• Meet Turiasaurus, first mega Dinosaur to be found in Europe
• 50 new Species found in Borneo
• India develops devices for Deepwater Exploration
• How to Make a Mummy
• Discovery reaches space station, crew transfer on
• Grasses Can Fuel Cars, Save Planet
• Black hole seen Gulping a Star
• Scientists Develop a Nano Cancer
• NASA wants Permanent Moon Base

• Will India's Moon Project transport energy to Earth?
• Telemedicine opening New Possibilities in Healthcare
• Mouthwash to help Cancer Treatment Pain
• Plant a Tree and Save the Earth?
• Meet the Dikika Baby, A Three-year-old from the Dawn of Humanity
• Now, an 'ultra-cold Atomic Clock'!
• NASA images show water on Mars. Life?
• Researchers warn of another Indian Ocean Tsunami
• NASA to Establish Lunar Outpose

Exploring the possibility of transporting Helium 3,the richest source of energy found on the moon, to the earth and converting it for energy production will be one of the focus areas of the Chandrayan Mission, a senior ISRO official said. "Space scientists are working on it and Chandrayan series will be continued to find out the potential of the moon and its use for mankind," Dr K N Shankara, Director, ISRO Satellite Centre, said. Efforts are also on for increasing the solar cell efficiency for energy production. "From 10 per cent, it has already reached 28 per cent and is expected to reach 60 per cent," he said, speaking on "Space Programme for Societal Development". R&D work is being carried out on building large solar panels on satellites to convert microwave power, which, in turn, can be utilised for power production, he said adding "it would, however, take 20-25 years to achieve it." ISRO's techniques are being utilised by West Bengal government to find out the sagging of transmission lines, he said. Space technology is also being utilised to forecast agricultural output three months prior to harvest. "Wheat growth estimates have already been done and we are now doing it for rice and it will be extended to all crops in the coming years." Referring to the Metsat programme (use of remote sensing technology for detecting the vagaries of weather), Shankara said Indian Meteorological Department is being assisted to establish auto weather stations and Doppler radars for weather forecast.

Courtesy: www.rediff.com, December 27, 2006

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Europe can now lay claim to its own massive dinosaur with the discovery of a 150 million-year-old fossil of a leaf-eating creature which grew up to 120ft long. Scientists have discovered dozens of fossilised bones of the sauropod dinosaur at a site called Barrihonda-El Húmero near the village of Riodeva in Teruel, Spain. Fully grown, Turiasaurus riodevensis would have weighed between 40 and 48 tons, equivalent to the combined weight of six or seven adult male elephants. Its immense size puts Turiasaurus on a par with some of the largest dinosaurs in the world, whose remains have been unearthed in Africa and America but never before in Europe. Details of the discovery are published today in the journal Science by a team led by Rafael Royo-Torres of the Joint Palaeontology Foundation of Teruel-Dinopolis. Brooks Hanson, deputy editor of physical sciences at Science, said the claw of the first digit on the dinosaur's foot was the size of an American football. "The humerus - the long bone in the foreleg that runs from the shoulder to the elbow - was as large as an adult [human]," said Mr Hanson.

The features of its skeleton indicate that the creature differed signifiantly from other large sauropod dinosaurs found in North and South America. "This dinosaur is also more evolutionary primitive than other giant sauropods found," said Mr Hanson. In addition to the humerus, the scientists have found fragments of the dinosaur's skull, scapula, femur, tibia and fibula, as well as teeth, vertebrae, ribs and phalanges - the tips of the fingers and toes. Sauropod dinosaurs typically had long necks and relatively small heads in terms of their large bodies and long tails. They fed on vegetation and many of them may have lived a semi-aquatic existence which would have helped to support their massive bulk. Until the latest find, the fossil of the largest sauropod in Europe was found in southern England, but this was estimated to be far smaller than the specimen found in Spain. The teeth of Turiasaurus had long roots and heart-shaped crowns. They grew in rows with overlapping tips, and wrinkled enamel which would have helped to break apart its diet of leaves, stems and roots. They probably walked slowly like modern-day elephants but may have been able to run for short periods.Scientists had thought that sauropods had a second brain in their tail but it now appears to be simply an enlargement of its spinal cord to help control the long extension of its backbone.

