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.
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