New Delhi, August 22: President Pranab Mukherjee Friday asked the IITs to explore ways to improve the country's quality of higher education so that India can become a global supplier of skilled manpower.

Speaking at the inauguration of a day-long conference of chairmen, board of governors and directors of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mukherjee described the IITs as "knowledge leaders of the nation" and urged them to "explore how quality of education can be improved".

"There is need for soul searching on what is holding back good governance in institutes of higher learning," said the president as he called upon the council of IITs to draw up a roadmap for governance in line with the best global practices and implement it without delay.

"In spite of our technical capabilities to put the satellites of other countries into space, we are still importing technology starting from security features and papers for Indian currency to defence equipment," he said.

The president advised the council to focus on how IITs can become a source for meeting technology needs of the government and become a harbinger of the vision 'Make in India' and 'Made in India'.

"So far we have been giving attention to industry-academia inter-linkages, but now we also must focus on the government-academia inter-linkages," he said.

The president said constraints such as huge shortage of faculty should be urgently addressed as the vacancy position in IITs varies from 10 to 52 percent, and the overall vacancy in 16 IITs is over 37 percent.

He said India's biggest strength in the coming years is going to be its demographic dividend. "This offers us a unique opportunity to become a global supplier of skilled manpower. For this, we must achieve our target of training 500 million people by 2022".

Houston, August 22: Astronomers have uncovered rhythmic pulsations from a rare type of black hole 12 million light-years away by sifting through archival data from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite.

The signals have helped astronomers identify an unusual midsize black hole called M82 X-1, which is the brightest X-ray source in a galaxy known as Messier 82. Most black holes formed by dying stars are modestly-sized, measuring up to around 25 times the mass of our sun. And most large galaxies harbor monster, or supermassive, black holes that contain tens of thousands of times more mass.

“Between the two extremes of stellar and supermassive black holes, it's a real desert, with only about half a dozen objects whose inferred masses place them in the middle ground," said Tod Strohmayer, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Explore M82 X-1 and learn more about how astronomers used X-ray fluctuations to determine its status as an intermediate-mass black hole.

Astronomers from Goddard and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) have suspected M82 X-1 of being midsize for at least a decade, but compelling evidence excluding it from being a stellar black hole proved elusive.

"For reasons that are very hard to understand, these objects have resisted standard measurement techniques," said Richard Mushotzky, a professor of astronomy at UMCP.

By going over past RXTE observations, the astronomers found specific changes in brightness that helped them determine M82 X-1 measures around 400 solar masses.

As gas falls toward a black hole, it heats up and emits X-rays. Variations in X-ray brightness reflect changes occurring in the gas. The most rapid fluctuations happen near the brink of the black hole’s event horizon, the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Astronomers call these rhythmic pulses quasi-periodic oscillations, or QPOs. For stellar black holes, astronomers have established that the larger the mass, the slower the QPOs, but they could not be sure what they were seeing from M82 X-1 was an extension of this pattern.

"When we study fluctuations in X-rays from many stellar-mass black holes, we see both slow and fast QPOs, but the fast ones often come in pairs with a specific 3:2 rhythmic relationship," explained Dheeraj Pasham, UMCP graduate student. For every three pulses from one member of a QPO pair, its partner pulses twice.

By analyzing six years of RXTE data, the team located X-ray variations that reliably repeat about 5.1 and 3.3 times a second, a 3:2 relationship. The combined presence of slow QPOs and a faster pair in a 3:2 rhythm sets a standard scale allowing astronomers to extend proven relationships used to determine the masses of stellar-mass black holes.

The results of the study were published online in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature.

Launched in late 1995 and decommissioned in 2012, RXTE is one of NASA's longest-serving astrophysics missions. Its legacy of unique measurements continues to provide researchers with valuable insights into the extreme environments of neutron stars and black holes.

A new NASA X-ray mission called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is slated for launch to the International Space Station in late 2016. Pasham has identified six potential middle-mass black holes that NICER may be able to explore for similar signals.

Bangalore, August 22: ISRO is planning to develop communication satellites in higher frequency bands and power and data handling capacity in the range of 100 Gigabits per second to meet the growing demands of broadband internet and rural telecom connectivity, ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan said.

Radhakrishnan also said the premier space research organisation is looking for suitable foreign partners to acquire the technology and upgrade ISRO's current satellite platforms to meet the future demands.