Courtesy: www.independent.co.uk, December 22, 2006

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Telemedicine, the marriage of medicine and modern communications technology, is raising hopes in healthcare. The ability to monitor patients at a distance means they can leave the hospital earlier and avoid unnecessary visits to the doctor, which also saves money. Christian Weigand, a computer scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, said telemedicine could help people with sleep apnea, a breathing disorder. Weigand is a member of a team that has developed a portable "laboratory" designed to help diagnose the condition as well as monitor it during therapy. The device is contained in a small box that the patient straps around his or her chest before sleeping. Using sensors attached to the body, the device records the patient's breathing, pulse, heartbeat, oxygen level in the blood, and sleeping position. The data are transmitted via short-range radio with Bluetooth technology to a base station in the patient's home, which analyses them and sends them to the treating physician. All the patient needs is a telephone line.

Heart patients will benefit most, and are already benefiting from telemedicine. According to the German Cardiac Society, many people with acute symptoms of chronic cardiac insufficiency can avoid a trip to the hospital, if they are in an electronic security network that remotely monitors key physiological data. The latest cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, implanted in people suffering from ventricular fibrillation, check themselves and send an email to the treating physician if they are not functioning properly. The physician then schedules a visit. Otherwise a heart patient may rely for months - until the next regular check-up - on a defective device. Pacemakers and defibrillators cannot only check themselves nowadays, but also record changes in heartbeat and heart rate. Devices developed by US company Medtronic measure the electrical resistance between the pacing lead in the heart and the pulse generator under the collarbone. A drop in resistance is a sign that fluid is collecting in the lungs. The physician is then notified via a mobile-phone text message. Health Manager, a device by the Stuttgart-based company Biocomfort that costs around 800 euros, measures blood pressure, weight, body fat and blood sugar. By early 2007, it will also be designed to check heart rhythm. It sends the data by radio to a personal computer or personal digital assistant, whose software makes a health assessment and gives warnings and health tips via email. The monitoring techniques available in telemedicine will mainly benefit people who are familiar with modern information technologies, noted Wolf-Dietrich Lorenz, editor in chief of Munich-based Krankenhaus-IT Journal (Hospital-IT Journal). "Elderly people who can't make sense of these technologies will definitely be in over their heads," he remarked.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, December 20, 2006

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Dozens of new species of animals and plants including a catfish with protruding teeth and a tree frog with striking bright green eyes have been found in the past year in the forests of Borneo, a WWF report said on Tuesday. The discoveries include 30 unique fish species, two tree frog species, 16 ginger species, three tree species and one large-leafed plant species, the conservation group said. "These discoveries reaffirm Borneo's position as one of the most important centres of biodiversity in the world," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo Programme. "The more we look the more we find," he added. Scientists had found a miniature fish - the world's second smallest vertebrate, measuring less than 1 centimetre in length and living in the acidic blackwater peat swamps of the island, the report said. Discoveries also included six Siamese fighting fish, including one with an iridescent blue-green marking, and a catfish with protruding teeth and an adhesive belly which allows it to stick to rocks. In terms of plants, WWF said the ginger discoveries more than doubled the entire number of the Etlingera species, while three new tree species of the genus Beilschmiedia were found. A number of the species were found in the "Heart of Borneo", a 220,000 sq km highland area covered with equatorial rainforest in the centre of the island, the WWF report said. The report said this habitat was being threatened by the clearing of forests for rubber, palm oil and paper pulp production. Since 1996, deforestation across Indonesia had increased to an average of 2 million hectares (5 million acres) per year and today only half of Borneo's original forest cover remained, WWF said. "The remote and inaccessible forests in the Heart of Borneo are one of the world's final frontiers for science and many new species continue to be discovered here," added Chapman. He said the highland forests were also key because they were the source of most of the island's major rivers, as well as acting as a natural barrier against forest fires. The conservation group said that it hoped that Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia, which jointly administer Borneo, would follow through on a commitment to conserve the upland area. Jane Smart, who heads the World Conservation Union's species programme, based in Gland, said that the discovery of 52 species within a year in Borneo was a "realistic" number given that scientists' guess there are about 15 million species on Earth. "There are still many more species that remain to be discovered here."

