One of the long-standing mysteries in solar physics is why the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.

Now, scientists claim to have finally solved the mystery after they discovered a major source of hot gas that replenishes the corona — jets of plasma shooting up from just above the Sun’s surface, the Science journal reported.

Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, a member of an international team which carried out the NASA-supported research, said, “It’s always been quite a puzzle to figure out why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface. By identifying that these jets insert heated plasma into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, we can gain a much greater understanding of that region and possibly improve our knowledge of the Sun’s subtle influence on the Earth’s upper atmosphere.”

Team member Rich Behnke of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research, said: “These observations are a significant step in understanding observed temperatures in the solar corona. They provide new insight about the energy output of the Sun and other stars. The results are also a great example of the power of collaboration among university, private industry and government scientists and organisations.”

In fact, for its research, the team focused on jets of plasma known as spicules, which are fountains of plasma propelled upward from near the surface of the Sun into the outer atmosphere.

For decades, researchers believed spicules could send heat into the corona. However, following observational research in the 1980s, it was found that spicule plasma did not reach coronal temperatures, and so the theory largely fell out of vogue.

“Heating of spicules to millions of degrees has never been directly observed, so their role in coronal heating had been dismissed as unlikely,” said Bart De Pontieu, the lead scientist and a solar physicist at Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

Khajjiar - The 'Mini Switzerland' of India

Khajjiar sits on a small plateau with a small stream-fed lake in the middle that has been covered over with weeds. The hill station is surrounded by green meadows and dense forests. It is about 6500 ft. (1981m) above sea level in the foothills of the Dhauladhar ranges of the western Himalayas and snowy peaks can be seen in the distance.

Khajjiar is often called the Mini Switzerland of India and was officially baptized thus by the Swiss Ambassador on July 7, 1992. It has a rare combination of three ecosystems: lake, pasture and forest, all in one place.

It is a best place to visit in India.

Soap Nuts

Soap Nuts also sometimes referred to as Washing Nuts or Ritha / Reetha /Aritha (in Hindi) or Anthwaal (Kannada), are actually the fruits of the soap nut tree and contain ‘Saponin’, which is a 100% natural alternative to chemical laundry detergent and cleansers.

When in contact with water, it creates mild suds, which is similar to soap.

Soapnuts are highly-effective and gentle at the same time. It will leave your laundry fresh and clean and compared to other detergents, its mildness will keep colours bright, maintaining fabric structure of your clothes for longer periods. It can be used on all fabrics and at all temperatures. It is a 100% substitute to normal detergents.

Soap nuts are allergy-free and hence are good for your skin especially good for babies, eczema and sensitive skin. This chemical free product is excellent for washing children’s clothing. Soapnuts are hypoallergenic. They are naturally antibacterial and antifungal and very gentle on the skin.

The chemicals in detergents are absorbed through the skin and into the blood stream. In comparison, soapnuts are a 100% natural product.

Soap nuts are both ecological and economical when compared to other forms of detergents.

They just needed some leg room…

New research shows the great dinosaur die-off made way for mammals to explode in size – some more massive than several elephants put together.

The largest land mammal ever – a rhinoceros-like creature, minus the horn, that stood 18 feet (5.5 meters) tall, weighed roughly 17 tons and grazed in forests in what is now Eurasia. It makes the better known woolly mammoth seem a bit puny.

Tracking such prehistoric giants is more than a curiosity – It sheds new light on the evolution of mammals as they diversified to fill habitats left vacant by the dinosaurs.

Within 25 million years of the dinosaurs’ extinction – fast, in geologic terms – overall land mammals had reached a maximum size and then levelled off, an international team of scientists reports in the journal Science. And while different species on different continents reached their peaks at different points in time, that pattern of evolution was remarkably similar worldwide.

“Evolution can happen very quickly when ecology permits,” said paleo-ecologist Felisa A. Smith of the University of New Mexico, who led the research. “This is really coming down to ecology allowing this to happen.”

Anyone who frequents natural history museums knows that the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago ushered in the age of mammals, and that some of them were gigantic. But the new study is the first comprehensive mapping of these giants in a way that helps explain how and why their size evolved.

