SCIENCE OF OCTOBER 2010



COMMON WEALTH! Girl child employed for venue constructing at the  11494 Crore Common Wealth Games in New Delhi.
Photo Courtesy: http://www.modernmom.com/



October 1: Astronomers have discovered an another planet orbiting a red-dwarf star labeled Gliese 581, located 20 light years from Earth in the constellation Libra, that might have liquid water on its surface.If they are actual, this would be the first added planet found exterior our solar system that would be able of sustaining life. Gliese 581g does not rotate on its axis like Earth, so partial the additional planet is always lack of light and half is always light, but water could exist on the border between the two halves.

October 2: The Ig Nobels, designed to honour achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think, are presented in the run up to the real awards next week. They are given out at a Harvard University ceremony by the science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable Research. The Zoological Society of London scooped the Engineering Prize for "perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote control helicopter".

October 3: To understand the genetic makeup of the Culex mosquito that are involved in the transmission of West Nile virus an international team of scientists, led by geneticists at the University of California, Riverside, has sequenced the genome of Culex quinquefasciatus, a representative of the Culex genus of mosquitoes. A close study of the genome, the researchers say, could give scientists the clues they need to target specific Culex genes that are involved in the transmission of other diseases spread by the Culex group of mosquitoes.

October 4: A Chinese rocket carrying a probe destined for the Moon has blasted into space. A Long March 3C rocket with the Chang'e-2 probe took off from Xichang launch centre at about 1100 GMT. The rocket will shoot the craft into the trans-lunar orbit, after which the satellite is expected to reach the Moon in about five days. Chang'e-2 will be used to test key technologies and collect data for future landings. It is China's second lunar probe - the first was launched in 2007.

October 5: The Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for 2010 has been awarded to the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, a procedure that has helped in the conception and birth of 4 million people around the world since the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown in 1978. IVF is also at the centre of a technique, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), that screens fertilised embryos for genetic conditions such as Cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease.

October 6: Graphene is the strongest and thinnest known material in existence, and its discovery six years ago has won University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. It's just one atom thick but it's more than 100 times stronger than steel. Nearly transparent, graphene is a highly heat-resistant conductor of electricity that has potential for use in transportation, electronics, and computers.

October 7: The 2010 Nobel prize for Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who developed an efficient way to create chains of carbon atoms, a critical tool for the synthesis of complex molecules such as drugs and coatings for electronic components. Richard Heck of the University of Delaware, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University, and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Japan came up with efficient ways to link carbon atoms together.

October 8: The first of India's six C-130J Super Hercules airlifters, considered the world's most advanced transport aircraft, has completed its maiden flight. Purchased from the US in a $1 billion deal, C-130J-30s would provide the Indian Army and Indian Air Force 'new special operations capabilities using the world's most advanced airlifter'. It is a four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft, is a comprehensive update of the venerable Lockheed C-130 Hercules, with new engines, flight deck, and other systems.

October 9: Researchers at Britain's Kew Botanical Gardens say the plant, Paris japonica, has the largest genome yet recorded, putting it at high risk of extinction. With 152.23 picograms (pg) of DNA, the Paris japonica has around 15% more than the previous record holder, the marbled lungfish or Protopterus aethiopicus, with 132.83 pg. It is also more than 50 times bigger than the human genome, which is 3.0 picograms. A picogram is one trillionth of a gram.

October 10: Results of the first ever Census of Marine Life were unveiled Monday, revealing more than one million species in the oceans, with at least three-quarters of them yet to be discovered. The 650-million-dollar (470-million-euro) international study discovered more than 6,000 potentially new species, and found some species considered rare were actually common. The findings are partially available on the www.iobis.org website.

October 11: The long lost lunar rover Lunokhod 1, has been rediscovered by astronomers using laser pulses, thirty-six years after it disappeared. A team led by Associate Professor Tom Murphy at the University of California, San Diego worked out its position to within a few centimetres using data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).Their paper, which has been submitted to the journal Icarus, and appearing on the pre-press website ArXiv.org.

October 12: Malaysia could be the first country in Asia to use genetically modified mosquitoes to battle a rise in dengue fever, government authorities said Monday.The program calls for genetically engineered male mosquitoes to be released into the wild that would mate with females and produce offspring that live shorter lives, thus curbing the population.Dengue is transmitted to humans by the Aedes aegypti or more rarely the Aedes albopictus mosquito.

October 13: A speckled, cat-sized mammal has been identified in the nick of time, as its discoverers say the carnivore is one of the most threatened in the world. Known as Durrell's vontsira, or Salanoia durrelli, the animal hides out in the Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar. It weighs just over a pound (just over 0.5 kilograms) and belongs to a family of carnivores known only from Madagascar. Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands are known as a biodiversity hotspot because of their great richness in species.

October 14: The Experts' Committee set up by the Union environment ministry to study the impact of communication towers on birds and bees has decided to elicit views of researchers who have already done studies on the problem in India and abroad. The existing studies on the issue included that of  Prof.Sainudeen Pattazhy, who argued that electromagnetic waves emitted by towers hampered navigational skills of worker bees, leading to a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Syndrome (CCS), reported worldover.

October 15: While the global community proposed a ban on the use of endosulfan globally at the Stockholm Convention of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee in Geneva, India opposed the move, saying there was not enough evidence to prove the health and environmental impacts of the insecticide. India being the largest producer and user of endosulfan in the world has now called for a technical review of its impacts.

October 16: Switzerland has completed a mammoth engineering project with the 60-year construction of the world’s longest tunnel, bringing to an end a US$10 billion infrastructure investment. The 57 kilometre, or 34 mile, tunnel which links Switzerland’s Zurich to Italy’s Milan under the Alps,though officially completed will be operational in 2017 only. The Seoul Metropolitan Subway's Line 5 is the longest rapid-transit line in the world right now and one of the longest tunnels.

October 17: The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Rustom1 - developed by Aeronautical Development Establishment - was successfully test flown from the Taneja Aerospace and Aviation airfield in Hosur. According to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the aircraft flew for 12 minutes and landed successfully meeting all its objectives. DRDO said that this development is the forerunner to the medium altitude long endurance UAV project RustomH to be taken up by the lab shortly. Last year, the first flight of technology demonstrator RustomI did not meet its objectives.

October 18: An international conference aimed at preserving the planet's diversity of plants and animals in the face of pollution and habitat loss begins Monday in Japan, facing some of the same divisions between rich and poor nations that have stalled U.N. climate talks. At stake is the fate of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement signed amid great hope and fanfare in the early 1990s, the status of which has fizzled steadily ever since. Over the next 11 days, 193 national delegations will discuss on this.

