• Meteorite's Organic Matter Older Than the Sun, Study Says
• Human Brain cells found in Whales
• New Scanning Technique detects killer heart Symptoms in kids
• A Chip made in India powers gaming thrills to new and new highs
• How Magicians can fool our Brains
• Experts make Vaccine for Brain Tumour
• Medicinal Plant Rediscovered after 115 years
• You are what your granny ate: Study
• Now Skin Patches Instead of Shoots
• Indian Scientists find Rare Plant
• Stem cells fill in for Liver in Mouse Experiment

• Giant "Terrible Fish" Packed Most Powerful Bite
• Nagpur Doctor Creates Software Solution for Photo Bloggers
• New Device may lead to Artificial Kidneys
• Prithvi against Prithivi
• Mousepad's the mouse
• ISRO, NASA for joint Moon Exploration
• India finds new use for an Old Bug
• Indian Scientists, Technologists push for manned Space Mission
• IIT Develops Technology to Produce Stealth Aircraft
• Nov 9: Mercury's day in the Sun
• Awards for 13 Young Scientists

Organic globules found in a meteorite that slammed into Canada's Tagish Lake may be older than our sun, a new study says. The ancient materials could offer a glimpse into the solar system's planet-building past and may even provide clues to how life on Earth first arose. "We don't really look at this research as telling us something about [the meteorite itself] as much as telling us something about the origins of the solar system," said Scott Messenger of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Most of the meteorite's material is about the same age as our solar system-about 4.5 billion years-and was likely formed at the same time (tour a virtual solar system). But the microscopic organic globules that make up about one-tenth of one percent of the object appear to be far older. In a study appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, Messenger and colleagues report that isotopic anomalies in the globules suggest that they formed in very cold conditions-near absolute zero. "What's really striking about this is that these globules clearly could not possibly have formed where [the meteorite] itself formed," Messenger said. "Under those extreme conditions the air that you'd breathe would be solid ice. You would never find those conditions in the asteroid belt or anywhere close to the sun."

Cold Origins
The Tagish Lake meteorite flashed across Earth's northern sky in January 2000. Most of the object burned up in the atmosphere, but pieces of it crashed in Canada's frozen, sparsely populated Yukon Territory and northern British Columbia (map of Canada). "It's the lowest density meteorite that's ever been studied," said Peter Brown, a meteor expert and professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. "It's extremely friable"-easily pulverized-"and the material breaks up very easily." The object's fragile nature is one of the clues that led some scientists to theorize that Tagish Lake could be the most primitive meteorite ever discovered. "By primitive we don't mean the oldest chronologically," explained Brown, who is not involved with the Science study. "We mean that the material in the meteorite has been processed the least since it was formed. The material we see today is arguably the most representative of the material that first went into making up the solar system." The meteorite likely formed in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, but the organic material it contains probably had a far more distant origin. The globules could have originated in the Kuiper Belt group of icy planetary remnants orbiting beyond Neptune. Or they could have been created even farther afield. The globules appear to be similar to the kinds of icy grains found in molecular clouds-the vast, low-density regions where stars collapse and form and new solar systems are born.

Links to Life?
Some scientists speculate that organic matter arriving via ancient meteorites and comets are responsible for the rise of life on Earth. (Related news: "Building Blocks of Life Found in Two Meteorites" [December 19, 2001].) The unique shape of the newfound globules could be of particular interest to supporters of this theory. The structures are invisible to the naked eye and resemble minute hollow balls with carbon-rich shells. A chunk of meteorite no larger than a grape could contain a billion of the tiny globules. Theoretically, their hollow-ball shape could have presented a homey environment of concentrated organic matter where early cellular life could develop. Such theories boast little evidence but raise many intriguing questions. "We don't claim that these things are alive or anywhere close to being alive," NASA's Messenger cautioned. "But the fact is that this material fell down on Earth, and similar if not identical material has been falling onto the Earth for its entire history. "Understanding the origins of that matter is inherently tied in with understanding the origins of life."

