Sunday, February 28, 2010

SCIENCE OF MARCH 2010


1 March: Google has quickly activated an online "person finder" tool to allow relatives and friends to find loved ones following the huge earthquake in Chile.The "Person Finder: Chile Earthquake" from the California-based Internet giant is located at Chilepersonfinder.appspot.com. Users can then search records by name or input information about someone.Google also deployed a "person finder" following last month's earthquake in Haiti. It currently contains some 58,700 records.

2 March: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has started work on its most ambitious project yet - sending humans into space.The government has approved research and development work relating to the manned space mission. In this year's budget, Rs 150 crore has been allocated for the manned mission, as against a token amount of Rs 30 crore given last year.ISRO is also working on a related project called the Space Capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE), aimed at developing and demonstrating capability to recover orbiting capsules.The SRE-I was launched onboard PSLV-C7 in January 10, 2007 and was recovered from the Bay of Bengal on January 22, 2007.Now, the agency is developing the SRE- II capsule.

3 March: A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice. But other compounds - such as hydrocarbons - are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another Moon mission called LCROSS. The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas. The results from the Mini-Sar instrument are due to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The team is currently analysing results for craters at the Moon's south pole.

4 March: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Wednesday successfully flight-tested its new-generation, high-performance sounding rocket at the spaceport in Sriharikota. The Advanced Technology Vehicle (ATV- D01), weighing three tonnes at lift-off, is the heaviest sounding rocket developed by the ISRO. An ISRO release said the rocket successfully flew at a velocity of more than Mach 6 (six times the speed of sound) for seven seconds. These conditions were required for a stable ignition of active scramjet engine combustor module planned in the next ATV flight.

5 March: A new infrared laser made from germanium that operates at room temperature could lead to powerful computer chips that operate at the speed of light, say US scientists.The research, by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in a forthcoming issue of Optics Letters"Using a germanium laser as a light source, you could communicate at very high data rates at very low power," says Dr Jurgen Michel, who developed the new germanium laser. "Eventually you could have the computing power of today's supercomputers inside a laptop."

6 March: A nano satellite "Jugnu" built by students and faculty of IIT Kanpur, has been handed over to the Indian Space Research Organisation.The three kg satellite is one-foot long and 10 centimetre wide and will be launched by a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from Sriharikota and take high resolution images.IIT scientists said the satellite is expected to last for about a year and will help combat drought. In 2008, IIT Kanpur and ISRO had signed a MoU under which the engineering institution was to build a nano satellite.

7 March: Scientists claim to have found a low-cost water purification technique that uses the seeds of the Moringa Tree (Moringa oleifera) .Although the research cautions that the treatment is not effective on bacterium or viruses, it does make the water far safer than the water without any treatment at all. The researcher is Michael Lea from Low-cost Water Treatment Technologies for Developing Countries, Canada. Ref: http://mrw.interscience.wiley.com/emrw/9780471729259/cp/cpmc/article/mc01g02/current/abstract

8 March: If reports are to be believed, the US still holds the dubious distinction of being the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. According to a report in New Scientist, the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, reports that in 2004, 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions - some 6.2 gigatonnes - went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries.

9 March: To monitor the greenhouse emissions in the country and as well as globe, a dedicated satellite would be launched with the support of ISRO by 2012, Union Minister for Environment and Forests Mr.Jairam Ramesh said. Another satellite called satellite forestry would be ready by 2013. The National Institute for studying Climate and Environment (NISCE) would be established in Tirupati. It will be with financial collaboration of  Indian Space Research organization (ISRO) and the Ministry departments such as Environment and  Forests, Earth Sciences, Science and Technology and Department of Space.

10 March: Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, passed in the third and final reading on Wednesday a government bill extending a ban on human cloning. The document, which has to be signed into law by President Dmitry Medvedev, stipulates that human cloning will remain banned in Russia until the adoption of new legislation regulating the cloning process.Human cloning has been the issue of heated debates since the 1960s. Russia's moratorium on cloning expired in June 2007.Amendments to a 2002 law prohibiting human cloning in Russia allow for the cloning of other organisms for research and organ transplants.

11 March: A tiny Japanese insect that could help the fight against an aggressive superweed has been given the go-ahead for a trial release in England. Since Japanese knotweed was introduced to the UK it has rapidly spread, and the plant currently costs over £150m a year to control and clear. But scientists say a natural predator in the weed's native home of Japan could also help to control it here. The insect will initially be released in a handful of sites this spring. This is the first time that biocontrol - the use of a "natural predator" to control a pest - has been used in the EU to fight a weed.

12 March: DNA has been extracted for the first time from the fossilised eggshells of birds such as emu and moa, providing a purer source of ancient DNA than bone, say scientists. Dr Michael Bunce, head of the Ancient DNA Research Laboratory at Murdoch University in Perth and colleagues report their findings today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Bunce and team analysed fragments of eggshell from extinct moa and ducks from New Zealand. Elephant birds have the largest known eggs, 150 times bigger than a chicken egg. The oldest DNA they extracted was 19,000 years old, from a fragment of Australian emu eggshell.

