2 October 2014: Researchers from University of Chicago have sequenced the genome of Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Only the monarchs from North America migrate, in the rest of the world they settle down in one area. The monarch’s current worldwide distribution appears to stem from three separate dispersal events, to Central and South America, across the Atlantic, and across the Pacific. In all three cases, the butterfly independently lost its migratory behavior. In studying that migratory behavior, the scientists identified more than 500 genes. The researchers also investigated the genetic basis for the monarch’s famous coloration. Comparing the genomes of these butterflies, the team discovered that a single gene which codes for a protein called myosin, that was never been implicated in insect coloration. The study is published in Nature. Link: http://www.nature.com
3 October 2014: Scientists from Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany, Lucknow and American Museum of Natural History, have chanced upon a 52-million-year-old amber encased fossil of a beetle from Gujarat, providing oldest known example of social parasitism among insects. Named Protoclaviger trichodens, the fossil was discovered from Tadkeshwar lignite mine in Gujarat. The fossil found among a colony of ants, is said to be the oldest-known example of this kind of social parasitism, known as 'myrmecophily' where a predator lives within the colony of ants thriving on their resources and eggs. The scientists suggest that although fossils is similar to modern Clavigeritae beetles some of its characteristics are clearly more primitive. There are 370 recorded species of these ant-loving parasite beetles across the world. The findings published in Current Biology. Link: http://www.zsl.org
4 October 2014: There has been a scientific evidence to suggest that life can continue after death, according to the largest ever medical study carried out on the subject. A team based in the UK has spent the last four years seeking out cardiac arrest patients to analyse their experiences, and found that almost 40 per cent of survivors described having some form of "awareness" at a time when they were declared clinically dead. Experts currently believe that the brain shuts down within 20 to 30 seconds of the heart stopping beating and that it is not possible to be aware of anything at all once that has happened. The study involved 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria, and the researchers say that the patients experienced real events for up to three minutes after death and could recall them. The results are published in the Resuscitation journal. Link: http://www.resuscitationjournal.com
5 October 2014: In a major breakthrough, scientists at Princeton University have observed an exotic particle that behaves simultaneously like matter and antimatter. Using a two-story-tall microscope, the scientists captured a glowing image of a particle known as a ‘Majorana Fermion’, just where it had been predicted after decades of study. In 1937, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana predicted that a single, stable particle could be both matter and antimatter. Despite combining qualities usually thought to annihilate each other, matter and antimatter, the Majorana fermion is surprisingly stable; rather than being destructive, the conflicting properties render the particle neutral, so that it interacts very weakly with its environment. Although many forms of anti-matter have since been observed, the Majorana combination remained elusive. The findings appeared in Science. Link: http://www.sciencemag.org
6 October 2014:The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to John O´Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.Their work, which collectively spans four decades, revealed the existence of nerve cells that build up a map of the space around us and then track our progress as we move around. John O’Keefe, a US-British citizen at University College London, received half of the award. The remaining half of the prize was shared by May-Britt Moser and her husband, Edvard who work at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. May-Britt Moser is only the 11th woman to have won the medicine prize since it was first awarded in 1901. But rarer still are Nobel laureate couples: the Mosers are only the fifth to have won the Nobel prize. Link: http://www.nobelprize.org
7 October 2014: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award this year’s Nobel prize in Physics to three Japanese-born scientists, Isamu Akasaki from Meijo University, Hiroshi Amano from the Nagoya University, Japan and Shuji Nakamura from the University of California "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". The Nobel laureates have been rewarded for having invented the blue light-emitting diode (LED). As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. The LED lamp holds great promise the life of over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity. Aka-saki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Che-micals, a small company in Tokushima. Link: http://www.nobelprize.org
