Knowledge Update

​New Delhi, June 15 (IANS) E-commerce major Flipkart on Tuesday announced the launch of laptop sale event "Lap it Up!" on its website in collaboration with Intel India. The campaign will offer latest laptop brands at some exciting prices with EMI option. “Around 50 per cent of our demand comes from tier II and III cities as a lot of the new models are not available in these cities. Our latest campaign has been designed in line with this trend to make latest laptops and technology accessible to our customers across geographies,” Adarsh K. Menon, Vice President (electronic and auto) Flipkart, said in a statement. “Our endeavour has always been to make technology affordable and accessible, especially for the first-time buyers,” added Anand Ramamoorthy, Director (consumption sales) South Asia, Intel.​

​New York, June 15 (IANS) Micro-blogging website Twitter has invested $70 million in popular music streaming service SoundCloud, a move that may push Twitter's stalled growth and engagement with its over 300 million users.

New York, June 15 (IANS) Older people struggle to remember important details because their brains cannot resist the irrelevant "stuff" they soak up subconsciously, thereby making them less confident in their memories, a study says.

Using bio-sensors to look at brain activity, the researchers saw that older participants wandered into a brief "mental time travel" when trying to recall details. 

This journey into their subconscious veered them into a cluttered space that was filled with both relevant and irrelevant information. 

This clutter led to less confidence, even when their recollections were correct, the study said.

Cluttering of the brain is one reason older people are more susceptible to manipulation, the researchers said. 

"This memory clutter that's causing low confidence could be a reason why older adults are often victims of financial scams, which typically occur when someone tries to trick them about prior conversations that didn't take place at all," said lead researcher Audrey Duarte, associate professor of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.

The findings appeared online in the journal Neuropsychologia.

For the study, the researchers showed that older adults (60 years and up) and college students a series of pictures of everyday objects while electroencephalography (EEG) sensors were connected to their heads. 

Each photo was accompanied by a colour and scene. Participants were told to focus on one and ignore the other. An hour later, they were asked if the object was new or old, and if it matched the colour and the scene.

Neither age group was very good at recalling what they were told to ignore. Both did well remembering the object and what they were supposed to focus on.

"But when we asked if they were sure, older people backed off their answers a bit. They weren't as sure," Duarte said.

The researchers noticed differences in brain activity between the young and old. Older adults' brains spent more time and effort trying to reconstruct their memories.

"While trying to remember, their brains would spend more time going back in time in an attempt to piece together what was previously seen," she said. 

"But not just what they were focused on -- some of what they were told to ignore got stuck in their minds," Duarte said.​

​Canberra, June 15 (IANS) Australia's Parkes Observatory telescope has discovered a molecule which displays key attributes associated with life, in a breakthrough set to help scientists solve the mystery of biology in space.

Chirality, or "handedness" is a key attribute related closely with life, but homochirality, or being exclusively either "left or right handed", has never been discovered outside of Earth, until the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO's) Parkes telescope found the 'handed' molecule propylene oxide.

Dr John Reynolds, Director of Operations at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, said the discovery will give scientists the chance to further research how the Universe can contribute to sustaining life, Xinhua reported.

"This discovery gives us a window into how an incredibly important type of molecule is made in space, and gives us the chance to understand the impact that process may have on life in the universe," Reynolds said in a statement on Wednesday.

Typically, many molecules exist in forms that are mirror images of each other, but molecules associated with life, such as proteins, enzymes, amino acids and sugars are found to be made up of a single handedness.

Propylene oxide is a common homochiral compound used in making polyurethane plastics, and was discovered by the radio telescope in an interstellar cloud near the center of the Milky Way.

The cloud, known as Sagittarius B2, is actively forming stars, and Reynolds said scientists would follow the developments in the region to see if the Universe divulges any further secrets about the potential of life in outer space.

"Understanding how this came about is a major puzzle in biology, " he said.​

​Washington, June 15 (IANS) For the first time, an instrument onboard an orbiting NASA spacecraft has measured the methane emissions from a single, specific leaking facility on the Earth’s surface, the US space agency has said.

