On Tuesday, 20 vulnerabilities were patched by Microsoft Corp. and more than half of them were categorized as critical, in 11 separate security updates for Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), Active Directory and the Host Integration Server.

Additionally for the very first time, it was assumed by the company that hackers would be able to come up with exploits for each bug.

London, October 18 : Scientists have suggested the use of waterless concrete for building future lunar bases, which would be composed entirely of moon dust, a process that would prove to be cost-effective.

NASA''s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will next year scout out a good landing site ahead of the 2020 mission that will put US astronauts back on the moon.

A four-strong team will spend seven days on the lunar surface, but NASA hopes to eventually have long-term moon bases.

London, October 18 : Details of last month''s accident at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world''s premier particle accelerator, have confirmed that the machine will not restart before late May or early June 2009.

The LHC is the world''s largest and highest energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy.

The machine circulated its first particle beams on 10 September 2008, but a few days later had to suspend operations due to equipment failure.

Officials at CERN, Europe''s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have said that the time till June 2009 is needed to overhaul a sector of the

During the global WiMax Exposition-cum-conference in New Delhi, the laptops installed with WiMax were unveiled, which come with Intel chips from computer manufacturers like Lenovo and Asus. The new WiMax embedded laptops are expected to increase the growth of wireless broadband in India at a really fast pace.

After the Department of Telecom announced the Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) spectrum auction policy, the first Indian WiMax Expo-cum-conference was held.

Washington - The successor to Windows Vista now has a name: Windows 7.

Although the new operating system is not due to hit store shelves until late next year, Microsoft felt that now was the time not only to unveil the name of the next version of the world's most-used operating system but, more importantly, the rationale for the abandonment of the "aspirational" naming scheme of recent versions of Windows.

Helsinki - The construction schedule for Finland's fifth nuclear reactor has run into a new delay, Finnish power company Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) said Friday.

Work on the third reactor at Olkiluoto, south-western Finland, began in 2005. Power generation was now slated to begin in 2012 instead of 2011, TVO said Friday.

Two of the country's four operating reactors are also located at Olkiluoto.

TVO said the "the reactor plant civil construction works will take several months longer than earlier estimated."