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| Solar Impulse 2 in its maiden flight |
1 June 2014: Indian scientists have cloned a female buffalo calf. The calf, which has been named, Lalima was born at National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, Haryana, India, on 2nd May 2004, though the news was disclosed only today. Lalima is NDRI's seventh cloned calf. Lalima was cloned using the indigenous "hand-guided cloning technique" and it was born through normal parturition. In Lalima's case, the donor cell was taken from the ear of a murrah buffalo which produced 2,713kg milk in standard lactation period of 305 days.Researchers at NDRI had produced the world's first cloned buffalo in 2009 using a donor cell from a foetus. It survived for six days only. The second clone, which became the first surviving clone of buffalo, died after two years in 2011. Garima, which was the third cloned buffalo born on August 22, 2010 and delivered a calf in 2013. Link: http://www.ndri.res.in
2 June 2014: The sun-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2, made a successful test flight today.It is the successor of Solar Impulse, a record-breaking craft that in 2010 notched up a 26-hour flight, proving its ability to store enough power in lithium batteries during the day to keep flying at night. The goal with Solar Impulse 2 is to fly non-stop for more than 120 hours, five days and five nights, enabling it to cross the Pacific and Atlantic legs of its global mission. The operation in March 2015 will circle the globe eastwards, making numerous stops on the way. It will start in the Middle East and will head over the Arabian Sea to India, Myanmar and China, then cross the Pacific Ocean, US, the Atlantic, southern Europe and finally North Africa before returning to its point of departure. The masterminds of this project are Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist and Andre Borschberg, a pilot. Link: http://live.solarimpulse.com
3 June 2014: Google services are being disrupted in China ahead of this week's 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre which falls on tomorrow. The massacre happened on 4th June 1989 as Chinese Military with assault rifles and tanks inflicted casualties on unarmed civilians resulting in bloodshed, unprecedented in the history of Beijing. The protests were triggered in April 1989 by the death of former Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, who had voiced grievances against inflation, limited career prospects, and corruption of the party elite. University students marched and gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn and called for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the restoration of workers' control over industry. An unknown protester, who stood in front of tanks on the morning after the massacre still remains as an icon of the protest. Link: http://www.pbs.org
4 June 2014: Astronomers at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, have determined that the planet Kepler-10c, discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope back in 2011 which was thought to be a gas giant, is actually a solid, 'Mega-Earth'. The planet orbits around the star Kepler-10, in the constellation Draco, which is roughly 560 light years away from Earth. The Kepler-10 system is about 11 billion years old, which means it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Kepler-10c is so big, more than twice the size of the Earth and 17 times as heavy as Earth. The researchers initially described it as a smaller Neptune, which is the densest gaseous planet in our solar system. But, now scientists learned that Kepler-10c is a different type of planet, similar to our own. Researchers used HARPS-N telescope in the Canary Islands to pin down Kepler-10c's mass. The findings were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston, this week. Link: http://www.nasa.gov
5 June 2014: 'Glory of Allapalli', a dense forest patch in Naxal-affected Gadchiroli district, has been notified as the first biodiversity heritage site in Maharashtra under Section 37 of Biological Diversity Act, 2002, that empowers state government to notify areas of biodiversity importance as Biodiversity Heritage Sites (BHS) in consultation with local bodies. On March 28, 2013, the Maharashtra State Biodiversity Board (MSBB) in its fourth meeting had given in-principle approval to 'Glory of Allapalli' as heritage site, considering its biological, ethnical and historical value. A formal notification was issued on May 21. Considering the uniqueness of the original climax vegetation, a preservation plot was established on six hectare area in 1953 in Allapalli range of Chandrapur reserved forest division. The spot is located on Allapalli-Bhamragad state highway. Here sunrays could hardly reach the ground and grass almost absent except in a few open patches. Link: http://www.mahaforest.nic.in