13 March: Tiny amounts of water have been found in some of the famous moon rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts. The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid. Going forward, the researchers plan to investigate how water ended up in the moon. The most common guesses center on the moon's earliest days, shortly after it had been created by the collision of a Mars-size object with Earth.

14 March: New economic analysis has confirmed that maize-based biofuel is unlikely to reduce global production of carbon dioxide (CO2).The analysis, conducted by Thomas W. Hertel of Purdue University and five co-authors, focuses on how mandated increases in production of the biofuel in the United States will trigger land-use changes domestically and elsewhere. In response to the increased demand for maize, farmers convert additional land to crops, and this conversion can boost carbon dioxide emissions.

15 March: In an effort to provide superior video and data services, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has launched the ambitious Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) service for the first time in the country at Jaipur.
The FTTH service was inaugurated by minister of state for communications & IT Sachin Pilot in the presence of BSNL CMD Kuldeep Goyal and G K Agrawal, CGM, BSNL Rajasthan circle here on Saturday. While 68 buildings have already been provided fibre connectivity, work is in progress at about 200 buildings and complexes.

16 March: There is a high probability our solar system will feel the effect of a close encounter from a nearby star, according to a new study.The star, known as Gliese 710, could disrupt planetary orbits and send a shower of comets and asteroids towards the inner planets when it passes in 1.5 million years time.Dr Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg is the author of the study, which appears on the prepress website arXiv and has been submitted to the journal Astronomy Letters.

17 March: The bacteria on our hands could be used in forensic identification, in the same way as DNA, say scientists. Researchers in the US discovered that the "communities" of bacteria living on a person's skin are different for each individual. The team took swabs from keyboards and were able to match the bacteria they found to the computer owners. They describe their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

18 March: CoRoT-9b, the first temperate planet was found by the CoRoT satellite, which is a mission led by the French space agency, Centre National d'Études Spatiales. Its presence was then confirmed by observations from several telescopes from the European Southern Observatory, in Tenerife and at other sites. In the journal Nature, the scientists say it is the first planet of its type which can yield detailed information. More than 400 exoplanets have been discovered so far.

19 March: A proposal to ban international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is a sushi mainstay in Japan, has been rejected by a UN wildlife meeting. The decision occurred after Japan, Canada and many poor nations opposed the measure on the grounds it would devastate fishing economies. Monaco tabled the plan at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

20 March: The Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics experiment, has broken its own particle beam energy record.On Friday morning, the machine created two beams of protons, each with an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The effort breaks the prior record, set by the LHC in December, of just over a trillion electron volts in each beam. The LHC will now aim to smash those two beams together, hoping to create new particles that give insight into the most fundamental workings of physics.

21 March: European researchers have taken the world a step closer to fictional wizard Harry Potter's invisibility cape after they made an object disappear using a three-dimensional cloak.Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London used the cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, they wrote in Science.

22 March: Manoj Mandelia, the 23-year-old student of IIT- Kharagpur has demonstrated that waste water can be used for producing electricity. The product  uses the concept of microbial fuel cell (MFC), a bio-electrochemical system, that drives current by mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature. This not only treats waste water but also produces electricity in the process. The project named LOCUS — Localised Operation of Bio-cells Using Sewage, can achieve chemical oxygen demand (COD) reduction levels in waste water to about 60-80 per cent.

23 March: Belgian, two Frenchmen and a Colombian-Italian have agreed to be locked away in steel containers for 18 months to simulate a mission to Mars.Their self-imposed exile will test the physical and mental requirements of ultra-long duration spaceflight. The Europeans will join a predominantly Russian crew for the Mars500 project, which is due to start in May. The experiment is being run by Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) with the key participation of Esa.

24 March: The new UK Space Agency (UKSA) will take over responsibility for government policy and the key budgets for space, according to ministers.The agency, which comes into being on 1 April, will also represent Britain on space matters in all negotiations with international partners. The UKSA's name, logo and remit were announced at a conference in London. Its establishment should bring more coherence to space policy - something critics say has been missing for years.

25 March: A team of scientists has successfully sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of a hominin who had lived in the Altai Mountain region of Siberia, Russia. This hominin had shared a common ancestor with anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago. The findings were based on a study of mitochondrial DNA that was extracted and sequenced from the fifth digit of the hominin that was found in 2008 in a Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains.The study is published today (March 25) in Nature journal.

26 March: Paying greater attention to the conservation of flora and fauna in the northern region of Kerala, a new wildlife sanctuary has been proposed to be carved out.The proposed Malabar Wildlife Sanctuary will cover 75 sq km of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve including the areas like Pannikootur reserve forests. Around 680 species of flowering plants (226 species endemic to the Western Ghats) have been identified here. A total of 41 species of mammals (6 endemic), 179 birds (10 endemic) and about 36 reptile varieties (12 endemic), 38 amphibians (26 endemic) and 52 fishes (8 endemic) are also here.

