SPECIES OF THE MONTH: JUNE 2013

                                                  

A horse has just taken us further back in time than ever before. The genome of a 700,000-year-old fossil has been sequenced, suggesting we could do the same with other long-extinct creatures – including early hominins like Homo erectus.

Small DNA fragments have survived up to 500,000 years, but until now, the oldest complete genome had come from 110,000-year-old polar bear remains. Pushing that back to 700,000 years is a big jump, says Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Willerslev's collaborator Ludovic Orlando, also at the University of Copenhagen, scoured a horse bone found in the permafrost of north-west Canada in 2003 for pockets of collagen. The protein degrades easily, so its presence is a sign that DNA could have survived alongside it.

The team compared the ancient horse DNA to that of five domestic breeds, plus a donkey and the Przewalski's horse. They found that the last common Equus ancestor lived between 4 and 4.5 million years ago, before the last ice age, making the lineage about twice as old as we thought.

They thrived when the ice sheets advanced, but suffered when temperatures rose. The team is now sequencing a more recent species, which lived shortly before horses were domesticated, to figure out how that process changed its genes. The work is a boost for efforts to recover DNA from fossils. 

Link: http://www.nature.com

SCIENCE OF THE MONTH: MAY 2013

                                                         

1 May 2013:India's hornbill conservator Aparajita Datta has won the Whitley award, often hailed as the 'Green Oscar'. It was in honour of the Datta 's work to protect threatened hornbills in the forests of Arunachal Pradesh. India is home to nine species of hornbill. Arunachal, where Datta mainly works, hosts five species, including the globally endangered rufous-necked hornbill and the brown hornbill. The Whitley awards, made annually by the Whitley Fund for Nature, honour exceptional individuals working in grassroots nature conservation. Link:http://whitleyaward.org
 
2 May 2013:The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, the largest telescope ever seen on Earth has opened its new international headquarters. It is located near to the iconic Lovell Telescope at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom. The elegant and modern 3.34 million pounds building is funded by the University of Manchester. Square Kilometre Array telescope is a radio telescope, the construction which will begin in 2016 in the remote and radio quiet deserts of Australia and Southern Africa. Link: http://www.skatelescope.org
 
3 May 2013:A team of 70 scientists from the U.S., China, Australia and Japan have sequenced and annotated the genome of the "Sacred Lotus" Nelumbo nucifera from China which is believed to have a powerful genetic system that repairs genetic defects, and may hold secrets about aging successfully. The scientists sequenced more than 86 percent of the nearly 27,000 genes of the plant. Scientists believe that Lotus seed’s long life and its genetic repair mechanisms could be very useful if they could be transferred to humans or to crops. Link:http://genomebiology.com
 
4 May 2013:Eminent scientist Dr. Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao has become the first Indian chemist to reach the h-index of 100, revealing the excellency and vastness of his published work.The h-index is based on a scientist's most cited papers and measures the impact of the published work. He is the only Indian scientist among a few in the world who have got nearly 50,000 citations and over 1,500 research papers published in his career. Rao is a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Society of London.Link:http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz
 
5 May 2013:NASA is preparing to send two Space Telescopes to Mars, donated by the National Reconnaissance Office which are comparable in size and appearance to the Hubble Space Telescope. One telescope is called MOST (Mars Orbiting Space Telescope) which has about 100 times better resolution than NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006. The other is called Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) which would probe the mysteries of dark energy and exoplanets. Link:http://salso.msfc.nasa.gov
 
6 May 2013:Cardiff University researchers found that 93% of DNA variants found in tigers shot the period of the British Raj were not present in tigers today. There are fewer than 2,000 tigers left worldwide, 60% of which is in India. The Cardiff university team collaborated with the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India in their research. The study-material was based on the Natural History Museum of London's tiger collection which holds the DNA-library of the tigers killed in the British Raj period from 1858 to 1947. Link:http://www.cardiff.ac.uk
 
7 May 2013:Astronomers have for the first time discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity. "Einstein's planet", formally known as Kepler-76b, is a "hot Jupiter" that orbits its star every 1.5 days. Its diameter is about 25% more than Jupiter's. It orbits a type F star located about 2,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The planet is tidally locked to its star, always showing the same face to it, just as the Moon is tidally locked to Earth. The study appears in The Astrophysical Journal.Link:http://arxiv.org
 
