharp, they could have snapped if the prey struggled violently when T.rex’s jaws first clamped down,” Reichel concluded.

Researchers, from the University of British Columbia, have discovered five tell-tale muscle groups that control facial expressions and activate differently when we are trying to deceive, the Daily Mail reported.

Psychologists based their study on over 23,000 frames of television footage from 52 people emotionally pleading to the public for the return of a missing relative — half of whom were eventually convicted of murdering that person.

The paper — Darwin the Detective: Observable Facial Muscle Contractions Reveal Emotional High-Stakes Lies — looked for emotional leakage. It observed particularly via those facial muscles which are harder to control, especially during stressful events or when high concentration is needed to maintain a lie.

Specifically, the “grief” muscles, the corrugator supercilli — located around the eyebrow — and depressor anguli oris — between the chin and corner of the lips – were more often contracted in the faces of genuine pleaders.

Researchers found subtle contraction of the zygomatic major — which runs from cheekbone to the mouth — activated during masking smiles, and full contraction of the frontalis – the brow — which flexed during failed attempts to appear sad, “were more commonly identified in the faces of deceptive pleaders”.

“During the critical lie, told by each deceptive murderer, upper face surprise and lower face happiness were likely to be expressed, attributed to the failed attempt to appear sad and leakage of happiness,” the study found.

Greg Erickson’s lab at the Florida State University, conducting these measurements, estimates that the largest extinct crocodilians, 35 to 40-foot animals, bit at forces as high as 23,100 pounds.

“If you can bench-press a pickup truck, then you can escape a croc’s jaws,” Erickson warned, of the kind of force these crocs exerted. “It is a one-way street between the teeth and stomach of a large croc.”

Erickson, biology professor, and his Florida counterparts Scott Steppan, Brain Inouye and graduate student Paul Gignac, looked at how hard alligators and crocodiles bite, the journal Public library of Science ONE reported.

The current study, funded by the National Geographic Society and Florida State, took place in both the US and Australia, according to a university statement.

The team roped 83 adult alligators and crocodiles, strapped them down, placed a bite-force device between their back teeth and recorded the bite force.

Erickson and his team have a new understanding on how these animals became so successful and a better understanding about the remarkable biology of living crocodiles and alligators. They’ve also developed new methods for testing bite forces.

The study’s findings are so unique that Erickson’s team has been contacted by editors at the Guinness Book of World Records about the data.

Eight mutations occurred in the common bacteria Staphylococcus aureus as it turned from an innocuous resident inside one person’s nose into a fatal blood infection, an Oxford University study has found.

The study, which sequenced the complete DNA of the bacteria at regular time intervals, was able to identify for the first time the genetic changes that accompanied the transition to a dangerous infection.

Understanding the biological causes of serious bacterial infections could help guide screening in hospitals, and could inform efforts to develop vaccines against such infections.

The study is published in the journal PNAS and was carried out in partnership with Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust through the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.

‘We have observed a significant genetic change in the bacteria corresponding with the development of a fatal blood infection,’ said Dr Bernadette Young of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at Oxford University, one of the lead researchers.

`It is one case study – we simply don’t know how much these results will be mirrored in others. But it could be a step towards identifying genetic changes that may be important in driving infection generally.’

S. aureus is common, with one in four people carrying it inside the nose without any symptoms. Occasionally S. aureus can cause serious invasive infections, such as blood poisoning. Blood poisoning can develop as a complication of a skin infection, or via medical equipment that goes inside the body such as a feeding tube or catheter. But sometimes it appears to occur spontaneously, and it is thought that this can happen when nasal bacteria change in some way to allow invasive disease.

The Oxford researchers set out to understand more about the carriage of S. aureus inside the nose. They enrolled over 1,100 adults at GP practices in Oxfordshire and carried out nasal swabs. 360 people were found to carry S. aureus, who were then monitored with regular nasal swabs.
However, one elderly participant became ill a number of months into the study. The participant developed a serious condition requiring treatment, but soon after became unwell with blood poisoning and later passed away.

Complete DNA sequencing of the bacteria from the patient’s blood showed just a handful of changes from the bacteria in nose swabs before the patient became ill. It was the same bug causing infection that had been carried in the nose. But the few DNA changes may have been significant.

