1 August 2012: This year marks the 350th anniversary of the publication of the Boyle’s Law by the Irish scientist Robert Boyle (1627-1691), often termed ‘the father of modern chemistry’.The Boyle’s law which states that, at constant temperature, the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely related.The hypothesis and the supporting data first appeared in Robert Boyle’s 1662 paper, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Air.Today the law is commonly expressed as p1 V1 = p2 V2 and is used to predict the result of a change in the volume (V) or pressure (p) of a fixed quantity of gas. Boyle's law is ubiquitous in science and has been combined with Charles's law and Gay-Lussac's law as part of the combined gas law.Link:http://jap.physiology.org
2 August 2012: Researchers in Japan have found the world's northernmost coral reef. Located off the coast of Tsushima Island at 34 degrees north latitude, the newly discovered reef is far different from other coral reefs and is 217 miles (350 kilometers) north of most others in the region.Coral reefs have been believed to develop under warm-water settings at least 18 degrees Celsius in winter.The new coral can tolerate 13 degrees Celsius.The discovery was made by Hiroya Yamano, a researcher at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies. In 2001, his team found a similar reef off the coast of Japan's Iki Island and until now, that was the planet's northernmost coral.The findings were published in the journal Geology.Link:http://geology.gsapubs.org
3 August 2012: 2012 marks the 100 year anniversary of the discovery of vitamins and the birth of modern micronutrient science.Kazimierz Funk (23 February 1884 – 20 November1967) commonly anglicised as Casimir Funk, was a Polish biochemist.He was generally credited with the first formulation of the concept of vitamins in 1912, which he called vital amines or vitamines.Amines are organic compounds, so vitamines literally meant amines of life.The 'e' at the end of vitamine was later removed when it was realized that vitamins need not be nitrogen containing amines.In the years that followed, a series of scientific breakthroughs were made that identified 13 vitamins and explored many of their functions.Link:http://www.100yearsofvitamins.com
4 August 2012:India’s latest communication satellite GSAT-10 is slated to be launched from Kourou in French Guiana on September 22.The satellite will be launched by European space consortium Arianespace’s Ariane-5 rocket.India will also will be launching Spot-6, a French satellite and a small Japanese satellite on board PSLV-C21 (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket in September. ISRO’s commercial arm Antrix Corporation Limited (Antrix) has entered into a commercial Launch Services Agreement with Astrium SAS, a company under EADS, France, for launching SPOT-6, an advanced remote sensing satellite.The 800-kg SPOT-6 built by Astrium SAS will be the heaviest third party payload that ISRO will be carrying after the 350-kg Italian satellite Agile it put into orbit in 2007.Link:http://www.isro.org
5 August 2012:Drilling of the seabed off Antarctica has revealed that rainforest grew on the frozen continent 52 million years ago, warning it could be ice-free again within decades.The study of sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor off Antarctica's east coast revealed fossil pollens that had come from a "near-tropical" forest covering the continent in the Eocene period, 34-56 million years ago.The analysis of temperature-sensitive molecules in the cores had showed it was "very warm" 52 million years ago, measuring about 20 degrees Celsius.CO2 is presently estimated at about 395ppm, but Antarctica had higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (around 990ppm) as per the study published in the journal Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
6 August 2012: More that eight months after taking off from Cape Canaveral, NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars today after a 563,000,000 km journey.The rover mission is set to explore for at least 687 Earth days (1 Martian year) over a range of 5 by 20 km. Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011 aboard the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity's goals include investigation of the Martian climate, geology, and whether Mars could have ever supported life, including investigation of the role of water and planetary habitability, and preparing for human exploration.The name Curiosity was suggested by Clara Ma, a sixth-grader from Kansas in 2009.Link:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov
7 August 2012: British chemist Martin Fleischmann, who stunned the world by announcing that he had achieved nuclear fusion in a glass bottle, has died after a long illness.Fleischmann and his partner Stanley Pons at Utiversity of Utah proclaimed in 1989 that they could attain nuclear fusion at room temperature.The reaction appeared to give off little radiation, an enormous contrast to the still-ongoing quest to harness fusion energy by conventional means, in reactors at temperatures of millions of degrees.The experiment raised hope but when other scientists tried to replicate the achievement, most failed, and Fleischmann was accused of incompetence and fraud.Link:http://lenr-canr.org
