The work, which has just been fully restored, is thought to have been painted by a Da Vinci assistant.

"I think what's important is it enables us to understand how Leonardo worked in his studio," said deputy director of conservation, Gabriele Finaldi.

The painting moves to the Louvre in Paris for an exhibition in March.

The original hangs in the Parisian gallery so this will allow visitors to compare the two works.

A black layer of paint on the Prado copy was removed as part of the restoration process – this revealed details in the landscape which experts say is evidence the replica was made at the same time Da Vinci painted the original.

The restoration process took two years.

Experts discovered that the Prado version was painted on a walnut panel. This wood was used for other small-format panels by Leonardo and his studio, including The Lady with the Ermine and Saint John the Baptist.

The high quality of the materials used in the creation of the Madrid version suggests that it was an important commission.

The Prado's Mona Lisa has been in the museum since it was opened in 1819.

The newly-revealed painting will be on display there until 13 March.

There are dozens of surviving Mona Lisa replicas from the 16th and 17th Centuries – when copying famous artworks was a thriving business.

The original painting, dating from the early 16th Century, is obscured by several layers of old, cracked varnish.

However, cleaning and restoration is thought to be too risky because the painting is fragile.

Shaikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Bin Sultan Al Qasimi, Crown Prince and Deputy Ruler of Sharjah, was present. 

The meeting touched upon a number of key issues concerning the nation and Emiratis to achieve the aspirations of the UAE’s wise leadership under President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and to fulfill needs of the citizens. 

Also present during the meeting were Lieutenant General Shaikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, Shaikh Hamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince’s Court, Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, and Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Public Works, and a number of Shaikhs and senior officials.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern that women were being “largely excluded from the transition process and even harassed in the street,” and that “the best-organized political parties supported few women candidates in the recent elections.”

Omaima Abou Bakr, a professor at Cairo University, looked upon Egypt’s long, checkered past and assured that “We go through different historical periods with different kinds of challenges.”

Women have won only eight seats – less than two per cent of the country’s parliament, despite a law that guaranteed 64 seats to female candidates.

While many worry about women being disenfranchised from political participation under conservative religious leaders, the physical violence against women in Cairo’s streets in December was perpetrated by ostensibly secular officials.

“This violence, these virginity tests, women having their veils snatched from them – the real threat of physical violence is coming from the military police, whereas the threat coming the Islamists is a quiet marginalization,” Abou Bakr said. 

Sanaa al-Banna, granddaughter of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, told Al Jazeera that “the revolution has been definitely good for segments of Egyptian women who first voiced their grievances and succeeded in mobilizing thousands, and later on millions, of Egyptians around primarily humane demands.” However, while women “paid the price, they shared little of the gain.”

Those gains have gone, ironically to Islamist parties.

“They [the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists] lived in a cave when young ladies … were shouting against dictatorship in the streets, on Facebook and Twitter,” said al-Banna.

“The Egyptian woman has participated in both the initiation and continuation of the revolutionary surge that pushed Islamist parties to power.

“The revolution has been good for women in the sense that we all know that Egyptian women of all social classes participated, were out on the streets, so it has been good – for Muslim or Christian or Copt – because we rediscovered our capacity to participate in street uprisings and politics,” said 54-year-old Abou Bakr. It had been especially empowering for the younger generation of Egyptian women, she added.

Mozn Hassan, an expert in constitutional reform in Cairo doesn’t think women will lose much in the new government, but worries that they won’t gain much either.

“The struggle will be, on a social level, the trial of all social conservatives to make us lose [the progress] we have been struggling hard for years to gain,” she said.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

They showed how a protein in the immune system was affected by changes in the chemistry of the body through the day.

The findings, published in the journal Immunity, showed the time of an infection changed its severity.

An expert said drugs were likely to take advantage of the body clock in the near future.

Plants, animals and even bacteria go through a daily 24-hour routine, known as a circadian rhythm. Jet lag is what happens when the body gets out of sync with its surroundings after crossing time zones.

It has been known that there are variations in the immune system throughout the day. Researchers are now drilling down into the details.

The immune system needs to detect an infection before it can begin to fight it off. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine were investigating one of the proteins involved in the detection process – Toll-like receptor nine (TLR9), which can spot DNA from bacteria and viruses.

In experiments on mice, the scientists showed that the amount of TLR9 produced and the way it functioned was controlled by the body clock and varied through the day.

