Science

Mice and rats have evolved to gnaw with their front teeth and chew with their back teeth more effectively than rodents that ‘specialise’ in one or other of these biting mechanisms, according to a new study.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool designed a computer model to simulate the bite of rats to understand whether their skull shape or muscle arrangement was a major factor in their evolutionary success and global dominance, making them one of the most common pest species in the world.

An ‘egg-shaped’ object, which was found inside a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth last year, could be final proof of life on the Red Planet.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe has asserted that the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted that they could only have been produced by living organisms.

He said that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.

VK Saraswat, the chief of Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO), has disclosed that the country’s missile defence system is ready for induction.

As per a report in The Indian Express, while speaking on a TV show Saraswat said that as part of the system a two-layer shield – the AAD (advanced air defence) and the PAD – will be put in place over Delhi.

The system has already undergone four tests as part of which incoming missiles were intercepted and destroyed.

A student in the US has invented a camera, which produces written descriptions of scenes rather than photographs.

The device uploads pictures to the web, which are described within minutes by users on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.

The short description is then sent back to the camera and printed.

It was developed by Matt Richardson, an Interactive Communications graduate student at New York University.

The US House of Representatives passed a cybersecurity bill on Thursday that would allow the government and companies to share information about hacking, but which has raised privacy concerns and a veto threat from the White House.

The House approved the bill 248-168, prompting the top Republican and Democrat on the intelligence committee who sponsored it to issue a joint statement lauding the bipartisan approval.

Any new arrival to New York City wants to see the sights — and the space shuttle Enterprise is no different.

Enterprise is scheduled to arrive in the city Friday, riding on top of a modified jumbo jet. Its trip was to include low-altitude flyovers over parts of the city and landmarks including the Statue of Liberty and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on Manhattan’s west side.

The shuttle had been scheduled to arrive earlier in the week but NASA pushed it back because of bad weather.

Turtles represent longevity and good luck, and that’s certainly true for 18 rare smuggled turtles that were returned from Hong Kong to their native Philippines.

Philippine Wildlife Bureau head Mundita Lim says the pond turtles were confiscated at the Hong Kong airport in February from a Chinese student, along with 13 more common box turtles.

Pond turtles live only in forests on Palawan Island southwest of Manila. Only about 120 remain in the wild. Lim says they are prized as novelty pets or food.

US chipmaker Intel Corp will ask Europe’s second-highest court in July to scrap a 1.06 billion euro ($1.4 billion) EU antitrust fine, arguing regulators failed to prove it blocked a rival in their 2009 decision.

The European Commission, which acts as EU competition regulator, penalized Intel with its largest ever corporate fine because of anticompetitive tactics against arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

The decision came after an eight-year-long investigation.

India’s second Moon mission Chandrayaan-2, slated for 2014, will have to wait till the country’s space agency flies two of its heavy rocket – Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) – successfully, a top official said Thursday.

Speaking to reporters after the successful launch of indigenously built Radar Imaging Satellite I (Risat-1) from here, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K. Radhakrishnan said: “We plan to fly two GSLV rockets at an interval of six months before the Chandrayaan-2 mission.”

Researchers are learning details about asteroid impacts going back to the Earth’s early history by using a new method for extracting accurate information from tiny “spherules” embedded in layers of rock.

The spherules were created when asteroids crashed into the Earth, vaporizing rock that expanded into space as a giant vapour plume.

Small droplets of molten and vaporized rock in the plume condensed and solidified, falling back to Earth as a thin layer.

The world’s largest solar-powered plane, Swiss-made Solar Impulse, will take its first-ever cross-continent flight in May or June.

The plane, co-piloted by Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, will attempt for the first time to fly more than 2,500 km, taking off in Payerne in western Switzerland, crossing the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean without using fuel, and landing in Morocco.

The exact date for taking off will be decided according to weather condition, said Andre Borschberg, co-founder and CEO of Solar Impulse that made the aircraft.

Apple Inc’s quarterly results beat Wall Street estimates on stronger-than-expected demand for the iPhone, especially in the greater China region where sales jumped five-fold.

While iPad sales were a little lighter than expected, the overall results sent the stock up 7 percent, recouping some losses from the past two weeks that had stemmed from concerns about weakening sales growth for iPhones.

Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones – which accounts for about half its revenue – in the March quarter, outpacing the 30 million or so expected by Wall Street analysts.

The designer of the Large Hadron Collider, a Bangalore-based biologist and a mathematician described as “extremely original” are among six Indian-origin scientists elected to the prestigious Fellowship of the Royal Society for 2012.

