At last, the launching date of the much-awaited 3G iPhone in the Indian market has been declared.

The two leading Indian telecom operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone will be launching this hugely successful instrument on August 22.

President Bharti Airtel mobile services Sanjay Kapoor said, “iPhone has been an iconic technological revelation of this year and Airtel has been at the forefront of innovation and customer delight in the Indian telecom sector.”

The new Blackberry Bold mobile phone has already set a solid impression, with making Orange its first network operator, which will provide this exclusive handset to the users in UK. August 16 will see the availability of the smartphone to all the Orange customers. The launch will be weeks ahead of T-Mobile, which had earlier announced the plans to launch the phone in the month of September and also restricted to only business customers.   

A statement passed by RIM’s chief operating officer, Don Morrison said, “The BlackBerry Bold is a breakthrough smart phone for both professional and personal use

The global financial crisis is having adverse affects on all the industries. First it was the aviation industry which cut its employees, and recently it has been learnt that Yahoo has also taken a step to cut its workforce by 10%.

Many companies offers decent discounts and new products to cash on the festive season. After Sony, now it's Canon who has launched many new Digital products in the market .The products are better versions of existing models as well as new products from digital cameras,camcoders,printers,copiers and all-in-ones besides quite a few software applications. 

The company, for the first time, has launched cable ID printers and card printers and is very confident of their performance.

Microsoft-owned digital marketing firm Razorfish has informed that it has acquired Wysiwyg, one of Spain's largest digital advertising agencies.

The purchase of Wysiwyg (which stands for "what you see is what you get") is part of Razorfish's larger goal to generate a third of its sales outside the U. S. by the end of 2009. The Madrid-based Wysiwyg offers digital services across a range of platforms, including video and mobile.

In a last-ditch effort to win US antitrust approval, Yahoo Inc and Google Inc have drastically scaled back the scope of their search advertising deal, calls for Google to place ads next to some Web search results on Yahoo, lifting Yahoo's revenue.

The companies had said in June that the search ad deal was expected to boost Yahoo's cash flow by up to $450 million in the first year.

LG Electronics, a global leader and technology innovator in consumer electronics, is looking at selling one million monitors during this fiscal. 
The company is targeting to sell one million monitors (both CRT and LCD) in 2008-09, of which 6.5 lakh are in the LCD space and 3.5 lakh will be CRT monitors.

LG Electronics, a major player in the global flat panel display, has recently entered into the B2B space for corporate and enterprise customers to increase sales. 

Washington, Nov 6 : Computer hard drives— that have been disposed of or sold into the second-hand market by corporations, organizations, and individuals—still carry sensitive data that may pose a big security threat.

That’s what an ongoing research has suggested which claims that a huge amount of private data is usually left on redundant computer hard disks.

According to the authors, such data represents a significant level of risk for commercial sabotage, identity theft, and even political compromise, and suggest that better education is essential to reduce the risk of harm.

Wellington, November 6 : A new study conducted by Australian researchers suggests that wireless gadgets like cordless phones and baby monitors are safe because they emit "minuscule" levels of radiation.

The researchers associated with the study came to this conclusion after testing the levels of electromagnetic waves in 20 Melbourne homes.

The research project was undertaken after some studies raised questions about health hazards.

Washington, Nov 7 : A new study has determined that while Earth experienced numerous changes in climate over the past 65 million years, recent decades have experienced the most significant climate change since the beginning of human civilized societies about 5,000 years ago.

The study was led by oceanographer Charles Greene, from Cornell University in the US.

New Delhi, Nov 7 : Union Minister of Communications and IT A. Raja reiterated on Friday that India will allocate spectrum for next generation wireless networks as planned earlier.

Successful bidders would be allocated the spectrum by the end of January after holding an auction, the Minister said.

The decision is likely to affect all leading telecom operators.

According to reports, India expects to earn 40-50 billion rupees in revenues annually from a higher spectrum fee to be levied on mobile telecom.

Washington, Nov 8 : Researchers have developed a computer model that can predict how people will complete a controlled task and how the knowledge needed to complete that task develops with time.

Frank Ritter, associate professor of IST and psychology from Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology, led the research team.

Hamburg  - Fans of online role-playing games will have even more worlds to explore this autumn when game publishers release expanded versions the most popular titles.

World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and Everquest are all set to release expansion packs this autumn. The Chronicles of Spellborn marks the introduction of at least one brand new online world. And for players who want to stay offline, there will be an apocalyptic world to explore in Fallout 3. If you just want to race a car, there's Need for Speed - Undercover.

Mainz, Germany  - Spam is losing none of its annoyance and is becoming even more dangerous, according to analysts at Sophos - a German security software firm.

During the third quarter, one out of every 416 e-mails contained a potentially dangerous attachment compared with one in every 3,333 e-mails in the second quarter, Sophos said.

The increase can be linked to a large series of malware-spam attacks over the summer. Fake mails were doctored to appear as if they were coming from delivery company UPS and designed to steal money or online identities. All the bigger attacks targeted computers running Windows.

Berlin  - Multi-functional devices are the Swiss army knives of the peripherals world. They can print, copy and scan all in one package. There are downsides, though. If one function breaks, the whole device has to be brought in for repairs. The devices won't win prizes based on their prowess in the individual disciplines, either -their value is as a package.