Immunising mice at the peak of TLR9 activity improved the immune response, the researchers said.

They said humans with sepsis, blood poisoning, were known to be at a greater risk of death between 02:00 and 06:00.

When testing mice, the severity of sepsis depended on the time of day infection started and coincided with changes in TLR9 activity.

Prof Erol Fikrig, who conducted the study at Yale University, said they had found a "direct molecular link between circadian rhythms and the immune system", which could have "important implications for the prevention and treatment of disease".

He added: "It does appear that disruptions of the circadian clock influence our susceptibility to pathogens."

Dr Akhilesh Reddy, who is researching circadian rhythms at the University of Cambridge, said it was "known long ago" that timing had an impact on the immune system, but this was "one of the first forays" into the reasons why.

The implications for healthcare could mean that drugs need to be given at certain times of day in order to make them more effective, or drugs could be made which actually target the body clock to put the immune system into its most active phase.

Dr Reddy said drug companies were "all switching onto this" and were "now screening drugs at different times of the day".

He could see the body clock impacting medicine "within 10 years".

Military chiefs say that 43 people were confirmed killed, but officials warned dozens of others were believed to be injured or missing in remote, mountainous areas.

“Heavy equipment we’ve requested from the provincial government has not arrived yet, because the roads and bridges are impassable,” Alvin Futalan, the police chief of Guihulngan town on Negros says.

“We are using our hands and shovels to search in the rubble,” Al Jazeera’s Marga Ortigas told the AFP news agency.

Thirty-nine people alone were reported killed in Guihulngan, a coastal city of 100,000 people that was close to the quake’s epicenter. Many buildings in the center of the city had collapsed, while landslides had buried some homes completely.

The city’s 42-man police rescue squad has been joined by hundreds of army troops and volunteers in clearing debris in their search to find people still believed to be missing.

“The army (troops) had to walk about 30 miles from the last stop reachable by vehicle to reach us,” Fatulan said.

Seismologists said more than 700 aftershocks battered Negros during the 20 hours following the initial quake, which stuck at midday on Monday.

Negros Oriental Governor Roel Degamo said he feared there could be more unreported casualties. “Sadly, we expect the death toll could still rise,” Degamo said.

Colonel Francisco Zosimo Patrimonio, an army commander in Negros, said a landslide buried dozens of houses in another town near Guihulngan.

“Local officials there have a minimal estimate of 40 adults missing (with the) number of children missing undetermined,” he said.

Telephone communications in some parts of Negros were cut off, leaving information from remote regions unobtainable.

Cebu, the Philippines’ second biggest city with 2.3 million residents and a popular tourist destination, was 50 kilometers from the epicenter and shook violently during the initial quake. No deaths were reported there.

The Philippines sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a belt around the Pacific Ocean where friction between shifting tectonic plates causes frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

Since her death, her album sales have been boosted by almost 6,000 per cent.

Data released late Tuesday by Nielsen SoundScan showed that Houston’s album sales for the week ending Sunday – the day after her death – were at 101,000.

The week earlier, she had sold just 1,700 copies of her albums.

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The screen showing the short video campaign, by children's charity Plan UK, is located at a bus stop opposite Selfridges on Oxford Street.

A camera will measure facial features of the person standing at the screen to decide whether it is a man or a woman. It guesses right 90% of the time.

If it is a male, the screen will direct him to the charity's campaign website.

The advertisement highlights the issue of women and girls in developing countries, who face poverty and discrimination, not getting the choice to decide how they want to lead their lives.

Males will not get to see the advertisement in order to make them aware about gender discrimination, the charity said.

The full advertisement will show three 13-year-old girls – from the UK, Mali and Thailand – talking about their lives.

The interactive advertisement, which will be available for two weeks from Wednesday, cost £30,000 and is activated when the viewer opts to see it.

The camera will measure facial features of the viewer – the distance between the eyes, width of the nose, length of jaw line and shape of cheekbone – to estimate the gender.

None of the data gathered is stored, the charity said.

Plan UK said it hoped to raise £250,000 over four months to provide access to education for girls from poor families.

Marie Staunton, chief executive of Plan UK, said: "Plan's Because I am a Girl campaign works with women and men, girls and boys, to challenge the discrimination that girls face as a result of their gender."

The Treasury Department recently proposed new regulations to make it easier to transfer money from 401Ks into an annuity. Robert Siegel talks with Andrea Coombes, personal finance editor for MarketWatch, about annuities and who they’re right for.