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KABUL, March 28 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama told troops in Afghanistan on Sunday he was confident they would succeed in their mission.
During his first visit to Afghanistan since his election as president, he said U.S. strategy included a civilian effort that would make life better for Afghans. Troops had changed the way they interact with Afghans, he added. (For more Reuters coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan, see: here)
Madrid (Spain), September 19 (ANI): An European company has developed innovative robots which are mobile, multifunctional, collaborative, autonomous and polyvalent, suitable for a wide range of work from street cleaning and rubbish collection to accompanying elderly people.
According to a report carried out in www.basqueresearch.com, this new generation of robots have been developed by TECNALIA Technological Corporation, and are a part of the European DUSTBOT research project under the remit of the VI European Framework Programme and in which TECNALIA is participating.
These latest generation robots are suitable for the monitoring of large spaces (open and closed), as guides for persons in large shopping areas (indicating to them where a particular shop or product is within a shopping centre), for accompanying elderly people or those with certain disabilities (both at home and outside), thanks to their functions of orientation, navigation, communications with others or tele-assistance centres.
They can also be used as guides in teaching spaces (museums, visitor centres), and for transport, storage and transport and goods deliveries, besides the cleaning of both open and closed surfaces, which have either difficult or easy access.
DUSTBOT has collaborative, multifunctional and autonomous robots that are capable of operating in partially destructured environments/situations based on information provided by a map.
The robots can also facilitate working in large areas, stations, airports and other types of public buildings, without being any obstacle for the activity of these places, given its reduced size, and without being a danger for members of the public, thanks to the novel system for the detection and avoidance of obstacles.
The rail station of the Euskotren company in the Bilbao neighbourhood of Atxuri in Spain was chosen for the public presentation of these devices.
The demonstration of two robot models was undertaken: the DustCart and the DustClean.
The DustCart robot, measuring 1.45 metres high and 70 Kg in weight, has a humanoid form and is designed to interact with the user and for the collection of low demand waste.
The DustClean robot, in the form of a small vehicle and measuring 96 cm high and 250 Kg in weight, cleans streets of dirt and dust. Moreover, both control the quality of air in real time.
“These robots are the solution for cleaning areas of difficult access and for the collection of rubbish at the very front door of, above all, persons who have mobility problems when moving the rubbish to the communal waste containers,” said Inaki Inzunza, Director of the Business Unit at the Tecnalia Technological Corporation. (ANI)
Srinagar, Sep 12 (ANI): Youth in Srinagar got a chance to voice their views and grievances against the security forces at a pro-active meet held recently here.
Jointly hosted by the All India Centre for Rural and Urban Development (AICURD), the New Delhi-based non-governmental organisation and the Kashmir University’s Department of Students Welfare, the meet was aimed to bridge the gap as well as mistrust between the youth and the security forces in the valley.
Since last year, there has been rising anger amongst the people of Kashmir against the police.he meet addressed vital issues to lessen that anger, hatred and contempt.
“The attempt was to tell these people the truth and arouse their conscience and listen to their views about us so that we can improve ourselves,” said Hemant Kumar Lohia, Deputy Inspector General (DIG), Central Range, Kashmir.
The students got ample scope to speak out their concerns and complaints before the top brass of the police and allied security forces.
The meet turned out to be an ideal platform for the youth to speak out their minds freely.
“The police are a force which is meant for protection of people. For the first time we got such a platform where we could interact with the police and put forth our views, it is a very good platform,” said Feroze Parry, a student.
The organisers of the meet were confident that the meet would help to dispel the hatred to a great extent.
“We hope that these discussions will help in lessening the hatred amongst the youth towards the security forces. And we can hope for a better Kashmir,” said Anupama Behen of AICURD. (ANI)
Chambaghat (HP), Sep 11 (ANI): Over 600 farmers from across the country learned about mushroom growing and marketing in a one day festival held at Chambaghat in Himachal Pradesh.he Directorate of Mushroom Research (DMR) had organised the fair at Chambaghat in Solan district where farmers from 14 states, including Sikkim, Jharkhand and southern Tamil Nadu, had taken part.