Courtesy: www.nationalgeographic.com, 30ovember, 2006

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This giant prehistoric sea predator packed the most powerful bite of any fish, living or extinct-strong enough to shear a shark clean in half, scientists say. Researchers discovered this awesome jaw power while studying the fossilized skull of Dunkleosteus terrelli, or "terrible fish," a 33-foot (10-meter) behemoth that lived 400 million years ago in what is now Ohio. Scientists from the University of Chicago and Chicago's Field Museum used the monster's skull to recreate the musculature of the fish's head and found that its colossal jaws delivered a bite with a remarkable 1,100 pounds (540 kilograms) of force. That rivals the infamous crunch of Tyrannosaurus rex, the researchers say. (See a National Geographic magazine feature about re-creating T. rex's bite.) What's more, the fish's bladed, quadruple-hinged jaws focused this force at the creature's front fangs, which struck at a literally bone-crushing 8,000 pounds per square inch (562 kilograms per square centimeter)-enough to crack modern concrete. This mighty munching power put the whole ocean on the ancient fish's menu, scientists say. Dunkleosteus dined freely on everything from giant mollusks and crustaceans to, yes, sharks, making it one of the world's first rulers of the food chain. "Dunkleosteus was able to devour anything in its environment," lead researcher Philip Anderson, of the University of Chicago, said in a statement released yesterday. "[Its bite] made this fish into one of the first true apex predators seen in the vertebrate fossil record," colleague Mark Westneat, the Field Museum's curator of fishes, added.

Courtesy: www.nationalgeographic.com, 29 November, 2006

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Humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins, US researchers reported on Monday. This might mean such whales are more intelligent than they have been given credit for, and suggests the basis for complex brains either evolved more than once, or has gone unused by most species of animals, the researchers said. The finding may help explain some of the behaviour seen in whales, such as intricate communication skills, the formation of alliances, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage, the researchers report in the Anatomical Record. Patrick Hof and Estel Van der Gucht of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York studied the brains of humpback whales and discovered a type of cell called a spindle neuron in the cortex, in areas comparable to where they are seen in humans and great apes. Although the function of spindle neurons is not well understood, they may be involved in cognition - learning, remembering and recognising the world around oneself. Spindle cells may be affected by Alzheimer's disease and other debilitating brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. The researches found spindle neurons in the same location in toothed whales with the largest brains, which the researchers said suggests that they may be related to brain size. Toothed whales such as orcas are generally considered more intelligent than baleen whales such as humpbacks and blue whales, which filter water for their food. The humpbacks also had structures that resembled "islands" in the cerebral cortex, also seen in some other mammals. These islands may have evolved in order to promote fast and efficient communication between neurons, the researchers said. Spindle neurons probably first appeared in the common ancestor of hominids, humans and great apes about 15 million years ago, the researchers said - they are not seen in lesser apes or monkeys. In cetaceans they would have evolved earlier, possibly as early as 30 million years ago. Either the spindle neurons were only kept in the animals with the largest brains or they evolved several times independently, the researchers said. "In spite of the relative scarcity of information on many cetacean species, it is important to note in this context that sperm whales, killer whales, and certainly humpback whales, exhibit complex social patterns that included intricate communication skills, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage," researchers wrote.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 27, 2006

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When Tarique Sani, a paediatrician in Nagpur, found himself stuck while creating a photo blog, he simply invented a software tool to help him out. Called the Cheesecake Photo Blog and downloadable for free at cheesecake-photoblog.org, this software tool helps anyone keeping a daily or regular online photo gallery on the Internet. A photo blog is a chronological log of photography, usually from a single photographer. Each photo in the log has a date associated with it. When you are looking at any photo in a photoblog, you can navigate directly to the next older or newer photo. Photoblogs also have archives that allow you to view all photos sorted by date. It is one of the top ten projects of its kind," Sani, the newly turned software guru, told IANS. "No existing photo blog software could provide me with the kind of functionality I needed. It took me only three weeks to write this," said Sani, whose firm SaniSoft.com in Nagpur, Maharashtra, deals with building tools in the Open Source world. "It's simple to set up. It's based on PhP and MySQL (commonly used Internet server tools). It gives clean URLs, is easy to log onto and can be extended by the use of plug-ins," he explained. Sani believes that it is not only possible to write Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) sustainably, but also make a living out of it. He has written a guide to business models based on FOSS. Said Sani: "PHP (the reflective programming language designed for producing dynamic Web pages) has a phenomenal potential for India. There's money to be made provided it is built up properly. Now it's making inroads into the enterprise class of code, which was earlier dominated by Java. That's good news." Available under the special, sharable PHP License, PHP is an open source language and is considered to be free software by the Free Software Foundation. "Yahoo is doing PHP, and so are other big firms. It's not going to go away in a hurry," he added. A photography enthusiast, Sani was behind the setting up of the nagpurbirds.org site. "Nagpur has a rich bird-life but very little awareness about its potential," said Sani.

