Facebook-owned WhatsApp boasts a billion users

Facebook-owned smartphone messaging service WhatsApp has hit the billion-user mark, according to the leading social network’s chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“One billion people now use WhatsApp,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page.

“There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people.”

Google’s free email service, Gmail, is the latest of the Internet giant’s offerings to crest the billion-user mark, chief Sundar Pichai said Monday during an earnings call.

The ranks of people using WhatsApp have more than doubled since California-based Facebook bought the service for $19 billion in late 2014, according to Zuckerberg.

“That’s nearly one-in-seven people on Earth who use WhatsApp each month to stay in touch with their loved ones, their friends and their family,” the WhatsApp team said in a blog post.

After buying WhatsApp, Facebook made the service completely free. The next step, according to Zuckerberg, is to make it easier to use the service to communicate with businesses.

Weaving WhatsApp into exchanges between businesses and customers has the potential to create revenue opportunity for Facebook.

Recent media reports have indicated that Facebook is working behind the scenes to integrate WhatsApp more snugly into the world’s leading social network by providing the ability to share information between the services.

#DidYouKnow: Mercury in seafood not harmful to aging brain

                                Eating seafood may lead to higher levels of mercury in the brain, but a study out Tuesday found that increased mercury does not appear to raise the risk of dementia.

The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) was based on the autopsies of 286 people who died at an average age of 90.

Participants in the study began reporting their food intake via questionnaire on average nearly five years before their death.

Those who ate more seafood also had higher levels of mercury in the brain.

But the autopsies showed no increasing signs of brain disease in those who had more mercury in the brain.

Mercury is a neurotoxin that makes its way into the air and water — and then accumulates in fish — when trash is incinerated and coal is burned for electricity.

Researchers said the toxic effects of mercury on cognition and brain development may be reduced by selenium, an essential nutrient present in seafood.

Among a certain group of people — those with a gene variant known as apolipoprotein E (ApoE4) which is linked to a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s — researchers found fewer signs of brain disease in those who ate fish once per week, or more.

Seafood consumption in the high-risk group was “significantly correlated with less Alzheimer disease pathology,” particularly in the amount of beta amyloid protein plaques and tau protein tangles, said the study, led by Martha Clare Morris of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

This protective effect was not seen in people without the high-risk gene variant.

About two percent of the population inherits two copies of this gene variant, placing them at a severe risk of Alzheimer’s. About 15 percent of the population inherits one copy of ApoE4.

According to the study, those who took fish oil supplements showed no statistically significant change — neither improvements nor declines — in brain health.

Researchers said their experiment is the first to examine the relationship between brain health and levels of mercury.

Most of the participants in the study were white, and 67 percent were women, so the finding may not apply to younger people or those of all ethnic groups.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

According to an accompanying editorial by Edeltraut Kroger and Robert Laforce Jr. of Universite Laval in Quebec, the study offers more evidence that eating seafood is good for the brain.

The research “provides reassurance that seafood contamination with mercury is not related to increased brain pathology,” they wrote.

“Eating fatty fish may continue to be considered potentially beneficial against cognitive decline in at least a proportion of older adults,” they added.

“Such a simple strategy is encouraging in the light of the lack of evidence on protection against many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease, another cause of dementia.”

#DidYouKnow: Like humans, ravens can imagine being watched

Ravens can imagine being spied upon by a hidden competitor, showing a capacity for abstraction once thought to be exclusively human, according to a study released Tuesday.

In a clever set of experiments, scientists showed that the famously intelligent birds take extra care to hide food if they suspect their movements are being monitored by another raven, even when the second bird is not really there.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that ravens — without recourse to direct observation — are able to understand what might be going on in the mind of another individual.

“This shows that traits that we consider ‘uniquely human’ may be found in animals too,” said lead author Thomas Bugnyar, a professor at the University of Vienna and a leading expert on social cognition in animals.

Over a six-month period scientists studied 10 ravens that had been raised in captivity.

The birds were placed in adjoining rooms divided by a window, that was initially left uncovered so one raven could watch while the other was given food to hide.

Researchers then covered the window, but left a peephole in it that the birds were taught they could see and be seen through.

Once this basic training was in place, the scientists played a recording of raven sounds while a bird was in the process of storing its food.

Only when the peephole was open, however, did the raven take extra care to hide its goodies. If the peephole remained closed, the bird — even when raven noises were audible — somehow concluded that it could not be spied upon.

Previous research, mainly with chimpanzees, has shown that non-human animals can understand what others are seeing.

But it was assumed that they did so by monitoring an individual’s head or eye movements, what scientists call “gaze cues.”

“It was still an open question whether any non-human animal can attribute the concept of ‘seeing’ without relying on behavioural cues,” the study noted.

Even without those cues, however, the ravens showed that they understood they were perhaps being watched, and changed their behaviour accordingly.

“This strongly suggests that ravens make generalisations based on their experience, and do not merely interpret and respond to behavioural cues from other birds,” said Bugnyar.

Scientists determined that the caching bird thought it was being observed when it hurried to hide its food, or when it later — once the coast was clear — returned to improve the food’s hiding place.

Young ravens are known to form and break alliances, demonstrating “social flexibility.” As adults, they typically defend territory and live in long-term monogamous relationships.