Kuala Lumpur, Oct 28 : Indian Government has reportedly given its green signal to AirAsia to fly daily to and fro between Kuala Lumpur and Tiruchi from Dec 1.

The airline would start selling tickets to Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu at midnight tomorrow, said AirAsia chief executive officer Datuk Seri Tony Fernandes.

“It will be a daily flight and we are looking at even adding a second flight now as the initial response has been tremendous,” staronline.com quoted him as telling reporters at a press conference here yesterday.

Special promotional prices for the flight will cost RM49 one way while the normal ticket price will cost about RM200 one way, he added.

Washington, October 28 : The perception that politicians never keep their promises may require reconsideration, for a study has revealed that political candidates’ words in their campaign ads generally match their deeds.

Tracy Sulkin, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, compared the campaign ads and legislative records of recent congressional officeholders, and observed that the candidates’ words generally matched their deeds.

She said that the issues, which the candidates said were priorities in their commercials, were likely ones that they cared about and would take action on through the introduction and co-sponsoring of legislation.

Whether they were vague or specific on an issue did not matter, she found.

Washington, October 28 : Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers say that the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be reduced with the aid of a high dose of cortisone.

Writing about their findings in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the researchers revealed that in an animal model of PTSD, high doses of cortisol-related substance corticosterone was found to prevent negative consequences of stress exposure, including increased startle response and behavioural freezing when exposed to reminders of the stress.

Washington, October 28 : A team of University of Houston researchers are trying to determine whether fat cells can help beef up heart muscles damaged by heart attack.

Associate Professor Stanley Kleis and his colleagues in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering say that they do see the promise of using adipose-derived stromal cells (ADSCs), which are found in fatty tissue, as a therapy for heart attack patients.

The heart cells do not get enough oxygen-rich blood when a patient has a heart attack, and some of them die, leaving behind damaged tissue.

Washington, Oct 28 : Senior officials in the Bush administration have reportedly said that a draft recommendation in a classified White House assessment of US strategy in Afghanistan has called for talks with elements of the Taliban in a bid to ensure peace in Afghanistan.

The recommendation suggested talks to be led by the Afghan central government, but with the active participation of the US administration. The prospective talks would have two main goals -- extending the Kabul government''s authority across Afghanistan; and persuading some Taliban figures to cease their attacks against U.S. and Afghan targets, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Washington, October 28 : An expert at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says that rapid digitising may ultimately lead to a “digital dark age”, where digital photographs will become unreadable to future computers.

Jerome P. McDonough, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the university, says that the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by the ever-growing information economy — including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos.

He is afraid that data produced with ever-shifting platforms and file formats may eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility.