Number of women workforce is rapidly increasing in Indian IT and business process outsourcing industry. It accounts for 28 per cent of the total two million workforce in 2007-08 as per data of National Association of Software and Service Companies. It stood at 24 percent in 2005-06.

Many companies have also provided the leadership roles to women in their senior management.

New York - Troubled US web portal firm Yahoo! is in negotiations to buy Time Warner Inc.'s AOL business, the financial news agency Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Yahoo!, which earlier in the week rejected a 47.5-billion-dollar takeover bid by Microsoft in a move that saw the resignation of CEO Jerry Yang, is according to Bloomberg bidding for AOL's web advertising business in return for a stake in a new combined company.

Executives from Yahoo! and Time Warner have met in the past few weeks to negotiate terms for the prospective deal, Bloomberg said, citing unnamed sources.

Washington, November 20 : A team of researchers used a 3-D locomotion video-recording and measuring system to observe and measure the angular rotation of joints in gecko''s limbs, as they ran on horizontal floor and climbing on vertical wall.

Scientists at Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering (IBSS), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) believe that their work may help understand gecko''s locomotion from the view point of angle change of joints, and provide a direct reference to plan the gait of gecko-robots.

Geckos’ excellent locomotion abilities to move on various surfaces are highly desired for creating such robots as will be able to move in unstructured environments, especially legged robots.

Washington, Nov 20 : A new research has indicated that urban trees have the potential to enhance water infiltration rates in reservoirs being used to store stormwater.

Global land use patterns and increasing pressures on water resources demand creative urban stormwater management.

Traditional stormwater management focuses on regulating the flow of runoff to waterways, but generally does little to restore the hydrologic cycle disrupted by extensive pavement and compacted urban soils with low permeability.

The lack of infiltration opportunities affects groundwater recharge and has negative repercussions on water quality downstream.

Washington, Nov 20 : As NASA selects a landing site for its next Mars mission called the ‘Mars Science Laboratory’, four intriguing places on the Red Planet have made it to the final round.

The sites, alphabetically, are: Eberswalde, where an ancient river deposited a delta in a possible lake; Gale, with a mountain of stacked layers including clays and sulfates; Holden, a crater containing alluvial fans, flood deposits, possible lake beds and clay-rich deposits; and Mawrth, which shows exposed layers containing at least two types of clay.

Washington, Nov 20 : A new research by a team of scientists has suggested that climate change can open new avenues for spread of invasive plants.

The team’s findings indicate that certain plants could become invasive if they spread to places that were previously too cold for them.

“This paper is the first to suggest that the mechanisms that aid invasive species when they move from one continent to the next may actually work within continents when climate change gradually extends the distributional range of a species,” said Koen J. F. Verhoeven, an evolutionary biologist at The Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

“Plants may be able to outrun, so to speak, their enemies from the southern range,” he added.