6 June 2014: Spit produced by Liver Fluke which damages the human liver can be used to treat non-healing wounds, as found in Diabetes patients, a scientist has claimed. There is a very high rate of a kind of liver cancer, throughout Southeast Asia. It's caused by chronic infection with Liver Fluke, which is found in uncooked fish. One-sixth of infected people develop liver cancer, and in Thailand alone 20,000 people die of this cancer each year. By making worm 'granulin' in the laboratory, Michael Smout from James Cook university has found that it is not just a potent human cell growth stimulator, but also promotes wound healing. The molecules in the 'worm spit', secreted by the parasite, cause cells to multiply faster than that they normally would which becomes a key factor in the initiation of many cancers. Michael Smout could isolate the factor called 'granulin', that causes excessive cell growth. Now, he aims to develop treatments or a vaccine to prevent liver fluke infection. Link: http://www-public.jcu.edu.au
7 June 2014: A cheap and easy to deliver vaccine against cholera is 86 percent effective in preventing the infection which causes severe diarrhea and can be fatal. The study was the first to measure the effectiveness of a vaccine called Shanchol in response to a cholera outbreak under field conditions in Guinea.Previously, the vaccine was tested only under experimental conditions in Kolkata, India.The research in Guinea was carried out by Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) who administered more than 300,000 doses of the two-dose vaccine, during a cholera outbreak in 2012. However, it remains unknown how the long the vaccine can remain effective at room temperature. There are three cholera vaccines currently on the world market. Shanchol is less expensive ($1.85 per dose) and easier to store than Dukoral($5.25 per dose). The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Link: http://www.nejm.org
8 June 2014: A new European mission aims to rendezvous a satellite with hazardous space debris and render it harmless by netting it like fish.The European Space Agency (ESA)'s ambitious mission called e.DeOrbit would use a satellite to net space debris and remove it from low Earth orbit. The agency's Clean Space initiative is studying the e.DeOrbit mission for removing all the space debris, aiming to reduce the environmental impact of the space industry on earth and space alike.Satellite launches have left earth surrounded by a halo of space junk: more than 17,000 trackable objects larger than a coffee cup, which threaten space missions with catastrophic collision. As per ESA, even a 1cm nut could hit with the force of a hand grenade. The only way to control the debris across low orbits is to remove large items like derelict satellites and launcher upper stages. The e.DeOrbit is designed to target debris items in well-trafficked polar orbits, between 800km to 1000km altitude.Link: http://www.esa.int
9 June 2014: Kaipad rice, a variety of rice cultivated by a unique integrated organic farming method in northern parts of the state, has been registered in the Geographical Indications Registry (GIR) of the Government of India, under the Geographical Identification of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999. Kaipad method of farming is practised in the saline-prone coastal wetland rice production tracts in Ezhome panchayat of Kannur district and on the banks of Korapuzha, Chaliyar, Kallayipuzha and Poonoor in Kozhikode and Kasargod districts, during the high saline phase (November to April).The Kaipad farming system, is similar to the ‘Pokkali’ farming method. Earlier, produces like Njavara, Pokkali, and Wayanad rice varieties of Jeerakasala and Gandhakasala, Palakkadan Matta rice, Central Travancore Jaggery, Vazhakkulam pineapple, Aranmula metal mirror, Payyanoor pavitra ring, screw pine craft, Kuthampully sarees and Kasargod sarees had found place in the GI registry. Link: http://nopr.niscair.res.in
10 June 2014: Digitisation of Kerala coast being carried out by the Hydrographic Survey Wing of the Ports Department is set for completion by the year-end. Conducted primarily for purposes of coastal navigation, coastal regulation zone calculation and security of the coastal areas, the project envisages creation of Geographic Information System (GIS) maps full with overlays comprising terrain features, bathymetric details of coastal waters and photos of landmark institutions over an area of 500 metre on land from the coastline along the State’s 580-km-long coast. Maps of Alappuzha, Ernakulam and Kozhikode districts are in the final stages of preparation, while digitisation survey was over for Malappuram and Kannur districts. Coastal police, Kerala State Disaster Management Authority, Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala State Coastal Area Development Corporation, and Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment also have demanded copies of the map. Link: http://www.trinet.in