27 March: The Earth Hour 2010 took place tonight, for an hour’s worth, starting at exactly 8:30PM local time. 126 countries have signed up to participate in this important event. Earth Hour is a global event organized by WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature also known as World Wildlife Fund) and is held annually on every last Saturday of March. We are asked in our households and businesses to turn off our non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.

28 March: Australian scientists say they have discovered the first evidence that an ancestor of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex once roamed across Australia.The finding, published today in the journal Science, fills a major gap in the evolutionary history of T. rex and overturns the theory the giant predator was a purely northern hemisphere animal.The discovery is based on a pubic bone found about 20 years ago at Dinosaur Cove, 220 kilometres west of Melbourne in Victoria.

29 March: New UK technology unveiled is set to play a major part in clearing dangerous clouds of debris hurtling around the Earth's lower orbit.Scientists at the University of Surrey, working on the project funded by the European space company Astrium, have devised a 3 kg miniature satellite or "nanosatellite" fitted with a "solar sail.""CubeSail" is a device which can be fitted to satellites or launch vehicle upper stages that are sent into orbit and then can be deployed to successfully de-orbit equipment that has reached the end of its mission.

30 March: Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced record-breaking high-energy particle collisions.Scientists working on the European machine have smashed beams of protons together at energies that are 3.5 times higher than previously achieved. Scientists hope the studies will bring novel insights into the nature of the cosmos and how it came into being. Media described the event as the beginning of a "new era in science".

31 March: India and Bangladesh will launch a forum for cooperation in the conservation of the Sunderbans, a region that is “ecologically vulnerable and sensitive to climate change". The forum  will coordinate efforts in afforestation, management of mangroves and conservation of the tiger. A joint tiger enumeration exercise may also be undertaken.The Sunderbans region is one ecosystem , 40% of which is in India and 60% in Bangladesh.

















































Friday, February 26, 2010

BOOK OF MARCH
























Title         : The Language of Life: DNA and the            Revolution in Personalized Medicine
Author     : Francis S. Collins
Publisher  : Harper Collins
Price        : $20.99

Millions of people around the world are affected rare diseases, many of which are primarily attributable to misspelled genes. And virtually all diseases have a significant hereditary component. A scientific and medical revolution has crept up on us, based on study after study, from hundreds of laboratories around the world. However, the revolution is much more fundamental than this: all of the diseases are having their secrets yet to be unlocked.

Here comes Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health and 15-year head of the Human Genome Project with one of the most important books of the year: The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine. With accessible, insightful prose, Dr. Collins describes the scientific efforts behind the secrets of the “personalized medicine,” and offers practical advice on utilizing these discoveries for one’s own current personal health and future well-being.

There is new world emerging of understanding, treatment, and prevention of the diseases. Everybody has to learn about one’s own DNA: how it works, what it reveals, its benefits and limitations for a better preference of a “personalized medicine”. Just in the past decade, most of what we think we know about DNA has been overturned. So the readers are guaranteed to face some surprises also. The book will also be a help to make better choices on issues relating to social and family health factors just around us.

Chapter Summary: The Future Has Already Happened (how the leading edge of the genome revolution is already affecting lives); When Genes Go Wrong, It Gets Personal (genetic screening prior to parenthood); Is It Time to Learn Your Own Secrets? (the pros and cons of finding the ticking time bombs in our genomes); Getting Personal with the Big C ('the role of DNA mutations in cancer'); What's Race Got to Do with It? (DNA analysis for personalized medicine, not racial profiling); Genes and Germs (future predictability of 'genetic susceptibility fo infectious disease'); Genes and the Brain (genetic factors in mental disorders); Genes and Aging (heredity's role); and The Right Drug and the Right Dose for the Right Person (effect of genetics on drug response).

(Book Review Text Courtesy: http://www.harpercollins.com/, http://www.sciencenews.org/, http://www.amazon.com/)

Friday, February 12, 2010

SCIENCE OF FEBRUARY 2010

1 February : A new study claims our Moon could have been born from a blob of the Earth's mantle, blasted outwards by the explosion of a runaway nuclear georeactor.If correct, it would replace the scientifically accepted model for the origins of the Moon, known as the 'giant impact theory'. The new theory was proposed by Professor Rob de Meijer at the University of the Western Cape in South Affrica and Dr Wim van Westrenen of VU University in Amsterdam..

2 February: Researchers at National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. Dr Asis Datta and colleagues believe the breakthrough could apply to other fruit - including bananas, mangoes and papaya. The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

3 February: Astronomers have found a comet-like object with its nucleus is severed from its tail, which make them believe that it was created by the collision of two asteroids, and may be linked to the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.The object, known as P/2010 A2, was circling about 144 million kilometres from Earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope.

