Knowledge Update | Horizon University UAE – Essential Insights

Phnom Penh, May 20 (IANS) The World Bank has approved $130 million worth of fresh loans to Cambodia following a five-year freeze sparked by the forced evictions of a Phnom Penh community.

​New York, May 21 (IANS) Just adopting a healthy lifestyle by refraining from drinking alcohol and smoking, maintaining a healthy body weight and exercising regularly can help you keep deadly cancer at bay, new research reaffirms.

About 20-40 percent of cancer cases could potentially be prevented through modifications to adopt a healthy lifestyle, the study found.

A large proportion of cancer cases and deaths can be prevented if people quit smoking, avoided heavy drinking, maintained a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 27.5, and got moderate weekly exercise for at least 150 minutes or vigorous exercise for at least 75 minutes, the study said.

The research, published online in the journal JAMA Oncology, analysed data from two study groups of White individuals to examine the associations between a "healthy lifestyle pattern" and cancer incidence and death.

Mingyang Song and Edward Giovannucci from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, conducted the study that included 89,571 women and 46,399 men.

A "healthy lifestyle pattern" was defined as never or past smoking; no or moderate drinking of alcohol -- one or less drink a day for women, two or less drinks a day for men; BMI of at least 18.5 but lower than 27.5; and weekly aerobic physical activity of at least 150 minutes moderate intensity or 75 minutes vigorous intensity.

Individuals who met all four criteria were considered low risk and everyone else was high risk, the researchers advised.

The results revealed that 16,531 women and 11,731 had a healthy lifestyle pattern (low-risk group) and the remaining 73,040 women and 34,608 men were high risk.

The researcehrs estimated that about 20 percent to 40 percent of cancer cases and about half of cancer deaths could potentially be prevented through modifications to adopt the healthy lifestyle pattern of the low-risk group.

"These findings reinforce the predominate importance of lifestyle factors in determining cancer risk. Therefore, primary prevention should remain a priority for cancer control," the authors noted.​

New York, May 24 (IANS) An international team of scientists has detected and confirmed the faintest early-universe galaxy ever -- a finding that can help explain how the "cosmic dark ages" ended.

Using the WM Keck Observatory on the summit on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the researchers detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago.

According to Tommaso Treu, professor of physics and astronomy at University of California-Los Angeles, the discovery could be a step toward unraveling one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy -- how a period known as the "cosmic dark ages" ended.

According to the Big Bang theory, the universe cooled as it expanded. As that happened, Treu said, protons captured electrons to form hydrogen atoms, which in turn made the universe opaque to radiation -- giving rise to the cosmic dark ages.

“At some point, a few hundred million years later, the first stars formed and they started to produce ultraviolet light capable of ionizing hydrogen," Treu said.

"Eventually, when there were enough stars, they might have been able to ionize all of the intergalactic hydrogen and create the universe as we see it now,” he added.

That process, called cosmic reionization, happened about 13 billion years ago but scientists have so far been unable to determine whether there were enough stars to do it or whether more exotic sources, like gas falling onto supermassive black holes, might have been responsible.
“Currently, the most likely suspect is stars within faint galaxies that are too faint to see with our telescopes without gravitational lensing magnification," Treu said.

The new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, exploits gravitational lensing to demonstrate that such galaxies exist, and is thus an important step toward solving this mystery.

Gravitational lensing was first predicted by famous theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

The effect is similar to that of an image behind a glass lens appearing distorted because of how the lens bends light.​

​New York, May 22 (IANS) A team of US scientists has created a new material, called "rewritable magnetic charge ice", that permits an unprecedented degree of control over local magnetic fields and could pave the way for new computing technologies.

​Tokyo, May 21 (IANS) Finance chiefs of the Group of Seven (G7) remained apart over the foreign exchange rate and coordinated steps to boost public spending to improve world economic growth after their two-day meeting in Sendai in northeast Japan ended on Saturday.

​Toronto, May 23 (IANS) A constantly crying baby can not only hamper your peace, it can also rattles your brain functions and alter the way you think and act to make daily decisions, a study has found.

The brain data revealed that the infant cries reduced attention to the task and triggered greater cognitive conflict processing than infant laughs.

"Parental instinct appears to be hardwired yet no one talks about how this instinct might include cognition," said David Haley from the University of Toronto.

