Molecular decay of enamel-specific gene in toothless mammals supports theory of evolution

Biologists at the University of California, Riverside have found molecular decay of enamel-specific gene in toothless mammals, which provides fresh support for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The researchers were able to correlate the progressive loss of enamel in the fossil record with a simultaneous molecular decay of a gene, called the enamelin gene, which is involved in enamel formation in mammals. Enamel is the hardest substance in the vertebrate body, and most mammals have teeth capped with it. Examples exist, however, of mammals without mineralized teeth (e.g., baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins) and of mammals with teeth that lack enamel (e.g., sloths, aardvarks, and pygmy sperm whales). Further, the fossil record documents when enamel was lost in these lineages. "The fossil record is almost entirely limited to hard tissues such as bones and teeth," said Mark Springer, a professor of biology, who led the study. "Given this limitation, there are very few opportunities to examine the co-evolution of genes in the genome of living organisms and morphological features preserved in the fossil record," he added. In 2007, Springer, along with Robert Meredith and John Gatesy in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside, initiated a study of enamelless mammals in which the researchers focused on the enamelin gene. They predicted that these species would have copies of the gene that codes for the tooth-specific enamelin protein, but this gene would show evidence of molecular decay in these species. "Mammals without enamel are descended from ancestral forms that had teeth with enamel," Springer said. "We predicted that enamel-specific genes such as enamelin would show evidence in living organisms of molecular decay because these genes are vestigial and no longer necessary for survival," he added. Now, his lab has found evidence of such molecular "cavities" in the genomes of living organisms. Using modern gene sequencing technology, Meredith discovered mutations in the enamelin gene that disrupt how the enamelin protein is coded, resulting in obliteration of the genetic blueprint for the enamelin protein. Darwin argued that all organisms are descended from one or a few organisms and that natural selection drives evolutionary change. The fossil record demonstrates that the first mammals had teeth with enamel. Mammals without enamel therefore must have descended from mammals with enamel-covered teeth. "We could therefore predict that nonfunctional vestiges of the genes that code for enamel should be found in mammals that lack enamel," Springer said.

Short- and long-term memories require same gene, but in different brain circuits

Conducting experiments on fruit flies, a group of scientists have found that long-term and short-term memories are stored very differently because they depend upon the activity of a gene in different circuits of the brain. Assistant Professor Josh Dubnau, of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), has ofund that both short- and long-term memories require the same gene, known as rutabaga, of which humans also have a similar version. He and his colleagues say that a rapidly occurring, short-lived trace in a group of neurons that make up a structure called the "gamma" lobe produces a short-term memory, while a slower, long-lived trace in the "alpha-beta" lobe fixes a long-term memory. During the study, the researchers placed flies in a training tube attached to an electric grid, and administered shocks through the grid right after a certain odour was piped into the tube. They observed that the flies with normal rutabaga genes learnt to associate the odour with the shock, and, if given a choice, buzzed away from the grid. On the other hand, the flies that carried a mutated version of rutabaga in their brains lacked both short- and long-term memory, did not learn the association, and failed to avoid the shocks. However, the researchers also found that total memory deficit did not occur when flies carried the mutated version in either the gamma or in the alpha-beta lobes. They said that restoring the normal rutabaga function in the gamma lobe caused the flies to regain short-term memory, but not long-term memory. Similarly, added the researchers, restoring the gene's function in the alpha-beta lobe alone restored long-term memory, but not short-term memory. "This ability to independently restore either short- or long-term memory depending on where rutabaga is expressed supports the idea that there are different anatomical and circuit requirements for different stages of memory," Dubnau said. His team will next try to determine how much cross talk, if any, is required between the two lobes for long-term memory to get consolidated, hoping that it may add to the progress that scientists have already made in treating memory deficits in humans with drugs aimed at molecular members of the rutabaga-signalling pathway to enhance its downstream effects. A research article describing the study has been published in the journal Current Biology.

