Washington, Oct 21 : US Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is expected to suspend his campaign trail for one full day this weekend to see his seriously ailing grandmother, who raised him as a child along with his mother and grandfather.

Senior advisor in Obama’s campaign programme, Robert Gibbs said she was released from hospital late last week but had not improved.

Washington, Oct 21 : A new study has determined that reducing the number of deer in forests and parks may unexpectedly reduce the number of snakes, salamanders and insects in that area, thus suggesting that these creatures thrive in areas with higher deer populations.

The study was carried out by researchers at Ohio State University and National Park Service, who found that higher deer activity is modifying forest ecosystems in unexpected ways.

Out of several species of snakes, salamanders, and invertebrates studied, a greater diversity of animals were found in areas with deer populations than were in areas with no deer activity.

Washington, Oct 21 : Using a natural cosmic lens, astronomers have gained a rare glimpse of the violent assembly of a young galaxy in the early Universe, which suggests that the galaxy has collided with another, feeding a supermassive black hole and triggering a tremendous burst of star formation.

The astronomers used the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to look at a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years from Earth, seen as it was when the Universe was only about 15 percent of its current age.

Between this galaxy and Earth lies another distant galaxy, so perfectly aligned along the line of sight that its gravity bends the light and radio waves from the farther object into a circle, or “Einstein Ring.”

New York, Oct. 21 : Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is outspending Republican rival John McCain in TV ads by nearly four to one, according to the independent Campaign Media Analysis Group.

The New York Daily News quoted Sarah Niebler, deputy director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, as saying that Obama would smash President Bush''s 2004 record of 188 million dollars in TV spending any day now.

Last week alone, Obama broadcast some 50,000 30-second spots on national, local and cable TV channels, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Washington, Oct 21 : A team of scientists have conducted sophisticated mapping of the soil landscape on an extinct American volcano.

The volcano that featured in the research was the Capulin volcano, which formed approximately 62,000 years ago, and is the youngest volcano in the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field in New Mexico, US.

The cone rises 396 m from the plain, reaching an altitude of 2,495 m above sea level. The base of the volcano is 6.4 km in circumference, and the crater is 126 m deep and 442 m across.

Four different flows of lava can be observed across the monument, indicative of different eruptive events.

Washington, Oct 21 (ANI): The world’s most advanced microscope has been unveiled at the McMaster University in Canada, an instrument so powerful that it can probe the spaces between atoms.

“The resolution of the Titan 80-300 Cubed microscope is remarkable, the equivalent of the Hubble Telescope looking at the atomic level instead of at stars and galaxies,” said Gianluigi Botton, director of the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and the project’s leader.

“With this microscope, we can now easily identify atoms, measure their chemical state and even probe the electrons that bind them together,” he added.