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Scientists will barcode life on Earth
A TEAM of international scientists have launched an ambitious project to genetically identify, or provide a barcode for, every plant and animal species on the planet.
By taking a snippet of DNA from all the known species on Earth and linking them to photographs, descriptions and scientific information, the researchers plan to build the largest database of its kind.
“We have discovered that it is quite possible to have a short DNA sequence that can characterize just about every form of life on the planet,” Dr Richard Lane, director of science at the Natural History Museum in London, told a news conference recently.
Less than a fifth of the Earth’s estimated 10 million species of plants and animals have been named. Researchers working on the Barcode of Life Initiative hope that genetically identifying all of them in a standardized way on a global scale will speed up the discovery of new ones.
Current techniques used to identify minute differences between species are complicated, time consuming and require specialist knowledge. “What we are looking at is a new method which will allow just about anyone, in any part of the world, to recognize organisms without recourse to a particular specialist,” said Lane.
Eyeing global projects
Indian software giant Tata Consultancy Services recently said it had signed a pact with state-owned National Aerospace Laboratories to bid jointly for national and international aerospace programmes. They will jointly offer “solutions and services” in the aerospace domain, including design, testing, manufacturing and use of advanced computer-aided techniques, said senior Tata Consultancy Services official Reghu Ayyaswamy.
They also announced the launch of the FLosolver Mk6 computing machine, which was capable of a range of aerospace applications. “Both firms are confident of making a significant impact on the international scene through this partnership,” Ayyaswamy told reporters.
India is poised to become a key outsourcing hub for global aerospace firms as it has cheap and skilled engineers on offer, according to analysts. “India’s aerospace industry is at the take-off stage,” Edward Gordon, manager of offset programmes of Northrop Grumman, a US-based defence firm with operations in 25 nations, told a news agency.
“Some of the companies, such as state-owned aircraft maker Hindustan Aeronautics, have come a long way. As a result the first-tier suppliers look very promising,” said Gordon, whose company is pitching the sale of its Hawkeye, an airborne early warning, command and control aircraft, to India.
US and global warming
A United States senate bill reintroduced last week, and three expected to be introduced shortly, take conflicting views on reducing the gases most scientists believe cause global warming.
The bills underline the American attempts to cut greenhouse emissions after President George W. Bush, early in his first term, pulled out of UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Senators Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, and John McCain, an Arizona Republican, recently reintroduced their bill, which would require a reduction in carbon dioxide emission levels to 2000 levels by the year 2010, by capping the overall greenhouse gas emissions from the utility, transportation, and industrial sectors.
It would create a market for individual companies to trade pollution credits, modeled on the successful US acid rain gas trading programme created by the US 1990 Clean Air Act. The Kyoto pact, which was launched on Feb 16, calls for greenhouse gas markets and is also modeled on the Clean Air Act.
Meanwhile, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who helped lead a Senate effort against the Kyoto accord, is expected to introduce three global warming bills. The bills would not create mandatory emissions caps.
Rather, they would seek to reduce emissions through incentives and technology, said Hagel’s spokesman Mike Buttry.
Tsunami pictures
A British Navy ship has released the first images of the seabed at the epicentre of the recent killer earthquake and tsunami, which reveal the massive canyons and ridges left by the collision of two of the earth’s plates.
The Royal Navy’s HMS Scott has been taking underwater sonar readings off the Indonesian island of Sumatra to try to find out how the Dec 26 earthquake unfolded and then produced the giant waves that have killed nearly 300,000 people in 11 countries.
The ship’s officers presented the readings in the form of coloured digital mapping at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office in Taunton, Somerset, southwest England, indicating a large landslide some 100 metres high by two kilometres long.
HMS Scott’s Commanding Officer Steve Malcolm said initial assessments by scientists indicate that two of the earth’s tectonic plates clashed, causing a ridge on the seabed which forced sea water to travel upwards, forming the devastating tsunami.
It must have occurred “like the rumpling up of a carpet,” he said. He expressed hope that the survey would give a warning as to when this could happen again “with the aim of removing the likelihood of such a terrible loss of life.”
New wave
An increasingly popular technology, called RSS, is changing the way consumers get their news online, spurring several newspapers to launch their own customized software in an attempt to stay ahead of the competition.
Instead of having to go to a favourite website to see if any new articles have been published, a piece of software called an RSS Reader pulls in headlines and text automatically, allowing users to create their own customized content from newspapers, blogs and even search engines.
In the past two weeks, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and an online news site CNET have announced plans to offer their own free, branded RSS Readers, in part to guard against potential dangers to their business models. — Sci-tech World Report
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