October 19: India today launched the National Green Tribunal thus becoming the third nation in the world to have special courts for environmental issues. Former Supreme Court judge Lokeshwar Singh Panta assumed charge as the Chairperson of the tribunal which will have, to begin with, four regional benches that would function in the circuit mode. The tribunal has been established by the National Green Tribunal Act passed by Parliament earlier this year. Appeals against the Tribunal can be moved in the Supreme Court.

October 20: A pale green comet will make a close pass by the Earth, one of the closest approaches of any comet in the past century and giving sky-watchers a good view of the cosmic body. Comet Hartley 2, officially designated 103P/Hartley, is a small periodic comet with an orbital period of 6.46 years,is on a course to make its closest pass by Earth at a mere 11 million miles (17.7 million kms). It was discovered by Malcolm Hartley in 1986 at the Schmidt Telescope Unit in Siding Spring, Australia.

October 21: Pitching for declaring Western Ghats as the world heritage site, the state government of Kerala presented its case before an evaluation team of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN team will meet the state forest officials, NGOs and experts dealing with conservation issues in the city on Wednesday before it holds field visits. However, in Karnataka locals gheraoed two UNESCO officials who were on an inspection tour of Western Ghats on Tuesday.

October 22: Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago. Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far. The study is published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

October 23: A major neutrino observatory set to be built in India cleared a major hurdle this week, when the Ministry of Environment and Forests formally approved the project. The $250 million underground laboratory, called the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), will be built in the Bodi West Hills Reserved Forest in the state of Tamil Nadu. INO will be made of 50,000 tonnes of magnetised iron, dwarfing the 12,500-tonne magnet in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

October 24: Indian students bagged two golds and one silver medal at the the 15th International Astronomy Olympiad (IAO) held in Sudak, Crimea, Ukraine. The team was lead by Dr Manojendu Choudhury, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai and Hemant Mone, Aakash Mitra Mandal, Kalyan from Maharashtra's Thane district. A total of 19 teams from 17 countries participated in the Olympiad including China, Korea, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Indonesia and Thailand.

October 25: Scientists and officials of the Sunderban Tiger Reserve are investigating whether the Sunderban tiger is a different sub-species compared to those found in the sub-continent. The Sunderban tiger exhibits certain distinctive morphological adaptations that make it particularly suited to the mangrove habitat of the Sunderban islands. For this purpose, the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of the tigers will have to be studied,” said Y. Jhalla, an expert at the Wildlife Institute of India.

October 26: The scientists from Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute, Palode, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala  has identified the Bamboo species with the largest leaf, Ochlandra ebrachteata, measuring 63.1 cm in length and 14.5 cm in breadth. Though the largest in the Old World, it is  the species with the sixth largest leaf among the world bamboos. The bamboo with the largest leaf is Neurolepis elata which is distributed in the Ecuador in the Paramo forest with leaf blades up to 5 m long and 30 cm wide.

October 27: Together with Indian and US colleagues, researchers from the University of Bonn have one of the largest amber finds ever worldwide from Nort-Western India. The insects trapped in the fossil resin cast a new light on the history of the sub-continent; it seems that it did not drift over the Earth’s oceans in isolation for as long as has been assumed so far. In the journal PNAS, the researchers are reporting on the 50 million year-old treasure that has only partially been uncovered so far.

October 28: The number of people killed in a double natural disaster in Indonesia is rising, after a volcano erupted and a tsunami smashed into several islands. Some 182 people are known to have died so far and there are fears the toll could rise much further. Mount Merapi, one of the country's most active volcanoes, spewed out ash, lava, and gas on the main island of Java, killing at least 28 people. Most were burned to death by bursts of hot air.

October 29: Basab Chaudhuri of the University of Calcutta and colleagues have shown that the membrane that lines an eggshell can absorb almost seven times its own weight of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide thus trapped could be stored until energy-effective methods of using the gas could be found. The study has been published in the International Journal of Global Warming.  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ind/ijgw/2010/00000002/00000003/art00005

October 30: Scientists say they've found the first complete skeleton of a dinosaur that is an ancestor to the sauropod, the largest creature ever to walk the planet. The 30-foot-long skeleton, complete with skull, may help reveal the story of how the 120-foot-long, giant-necked sauropods evolved and became solely plant eaters. The bones were found in southern China and the findings will be presented at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver.

October 31: The UN biodiversity meeting in Japan has agreed a 10-year plan aimed at preserving nature. Targets for protecting areas of land and sea were weaker than conservation scientists wanted, as was the overall target for slowing biodiversity loss. The meeting settled on targets of protecting 17% of the world's land surface, and 10% of the oceans, by 2020. About 13% of the land is already protected - while the existing target for oceans is already 10%. Link: http://www.cbd.int/cop10/

BOOK OF OCTOBER

                                                     

Title         : The Grand Design

Author     : Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

Publisher : Bantam Press
Pages       : 208
ISBN        : 0593058305
Price        : $ 28

In the last thirty years of his life Albert Einstein searched for a unified theory - a theory which could describe all the forces of nature in a single framework. But the time was not right for such a discovery in Einstein's day. Neither was the time right when, in 1988, Professor Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time. Now, in this ground-breaking new work The Grand Design, Professor Hawking and renowned science writer Leonard Mlodinow have drawn on forty years of  Hawking's own research and a recent series of extraordinary astronomical observations and theoretical breakthroughs to reveal the long sought truths.

The authors convincingly argue that scientific obsession with formulating a single new model may be misplaced, and that, instead, by synthesising existing theories we may discover the key to finally understanding the universe's deepest mysteries. Written with the clarity and lively style for which Hawking is famous, The Grand Design is an account of Hawking's quest to fuse these different strands of scientific theory. It examines the differences between past and future, explains the nature of reality and asks an all-important question: How far can we go in our search for understanding and knowledge?

The authors write: Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.  The book concludes with the statement that only some universes of the multiple universes (or multiverse) support life forms. We, of course, are located in one of those universes. The laws of nature that are required for life forms to exist appear in some universes by pure chance, Hawking and Mlodinow explain.

Chapters: 1. The Mystery of Being 2. The Rule of Law 3. What is Reality 4. Alternative Histories 5. The Theory of Everything 6. Choosing Our Universe 7. The Apparent Miracle  8. The Grand Design. About the Authors: Professor Hawking is now Director of Research for the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. His books include the bestselling A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell and A Briefer History of Time. Leonard Mlodinow has taught at Cal Tech, written for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and is the author of Euclid's Window, Feynman s Rainbow and Some Time with Feynman.

Review text Courtesy: www.ft.com  http://www.reuters.com, www.qbd.com.au, www. wikipedia.com.



                                                                           

SCIENCE OF SEPTEMBER 2010

Cocoa farmers from West Africa. Scientists decoded Cocoa Tree Genome on 19th September. Picture Courtesy: http://www.slavefreechocolate.org/

September 1: Officials at the Indian Space Research Organization finally announced the instruments for the next lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2. Some of the instruments and suites experts recommend for the orbiter include the Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) and the Solar X-ray monitor (XSM). Both of these payloads are meant to give the orbiter the ability to map out the most interesting elements of the lunar surface in great detail. As far as the experts are concerned, the orbiter could include only two scientific payloads.

September 2: The majestic animal,long perceived as an icon of India,is facing a severe threat from human-animal conflict,lack of movement corridors and trade in ivory,among others. To tackle this problem,the elephant task force constituted by the ministry of environment and forests recommended to the Centre that it be declared a national heritage animal. It also recommended the setting up of a new body called the National Elephant Conservation Authority (NECA) on the lines of the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

September 3: The fossil of a stocky new dinosaur with two sets of claws on its feet unearthed in Romania has given researchers a window into what European predators looked like in the final years of the Age of Dinosaurs. It prowled Romania during the Late Cretaceous period -- about 90 to 65 million years ago- when warm temperatures and high sea levels fragmented Europe into small islands. The new dinosaur was described in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

September 4: The latest chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians has revealed that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. This is the strongest evidence that even if the penicillin was invented in 1928, the art of making antibiotics was no secret 2,000 years ago. The research led by Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

September 5: Today is the 25th anniversary of buckyball. A molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere called buckyball. The discovery of buckyball helped lot to understand the chemistry and technological applications in material sciences, electronics and nanotechnologies. The invention of buckyball was made in 1985 and was named buckminsterfullerene after Richard Buckminster Fuller.On this occasion, the search engine giant Google has converted its famous doodle into a buckyball.

September 5: God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the universe due to a series of developments in physics, according to a new book by Stephen Hawking.
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists,why we exist," he writes in The Grand Design. The publisher is Bantam Books. Website: http://bantam-dell.atrandom.com/  

September 6: People have been using antibiotics for nearly 2000 years, suggests a new study, which found large doses of tetracycline embedded in the bones of ancient African mummies. What's more, they probably got it through beer, and just about everyone appears to have drank it consistently throughout their lifetimes, beginning early in childhood. Thestudy was conducted by biological anthropologists at Emory University in Atlanta.The team reported their results in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.                                                                                                 
September 7:  The first entire genome of an Irish individual has been sequenced. The sequence is reported in BioMed Central's open access journal, Genome Biology and provides insight into the evolutionary history of this distinct lineage. The research team from UCD Conway Institute in conjunction with collaborators from Trinity College Dublin, Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI), Beaumont hospital, the MRC Human Genetics Unit and University of Edinburgh.

September 8: Global software major Microsoft has designed a computer programme that allows you to scan the universe and zoom into outer space through its Windows. Touted as a worldwide telescope, the programme enables students and scholars to conduct astronomical research, promote science education and create entertainment. The data from sky, planets, solar system and the earth are categorised to access information easily. Website: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

September 9: An international consortium of researchers has completed the majority of the genome sequence of the domesticated turkey, publishing it in the online open-access journal PLoS Biology next week. The research team hopes that the turkey genome will provide a model for creating gene- and chromosome-level assemblies. The complete genome sequence, rapidly acquired using 'next-generation' sequencing technology, promises new data for avian researchers and, ultimately  for turkey producers and consumers.

September 10: Six months after a failed test, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully conducted the second static testing of its liquid core stage (L110) of Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III (GSLV Mk -III), according to a press release. The test lasted 200 seconds at ISRO's Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) test facility at Mahendragiri today (September 8, 2010) at 15:50 hrs. L110 is one of the heaviest earth storable liquid stages ever developed by ISRO.

September 11: China is on track to launch its second lunar satellite by year's end, as the country pursues its plans for a manned mission to the moon by 2020. Preparations for the launch of the Chang'e-2 probe, which will go into orbit within 15 kilometres of the moon, are going smoothly as per media.  The lunar probe will test soft-landing and other technologies in preparation for the launch of the Chang'e-3, which is slated for launch in 2013 and aims to be China's first unmanned landing on the moon.

September 12: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration may soon approve Genetically Modified Salmon for humans to eat, against consumer advocates who consider the fish a threat to both health and the environment. The panel of experts call it "as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon." The Genetically Modified Salmon is called  AquAdvantage Salmon and is developed by AquaBounty Technologies. The FDA is scheduled to hold public hearings on the issue from Sept. 19 to 21.

September 13: A team from University College Dublin successfully sequenced the entire genetic code of an Irish person for the first time in history. They used sophisticated sequencing technology to map 3.1 billion sub-units of DNA that comprise the human genome. Specifically, it is hoped that experts may finally be able to understand why the Irish are more susceptible to diseases such as cystic fibrosis than other European nationals. The landmark study is published in the journal Genome Biology.

September 14:  Scientists at University of California, Berkeley have engineered electronic skin that can sense touch, in a major step towards next-generation robotics and prosthetic limbs. The lab-tested material responds to almost the same pressures as human skin and with the same speed, they reported in the British journal Nature Materials. The "e-skin" comprises a matrix of nanowires made of Germanium and Silicon rolled onto a sticky polyimide film can respond to chemicals, biological agents and temperature.

September 15: Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, (BARC) is developing mutants lines of wheat and getting ready for testing in the fields of Kenya in Africa, to check if these will be resistant to the virulent strain of wheat stem rust 'Ug99'. The evolving pathogen Ug99 may pose even greater threat to global wheat production than the original Ug99 (identified first in Uganda in 1999), according to Food and Agricultural Organisation. If BARC succeeds it will be a significant development as wheat scientists all over the world

September 16: ISRO is gearing up to launch eight spacecrafts annually to increase revenue and meet global demand, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Director P.S. Veeraraghavan said on Tuesday. PSLV will carry three satellites and GSLV will carry INSAT 5C, he said. Chandrayaan-2 mission would be launched by GLSV instead of PSLV. In Chandrayaan-2 there would be an orbiter, lander and a rover.

September 17: Scientists developed the world's first artificial ovary. The study is  published in the Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, could help thousands of cancer sufferers who become infertile through treatment. The scientists from Brown University on Rhode Island, also said the artificial organs could be used to help discover why some women find it difficult to conceive. The breakthroughs also raise the prospect that women will one day use the techniques to side-step the menopause.

