Washington, Apr. 17 : The Taliban's expanding writ in Pakistan with every passing day may ultimately see the whole country falling into the hands of the insurgents, and being turned into a fiefdom controlled by Islamists warlords, a report in the McClatchy newspaper said.

According to the report, intelligence officials and experts having a long experience in Pakistan viewed the current precarious condition of the country as a making of a disaster.

"It''s a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," an intelligence official said.

Experts believe that the insurgent groups not only pose a danger to the US, but the whole region is facing the threat.

Washington, April 17 : Scientists have studied alligators to analyze what life may have been like for dinosaurs at low oxygen levels of 12 percent during pre-historic times.

The scientists chose the alligator as a test subject for the study because they are believed to be the modern relatives of the dinosaurs.

"We knew testing the effects of different oxygen levels would work with alligators because crocodilians have survived in their basic shape and form for 220 million years. They must be doing something right to have survived the oxygen fluctuations," said scientist Tomasz Owerkowicz.

New York, Apr. 17: In another step in its transformation from an online jumble of amateur videos to a destination for mainstream TV programs and movies, YouTube said Thursday that it had signed deals with Hollywood studios to showcase thousands of TV episodes and hundreds of movies on its Web site.

Google, which owns YouTube, said it might eventually bring another innovation to the site: payment for some premium content.

Washington, Apr 17 : A bacterial protein called SopB plays a very important role in letting the deadly bacterium Salmonella enterica invade cells lining the intestine, and also hijack cellular functions to avoid destruction, according to a new study.

Yale researchers have said that the discovery of this crafty protein may shed new light on the lethal tricks of Salmonella.

"In evolutionary terms, this hijacking of cellular machinery to diversify the function of a bacterial protein is mind boggling,'''' said Jorge Galan, senior author of the paper and the Lucille P. Markey Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Cell Biology and chair of microbial pathogenesis at Yale.

Washington, Apr 17 : The size of males' feather crests in a breed of northern seabird is not just simple ornamentation, but a physical indicator of the bird's quality as a mate, according to a study by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

For a long time, scientists have known that female auklets prefer males with larger crests, but they have been unaware of the reason behind it to date.

The new study has shown that low levels of stress hormones in males with larger crests indicate that they cope better with the stresses of reproduction, like finding food, competing with thousands of other birds for mates and nest sites, and helping rear chicks.

Tokyo - China has expressed a willingness to mediate in talks between North Korea and the United States on Pyongyang's nuclear programme, a Japanese media report said Friday.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told the Nikkei financial newspaper, "Maintaining the process is in the interest of each participant" of the six-party talks, which include Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Russia, China and the United States.

Many analysts see a breakthrough in relations between the United States and North Korea as necessary for the resumption of the six-nation talks.