The WEB GIST

The magnificent Zuma rock stands tall and conferring on the scenery the gift of its presence. It is located between Abuja and Niger State.

Visitors and tourists to the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, cannot miss  Zuma Rock, which about 725 meters tall above its surroundings, 3.1 kilometers in circumference and stands at 623 feet, is one of the wonders of the city.

Originally located in Niger State, North of Abuja, along the expressway from Abuja to Kaduna, the monolith is breathtaking. First time visitors, cannot but pause at the foot of this massive rock to appreciate the wonder of nature.

A close look, reveals a sort of human face, looking whitish on the outside. This only adds to the myth of the rock. To most people, especially indigenes, it tells of the mysterious powers, surrounding the rock. This belief seems re-enforced by the story that the strange powers attached to Zuma Rock are responsible for the abandoned proposed five-star hotel that has become a shadow of itself, and now lying fallow, desolate and overtaken by bushes.

The history of Zuma rock is older than the history of Zuba and the Koros that settled around the Zuma rock. It had been known that by the 15th century the Kwararafa (Kororofa) had started to spread all over the northern areas of Nigeria. We, the people of Zuba today were part of the Kwararafa that are called or identified today as Koro.

It was well known that the physical boundary of FCT dissected the Zuma-Rock, where we have the larger part falling into Niger State while the smaller part into FCT, geographically it is in-between Niger State and FCT. Traditionally, Zuma-Rock remains for the Koros led by the Agora of Zuba and all other Koros in FCT, Niger and others states know that really the Zuma-Rock is under the Agora of Zuba.The top of the Zuma rock catches fire during the raining season

Woolly mammoths – or, at least, animals with very similar DNA – could be brought back from extinction within two years, say scientists behind a ground-breaking resurrection project.

Professor George Church, a world renowned geneticist, has been working with his team at Harvard University to recreate a DNA blueprint of the mammoth for the past two years using material from carcases preserved in the Arctic permafrost.

They hope to isolate the genes that differentiate Ice Age mammoths from modern elephants – such as those responsible for its shaggy coat – then splice mammoth genes with the genome of an elephant embryo to create a hybrid with the recognizable features of a mammoth.

Laboratory tests show that cells function normally with mammoth and elephant DNA and the Harvard team plans to grow a mammoth embryo in an artificial womb, rather than use a female elephant as a surrogate mother.

Since starting the project in 2015, the researchers have increased the number of “edits” where mammoth DNA has been spliced into the elephant genome from 15 to 45. Church, who heads the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, said: “We’re working on ways to evaluate the impact of all these edits and trying to establish embryogenesis.

“The list of edits affects things that contribute to the success of elephants in cold environments,” he said. “We already know about those to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair and blood, but there are others that seem to be positively selected.”

Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP / Getty ImagesA bronze sculpture of a mammoth in the Siberian city of Khanty-Mansiysk
He added: “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo. Actually it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”

The woolly mammoth, which is most closely related to the Asian, rather than African elephant, roamed Europe, Asia, Africa and North America during the last Ice Age and vanished some 4,500 years ago, probably due to a climate change and hunting by humans.

“De-extinction” has become a realistic prospect due to revolutionary gene editing techniques that allow precise selection and insertion of DNA taken from specimens found in Siberian ice.

Church helped develop the most widely used technique, known as CRISPR/Cas9, that has transformed genetic engineering since it was first demonstrated in 2012. It derives from a defence system bacteria used to fend off viruses and allows precise “cut and paste” manipulation of strands of DNA.

Antoine Antoniol / Bloomberg NewsA large mammoth skeleton is seen on display at Christie's in Paris, France, on Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Edze Westra, of the University of Exeter, said Church’s work “represents a massive opportunity”, but he added: “I’m not sure if it is something we should be doing now, but it is definitely something that the technology offers.”

Some experts argue that the technology should be used to save animals that are still alive but in decline, rather than trying to bring back extinct creatures.

Beth Shapiro, author of How to Clone a Mammoth, said scientists would never achieve a creature that was “100 per cent mammoth”. She added: “Elephants are an endangered species, and what if you could swap out a few genes for mammoth genes, not to bring the mammoth back but to allow them to live in colder climates.”