8 May 2013:India has developed its first vaccine under public-private partnership - Rotavac. The indigenous low-cost vaccine helps to prevent Rotavirus diarrhoea, will soon be hiting markets in India. Priced at around Rs 54, it will be a boon for fighting the killer virus. The research was done by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), Bharat Biotech (BBIL) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). Rotavirus infection is responsible for 100,000 deaths of children in India every year.Link:http://www.nih.gov
 
9 May 2013: The recently launched digital herbarium of the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) has become the largest collection of plants including medicinal plants in India, available on the web. The online herbarium is with 10306 specimens. It has been recognized internationally by the International Association of Plant Taxonomists (IAPT). It has a complete collection of medicinal plants of South India and palms and bamboos, including those from Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is the biggest online herbarium portal in India. Link: http://kfriherbarium.org

10 May 2013:Space scientist G Madhavan Nair is broadening his orbit and would soon launch a science school in Kochi, Kerala. The school, the first-of-its-kind in the country, will be run by Vikram Sarabhai Science Foundation under the CBSE stream. Space scientist G. Madhavan Nair, Anil Kakodkar, the chief of Atomic Energy Commission are in the governing body. The students will receive lectures from eminent space scientists around the world. The school will be inaugurated by Yannick d' Escatha, president of the French Space Agency.Link:http://www.isro.org
 
11 May 2013:India is taking part in the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, southern France, to produce energy from atomic fusion. The reactor is based on the 'tokamak' concept of magnetic confinement, in which a hot plasma of 150 million degrees Celsius is generated. India is making a component called Cryostat which will be delivered there on December 2015. 34 nations are collaborating to realize the ITER project's First Plasma in November 2020.Link:http://www.iter-india.org
 
12 May 2013 : India proposes to launch its first navigational satellite, which will provide terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation services and help in disaster management on June 12. The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System-1A (IRNSS) is slated to be launched on board home-grown rocket, PSLV-C22 XL at 1.01 am from Sriharikota spaceport. IRNSS-1 will have a life span of about ten years and will provide satellite-based terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation services, and also help in disaster management and vehicle tracking. Link:http://www.isro.org

13 May 2013 : NASA's asteroid mission called the Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) has been approved. It will be NASA’s first mission to collect sample from an asteroid and returning to earth. The mission will be launched in 2016. OSIRIS-REx will come together with the asteroid Bennu in year 2018. It is scheduled to return a sample of it to Earth in year 2023. OSIRIS-REx will gather 60 g of surface material. It will plot the asteroid's global features, measuring the non-gravitational forces.Link:http://osiris-rex.lpl.arizona.edu
 
14 May 2013:After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. They transplanted genetic material from an adult skin cell into an egg cell, the genetic material of which was removed. The technique was announced by scientists at Oregon Health Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, which will be used for harvesting stem cells for research. The study is reported in the journal Cell.Link:http://download.cell.com
 
15 May 2013: A scientific paper has come to light which states that a virus, generally found in domestic livestock, has been spotted for the first time in the lions in Gir. The virus, Peste des petits ruminants virus (PPRV), has been detected from a dead Asiatic lion by Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI). The strain is said to be common in domestic livestock, which is more deadly than the Canine Distemper Virus (CDV) that wiped out a third of African Lions in Serengeti. The paper was published in the Journal of Veterinary Science in June 2012. Link:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
16 May 2013:According to Mark Pendergrast the recipe of Coca-Cola was handed down through the family of Frank Robinson, the commercial partner of chemist John Pemberton, who first produced the drink in the summer of 1886. In his book, 'For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It', Pendergrast reproduces the original recipe that Pemberton devised over 125 years ago. In 1903, traces of cocaine were removed after the drink became widely available.Link:http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com
 
17 May 2013: In a joint project of the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment (SASE), a Indian Defence Research Development Organization (DRDO) laboratory in Chandigarh, and the US army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), a new prototype of wind turbine has been developed to harness wind energy, which can overcome ice and snow accumulation on wind turbine structures. SASE has already installed a 10kW capacity wind turbine project in Banihal Top, Jummu & Kashmir, in which snow riming was observed. Link: http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil
 
18 May 2013: Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science has developed a pen-shaped needleless drug delivery device that promises to be pain free and economical. This was informed to the Lok Sabha by minister of state for HRD Shashi Tharoor in a written reply.The device uses supersonic shock waves for painless delivery of medicines into the body. The new system has multiple advantages in also being easily portable, disposable, safe and economical. Using the new technique, typhoid vaccines were successfully delivered into mice.Link:http://www.iisc.ernet.in
 
