Washington, Nov 21 : Chemists at the University of Liverpool have developed a material made out of a mixture of silica and water which can soak up large quantities of methane molecules, which would make methane gas more transportable.

The material looks and acts like a fine white powder which, if developed for industrial use, might be easily transported or used as a vehicle fuel.

Methane is the principal component of natural gas and can be burnt in oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water.

The abundance of the gas and its relatively clean burning process makes it a good source of fuel, but due to its gaseous state at room temperature, methane is difficult to transport from its source.

Washington, November 21 : A research team has announced the discovery of a new species of Ebola virus, provisionally named Bundibugyo bolavirus.

Writing about the discovery in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the researchers revealed that the same virus was responsible for a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in western Uganda in 2007.

The team — comprising of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia the Uganda Virus Research Institute; the Uganda Ministry of Health; and Columbia University — have revealed that the new virus is genetically distinct from all other known Ebola virus species, differing by more than 30% at the genetic level.

Number of women workforce is rapidly increasing in Indian IT and business process outsourcing industry. It accounts for 28 per cent of the total two million workforce in 2007-08 as per data of National Association of Software and Service Companies. It stood at 24 percent in 2005-06.

Many companies have also provided the leadership roles to women in their senior management.

New York - Troubled US web portal firm Yahoo! is in negotiations to buy Time Warner Inc.'s AOL business, the financial news agency Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Yahoo!, which earlier in the week rejected a 47.5-billion-dollar takeover bid by Microsoft in a move that saw the resignation of CEO Jerry Yang, is according to Bloomberg bidding for AOL's web advertising business in return for a stake in a new combined company.

Executives from Yahoo! and Time Warner have met in the past few weeks to negotiate terms for the prospective deal, Bloomberg said, citing unnamed sources.

Washington, November 20 : A team of researchers used a 3-D locomotion video-recording and measuring system to observe and measure the angular rotation of joints in gecko''s limbs, as they ran on horizontal floor and climbing on vertical wall.

Scientists at Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering (IBSS), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) believe that their work may help understand gecko''s locomotion from the view point of angle change of joints, and provide a direct reference to plan the gait of gecko-robots.

Geckos’ excellent locomotion abilities to move on various surfaces are highly desired for creating such robots as will be able to move in unstructured environments, especially legged robots.

Washington, Nov 20 : A new research has indicated that urban trees have the potential to enhance water infiltration rates in reservoirs being used to store stormwater.

Global land use patterns and increasing pressures on water resources demand creative urban stormwater management.

Traditional stormwater management focuses on regulating the flow of runoff to waterways, but generally does little to restore the hydrologic cycle disrupted by extensive pavement and compacted urban soils with low permeability.

The lack of infiltration opportunities affects groundwater recharge and has negative repercussions on water quality downstream.