Washington, October 17 (ANI): A research team comprising of experts from Penn State and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has devised a way to use light to control certain proteins that catalyze biochemical reactions.

"This is one of the first examples of someone successfully controlling the activity of a protein using light," said Stephen Benkovic, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Chemistry, and one of the team''s leaders.

"The technology one day could be expanded to have multiple uses, including the ability to turn off the activities of some disease-causing proteins in the cell," he added.

Toledo (Ohio, US), Oct. 17 : Joe Wurzelbacher, the plumber in Toledo, Ohio, who hit the headlines in America this week after stopping Senator Barack Obama to complain about taxes, has suddenly found himself facing celebrity-level scrutiny.

It now turns out that Joe is not a licensed plumber.

Thomas Joseph, the business manager of Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and Service Mechanics, based in Toledo, said Thursday that Mr. Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber''s license, which is required in Toledo and several surrounding municipalities.

According to the New York Times, he also never completed an apprenticeship and does not belong to the plumber''s union, which has endorsed Obama.

Lahore, Oct 17 : A top secret report, which is still in draft stages, has described Pakistani economy to be “on the edge”, as it had “no money, no energy, and no government”.

According to US official who participated in drafting of the report, it portrays the situation in Pakistan as ‘very bad’ having “no money, no energy, no government”. Another official called the draft ‘very bleak’, and said it describes Pakistan as being ‘on the edge’.

Washington, October 17 : Scientists are now recruiting dogs as research models to study genetic mutations that led to diseases in humans.

"Dogs get very similar diseases to humans," said Kerstin Lindblad-Toh of Uppsala University in Sweden and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"If you ask a dog owner what sort of conditions their pets get, they will say cancer, allergies, eye diseases," the researcher added.

Speaking at the European Science Foundation''s 3rd Functional Genomics Conference in Innsbruck, Austria, Lindblad-Toh said that many canine diseases could share the same genetic basis in humans and dogs.

Riverside (California, US), Oct. 17 : A San Bernardino County Republican group’s distribution of a newsletter picturing Barack Obama on a phony 10 dollar bill adorned with a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken has been roundly condemned by both Democrats and Republicans.

Various GOP officials denounced the illustration after it appeared in the October newsletter of the Chaffey Community Republican Women.

A defensive Diane Fedele, the president of the group, said the move had no racist intent.

Washington, Oct 167 : US Department of Energy''s Savannah River National Laboratory’s unique collection of microbes, called BioTiger, has been found to be useful for both cleaning up the environment and addressing people’s energy needs.

The BioTiger was the result of over eight years of extensive work that began at a century-old Polish waste lagoon.

"DOE had originally funded us to work with our Polish counterparts to develop a microbe-based method for cleaning up oil-contaminated soils," explained Dr. Robin Brigmon, SRNL Fellow Engineer.