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, December 19, 2006

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A cheap and effective relief solution will soon be available in the markets for oral cancer patients suffering from radiation associated mucositis. Scientists at the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology and Regional Cancer Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, have developed an ayurvedic mouthwash consisting of three commonly used medicinal herbs for controlling mucositis - mouth sores and gum inflammations that last six to eight weeks, and often result in a break of treatment that allows the tumour to return. A year-long clinical study on 148 patients with oral cancer undergoing radiotherapy found the mouthwash effective in reducing pain, besides minimising oral bacterial infections and cutting down on consumption of painkillers. The two Council of Industrial and Scientific Research institutes have now filed for a global patent for the mouthwash, which is expected to be ready by January 2007. Speaking to TOI, Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology director M Radhakrishna Pillai said,"We can't reveal names of the medicinal herbs as we are yet to receive the patent. But the plants are common and used in many of our traditional medicines." The commonly used drug to control mucositis is called Amifostine (Ethyol) that costs Rs 9,000 per dose. It has to be injected half-an-hour before radiation. On the other hand, the mouthwash comes in the form of a powder that will have to be kept dissolved overnight before the patient rinses his mouth with it. The approximate production cost in an experimental set up has been estimated to be just 65 paise per dose, excluding packaging and marketing costs. Pillai said the patient will have to use the mouthwash four times a day."Patients who are under radiation suffer from inflammation of gums and mouth tissue. It is painful and often interrupts their treatment. During this time, the tumor can recur. That's why it is important that patients with oral cancer have a solution whereby they can have relief from pain and their treatment continues till the cancer is totally controlled," Pillai added.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, December 16, 2006

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India has developed devices to search the depths of the ocean - to as deep as over 5,000 meters (5 km) - for economic exploration, joining a league of nations that are developing such capability to exploit ocean wealth. "The technology and know-how developed and proved by Indian scientists will help to explore greater depths in the deep ocean in future for economic exploration of non-living resources," said Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal here Friday. Developed and tested successfully by Chennai-based National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), the technical arm of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the devices include a world-class Remotely Operable Vehicle (ROV), a deep sea mining machine or Underwater Crawler, and a deep sea soil testing machine or In-Situ Soil Property Measurement System. Some of the components have been acquired from the Experimental Design Bureau of Oceanological Engineering of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Designed to work in most extreme conditions, NIOC has already harnessed potato shaped nodules called Polymetallic Nodules, at depths greater than 4,000 metres in the deep sea.

"These nodules contain manganese (27-30 percent), copper(1-2 percent), nickel (1-2 percent) and cobalt (0.2-0.3 percent), apart from traces of other minerals," said P.S. Goel, secretary to the ministry of earth sciences. Copper and nickel are strategically important elements, as these are not available from terrestrial resources in the Indian sub-continent and hence it is essential that India develops technology to mine these nodules from the deep sea. Being a pioneer investor in polymetallic nodules exploration, a site of 150,000 sq km was allotted to India in the Central Indian Ocean Basin by the International Seabed Authority (ISBA) of the United Nations. The mining site is located about 2,000 km south of Kanyakumari with the nearest island being 500 km away. Today India is the only country with mining site allocated in the Central Indian Ocean Basin, the others being in the Pacific Ocean. "Once fully tested, we will be able to demonstrate and study what is available at depths of 5,000 metres and more. This will help us know how the mineral wealth can be exploited," said Dr M.A. Atmanand, project director at NIOT. Deep sea mining is a technologically challenging field as the depth of water and weather conditions are major constraints. At 5,000 metres depths, the pressure is extremely high - 500 times the atmospheric pressure, and the seabed is extremely soft comparable to thick grease. Developed with an investment of Rs.350 million over the last few years, NIOT Director Dr. S. Kathiroli said it will take a couple of years before the devices are available for commercial use for exploration of oil and gas, gas hydrates and other valuable ocean wealth and studies. "The ROV will be able to provide drilling support and also for laying pipelines," he said. ROV can operate at depths where human beings cannot go to undertake repairs or change tools. This equipment has been successfully tested at a depth of 205 metres in October.

Courtesy: www.teluguportal.net, December 15, 2006

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Can planting a tree stop the sea level from rising, the ice caps from melting and hurricanes from intensifying? According to a press release from EurekAlert, a new study says that it depends on where the trees are planted. It cautions that new forests in mid- to high-latitude locations could actually create a net warming. It also confirms the notion that planting more trees in tropical rainforests could help slow down global warming worldwide. In the first study to investigate the combined climate and carbon-cycle effects of large-scale deforestation in a fully interactive three-dimensional climate-carbon model, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Carnegie Institution and Université Montpellier II found that global forests actually produce a net warming of the planet. The study provides a holistic view of the deforestation issue. "This is the first comprehensive assessment of the deforestation problem" said Govindasamy Bala, lead author of the research that will be presented on Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Society annual meeting in San Francisco.

The models calculated the carbon/climate interactions and took into account the physical climate effect and the partitioning of the carbon dioxide release from deforestation among land, atmosphere and ocean. Forests affect climate in three different ways: they absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help to keep the planet cool; they evaporate water to the atmosphere and increase cloudiness, which also helps keep the planet cool; and they are dark and absorb a lot of sunlight, warming the Earth. Climate change mitigation strategies that promote planting trees have taken only the first effect into account. "Our study shows that tropical forests are very beneficial to the climate because they take up carbon and increase cloudiness, which in turn helps cool the planet" Bala said. But the study concludes that, by the year 2100, forests in mid- and high-latitudes will make some places up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than would have occurred if the forests did not exist. "The darkening of the surface by new forest canopies in the high latitude Boreal regions allows absorption of more sunlight that helps to warm the surface. In fact, planting more trees in high latitudes could be counterproductive from a climate-perspective," Bala said. The study finds little or no climate benefit when trees are planted in temperate regions. "Our integrated systems approach allowed us for the first time to estimate the total effects of land cover change in different regions of the world," Bala said. Afforestation has been promoted heavily in mid-latitudes as a means of mitigating climate change. However, the combined carbon/climate modeling study shows that it doesn't work. The albedo effect (the process by which less sunlight is reflected and more is absorbed by forest canopies, heating the surface) cancels out the positive effects from the trees taking in carbon. "Our study shows that preserving and restoring forests is likely to be climatically ineffective as an approach to slow global warming, said Ken Caldeira, a co-author of the study from the Carnegie Institution. "To prevent climate change, we need to transform our energy system. It is only by transforming our energy system and preserving natural habitat, such as forests, that we can maintain a healthy environment. To prevent climate change, we must focus on effective strategies and not just 'feel-good' strategies."

Courtesy: www.hindu.com, December 13, 2006

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And since they didn't want to spend eternity looking rotten, those who could afford to had their bodies painstakingly embalmed. Embalming, as practiced in ancient Egypt, was a lost art, until Bob Brier decided to learn by doing. He and a team of experts retraced the steps of the Egyptian masters. It was startling. More than 5,000 years ago, after burying their dead, the ancient Egyptians learned that the burning desert sands desiccated corpses. Instead of turning to dust, the skin shriveled up and clung to the bones. Mummification-the practice of dressing for success, eternal success-had begun. Wielding a tool much like a crochet hook, the ancient embalmers emptied the skull by pulling clumps of brain matter out through the nostrils. Delicate and skilled, they caused no damage to the visage of their dearly departed. Slicing the smallest possible incision into the abdomen, embalmers plucked out the stomach, liver, intestines, and other organs.

Beautifully sculpted canopic jars stored the cured entrails for all eternity. Natron, a type of salt, was the embalmers' secret weapon. It coaxed moisture from the flesh and reduced odors. Small packets were stuffed inside the abdominal cavity. The body was covered with some 400 pounds of it. Thirty-five days after recreating the ancient embalmer's art, Dr. Brier returned-fingers crossed. He saw...a mummy. Slowly, gently, Dr. Brier and his team removed the natron. They anointed the body, by now dehydrated, with frankincense and myrrh. Then the wrapping started-layer after layer of linen, decorated with hieroglyphic prayers. A small amulet was placed over the only organ left inside, the heart. With a final benediction, the mummy embarked on its journey to the afterworld and eternal life.

"You are young again. You live again. You are young again. You live again. Forever."

Courtesy: www.nationalgeographic.com,

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The skull of the Dikika baby, a 3.3-million-year-old infant discovered by Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged. The find is the most complete ancient infant and arguably the best fossil of its species, Australopithecus afarensis, ever found. eresenay Alemseged has two babies. One is Alula, who spends most of his time in his mother's arms in a cozy bungalow in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. The other is a little girl of three, who spent 3.3 million years locked in sandstone, until the Ethiopian scientist and his team discovered her remains and painstakingly teased them out of the rock. It was a long, slow second birth for a baby from the dawn of humanity. Until now all fossils of babies this ancient could have fit in a diaper. This new arrival is not only the most complete ancient infant but arguably the best fossil of her species, Australopithecus afarensis. That's the same species as the superstar fossil called Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old adult female found in 1974. Unlike Lucy, the baby has fingers, a foot, and a complete torso. "But the most impressive difference between them," says Zeresenay (Ethiopians' first names are their formal ones), "is that this baby has a face." No bigger than a cantaloupe, the little bundle of bones may also bear witness to a key event in the evolution of hominins, as humans and their ancestors are known: the beginning of our long, dependent childhood, when we grow our large brains. "Outside of its completeness, the major importance of this find is the light it will shed on how this species lived and grew," says Bill Kimbel, an expert on A. afarensis and a member of the study team. "Now we can begin to read its biography."