Church said the mammoth project had two goals; to secure an alternative future for the Asian elephant and to combat global warming.

“They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” said Church. “In the summer they knock down trees and help the grass grow.”

Eitan Abramovich / AFP / Getty Images Asian elephants at Buenos Aires zoo on November 24, 2016
The Harvard team intends to engineer elephant skin cells to produce the embryo, or multiple embryos, using cloning techniques. Nuclei from the reprogrammed cells would be placed into elephant egg cells whose own genetic material has been removed.

The eggs would then be artificially stimulated to develop into embryos.

Referring to the artificial womb, PChurch told the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston: “We hope to do the entire procedure ex-vivo (outside a living body). It would be unreasonable to put female reproduction at risk in an endangered species.

“We’re testing the growth of mice ex-vivo. There are experiments in the literature from the 1980s but there hasn’t been much interest for a while.

“Today, we’ve got a whole new set of technology and we’re taking a fresh look at it,” Church said.

He predicted that age reversal will become a reality within 10 years as a result of developments in genetic engineering.

New Zealand authorities have said they will move the carcasses of hundreds of whales that died in a mass stranding to an area not open to the public.
About 300 whales will be moved with a digger and buried in the sand dunes further up Farewell Spit, South Island.
On Monday, conservation workers pierced the bodies to release gas built up during decomposition, following warnings the carcasses might explode.
It is not clear why the whales continue to arrive on the beach.
"It has been decided it is more suitable to take the dead whales out of the area that is open for public walking access," New Zealand's department of conservation said on its website.
Last week, more than 400 whales arrived on the 5km-long (three mile-long) stretch next to Golden Bay, in one of the worst beaching incidents in New Zealand's history. Most of the them died, while some were successfully floated back out to the sea by conservations officials and volunteers.
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Since then, more whales have also come ashore, including more than 200 on Saturday, who later mostly refloated on a high tide and returned to sea.
But Department of Conservation spokeswoman Trish Grant told the BBC that that group was still swimming worryingly close to shore.

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The shape of the coastline and its shallow waters have been cited as possible factors in the strandings
"We have staff in a boat offshore because there is a risk they could re-strand," she said.
Stressing the difficulty of preventing whales from stranding themselves, she added that "if they start to move towards shore... sometimes we can get people in the water to try and deter them".
New Zealand has one of the highest stranding rates in the world. About 300 dolphins and whales end up on beaches in the country every year, according to Project Jonah.
Many of these incidents happen at Farewell Spit. In February 2015 about 200 whales beached themselves at the same location, of which at least half died.

Meet Neopalpa donaldtrumpi. University of California, Davis biologist Dr. Vazrick Nazari named the twirler moth, a new species recently discovered in the American southwest, in honor of the yellowish-white scales on its head that bear a striking resemblance to Donald J. Trump's iconic coif.

Nazari notes that N. donaldtrumpi is native to an area of the country that is becoming increasingly urbanized and popualted, which could pose a threat to the species' long-term survival. He hopes that naming the species after the new president will generate interest in wildlife conservation.

"By naming this species after the 45th President of the United States, I hope to bring some public attention to, and interest in, the importance of alpha-taxonomy in better understanding the neglected micro-fauna component of the North American biodiversity," Nazari said in a news release.

Trump isn't the only president to have species named after him -- nine species have been named in honor of President Barack Obama, including an ancient lizard and a coral reef fish.

A rift that has been wending its way across Antarctica’s massive Larsen C ice shelf just made another leap forward, growing by more than 10 miles, scientists monitoring it reported Thursday.
Now, a chunk of ice bigger than New York's Long Island is hanging on by a relative thread. When it breaks off—possibly very soon—it could put the ice shelf in a more precarious position that could eventually lead it to disintegrate. That could contributie further to the global sea level rise that is threatening the many populous cities that lie within a few miles of the world’s coasts.
“This event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” the scientists at Project MIDAS, an Antarctic research effort that has been watching the rift closely, wrote in update.
The rift runs for more than 50 miles from south to north across the ice shelf, which is a vast platform of ice floating atop the ocean.
The stability of ice shelves is important because they help buttress the huge glaciers that feed them. When an iceberg calves off an ice shelf, there is less ice to push back on the glaciers, causing them to speed up. In a stable system, the front of the ice shelf eventually moves forward until the whole system is once again in balance.
While calving is a natural process, it can be driven into overdrive by the warm ocean waters that are lapping away at the ice shelves that fringe Antarctica. When calving events happen too quickly in succession, the glacier-ice shelf system doesn’t have time to rebalance, which can result in glaciers continuing to speed their flow, bringing more and more ice into the oceans and raising sea levels.
This is what happened with Larsen C’s northern neighbors, Larsen A and B, which collapsed spectacularly in 1995 and 2002, respectively. The glaciers that had fed Larsen B flowed six times faster after its demise.
The world’s oceans have already risen by an average of 8 inches over the last century from a combination of water added by ice melt and the expansion of ocean waters as they warm. The entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, of which Larsen C is a part, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by another 10 to 13 feet if it were all to melt.
Scientists are worried that Larsen C, which is 10 times the size of Larsen B and the fourth biggest ice shelf in Antarctica, could eventually follow in its neighbors’ footsteps, though they don’t think it will destabilize as quickly because it hasn’t shown the same surface melt that helped drive Larsen B to collapse.
The Project MIDAS team and other Antarctic researchers have been watching the rift in Larsen C grow for several years and spotted another surge earlier this year.
After that, the rift seemed to progress at a fairly steady pace until another surge in late December. It is now “primed to shed an area of more than 5,000 square kilometers” (about 1,900 square miles), the MIDAS team wrote in their update.
When it does so, the ice shelf will be in its most retreated position on record, which modeling done by the MIDAS team suggests will be more unstable than its current configuration.
How long it will take for the rift to reach the edge of the ice and cause the iceberg to calve is still uncertain and depends on factors like local winds and sea ice conditions, MIDAS team member Daniela Jansen, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegner Institute in Germany, said in an email, though she thinks it is “very close.”
Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University, was less certain, saying the rift still had to progress through a zone of ice that may cause it to slow down again.
“There are still many more open rather than ‘closed’ questions on the rift and the subsequent response of the ice shelf to this perturbation,” he said in an email

Kolkata, Dec 24 (IANS) In 2016, science fiction and reality collided when LIGO opened up our sixth sense to understand the universe and set the ball rolling for a new era of observational astrophysics with the detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes.

Along the way, the international team of researchers associated with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) scientific collaboration picked up numerous accolades and inspired a new generation of scientists.

The discovery of these elusive waves, a century after Albert Einstein's prediction, is undoubtedly the biggest physics success story in 2016.
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Dubbed as "ripples in the curvature of space and time", these waves will provide information on the cosmos that wouldn't have been possible by peering through any kind of telescope: to explore fundamental physics and could even offer a peep into the universe's earliest moments.

The electrifying revelations by the 1,000-member LIGO also heralded a new chapter in India's future of new-age astrophysics.

With India poised to set up a LIGO (the third in the world), scientists expect to hear space-time rhythms from Indian soil within next six to seven years, according to Karan P. Jani, one of the many US-based Indian researchers working on the project.

LIGO research is carried out by the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration in Europe.

The LIGO-India project is envisaged as an international collaboration between the LIGO Laboratory and three lead institutions in the IndIGO consortium: Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) Gandhinagar, Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune and Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Indore.

The window to the cosmos literally opened up on February 11, 2016, when LIGO announced the first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves.

The waves arose from the merger of two massive black holes 1.3 billion light years away and were recorded by both of LIGO's detectors - one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana.

They were first tracked down on September 14, 2015, by both detectors.

The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A second gravitational-wave detection by LIGO was announced on June 15, 2016, also from merging black holes.

After an upgrade, on November 30, scientists restarted the twin detectors of LIGO, after making several improvements to the system.

The hunt is back on.

