Washington  - US President George W Bush Wednesday renewed his call for the lifting of a federal ban on oil drilling off the US coast and placed the blame for high petrol prices squarely at the feet of the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Bush acknowledged the economic struggles plaguing the US population and said lifting the offshore drilling ban would help lower surging petrol prices.

Washington, July 30: A team of astronomers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) has found direct evidence for the existence of “dark energy” in supervoids and superclusters.

Dark energy works against the tendency of gravity to pull galaxies together and so causes the universe’s expansion to speed up.

The nature of dark energy is one of the biggest puzzles of modern science.

The team from the University of Hawaii IfA made the discovery of dark energy by measuring the subtle imprints that superclusters and supervoids leave in microwaves that pass through them.

“We were able to image dark energy in action, as it stretches huge supervoids and superclusters of galaxies,” said Dr. Istvan Szapudi.

Washington, July 30: University of Florida researchers have found that recharging a naturally occurring oestrogen receptor in the brains of women suffering from certain medical conditions may help boost their mental performance, while avoiding the problems associated with adding this hormone to the body.

Writing about their findings in the journal Molecular Therapy, the researchers highlighted that they had successfully improved thought process in female mice bred with the inability to produce oestrogen receptor-alpha, a protein apparently necessary for healthy learning and memory.

Washington, July 30: A new study has found that epaulette sharks have evolved a clever solution for avoiding suffocation by shutting down their body’s electrical activity and even go temporarily blind until they can properly “breathe” oxygen again through their gills.

According to a report in Discovery News, this find puts the shark on the short list of vertebrates that can tolerate situations where there is zero to very little available oxygen.

For the shark, breathing can become a challenge when the sun goes down.

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Washington  - Japan is headed for a mild slowdown this year and continues to face threats to its economic outlook from high petrol and other commodity prices, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

But the world's second-largest economy has shown little effect from a housing and financial market crisis that has sharply slowed growth in the United States.

"Clearly the economy is headed for a slowdown this year," said Daniel Citrin, who headed the IMF's recent annual talks with Japan on its economic situation.