Must know Information about News And Events, Politics And Government and More

A new research has suggested that the first eyes in the animal kingdom evolved for the purpose of seeking light.Larvae of marine invertebrates - worms, sponges, jellyfish - have the simplest eyes that exist. They consist of no more than two cells: a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell.

These minimal eyes, called eyespots, resemble the ‘proto-eyes’ suggested by Charles Darwin as the first eyes to appear in animal evolution. They cannot form images but allow the animal to sense the direction of light.

This ability is crucial for phototaxis - the swimming towards light exhibited by many zooplankton larvae.

Myriads of planktonic animals travel guided by light every day. Their movements drive the biggest transport of biomass on earth.

“For a long time, nobody knew how the animals do phototaxis with their simple eyes and nervous system,” explained Detlev Arendt, whose team carried out the research at EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory).

“We assume that the first eyes in the animal kingdom evolved for exactly this purpose. Understanding phototaxis thus unravels the first steps of eye evolution,” he added.

Studying the larvae of the marine ragworm Platynereis dumerilii, the scientists found that a nerve connects the photoreceptor cell of the eyespot and the cells that bring about the swimming motion of the larvae.

The photoreceptor detects light and converts it into an electrical signal that travels down its neural projection, which makes a connection with a band of cells endowed with cilia.

These cilia, which are thin, hair-like projections, beat to displace water and bring about movement.

Shining light selectively on one eyespot changes the beating of the adjacent cilia.

The resulting local changes in water flow are sufficient to alter the direction of swimming, computer simulations of larval swimming show.

The second eyespot cell, the pigment cell, confers the directional sensitivity to light.

“Platynereis can be considered a living fossil. It still lives in the same environment as its ancestors millions of years ago and has preserved many ancestral features,” said Gaspar Jekely, former member of Arendt’s lab.

“Studying the eyespots of its larva is probably the closest we can get to figuring out what eyes looked like when they first evolved,” he added.

It is likely that the close coupling of light sensor to cilia marks an important, early landmark in the evolution of animal eyes. Many contemporary marine invertebrates still employ the strategy for phototaxis.

On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet’s smallest and rarest primates.Over a two-month period, the scientists used nets to trap three furry, mouse-sized pygmy tarsiers — two males and one female — on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the researchers said on Tuesday.

They spotted a fourth one that got away.

The tarsiers, which some scientists believed were extinct, may not have been overly thrilled to be found. One of them chomped Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a Texas A&M University professor of anthropology who took part in the expedition.

“I’m the only person in the world to ever be bitten by a pygmy tarsier,” Gursky-Doyen said in a telephone interview.

“My assistant was trying to hold him still while I was attaching a radio collar around its neck. It’s very hard to hold them because they can turn their heads around 180 degrees. As I’m trying to close the radio collar, he turned his head and nipped my finger. And I yanked it and I was bleeding.”

The collars were being attached so the tarsiers’ movements could be tracked.

Tarsiers are unusual primates — the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people. The handful of tarsier species live on various Asian islands.

As their name indicates, pygmy tarsiers are small — weighing about 2 ounces (50 grammes). They have large eyes and large ears, and they have been described as looking a bit like one of the creatures in the 1984 Hollywood movie “Gremlins.”

They are nocturnal insectivores and are unusual among primates in that they have claws rather than finger nails.

They had not been seen alive by scientists since 1921. In 2000, Indonesian scientists who were trapping rats in the Sulawesi highlands accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier.

“Until that time, everyone really didn’t believe that they existed because people had been going out looking for them for decades and nobody had seen them or heard them,” Gursky-Doyen said.

Her group observed the first live pygmy tarsier in August at an elevation of about 6,900 feet.

“Everything was covered in moss and the clouds are right at the top of that mountain. It’s always very, very foggy, very, very dense. It’s cold up there. When you’re one degree from the equator, you expect to be hot. You don’t expect to be shivering most of the time. That’s what we were doing,” she said.