4 February: Iran launched its third spacecraft, this time carrying a rat, two turtles and an unspecified number of "worms" on a one-way trip into space. The rat, according to reports, is named "Helmz 1".The "Kavoshgar 3" (Explorer 3) rocket was used to place the "experimental capsule" into orbit. Iranian Aerospace Organization said that the capsule can relay live video from the tiny space ark in which Helmz 1 and his companions will live out the rest of their lives.

5 February: President Barack Obama's proposed FY 2011 federal budget kills NASA's much heralded Constellation program. The Constellation program was based on a vision of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020An independent review panel determined that even if fully funded, NASA's program to repeat many of the achievements of the Apollo era, 50 years later, was the least attractive approach to space exploration when compared to potential alternatives.

6 February: February: Scientists in China say they have discovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, all facing the same way. The footprints which range from 10cm (3.9in) to 80cm in length thought to belong to at least six dinosaur types including tyrannosaurs, coelurosaurs and hadrosaurs. They were found in eastern Shandong province in the Zhucheng area. As a result, Zhucheng City has become known locally as "dinosaur city".

7 February: India on Sunday successfully test-fired its indigenous Agni-III ballistic missile, which has a range of over 3,500 km. This paves the way for induction of the nuclear-capable missile into the armed forces and consolidates India’s position among a select group of nations having intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) capability. The missile, developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), is capable of carrying warheads weighing up to 1.5 tonne, is 17 metres tall and has a launch weight of 50 tonne with a two-metre diameter.

8 February: In a finding that overturns conventional wisdom, scientists are reporting the first discovery of the female sex hormone progesterone in a plant. Until now, scientists thought that only animals could make progesterone. The hormone was identified in the leaves of the Walnut treeand also in a plant belonging to the Ranunculaceae family by Guido F. Pauli and his co-workers at University of Illinois. The discovery is reported in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Natural Products.

9 February: India has deferred the commercial cultivation of what would have been its first genetically modified vegetable crop (Bt Brinjal) due to safety concerns.Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said more studies were needed to ensure genetically modified aubergines were safe for consumers and the environment. The GM vegetable has undergone field trials since 2008 and received approval from government scientists in 2009. But there has been a heated public row over the cultivation of the GM crop.

10 February: Google has finally launched its new social product named Google Buzz. It is an easy way to start conversations, share updates, photos, videos, add comments and much more right from the Gmail account. Gmail users now gained a Module which will display status updates for selected contacts from Google, a form of interaction popularized by Facebook and MySpace, and also adopted by Yahoo. Google also is expected to develop closer ties between Gmail and YouTube video service and the Picasa photo gallery.

11 February: The US Space Agency (NASA) launched its latest Sun probe, Solar Dynamics Observatory on Thurssday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The observatory will acquire detailed images of our star to try to get a keener understanding of why it behaves the way it does. The UK is involved through the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot; the e2v company in Chelmsford which made CCD camera detectors, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London; and the University of Sheffield.

12 February: A nearly complete sequence of nuclear DNA extracted from strands of 4,000-year-old Greenland man’s hair — the first such sequence obtained from an ancient person — highlights a previously unknown and relatively recent migration of northeastern Asians into the New World about 5,500 years ago. The analysis is reported by the geneticist Morten Rasmussen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues in the Feb. 11 Nature. A largely complete mitochondrial DNA sequence from the ancient man’s hair, extracted by the same researchers in 2008, places his maternal ancestry in northeastern Asia as well.

13 February: Reports indicate that SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has opened up its data to 'citizen scientists' to help in its quest for finding aliens. The site's launch SETIQuest.org was announced at the TED 2010 conference currently underway in Long Beach, California. The website will make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time.It will also publish the SETI Institute's signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better.

14 February: Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC), a subsidiary of Tata Motors, has developed a range of hydrogen fuel cell-powered commercial vehicles and is currently undertaking trial runs of these buses and light trucks. Tata Motors recently show-cased an electric Indica model and announced plans for a hybrid Nano. Auto firms and governments across the world are increasingly going for the use and development of vehicles that emit less pollution and are investing heavily in eco-friendly technology.

15 February: Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science said that There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy and many of these worlds could be inhabited by simple lifeforms. He was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. So far, telescopes have been able to detect just over 300 planets outside our Solar System. Very few of these would be capable of supporting life, however.

