Monday, February 28, 2011

SCIENCE OF THE MONTH: MARCH 2011

Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC) has proclaimed  2011 as the Year of the Turtle. Link: http://www.parcplace.org/yearoftheturtle.htm 
                                                                                   
                                                                                                        1 March 2011: The Government will establish The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) jointly by the Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology. A site in Bodi West Hills near T. Pudukottai village of  Theni district, Tamilnadu has been identified as a suitable location. The project includes construction of a world-class underground laboratory under a rock cover of 1200 metre from all directions.  The primary goal of INO is to study neutrino properties. Link: http://www.imsc.res.in/~ino/ 

2 March 2011: Earth is worth £3,000 trillion, according to an astrophysicist who claims to have created a formula to calculate the value of a planet. The astrophysicist, Greg Laughlin from University of California , came up with the figure by calculating the sum of the planet’s age, size, temperature, mass and other vital statistics. Laughlin invented the equation, which he used to evaluate the discoveries made by US space agency NASA’s £600 million Kepler spacecraft. Link: http://www.ucolick.org/~laugh/ 

3 March 2011: Robonaut 2 has become the first humanoid robot ever to reach space. It was transported to the International Space Station via the Space Shuttle Discovery. The Robobaut is a dextrous robot designed by General Motors and NASA engineers and is on its first mission. Robonaut, or R2, does not have a specific job aboard the station and will perform maintenance and service tasks. The robot has 38 computer processors. Link: http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp

4 March 2011: India has applied to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) at Geneva in Switzerland for associate membership. This was stated by CERN official Rudiger Voss who said if India is granted associate membership, Indian researchers would be eligible for jobs at the CERN. At present, CERN has 20 member-States. Currently, researchers of institutes that collaborate with the CERN can only be deputed there for short periods of time. Link: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/


5 March 2011: Paleontologists believe that at least seven species of Dinosaurs lived in the tiny town called Balasinor of  Raiyoli Taluk in Gujarat making Raiyoli the third largest hatchery in the world. In 2003 they also discovered a new species here named Rajasaurus narmandensis, meaning "theprincely reptile from the Narmada". The site was discovered accidentally in 1981 when geologists were conducting a mineral survey of the area. Link: http://www.dinohunters.com/History/Rajasaurus.htm 

6 March 2011: The number of spots on the Sun's surface varies periodically, going through successive maxima and minima in roughly 11 year solar cycles. Now a team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Dibyendu Nandy from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata, has developed a model which may explain why some solar cycles are worse than others. The study is reported in the journal Nature. Link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7336/full/nature09786.html 

7 March 2011: The Great Indian Bustard has recently been declared as Critically Endangered by the BirdLife International, a global alliance of conservation organisations, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).Environmentalists and experts say that this upgradation of category of the Great Indian Bustard will give priority to its conservation and protection. At present, the bustard population in six states, including Maharashtra, is just 300.Link: http://www.birdlife.org/ , http://www.iucn.org/

8 March 2011: Discovery ended its career as the world's most flown spaceship Wednesday, returning from orbit for the last time and taking off in a new direction as a museum piece in Smithsonian Institution.Even after shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis make their final voyages in the coming months, Discovery will still hold the all-time record with 39 missions, 148 million miles, 5,830 orbits of Earth, and 365 days spent in space. . Link: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/orbiters/discovery.html, http://www.si.edu/

9 March 2011: Eminent astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar will be the recipient of the prestigious 'Maharashtra Bhushan' award for 2010. The award - instituted in 1997 by the Maharashtra government to recognise the highly distinguished achievements of eminent persons from the state, representing different walks of life - carries cash Rs 5 lakh, a shawl and shriphal (traditional coconut) and a citation.  He has received several awards including Padma Bhushan in 1965, at the young age of 26. Link: http://maharashtra.gov.in/ 

10 March 2011: Richard Hoover, a  NASA scientist reports detecting tiny fossilised bacteria on three meteorites, and maintains these microscopic life forms are not native to Earth. If confirmed, this research would suggest life in the universe is widespread and life on Earth may have come from elsewhere in the solar system. The study is published in the Journal of Cosmology, is considered so controversial as the journal's editor seeks other scientific comment on this. Link: http://journalofcosmology.com/ 