The primary aim of the fair was to disseminate the latest information and data acquired at the research centre and promote mushroom farming as a business crop. The research centre has developed new varieties of mushrooms including, Austere, Adistra and Shiitake.
Manjeet Singh, Director, the Directorate of Mushroom Research, said such fairs are important to bring mushroom growers at one platform and equip them with the latest development taking in the field.
“I think when you go to such fairs you get a chance to directly interact with experts and scientists and secondly you interact with other mushroom growers who are into this business and both these interactions are very important for starting or proliferating into mushroom production business,” Manjeet Singh added.
Farmers said such should be organised more often and in various places.
“Such fairs are very important for us because farmers, scientists and experts come here from different states and exchange their information. They learn about mushroom growing and marketing and find solutions to related problems,” said Basant Kumar Gupta, a mushroom farmer.
Farmers were seen interested in learning about cultivating Ganoderma mushroom variety, which is known for its medicinal properties.
The fair which has been organised for the past 15 years has popularised and motivated farmers to grow mushrooms. (ANI)
Washington, Sep 10 (ANI): Researchers at Michigan Technological University have identified three genes that play a major role in the most common type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), generally known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The team of mathematicians, led by Shuanglin Zhang, isolated the genes from the many thousands scattered throughout human DNA.
Zhang noted that the discovery does not mean an end to ALS, but it could provide scientists with valuable clues as they search for a cure.
“I felt very urgent to find the genes for ALS,” Zhang said.
“This is very nice work. It’s very challenging to map genes for complex diseases, and while many statistical methods have been developed, most don’t work well in practice. Zhang’s group has developed a method to detect genes and gene-gene interaction in complex diseases and provided evidence that it works,” said Xiaofeng Zhu, an associate professor of epidemiology at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine.
“Their findings will need to be confirmed by other researchers, but I think this will be very useful for the investigators who are trying to find genes underlying complex diseases such as ALS,” said Zhu.
According to the ALS Association, only about 10 percent of patients have familial ALS, a directly inherited form of the usually fatal neuromuscular disorder, while the remaining 90 percent are diagnosed with the sporadic form of the disease.
While everyone has the three genes in question, but in people with sporadic ALS, they differ from those in people who don’t have ALS.
The mathematicians were not surprised when they tracked down the location of the genes.
“Everybody has 23 chromosomes, and the three genes on chromosomes 2, 4, and 10 interact. If you have this combination of the three genes, you are at high risk of developing the disease. It’s really exciting, especially because my husband has sporadic ALS. Maybe they can find a cure by blocking the genes,” explained Zhang’s wife Qiuying Sha.
ALS destroys the nerves in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary movement, eventually leading to paralysis.
Zhang’s team used a new statistical method to analyse the genetic codes of 547 individuals, 276 with sporadic ALS and 271 without.
The method, a two-locus interaction analysis approach, allows the researchers to identify multiple genes associated with a complex illness.
The data set they analyzed was provided by National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Human Genetics Resource Center at the Coriell Institute, a publicly funded “bank” or repository for human cells, DNA samples, clinical data, and other information that aims to accelerate research on the genetics of nervous system disorders.
The study has been published in the open access journal BMC Medical Genetics. (ANI)
New Delhi, Sep.9 (ANI): Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee will inaugurate the two-day All India Annual Conference of the Chief Commissioners and Directors General of Customs and Central Excise here today.
The Conference is being organized by the Central Board of Excise and Customs, Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance from September 8 to 9 in the national capital.
The conference will focus on the functioning of the Department and the emerging challenges before it.
It will have a session on administering the Goods and Service Tax (GST), the present status and the Department’s preparedness for its implementation.
Besides, it will also deliberate on other important issues such as IT initiatives, Audit controls, Revenue Collections, and Border management.
The conclave will also discuss the initiatives to fine-tune the tax administration and measures to improve compliance levels in Indirect Taxation.
The conference will act as a catalyst for strengthening the Indirect Tax administration. It will also provide an opportunity to the Chief Commissioners and Directors General to interact with each other and discuss issues of general and common nature.
