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Fish throws away its genes as it grows

2009-06-25T16:23:00.003+05:30

Whether it's its extraterrestrial looks or status as a "living fossil," there's always been something fishy about the sea lamprey. Now scientists have added another oddity to the creature's repertoire: The lamprey jettisons 20% of its genome during development.

Jeramiah Smith of the University of Washington, Seattle, first suspected something strange while piecing together the sea lamprey's genetic sequence. The postdoctoral fellow and his colleagues tried labeling live lamprey cells using a technique that detects broken DNA. "Every cell in the embryo was [labeled] as dying," he recalls. So he took a closer look to see what was going on and got a big surprise.

Working with Chris Amemiya of the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason in Seattle, the group found that lamprey sperm DNA had sequences not found in lamprey liver and that overall the sperm genome was millions of bases longer. The sperm DNA included a highly repetitive sequence called Germ1, and by monitoring the loss of Germ1 during development, Smith was able to track the genome's reorganization.

His group found that the egg and sperm have the full genome, but shortly after fertilization--about the time the new genome turns on--the genome starts to be pared down. By day two, the amount of Germ1 has decreased substantially. And by the time the larvae hatch, it's almost entirely disappeared, Smith's team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The group has also identified specific genes in sperm DNA that were lacking in liver. One of them, called SPOPL, may help stabilize the DNA-protein complex called chromatin, but Smith says he suspects "probably hundreds" more are missing from various places in the genome.

The discovery "opens up a whole new area of thought, as it's contrary to what you generally think happens in vertebrates," says Marianne Bronner-Fraser, a developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Typically, vertebrates silence genes by modifying them or their surroundings chemically, not by getting rid of them.

Paring down might be economical, as each dividing cell has less DNA to replicate. But Smith thinks that the cell might be getting rid of genes that are good for the tissue destined to become egg and sperm--such as ones that stimulate rapid growth and proliferation--but which could make a specialized cell cancerous.

The work "is a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the dynamic nature of genome evolution," says embryologist Mark Martindale of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

Other organisms undergo genomic reduction, notes molecular biologist Guy Drouin of the University of Ottawa, Canada, who studies this phenomenon in tiny invertebrates called copepods. "The real breakthrough will come when someone is able to figure out the mechanism by which [genome reduction] occurs." One nice thing about lampreys, he says, is that they are easy to study--so perhaps these strange creatures will help solve the mystery.

Credit: Photo courtesy of Jeramiah J. Smith and Chris T. Amemiya

Secret cities of the Indus

2009-06-20T15:07:00.002+05:30

A civilization that has disappeared even from legend

Even in ruins, the ancient cities of Indus Valley (now in Pakistan) look better planned than most modern cities in the Indian sub-continent. Indeed, they recall the symmetry of modern American towns, with regular grids of streets, brick buildings and sewers for sanitation.

The archaeologists who uncovered the Indus Valley ruins early in 1900s realized they had stumbled on an original culture, contemporary with ancient Sumer and Egypt (around 2400 BC). But in some ways (such as in its plumbing and town planning) it was more advanced than either. It had its own system of writing - so far undeciphered - and trade links with ancient Mesopotamia, as well as outposts near modern Bombay (now Mumbai), more than 1000 km (600 miles) distant.

Where did the creators of this civilization come from? What language did they speak? Did the same rulers govern all its remarkably similar cities - more than 100 built on the same pattern have been discovered, stretching over an area larger than Egypt or Sumer? And why did the civilization collapse around 1700 BC? These mysteries all remain unsolved.

Town planners

The major cities, which include Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, had citadels with huge walls, with towers at regular intervals, set on mounds about 12 m (40 ft) high. Archaeologists have also found remains of gigantic granaries and of huge public baths.

It had been suggested that the idea of building cities came from Mesopotamia, along the trade routes. Trade links with Sumer became so close that there were official Sumerian translators of the Indus language. But the few surviving examples of Indus writing are too fragmented to give us any real clues as to what that language was like.

Why did this culture collapse so completely? Possibly the River Indus altered its course, condemning the cities to either flodding or desert; possibly the desert was man-made, caused by excessive tree-felling to provide fuel for baking bricks; perhaps epidemics and famines played a part.

Grisly clue

The end, however, may have come more violently. At Mohenjo-Daro, archaeologists found 13 skeletons, some with axe or sword blows to the head. These may have been inflicted by the invading Aryans - ancestors of the modern Hindus - who dominated India after the Indus civilization.

Except in Hindu myths like the Rigveda, which speaks of a dark-skinned, wealthy people overcome by the Aryan invaders, and in the worship of Siva, a Hindu deity who in his aspect as Lord of the Beasts is strikingly like the god of the Indus religion, this short-lived, mysterious culture has vanished almost without trace.

Practical genius has often gone unrewarded

2009-06-20T07:21:00.007+05:30

There is a compelling fascination in the magic moment at which an original idea crystallizes in someone's head and a new invention is born. Sometimes the moment comes after months or years spent searching for a solution to a clearly-defined problem; in other cases a need is perceived and in answer provided for it almost simultaneously. But a flash of inspiration does not necessarily bring a happy or a prosperous future. For many gifted inventors, legal wrangles over patents have soured the original joy of their discoveries; others, as employees of large corporations, never saw any of the profits made from the commercial exploitation of their ideas. Still others made large fortunes from their inventions, yet have continued to live their lives much as before.

Wired up

The creator of the first wire coat-hanger received not a cent for his ingenious invention. In 1903, Albert J. Parkhouse (Left) was working for a company in Jackson, Michigan, manufacturing wire lampshade frames. The firm was too mean to provide enough hooks for its employees to hang up their coats, so one day, rather than throw his coat on the floor, Parkhouse twisted a piece of wire into the now familiar shape of a hanger. His employer noticed what he had done, immediately grasped its potential and patented the idea. Parkhouse just went on working on the shop floor of the factory.

Keeping time

In the early 19th century, many inventors were competing to produce a practical and reliable metronome - a device that helps musicians learn to play in a steady rhythm. Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (Left), a German organ-builder living in Amsterdam, finally solved the problem in 1814. He placed two weights on a clockwork-driven pendulum, one fixed and one sliding, on opposite sides of a pivot. Each time the pendulum swings, it produces a clicking noise. The position of the sliding weight affects the speed of the pendulum, so musicians can adjust the metronome to produce a series of clicks at the speed they wish to play. Unfortunately for Winkel, he demonstrated his invention to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German rival in the same field. Maelzel unscrupulously patented the metronome in his own name and began mass production. The gadget, which still uses the principle devised by Winkel, has been known as the Maelzel Metronome ever since.

Seeing in the dark

One dark and foggy night in 1933, Percy Shaw (Left), a road-repairer from Yorkshire, England, was struck by the sight of a cat's eyes gleaming brightly in the light of his headlamps. This everyday experience inspired him to develop a revolutionary form of road-marking for night driving - a convex lens backed by an aluminium mirror. These are embedded in a rubber pad, which is mounted in a cast-iron housing set into the road. The lens and mirror are positioned so as to direct reflected light from car headlamps back to the driver. A year after he first had the idea, Shaw was ready to patent his invention. He opened a factory to manufacture his 'catseyes' in 1935. Although the invention made him rich and famous, his style of life was completely unaltered. He continued to lead a simple existence in a small house in his native Halifax, and spent only a faction of his vast accumulated wealth.

Riding on air

The pneumatic rubber tyre was first invented by a London engineer, Robert W. Thomson (Left), in 1845, for use on the wheels of carriages. The invention failed to catch on at first - rubber was expensive at the time, so Thomson's idea was not marketable. In 1887, the pneumatic tyre was re-invented by John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish-born veterinarian, who had a flourishing practice in Ireland. Dunlop noticed how his son's tricycle jarred its rider as the solid rubber tyres bumped over the unevenly paved streets of Belfast. He substituted rubber tyres filled with air and patented his invention the following year. Dunlop's pneumatic tyres were an immediate success with bone-shaken cyclists and should have made him a millionaire. But he sold his interest in the business in 1896, and gained nothing from any of the subsequent developments of his invention, such as the automobile tyre - a multi-million-dollar business that made his name famous throughout the world.

The deadly traps laid by carnivorous plants

2009-06-17T12:08:00.007+05:30

The usual order of events in nature is that plants manufacture their own food through photosynthesis, while animals either eat plants or other animals. But more than 500 plant species are exceptions to this order: they eat animals. All grow in soil or water that contains little or no nitrogen, an element vital for plant growth, and animals provide that missing nourishment.

Pitcher plants, for example, a family of climbing vines found throughout the tropics of the Old World, grow pitcher- or urn-shaped traps, some large enough to capture a rat. Although they occasionally digest small mammals or reptiles, they are designed for eating insects, which enter the trap under the illusion that it is a flower, attracted by its scent or by a supply of false nectar. Once over the pitcher's rim, they slither helplessly down to the bottom, where downward-pointing spikes prevent escape. The plant then secretes an acid and digestive enzymes to break down the body of its victim. The pitcher plant's distinctive lid serves as a lure to flying insects and as an umbrella to prevent the pitcher from filling up with rainwater. Some species, however, do let rainwater enter their pitchers, thus drowning their prey, instead of killing it with acid.

Trigger hairs

In mechanical terms, the most sophisticated traps of all are those of the bladderworts, a successful and varied group established throughout the world. They are mainly water plants, which, depending on their size, feed on anything from single-celled protozoans to small fish. Among their branching underwater leaves grow tiny bladders, each fitted with an inward-opening trap door. Sticking out from the entrance are hairs, and any creature brushing against these make the trap fly open. As water rushes in to fill the bladder, it sucks the hapless animal in with it. The bladder then uses special glands to extrqact the water, allowing the door to close again, and leaving the animal trapped.

How Alcohol Changes the Brain ... Quickly

2009-06-16T09:26:00.000+05:30

In the name of science, eight men and seven women drank alcohol through a straw while lying in an MRI scanner, presumably not all together, to see what would happen.

It went to their heads. Quickly, the researchers say.

Only 6 minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three beers — leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, which impairs driving ability — changes had already taken place in the brain cells.

For one thing, the brain begins to run on the sugar in alcohol instead of using glucose, the normal brain food.

"Our study provides evidence for alternative energy utilization upon alcohol ingestion," said researcher Armin Biller at Heidelberg University Hospital "The brain uses an alcohol breakdown product instead of glucose for energy demands."

The concentration of substances such as creatine (energy metabolism), which protect brain cells, decreases as the concentration of alcohol increases. Choline, a component of cell membranes, was also reduced.

"That probably indicates that alcohol triggers changes in the composition of cell membranes," Biller said.

Whether there are long-term effects remains to be studied.

"Our follow-ups on the next day showed that the shifts in brain metabolites after moderate consumption of alcohol by healthy persons are completely reversible," Biller said. "However, we assume that the brain's ability to recover from the effect of alcohol decreases or is eliminated as the consumption of alcohol increases. The acute effects demonstrated in our study could possibly form the basis for the permanent brain damage that is known to occur in alcoholics. This should be clarified in future studies."

The fastest, the slowest, the highest birds

2009-06-14T08:36:00.003+05:30

In the same way that human speed and endurance records are constantly being broken, so too the animal world's fastest, slowest and highest continues to change as naturalists discover previously unknown facts. For instance, it was widely accepted among naturalists that the white-throated spinetail swift of northeast Asia and Japan was the world's fastest bird, reaching speeds of up to 150 km/h (95 mph). But researchers have fitted speedometers to the legs of the peregrine falcon and discovered that when hunting its main prey of ducks, pigeons and other birds, it makes a 'stoop' or power dive at 160 km/h (100 mph). Sometimes this falcon knocks the head clean off its victim as it strikes it in midair with its strong talons.

Peregrine Falcon (Falco Peregrinus)

By contrast, the slowest flying (rather than hovering) bird is the American woodcock. The male's display fight has been measured at only 8 km/h (5 mph). It circles high above its woodland territory at dusk, giving twittering calls before zigzagging down to Earth on whistling wings. The combination of the slow, circling flight and the sudden descent seem to impress the females waiting on the ground.

Although birds such as kestrels and buzzards can remain stationary in midair by flying into the wind, very few birds can truly hover. Only the hummingbirds have mastered the art. They have the fastest wing beats of any bird - up to 78 beats per second - and can fly backwards as well as hover. Their short 'arm' bones, stiff wing joints and flexible shoulder joints allow them to rotate their wings in a figure of eight, and thus achieve their feats.

Other birds flap their wings very slowly - some large vultures do so only once per second. Albatrosses, using wind current to their best advantage, are able to soar over the waves for days on end with scarcely a flap of their great wings, which, with a span of up to almost 4 m (12 ft), are the longest of any living bird.

Soaring to new heights

Some animals fly fast, others fly high. The great majority of birds remain below 150 m (500 ft) for much of their lives, perhaps reaching 1500 m (5000 ft) when migrating. But bar-headed geese have been seen by mountaineers flying over the Himalayas at a height of almost 9000 m (30 000 ft). The undisputed holder of the bird altitude record is the Ruppell's griffon vulture that collided with an aircraft at 11 250 m (36 900 ft) over western Africa in 1973.

Ruppell's Griffon Vulture (Gyps rueppellii)

Birds can survive in the thin atmosphere of such heights, where humans would need oxygen masks, because their circulatory system is far more efficient at extracting oxygen than our own. The high-fliers can also cope with very low temperatures: whooper swans, for instance, have been recorded at heights where the temperature was as low as -48 degree C (-54 degree F).

The human iPod: Derek Paravicini

2009-06-13T09:56:00.001+05:30

Derek Paravicini is blind and severely disabled yet can master any song after hearing it once... What is his secret?

Thirty years ago, Derek Paravicini was within a heartbeat of death. No other baby born in the Royal Berkshire Hospital 14 weeks prematurely had ever survived. His twin sister was dead at birth.

When Derek came along a few minutes later, the doctor presumed that he, too, could not possibly live. And yet, and yet... just when his mother Mary Ann had given up hope, she heard the faintest of whimpers, the tiniest of muffled squeaks. He had made it.

Three decades on, Derek no longer makes muffled squeaks. Instead, he brings a rapt audience in St George’s concert theatre, Bristol, to their feet again and again, with a dazzling range of music — an Oscar Peterson arrangement of Greensleeves, his own version of Bach’s Air in the key of G, a jaunty ragtime taste of Debussy.

You’ll have heard of perfect pitch. Well, Derek has absolute pitch — a rare gift, meaning that, when he hears a chord with ten notes in it, he can identify every one. Most professional musicians can get about five.

He can master any melody on earth, has a databank of thousands of songs in his head and can play any one of them at will, improvising as he goes.

One member of the audience asks him to play Ain’t No Sunshine. Another suggests that he play it in B major. And another, that it’s done in ragtime. No problem — without a pause, his fingers flutter across the keyboard in a hummingbird blur of staggering virtuosity.

‘Goodnight Sweetheart,’ shouts out someone from the back row. In C sharp, in the style of theatre composer Jerome Kern. And so it goes on, for two hours of riotous shared joy, the latest chapter in an uplifting tale of rare talent locked in a damaged brain.

Because he was born so early, Derek is blind. The oxygen used to revive him at birth caused certain vessels in his eyes to grow abnormally, damaging his retinas, in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity.

As he is blind, he cannot read music — he can’t even read Braille. The whole of tonight’s performance — his and the orchestra’s — is encapsulated entirely within his head.

Despite his music gift, Derek’s verbal skills are limited. His English is well-spoken, clear and loud, but his capacity for thought does not stretch far.

He is an echolaliac, meaning that he echoes what you say to him, turning your question into a statement.

‘Do you know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Derek?’ I ask.

‘Yes, I know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Harry.’

‘Are you looking forward to playing in London?’

‘Yes, I am looking forward to playing in London, Harry.’

There are flashes of humour. At a recent recital in 11 Downing Street, hosted by Alistair Darling, Derek launched, unbidden, into a version of Big Spender. At an earlier concert at No10, he coaxed Cherie Blair into singing along to The Beatles’ When I’m 64.

Usually, though, Derek’s thoughts dwell on the immediate future and no further. ‘Where will we go after the concert, Adam?’ he asks Adam Ockelford, the Professor of Music at Roehampton University, who has taught Derek for 26 years. ‘Can we have fish and chips?’

This short-term view of life means he barely suffers from nerves. Half an hour before tonight’s concert started, he asked Roger Huckle, the artistic director of the Emerald Ensemble, what they were going to do that evening. On being told that he was going to play a concert, he said calmly: ‘Yes, let’s do a concert.’

For someone so handicapped, it is a godsend that his hidden talent was unleashed at all. Much of the credit goes to his nanny, Winifred Daly, who died 12 years ago.

She had looked after several generations of Derek’s mother’s side of the family — the Parker Bowleses, as in Camilla. Derek’s mother, born Mary Ann Parker Bowles, is sister to Andrew Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall’s ex-husband. It was Winifred Daly who first spotted something unusual in Derek.

Looking for a diversion to occupy the blind 20-month-old, she dragged down a small electric organ from the attic of the Paravicini home in Berkshire; the organ had belonged to Derek’s grandfather, Derek Parker Bowles, after whom he was named.

To begin with, Derek used a jumble of fists, palms and knuckles to knock the living daylights out of the keyboard. Gradually, though, with no tuition, he started moving his hands in synch, up and down the keys. Soon he was forming chords, until one day, his older sister, Libbet, came rushing into her parents’ sitting room and announced: ‘Quick, quick, come and see, Derek’s playing that hymn we sang in church.’

What had happened? How had he magically summoned up the capacity to produce music from within his damaged brain? ‘His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first 20 months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form,’ says Professor Ockelford. ‘And it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.’

If it was Winifred Daly whose love — and repeated singing and talking in the nursery — sparked off Derek’s talents, it was Professor Ockelford who harnessed them and moulded them into concert-worthy form.

‘The man is a saint,’ says Derek’s father, Nic Paravicini, a banker who now lives in Wales. ‘I tried to pay him and he refused. I had to force petrol money on him.’

They first met at Linden Lodge — the school for the blind attended by the celebrated jazz pianist George Shearing in the 1920s. Professor Ockelford taught Derek conventional musical techniques and untaught his unconventional ones — in particular his desire to play music as loudly as possible.

Still today, in Bristol, the professor is at Derek’s side, gently cueing his intros and tapping him on the back, encouraging him to take a bow when the audience erupts once more.

In time, news of Derek’s exceptional talent spread. At seven, he gave his first concert in Tooting Leisure Centre in South London. At nine, he was on the Wogan show.

At ten, he was presented with a Barnardo’s Children’s Champion Award by Diana, Princess of Wales. She was unruffled by the fact that he was Camilla Parker Bowles’s nephew, even though her marriage was on the rocks at the time. When Derek suggested playing Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, she laughed uproariously.

In recent years, he has played at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Las Vegas and has accompanied Jools Holland. He has appeared in two documentaries about genius savants, and the show I attended was being filmed by the popular American show 60 Minutes, on CBS. Now he is embarking on his first tour with a 20-piece orchestra.

After 26 years of tuition, Derek’s playing style is much more traditional. But still Professor Ockelford is trying to work out exactly how his genius works. ‘Recent research has revealed that only one in 10,000 babies who are born at term have absolute pitch, but 40 per cent born prematurely have it,’ says the professor. ‘So there is a link. And it seems that all the brain capacity that would have gone elsewhere, into verbal reasoning or social skills, is transferred to music.’

Certainly, Derek’s emotional capacity is limited. When his beloved nanny Winifred Daly was on her death bed, she said to Professor Ockelford: ‘He won’t miss me, you know.’

She appears to have been largely right. He remembers Winifred, but has not cried over her. He very rarely cries — and then it will be over physical pain — and he has no self-indulgence. ‘He never says he’s ill,’ says his stepmother, Suki Paravicini (Derek’s parents divorced when he was five, and have each since remarried.) ‘All he’ll say, very politely, is: “Can I have a Lemsip?”’

His playing, though, has grown more emotional. Professor Ockelford has determined that Derek is not just a human iPod who can replay exactly what he has heard after listening to it once. Instead, he initially recreates pieces by recalling crucial fragments and reassembling them as he plays.

If a piece is too long or complicated for him to absorb at one sitting, he is inventive when he plays it back, reordering the snatches that he can remember, borrowing snippets from pieces with a similar stylistic pedigree or making up new material.

Whatever magic is going on in his head, certainly it is when he is at the piano that he is most at ease. As he comes on stage, led by Professor Ockelford, his steps are hesitant. His hands clutch at his trousers, fingers twisting the cloth.

And then, as he sits down, his hands reach out for the keys. As soon as his fingers hit the ivories, the hands relax. His head sometimes sways with the music, much like those other blind pianists Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.

At other times, his head is still, his sightless gaze fixed in the direction of the hammers of the Steinway, furiously striking away to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. He is doing what he was born to do.

The vanished race

2009-06-12T08:54:00.003+05:30

About 15000 Indians from all over the USA live in New York City. But where now are the people whose ancestors were the city's first inhabitants?

Two surviving groups of Indians do have a connection with Manhattan. They are the Delaware, who now live, after enforced migration, over 2000 km (1250 miles) away in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario; and the Ramapough, a community living on the order of New York and New Jersey, direct descendants of Manhattan's original inhabitants. When the Dutch first settled the island, two groups of Indians, the Canarsee and Wickquaasgeek, came seasonally to settlements in the south and north respectively, to hunt, fish and grow crops.

By the 1740s, disease, the spread of European settlers and warfare had emptied the island of its first Indians. Yet Indians and New York's most famous modern feature are indelibly associated. As the skycrapers began to rise over Manhattan, descendants of New York State's Iroquois Indians became renowned as supremely skilled steel-workers in the construction industry.

Lifeguards of the deep

2009-06-11T09:11:00.002+05:30

When Adam Maguire and his two friends Jason Maloney and Bradley Thompson went surfing at Halftide Beach, in New South Wales, early in January 1989, they found themselves in exhilarating company. For an hour or more, a school of dolphins played with them in the surf, riding in on the waves towards the beach.

But then the dolphins became agitated, splashing and turning in the water, and making loud clicking and whistling noises. It was then that Adam saw the fin of a shark speeding towards him through the waves.

Before he knew it , the shark had attacked, biting a large chunk out of his surfboard and knocking him into the water. He hit out at the shark with his fists, but it bit him in the stomach and side. Adam thought the end had come. Then the dolphins came to his rescue. They surrounded the shark and drove it out sea by ramming it with their beaks.

A friendly push

The dolphin has a reputation for being friendly to humans, and there have been many other reports of dolphins rescuing people in distress - chasing off attacking sharks, pulling drowning sailors to the surface, even guiding them to dry land. In 1945, a woman swimming off a beach in Florida was pulled under by a strong current. As she struggled to get her head above water, something pushed her violently from behind and she landed on the beach, face down. When she looked around, no one was near - but a dolphin was leaping through the waves, 6 m (20 ft) from the shore. In 1983, a Dutch helicopter pilot was helped by a dolphin after he had crashed into the Java Sea; for nine days the dolphin swam beside his rubber life raft, nudging it along until it at last reached the coast.