September 18: The protective ozone layer in the Earth's upper atmosphere has stopped thinning and should largely be restored by mid-century thanks to a ban on harmful chemicals, say UN scientists. The Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2010 report says a 1987 international treaty that phased out Chloro Fluoro Carbons (CFC) - substances used in refrigerators, aerosol sprays and some packing foams - has been successful. Ozone provides a natural protective filter against harmful ultra-violet rays from the Sun.

September 19: Scientists have sequenced the genetic code of the cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao), which they say could triple the yield of the disease-prone crop and transform the lives of millions of poor farmers in Africa and around the developing world who rely on it for their livelihood. The US chocolate firm Mars, working with the computer firm IBM and the US Department of Agriculture, took two years and two months to unlock the genetic code of the tree. Web: http://www.cacaogenomedb.org/

September 20: Scientists have discovered some of world's biggest, strongest spider webs, as wide as 82 feet (25 meters)-about as long as two city buses in Andasibe-Mantadia National Park in Madagascar. Made of the world's strongest known biological material, the web is the product of a new species, the Darwin's Bark Spider, which makes the world's largest webs of any single spider, according to new studies. The findings appear in the Journal of Arachnology and PLoS ONE.

September 21: The timetable for China's first manned moon landing, as well as the launch of a space station, lab and probes to explore Mars and Venus, was announced by scientists over the weekend.China will launch its first manned moon landing in 2025, a probe to Mars by 2013 and to Venus by 2015. China plans to launch the country's first unmanned space laboratory, Tiangong-1, next year, which is expected to accomplish the country's first unmanned docking with Shenzhen-8, a step toward building a space station.

September 22: Scientists have discovered a new species of ape living in the treetops of the rugged mountains along the Vietnamese, Laos and Cambodian borders. The "Yellow-cheeked Crested Gibbon" has been given the name Nomascus annamensis. It is is the seventh Nomascus species to be identified. Van Ngoc Thinh at German Primate Centre which is part of central Germany's Goettingen University, observed the gibbons and wrote up the findings in the Vietnamese Journal of Primatology.

September 23: The United Nations launched the 'Year of the Bat' (2011-2012) hoping a bit of positive publicity can foster better understanding of the role the mammals play in pollination and dispersal of seeds.
From insect-eating bats in Europe that provide important pest control to seed-dispersing bats in the tropics that help sustain rainforests, bats deliver vital ecosystem services. An estimated 134 plants that yield products used by humans depend on bats for seed dispersal or pollination. Website: http://www.yearofthebat.org/

September 24: Scientists said they've discovered fossils in the southern Utah desert of two new dinosaur species closely related to the Triceratops, including one with 15 horns on its large head. The discovery of the new plant-eating species — including Kosmoceratops richardsoni, considered the most ornate-headed dinosaur known to man — was reported  in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE. The other dinosaur, which has five horns and is the larger of the two, was dubbed Utahceratops gettyi.

September 25: Centuries after Leonardo Da Vinci sketched designs of a giant bat-shaped craft that used a pilot's arms and legs to power the wings, Canadian engineering students say they have flown an engineless aircraft that stays aloft by flapping its wings like a bird. International aviation officials are expected to certify next month that "The Snowbird" has made the world's first successful, sustained flight of a human-powered ornithopter. It sustained both altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, in an 2 August test flight near Toronto.

September 26: Nine scientists were on sunday chosen for the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize 2010 for their achievement in the field of science and technology, with three of the awardees being women for the first time. The awards were announced at a function to mark the foundation day of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. The CSIR also said its award for S&T Innovations for Rural Development 2009 will go to Indian Oil Corporation Ltd's Research and Development Centre in Faridabad.

September 27: Subhra Chakraborty and her team from the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi, India, have "successfully" combined genes from the amaranth plant with those of the common potato, a feat which the team says increases potato protein content by up to 60 percent. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study explains that it helps potatoes to develop high amino acid and protein levels. And they claim that the genetically modified crop is safe for consumption.

September 28: Solar cells that mimic "green leaf" have been created at North Carolina State University where water-gel-based artificial leaves containing chlorophyll produce electricity. The light-sensitive molecules get "excited" by the sun's rays to produce electricity, similar to plant molecules that get excited to synthesize sugars in order to grow, explains Velev, whose work has been published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

September 29: ‘Project Aadhar’, which is seen as the symbol of modern India by the government, was launched by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh as ten adivasis from the tribal area of Tembhli village in Maharashtra received their Unique Identification Number. Four-year-old Hitesh Sonawane became the youngest member to receive the UID card from the Prime Minister. 12 digit numbers will be given to the person as his identity which will be kind of link to all demographic details and bank accounts.

September 30: A decline in pollinating insects in India is resulting in reduced vegetable yields and could limit people's access to a nutritional diet, a study warns. The loss of the natural service could have a long-term impact on the farming sector, which accounts for almost a fifth of the nation's GDP. Globally, pollination is estimated to be worth £141bn ($224bn) each year. The findings were presented at a recent British Ecological Society meeting, held at the University of Leeds.

BOOK OF SEPTEMBER

                                                                       
Title          : The Disappearing Spoon: and Other True Tales of  Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
Author      : Sam Kean
Publisher  : Little, Brown and Company
Pages       : 400

ISBN         : 10-0316051640

Few of us would ever associate the periodic table of the elements with high intrigue. The story of how we came to discover and understand the elements touches on topics that range from the hot centers of stars to human folly. The Periodic Table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession.

The author Sam Kean clusters the elements not just by their physics, but by their character. There's a "Poisoner's Corridor" chapter that follows a hapless geek into a radioactive misadventure, for example, and a great economics lesson offered through the rise of aluminium. Literature buffs might be surprised to learn of Goethe's own connections with the early history of the periodic table, from the chapter "Artistic Elements".

We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground. Why did Gandhi hate Iodine? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of Cadmium? And why did Tellurium lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history?

Collective, the tales of  "The Disappearing Spoon", do, however, convey an uneasy sense of just how many human lives have been lost over our ignorance of the elements. Sure, there are plenty of exploding lab incidents throughout history, but there are also mass poisonings and other atrocities that could have been prevented with simple scientific understanding. Kean leaves readers with a satisfying evolutionary sense of the periodic table and its future.

He describes the rise of the semiconductor industry; the connection of wars to the discovery of new elements; and the practice in colonial America of putting a silver coin in a milk jug to prevent the milk from spoiling. Readers also learn that Wilhelm Röntgen thought he had gone insane when he first discovered X-rays; and that the talented chemist Maria Goeppert-Mayer was nevertheless billed as a “mother” rather than a scientist when she won the Nobel Prize.
 
