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State-run Kerala State Industrial Development Corp (KSIDC) will set up a state-of-the-art life science park near here, it was announced Saturday.The Rs.3 billion (Rs.300 crore) project would be developed under public-private partnership model, a KSIDC release said.

The park will come up in 260 acres at Thonnakkal, about 25 km from here.

‘It will be a geographic cluster of industries in the field of biotechnology or nanotechnology, research institutions and sci-tech academia,’ the release said.

KSIDC also envisages a separate company, Trivandrum Life Sciences Park Co, for developing the park.

The park will house an incubation centre, a technology development centre, biotechnology companies, drug discovery companies, pure play firms and also contract research outsourcing units, the statement said.

It added that the park would address the IT related needs of the rapidly emerging life sciences industry and attract huge investments in related areas.

The theory of ‘naked singularity’ of collapsing stars given by Indian astrophysicists has drawn global attention as it might change the basic tenets of ‘Blackhole’.

The issue of collapsing stars holds secrets in human’s search for a unified understanding of all forces of nature.

The Indian scientific work on the final fate of massive collapsing stars, titled as ‘Naked singularities’ has been featured in the cover story of the recent issue of an international magazine ‘Scientific Americans’.

The prediction, if discovered, will open up a vast number of exciting possibilities in fundamental physics and cosmology, said the author of the paper Pankaj Joshi from Mumbai.

The collapse of massive stars is inevitable in the universe which creates ’singularities’ as described by Albert Einstein’s theory.

A drug used in treating vascular problems also improves spatial learning and working memory in middle-aged rats, according to a team of psychologists, geneticists and neuroscientists.The finding supports the scientific quest for a substance that could treat progressive cognitive (brain related) impairment, cushion the cognitive impact of normal ageing, or even enhance learning and memory throughout the life span.

The drug Fasudil, has been used for more than 10 years to treat vascular problems in the brain, often helping with recovery from stroke.

Researchers injected hydroxyfasudil, the active form of Fasudil, into middle-aged (17-18 months old) male rats daily starting four days before behavioural testing and continuing throughout testing. Injection made it easy to give the drug to rats, but people take it in pill form.

Rats were tested on the water radial-arm maze, which assessed how well they remembered which of the radiating arms had a reward, a sign of accurate spatial learning and working memory.

Rats given a high dose of hydroxyfasudil successfully remembered more items of information than those given a low dose. Both dosed groups performed significantly better than control-group rats given saline solution.

On this same test, the high-dose group showed the best learning (fewest total errors) and best working memory (measured two different ways).

For every test of learning, the scores of the low-dose group fell between the scores of the no-dose and high-dose groups, meaning that learning and memory boosts depended on the size of the dose.

Hydroxyfasudil’s parent drug, Fasudil, is known to protect the brain by dilating blood vessels when blood flow is curtailed, said a release of the American Psychological Association (APA).

The finding will appear in the February issue of Behavioural Neuroscience, published by the APA.

Pleurocoelus has served ably as the official dinosaur of Texas. Sure, it was a plant-noshing herbivore in a fiercely barbecue-proud state, but the sauropod dwarfed most other dinos and lumbered with a 20-ton swagger.Then he was exposed as an East Coaster.

The discovery in 2007 led a Fort Worth lawmaker to file a resolution in the Legislature this month that seeks to send pleurocoelus packing and transfer the state dinosaur title to a very similar but more uniquely Texas species, newly dubbed Paluxysaurus jonesi.

That’s paluxysaurus as in the Paluxy River in central Texas, where a graduate student found the dinosaur crowned by state lawmakers in 1997 was really a 112-million-year-old impostor.

“It’s important to get things right,” said Aaron Pan, curator of science for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. “If it’s not the same thing, you can’t really call it that.”

Passage of the measure is a virtual guarantee, while lawmakers struggle with the recession, shortfalls in tax revenue and paying for hurricane damage.

The resolution repairs what is largely a case of mistaken identity. Pleurocoelus and paluxysaurus were both giraffe-necked and enormous four-footed herbivores, with a close resemblance to the more widely known brachiosaurus.

A Detroit-area native uncovered that Texas backed the wrong dinosaur.

Peter Rose was studying at Southern Methodist University when he began scrutinizing fossils — thought to belong to pleurocoelus — that littered a Hood County ranch. The prevalence of the remains helped sell the sauropod as state’s official dinosaur in the first place.

Paleontologists had long accepted the fossils belonged to pleurocoelus, whose bones were first dug up in Maryland. But Rose found the juvenile pleurocoelus specimens in Maryland didn’t match the adult bones found in Texas.

