Internet direct link: SACS links Africa to South America

ITRealms:

The Angola Cables has commenced its link between South Africa and South America kicked off, with the launch of the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) in Sangano, Angola, reports ITRealms.

SACS, ITRealms gathered, is the first direct link between Africa and South America.

SACS is a subsea cable with 40 Tera bytes per second (tbps) of capacity that will extend more than 6,500 km to Fortaleza, Brazil which began on the Angolan coast in the municipality of Quissama, being constructed by NEC Corporation.

The launch event was attended by José Carvalho da Rocha, the Angolan Minister of Telecommunications and Technologies, local and international business leaders, as well as the shareholders and guests of Angola Cables.

The installation of SACS, ITRealms reports, has been considered a strategic project for Angola to advance the region’s digital economy and to improve global communications.

The chief executive officer, Angola Cables, António Nunes, noted that data centres and Internet Exchange Points, benefit immensely, just as it offers a paradigm shift in Africa’s telecommunications sector.

“For Angolans, the time to access content available in America – the largest centre for the production and aggregation of digital content and services – will improve fivefold,” he said.

Currently, he said, it takes approximately 300 milliseconds to connect between Angola and Brazil, stressing that with SACS, the latency – the time lag between a data packet being sent and received – is expected to be reduced to approximately 60 milliseconds.

“Angola is becoming one of the telecommunications hubs in sub-Saharan Africa,” Nunes said, adding that “Current cable systems, such as WACS, together with the SACS and Monet cables systems – complemented by local data centers – will improve connectivity, but also economically benefit Angola and the surrounding regions as tech companies requiring high connectivity establish and grow their operations in Africa.”

Chuks Egbune/GEE 

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Scientists say genetic links sleep disturbance with restless legs syndrome, schizophrenia, and obesity

ITRealms:

A team of American and British scientists have for the first time discovered genetic connections between sleep disturbance and a range of medical disorders including obesity, reports ITRealms.

Lead author Dr Jacqueline Lane, postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and joint senior authors Richa Saxena, Assistant Professor of Anaesthesia at the MGH and Harvard Medical School and Dr Martin K Rutter, Senior Lecturer in Cardiometabolic Medicine from The University of Manchester, publish their ground-breaking research in Nature Genetics today.

The study looked at the biological controllers of sleep duration, insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness, and how they linked to the health and life histories of more than 112,000 people taking part in the world-leading UK Biobank study.

Study participants reported their sleep duration, the degree of insomnia and daytime sleepiness, and then had their genes mapped. Other information about them such as their weight and any diseases they suffered from was also collected.

The researchers identified for the first time areas of the genome that are associated with sleep disturbance including insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness and also discovered novel genetic links with several medical conditions including restless legs syndrome, schizophrenia and obesity.

The strongest genetic association for insomnia symptoms fell within a gene previously linked to restless legs syndrome – a nervous system disorder affecting around 1 in 20 people that leads to a strong urge to move one's legs which is often worse at night. Other gene regions were important for insomnia but selectively in either men or women.

The team also identified genetic links between longer sleep duration and schizophrenia risk and between increased levels of excessive daytime sleepiness and measures of obesity (body mass index and waist circumference).

The research also suggested that insomnia has shared underlying biology with major depression and abnormal glucose metabolism.

Funded by the US National Institutes of Health and The University of Manchester’s Research Innovation Fund, the study marks a major advance in our understanding of the biology of sleep.

One in four British adults are obese, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, prompting fears that the UK has become the "fat man of Europe". And at any one time about 280,000 people are being treated for schizophrenia by the NHS. Sufferers have a 1 in 10 chance of dying by their own hand within ten years of diagnosis.

Dr Rutter said: “This clinical science is an important step forwards in understanding the biological basis for these conditions so it’s very exciting.

“Scientists have long observed a connection between sleep disorders and these conditions in epidemiological studies. But this is the first time these biological links have been identified at a molecular level.”

UK Biobank aims to improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses. 

Dr Lane said ”We’re particularly pleased to be able to use UK Biobank data in this way; it’s an amazing resource for scientists.”

Dr Saxena said: “It’s important to remember there is no molecular targeting available for conditions which affect sleep: all we really have are sedatives.

“So we hope that this research will enable scientists to develop new ways to intervene on a range of conditions in a much more fundamental way.

“We do acknowledge these findings will need further study, but believe this knowledge amounts to a key advance in our understanding of the biology behind sleep - a major influence on our health and behaviour.”

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