Review Text Courtesy:  http://www.goodreads.com, http://www.mediabistro.com,
http://www.americanscientist.org, http://www.nytimes.com.
 
 
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SCIENCE OF AUGUST 2010

Jantar Mantar -the newly  declared UNESCO World Heritage Site

August 1: Spain has designed the world's first robot with its own "conscience" and "life", which will "entertain, teach and be a companion" to humans who purchase it.  The AISoy 1, which will go on sale in August, is the first social android developed by Spanish firm AISoy Robotics, which is now bringing its creation out of the laboratory. The robot is capable of learning from experience and modifying its behaviour, values and actions it can undertake at specific times. It weighs 1.5 kg and 25cm in height.

August 2: India's largest desalination plant in Chennai on Saturday. The facility will draw water from the Bay of Bengal, process it using the reverse osmosis technology and supply purified water to the city. The Rs 600-crore plant at Minjur, around 35 km north of here, is the state's first seawater desalination plant. I is a joint venture between IVRCL Infrastructures and Project Ltd and Befessa of  Spain. The facility will supply water at a cost of Rs 48.74 per 1,000 litres for the first 25 years.

August 3: Jaipur’s famed astronomical observatory, Jantar Mantar was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the UNESCO world heritage committee meeting in Brazil on Saturday. The observatory will be India’s 28th world heritage site and Rajasthan’s second. Jantar Mantar was built by Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur and completed around 1730 as an astronomical observatory.  UNESCO observed it as an expression of  Indian astronomical skills and cosmological concepts. Website: http://www.jantarmantar.org/

August 4: The Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, home to numerous U.S. nuclear tests in the 1940′s and ’50′s, has been designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO. The Bikini Atoll wes evacuated in 1946 while the United States carried out nuclear weapons tests. Islanders in the region were touched by fallout from the tests and the ground of Bikini was tainted by radiation, causing illnesses among its inhabitants and leading to US compensation in the 1990s.

August 5: Since Sunday, four eruptions, dubbed Coronal Mass Ejections are coming from Sun which are on a crash course for Earth. Scientists there said they were part of the sun awakening from Solar Minimum--a time where little activity and few sunspots are witnessed on the sun--and moving toward Solar Maximum, a period of high activity and more sun spots. The period of time between Solar Minimum and Solar Maximum is usually 11 years. The last Solar Maximum occurred in 2001.

August 6: The fourth update of the Census of Marine Life has been released to coincide with the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Valencia, Spain. The census, which was started in 2000, involves over 2000 scientists from 82 nations. It is the worlds first ever marine census documenting over 230,000 known species and filling in the gaps, which have now seen over 95% of the Earths oceans unexplored. The data collected is being published through the open access journal PloS ONE:  http://www.plosone.org/

August 7: The fossilised remains of a small land-dwelling crocodile that jumped for prey like an agile cat, has been found in Tanzania. It was discovered by an  Australian team at James Cook University. Named Pakasuchus kapilimai (from Paka, which is in Kiswahili language means 'cat'), it  adds to the collection of interesting Cretaceous crocodiles. The animal is the most mammal-like croc to have been found. It  is described today in the journal Nature.

August 8: Police began investigation into the dumping of  bags of insecticides and pesticides into the Neduvode river at Alakkode in Kerala that caused health problems to the people. The pollution of the river was revealed when some local people who went to swim in the river on Monday developed exhaustion and itching. It was then found that the pollution was caused by the large quantities of insecticides and pesticides dumped into the river from a nearby bridge.

August 9: Asus has launched a new Bamboo Collection notebook -- U43Jc. The laptop is a follow-up to the first Bamboo Series launched in 2008. Asus calims that the new U Series Bamboo Collection carries the message: protecting nature is a joint effort that unites us all, but it does not have to exclude innovative design, memorable style and powerful computing potential.  The natural bamboo exteriors are juxtaposed with brushed aluminum interior.

August 10: The oil leak from the sinking cargo vessel MSC Chitra after it collided with MV Khalijia-III outside the Mumbai harbour has been plugged with the Indian Coast Guard. But nearly 800 tonnes of oil is already believed to have leaked out into the Arabian Sea. MSC Chitra was also carrying 1219 containers out of which 31 had hazardous chemicals like pesticides. The oil spill may affect about 200 species of marine life. Mangroves of  Navi Mumbai are also in danger.

August 11: India is set to launch its own satellite-based navigation system - GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation or GAGAN. In the next five years the Indian airspace will get more crowded and the chances of accidents may increase. To reduce the chances of future air disasters, India has endeavoured on the GAGAN project for traffic and directional guidance from outer space. When ISRO's satellites are in  orbit, India will join an elite club that includes USA, Russia and European Union, who run their own GPS.

August 12: The greatest mystery in mountain climbing involving the death of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine who might have climbed Mount Everest in 1924, nearly 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the world's highest summit, has been solved. Kent Moore and John Semple of University of Toronto and Indian researcher Dev Raj Sikka came to the conclusion that an extreme plunge in barometric pressure, a blinding blizzard and sudden oxygen deprivation were the key factors in the pair's death.

August 13: The human brain on a microchip is almost ready. The neuro-chip, which has been developed by medicine scientists at the University of Calgary, will network brain cells and thus record brain cell activity at a resolution never achieved before. The neuro-chip will help future understanding of how brain cells work  and permit drug discoveries for a variety of neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. The new technology has been published online in the journal, Biomedical Microdevices.

August 14: Researchers reported dozens of cases of  British, Indian and Pakistani patients who contracted infections caused by bacteria harbouring an enzyme called  NewDelhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.  The article was co-authored by Karthikeyan Kumarasamy (and Timothy Walsh)  while he was  working at Cardiff  University. However the strain was initially characterised at the lab in Chennai.

August 15: Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan of  the University of  Texas at Austin and Nicola Cabibbo of the University of Rome and  have won the 2010 Dirac medal for their "fundamental contributions to the understanding of weak interactions and other aspects of theoretical physics". Cabbibo and Sudarshan will each receive a $5000 prize from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. The Dirac medal is awarded to scientists who have not yet won a Nobel prize.

August 16: Scientists using Google Maps have discovered a new crater like structure in the Bayuda Desert of Sudan. If confirmed, it will be the second such discovery using the popular online mapping tool and could spawn a new generation of home-based amateur crater hunters. Assistant Professor Amelia Sparavigna from the Politecnico di Torino in Italy has detailed her discovery on the pre-press website arXiv.org. She says she got the idea from Italian researcher Vincenzo de Micheles who reported it in the journal Science in 2008.