Eight new mutations were detected in the bacterial DNA from the patient’s blood. Four of the mutations cut genes short and are likely to have impaired the functions of bacterial proteins. One of these was in a protein that regulates stress response and virulence in S. aureus and could conceivably be connected to a biological change leading to infection.

The researchers also sequenced the DNA of bacteria from two other people that didn’t develop infections over the course of the study. No similar patterns of DNA change were seen.

Professor Derrick Crook of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at Oxford University, and one of the principal investigators, said: ‘Sequencing the whole bacterial genome was crucial to detecting these small changes in the DNA code. The genetic variation between bacterial samples was at much too low a level to be detected by conventional means.

‘As DNA sequencing technology continues to get quicker and cheaper, this does point to a role for this technology in monitoring clinical samples for bacterial infections.’

The researchers say that there should now be clinical trials in humans to see if fumarate, which comes in the form of simple pills to swallow, can reduce injury to the heart in a range of conditions. Fumarate is already known to be safe and well-tolerated from clinical trials in multiple sclerosis and psoriasis.

The team is now beginning planning for a trial of fumarate in patients undergoing heart surgery.

The Oxford University researchers – along with colleagues from the University of Birmingham, the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, the National Hospital of Neurology in London, Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark and the National Institutes of Health in the USA – investigated whether increasing levels of fumarate in mice was protective for the heart.

They showed that fumarate greatly reduces the amount of heart tissue damage occurring in a mouse model of a heart attack.

The amount of dead heart tissue after the heart attack as a proportion of the whole heart volume was 9.3% in mice given fumarate compared with 36.9% in untreated mice.

‘We have shown that heart attack size in mice can be reduced substantially by boosting their fumarate levels,’ says Dr Houman Ashrafian of Oxford University, who led the study.

The findings of the study are published in the journal Cell Metabolism. The research was funded predominantly by the British Heart Foundation.

Coronary heart disease is still the biggest killer in the UK. It occurs when blocked arteries reduce the blood flow to the heart. The lack of oxygen reaching the heart muscle results in tissue damage.

A heart attack is caused by a sudden block in the blood flow and rapid treatment is needed to remove the blood clot and re-open the artery. Despite modern treatments contributing to a reduction in death rates, there are still many patients that sustain significant heart damage.

There is a need for additional treatments that can help protect the heart – not just in heart attacks but also in patients with a range of conditions whose hearts may be exposed to other causes of injury. This could include patients undergoing high-risk surgery and also some cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy that may be at increased risk.

Fumarate is a simple chemical compound or metabolite that forms part of the normal metabolic pathway the body uses to break down food and release energy – the process known as the citric acid or Krebs cycle.

But metabolites can also have roles in biological pathways that control the responses of cells to stress, such as low oxygen.

For example, increased levels of fumarate have been implicated in allowing some cancer cells to thrive in the low oxygen levels that surround them.

Some seals that can dive to great depths under the Antarctic where there is little oxygen appear to activate similar biological pathways that employ fumarate.

These lines of evidence led the Oxford University researchers to become interested in whether there was any role of fumarate in heart cells’ response to stress, and whether fumarate could be protective against low oxygen levels.

As well as showing the reduction in heart attack size in mice, the researchers also identified the biological pathways triggered by increased levels of fumarate which appeared to result in the extra protection for the heart.

‘The advantages of fumarate are that it would present a relatively safe, cheap drug that wouldn’t need to be given for very long,’ says Dr Ashrafian. ‘It could be used upfront to protect the heart ahead of surgery or other predictable insults. Potentially it may also be beneficial in heart attacks in addition to standard treatments.

‘But let’s be clear: it’s great to show we can reduce heart attack damage in mice. It’s another thing altogether to show that fumarate is protective in humans. But it is now ready to test in clinical trials.’

Speaking at the public lecture, entitled ‘The 21st Century – the last century of youth?’, Professor Harper, Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, will refer to UN estimates showing the proportion of children per population in most countries is likely to fall to 15% or below by the end of this century. It could even dip to that level by 2050 in some countries, she says. Meanwhile, she will outline how life expectancy is now increasing rapidly in the more developed world, and catching up in the emerging economies, due to improvements in public health and medical advances. Demographers who have attempted to build assumptions about future scientific and medical advances into their forecasts say the number of centenarians may reach almost one million in the UK alone by the end of the century.

