• Myanmar Armed Forces To Ste Up Operations Against North East Militants
• Vanishing honeybees mystify scientists
• Sleep enforces the temporal sequence in memory
• "Instant face lift" chemical DMAE damages skin cells
• NASA paid USD 26.6 mn to families of Columbia astronauts
• One donor cornea may treat three patients
• Studies prove harmful effects of violent videogames on kids
• NRIs can now make use of Right to Information Act

• Good health: India eating better
• Sleep protects memories: study
• Science seal on Muslim history
• Oldest tree had fronds, not leaves
• Eat your greens to cut cancer risk
• Ancient diamonds found in Canada
• Rare bird spotted after 140 yrs
• 108 ft: Tha's height of devotion

Indians are on the high road to health and wellness. Their eating habits have turned distinctly healthier - more green vegetables, less red meat; more fruits and milk, less smoking; more pulses, chicken and eggs, less saturated fat like vanaspati and coconut oil. These are the findings of a study by National Sample Survey Organisation which has captured the country's stay-fit spirit - a spirit already sweeping developed countries. While the study has not captured whether Indians are exercising more or not, it has found they are spending more on healthcare than before. There's been a switch to cooking mediums like sunflower, corn and soya oil, pitched as healthier than traditional options, like mustard and coconut oil and vanaspati. Smoking too has dropped 30% in urban areas in the 11-year period since 1993-94. The proportion of households with at least one bidi smoker has dropped 26% (rural India) and 35% (urban). The nationwide Consumer Expenditure Survey was carried out on a sample of 79,298 rural and 45,346 urban households in 2004-2005. It tracked changes in consumer behaviour in the preceding decade and found people in rural areas were increasingly giving up on coarser grains like jowar while turning to more nutritious, protein-rich items like pulses. This could explain the current mismatch between demand and supply of pulses and its high prices. It could also mean that high demand for pulses is here to stay. While consumption of milk has gone up by a mere five percentage points in both rural and urban India between 1993-94 and 2004-05, people have taken to eating eggs with a vengeance - egg consumption going up by nearly 60% in rural India. In keeping with latest health trends, people are giving up red meat, while the consumption of chicken has gone up by three times in urban areas and by two-and-a-half times in rural areas. Consumption of fruits and vegetables is also up, with a five to 15 percentage point increase in intake of various vegetables. This indicates rising demand for veggies. Perhaps their prices won't come down to levels we knew a few years ago.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, April 30, 2007

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Myanmar will soon launch a military offensive to evict Indian separatists from its soil following New Delhi's request to crack down on rebel bases in that country, Indian officials said Friday. 'The Myanmar army has promised to step up the fight against militants from our northeast states based in their country,' an Indian Army commander told IANS on condition of anonymity. Myanmar's decision to crack down on Indian rebel bases was made by Brigadier General Tin Maung Ohn who was leading an 18-member Myanmarese army delegation to India. The Myanmar team, during the last five days, held extensive meetings with India's army and paramilitary commanders in the northeastern states of Nagaland and Assam. 'This is the first breakthrough, with Myanmar deciding to take proactive action against those (Indian militants) that already exist in their country,' Paramjit Singh, director general of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary force engaged in anti-insurgency operations in the northeast, told reporters. New Delhi has mounted pressure on Yangon to launch a military offensive against Indian militant groups - mainly the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the United National Liberation Front (UNLF). The ULFA, a rebel group fighting for an independent homeland in Assam, is on the run since the Indian Army launched a crackdown in January after the group killed 80 people. 'The ULFA militants have sneaked into bases in Myanmar. If the military junta there launches an operation, it would be easier for us to deal with militancy here,' the commander said. At least five major militant groups from India's northeast, where numerous tribal and ethnic groups are fighting for greater autonomy or independence, have training camps in the dense jungles of Sagaing in northern Myanmar. 'There are at least 20,000 guerrilla fighters in Myanmar belonging to various groups of the northeast,' said Kughalo Mulatonu, a rebel leader of the S.S. Khaplang faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-K). The NSCN-K, a rebel group fighting for an independent tribal homeland in Nagaland, operates out of Myanmar with the outfit's general headquarters located in Sagaing. Myanmar had earlier pledged that the junta would not let Indian rebels operate from its soil. The country last year launched a military operation against the NSCN-K, killing at least a dozen rebels and overrunning several of their bases. India and Myanmar share a 1,640-km long unfenced border, allowing militants from the northeast to use the adjoining country as a springboard to carry out hit-and-run guerrilla strikes on Indian soldiers. The rebels say they are seeking to protect their ethnic identities and allege that the central government has exploited the resources in the region rich with mineral, tea, timber and oil. Over 50,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in the northeast since India's independence in 1947.