8 August 2012: The 2nd Asia Regional Conference of the Society for Conservation Biology-Asia Section will take place from today to 10th August at JN Tata Auditorium, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru.The international conference is being organized in India to highlight the urgency of biodiversity conservation in Asia ahead of the 11th Conference of the Parties (CoP) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in India in October 2012.The 1st Asian Regional Meeting was held in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2005.The scientific papers from that conference were published as a book “Biodiversity in Asia” and can be downloaded free from the Internet. Link:http://www.conbio.org
2 August 2012: Researchers in Japan have found the world's northernmost coral reef. Located off the coast of Tsushima Island at 34 degrees north latitude, the newly discovered reef is far different from other coral reefs and is 217 miles (350 kilometers) north of most others in the region.Coral reefs have been believed to develop under warm-water settings at least 18 degrees Celsius in winter.The new coral can tolerate 13 degrees Celsius.The discovery was made by Hiroya Yamano, a researcher at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies. In 2001, his team found a similar reef off the coast of Japan's Iki Island and until now, that was the planet's northernmost coral.The findings were published in the journal Geology.Link:http://geology.gsapubs.org
3 August 2012: 2012 marks the 100 year anniversary of the discovery of vitamins and the birth of modern micronutrient science.Kazimierz Funk (23 February 1884 – 20 November1967) commonly anglicised as Casimir Funk, was a Polish biochemist.He was generally credited with the first formulation of the concept of vitamins in 1912, which he called vital amines or vitamines.Amines are organic compounds, so vitamines literally meant amines of life.The 'e' at the end of vitamine was later removed when it was realized that vitamins need not be nitrogen containing amines.In the years that followed, a series of scientific breakthroughs were made that identified 13 vitamins and explored many of their functions.Link:http://www.100yearsofvitamins.com
4 August 2012:India’s latest communication satellite GSAT-10 is slated to be launched from Kourou in French Guiana on September 22.The satellite will be launched by European space consortium Arianespace’s Ariane-5 rocket.India will also will be launching Spot-6, a French satellite and a small Japanese satellite on board PSLV-C21 (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket in September. ISRO’s commercial arm Antrix Corporation Limited (Antrix) has entered into a commercial Launch Services Agreement with Astrium SAS, a company under EADS, France, for launching SPOT-6, an advanced remote sensing satellite.The 800-kg SPOT-6 built by Astrium SAS will be the heaviest third party payload that ISRO will be carrying after the 350-kg Italian satellite Agile it put into orbit in 2007.Link:http://www.isro.org
5 August 2012:Drilling of the seabed off Antarctica has revealed that rainforest grew on the frozen continent 52 million years ago, warning it could be ice-free again within decades.The study of sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor off Antarctica's east coast revealed fossil pollens that had come from a "near-tropical" forest covering the continent in the Eocene period, 34-56 million years ago.The analysis of temperature-sensitive molecules in the cores had showed it was "very warm" 52 million years ago, measuring about 20 degrees Celsius.CO2 is presently estimated at about 395ppm, but Antarctica had higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (around 990ppm) as per the study published in the journal Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
6 August 2012: More that eight months after taking off from Cape Canaveral, NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars today after a 563,000,000 km journey.The rover mission is set to explore for at least 687 Earth days (1 Martian year) over a range of 5 by 20 km. Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011 aboard the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity's goals include investigation of the Martian climate, geology, and whether Mars could have ever supported life, including investigation of the role of water and planetary habitability, and preparing for human exploration.The name Curiosity was suggested by Clara Ma, a sixth-grader from Kansas in 2009.Link:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov
7 August 2012: British chemist Martin Fleischmann, who stunned the world by announcing that he had achieved nuclear fusion in a glass bottle, has died after a long illness.Fleischmann and his partner Stanley Pons at Utiversity of Utah proclaimed in 1989 that they could attain nuclear fusion at room temperature.The reaction appeared to give off little radiation, an enormous contrast to the still-ongoing quest to harness fusion energy by conventional means, in reactors at temperatures of millions of degrees.The experiment raised hope but when other scientists tried to replicate the achievement, most failed, and Fleischmann was accused of incompetence and fraud.Link:http://lenr-canr.org
8 August 2012: The 2nd Asia Regional Conference of the Society for Conservation Biology-Asia Section will take place from today to 10th August at JN Tata Auditorium, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru.The international conference is being organized in India to highlight the urgency of biodiversity conservation in Asia ahead of the 11th Conference of the Parties (CoP) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in India in October 2012.The 1st Asian Regional Meeting was held in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2005.The scientific papers from that conference were published as a book “Biodiversity in Asia” and can be downloaded free from the Internet. Link:http://www.conbio.org