The Minister of State for Finance (Revenue) S.S. Palanimanickam will preside over the valedictory function. (ANI)
Washington, Sept 4 (ANI): Rewards have been found to be much more successful in promoting public cooperation rather than punishment, suggests a new study.
According to researchers, rewards robustly build compliance and cooperation and could help in developing solutions for thorny problems requiring the cooperation of large numbers of people to achieve a greater good.
“All of us engage in public goods games, on both large and small scales,” said David G. Rand, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and lead author of the study.
“Climate change is a huge public goods game: If each person does his or her part to conserve energy and reduce CO2 emissions, it benefits us all.
“On a more local level, public goods games include volunteering on school boards, helping to maintain public facilities in your community, or cleaning up after yourself and doing your share of work at the office.
“In these types of domains, where people interact repeatedly with each other to solve a group social dilemma, our work suggests that rewards result in better outcomes than punishment,” he added.
Rand said that these rewards could change individuals’ behaviour and encourage cooperation without the destructive negative consequences that come with punishment.
During the study headed by Martin A. Nowak of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the researchers examined cooperation among 192 participants in a public goods game probing the fundamental tension between the interests of an individual and a group.
Over 50 rounds of interaction, each of four participants in a group would decide how much to contribute toward a common pool that benefited all four equally. Each participant was then able – at a cost to him or herself- to either reward or punish each of the three other subjects for their contributions to the group, or lack thereof.
As in real life, Rand said, study subjects tend to resent “free riders” who fail to contribute to a group yet reap the benefits of membership in it.
“But despite this anger at free riders, rewarding good behaviour is as effective as punishing bad behaviour for maintaining public cooperation and leads to better outcomes for the group. When both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff for the group, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff for the group,” Rand added.
The study appears in journal Science. (ANI)
Moscow (Russia), Sep 3 (ANI): President Pratibha Devisingh Patil on Thursday condoled the tragic and untimely demise of the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Dr. Y.S Rajasekhara Reddy, and described him as a dynamic Chief Minister who always worked for the welfare of the people of Andhra Pradesh
In her condolence message, from Moscow, where she is currently on a State Visit to Russia, President Patil said that in his sudden demise, the people of Andhra Pradesh and indeed the nation, have lost a dynamic leader.
“I had the opportunity to interact with him on a number of occasions. During our interactions his deep commitment to the development of Andhra Pradesh, its rural areas and the weaker sections of society and the empowerment of women was always evident,” said President Pratibha Patil.
Patil also said that his loss shall be deeply felt. (ANI)
Washington, August 25 (ANI): Experts have expressed doubts over the use of cranberry juice as a preventative against urinary tract infections (UTIs).
Dr. Raz, Director of Infectious Diseases at the Technion School of Medicine in Israel, said that the present clinical evidence for using cranberry juice and related products to fight the common ailment was ‘unsatisfactory and inconclusive’.
Raz, a member of F1000 Medicine, along with his associate Faculty Member, Hana Edelstein, suggested that “cranberry should no longer be considered as an effective [preventative] for recurrent UTIs.”
The boffins explained that it was difficult to point out a single compound from the hundreds in cranberry to be held responsible for any therapeutic effect, creating a shadow of doubt over its adoption.
Raz and Edelstein also warned that cranberry could also interact badly with other medicines such as Warfarin, commonly used to treat heart disease. (ANI)
London, Aug 22 (ANI): An international team of physicists have revealed that metamaterials, which are currently being used to make real-life invisibility cloaks, may soon shrink cellphone antennas, leading to smaller gadgets.
The new metamaterial antennas could be tuned to a range of different frequencies as required.
It could be tuned to work efficiently across a small frequency range, and retuned to a different band for roaming.
Tom Driscoll at the University of California, San Diego along with Dimitri Basov and collaboraters from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and ETRI in the Republic of Korea developed the new “frequency-agile” design by attaching a thin film of vanadium dioxide to a gold metamaterial structure.