Courtesy: www.india-defence.com, April 27, 2007

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Sleep, a period of rest common to all living beings, protects memories, says a study that provides important insights into how slumber influences memories. Researchers studied 48 healthy adults aged 18-30, dividing them into four groups. All of them were told to remember certain words. The students who slept at home before the tests performed best, correctly identifying three-quarters of the word pairs. The students who took the test before going home for the evening correctly identified one-third of the word pairs, the online edition of health magazine WebMD reported. "This is the first study to show that sleep protects memories from interference," said researcher Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist and fellow in sleep research at Harvard Medical School. "These results provide important insights into how the sleeping brain interacts with memories. It appears to strengthen them," he said. "Perhaps, then, sleep disorders might worsen memory problems seen in dementia." The study will be presented May 2 in Boston at the American Academy of Neurology's 59th annual meeting.

Courtesy: www.teluguportal.net, April 26, 2007

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Go to work, come home. Go to work, come home. Go to work -- and vanish without a trace. Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why. The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees also have been reported in Europe and Brazil. Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks. If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen. Since about one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the US Agricultural Research Service. "They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming." Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts. "It's not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that's what it would be like" without honeybee pollination. Pettis and other experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder. "What we're describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn't expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring," Pettis said.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 24, 2007

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by G.S. Mudur
Scientists have confirmed what historians have known. Genetic studies have suggested that Muslims in northern India are mostly descendants of local people who embraced Islam rather than repositories of foreign DNA deposited by waves of invaders. The studies by scientists in India, Spain and the US indicate that while the Shias and the Sunnis in Uttar Pradesh are mostly descendants of converts, the former have some elements of paternal foreign ancestry. But overall, the Shias and the Sunnis in Uttar Pradesh display higher genetic affinity to northern Indian caste populations than to western or central Asian populations. The findings, based on the analysis of genetic material from 60 Sunni and 59 Shia volunteers, will appear in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The researchers say their studies are the first to test two ideas on the ancestry of northern Indian Muslims - they may be descendants of local people who converted to Islam, or they may represent bloodlines of Muslims who arrived in several waves between the 8th and 14th centuries. "Our results point to conversions in both groups, but greater foreign ancestry in the Shias," said Suraksha Agrawal, a team member and head of medical genetics at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. Agrawal has tried to piece together maternal and paternal lineage of Muslims by analysing genetic material called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is acquired only from mothers, and Y chromosome, which is passed down only by fathers. "In the mtDNA, we do not see discrete signals from outside India," Rene J. Herrera, a biologist at Florida International University in the US and one of the collaborators, said. "Thus, both are, for the most part, descendants from local caste groups," he told The Telegraph. However, the Shias do show some signatures of foreign DNA from southwest Asia and North Africa in the Y chromosome, Herrera said. "Until now, there has been no genetic study to explore the historical extrapolations of Muslim ancestry in India," Herrera added. "History can get contaminated over time. But DNA does not lie."

Courtesy: www.samachar.com, April 22, 2007

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A research group headed by Jan Born at the University of Lübeck has now provided evidence that sleep not only strengthens the content of a memory but also the particular order in which they were experienced, probably by a replay of the experiences in "forward" direction. We have usually quite strong memories of past events like an exciting holiday or a jolly birthday party. However it is not clear how the brain keeps track of the temporal sequence in such memories: did Paul spill a glass of wine before or after Mary left the party? Previous findings from a research group headed by Jan Born at the University of Lübeck have confirmed the widely held view that long-term memories are formed particularly during sleep, and that this process relies on the brain replaying recently encoded experiences during the night. The same research group now provides evidence that sleep not only strengthens the content of a memory but also the particular order in which they were experienced, probably by a replay of the experiences in "forward" direction. Students were asked to learn triplets of words presented one after the other. Afterwards they slept, whereas in a control condition no sleep was allowed. Later, recall was tested by presenting one word and asking which one came before and which one came after during learning. Sleep was found to enhance word recall, but only when the students were asked to reproduce the learned words in forward direction. This finding shows that sleep associated consolidation of memories enforces the temporal structure of the memorized episode that otherwise might be blurred to a timeless puzzle of experiences.

