Leonids will be seen on Monday, better known as earth gazers, at their peak, Space Director C B Devgun told a news agency on Sunday.

Leonids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle.

The meteor shower is visible every year around November 17 when the Earth moves through the Leonid meteor stream, he said, adding that the stream comprises solid particles, known as meteoroids, ejected by the comet as it passes by the Sun.

Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo.

The Leonids are famous because their meteor showers or storms can be among the most spectacular. During a strong storm in dark viewing conditions the sky can appear to be “raining stars”, Devgun said, adding that this year Leonids will be seen in its peak on Monday night.

Meteors are also called as “shooting stars”, startling streaks of light that suddenly appear in the sky when a dust particle from outer space evaporates high in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Most visible Leonids are between 1 mm and 1 cm in diameter, Devgun said. For example, a Leonid meteor barely visible with the naked eye in a dark sky is caused by a meteoroid of 0.5 mm in diameter and weights only 0.00006 gram.

Just before they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, Leonid meteoroids travel at 71 kilometers per second, or 213 times as fast as speed of sound, Devgun added.

Pedroia added to his ever-expanding trophy case Tuesday, becoming the first second baseman to earn the honor in nearly a half-century.

The Boston little man with the meaty swing easily beat out Minnesota slugger Justin Morneau, Red Sox teammate Kevin Youkilis and record-setting closer Francisco Rodriguez in a scattered ballot that saw five different players draw first place-votes.

Generously listed at 5-foot-9, Pedroia has quickly piled up a huge stack of hardware. Earlier this month, he won the Gold Glove. He was the 2007 AL Rookie of the Year and capped off that season with a World Series ring.

“I had to overcome a lot of things to prove people wrong, and so far I’ve done that,” he said on a conference call from his home in Arizona. “I have to find a way to have that edge.”

Pedroia drew 16 of the 28 first-place votes cast by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and finished with 317 points. He was even left off one ballot, while Morneau and Youkilis were listed on every one.

“You look around the league, there are a ton of great players,” Pedroia said.

Pedroia led the AL in hits, runs and doubles in helping the Red Sox win the wild-card berth. He batted .326 with 17 home runs and 83 RBIs and also stole 20 bases.

Pedroia became a fan favorite at Fenway Park with his scrappy approach. In a lineup depleted by injuries to David Ortiz, Mike Lowell and J.D. Drew and the midseason trade of Manny Ramirez, Pedroia took his hearty hacks wherever needed — while he usually batted second, he also hit leadoff and cleanup.

Nellie Fox was the previous second baseman to become AL MVP, in 1959 with the White Sox. No position has produced fewer MVPs overall — just 10 overall since the AL and NL awards were first presented in 1931.

Pedroia was the fourth second baseman to win the AL MVP award, along with Fox, Joe Gordon (1942) and Charlie Gehringer (1937). Six second basemen have won the NL honor, with Jeff Kent, Ryne Sandberg and Joe Morgan doing it most recently.

Pedroia and his wife originally planned to leave early this week for a vacation in Mexico. But with the MVP vote looming, a Red Sox official suggested he delay the trip by a day or two, just in case.

“I really didn’t know what to expect,” Pedroia said. “I wasn’t nervous or overly excited.”

Pedroia certainly didn’t plan on this. He made just $457,000 last season and didn’t have an MVP bonus provision in his contract.

Pedroia was driving to his daily workout when he got the phone call telling him he’d won. Right away, the calls and text messages from teammates began pouring in.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said.

Pedroia became the 10th Red Sox player to take the award and first since Mo Vaughn in 1995. He also is just the third player to become MVP the season after earning the Rookie of the Year award, joining Cal Ripken Jr. and Ryan Howard.

Morneau got seven first-place votes and had 257 points, and Youkilis and Twins catcher Joe Mauer each got a pair of first-place votes. Rodriguez drew the other first-place nod and came in sixth.

Morneau, the 2006 AL MVP winner, hit .300 with 23 home runs and 129 RBIs in helping the Twins reach a one-game playoff for the AL Central, which they lost to Chicago.

Youkilis (.312, 29, 115) was third with 201 points and Mauer (.328, 9, 85) was next with 188 points.

White Sox star Carlos Quentin, who was leading the AL with 36 home runs when he broke his right wrist in an act of frustration, was fifth with 160 points. Rodriguez, who went 62-for-69 in save chances and recently filed for free agency, drew 143 points.

Texas slugger Josh Hamilton, who made a remarkable recovery from drug addiction to resume his career, was seventh and followed by last year’s winner, Yankees star Alex Rodriguez.

Tampa Bay first baseman Carlos Pena came in ninth, the top vote-getter from the AL champions. The Rays beat Boston in Game 7 of the ALCS.

Morneau earned $75,000 for his MVP finish and Mauer, Youkilis and Pena got $25,000 each.