They found that applying a voltage to the film alters the frequency at which the gold metamaterial interferes with light waves, tuning it to a new “setting”.
This occurs because voltage causes nanoscale “puddles” of conducting vanadium metal to form within the insulating vanadium dioxide.
They interact with the design’s electrical properties and alter the metamaterial’s tuning.
“The effect continues after the electrical current is gone because the metal puddles, once formed, will not readily disappear without some cause,” New Scientist quoted Driscoll as saying
He added that there is evidence to suggest the effect should last for months or more.
“Metamaterials are often narrowband, but at least with this scheme one could adapt the material to new frequencies,” said Ulf Leonhardt, a metamaterial researcher at the University of St Andrews in the UK.
That removes an obstacle to the wider use of metamaterial antennas. Such antennas would be attractive because they could help to shrink the size of cellphones.
Driscoll said that a tunable metamaterial antenna would allow a wireless gadget to work “outstandingly well” at the frequencies used in one country, but also carry the option of retuning for use abroad.
The findings appear in journal Science Express. (ANI)
Washington, August 22 (ANI): A scientist of Indian origin has created a new supercomputer, called Cystorm, which can carry out 28.16 trillion calculations per second.
Cystorm, a Sun Microsystems machine, was developed by Srinivas Aluru from the Iowa State University.
The 3,200 computer processor cores that power Cystorm makes it perform 28.16 trillion calculations per second, which is five times the peak of CyBlue, an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that’s been on campus since early 2006 and uses 2,048 processors to do 5.7 trillion calculations per second.
According to Aluru, the Ross Martin Mehl and Marylyne Munas Mehl Professor of Computer Engineering and the leader of the Cystorm project, the new machine also scores high on a more realistic test of a supercomputer’s actual performance: 15.44 trillion calculations per second compared to CyBlue’s 4.7 trillion per second.
That measure makes Cystorm 3.3 times more powerful than CyBlue.
“Cystorm is going to be very good for data-intensive research projects,” Aluru said. “The capabilities of Cystorm will help Iowa State researchers do new, pioneering research in their fields,” he added.
The supercomputer is targeted for work in materials science, power systems and systems biology.
Aluru said that materials scientists will use the supercomputer to analyze data from the university’s Local Electrode Atom Probe microscope, an instrument that can gather data and produce images at the atomic scale of billionths of a meter.
Systems biologists will use the supercomputer to build gene networks that will help researchers understand how thousands of genes interact with each other.
Power systems researchers will use the supercomputer to study the security, reliability and efficiency of the energy infrastructure of the US.
Computer engineers will use the supercomputer to build a software infrastructure that helps users make decisions by identifying relevant information sources.
“These research efforts will lead to significant advances in the penetration of high performance computing technology,” said a summary of the Cystorm project. (ANI)
Washington, Aug 21 (ANI): The affectionate bond between kids and their grandmothers is well known. And now, a new study has revealed that frequent visits to nana’s place could keep toddlers away from developing negative old age stereotypes.
A variety of negative stereotypes are attributed to the elderly such as they are considered forgetful, hard-of-hearing, absent-minded and confused.
Lead researcher Sheree Kwong See from University of Alberta has identified that those stereotypes exist in some children at the age two and three, which could adversely affect them when they are older.
“We’ve been able to show really early on that kids, when they’re just starting to talk, have established beliefs about older people,” said Kwong See.
“We’re seeing what we could call ageism by about age three,” she added.
Kwong See and fellow researcher Elena Nicoladis measured the reactions of young children after being quizzed on vocabulary words by either an older or younger adult.
It showed that children who had less exposure to older adults had a stronger language bias against the older person than those who had more exposure to older people.
“If you are interacting with ‘nana’ more frequently, you’ll start to see that she’s a pretty good teacher of words even though she’s old,” said Kwong See.
“When you have little contact dominant negative cultural stereotypes emerge. You think an older person isn’t as alert or in-the-know as a young person and maybe is not as good a teacher,” she added.
However, Kwong See warns that frantic trips to grandmother’s house to curb the bias, is not the sole factor.