Professor Harper will say there has been a marked increase in the use of expensive new drug therapies which have helped us to live longer, and this trend is likely to increase. However, she warns that pharmaceutical advances should not replace public education programmes on healthy living: ‘I think we may be entering a world where preventable chronic disease will not be prevented by public health measures tackling lifestyles, but increasingly by drug therapies which will control and reduce symptoms of chronic disease.

‘We have to ask if we wish our future to be one where individuals at increasingly younger ages pop pills rather than eat healthily, stop smoking, reduce alcohol, and take up exercise. Do we want 10-year-olds popping statins?’

Drawing on their database of nearly two million occupational pension records, researchers at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing have found that healthy lifestyles have contributed as much to raising life expectancies as high incomes. Professor Harper says that 65 year-old-men retiring in ill health who had a low income and an unhealthy lifestyle could expect to live another 11 years, but 65-year-olds with healthy lifestyles added an extra four years to their lives, regardless of income.

On the issue of global population predictions, Professor Harper says fertility rates are dropping, a phenomenon identified by demographers as ‘the decline of the two-child family’. ‘If there is one thing which demographers failed to predict last century, it is how fast the total fertility rate would fall,’ she says. She says some are warning of ‘the low fertility trap’, whereby children in low-fertility countries adapt to the childless or one-child family model, thereby causing fertility rates to decline further. Anecdotal evidence on this is already emerging from China, whose one-child policy was in place for 30 years. ‘Limited evidence is emerging that despite the fact that they are allowed two children, most Chinese people are choosing to have just one child themselves because this is their own experience,’ says Professor Harper.

She will conclude: ‘The message is I think clear– the 21st Century is unlikely to be the last century of where youth exists, but it is also unlikely that we will see a return to population structures dominated by young people. In that sense it will be the last century to see the youthful demographies which the human race has experienced to date. We are seeing unprecedented change in our population structures.’

Most cases of womb rupture happen in women who’ve had a caesarean section before.

However, the Oxford researchers found that the risks remain small even in women planning a normal birth after a previous caesarean – though they are higher than those that opt for another caesarean.

They say that there is no need to change current guidance on birth after a previous caesarean, which is that women should be able to plan the birth they feel most happy with, after discussing the risks and benefits of caesarean and vaginal birth with their doctors and midwives.

‘Womb rupture is a severe but thankfully very rare complication. We found that many of the hospital maternity units across the country don’t even see one case a year,’ says Professor Marian Knight of the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University, who led the study.

‘Among women who’ve had a previous caesarean, there is a higher risk for those planning a normal birth rather than another caesarean. But the risk remains very small, occurring in just 0.2% of such pregnancies.’

She adds: ‘Given that this figure is lower than many previous estimates, there should be no extra reason to worry. We see no reason to change current advice that women can choose how they would like to have their baby after a previous caesarean, and that in general a vaginal birth should be possible.’

The study is published in the journal PLoS Medicine and was funded by the UK charity Wellbeing of Women and a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Programme Grant.

The Oxford researchers found that womb rupture occurs in just 2 in 10,000 pregnancies in the UK – confirming that this is a rare complication. The vast majority of cases (139 out of 159) were in women who’d had previous caesarean sections.

Womb rupture is still rare among women who have had a previous caesarean section and plan to have a normal birth at 21 per 10,000 pregnancies. But this is higher than in those who elect for another caesarean section, where the incidence is 3 per 10,000 births.

Professor Knight adds: ‘Womb rupture is not the only complication that should be taken into account when planning births following a previous caesarean delivery. These findings need to be considered alongside other small risks and benefits of either vaginal or caesarean birth. This is why it should be an individual choice for women in consultation with their midwives and doctors.

‘While there may be an increase in risk of womb rupture in planning normal birth after a caesarean, electing to have another caesarean can have other associated risks. C-sections are very safe operations but there are small short-term risks of infection or blood clots, there is the often longer recovery period and there are consequences for subsequent births. For example, the more caesareans you have, the more likely hysterectomy and womb rupture becomes.’

