Science

Police in China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region have seized more than 3,600 smuggled crocodiles, saving them from being served as exotic dishes, official sources said.

Veterinarians are providing medical treatment to the endangered reptiles, with some having died from heatstroke during transportation, an official from the public security bureau of Chongzuo city said.

The Siamese crocodiles were seized in the city on Tuesday as their trucks crossed the China-Vietnam border. Smugglers intended to supply them to restaurants in neighbouring Guangdong province, the official said.

Devices connected to the internet will reach 15 billion by 2015 and later to 50 billion by 2020, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad Director Professor U B Desai said here today.

Aliens may not actually resemble the little green creatures Hollywood loves to portray them as.

Rather, they are more likely to look like ‘giant jellyfish with orange bottoms’, if a leading British space scientist is to be believed. “My vision of aliens is an inhuman, silicon-based life form that looks much more like a jellyfish than sci-fi’s little green men. It is likely that there is extra-terrestrial life – it is just more alien than you’d imagine,” Maggie Aderin-Pocock, satellite expert and government adviser in UK, said.

Some Indian scientists and research institutes were also part of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment conducted at the European Organization for Nuclear Physics known as CERN in Switzerland. The discovery was of a new sub-atomic particle that is crucial to understanding how the universe is built.

Scientists from Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, Harishchandra Research Institute, Allahabad and Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar took part in the experiment.

Global warming may be spurring the spread of Cyanobacteria, one of the most primitive of bugs, while causing them to produce greater amounts of toxins, which may affect liver, nervous system and eyes, according to a study.

“These toxins may affect the liver and other organs (hepatotoxins), the nervous system (neurotoxins), different cells (cytotoxins), the eyes and mucous membranes, as well as causing dermatitis and allergies,” explains Francisca F. del Campo, study co-author and researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Scientists have been able to click the shadow of a single atom for the very first time — an unprecedented feat crowning efforts lasting more than five years.

“We have reached the extreme limit of microscopy; you cannot see anything smaller than an atom using visible light,” said Dave Kielpinski, professor at the Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics in Brisbane, Australia.

“We wanted to investigate how few atoms are required to cast a shadow and we proved it takes just one,” Kielpinski said, the journal Nature Communications reports.

India’s 1600-km long Western Ghats mountain chain, which has forests older than the Himalaya mountains, has been added to list of world heritage sites by the United Nations.

The Western Ghats mountain chain is recognised as one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity. The chain’s forests, which are older than the Himalaya mountains influence the Indian monsoon weather pattern.

A Russian spacecraft with three crewmembers on board returned to earth Sunday.

The Soyuz spacecraft landed safely in Kazakhstan, Russia’s mission control centre said.

The crew included Russian astronaut Oleg Kononenko, American Donald Pettit and Dutch Andre Kuipers.

It undocked from the International Space Station at 0448 GMT and landed on earth at 0815 GMT, Xinhua reported. The trio spent 193 days in space.

IANS

Google has announced Compute Engine, a cloud-computing service that allows businesses to run their applications on servers in the tech giant’s data center.

“We’re introducing Google Compute Engine, an infrastructure-as-a-service product that lets you run Linux Virtual Machines on the same infrastructure that powers Google,” said Google in its official blog Thursday.

According to the company, the economy of scale and efficiency of its data centers can provide users 50 percent more computing power than other leading cloud providers, reported Xinhua.

China’s first woman cosmonaut and two of her colleagues returned to Earth today after successfully accomplishing the country’s first-ever manual space docking during a two-week mission, giving a boost to Beijing’s efforts to build a space station by 2020.

The spacecraft Shenzhou-9 carrying the three astronauts landed at the designated spot at Inner Mongolia region.

The landing, which was shown live on the television was a bit bumpy as the module turned upside down as it hit the ground.

The immediate ancestor of humans may have lived almost exclusively on a diet of leaves, fruits, wood and bark instead of a menu based on the open savanna as other extinct relatives of humanity did, scientists claimed.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, are based on two million years old fossils of the extinct hominin Australopithecus sediba that were accidentally discovered by a scientist’s nine-year-old son in a South African cave in 2008.

With several states reeling under a drought-like situation as they await the monsoon, experts have pointed out that not enough is being done to deal with the situation arising out of scanty rainfall.

Drought management, they say, assumes significance in view of changing weather patterns.

“We are not prepared to handle the effects of climate change on agriculture. It is reflected through our management of drought situation in states like Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh,” veteran agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan told.

China’s first woman astronaut and two of her colleagues, who successfully accomplished the country’s first-ever manual space docking, would return home tomorrow after remaining in the space for two weeks.

