London, August 11 : With the help of an autonomously controlled, robot submarine, scientists are all set to explore the world’s deepest undersea volcanoes, which lie
6 km down in the Caribbean.

According to a report by BBC News, the submarine, known as Autosub6000, will delve into uncharted waters to hunt for volcanic vents.

Once found, the life, gas and sediment around the vents - the world’s hottest - will be sampled and catalogued.

London, August 11: A group of 20 sailors on Arwad Island off the coast of Syria have set sail on a journey that would involve the circumnavigation of Africa, a feat which has not been undertaken for two and a half millennia.

According to a report in BBC News, the sailors have set off on a journey that attempts to replicate what the Greek historian Herodotus mentions as the first circumnavigation of Africa in about 600 BC.

Their vessel, the small, pine-wood Phoenicia, is modelled on the type of ship the Phoenician sailors Herodotus credited with the landmark voyage would have used.

The year-long voyage will take the crew into some of the most dangerous waters in the world.

London, August 11: A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena has moved a step closer to commercially producing previously unobtainable and potentially valuable alkaloids — naturally occurring chemical compounds such as morphine that often have useful pharmaceutical properties.

Chemist Christina Smolke and her colleague Kristy Hawkins claim that they have successfully reconstructed, within a yeast cell, many of the key elements of the elaborate pathways for synthesising alkaloids.

Washington, August 11: Researchers at the U. S. Department of Energy''s Idaho National Laboratory claim to have developed an inexpensive technology that may one day help power everything from hybrid cars to iPods with higher efficiency than traditional solar cells.

They describe their breakthrough as a method to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources, the first step toward a solar energy collector that could be mass-produced on flexible materials.

London, August 11 : A new study has enabled to reconstruct the last months of a cougar’s life by analyzing the chemical isotopes in its claw, a technique that could help conservation biologists and land managers to track the movements of animals.

Cougars, like all animals, carry an invisible history of their movements in non-living tissue such as claws and hair. These contain characteristic ratios of stable isotopes, unique to a particular location and determined by the food and water they consume.

Stable isotope tracking has seen “an explosion of applications” since pioneering work on monarch butterflies in the mid 1990s.

London, Aug 10 : Former ninth planet Pluto should get back its planet-status, say leading astronomers.

This week, many senior space scientists, including NASA experts will be debating the controversial decision by the International Astronomical Union, the body which demoted Pluto to a new kind of celestial underclass now known as "plutoids".