Science

Washington, Mar. 20 (ANI): Military researchers in the United States have sought a system to allow small ships to launch medium-altitude long-endurance aircraft (MALE) drones, in a bid to increase their range. The Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node (TERN) program is named after the tern, a seabird that possess remarkable endurance and can migrate thousands of miles every year, reports Fox News. In the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program, the MALE UAV will carry a 600-pound payload and operate 600 to 900 nautical miles from its home vessel.

German scientists have completed the first high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome, and made it freely available online to the scientific community.

Scientists led by Dr Svante Paabo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany used a toe bone excavated in 2010 in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia to generate a high-quality genome from a single Neanderthal individual.

The laser-shooting ChemCam instrument aboard the Curiosity rover currently searching the surface of Mars for signs of habitability has shown what appears to be a common feature on the surface of some very different Martian rocks during Curiosity’s first 90 days on the Red Planet.

But exactly what that common feature is remains an intriguing mystery.

The ChemCam instrument uses an extremely powerful laser to vaporize a pinpoint of rock surface.

The instrument then reads the chemical composition of the vaporized sample with a spectrometer.

A panel of experts is publishing a first-of-its-kind rulebook on cyberwarfare, a manual aimed at applying the venerable practice of international law to the emerging field of military hacking.

The officers and academics behind the Tallinn Manual so-called because it was devised in the Estonian capital say
they aren’t proposing new rules to govern the world’s rapidly expanding electronic armies.

Instead they argue that laws protecting neutral nations and civilians apply in cyberspace just as they do on the
traditional battlefield.

Uttarakhand Governor Aziz Qureshi said today the conservation of the environment has become a challenge in the state which needs to be taken seriously.

“Conserving the fragile ecology of this hill state is a tough challenge that needs to be tackled on a priority basis,” Qureshi said while honouring Sampoornand Bharti with the ‘Green Award’ at a function organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries here

Bharti runs an NGO named ‘Doodhatoli Lok Vikas Sansthan’ at Pauri which works in the field of environment protection.

New calculations by NASA scientists showed that electrically charged lunar dust near shadowed craters can get lofted above the surface and jump over the shadowed region, bouncing back and forth between sunlit areas on opposite sides.

The research is being led by Michael Collier at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., as part of the Dynamic Response of the Environment At the Moon (DREAM) team in partnership with the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI), managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

By examining the frequency of extreme storm surges in the past, previous research has shown that there was an increasing tendency for storm hurricane surges when the climate was warmer.

But how much worse will it get as temperatures rise in the future? How many extreme storm surges like that from Hurricane Katrina, which hit the U.S. coast in 2005, will there be as a result of global warming?

If you are given to gossiping and easing out in office the minute your boss steps out, beware your computer could be keeping an eye on you.

Researchers from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, have developed a new kind of computer monitor which will be able to tell your boss if you are paying attention at work or not, the Daily Mail reported.

It works by having a camera mounted above the workstation display which can identify the user’s eyes to see if they are looking at the computer or not.

Adding to the rare bouquet of rich biodiversity in the Himalayan state, researchers have discovered a new beautiful species of pink rhododendron flower in Arunachal Pradesh which was hitherto unknown to science.

A team of botanical experts recently carried out explorations in West Siang district’s remote Mechukha valley, few km away from the China border, and found the rare and endemic flower which has been named ‘Rhododendron Mechukae’ after its place of origin.

An international research team has discovered that a highly active bacteria community exists in one of the most inaccessible places on Earth: the bottom of the Mariana Trench located nearly 11 kilometres below sea level in the western Pacific, which makes it the deepest site on Earth.

Even though the environment is under extreme pressure almost 1,100 times higher than at sea level, the trench sediments house almost 10 times more bacteria than in the sediments of the surrounding abyssal plain at much shallower water depth of 5-6 km water, the researchers said.

Pluto’s orbit may host a formation of 10 or more tiny undiscovered moons, which would each measure just 1 to 3 kilometres across, astronomers say.

This preliminary finding could make life even more difficult for the team planning NASA’s New Horizons mission, which is slated to take the first-ever up-close look at the Pluto system in July 2015.

After Pluto’s fifth known moon, a small satellite known as P5, was discovered last year, officials said they may need to redraw the spacecraft’s path to avoid such obstacles.

Situated right on top of our planet, the Arctic Ocean has been frozen since times immemorial. Desolate, frigid and mysterious, it remained insignificant. However, of late, the Arctic is increasingly attracting global media coverage. For a single reason: it is melting rapidly. The consequences of which will be transnational and transoceanic, many of which cannot even be envisaged at this juncture.