It is a curious coincidence that the world's oldest baby, who died while still of nursing age, lived her short life in a region named Dikika-"nipple" in the local Afar language, after a distinctly shaped hill. The hill is just across the winding Awash River from Hadar, the site in Ethiopia's Rift Valley where Lucy and the fossils of many other hominins have been found. The region is plagued by extreme heat, flash floods, malaria, and occasional shoot-outs between rival ethnic groups, not to mention lions, hyenas, and other uninvited nocturnal guests. It is one of the most difficult places on Earth to hunt for fossils-and one of the most fruitful. For decades the low-lying northern end of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the Afar depression, has been the domain of foreign-led expeditions. Zeresenay, one of a new generation of Ethiopian paleoanthropologists, changed that in 1999 when he led a band of Ethiopian fossil hunters into the Afar badlands. By December 2000, the search had turned up plenty of fossil mammals, such as elephants, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and antelopes, but no hominins. Yet Zeresenay, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, knew his team was looking in the right place. These animals would have thrived in the gallery forest that flanked the ancestral Awash River. Early hominins would have lived in these shady woodlands as well. The prehistoric forests of Dikika are long gone, and there was no shade on December 10, when team members forced themselves out into the hot sun to look again. Tilahun Gebreselassie was the first to see the Dikika baby's tiny face peering out from a dusty slope. It was no bigger than a monkey's, but a smooth brow and short canine teeth told Zeresenay right away that this was a small hominin. His team had struck fossil gold, for not only was the baby's skull in perfect shape, but tucked beneath the head in a hard ball of sandstone were many bones of the upper body as well. "This is something you find once in a lifetime," Zeresenay says. He doesn't know how the Dikika baby died, but the river must have rapidly buried the body in pebbles and sand, protecting it from scavengers and weather before gradually hardening into rock. While most hominin fossils have to be glued together from hundreds of fragments, Zeresenay faced the opposite challenge. He had to etch away hard sandstone with a dentist's drill, navigating between tiny vertebrae and ribs so anatomical details could be seen. "I cleaned it grain by grain," he says. "You don't want to destroy it by rushing." The task has taken five years so far. The payoff: details rarely seen in a fossil australopith, among them a full set of both milk teeth and unerupted adult teeth. All of her tiny ribs were positioned, as in life, along a sinuous spinal column. Several fingers were still curled in a tiny grasp, and where her throat once was, Zeresenay found a rare example of a hyoid bone, a bone that later became crucial to human speech. The discovery offers an early glimpse of the evolution of the human voice box, says Fred Spoor of University College London, another member of the study team.

From the waist down the Dikika baby looked like us. One of her humanlike knees was complete with a kneecap no bigger than a dried pea. But her upper body, like Lucy's, had many apelike features. Her brain was small, her nose flat like a chimpanzee's, and her face long and projecting. Her finger bones were curved and almost as long as a chimp's. Her two complete shoulder blades, the first ever found from an australopith, were similar to those of a young gorilla-a shape that might have made it easy for her to climb. A. afarensis walked on two feet, but some scientists think this species also spent time in trees. Either way, the Dikika baby was a distinctly different creature from the apes that her ancestors had diverged from several million years earlier. The differences rippled through later human evolution, affecting everything from family ties to the origin of speech. As apelike feet evolved to support and propel an upright body, they could no longer grasp objects with a thumb-like big toe, as the feet of chimps and other apes can. For hominin mothers and infants, the consequences were momentous: While chimp babies cling to their mothers' hair with muscular hands and grasping toes, a baby hominin probably had to be carried, limiting the mother's ability to provide for herself. She may have had to depend on her mate and the larger group-which may have strengthened social bonds and could help explain why humans are largely monogamous, unlike most apes. Brain evolution expert Dean Falk speculates that the helplessness of baby hominins could even lie at the root of speech, which could have evolved from "motherese," the sounds a mother makes to comfort her baby when she has to set it down. The Dikika fossil also hints that brain development may already have started to take longer, a change that prolonged the dependence of human young on their parents. From the Dikika baby's teeth, the team estimated her age at three years; her brain, preserved as a sandstone cast inside the skull, had a volume of about 330 cc-roughly the same as a small three-year-old chimpanzee's. This could mean her brain was growing no faster than a chimp's, so it might have taken longer to reach its adult size, slightly larger in an australopith than in a chimp.