“We didn’t have a clear idea of how the story went after the extinction of the dinosaurs,” explained Nicholas D. Pyenson, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t involved with the new research. Previous theories suggested that species diversity drove increases in size, but the new study didn’t find that connection. “It suggests there’s a deeper explanation of how large body size evolves in mammals,” he said.

Mammals did coexist with dinosaurs, but small ones, ranging from about the size of a mouse to a maximum of a small dog. “We were pretty much the varmints scurrying around the feet of the dinosaurs,” is how New Mexico’s Smith puts it.

To see how that changed, researchers funded by the National Science Foundation collected fossil data on the maximum sizes attained by all major groups of mammals on each continent throughout their evolutionary history. How do they know the sizes? Smith said mammal teeth not only tend to preserve better than bones, but they correlate very well to body mass.

The largest was that 17-ton rhino-like Indricotherium, followed closely by an elephant-looking creature named Deinotherium in Africa, Smith said. Contrast them to modern elephants, which average about 3 to 5 tons.

The herbivores grew large first, perhaps because they had an advantage in eating the vegetation left flourishing after the plant-eating dinosaurs were gone. Just like with today’s lions and elephants, the largest carnivores, that came along a bit later, remained an order of magnitude smaller than the biggest prehistoric herbivores.

Why did mammal size level off?

Available land area and the earth’s temperature, Dr. Smith said. Ninety percent of the food mammals eat goes to maintaining their core body temperature, and the amount of food is related to the amount of land supporting a population. The biggest mammals evolved when a cooler climate meant lower sea levels and more land area. Also, bigger animals conserve heat better, a problem when temperatures rise.

Scientists debate if climate change or early humans eventually ended the age of giant mammals, something the new study doesn’t address.

Animals like tigers and polar bears are much more vulnerable to environmental change because of their huge appetite, researchers say.

Large predators suffer more than smaller species from habitat change because they have to work harder to find their next meal.Experts found numbers of mammals like lions, tigers and polar bears dropped more, compared to weasels or badgers, when food was scarce, according to the journal Biology Letters.

It suggests that the vulnerability of larger species may be linked with the high energetic costs of being ‘big’, reports the Daily Mail.The robustness and large size of these species, which are well suited for hunting large prey, might become a hindrance when times are tough.

Dr. Philip Stephens, from Durham University’s School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, in U.K., said that when prey was scarce, large predator populations dropped five to six times more than those of their smaller rivals.He said, “It’s hard work being a large predator roaming and hunting across extensive areas to find food.”

“The apparent vulnerability of tigers and polar bears to reductions in the availability of prey may be linked to the energetic costs of being a large carnivore.” he added.

The thinning ozone layer could be leaving the world’s whales scarred from severe sunburn, experts said on Wednesday.

A study of whales in the Gulf of California over the past few years shows that the sea-going mammals carry blisters and other damage typically associated with the skin damage that humans suffer from exposure to the ultraviolet radiation.

That makes it yet another threat for the already endangered animals to worry about.

Whales would be particularly vulnerable to sunburn in part because they need to spend extended periods of time on the ocean’s surface to breathe, socialize, and feed their young. Since they don’t have fur or feathers it effectively means they sunbathe naked.

As Dr. Laura Martinez-Levasseur, the study’s lead author, put it- “Humans can put on clothes or sunglasses, but whales can’t.”

Martinez-Levasseur, who works at Zoological Society of London, spent three years studying whales in the Gulf of California, the teeming body of water which separates Baja California from the Mexican mainland.

Photographs were taken of the whales to chart any visible damage, and small samples – taken with a crossbow-fired dart – were collected to examine the state of their skin cells.

Her study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, seemed to confirm suspicions first raised by one of her whale-watching colleagues. The beasts were showing lesions associated with sun damage, and many of their skin samples revealed patterns of dead cells associated with exposure to UV radiation.

As with humans, the lighter-skinned whales seemed to have the most difficulty dealing with the sun. Blue whales had more severe skin damage than their darker-skinned counterparts, fin whales and sperm whales, even though the latter spend bigger chunks of time at the surface.

So far, there were no indications of skin cancer among the whales studied, although Martinez-Levasseur, who is also a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary, University of London, noted that only tiny samples were taken of the massive animals.

She said one of her next projects will be to examine how well whales’ cells hold up under the increased UV radiation – and whether whales’ pigmentation darkens as a result of their time spent out in the sun.

