SCIENCE OF OCTOBER 2010



COMMON WEALTH! Girl child employed for venue constructing at the  11494 Crore Common Wealth Games in New Delhi.
Photo Courtesy: http://www.modernmom.com/



October 1: Astronomers have discovered an another planet orbiting a red-dwarf star labeled Gliese 581, located 20 light years from Earth in the constellation Libra, that might have liquid water on its surface.If they are actual, this would be the first added planet found exterior our solar system that would be able of sustaining life. Gliese 581g does not rotate on its axis like Earth, so partial the additional planet is always lack of light and half is always light, but water could exist on the border between the two halves.

October 2: The Ig Nobels, designed to honour achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think, are presented in the run up to the real awards next week. They are given out at a Harvard University ceremony by the science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable Research. The Zoological Society of London scooped the Engineering Prize for "perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote control helicopter".

October 3: To understand the genetic makeup of the Culex mosquito that are involved in the transmission of West Nile virus an international team of scientists, led by geneticists at the University of California, Riverside, has sequenced the genome of Culex quinquefasciatus, a representative of the Culex genus of mosquitoes. A close study of the genome, the researchers say, could give scientists the clues they need to target specific Culex genes that are involved in the transmission of other diseases spread by the Culex group of mosquitoes.

October 4: A Chinese rocket carrying a probe destined for the Moon has blasted into space. A Long March 3C rocket with the Chang'e-2 probe took off from Xichang launch centre at about 1100 GMT. The rocket will shoot the craft into the trans-lunar orbit, after which the satellite is expected to reach the Moon in about five days. Chang'e-2 will be used to test key technologies and collect data for future landings. It is China's second lunar probe - the first was launched in 2007.

October 5: The Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for 2010 has been awarded to the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, a procedure that has helped in the conception and birth of 4 million people around the world since the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown in 1978. IVF is also at the centre of a technique, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), that screens fertilised embryos for genetic conditions such as Cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease.

October 6: Graphene is the strongest and thinnest known material in existence, and its discovery six years ago has won University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. It's just one atom thick but it's more than 100 times stronger than steel. Nearly transparent, graphene is a highly heat-resistant conductor of electricity that has potential for use in transportation, electronics, and computers.

October 7: The 2010 Nobel prize for Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who developed an efficient way to create chains of carbon atoms, a critical tool for the synthesis of complex molecules such as drugs and coatings for electronic components. Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University, and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Japan came up with efficient ways to link carbon atoms together.

October 8: The first of India's six C-130J Super Hercules airlifters, considered the world's most advanced transport aircraft, has completed its maiden flight. Purchased from the US in a $1 billion deal, C-130J-30s would provide the Indian Army and Indian Air Force 'new special operations capabilities using the world's most advanced airlifter'. It is a four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft, is a comprehensive update of the venerable Lockheed C-130 Hercules, with new engines, flight deck, and other systems.

October 9: Researchers at Britain's Kew Botanical Gardens say the plant, Paris japonica, has the largest genome yet recorded, putting it at high risk of extinction. With 152.23 picograms (pg) of DNA, the Paris japonica has around 15% more than the previous record holder, the marbled lungfish or Protopterus aethiopicus, with 132.83 pg. It is also more than 50 times bigger than the human genome, which is 3.0 picograms. A picogram is one trillionth of a gram.

October 10: Results of the first ever Census of Marine Life were unveiled Monday, revealing more than one million species in the oceans, with at least three-quarters of them yet to be discovered. The 650-million-dollar (470-million-euro) international study discovered more than 6,000 potentially new species, and found some species considered rare were actually common. The findings are partially available on the www.iobis.org website.

October 11: The long lost lunar rover Lunokhod 1, has been rediscovered by astronomers using laser pulses, thirty-six years after it disappeared. A team led by Associate Professor Tom Murphy at the University of California, San Diego worked out its position to within a few centimetres using data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).Their paper, which has been submitted to the journal Icarus, and appearing on the pre-press website ArXiv.org.

October 12: Malaysia could be the first country in Asia to use genetically modified mosquitoes to battle a rise in dengue fever, government authorities said Monday.The program calls for genetically engineered male mosquitoes to be released into the wild that would mate with females and produce offspring that live shorter lives, thus curbing the population.Dengue is transmitted to humans by the Aedes aegypti or more rarely the Aedes albopictus mosquito.

October 13: A speckled, cat-sized mammal has been identified in the nick of time, as its discoverers say the carnivore is one of the most threatened in the world. Known as Durrell's vontsira, or Salanoia durrelli, the animal hides out in the Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar. It weighs just over a pound (just over 0.5 kilograms) and belongs to a family of carnivores known only from Madagascar. Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands are known as a biodiversity hotspot because of their great richness in species.

October 14: The Experts' Committee set up by the Union environment ministry to study the impact of communication towers on birds and bees has decided to elicit views of researchers who have already done studies on the problem in India and abroad. The existing studies on the issue included that of  Prof.Sainudeen Pattazhy, who argued that electromagnetic waves emitted by towers hampered navigational skills of worker bees, leading to a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Syndrome (CCS), reported worldover.

October 15: While the global community proposed a ban on the use of endosulfan globally at the Stockholm Convention of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee in Geneva, India opposed the move, saying there was not enough evidence to prove the health and environmental impacts of the insecticide. India being the largest producer and user of endosulfan in the world has now called for a technical review of its impacts.

October 16: Switzerland has completed a mammoth engineering project with the 60-year construction of the world’s longest tunnel, bringing to an end a US$10 billion infrastructure investment. The 57 kilometre, or 34 mile, tunnel which links Switzerland’s Zurich to Italy’s Milan under the Alps,though officially completed will be operational in 2017 only. The Seoul Metropolitan Subway's Line 5 is the longest rapid-transit line in the world right now and one of the longest tunnels.

