News Kvartha

Washington, July 31 (IANS) Feeling good usually makes us smile, but does it work the other way around? Yes, smiling during episodes of stress can help to reduce its intensity regardless of whether a person actually feels happy or not, according to a research. Psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas investigate the potential benefits of smiling by looking at how different types of smiling, and the awareness of smiling, affects individuals' ability to recover from episodes of stress. "Age old adages such as 'grin and bear it' have suggested smiling to be not only an important non-verbal indicator of happiness but also wishfully promotes smiling as a panacea for life's stressful events," says Kraft. "We wanted to examine whether these adages had scientific merit, whether smiling could have real health-relevant benefits," Kraft said. Smiles are generally divided into two categories: standard smiles, which use t...

Washington, July 30 (IANS) The American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI), a powerful professional community of doctors with over 65,000 members, has not only become a "force to reckon with" but aims to "advance the science of healing" worldwide, particulary in India. According to the new AAPI president Narendra Kumar, who assumed leadership of AAPI at its 30th annual Convention in Long Beach, California last month, "the slate of officers for AAPI 2012-13 comprise of individuals who are dedicated, industrious, experienced and very aware of the challenges that lie ahead." "AAPI has become a force to reckon with; we will all work together, stay focused and make you proud of our organization," added Kumar, who has been practicing otolaryngology - head & neck surgery - in Saginaw, Michigan since 1988. The members of the new executive committee are: Jayesh Shah, president-elect; Ravi Jahagirdar, vice president; Seema Jain, secret...

By Arun Kumar Washington, July 30 (IANS) A highly successful AIDS prevention programme launched in India by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has evoked great interest in Africa where over two thirds of people with the deadly disease live. "There is so much demand for these learnings in Africa," Alkesh Wadhwani, head of the foundation's India programmes, told IANS. "Multiple countries visit us and seek all the tools and techniques we use to scale up their programme with sex workers," said Wadhwani who was here to attend the just concluded International AIDS Conference. In just one year, official teams have come to visit the foundation from seven eight African countries, including Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Surprisingly, even Thailand, which pioneered such initiatives with a very successful programme in the 1990s, visited. "The irony is that when we started in 2003, we went to Thailand to learn how to launch these pr...

By Arun Kumar  Washington, July 26 (IANS) An exhibition showcasing the remarkable artistic legacy of India's Mughal era opens here Saturday at the Freer/Sackler galleries, which own one of the world's greatest collections of these works. Titled "Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran", the exhibition would display through Sep 16, 50 of the finest folios and paintings made for Persian rulers and the Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. The exhibition is also accompanied by the book "The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court", by Milo Cleveland Beach, pre-eminent Mughal art historian and former director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art. Opening of the exhibition will be marked by a day-long festival called "Inspired by India: A Family Celebration" Aug 11. This free event, which coincides with India's Independence Day on Aug 15, features traditional music and dance performanc...

By Arun Kumar  Washington, July 25 (IANS) A leading Indian health expert has suggested greater collaboration between the US and India to meet the healthcare challenge with new tools to transform its delivery, such as through information technology. Calling the healthcare challenge 'solvable'' at an interactive session on 'US and India: Innovating Health Care' here Tuesday, Dr. Prathap Reddy, chairman of the Apollo Group of Hospitals, said that it was a key area where the US and India can work together. Speaking at the event organized jointly by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Reddy lauded the ongoing efforts in the US to digitise healthcare data through Electronic Medical Records and hoped that such techniques would be brought to India as well. He also acknowledged the tremendous contributions made by research organizations in the US in diagnosis, methodology, innovation, research and tech...

By Arun Kumar  Washington, July 21 (IANS) Eyeing India's expansive multi-million dollar military modernisation programme, two top US lawmakers have asked the Pentagon to develop a closer defence relationship with New Delhi, including potential co-development or co-production of military weapon systems. In a letter Friday to deputy defence secretary Ashton B Carter, who is visiting India next week, Senators John Cornyn and Mark Warner, co-chairs of the Senate India Caucus, said it is in the interest of both the US and India to continue building a strategic and military culture of cooperation between the two countries. With 38 Senators, the Senate India Caucus is the largest country-specific caucuses in the US Senate. "As India undertakes its expansive military modernisation programme - projected to cost an estimated $80 billion by 2015 - numerous prospects exist for the US to further expand defence trade and cooperation with India," wrote Republican Cornyn and Democra...

Washington, July 19 (IANS) One out of four college women in the US are gravitating towards the hookah, which originated in India and Persia, and many of them mistakenly believe that it is safer than cigarettes, says a US study. Researchers from the Miriam Hospital's Center for Behavioural and Preventive Medicine found the more alcohol women consumed, the more likely they were to try the hookah, while women who used marijuana engaged in hookah smoking more frequently than their peers, the journal of Psychology of Addictive Behaviours reports. The phenomenon was mostly prevalent among the first year college students. Many of them also mistakenly believe that hookah is safer than cigarettes, even though its use has been linked to many of the same diseases caused by cigarette smoking, including lung cancer, respiratory illness and periodontal disease. Hookah smoking is a social activity during which users smoke tobacco filtered through a water pipe. Their tobacco mixtures vary in com...