“They’re getting negative images of aging from cartoons, from their story books, from watching how other people interact with seniors,” she said.
“But, they’re also starting to pick up some of the positive images as well if they get lots of good interactions,” she added.
The study is published in the journal Educational Gerontology. (ANI)
Washington, August 20 (ANI): Scientists in America have developed a way to target brain cancer cells using inorganic titanium dioxide nanoparticles bonded to soft biological material.
This achievement is a result of the joint efforts of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) and the University of Chicago’s Brain Tumor Center.
Thousands of people die from malignant brain tumours every year, and the tumors are resistant to conventional therapies.
The researchers say that their nano-bio technology may eventually provide an alternative form of therapy, which targets only cancer cells and does not affect normal living tissue.
“It is a real example of how nano and biological interfacing can be used for biomedical application. We chose brain cancer because of its difficulty in treatment and its unique receptors,” said scientist Elena Rozhkova with the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.
The novel approach relies upon a two-pronged approach.
The researchers describe titanium dioxide as a versatile photoreactive nanomaterial that can be bonded with biomolecules.
When linked to an antibody, they say, nanoparticles recognize and bind specifically to cancer cells.
When focused visible light is shined onto the affected region, the researchers add, the localized titanium dioxide reacts to the light by creating free oxygen radicals that interact with the mitochondria in the cancer cells.
Mitochondria act as cellular energy plants, and when free radicals interfere with their biochemical pathways, mitochondria receive a signal to start cell death.
“The significance of this work lies in our ability to effectively target nanoparticles to specific cell surface receptors expressed on brain cancer cells,” said Dr. Maciej S. Lesniak, Director of Neurosurgical Oncology at University of Chicago Brain Tumor Center.
“In so doing, we have overcome a major limitation involving the application of nanoparticles in medicine, namely the potential of these agents to distribute throughout the body. We are now in a position to develop this exciting technology in preclinical models of brain tumours, with the hope of one day employing this new technology in patients,” Lesniak added.
Using X-ray fluorescence microscopy at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source, the researchers have also found that the tumours’ invadopodia, actin-rich micron scale protrusions that allow the cancer to invade surrounding healthy cells, can be also attacked by the titanium dioxide.
The researchers have thus far carried out tests on cells in a laboratory setting, but animal testing is planned for the next phase.
Results show an almost 100 percent cancer cell toxicity rate after six hours of illumination, and 80 percent after 48 hours.
Also, since the antibody only targets the cancer cells, surrounding healthy cells are not affected, unlike other cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Rozhkova said that a proof of concept is demonstrated, and other cancers can be treated as well using different targeting molecules.
The expert, however, admits that the research is presently in the early stages. (ANI)
Washington, August 20 (ANI): A computer similar to the Hal 9000 system in the movie ’2010′, which claims enjoying working with human beings and having stimulating relationships with them, may soon be created, thanks to a new research project.
Oregon State University researchers are pioneering the concept of “rich interaction” that can pave the way for computers that do want to communicate with, learn from and get to know humans better as persons.
The idea behind this “meaningful” interaction is one of the latest advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, in which a computer doesn’t just try to learn from its own experiences, it listens to the user, tries to combine what it “hears” with its internal reasoning, and changes its program as a result.
When ordinary users spot the machine’s errors they should be able to step in, and explain directly to the machine the logic it should be using.
“There are limits to what the computer can do just by its own observations and efforts to learn from experiences. It needs to understand not just what it did right or wrong, but why. And for that, it has to continue interacting with human beings and make constant changes in its own programming, based on their feedback,” said Margaret Burnett, an associate professor of computer science at OSU.
According to the researchers, for a computer to be of optimal help to its user, it has to customize itself to the end user and get more personal.
“We all have fairly specific life experiences, personal preferences, ways of doing things, different types of jobs. For machine learning to reach its potential the computer and the user have to interact with each other in a fairly meaningful way, the computer really needs to get to know your situations and understand why it made a mistake, so that it can try not to make the same mistake again,” Burnett said.