11 March 2011: James Elliot, an astronomer who used light from distant stars to study planetary objects throughout the solar system, leading to his discovery of the rings of Uranus, died on March 3 at his home in Wellesley, Mass. He was 67. In 1977, using a telescope in an airplane, Dr. Elliot led a team of Cornell University scientists to observe the planet Uranus when it passed between Earth and a star, recording  the first evidence of Uranus’s rings. Link: http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/elliot_james.html h

12 March 2011: India successfully test-fired its homegrown nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles Prithvi-II and its naval version Dhanush from different locations off the Orissa coast, on a day Pakistan too tested its nuclear-capable Hatf-II ballistic missile. The Prithvi-II was fired from complex-3 of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur in Balasore district. Pakistan too successfully test-fired the Hatf-II (Abdali) short-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile. Link: http://www.mod.nic.in/

13 March 2011: The devastating tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 was "completely unrelated" to the approaching "supermoon," according to U.S. Geological Survey. The supermoon will occur on March 19, when the moon is at or near its point of closest orbit and is also full. However, a very small correlation exists between full or new moons and seismic activity, because the stronger-than-usual tidal forces caused by the alignment of the sun and moon puts added stress on tectonic plates. Link: http://www.usgs.gov/ 

14 March 2011: The massive earthquake that struck northeast Japan on March 11 has shortened the length Earth's day by a fraction and shifted how the planet's mass is distributed. A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Link: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ 

15 March 2011: The Royal British Mint has released a  50 pence coin to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the World Wildlife Fund. Centered around the charity’s iconic panda logo at the heart of the design, is a dolphin, gorilla, rhino, polar bear and butterfly. Other symbols featured on the coin include a car, a wind turbine, coffee bean, and a human footprint to represent man’s impact in the world. The reverse design was created by award winning graphic artist Matthew Dent. Link: http://www.royalmint.com/

16 March 2011: A whale shark was satellite-tagged for the first time in India, as part of research to understand behavior, ecological preferences and migration of this species. The satellite tag was installed by a team of researchers under the Whale Shark Conservation Project. Since its inception in 2008, the Whale Shark Conservation Project has been working with the support of the fishing communities, involving them in the conservation of this largest fish in the world. Link: http://www.whalesharkproject.org/


17 March 2011: Scientists at the Norwich Research Park in the United Kingdom have successfully sequenced the genome of a novel strain of Clostridium botulinum that can produce a deadly neurotoxin and could be used as biological terrorism weapon. The strain produces an unusual botulinum neurotoxin called type A5 neurotoxin, News-Medical.net reports. By sequencing the complete genome, the researchers hope to be able to manage any possible threat that the new strain poses. Link: http://www.nrp.org.uk/ 

18 March 2011: Researchers are trying to sequence  the complete genome of the world's largest fish, the Whale Shark. Researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Aquarium are working to create a complete library of Whale Shark DNA, sequencing the genomes of the aquarium's captive sharks, which come from Taiwan, and comparing them with wild whale sharks in Mexico. The genome sequencing project will take months to complete. Link: http://www.georgiaaquarium.org/ , http://www.emory.edu/home/index.html

19 March 2011: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operations last year, could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet. According to Weiler and Chui Man Ho's theory, these singlets can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or in the past. Link: http://public.web.cern.ch/

20 March 2011: For more conservation measures and research on common bird species and urban biodiversity, March 20 will be celebrated and marked as World House Sparrow Day. The marking of the day is an international initiative by the Nature Forever Society, in collaboration with the Bombay Natural History Society, Cornell Lab of Ornithology (U.S.), Eco-Sys Action Foundation (France), Avon Wildlife Trust (U.K.) and numerous other organisations. Link: http://www.natureforever.org/

21 March 2011: For the first time, Earth has a regular orbiting eye-in-the-sky spying on the solar system's smallest and strangest planet, Mercury. NASA's spacecraft called Messenger successfully veered into a pinpoint orbit after a 6 1/2-year trip and 4.9 billion miles (7.9 billion kilometers) and tricky maneuvering to fend off the gravitational pull of the sun. It is the fifth planet in our solar system that NASA has orbited, in addition to the Earth and the moon. Link: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/

