Over the last few weeks the solar activity has been very minimal and based on the observations made over past 100 years, Sun’s brightness has dimmed down over past few weeks.

The scientists watching the events closely as many of them believe this could be sign of next little ice age.The last time the little ice age occurres was between 1300-1850 ensuring heavy cold spells in Europe and North America.

The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum. And Scientists believe we could be in one of this period.

Source : National Geogrphic society

Scientists say the Maunder Minimum can be tracked based on the number of Sun spots visible. Sun Spots (dark spots in Sun) are caused by violent storms and usually they follow a 11 year cycle of High activity and a lull. The last lull was in 2008 and this year Sun should have started showing more activity. But It has become even quieter.

But many argue the effects of this cool period wont be felt due to Global warming. Lets wait and watch.

Scientists report today that artificial blood vessels made using a person’s own skin cells work well in patients receiving kidney dialysis. The new blood vessels mark the first vascular grafts to be derived entirely from a patient’s own tissues, which lowers the odds of a harmful immune reaction.

To speed the procedure of renal dialysis doctors typically implant a small blood vessel between a vein and an artery in the patient’s arm. Blood is then removed and reinserted through an intravenous line inserted into this bypass vessel. When possible, doctors typically harvest a piece of a vein from a patient to make this bypass, called a shunt. But over time, these shunts often fail, forcing doctors to use shunts made with plastics and other synthetic materials that can trigger immune reactions or blood-flow problems downstream.

They start by harvesting skin cells known as fibroblasts and growing these in a sheet. They then roll up the sheet and allow the cells to produce an interpenetrating mixture of structural support proteins, known as collagen and elastin. The trouble with fibroblasts is that they can transform into smooth muscle cells that can eventually clog the vessel. So McAllister’s team removed the fibroblasts, leaving behind just the protein scaffold. Then the researchers layered another sheet of fibroblasts on the outside of this scaffold, which is dense enough to prevent the cells from easily migrating to the inside of the engineered vessel. Finally, the team added a layer of the patient’s own endothelial cells, which promote smooth blood flow, on the inside of the vessel.

New research presented at the Experimental Biology 2009 meeting being held in New Orleans that a specific type of antioxidant phytochemical called ellagic acid holds the promise of enhancing our bodies on the outside. In fact, it may hold the key to successfully slowing down or even stopping skin aging.

Researchers in the laboratory of Dr. Young-Hee Kang at Hallym University in the Republic of Korea have found topical application of ellagic acid markedly prevents the two major causes of wrinkles and aged-looking skin — the destruction of collagen and inflammation. Their findings are based on studies in human skin cells as well as on experiments with mice exposed to UV-B light that mimics the sun’s skin-damaging ultraviolet radioactive rays.

Ellagic acid is found in many fruits, vegetables and nuts but it is especially abundant in raspberries, strawberries, cranberries and pomegranates. Previous studies have suggested it has a photoprotective effect on the skin so the Korean scientists decided to try to find out the exact mechanism. They discovered that in human skin cells, ellagic acid worked to protect against UV damage by blocking production of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP), enzymes that break down collagen in damaged skin cells. It also reduced the expression of a molecule known as ICAM that is involved in inflammatory reactions.

In animal study the mice exposed to UV radiation without the ellagic treatment developed wrinkles and thickening of the skin but the group that received a topical dose of ellagic acid showed reduced wrinkle formation. The ellagic acid tamed the inflammation response, kept collagen from degrading and prevented the skin from thickening. The researchers concluded these results show that ellagic acid works to prevent wrinkle formation and photo-aging caused by UV destruction of collagen and inflammation.

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

“The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the ‘habitable zone,’” said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet “extraordinary.”

Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.

Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a “good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets.”

Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the “habitable zone” — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet’s surface, Mayor said.

He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.

Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a “large and deep” ocean.

For at least 3,000 years, a drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world’s poorest people, climate researchers report in a new study.

The last such drought, persisting more than three centuries, ended around 1750, the research team writes in the April 17 issue of the journal Science.

The scientists warned that more such mega-droughts are inevitable, although there is no way to predict when the next one could unfold.

That sobering prediction emerged from the first study of year-by-year climate conditions in the region over the millenniums, based on layered mud and dead trees in a crater lake in Ghana. Although the evidence was drawn from a single water body, Lake Bosumtwi, the researchers said there was evidence that the drought patterns etched in the lake bed extended across a broad swath of West Africa.