11 June 2014: Researchers at Curtin University in Western Australia looking into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have released data about an unusual underwater sound recorded around the time the plane vanished. The data came from underwater recorders off the southwest tip of Australia that are run by the United Nations’ Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation in Vienna. The scientists normally use the recorders for environmental research, such as studying whale sounds. This time, however, the data showed a signal that they initially thought might be the aircraft crashing into the ocean, an event that would have produced a low-frequency sound waves. The low-frequency sound waves were was picked up by underwater recorders on 8 March, the same day the Boeing 777 disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people. Despite a massive air and sea search, no trace of Flight 370 has been found, so far. Link: http://cmst.curtin.edu.au
12 June 2014: A British expert scientific panel gave its backing today to potential new 3-way fertility treatments that would for the first time allow genetically modified embryos to be implanted into women. The treatment is also known as three-parent in vitro fertilization (IVF), is presently illegal in Britain, because the offspring would have genes from a mother, a father and from a female donor. The "three-parent" IVF techniques are designed to help families with particular genetic faults who want to avoid passing on incurable diseases to their children. Known as 'Mitochondrial Replacement or Transfer', the methods are at the research stage in laboratories in Britain and the US and have never yet been carried out in people anywhere in the world.Mitochondrial replacement involves intervening in the fertilization process to remove faulty mitochondrial DNA, which can cause inherited conditions such as fatal heart problems, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy. Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
13 June 2014: An international team of scientists have successfully sequenced the complete genome of sheep (Ovies aries), revealing new information about the species' unique and specialised digestive and metabolic systems. Sheep, a major source of meat, milk, and fiber in the form of wool, is one of the represent animals for the ruminants, which are the dominant land herbivores. These animals have a unique digestive organ called rumen that turns plant material into a source of protein. The sequencing was done by researchers from China's Northwest A&F University, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and BGI. They screened all of the lipid metabolic pathway genes and were surprised to find that two genes known as MOGAT2 and MOGAT3 that are highly expressed in sheep skin. China raised about 300 million sheep and goats, but still imported 259,000 metric tonnes of lamb and mutton last year, accounting for about 20 percent of the world trade volume of sheep meat.Link: http://www.sciencemag.org
14 June 2014: The iconic Taj Mahal, which finds its place among the seven wonders of the world, is set to receive a 'mud-pack treatment' to restore the natural sheen of the white marble which is yellowing due to high pollution level. Due to increasing pollution in the city, the white marble of Taj Mahal is yellowing and is losing its sheen. To restore the natural look of the monument the chemical wing of the Archeological Survey of India has started preparations for a mud-pack treatment. The process is modeled on a traditional beauty cleansing treatment used by Indian women who apply 'Fuller's Earth' on their faces to retain skin's glow. The 17th century white marble mausoleum had been given this treatment three times in the past, maiden mud-pack treatment in 1994, the second one in 2001and the last such treatment was in 2008. The white-marbled domed monument was built by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan between 1632 and 1654 in memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Link: http://landarch.illinois.edu
15 June 2014: Scientists from the universities of Oxford, Strathclyde and Sheffield have found that spiders tune their silk to specific frequencies to communicate information about their prey and to check the structural integrity of the web. Monitoring the effect of soundwaves on spiders' silk was made by using tiny cameras and laser monitors. The spiders are able to pick up on the nanometre scale vibrations using organs on their legs called slit senillae, which look like small grooves on their exoskeleton. The Garden Cross Spider Araneus diadematus, was observed to be turning around on the hub and pulls at each radial thread in some sort of sequence; in response to what it 'feels' and often readjusts a tension by reconnecting the thread to the hub mesh. The findings further demonstrate the outstanding properties of many spider silks that have practical applications in the making and development of intelligent sensors and actuators, which react to heat, light, sound, motion or touch. Link: http://www.ox.ac.uk
