SCIENCE OF JULY 2010

                                                                              

Karimeen (Etroplus suratensis) - the newly declared State fish of Kerala

July 1: Despite technical snags in the indigenous cryogenic engine that powered the Geo-stationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) which was flight-tested in April, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is expected to launch Chandrayaan-2 on an indigenous cryogenic engine on schedule by 2013. ISRO is also developing a satellite that would have instruments on board to test traces of greenhouse gases to enable a better understanding of  atmospheric chemistry.

July 2: The fossilised remains of an extinct sperm whale with teeth each more than a foot long has been unearthed in Peru by scientists who believe the great predator ate other whales to survive.The new species has been named Leviathan melvillei after the Hebrew word Livyatan, meaning a large, mythical sea monster, and in honour of the American novelist Herman Melville, author of  The Whale, also known as Moby Dick. it was a classic tale of 19th-century.

July 3: An international project aims to genetically modify the C3-type of photosynthesis rice uses. If the scientists are successful in creating rice that follows the C4-type of photosynthesis like some plants including maize and sorghumthe, they could produce 50 per cent more grain, and would require less water and fertiliser. The study is coordinated by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, under 'Project Sunshine', a programme that investigates how the power of the sun can be harnessed.

July 4: World's first flying car cleared for take off. The Terrafugia Transition is a car that can fly but with wings like a normal airplane. Once airborne, the speed of the car-plane powered by 100 hp Rotax 912S engine is expected to be around 115 mph with a payload of around 430 lbs. The first finished vehicle is expected to be delivered in late 2011. US Federal Air Authority have given the car-plane a special weight exemption, paving way for the mass production.

July 5: Using sensors onboard the Kaguya spacecraft, which was placed in orbit around the Moon in 2007, Japanese astronomers found abundant signatures of the mineral in concentric rings in three big craters. The mineral, called Olivine, the deep inner layer of Iron- and Magnesium-rich rock lies beneath the Moon's crust. Headed by Satoru Yamamoto of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, the study appears online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

July 6: British engineers are developing new technology that would soon allow paralysed patients to operate bionic limbs with the aid of implanted brain transmitters. The technology uses tiny microchips to sense nerve messages, decode the signals, and turn thought into movement. Scientists believe within the next five years patients with damaged spinal cords would be using robotic devices that will allow them to move their arms or legs at will. The study is led by a team in University of Leicester headed by Prof. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga.

July 7: The proton seems to be 0.00000000000003 millimetres smaller than researchers previously thought, according to work published in Nature. Protons are among the most common particles out there. But despite its everday appearance, the proton remains something of a mystery to nuclear physicists, says Randolf Pohl, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and an author on the Nature paper.

July 8: Karimeen (Etroplus suratensis) will be the official State fish of Kerala. The State Government has also declared 2010-11 is being observed as ‘The Year of Karimeen'. The National Bureau of Fish Genetics Resources had in 2008 suggested that States adopt a State fish and already, a dozen States have an official fish. The Kuttanad region in Alappuzha district is considered the "family home" of the fish. However, Karimeen (Green Chromide)  is one of the most expensive fish. It is too beyond the pocket of the poor.

July 9: Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala launched successfully an advanced sounding rocket RH 200 at 3.50 p.m.on Wednesday. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said the rocket was developed part of the payload in the flight “as a co-passenger,” with the guidance of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). The students' payload comprised tri-axial accelerometers, power switching module and safe arm relay unit matching the requirements of the rocket.

July 10: In a major triumph for alternative energy researchers and enthusiasts, an experimental, solar-powered plane successfully completed a 26-hour flight powered by 12,000 solar cells and sunlight-powered lithium batteries. The Solar Impulse landed where it had taken off -- in Payerne, Switzerland. Andre Borschberg, 57, a former Swiss air force fighter pilot, flew the plane. The solar plane project was under the guidance of Bertrand Piccard, the first person to complete a nonstop balloon flight around the world.

July 11: Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams, who holds the record of the longest spaceflight (195 days) for female space travellers will head for the stars once again. She will be joined on the Soyuz 31 flight to the space station in 2012. Daughter of  Indian born neuroanatomist Deepak Pandya and Slovak mother Bonnie Pandya, among the personal items Sunitha took with her on her last trip were a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and a small figurine of Ganesha.