A report to be presented at the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) on April 20 will canvas the possibility that the world’s forests may move from being important carbon “sinks” to a net source of CO2.

The study: ‘Adaptation of Forests and People to Climate Change – A Global Assessment’ was put together by the Vienna-based International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) through the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF).

The report was the result of work by 35 of the world’s top forestry scientists and is expected to play a key role at the UNFF discussions which run until May 01.

Risto Seppälä, a professor at the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla) and Immediate Past President of IUFRO, who chaired the expert panel that produced the report, described the very real risk of forests becoming sources for carbon.

“We normally think of forests as putting the brakes on global warming, but in fact over the next few decades, damage induced by climate change could cause forests to release huge quantities of carbon and create a situation in which they do more to accelerate warming than to slow it down,” he said.

The report said a rise in global temperatures has already slowed regenerative growth in the world’s tropical rainforests and the dryer conditions have made the forests more vulnerable to fire, disease and insect infestations.

“The current carbon-regulating functions of forests are at risk of being lost entirely unless carbon emissions are reduced drastically,” said Alexander Buck, IUFRO’s deputy director and a coordinator of the report, to news agency.

“With a global warming of 2.5 C (4.5 F) compared to pre-industrial times, the forest ecosystems would begin to turn into a net source of carbon, adding significantly to emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation,” he added.”Policymakers should focus greater attention on helping forests and the people who live around them adapt to anticipated problems,” said Professor Seppälä.

A microbial ecosystem has been trapped under an Antarctic glacier for over a million years. Researchers have now figured out what fuels these bacteria thanks to a shift that has brought bright red, iron-rich ice to the surface.

The McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are considered one of the least hospitable places on Earth; NASA has used them to simulate conditions that might prevail on Mars. But scientists are now reporting the discovery of an ecosystem buried under the ice of one of these glaciers that stretches the definition of unusual well past the breaking point.

Nobody would be likely to suspect that there is any life underneath the ice, which is hundreds of meters thick in the area, if it weren’t for the striking red ice erupting from the glacier’s terminus, giving the formation the name Blood Falls. That red color comes from iron concentrated in the ice, which exists primarily in the Fe(II) state favored when oxygen is absent..

It seems that the red ice has travelled from a pocket that exists four kilometers from the glacier’s end, at a site where the ice is over 400m thick. Based on the chemical composition of the material trapped in the ice, scientists think that the pocket encases the remains of an arm of the ocean that extended into the area during the Pilocene, which ended over 1.8 million years ago. Once encased under the glacier, that pocket became hyper-saline and completely devoid of free oxygen. Consistent with its total isolation from the surface, the amount of 14C in the sample is extremely low.

The DNA sequences obtained from Blood Falls appear to come from relatives of marine organisms. Most of the clones come from within the Proteobacteria, and the closest cultured relatives of many of these metabolize sulfur and iron (there are also high levels of sulfur present in the brine).

Unlike the sulfur-powered communities present at undersea vents, there’s little indication of a hydrogen sulfide metabolism present in the ice at Blood Falls. Instead, it appears that energy is obtained when sulfur is cycled through different oxidation states by reacting it with iron, producing the Fe(II) seen in the brine. The oxidized sulfur is then used to react with carbon compounds, powering the metabolism. All of that is pretty low-energy—the authors suggest that the doubling time for a bacterium in this environment would be roughly 300 days—and requires an external source of Fe(III) to power the system. The authors posit that the glacier itself might provide the source by extracting new iron as it scrapes across the underlying rocks. The Blood Falls bacteria suggest that life could have eked out a metabolism under these extreme conditions, providing raw material for evolution once the planet warmed again.

A highly virulent and deadly form of cholera strain — the El Tol hybrid — has now been found in India. First discovered in Bangladesh in 2006 and subsequently found in parts of Africa, this recombinant strain is more dangerous than all its predecessors, with the power to kill more people and cause prolonged outbreaks.

Scientists at the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) in Kolkata fear that almost 100% of all new cholera infections in West Bengal and Orissa are being caused by this “new bad boy”.

“The hybrid strain presently found in Bangladesh, Mozambique and now in India is a combination of both the previous strains. The dehydration caused by cholera is extremely severe when infected with the El Tol hybrid and hence mortality rates are higher,” Dr Ghosh said.