The observation -- by the Hyperion spectrometer on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) -- is an important breakthrough in our ability to eventually measure and monitor emissions of this potent greenhouse gas from space.

"This is the first time the methane emissions from a single facility have been observed from space,” said one of the researchers, David Thompson from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

In a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a research team detailed the observation, which occurred over Aliso Canyon, near Porter Ranch, California. 

The Hyperion instrument successfully detected the methane leak on three separate overpasses during the winter of 2015-16. 

The research was part of an investigation of the large accidental Aliso Canyon methane release last fall and winter.

The orbital observations from Hyperion were consistent with airborne measurements made by NASA’s Airborne/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) imager flying onboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft.​

Canberra/Washington, June 15 (IANS) In a first, a team of scientists using highly sensitive radio telescopes has discovered the first complex organic “chiral” molecule in interstellar space near the centre of our galaxy.

Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality.

These so-called "handed" molecules are essential for biology and have intriguingly been found in meteorites that have hit the Earth and comets in our solar system.

The molecule, propylene oxide (CH3CHOCH2), was found in an enormous star-forming cloud of dust and gas known as Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2).

“This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life," explained Brett McGuire, Jansky post-doctoral Fellow with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Propylene oxide is among the most complex and structurally intricate molecules detected so far in space," added Brandon Carroll, chemistry graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.

Detecting this molecule opens the door for further experiments determining how and where molecular handedness emerges and why one form may be slightly more abundant than the other.

Complex organic molecules form in interstellar clouds like Sgr B2 in several ways.

The most basic pathway is through gas-phase chemistry, in which particles collide and merge to produce ever more complex molecules.

To form more complex molecules like propylene oxide, astronomers believe thin mantles of ice on dust grains help link small molecules into longer and larger structures.

These molecules can then evaporate from the surface of the grains and further react in the gas of the surrounding cloud.

To date, more than 180 smaller molecules have been detected in space.

“Meteorites in our solar system contain chiral molecules that predate the Earth itself, and chiral molecules have recently been discovered in comets," noted Carroll. "Such small bodies may be what pushed life to the handedness we see today."

"By discovering a chiral molecule in space, we finally have a way to study where and how these molecules form before they find their way into meteorites and comets, and to understand the role they play in the origins of homochirality and life," McGuire said in a paper published in the journal Science.

The research was undertaken with the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia as part of the Prebiotic Interstellar Molecular Survey. Additional supporting observations were taken with the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.​

​Beijing, June 13 (IANS) The indicators of industrial production and retail sales maintained their growth in May, while investments in fixed assets slowed down, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) on Monday.

Beijing, June 14 (IANS) Encouraging data points to stabilisation of China's economy but challenges ranging from tepid private investment to sluggish global economy suggest a strong recovery is unlikely.

​New York, June 14 (IANS) US-based technology giant Apple at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco on Monday announced revealed iOS 10.

The OS will not be available to customers until later this year. The company rolled out the developer betas on Monday and said public betas for non-developers will follow in July,

London, June 13 (IANS) A combination of text messages and individual counselling sessions help motivate patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), resulting in improved patient-reported clinical outcomes, finds a study.

"The findings support the introduction of behavioural approaches as an effective way to improve the health of rheumatoid arthritis patients which may also be applicable in other populations with chronic disease and limited mobility," said Tanja Thomsen from the Copenhagen Centre for Arthritis Research in Denmark. 

According to the researchers, RA patients tend to be more sedentary than the general population that can have serious health consequences, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and premature death. 

In the study, 75 adult RA patients underwent a 16-week intervention that included three individual motivational counselling sessions with a health professional and regular text messages aimed at improving motivation to reduce daily sitting time and replacing it with light intensity physical activity.

A control group of 75 healthy adult patients matched for other characteristics was encouraged to maintain their usual lifestyle. Daily sitting time was recorded using a wearable activity monitor.

The researchers found that after 16 weeks, there was a significant between-group difference in average daily sitting time in favour of the intervention group. 

Secondary outcomes that were also in favour of the intervention group included self-assessment scores of pain, fatigue, physical function and blood measurements of total cholesterol. 

The study was recently presented at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress 2016 in London.​