2 November, 2015: Scientists have for the first time detected oxygen on a comet, a finding that could upend theories about how the solar system was formed. The international team detected “a lot” of molecular oxygen in the cloud of gas, or coma, surrounding the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. While molecular oxygen has been found in Jupiter and Saturn, it’s never been found on a comet. The neutral gas comas of most comets are composed largely of water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The researchers consider two theories: either the oxygen was in the gaseous phase or the oxygen was built onto the icy grains. Ever since the Philae probe landed on the comet in November, scientists have collected extensive data through the Rosetta spacecraft orbiting it, suggesting, the comet may host alien life. The findings are reported in Nature. Link: http://www.nature.com
3 November, 2015: The cloned camel, named Injaz (Arabic for "achievement"), gave birth to a healthy female calf weighing about 38kg. The announcement was made by the Reproductive Biotechnology Centre, established under the patronage of Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai. Injaz had conceived naturally and delivered the calf after completing the normal gestation period. This proves that cloned camels are fertile and can reproduce like other camels. Injaz was cloned using ovarian cells of a camel and was applauded as a great scientific achievement throughout the world scientific community. According to Director of the Centre, many camels have been cloned in successive years using cells from the skin of animals. Bin Soughan was the world’s first camel calf cloned from skin cells of an “elite bull” in 2010. Link: http://www.abc.ae
5 November, 2015: A rare mental illness can make the sufferer believe they are dead, partly dead or do not exist. Cotard's syndrome, sometimes dubbed 'Walking Corpse syndrome', is a condition where patients believe they are dead, parts of their body are dead or that they do not exist. It is not classified under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) but is recognised as a "disease of human health" in the International Classification of Diseases. Cotard's syndrome is a type of delusion that is usually associated with denial of self-existence. The person experiencing the delusion might believe that they are dead, dying, parts of their body do not exist or they do not need to do activities to keep themselves alive like drinking, eating and keeping basic hygiene etc. French neurologist Jules Cotard identified the first case in the 1800s. Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
6 November, 2015: With the demand for milk in India projected to reach 200 million tons by 2021-22, the country's premier dairy research institute is looking at cloning as a strategy to boost the population of high-yielding, elite variety of buffaloes. The National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal had cloned the world's first buffalo in 2009, and repeated the experiment over the years. The 11th such calf, named Swarupa, was born last month using an advanced "hand-guided cloning technique". Scientists had used a donor cell from the ear of an adult buffalo named Karan Kirti to facilitate the faster multiplication of elite germplasm. This process may go a long way in increasing the number of superior milch buffaloes in India. Karan Kirti, with a peak yield of 25.1kg. holds a record at the institute. So, Swarupa too will be growing into a high-yielding elite variety. Link: http://ndri.res.in
7 November, 2015: Researchers from the University in Beijing have found a biological compass needle in fruit-flies that can align with Earth’s weak magnetic field. Many organisms, ranging from whales to butterflies, and termites to pigeons, use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate or orient themselves in space. Some rearchers have pointed to magnetically sensitive proteins called ‘cryptochromes’, or ‘Cry’. The researchers also found that fruit flies lacking the proteins lose their sensitivity to magnetic fields. But they also found that Cry proteins alone cannot act as a compass, but another protein that both binds to iron and interacts with Cry. Known as CG8198, it together with Cry, forms a nanoscale ‘needle’: a rod-like core of CG8198 acting as a biological compass in fruit-flies. The finding is reported in a paper published on Nature Materials. Link: http://dx.doi.org
8 November, 2015: The collaboration between NASA and ISRO began in 2005 with the Chandrayaan-I mission where an eight-kilogram Moon Mineralogy mapper from NASA accompanied the mission, resulting in "joint-discovery" of water on moon. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission will be the biggest collaboration between the two space agencies yet. The mission involves building a 2,600 kg satellite that will look on disturbances in the ecosystem and natural hazards. In 2011, NASA was thinking of making the mission by itself or in collaboration with Germany or Canada. ISRO will be providing the ‘spacecraft bus’, S-band SAR payload and the launch vehicle, while NASA will be providing the L-band SAR and the engineering payload which will cost over USD one billion. It is expected to be launched in 2020. Link: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