The researchers compared outcomes for the womb rupture cases with those for a control group of 448 women giving birth after previously having had a caesarean section.

Other factors that were associated with increased risk of womb rupture were the number of previous caesarean sections the mother had had; a short time since the previous caesarean delivery; and induction of labour.

Professor Knight explains what can be taken from these findings: ‘For women who have had a caesarean section, what may be the most useful thing to know is that you will have a lower risk of womb rupture if you wait at least 12 months before conceiving again.’

She adds: ‘Obstetricians and midwives can now be aware that, although rare, inducing labour, or using oxytocin to strengthen contractions, is associated with greater risk of womb rupture. We now have a good measure of the size of that risk, enabling this information to be put into perspective when discussing birth options with women.’

Speaking Friday at the India Today Conclave, head of Google India, Rajan Anandan, claimed that despite the underdeveloped internet infrastructure in India, “3.2 percent of the GDP is due to internet”.

Anandan was speaking at a session titled ‘Who will win the web’. With him was Kirthiga Reddy, country head for Facebook. The two internet giants are in competition to dominate internet.

Hailing the consumers as the ultimate winners of the internet wars, Anandan said it was futile to argue which company would emerge the winner in an environment where “there are new players every five years”.

According to Anandan, mobile internet, video content, social networking and e-commerce were the four biggest trends in the digital world, especially in India.

“I expect mobile internet users to cross the 1 billion mark in four years, out of which 200 million will be from India.”

Earlier, Reddy showcased how Facebook, and social networking in general, was changing the way how people communicate.

“Examples such as Saavn, an online music site, and closer home, Delhi Traffic Police, that have been able to tap into the power of social networking, have grown exponentially,” she said.

Both Delhi Traffic Police and Saavn use Facebook to target and interact with people.

But how to get mobile users to cooperate? “We can ‘soft control’ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them,” said study co-author Fabian Bustamante of Northwestern University.

For example, a game might offer extra points if a player visits a certain location in the real world, or it might send a player to a certain location in a virtual scavenger hunt, according to a Northwestern statement.

To test soft control, researchers created Android games, including one called Ghost Hunter in which a player chases ghosts around his neighbourhood and “zaps” them through an augmented reality display on his phone.

In actuality, the player’s zapping motion snaps a photo of the spot where the ghost is supposedly located, said Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern.

In Ghost Hunter, researchers are able to manipulate where the ghosts are placed. Some are placed in frequently travelled areas, others are located in out-of-the-way, rarely photographed locations.

Participants were willing to travel well out of their regular paths to capture the ghosts helping researchers collect photos of Northwestern’s Charles Deering Library from numerous angles and directions – a far broader range of data than the random sampling found on Flickr.

“Playing the game seemed to be a good enough vehicle to get people to go to these places,” said John P. Rula, McCormick graduate student, who led the study.

If this technology were implemented on a larger scale, users would need to be notified that their data was being collected for research purposes, Bustamante said.

“Obviously users need to know where their data is going,” he said, “and we take every measure to protect user privacy.”

These findings were presented at the XIIIth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile).

“The varying edges, or keels, not only enabled T.rex’s very strong teeth to cut through flesh and bone, the placement and angle of the teeth also directed food into its mouth,” said Miriam Reichel, paleontologist at University of Alberta.

Reichel analyzed the teeth of the entire tyrannosaurid family and found T.rex had the greatest variation in tooth structure, the Canadian Journal of Earth Science reported.

The dental specialization was a great benefit for a dinosaur whose preoccupation was ripping other dinosaurs apart, according to a university statement.

Reichel’s research shows that the T.rex’s front teeth gripped and pulled, while the teeth along the side of the jaw punctured and tore flesh. The teeth at the back of the mouth did double duty: not only could they slice and dice chunks of prey, they forced food to the back of the throat.

Reichel says her findings add strength to the classification of tyrannosaurids as heterodont animals, which are animals with teeth adapted for different functions depending on their position in the mouth.

One surprising aspect of T.rex teeth, common to all tyrannosaurid’s, is that they weren’t sharp and dagger-like. “They were fairly dull and wide, almost like bananas,” said Reichel.