Potential buyers should decide beforehand how they intend using the device.

Darmstadt - Hackers are always refining their methods of sniffing out other people's passwords. That's why experts advise that you always select tough-to-crack passwords. That means using different passwords for different web sites. Luckily, special programs are available to help you remember them all.

"There are two prime ways to steal users' passwords," explains Ruben Wolf from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Germany.

London, Nov 10 : With plans underway for passenger space travel becoming a reality by the middle of next decade, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has started developing safety rules for civilian space flight.

According to a report in New Scientist, EASA has decided to develop the new rules after Sweden built a spaceport from which Virgin Galactic may offer flights into the aurora borealis, a major attraction for people.

“Both (Virgin’s) carrier aircraft and the rocket-powered aeroplane/glider would meet the definition of an aircraft, and therefore fall under EASA’s scope,” said a spokesman.

Washington, Nov 10 : Researchers have developed a new type of small-scale electric power generator able to produce alternating current by the stretching and releasing of zinc oxide wires.

These zinc oxide wires are encapsulated in a flexible plastic substrate with two ends bonded.

The new "flexible charge pump" generator is the fourth generation of devices designed to produce electrical current by using the piezoelectric properties of zinc oxide structures to harvest mechanical energy from the environment.

The new generator can produce an oscillating output voltage of up to 45 millivolts, converting nearly seven percent of the mechanical energy applied directly to the zinc oxide wires into electricity.

London, Nov 11 : A coroner has declared three 700-year-old coins, which were found in a field in Flintshire, north-east Wales, as treasure.

John Gittins, Deputy Coroner for North East Wales, declared the coins treasure under the Treasure Act 1996.

According to a report by BBC News, the silver pennies date back to between 1307 and 1314, to the reigns of both Edward I and his son Edward II.

London, Nov 11 : Scientists at UCLA''s California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) have come up with a new method for the large-scale production of graphene sheets, which are used as nanomaterial.

Graphene is created when graphite is reduced down to a one-atom-thick sheet, which can be used as electrodes for solar cells, for use in sensors, as the anode electrode material in lithium batteries and as efficient zero-band-gap semiconductors.

Washington, November 11 : A contact lens solution loses its anti-fungal properties when exposed to high temperatures, according to a new study.

Published in the Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, the study involved the same contact lens solution that was implicated in the epidemic of the eye infection Fusarium keratitis, which occurred between 2004 and 2006.

Background information in the article suggests that Bausch & Lomb launched in 2004 its ReNu with MoistureLoc, which contains an antimicrobial agent not found in other solutions.

San Francisco Reflecting a sharply weaker economy, Intel, the world's largest maker of computer chips, slashed its fourth- quarter sales forecast Wednesday by more than 1 billion dollars.

The technology bellwether said it now expects sales to come in at 8.7 billion to 9.3 billion dollars, compared to an earlier prediction of between 10.1 billion and 10.9 billion dollars.

The company makes chips that power more than three-quarters of the world's computers.

Washington, Nov 15 : Scientists have determined that to understand how life began on Earth, it is important to study the chemistry that preceded early life, as well as studying Mars.

These two new approaches for understanding how life started on our planet were discussed at a European Science Foundation (ESF) and COST ‘Frontiers of Science’ conference in Sicily, which was held recently.

The first applies complex systems theory to the chemistry that preceded early life. The second involves studying Mars, which may yield ample evidence about what Earth was like when life evolved.

London, Nov 15 : Reports indicate that the Mars rover Spirit is still working and is slowly recharging its batteries after a weekend dust storm that caused the craft’s power levels to drop to an all-time low.

The storm that hit Spirit came less than two weeks after similar weather in the far north sent NASA’s Phoenix Lander to an early grave.

Rover team members were awaiting a sign this week that the craft had survived the storm, which blanketed Spirit’s solar panels with dust.

Kuala Lumpur, Nov 15 : The world’s first-ever humanoid robot Asimo is showcasing its abilities in Malaysia during an ongoing road tour until Nov 30.

Honda Malaysia Sdn Bhd has brought in Asimo, an acronym for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, which is capable to grip objects and recognise people.

Washington, Nov 15 : Scientists have discovered an unusual microorganism in the sea that plays an important role in ocean ecology, and may force them to rethink their understanding of how carbon and nitrogen cycle through ocean ecosystems.

A research team led by Jonathan Zehr, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterized the new microbe by analyzing its genetic material, even though researchers have not been able to grow it in the laboratory.

Washington - Space shuttle Endeavour continued to enjoy a problem-free journey throught space Saturday on its way to link up with the International Space Station (ISS).

The shuttle is expected to rendezvous with the station around 0100 GMT on Sunday, 24 hours after takeoff from Cape Canaveral.

The shuttle's 15-day mission will include four spacewalks to repair joints that allow the station's solar panels to rotate toward the sun. Astronauts will also install a nitrogen tank, a global positioning system and a camera outside the ISS

In a significant development, Adobe and Major League Baseball announced that they have signed an agreement for Major League Baseball to power all their video content, including the live MLB TV content that is wildly popular.
 

Dubai, 18th Nov. 2008 -- Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum received today CEO of Russian Technologies State Corporation Sergei Chemezov.