19 May 2013: Britain's first "official" astronaut, Major Tim Peake will be going to a five-month mission on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015. Major Tim Peake is considered Britain's first official spaceman as previous UK citizens have either secured private funding or have taken out American citizenship. The first Briton in space was Sheffield-born chemist Helen Sharman, in 1991. Three British-born astronauts have flown into space under an American flag are Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick.Link:http://www.esa.int
 
20 May 2013: 24 May 2013: Eesha Khare, 18, of Saratoga, California received the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award of $50,000 for developing a fast-charging supercapacitor that fits inside a cell phone, charge the battery in under a minute, and hold it for long. It can result in batteries that can last for 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with 1,000 cycles for conventional rechargeable batteries. The award description cited Eesha for "Design and Synthesis of Hydrogenated TiO2-Polyaniline Nanorods for Flexible High-Performance.” Link:http://www.intel.com
 
21 May 2013: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) claim to have recreated the world's tiniest droplets of a primordial state of matter that existed moments after the Big Bang. This represents the type of matter that existed some 13.8 billion years ago. Evidence of the minuscule droplets was extracted from the results of colliding protons with lead ions at velocities approaching the speed of light. The short-lived droplets are too small that they are of the size of three to five protons. The finding is submitted to the journal Physical Review D. Link:http://prd.aps.org
 
22 May 2013: India's Ministry of Environment and Forests has banned Dolphinariums where dolphins are exhibited in the country. In the strongest stance yet opposing the development of Dolphinariums in India, the Ministry of Environment and Forests has issued a ban, which says 'state governments are advised to reject any such proposal' that comes forward. In January, the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) has issued a directive deeming dolphinariums unlawful under Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960. Link:http://www.awbi.org
 
23 May 2013: The Zoological Society of London have for the first time made a list of world's mammals, scoring them according to how Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) they are. India's Gangetic River Rolphin and wild elephants figure as the toppers in the latest 100 mammals on the list. The list includes the world's most threatened species and raises a serious alarm for the largest land mammal in Asia, the elephant. The River Dolphin has been ranked 60th most endangered mammal in the world.Link: http://www.edgeofexistence.org
 
24 May 2013: An international team of genetic scientists has completed the genomic sequence of the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii).Also known as chiru, is a native of the high mountain steppes and semi-desert areas of the Tibetan plateau. The Tibetan antelope, the only member of the genus Pantholops is with the unique adaptations to live in the harsh high-altitude climate. The work may also open a way to understand the adaptation of the low partial pressure of oxygen in human activities. The study published in Nature Communications.Link:http://www.nature.com
 
25 May 2013: Researchers in the UK, Germany and the US analysed dried leaves kept in collections in Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, UK, and Botanische Staatssammlung Munchen, Germany to identify the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine, that led to the deaths of about a million people from starvation and disease between 1846 and 1851. Until now, it has been unclear how early strains of Phytophthora infestans are related to those present in the world today. The research, published in the new open-access scientific journal, eLife. Link:http://elife.elifesciences.org
 
26 May 2013: Swedish scientists have mapped the gene sequence of Norway spruce (the Christmas tree) and that is the largest genome to have ever been mapped. The genome is complex and seven times larger than that of humans with about 29,000 functional genes. The greatest challenge in the project has been to get the approximately 20 billion "letters" found in spruce's genetic code into the correct order. The study led by Umeå Plant Science Centre (UPSC) in Umeå and the Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm is published in the journal Nature.Link: http://www.nature.com

27 May 2013: A team of genetic scientists led by Dr Shu-Jin Luo from Peking University in Beijing has revealed that a mutation in a single pigment gene, called SLC45A2, is responsible for the unusual coloration of white tigers. The white tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) variant of the Bengal Tigers has the same pigment gene which had already been associated with light coloration in animals like horses, chickens, and fish. The history of white tigers on the India date back to the 1500s, but the last known free-ranging white tiger was shot in 1958. Link:http://www.cell.com
 
28 May 2013: Scientists are building a 40 kg germanium detector, 4,850 feet beneath the earth’s surface in the underground laboratory in South Dakota in the US, to help explain the puzzling imbalance between matter and antimatter generated by the Big Bang. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has begun delivery of germanium-76 detectors with the intention of building the Germanium detector, capable of detecting the theorized neutrino less double beta decay. It is a joint venture of institutions from the US, Russia, Japan and Canada.Link:http://www.ornl.gov
 