July 12: Indian Space Research Organisation on Monday sent PSLV-C15 soaring into space to place in orbit Cartosat-2B, a remote sensing satellite with applications in mapping and infrastructure planning. PSLV-C15 also launched Algeria's 116-kg ALSAT-2A, Canada's 6.5 kg NLS-6.1 and AISSAT-1, Switzerland's NLS-6.2 TISAT, and picosatellite STUDSAT designed by 35 undergraduate engineering students from seven colleges in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

July 13: An Octopus named "Paul" living in  Sea Life Centre in Germany, has become a World Cup sensation by correctly forecasting the results of semi-finals and predicting the Spanish victory in the final. The octopus made his prediction by choosing between two containers of food marked with the flags of the competing countries. But experts say  "Paul" (Octopus vulgaris) and octopuses in general are colourblind, so the colour of the flag is irrelevant to them.

July 14: A team of scientists led by Professor Yoel Fink of  Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States have created a cloth madeup of  fibers that can detect and produce sound. The development, described in the August issue of Nature Materials, transforms the usual passive nature of textiles into a virtually all-singing, all-dancing version. The "cloth" can be used for for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, or could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain.

July 15: Thirty-two scientists from India have been selected by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to contribute to the fifth edition of its assessment report that is known to be the most exhaustive analysis of existing knowledge in climate science. The report is slated to come out in 2013-14. Among the omissions is Prof Murari Lal, whose was the lead author for the chapter that had the controversial prediction about the Himalayan glaciers. Almost 60 per cent of the scientists selected are new to the IPCC.

July 16: Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean appear to be at least partly a result of human-induced increases of atmospheric greenhouse gases, says a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The sea level rise which may aggravate monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and India could have far-reaching impacts on both future regional and global climate, according to a University of Colorado. Along the coasts of the northern Indian Ocean, seas have risen by an average of about 13 mm per decade.

July 17: The European Space Agency’s (ESA) comet-chasing probe Rosetta has captured the first close-up images of the asteroid Lutetia. Lutetia is the largest asteroid ever visited by a space probe. Lutetia is located between Mars and Jupiter, some 454 million km away from Earth. Rosetta will now continue its course towards its main destination: the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After orbiting alongside the comet for a few months, it will send a lander to the surface in November 2014.

July 18: Yet another milestone in mobile communication when the 5 billionth mobile subscription added to the count, largely thanks to emerging markets like India and China. According to Ericsson estimates based on industry information, the 5 billionth subscription was added Thursday 8 July. Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015. Studies show that soon 80 % internet users will be doing so using their mobile device.

July 19: First web browser for India called Epic launched by Hidden Reflex, a Bangalore based software startup. Any internet user can now download the browser for free by logging onto the website http://www.epicbrowser.com/. Epic’s India sidebar supports Indian content by providing users access to the latest national and regional news. Users can instantly write in Indian languages on any webpage or in write, Epic’s free built-in word processor. Twelve Indian languages are currently supported.

July 20: Two new bacterial species that produce enzymes which could have application for biotech industry have been discovered in the Arctic region by a senior scientist from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. The bacteria can grow at 2 degrees Celsius and produce enzymes such as protease and lipase which can be used in detergents and washing machines. These bacteria produce anti-oxidants and unsaturated fatty acids that could be used as nutrient supplements also.

July 21: David Warren, who is widely credited with creating the prototype of the flight data recorder, or “black box,”died in Australia. He was 85. David Ronald de Mey Warren was born to missionary parents on March 3, 1925, on Groote Eylandt, an island off northeastern Australia. He was said to be the first European child born there. His father died in one of Australia’s earliest air disasters, in 1934. It inspired him to invent the "ARL Flight Memory Unit” in 1957 which was later called the "Black Box".

July 22: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has started receiving high-quality images from the advanced remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2B. The space agency had successfully launched Cartosat-2B – the 17th remote sensing satellite of India – into orbit onboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on July 12.
The multiple spot scene imagery sent by Cartosat-2B camera would also be useful for village/cadastral level resource assessment and mapping and detailed urban and infrastructure planning and development.