The most severe warning about the risks of the El Tol hybrid, however, came from Dr Nair. According to him, the classical strain was more virulent and less infectious while El Tol was less virulent and more infectious. “The El Tol hybrid has picked up both attributes and is more virulent and more infectious,” Dr Nair said.

Cholera is an acute intestinal infection caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. It has a short incubation period, from two hours to five days, and produces an enterotoxin that causes a painless, watery diarrhoea that can quickly lead to severe dehydration and death if treatment is not promptly given.

About 75% of people infected with cholera do not develop any symptoms. However, the pathogens stay in their faeces for 7-14 days and are shed back into the environment, potentially infecting other individuals.

Researchers have known that the naturalist collected 16 bird eggs during his trip between 1831 and 1836 but all were thought to be lost.

But one sample – that of the Tinamou bird of Uruguay – has been discovered by a volunteer as she catalogued a collection at the Zoology Museum.

The records seem to indicate that Darwin himself was responsible for damage caused to the heavily cracked egg after packing it in too small a box during or following his famous voyage.

The chocolate brown egg – slightly smaller than a hen’s egg – was among the museum’s 10,000 strong collection from Darwin being partly catalogued by volunteer Liz Wetton.

She has spent half a day at the Museum each week for the past ten years where she faithfully sorts and reboxes the Museum’s bird egg collection.

She merely commented that the specimen had C. Darwin written on it before moving to the next drawer.

Arctic sea ice is not only shrinking in coverage area; it’s also thinning, according to a report and satellite images jointly released on Monday by NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

The Arctic basin is covered in a thick semipermanent sea ice, which is covered in thin seasonal ice caps that are built up each winter, only to melt away again each summer.

The 2009 Arctic summer-melting season is starting out with a substantial amount of thin seasonal ice and an unusually small amount of the thick sea ice, making it more vulnerable to melting, according to the NSIDC’s report.

“Thin seasonal ice–ice that melts and refreezes every year–makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea ice in wintertime, up from 40 (percent) to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 (percent) to 40 percent,” according to the report from the University of Colorado team led by Charles Fowler.

Typically a battery functions with lithium ions flowing between a negatively charged anode, usually graphite, and the positively charged cathode, usually cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate. But three years ago, an MIT team reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire. The “virus batteries” have the energy capacity and power performance similar to rechargeable batteries.

The prototype battery is a coin battery, but the idea is that cell and larger batteries could be made from this process and that one day it will power cars, boats and everything else. As it stands right now, it can go at least 100 charges before performance goes down. That will change of course.

The idea behind industrial bioengineering is that viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms are really microscopic chemical factories. They eat, and through the metabolic process, subsequently secrete things. Wine, cheese, beer and antibiotics are, in that light, really the waste product of selectively fed and bred microbes.

One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday.

They said the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.

Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, “the rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.

“This continued and often significant glacier retreat is a wakeup call that change is happening … and we need to be prepared,” USGS glaciologist Jane Ferrigno, who led the Antarctica study, said in a statement.

“Antarctica is of special interest because it holds an estimated 91 percent of the Earth’s glacier volume, and change anywhere in the ice sheet poses significant hazards to society,” she said.

In another report published in the journal Geophysical Letters, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that ice is melting much more rapidly than expected in the Arctic as well, based on new computer analyses and recent ice measurements.

The U.N. Climate Panel projects that world atmospheric temperature will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius because of emissions of greenhouse gases that could bring floods, droughts, heat waves and more powerful storms.As glaciers and ice sheets melt, they can raise overall ocean levels and swamp low-lying areas.

By monitoring carbon 14 emitted from Cold War-era nuclear bomb tests, researchers found that heart muscle cells continue to divide throughout adulthood, shows a study appearing in the April 3 Science. The low-level cell renewal may eventually be exploited to treat damaged hearts, says study coauthor Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The finding contradicts the belief of many scientists that the heart muscle cells sticking around until the end were present at birth.”The dogma has always been that cell division in the heart pretty much stops after birth,” says Charles Murry of the University of Washington in Seattle.To figure out whether the cells continue to be regenerated throughout life, researchers took advantage of an inadvertent marker that has found its way into heart cell DNA. The radioactive isotope carbon 14 was generated by aboveground nuclear test bombs during the Cold War. After the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty took effect in 1963, carbon 14 levels in the atmosphere dropped, but amounts of the isotope remain in both the environment and humans.

“The carbon 14 in the atmosphere is mirrored in bodies,” Frisén says.