It is tempting to believe that we do have a special affinity with these gentle, intelligent creatures. But would an animal really take the trouble to save a human being, in some cases risking its own life in the process?

Blind instinct

Dolphin expert Dr Margaret Klinowska, of Cambridge University, believes not. She says that when attacking sharks, dolphins are only following a natural instinct to defend themselves; indeed, the presence of humans is probably coincidental. As for pulling people to the surface or pushing stranded boats along in the water, these too are probably instinctive reactions useful for the survival of the species: a dolphin is born underwater, but its mother immediately nudges it to the surface so that it can start to breathe. Perhaps the Dutch helicopter pilot's dinghy seemed to be no more than a struggling baby to the dolphin that guided it to safety.

The serious side of speaking backwards

2009-06-10T20:33:00.000+05:30

Anybody can painstakingly read words backwards, but how many can do it by ear? Professor Andrew Levine discovered his talent for speaking backwards in 1959 when, as a teenager watching the news on television, he admired the skill of the interpreters accompanying Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on his visit to the United States. Levine was keen to try his own hand at interpreting, so, as he turned every English word he heard back to front.

Word game

Amusements of this kind are not uncommon in children, especially between the ages of eight and ten, when they like to construct secret play languages. To do this, they do not have to be literate: in Panama, young Cuna Indians have a traditional game called sorik sunmakke, in which they reverse the order of the syllables in each word.

In Levine's case, the speed at which he spoke backwards was quite exceptional. He thought of his talent as nothing more than a party trick, until colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught political philosophy, decided to subject him to rigorous tests.

When asked to provide a simultaneous 'translation' of simple sentences, Levine started and finished less than two seconds behind the spoken model he was translating. Individual words he could reverse almost instantaneously, as if speaking normally. Turning words backwards often produces combination of sounds that do not occur in English, yet his failure rate over long passages was only 7 per cent.

The reason for Levine's proficiency is that he does not allow the spelling to interfere with his backwards versions of words. Like many children who take up talking backwards, he reverse the phonemes, the units of sound considered to be the building blocks of speech: 'dollars' becomes 'srallod', and 'peace' becomes 'seep'. As Levine reverses only the sounds he hears, silent letters are ignored. This means he is almost as fluent in repeating foreign languages backwards, even ones he does not understand.

Subconscious ability

Linguists were particularly interested in the fact that Levine, albeit subconsciously, was aware of the existence of phonemes. If the brain does cut spoken language up into segments of sound, further research may have practical applications in helping both the deaf and children who, through some mental disorder, have difficulty in acquiring normal forwards speech.

How did 100,000,000 women disappear?

2009-06-08T09:41:00.000+05:30

Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm

In India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, millions upon millions of women are missing. They are not lost, but dead: victims of violence, discrimination and neglect.

A University of British Columbia economist is amongst those trying to find them – not the women themselves, who are long gone, but their numbers and ages, which paint a sad and startling picture of gender discrimination in the developing world.

The term "missing women" was coined in 1990, when Indian economist Amartya Sen calculated a shocking figure. In parts of Asia and Africa, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, 100 million women who should be alive are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services. These are excess deaths: women "missing" above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.

Women who are dead because their lives were undervalued.

Around the world boys outnumber girls at birth, but in countries where women and men receive equal care, women have proved hardier and more resistant to disease, and thus live longer. In most of Asia and North Africa, however, Sen found that women die with startlingly higher frequency.

His research began a flutter of activity in academic circles and by 2005, the United Nations produced a much higher estimate for how many women could be "missing": 200 million.

From her office at the University of British Columbia, economics professor Siwan Anderson has been crunching numbers to try and understand why so many women are dying. "If you're interested in gender discrimination, it's really one of the starkest measures of discrimination, because it's women who should be alive, but aren't," she says.

The 40-year-old researcher recently co-authored a paper with New York University's Debraj Ray, focusing on figures from China, India and sub-Saharan Africa for the year 2000. What they discovered flew in the face of existing literature and commonly held beliefs about the missing women phenomenon.

"Previously, people had thought that they (the missing women) were all at the very early stages of life, prenatal or just after, so before four years old," Anderson says. "But what we found is that the majority are actually later." Female infanticide has been endemic in India and China for some time, which she says led researchers to assume that it was the source of all the missing women. But the truth is much more complicated.

Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

One of their colleagues in the economics department at the University of British Columbia says this finding is striking, and points the way for future research and advocacy.

"Why would there be excess mortality of, let's say, 45-year-old women versus 45-year-old men?" asks economics professor Kevin Milligan. "And what they find is ... they have the same set of diseases, they just seem to die more frequently. The explanation that seems most consistent with that is differential access to health care. And so that's a really striking finding."

Anderson says that lack of health care is likely a big part of the problem, but that there are numerous cultural and social factors at play that can be difficult to pinpoint.

In their "elementary accounting exercise" published this February, Anderson and Ray began to plot the causes of excess death in 2000 by age group, and produced some interesting figures.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the dominant source of missing women was HIV and AIDS, the cause of more than 600,000 excess female deaths each year.

In China, Anderson says, most of the 141,000 excess female deaths by injury were suicides, making China the only place in the world where women are more likely than men to kill themselves, often by eating pesticides used for crops.

And in India, a category called "injuries" yielded ominously high figures: 86,000 excess deaths in the age group 15-29 in 2000 alone. Anderson has done extensive research in India, and says the numbers beg the question of exactly how many deaths were so-called "kitchen fires" – often used to mask dowry-related killings, the result of a new bride being tortured by her new family until her parents pay their debts.

Contrary to what you might expect, Anderson says, dowry prices have not dropped off with improvements in education in India. Instead, they have gotten worse, with educated brides and their families willing to pay even more for high-quality grooms.

Anderson says dowry payments can be six times a family's annual wealth – an excruciating price, especially for poor villagers. The implications of this hefty sum trickle down to the first moments of a child's life. While conducting recent field work in India, Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.

"They see no other options," she says. "They really cannot afford to have a daughter."

Future research will delve deeper, seeking answers to questions such as: How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?

Anderson is using data gathered primarily from the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, but admits that getting the figures can be a huge challenge. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, many deaths go undocumented, and in India, it is virtually impossible to know how many "unintentional" deaths are actually dowry killings, because they are not accurately reported to the authorities.

It is also difficult to separate direct gender discrimination from biological, social, environmental, behavioural and economic factors. That will be part of the task as Anderson works on calculating missing women by region in India, and isolating gender discrimination from other factors that might contribute to uneven male-to-female ratios.

When asked what can be done to combat such deep-seated inequality, Anderson pauses. Even when governments outlaw root causes, such as the Indian dowry system, violence persists, she says. "It's too embedded in the system in their world."

The duck that astounded Paris

2009-06-06T16:07:00.004+05:30

In 1738, Jacques de Vaucanson presented duck to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Like any duck, this one rose upon its legs, threw its neck to the right and left, plumed its wings, made gurgling noises, played in the water with its bill, took food from people's hands and occasionally excreted. But this duck was completely mechanical.

Unfortunately, Vaucanson's duck no longer exists, only the description and drawings of it he published. The gilded-copper duck 'digested' food, but only after a fashion - it dissolved food in its stomach, but absorbed no energy in the process, and needed to be wound up.

Vaucanson must have been an inventor of considerable genius; the same year, at the age of 29, he demonstrated an automation that could faultlessly play 12 'airs' on the flute. He also built a shepherd that could play 20 tunes on his pipe with one hand and beat a drum with the other.

However, he did not restrict his talent to such whimsical projects. Applying himself to the challenge of building a machine to weave silk, he eventually designed an important forerunner of the modern automated loom. It was guided by perforated cards and powered by animals or falling water.

Can a Nuclear Blast Alter Earth's Rotation?

2009-06-05T16:29:00.002+05:30

Nuclear bombs are humankind's most powerful weapon, but their destructive impact would unlikely alter the spinning of the Earth on its axis.

One way to see this is to compare the energy of a nuclear blast to that of the rotational motion of the Earth. The largest nuclear bombs have an explosive energy of several tens of megatons, or about 10^17 Joules, whereas the Earth's rotational energy is around 10^29 Joules.

So even if all the force of a nuclear explosion was used to push the Earth in a particular direction, the energy in this push would be less than a trillionth that of the rotational energy.

It would be like trying to divert a speeding car with the energy of a flying mosquito.

Even the largest earthquakes have only a miniscule effect on our planet's spinning. Scientists calculated that the colossal tsunami-causing 2004 Sumatra earthquake caused a slimming of the Earth that shortened the day by a few millionths of a second and shifted the North Pole by an inch.

The amount of fault-moving ("Earth-slimming") energy in this magnitude 9.3 earthquake was estimated at more than 10&^22 Joules, or roughly 100,000 times that of the biggest nuclear bombs. So any effect of a nuclear blast on Earth's rotation would be far below what is measureable.

One final note: Nuclear explosions would have even less influence on the Earth's orbit around the sun, as the planet's orbital energy is 10,000 times greater than its rotational energy. This fact did not prevent the making of the 1961 film "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," in which nuclear testing knocks the Earth out of its orbit and towards the sun.

Get out of town!

2009-06-05T15:33:00.003+05:30

The citizens - that is the free men of ancient Athens - were proud of their equality, so what happened when some citizens threatened to become more equal than others?

Democracy was frequently jeopardized by the development of factions and vendettas in the Assembly. Professional politicians (called 'orators' or 'demagogues') were charismatic men who often inspired great personal loyalty. It followed that there were sometimes bitter arguments between rival supporters. If feuds were allowed to become too bitter or an unpopular politician became too strong, the business of government would be disrupted - and that would endanger Athenian democracy. So a system called 'ostracism' was invented.

Banishing acts

Any prominent citizen who had become unpopular could be 'ostracized' by his fellow citizens - banished from the city for a period of ten years. The system worked like this: without specifying anyone's name, any citizen could propose that an ostracism be held. If the Assembly agreed to the proposal, the Agora - the market place that also acted as a civic center - was fenced off. Each of the ten tribes of Athens had its own gate through which the members would pass to vote. Each citizen voted by writing the name of the person he wished to see exiled on a fragment of pottery called an ostracon.

At least 6000 'votes' had to be cast before a citizen - the one with the highest score - could be banished. But when his ten-year exile was over, he could return and resume his life as if nothing had happened - without any dishonour or loss of rights or property.

How a mummy was prepared

2009-02-13T17:11:00.001+05:30

Investigation of mummies over the years has shown that techniques and the level of skill changed during the period mummification was practiced - from about 2800 BC until the Arab invasion of about AD 640. The technique was at its most successful around 1000 BC, when the High Priests of Amon (king of the gods) were all-powerful - at the time Solomon and David were on the throne of Israel.

The process took 70 days, as described by Herodotus, the Greek historian, writing about 450 BC. There were, he says, three qualities and three prices. In the most expensive, the brain was extracted through the nostrils, and the contents of the trunk, usually with the exception of the heart, were removed through an incision made in the side with a flint knife. Then the body was dried out. In the less expensive method, the internal organs were not removed, instead cedar oil was injected into the body before drying. In the cheapest method the body was just dried.

Herodotus was writing at a time when the skill was on the decline. In earlier periods, in general, the internal organs and brain were removed and the body was packed with material that included sawdust, linen and mud. At the peak of the technique, packing was also inserted under the skin through small incisions.

Drying out took about 40 days, the body being covered with dry natron - a naturally occurring salt compound similar to washing soda. The remaining time was used for anointing with oil, adornment, bandaging and religious rites. The outer bandages were impregnated with beeswax and glued with gelatin.

The internal organs were also dried out in natron before being stored in four sealed vases, the canopic jars, near the body. But at one period, the organs were parceled up and used as part of the body packing.

The wrapped mummy was given a face and chest mask made of cartonage which consisted of linen and plaster. This might be gilded and have inlaid eyes and eyebrows. It was sometimes placed in a wooden case shaped to the body, then in a rectangular wooden coffin, and finally in an outer coffin, or sarcophagus, frequently made of stone. Decoration on the coffins included ritual verses to guard the spirit on its journey.

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Bugs Find Meals With Heat Sensors

2009-02-12T19:39:00.001+05:30

The western conifer-seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, has a peculiar world view. Objects stand out against the background as a result not of their color, but of their temperature — and the infrared radiation that comes with it.

Trees, warmed by their active metabolism, appear as if on fire, and their even warmer reproductive organs — in conifers, the cones — seem to glow like embers. The bugs navigate this thermoscape using infrared receptors to locate the precious seed-bearing cones they feed on.

Stephen Takács of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and several colleagues discovered the novel system after noticing that conifer-seed bugs are often attracted to warm objects in people’s homes.

To find out more, the team first measured the temperature and radiation of different pine-tree parts. Cones were as many as 27 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than needles and emitted proportionally stronger infrared radiation. Then, they tested the ability of conifer-seed bugs to perceive the radiation. Placed in cooled experimental boxes, the insects were offered the choice of a strong or weak infrared source. Insects overwhelmingly chose the strong radiation. Electron micrographs of the insects’ abdomens revealed eight bristly organs that, when irradiated, responded with frantic electrical activity. Moreover, when the presumed receptors were covered, the bugs lost their infrared “vision.”

Takács and his team suspect that many other insect species can sense infrared, and that some plants use the radiation to advertise to pollinators.
The findings were detailed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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The Enduring Mystery of Light

2009-02-12T18:15:00.002+05:30

It goes through walls, but slows to a standstill in ultra-cold gases. It carries electronic information for radios and TVs, but destroys genetic information in cells. It bends around buildings and squeezes through pinholes, but ricochets off tiny electrons.

It's light. And although we know it primarily as the opposite of darkness, most of light is not visible to our eyes. From low energy radio waves to high energy gamma rays, light zips around us, bounces off us, and sometimes goes through us.

Because it is so many things, defining light is a bit of a philosophical quandary. It doesn't help that light continue to surprise us, with novel materials that alter light's speed and trajectory in unexpected ways.

Is it a wave?

What ties together microwaves, X-rays and the colors of the rainbow is that they are all waves—electromagnetic waves to be exact. The substance that sloshes back and forth isn't water or air, but a combination of electric and magnetic fields.

These fluctuating fields exert forces on charged particles—sometimes causing them to bob up and down like buoys in the ocean.

What separates all the various forms of light is wavelength. Our eyes are sensitive to light with wavelengths between 750 nanometers (red) and 380 nanometers (violet), where a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or about the size of a single molecule.

But the visible spectrum—seen through a prism—is only a small chunk of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The wavelength of light ranges from hundreds of miles for long radio waves to one millionth of a nanometer for gamma rays.

The energy of light is inversely proportional to the wavelength, such that gamma rays are a billion billion times more energetic than radio waves.

Or is it a particle?

But waves are not the whole story. Light is composed of particles called photons. This is most obvious with higher energy light, like X-rays and gamma rays, but it is true all the way down to radio waves.

The classic example of particleness is the photoelectric effect, in which light hitting a metal sheet causes electrons to fly out of the surface. Surprisingly, light longer than a certain wavelength cannot liberate electrons, no matter how bright the source is.

A strict wave theory of light cannot explain this wavelength threshold, since many long waves should pack the same total energy as a few short waves.

Albert Einstein deciphered the mystery in 1905 by assuming that particles of light smacked into the electrons, like colliding billiard balls. Only particles from short wavelength light can give a hard enough kick.

Despite this success, the particle theory never replaced the wave theory, since only waves can describe how light interferes with itself when it passes through two slits. We therefore have to live with light being both a particle and a wave—sometimes acting as hard as a rock, sometimes as soft as a ripple.

Physicists rectify light's split personality by thinking in terms of wave packets, which one can imagine as a group of light waves traveling together in a tight, particle-like bundle.

Making a spectacle

Instead of worrying about what light is, it might be better to concentrate on what light does. Light shakes, twists and shoves the charged particles (like electrons) that reside in all materials.

These light actions are wavelength-specific. Or to say it another way, each material responds only to a particular set of wavelengths.

Take an apple, for instance. Radio waves and X-rays go essentially straight through it, whereas visible light is stopped by various apple molecules that either absorb the light as heat or reflect it back out.

If the reflected light enters our eyes, it will stimulate color receptors (cones) that are specifically "tuned" to either long, medium or short wavelengths. The brain compares the different cone responses to determine that the apple reflects "red" light.

Here are some other examples of light's specific activities.

* Radio waves from a local station cause the free electrons in a radio's antenna to oscillate. Electronics tuned to the station's frequency (or wavelength) can decode the oscillating signal into music or words.

* A microwave oven heats food from the inside out because microwaves penetrate the surface to rotate water molecules contained in the food. This molecular shuffling generates heat.

* Standing next to a camp fire, infrared light vibrates molecules in our skin to make us warm. Conversely, we constantly lose heat when these same molecules emit infrared light.

* In sunlight, several visible and ultraviolet wavelengths are missing, or dark. These "shadows" are due to the capture of photons by atoms, like hydrogen and helium, that make up the sun. The captured photon energy is used to boost the atoms' electrons from one energy level to another.

* An X-ray image of a skeleton is due to the fact that X-rays pass through soft tissue but are blocked by dense bone. However, even when just passing through, X-rays and gamma rays ionize molecules along their path, meaning they strip electrons from the molecules. The ionized molecules can directly or indirectly damage DNA in a cell. Some of these genetic alterations may lead to cancer.

All this shows that light wears many different hats in its manipulation of matter. It is perhaps fitting then that light's true identity—wave or particle—is unanswerable.

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Why Do I Laugh at Funny Things?

2009-02-09T20:33:00.000+05:30

Humans are not the only animals who have the ability to laugh. Smiling and laughing have been observed in non-human primate species during social play. This type of behavioral response serves as a signal to the group by spreading positive emotions, decreasing stress, and contributing to the cohesiveness of the group.

Humor-evoked laughter in humans can be divided into these stages. When listening to a joke, the first part of the humor is the punch line, an incongruous ending. Second, your mind begins to problem-solve in order to interpret this incongruity or surprise. Finally, the brain is able to appreciate these steps, which together form humor and evoke a response of laughter.

The neurotransmitter dopamine (a brain chemical) is responsible for allowing the brain to progress through the stages of humor. Dopamine allows us to feel good when we laugh. Some studies have demonstrated an improvement in health for chronically ill patients when they are exposed to funny stimuli. Thus the old adage “Laughter is the best medicine" probably has a note of truth in it.

Sony launches 'purse-sized' laptop

2009-02-08T07:56:00.002+05:30

Tech-savvy girls won't have to carry the load of laptop bags anymore, for Sony has launched an ultra-portable "netbook" computer that will fit in any aspiring career woman's purse.

The Vaio P boasts most features found on a laptop, from a webcam and GPS to a built-in 3G modem, allowing users to go online by inserting a mobile phone sim card.

The new netbook is aimed at people who want to surf the Internet, edit documents and check their emails on the go.

In fact, its designers have claimed that it is the lightest eight-inch netbook in the world.

They said it does everything that equivalent models of bigger sizes would do.

And the reviewers said that its keyboard, unlike many other small laptops, is easy to use.

While a basic model is available at 849 pounds, a faster-operating netbook with more memory will cost 1,370 pounds.

However, Joshua Topolsky from the technology website Engadget is not quite sure if many consumers will pay the asking price.

"It simply costs more than other options. A cost which Sony want users to 'aspire' to pay. There are plenty of viable, less expensive options," The Telegraph quoted him as saying. (ANI)

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Bees know a bit of maths too

2009-02-07T18:33:00.002+05:30

Intelligent honeybees know a bit of maths too, and can count upto four, according to an international team of scientists.

A new experiment has shown bees can discriminate between patterns containing two and three dots - without having to count the dots. And, with a bit of schooling, they can learn to tell the difference between three and four dots.

However at four, bee maths seems to run out. The team found their honeybees couldn't reliably tell the difference between four dots and five or six.

The researchers were led by Shaowu Zhang, chief investigator at The Vision Centre and Australian National University (ANU) and Hans Gross and Juergen Tautz, professors at the Wurzburg University in Germany.

The bees flew though an entry marked with a pattern of either two or three dots, which were signposts to the reward.

They then had to choose between two patterns by correctly matching the number of dots, to find where the reward was - a feat they then managed to repeat reliably once they had learned that two dots at the first entry meant they had to look for two dots at one of the second pair of patterns, where the reward was hidden.

Careful control over the experimental environment showed the bees were not using colour, smell or other clues to find their way to the hidden sugar-water reward, said Zhang, according to an ANU release.

To begin with the bees spent quite a bit of time scanning the dots. On later visits they zipped straight past them, once they knew what they meant.

The paper appeared in PLoSONE Wednesday.

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What should you do if someone is harassing you online?

2009-02-07T05:40:00.004+05:30

If you or someone you know has been the victim of online abuse, you CAN do something to stop it. Ignoring abusive e-mails, changing your e-mail address, and contacting the authorities can all help end the abuse.

Just like a malicious telephone caller, the online abuser hides behind the anonymity of the internet to cause distress and harm to the victim.

Anonymity is their only power, and you can take a variety of different steps to make sure they stop harassing you.

What is online abuse?

Online abuse can come in many forms, from insulting and inappropriate e-mail messages, aggressive chat room behaviour or continuous spam e-mails.

Just like in the real world, if you are offended by any form of online communication that is directed at you - this could be considered online abuse.

This doesn't mean that all the inappropriate spam or junk e-mail messages that clog up your inbox are a form of abuse.

Most often spam is sent at random by computers automatically rather than targeted at individual users.

But if someone gets hold of your personal e-mail address and continues to send offensive e-mails referring to you personally, then that is abuse.

On rare occasions, the online abuser can get hold of information such as your postal address or telephone number, and begin harassing you in the real world.

If this happens, you should treat the matter very much like you would a malicious caller and report it to your telephone operator and the police.

What can you do about it?

Once you are sure that someone is harassing you in an abusive manner, you might be tempted to respond with a lengthy and irate e-mail telling them to stop, but in most cases, you will only provoke them.

We suggest that you don't respond to an online abuser, but if you feel compelled to do something, then reply with one very short e-mail that simply states, "Do not e-mail or contact me in the future."

You might also be tempted to delete all the communications that have been sent between you, but remember that these messages are the only evidence you have that you've been abused.

Save every online communication you have had - including e-mail, message thread or chat log - and print them off and make a diary of when and how you were contacted.

It is difficult to know who to get in touch with, because it depends on what method of online communication the abuser uses.

Most chat rooms, message boards and e-mail servers will have a complaints procedure on their site. If you are residing in the UK you can also contact the Internet Watch Foundation.

You can also find some useful links for reporting Internet abuse at Google Directory.

If you are physically threatened contact the police.

Online abuse advice

1. Avoid replying to the abuser, it only encourages them.
2. If you must reply, keep it simple and brief.
3. Save every communication between you and the abuser.
4. Make a diary of when and how you are contacted by them.
5. If they contact you offline, save any letters and make a log of each telephone call.
6. Contact the appropriate chat host, ISP or e-mail server host.
7. If in doubt contact the Internet Watch Foundation and the police.
8. Be willing to change e-mail addresses, chat rooms or message boards to avoid the abuser.
9. Don't expect an apology.
10. Improve your online safety, but don't be scared away from the internet.

