Everyday Science

A 39-year-old acoustic engineer who worked in a television studio for eight hours a day and six days a week for eight years went to see an ENT doctor after he felt the ground turn under his feet. He was also constantly ill at ease. The symptoms did not have a pattern and the doctor was not able to pinpoint a diagnosis. The engineer was asked to go on a month-long vacation in the countryside -- sans most of the technology around him. When he returned, the symptoms had disappeared. "In my area (of work), I see a lot of patients, especially young ones, who come up with complex symptoms. These symptoms were not so common earlier. I have been in the medicine field since 1985. I am talking about things (symptoms) of the last 10 years, which I did not see in my last 20 years before that," Dr Vikas Nehru, an ENT (ear, nose, throat) surgeon by profession and training, told IANS in an interview here. Nehru, who is now a Dubai-based specialist and worked as an Associate Profess...

Ross 128b A new extrasolar system planet can be added to a handful of fellow exoplanets which could theoretically support life, the European Southern Observatory said Wednesday. The ESO said it had discovered the planet, Ross 128b, orbiting a star within the constellation of Virgo and it is comparatively ‘close’ at just 11 light years outside the Solar System. One light year is equivalent to 9.46 trillion kilometres (5.85 trillion miles). But in inter-galactic terms that is not so far, says Xavier Bonfils, an astronomer for the French CNRS research centre at the Grenoble Observatory for Sciences of the Universe. “Ross 128b is very close, which will allow us to see it with a telescope such as E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) in construction for 2025,” Bonfils told AFP. Researchers say Ross 128b could potentially harbour life, as it has a similar mass to that of Earth—a multiple of 1.35 -- and “its surface temperature could equally be close to that of Earth”. ...

Google has developed a text-to-speech artificial intelligence. In a major step towards its "AI first" dream, Google has developed a text-to-speech artificial intelligence (AI) system that will confuse you with its human-like articulation. The tech giant's text-to-speech system called "Tacotron 2" delivers an AI-generated computer speech that almost matches with the voice of humans, technology news website Inc.com reported. At Google I/O 2017 developers conference, company's Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the internet giant was shifting its focus from mobile-first to "AI first" and launched several products and features, including Google Lens, Smart Reply for Gmail and Google Assistant for iPhone. According to a paper published in arXiv.org, the system first creates a spectrogram of the text, a visual representation of how the speech should sound. That image is put through Google's existing WaveNet algorithm, which ...

Blood test may diagnose cancer: Scientists A new blood test for cancer has shown promise toward detecting eight different kinds of tumors before they have spread elsewhere in the body, offering hope of early detection, researchers said Thursday. Further study is needed before the test -- called CancerSEEK -- can be made widely available for its projected cost of about $500, said the report in the journal Science. The study, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, involved 1,005 patients whose cancer -- already pre-diagnosed based on their symptoms -- was detected with an accuracy rate of about 70 percent overall. Cancers were detected in the ovaries, liver, stomach, pancreas, esophagus, colorectal, lung and breast. For five of these cancer types -- ovary, liver, stomach, pancreas and esophagus -- there are no screening tests available for people of average risk. The test was able to detect these five with a sensitivity range of 69 to 98 percent. In 83 percent o...

Thinking that you may receive mosquito bites if you are more sweet may not be that far-fetched as a new study suggests that mosquitoes may abandon hosts who swat at them, according to a new study. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that mosquitoes can rapidly learn and remember the smells of hosts and that dopamine is a key mediator of this process. Mosquitoes use this information and incorporate it with other stimuli to develop preferences for a particular vertebrate host species, and, within that population, certain individuals. However, the study also proved that even if an individual is deemed delicious-smelling, a mosquito’s preference can shift if that person’s smell is associated with an unpleasant sensation. According to the researchers, hosts who swat at mosquitoes or perform other defensive behaviour may be abandoned, no matter how sweet they are. “We now know that mosquitoes are able to learn odours emitted by their host and avoid those...

Living in a large social group makes magpies more intelligent, finds a new study emphasising that social environment plays an important role in cognitive evolution. Magpies are considered as one of the most intelligent animals in the world, and one of the only non-mammal species who are able to recognise themselves in a mirror test. The findings revealed that wild Australian magpies from larger groups showed an “elevated cognitive performance”, when tested for their memory, problem-solving and ability to control behaviour. Females who are more intelligent are likely to have more offspring, indicating there is the potential for natural selection to act on cognition. The demands of living in complex social groups may have played a role in the evolution of intelligence, the researchers suggested. “We showed that individuals living in larger groups in the wild show elevated cognitive performance, which in turn is linked to increased reproductive success,” said Alex Thornton,...

The Canadarm 2 reaching out to grapple the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft and prepare it to be pulled into its port on the International Space Station (ISS). AFP file photo Could the International Space Station become a commercial venture run by private industry? That is the wish of the White House, which hopes to end funding for the costly program within a few years, The Washington Post reported Sunday. The US plan, the paper said, involves privatizing the ISS, a low-orbit space station piloted by the US space agency NASA and developed jointly with its Russian counterpart. The station has allowed international crews-notably in collaboration with the Canadian, European and Japanese space agencies-to pursue scientific research in the environment of a low Earth orbit. “The decision to end direct federal support for the ISS in 2025 does not imply that the platform itself will be deorbited at that time,” says an internal NASA document obtained by the Post. “It is possible th...