9 November 2015: In a breakthrough, scientists have developed the world's first 'porous' liquid that can potentially be used to capture harmful carbon emissions to prevent them from entering the Earth's atmosphere. Researchers at Queen's University Belfast in UK, along with colleagues at the University of Liverpool and other international partners, invented the new liquid and found that it can dissolve unusually large amount of gas, which are absorbed into the `holes' in the liquid. The research could pave the way for many more efficient and greener chemical processes, including the procedure known as 'Carbon capture' -trapping carbon dioxide from major sources, for example a fossil-fuel power plant, and storing it to prevent its entry into the atmosphere. What the researchers have done is to design a special liquid from the 'bottom-up' -we designed the shapes of the molecules which make up the liquid so that the liquid could not fill up all the space. Link: http://www.qub.ac.uk
10 November 2015: India's latest communication satellite GSAT-15 was launched on board Arianespace rocket from the space port of Kourou in French Guiana, today morning. The launch of GSAT-15 with its co-passenger Arabsat-6B for Arabsat, Saudi Arabia is by Ariane-5 VA-227 launch vehicle. Weighing 3,164 kg at lift-off, GSAT-15 is a high power satellite being inducted into the INSAT/GSAT system. It carries a total of 24 communication transponders in Ku-band as well as a GPS-Aided GEO Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) payload operating in L1 and L5 bands. GSAT-15 is the third satellite to carry GAGAN payload after GSAT-8 and GSAT-10, which are already providing navigation services. GSAT-15 will be the 19th payload launched by Arianespace for ISRO. Arabsat-6B, to be renamed BADR-7, will be the ninth satellite by Arianespace for use by the operator Arabsat, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Link: http://www.isro.gov.in
11 November 2015: A team of astronomers working at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics has discovered an extremely rare galaxy of gigantic size. This galaxy, located about nine billion light years away, emits powerful radio waves, the researchers found. Such galaxies with extremely large 'radio size' are called giant radio galaxies. This newly discovered galaxy known by its scientific identification 'J021659-044920' was discovered using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), near Narayangaon town of Pune district. This project was led by Prathamesh Tamhane from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER-Pune) working under the supervision of Yogesh Wadadekar at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics. While radio galaxies with size less than a million light years are common, giant radio galaxies are extremely rare. The findings are detailed in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Link: http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org
12 November 2015: Plants release chemical poisons to destroy neighbouring plants in their bid for more space and sunlight, new research by a team of German and French scientists has shown. The existence of this chemical warfare, referred to as 'allelopathy', is widespread among many plant species, and has been known for a long time to scientists and agriculturists. But what had remained a mystery was how this strategy works. Work by Sascha Venturelli of the University of Tubingen, Germany and colleagues now sheds light on the inner workings of this plant chemical warfare. The scientists investigated the role a chemicals known as DIBOA and DIMBOA. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the scientists found that inhibition of histone deacetylases by the plant toxins lead to more histone acetylation and an increase in gene expression, ultimately causing plant growth to slow down. The study thus not only presents the first molecular mechanism for allelopathy, but also illustrates how environmental toxins can alter chromatin structure and gene expression. Link:http://www.plantcell.org
13 November 2015: Researchers have found that monkeys which commonly dwell with people in Asia can harbour variants of a type of virus which can cause infectious gastroenteritis or diarrhoea in humans. Knowing that non-human primates can harbour diverse astroviruses highlights the importance of continued monitoring, particularly in countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia, where macaques and humans live side-by-side. It is still unknown whether these viruses are two-way and can be transmitted to humans from monkeys. Astroviruses are most commonly associated with diarrheoa. They can also cause clinical diseases such as nephritis, hepatitis and encephalitis. In this study of 879 samples of primate feces, 68 (7.7 percent) were positive for astroviruses. The majority of the positive samples (72 percent) were 79-100 percent similar to astroviruses associated with human infections. The team also collected blood samples, which confirmed that more than 25 % of monkeys had been infected with human astroviruses. The study is published in PLOS Pathogens. Link:http://www.plantcell.org