Blind people may soon be using their tongues to 'see'

In a groundbreaking innovation, scientists have created an electronic device that may allow blind people to "see" using their tongues. The extraordinary technology works by taking pictures filmed by a tiny camera, and turns the information into electrical pulses, which can be felt on the tongue. Tests have shown that the nerves send messages to the brain, which turn these tingles back into pictures. The tool, called the BrainPort vision device, resembles a pair of sunglasses attached by cable to a plastic lollipop. Its users have revealed that they can make out shapes, and even read signs with fewer than 20 hours training only. The scientists behind this innovation say that learning to picture images felt on the tongue is similar to learning to ride a bike. The device, which collects visual data through a small digital video camera about 2.5cm in diameter, which sits in the middle of a pair of sunglasses worn by the user, could be available for sale later this year. The information is then transmitted to a hand-held control unit, which is about the size of a mobile phone. The unit converts the digital signal into electrical pulses and sends this to the tongue via the lollipop that sits on the tongue. The lollipop contains a grid of 600 electrodes, which pulsate according to how much light is in that area of the picture. The control unit allows users to zoom in and out and control light settings and electric shock intensity. "At first, I was amazed at what the device could do. One guy started to cry when he saw his first letter," News.com.au quoted William Seiple, research director at Lighthouse International, which has been testing it, as saying. Robert Beckman, president of US-based Wicab which is developing the BrainPort, said: "It enables blind people to gain perception of their surroundings, displayed on their tongue. They cannot necessarily read a book but they can read a sign." Beckman is hoping that the device would be used to improve people's mobility and safety.

'Telepathic' microchip can help paraplegics operate PCs, TV by thought

A British scientist has developed a "telepathic" microchip that can enable paraplegics to operate PCs and television by thought alone. Jon Spratley, 28, who works for Cornwall-based specialist engineering company 42 Technology, developed this chip while studying for a PhD at Birmingham University. He says that the chip takes advantage of the fact that even though paraplegics are unable to move their limbs, their brains still produce an electronic signal when they try. He adds that once implanted onto the surface of the brain, the chip captures this electronic "thought" and transmits it wirelessly to control a range of simple devices. He hopes that this chip may prove very help paraplegics, amputees, and those with motor neurone disease to operate light switches, PCs and even cars by the power of thought alone.pratley, from Stevenage, Hertfordshire, revealed that the main aim of his research was to "help patients communicate". "We are just trying to help people with severe communication problems or motor neurone disease - like Dr Stephen Hawking or Christopher Reeve," the Telegraph quoted him as saying. "What we have designed would allow them to control a computer with their thoughts - if they imagine their muscles moving that could flick a light switch for example," he added. Spratley, honoured with the MediMaton prize by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, claims that implanting the chips will require minimal invasive surgery. Tests conducted in the laboratory have shown the technology to work, but human trials have not been conducted as yet.

The curious case of the 2,500-yr-old bizarre Nok people of Nigeria

A team of German archaeologists is looking for clues to explain the mysterious culture of the 2,500 years old Nok people in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues, broken pots, storage vessels, a clay lizard and fragments of clay faces with immense nostrils. The chipped head of a statue depicts an African man with a moustache, a fixed glare and hair piled high up on his head. He looks gloomy, almost sinister. Peter Breunig from the University of Frankfurt am Main runs an excavation near the Nigerian highlands of Jos, where the mysterious Nok culture once blossomed. Spanning more than 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles), the tropical region they lived in was larger than Ireland. Its inhabitants lived in wooden huts and ate porridge made from pearl millet. Some women subjected themselves to bloody "scar ornaments" scratched into their breasts with knives. As archaeologists imagine it, smoke hung in the air as people fired masterly terracotta creations in kilns heated to 700 degrees Celsius (1,300 degrees Fahrenheit). The most astonishing fact about what Breunig calls "a society without writing" is its age. It dates from around 2,500 years ago, a time when a wave of change in belief systems washed over other continents. Nok sculptors were contemporaries of Solon, Buddha and the early Mayans. For years, people have believed that Africa was left behind at that time - but Breunig knows better. "Around 500 B.C., the population exploded," he said. People that had been living a Stone Age-like nomadic existence suddenly settled. Breunig speaks of a "cultural Big Bang." In their excavations, the team discovers shards of clay statues everywhere - on rock slopes, in ancient refuse pits and in open spaces. The largest of these impressive figures can stand up to one meter (3.3 feet) tall and resemble what might be kings or members of a social elite. Others wear horned helmets or carved-out gourds on their heads. A third of these figures are women. The clay figures are strangely uniform, almost as if they had been mass produced. The eyes are always triangular, the pupils are pierced, and the eyebrows are high and arched. They look sedate and immersed in their thoughts. Lightning-shaped tattoos adorn their cheeks.cientists are puzzled about who could have created this collection of curiosities. The German researchers have now used state-of-the-art analytical devices to examine this area. The project could finally shed some light on a phenomenon that is one of the biggest mysteries of early history.