July 23: India will launch its first scientific expedition to the South Pole this November to commemorate the centenary of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's feat. An eight-member team of scientists will embark on the treacherous journey to the South Pole from 'Maitri', India's research station in the Antarctic region. India is also in the advanced stages of building its third research station named 'Bharti' in the Larsemann Hills region in the eastern part of the frozen continent. The station is expected to be functional by 2012.

July 24: According to US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the world is gearing up for the hottest year since 1880. According to them, 2010 will break all records of rising temperatures. The first six months of the year indicated so. It also said that June 2010 was the hottest June in the history. Earlier, 1998 was the hottest year in the recent history. The combined land and ocean temperature for the first six months of  2010 are 14.2 degrees Celsius. It is above the above the 20th century average of 15.5 C.

July 25: India develops world's cheapest computer, Priced Rs.1,600. Jointly developed by IIT-Rajasthan and IIT-Kanpur, the cheapest computer in the world, weighs 400 grams, which has all the applications of a regular computer. The laptop is equipped with touch-screen device and is also wi-fi enabled to access Internet. Interestingly, without hard disk it has 2GB memory and can be connected to external memory of 32 GB. The laptop will be available for students under the National Mission on Education.

July 26: Astronomers have found the largest star yet detected - up to 20 million times brighter than the Sun - using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Named R136a1, the star is thought to have started off with a mass of up to 320 times that of the Sun and the new discovery has doubled the previously accepted limit of solar mass. The research, conducted by scientists from Britain, Malaysia and Germany, was published in scientific journal  The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

June 27: Scientists have for the first time collected venom from octopuses captured from the waters of Antarctica. In the process they have discovered four new octopus species and two new types of cephalopod venom. Researchers hope the new venoms will lead to the development of drugs for pain management, fighting allergies and treating cancer. The study was led by Dr Bryan Fry of the University of Melbourne with researchers from the University of Hamburg and the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.

July 28: Physicists are planning their next atom-smasher which they hope to start building in 2012. Physicists will meet in Paris this week for a conference on high-energy physics, and they're expected to discuss plans for the 20-mile-long International Linear Collider (ILC). The ILC would collide electrons with positrons. In terms of particle energies, it would be less powerful than the LHC and the Tevatron at Fermilab, but it would allow for more accurate measurements. Details: http://www.linearcollider.org/

July 29: A team of scientists will launch an expedition to the Titanic next month to assess the deteriorating condition of the world's most famous shipwreck and create a detailed three-dimensional map that will "virtually raise the Titanic" for the public. The 20-day expedition is to leave St. John's, Newfoundland, on Aug. 18 under a partnership between RMS Titanic Inc., which has exclusive salvage rights to the wreck, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

July 30: India's latest supercomputer 'Annapurna' was unveiled at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) in Chennai today. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee unveiled the country's seventh fastest high-performance computation (HPC) cluster having 1.5 Tera Byte (TB) memory and 30 TB storage space cluster capacity. Among broad-based scientific institutions in India, the Annapurna cluster is the third fastest, ranking below the IISc Bangalore and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

July 31: The milk of the indigenous Vechur cow is more beneficial to health than the milk from cross-bred bovine varieties. This has been revealed in a study conducted for a thesis at the College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Trissur, Kerala by EM Muhammed for his thesis. Among 12 milk protein beta Casein variants, two common types have been identified as A1 and A2. The A2 variant is found to be safe for human consumption which is protective against Diabetes and Heart diseases.

BOOK OF JULY

                                            
Title         : This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from
                               the Fifteen Worst Environmental Disasters around the World

Author      : Robert Emmet Hernan
Pages      : 256
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN        : 0230619835

As the Gulf of Mexico continues to fill with oil due to our own negligence and government agencies’ lack of oversight, we are experiencing an environmental disaster of catastrophic proportions. Tragically, this isn’t the first human-caused environmental disaster. In his book, This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from the 15 Worst Environmental Disasters Around the World, Robert Emmet Hernan describes in detail 15 environmental crises we must remember so that history doesn’t repeat itself.

There is also the context of seven former senior employees of Union Carbide's Indian subsidiary being convicted of causing "death by negligence" over their part in the Bhopal gas tragedy more than 25 years ago. On 3 December 1984, about 40 tonnes of deadly methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant into the air in Bhopal, killing about 4,000 people.The lingering effects of the poison increased the death toll to about 15,000 over the next few years, according to government estimates.