9 August 2012: The phenomenon of Plate tectonics, previously thought to exist only on Earth also occurs beneath the surface of Mars.University of California researchers found that the movement of crustal plates also occurs on Mars.The discovery was made during his analysis of images from NASA's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) spacecraft and from the HIRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Mars contains the longest and deepest system of canyons in our solar system, known as Valles Marineris.The study was published in the journal Lithosphere.Link: http://lithosphere.gsapubs.org
10 August 2012: An eyeless huntsman spider, named the Sinopoda scurion, the first of its kind was discovered by scientist Peter Jager, head of the Arachnology section at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt.Frankfurt researchers have described nine new species of the genus Sinopoda.The regression of the eyes is attributable to living permanently without daylight.The Sinopoda species described demonstrate all kinds of transitions to cave adaptation, from eight functioning eyes to forms with six, four and two lenses, right up to blind spiders.The eyeless huntsman spider was named Sinopoda scurion after the Swiss company “Scurion” that makes headlamps for caves.Link:http://www.mapress.com
10 August 2012: An eyeless huntsman spider, named the Sinopoda scurion, the first of its kind was discovered by scientist Peter Jager, head of the Arachnology section at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt.Frankfurt researchers have described nine new species of the genus Sinopoda.The regression of the eyes is attributable to living permanently without daylight.The Sinopoda species described demonstrate all kinds of transitions to cave adaptation, from eight functioning eyes to forms with six, four and two lenses, right up to blind spiders.The eyeless huntsman spider was named Sinopoda scurion after the Swiss company “Scurion” that makes headlamps for caves.Link:http://www.mapress.com
11 August 2012: Scientists have for the first time found unequivocal evidence of another oxidant playing a vital role in the formation of gaseous sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. Until now, it was thought that the combination of OH (hydroxyl radical) oxidant with Sulphur dioxide (SO) was the dominant way by which gaseous sulphuric acid is formed in the atmosphere.R.L. Mauldin from the University of Helsinki and other co-authors are yet to identify the oxidant with certainty, and have named it as ‘X.’ They found the new oxidant has “significant capacity” to oxidise sulphur dioxide.The results are published on August 9, 2012 in Nature.
Link:http://www.nature.com
12 August 2012:The 36th International Geological Congress (IGC) will be held in New Delhi in 2020 from November 29 to December 5. The host institution would be the Geological Survey of India (GSI), along with the science academies of five countries of the sub-continent. The event will be sponsored by the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India.The decision was taken at the ongoing 34th International Geological Congress in Brisbane, Australia.The Congress is a prestigious conclave of geoscientists from around the world, and is held once every four years.It is for this reason that the IGC is considered as an Olympic of the International Geosciences fraternity.The last time India hosted the Congress was in 1964.Link:http://iugs.org
Link:http://www.nature.com
12 August 2012:The 36th International Geological Congress (IGC) will be held in New Delhi in 2020 from November 29 to December 5. The host institution would be the Geological Survey of India (GSI), along with the science academies of five countries of the sub-continent. The event will be sponsored by the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India.The decision was taken at the ongoing 34th International Geological Congress in Brisbane, Australia.The Congress is a prestigious conclave of geoscientists from around the world, and is held once every four years.It is for this reason that the IGC is considered as an Olympic of the International Geosciences fraternity.The last time India hosted the Congress was in 1964.Link:http://iugs.org
13 August 2012:Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN are now searching for signs of what they call 'SUSY'.Formally known as SuperSymmetry, SUSY is the idea that every one of the elementary particles that make up the universe and everything in it has an almost, but not quite identical, “super-partner”.That overarching view would replace the present explanation of how the universe works - the Standard Model, which was developed in the 1970s but has glaring gaps, including where gravity fits into the picture.Searching for SUSYwas one of the objectives behind the creation of the LHC, in which particles are smashed together at near light-speed to create billions of explosions like the primeval Big Bang.Link:https://twiki.cern.ch
14 August 2012:House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) popularly known as "Angadikkuruvi" in Malayalam has been declared as the ‘State Bird of Delhi’.The move is part of a new campaign to save the species and enhance awareness about their life and habitat. It is one of about 25 species in the genus Passer and occurs naturally in most of Europe, the Mediterranean region, and much of Asia. Its introductions to Australia, Africa, and the Americas, make it the most widely distributed wild bird.It is extensively persecuted as an agricultural pest and though it is widespread and abundant, its numbers have declined in some areas. IUCN however declares the animal's conservation status as Least Concern on the Red Data Book.Link:http://www.worldsparrowday.org
