NANKANA SAHIB (Dunya News) – At least four people were killed as roof of a house caved in due to cylinder blast in Nankana Sahib today (Saturday). According to details, Malikabad’s locals turned on stove to fight cold and slept after which it exploded late night, causing roof collapse. Mother Allah Rakhi and her three children eight-year-old Azam, seven-year-old Nazim and five-year-old Maria trapped under the rubble.

Getting information about the incident, rescue team arrived at the scene and shifted the victims to hospital where they succumbed to injuries.

Communication between two proteins is what triggers the cell tent to lose its shape and become unanchored, their research found.

This allows the cells to travel to other areas of the body.

The researchers said their findings could help prevent the spread of lung cancer.

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers from York and the University of Texas describe how the communications centre of a cell - known as the Golgi apparatus - receives a signal from proteins which prompts the movement of membrane sacks inside it.

This movement alters the shape and surface of the cancer cell, allowing it to break free from its moorings and move around freely.

Dr Daniel Ungar, from the University of York's biology department, said it was apt to think of the cancer cell resembling a tent structure.

"It has fixed sides to hold its shape and is firmly anchored to the ground in order to secure its contents.

"In order to move the tent, we have to rearrange its contents and collapse its sides in order to lift it out of its anchored position and carry it away," he said.

He added that a similar process happens with cancer when it spreads - its outer edges are altered leaving it unanchored.

The study found that a protein called Zeb1 was critical to this process and the research team now want to look at how to target the protein without damaging healthy cells, in which the protein also exists.

The researchers only looked at lung cancer cells and do not know if the same process occurs in other cancers.

The infection has been linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains.

Some areas have declared a state of emergency, doctors have described it as "a pandemic in progress" and some are even advising women in affected countries to delay getting pregnant.

But there is much we do not know.

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Monkey experiments showed low status alters the immune system in a way that raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes and mental health problems.

One expert said the findings were "terrifically applicable" to people.

The findings, in Science, had nothing to do with the unhealthy behaviours that are more common in poorer groups.

The gulf in life expectancy between the richest and poorest is huge - in the US it is more than a decade for women and 15 years for men.

Part of the explanation is that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to have a worse lifestyle - including smoking, little exercise and diets containing junk food.

But the latest study goes further to show low status - with all of those other factors stripped out - still has an impact on the body.

Looking at 45 non-human primates allowed scientists to adjust only social status to assess its impact - something impossible to do in people.

The captive Rhesus monkeys - who were all female, unrelated and had never met before - were divided one-by-one into nine new groups of five.

The newest member nearly always ended up at the bottom of the social order and became "chronically stressed", received less grooming and more harassment from the other monkeys.

A detailed analysis of the monkeys' blood showed 1,600 differences in the activity levels of genes involved in running the immune system between those at the top and bottom.

It had the impact of making the immune system run too aggressively in those at the bottom. High levels of inflammation cause collateral damage to the body to increase the risk of other diseases.

Inflammation: A revolution in depression treatment?

One of the researchers, Dr Noah Snyder-Mackler, told the BBC News website: "It suggests there's something else, not just the behaviours of these individuals, that's leading to poor health.

"We know smoking, eating unhealthily and not exercising are bad for you - that puts the onus on the individual that it's their fault.

"Our message brings a positive counter to that - there are these other aspects of low status that are outside of the control of individuals that have negative effects on health."

Further experiments showed the immune system was not fixed and could be improved, or made worse, by mixing up the social rankings.

Sir Michael Marmot, one of the world's leading experts on health inequalities and based at University College London, said the findings were "extraordinarily interesting" and underpinned much of his own research.

He told the BBC News website: "This is hard science saying there's a plausible biological mechanism that results in clear differences depending where you are in the hierarchy.

"The gateway through which the social environment impacts health is the mind. Whether it is unhealthy behaviours or direct stress, the mind is crucial and this study is lending real credence to that."

While Rhesus macaques do form strict societies, they are far more simplistic that human ones.

But Prof Graham Rook, from University College London, told the BBC Newswebsite: "All the evidence is showing the findings are terrifically applicable to humans."

He pointed to evidence suggesting people at the bottom end up with worse health when the top gets richer, even if they themselves do not get any poorer.

He said: "It is something governments just don't understand; they think people at the bottom have got cars, have got TVs, so compared with people in India they're enormously wealthy.