Sheikh Mohammed and his guest took stock of the global economic situation and the role of governments in anchoring national economies in line with a new long term approach based on balanced policy and capable of crafting a remedy to ills of the international financial order.

New Delhi, Nov 19, 2008 - India and Egypt, once partners in developing Helwan HA-300 and Marut aircraft, will cooperate in "peaceful" ventures in outer space.

A Joint Communique issued at the end of three-day visit of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, released simultaneously here and in Cairo, said that the two countries signed five agreements to boost bilateral ties in trade, health, technical cooperation and security.

London, November 19 : The World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in New York will see this week a presentation on how GPS systems can help track traffic snarls.

One of the two systems, which went into operation earlier this month with a service known as HD Traffic, will be showcased at the event.

Media reports suggest that this system can be helpful in improving traffic reporting, and the information generated by it may be used to route traffic, assist town planners and fine-tune future assistive driving technologies.

London, Nov 19 : In case the modern-day dentistry makes you wince, spare a thought for the toothache sufferers of the 18th century.

According to a rare book about the dental techniques of the period, even those treated by the most eminent practitioners were in for an agonising time.

Written in 1770 by Thomas Berdmore, who was considered to be the outstanding dentist in England, ''A Treatise on the Disorders and Deformities of the Teeth and Gums and the Most Rational Methods of Treating Them'' provides an insight into tortures endured by our forbears.

Berdmore, who was a dentist to King George III, has written about a 23-year-old woman left in a ''terrible state'' by a ''barber dentist''.

London, Nov 19 : British iPhone users are facing a tough time using the new voice recognition software, because it does not understand British accents.

The new Google iPhone gives its users an opportunity to search for information using voice-recognition.

The high-tech programme was launched this week and allows users to search Google for cinema times, bring up pictures and information and convert

currency and measurements with one tap of the screen.

Dubai, 20th Nov. 2008 -- The Director General of the Emirates Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST), Ahmed Obaid Al Mansoori, has highlighted the vital need of establishing an integrated National Science Authority, during his participation as a keynote speaker during the Global Space Technology Forum, held on
16- 18 November in the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre.

The need for this Authority is to advise collaboration between various sectors and encourage securing funds to support scientific research associations serving the UAE's strategic objectives and the global advanced science community as well.

Washington, Nov 20 : A new study has highlighted how the exploration of the ocean depths can benefit humankind in the field of biomedical research.

Many marine organisms such as sea anemones and corals produce fluorescent proteins, which come in a variety of dazzling hues.

Fluorescent proteins have revolutionized biomedical research by enabling the imaging of processes within living cells and tissues.

The impact of this technology is considered so high that the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was most recently awarded to scientists that discovered and further developed the first green fluorescent protein that was applied as cellular marker.

Washington, Nov 20 : A detailed analysis of black carbon, in computer climate models, has suggested that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.

Savanna fires occur almost every year in northern Australia, leaving behind black carbon, which is the residue of burned organic matter that remains in soil for thousands of years.

A new study, by researchers at Cornell University, quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected, according to Johannes Lehmann, a Cornell professor of biogeochemistry.

As a result of global warming, soils are expected to release more carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, which, in turn, creates more warming.

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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

Washington, November 21 : A research team has announced the discovery of a new species of Ebola virus, provisionally named Bundibugyo bolavirus.

Writing about the discovery in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the researchers revealed that the same virus was responsible for a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in western Uganda in 2007.

The team — comprising of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia the Uganda Virus Research Institute; the Uganda Ministry of Health; and Columbia University — have revealed that the new virus is genetically distinct from all other known Ebola virus species, differing by more than 30% at the genetic level.

Washington, Nov 21 : Chemists at the University of Liverpool have developed a material made out of a mixture of silica and water which can soak up large quantities of methane molecules, which would make methane gas more transportable.

The material looks and acts like a fine white powder which, if developed for industrial use, might be easily transported or used as a vehicle fuel.

Methane is the principal component of natural gas and can be burnt in oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water.

The abundance of the gas and its relatively clean burning process makes it a good source of fuel, but due to its gaseous state at room temperature, methane is difficult to transport from its source.

Washington, Nov 21 : The discovery of the second gate of a 3,000-year-old fortress unearthed outside Jerusalem, is being claimed by archaeologists as further evidence that the first kingdom of King David was as grand as the Bible describes it to be.

“Here we are in the footsteps of David,” said archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel. “It’s facing Jerusalem, another indication that it is part of the Judean kingdom,” he added.

London, Nov 21 : A gambler has broken records by claming the largest amount won from a British bookmaker after winning more than 2 million dollars on an online fruit machine.

The 49-year-old jackpot winner won his 2,086,585 pounds prize on the Coral MegaJackpots Cluedo game.

The game is an online slot machine, with the traditional symbols of cherries and bells replaced by characters from the Cluedo board game, such as Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlett.

Players can stake between 2p and 5 pounds a line.

New Delhi, Nov 21 : A three-day conference on “In Service of the Soldiers: Life Sciences Perspective” is scheduled to be held from November 24-26, to commemorate the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) R&D activities at DRDO Bhawan.

London, November 22: Stanford researchers say that they have made a significant advance towards creating quantum computers that will dramatically outshine tradioinal computers in tackling certain key problems like searching large databases, factoring large numbers, creating uncrackable codes, and simulating the atomic structure of materials.

The researcher say that they have successfully employed ultrafast lasers to set a new speed record for the time it takes to rotate the spin of an individual electron, and confirm the spin''s new position.

Washington, Nov 22 : A new analysis of the “screaming mummy”, an Egyptian mummy who died wearing a pained facial expression, has suggested that he could be Prince Pentewere, suspected of plotting the murder of his father, Pharaoh Ramses III.

According to a report in National Geographic News, recent examinations of the mummy, found in 1886 and now located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, have helped archaeologists piece together a story of attempted murder, suicide, and conspiracy.

Washington, Nov. 22 : The cyber attack on the Department of Defense that has led to a ban on the use of external hardware devices could have come from a number of foreign countries, possibly Russia or China, the Pentagon has claimed.

The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.

FOX News has quoted a US Navy rear admiral as telling his staff on Thursday that the coordinated attack was strategically timed to hit between the November 4 presidential election and Inauguration Day on January 20.

Washington  , November 22 : Verizon Wireless, the second largest wireless telecommunications network in the US, has said that its employees who accessed Barack Obama''s personal cellular phone account without authorisation have neither heard the U. S. President-elect’s voice mails nor viewed his e-mails.

A spokesman on the transition team said that the company had found earlier this week that several employees had breached the personal cellphone account of the president-elect.

London, Nov 22 : A new generation of ultra-low-power computers may soon be a reality, courtesy microchips that process information without moving electrons.

The conventional computer chips process information in the form of electric charges and transmitted by physically moving electrons from one place to another.

Using this technique, engineers were able to pack numerous transistors onto a single chip.

However, as transistors become smaller, tiny variations in the structure of the materials they are made from can affect the smooth electron flow, which makes it difficult to guarantee that neighbouring transistors are alike.

London, November 24: The computer technology shown in science fictions like Minority Report and James Bond flicks are drawing closer to reality, with a Los Angeles-based company designing a system that can consign the mouse to history.

John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries that has created the technology, says that the new technology called G-Speak may fundamentally change the way we interact with computers.

London, Nov 24 : In a collaborative study, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Vaccine Center, Emory University, have developed a new strategy to predict the immunity of a vaccine without having to expose individuals to infection.

The multidisciplinary approach, which involves immunology, genomics and bioinformatics, is a breakthrough in the development of vaccines.

Washington, November 24 : University of Liverpool researchers reckon that the modern human foot might have first appeared about 1.8 million years ago, but their ape-like ancestors probably took to walking several million years earlier.

Researcher Evie Vereecke believes the feet of the ancestors at the time would have been more “floppy” and ape like than humans’.

She joined forces with University of Antwerp researcher Peter Aerts to look at the flexible feet of modern gibbons to find out more about how they walk.

Since it is very difficult to work with gibbons in the lab, the researchers sought access to a troop of the semi-wild apes just down the road at Belgium''s Wild Animal Park of Planckendael.

Washington, Nov 25 : A new study has found that telephone counselling may be as effective as face-to-face counselling when it comes to weight loss maintenance.

According to researchers, face-to-face and telephone follow-up sessions appear to be more effective in the maintenance of weight loss for women from rural communities compared with weight loss education alone.

Washington, November 25 : Researchers at the University of Utah have created a synthetic version of the superglue that sandcastle worms combine with sand and shell to build their sturdy tube-shaped homes, and believe that it may one day be used to repair shattered bones in knees, other joints and the face.

"You would glue some of the small pieces together," says Russell Stewart, associate professor of bioengineering, and senior author of the study to be published online within a week in the journal Macromolecular Biosciences.

Sacramento, Nov 25 : The Transportation Department of Northern California, which has banned cell phones in cars, is allowing people headed to Tahoe for the holidays to turn their devices on, to test the efficacy of a new software program in sending information regarding traffic conditions to travellers’ handsets.

The new software, called Traffic Pilot, can give a real-time colour-coded map on the cell phone showing how fast traffic ahead is going.

According to sponsors, it''''s a major step towards ‘real time’ tools to battle congestion, basically turning car cabins into commute command centers.

Phones can be programmed to give drivers verbal warnings about problems ahead.

Geneva - Global concentrations of greenhouse gases continued to increase in 2007, a report issued Tuesday said, with carbon dioxide rates reaching the highest level ever recorded.

The major cause of the gas emissions was human activities like burning fossil fuels and agriculture, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported, adding that methane gas emissions had their greatest increase since 1998.

Berlin, Nov 26 : The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the image of a pair of stars that are two of our galaxy’s most massive stars.

They have, until recently, been shrouded in mystery, but the new image shows them in greater detail than ever before.

The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth.

The Carina Nebula contains several ultra-hot stars, including these two star systems and the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity yet confirmed.

Amsterdam, Nov 26 (ANI): New observations made by radio telescopes have revealed that the bizarre astronomical object known as “Hanny’s voorwerp”, which is a huge green irregular cloud of gas, is being generated by a massive black hole at the centre of a nearby galaxy.

The Voorwerp was discovered by Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch school teacher and an enthusiastic volunteer of the Galaxy Zoo project.

