London, Oct 22 (ANI): Conservation experts have said that the number of tiger attacks on people is growing in India's Sundarban islands as habitat loss and dwindling prey caused by climate change drives them to prowl into villages for food.

The Sundarbans, a 26,000 sq km area of low-lying swamps on India's border with Bangladesh, is dotted with hundreds of small islands criss-crossed by water channels.

According to a report in New Scientist, wildlife experts said that endangered tigers in the world's largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers' natural habitat.

"In the past six months, seven fishermen were killed in an area called Netidhopani," said Pranabes Sanyal of the World Conservation Union.

"Owing to global warming, the fragile Sundarbans lost 28 percent of its habitat in the last 40 years. A part of it is the core tiger reserve area from where their prey migrated," he added.

But as sea levels rise, two islands have already disappeared and others are vulnerable.

Wildlife experts said that the destruction of the mangroves means the tigers' most common prey, such as crocodiles, fish and big crabs, is dwindling.

Mangroves have been overexposed to salt water as sea levels rise. Many plants have lost their red and green colours and are more like bare twigs, exposing tigers to poachers who hunt them for their skin and bones.

Sundarban villagers pass through tiger territory on boats to fish in the sea, or to collect honey in forest areas.

"Villagers are not supposed to enter a number of islands earmarked as tiger territories, but they seldom follow the rules, get attacked and claim compensation," said Pradip Shukla, a senior forest department official.

Once home to 500 tigers in the late 1960s, the Sundarbans may only shelter between 250 and 270 tigers now, wildlife officials said.

The Indian Statistical Institute said that the number is as low as 75. Most tigers have been wiped out due to poaching and habitat loss.

According to authorities, a tiger was killed by poachers in the Sundarbans earlier this month, the latest such killing in India.

The area is the world's largest mangrove reserve and one of the most unique ecosystems in South Asia, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ullas Karanth, of the Wildlife Conservation Society India, said that the Sundarbans are a poor quality tiger habitat because of low prey densities.

"The tendency to seek alternate prey in the form of livestock - and sometimes humans - might be higher in these tigers," Karanth said. (ANI)

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London, Oct 22 (ANI): A scientist has claimed to have found concrete evidence that confirms the detection of methane gas on Mars and also identifies key sources of the gas.

The scientist in question is Michael Mumma, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

While on Earth, methane is mostly biological in origin, on Mars, it could signal microbes living deep underground.

According to a report in Nature News, the latest work suggests that Martian methane is concentrated in both space and time.

At a handful of hotspots hundreds of kilometers across, plumes of methane bloom and dissipate in less than a year.

News of the detection is rippling through the Mars community just months before a destination is picked for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), the 2-billion dollars rover that is due to launch in 2009.

It will carry an instrument that could both detect trace amounts of methane and help discern whether it is of biological or geological origin.

Mumma has been arguing for methane on Mars since 2003, when other startling findings began to emerge.

Mumma, a spectroscopy expert, obtained data from telescopes in Hawaii and Chile that supported the notion of methane hotspots.

Having obtained four more years of data, Mumma has confirmed the presence of methane by matching four lines in his infrared spectra of the planet's atmosphere to the characteristic signature of methane.

This is a more definite determination than previous analyses, and has made Mumma find more evidence that the methane is localized in discrete hotspots, which peak at levels of 60 parts per billion.

"Whether the methane plumes are biological or geological in origin is impossible to know at the moment," said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

or example, microbes could be living in deep groundwater below a perma-frost zone, and their waste methane could percolate up and leak out.

The methane could also come from chemical reactions in which buried volcanic rocks rich in the mineral olivine interact with water.

A third possibility is that the methane is escaping from buried clathrates, deposits of methane ice formed long ago by one of the other two mechanisms.

NASA's next Mars rover will be able to analyze, at levels of parts per trillion, the fractional concentrations of the carbon isotopes in each methane molecule. (ANI)

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Washington, October 22 (ANI): Scientists at Rutgers University in Newark say that gamma wave activity in the brains of infants may be the key to the development of cognitive and language abilities during the first 36 months of life.

"Research into the adult brain has shown that gamma activity is the 'glue' that binds together perceptions, thoughts and memories. Little research, however, has been conducted into the development of gamma activity in the infant brain and its possible connection to cognitive and language skills," says study leader April Benasich, a professor of neuroscience.

She claims that her team is the first to look at "resting" gamma power in the frontal cortex, the "thinking" part of the brain, in children 16, 24 and 36 months old.

A research article in the online edition of the journal Behavioral Brain Research says that the new findings provide a window into their cognitive development, and may open the way for more effective intervention for those likely to experience language problems.

Gamma waves are fast, high-frequency, rhythmic brain responses that have been shown to spike when higher cognitive processes are engaged. Lower levels of gamma power may hinder the brain's ability to efficiently package information into coherent images, thoughts, and memories.

During the study, Benasich and her colleagues analysed the children's EEGs (electroencephalograms), and found that those with higher language and cognitive abilities had correspondingly higher gamma power than those with poorer language and cognitive scores.

The researchers further observed that children with better attention and inhibitory control - the ability to moderate or refrain from behaviour when instructed - also had higher gamma power.

According to them, there were no differences in gamma power based on gender or socio-economic status.

Separate tests were conducted to evaluate the children for their emerging language and cognitive skills. The team studied children from families with normal language development as well as those at higher risk for problems because they were born into families with a history of language disorders.

The researchers observed that the group of children with a family history of language impairments showed lower levels of gamma activity.

"We believe that maturation of the brain mechanisms that support gamma activity and those critical for mounting normal language and cognitive development may be occurring simultaneously. We seem to have identified a window, during a period of sustained and dramatic linguistic and cognitive growth, that can help us to better determine where a child is developmentally," says Benasich.

Based on their observations, the researchers came to the conclusion that the emergence of strong gamma activity is critical for linguistic and cognitive development, and that children at risk for language impairments may lag in this process.

"Having strong bursts of gamma appears to assist the brain in making the neural connections needed for effective language development. By measuring gamma activity in the frontal cortex, which is the last brain area to mature and is used to make decisions and solve problems, we may be able to tell how well the brain is developing in general," says Benasich.

"Lower levels of gamma power in the resting brain may provide a 'red flag' indicating that a child will experience language or attentional problems. Knowing that may allow us to provide effective intervention during this critical learning period," she adds. (ANI)

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New Delhi, Oct 22 (ANI): Hailing the efforts of scientists over the successful launch of of Chandrayaan-1, India's spacecraft mission to moon, Senior BJP leader L K Advani today described it is a "historic moment" for India.

"I feel that the successful launch of Chandrayaan is a historic moment for India. I am happy to know about it. "It is a matter of time...we will send Indian astronauts to moon," said the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha.

The project was sanctioned by the then NDA Government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2003. (ANI)

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