Washington, April 17 : Scientists at Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have become the first to transform the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into methanol, which is a widely used industrial feedstock and clean-burning biofuel.

The IBN researchers report that by using organocatalysts, they activated CO2 in a mild and non-toxic process to produce methanol, a widely used industrial feedstock and clean-burning biofuel.

Organocatalysts are catalysts that are comprised of non-metallic elements found in organic compounds.

Washington, April 17 : By combining information from three different telescopes, scientists are learning what happens when some of the largest galaxy clusters in the Universe collide with each other in a cosmic free-for-all.

Galaxy clusters are the largest objects bound by gravity in the Universe.

Washington, April 17 : A new research has led to the discovery of unusual microbial life under an inland Antarctic glacier, a place where cold, darkness and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive.

The microbes were found in an unmapped reservoir of briny liquid chemically similar to sea water, but buried under an inland Antarctic glacier.

London, April 17 : Researchers studying ultra-cold atoms have made a clock that takes 300 million years to lose just one second.

The atomic clock, which is twice as accurate as any similar device made previously, may believably turn out to be useful for measuring distances to far away galaxies, or for tracking tiny movements in the Earth''s crust that may give a warning of earthquakes.

Its makers have revealed that the clock consists of gas atoms trapped in a magnetic field and cooled almost to absolute zero, or minus 273 Celsius, the coldest temperature permitted by the laws of physics.

Washington, April 17 : NASA's Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.

The new images show the mission's target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

One image shows millions of stars in Kepler's full field of view, while two others zoom in on portions of the larger region.

With the consistent, almost two months-long efforts of the scientists at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi, a striped 'Zebra fish,' picked up from a rivulet in Assam, has become the first vertebrate in India to have its whole genome sequenced.