2 June 2012: In what is considered a major step forward in biotechnology research, a group of 300 scientists from across the world, including India, have sequenced the genome of Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum).The achievement is expected to lower the costs and speed up efforts to improve tomato production and to tolerate droughts.Scientists from the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), the National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology under the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the Delhi University's South Campus also participated in the programme.The ‘Tomato Genome Consortium' was established after a scientific conference organised in 2003 in the U.S.The study is published in Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
3 June 2012: The super-heavy elements 114 and 116 have officially been recognized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the official arbiter of chemical names, and have been named in honor of the U.S. and Russian institutions where they were jointly discovered. Element 116 has been named Livermorium with the symbol Lv in honor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the nearby city of Livermore.Element 114 has been named Flerovium, with the symbol Fl, in honor of the Flerov Laboratory on Nuclear Reactions in Dubna and Georgiy N. Flerov who died in 1990.The official names will be published in the July issue of the IUPAC journal, Pure and Applied Chemistry.Link:http://www.iupac.org
4 June 2012: Over the course of the year, India hopes to formulate a new science and technology policy that will update the existing policy document of 2003.The statement came from Prime Minister Manmohan at the inception ceremony of the centenary session of the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA).Dr. Singh was appointed as the General President of ISCA and he is the first Prime Minister to be appointed to that position. The theme of this year's Indian Science Congress will be ‘Science for Shaping the future of India'.ISCA would bring out a publication of 100 high impact discoveries of Indian science during the past 100 years and a Hall of Fame in cyberspace to portray its global contributions. Link:http://sciencecongress.nic.in
5 June 2012:Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia has declared June 5, 2012 as the start of the International Year of the Rhino, following the advice of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other conservation organisations including WWF.In the last decade, two rhino subspecies, the western black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis longipes) in Cameroon and the Indochinese Javan rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus) in Vietnam have gone extinct.The urgent measures needed to ensure the effective conservation of the world’s five rhino species will be discussed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Jeju, Republic of Korea, from 6-15 September 2012.Link:http://www.wwf.org.uk
6 June 2012:Astronomy enthusiasts in the Southern Hemisphere of the world, including India, viewed one of rarest celestial events of their life-time, the Transit of Venus, today.The Transit of Venus is a phenomenon that occurs when planet Venus comes between the Earth and the Sun which can be viewed as a black spot moving across the face of the Sun.The next Transit of Venus will occur 105 years later, in 2117 only.Today, the Transit of Venus began at 3.40 AM before sunrise and continue till around 10.19AM.The transit comes at a time when India is exploring the possibility of launching an unmanned scientific mission to Venus. If all goes as planned, the Vnus Mission would lift off from Sriharikota on May 20,2015 arriving in Venus in October 2015.Link:http://www.iiap.res.in
7 June 2012:Frederick Herbert Bormann, a plant ecologist whose research in 1971 documented a new environmental horror in the United States,acid rain, died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.Dr. Bormann and his team of scientists discovered the threat of acid rain in a small watershed in the White Mountains, where they had gone to analyze chemical interactions in the area’s ecosystem.Dr. Bormann and his team detailed some of the pernicious effects of acid rain, including reduced forest growth and fish kills, in Science magazine in 1974.American Congress consulted Dr. Bormann’s work on all of this when it moved to regulate acid rain in the Clean Air Act of 1990.Link: http://environment.yale.edu
9 June 2012:Cyrtoptyx wayanadensis, a new species of class parasitic wasp, has been reported from Wayanad. It is only the second record of the species from the country and for the first time in Kerala. Earlier, the species was reported from Tamil Nadu (Cyrtoptyx latipes) way back in the year 1979.Cyrtoptyx wayanadensis was collected from a patch of moist deciduous forest located at the foothills of Banasura peak during the faunal exploration surveys conducted in the forested tracts of the southern Western Ghats in Wayanad district by P M Sureshan, scientist at the Western Ghat Regional Centre of Zoological Survey of India(ZSI), Kozhikode.The discovery is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Threatened Taxa.Link:http://threatenedtaxa.org
