Knowledge Update

​New York, Dec 10 (IANS) A $15 prosthetic hand created by a student at Ithaca College here can offer a helping hand to a person who still has the ability to move their wrist.

By moving their wrist, they can control and use the hand's fingers to grab and hold various objects.

Unlike electronic hands, which are typically made from metal and are generally expensive, Ryan Bouricius's prosthetic hand is mostly plastic.

"The nice thing about 3D printing is that the price only has to do with the amount of plastic used, not the complexity of the piece," Bouricius said. 

Bouricius derived the idea for his innovation from a YouTube video but through testing and tinkering, he made changes to the original design to give the hand more functionality.

"So even though my modified pieces are trickier shapes, since it is the same amount of plastic, it's the same amount of money," Bouricius noted in a statement released by Ithaca College.

This is especially important for families with children who need prostheses. Because children outgrow them quickly, the costs of prostheses can be considerable over time. 

With 3D printing, however, Bouricius' model can be affordably re-printed in larger sizes as the child grows.

Bouricius is working with eNABLE, a non-profit organisation that matches 3D-printed prostheses with those in need of them, to find a recipient for his printed hand.

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Researchers in Belgium have found that 20 to 40 per cent of patients with the multiple myeloma type of leukaemia have a defect in the ribosome, the protein factory of the cell.

Multiple myeloma (MM, also known as Kahler's disease) is a blood cancer in which the plasma cells in the bone marrow start proliferating malignantly. 

The disease cannot be cured and is most common among older people. Various treatments exist to temporarily suppress the disease, but the challenge is determining to which treatment the patient will respond best.

The researchers believe that the new findings - published in the journal Leukemia - can lead to tests to identify defects in the protein factory and also determine an effective therapy. 

"The ribosome is the protein factory of a cell. In MM patients, one part of the ribosome is produced less in 20 to 40 percent of the patients, depending on how aggressive the cancer is. We suspect that their cells are still producing protein, but that the balance is somewhat disrupted," said Kim De Keersmaecker, Professor at University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. 

"On the basis of these findings, we can now develop tests to identify defects in the ribosome and thus determine which therapy will have most effect in a specific patient," she said. 

The notion that cancer is related to ribosome defects is a relatively new concept in science.

"A few years ago, we discovered defects in the ribosome of patients with acute lymphatic leukaemia. Now we know that the same applies to MM," De Keersmaecker said.

In all likelihood, this will also hold true for other types of cancer, she noted.

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Increased exposure to gaseous air pollutants such as Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Ozone (O3) can impair the function of blood vessels in the lungs and raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a study.

The findings showed that air pollution is a major public health issue for people living in polluted urban areas where exercise could damage the lungs and potentially lead to decompensated heart failure.

"Air pollution is associated with increased pulmonary vascular tone which makes it more difficult for blood to flow to the lungs. Longer exposure to air pollution exposure seems necessary to impair right ventricular systolic function," said lead author Jean-Francois Argacha, cardiologist at the University Hospital (UZ) in Brussels.

According to researchers, if air pollution causes narrowing of the blood vessels in the lungs -- vasoconstriction -- this combined with the systemic effects of air pollution, which consists of particulate matter of different sizes and gases such as nitrogen dioxide and ozone, could cause decompensated heart failure.

The study showed a negative effect of particulate matter -- PM10, PM2.5 and ozone on pulmonary circulation.

Increase in PM10 and PM2.5 over ten days were associated with worse right ventricle function.

Specifically, increases in these pollutants were associated with reduced pulmonary acceleration time and increased pulmonary acceleration slope.

The negative impact of PM10 on pulmonary circulation was more pronounced in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea.

In addition, the study showed that exposure to diesel exhaust did not modify the pulmonary circulation compared to ambient air when the volunteers were resting but did when dobutamine was administered.

"This suggests that pollution is more harmful to the lung circulation during exercise," Argacha said.

"Our main advice is to limit physical activities during heavy air pollution," Argacha suggested in the study presented at annual meeting EuroEcho-Imaging 2016 in Leipzig, Germany.

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Ever wondered why you can't simply resist that mouth-watering chicken or delicious chocolate cake made by your mother?

According to researchers, food that is perceived to have been "made with love" tastes more delicious.

The emotional perception of taste can be enhanced or diminished by the amount of time, love and care that goes into meals, which ultimately can increase people's enjoyment of food, a Britain-based food psychologist, Christy Fergusson, was quoted as saying by dailymail.co.uk.

"We set out to prove that food made with love tastes better and demonstrates how the power of intention impacts people's perception of food enjoyment," Fergusson said.

The findings revealed that 58 per cent of people enjoy food more when it has been prepared with a certain level of time and love, said research led by Birds Eye -- frozen food firm in Britain.

For the study, the team fed two groups of people with an identical Christmas dinner.

The first group ate their meal in a festively decorated room after being told the food had been lovingly prepared by a team of chefs using family-favourite recipes.

In contrast, the second group ate in conditions where little effort was made to make the participants feel welcome and the room was sparingly decorated.

The results showed that the first group believed their meal tasted better.

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Some groups killifish are up to 8,000 times more resistant than others to highly toxic industrial pollutants such as dioxins, heavy metals and hydrocarbons, thanks to their high levels of genetic variation, a study says.

"The Atlantic killifish seem particularly well-positioned to evolve the necessary adaptations to survive in radically altered habitats, because of their large population sizes and the relatively high level of DNA diversity seen in their populations," said one of the researchers John Colbourne, Professor at University of Birmingham in Britain.