8 October 2014: The Nobel prize in chemistry for this year has been awarded to Eric Betzig from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Stefan W Hell from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen and William E Moerner from the University of Stanford. In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Helped by fluorescent molecules, the Nobel laureates ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Scientists achieved this through 'nanoscopy' by two methods. One is the Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell, in 2000. The other method is known as ‘single molecule microscopy’, developed by Eric Betzig and William Moerner, working separately. These findings together could yields an image at the nanolevel. Link:http://www.nobelprize.org
9 October 2014: Over 30 years after it first emerged and has since infected over 75 million people, scientists from University of Oxford have finally pinpointed from where exactly HIV emerged. The breakthrough was possible due to a new, sophisticated analysis of hundreds of genetic sequences of HIV from different time points and locations. A genetic analysis of thousands of individual viruses has confirmed that HIV first emerged in Kinshasa, the capital of the Belgian Congo, in about 1920 from where it spread and then to other parts of central Africa. Scientists have nailed the origin of the AIDS pandemic to a colonial-era city, then called Leopoldville which was then the biggest urban centre in Central. By the 1960s, transport systems such as the railways enabled the virus to seeds the pandemic across Africa and beyond. Over one million people were travelling throgh railways then. Link: http://www.ox.ac.uk
10 October 2014: A NASA-backed study is exploring the feasibility of lowering the cost of a human expedition to Mars by putting the astronauts in deep sleep. The deep sleep, called torpor, would reduce astronauts' metabolic functions with existing medical procedures. Therapeutic torpor has been around in theory since the 1980s and really since 2003 has been a staple for critical care trauma patients in hospitals. So far, the duration of a patient's time in torpor state has been limited to about one week. Coupled with intravenous feeding, a crew could be put in hibernation for the transit time to Mars, which under the best-case scenario would take 180 days one-way. The study found a five-fold reduction in the amount of pressurised volume need for a hibernating crew and a three-fold reduction in the total amount of mass required, including food and water. Link: http://www.sei.aero
11 October 2014: India along with Japan, the US, China and Canada will start work on the world's biggest telescope on Hawaii Island that will enable to identify an object as small as coin from a distance of 500km. The Thirty-Meter Telescope, or TMT, will be established near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano with a cost of $1.4 billion. They plan to complete the construction in March 2022. Japan will cover about a quarter of the construction costs. To mark the start of construction, some 100 astronomers and officials from the five countries were scheduled to attend a ceremony to be held at a location 4,012 meters high on Mount Mauna Kea.The TMT will be larger than Japan's Subaru Telescope, one of the world's biggest, which was also built on the summit of Mauna Kea. The TMT will help to identify planets outside the solar system that are capable of supporting life. Link: http://www.tmt.org
12 October 2014: Bio-cremations, a practice that ensures that the human body is turned into a liquid and not into ashes is all set to be legalized across parts of Europe. At present, the only legal way to cremate the dead in the continent is to exhume the body or bury it. Belgium and the Netherlands are contemplating allowing the mass use of bio cremations which at present has only been legalized recently in the US and Canada. The Bio Cremation technology replaces the use of flame with the utilization of water, blended with an alkali solution of potassium hydroxide (KOH) and the process is also known as chemical hydrolysis. In 2011, a Florida funeral home became the first in the world to perform a bio cremation and since then, over 3,000 people in the US have chosen the procedure. Bio cremation uses less energy and releases less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Link:http://biocremationinfo.com
13 October 2014: NASA is exploring the idea of mining the moon to provide drinking water for future manned outposts when humans are successful in colonizing the lunar surface. The US space agency is developing two separate mission concepts to assess, and learn how to exploit, stores of water ice on the moon and other lunar resources. The missions, called Lunar Flashlight and the Resource Prospector Mission, are scheduled to launch in 2017 and 2018, respectively. The Lunar Flashlight probe would measure and map deposits of water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. Such deposits could provide drinking water for potential manned lunar outposts. Moon water could also be split into hydrogen and oxygen, the prime components of rocket fuel. The Resource Prospector Mission also plans to send a rover onto the lunar surface. Link: http://www.hems-workshop.org
