London, November 10 : A Scottish research team is gearing up to study parrots, ravens, and pigeons to discover how human language evolved.

Researchers at St Andrews University have revealed that their plan is to compare "highly intelligent" parrots and ravens with "cognitively normal" pigeons, which they believe may shed light on how human intelligence and language involved.

The team have secured a funding of 3.25 million pounds from the new European Research Council for their five-year study.

Washington, November 10 : A new study has revealed that influenza vaccination can help reduce the risk of blood clots forming in veins by 26 percent

“Our study suggests for the first time that vaccination against influenza may reduce the risk of venous thrombotic embolism (VTE),” said Dr. Joseph Emmerich, lead author of the study and professor of vascular medicine at the University Paris Descartes and head of the INSERM Lab 765, which investigates thrombosis.

“This protective effect was more pronounced before the age of 52 years,” he said while presenting the findings at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions
2008.

Washington, Nov 10 : Former James Bond and wife Keely Shaye have received an award for their work with a youth charity.

The couple were honoured with the Responsible Activism in Media and Entertainment award at the second annual Jane Goodall Institute Global Leadership Awards Celebration in Washington, D. C., on November 7.

Both Brosnan and Shaye have been involved in the institute''s Roots n Shoots global environmental youth programme, ever since it came into being in the early 1990s.

Los Angeles, Nov 10 : Besides the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US President-elect Barack Obama will have to face another war - against stateless networks of Islamic extremists, particularly in the wake of trained terrorists retrning to Britain and other western countries, said an unidentified Italian anti-terrorism official.

London, November 10 : Health experts are urging people not to rely on untested remedies advertised on the Internet, insisting that they sell “false hope”.

Backed by charity Sense About Science, the group of medical experts has revealed that the online promotion of treatments is increasingly exploiting vulnerable people.

According to them, many untested therapies being advertised on the Internet involve high costs, and do not work.

The experts say that such therapies are based on "unreliable" evidence.

Sense About Science says that people desperate for a cure are being targeted by hundreds of online advertisers.

London, November 10 : American scientists have devised a way to place a window in the chest so as to see the movement of cancer cells to other tissues.

Researchers at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York claim that they were able to keep a mouse alive for 21 days with the tiny piece of glass in place, and that they could watch during that period cells from a breast tumour as they spread to other tissues.

A report in the journal Nature Methods suggests that the cutting-edge research offers new opportunities to study the complex relationship between cancer cells and their surrounding tissue.

The poorly understood process whereby bits a tumour break away and travel to other parts of the body is called metastasis.