London, Nov 26 : Millions of mobile phone owners in the UK use their handsets to access the Internet, a new research by analyst firm Nielsen Online has found.

The media analyst firm says that some 7.3 million people are accessing the Internet via their mobile devices, from 5.8 million, compared to a three per cent rise for PC-based Internet.

This, according to the research, is an increase of 25 percent compared to a growth of just 3 percent for the PC-based net audience, reports BBC.

The study also found that the mobile net audience was younger and searched for different things.

London, Nov 26 : Reports indicate that the temperature inside India’s first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 has gone over 50 degrees Celsius, prompting scientists to explore various options to cool down the unexpected surge.

According to a report by BBC News, scientists say that the problem arose because of very hot temperatures during the lunar orbit.

“Now the moon, our satellite and the sun are in same line this means our craft is receiving 1,200 watts of heat from the moon and 1,300 watts from the sun per meter square,” said M Annadurai, project director of Indian’s moon mission.

If the temperature is not kept in check, many instruments on board the orbiter may fail to perform, according to scientists.

Washington, Nov 26 : Investigation of the fireball that lit up the skies of Alberta and Saskatchewan in the US on November 20 has determined that it was caused by an asteroid fragment weighing approximately 10 tonnes.

The investigation was conducted by University of Calgary researcher Alan Hildebrand, who has outlined a region in western Saskatchewan where chunks of the desk-sized space rock are expected to be found.

The fireball first appeared approximately 80 kilometers above and just east of the border city of Lloydminster, Alberta/Saskatchewan, and traveled SSE towards the Battle River valley, fragmenting spectacularly in a series of explosions.

London, Nov 26 : A team of archaeologists has uncovered 2,700 previously unrecorded historic features along the length of Hadrian’s Wall in England, by studying thousands of aerial pictures.

Hadrian’s Wall, in northern England, is a World Heritage Site, built during the rule of the Roman Empire.

According to a report by BBC News, the experts from ‘The English Heritage’ found ancient burial mounds, medieval sheep farms and 19th Century lead mines, among other findings.

For their research, the team was working from more than 30,500 pictures taken during the past 60 years as part of a push to map and interpret archaeological sites across England.

Washington, November 26 : A new set of communication skills is required to improve email interaction, reveals new study.

According to the study authors Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian, of the University of Chicago, unlike face-to-face conversations, email interactions tend to ignore tone of voice, body-language and context and can results in creating misunderstandings.

It is to avoid such miscommunication that face-to-face and internet-based contexts each require a set of distinct interaction strategies.

The Hague - The Netherlands is to develop Europe's next climate satellite, it was announced by the European Space Agency (ESA) at the close of the agency's tri-annual conference in The Hague on Wednesday.

Dutch Economics Minister Maria van der Hoeven had been lobbying for collective European financing of a new climate satellite.

The Dutch government has reserved 78 million euros (101 million dollars) to finance the 115- to 130-million-euro Tropospheric Ozone- Monitoring Instrument, or Tropomi.

Helsinki - The world's largest mobile phone maker, Finnish- based Nokia, said Thursday it was to stop selling and marketing its mobile devices in Japan over poor sales.

"In the current global economic climate, we have concluded that the continuation of our investment in Japan-specific product variants is no longer sustainable," Timo Ihamuotila, Nokia executive vice president, said in a statement.

Nokia was to continue with its global research and development activities based in Japan. Sales of the Nokia-owned luxury brand Vertu were also to continue.

New York, Nov 27 : A new keyboard called ‘Keyboard for Blondes’ has been developed with keys that have ‘Smart Blonde Button’ and ‘Somewhat Useless Key’, written on them.

The keyboard, which comes in a bubblegum-pink colour and is priced at 50 dollars, can even talk back and has funny titles for boring keystrokes like, “I need my space” bar.

The best features, however, are the keys dedicated to 100-times-a-day texts like “OMG,” “LOL” or “ZZZD,” which is girl-speak for boring date.

“It’s pink? That''s great,” the New York Daily News quoted blonde Samantha Dubin, 34, as saying wryly.

Brussels - The European Union's richest members must make concessions to their poorer peers if the bloc is to agree to a landmark deal on fighting climate change, a Polish minister insisted Thursday.

"We are as far from an agreement as we were in October ... It is really difficult to understand why a number of the most affluent member states ... are not really moving an inch," Polish Minister for Europe Mikolaj Dowgielewicz told journalists in Brussels.

London, Dec 1 : One computer device could be called as being most ‘in touch’ with humans –the mouse, which celebrates it’s 40th birth anniversary today.

The first computer mouse, developed 4 decades ago, was a little wooden box with a single red button on top and a wire hanging from the back, because of which it was likened to a rodent.

And while computers have transformed from big white boxes to cool flat screens and laptops, the mouse has, more or less, stayed the same.

But, its designer, Douglas Engelbart, is not a rich man giving orders in a huge IT firm.

London, Dec 2 : Archaeologists have uncovered rare sculptures from the late Stone Age at Zaraysk, 150 km south-east of Moscow in Russia.

According to a report by BBC News, the findings have yielded figurines and carvings on mammoth tusks, including a cone-shaped object whose function “remains a puzzle” to the archaeologists.

