Knowledge Update

​Kathmandu, March 22 (IANS) Nepal on Tuesday officially become a Dialogue Partner of the Sanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), after signing a Memorandum of Understanding in Beijing.

​Colombo, March 22 (IANS) Internet giant Google on Tuesday announced that its popular street view feature for Sri Lanka is active and available on Google Maps.

The launch brings the total number of countries where street view is available to 76.

A new technique developed by a team of chemists at Stanford University has shown promise to be thousands of times more sensitive than current techniques to diagnose diseases -- whether it is a cancer or a virus like HIV.

Found effective in laboratory experiments, the technique, described in the journal ACS Central Science, is now being put to test in real-world clinical trials.

When a disease begins growing in the body, the immune system responds by producing antibodies.

Fishing these antibodies or related biomarkers out of the blood is one way that scientists infer the presence of a disease.

This involves designing a molecule that the biomarker will bind to, and which is adorned with an identifying "flag." Through a series of specialized chemical reactions, known as an immunoassay, researchers can isolate that flag, and the biomarker bound to it, to provide a proxy measurement of the disease.

The new technique, developed in the lab of Carolyn Bertozzi, professor of chemistry at Stanford, augments this standard procedure with powerful DNA screening technology.

In this case, the chemists replaced the standard flag with a short strand of DNA, which can then be teased out of the sample using DNA isolation technologies that are far more sensitive than those possible for traditional antibody detections.

The researchers tested their technique, with its signature DNA flag, against four commercially available tests for a biomarker for thyroid cancer.

It outperformed the sensitivity of all of them, by at least 800 times, and as much as 10,000 times.

By detecting the biomarkers of disease at lower concentrations, physicians could theoretically catch diseases far earlier in their progression.

"The thyroid cancer test has historically been a fairly challenging immunoassay, because it produces a lot of false positives and false negatives, so it wasn't clear if our test would have an advantage," said study co-author Peter Robinson.

"We suspected ours would be more sensitive, but we were pleasantly surprised by the magnitude," Robinson noted.

Based on the success of the thyroid screening, the group has won a few grants to advance the technique into clinical trials for screening other diseases including HIV.​

New York, March 20 (IANS)

​London, March 20 (IANS) A team of German scientists has found out what actually happens if we try to remember things that took place years or decades ago?

The study revealed that the neural networks involved in retrieving very old memories are quite distinct from those used to remember recent events.

"For the very first time we were able to show that the retrieval of old and recent memories are supported by distinct brain networks," said Magdalena Sauvage, professor at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.

When we remember events which occurred recently, the hippocampus -- the portion of the brain, thought to be the centre of emotion, memory, and the autonomic nervous system -- is activated, said the paper appeared in the journal eLIFE.

Hippocampus contains the cornu ammonis regions 1 and 3 (CA1 and CA3), which plays a major role in retrieving recent memories.

For the study, the team monitored brain activity in mice during the retrieval of memories that are one day to one year old - e.g. up to the mouse-equivalent of 40 human years.

For their study they applied a high-resolution molecular imaging technique, which detects the expression of a particular gene tied to plasticity processes and this way sheds light on cognitive processes.

The CA3 region, believed to be the place of memory storage in the hippocampus, no longer plays a role when we remember very old memories.

Rather, the involvement of the CA1 region persists and the cortical areas -- largest part of the brain -- adjacent to the hippocampus become involved.

The reason for the differential involvement of the hippocampal sub-regions could lie in the mechanisms supported by CA3.

In CA3, memories can be retrieved on the basis of single features of an original memory, which are used as cues. 

"Since the memory for single features degrades over time, we speculate that they might ultimately be of no more use as cues, hence retrieving memory would then essentially rely on CA1 and other processes taking place in the parahippocampal region of the brain," explained Sauvage.​

​Cape Town, March 20 (IANS) South Africans actively took part in the Earth Hour campaign by switching off lights from 8.30-9.30 p.m., saving an average of 515 mw electricity during the hour, authorities said on Sunday.

As part of its support for the Earth Hour campaign, the country's electricity utility Eskom measured the reduction in electricity used during the hour on Saturday, Xinhua reported.