“If the teeth were flat, knife-like and sharp, they could have snapped if the prey struggled violently when T.rex’s jaws first clamped down,” Reichel concluded.

Researchers, from the University of British Columbia, have discovered five tell-tale muscle groups that control facial expressions and activate differently when we are trying to deceive, the Daily Mail reported.

Psychologists based their study on over 23,000 frames of television footage from 52 people emotionally pleading to the public for the return of a missing relative — half of whom were eventually convicted of murdering that person.

The paper — Darwin the Detective: Observable Facial Muscle Contractions Reveal Emotional High-Stakes Lies — looked for emotional leakage. It observed particularly via those facial muscles which are harder to control, especially during stressful events or when high concentration is needed to maintain a lie.

Specifically, the “grief” muscles, the corrugator supercilli — located around the eyebrow — and depressor anguli oris — between the chin and corner of the lips – were more often contracted in the faces of genuine pleaders.

Researchers found subtle contraction of the zygomatic major — which runs from cheekbone to the mouth — activated during masking smiles, and full contraction of the frontalis – the brow — which flexed during failed attempts to appear sad, “were more commonly identified in the faces of deceptive pleaders”.

“During the critical lie, told by each deceptive murderer, upper face surprise and lower face happiness were likely to be expressed, attributed to the failed attempt to appear sad and leakage of happiness,” the study found.

Frank Soong and Rick Rashid — from the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington –
created the software which can also speak in the user’s own voice, the Daily Mail reported.

The scientists hope that the software will one day allow visitors to foreign countries have conversations with other people, even though they do not speak the same language.

Soong said his breakthrough could help language students and might also work with navigational devices.

Hypothetically, it could be installed into a smart phone meaning tourists have a ready made translation device sitting in their pockets.

“We will be able to do quite a few scenario applications. For a monolingual speaker travelling in a foreign country, we’ll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output in a different language, but still in his own voice,” Soong said.

Soong and Rashid created the software with colleagues at the Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, the company’s second-largest research lab.

The device needs around one hour to get used to a person’s voice, and then works by comparing the words that have been recorded with stock models for the target language.

Well-placed sources said the union cabinet, which met Saturday, deferred a decision on the matter. It sought Solicitor General Rohinton Nariman’s views before taking a final call on the issue.

Through Article 143 of the Indian Constitution, the President can refer matters of public interest to the Supreme Court.

In this particular case, President Pratibha Patil can ask the Supreme Court if its order directing the government to auction spectrum, which is one of the natural resources, will be binding on other natural resources as well.

“The presidential reference, if decided by the cabinet, will not be against the verdict but certain sections arising out of the verdict,” the sources said.

The last time that a presidential referral was sought by the government was in 2004 over the water-sharing dispute between Punjab and Haryana.

The government has filed a petition in the apex court seeking a review of its January order on the appropriateness of the first-come-first-served policy it followed for allotting 2G spectrum in 2008.

The government has also sought relief from the Supreme Court over the four-month deadline for re-auction and said that it would take at least 400 days to complete a fresh auction.

The storm occurred on the Sun at 4.24 a.m. Wednesday.

“The magnetic field orientation needed to cause strong geomagnetic storming finally occurred overnight, so although it got off to a slow start, levels have reached what was predicted,” the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center said.

Strong geomagnetic storms can wreak havoc on satellites and have even knocked out power grids on Earth, as occurred in Quebec in 1989.

The current storm caused the European Space Agency’s Venus Express probe to temporarily malfunction shortly after the occurrence of the flare, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), but controllers say they have now restored the spacecraft to normal operation.

“The CME was the second largest in the current 11-year solar cycle and the largest so far this year,” Sergei Bogachev, a specialist at Russia’s Laboratory of Solar X-ray Astronomy told RIA Novosti.

“A G4 event occurred earlier in the cycle (last year), so this is a major event, but not a record one for the cycle,” he said.

The kp index used to measure geomagnetic activity initially rose to 5 units following the March 7 CME, based on data from ground stations.

That is considered the minimum level to qualify as a geomagnetic storm. It remained at 5 kp for about nine hours, then dropped to 4 kp only to begin rising again four hours later.

