(General Awareness For Bank's Exams) Science & tech
June - 2014

KLOTHO

•  People who have a variant of a longevity gene have improved brain skills such as thinking, learning and memory. Researchers found that increasing levels of the gene, called KLOTHO, in mice made them smarter, possibly by increasing the strength of connections between nerve cells in the brain.
•  The study was published in Cell Reports. Those who have one copy of a variant of the KLOTHO gene, called KL-VS, tend to live longer and have lower chances of suffering a stroke whereas those who have two copies may live shorter lives and have a higher risk of stroke.
•  The study also found that those with one copy performed better on cognitive tests regardless of age, sex or the presence of the apolipoprotein 4 gene, the main genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.

India’s first cyber lab

•  The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) on May 6 will launch what is touted to be the country’s first cyber lab in a legal academic institution.
•  The lab, co-funded by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, will be inaugurated by ShyamalGhosh, the former Telecom Secretary, Government of India; GulshanRai, Director-General, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and R. VenkataRao, Vice-Chancellor, NLSIU.
•  A release from NLSIU’s Advanced Centre for Cyber Law and Cyber Forensics, said the centre also offers training programmes for bank officials and other professionals who want to gain knowledge of cyber technology and forensics crucial for detection and investigation of cyber crimes.
•  The centre launched its Postgraduate Diploma in Cyber Law and Cyber Forensics in June 2013, which senior police officers, IT security officers and lawyers have enrolled for.
  Implantable device to control BP
•  Not being able to control blood pressure even after gulping pills would no longer be a problem. Soon, an implantable device will reduce blood pressure by sending electrical signals to the brain.
•  In a first, German researchers have successfully reduced the blood pressure in rats by 40 percent with this device without any major side effects.
•  This could offer hope for a significant proportion of patients worldwide who do not respond to existing medical treatment for the condition.
•  The implantable device uses an intelligent circuit to record the activity of the patient, for instance when they are exercising, and adjust the blood pressure accordingly.
•  The device consists of 24 individual electrodes that are integrated into a micro-machined cuff. It is designed to wrap around the vagus nerve, which extends from the brainstem to the thorax and abdomen — supplying and stimulating various major organs including the heart and major blood vessels. 

MERS virus

•  Despite a recent surge of ‘Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus’(MERS-CoV) cases, a meeting of an expert committee called by the World Health Organisation has concluded that conditions for declaring a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ had not been met.
•  The fifth meeting of WHO’s Emergency Committee for MERS-CoV, which was first convened last year took into account the fact that there had been sharp increase in cases since this March, particularly in Saudi Arabia but also in the United Arabian Emirates.
•  Since the virus was first detected in humans two years back, a total of 152 people have now died and 495 have been confirmed to have contracted the virus in Saudi Arabia, according to an Associated Press report. Most cases of the disease have been in the desert kingdom.
•  Egypt, Greece, Malaysia, Philippines, and the U.S. have recently reported isolated cases in individuals who had travelled there from the Middle East. The Netherlands has now reported its first such case.
•  Seasonality could be a factor driving the recent increase. The virus is widespread in camels in the Middle East and north-east Africa, and the animals appear to become infected when young. Increased spread of the virus from camels to humans might be contributing to the outbreak.

Oldest sperm in the World

•  Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest and best-preserved sperm from tiny shrimps, measuring a massive 1.3 millimetres and dating back to 17 million years in Australia.
•  Preserved giant sperm from shrimps were found at the Riversleigh World Heritage Fossil Site in Queensland and are the oldest fossilised sperm ever found in the geological record, researchers said.
•  The shrimps lived in a pool in an ancient cave inhabited by thousands of bats, and the presence of bat droppings in the water could help explain the almost perfect preservation of the fossil crustaceans.
•  The giant sperm are thought to have been longer than the male’s entire body, but are tightly coiled up inside the sexual organs of the fossilised freshwater crustaceans, which are known as ostracods.
•  Within these are the almost perfectly preserved giant sperm cells, and within them, the nuclei that once contained the animals’ chromosomes and DNA.

Newborn mortality

•  Globally, about 5.5 million babies — nearly three million neonates and about 2.6 million stillbirths — die every year. In other words, every day, about 8,000 neonates are dying and the number of stillbirths is about 7,000. Stillbirths happen at about 28 weeks of gestation and also during labour. Babies who die during labour — just five minutes before birth — account for nearly half of all stillbirths.
•  Half of all the newborn deaths across the world occur in five countries. With 7,79,000 deaths, India accounts for the highest number of newborn mortality in the world. The other four countries are Nigeria (2,76,000), Pakistan (2,02,400), China (1,57,000), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (1,18,000). According to the journal, “preterm babies are less likely to be counted, even in rich countries, especially where they are not expected to survive.”
•  But about three million deaths — 54 per cent of maternal deaths, 33 per cent of stillbirths, and 71 per cent of newborn deaths — can be easily prevented if “achievable interventions are scaled up to nearly universal coverage” at all stages — before conception, as well as before, during and after pregnancy.
•  Preterm birth is the biggest risk factor in both 0-6 days and 7-27 days periods. While in the case of the early neonatal period (0-6 days), the intrapartum conditions that occur during childbirth or delivery play a significant role, infections become the predominating factor in the later neonatal period.

