Author Archives: Srinivas Chakravarty

Leaving the house every day may help older adults live longer

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In a Journal of the American Geriatrics Society study of community-dwelling individuals aged 70 to 90 years who were participating in the Jerusalem Longitudinal Study, leaving the house daily was linked with a lower risk of dying over an extended follow-up period, independent of social, functional, or medical factors.

The study’s investigators noted that getting outside of one’s home provides numerous opportunities for engagement with the world outside, and may facilitate exposure to a variety of beneficial experiences.

“What is interesting is that the improved survival associated with getting out of the house frequently was also observed among people with low levels of physical activity, and even those with impaired mobility,” said lead author Dr. Jeremy Jacobs, of the Hadassah Hebrew-University Medical Center, in Jerusalem. “Resilient individuals remain engaged, irrespective of their physical limitations.”

Not English but mother tongue helps marriages to last longer: Study

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Amid rising number of intercultural marriages, more and more couples use English as the lingua franca but speaking in common native language helped many marriages to last longer, said a new study.

Kaisa Pietikainen from the University of Helsinki, who has studied the interactions of these so-called ELF couples in her doctoral dissertation, says:”It’s often thought that when the partners learn to speak each other’s native languages, they will pick either language as their shared language. But when one is used to speaking a certain language to one another, it becomes difficult to change.”

Usually couples have an open attitude toward language-mixing. Features from other languages become such an integrated part of their ‘couple tongue’ that after a while, they may not even notice when they switch languages, she says.

ELF couples identify mainly as English-speaking couples, but they are also aware of the presence of other languages in their interactions.

“The previously held idea that a lingua franca can’t become a language of identification or that one can’t use it to express feelings doesn’t hold true when it comes to ELF couples.”

Ensuring understanding with creative means Pietikaiinen says that misunderstandings are not very common in ELF couples’ conversation. The couples invest in practices that support understanding, for example, they paraphrase difficult words and check whether the partner has understood them. ELF couples even utilise onomatopoetic expressions and drawing as an aid for achieving mutual understanding.

Silence matters in conflicts

Silence in ELF couples’ conflict interactions does not only mean that the partners disagree or that one is offended by what the other one has said or done. It can also be used to avoid giving self-incriminating answers, or in resisting the partner’s attempt to defuse the conflict with the use of humour.

“These observations have, however, nothing to do with the fact that the partners use non-native English between them. I’m sure these kinds of silences are very familiar for every long-term relationship,” Pietikaiinen adds.

The female brain reacts more strongly to prosocial behavior than the male brain

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Behavioral experiments have shown that when women share a sum of money more generously than men. To gain a more in-depth understanding of this behavior, neuroscientists from the Department of Economics looked at the areas of the brain that are active when decisions of this kind are made. They are the first to demonstrate that the brains of men and women respond differently to prosocial and selfish behavior.

Selfish behavior activates reward system more strongly in men

The striatum, located in the middle of the brain, is responsible for the assessment of reward and is active whenever a decision is made. The findings show: The striatum was more strongly activated in female brains during prosocial decisions than during selfish decisions. By contrast, selfish decisions led to a stronger activation of the reward system in male brains.

Disrupted reward system leads to more selfish behavior in women

In the second experiment, the reward system was disrupted by administering medication to the participants. Under these conditions, women behaved more selfishly, while men became more prosocial. The latter result surprised the researchers. As Soutschek explains, “these results demonstrate that the brains of women and men also process generosity differently at the pharmacological level”. The results also have consequences for further brain research, with Soutschek stating that “future studies need to take into account gender differences more seriously”.

Culturally conditioned behavior patterns are decisive

Even if these differences are evident at the biological level, Soutschek warns against assuming that they must be innate or of evolutionary origin. “The reward and learning systems in our brains work in close cooperation. Empirical studies show that girls are rewarded with praise for prosocial behavior, implying that their reward systems learn to expect a reward for helping behavior instead of selfish behavior. With this in mind, the gender differences that we observed in our studies could best be attributed to the different cultural expectations placed on men and women.” This learning account is also supported by findings that indicate significant differences in the sensitivity of the reward system to prosocial and selfish behavior across cultures.

Eating protein three times a day could make our seniors stronger

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Loss of muscle is an inevitable consequence of aging that can lead to frailty, falls or mobility problems. Eating enough protein is one way to remedy it, but it would seem that spreading protein equally among the three daily meals could be linked to greater mass and muscle strength in the elderly. These are the findings of a study conducted at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in collaboration with the Université de Sherbrooke and the Université de Montréal. The research team examined both the amount of protein consumed and its distribution among people aged 67 and over, using one of the most comprehensive cohort studies in Quebec.

The results of the study, which were published recently in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, shed new light on the diet of people in an aging population.

