BOOK OF DECEMBER

                                                                           
Title         : Of Thee I Sing:
             A Letter to My Daughters
Author     : Barack Obama
Publisher : Knopf Books
Pages       : 40
Price        : $26
ISBN        : 978-0375835278

On sale for about a week, “Of Thee I Sing,” President Obama’s children’s picture book, an ode to 13 inspirational Americans written as a letter to his daughters, Malia and Sasha, is already on the best-seller lists in the world.

"Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters" is a tribute to 13 groundbreaking Americans, from the first president, George Washington, to baseball great Jackie Robinson to artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It will be released Nov. 16 by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, which will officially announce the new work Tuesday. Knopf declined to identify the other 10 subjects.

Obama is not the first president to write for young people. Jimmy Carter's "The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer" was published in 1995, more than a decade after he left office. More in line with Obama's effort, Theodore Roosevelt collaborated with Henry Cabot Lodge on "Hero Tales from American History," released in 1895, before Roosevelt was president.

Obama's book is illustrated by Loren Long, whose many credits include Watty Piper's classic "The Little Engine That Could," Randall de Seve's "Toy Boat" and Madonna's "Mr. Peabody's Apples." Long wrote and illustrated the children's stories "Otis" and "Drummer Boy." His cover design for "Of Thee I Sing" is a sunny impression of presidential daughters Sasha and Malia Obama walking their dog, Bo, along a grassy field.

Obama's 40-page book will have a first printing of 500,000 copies and a list price of $17.99. Both of Obama's previous works, the memoir "Dreams From My Father" and the policy book "The Audacity of Hope," are million sellers published by Crown, a division of Random House Inc.

While Mr. Obama may be the first sitting president to publish a children’s book, other White House occupants have made their own contributions to children’s literature.Long before she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote “Dear Socks, Dear Buddy,” a compilation of letters to the first pets of the Clinton administration.

While children’s books are generally safe territory, politically speaking, Mr. Obama attracted criticism from the right for his inclusion of Sitting Bull as one of 13 “groundbreaking Americans” honored in the book. A headline on Fox Nation, a Fox News online conservative forum, read, “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General.”

Doug Wead, a former Bush family adviser and the author of “All the Presidents’ Children: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America’s First Families,” said in an e-mail that he wondered how Mr. Obama had managed to find time to write the book.

As for a possible motivation Mr. Obama might have had for writing it, Mr. Wead suggested, “He is wanting to build the dreams of young ladies.”

Review Text Courtesy: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com, http://abcnews.go.com
Link: http://my.barackobama.com

EVENT OF THE MONTH: DECEMBER 2010

UN Climate Change Conference in Mexico

(29 November to 10 December 2010)

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010. It encompasses the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA. But some who attended the meetings, sponsored by the United Nations, expressed muted hope that small steps could be made on a decades-long journey to reduce the planetary threat of rising global temperatures.

The United States entered the talks in a weak position because of a lack of action on domestic climate and energy legislation and continuing disputes with China and other major developing nations over verification of emissions reductions. The United Nations negotiating process itself is on the line, with many saying that the 190-nation talks cannot survive another debacle like that at Copenhagen last December.

This year’s talks come at a low point for global climate diplomacy. Last year, more than 100 heads of state gathered with hopes of fashioning a binding treaty to address global warming. A year later, midlevel envoys are trickling into a Mexican resort with hopes, at best, of averting disaster.

Last year, President Obama had large majorities in Congress and hopes of passing a comprehensive climate and energy bill. Next year, he faces a new Congress much more dubious about the reality of climate change and considerably more hostile to international efforts to deal with it. Still, leaders expressed belief that the United Nations remained the best, if not the only, place to address a problem that will require a global solution.

“We’re not going to solve the whole problem this year, but we can lock in bigger and better agreements every year,” said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who took over this year as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that convenes the talks. “Multilateral negotiations such as this one involve not just solving an environmental problem but actually involve the transformation of economic patterns and the economic structure we have lived with for decades.”

The annual climate change conference combines the technical complexity of arms control negotiations with the leaden pace of global trade talks. It attracts thousands of journalists, environmental campaigners and corporate executives, each looking for a story or selling a product. The actual negotiations tend to take place behind closed doors, where progress is measured in verb tenses and punctuation changes. And nothing of significance seems to happen until the 11th hour of the final day.

