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This week, observers in parts of Southeast Asia will be able to witness a celestial spectacle, a total eclipse of the sun. The occurrence of the total solar eclipse can be witnessed in many parts of Southeast Asia on Wednesday. Beginning over the Indian Ocean and thereafter darkening the parts of Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and other islands prior to disappearing in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii, people will be able to witness solar eclipse.

The natives in many parts of the world, including China, Japan, northern Australia, Hawaii and Alaska, will get to see a partial eclipse.

NASA has blamed severe drought, which can be termed as the worst in last 900 years, for causing the extremely complicated disorders in the Middle East and disruptions of Syria and Iraq. According to a research conducted by NASA, the eastern Mediterranean Levant region, consisting Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey, has been under severe drought conditions since 1998.

Researchers have found a dozen ancient lizard fossils locked in amber, which they believe could offer a quick look at a lost world. The unsuspecting lizards from the Cretaceous period fell into amber some 99 million years ago in modern-day Myanmar. The fossils are well preserved and can offer interesting information about evolution of lizards.

The prehistoric chunks are one of the oldest specimens to have been ever found, the researchers reported Friday in the journal Science Advances.

Now, the researchers are conducting experiments on these tiny ancient lizards to better understand the evolution of the reptile.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope broke previous cosmic distance record when it zoomed into the most distant galaxy in the deepest reaches of the space. The remote galaxy is GN-z11, which existed mere 400 million years after the Big Bang. Hubble Space Telescope has been offering amazing capabilities to astronomers for the past 25 years. James Webb Telescope will offer even better resolution compared to Hubble.

The most distant galaxy located in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) north field is about 25 times smaller than the earth’s Milky Way galaxy. The discovery is a result of a wide-range survey, which contains about tens of thousands of galaxies, by the Hubble telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

A new study in Sumatra has put the orangutan population at two times higher than the count shown earlier and the research team noted that the species is still under serious threat. Even as dark clouds of deforestation and hunting continue to daunt orangutans and damage the Indonesian island’s biodiversity, researchers have urged the authorities to take action in time.

Researchers, who arrived at the double-population conclusion after conducting a survey of the orangutans’ nests, say the last estimates could have gone wrong mainly because many orangutans may have been nesting at heights previously considered to be out of their range.

British scientists have come up with a technique to obtain naive pluripotent stem cells from human embryos. According to them, the technique may result into advances in regenerative medicine and boost research on disorders, including Down syndrome.

The technique has been explained in a study appeared in the journal Stem Cell Reports. The technique holds significance because current methods of deriving stem cells are tough, and the cells even then generally contain instructions to change into a particular cell type.

Naive pluripotent stem cells are the representatives of the earliest incarnation of the cells before they were distinguished into different types of cells present in different body parts and organs.