16 February: The hottest temperature ever in the lab has been created - four trillion degrees Celsius - hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.They used a giant atom smasher at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions - which lasted only for milliseconds.Details of the findings will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

17 February: Dr. Robert P. Anderson, Associate Professor of Biology at The City College of New York, and Ph.D. student Eliécer E. Gutiérrez have reported the existence of a new species of spiny pocket mouse, from Venezuela, Heteromys catopterius. The name derives from the Greek katoptêrios, which means a "height that commands a view." The findings were published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

18 February: India successfully tested the "captain-less' submarine developed by the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO). The AUV-150 (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) was built by the engineers of Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CMERI),Durgapur,West Bengal. It was brought to Idukki dam in Kerala for the test because Idukki was the deepest reservoir in India. AUV-150's ocean test will be carried out later. The AUV-150 will be used as a tool for coastal security operations. The device which measures 4.8 metres in lenghth and weighs 490 kg . This unmanned vehicle operates on battery.
19 February: The Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary in Palakkad was declared a Tiger Reserve by Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. It will then become the second 'tiger reserve' in Kerala after Thekkady wildlife sanctuary and 38th in the country. The sanctuary is home to animals like Lion-tailed Macaques, Nilgiri Tahr and Gaur, reptiles like Indian Rock Python, Malabar Pit Viper, Travancore tortoise, south Indian Forest-ground Gecko, 134 species of rare birds and 47 varieties of fish, of which seven have been listed as endangered.The sanctuary will have a core area of 390.88 sq km and a buffer area of 252.77 sq km coming under Chalakudy, Vazhachal and Nermara forest division.

20 February: As work on the world's first ocean census inches closer to completion, scientists working on the decade-long project claim to have found over 5,000 new marine organisms that were not known to mankind all this while. A network of 2,000 scientists from 82 nations have been working since the year 2000 to prepare an inventory of marine organisms in the world, which will be released in London in October this year. The project costs around $650 million.

21 February: A research team led by an Australian scientist has uncovered the first indigenous DNA sequence, a discovery that has vast implications for medical research. While studying the virus, Dr Vanessa Hayes of the University of New South Wales found that the southern African population was not included in the genetic data base, and that proved to be a major hurdle for scientists attempting to understand HIV. Researchers believe many diseases may have originated in Africa, so this find will complete the picture and open the door for crucial medical breakthroughs. The discovery, which appears today in the journal Nature.

22 February: China aims to land its first astronauts on the moon within a decade at the dawn of a new era of manned space exploration.US President Barack Obama earlier this month said he planned to drop the costly Constellation space programme, a budget move that would kill off future moon exploration if it is approved by Congress.In contrast, China has a fast-growing human spaceflight project that has notched one success after another, including a spacewalk by astronauts in 2008, with plans for a manned lunar mission by around 2020. India landed Chandrayaan 2008, and a top official said last month it was targeting a manned space mission in 2016. Japan, meanwhile, launched its first lunar satellite in June last year.

23 February: W. Selvamurthy, Chief Controller (Life Sciences and Human Resource), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), has been chosen for the DRDO’s Technology Leadership Award for 2008 instituted by the DRDO.Dr. Selvamurthy will receive this award for his contribution to biomedical sciences, leading to the development of various life-support technologies that culminated in increasing the fighting efficiency of the armed forces at high altitudes such as Siachen.The award was presented to him by Defence Minister A.K. Antony at a function in New Delhi.

24 February: The first monogamous amphibian has been discovered living in the rainforest of South America.Genetic tests have revealed that male and females of one species of Peruvian frog (Ranitomeya imitator, known as the Mimic Poison Frog)remain utterly faithful. It was discovered by Dr Jason Brown, then of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, who made the discovery with colleagues Dr Victor Morales and Professor Kyle Summers. Details of the frog's sex life is to be published in the journal The American Naturalist.(Photo above).

25 February: The first fully calibrated images from the European Space Agency's Smos satellite have now been released. The maps record the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in seawater. The mission's data is expected to have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods. Smos was launched on 2 November 2009. The satellite is part of Esa's Earth Explorer programme - eight spacecraft that will acquire data on issues of pressing environmental concern. The first - a gravity satellite called Goce - launched in early 2009. The third in the series is called Cryosat-2 and will launch in the coming weeks.

26 February: In a primeval version of the horror flick Lake Placid, a 19-foot-long (5.8-meter-long) horned crocodile may have leaped from the water to snack on early humans, a new fossil find suggests.The newly described, 1.84-million-year-old species has been dubbed Crocodylus anthropophagus, which means "eater of humans" in Latin.The croc's fossils were discovered in 2007 in Tanzania's fossil-rich Olduvai Gorge, a site that was also home to early humans—or hominids—such as the tiny species Homo habilis and Australopithecus boisei.

27 February: A translation of old scientific papers has confirmed that the scientist who received a Nobel Prize for his work on cosmic rays wasn't alone in his discovery.Austrian physicist Victor Hess received the Nobel Prize in 1936 for identifying the source of cosmic rays - high energy particles that stream into the atmosphere from space and the Sun. Professor Alessandro De Angelis of the University of Udine in Italy and colleagues claim recently translated the works of twentieth century Italian Domenico Pacini, show he discovered the source two years earlier. The new translation has been submitted to the European Journal of Physics.

