Some scientists have worked out a new theory about the Moon's creation which says that the satellite may have been formed because of a nuclear explosion.

Rob de Meijer of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and Wim van Westrenem of VU University Amsterdam believe the explosion theory caused the creation of moon.

In a unique event of its kind in the Universe, people will see Mars - the Red Planet, coming closer to the Earth. Astronomical observers gear up for enjoying the special phenomenon set to happen in few hours in the sky.

The planet will appear brighter and bigger than usual at the occasion and it would be a best time for the telescopic viewing and astrophotography, according to the US space agency-NASA.

The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched 10 rockets in two days to study the partial annular solar eclipse, which was observed by many people on its path, which included many African and Asian countries.

The fleet of small suborbital rockets was launched for the purpose of studying the effects of a sun-moon alignment on Friday. The eclipse was the longest eclipse of the millennium. The Rohini series indigenous sounding rockets were launched by the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station and the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

New Delhi, Jan 15 : The stage is set for astronomy lovers to witness the longest solar eclipse of the millennium on Friday, as the sun eclipse in India began around 11 a. m. and is expected to finish around 3:15 p. m., with the maximum eclipse to be witnessed at 1:39 p. m.

The people of Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Mumbai, Varanasi, Chennai, Kurkshetra and Kerala are witnessing the solar eclipse at present.

The photosphere of the sun would be covered by the moon and form a ring of fire in the sky for more than 10 minutes in some parts of India.

Washington, January 11 : New research indicates that scientists are making remarkable advances that are bringing us closer than ever before to the possibility of resurrecting extinct species.

In the age of DNA, we now know that vanished creatures, like mammoths and mastodons, ground sloths and sabretooth cats, are ultimately nothing more than sequences of the four letters - A, C, T, and G - that make up the genetic blueprint or code of life.

The codes for extinct animals were thought to have died along with them, until recently, when machines like one at the Smithsonian’s DNA lab started working magic.

Washington, January 11 : A new study by scientists has found that in some cases, watering your garden in the midday can lead to burnt plants because of sunlit water droplets.

“The problem of light focusing by water droplets adhered to plants has never been thoroughly investigated, neither theoretically, nor experimentally”, said lead researcher Dr Gabor Horvath, from Hungary’s Eotvos University.

“However, this is far from a trivial question. The prevailing opinion is that forest fires can be sparked by intense sunlight focused by water drops on dried-out vegetation,” he added.

Edinburgh, January 11 : A new set of tombs, belonging to the workers who built the great pyramids, discovered by archaeologists in Egypt is providing evidence that the builders of the massive structures were labourers, not slaves.

The thousands of men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world 4,000 years ago worked in three-month long shifts, ate meat regularly, and were accorded the honour of being buried in mud-brick tombs within the shadow of the sacred pyramids they had been working on.

The newly discovered tombs date to Egypt’s 4th Dynasty (2575BC to 2467BC) when the great pyramids were built, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, told The Scotsman.

London, Jan 10 : Scientists have developed a shockwave device to cure male impotence.

Promising no side effects, the treatment was originally used to break up kidney stones. But now it has shown promise in transforming the love lives of millions of men.

The hand-held gadget uses high frequency sound waves to widen narrowed blood vessels in the penis responsible for causing erection problems, reports The Daily Express.

The research was carried out by Israeli doctors and could be widely available within 18 months.

Doctors at the Technion University and Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa have carried out an initial trial of the sound wave device, with very promising results.

Washington, January 10 : New evidence has emerged recently which indicates that ancient hominids that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world may have been seafarers, not just land dwellers.

According to a report in Science News, stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between.

Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, according to archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island.

Washington, January 10 : In a new research, scientists have come up with a method that could reveal the pieces of human DNA that have been favored by evolution because they confer beneficial traits.

The research, by scientists from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, describes a method for pinpointing the preferred regions within the human genome that offers greater precision and resolution than ever before, and the possibility of deeply understanding both our genetic past and present.

London, January 10 : A team of archaeologists has found a massive one ton statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Taharqa, deep in Sudan.

Taharqa was a pharaoh of the 25th dynasty of Egypt and came to power in 690 BC, controlling an empire stretching from Sudan to the Levant.

According to a report in the Independent, in addition to Taharqa’s statue, those of two of his successors - Senkamanisken and Aspelta – were found alongside.

These two rulers controlled territory in Sudan, but not Egypt.

Dr. Julie Anderson of the British Museum, who is the co-director for the Dangeil excavations, confirmed that no statue of a pharaoh has ever been found further south of Egypt than this one.