14 October 2014: Scientists have sequenced the genome of the House Fly (Musca domestica). From insights into pathogen immunity, to pest control and decomposing waste, the 691 Mb genome has been sequenced and analyzed by a global consortium of scientists. The genome highlights detoxification and immune system genes that are unique to the insect, and could be subjects of further study to help humans deal with toxic and disease causing environments. The house fly lives on human and animal waste. They are an important species for scientific study because of their roles as waste decomposers and as carriers of more than 100 human diseases, including typhoid and tuberculosis. The consortium of scientists sequenced the genomes of six female houseflies, creating a 691 Mb long sequence. The study is published in the journal Genome Biology. Link: http://genomebiology.com
15 October 2014: India launched its third navigation satellite today morning from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre with a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) successfully carrying the IRNSS-1C satellite on the first leg of its journey towards geostationary orbit. IRNSS-1C forms part of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), a constellation of geosynchronous satellites which the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has been deploying to provide navigation data to India and the surrounding region. The first satellite, IRNSS-1A, was launched last July with the seven-satellite constellation scheduled for completion by the end of 2015. IRNSS-1C is the first geostationary satellite in the IRNSS system. Today’s launch was the twenty-eighth for the PSLV, with the flight number for the IRNSS-1C launch being C26. Link: http://www.sac.gov.in
16 October 2014: Mangalyaan (Mars Orbiter Mission-MOM) observed the comet ‘Siding Spring’ when it flew past the Red Planet around, today midnight. The duration between the comet's arrival and departure was approximately one-and-a-half hours. Mangalyaan's instrument by name ‘Methane Sensor for Mars’ checked for presence of Methane on ‘Siding Spring’, which travelled at a velocity of 56km/second relative to the planet. At its closest approach ‘Siding Spring’ came within 1,32,000km of the Red Planet, which is about a third of the distance between Earth and moon. ‘Siding Spring’ was discovered by Robert H McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia on January 3, 2013. The comet's mass is equivalent to about 70,000 Eiffel Towers in Paris. Mangalyaan and NASA's Maven are expected to exchange data regarding the comet. Link:http://mars.nasa.gov
17 October 2014: India-born Mexican scientist, Sanjaya Rajaram, has been presented with the prestigious World Food Prize 2014 for his agricultural research that led to a remarkable increase in world wheat production, building on the successes of the Green Revolution. By crossing winter and spring wheat varieties, he created wheat varieties that are disease- and stress-resistant and adaptable to diverse geographical regions and climates. Now a citizen of Mexico, Rajaram conducted the majority of his research in Mexico at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT). His work there led to a prodigious increase in world wheat production by more than 200 million tons during the 25-year-period known as the "golden years of wheat", amounting to Green Revolution. In 2007, Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, had called Rajaram “the greatest present-day wheat scientist in the world”.Link: http://www.worldfoodprize.org
18 October 2014: Although some kelp beds are vast enough to be visible from space, scientists lack long-term data on these forests of seaweed and how their abundance has changed over time. Researchers from the Kelp Ecosystem Ecology Network, the Santa Barbara Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research Project and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis have designed a citizen science project called 'Floating Forests' to help. The website that relies on volunteers to search through images taken over the last 30 years by NASA’s Landsat satellites and identify kelp beds. Sometimes clouds obscure the view and many pictures go by with no sign of kelp. Marked images will help scientists monitor kelp, which serve as both food and home for marine creatures. The data may also offer insights into how ocean circulation affects the seaweed. Link: http://www.floatingforests.org
19 October 2014: In a big blow to plans of colonizing the Red planet, scientists have confirmed that humans won't last more than 68 days in Mars with present day technology. Researchers have said that an oppressive environment would suffocate the first settler within an estimated 68 days. The MIT researchers developed a detailed settlement-analysis tool to assess the feasibility of the Mars One mission and found that new technologies will be needed to keep humans alive on Mars. For example, if all food is obtained from locally grown crops, as Mars One envisions, the vegetation would produce unsafe levels of oxygen, which would set off a series of events that would eventually cause human inhabitants to suffocate. To avoid this scenario, a system to remove excess oxygen would have to be implemented, a technology that has not yet been developed for use in space. Link: http://www.space.com
