Washington, Nov 20 : Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader, has accepted President-elect Barack Obama’s offer to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, according to Domocrat officials.

CBS News reported that the officials on Capitol Hill and close to the transition confirmed the selection.

The appointment has not been officially announced, but these officials say the job is Daschle’s barring an unforeseen problem as Obama’s team reviews the background of the South Dakota Democrat.

Washington, Nov 20: Excavations at Herodium, an area close to Jerusalem, have provided archaeologists with further assurances that this was indeed the site of Herod’s grave, who was the Roman-appointed king of Judea from 37 to 4 B. C. E.

Herod was renowned for his many monumental building projects, including the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the palace at Masada, the harbor and city of Caesarea, as well as the palatial complex at Herodium, 15 kilometers south of Jerusalem.

Washington, Nov 20 : Scientists at Penn State have for the first time sequenced the genome of the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere.

According to Webb Miller, professor of biology and of computer science and engineering and one of the project’s two leaders, the scientists are the first to report the genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal.

They sequenced four billion DNA bases using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA highly efficiently.

Although their dataset consists of more than four-billion DNA bases, only 3.3 billion of them can currently be assigned to the mammoth genome.

NASA recently reported that astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, who took part in the first of the mission's four planned spacewalks from the space shuttle, let slip her tool bag during a spacewalk on Tuesday and watched helplessly as it floated off into space.

She had just begun to work on a jammed joint on a solar panel of the International Space Station (ISS) when the accident occurred.

Washington  - The executive board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a two-year 2.1 billion dollar loan to Iceland to "restore confidence and stabilize the economy," the IMF announced on Wednesday.

The fund said it approved the stand-by arrangement - structured so that Iceland can immediately draw about 827 million dollars, with the rest in eight installments of about 155 million dollars - to stabilize a "banking crisis of extraordinary proportions."

With the aim to strengthen the bond among them, AT&T and Samsung have taken a step ahead together and brought out a new phone, Samsung Eternity aka the Samsung SGH-a867. The new Samsung Eternity is supported by TouchWiz technology and lots of other unique features that will definitely attract a lot of attention.

With 3.2 inch touch screen and haptic support, Eternity also features a black and chrome exterior.