The team looked at infant vocalisations -- in this case, audio clips of a baby laughing or crying -- and its effect on adults who completed a cognitive conflict task. 

They asked participants to rapidly identify the colour of a printed word while ignoring the meaning of the word itself. 

Brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG), which took place immediately after a two-second audio clip of an infant vocalisation. 

Cognitive conflict processing is important because it controls attention -- one of the most basic executive functions needed to complete a task or make a decision. 

A baby's cry has been shown to cause aversion in adults but it could also be creating an adaptive response, "switching on" the cognitive control parents use in effectively responding to their child's emotional needs while also addressing other demands in everyday life, Haley added in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. 

"If an infant's cry activates cognitive conflict in the brain, it could also be teaching parents how to focus their attention more selectively," he added.

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that infants occupy a privileged status in our neurobiological programming, one deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. 

But, as Haley noted, it also reveals an important adaptive cognitive function in the human brain.​

​New York, May 21 (IANS) Harvard researchers have created a new, simplified, platform for antibiotic discovery that may go a long way in solving the crisis of antibiotic resistance.

This is "a platform where we assemble eight (chemical) building blocks by a simple process to make macrolide antibiotics" without using erythromycin, the original macrolide antibiotic, and the drug upon which all others in the class have been based since the early 1950s,” the researchers said.

Erythromycin, which was discovered in a soil sample from the Philippines in 1949, has been on the market as a drug by 1953. 

"For 60 years chemists have been very, very creative, finding clever ways to 'decorate' this molecule, making changes around its periphery to produce antibiotics that are safer, more effective, and overcome the resistance bacteria have developed," said Andrew Myers, professor of chemistry at Harvard University.

"That process is semisynthesis, modifying the naturally occurring substance," Myers noted.

In contrast, the process described in the new study involves using eight industrial chemicals, or substances derived from them, and manipulating them in various combinations and then testing the products against panels of disease causing bacteria. 

This allows us to make new "new compounds in fewer steps than was previously possible," Myers explained.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

"One of the things that's quite encouraging about the data in our paper is that some of the structures we've made are active against clinical bacterial strains that are resistant to every known macrolide," Myers said. 

In fact, he added, two of the 350 compounds reported on in the paper have, in initial testing, shown efficacy against a bacterium that has become resistant to vancomycin, "which is known as the antibiotic of last resort. And if you have a bug that's resistant to vancomycin, you're in trouble," Myers added.​

New York, May 21 (IANS) Google plans to start selling its mobile phones with modular, replaceable parts - the first phone ever that the tech giant is manufacturing - by next year, according to a media report. The Project Ara team, involved in developing the product, confirmed that the modular phones would be available to consumers next year, technology website The Verge reported on Friday. The Google modular phones will work on a simple concept - once a basic model is bought all the bits can be pulled off and swapped as the consumer sees fit. For instance, if a user fancies a more powerful camera module he can buy one through Google's dedicated store and replace the existing one with it. The same can be done with other components as well including memory, battery, display panels, keyboards, sensors and scanners. "It's a system that will allow more space for modules," The Verge reported after taking a look at the prototype of the modular mobile at Google headquarters in California. "They let me try saying 'Okay Google, eject the camera module' and it straight-up worked: a tiny latch inside the phone body moved when I set the phone on the table (face down) and the module released," the report said quoting the website's executive editor Dieter Bohn. "There's still work to do here - Google needs to ship, it needs to get module partners on board, it needs to make the whole thing a little thinner and nicer looking," he added

​London, May 21 (IANS) A European company has developed a set of thin, stick-on lenses that can turn your mobile phone into a portable, digital microscope, a media report said.

The BLIPS lenses, which come in a pack for both micro and macro shots, come with reusable adhesive, and are slim enough (between 0.5 mm and 1.2 mms thick) to fit into your wallet, technology website The Verge reported on Friday. 

According to BLIPS' creators SmartMicroOptics, the lenses were developed in the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy. 

The exact amount of magnification depends on the smartphone, but with the right digital zoom it's possible to magnify images up to 100 times, the company added.

The lenses are available on Kickstarter -- an American public-benefit corporation based in New York which has built a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity.

According to SmartMicroOptics, BLIPS lenses can be used by hobbyists as well as professionals.​