16 June 2014: Scientists have measured a force of 42 yoctonewtons, the smallest force measured so far. A yoctonewton is one-septillionth, or 10 of a Newton.Using a combination of lasers and a unique optical trapping system that provides a cloud of ultra-cold atoms, the force has been detected by researchers at Berkeley Lab and University of California, Berkeley.Measurements of force and motion at the quantum levels bump against a barrier imposed by the Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle' when the measurement itself perturbs the measuring device, a phenomenon known as “quantum back-action”. This barrier of least possible measurement is called the Standard Quantum Limit (SQL). A wide array of strategies have been deployed to minimise quantum back-action and get ever closer to the SQL, but the best of these techniques fell short by six to eight orders of magnitude.The present measurement which is the closest ever to the SQL, is published in the journal Science. Link: http://www.sciencemag.org
17 June 2014: A new species of lizard has been discovered in the northwestern ghats of Maharashtra by four researchers from Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and Centre for Ecological Studies (CES). The species has been named Cnemaspis girii, after Dr. Varad Giri of the Bombay Natural History Society. The gecko from the genus Cnemaspis, or dwarf geckos, was discovered in the unexplored forests of the Kaas plateau in Satara district.It was first sighted by Harshad Bhosle and Zeeshan Mirza in 2010. There are around 17 Cnemaspis species found in Maharashtra. Geckos of this genus have a unique rounded pupil, unlike the cat-like eyes of other geckos. The researchers compared the newly-found gecko with the other 17 species and found no similarities, except for two. They also checked the specimens collected by the British rulers in India, in the National History Museum of London. The new finding is published in the journal Zootaxa. Link: http://biotaxa.org
18 June 2014: In a delicate maneuver conducted today from nearly 1.4 billion kilometers away, NASA scientists bounced radio waves off Saturn's moon Titan's lakes in such a way that they were received on Earth. Analysis of the signal received by the Deep Space Network (DSN) stations on Earth would reveal the nature of the lakes. The radio signals were sent from Cassini spacecraft which is currently orbiting Saturn. The radio signal emanating from it would bounce off the second largest sea on Titan, Ligeia Mare and Kraken Mare, the largest body of liquid on Titan. Cassini, launched in 1997, reached Saturn's neighborhood in 2004 and it has been studying the giant gaseous planet and its moons since then. Titan is Saturn's biggest moon and the only known natural satellite in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere. Scientists think that Titan's lakes could be made of hydrocarbons like methane or ethane in liquid form. Link: http://www.nasa.gov
19 June 2014: CERN researchers have found evidence to fall in place is the decay of Higgs boson to fermions. This discovery complements the earlier findings in which the Higgs was seen to decay into bosons such as pairs of W, Z and photons. The experimental results came from CMS and ATLAS experiments. The data came from the analysis of events in which the Higgs boson decays into tau-lepton pairs and also where the Higgs boson decays into b quark and anti-b quark pairs. These measurements find evidence for Higgs coupling by decay to fermions. In the Standard Model, the Higgs also gives mass to the fermions in addition to the weak gauge bosons. Interestingly, the observed Higgs particle has a mass less than that is predicted by the Standard Model. The Standard Model also fails to explain why the Higgs boson mass is light enough to be observed at Colliders. The finding is published in Nature Physics. Link: http://www.nature.com
20 June 2014: China's Tianhe-2 has been named the world's fastest computer for the third year in a row at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany.The Tianhe-2 was developed by China's National University of Defense Technology. Its predecessor, the Tianhe-1A, held the top spot on the supercomputer list in 2010. Of the 500 systems on the list, nearly all of them use multicore processors, and 85% running Intel processors. As for the systems themselves, 36 percent are built by HP and 33 percent by IBM. Cray builds 10percent. Overall, the United States has by far the most supercomputers out of the top 500 systems Overall, with China in a distant second; the UK, France and Germany lagging far behind. Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers. Link: http://www.top500.org