"For the future, we are looking for communication satellites in the higher frequency bands with about 15 KW of power and data handling capacity in the range of 100 Gigabits per second that can meet the ever growing demand in the country towards broadband internet, rural telecom connectivity etc," the chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation said.

He was speaking at the convocation of BITS-Pilani Hyderabad campus.

Besides launching new satellites, the organisation has also plans of replacing the ageing satellites and enhance the observation capability to the level of 0.25 m spatial resolution and provide new capability for imaging from geo stationary orbit with 50 m spatial resolution, he said.

ISRO is also partnering with Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA to jointly develop a dual frequency microwave imaging satellite by 2020, Radhakrishnan said.

"In this scheme of alliance, ISRO is responsible for the overall satellite platform, S Band synthetic aperture radar and the launch of the satellite by GSLV," he explained.

On the moon mission, he said India is in the process of developing its own Lander-module and lunar rover as well as orbiter craft for Chandrayaan-2 that is targeted for launch by GSLV within the next three years.

Elaborating on the Mars mission, the ISRO head stated that the Mars orbiter space aircraft has traversed nearly 88 percent distance along its designated path to the red planet.

"The next operational milestone is the insertion of the spacecraft into the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014. If successful, India will be the first Asian country to orbit a spacecraft around planet Mars and the first country in the world to achieve this in the first attempt," he said.

According to him, a number of critical technologies are being developed for a possible human spaceflight in the future.

Panaji, August 22: Goa's 90 odd open-cast iron ore mines, currently closed for nearly two years following a mining ban, could be tapped for generating hydel power, says wildlife conservationist Bittu Sahgal.

Speaking during the inauguration of an environment film festival in Panaji Friday, Sahgal, a member of the National Wildlife Board, also said that mining is necessary but not at such a scale that it "consumes us".

"We certainly need mining to do a whole load of things, but we don't need it at a scale that mining itself consumes us," Saghal said.

"The potential to convert old mining pits into natural dams that could power mini hydro-electric plants must be seriously examined," Sahgal said.

Until the time mining was banned by the Supreme Court in September 2012, Goa's 90 odd operational iron ore mines produced 45 million tonnes of iron ore annually.

The ban was lifted in April this year, but mining could not be resumed because of formalities and policies which the apex court has asked the state government to put in place.

Open-cast mines are shaped like volcanic craters and in these millions of cubic feet of water is collected during the monsoon. This water is normally pumped out and is literally wasted, before mining operations begin.

"Nature will never argue with you....it will only punish and, or reward everybody, uniformly, irrespective of whether or not you've been good or bad to the environment," Bittu said.

New Delhi, August 13: Indian Internet users will surpass the number in the US by the end of this year and around 500 million people will be online by 2018, Rajan Anandan, managing director, Google India said on Tuesday.

"Even at the current growth rate, we will have 500 million Indians on the Internet by 2018. By the end of this year, India will become larger than the US in terms of number of Internet users. By 2018, India will have twice the number of Internet users as the US does. Almost half the country will be connected through the Internet," he said while addressing "Digitizing India" organised by FICCI Ladies Organisation.

He mentioned that it took the country 10 years to go from 10 million Internet users to 100 million Internet users. Now the country is adding five million new Internet users every month. India now has over 200 million Internet users.

"A lot of people talk about the last elections (2014 general elections) and how urban India was mobilised using the Internet. We have seen nothing yet in terms of what the Internet can do to every aspect of life, of society and of governance. By the next elections (expected in 2019) almost half a billion Indians will be connected through Internet. In terms of the kind of mobilisation, can you imagine what it can do?"

He mentioned that the path of purchase has changed in India and people are increasingly using online platform for retail purchase.

Talking about the next big technology wave in the world, he said wearable gadgets are expected to take four years to reach a billion consumers.

"Everything is getting accelerated with technology. Every new wave of technology has taken half as long as the previous technology. The next big thing will take half the time taken by smartphones," he said.

Smartphones took eight years to reach a billion consumers.

"The future is here. Wearable devices are the next big thing. It is taking on computing. All these wearable devices will penetrate across the world very fast, and with it technology will get better and better," he added.

He also mentioned that software will impact traditional industries in a big way in the coming days. "Like the automotive industry has not changed much in the last 50 years. The next big thing that could happen is the driverless car. In the next 20 years, in our lifetime, software can do anything," Anandan said.

He pointed out that consumers are now connected through numerous devices like television, notebooks, laptops, smartphones and wearable devices as well. In 2014, 2.8 billion people in the world out of seven billion are connected through the Internet. By 2020, it is expected that five billion people will be using the Internet.

The summer of 2014 will be bathed in moonlight as three perigee "supermoons" occur in consecutive months: July, August, September. To understand, watch the video below: 

London, Aug 13: A four-billion-year mystery about how life evolved on earth may be solved by a "leaky" membrane in our last common ancestor - a single-celled organism - that spurred growth.

According to scientists, life's Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) had a "leaky" membrane that helps answer biology's biggest questions: Why cells use the same complex mechanism to harvest energy and why two types of single-celled organism - bacteria and archaea - have completely different cell.

"The leakiness of the membrane allowed LUCA to be powered by energy in its surroundings, most likely vents deep on the ocean floor, whilst holding in all the other components necessary for life," explained Nick Lane from University College London's (UCL) department of biosciences.

The team modelled how the membrane changed, enabling LUCA's descendants to move to new, more challenging environments and evolve into two distinct types of single-celled organism - bacteria and archaea - creating the deepest branch of the tree of life.

As they both stemmed from LUCA, scientists set out to find answers in the structure and function of LUCA's membrane.

"The new model can explain the fundamental differences between bacteria and archaea. It makes some clear predictions that we plan to test in the future," Lane noted.

The study suggests that LUCA lived in the area where ancient seawater, dense with positively charged particles called protons, mixed with warm alkaline vent fluid, which contained few protons.

"The difference in the concentration of protons across these two environments enabled protons to flow into the cell, driving the production of a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which powered the growth of cells, just as it does today," researchers emphasised.

However, unlike modern cells, scientists believe this could only happen if the membrane was "leaky" - enabling protons to leave the cell spontaneously so more protons could enter to power growth.

"We show that modern 'non-leaky' membranes had to evolve later and they did so independently in archaea and bacteria," said co-author Victor Sojo from UCL.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

A leading UK brain specialist has warned parents that heading footballs can be very dangerous for kids.

According to neuroscientist Michael Grey from the University of Birmingham, highly-paid professional players could be risking brain injuries and the impact of repeatedly heading a football is still unknown and calls for tougher guidelines, the Mirror reported.

He said that reasons why heading can be dangerous are that the neck muscles aren't yet developed for the size of the children's head at that age and kids ' brains are still developing so they're very vulnerable for taking a blow to the head.

New Football Association guidelines on concussion and head injuries, which was issued after a spate of on-field incidents, said that it is the team doctor's decision if a player can carry on. But the rules offer no guidance in relation to children and heading the ball.

A group of researchers have created a new use for used- cigarette butts by converting them into electrical energy storage material.

According to co-author of the study, Professor Jongheop Yi, from Seoul National University, South Korea, their study shows that used-cigarette filters could be transformed into a high-performing carbon-based material, by using a simple one step process, which simultaneously offers a green solution to meeting the energy demands of society.

Carbon is the most popular material that supercapacitors are composed of, due to its low cost, high surface area, high electrical conductivity and long term stability.

It is estimated that as many as 5.6 trillion used-cigarettes, or 766,571 metric tons, are deposited into the environment worldwide every year.

In their study, the researchers demonstrated that the cellulose acetate fibres that cigarette filters are mostly composed of could be transformed into a carbon-based material using a simple, one-step burning technique called pyrolysis.

As a result of this burning process, the resulting carbon-based material contained a number of tiny pores, increasing its performance as a supercapacitive material.

The material stored a higher amount of electrical energy than commercially available carbon and also had a higher amount of storage compared to graphene and carbon nanotubes, as reported in previous studies.

The study is published in the journal Nanotechnology.

London, August 12: You have blamed plastics all along for increased pollution but researchers have now made a material - inspired by the plastics used in food containers - that soaks up carbon dioxide (CO2).

Researchers believe that the material might ease our transition away from polluting fossil fuels and toward new energy sources, such as hydrogen.

"The key point is that this polymer is stable, it's cheap, and it adsorbs CO2 extremely well. It's geared toward functioning in a real-world environment," said Andrew Cooper from University of Liverpool in Britain.

"In a future landscape where fuel-cell technology is used, this adsorbent could work toward zero-emission technology," he added.

The material, which is a brown, sand-like powder, is made by linking together many small carbon-based molecules into a network and the idea to use this structure was inspired by polystyrene, a plastic used in styrofoam and other packaging material.

The new material would be a part of an emerging technology called an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), which can convert fossil fuels into hydrogen gas, the researchers said.

But the IGCC process yields a mixture of hydrogen and CO2 gas, which must be separated.