The researchers wanted to explore the genetic mechanism responsible for evolutionary adaptation to toxic pollution observed in wild Atlantic killifish populations.

The Atlantic killifish is renowned for its ability to tolerate large fluctuations in temperature, salinity and oxygen levels. 

However, its rapid adaptation to the normally lethal levels of toxic pollution found in some urban estuaries in the US is unusual, even for such a hardy species.

The team analysed the genomes of four wild populations of pollution-tolerant killifish compared with four non-tolerant populations, to identify the mechanism behind this adaptation. 

"This report highlights the complexity of the processes involved in the adaptation of wild fish to lethal levels of environmental pollution," Colbourne said.

"It also demonstrates how the DNA of populations that differ in their susceptibility to pollutants can reveal 'signatures' of the adverse effects of chemicals in the environment," Colbourne noted.

The researchers warned that these findings -- published today in the journal Science -- should not be used to justify the harm caused by human pollution of the natural environment.

"Unfortunately, most species we care about preserving probably can't adapt to these rapid changes because they don't have the high levels of genetic variation that allow them to evolve quickly," lead author Andrew Whitehead, Associate Professor at University of California, Davis in the US.

​Tokyo, Dec 10 (IANS) Japan on Friday successfully launched a rocket carrying the unmanned cargo spaceship Kounotori 6 to deliver supplies for astronauts living in the International Space Station (ISS).

The H-2B rocket carrying the spaceship lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, at 10:26 p.m. local time (GMT 1326), Xinhua news agency reported.

The spaceship, sixth of its kind, carries some 5.9 tonnes of supplies, including food, drinking water and other necessities, as well as some batteries and ultrasmall satellites.

It is expected to dock with the ISS on Tuesday, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

After the supplies are unloaded to the ISS, the spaceship will then be loaded with waste materials, including used experiment equipment or used clothes and then undock.

Before re-entering the atmosphere, the Kounotori 6 will also conduct experiment on an electrodynamic tether, called the Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiment (KITE).

The launch, originally scheduled for September 2016, was postponed due to piping leakage.

Developed and built in Japan, the Kounotori spacecraft, also known as H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), has been used to deliver supplies to the space station.

The first mission of the HTV, or Kounotori 1, was launched in 2009.

New York, Dec 9 (IANS) Global open source solution provider Red Hat on Friday launched its "OpenShift Dedicated" solution -- a cloud-based service targeting enterprise IT and development teams -- on the Google Cloud Platform.

Beijing, Dec 9 (IANS) China's consumer price index, a main gauge of inflation, grew 2.3 per cent year on year in November, up from October's 2.1 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Friday.

Toronto, Dec 9 (IANS) Canadian mobile company BlackBerry on Friday launched a Cloud-enabled mobile security platform for "Enterprise of Things" that will address entire businesses from endpoint to endpoint. "Enterprise of Things" is defined as the network of intelligent connections and endpoints within the enterprise that enable products to move from sketch to scale. It is a collection of devices, computers, sensors, trackers, equipment and other things that communicate with each other to enable smart product development, distribution, marketing and sales. "Businesses must be able to confidentially and reliably transmit sensitive data between endpoints to keep people, information and goods safe," John Chen, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, BlackBerry, said in a statement. The platform completes the integration of the BlackBerry's prior acquisitions of key technologies such as Good Technology, WatchDox, AtHoc and Encription, the company said.

​Toronto, Dec 9 (IANS) Smallpox, a pathogen that caused millions of deaths worldwide, may not be an ancient disease but a much more modern killer that went on to become the first human disease eradicated by vaccination, suggests genetic research.

Smallpox, one of the most devastating viral diseases ever to strike humankind, had long been thought to have appeared in human populations thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, India and China, with some historical accounts suggesting that Pharaoh Ramses V - who died in 1145 BC -- suffered from smallpox.

The new findings, published in the journal Current Biology, fuel a longstanding debate over when the virus that causes smallpox, variola, first emerged and later evolved in response to inoculation and vaccination.

"This study sets the clock of smallpox evolution to a much more recent time-scale" said Eddie Holmes, Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia.

In an attempt to better understand its evolutionary history, and after obtaining clearance from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the team of scientists extracted the heavily fragmented DNA from the partially mummified remains of a Lithuanian child.

The child is believed to have died between 1643 A.D. and 1665 A.D., a period in which several smallpox outbreaks were documented throughout Europe with increasing levels of mortality. 

The smallpox DNA was captured, sequenced and the ancient genome, one of the oldest viral genomes to date, was completely reconstructed. 

Researchers compared and contrasted the 17th century strain with those from a modern databank of samples dating from 1940 up to its eradication in 1977. 

Strikingly, the research showed that the evolution of smallpox virus occurred far more recently than previously thought, with all the available strains of the virus having an ancestor no older than 1580.

"So now that we have a timeline, we have to ask whether the earlier documented historical evidence of smallpox, which goes back to Ramses V and includes everything up to the 1500s, is real," senior author of the study Hendrik Poinar from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, said.

"Are these indeed real cases of smallpox, or are these misidentifications, which we know is very easy to do, because it is likely possible to mistake smallpox for chicken pox and measles," Poinar pointed out.

"It is still unclear what animal is the true reservoir of smallpox virus and when the virus first jumped into humans," Holmes noted.