Washington, September 12 : A new fossil study has indicated that ancient whales has large back legs, a tail like a dog’s, and a hip-wiggling swimming style, which helps pinpoint the advent of new physical features in modern whales between 38 and 40 million years ago.

The new features are known as ‘flukes’, which are the two wide, flat triangular lobes on a whale’s back end and are made of skin and connective tissue, with bones in the middle.

Scientists have known whales evolved from semiaquatic, four-footed creatures with long, thin tails to today’s fully aquatic mammals with fluked tails, no back legs, and flippers instead of front legs.

Kabul, Sep 12 : Afghanistan’s insurgent Taliban movement said that the United States was on the “edge of an historical defeat” in Afghanistan, seven years after invading following the 9/11 attacks.

In a statement released to mark the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, the Taliban reiterated their rhetoric that the West was leading a “crusade” in Afghanistan.

The US had not realised that there were “so many guardians of Islam who will guard God’s religion and its values”, said the statement e-mailed to the media.

It asked what US President George W Bush and his North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies had achieved in the seven years since they had invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban government in 2001.

Lahore, Sep 12: United States counterterrorism experts believe that terrorists with an “American face” will conduct any future attack.

Referring to reports of Westerners in terrorism training camps in Pakistan, The Telegraph quoted experts as saying that dozens of Westerners have undergone training, as terrorists try to recruit non-Middle Eastern Asians, particularly Caucasians, because they are less likely to attract the attention of security forces.

Washington, September 12 : A new study has rebuffed the theory that dinosaurs were superior, stating that comparison to competitors shows that early dinos survived 
2 mass extinctions because they were plain lucky.

The study, carried out by Steve Brusatte, a doctoral student at Columbia University who is an affiliate of the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues, have challenged the dino superiority theory, with the help of new fossil data and math.

Washington, September 12 : American scientists, including an Indian-origin researcher, have created nanometre-sized ‘cargo ships’ that can sail throughout the body via the bloodstream, and ferry anti-cancer drugs into tumours that might otherwise go untreated or undetected.

Ji-Ho Park, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, says that these ships can even avoid rapid removal by the body’s natural immune system.

The researcher has revealed that the whole system is composed of a magnetic nanoparticle, a fluorescent quantum dot, and an anti-cancer drug molecule that will be left on the site of the tumour.

Washington, Sep 12 : The United States has assured Pakistani officials that it will not to launch strikes against Taliban militants operating from Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s Ambassador in Washington Husain Haqqani spent part of his day at the White House meeting National Security and the rest on Capitol Hill trying to assure US lawmakers that his country remained a key partner in this war.

“It is our understanding that the kind of authorisation for US military actions in Pakistan (that The New York Times reported) has not been given,” said Mr Haqqani after his talks with officials at the White House.