The AL MVP was the last of the major BBWAA awards presented this year. Albert Pujols won the NL MVP award Monday and last week Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum won Cy Youngs, Joe Maddon and Lou Piniella were picked as Managers of the Year and Evan Longoria and Geovanny Soto were the top rookies.

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Without the investment for your own servers and bandwidth, you can share these with those of other providers, through a strategy called colocation.

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When this is compared with other solutions, the profit and benefit obtained are high. Utah colocation providers come up with various strategies required for the growth of your business. The reliability of this server environment multiplies the benefits.

When you use the service delivered by these providers, you will not have to be worried about the maintenance issues related to a network. The fully managed and built set up in which the providers function enable you to enjoy the same level of hosting environment that a large company owns.

Without the thorough knowledge of this functioning and management, you will thus have a server hosted for your business.

After investing a sum rumoured to be in the hundreds of millions of euros (dollars), Sanofi-Aventis of France announced this month it was abandoning its drug rimonabant, which had stoked huge expectations at its launch in 2006.

Rimonabant — brand name Acomplia — ran into a flurry of ever-tougher warnings from European watchdogs about potential psychiatric side effects, including depression.

In October, the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) recommended that rimonabant be pulled from sale in Europe. The drug had never been able to gain approval in the all-important US market.

Also this month, the US giant Pfizer put a stop to tests of a prototype in late-stage development called CP-945,598, citing regulatory hurdles.

“The risk/benefit profile in this class of drugs was lower than expected for obtaining market authorisation,” said Catherine Baulac, in charge of new products with Pfizer’s French subsidiary.

And on October 2, Merck of the United States pulled the plug on its own experimental obesity fighter, taranabant, because of concerns about anxiety and depression at high doses.

The main causes of obesity — overconsumption of fatty or sugary food and a sedentary lifestyle — are well known. But the molecular machinery that drives it is in many ways obscure and, it is now suspected, more complex than thought.

Treating obesity entails a limited basket of options, from lifestyle changes to drugs and gastric-bypass surgery.

But when it comes to that middle choice, the most promising class of new prescription medicines for treating long-term obesity has just been wiped out.

The three scratched drugs belong to a group called cannabinoid receptor antagonists.

They take on the same target in the central nervous system as marijuana. But instead of sharpening appetite — the “munchies” associated with smoking cannabis — they work in reverse, dulling the urge to eat.

“There are now just two drugs left, orlistat and sibutramine,” said Colin Waine, a doctor who is chairman of a British organisation, the National Obesity Forum.

Anders Sjoedin, a specialist in obesity drugs at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, said cannabinoid receptor antagonists had now been discredited as an approach.

“Cannabinoid receptors not only regulate the appetite, they also affect mood,” he said.

Orlistat, marketed as Xenical or alli, curbs absorption of fat in the intestine by blocking a pancreatic enzyme. Sibutramine, sold as Reductil or Meridia, affects levels of a brain chemical called serotonin, believed to influence feelings of hunger or satiety.

Both are “very useful,” said Waine. But they come with a list of side effects, including, in orlistat’s case, the risk of sudden, oily faeces.

As proof of the glittering allure of the obesity market, drug engineers are exploring unusual paths.

According to the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO), around 400 million adults were obese in 2005, and the tally is expected to balloon to more than 700 million in 2015.

In the lab, at least, are potential rivals to orlistat in the field of lipase inhibitors; new neurotransmitter inhibitors that reduce appetite; and even a hydrogel pill that expands in the stomach to give a sense of fullness.

But, should these prototypes ever get the green light to go on sale, will they meet the hopes of people desperate to lose dozens of kilos in a year, rather than just a few?

Even more important, are they safe?

Eleven years ago, the search for an obesity drug ran into controversy when fenfluramine, an appetite suppressant, was banned in the United States over fears of its effect on the heart.

This month, a study published in the journal BioMed Central found fenfluramine’s damage to cardiac valves was visible seven years later.

Such questions pose a dilemma for scientists much as they do for drug regulators.

Obesity is a huge and growing problem, for which people are clamouring for a quick fix. Yet it is also a complex condition, and no drug is without side effects to some degree.

Sjoedin said that researchers believed that regulators, especially in the United States, were becoming increasingly demanding about proposed obesity drugs.

Watchdogs were wanting to see more data about adverse effects from proposed drugs, as well as further proof of benefits other than weight loss, such as lower blood pressure.

“Obese people will be around, and I’m not sure that surgery is the solution for all them,” said Sjoedin.

“In that respect, there is a need for drugs. But no one is going to make a drug unless they can make money out of it in the end.”

While the one in India has been named ‘Preferred Co for Engineering’ (FOCUS-India), the one in Egypt has been named ‘Focus for Engineering Services’ (FOCUS).

The two companies would provide engineering services that will help design and provide drawings for all plants and projects of CPC, as well as serve other customers in Egypt and India, Faysal Alaquil, director of business development and spokesman for CPC, said in a statement.

