Washington, April 24 : In a new research of ice cores by scientists, it has been revealed that a vast, potential source of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, is more stable in a warming world than previously thought.

The finding includes Australian contributions from CSIRO and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

Wetlands in the tropics and emerging from under receding Northern Hemisphere glaciers have been considered the primary source of rising atmospheric methane in a warming world.

Washington  - The fifth and last mission to repair the ageing Hubble Space Telescope could launch a day earlier than planned, officials at the US space agency said Thursday.

The space shuttle Atlantis was to take off from its Florida launch site on May 12 and could likely take off at 2:01 pm (1801 GMT) on May 11, officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said.

"I'm fairly confident that we can make a May 11 launch date," said LeRoy Cain, deputy manager of the Space Shuttle Programme.

Berlin - An elaborate study of genes from Ice Age and modern horses has shown that the horse was domesticated at least 5,000 years ago in a region known as the Ponto-Caspian steppe, scientists said Thursday.

That region spreads from modern-day Romania through Russia to Kazakhstan.

Washington, April 23: Astronomers have found the most distant signs of water in the Universe to date, in the form of water vapor contained in a jet ejected from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.

Dr. John McKean of the Netherlands Institute has made the discovery for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON).

The water emission is seen as a maser, where molecules in the gas amplify and emit beams of microwave radiation in much the same way as a laser emits beams of light.

Washington, April 23: Astronomers have found three brown dwarfs with estimated masses of less than 10 times that of Jupiter, making them among the youngest and lowest mass sub-stellar objects detected in the solar neighborhood to date.

The observations were made by a team of astronomers working at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de l’Observatoire de Grenoble
(LAOG), France, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).

London, Apr 23 : Swedish researchers claim to have solved the mystery of how some animals can sniff out sickness.

Ivan Rodriguez at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and colleagues have found a type of smell receptor in mice that appears to respond to disease-related molecules produced by bacteria, viruses, or as the result of inflammation, reports New Scientist.