Jantar Mantar -the newly declared UNESCO World Heritage Site
August 2: India's largest desalination plant in Chennai on Saturday. The facility will draw water from the Bay of Bengal, process it using the reverse osmosis technology and supply purified water to the city. The Rs 600-crore plant at Minjur, around 35 km north of here, is the state's first seawater desalination plant. I is a joint venture between IVRCL Infrastructures and Project Ltd and Befessa of Spain. The facility will supply water at a cost of Rs 48.74 per 1,000 litres for the first 25 years.
August 3: Jaipur’s famed astronomical observatory, Jantar Mantar was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the UNESCO world heritage committee meeting in Brazil on Saturday. The observatory will be India’s 28th world heritage site and Rajasthan’s second. Jantar Mantar was built by Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur and completed around 1730 as an astronomical observatory. UNESCO observed it as an expression of Indian astronomical skills and cosmological concepts. Website: http://www.jantarmantar.org/
August 4: The Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, home to numerous U.S. nuclear tests in the 1940′s and ’50′s, has been designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO. The Bikini Atoll wes evacuated in 1946 while the United States carried out nuclear weapons tests. Islanders in the region were touched by fallout from the tests and the ground of Bikini was tainted by radiation, causing illnesses among its inhabitants and leading to US compensation in the 1990s.
August 5: Since Sunday, four eruptions, dubbed Coronal Mass Ejections are coming from Sun which are on a crash course for Earth. Scientists there said they were part of the sun awakening from Solar Minimum--a time where little activity and few sunspots are witnessed on the sun--and moving toward Solar Maximum, a period of high activity and more sun spots. The period of time between Solar Minimum and Solar Maximum is usually 11 years. The last Solar Maximum occurred in 2001.
August 6: The fourth update of the Census of Marine Life has been released to coincide with the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Valencia, Spain. The census, which was started in 2000, involves over 2000 scientists from 82 nations. It is the worlds first ever marine census documenting over 230,000 known species and filling in the gaps, which have now seen over 95% of the Earths oceans unexplored. The data collected is being published through the open access journal PloS ONE: http://www.plosone.org/
August 7: The fossilised remains of a small land-dwelling crocodile that jumped for prey like an agile cat, has been found in Tanzania. It was discovered by an Australian team at James Cook University. Named Pakasuchus kapilimai (from Paka, which is in Kiswahili language means 'cat'), it adds to the collection of interesting Cretaceous crocodiles. The animal is the most mammal-like croc to have been found. It is described today in the journal Nature.
August 8: Police began investigation into the dumping of bags of insecticides and pesticides into the Neduvode river at Alakkode in Kerala that caused health problems to the people. The pollution of the river was revealed when some local people who went to swim in the river on Monday developed exhaustion and itching. It was then found that the pollution was caused by the large quantities of insecticides and pesticides dumped into the river from a nearby bridge.
August 9: Asus has launched a new Bamboo Collection notebook -- U43Jc. The laptop is a follow-up to the first Bamboo Series launched in 2008. Asus calims that the new U Series Bamboo Collection carries the message: protecting nature is a joint effort that unites us all, but it does not have to exclude innovative design, memorable style and powerful computing potential. The natural bamboo exteriors are juxtaposed with brushed aluminum interior.
August 10: The oil leak from the sinking cargo vessel MSC Chitra after it collided with MV Khalijia-III outside the Mumbai harbour has been plugged with the Indian Coast Guard. But nearly 800 tonnes of oil is already believed to have leaked out into the Arabian Sea. MSC Chitra was also carrying 1219 containers out of which 31 had hazardous chemicals like pesticides. The oil spill may affect about 200 species of marine life. Mangroves of Navi Mumbai are also in danger.
August 11: India is set to launch its own satellite-based navigation system - GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation or GAGAN. In the next five years the Indian airspace will get more crowded and the chances of accidents may increase. To reduce the chances of future air disasters, India has endeavoured on the GAGAN project for traffic and directional guidance from outer space. When ISRO's satellites are in orbit, India will join an elite club that includes USA, Russia and European Union, who run their own GPS.
August 12: The greatest mystery in mountain climbing involving the death of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine who might have climbed Mount Everest in 1924, nearly 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the world's highest summit, has been solved. Kent Moore and John Semple of University of Toronto and Indian researcher Dev Raj Sikka came to the conclusion that an extreme plunge in barometric pressure, a blinding blizzard and sudden oxygen deprivation were the key factors in the pair's death.
August 13: The human brain on a microchip is almost ready. The neuro-chip, which has been developed by medicine scientists at the University of Calgary, will network brain cells and thus record brain cell activity at a resolution never achieved before. The neuro-chip will help future understanding of how brain cells work and permit drug discoveries for a variety of neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. The new technology has been published online in the journal, Biomedical Microdevices.
August 14: Researchers reported dozens of cases of British, Indian and Pakistani patients who contracted infections caused by bacteria harbouring an enzyme called NewDelhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The article was co-authored by Karthikeyan Kumarasamy (and Timothy Walsh) while he was working at Cardiff University. However the strain was initially characterised at the lab in Chennai.
August 15: Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan of the University of Texas at Austin and Nicola Cabibbo of the University of Rome and have won the 2010 Dirac medal for their "fundamental contributions to the understanding of weak interactions and other aspects of theoretical physics". Cabbibo and Sudarshan will each receive a $5000 prize from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. The Dirac medal is awarded to scientists who have not yet won a Nobel prize.