"We would like to encourage people to take action beyond this one hour, and to make energy efficiency and environmental conservation part of their daily lifestyles," Eskom said.

People are encouraged to reduce their energy consumption every day by using electricity efficiently, and switching off all non-essential lights and household appliances, said the utility.

Commercial customers, particularly shopping centres and office blocks, can also make a big difference by switching off non-essential lights and not leaving office equipment such as computers in standby mode after hours, it added.

Earth Hour is an annual global event, initiated in Sydney, in 2007 to encourage people to switch off lights and unused appliances for an hour as a symbolic demonstration of their commitment to action against climate change.​

​London, March 21 (IANS) For mothers-to-be, going for an MRI of the cervix area can give more accurate results than ultrasound to predict if some women will give a preterm birth, say researchers.

Early dilation of the cervix, a neck of tissue connecting the uterus with the vagina, during pregnancy can lead to premature delivery. 

Women in their second trimester of pregnancy with a cervix measuring 15 millimeters or less, as seen on ultrasound, are considered to be at higher risk of preterm birth. 

However, ultrasound has limitations as a predictor of preterm birth, as it does not provide important information on changes in cervical tissue in the antepartum phase just before childbirth.

"A better understanding of the process of antepartum cervical remodeling, loosely divided in two distinct phases called softening and ripening, is critical to improve the diagnosis of cervical malfunction and anticipate the occurrence of birth," explained lead study author Gabriele Masselli from Sapienza University in Rome.

To learn more, researchers used an MRI technique called diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) to examine pregnant women who had been referred for suspected fetal or placental abnormality. 

DWI has been increasingly used for abdominal and pelvic diseases, but has not been tested for the evaluation of the uterine cervix in pregnant patients.

Each of the 30 pregnant women in the study, published in the Journal of Radiology, had a sonographically short cervix and a positive fetal fibronectin test between 23 and 28 weeks of gestation. 

Fetal fibronectin is a glue-like protein that helps hold the fetal sac to the uterine lining and the presence of it before week 35 of gestation may indicate a higher risk of preterm birth.

Of the 30 women, eight delivered within a week of the MRI examination. The other 22 delivered an average of 55 days later. 

The researchers analysed the difference between an MRI and ultrasound method.

"Our results suggest that MRI has emerged as a powerful imaging biomarker in evaluating patients with impending delivery," the authors stated.​

New York, March 22 (IANS) Not only genes, even jobs may run in some families, and people within a family are proportionally more likely to eventually also choose the same occupation and this is especially true of twins, a Facebook study has revealed.

New York, March 22 (IANS) Researchers from the University of Missouri have developed a method of transferring an energy source to virtually any shape - a technology that can help develop new-age smartphones and other devices.

​Hong Kong, March 21 (IANS) Even as it promotes Hong Kong as the gateway for Indian companies to the Chinese markets, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) is promoting India as an alternative manufacturing base for its industries based in China, states a research report.

​New Delhi, March 22 (IANS) Expanding its presence in the professional projectors solutions category, consumer electronics major Sony has launched five new laser and lamp projectors, an official statement said. The projectors aim to cater to professional users who require higher level of brightness and resolution, with enhanced versatility and affordability for business, academic, large venue or entertainment use, the statement added. The new products include three 3LCD laser models (VPL-FHZ65, VPL-FHZ60 and VPL-FHZ57). The new laser models deliver brightness of 6,000 lumens (VPL-FHZ65), 5,000 lumens (VPL-FHZ60) and 4,100 lumens (VPL-FHZ57). The other two are lamp models. The new laser models are designed to deliver enhanced picture quality with new features such as "reality creation" and "contrast enhancer," both technologies already in use by Sony’s home theatre projection systems for high-end consumer entertainment, the statement added. The new projectors also offer colour space adjustment and colour correction features for more accurate colour reproduction. A laser light source means there is no lamp that needs to slowly warm up or cool down, no lamp to limit tilt angle and no compromise between high brightness and high resolution. Smartly designed, the new laser models’ “quick turn on/off” requires only approximately seven seconds for the brightness to ramp up after turning on, the statement said.​