During human evolution, ever longer brain growth led to the extended period of dependence we call childhood. In most mammals, including other primates, the young move on to forage for themselves after they finish nursing. In the Dikika baby, Zeresenay already sees hints of this uniquely human life stage. "This is extraordinary," he says. "We've captured a moment in time for an individual, but also a moment in the life history of a species." A cascade of other changes may have begun around the same time. "It's no good growing a big brain if you don't have a long life span," says Holly Smith, an expert on hominin development at the University of Michigan. "You need that for the investment in a big brain to pay a return." She sees the beginning of a longer childhood as a sign that human ancestors were also living longer than their ape cousins, a trend that ultimately led to humans outliving other apes by decades. Growing bigger brains had other consequences. Gray matter is the gas-hog of our bodies. A fifth of the calories you consume go to fuel your brain. Within a million years of the Dikika baby our ancestors learned to supplement the mostly vegetarian diet of Lucy and her kin with nutrient-packed meat, devising stone tools to strip flesh and crack bones for the protein-rich marrow. Good nutrition made even bigger brains possible. And that led to more inventions, and then bigger brains. The rest is history. The Dikika baby's biography is short, but the evolutionary steps she embodied have had profound and enduring effects. Although bipedalism and big brains carried a high cost, particularly for the mothers of our lineage, these traits ultimately combined to produce smarter babies who would eventually be able to master technologies, build civilizations, and, yes, explore their own origins.

Courtesy: www.nationalgeographic.com

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Space shuttle Discovery has docked with the International Space Station (ISS) after two days of orbital pursuit. Mission Specialist Sunita Williams, the second woman of Indian origin to touch the stars after astronaut Kalpana Chawla, will stay at the ISS for another six months. The STS-116 crew entered the station at 5:54 pm CST to mark the start of joint operations with the Expedition 14 crew. Later in the day, Sunita will switch crews and replace Flight Engineer Thomas Reiter, who will return to Earth with STS-116. The crew transfer becomes official when Williams' custom-made seatliner is installed into the Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station. Sunita will stay back as she takes German astronaut Reiter's place as part of the three-person crew at the space lab. "I've always wanted to fly a long-duration mission," said Indian American Sunita, whose father Deepak Pandhya is originally from India. "A long-duration spaceflight will supply answers ... to what happens to the human body, how materials work in space." The arrival of Discovery sets the stage for the continuation of station construction. Inside Discovery's payload bay is the P5 integrated truss structure. The STS-116 crew will conduct three spacewalks to install the P5 structure and to reconfigure and redistribute power generated by the station.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, December 12, 2006

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French Nobel laureate Prof Claude Cohen-Tannoudji on Friday disclosed that there were plans to set up a kind of a global time keeper or clock in space. In an exclusive interview with the Hindustan Times he said, there are plans to have an "ultra-cold atomic clock" in a space station to synchronise and give precise common time reference to all the clocks in the world. He said ultra cold atomic clocks were so precise that they would go off by less than a second in 300 million years. Ultra cold atomic clocks have been developed as an offshoot of the work done by Prof Cohen-Tannoudji to cool atoms. He received his Nobel Prize in 1997 alongwith Steven Chu and William Daniel Phillips for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. Seventy three year old Prof Cohen-Tannoudji explained that his work is primarily concerned with controlling the motion of atoms with light.

He said atoms and molecules generally moved around the room at room temperature at a speed of about one kilometer per second. However, when laser light was put on the atoms their velocity was slowed down by the pressure of photons in the laser ray. This pressure of light is called "radiation pressure", he added. As temperature depends on the velocity of atoms, slowing down of atoms led to lowering of the temperature. Shining laser light can thus bring down the temperature to millionths of a Kelvin (on the Kelvin scale the freezing point of water is 273) to have "cold atoms". Instead of the usual one kilometer per second velocity these "cold atoms" move at one centimeter per second. By trapping these cold atoms in a vaccum and using magnetic field and light, temperatures could be reduced further to nano Kelvin levels or billionths of Kelvin,he added. The cold atoms because of their slow movement remain for longer period in the observable zone which help in making extremely precise scientific measurements. One of the major application for cold atoms is in making better atomic clocks which depend on the natural atomic frequency of cesium or rubidium atom to keep precise time, he said. Ultra cold atomic clocks would improve GPS system further, besides improving high speed communication, gyrometers, he added. The recent discovery in the USA of a Bose-Einstein condensation of ultra cold atoms have now led to work on Atom lasers where light would be replaced by a beam of matter, he added. "Curiosity has always driven me and I feel we must never forget the fundamental side of physics for getting new ideas and breakthrough in technology, even though politicians have a short term view and its difficult to get funds for fundamental research," he added.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, December 8, 2006

