The word Nanotechnology refers to inventions and discoveries in the realm of the nanometer scale, usually 0.1 to 100 nm. NanoTech is poised to revolutionize our world. Just as the latter part of the 20th Century saw breakthroughs in electronics and computers, the first half of this century should see huge steps in nano-sciences.
With that in mind, working with Platinum nanowires 100 times thinner than a human hair - and using blood vessels as conduits to guide the wires - a team of U.S. and Japanese researchers has demonstrated a technique that may one day allow doctors to monitor individual brain cells and perhaps provide new treatments for neurological diseases such as Parkinson's:):).

Nanowires in the brain (Courtesy: PhysOrg)In the research, published in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research, the scientists explain how such thin wires can be used to directly interface with the neurons in our brain. The nanowires are even thinner than the thinnest capillaries and blood vessels, which makes it possible to thread them through our vascular system. The logic is similar to using catheters to transport nutrients, but at a much smaller scale, and with much higher focus and impact.
The team (Neuroscientist Rudolfo Llinas and his colleagues) describes a proof-of-principle experiment in which they first guided platinum nanowires into the vascular system of tissue samples, and then successfully used the wires to detect the activity of individual neurons lying adjacent to the blood vessels:):).
The technique could revolutionize medicine as we know it. The nanowires could, in principle, direct nutrients and chemicals to the areas of the body that need it. It could be used to direct chemicals to tumors, or neurotransmitters to the regions of the brain that need it.
However, the biggest challenge is to thread the nanowire to the exact place required. There are thousands of such blood vessels in the brain, and to navigate through them to the exact spot is a daunting task indeed! But the researchers have a possible solution:). It is to replace the platinum nanowires with new conducting polymer nanowires. Not only do the polymers conduct electrical impulses, conductive, they change shape in response to electric fields, which would allow the researchers to steer the nanowires through the brain's circulatory system. Polymer nanowires have the added benefit of being 20 to 30 times smaller than the platinum ones used in the reported laboratory experiments. They also will be biodegradable, and therefore suitable for short-term brain implants:):).
Who knows... perhaps this same technology can one day be adapted to interface our brains with computers. We will all be cyborgs then:D.

Zero is supposed to be an abstract concept. It was the last numeral to be created in most numerical systems, as it is not a counting number. The ancient peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization used fractions and negative numbers, but were unsure of the concept zero. Greeks had long philosophical discussions about the concept of zero! The first documented mention of zero is near 300 AD by Indian mathematicians.

Alex the Parrot (Courtesy: GEAE)Now it seems a bird has grasped the zero, even though it took us humans such a long time to get our arms around it:). Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has a brain the size of a walnut. But when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says 'none':):).
Today, zero might not seem to be such an abstract concept to us. But kids are unable to grasp the concept till they are about the age of three to four! The result, published in the current issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, adds to growing evidence that birds and other animals are smarter than we thought:):). Perhaps we should look at the word 'bird-brain' with some respect from now on:D.

We are all familiar with the concept of a leap year. Every four years, an extra day is added to the year to keep the calendar year in sync with the seasonal year. If there were no leap years, then our seasons would be out of sync with our months within a generation! Similarly, a leap second is sometimes added to a year, so that our day is in sync with the Earth's rotation. When such a second is added, the last minute of the last day of the year is a second longer (61 seconds):D. Since 1970s, a total of 32 leap seconds have been added (the last being in 1998), and this year, the 33rd one will be added:).

Check your clocks on New Year's Eve! (Courtesy: University of Oklahoma)Millions of years ago, the Earth had 10 hour long days! Due to tidal and wind forces, gravitational attraction of the moon and planets, and friction within the Earth's mantle and core, the Earth's rotation is slowing down. The extra second will be added to account for this slowdown. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris will sneak the extra time in on 31 December 2005.
The advent of atomic clocks in the 1950s allowed for extremely accurate measurement of periods of time. Starting at a particular point in 1958, an international array of these clocks has been counting out seconds, the length of which was defined at that point. This representation of time is the standard by which the public sets their watches. But people have been keeping an eye on changes in the length of seconds, as fractions of the Earth's daily rotation, using astronomical measurements.
Desktop computers will adjust to the added second by talking to other units on the Internet. Our clocks and watches perhaps need to be adjusted manually:):), so do not trust the advertizers when they say that your really accurate atomic clocks do not require any adjustments ;);).