15 August 2012:A Delhi boy has discovered a new comet using data from NASA and European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).Discovered by Prafull Sharma, a Class XII student of Ahlcon Public School, the new comet SOHO 2333 is a fragment believed to have separated from a relatively larger comet Machholz when it last came close to the Sun in 2007.Sharma was associated with "Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE)".He is also part of a world-wide team of comet hunters who analyse SOHO images.The British Astronomical Association has confirmed SOHO 2333 as a new comet.Link:http://www.space-india.org
16 August 2012:Researchers studying fossils from northern Kenya have identified a new human species, Homo rudolfensis,that lived two million years ago.The discoveries suggests that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa.With the discovery of the three new fossils researchers can say with more certainty that Homo rudolfensis really was a separate type of human that existed around two million years ago along the even older and more primitive species of human called Homo habilis that may have coexisted with Homo erectus.Now it seems Homo rudolfensis was around too and raises the distinct possibility that many other species of human also existed at the time.The research has been published in the journal Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
14 August 2012:House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) popularly known as "Angadikkuruvi" in Malayalam has been declared as the ‘State Bird of Delhi’.The move is part of a new campaign to save the species and enhance awareness about their life and habitat. It is one of about 25 species in the genus Passer and occurs naturally in most of Europe, the Mediterranean region, and much of Asia. Its introductions to Australia, Africa, and the Americas, make it the most widely distributed wild bird.It is extensively persecuted as an agricultural pest and though it is widespread and abundant, its numbers have declined in some areas. IUCN however declares the animal's conservation status as Least Concern on the Red Data Book.Link:http://www.worldsparrowday.org
15 August 2012:A Delhi boy has discovered a new comet using data from NASA and European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).Discovered by Prafull Sharma, a Class XII student of Ahlcon Public School, the new comet SOHO 2333 is a fragment believed to have separated from a relatively larger comet Machholz when it last came close to the Sun in 2007.Sharma was associated with "Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE)".He is also part of a world-wide team of comet hunters who analyse SOHO images.The British Astronomical Association has confirmed SOHO 2333 as a new comet.Link:http://www.space-india.org
16 August 2012:Researchers studying fossils from northern Kenya have identified a new human species, Homo rudolfensis,that lived two million years ago.The discoveries suggests that at least three distinct species of humans co-existed in Africa.With the discovery of the three new fossils researchers can say with more certainty that Homo rudolfensis really was a separate type of human that existed around two million years ago along the even older and more primitive species of human called Homo habilis that may have coexisted with Homo erectus.Now it seems Homo rudolfensis was around too and raises the distinct possibility that many other species of human also existed at the time.The research has been published in the journal Nature.Link:http://www.nature.com
17 August 2012: The report of Parliament's standing committee on Agriculture and Genetically Modified Crops has asked for an end to all field trials for these.Further research and development on transgenics in agricultural crops should only be done in strict containment, and field trials should be discontinued.The panel also wanted a thorough probe into the case of GM brinjal (also termed Bt brinjal) from the outset up to the imposing of a moratorium on its commercialisation on February 9, 2010.The panel questioned the approval system for GM crops. It noticed several shortcomings in the functioning and powers of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) and the Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation (RCGM).Link:http://www.parliamentofindia.nic.in
18 August 2012:Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year.Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.The galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give off the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen. It is by far the biggest creation of stars that astronomers have seen for this kind of galaxy. The unnamed galaxy,officially known by a string of letters and numbers, is about 3 trillion times the size of our sun.Link: http://chandra.harvard.edu
19 August 2012:To day is the 10th anniversary of the Ashtamudi Lake in Kollam district of Kerala being declared as a Ramsar site by designating it as a wetland of international importance. The lake was recommended by the Ramsar Convention’s partner organisations as a wetland of 61.4 sq km. And the lake entered the Ramsar list as site number 1,204.However, since then, the area of the lake has shrunk to 34 sq km and it is facing serious environmental degradation.Internationally there are 2,046 wetlands designated Ramsar sites and India has 25.The main purpose of declaring an important wetland as Ramsar site is to enable its conservation through local and national-level action with international cooperation for achieving sustainable development.
