London, September 8 : China has announced the date for the launch of Shenzhou VII, its third manned space mission, as sometime between 25 and 30 September.

The spacecraft will be launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the country’s northwestern Gansu province.

According to a report by BBC News, the Shenzhou VII flight will feature China’s first ever space walk, which will be broadcast live with cameras inside and outside the spacecraft.

Moscow, September 7 : Russian forensic experts have said that archaeologists could discover another site where the remains of the children of Russia''s last tsar are buried.

Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, their four daughters and son, and several servants, were shot dead by the Bolsheviks in a basement in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918.

Washington, September 8 : Japanese researchers have come up with a new approach to user authentication and security that is based on a person''s reflexes that could never be copied, forged, or spoofed.

Though electronic fingerprinting, iris scans, and signature recognition software are all becoming commonplace biometrics for user authentication and security, they all can be spoofed by a sufficiently sophisticated intruder.

According to Masakatsu Nishigaki and Daisuke Arai of Shizuoka University, Japan, biometric information can easily be leaked or copied. It is therefore desirable to devise biometric authentication that does not require biometric information to be kept secret.

London, September 7 : A roboticist has said that finding out exactly how fictional robots influence people can help engineers build real ones.

According to a report in New Scientist, the roboticist in question, Bill Smart, suggests that fictional robots like the ones in the movie "Wall E", can teach engineers how to build actual robots.

Smart and literature researcher Lara Bovilsky, both at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, recently held a workshop on the topic at the RO-MAN conference on human-robot interactions in Munich, Germany.

London- A computer disk containing the personal data of around 5,000 prison workers in Britain has gone missing, in another case of several similar incidents that have embarrassed the British government, a British tabloid reported Sunday.