22 March 2011: A new species of a Rugged Darkling Beetle that thrives in an arid region of the Chihuahuan Desert is being named in honor of Theodore Roosevelt on the 100th anniversary of a speech he gave at Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University.  The new species of beetle, Stenomorpha roosevelti was discovered and named by Aaron Smith, an authority on darkling beetles and a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University. Link: http://species.asu.edu

23 March 2011: Scientists at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, have discovered a new type of moon rock thanks to the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument aboard the Indian Space Agency's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The imaging spectrometer took the first high resolution pictures of the far side of the moon. Evidence of the new type of moon rock, believed to be a form of pink spinel, was found on the edge of the Moscoviense basin on the far side of the moon. Link: http://m3.jpl.nasa.gov/

24 March 2011: The fossilised remains of the world's largest known rabbit, Nuralagus rex have been found off the coast of Spain. The animal, which lived three to five million years ago and was six times the size of most rabbits today, has been dubbed the "Minorcan King of the Rabbits", since it was found on the small Mediterranean island of Minorca. Researchers at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology report their discovery of the new species in the Journal of  Vertebrate Paleontology. Link: http://www.vertpaleo.org/

25 March 2011: Japanese scientists have found measurable concentrations of iodine-131 and caesium-137 radiation in seawater near the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. The iodine concentrations were at or above Japanese regulatory limits, and the caesium levels were well below those limits,says International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).Food products from the affected areas near the plant were found to have levels of iodine-131 and caesium-137 had exceeding acceptable limits. Link: http://www.iaea.org/

26 March 2011: A new species of seabird has been recognized in Puerto Montt, Chilea. It is a new species of Storm Petrel, the first new species of seabird in 55 years. The announcement was made at a recent ceremony held by the San Diego Bird Festival. Thousands of Storm Petrels are found along the Chilean coast but scientists missed this new species. Storm petrels, 22 species in all, are called "the ballerinas of the sea" as they seem to dance on water with their webbed-feet. Link: http://www.sandiegoaudubon.org/


27 March 2011: When city lights go off during "Earth Hour" today, the Amateur Astronomers Association Delhi will set up telescopes at India Gate on today evening for the public to view celestial wonders such as planet Saturn. They will also raise awareness about minimizing light pollution in the city so that Delhiites get a chance to appreciate the night sky. "Earth Hour" is an annual international event started in 2007 by the World Wide Fund for Nature  to raise awareness about climate change. Link: http://www.earthhour.org/


28 March 2011: NASA says the unmanned spacecraft Stardust will burn off all its remaining fuel in a single burst today, and then its transmitter will be shut off and the spacecraft left to drift. Stadust will transmit information about its fuel usage as the burn happens. Since it was first launched in February 1999, Stardust has traveled more than 5.5 billion kilometers.  It has flown past an asteroid and two comets, and has returned comet particles to Earth in a sample capsule. Link: http://www.stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/

29 March 2011: India's latest tiger census shows an increase in the numbers of  it. The census counted at least 1,706 tigers in forests across the country, about 300 more than four years ago. The census included 70 tigers in the eastern Indian Sunderbans Tiger Reserve, which had not been counted in the last census in 2007. The 2007 census had shown 1,411 tigers, a sharp fall in the population from about 3,600 five years earlier.A century ago, about 100,000 tigers roamed India's forests. Link: http://projecttiger.nic.in/


30 March 2011Scientists have created the world’s first artificial leaf that can turn sunlight and water into energy. A team at Massachusetts Institute of  Technology says that the artificial leaf from Silicon, electronics and various catalysts which spur chemical reactions within the device, can use sunlight to break water into Hydrogen and Oxygen which can then be used to create electricity in a separate fuel cell. The findings were presented at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Link: http://web.mit.edu/

31 March 2011: Shri Jairam Ramesh, Minister of State for Environment and Forests today launched Black Carbon Research Initiative National Carbonaceous Aerosols Programme (NCAP). It is a joint initiative and Ministry of Environment and Forest, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Indian Space Research Space Organisation and Department of Science and Technology are working together. The National Institute of Glaciology has been set up in Dehradun already related to this. Link: http://envfor.nic.in/


MOVIE OF THE MONTH: MARCH 2011

                                          LIMITLESS
                                                          

Director         : Neil Burger
Camera         : Jo Willems
Distributor     : Relativity Media
Screenplay    : Leslie Dixon
Releasing on : March18, 2011
Language      : English

Ever since Alice popped down the Wonderland rabbit hole, we humans have daydreamed about pills that can transform us. If there were a pill that could make you smart, rich and powerful, the best that you could be, would you take it? Such is the intriguing premise of  Limitless, the American techno-thriller film directed by Neil Burger and starring Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, and Robert De Niro. It is based on the 2001 novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn with the screenplay by Leslie Dixon.