“Many seniors, especially in North America, consume the majority of their daily protein intake at lunch and dinner. We wanted to see if people who added protein sources to breakfast, and therefore had balanced protein intake through the three meals, had greater muscle strength,” says the lead author of the study, Dr. Stéphanie Chevalier, who is a scientist with the Metabolic Disorders and Complications Program at the RI-MUHC and an assistant professor at the School of Human Nutrition at McGill University.

A rich database of nutrition data

To achieve these results, Dr. Chevalier and her team collaborated with the Université de Sherbrooke and used the database from the Quebec longitudinal study on nutrition and aging called NuAge (Nutrition as a Determinant of Successful Aging).

RI-MUHC researchers analyzed data from the NuAge cohort, which included nearly 1,800 people who were followed for three years. They reviewed the protein consumption patterns of 827 healthy men and 914 healthy women aged 67 to 84 years, all residents of Quebec, trying to establish links with variables such as strength, muscle mass or mobility.

“The NuAge study is one of the few studies gathering such detailed data on food consumption among a large cohort of elderly people. We are proud that the NuAge study can contribute to relevant research of this magnitude in Quebec,” says study co-author Dr. Hélène Payette of the Centre for Research on Aging and a professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Sherbrooke.

“We observed that participants of both sexes who consumed protein in a balanced way during the day had more muscle strength than those who consumed more during the evening meal and less at breakfast. However, the distribution of protein throughout the day was not associated with their mobility,” explains the first author of the study, Dr. Samaneh Farsijani, a former PhD student at the RI-MUHC supervised by Dr. Chevalier.

A “boost” of amino acids

All body tissues, including the muscles, are composed of proteins, which consist of amino acids. If the protein intake decreases, the synthesis is not done correctly and this leads to a loss of muscle mass.

“Our research is based on scientific evidence demonstrating that older people need to consume more protein per meal because they need a greater boost of amino acids for protein synthesis,” says Dr. Chevalier, adding that one of the essential amino acids known for protein renewal is leucine. “It would be interesting to look into protein sources and their amino acid composition in future studies to further our observations.”

Using machine learning to improve patient care

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Doctors are often deluged by signals from charts, test results, and other metrics to keep track of. It can be difficult to integrate and monitor all of these data for multiple patients while making real-time treatment decisions, especially when data is documented inconsistently across hospitals.

In a new pair of papers, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) explore ways for computers to help doctors make better medical decisions.

One team created a machine-learning approach called “ICU Intervene” that takes large amounts of intensive-care-unit (ICU) data, from vitals and labs to notes and demographics, to determine what kinds of treatments are needed for different symptoms. The system uses “deep learning” to make real-time predictions, learning from past ICU cases to make suggestions for critical care, while also explaining the reasoning behind these decisions.

“The system could potentially be an aid for doctors in the ICU, which is a high-stress, high-demand environment,” says PhD student Harini Suresh, lead author on the paper about ICU Intervene. “The goal is to leverage data from medical records to improve health care and predict actionable interventions.”

Another team developed an approach called “EHR Model Transfer” that can facilitate the application of predictive models on an electronic health record (EHR) system, despite being trained on data from a different EHR system. Specifically, using this approach the team showed that predictive models for mortality and prolonged length of stay can be trained on one EHR system and used to make predictions in another.

ICU Intervene was co-developed by Suresh, undergraduate student Nathan Hunt, postdoc Alistair Johnson, researcher Leo Anthony Celi, MIT Professor Peter Szolovits, and PhD student Marzyeh Ghassemi. It was presented this month at the Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference in Boston.

EHR Model Transfer was co-developed by lead authors Jen Gong and Tristan Naumann, both PhD students at CSAIL, as well as Szolovits and John Guttag, who is the Dugald C. Jackson Professor in Electrical Engineering. It was presented at the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Halifax, Canada.

Both models were trained using data from the critical care database MIMIC, which includes de-identified data from roughly 40,000 critical care patients and was developed by the MIT Lab for Computational Physiology.

ICU Intervene

Integrated ICU data is vital to automating the process of predicting patients’ health outcomes.

“Much of the previous work in clinical decision-making has focused on outcomes such as mortality (likelihood of death), while this work predicts actionable treatments,” Suresh says. “In addition, the system is able to use a single model to predict many outcomes.”

ICU Intervene focuses on hourly prediction of five different interventions that cover a wide variety of critical care needs, such as breathing assistance, improving cardiovascular function, lowering blood pressure, and fluid therapy.

At each hour, the system extracts values from the data that represent vital signs, as well as clinical notes and other data points. All of the data are represented with values that indicate how far off a patient is from the average (to then evaluate further treatment).

Importantly, ICU Intervene can make predictions far into the future. For example, the model can predict whether a patient will need a ventilator six hours later rather than just 30 minutes or an hour later. The team also focused on providing reasoning for the model’s predictions, giving physicians more insight.