29 May 2013: 60 years ago, today, on May 29, 1953, at 11.30am, both Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand on the summit of Mount Everest with a peak of 8,848m (29,029 ft) in the Himalaya range, the highest point on Earth. Triangulated as Peak XV in 1856, foreigners first set their eyes on the great mountain in 1849. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were on the ninth attempt on the mountain. There were 13 men (not including Sherpas), led by John Hunt, on the 1953 expedition which first conquered Everest.Link:http://teacher.scholastic.com
 
30 May 2013: An asteroid named 1998 QE2 passed near to Earth at nearly 6 million kilometers away t aabout 4:29 AM(Indian Standard Time). Strangely enough, it was not travelling alone. NASA scientists tracking the asteroid with the giant Deep Space Network antenna in California have found that the asteroid has a small satellite or moon. The asteroid is about 2.7 kilometers in diameter. Such a 'binary' or double system is rare but about 16 per cent of asteroids with diameters 200 meters or more are binary or even triple systems. Link:http://www.nasa.gov
 
31 May 2013: The highly threatened Nicobar islands of India, home to 1,800 animal species has now been designated as a world biosphere reserve. The island is characterized by tropical wet evergreen forest. The International Coordinating Council of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) which is meeting now in Paris also added 12 more sites to the World Network of Biosphere Reserves changing it to 621 in 117 countries. Pakistan's largest Juniper forest the Ziarat Juniper forest has been accorded the same status. Link:http://www.unesco.org

MOVIE OF THE MONTH : MAY 2013

                                                           

Director  : Sebastián Cordero
Producer : Ben Browning
Story       : Philip Gelatt
Studio     : Wayfare Entertainment
Release   : June 27, 2013 (VOD)
Country  : United States
Language: English
 
Europa Report (also known as simply Europa) is an upcoming science fiction film starring Sharlto Copley, directed by Sebastián Cordero. Europa Report tells the story of six international astronauts on a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, in search of alien life. Needless to say, things are unlikely to go according to plan. Following a disastrous technical failure and the death of one of the crew, the remaining crew struggle to regain communication with Earth.
 
Filming took place in Brooklyn. It is now completed and the film is in post-production. The first image from the film was revealed on February 11, 2012. A viral website to promote the film was launched shortly afterward.The film's screenplay was written Philip Gelatt, and the production design was done by Eugenio Caballero.An online trailer was released on 20th May.The film is set to be released on Video on Demand, June 27th, 2013, and theatrically, August 2nd.
 
Movie Website: http://www.magnetreleasing.com
Source: http://www.movie-moron.com, http://www.wikipedia.com

BOOK OF THE MONTH : MAY 2013

                                                                

Title         : The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: 
                   A 21st Century  Bestiary
Author     : Caspar Henderson
Pages       : 448
Publisher : Granta Publications Ltd
ISBN-10  : 184708172X
Price        : 25 (Pound)
 
From Axolotl to Zebrafish, meet a world of 'barely imagined beings': real creatures that are often stranger and more astonishing than anything dreamt in the pages of a medieval bestiary. Ranging from the depths of the ocean to the most arid corners of the earth, Caspar Henderson captures the beauty and bizarreness of the many living forms we thought we knew and some we could never have contemplated, and invites us to better imagine the world around us. An extraordinary, vivid combination of natural history and spiritual primer, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a mind-expanding, wonder-inducing read.
 
Caspar Henderson says us that "for much of human history attempts to understand and define ourselves have been closely linked to how we see and represent other animals." Bestiaries are not just classical or medieval works, but part of a tradition that stretches back to the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, art that is painstakingly accurate as well as possessed of great symbolic power. In his introduction he observes that we have so little knowledge of most of them that, for the most part, we have "barely imagined them".
 
So begins Henderson's project: a spellbinding book that seeks to astonish us with the sheer intricacy, diversity and multiplicity of life forms that share our planet. He fuses zoology, literature, mythology, history, paleontology, anecdote and art through 27 brilliantly executed essays. Each concludes with a philosophical reflection. So a discussion of turtles leads to an exploration of the place of Brahma in Hindu cosmology. A passage on the Cuban missile crisis leads into an account of Russian attempts to impregnate chimpanzees with human sperm. An encomium to octopuses leads into a reflection on the value of a happy childhood.
 