18 August 2012:Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It's a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year.Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.The galaxy is about 5.7 billion light years away in the center of a recently discovered cluster of galaxies that give off the brightest X-ray glow astronomers have seen. It is by far the biggest creation of stars that astronomers have seen for this kind of galaxy. The unnamed galaxy,officially known by a string of letters and numbers, is about 3 trillion times the size of our sun.Link: http://chandra.harvard.edu
19 August 2012:To day is the 10th anniversary of the Ashtamudi Lake in Kollam district of Kerala being declared as a Ramsar site by designating it as a wetland of international importance. The lake was recommended by the Ramsar Convention’s partner organisations as a wetland of 61.4 sq km. And the lake entered the Ramsar list as site number 1,204.However, since then, the area of the lake has shrunk to 34 sq km and it is facing serious environmental degradation.Internationally there are 2,046 wetlands designated Ramsar sites and India has 25.The main purpose of declaring an important wetland as Ramsar site is to enable its conservation through local and national-level action with international cooperation for achieving sustainable development.
20 August 2012: Scientists at Imperial College, London, and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory have made the first solid-state MASER (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) that operates at room temperature, suggesting that the near-forgotten technology could find a number of commercial applications, provided that it can be coaxed into working for longer than a fraction of a second.The MASER is known as the forerunner of the LASER, and is normally based around a ruby crystal, the same material that formed the basis for the very first optical laser.By using crystals of pentacene-doped p-terphenyl – the new MASER works at room temperature. The finding is reported in the in the journal Nature.
21 August 2012: Scientists have claimed that the Sun is surrounded by dark matter, a phenomenon first proposed in the 1930s by a Swiss astronomer, Fritz Zwicky, who believed that clusters of galaxies were filled with a mysterious dark
matter that kept them from flying apart.Researchers from the University of Zurich have developed a new simulation of the Milky Way to test their mass-measuring method before applying it to real data.The study claims that the techniques used over the past 20 years were biased, always tending to underestimate the amount of dark matter in the universe.Around 1930, the Dutch scientist Jan Oort also predicted the existance of dark matter around the sun.Link: http://iopscience.iop.org
22 August 2012:The Indian Institute of Soil Sciences, Bhopal, has developed a web-based system for advising farmers the right quantity of fertilizers that they should use in their soils for a particular type of crop.The software takes into account the soil type in different districts of the country and available nutrient in the soil. It takes into consideration the crop and cropping season in calculating the nutrient requirement.It also takes care of the available varieties of crops.This system is presently available district-wise for these 11 states: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.Link: http://www.iiss.nic.in
22 August 2012:The Indian Institute of Soil Sciences, Bhopal, has developed a web-based system for advising farmers the right quantity of fertilizers that they should use in their soils for a particular type of crop.The software takes into account the soil type in different districts of the country and available nutrient in the soil. It takes into consideration the crop and cropping season in calculating the nutrient requirement.It also takes care of the available varieties of crops.This system is presently available district-wise for these 11 states: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.Link: http://www.iiss.nic.in
23 August 2012:After devoting 12 years to the project, scientists have fabricated the first-ever device to measure molecules one at a time.The device, only a couple millionths of a metre in size, consists of a tiny, vibrating bridge-like structure.When a particle or molecule lands on the bridge, its mass changes the oscillating frequency in a way that reveals how much the particle weighs.The new instrument was based on a technique developed by Michael Roukes, Professor of Physics at California Institute of Technology.It would be helping doctors to diagnose diseases, enable biologists to study viruses and and even allow better measurement of air pollution.The finding is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.Link: http://www.nature.com
24 August 2012:China’s first Moon rover will be powered by a home-built nuclear battery.The battery, using Plutonium-238, will be able to power the 100-kilogram vehicle for more than 30 years.The battery will also prevent the equipment from freezing.The rover will land on moon next year on board Chang’e-3, China’s third lunar probe.The Chang’e-3 is expected to be launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest Sichuan Province. The Chang’e-3 will also observe space from the lunar surface as the lack of atmosphere allows better viewing than from Earth.The nuclear power system will make China the third country apart from the United States and Russia to be able to apply nuclear technology to space exploration.Link:http://www.cnsa.gov.cn