14 November 2015: The next revolution in space, what was long the special preserve of tax-funded giants like NASA, will be launching next year from a paddock in New Zealand's remote South Island. The rocket launch range is not just New Zealand's first of any kind, but also the world's first private launch range, and the rocket, designed by Rocket Lab, one of a growing number of businesses aiming to slash the cost of getting into space, will be powered by a 3D-printed rocket engine, another first. The 16-metre carbon-cased rocket will weigh just 1,190 kilogrammes, and with fuel and payload will be only about a third the weight of SpaceX's Falcon-1, the first privately developed launch vehicle to go into orbit back in 2008.Ships and planes need re-routing every time a rocket is launched, which limits opportunities in crowded US skies, but New Zealand, a country of 4 million people in the South Pacific, has only Antarctica to its south. Rocket Lab is aiming to launch from around 2018. Link: https://www.rocketlabusa.com
15 November 2015: The Manila Observatory is celebrating its sesquicentennial year as the first scientific institution in the Philippines. The Manila Observatory was founded in 1885 by the Society of Jesus in the Philippines. In 1887, Martin Juan, SJ was the first to measure the geomagnetic field in Mindanao and Palawan. Meanwhile, in 1895, Miguel Saderra Maso, SJ made the first atlas of Philippine quakes and tremors. Four years later, Jose Algue, SJ became the first to view the stars over the Philippines. It is considered as the 'grandfather' of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA). From 1884 to 1945, the Manila Observatory served as the Philippine Weather Bureau and as an international time station. After World War II, the Philippine government decided to create its own weather bureau outside the MO, thus creating PAGASA in 1972 and PHIVOLCS in 1982.Link: http://www.observatory.ph
16 November, 2015: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year with some very high-tech decorations. Today, a slew of superpowerful projectors will turn the many facades of the organization's headquarters in Paris into a giant digital photo album. Over the weekend, several new images were added to the photo rotation in light of the terrorist attacks that took place in Paris, the French capital on November 13. The word "peace" will appear on the side of UNESCO headquarters in six different languages. Nearly 200 countries participate in UNESCO-sponsored activities and programs, which include international science programs, as well as the founding of natural World Heritage Sites, such as Great Himalayan National Park in India and Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Link: http://en.unesco.org
17 November, 2015: For the first time, scientists have developed an 'electronic' rose by implanting circuits inside the vascular system used to distribute water and nutrients in the plant. Researchers at Linkoping University in Sweden created analog and digital electronics circuits inside living plants. Researchers at Umea Plant Science Centre used the vascular system of living roses to build key components of electronic circuits. Augmenting plants with electronic functionality would make it possible to combine electric signals with the plant's own chemical processes. Researchers tried many attempts of introducing conductive polymers through rose stems. They found that the polymer, called PEDOT-S can be successfully assembled itself inside water-transporting tubes called xylem as conducting wires, while still allowing the transport of water. Link: http://www.upsc.se
18 November, 2015: Private space transport company SpaceX has been offered its first NASA contract to deliver a team of astronauts to to the International Space Station in 2017. Historically, NASA has taken charge of organizing and conducting its own missions -however, in recent years, more space mission contracts have been given to private companies like Boeing. Tech superstar Elon Musk's SpaceX has now been given its own. The astronauts involved in upcoming mission will be sent into space aboard SpaceX's futuristic Crew Dragon spacecraft. Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, the US has relied on Russia to send its astronauts to the ISS, at a high monetary cost. Boeing was also awarded a similar manned mission contract by NASA in May, the first in a series of four orders. The recent SpaceX order was the second of these contracts. Link: http://www.spacex.com
19 November, 2015: Gary Prezeau of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)has suggested that long filaments or 'hairs' of dark matter may be sprouting around earth and other planets in the solar system. The root of one such hair should be around 1 million kilometers away from the surface of earth, or twice as far as the moon while the tip of the hair would be about twice as far from Earth. Dark matter is an invisible, mysterious substance that makes up about 27 per cent of all matter and energy in the universe. It has never been directly detected. According to calculations done in the 1990s and simulations performed in the last decade, dark matter forms "fine-grained streams" of particles that move at the same velocity and orbit galaxies such as ours. However, further study is needed to support these findings. The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal. Link: http://iopscience.iop.org