“Deep neural-network-based predictive models in medicine are often criticized for their black-box nature,” says Nigam Shah, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University who was not involved in the paper. “However, these authors predict the start and end of medical interventions with high accuracy, and are able to demonstrate interpretability for the predictions they make.”

The team found that the system outperformed previous work in predicting interventions, and was especially good at predicting the need for vasopressors, a medication that tightens blood vessels and raises blood pressure.

In the future, the researchers will be trying to improve ICU Intervene to be able to give more individualized care and provide more advanced reasoning for decisions, such as why one patient might be able to taper off steroids, or why another might need a procedure like an endoscopy.

EHR Model Transfer

Another important consideration for leveraging ICU data is how it’s stored and what happens when that storage method gets changed. Existing machine-learning models need data to be encoded in a consistent way, so the fact that hospitals often change their EHR systems can create major problems for data analysis and prediction.

That’s where EHR Model Transfer comes in. The approach works across different versions of EHR platforms, using natural language processing to identify clinical concepts that are encoded differently across systems and then mapping them to a common set of clinical concepts (such as “blood pressure” and “heart rate”).

For example, a patient in one EHR platform could be switching hospitals and would need their data transferred to a different type of platform. EHR Model Transfer aims to ensure that the model could still predict aspects of that patient’s ICU visit, such as their likelihood of a prolonged stay or even of dying in the unit.

“Machine-learning models in health care often suffer from low external validity, and poor portability across sites,” says Shah. “The authors devise a nifty strategy for using prior knowledge in medical ontologies to derive a shared representation across two sites that allows models trained at one site to perform well at another site. I am excited to see such creative use of codified medical knowledge in improving portability of predictive models.”

With EHR Model Transfer, the team tested their model’s ability to predict two outcomes: mortality and the need for a prolonged stay. They trained it on one EHR platform and then tested its predictions on a different platform. EHR Model Transfer was found to outperform baseline approaches and demonstrated better transfer of predictive models across EHR versions compared to using EHR-specific events alone.

In the future, the EHR Model Transfer team plans to evaluate the system on data and EHR systems from other hospitals and care settings.

Both papers were supported, in part, by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data and the National Library of Medicine. The paper detailing EHR Model Transfer was additionally supported by the National Science Foundation and Quanta Computer, Inc.

Cassini Takes Plunge Into Saturn, Scientists Cross-Fingered

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In its line up for final plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, Cassini has once again taken a proximal plunge into the surface of Saturn on June 29, 2017. The final plunge is scheduled for mid-September.

The Cosmic Dust Analyzer’s (CDA) science team, in Germany adjusted the instrument’s settings this week based on experience in recent “proximal” passages between Saturn’s rings and atmosphere. They have created a string of 39 commands that would set the instrument to make the best possible observations during the next proximal plunge. Now the instrument’s data-collection rate has been adjusted to 4 kilobits per second, thus making sure all ring-particle impacts would be sensed.

Here is a week-long update previous to the plunge:

Wednesday, June 21 (DOY 172)

Writers, bloggers, photographers, educators, students, artists and others who use social media to engage specific audiences are encouraged to apply for special access to Cassini’s Grand Finale event in mid-September.

Thursday, June 22 (DOY 173)

The Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) turned and looked at Saturn’s large icy moon Dione for 3.5 hours today. The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS), the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) – all the other Optical Remote-Sensing (ORS) instruments – rode along to make observations as well. CIRS’s goal was to measure Dione’s surface emissivity at thermal-infrared wavelengths, which hold clues to the composition and structure of that moon’s regolith.

Friday, June 23 (DOY 174)

Beginning late today, the spacecraft trained its High-Gain Antenna dish on the distant Earth. It then accurately tracked our planet for a total of 28 hours. Accordingly, the Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) team had Cassini power on its S-band (2 GHz) and Ka-band (32 GHz) radio transmitters, which directed their beams of energy out the HGA along with the main communications beam at X-band (8 GHz).

The result was a high-precision measurement of Saturn’s gravitation, which will be analyzed to reveal deviations from spherical symmetry.

Saturday, June 24 (DOY 175)

CIRS observed the dark side of Saturn’s A ring at far-infrared wavelengths for five hours today, with the other ORS instruments riding along. In addition to studying ring-particle compositions, the observation was part of a campaign to compare the spectral properties of ices among different regions of Saturn’s rings and icy moons.

Cassini and Titan happened to come close to one another today, to a distance about the same as that from Earth to our own Moon.

Sunday, June 25 (DOY 176)

This week’s Titan observing wrapped up with its final 4.3 hours devoted to observing clouds on the planet-like moon; VIMS rode along.

Monday, June 26 (DOY 177)

ISS turned and spent 7.7 hours observing Saturn’s irregular moon Bebhionn, an object of about six kilometers diameter, which orbits Saturn in an inclined ellipse that reaches as far as 25.1 million km from the planet. It might have a binary or contact-binary nature. Bebhionn was named after the goddess of birth in early Irish mythology.

