A team of researchers from Australia and the United States has discovered 274 new species in the Huon Commonwealth Marine Reserve, off the southern coast of Tasmania, Australia. The species include fiery red coral, purple-spotted sea anemones, sea spiders, a carnivorous sea squirt, and a waffle-like sponge. The scientists also found more than 10,000-year-old corals, which may provide clues on ancient climate. But, most corals deeper than 4,200 feet were newly dead. “If the Carbon dioxide patterns continue in the atmosphere, these whole reefs could be at risk of extinction within 50 to 100 years”, says the chief scientist of the expedition, Ron Thresher.
What if infectious viruses could be simply filtered out? Sounds bizarre? A new device, called Hemopurifier, may actually do that! It may help fight Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), hepatitis and cancers, and replenish CD4 immune cells, a type of white blood cell, in the body. The device targets all circulating strains of HIV, including those that cause patients to fail antiviral drug treatments. It also removes toxic proteins shed by HIV to kill-off immune cells. “The antiviral and immunotherapeutic attributes of our Hemopurifier offer a realistic strategy for managing a broad spectrum of infectious disease conditions”, says Jim Joyce, chairman and CEO of Aethlon Medical, the firm behind the device. It is now being tested at the Jattinder Gambhir Hospital in Ludhiana, Punjab, India.
Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the US, have discovered a planet 4.7 times the size of Earth, 25 times its mass! Named HAT-P-11b, it is orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth, and is baked to a temperature of around 1100 degrees F. It passes directly in front of (transits) its parent star, thereby blocking about 0.4 per cent of the star’s light. And this periodic dimming, detected by a network of automated telescopes known as HATNet, helped discover the planet. HAT-P-11b is the 11th extrasolar planet found by HATNet, and there are signs of a second planet in the same system. NASA’s upcoming Kepler spacecraft will search for such extrasolar planets. “In addition, however, we expect Kepler to measure the detailed properties of HAT-P-11 with the extraordinary precision possible only from space,” says Robert Noyes, a member of the discovery team. |
|
Indian scientists have created an ‘agricultural Wikipedia’ to act as an online repository of agricultural information in the country. It would disseminate crop and region-specific information to researchers, students, farmers and agricultural extension workers, who share the knowledge with farmers. The site also has blogs and other platforms. The website currently contains information on nine crops — rice, wheat, chickpea, pigeon pea, vegetable pea, lychee, sugarcane, groundnut and sorghum. More topics will be added soon, after being validated through review and analysis by invited agricultural researchers. “It is hoped that even where farmers have no access to the Internet, the Agropedia information can be used as a basis for radio plays, for example,” says V. Balaji, head of knowledge management and sharing with the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a partner in the project.
Japan has launched the world’s first greenhouse gas monitoring satellite into space. It is called Ibuki, which means ‘breath’. It will circle the planet every 100 minutes, gathering data to be shared with space and scientific organisations. It has three major mission objectives – to monitor the density of greenhouse gases precisely and frequently; to study the absorption and emission levels of greenhouse gases per continent or large country over a certain period of time; to establish advanced technologies essential for precise greenhouse gas observations. “The satellite is expected to play an important role in monitoring global environmental changes and look out for any small warning signs that could affect our future,” says a statement released by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). |