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12 Effective Tips & Tricks to Maximize Google Adsense Revenue

2009-02-05T20:35:00.002+05:30

The first name which comes to everyone while talking about PPC Program is Google adsense. It is by far is the most popular contextual advertising program used by publishers worldwide. It has variety of revenue generating programs starting from Pay per click ads, adsense for search, referrals for Firefox with Google toolbar, Picassa, Google Pack. But does everyone earn a lot from it? Many think that just copying and pasting the adsense code will fetch a huge amount of money, but that’s a mistake. There are some effective tips to increase Google Adsense CTR.

The following optimization tips can help you increase your Google Adsense dollars:

1> Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. For doing this create open topic one page, use your keywords in page title, also check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic.

2> Increase your keyword density. If you use the proper keyword density in your content, you will attract more targeted ads. Your visitors are far more likely to click on a relevant ad. Targeted ads usually pay more per click too.

3> Use Online Keyword research tools like Overture Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Research Tool and Goodkeywords.com. You can also try the free trial of Word Tracker and if you like, pay for the service. Other excellent paid keyword research tools include NicheBot and KeywordElite.

4> Use wide ads (336x280, 300x250 or 250x250). Because there are the best performing ads.

5> No Border ads. One of the best ways is to erase the borders of Adsense ads and make them merge with the website’s background color.

6> You can embed your Adsense ads in your content. You should surround the ads with the content of the page. This is where your visitors will be looking, so you should also give them ads to read and maybe click on if they're interested.

7 > Place an image near your ads because user tends to look at this section.

8> Rotate Google Adsense Ads Colors to Reduce Ad Blindness. To prevent regular users from ignoring the ads, you can officially rotate up to 4 different types of color palettes for your adsense ads. When you are selecting the color scheme for the adsense ads, press the Ctrl key, scroll up or down with the arrow keys and select multiple color schemes with the SPACE bar.

9> Track your ads. Google gives you up to the ability to track ads by web page or by the type of ads displayed. They give you up to 200 custom channels for you to use. Experiment with different ad types and positions to see which suites best.

10> Use the Adsense for search box. It's always a good idea to give your visitors the ability to search your site. If you use Adsense’s search box, you would be paid for visitors who click on the ads in the search results page.

11> Do not rely on one website. The more sites you have, the more ads have the potential to get clicked.

12> Use site maps. Use Google's site map. It visits your site and will crawl it much sooner that any other submission process.

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The curse of Internet Spyware

2009-02-04T15:16:00.004+05:30

It is always safer to keep soft copies of confidential information. But e-mails are meant to be Internet facilities. What about the passwords and mails?

Often without Internet users’ knowledge, several marketing companies have developed tools to extract information from them. Today the whole world has begun to focus on the Internet for online trade and commerce. Companies desperately trying to market their products, use Spyware to collect information to sell their products. People dislike this form of approach and find it highly unethical, due to which this stealing software came to be known as Spyware, literally meaning that someone is spying on the user. This kind of Internet Spyware has become a great curse in a normal office going person or anyone else for that matter. How far do Spyware removal tools help us at this time?

The Internet Spyware analyzer conducts an Internet dialogue with the suspicious software. This helps in publicizing the activities of Spyware. There are some laws pertaining to this Spyware in the United States. This came into effect in 2004. The law states that no Spyware can automatically install itself onto some users’ website without their consent. Of course the laws may vary from state to state but this is what the general outlook towards Spyware is. This kind of Spyware has become the greatest online threat. Free Spyware removers too are not hundred percent handy as the Spyware still seems to be flooding the computer. Paying bills and working online has become first priority to most developed countries in the world.

The Internet Spyware has a great favorite in tracking banking information about thousands of unsuspecting customers. Banks definitely spend millions of dollars to keep their websites hackers free; they do not obviously want to betray their customers. Plus if any information was stolen from a confidential website, the user can sue the company for falsely selling private information for their gains. Little do they know that the companies themselves are at high risk. Spyware removal is done in huge extent in these kinds of institutions yet hackers are finding ways to easily log onto sites and track people as they move.

Chatting is a favorite among the young and old alike. All users must be careful when sending photographs and other information. It takes a few seconds to locate the exact geographical location of the user and they will be at high risk of being stalked or even falsely framed. Several anti Spyware companies are spending a lot of money to combat Internet Spyware.

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Pistol shrimps send out cracks of sound

2009-02-04T06:01:00.003+05:30

One of the loudest ocean noises is created by the snapping or pistol shrimp, which inhabits tropical coastal waters. This ferocious underwater hunter, only about 2 in (50 mm) long, stalks small fish and knocks them out with stunning 'shots' of high-intensity sound. The immobilised fish tip over and the shrimp catches and eats them.

So loud is this sound that it has been known to set off sound detectors on navy submarines. In the South Pacific, fishermen are said to use the loud cracks of pistol shrimps on a reef to guide them home. The sound is made by one of the pistol shrimp's front claws, which is almost half as big again as the creature's body, although it is carried on a leg of normal size.

To produce the noise, a shrimp strikes together two parts of this enlarged claw, used both to stun prey and to defend its burrow.

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Sound engineers of the insect world

2009-02-03T07:59:00.001+05:30

In his quest for a mate, the male cricket, a skilled communicator, sings three different songs: one to advertise his presence, one to court and one to ward off unwanted competitors.

First comes the calling song, a high-frequency sequence of simple chirps that is maintained for as long as it takes to attract attention. Should a female show interest by approaching, the male increases the frequency and shortens the duration of each note. This results in an excited buzz which seems to entice the female cricket.

If a male approaches, this song gives way to another, more aggressive outburst in which each chirp is drawn out in an expression of self-assertion.

Females, for their part, are well adapted to pick up these signals. They use different receptor cells in their ears and nervous systems to distinguish between the songs of competing males, and will travel right through the territory of an unwanted partner to a male that produces a more attractive song.

The male cricket produces his songs by 'stridulating' or rubbing together specially adapted areas at the base of his wings. On the underside of one wing is a row of teeth-like protrusions similar to a comb; on the edge of the other lies a tongue of toughened tissue. The tongue acts like a guitar plectrum. Each time it strikes one of the teeth it creates a sharp click. This sound is then amplified and transmitted by a resonating part of the wing called the 'harp'. The rate at which the plectrum strikes the teeth gives the songs the distinctive quality of each species.

The male grasshopper uses similar means to amplify his mating songs, but the method used to make them is different. He calls by scrapping rows of tiny pegs on his back legs against a thickened vein on the forewing. Each species of grasshopper has its own call which is determined by the arrangement of pegs and the rate at which they are scraped. The number of pegs also varies from 80 to 450 per leg.

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A special arm for a mating octopus

2009-02-02T09:11:00.001+05:30

During the breeding season, a male octopus develops a modified third right arm, called a hectocotylus, Initially he may use it to caress his mate, then after a while he reaches into his body with it and pulls out a mass of spermatophores - large sperm packages shaped like baseball bats. Each has spring-like ejaculatory organ held by a cap at one end. In one octopus species, spermatophores may be more than 3 ft. (1 m) long.

Using his hectocotylus, the male pushes the sperm package into the female's body through her breathing siphon. Sometimes the arm breaks off and stays inside the female. If the male completes this manoeuvre successfully, the sperm package takes up water through a syringe-like system. The water pressure inside eventually pushes off the cap and the spring uncoils, pulling out the mass of sperm and spilling it all over her eggs.

With common squids, a female has more control. She stores the male's sperm in a cavity under her mouth until her eggs are ready for fertilisation. Then she reaches inside her own body and removes her eggs in a string. She makes sure they are fertilised by pressing them one by one against the stored package of sperm, and then she attaches them to the ocean floor in a cluster of 10-50 long strings.

In primitive insects such as the springtail, a male has to trust to luck. He leaves his sperm package on the ground hoping a receptive female will stumble across it. The moisture within her genital cavity melts the protective skin of the package, allowing the sperm to swim free and fertilise her eggs.

If a male finds another male's sperm package, he will eat and then substitute one of his own.

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What is a cookie?

2009-02-01T18:55:00.001+05:30

A cookie is a small text file that is sent to your computer via your web browser when you visit some websites.

These cookies are used to store information about you for the next time you visit that site - information like where you went on the site and what you did.

Cookie files are a great way for a website to remember you when you next visit, but if you want to surf the net without worrying about your privacy or security being threatened, you might want to stop them being sent.

What they do

Cookies have a variety of different functions, from remembering purchasing information or recording your viewing preferences, to storing scores for online quizzes.

All of which can be useful if you repeatedly visit the same sites time and again.

A cookie from a particular website will sit on the hard drive of your computer and wait until the next time you visit that site.

Without the cookies the web server would have no way of knowing that you had been to the site before unless you logged in with a username and password.

Cookies allow web servers to remember you.

How cookies work

Let's say you go to a website and it has a quiz with question one on the first page and question two on the second etc.

When you go to the second page, the web server needs some way of knowing that you are the same person who answered 'A' for example on page one.

That way, when it comes to adding up your score it can combine all your answers, from many different pages, all together.

Putting a cookie on your computer allows the server to remember that you are the person with that unique cookie and it can recognise you wherever you go on that site even though you aren't logged in.

If the computer didn't give you a cookie it wouldn't know whether it was the same person visiting all the pages.

It's because of things like this that some websites even refuse to let you in if you don't accept cookies - so you could be missing out.

Third party cookies

Third party cookies are the ones that have got users concerned about their privacy most worried.

In theory, only the website which placed a cookie on your computer can see that cookie so it shouldn't be possible for any other sites to look at that cookie.

When a cookie is placed on your computer, it records the name of the website that will be allowed to reopen it in the future.

If 'Super Supermarket' places a cookie in its name then only 'Super Supermarket' should be able to open it.

The problem is that many sites use cookies from other third parties like marketing companies and give them permission to look at the cookie.

By doing this marketing companies can track you across all the sites that use their cookies.

They do this to get an idea of your viewing and shopping habits and then share that information with the websites who are their customers.

So, let's say you buy nappies at 'Super Supermarket' other websites can start trying to sell you other baby products.

If you give your e-mail address or full name to one site it could share them with other marketing partners, and you could even start to end up with spam for baby products in your e-mail inbox!

Can they damage my computer?

Despite their reputation, cookies are very small files that don't cause damage to your computer just by sitting on your hard drive.

In general, cookies are just text files and are not executables so they cannot spread viruses around your computer.

However, as well as third-party cookies they do also contain information such as user names that could reveal your identity.

Because cookies help sites remember things about you, another person using your computer could have access to some of the less secure private information on websites that you have visited.

To view the web anonymously, you could consider getting rid of your cookies. The easiest way to do this is to refuse to accept, or 'disable' them in your web browser.

However, this can be a bit limiting, because many features in sites won't work if you disable cookies.

Delete them?

Because some sites prevent you visiting them without a cookie, most web-savvy internet users simply delete their cookies every so often.

This may sound complicated, but deleting your cookies is actually relatively straight-forward.

In Internet Explorer, simply go to 'Tools', 'Internet Options' and then click the 'Delete Cookies' option.

Organising your cookies

In most web browsers there is a function for organising your cookies and setting the level of security so that you only receive cookies from certain safe sites.

In Internet Explorer 6, select 'Tools' then 'Internet Options' and then 'Privacy' - this will open a window with various different options.

You can use the slider to change which cookies you are willing to accept and use advanced settings to block or accept cookies from specific sites.

Other versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape and other browsers have similar settings.

Snakes that play the corpse for their foes

2009-02-01T05:57:00.002+05:30

Snakes in trees often simply relax and fall to the ground out of harm's way if they are threatened, but there are snakes, such as the European grass snake and the American hognose, that are truly consummate actors. Despite the fact that a snake, dead or alive, cannot fall over a 'dying' grass or hognose snake will lie belly-up if it is threatened.

The sagging jaw, lolling tongue and deathly expression are all quite convincing, but the effect is sometimes spoiled by the wriggling involved in staying upside-down. The snake's instinctive desire to remain belly-up is so strong that it betrays itself by writhing back into its upside-down death pose if a predator tries, out of curiousity, to roll it over.

The prize for the most impressive use of props for playing dead goes to the West Indian wood snake. When threatened, this small boa twists itself into a taut coil, mimicking the stiffness of death. Fluids coating the snake's scales give off a foul stench of decomposing flesh to add to the success of the illusion.

As a final effect, blood, released from special tiny blood vessels, flushes the eyes of the coiled 'corpse' a dull red, and trickles from its gaping mouth. Thus a predator, such as a mongoose, is led to believe that the snake is dead - and that it has been so for some time.

Unless the predator is particularly hungry, or has a taste for rotting flesh, this performance is usually enough to put it off, or to make it hesitate for long enough to give the snake a chance to make its escape.

Make Money with Domain Parking

2009-01-31T19:48:00.001+05:30

Domain Parking is the method to make money with your domain names. Companies like www.Sedo.com offer you to park your domain for free and providing their advertisements, so when someone visits your domain they will see advertisements placed by your sponsor. Sedo also lists your name up for sale if you want to (also free). The only thing you have to do is forward your domain name to a specific address you will get when you register with Sedo.

They provide all the ads you will display on your domain and no action on your behalf will need to be made except for forwarding your domain which is usually done at your registrar’s control panel. After setting up the domain forward the ads will be displayed automatically each time some one visits your domain.

If the visitor clicks on any of the advertisements, you will get paid a commission (which is always like five cents average per click depending on the domain’s name topic). So imagine having 10,000 visitors a day, and say 3,000 click on any ad.. You’ll get $150 just for doing nothing. Sounds great :) huh? Well.. It’s not so easy. In order to get thousands of visitors daily to your domain, you need to work hard on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and god knows what other things.

10k visits a day is a pretty decent number of visitors for a website. The point here is, if you get a pretty damn good name registered (good keyword) you should have little or no problem at all if you park your page with someone who pays for clicks; the most difficult task will be getting some traffic to the domain.

If you really want to make money with domain parking, you should register domains related to business. I’m talking about good names though. I personally own 6 business-related domains and have them parked with Sedo. In my experience with domain parking, business and banking domains pay around $0.35 - $1.20 per click! I have worked hard optimizing these domains; obviously those kinds of clicks are worth the hard work. I get around 400-500 visits per day on each domain and the click-through rate ranges from 18% to 25%, which is NOT bad at all.

Talking in dollars and cents, that’s around $65 - $100 per day. It took me around 9 months of SEO to get this kind of traffic, but again, much of its weight stands on the quality of your domain name.

Original Author : Arterm Belinskly

What is the Internet proxy server

2009-01-31T17:46:00.004+05:30

The Internet proxy server is the server that is situated between the client application and an actual server. The Internet proxy server has the role of intercepting every request to the actual server and see if the request can be fulfilled by it. If that is not possible, then it must forward the request to the other server.

If used in an enterprise the Internet proxy server besides the role that it plays in all situations, also have the role of ensuring control and security. This Internet proxy server is linked to a gateway server. This has the role of separating the network of the enterprise from other networks. The Internet proxy server is also associated with a firewall

The Internet proxy server receives requests from web pages or any other Internet services from the user. Then if the filtering requirements are passed, the Internet proxy server checks its cache for other downloaded pages( this assuming that the Internet proxy server is a cache server as well ). If the web pages that are required are then found by the Internet proxy server, they are returned to the user. In this case there is no need for the Internet proxy server to forward the request. In case the page can not be found in the cache, then the Internet proxy server must act as a client as thus use its own IP address to request the web page from other servers that are found on the Internet. When the required page is then returned, the Internet proxy server reports it to the initial request and then it is forwarded to the user.

In the users eye, the Internet proxy server seems to be invisible. This is because the request and the response are so quick that the user is under the impression that they are made directly with the Internet server that was addressed. However, this is not the case and the Internet proxy server actually plays a very important part.

There are two main reasons why Internet proxy servers are used. One is to improve the performance and the second to filter the requests. The Internet proxy server can improve the performance for users, because the Internet proxy server actually saves all the requests that the user has made, thus making Internet operations a lot faster. The second reason why Internet proxy servers are used is to filter requests. This operation might be seen in schools or workplaces, where the employees are not allowed to visit certain web sites. This can be very easily done by configuring the Internet proxy server that is used.

Lizards sacrifice their tails to save their lives

2009-01-31T06:51:00.000+05:30

Lizards rely on speed and agility to flee from danger. But if running does not suffice, then the lizard brings its tail into use. Most lizard species shed their tails when they are threatened, an action that not only tends to confuse the attacker but focuses its attention on the distracting tail while the lizard makes a dash for safety. So the lizard offers its tail as a snack, albeit a fairly paltry and fleshless one, for the safety of the rest of its body. Predatory monitor lizards take full advantage of this and feed almost entirely on such discarded tails.

A lizard's detachable tail has sections that can be snapped off at will by the simple contraction of some of the lizard's muscles. In spite of the fact that the fracture occurs across the spine, the loss causes the creature little discomfort. This is because the joints at the 'crisis point' where the tail breaks off are made of cartilage rather than bone, and blood vessels and nerves are constricted to reduce the pain and blood loss.

Although a lizard's tail is not essential, it does play an important role in balance and in breeding success. The lost tail grows again with time, although it may differ in length or pattern from the original, and the lizard may even end up with more than one tail. Victorian records, for example, tell of a lizard which had seven. But regrowing a tail takes considerable energy. If a predator refuses to eat the snack, some skinks have been known to return to eat their own discarded tails.

The glass snake is really a lizard with no legs. It takes its name from its extraordinary ability to shatter its own body. If under stress, this 5 ft (1.5 m) long creature fractures its tail at all or most of its joints. Each piece then wriggles around on its own, while the snake itself slips away - sometimes reduced to two-thirds of its original length.

A species of gecko found in Puerto Rico also dismantles itself spectacularly when in danger. It sheds bits of skin from all over its body, or even its whole outer covering, and moves off to safety.

Matching the wardrobe to the season

2009-01-30T23:38:00.000+05:30

From the tiger's stripes, which echo the light and shade of the forest, to the bright green of the tree frog, most animals have developed color schemes that blend with their environment. In situations where that environment is subjected to extremes of seasonal change, however, extra and rather special adaptations are called for.

Like other birds living in landscapes that are snow covered for part of the year, the Scandinavian willow grouse regularly exchanges the tones and patterns of its brown summer plumage for winter whites. Not that the transition is abrupt; rather it is gradual, mirroring the drift of summer into autumn and then into winter. The willow grouse's life is constantly under threat . Terrestrial predators such as lynxes and wildcats share its mountain and tundra home, and eagles sheel overhead. Survival depends upon the grouse making the most of its colouring by gearing its movements to the state of its surroundings. Thus its greatest security is achieved when there is a good blanketing of snow and the bird is in full white feather.

During the long spring thaw, the landscape becomes a patchwork of snow, rock and exposed vegetation. While the grouse retains its winter colours, it will feed only against a snowy background. Not until its plumage is almost completely changed again will the bird move to snowless terrain. So important is the right camouflage to the grouse that it will even cut down its food intake rather than risk exposing itself against a contrasting background.

Birds that know when to hide their beauty

2009-01-29T17:40:00.002+05:30

For a great deal of the year the golden plover struts conspicuously among the dune grasses and heathers of its moorland breeding ground. It has striking black and white plumage on the front, and a broken, spangled pattern on a golden-brown back. But when the time comes to incubate its eggs, it cannot afford to draw attention to itself. It is then that the plumage on a female's back shows its value as camouflage.

As the hen crouches low on the nest, her back blends in with the surrounding carpet of windblown, flower-speckled grass. She is practically invisible from above and from the sides. Thus her eggs are able to hatch in safety.

A relative of the golden plover, the eye-catching blacksmith plover of tree-scattered African grassland, is so conspicuous in its black and white feathers that it would be futile for it to attempt to blend with its background. Its nesting technique, though, is of startling originality - it often lays its dark, mottled eggs in a pile of zebra dung, which is probably the last place any hungry predator would think of looking for a meal.

Another relative is the ringed plover - a wader that breeds on rocky coasts. Rejecting formal nest building, it lays its mottled eggs straight onto the shingle, from which they are indistinguishable. The adult is similarly camouflaged, with sandy wings and black and white head. The downy chicks are equally difficult to see against the pebbles and debris of the shore.

It takes a very good disguise to enalbe a bird to sleep safely on the ground by day. The white-throated nightjar hunts moths at night; but at daylight, it selects a spot among the dried vegetation, where it is practically invisible. It is probably more at risk there from being trodden on than from being attacked by a predator.

Wings that are meant for one flight only

2009-01-29T17:30:00.003+05:30

It happens only once during the termite year. On one warm, still summer evening, breaches appear in the towering earthen mound of an African termite nest. From the holes, fluttering a little inexpertly on gauzy wings, emerge hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of plump termites. The swarm consists of both males and females of the royal, or reproductive, caste - the only termites to grow wings. Their flight is of short duration. Though they climb some 200 ft (60 m) into the air, they travel no more than 300 yd (275 m) from their home mound. Like paratroops ridding themselves of their 'chutes, as soon as they land they termites pivot on their wings and break them off, for they are no longer needed. Both sexes search excitedly for a mate, then run off in tandem, the males hard on the females' heels. At this point they are in extreme danger, for even creatures that would not normally eat termites - spiders, shrews, lizards, birds, even local tribesmen - close in on this insect feast. Very few of the couples survive, but those that do seek a nest site in the ground or in a decaying log, and burrow in, excavating a mating chamber. It is lined with chewed wood mixed with saliva and droppings, and once it is complete, they seal themselves in.

From now on the queen, with her consort beside her, will do nothing but lay eggs, creating a colony that over years may amount to millions. Most of her offspring will become workers, sterile males and females. They forage for food - plant and wood fibres - and build and repair the nest mount, which may eventually reach a height of 30 ft (9 m).

Their taks include feeding and grooming the royal pair, as well as the soldier caste that guards the nest.

Treetop academy

2009-01-23T19:25:00.002+05:30

Tree houses have always been an attraction for tourists visiting Kerala. But now, a school in Wayanad district of the State, is holding classes for students in a tree house built on a giant tree in the school courtyard.

Tree houses, which have traditionally been the watch towers for village farmers of hilly regions for protecting their crops from wild animals and thieves, have already become a big attraction for domestic and foreign travellers in Kerala. But now, a school in Wayanad district of the State is holding classes for the students inside a tree house built on a giant tree in the school courtyard.

According to EP Sivadas, headmaster of ANM Upper Primary School, Mayilampady in Wayanad, the tree house class sessions are not just a novel way of preparing atmosphere for academic activities. For him, it is also an important act in melding the times with the tradition.

The tree house houses a classroom, which can hold up to 50 students at a time and is built at a height of about 25 feet from ground atop a giant Vaaka tree in front of the school in its courtyard. The tree house can indeed hold furniture for students but furniture are not allowed for safety reasons. Students of all classes in the school do get chance to study in the tree house on a regular basis as per turns.

The concept of the tree top classroom is the brainchild of headmaster Sivadas, and the idea was welcomed by all teachers in the school, the Parent-Teacher Association and the village development committee. The tree top classroom was built at a cost of Rs 1.5 lakh and the fund was raised from the grants for the school and the Ayalkoottam and the PTA fund.

