The Indian car giant Tata Motors is ready to go for mass production of world’s first commercial compressed air-powered vehicle designed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre and developed by Moteur Developpment International, his foundation.

With its launch, India will not get a cost effective car but it will also free air pollution as well as will be able to solve the fuel problem.

The technology behind the air-car is not new and it had been around for years. It uses compressed air as an alternative fuel to push the piston. The manufacturer is expecting to roll out at least 6,000 cars by the end of 2008.

Mainly two technologies have been modified to meet up needs: single energy compressed air engines and dual energy compressed air plus fuel engine. In Minicats and Citycats models, the single energy engines will be available while the dual engine will be available with all MDI vehicles.

Both engines will be available with 2, 4, and 6 cylinders. The engine will be equipped to use gasoline, gas oil, bio diesel, gas, liquidized gas, ecological fuel, alcohol and more. Minicat will be projected as urban vehicle while Citycat is meant for long distance utility vehicle. And the most encouraging fact is that it will not cut consumers’ pockets by more than 0.75 Euro per 100 km. Instead of the usual speedometer and RPM, the cars will have an onboard computer which will flash the car’s information in front of the drive. The seat belt is also different compared to other cars and has been claimed as more secure than ever.

The recharging will be of much convenience and wallet friendly. The quickest way to refill is to go to any petrol station and to refuel it in 2-3 minutes by spending just 1.5 Euros. Alternately the fuel tank is mainly refueled by plugging the car into a socket to feed the motor alternator which compresses the air with the motor-compressor. The average estimated time for refilling has been calculated as 4 hours.

Though the car is mainly aimed at the green market, but there is doubt if it will really reduce the emission and air pollution overall. In India, fossil fuels are mainly burnt to produce electricity. Still, as the car will only emit pure air, common street air pollution is bound to decrease with its advent in the market.

Unfortunately northern America may not experience the air-car but Germany, Israel and South Africa along with 12 more countries will soon be able to test drive the car. MDI, the developer of the car is also not sitting idle while the car readies for the launch. They are already working on the dual engine hybrid version to make it a reality soon.

You will get more information by visiting the AirCar website or http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/315

Sunita Williams, the Indian-American astronaut sets a new world record by making the longest flight in space by any woman. She beat her precedent American Shannon Lucid’s (set by Shannon Lucid in 1996 on a mission to the Russian Mir space station) record by 188 days 4 hours at 12:47 CDT IST on June 16 2007. “Early this morning, Mission Specialist Sunita Williams set the record for the longest-duration single spaceflight by a woman,” NASA said in a statement. If all goes well, she will touch her feat on Earth on June 21st, 2007 as a tear in space shuttle Atlantis’s heat shield and computer glitches on international space station have been corrected.

This is yet another feather in her cap and early in February 2007, she broke the record of Kathryn Thornton’s most spacewalk time by a woman. She set a new world record of 29 hours and 17 minutes in four spacewalks. And in April 2007 she ran the first ever marathon in orbit, taking 4 hours 24 minutes.

Sunita started her career in NASA in June 1998 and she was launched on the Space Shuttle Mission STS 116 on December 10, 2006 to join the Expedition 14 crew as a Mission Specialist. Among the personal items she took her to the International Space Station are a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, a small figurine of Ganesha and some samosas. As the decision to bring back Sunita has been taken by NASA, she is no longer expected to break the US single spaceflight record set by Michael Lopez Alegria.

Last Wednesday some significant development happened in the stem cell research front which was moving at snail’s pace in the last five years. The US and Japan researchers announced thrilling development in the exploration, claiming their ability to make adult cells generate embryonic stem cells. This announcement is a bold advancement as the US congress gets ready to vote on legislation for the expansion of federal funding for the field to include studies on excess IVF embryos.

In multi-cellular organism, stem cells are primal cells which can renew themselves through mitotic cell division. These cells can generate wide variety of specialized cells for all tissue types. For mammalian stem cells, three broad categories are available; namely embryonic stem cells derived from blastocysts, adult stem cells, which generally available in adult tissues and cord blood stem cells, found in the umbilical cord. In an embryo, all kinds of cells are derived from stem cells while for adult these act as repair system for the body, making up for the damaged cells.

The announcement published in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell, is really a big stride in the advancement of cell stem research and can be considered as a true milestone. Three research groups worked independently, to get to the same outcome. The first group worked in Kyoto University led by Shinya Yamanaka, successfully coaxed a mouse skin cell to reverse its development and to get back to embryonic stage at which it produced stem cells. One of the other two groups, who are based at Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) proved that stem cells can be generated even from fertilized mouse zygotes. The third group of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT reached the same conclusion working separately. This invention hit hard the earlier belief that stem cells cannot be produced from fertilized embryos embarked on the development path.

Though the experiment is yet to be carried on human stem cells, but considering the fundamental similarities between stem cell generation principle in mice and human, scientists are hopeful of getting similar success in human cells. If the success can be made on human cells too, then it will indeed be possible to take a skin cell from an adult and regenerate it into embryonic cell. In other words, a person can heal himself, at least in theory. Yamanaka, last year came up with similar announcement but stem cells he generated were unstable. But this time, they progressed in their approach along with the other two groups and concluded that the process indeed works. Their methods proved that stable stem cells can go back to egg and sperm which can produce healthy mice.

Among all the elations there are concerns too. Scientists in order to turn back the aging of stem cells used a retrovirus vector which for human being is not easy to control and can cause infectious disease like HIV. So before testing the method on human they need to find other modes of transport for the critical compounds. The major apprehension is scary, as two of the four factors that can turn back the clock on adult cells so efficiently are carcinogenic. “Figuring out how to reprogram cells without directly exposing the cell to the cancer-causing effects of these genes is a major area of scientific activity, and would have to occur before we could consider using similar factor in humans,” says Eggan.of HSCI. Eggan’s group has derived an alternative approach for generating tailored stem cells using Nucleus Transfer method – Taking nucleus from a skin cell and transplanting it into an egg cell which has its nucleus removed. This method is not yet fully successful as it has its own difficulties.

With all the pros and cons, success and failures, controversies and opinions about stem cell research, the scientists are working relentlessly towards its advancement. Biologists all around the world believe that stem cells will one day stop the aging process. This declaration of the new invention is indeed a great success towards that step and we now can count days for some more exciting claims on stem cell research.