10 June 2012: The first sequencing of the Asiatic Pear cultivar 'Suli' (Pyrus bretschneideri cv.Dangshansuli) has been completed by an international consortium of seven worldwide universities and institutions including the Bejing Genomics Institute, Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, University of Georgia, University of Hawaii, and Tohoku University and University of Illinois.The Pear genome sequencing project was initiated in April of 2010.China is the the center of the origin of Pear where it originated 65 million years ago.There are two major varieties of pear, European and Asiatic.The Asiatic pear is the most important commercial variety in China which has high level of antioxidants.Link:http://peargenome.njau.edu
11 June 2012:The earliest ancestors of modern human may have originated in Asia and not Africa as widely believed, according to a new study based on fossil discovery in Myanmar.Previous fossil finds have long suggested that Africa was the cradle for anthropoids, which include monkeys, apes and humans. Now, an international team in Myanmar has found the tooth of a pre-human ancestor which may prove that anthropoids originated in Asia.Thus the prehistoric human, called Afrasia djijidae forms a missing link between Africa and Asia. It dates back to 37 million years and resemble Afrotarsius libycus, recently found in the Sahara Desert of Libya.The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Link:http://www.pnas.org
12 June 2012:A field team from the University of Houston and the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) has mapped a remote region of Honduras that may contain the legendary lost city of Ciudad Blanca in Mosquitia region, one of the world's least-explored virgin rainforests.The results mark the successful completion of the first light detection and ranging (LiDAR) survey of the precise locations of features within fractions of meters.The project has demonstrated the power of airborne laser mapping to locate regions covered with thick forest, and it appears that the method will be used archaeology in the years ahead.Link:http://www.ncalm.cive.uh.edu
13 June 2012:Diesel exhaust causes cancer, the World Health Organisation has declared, a ruling it said could make exhaust as important a public health threat as passive smoke.The WHO's science panel is raising the status of diesel exhaust to carcinogen from "a probable carcinogen".Reclassifying diesel exhaust as carcinogenic puts it into the same category as other known hazards such as asbestos, alcohol and ultraviolet radiation.The new classification followed a week-long discussion in Lyon, France, by an expert panel organised by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).The last time the agency considered the status of diesel exhaust was in 1989, when it was labeled "a probable carcinogen".Link:http://www.iarc.fr
14 June 2012:NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected long-standing methane lakes in the 'tropics' of Saturn’s moon Titan.The result is unexpected because models had assumed the long-standing bodies of liquid would only exist at the poles.Like Earth’s hydrological cycle, Titan has a 'methane' cycle, with methane rather than water circulating. But existing models haven’t been able to account for the abundant supply of methane.The latest results come from Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which detected the dark areas in the tropical region known as Shangri-La, near the spot where the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe landed in 2005.The findings appear in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
15 June 2012: An agreement on collaboration in Diabetes Research has been signed between Sh. Ghulam Nabi Azad, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare and Ms. Kathleen Sebelius, US Secretary, Health and Human Services during the bilateral meeting between India and the US.As part of this collaboration joint research programs in diabetes will be developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Department of Biotechnology of the Ministry of Science and Technology, with National Institutes of Health of the Department of Health and Human Services, United States.This is the eighth agreement between the two countries in the field of health and medicine.Link:http://www2.niddk.nih.gov