The money spent for building the tree top classroom has not been a waste as the idea is to give the tree house on rent to tourists from abroad on school holidays. PTA office-bearers said they were getting lots of enquiries for accommodation at the school tree house.

A PTA office-bearer said tourism need not be just a business to make money but it could also be used for making the children here familiar with the lifestyles of the visitors from other lands. “The children can understand the differences in their languages and food habits and the students can get to know about the cultures of the countries of the tourists,” he said.

The school had taken particular care to make the tree house classroom attractive for the looks and cozy for the tourists from abroad. Unlike the usual steep and hanging ladders found in the traditional tree houses, the tree top classroom of Mayilampady is accessed through a beautiful crafted wooden staircase to make it easy for the children to climb.

Tree houses in Wayanad had become a craze among the foreign tourists reaching here in search of a tranquil stay away from the commotions of modern civilisation. The best known tree houses in Wayanad district meant for tourists are among the Vythiri forests.

Different tourism-oriented tree houses in Wayanad provide varying facilities, but all of them give special care not to disturb the environment. There is no power connection, no fuel-powered mechanical devices in these ‘heavenly’ abodes. Some of the tree houses use hydraulics in improvised elevators using baskets, buckets and ropes. Others are operated using the all-pervading force available in the nature, gravitation.

Quite appropriately, the children of Mayilampady school call their tree house ‘a hanging castle.’ They make it a point to sweep away the motes and dead leaves that wind brings to their castle everyday, to dust the windows and the sparse furniture inside everyday, and actually everyday sees a contest among them to get the chance to do this cleaning job, so that they can be inside the ‘castle’.

Fish Poop Helps Balance Ocean Acidity

2009-01-19T17:31:00.000+05:30

The ocean's delicate acid balance may be getting help from an unexpected source, fish poop.

The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere not only drives global warming, but also raises the amount of CO2 dissolved in ocean water, tending to make it more acid, potentially a threat to sea life.

Alkaline chemicals like calcium carbonate can help balance this acid. Scientists had thought the main source for this balancing chemical was the shells of marine plankton, but they were puzzled by the higher-than-expected amounts of carbonate in the top levels of the water.

Now researchers led by Rod W. Wilson of the University of Exeter in England report in the journal Science that marine fish contribute between 3 percent and 15 percent of total carbonate.

And the contribution may be even higher than that, say the researchers from the U.S., Canada and England.

They report that bony fish, a group that includes 90 percent of marine species, produce carbonate to dispose of the excess calcium they ingest in seawater. This forms into calcium carbonate crystals in the gut and the fish then simply excrete these "gut rocks."

The process is separate from digestion and production of feces, according to the researchers.

The team estimated the total mass of bony fish in the ocean at between 812 million tons and 2,050 million tons, which they said could produce around 110 million tons of calcium carbonate per year.

The carbonate produced by fish is soluble and dissolves in the upper sea water, while that from the plankton sinks to the bottom, the team noted.

The research was funded by the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, The Royal Society, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, United Nations Environmental Program, the Pew Charitable Trust and the U.K. Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

How Birds Can Down a Jet Airplane

2009-01-18T18:07:00.003+05:30

The result of bird striking the jet engine of a Delta MD 11 on Jan 21, 2001. Credit: FAA

Early reports suggest that a bird strike caused a jet plane to crash in the Hudson River near Manhattan today, leaving questions about how a little flying animal could down a big airliner.

More than 200 people have been killed worldwide as a result of wildlife strikes with aircraft since 1988, according to Bird Strike Committee USA, and more than 5,000 bird strikes were reported by the U.S. Air Force in 2007. Bird strikes, or the collision of an aircraft with an airborne bird, tend to happen when aircraft are close to the ground, which means just before landing or after take-off, when jet engines are turning at top speeds.

The incidents are serious particularly when the birds, usually gulls, raptors and geese, are sucked into a jet engine and strike an engine fan blade. That impact displaces the blade such that it strikes another blade and a cascade can occur, resulting in engine failure.

A 12-pound Canada goose striking an aircraft going 150 mph at lift-off generates the force of a 1,000-pound weight dropped from a height of 10 feet, according to Bird Strike Committee USA.

Today's incident, which occurred just after US Airways flight 1549 (an Airbus 320) had taken off with more than 150 passengers and crew members from LaGuardia Airport in New York, en route to Charlotte, N.C., involved a flock of geese, according to CBS News. Reports indicate no deaths or serious injuries as of this writing.

Large aircraft are certified to be able to keep flying after impacting a 4-pound bird, however 36 species of birds in North America weigh more than this, according to the committee. Even smaller birds, such as starlings (which the committee's Web site refers to as "feathered bullets" due to their density), can cause engine failure.

The greater the difference in the speed of the plane and the bird, the greater the force of the impact on the aircraft. The weight of the bird is also a factor, but the speed difference is a much bigger factor.

Flocks of birds are even more dangerous as they can result in multiple strikes.

Delicate birds, delicate aircraft

Dale Oderman, associate professor of aviation technology at Purdue University in Indiana says birds can be very dangerous to aircraft, particularly in the first several thousand feet after take-off, where the birds are flying.

"Obviously, geese or another large bird would be much more hazardous than a little black bird," Oderman said. "The speed at which the two are moving causes the bird to get ingested into the engine. And the engine is very delicate to withstanding a major impact."

He added: "It just shuts the engine down."

Basically, if the birds get too close to the engine's intake, it's like a vacuum — the birds just get sucked in.

"The initial stages of a jet engine are made up of a lot of compressor blades. Those aren't very big and they can be very easily damaged," Oderman told LiveScience. "Even if one of those things breaks off, then the one blade will go through the rest of the engine and it's like shrapnel to the engine."

And in the case of the Hudson River crash, the birds apparently took out both engines.

"Apparently in this particular case it seems both engines were hit. If it was a flock of birds they flew thought it wouldn't be a surprise to me," Oderman said.

Airports, Oderman said, take several precautions to keep planes safe from birds. For instance, they often don't plant many trees nearby, as these are nesting areas for birds. Since La Guardia is right on the water, he noted, there are a lot of water birds around.

Bird strike remains

Bird strikes are on the rise, according to the committee. After a bird strike in the United States, the remains, called snarge, are sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Laboratory to identify the species, according to Wikipedia.

Bird and other wildlife strikes to aircraft result in more than $600 million in damage a year, according to Bird Strike Committee USA. Five jet airliners have had major accidents involving bird strikes since 1975, the committee says. In one case, about three dozen people died.

NASA worries about bird strikes, too.

During the July 2005 launch of Discovery on mission STS-114, a vulture soaring around the launch pad impacted the shuttle's external tank just after liftoff. With a vulture's average weight ranging from 3 to 5 pounds, a strike at a critical point on the shuttle — like the nose or wing leading thermal protection panels — could cause catastrophic damage to the vehicle.

NASA put safety measures into place in 2005 to reduce the odds of bird strikes with the shuttle. The agency particularly wants to avoid bird strikes to the shuttle's fuel tank that could damage the heat shield during launch and landing.

For instance, NASA has a special during launch countdown where they can stop to wait for birds to pass. And during landing, NASA has a sound cannon that they fire to make sure the runway is clear from birds to make sure shuttle isn't damaged during landing.

Protests or not, Japan keeps eating whale

2009-01-17T17:01:00.003+05:30

Japanese businessmen enjoy their whale meat lunches at a whale meat eatery in Tokyo in this photo taken on May 5, 2007. As diners sit down to their whale meat lunches in Tokyo and elsewhere across the nation, its whaling fleet is now on its annual hunt in the Antarctic keeping specialty restaurants alive but drawing blunt public criticism from neighboring governments, protests from environmental groups and the ire of whale-lovers worldwide. ((AP Photo/Katsumi Kasahara))

As diners sit down to lunches of whale meat in Tokyo and elsewhere across the nation, Japan's whaling fleet is on its annual hunt in the Antarctic, drawing protests from environmental groups, international governments and whale-lovers worldwide. So why does Tokyo persist?

Why shouldn't it, many Japanese say.

"Why do people say we can't eat the things we've eaten since the end of World War II?" asked Koji Shingu, the proprietor of a whale eatery called Yushin in Tokyo, a few blocks from the city's oldest temple, a popular tourist draw.

His feelings echo those of many older Japanese.

The country has hunted whales for hundreds of years, and the meat is a sentimental favorite of people who lived through the lean postwar years, when whale was the chief source of protein because Japan couldn't afford pork or beef. Whale was a common family dish, and many schoolchildren ate it every day.

Whale meat is still easily found in restaurants and canned in supermarkets, but is not a part of a typical home-cooked meal.

Shingu says most of his customers are in their 40s or older, while younger diners come mainly for the novelty. At the tail end of lunch hour, his clients included several older men eating alone and a pair of younger girls at a corner table.

The calm in the restaurant belied the battle it took to bring in the whale meat it serves.

The Japanese fleet, now somewhere between New Zealand and Chile, catches mostly minke whales, which at about 25 feet (7.6 meters) long and 5 tons are smaller than many other species.

It's dangerous work—the current expedition has lost a crew member, who fell overboard and is presumed dead.

The task is made more difficult by environmentalists who relentlessly pursue the hunters.

This year the conservationist group Sea Shepherd has chased Japan's whaling ships for thousands of miles and thrown bottles of rancid butter to disrupt operations. In late December the group's ship and a whaling boat collided at sea.

Commercial whaling is banned internationally, but the six-vessel Japanese fleet operates under permission from the International Whaling Commission, which allows hunting for research purposes. Japan plans to take up to 935 minke whales and 50 fin whales this year, and says it sells most of the meat for food only after conducting its research.

Minke whales are not endangered, and few dispute that there are hundreds of thousands in the wild. But many feel that Tokyo's research operation is thinly veiled commercial hunting, and that harpooning whales at sea is a brutal way to kill them.

"We deal with a ruthless and cruel enemy whose very reason for being here is to inflict agonizing suffering and to deliver cruel death to gentle, sensitive, intelligent and socially complex sentient beings," the founder of Sea Shepherd and captain of its ship, Paul Watson, wrote from the Antarctic last week after clashing with whalers.

Makoto Ito, the managing director of Kyodo Senpaku, the company that runs Japan's whaling fleet, says invoking images of whales being killed at sea is unfair because killing animals for food is never a pretty sight.

"There are intense scenes of cows and chickens being slaughtered too," he said.

Ito says the scientific whaling done by his company, in connection with the government-backed Cetacean Research Institute, is needed to prove there are enough minke whales for harvesting, and thus for the lifting of the commercial whaling ban.

He said the entire operation costs $65 million to $76 million per year, of which the government provides about $5.5 million. The rest comes from selling the whale meat, and the entire operation is "barely making a profit."

But international allegations that it is commercial whaling in disguise abound, and Japan has been strongly criticized by a number of nations, including Australia and New Zealand, as well as the United States.

This week, Tokyo said Sea Shepherd's activities are tantamount to terrorism and said it planned to ask Australia to bar the group's anti-whaling ship from its ports.

Australia, which has been a leading opponent of whaling, said it wouldn't do so.

Sea Shepherd's aggressive save-the-whales campaign has resonated with Western audiences and is the subject of a popular series on the Animal Planet TV network, "Whale Wars," filmed from its ship.

Images of foreigners interfering with what is seen as a traditional fishing tradition have helped stir up pro-whaling sentiment in Japan. Still, younger generations are increasingly fond of red meat and other Western food, and without a publicity boost, whaling may fade away on its own.

That, Ito said, would be a shame.

"If there are plentiful resources, and we can take some without causing whales to go extinct for future generations, what is wrong with that?" Ito asked.

Ants Practice Nepotism, Study Finds

2009-01-16T18:46:00.002+05:30

The highly social and complex world of ants is not void of selfish acts. Worker ants of the species Formica fusca apparently can distinguish who their closest relatives are and kill their more distant relations.

"That workers capitalize on this ability simply means that the workers use the information they have to enhance their genetic contribution to future generations," said Liselotte Sundström, an entomologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Science has long held that ants who share the same genetic make up have a vested interest in favoring their closest kin at the expense of the social cohesion of the entire ant colony. But evidence for ant nepotism has been difficult to find.

Sundström and colleague Minttumaaria Hannonen took advantage of advances in genetic analysis to prove the theory correct. They report the results of their study in the February 27 issue of Nature.

Kenneth Ross, an entomologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, said that researchers have looked for nepotism in social insects for the last 10 to 15 years and not found it. Given that fact, Ross said he was surprised at the success of Sundström and Hannonen's study, which he described as nicely done.

"The theory tells us it should be there," he said. "But the implication from data from the last 10 to 15 years tells us it shouldn't be there. In light of these negative results, I am somewhat surprised."

Ant Study

Unlike bee colonies, ant colonies are often ruled by more than one queen. Among some species, such as fire ants, a single ant colony can have as many as 500 queens. On the surface, the ants in such colonies seem to work cooperatively for the interest of the entire group.

Scientists have often wondered if evidence for nepotism is present in such a complex social environment. But each time they have looked for it their results come up negative. Sundström said that perhaps their studies were hindered by logistical constraints.

"For instance, there has not been any way to very accurately distinguish the brood produced by different queens, especially in the field where the actual number of queens is not known," she said.

In addition, Sundström said scientists have not had a way to accurately determine how closely individuals within a colony are related to each other. As a result, they could not predict which ants should favor others if nepotism were indeed taking place.

But advances in genetic analysis enabled Sundström and Hannonen to test for nepotism. The pair were able to distinguish one ant's DNA from another's and use certain genetic markers to determine what queen was the mother of various ant offspring.

They conducted their experiment on laboratory colonies with two mother queens. The colonies were set up in the early spring, just before the queens lay their brood. At the time the colonies were established, they consisted of only the queens and adult worker ants.

"When the queens started to lay eggs in our laboratory colonies, we collected a sample of about 50 eggs and left about the same amount in the colony. The eggs left in the colony were allowed to mature into adults," said Sundström.

The researchers then screened all the queens and eggs and a sample of mature individuals from each colony. Based on their genetic analysis, the researchers determined the proportion of eggs laid by each queen and also the proportion of the adult brood that belonged to each queen. The researchers then calculated how the proportions had changed.

"We predicted that if the workers on average are more closely related to one queen than the other they could gain genetic benefits by favoring the offspring laid by this queen," said Sundström. "Conversely, if the workers are equally related to both queens they would have no incentive to favor the offspring of one queen over the other."

If the researcher's theory is correct, in colonies where there is a high proportion of worker ants more closely related to one queen than the other, the brood belonging to the queen with all the close working relatives will get a higher proportion of surviving offspring.

The results from Sundström and Hannonen's experiment were in line with this prediction, implying that "the workers manipulated brood composition to fit their interests," said Sundström.

Ross says there is little reason to question the methodology of Sundström and Hannonen, but their result does raise the question of why nepotism was found in this species of ant when it has not been found in so many others.

"You can't argue that the earlier studies were systematically flawed, so why is this one different?" he said.

Nepotistic Behavior

While the researchers do not yet have direct evidence that workers remove eggs or larvae to achieve their nepotistic goals, they say that such action is the most plausible explanation for the observed nepotistic behavior among Formica fusca ants.

"The rationale behind this argument builds on kin selection theory," said Sundström. "In social insects such as ants and bees, workers are sterile females, which help their mother, or some other female relative to reproduce."

Since the workers share half their genes with their mothers, they also share half their genes in common with their siblings. Since siblings have more genes in common than do cousins, if a worker wants to see its genes passed on to the next generation, it's to the ant's advantage to favor its close relatives, assuming it can tell which ants are its closest relatives.

"Accurate kin discrimination abilities are a prerequisite for nepotism. Because we found evidence for nepotism, we can conclude that workers have the necessary ability to discriminate between closer and more distant relatives," said Sundström

That nepotism is now known to exist at least among one species of ant in one situation, Ross says it puts ant nepotism research back 15 years, posing such questions as, "How common is it? How universal is it? What sort of conditions should we expect to see it in?" he said.

Sundström finds such questions to be the most rewarding aspect of her research. "Every time one resolves one question, there will be ten new ones emerging."

Dinosaur Dads Took Care of Nest

2009-01-14T16:11:00.001+05:30

The movie Jurassic Park gave advanced, birdlike dinosaurs a fearsome reputation--swift, intelligent, and deadly. Now it turns out that they had a softer side. Researchers report that males in three species were stay-at-home dads that incubated the eggs in their nests.

There's plenty of evidence to suggest that dinos baby-sat their offspring. A predatory dinosaur called Oviraptor, for example, was discovered in the Gobi Desert in 1993, its fossilized remains protecting a brood of eggs. In addition, dinosaurs' closest living relatives, birds and crocodiles, display nesting behavior: Female crocs guard the eggs, whereas in birds the gender of the stay-at-home-parent depends on the species. But whether male or female dinos had nest duty has remained a mystery.

For the new research, paleontologist David Varricchio of Montana State University in Bozeman compared three species of birdlike dinosaurs--Oviraptor, Citipati, and Troodon--with birds and crocodiles. All three types of dinosaurs were found on nests, and those nests contain large clutches of eggs, as many as 30 each. Varricchio and his colleagues investigated whether they could discern the nesting behavior from the relationship of the clutch size and the animal's body size. Measurements in 433 living birds and crocodiles revealed that, for a given body size, species in which males took care of the nest tended to have the largest clutches. The next-largest clutches were cared for by mothers. Mom-dad partnerships had the smallest clutches. Extrapolated to dinosaurs, the data revealed a pattern of paternal care in the ancient beasts.

Another line of evidence in the paper comes from Gregory Erickson, a biologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee. His studies of dinosaur bone tissue showed that none of the seven specimens associated with nests showed signs of changes associated with egg laying, such as medullary tissue (ScienceNOW, 2 June 2005). That's not sure-fire proof the nest-caretakers were male, he notes, but it's consistent with the hypothesis. The findings are reported in tomorrow's issue of Science.

Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University, says he never expected paternal care in dinosaurs. But with their dinosaur ancestors showing more and more traits once thought to be exclusive to birds, such as feathers, he says the finding makes sense. It also points to a question on the reproductive frontier: Did dinosaurs practice polygamy?

Your Brain Sees $$$ More Clearly Than You Know

2009-01-13T18:06:00.000+05:30

When you see something of value, your brain essentially sees dollar signs, a new study finds.

The effect occurs even if you don't consciously realize the object's worth.

Researchers scanned the brains of subjects who were presented with choices of constantly changing red and green objects that represented 10 cents or nothing, with good choices in a game leading to potential winnings of $10.

Upon seeing objects that had been of value previously, brain activity lit up in several areas, including a part of the cortex known as V1, which is associated with representing basic features such as edge orientations and color.

"When a target had been valuable in the past — if selecting it had had paid off with money — the visual system represented it more strongly," said lead researcher John Serences, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Rewards affected information processing in this initial sense and also in parts of the brain where higher cognitive thinking takes place.

"Though it is too early to say how this relates to perception," Serences said, "it raises the intriguing possibility that we see things we value more clearly — much like the way the brain responds to a bright object versus a dimly lit one."

In fact, the brain seemed to know more than a participant was able to call to mind: The changes in neural activity were a better sign of an object's past value than what subjects recalled when asked about those objects.

"It's as if the visual system is telling you how valuable something has been to you in the past," Serences said, "and telling it to you like it is, even though you can't consciously identify it."

The findings are reported in the Dec. 26 issue of the journal Neuron. Further study could help researchers better understand how addictions influence information processing, Serences said. Just seeing food or drugs, for example, might have a larger impact on the psyches of some people than others.

Women Can Smell a Man's Intentions

2009-01-10T06:37:00.000+05:30

It's not hard to tell when a guy is "happy to see you."

The twinkle in his eye, his swagger, that sexy smile — all are clear signs he's in the mood.

And, at least subconsciously, a woman can also tell by the scent of his sweat, according to new research.

Scientists have long debated whether humans, like animals, use chemical signals called pheromones to communicate sexual interest to potential mates. Problem is, the effects of pheromones are thought to be subconscious — meaning that if we do communicate using them, we sure don't know it. It's also hard to know what these pheromones might be and how we sense them, so researchers understand little about them.

But if human pheromones are going to be anywhere, they're going to be in sweat, right? Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston, and her colleagues devised an experiment to compare how women respond to different forms of male sweat — sweat produced in everyday situations versus that produced when a man is turned on.

The researchers speculated that if humans do produce and respond to sweat pheromones, then a woman should respond to a guy's sexual sweat differently than she does to his normal sweat.

Chen and her colleagues asked 20 heterosexual guys to stop wearing deodorant and scented products for a few days. Then they told the men to put small pads in their armpits as they watched pornographic videos and became aroused (the researchers confirmed, using electrodes, that the images did the job). Later, the guys were asked to exchange those pads for fresh pads to collect the sweat they produced when they weren't aroused.

Then the researchers recruited 19 brave women to smell the men's pads while undergoing brain scans.

The investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that reveals the brain regions a person is using at any given time — even if their brain activity is subconscious.

Sure enough, the women's brains responded very differently depending on which sweat they sniffed. (And no, none of them passed out.) The sexual sweat, but not the normal sweat, activated the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform cortex, brain areas that help us recognize emotions and perceive things, respectively. Both regions are in the right hemisphere, which is generally involved in smell, social response, and emotion.

The findings bolster the idea that humans do communicate via subconscious chemical signals, notes Chen in her study, which was published in the Dec. 31 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Our sexual intentions, in other words, may be a lot clearer than we ever intended them to be. That crush you have on your co-worker? She may already know — at least subconsciously.

Santa Likely Pulled by All-Female Reindeer Team

2009-01-03T09:17:00.002+05:30

There may be a perfectly good reason why Santa doesn't get lost on his annual Christmas globetrot: His flying reindeer just might be female and don't mind stopping for directions.

The gender of Rudolph and his or her sleigh-hauling friends -- the subject of goofy Internet chatter every year around this time -- is now being pondered by renowned wildlife experts at Texas A & M University.

"Santa's reindeers were really females, most likely," said Alice Blue-McLendon, a veterinary medicine professor specializing in deer who cites the depictions of Santa's helpers with antlers as the primary evidence. It turns out reindeer grow antlers regardless of gender, and most bulls typically shed their fuzzy protrusions before Christmas.

But Santa's sleigh helpers might also be castrated males, known as steers, said Greg Finstad, who manages the Reindeer Research Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Young steers finish shedding their antlers in February and March, just as non-expecting females do. Bulls generally lose theirs before Christmas, while expectant mothers retain their antlers until calves are birthed in the spring. This allows them to protect food resources through harsh weather and to have enough for developing fetuses, he said.

Sledders most often use steers because they maintain their body condition throughout the winter, he said. Bulls are tuckered out from rutting season when they mate with as many as a dozen females in the months leading up to December. That leaves them depleted and too lean to pull a sleigh or sled through heavy snows, Finstad said. Many females are pregnant after rutting season, which lasts from summer and into the fall. That would mean long hours of backbreaking work for an expecting Rudolph, as well as Donner, Blitzen, Cupid, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Comet and Vixen. "You don't hook up your pregnant females to a sled," Finstad said. "That is not good animal husbandry."