When cells divide, they use carbon 14 to build DNA, a phenomenon that can serve as a birthmark for new cells. By looking at DNA from people born before 1955, when the first nuclear bombs were tested, researchers could see whether heart cells were born after the people in the study were born. (Cells that did not divide after a person’s birth would not contain any carbon 14.) The researchers also inferred cells’ birth dates by matching cells’ carbon 14 levels to the atmospheric carbon 14 levels.

Frisén and his colleagues found that samples from people born before 1955 did indeed have carbon 14 in heart muscle cell DNA, indicating that the cells had recruited the isotope and were therefore created after the person’s birth. Using multiple samples, the researchers estimated that a 20-year-old person renews about one percent of heart muscle cells in a year. By age 75, the rate of cell turnover slows to about 0.4 percent a year. This means that a 50-year-old has only about 55 percent of the heart muscle cells he or she was born with, while the remaining 45 percent of the cells were generated later.

At this stage, the results are “really basic knowledge that doesn’t solve any problem or help someone with a heart attack,” Frisén says. But knowing that heart muscle cells do regenerate opens up possibilities of regulating that process. “The dream scenario would be after a heart attack, we have a drug to take to increase heart cells,” Frisén says. The new results “indicate that is rational and realistic to think of such possibilities.”

Young vegetarians consuming plenty of fruits and vegetables are eating a healthy diet but they may also have an increased risk of spree eating and other unusual behaviors, researchers said. Despite its proven health benefits, a vegetarian diet might in fact be masking an underlying eating disorder.

After examining the diets, weight and drug and alcohol use of 2,516 teenagers and young adults aged 15 to 23 who took part in a survey in 31 Minnesota schools they found that young vegetarians reported more binge eating than meat eaters.

“Findings from the present study indicate that adolescent and young adult vegetarians may experience the health benefits associated with increased fruit and vegetable intake, and young adults may have the added advantage of decreased risk for overweight and obesity,” said Romona Robinson-O’Brien, an assistant professor at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota.

“However, current vegetarians may be at increased risk for binge eating, while former vegetarians may be at increased risk for extreme unhealthful weight control behaviors,” she added.

Scientists have decoded the unique structure and mechanism of a tuberculosis enzyme, paving way for development of new drugs to combat active and latent tuberculosis infections. Barbara Gerratana, assistant chemistry and biochemistry professor in Maryland University College of Chemical and Life Sciences, led the research team, which included her graduate student Melissa Resto and assistant professor Nicole LaRonde-LeBlanc.

“The NAD plus synthetase enzyme that our study describes is absolutely essential for the survival of tuberculosis bacteria and an important drug target. We can now use the information we have about its structure and mechanism to develop inhibitors for this enzyme,” Gerratana explained.

The development of new TB drugs has become urgent, as strains of TB resistant to all major anti-TB drugs have emerged worldwide. World Health Organisation estimates that one-third of the world’s population carries latent TB and that 10 percent will eventually develop the disease, said a Maryland release.

Discovery and its crew are scheduled to touch down at NASA’s Florida spaceport early Saturday afternoon. Favorable weather is expected.

The seven astronauts are winding up a 13-day mission that was highlighted by the successful installation and unfurling of the space station’s last pair of solar wings. The $300 million addition brought the orbiting outpost up to full power. It’s an essential part of NASA’s plan to double the space station population by late spring and boost the amount of science work.

Discovery is bringing back former space station resident Sandra Magnus. She’s spent 4 1/2 months in orbit.

The space station, meanwhile, is getting more guests Saturday with the arrival of a Russian Soyuz capsule.

Researchers studying a hydrogen-producing, single-celled green algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, have unmasked a previously unknown fermentation pathway that may open up possibilities for increasing hydrogen production.

Normally, only a small fraction of the electrons go into generating hydrogen during fermentation.

However, a major research goal has been to develop ways to increase this fraction, which would raise the potential yield of hydrogen.

In the new study, researchers at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Plant Biology, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), examined metabolic processes in a mutant strain that was unable to assemble an active hydrogenase enzyme.

The researchers expected the cell’s metabolism to compensate by increasing metabolite flow along other known fermentation pathways, such as those producing formate and ethanol as end products.

Instead, the algae activated a pathway leading to the production of succinate, which was previously not associated with fermentation metabolism in C. reinhardtii.

Notably, succinate, a widely used industrial chemical normally synthesized from petroleum, is included in the Department of Energy’s list of the top 12 value added chemicals from biomass.