The flight team held a Command Approval Meeting fine-tuning commands with consent from representatives from each of the affected spacecraft subsystems and instruments.

Tuesday, June 27 (DOY 178)

UVIS observed. Ten minutes after the Deep Space Network (DSN) station in Australia acquired Cassini’s downlink, its 18-kilowatt transmitter was turned on, and comands were sent. After a round-trip of 2 hours 31 minutes, telemetry confirmed that the commands had been received and were ready to take effect right before Cassini’s eleventh proximal plunge on June 29.

A total of 58 individual commands were uplinked, and about 1,625 megabytes of science and engineering telemetry data were downlinked and captured at rates as high as 142,201 bits per second.

Wrap up:

Cassini is executing its set of 22 Grand Finale Proximal orbits, which have a period of 6.5 days, in a plane inclined 61.9 degrees from the planet’s equatorial plane. Each orbit stretches out to an apoapsis altitude of about 1,272,000 km from Saturn, where the spacecraft’s planet-relative speed is around 6,000 km/hr. At periapsis, the distance shrinks to about 2,500 km above Saturn’s visible atmosphere on the planet’s total 120,660 km in diameter with a speed of 123,000 km/hr.

Mars Colony with Child Slaves? No Way, Says NASA Denying Ex-CIA Man’s Allegations

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NASA has always been accused of wrong doing in space or hiding aliens or UFOs spotted in the sky and the US space agency has kept silent or denied very often any such conspiracy theories and the lastest one was Anonymous video and in less than a week another conspiracy theory has hit the agency.

In a bizarre revelation on Jones’ TV show , Robert David Steele, an erstwhile CIA officer proposed that kids have been secretly shipped to Mars in the last two decades to live and work as slaves. However, his contention had no evidence but enough of an allegation that forced NASA to deny it.

In his allegations, Steele said: “We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride. So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Jones pointed out that 90 percent of NASA’s missions are secret and hence the allegations get credence. Soon, a NASA official gave a curt statement to the Daily Beast, which had published the allegation:

“There are no humans on Mars. There are active rovers on Mars. There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t. There are,” said Guy Webster, a spokesperson for Mars exploration at NASA told the site. “But there are no humans,” he added categorically.

 

The “discovery” or allegation was made after showing an image on Mars that showed tracks, which looked like man-made.

Zika Virus Surveillance in India Widened Now: Centre

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Following the first zika virus positive test report from Ahemedabad and two more in surveillance tests, the government said it has announced immediate measures to tackle the cases and test equipment across the country.

The sample was from a 34-year-old female patient admitted to hospital with complaints of fever following delivery of a healthy baby who had no travel history to any Zika affected country. Two more cases have been confirmed positive for Zika virus disease from the samples collected during January and February 2017. The other two cases include a 22-year-old pregnant woman in her 37th week of pregnancy and a 64-year-old male with 8 days history of fever.

Though World Health Organization had declared last November that Zika disease infection no longer constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the state government and the Centre have initiated country-wide Zika laboratory based surveillance in India that has so far tested 36,613 human samples and 16,571 mosquito samples for the presence of Zika virus, though no more positive cases have been reported.

National Guidelines and Action Plan on Zika virus, prepared and shared with the States whille an Inter – Ministerial Task Force has been set up under Chairmanship of Secretary (Health) with Secretary (Bio – Technology), Secretary (Department of Health Research) as members, said a statement.

The Joint Monitoring Group, a Technical group under DGHS, tasked to monitor emerging and re-emerging diseases is regularly reviewing the situation on Zika virus disease, it said.

All the International Airports / Ports have displayed signage providing information for travelers on Zika virus disease and to report if they are returning from any of the affected countries and suffering from febrile illness.

Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) is tracking for clustering of acute febrile illness in the community and sensitized its State and District Rapid Response Teams, while the National Institute of Virology, Pune, and NCDC, Delhi, 25 laboratories have been strengthened by Indian Council of Medical Research for laboratory diagnosis.

Currently, three entomological laboratories are conducting Zika virus testing on mosquito samples and six more lab staff have been trained for vector surveillance for Zika virus.

The Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK) is monitoring microcephaly from 55 sentinel sites though no increase in number of cases / clustering of microcephaly has been reported from these centers, said the government. Meanwhle, a 24×7 control room (011-23061469) is functioning from Directorate General of Health Services.

International Asteroid Day Today: More Than 16000 In Nearby Galaxy

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NASA will mark the worldwide observance of International Asteroid Day at 9 a.m. PDT (noon EDT) on Friday, June 30, 2017 with a special television program featuring the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and other projects working to find and study near-Earth objects (NEOs). There are more than 16,000 asteroids in the vicinity, according to NASA.