It measured more than 7 kp Friday evening in Moscow, which corresponds to a “strong” storm according to the NOAA scale.

According to scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University, the survival strategy that has served Cardinal fish so well for 50 million years could come unstuck due to rapid global warming.

“We studied how Cardinal fish has evolved over millions of years and found that these mouthbrooders haven’t changed much – their jaw cavities have become larger for keeping more young in their mouths, and their colours are different, but that’s about it,” explained David Bellwood, professor and study co-author.

“While other fishes have evolved by changing shape and broadening their diet, the mouthbrooding fishes remain simple feeders that eat mainly plankton. This can be bad news when food is scarce,” added Bellwood, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B reported.

With a lifespan of about two years, Cardinal fish breed several times a year, mostly in summer. Instead of laying thousands of eggs in a batch like other fish, they lay hundreds of slightly larger eggs, according to a university statement.

When the female releases the eggs, the male gathers them into a tight bundle which he keeps safe in his mouth for a couple of weeks until the young hatch and become free-swimming.

“These eggs occupy up to 100 percent of the oral cavity, and the dad’s mouth would expand and look like a large bubble,” said Andrew Hoey, who conducted the study.

“It’s a wonder that they can even breathe. They don’t feed, but live on stored energy, and stay sedentary in and around corals,” said Hoey.

“The females play the role of jealous wives. They stay close to the males, not to help rear the kids, but to prevent other females from swimming off with such a desirable mate. Our guess is these stay-at-home dads are very much in demand,” Hoey said.

Although the 50 million-year-old breeding technique has proved successful so far, providing large and happy families for cardinal fishes, their future is looking grim, Bellwood said.

The other problem is the increasing lack of shelter as corals around the world die from bleaching and disease: Cardinal fish are popular prey for larger predatory fish like coral trout.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Black Dog Institute have carried out the largest and most definitive study of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) and found up to half of depressed participants experienced substantial relief after the treatment.

A non-invasive form of brain stimulation, tDCS passes a weak depolarising electrical current into the front of the brain through electrodes on the scalp. Patients remain awake and alert during the procedure, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported.

“We are excited about these results. This is the largest randomised controlled trial of transcranial direct current stimulation ever undertaken and, while the results need to be replicated, they confirm previous reports of significant anti-depressant effects,” said trial leader, Colleen Loo, professor from UNSW’s School of Psychiatry.

The trial saw 64 depressed participants who had not benefited from at least two other depression treatments receive active or sham tDCS for 20 minutes every day for up to six weeks, according to a university statement.

“Most of the people who went into this trial had tried at least two other anti-depressant treatments and got nowhere. So the results are far more significant than they might initially appear – we weren’t dealing with people who were easy to treat,” Loo said.

Significantly, results after six weeks were better than at three weeks, suggesting the treatment is best applied over an extended period. Participants who improved during the trial were offered follow up weekly ‘booster’ treatments, with about 85 percent showing no relapse after three months.

“These results demonstrate that multiple tDCS sessions are safe and not associated with any adverse cognitive outcomes over time,” Professor Loo said, adding tDCS is simple and cost effective to deliver, requiring a short visit to a clinic.

The study also turned up additional unexpected physical and mental benefits, including improved attention and information processing.

“One participant with a long-standing reading problem said his reading had improved after the trial and others commented that they were able to think more clearly,” Loo said.

“Another participant with chronic neck pain reported that the pain had disappeared during the trial. We think that is because tDCS actually changes the brain’s perception of pain,” he added.

The burst of charged particles, released by the Sun and rushing towards Earth, is the biggest since August and comes as the Sun begins the most active stage of its 11-year cycle, The Telegraph reported.

The cloud of particles was expected to reach Earth around midday Thursday and last until Friday but could be followed by further bursts, experts said.

The charged particles, which will arrive at about four million miles per hour, have the potential to disrupt any magnetic, radio or radiation emissions, according to the paper.

Solar flares also raise the chance of seeing auroras or Northern Lights which could appear as far south as Britain.

Proview Technology is fighting Apple over the iPad trademark in a major legal case.

It has now called for Chinese distributors to cease selling the tablet.