Why is the sun hotter outside than inside?

The mystery of why temperatures in the sun's outer atmosphere soar to several million degrees, far hotter than temperatures near the sun's surface, has been solved. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the hotter outer atmosphere is due to nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' said James Klimchuk, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Centre's Solar Physics Lab in Maryland. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. Scientists previously thought steady heating explained the corona's million degree temperatures. Observations from the NASA-funded X-Ray Telescope (XRT) and Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) instruments aboard Hinode reveal that ultra-hot plasma is widespread in solar active regions. The XRT measured plasma at 10 million degrees Kelvin, and the EIS measured plasma at five million degrees Kelvin; 273 degrees Kelvin equal zero degree Celsius. 'These temperatures can only be produced by impulsive energy bursts,' said Klimchuk, who presented the findings at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Cool Hand Of Technology

A young engineer slips a glove on his right hand and wiggles it around at the wrist, then curls in his fingers. A shiny, black robotic hand mounted upright on his desk whirs and clicks as it mirrors his "real" hand with rapid movements. Very cool. But ask any of the other engineers what they think this hand could be used for and they have one, enthusiastic response: "Everything." That's a problem for Shadow Robot, the tiny London company (2008 sales: 350,000 pounds or $577,000) that has been developing this robotic hand, considered one of the most dexterous in the world, for more than decade. It proudly counts NASA and the British defense department as clients, along with several universities. But the device has yet to be put to practical use or find itself a market, much less make a profit. Rich Walker, the company's 38-year-old managing director, wants to change that.

