Washington, July 29 : A Michigan-based company carrying on its business operations as Fisher Coachworks has officially launched a lightweight urban transit bus, which has double the fuel efficiency of conventional hybrid buses.

The 40-foot green technology bus also has insights from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and funding from the Department of Energy for its commercialisation.

The bus features a high-strength stainless steel body and chassis and a hybrid power system that drives it primarily with stored electrical energy.

This approach reverses the paradigm of conventional parallel hybrid designs that use electric energy only to supplement the acceleration and torque requirements of a diesel engine.

Moscow - Sergei Kislyak, Russia's deputy foreign minister, was named the country's new ambassador to Washington, news agencies reported Tuesday.

Kislyak, 57, has headed difficult negotiations with the United States in recent months over Washington's plan to install parts of a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe.

The countries' conflicting security vision is one of a number of issues that makes for tense relations that show no signs of easing as Kislyak takes the post, despite a change of administrations in both capitals.

The two front-runners in the US presidential race have been strongly critical of former president Vladimir Putin, whose legacy his successor Dmitry Medvedev has pledged to follow.

Washington, July 29: A new study has rebuffed the theory that seafaring Polynesians and their chickens beat Columbus to the Americas by a century.

In 2007, a chicken bone found in Chile dating to A. D. 1320 to 1410—well before the explorer’s arrival—and evidence of a genetic mutation linking that bone to chickens in Polynesia supported the theory.

But now, according to a report in National Geographic News, the fossil has become a bone of contention in a new study, which contradicts the genetic evidence linking Chilean and Polynesian chickens.

Washington, July 29: Researchers from Penn State University have used computed tomography (CT) technology to virtually glue newly-discovered skull fragments of a rare extinct lemur back into its partial skull, which reveals that it was as large as a big baboon.

Alan Walker, Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Penn State, and Research Associate in Anthropology Timothy Ryan, led the research.

The different fragments of this lemur''s skull are separated by thousands of miles, with the partial skull in Vienna and the pieces of frontal bone in the US.

The original specimens of Hadropithecus stenognathus were found in Andrahomana Cave in Madagascar by a professional fossil-collector, Franz Sikora, in 1899.

Washington, July 29: Barely a few hours after US-led coalition forces’ air strike killed six persons in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), US President George Bush last evening said that his country respected Pakistan’s sovereignty, and described its democracy as “vibrant”.

In a brief statement to the presspersons after holding talks with visiting Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in the Oval Office, Bush said that both admitted that terrorism and extremism were dangerous for everyone, including Pakistan.

Washington, July 29: A new study led by Shahriar Mobashery, Navari Family Professor in Life Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, explains how new antibiotics aimed at battling the superbug Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) function.

Mobashery is a known expert in antibiotic resistance and enzyme inhibitors and he and his research team have long probed the nuances of MRSA as a superbacterium.

The researchers investigated two new anti-MRSA â-Lactam antibiotics from the pharmaceutical company Cerexa Inc., which are currently undergoing clinical trails. Both are broad-spectrum antibiotics, but their activities against MRSA and multi-drug-resistant MRSA have been especially noteworthy.