28 February: A vast iceberg that broke off eastern Antarctic earlier this month could disrupt marine life in the region, scientists have warned.They say the iceberg, which is 78km long and up to 39km wide, could have consequences for the area's colonies of emperor penguins. The emblematic birds may be forced to travel further afield to find food.The iceberg calved from the Mertz Glacier Tongue after it was hit by another huge iceberg, called B9B. The warning comes from the Australia-based Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre.








































 



Thursday, February 11, 2010

BOOK OF FEBRUARY
























Seeing Further : The Story of Science and the Royal Society
Author (Editor)  : Bill Bryson
Publisher            : Harper Collins
Price                  : £25
ISBN                 : 0007302568

On a damp weeknight in November 1660, a dozen or so men gathered at Gresham College in London. A twenty-eight year old -- and not widely famous -- Christopher Wren was giving a lecture on astronomy. As his audience listened to him speak, they decided that it would be a good idea to create a Society to promote the accumulation of useful knowledge. With that Royal Society was born.

2010 is a special year for the Royal Society. It is turning 350 this year. Since its inception the Royal Society has pioneered scientific discovery and exploration. The oldest scientific academy in existence, its backbone is its Fellowship of the most eminent scientists in history including Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

The Royal Society continues to do today what it set out to do all those years ago. Truly international in its outlook, it has created modern science. Seeing Further celebrates its momentous history and achievements, bringing together the very best of science writing. Filled with illustrations of treasures from the Society's archives, this is a unique, ground-breaking and beautiful volume, and a suitable reflection of the immense achievements of science.

Published to mark its 350th anniversary, Seeing Further shows that the history of scientific endeavour and discovery is a continuous thread running through the history of the world and of society - and is one that continues to shape the world we live in today.Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, with contributions from Richard Dawkins and others, this beautiful, lavishly illustrated book tells the story of science and the Royal Society, from 1660 to the present. This unique, ground-breaking and beautiful volume will be a worth addition to the bookshelf of anybody that is interested in science.

(Book Review Text Courtesy: http://www.royalsociety.org/, http://www.amazon.co.uk/, http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

BOOK OF JANUARY


Title         : George's Secret Key To The Universe
Author     : Stephen Hawking & Lucy Hawking
Publisher : Random House
Price        : $12.91
Pages       : 320

Stephen Hawking requires no introduction. As the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, and author of a number of books and papers he has changed the way we see ourselves, our world, and the cosmos. His books are clearly written so that a layperson can read them, but they’re primarily designed for adults to read and reasonably heady. Not so with George’s Secret Key to the Universe. The book was a collaborative effort between Stephen Hawkings and his novelist daughter Lucy, and thus working on both a fictional and non-fictional level.

The novel is about a young boy named George whose parents are extreme technophobes, to the point of refusing to use light bulbs. George doesn’t feel the same way, and wants a computer more than anything else in the world. One day his pet pig Freddy runs away, he follows him and discovers that the neighbors are Eric, a physicist, and his daughter Annie. Eric has a computer- Cosmos which can take George to anywhere in universe and at the same time introducing him to the wonders of science.

George's Secret Key to the Universe, however, is not merely an adventure.It makes a strong case for the importance of science and the scientific way of thinking in our lives. It is also a book that has its heart in the right place -- it repeatedly stresses that science is to be used for the good of humanity and the quest for scientific knowledge should not be at the cost of the planet. The book also neatly brings in the importance of scientists and environmentalists working together to save and rejuvenate the planet.

The book contains beautiful full colour plates, charts and fact boxes which provide background and information relating to the story. The book make a refreshing change for young readers from the dark world of black magic that seems to have taken precedence in fiction for young adults. And for anybody, there’s something comforting about knowing that one need not have to double-check the science in the book, because one of the authors is the renowned scientist of our time. A Malayalam translation of it is also available from DC books, Kerala.

(Book Review Text Curtesy: http://www.georgessecretkey.com/, http://www.physics.about.com/, http://www.amazon.com/)

SCIENCE OF JANUARY 2010

1 January : Indian summer monsoon rains have been decreasing steadily over the past three decades, a trend not seen in the ninteenth century, says a new study. The researchers compared monsoon rainfall trends in these four months over two time scales: from 1871–2005 and from 1970–2005. The study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last month (31 December).

2 January: Scientists have discovered 419 million-year-old DNA intact inside ancient salt deposits.The genetic material, the oldest ever found, belongs to salt-loving bacteria whose ancestors may have been among the first life forms on Earth. A team of researchers led by Dr Jong Soo Park of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, found six segments of identical DNA that have never been seen before by science. Their work appears in the December issue of the journal Geobiology .

3 January: NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered its first five new exoplanets. Named Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b, the five planets are quite a bit larger than Earth. Known as "hot Jupiters" because of their high masses and extreme temperatures, the new exoplanets range in size from similar to Neptune to larger than Jupiter.

4 January: Genetically modified rice cleared for commercial sale could be growing on Chinese farms as early as next year, making China the first country to allow commercial cultivation of GM strains. The field trials required for any new variety are now under way, following official safety clearance November.Two varieties, called Huahui 1 and Bt Shanyou 63, received clearance and should be launched within the next two years. Both contain "Bt" proteins from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium to protect them against the rice stem borer, the most serious rice pest in China.