Courtesy: www.spiritindia.com, April 20, 2007

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The branches of Earth`s oldest tree probably waved in the breeze like a modern palm, scientists said on Wednesday, based on two intact tree fossils that help explain the evolution of forests and their influence on climate. The 385-million-year-old fossils, which scientists believe are evidence of Earth`s earliest forest trees, put to rest speculation about fossilized tree stumps discovered more than a century ago in Gilboa, New York. Scientists believe these early forests absorbed carbon dioxide, cooling the Earth`s surface. The forests were flourishing at an important juncture in the history of life of Earth, coming shortly before the appearance of the first vertebrates -- four-legged amphibians -- that could live on dry land.

"We`ve solved this long-standing puzzle," said Linda VanAller Hernick, a paleontologist at the New York State Museum, who wrote about her discovery in the journal Nature. The stumps in Gilboa were unearthed in 1870 when workers were blasting a quarry. Until now, scientists had never seen the tops of those trees. Hernick and museum colleague Frank Mannolini discovered an intact crown and part of a tree trunk in 2004 and a year later found a 28-foot (8.5-metre) trunk portion of the same species. Pieced together, they represent Wattieza, a tree that looked like modern-day palm with a crown of fronds that grew up to 30 feet high and reproduced through spores. "Previously, paleobotanists thought that a tree called Archaeopteris was the oldest tree. Now we know there were tree-like plants in abundance much earlier," Hernick said in a telephone interview. The fern-like trees are about 23 million years older than Archaeopteris, which Hernick said resembled a modern tree, with conventional branches. Instead of leaves, the Wattieza had frond-like branches with branchlets that resembled a bottlebrush, said William Stein, a paleobiologist at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and co-author of the study. The tree branches fell to the forest floor, providing a potential food source and shelter for living creatures, the researchers said. "This is a spectacular find which has allowed us to recreate these early forest ecosystems," said British researcher Christopher Berry of Cardiff University, who worked on the study. Berry said the branches would have decayed, providing a new food chain for the bugs living below. "The rise of the forests removed a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This caused temperatures to drop and the planet became very similar to its present day condition," he said in a statement. For Hernick, who was inspired to become a paleontologist after viewing the Gilboa stumps as a child, the discovery offers a fair bit of personal satisfaction. "It`s kind of nice to bring this story to a close," she said.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 19, 2007

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A chemical used in cosmetic products promising an "instant face lift" makes wrinkles disappear by damaging skin cells, Canadian researchers report. "From our point of view the cells are altered. They stop dividing, they stop secreting, and after...24 hours a certain proportion of them die," Dr. Francois Marceau of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Quebec told news agencies. Marceau, a cell biologist, said he is reluctant to recommend that these products not be used. However, the findings make it clear that more research is needed on how these and similar products work. "I don`t want to scare people," he added. "The risk is not probably very big, but in my opinion it hasn`t been measured accurately." Marceau and his team tested 2-dimethylaminoethanol (DMAE) in cultured rabbit and human skin cells. As the researchers predicted, applying the product caused a massive and rapid swelling of the cells as they filled with DMAE and water, leading to a thickening of the epidermal layer. They also found that DMAE was toxic to the skin cells, halting cell division, inhibiting secretion, and killing some cells after 24 hours of exposure. This "facelift in a jar" chemical is certainly safer than a real facelift, or Botox injections, Marceau noted. Nevertheless, the fact that DMAE and other "cosmeceuticals," such as triethanolamine, aren`t considered drugs means they are sold with very minimal information about how they work and their toxicity. "We know far less for these chemicals than for any new drug that has been marketed in the last 30 years," Marceau said. "What I`d like to see is more science in this field." These chemicals should be treated as drugs, and many studies, such as of mode of action and toxicology, should be completed before it is marketed.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 19, 2007