16 June 2012:Liu Yang, a pilot in the People's Liberation Army, has made history by becoming the first Chinese woman to go into space.The 33 year-old is among the three member crew of the Shenzhou 9 mission, the latest step in China's increasingly ambitious space programme.The Shenzhou 9 mission, which blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the remote northwest of China, is a crucial test for China's rapidly-evolving space programme. The ten-day mission will see the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft perform the first manned docking with the Tiangong-1 space lab, a vital step towards China's ambition to have a working space station by 2020.Major Liu is the 56th woman to go into space. Link:http://www.cnsa.gov.cn
17 June 2012Researchers have assembled the complete genome of the Ulindi, a female Bonobo (Pan paniscus) which lives at the Leipzig Zoo, Germany.Adding the Bonobo genome to the already-sequenced human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan genomes gives scientists a complete catalog of the DNA of all of the so-called great apes.Kay Pruefer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany was first author of the Bonobo genome study, working with an international team to sequence the DNA of Ancient humans split away from Bonobos and chimps about 4.5 million years ago.The milestone making achievement is reported in the journal Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
18 June 2012:Sikkim has got its first moss garden at the Jawaharlal Nehru Botanical Garden in Rumtek, some 24 kilometres to the south-west of Gangtok, courtesy to Robert Pompey who put in voluntary efforts to create the facility.The mosses (Bryopsida and Lycopodiopsida spp) have been collected mostly from within or around the Botanical garden.Other seedless plants (eg Marchantiomorpha (liverworts), Anthocerotophyta (Hormworts), Polypodiospida (Ferns etc) and some local grasses (Poaceae) and Orchids (Orchidaceae) also feature in the garden.The use of mosses to create gardens has been a Japanese tradition since the feudal era (12th -19th centuries).Link:http://sikkim.gov.in
19 June 2012:Chandigarh Panjab University’s dean research, Professor R K Kohli, has been selected for the JC Bose Fellowship by the Union Ministry of Science and Technology.Kohli is the only Indian scientist who has been be accredited as senior ecologist - the highest global accreditation. He is a fellow of all the four official national academies (FNA, FASc, FNASc, FNAAS), a rare distinction among states of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu & Kashmir andChandigarh.The JC Bose Fellowship - introduced recently by the central government - is meant to recognise active scientists and engineers for their outstanding performance and contributions. Link:http://www.dst.gov.in
20 June 2012:Rio+20 Earth Summit began at Rio de Janeiro with promise to establish clear goals for sustainable development. Compared with the original Earth Summit, which led to historic decisions on biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions, organizers say this summit is only the beginning of a new goal-setting process for global development.One of the themes of the Rio meeting, which comes 20 years after the iconic Earth Summit of 1992 in the same city is Green Economy: an economy that uses the services nature provides more wisely, and safeguards them.The Rio+20 summit is not directly concerned with nature protection - that is the job of other UN organisations such as the Convention on Biological Diversity.Link:http://www.uncsd2012.org
21 June 2012:The latest Red List of Threatened Species was unveiled at the Rio+20 meeting.Plants seemed to be the most threatened life form with 60 species being listed as Critically Endangered and 141 as Endangered.The Critically Endangered list included 18 species of amphibians, 14 fishes and 10 mammals. There are also 15 bird species in the category. There are 310 species as Endangered ones, including 69 fishes, 38 mammals and 32 amphibians. Two plant species were reported to be extinct in the wild, including the Euphorbia mayuranthanii of Kerala.15 species of Indian birds, including the great Indian bustard, Siberian Crane and sociable lapwing are there in the list of Critically Endangered birds.Link:http://www.iucnredlist.org
22 June 2012:Continuous ice melting of Antarctica is threatening extinction of many species.One such specie is of Emperor penguins who are on the verge of extinctions according to a new study carried on by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).If global temperatures continue to rise four-feet tall Emperor penguins may eventually disappear.Melting is affecting their food source and is causing imbalance.Penguins feed on fish, squid, and krill that feed on zooplankton and phytoplankton that grow on the underside of the ice.If the melting of ice continues this food web will be broken causing various species Penguins to starve to death.The study has been published in journal Global Change Biology. Link:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com