During the year, the LIGO team and the founders were honoured with all major awards including the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Kavli Prize and Gruber Prize in Cosmology.

The Special Breakthrough Prize would be shared between two groups of laureates - the three founders of LIGO and 1,012 contributors to the experiment, including 40 Indian researchers.

Gabriela Gonzalez, who serves as the spokesperson for the international collaboration, was named one of the top 10 scientists in the world by the scientific journal Nature.

She was also named one of the top 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine for the collaboration.

LIGO saw two strong gravitational wave events in its first four months, and possibly a third weaker signal. If that trend continues in the new run, researchers hope for, at least six events in the first half of 2017.

Another gravitational wave detector, Virgo, in Italy, is scheduled to be switched on in 2017 and combined with the twin LIGO detectors, they should be able to pinpoint the source of the waves.

Besides adding to the knowledge of the black hole population in the universe, the observatory could also quench science's thirst to detect gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars, believed to be the producers and distributors of the heavy elements, such as the precious metals.

So far, technological developments that were made for LIGO have found independent applications in science as well as industry.

With the discovery, related projects like the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder satellite (which reported record-breaking gravitational wave results) have also come under the spotlight for the possibility that the search for gravitational waves could one day occur in space.

The LIGO discovery capped a decade-long search and is the unequivocal proof that Einstein's theory of general relativity was valid.

It has spawned several other studies, including one which claims the discovery may have, in fact, invalidated Einstein's theory and instead indicate that the first signs of quantum gravity may have been found.

2016 may have been a watershed year for new-age astrophysics, but 2017 could open the floodgates.

Britain is the first country to formally licence an in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment designed to create babies from three people.

In a long-awaited decision, Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) gave the final go-ahead for the treatment known as mitochondrial transfer, which doctors say could help prevent incurable inherited diseases.

Britain's parliament last year voted to change the law to allow the treatments if and when they were ready for licensing. This latest HFEA decision means the first babies created by the technique in Britain could be born in 2017.

The government's chief scientific adviser, Mark Walport, praised the decision as a "careful and considered" assessment which put Britain at the forefront of medical advances.

The technique involves intervening in the fertilisation process to remove mitochondria, which act as tiny energy-generating batteries inside cells, and which, if faulty, can cause fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.

"Mitochondrial donation offers a real opportunity to cure a class of potentially devastating inherited conditions and will bring hope to hundreds of affected families in the UK," said Dagan Wells, a professor at Oxford University's biomedical research centre and one of many experts welcoming the decision.

The treatment is known as "three-parent" IVF because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos, would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity, said it was a "landmark day for people living with mitochondrial disease".

Research teams around the world have tested and trialled the techniques in a series of pre-clinical experiments, but as yet they have not been used to treat patients in Britain

NASA is asking everyday terrestrials to come up with cosmic solutions to a very down-to-earth problem: how to deal with human waste when you’re trapped in a space suit for up to a week.

The American space agency has launched a competition for participants to invent a hands-free system that routes and collects waste away from the astronaut’s body for up to six days. Inventors have the chance of winning $30,000, and have until Dec. 20 to submit their best “space poop” ideas.

“I can tell you that space flight is not always glamorous,” said astronaut Rick Mastracchio, a veteran of Space Shuttle Soyuz, and Space Station missions speaking in a video promoting NASA’s call to action. “People need to go to the bathroom even in a spacecraft.”

During spaceflight astronauts can be in their suits for more than 10 hours at a time. But with NASA planning on sending humans deeper into space, future missions will require the advancement of new technology to keep the astronauts alive and well.

Currently, crews wear an absorbent diaper but these would not be suitable for flights longer than a day, according to a description on the contest’s website HeroX. While it goes without saying that nobody in their right mind would want to wear a diaper for a week, the issue is more than a matter of squeamishness, it’s a matter of life or death.

Mastracchio said it is vital that the waste needs to be treated otherwise it could harm or even kill the astronaut. “Given enough time, infection, and even sepsis can set in. This is the problem we are asking you to help us with.”

NASA said it aims to test the winning ideas in the next year and roll out successful systems in the next three.