An indigenous design for a Thorium nuclear reactor, which can produce 600 MWs of power for two years without being replenished, was unveiled on Thursday by two Indian scientists at an international conference on emerging nuclear energy systems in Brussels (ICENES 2005).
Designed by scientists (V Jagannathan and Usha Pal) of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), the thorium breeder reactor (ATBR) has been claimed to be far more economical and safer than any other in the world. More importantly, the reactor doesn’t need expensive and scarce Uranium²³⁵. Although it would require Plutonium initially, the reactor will eventually run entirely on Thorium and Uranium-233, the scientists said.

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Courtesy: Wikipedia)In the paper, the scientists explained that the reactor, while annually consuming 880 kg of Plutonium for energy production from seed rods, converts 1100 kg of Thorium into fissionable Uranium-233.
Nuclear analysts say that it may be possible for India to obtain Plutonium from friendly countries wanting to dismantle their weapons or dispose of their stockpiled plutonium:):).

Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living nematode (a roundworm), about 1 mm in length, which lives in a temperate soil environment. Researchers (Shou-Wei Ding, Morris Maduro and others) at the UC Riverside have discovered that this simple worm makes an excellent experimental host for studying some of the most virulent viruses that infect humans:):). The research is published in the journal Nature this month.

Caenorhabditis elegans (Courtesy: UC Riverside)For years researchers throughout the world have studied C. elegans because many aspects of its biology, such as genetics, development and the workings of neurons, mirror the biology of humans. However, no viruses were known to infect the millimeter-long roundworm so it was not used as a model for studying viral infections. The researchers have developed a strain of the worm, in which an animal virus could replicate, allowing them to map the delicate dance of action and reaction between virus and host:).
When a virus infects a living cell, it produces viral RNA, which allows the virus to replicate inside the host cell. When a virus infects the modified elegans worm however, the worm's DNA triggers an antiviral response known as RNA interference (RNAi). RNAi specifically breaks down the virus’ RNA:D. The virus responds by producing a protein acting as a suppressor of RNAi to shut down the host’s antiviral response:-SS. When the researchers introduced a mutation in the elegans genome that shuts down this virus protein generation, the worm did not get infected!!
By studying this interaction between the virus and the worm RNA/DNA, researchers are able to understand how the virus infection works:), as this process of infection has exact parallel in us humans! Viruses like Influenza and HIV are known to produce RNAi suppressors, and so by using the elegans to generate mutated genes, we might be one day able to conquer these days.
On a side-note, we are able to do all this, as we share a lot of our genome with even the lowliest of worms. Another hurrah for evolutionary theory:):).

For the first time in history, scientists will be able to observe how the Earth's gravity will disrupt a massive asteroid's spin:). Scientists (Daniel Scheeres and colleagues) at University of Michigan predict a near-miss when Asteroid 99942 Apophis passes Earth in 2029. An asteroid flies this close to the planet only once every 1,300 years. The chance to study it will help scientists deal with the object should it threaten collision with Earth.

Close Encounter of the rocky kind (Courtesy: Wikipedia)Only about three Earth diameters will separate Apophis and Earth when the 400-meter asteroid hurtles by Earth's gravity, which will twist the object into a complex wobbling rotation. Such an occurrence has never been witnessed but could yield important clues to the interior of the sphere:D.
Apophis is one of more than 600 known potentially hazardous asteroids and one of several that scientists hope to study more closely. In Apophis' case, additional measurements are necessary because the 2029 flyby could be followed by frequent close approaches thereafter, or even a collision:-SS. If NASA places measuring equipment on the asteroid's surface, scientists could for the first time study an asteroid's interior, similar to how geologists study earthquakes to gain understanding of the Earth's core:):).
The asteroid is relatively small, about the length of three football fields. If it hit it wouldn't create wide-scale damage to the Earth, but would cause major damage at the impact site. But readers need not worry, the chance that it might hit is 1 in 300:):).

Many species of birds migrate long distances every year. Not only do they migrate over tens of thousands of miles, they almost always fly an exact route. The route is often independent of the landmarks they might fly over; for example, birds have been found to fly along some ancient riverbed, as if faithfully executing a pattern transferred from generation to generation:).