In other words, she wants “to be able to see if they’re tanning.”

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has succeeded in creating a miniature version of the Big Bang by smashing stripped-down lead atoms together.

The reaction created temperatures a million times hotter than the sun’s core. Such high temperatures have not been reached since the first billionth of a second following the Big Bang — the event which many scientists say was the beginning of the universe.

This was expected to cause atomic particles such as protons and neutrons to melt, producing a “soup” of matter in a state previously unseen on earth.

Scientists, including British particle physicists, will now study the particles in the hope of discovering what holds atoms together and gives them their mass, reports the Telegraph.

The collisions were produced by firing lead ions — atoms with their electrons removed — at incredible speeds in opposite directions around the LHC’s underground tunnel at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva.

The heavyweight particle collisions follow seven months of experiments crashing protons — which are 200 times lighter than lead ions — at near-light speeds.

“We are thrilled with the achievement. The collisions generated mini Big Bangs and the highest temperatures and densities ever achieved in an experiment,” said David Evans, of Birmingham University, U.K.

“This process took place in a safe, controlled environment generating incredibly hot and dense subatomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees — a million times hotter than the centre of the sun,” he added.

The latest experiment at CERN went ahead despite warnings by a group called Heavy Ion Alert that it could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction that might destroy the earth.

LHC scientists dismissed the claims.

Scientists from a consortium of nine central laboratories have undertaken a project to discover potential of making bio fuel commercially from microalgae.

The project called “New Millennium India Technology Leadership Initiative” (NMITLI) – initiated by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 2006 to develop a scalable commercial model of producing biofuel from microbes has taken off recently and research has got underway.

“Members of the nine inter laboratory consortium shall be assessing techno-economic viability of making bio diesel from microalgae,” Director of the Bhavnagar-based Central Salt and Marine Chemical Research Institute (CSMCRI) Pushpito Ghosh said.

The objective of this project is to create primary reliable data bank and also assess techno feasibility of commercial production of bio diesel from microalgae using core research strength of each of the consortium laboratory.

World over a general belief prevails that microalgae can grow very fast and is able to produce large amount of bio-mass.

“But, when it comes to putting them (microalgae) in use for manufacturing high volume and low value products like bio diesel then not many practical established processes are still known,” Mr. Ghosh said.

“The focus will be on looking at two or three varieties of lipid producing microalgae which has the potential to manufacture bio diesel at commercial scale,” Mr. Ghosh said.

“The possibility of putting effluents and exhaustive gases emitted from the thermal power plant to productive use shall be explored as part of this project to enhance growth,” he said.

“We will explore if emissions from thermal power plants can be used to accelerate photosynthesis process using the type of CO2 emissions from it and them reverse the process to convert it into lipids,” Mr. Ghosh said.

Microalgae are usually found in sea or along the coast lines. They are presently being used to manufacture protein supplements like Spirulina, which are low volume and high value products.

The inter laboratory consortium comprise CSMCRI, Department of Marine Living Resources, Andhra University in Vishakhapatnam, Calcutta University in Kolkata, Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) of Hyderabad, IIT-Kharagpur, National Chemical Laboratory at Pune, National Institute of Oceanography at Goa, National Institute of Ocean Technology – Chennai and National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology of Thiruvananthapuram.

A new study by Spanish scientists has revealed that humans are not the only species to prefer to use their right hand – chimpanzees also share the trait. The researchers reached their findings after observing 114 chimpanzees from two primate rescue centres, one in Spain and the other in Zambia.

The primates were provided with food hidden inside tubes and the scientists monitored them to see which hand they used to get at it, either their fingers or with the help of tools.

“The chimpanzees showed a preferential use of the right hand to get the food from the tube,” Discovery News quoted the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution, which coordinated the study, as saying in a statement. “This feature had traditionally been considered exclusively human and had been believed to be caused by asymmetries observed in the human brain that are related to the realization of complicated activities that require the use and coordination of both hands.”

The study also found that female chimpanzees, like their human counterparts, are more likely to be right-handed than males. The researchers said this suggests, “that just like in our species, there are shared biological factors, genetic and hormonal, that modulate the functioning of our brain.”

The study has been published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Primatology.