Washington, Dec 9 : New analyses have suggested that climate change was responsible for the extinction of the cave bears, 27,800 years ago.

Weighing up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds), cave bears lumbered in and out of caves throughout Europe for tens of thousand years.

Then, for unknown reasons, they disappeared.

Scientists have long thought that the cave bears went extinct about 15,000 years ago. New analyses, however, suggest that these legendary animals actually vanished
13,000 years before that, and climate change was probably responsible.

London, Dec 9 : A new study has suggested that earthquakes can set off volcanoes by shaking up molten rock like champagne in a bottle until they explode.

According to a report in The Times, researchers at the University of Oxford identified the champagne effect after analyzing records of volcanoes and earthquakes in southern Chile, the region where Charles Darwin first speculated on the likely link in 1835.

The link between volcanoes and earthquakes has long been suspected but the new research has provided the first statistical evidence.

The effects of an earthquake can be felt hundreds of miles from the epicentre and are powerful enough to wake dormant volcanoes.

Canberra, Dec 9 : Scientists have urged Australian consumers to eat more camel meat because the country’s one million-plus population of the animals is out of control, and is also wreaking environmental havoc.

According to a report in the website news. com. au, Murray McGregor, an agribusiness lecturer, said that a good way to bring down the number of camels was to eat them.

“Eat a camel today, I’ve done it,” Professor McGregor said. “It’s a bit like beef. It’s as lean as lean, it’s an excellent health food,” he added.

Washington, December 9 : A new study suggests that non-profit organizations should rely on the same strategies to attract netizens to their websites as online marketers, so that they may raise awareness of their “brand” and its aims and convert Internet users into donors.

Dave McMahon and Charla Griffy-Brown of the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, say that non-profit organisations can exploit Search Engine Marketing (SEM)—which involves focusing on how well a website can attract high ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of the main web search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

Washington, Dec 9 : The discovery of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet 63 light-years away has fuelled hopes for the detection of habitable exoplanets in the future.

According to a report in National Geographic News, Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that CO2 is a biomarker, a molecule associated with life as we know it.

This first discovery of the molecule on a far-flung planet, he said, is a step toward eventually finding biomarkers on smaller, more Earthlike worlds.

London, Dec 9 : A new research has suggested that meteorite impacts during Earth’s early history could have created amino acids, which kick-started life on the planet.

Exactly how and when organic molecules appeared in abundance on the young Earth, leading to the origin of life about 4 billion years ago, has been unclear.

But, according to a report in New Scientist, a new research by Yoshihiro Furukawa at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and colleagues, suggests that meteor impacts could have created amino acids, the building blocks of life.