21 June 2014: India has developed the world’s second largest gamma ray telescope. The MACE (Major Atmospheric Cherenkov Experiment) telescope was designed by State-owned Electronics Corporation of India Ltd in Hyderabad. The 45 m high and 180 tonne mammoth structure will begin its journey today to the high altitude Hanle region in Ladakh, where it will be finally be installed. This will be the fourth gamma ray telescope in the world. The largest such telescope built by a consortium of European countries with a diameter of 28 m is currently in operation in Namibia. India’s is the second largest with a diameter of 21m. The other two gama ray telescope are located in Spain and the US. Unlike the other three, the Indian telescope is totally built indigenously, with designs supplied by BARC. MACE has over 1,300 specialised diamond-turned mirrors that can capture gamma rays. It will be operational by early 2016. Link: http://www.barc.gov.in
22 June 2014: The same way we need values to measure everything from temperature to time, astronomers have now developed a new stellar scale to help them classify and compare data on star discoveries. Previously, as with the longitude problem 300 years earlier for fixing locations on earth, there was no unified system of reference for calibrating the heavens. The astronomers selected 34 initial 'benchmark' stars to represent the different kinds of stellar populations in our galaxy, such as hot stars, cold stars, red giants and dwarfs, as well as stars with different chemical patterns in their spectrum. This detailed range of information on the 34 stars form the first value set for measuring the millions of stars that the Gaia satellite, an unmanned space observatory of the European Space Agency, aims to catalogue. Many of the benchmark stars can be seen with the human eye, and have been studied for most of human history. The study appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Link: http://www.aanda.org
23 June 2014:The latest order by the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) to stop feeding hormones and antibiotics to poultry birds and animals has boosted the efforts of animal welfare activists to also stop the use of cruel battery cages. The Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations (FIAPO) has now appealed before the Bombay high court to completely ban the horrid battery cages in which the hens are confined throughout their lives, and forced to lay eggs till they are ultimately killed for meat. Curiously, while 23 states in India have expressed intent to phase out battery cages by 2017, Maharashtra, which is one of the leading egg producers in India is yet to respond to an Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) and Government of India directive asking for battery cages to be phased out. Earlier this year, Punjab and Haryana are the latest states to agree in principle to abolish battery cages. India is the third largest egg producing country (46.17 billion eggs in 2005-06). Link: http://www.fiapo.org
24 June 2014: Today, on June 24, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover completes one Martian year, 687 Earth days, on the Red Planet. Launched in November 2011 from Florida, US, the 3 meter long laboratory-on-wheels landed on Mars in August 2012. Since then it has been busy trundling around on its special wheels, collecting rock and mud samples from the dusty Martian surface.One of Curiosity's first major findings was in an ancient riverbed at its landing site, Yellowknife Bay, where analysis of samples revealed the site was once a lake-bed with mild water, the essential elemental ingredients for life. Till now, Curiosity has clocked up 7.9 kilometers of travel on the Mars surface. Wheel damage in late 2013 prompted mission control to adjust its travel routes so that further damage is minimized. Curiosity is now heading westward towards the lower slopes of Mount Sharp. At Mount Sharp, the mission team will seek conditions that favored preservation of clues to life existed there. Link: http://mars.nasa.gov
25 June 2014: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first spacewalk by a woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, cosmonaut sent by the former Soviet Union. She became the first woman to perform a space walk on July 25, 1984. She conducted an EVA outside the Salyut 7 space station for 3 hours 35 minutes during which she cut and welded metals in space along with her colleague Vladimir Dzhanibekov. Of the 57 Soviet/Russian spacewalkers through 2010, she is the only female. Born in Moscow in 1948, her father was a Soviet air commander and her lifelong dream was to follow him into flight. She began to train secretly as a parachutist and then became an aerobatics expert; the British press dubbed her Miss Sensation. In 1962, NASA sent a rejection letter, telling a woman who wanted to be an astronaut. Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space the following year. Savitskaya was one of five cosmonauts selected to raise the Russian flag at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Link: http://voiceofrussia.com