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New research is strengthening evidence that following mom's admonition to eat your vegetables may be some of the best health advice around. A large study of 500,000 American retirees has found that just one extra serving of fruit or vegetables a day may reduce the risk of developing head and neck cancer. Numerous studies have demonstrated that diet plays a role in cancer. Cancer experts now believe that up to two-thirds of all cancers come from lifestyle factors such as smoking, diet and lack of exercise. "It may not sound like news that vegetables protect from cancer, but there is actually some controversy in the literature. It is important that we do these large studies," said Alan Kristal, associate head of the cancer prevention program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute queried men and women aged 50 and older about their diets, then followed participants for five years to record all diagnoses of head and neck cancer, which is the sixth-leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Tobacco and alcohol use increase the risk of head and neck cancers, which affect the mouth, nose, sinuses and throat. The study found eating six servings of fruit and vegetables per day per 1,000 calories cut the risk of head and neck cancer by 29% compared to eating one and a half servings. The typical adult consumes around 2,000 calories a day. "Increasing consumption by just one serving of fruit or vegetables per 1,000 calories per day was associated with a 6% reduction in head and neck cancer risk, said Neal Freedman, cancer prevention fellow at the NCI. A second study of food consumption in more than 183,000 residents of California and Hawaii found that a diet high in flavonols might help reduce pancreatic cancer risk, especially in smokers. Flavonols are common in plant-based foods but are found in highest concentrations in onions, apples, berries, kale and broccoli.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, April 17, 2007

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NASA paid USD 26.6 mn to the families of seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia, a settlement that has been kept secret for more than two and a half years, a report said. Indian-American astronaut Kalpana Chawla was among those killed when the shuttle broke up as it re-entered the earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003. An investigation later discovered that chunks of insulation shed from the tank during take off damaged Columbia's left wing leading to the disaster. Reporting this, Orlando Sentinel said the space agency recruited former FBI Director William Webster, also a former federal judge, to act as a mediator and adviser in negotiating the out-of-court settlements. The paper said its request yielded just seven pages of documents that leave many questions unanswered, including exactly when the settlements occurred. In an interview with the sentinel, Webster, also a former CIA director, said he was bound by confidentiality and couldn't discuss details of the agreements, but defended the process as proper.

"The members of the (survivors') families wanted this to be a private matter," said Webster, a consulting partner in Washington with the international law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. "They were healing, and they were ready to discuss, properly, their rights.... Everyone felt it had a better chance of coming together without seeing their name in lights." In brief written responses to sentinel questions, NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said little about the settlements, citing family privacy. He said the money came from the agency's budget via a 2004 Congressional appropriation. "The Columbia astronauts were our friends and co-workers," Beutel wrote. "Our concern always has been with the crew's families and we didn't announce details of the settlement in an effort to protect the personal privacy of the Columbia families." Former NASA administrator Sean o'Keefe and ex-general counsel Paul Pastorek, who helped set up the settlement process, did not return phone calls and e-mails, the paper said. Jon Clark, widower of astronaut Laurel Blair Salton Clark, was quoted as saying NASA was "deferential" in dealing with the families through a turbulent period in their lives. "We were in a state of shock," he said. "To go the lawsuit route, it's very painful and very protracted. So we settled." Also killed were air force Col. Rick husband, 45, mission commander; Navy Cmdr. Willia, who was the shuttle pilot; Navy capt. David M. Brown, 46; Navy Cmdr. Clark, 41; and payload specialists air force Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson, 43; and Israeli air force col. Ilan Ramon, 48, Israel's first astronaut. The documents were released to the sentinel last month after a reporter filed requests in 2005 and 2006. Stephen L. Mcconnell, NASA's principal FOIA officer, insisted the agency was not trying to delay the records release. Five of the seven astronauts on Columbia were military officers and barred from suing the government because they were on active duty while on loan to NASA, making contractors likely targets for lawsuits.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 15, 2007