The researchers say that a major part of this challenge is to create interactive systems that are easy enough to operate without one needing a computer programmer’s qualification, which they believe may be possible.
Another challenge before the researchers is to ensure that the learning in such systems happens to be a two-way street, as a stubborn human user may insist that the computer “learn” something that is incorrect.
Having recently received a 1million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for their research, the OSU researchers now believe that the era of humans as passive observers in the field of artificial intelligence may be coming to a close.
“In the future we believe the computer should be like your partner. You help teach it, it gets to know you, you learn from each other, and it becomes more useful,” Burnett said. (ANI)
Washington, Aug 18 (ANI): Researchers have used the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and molecular engineering to design synthetic protein-like molecule, which may be able to put a stop to unwanted biological interactions between the cells.
The pioneering study may protect cells against HIV infection.
In a bid to control protein shape, Samuel Gellman, a chemistry professor and his University of Wisconsin-Madison research team, created a set of peptide-like molecules that were successful in blocking HIV infection of human cells in the laboratory.
Adjusting molecular blueprints, Gellman and his colleagues made small structural changes to the backbones of their synthetic molecules to improve stability while retaining the three-dimensional shape necessary to recognize and interact with the HIV gp41 protein.
The resulting molecules, named “foldamers”, are hybrids of natural and unnatural amino acid building blocks, a combination that allows the scientists to control shape, structure and stability with much greater precision than is currently possible with natural amino acids.
The team found that the interaction of synthetic molecules with a piece of HIV protein gp41 physically obstructs the virus from infecting host cells.
The findings have appeared online in the August 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Interactions between proteins are not only fundamental to many biological processes, but also to infections like HIV and tumours.
“There’s a lot of information transfer that occurs when proteins come together, and one would often like to block that information flow,” said Gellman.
These synthetic molecules not only interrupt protein-protein interaction, but are also highly resistant to degradation by naturally occurring enzymes, which do not recognize their unusual structure. This means even a low dose of these molecules can remain effective for a longer time.
“We want to find an alternate language, an alternate way to express the information that the proteins express so that we can interfere with a conversation that one protein is having with another,” Gellman explains.
Gellman said the results of their study show that this type of approach could be very useful in designing molecules for antiviral therapies and other biomedical applications.
He said: “You don’t have to limit yourself to the building blocks that nature uses,” Gellman says.
“There’s a huge potential here because the strategy we use is different from what the pharmaceutical and biotech industries now employ.” (ANI)
Kabul, Aug.13 (ANI): For the vast majority of troops at the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters, Afghanistan remains an enigma, a threatening land lying beyond the concertina wire of the base.
When ISAF troops venture out from their base into the “red zone” (i.e. the comparatively safe streets of Kabul) they are prepared for combat.
Barreling through the crowded streets of a city that has been called a comparative “safety zone” by those fighting in the south, they jam the phone signals of average Afghans with their ECMs (electronic counter measures) and jam the roads with their convoys.
Defeat takes the form of thousands of casualty-phobic troops ensconced behind the walls, sand bags, and blast barriers of a well-protected safety bubble.
One would think that the coalition vehicles driving around Kabul in combat posture and menacingly waving 50 caliber machine guns at Afghans were storming a Taliban sangar (trench) in Helmand, not competing with rush hour traffic.
The only Afghan most ever meet is the Hazara carpet seller on base who serves authentic Afghan food once a month. And the only coalition soldiers most Afghans meet are encased in armor-plated vehicles or flak jackets.
Only a small percentage of “fobbits” (those who live in forward operating bases or FOBs) actually interact with average Afghans due to hyper-protective S.O.P. (standard operating procedures) meant to lessen their risks from interaction with Afghans.
ISAF troops suffer from a siege mentality that led the United States dangerously close to losing the war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq were more concerned with force protection than protecting the center of gravity in Iraq, the Iraqi people.
It was only when Generals Petraeus and Odierno pushed their troops out of the bases and into the streets of Iraq that they began to make headway in the counterinsurgency.
This meant more meetings with Iraqi people, who began to feel that the Americans were protecting them.