But other aspects of the Christmas story support the all-girl sleigh team theory, Blue-McLendon said.

For example, would a boy reindeer really sport a shiny red nose that almost glows?

"Females like accessories," said Blue-McLendon, who in 2003 led the school's cloning of a white-tailed deer. "I think that fits because females like bling. We like shiny stuff."

As for the reindeer games, forget the rough antler-smashing stuff. Blue-McLendon suggests a female Rudolph would be more up for "games of wit."

And as for the name, Rudolph could certainly still work.

"Why not?" Blue-McLendon said. "I know women named Charlie."

New study: Trees reduce obesity in children

2009-01-01T08:24:00.000+05:30

A study found that inner-city kids living in neighborhoods with more green space gained about 13% less weight over a two-year period than kids living where there were less trees and more pavement. It seems that although the size of Americans have changed over the years i.e. Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 and very desirable whereas that is now considered a plus (or close to it) size the real problems began in the 1980s.

Kids grew up in the 80s and are thin so as we are all a product of nature and nuture. In any case those who eat Whoppers and watch much too much television will get fat.

However, "Most experts agree that the changes were related to something in the environment," says social epidemiologist Thomas Glass of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That something could be a shrinking of the green." Interesting!

In India, a woman becomes a crime victim every three minutes

2008-12-25T15:05:00.003+05:30

Every three minutes a woman becomes victim of a crime somewhere in India . The highest number become targets of their husbands and in-laws.

A total of 185,312 incidents of crime against women were reported in the country during 2007 as compared to 164,765 during 2006, an increase of 12.5 percent.

The number of crimes committed against women has increased continiously during the last five years.

In 2007, the highest number of crimes against women was recorded in Andhra Pradesh, according to the 'Crime in 2007' report of the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB).

Homes were far from being safe havens for women. Last year, 75,930 women became victims of torture and cruelty by their husbands and in-laws, accounting for the highest number of crimes against women.

'This reflects growing disorder in terms of social relations in our society. On the other front our law enforcement agency has also failed to book culprits and our laws, rather than acting as a deterrent, is giving culprits a chance to commit crime and walk away scot-free,' women's rights activist Ranjana Kumari told IANS.

According to the Centre for Social Research, an NGO working for women's rights, aspiration for a high standard of living among young couples is an important reason behind rising family discord.

'Globalisation has brought a major shift in our attitude as we are moving towards a spending culture from a saving culture which is causing inter-personal tensions,' said Kumari.

There were 20,771 cases of rape reported in the country in 2007. In more than 90 percent of the cases, the victims knew the offenders. The highest number of rape cases was reported from Madhya Pradesh.

Despite the rise in the number of crimes against women, the National Commission for Women is of the view that laws such as the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, the Dowry Prohibition Act and various sections in the Indian Penal Code are important legislative measures that provide protection and legal remedies to women.

'The laws are effective enough to protect women, but it is the lack of awareness that is responsible for increasing crime against women. We need a major change in the mindset of our society to deal with these issues,' said National Commission for Women member Yasmin Abrar.

110 tigers lost in six years in India

2008-12-23T15:08:00.002+05:30

India's forests have lost at least 110 royal striped cats, including 17 tigresses, in the past six years due to poaching and several other reasons, according to government data.

The figures made available under the RTI Act reflects that the royal predators have been unsafe not only in non-protected area but also inside reserves, given that this year alone 14 cases of tiger mortality, including four tigresses and two cubs, have been reported till November.

Of six cases of poaching, three tigers were killed in the last month itself with one each outside
Kanha and Khatiya buffer range in Madhya Pradesh and another in Dudhwa tiger reserve in Uttar Pradesh, according to the data.

Similarly, as many as 30 endangered big cats died in 2007, highest in the past five years, with 16 perishing in reserves while 14 in non-protected areas.

Five big cats died in world famous Corbett Tiger reserve in Uttar Pradesh while Bandipur park in Madhya Pradesh lost two tigresses.

During the same period, 14 cases of tiger mortality were reported from outside reserves of which five of the big cats were killed in poaching and three due to poisoning.

A man-eater tiger which had strayed in Chandrapur in Maharashtra's Nagpur region had to be shot dead by the forest department late last year.

“These are official figures and the actual figures may be higher,” Delinda Wright, prominent wildlife expert, noted.

The situation was grim in 2006 too when eight tigresses and two male striped cats died inside the reserves in various tiger-range states.

The big melt: More than 2 trillion tons of ice gone

2008-12-17T18:46:00.000+05:30

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren't complete, but this year's ice loss, while still significant, won't be as severe as 2007.

The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.

In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.

Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn't add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about a half-millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said.

Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.

Other research, being presented this week at the geophysical meeting point to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice.

"It's not getting better; it's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification," Zwally said. "There's no reversal taking place."

Scientists studying sea ice will announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That's when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.

As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the fall. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are six to 10 degrees warmer than they were in the 1980s, said research scientist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

"The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the Arctic amplification study.

Two other studies coming out at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane — the second-most-potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane.

A second study suggests that even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lake beds and sea bottoms around Siberia and that they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

In late summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said.

The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said.

Scientists find hole in Earth’s magnetic field

2008-12-17T18:44:00.000+05:30

Recent satellite observations have revealed the largest breach yet seen in the magnetic field that protects Earth from most of the sun’s violent blasts, researchers reported Tuesday.

The discovery was made last summer by Themis, a fleet of five small NASA satellites.

Scientists have long known that the Earth’s magnetic field, which guards against severe space weather, is similar to a drafty old house that sometimes lets in violent eruptions of charged particles from the sun. Such a breach can cause brilliant auroras or disrupt satellite and ground communications.

Observations from Themis show the Earth’s magnetic field occasionally develops two cracks, allowing solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million mph — to penetrate the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Last summer, Themis calculated a layer of solar particles to be at least 4,000 miles thick in the outermost part of the Earth’s magnetosphere, the largest tear of the protective shield found so far.

"It was growing rather fast," Themis scientist Marit Oieroset of the University of California, Berkeley told an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Such breaches are temporary, and the one observed last year lasted about an hour, Oieroset said.

Solar flares are a potential danger to astronauts in orbit but generally are not a risk to people on the surface of the Earth.

The research was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Scientists initially believed the greatest solar breach occured when the Earth’s and sun’s magnetic fields are pointed in opposite directions. But data from Themis found the opposite to be true. Twenty times more solar wind passed into the Earth’s protective shield when the magnetic fields were aligned, Oieroset said.

The Themis results could have bearing on how scientists predict the severity of solar storms and their effects on power grids, airline and military communications and satellite signals.

The Themis satellites were launched to find the source of brief powerful geomagnetic disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Archeologists in Peru unearth ancient city

2008-12-17T18:37:00.001+05:30

Researchers digging at the Cerro Patapo archeological site in northern Peru have discovered the ruins of an entire city, which may provide the "missing link" between two ancient cultures, investigators said yesterday.

Scientists say the find, located 14 miles from the Pacific coast city of Chiclayo, likely dates to the Wari culture, which existed in what is now Peru between about 600 AD and 1100 AD.

If initial assumptions prove correct, the discovery would connect the ancient Wari civilization to the Moche culture, which flourished from about 100 AD to 600 AD.

Researchers say the buried city includes ceramics, bits of clothing and the well-preserved remains of a young woman.

The sprawling site, which stretches over 3 miles, also shows evidence of human sacrifice, with special spots designated for the purpose and a heap of bones at the bottom of a nearby cliff.

"It provides the missing link because it explains how the Wari people allowed for the continuation of culture after the Moche," Cesar Soriano, chief archeologist on the project, told Reuters.

He said the discovery provides the first evidence of Wari culture, which expanded from the country's south, at the northern site.

The Wari people made their capital near modern-day Ayacucho, in the Andes, but travelled widely and are known for their extensive network of roads. Earlier this year, archeologists at the Huaca Pucllana ruins in Lima, located some 500 miles south of Chiclayo, discovered a mummy that is also thought to be Wari.

Peru is a country rich in archeological treasures. It has hundreds of sites that date back thousands of years and span dozens of cultures, including the Incan empire that was in power when Spanish explorers arrived in the early 1500s.

World's stingiest woman - Hetty Green

2008-07-07T08:09:00.003+05:30

Back in the late 1800s, the world's richest woman was also the world's stingiest. Though she had millions in the bank, she dressed like a street hag and lived like a pauper.
As a child, Hetty Robinson learned to read from the financial pages, which she would recite to her wealthy Father. At age 30 she inherited one million dollars and, over the course of the next 50 years, she shrewdly manipulated stocks and bonds until her fortune grew to nearly $100 million.
Her financial wizardry and infamous stock manipulations confounded such formidable tycoons as Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and earned her the ignominious title "The Witch of Wall Street." But though she was a genius at making money, when developed an unparalleled hatred of spending it.
When she turned 33, she married Edward Green, another millionaire, but made him sign a prenuptial agreement not to claim any of her money. When he went broke speculating on stocks, they separated, and Hetty, though she had vast wealth, raised her two children under dingy conditions, moving from one cheap hotel to another to avoid paying personal property taxes.
To save money on clothes and laundry soap, she wore the same black dress every day and washed only the bottom portion that touched the ground. Hetty's reluctance to spend money reached horrifying proportions shen her son, Ned, injured his knee. She took him to a charity ward to be treated. Unfortunately for Ned, a doctor recognized his millionaire mother and demanded payment. She refused to pay and treated the boy's injury herself. After two years, his leg had to be amputated.
She was far too cheap to pay rent for an office. Instead she conducted her financial dealings from the bank where she kept her fortune, threatening to withdraw it if the bank officers refused to let her use an available desk. When she was feeling particularly unhappy, she would sometimes sit on the marble floor of the bank's vault and admire her notes and securities, which she filed in the specially make pockets of her petticoat. For her meals she would warm up a bowl of oatmeal on the radiator or take out a ham sandwich, unwrapped, from one of her voluminous pockets.
Hetty's lifelong stinginess even played a role in her death in 1916 at the age of 81. She suffered a stroke while arguing over the price of milk. Her son Ned hired nurses to care for her before she died, but had them dress in street clothes for fear that Hetty's condition would worsen if she realized money was being spent to pay nursing bills.
As a final irony, Ned, who inherited much of his mother's vast fortune, became an extravagant spender. He threw his millions away on lavish parties, expensive jewelry, yachts, even diamond studded chamber pots.

Scientists Get Closer to Center of the Earth

2008-07-03T15:57:00.001+05:30

Fiery journeys to the center of the Earth occur only in the sci-fi realm, but now scientists have laid out a way to pinpoint our planet’s center of mass, providing a more accurate map of that core destination.
The results will lead to critical information for studying earthquakes, volcanoes, global sea-level rise and warming, and a post-glacial rise in some surface areas related to the melting of ice sheets.
Until now, scientists have defined Earth’s center of mass in two ways—either as the mass center of Earth as a single object or as the mass-center of Earth’s system, including ice sheets, oceans and our atmosphere in the equation.

Jell-O planet

It's tricky finding the center of a giant, squishy object, scientists say.
"By its very nature, Earth's reference frame is moderately uncertain no matter how it is defined," said Donald Argus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “The problem is very much akin to measuring the center of mass of a glob of Jell-O, because Earth is constantly changing shape due to tectonic and climatic forces."
If Earth were a completely solid, perfectly round object, finding its center of mass would be sweet and simple. However, as first proposed by Isaac Newton, our planet is not perfectly round.
Now scientists know Earth is somewhat of a “buckled” sphere in which the midsection bulges outward. And because mass is distributed unevenly across its surface (more mass means more gravitational tug), the point around which the planet is balanced is offset from the actual center of Earth.
Plus, mass doesn’t stay put, but instead changes over time as glaciers melt, tectonic plates move and volcanoes empty out to lay massive lava on Earth’s surface. These changes in mass atop and beneath Earth’s surface cause the center of mass to shift slightly over time.

Accurate measure

Argus developed the new center-finding technique to find the mass center of Earth as a single object, which can estimate Earth’s center of mass to within 0.04 inches a year. The center of mass is calculated as a relative measurement, and so the measurement is given as a velocity.
Past estimates calculated the center of the whole Earth system, resulting in the 2000 and 2005 estimates differing by about 0.07 inches a year.
Argus believes the mass center of solid Earth is a more accurate reference frame, because it doesn’t change from year to year.
The new technique, described in the June issue of the Geophysical Journal International, relies on data collected from a string of instruments. These include a network of global positioning system (GPS) receivers, a network of satellites called Laser Geodynamics Satellites (LAGEOS), radio telescopes and satellite-tracking instruments.
The Earth-only reference frame will improve estimates of sea-level rise made by satellite altimeters, which rely on measurements of the location and motion of the center of mass of Earth’s system. Sea-level rise is a gauge of global warming, and so the results will boost scientists’ understanding of the increase in our planet’s average temperature. The rising seas are thought to be the result of melting ice sheets in areas such as Greenland and Antarctica.
“If you changed the velocity of the Earth’s center a millimeter (0.04 inches) per year, you would change the estimate of sea level by less than one millimeter,” Argus told LiveScience, “but even half a millimeter would be important.”

On the rebound

In addition, how Earth will respond physically to past and future glacial melting has been shrouded in uncertainty. When frozen, the mammoth weight of miles-high sheets of ice causes tiny deformations of Earth’s crust. And when this ice melts, the land rebounds a bit. Earth is still on the rebound from the close of the last ice age.
“For scientists studying post-glacial rebound, this new reference frame helps them better understand how viscous Earth's solid mantle is,” Argus said, “which affects how fast Earth's crust rises in response to the retreat of the massive ice sheets that covered areas such as Canada 20,000 years ago.”
He is working on post-glacial-rebound models. One possibility is that these updated models will shed light on the mysterious dip in the gravity field over parts of North America.

Water Woes

2008-06-25T14:48:00.003+05:30

A picturesque mountain hamlet in Meghalaya (a province in India) may hold the world record for rainfall, but water is currently the scarcest commodity. Known to the outside world as Cherrapunji, now renamed Sohra, 56 km from Shillong, this town of about 150,000 inhabitants is the world's rainiest place. Perched on the edge of a cliff 4192 feet above the sea level, Cherrapunji overlooking the plains of Bangladesh, holds various world records like highest rainfall in 12 months, 11 months, six months, one month and 15 days.
From August 1860 to July 1861, Cherrapunji recorded 26.5 metre of rainfall and during July in 1861 it was lashed by 9.3 metre of rainfall -- the two records still exist.For a majority of the people who belong to the dominant Khasi race, the fickle weather is what they look forward to. But despite the torrential rain, water is the scarcest of commodities for locals. The South-West monsoon and thunderstorms soak the village from June to September. But during winter, the natural springs and streams dry up and crops suffer. "It is an irony of sorts that the world's rainiest place is, in reality, a wet desert where people have to buy drinking water," Robert Jrwa, a Government official, said.Locals in this predominantly matrilineal society go to distant places and streams downhill to fetch drinking water during winter. Water tapped from streams and supplied through pipelines to the village is inadequate. "We often have to buy drinking water," Sweety Diengdoh, a housewife, said.A jerrycan of water costs anything between Rs 5 to Rs 10. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Mawsynram, also in the State, as getting the highest rainfall. Indian meteorologists, however, say that not only is Sohra getting the maximum rain, but it has also been getting more rainfall in the past decade. "Cherrapunji's record of being the world's rainiest place continues with the village lashed by heavier rains than before," an official of the Regional Meteorological Centre said."People are talking about global warming and there are apprehensions that Sohra might cease to be the world's rainiest place. But the rainfall data indicate that the rain God is quite happy to lash the region," the meteorologist said. But Cherrapunji is now showing signs of desertification as incessant rain wash away the thin layer of soil, leaving very little topsoil in both villages. "With no soil surface to soak the rainwater, most of the rainfall gets quickly discharged resulting in negligible base flows in the streams during winter. This leads to no stored underground water to draw from," a local soil scientist said. Due to lack of topsoil, there is no vegetation in the area. Experts say wanton destruction of the forest cover could be responsible for the yearly drought. The once-thick pine forest is lost and official figures suggest there could be less than ten per cent of the forest cover left. "By denuding the forest cover, villagers invite nature's wrath and the only way to strike a balance is by carrying on afforestation drives in the area," former Meghalaya Geology and Mining Minister DP Iangjuh said. For close to 180 years, it was known as Cherrapunji to the outside world.Now the State Government, under sustained lobbying for decades by the nearly 150,000 tribal Khasi inhabitants, decided to rename Cherrapunji as Sohra -- locals always referred to it as Sohra, expect for official communications. "Sohra is the actual name of this village, but the British rulers tweaked the local name unable to pronounce it correctly and started saying as Cherra....some of the Bengali bureaucrats later added 'punjo,' which means a cluster, to make it Cherrapunji," 82-year-old Marbaniang, a retired schoolteacher, said. Lighting his antique tobacco-filled pipe near the famous Mawsmai cave, five km off Sohra, Marbaniang said the fight to get the original name back was more of a sentimental issue for the locals. "How would you feel if someone for the sake of convenience changes your name from Tom to Harry? If I am Tom call me Tom and not Harry," he said. The British had made Sohra their regional headquarters in the 1830s with the area resembling very much like Scotland with rains and fogs enveloping this quaint little village. Meghalaya, meaning the land of the clouds, later earned the sobriquet from the British as the Scotland of the East for its cool clime. It would take time for the Guinness Book of Records to correct the name, but this village is listed as getting the highest rainfall.

Tree Grown From 2,000-Year-Old Seed

2008-06-15T11:14:00.003+05:30

Just over three years old and about four-feet tall, Methuselah is growing well. "It's lovely," Dr. Sarah Sallon said of the date palm, whose parents may have provided food for the besieged Jews at Masada some 2,000 years ago.
The little tree was sprouted in 2005 from a seed recovered from Masada, where rebelling Jews committed suicide rather than surrender to Roman attackers.
Radiocarbon dating of seed fragments clinging to its root, as well as other seeds found with it that didn't sprout, indicate they were about 2,000 years old -- the oldest seed known to have been sprouted and grown.
Sallon, director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah Medical Organization in Israel, updates the saga of Methuselah in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
One thing they don't know yet is whether it's a boy or girl. Date palms differ by sex, but experts can't tell the difference until the tree is six or seven years old, Sallon said.
She hopes there's a chance to use it to restore the extinct Judean date palm, once prized not only for its fruit but also for medicinal uses.
The researchers have had a look at the plant's DNA, however, and found it shares just over half its genes with modern date cultivars.
"Part of our project is to preserve ancient knowledge of how plants were used," Sallon said in a telephone interview. "To domesticate them so we have a ready source of raw material."
Her Middle Eastern Medicinal Plant Project is working to conserve and reintroduce plants to the region where they once lived.
"Many species are endangered and becoming extinct. Raising the dead is very difficult, so it's better to preserve them before they become extinct," she said.
The oldest documented seed to be grown previously was a 1,300-year-old lotus, Sallon said.

Source : Associated Pess

Photo Courtesy : Science Magazine

One-horned Deer

2008-06-13T08:13:00.004+05:30

A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

"This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. "The unicorn has always been a mythological animal."

The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed "Unicorn" — was born in captivity in the research center's park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said.

He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.
Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, Tozzi said such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn.

The unicorn, a horse-like creature with magical healing powers, has appeared in legends and stories throughout history, from ancient and medieval texts to the adventures of Harry Potter.
"This shows that even in past times, there could have been animals with this anomaly," he said by telephone. "It's not like they dreamed it up."

Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of — but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn, experts said.

"Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the center. This looks like a complex case," said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome's zoo. He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal's life.

Other mammals are believed to contribute to the myth of the unicorn, including the narwhal, a whale with a long, spiraling tusk.

Cat puts Japan rail firm on track

2008-05-28T07:13:00.002+05:30

A loss-making Japanese railway company is back on track thanks to the popularity of a stray cat.

Wearing a black cap and posing for photos with passengers, Tama the tabby is credited with boosting Wakayama Electric Railway's revenue by 10%.

The firm had to axe all staff at Kishi station in western Japan two years ago.

But Tama stuck by her post and was rewarded with promotion to station manager. The pet mascot even has her own office, a former ticket booth.

The feline, who was born and raised at the station in the city of Kinokawa, Wakayama prefecture, is living proof of the Japanese belief that cats are good luck.

"She never complains, even though passengers touch her all over the place. She is an amazing cat. She has patience and charisma. She is the perfect station master," said Yoshiko Yamaki, a spokeswoman for the rail company.

The nine-year-old - who receives cat food in lieu of a salary - won national stardom last year when the firm formally appointed her as "station master".

Since then passengers have been gradually returning, recently rising 10% to about 2.1 million a year.

The cat has spawned a range of popular merchandise, including a picture book called: "Diary of Tama, the Station Master."

Source : BBC

Olympic Swimmers Learn From Sharks, Dolphins

2008-05-27T06:50:00.003+05:30

When winning an Olympic gold medal in swimming is the goal, it helps to take inspiration from some of the best swimmers in the world -- sharks and dolphins -- and that is exactly what U.S. Olympic team swimmers have been doing as they train.

From suits to strokes, coaches, researchers and other advisers are making sure that their athletes benefit from fish and marine mammals' natural swimming abilities.

"Some of our athletes are now wearing what are called 'shark skin suits,'" Russell Mark, biomechanics coordinator for U.S.A. Swimming, told Discovery News.

"These aren't made of actual shark skin, of course, but they are slippery in feel, like sharks, and they make the wearer move faster than normal in the water by reducing friction and drag," he explained.

Mark also indicated that excelling at the dolphin kick can make or break a swimmer's race.
"This is when swimmers push off walls and swim underwater without moving their arms, very similar to how a dolphin swims," he said.

The move emulates how dolphins zoom through water by moving their flipper in an up and down motion. Sharks, in contrast, move side to side. Humans are mammals like dolphins and the up and down undulating motion propels people as it does dolphins. The dolphin kick is one of the most powerful moves among professional swimmers.

The move begins when an individual raises the hips, and then follows with a knee bend with flexed ankles. Put together, the sequence creates an undulating, whipping motion that runs all along the legs to the toes, minimizing water resistance and smoothly zooming the person forward.

"Our top swimmers -- Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin, Ryan Lochte and others -- all excel at dolphin kicking," Mark said. "Phelps is among the best in the world and probably gets as close to anyone as also having a more shark-like finesse in the water."

Sharks are some of the world's fastest swimmers. One impressive species is the shortfin mako, which has been reliably clocked at 31 miles per hour underwater. Everything about this fish is designed for swimming in short bursts of perfection. It has a streamlined body, a crescent-shaped tail supported by keels and a water-cutting, pointed snout.
Sharks, as fans of B-horror movies know, can also be quite hefty and large, yet still move quickly in the water.

"I think it has to do with surface area to volume ratio and drag," Neil Hammerschlag, University of Miami marine biologist, told Discovery News. "That is perhaps why larger, longer boats and longer airplanes move quicker."

Hammerschlag explained that big volumes have a smaller surface area to volume ratio and can move in a speedier fashion as a result, since surface drag can cause a boundary layer of water to sort of stick to the individual, potentially holding them back.