How cool will it be, if we could reconstruct an extinct animal from the fragments of its fossilized genome? Such a project is currently being unveiled at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where U.S. and German scientists have launched a project to recreate the Neanderthal genome:).

Gibraltar Neanderthal Child (Courtesy: RDOS)The project involves isolating genetic fragments from fossils of the prehistoric beings to map their complete DNA. Neanderthal was a species of genus Homo (Homo Neanderthalensis) that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia from about 230,000 to 29,000 years ago. Adapted to cold, with short but robust builds and large nose, Neanderthals were finally wiped out when modern humans possibly moved in.
The genome project should be able to tell us how much genetically identical (and different) our closest cousins really were. The goal thus is not to recreate a Neanderthal (which might be unethical since they are so similar to us and might have been capable of conscious thought), but to help reveal the molecular evolution of human beings.
But the techniques developed during this work can certainly be adapted to recreate other extinct creatures. Jurassic Park, anyone:D:D?

When did the first human being land in the Americas? For a long time, conventional wisdom suggested that the first humans entered North America through a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska (over the current Bering Strait) about 12-15,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, when the sea levels dropped. But there are competing theories, which suggest that humans entered the Americas by boat across the Pacific, or by walking along the Greenland coast.

Left: Closeup, Right: Walk in the park! (Courtesy: Nature)Now a new evidence might push the date of this first arrival, further back in time. Researchers think they may have found footprints in southern Mexico that mark the oldest evidence for the presence of humans in the Americas. The impressions are preserved in volcanic ash outside the city of Puebla, and have been dated at 40,000 years ago!! This, if conclusively proved, would lend credence to the theory that humans crossed into the New World much earlier than previously thought.
Though they do look like footprints, researchers need to make sure that they are not some quirky creations of Mother Nature. But it does look like the area is peppered with more than 200 impressions that seem to be footprints from several people, including children, along with birds, cats, dogs and species with cloven feet:):). According to geoarchaeologist Silvia Gonzalez of Liverpool John Moores University, UK, these people might have been fleeing an eruption from the nearby Cerro Toluquilla volcano. It is the same volcanic ash that also helped preserve the prints for the last thousands of years, along with biological material such as shells which were used to date the ash strata:):).

Update: Videos (68.6KB, 108KB, Courtesy: NASA-DeepImpact)
Deep Impact is a NASA space probe designed to study the composition of the interior of the nucleus of the comet named Tempel-1. Tempel-1 is a periodic comet discovered in 1867 by Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, an astronomer working in Marseille, France. The probe was launched on January 12, 2005. After its initial analyses of the comet, the probe separated into two parts (Impactor and Flyby).

Bada Boom! (Courtesy: NASA)Now scientists have successfully crashed the Impactor into the comet:). The goal is to expose the interior of the comet, and thus gather data (using the Flyby) that should tell us a lot about the inner workings of the comet, and also shed light on the formation of our Solar System.
The Impactor is the size of a washing machine, whereas the comet is of the size of Manhattan (14 km long). The collision happened some 83 million miles from Earth:):).
The show is observed by all the major telescopes! It's not just Deep Impact that observed the mission. Every space and ground-based telescope large enough to do the job were watching: Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Galex and SWAS space telescopes were all recording the event:). The Rosetta spacecraft, a European probe on its way to another comet (67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko), also observed and recorded the show:)).
Scientists expect a wealth of data from all these observations. Not only will this help us in our understanding of comets, but it should also tell us more about the origins of our Sun, planets, and ultimately, us:).

The mathematical symbol Pi represents the universal constant 3.1415926535... which is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Pi is a transcendental number, that is, it cannot be obtained as the solution of any polynomial equation with rational coefficients. This also means that there are infinite digits in Pi, with no apparent pattern:). One of the most beautiful numbers in mathematics, Pi has always fascinated mathematicians and laypeople of all ages. Currently, Pi haw been calculated to 1.24 trillion decimal places with the aid of a supercomputer:D:D.
Now a Japanese mental health counsellor has broken the world record for reciting pi from memory. Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed to recite the number's first 83,431 decimal places, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese:)).

Pi (Courtesy: BBC)Mr Haraguchi, from Chiba, east of Tokyo, took several hours reciting the numbers, finishing in the early hours of Saturday. He hopes to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records to replace his fellow countryman Hiroyuki Goto, who managed to recite 42,195 numbers as a 21-year-old student in 1995. Mr Haraguchi's effort took eight hours and 40 minutes, during which nothing passed his lips except water and several bite-size rice balls:):).