Washington, March 20 : Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are studying the teeth of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola after his second voyage to America in 1493-94, hoping to gain fresh and perhaps personal insight into the earliest European visitors to the New World.

The researchers are extracting the chemical details of life history from the tooth enamel of three individuals from a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago from shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, the first European town in America.

"This is telling us about where people came from and what they ate as children," says research leader T. Douglas Price, a UW-Madison professor of Anthropology.

Washington, March 20 : A new simulation has shown that if 193 nations had not agreed to ban ozone-depleting substances, then nearly two-thirds of Earth''s ozone would have been gone by the year 2065.

The simulation was developed by atmospheric chemists at NASA''s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Bilthoven.

Washington, Mar 20 : When drawing a cartoon face from memory, the brain remembers key locations and "joins the dots" with a straight or curved line to achieve the desired image on the page, according to a new study.

The study led by Miall, Gowen and Tchalenko has revealed that the captured visual information is stored as a series of locations or action plans to reach those locations.

During the study, participants who had no particular expertise as artists were studied using an MRI scanner to measure levels of oxygen in the brain.

They viewed black and white cartoons of faces, and were asked to reproduce them using pencil and paper.

Washington, Mar 20 : In a study on mice, a team of scientists have found how the biological circadian clock mechanism in animals corresponds with processes that control aging and metabolism.

The findings by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Northwestern University can explain why the weakening of the circadian rhythm with age could contribute to age-related disorders, such as insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

Washington, March 20 : A new study by scientists has determined that it would be much more difficult to detect Earth-sized worlds that are habitable than previously believed.

The study, by Lisa Kaltenegger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Wesley Traub (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), examined the ability of JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) to characterize the atmospheres of hypothetical Earth-like planets during a transit, when part of the light of the star gets filtered through the planet''s atmosphere.

Washington, Mar 20 : A study on native African people has revealed that the language of music is certainly universal, and that people can pick out happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music without any prior exposure to it.

The researchers said that their findings indicated that the expression of those three basic emotions in music could be universally recognized