Such artistic artefacts have been found in the nearby regions of Kostenki and Avdeevo, but this is the first such discovery at Zaraysk.

The new artefacts, discovered by Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, include a mammoth rib inscribed with what appear to be three mammoths, a small bone engraved with a cross-hatch pattern, and two human figurines presumed to be female.

Washington, Dec 2 : A new study has determined that keeping tropical rain forests intact is a better way to combat climate change than replacing them with biofuel plantations.

It was undertaken by an international research team of botanists, ecologists and engineers from seven nations.

The study revealed that it would take at least 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through forest conversion.

If the original habitat was carbon-rich peatland, the carbon balance would take more than 600 years.

Washington, Dec 2 : The study of a rare mineral, which can be used to track ancient climates, will help scientists estimate what will be the condition of the world over the next century or two, as global warming begins to crank up the heat.

Binghamton University geologist Tim Lowenstein is doing the study.

Lowenstein and his colleague Robert Demicco at Binghamton University have discovered that nahcolite, a rare, yellowish-green or brown carbonate mineral, only forms on earth under environmental conditions marked by very high atmospheric CO2 levels.

That establishes it as both a marker and a benchmark that can be used by scientists as they consider the likely climatic implications of ever-increasing CO2 levels in our atmosphere today.

London, Dec 2 : A new research has suggested that a chemical reaction in rocks in landslides may be responsible for starting wildfires.

According to a report in New Scientist, in August 2004, fire crews attending a wildfire near Santa Barbara, California, traced the source of the blaze to a recent landslide, but they had no idea how the fire got started.

A few weeks later, Robert Mariner of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and his colleagues visited the site.

Washington, December 2 : The U. S. National Science Fioundation (NSF) is funding an initiative at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that has been designed to help prepare visually impaired middle school and high school students participate in computer science programs at the collegiate level.

The objective behind Enter Project Accessible Computing Education (ACE) is to increase the number of visually impaired students pursuing degrees in computer science, and give them the foundations they need to be fully successful in their studies and beyond.

Stephanie Ludi, a professor of software engineering at RIT and the principal investigator for the project, says that encouraging such students will benefit every computer user in the long run.

London, Dec 2 : Scientists have put forward a patent application about developing a supersonic hurricane neutralizer, which can put a spanner in the atmospheric works by flying supersonic jet aircraft in concentric circles around a hurricane’s eye, the calm area around which the storm rotates.

According to a report in New Scientist, the idea has been theorized by Arkadii Leonov at the University of Akron in Ohio, US, and his colleagues.

Abu Dhabi, 2nd Dec. 2008 -- The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) will implement all its future projects according to the framework of the Kyoto Agreement's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) related to the reduction of carbon emissions.

Applying this in line with the directives of H. E. Yousef Omair bin Yousef, Secretary General of the Supreme Petroleum Council (SPC) and CEO of ADNOC, the company will be cooperating with the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (MASDAR) and Environment Agency - Abu Dhabi (EAD).

Washington, Dec 3 : Using a novel, hand-operated robotic device along with functional MRI (fMRI), scientists have found that chronic stroke patients can be rehabilitated, says a new study.

This is the first study using fMRI to map the brain in order to track stroke rehabilitation.

"We have shown that the brain has the ability to regain function through rehabilitative exercises following a stroke. We have learned that the brain is malleable, even six months or more after a stroke, which is a longer period of time than previously thought," said A. Aria Tzika, Ph. D., director of the NMR Surgical Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Wellington, Dec 3 : Sick and tired of your incompetent personal assistant who often forgets one thing or the other? Well, then Nicole, the virtual PA, might just turn out to be your ultimate saviour.

Brainchild of Dr Tom Moir from Massey University''s School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Nicole is a glamorous personal assistant on your desktop, who can help with tasks around the office.

London, Dec 4 : A member of a jihadist forum has urged supporters to wage a ''YouTube Invasion'' by uploading propaganda videos to the Google-owned website.

The SITE Intelligence Group, a US-based monitoring service, reported that the call was made last week by a member of al-Faloja, a password-protected jihadist forum, using the name Omar Abdul Hakim.

Noting that the popular video-sharing website is watched by millions and is even used by US president-elect Barack Obama, Hakim wrote that those wishing to wage jihad should use the popular website "to shame the crusaders by publishing clips of videos showing their losses.”

London/Strasbourg - A ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg condemning Britain's policy of storing DNA samples from innocent people was described as "disappointing" by the government in London Thursday.

The court said the DNA and fingerprints of two British men who had no previous convictions should not have been kept on a national database by police in Yorkshire, northern England.

The judges said keeping the information constituted a "breach of rights" and "could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society."

New Delhi, Dec 5 : India and Russia signed a landmark agreement on civil nuclear cooperation today.

Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh said while addressing a joint press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in New Delhi today that Moscow would build four additional atomic reactors in the Koodankulam nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu.

The deal will allow Russia to build more reactors at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant and plants in other parts of the country.

London, Dec 8 : Wikipedia users are enraged after many UK Internet providers decided to block a page on the online encyclopaedia showing an image of a naked girl.

The blocked page shows an album cover of German heavy metal band Scorpions.

Internet providers blocked the controversial page after online watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) warned them its picture might be illegal.

