Coral reef recovery in Lakshadeep ~~~>> see the progress....

The year 1998 saw a large scale destruction of coral reefs all over the world. This was due to increased sea surface temperature.
Coral reefs are extremely sensitive to water temperature. Any change beyond 1 degree C for extended periods of time affects the corals.
Coral bleaching

Ten years ago saw a layer of warm water spreading from the south into the tropical water. The warm water conditions persisted for as long as one month in certain places.
The mean maximum summer sea surface temperature increased by 2 degree C. “About 40-50 per cent of corals were lost in most of the reefs,” said Dr. M. Wafar, Senior Scientist at the National Oceanography Institute (NIO), Goa. “80-90 per cent of corals in Lakshadeep were destroyed.” Dr. Wafar has been involved in coral research for nearly 25 years.
Scientists from NIO have recovered coral reef in Kavaratti island, Lakshadeep through coral transplantation.
“The recovery has been quite good. In some places the live coral cover has increased by nearly 50 per cent,” said Dr. Wafar. “The government now wants us to undertake similar initiative in all the islands at Lakshadeep.”
Scientists will soon start growing corals for transplantation work at Agatti and Kadmat islands.
Coral transplantation

Pieces of corals broken naturally or otherwise are tied to slabs and put in shallow water and allowed to grow. The coral are put in reefs once they have grown well.
“We started the pilot exercise in Nov-Dec 2005. We used 100 coral tips, most of them belonging to fast growing coral genera.
“In 2 years’ time the growth was up to 25 cm in the best of the cases,” Dr. Wafar said.
In all 4 fast growing coral species and 4-5 slow growing species were grown and transplanted in the coral reefs in Kavaratti in 2008.
“We grew fast and slow growing coral species to offset a bias in the natural species composition,” he said. “We will do the same now as well.” Since reefs support many fishes, increased coral coverage has a direct positive impact on fish population.

Google to close engineering offices

Recession seems to have started hurting search giant Google. In a statement on its official blog, Google Senior Vice President, Engin

eering and Research, Alan Eustace said the company was eliminating some engineering jobs at various locations across the world.

Eustace said that Google had been hiring "outstanding engineers in a wide mix of countries. Having offices distributed around the globe is critical to Google's long-term success, and today we have thousands of engineers working in 40 offices in more than 20 countries."

"It has enabled us to make significant improvements in our products and attract more users globally. It has also presented unique challenges. The most difficult of these being to coordinate our efforts across all geographies, and provide engineers with significant, meaningful projects that make a real difference to people's lives."

Eustace further said that the company in last September asked engineers in Phoenix, Arizona to move to other offices and now it is "doing the same thing in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden.

"Our strong desire is to keep as many of these 70 engineering employees at Google as possible. However, we do recognise the upheaval and heartache that these changes may have on Google families, and that we may not be able to keep 100 per cent of these exceptional employees."

"Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core," the official added.

Also, sensing that it does not need many people for its "reduced rate of hiring," Internet search giant Google is laying off about 100 employees from its recruitment team and has also terminated its contracts with the external hiring agencies, a company official said.

In a statement posted on the company's official blog, Google Vice-President, People Operations, Laszlo Bock said that "Google is still hiring but at a reduced rate.

"Given the state of the economy, we recognised that we needed fewer people focused on hiring," Bock said, following which it decided to "wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google."

14 % drop in coral growth seen in the Great Barrier Reef

Increased sea surface temperature and acidity of sea water are the most likely causes

The effects of global warming have shown up in a definite way in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.

A paper in the latest issue of the Science journal notes unprecedented effects of increased CO{-2} on the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists found the rate at which corals were able to build skeletons dropped by 14 per cent during the p eriod of study — 1990 to 2005.

Coral reefs are considered as the rain forests of the ocean as they support great biodiversity. Any drop in growth of the reefs of the Great Barrier Reef is hence worrying.
Unprecedented

What makes the study significant is that scientists studied 328 colonies from 69 reefs, and the duration of study was 15 years. “…This study shows that the effects are probably large-scale in extent and that the observed changes are unprecedented within the past 400 years.”

The growth of coral reefs depends on their ability to build skeletons. Skeletons are built by calcification of calcium carbonate (CaCO{-3}). There are a few things that may affect the calcification process.

Though the scientists note that the precise “causes of decline” in calcification are not known, their study suggests that increased temperature stress and increased acidity of sea water are the most likely causes.

Coral reefs are extremely sensitive to sea surface temperature. Any changes beyond 1 degree C for extended periods of time affect the corals. Increase in sea surface temperature affects and destroys the symbiotic zooxanthellae algae that live on the corals. Any damage to the algae leads to a loss of the symbionts and a rapid whitening of the coral host (thus the term "bleaching").

Mass coral bleaching was not documented in the scientific literature before 1979. 1998 saw a large scale destruction of coral reefs all over the world.
Effect of salinity

Since the oceans act as sinks for carbon dioxide, increased uptake of CO{-2} by ocean water will make them acidic. Supersaturation of tropical sea water with calcium carbonate is crucial for reef calcification process. Hence acidic water will compromise supersaturation.

The pH of the ocean has decreased by 0.1 unit (become acidic) since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And this has affected the calcification process.The researchers studied the Porites corals using X-rays and a technique called gamma densitometry to measure annual growth and skeletal density.