This year’s conference opened with the same set of issues that the participants left on the table when the meeting in Copenhagen broke up a year ago and the same flawed document — the Copenhagen Accord — before them. At the end of the chaotic talks in Copenhagen, participants failed to adopt the accord, a nonbinding statement of good intentions, but only “took note” of the three-page document. About half the participating countries have since agreed to “associate” themselves with the accord.

But even if all the promised emissions reductions in the accord were achieved, the world would still fall short of the action needed to meet the goal of keeping global average temperatures within two degrees Celsius of preindustrial times. Despite a year of preliminary meetings, delegates remain far apart on the two biggest questions: how much and how quickly nations will reduce their emissions of climate-altering gases and what sort of international monitoring can be established to ensure that countries are meeting their targets. No one expects that the gaps on those issues will be significantly closed over the next two weeks in Cancún.

There has, however, been some progress on the other four major points of discussion at the talks. Those involve slowing the destruction of forests, sharing technology to produce energy in less-destructive ways, helping poorer countries adapt to the inevitable changes to the climate and building a multibillion-dollar fund to further these goals. The goal at Cancún, according to negotiators and observers, would be a “balanced package” of progress on each of those issues and an agreement by the wealthier countries to make good on their promise to come up with $30 billion in short-term financing to help developing nations adjust to global climate disruption.

Jonathan Pershing, the deputy United States climate envoy, said Monday in Cancún that while preliminary talks this year had been hung up by disputes over substance and procedure, “We are optimistic we can work through many, if not all of these.” He also said that the United States and China had made progress on some issues dividing them and that the United States was prepared to contribute $1.7 billion to the short-term adaptation fund, most of it new money appropriated by Congress.

What remains really difficult, and what most likely will not be resolved at Cancún, is the fate of the 13-year-old Kyoto Protocol, the global warming agreement largely set to expire at the end of 2012. The protocol — never accepted by the United States — sets different requirements for developed and developing countries. It has been used as a cudgel by large developing countries like China, India and Brazil to demand more emissions reductions by the United States and other advanced economies as a price for their own participation in any global climate regime.

China has passed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse pollutants and has voluntarily taken large strides toward slowing the growth of its emissions. But it refuses to be bound to an international agreement that does not require larger, verifiable reductions from the United States and other wealthy countries. The United States is demanding that the protocol’s distinctions among countries be scrapped and that all nations move forward together to attack the problem of global climate change. Until that fundamental dispute is resolved, the prospects for progress are slim.

“Success here will mean finally discarding Kyoto and beginning the process of requiring major developing countries to cut emissions along with developed countries,” said Paul W. Bledsoe of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, who is in Cancún and has followed climate deliberations for years. “Both substantive and political progress demand that the Kyoto stalking horse be let loose.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/
Link   : http://unfccc.int/2860.php

SPECIES OF THE MONTH: DECEMBER

 Paris japonica : Plant with the Longest Genome

                                                        
Kingdom       : Plantae

Division        : Angiosperms
Sub-Division : Monocots
Order            : Liliales
Family          : Melanthiaceae
Genus           : Paris
Species         : Paris japonica

Scientists at Kew’s Jodrell Laboratory have discovered that Paris japonica, a striking rare native plant of Japan, has the largest genome of them all – bigger than the human genome and even larger than the previous record holder - the marbled lungfish. The results are published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.

The diversity of genome sizes (the amount of DNA) in plants and animals has fascinated - but at the same time puzzled - scientists since this variation was first detected in the early 20th century. How and why such diversity evolved are important unanswered questions, as we know that this phenomenon has biological and ecological consequences affecting the distribution and persistence of biodiversity.

There is a staggering diversity of genome sizes. The smallest genome so far reported (0.0023 picogram (pg) of DNA) is found in a parasite (Encephalitozoon intestinalis) of humans and other mammals. The human genome, at 3.0 pg, is 1,300 times larger than this, but this pales into insignificance compared to those found in some animals and plants.

Among animals, some amphibians have enormous genomes, but the largest recorded so far is that of the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus) with 132.83 pg(3) . Among plants, the record holder for 34 years was a species of fritillary (Fritillaria assyriaca). However earlier this year a Dutch group knocked the fritillary off the top spot when they found that a natural hybrid of trillium (Trillium × hagae), related to herb paris, had a genome just 4% larger than the fritillary (132.50 pg).