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Shadow Robot's hand is unique in its lifelike size and complexity. Its joints comprise 24 different degrees of freedom (or angles of independent movement) and are powered by "air muscles," which consist of tiny rubber tubes covered in a plastic mesh. When the tubes inflate, the mesh contracts, moving a tendon in a certain way. The technology is also easily compatible with other systems. Most other robotic hands, as developed by competitors like Barrett Technologies and Germany's Schunk Group, are simpler or larger. Barrett's hand has three fingers and is mainly used for manufacturing, while it also sells a robotic arm used for performing surgery. There are around 11 or 12 multinational companies in the world today selling 99% of the world's robotic arms, says Bill Townsend, the founder and CEO of Barrett. About 70% of them are used for making cars, and 30% are for other industrial manufacturing. But Shadow Robot's hand is so dexterous, Townsend notes, it is better suited to "emerging applications" that are more human friendly than his machines. "Emerging" describes it well. Over the course of a decade, Shadow Robot has sold about a dozen hands retailing at approximately 100,000 pounds ($165,830) each, but most of its clients have been so intrigued by its human-like qualities that they buy just to research it. NASA has been cagey about what it's doing with the hand, Walker says, but he knows the agency took it apart immediately after purchase. Britain's Ministry of Defense isn't doing such reverse surgery. It paid Shadow Robot 200,000 pounds ($331,660) to build and develop a robotic hand that could be integrated onto another robot used to defuse bombs, though it won't give the company much more information than that. This seems to be along the lines of where Walker, a Cambridge math graduate with dreadlocks down to his waist, wants to take the company: robots that can do things any human hand could, but shouldn't because it's too dangerous, including working with hazardous materials. He also imagines specialists using the hand to fix things from great distances--even many miles--with the help of a video camera. This is still years in the future, though. After a decade of struggling along with 250,000 pounds ($414,560) investment capital from founder Richard Greenhill and another director, Shadow Robot is currently at that difficult stage met by many high-tech companies, where the people behind it start to realize they cannot continue to just make cool-looking technology anymore--they have to make money too. Shadow Robot has never made a profit. Most years it has either booked a loss or broken even; it only started being funded by its own sales last year. Recently its accounts have started to show some promise. Shadow brought in revenues of 100,000 pounds ($164,880) in 2007, then 350,000 pounds ($577,089) in 2008 and is projecting sales of 700,000 pounds ($1.2 million) this year. A big chunk of that, or 200,000 pounds ($331,660), will come from the sale of a hand to Britain's Ministry of Defense, and another 150,000 pounds ($248,750) is the first installment of a four-year research contract with the European Union, via a lengthy grant application through Pierre et Marie Curie university in Paris. Shadow Robot is 50% owned by 66-year-old Greenhill, who was able to fund it until 2008 with money from a stock photography firm he started with his wife. The rest of the company is owned by its eight, full-time employees. Greenhill is the ultimate geek. He would happily continue tinkering with his robots for the remainder of his life and finds the notion of making money from them jarring and a "commercial pipe dream," according to Walker. One reason for his view may be the difficulty he had making money from robots in the past: he set up an educational robotics company in the early 1980s, which quickly folded. For many years Greenhill's anti-commercial stance bothered Walker and the company's main board member, Nick Singer, a banjo-playing design engineer who took care of about a third of Shadow's funding in the 1990s. After a number of heated discussions--"We provided hours of entertainment," Walker says of himself and Greenhill--he and Singer finally confronted the founder last year. "Greenhill didn't want to run a business. Singer and I felt that a commercial approach would enable us to get the company off the rocks financially, and Greenhill agreed to step back." The company's advisors recommended that Walker take over. It was a stark change in roles. Walker had first met Greenhill when he was just 15 and attending a summer camp devoted to computers. He became something of a protégé for the older inventor, and went on to spend his summers working with Greenhill and his small team of robot enthusiasts out of the attic of the founder's home in Islington, North London. (The company transferred to a store front just 400 yards away in 1993 after Greenhill bought the building. It remains there to this day.) While Walker has pulled away from robotics designing and started managing the office and accounts, Greenhill also pulled away geographically - he spends much of his time in the English mountains of Cumbria, hiking in remote areas with no mobile phone access. Occasionally he lends his advice to the company on research. This may be a good thing if Shadow is to succeed. "Richard is a visionary," says Walker. "And his long-term goal is building humanoid robots that will do everything." But while the protégé likes that long-term goal too, he wants to add "shorter goals and road maps and plans." With Greenhill having come up with the new ideas to prove people wrong, Walker wants to avoid reinventing the wheel. Whereas the founder avoided books, his energetic successor walks out of the library with 12 of them, all about business and marketing. "A few years ago we were focused inwards and assuming that people would find out about us. We thought that if you built a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door." Now Walker, a lover of metaphors, is the one knocking on doors and picking up the phone to companies or people he reads about in trade magazines. He tried hiring sales people, but found that research departments were put off by their pitches, so he stopped. Now Walker takes care of much of the selling himself, as well as of the grant applications; for three months out of the year he spends 75% of his time applying for grants. He's learned to spend as much of the rest of his time attending trade fairs, meeting potential customers, or reminding an engineer to drop a line to someone who could find their robotic hand useful. It's how they got that Ministry of Defense contract. "You sow bread on the water and eventually something bites." With the company now refocused, Walker is trying to find other markets to tap besides defense. The Defense gig has the potential to become much bigger, but until that is confirmed he's sniffing around in biomedicine, nuclear energy and hazardous waste. Gaining traction in those markets has been difficult, but Walker at least knows that Shadow Hand is a product that could one day minimize risk to humans, in war zones or with hazardous materials. More importantly, he's caught on to the basic principle behind running a business: "If you don't have somebody that's interested in what you're doing, there's not a lot of point doing it."

