Love About.....MENDAL2

South Korean scientists said they have created a glowing dog using a cloning technique that could help find cures for human diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.


A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle, named Tegon and born in 2009, has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic, the report said.

The researchers, who completed a two-year test, said the ability to glow can be turned on or off by adding a drug to the dog's food.

"The creation of Tegon opens new horizons since the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases," the news agency quoted lead researcher Lee Byeong-chun as saying.

He said the dog was created using the somatic cell nuclear transfer technology that the university team used to make the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005.

The scientist said that because there are 268 illnesses that humans and dogs have in common, creating dogs that artificially show such symptoms could aid treatment methods for diseases that afflict humans.

JOHANNESBURG: A South African man awoke to find himself in a morgue fridge — nearly a day after his family thought he had died, a health official said.Health department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said the man awoke Sunday afternoon, 21 hours after his family called in an undertaker who sent him to the morgue after an asthma attack.


Morgue owner Ayanda Maqolo said he sent his driver to collect the body shortly after the family reported the death. Maqolo said he thought the man was around 80 years old.

"When he got there, the driver examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing," Maqolo told this news agency.But a day after staff put the body into a locked refrigerated compartment, morgue workers heard someone shouting for help. They thought it was a ghost, the morgue owner said.

"I couldn't believe it!" Maqolo said. "I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn't scared, so I called the police."After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.

"I was glad they had their firearms, in case something wanted to fight with us," Maqolo said.He said the man was pale when they pulled him out.

"He asked, 'How did I get here?'" Maqolo said.

The health department said the man was then taken to a nearby hospital for observation and later discharged by doctors who deemed him stable.Kupelo, the health department spokesman, urged South Africans to call on health officials to confirm that their relatives are really dead.

The man's family was informed that he was alive during a family meeting convened to make funeral arrangements. They're very happy to have him home, Maqolo said.But Maqolo said he is still trying to recover from the traumatic experience.

"I couldn't sleep last night, I had nightmares," he said. "But today I'm much better." (AP)

NEW DELHI: Auction house Bonhams will put under the hammer a rare Rolls Royce Phantom modified for tiger hunting by an Indian maharaja during the days of the British Raj, featuring a mounted machine gun and a cannon, that may fetch up to $1 million.


The custom-made 1925 Rolls Royce was originally commissioned by Umed Singh II, the maharaja of Kotah in the 1920s at a time when tiger hunting was hugely popular in India.

The flaming red vehicle, with a convertible canvas roof and bespoke hunting features including a double-barreled shotgun, spotlights for night hunting and a mountable Lantaka cannon, is expected to fetch up to $1 million when it goes on the block in mid-August in Carmel, California.

"It was quite common, most of the maharajahs had specialized customized cars manufactured in the U.S. and they even had gilted frames and all sorts of things," said Pran Nevile, a writer and expert on India's colonial era known as the British Raj.

The car's 8.0-liter, 6-cylinder engine with a low gearing ratio allowed "it to creep powerfully through the roughshod jungles of Rajasthan," wrote Bonhams.

For centuries, big game hunting of tigers, leopards and Asiatic lions in India's forests was a favored pastime of India's rulers from the Mughal emperors to the British elite.

While much tiger hunting was carried out on elephant-back, some Indian maharajahs, or "great kings" of princely states across India including arid Rajasthan, took things to the extreme.

"It was more for a show but everything would be ready and then they would then go and take this Rolls Royce up to a point or the hills and from there shoot the tiger that was already captured by their servants," Nevile told Reuters.

Indiscriminate hunting, however, decimated India's Bengal tiger population from an estimated 40,000 a century ago to about 1,700 today. Tigers are now a protected keystone species throughout Asia from Indonesia's Sumatra to Indochina and India.

Indian maharajas were known for their high living and extravagant spending on all manner of trappings including ornate palaces, vintage cars and Louis Vuitton bags.

The nawab, or ruler, of southern Hyderabad state used the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond, once the largest known gemstone in the world, as a paperweight, while the nawab of tiny western Junagadh state was renowned for spending lavishly on his dog's wedding.

"They wanted to live in ostentatious style. Being a princely lot they had their own grand style and it was even copied by the British," said Nevile. (Reuters)

@ajithfanswing.blogger

Nepal has begun a project to re-measure Mount Everest in an attempt to end confusion about the exact height of the world's tallest peak, a government spokesman in Kathmandu said Tuesday.

Everest, which straddles Nepal and China, is generally thought to stand at 8,848 metres (29,029 feet) after an Indian survey in 1954, but other more recent measurements have varied by several metres.

Gopal Giri, a spokesman with the Nepalese land reform and management ministry, told that during border talks between the two countries, the Chinese delegates often use their measurement of 8,844 metres.

"We have begun the measurement to clear this confusion. Now we have the technology and the resources, we can measure ourselves," Giri said. "This will be the first time the Nepal government has taken the mountain's height."

He said that the project's results would only be known in two years' time after reference points are set up on Everest and then global-positioning system satellites are used to calculate the precise measurement.

Last year, officials from both nations reached a compromise under which Nepal measured the height of Everest's snowcap at 8,848 metres and China measured the rock peak at 8,844 metres.

The first measurement of Everest was made in 1856. It was conquered in 1953 by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, and has since been climbed by more than 3,000 people. (AFP)