August 17: Judge Jeffrey of the federal court in San Francisco has ordered a ban on growing genetically modified beets in the United States until the Department of Agriculture fully investigates their environmental impact. It bars new cultivation of the genetically modified beets, which represent 90 percent of the US crop.
Experts think the evaluation that was requested will take more than two years. Some fear that could lead to shortages, and growers warn there may not be enough of the traditional unmodified seed.

August 18: Geophysicist Dietmar Muller from University of Sydney has said that the churning of the Earth’s molten interior may have played a vital role in sea level change over the past two to 20 million years. The levels vary because of natural processes on Earth on timescales from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. In the past they have been more than 120 metres higher than present day levels. The findings were published in the journal Science.

August 19: India Monday launched the second phase of pan-Africa e-network, adding 12 more countries to the New Delhi-aided long distance education and tele-medicine programme. A brainchild of India's former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the e-network seeks to bridge the digital divide across the 53-nation African continent and seeks to provide tele-medicine and tele-education through a fibre-optic network. The project also won the prestigious Hermes Prize recently for innovation in the field of sustainable development.

August 20: Tamil Nadu banned use of old-style, energy intensive incandescent bulbs in offices across the state and ordered the use of compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) to save power. According to the order, the ban was applicable to state government undertakings, government boards, and organisations getting governmental assistance. Comparing the energy consumption of four crore 60 watts incandescent bulbs and 14 watts CFL for an hour, the government said the use of CFL results in a whopping saving of 1,840 MW.

August 21: A spot on Mars called Nili Fossae that is rich in clay mineral-rich rocks could be a prime spot to search for Martian life that may have existed 4 billion years ago, a new study suggests. In the study, scientists used an instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study clay-carbonate rocks on the Martian surface leftover from ancient red planet era known as the Noachian period. The study's findings will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

August 22: Scientists returning from a 30-day research expedition to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands found what they believe are 10 new species of coral. Researchers returned from the remote string of atolls, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. More than half were found at deep water coral reefs more than 150 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Scientists plan to analyze the specimens they gathered to verify they're species that haven't been identified before.

August 23: The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry's seed bank is in danger, because of court-approved plans to rip up its vast fields of genetically diverse plants and build fancy homes on the prime real estate they occupy near St. Petersburg. International organizations dedicated to agricultural diversity have appealed directly to President Dmitry Medvedev to save the Pavlovsk Agricultural Station, which they say could be crucial for sustaining fruit crops around the world.

August 24: Dr. Kunio Komiyama, a dentistry professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, has invented a toothbrush that will not need toothpaste, but will clean teeth with solar power. He designed the first model 15 years ago and has been perfecting it since. The Soladey-J3X  houses a solar panel at the base of the brush that transmits electrons and when the electrons reach the head, they react with acid in the mouth, creating a chemical reaction that breaks down plaque cells and kills other bacteria in the mouth.

August 25: Indian scientists have successfully produced a calf through cloning, the world's third. The calf was born on on August 22 and is doing fine. Scientists at the National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, Haryana had cloned the world's first buffalo calf in February 2009 which stayed alive for five days. A second calf was cloned in June last year, which has survived. The latest calf has been named Garima II. The new and advanced "Hand-guided Cloning Technique" was used for cloning.

August 26: A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf following the explosion of  BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

August 27: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was loaded onto a massive U.S. Air Force plane for the final leg of its journey on Earth before it catches the last scheduled shuttle flight into space. It took about 15 years to build and was part-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It will be one of two payloads carried to the space station on Endeavour STS-134, NASA's last shuttle mission scheduled for Feb. 26, 2011. The AMS detector will complement CERN's Large Hadron Collider in its search for Anti-matter.

August 28: Observations from the Kepler space observatory confirmed the smallest, most Earth-sized world yet seen has been discovered around a star like our sun, NASA announced. Astronomers have not yet confirmed the potential Earth-like planet, but early analysis suggests it has a radius just 1.5 times that of Earth. The Earth's radius is about 6,378 km.  The Earth-sized world, if confirmed, would be so close to its star that it would look nothing like Earth. It would be hot and likely not habitable.

August 29: Scientists at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the John Innes Centre, have sequenced the entire wheat genome and will make the DNA data available to crop breeders to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding. Wheat is a relative latecomer to the world of DNA mapping. Other crops have had their genetic codes unscrambled within the past few years — rice in 2005, corn in 2009, and soybeans earlier this year.

August 30: Antibiotic compounds found in the skin secretions of some species of frogs could hold the key to treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to researchers from United Arab Emirates University, in Al-Ain. Frog skins are moist and contain secretions of antimicrobial peptides that kill bacteria and other micro-organisms, helping the animals to fight off pathogens. Around 200 antibiotic compounds had been identified in frog skin secretions, and some could soon be developed into new antibiotics.

August 31: The complete genome of Apple (Malus domestica) has been sequenced. A consortium of 86 scientists from 20 institutions took two years to unravel the code - the largest plant genome uncovered to date. The researchers were also able to trace the apple's ancestry, and found the domestic fruit's wild ancestor Malus sieversii originally grew mountains of southern Kazakhstan. There are more than 7,500 varieties of Apple known today. The report is published in the journal Nature Genetics.





















































                                           

BOOK OF AUGUST

                                             
Title          : The Edge of Physics
Author      : Anil Ananthaswamy
Pages      : 322
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN        : 0618884688

As we can guess from the subtitle of the book, A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, this is a book of  extreme "Physics Tourism",yes,it's a book about visiting the remote and inhospitable places where a lot of groundbreaking physics and astrophysics experiments are conducted. Ananthaswamy, the author and consulting-editor of  the New Scientist magazine, tells the story of our quest to understand the universe, as seen through the eyes of a traveller.

Each chapter is a visit to  a new place, and looking at a different problem in Physics. Stories about the history of the experiments and locations are mixed together with short and readable explanations of the physics problems being studied, and why the experiments demand to be done in the odd places where they're located. The author takes readers behind the scenes of these experiments in some of the most inhospitable places in the world, leading the tour with wit and an eye for compelling detail.

The book begins with a pilgrimage to the Mount Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble made the astounding discovery that not only is there a universe beyond the Milky Way but that the universe is expanding. We go inside the venerable dome of the 100-inch telescope that made Hubble's work possible. The next chapter is a story of how dark matter was discovered, how physicists converged on the mostly likely explanation and of the painstaking search for what makes up the universe's unseen mass.