20 November, 2015: Mars' largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling towards the planet and is likely to be shredded into pieces that will be strewn about the red planet in a ring like those encircling Saturn and Jupiter.The demise of Phobos will probably happen in 20 to 40 million years, leaving a ring that will persist for anywhere from one million to 100 million years. Researchers Benjamin Black and Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars. Just as Earth's moon pulls on our planet in different directions, raising tides in the oceans, Mars too tugs differently on different parts of Phobos. As Phobos gets closer to the planet, the tugs are enough to actually pull the moon apart. This is because Phobos is highly fractured, with lots of pores and rubble. Link: http://www.nature.com
21 November, 2015: A stethoscope-like instrument will soon be deployed in mines for predicting movement of rocks during excavation and minimize the risk of mining accidents. Developed by IIT Kharagpur researchers, the 'Instrumented Rock Bolt' can forecast vital information of rock movement before any unwanted accident occurs. Field trials at Asansol coal mines of West Bengal have yielded positive results after which experiments would soon be done in the copper mines of Madhya Pradesh. The instrument will collect data on the health of the rock using geocomputing technology. A part of this project is funded by the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute (CMPDI), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited. IIT Kharagpur researchers are also collaborating with fellows from the MIT who are testing the methods for shale gas exploration. Link: https://iitkgp.org
22 November, 2015: Researchers at the Irvine campus of the University of California, have created a novel breed of mosquito that has been engineered to carry two ingenious genetic modifications. One is a set of genes that spew out antibodies to the malarial parasite harbored by the mosquito. Mosquitoes with these genes are rendered resistant to the parasite and so cannot spread malaria. The other modification is a set of genetic elements known as a gene drive that should propel the malaria-resistance genes throughout a natural mosquito population. When a malaria-resistant male mosquito mates with a wild female, the gene drive copies both itself and the resistance genes .The anti-malarial antibody genes were developed by a group led by Anthony A. James and the gene drive by Valentino M. Gantz and Ethan Bier of the University of California, San Diego. Link: http://www.nature.com
23 November, 2015: A Chinese-Korean joint venture to build the world's largest animal cloning factory in Tianjing China is set to save thousands of animals from extinction. The 31.3 million dollar commercial facility is a follow up on the technique which made Dolly the Sheep, the first cloned mammal from Scotland on the 1996. The plant in the Tianjing Economic and Technological Development Area which is a government sponsored business development park will clone animals which like pet dogs, beef cattle and racehorses and 'non-human primates'. The cloned animals will be mostly used commercial services and improving the quality of livestock. The centre will produce 100,000 cattle embryos a year initially, eventually increasing to 1 million, Xu Xiaochun, as per the chairman of board Boyalife Group. Link: http://www.boyalifegroup.com
24 November, 2015: It was today, a centaury before, Einstein set down the equation that rules the universe. As compact and mysterious as a nutshell, it describes space-time as a kind of sagging mattress where matter and energy, distort the geometry of the cosmos to produce the effect we call gravity. And it summarized his general theory of relativity. The equation that Einstein wrote out a week later was identical to one that he had written in his notebook two years before but had abandoned. In December 1915, he received a telegram from Karl Schwarzschild, a German astrophysicist, who had solved Einstein’s equation to describe the gravitational field around a solitary star. Last spring, astronomers discovered an ‘Einstein cross’, in which the gravity of a distant cluster of galaxies had split the light from a supernova beyond them into separate beams. Link: http://astro.qmul.ac.uk
25 November, 2015: Yesterday was the 41st anniversary of the discovery of Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old hominin whose fossil remains were uncovered in Ethiopia in 1974. In 1974, anthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray unearthed the ancient hominin in the Afar region of what is now Ethiopia while taking a detour back to their camp. They noticed an arm bone sticking out of the ground and began excavating, according to the Institute for Human Origins. Soon they had unearthed hundreds of bones and bone fragments, representing about 40 percent of a single hominin skeleton. At the time, Lucy was the most complete ancient hominin fossil ever unearthed. It turned out the fossil belonged to a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, who lived about 3.2 million years ago. Lucy actually got her name from the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' which played on a continuous loop during excavations. Link: https://richarddawkins.net
