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.
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