World's smallest laser unveiled

The world's smallest laser, contained in a silica sphere just 44 nanometres across, and about 10 times smaller than the wavelength of light, has been unveiled. According to a report in Nature News, the laser has been named as the 'spaser'. Whereas a laser amplifies light, using a mirrored cavity to intensify it, a spaser amplifies surface plasmons - tiny oscillations in the density of free electrons on the surface of metals, which, in turn, produce light waves. The spaser could be used as a light source for scanning near-field optical microscopes, which can resolve details beyond the reach of standard light microscopy, and in nanolithography, to etch patterns much smaller than the width of a human hair. The device also opens the door to nanoscale circuits that could process information thousands of times faster than the microelectronic chips inside today's computers. "This work has utmost significance," said Mark Stockman of Georgia State University in Atlanta, who with David Bergman of Tel Aviv University in Israel proposed the spaser concept in 2003. "The spaser is the smallest possible quantum amplifier and generator of optical fields on the nanoscale - without it, nanoplasmonics is like microelectronics would have been without a transistor," he added. According to Nikolay Zheludev, a physicist at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at Southampton University, UK, "I can think of applications in tagging large biochemical assays and in security marking, where the spaser's narrow spectral output gives better tagging capacity than existing semiconductor quantum dot emitters." Such applications are not far off, according to the US team. But, Noginov thinks that the spaser's ability to generate coherent surface plasmons may be even more important than its uses as a nanolaser, and could herald a new generation of ultrafast nanoelectronics. So far, researchers have made plasmonic circuit elements that serve as wires, resistors and capacitors, but the spaser should enable the development of amplifiers and generators. For the spaser to have realistic applications in computing, however, researchers need to find a way to make it work electrically using a semiconductor, rather than using light to pump an organic dye. That would allow the spaser to be integrated with photonic nanocircuitry. According to Stockman, such devices are about a year away. "There is already a nanolaser with electrical pumping, and its extension to the spaser is very realistic," he said.

Archaeologists discover oldest map in Western Europe

Researchers at the University of Zaragoza have unearthed what they believe is man's earliest map, dating from almost 14,000 years ago. The research team, led by archaeologist Pilar Utrilla, discovered a stone tablet in a cave in Abauntz in the Navarra region of northern Spain in 1993 but it has taken them 15 years to disentangle the mess of etched lines. The artefact found during excavation of the cave is believed to contain the earliest known representation of a landscape. Engravings on the stone, which measures less than seven inches by five inches, and is less than an inch thick, appear to depict mountains, meandering rivers and areas of good foraging and hunting. "We can say with certainty that it is a sketch, a map of the surrounding area," the Telegraph quoted Utrilla as saying. "Whoever made it sought to capture in stone the flow of the watercourses, the mountains outside the cave and the animals found in the area. "The landscape depicted corresponds exactly to the surrounding geography. Complete with herds of ibex marked on one of the mountains visible from the cave itself," she added. The research adds to further understanding of early modern human capacities of spatial awareness, planning and organised hunting. "We can't be sure what was intended in the making of the tablet but it was clearly important to those who populated the cave 13,660 years ago. Maybe it was to record areas rich in mushrooms, birds' eggs, or flint used for making tools," Utrilla said. According to the researchers, it may also have been used as a storytelling device or to plan a hunting expedition. "Nothing like this has been discovered elsewhere in western Europe," she said. The research has been published in the latest edition of the Journal of Human Evolution.

Send e-mails via mobile phone just by writing in the sky

Duke University engineering students have come up with a cell phone application that can enable users to remember things just by writing short notes in the air with their handsets, which will be automatically sent to their e-mail address. The researchers say their PhonePoint Pen application uses the built-in accelerometers in cell phones to recognize human writing. Accelerometers are the devices in phones that not only keep track of the phone's movements, but make it possible for the display screens to rotate from landscape to portrait modes depending on how the phone is rotated. These devices are always "on," so there is no additional burden on the phone to use this new application. "We developed an application that uses the built-in accelerometers in cell phones to recognize human writing," said Sandip Agrawal, electrical and computer engineering senior at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, who with Duke graduate student Ionut Constandache developed the PhonePoint Pen. "By holding the phone like a pen, you can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air. Constandache said: "The accelerometer converts the gestures to images, which can be sent to any e-mail address for future reference." "Also, say you're in a class and there is an interesting slide on the screen. We foresee being able to take a photo of the slide and write a quick note on it for future reference. The potential uses are practically limitless. That this prototype works validates the feasibility of such a pen," Constandache added.

Computer hackers can use power sockets to spy on what you're typing

Computer hackers can use power sockets to scout what people are typing, warn experts. Researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco, of Inverse Path, have revealed that poor shielding on some keyboard cables can allow hackers to identify each character typed on a computer. According to the BBC, the information passed along cables connecting keyboards to desktop PCs is leaked onto power circuits. "Our goal is to show that information leaks in the most unexpected ways and can be retrieved," the Telegraph quoted the researchers as saying. During the study, the research focused on the cables used to connect a type of keyboard, called a PS/2, to desktop PCs. They found that six wires inside a PS/2 cable were typically "close to each other and poorly shielded", thus information travelling along the data wire, when a key is pressed, leaks onto the earth wire in the same cable. The study said that picking up the voltage changes, which identify each keystroke, was made easier because data travels along PS/2 cables one bit at a time.

