The expensive, hand-made sort or just the regular ones? I got in the expensive, hand-made sort for Des, but have yet to receive a thank-you Des was something of a disappointment. I expect better things of Lawro, and hope he’s not going to spend all evening doing his “highlights”. I mean, if he’s got time to fuss with his hair, then he’s got time to do his bit around the house.. Sleeping on the job helps to boost mental performance by preventing the brain becoming overloaded by too much information, a new study suggests. Naps lasting an hour or less had previously been shown to improve alertness, productivity and mood.Scientists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who reported their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience yesterday, found that sleep, and not merely resting with the eyes closed, was necessary to produce the restorative effect.The scientists, led by Sara Mednick, wrote: “It suggests that the psychological sensation of ‘burn out’, described anecdotally as increased irritation and frustration along with decreased effectiveness after prolonged cognitive effort, may not reflect a general mental fatigue, but rather the specific need of an overused local neural network to enjoy the restorative benefits of sleep.”.

NASA IS poised to announce its firmest plans yet to send men to Mars within 20 years, following the stunning discovery of huge quantities of water-ice close to the planet’s surface. In a paper for the journal Science, two scientists in Los Alamos involved with the mission will present evidence that ice lies about a metre beneath the surface over a large area.There were “features that suggest water, or something like water, everywhere,” Bob Reedy, one of the authors, told the Albuquerque Journal last week “Yet today there’s no water on the surface. Where did all that water go?”This week Jim Garvin, the head of the US space agency’s Mars exploration programme is expected to announce that, on the basis of the existence of accessible water on the planet, his agency is aiming to make a manned landing there within the next 20 years.The lack of water has long been a huge obstacle to men carrying out the nine-month, 40-million-mile journey to Mars. But confirmation of the buried icepacks could solve the problem – as well as rekindle the debate about whether life existed there.The discovery of water was made by gamma-ray and neutron spectrometers which measure gamma-ray emanations and other evidence of the presence of hydrogen.

Scientists believe the hydrogen is locked inside crystals of ice. The paper submitted by Mr Reedy and his colleague Bill Feldman will provide the most detailed map yet of the chemical composition of Mars’ surface.Water would provide not only drinking supplies. The hydrogen inside could be extracted to provide fuel for a spacecraft’s return journey.. Plans to clone human embryos to generate vital stem cells for transplant operations are likely to fail using the techniques currently available, a study has found. The same flaws could also jeopardise the use of stem cells derived from cloned human embryos produced for “therapeutic” purposes. The resulting tissues would be too defective to repair damaged organs, the scientists said.”Currently, cloning technology is immature and shouldn’t be expanded out to humans,” said Cindy Tian, assistant professor of developmental biology.

“It’s bad news at the moment for therapeutic cloning but it’s good news in that we’re realising what needs to be overcome,” she said.The study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, examined 10 genes on the X chromosomes of 10 cloned female calves, six of which had died either in the womb or soon after birth.They looked at a process called X-chromosome inactivation. This normally results in one of the two X chromosomes of females being switched off so that the cells of females have the same number of genes switched on as males, who have only one X chromosome.The scientists found that nine out of 10 genes for the dead clones were abnormal in the way they were activated, or “expressed”. They also found that this pattern of activation differed from one cloned animal to another, indicating the random nature of the process.There were no such abnormalities in gene activation in the clones that had lived and in female calves resulting from normal sexual reproduction.During normal animal development only the X chromosome inherited from the mother is activated in the placenta, but the study showed that both X chromosomes were active in the placentas of the dead cows. This might explain why the placentas of cloned animals are often bigger than normal and why some cloned foetuses are abnormally large.Jerry Yang, who led the Connecticut team, said the work could explain why some 80 per cent of cloned animals died during pregnancy or soon after birth..