23 June 2012:Scientists will gather today in all parts of the world to honour British mathematician Alan Turing, a pioneer of the modern computer whose code-cracking is credited with shortening World War II.Turing died aged 41 of cyanide poisoning and some believe he took his own life by eating a poisoned apple in 1954.In his short life, Turing lay the theoretical foundation for the modern-day computer and artificial intelligence. He also unravelled German codes in a war effort for his mother country. In 1936, Turing published a paper conceiving of a Universal Turing machine.The first version of Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was completed by other scientists and engineers in 1950, then the fastest machine in the world.Link:http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk
24 June 2012:A research team led by Nepali Scientist Bhakta Bahadur Raskoti has recently discovered a new species of orchid at Langtang National Park.Raskoti, who has also published a book on orchids, has photographed more than 400 orchid species in the country.The new Orchid species Neottia chandrae is found in central Nepal, where it is threatened by overgrazing.The new orchid has been named Neottia chandrae in honour of conservationist Chandra Gurung, who was killed in a helicopter crash in Taplejung in 2006.Apart from Chandra Gurung,more than fifteen eminent conservationists were killed in the crash.The finding is published in the Nordic Journal of Botany.Link:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com
25 June 2012:Scientists are searching for a link between mosquito coils and incidence of diabetes.The active ingredients of the coil are Pyrethrins (organic compounds from Chrysanthemum cinerariaefolium that are insecticides), wood powder, coconut shell powder, joss powder, binders, nitrates and additives.A lab experiment with Malaysian and Chinese mosquito coils and found that each coil releases concentrations of particulate matter equal to that from 137 cigarettes.National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai, will launch a study on the use of household pesticides including mosquito coils and the effect on insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.Link:http://www.nie.gov.in
26 June 2012:Scientists have discovered a new species of freshwater fish in a stream flowing off the Barapole tributary of the Valapattanam river in the Western Ghats in southern Karnataka.Researchers have named the fish Dario urops which was first collected 130 years ago from Wayanad in Kerala by the British Zoologist Francis Day, who, however, did not make a formal description of the species.Dario urops is the first member of the Badidae family that has been described from the Western Ghats.The remaining 19 species within the family are distributed in the rivers of Eastern Himalayas and Indo-Burma.The researchers have and have described their finding in the latest edition of journal Zootaxa.Link:http://www.mapress.com
27 June 2012:Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have smashed gold ions together to produce a quark-gluon plasma like that which existed in the first instant after the Big Bang that created the universe, and in doing so have produced what Guinness World Records says is the highest man-made temperature ever, 7.2 trillion degrees.That is about 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun.At Brookhaven, they are doing it with a large accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) with an experiment called PHENIX where gold ions are accelerated in both directions,ultimately smashing them together. Link:http://www.mapress.com
28 June 2012:A Chinese space capsule carrying three crew members has returned to Earth following a 13-day mission.The capsule landed in Inner Mongolia's Siziwang county,deploying a parachute to slow its approach.The astronauts, including China's first woman in space, carried out a successful manual docking with the Tiangong-1 laboratory module.The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft was launched on 16 June.The mission is a key step towards China's goal of building a space station by 2020.The Shenzhou-9 mission posted a series of firsts: the first manned automatic and manual dockings; the first long-duration spaceflight; and the first crew to live aboard a permanently orbiting Tiangong-1.Link:http://www.mapress.com
30 June 2012:The B612 Foundation announced the first privately Funded Deep Space Mission today.It is called Sentinel, a half-meter infrared telescope designed to look for any asteroids whose orbits will cross the Earth's in the next hundred years and posing the threat of an impact.An asteroid impacting the Earth does so at a speed so high that the explosion can often be larger than a thermonuclear weapon.Asteroids have wiped out almost all life on Earth several times in the past.Construction is expected to begin this fall, and the prime contractor will be Ball Aerospace, contractor for Spitzer and Kepler.When the telscope is ready it will be launched using a SpaceXFalcon9.Link:http://b612foundation.org
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