Eddie Morra is an unemployed writer whose girlfriend Lindy breaks up with him. Eddie believes he has no future, but when a friend introduces him to the experimental drug NZT, Eddie becomes highly focused and highly confident. He is able to recall everything he has read, heard, or seen, and he uses the knowledge to become successful in the financial world. Business mogul Carl Van Loon sees Eddie as a potential tool to make money, but Eddie's success also attracts hitmen who pursue him for the NZT. Eddie's stash dwindles, causing him side effects, as he tries to escape being assassinated.

Limitless is based on the 2001 novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn. The film is directed by Neil Burger based on a screenplay by Leslie Dixon, who had acquired rights to the source material. Dixon wrote the adapted screenplay for less than her normal cost in exchange to be one of the film's producers. She and fellow producer Scott Kroopf approached Burger to direct the film, at the time titled The Dark Fields. For Burger, who had written and directed his previous three films, the collaboration was his first foray solely as director.With Universal Pictures developing the project, actor Shia LaBeouf was announced in April 2008 to be cast as the film's star.

The project eventually moved to development under Relativity Media with Universal distributing through Relativity's Rogue Pictures. By November 2009, actor Bradley Cooper replaced LaBeouf in the starring role.Actor Robert De Niro was cast opposite Cooper by March 2010, and The Dark Fields began filming in Philadelphia the following May. Filming also took place in New York City. Burger described the premise, "The whole movie is a ride, a kind of fever-dream crazy story constantly going off the rails. It's about the nature of power and what I'm willing to do to get that power."


Source: http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-12-17-limitless17_ST_N.htm, http://www.wikipedia.org/

BOOK OF THE MONTH: MARCH 2011

                                              
Title          : Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with
                                Julian Assange at the World's
                                Most Dangerous Website
Author      : Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Pages       : 288
Publisher  : Random House UK
Published : 03 February 2011
Price         : $ 23
ISBN         : 13: 9780224094016

Since its launch in 2006, WikiLeaks has rapidly grown into the most powerful and influential whistleblowing organisation ever. Its status as a repository and publisher of leaked sensitive and confidential documents ‹ while preserving the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors ‹ as well as the statements and behaviour of its leader, Julian Assange, have made WikiLeaks daily front-page news and a topic of enormous controversy.

In an eye-opening account, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who joined WikiLeaks in its early days and became its spokesman, reveals never-disclosed details about the inner workings of the organisation that has struck fear into governments and businesses worldwide, and prompted the Pentagon to convene a 120-man investigative task force. He also provides a remarkably up-close portrait of Julian Assange himself.

Under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, Domscheit-Berg was the effective No. 2 at WikiLeaks and the organisation's most public face after Julian Assange. In this book, he tells the backstories of leaks ranging from the Church of Scientology and the Afghanistan and Iraq War logs to Cablegate, and reveals the evolution, finances, and inner tensions of the whistleblower organisation, beginning with his first meeting with Assange in December 2007.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg is a computer scientist who worked in IT security prior to devoting himself full-time to WikiLeaks. He was born in 1978. After finishing school he worked as a programmer for the global market-leader EDS (Electronical Data Systems), before becoming involved with WikiLeaks in 2007. Today, he and other former WikiLeaks people are working on a more transparent secret-sharing website called OpenLeaks, to be launched in early 2011. He lives in Berlin with his family.

Review Tesxt Courtesy: http://www.scribepublications.com.au/book/insidewikileaks, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10068893-inside-wikileaks

EVENT OF THE MONTH: MARCH 2011

42nd ANNUAL LUNAR AND PLANETARY SCIENCE CONFERENCE


Date: March 7-11
Venue: The Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel and Convention Center, The Woodlands, Texashe Woodlands, Texas.