Courtesy: www.teluguportal.net, November 27, 2006

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Cardiologists at Royal Brompton Hospital have developed a new technique of medical scanning that can spot children who are at risk of sudden death because of weak hearts. The scan shows up heart scar tissue, giving doctors an important warning sign of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a condition in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged, and cannot pump blood efficiently. The whole process involves injecting a dye called gadolinium into the patient's veins, and then scanning them using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Professor Peter Weissberg of the British Heart Foundation feels that the development of new technique is significant in the field of medical science, for it will help doctors prevent many young lives. The researchers tested the technique on 101 patients with and without scar tissue, and followed them for two years to determine the effect of scar tissue on their health. They say that the detection of the scar tissue helped them determine the risk of hospitalisation or death, which in turn enabled them to ensure that patients received timely and appropriate care. Professor Dudley Pennell, lead researcher, believes that the scans would help guide important treatment choices. "Prior to this technique it was difficult to decide which patients could be treated effectively using drugs alone, and which patients needed life-saving devices implanted," BBC quoted him as saying. "It is a costly and wasteful exercise to implant all patients with DCM when only 20 or 30% may truly require it," he added. Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, says that the latest technique will help doctors prevent lives from being lost to DCM. "This is an important advance that will help doctors prevent lives being lost to the condition," he said.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, November 26, 2006

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Though many obstacles remain, researchers say the breakthrough could revolutionise the approach to filtering blood in patients whose kidneys have failed. Ideally, people for whom a kidney transplant isn't possible could receive an artificial organ that worked almost as well, said Dr William Fissell, assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Medicine. The first step toward that goal, Fissell said, is improving the effectiveness hemodialysis devices. Next would be to make an external device small enough for a patient to wear continuously. The final step would be a device that could be implanted, not unlike a pacemaker. One of the keys to such a device, which Fissell and his colleagues, including Shuvo Roy, a biomedical engineer at the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute are developing, is a much more effective filter. "We think that we have a platform technology that will revolutionise the way that renal replacement is delivered," Fissell says. Dialysis filters trap the good stuff (proteins and blood cells) and return it to the body while letting the bad stuff (toxins, excess fluids, and salt) through to be discarded. The trick, Fissell says, is to refine the holes in the filter, which is a type of membrane. The holes need to be the right size, the right shape, and in the right pattern to let blood flow through the filter easily. They must be big enough to allow toxins to pass through the filter but not so big as to allow valuable proteins and blood cells to escape. To trap the good stuff, current filters rely primarily on very small holes that are irregular in shape and are organised chaotically. But small holes means that blood must be forced through the filters with big, powerful pumps. And the chaotic patterns allow high-pressure-causing currents to form. These currents increase the pressure required to force blood through the filter. A better membrane could be driven by a portable, pump. And an ideal membrane would work with normal blood pressure and so could be implanted into the body. Fissell's team is building an easy-flow membrane by etching precise patterns into silicon wafers. Micromachine technologies let the scientists increase the number of pores in a given area and control their shape and pattern.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 23, 2006