“FOCUS-Egypt is already fully operational in Cairo, and is staffed by 200 engineers specialising in architectural and other engineering disciplines. FOCUS-India will be based in Pune, India, with full operations expected to start in December 2008,” Alaquil said.

Stating that CPC’s expansion plans were going on in full force, he said: “We are raising our capacity so as to execute projects to the highest standards in line with our company’s founding values and principles. CPC is taking advantage of the current rapid growth of construction projects in Saudi Arabia and its surrounding markets complimenting CPC’s concept of the one-stop shop.”

CPC is an extended industrial arm of the Saudi Binladin Group of Companies (SBG).

Its subsidiaries work in the fields of building materials and construction products.Marble and Granite International Company, Saudi Co for Development of Construction and Trading, Precast Manufacturing Co, Adhesive Manufacturing Co, United Transport Co, United Arab Aluminum Co, Bahra Steel Co are the major subsidiaries of CPC.

These two new approaches for understanding how life started on our planet were discussed at a European Science Foundation (ESF) and COST ‘Frontiers of Science’ conference in Sicily, which was held recently.

The first applies complex systems theory to the chemistry that preceded early life. The second involves studying Mars, which may yield ample evidence about what Earth was like when life evolved.

Complex systems chemistry uses computer models to simulate combinations of reactions, involving membrane-forming reactions, self-replicating nucleic acids and metabolic energy-producing reactions.

Then it examines how these systems develop in time and space.

One promising area is the discovery of reaction systems that lead to the spontaneues generation of chiral asymmetry.

It is a universal property of life that compounds such as amino acids and sugars exist exclusively in a one-handed form although both forms are equally likely from an energetic point of view.

It is quite difficult to achieve this asymmetry in non-living chemical reactions. Chemistry tends to create equal proportions of the different forms, which behave like objects and their mirror images.

“The recipe for asymmetry is the co-occurrence of positive and negative feedback loops within such systems,” said Gunter Von Kiedrowski, of Ruhr Universitat Bochum in Germany.

Complex systems chemistry cannot tell the story of life entirely.

“We are in the same position as the physicists trying to understand the origin of the universe,” said Kiedrowski.

“We will not know exactly how life began, because we do not know the precise conditions at the time, but we can get a good model of how it could have happened with this approach,” he added.

Understanding the context of early life from the evidence on Earth is difficult. Because the Earth’s crust is so active, there is very little surface rock remaining from the time when life originated, before 3.5 billion years ago.

On Mars, by contrast, about 50 percent of the surface is from before 3.7 billion years ago, so there is a lot more to work with.

“Mars may be our best bet to find out about life’s origins on Earth,” said Tanja Zegers, a geoscientist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Some investors parking their funds toward precious metals from melting equity market for safe investment also boosting gold demand. Standard gold and ornaments surged by Rs 190 each to Rs 12,040 and Rs 11,890 per ten grams respectively while sovereign gained Rs 50 at Rs 10,400 per piece of eight gram.

The precious metal witnessed a rise in buying activity as metal prices closed higher in Hong Kong at 728.50 dollars an ounce against last close of 713.00-714.00 dollars. However, silver remained under selling pressure and lost further ground.

Silver ready remained under selling pressure and dropped by Rs 100 at Rs 16,500 per kg and weekly-based delivery by Rs 337 to Rs 16,290 per kg. Silver coins,however, remained flat at Rs 26,400 for buying and Rs 26,500 for selling of 100 pieces.

That’s the conclusion of a U.S. National Cancer Institute study that included half a million men and women who provided information about their eating habits over eight years.

Previous research had identified a link between red and processed meats and cancer of the large intestine, but this is the first prospective study to examine the association between meat and fat intake and cancer of the small intestine.

During the study, 60 adenocarcinomas and 80 carcinoid tumors of the small intestine were diagnosed among the participants, and an elevated risk for these cancers was associated with saturated fat intake, the NCI researchers reported in the current issue of the journal Cancer Research.

“Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that cancers of the small and large bowel both arise from adenomatous polyp precursor lesions, suggesting the adenoma-carcinoma sequence is relevant to both sites. For some unknown reason, the large intestine is much more susceptible to malignant transformation,” the study’s lead author, Amanda Cross, said in a news release.

“Identifying risk factors that are unique as well as those that are similar for the two sites may aid our understanding of the comparative resistance of the small intestine to carcinogenesis,” she added.

Cancer of the small intestine is relatively rare, but rates of the disease have been increasing since the 1970s. People who develop this type of cancer are at increased risk for developing a second primary cancer, particularly colorectal cancer, the researchers said.

“Identifying modifiable risk factors for cancer of the small intestine is important not only because the incidence of this cancer is on the rise, but it may enable us to further understand other gastrointestinal malignancies,” Cross said.