Washington, July 19 (IANS) Over eight million people worldwide had access to life-saving treatment in low- and middle-income countries last year, an increase of 1.4 million over 2010, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said in a report. The report - Together We Will End AIDS - said that despite the substantial numbers of people newly starting treatment, it is only just over half (54 percent) of the 14.8 million people eligible, Xinhua reported. According to the report, some 34.2 million people are living with the AIDS virus globally, including 2.5 million who became infected last year. And 1.7 million died in 2011. New infections and deaths dropped slightly last year. The report also outlined the significant progress that has been made in reducing new HIV infections in children. Since 2009, new infections in children have fallen by an estimated 24 percent. Some 330,000 children were newly infected in 2011, almost half than at the peak of the epidemic in 2003 (570,...

By Arun Kumar  Washington, July 17 (IANS) US Senate investigators have accused global banking giant HSBC of failing to prevent billions of dollars worth of money transfers linked to drug cartels and terrorist groups. HSBC failed to review thousands of suspicious transactions and properly vet clients over the past decade, Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a report released Monday. Among other issues, the report notes that in 2007 and 2008, HSBC's Mexico unit shipped $7 billion in cash to the bank's US affiliate, a volume of shipments that law enforcement officials said could reach that size "only if they included illegal drug proceeds." HSBC Mexico had a number of high-profile clients linked to drug trafficking, the report said, as well as "a huge backlog of accounts marked for closure due to suspicious activity, but whose closures were delayed." The subcommittee also found that HSBC worked extensively with Saudi Arabi...

Washington, July 16 (IANS) Scientists have discovered a biochemical that shows a completely new and promising direction for the development of drugs to treat type-2 diabetes. Scientists had long suspected that diabetes and obesity could be linked to problems in the biological clock. Lab mice with altered biological clocks, for example, often become obese and develop diabetes. Two years ago, a team headed by Steve Kay, dean of the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego, discovered the first biochemical link between the biological clock and diabetes, the journal Science reported. It found that a key protein, cryptochrome, that regulates the biological clocks of plants, insects and mammals also regulates glucose production in the liver and that altering the levels of this protein could improve the health of diabetic mice, according to a university statement. Now Kay and his team have discovered a small molecule -- one that can be easily developed into ...

Washington, July 13 (IANS) A system developed by scientists is capable of warning astronauts about radiation from solar storms nearly three hours in advance, says a study. "If you're in a plane flying over the poles, there is an increased radiation exposure comparable to having an extra chest X-ray you weren't planning on," says John Bieber, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware Bartol Research Institute. "However, if you're an astronaut on the way to the Moon or Mars, it's a big problem. It could kill you," adds Bieber, who supervised the project led by Su Yeon Oh, post-doctoral researcher at Chungnam National University, South Korea, the International Journal of Research and Applications reported. The sun is now moving into a peak period of solar storm activity, which generally occurs every 11 years. The solar storms, flares and coronal mass ejections threaten the electrical system on the Earth in addition to some astron...

Washington, July 12 (IANS) A free new app called UMSkinCheck, designed for iPhone and iPad, will screen skin cancers by reminding users to compare unusual growths on their skin with actual photos provided by the app. A collaboration of the University of Michigan Medical School technology and clinical expertise, the app guides users through a series of 23 photos, covering the body from head to toe. Photos are stored within the app and serve as a baseline for future comparisons. The app will create a reminder to repeat a skin self-exam on a regular basis. If a mole appears to be changing or growing, the photos can then be shared with a dermatologist to help determine whether a biopsy is necessary, according to a Michigan statement. "We recommend skin self-exams for everyone in order to detect skin cancer at the earliest stages, when treatment is less invasive and more successful," said Michael Sabel, associate professor of surgery at the Michigan Medical School, who led the p...

Washington, July 6 (IANS) Researchers have designed a robotic set of legs which they believe is the first to mimic the human gait accurately. The neural (nerve cell) architecture, musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans have been simplified and built into the robot, giving it a remarkably human-like walking gait. The robot's biological accuracy has allowed the researchers to investigate the processes underlying walking in humans and may bolster theories of how babies learn to walk, as well as helping to understand how spinal-cord injury patients can recover the ability to walk, the Journal of Neural Engineering reports. A key component of the human walking system is the central pattern generator (CPG). The CPG is a neural network in a spinal cord region that generates rhythmic muscle signals, according to an University of Arizona statement. "Interestingly, we were able to produce a walking gait, without balance, which mimicked human walking,...