The program will air on NASA Television and the program will show how NASA researchers find, track and characterize NEOs — asteroids and comets that come within the vicinity of Earth’s orbit and could pose an impact hazard to Earth. NASA is also working to get the planet prepared to respond to a potential impact threat.

The program will include segments on NASA’s NEO projects from multiple locations, including the agency’s Headquarters in Washington and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Viewers may submit questions during the program using #AskNASA.

The broadcast will be part of a 24-hour Asteroid Day program from Broadcasting Center Europe, beginning at 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. June 29 EDT, 1 a.m. June 30 GMT) and streaming online at:

https://asteroidday.org/live

“At NASA, every day is an asteroid day, but we value the international collaboration for a designated day to call attention to the importance of detecting and tracking hazardous asteroids,” said Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson at NASA Headquarters.

Just two days ago an asteroid flew by Earth on Wednesday at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million km), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. Though it was a safer distance from Earth, the encounter is the closest ever any celestial object will have come to Earth in the past 400 years and in the next 500 years, said NASA.

However, the closest flyby of the asteroid has raised concerns among the space scientists about the possibility of a threat from a stray asteroid hitting the Earth and leading to extinction of one-third of the population on the planet, leaving behind huge dent on Earth’s atmosphere and topography.

Ironic but the world is observing the International Asteroid Day on Friday and the closest flyby will set in motion debate over future of mankind on the Earth.

On this day, June 30, 1908, an object measuring 40-meters exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, flattening about 80 million trees over 2,000 sparsely populated square km, that may measure bigger than London. The day is marked as International Asteroid Day.

Though in its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummeled by space rocks which could have annihilated many species and caused huge eruption of ocean waters, scientists are concerned over estimating the possibility and its impact.

“Sooner or later we will get … a minor or major impact,” said Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. “The risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high.”

Among the possible ways of intercepting an approaching asteroid could incldue nuking it or using lasers to vaporize it, while some researchers have proposed a space “tractor” to drag it off course or bumping it into a new direction.

While the smallest objects enter Earth’s atmosphere but get burnt up as shooting stars, medium sized 10-km sized rocks could play havoc on Earth as similar one was believed to have made the dinosaurs extinct.

The largest occur once every 100 million years, researchers said and if it ever happens, it could mean the end of human civilization, they warn.

New Algorithm Can Read Your Mind, Shows Study Using Brain Imaging Technology

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Now brain imaging technology can read what’s going on in your mind by using machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania. The new algorithm can ‘read minds’ and identify complex thoughts with 87 per cent accuracy, they claim.

Since the brain’s building blocks for complex thoughts are formed by various sub-systems and not language-based, by measuring the activation in each brain system, the new technology can decipher what kind of thoughts are being contemplated and relay them to the monitors.

“We have finally developed a way to see thoughts of such complexity in the fMRI signal. The discovery of this correspondence between thoughts and brain activation patterns tells us what the thoughts are built of,” says Prof. Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, where it was developed.

Based on their study, they could predict the features of the left-out sentence, with 87 per cent accuracy, even among those who were never exposed to its activation before.

“Our method overcomes the unfortunate property of fMRI to smear together the signals emanating from brain events that occur close together in time, like the reading of two successive words in a sentence,” Just said. “This advance makes it possible for the first time to decode thoughts containing several concepts.”

The study has been published in the journal Human Brain Mapping.

NASA Denies Anonymous Video on Alien Life Discovery Announcement

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US space agency NASA has denied global hackers group Anonymous claim that it is going make announcement on the discovery of alien life, said a spokesman.

Last week, the hacking group Anonymous posted a video on YouTube that said NASA is about to announce the discovery of life in our galaxy but NASA scientist beyond Earth.

“Contrary to some reports, there’s no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life,” said NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen in a tweet.

“Are we alone in the universe? While we do not know yet, we have missions moving forward that may help answer that fundamental question,” Zurbuchen said.

In fact, Anonymous has put out its video based on Zurbuchen’s testimony to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Science and Space in April this year. However, NASA has always maintained that there is no discovery of alien life and Anonymous video (see below) has surprised many.

Anonymous on their website said, “NASA says aliens are coming!” and  uploaded the above video citing alien-friendly comments made by NASA astronauts and space scientists.

Anonymous quoted Zurbuchen’s rendering before a Congressional hearing in April titled “Advances in the Search for Life” that said: “NASA`s recent advances, such as the discovery of hydrogen in Saturn`s moon Enceladus and the Hubble team’s promising results from the oceans of Jupiter`s moon Europa, are promising signs that we’re closer than ever to discovering evidence of alien life.”

“Taking into account all of the different activities and missions that are specifically searching for evidence of alien life, we are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented, discoveries in history,” Zurbuchen said. Perhaps the second part of the quote has made Anonymous see NASA forthcoming with an announcement.