"But that really isn't the point, they feel they are at the bottom of the heap."

Hierarchies are a fixture of society. However, the researchers believe more can be done to ease the health problems coming from being bottom of the pile.

Dr Snyder-Mackler said: "Status is always relative, but if we could flatten the slope so the differences between the highest and lowest weren't as much, or find ways to focus attention on lower social environments so they are not as 'crappy' we could mediate some of those consequences.

"It's a hard problem that might never be fixed, but it might be possible to make it less worse."

Not only does the study expand the catalogue of known viruses, it also indicates they have existed for billions of years.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

Few would argue that all living species on Earth are susceptible to viruses – these microscopic parasites are ubiquitous.

But virologists have long suspected that our current view of the diversity of viruses is blinkered – all too often constrained to those causing disease in humans, animals and plants, or to those that we can grow in the laboratory.

A trip to a tropical rainforest or the African savannah gives a snapshot into the incredible diversity of visible life on Earth, but understanding the potentially mind-boggling myriad of minuscule viruses has not been so easy.

Capturing new viruses is not like netting a new species of butterfly – viruses are invisible.

Undeterred by this practical problem an international team was keen to survey invertebrates for new viral species.

Invertebrates are spineless creatures and the group includes many familiar animals, such as insects, spiders, worms and snails. They represent the vast majority of animal species in the world today.

Scientists wanting to work out the totality of viral "life" – although many virologists would argue that viruses are not truly alive – are starting to adopt techniques that reveal their genetic calling cards, revealed in the things they infect.

Just like powerful new telescopes are peering deeper into space, revealing a wealth of hitherto unknown stars, next-generation sequencing techniques are providing new insight into the magnitude of the invisible world of viruses; a world we call the virosphere.

We are familiar with DNA, the "stuff of life" that makes up the blueprint of our genomes. But many viruses use a different chemical to construct their genomes – a substance known as RNA.

Just like DNA, this consists of strings of individual building blocks, or bases; each designated by a different letter: A, C, G and U.

Next generation sequencing allows researchers to quickly determine the sequence of these letters. And if you work out the order of the letters on any chain of RNA, you can determine if it belongs to a virus and whether or not the virus is new.

Its potential for virus discovery is huge.

The research team collected around 220 species of land- and water-dwelling invertebrates living in China, extracted their RNA and, using next-generation sequencing, deciphered the sequence of a staggering 6 trillion letters present in the invertebrate RNA "libraries".

When the researchers analysed this mass of data they realised that they had discovered almost 1,500 new virus species – a whopping number by any measure. Many of these were so distinct that they did not easily fit into our existing virus family tree.

Prof Elodie Ghedin from New York University, who was not directly involved with the study, told the BBC: "This is an extraordinary study providing the largest virus discovery to date.

"It will no doubt remodel our view of the virus world and redraw virus phylogeny.

"This is what happens when you combine a bold and brute force approach with the right technology and the right set of eyes."

Even though some invertebrates carry viruses that can infect humans - like zika and dengue - the study authors do not think that these newly discovered viruses pose a significant risk.

However, this cannot be ruled out entirely, and Prof Ghedin thinks that this is an important issue to address.

"If we have learned anything from these types of true discovery projects is that when we start looking into places we haven’t looked at before, we find an incredible richness that goes beyond what was suspected.

"It also makes a strong case for expanding virus surveillance to invertebrates in our quest to better understand (and predict) emerging viruses," she said.

The research also showed that throughout time viruses have been trading genetic material to create new species – an incredible feat according to Prof Eric Delwart from the University of California, San Francisco, who told the BBC: "It shows a lego-like ability of different viral functional units to be recombined to create new viruses even when they originate from highly divergent viruses. The plasticity of viral genomes continues to amaze."

Not only have these studies expanded our view of the diversity of viruses, they have also provided a more complete picture of virus history, as Prof Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, who was involved in the study explained: "We have discovered that most groups of viruses that infect vertebrates – including humans, such as those that cause well-known diseases like influenza – are in fact derived from those present in invertebrates."

He also believes that his group's data shows that viruses have been infecting invertebrates for possibly billions of years, raising the prospect that invertebrates are the true hosts for many types of virus.

