പലന്റ്സുസ്........

Some insects that live above and below the ground communicate with each other by using plants as "green telephone lines", a new study has found.

Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, insects above the ground are alerted that the plant is already "occupied", according to the study by scientists.

This messaging enables spatially-separated insects to avoid each other, so that they do not unintentionally compete for the same plant, Science Daily reported.

In recent years it has been discovered that different types of above-ground insects develop slowly if they feed on plants that also have subterranean residents and vice versa.

It seems that a mechanism has developed via natural selection that enables the subterranean and above-ground insects to detect each other. This avoids unnecessary competition.

Using these "telephone lines", subterranean insects can also communicate with a third party, namely the natural enemy of caterpillars.

Parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside above-ground insects. The wasps also benefit from the volatile signals emitted by the leaves, as these reveal where they can find a good host for their eggs.

The communication between subterranean and above-ground insects has only been studied in a few systems. It is still not clear how widespread is this phenomenon.

DESIGNER FUEL

Imagine a world where synthetically made microorganisms will suck up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel. It's not the imagination of a science fiction writer.
Where artificially created organisms could provide solutions to some of the most pressing ecological dilemmas.

"We can use the potential of the new field of synthetic genomes to tap energy from sunlight, create biomass, recycle carbon dioxide, which will bring down its level.

A new company, Synthetic Genomics, which as its name implies fabricates modified microorganisms to produce alternative fuels.

"The biggest problem that, today is what we are doing to the environment.

Scientist was involved in a programmed with British Petroleum to convert coal into natural gas using natural organisms.

"Bacteria live on the surface of the coal, eat it and digest natural gas... If we could have even a one percent change, it will be a huge impact on the natural gas industry, adding that it will also put a dent on the ecologically harmful method of using coal as a fuel by burning it and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

"In the long term, the area for potential is of designer fuels.

He said he was working on "fourth generation fuels" which will have carbon dioxide as the "feedstock". "Imagine, instead of burying carbon dioxide in the ground, we have pipelines of carbon dioxide running around, which are then converted into natural gas.

Besides future fuels, researcher also talked about his plans to capture human phenotypes, that is, observed qualities that are not inherited, like behavior and development.

"Think of all your physical, mental, historical or medical information in one place. Then we can compare it with genotype to answer the eternal question - what's nature and what's nurture," scientist said.

Speaking on his controversial image, Venter, The researcher said it was a result of being on the "leading edge of technology".

COMPUTER CAN TELL....

''Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions, but our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment,''
In the first step of the study, 30 men and women were presented with 100 different faces of Caucasian women, roughly of the same age, and were asked to judge the beauty of each face. The subjects rated the images on a scale of 1 through 7 and did not explain why they chose certain scores.
''Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don't understand how they arrived at their conclusions''.The researchers then went to the computer and processed and mapped the geometric shape of facial features mathematically.

Additional features such as face symmetry, smoothness of the skin and hair color were fed into the analysis as well.

Based on human preferences, the machine ''learned'' the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a fresh set of faces, as reported by Science Daily. ‘The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.

This is considered a remarkable achievement, because it's as though the computer ''learned'' implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.

END OF ANOTHER DAY!

TOMORROWS CELL PHONE

Making calls from a cell phone without a battery, using just the
Warmth of your hand? Perhaps that's no more than a pipe dream right
now. But new circuits being developed by researchers in Germany are
already making it possible to harness body heat for generating
electricity.

Numerous items of medical equipment are attached to a patient's body
in the intensive care ward. They monitor the heart rate, blood
pressure, body temperature, pulse and breathing rate. This tends to
produce quite a jumble of cables as all these devices require their
own electricity supply.

In future, medical sensors may be able to function without power from
a wall socket. Instead, they will draw all the power they need from
the warmth of the human body, say the German researchers. The data
will be sent by a radio signal to the central monitoring station.

Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated
Circuits IIS in Erlanger, Germany, have developed a way of harnessing
natural body heat to generate electricity.

It works on the principle of thermoelectric generators, TEG for short,
made from semiconductor elements. The TEGs extract electrical energy
simply from the temperature difference between a hot and a cold
environment.

Normally, a difference of several tens of degrees would be required to
generate enough power, but the differences between the body's surface
temperature and that of its environment are only a few degrees.

A conventional TEG delivers roughly 200 millivolts, but electronic
devices require at least one or two volts. The engineers have come up with a solution to this problem: "They combined a number of components in a completely new way to create circuits that can operate on 200 millivolts,".

"This has enabled us to build entire electronic systems that do not
require an internal battery, but draw their energy from body heat
alone." The scientists are making further improvements to this system:

canthecowhelpstomorrowsoilproblem

What does the cow have to do with the global oil crisis? Well, it may help ease it!

An enzyme from a microbe that resides deep in a cow's gut holds the key to converting corn into a cheap biofuel like ethanol, a new study has found.

The enzyme, which allows a cow to digest grasses and other plants, can be used to turn other plant fibers into simple sugars. These simple sugars can be used to produce ethanol to power cars and trucks.

Traditionally, only the kernel of corn plants have been used to make ethanol, but the new discovery will allow the entire corn plant to be used, so more fuel can be produced at far lower cost.

The enzyme from a bacterium in the cow's gut into a corn plant, triggering the ethanol-making process without having to use extremely expensive synthetic chemicals.

"It will save money in ethanol production.”Without it they can't convert the waste into ethanol without buying enzymes - which is expensive."

Turning plant fibers into sugar requires three enzymes. The new variety of corn created for biofuel production, called Spartan Corn III, builds on earlier corn versions by containing all three necessary enzymes.

The first version, released in 2007, cuts the cellulose into large pieces with an enzyme that came from a microbe that lives in hot spring water.

Spartan Corn II, with a gene from a naturally occurring fungus, takes the large cellulose pieces created by the first enzyme and breaks them into sugar pairs.

Spartan Corn III, with the gene from a microbe in a cow, produces an enzyme that separates pairs of sugar molecules into simple sugars. These single sugars are readily fermentable into ethanol, meaning that when the cellulose is in simple sugars, it can be fermented to make ethanol.

Himalayan glaciers..

Himalayan glaciers are melting fast and may disappear within decades, affecting as many as 750 million people downstream who depend on the glacial melt for their water, according to a new UN report.

Rivers in the region such as the Ganga, the Indus and the Brahmaputra, as well as others criss-crossing northern India may soon become seasonal rivers - a development that has ramifications for poverty and the economies in the region, warns the report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

On the Indian subcontinent, the report said, people in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush regions and those downstream who rely on glacial waters would be seriously affected.

The trend in the Himalayas is reflective of glaciers worldwide that are melting at more than double the rates existing until a few years ago, warns the report, based on data from 30 locations across nine mountain ranges.

The average glacier shrank 1.4 meters in 2006, compared to half a meter in 2005 and 0.3 meters in the eighties and the nineties.

Some of the most dramatic shrinking has taken place in Europe, with Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier thinning by close to 3.1 metres during 2006, compared with a thinning of 0.3 metres in 2005.

It has been tracking the fate of glaciers for over a century.” The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight.” Millions if not billions of people depend directly or indirectly on these natural water storage facilities for drinking water, agriculture, industry and power generation during key parts of the year."

A two degree Celsius warming by the 2040s is likely to lead to sharply reduced summer flows in most rivers fed by glaciers, which will coincide with sharply rising demand for water.