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For the first time, scientists have dated diamonds from the recently discovered diamond fields in Canada's Northwest Territories and have found them to be the oldest precisely dated diamonds on Earth. They formed 3.5 billion years ago in an era called the Archean when the Earth was forming its first continents. Other ancient continents, such as in southern Africa or Siberia, have long been known to have diamonds almost as old, but none that have been so precisely dated. The researchers, including Steven Shirey and Richard Carlson from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Kalle Westerlund, Stephen Richardson, and John Gurney from the University of Cape Town, and Jeffrey Harris from the University of Glasgow, also report evidence suggesting that the diamonds formed during a process called subduction. Subduction occurs when one crustal plate sinks and slides under another and is plunged hundreds of miles into Earth's mantle. This conclusion documents one of the oldest known examples of modern plate tectonics. The findings are published in the September issue of Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology. "Diamonds aren't just for spectacular jewelry," commented Shirey. "They are scientific gems too. They act as tiny time capsules. Many diamonds encase tiny mineral grains-what jewelers call impurities but geoscientists call inclusions-that can tell us how old the diamond is and what geologic processes occurred in the deep Earth billions of years ago." Diamonds, dense forms of carbon, are the hardest natural substance known. The largest diamonds come from cratons-ancient continental regions and their deep roots that provided a nucleus around which younger continental material gathered. Cratons contain the oldest rocks on the planet and hold much of the Earth's mineral wealth, including diamonds. Cratonic roots extend into the mantle more than 125 miles (200 km) deep where pressure is high enough, but temperature cold enough, for diamond formation. The mantle "keels" to cratons are as old as the overlying crust and they date to the Archean period (3.9 to 2.5 billion years ago). Rare volcanic eruptions, of magmas that solidify into rocks called kimberlites, from depths of 95 to 125 miles (150 to 200 km) have brought diamonds to the surface as passive passengers in the exploding kimberlite magma. Diamonds come in two major varieties: eclogitic and peridotitic. Scientists have believed for some time that eclogitic diamonds, related to the high pressure equivalents of basaltic crustal rocks, form from the process of subduction. But this study contains the first evidence that the peridotitic diamonds, which are in chemical equilibrium with the peridotite of the Earth's mantle, also may be formed from the water and other fluids released by subducting crustal plates at depth.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 15, 2007

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An Indian medical school study has determined one donor cornea can be divided and transplanted into multiple patients with eye disease or eye damage. Recent advances have allowed ophthalmologic surgeons to move from transplanting the entire cornea in every patient to more focused operations that involve removing and replacing only the diseased or damaged portion of the cornea. Such surgical techniques provide an opportunity to make use of a single donor cornea in more than one patient. B In the study, Rasik Vajpayee -- then of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and now at the University of Melbourne -- used a cornea from a man who died of cardiac arrest for transplants in three patients. The corneal tissue was divided into three parts, each part was then transplanted into different patients. The procedures were performed on the same day and were all successful. The scientists said the use of a single donor cornea in more than one patient might become standard surgical practice, helping reduce the backlog of patients with corneal blindness in countries in which there is a dearth of good-quality donor corneal tissue.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 14, 2007

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A rare large-billed reed warbler, thought to have been lost by ornithologists, has been spotted in India after 140 years. Except for a single bird found in the Sutlej valley in Himachal Pradesh in 1867, it has not been sighted in India since, Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) said here on Thursday. The warbler was discovered by a team of bird watchers in Kolkata, who say they saw it feeding amid the bamboo vegetation in Narendrapur on the outskirts of the city. The wetland bird, smaller than a house sparrow but with a longer beak, has an olive-brown back with a whitish underside, and "is drab in appearance". From a distance one could mistake it for a sparrow. Photos of the bird were sent to BNHS to confirm its identity and ornithologists identified it from preserved specimens of other warblers in its collection. The warbler's identity was also confirmed by Delhi-based Bikram Grewal, author of several books on Indian birds. The bird was spotted in Thailand in March last year after 130 years. Professor Steffan Bensch of Sweden's Lund University had confirmed the identity of the bird found in Thailand using DNA testing. "Almost nothing is known about this mysterious bird. The Indian specimen has short, round wings and we speculated it is resident or short-distance migrant, so its appearance in Thailand is very surprising," Bensch had said.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, April 13, 2007

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ISU psychologists have recently released a book which has proved the harmful effects of violent video games on kids and youth. The results published in the book are based on the findings of three different studies carried out by the psychologists recently. ISU distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson, Assistant Professor of Psychology Douglas Gentile, and doctoral student Katherine Buckley have shared the results of three new studies in their book, "Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents". The first study found that even exposure to children's violent video games had the same short-term effects on increasing aggressive behavior as the more graphic teen (T-rated) violent games. Almost 161 9- to 12-year-olds, and 354 college students who participated in the study were randomly assigned to play either a violent or non-violent video game. The participants subsequently played another computer game designed to measure aggressive behavior in which the punishment levels were set in the form of noise blasts to be delivered to another person participating in the study. Additional information was also gathered on each participant's history of violent behavior and previous violent media viewing habits.