Rose determined he had a whole new dinosaur on his hands. After tinkering with the name, he settled on incorporating Paluxy and stamped the species as jonesi, in a tribute to the Jones Ranch and its rich collection of fossils.

He then published a paper in 2007 explaining how Texas had been duped.

“I was more intimidated by throwing that out to my peers and the dinosaur community,” said Rose, now at the University of Minnesota.

Rose said he’s unaware of any challenges to his paper. And take heart, Texans: paluxysaurus hasn’t been found anywhere else so far.

A new species of the fist-sized babbler bird has been found in a network of underground caves in southwestern China, raising the prospect the country could become a hot spot for other discoveries, a conservation group said Thursday.Ornithologists Zhou Fang and Jiang Aiwu first spotted the dark brown bird with white specks on its chest in 2005 and have since confirmed its identity as an undescribed species. They named it the Nonggang babbler, or Stachyris nonggangensis, for the region in China where it was found.

A formal description was published last year in The Auk, which is the quarterly journal of the Virginia-based American Ornithologists’ Union.

“This is exciting evidence that there could be many more interesting discoveries awaiting ornithologists in China,” said Nigel Collar of Birdlife International, which announced the discovery.

The new species resembles a wren-babbler in that it prefers running to flying, and seems to spend most of its time on the ground foraging for insects, Zhou said. About 100 Nonggang babblers have been identified so far in the Nonggang Natural Reserve in southwestern China.

A similar habitat straddles the border of northern Vietnam and southeast Yunnan, China, and it is possible the species may also be found there, Zhou said.

“The discovery shows that there are still some birds that haven’t been (identified) yet in China, such a vast territory that is rich in biodiversity,” Zhou said in a statement.

Xi Zhinong, the founder of conservation group Wild China, said similar finds are likely to become more common in China as laymen join professionals in the search for new species.

Because China was never explored like India and other countries that were colonized, and has regions that are difficult to access, researchers said they believe there are scores of small birds that remain to be identified.

“In recent years, more and more bird lovers and photographers are participating in the research of wild birds,” Xi said. “The participation of those nonprofessionals has pushed forward the research of wildlife in China.”

Birdlife’s Mike Crosby noted that there are now 27 bird watching clubs across China.

“There is an emerging middle class in China with leisure time,” said Crosby, who has worked extensively in the country.

But Zhou warned the country’s rapid development could threaten many biologically rich areas like the karst formations — a network of limestone sinkholes marked by underground streams and caverns — before further discoveries are made.

“The fragility of the karst ecosystem and its destruction by people pose great threats to the bird’s existence,” he said.

What transforms a harmless, solitary and peace loving insect like the desert locust into a rampaging, voracious swarm that blacks out the sky and strips bare vast swathes of standing crops?With desert locusts, the expression of this swarming characteristic spells serious trouble for the hapless farmers caught in their rampaging path. Locusts swarms, billions strong, are known to destroy crop yields in a jiffy.

The villain of the piece is serotonin, neurotransmitter that acts as a chemical messenger between nerve cells. It is present in every multi-cellular organism on the planet, and serotonin receptors are often targeted by antidepressant drugs in humans to increase its availability.

Michael Anstey from University of Oxford and colleagues monitored the levels of serotonin in desert locusts while they triggered both solitary and gregarious behaviour in the creatures, said an Oxford release.

Their results show that locusts behaving the most gregariously (in swarm-mode) had approximately three times more serotonin in their systems than the calm, solitary locusts. This raises the prospect that individual neurons that drive this swarming behaviour could be identified and targeted.

These findings were published on Friday in Science.

Hormone replacement therapy may lead to brain shrinkage in postmenopausal women, say researchers.The study showed that volumes of brain lesions were not significantly increased among women prescribed hormone therapy, but that the total olumes of brain tissue in regions critical to memory were slightly smaller.

The research team found that women who had taken hormone therapy had slightly smaller brain volumes in two critical areas of the brain: the frontal lobe and the hippocampus.

Both areas are involved in thinking and memory skills, and loss of volume in the hippocampus is a risk factor for dementia.

“Our findings suggest one possible explanation for the increased risk for dementia in older women who had previously taken post-menopausal hormone therapy in the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study,” said Susan Resnick, Ph.D., of the National Institute on Aging, which is part of NIH.

“Our findings suggest that hormone therapy in older post-menopausal women has a negative effect on brain structures important in maintaining normal memory functioning.

“However, this negative effect was most pronounced in women who already may have had some memory problems before using hormone therapy, suggesting that the therapy may have accelerated a neurodegenerative disease process that had already begun,” she added.

Researchers will next set out to determine whether the negative effects of hormone therapy on brain volumes continue over time through follow-up MRI studies of the women studied.

Scientists in China say they have discovered the world’s largest dinosaur fossil site in the eastern province of Shandong, state media reported on Tuesday. Scientists had recovered some 7,600 fossils from a 300 meter (980 ft) long pit near Zhucheng city over the past seven months, Xinhua news agency said.

The finds included remains of a 20-meter hadrosaurus, which could be a record size for the duck-billed dinosaur, Xinhua said.

Scientists had put down tools for the winter, but said further excavations could yield more fossils.

Zhucheng, known locally as China’s “Dinosaur City,” has produced dinosaur fossils in some 30 sites, according to local media.

China, a relative late-comer to archaeology, has ramped up exploration in recent years and makes regular finds of rare fossils, which are sometimes smuggled out of the country to be sold for large sums.

In January, Australia handed back hundreds of kilograms of Chinese dinosaur fossils to Beijing, including eggs dating back hundreds of millions of years, recovered from warehouses and cargo containers in sting operations, Australian media reported.

Fearing that gorging on chocolate cake and juicy beef roast might send your blood cholesterol levels sky high? Well then here’s your ultimate saviour- synthetic high-density lipoprotein (HDL).Scientists at Northwestern University have designed synthetic HDL, the “good” cholesterol, which could help fight chronically high cholesterol levels and the resulting deadly heart disease.

The researchers have shown that their nanoparticle version of the is a promising new weapon to bind cholesterol irreversibly.

The synthetic HDL, based on gold nanoparticles, is similar in size to HDL and mimics HDL’s general surface composition.

“We have designed and built a cholesterol sponge. The synthetic HDL features the basics of what a great cholesterol drug should be,” said Chad A. Mirkin, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, who led the study with Shad Thaxton, M.D., assistant professor of urology in Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine

He added: “Drugs that lower the bad cholesterol, LDL, are available, and you can lower LDL through your diet, but it is difficult to raise the good cholesterol, HDL. I’ve taken niacin to try and raise my HDL, but the side effects are bad so I stopped. We are hopeful that our synthetic HDL will one day help fill this gap in useful therapeutics.”

To create synthetic HDL the researchers started with a gold nanoparticle as the core, which was then layered on a lipid that attaches to the gold surface, followed by another lipid and last a protein, called APOA1.

APOA1 is the main protein component of naturally occurring HDL.

The final high-density lipoprotein nanoparticles are each about 18 nanometers in diameter, a size similar to natural HDL.

“Cholesterol is essential to our cells, but chronic excess can lead to dangerous plaque formation in our arteries. HDL transports cholesterol to the liver, which protects against atherosclerosis. Our hope is that, with further development, our synthetic form of HDL could be used to increase HDL levels and promote better health,” said Thaxton.

Mirkin said: “HDL is a natural nanoparticle, and we’ve successfully mimicked it. Gold is an ideal scaffolding material — it’s size and shape can be tailored, and it can be easily functionalized. Using gold nanoparticles, which are non-toxic, for synthetic HDL bodes well for the development of a new therapeutic.”

The scientists are now planning to further study the synthetic HDL in biologically relevant conditions and measure and evaluate the cholesterol-binding properties.

The study is published online by the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

Space is not as far from the Earth’s surface as people think, for scientist have discovered that the ionosphere, the layer of electrically charged particles that comprises the outer atmosphere, is thinner than expected, and cooler too.

Knowledge of the shape and size of the ionosphere may help in determining how particularly dense regions within it may distort radio, radar and navigation signals, which can make communications and satellite-based systems less reliable.

“In order to predict how severe those distortions will be, it’’s necessary to know how big those structures in the ionosphere are and where they exist,” Discovery News quoted Roderick Heelis, with the Space Sciences Center at the University of Texas in Dallas, as saying.

The researchers used a suite of NASA instruments called CINDI, which fly on the U.S. Air Force Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite between 250 miles and 530 miles around the equator.

CINDI is an acronym for Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation, and works by separately measuring ionized and neutral particles at altitudes where the Air Force satellite flies.

During the summer of 2008, a time when the solar activity was unusually quiescent, the researchers found that the ionosphere was quite thin at those altitudes.

“It was a real fortuitous combination of low solar activity and the satellite’’s [range]. We didn”t expect to be able to look at the top of the ionosphere in all places,” said Hellis.

Based on previous research, computer models had predicted the ionosphere to be about 370 miles above Earth at night and about 620 miles up during the day, which varied due to temperature and other factors.

However, using CINDI, the researchers found that the transition between the ionosphere and space was about 250 miles above Earth at night and about 500 miles up during the day.

The ionosphere is primarily caused by extreme ultraviolet energy from the sun.

The findings were presented at the annual American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco last month.