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It sounds too good to be true: Weedy grasses that rejuvenate degraded Minnesota farmland, gobble up climate-warming carbon and make fuel for cars - all the while creating a net drop in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That's what Minnesota researchers are claiming could be possible based on their long-term, ongoing study of native grasses on depleted farmland."We were doing this experiment for different reasons," explained researcher Dave Tilman of the University of Minnesota. They were studying the diversity of plant species that the worn-out farmland supported and the impacts of the numbers of species on the ecosystem. "As the experiment went along we saw a much larger effect," he said. "We were seeing 230 percent more biomass production by the wild species." That means the wild grasses, growing all jumbled together in pretty much the way they evolved, are making more than twice as much plant material - which is largely carbon - as the domesticated, single-species crops like corn. Even more surprising is that the grasses were putting a lot of that biomass underground. That means the above-ground parts of the plants could theoretically be mowed annually to mimic natural wildlife grazing or grass fires, and still leave more carbon in the ground each year. Meanwhile the cuttings could be fermented to make ethanol fuel and the remainder burned to generate electricity. Tilman and his team have published a report on their discovery in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Science. Previous biofuel studies about corn ethanol have touted the benefits of being less "carbon positive" than gasoline, which means they result in less net carbon-based greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. But they still add carbon by way of the fossil fuels used to grow a crop of corn. When all is said and done, corn ethanol releases 15 percent less carbon than gasoline, Tilman said. On the other hand, the wild grasses could be "carbon negative." The idea could also be employed far beyond Minnesota. Tilman pointed out there are 1.5 billion acres of degraded, abandoned farmland worldwide that are available to possibly grow fuel and slow the greenhouse effect. Another longer-term benefit of growing grasses for fuel is that they do not use any of the land now used to grow food. Instead the wild plants could rejuvenate farm economies in many areas by making some depleted lands profitable again. Eventually the grasses will even improve soil to the point that it can be useful for growing other crops, Tilman said, although that could take a century. "This is something that really needs to be looked at," said Steve Pacala, director of Princeton University's Environmental Institute. He enumerated some of the benefits, including preserving the biodiversity of grasslands, making fuel, reducing greenhouse gasses and reducing runoff to streams from vacant fields. "It's a quadruple win," said Pacala. "The corn-based craze is at the other end of the spectrum." It's possible that the next version of the Farm Bill, soon to be debated Congress, could include language to allow U.S. farmers to collect subsidies and grow grasses. "This is really something that we need to pursue," Pacala said.

Courtesy: www.discovery.com, December 7, 2006

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The big question is back: could life exist on Mars? Photographs taken from orbit suggest that water may have flowed on the surface of Mars in the very recent past - or may still do so - raising yet again the possibility of life on Mars. Or, as Stephen Hawking recently advised, a real possibility of Earthlings colonising our celestial cousin. Speculation about water on Mars is not new. What's new is the evidence of its recent traces. The images taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor show apparently recent changes in surface features that provide the strongest evidence yet that water even now sometimes flows on the dusty, frigid world. "These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said on Wednesday. The Global Surveyor spotted gullies and trenches that seemed to be geologically young and carved by fast-moving water coursing down cliffs and crater walls. Scientists at the San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems, who operate a camera aboard the spacecraft, decided to retake photos of thousands of gullies. Two gullies that were originally photographed in 1999 and 2001 and re-imaged in 2004 and 2005 showed changes which could have been caused by water flowing down crater walls. In both cases, scientists found bright, light-coloured deposits in the gullies that weren't present in the original photos. They concluded the deposits possibly mud, salt or frost were left there when water recently cascaded through the channels. "It's one more reason to think that life could be there,'' said Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who had no role in the study. However, Oded Aharonson, an assistant professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, said that while the interpretation of recent water activity on Mars was "compelling," it's just one possible explanation. Aharonson added that further study is needed to determine whether the deposit could have been left there by the flow of dust rather than water.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, December 7, 2006

