Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh), Oct 21 (ANI): The weather in Sriharikota will hold the key for Wednesday's proposed launch of Chandrayaan-1, India's spacecraft mission to moon.

The space port has reported lightning activity and inclement weather, and any further lightning tonight may lead to a postponement of the launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

According to ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair, rain has led to count down related activities being shifted from the outdoors to the control room.

"If lightening continues tonight, then the launch will be put on hold," Nair said.

For the first time, ISRO has constituted a high level team to monitor weather conditions and its input will be vital for the launch.

ISRO has a window period starting from tomorrow till October 28 for the launch.

The spacecraft would be carrying 11 payloads (scientific instruments) and weigh about 1,380 kg at the time of its launch, according to reports.

The Chandrayaan-1 satellite would orbit the Moon at an altitude of 100 km mapping the topography and the mineralogical content of lunar soil. It would also carry a Moon Impact Probe payload for demonstrating the technology needed for landing on the Moon's surface. India believes the Rs 386-crore lunar mission is a step towards its quest for exploration of outer space and inter-planetary missions. (ANI)

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Washington, Oct 21 (ANI): People designing corridors for wildlife should not opt for simple symmetrical plans, but should rather go for more complex travel plans, according to a new UC Davis study.

The study said that people trying to help nature by designing corridors for wildlife should think more naturally.

Corridors are physical connections between disconnected fragments of plant and animal habitat.

"Human beings tend to think in terms of regular, symmetrical structures, but nature can be much more irregular. We found that symmetrical systems of corridors may actually do less good for natural communities than designs with some randomness or asymmetry built in," said UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Matthew Holland, the study's lead author.

A corridor can be as big as a swath of river and forest miles wide that links two national parks, or as small as a tunnel under an interstate highway.

Without such connections, animals cannot travel to food, water, mates and shelter; plants cannot disperse their pollen and seeds to maintain healthy, genetically diverse populations.

Designing and implementing corridors (sometimes called corridor ecology or connectivity conservation) is a new subfield in environmental science.

The new research is among the first to help land managers and community planners designing corridors to know what will work and what will not. (ANI)

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London, Oct 21 (ANI): If you thought it's only shopping and porn sites that rule the internet, then you certainly need a reality check, for a cat themed humour site, called icanhascheezburger.com has become the latest fad among Britons.

The Seattle-based website, owned by Ben Huh, receives more than 8,000 cat pictures with insane captions everyday.

On the site, cat owners post pictures of their feline pets in various moods and provide with a caption in bold white lettering, misspelt in a language termed "lolspeak" or "pidgin kitty."

The site was founded by a between-jobs Hawaiian computer geek called Eric Nakagawa, which was later bought by Huh, a 35-year-old journalist, for 2 million dollars, reports Times Online.

This March, icanhascheezburger reached No 8 in a UK newspaper's 50 Most Powerful Blogs list and just last week, it was recording about 5.5 million hits every day.

Time magazine has called icanhascheezburger "no longer a subculture, just the culture", but it still retains some very cultish aspects.

However, Huh has claimed that despite the recent founding of a lolspeak dictionary, there are no real rules, but still certain customs have evolved.

The site is managing to be mainstream yet making its users feel as if they are part of an exclusive club.

Also, the childish language, or lolspeak is often mistaken for the textspeak of Generation Y, but its appeal goes far beyond millennials. (ANI)

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Washington, Oct 21 (ANI): Do you often forget to drop off the clothes at the dry cleaner? Well, then you are suffering from what the Yale researchers call the "dry cleaning effect," which they say is the result of clashing of brain systems.

Such duelling in brain system also points to ways by which substance abusers and people with obsessive-compulsive disorder can overcome bad habits.

Led by Christopher J. Pittenger, M.D., researchers have described a sort of competition between areas of the brain involved in learning that results in "dry cleaning effect."

An area of the brain called the striatum helps record cues or landmarks that lead to a familiar destination. It is the area of the commuter's brain that goes on autopilot and allows people to get to work, often with little memory of the trip.

However, when driving to an unfamiliar place, the brain engages a second area called the hippocampus, which is involved in a more flexible system called spatial learning. The commuter must employ this system if he or she wants to run an errand before work.

"When you have driven the same route many times and are doing it on autopilot, it can be really difficult to change. This is why I cannot, for the life of me, remember to drop off my dry cleaning on the way to work. If I'm not paying enough attention right at that moment, if I am thinking about something else, I just sail right on by," said Pittenger.

The researchers developed a way to study how these two modes of learning might be interconnected in mice.

When the researchers disrupted areas of the striatum in mice in one group, it was discovered that the mice's ability to complete landmark navigation tasks was impaired. However, these mice actually improved on tasks that involved spatial learning.

On the other hand, when an area of the hippocampus involved in spatial learning was disrupted, the animals could no longer navigate spatially but learned landmark tasks more quickly.

The researchers hypothesised that the interactions between these two systems may be important for understanding certain mental illnesses in which patients have destructive, habit-like patterns of behavior or thought. Obsessive-compulsive disorder,

Tourette syndrome, and drug addiction involve abnormal function of the striatum and may also involve disruption of the interactions between the two learning systems, which may make habits stronger and less flexible.

"This is part of what we are doing in cognitive-behavioral therapy when we teach patients to recognize their destructive habits, to take a step back, and to learn to do things differently. What we're really asking them to do is to use one of these systems to overcome and, ultimately, to re-train the other," said Pittenger.

In time, Pittenger hopes his studies will lead to more effective treatments for psychiatric disease - and, maybe, help him drop off his dry cleaning.

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

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