This was widely thought to be approaching the maximum size that a genome could reach, until this summer when a team of Kew scientists discovered that the genome of another close relative of herb paris, Paris japonica from Japan, is a staggering 15% bigger than the genome of either the trillium or the fish at a whopping 152.23 pg.

Ilia Leitch, Research Scientist in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew says “We were astounded when we discovered that this small stunning plant had such a large genome — it’s so large that when stretched out it would be taller than Big Ben.

“Some people may wonder what the consequences are of such a large genome and whether it really matters if one organism has more DNA than another. The answer to this is a resounding “yes, it does”, and the consequences operate at all levels from the cell up to the whole organism and beyond. In plants, research has demonstrated that those with large genomes are at greater risk of extinction, are less adapted to living in polluted soils and are less able to tolerate extreme environmental conditions – all highly relevant in today’s changing world.”

Another example of the significance and importance of genome size in both animals and plants is the fact that the more DNA there is in a genome, the longer it takes for a cell to copy all its DNA and divide. The knock-on effect of this is that it can take longer for an organism with a larger genome to complete its life cycle than one with a small genome. It is no coincidence that many plants living in deserts which must grow quickly after it rains have small genomes enabling them to grow rapidly. In contrast, species with large genomes grow much more slowly and are excluded from such habitats.

Genome size is also positively correlated with nuclear size (the more DNA you have the more space you need for it), and, in many cases, also with cell size which can have knock-on consequences at the whole organism level.

Link: http://www.kew.org/news/kew-scientists-discover-largest-genome.htm

SCIENCE OF DECEMBER 2010

UN/S "peacekeepers" torturing a Somali child over fire.

In 2009, Wikileaks released over 600 United Nations investigative reports.

 Now on US documents, facing "Criminal Offence" by Pentagon.

December 1: India’s first science expedition has reached the South Pole, with five scientists, two vehicle mechanics, and a doctor driving 10 days across 2,350km of icy and crevassed terrain where temperatures at one point dropped to minus 64°C. The team had set out on November 13 from Maitri, India’s scientific outpost in Antarctica, riding on Arctic trucks that have specialised spiked tyres and high clearance to negotiate the rugged and crevasse-infested terrain.

December 2: Scientists have discovered an arsenic eating bacterium, which opens up new areas of exploration for extraterrestrial life.A report published today in the journal Science claims it's the first microorganism found that can sustain life using a 'toxic' chemical. The researchers of the US Geological Survey, isolated a bacterium strain called GFAJ-1, a member of the Halomonadaceae family of Proteobacteria which uses arsenic instead of Phosphorus.

December 3: A Chinese passenger train hit a record speed of 302 miles per hour (486 kilometers per hour) during a test run of a yet-to-be opened link between Beijing and Shanghai. A specially modified French TGV train reached 357.2 mph (574.8 kph) during a 2007 test, while a Japanese magnetically levitated train sped to 361 mph (581 kph) in 2003. China already has the world's longest high-speed rail network, and it plans to cover 8,125 miles (13,000 kilometers) by 2012 and 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) by 2020.

December 4: Neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen, who designed the tactical nuclear weapon intended to kill people but do minimal damage to structures, has died. Cohen worked for the RAND Corporation and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory when he developed the small neutron bomb in 1958, which used tiny particles that could zip through tanks, walls or buildings with minimal damage but kill humans, usually by attacking their central nervous system. It also minimized long-term nuclear contamination.

December 5: India will soon phase out the Cirus research reactor, the 40-MW power unit supplied by Canada in the mid-50s with heavy water from the US to the state-run Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) at Trombay near Mumbai. Plutonium from Cirus (Canada India Research US) was used in India's first nuclear test at Pokharan in Rajasthan May 18, 1974. The country's largest indigenous nuclear reactor, Dhruva, also located at BARC, generates weapons-grade plutonium-bearing spent fuel.

December 6: Haryana state would host the world's first Global Centre for Nuclear Energy partnership. The global centre would be at village Kheri Jassaur, near Bahadurgarh, in district Jhajjar. The centre would be set up with the assistance of France, Russia and United States for research and development of secure and proliferation resistant reactor systems. The Centre would also host short-term training courses for international nuclear experts in the field of nuclear security.

December 7: United Nations Resident Co-ordinator and UNDP resident representative Patrice Coeur-Bizot handed over certificates to the Forest Department for their achievements in planting trees under various schemes. The acknowledgement comes as part of the ‘One Billion Tree Campaign’ of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).The UNEP acknowledged the efforts of the Forest Department in providing strong support to such programmes aimed at combating the ill-effects of global warming.