Washington, January 10 : A new research by scientists has claimed that some non-avian feathered dinosaurs may have been flightless birds, the equivalent of today’s ostriches and emus.

So called “non-avian theropod” dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period had feathers, nests, laid eggs and roosted like birds, but are not referred to as birds.

The group includes what are now called troodontids and oviraptorids.

According to a report in Discovery News, these “dinosaurs” could very well have been birds.

UC (University of California) Berkeley’s J. Lee Kavanau, the author of the paper, said that there is ample evidence supporting that troodontids and oviraptorids were secondary flightless birds.

Washington, January 10 : Reports indicate that NASA engineers are working on an ultra-compact nuclear power plant for the Moon that should generate enough electricity to run a house, or a lunar exploration base.

According to a report in Discovery News, the reactor is about the size of a big wastebasket.

When the Apollo astronauts were on the moon, they only stayed a few days at a time, and batteries or fuel cells did them just fine.

But now, NASA is talking about astronauts staying for weeks or months, and batteries won’t help their cause at all.

They’re going to need a long-term source of power for their exploration and scientific activities.

London, January 10 : Two glaciologists have determined that Antarctica isn’t melting as much as expected because it undergoes a seasonal pattern of warming.

During the continent’s summer this time last year, there was less melting than at any time in the 30 years that there have been reliable satellite measurements of the region.

According to a report in New Scientist, two glaciologists writing in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union, have said that the apparent contradiction is explained by the seasonal pattern of warming.

The continent’s winters and springs have warmed most, but it is still too cold in these seasons for anything to melt.

A latest discovery has provided scientists with the first convincing proof that Neanderthals wore "body paint" 50,000 years ago.

The report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claims that Neanderthals used the shells containing pigment residues as their make-up containers.

The shells were dug and found at two archaeological sites in the Murcia province of southern Spain.

The study was led by professor Joao Zilhao, the archaeologist from Bristol University in the UK, who explained that the shells were examined by his team and it found that the shells were used as containers to mix and store pigments.

Washington, January 9 : New experiments on a recently discovered class of iron-based superconductors suggest that the ability of their electrons to conduct electricity without resistance is directly connected with the magnetic properties of those electrons.

The tests, which were carried out by a team of US and Chinese physicists, shed light on the fundamental nature of high-temperature superconductivity, according to Rice University physicist Qimiao Si, a co-author on the study.

If better understood, high-temperature superconductors could be used to revolutionize electric generators, MRI scanners, high-speed trains and other devices.

Washington, January 9 : A Japanese craft has sniffed the moon's whiff of an atmosphere, and has confirmed that it comes largely from sunlight brutally hammering the lunar surface.

The atmosphere of the moon, which is so thin, is referred to as an exosphere.

According to a report in Discovery News, using the very first direct measurements of the moon's "exosphere" as the moon passed through the streaming tail of Earth's protective magnetic field, researchers were able to watch the short-lived and ever-changing exosphere in the absence of the hot, magnetized solar wind.

Washington, January 9 : A scientist of Indian origin has been selected as the 2010 laureate of the Swiss Chemical Society's Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize.

The scientist in question is Sivaguru Jayaraman (Siva), Ph. D., assistant professor of chemistry and molecular biology at North Dakota State University, Fargo, US.

The honor includes an invitation to speak at the Swiss Chemical Society Fall Meeting in September 2010, a diploma and a financial award of 5,000 (CHF) or approximately 4850 dollars.

Dr. Siva will receive the Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize in Zurich, Switzerland on Sept. 16, 2010.

Washington, January 9 : Experts have been successfully able to treat a patient suffering from severe depression by stimulating the habenula, a tiny nerve structure in the brain.

A team of neurosurgeons at Heidelberg University Hospital and psychiatrists at the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH), Mannheim, performed the world''s first operation on the habenula of a 64-year-old woman, who had suffered from the common psychiatric illness since age 18.

The woman, who could not be helped by medication or electroconvulsive therapy, was now said to be symptom free for the first time in years following the procedure.

London, Jan 9 - Our ancestors left the water at least 18 million years earlier than previously thought, suggests the discovery of fossil footprints in Poland.

These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals, says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, Sweden, one of the two co-authors of a new study on the subject.

For nearly 80 years, palaeontologists have been scouring the planet for fossil bones and skeletons of the earliest land vertebrates or "tetrapods" - the ultimate progenitors of all later amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, including ourselves.