My top 10 science stories

in 2009

Bergin.G,MDO,SSA,

Kanyakumari Distriict.

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10Hubble

Servicing Mission

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The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by the space shuttle in April 1990. Servicing Mission 4 (SM4), launched on May 11, 2009, was the culmination of a long effort to provide the telescope with one more servicing mission.

9AIDS

Vaccine

In September 2009, for the first time  a vaccine against AIDS has shown effectiveness amoung humans in Thailand .

Although modest, it is very encouraging for the scientific community.

Although the degree of protection they have observed is truly modest, the study is a major scientific breakthrough. Click to continue

8Oldest

Skeleton of Human

Ancestor Found Ardi – short for Ardipithecus ramidus or

‘root of the ground ape’ – stood 4ft tall and weighed 110lb.   She lived a million years before the famous Lucy, the previous earliest skeleton of a hominid who was dug up in 1974.   Experts believe Ardi is very, very close to the ‘missing link’ common ancestor of humans and chimps, thought to have lived five to seven million years ago.

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7The H1N1 - swine flu

Swine influenza (also called pig influenza, swine flu, hog flu and pig flu) is an infection by any one of several types of swine influenza virus.  Swine influenza virus is common throughout pig populations worldwide. Transmission of the virus from pigs to humans is not common and does not always lead to human influenza, often resulting only in the production of antibodies in the blood. Swine flu cannot be spread by pork products, since the virus is not transmitted through food.

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6Computer Program Predicts

Drug Side Effects

This year, a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California, San Francisco developed a computer program to do that.

Their software compares the shape of each drug to thousands of other drugs and natural chemicals, and uses that information to predict which biological buttons the drug can push.

By looking at the constellation of proteins the drug affects, They can predict how it may affect the body.

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5BT Brinjal controversy

Bt Brinjal is a transgenic brinjal created out of inserting a gene [Cry 1Ac] from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis into Brinjal. The insertion of the gene into the Brinjal cell in young cotyledons has been done through an Agrobacterium-mediated vector, along with other genes like promoters, markers etc. This is said to give the Brinjal plant resistance against lepidopteran insects like the Brinjal Fruit and Shoot Borer (Leucinodes orbonalis) and Fruit Borer (Helicoverpa armigera). It is reported that upon ingestion of the Bt toxin by the insect, there would be disruption of digestive processes, ultimately resulting in the death of the insect. Rats fed Bt brinjal had diarrhoea, increased water consumption; decrease in liver weight, and liver to body weight. Health and Environmental impacts makes Bt Brinjal an environmental and health controversy in India.

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4Water on the moon

On November 13, 2009, scientists from NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite said unequivocally there is water on the moon and plenty of it. Chandrayaan – 1 carried a NASA radar on board which has detected deposits of water ice at both poles of the moon. 

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3Retinal implant MIT researchers seem to be developing a retinal

implant that could Aid in restoring some amount of vision that may be necessary to certain group of blind people. The chip may not restore normal vision but it could assist Blind in navigating the room mare easily or to help Walk down a side walk.

The Retinal Implant Research Group has developed a microelectronic retinal implant to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and blindness. A microchip will be implanted into the patient's eyeball. A pair of glasses equipped with a tiny camera will transmit information to that microchip that will pass along recognizable visual information to the human brain, enough information to allow a blind person to navigate the room or recognize objects. Dr. Joseph Rizzo and Professor John Wyatt co-founded the Boston Retinal Implant Project (BRIP). The collaboration was initiated between the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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2Sixth Sense

Pranav Mistry, MIT graduate student and his adviser, Pattie Maes, have contrived this fascinating gesture-controlled computer interface that recognizes and responds to hand signals and conducts appropriate searches. The Sixth Sense is a wearable gestural interface that lets natural hand gestures interact with digital information. In other words, it's the computer interface that you have watching in every science fiction film made in the last ten years. Imagine a watch appearing on your wrist when you tap on it, or a phone call being placed after tapping out a phone number on the palm of your hand. Still a prototype, the SixthSense's hardware components are coupled in a wearable device with a projector and a camera connected to the computer. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and objects to be used as computer interfaces; while the camera tracks the user's hand gestures using computer-vision based techniques.

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1The Large

Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator

The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) 

The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometers (17 mi) in circumference, as much as 175 metres (574 ft) length beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.