Washington, Feb 26 : In a previously untested method, solar power cells have been produced by printing presses normally used to make Australian dollar bills.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the giant machines arranged and stamped flexible solar panels onto plastic film, in a trial near Melbourne last week.

The cells were only 3 percent efficient, meaning they could convert only a small amount of solar energy into electricity.

But, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) project leader Gerry Wilson told Australian ABC News that he expects the output to more than double by next year and top 10 percent after that.

Washington, February 26 : Experts at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) say that an individual's lifetime risk of stroke can now be predicted with the aid of a new statistical model.

During a study, they used genetic information from 569 hospital patients, and showed that their predictive model could estimate an individual's overall risk of cardioembolic stroke - the most common form of stroke - with 86 percent accuracy.

"For complex diseases like stroke, it's not just a single mutation that will kill you. More likely it is an interaction of many factors," explains CHIP researcher Dr. Marco Ramoni, an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study reported in the journal Stroke.

Washington, February 26 : U. S. President Barack Obama credited Stevie Wonder's music for earning him the love of First Lady Michelle, when he honoured the legendry singer with the Library of Congress Gershwin Award on Wednesday night.

"I think it's fair to say that had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me. We might not have married. And the fact that we agreed on Stevie was a part of the essence of our courtship," Fox News quoted him as saying in a half-joking manner.

Washington, Feb 26 : A four-ton shipment of critical food crops has been supplied to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it celebrates its one-year anniversary.

The shipment included almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species, from food crop collections maintained by Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, USA, and three international agricultural research centers in Syria, Mexico and Colombia.

The repository, located near the village of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, has in one year amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed samples - some 200 million seeds.

Washington, Feb 26 : Using data from the satellite-based MIPAS and GOME-2 instruments, scientists have for the first time detected important ozone-depleting species in the atmosphere.

These new measurements will help scientists to better understand sources of these bromine species and to improve simulations of stratospheric ozone chemistry.

Despite the detection of bromine monoxide (BrO) in the atmosphere some 20 years ago, bromine nitrate (BrONO2) was first observed in 2008 when scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology discovered the gas's weak signal with data from MIPAS (the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding).

Washington, Feb. 26 : Former Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain has told participants at the American Enterprise Institute that the U. S. is not winning the war in Afghanistan, and called for a "serious change" in Washington's strategy.

Painting a grim picture of the war in the Afghanistan on Wednesday, Fox News quoted McCain as saying that it will require a change in strategy and years to achieve victory in that landlocked country.