London, Oct 16 : NASA scientists have found the key to keep harmful moon dust at bay— a little sunshine.

Astronauts landing on the moon have to tackle with lunar dust, which is easily disturbed and highly abrasive, reports New Scientist.

The dust cannot only damage equipment, but could also prove dangerous to astronauts'' lungs, if it gets into inhabited areas.

Thus, study leader Paul Hintze of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, has found that a 1-metre-wide lens that focuses sunlight can melt and fuse the dust.

The finding could protect a future moon base from the fine powder on the lunar surface.

Washington, Oct 16: A team of researchers in Canada have made a bold stride in the struggle to detect dark matter, by documenting the discovery of a significant difference between the acoustic signals induced by neutrons and alpha particles in a detector based on superheated liquids.

Since neutron induced signals are very similar to dark matter induced signals, this new discovery, by the PICASSO collaboration, could lead to improved background suppression in dark matter searches with this type of detector.

So far, alpha particles have been an obstacle to the detection of dark matter''s weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in PICASSO.

London, October 16 : The Queen’s image has featured on the homepage logo of Internet search engine ‘Google’ to mark her visit to the organisation’s London office.

The ‘Google doodle’ has added the feature to its existing collection of logos, which are changed periodically to mark national holidays or anniversaries of major events.

The exclusive logo fits in a profile of Her Majesty and a crown, reports the Independent.

Washington, October 16 : Michigan-based Fanuc Robotics claims to have developed a robot stronger than the KUKA Titan, which has been regarded as the world’s strongest to date.

London, Oct 16 : In a breakthrough study, European physicists have developed a unique computer circuit that can build itself - a development that can lead to self-assembling computers.

A team of European physicists has developed an integrated circuit that can build itself. The work, appearing in this week''s Nature1, is an important step towards its ultimate goal - a self-assembling computer.

Currently, computer chips are made by etching patterns onto semiconducting wafers using a combination of light and photosensitive chemicals.

Hong Kong - Phone users in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are Asia's most enthusiastic senders of text messages, according to a survey released Thursday.

More than 97 per cent of mobile phone users in Singapore have sent text messages in the past month, followed by 96 per cent of people in Kuala Lumpur and 94 per cent of people in Seoul, the survey found.

More than 87 per cent of people in Melbourne and Sydney said they had sent texts in the past month while the region's lowest rate of text messaging were recorded by Hong Kong (85 per cent) and Bangkok (69 per cent).

The survey was conducted by the market research company Synovate, which studied the habits of more than 5,000 mobile phone users in seven Asian-Pacific markets.