First quarter of 2015 the warmest ever in US

Washington: The US recorded its warmest first quarter since the 1880s this year even as central India experienced a cooler temperature than the average, according to an American scientific agency.

Further, March this year became warmest month in the last 136 years, latest US official figures reported.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its latest report said the globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for March 2015 was the highest for the month since record keeping began in 1880.

Central India, southeastern Mauritania, central Mexico, and eastern Canada were cooler than average, the report said.

The year-to-date (January-March) globally averaged temperature was also record high.

During March, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.53F (0.85C) above the 20th century average.

This was the highest for March in the 1880-2015 record, surpassing the previous record of 2010 by 0.09F (0.05C), it said.

Also during January-March, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.48F (0.82C) above the 20th century average.

This was the highest for January-March in the 1880-2015 record, surpassing the previous record of 2002 by 0.09F (0.05C), it said.

The average March temperature over land surfaces across the globe tied with 1990 as the second highest for March on record, at 1.59C (2.86F) above the 20th century average. 

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Goodbye forever to 'Candy Crush' invites on Facebook

New York: Already fed up of annoying app and game invites from friends on Facebook? There is some good news for you. You can now block all such irritating requests and reminders.
And that's just a click of a few buttons away now, so let's get started.
Invitations to install apps or join games are the number one most frustrating feature of Facebook. You could be bombarded with invites on a daily basis, and most apps make it quite easy to spam an entire friends list with annoying alerts.
Now you can put a lid on this nightmare.
Open your Settings screen on the Facebook Web client and click on the "Blocking" tab on the left sidebar.
Under the heading "Block App Invites", type the name of the person on your friends list who has been pestering you for long enough now with unwarranted invites. It's done!
You can use this same page to block specific apps from contacting you entirely, and even prevent your friends from sending you event invitations.

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Next-generation tele-operated robots can be hacked

Washington: If you feel that your car`s remote-controlled security system is full-proof, you may be wrong as a team of engineers has shown how easily a malicious attack could hijack remotely-controlled operations in the future.
A team of engineers from the University of Washington demonstrated that next generation tele-operated robots using non-private networks can be easily disrupted or derailed by common forms of cyber attacks.
Incorporating security measures to foil those attacks will be critical to their safe adoption and use.
"We want to make the next generation of telerobots resilient to some of the threats we`ve detected without putting an operator or patient or any other person in the physical world in danger," said lead author Tamara Bonaci, a University of Washington doctoral candidate in electrical engineering.
The team mounted common types of cyberattacks as study participants used a tele-operated surgical robot to move rubber blocks between pegs on a pegboard.
During denial-of-service attacks, in which the attacking machine flooded the system with useless data, the robots became jerky and harder to use.
With a single packet of bad data, for instance, the team was able to maliciously trigger the robot`s emergency stop mechanism, rendering it useless.
"If there`s been a disaster, the network has probably been damaged too. So you might have to fly a drone and put a router on it and send signals up to it," said Howard Chizeck, UW professor of electrical engineering.
Encrypting data packets that flow between the robot and human operator would help prevent certain types of cyberattacks.
The study was presented at the 6th ACM/IEEE I

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Scientists use light to alter genes

New York: With a new gene editing method that uses light, scientists can modify functions of genes more precisely, a new study says.
"This method may allow people to engineer genes in cells or animals with better spatial and temporal control than ever before," said researcher Alexander Deiters from University of Pittsburgh in the US.
The improved control over the time and location at which a gene would be manipulated may help eliminate "off-target effects", Deiters said.
Since 2013, scientists have used a gene-editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9. The method employs a bacterially derived protein (Cas9) and a synthetic guide RNA to induce a double-strand break at a specific location in the genome. This enables excision of a gene, alteration of its function, or introduction of desired mutations.
In practice, the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats of DNA base sequences) method has shown tremendous promise to enable researchers to treat cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia, create laboratory animals that mimic human disease, and create a strain of wheat resistant to powdery mildew.
In the new study, the researchers have found that a lysine residue (lysine is an amino acid) in Cas9 can be replaced with a light-activated analog.
The new approach generates a Cas9 protein that is functionally inactive, so called "caged," until the cage is removed through light exposure, activating the enzyme and thereby activating gene editing.
"Previously, if you wanted to knock out a gene, you had limited control over where and when it would happen. Engineering a light switch into Cas9 provides a more precise editing tool. You can say, 'In this cell, at this time point, is where I want to modify the genome," Deiters noted.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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Traces of flowers found on Palaeolithic tomb

London: Placing flowers on the tomb could be quite an ancient practice as researchers have traced flowers placed on the tomb of the so-called Red Lady, dating to the early phase of the Stone Age.

The burial was discovered in El MirAn cave in Cantabria, Spain, in 2010.

"It has not been possible to say whether the aim of placing these plants was to give the dead woman a ritual offering, or whether they fulfilled a more simple purpose linked, for example, to hygiene or cleansing," said one of the researchers Maria Jose Iriarte from University of the Basque Country.

Iriarte analysed the remains of fossilised pollen dating back more than 16,000 years ago and which appeared on the tomb.

At the sepulchral level in the cave and there only, the researchers found a high concentration of pollen of plants of a single family, the so-called Chenopodiaceae.

The appearance of part of this pollen grouped together with the absence of this taxon in other records of the same archaeological level from other parts of the cave suggest that they did not appear naturally reflecting the plant landscape around the cavity.

Having ruled out other possibilities for various reasons, like the fact that these plants may have been used for food or therapeutic purposes, "the most plausible hypothesis is that complete flowers were placed on the tomb," Uriarte explained.

The grave containing the osseous remains of a woman aged between 35 and 40 is located at the back of the cave in a small space between the wall and a block that has come away from the roof.

What is more, there are various engravings on this block that could belong to the same period as the burial.

The reddish colour of the bones and the sediment in which they lie point to the use of ochre as part of the interment. Hence the name 'Red Lady' given to the remains.

The study appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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EU project to engineer bacteria for novel vaccines

London: A European Union-funded project is combining gene engineering and biotechnology to design novel vaccines based on the bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae.
The Mycosplasma bacteria are the smallest self-replicating organisms.
They lack a cell wall, making them resistant to almost all antibiotics, and infections caused by Mycoplasma in livestock, result in huge losses in Europe and throughout the world.
Although there are vaccines against two species of Mycoplasma that affect pigs and poultry, no vaccines exist for many Mycoplasma species that affect not only livestock but also pets and humans.
The eight-million Euro MycoSynVac project will see researchers engineer a universal vaccine chassis that will be free of virulence and optimised for fast growth in a serum-free medium.
This chassis will be used to create specific vaccines against two highly detrimental pathogens that are causing suffering in livestock animals and large financial losses to the animal industry.
The chassis will also set the basis for other potential applications, such as for cell therapy and infectious lung disease treatment.
"We will engineer a new bacteria to be used as a vaccine. We will remove the genes that make the bacteria pathogenic and the improve the chassis for an optimised growth in a serum-free medium," said Luis Serrano, director of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and co-coordinator of the project.
By expressing specific harmless antigens from one or more pathogens, we will be able to create targeted vector vaccines, he said.
Researchers also foresee that the generated mycoplasma chassis can be further developed for other vaccines and will have other potential applications, such as in cell therapy and infectious lung disease therapy.

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