The government will invest 50,000 crore rupees for funding infrastructure projects to boost the economy through public expenditure,

India

The Minister of State for Industry Ashwani Kumar said, the money will be spent on projects to be built through the Public-Private-Partnership.

He said, the specific contours of the spending will be announced soon.

The announcement came close on the heels of the meeting of the special committee headed by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The committee is keeping a close eye on the impact of the global slowdown on the Indian economy.

Meanwhile government has announced five percent import duty on specified iron and steel items to protect domestic industry from cheaper imports.

Steel ministry says it will consider further hike in the duty in there is a need.

The government has also imposed 20 percent import duty on crude soyabean oil to prevent dumping of cheap products from overseas markets. The duty on refined oil remains unchanged at 7.5 percent.

In April this year the government had withdrawn import duty on steel and soya oil as a part of the inflation management exercise

Volatile grand champion Asashoryu will not return to the ring until the New Year despite being fit enough to hunt and cook wild animals in the Mongolian mountains. The firebrand yokozuna returned to his native country for treatment to an elbow injury last month and spent 10 days living in a tent and eating wild boar, deer and wolves.

“I was just trying to survive,” Asashoryu told reporters. “Out in the wild we had to catch the animals, prepare them and eat them ourselves.

“I brought some sauce for cooked meat from Japan so they really tasted good. The whole experience really helped toughen me up mentally.”

The 28-year-old endured temperatures of minus 15 degrees Celsius in a bizarre rehabilitation regime that also involved him plunging into icy mountain rivers.

“The rivers were freezing,” said Asashoryu, whose future has been the subject of intense speculation in the Japanese media after a series of injuries and controversies. “We just jumped in.”

The Mongolian has struggled since returning to Japan’s ancient sport following a ban for playing in a soccer match while claiming to have a back injury in August last year.

However, the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) said they saw nothing wrong with Asashoryu’s hunting trip and insisted his injury was legitimate.

“He’ll return to sumo when his injury is healed,” the JSA told Reuters on Wednesday. “A yokozuna must be able to fight at the highest level and can’t afford to embarrass himself.”

Asashoryu has targeted a return at the New Year grand sumo tournament in January after a troubled 18 months.

Last year’s ban triggered a bout of clinical depression, leading Asashoryu to seek solace back in Mongolia.

He finally returned from lengthy treatment at a luxury spa resort last November, apologising for his actions and promising to mend his ways.

Steve Austin won loads of accolades as a bionic man in the 70s series ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, and now scientists claim that a revolutionary brain implant would soon make the fictional character a reality - using the help of the movie.MicroBridge Services, based at Cardiff University, south Wales, is pioneering work in which tiny implants would be able to effectively channel brain-waves to prosthetic limbs.

The company is a leader in micro-engineering design and manufacture and possibly the only firm in the world capable of creating the implants.

The implants are the size of a match head carrying 100 sensors made of extremely hard tungsten carbide, which conducts electricity.

Only slightly thicker than a human hair, the sensors sit on the brain picking up nerve impulses and send them to prosthetic limbs.

The scientists are expecting that the technology may eventually help amputees to learn to move prosthetic limbs and regain lost mobility.

Researchers at Utah University, in the USA, asked the company set up by Cardiff University to develop durable micro-needle array sensors.

Dr Robert Hoyle, of MicroBridge Services, claimed that the company’s ability to create implants using tungsten carbide instead of silicon was crucial.

And their choice is using an extremely strong material proved vital.

Hoyle revealed that the implant works by detecting electrical signals from the brain, amplifying them then transmitting them to produce movements in the prosthetic limbs.

After being fitted with an implant, the patient has to actually learn to think the correct mental activity to get the required response from the system.

While the training may require weeks, but tests on volunteers have already shown promising results.

“The outcome, I suppose, is what people call a bionic man,” The Telegraph quoted Hoyle as saying.

In future, the technology may help patients paralysed in accidents, which damage the spine. The implant would be placed on the spinal column effectively bridging the injury and allowing them to relearn how to move.

Dick Komiyama, President of Sony Ericsson, inaugurated new Product Development Center.

Sony Ericsson has covered an area of more than hundred thousand square feet in a new building in DLF City, Chennai.

Dick Komiyama said, “We put special emphasis on India and are committed to further investment and expansion in this country as we strengthen our market presence. India is one of the three most important markets for us.”

Sony Ericsson has established integrated operations in the India Region, which include product development, manufacturing, marketing, distribution and after sales service.

Anil Sethi, President of India operations revealed that Sony Ericsson will tap the vast pool of very talented young engineers in the Chennai area to create India specific products and services. It will also create opportunities for young engineers coming out of the Indian educational system to get exposed to the latest technological practices around the world for which closer interaction with the Indian technical institutes is planned.

Women whose mothers consumed canola oil during pregnancy and breast-feeding may be less likely to develop breast cancer than those whose mothers consumed corn oil, a new study suggests.Researchers fed pregnant and lactating mice a diet high in either corn oil, which contains 50 percent omega-6 polyunsaturated fats, or canola oil, which contains only 20 percent omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. Canola oil also has a much greater percentage of omega-3 polyunsaturated fat — 10 percent compared with 0.5 percent in corn oil.

The study, expected to be presented Tuesday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual conference, found that pregnant and lactating mice fed the corn oil diet gave birth to females with a greater risk of developing breast tumors than those who ate the diet higher in canola oil.

If further studies confirm the findings in humans, health officials may advise that pregnant and lactating women substitute corn oil with canola oil.

“Physicians started telling us in the ’50s and ’60s to take the saturated fat out of our diet and use unsaturated,” said study author Elaine Hardman, an associate professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Marshall University School of Medicine, in Huntington, W.Va. “The unsaturated fat we went to was mostly corn oil, and that’s about the time some of these hormonally influenced cancers started going up.”

The study could have wide-reaching implications for both men and women. “Most of the time, the same things influence breast and prostate cancer, because they’re both hormonally sensitive, so the same things that impact breast cancer risk also increase prostate cancer risk and the reverse,” Hardman said.

But some experts advised against people changing behavior until unanswered questions are resolved.

“Is it gestation or is it lactation, because that’s a pretty big difference,” said Dr. Alan Astrow, director of the division of hematology and medical oncology at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Before you make a blanket recommendation that has an impact on the entire population, you have to be on very solid ground.”

Still, some researchers believe that pregnant and lactating women have nothing to lose by switching to canola oil.

“Some populations that eat a lot of fish consume a lot of omega-3, and there doesn’t seem to be any detrimental health impact,” said Hardman. “It reduces inflammation, which is also beneficial, so there are a number of beneficial things, and we don’t know of anything that’s prohibitive.”

A 4,600-year-old grave in Germany containing the remains of two adults and their children provides the earliest evidence that even prehistoric tribes attached importance to the family unit, researchers said on Monday. The researchers used DNA analysis and other techniques to determine that the group buried facing each other — an unusual practice in Neolithic culture — consisted of a mother, father and their two sons aged 8-9 and 4-5 years.

“By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe — to our knowledge the oldest authentic molecular genetic evidence so far,” Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide said in a statement.

“Their unity in death suggests a unity in life.”

The remains were found in graves that held a total of 13 people, all of whom had been interned simultaneously, Haak and colleagues reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Several were buried face-to-face, with arms and hands interlinked in many cases. The remains included children ranging from newborns up to 10 years of age, and adults of around 30 years or older.

Tests showed that many had suffered massive injuries, suggesting they were victims of a violent raid. One female had a stone projectile point embedded in her back and another had skull fractures.

“Our study of the Eulau individuals shows that their deaths were sudden and violent, apparent in lesions caused by stone axes and arrows, with evidence of attempts of some of the individuals to defend themselves from blows,” the researchers wrote.

An analysis of dental remains also offered up insight into Stone Age society and showed that the females came from different regions than the males and their children.

This is evidence that men sought partners from different regions to avoid inbreeding and that it was customary for women to move to the location of the males, the researchers said.

“Such traditions would have been important to avoid inbreeding and to forge kinship networks with other communities,” Alistair Pike, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol, who co-led the study, said in a statement.

Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of water vapor as a critical component of climate change.Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A and M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally what existing climate models had anticipated theoretically.

The research team used novel data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite to measure precisely the humidity throughout the lowest 10 miles of the atmosphere.

That information was combined with global observations of shifts in temperature, allowing researchers to build a comprehensive picture of the interplay between water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmosphere-warming gases.

“Everyone agrees that if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, then warming will result,” Dessler said. “So the real question is, how much warming?” he added.

The answer can be found by estimating the magnitude of water vapor feedback.

Increasing water vapor leads to warmer temperatures, which causes more water vapor to be absorbed into the air. Warming and water absorption increase in a spiraling cycle.

Water vapor feedback can also amplify the warming effect of other greenhouse gases, such that the warming brought about by increased carbon dioxide allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere.

“The difference in an atmosphere with a strong water vapor feedback and one with a weak feedback is enormous,” Dessler said.

Using data from AIRS, the research team observed how atmospheric water vapor reacted to shifts in surface temperatures between 2003 and 2008.

By determining how humidity changed with surface temperature, the team could compute the average global strength of the water vapor feedback.

“This new data set shows that as surface temperature increases, so does atmospheric humidity,” Dessler said.

“Dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere makes the atmosphere more humid. And since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, the increase in humidity amplifies the warming from carbon dioxide,” he added.

Specifically, the team found that if Earth warms 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the associated increase in water vapor will trap an extra 2 Watts of energy per square meter.

“That number may not sound like much, but add up all of that energy over the entire Earth surface and you find that water vapor is trapping a lot of energy,” Dessler said.

“We now think the water vapor feedback is extraordinarily strong, capable of doubling the warming due to carbon dioxide alone,” he added.

U.S. stocks slid on Monday after Citigroup Inc. said it planned more than 50,000 job cuts and Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, slid into recession, adding to a bleaker global economic and profit outlook.Shares of Citigroup, a Dow component, fell 5 percent, and the S&P financial index shed 4 percent. Investors also sold off technology, one of the sectors seen as vulnerable to a global downturn and reduced business spending.

According to a survey of professional forecasters by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank the United States, the U.S. economy entered recession in April that will last for 14 months.

“The market has correctly forecast the recession that we are in,” Ernie Ankrim, chief investment strategist for Russell Investment Group in Tacoma, Washington, said. “The news of job cuts is one more indication that the economy is in a very difficult shape right now.”

The Dow Jones industrial average slid 217.44 points, or 2.56 percent, to 8,279.87. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index tumbled 21.31 points, or 2.44 percent, to 851.98. The Nasdaq Composite Index plunged 31.22 points, or 2.06 percent, to 1,485.63.

Microsoft shares fell about 3 percent, making the stock a top drag on Nasdaq. Shares of Apple Inc fell nearly 2 percent.

The news from Japan marked another big blow to investors’ sentiment, along with the failure of this weekend’s meeting of the world’s 20 largest economies to come up with new stimulus measures for the world economy.

Citigroup shares dropped to $9.02 on the New York Stock Exchange, as shares of Microsoft dropped to $19.43 on Nasdaq.

Apple shares fell to $99.92.

News of Japan sliding into its first recession in seven years in the third quarter followed last week’s news that the Euro zone had also entered recession.

Monday’s economic reports included data that showed a key manufacturing gauge in New York state tumbled in November to yet another record low.

Wachovia Capital Markets cut its 2009 operating earnings estimate on the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index to $78.30 per share from $86 per share, citing deterioration in global growth prospects.