Web addresses exceed world's population

Internet is growing in dimensions every second, so much so that there are more addresses than there are people on Earth, claims the team behind Microsoft's new search engine Bing. Bing has put the number of web pages at "over 1 trillion", while Google had earlier indexed more than one trillion discreet web addresses. The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion, which means that there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world. And this could mean that if a person spent just one minute reading every website in existence, then he or she would be kept busy for 31,000 years, without any sleep. "An average person would need six hundred thousand decades of nonstop reading to read through the information," News.com.au quoted Bing as saying. Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said that the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year. "Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year's estimate (1.26 billion in 2007)," he said. The largest Internet population belongs to China, with 338 million users online, which is more than there were people in the US. However InternetWorldStats.com (IWS), a website that combines multiple data sources, has claimed that China's online population is more like 298 million. "With the rates of India and China still quite low, there is ample room for growth in the coming decade," said Higginson. But, measuring the online population could be tricky-there are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. And thus it is difficult to find a single figure to represent the world online population. IWS combined data from the UN's International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau, and its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108. And this is just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world. But it changes every day. "In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage," said Higginson. According to IWS, the top 5 countries with the most internet users are:

1 - China (298,000,000 users, or 22.4 percent of their population)

2 - US (227,190,989, or 74.7 percent)

3 - Japan (94,000,000, or 73.8 percent)

4 - India (81,000,000, or 71.5 percent)

5 - Brazil (67,510,400, or 34.4% percent)

Rare Buddhist treasures unearthed in Gobi Desert

A joint Austrian-Mongolian treasure hunt team has unearthed rare Buddhist treasures, not seen for more than 70 years, in the Gobi Desert. The relics, which include statues, artwork, manuscripts and personal belongings of a famous 19th Century Buddhist master, were buried in the 1930s during Mongolia's Communist purge, when hundreds of monasteries were looted and destroyed. Michael Eisenriegler, leader of the search team, told the BBC World Service they were filled with "the most amazing Buddhist art objects". The expert said: "It is of tremendous value for Mongolian culture because Buddhism was almost extinct in the Communist times, especially in the 1930s. "I'm totally exhausted right now but I'm also totally impressed with what I've seen." The finds will be put on show at the Danzan Ravjaa Museum in Sainshand, 400km (450 miles) south of the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator. About 20 boxes remain hidden in the desert.

Sahara desert becoming green due to climate change

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall, all thanks to the rising temperatures due to climate change. According to a report in National Geographic News, if sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago. The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers). Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences. The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan. he transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, according to Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. "The water-holding capacity of the air is the main driving force," Claussen said. While satellite images can't distinguish temporary plants like grasses that come and go with the rains, ground surveys suggest recent vegetation change is firmly rooted. Throughout North Africa, new trees, such as acacias, are flourishing, according to Stefan Kropelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany. "Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass," he said. In 2008, Kropelin visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco. "The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," he said. "They have never seen so much grazing land," he added. He explained it's a similar story in the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, a remote desert region that he has studied for two decades. "Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," Kropelin said. "Now, you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said. According to Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, satellite data shows "that indeed during the last decade, the Sahel is becoming more green."