The three astronauts will return to Earth around 10 am (Beijing Time) tomorrow in Shenzhou-9 (Divine Grace) manned spacecraft, a spokesperson for China’s manned space programme announced here Thursday.

The return capsule is due to land in Inner Mongolia’s Siziwang Banner (county). The landing zone has been used for all previous Shenzhou space missions.

For the third time in five days, India on Wednesday test-fired two surface-to-air anti-aircraft ‘Akash’ missiles from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur near here, achieving success in one while the data of the second trial was being analysed.

“Two Akash missiles were launched from the ITR. While one test was successful, data for the other is still being analysed,” ITR Director M V K V Prasad told PTI over phone.

A rare kind of mineral known as “green rust”, which could be used to scape toxic metals and radioactive species from the environment, also played a similar and crucial role early in Earth’s history.

Research suggests for the first time that ‘green rust’ was likely widespread in ancient oceans and may have played a vital role in the creation of our early atmosphere.

Led by Newcastle University, the study shows that during the Precambrian period, green rust ‘scavenged’ heavy metals such as nickel out of the water, the journal Geology reports.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the World Bank Group have agreed to establish the India Wildlife Business Council (IWBC) to promote tiger and biodiversity conservation for sustainable development.

A memorandum of understanding to set up the IWBC to improve the dialogue between business, conservation stakeholders as well as decision makers was signed here Tuesday by CII Deputy Director General Indrani Kar and World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick.

Facebook has named its Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as a member of its Board of Directors, making her the first woman director in the eight-year-old social network company.

Facebook announced Harvard alumna Sandberg’s promotion to the eight-member board yesterday.

42-year-old Sandberg joined the social network in 2008 and oversees Facebook’s business operations including sales, marketing, business development, legal, human resources, public policy and communications.

Scientists claim to have found clinching evidence that suggest Mars’ interior holds vast reservoirs of water, with some spots apparently as wet as Earth’s innards.

The new findings, published in the journal Geology, upend previous studies, which had estimated that the Red Planet’s internal water stores were scanty at best — something of a surprise, given that liquid water apparently flowed on the Martian surface long ago.

“It’s been puzzling why past estimates for the planet’s interior have been so dry,” said study co-author Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The space agency is keen to focus on unique science projects, develop remote sensing satellites and do more R&D instead of engaging in the repetitive exercise of building communication satellites and launch vehicles.

“We want to explore the possibility of ‘producing’ PSLV and communication satellites through the industry,” K Radhakrishnan, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told PTI in an interview here.

If you forget to give a goodbye call to your near and dear ones before boarding a flight, you don’t have to worry, because, now you can call them from the plane itself. Not every passenger but at least, travelers flying Virgin Atlantic between Delhi to London can do this.

The facility would be available on premier British carrier Virgin Atlantic’s brand new Airbus A-330 when it takes off on its inaugural flight from here on July 11. Virgin has introduced this and other facilities in a new product package on the busy Delhi-London sector.

Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams is all set to return to to the International Space Station, where she spent a record six months in 2006.

Daughter of an Indian American father from Gujarat and a Slovenian mother, Williams is currently making final preparations for a July 14 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to a NASA announcement.

Rapid sea ice melting in Antarctica threatens the lives of Emperor penguins, and if global temperatures continue to rise, the largest sea birds may eventually disappear, a new study has claimed.

Unlike other sea birds, the four-feet tall Emperor penguins breed and raise their young almost exclusively on sea ice.

If that ice breaks up and disappears early in the breeding season, massive breeding failure may occur, said the researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

A crucial summit on global development kicks off here Wednesady with nearly 20 heads of state and government, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in attendance in a fresh bid to rally the world behind a common environmental blueprint amid economic woes and discord.

As calls go out to world leaders to commit to reaching an accord that addresses the most pressing environment and social woes, Singh will pitch for the principle of common but differentiated responsibility during the meeting, 20 years after the first Earth Summit was held in this Brazilian city.

Students of physics at a university in Pakistan have designed a solar car and want to introduce the energy-friendly and pollution-free vehicle at the commercial level.

Raja Imran, Sabeen Dilawar, Adnan Sultan, Sundus Nawaz, Wajahat Ali, Zainab Liaqat and Mohammad Tahir — students of Hazara University in Mansehra of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — built the car under the supervision of their professor, Mohammad Sadiq, the News International daily reported.

Pakistan could launch a nuclear strike on India within eight seconds, claimed an Army General in Islamabad in 2001, a warning that is described in the latest volume of diaries by a key aide of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The General asked Blair’s former communications director, Alastair Campbell, to remind India of Pakistan’s nuclear capability amid fears in Islamabad that Delhi was “determined to take them out”.