New York: Kids who live in neighborhoods with heavy traffic pollution have lower IQs and score worse on other tests of intelligence and memory than children who breathe cleaner air, a new study shows. The effect of pollution on intelligence was similar to that seen in children whose mothers smoked 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, or in kids who have been exposed to lead, Dr Shakira Franco Suglia of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, the study's lead author, said.

Boston: Life on Mars may have been snuffed out early on because the water there was too salty, a biologist involved in exploring the red planet said. "Mars has been a very dry place for a very long time,' said Andrew Knoll, an expert member of a team operating two US robots that are currently exploring Mars. "The best place to look for life is in the earliest history,' he added.

Titan, the deep-frozen moon of Saturn, is emerging as the most likely place in the solar system for new life to evolve, according to scientists who have been studying its atmosphere and surface chemistry. They found that Titan's atmosphere is drenched in a wide range of complex organic molecules very similar to those that gave rise to life on Earth billions of years ago. Although it is far too cold for life at present, this is likely to change because stars such as the sun expand and grow far hotter as they reach old age.

Micro-finance is the key to helping India's poorest

Indians just don't quit, especially when it comes to smoking. According to the first nationally representative case control study of smoking and death in India, only 2% of adults were found to have quit smoking in the country. However, almost 90% of them did so after they had developed serious diseases. In comparison, China, which a decade back had similar cessation rate among smokers like India, has greatly improved to almost 10%. India's eastern neighbour Bangladesh too is better off with nearly 8% of smokers giving up smoking annually.

An angry chief secretary rang up The Times of India on Saturday. The morning's report of a fatal accident on the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor

The highway from Pune to Ahmednagar is an interesting one. Farmers in traditional white peaked caps zip past you, some in fancy new cars. Signs of prosperity are apparent, although the region battled with severe drought just a couple of years ago. A few kilometres down the highway, beyond the small town of Chikrapur, a left turn reveals the road that leads to our destination

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Washington: Physicists have developed a new atomic clock that surpasses previous records for accuracy of current US time standard, making it the world's most accurate atomic clock. Developed by physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, the new clock is based on thousands of strontium atoms trapped in grids of laser light.