Science

New Delhi, December 11: Indians are the ancestors of Chinese and many of those in other East Asian countries.

This is revealed by a study ‘Mapping Human Genetic History in Asia’, conducted by ten Asian countries, which said that the human population originally came from Africa nearly a hundred thousand years ago to India from where it went to China and other Asian countries.

The findings also nullify theories that a wave of human population directly went to the East Asian countries.

London, December 11: Patterns of brain activity can tell when you are likely to break a promise, says a new study.

Brain activity suggests that breaking a promise spurs an emotional conflict in the violator owing to the suppression of an honest response.

Besides, the most important finding of the study enabled researchers to show that “perfidious” patterns of brain activity even allow the prediction of future behaviour.

Melbourne, December 11: Tiger Woods ordered high-priced prostitutes, claims Hollywood madam Michelle Braun.

According to the New York Post, Braun said she sent at least four escorts on pay-for-sex dates with Woods a total of “six times” from late 2006 and 2007, charging him a total of 60,000 dollars.

Braun claims that Woods would call her on the phone to order up the female company.

“The most was for a girl in Manhattan,” whose name is Loredana, Braun said. “He paid 15,000 dollars for her. He liked girl-on-girl. He had sex with them together.”

London, Dec 11: 2010 is likely to be the world’s warmest year on record, the British Met Office has predicted.

According to the Met Office, man-made climate change will be a factor and natural weather patterns would contribute less to 2010’s temperature than they did in 1998, the current warmest year in the 160-year record.

El Niffect, the cyclical heating of the Pacific Ocean, is much weaker than it was in 1998, but the Met Office expects the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions to more than make up the difference, reported.

Geneva, December 11: The world’s largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said on Friday.

Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

Brussels, December 11: Germany is to pledge the highest single contribution to a EU fund aimed at helping poor nations cope with climate change, the German media has reported.

EU governments have so far vowed to provide a total of 3 billion euros ($4.4 billion) over the next three years to a global fund provided by rich nations.

The biggest single contribution thus far – 883 million euros – has come from Britain.

While Berlin has been reluctant to make its own contribution known, EU diplomats said that Germany had made “an important pledge” during an EU summit in Brussels.

Washington, Dec 11: At a critical time, the uproar over stolen e-mails suggesting scientists suppressed contrary views about climate change has emboldened sceptics — including U.S. congressional Republicans looking to scuttle President Barack Obama’s push for mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases.

Pune, Dec 11: With the increasing threat of terrorism, the Defence Ministry is paying greater attention to developing technologies that could be used in situations of low intensity conflict. Teams of 15-20 scientists in over 10 laboratories of the Defence Research and Development Organisation are working on developing such technologies, V.K. Saraswat, scientific advisor to the Defence Minister, said here on Friday.

New Delhi, Dec 11: Global climate change may be showing its impact on the Indian shores as scientists report that coral reefs around the country could see their severe decline starting in next three to four decades resulting from increase in the sea temperature.

Not only coral reefs around Lakshadeep, four other regions around Indian coastline — Andaman, Nicobar, Gulf of Kutch and Gulf of Mannar — having majority of Indian coral reefs are also facing extreme threat resulting from changes in the temperature of the sea.

New Delhi, December 11: Infosys Technologies, India’s second largest information technology services company, has planned to hire 13,000 freshers, from the college campuses for 2010-11 period. Though the number of engineering colleges it visits every year for campus recruitment is expected to decrease by 50% as compared with the year 2007.

Paris, December 10: Facebook makes you despair? Social networking makes you want to end it all? You may be ready for online ritual suicide with the aid of a new website that helps you kill your virtual identity.

“Impress your friends, disconnect yourself,” is the slogan on seppukoo.com, a site that aims to subvert Facebook by offering its millions of users a glorious end and a memorial page to match.

Washington, December 10: Parents who let their kids romp in the mud and get chummy with germs could be helping to protect them against maladies like heart disease later in life, a US study showed on Wednesday.

“Our research suggests that ultra-clean, ultra-hygienic environments early in life may contribute to higher levels of inflammation as an adult, which in turn increases risks for a wide range of diseases,” including of the cardiovascular system, Thomas McDade, lead author of the study, said.

Sydney, December 10: Australia will lift a five year ban on animal-to-human transplant trials at the end of 2009, the National Health and Medical Research Council said on Thursday.