Venus may once have been more Earth-like

Venus Express has charted the first map of the planet's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths, which hints that Venus may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water. The map comprises over a thousand individual images, recorded between May 2006 and December 2007. Because Venus is covered in clouds, normal cameras cannot see the surface, but Venus Express used a particular infrared wavelength that can see through them. Although radar systems have been used in the past to provide high-resolution maps of Venus's surface, Venus Express is the first orbiting spacecraft to produce a map that hints at the chemical composition of the rocks. The new data is consistent with suspicions that the highland plateaus of Venus are ancient continents, once surrounded by ocean and produced by past volcanic activity. "This is not proof, but it is consistent. All we can really say at the moment is that the plateau rocks look different from elsewhere," said Nils Muller at the Joint Planetary Interior Physics Research Group of the University Munster and DLR Berlin, who headed the mapping efforts. The rocks look different because of the amount of infrared light they radiate into space, similar to the way a brick wall heats up during the day and gives off its heat at night. Besides, different surfaces radiate different amounts of heat at infrared wavelengths due to a material characteristic known as emissivity, which varies in different materials. The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument captured this infrared radiation during Venus's night-time orbits around the planet's southern hemisphere. The new map shows that the rocks on the Phoebe and Alpha Regio plateaus are lighter in colour and look old compared to the majority of the planet. On Earth, such light-coloured rocks are usually granite and form continents. Granite is formed when ancient rocks, made of basalt, are driven down into the planet by shifting continents, a process known as plate tectonics. The water combines with the basalt to form granite and the mixture is reborn through volcanic eruptions. "If there is granite on Venus, there must have been an ocean and plate tectonics in the past," said Muller. The new map gives astronomers another tool in their quest to understand why Venus is so similar in size to Earth and yet has evolved so differently.

120,000 yr old frozen microbe in Greenland may hold clues to alien life

A team of scientists has found a tiny frozen microbe trapped more than three kilometres under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years, which may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets. The novel microbe was found by Dr Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and a team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University, US. The team coaxed the dormant microbe back to life; first incubating their samples at 2 degree Celsius for seven months and then at 5 degree C for a further four and a half months, after which colonies of very small purple-brown bacteria were seen. H. glaciei is small even by bacterial standards. It is 10 to 50 times smaller than E. coli. Its small size probably helped it to survive in the liquid veins among ice crystals and the thin liquid film on their surfaces. Small cell size is considered to be advantageous for more efficient nutrient uptake, protection against predators and occupation of micro-niches and it has been shown that ultramicrobacteria are dominant in many soil and marine environments. Most life on our planet has always consisted of microorganisms, so it is reasonable to consider that this might be true on other planets as well. Studying microorganisms living under extreme conditions on Earth may provide insight into what sorts of life forms could survive elsewhere in the solar system. "These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats", said Dr Loveland-Curtze. "The exceptionally low temperatures can preserve cells and nucleic acids for even millions of years. H. glaciei is one of just a handful of officially described ultra-small species and the only one so far from the Greenland ice sheet," she added. "Studying these bacteria can provide insights into how cells can survive and even grow under extremely harsh conditions, such as temperatures down to -56 degree C, little oxygen, low nutrients, high pressure and limited space," she explained.

Engineers working on converting foot power into battery power

Engineers are developing a way to capture the energy released by the marching boots of soldiers and are trying to use it to power their equipment, according to the latest research. The new system designed to convert foot-power into battery power could help troops reduce the weight of their packs by up to 10 kg. The project has been designed to address the needs of infantrymen. Heavy packs can severely limit a soldier's mobility and also lead to long-term health problems. The typical pack weight that an infantryman carries on a six-hour patrol is around 75 kg, with batteries making up 10 kg of the load. Essential kit such as ammunition and water make up much of the rest. A similar energy harvesting idea has been used in cars for some time where braking force is stored and later used to drive the vehicle forward. However, harvesting energy from people walking has always proved difficult due to the flexibility and strength of the materials required and the fact that everyone's walking patterns are different. The devices will use high tech ceramics and crystals as piezoelectric transducers in order to convert mechanical stress into an electric charge. Andrew Bell, professor at the University of Leeds, who is leading the project says: 'It could also reduce a soldier's pack weight by around 15 percent.' 'And this technology could potentially have lots of applications in civvy street too.' Bell says his team will succeed where others have failed because they are taking a holistic approach.

