Happy New Year 2016

Sleep isn’t needed to create long-term memories – just time out

Need to remember something important? Take a break. A proper one – no TV or flicking through your phone messages. It seems that resting in a quiet room for 10 minutes without stimulation can boost our ability to remember new information.

The effect is particularly strong in people with amnesia, suggesting that they may not have lost the ability to form new memories after all.

“A lot of people think the brain is a muscle that needs to be continually stimulated, but perhaps that’s not the best way,” says Michaela Dewar at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.

Memory boost

New memories are fragile. They need to be consolidated before being committed to long-term storage, a process thought to happen while we sleep. But at least some consolidation may occur while we’re awake, says Dewar – all you need is a timeout.

In 2012, Dewar’s team showed that having a rest helps a person to remember what they were told a few minutes earlier. And the effect seems to last. People who had a 10-minute rest after hearing a story remembered 10 per cent more of it a week later than those who played a spot-the-difference game immediately afterwards.

“We dim the lights and ask them to sit in an empty, quiet room, with no mobile phones,” says Dewar. When asked what they had been thinking about afterwards, most volunteers said they had let their minds wander.

Now Dewar, along with Michael Craig at the University of Edinburgh and their colleagues, have found that spatial memories can also be consolidated when we rest.

Volunteers who rested after exploring a virtual-reality environment were 10 per cent more accurate at orientating themselves in relation to virtual landmarks than those who played a game of spot the difference afterwards.

It’s good to rest

These findings together suggest that simply resting while we’re awake can give us some of the memory benefits thought to be confined to sleep.

This is good news for insomniacs. “As long as you’re reasonably relaxed, you might still be experiencing some of the memory-consolidation processes that sleep would normally do,” says Gareth Gaskell at the University of York in the UK.

The research could have bigger implications for people with amnesia. When Dewar’s team conducted a memory experiment with people who had the condition, they saw more striking results. “Most of them can’t lead a normal life because they can’t remember what they did 10 minutes ago,” she says – but all showed huge improvements on the memory test when given a break.

The volunteers were able to recall between 30 and 80 per cent of a list of words when they rested for 9 minutes. Without a break, eight of the 12 were unable to remember anything.

“The findings challenge current theories of memory,” says Dewar. “It is typically assumed that people with amnesia lose the ability to consolidate memories; they can take in information but it is rapidly gone.”

Information overload

Dewar thinks that overstimulation may be what causes memory problems in people with amnesia. “If we try to reduce the amount of information going in, people with amnesia can form new memories. There is some spare capacity there that we can tap into,” she says.

“It is very surprising and exciting,” says Gaskell. “If we can understand how this takes place, we could help people with amnesia,” he says.

Dewar hopes to investigate whether having plenty of breaks can help people with amnesia to learn new information, such as family news or how to navigate a new home. She has reason to be optimistic: the wife of a man with Alzheimer’s who took part in her study says she has used the technique to teach her husband the name of his new grandchild.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

To push through goo, use itty, bitty propellers :

A really nice example of bioinspired engineering, By stealing a trick from bacteria, tiny human-made vehicles can cruise through goo.
Researchers in Germany have designed metal and glass micropropellers that travel through mucus in part by liquefying their thick surroundings. The propellers mimic the activity of ulcer-causing bacteria, and could help inform the design of microbots or drug delivery systems.

New Type of Carbon Is Harder and Brighter Than Diamonds

Scientists have designed a new type of carbon that is harder and brighter than naturally formed diamonds.

For those who want to wear a one-of-a-kind sparkler on their fingers, the new material, called Q-carbon, also gives off a soft glow.

"This new phase is very unique," said study co-author Jagdish Narayan, a materials scientist at North Carolina State University. "It has novel electrical, optical and magnetic properties."

For instance, the material can act as either a metal or a semiconductor, and is magnetic at room temperature.

Heat and pressure :- Despite being one of the most ubiquitous and iconic symbols of wealth and luxury, scientists still don't fully understand how diamonds are formed. Most think the diamonds mined today formed between 1 billion and 3 billion years ago, at a depth of about 62 miles (100 kilometers) below the Earth's surface, researchers previously told Live Science.

New e-skin feels heat, textures and more :

