Knowledge Update

​London, June 3 (IANS) Your loving dog may have come into being independently from two separate -- possibly now extinct -- wolf populations that lived on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent, new research has revealed.

An international team of scientists compared genetic data with existing archaeological evidence and found that dogs may have been domesticated not once, as widely believed, but twice.

A review of the archaeological record shows that early dogs appear in both the East and West more than 12,000 years ago, but in Central Asia no earlier than 8,000 years ago.

"Our ancient DNA evidence, combined with the archaeological record of early dogs, suggests that we need to reconsider the number of times dogs were domesticated independently,” said professor Greger Larson from University of Oxford.

The project on dog domestication, led by University of Oxford, reconstructed the evolutionary history of dogs by first sequencing the genome (at Trinity College Dublin) of a 4,800-year old medium-sized dog from bone excavated at the Neolithic Passage Tomb of Newgrange, Ireland.

The team (including French researchers based in Lyon and at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris) also obtained mitochondrial DNA from 59 ancient dogs living between 14,000 to 3,000 years ago and then compared them with the genetic signatures of more than 2,500 previously studied modern dogs.

Combined, the new findings suggest that dogs were first domesticated from geographically separated wolf populations on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent.

At some point after their domestication, the eastern dogs dispersed with migrating humans into Europe where they mixed with and mostly replaced the earliest European dogs.

Most dogs today are a mixture of both Eastern and Western dogs -- one reason why previous genetic studies have been difficult to interpret.

The new genetic evidence also shows a population turnover in Europe that appears to have mostly replaced the earliest domestic dog population there, which supports the evidence that there was a later arrival of dogs from elsewhere.

"The Newgrange dog bone had the best preserved ancient DNA we have ever encountered, giving us prehistoric genome of rare high quality. It is not just a postcard from the past, rather a full package special delivery,” added senior author professor Dan Bradley from Trinity College Dublin in a paper appared in the journal Science.

"With so much new and exciting data to come, we will finally be able to uncover the true history of man's best friend,” noted professor Keith Dobney, co-author from Liverpool University.​

​London, June 3 (IANS) The elderly are less willing to indulge in risk-taking behaviour for potential rewards when compared to youngsters because of the declining levels of dopamine in the brain, finds a study.

Dopamine is a chemical in the brain involved in predicting which actions will lead to rewards and has been known to fall by up to 10 per cent every decade throughout adult life.

The findings showed that older people were not overall more risk-averse as well as they didn't make much mistakes as compared to young adults. 

Rather, the elderly were found simply less attracted to big rewards and this made them less willing to take risks to try to get them, the researchers said.

"The findings offer a potential neuroscientific explanation, suggesting that a natural decline in dopamine with age might make people less receptive to the positive approach than they would have been when they were younger," said lead author Robb Rutledge from University College London.

The steady decline in risky choices with age matched up with the declining dopamine level.

However, they were no different to younger participants when it came to choosing risky gambles to avoid losing points. 

"As one ages, the dopamine levels naturally decline explaining the reason why one is less likely to seek rewards," added Rutledge.

The study, published in Current Biology, involving 25,189 smartphone users aged 18-69, found that older people were less likely to choose risky gambles to win more points in a smartphone app called The Great Brain Experiment.

In the game, players start with 500 points and aim to win as many points as possible in 30 different trials where they must choose between a safe option and a risky 50/50 gamble.

"This study is an excellent example of the use of digital technology to produce new and robust insights into the workings of the brain," explained Raliza Stoyanova from the neuroscience and mental health team at Wellcome Trust in Britain.​

Bangkok, June 3 (IANS) The discovery of more than 40 dead tiger cubs in Thailand's Tiger Temple represents only a "tiny proportion" of the enormous extent of an illegal trade in wildlife that is "pushing species to the brink of extinction", the UNEP-UNODC said on Friday.

"While circumstances of their death remain unclear, sadly, those tiger cubs represent only a tiny proportion of the enormous extent of an illegal trade in wildlife that is pushing species to the brink of extinction. Indeed, only around 4,000 tigers are left in the wild," United Nations Environment Programme-United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a statement.

"Until the illegal trade in wildlife is stopped, we are only likely to see more of these types of situations," the statement added.

The theme for World Environment Day on June 5 this year is the illegal trade in wildlife to raise awareness of this severe problem. Tigers are one of the key species in the campaign.

The illegal trade in wildlife, estimated to profit criminals to the tune of billions of dollars annually worldwide, comprises everything from the lucrative trade in Tiger parts in East Asia to ivory from African elephants, the organisations said.

"It undermines our environment, economies, communities and security."

"The commendable action by Thailanda's authorities, coordinated by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, highlights the need for constant vigilance by wildlife law enforcement authorities to the threat posed by traffickers."

"Given the extent of the illegal wildlife market in Asia it is important for all countries to unite and eradicate these illegal practices," the statement said.

