“The new products take full advantage of the most innovative cutting-edge technologies to provide more accurate detection and an even-faster response to any IT threats,” Kaspersky Lab’s South Asia, managing director, Suk Ling Gun, told reporters in Mumbai.

Kaspersky Lab India (KLI) started full-fledged operations from June 1, 2010 with marketing, sales and technology teams based out of Hyderabad.

The newly-implemented system watcher technology monitors all system events in full creation and modification of files, system calls and changes to the system registry, Gun said.

The new solutions incorporate reputation rating services as well, she added.

“It means information about a known object is received in real-time without the need for it to be scanned locally. The information is sourced from Kaspersky Lab’s databases that are constantly updated by the company’s experts,” she said.

Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 contains a significantly improved parental control module that restricts a child’s access to social networking sites, instant messaging (ICQ, MSN) and specific programs on the computer.

“It can also control the downloading of files and the transfer of personal data,” KLI Channel sales director, Jagannath, said. DNA India

More likely, it’s related to the genetics of the parents who turned to in vitro fertilization because of infertility, the study’s Swedish authors and other experts say. Also, test-tube infants often are born prematurely and have breathing problems at birth – traits linked in other studies with increased cancer risks.

Still, cancer in these children is rare despite any elevated risks.

“It’s rather reassuring,” said Dr. Bengt Kallen, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Lund. The risk “is so small that it can’t matter much for the individual parents or parents-to-be.”

The study examined Swedish children conceived by IVF, in which eggs are fertilized with sperm in a lab dish and then implanted in the womb. Research on possible health risks including cancer and birth defects in IVF children has had mixed results.

Dr. Tommaso Falcone, the Cleveland Clinic’s obstetrics and gynecology chief, said it’s uncertain whether similar results would be found in the more racially diverse United States. About 57,000 infants are born after IVF each year in the U.S., or roughly 1 percent of all births

The results of the new study were published online Monday in Pediatrics. It analyzed more than 2.4 million births in Sweden between 1982 and 2005, including almost 27,000 IVF babies, along with cancer data in children tracked for up to 19 years.

Overall, 53 IVF children developed cancer versus 38 that would be expected in other children of the same age, a 42 percent increased risk. Leukemia and brain cancers were among the most common.

Kallen said possible reasons for the link include unidentified traits in the parents that might be related to infertility and cancer risks.

Absolute risks for cancer in these children are still very low, “far less than 1 percent,” Falcone noted.

Dr. Elizabeth Ginsburg, medical director of the IVF program at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said patients nonetheless should be counseled about the study results. By Lindsey Tanner,  PhysOrg

evolutiongems.pdf) briefly describes 15 examples published in the journal Nature over the past decade that offer powerful evidence for the theory. I will describe three examples.

1 The origin of feathers

The fossil record is one of the main pillars of evidence on which the theory of evolution stands. But critics claim the fossil record is fatally flawed because of the lack of “transitional forms” that illustrate intermediates in the transition of one major group of animals to another. The critics are wrong, and the first two cases I will cite describe examples of transitional forms.

Evolutionists tell us that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs. A famous fossil that provides evidence for this was discovered in Bavaria in 1861. The fossil is called Archaeopteryx . The creature displays reptilian features, such as teeth and a long, bony tail, but it also has wings and flight feathers like a bird. It is commonly interpreted as a fossil of the earliest known bird. But has the fossil record thrown up any dinosaurs with feathers – unambiguous transitional forms?

Yes. Fossils found in China in the 1980s showed a variety of dinosaurs with feathers and feathery plumage. Many of these feathered dinosaurs could not have flown, which means that feathers evolved for reasons other than flight (heat insulation, for example). Flight was an extra opportunity that was exploited by creatures already carrying feathers.

2 Land-living ancestors of whales

Whales are mammals, like ourselves, but they have lived in the water for millions of years. There is good evidence that mammals originated on land, which means that, originally, the ancestors of whales forsook the land for the water. The fossil record now provides good evidence for this.

There is no shortage of fossils from the first 10 million years of whale evolution of creatures showing whale features (anatomy of the ear, for example) and limbs like those of land-living animals from which they descended. But until 2007, there was no report of a good fossil of the land-living creature from which whales eventually evolved. Work by Hans Thewissen and others described now-extinct creatures called raoellids that looked like small dogs but were more closely related to even-toed ungulates (a group that includes cows, sheep, deer, pigs and hippos). Molecular evidence had already hinted at a deep evolutionary connection between whales and even-toed ungulates.

Thewissen’s work shows that one raeollid, Indohyus (oictured), is similar to whales but unlike other even-toed ungulates in various ways (for example, ear and teeth structure) that indicate the creature spent much of its time in the water. The raeollid diet is very unlike the whale diet, suggesting that the impetus to take to the water might have been dietary change. Indohyus is definitely a good candidate for a transitional form.

3 The molecular basis for Darwin’s finches

All living processes and behaviours are underpinned by molecular mechanisms. Evolution works through molecular mechanisms, and these mechanisms are being elucidated by elegant research.

Darwin described several species of finches in the Galapagos Islands that all looked similar except for their beaks. Ground finches had broad, deep beaks, warbler finches had slender, pointed beaks, and so on. Beak size and shape reflected differences in diet. Darwin speculated that all the finches had a common ancestor that originally migrated to the islands, and that natural selection had then evolved a variety of forms from this common ancestor suited to different ecological niches on the island.

Arhat Abzhanov and others have studied the genes that are switched on and off in the developing beaks of finch chicks. They found that differences in beak shape coincided with variations in the expression of the gene for calmodulin, a molecule that regulates the signalling effected by calcium on metabolism and development. For example, calmodulin is expressed stronger in species with long pointed beaks than in species with more robust beaks.

Biologists are advancing from the documentation of evolution at whole animal level to identification of the underlying molecular mechanisms. By William Reville, Irish Times