 

 

 

Google Job Search Engine Takes Off in US, India Next?

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The new Google for Jobs feature has been rolled out in US and India would soon be the next though both markets are entirely different in nature. It said 46% of US employers face talent shortage. In India, the situation is different as India has shortage of jobs in equal number.

Google, which has a long history of using technology to connect people on Google+ and Gmail chat, had announced the new feature at its I/O Conference early this year. Google for Jobs, an initiative for the job matching industry, includes the Cloud Jobs API, announced last year, which provides access to Google’s machine learning capabilities to power smarter job search and recommendations within career sites, jobs boards, and other job matching sites and apps.

“Today, we’re taking the next step in the Google for Jobs initiative by putting the convenience and power of Search into the hands of job seekers. With this new experience, we aim to connect Americans to job opportunities across the U.S., so no matter who you are or what kind of job you’re looking for, you can find job postings that match your needs,” said Google in its blog.

 

Search strings include “jobs near me,” “teaching jobs,” or similar job-seeking queries. Plus other criteria, like commute time, job specialties or the hours they can work also find room in this feature.

“We’ll continue to add additional filters and information in the future. Looking for jobs is a personal and complex journey, and one that we’re trying to support in this new search experience,” assured Google for Jobs.

 Though the new feature may emerge as a competitor to job search portals like Monster or Naukri, Google said it is keen to rope them into the new initiative and holding negotiations with LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor and Facebook.

“To ensure even more jobs are listed over time, we’re publishing open documentation for all jobs providers, from third-party platforms or direct employers, big or small, detailing how to make their job openings discoverable in this new feature,” said Google in its post.

It remains to be seen how Google for Jobs works in US but in India it is sure to win many admirers and followers as the job scene is becoming adverse in the country due to economic slowdown.

NASA Kepler Team Releases Catalogue of Exoplanets, 10 Similar to Earth

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NASA has released catalogue of 4,034 planets of which 2,335 are exoplanets and ten planets found similar to earth in size and habitability. These 10 planets orbit with their star’s habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

Available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, the catalogue has 4,034 planets of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets, with 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, of whom more than 30 have been verified and 10 of them have been found earth-like. The findings were presented at a news conference on Monday at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”

This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, that will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations – from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter – make up the galaxy’s planetary demographics.

It seems that nature commonly makes rocky planets up to about 75 percent bigger than Earth. For reasons scientists don’t yet understand, about half of those planets take on a small amount of hydrogen and helium that dramatically swells their size, allowing them to “jump the gap” and join the population closer to Neptune’s size.

The Kepler spacecraft continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.

Launched in 2009, Kepler has identified more than 5,000 planet candidates. Of these, more than 2,500 have been verified as bona-fide planets, including a dozen that are less than twice the size of Earth and reside in the habitable zone of their host star. The habitable zone is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

 

AYUSH Ministry Clarifies on Sex During Pregnancy in Booklets

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With the Indian media going gaga over the brochure on “Mother and Child Care”, published by the Central Council for Research in Yoga and Naturopathy (CCRYN), the AYUSH ministry has given clarification that the advice to have ‘no sex’ was not true.

Some news reports have drawn an assertion that the booklet puts forward the “prescription” that “pregnant women in India” should “say no to sex after conception”. “This is far from the truth. In fact, the words “no sex” do not feature at all in the booklet,” the AYUSH ministry pointed out in a statement.

Some reports have appeared in the print and electronic media since June 13, 2017 concerning the publication of CCRYN, an autonomous body under the Ministry of AYUSH but these reports are seen to be inaccurate, and some are even seen to misrepresent facts, that forced the Ministry of AYUSH to issue clarification:

It said the booklet puts together relevant and useful information culled out from many years of clinical practice in the fields of Yoga and Naturopathy, keepin in view the health benefits of Yoga and Naturopathy to expecting mothers and new mothers in a simple format.

This publication, which has been in distribution through the units of the erstwhile Department of AYUSH and CCRYN since 2013, and not a recent publication, clarified the statement.

Many new mothers and families have appreciated that information relevant to the different phases of pregnancy has been made available in a simple format in the booklet. The information provided includes diet plans based on clinical experience, simple naturopathy treatments and tips for remaining stress-free during pregnancy.

It also suggests on page 14 of the booklet to avoid certain types of food like tea, coffee, white flour products, fried and oily items and non-veg during pregnancy, which have received selective attention. The suggestion that non-vegetarian food may be avoided (as Yoga & Naturopathy doesn’t advocate non-vegetarian food in its practice) has been singled out for high-lighting in some reports, omitting the mention of white flour products, fried and oily items etc have also been there, said the statement.

The Ministry of AYUSH has urged the media to view the efforts of CCRYN to take the preventive health benefits of Yoga to all sections of the population (including expecting mothers) in the right perspective.

UK and US Share Similar Mindset? How?