26 June 2014: Astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized 'diamond' about 900 light-years away in space, which is possibly the coldest, faintest white dwarf star ever detected. This ancient stellar remnant is so cool that its carbon has crystallised, forming, in effect, an Earth-size diamond in space. The object is likely the same age as the Milky Way, approximately 11 billion years old. White dwarfs are very dense end-states of stars like our Sun that have collapsed to form an object approximately the size of Earth. The pulsar companion to this white dwarf, dubbed PSR J2222-0137, was the first object in this system to be detected. It was found using the GBT by Jason Boyles, then a graduate student at West Virginia University in Morgantown. As neutron stars spin, beams of radio waves, streaming from the poles sweep through space. When one of these beams sweeps across Earth, radio telescopes can capture it as radio waves. Link: http://adsabs.harvard.edu
27 June 2014: In a major breakthrough for astronomers in their search for gravitational waves as predicted by Einstein, scientists have discovered three closely orbiting super massive black holes in a galaxy more than four billion light years away. General Relativity predicts that merging black holes are sources of Gravitational Waves. Examining six systems thought to contain two super massive black holes, the researchers found that one of them contained three super massive black holes, the tightest trio of black holes detected at such a large distance. Currently, very little is known about black hole systems that are so close to one another. The team used a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to discover the inner two black holes of the triple system. VLBI combines the signals from large radio antennae separated by up to 10,000 km to see detail 50 times finer than that possible with the Hubble Space Telescope. The study appeared in the journal Nature. Link: http://www.nature.com
28 June 2014: Antibiotic resistance has been voted as the deadliest threat of our times. The theme has won the £10 million prize - the Longitude Prize 2014 set up to tackle a major challenge of our time. Scientists will now use the £10 million prize fund to make antibiotics lethal again. The prize marks the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act where in 1714 the British government set out the scientific challenge of how to pinpoint a ship's location at sea. This was solved by watchmaker John Harrison who designed the chronometer, the first seafaring clock that allowed accurate navigation. The solution not only led to safer sea travel but opened up global trade. The prize was run and developed by Nesta with the Technology Strategy Board. When antibiotics were first introduced in the 1940s, they were hailed as 'wonder drugs'. But now, the World Health Organisation warns that the world is staring at a post-antibiotic era when common infections will no longer have a cure. Link: http://www.longitudeprize.org
29 June 2014: Scientists have used a gene identified in fruit flies to discover a crucial component of the origin of language in humans. Considered by some as 'operant learning', the evolution of language in humans, is a multi-tiered trait involves many genes and modification of an individual's behaviour by trial and error. Now, using a gene identified in fruit flies by a University of Missouri researcher, scientists involved in a global consortium have discovered a crucial component of the origin of language in humans. The researchers studied the Forkhead Box P (FoxP) gene in fruit fly which is very similar to the human version of the Forkhead Box P (FoxP) gene in which the FoxP gene had been modified. In a learning experiment that comes as close to simulating human language learning as possible, flies had to try different movements with their flight muscles in a custom-built flight simulator to learn where to fly and where not to fly. The study is published in PLOS One. Link: http://www.plosone.org
30 June 2014: Today was the 10th anniversary of the spacecraft Cassini's arrival in Saturn's system of rings and moons. But to make that 2.2-billion-mile journey from Earth, Cassini had to launch on October 15, 1997. So really it's been 17 great years. The International Space Station and the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity all launched after Cassini did. Yet Cassini is still in working order, and still sends data and images back to Earth. Data from Cassini have taught astronomers that several of Saturn's moons have chemistry that is amenable to life. That's expanded science's understanding of where life could thrive in the solar system. Cassini's instruments have also revealed more about Saturn itself, snapping images of its enormous hurricanes and sampling the composition of its rings. Just a few months ago, astronomers used Cassini data to build more evidence that the Saturnian moon Enceladus likely has a subterranean sea. The honor of Cassini is also highlighted by the images it sent. Link:http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
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