The telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal observatory form a virtual mirror of 130 metres in diameter, and a previous attempt to link the telescopes last March had failed.

 The link-up was the system’s scientific verification, which was the final step before scientific work starts.

 Linking all four units of the VLT is expected to give scientists a much more detailed look at the universe as compared to previous experiments using just two or three telescopes to create a virtual mirror.

 The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry. In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on earth.

 Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope’s spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.

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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered the cabinet to approve the plan and earmark funding for the project, space agency chief Hamid Fazeli said.

RIA Novosti reported that earlier Friday, Iran successfully launched an observation satellite, Navid (Harbinger), to take pictures of the Earth at low altitudes of 250 to 370 km.

Tehran launched its first domestically-produced satellite Omid (Hope) in 2009, an endeavour which made it the ninth country having the capability to launch satellites.

Iran also plans to launch the country’s first manned mission into space by 2019.

Police said the influential but controversial politician had stated that the IP address from which the email account vijaysardesai4fatorda@gmail.com was hacked originated in Honduras and Thailand.

“The hacking occurred between Jan 28 and 30. And the hackers sent across a lot of email saying untoward things from the email address,” a police official said.

New evidence shows that the sex hormones – testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone – act in a key region of the brain, switching certain genes on and others off.

When researchers tinkered with each of these genes one by one, animals showed subtle but important shifts in gender-specific behaviours, such as how males mate or females care for their pups, the journal Cell reports.

“What this means is that complex behaviours like male mating or maternal care in mice can be deconstructed at the genetic level,” said Nirao Shah of the University of California, San Francisco.

Researchers focused specifically on the hypothalamus, a brain region governing sex-specific behaviours. They singled out 16 genes with clear sex differences in distinct neurons (brain cells) in the hypothalamus, according to a California statement.

Surprisingly, Shah’s team found that many of these genes also show sex differences in the amygdala, a part of the brain important for emotions.

Mice missing only one of these 16 genes seemed to behave normally. But upon closer observation, these mice showed significant differences in sex-specific behaviours.

For instance, Shah, who led the study, explained, females mutant for one gene took longer to return their pups to the nest and to fight off intruders. “They still take care of their pups, but less effectively,” he said.

In other experiments, deletion of a single gene produced females that were two-fold less receptive to mating with males. Similarly, males mutant for another gene were less interested in females.

Barry D. Bruce, professor of biochemistry at the University of Tennessee, worked with researchers from MIT and Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Switzerland to develop a process to improve the efficiency of generating electric power using molecular structures from plants.

To produce the energy, the scientists harnessed the power of a key component of photosynthesis known as photosystem-I (PSI) from blue-green algae.

This complex was then bioengineered to specifically interact with a semi-conductor so that, when illuminated, the process of photosynthesis produced electricity.

“This system is a preferred method of sustainable energy because it is clean and it is potentially very efficient,” said Bruce, named one of “Ten Revolutionaries that May Change the World” by Forbes magazine in 2007 for his early work, which first demonstrated biosolar electricity generation.

“As opposed to conventional photovoltaic solar power systems, we are using renewable biological materials rather than toxic chemicals to generate energy,” said Bruce, reported the journal Nature: Scientific Reports, citing a Tennessee varsity statement.

“Likewise, our system will require less time, land, water and input of fossil fuels to produce energy than most biofuels,” he added.

Because of the engineered properties, the system self-assembles and is much easier to re-create than Bruce’s earlier work. In fact, the approach is simple enough that it can be replicated in most labs-allowing others around the world to work toward further optimization.

“Because the system is so cheap and simple, my hope is that this system will develop with additional improvements to lead to a green, sustainable energy source,” said Bruce.

Collective problem solving can provide benefits over individual decisions as we are able to share our information and experiences, said a new study from Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Neuroimaging at the University College London.

Now researchers have shown that the testosterone has the opposite effect — it makes people act less cooperative and more egocentric, the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B reported.

Researcher Nick Wright and colleagues at the Centre for Neuroimaging carried out a series of tests using 17 pairs of female volunteers who had previously never met. The test took place over two days, spaced a week apart, a university statement said.

“When we are making decisions in groups, we tread a fine line between cooperation and self-interest: too much cooperation and we may never get our way, but if we are too self-orientated, we are likely to ignore people who have real insight,” explained Wright.

On one of the days, both volunteers in each pair were given a testosterone supplement; on the other day, they were given a placebo.

Researchers found that as expected, cooperation enabled the group to perform much better than the individuals alone when individuals had received only the placebo. But, when given a testosterone supplement, the benefit of cooperation was markedly reduced.

In fact, higher levels of testosterone were associated with individuals behaving egocentrically and deciding in favour of their own selection over their partner’s.

University of New South Wales (UNSW) researchers reviewed 3,291 patient records and looked at both procedural (incomplete, unclear medication orders) and clinical (wrong dose, wrong drug) errors, and rated the potential severity of the errors (minor to serious).

Researchers found that procedural prescribing error rates fell by more than 90 percent, and the most serious prescribing errors declined by 44 percent, the journal Public Library of Science reports.

“The study provides persuasive evidence of the value of commercial e-prescribing systems to significantly and substantially reduce a range of prescribing errors,” said study leader Johanna Westbrook, professor from UNSW’s Australian Institute of Health Innovation.

The six percent reduction was far beyond anything anticipated. Previous attempts to reduce such errors, had resulted in an improvement of only around four percent, Westbrook said, according to a UNSW statement.

“Prescribing errors are among the top hazards faced in a hospital setting,” said Ric Day, professor of pharmacology, who helped implement a commercial e-prescribing system at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital.

“Most of this technology was developed in the US with the big medical centres designing their own customised systems,” Westbrook said.

It receives about 90 percent of the light that the earth receives from the sun. But most of this incoming light is infrared, and so more of it will be absorbed by the planet, says Chris Tinney, professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

“This means that overall the planet absorbs about the same amount of energy from its star as the Earth absorbs from the Sun: so that would give the planet the right temperature, if it has a rocky surface and a wet atmosphere, to host liquid water,” said Tinney.

“And liquid water is seen as an essential pre-condition for the development of life,” said Tinney, who co-authored the study with Jeremy Bailey and Rob Wittenmyer, the Astrophysical Journal Letters reports.

The planet, GJ 667Cc, circles a relatively cool star (GJ667C), has an orbital period of 28.15 days and a minimum mass of 4.5 times that of Earth, according to an UNSW statement.

“This discovery shows that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than we previously considered,” said Simon O’Toole of the Australian Astronomical Observatory, another team member.

The planet was discovered using the “Doppler wobble” technique, which detects the slight movements of a star as its orbiting planets tug it to and fro in space.

The child prodigy died Jan 16 following complications resulting from an epileptic stroke, the Geo News reported.

The stamp’s launching by the Pakistan Post coincided with the young prodigy’s birthday (Feb 2).

With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth, the planet orbits within the star’s “habitable zone”, where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface, Xinhua reported.

The researchers found evidence of at least one and possibly two or three additional planets orbiting the star, which is about 22 light-years from Earth, according to a study published Thursday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The host star is a member of a triple-star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, with a much lower abundance of elements heavier than helium, such as iron, carbon, and silicon.

This discovery indicates that potentially habitable planets can occur in a greater variety of environment than previously believed.

Researchers from the University of California and the Carnegie Institution for Science and astronomers conducted the study.

Officers say it will help in their zero-tolerance approach to motoring offences.

But critics say Dorset police are using the equipment to “maximise the number of offences” simply to raise funds.

The 12,500-pound Concept II is fitted with laser speed-detection equipment and a powerful camera that can capture motorists in the “act” of using a mobile phone while driving or not wearing a seat belt.

The resolution is sharp enough to pick out an unbuckled belt at ranges of up to 600 metres and records image and video evidence to DVD, the newspaper said.

Project manager Brian Austin said: “Bizarrely, officers at one of the sites in Dorchester were stunned to see a driver pass them while playing a harmonica using both hands.

“He claimed that he thought he was driving while playing the harmonica quite successfully.”

Officers will be able to use the pictures as evidence to secure a conviction.

One whole face of the Moon can never be seen from Earth because it constantly faces away from our planet. But now one of the twin GRAIL spacecraft launched by NASA last September has returned its first video of the Moon’s hidden side.

The video scans the barren, dusty face – the oldest part of the moon – all the way from north to south poles, revealing a landscape scarred by countless collisions with comets and asteroids, the newspaper said.

Among the geographical features it picks up are the 149 km wide Drygalski crater, which features a star-shaped formation in its centre and can be seen to the left of centre near the bottom of the screen as the video reaches the south pole.

The footage was taken as part of a project for middle school students, who will pick out areas such as craters which they want to study in more detail, and is intended to inspire the next generation of space scientists.

Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator, said: “The quality of the video is excellent and should energise our students as they prepare to explore the Moon.”

The smartphone, called ‘ADzero’, is expected to launch later this year. Made from four-year-old organically grown bamboo that has been treated to improve its durability, the phone runs Google’s Android operating system.

Kieron Scott-Woodhouse, from Shepherds Bush in London, designed the phone because he was frustrated that so many existing models looked similar to each other.

He is a student of Middlesex University. A technology entrepreneur had contacted him after he posted designs online.

The phone was initially intended for the Chinese market but an enthusiastic reception in Britain means it will go on sale in design retailers later this year, the newspaper said.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, (UCSF) teased out a molecular profile of these genes whose expression in the prostate gland is tied to vigorous exercise.

“Vigorous physical activity may provide clinical benefits for men diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer,” said study author June Chan, professor at the UCSF.

The finding is based on two studies conducted earlier by the UCSF and the Harvard School of Public Health that compared the activity of 20,000 genes in healthy prostate tissue biopsied from dozens of patients, according to a statement from the UCSF.

They showed that brisk walking or vigorous exercise such as jogging for three or more hours a week was linked to a lowered risk of prostate cancer progression and death after diagnosis, but offered no explanation as to why.

Understanding how the activity of these genes was impacted by vigorous exercise and how this might translate to a lowered risk of prostate cancer progression may help reveal new ways to manage the disease, said Chan.

Prostate cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in the US. More than 217,000 men are diagnosed with the disease, and some 32,000 men die from prostate cancer, each year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Phobos-Grunt, Russia’s most ambitious planetary mission in decades, was launched Nov 9, however, it was lost due to propulsion failure and fell back to Earth Jan 15.

“We are holding consultations with the ESA about Russia’s participation in the ExoMars project… If no deal is reached, we will repeat the attempt [to launch a Phobos mission],” Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said.

During the ExoMars mission, ESA plans to send an orbital spacecraft, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, to Mars in 2016 and a robot rover two years later.

The rover will be able to cover several km in search of possible past and present signs of life, take samples from the surface and dig to the depth of two meters (six feet).

The ExoMars program was run jointly by NASA and ESA but the US space agency later said it would cut its participation in the project and will not provide its Atlas carrier for the launch.

The software — called “Unfriend Finder” — also alerts users when someone rejects or ignores a friend request.

It is free, and till date has been downloaded 44 million times, the Daily Mail reported.

The script works in browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Users see a red counter in their menu bar which comes up “-1″ when someone unfriends them.

Facebook itself does not have the option of alerting people when they are removed from the friends list.

Vandana Suryawanshi of Vidya Valley School in Maharashtra is a middle school educator who has been teaching biology, earth science and general science for 20 years. She joins 19 other outstanding educators selected for their active promotion of space and science education.

The new flight of Teacher Liaisons will serve as advocates for space-themed education across the curriculum and will use Space Foundation-provided training and resources to further integrate space principles into the classroom, the Colorado Springs based non-profit leader in space awareness activities, educational programmes announced.

The highly regarded Space Foundation Teacher Liaison programme has more than 270 active participants.

The teachers are selected by a panel comprising experienced Teacher Liaisons and representatives from the space industry and the military.

The 2012 Teacher Liaisons will be publicly recognized at the Space Foundation’s 28th National Space Symposium, which is being held April 16-19 at The Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

In addition to the recognition activities, the 2012 Teacher Liaisons will participate in workshops and education programmes at the 28th National Space Symposium.

Following the symposium, Teacher Liaisons can take advantage of specialised training and instruction at Space Foundation and NASA workshops with optional graduate-level credit; exclusive science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professional development experiences with optional continuing education credit; and special space-oriented student programmes created just for Teacher Liaisons.

Besides the many known benefits of milk, from bone health to cardiovascular health, the potential to stave off mental decline would potentially benefit an aging population.

Adults who drank more milk scored significantly higher on memory and other brain function tests than those who drank little to no milk. They were five times less likely to “fail” the test, compared to non-milk drinkers, the International Dairy Journal reports.

University of Maine researchers put more than 900 men and women ages 23 to 98 through a series of tests, spatial, verbal and working memory tests and tracked their milk consumption habits.

In the series of eight different measures of mental performance, regardless of age and through all tests, those who drank at least one glass of milk each day had an advantage, according to a Maine statement.

The highest scores for all eight outcomes were observed for those with the highest intakes of milk and milk products compared to those with low and infrequent milk intakes.

The benefits persisted even after controlling for other factors that can affect brain health, including cardiovascular health and other lifestyle and diet factors.

Study co-authors suggest some of milk’s nutrients may have a direct effect on brain function and that “easily implemented lifestyle changes that individuals can make present an opportunity to slow or prevent neuropsychological dysfunction.”