We then journey to one of the harshest places in the world: Siberia in winter. Deep beneath the frozen surface of the massive Lake Baikal is the world's first underwater neutrino telescope. Designed to detect the slipperiest of subatomic particles, the Lake Baikal Neutrino Telescope could point us to dense regions of dark matter in our galaxy. Next is a trip to the Atacama Desert high in the Chilean Andes which is the site of  the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

There is a chapter dedication to the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its detectors, like ATLAS. What does it take to build a machine like the LHC? Will it find the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give other elementary particles their mass? Will it create particles of dark matter, and solve the mystery of the universe's missing mass? Will it find signs of supersymmetry, and give physicists a clue to physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. A lot of questions are that subsequently being answered.


The author's travels ends in the Hanle Valley in Ladakh, India. The valley floor is at an altitude of 14,000 feet. It was a fitting end, given that the observatory being established there by Indian astronomers represents the next generation of observatories: higher, colder, and so remote that telescopes in such locations will have to be robotic. The epilogue also looks ahead to experiments of the future. The historical and other anecdotes are well done in the travelogue style which is an exotic experience.

Chapters: One: Monks and Astronomers. Two: The Experiment That Detects Nothing. Three: Little Neutral Ones. Four: The Paranal Light Quartest. Five: Fire, Rock, and Ice. Six: Three Thousand Eyes in the Karoo. Seven: Antimatter Over Antarctica. Eight: Einstein Meets Quantum Physics at the South Pole. Nine: The Heart of the Matter. Ten: Whispers from Other Universes. Website: www.edgeofphysics.com.
Email of author: anil@nasw.org.


(Book review text courtesy: website of the book)

SCIENCE OF JULY 2010

                                                                              

Karimeen (Etroplus suratensis) - the newly declared State fish of Kerala

July 1: Despite technical snags in the indigenous cryogenic engine that powered the Geo-stationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) which was flight-tested in April, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is expected to launch Chandrayaan-2 on an indigenous cryogenic engine on schedule by 2013. ISRO is also developing a satellite that would have instruments on board to test traces of greenhouse gases to enable a better understanding of  atmospheric chemistry.

July 2: The fossilised remains of an extinct sperm whale with teeth each more than a foot long has been unearthed in Peru by scientists who believe the great predator ate other whales to survive.The new species has been named Leviathan melvillei after the Hebrew word Livyatan, meaning a large, mythical sea monster, and in honour of the American novelist Herman Melville, author of  The Whale, also known as Moby Dick. it was a classic tale of 19th-century.

July 3: An international project aims to genetically modify the C3-type of photosynthesis rice uses. If the scientists are successful in creating rice that follows the C4-type of photosynthesis like some plants including maize and sorghumthe, they could produce 50 per cent more grain, and would require less water and fertiliser. The study is coordinated by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, under 'Project Sunshine', a programme that investigates how the power of the sun can be harnessed.

July 4: World's first flying car cleared for take off. The Terrafugia Transition is a car that can fly but with wings like a normal airplane. Once airborne, the speed of the car-plane powered by 100 hp Rotax 912S engine is expected to be around 115 mph with a payload of around 430 lbs. The first finished vehicle is expected to be delivered in late 2011. US Federal Air Authority have given the car-plane a special weight exemption, paving way for the mass production.

July 5: Using sensors onboard the Kaguya spacecraft, which was placed in orbit around the Moon in 2007, Japanese astronomers found abundant signatures of the mineral in concentric rings in three big craters. The mineral, called Olivine, the deep inner layer of Iron- and Magnesium-rich rock lies beneath the Moon's crust. Headed by Satoru Yamamoto of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, the study appears online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

July 6: British engineers are developing new technology that would soon allow paralysed patients to operate bionic limbs with the aid of implanted brain transmitters. The technology uses tiny microchips to sense nerve messages, decode the signals, and turn thought into movement. Scientists believe within the next five years patients with damaged spinal cords would be using robotic devices that will allow them to move their arms or legs at will. The study is led by a team in University of Leicester headed by Prof. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga.

July 7: The proton seems to be 0.00000000000003 millimetres smaller than researchers previously thought, according to work published in Nature. Protons are among the most common particles out there. But despite its everday appearance, the proton remains something of a mystery to nuclear physicists, says Randolf Pohl, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and an author on the Nature paper.

July 8: Karimeen (Etroplus suratensis) will be the official State fish of Kerala. The State Government has also declared 2010-11 is being observed as ‘The Year of Karimeen'. The National Bureau of Fish Genetics Resources had in 2008 suggested that States adopt a State fish and already, a dozen States have an official fish. The Kuttanad region in Alappuzha district is considered the "family home" of the fish. However, Karimeen (Green Chromide)  is one of the most expensive fish. It is too beyond the pocket of the poor.

July 9: Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala launched successfully an advanced sounding rocket RH 200 at 3.50 p.m.on Wednesday. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said the rocket was developed part of the payload in the flight “as a co-passenger,” with the guidance of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). The students' payload comprised tri-axial accelerometers, power switching module and safe arm relay unit matching the requirements of the rocket.

July 10: In a major triumph for alternative energy researchers and enthusiasts, an experimental, solar-powered plane successfully completed a 26-hour flight powered by 12,000 solar cells and sunlight-powered lithium batteries. The Solar Impulse landed where it had taken off -- in Payerne, Switzerland. Andre Borschberg, 57, a former Swiss air force fighter pilot, flew the plane. The solar plane project was under the guidance of Bertrand Piccard, the first person to complete a nonstop balloon flight around the world.

July 11: Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams, who holds the record of the longest spaceflight (195 days) for female space travellers will head for the stars once again. She will be joined on the Soyuz 31 flight to the space station in 2012. Daughter of  Indian born neuroanatomist Deepak Pandya and Slovak mother Bonnie Pandya, among the personal items Sunitha took with her on her last trip were a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and a small figurine of Ganesha.

July 12: Indian Space Research Organisation on Monday sent PSLV-C15 soaring into space to place in orbit Cartosat-2B, a remote sensing satellite with applications in mapping and infrastructure planning. PSLV-C15 also launched Algeria's 116-kg ALSAT-2A, Canada's 6.5 kg NLS-6.1 and AISSAT-1, Switzerland's NLS-6.2 TISAT, and picosatellite STUDSAT designed by 35 undergraduate engineering students from seven colleges in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

July 13: An Octopus named "Paul" living in  Sea Life Centre in Germany, has become a World Cup sensation by correctly forecasting the results of semi-finals and predicting the Spanish victory in the final. The octopus made his prediction by choosing between two containers of food marked with the flags of the competing countries. But experts say  "Paul" (Octopus vulgaris) and octopuses in general are colourblind, so the colour of the flag is irrelevant to them.