Japanese scientists have developed a new drug-delivery gel that releases the drug in response to pressure applied by the patient, Science Daily reports.

A research group headed by Katsuhiko Ariga, principal investigator, Kohsaku Kawakami, scientist, and Hironori Izawa, a post-doctoral researcher (currently assistant professor, Tottori University) of the NIMS International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) succeeded in developing a gel material which is capable of releasing drugs in response to pressure applied.

London, Mar. 17 (ANI): The campaign to save Google Reader is gaining momentum, with 100,000 people signing the online petition in a bid to stop Google withdrawing the service. Earlier this week, Google announced it was to withdraw its Google Reader service due to declining interest in the RSS content aggregator, reports the Telegraph. The Keep Google Reader Running petition on Change.org generated more than 400,000 page views since Wednesday. At least eight related petitions have been started on the site since Wednesday, several of which also have thousands of signatures.

Even though dinosaurs have been long extinct, bringing them back to life might be possible.

Resurrecting long extinct species such as the woolly mammoth, passenger pigeon or other extinct species is the subject of a conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.

Organizers said that rapid advances in molecular biology and new conservation perspectives are creating a new field called ‘de-extinction.’

The population of the Amur leopard has grown by half since 2007 and the cats have expanded their habitat as far as North Korea, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said.

But at an estimated 48 to 50 animals in Russia, including four to five cubs, it remains critically endangered and the least populous of all leopard subspecies, the fund said.

India plans to launch its first navigational satellite in June, a top official of the Department of Space (DoS) said today.

The first Satellite of Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) constellation, IRNSS-1 will be launched by PSLV-C22, said DoS Secretary and Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) K Radhakrishnan.

According to ISRO officials, IRNSS is an independent regional navigation satellite system, designed to provide position accuracy of better than 10 metres over India and the region extending about 1500 km around the country.

Indian-origin Sunder Pichai, an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus, has been named as the new head of Google’s Android division, making him one of the most powerful executives at the Internet giant.

Going forward, Sundar Pichai will lead Android, in addition to his existing work with Chrome and Apps,” company
CEO Larry Page has announced.

Page made the announcement on a blog, adding that Tamil Nadu-born Pichai has a talent for creating products that
are technically excellent yet easy to use-and he loves a big bet.

Researchers have unearthed one of the world’s oldest Egyptian sun dials – possibly dating back to 13th century BC – used by the people to tell time with the position of the Sun.

The discovery was made during archaeological excavations in the Kings’ Valley in Upper Egypt by a team of researchers from the University of Basel.

The team led by Professor Susanne Bickel made the significant discovery while clearing the entrance to one of the tombs.

A team of international scientists has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system.

The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed.

“This is the sharpest spectrum ever obtained of an extrasolar planet,” said co-author Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The first launch of Russia’s new Soyuz-2.1V lightweight carrier rocket, scheduled for early 2013, has now been delayed until the second half of 2013, rocket-maker Progress said.

“The first launch of the Soyuz-2.1V rocket has been preliminarily scheduled for the second half of this year,” Progress design bureau’s general director Alexander Kirilin said.

He did not specify the reasons for the delay.

Russia originally planned to launch the first Soyuz-2.1V in October 2012 but that was postponed after a failed ground test of its first-stage engines in August, Progress said.

The “save Yamuna” movement launched to secure the release of water from Hathinikundi in Haryana into the river appears to have split: One group has accepted the agreement arrived at midnight Wednesday while the other says the protest will continue.

The group that has refused to accept the agreement that union Water Resources Minister Harish Rawat and union Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan signed with the protestors has threatened to continue the agitation at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.

New observations by a Caltech-led team have discovered dozens of starburst galaxies that were churning out stars when the universe was just a billion years old.

Previously, astronomers didn’t know whether galaxies could form stars at such high rates so early in time.

The discovery enables astronomers to study the earliest bursts of star formation and to deepen their understanding of how galaxies formed and evolved.

Scientists have discovered an extremely rare triple quasar system, located 9 billion light years away – and it is only the second-ever to be spotted.

Quasars are extremely bright and powerful sources of energy that sit in the centre of a galaxy, surrounding a black hole.

Amid growing concerns over the quality and availability of water, the government is giving final shape to a policy that will allow citizens and other stakeholders to access hydrological information at the click of a mouse and also participate in informed decision-making.

The draft Hydro-meteorological Data Dissemination Policy 2013 formulated by the water resources ministry is expected to be given final shape next month and implemented by June.