The commission, which submitted its final report to the head of Russia’s Federal Space Agency Vladimir Popovkin late Monday, concluded that the main cause of the failure was “a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer”.

Investigators have ruled out any “external or foreign influence” on the spacecraft, including the alleged emissions from a US radar in the Pacific Ocean.

“The US radar theory was deemed ungrounded after a series of tests showed that the electronics similar to those onboard the Phobos-Grunt had withstood the highest possible level of electromagnetic radiation,” the Kommersant source said.

The report will be presented to Russia’s new Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the probe.

Phobos-Grunt, Russia’s most ambitious planetary mission in decades, was launched Nov 9 but it was lost due to a propulsion failure and fell back to Earth Jan 15.

Soon after the failed launch, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said a rocket motor should have started up to push the probe into higher orbit, but it failed to fire for unknown reasons.

According to NASA, Russia has failed in all 17 of its attempts to study the Red Planet close-up since 1960. The most recent failure before November last year occurred in 1996, when Russia lost its Mars-96 orbiter during launch.

According to the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, Facebook plans to file papers with the US financial watchdog Wednesday.

The flotation later this year would raise around $10 billion, making it one of the biggest share sales ever on Wall Street.

Rumours of Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) have been circulating for months.

“Facebook a brilliant achievement, but $75-$100bn? Would make Apple look really cheap,” wrote Rupert Murdoch on Twitter.

The company was started by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow students at Harvard University in 2004. It has over 800 million users and makes most of its money through advertising.

The ministry of justice said all the prisoners’ profiles were closed after a probe but there could be hundreds more who have used the site without the knowledge of officials.

Two years ago, a 44-year-old jailed criminal named Colin Gunn was caught using Facebook to threaten his enemies from a high security prison cell, The Sun reported.

“I will be home one day and I can’t wait to look into certain people’s eyes and see the fear of me being there. It’s good to have an outlet to let you know how I am, some of you will be in for a good slagging and some have let me down badly and will be named and shamed,” Gunn wrote in one post.

The news has been criticised by social organisations.

“Offenders using Facebook from prison makes a mockery of the idea that they are being punished,” said Javed Khan of the Victim Support group.

Jean Taylor, from Families Fighting for Justice, said: “These perpetrators should not be able to have access to mobile phones in prison. They are getting away with torturing their victims. The social networking sites should police this much more closely.”

“Modern science lacks a unifying, interdisciplinary theory of life. In other words, current theories are unable to explain why life is the way it is and not any other way,” says molecular biologist Erik Andrulis, who propounded the theory.

His “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life,” explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on earth and in the universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres, reports the journal Life.

By showing that the earth is theoretically synonymous with life, Andrulis’ paradigm substantiates the Gaian premise that all organisms and their surroundings on earth are closely integrated to form a single self-regulating complex system.

Applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance, says Andrulis, assistant professor of molecular biology at Case Western Reserve University.

Besides resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Andrulis’ theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics, according to a Case Western statement.

His unorthodox solution differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory. His basic idea is that all physical reality can be modelled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre.

The so-called “gyromodel” depicts objects — particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells — as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel’s centre.

By fitting the gyromodel to facts accumulated over scientific history, Andrulis confirms that the eight laws of nature formally establish there is one physical reality. One of them dictates that atoms in the human body and solar systems move and behave in the exact same manner.

Talking to mediapersons at the end of a two-day visit here, Mukherjee said outsourcing of jobs had helped increase the profitability of American companies and any move to discourage such activities would hurt them.

Mukherjee’s comments Sunday came after Obama last week raised concerns on outsourcing, calling out US firms to bring jobs back home.

In his State Of the Union address, Obama had said the companies which provided jobs at home would get a bigger tax break while those outsourced jobs would have to pay more tax.

Urging all countries to avoid creating barriers for movement of trade and services, Mukherjee warned that growing protectionist tendencies in the US and some other countries would hurt the global economy.

“I do believe that there is merit in giving up protectionism and I do hope that the countries will not resort to protectionism.”

Mukherjee said the world trade and economic growth had increased substantially in the last two decades mainly because of dismantling of barriers.

“Growth in world output over the years have been substantial because of a substantially removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers,” he said.

The event was organised in the run-up to World Cancer Day Feb 4 by Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre (RGCIRC) which treated the patients in collaboration with Cancer Sahyog, the emotional support group of Indian Cancer Society.

Bone marrow transplant (BMT) patients from India as well as countries like Afghanistan, Nepal, Iran, Kenya and the UAE along with their families shared their experiences and got in depth knowledge about cancer.

“This get together was aimed at equipping the patients and their families with right information so that they are able to face the challenging phase in their lives successfully,” said Dinesh Bhurani, senior consultant, BMT, RGCIRC.

“The reunion also led to bonhomie between patients and they benefitted a lot from sharing of their experiences,” added Bhurani.

According to the centre, blood cancer is one of the most dreaded cancers. However, BMT has emerged as an effective treatment.

“Post-operative period is as critical as the bone marrow transplant itself. After a bone marrow transplant, it may take a year or more for the immune system to recover,” said Bhurani.

“The cost is a major concern in a BMT. We are providing this facility at most economical way. The results of transplants are at par with international standards,” added Shishir Seth, consultant, RGCIRC.

As per the official statement by RGCIRC, it was amongst the first in the country to introduce BMT in 2001. In 2011, it became the first institute in north India to perform more than 50 transplants in a year.

“Having a best friend present during an unpleasant event has an immediate impact on a child’s body and mind,” says study co-author William M. Bukowski, psychology professor and director of the Concordia University Centre for Research in Human Development.

“If a child is alone when he or she gets in trouble with a teacher or has an argument with a classmate, we see a measurable increase in cortisol levels (hormone produced by the adrenal gland in response to stress) and decrease in feelings of self-worth,” says Bukowski.

“Excessive secretion of cortisol can lead to significant physiological changes, including immune suppression and decreased bone formation. Increased stress can really slow down a child’s development,” adds Bukowski, the journal Developmental Psychology reports.

A total of 55 boys and 48 girls from grades five and six in local Montreal schools took part in the study. They kept journals on their feelings and experiences over the course of four days and submitted to regular saliva tests that monitored cortisol levels, according to a Concordia statement.

This study is the first to definitively demonstrate that the presence of a friend results in an immediate benefit for the child undergoing a negative experience.

These results have far-reaching implications. “Our physiological and psychological reactions to negative experiences as children impacts us later in life,” explains Bukowski.

The new magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) technique provides a definitive diagnosis of cancer, based on imaging a protein tied with mutated gene, found in 80 percent of low-and intermediate-grade gliomas (brain or spinal cancers).

“To our knowledge, this is the only direct metabolic consequence of a genetic mutation in a cancer cell that can be identified through noninvasive imaging,” said Elizabeth Maher, associate professor of internal medicine at University of Texas Southwestern and senior study author, the journal Nature Medicine reports.

Texas researchers developed the test by modifying the settings of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to track the protein’s levels, according to a Texas statement.

The data acquisition and analysis procedure was developed by Changho Choi, associate professor of the Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC) and radiology, who led the study.

Previous research linked high levels of this protein to the mutation (change), and Texas researchers already had been working on MRS of gliomas to find tumour biomarkers.

“Our next step is to make this testing procedure widely available as part of routine MRIs for brain tumors. It doesn’t require any injections or special equipment,” said Maher, medical director of UT Southwestern’s neuro-oncology program.

The discovery potentially paves the way for more effective treatments against the bug, Vibrio cholerae, which is able to colonise the gut after consumption of contaminated water or food.

The bug secretes a toxin that causes watery diarrhoea and ultimately death if not treated rapidly, the Journal of Biological Chemistry reported.

Colonisation of the intestine is difficult for incoming bugs as they have to compete to gain a foothold among the trillions of other bacteria already on the site.

A team led by biologist Gavin Thomas from the University of York, England, investigated how Vibrio cholera gains this foothold with the help of sialic acid, a sugar, present on the gut cells surface, according to a university statement.

Their associates, led by Fidelma Boyd, professor at the University of Delaware, US, had shown previously that eating sialic acid was important for the bug’s survival in animal models, but the mechanism by which it recognises and takes up the sialic was unknown.

The York research demonstrates that the pathogen uses a particular kind of transporter called a TRAP transporter to recognise sialic acid and take it up into the cell.

The transporter has particular properties that are suited to scavenging the small amount of sialic acid available. The research also provided some important basic information about how TRAP transporters work in general.

“This work continues our discoveries of how bacteria that grow in our body exploit sialic acid for their survival and help us to take forward our efforts to design chemicals to inhibit these processes in different bacterial pathogens,” said Thomas.

The finding is based on a study on fruit flies conducted by neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas University.

It supports a surprising new theory about memory and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer’s disease and prion diseases, the journal Cell reported.

“Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory,” said Kausik Si, associate investigator at the Stowers Institute.

Kausik’s investigations in this area began nearly a decade ago during his doctoral research in the Columbia University lab of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, according to a univesity statement.

He found that in the sea slug Aplysia californica — long been favoured by neuroscientists for memory experiments because of its large, easily-studied neurons, a synapse-maintenance protein CPEB, (Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding protein) has an unexpected property.

In the new study, Kausik and his colleagues examined a Drosophila fruit fly CPEB protein known as Orb2. Like its counterpart in Aplysia, it forms oligomers within neurons (nerve cells).

“We found that these Orb2 oligomers become more numerous in neurons whose synapses are stimulated, and that this increase in oligomers happens near synapses,” said Amitabha Majumdar, postdoctoral researcher in Si’s lab, who led the study.

“As I am not aware who took the decision in the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office), I want the prime minister to investigate the order and ascertain the basis of the recommendation for action as I was not given a chance to know what my crime is,” an upset Nair told IANS in an interview here.

The other three scientists who have been barred from holding any government job are former scientific secretary A. Bhaskarnarayana, Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) former satellite centre director K.N. Shankara and former Antrix Corporation executive director K.R. Sridharamurthi.

The Rs.1,000-crore ($200 million) Antrix is the commercial arm of the state-run ISRO, which is headquartered in this tech hub with centres across the country.

The quartet had been punished for their alleged role in the nixed $300 million (Rs.60 crore) spectrum deal between Antrix and the Bangalore-based Devas Multimedia Ltd in violation of rules, including competitive bidding through a global tender.

“The fact that the blacklisting order was not sent to me even 12 days after it was issued (Jan 13) but leaked to the media makes me suspect a sinister design behind the entire episode to cover up something or shield someone,” Nair asserted.

Claiming that the review committee headed by former cabinet secretary B.K. Chaturvedi and Space Commission member Roddam Narasimha found nothing amiss with the terms under which the contract was signed to allot 70MHz of the scarce S-band spectrum (radio waves) to Devas for digital multimedia services, Nair said even the one-man committee headed by B.N. Suresh gave him a clean chit.

Present ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan set up the Suresh panel in December 2009 to probe the deal.

“The Chaturvedi committee was at least fair to send a questionnaire and seek my explanation for some policy decisions on the deal, as I was also secretary of the space department during my tenure as ISRO chairman. After I sent a rejoinder and clarified the issues to their satisfaction, I thought the matter rested there,” Nair recalled.

The prime minister had set up a panel May 31, 2011 under the chairmanship of former Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) Pratyush Sinha to study the recommendations of the Chaturvedi panel report. Nair said the panel had neither summoned him nor asked him to appear before it.

“It is a mystery to me on how the Sinha panel made a case against me to warrant such an action by the PMO. I wish it had given me a chance to clear the air. Instead, I have been convicted and sentenced without giving me a hearing… I strongly suspect the hand of Radhakrishnan who scuttled the deal but held us responsible for his misdeeds,” Nair charged.

The prime minister had set up the Chaturvedi panel on Feb 10, 2011 to go into the Antrix-Devas agreement that was scrapped Feb 17, 2011.

The panel submitted its report to the prime minister March 12, 2011.

As per the deal, Devas was to get 90 percent of the transponders for 12 years from GSAT-6 and GSAT-6A satellites ISRO proposes to launch in the near future for communication and broadcasting services.

Reiterating that the contract was signed as per the policy prevailing then (2004), Nair said due to lack of clarity on ISRO’s role in the operational aspects of the deal, facts and issues have been distorted.

“ISRO’s role is to launch the twin satellites (GSAT-6 & GSAT-6A) and lease the transponders to the bidder at a cost, while it is the DoT (Department of Telecom) which charges for providing other links. When Devas applied for the satellite, there were no other bidders as the technology was new and there was no 3G or 4G for which the S-band spectrum is used to provide high speed links for various multimedia services,” he said.

Contesting the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) valuation, Nair said when even the satellites were not launched or transponders leased and services began, how can a loss be estimated and the entire deal dubbed a scam?

The CAG in February 2011 estimated the loss to the exchequer to the tune of Rs.2 lakh crore (Rs.2 trillion) from the deal.

“The satellite spectrum cannot be equated with the land-based radio waves as the former’s usage is restricted. The CAG has extrapolated the land based spectrum usage to space based one,” Nair added.

The results of a study show that an itch was perceived most intensely at the ankle and back, while the perception of scratching relief was less pronounced on the forearm.

“We first evaluated whether itch intensity was perceived differently at three body sites, and then we investigated the potential correlation between the pleasurability and the itch relief induced by scratching,” said Gil Yosipovitch, professor of dermatology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, who led the study.