For the most part, the coalition has ceded the countryside of the south and parts of the east to the enemy, who took advantage of the vacuum left by enemy troops in 2003 when the U.S. was focused elsewhere.
The White House’s fear of engaging in grassroots nation building allowed the Taliban to fill the void. Pro-government khans and mullahs were executed, villagers cowed into submission, and “vanguard” groups sent onto the next province to lay mines and kill “infidel collaborators.” With no visible coalition presence outside of the provincial capitals, the Taliban swarmed the countryside.
Much the same thing happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s under the Soviets, who controlled the major roads and cities and remained safe in their bases for fear of sustaining casualties.
The U.S. Marines’ recent efforts to clear and hold territory in Helmand Province represent a welcome break from this barracked mentality.
It is only by establishing a reliable coalition presence in contested places like Helmand that the coalition can show the Afghans that they are there to stay and protect them. (ANI)
Washington, July 16 (ANI): A team of scientists is using laser light technology to create new forms of metal and enhance aircraft performance.
The laser light technology is being used by AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research) funded researchers at the University of Rochester to help the military create new forms of metal that may guide, attract and repel liquids and cool small electronic devices.
Dr. Chunlei Guo and his team of researchers for the project discovered a way to transform a shiny piece of metal into one that is pitch black, not by paint, but by using incredibly intense bursts of laser light.
The black metal created, absorbs all radiation that shines upon it.
“With the creation of the black metal, an entirely new class of material becomes available to us, which may open up a whole new horizon for various applications,” said Guo.
“To do this, we looked at the reverse process of light absorption or light radiation and transformed the incandescent lamp into a bulb that glows twice as brightly as a regular light source, while consuming the same amount of energy,” Guo added.
The key to creating this super-filament is an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse.
The laser burst lasts only a few quadrillionths of a second.
That intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form nano-structures and micro-structures that dramatically alter how efficiently light can radiate from the filament.
In addition to increasing the brightness of a bulb, Guo’s process can be used to tune the color of the light as well.
In addition to this research, Guo and his team have been working on creating technology that may enable the Air Force to create an additional kind of metal.
They are able to do this by using the femtosecond laser once again to alter the surface of metal and create unique nano- and micro-scale structures on the metal.
The unique nano-structures which are created from the laser affect the way liquid molecules interact with metal molecules.
The liquid spreads out over the metal because the nano-structures attach themselves to the liquid’s molecules more readily than the liquid’s molecules bond to each other.
The end result is the formation of a new kind of metal that can cool the plane’s electronic brain and heat pumps and allow the craft to retain dominance over any enemy that is also in flight. (ANI)
Washington, July 14 (ANI): People finding it difficult to soothe their babies need not worry about their parenting skills anymore, for a new study suggests that children’s temperament may be due in part to a combination of a certain gene and a specific pattern of brain activity.
Writing about their findings in the journal Psychological Science, McMaster University researcher Louis Schmidt points out that the pattern of brain activity in the frontal cortex of the brain has been associated with various types of temperament in children.
He highlights the fact that infants who have more activity in the left frontal cortex are characterized as temperamentally “easy” and are easily calmed down, while those with greater activity in the right half of the frontal cortex are temperamentally “negative” and are easily distressed and more difficult to soothe.
In the current study, he and his colleagues focused on the interaction between brain activity and the DRD4 gene to see whether it predicted children’s temperament.
According to background information in the Psychological Science article, previous studies have linked the longer version of this gene to increased sensory responsiveness, risk-seeking behaviour, and attention problems in children.
In the present study, brain activity was measured in 9-month-old infants through electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. When the children were 48 months old, their mothers completed questionnaires regarding their behaviour and DNA samples were taken from the children for analysis of the DRD4 gene.
Schmidt says that the results reveal interesting relations among brain activity, behaviour, and the DRD4 gene.
He says that among the children with more activity in the left frontal cortex at 9 months, those who had the long version of the DRD4 gene were more soothable at 48 months than those who possessed the shorter version of the gene.
