Washington  - US President George W Bush on Thursday defended the "extraordinary measures" taken by the government to address a growing financial crisis and sought to reassure investors leading a sell-off on Wall Street in the past week.

Speaking after an emergency White House meeting with his economic advisors, Bush promised the government would continue taking necessary actions "to strengthen and stabilize our financial markets and improve investor confidence."

Washington, September 18: University of Rochester biologists claim to have discovered a novel anti-cancer mechanism in small-bodied rodents with long lifespans.

Writing about their findings in the journal Aging Cell, the researchers said that the mechanism they had found appeared to be different from any anti-cancer mechanism employed by humans or other large mammals.

They believe that understanding this mechanism may help prevent cancer in humans because many human cancers originate from stem cells, and similar mechanisms may regulate stem cell division.

Washington, September 18: Among the looming 2010 retirement of NASA’s aging space shuttle fleet and at least a four-year gap before the replacement spaceship take flight, the agency is worried that it’s running out of astronauts.

With NASA’s 50th anniversary approaching on October 1, there is worry that NASA astronauts won’t have rides to the International Space Station (ISS) during the hiatus unless the agency gets a vital waiver to buy seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft after 2011.

Washington, September 18: Researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland have found that male fallow deer’s groans during the breeding season reveal their status and size, and the information is exploited by females to chose mates.

The researchers say that larger males have higher social status, and are preferentially chosen by females for mating.

During a study, they observed that higher-ranking males produced groans with lower minimum fundamental frequencies and to a lesser extent, with lower dispersion of formant frequencies that result from filtering of vocalizations in the vocal tract.

Larger males were also found to produce groans with lower formant frequencies and lower formant dispersion.

Washington  - Texas was still picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ike on Wednesday as states across the Midwest tallied the number of dead and injured from the mammoth storm that cut a swath of devastation across the United States.

Houston Mayor Bill White proclaimed his city's water safe to drink, telling reporters he had tried it and urging other Houstonians to do the same.

The bottled water being brought in by state and federal rescue officials should be reserved for people truly in need, he said.

Washington  - The attack on the US embassy in Yemen on Wednesday serves as a reminder that "we are at war with extremists," President George W Bush said, offering condolences to the families of those killed.

"This attack is a reminder that we are at war with extremists who will murder innocent people to achieve their ideological objectives," Bush said at the White House.