Information about News And Events, Politics And Government and More

Routine activities like wearing swim goggles, sleeping face down or doing a gym workout may contribute to glaucoma that damages the optic nerve and leads to blindness, according to a new study.

‘The fluid pressure inside the eye increases - or spikes - during many everyday activities,’ said Charles McMonnies, a professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Optometry and Vision Science.

‘Eye rubbing, yoga head stands, weightlifting, sleeping face down, playing instruments like the trumpet and swimming laps are some of the many ways of causing eye pressure spikes,’ McMonnies said.

Any touching of the eye through the eyelids raises pressure: light touch causes a small increase but firm touch can cause a spike three to five times normal pressure, he says.

Wiping a watery eye and removing eye make-up both increase eye pressure, partly because they involve eye closure combined with lid contact.

In the case of eye rubbing, the combined effects of eye closure and rubbing forces on the eye can raise pressure to very high levels; strong rubbing may raise pressure to 10 times normal levels.

‘Normally these pressure spikes are of little consequence and healthy eyes appear to be unaffected by them. But eye-pressure spikes that are large, and/or last a long time, and/or occur frequently, may contribute to the progression of pressure-related eye diseases.’

These diseases include glaucoma - which affects a large proportion of elderly people and can lead to blindness - and rapidly increasing myopia, or short-sightedness. Rarer pressure-related conditions include keratoconus, or conical cornea, said a UNSW release.

‘Avoiding sleeping with the eyes in contact with a pillow or sleep mask may help to slow the progression of pressure-sensitive eye diseases,’ he says.

These findings have been published in Optometry and Vision Science.

Archaeologists in China have discovered fossils of a pigeon-sized feathered dinosaur which they believe to be an ancestor of birds.

Its remains were found 90 percent complete, preserved in a slab of rock in Inner Mongolia’s Ningcheng county in northern China, the researchers wrote in an article in Nature.

Its four limbs lacked contour feathers for flight and it probably lived from the Middle to Late Jurassic periods, or 176 to 146 million years ago.

This means it is older than the Archaeopteryx, which lived around 155 to 150 million years ago.

Feathered but flightless, the small creature weighed just 164 grams and had buck teeth resembling that of carnivores.

But scientists have no clue what it ate.

“Insects? Other reptiles or amphibians? Or plants?” Professor Fucheng Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences wrote in reply to a question from Reuters regarding its diet.

Named the Epidexipteryx, it had four long and thin tail feathers and a short tail.

The scientists said it belonged to a different group from the Microraptor, which had flight feathers and which some scientists believe flew sometimes in addition to gliding.

But like the Microraptor — which lived in a later period 130 to 125 million years ago — it gave important evidence about the evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

“You could say it was a link between dinosaur and birds. It was very close to the ancestor of birds,” Zhang wrote.

“This new fossil adds yet more complexity to the early history of evolution from dinosaurs to birds.”

India’s Chandrayaan-1 has begun its journey to the Moon -eagerly to find water on its surface - but there is a disappointing news from the Japanese lunar explorer Selene that has been circling the Moon for about a year.

Scientists, who are operating Selene, say that new images taken by a stereo camera onboard the spacecraft indicate that there may not be water or ice in Shackleton crater, the most likely place on Moon that was thought to have water.

The findings were published online Thursday by the American journal Science.

The inside of the Shackleton crater at the Moon’s south pole is a permanently shadowed area, unexposed for the most part to sunlight and, therefore, a place where water-ice deposits have been inferred to exist.

Based on a model of the crater’s shape, the authors suggest that temperatures on the crater floor are less than minus 180 degrees Centigrade — cold enough to hold ice.

The spacecraft Selene took the images of the crater during the lunar mid-summer - when enough sunlight is scattered off the upper inner wall of the crater to provide some faint illumination. The terrain camera has a 10-meter resolution.

‘But the images reveal no conspicuous brightness that would indicate a patch of pure water-ice. There may be no ice at all, or any ice that exists might be mixed into the soil at low concentrations,’ the researchers conclude.

It is to be seen if Chandrayaan-1 will have better luck. Three of its 11 scientific payloads will look for water in the polar regions including the Shackleton crater.

One of them is the High Energy X-ray Spectrometer built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

According to ISRO, this is the first planetary experiment to carry out spectral studies at those X-ray energies capable of identifying polar regions covered by thick water-ice deposits.

The other is the Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR) supplied by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US.

According to NASA documents, MiniSAR is mainly intended for detecting water-ice in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles up to a depth of a few meters. It can optimally distinguish water-ice from the dry lunar surface.

The other NASA-supplied payload - Moon Mineralogy Mapper - is an imaging spectrometer. It is mainly intended to assess and map lunar mineral resources but ISRO says ‘may also help in identifying water-ice in the lunar polar areas’.

If everything goes as planned, Chandrayaan-1 will start hunting for water on the Moon from November end.