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The research team at NVidia Bangalore achieved a feat that can make the best labs in the world cringe. A team of approximately 100 people spearheaded by Senior directors, Sunil Nanda and Sridhar Manthani designed the latest NForce 600i class of chips that are currently powering NVidia's latest high-end motherboards meant purely for enthusiast PC users and gamers. The chips were completely designed in the Bangalore labs, even the BIOS was completely written right here in our country. NVidia enjoys 90% market share in India and their last quarter revenues added to $830 million. The company expects to hit the $3 billion mark in this financial year. A total of 3600 people work for NVidia worldwide out of that 600 work in India. This means one out of six employees working for the company is an Indian. Coming back to the chip designed here in the Bangalore labs, what NVidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and the team heads had in mind, was clear. Build the most overclockable, feature rich, and fastest chip for their future motherboards, which will support the Intel Core 2 Duo range of processors and NVidia's very own G80 graphics processing unit (GPU), based Graphics cards. And to make it happen Jen Hsun, turned to the NVidia Labs in Bangalore. Work commenced on the chip around June last year and $30 million was pumped into the project. So when the first prototype chip worked without any problems there was nothing less than a celebration, as Sunil Nanda exclaims 'The chip worked at the very first crank'. The new NForce chip, available in three flavours (680i, SLi, 650i SLi and 650i Ultra) was released with careful planning to coincide with the launch of the G80 range of graphics cards, DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. And now since the chip is ready the timing couldn't have been any better. The reason why the chip will work well with enthusiast PC users is because it removes all the speed bottlenecks within the architecture thus enabling a lot of bandwidth. Plus with SLi you can plug in two graphics cards on to your motherboard and enjoy the most graphics heavy games without any problems. What the new NForce plainly does, is allow system wide overclocking. NVidia also plans to invest a total of around $250 million in research in Bangalore labs in the next couple of years for further research. The expected revenue from 680i chip alone is estimated at $200 million.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 24, 2006

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For the first time, India will fire two Prithvi-II missiles from different points off the Orissa coast and have them collide on Sunday. The mission is to test the interception efficacy and the air-defence capability of the indigenous missile.The first missile will be launched at 10 am from Launching Complex-3 of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur. Five seconds later, another missile will be launched from Inner Wheeler Island, 60 km from Chandipur. The second missile has to intercept the first. Called the Prithvi Air Defence Exercise, the test will be conducted by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).Missile-interception tests have been conducted before, but only using a dummy as a target. This will be the first 'live' test."If the missiles strike each other with perfect alignment, we will have accomplished our objective," said a DRDO source. "We want to test how accurate the programming of the missile is."Hectic preparations are on at Chandipur. Unless the weather plays spoilsport or there are some last-minute problems, the test will be conducted as scheduled.After the missiles strike each other, they are expected to fall into the sea. As a precaution, however, more than 2,500 people residing near the Chandipur ITR will be evacuated, just in case missile debris falls on land.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, November 24, 2006

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Scientists are figuring out how magicians fool our brains in research that also helps uncover how our mind actually works. A great deal of what scientists now understand about how the human visual system works stems from research into our usceptibility to optical illusions. "It made sense to look at magicians to advance knowledge of human cognition, since magicians have been working on figuring out how certain principles of psychology work for hundreds of years," said researcher Gustav Kuhn, a cognitive psychologist who has also performed magic the past couple decades. "Magicians have an ability to distort perceptions, to get people to see things that never happened, like an illusion," he added. The researchers looked into a trick called the "vanishing ball," in which a ball apparently disappears in midair. It's done by faking a throw while keeping the ball palmed in the magician's hand. Kuhn videotaped himself performing two versions of the illusion. In the "pro-illusion" version, on the fake throw, his gaze and head followed an imaginary ball moving upwards. In "anti-illusion", Kuhn's eyes stayed on the hand concealing the ball. Roughly two-thirds of volunteers watching the pro-illusion version on TV had a vivid recollection of the ball leaving the top of the screen. "Often they claimed someone at the top of the screen caught the ball," Kuhn said. In comparison, only a third of the people viewing the anti-illusion experienced that illusion. Kuhn measured the eye movements of volunteers during the experiment. Surprisingly, they found that when people believed they saw the ball vanish, most claimed they spent their entire time looking at the ball, yet most actually glanced at the magician's face prior to following the ball.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 22, 2006

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British defence company Qinetiq has developed a mouse pad that doesn't require a mouse but instead monitors the movement of the hand above its surface. The pad catches the hand motions left, right, forwards and backwards through a T-shaped array of infrared emitters and sensors, placed together in closely spaced pairs. As and when a hand signal is made, the T-shaped sensor pairs get excited. Each emitter produces uniquely coded pulses so only its paired sensor can "see" the light as it is reflected by a hand moving above, reports New Scientist.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 22, 2006

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In an attempt to beat brain tumour, one the deadliest of all cancers, a researcher and his team in US has tried to harness a remedy by producing vaccine from the tumour itself, reports NewScientist. Andrew Parsa, a neurosurgeon from the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, has helped create made-to-measure vaccines using a person's surgically removed tumour, and he's started testing the concept in a small group of patients. The vaccine, which utilises specific proteins from the tumour, is administered through a needle to the arm every two weeks, with the aim of stimulating T-cells from the immune system to attack any regrowth of the cancer. "We've now got some compelling data from the first six patients and it looks like clearly all six patients had an immune response," said Parsa, the study's principal investigator. "In other words, when I test their blood after the vaccination, it's apparent that they have T-cells that weren't there before that are specific to their tumour."

"And of those six patients, five of them have lived longer or are living longer than 6.5 months after recurrence of glioblastomas, which is the most malignant kind of brain tumour you can have," Parsa said in Orlando, Florida, where he presented his findings at the Society of Neuro-Oncology annual scientific meeting. Four of the patients have survived almost a year. One woman died about 10 months after starting vaccinations, while the sixth patient died before 6.5 months the average expected period of survival for this form of brain tumour, which arises in tissue that surrounds nerve cells. Brain tumours known as recurrent gliomas are notoriously difficult to treat and remain among the deadliest of all cancers. High-grade recurrent gliomas, or glioblastomas, can be made up of several different types of cancer cells and may infiltrate many parts of the brain. But Parsa stressed that these are extremely preliminary findings, based on a small number of patients in a phase 1 study designed to ascertain safety not effectiveness. "It just so happens we have some really dramatic immunomonitoring data and some interesting survival data at this point," he said. Commenting on the research, neuro-oncologist Warren Mason of Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital said various types of experimental immune-stimulating therapies have been tried in the past, all without success.

Courtesy: ww.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 20, 2006

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In a first ever joint space programme between India and the US, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has joined hands with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for launching a unique Moon Mineral Mapping(M3) mission by March 2008, thereby opening a new vista in joint scientific collaboration between the two countries in a big way. Highlighting details of the unique project, termed as a 'giant step' by the world scientific research community, Dr Alok K Chatterjee, an Indian American project engineer in the world famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in NASA and who is closely associated with the multi-billion dollar space programme, said that the M3 project was aimed at performing detailed mineral mapping on the surface of moon not only for gaining greater scientific knowledge but also for their exploration, if possible for the use of mankind in the coming years. Claiming that first such major joint scientific and space exploration by the two largest democracies in the world would open a new window of opportunity in diversified sectors, Dr Chatterjee who arrived in Kolkota on Sunday, after participating in an ISRO-NASA joint programme in Bangalore last week, said this collaborative effort between the two largest space and scientific organisations of the world would be a harbinger of future cooperation in several other future space missions.

Dr Chatterjee, who also worked for ISRO under President APJ Abdul Kalam for nine years in early 1980s before migrating to the US and joining NASA, said he was very confident that apart from sending several unmanned missions to space, "ISRO would be in a position to send a manned mission to moon by 2020". "Even the NASA chief during his recent visit to ISRO had collaborated similar views," Dr Chatterjee said and hoped that there would be no dearth of funds for India's first manned mission to moon as, he felt, the Indian economy was strong enough to meet the demand. Coming back to ISRO-NASA's joint M3 mission, Dr Chatterjee said under the project scientists of both the organisations had already developed one "unique instrument" which on reaching moon would reflect the photo-synthesis of all major mineral deposits both on the surface and under the surface and send back all necessary data to its earth station for processing and future explorations. Asked about the total cost of the project which might run into several billion dollars, Dr Chatterjee said he was not aware of the financial aspects of the mission since he was only dealing with the technical aspects to ensure 'total success' of the mission.

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

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Itanagar, Nov 18 (IANS) Botanists in Arunachal Pradesh have rediscovered a rare medicinal plant after more than a century. Two scientists of the Botanical Survey of India spotted the wild flower, Begonia Tessaricarpa, during a routine research work near Ligu village in the northeastern state's Upper Subansari district bordering China. "Begonia Tessaricarpa was long believed to be extinct but we found the flower blooming in a narrow strip of rocky land during one of our surveys," Kumar Ambarish, one of the two scientists, told IANS. The rediscovery of the plant was published in the November issue of Current Science, a reputed Indian journal. The plant was first listed in scientific literature by British scientist C.B. Clarke in 1879 and 1890 but had not been seen since. "Everybody thought the plant had become extinct as there were no reports of sighting Rebe (as the plant is locally known) and no recorded use by locals for medicinal purpose," Ambarish said. The small plant, measuring about 30 centimetres with two petals and two sepals, was also found growing in a scattered manner in the state's Namdapha National Park in the eastern Changlang district.

"Actually we found the plant first in 2004 and again during another visit in October 2005 in the two places. But it takes time for verification and hence it took a long time to publicize the rediscovery," Ambarish said. The tribal people of Arunachal Pradesh have for long used Rebe as a cure for stomach disorder and dehydration. The extracts of the plant were also used to ward off mountain leeches. "We have collected samples of the plant and it is now growing in two experimental gardens and showing good results," he said. Ambarish, along with his co-scientist M. Amadudin, now plans to carry out extensive research on the plant that grows at very high altitudes. "This is a plant under threat and now we have to do some study to find out more about the herbaceous flower," Amadudin said. Arunachal Pradesh is home to a wide variety of medicinal plants and other exotic flora, although wanton destruction of the forest cover had led to many of the rare species being wiped out. The Texas Bacata, the yew tree, is an example of unregulated exploitation of forest wealth. The bark of this tree is processed to make Taxol, a known treatment of ovarian cancer.

Courtesy: www.teluguportal.net, November 18, 2006

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Quietly and without fanfare, Indian scientists have been sequencing the genome of an organism called Mycobacterium-w (Mw). It is India's first sequencing effort of a complete genome that holds promise in the treatment of several diseases, including tuberculosis and leprosy. Recent evidence that a vaccine made from killed Mw drastically reduces treatment time of tuberculosis (TB) including the multi-drug resistant (MDR) variety is driving this project more than three decades after the discovery of the bug. The organism Mw was discovered in late 1970s by a team led by biochemist Gursaran "Pran" Talwar, then head of the biochemistry division at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi. "Because we have not sequenced any genome so far, we decided to sequence Mw that was discovered in India," says Syed Hasnain, formerly director of the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) in Hyderabad, one of the three laboratories involved in the sequencing project. "The complete sequence will be available in about a month," Hasnain, now vice chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, told IANS. "Our data already suggests there may be surprises to the scientific community. I cannot say more until we publish the work." Other labs participating in sequencing Mw are those of Akilesh Tyagi and Anil Tyagi in Delhi University. The infrastructure built up in Delhi University for sequencing the chromosome number 11 of rice, as part of the global rice genome project, is used for cracking the genome of Mw, says Hasnain, who is coordinating the project. The sequencing of Mw and a large-scale clinical trial with the Mw vaccine are two parts of a study funded by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

In the clinical trial being carried out in eight centres around the country, the Mw vaccine is given to tuberculosis patients already on drugs to see if the drug-vaccine combination reduced the treatment time. And the results are reported to be amazing. Hasnain says the ongoing clinical trials aim to find out the ability of the Mw vaccine in treating TB rather than preventing it. The trials are conducted on four categories of TB patients - from uncomplicated to chronic cases - including the hard to treat multi-drug resistant (MDR) cases. Data from one of the centres shows that four shots of the vaccine at 15 days interval (given in addition to drugs) increase the cure rate to 82 percent even in MDR category. In uncomplicated cases (category 1), patients' sputum becomes completely negative for TB germs after just one shot. Another important finding is that the vaccine induced sputum conversion after a single shot in 48 out of 50 AIDS patients suffering from tuberculosis. According to Talwar, introducing the Mw vaccine for tuberculosis control programme should not face problems in India from regulatory angle because it is an already approved vaccine for leprosy and is commercially manufactured by Cadila Pharmaceuticals in Ahmedabad. Talwar's group at AIIMS found the Mw organism among the collections in a tuberculosis hospital in Madras, now Chennai. The fact that it was a fast growing harmless organism that shared many of its antigens with M.leprae -- the organism that causes leprosy - led Talwar and his colleagues to use the organism for developing an anti-leprosy vaccine in 1981. Ten years later the Indian health ministry launched a trial of the vaccine on a leprosy endemic population of 420,000 in Uttar Pradesh. Although it was a leprosy vaccine trial, the last survey in 2001 sprang a surprise: the number of new TB cases in vaccinated group was less than half of that in the unvaccinated control group. This unexpected observation prompted the DBT and the Indian Council of Medical Research to take a fresh look at Mw and the vaccine's potential use against TB. If the ongoing clinical trials turn out to be successful, Mw vaccine could emerge as an alternative to the currently used BCG vaccine, Talwar believes. "One great advantage with Mw vaccine," he says, "is that it is made from killed organisms unlike the BCG vaccine that uses inactivated but live organisms." While the BCG vaccine is used to immunize only infants, the Mw vaccine can be used in adults also, according to Talwar.