The researchers found that participants who played the violent video games -- even if they were children's games -- punished their opponents with significantly more high-noise blasts than those who played the non-violent games. They also found that habitual exposure to violent media was associated with higher levels of recent violent behavior -- with the newer interactive form of media violence found in video games more strongly related to violent behavior than exposure to non-interactive media violence found in television and movies. "Even the children's violent video games -- which are more cartoonish and often show no blood -- had the same size effect on children and college students as the much more graphic games have on college students," said Gentile. "What seems to matter is whether the players are practicing intentional harm to another character in the game. That's what increases immediate aggression -- more than how graphic or gory the game is." The second study, which surveyed 189 high school students, found that participants who had more exposure to violent video games held more pro-violent attitudes, had more hostile personalities, were less forgiving, believed violence to be more typical, and behaved more aggressively in their everyday lives. "We were surprised to find that exposure to violent video games was a better predictor of the students' own violent behavior than their gender or their beliefs about violence," said Anderson. "Although gender aggressive personality and beliefs about violence all predict aggressive and violent behavior, violent video game play still made an additional difference. "We were also somewhat surprised that there was no apparent difference in the video game violence effect between boys and girls or adolescents with already aggressive attitudes," he said. The thied study which analyzed 430 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, their peers, and their teachers twice during a five-month period in the school year, found that children who played more violent video games early in the school year changed to see the world in a more aggressive way, and became more verbally and physically aggressive later in the school year. Higher aggression and lower pro-social behavior were in turn related to those children being more rejected by their peers. "I was startled to find those changes in such a short amount of time," said Gentile. "Children's aggression in school did increase with greater exposure to violent video games, and this effect was big enough to be noticed by their teachers and peers within five months." The book's final chapter gives "Helpful Advice for Parents and Other Caregivers on Choosing and Using Video Games." The authors say that providing clear, science-based information to parents and guardians about the harmful effects of exposure to violent video games is the first step to educate the people who are best able to use the information.

Courtesy: www.zeenews.com, April 5, 2007

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Taking devotion to a new high, Delhiites have got an all-new architectural marvel which boasts of being the tallest and the only automated idol of Lord Hanuman in the world. Its developers are now planning to make it to the Guinness Book of World Records with their creation. The towering Lord Hanuman idol, which has been coming up at Pusa Road roundabout over the last 13 years, was thrown open to public on Monday. The statue depicts Lord Hanuman standing tall on the severed head of a demon. Its height is 108 feet (by comparison, the Qutab Minar stands at 239 feet). "Hundred-and-eight is Lord Hanuman's favourite number - he chanted 108 times, ate 108 laddus and took Lord Ram's name 108 times. It is the tallest Hanumanji idol in the world," said Om Prakash, general secretary of the temple trust which created the idol. The arms of the idol open and close at the touch of a button. "The movement is controlled by a computer. When the arms open, a trolley holding Ram and Sita idols comes out of his heart. This is the only such automated statue in the world. The idols that come out are plated with gold," he said.

Courtesy: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, April 3, 2007

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The Central Information Commission (CIC) has ruled that Indian missions abroad come under the purview of the Right to Information Act, thus enabling the 50 lakh NRIs to make use of it too. At a meeting last week, the CIC said since Indian missions were set up by the External Affairs Ministry, "they come under the ambit of the RTI Act". It is not yet clear how applicants approaching missions abroad for information will pay the mandatory fee. But the commission asked the ministry and the Department of Personnel and Training to find them a means of doing so. In the interim, the commission said Indian missions "would not have the right to reject applications on grounds of non-payment of fee". Information Commissioner OP Kejariwal had asked his colleagues for their opinion in this matter when an Ahmedabad resident wanted to know why a French national who wanted to visit India was denied a visa by the Indian mission in Paris.

Courtesy: www.hindustantimes.com, April 2, 2007

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