20 October 2014: Astronomers have discovered a new planet that resembles our own Uranus in a binary star system 25,000 light-years away. This is the first time anyone has spotted a twin for our so-called "ice giant" planets, Uranus and Neptune. While Uranus and Neptune are mostly composed of hydrogen and helium, they both contain significant amounts of methane ice, which gives them their bluish appearance. As the newly discovered planet is so far away, astronomers can't tell anything about its composition. But its distance from its star suggests that it's an ice giant. The newly discovered planet leads a turbulent existence: it orbits one star in a binary star system, with the other star close enough to disturb the planet's orbit. The binary star system lies in our Milky Way galaxy, in the direction of Sagittarius. The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal. Link:http://iopscience.iop.org
21 October 2014: Chinese and American researchers have successfully used cloud computing to link robots with very different specifications in the two nations to communicate with each other and work together. Using Internet-based computing in which remote servers are networked to share information, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University have tested how robots with very different specifications can communicate with each other and work together. Hefei-based ‘KeJia’ can understand human language and has reasoning abilities, while Pittsburgh-based ‘CoBot’ is good at analysing large and complex sets of data. ‘Kejia’ can work as a tour guide and house keeper. By allowing different robots to connect with the cloud to share knowledge and skills, robots can be made more efficient and cheaper to operate. Link:http://fei.edu.br
22 October 2014: Scientists at an Italian institute have set a world record of the lowest temperature ever achieved in the universe. They cooled a copper vessel with a volume of one cubic meter to -273.144 degrees celsius. The cooled copper mass, weighing approximately 400 kg, was the coldest cubic meter in the universe for over 15 days. This is stunningly close to 'absolute zero', which is equal to -273.15 degrees celsius or zero on the Kelvin scale, named after William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin. Theoretical physics says that temperature can never go below this limit. The experiment was carried out under the CUORE collaboration (which stands for Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) located at the National Nuclear Physics Institute's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. CUORE involves some 130 scientists mainly from Italy, USA, China, Spain, and France. Link:http://arxiv.org
23 October 2014: Ebola's evolutionary roots more ancient than previously thought, the study at University of Buffalo has found. The family of viruses housing Ebola and Marburg is ancient, and the two viruses last shared a common ancestor millions of years ago. The research shows that filoviruses, a family to which Ebola and its similarly lethal relative, Marburg, belong are at least 16-23 million years old. Filo viruses likely existed in the Miocene Epoch, and at that time, the evolutionary lines leading to Ebola and Marburg had already diverged. The research however does not address the age of the modern-day Ebolavirus. The first Ebola outbreak in humans occurred in 1976, and scientists still know little about the virus' history. The same dearth of information applies to Marburg, which was recognized in 1967 and implicated in the death of a Ugandan health worker. Link:http://www.sciencedaily.com
24 October 2014: Two tablespoons of blood are all that is needed to grow a brand new blood vessel in just seven days. This is shown in a new study from Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Sahlgrenska University Hospital. Just three years ago, a patient at Sahlgrenska University Hospital had received a blood vessel transplant grown from her own stem cells. Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, professor of transplantation biology at Sahlgrenska Academy, and Michael Olausson, medical director of the Transplant Center and professor at Sahlgrenska Academy, came up with the idea and carried out the procedure. Sumitran-Holgersson and Olausson have published a new study based on two other transplants which were performed in 2012 at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. Olausson and Sumitran-Holgersson have treated three patients so far. Link:http://www.surgery.gu.se
25 October 2014: A team of researchers from India and Sri Lanka has discovered seven new species of golden-backed frogs in the Western Ghats-Sri Lanka global biodiversity hotspot, throwing new light on the highly distinct and diverse fauna in the two countries. The findings show that the frogs in Sri Lanka and those in India belong to distinctly different species. It was earlier believed that some of the golden-backed frogs (Genus Hylarana) found in the two countries were of the same species. The team, led by Delhi University’s Prof. S.D. Biju yielded 14 distinct golden-backed frogs, with seven new species, including one (Hylarana serendipi) from Sri Lanka. Interestingly, one of the newly-named species, Hylarana urbis, is from Kochi, Kerala, India and is under threat due to human activity. The findings are published in the journal, Contributions to Zoology. Link: http://www.contributionstozoology.nl