25 August 2012:US astronaut Neil Alden Armstrong who took a giant leap for mankind when he became the first person to walk on the moon, has died at the age of 82.As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. As he stepped on the dusty surface, Armstrong said, "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind."Those words endure as one of the best known quotes in the English language.The Apollo 11 astronauts' euphoric moonwalk provided Americans with a sense of achievement in the space race with Cold War foe the Soviet Union and while Washington was engaged in a bloody war with the communists in Vietnam.Link: http://neilarmstronginfo.com24 August 2012:China’s first Moon rover will be powered by a home-built nuclear battery.The battery, using Plutonium-238, will be able to power the 100-kilogram vehicle for more than 30 years.The battery will also prevent the equipment from freezing.The rover will land on moon next year on board Chang’e-3, China’s third lunar probe.The Chang’e-3 is expected to be launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest Sichuan Province. The Chang’e-3 will also observe space from the lunar surface as the lack of atmosphere allows better viewing than from Earth.The nuclear power system will make China the third country apart from the United States and Russia to be able to apply nuclear technology to space exploration.Link:http://www.cnsa.gov.cn
26 August 2012:India's first Centre for Biopolymer Science and Technology, a unit of the Central Institute of Plastic Engineering and Technology at Chennai, was inaugurated jointly by Union Fertilisers and Chemicals Minister M K Alagiri and Chief Minister Oommen Chandy in Kochi, Kerala.The capital outlay of Rs 30 crore for setting up the Centre, which would be conducting MSc on Biopolymer Science and Doctoral programmes in the area of Biopolymer Science and Technology in collaboration with Cochin University of Science and Technology, would be shared equally between the central and state governments.With the support of the Kerala government, full-fledged CBPST campus would be established in 2-3 years.Link:http://cipet.gov.in
27 August 2012:NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that it has dubbed the landing site of the Mars rover Curiosity “Bradbury Landing” in honor of sci-fi author Ray Bradbury.Bradbury passed away back in June, and the announcement coincided with what would have been Bradbury’s 92nd birthday.The honor seems fitting, considering Bradbury’s most popular work was The Martian Chronicles, which portrayed a human invasion of Mars.The book was published in 1950 and later adapted into a TV series and video game. Ray Bradbury died in June at age 91.Since sending the first rover to Mars in 1997, NASA has made it a tradition to name its landing sites after visionaries and explorers.Link:http://www.raybradbury.com
28 August 2012:NASA's Curiosity rover has captured a strange white light dancing across the horizon of Mars and four blobs hovering in the sky, which UFO hunters claim are alien ships monitoring humans' baby steps into the universe.While the images are certainly a curiosity, NASA and photography experts insist they are nothing more than blemishes on the images, picked up by the camera lens sitting on the rover at a distance of 350 million miles away.NASA has not commented on any of the strange sightings so far, but alien hunters have suggested that these are alien ships monitoring humans' baby steps into the universe.Curiosity is now near to Mars' equator and will comtinue its operations there for more than a year.Link:http://www.nasa.gov
29 August 2012: Scientists have discovered that extracts from a plant which has the botanical name Fagonia cretica found in arid, desert regions of Pakistan, India, Africa and parts of Europe can kill cancerous cells and produces no harmful side-effects associated with chemotherapy. Tea from the plant known as Virgin's Mantle (Fagonia cretica) is already drunk by women in rural Pakistan who have breast cancer.Researchers from Aston University, Birmingham, and Russells Hall Hospital, Dudley, found that it contains potent anti-cancer agents that act singly or in combination against the proliferation of cancer cells.Reports from breast cancer sufferers in Pakistan suggested the plant extract does not trigger any serious side effects.Link:http://herbarivirtual.uib.es
30 August 2012:Keeping pace with the government's focus on food processing, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) is offering a new programme,Postgraduate Diploma in Food Science and Technology at its School of Agriculture.The one-year programme would cover areas such as food chemistry and nutrition, food microbiology, food processing and engineering, quality control and food packaging, among others.Graduates in agriculture/food technology/ dairy technology/ horticulture /home science/ agriculture engineering and science graduates with chemistry/ life science/ biotechnology/microbiology are eligible for the admission.The last date for submission of application forms is September 10.Link:www.ignouonline.ac.in/safe
31 August 2012:August 2012 is a month with two full moons. And, by popular acclaim, that means it’s a Blue Moon month,but Blue in name only. That’s because a Blue Moon is sometimes defined as the second full moon in a calendar month. The first full moon was August 1.The second full moon is today.The second full moon of August 2012 is the Blue Moon.The idea of a Blue Moon as the second full moon in a month stemmed from the March 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, which contained an article called “Once in a Blue Moon” by James Hugh Pruett. And today's Blue Moon falls on the day the death service for Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who died last Saturday.The next blue moon will fall on August 21, 2013.Link:http://deity.gov.in
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