World’s biggest dinosaur

•  Scientists have recently discovered in Argentina the bones of the world’s biggest dinosaur, as heavy as 14 African elephants and as tall as a seven-storey building.
•  The 65-foot-tall new species of titanosaur, 130 feet in length and weighing 77 tonnes, is much heavier than the previous record holder Argentinosaurus.
•  The remains of the enormous herbivore dating from the Late Cretaceous period were first discovered by a local farm worker in the desert near La Flecha, about 250km west of Patagonia.
•  The giant herbivore lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago, based on the age of the rocks in which its bones were found.
•  However it does not yet have a name.

Suspension of radioactive water treatment system in Japan

•  Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it had suspended a radioactive water treatment system at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant recently.
•  The operator halted the Advanced Liquid Processing System after it found higher calcium levels than normal in water in one of the system’s three lines.
•  The system is a key component in the effort to deal with the massive amounts of toxic water at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, as the operator keep injecting water into three of its six reactors to keep them cool.
•  The plant suffered meltdowns at the three units after it was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

World's smallest, fastest nanomotor

• Researchers have built the smallest, fastest and longest-running tiny synthetic motor to date.
•  The team's nanomotor is an important step toward developing miniature machines that could one day move through the body to administer insulin for diabetics when needed, or target and treat cancer cells without harming good cells.
•  With the goal of powering these yet-to-be invented devices, UT Austin engineers focused on building a reliable, ultra-high-speed nanomotor that can convert electrical energy into mechanical motion on a scale 500 times smaller than a grain of salt.
•  The team's three-part nanomotor can rapidly mix and pump biochemicals and move through liquids, which is important for future applications.
•  With all its dimensions under 1 micrometer in size, the nanomotor could fit inside a human cell and is capable of rotating for 15 continuous hours at a speed of 18,000 RPMs, the speed of a motor in a jet airplane engine. Comparable nanomotors run significantly more slowly, from 14 RPMs to 500 RPMs, and have only rotated for a few seconds up to a few minutes.

Three Akash missiles test fired

•  The Indian Air Force has test-fired three surface-to-air Akash missiles — two of them in ripple mode — from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur, Balasore district, Odisha.
•  All the three missiles tore apart their targets — a contraption called tow-body flown by the pilotless target aircraft (PTA) Lakshya. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has developed both Akash and Lakshya.
•  The IAF launched the next two missiles in ripple mode, that is, the second missile lifted off from its launcher five seconds after the first one did so.
•  The missile can engage targets such as fighter aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters and cruise missiles, flying 25 km away

A loss for ocean research

• one of the world’s most advanced submersibles Nereus, blew apart 10 km underwater. The submersible, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was on a deep-sea expedition and the loss of the unmanned exploratory undersea vehicle has left ongoing and future projects at stakeIt is believed that it was likely that one of the ceramic vessels used to encase components on Nereus collapsed due to water pressure, leading to an implosive chain reaction.
•  A report on the mishap appeared in Nature . The loss gains significance because Nereus was designed to explore as part of a US National Science Foundation (NSF) programme, the hadal zone. This area of the ocean, in deep-sea trenches between 6,000 and 11,000 metres down, is one of the least explored regions on Earth.
•  Researchers have long dismissed the idea that the area is a ‘dead zone’. For example, on its first deep dive in May 2009, Nereus discovered a new species of anemone in the deepest part of the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Pacific’s Mariana Trench.
•  But systematic exploration has been lacking, leading in 2011 to the creation of the NSF project, an international collaboration called the Hadal Ecosystem Studies (HADES) programme. It aims to determine the composition and distribution of hadal species, and the role of hadal pressures, food supply and trench topography on community structure.

Continent formed like Iceland

•  The timing and mode of continental crust formation is a controversial topic but geochemical analysis of a newly discovered rock unit from Canada has shown that the first continent on earth may have formed in a way modern-day Iceland came into existence.
•  The rocks about four-billion-year-old showed crust-forming processes that are very similar to those occurring in present-day Iceland.
•  These ancient rocks are among the oldest samples of protocontinental crust that we have, and may have helped jump-start the formation of the rest of the continental crust.
•  Continents today form when one tectonic plate shifts beneath another into the Earth's mantle and cause magma to rise to the surface, a process called subduction.
•  One theory is the first continents formed in the ocean as liquid magma rose from the Earth's mantle before cooling and solidifying into a crust.
•  Iceland's crust formed when magma from the mantle rises to shallow levels, incorporating previously formed volcanic rocks.

Scientists map proteins produced in human body

• Thirteen years after the human genome was sequenced, two research groups have independently mapped the extent to which cells in various organs in the body turn many thousands of genes into proteins.
•  From bacteria to humans, genes are made up of units of DNA, called base pairs. The sequence of base pairs in genes tell a cell's molecular machinery what proteins to produce. Ultimately, it is the proteins that carry out a myriad processes essential for life.
•  Once the over three billion base pairs that make up the human genome were sequenced, analysis of that data indicated that there are about 20,000 protein-coding genes.
•  In a paper just published in Nature , an international team of scientists led by AkhileshPandey of the Johns Hopkins University in the U.S and HarshaGowda at the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore has drawn up a draft map of proteins produced from 17,294 genes.
•  There was evidence for proteins coming from 18,097 human genes, reported Bernhard Kuster of TechnischeUniversitaetMuenchen in Germany and his colleagues in a separate paper published in the same issue of the journal.
•  Although proteins from about 84 per cent of all human genes had been found, those from the remaining genes may have eluded detection, remarked Dr. Gowda, a Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Fellow. This could have occurred if the proteins were expressed in tissues or organs that had not been sampled. Alternatively, they might be expressed at very low levels, requiring special techniques to track down.

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