Proview, which claims it owns the iPad name, filed a lawsuit against Apple’s use of the trademark in China at the Santa Clara Superior Court last month, The Telegraph reported.

It has previously tried to ban the sale of the tablet in China but to no avail.

However, in a new attempt, the nearly bankrupt Proview, has sent an open letter to China’s technology supplies and resellers – asking them to stop storing and shipping the iPad as of Thursday.

“Anybody who continues to do so will be seen as intentionally infringing rights and the company will adopt the most severe measures by taking legal action,” the letter said.

Apple’s new device, named “new iPad” and launched Wednesday, offers 3.1 million pixels, which is a higher screen resolution than an HDTV.

In a decree issued Wednesday, Khamenei gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the duty to establish the Supreme Council of Cyberspace.

According to Press TV, the council will establish a national centre for cyberspace to acquire up-to-date and thorough knowledge about the activities in cyberspace on a domestic and international scale.

The cyberspace council, headed by Ahmadinejad, would comprise high-ranking officials such as the Majlis (parliament) speaker, judiciary chief, and head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) TV.

It would also include the minister of communication and information technology, minister of culture and Islamic guidance, minister of Intelligence, chief of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and police chief.

The discussion was organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST). Participants included experts from Russia, France, Japan, the US, South Korea, Germany and Britain.

Addressing the conference, MoST Deputy Minister Le Dinh Tien said nuclear power has become an important power source worldwide, Xinhua reported.

Vietnam’s consistent viewpoint is to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, he said.

According to a master plan, Vietnam’s first nuclear plant will be launched by 2020.

In November 2009, Vietnam’s National Assembly approved a project to build two nuclear power plants in central Ninh Thuan province with a capacity of about 4,000 MW.

Vietnam has signed cooperative agreements with Russia and Japan on building these plants.

The Action Trackchair is made by Action Manufacturing in Marshall, Minnesota, and is specifically designed to go off-road, the Daily Mail reported Thursday.

It can power across mud, rocky terrain and even in water. It has a top speed of eight kilometres per hour.

The man behind the world’s toughest wheelchair, Tim Swenson, came up with the idea after his son, Jeff, was paralysed in a car accident, the Mail said.

The ability to go off-road doesn’t come cheap, though. An Action Trackchair costs $9,000 (5,700 pounds) and is currently sold in the US, Canada, Norway and Australia.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a device that, attached to a mobile phone, can detect small amounts of E. coli in liquid samples.

Outbreaks of E. coli pose a huge threat to health.

E. coli is transmitted to humans through consumption of contaminated foods, such as raw or undercooked ground meat products, raw milk and contaminated raw vegetables.

As existing detection devices are often expensive and complex, an accurate and efficient detection device could be extremely popular.

There are more than five billion mobile phones on the planet and 70 percent of these are in the developing world, the Mail said.

The burst of charged particles, released by the Sun and rushing towards Earth, is the biggest since August and comes as the Sun begins the most active stage of its 11-year cycle, The Telegraph reported.

The cloud of particles was expected to reach Earth around midday Thursday and last until Friday but could be followed by further bursts, experts said.

The charged particles, which will arrive at about four million miles per hour, have the potential to disrupt any magnetic, radio or radiation emissions, according to the paper.

Solar flares also raise the chance of seeing auroras or Northern Lights which could appear as far south as Britain.

Proview Technology is fighting Apple over the iPad trademark in a major legal case.

It has now called for Chinese distributors to cease selling the tablet.

Proview, which claims it owns the iPad name, filed a lawsuit against Apple’s use of the trademark in China at the Santa Clara Superior Court last month, The Telegraph reported.

It has previously tried to ban the sale of the tablet in China but to no avail.

However, in a new attempt, the nearly bankrupt Proview, has sent an open letter to China’s technology supplies and resellers – asking them to stop storing and shipping the iPad as of Thursday.

“Anybody who continues to do so will be seen as intentionally infringing rights and the company will adopt the most severe measures by taking legal action,” the letter said.

Apple’s new device, named “new iPad” and launched Wednesday,

“In 2012, 90 million rubles were allocated on the further modernisation of the defence ministry’s site. Part of this amount will be spent on salaries to new employees, but most of the money will be spent to develop the site’s People’s Exploit page, which contains an electronic database of soldiers and officers who perished during World War Two,” a ministry source said.