The council said developments in science and technology since the xenotransplantation research ban was introduced in 2004 meant the risk of transmitting animal viruses was now low.

“The risks, if appropriately regulated, are minimal and acceptable given the potential benefits,” it said in a statement.

Adelaide, December 10: Veterinarians treated a fur seal pup for dehydration Thursday after it was found trying to cross an Australian highway a few kilometres from a beach and nearly 300km from the nearest seal colony.

Aaron Machado of Project Dolphin Safe said he was contacted on Wednesday night by the parks service after a trucker spotted the 6kg pup on a highway near the seaside town of Port Germein in the state of South Australia.

Cape Town, December 10: Google SA has unveiled the Google Street View Trike in Cape Town and invited South Africans to register their businesses for free on Street View, in time for the 2010 World Cup.

Google Street View (first launched in the US in 2007) is a special feature of Google Maps and Google Earth that allows users to virtually explore and navigate a neighbourhood through panoramic street-level images, which are collected by Google Trikes (three-wheeled bicycles) and Toyota Prius cars (both fitted with hitech 360 degree cameras).

Paris, December 10: The Mediterranean Sea was mostly filled in less than two years in a dramatic flood around 5.33 million years ago in which water poured in from the Atlantic, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Sea water flooded in through the Strait of Gibraltar at a rate three times the current flow of the Amazon River, said the report publish by the scientific journal Nature.

Washington, December 10: If the data devoured in the United States last year were converted to text there would be enough books to bury the country under a pile two metres deep.

US residents consumed about 1.3 trillion hours worth of information from radios, televisions, computers, newspapers, mobile telephones and other sources, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

That translated into an average of nearly 12 hours spent daily by each US resident watching television, listening to MP3 players, scouring the internet or tapped into other sources of data.

Washington, December 10: US researchers have found a drug-free way to block fearful memories, opening up the possibility of new treatment approaches for problems such as post traumatic stress disorder.

Scientists found that showing people objects that stimulated a fearful memory opened up a specific time window in which the memory could be edited before it was stored again.

“Before memories are stored, there is a period where they are susceptible to being disrupted,” Elizabeth Phelps of New York University said.

Her study was published in the journal Nature.

London, December 10: A Study into character, intelligence and usefulness shows dogs are better pets than cats – but only by a whisker.

In the “great pet showdown” experts compared 11 traits from brain size to environmental impact by looking at research published in scientific journals.

Dogs came out on top in six categories to cats’ five, the Daily Mail reports.

Staff at New Scientist magazine first listed the areas where cats fared best. These included having bigger brains in proportion to their body size.

Washington, December 09: Dip a piece of paper into ink infused with carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, it morphs into a real battery. Crumple the piece of paper and it still works.

These are some of the newest ways of storing power, says researcher of material science and engineering.

Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and super capacitors in the form of everyday paper.

The paper batteries are treated with a nanotube ink, baked and folded into electrical generating sources.

Washington, December 09: An international research team has taken a deep look into the shape and geometry of the accreting material around the black hole in nearby Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).

The team, led by Makoto Kishimoto from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, combined infrared imaging from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and some of the first ever infrared long-baseline interferometric measurements from the Keck Observatory to observe the nearby AGN.

Kathmandu, Dec 09: China led calls by developing nations for deeper emissions cuts from the United States, Japan and Europe at U.N. climate talks on Tuesday, as a study showed that this decade will be the warmest on record.

The first decade of this century was the hottest since records began, the World Meteorological Organisation said, underscoring the threat scientists say the planet faces from rising temperatures.

Copenhagen,Dec 09: Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri along with fellow scientists stood up for their colleagues allegedly involved in the ‘Climategate’ scandal, stating that they had been “unfairly targeted.”

New Delhi, Dec 09: Using as little as 10 millilitres of blood from a “healthy 52-year-old-man”, scientists at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) in Delhi have successfully mapped the Human Genome Sequence for the first time in India.

The breakthrough paves the way for predictive healthcare and the possibility of identifying why certain people (with particular gene sequences) do not respond to certain medications, and what diseases a particular gene carrier, or a population, is likely to develop.

Stuttgart, December 09: German officials are planning to step up the fight against online viruses by phoning Internet users to warn them their computers are infected, an industry summit was told Tuesday.

Germany’s federal computer security agency (BSI) and the German internet business federation ECO said Internet providers already had the technology to know which of their customers were infected.

They estimated one quarter of the computers in Germany had been taken over by harmful software.