Knowledge Update | Horizon University UAE – Essential Insights

New York, Jan 19 (IANS) Scarcity of food or other resources may drive some baboon males to attack and kill infants of their own kind, a study has found.

The findings showed that some baboon males vying for a chance to father their own offspring expedite matters in a gruesome way -- they kill infants sired by other males and attack pregnant females, causing them to miscarry.

The behaviour reduces their waiting time to breed with pregnant and nursing females, who otherwise would not become sexually available again for up to a year.

"In situations where males have few opportunities, they resort to violence to achieve what's necessary to survive and reproduce. When reproductive opportunities abound, this behaviour is less frequent," said lead author Matthew Zipple, graduate student at Duke University in North Carolina, US.

Shortages of fertile females were particularly common in times of food scarcity, when baboon troops distance themselves from each other and females take 15 per cent longer between successive births -- which means males who don't kill have even longer to wait.

The perpetrators are more prone to commit domestic violence when forced to move into a group with few fertile females, Zipple added.

It was also more common when the incoming male achieved high social status very quickly, when he stayed in the group for three months or more or when there were many infants and pregnant females in the group.

"It's not just who they are, it's the circumstances they find themselves in that makes the difference," Zipple said.

In addition, the researchers found that immigrant males were responsible for roughly 2 per cent of infant deaths and 6 per cent of miscarriages between 1978 and 2015. 

But when cycling females were few, the death rates more than tripled.

The findings come from a long-term study of wild baboons monitored on a near-daily basis since 1971 at Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya.

The study appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

​Mumbai, Jan 17 (IANS) By 2020, 20 per cent of organisations will use smartphones in place of traditional physical access cards globally, market research firm Gartner has predicted.

​New York, Jan 18 (IANS) Twitter has finally shut down the Vine app service, revamping it into Vine Camera that will let users shoot 6.5 seconds looping videos which can be later uploaded.

​London, Jan 18 (IANS) A month after photo-sharing app Instagram launched live video streaming in the US, the feature has now been expanded to Britain.

According to a report in Engadget, people in Britain can now swipe across into the camera and select "Live" mode.

​New York, Jan 18 (IANS) Microsoft has acquired Sweden-based company Simplygon to accelerate innovation in enabling 3D for everyone.

Developer of automatic 3D data-optimisation solutions, Simplygon was developed by Donya Labs AB, a privately-held company based in Sweden.

​Agartala, Jan 18 (IANS) The railways will launch a train for religious tourists on February 17 that will originate in Guwahati and cover shrines in West Bengal and Odisha, it was announced on Wednesday.

The Aastha Circuit Tourist Train will be jointly operated by the Northeast Frontier Railway and the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp.

It will "take travellers to a mix of popular pilgrimage destinations across the eastern part of the country at affordable rates", a railway official said.

The train will cover Gangasagar in West Bengal, Sri Swami Narayan temple, Kalighat and Birla temple in Kolkata, Jagannath temple and Konark temple in Puri district and Lingaraj temple in Bhubaneswar.

The train will run from Guwahati and will return in six nights and seven days. A round trip will cost Rs 6,161.

Beijing , Jan 17 (IANS) China on Tuesday announced more measures to attract foreign investment, promising easier access and better environment.

Foreign firms will face fewer restrictions when entering service, manufacturing and mining sectors, said a State Council document, according to Xinhua news agency.

​London, Jan 18 (IANS) British Prime Minister Theresa May said Britain was to leave the European Union's single market but would pursue ambitious new trade agreements.

During her eagerly-awaited Plan for Britain speech at Lancaster House in London on Tuesday, the Conservative leader outlined the government's 12-point program of goals they

​The relationship between gender and language had been one of the most debated topics since the beginning of women`s movement in the late 1960s. The movement that had tried to look at the representation of gender in different fields. More specifically, the concept of gender and language is always associated with the differences between women and men in terms of the way the speech is structured and the way language is used. Thus, and because of the social norms and what every society dictates on its individuals, these differences between men and women`s speech were omnipresent across a range of languages. In this article an attempt will be made to inspect some of the gender differences common in men`s and women`s speeches.

​New York, Jan 18 (IANS) Vision deterioration in astronauts is likely owing to the lack of a day-night cycle in intracranial pressure, say scientists, adding that using a vacuum device to lower pressure for part of each day might prevent the problem.

To study how zero-gravity conditions affect intracranial pressure, researchers from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre recruited volunteer patients who had had a port permanently placed in their head as part of treatment for cancer. 

The ports provided a way for researchers to measure intracranial pressure. 

NASA flights then flew the eight volunteers one by one on steep up-and-down maneuvers (parabolic flights) that created 20-second intervals of weightlessness. 

The researchers measured intracranial pressure during the zero-gravity intervals and compared these with intracranial pressure during standard times of sitting, lying face upward (supine), and lying with head inclined downward.

The findings showed that intracranial pressure in zero-gravity conditions, such as exists in space, is higher than when people are standing or sitting on Earth, but lower than when people are sleeping on Earth. 

"These challenging experiments were among the most ambitious human studies ever attempted and changed the way we think about the effect of gravity - and its absence - on pressure inside the brain," said senior author Dr Benjamin Levine, Professor of Internal Medicine.

It suggests that the constancy of pressure on the back of the eye causes the vision problems astronauts experience over time.

"The information from these studies is already leading to novel partnerships with companies to develop tools to simulate the upright posture in space while astronauts sleep, thereby normalising the circadian variability in intracranial pressure," added Dr Levine.

"The idea is that the astronauts would wear negative pressure clothing or a negative pressure device while they sleep, creating lower intracranial pressure for part of each 24 hours," noted first author Dr Justin Lawley in a paper appeared in the Journal of Physiology.