Courtesy: www.teluguportal.net, November 16, 2006

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A mother's diet can change the behaviour of a specific gene for at least two subsequent generations, a study demonstrates for the first time. Feeding mice an enriched diet during pregnancy silenced a gene for light fur in their pups. And even though these pups ate a standard, un-enriched diet, the gene remained less active in their subsequent offspring. The findings could help explain the curious results from recent studies of human populations-including one showing that the grandchildren of well-fed Swedes had a greater risk of diabetes. The new mouse experiment lends support to the idea that we inherit not only our genes from our parents, but also a set of instructions that tell the genes when to become active. These instructions seem to pass on through "epigenetic"changes to DNA-genes can be activated or silenced according to the chemical groups that are added onto them. David Martin at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California, US, and colleagues used a special strain of genetically identical mice with an overactive version of a gene that influences fur colour. Mice with the AVY version of this gene generally have golden fur. Half of the mice were given a diet enriched with nutrients such as vitamin B12 and zinc. These nutrients are known to increase the availability of the "methyl"chemical groups that are responsible for silencing genes. The rest of the mice received a standard diet. The pups of mice on the standard diet generally had golden fur. But a high proportion of those born to mice on the enriched diet had dark brown fur. Martin believes that the nutrient-rich maternal diet caused silencing of the pups'AVY genes while they developed in the womb. Intriguingly, even though all of the pups in this generation received a standard diet, those that had exposure to a high-nutrient diet while in the womb, later gave birth to dark-coated offspring. Their control counterparts, by comparison, produced offspring with golden fur. This shows that environmental factors-such as an enriched diet-can affect the activity of the AVY gene for at least two generations, the researchers say.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 15, 2006

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Top scientists and technologists here on Tuesday strongly favoured a proposal to undertake a manned mission into space that would catapult India into a select group of nations with such a capability. At a national consultative meeting convened by the Indian Space Research Organisation to "crystallise and converge" on the issue, participants "overwhelmingly and very positively" supported the proposal, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair told PTI. ISRO is in a position to undertake the manned mission in eight years. Nair said the estimated cost of such a mission would be in the region of Rs 10,000 crore to Rs 15,000 crore. Nair made a presentation to a gathering of 80 scientists and technologists, including those from ISRO, HAL and NAL and those associated with space technologies, and detailed studies conducted by the organisation in this context. "All of them were supportive of the idea," Nair said. "There was absolute unanimity on the issue. Everyone feels it's a logical step." Among those who participated in the meet were U R Rao, Roddam Narasimha and Yash pal. Some others, who could not attend, including M G K Menon, sent written comments, he said. Some key questions at the interaction centred on the safety of personnel making the flight, ISRO sources said, adding the space agency will respond to these queries. Nair, also space commission chairman and secretary in the department of space, said ISRO will submit a report on the deliberations to the government by the year-end. He had made a presentation last month on the space department to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who suggested a national team of scientists look into the manned mission issue. Tuesday's meeting was a result of suggestion.