Over the years, Olympic swimmers have been beefing up by incorporating weight training into their schedules. This not only helps to combat drag, but also to simply improve power. Australian Libby Trickett, for example, has a powerful upper body, which may be behind her success in the butterfly stroke.

Rajat Mittal, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at George Washington University, has worked with Mark by providing information about swimming mechanics inspired by dolphins. Mittal recently even created a computer model of a dolphin to better understand its movements.

Mittal said basic anatomical differences, such as lack of a totally flexible spine, joint structure, the nature of human musculature and the need to frequently breathe, keep humans way out of the range of shark and dolphin swimming records.

"To win, our Olympians must go all out and swim in what is essentially an inefficient manner," Mittal said. "Dolphins and sharks, by contrast never compromise their speed with efficiency. They are truly among nature's best swimmers."

The Science of Fairy Tales

2008-05-22T17:00:00.002+05:30

Kids of any age love to read fairy tales because the storyline never limits the possibility that anything could happen. Curses, spells, and handsome princes reign in worlds beyond the reader’s imagination.

But are the most magical moments from some of our favorite stories actually possible? Basic physical principles and recent scientific research suggest that what readers might mistake for fantasies and exaggeration could be rooted in reality.

So suspend your imagination for a moment, and look at the following fairy tales as a hard-core scientist might.

Rapunzel

In the Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel, a witch holds a beautiful young woman captive in a tower. Rapunzel is blessed with a lovely singing voice and long, long blond hair. One day, her voice enchants a prince passing through a nearby forest. They fall in love, and Rapunzel lets down her hair so that the prince may use it to climb the tower to meet her. This chain of events begs readers to ask a question. Can human hair support the weight of another person?

On average one strand of hair can support about three and one-half ounces, or about the weight of two candy bars. Each strand of dark hair is generally thicker, and therefore stronger, than blond hair.

But, alas, Rapunzel must make do with blond locks. Given that blondes generally have about 140,000 hairs on their heads, her hair should easily support the weight of many, many princes. However, there is more to this story.

If Rapunzel simply let down her hair and the prince started climbing immediately, her hair would not break, but it might rip out. Also, the rest of her body might not be able to support the weight. Thankfully, there are strategies that she can use to help reduce the strain on her head and body.

Nathan Harshman, Assistant Professor of Physics at American University in Washington, DC, suggests Rapunzel would be safer and more secure if she tied her hair around something before lowering it. “The whole idea is that you can use the friction of the hair against itself in the knot, and whatever it is tied around will support the weight of the prince.” That is a much better idea than making Rapunzel’s scalp the anchor point.

The Little Mermaid

In the Disney version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Ariel (the mermaid) asks a witch to make her human because she has fallen in love with a human prince. The witch bargains with Ariel and takes her voice in exchange for performing the transformation. For a considerable part of the story Ariel cannot speak, which is a problem because the prince can only recognize her by her incredibly beautiful singing voice. Later, she recovers her voice and wins the love of the prince (sorry to spoil the ending).

In the story, Ariel loses her voice because of a curse. However, a less skilled sorceress could use a different method to silence a singing mermaid. Scientists have figured out a way to bend sound waves around an object and, can even prevent the escape of all sounds created inside a given area (important for keeping a transformed, singing mermaid from being heard).

Recently, Steve Cummer, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University announced that it is theoretically possible to create such a sound shield. Building on research demonstrating how light waves can be bent around an object to make it appear invisible, Cummer and his collaborators used mathematical analysis to show how to do the same thing with sound. They established that it is possible to create a material that bends sound waves around walls, pillars, or any enclosed area, where the sound waves emerge as if nothing had been in their way. It would be like someone in the bedroom being able to hear what someone in the living room said, but as if there were no wall between them.

A side effect of this discovery is that sound waves generated inside the enclosed area would never escape. If the witch had been extremely clever, she could have built this material, and there would have been no need for a curse. Or maybe she did, and a transparent sound shield based on these principles was what enveloped Ariel until her love for the Prince melted it away, finally releasing her melodious voice for the Prince to hear.

1,001 Arabian Nights

One of the most exciting objects found in fairy tales is the flying carpet. In tales from a wide variety of cultures, including 1,001 Arabian Nights, these tangled tapestries take flight to carry people vast distances. Flying carpets are clearly impossible, right?

Three scientists recently published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters showing that there are conditions under which a carpet could fly. They used the basic laws of physics to show that a small, thin carpet could fly if the air were vibrating at the right frequency, much like how a piece of tissue paper floats softly to the ground when it is dropped. Their calculations showed that small waves of air in repeated fast pulses could steer a carpet at a speed of around one foot per second.

Don’t expect to see Aladdin flying by anytime soon, but the scientists write that all of their conditions “are within the realm of possibilities in nature and in technology. Making a heavy carpet fly would, of course, require a much more powerful engine, and our
[calculations] suggest it will remain in the magical, mystical, and virtual realm as it has existed for millennia.”

Perhaps some fairy tales are more grounded in reality than others. Or maybe these precious stories are exactly what we thought they were. An idea is fertilized by the imagination and expanded beyond what seems possible. Or maybe science has come so far over the years that scientists are looking beyond the problems of the physical world and into the imaginations of children for their inspiration.

What could be next? Perhaps a scientific debate over the temperature at which porridge is considered “just right.”

This article was provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

Sharks Use Strange Trick to Hunt Prey

2008-05-19T07:29:00.002+05:30

Like dogs, sharks rely on a keen sense of smell to track down food. But new research shows noses aren’t the only way that sharks detect smells: Their entire bodies, in fact, function as giant noses capable of even picking up the “shape” of a smell.
Running down the sides of every shark are nerve-packed strips called lateral lines. Researchers know these sensitive structures can detect the faint vibrations emitted by living things in water, but their ability to pick up scent was previously unknown. Even more surprising, researchers said, is that lateral lines can detect the 3-D “plumes” of scents—structures resembling the turbulence left behind after waving a hand through thick fog or steam.
"Odor plumes are complex, dynamic, three-dimensional structures used by many animal species to locate food, mates and home sites," said Jelle Atema, a Boston University biologist and co-author of the study detailed in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology. When deprived of the “odor plume” information, the study shows, sharks are unable to find the source of an odor.
To figure this out, researchers ran a stream of squid odor through a circulating water tank and noted a shark’s ability to find the source—with no eddies and plumes to track, the shark almost always failed. They then used the same setup, but added a brick behind the scent source, thereby jumbling up the flow of the squid smell and giving the shark more information to track it. Sure enough, the sharks fared much better in locating the "prey."
Researchers also numbed the lateral lines with a common antibiotic, producing a similarly disabling effect on the sharks ' hunting abilities.
"The results are interesting for our understanding of animal navigation under water and for the development of guidance of autonomous underwater vehicles,” Atma said.

Source : Live Science

Space Rocks Could Reseed Life on Earth

2008-05-17T06:50:00.003+05:30

Asteroid and comet impacts on Earth can cause catastrophic extinction events. They can also bring life back, new research shows.

Many scientists believe that a massive rock from space came crashing down 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The resulting blast set forests ablaze. The skies of Earth were filled with ash that blocked out the sun, and the planet went cold. Vegetation died in the absence of sunlight. Shortly thereafter, the dinosaurs and many other life forms on Earth went extinct. Millions of years of evolution were wiped clean in an instant.

It's frightening that one instantaneous event could completely change the face of life on Earth. However, a new study supports longstanding suggestions that asteroid impacts could also help spread life throughout the universe.

Rocks that are ejected from the Earth — or any other life-bearing planet — by an asteroid impact might actually protect microbes living inside them while they float through space. These rocks could then fall to the surface of other planets, or even back to their planet of origin.

In this way, the microbes could return to their home planet and "re-colonize" the surface after the disastrous effects of the asteroid impact have worn off.

Blast off

In order for organisms to survive a trip into orbit, they must endure a series of life-threatening events.

First there's the asteroid impact itself. Then there's the force of being launched into space. Next, they must travel in the harsh environment of space until a planet's gravity reels them in. This means facing an environment of extreme cold, intense radiation and vacuum exposure. Finally, they need to fall down through the atmosphere, experiencing extreme pressure, heating and the shock of landing.

Previous studies have shown that some rock-inhabiting organisms, known as "endoliths," might be able to survive a trip through space and a plunge through a planet's atmosphere to the surface. However, nobody knew whether these organisms could survive the initial trip into space.

Recently, an international team of researchers, led by Gerda Horneck of the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Köln, Germany, selected a number of hardy microbes from Earth and tested their ability to hitchhike aboard rocks similar to martian meteorites.

The organisms used in the study included bacterial endospores, endolithic cyanobacteria and lichens. This selection provided a wider range of organisms than in other studies performed to date, including not just simple bacteria but also more complex eukaryotic organisms.

Smashing life

The researchers looked at previous studies of martian meteorites that provided information about the kinds of forces needed to eject rocks from a large planet. Using this data, the researchers developed a series of tests designed to simulate these pressures on the selected organisms.

By smashing the life-containing rocks between metal plates, the researchers were able to determine which organisms are capable of surviving different pressures caused by asteroid impacts and ejection into space. Ultimately, they discovered that a wide range of organisms would be capable of surviving impacts on Mars or Earth.

"Our results enlarge the number of potential organisms that might be able to reseed a planetary surface after early very large impact events, and suggest that such a re-seeding scenario on a planetary surface is possible with diverse organisms," the researchers report.

The research is detailed in the Spring 2008 issue of the journal Astrobiology.

Leaving science behind

2008-05-16T06:23:00.003+05:30

It is a cruel and poignant certainty that the children who died in the wreckage of their school during the earthquake this week in Dujiangyan, China, knew all too well that their country once led the world in the knowledge of the planet's seismicity.

They would have been taught, and proudly, that almost 2,000 years ago an astronomer named Chang Heng invented the world's first seismoscope. It was a bizarrely imagined creation, with its centerpiece a large bronze vessel surrounded by eight dragons, each holding a sphere in its mouth.

A complex system of internal levers ensured that if an earthquake ever disturbed the vessel, a ball would drop from a dragon's care into the mouth of a bronze frog positioned underneath. By observing which dragon had dropped its ball, Chang Heng could ascertain the location of the quake. And always, as the emperor for whom Chang Heng fashioned the device noted, the earthquakes came from the mountains in the west, where Dujiangyan lies.

As we watch with mounting melancholy the devastation from Sichuan, a question lingers, and troublingly. Why, if the Chinese had come to know so much about earthquakes so early on in their immensely long history, were they never able to minimize the effects of the world's contortions - to at least the degree that America has? Why did they leave the West to become leaders in the field, and leave themselves to become mired, time and again, in the kind of tragic events that we are witnessing this week?

The question applies to very much more than the science of earthquakes. In almost every area of technology the Chinese were once supreme, without competition. The stirrup, so hugely important in peace and war, was invented by the Chinese. Printing, gunpowder, the use of the compass - the three inventions that Francis Bacon once said defined the modern world - are all thought to have been first made in China. So too, many think, were vaccination, toilet paper, segmental arch bridges, iron chains and perhaps chess - the list seems endless.

And yet, in the 16th century China's innovative energies inexplicably withered away, and modern science became the virtual monopoly of the West. There had been any number of Chinese Euclids and Archimedes but there was never to be a Chinese Newton or Galileo. The realm fell steadily behind, century by century; it became impoverished, backward and prey to the caprices of nature.

There is a peculiar paradox in the Sichuan disaster. Dujiangyan is known as the site of one of China's greatest ancient wonders. In 256 B.C. an engineer named Li Bing, concerned about the catastrophic annual flooding of the Min River, completed a huge water diversion and irrigation scheme. It involved cutting a long trench through a granite mountainside - achieved by burning grass bonfires on top of the rocks and pouring cold water until the granite cracked. It took decades, but Li Bing's 2,300-year-old project still stands less than a mile from the town's ruined school, and it still works.

And yet, did the Chinese continue with their early expertise in flood prevention? Just as with Chang Heng's seismic mastery, Li Bing's expertise counted for nothing; year upon year, thousands of Chinese die in immense inundations in the great rivers that course across the country; some 400 dams sustained damage in this week's quake.

Historians have long debated why the Chinese so signally failed to exploit their early promise. Lack of internal competition, some suggest. Others blame the long-held central ambition of every young Chinese man to become a Confucian mandarin, a bureaucrat, rather than an engineer or scientist.

Not a few others, however - admirers of China and optimists in the main - say that in the long sweep of Chinese history, a mere 400 or 500 dark, non-scientific years are a mere blip, a hiccup, and that China's innovative energies are now roaring back, with the universities and scientific institutions brimming as they did back in the golden ages of the great dynasties.

That had better be the case. China, in its headlong attempts to modernize, has often demonstrated a dismayingly cavalier attitude toward the well-being of its people: Skyscrapers are built with little attention to safety standards and are invariably far from earthquake-resistant; huge dams - not least the monstrosity that has so ruined the Three Gorges of the Yangtze - are erected in a slapdash fashion; subways, like the system burrowing through the waterlogged alluvium beneath Shanghai, are built with incautious haste; freeway tunnels are bored through earthquake fault zones.

If the country does not occasionally stand back and pause for breath, then its future - at least so far as nature's occasional moments of seismic madness are concerned - will continue to be marked by calamity. Until this week Dujiangyan was a place of which China could be proud; today its wreckage stands as a tragic monument to a culture that turned its back on its remarkable and glittering history.

Source : International Herald Tribune

New variant of rare flower found in Camerons

2008-05-14T16:09:00.002+05:30

CAMERON HIGHLANDS: It is a plant with an awful stench but its beauty is enough to stop nature-lovers in their tracks.

The Amorphophallus bufo, a rare species found in tropical and sub-tropical areas, sparked interest when news of its discovery here broke last year.

But there is fresh excitement now with the sighting of a new variant with reddish and pinkish flowers.

Local environmentalist and orchid enthusiast Embi Abdullah, 60, said he and his friend N. Madi were trekking when they spotted the reddish bloom in the jungles of Gunung Jasar, Tanah Rata, here.

Most Amorphophallus bufo flowers were brown with white spots, he said.

Within just a week, Embi and several others came across a colony of more than 10 of the plants, five of them in bloom.

“You only get to see these flowers once every five or six years,” Embi said in Brinchang here.

He added that the highlands Amorphophallus bufo, measuring about 1.5m in height, was unusually tall and dwarfed other Amorphophallus species.

“The Amorphophallus is also a plant found in warmer lowlands, so the Cameron Highlands species is even more unique,” he added.

Embi said a group of them planned to approach the district officer or the state forestry department with a proposal to set up an Amorphophallus conservatory.

“The Amorphophallus might have some medicinal value and the conservatory could be used for research and maybe tourism purposes.

“In India, the tuber of one Amorphophallus species has even been used as food,” he added.

The group also hoped to consult fellow environmentalist Datuk Seri Lim Chong Keat, who recently led a group of scientists in finding another variety of the plant during a Forest Research Institute of Malaysia expedition.

Source : TheStar online

Frog With No Lungs Found

2008-04-12T08:25:00.003+05:30

A frog has been found in a remote part of Indonesia that has no lungs and breathes through its skin, a discovery that researchers said Thursday could provide insight into what drives evolution in certain species.

The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis was found in a remote part of Indonesia's Kalimantan province on Borneo island during an expedition in August 2007, said David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. Bickford was part of the trip and co-authored a paper on the find that appeared in this week's edition of the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology.

Bickford said the species is the first frog known to science without lungs and joins a short list of amphibians with this unusual trait, including a few species of salamanders and a wormlike creature known as a caecilian.

"These are about the most ancient and bizarre frogs you can get on the planet," Bickford said of the brown amphibian with bulging eyes and a tendency to flatten itself as it glides across the water.

"They are like a squished version of Jabba the Hutt," he said, referring to the character from Star Wars. "They are flat and have eyes that float above the water. They have skin flaps coming off their arms and legs."
Bickford's Indonesian colleague, Djoko Iskandar, first came across the frog 30 years ago and has been searching for it ever since. He didn't know the frog was lungless until they cut eight of the specimens open in the lab.

Graeme Gillespie, director of conservation and science at Zoos Victoria in Australia, called the frog "evolutionarily unique." He said the eight specimens examined in the lab showed the lunglessness was consistent with the species and not "a freak of nature." Gillespie was not a member of the expedition or the research team.

Bickford surmised that the frog had evolved to adapt to its difficult surroundings, in which it has to navigate cold, rapidly moving streams that are rich in oxygen.
"It's an extreme adaptation that was probably brought about by these fast-moving streams," Bickford said, adding that it probably needed to reduce its buoyancy in order to keep from being swept down the mountainous rivers.

He said the frog could help scientists understand the environmental factors that contribute to "extreme evolutionary change" since its closest relative in the Philippines and other frogs have lungs.

Bickford and Gillespie said the frog's discovery adds urgency to the need to protect its river habitat, which in recent years has become polluted due to widespread illegal logging and gold mining. Once-pristine waters are now brown and clogged with silt, they said.

"The gold mining is completely illegal and small scale. But when there are thousands of them on the river, it really has a huge impact," Bickford said. "Pretty soon the frogs will run out of the river."

Source : Associated Press

Aubergine - Uncharted powers?

2008-04-11T06:19:00.003+05:30

The glossy purple aubergine (called baingun in India) is a family component of Indian curries, Greek moussakas and French ratatouille. The raw vegetable contains 15 Calories per 100g (3.5oz), but its calorific value rises steeply when it is fried: the same portion cooked in oil contains more than 300 Calories because of the extraordinary amounts of fat absorbed.

The aubergine is native to India, but was also a common food in China as long ago as 600 BC, when it was called the Malayan purple melon. Chinese ladies of the time used it as a beauty aid, staining their teeth black with a dye made from its skin. The first varieties that English-speakers came across probably bore egg-shaped fruits - hence its other name of eggplant.

The aubergine was both prized and feared when it was introduced to Spain by Arab traders during the Middle Ages. For centuries it was valued only as an exotic ornament in Europe because eating it was thought to provoke bad breath, madness, leprosy and even cancer.
In African folk medicine, however, the aubergine has long been used to treat epilepsy and convulsions. In South-east Asia it is still used to treat measles and stomach cancer, although there is no scientific evidence that supports its use as a cancer treatment.

Arthritis and copper bracelets

2008-04-10T09:22:00.003+05:30

There are around 200 kinds of arthritis, the two most common being osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. People with osteoarthritis should improve their diet by cutting down on highly refined and processed foods, saturated animal fats, sugar and salt, and by eating more wholegrain cereals and fresh fruit and vegetables. A healthy diet boosts the immune system and provides the sufferer with extra energy to fight the disease.

Many people who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis claim that wearing a copper bracelet reduces their discomfort. However, research into this controversial area has come up with no scientific explanation. It is thought that if wearers believe in the power of such bracelets to help them, then this belief may trigger some form of self-healing. Medical science called this type of self-healing effect generated by our own feelings and thinking as 'placebo'.

Dogs in the air

2008-04-09T17:50:00.004+05:30

A pet owner must research the many requirements before taking a dog on an airplane. Different airlines have slightly different regulations, but most airlines follow the same basic set of rules in regards to flying with a dog.

One universal rule is that dogs cannot fly on a plane without the owner on board. Each airline that was contacted for this article has a rule that outlaws flying unaccompanied dogs from one point to another. Realize that the airline considers dogs to be cargo. Just as you are not allowed to send your luggage across the country without also being present, same thing goes when it comes to your dog. The intent of each rule is slightly different (it's unlikely that a bomb would be inside of a dog), but the bottom line is that the airlines to not want to be responsible for your dog. However, if you absolutely must transport your dog without being present, you can contact a licensed and approved pet transportation company to get the job done for you.

Before you even go to the airport, you need to make an appointment with your veterinarian. All airlines mandate that every dog that boards the plane must receive a full physical examination and be tested for various diseases (rabies is their main concern) prior to boarding. Usually the airline will want the exam certificate be dated within 30 to 60 days prior to the date of the flight, so the exam you had last year will not work for a flight you plan on taking next week.

Also, be aware of weather restrictions. These might be a big inconvenience, but they are in place to ensure the safety of your pet. The cargo area on an airplane can be incredibly hot. Because of this, there are restrictions on what times of the year dogs are allowed to travel to and from certain regions. Virtually all airlines will as well enforce weather and temperature related restrictions. For instance, if the temperature in the arrival or departure city is hotter than 85 degrees Fahrenheit, pets will not be permitted on the plane. Do not argue with the airline staff, because this is for your dog's safety.

Many airlines are currently allowing pets to be transported in the cabin of the plane, as long as they can comfortably fit into the in-cabin kennel cage (usually 22" long by 9"). The price of this service varies by airline but is usually under $100.00. This is considerably cheaper in comparison to the pets flying in the cargo hold which is not as safe and which can cost upwards of $300.00 on some airlines.

When flying internationally, be aware that the customs laws of many countries prohibit the entrance of dogs across their borders. Airlines are required to comply with these laws, and in many cases your dog will not be able to join you on an international flight at all.

Is leaving a cell phone on dangerous to planes?

2008-04-07T15:32:00.003+05:30

One of the final hurdles preventing Europeans from chit-chatting on their cell phones while hurtling through Euro airspace has been cleared, as UK regulator Ofcom, has given the OK for cell phones to be used on planes, as long as they're above 3,000 meters. (Many of the other approvals required across Europe have already been granted.)

While the idea of airborne cell phone usage has been a public disaster in the U.S., Europeans seem somewhat warmer to the notion. Perhaps it's the generally shorter flights that tend to dominate Europe, or perhaps it's cultural: Cramped, loud buses and subways tend to be the norm, so the additional noise of a few people on their phones may tend to bother Europeans less than it does their privacy-and-silence-obsessed American counterparts.

Just because Ofcom has signed off, though, that doesn't mean that cell phones will immediately start being whipped out as soon as that 10,000-foot bell chimes en route to Grenoble. It's up to individual airlines now to decide whether they want to offer cell phone in-flight services, and then they have to install the equipment on their planes to make it work. Europe's Aviation Safety Agency also has to approve any new equipment installed on planes (though this is not seen as a major obstacle; all new electronics devices installed on jets have to be approved in this manner). It's also worth noting that no airline has formally applied for permission to offer such services yet, though this is probably just a matter of time.

Of course, in the U.S., no such plans are underway, though those hopeful for getting Internet access while airborne are in for a treat. This week, the FAA approved plans for American Airlines to offer in-flight Wi-Fi service, and that approval can potentially be applied to any U.S. airline that wants to offer the same type of technology (provided by Aircell). No news on a date when such services will be turned on, but many are hoping to have live Wi-Fi rolled out on at least a few planes by the end of the year.

Dousing the flames

2008-04-06T17:22:00.004+05:30

To fight fires more effectively the Greek inventor Ctesibius, who lived in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, devised a pump to replace buckets of water, This was bettered four centuries later by the inventor Hero whose hand powered pistons forced water through a pipe and a nozzle. Emperor Augustus created the world's first fire brigade in Rome in AD6, with 7000 vigiles.