Chicken Family :D (Courtesy: PhysOrg)It has been known for some time that many species of birds use the Earth's magnetic field to select a direction of movement. However, although such birds clearly have a sense of direction, until now it has not been possible to train birds to move in a certain direction in the laboratory, even if they are motivated by a food reward. The reasons for this failure have been perplexing, but researchers now report that they have been able to successfully accomplish this training task, providing new insight into the evolution of magnetic sensing and opening new opportunities for further study of magnetoreception:):).
In the new work, researchers including Rafael Freire from the University of New England, Australia, Wolfgang Wiltschko and Roswitha Wiltschko from the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and Ursula Munro from the University of Technology in Sydney, demonstrated for the first time that birds could be trained to respond to a magnetic direction. The researchers trained domestic chicks to find an object that was associated with imprinting and was behind one of four screens placed in the corners of a square apparatus, and, crucially, showed that the chicks' direction of movement during searching for the hidden imprinting stimulus was influenced by shifting the magnetic field.
It is expected that this work will facilitate current efforts to understand how birds detect the magnetic field, because the new approach does not rely on complex behaviors, such as migration or homing, that are difficult to study in the laboratory and are dependent on the time of year. The work also shows that the ability to orient with magnetic cues is not only present in an ancient avian lineage dating back to the Cretaceous period, but has also been retained in a nonmigrating bird after thousands of years of domestication:):):).

A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical computing to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry.

Let there be light! (Courtesy: Griffith University)On the screen, a small pulse shifts back and forth – just a little bit. But this seemingly unremarkable phenomenon could have profound technological consequences. It represents the success of Luc Thévenaz and his fellow researchers in the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory at EPFL in controlling the speed of light in a simple optical fiber. They were able not only to slow light down by a factor of three from its well – established speed c of 3x10⁶ meters per second in a vacuum, but they've also accomplished the considerable feat of speeding it up – making light go faster than the speed of light:D.
The telecommunications industry transmits vast quantities of data via fiber optics. Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly. If the light signal could be controlled by light, it would be possible to route and process optical data without the costly electrical conversion, opening up the possibility of processing information at the speed of light!!
This is exactly what the EPFL team has demonstrated. Using their Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) method, the group was able to slow a light signal down by a factor of 3.6, creating a sort of temporary optical memory. They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than light in vacuum. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected:):).

Fixed-wing aircrafts generate lift by passing air at different speeds above and below the wings. The difference in the wind speed creates the lift, which keeps the wing (and the plane) afloat:). The greater this difference, the more is the lift, which is proportional to the speed of the aircraft; lower the speed, smaller is the lift. Many a small aircrafts stall (lose the lift) when they are moving at slower than recommended speeds or are making sharp turns which reduces the speed.
It seems that when the wings of such airplanes are vibrated using sound-emitting plastic coatings, they stay afloat even at slow speeds! The sound helps control the flow of air over the wings, reducing the chance of the aircraft stalling:):).

Aerofoil (Courtesy: North Sail Sod)The research was conducted by Ian Salmon, an engineer with Qantas Airways in Sydney, while he was at the University of New South Wales. Tests using a barely audible sinusoidal tone of about 400 Hz (vibrations per second) showed a 22% increase in lift, compared with a standard wing. This could translate into a few extra seconds of time for a pilot to boost a plane’s speed before it stalls!
The technique could have other advantages. The size of a small plane’s wings is determined by the need to avoid stalls during take-off and landing. So if you use this device to improve lift at low speed, you can potentially decrease wing size, thereby reducing the plane’s weight and its fuel requirements:):).

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was launched in 1995 and is positioned in a stable orbit at a point between the Earth and the Sun, where the gravitational forces of the two bodies exactly cancel each other. Consequently, the SOHO is fixed in space between Earth and Sun, and thus is at a prime position to monitor the Sun:).
As comets orbit around the Sun and once in a while crash into it, the SOHO takes their pictures. Scores of volunteers pore through the videos from the craft, and often are the first to spot new comets. Toni Scarmato, a high school teacher from Italy, discovered SOHO's 999th and 1000th comet recently, when two comets appeared in the same SOHO image:):).

