Megha Suri New Delhi: Using public transport to reach IGI airport may soon be a whole new experience. After the metro's upcoming 20-minute line to IGI from Connaught Place, the urban development ministry along with Delhi Transport Corporation is planning a

PM Manmohan Singh sought to give another push to the India-US nuclear deal by telling Congress chief Sonia Gandhi that efforts to operationalize the pact should not be called off even in the face of Left opposition. The PM expressed his views when Sonia met him on Wednesday morning. Singh also told Sonia the party needed to take a view soon because no purpose was served in holding talks with the Left when no progress was being made.

Times of India, Jaipur, 19 June 08 JAIPUR: A day after the city faced severe problems of waterlogging when the first showers of the monsoon hit the city, JMC, JDA and the district administration held a joint consultation at the JDA headquarters on how to deal with the problem. As the city is not yet ready to provide the basic civic amenities, the mayor on Wednesday announced some emergency measures to tackle a repeat of Tuesday-like situation in the city.

Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That's the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.
Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.

Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, US researchers said. In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.

Mass extinctions that wiped out up to 90% of earth's flora and fauna were driven in large part by shifting ocean levels, according to a study published in Nature. Understanding what made many of the planet's living organism rapidly die out at least five times over the last half billion years remains one of the great challenges in paleontology and biology. Some theories point an accusing figure at the cooling effect of massive dust shrouds thrown into the atmosphere by volcanoes and asteroids crashing into earth, or the warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

Soldiers scrambled to shore up soggy levies with sandbags on Tuesday in southern China as forecasters warned that more heavy rain could trigger flooding on the country's second-longest river. The death toll rose to 171, Xinhua reported. The high waters swamped crop land in the south, forcing farmers to wade into their fields and harvest unripe cucumbers, bitter melons and other vegetables before they spoiled in the water. The natural disaster was driving up food prices that were already soaring before the heavy rains began last month.

India has asked the US to cut farm subsidies by just one dollar and New Delhi will come on board for a deal on the Doha Round of trade talks which has dragged for seven years. "My offer to the US is that they should reduce their subsidy by just one dollar and we have a deal," commerce and industry minister Kamal Nath said on Monday at a conference on globalization, organised by Ficci and University of Oxford." But the US has not been forthcoming," Nath said.

Biopharma major Biocon is planning to set up a dedicated greenfield facility to manufacture tablet formulations. The Bangalore-based company currently outsources this activity. Biocon is in the tablet formulation market in a small way now across the nephrology, diabetology, cardiology and oncology verticals. This segment accounts for about 10% of Biocons revenues, which it hopes to more than double to 25% in the next three to four years with its own manufacturing facility. Biocon manufactures its own injectable formulations across all bio-pharma verticals that it operates in.

Those of us who have some hope of remaining alive for the next 20 years will be very worried about the doomsday predictions for the environment. Looks like the world won't just be a hothouse, but a very bleak house