There are other similarities with the original bestiaries. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and diagrams, with each chapter decorated by artwork in the style of a medieval folio illumination, Henderson's book is packed with marginalia, printed in red ink and relating back to red lettering within the body of the text. Some examples: octopuses use copper instead of iron in their haemoglobin; the word for "tortoise" in Hungarian means "bowl-frog"; phytoplankton productivity is intimately related to the prevalence of whale shit; there are diatoms in the sea with names such as "the Fathead Congregant" and "the Crucial Pocket-Compass".
 
Caspar Henderson is a journalist and writer who has worked for the Financial Times, the Independent, and the New Scientist. From 2002 to 2005 he was a senior editor at OpenDemocracy. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009, and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is currently writing a bestiary for the 21st Century called The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. He lives in Oxford, England. The book is with specially commissioned illustrations by Golbanou Moghaddas.
 
Review Courtesy: http://grantabooks.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk

EVENT OF THE MONTH : MAY 2013

WHITLEY AWARDS 2013

2nd of May 2013

The Royal Geographical Society, London

The Whitley Awards is a prestigious international prize awarded annually to individuals working in nature conservation at a grassroots level. This year, the prestigious prize was awarded to the Horbill Conservator from India, Dr. Aparajita Datta. It was for her project, "threatened hornbills as icons for the conservation of the Himalayan forests of Arunachal Pradesh, India". 

Princess Royal Anne, presented the award to Datta at a ceremony at the Royal Geographical Society in London. "Every winner has a close connection with their community, as well as experience and an understanding of the issues, which often relates to human-wildlife conflict, but they also know how to make an impact through practical solutions, engaging people and initiating change at government level", Princess Anne said. 

Nine species of hornbills live in India and Arunachal Pradesh is home to five of those, including the globally endangered rufous-necked hornbill and the brown hornbill. The state has more than 80% of its geographic area under forest cover. Dutta's project has also involved asking common people to adopt nests and so far he has found 70 donors who have ‘adopted’ nests. 

The Whitley Awards were first awarded in 1994 and over the past two decades.These awards are known as the ‘Green Oscars’ and are often awarded to conservationists working in conflict-torn and developing countries. This year was the 20th anniversary of the Whitley Prize and it saw a huge surge in submissions. 

Link: http://whitleyaward.org

News Courtesy: http://news.mongabay.com

SPECIES OF THE MONTH: MAY 2013

ITS SALTY! NEW FROM KERALA 

                                                        

A group of researchers from Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin has discovered a new species of fish from the sea off the Kollam coast. The new species is named Chelidoperca maculicauda. The researchers involved in the discovery of Chelidoperca maculicauda are E M Abdussamad and N G K Pillai. 

Chelidoperca maculicauda represents the third known species in the genus Chelidoperca from the Arabian Sea. It is a new species of Serranid fish and was found out from the bycatch of a commercial deep-sea shrimp trawler operated off Kollam at depths 180-320 m, and landed at Sakthikulangara Fishing harbour.

Researchers said that the combination of caudal fin shape and a unique colour pattern of five red bars on a pinkish body and pale yellow fins with a bright red margin on the anal fin distinguish the new species from other congeners. 

Another discovery, Opistognathus pardus, is a jaw fish. This is the fourth species of Opistognathus known from the coast of India or Sri Lanka. The researchers involved in the discovery of Chelidoperca maculicauda are K K Bineesh, K V Akhilesh.

Link to Original Paper: http://www.aqua-aquapress.com

News Source Courtesy:http://newindianexpress.com

SCIENCE OF THE MONTH: APRIL 2013

                                                        

1 April 2013: A type of mud turtle which was declared as "Extinct" by IUCN, has now been found to have never existed. It all started when three specimens of mud turtles were collected in Seychelles, which were thought to be a new turtle species and named Pelusios seychellensis. Recently, scientists at the Senckenberg Institute carried out a genetic analysis and found that it is actually another species of turtle widespread in West Africa called Pelusios castaneus. The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE. Link: http://www.plosone.org

2 April 2013:Chinese scientists have developed the world's lightest substance, Carbon Aerogel with a density only one sixth of the air. The solid material produced by scientists at Zhejiang University has a density of only 0.16 mg/cubic cm. The Graphite Aerogel developed by German scientists last year, had a density of 0.18 mg/cubic cm. In addition to pollution control, Carbon Aerogel is expected to become an ideal material for energy storage insulation,catalytic carrier and sound-absorption.The study was published in the journal Advanced Materials.Link:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com

3 April 2013: Forty years ago today on 3 April 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper, credited as the inventor of the cellphone, made the world's first public call from a mobile phone, choosing to get in touch with his rival in the race to create the device. Martin Cooper made the call on a New York City street in front of reporters from a device weighing about 1½ kilograms. Ten years later, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved Motorola's first Mobile phone model: DynaTAC , for public use. In 1984, the first DynaTACs became available for consumers.
Link:http://mediacenter.motorola.com

4 April 2013: Japanese scientists at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto developed a computer model to predict dream imagery from MRI scans. Rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage richest in dreams, usually starts about 90 minutes into sleep.This makes it difficult to collect data.The researchers argue that further research should reveal more dynamic and emotional aspects of dreaming. However, it is the first time in the world that dreams have been recorded.The study is published in the journal Science.Link: http://www.cns.atr.jp/en

5 April 2013: Exactly 40 years ago, today, on 5th April 1973, Pioneer 11 blasted off from Cape Canaveral for a mission that would take the small satellite dangerously close to Jupiter's surface and through Saturn's outer rings. After leaving its last transmission on 1995, the spacecraft is now thought to be 13 billion km from the sun and traveling in the direction of the constellation Scutum. Pioneer 11 carries a gold plaque with images of humans on Earth.The plaque was co-designed by SETI founder Frank Drake and Carl Sagan. Link: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov

6 April 2013: Arun Pandey from the Department of Botany, University of Delhi, India and Susanne Renner from the Departments of Systematic Botany and Mycology, University of Munich, Germany have made a checklist of the Cucurbitaceae of India that would bring up-to-date the information available for that plant family.The list includes 94 species (10 of them endemic to India) from 31 genera.The checklist also includes a phylogenetic reconstruction of the Cucurbits in India in relation to the World's remaining Cucurbits. The study is published in the journal PhytoKeys.Link:http://www.pensoft.net

7 April 2013:Jayanta Roy and Bhaswati Bhattacharya, scientists at the Pune-based National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) has developed a novel technique of 'gated imaging' to find the location of Neutron stars in the galaxy. It can also be used for the location of Pulsars in galaxy. The new technique is thousand times more accurate and faster than the traditional method. It was made possible through NCRA’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) and it is the first time that such a technique had been created. The discovery is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.Link:http://iopscience.iop.org

8 April 2013: A comet heading towards the planet could derail Indian Space Research Organisation’s Mars Mission project, scheduled to take off in October-November this year. The comet , C/2013 A1, is approaching Mars at a speed of 2 lakh km/hour. As per NASA, the comet will be closest to Mars at a distance of 3 lakh km, but the planet will be engulfed in the tail of the comet, extending to millions of kilometres. So Indian scientists are now exploring the possibility of postponing the launch to allow the comet to pass by before the spacecraft arrives there.Link:http://scully.cfa.harvard.edu

9 April 2013: NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope has captured the clearest view yet of Comet ISON, which experts believe could become one of the brightest comets ever seen when it lights up the sky later this year. Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012 by Russian amateur astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok. The new photos were snapped when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter, at about 634 million km from the Earth. ISON is apparently making its first trip through the inner Solar system from the distant Oort Cloud. Link: http://hubblesite.org

10 April 2013: Robert Edwards, a British Nobel prize-winning scientist known as the father of the fertility treatment called ‘In Vitro Fertilization' ( IVF) and  "test tube babies", died aged 87 after a long illness. Professor Edwards began his work on fertilisation in 1955, and by 1968 had managed to fertilise a human egg in a laboratory. He then started to collaborate with Patrick Steptoe. The first so-called test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. In 1980, Edwards founded Bourn Hall, the world's first IVF clinic, in Cambridge.Link:http://www.bourn-hall-clinic.co.uk

11 April 2013: As per the budget for the year 2014, NASA proposes to capture a small asteroid and tug it near to the Moon. The asteroid-capturing robot could launch as soon as 2017, with astronauts flying to meet it near the moon by 2021.The mission includes the construction of a new Space Launch System and the building of a human exploration capsule called Orion. Astronauts visiting the captured asteroid could conduct experiments in extracting water, oxygen, metals and silicon and other life-sustaining minerals there that would help “living off the land” during long missions. Link: http://www.nasa.gov