Courtesy: www.newindpress.com, November 8, 2006

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One day, vaccinations could be as simple as sticking on a bandage. Early tests of skin-patch vaccines are beginning in hundreds of volunteers, one version designed to protect against the flu and another to prevent travellers' diarrhoea. The idea is not just pain-free vaccination. The National Institutes of Health is helping fund patch research in hopes of strengthening imperfect flu shots, and gaining extra help if bird flu or some other super-flu ever triggers a pandemic. Indeed, patch developer Iomai proposes that the mailman, not a doctor, deliver flu vaccine during a pandemic. Once a vaccine is brewed, simply ship patches to people's homes with instructions to slap one on. Doctors might not like the go-it-alone method. But the technology's main promise may be in developing countries. Unlike syringe-based vaccines, patches would not need refrigeration - nor pose the infection risk of reused needles, a continuing problem. Only time will tell if the patches work. Iomai is in initial stages of human testing, and years of work is required for proof. But previous research does suggest the skin could provide an improved route to energise the immune system, perhaps allowing doctors to use lower doses.

Alluring
"It may be that the expectations for vaccine patch technology are now slowly bearing fruit," says Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, a vaccine expert who has long monitored the field. "It is what I would call an alluring technology." If it works against one disease, a patch likely could be tweaked to deliver numerous kinds of vaccines. "The approach is novel and may be the way many vaccines are given in the future," says Dr. Herbert DuPont of the University of Texas Health Sciences Centre in Houston. He is helping test the diarrhoea patch in. tourists. Most of today's vaccines are shots into muscle. But doctors have long known that getting vaccine just inside the skin is deep enough. History's first crude inoculations, against smallpox, merely involved scratching pus from a related but milder virus into the skin. And recent research using small needles to push flu vaccine just inside the skin found lower doses could be as protective as full-strength muscle shots. Iomai's method, discovered by one of its founders at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research: Just get past a thin outer layer of dead skin to the epidermis, the first living skin layer. There, specialised Langerhans cells can recognise a pathogen and speed to the lymph nodes to alert the immune system.

Courtesy: www.hindu.com, November 8, 2006

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Materials scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee (IIT-R) have developed microwave absorbing nanocomposite coatings that could make aircraft almost invisible to radar. The technology for building invisible, or stealth aircraft, is a closely guarded secret of developed countries and a handful of laboratories in India are doing research in this area. Radars that emit pulses of microwave radiation identify flying aircraft by detecting the radiation reflected by the aircraft's metallic body. The nanocomposite coatings developed by Rahul Sharma, R.C. Agarwala and Vijaya Agarwala at IIT-R absorb most of the incident radiation and reflect very little. Sharma, who revealed his team's work at an international nanomaterials conference held recently at the Indian Institute of Science here, believes their nano-product is a significant step in developing a technology to enable aircraft escape radar surveillance and protect its equipment from electronic "jamming". Nanoparticles -- so called because of their very small size -- are known to exhibit unique physical and chemical properties. The IIT team found that crystals of "barium hexaferrite" with particle size of 10-15 nanometres have the ability to absorb microwaves. (Human hair, for comparison, is 100,000 nanometres thick). They developed special processes for synthesizing the nanopowder and formulating it as a coating. Sharma said that the nanocomposite coating on the aluminium sheet absorbed 89 percent of incident microwaves at 15 giga hertz - the frequency normally used by radars -- reflecting only 11 percent. A stealth aircraft should ideally absorb all the incident radiation and reflect nothing.

Courtesy: www. teluguportal.net, November 7, 2006

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Indian scientists working in a tropical forest in the northeast have found a rare medicinal plant last seen 115 years ago, a scientific journal reported. The botanists were working in the Upper Subansiri district of Arunchal Pradesh, when they found a specimen of "Begonia Tessaricarpa," according to this month's issue of Current Science, a journal. The journal did not say when they found the plant. The herbaceous plant was once regarded as having medicinal properties by the region's ethnic tribes, and reportedly was used to treat stomach aches and dehydration. It's juices were also reportedly used to ward off leeches. The plant was first listed in scientific literature by British scientist C. B. Clarke in 1879 and 1890, but had not been seen since, the journal reported. "This species is still surviving in a few pockets of Arunachal Pradesh and was found growing in damp rocky places," a news agency quoted Kumar Ambarish of the Botanical Survey of India as saying. It was not immediately possible to independently verify the journal's report.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, November 7, 2006

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