August 16: Scientists using Google Maps have discovered a new crater like structure in the Bayuda Desert of Sudan. If confirmed, it will be the second such discovery using the popular online mapping tool and could spawn a new generation of home-based amateur crater hunters. Assistant Professor Amelia Sparavigna from the Politecnico di Torino in Italy has detailed her discovery on the pre-press website arXiv.org. She says she got the idea from Italian researcher Vincenzo de Micheles who reported it in the journal Science in 2008.
August 17: Judge Jeffrey of the federal court in San Francisco has ordered a ban on growing genetically modified beets in the United States until the Department of Agriculture fully investigates their environmental impact. It bars new cultivation of the genetically modified beets, which represent 90 percent of the US crop.
Experts think the evaluation that was requested will take more than two years. Some fear that could lead to shortages, and growers warn there may not be enough of the traditional unmodified seed.
August 18: Geophysicist Dietmar Muller from University of Sydney has said that the churning of the Earth’s molten interior may have played a vital role in sea level change over the past two to 20 million years. The levels vary because of natural processes on Earth on timescales from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. In the past they have been more than 120 metres higher than present day levels. The findings were published in the journal Science.
August 19: India Monday launched the second phase of pan-Africa e-network, adding 12 more countries to the New Delhi-aided long distance education and tele-medicine programme. A brainchild of India's former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the e-network seeks to bridge the digital divide across the 53-nation African continent and seeks to provide tele-medicine and tele-education through a fibre-optic network. The project also won the prestigious Hermes Prize recently for innovation in the field of sustainable development.
August 20: Tamil Nadu banned use of old-style, energy intensive incandescent bulbs in offices across the state and ordered the use of compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) to save power. According to the order, the ban was applicable to state government undertakings, government boards, and organisations getting governmental assistance. Comparing the energy consumption of four crore 60 watts incandescent bulbs and 14 watts CFL for an hour, the government said the use of CFL results in a whopping saving of 1,840 MW.
August 21: A spot on Mars called Nili Fossae that is rich in clay mineral-rich rocks could be a prime spot to search for Martian life that may have existed 4 billion years ago, a new study suggests. In the study, scientists used an instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study clay-carbonate rocks on the Martian surface leftover from ancient red planet era known as the Noachian period. The study's findings will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
August 22: Scientists returning from a 30-day research expedition to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands found what they believe are 10 new species of coral. Researchers returned from the remote string of atolls, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. More than half were found at deep water coral reefs more than 150 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Scientists plan to analyze the specimens they gathered to verify they're species that haven't been identified before.
August 23: The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry's seed bank is in danger, because of court-approved plans to rip up its vast fields of genetically diverse plants and build fancy homes on the prime real estate they occupy near St. Petersburg. International organizations dedicated to agricultural diversity have appealed directly to President Dmitry Medvedev to save the Pavlovsk Agricultural Station, which they say could be crucial for sustaining fruit crops around the world.
August 24: Dr. Kunio Komiyama, a dentistry professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, has invented a toothbrush that will not need toothpaste, but will clean teeth with solar power. He designed the first model 15 years ago and has been perfecting it since. The Soladey-J3X houses a solar panel at the base of the brush that transmits electrons and when the electrons reach the head, they react with acid in the mouth, creating a chemical reaction that breaks down plaque cells and kills other bacteria in the mouth.
August 25: Indian scientists have successfully produced a calf through cloning, the world's third. The calf was born on on August 22 and is doing fine. Scientists at the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, Haryana had cloned the world's first buffalo calf in February 2009 which stayed alive for five days. A second calf was cloned in June last year, which has survived. The latest calf has been named Garima II. The new and advanced "Hand-guided Cloning Technique" was used for cloning.
August 26: A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf following the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
August 27: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was loaded onto a massive U.S. Air Force plane for the final leg of its journey on Earth before it catches the last scheduled shuttle flight into space. It took about 15 years to build and was part-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It will be one of two payloads carried to the space station on Endeavour STS-134, NASA's last shuttle mission scheduled for Feb. 26, 2011. The AMS detector will complement CERN's Large Hadron Collider in its search for Anti-matter.
August 28: Observations from the Kepler space observatory confirmed the smallest, most Earth-sized world yet seen has been discovered around a star like our sun, NASA announced. Astronomers have not yet confirmed the potential Earth-like planet, but early analysis suggests it has a radius just 1.5 times that of Earth. The Earth's radius is about 6,378 km. The Earth-sized world, if confirmed, would be so close to its star that it would look nothing like Earth. It would be hot and likely not habitable.
August 29: Scientists at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the John Innes Centre, have sequenced the entire wheat genome and will make the DNA data available to crop breeders to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding. Wheat is a relative latecomer to the world of DNA mapping. Other crops have had their genetic codes unscrambled within the past few years — rice in 2005, corn in 2009, and soybeans earlier this year.
August 30: Antibiotic compounds found in the skin secretions of some species of frogs could hold the key to treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to researchers from United Arab Emirates University, in Al-Ain. Frog skins are moist and contain secretions of antimicrobial peptides that kill bacteria and other micro-organisms, helping the animals to fight off pathogens. Around 200 antibiotic compounds had been identified in frog skin secretions, and some could soon be developed into new antibiotics.
August 31: The complete genome of Apple (Malus domestica) has been sequenced. A consortium of 86 scientists from 20 institutions took two years to unravel the code - the largest plant genome uncovered to date. The researchers were also able to trace the apple's ancestry, and found the domestic fruit's wild ancestor Malus sieversii originally grew mountains of southern Kazakhstan. There are more than 7,500 varieties of Apple known today. The report is published in the journal Nature Genetics.
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