12 April 2013:The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it would launch the fourth, and the heaviest, in a series of cargo-vehicles to the International Space Station (ISS) on June 5.Named Albert Einstein, the freighter has a total mass of 20.235 tonnes, making it  the heaviest ever lofted into orbit by an Ariane rocket to the International Space Station. .The launch will be from ESA's base in Kourou, French Guiana. The fifth and last ATV, named after Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre, the father of the "Big Bang" theory, is due to be launched in 2014.Link:http://www.esa.int

13 April 2013: NASA's Cassini spacecraft has observed an ice cloud taking shape over Titan's South Pole, the latest sign that the change of seasons is setting off a cascade of radical changes in the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon. Made from an unknown ice, this type of cloud has long hung over Titan's north pole, where it is now fading, according to observations made by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) on Cassini. CIRS didn't detect it until about July 2012, according to the study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.Link: http://www.nasa.gov

14 April 2013: NASA has recently green-lighted two new missions: The most anticipated is TESS, the ‘Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite’ .Slated for launch in 2017, TESS will search for planets beyond the Solar System. TESS will be the first exoplanet hunting satellite. Also on the board for launch in 2017 is NICER, the ‘Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer’ to be placed on the exterior of the International Space Station. NICER will specialize in the study of a particular sub-class of neutron star known as “millisecond pulsars”. Link:http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov

15 April 2013: For the first time, scientists, including an Indian-origin physicist, have observed concrete hints of a Dark Matter particle that is believed to hold the cosmos together. It was found out by the international Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (Super CDMS) experiment. The discovery was based on the hint for a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) signal. WIMPs rarely interact with normal matter and are difficult to detect. The Indian-origin physicist involved was Rupak Mahapatra.Link:http://cdms.berkeley.edu

16 April 2013:A team of Australian scientists involved in the Lazarus Project are aiming to bring the extinct Rheobatrachus silus frog, back to life. Rheobatrachus silus is one of the two species of gastric-brooding frogs or “Platypus frogs” that are native to Australia. They swallow their eggs, brood their young ones in their stomach and give birth through their mouth.The researchers took egg cells  from the distantly related Great Barred Frog, Mixophyes fasciolatus and its nucleus was replaced with nucleus from Rheobatrachus silus. The results however are awaited. Link: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au

17 April 2013: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the oldest, most distant supernova ever discovered, which experts say could help scientists better understand the evolution of the universe.A supernova is the explosive death of a star, which emits a dramatic burst of light. The Supernova UDS10Wil named after President Woodrow Wilson as SN Wilson, exploded more than 10 billion years ago.SN Wilson is categorized as a Type Ia supernova, which provide a consistent level of brightness that can be used to measure the expansion of space. Link:http://www.nasa.gov

18 April 2013: A asteroid, 2013 GM3, will pass dangerously close to Earth’s surface on April 14, 2026. The asteroid, 20 m in diameter may bring it within 8,620 km nearer to Earth’s surface. The prediction is made by Francesco Manca of the Sormano Astronomical Observatory near Milan. The 2013 GM3 was discovered by Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona, but calculations by NASA showed it would pass 39,000 km from Earth’s surface. NASA estimates the probability of  collision between at 0.018%. Link:http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov

19 April 2013: India expects total monsoon rainfall to be average in 2013.Monsoon rains are vital for the 55 % of the country's farmland that lacks irrigation facilities, and can make the difference between India being an exporter or importer of staples such as rice and sugar. Rainfall is expected to be 98 % of the long-term average during the June to September season. Rains between 96 % and 104 % of a 50-year average of 89 cm for the entire season are considered normal, or average.The last time there was a drought in 2009 and prior to that, in 2004. Link: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov

20 April 2013: Solar Impulse, the solar-powered plane will attempt its first crossing of the United States by next month. Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard and project co-founder and pilot Andre Borschberg, are making their final preparations for the flight which is without any fuel, except that the engine will be powered by solar energy. Piccard and Borschberg aim for their plane to take off from near San Francisco in early May and land at New York. Solar Impulse made its first intercontinental flight from Spain to Morocco in 2012 June. Link:http://www.solarimpulse.com

21 April 2013: US Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, has laid out an ambitious plan of setting up a human colony on Mars within the next two decades. He plans to have a human colony on the Red Planet by the mid 2030s using a special space vehicle called the Lynx spacecraft. Aldrin wants the next generation to be Mars generation. Aldrin is also starting a competition that will give Australians the chance to take a once-in-a-lifetime journey into space.One Australian will be granted a seat aboard the Lynx spacecraft.Link: http://buzzaldrin.com