Coordinated fire-fighting was rare in Roman and medieval Britain. But from the 13th century some towns required householders to own equipment - after 1574 the inhabitants of Winchester had to bring their buckets of water to quench fires. The Great Fire of London 1666, which left more than 100 000 homeless, showed the need for a more effective system.

The City of London council made provision for men to patrol the city looking for blazes, but did not see the need to organise fire-fighting. That was left to insurance companies, who established private fire brigades. The first, set up by the Phoenix Fire Office in 1684, was probably staffed by watermen.

A lever-operated pump mounted on a carriage was built in Germany in 1518, and by 1632 there was a fire engine in use in London. In 1712 John Grey and Nicholas Mandell patented a pump fitted with an air vessel, which produced a continuous jet. Long hoses, used from 1672 in Holland, were introduced into England in 1688.

John Braithwaite and John Ericsson increased the force of the jet with their 1829 steam fire engine. It was cumbersome and slow, and manual pumps continued to be used until motorised fire engines were invented in 1910.

Your footwear may reveal your personality

2008-04-05T09:49:00.002+05:30

Got a passion for buying sneakers? It could be a good sign, with a poll finding that people who buy three pairs of sneakers or more a year are far more likely to be a leadership type that other people.

Mindset Media, a media company that examines personality traits of different consumers, found that people who buy more than three pairs of sneakers a year are 61 percent more likely to have the qualities of a modern leader.

These qualities were defined as having ideas and vision, and a style with others that is both inclusive and decisive.

The survey of 7,500 people, using market research group Nielsen's online panel, found multi-sneaker buyers were 50 percent more likely to be very assertive and 47 percent more likely to be spontaneous.

Lauren Arvonio, a spokeswoman for Mindset Media, said sneaker buyers were more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.

"It is often said you can tell a lot about a person by the shoes they wear, and now we have some hard data to back that up," Arvonio told Reuters.

"What is interesting is that these personality traits held true across the board, regardless of age, income, or gender."

Previous Mindset Media surveys found that people who pay their credit card bills off each month were more likely to be "highly deliberate," thinking through their actions, but also less modest than others, likely to brag about their habits.

Hybrid car owners were found to be 78 percent more likely to be highly creative than other people and less dogmatic.

Source : Reuters

Human-Animal Embryos Announced in U.K.

2008-04-03T17:17:00.006+05:30

For the first time in Britain, researchers at Newcastle University in northern England said Tuesday they had created human-animal hybrid embryos, amid a political row over a disputed embryo research bill in parliament.

According to the university, the research, which was first presented at a lecture in Tel Aviv on March 25, has yet to be published or verified, with a spokesman for the university saying that the institution "wouldn't claim it to be final at all."

The revelation comes with British MPs engaged in a fierce battle over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, which allows the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's governing Labor Party conceded in March that its party lawmakers with moral or ethical objections would be allowed to vote against parts of the proposed legislation when it comes before parliament this year.

The embryos were created by injecting DNA taken from human skin cells into eggs derived from cow ovaries with almost all their genetic material stripped away, and lasted for three days in a laboratory.

The Newcastle University spokesman said that the research would likely be published in "months rather than weeks."

At present, researchers wanting to create such embryos have to apply for a license from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which currently regulates the practice in Britain, and hybrid embryos have to be destroyed after 14 days.

The government says that the scientific advantages of allowing the creation of hybrid embryos for research purposes could help millions of people to recover from illness or disease.

Religious leaders, however, have argued against the bill, with the leader of Catholics in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, using his Easter Sunday sermon to brand the bill a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life" which will allow experiments of "Frankenstein proportion".

Source : AFP

Dig Begins at Stonehenge Site

2008-04-02T14:37:00.004+05:30

Some of England's most sacred soil was disturbed for the first time in more than four decades as archaeologists worked to solve the enduring riddle of Stonehenge: When and why was the prehistoric monument built?

The excavation project, which started Monday and is set to last until April 11, is designed to unearth materials that can be used to establish a firm date for when the first mysterious set of bluestones was put in place at Stonehenge, one of Britain's best known and least understood landmarks.

The World Heritage site, a favorite with visitors the world over, has become popular with Druids, neo-Pagans and New Agers who attach mystical significance to the strangely shaped circle of stones, but there remains great debate about the actual purpose of the structure.

The dig will be led by Timothy Darvill, a leading Stonehenge scholar from Bournemouth University, and Geoffrey Wainwright, president of the Society of Antiquaries. Both experts have worked to pinpoint the site in the Preseli Mountains in south Wales where the bluestones -- the earliest of the large rocks erected at the site -- came from. They will be able to compare the samples found in Wales to those at Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain.

"The excavation will date the arrival of the bluestones following their 153-mile journey from Preseli to Salisbury Plain and contribute to our definition of the society which undertook such an ambitious project," Wainright said. "We will be able to say not only why, but when the first stone monument was built."

Scientists believe the bluestones were first put in place about 2600 B.C., but they concede the date is only an approximation at best. The original bluestones were removed about 200 years later and scientists hope to find bits of them embedded in the earth.

Darvill said the excavation marks the first opportunity to bring the power of modern scientific archaeology to bear on a problem that has taxed the minds of so many experts since medieval times: Why were the bluestones so important to have warranted bringing them from so far away?

The excavation goal is to find remnants of the original bluestones, or related materials, that can be subjected to modern radiocarbon dating techniques to establish a more precise timeline for the construction of Stonehenge, said Dave Batchelor, an archaeologist with English Heritage, which oversees the Stonehenge site.

"We have to find the material that will give us a good date," he said. "That's where the luck comes in. We could get an absolute blank or we could get something magnificent or we could get something in between."

He said bluestones have an "inky, bluey, black" appearance and come from the Preseli Mountains in South Wales. About 6 feet tall, they are the smaller stones that make up part of the monument, alongside the larger sarsen stones, which are about twice as tall and were added later.

Source : Discovery News

Installing Freeware Wisely

2008-03-30T18:49:00.004+05:30

Though one cannot be 100 per cent safe, there are some simple rules one can follow while installing freeware, or any software for that matter, to ensure that spyware applications do not
install themselves on your computer.

Download software only from trusted and reliable sources. If at any point you are unsure about the legitimacy or the trustworthiness of a download source, it would be advisable to look elsewhere.
Though it can be a pain, it is definitely worth the while to read the Terms of Agreement of the software. Look for sentences like “When you agree to these terms you agree to allow third party software to be installed on your computer.” Immediately avoid such programs.
If you really want to install a software you downloaded, but are not sure of its integrity, you should ask someone who knows more about the subject. Even a simple Google search should bring up some answers. The golden rule is: only install software the contents of which you’re sure of.
Spam is one of the leading sources of spyware. A large amount of spyware (posing as Trojans) is spread through e-mail.
Use your discretion and a general sense of caution when clicking on Internet ads (if you do). A lot of banner ads have buttons that say “Cancel” or “No” that you’re prompted to click if you don’t want the product they offer. Do ~not~ click that button! More often than not, doing that will take you to another ad site. If you are unsure about what to do, just close your browser window.
Everyone needs pop-up blockers, and luckily, most new versions of popular browsers have pop-up blockers already inbuilt. It is advisable to install the latest version of your Web browser.

Germ-phobia and death rays

2008-03-29T18:50:00.006+05:30

In the scientific world, Nikola Tesla is remembered principally for his work on the rotating magnetic field, which made possible the alternating-current generators that supply most of the world with electricity today. In honour of this achievement a scientific unit was named after him. The 'tesla' does not often crop up in layman's conversation, however, as it is used to calculate the force of a magnetic field. His name is also immortalised in the Tesla coil, a device that allows a transformer to generate high frequency current at a very high voltage. It is still used in televisions, radios and other modern electronic devices. He invented the coil in the course of his work on alternating current in 1891.

In later years Tesla was something of a solitary eccentric, often to be seen walking to the New York Public Library from his hotel, where his room had to serve as his laboratory. Although he developed a phobia for germs, it appears he did not suspect the city's pigeons of being carriers of disease; watching pleasures in life.

Peacemaking weapon

Occasionally Tesla would emerge from his hotel-room with announcements of discoveries and inventions that people found increasingly hard to take seriously. In 1934, for example, he told the press that he had devised a deathray. This was to be the ultimate deterrent that would put an end to war. It consisted of a beam of high-velocity particles that would destroy squadrons of enemy aircraft at a range of 400 km (250 miles). The details of this weapon were never disclosed.

A matter of give and take

2008-03-27T17:27:00.006+05:30

Most flowering plants produce seeds that have a built-in food supply to help the young seedling in the early stages of its life. But the orchid Dactylorchis purpurella is an exception. Its seeds are so tiny that there is no room for a food store. The seed of this flower survives only because of its relationship with a particular kind of fungus, which feeds it and helps it to germinate.

The fungus, a species of the Rhizoctonia family, penetrates the seed and provides it with nutrients from the soil until it has grown leaves that can produce their own food through photosynthesis. As the orchid develops, the fungus takes nourishment from the orchid's roots. The two plants live side by side, in what at first appears to be a mutually beneficial relationship.

But as the orchid takes the nutrients it needs, it actually eats away at the fungus. Eventually, when the orchid can depend on its leaves to provide enough food, it devours its life-giving partner completely.

Living dangerously

2008-03-24T17:45:00.004+05:30

The Dangerous Sports Club is a group of eccentrics based in Oxford, England, who endeavour to 'act boldly in timorous, over-protected world'. 'Acting boldly' to the Dangerous Sports Club means acting like madmen to most other people. Why else would David Kirke, one of the club's founding members, have hurled himself from the Royal Gorge Bridge in 1982, 320 m (1030 ft) above the Arkansas River in Colorado? He was attached to the bridge by a length of elasticated cord tied to his ankles. At 260 m (860 ft) the cord was stretched to its limits, and so was Kirke: virtually unconscious, he dangled for over two hours before his companions could haul him back to the bridge.

Grabbing the bull by the horns

History is full of such daredevils. The 'bull leapers' of ancient Crete, for example, used to grab the horns of a charging bull and somersault over its back. These were the forerunners of circus acts such as Hugo Zacchini, a Californian, whose fame was due as much to his showmanship as to his acrobatic skills. In 1929, Zacchini was shot from the mouth of a cannon, propelled by compressed air. He travelled over 40 m (135 ft) through the air at a speed of 130 km/h (80 mph). In the 1870s, the American circus performer John Holtum would catch cannonballs fired at point-blank range - in his own hands.

But death-defying acts can go wrong. The escapologist Harry Houdini used to invite people to punch him hard in the stomach, resisting the blow by tensing his muscles. On October 22, 1926, however, Houdini was struck in the stomach before he had time to prepare himself, and died six days later of a ruptured appendix.

Circus folk perform their dangerous deeds to make money. But people like George Willig, who climbed up the outside of the World Trade Center in New York in 1977 without ropes, or Jaromir Wagner, the Czech who flew the Atlantic strapped to the pylon of a light aircraft in 1980, have no other motive than a love of danger.

Cause for celebration

2008-03-23T15:17:00.004+05:30

Children receive gits of chocolate coffins bearing their own names, sugar skulls grin merrily, and families enjoy picnics in the cemetery to sing and chat to the corpses there. There are all part of the extraordinary festivities that take place on Mexico's El Dia de los Muertas, the Day of the Dead.

Mexicans believe that on this day the dead return briefly to the land of the living - and since their visit is but a short one, they deserve a joyful reception.

The Day of the Dead - held on what other countries call All Souls' Day - is no more than an enjoyable reminder of the brevity and insignificance of life. The Mexican author Octavio Paz even goes as far as to say that: 'The Mexican frequents death, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it.'

Such an attitude has its roots deep in Mexico's history. Between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, long before the rise of the Aztec civilisation there, the Totonaca Indians believed that the 'underworld' of the dead was a parallel world to this. A dead person would repeat his previous existence, even marry the same partner as before. Dying was nothing to be feared; and, as if to prove it, the Totonaca god of death was always portrayed as a skeleton wearing a broad grin.

Saved in the nick of time

2008-03-21T08:09:00.005+05:30

The Arabian oryx, once extinct in the wild, has been given a second chance

Among the horned heads of deer and antelope with which hunters used so proudly to decorate their walls, pride of place in many collections went to a noble-looking animal with a black and white face and two long, slightly curving horns: the Arabian oryx. In antiquity, this creature was revered by the Arabs, who bound its horns together, creating the original unicorn.

For centuries the oryx had been a prized trophy for hunters living in the Arabian peninsula. A tough and elusive antelope, it was hard to track down on horseback in the desert, and to kill one with primitive firearms was considered a high test of manhood.

The oryx has remarkable stamina, migrating over vast tracts of desert in search of new feeding grounds, but it is not a fast runner. Against a new breed of hunter, armed with an automatic rifle and riding in a four-wheel-drive vehicle or even a light plane, it stood no chance. The animal was hunted to extinction in the wild, the last one being shot in October 1972.

Luckily, some far-sighted conservationists had prepared for this eventuality. They had started 'Operation Oryx' in the early 1960s, breeding a captive herd in the United States from animals brought in from the Arabian peninsula. By 1975, this herd was over 100 strong, while zoos and private collections in the Middle East had preserved a similar number of captive animals.

In 1980, five oryx were flown to Oman from the San Diego Zoo. To allow them to become acclimatised and establish their identity as a herd, they were kept in an enclosure for nearly two years, during which time five more animals were added to their number.

Success story

This caution was rewarded, for, since their release, they have survived and bred. Now, with the support of local people, the Arabian oryx is a wild animal again, its future safe in the hands of those who once hunted it.

Going over the top

2008-03-20T08:17:00.006+05:30

On the afternoon of October 24, 1901, several thousand people watched as a large wooden barrel careered through violent rapids towards Niagara's Horseshoe Falls. Swept along by the current, the cask disappeared over the edge. Seconds later the barrel rose up to the surface in the calmer waters 54 m (160 ft) below: it had survived its battering. And miraculously, for the fist time in Niagara's long history of daredevils, so had its passenger.

Strapped and cushioned inside, school teacher Anna Edson Taylor had just celebrated her 43rd birthday with a death-defying plunge into the history books. Taylor was shocked and badly shaken and had a gash in her head; but she was alive, conscious, and within a few days had fully recovered.

Anna Taylor's bravery did not bring her the cascade of riches she had hoped, and she died penniless in 1921. She is buried in a 'stunters' section of Niagara Falls' Oakwood cemetery, remembered still as the first person - and only woman ever - to survive the Niagara fall. Her advice to potential imitators was: 'Don't try it!'

Spelling out our ABC

2008-03-19T19:09:00.006+05:30

We often say that things are 'as easy as ABC', but if it hadn't been for the Phoenicians, we might not have an alphabet at all. And without the ancient Greeks - who adapted the Phoenician alphabet before passing it on to us - all our letters would would be back to front.

It is thought that the Greeks first encountered the alphabet around 1000 BC through trade with the Phoenicians, who inhabited what is now Lebanon. The Phoenicians wrote from right to left. When the Greeks borrowed their script, they experimented with boustrophedon (meaning 'plough-wise') writing: changing direction line by line, like an ox pulling a plough. Eventually, the Greeks settled on writing from left to right, and so their letters were mirror images of the Phoenician originals.

To adapt the alphabet to their own needs, the Greeks had to use some of the Phoenician letters in a different way. The Phoenicians only wrote down their consonants, leaving the reader to fill in the vowel sounds. But vowels had a far greater significance in Greek - for example, certain words could only be distinguished from others by placing the correct vowel at the beginning.

Spare letters

Fortunately, Phoenician had several letters for consonant sounds that were not used in the Greek language, so the Greeks used these letters for vowels. The order of the Phoenician alphabet was, by and large, kept on, as were most of the names of the letters: aleph, beth and gimel for example, became alpha, beta and gamma. The Romans, in turn, adapted the Greek alphabet for the Latin language, and are responsible for the shape of the alphabet as we know today.

Giants of the hills

2008-03-18T07:29:00.004+05:30

Great figures are incised into the turf of chalk hillsides in many parts of Britain. Some, such as the Uffington Horse [374 feet (110 m)] in Oxon formerly Berks (above), were probably created by Celts around 1000 BC. The horse may represent a god or be the badge of a tribe that worshipped horses.

The male figure at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, long associated with fertility, is thought to be some 1500 years old. According to local lore it is the outline of a giant who terrorised the area, stealing sheep, until the people killed him while he slept, preserving his shape by cutting a line around his body.

Journey to Mecca

2008-03-16T18:49:00.005+05:30

Every year, at the start of the last month - called Zil-Hijjah in Arabic - of the Muslim calendar, almost 2.5 million people journey to the east coast of Saudi Arabia for the hadj (al-Hajj in Arabic), the holy pilgrimage to Mecca which all devout Muslims should, if they can, perform once in their lifetime. This host of visitors comes from every corner of the globe where Islam is practised, an astonishing mixture of nationalities.

The city of Mecca was the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, in AD 570, and it was he who decreed it should a site of Muslim pilgrimage. The focus of the pilgrimage is the sanctuary of the Kaaba, a cube-shaped building in Mecca which, according to Muslim tradition, was built by Abraham. (It is towards the Kaaba that all Muslims, no matter where in the world they are, turn to pray five times - Fajr, Zohr, Asr, Mughrib and Esha - every day.) Especially holy is the sacred black stone - Hajr-e-Aswad - set into one wall of the building by Muhammad. As the first and last acts of their pilgrimage, all Muslims visit the Kaaba and walk around it seven times; those who can get close enough to the black stone kiss or touch it as they pass by, but because of the crowds most have to be content with waving in its direction. The principal days of ceremony, prayer and meditation are those between the 7th and 10th of the month - and for much of this period, all the pilgrims must be in the same place at the same time.

The annual hadj is an extraordinary feat of organisation. The sheer numbers of people involved pose enormous problems of health, transport and policing. A vast air-conditioned tent city is erected to house the visitors, who outnumber the ordinary inhabitants of Mecca by three to one.

Yet despite the problems, the pilgrimage is becoming ever more popular. The pilgrim (Hadji) returns to his own country with new honour, having fulfilled one of the most sacred obligations of his faith.

Sick of the sea

2008-03-15T08:04:00.005+05:30

Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson - British admiral famous for his participation in the Napoleonic Wars, most notably in the Battle of Trafalgar - paid a heavy price for his courage and determination. He lost an eye, an arm and ultimately his life while serving his country. But, perhaps surprisingly for Britain's greatest sailor, he suffered throughout life from seasickness.

He endured five months of seasickness on his very first voyage. And as late as 1801 - 30 years after his first voyage - he wrote of 'a heavy sea, sick to death . . .. I shall never get over [it].' Yet he was not deterred from a naval career.

Seamen were constantly exposed to deprivation, malnutrition and disease. And Nelson was as prone to them as the next sailor. During a voyage to the Caribbean in 1780. Nelson and 87 of his crew came down with yellow fever, fewer than ten survived.

Among other ailments, Nelson suffered from recurrent malaria, scurvy, temporary paralysis and possibly tuberculosis. He also frequently suffered from depression - hardly surprisingly, considering his medical history.

Height of jealousy

2008-03-13T19:31:00.004+05:30

Shorter men are more likely to be jealous husbands and boyfriends than their taller counterparts, suggests a fascinating research, which may finally have proof for the controversial 'Napoleon complex'.

The studies, reported in the New Scientist journal, believes it reflects insecurities among men who are not society's "ideal" height. The much-talked about 'short man syndrome' is a phenomenon where short men compensate for their lack of height by inculcating aggressive tendencies, often associated with Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler and Attila the Hun.

In the study carried out by the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, researchers asked men and women how jealous they were in their current relationships.

In another similar study, involving 119 male and 230 female students, the participants were quizzed on their reaction if they saw their girlfriend, or boyfriend, flirting with a stranger. The findings suggested that shorter men were far more likely to say they were jealous than taller ones.

"Taller men tended to be less jealous, and the tallest men were the least jealous," the Daily Mail of Britain quoted the researchers, led by Dr Abraham Buunk, as saying. Among the women, average sized females were the least jealous- while tall and short women were the most.

Repeated studies have shown that women rate taller men as more attractive and powerful than shorter ones, while men prefer "average" women, usually who are a couple of inches shorter than them in height.

The trains that drive themselves

2008-03-12T08:36:00.006+05:30

In 1910, the world's first fully operational driverless railway opened below the streets of Munich. Although the train carried no passenger, only mail for the Post Office, it was hailed as having revolutionary implications for the future of rail travel in general.

Decades later, despite the use of modern technology - closed-circuit televisions to monitor the movement of passengers on both the train and the platform, and microprocessors that can perform all the tasks of a human crew on a conventional train - just 20 passenger-carrying railways around the world use automatic trains and only a few of these are completely unmanned. An attendant is usually on board to control doors, start the train and cope in an emergency.

Why is it that such a labour-saving and therefore economical system has had such little success? Research shows that passengers are reluctant to travel on trains without drivers because they fear they are not safe. But, since the first fully automatic unmanned system was introduced, in Lille, France, in 1983, the indications are that these trains are as safe as - if not safer than - those with drivers. Once an automatic computerised system detects an object on the line, for example, it can operate the emergency brake far faster than the most alert driver.

Village calls off marriages after cow's death

2008-03-11T19:14:00.005+05:30

It can only happen in incredible India. All marriages have been put on the hold in a Madhya Pradesh ( a province) village after a cow died. Local custom and belief decree that till such time there's a marriage in the family that owned the cow, no marriage can take place in the community. There's a problem though: There is nobody of marriageable age in the household.

The story begins four months ago when a villager, Chandan Dhanak, while coaxing his cow, Sona (gold), to get inside the cowshed, hit her with a cane. Sona dropped dead, leaving Dhanak, his family and the entire village stupefied. Convinced that Sona died because of a curse, Dhanak and his son have gone on pilgrimage and done Gangasnan (holy dip in river Ganges - a sacred river for Hindus), not once but thrice.

Despite his act of penitence, people in Chhapara village, 82 km from Vidisha district town and 40 km from capital city Bhopal, are not convinced. They insist that the curse can be shaken off only after a marriage is solemnised in the Dhanak household. Meanwhile, ever since Sona's death, all marriages that had been fixed have been postponed.

Vidisha district is known for its conservative society where tradition rules over modernity. So, although the panchayat (a village assembly) has not endorsed the collective community decision, the people say it is the right thing to do. "This is an ancient convention and nothing can change our view," said a villager.

Dhanak has been pleading with the villagers not to postpone or put off their children's marriages, but in vain. Nor is anybody willing to relax the rules of the 'ancient convention' and thus spare him from solemnising a marriage in his house, regardless of the fact that there is nobody in the family whose marriage can be immediately solemnised.

Dhanak finds himself in a fix as his elder daughter and son are already married and his younger daughter is only 15. Village Sarpanch (judge) Balbir Singh, in an effort to resolve the piquant situation, has come up with a solution: He has suggested that the marriage of Dhanak's granddaughter (his elder daughter's child) could be solemnised to break the curse. She is 20 years old.

Singh told The Pioneer that in spite of his efforts to root out superstition, the villagers remain rooted in their beliefs. "These will go with time. I know superstitions are stumbling blocks for society to develop, but they cannot be removed overnight," he added.