While it is known that small nerve fibres are involved in unpleasant sensations such as itch and pain, Yosipovitch along with researchers now suspect that there are also specific nerve fibres involved in pleasure.

Yosipovitch and colleagues induced itch on the ankles, forearms and backs of participants with cowhage spicules, which are known to cause intense itching, the British Journal of Dermatology reported.

Itch intensity and scratching pleasurability were assessed every 30 seconds for a duration of five minutes using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) to rate intensity – 0 for no itch, up to 10 for maximum unbearable itch, according to a university statement.

Their results show that an itch was perceived most intensely at the ankle and back, while the perception of itch and scratching relief were less pronounced on the forearm.

“Another major finding of the paper explains the pleasurability of scratching the ankle appears to be longer lived compared to the other two sites,” said Yosipovitch.

“We see commonly involved areas such as the ankle and back in itchy patients with skin disorders caused by eczema or psoriasis,” he added.

Yet, a far more serious free-speech drama was quietly playing out. It started with Vinay Rai, editor of a little-known Delhi-based Urdu daily called Akbari, filing a criminal complaint in a district court in New Delhi.

Rai had been busy scouting the internet for dirt. Surprise — he found it! On Google, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, BlogSpot and on smaller services and blogs: Broadreader, Mylot, Zomie Time, Shyni Blog, Exbii.com, and IMC India.

And so he filed a criminal complaint against — hold your breath — Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Larry Page of Google, Donald Edward Graham, chairman of Facebook and the Washington Post, Yahoo chairman Roy J Bostock, the Indian country heads of those organizations, and other named and unnamed persons.

He did so “in public interest and as an affected person who believes in a secular India.” (Oddly, he missed out Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.)

Why? “These accused persons knowingly well these facts that these contents and materials are most dangerous for the community and peace of the harmony,” says Rai’s criminal complaint (language unedited), “but with common and malafide intention and hands under glove with each other failed to remove the same for the wrongful gain.”

In my first and only meeting with Rai on a recent prime-time show, Rai sounded placative. He wasn’t trying to get anything “banned”. He merely wanted removed from the internet all content that offended him.

So would he be the sole arbiter of offensive content? How would India’s jurisdiction cover all these sites in the US and Europe? Questions like these got his goat, and at one point he snapped out to a fellow panelist that he was trying to instigate riots. The show host asked him about his remarkable coincidence of timing, language and intent with those of the government, and minister Kapil Sibal: Was he their agent? No, he said. I am an agent of the People.

I had not read the complaint submitted before the district court in Delhi. I did so, two days later. The “agent of the people” was being economical with the truth. Nowhere in his plaint did he seek removal of content. Instead, he outlined a conspiracy between authors and the respondents to “malice [sic] and defame India with intention to spread communal violence to destabilize the country with”.

His goal is modest: That Ballmer, Page, et al, be summoned, brought from across the world to the courts in Delhi, charged, prosecuted, and punished under the Indian Penal Code sections 153(A), 153(B), 292, 293, 295(A), 298,109, 500 and 120B.

Anyone remotely familiar with the internet would dismiss this as bizarre: Extremism for shock value. But the issue goes beyond that. This petitioner indeed has remarkable coincidence with the views and intent of — and thus, likely, the support of — the establishment. So even if the present complaint is unlikely to find favor with the high court, or, worst case, the Supreme Court, this could be the shape of things to come in India – an India which aspires to be China.

India cannot pick out pieces of China that it wants to be like. There is a total picture that ensures that that regime endures, including not just infrastructure and industrial progress but also a totalitarian regime, an opaque justice system, a filtered internet, and overall, blanket media censorship enforced by extreme punishment. India isn’t China, and simply cannot be.

But Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal may have rejoiced the order of Delhi High Court Justice Suresh Kait Jan 12, who cleared the decks for the prosecution of Facebook, Google, et al. He said those who do not remove offensive content “like China, we could block all such websites”.

(29.01.2012 – Prasanto K. Roy is chief editor at CyberMedia and blogs on pkr.in and twitter.com/prasanto. The views expressed in this commentary are personal)

“The satellite will be launched in the fourth quarter of 2013,” head of the country’s State Space Agency Yury Alexeyev told reporters Friday, adding that the pay-off period of the satellite was between seven to eight years.

The project, which has cost $292 million, is financed with a 10-year loan from Canada, Alexeyev said.

He said that the satellite was being mounted in Russia’s southern city of Krasnoyarsk, reported Xinhua.

The satellite would be launched by Ukrainian missile “Zenit” at the country’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. It could offer telecommunications services for countries in Central Asia and North Africa.

“Reflective white paint on commercial building roofs reduces the energy used to cool the building,” said Dominique Hes, senior lecturer in sustainable architecture at the Melbourne University, who led the study.

For instance, if the roofs of the buildings in Melbourne were painted white, the city could potentially reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 1.5 million kilos,” a university statement quoted Hes as saying.

“White roofs are a low cost solution in making buildings more sustainable, particularly for our older buildings. And if our air conditioners are not working as hard, there are financial benefits for buildings owners as well,” said Hes.

The research monitored the temperatures of buildings at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley Campus for their performance with and without white coatings. The buildings with white roofs experienced significantly cooler temperatures, both on the exterior and interior.

Over 200,000 new cases are reported worldwide annually, with China being home to about one-tenth of the world’s infected population, Xinhua reported.

A research team from the Shandong Provincial Institute of Dermatology and Venereology in east China recently discovered a new susceptibility gene for leprosy based on a long-term study of over 20,000 cases, said Zhang Furen, leader of the research team Sunday.

Nine other susceptibility genes were found by Zhang’s team and two other research teams in 2009 and 2011, respectively.

Leprosy, an infectious disease that has afflicted mankind for over 4,000 years, is primarily characterised by skin lesions and progressive physical disability and can cause permanent nerve damage.

“Our research showed that nearly a quarter of the leprosy patients we surveyed have a family history of leprosy,” said Zhang.

Zhang and his team during their research discovered several cases in which people who had close contact with leprosy patients were not infected, leading them to conclude that both physical contact and genetic predisposition play a role in infection, said Zhang.

Zhang said it is more effective to prescribe drug therapy for high-risk individuals, found to have the susceptibility genes, than simply give drugs to all individuals coming into contact with leprosy patients.

“The ten susceptibility genes we have found are relevant to the body’s innate immunity,” said Zhang. “Due to a deficiency of the innate immune system, people who carry the susceptibility genes are likely to suffer from the disease.”

More susceptibility genes are expected to be found in future, Zhang added.

La Trobe University psychologist Kristelle Hudry, a key researcher in the study, says the results of the study are linked with emerging autism.

Hudry and her UK colleagues studied six to 10-month-old babies who were at risk of developing autism because they had a sibling with the condition, the journal Current Biology reported.

They placed sensors on the babies’ scalps to register their brain activity, while they viewed videos of faces that switched from looking at them to looking away, or vice versa, said a university statement.

“These results are important because early diagnosis can secure the best possible outcome for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), through early access to intervention,” Hudry said.

While behaviours characteristic of autism emerge over the first few years of life, a firm diagnosis using existing methods can usually only be made after the age of two.

In reality, however, diagnosis often doesn’t happen until much later, so most autism research has concentrated on children older than two years, which means we still know very little about the very earliest symptoms and signs, said Hudry.

Releasing the report in the UK, Mark Johnson, professor and chief investigator, University of London, said: “Our findings demonstrate for the first time that direct measures of brain functioning during the first year of life associate with a later diagnosis of autism – well before the emergence of behavioural symptoms.”

Since its launch in Kent county earlier this month, at least 85 teenagers have downloaded the free application, the Daily Mail reported.

Though there are no restrictions on who can download it, but to get free condoms, users have to be aged between 13 and 19 and registered with a national sexual health programme called the “C Card Scheme”.

Young people registering with the scheme must first have an appointment with a sexual health professional.

Once issued with a card, they can use it to access free contraception 20 times before being required to have a follow-up appointment.

The idea comes from the National Health Service Kent and Medway primary care trust.

The application — available at Apple’s App Store — was created by design company Tinderhouse, linked to the University of Kent Innovation Centre.

Tory MP Nadine Dorries, a former nurse and a campaigner for teenage sexual abstinence, has, however, criticised the move, and called it a “joke” and a “gimmick”.

Ruth Herron, head of sexual health at Kent Community Health NHS Trust, said the scheme has been very successful, with nearly 46,000 teenagers registering since 2007 and more than 5,000 hits to the website every month.

Located in the eastern Beijing’s Chaoyang district, the Gaoantun charging station can charge up to eight vehicles simultaneously and it takes only four to six minutes to swap a battery of an EV.

The station has been installed with over 10 types of EV charging or battery swapping machines, covering all charging modes that are available in China.

Beijing is striving to build a new energy vehicle grid as part of the nation’s plan to usher in more energy-saving and environmentally-friendly vehicles.

Beijing hopes to build a three-level EV charging and battery swapping network that consists of six large-scale concentrated charging stations, 250 charging and battery swapping stations and 210 small-sized delivery stations by the end of 2015.

So far, the China’s capital city has completed construction of 12 charging and battery swapping stations and 274 charging posts.

The city was chosen as one of the 25 pilot cities in China for the utilisation of new-energy vehicles.

China plans to have over 500,000 electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles on the road by 2015 and five million by 2020.

Through analyses of the vocalizations of wild house mice, researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, have found that the songs of male mice contain signals of individuality and kinship.

It has been known for some time that house mice produce ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during courtship but it has generally been assumed that these are no more than squeaks, the journal Physiology & Behaviour and the Journal of Ethology report.

However, analyses have revealed that USVs are complex and show features of song. Although the vocalizations are inaudible to human ears, when playbacks of recorded songs are slowed down their similarity to bird song becomes striking, according to a Konrad Lorenz statement.

Frauke Hoffmann, Kerstin Musolf and Dustin Penn of the University of Veterinary Medicine Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology aimed to learn what type of information is contained in males’ songs for the discerning ear of the female mouse to detect.

Their initial studies, the first to study song in wild mice, confirmed that males emit songs when they encounter a females’ scent and that females are attracted to males’ songs.

Additionally, the scientists discovered that females are able to distinguish siblings from unrelated males by their songs – even though they had previously never heard their brothers sing.

They found that males’ songs contain “signatures” or “fingerprints” that differ from one individual to another.

Moreover, they confirmed that the songs of siblings are very similar to one another compared to the songs of unrelated males, which helps explains how females can distinguish unrelated males.

“An estimated 12 percent of toddlers experience significant delays in their language development,” said Andrew Whitehouse, associate professor at Perth’s Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.

“While language development varies between individuals, boys tend to develop later and at a slower rate than girls,” added Whitehouse, who led the study.

The finding is significant for explaining why boys’ language development differs to that of girls, said Whitehouse, the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry reports.

Whitehouse said his team wanted to test whether this could be due to prenatal exposure to sex-steroids such as testosterone, according to Telethon statement.

They measured testosterone levels in the umbilical cord blood of 767 newborns before examining their language ability at one, two and three years.

The results showed boys with high levels of testosterone in cord blood were between two-to-three times more likely to experience language delay. Male foetuses are known to have 10 times the circulating levels of testosterone compared to females.

However, the opposite effect was found in girls where high-levels of testosterone in cord blood were associated with a decreased risk of language delay.

Previous smaller studies have explored the link between testosterone levels in amniotic fluid and language development. However, this is the first large population-based study to explore the relationship between umbilical cord blood and language delay in the first three years of life.

The state officials have reportedly planned to distribute the tablet in two phases. In the first phase, students from state universities, engineering and polytechnic colleges will be able to procure the Datawind manufactured tab while the next phase is expected to cater students from private colleges.

Aakash has been in news ever since the Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled the tablet at a conference in Delhi last year.

The tablet has already received about 2 million pre-booking orders.

The government also plans to provide the tablet on rent in colleges and university libraries for students who have missed booking the tablet.

The entire flight was pre-programed and was totally successful. It demonstrated various technologies and sub-systems including software correction to auto rudder scheme done to prevent loss of mission, engaging and flying in way point navigation mode while carrying 2 tow targets. During the flight one of the tow targets was released and the other was deployed while way point navigation was on.

This was the 10th flight of Lakshya-II PTA and this was the first time that the ultimate capability of the Lakshya-II, was demonstrated achieving all the user’s objectives. Lakshya-II has been designed and developed by the Bangalore based Aeronautical Development Establishment, a premier DRDO lab specializing in UAVs and flight control systems

The primary design decisions that have enabled achievement of this high degree of accuracy and scale are:

1. Combining both 10 Finger Prints and 2 Iris has greatly improved accuracy of de-duplication. The mulit-modal ‘Fusion’ approach of biometrics has been validated.

2. The multi-ABIS solution architecture (three biometric service providers) has contributed to lowering costs, increasing throughput and fine-tuning accuracy.

3.. The combining of demographic and biometric de-duplication has further helped in eliminating trivial duplicates and increasing accuracy.

4. The highly scalable architecture based on open components and commodity hardware has made this ramp-up possible

The UIDAI conducted a detailed analysis of the biometric accuracy and performance based on 8.4 crore Aadhaar enrolments. This analysis has resulted in the UIDAI releasing this paper “The Role of Biometric Technology in Aadhaar Enrolment”. Some of the key findings of this paper include:

• Since both fingerprints and irises are being captured using high quality sensors, as well as the use of 3 different biometric service providers at the UID’s CIDR (Central ID Repository), high levels of accuracy are being achieved in enrolling residents.

• On the effectiveness of biometric technology in Indian context with large number of rural/agricultural workers, the analysis has shown that the ‘Failure to Enroll’ (FTE) rate of the UIDAI Biometric system is at: 0.14%. This implies that 99.86% of the population can be uniquely identified by the biometric system. Even the exceptions (0.14%) are checked manually and processed. The False Negative Identification Rate (FNIR) of the UIDAI system is computed to be as low as 0.035%. This implies that 99.965% of all duplicates submitted to the biometric de-duplication system are correctly caught by the system as duplicates.

• The amount of hardware processing power needed by the UIDAI system is well within the design and expectations and has not increased in a non-linear fashion.

Based on the analysis, the UIDAI confirms that the enrollment system has proven to be reliable, accurate and scalable to meet the nation’s need of providing unique Aadhaar numbers to the entire population. It is asserted that the system will be able to scale to handle the entire population. The analysis resulting from such a large data set (8.4 crore enrollments) is empirically repeatable and statistically accurate.

Shri.Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UIDAI said “The UIDAI biometric system is processing over 100 trillion biometric person matches with a high degree of accuracy each day capable of issuing 10 lakh Aadhaars daily. This makes it not only one of the most accurate but soon to be the largest biometric system in the world.” Shri.R.S.Sharma, Director General, UIDAI said “This certainly gives us a high degree of confidence in executing this project of national importance with scale and accuracy.”

The asteroid 2012 BX34 passed within 36,750 miles (59,044 kilometers) of Earth. The space rock is about 37 feet (11 meters) wide and would have broken apart in Earth’s atmosphere long before it reached the ground, if it had reached the planet at all, scientists said. Asteroid 2012 BX34 revolves around the Sun every 242 days.“The asteroid 2012 BX34 passed within 59,044 km of the Earth at about 9 p.m.,” Planetary Society of India Director N. Raghunandan Kumar said.

“The space rock, first observed on January 25, was about 11 metres wide, making it much too small to pose a threat to the Earth,” Mr. Kumar said.

The space rock passed Earth at a distance that is only about 0.17 times that between the Earth and the moon. For comparison, the moon typically orbits Earth at a distance of about 240,000 miles (386,000 km).

“Asteroids this small are hard to spot, & luckily they pose the least concern,” Asteroid Watch scientists explained. “Our goal is to find the bigger ones.”

NASA scientists and other astronomer teams regularly monitor the skies in search of asteroids that could pose a danger to Earth.

Experts estimate that asteroids measuring about 460 feet (140 m) across can cause widespread destruction near their impact sites, but they’d need to be even larger to cause devastation on a global scale.

Asteroids are a class of small solar system bodies in the orbit around the sun. The larger asteroids are called planetoids.

This week, scientists from around the world are also discussing how Earth should respond to the threat of an asteroid impact. The so-called NEO Shield project is a European commission led by the German Aerospace Center and includes scientists from universities and industrial partners in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United States and Russia.

In an email sent to around 60,000 employees, the company’s chief executive Tim Cook said Apple “cares about every worker in its supply chain”, the Telegraph reported.

The letter was reportedly in response to a series of articles in the New York Times that spoke about the company’s problems in China.

“Most people would be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from,” an unnamed former Apple executive told the newspaper.

Cook’s letter said Apple would “continue to dig deeper” into the reported problems in China. “What we will not do, and never have done, is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain,” he wrote.

“Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are,” he said.

The Telegraph report said Apple has monitored its factories in China since 2007, but has so far failed to significantly improve working conditions or safety.

Soaring sales of Apple gadgets have put intense pressure on the company’s suppliers to ramp up production, leading to a spate of suicides, explosions and poisonings, it said.

In the company’s latest report, it found at least 90 factories were asking workers to work for more than 60 hours a week, which were significantly over the 40-hour limit imposed by Chinese law. The company reportedly also found five cases of child labour at factories.

The tunes are sung at ultrasonic range beyond human hearing, and each mouse has its own individual signature song, said the study by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.

“It seems as though house mice might provide a new model organism for the study of song in animals. Who would have thought that,” researcher Dustin Penn was quoted as saying by the Telegraph.

The scientists used digital audio software to analyse the duration, pitch and range of the songs of house mice.

They found that males’ songs contain “fingerprints” that differ from one individual to another, including siblings.

The daily said the finding could lead to understanding how female mice avoid inbreeding.

The research has been published in the journal Physiology & Behaviour and in the Journal of Ethology.

The FBI has asked technology firms to create software that can effectively scan the websites for words, phrases and other suspected behaviour, the Telegraph reported.

It will also be able to translate from foreign languages as well as detect patterns of users misleading the police.

Campaigners of free speech have now raised concerns.

Jennifer Lynch, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it could erode the sense of freedom provided by the internet.

“These tools that mine open source data, and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US,” she said.

Privacy International said the move risked placing large numbers of people under surveillance.

Police in Britain already use Facebook routinely to ascertain the whereabouts of criminals

A working group, under the chairmanship of RBI Executive Director G. Gopalakrishna, has recommended strengthening the informattion technology architecture of banks and security measures to tackle cyber fraud.

“The banking regulator expects reasonable compliance. RBI will take a serious action against banks that do not implement the recommendations of the committee. By October 2012, banks will have to implement the recommendations,” Gopalakrishna said here.

“At present some banks do not have proper security policy, methods to monitor the service level agreements with third parties and inadequate audit trail,” he said.

The working group submitted its report last January and the final guidelines were circulated to all banks, except regional rural banks, last April.

Inaugurating a seminar on “Banking on e-Security”, organised jointly by city-based Cyber Society of India and Indian Overseas Bank (IOB), Gopalakrishna said banks had awarded business to IT companies to comply with the recommendations of the committee.

The Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) has formed several committees for implementing the committee’s recommendations by member banks.

Though the report had made 265 recommendations, all are not applicable for all the banks.

According to the report, banks with a high technology penetration will have to implement all the guidelines and those not having any major online transactions have to implement only some of its recommendations.

Gopalakrishna said the committee had recommended the involvement of the top management in addressing the issues of security and many of the banks have started having IT professionals on their boards.

He said unlike in other countries where banking operations were considered crucial and telecom bandwidth was allotted on priority basis, in India banks did not get the required bandwidth to carry out their operations.

M.Narendra, chairman and managing director of IOB, said banking industry had spent lots of money in software but their usage was not at optimal level.

He said banks apart from losing their money by compensating the customers for their loss owing to inadequate security measures would also face much bigger risk– the risk of losing their reputation.

K.Srinivasan, president, Cyber Society of India, said around 1.8 crore credit cards had been issued by Indian banks and around Rs.8,000 crore worth of transactions were done by the holders per month.

“The banks have issued 26 crore debit cards and Rs.3,000 crore worth of transactions are done with them. On an average per month around Rs.200,000 crore worth of online banking transactions are being carried out in India. Hence securing their network for banks gains more importance,” Srinivasan said.

The con occurs when a grifter virus injects its DNA into a bacterium living in a phosphorus-starved region of the ocean. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers are the very first to document the virus-bacteria relationship.

Such bacteria, stressed by the lack of phosphorus (which they use as a nutrient), have their phosphorus-gathering machinery in high gear. The virus senses the host’s stress and offers what seems like a helping hand: bacterial genes nearly identical to the host’s own that enable the host to gather more phosphorus, the journal Current Biology reported.

The host uses those genes – but the additional phosphorus goes primarily toward supporting the virus’ replication of its own DNA, a university statement said.

Once that process is complete (about 10 hours after infection), the virus explodes its host, releasing progeny viruses back into the ocean where they can invade other bacteria and repeat this process. The additional phosphorus-gathering genes provided by the virus keep its reproduction cycle on schedule.

In essence, the virus (or phage) is co-opting a very sophisticated component of the host’s regulatory machinery to enhance its own reproduction – something never before documented in a virus-bacteria relationship.

“This is the first demonstration of a virus of any kind – even those heavily studied in biomedical research – exploiting this kind of regulatory machinery in a host cell,” said Sallie (Penny) W. Chisholm, professor of civil and environmental engineering and biology at MIT and principal study investigator.

According to the research by consulting firm Strategy Analytics, global tablet shipments reached a record high of 26.8 million units in the last quarter of 2011, surging 250 percent from 10.7 million units in the same period a year earlier.

Android captured a record 39 percent share of global tablet shipments, rising from 29 percent in the year-ago quarter, reported Xinhua.

Global Android tablet shipments tripled annually to 10.5 million units in the last three months of 2011 and the platform so far is relatively popular with tablet manufacturers, said the research.

However, Apple shipped 15.4 million iPads worldwide and maintained its market leadership with 58 percent share during the fourth quarter last year.

“Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android models this quarter,” Peter King, director at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.

The research found Microsoft captured a mere 1.5 percent global tablet share in the quarter, noting that “the upcoming release of Windows 8 this year cannot come quickly enough for Microsoft, so its hardware partners can start competing more effectively in the tablet space”.

In the full year of 2011, global tablet shipments hit 66.9 million units, increasing by 260 percent from 18.6 million units in 2010. Consumers are increasingly buying tablets in preference to netbooks and even entry-level notebooks or desktops, said the research.

The patent, titled “Apparatus and Method to Facilitate Universal Remote Control” was filed Sep 30, 2011, said that the remote will be capable of controlling multiple devices including “a television, a video tape player, a video disk player, stereo, a home control system or a computer system”, reported Xinhua.

“Manufacturers have created so-called universal remote controls, which can be trained to mimic several remote controls, and can then control each appliance for which they have been trained. While universal remote controls attempt to address the problem of multiple remote controls, these devices are even more complex to operate, further confusing the user,” said the filing.

According to the filing, Apple’s universal remote control will include a touchscreen which functions as the display screen and the user input mechanism and a discovery mechanism that would discover available appliances to control.

AppleInsider, a technology news site focusing on Apple, first discovered the filing. It said that the application is particularly noteworthy as rumours of a full-fledged Apple TV set have gained considerable steam since the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs late last year.

In the book, the late Apple co-founder told his biographer that he had “cracked” the concept for a TV set with “the simplest user interface you could imagine”.

The discovery of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus has revealed significant clues about the evolution of complex reproductive behaviour in early dinosaurs.

Led by University of Toronto (Mississauga) palaeontologist Robert Reisz, with co-author Eric Roberts from James Cook University and a group of international researchers, the study describes clutches of eggs, many with embryos, as well as tiny dinosaur footprints.

According to the authors, the newly-unearthed dinosaur nesting ground is over 100 million years older than previously known nesting sites.

Roberts, senior lecturer of geology, said the sediments were an incredible source of information about the life and times of early dinosaurs.

“Clues recorded in the rock, such as the tracks of the hatchling dinosaurs, traces of ancient ripples and evidence desiccation cracks all suggest that these animals were nesting in a dynamic shoreline environment with fluctuating climate conditions,” he said.

Roberts said over 10 nests had been discovered at several levels at the site, each with up to 34 round eggs in tightly clustered clutches.

The computer, along with others at two major Mexican universities, is part of the new high-performance network Lancad, said the Center for Research and Advanced Studies, or Cinvestav in a communique.

Cinvestav chief Rene Asomoza explained that the Lancad project will generate physical infrastructure that will improve Mexico’s competitive position in the world.

Besides benefiting the academic sector, the computer also will benefit the government and businessmen, said Asomoza, who issued a call to take advantage of its enormous technological capabilities to develop high-impact social and economic projects.

The government can accommodate “critical applications that require a high level of storage and security”, or push for education and distance-learning, while the private sector can develop “modeling applications and simulation of processes or the development of tools and teams”, he said.

The official said that the computer, dubbed Xiuhcoatl (“serpent of fire”), will allow the processing of information to solve problem in health care, climate change and security, among many others.

For example, using the computer a pharmaceutical firm can undertake simulations of new medications, aerospace simulations can be carried out and scientists can work with new proteins, he said.

The supercomputer, the largest in the region after a machine in Brazil, required an investment of some 18 million pesos ($1.3 million).

He told the 62nd anniversary function to mark India’s Republic Day at the residence of the Indian High Commissioneri Malay Mishra on Thursday night that ICT collaboration is important to Trinidad and Tobago as it can only benefit from India’s remarkable technological advancements in this area.

Rambachan said that India has increased its allocation to 50 slots under its ITEC programme and the appication of new technologies in the various industries will increase “our national capacity and our competitiveness over the longer turn as we seek to diversify our economy beyond the current advantages in oil and gas”.

“India as an international leader in the fields of technology, science and industrial development as well as in sustainable and meaningful development through South-South cooperation can share experiences and best practices with Trinidad and Tobago as we strive to become a leading international player in the highly competitive and interdependent world,” he said.

Rambachan said Trinidad and Tobago remains motivated by the level of interest shown and positive responses demonstrated by the various stakeholders in India for cooperation in the fashion and film industries. “Trinidad and Tobago acknowledges the high standards of India’s fashion and film industries and we are proud to partner with India the development of our very own,” he stated.

Rambachan recalled Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s visit earlier this month to Bhelupur in Bihar, home of her ancestral parents who came here between 1845 and 1917 to work on the sugar and agricultural plantations. The prime minister was the chief guest at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), the annual congregation of the Indian diaspora, at Jaipur Jan 7-9.