26 November, 2015: Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) Director Dr S Chandrasekhar and scientist Dr G Narahari Sastry were awarded prestigious J C Bose National Fellowship, by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in recognition of their exemplary performance in scientific research and desire to pursue research in India. Dr Chandrasekhar has made significant contributions in diverse areas of organic chemistry, especially in Chiral Chemistry (Chirality usually refers to molecules) and total synthesis of biologically active natural products. Dr G Narahari Sastry made fundamental contributions in the area of computer aided drug design, supra-molecular interactions and advanced material design. The award comes with a research grant of Rs 10 lakh per year, in addition to a monthly special fellowship for a period of five years initially. Link: http://serb.gov.in
27 November, 2015: Plastic trash has been found in ocean waters around the world. Now it’s being seen in the Arctic. Discovering plastic pollution that far north suggests that a sixth garbage patch could be forming there. Plastic trash has infiltrated the Arctic. Two new studies have spied bags, fishing rope and tinier bits of rubbish in the Barents Sea. This sea sits north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. It mixes with the Arctic Ocean, which is even farther north. The Barents Sea is that part of the Arctic that runs between parts of northern Russia and Greenland. Plastic trash in the Arctic could harm wildlife and may hint that large volumes of human rubbish are collecting there. She is one of the scientists who spotted the trash. She studies Earth’s oceans at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. She first started counting bits of plastics in the Barents Sea because she kept spotting signs of the stuff there in images taken with deep-sea cameras. The findings are described in Polar Biology. Link: http://link.springer.com
28 November, 2015: A rare tiger has been spotted with two small cubs in the Bastak Reserve in far eastern Russia. Zolushka (which means Cinderella in Russian) is a Siberian (or Amur) tiger rescued as a cub. She is the first such rescue tiger to be released back into the wild and to then have cubs of her own. This tiger was found in a remote part of Russia in February 2012. Only four months old at the time, she was lying in the snow. She had not eaten for days. Then in May 2013, when she was about 20 months old, Zolushka was released into the Bastak Reserve. In the late 19th century, Amur tigers roamed across a large swath of eastern Russia, China and the Korean peninsula. But hunting and habitat destruction has cut their range and numbers. The latest Amur tiger census calculates that there may be no more than 540 animals in the wild. That is a low number. But it is more than the 420 Amur tigers that existed a decade ago. Conservation groups are working to increase the number of these in the wild. Link:http://newsroom.wcs.org
29 November, 2015: NASA has successfully installed the first of 18 flight mirrors onto the James Webb Space Telescope, beginning a critical piece of the observatory's construction to replace the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland this week, the engineering team used a robot arm to lift and lower the hexagonal-shaped segment that measures just over 1.3 meters across and weighs approximately 40 kg. After being pieced together, the 18 primary mirror segments will work together as one large 6.5-metre mirror. The full installation is expected to be complete early next year. The telescope structure is presently at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope's biggest feature is a tennis court sized five-layer sunshield that attenuates heat from the Sun more than a million times. Link: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov
30 November 2015: Recently, scientists have been using chemical 'scissors' to edit, or change, the DNA in living organisms. This swapping out of parts of DNA could replace faulty genes. In theory, it also might make it possible to create designer babies that are smarter or better-looking than other individuals. But some people have questioned whether such tinkering with human cells would be like playing god. Many people also worry that editing isn’t safe. Those and other concerns have led some people to wonder if gene editing is so unethical that it should be banned. To answer that, a host of experts met in Washington, D.C., this week. After reviewing the science and other issues, they offered a temporary green light. But the experts also gave one big exception. It is not for a 'designer baby'. Any cells edited in a lab may not be used to establish a pregnancy. That also would mean researchers could not fix genetic diseases before birth. Link: https://student.societyforscience.org
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