Washington, March 6 : The first evidence for an extinct giant camel has been discovered in Canada's High Arctic by a research team led by the Canadian Museum of Nature.

The discovery is based on 30 fossil fragments of a leg bone found on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut and represents the most northerly record for early camels, whose ancestors are known to have originated in North America some 45 million years ago.

Washington, March 6 : Based on a medicinal herb, researchers in India have developed a filter system, which they say can quickly and easily remove "fluoride" from drinking water.

The technology uses parts of the plant Tridax procumbens as a biocarbon filter for the ion.

Drinking water can contain natural fluoride or fluoride might be added as a protective agent for teeth by water companies.

But in some natural drinking water, fluoride levels may be above those considered safe by the World Health Organisation.

Washington, March 4 : Johns Hopkins researchers have found that red blood cells stored longer than three weeks begin to lose the capacity to deliver oxygen-rich cells where they may be most needed.

The investigators said that red cells in blood stored that long gradually lose the flexibility required to squeeze through the body''s smallest capillaries to deliver oxygen to tissue.

Moreover, they said, that capacity is not regained after transfusion into patients during or after surgery.

Washington, March 4 : New scans of a mysterious fossil has suggested that an ancient sea predator had a spiraling whorl of teeth that acted as a lethal slicing tool.

According to scientists, Helicoprion was a bizarre creature that went extinct some 225 million years ago, Fox News reported.

Like modern-day sharks, Helicoprion had cartilaginous bones rather than calcified ones, so the only traces it left in the fossil record were weird, whorl-like spirals of teeth that look quite unlike anything sharks sport today.

Washington, February 28 : Researchers have found that a line of pig liver cells could perform many of the same functions as a human liver.

They believe that these cells called PICM-19 could make artificial liver devices more effective.

Chronic or acute, liver failure can be deadly. Toxins take over, the skin turns yellow and higher brain function slows.

"There is no effective therapy at the moment to deal with the toxins that build up in your body. Their only option now is to transplant a liver," said Neil Talbot, a Research Animal Scientist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Washington, February 28 : Biologists at Tufts University have, for the first time, shown that transplanted eyes located far outside the head in a vertebrate animal model can confer vision without a direct neural connection to the brain.

They used a frog model to shed new light - literally - on one of the major questions in regenerative medicine, bioengineering, and sensory augmentation research.

"One of the big challenges is to understand how the brain and body adapt to large changes in organization," said Douglas J. Blackiston, Ph. D., at Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences and first author of the study.

Washington, February 27 : Spanish researchers have created a high-resolution atlas of the heart with 3D images taken from 138 people.

This atlas is a statistical description of how the heart and its components - such as the ventricles and the atrium - look, Corne Hoogendoorn, researcher at the CISTIB centre of the Pompeu Fabra University explained to SINC.

Scientists from this university have managed to create a representation of the average shape of the heart and its variations with images from 138 fully functioning hearts taken using multislice computed tomography. This technique offers three-dimensional and high resolution X-ray.

Washington, Feb 26 : Coral reefs across the world are at risk if the carbon emissions are not reduced, says a study.

The study published in Nature Climate Change researchers used the latest emissions scenarios and climate models to show how varying levels of carbon emissions are likely to result in more frequent and severe coral bleaching events.

Large-scale 'mass' bleaching events on coral reefs are caused by higher-than-normal sea temperatures. High temperatures make light toxic to the algae that reside within the corals, reports Science Daily.

The algae, called 'zooxanthellae', provide food and give corals their bright colours.

Washington, Feb 25 - Targeting bits of junk DNA, known to regulate the activity of a cancer-related gene PTEN, can help suppress cancers, says a new study.

Small stretches of such DNA in the human genome, called pseudogenes, are considered to play no role even while being nearly identical to those of various genes.

But now a discovery made by the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) scientists shows that by targeting pseudogenes related to PTEN, cancers can be suppressed, the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology reports.

Washington, Feb. 22 : Researchers have developed a new method of vaccine creation for Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) using a technique called large scale random codon re-encoding, which helped them modify nucleic acid composition of the virus without changing encoded viral proteins.

Washington, Feb 22 : For nations battling malaria, they face an economic dilemma - spend money indefinitely to control malaria transmission or commit additional resources to eliminate transmission completely.

Now a review of malaria elimination conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute and other institutions suggests that stopping malaria transmission completely has longlasting benefits for many countries and that once eliminated, the disease is unlikely to reemerge over time.

Washington, February 21 : Paleontologists who thought dinosaurs had fleas and other parasites have revised their original theory after a new study confirmed that the insects were actually aquatic or amphibious flies.

The study, published in the journal Nature, focuses on enigmatic Jurassic insects called strashilids, the Discovery News reported.

Diying Huang of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and colleagues first thought that strashilids were huge fleas.

But closer investigation of the Jurassic insects has revealed that they weren't parasites.

Previously, their pincer-like legs were thought to help the insects cling to hosts.

Washington, Feb 14 : Providing a sense of power to someone instills a black-and-white sense of right and wrong (especially wrong), a new study suggests.

Once armed with this moral clarity, powerful people then perceive wrongdoing with much less ambiguity than people lacking this power, and punish apparent wrong-doers with more severity than people without power would.

Washington, Feb 12 : An international research team coordinated at the IRCM in Montreal has found a possible alternative treatment for lymphoid leukemia.

Led by Dr. Tarik Moroy, the IRCM's President and Scientific Director, the team discovered a molecule that represents the disease's "Achilles' heel" and could be targeted to develop a new approach that would reduce the adverse effects of current treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

The researchers' results have direct implications for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), one of the four most common types of leukemia.

Washington, Feb 12 : People like to believe that their way of life - whether single or coupled - is the best for everyone, especially if they think their relationship status is unlikely to change, according to a new study.

The study suggests that this bias may influence how we treat others, even in situations where relationship status shouldn't matter.

Research shows that feeling "stuck" within a particular social system leads people to justify and rationalize that system.