22 April 2013: Chamber A, the largest high-vacuum, cryogenic-optical test chamber in the world, originally built in 1965 to test the Apollo astronauts to the moon is now ready to check the space agency's next-generation telescope: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2014. The James Webb Space Telescope will make observations primarily in the infrared spectrum, but to avoid the telescope's own radiation, its instruments must be made very, very cold. Chamber A is used for this kind of testing. Link:http://www.jwst.nasa.gov

23 April 2013: Scientists have found promising clues towards antibody-based AIDS vaccine. For the first time, scientists were able to follow the full chain of events leading to the patient naturally producing Broadly neutralizing Antibodies (BnAbs), so called because they attack different strains of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. In this study, researchers isolated an antibody named CH103, and found that it was triggered by a specific protein on HIV. The research is published in the journal Nature. Link:http://www.health-e.org.za

24 April 2013: On April 24, 1990, NASA launched the pioneering satellite that would deliver some of the best images of the cosmos to date.Free from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope was able to see objects clearer and further away. Over the last two decades, Hubble has been instrumental in helping pinpoint the age of the universe to between 13 and 14 billion years old. The Hubble Space Telescope was named after U.S. astronomer Edwin Hubble, who first posited that the universe was expanding. Link: http://hubblesite.org

25 April 2013: Three lunar eclipses taking place within a month, it's a rare phenomenon. The partial Lunar Eclipse that occurred today (the eclipse began from 11.33 pm on 25th April and ended at 3.43 am on 26th  April) was the first of the three eclipses that will take place over the next one month. Following the partial Lunar Eclipse, two more eclipses will occur on May 10 (Annular Solar Eclipse) and May 25 (Penumbral Lunar Eclipse). In 2009, a total of six eclipses occurred and 2009 also the International Year of Astronomy. Link: http://www.astronomy2009.org

26 April 2013: Seventy-five years ago an amateur scientist made a breakthrough discovery in the field of climate change. Guy Stewart Callendar linked global warming to CO2 emissions but his work went largely unnoticed at the time. Now the anniversary of his discovery has been commemorated. Guy Stewart Callendar, born in Montreal, Canada in 1898, made all his calculations by hand in his spare time, decades before the effects of global warming became widely debated. This became known for a time as the "Callendar Effect".Link: http://www.aip.org

27 April 2013: Today is World Veterinary Day. Livestock producers are being reminded to keep their annual vaccination programs up-to-date to maximize the health of their animals and business.Selected Theme 2013 was “Vaccination: to prevent and protect”. According to the Animal Health Alliance vaccination is arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the modern era, and is the theme for this year's World Veterinary Day, which is celebrated on April 27. A pre-calving booster is given to protect the unborn calf. Link: http://www.worldvet.org

28 April 2013: Shakuntala Devi, an Indian mathematical wizard known as “the human computer” for her ability to make incredibly swift calculations, died today in Bangalore, India. She was 83. Shakuntala Devi was born in Bangalore on November 4, 1929. In 1977, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a Univac computer, which took 62 seconds. In 1980, she correctly multiplied two 13-digit numbers in only 28 seconds. The feat earned her a place in the 1982 edition of the Guinness Book of World. Link: http://sbioak.org

29 April 2013: Today, Earth will be exactly in between the sun and Saturn. Called ‘Saturn opposition’, this day is when Saturn is the closest to Earth in the whole year. Two celestial bodies (in this case the Sun and Saturn) are said to be in ‘opposition’ when they are on opposite sides of the sky when viewed from Earth.Opposition occurred last year on April 15 and will occur next year on May 10. Though this is a yearly phenomenon, 2013’s Saturn opposition is a little extra special because this will be the closest Earth-Saturn encounter until 2023.Link:http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com

30 April 2013: Today, Worl Wide Web (WWW) celebrated its 20th birthday. It was on April 30th, 1993 CERN released the technology behind the World Wide Web into the public domain. Sir Tim Berners-Lee was a scientist at CERN. His team invented www in 1991, and Berners-Lee developed a version which could send photos the next year. The first picture uploaded to the World Wide Web was in July of 1992..In a celebration of the web's proud history, the CERN team has started up a new project to revive the very first website at its original URL.Link: http://info.cern.ch