NEW YORK:  Cats can respond to the sound of their own names, according to a study. Japanese scientists said that they have provided the first experimental evidence that cats can distinguish between words that we people say.

Atsuko Saito of Sophia University in Tokyo says there’s no evidence cats actually attach meaning to our words, not even their own names. Instead, they’ve learned that when they hear their names they often get rewards like food or play, or something bad like a trip to the vet. And they hear their names a lot. So the sound of it becomes special, even if they don’t really understand it refers to their identity.

Saito and colleagues describe the results of their research in the journal Scientific Reports. In four experiments with 16 to 34 animals, each cat heard a recording of its owner’s voice, or another person’s voice, that slowly recited a list of four nouns or other cat’s names, followed by the cat’s own name.

Many cats initially reacted — such as by moving their heads, ears or tails — but gradually lost interest as the words were read. The crucial question was whether they’d respond more to their name. Sure enough, on average, these cats perked up when they heard their own name.

Kristyn Vitale, who studies cat behavior and the cat-human bond at Oregon State University in Corvallis but didn’t participate in the new work, said the results “make complete sense to me.”

(Agencies)

SEATTLE: A man in London has become the second person to be free of the AIDS virus after a stem cell transplant, Associated Press reported doctors as saying.

Until now, Timothy Ray Brown from the US was the only person believed to have been cured of HIV after undergoing a transplant in Berlin 12 years ago.

The latest case “shows the cure of Timothy Brown was not a fluke and can be recreated,” said Dr Keith Jerome of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle.

The transplant changed the London patient’s immune system, giving him the donor’s mutation and HIV resistance. The patient voluntarily stopped taking HIV drugs to see if the virus would come back. There is no trace of the virus after 18 months off the drugs, says the report.

(Agencies)

Chinese scientists cloned five monkeys from a gene-edited macaque with circadian-related disorders, another first for the country in the controversial field.

The cloned monkeys were born in Shanghai at the Institute of Neuroscience of Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to two articles published in National Science Review on Thursday. Researchers knocked out BMAL1 — a critical transcription factor for activating circadian rhythms — through gene editing at the embryo stage, then cloned a monkey with the mutation.

This was the first time multiple monkeys have been cloned from a gene-edited adult male, Xinhua News Agency reported, employing the same method used to create the first cloned monkeys born in China in 2017. The result proves batch cloning of gene-edited male monkeys with diseases is feasible, one of the scientists told Xinhua.

Circadian disturbance is related to many human diseases including sleep disorder, depression and Alzheimer’s disease.

The creation of monkeys with a uniform genetic background is useful for developing models of human diseases, which can be used to study therapeutic treatments, the researchers said.

The new studies come after Chinese scientist He Jiankui was fired by his university for altering the genes of twin baby girls as embryos. He triggered an international backlash when he shocked the world with his claims of genetically-altering human embryos that resulted in births.

(Agencies)

WUHAN: Chinese scientists have released nighttime remote sensing imagery capturing finer spatial details of artificial nighttime light in China. The imagery is made up of 275 photos taken from June to December in 2018 across China. It is made by Wuhan University and Hubei high-resolution earth observation statistics and application center in central China’s Hubei Province.
The details of artificial light captured on the imagery can reveal human activities at night. Activities including oil or natural gas burning, forest fires and volcano eruptions are also captured.
Luojia-1, a scientific experiment satellite, was sent into space on June 2 last year. Its spatial resolution reaches 130 meters. So far, nighttime remote sensing data collected by Luojia-1 have been provided to over 3,000 users in 16 countries and regions. Compared with ground-based measurements, nighttime light remote sensing is able to acquire larger-scale and higher quantities of artificial lighting data.