The researchers hope that next-generation sequencing can pave the way for virus discovery in a variety of other species. And it does not stop there.

Prof Delwart thinks that further analyses of existing next-generation datasets may yield additional virus species unlike any that we have seen before.

If future studies reveal anywhere near this number of new viruses, then we’ve only just scratched the surface. It seems that the virosphere is set to explode.

Jonathan Ball is a professor of virology at Nottingham University. This coming Saturday, he will be taking part in CrowdScience, the new BBC World Service science weekly, which starts with a question from listener Ian in Jordan which is "where did viruses come from?"

These ephemeral ecosystems support unique flora and fauna species that do not occur in permanent wetlands. Yet these poorly understood habitats are being lost to future generations as a result of poor land-use practices, the authors observed.

Although these intermittent, shallow-water seasonal natural features are most closely associated with arid or semi-arid landscapes, they are more widespread than generally realised. 

Changing landscape

"They tend to occur during the rainy season which is when you will see shallow water but for most months of the year, it will appear to be dry," explained co-author Tatenda Dalu, from Rhodes University, South Africa.

The seasonal wetlands are dominated by aquatic biodiversity, he told BBC News.

"You have your plankton, you have your insects, which then brings in the birds to feed on these insects," Dr Dalu said.

"Some of these systems have unique communities of fish, such as the 'land fish'."

However, these unique ecosystems were vulnerable for a number of reasons, explained Dr Dalu.

"The biggest threat we are seeing at the moment is either the digging up of the ecosystems or making them permanent.

"By making them permanent, people accidently introduce invasive species which then wipe out the unique invertebrate communities."

For example, people look to have a lake full of fish on their land. Very often, the introduced species of fish results in the unique habitat that had previously thrived in the intermittent water being squeezed to the point of becoming locally extinct.

The team also recognised that changes to the climate system were set to alter rainfall and temperature patterns.

The researchers observed in their paper: "In tropical regions of southern Africa, for example, drought is projected to be particularly problematic.

"In such areas, ephemeral wetlands are highly likely to be affected given that ephemeral aquatic environments are internally drained systems, wholly reliant on localised rainfall."

Dr Dalu said the time to act to attempt to make the wetlands more resilient was now.

"One of the most important things for us is to try to map as many of the systems as we can.

"Having a record of where these unique systems exist will be important for the development of any further legislation."

He said that the flora of ephemeral wetlands enriched people's lives, even if they were not aware of the ecological importance of such sites.

"People will tell you about some of the unique flowers they see there," he said.

"That's how people identify them but they do not know anything else about these seasonal wetlands."

Retailers offer up a dizzying array of special offers and big discounts, with more deals added online on Cyber Monday.

But how can you spot a genuine bargain?

Before you buy, it is always worth checking if the same product is cheaper somewhere else, experts say.

Some specialist sites can tell you if the product has been discounted more heavily before.

For example, Camelcamelcamel.com shows the price history of Amazon products - allowing shoppers to see if they have been offered more cheaply in the past.

Researchers trained an algorithm using more than 1,500 photos of Chinese citizens, hundreds of them convicts.

They said the program was then able to correctly identify criminals in further photos 89% of the time.

But the research, which has not been peer reviewed, has been criticised by criminology experts who say the AI may reflect bias in the justice system.

"This article is not looking at people's behaviour, it is looking at criminal conviction," said Prof Susan McVie, professor of quantitative criminology at the University of Edinburgh.

"The criminal justice system consists of a series of decision-making stages, by the police, prosecution and the courts. At each of those stages, people's decision making is affected by factors that are not related to offending behaviour - such as stereotypes about who is most likely to be guilty.

"Research shows jurors are more likely to convict people who look or dress a certain way. What this research may be picking up on is stereotypes that lead to people being picked up by the criminal justice system, rather than the likelihood of somebody offending."

The researchers took 1,856 ID photographs of Chinese citizens that fitted strict criteria of males aged between 18 and 55 with no facial hair or markings. The collection contained 730 ID pictures - not police mugshots - of convicted criminals or "wanted suspects by the ministry of public security".

After using 90% of the images to train their algorithm, the researchers used the remaining photos to see whether the computer could correctly identify the convicts. It did so correctly about nine times out of 10.

The researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University said their algorithm had identified key facial features, such as the curvature of the upper lip and distance between eyes, that were common among the convicts.