Deputy Director of Social Justice Department PC Rajak said there were no marriages in the village in the last marriage season. After this, he contacted Singh who has come up with a possible solution. According to Rajak, if all goes fine, "Dhanak's grand daughter's marriage will be solemnised in the next season".

Source : The Pioneer

The array of senses that make owls supreme night hunters

2008-03-09T08:54:00.006+05:30

The circles of feathers around an owl's eyes do not, as you might expect, help it to see; they help it to hear. Known as facial discs, the circles have tightly packed feathers around their rims. The feathers channel high-frequency sounds, such as the squeak of a mouse, into the owl's ears, which lie behind the discs. They perform essentially the same function as they fleshy external ears of mammals such as rabbits and cats.

With their enormous eyes, owls are particularly well-equipped for hunting in dim light. But their remarkable vision cannot help them in the complete darkness they encounter under trees at night. They then have to rely on their extremely acute hearing.

Owls locate sounds much as we do; a sound from the right reaches the right ear fractionally before it reaches the left, and their brains analyse this tiny difference to give the direction of the sound. In the same way, some species of owl can sense the exact height a sound is coming from, as one of their ears is higher than the other. Owls turn their heads to balance a sound in both ears - this gives them the precise direction of a sound, and allows them to pinpoint their prey with complete accuracy in total darkness.

As if all this was not enough, owls have extremely soft plumage, allowing them to make their final gliding assault in almost complete silence. A mouse scuttling through the undergrowth has very little chance of escape.

Nut hazards

2008-03-08T18:55:00.006+05:30

Avoid eating almonds which have not fully matured as they can contain compounds which produce hydrogen cyanide, a poisonous gas which has a distinctive aroma of bitter almonds. The shells of immature nuts may be slightly softer and are sometimes tinged with green, rather than the normal light brown.

Nuts should be stored in cool, dry conditions because they are prone to contamination with moulds. Some of these produce poisonous substances called mycotoxins, so never eat nuts with any trace of mould on the shell or kernel. In tropical countries, mouldy nuts may contain more dangerous mycotoxins - called aflatoxins - which cause liver cancer. These were identified in England in the 1960s when there was a large outbreak of liver disease in turkeys which had been fed on peanut meal. Peanuts are particularly prone to this form of contamination and, even though those imported into Britain are routinely checked for these moulds, it is safest to eat only peanuts that are sold in packets. Children should never be allowed to eat peanuts sold for use as birdfood.

Choking is one of the greatest hazards posed by nuts: for this reason, children under the age of four, who may not chew their food properly, should never be given nuts unless they have been finely ground.

Allergy alert

Nuts, especially peanuts, are one of the most common food allergens. In exceptional instances nut allergies can be fatal. Fortunately, such serious allergies are extremely rare, but people who are allergic to peanuts have to avoid all foods that contain even the tiniest traces of peanuts or peanut oil. Unfortunately, peanut allergy is normally a life-long condition.

An electrode for your thoughts!

2008-03-07T20:01:00.003+05:30

With a sheet of electrodes placed over the brain, people can quickly learn to move a cursor around a computer screen using their thoughts. Early trials suggest that this new procedure could overtake more established brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
The two established techniques involve inserting electrodes into the brain or attaching them onto the scalp. These approaches have let people control robotic limbs, steer wheelchairs, type messages and walk in virtual worlds using thought alone. BCIs will one day transform the lives of people with disabilities and neurological disorders affecting their ability to move or communicate, says neuroscientist Gerwin Schalk at the Wadsworth Centre, New York State Department of Health, US.
But which method will be best at doing that is still an open question, he says. "The two established sensor methods have fundamental problems that I think will be difficult to overcome."
Electrodes on the scalp can only detect electrical waves that have passed through the skull, producing a weak signal susceptible to interference from mains electricity and other sources. Electrodes implanted directly into the brain produce much clearer signals, but are not well tolerated by the body. "The brain tries to get rid of the electrodes by covering them with a sheet of tissue," explains Schalk. "The signal degrades over time."
Schalk and colleagues at Albany Medical College, Washington University in St Louis, University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, think a third approach will face fewer hurdles.
They cover part of the brain's surface with a polymer sheet containing a grid of electrodes 2 mm in diameter and spaced 10 mm apart, a method called electrocorticography (ECOG). Such electrode grids are often placed in people with severe epilepsy to identify the focus of seizures within the brain. "These grids are thin like a sheet of paper," says Schalk. "The electrodes record signals similar to those recorded by electrodes on the scalp, but with much greater fidelity."
In recent experiments, five patients learned to control a computer cursor in two dimensions on a computer screen using their brain signals. All five acquired this skill in less than 30 minutes, a performance similar to those achieved using electrodes implanted directly into the brain, says Schalk. Learning to control a cursor like this using a scalp-recorded methods takes weeks or months, he adds.
In other studies, the researchers have shown it is possible to read a person's hand and finger movements from their brain using these types of electrodes. Dedicated human trials will require electrode grids designed to be implanted permanently. Researchers at Washington University in St Louis are testing new designs -- developed by colleagues at the University of Wisconsin -- in monkeys, says Schalk.
If those studies work out, their goal is to seek approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for human trials. "Ultimately, these electrode grids could be put in place in a minimally invasive procedure," Schalk says.
"Whether electrocortigraphy will become the prime method of choice for clinical BCI research is very open," says Klaus-Robert Müller, who works on scalp-attached EEG brain-computer interfaces at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany.
Achieving 2D control of a cursor within 20 minutes is a significant result, he says, but although simpler than implanting electrodes into the brain, the approach is still invasive.

Herbal migraine relief

2008-03-05T16:37:00.003+05:30

Feverfew is a herbal remedy for migraine; it cannot stop an attack which has already started but can help to reduce frequency, and in some cases prevent migraines occurring in the first place. Although feverfew is available in tablet form, alternative practitioners find the fresh leaves most effective: you can grow the plant on a window sill. A couple of leaves each day is the recommended dose, but eat them in a sandwich because nibbling on the raw leaves can cause mouth ulcers. Pregnant women should refrain from taking feverfew.

Soaking a towel or flannel in a cool infusion of feverfew, squeezing it out, and laying it across the forehead, may also be soothing.

The 'Accident' of sourdough

2008-03-05T09:15:00.002+05:30

The first raised or leavened bread seems to have been accidental - when airborne wild yeasts found their way into plain wheat dough, expanding it and giving a lighter-textured bread. The Egyptians kept this process going by using a piece of uncooked dough from one batch to start another. Spread by the Romans, this technique led to what is today called sourdough.

The great Trojan war

2008-03-04T18:05:00.007+05:30

The Austrian Police has become the latest European agency to express its intention to use specially-crafted Trojans to remotely monitor criminal suspects. DIRT (Data Interception by Remote Transmission) Trojan, with which law-enforcement agents can secretly monitor a suspect's computer, is the latest on police's cards.

According to reports in Austrian media, the Minister of Justice Maria Berger and Interior Minister Gunther Plater, have drafted a proposal that will be amended by legal experts and the cabinet with the intention of allowing police to carry out such surveillance legally with a judge's warrant.

There doesn't appear to be a defined timescale for such a law and it is not clear whether the move would face the legal challenges encountered by the German authorities in the last year as they attempted to get a similar law off the ground. According to Berger, Trojans would only be used in cases of serious crime, such as terrorism and organised racketeering. The Swiss authorities have declared the intention of using the same controversial technique, but only in cases of the most extreme nature, such as terrorism.

One formidable hurdle is that opinion in the security software industry is almost universally hostile to the idea. You don't have to dig far to find negative reaction.

"I'm sure the Austrian Secret Service will develop some pretty ingenious software to infect users' PCs, but there is a real danger that the package could leak into the hacker community," said Geoff Sweeney of security outfit Tier-3. "That scenario would create a serious free-for-all on the industrial espionage and identity theft fronts as legitimate Trojans are redirected to create an even more hostile environment for organisations to defend against," he said.

The authorities have been keen to portray the use of Trojans as similar to phone-tapping, a long established police practice the world over. However, Trojans are different on one important respect from phones and this is where the anti-malware companies sense trouble.

"How should anti-virus companies react to the existence of such malware? Detect it? Avoid detecting it on purpose? Avoid detecting hacking software used by Governments of which country? Germany, USA, Israel, Egypt, Iran?," commented F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen in a blog earlier this year.

The Austrian, German and Swiss Governments have yet to explain how they would circumvent security programs that might be used by criminals to protect themselves, whether this would involve collusion with security software companies and what would happen if such software-busting Trojans were subsequently reverse engineered and deployed by criminals themselves.

"The anti-virus companies aren't going to turn a blind eye to State-endorsed Trojan horses," said Graham Cluley of Sophos, himself a good barometer of likely industry opinion.

"We're going to add detection for them just like any other spyware. So, if the cybercops think they can give us a funny handshake, a wink and buy us a pint for not adding detection for the Trojan they're using to spy on their suspect they're mistaken.

"The reason why we take that policy is that we can't know if the Trojan has been placed there by the cops or a criminal. It's unlikely that the Trojan will say 'Copyright (c) FBI 2007'," he said.

...so that Taj Mahal get its gleam back

2008-03-03T08:32:00.004+05:30

Archaeologists have started giving a facelift to the centuries-old Taj Mahal by applying a mud pack to the marble exteriors of the country's most famous monument. The procedure, expected to cost Rs 28 lacs (70,000 USD), will restore the gleam to the 17th-century architectural wonder, says Vijay Upadhyay

Known as poetry in white marble, the Taj Mahal has been the centre of environmental debates for decades, which have been focused on the apparent 'yellowing' of the monument's white surface. This is due to the reaction of pollutants with marble that have caused a yellow tinge on the monument.

Though the Archaeological Survey of India has refuted the claims of a 'Yellowing Taj', the effect of the polluted air combined with dust-laden winds from Rajasthan blowing over the monument, has actually drilled microscopic 'pits' in the smooth marble surface, which renders a yellow tinge to the Taj Mahal apparent from a distance.

But this yellow tinge is about to get washed away, as for the second time in the past six years, the Taj is undergoing a monumental beauty treatment that includes an 'exfoliating facewash' after the application of a multani (mooltani) mitti (Fullers' Earth) mud pack, an Ayurvedic beautification recipe known to women in India for ages.

Recently, archaeologists in Agra embarked on a six-month project to clean up every nook and corner of the Taj Mahal's pristine white surface, mixing huge quantities of Fullers' Earth in water to make a thick paste that was then painstakingly applied to a part of the western wall of the monument, to be covered immediately with sheets of paper to allow it to dry completely.

Explaining the reason behind the application of a traditional cleaning method when there were a number of chemical cleaning agents available for such purpose, SK Samadhia, chief chemist (archaeology), Agra said: "The quality of marble used in the Taj Mahal is one of the best stones in the world and it has withstood the rigors of over 300 years without a even a blemish on its surface. But on studying the effect of different chemical cleaning agents, the ASI found that such chemical agents had a long-term degrading effect on the structure of marble. The surface may appear clean, it could become brittle over time."

Samadhia said that contrary to popular belief, the Taj, or any form of white marble, could not become yellow with age unless exposed to strong chemicals or left to collect grime and dirt over time. The Taj was also experiencing an identical condition.

Since it's located on the Rajasthan border, Agra is susceptible to strong dust-storms with tons of yellow silica dust during summer, which accumulated on the surface of the monument, only to be washed away by rain, highlighting the need for a specialised cleaning process for the monument.
But here, another factor came into play. Air pollution around Agra caused occasional acid rains over the city which reacted with the marble causing the formation of microscopic pits into the surface of the monument and some of the dust particles raining on the Taj got stuck in these 'pits', ultimately making it appear yellow due to the accumulation of millions of such sand particles on the marble surface.

When applied evenly in the form of a thick slurry, the Fullers' Earth, which is a form of lime-rich clay, seeps into these pits and adheres to the accumulated sand particles. Left overnight, this 'mud pack' is peeled off before it dries completely, resulting in a complete exfoliation of the monument's surface under the pack.

According to Samadhia, there had been doubts raised by some environmentalists that the application of a mud pack could result in uneven white patches on the Taj's surface. But the mud pack is only being applied in select vertical portions of the monument which remained unaffected by rain, being vertical. At any time, only a small part of the monument will be undergoing the treatment, as unobtrusively to the tourists as possible.

Regarding the effect of the Fullers' Earth, which is a natural bleaching agent, on the marble, he said that it was only after elaborate tests conducted by the chemical branch of the ASI, that the decision to apply the mud pack on the monument had been taken. He claimed that this was not the first time when the monument was undergoing a beauty treatment.

In fact, he said, the first trial of a mud pack was six years back on a small portion of the Taj after which, it was observed for three years. The success of this experiment spurred the ASI into applying the mud pack on the entire monument and this is the second time it is being done.
He said that this work, expected to cost Rs 28 lakh, would continue until late March and resume in January next year for another three months, as the mud pack was best effective in the winter months, whereas in summers, it became completely useless, drying too quickly to enable it to adhere to the sand particles clinging to the marble surface.

Interestingly, the restoration of the Taj had been first suggested by Lord Curzon, British Viceroy of India in the early 20th century, which ultimately laid the foundation of the Archaeological Survey of India, but the real efforts towards restoration of the monument's beauty have only begun in the past decade with the Supreme Court of India ordering a shutdown of polluting industries in the region and also placing a number of restrictions on the automobile traffic in Agra, a move which has resulted in a considerable improvement in the quality of air around the Taj.

Ancient man more mobile than believed

2008-03-01T17:40:00.004+05:30

Analysis of a 40,000-year-old tooth found in southern Greece suggests Neanderthals were more mobile than once believed, paleontologists and the Greek Culture Ministry said.

A part of the first and only Neanderthal remains found in Greece -- showed the ancient human to whom it belonged had spent at least part of its life away from the area where it died.
Paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany said that Neanderthal mobility is highly controversial. Some experts believe Neanderthals roamed over very limited areas, but others say they must have been more mobile, particularly when hunting, Harvati explained.

Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said the tooth analysis provided a rare piece of hard evidence. The findings were published in the journal of Archaeological Science.

The tooth was found in a seaside excavation in Greece's southern Peloponnese region in 2002. The team from the Max Planck Institute, led by Department of Human Evolution professor Mike Richards and Harvati, analysed tooth enamel for ratios of strontium isotope, a naturally occurring metal found in food and water. Levels of the metal vary in different areas. As it is absorbed by the body, an analysis of its levels can show where a person lived.

Eleni Panagopoulou of the Paleoanthropology-Speleology Department of Southern Greece said the levels of strontium isotope found in the tooth showed that this particular Neanderthal grew up in a different area - at least 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) away -- from its discovery site. Given that Neanderthals also coexisted with modern man in some parts of Europe, one could presume that this mobility would facilitate the contacts of the two populations on a cultural and, perhaps, on a biological level.

Professor Clive Finlayson, an expert on Neanderthal man and director of the Gibraltar Museum, disagreed with the finding's significance. It is unlikely that Neanderthals didn't move at least 20 km. It is not as if they were trees, he said.

Source : AP

Mysterious monolith - grows and shrinks with the moon

2008-02-29T20:08:00.006+05:30

Ranchi, Jharkhand, India - It is a treasure of the bygone era. The capital's heart was named after it. Shady trees stood by it to protect its sheen. Tribals worshipped it, foreigners used to see with astonishment and locals used to measure it on every full moon and no-moon nights.

The thar pakhna (thar: stone, pakhna: living) might have gone into oblivion, but not its characteristic. Considered as a blessing to the tribal people, the living stone, now sandwiched between the hostel of the Government Girls' Polytechnic and its boundary wall, once enjoyed pride of place at Charan Pahan's garden.

Charan, the Munda headman of the locality in 1860, did not know how the stone increased and decreased every fortnight, but took the trouble to get the fact entered in the District Gazetteer, lest people forget it.

Documentary evidences support the fact that the monolith increased by a foot or so on every full-moon night and again shrunk within the next fortnight. A few books and souvenirs published from Ranchi in the late 19th and early 20th century, have mentioned about the monolith and its interesting characteristic.

According to geologist Nitish Priyadarshi, it is a rock with perforations that soak water during high tide. "It is a tidal occurrence. The rock being porous, it absorbs water during the phase of full moon. By the night of full moon it attains its maximum height. As it gradually exudes water during the no-moon phase, the height decreases and on the no-moon night it has the minimum height," explained Priyadarshi.

He, however, pointed out that Ranchi rocks do not have the similar kind of characteristic. "The rock must have been planted at its place years ago (may be thousand years ago). Other rocks in this region are not porous," he added.

Ironically, very few residents of the city now know the monolith, which remained the talk of the town till 1985. The guards of the Government Girls' Polytechnic do not know about it, neither the students putting up at the hostel. Not even the girls know about the uniqueness of the stone whose room is situated just opposite to it on the hostel premises.

"How do you expect young girls to know about the history of this place? No one has made any effort to popularise it," said the tribal gardener, Mahesh Mahato, of the hostel. "I know because we worship it," he added.

Jalendar, the little cook of the hostel, too knows about it, because he heard about the stone's peculiarity from an old guard of Chhotanagpur Girls High School (opposite the polytechnic). "The stone is more than seven feet, my hands do not reach to measure it on new-moon or no-moon nights. I wish I could measure it," said Jalender.

The teachers of the polytechnic feel that it is a real treasure that should have been protected by the Government, but refuse to talk about it, fearing it would draw unwanted visitors to the girls hostel.

"Had it been protected before construction of the hostel and the polytechnic, we would have had nothing to say. But now the institution is functioning and we do not want any kind of disturbances here," said a teacher.

Ensure disks are formatted with NTFS

2008-02-28T09:53:00.004+05:30

NTFS is the recommended file system for Windows XP. It gives better access control protection for files and folders as compared to the FAT family of file systems. NTFS enables you to specify which users or user groups have access to which files and folders on your computer. You can also determine what the permission level for each user and user group should be. User permissions can be set to full control, change (cannot delete) or read only. It also gives better performance on hard disks that are larger than 32 GB in size.

To get a quick overview of the file systems on your computer, right-click My Computer and select Manage. Click on Disk Management in the left pane under the Storage section of the tree. The graphical view will show you all your hard disks and partitions, along with the file system they’re currently formatted with.

If you have any FAT or FAT32 partitions, these can be converted to NTFS using the Convert.exe command line utility. To convert a partition to NTFS, open a command prompt. Type in “convert drive-letter: /fs:ntfs” (without the quotes) to convert “drive-letter” to NTFS. For example, if you want to convert drive F to NTFS, you would type in “convert f: /fs:ntfs”.

If you wish to see the details of the conversion process, turn on verbose mode using the /v switch. Note that this is a one-way conversion: you cannot undo the conversion once it has been
done. Also, data loss is unlikely when you convert a FAT volume to NTFS, but it’s still a good idea to take a backup before you convert.

Toothbrush old as pyramids

2008-02-27T19:22:00.002+05:30

How far back in history does the toothbrush appear?

Did you ever notice the cavemen on those Geico commercials have all their teeth? It is not because they had toothbrushes; it is due to the fact processed sugar was not invented yet. (They were too busy figuring out why square wheels just can't plow through mammoth dung as easily as they thought).

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek MD and "stand-up philosopher," used a toothpaste made of lizard head and rat parts, rich in tri-calcium phosphate. Yum.

Some folks think the Chinese brought the toothbrush to us; wrong again. Egyptians used a tree bark called "Arak" that was rich in sodium bicarbonate to scrub their teeth.

In the 17th century, a prisoner in London named William Addis drilled small holes in leftover chicken bones from dinner and glued in pieces of string the guards brought him. Upon his release, he entered the retail oral health care business. Plyni the Great dipped his wild boar hair toothbrush into a mix of burnt eggshells and powdered ocean shells, high in calcium carbonate, similar to modern (and tastier!) dentifrices.

Can psychiatric problems cause heart disease and vice versa?

2008-02-26T17:25:00.004+05:30

According to some estimates, 10 to 20 per cent of patients consulting cardiologists have a psychiatric basis for their symptoms. This means they have chest pains, breathlessness, palpitations and tachycardia (fast heartbeat) precipitated by psychiatric problems such as anxiety, panic disorders and depression. This does not mean their symptoms are insignificant; sometimes they are severe enough to mimic angina or a heart attack. In addition some of the antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs taken by psychiatric patients can cause irregular heartbeat.

Victims of heart attacks are usually both anxious and terrified at the time of the attack, and often depressed afterwards, as they wonder whether they will ever be able to resume a normal life. It is also common for open-heart surgery patients to experience disorientation, confusion, hallucinations and delusions for a few days after their operation.

Gripping stuff

2008-02-26T08:53:00.002+05:30

While hunting, Georges de Mestral, a Swiss aristocrat, was inspired to create an alternative to the zip by the burs that attached themselves to his clothes and to his dog. Examining the burs under a microscope, he realised they were covered in thousands of hooks and tried to reproduce the effect. The result, patented in 1956, was two strips, one with tiny loops to which the little hooks on the other clung. Although his fastener was made from nylon, de Mestral named it Velcro, from the French velours, 'velvet', and croche, 'hooked'.

Predictions and dreams

2008-02-25T19:52:00.002+05:30

Before amniocentesis - the scientific analysis of fluid from a pregnant woman's uterus - was developed in the 1930s, superstitions offered the sole means of predicting the sex of an unborn child. Around 4000BC in Egypt, two types of wheat were watered with the woman's urine. The child's sex was determined by which sprouted first.

The Egyptians devised guidelines for interpreting the images seen in dreams around 2000BC. A papyrus states: 'If a man sees himself in a dream looking at a snake - good, it signifies [many] provisions,' and 'If a man sees in a dream his bed on fire - bad, it signifies the rape of his wife.'

How cholesterol levels are measured

2008-02-23T15:05:00.004+05:30

Lay testing of cholesterol levels in the blood is an increasingly popular practice, but to be certain of reliable results, testing is best done under medical supervision.

Levels of blood cholesterol are measured in millimoles/litre, or (mmol/l), against which the risks of heart disease are calculated.

..................................................................................................
Cholesterol - Risk factor
..................................................................................................
Less than 5.2mmol/l - Low
5.2 - 6.5mmol/l - Average
6.5 - 7.8mmol/l - Moderate
Greater than 7.8mmol/l - High
..................................................................................................

However, when assessing the risk other factors also need to be considered. Account should be taken of any family history of heart disease as well as an individual's life style. For example, a cholesterol level of 6.4 might be acceptable in a fit man with no other risk factors but worryingly high for a man who had angina, or whose family had a long history of the illness.

Rice - A white truth

2008-02-22T19:27:00.003+05:30

Rice is believed to have originated in southern Asia - it is known to have been cultivated in India and China for more than 6500 years. Yet it did not make an appearance in Europe until around AD 1000. It reached England's shores during Elizabethan times, when it was imported from Spain.

Rice cannot be grown in the cold British climate and a large proportion of the rice now eaten in Britain comes from Carolina in North America. On a world scale, however, 90 per cent of all rice is still grown and consumed in Asia.

In some oriental cultures, rice is the symbol of life and fertility. Perhaps that is the origin of the widespread custom of throwing rice at newly married couples.