In This Borrowed Earth, the culpability of Union Carbide is clear. Workers were poorly trained. Safety of the public was completely neglected, both in preparing for possible leak and in the panic that ensued after a leak occurred. Though a plant audit in 1982 had warned of serious problems, the warning was ignored. And, like most of the other disasters, financial awards for the victims were pathetically small in comparison to the $470 million Union Carbide paid in a relative pittance.

Corporate irresponsibility is seen to be sharing the large part of the problem, also in the other environmental disasters described in this book. Another theme that runs through this book is the complicity of the government in protecting companies who were contributing largely to the tax base of those countries. It was the tight relationship between the government and companies that often led to the tragedy.

This Borrowed Earth is an amazing book, and should be required reading in every classroom. Here are the  fifteen of the worst man-mand disasters that have shaped and given urgency to the contemporary environmental movement. Full of information about the causes of these disasters, the book also focuses on the human experiences around the events, often heartbreaking. This book will help future generations to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Contents: Minamata, Japan, (1950); London, England, (1952); Windscale, England, (1957); Seveso, Italy, (1976); Love Canal, New York, (1978); Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, (1979); Times Beach, Missouri, (1982); Bhopal, India, (1984); Chernobyl, Ukraine, (1986); Rhine River, Switzerland, (1986); Prince William Sound, Alaska, (1989); Oil Spills and Fires of Kuwait, (1999); Dassen and Robben Islands, South Africa, (2000); List of Some Environmental Organization, Notes, Sources etc.

Book Review text courtesy: www.amazon.com, http://search.barnesandnoble.com,
www.blueplanetgreenliving.com

SCIENCE OF JUNE 2010

                                   NOBY- the baby robot created by Japan Scientists 

June1: A large number of star-forming areas in our Milky Way galaxy, previously unknown to astronomers, have been discovered. These newfound regions are providing astronomers with important information about the galaxy's structure and are yielding new clues about the process of galaxy evolution. In a separate study, the discovery of enormous hydrogen clouds in portions of the Milky Way will also help astronomers better understand the process of galactic evolution.

June 2: The World Science Festival begins at New York City. Renowned physicist Stephen W. Hawking will be honored in the function. The event will last upto June 6. In conjunction with the opening ceremony, the Kavli Foundation announced the winners of this year's Kavli Prizes, which honor researchers in fields that didn't exist as organized disciplines when the Nobel Prizes started: Astrophysics, Neuroscience, and Nanoscience. The prizes are handed out every other year, and were first awarded in 2008.

June 3: China’s newly installed Nebulae supercomputer at National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) in Shenzhen, has become the world’s second fastest, just behind Jaguar, the world’s fastest located at National Centre for Computational Sciences in United States. Jaguar is used by the US department of energy for calculation and simulation in areas like climate modelling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion , and combustion.

June 4: Climate scientists have expressed surprise at findings that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking. The findings, published in the journal Global and Planetary Change, were gathered by comparing changes to 27 Pacific islands over the last 20 to 60 years using historical aerial photos and satellite images. Auckland University's Associate Professor Paul Kench, a member of the team of scientists, says the results challenge the view that Pacific islands are sinking due to rising sea levels associated with climate change.

June 5: India's first home made swine flu vaccine was launched by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Thursday. It will hit the markets on today. Named Vaxiflu-S, it has been manufactured by pharmaceutical major Cadila Healthcare and is an egg-based, single dosed vaccine. It's priced at Rs 350.Over the next few months, another three drug companies will come out with their own versions of the vaccine.It's a vaccine that promises to change the way India will tackle swine flu.

June 6: Astronomers claim to have found hints of life on Saturn's moon Titan which is much too cold to support even liquid water on its surface. According to the 'New Scientist', the two potential signatures of life on Titan were found by Cassini spacecraft, but scientists have pointed out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations. Cassini measurements also suggest hydrogen is disappearing near Titan's surface, according to a study by Darrell Strobel of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

June 7: Scientists taking a genomewide view of ancestry have traced the genetic roots of seven Jewish groups. Each of the Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi) has its own genetic signature but is more closely related to the other Jewish groups than to non-Jewish groups, the researchers found. The research was lead by New York University School of Medicine. The study is published in the online issue of American Journal of Human Genetics.