The military has already shelled out 36 million rubles (around $1.2 million) to have its online domain modernised, but the project was never completed, the Military Prosecutor General’s Office said.

The earlier update for the ministry website — that downloaded the Tetris game instead of state-of-the-art patriotic shooter games — was a likely fraud, according to military prosecutors.

The project was overpriced to begin with, and military officials did not check whether the work done was worth the money when they paid the bill to the website designer, the report said.

Prosecutors have identified no suspects but said they have opened a case on charges of large-scale fraud, punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to one million rubles.

The defence ministry has said the website was actually enhanced during the revamp, with multimedia features added and technical specs boosted.

But it avoided denying the allegations, saying only that it was cooperating with prosecutors on the matter.

The story first hit the media in January, when reports spoke of simple flash games, including Tetris, Minesweeper and Battleship that the site offered instead of modern war-themed computer games that Russian military officials have been demanding since 2010.

The four games on the ministry’s website cost around 320,000 rubles ($11,000) to produce each, while just $1 million sufficed to create a state-of-the-art massive multiplayer online game, the Izvestia daily said.

The ministry’s updated website has been endorsed with a “test version” tag ever since the revamp.

A spokesman for the developer, IT company Systematic, said it has done everything that its contract with the ministry required. He said the only problem was that the company missed the deadline, which resulted in a fine of 2.8 million rubles.

Up to 20 percent of all military spending is lost to embezzlement, Military Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said last year.

In a decree issued Wednesday, Khamenei gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the duty to establish the Supreme Council of Cyberspace.

According to Press TV, the council will establish a national centre for cyberspace to acquire up-to-date and thorough knowledge about the activities in cyberspace on a domestic and international scale.

The cyberspace council, headed by Ahmadinejad, would comprise high-ranking officials such as the Majlis (parliament) speaker, judiciary chief, and head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) TV.

It would also include the minister of communication and information technology, minister of culture and Islamic guidance, minister of Intelligence, chief of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and police chief.

Ten approved nuclear power plants will be granted permission to begin construction soon “as a comprehensive plan on nuclear safety had been submitted to the State Council,” the China Daily quoted Wang Yuqing, former director of the National Nuclear Safety Administration, as saying.

The official was addressing the plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee (CPPCC).

The central government has set a goal of China having 11.4 percent of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources by the end of 2015, as opposed to the present 8 percent.

By 2020, the country is to get 15 percent of its energy from non-fossil fuel.

College students who viewed a Facebook photo of a fellow student having fun with friends rated that person as extraverted (being concerned with the social and physical environment) — even if his profile said he was “not a big people-person”.

“Photos seem to be the primary way we make impressions of people on social networking sites,” said Brandon Van Der Heide, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, who led the study, the Journal of Communication reports.

The exception is when a photo is out of the ordinary or shows someone in a negative light. In that case, people do use profile text to help interpret what kind of person is shown in the profile, according to an Ohio statement.

“People will accept a positive photo of you as showing how you really are. But if the photo is odd or negative in any way, people want to find out more before forming an impression,” he said.

Van Der Heide conducted the study with Jonathan D’Angelo and Erin Schumaker, graduate students in communication at Ohio State University. The researchers conducted two studies.

In the study, 195 college students viewed a mock Facebook profile of a person who was supposedly a fellow student. The profile included a photo and a written “about me” statement.

The participants were asked to rate how extraverted they thought the student in the profile was, on a scale of 1 (least extraverted) to 7 (most extraverted) based on the photo and text.

The participants viewed one of four profiles: in one, both the photo (a person shown socializing with friends) and the text (“I’m happiest hanging out with a big group of friends”) suggested an extrovert.

A second profile had both a photo (a person alone on a park bench) and text (“I’m happiest curled up in my room with a good book”) that suggested an introvert.

The other two profiles were mixed, with the photo suggesting an extravert and the text an introvert, and vice versa.

The question the researchers wanted to answer was which mattered more – the photo or the text – in deciding whether the person was an extrovert or an introvert. Results showed the photo was generally most important, Van Der Heide said.