5 January: The world's smallest transistor, made from only six atoms of carbon suspended between two gold electrodes, has been created by scientists from the US and South Korea. Transistors amplify or switch electric signals and are the fundamental building blocks of modern electronic devices. This molecular model, which appears in the journal Nature, is more of a scientific discovery than a technological breakthrough for now.

6 January: A new species of bird has been spotted in the rainforests of Borneo. Leeds University biologist Richard Webster first glimpsed the bird from a canopy walkway 35m above ground. The spectacled flowerpecker, a small, wren-sized, grey bird, was feeding on some flowering mistletoe in a tree. On one sighting it was heard singing. The bird has white markings around its eyes, belly and breast. It has not yet been given a scientific name because so little is known about it. Dr David Edwards, a tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds, identified the bird as a new species from photographs.

7 January: Europe's billion-euro Herschel Space Telescope is fully operational again after engineers brought its damaged instrument back online. The observatory's HiFi spectrometer was turned off just three months into the mission because of an anomaly that was probably triggered by space radiation. The Dutch-led consortium that operates HiFi has now switched the instrument across to its reserve electronics. It says the failure event has been understood and cannot happen again.

8 January: Israeli researchers from Tel Aviv University have cloned the genes involved in producing specific toxic protein compounds, developing ways to produce and manipulate these toxins inside bacteria grown in their lab. These technical developments may eventually help scientists develop new, scorpion-inspired pesticides that would zero in on specific insect pests without harming people, the environment, or other animal bystanders.

9 January : Scientists claim to have the first persuasive evidence that Neanderthals wore "body paint" 50,000 years ago. The team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shells containing pigment residues were Neanderthal make-up containers. Scientists unearthed the shells at two archaeological sites in the Murcia province of southern Spain.

10 January : The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission – Solar India in New Delhi today. The target of 20,000 MW of solar generating capacity by the end of the 13th Five Year Plan is no doubt an ambitious target. The focal point, for the next three years, will be the NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam (NVVN), the power-trading arm of government-owned NTPC.

11 January : A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired "chemical computer" has begun as part of an international collaboration. The "wet computer" incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power. The team's approach mimics some of the actions of neurons in the brain. The 1.8m-euro (£1.6m) project will run for three years, funded by an EU emerging technologies programme.

12 January: The Doomsday Clock - a barometer of nuclear danger for the past 55 years - has been moved one minute further away from the "midnight hour". The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) now stands at six minutes to the hour. The group said it made the decision to move the clock back because of a more "hopeful state of world affairs". The clock was first featured by the magazine in 1947, shortly after the US dropped its A-bombs on Japan.

13 January:  The first direct capture of a spectrum of light from a planet outside the solar system has been obtained, in what is a landmark discovery in the search for extraterrestrial life, say astronomers.The light was snared from a giant planet that orbits a bright young star called HR 8799 about 130 light years from Earth, according to European Southern Observatory .

14 January: Global supply of a key, plant-based, anti-malaria drug is set to be boosted by a genetic study, scientists say. Researchers have mapped the genes of Artemisia annua to allow selection of high-yield varieties.The study, published in the journal Science, aims to make growing the plant more profitable for farmers. "It's a major milestone for the development of this crop," Professor Ian Graham from the University of York in the UK told BBC News.

15 January: The Indian space agency is launching five on rockets Friday to study the effects of the millennium's longest annular solar eclipse in the southern part of the country, an official said."Five rockets are being launched on Friday between 1 and 3 pm to investigate the effects of the solar eclipse in the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) project director P Ratnakar Rao told IANS from Thiruvananthapuram on Friday.The Rohini (RH) sounding rockets will be launched from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Station (TERLS) at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) of ISRO in the Kerala capital.

16 January: The Ministry of Shipping has nominated the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), the Goa-based constituent laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), to carry out the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for a new alignment of the Sethusamudram Channel between the southern tip of India and the northern tip of Sri Lanka. The Expert Committee — chaired by Dr. R.K. Pachauri — established by the Supreme Court to advise on the alignment recommended NIO for this task.

17 January: The science-fiction blockbuster “Avatar” won best drama at the Golden Globes and picked up the directing honor for James Cameron on Suday, raising the “Titanic” filmmaker’s prospects for another Academy Awards triumph. It was a repeat of Cameron winning Globes 12 years ago, when “Titanic” won best drama and the directing prize on its way to dominating the Oscars. This time, though, instead of being “king of the world”, as Cameron declared at the Oscars, he has become king of an alien landscape, elevating space fantasy to enormous critical acclaim.