The society, which was founded in 1660 to recognise, promote and support excellence in science, has over the years awarded the Fellowship to nearly 1,500 individuals, including Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton and Tim Berners-Lee.

The Fellows, elected for life, include more than 80 Nobel laureates.

The researchers have uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of Arctic methane: the ocean itself.

The high concentrations of the greenhouse gas recorded in the air above cracks in the ice could be evidence of yet another positive feedback on the warming climate – leading to even faster Arctic warming, the New Scientist reported.

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic region is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

A Russian cargo spacecraft Sunday successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said.

The Progress M-15M docked with the Pirs unit at 6.39 pm, Xinhua reported.

The spacecraft delivered about 2.4 tonnes of fuel and scientific equipment to the ISS as well as oxygen, food and clothes for the crew.

Among them, there is a special present for Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who is expected to fly to the ISS on May 15 and celebrate his 54th birthday in orbit on June 21.

After months of consultations with Israeli security officials, Google has launched its popular Street View service in the country’s three largest cities.

The new Street View provides images of ordinary life, contested areas and religious sites in the Holy Land. Due to security issues, areas around several sensitive sites, such as the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, are blurred out.

Students of Bishop Union High School in California last month sent a rubber chicken to space to study a solar storm.

The bird, called Camilla, was attached to a helium balloon and sent to an altitude of 120,000ft to test the levels of radiation in one of the strongest proton storms in years, reportsw Daily Mail.

It was the second time she has been sent to space.

Rachel Molina, 17, told NASA: ‘Later this year, we plan to launch a species of microbes to find out if they can live at the edge of space.’

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with “Avatar” director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week.

The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week.

The white-capped volcano that looms over Mexico City emitted a terrifying low-pitched roar Friday and spewed roiling towers of ash and steam as it vented the pressure built up by a massive chamber of magma beneath its slopes. Authorities prepared evacuation routes, ambulances and shelters in the event of a bigger explosion.

Scientists claim to have invented their own improved version of Doctor Who’s famous sonic screwdriver.

The Dundee University researchers have created a machine, which uses ultrasound to lift and rotate a rubber disc floating in a cylinder of water.

It is apparently the first time that ultrasound waves have been used to turn objects rather than simply push them.

According to the physicists, the study could help make surgery using ultrasound techniques more precise.

Surgeons make use of ultrasound to treat a range of conditions without having to cut open a patient.

The Agra district authorities have begun an exercise to clean up the Yamuna, fearing Supreme Court action on non-implementation of its directives on the pollution threat to the 17th century Taj Mahal.

On Friday, some encroachments were removed from the Ghats along the Yamuna river bank.

“Thursday, they destroyed standing kheera and kakdi (cucumber) plus tarbooz (melon) crops to clean up the river bed near the Hathi Ghat,” said Yamuna activist Ashwin Sharma.

An Indian group will build an IT park in Serbia with an estimated investment of 600 million euros ($788 million).

Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic and Jitendra Virwani, chairman of the India-based Embassy Group, Thursday broke ground for the construction of the IT park.

Cvetkovic said that the 25,000 square meter facility in the town of Indjija, north of Belgrade, represented a new chapter in the economic development of Serbia, reported Xinhua citing Radio Television Serbia (RTS).

An estimated 15,000 jobs are expected to be created by the IT park.

Paleontologists found about 300 well-preserved fossils of pre-historic animals at two quarries outside Buenos Aires, Argentine officials said.

The fossils were found by specialists from the University of La Plata in a 1,000 sq. meter lot in Marcos Paz, a city about 40 km from the capital.

Paleontologists found everything “from (fossils of) a baby glyptodon to a complete herd of huge mastodons, the ancient relatives of today’s elephants”, Marcos Paz Paleontology Division chief David Piazza told the official Telam news agency.

Although cosmic rays were discovered 100 years ago, their origin has mystified physicists since long.

Now, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive detector in Antarctica, is honing in on how the highest energy cosmic rays are produced.

“Although we have not discovered where cosmic rays come from, we have taken a major step towards ruling out one of the leading predictions,” said IceCube principal investigator and University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor Francis Halzen.

The only thing louder than the thunderous roar of the Agni V long-range ICBM as it blasted off this morning was the spontaneous eruption of euphoria on social media platforms that India had joined an “elite club” of nations with the power to vaporise enemies with long-range ICBMs.

In the same way that India’s muscling its way into the club of “nuclear haves” in 1998 with the Pokharan nuclear tests was seen as a milestone in India’s ascendance and power projection capability, today’s launch has come as an adrenaline rush for minds dizzy with war scenarios.