Washington, July 6 (IANS) Matching the profile of interests of a person in various works with skills required for a particular job could be a better way to evaluate a his/her suitability for a particular job, a new research suggests. Psychological scientist Christopher Nye of the Bowling Green University and colleagues from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, US, used a technique called meta-analysis to carry out the study. Meta-analysis allowed them to pool the findings from existing studies on vocational interests and analyse the body of research as a whole, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science reports. Nye and his team hypothesised that it was not a person's overall interest in a particular kind of work but how their profile of interests across various types of work matches with the profile of skills and tasks involved in a particular job that mattered, according to a Green statement. They surmised that this match - known as person-environment fit - would ...

Washington, July 6 (IANS) Astronomers have been baffled by an extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star disappearing mysteriously. "It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared. This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings," said Benjamin Zuckerman, study co-author and professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD). "The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury," Zuckerman was quoted as saying in the journal Nature. "It's like the classic magician's trick - now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, post-doctoral scholar at the UCSD, who led the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!" The cosmic vanishing act occurred arou...

Washington, July 6 ( IANS) Former England captain David Beckham will sit out the next game after he received a ban from Major League Soccer (MLS) for kicking a ball at an opponent in Los Angeles Galaxy's loss at San Jose. Beckham received the ban Thursday for kicking the ball at San Jose's Sam Cronin during the 3-4 loss Saturday. Cronin was down in the penalty box at the time, and Beckham's kick set off a prolonged argument between the teams, reported Xinhua. Beckham was issued a yellow card for the incident. He missed the Galaxy's home loss to Philadelphia Wednesday under suspension for an accumulation of yellow cards. The struggling defending MLS champions' next game is Sunday at Chicago.

By Arun Kumar   Washington, July 6 (IANS) President Barack Obama has a slight 3-point advantage over likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney in a new poll of polls averaging three recent national surveys of the presidential race. The CNN poll of polls showing Obama at 48 percent and Romney at 45 percent includes the most recent CNN/ORC International Poll, the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll and the Newsweek/Daily Beast Poll conducted between June 27 and July 3. Obama's advantage over Romney is within the sampling error of each survey. As an average of other polls, the CNN Poll of Polls does not have a sampling error, the news channel said. In the CNN/ORC International Poll, Obama is ahead of Romney, 49 percent to 46 percent. The sampling error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The Gallup poll includes results of the past seven days and has Obama over Romney, 48 percent to 44 percent, with a sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points. Obama has 47 percent and Romney 4...

Washington, July 5 (IANS) If you are a parent, then you are 52 percent less likely to develop a cold than non-parents, says a latest research. "We have had a long-term interest in how various social relationships influence health outcomes," said Sheldon Cohen, professor of psychology at Carnegie College of Humanities and Social Sciences, who led the study with Rodlescia S. Sneed. "Parenthood was especially interesting to us because it has been proposed that it can have both positive and negative effects on health," Cohen was quoted as saying in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. "For example, being a parent can be stressful but at the same time can be fulfilling, facilitate the development of a social network and provide purpose in life," said Cohen, according to a university statement. Cohen, Sneed, Ronald B. Turner from the University of Virginia and William J. Doyle, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, exposed 795 healthy adults aged between ...

By Arun Kumar  Washington, July 4 (IANS) More than four days after a savage summer storm brought the world's most powerful nation to its knees, about 1.2 million customers in the American capital and ten states from Indiana to Delaware still have no electricity. Even as the number of 'powerless' came down from about 1.8 million Monday night-- and a peak of 4 million on Friday night and Saturday, just after the storms hit, officials said some residents may not get electricity back until the end of the week. The total number of households and businesses without power Tuesday night included about 96,000 in metropolitan Washington, DC, some 326,000 in West Virginia, 291,000 in Ohio and roughly 223,000 in Virginia, according to CNN. Amid rising frustration among the residents over such a long delay in restoration of power, Washington city mayor Vincent Gray has opened six sites to distribute boxed lunches to affected residents. Some of the millions without power flocked to ...

By Arun Kumar  Washington, July 4 (IANS) Recognising India's growing maritime power, the United States wants to maintain a "significant" relationship with India to help provide stable and secure international commerce through the sea lanes, according to a top US naval commander. Although India is only providing staff personnel for the ongoing Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC) 2012 exercise, India's participation is of significance for all 21 other participants, Vice Admiral Gerald Beaman, commander of the US Third Fleet and RIMPAC, said during a media teleconference Tuesday. India and 21 other nations are participating in what is described as the world's largest international maritime exercise being held June 27 to August 7, in and around the Hawaiian Islands.with 42 ships, six submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel. "The partnerships we are building during the RIM exercise is exactly why we want to maintain our relationship with Indi...