“Those of us who were there couldn’t hold back the tears, couldn’t restrain the emotions because we, too, were overwhelmed by this karmic encounter, best understood and appreciated by those who engage in social adventure, willing to know better, ourselves, by tracing our roots and researching the characteristics of our forebears so that our lives can be of greater meaning and purpose to those around us, especially when we hold public office,” Rambachan added.

Over 40 percent of Trinidad and Tobago’s population of over 1.3 million is of Indian origin.

The study “How Africa Tweets” said African users of Twitter aged 20-29 are also active across a range of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.

The research by Portland Communications and Tweetminster said Twitter was helping form new links within the continent.

“It is clear that Africa’s Twitter revolution is really just beginning,” Beatrice Karanja, associate director and head of Portland Nairobi, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

“Twitter is helping Africa and Africans to connect in new ways and swap information and views. And for Africa — as for the rest of the world — that can only be good,” she said.

The report said Twitter was becoming an important source of information in the continent, with 68 percent of those polled saying they use Twitter to monitor news while 22 percent use it to search for employment opportunities.

Analysts said Twitter will play a crucial role as Kenya gears up for general elections either in December or in early 2013.

All of Kenya’s presidential candidates, including Prime Minister Raila Odinga, Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka and Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta are active Twitter users.

The survey analysed over 11.5 million tweets originating from the continent during the last three months of 2011.

“Twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81 percent of those polled saying that they mainly use it for communicating with friends,” the report said.

Latest figures from the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) also said mobile telecommunications were driving the country’s rapid internet growth.

The CCK’s latest telecommunications and internet report said Kenya now has 14.3 million internet users, and most of them — 75 percent — access the internet using mobile devices.

The study found that South Africa was the continent’s most active country by volume of tweets, with about five million tweets during the fourth quarter of 2011.

It was followed by Kenya with 2.5 million tweets, Nigeria with 1.65 million, Egypt with 1.21 million and Morocco with 745,620, to make up the top five most active countries in Africa.

Experts at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology aim to launch three small satellites weighing six kg each to orbit earth at an altitude of 600 km for one year.

Once in orbit, the satellites would pinpoint people showing signs of distress, Xinhua reported quoting the daily Ma’ariv Wednesday.

The orbiters will also help conduct surveillance of birds’ migratory patterns across the globe, among other missions.

Project head Pini Gurfil received a $2.1-million grant from the European Research Council last June to develop Disaggregated Spacecraft Architectures (DSA), a method for launching satellites in separate components.

After reaching their designated altitude, these unattached components would cluster together and communicate wirelessly to form a complete satellite.

The researchers’ ultimate goal is to develop technology that will enable flight in a DSA formation.

“This is the first time ever that an attempt will be made to launch three satellites, which will fly together in a unified formation,” Gurfil told Ma’ariv.

“A launching of this kind has not been possible until now due to the size and weight of the satellites and other problems,” he said.

As part of the experiment, the satellites will be equipped with a specially-designed propulsion system that will assist in maintaining the flight formation for an extended period of time. Once in space, the satellites will attempt to receive signals from earth and calculate their origin.

The project will be officially inaugurated next week at the 7th annual Ilan Ramon Space Conference near Tel Aviv, which will be attended by representatives of international space agencies and leading space experts. Technion researchers have set 2015 as the deadline for a launch.

Gurfil said that if successful, the experiment would be significant to the development of miniature satellites and technologies that seek to miniaturize electronic components for civilian applications.

Boosting the feel good factor was that ISRO had not landed in a row in over 50 years of its existence, a rare feat indeed when almost every other aspect of life in the country was mired in controversies.

The first rocket was launched in 1963, a proud moment for Indians.

The good image seemed to crash Wednesday, on the eve of the country’s 63rd Republic Day, with ISRO’s former chairman G. Madhavan Nair launching a blistering attack on his successor K. Radhakrishnan and saying the agency “has gone to the dogs”.

Nair’s blast is bound to send shockwaves in space agencies around the world as most of them — from the famed NASA of the US to the fledgling space establishments in West Asian countries — were doing business with ISRO’s commercial arm Antrix Corporation Ltd.

It is Antrix’s deal with a private firm Devas Multimedia, finalised during Nair’s term as ISRO chairman, that has set off events culminating in his fusillade against his former organisation as well as the central government.

Antrix came into being in 1992 to commercially exploit India’s expertise in space science — satellite launching to mission support services. It became a mini-ratna company in 2008.

The Antrix-Devas deal for providing S-band airwave was cancelled by the central government last February after a controversy that the pact will cause a huge loss to the country.

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has estimated the loss to the exchequer at Rs.2 lakh crore from the deal, under which Antrix was to provide 70 MHz S-Band spectrum to Devas.

In Nair’s view, the CAG had gone wrong in its estimation of the probable loss of revenue in the Antrix-Devas deal.

“Satellite spectrum cannot be equated with land-based spectrum as its usage is restricted. The CAG has extrapolated the land-based spectrum usage to space-based one,” Nair maintained.

But, as often happens in such cases, everyone forgot about the controversy and it was business as usual at ISRO.

But it has re-surfaced after the central government banned Nair and three others from taking up any government assignment in future.

It is not clear when the government took the decision and why it became public now; particularly after Nair was appointed after he retired from ISRO to head a committee to design a civilian aircraft for Indian needs that can be built in the country.

Nair, who headed the ISRO when it launched the moon mission Chandrayaan-1 in October 2008, has set off an ugly spat with the central government, his successor K. Radhakrishnan and his former colleagues at the space agency.

The reverberations will be heard in the coming days as the central government and Radhakrishnan will have to defend themselves and the ISRO.

The war of words will only scar the pristine image ISRO and Indian space scientists hitherto enjoyed, though the battle may not mean loss of business to Antrix.

This can be used by students from Class 1 to 12.

Priced at Rs.7,500, inclusive of content, the product would be available in the market from April onwards.

The e-tutor tablet is a joint effort of Technopark-based e-tutor and Oztern Technology.

Ranjith Balan, founder and managing director of e-tutor, said that this will be the first complete solution for education to be made available on Tablet PCs.

“The teacher can easily explain concepts using the digital whiteboard that is set up in the Tablet PC. Using e-tutor learning tablet the students can access what was taught in the classroom and can also access the collaborative learning platform for discussions on relevant topics taught in the classroom,” said Balan.

The product is also aimed at making internet a safer place for children. E-tutor tablet safeguards the connectivity from the personalized Tablets PCs provided as a part of the solution, and restrict it to connect to internet only through the synchronization module in the product.

Detailing on the technology, Saiju V. Stella, CEO of Oztern Technology, said cloud computing technology can bring about a major leap in the way technology is being used in the educational sector.

“Most of the technology products available in the market today for education act as teaching aids rather than learning aids. Cloud computing also fulfills another major social commitment by reducing the carbon emissions, from dedicated servers and data centres that consume huge amounts of energy, thus making computing more energy efficient and green,” said Stella.

Lessons will be made available to the learner through personalised Tablet PCs, and regular content updates will be made available through a unique cloud – tablet synch mechanism, thus making sure that the device connects only to the relevant locations to access content.

Rajinish Menon, director, Business Strategy and Operations, Microsoft, who was present at the occasion, expressed his happiness to see partners like Oztern coming up with innovative solutions in the education sector using Microsoft Windows Azure which is Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure.

Cloud computing is a technology that uses internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralising storage, memory, processing and bandwidth.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe their findings could help the military fly unmanned drones as fast as possible without crashing.

They looked at birds such as the daredevil northern goshawk and developed mathematical models based on the way the animals travel through the air.

MIT professor and study author Emilio Frazzoli said: “If birds flew at speeds purely based on what they can immediately see, they wouldn’t go very fast.”

Instead, he explained, they roughly calculate the density of the environment they are flying through and set themselves a top speed based on the likelihood of finding a gap between the trees or buildings, the Daily Mail reports.

Above that top speed, he went on, they are “sure to crash”. But if they stay below it, they could theoretically remain in flight forever.

Frazzoli, who is currently testing his theory on pigeons, added: “There is no magic number for the critical speed. In fact, the critical speed depends on some parameters describing tree density and size, and the bird’s manoeuvrability and size.

“In other words, if the forest is too dense, the trees are too thick, the bird is too large or flying too fast, it will eventually collide with a tree,” he added.

He said that mathematical calculations drawn from the way birds fly could eventually be used by scientists to increase the speed unmanned drones can safely fly at.

In a Jan 13 order, the Department of Space barred Nair and three others from holding any government positions over the soured deal between Antrix Corp (commercial arm of ISRO) and Devas Multimedia Pvt Ltd which was annulled.

The other three are A. Bhaskarnarayana, former scientific secretary in ISRO, K.N. Shankara, former director of ISRO Satellite Centre, and K.R. Sridharamurthi, former executive director of Antrix.

A furious Nair said he was not interested in serving any organisation under the current government and termed blacklisting him from future jobs in government or government committees as “totally unjust”.

Referring to the order, Nair told IANS: “Even in an autocratic/military regime an opportunity would have been given to the person who has been blacklisted. No such opportunity was given to me. I am shocked at the order which has not been served on me.

“I am yet to see the order. Once it is sent to me, I will decide on the appropriate action.”

Nair, who was awarded Padma Bhushan in 1998 and Padma Vibhushan in 2009 by the Indian government, said it was an attempt to tarnish his reputation.

He also accused present ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan of inefficiency and pursuing a personal agenda.

He alleged that Radhakrishnan had been unable to live up to expectations of ISRO and was resorting to actions like blacklisting others to divert attention.

“He may not be knowing the difference between transponders and satellites. During the past two years ISRO has not announced any major project and the organisation will soon come to a grinding halt,” Nair told IANS.

“Ever since Radhakrishnan has taken over as ISRO chief, the organisation’s total budgetary expenditure has come down to around 50 percent of the allocation.

“On the other hand, during my period ISRO nearly made full utilisation of the budgetary allocation.”

“ISRO has now gone to the dogs,” he declared.

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) estimated the loss to the exchequer to the tune of Rs.2 lakh crore because of the Antrix-Devas deal, according to which ISRO’s commercial arm was to provide 70 MHz S-Band spectrum to Devas.

Accusing Radhakrishnan for the decision on the order blacklisting order, Nair said the former was a member of Antrix board with the deal with Devas was signed.

“Radhakrishnan did not say anything at that point of time and but now says that the deal was wrong. He has misled the government on Antrix-Devas deal and killed it.”

The former ISRO chief said the Suresh committee appointed by Radhakrishnan had given a clean chit for the deal.

In his view, the CAG had gone wrong in its estimation of the probable loss of revenue in the Antrix-Devas deal.

“The satellite spectrum cannot be equated with the land based spectrum as the former usage is restricted. The CAG has extrapolated the land based spectrum usage to space based one.”

Radhakrishnan was not available for comment.

The blacklisting order has taken ISRO officials by surprise.

“It is unfortunate. The blacklisting not befitting the stature of the people concerned,” an ISRO scientist told IANS.

An analytical study, led by Nayu Ikeda from the University of Tokyo, found that in 2007, tobacco smoking and high BP among adults aged 30 years and above accounted for 129,000 and 104,000 deaths respectively in Japan.

Physical inactivity took 52,000 lives, high blood glucose and high dietary salt intake accounted for 34,000 lives, and alcohol use reported 31,000 deaths, the journal Public Library of Science-Medicine reported.

Furthermore, the authors found that life expectancy at age 40 would have been extended by 1.4 years for both sexes if exposure to multiple cardiovascular risk factors had been reduced to an optimal level, said a university statement.

In order to sustain the trend of longevity in Japan in the 21st century, additional efforts in a variety of fields are required for decreasing adult mortality from chronic diseases and injuries.

“A first step will be to powerfully promote effective programs for smoking cessation,” said Ikleda.

Tobacco smoking is deeply rooted in Japanese society, but the authors argue that health professionals can play a big role.

“We believe that infants are born with expectations about the objects around them, even though that knowledge is a skill that’s never been taught,” said Kristy vanMarle, assistant professor of psychological sciences at the Missouri University’s College of Arts and Science.

“Intuitive physics include skills that adults use all the time. For example, when a glass of milk falls off the table, a person might try to catch the cup, but they are not likely to try to catch the milk that spills out, said vanMarle, who co-authored the study, the journal Cognitive Science reports.

“As the child develops, this knowledge is refined and eventually leads to the abilities we use as adults,” added vanMarle, who co-authored the study, according to a Missouri statement.

“The person doesn’t have to consciously think about what to do because the brain processes the information and the person simply reacts,” said vanMarle.

In a review study from the past 30 years, vanMarle and Susan Hespos of Northwestern University found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months – the earliest age at which testing can occur.

At that age, infants show an understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that hidden objects do not cease to exist. Scientific testing also has shown that by five months, infants have an expectation that non-cohesive substances like sand or water are not solid.

In a previous publication, vanMarle found that children as young as 10 months consistently choose larger amounts when presented with two different amounts of food substance.

“The majority of an adult’s everyday interactions with the world are automatic, and we believe infants have the same ability to form expectations, predicting the behavior of objects and substances with which they interact.”

While the intuitive physics knowledge is believed to be present at birth, vanMarle believes parents can assist skill development through normal interaction, such as playing and talking with the child and encouraging him/her to interact with objects.

“Banning or blocking websites and social content on web is a threat to the democracy and the freedom of speech of the netizens,” Fadia told reporters here at the launch of his 15th book, “How To Unblock Everything On The Internet”.