But Prof McVie said the algorithm may simply have identified patterns in the type of people who are convicted by human juries.

"This is an example of statistics-led research with no theoretical underpinning," said Prof McVie, who is also the director of the Applied Quantitative Methods Network research centre.

"What would be the reason that somebody's face would lead them to be criminal or not? There is no theoretical reason that the way somebody looks should make them a criminal.

"There is a huge margin of error around this sort of work and if you were trying to use the algorithm to predict who might commit a crime, you wouldn't find a high success rate," she told the BBC.

"Going back over 100 years ago, Cesare Lombroso was a 19th Century criminologist who used phrenology - feeling people's heads - with a theory that there were lumps and bumps associated with certain personality traits.

"But it is now considered to be very old and flawed science - criminologists have not believed in it for decades."

Prof McVie also warned that an algorithm used to spot potential criminals based on their appearance - such as passport scanning at an airport, or ID scanning at a night club - could have dangerous consequences.

"Using a system like this based on looks rather than behaviour could lead to eugenics-based policy-making," she said.

"What worries me the most is that we might be judging who is a criminal based on their looks. That sort of approach went badly wrong in our not-too distant history."

Thursday's 12% fall comes on top of a 5% drop following the news that letting agents fees are to be scrapped.

In its third quarter trading update Countrywide said it expected transactions to fall because of stamp duty changes and the Brexit vote.

Group revenue was £188.5m compared with £197.1m for the same time last year.

The group, whose 55 high street brands include Bairstow Eves, John D Wood and Gascoigne Pees, forecast transactions would be 6% down this year, and for levels to fall even further in 2017.

The company said the reduced level of market transactions it had seen in the second half of this year would lead to its 2016 profits being at the "lower end of expectations".

Countrywide said figures for the three months to the end of September showed that overall house exchanges were down by 1% compared with the same time last year, however in London they were 29% lower.

It also said mortgage approvals were 12% down on the same time last year.

The lettings side of the business was affected by the rush to beat the changes in stamp duty at the end of the first quarter of the year, which resulted in a larger than usual supply of rental properties, it said in its statement.

News of the ban on letting agents' fees announced in Wednesday's Autumn Statement was described as a "hammer blow" to estate agents.

Countrywide's chief executive Alison Platt said the company was looking forward to working with government on the "consultation".

"We have made good progress this year despite tough market conditions since the EU referendum," said chief executive Alison Platt. "Particularly pleasing is our growth in market share in both sales and lettings."

However, ETX Capital markets analyst Neil Wilson said: "Countrywide shares are tumbling again this morning after it offered a very downbeat assessment of the property market.

"The company says it's making good progress but today's trading statement confirms that estate agents are facing a troubled future.

"Yesterday's Autumn Statement bombshell banning letting agents from charging upfront fees to tenants couldn't have come at a worse time for the sector. The trading statement presumably doesn't take stock of this change so we could see a greater adverse effect as a result," he added.

The store, which specialises in frozen food and has its head office in Deeside, Flintshire, has been trading under the name for 46 years.

It owns the European trademark for using the name Iceland, which Icelandic officials claim the firm defends "aggressively".

The company said it regretted the move.

The Nordic nation confirmed on Thursday that it had mounted a legal challenge against the food store at the European Union Intellectual Property Office.

It said it hoped to ensure "the right of Icelandic companies to use the word 'Iceland' in relation to their goods and services".

In a government circular, officials stated: "The government of Iceland is concerned that our country's businesses are unable to promote themselves across Europe in association with their place of origin - a place of which we are rightly proud and enjoys a very positive national branding.

"This untenable situation has caused harm to Icelandic businesses, especially its small and growing companies."

The Icelandic government said it had made efforts to negotiate with Iceland Foods, but said it had been met with "unrealistic and unacceptable" demands.

The claim is disputed by the supermarket, which has more than 800 stores across the UK and employs more than 23,000 staff.

"Contrary to their assertion we have received no recent approaches to achieve an amicable resolution of this issue, which would be our preferred approach," a company official said.

The firm insisted it would "vigorously defend" its established rights, adding: "We have been trading successfully for 46 years under the name Iceland and do not believe that any serious confusion or conflict has ever arisen in the public mind, or is likely to do so.

"We hope that the government will contact us directly so that we may address their concerns."