Hyunhyub Ko and his team reports rubbery plastic-and-carbon film mimics the structure of human skin (new electronic skin), that can feel the raspy texture of sandpaper, the beat of someone’s pulse and even heat. But there’s more. It also can detect sound.
It’s the first time anyone has demonstrated an e-skin that can sense so many different types of stimuli. It can relay signals directly to brain cells, based on tests with cells that had been isolated from a mouse. Those cells got the skin’s message, too. They became more or less active depending on how hard researchers pushed on the skin.
Such work offers a blueprint for scientists to actually “bridge electronics with biology.
One day, such an e-skin might cover prosthetic limbs and plug directly into people’s nerve cells, he says. This would let people know if they were touching something hot or rough or sharp — just as real skin does. The artificial skin also could form the basis for soft, wearable medical devices.
Over the last several years, scientists have invented an assortment of electronic-skin components. These range from different soft materials to new types of sensors. Some sensors can recognize more than one type of stimuli, but only under just the right conditions. E-skins are still “far from having the capabilities that human skin has,” he admits. But the newly reported advances do bring the prospect of such a technology closer.
By mimicking the ultrasensitive skin of human fingertips, Ko and his colleagues designed their e-skin to detect many types of signals. The researchers placed a soft ridged film over thin bumpy sheets made from plastic and Graphene. (Graphene is a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon with a host of unusual properties.) Those thin bumpy sheets are only about as thick of a few layers of the plastic cling-wrap used to seal up kitchen leftovers.
Touching this e-skin pressed together the electrodes on the bumpy sheets. This caused an electric current to flow through the device, which was hooked up to a machine to measure such signals. The amount of current depended on how much the bumps compressed. This provided a gauge of the pressure.
Heating the Korean team’s e-skin also generated a current, showing that it could sense temperature, too. A strip of the e-skin placed on a person’s wrist let the researchers simultaneously measure skin temperature and blood pressure.
And ridges on this simulated skin help it detect texture. When researchers skimmed its surface over glass or sandpaper, the ridges vibrated. The pattern of those vibrations differed depending on what had touched it. Sensors in the skin picked up on those differences.
Sound waves also made the e-skin vibrate. It could “hear” noise from a speaker playing a famous lecture by the late physicist, Richard Feynman. The e-skin converted his words into electrical signals, and then sent them to a machine. This let the researchers judge how well the e-skin sensed sounds. It worked even better than an iPhone’s microphone, Ko concluded.

People are less willing to rely on their knowledge and say they know something when they have access to the Internet, suggesting that our connection to the web is affecting how we think.

Professor Evan F. Risko, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, led a recent study where the team asked about 100 participants a series of general-knowledge questions, such as naming the capital of France. Participants indicated if they knew the answer or not. For half of the study, participants had access to the Internet. They had to look up the answer when they responded that they did not know the answer. In the other half of the study, participants did not have access to the Internet.

The team found that the people who had access to the web were about 5 per cent more likely to say that they did not know the answer to the question. Furthermore, in some contexts, the people with access to the Internet reported feeling as though they knew less compared to the people without access.

"With the ubiquity of the Internet, we are almost constantly connected to large amounts of information. And when that data is within reach, people seem less likely to rely on their own knowledge," said Professor Risko, Canada Research Chair in Embodied and Embedded Cognition.

In interpreting the results, the researchers speculated that access to the Internet might make it less acceptable to say you know something but are incorrect. It is also possible that participants were more likely to say they didn't know an answer when they had access to the web because online searching offers an opportunity to confirm their answer or resolve their curiosity, and the process of finding out is rewarding.

"Our results suggest that access to the Internet affects the decisions we make about what we know and don't know," said Risko. "We hope this research contributes to our growing understanding of how easy access to massive amounts of information can influence our thinking and behaviour."

David McLean and Amanda Ferguson, research assistants, are co-authors of the study, which appears in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition. Professor Risko plans to further the research in this area by investigating the factors that lead to individuals' reduced willingness to respond when they have access to the web.

Scientists Spot A Planet That Looks Like 'Earth's Cousin'

An artist's rendering of Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit in the habitable zone of a distant star.
T. Pyle/NASA/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Scientists who have been hunting for another Earth beyond our solar system have come across a planet that's remarkably similar to our world.

It's almost the same size as Earth, and it orbits in its star's "Goldilocks zone" — where temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, and maybe just right for life.

But a lot about this planet is going to remain a mystery, because it's 500 light-years away.

Researchers detected the planet while poring over data collected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. The telescope spent years staring at 150,000 stars, watching for telltale dips in brightness that might mean a planet was circling around a star.

One small star in the direction of the constellation Cygnus showed signs of five planets. Four of them are tucked in close to the star, so they're probably too hot for life.

But the fifth planet looked special.

"This planet orbits its star every 130 days," says Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center. It's called Kepler-186f, and it's just 10 percent bigger than Earth.

Kepler-22b, seen in this artist's rendering, is a planet a bit larger than Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of its star. Some researchers think there might be "superhabitable" worlds that may not resemble Earth.
THE TWO-WAY
In Search For Habitable Planets, Why Stop At 'Earth-Like'?
At least in our solar system, Earth-sized planets are made of rock and iron and gas, says Quintana, "so we can guess that Kepler-186f, being so close in size to Earth, has a high probability of being rocky also and composed of those sorts of materials."

This artist rendering provided by NASA, shows Kepler-11, a sunlike star around which six planets orbit.
THE TWO-WAY
'Planet Bonanza' Indeed: NASA Unveils 715 New Worlds
Conditions on the surface would depend on what kind of atmosphere it had, if any. If it was like Earth, temperatures wouldn't be balmy, Quintana says.

"Being on this planet would probably be like being in San Francisco on a cool day," she says. "It would be a much colder place to live."

It would be warm enough, however, for one thing that's thought to be essential for life. "If this planet had the right atmospheric conditions, and if there were water on the surface, it would be likely in liquid form," says Quintana.

But if it has oceans, they would look different.