“Government’s demand that Google and Facebook be held liable for malicious content is unreasonable,” he added.

Fadia said his new book would teach “non-technical users how to unblock access to everything on internet”.

According to him, the book targets college students and office goers who often face censorship by their respective institutions while accessing social networks from the classrooms or offices and the book provides basic tools to bypass the institutional blocking mechanisms.

Fadia further said that despite effective cyber-crime laws in place, India’s cyber security is not up to the mark due to lack of trained security personnel dealing with the issue,

“Our laws are good but we need to train our security forces in cyber security technologies. The cyber security of India is not as good as the countries like America,” said Fadia.

That is a key finding of a new University of British Columbia-led study that explores the global rise of monogamous marriage as a dominant cultural institution.

Monogamous marriage ensures significant improvement in child welfare, too, including lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death, homicide and intra-household conflict, the study finds, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society reports.

The study, considered the most comprehensive on polygamy and the institution of marriage, finds significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault, robbery and fraud in polygynous cultures, according to a British Columbia statement.

“Our goal was to understand why monogamous marriage has become standard in most developed nations in recent centuries, when most recorded cultures have practiced polygyny,” says Joseph Henrich, professor of cultural anthropologist at the British Columbia, who led the study.

He is referring to the form of polygamy that permits multiple wives, which continues to be practiced in some parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America.

According to Henrich and his team, which included Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, both professors from the University of California, Los Angeles and Davis, respectively, these crimes are caused primarily by pools of unmarried men, which result when other men take multiple wives.

“The emergence of monogamous marriage is also puzzling for some as the very people who most benefit from polygyny – wealthy, powerful men – were best positioned to reject it,” says Henrich.

“Our findings suggest that institutionalized monogamous marriage provides greater net benefits for society at large by reducing social problems that are inherent in polygynous societies,” adds Henrich.

“The scarcity of marriageable women in polygamous cultures increases competition among men for the remaining unmarried women,” says Henrich, adding that polygamy was outlawed in 1963 in Nepal, 1955 in India (partially), 1953 in China and 1880 in Japan.

The technique takes advantage of a convergence of nanotechnology and surface plasmonics, which explores the interaction of electrons and photons (light atoms), the journal Nano Letters reports.

Brown engineers etched thousands of plasmonic interferometers onto a fingernail-size biochip and measured the concentration of glucose molecules in water on the chip, according to a Brown statement.

Interferometers are instruments that measure biomolecular interactions, wavelengths, very small distances and thicknesses in various scientific disciplines.

“This is proof of concept that plasmonic interferometers can be used to detect molecules in low concentrations, using a footprint that is 10 times smaller than a human hair,” said Domenico Pacifici, assistant professor of engineering at Brown, who led the study.

Their results showed that the specially designed biochip could detect glucose levels similar to the levels found in human saliva. Glucose in human saliva is typically about 100 times less concentrated than in the blood.

The technique can be used to detect other chemicals or substances, from anthrax to biological compounds, Pacifici said.

Abhinav Das, a 26-year-old mechanical engineer from Delhi’s Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University is confident that if and when he gets the funds, his Rural Utility Vehicle (RUV) will prove to be a boon for the dwellers of rural india.

“I had designed a vehicle for an inter-college off-road contest while in college but soon realised that if properly modified, it would be perfect for the off-road and no-road conditions in rural India,” Das told IANS in an interview.

The annual off-road event, the Baja Rally, is organised by the Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE) at Indore and serves as a stage for young engineering students to showcase their designing and manufacturing talents.

After a stint at the International Center for Automotive Technology (ICAT) and automobile-parts major Sona-Koyo, Das left for the Incubation Center at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, where he got the funds to further develop his idea.

Pursuing his goal, he travelled extensively in the rural heartlands of northern India, gaining a deeper understanding of the harsh realities of the poor infrastructure available in the region.

“Millions of villages lack road connectivity. Every day 50 million girls walk up to 40 kilometres to fetch water which in turn results in their dropping out of school,” said Das.

“According to UN studies, in rural India, the majority of deaths in childbirth happen because medical help can’t reach on time. My aim is to provide these people a better mobility solution as in such areas, mobility is hugely empowering,” he added.

After three years of struggle, the first prototype of his RUV is ready and all he needs is some investors who will believe in his idea.

“Its innovative chassis design means the structural strength of the RUV is better than the mini-trucks plying on Indian roads and three to four times stronger than the three- wheelers,” he said, adding the RUV can be legally used on the road and is less polluting unlike the ‘jugaads’.

Jugaads are locally made vehicles used mostly as a means of low-cost transportation in rural areas. With poor brakes, agricultural pump engines, faulty structures, they are often overloaded and are a disaster waiting to happen.

“The RUV can be easily transformed from people carrier to goods carrier and can be serviced locally and cheaply. The 12 horsepower power take-off (PTO) can be used for pumping, spraying or even power generation in rural areas, just like the tractors,” he added.

A PTO is a splined driveshaft, usually on a tractor or truck, that allows implements to draw energy from the vehicle’s engine.

Powered by a Greaves-Cotton 600 cc diesel engine, Das’ RUV would have a top speed of 50 to 60 kmph.

“Couple of years down the line, depending on customer demands, the RUV can be adapted to run on green fuels like CNG or electricity too,” says Das.

According to Das, his vehicle would be the perfect substitute for the ‘jugaad’ as it can do everything that the ‘jugaad’ does but in a much refined and safe manner.

And the price of the RUV is not too high for the intended market.

“An average jugaad costs around Rs. 1.25 lakh. At Rs.1.5 lakh, a finished RUV will cost only Rs.25,000 more and would in turn provide a much safer ride. In our surveys, most of the jugaad users were more than willing to shell out the extra cash,” he said.

Kuang Jie, senior partner of ProKing Management Consulting, made the estimate based on the number of text messages sent by phone users during the same periods of the past two years.

Subscribers of China Mobile’s Beijing branch sent 680 million greeting messages on the Lunar New Year’s eve of 2010, while subscribers of the carrier’s Shanghai branch sent more than 900 million messages on the Lunar New Year’s eve of 2011, Kuang said.

“Considering that China’s mobile subscribers have risen by 11.5 percent year-on-year to reach 975.7 million by the end of December, I think it’s highly possible that messages sent on Sunday evening exceeded 10 billion,” Kuang said.

Short messages have become one of the most popular ways to exchange greetings during the Spring Festival holiday, a time for family reunions.

The study, headed by microstructural geology experts Nick Timms and Steven Reddy, professor, Western Australian School of Mines (WASM), documents the discovery of impact-related shock features in lunar zircon.

Timms said they stumbled upon the discovery while looking more closely at lunar zircon mineral grains, with the use of microscopy facilities at Curtin University, the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science reports.

They found the presence of preserved microscopic details, known as planar deformation features (PDFs), as well as micro-twins (impact indicators), which are only ever produced by large-scale meteorite impacts, according to a WASM statement.

“This research is the first to report the presence of PDFs and micro-twins in lunar zircon, which provide unequivocal evidence of the immense pressures that occur during an impact event,” Timms said.

“This research also provides a new explanation of how these features form. As shock waves pass through a rock, fractions of a second after a meteorite impact, these features form like microscopic crumple zones which are caused by directional differences in zircon’s elasticity.”

Timms said the research was a step closer to the major scientific goal of establishing the absolute timing of meteorite impact events on the moon, and consequently, the inner solar system.

“The current paradigm for the early impact history of our solar system stems from studies of lunar rocks and involves a period of intense impact events around 3.9 billion years ago, known as the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’,” he said.

Soap is made of long molecules with ends that behave differently: One end of the molecule is attracted to water and the other is repelled by it.

The “detergent” action of soap comes from its ability to attach to oily, grimy surfaces, with the “water-hating” end breaking up molecules at that surface. The soap molecules then gather up into droplets in which all the “water-loving” ends face outward.

Prof Eastoe and his team started with detergent molecules that he said were “very similar to what you’d find in your kitchen or bathroom” – one of which can be found in mouthwash.

The team found a way to simply add iron atoms into the molecules. The droplets that the soap formed were attracted to a magnet, just as iron filings would be.

But single iron atoms would not behave as tiny individual magnets, so some other process had to be at work. To get a look at what was going on in the chemical process required a view at the molecular level.

FOR MORE READING. . .

Time may be running out for the leap second.

Clocks around the world are routinely adjusted to keep them ticking in synchrony with the rising and setting of the Sun – but is that effort just a waste of time? That was the issue under debate this week by the World Radiocommunication Assembly of the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, Switzerland.

Delegates from about 150 countries discussed whether to stop adding a second — called a leap second — to calendars every year or so, a practice that keeps atomic clocks in step with Earth’s rotation and the position of the Sun in the sky. But participants reached a state of confusion, rather than consensus, so the decision about the leap-second’s fate has been deferred to 2015.

Since 1972, international time zones have been defined against Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is based on signals averaged from around 400 atomic clocks. Leap seconds are added in at a rate of about one minute every 60-90 years. But nations disagree about whether the second is actually needed.

FOR MORE READING. . .

It could not only lead to a better understanding of corrosion and how toxic minerals leach from rocks and soil, but also help create new types of batteries or cutting edge catalysts for hydrogen cell.

“This is a global change in how people should view these processes,” said William Casey, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Davis.

Casey co-authored the study with James Rustad, former geology professor at the same university, who now works as a scientist at Corning Inc. in New York.

Previously, when studying the interactions of water with clusters of metal oxides, researchers tried to pick and study individual atoms to assess their reactivity. But “none of it really made sense,” Rustad said, the journal Nature Materials reports.

Using computer simulations developed by Rustad, and comparing the resulting animations with lab experiments by Casey, the two found that the behaviour of an atom on the surface of the cluster can be affected by an atom some distance away, according to a California statement.

Instead of moving through a sequence of transitional forms, as had been assumed, metal oxides interacting with water fall into a variety of “metastable states” — short-lived intermediates, the researchers found.

For example, in one of Rustad’s animations, a water molecule approaches an oxygen atom on the surface of a cluster. The oxygen suddenly pulls away from another atom binding it into the middle of the cluster and leaps to the water molecule.

Then the structure collapses back into place, ejecting a spare oxygen atom and incorporating the new one. The US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation sponsored the research.

“In some regions, the man-made rate of change in ocean acidity since the Industrial Revolution is 100 times greater than the natural rate of change between the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago) and pre-industrial times,” said Tobias Friedrich, from the University of Hawaii.

Friedrich and Axel Timmermann, also from Hawaii University, led a team of marine chemists, conservationists, biologists and ecologists, to simulate climate and ocean conditions from 21,000 years ago, to the current day, with the help of computer modelling, the journal Nature Climate Change reports.

The research team analysed changes in the saturation level of aragonite (a form of calcium carbonate) used to measure ocean acidification. As acidity rises, saturation level of aragonite drops, according to a Hawaii statement.

Current levels of aragonite saturation have already dropped five times below the pre-industrial range. Thanks to fossil fuels, saturation levels will drop further, reducing calcification rates of some marine organisms by more than 40 percent of their pre-industrial values.

“When earth started to warm 17,000 years ago, terminating the last glacial period, atmospheric CO2 levels rose from 190 parts per million (ppm) to 280 ppm over 6,000 years,” says Friedrich.

“Marine ecosystems had ample time to adjust. Now, for a similar rise in CO2 concentration to the present level of 392 ppm, the adjustment time is reduced to only 100 – 200 years,” adds Friedrich.

Nearly a third of manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions finds its way into the sea, every year, reacting with the water to increase its acidity, threatening corals and other species.

Farmlands that accumulate salt have lower crop yields, which can threaten food supply, as rice happens to be the staple of billions of people worldwide.

“The beauty of the new method (called MutMap) is its simplicity,” said Sophien Kamoun, professor and head of the Sainsbury Lab on Norwich Reserch Park, who co-authored the study which was reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

“By working with cultivars favoured by farmers and already adapted to local conditions, the MutMap method will enable plant scientists and breeders to develop new crop varieties in nearer a year rather than five to 10 years,” added Kamoun.

The new method can also improve rice productivity worldwide. Even otherwise, much of the crop is often grown on land that is prone to high levels of salinity.

The new technique also takes advantage of the speed at which sequencing can now be done to screen plant mutants for valuable traits, according to a Norwich and Iwate Research Centre statement.

“Until now, plant breeding has not been able to take advantage of the genomics revolution,” said Ryohei Terauchi, professor at Iwate Biotechnology Research Centre, Japan, who led the study.

“MutMap overcomes one of the greatest limitations, which has been the time it takes to identify genetic markers for desirable traits,” Terauchi added.

Research from the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions and cocktail parties — small-group dynamics — can alter or stifle the expression of IQ in some susceptible people.

“You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit at Virginia Institute, who led the study, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B reports.

“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ,” said Montague. “Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems.”

Scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain processes information about social status in small groups and how perceptions of that status affect expressions of cognitive capacity, according to a Virginia Carilion statement.

“Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning,” said co-author Kenneth Kishida. “And, through neuro-imaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.”

The researchers recruited subjects from two universities and administered a standard test to establish baseline IQ. The results were not viewed until after a series of ranked group IQ tasks, during which test takers, in groups of five, received information about how their performances compared to those of the other group members.

Researchers wanted to know what was happening in the brain during the observed changes in IQ expression.

One proposal for cooling the planet is to use high-flying airplanes to constantly replenish a layer of small particles in the stratosphere that would scatter sunlight back to space.

