Misbah was not forced to sit out, clarifies PCB

Karachi: The trouble-prone Pakistan cricket team dressing room was once again witness to some drama and it took PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan’s intervention to diffuse the controversy generated by Misbah-ul Haq’s decision to rest from the third ODI against Australia.

Misbah-ul-Haq

Khan had to talk to the media in Abu Dhabi during the third ODI to defuse the impression that Misbah had been coerced or pressurised into not playing the third ODI by the team management, which is totally behind Shahid Afridi who led the side in the match on Sunday.

Although Misbah took pains to make politically correct appearances during the match to give the impression that everything was alright in the dressing room but former players still didn’t spare the PCB for its sudden decision to hand over the captaincy to Afridi.

Shaharyar said that Misbah was not forced to sit out.

“Neither me nor management have influenced Misbah to sit out, he has done it on his own, he is determined to return. I had an half hour chat with him. He says if ‘I am back to form I would like to lead to the World Cup’,” Khan told the media.

After Pakistan lost the match, former fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar waded into head coach Waqar Younis and even manager/chief selector Moin Khan and the PCB for even accepting Misbah’s wish to take a break.

“What is happening? What sort of message is being conveyed to the cricket world? Four months before the World Cup, we don’t know who is going to be our ODI captain. The PCB and management is only adding to the confusion with their strange statements,” Akhtar said.

Former Test captain, Ramiz Raja said if Misbah wanted to rest, a younger player should have been given charge of the team instead of Afridi.

Blonde woman makes head turn by walking 'Polar Bear'

London: A blonde recently made heads turn when she took a polar bear out for a stroll in Tokyo, Japan.

People clicked pictures, which showed the bear crossing the world-famous Shibuya Scramble crossing, however, some of the people believed that it wasn't real and could have been a "robot," the Daily Star reported.

The woman who walked the bear was accompanied by some men, and all of them were clad in similar T-shirts with the words "LALSH" printed on them, a name which as per the reports belongs to some unspecified group from Russia.

The group, which is also listed on Facebook as an organisation, has promised some sort of reveal in Shinjuku at the end of this month.

IRCTC finally releases a ticketing app for your Android device

New Delhi: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, better known as IRCTC, has at long last launched its official app for Google's mobile platform, Android. The app can now be downloaded from Google Play India, requires about 12MB of free space, and will work on devices running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean or above.

 The new IRCTC Connect app for Android will allow users to do pretty much everything that they can do on the website – booking tickets, checking reservation status, train schedules, train routes and more. Users can even login to their IRCTC accounts to search, book and cancel train tickets, and even receive upcoming journey alerts.

IRCTC launched its official ticket booking app for Blackberry's BBOS 10 in August this year, while the version for Windows Phones and PCs was released last year. While it's odd that the Indian railways chose to bring their service to less popular platforms first, there has been a beta version of the IRCTC app for Android for some time now.

In any case, Android users will now be able to book Indian railway tickets right from the smartphone app, eliminating the requirement to access the IRCTC website. The app boasts of being an easy and quick way of booking tickets, checking reservation status and canceling them, but for a first hand experience you can download the app from here.

Why beer tastes good to us

London: The importance of yeast in beer brewing has long been underestimated but researchers from University of Leuven in Belgium now report that beer yeasts produce chemicals that mimic the aroma of fruits in order to attract flies that can transport the yeast cells to new places.

Interestingly, yeasts are essential for the flavour of beverages such as beer and wine.

“In fact, yeasts may even be responsible for much of the 'terroir', the connection between a particular growing area and wine flavour which previously often was attributed to differences in the soil,” said Kevin Verstrepen from University of Leuven, also known as KU Leuven.

The new collaborative study from VIB, a life sciences research institute, and KU Leuven shows that the fruity volatiles produced by yeast cells are highly appealing to fruit flies.

This attraction allows some yeast cells to hitch a ride with the insects who carry the otherwise immobile microbes to new food sources.

Flies are strongly attracted to normal yeast cells when compared to mutant yeasts that do not produce esters.

“Knowing that esters make beer taste good, it seems that the same flavours that allow us to enjoy our beer probably evolved to attract flies and to help yeast disperse into broader ecosystems,” explained neuroscientist Emre Yaksi from Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), an academic research initiative.

The team believes that their findings have far-reaching implications.

“We all know that flowers attract insects by producing aromas. But there is also a lot of microbes living inside flowers and the chemicals they produce may also play an important role,” added Joaquin Christiaens from VIB who performed the experiments with yeast cells.

New app enables smartphones to understand gestures

London: Scientists have developed a new app enabling users to operate their smartphone with gestures.

The app developed by Professor Otmar Hilliges and his staff at ETH expands the range of potential interactions with such devices and the gesture control significantly expands the range of smartphone functionality.

The app lets the smartphone understand gestures such as movement of your index finger to the left, or right or spreading out of your fingers, or imitate a pair of pliers or the firing of a pistol.

This gesturing wizardry is made possible by a new type of algorithm that uses the smartphone's built-in camera to register its environment and then executes the gesture command associated with the gesture it observes.

The program also recognizes the hand's distance from the camera and warns the user when the hand is either too close or too far away and currently recognizes six different gestures and executes their corresponding commands.

The researchers are convinced that this new way of operating smartphones greatly increases the range of interactivity. The researcher's objective is to keep the gestures as simple as possible, so that users can operate their smartphone effortlessly.

Now, a veggie burger that tastes like actual meat cheeseburger

London: Scientists have now created a veggie burger that has the taste of the actual cheeseburger.

Stanford professor, Patrick Brown has crafted The Impossible Cheeseburger, which is made by using "plant blood" that holds the secret the replicate the taste of meat, the Independent reported.

The sanguine liquid has the same consistency and metallic taste of blood and comes from the same molecule found in haemoglobin, which plays a big part in steak's distinctive taste.

The Wall Street Journal said after a taste test that it has the consistency of animal tissue and isn't overly spongy like tofu.

Brown said that the system that is used for the production of meat and cheese was totally "unsustainable" and had awfully harsh environmental consequences.

Should we engineer animals to be smart like humans?

Human beings have long believed that it is our unique level of intelligence that separates us from other animals. Our ability for higher learning, creative thought, and – perhaps most importantly – our sophisticated communication via speech and language, defines us as a superior species. However, as we expand our understanding of how the brain works, and use animal experiments to learn more about the genes involved in intelligence, will we reach a point where we can pull other species onto our intellectual plane?
The idea of enhancing animal intelligence may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Consider a study published last month by Ann Graybiel and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the relationship between intelligence and genes. The team genetically engineered mice to produce the human form of FOXP2 – a gene known to be linked to the human brain's capacity to learn and process speech – to see whether it would improve the rodents’ ability to learn. Sure enough, when the boosted mice were made to navigate a maze in order to get a reward of chocolate milk, they learned the route faster than the mice without the added human gene.
The results are exciting for anyone interested in understanding the genetic changes in our prehistory that helped us become the wise – or “sapient” – ape. But the nature of this study speaks to another question: whether through fundamental alterations and improvements to mouse brains we could create sentient animals with levels of intelligence to rival our own – a concept known as “uplifting”.

Mice engineered with a certain human gene showed they could learn quicker (Elena Gurzhiy/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

In the past, uplifting has been explored mainly in science fiction. One of this summer's biggest movies was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which depicts a civilisation of intelligent primates descended from test subjects altered by scientists hoping to find a cure for Alzheimer's.
And yet the movie has parallels with real research now under way. In 2011, a research team led by Sam Deadwyler of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, used five rhesus monkeys to study the factors that lead people with diseases like Alzheimer’s to lose control of their thought processes. The researchers trained the monkeys in an intelligence task that involved learning and identifying images and symbols. They were then given doses of cocaine in order to dull their intelligence and made to repeat the test, with predictably less impressive results.
What happened in the next stage of the research was remarkable. The same monkeys were fitted with neural prosthetics – brain implants designed to monitor and correct the functions of the neurons disabled by the cocaine. These implants successfully restored normal brain function to the monkeys when they were drugged – but crucially, if they were activated before the monkeys had been drugged, they improved the primates’ performance beyond their original test results. The aim of the experiments was to see whether neural prosthetics could theoretically be used to restore decision-making in humans who have suffered trauma or diseases such as Alzheimer's – but as far as these specific tests were concerned at least, the brain prosthetics appeared to make the monkeys smarter.

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All this means we may have already entered the era of animal uplifting, says George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a think tank that focuses on the implications of future technology. "But as for more substantive, impactful augmentations, that's still a way off,” he says. “The kind of uplift that appears in science fiction will require technologies far more advanced than anything we have today.” This doesn’t mean we won’t eventually develop these technologies, he adds, particularly as they will primarily help us use animals to learn about cognitive problems in humans, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's.
It’s an important point: even if the idea of uplifting may seem fantastical – and not the sort of goal we should be pursuing – the potential medical benefits in terms of combating human disease and injury suggest further progress down a path that leads to uplifting is inevitable. Certainly such manipulation of animals has advanced enough to become a serious matter to bio-ethicists: in 2011, the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK reported on the ethics of research involving animals containing human material, and devoted an entire section to brain and cognitive manipulation.
The matter has also become a passionate debate for theorists. Some, like Dvorsky, suggest that the debate should be pushed even further, beyond considering just the medical and scientific advances. He believes in an “ethical imperative to uplift”, arguing that if the technology is developed it should be shared with animals in order to free them from the anguish of 'survival of the fittest' as much as it is to free humans: "As the stewards of this planet, it is our moral imperative to not just remove ourselves from the Darwinian paradigm, but all the creatures on Earth as well. Our journey to a post-biological, post-Darwinian state will be a mutual one."

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For David Brin, a science fiction author whose novels helped popularise the concept of uplifting, the reasons to pursue the idea are slightly more pragmatic. He hopes that newly intelligent species would help us share the responsibility of protecting the environment. "The oceans of planet Earth are a vast mystery, filled with both physical wealth and unique treasures to preserve,” he says. “We are trying to learn to be good planetary managers, but I doubt we could fill that role all by ourselves, anywhere near as well as if sapient dolphin partners (and critics) were by our side. The same holds for countless other opportunities for both profit and wisdom."
For others the whole idea is far more problematic. Paul Graham Raven, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, believes the pro-uplifting stance represents biological and scientific arrogance and a misguided belief in human superiority over nature, where human intelligence is viewed as the pinnacle of evolution.
This is perhaps the biggest moral dilemma of the whole uplifting debate: even if Dvorsky, Brin, and others believe granting intelligence to other species would be for their benefit, Raven questions whether we possess the moral authority to make that decision for them without their consent. "It assumes we know what's best for species other than ourselves. Given we show little evidence of knowing what's best for our own species, I'm inclined to mistrust that assumption, however well intended," he says.
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