However, he adds, the children with the long version of the DRD4 gene, who had more activity in the right frontal cortex, were the least soothable and exhibited more attention problems compared to the other children.
Schmidt says that these findings suggest that the long version of the DRD4 gene may act as a moderator of children’s temperament.
“(The) results suggest that it is possible that the DRD4 long allele plays different roles (for better and for worse) in child temperament (depending on internal conditions or the environment inside their bodies),” note the authors.
They conclude that the pattern of brain activity-that is, greater activation in left or right frontal cortex-may influence whether this gene is a protective factor or a risk factor for soothability and attention problems.
The authors cautioned that there are likely other factors that interact with these two measures in predicting children’s temperament. (ANI)
Washington, July 10 (ANI): In a new research, scientists at the University of Illinois, US, have determined that a toxic molecule, ‘superoxide’, known to damage cells and cause disease may also play a pivotal role in bird migration, as it allows them to ‘see’ Earth’s magnetic field.
According to principal investigator Klaus Schulten, who holds the Swanlund Chair in Physics at Illinois, the discovery occurred as a result of a ‘mistake’ made by a collaborator.
His postdoctoral collaborator, Ilia Solov’yov, of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, did not know that superoxide was toxic, seeing it instead as an ideal reaction partner in a biochemical process involving the protein cryptochrome in a bird’s eye.
Cryptochrome is a blue-light photoreceptor found in plants and in the eyes of birds and other animals. Schulten was the first to propose (in 2000) that this protein was a key component of birds’ geomagnetic sense, a proposal that was later corroborated by experimental evidence.
He made this prediction after he and his colleagues discovered that magnetic fields can influence chemical reactions if the reactions occur quickly enough to be governed by pure quantum mechanics.
“Prior to our work, it was thought that this was impossible because magnetic fields interact so weakly with molecules,” he said.
Such chemical reactions involve electron transfers, “which result in freely tumbling spins of electrons. These spins behave like an axial compass,” Schulten said.
Changes in the electromagnetic field, such as those experienced by a bird changing direction in flight, appear to alter this biochemical compass in the eye, allowing the bird to see how its direction corresponds to north or south.
“Other researchers had found that cryptochrome, acting through its own molecular spins, recruits a reaction partner that operates at so-called zero spin. They suggested that molecular oxygen is that partner,” Schulten said.
“We propose that the reaction partner is not the benign oxygen molecule that we all breathe, but its close cousin, superoxide, a negatively charged oxygen molecule,” he added.
When Solov’yov showed that superoxide would work well as a reaction partner, Schulten was at first dismissive.
“But then I realized that the toxicity of superoxide was actually crucial to its role,” he said.
According to Schulten, the body has many mechanisms for reducing concentrations of superoxide to prevent its damaging effects.
But this gives an advantage, since the molecule must be present at low concentrations – but not too low – “to make the biochemical compass work effectively,” he said. (ANI)
New Delhi, July 6 (ANI): Two Chinese writers worked continuously for 48 hours to produce an “instant biography” of late King of Pop Michael Jackson.
The 130,000-word book, titled ‘Moonwalk in Paradise’, has been written by Jiang Xiaoyu and Xing Han, and published by Chinese publishing house Xiandai.
A story published by the China Youth Daily suggests that the two writers, who have never met Jackson, have simply written the story from their “accumulated knowledge about the king of pop,” reports the China Daily.
“Though it is hard to tell how big the market for instant books is in China, I am sure we have done a nice job on quickly responding to market needs,” said Zang Yongqing, the general editor of Xiandai.
Jiang, who has written blogs and reviews about the pop icon, said that he hoped his book would help Chinese fans find a better way to relieve their pain.
“I am not only a music critic but also a fan of the King of Pop, so I understand what fans really need,” he said.
However, Zhao Xin, a PhD student of literature at Beijing Normal University, said that “authenticity and accuracy” should be the cornerstones of a biography.
“The writers might infringe on copyright if they never had the chance to interact with the subject,” he said.
More than 10 Chinese publishing houses are also planning to launch instant books about Jackson. (ANI)
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