The idea has been inspired by big volcanoes placing lots of small particles in the stratosphere, which cool the earth, but the particles fall out within a year and the planet heats back up.

New research led by Carnegie Institute’s Julia Pongratz concludes that similar geo-engineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security, as feared in certain scientific establishments, the journal Nature Climate Change reports.

Pongratz’s team, which included Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira and Long Cao, as well as Stanford University’s David Lobell, used models to assess the impact of sunshade geo-engineering on crop yields, according to a Carnegie statement.

“In many regions, future climate change is predicted to put crops under temperature stress, reducing yields. This stress is alleviated by geo-engineering,” Pongratz said. “At the same time, the beneficial effects that a higher CO2 concentration has on plant productivity remain active.”

The models also predict that some areas could be harmed by the geo-engineering. For example, deployment of such systems might lead to military conflict. Furthermore, these approaches do not solve the problem of ocean acidification, which is also caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

In a number of studies since early 2000, researchers have shown that when people took intelligence tests as children and then again in old age they tended to keep about the same relative score.

However, there was also some change: some who did well early on went down a bit, and some who scored poorly as children did better in old age. The researchers are keen to understand what drives these changes in lifetime cognitive ageing.

“Identifying genetic influences on intelligence could help us to understand the relationship between knowledge and problem solving and an individual’s outcomes in life, and especially to understand why some people age better than others in terms of intelligence,” said study co-author Peter Visscher.

“We excluded people with dementia,” added Visscher, professor at the Queensland Brain Institute and the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute.

“This research was only possible because of remarkable detective work by Professor Ian Deary and his team at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Whalley and his team at the University of Aberdeen,” he said, according to a Queensland statement.

In June 1932 and June 1947, intelligence tests were carried out on almost all children born in Scotland in 1921 and 1936, respectively. Ian Deary and colleagues successfully tracked down 2,000 of these people who, then aged from 65 to 79, agreed to be re-tested and to give samples for DNA analysis.

They then examined more than half a million genetic markers to work out how genetically similar the individuals were, even though they were not related.

“Until now, we have not had an estimate of how much genetic differences affect how intelligence changes across a lifetime,” said Deary of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology.

“The results also strongly suggest how important the environment is helping us to stay sharp as we age. Neither the specific genetic nor environmental factors were identified in this research. Our results provide the warrant for others and ourselves to search for those,” said Visscher.

Simply told, decision-making over ‘sacred values’ prompts our brains to act in a specific way, says an Emory University neuro-imaging study.

“Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Centre for Neuropolicy at Emory University who led the study, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society reports.

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of a group of adults during key phases of an experiment, according to an Emory statement.

Participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural (brain cells) systems linked with evaluating rights and wrongs (left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems tied with reward.

Participants who reported more active affiliations with organisations, namely churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values.

“Organised groups may instil values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says.

Currently, all other adjuvants (compounds added to boost the shots) are believed to bolster immunity at the site where the vaccine is injected rather than going to the lymph nodes. The mice based study shows the delivery path can be directed to the lymph nodes.

Duke University Medical Centre researchers based their strategy on their observation that the skin’s mast cells that fight infections also communicate directly with the lymph nodes by releasing nanoparticles (granules), the journal Nature Materials reports.

“Our strategy is unique because we have based our bioengineered particles on those naturally produced by mast cells, which effectively solve the same problem we are trying to solve of combating infection,” said Ashley St. John, researcher at the Duke’s Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The synthetic granules when injected, mimic the attributes of the granules found in natural cells, and the synthetic particles also target the draining lymph nodes and provide for the timed release of the encapsulated material, according to a Duke statement.

Traditional vaccine adjuvants may help antigens (the small part of a pathogen that is injected during vaccination that the body reacts to) to persist so the body can have an immune reaction and build antibodies so that when a real pathogen, such as the flu virus arrives, it will be conquered.

But this zapper comes with a shocker — firing a 2,500-volt charge enough to execute prisoners in electric chairs. The concentrated energy penetrates weed’s vascular systems, boiling the water in the plant cells and breaking down the cell walls.

Weeds wilt immediately in a cloud of steam like overcooked vegetables, then dry out and within days disintegrate into the soil.

The device can annihilate garden invaders such as nettles, bindweed and dandelions, and even obliterate the dreaded Japanese knotweed. But if used on a human, the current would stop the heart by raising the body temperature to 284F (140C), the Daily Mail reports.

Electrical engineer Mike Diprose, who invented the zapper, believes it will revolutionise gardening and curb the use of potentially dangerous chemical sprays.

‘It could clear overgrown plots in hours and tackle weeds more than six feet high,’ says Diprose, 64. He has been testing it at his house in Calver, Derbyshire, with a warning: Danger of Death: High Voltage.

The zapper is a square blue box, similar in size to a vacuum cleaner mounted on a trolley. Leading from the box is a cable attached to a long plastic probe with a handle and a 3in metal spike on the end.

However, the apparatus is so dangerous that use by amateur gardeners has been ruled out. Instead, he proposes a scheme to license and train operators who could be called out by householders to exterminate weeds. “It would be lethal in the wrong hands, like a shotgun,” said Diprose.

Their results may point the way to how companies like Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft can make software and hardware to lower energy costs of very small and very large devices.

“The less power cell phones draw, the longer the battery will last,” says Kathryn McKinley, professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin, the journal IEEE Micro reports.

“For companies like Google and Microsoft, which run these enormous data centres, there is a big incentive to find ways to be more power efficient, according to a Texas university statement.

“More and more of the money they’re spending isn’t going toward buying the hardware, but toward the power the data centres draw,” she said.

McKinley says that without detailed power profiles of how microprocessors function with different software and different chip architectures, companies are limited in terms of how well they can optimize for energy usage.

“Say you want to get an application on your phone that’s GPS-based,” says McKinley, “In terms of energy, the GPS is one of the most expensive functions on your phone.

“A bad algorithm might ping your GPS far more than is necessary for the application to function well. If the application writer could analyze the power profile, they would be motivated to write an algorithm that pings it half as often to save energy without compromising functionality.”

The worm, found in soils, where they eat bacteria, is used frequently as a model in aging studies, according to University of California Los Angeles biochemists.

“This finding floored us – it’s shocking,” said Steven Clarke, a California professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

In humans, alcohol consumption is generally harmful, Clarke said, and if the worms are given much higher concentrations of ethanol, they experience harmful neurological effects and die, other research has shown.

Clarke’s research team – Paola Castro, Shilpi Khare and Brian Young – studied thousands of these worms in the first hours of their lives, while they were still in a larval stage.

The worms normally live for about 15 days and can survive with nothing to eat for roughly 10-12 days. “Our finding is that tiny amounts of ethanol can make them survive 20 to 40 days,” Clarke said.

The scientists fed the worms cholesterol, and the worms lived longer, apparently due to the cholesterol. They had dissolved the cholesterol in ethanol, often used as a solvent, which they diluted 1,000-fold.

“It’s just a solvent, but it turns out the solvent was having the longevity effect,” Clarke said.

“The cholesterol did nothing. We found that not only does ethanol work at a 1-to-1,000 dilution, it works at a 1-to-20,000 dilution.

“That tiny bit shouldn’t have made any difference, but it turns out it can be so beneficial.

“The concentrations correspond to a tablespoon of ethanol in a bathtub full of water or the alcohol in one beer diluted into a hundred gallons of water,” Clarke said.

The US-Russian team will review adherence to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 by countries, Xinhua reported Saturday. This will be the first joint inspection conducted by either country. The US last conducted an Antarctic inspection in 2006.

The state department coordinates US policy on Antarctica with federal agencies. It leads diplomatic efforts within the framework established by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.

The treaty, signed in Washington, is to ensure Antarctica’s status as a continent reserved for peace and science. Currently, 49 nations are signatories of the treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve where military activity is banned.

Signed in 1991, the environmental protocol provides for environmental impact assessments and waste management, and designates protected areas in order to safeguard the pristine region’s marine environment and its flora and fauna.

“Construction activities will come to close this year-end. Loading of the part fuel is expected to happen during the first quarter of next year and the reactor would go critical,” said S.C. Chetal, director at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) that designed the PFBR.

Chetal is also a director at Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Ltd (BHAVINI), a public sector company under the Directorate of Atomic Energy (DAE), that has been given the responsibility to build fast reactor power plants in the country.

When the PFBR is commissioned, power can be produced at a lesser cost than electricity generated from conventional sources.

A breeder reactor is one that breeds more material for a nuclear fission reaction than it consumes. The reaction produces energy that is used in the form of electricity. The Indian fast reactors will be fuelled by a blend of plutonium and uranium oxide.

While the reactor will break up (fission) plutonium for power production, it will also breed more plutonium than it consumes. The original plutonium comes from natural uranium.

The surplus plutonium from each fast reactor can be used to set up more such reactors and grow the nuclear capacity in tune with India’s energy needs.

Fast reactors form a key in the India’s three-stage nuclear power programme, which comprises pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs) at the first stage, fast breeder reactors (FBRs) at second and thorium-based systems at the third stage. In 1985, India became the sixth country in the world to have such a technology.

The government has said in parliament that the PFBR is expected to begin commercial production in March 2015. Nuclear scientists though are of the view that commercial generation can happen even before that date.

According to Prabhat Kumar, project director, BHAVINI, the PFBR construction work will be over by September this year and testing of various systems would end by December 2012 or January 2013.

“There is no inordinate time lag between PFBR attaining criticality and it starting commercial production given the fact that it is a newly-designed reactor. With small core/fuel lot of tests on reactor physics would be done. Then by gradually increasing the generation engineering tests would be carried out,” a nuclear scientist told IANS, preferring anonymity.

“A year of testing will be sufficient after reactor attained criticality,” he remarked.

Asked about the delay in commercial production, Chetal said: “The PFBR is first of its kind in the country and we want to be sure about the functioning of each and every system.”

According to him, with the loading of part fuel, the reactor systems will be checked by increasing the power generation in a gradual manner.

He does not agree that the delay in commercial production of PFBR would have an impact on the next two fast reactors that is planned at Kalpakkam.

“The design modifications made in the proposed two reactors will not make them as first of its kind. They will be commercial reactors. Since PFBR is new we want to be sure with its systems,” Chetal added.

The government has allotted Rs.250 crore for pre-project activities for two more 500 MW units.

It has sanctioned construction of two more 500 MW fast reactors whose location is yet to be finalised.

The “Sex and Relationship Education CD-ROM”, produced by BBC Active, discusses the emotional aspects of relationships, including sexual feelings and same-sex crushes as well as marriage, the Daily Mail reported.

The video aims to teach children aged between nine and 11 about growing up, the cycle of life, feelings, family life and friendship.

But included in the CD-ROM is an animated video of two cartoon characters and a computer-generated sequence of a couple having sex accompanied by an explanation.

There is also footage of a naked man and woman, used to demonstrate the differences between the sexes, information about masturbation, and graphic diagrams of genitalia.

“This material is explicit. It is shattering the innocence of childhood. It was like a blue movie,” Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom was quoted as saying.

Leadsom raised the issue after being contacted by concerned parents.

She said sex education films should be given a film-style rating to act as a guide for teachers.

The BBC said it stands by the film. It said the film has been put together after consultation with local authorities and education experts.

A team, including an Indian origin computer scientist at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, is behind the new facial-recognition software.

“If someone has plastic surgery, they’re trying to change the appearance of one or more parts of their face,” New scientist quoted Kevin Bowyer, a computer scientist at the University, as saying.

As a result, existing software can hardly match before and after photos gathered from plastic surgery websites.

Gaurav Aggarwal of the team realised that matching individual facial features rather than whole faces could be more successful.

Aggarwal was inspired by a facial-recognition technique called sparse representation, which matches an image of a face by comparing it with combinations of individual features from faces already recorded in a database.

If the closest matching combination turns out to be made up of features mostly drawn from one person in the database, it is a good bet to say the target image is also of that person.

FOR MORE READING. . .

A team in the US has located a chemical receptor in the tongue’s taste buds that recognises fat molecules, whose sensitivity varies between individuals.

The finding may help to explain why some people consume more fatty foods, as they are less aware of the taste as they eat.

The study found that those with half as much CD36 were eight times less sensitive to the presence of fat.

Researchers hope their discovery can be exploited to combat obesity by increasing people’s sensitivity to fat in their food. Apart from the basic tastes, other aspects of food flavour actually come from the smell and are detected in the nose.

The research team, from the school of medicine at Washington University, St Louis, showed that people with more of CD36 were better at detecting the presence of fat in food.

They found that variations in a gene that produces CD36 makes people more or less sensitive to the presence of fat.

“The ultimate goal is to understand how our perception of fat in food might influence what foods we eat and the qualities of fat that we consume,” said Nada Abumrad, professor at Washington, who led the research.

Up to 20 percent of people are believed to have a variant of the CD36 gene that is tied with producing lower levels of the receptor, which could mean they are less sensitive to the presence of fat in food. This may make them more prone to obesity.

Senior Superintendent of Police Raghubir Lal launched the programme at the Pushpanjali Crosslay Hospital.

“Besides catering to patients and their families, we will generate awareness in the community,” said Anandi Lal, a doctor.

According to the National Crime Record Bureau report for 2010, more than one lakh lives are lost every year in India due to suicides.

Fifteen suicides take place every hour. The number of suicides in India in the last decade recorded an increase of 23.9 percent.