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UK and US share a similar mindset when it comes to horizontal drilling for shale energy, say Cardiff University researchers and colleagues. Though an entire ocean separates the UK from the US, when the issue of fracking arises, the great divide — philosophically speaking — narrows considerably.

Concerns about short-term and long-term impacts of horizontal drilling for shale energy are prevalent in both countries. According to a new study by Cardiff University researchers and colleagues, key issues include the risk of water contamination as well as preferences for renewable energy sources over fossil fuels to meet national energy needs.

“This — and other research we have conducted — shows that the public in both countries clearly want a move toward a cleaner, more sustainable energy system in the future,” said corresponding author Nick Pidgeon, a professor of environmental psychology at Cardiff University. “The results confirm that shale development is not compatible with that vision.”

Shale gas and oil production in the US has increased rapidly in the past decade, and the UK government is interested in potential development. Understanding public views is a crucial first step in creating more informed energy debates and promoting better decision-making.

The researchers held a series of carefully formatted, daylong deliberation workshops with diverse members of the public in four cities: London, Cardiff, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. These in-depth discussions enabled the investigators to look beyond existing evidence on public views about hydraulic fracturing based primarily in already impacted areas.

“The results showed that shale development was widely seen as a short-term fix leading to an unwanted dependency on finite fossil fuels at the expense of renewables development,” said co-author Merryn Thomas, a research associate at Cardiff University. “Participants in both countries noted that the majority of proposed benefits, such as specialized jobs of limited duration, would be relatively short-term, while the risks, such as environmental degradation, would almost certainly be longer.”

The study found that those surveyed viewed potential impacts as inequitably distributed, arguing that the economic and employment benefits attributed to shale development were not unique and would apply equally to significant investment and scaling-up of renewable technologies.

Different concerns in the two countries reflected different models of governance of extractive industries. In the US, some participants wanted more standardized federal guidelines and long-term accountability. Conversely, in the UK, where regulation is predominantly at the national level, there were calls for more local control. Regardless of location, participants expressed deep-seated distrust of government and institutions.

In California, past and current experiences with the regional oil industry minimized concern for some about future shale development. However, for others, personal experiences of water shortages and earthquakes amplified this sense of risk. In the UK, where onshore oil and gas extraction is less common, participants drew on tangential experiences of coal and heavy industries when making sense of what shale development might mean for them in the future.

“This study found surprisingly high levels of environmental and societal concern about hydraulic fracturing in areas with no direct experience with the technology,” said co-author Barbara Harthorn, director of the CNS and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCSB. “This method provides strong evidence that diverse members of the public are able to weigh in thoughtfully and critically about local and collective energy system decisions and their impacts.”

The main funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation with supplemental support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Drawing on more than a decade of research developed by Cardiff University and University of California Santa Barbara Center for Nanotechnology in Society (UCSB-CNS) in the US, this is the first qualitative, interdisciplinary, cross-national study of UK and US public perceptions of shale extraction. The results appear in the journal Nature Energy.

India ‘Reactivates’ Its Association Status with IEA

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India has reactivated its association status with the world energy body International Energy Association and said both will work in the areas of mutual interests, including capacity building to meet supply side disruptions.

Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan met Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of IEA on Thursday jointly with Minister of State for Power, Coal & New and Renewable Energy and Mines Piyush Goyal. Dr Birol is visiting India to jointly announce the Activation of ‘Association Status’ of India with IEA.

During the meeting, Pradhan welcomed the elevation of India’s relationship with IEA from Partnership Status (2013) to Association Status and vowed to work towards balancing the global Energy Dynamics reflecting today’s global realities.

India and IEA have an MoU since 2011 under which both are working on capacity building to respond to an oil emergency situation. With the Association Status in place, both India and IEA will work in the areas of mutual interests pertaining to Oil and Gas sector, including capacity building to meet supply side disruptions.

IEA is a Paris based autonomous organisation established in 1974 to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 29 member countries by coordinating collective response to major disruptions in oil supply through release of oil stocks into the global markets.

ISRO Earned $4.5 Million, 76.5 Million Euros in Last 2 Years

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Indian Space Research Organisation’s commercial arm Antrix Corporation Limited (Antrix) has earned a foreign exchange of 76.5 Million Euros and $4.5 Million from foreign countries through launching of their satellites on-board PSLV.

Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Space Jitendra Singh in written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, March 15, 2017, informed the House that the spare capacity available onboard PSLV, after meeting the national requirements, is provided for commercial launch services.

He said ISRO will continue to make available the spare capacity available on its launch vehicles for commercial launch services through Anrix.

Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on February 15, 2017, successfully launched 104 satellites, in a single launch, onboard India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle “PSLV-C37’ on February 15, 2017 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota.