"It's not going to have a deep rich blue ocean, such as we have, because there's less blue light coming from the star," says Tom Barclay of NASA's Ames Research Center, another member of the team that describes the planet in the journal Science. "So the ocean would probably be a duller, grayer blue."

And because this planet orbits a dim, red dwarf star, he notes that midday on this planet wouldn't be bright — it would look more like an hour before sunset on Earth.

"It's very romantic to imagine there'd be places out there that look like Earth, and that's what we're trying to find — places that remind us of Earth," Barclay says.

Although Kepler-186f shares characteristics with Earth, "it's not an Earth twin," he notes. "It isn't around the same type of star. It's perhaps more of an Earth cousin."

Still, it's the first time anyone has found an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a distant star, Barclay adds. "This is a really profound discovery. It's a major milestone."

Other experts on planets beyond our solar system agree that this discovery is a big deal.

"This planet really is the same size as the Earth and the same temperature," says David Charbonneau of Harvard University. "Up until this point, planets satisfied one of those two, but we really didn't have one that was both those things together."

Both those things are key to life on Earth, Charbonneau says, but we'll probably never know if this new planet has life. "And the reason," he explains, "is that this star system is just too far away from us."

Even though this planet is too distant for follow-up work with other telescopes, it suggests similar worlds might be out there orbiting other red dwarf stars, which are very common.

If scientists could find another planet like this around a nearby star, he says, "we could really study the atmosphere and really figure out something about whether it truly is Earth-like and maybe whether it actually has life on the surface."


That's why Charbonneau and other scientists will keep searching for other Earth-like planets closer to home.

Roboticists learn to teach robots from babies

Babies learn about the world by exploring how their bodies move in space, grabbing toys, pushing things off tables and by watching and imitating what adults are doing.

But when roboticists want to teach a robot how to do a task, they typically either write code or physically move a robot's arm or body to show it how to perform an action.

Now a collaboration between University of Washington developmental psychologists and computer scientists has demonstrated that robots can "learn" much like kids -- by amassing data through exploration, watching a human perform a task and determining how best to carry out that task on its own.

"You can look at this as a first step in building robots that can learn from humans in the same way that infants learn from humans," said senior author Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering.

"If you want people who don't know anything about computer programming to be able to teach a robot, the way to do it is through demonstration -- showing the robot how to clean your dishes, fold your clothes, or do household chores. But to achieve that goal, you need the robot to be able to understand those actions and perform them on their own."

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor:

In a new research scientists have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6,000-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.









What is the genetic mutation
"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Hans Eiberg(Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine). "But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a "switch," which literally "turned off" the ability to produce brown eyes." The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The "switch," which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris -- effectively "diluting" brown eyes to blue. The switch's effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour -- a condition known as albinism.



Limited genetic variation
Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. "From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," says Professor Eiberg. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.



Nature shuffles our genes

The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human's chance of survival. It simply shows that “Nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so."

Android v/s ios (Stability of Apps and the Operating System)

The Crittercism Mobile Experience Report published in March 2014 ranked Android KitKat as more stable than iOS 7.1. Other findings from the report include:

Android 2.3 Gingerbread has the highest total crash rate, at 1.7%. Other versions of Android — Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, and KitKat — have a crash rate of 0.7%.

iOs 7.1 has a crash rate of 1.6%., and the rates for iOS 7.0 and iOS 5 are 2.1% and 2.5% respectively.

Phone versions of both Android and iOS are more stable than their tablet versions.

Crash rates for apps vary by category — games are most likely to crash (4.4% crash rate) and e-commerce apps have the lowest crash rate of 0.4%.

Android v/s ios (In Terms of Security and Privacy)

Security:

Android’s applications are isolated from the rest of the system’s resources, unless a user specifically grants an application access to other features. This makes the system less vulnerable to bugs, but developer confusion means that many apps ask for unnecessary permissions. The most widespread malware on Android is one where text messages are sent to premium rate numbers without the knowledge of the user, and the sending of personal information to unauthorized third parties. As it is the more popular smartphone operating system, it is more likely to be the focus of attacks.

Malware writers are less likely to write apps for iOS, due to Apple's review of all the apps and verification of the identity of app publishers. However, if an iOS device is jailbroken and apps installed from outside Apple's store, it can be vulnerable to attacks and malware.

Privacy:

When it comes to protecting users' private information, iOS wins. When installing apps on Android, the user is presented with all the permissions that the app is requesting. This is an all-or-nothing proposition. The user can choose to accept the app's request for permissions or not install the app at all. App developers take advantage of this "feature" and request a lot of user information. For example, Pandora's mobile app on Android requests permissions for your Google identity, contacts, calendar, photos, media, files and even call information.

Pandora's app on iOS gets no such permissions. After it is installed and opened by the user, an iOS app may request additional permissions like location and access to Contacts. But the user can reject these permission requests. Even after approving the permission requests, iOS users can quickly glance at which apps have access to their Contacts and location data, and turn off access for apps with which they no longer want to share this data.

In November 2014, Twitter announced that it is now tracking the list of apps its users have installed on their phones. Both iOS and Android are vulnerable — an app installed on either platform can get a list of other apps installed on the same device.