18 January : A United Nations body is expected to retract its oft-repeated prediction that most of the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035.Two years ago, the UN’s Nobel prize-winning body — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) headed by R.K. Pachauri — had warned of the melting of glaciers, which would have far-reaching consequences for India. Now, evidence has emerged to suggest that the IPCC may have been mistaken.The IPCC’s claim was based on an article in the New Statesman, London, which relied on an estimate made by India’s leading glaciologist and Padamshree recipient Syed Iqbal Hasnain.

19 January: The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) wants participation of more Indian experts, including scientists, for conducting various experiments at its recently commissioned Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Director General Prof Rolf-Dieter Heur said today.A meeting will be held with officials of the Atomic energy Commission and other expert bodies next month to discuss the availability of Indian manpower, he said.

20 January: "Plasma jets" could one day be used to clean out bacteria from tooth cavities, say researchers from Saarland University in Homburg, Germany. Tests reported in the Journal of Medical Microbiology found the plasma destroyed bacteria in infected teeth. They say plasma dentistry may be available within three to five years. Dr Stefan Rupf, who led the study, said the low temperature killed the microbes while preserving the tooth.

21 January: A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record. January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record.

22 January: Physicist Andrew Lange, who conducted award-winning research into the remnants of the Big Bang died at age 53.Lange was co-leader of a project that in 1998 used a telescope, carried over Antarctica by a balloon, to study the so-called cosmic microwave background . Project "Boomerang" showed the spatial geometry of the universe is flat and supported theories that it will expand forever and not collapse upon itself.

23 January: In a new research, scientists have found that dolphins might be the second-smartest animals after humans.Lori Marino, a senior lecturer in neuroscience and behavioral biology at Emory University who has performed several MRI scans on dolphin brains, said that at least two other lines of evidence support her claims about dolphin intelligence.First, various features of the dolphin neocortex - the part of the brain involved in higher-order thinking and processing of emotional information - are "particularly expanded" in dolphins.Second, behavioral studies conducted by Marino and other experts demonstrate that dolphins exhibit human-like skills.

24 January: Indian Space Research Organisation successfully conducted the static test of its largest solid booster S200 at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota today. The successful test of S200 makes it the third largest solid booster in the world, next to the RSRM solid booster of Space Shuttle and P230 solid booster of ARIANE-5. The S200 solid booster will form the strap-on stage for the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III (GSLV-Mk III) which is currently under advanced stage of development for launching 4 ton class of communication satellites. It is a major milestone in the solid rocket motor programme of ISRO and a vital step in the development of GSLV Mk III.


25 January: For the first time, astronauts on board the International Space Station have personal access to the Internet and World Wide Web when the station is at points in its orbit when it can take advantage of high-speed Ku-band links to ground stations. The new systems enables astronauts to have personal, real-time internet access so long as the Ku-band links are operating. The astronauts will be able to use email and use videoconferencing systems.

26 January: The account of Newton's eureka moment, which led to his famous theory of gravity, forms part of William Stukeley's 1752 biography of the great scientist.Until now it has remained hidden away in the Royal Society's archives - but from Monday anyone with internet access will be able to look at it.The manuscript is one of a number of archive documents being published online by Britain's leading academic institution to mark its 350th anniversary.

27 January: NASA has given up trying to free its Spirit rover, which has been stuck in soft ground on Mars since May last year. NASA says all efforts to free the robot vehicle have failed and it will now live out its days as a static science station. In its six years on the planet, this robotic geologist has taken thousands of images and found evidence in the rocks of a wetter, warmer part in Mars history.

28 January: Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chief K Radhakrishnan on Wednesday said the configuration for the new moon mission 'Chandrayaan-2' is being finalised and added that it would be launched by 2013. Chandrayaan-2, which will be a joint effort between ISRO and Russia, will consist of a lander and a rover for a soft land on moon. The rover will move on the surface of the moon and pick up samples of rocks and soil and conduct a chemical analysis on it.

29 January: The world’s largest marine geoscience project is underway to drill deep beneath the Antarctic to discover clues to climate change.That would involve boring through two km of rock in the sea bed, seven km deep in the ocean.Rob McKay, post-doctoral fellow at Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Centre says the two-month expedition would help to understand the past climate history of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world’s largest and drilling will helpto document the onset of glaciations in Antarctica and the end of the greenhouse world when there were forests in Antarctica.

30 January: Researchers have transformed ordinary mouse skin cells into neurons, bypassing the need for stem cells or even stemlike cells and greatly speeding up the field of regenerative medicine.The experiment could make it possible to someday take a sample of a patient's skin and turn the cells into a tailor-made transplant to treat brain diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, or heal damaged spinal cords.The study was coducted in Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University in California and the methodology has been patented.

31 January: NASA is embarking a new ambitious mission to unravel the sun's interior mechanisms that may help predict solar storms that cause chaos on Earth.The mission scheduled for February 9 from Space Launch Complex-41, Cape Canaveral AFS, Florida will help understand the causes of extreme solar activities such as sun spots and solar winds and flares.According to NASA, after its launch, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will spend five years in orbit trying to discover how such solar phenomena are created.