These satellites include- (i) India’s Cartosat-2 Series Satellite (weighting 714kg) as primary payload, (ii) two Indian Nano-Satellites viz. INS-IA&IB(together weighing 18.1 kg) and (iii) 101 foreign nano-satellites together weighing 645.9 kg) from six counties as co-passengers.

This was the 38th successful PSLV mission in a row, which has once again demonstrated the versatility and reliability of the PSLV vehicle. While PSLV has already established itself as a preferred launch vehicle, in its class, in the global satellite market.

“This mission is expected to further strengthen the commercial footprint of PSLV in the global market for launch services, especially for smaller satellites,” said the minister.

Shocked at ISRO Feat of Lofting 104 Satellites, Says Trump Nominee to Head CIA

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US President Donald Trump’s nominee for National Intelligence, Dan Coats, told the Senate Hearing Committee that he was “shocked” to learn India’s space agency successfully launched more than 100 satellites in one go, saying that the US cannot afford to be laggard.

“I was shocked the other day to read that India, on one rocket launch, deposited more than 100 satellites in space,” said Coats during his confirmation hearing for the position of Director of National Intelligence on Tuesday.

“They may be small in size with different functions but one rocket can send up, I think it was 104 platforms,” said Mr Coats, who will be supervising even the CIA.

In fact, out of 104, 96 satellites were for the US companies and most of them were launched for Planet Labs Inc, a San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company.

The successful launch of 104 has relegated even the US which had created a record in 2014 launching 37 satellites in a single go. All 104 satellites were lofted off by India’s PSLV rocket in a precisely timed method and all the 104 were put in their respective orbits in a span of 18 minutes, each travelling at 27,000 kmph.

WHO Applauds India on National Regulatory Authority 100% Compliance

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World Health Organization has applauded India’s National Regulatory Authority which was declared “functional’ with a maturity level of 4, the highest level as per currently evolved definitions in respect of 5 functions, and maturity level 3 in respect of 4 functions.

While, maturity level 4 indicates good results and sustained improvement trends, maturity level 3 reflects systematic process based approach, early stage of systematic improvements, data availability regarding conformance to objectives and existence of improvement trends, said health minister J.P. Nadda, who has appreciated the ministry for the effort.

“The successful outcome of the WHO conducted assessment of the National Regulatory Authority (NRA) of India is a big boost to the Government’s efforts towards quality healthcare, for which the Government is committed to,” he said.

The Minister informed that WHO has termed the 100% compliance in the WHO assessment (benchmarking) of the Indian vaccine regulatory system as another ‘landmark achievement’. The previous WHO assessment (benchmarking) of the Indian vaccine regulatory system was conducted in 2012 during which institutional development plan (IDP) and the road map for strengthening the NRA were developed.

Pointing out to the introduction of newer vaccines in the country’s full immunisation basket through the nationwide introduction of pentavalent vaccine, and the phased roll-out of Rotavirus vaccine and Measles Rubella vaccine, Mr. Nadda stated that the Ministry is confident that India shall meet all its global commitments in the healthcare sector as a result of these focussed endeavours.

In addition, Mission Indradhanush has strengthened the full immunisation drive of the Government, the Health Minister stated.

WHO Gives Maximum Marks to India’s Vaccination System

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WHO, in its assessment of the status of the Indian vaccine regulatory system against WHO NRA Global Benchmarking Tool (GBT) for benchmarking found  Indian NRA as ‘functional’ with a maturity level of 4 or the highest level in respect of 5 functions, and maturity level 3 in respect of 4 functions.

While, maturity level 4 indicates good results and sustained improvement trends, maturity level 3 reflects systematic process based approach, early stage of systematic improvements, data availability regarding conformance to objectives and existence of improvement trends.

The assessment has been carried out by a WHO team comprising lead experts in different areas from WHO Headquarters Geneva, WHO India Country Office, experts drawn from the regulators of USA, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Indonesia, Thailand and Egypt. The assessment has been done in respect of nine different functionalities and

India, as a large vaccine producing country, is currently supplying several vaccines to the UN agencies (UNICEF, WHO and PAHO). A fully functional NRA is a pre-requisite for WHO prequalification of vaccines. One of the requirements to become eligible and retain prequalification status is to have the National Regulatory Authority (NRA) assessed as functional against the WHO published NRA indicators.

WHO Prequalification Programme, as such, facilitates access to vaccines that meet the unified standards of quality, safety and efficacy as well as programme needs. The vaccine manufacturers can only apply for WHO vaccine prequalification if the NRA meets the standards of the WHO NRA published indicators i.e. WHO Global benchmarking Tool on functional regulatory system for vaccines.

The Global Benchmarking Tool (GBT) so developed has 63 indicators and 288 sub-indicators, out of which 150 are critical . The result reflects the growing maturity of the Indian NRA emanating from a concerted effort by the Government in consultation WHO to build capacity and capability of the National Regulatory Authority over last several years.