NASA researchers and other scientists will present findings that provide new insights into the evolution of thesolar system during the 42nd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The conference is hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The institute is managed by the Universities Space Research Association, a national, nonprofit consortium of universities chartered in 1969 by the National Academy of Sciences at NASA's request.

This conference brings together international specialists in petrology, geochemistry, geophysics, geology, and astronomy to present the latest results of research in planetary science. The schedule for the conference consists of parallel sessions of contributed presentations that emphasize planetary processes in addition to presentations related to planetary bodies. Contributed abstracts were peer reviewed, and selections for presentation were based on the overall relevance of the subject matter to the conference.

Key events include the unveiling of future planetary science strategy; early science results from a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission, called Hayabusa, that returned the first particle samples from an asteroid; presentations about the recent comet Hartley 2 flyby; and the upcoming MESSENGER mission, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

The conference also will include a briefing about the Planetary Decadal Survey at 5:30 p.m. CST on March 7. The survey is a strategy released by the National Research Council in Washington to prioritize missions, research areas and observations ten or more years into the future. The briefing's featured speaker will be Steve Squyres of Cornell University. He is the survey's chair and principal investigator for NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers.

Link: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2011/, http://www.nasa.gov/






SPECIES OF THE MONTH: MARCH 2011

.NEW DINOSAUR


Phylum       : Chordata
Class          : Reptilia
Superorder : Dinosauria
Order         : Saurischia
Infraorder   : Sauropoda
Genus         : Brontomerus
Species       : Brontomerus mcintoshi

Palaeontologists claim to have discovered the newest member of the dinosaurs- Brontomerus mcintoshi.It is a sauropod Dinosaur which lived during the early Cretaceous (approximately 110 million years ago). It has bony plate that projects from the hip bone. This plate serves as an anchor for the Dinosaur's leg muscles.
An international team which spotted the remains of the creature in the American state of  Utah saysthey have generated a computer image of the species also.

The new dinosaur had substantially powerful hind legs, the most muscular legs of any Sauropod! These legs were so powerful, in fact, that scientists gave it the name Brontomerus, which means "Thunder Thighs"(from Greek bronte meaning "thunder", and merĂ³s meaning "thigh"). The species name is in honor of John "Jack" Stanton McIntosh, a retired physicist at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, and lifelong advocational paleontologist.

The fossils were recovered from a locality known at the Hotel Mesa Quarry in easternmost Grand County, Utah. The site had been previously known to private collectors, who had already removed a considerable number of fossils, some of which may have been scientifically valuable. Exposed bones that remained were in various states of disrepair: some had even been broken and their pieces used to hold down a plastic tarpaulin.

Brontomerus is known from two fragmentary specimens differing in size, likely a juvenile and an adult. Other recovered fossils include a crushed presacral centrum, several caudal vertebrae, a right-side dorsal rib, a large scapula, and two partial sternal plates. The adult specimen is thought to have weighed around six tons, and probably measured around fourteen meters in length. The juvenile specimen weighed around 200 kilograms and measured 4.5 meters in length.

Its assignment to a new species is based on several noteworthy autapomorphies, including an oddly-shaped hipbone which would have permitted the attachment of unusually massive leg muscles. This unique ilium would have given it the largest leg muscles of any sauropod dinosaur.The ilium is unusual in being very deep and having a front part that is much larger than the part behind the hip socket.

Dr. Michael Taylor, one of the dinosaur's describers, theorizes that that for fast movement, the strong muscles would be oriented at the back of the leg to pull it along, but the actual positioning of the muscles indicates they were more likely used to deliver a kick. This is due to the apparent anchoring of large femoral protraction muscles, which would have been used to move the leg forward powerfully.

It was the eighth discovery of remains from a member of that species in North America and there are expected to be more in the future. The team believes it will find more as the number of dinosaurs within the land mass did not decline significantly at the end of the Jurassic period. The findings have been published in the latest edition of the Acta Palaeontologica Polonica journal.

Source : http://animaladay.blogspot.com/2011/02/brontomerus-mcintoshi.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontomerus