Iran introduces $100K Avicenna award

Iran has introduced a $100,000 international award in commemoration of the celebrated Persian philosopher and scientist, Avicenna. The award will be given in five categories to researchers who have done scientific or cultural research on the polymath figure. The Avicenna award will be presented at the international conference on Avicenna's philosophy and Avicennian logic, which will be held in the city of Hamedan where the great philosopher has been laid to rest. “The conference aims to introduce Avicenna's philosophical theories as well as the historical and cultural aspects of Hamedan,” said Hamedan governor, Behrouz Moradi. Also known as Shaykh al-Ra'is (Master and Head), Avicenna wrote about 450 works, of which only 240 have survived. Some 150 of his books are on philosophy and 40 on medicine. Avicenna is regarded as the father of modern medicine and his magnum opus is the immense encyclopedic work of the Kitab al-Shifa (The Book of Healing). Many literary and scientific figures were influenced by Avicenna, including the renowned poet Omar Khayyam and the celebrated 13-century scientist Khwaja Nasir al-Din at-Tusi. The life of Avicenna has been documented in the "Life of Avicenna", written by his disciple Jorjani (Sorsanus).

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Tart cherries lower heart, diabetes risks

A study has revealed that tart cherries have significant health benefits in animal models when it comes to heart, diabetes and weight. According to a research team, the delicious bite-sized round fruit helps reduce belly fat and even lowers cardiovascular and diabetes risks. The discovery was made after researchers used rat models and fed them whole tart cherry powder in addition to a high-fat diet. The study group had "significantly" lower blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels in comparison with the group that received no cherry powder. The study also revealed that the cherry-fed rats were also less likely to develop belly fat which in humans is linked to high cardiovascular risk. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan and presented at the annual meeting of the American Dietetic Association. A pilot study is scheduled to be implemented by the University of Michigan using whole tart cherries in human models this spring. Cherries contain resin, tannin, gallic acid, lignin, calcium, potassium, iron, volatile oil and hydrocyanic acid and are considered to be one of the most powerful disease-fighting foods.

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Iran's first cloned goat born in Isfahan

The Middle East's first and the world's fifth cloned goat, 'Hanna', has been successfully born at Royan institute in Isfahan, Iran. The cloned goat was developed in the surrogate uterus of a black Bakhtiari goat for 147 days and was born, Wednesday, at 1.30 am through a cesarean section. She is reported to be in a good health. Hanna, also known as R-CAP-C1, is completely distinguished from other goats because of its white and henna-like color. Iran's first cloned lamb, Royana, was born on Sept. 30, 2006 in Royan institute and was able to survive the post-natal complications common in cloned animals. Iranian researchers are looking to use cloned goats to produce the genetically modified animals required for manufacturing new recombinant medications particularly tPA.

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World's 1st cloned camel born in Dubai

The first-ever camel cloned in the world, Injaz (Achievement), has been born at the Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai, UAE. "We are all very excited at the birth of Injaz as she is the result of the great skill and teamwork of everyone at the Camel Reproduction Centre," scientific director of the Camel Reproduction Centre, Lulu Skidmore, said on Tuesday. "This significant breakthrough in our research program at the CRC gives a means of preserving the valuable genetics of our elite racing and milk producing camels in the future," the scientist added. According to the center, the female camel was born April 8 after an uncomplicated gestation of 378 days. "Injaz, who is 30 kilos (during birth), seems to be happy and is doing all the right things so far," Skidmore explained. The clone was produced using DNA which was extracted from cells from the ovaries of an animal that was slaughtered in 2005. Camels, a valuable commodity in Arab countries, are used for racing and transport. They are famous for healthy low-fat milk and can fetch owners millions of dollars at camel beauty contests. In 1996, the first cloned animal of the world, Dolly, was born in Edinburgh. The sheep, which died in 2003, was considered one of the world's most significant breakthroughs.

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Egypt car crash claims 11, injures 7

A head-on collision between a minibus and a lorry on a motorway has claimed the lives of eleven Egyptians and left seven others injured. According to a security official, the accident took place near Zaqaziq north east of the Egyptian capital Cairo on Saturday. The official further pointed out that the excessive speed of both vehicles was the cause of the crash. He also said that one of the victims was a three-year-old child, adding that two of the wounded people were in a serious condition. Egyptian roads are among the most chaotic and dangerous in the world as speeding, careless driving and poor road conditions lead to a high accident toll in Egypt. According to the Egyptian transport ministry, every year around 6,000 people lose their lives and 30,000 are injured in road accidents throughout the country. The transport ministry has also cited poorly maintained vehicles as another cause of crashes in Egypt. Egyptian traffic authorities have implemented tougher traffic rules and harsher punishments for traffic offenders. The new traffic regulations went into effect on August 1, 2008, in an attempt to reduce the number of road accidents in the country.

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Silk Road to apply for World Heritage

China and central Asian countries are to submit an application to add the ancient Silk Road to the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List. "The final application will be submitted to UNESCO in two years," Guo Hongchang, mayor of Luoyang city in Henan, said on Thursday. The 2,000-year-old Silk Road was a trade route linking Asia and Europe through Persia. The 7,000-kilometer-long road extended from the Chinese cities of Luoyang and Xi'an, to Europe via south and central Asian countries. "A multinational application will be the better choice if we want to aptly present the historical culture of the ancient Silk Road," said Jing Feng, an official with the UNESCO World Heritage Center's Asia-Pacific Region Program. Dozens of experts and heritage officials from UNESCO and China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan agreed on a multinational application for the Silk Road to join the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List back in 2006. "The application will help us to exchange the experience of cultural heritage protection with other historical sites," said Guo Yinqiang, head of Luoyang's Cultural Heritage Bureau. Luoyang has spent about $11.7 million on the project plan since 2005 to protect its relics at the sites of the Sui and Tang Dynasties (581-907) where the Silk Road started at that time. The Luoyang administration moved six enterprises, including a cement factory and a bearing factory, out of the area in 2008 in an attempt to improve the environment.

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Hot summer raises red tide alert

Scientists express concern that summer's warming weather will increase the soap-like foam substance produced by algae in the Persian Gulf. Although tourists and residents may enjoy the beach, Mother Nature is struggling to find its way out the red algal bloom; experts are keeping a watchful eye on the situation. The phenomenon known as a 'red tide' is actually the result of an algal bloom, an event in which marine or fresh water algae accumulate rapidly in the water. The latest ecological studies reveal the bloom of the microorganism Cochlodinium polykrikoides is having serious effects on the Persian Gulf environment and ecosystem. The conditions warm bodies of water provide are even more ideal for the bloom. The speed of the spread depends on factors such as wind direction and water salinity too. Spring rains have played a helpful role in controling the dangerous phenomena by cooling down the weather. Before the rains, four to five million units of algae could be found in a liter of Persian Gulf water. After the spring rains, the number decreased to 50,000 units per liter. The speed at which the algae multiply can be deceiving. Iranian researchers are racing to find ways to stop the spread of the red tide before the ocean warms in spring and summer. The effect of excessive algae on fish can be lethal. It produces oxygen radicals which can damage fish gills, possibly leading to suffocation. Last year, the little creatures were to blame for 45 tons of dead fish; the damage inflicted on the Persian Gulf is estimated to be close to 500 million dollars.

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Darwin's egg found at Cambridge

A Cambridge University volunteer has found an egg collected by English naturalist Charles Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle. The 80-year-old retired volunteer, Liz Wetton found the small dark brown egg at the university's zoology museum, BBC reported. "It was an exhilarating experience. After working on the egg collections for 10 years this was a tremendous thing to happen," said Wetton. The egg, known as the only existing one from the Beagle collection, bears Darwin's name and a large crack caused by the small box it was forced into. The collections manager, Mathew Lowe referred to the discovery as an important one, saying, “To have rediscovered a Beagle specimen in the 200th year of Darwin's birth is special enough, but to have evidence that Darwin himself broke it is a wonderful twist," The museum's curator of ornithology, Dr. Mike Brooke, said that Professor Alfred Newton, a friend of Darwin's and a professor of zoology in the late 19th century, wrote in his notebook that the egg belonged to a Tinamou. "One egg, received through Frank Darwin, having been sent to me by his father who said he got it at Maldonado (Uruguay) and that it belonged to the Common Tinamou of those parts,” Newton's notes read. "The great man put it into too small a box and hence its unhappy state." Darwin had thought the bird was a partridge and his 1833 notes say that the bird had a "high shrill chirp" and its cooked flesh was "most delicately white."

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Microsoft says e-mails are spam-dominated

A Microsoft security report says over 97% of e-mails sent over the net are dominated by spam adverts and contain malicious attachments. Microsoft says that although the global ratio of infected machines is 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines, users should not panic about the high levels of their unwanted e-mails. "The good news is that the majority of that never hits your inbox although some will get through," head of security and privacy for Microsoft in the UK Cliff Evans told the BBC. The report, which covers online activities of the second half of 2008, also says that Office document attachments and PDF files were the main targets for hackers. "With higher capacity broadband and better OS (operating systems), and higher power computers it is easier now to send out billions of spams. Three or four years ago the capacity wasn't there," said Microsoft's chief cyber security advisor, Ed Gibson. This is while the Message Labs e-mail security firm said the Microsoft figure for unwanted e-mail was surprisingly high and that spam rates had fallen at the end of 2008. "Our own analysis shows that around 81% of e-mail traffic we were processing was identified as spam and unwanted," said Message Labs senior analyst Paul Woods. According to the Microsoft report, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Serbia are the countries suffering the most from malicious software or malware. Gibson advised users to protect themselves and others by updating applications, such as Office and Adobe. "If you don't update your software you are not just a hazard to yourself, you are hazard to others because you can be part of a botnet [if your computer is hijacked]." The report also warns about scareware or fake security programs which falsely ask people to install software which steal personal details from users' PC.

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Russian Soyuz returns to Earth

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two astronauts and an American space tourist has landed safely near Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan. About 200 rescue workers and doctors helped assist US billionaire Charles Simonyi, US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov back on Earth at 3:16am EDT, Wednesday. "All the systems worked excellently. We are extremely happy about it," head of Roskosmos Russian space agency, Anatoly Perminov told reporters at a post-landing news conference. "I want to congratulate the entire team. It looks like we know how now to take care of our astronauts and cosmonauts in orbit so that they look good on landing," responded NASA official Brian O'Connor. The TMA-13 craft docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, March 28, at 1305 hours GMT, with 60-year-old Hungarian-born Simonyi and Russian-American crewmembers onboard. This was Simonyi's second experience aboard the Russian/US jointly operated space station, for which he paid US$35 million. His first stay cost him US$25 million in 2007. NASA officials say, however, that Simonyi might be the last space tourist to visit the space station because the permanent ISS crew will be doubled in the near future.

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Antarctic ice shelf nears breaking

The Paris-based European Space Agency (ESA) has warned that Antarctica's massive Wilkins ice shelf could break away in the near future. 

According to the pictures taken by Envisat, the Earth-monitoring satellite, the icy bridge that connects the ice shelf to the continent is dramatically weakening. 

"The beginning of what appears to be the demise of the ice bridge began this week when new rifts" appeared and a large block of ice broke away, said ESA. 

Located on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins Ice Shelf originally covered about 13,000 square kilometers and began retreating in the 1990s, the Agency statement said. 

According to Angelika Humbert of Germany's Munster University, the shelf lost 14 percent of its mass last year and two large chunks of the ice bridge broke away, thinning it to 900 meters in some parts. 

As a result, "In the past months, we have observed the ice bridge deforming and its narrowest location acting as a kind of hinge," the ESA statement quoted Humbert as saying. 

Scientists are not sure whether global warming is responsible for the shelf's breakup or the warm currents from the Southern Ocean that might have shaved it down from underneath. 

Antarctica has lost some seven shelves in the past 20 years. This is while experts in the early 1990s believed that it would take 30 years for a shelf as large as the Wilkins to be lost. 

The Antarctic Peninsula has experienced a 2.5C rise in temperature in the past 50 years, which is higher than the global average, AFP reported.

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Genes guide monarch butterflies to Mexico

Scientists have found a group of genes that may be involved in driving North America's monarch butterflies every fall toward the south. 

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School say 40 genes are responsible for the monarch's 4,000-km journey from Canada to Mexico. 

The study conducted by neurobiologist Steven Reppert and colleagues is the first of its kind focusing on the exact genes responsible for migratory behavior in animals. 

"Our data are the first to provide a link between gene expression profiles in the brain and migratory state in any animal that undergoes long-distance migration," ScienceDaily quoted Reppert as saying. 

The study found that the monarch uses an internal clock and a 'sun compass,' which senses the angle of the sun, to find its way south every fall. 

“Our results also provide the first insights into gene expression patterns that may underlie sun compass orientation, a complex process involving the integration of temporal and spatial information," explained Reppert.

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Giant laser recreates sun power

US scientists have completed world's most powerful lab laser capable of self-sustaining nuclear fusion and recreating energy force of the sun. 

After more than half a century and a budget of $US3.5 billion, US National Ignition Facility (NIF) realized its long-sought goal: the huge physics experiment to recreate conditions at the sun and simulate the energy force of a hydrogen bomb. 

Completed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and housed in a ten-story building the size of three football fields, NIF will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant lasers beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. 

When all of its beams are operational, NIF will focus about two million joules of ultraviolet laser energy on a tiny target in the center of its target chamber - creating conditions similar to those that exist only in the cores of stars and giant planets and inside a nuclear weapon. 

The resulting fusion reaction will deliver at least 60 times more energy than any previous laser system. 

The American experiment, which is claimed to contribute to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy.

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