June 8: An UFO was seen moving through the sky just before Saturday's sunrise by people across eastern Australia. The people who have seen the flying object described it as a "lollipop-type swirl". It hovered for a while before gradually moving in an eastern direction until it was out of sight. Those who saw it said photos do not reflect how large it actually was.However scientists say that a bright spiraling light spotted in the sky was probably a satellite, space junk or a rocket.

June 9: Impressed by the global popularity of saffron produced in Jammu and Kashmir, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that a national mission to promote research and production of the valuable spice will be set up in the state. Saffron from the Jammu is famous world over for its use in enhancing the taste of food and for its medicinal properties. He was speaking at the convocation of Sher-i-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology.

June 10: The Trappist telescope (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope), the new robotic telescope designed to study planets around other stars has taken its first image. Although based in Chile, the Trappist telescope is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) organisation, which oversees the La Silla facility and the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is also in Chile. As well as detecting and characterising so-called exoplanets, Trappist will also study comets orbiting our Sun.

June 11: The user trials of laser-guided bombs developed by the Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE) were conducted on Wednesday by Indian Air Force (IAF) aircraft over the Pokhran range in Rajasthan. The ADE is a unit of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). A DRDO press release said the flight tests had demonstrated the accuracy, reliability and performance of these precision air-launched bombs.

June 12: A perfectly preserved shoe, 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, has been found in a cave in Armenia. The 5,500 year old shoe, the oldest leather shoe in the world, was discovered by a team of international archaeologists and their findings will publish on June 9th in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE. The oldest known footwear in the world, to the present time, are sandals made of plant material, that were found in a cave in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri in the US.

June 13: A Swiss solar innovator has been awarded the Millennium Technology prize for his research into the way that plants turn light into energy. Professor Michael Gratzel of the Lausanne Federal Technology Institute received the £660,000 prize in Helsinki. Michael Gratzel said India stands to benefit significantly from a new technology on solar power as it is cheap, green and efficient. Solar cells can also provide energy for water purification. Solar panel is now already capable of charging your mobile phone, he said.

June 14: A vast mountain range that rivals the Alps in majesty buried underneath the ice of Antarctica - is revealed by scientists. They are buried beneath solid ice more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick, deep within Antarctica's eastern interior. The existence of this mountain range, called the Gamburtsev Mountains, shocked the Russian scientists who first discovered it more than 50 years ago. At the International Polar Yearconference in Oslo, Norway, scientists unveiled new radar images of the area.

June 15: A capsule thought to contain the first samples grabbed from the surface of an asteroid has returned to Earth. The Japanese Hayabusa container hit the top of the atmosphere just after 1350 GMT, producing a bright fireball over southern Australia. The Hayabusa mission was launched to asteroid Itokawa in 2003, spending three months at the space rock in 2005. The main spacecraft, along with the sample-storage capsule, should have come back to Earth in 2007, but a succession of technical problems delayed their return by three years.

June 16: An international meeting has given the green light to the formation of a global "science policy" panel on biodiversity and ecosystem services, viz., Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). More than 230 delegates from 85 nations backed the proposals at a five-day UN meeting in Busan, South Korea. The international panel is expected to be formally endorsed in 2011.
It is expected that the IPBES will be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

June 17: By building a machine that uses 2,000 bouncing beads to spin a paddle and perform work, researchers from the University of Twente have finally realized a long-debated thought experiment. A similar machine was first proposed in 1912 by the Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski. However, several years later, physicist Richard Feynman argued that, in reality, the bouncing beads would not be capable of doing meaningful work. The details of their study are published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.


June 18: The world's oldest known example of a fig wasp has been identified from the Isle of Wight. Dating back 34 million years, the fossil wasp looks almost identical to the modern species, suggesting the specialized insect has remained virtually unchanged for at least that long. Steve Compton, a fig wasp expert at the University of Leeds in England says that molecular evidence shows that fig wasps and fig trees have been evolving together for over 60 million years. The research will be published this week in Biology Letters.