“India has immense scope for robotic surgery. What we need is skilled manpower for doctors who can conduct the surgery. Vattikuti Foundation will open the first such training centre in Chennai by the end of this year for doctors from all over India,” said Mahendra Bhandari, CEO of the Vattikuti Foundation, at the ongoing global robotics conference here.

“It will be our first step to help overcome the shortage of high-quality training on robotic surgery in India. The centre will provide services of skilled surgeons at affordable costs. By 2016, we expect 30,000 surgeries to be done annually with the new technology,” Bhandari added.

The foundation has collaborated with hospitals in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and other cities to provide robot-assisted surgeries. Among the government hospitals, All India Insitute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) conducted the first such surgery in 2008.

While the surgery is conducted by a four-armed robot, the movements of the robot are controlled by a trained doctor. An arm of the robot controls the camera and the other three hands manipulate the surgical instruments. The entire surgical process is observed via a high-definition 3D vision system known as the Da Vinci surgical robotic system.

According to experts, the surgery is expected to find more takers when the cost comes down in the times to come.

“Till now, the robot is manufactured by California-based Intuitive Surgical. One particular company maintains monopoly in the market, competetion could help us bring down the cost,” said Gagan Gautam, senior consultant and head of uro-oncology and robotic surgery at the Medanta Kidney and Urology Institute.

“Robotic surgery cannot replace conventional surgery. But it has many advantages over traditional surgery since it is minimally invasive, reduces hospital stay of the patient by initiating a quick recovery, reduces blood loss and helps with greater precision and visualisation,” Gautam said, adding that “there are lesser complication”.

Robotic surgery is available for a range of conditions such as thoracic (throat), cardio-vascular (heart), urology, gynaecological surgery, and cancer surgeries among others.

Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question.

In previous years, they have included “how is the Internet changing the way you think?” and “what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?”

This year, he posed the open-ended question “what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?”

The responses, released at midnight on Sunday, provide a crash course in science both well known and far out-of-the-box, as admired by the likes of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, physicist Freeman Dyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Several of the nearly 200 scholars nominated what are arguably the two most powerful scientific theories ever developed. “Darwin’s natural selection wins hands down,” argues Dawkins, emeritus professor at Oxford University.

“Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few,” he says of the theory that encompasses everything about life, based on the idea of natural selection operating on random genetic mutations.

Einstein’s theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the curvature of space, also gets a few nods.

As theoretical physicist Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes, “This central idea has shaped our ideas of modern cosmology (and) given us the image of the expanding universe.”

General relativity explains black holes, the bending of light and “even offers a possible explanation of the origin of our Universe – as quantum tunneling from ‘nothing,’” he writes.

Many of the nominated ideas, however, won’t be found in science courses taught in high school or even college.

Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, extols the discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions such as what work people do and who they marry. Instead, he writes, “an ancient brain system called the basal ganglia, brain circuits that consciousness cannot access,” pull the strings.

Running on the neurochemical dopamine, they predict how rewarding a choice will be – if I pick this apartment, how happy will I be? – “evaluate the current state of the entire cortex and inform the brain about the best course of action,” explains Sejnowski. Only later do people construct an explanation of their choices, he said in an interview, convincing themselves incorrectly that volition and logic were responsible.

To neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, the most beautiful idea is emergence, in which complex phenomena almost magically come into being from extremely simple components.

For instance, a human being arises from a few thousand genes. The intelligence of an ant colony – labor specialization, intricate underground nests – emerges from the seemingly senseless behavior of thousands of individual ants.

“Critically, there’s no blueprint or central source of command,” says Sapolsky. Each individual ant has a simple algorithm for interacting with the environment, “and out of this emerges a highly efficient colony.”

Among other tricks, the colony has solved the notorious Traveling Salesman problem, or the challenge of stopping at a long list of destinations by the shortest route possible.

THE OTHER PAVLOVIAN EFFECT

Stephen Kosslyn, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, is most impressed by Pavlovian conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus such as a sound comes to be associated with a reward, such as food, producing a response, such as salivation.

That much is familiar. Less well known is that Pavlovian conditioning might account for placebo effects. After people have used analgesics such as ibuprofen or aspirin many times, the drugs begin to have effects before their active ingredients kick in.

From previous experience, the mere act of taking the pill has become like Pavlov’s bell was for his dogs, causing them to salivate: the “conditioned stimulus” of merely seeing the pill “triggers the pain-relieving processes invoked by the medicine itself,” explains Kosslyn.

Science theories that explain puzzling human behavior or the inner workings of the universe were also particular favorites of the Edge contributors:

* Psychologist Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley, is partial to one that accounts for why teenagers are so restless, reckless and emotional. Two brain systems, an emotional motivational system and a cognitive control system, have fallen out of sync, she explains.

The control system that inhibits impulses and allows you to delay gratification kicks in later than it did in past generations, but the motivational system is kicking in earlier and earlier.

The result: “A striking number of young adults who are enormously smart and knowledgeable but directionless, who are enthusiastic and exuberant but unable to commit to a particular work or a particular love until well into their twenties or thirties.”

BEAUTIFUL IDEAS

* Neurobiologist Sam Barondes of the University of California, San Francisco, nominates the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance. One serendipitous force is which parental genes happen to be in the egg and sperm that produced the child.

“But there is also chance in how neurodevelopmental processes unfold – a little virus here, an intrauterine event there, and you have chance all over the place,” he said in an interview. Another toss of the dice: how a parent will respond to a child’s genetic disposition to be outgoing, neurotic, open to new experience and the like, either reinforcing the innate tendencies or countering them.

The role of chance in creating differences between people has moral consequences, says Barondes, “promoting understanding and compassion for the wide range of people with whom we share our lives.”

* Timothy Wilson nominates the idea that “people become what they do.” While people’s behavior arises from their character – someone returns a lost wallet because she is honest – “the reverse also holds,” says the University of Virginia psychologist. If we return a lost wallet, our assessment of how honest we are rises through what he calls “self-inference.” One implication of this phenomenon: “We should all heed Kurt Vonnegut’s advice,” Wilson says: “‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’”

* Psychologist David Myers of Hope College finds “group polarization” a beautiful idea, since it explains how interacting with others tends to amplify people’s initial views. In particular, discussing issues with like-minded peers -increasingly the norm in the United States, where red states attract conservatives and blue states attract liberals – push people toward extremes. “The surprising thing is that the group as a whole becomes more extreme than its pre-discussion average,” he said in an interview.

FOR MORE READING. . .

The LAMP maps show that many PSRs are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight.

They show many permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths (top) and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight (bottom).

The darker PSR regions are consistent with having large surface porosities, indicating “fluffy” soils, while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.

“Our results suggest there could be as much as 1 to 2 percent water frost in some permanently shadowed soils,” Randy Gladstone, the study author, said.

“This is unexpected because naturally occurring interplanetary Lyman-alpha was thought to destroy any water frost before it could accumulate,” Gladstone said.

FOR MORE READING. . . .

In a country where close to 60 percent of the 1.21 billion population still depends on agriculture for a living, the spoken web service can be a boon to farmers in distant areas.

The Ministry of Earth Sciences has approached IT giant IBM to design a dedicated agromet (agriculture meteorological) service for farmers. The company has recently launched a similar service for farmers to connect them to Amul Dairy.

The ministry already provides SMS and an Integrated Voice Response System (IVRS) service to farmers, giving them farming information, weather and climatic details to help them meet agricultural targets.

The need for the spoken web service was felt to provide information in an interactive mode. “Through SMS and IVRS service, farmers only get updates but through spoken web service they can ask questions and get answers for their queries related to agriculture,” Shailesh Nayak, secretary in the ministry, told IANS.

Nayak said the ministry has approached IBM for developing the dedicated service for farmers.

However, IBM denied any information on the project.

Spoken web is a project where people can speak and interact with web information through voice. Farmers can dial a toll-free number and ask questions and get them answered. Specific questions would be recorded and later answered by experts.

“Spoken web service will be of great use to illiterate farmers who are not technologically equipped,” he said.

The SMS and IVRS mode were launched in 2009 covering 5,000 farmers. It now covers 2.8 million growers and by 2017 the method would cover 20 million.

While the India Meteorological Department (IMD) dishes out the weather report, the Integrated Agromet Advisory Service — involving organisations like the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Ministry of Agriculture (Central and State) and State Agricultural Universities (SAUs) — gives weather-based agro advisories specifically meant for the farming community.

The SMSs are being sent to farmers in their regional language on their mobile phones. The IVRS was developed keeping in mind illiterate people as they can listen to an automated message and get farming information.

The short and timely alerts to farmers about the weather have led to economic benefits worth a whopping Rs.50,000 crore annually.

According to a National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) report, roughly 24 percent of farmers in over 550 districts are either aware or using the Agromet services, while two million farmers are availing themselves of the mobile SMS service which started over a year ago.

The report says the Rs.50,000 crore figure could rise to Rs.211,000 crore if the entire farming community in the country was to judiciously use the Agromet information and apply it to agricultural activities.

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13 Jan 12

Photographs and artefacts from wartime refugees who came to Oxford.

An exhibition hosted by the Institute of Archaeology  is to remember the experiences of refugees who sought shelter in Oxford during World War II.

The exhibition called ‘Persecution and Survival: A wartime refugee’s story’ opens at Oxford Town Hall on Monday. The exhibition is the culmination of a project started in May 2010. It focuses on one Jewish refugee in particular, Professor Paul Jacobsthal, an eminent archaeologist who left Germany and worked as an academic at the University of Oxford until his death in 1957.

Since the launch of the project, many people from Oxfordshire have approached the Institute researchers with their accounts of the war years, either as refugees or because they had provided homes for refugee families. Their memories have been recorded and their personal letters, luggage labels and photographs are also on display in the exhibition.

The project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, aims to show the contribution of refugees to Britain’s cultural life through the example of Paul Jacobsthal. Their momentos and testimonies, displayed at the exhibition, highlight the largely forgotten stories of the very many refugees who came to Britain just before the war. On display will be Professor Jacobsthal’s personal letters dating from 1920-1957, which reveal his experiences of worsening conditions in Germany, his escape to Christ Church, internment during the war, and rebuilding and reconnecting with the Continent afterwards. Other personal items include photographs of him and his wife, their works of art and even his typewriter. Professor Jacobsthal made his name as a leading expert in Celtic Art, publishing the book Early Celtic Art in 1944. The book was controversial at the time as the pan-European origins of Celtic art did not fit with Nazi Germany’s own nationalistic doctrines.

There are also contributions from the Association of Jewish Refugees and the Oxford City of Sanctuary movement, a group promoting safety and inclusion to people seeking refuge in the city.

Project Directors Dr Sally Crawford and Dr Katharina Ulmschneider, from the University’s Institute of Archaeology, said: ‘One of the main themes to emerge from the interviews we did with the survivors was that no-one had taken an interest in their stories before. We hope this exhibition will illustrate that these stories are worth recording and are still relevant today. We were struck by the number of people who said they had been warmly welcomed by the people of Oxford during the war years.’ 

The exhibition will run from Monday 16 January until 10 March.

Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford have catalogued Professor Jacobsthal’s letters and made them publicly available online.

Later this month, the Institute will also be hosting a debate for Oxfordshire secondary schools at Christ Church, Professor Jacobsthal’s old college. Sixth-formers will be taking part in a public speaking competition to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Science

13 Jan 12

Maize plants. Photo: Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez

The discovery of a new ‘provisioning’ gene in maize plants that regulates the transfer of nutrients from the plant to the seed could lead to increased crop yields and improve food security.

Scientists from Oxford University and the University of Warwick, in collaboration with agricultural biotech research company Biogemma-Limagrain, have identified the gene, called Meg 1.

They report their find, which they believe could help to increase global food production, in this week’s Current Biology.

Unlike the majority of genes, which are expressed from both maternal and paternal chromosomes, Meg1 is expressed only from the maternal chromosomes. This unusual form of uniparental gene expression, termed ‘imprinting’, also occurs with some genes in humans, which regulate the development of the placenta to control the supply of maternal nutrients during foetal growth.

The team, led by Dr Jose Gutierrez-Marcos of the University of Warwick, and Dr Liliana Costa and Professor Hugh Dickinson of Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, has now highlighted that plants have also adopted a similar system to regulate nutrient provisioning during seed development.

The researchers demonstrated that Meg1 is responsible for the formation of specialised conduit cells that confer placenta-like properties to the embryo surrounding tissues of plant seeds to regulate the transfer of nutrients from mother to offspring.

Dr Gutierrez-Marcos of the University of Warwick said: ‘These findings have significant implications for global agriculture and food security, as scientists now have the molecular know-how to manipulate this gene by traditional plant breeding or through other methods in order to improve seed traits, such as increased seed biomass yield.

‘This understanding of how maize seeds and other cereal grains develop (e.g. in rice and wheat) is vital, as the global population relies on these staple products for sustenance. Therefore to meet the demands of the world’s growing population in years to come, scientists and breeders must work together to safeguard and increase agricultural production.’

Professor Hugh Dickinson of Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, said: ‘The identification of Meg1 is a highly-important discovery and represents a vital first step in this process; the next will be to identify other genes involved in regulating provisioning and nutritional content of seeds.’

The research was supported by the European Union and the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. A report of the research, entitled ‘Maternal control of nutrient allocation in plant seeds by genomic imprinting’, is published in this week’s Current Biology.

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