26 October 2014: People who are born in aggressive environments may pass on traits that make it more likely for future generations to react to certain situations in a violent manner, found a research, underscoring how culture could affect biology. Those who grow up in a violent culture may have more of a tendency to respond with aggression in the future. As per Pete Hatemi, associate professor of political science from the Pennsylvania State University, the way culture can affect gene expressions in future generations is often harder to show and may take longer to reveal itself. One obvious way to see how culture affects natural selection is the effect that politically inspired atrocities, for example, the Nazi Holocaust and Communist purges in China have a base on genetic diversity. The study appeared in Advances in Political Psychology. Link: http://www.ispp.org
27 October 2014: The Malabar Botanical Garden (MBG) got a boost towards becoming a premier centre for research in aquatic plant diversity with the institution getting upgraded into a constituent Research and Development Centre under the Kerala State Council for Science Technology and Environment (KSCSTE). The decision was taken at the meeting of the governing council of the Malabar Botanical Garden Society. Consequently the name of the institution will be changed into Malabar Botanical Garden and Institute of Plant Sciences. Malabar Botanical Garden, located on 40 acres of land at Olavanna in the district, has a rich collection of over 3,000 plant species, 400 medicinal plants, over 250 aquatic plants, 35 orchid species, 35 RET species, over 40 fern species, 10 gymnosperms, 20 palm species, 10 mangrove associates, 40 species of xerophytes and 15 bonsai species etc. Link:http://mbgs.in
28 October 2014: Today is the 100th birth anniversary of Jonas Salk, the man who developed the first vaccine against polio. Salk developed it in 1954 while he was at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, registered a success rate of only 60 to 90 percent. Yet the annual incidence of polio in the U.S. quickly and dramatically fell from tens of thousands of cases to a few dozen in only a few years. The initial Salk vaccine, a ‘killed-virus’ version, was replaced within a few years by a ‘live-virus’ formulation developed by Albert Sabin of the University of Cincinnati. Since 2000, however, an updated version of the Salk vaccine, safer than the Sabin version, has been the only one given in the U.S. to prevent polio. Salk never patented his discovery. His article, ‘Vaccines For Poliomyelitis’, can be found in Scientific American dated April 1955. Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com
29 October 2014: An unmanned supply rocket bound for the International Space Station has exploded shortly after its launch from the US state of Virginia. Antares, built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, combusted seconds after leaving the seaside launch pad at Wallops Flight Facility. The flight was expected to be the third contracted mission with NASA. The rocket was due to carry nearly 2,200kgs of supplies to six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). At the same time, Russia's space agency conducted its own launch to the ISS on the same day. The AJ-26 engines used to lift the rocket away from the pad, are actually modified Russian-built power units that were originally developed for the ill-fated Soviet Moon rocket, the N-1. The incident is a major setback for Orbital Corp, and its plans to market Antares as a commercial launcher. Link:https://www.orbital.com
30 October 2014: China launched 'Chang'e-5-T1', the spacecraft that will act as a precursor for a robotic lunar sample return mission and perhaps also help prepare for subsequent manned exploration of the Moon. The spacecraft’s trajectory sends it swinging around the Moon before heading back to Earth. China embarked on lunar exploration with the launch in 2007 of Chang'e-1, a probe that imaged the Moon from orbit. Chang'e-2, another orbiter, followed three years later. Last December, the Chang'e-3 successfully put a lander and a small rover on the lunar surface; a malfunction, however, left the rover unable to move around soon afterwards. The current eight-day mission, which some analysts have called 'Chang'e-5-T1', is intended to test technologies for re-entry, needed for ‘Chang'e-5’. The re-entry module looks like a scaled down version of the one in Shenzhou. Link:http://moon.luxspace.lu
31 October 2014: This month marks the 30th anniversary of the first ‘Terminator’ movie. It made Arnold Schwarzenegger into a superstar, culminating in his career as the governor of California which also gave him the nickname: ‘Governorator’! The story of ‘Terminator’ was written by James Cameron and the film's producer Gale Anne Hurd in which Schwarzenegger played the role of ‘Terminator’, a cyborg assassin sent back in time from the year 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. When first released in 1984, ‘Terminator’ was not expected to be a commercial success, but it topped the American box office for two weeks. In 2008, ‘The Terminator’ was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the American National Film Registry. Arnold was born in Austria on July 30, 1947 and served two terms as Governor of California. Link:http://www.theterminatorfans.com