The sponge works best under the high pressures intrinsic to the IGCC process.

Just like a kitchen sponge swells when it takes on water, the adsorbent swells slightly when it soaks up CO2 in the tiny spaces between its molecules.

When the pressure drops, he explains, the adsorbent deflates and releases the CO2, which they can then collect for storage or convert into useful carbon compounds.

IGCC is a bridging technology that is intended to jump-start the hydrogen economy, or the transition to hydrogen fuel, while still using the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure.

New York, Aug 12: As many as 23 million of its 271 million active users (MAUs) are not humans but “bots”, says microblogging site Twitter in its new filing.

According to it, “up to approximately 8.5 percent” of the accounts it considers active are automatically updated “without any discernible additional user-initiated action”.

Twitter bots are essentially computer programmes that tweet of their own accord.

The new disclosure clarifies an earlier statement that 14 percent of MAUs access the service outside of the official website and mobile apps by using Twitter's application programming interface (API).

In a statement, Twitter specified that the 14 percent figure “included certain users who accessed Twitter through owned and operated applications”.

While people access Twitter through its website and other clients, “bots” connect directly to the Twitter mainline, parsing the information in real time and posting at will.

“Only 11 percent of MAUs accessed Twitter from applications that the company does not own like Tweetbot or Flipboard,” it added.

Washington, August 11: A NASA 'vintage' spacecraft that was launched 36 years ago and is now being handled by a team of retired and active aerospace engineers has successfully completed a return visit to the earth-moon system.

The ISEE-3 spacecraft made its closest approach to the earth Aug 9 and flyby of the moon Aug 10.

The closest approach was 15,600 km from the moon's surface.

After a lunar flyby, the unmanned probe has now been hurled back into deep space.

With the lunar flyby, California-based Skycorp Inc and Google Creative Labs have announced a revised mission for ISEE-3, Universe Today reported.

ISEE-3 is currently over 20,000 km from the moon and over 370,000 km from earth.

Launched in 1978 and originally tasked with studying the outer reaches of the earth's magnetosphere, the probe was given a second mission in the 1980s to chase comets before NASA decided to shut it down in 1997.

In April this year, the private "ISEE-3 Reboot Project" started a crowdfunding project that raised $159,502 for the goal of re-establishing contact with the probe.

In an unprecedented move, NASA formally handed over control of ISEE-3 to the group in May.

In the same month, contact was re-established with the abandoned spacecraft and the group carried out a series of tests after ordering the craft to broadcast telemetry back to earth.

The group has established the ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission that will allow the public access to the data still being transmitted by the craft as it speeds away from earth, reports added.

London, August 11: Exploiting the electron's tiny magnetic moment or 'spin', scientists have discovered a new method to efficiently generate and control currents based on the magnetic nature of electrons in semi-conducting materials - offering a radical way to develop a new generation of electronic devices.

"We borrowed 50-year-old semiconductor phenomena for our modern spintronic research. Our results are the start of the story but are a proof of principle with a promising future for spins," said Hidekazu Kurebayashi from University College London's centre for nanotechnology.

Electrons have two properties - charge and spin.

Current technologies use charge but it is thought that spin-based technologies have the potential to outperform the 'charge'-based technology of semiconductors for the storage and process of information.

"The spin-Hall effect helps generate 'spin currents' which enable spin information transfer without the flow of electric charge currents," Kurebayashi added.

New research showed how applying an electric field in a common semiconductor material can dramatically increase the efficiency of the spin-Hall effect which is key for generating and detecting spin from an electrical input.

The scientists reported a 40-times-larger effect than previously achieved in semiconductor materials, with the largest value measured comparable to a record high value of the spin-Hall effect observed in heavy metals such as Platinum.

"This demonstrates that future spintronics might not need to rely on expensive, rare, heavy metals for efficiency, but relatively cheap materials can be used to process spin information with low-power consumption," Kurebayashi noted.

Unlike other concepts that harness electrons, spin current can transfer information without causing heat from the electric charge, which is a serious problem for current semiconductor devices.

Effective use of spins generated by the spin-Hall effect can also revolutionise spin-based memory applications, researchers maintained.

The study appeared in the journal Nature Materials.

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.

The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.

While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.

"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."

Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky.

"We know of just one planet where life exists -- Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth," said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. "Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward."

Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

"M dwarfs are the most numerous stars," said Quintana. "The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf."

Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130-days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.

"Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has," said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. "Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth."

The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth.

The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins -- Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star -- and measuring the their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA's first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun.

Evidence suggest that Mars was wet, but it was probably not consistently warm enough for making the water flow, a thrilling study reveals.

Signs of flowing water on Mars include layered sediments presumed to have been laid down in ancient lakes, as well as rugged canyons and lowlands apparently sculpted by massive floods.

These prompted researchers to suggest that the red planet, now frigid and dry, was warm and wet throughout its early history.

But that would have required an atmosphere much thicker than today’s, a prospect that now seems unlikely, said Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist at Princeton University in the US.

The evidence against the idea that ancient Mars held a thick atmosphere for more than a few millennia at a time lies in the sizes of the planet’s craters, said the researchers.

If Mars had once possessed a denser atmosphere, they said, small objects would have broken up as they passed through it, as they do in Earth’s atmosphere, rather than surviving largely intact to blast craters.

The researchers used images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to catalogue more than 300 craters pockmarking an 84,000-square-kilometre area near the planet’s equator.

“It’s not the size of the smallest craters, but the size distribution of the entire population that’s important,” Kite said.

“The thickness of the atmosphere was less than one-third what some teams say would be needed to consistently keep Mars’ surface above freezing," said Sanjoy Som, an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in the US.

An Israeli company called Stemrad has developed a body belt that protects people from the worst effects of gamma radiation. Called the Stemrad 360 Gamma, the belt could be a lifesaver for the emergency services in a nuclear accident.

Oren Milstein, the co-founder of Stemrad, says it’s partially made out of lead and is designed to first and foremost protect the pelvic area, where most of the body’s renewable bone marrow is made, Reuters reports.

“It may look simplistic on the outside but the structure inside is three-dimensional and very unique. The idea here was to create a product that on the one hand protects but on the other hand is not overburdened by weight,” he said.

Nobel laureates Roger D Kornberg and Michael Levitt are on Stemrad’s scientific advisory board, as they were quickly persuaded of the belt’s merits.

“When I first told about it, I was at first skeptical,” said Kornberg.

At just over 15 kilos, the belt would be wearable for most people. A full body suit to protect all the body’s vital organs such as the liver and thyroid would weigh about 200 kilos, so most people wouldn’t be able to wear it.

The belt can protect the wearer for doses of up to 1,000 rads – a high level of radiation poisoning that can cause serious illness and even death.

Milstein says that protecting the body’s bone marrow is crucial to ensuring survival after radiation exposure.

After the Chernobyl disaster, many of the firemen and engineers who were first on the scene had to have bone marrow transplants, and even then most of them died soon afterward, so protecting the bone marrow may have made a difference.
"Conceptually, it's agreeable that the bone marrow is the most radiation sensitive tissue and that bone marrow is able to regenerate itself. So kind of like adding one plus one, we know that if we perform partial shielding on bone marrow, we get an increased survivability of the individual," said Millstein.

The gamma belt hasn’t yet been tested in real radiation environments – such as in Fukushima – but simulations using mannequins have demonstrated its effectiveness in absorbing radiation.

The belt doesn’t offer full protection or allow an unlimited stay in an irradiated area and despite still being unproven Stemrad has already got orders from Israel, Russia and Japan.

Israel has a history of being as prepared as possible for any kind of attack from outside forces. Earlier this year Israel stopped distributing gas masks to its citizens after concluding that an imminent chemical weapons attack from Syria was unlikely, although the emergency services will still be issued with them.

If you thought weather prediction was a recent phenomenon, you would be in for a surprise if told that weather prediction was done in ancient Egypt some 3,500 years ago!

A new translation of a 40-line inscription on a six-foot-tall 3,500-year-old calcite block from Egypt - called the Tempest Stela - describes rain, darkness and “the sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses”.

The inscription could provide new evidence about the chronology of events in the ancient Middle East.

Two scholars at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute - Nadine Moeller and Robert Ritner - believe the unusual weather patterns described on the slab were the result of a massive volcano explosion at Thera - the present-day island of Santorini in the Mediterranean Sea.

“This is important to scholars of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, generally because the chronology that archaeologists use is based on the lists of Egyptian pharaohs, and this new information could adjust those dates,” explained Moeller, an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Oriental Institute.

The new translation suggests the Egyptian pharaoh Ahmose ruled at a time closer to the Thera eruption than previously thought - a finding that could change scholars’ understanding of a critical juncture in human history as Bronze Age empires realigned.

The Tempest Stela dates back to the reign of the pharaoh Ahmose, the first pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.

The block was found in pieces in Thebes, modern Luxor, where Ahmose ruled.

Until now, the archaeological evidence for the date of the Thera eruption seemed at odds with the radiocarbon dating, explained Oriental Institute post-doctoral scholar Felix Hoeflmayer.

However, if the date of Ahmose’s reign is earlier than previously believed, the resulting shift in chronology “might solve the whole problem”, Hoeflmayer commented. 

The research appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.

In what could be a probable answer to an enduring puzzle about how earth's tectonic plates were created, a thrilling research indicates that these tectonic plates may have taken as long as one billion years to form.

Geophysicists have discovered that earth's outermost layer, or lithosphere, was weakened by movement in viscous layers below it - a process when one plate dives below another.

Starting roughly four billion years ago, cooler parts of earth's crust were pulled downwards into the warmer upper mantle, damaging and weakening the surrounding crust.

The process happened again and again until the weak areas formed plate boundaries.

“Over a much longer period, the same process could have created many tectonic plates. We have got a physical mechanism to explain how it could have happened,” study author David Bercovici from Yale University explained.

The process began about four billion years ago and caused complete fractures some three billion years ago.

To investigate how the plates formed, Bercovici and Yanick Ricard of University of Lyon in France developed a computer model of earth's crust as it may have existed billions of years ago.

The model included a low-pressure zone at the base of the crust which caused a piece of the crust to sink into the upper mantle - mimicking conditions thought to have occurred early in the earth's history.

As the process repeated over time, it created a large tectonic plate with an active subduction zone.

Prior studies suggested the age of the plates - based on evidence of subduction gathered from minerals - preserved in ancient rocks.

In geology, subduction is the process that takes place at convergent boundaries by which one tectonic plate moves under another tectonic plate and sinks into the mantle as the plates converge.

The oldest such specimens are four-billion-year-old zircons found in the Jack Hills of Australia that appear to have formed at temperatures and pressures that are indicative of subduction.

“The subsequent movement of the plates has erased much of the evidence of their origin,” said Paul Tackley, a geophysicist at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland in a report published in Nature.

According to Robert Stern, a geologist at University of Texas in Dallas, there is no firm evidence of plate tectonics earlier than one billion years ago, but the new mechanism behind plate formation is “the first interesting example of how it might have occurred”.

Washinton, August  10: A saucer-shaped test vehicle launched by NASA tested breakthrough technologies that may enable large payloads to be safely landed on the surface of Mars.

It will also allow access to more of the planet's surface by enabling landings at higher altitude sites, NASA said.

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project successfully flew a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space in late June from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.

"A good test is one where there are no surprises but a great test is one where you are able to learn new things, and that is certainly what we have in this case." said Ian Clark, principal investigator for LDSD at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"Our test vehicle performed as advertised. We are literally re-writing the books on high-speed parachute operations, and we are doing it an year ahead of schedule," Clark added.

The goal of this experimental flight test, the first of three planned for the project, was to determine if the balloon-launched, rocket-powered, saucer-shaped, design could reach the altitudes and airspeeds needed to test two new breakthrough technologies destined for future Mars missions.

Carried as payload during the shakeout flight were two cutting-edge technologies scheduled to be tested next year aboard this same type of test vehicle.

Houston, August 7: A European spacecraft has arrived at a comet more than 250 million miles away - bringing a 10-year journey across the solar system to an end. Since launching in March 2004, Rosetta has travelled more than four billion miles across the asteroid belt and more than five times the Earth's distance from the Sun. Rosetta has now entered orbit around the comet.

The comet is currently travelling round the sun at about 34,175 mph. The craft was launched in March 2004 and is set to complete the next phase of its mission on Wednesday afternoon - when it moves within just 62 miles of the comet at the same speed. Later in November it will deploy a small robotic lander, which will steer itself to the comet's surface, in order to send back images and conduct the first ever direct analysis of a comet's composition. The probe and its orbiter will study plumes of gas and water vapour that will boil off and trail behind as the comet nears the Sun. If the chemical signature of hydrogen matches that found in water on Earth, it could suggest that comets filled the oceans when they smashed into the planet billions of years ago.

A European spacecraft has arrived at a comet more than 250 million miles away - bringing a 10-year journey across the solar system to an end. Since launching in March 2004, Rosetta has travelled more than four billion miles across the asteroid belt and more than five times the Earth's distance from the Sun. Rosetta has now entered orbit around the comet. Report by Sarah Kerr.