October 17: The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Rustom1 - developed by Aeronautical Development Establishment - was successfully test flown from the Taneja Aerospace and Aviation airfield in Hosur. According to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the aircraft flew for 12 minutes and landed successfully meeting all its objectives. DRDO said that this development is the forerunner to the medium altitude long endurance UAV project RustomH to be taken up by the lab shortly. Last year, the first flight of technology demonstrator RustomI did not meet its objectives.

October 18: An international conference aimed at preserving the planet's diversity of plants and animals in the face of pollution and habitat loss begins Monday in Japan, facing some of the same divisions between rich and poor nations that have stalled U.N. climate talks. At stake is the fate of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement signed amid great hope and fanfare in the early 1990s, the status of which has fizzled steadily ever since. Over the next 11 days, 193 national delegations will discuss on this.

October 19: India today launched the National Green Tribunal thus becoming the third nation in the world to have special courts for environmental issues. Former Supreme Court judge Lokeshwar Singh Panta assumed charge as the Chairperson of the tribunal which will have, to begin with, four regional benches that would function in the circuit mode. The tribunal has been established by the National Green Tribunal Act passed by Parliament earlier this year. Appeals against the Tribunal can be moved in the Supreme Court.

October 20: A pale green comet will make a close pass by the Earth, one of the closest approaches of any comet in the past century and giving sky-watchers a good view of the cosmic body. Comet Hartley 2, officially designated 103P/Hartley, is a small periodic comet with an orbital period of 6.46 years,is on a course to make its closest pass by Earth at a mere 11 million miles (17.7 million kms). It was discovered by Malcolm Hartley in 1986 at the Schmidt Telescope Unit in Siding Spring, Australia.

October 21: Pitching for declaring Western Ghats as the world heritage site, the state government of Kerala presented its case before an evaluation team of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN team will meet the state forest officials, NGOs and experts dealing with conservation issues in the city on Wednesday before it holds field visits. However, in Karnataka locals gheraoed two UNESCO officials who were on an inspection tour of Western Ghats on Tuesday.

October 22: Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago. Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far. The study is published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

October 23: A major neutrino observatory set to be built in India cleared a major hurdle this week, when the Ministry of Environment and Forests formally approved the project. The $250 million underground laboratory, called the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), will be built in the Bodi West Hills Reserved Forest in the state of Tamil Nadu. INO will be made of 50,000 tonnes of magnetised iron, dwarfing the 12,500-tonne magnet in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

October 24: Indian students bagged two golds and one silver medal at the the 15th International Astronomy Olympiad (IAO) held in Sudak, Crimea, Ukraine. The team was lead by Dr Manojendu Choudhury, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai and Hemant Mone, Aakash Mitra Mandal, Kalyan from Maharashtra's Thane district. A total of 19 teams from 17 countries participated in the Olympiad including China, Korea, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Indonesia and Thailand.

October 25: Scientists and officials of the Sunderban Tiger Reserve are investigating whether the Sunderban tiger is a different sub-species compared to those found in the sub-continent. The Sunderban tiger exhibits certain distinctive morphological adaptations that make it particularly suited to the mangrove habitat of the Sunderban islands. For this purpose, the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of the tigers will have to be studied,” said Y. Jhalla, an expert at the Wildlife Institute of India.

October 26: The scientists from Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute, Palode, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala  has identified the Bamboo species with the largest leaf, Ochlandra ebrachteata, measuring 63.1 cm in length and 14.5 cm in breadth. Though the largest in the Old World, it is  the species with the sixth largest leaf among the world bamboos. The bamboo with the largest leaf is Neurolepis elata which is distributed in the Ecuador in the Paramo forest with leaf blades up to 5 m long and 30 cm wide.

October 27: Together with Indian and US colleagues, researchers from the University of Bonn have one of the largest amber finds ever worldwide from Nort-Western India. The insects trapped in the fossil resin cast a new light on the history of the sub-continent; it seems that it did not drift over the Earth’s oceans in isolation for as long as has been assumed so far. In the journal PNAS, the researchers are reporting on the 50 million year-old treasure that has only partially been uncovered so far.

October 28: The number of people killed in a double natural disaster in Indonesia is rising, after a volcano erupted and a tsunami smashed into several islands. Some 182 people are known to have died so far and there are fears the toll could rise much further. Mount Merapi, one of the country's most active volcanoes, spewed out ash, lava, and gas on the main island of Java, killing at least 28 people. Most were burned to death by bursts of hot air.

October 29: Basab Chaudhuri of the University of Calcutta and colleagues have shown that the membrane that lines an eggshell can absorb almost seven times its own weight of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide thus trapped could be stored until energy-effective methods of using the gas could be found. The study has been published in the International Journal of Global Warming.  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ind/ijgw/2010/00000002/00000003/art00005

October 30: Scientists say they've found the first complete skeleton of a dinosaur that is an ancestor to the sauropod, the largest creature ever to walk the planet. The 30-foot-long skeleton, complete with skull, may help reveal the story of how the 120-foot-long, giant-necked sauropods evolved and became solely plant eaters. The bones were found in southern China and the findings will be presented at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver.

October 31: The UN biodiversity meeting in Japan has agreed a 10-year plan aimed at preserving nature. Targets for protecting areas of land and sea were weaker than conservation scientists wanted, as was the overall target for slowing biodiversity loss. The meeting settled on targets of protecting 17% of the world's land surface, and 10% of the oceans, by 2020. About 13% of the land is already protected - while the existing target for oceans is already 10%. Link: http://www.cbd.int/cop10/