Washington, Apr 25 : A University of Arizona professor, who led NASA''s Phoenix Mars Mission, has said that within 10 years life will be found outside Earth.

Peter Smith held the audience spellbound in his lecture, "Journey of the Phoenix," on April 16 at the University of Delaware, as he shared images taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down in the Martian arctic on May 25, 2008.

The event was a collaboration of numerous agencies and academic institutions, including the University of Arizona''s Science Operations Center, NASA''s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, along with scientific institutes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Switzerland.

Washington, Apr 25 : American researchers have found how to turn off a certain receptor that promotes the growth of leukemia cells.

The study by researchers from the Children''s Cancer Hospital at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has been presented in a platform session at the 22nd annual meeting of the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology (ASPHO).

The researchers have come up with a new theory that the ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus River basin 4,000 years ago, Indus Valley civilization (IVC) was a literate society using script that is much similar to the present day languages, such as Tamil, Sanskrit and English. In a new research, a team of Indian researchers have articulated that the mystical script symbols used by the IVC people were a hieroglyphic language, instead of mere pictograms or symbols.

Washington, Apr 24: Turning all ear-related theories on their head, scientists have found that the ion channels responsible for hearing aren''t located where scientists previously thought.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have claimed that the age-old model to explain how the inner ear translates vibrations in the air into sounds heard by the brain is wrong.

The discovery by Anthony Ricci, PhD, associate professor of otolaryngology, and colleagues, could have major implications for the prevention and treatment of hearing loss.

Washington, April 24 : In a new study, scientists have determined that fire must be accounted for as an integral part of global climate change.

The study identifies significant contributions of fire to climate change and identifies feedbacks between fire and climate change.

The researchers determined that intentional deforestation fires alone contribute up to one-fifth of the human-caused increase in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), a heat-trapping gas that increases global temperature.

Increasing numbers of wildfires are influencing climate as well, the authors of the study report.

Washington, April 24 : New observations by a suite of five NASA space probes has reportedly solved the mystery of the Northern Lights, attributing the cause of the natural phenomenon to powerful currents generated by giant electrical tornadoes in outer space.

The probe cluster, called Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS), indicate that these "space tornadoes" span a volume as large as Earth and produce electrical currents exceeding 100,000 amperes.