The twin comets (Courtesy: SOHO)About 85 percent of the SOHO comets discovered so far belong to the Kreutz group of sun grazing comets, named because their orbits take them very close to the Sun. SOHO's 999th and 1,000th comets also belong to the Kreutz group. The Kreutz sun grazers pass within 500,000 miles of the star's visible surface. In contrast, Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, is about 36 million miles from the solar surface.
SOHO has also been used to discover three other well-populated comet groups: the Meyer, with at least 55 members; Marsden, with at least 21 members; and Kracht, with 24 members. These groups are named after the astronomers who suggested the comets are related, because they have similar orbits.
Almost all SOHO's comets are discovered using images from its Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument. LASCO is used to observe the faint, multimillion-degree outer atmosphere of the sun, called the corona. A disk in the instrument is used to make an artificial eclipse, blocking direct light from the sun so the much fainter corona can be seen. Sun grazing comets are discovered when they enter LASCO's field of view as they pass close by the star.
A large animation of the comets can be found here.

A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be also suggests that the primordial soup where life began on earth was hot and not cold, as many scientists believe:D.

Primordial soup (Courtesy: SpaceDaily)
Our DNA is made up of four nucleotide bases (complex organic molecules called Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, Cytosine). If you imagine the DNA as a sequence of these molecules, every three of the nucleotides is actually a code for an amino acid (a protein is a sequence of amino acids). Such a triplet is called a codon. However, four nucleotides can code for 4³, or 64 different amino acids, while in nature, we only have 20 amino acids! This is a puzzle that has baffled scientists for 40 years, and now researchers from the University of Bath describe a new theory which they believe could solve it:).
One of quirks of the genetic code is that there are groups of codons which all translate to the same amino acid. For example, the amino acid leucine can be translated from six different codons whilst some amino acids, which have equally important functions and are translated in the same amount, have just one.
The new theory extends upon one of Crick's idea, that the three-letter code evolved from a simpler two-letter code. The new theory suggests that the primordial doublet code was read in threes - but with only either the first two prefix or last two suffix pairs of bases being actively read.
By combining arrangements of these doublet codes together, the scientists can replicate the table of amino acids - explaining why some amino acids can be translated from groups of 2, 4 or 6 codons. They can also show how the groups of water loving (hydrophilic) and water-hating (hydrophobic) amino acids emerge naturally in the table, evolving from overlapping prefix and suffix codons:).
Such a technique ensures that the DNA is error tolerant! An error in one of the three nucleotides in a codon, is not fatal, as the changed codon will often code for the same protein:):).

A physicist in the US has proposed a new way of quantifying the scientific output of individual scientists. Jorge Hirsch of UC San Diego says that the h-index - which is derived from the number of times that papers by the scientist are cited - gives an estimate of the importance, significance and broad impact of a scientist's cumulative contributions. According to Hirsch the h-index should provide a useful yardstick to compare different individuals" when recruiting new staff, deciding promotions and awarding grants.

Nobel laureates in Physics vs. their h-Index (Courtesy: PhysicsWeb)While the number of papers published by a scientist provides a measure of their productivity, it says nothing about the quality of their work. The number of citations received by a scientist is a better indicator of quality, but co-authoring a handful of articles that are cited widely could inflate the reputation of a scientist. The new technique is supposed to take care of these issues.
Hirsch, who has a h-index of 49, says that a "successful scientist" will have an index of 20 after 20 years; an "outstanding scientist" will have an index of 40 after 20 years; and a "truly unique individual" will have an index of 60 after 20 years. Moreover, he goes on to propose that a researcher should be promoted to associate professor when they achieve a h-index of around 12, and to full professor when they reach a h about of 18:-?. I am not too sure about that, though:):).

We humans show a distinct preference for our right hand. It is a big puzzle for scientists, as no other mammal showed a preference for their left or right limb. Till now that is. It seems chimpanzees, our closest relatives, show a preference for their left hand! Does it say something about our past perhaps? Perhaps when our ancestors split from theirs, ours split with a right-handedness, whereas their ancestors split with a left-handedness:-? It is a mystery:).

My other self:D (Courtesy: Strange Zoo)A three-year study of 17 wild chimps in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, found that 12 of them used their left hands when using sticks to probe for termites. Four were right-handed and one was listed as ambiguously handed. The findings (by research team led by William D. Hopkins of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta) are reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper also looked at previous studies of chimpanzees and found that others had noted a left-handed preference when using sticks to fish for termites, but there had been reports of a right-handed preference when cracking nuts:)).
Because the hands are controlled by opposite sides of the brain, the finding could indicate that this brain division had begun as long as 5 million years ago, prior to the split between humans and chimpanzees:):).