Thu, 25/11/2010 - 09:35 by Prince damin
Adelaide, Australia -- Australian researchers using DNA says they have identified a new but critically endangered species of parrot in Western Australia.
DNA experts from the University of Adelaide using museum specimens up to 160 years old say populations of ground parrots in eastern and western Australia are highly distinct from each other and that the western populations should be recognized as a new species, Pezoporus flaviventris, BiologyNews.net reported.
"The discovery has major conservation implications," said research leader Stephen Murphy of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
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Thu, 25/11/2010 - 07:17 by Prince damin
New York -- New York City wants to be home to one of NASA's space shuttles when the shuttle fleet is retired in 2011, city officials say.
New York's Intrepid Sea-Air and Space Museum is lobbying hard to acquire one of the historic shuttles for its collection once they are retired at the end of their space careers, the New York Daily News reports.
"We believe the merits of New York City and the Intrepid will continue to position New York to be a final destination for a shuttle," Susan Marenoff, the museum's executive director, said
"The opportunity for an enormous population to visit, to learn and simply see this icon in a contextual historical setting simply cannot be ignored," she told the Daily News.
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Thu, 25/11/2010 - 07:15 by Prince damin
Champaign, Ill. -- A tissue-imaging technique developed by U.S. researchers could produce almost instant biopsy test results in searching for cancer cells, scientists say.
Scientists at the University of Illinois demonstrated the novel microscopy technique, called nonlinear interferometric vibrational imaging, on rat breast-cancer cells and tissues.
It produced easy-to-read, color-coded images of tissue, outlining clear tumor boundaries, with more than 99 percent accuracy in less than five minutes, a university release said.
Current diagnostic methods, which can take a day more to produce results, are also subjective, based on visual interpretation of the shape and structure of cells, the researchers say.
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Thu, 25/11/2010 - 07:02 by Prince damin
Cairo -- A collection of Egyptian artifacts found in the vault of the national bank has been given to the Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, officials say.
The collection of some 200 ancient artifacts, including a carved wooden hand and a marble head of a Greco-Roman god, was likely in the possession of foreigners who lived in Egypt during the late 19th and 20th centuries, LiveScience.com reported Wednesday.
The collection had been stored in boxes in the vaults of the Al-Ahly Bank, bank chairman Tarek Amer said.
No one had claimed the collection or asked about it since the early 20th century, so the artifacts remained in the bank's care until its executive board decided to offer it to the antiquities council.
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Wed, 24/11/2010 - 06:07 by Prince damin
Washington -- The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued the first-ever license for a commercial spacecraft to re-enter Earth's atmosphere from orbit, officials say.
The license will allow the California-based company SpaceX to complete the first operational flight of the Dragon spacecraft during a NASA demonstration mission set for a Dec. 7 launch, Florida Today reported.
After its launch from Cape Canaveral atop a Falcon 9 rocket, the Dragon will orbit the planet twice before re-entering and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off Southern California.
"The flight of Dragon will be an important step toward commercial cargo delivery to the International Space Station," NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement.
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Wed, 24/11/2010 - 06:01 by Prince damin
Pasadena, Calif. -- Earth's largest lakes have warmed in the past 25 years in response to climate change, a global survey of temperature trends by U.S. scientists says.
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used satellite data to measure the surface temperatures of 167 large lakes worldwide for the comprehensive study, a JPL release said Tuesday.
They found an average warming rate of 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, with some lakes warming as much as 1.8 degrees per decade.
Although the warming trend was global, the greatest increases were in the mid- to high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, the study found.
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Wed, 24/11/2010 - 05:52 by Prince damin
Zurich, Switzerland -- Orangutans in Borneo are descended from a small number of ancestors who survived a population "bottleneck" about 176,000 years ago, Swiss researchers say.
Scientists at the University of Zurich say a genetic analysis of the species suggests a global cooling trend could have created the bottleneck, defined as a period in which animal numbers shrink but eventually expand again when conditions improve, ScienceNews.org reported Monday.
The Earth experienced a serious period of cooling about 190,000 to 130,000 years ago, anthropological geneticist Natasha Arora says, and while Borneo itself wasn't iced over, rain forests where orangutans live might have shrunk during this time, threatening the orangutan population within it.
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Tue, 23/11/2010 - 10:06 by Rakhi
Rotterdam, Netherlands -- Dutch researchers say they've developed a way to tell a person's approximate age from one drop of blood, a test that could be used in crime investigation.
Scientists at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam say as a forensic technique it could be used to revive police investigations that have hit a dead end, AAAS ScienceMag.org reported Monday.
The blood-age test relies on a peculiarity of T cells, immune cells in the body that recognize and fight microbial infections.
As T cells develop, they modify their DNA to recognize a wide variety of bacteria and other pathogens.
In the modification, some DNA is left over that is useless to the T cell, which discards it, researchers say.
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Tue, 23/11/2010 - 10:00 by Rakhi
Paris -- Astronomers have discovered the 500th exoplanet outside our solar system, a database maintained by a French astronomer says.
Astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, who compiles the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, says less than 20 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet he has logged No. 500, discovered Nov. 19, SPACE.com reported.
The 500th extrasolar planet was reported in the midst of the announcement of the discovery of several others, including a planet tagged HIP 13044b astronomers say was born in another galaxy before being captured by our own Milky Way galaxy.
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Tue, 23/11/2010 - 09:47 by Rakhi
Edinburgh, Scotland -- Scottish researchers say seeing how biological clocks adjust to fewer hours of sunlight in winter could help us understand the impact of jet lag and shift work.
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh studying the daily activity cycle in plants, known as circadian rhythms, have discovered a finely tuned process that enables the plants' genes to respond to the times of dawn and dusk each day, as well as the length of daylight in between, a university release said.
This allows the plant to reset its internal clock every day in response to seasonal changes in daylight, which helps the plant control the timing of key activities such as growth and flowering.
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Tue, 23/11/2010 - 07:27 by Prince damin
Washington -- The second clinical trial using human embryonic stem cells has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the company conducting the trial said.
Biotech company Advanced Cell Technology of Marlborough, Mass., said Monday it has received approval for testing retinal cells in patients with Stargardt's macular dystrophy, a rare disease that causes progressive vision loss in children, AAAS ScienceMag.org reported.
The company says it plans to treat 12 patients with advanced cases of the disease with up to 200,000 retinal pigment epithelium cells derived from human embryo stem cells transplanted directly into the eye, Robert Lanza, ACT's chief scientific officer, says.
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Tue, 23/11/2010 - 07:15 by Prince damin
Edinburgh, Scotland -- A Scottish organization dedicated to upholding traditions says underwear should be worn under kilts for "common sense and decency."
Brian Wilton, director of the Scottish Tartans Authority, said the tradition of "going commando" under a kilt "should be thrown into the same wastepaper basket as the idea you're not a real Scot unless you put salt on your porridge," The (Glasgow) Daily Record reported Monday.
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