However, some volunteers who run Wikipedia claimed that the foundation had no authority to censor one of the web''s most popular sites.

Washington, Dec 8 : New dating of an important hominid site in Ethiopia has suggested that the road to advanced cognition in modern humans was a long and winding one, and they developed their greater intelligence gradually.

About 1.7 million years ago in Africa, Homo erectus, an ancestor of modern humans, started using large hand axes and cleavers.

This know-how spread to Asia and Europe and remained cutting-edge technology for well over a million years.

London, Dec 8 : Taking a major step towards creation of quantum networks, physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made a new record for the length of time that quantum information can be stored in and retrieved from an ensemble of very cold atoms.

Although the information remains usable for just milliseconds, even that short lifetime should be enough to allow transmission of data from one quantum repeater to another on an optical network.

The new record is of 7 milliseconds for rubidium atoms stored in a dipole optical trap, while the previous record for storage time was 32 microseconds- a difference of more than two orders of magnitude.

Washington, Dec 8 : A new study of redback spiders has revealed that tiny males are ten times better lovers than bigger counterparts – because they''re quicker to mature and faster on their feet.

The study shows the importance of maturation in defining mating and paternity success.

For the study, the researchers simulated two competitive contexts favouring the development of differently sized male redbacks (Latrodectus hasselti) in field enclosures.

London, Dec 8 : A new report has suggested that rich countries will have to help poorer nations develop alternatives to fossil fuels as well as cutting their own emissions if the world is to tackle climate change.

According to the Telegraph, the new report, from the Global Climate Network, said that rich countries would have to help poorer nations develop low carbon technology so that they are pumping out less carbon from coal or oil.

Washington, Dec 8 : Researchers in Finland say they have identified the first potential "biomarker" that could be used in development of a sputum test for early detection of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a condition that causes severe difficulty in breathing — most often in cigarette smokers.

Vuokko L. Kinnula and colleagues point out that until now, no disease marker for COPD currently exists, despite extensive efforts by scientists to find one.

Previous studies pointed to a prime candidate — surfactant protein A (SP-A), which has a major role in fighting infections and inflammation in the lung.

London, Dec 8 : It can withstand enemies’ attack, but a nuclear bunker failed to protect itself from the dreading effects of the financial credit crisis.

The auctioneers were forced to trim down more than 40,000 pounds from the asking price of the secure shelter underneath the Hampshire Downs despite its potential of converting into an eight-bedroom home, reports the Telegraph.

The 7,000 square feet nuclear bunker outside Twyford, near Winchester, which was priced at more than 300,000 pounds, is now up for sale for a price between 240,000 pounds and 260,000 pounds.

London, Dec 8 : Marine archaeologists have discovered a piece of string made out of honeysuckle, nettles or wild clematis dating back to the Stone Age.

The team led by Gary Momber of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology found the four-and-a-half inch long string in a pre-historic camp 30 feet below the surface, 200 yards off the coast of the Isle of Wight.

The tough stems of honeysuckle, nettles or wild clematis were twisted together.

The researchers had cut out small blocks of the sea floor for analysis after seeing the wooded remains of the settlement by chance.

The string was buried in one of them.

Melbourne, Dec 8 : Going through a heavily abbreviated SMS can take twice as long time and only saves the sender a few seconds of typing, says a new research.

The study led by University of Tasmania psychology lecturer Dr Nenagh Kemp has shown that many common abbreviations were hard to be deciphered or was misinterpreted.

She asked students to write as many abbreviations as possible in five minutes and then read a series of shortened messages.

London, Dec 9 : A new research has suggested that 3D laser scans of people’s faces could be a more strong option in spotting terrorists.

Security services around the world are devising software to match CCTV photos of faces with image archives, to catch known criminals and terrorists.

However, the technology struggles to overcome problems caused by variations in lighting and the position of people’s faces between photos.

London, Dec 9 : A new research has suggested that meteorite impacts during Earth’s early history could have created amino acids, which kick-started life on the planet.

Exactly how and when organic molecules appeared in abundance on the young Earth, leading to the origin of life about 4 billion years ago, has been unclear.

But, according to a report in New Scientist, a new research by Yoshihiro Furukawa at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and colleagues, suggests that meteor impacts could have created amino acids, the building blocks of life.

Washington, Dec 9 : The discovery of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet 63 light-years away has fuelled hopes for the detection of habitable exoplanets in the future.

According to a report in National Geographic News, Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that CO2 is a biomarker, a molecule associated with life as we know it.

This first discovery of the molecule on a far-flung planet, he said, is a step toward eventually finding biomarkers on smaller, more Earthlike worlds.

Washington, December 9 : A new study suggests that non-profit organizations should rely on the same strategies to attract netizens to their websites as online marketers, so that they may raise awareness of their “brand” and its aims and convert Internet users into donors.

Dave McMahon and Charla Griffy-Brown of the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, say that non-profit organisations can exploit Search Engine Marketing (SEM)—which involves focusing on how well a website can attract high ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of the main web search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.

Canberra, Dec 9 : Scientists have urged Australian consumers to eat more camel meat because the country’s one million-plus population of the animals is out of control, and is also wreaking environmental havoc.

According to a report in the website news. com. au, Murray McGregor, an agribusiness lecturer, said that a good way to bring down the number of camels was to eat them.