Studying the skeletal density allowed them to calculate the amount of calcification annually. They found that the calcification rate rose 5.4 per cent between 1900 and 1970. It dropped by 14.2 per cent between 1990 and 2005. The drop was mainly due to a growth slowdown from 1.43 cm a year to 1.24 cm.
Long term effects

How the sea surface temperature and lower pH would affect the reefs and marine organisms in the long run cannot be accurately predicted since living organisms and ocean are dynamic.

“We may not see drastic changes in a short period. And how the increased temperature, acidity and reduced skeletal strength due to calcite erosion would affect marine life are not known,” said Dr. M. Wafar, Senior Scientist at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa. “So this only calls for a more cautious approach.”

IBM to create 1,300 jobs

IBM, the world's largest technology services company, plans to open a new computer support center in Iowa, creating up to 1,300 new jobs

and defying a trend of widespread corporate layoffs.

The Dubuque facility in a 10-story office building once occupied by now-defunct retailer Roshek's Department Store, will create jobs for high-tech workers at a time when many technology companies are cutting staff.

Workers will provide security services and remote support to IBM customers, helping to maintain computers and software systems primarily located in the United States, IBM said.

International Business Machines Corp said it plans to employ several hundred people in the facility by the end of this year, following renovations to the top eight floors of the building that it will occupy to make it more energy efficient.

By the end of next year, as many as 1,300 IBM employees will work in the building built in the 1930s, IBM said.

On Tuesday, IBM announced plans to work with Michigan State University to build a software development center in East Lansing, Michigan, that will create up to 1,500 jobs over the next five years.

Google offers cloud software to biz

Google is recruiting a sales force to offer the Internet firm's software to business customers worldwide who traditionally use Microsoft programmes.

Google will train people to pitch its Google Apps Premier Edition, an array of business software hosted online in what is referred to as "cloud services."
Cloud services such as spread sheets, word processing, and calendars are maintained and supported on Google computers and users access them when they wish by using the Internet.
Cloud services eliminate the need for packaged software to be installed and maintained on computers in homes or offices.Google has been steadily increasing its host of cloud services, with a basic array offered for free and a Premier Edition available at a cost of 50 dollars annually.

"Google Apps has reached a level of maturity where it is useful and valuable for almost any business" said Google president of enterprise Dave Girouard.
"This programme gives IT solution providers an easy way to introduce cloud computing to their service offerings, while helping more businesses make the transition to this new era of technology."
Google said it will teach "resellers" how to integrate Apps into customers' business operations and give them a 20 per cent break on the price that they can pass on to customers if they chose to do so.
The programme has been tested with more than 50 pilot partners. "We believe strongly that all companies will adopt SaaS (Software as a Service) to one degree or another, and Google's reseller programme empowers us to be experts in the cloud," said Tony Safoian, president of SADA Systems, an IT consulting firm.

"Reselling Google Apps opens up new opportunities via new conversations we could not have had with prospective clients as little as two years a

go."

Safoian said Google Apps can be an easy sell, given that letting the California technology firm handle software updates, maintenance and disaster recovery can cost businesses 75 per cent less than doing it themselves.

Google Apps is seen as a direct challenge to a Microsoft empire founded on selling packaged software for installation on people's machines.

Until now, Google had relied on its own team to sell businesses subscriptions to its cloud services. Schools and charity groups are able to use the software services free.

Microsoft has responded with its own move "into the cloud" and says that the Windows 7 operating system it is preparing for release has been crafted with that in mind.

CBS scientists clone important gene ~~~>> read this...

Young scientists at the Centre for Excellence in Basic Science (CBS) here have cloned a gene which is involved in processing

environmental signals and interpret them to guard the cells from any unwarranted situations.

The novel gene, namely flagellar-associated gene from green alga 'Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii', was cloned for the first time in an University environment in a record time, with minimal lab space and less ideal infrastructure, the chief investigator of the project Dr Jacinta D'Souza said.

Flagella of this alga is used for locomotion and the flagellar proteins are important for its security.

"The flagellar gene is now popularly recognised as the watchtower of a cell and loss of any ciliary protein function leads to serious diseases including cancer," she said.

The CBS scientists have name the cloned gene as CBS-1, she said. Algae are now popularly used for generating biofuels and understanding how biomotors work.

The flagella of this alga (or cilia in the case of humans) are structures involved in processing environmental signals and interpret these signals either to move the cell towards or away from the same.

The long-term aim in the CBS lab is to recognise these very proteins, clone the genes involved in the movement of biomotors so as to eventually design a functional nanomachine, D'Souza who is working with two of her Ph.D students Dolly Khona and Venkatramanan Rao, said.

CBS, is an autonomous institution funded by the Department of Atomic Energy and Univeristy of Mumbai.

Baby delivered 2 days after mom dies ~~~>> read this to believe...

British doctors have delivered a baby girl two days after the mother collapsed and died from a brain haemorrhage, a hospital in Oxford confirmed on Tuesday.

Jayne Soliman's heart was kept beating until baby

Aya Jayne was born by Caesarian section 25 weeks prematurely Friday at Oxford's John Radcliffe hospital.

Soliman, who was 41, was a professional ice skater who in 1989 was British champion and number seven in the world in professional free skating.

Doctors said she had suffered a brain haemorrhage caused by an aggressive tumour which had struck a major blood vessel.

She was given large doses of steroids to help the child's lungs develop and within 48 hours gave birth to the baby.

Although exceedingly rare, this is not the first time a baby has been kept alive in the womb of a dead mother.

In 1999, a boy was born at Cabuenes hospital in Gijon, northern Spain, on New Year's Eve to a mother who had been clinically dead since mid-November.