Science & Technology News

Nem Bai was told getting a tubectomy would be an easy process – that she’d be home by sunset, a few hundred rupees richer and back to work in the fields within two days. Instead, the 35-year-old mother-of-five was incapacitated within hours of having the surgery at a mass sterilisation camp in Chhattisgarh on Saturday, her widower told Reuters. She was one of 13 women who have died since. “The entire night she was in tremendous pain,” said Ramavtar Suryavanshi, while waiting in his village for his wife’s body to be delivered from the hospital. …

MOUNTAIN VIEW CALIF. (Reuters) – Here are the Breakthrough Prize winners for 2014: LIFE SCIENCES – C. David Allis of the Rockefeller University for the discovery of covalent modifications of histone proteins and their critical roles in the regulation of gene expression and chromatin organization, advancing our understanding of diseases ranging from birth defects to cancer. – Alim Louis Benabid of Joseph Fourier University for the discovery and pioneering work on the development of high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. …

By Fredrik Dahl VIENNA (Reuters) – A U.S. think-tank said Iran may have violated last year’s interim nuclear deal with world powers by stepping up efforts to develop a machine that could enrich uranium faster, but other experts said they saw no breach. Iran’s development of advanced enrichment centrifuges is sensitive because, if successful, it could enable the country to produce potential nuclear bomb material at a rate several times that of the decades-old model now in use. …

VIENNA (Reuters) – A U.S. think-tank said Iran may have violated last year’s interim nuclear agreement with six world powers by stepping up efforts to develop a machine that could enrich uranium much faster. Iran’s development of advanced enrichment centrifuges is sensitive because, if successful, it could enable it to produce potential nuclear bomb material at a rate several times that of the decades-old model now in use. …

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – All’s fair in love and war – and also in mid-air bug hunting, if you’re a bat. Scientists studying a common species of these flying mammals found that the bats, while competing for the juicy insects they call dinner, make noises that “jam” other bats that are using their sonar-like echolocation abilities to zero in on prey. Echolocation – bouncing sound waves off objects – is how bats navigate in the dark while hunting, enabling them to find and catch elusive insects zipping through the nighttime air. …

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL (Reuters) – The comet that sailed by Mars last month spawned thousands of shooting stars per hour and created a new layer of ionized particles high in the planet’s atmosphere, NASA scientists said on Friday. At twilight, the Martian skies likely took on a yellowish hue from sodium in vaporized comet dust, creating a glow similar to sodium vapor lights commonly used in parking lots on Earth. …

By Piya Sinha-Roy LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After recasting the superhero genre with a dark realism in the “Dark Knight” Batman trilogy and dissecting dream manipulation in “Inception,” director Christopher Nolan is tackling the final frontier. “Interstellar,” out in U.S. theaters on Friday, has taken Nolan into what he described as the furthest exploration of space in film. The movie balances an intimate father-daughter relationship within the backdrop of an intergalactic journey to save mankind. …

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – They pollinate our flowers, vegetables and fruit. They spread deadly diseases. They flash in the summer night. They bore into the wood in our homes. And they serve as supper for birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals – including people. Insects are seemingly everywhere, and scientists have been striving to better grasp their history on Earth. …

By Caroline Copley ZURICH (Reuters) – Google’s ambition to defy the limits of ageing has fired up interest in the field, drawing in drug companies who are already quietly pioneering research, despite the regulatory and clinical hurdles that remain. In September life-science company Calico, which was set up by Google last year to investigate the ageing process, joined with U.S. drugmaker AbbVie in committing an initial $250 million apiece to developing cures for age-related diseases. …

By Ossian Shine SOUTHAMPTON England (Reuters) – ‘We don’t buy success, we build it’ – there could hardly be a more fitting ethos for a football club saved by a construction machinery magnate and now owned by his daughter. Certainly, it is an ethos currently reaping rich rewards on the south coast of England. That is not to say Katharina Liebherr’s Southampton Football Club has shallow pockets, it just chooses carefully where to spend its money, shown by Wednesday’s unveiling of a new 40 million pounds (63.92 million US dollar) training centre to the west of the city. …