Now, send e-mail greetings to loved ones from beyond the grave

A new range of internet services have made it possible for users to now send e-mail greetings to their loved ones from beyond the grave. These online services are being used to send birthday wishes to friends, congratulations on a graduation, and to keep spouses happy. Before they die, internet users can programme the sites to fire off posthumous e-mails on key dates each year. People using these services can even set up their own online memorial in advance. The messages go live when the website is alerted to a subscriber's demise. According to reports, these websites are part of a growing trend for "digital wills". Though not legally binding, the online wills are aimed at ensuring that next of kin can gain full access to a dead person's musings on sites like Facebook and Hotmail, as well as passwords for internet banking and other e-documents. One Simon Gilligan, 63, from Littleport, Cambridgeshire, has made a digital will on lastmessagesclub.co.uk, which launched this month, in tandem with a paper will. "It has things like personal messages to my wife and children and various details of my bank accounts, e-mail and my Facebook account," Times Online quoted him as saying. "I did it because I have heard of situations where people have died and it has taken a long time to get the information. This will make it easier for my wife and children. "I would definitely consider setting it up to send another e-mail out to my family on a birthday. That would choke everybody up," he added.

Mars, a seething cauldron for 100 million years

Mars may have been a seething cauldron for nearly a 100 million years after its formation, thwarting evolution of life on the planet, according to an analysis of meteorites. The research has shown that the red planet remained excessively hot - with temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius - for 100 million years following its formation. A team of scientists from the US, Belgium, and Australia and workers at NASA's Johnson Space Centre, studied the radioactive clocks ticking away in a particularly rare and ancient type of Martian meteorite called a Nakhlite (named after Nakhla in Egypt). 'We were able to reconstruct the time scale for Mars' earliest evolution,' said Craig O'Neill, planetary scientist at Macquarie University. 'Our measurements are up to 20 times more accurate than previous studies, so we've really been able to nail the time scale,' O'Neill said.' Contrary to the popular belief that it only took a few thousand years for Mars to cool and solidify from an initially molten ball, their study suggests that there was a thick steam atmosphere on Mars very early in the planet's history that kept the surface a magma ocean for 100 million years - and essentially sterile the whole time. 'The toughest extremophile bacteria on Earth can withstand up to 130 degrees Celsius, so that makes it very difficult to see how life could have evolved under the conditions on primeval Mars,' said O'Neill. 'The conditions for life wouldn't have existed, unless you could really handle the heat,' he added. These results were recently published in Nature Geoscience.

British fighter jets chase UFO, shows video

A dramatic 30-second video clip shows two British fighter jets in hot pursuit of a UFO, a media report said Sunday. A cameraman shot the video of the aircraft chasing the shiny orb and it is believed to have been taken from a West Midlands service station car park, The Sun reported. 'This is one of the best videos I've seen. It could be a new drone - that might explain the military jets. 'But you don't normally test-fly secret projects in daylight. Alternatively, this could be the real thing - a UFO in our airspace and military aircraft scrambled to intercept, probably due to it being tracked on radar,' Nick Pope, who probed UFO sightings for the defence ministry, was quoted as saying. The defence ministry refused to comment on the alleged sighting, but confirmed it would scramble jets to meet an air threat. A police official from West Midlands, however, said: 'We are not aware of any reports of unidentified aircraft.'

Galaxy with key to Milky Way creation found

         A team of scientists from the UK and the US has discovered a galaxy far away from us which is churning out stars 250 times faster than our Milky Way. The discovery of the galaxy, about 10 billion light years away from the earth, will help researchers understand how the Milky Way was formed.Galaxy SMM J2135- 0102 has four distinct star- forming regions, each of which is 100 times brighter than Milky Way locations such as the Orion Nebula. The team which discovered the galaxy was led by scientists from the UK's Durham University.

        
        It also included researchers from European Southern University and the Massachusetts based Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics." The new galaxy is forming stars at about 250 suns per year. Our Milky Way is forming about two suns per year," lead scientist Mark Swinbank of Durham University said. Because of the time it takes light to reach the earth, the scientists observed the galaxy as it would have appeared 10 billion years ago - just three billion years after the Big Bang.

       It was Milky Way- sized at the time. But today, 10 billion years later, it would have grown into a giant elliptical galaxy much more massive than the Milky Way." When we look at the stars in the Milky Way, we find that most are about 10 billion years old. So, to understand how the Milky Way was formed, we must look back to these times. In this study, we have done just that," Swinbank said. "The main result of our study is that we have located four individual star- forming regions.

       Each of these regions is forming stars much more rapidly than we would expect, given their sizes. In essence, the regions are much more efficient at forming stars than we typically see in the local universe," he said. The findings indicate star formation was more vigorous in the early universe. The paper was published on Sunday in the science journal Nature.