December 8: A brand-new bacterial species has been found aboard the RMS Titanic, 3.8 km below the ocean surface, which is contributing to its deterioration. The new bacterium has been named Halomonas titanicae by the scientists from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada and the University of Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain. The researchers, who report their findings in the latest issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology published on 8 December.

December 9: Akatsuki, the Japanese probe to Venus failed to reach orbit and was captured by the sun's gravitational pull in a setback to Japan's shoestring space program, which will have to wait another six years to try again. The probe would have been the first that Japan had put in orbit around another planet. Japan launched a failed mission to Mars in 1998 that was plagued by technical glitches and finally abandoned in 2003. Akatsuki was designed to monitor volcanic activity on Venus.

December 10: Scientists may need to rewrite the text books following the discovery of a carbon-rich exoplanet. Reporting in the journal Nature, Dr Nikku Madhusudhan and colleagues from Princeton University, say the planet WASP-12B has an atmosphere with equal parts carbon and oxygen. Madhusudhan says the planet's atmosphere is abundant in carbon monoxide, and has considerably more methane and less water than would be expected for a planet of this temperature in our solar system.

December 11: A team of researchers in the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) has created the tiniest battery in the world. The rechargeable, lithium-based battery is developed by a team led by researcher Jianyu Huang. The discovery has paved way for the development of smaller and more efficient batteries in future. The battery comprises of a three millimeters long lithium cobalt cathode, a single tin oxide nanowire anode and an ionic liquid electrolyte.

December 12: Scientists at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas, have used stem cell technology to create mice from two fathers, an advance that they say could help preserve endangered species and even help same-sex couples have their own genetic children one day. According to the study published Wednesday in the journal Biology of Reproduction, scientists were able to manipulate cells from a male (XY) mouse fetus to produce an induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell line.

December 13: The UN conference on Climate in Mexico has reached an agreement. The agreement comprises a "Green Climate Fund," reaffirms a goal of raising $100bn (£63bn) in aid by 2020 and has measures to protect tropical forests and new ways to share new clean energy technologies. The Mexico deal does not include a commitment to extend Kyoto beyond 2012. Kyoto obliges almost 40 developed nations to cut emissions until 2012. Website: http://unfccc.int/2860.php

December 14: Beginning next year, Ukraine plans to open up the sealed zone around the Chernobyl reactor to visitors who wish to learn more about the of the world's worst nuclear disastert that occurred nearly a quarter of a century ago. Chernobyl's reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, spewing radiation over a large swath of northern Europe. Related health problems still persist. A few private firms now offer tours to the restricted area, but the government says those tours are illegal and their safety is not guaranteed.

December 15: A research scholar at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, V.N. Linshy has found that foraminifera, a kind of single cell microorganism, is capable of detecting even minute amounts of toxic pollutants in the sea. She has been honoured by the Indian Science Congress, the country’s apex scientific body, with the best young environmental scientist for 2010-11 for her work. Foraminifera organisms can detect even micro gram quantities of mercury and cadmium, major pollutants of oceans across the world.

December 16: NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached a point at the edge of the solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind. The event signifies that after 33 years on the go, the spacecraft is about to reach interstellar space. Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena California say the spacecraft is now some 17.4 billion kilometres from the Sun. Launched on September 5th, 1977, Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock and entered the heliosheath in December 2004.

December 17: The environment ministry Tuesday launched a web portal to provide information about the vast biodiversity of the country. The Indian Biodiversity Information System (IBIS) has been developed by the Foundation and Ecology Security, Gujarat. The interactive portal uses open-source interface and will help the users to contribute data to the portal that would be periodically reviewed by experts. Website: http://www.bisindia.org/

December 18: Scientists have identified amino acids, a fundamental building block of life, in a meteorite where none were expected. The meteorite formed when two asteroids collided. Finding aminoacids from this type of meteorite suggests that there is more than one way to make amino acids in space, which increases the chance for finding life elsewhere in the Universe. Previously, scientists had found amino acids in samples of Comet Wild 2 from NASA's Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites.

December 19: Internet search engine Google has developed a new browser that can map out the entire human body. The hi-tech 3D application, called 'Google Body Browser', has been hailed as a breakthrough in the study of anatomy that could revolutionise people's understanding of the human body and fast-track medical research. The gadget, yet to be officially released, lets you explore the human body in much the same way you can navigate the world on Google Earth.

December 20: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said the launch of the GSLV-FO6 with India’s latest communication satellite scheduled for today, has been postponed due to a minor leak in one of the valves of the Russian cryogenic stage. The revised schedule for the launch would be firmed up after ascertaining the cause of the leak, remedial actions and due verifications. However, according to ISRO, other major changes in the launch vehicle had been incorporated in GSLV-FO6.

December 21: The United Nations decided to constitute an ultimate scientific authority on biodiversity to help protect ecosystems and stem the planet's dramatic loss of animal and plant life.Modelled on the UN's climate change panel (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), will harness the expertise of thousands of scientists worldwide. The idea nudged closer to reality in October at a meeting in Nagoya, Japan of the UN Convention on Biodiversity.

December 22: A prototype solar device devised by researchers in the US and Switzerland mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel. The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported. It has been suggested that the device mimics plants, which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis. Details are published in the journal Science.

December 23: Scientists recently announced the discovery of a  new species of Pitcher plant in central Palawan and said they would name it after the late Filipino botanist Leonardo Co.The new species, believed by its discoverers to be the only one of its kind in the world, is distinguished by its unusual dark strains and enlarged traps, according to the latest post in the scientists.The scientists said it was a sad irony that this black Pitcher plant was found so soon after Leonardo Co died.

December 24: Scientists at the High Altitude Regional Centre of Zoological Survey of India have discovered a rare species of butterfly known as Silvery Meadow Blue (Polyommatus florience)  in Paangi Valley of Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh. The Silvery Meadow Blue butterflies are found in areas 3,000 metres above sea level. It likes meadows and areas outside forests and can be found during the month of July when the high altitude areas experience a late-flowering season.

December 25: The rocket carrying an Indian communication satellite exploded just after liftoff  in the second launch failure for India's space agency this year.The rocket exploding in smoke and fire just after it launched from the Sriharikota space center in Andhra Pradesh state. It was carrying a GSAT-5P communication satellite into orbit. The vehicle developed an error 47 seconds after liftoff and lost command according to
Indian Space Research Organization.
 
December 26: Union environment launched a project to create a genetic garden of halophytes, the first of its kind in the country, in Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district today. The garden will initially house over 45 species found along the coast including Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The idea behind the creation of the botanical garden is to explore the venues for commercial exploitation of halophytes, or saline-resistant species of plants, which would ensure livelihood for the coastal inhabitants.

December 27: Scientists in Russia said they had discovered a mysterious new human species that has never encountered before. These creatures are living with the ancestors of modern humans 30 thousand years ago. These ancient humans lived on earth in the last Ice Age, when modern humans began to develop stone tools, jewelry and the arts. This discovery followed another controversial discovery of new species of tiny Hobbit in Indonesia in 2004, they also walked upright on two legs.

December 28: A paper published this week in the journal PLoS Biology shows that African elephants are in fact two species that diverged millions of years ago. Modern savanna, or bush, elephants weigh about twice as much as their forest-dwelling cousins and have significantly different body shapes, with the savanna breed standing nearly 3 feet taller than the forest elephants. Scientists say that distinct species of savanna-dwellers and forest-dwellers diverged millions of years ago.


December 29: An international consortium of scientists has claimed to have successfully sequenced the genome of the wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca). According to the scientists, the 14-chromosome woodland strawberry has one of the smallest genomes of approximately 240 million base pairs. The consortium comprised of 75 researchers from 38 institutions. The research, published in the journal Nature Genetics,will help strawberry breeders to develop disease resistance and improve fruit quality.

December 30: Giving alternative treatments such as homeopathic remedies to children may have deadly side effects in rare instances, a new analysis says. Australian researchers monitored suspected side effects from alternative medicines like herbal treatments, vitamin supplements or naturopathic pills. They found 39 reports of side effects including four deaths.The study was published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, a specialiozed publication of the medical journal BMJ.

December 31: The Earth and the diversity of life it harbors continues to surprise us. This year, researchers found some truly astounding creatures that had been unknown to science even through centuries of exploration.While some of these newfound species were found in remote, others were hiding in seemingly plain sight. Here are some of  the new species found in 2010  http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/new-species-discovered-2010-0900/. Also on http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2010/dec/25/new-species-discovered-2010.