Officials had recovered 40 dead tiger cubs, just one to two days old, from a freezer at Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua temple, known as the "Tiger Temple", on Wednesday, EFE news reported.

The cubs were not recorded in the register for wild animals the temple has to maintain by law and that means the protection department will press charges for illegal possession, besides other possible offences.​

​New York, June 3 (IANS) By fabricating tiny lasers directly on silicon, an international group of scientists has found a way that could make microprocessors run faster without consuming more power.

The group of scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University grew tiny high-performance lasers directly on silicon wafers.

Reported in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the group said integrating subwavelength cavities -- the essential building blocks of tiny lasers -- onto silicon enabled them to create and demonstrate high-density on-chip light-emitting elements.

"Putting lasers on microprocessors boosts their capabilities and allows them to run at much lower powers, which is a big step toward photonics and electronics integration on the silicon platform," said professor Kei May Lau from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The scientists used "tiny whispering gallery mode lasers -- only 1 micron in diameter -- that are 1,000 times shorter in length and 1 million times smaller in area than those currently used."

In terms of applications, the group's tiny lasers on silicon are ideally suited for high-speed data communications.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) Some periodic comets -- objects that orbit the Sun in 200 years or less -- may regularly split in two and then reunite down the road, a new study has found.

According to a team from Purdue University and University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder), this may be a repeating process fundamental to comet evolution.

Led by Purdue postdoctoral fellow Masatoshi Hirabayashi and CU-Boulder Professor Daniel Scheeres, the team studied a rubber duck-shaped comet known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). 

Images of 67P show two cracks on the comet's neck that connects its two larger lobes.

In order to reconstruct the past life of 67P, the team used numerical models in which the spin rate was cranked up from its roughly one rotation every 12 hours today to one rotation every seven to nine hours.

The models showed the faster spin would lead to more stress and the formation of two similar cracks on the neck of 67P in the same location.

"Our spin analysis predicted exactly where these cracks would form," Scheeres said, adding that "we now have a new understanding of how some comets may evolve over time".

The models run by the team showed that if 67P's spin is increased to less than seven hours per rotation, the head will pop off.

"The head and body aren't going to be able to escape from each other," he said. 

"They will begin orbiting each other, and in weeks, days or even hours they will come together again during a slow collision, creating a new comet nucleus configuration," Scheeres noted.

This pattern could go on for the life of the comet, said Scheeres in a paper published in the journal Nature.​

Washington, June 3 (IANS) A wearable artificial kidney could be developed as a viable, new dialysis technology that allows patients to be mobile and untethered during treatment, results of a US Food and Drug Administration-authorised clinical trial suggest.

The technology may become an alternative to conventional hemodialysis for people with end-stage kidney disease. 

Present-day treatment generally requires three sessions a week on a stationary machine that restricts patients' ability to walk around while it is attached and running.

In contrast, a wearable device would allow patients to be mobile and untethered. It could also provide additional treatment benefits from longer sessions or more frequent days of dialysis.

The trial of a prototype for such a device was performed with seven patients at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.

Those leading the trial included the inventor of the device, Wearable Artificial Kidney prototype, Victor Gura of Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The findings were reported in the journal JCI Insights.

The trial was conducted to determine the safety and efficacy of the device - its ability to take over some functions of failed kidneys. 

The researchers also wanted to ask the participants about their impressions of the experimental treatment, and to compare those with standard dialysis treatment.

The patients were treated with the device for up to 24 hours.

In the patients studied, the device was shown to effectively clear the blood of waste products, like urea, creatinine and and phosphorus, while also removing excess water and salt. These are normally filtered out and removed by working kidneys.

While the usual diet for patients on standard dialysis is highly limited, their blood fluid volume of those on the wearable device remained balanced during the test, even without any diet restrictions.

Regulating the volume and composition of body fluids is another job of normal kidneys.

During the trial, the participants tolerated the treatment well and did not have any serious, adverse effects. 

However, this trial of the device was stopped after the seventh patient because of technical problems with the device. These included the excessive formation of carbon dioxide gas bubbles in the dialysis solution, and intermittent variations in solution and blood flow.

Nevertheless, the findings provide proof of concept that a wearable devise along these lines could be developed as a viable, novel dialysis technology, the researchers said​

​London, June 2 (IANS) In a first, an international team of scientists has detected a faint signal emitted by hydrogen gas in a galaxy more than five billion light years away -- almost double the previous record.

Using the Very Large Array radio telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US, the team observed radio emission from hydrogen in a distant galaxy and found that it would have contained billions of young, massive stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas.

As the most abundant element in the universe and the raw fuel for creating stars, hydrogen is used by radio astronomers to detect and understand the makeup of other galaxies.

However, until now, radio telescopes have only been able to detect the emission signature of hydrogen from relatively nearby galaxies.

"Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we've been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth," said lead author, Dr Ximena Fernández from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

"These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after five billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they've fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time,” he added.

The success for the team comes after the first 178 hours of observing time with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope for a new survey of the sky called the 'COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey' or CHILES.

Once completed, the CHILES survey will have collected data from more than 1,000 hours of observing time.

In a new approach, members of the team including Dr Attila Popping from International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the ARC Centre of All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) in Australia are working with Amazon Web Services to process and move the large volumes of data via the “cloud”.

“For this project, we took tens of terabytes of data from the Very Large Array and then processed it using Amazon's cloud-based servers to create an enormous image cube, ready for our team to analyse and explore," Dr Popping added.

Professor Andreas Wicenec, head of the Data Intensive Astronomy team at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the limiting factor for radio astronomers used to be the size of the telescope and the hardware behind it.

"It's fast becoming more about the data and how you move, store and analyse vast volumes of information," he said in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) Asthma patients may soon do away with their inhalers as researchers, including one of Indian origin, have developed an integrated, wearable system that monitors a user's environment, heart rate and other physical attributes with the goal of predicting and preventing asthma attacks.

"We have tested the system in the benchtop and on a limited number of human subjects for proof of concept demonstration and have confirmed that all of the sensors work, and that the system accurately compiles the data," said study co-author Veena Misra, professor at North Carolina State University in the US.

The system, called the Health and Environmental Tracker (HET), incorporates a host of novel sensing devices, which are incorporated into a wristband and a patch that adheres to the chest.

The patch includes sensors that track a patient's movement, heart rate, respiratory rate, the amount of oxygen in the blood, skin impedance and wheezing in the lungs.

The wristband focuses largely on environmental factors, monitoring volatile organic compounds and ozone in the air, as well as ambient humidity and temperature. 

The wristband also includes additional sensors to monitor motion, heart rate and the amount of oxygen in the blood.

The system also has one nonwearable component: a spirometer, which patients breathe into several times a day to measure lung function.

Data from all of these sensors is transmitted wirelessly to a computer, where custom software collects and records the data.

"This summer, we plan to begin testing HET in a controlled environment with subjects suffering from asthma and a control group, in order to identify which environmental and physiological variables are effective at predicting asthma attacks," Misra noted.

Asthma patients currently rely on inhalers to deal with their symptoms, which can include often-debilitating asthma attacks.

"Our goal was to design a wearable system that could track the wellness of the subjects and in particular provide the infrastructure to predict asthma attacks, so that the users could take steps to prevent them by changing their activities or environment," principal investigator Alper Bozkurt, Assistant Professor at NC State, noted. 

A paper describing the work was published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

"Preventing an attack could be as simple as going indoors or taking a break from an exercise routine," lead author James Dieffenderfer, PhD student in the joint biomedical engineering programme at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explained.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) If you like to observe whether the person sitting next to you is rhythmically drumming his fingers because he's anxious or if someone is preoccupied because she's gazing off into the distance, make sure to use this talent at the workplace.

According to an interesting study, such “observing” people are high in mind-reading motivation (MRM) which can lead to many social benefits, including better teamwork.

MRM is a newly coined term for the practice of observing and interpreting bits of social information. It is the tendency to engage with the mental states and perspectives of others.

“We're not talking about the psychic phenomenon or anything like that but simply using cues from other people's behaviour, their non-verbal signals, to try to figure out what they're thinking," said Melanie Green, associate professor in University at Buffalo.

Individuals high in MRM enjoy speculating on others' thoughts based on the potentially hundreds of social cues they might receive.

Those low in MRM dislike or have no interest in doing so.

MRM is about the motivation to engage with other minds, and is distinct from the ability to accurately interpret others' cues.

“We didn't measure ability directly in our study of teamwork but the research suggests that just the motivation to understand others, and presumably the behaviours that go along with that motivation, appear to lead to benefits," Green added.

In addition to facilitating cooperation and better teamwork, people high in MRM also consider people in great detail and have a nuanced understanding of those around them.

Those high in MRM seem to develop richer psychological portraits of those around them.

“High MRM people are more drawn to and pay more attention to messages with an identifiable source - a spokesperson or an ad focusing on company values - that is, someone whose perspective they can try to understand,” Green noted.

On the other hand, low MRM people seem to pay more attention to ads that are more impersonal, like those that just discuss the product - a message that does not appear to come from a particular person or group.

Green and her colleagues think there might be a difference in how much people enjoy or were motivated to speculate on people's thoughts in situations where there was no situational need or institutional pressure.
It could be as simple as a bus passenger considering the thoughts of those across the aisle.

"This hadn't been previously considered from the standpoint of individual differences," Green stated in a paper published in the journal Motivation and Emotion.

The concept of MRM has been developed by Green and her coauthors Jordan M. Carpenter at the University of Pennsylvania and Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.​