NASA on Tuesday rolled out an interactive computer simulation of communications with space shuttles, the International Space Station, the Hubble telescope, Mars rovers and more.

"The elaborate space communications networks that connect scientists and engineers with NASA's spacecraft is essential to all of NASA's missions and can be a challenging concept to comprehend," Barbara Adde.

A policy and strategic communications manager for the Office of Space Communications and Navigation at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a news release.

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The deep space antenna that relayed Neil Armstrong's famous "one giant leap for mankind" declaration from the moon to a rapt American audience will be offline for eight months for repair. Work begins this week to replace a steel donut-shaped bearing on the aging 230-foot-wide dish at the NASA Deep Space Network site at Goldstone Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The labor-intensive process, which will involve jacking up 9 million pounds, will keep the antenna out of service until at least November."It's not trivial," said Pete Hames of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is in charge of maintaining the antennas at the Goldstone complex.

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Obesity is a serious problem, one that has always been hard to understand why this happens. We all assume that it is just down to us eating more and exercising less, but there is so much more to it. American scientist claim that they are now able to perform a DNA test to determine whether a person is more likely to lose weight by going on a low fat diet.

The reason why certain people are overweight is down to their genes, it does not matter how much they exercise or how many diets they go on, they will not lose as much weight as they hope. However, studies show that this new DNA Diet Test will be able to show what is the best diet suited to your DNA.

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Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions.

The lion's share live in the intestinal tract, where they help fend off bad bacteria and aid in digesting our dinners. But as scientists use genetics to uncover.

what microbes are actually present and what they're doing in there, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected and perhaps at times exerting more influence than human genes themselves.

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In the long-running debate over diets low-fat or low-carb Stanford University researchers reported Wednesday that a genetic test can help people choose which one works best for them. In a study involving 133 overweight women, those with a genetic predisposition to benefit from a low-carbohydrate diet lost 2 1/2 times as much weight.

As those on the same diet without the predisposition. Similarly, women with a genetic makeup that favored a low-fat diet lost substantially more weight than women who curbed fat calories without low-fat genes. The women were followed for a year. "Knowing your genotype for low-carb or low-fat diets ...

Ohio State University researchers said they used gene therapy to reverse a protein deficiency as a treatment for the muscle-wasting disease that results when a child's motor neurons produce insufficient amounts of what is called survival motor neuron protein, or SMN. That reduced protein in motor neurons is caused by the absence of a single gene.

The OSU scientists said they used an altered virus to deliver a portion of DNA that makes the SMN protein into the veins of newborn mice. The SMN-laced viral vector injected into the youngest mice reached nearly half of their motor neurons, resulting in improved muscle coordination, properly working electrical signals to the muscles and longer survival than in untreated mice, scientists said.

"We're replacing what we know is lost," said Professor Arthur Burghes, a senior study co-author. "And we have shown that when you put the protein in postnatally, it will rescue the genetic defect. "This technique corrects the mice considerably more than any drug cocktails being studied as a potential treatment in humans," he added. The researchers -- who say they hope to progress to human clinical trials as soon as required toxicology experiments are completed -- report their findings in the online early edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

A decades-long study of fossils found in India in 1987 has revealed how ancient snakes ate newly hatched dinosaurs while still in their nests.

The 67-million-year-old fossils show a 3.5-metre-long snake, Sanajeh indicus, coiled up alongside fossilized dinosaur eggshells and the remains of a baby sauropod.

Dhananjay Mohabey, a dinosaur egg expert from the Geological Survey of India, found the fossils in the state of Gujarat in western India, but snake fossils were originally identified as other hatchling dinosaurs. Mohabey and paleontologist Jeff Wilson from the University of Michigan recognized the coiling fossils as those of a large snake in 2001.

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The comets that come streaking through Earth's neighborhood are visitors from frigid, distant regions in the outer solar system. The icy, dusty bodies formed there billions of years ago, far from the heat and radiation of the sun, so it was long thought that they comprised unsullied scraps left over from the solar system's formation.

But a new analysis of a particle from Comet Wild 2 indicates that the mote formed close to the sun and then migrated outward to be captured by the comet millions of years after the solar system began taking shape.

Along with similar investigations of other samples, the new finding reinforces the theory that comets originating in the Kuiper belt, the distant field of icy debris where Pluto orbits and beyond, contain fragments that formed somewhat later than the solar system's primordial grains, and much closer to the sun.

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Yet another group of lab mice have been "humanized" so researchers can seek cures for infections that normally only strike people. Earlier this month, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill reported pre-exposure administration of a pair of anti-AIDS drugs help mice with humanized immune system warded off HIV infections.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have now announced they have created mice with livers full of human cells and then infected them with the B and C forms of hepatitis. Mice normally aren't susceptible to the viruses that cause these chronic liver ailments.

A team at Salk, in La Jolla, Calif., had previously generated a mouse with a partially "humanized" liver, but wanted to improve their method to achieve almost complete transformation. To that end, they used a special mouse that has liver problems of its own, but whose problems could be kept in check with a drug. Taking away the drug allows human liver cells, known as hepatocytes, to take hold within the mouse liver.

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NASA plans to launch the third and final Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) in the GOES-N series on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on March 2.

Liftoff is set for a window that opens at 6:19 p.m. EST and closes an hour later.Designated GOES-P until its checkout in orbit by manufacturer Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems of El Segundo Calif., the geostationary weather satellite will be stored in orbit as GOES-15 until one of the operational GOES spacecraft fails.

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