London, Dec 3 : Remember your first date? Well, a new study in mice has suggested that patterns of chemical "caps" on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such long-term memories.

A specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time to remember a particular event. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses, reports New Scientist.

However, how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, remains a mystery.

London, Dec 3 : Is the girl of your dreams playing hard to get? Well, don''t panic, for there''s a possibility that she''s testing how helpful you will be in bringing up a child, at least that''s what a new study says.

The study by a team of biologists and mathematicians at the University of Bristol, found that women in general play hard to get in order to determine how helpful a potential mate will be in raising a child.

The researchers worked out the theory from extensive studies of mating birds.

In their opinion, the researchers think that the female of any species makes use of this technique so that men can prove themselves more worthy than their rivals.

London, December 3: British child abuse experts say that the maltreatment of children in the country has reached such a mark that one in 10 kids suffers physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

They even say that most maltreated children are not referred to the concerned authorities for help.

A series of papers published today by the Lancet medical journal in collaboration with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health suggests that teachers, GPs and paediatricians lack confidence in the ability of social services because they fear that the child''s plight may worsen if he/she is taken into care and placed in a foster family.

London, Dec 3 : Uganda’s police warned men of a ‘booby trap’ after a probe found that a gang of robbers had been using women with chloroform smeared on their chests to knock their victims unconscious.

Police officers have discovered victims of the attacks naked with all their possessions stolen by the gang, who use the women to lure their prey and rob them when they fall unconscious after intimate activity.

Fred Enanga, a spokesman for the country''s Criminal Investigations Directorate, has warned all men, and particularly travelling businessmen who tend to carry more cash than locals.

"It''s a serious situation and people have to be aware," the Telegraph quoted him, as saying.

London, December 3 : Researchers at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, have come up with a way whereby website owners can predict which news stories, blogs or video clips will prove popular in the long term, something that can allow them to allocate extra bandwidth if they need to.

Bernardo Huberman and Gabor Szabo highlight the fact that the number of hits an online item receives when first published is often relied upon to predict its future popularity, but such forecasts tend to be inaccurate as daily and weekly fluctuations in overall website traffic can skew the results.

London, Dec 3 : Astronomers have discovered a new comet which raises the possibility that it did not originate in our solar system, but instead escaped from another star.

According to a report in New Scientist, David Schleicher of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, US, found the comet.

Schleicher measured the chemical makeup of 150 comets, and found that they all had similar levels of the chemical cyanogen (CN) except for Machholz 1, which has less than 1.5 percent of the normal level.

Along with some other comets, it is also low on the molecules carbon2 and carbon3.