June 19: A team of Korean researchers at Jeju National University led by Professor Park Se-pill cloned a "Black Bull" native to Jeju Island. Black bulls and cows from Jeju were near extinction in the 1980s.  In an effort to revive the black cow, the National Institute of Animal Science and the Jeju government started a breeding program in 1993. Black bulls and cows are known for a high unsaturated fat content of their meat, which is considered healthier for consumption.

June 20: Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) will be releasing  the India’s first intra-nasal indigenous H1N1 flu vaccine, this week. The vaccine, to be marketed under the brand name Nasovac, can be administered to anyone above the age of three. The vaccine is likely to be available in the market in a week’s time. It will cost around Rs 150. The first swine flu case in the country was reported on May 13 last year. Pune schoolgirl Reeda Shaikh was the first victim of the virus.

June 21: Today is the longest day of the year. It is the Summer Solstice. Solstice is an astronomical event which occurs twice a year, when the tilt of the earth's axis is most inclined towards or away from the sun. So, Northern Hemisphere points directly towards the sun while the Southern Hemisphere points directly opposite the sun. The sun rose at 5:24 AM and set at 7:22 PM, marking a 14-hour-long day. Students from various schools would perform experiments such as measuring the sun's angle etc.

June 22: Japanese researchers have created a baby robot  to understand  the behaviour and development of humans. Named Noby, short for “nine-month-old baby”, it has 600 sensors across its body to feel touch, cameras and microphones fitted into its head for vision and hearing, and is hooked up to a powerful computer. Noby is one of the humanoids created under a broader project headed by Minoru Asada, robotics engineering professor at Osaka University.

June 23: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced that it will make a detailed study on the green house gases and forest fire for which the fund comes from Union Ministry of Environment and Forests. This will be the first effort from the ISRO to conduct a study like this and if this comes successful then India will equal the US in these types of studies. Former ISRO chief Dr K Kasturirangan said that this is under designing stage and will be implemented in two to three years.

June 24: Scientists have sequenced the genome of the body louse (Pediculus humanus humanus). The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed the louse had the smallest genome of any insect. The body louse is an important vector for human diseases, including epidemic typhus, relapsing fever, and trench fever. In turn a tiny microbe, the bacterium Candidatus riesia pediculicola, lives inside it and produces Vitamin B5, an essential nutrient for its host's survival.

June 25: A bill, the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2010 (ART Act),drafted by the Indian Council of Medical Research is before the Indian parliament. The Bill has been scanned by the law ministry and their suggestions have been taken into account. Assisted Reproductive Technology is defined as all techniques that attempt to enable a pregnancy by handling or manipulating the sperm or the egg outside the human body and transferring the embryo into the reproductive tract.

June 26: Two teams of scientists in the US have taken major strides in developing lung tissue that could be used for future transplants or testing the effects of new drugs. In one study, a team at Yale University in Connecticut implanted engineered lung tissue into rats.  In another, a team at Harvard University in Massachusetts developed a tiny lung device from human tissue and synthetic materials. Both studies, published in the latest issue of  the journal Science.

June 27: India has joined the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) project, the next generation astronomical observatory that will be located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The observatory is scheduled to begin operations in 2018. The proposal to join the TMT project was initiated by three Indian institutes engaged in astronomy: the IUCAA, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore, and the Aryabhata Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital.

June 28: Taking up the cause of endangered Great Indian Bustard, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh asked Gujarat government to conserve one of the last remaining habitats of the golden birds - the Adbassa grassland in Kutch. IUCN has warned that the Great Indian Bustard (Ardeotis nigriceps) could become extinct within a decade. Listed in Appendix-I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, international trade and killing of the bird is prohibited.

June 29: Australian researchers calculate that Southern Ocean sperm whales release about 50 tonnes of iron every year. This stimulates the growth of tiny marine plants - phytoplankton - which absorb CO2 during photosynthesis. The process results in the absorption of about 40,000 tonnes of carbon - more than twice as much as the whales release by breathing, the study says. The researchers note in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B that the process also provides more food for the whales, estimated to number about 12,000.

June 30: The X Prize Foundation wants to make fixing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill a multimillion dollar competition. It has done the same for space, fuel efficient cars and gene-mapping.They've already received 35,000 unsolicited ideas for fixing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. X Prizes are usually $10 million or more. The X Prize Foundation is a non-profit prize institute that designs and manages public competitions intended to encourage technological development that could benefit mankind.