July 14: A team of scientists led by Professor Yoel Fink of  Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States have created a cloth madeup of  fibers that can detect and produce sound. The development, described in the August issue of Nature Materials, transforms the usual passive nature of textiles into a virtually all-singing, all-dancing version. The "cloth" can be used for for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, or could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain.

July 15: Thirty-two scientists from India have been selected by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to contribute to the fifth edition of its assessment report that is known to be the most exhaustive analysis of existing knowledge in climate science. The report is slated to come out in 2013-14. Among the omissions is Prof Murari Lal, whose was the lead author for the chapter that had the controversial prediction about the Himalayan glaciers. Almost 60 per cent of the scientists selected are new to the IPCC.

July 16: Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean appear to be at least partly a result of human-induced increases of atmospheric greenhouse gases, says a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The sea level rise which may aggravate monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and India could have far-reaching impacts on both future regional and global climate, according to a University of Colorado. Along the coasts of the northern Indian Ocean, seas have risen by an average of about 13 mm per decade.

July 17: The European Space Agency’s (ESA) comet-chasing probe Rosetta has captured the first close-up images of the asteroid Lutetia. Lutetia is the largest asteroid ever visited by a space probe. Lutetia is located between Mars and Jupiter, some 454 million km away from Earth. Rosetta will now continue its course towards its main destination: the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After orbiting alongside the comet for a few months, it will send a lander to the surface in November 2014.

July 18: Yet another milestone in mobile communication when the 5 billionth mobile subscription added to the count, largely thanks to emerging markets like India and China. According to Ericsson estimates based on industry information, the 5 billionth subscription was added Thursday 8 July. Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015. Studies show that soon 80 % internet users will be doing so using their mobile device.

July 19: First web browser for India called Epic launched by Hidden Reflex, a Bangalore based software startup. Any internet user can now download the browser for free by logging onto the website http://www.epicbrowser.com/. Epic’s India sidebar supports Indian content by providing users access to the latest national and regional news. Users can instantly write in Indian languages on any webpage or in write, Epic’s free built-in word processor. Twelve Indian languages are currently supported.

July 20: Two new bacterial species that produce enzymes which could have application for biotech industry have been discovered in the Arctic region by a senior scientist from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. The bacteria can grow at 2 degrees Celsius and produce enzymes such as protease and lipase which can be used in detergents and washing machines. These bacteria produce anti-oxidants and unsaturated fatty acids that could be used as nutrient supplements also.

July 21: David Warren, who is widely credited with creating the prototype of the flight data recorder, or “black box,”died in Australia. He was 85. David Ronald de Mey Warren was born to missionary parents on March 3, 1925, on Groote Eylandt, an island off northeastern Australia. He was said to be the first European child born there. His father died in one of Australia’s earliest air disasters, in 1934. It inspired him to invent the "ARL Flight Memory Unit” in 1957 which was later called the "Black Box".

July 22: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has started receiving high-quality images from the advanced remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2B. The space agency had successfully launched Cartosat-2B – the 17th remote sensing satellite of India – into orbit onboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on July 12.
The multiple spot scene imagery sent by Cartosat-2B camera would also be useful for village/cadastral level resource assessment and mapping and detailed urban and infrastructure planning and development.

July 23: India will launch its first scientific expedition to the South Pole this November to commemorate the centenary of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's feat. An eight-member team of scientists will embark on the treacherous journey to the South Pole from 'Maitri', India's research station in the Antarctic region. India is also in the advanced stages of building its third research station named 'Bharti' in the Larsemann Hills region in the eastern part of the frozen continent. The station is expected to be functional by 2012.

July 24: According to US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the world is gearing up for the hottest year since 1880. According to them, 2010 will break all records of rising temperatures. The first six months of the year indicated so. It also said that June 2010 was the hottest June in the history. Earlier, 1998 was the hottest year in the recent history. The combined land and ocean temperature for the first six months of  2010 are 14.2 degrees Celsius. It is above the above the 20th century average of 15.5 C.

July 25: India develops world's cheapest computer, Priced Rs.1,600. Jointly developed by IIT-Rajasthan and IIT-Kanpur, the cheapest computer in the world, weighs 400 grams, which has all the applications of a regular computer. The laptop is equipped with touch-screen device and is also wi-fi enabled to access Internet. Interestingly, without hard disk it has 2GB memory and can be connected to external memory of 32 GB. The laptop will be available for students under the National Mission on Education.

July 26: Astronomers have found the largest star yet detected - up to 20 million times brighter than the Sun - using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Named R136a1, the star is thought to have started off with a mass of up to 320 times that of the Sun and the new discovery has doubled the previously accepted limit of solar mass. The research, conducted by scientists from Britain, Malaysia and Germany, was published in scientific journal  The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

June 27: Scientists have for the first time collected venom from octopuses captured from the waters of Antarctica. In the process they have discovered four new octopus species and two new types of cephalopod venom. Researchers hope the new venoms will lead to the development of drugs for pain management, fighting allergies and treating cancer. The study was led by Dr Bryan Fry of the University of Melbourne with researchers from the University of Hamburg and the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.

July 28: Physicists are planning their next atom-smasher which they hope to start building in 2012. Physicists will meet in Paris this week for a conference on high-energy physics, and they're expected to discuss plans for the 20-mile-long International Linear Collider (ILC). The ILC would collide electrons with positrons. In terms of particle energies, it would be less powerful than the LHC and the Tevatron at Fermilab, but it would allow for more accurate measurements. Details: http://www.linearcollider.org/

July 29: A team of scientists will launch an expedition to the Titanic next month to assess the deteriorating condition of the world's most famous shipwreck and create a detailed three-dimensional map that will "virtually raise the Titanic" for the public. The 20-day expedition is to leave St. John's, Newfoundland, on Aug. 18 under a partnership between RMS Titanic Inc., which has exclusive salvage rights to the wreck, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

July 30: India's latest supercomputer 'Annapurna' was unveiled at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) in Chennai today. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee unveiled the country's seventh fastest high-performance computation (HPC) cluster having 1.5 Tera Byte (TB) memory and 30 TB storage space cluster capacity. Among broad-based scientific institutions in India, the Annapurna cluster is the third fastest, ranking below the IISc Bangalore and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

July 31: The milk of the indigenous Vechur cow is more beneficial to health than the milk from cross-bred bovine varieties. This has been revealed in a study conducted for a thesis at the College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Trissur, Kerala by EM Muhammed for his thesis. Among 12 milk protein beta Casein variants, two common types have been identified as A1 and A2. The A2 variant is found to be safe for human consumption which is protective against Diabetes and Heart diseases.