Bangkok - A team of 30 Chinese and Thai scientists have launched a two-year joint research programme to study the impact of climate change on the monsoon variability - the annual rains that are key to regional rice production, media reports said Wednesday.

The joint research programme will investigate variability of the monsoon in the Indian Ocean and China and its likely impact on rice- growing in China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, The Nation newspaper reported.

Washington, March 24: A cast of a ‘Hobbit’ skeleton will be publicly displayed for the first time ever at Stony Brook University’s 7th Human Evolution Symposium on April 21, thanks to the National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, Indonesia.

As the debate rages on about whether Homo floresiensis – the so called “Hobbit” – fossils discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, represent a separate human species, the symposium will bring together the researchers currently in the process of describing and analyzing the remains.

Washington, Mar 24: Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have shown that adult human testes cells can be turned into embryonic stem-like cells.

The researchers used a simple method to extract stem/progenitor cells from adult testes and successfully converted them back into pluripotent embryonic-like stem cells.

In their opinion, the naive cells are now potentially capable of morphing into any cell type that a body needs, from brain neurons to pancreatic tissue.

Washington, March 24: Researchers have reported that gas hydrates, known as “ice that burns”, which is derived from chunks of ice that workers collect from beneath the ocean floor, show increasing promise as an abundant, untapped source of clean, sustainable energy for the future.

These so-called “gas hydrates,” a frozen form of natural gas that bursts into flames at the touch of a match, may one day may fuel cars, heat homes, and power factories.

Lahore, Mar 24: The use of stem cells for research was allowed in Islam, but not for human cloning, said Dr. Israr Ahmed, an internationally recognised Pakistani religious scholar and founder of Tanzeem-e-Islami Quran Academy.

He was speaking on the issue at a seminar organised by the Punjab University Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology (CEMB) on “Ethical Issues Related to Work on Stem Cells”.

Washington, March 24: An international team of researchers has found the earliest physical evidence for domesticated maize in Mexico, dating back to at least 8,700 calendar years ago, which is 1,500 years earlier than previously documented.

According to the researchers, the maize was probably domesticated by indigenous peoples in the lowland areas of southwestern Mexico, not the highland areas.