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A giant black hole displaying horrifying table manners has been caught in the act of guzzling a star in a galaxy 4 billion light-years away, scientists using an orbiting Nasa telescope said. For the past two years, scientists have monitored the dramatic events as the star, residing in a galaxy in the Bootes constellation, was ripped apart by the black hole. Scientists used Nasa's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, an orbiting telescope sensitive to two bands of ultraviolet wave lengths, to detect an ultraviolet flare coming from the center of a remote elliptical galaxy. "This ultraviolet flare was from a star literally being ripped apart and swallowed by the black hole,"Suvi Gezari of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and lead author of the paper describing the findings in Astrophysical Journal Letters, said. "This is the first time that we've actually been able to monitor the flare of radiation from such an event in detail. Only once every 10,000 years will a star pass close enough to a (galaxy's) central black hole to be ripped apart and swallowed in this manner,"Gezari said. The scientists hope the findings will give them a better understanding of black holes, objects whose gravity is so powerful even light cannot escape. It is believed that super-massive black holes are located at the core of every galaxy. For example the Milky Way in which our solar system resides has a dormant super-massive black hole at its centre. Scientists said in this case the unfortunate star strayed a bit too close to the black hole deep inside the galaxy, and was mutilated by the force of its gravity. They believe that parts of the star swirled around and then plunged into the black hole, which sent out the bright ultraviolet flare that the satellite detected.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, December 6, 2006

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Researchers have warned that another large-scale tsunami could flood densely populated areas of western coastal Sumatra, Indonesia, in the next couple of decades. Using samples of coral from the Mentawai islands, the researchers from Caltech University, University of Southern California (USC) and Indonesia conducted computer simulations of the 1797 and 1833 tsunamis, allowing them to evaluate worst-case scenarios for future tsunamis.he computer modelling determined that two river valleys near Bengkulu, a coastal city of about 350,000 people, could experience flooding up to several kilometres inland. The computer models "confirm a substantial exposure of coastal Sumatran communities to tsunami surges," said lead author Jose Borrero, a scientist at USC's Tsunami Research Center. In December 2004, a 9.0 quake off the coast of northwest Sumatra triggered a tsunami that hit many countries in the Indian Ocean area and left more than 220,000 people dead. The study found that the same fault that caused the 2004 tsunami extends farther southeast beneath the Indian Ocean, just off the southwestern coast of Sumatra. The fault produced large earthquakes and tsunamis in 1797 and 1833, and researchers said the events appear to recur every 230 years on an average. The study found that offshore islands could offer some protection to the larger city of Padang, but during the 1797 tsunami, the waves reportedly carried a 200-tonne ship and other vessels into the town. "The population of Padang in 1797 and 1833 was a few thousand," Caltech geology professor Kerry Sieh said. "Now it is about 800,000, and most of it is within a few meters of sea level." "We hope that these initial results will help focus educational efforts, emergency preparedness activities and changes in the basic infrastructure of cities and towns along the Sumatran coast," he said. "When we tell people living along this 700-km section of the Sumatran coast that they will likely experience a big tsunami within the next 30 years, they ask for details," Sieh said. "How much time after the earthquake will they have before the tsunami strikes? How big will the waves be? How far inland should they be prepared to run? What areas are likely to suffer tsunami damage? This paper is our first attempt to answer these important questions," he said. The study was published in Monday's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Courtesy: www.teluguportal.net, December 5, 2006

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U.S. scientists say they are developing a tiny implant that could help doctors monitor tumor growth and the progress of chemotherapy in cancer patients. The implant under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology contains nanoparticles that can be designed to test for different substances, including those associated with tumor growth. It can also track the effects of cancer drugs. 'You really want to have some sort of rapid measure of whether (chemotherapy) is working ... or whether you should go on to the next (drug),' said Professor Michael Cima, who is leading the research. Such nanoparticles have been used before but, for the first time, the MIT researchers have encased them in a silicone delivery device, allowing the nanoparticles to remain in a patient`s body for an extended period of time. In addition to monitoring the presence of chemotherapy drugs, the device could also be used to check whether a tumor is growing or shrinking, or whether it has spread to other locations. The researchers presented their findings during recent meetings of the European Cancer Society and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Courtesy: www.monstersandcritics.com, December 5, 2006

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