“Eat a camel today, I’ve done it,” Professor McGregor said. “It’s a bit like beef. It’s as lean as lean, it’s an excellent health food,” he added.

London, Dec 9 : A new study has suggested that earthquakes can set off volcanoes by shaking up molten rock like champagne in a bottle until they explode.

According to a report in The Times, researchers at the University of Oxford identified the champagne effect after analyzing records of volcanoes and earthquakes in southern Chile, the region where Charles Darwin first speculated on the likely link in 1835.

The link between volcanoes and earthquakes has long been suspected but the new research has provided the first statistical evidence.

The effects of an earthquake can be felt hundreds of miles from the epicentre and are powerful enough to wake dormant volcanoes.

Washington, Dec 9 : New analyses have suggested that climate change was responsible for the extinction of the cave bears, 27,800 years ago.

Weighing up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds), cave bears lumbered in and out of caves throughout Europe for tens of thousand years.

Then, for unknown reasons, they disappeared.

Scientists have long thought that the cave bears went extinct about 15,000 years ago. New analyses, however, suggest that these legendary animals actually vanished
13,000 years before that, and climate change was probably responsible.

London, Dec 9 : A team of scientists has devised a unique way of refueling aircraft, using a high-powered laser to recharge on-board batteries.

A fundamental problem with aircraft is the amount of fuel they have to carry. Designers are forced to make compromises to reduce fuel consumption and to squeeze the necessarily large fuel tanks into the craft.

All this drives up cost and reduces manoeuvrability.

One alternative is in-flight refuelling, but that can be logistically difficult as well as dangerous, requiring to aircraft to meet in mid-air and transfer liquid fuel via a flexible hose.

Washington, Dec 9 : In a new study, it has been found that oil spray can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.

Greenhouse gas emissions can potentially become a limiting factor in the development and sustainability of animal production and technologies are needed to mitigate pollutant gas emissions.

Oil spray has been used as a mitigation technique to reduce pollution from animal buildings. However, little is known about its effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists at Purdue University and the University of Missouri have investigated oil spray on air pollutant emissions from pig barns in northern Missouri.

Washington, Dec 9 : Scientists have identified two new species of extinct corals, which provide an important link between corals in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The corals - Isopora curcaoensis and Isopora ginsburgi, were found by Dr. Ann F. Budd from the University of Iowa and Dr. Donald McNeill of the University of Miami.

The new species was originally thought to be an elkhorn coral (genus Acropora), a species widely distributed throughout the Caribbean that was informally christened Acropora ginsburgi in 1995.

Washington, Dec 9 : Video sharing websites like YouTube face major problems dealing with proper labelling of videos and monitoring for copyright infractions. But now, a revolutionary technology has been developed that will help ward off these issue.

The breakthrough technology, developed by one student from the University of Toronto, will not only improve the efficiency of such websites but cut down on copyright infringement also.

Washington, Dec 9 : In an effort to improve the on-board entertainment and internet access enjoyed by train passengers, University of York researchers have developed a new technology that could not only offer internet and live media services on the move but will not be too harsh on your pocket as well.

With the advent of the new technology, the researchers have overcome two of the major technological challenges, which severely limit the services currently provided on trains.

Washington, Dec 9 : Research at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has led to better understanding of the behavior of clouds, which would help to make reliable predictions on climate change.

The behaviour of clouds is the great unknown quantity in current climate models. To make reliable predictions on climate change, more knowledge about clouds is thus essential.

Delft researcher Thijs Heus has tackled this issue with a combination of detailed computer simulations and airplane measurements.

He charted data including cloud speed, temperature and the ''life span'' of clouds to arrive at new observations.

Washington, Dec 9 : A new image from NASA''s Spitzer Space Telescope shows a turbulent star-forming region, where rivers of gas and stellar winds are eroding thickets of dusty material.

The image is of a stormy region, called M17, or the Swan nebula.

The picture provides some of the best examples yet of the ripples of gas, or bow shocks, that can form around stars in choppy cosmic waters.

"The stars are like rocks in a rushing river," said Matt Povich of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Washington, Dec 9 : The High Resolution Science Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) team, based at the University of Arizona (UA) in the US, has captured 362 three-dimensional images of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Other Mars-orbiting cameras have taken 3D views of Mars, but the HiRISE camera - the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet - can resolve features as small as one meter, or 40 inches, across.

London, December 9 : Researchers at Imperial College London claim that they have set a new record for concentrating the Sun’s light on to a solar cell with the aid of a transparent polymer plate.

They think that their solar concentrator sheets may help develop a technology that can result in vastly improved solar power capabilities at much cheaper cost.

Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are plates of plastic or glass that have solar cells mounted along their edges. They are coated with light-absorbing dye molecules.

When the molecules re-emit the light, it bounces through the plate by total internal reflection until it hits the solar cell.

Washington, Dec 10 : In an effort to combine the properties of plastics and metals, scientists have developed a composite material, which not only conducts electricity like metals but is also light and inexpensive like plastics.

The plastic-metal hybrids will be used in the very places where plastic components are equipped with printed circuit boards, for instance in cars or aircraft.

Till date, it was only possible via the roundabout route of punching and bending metal sheets in an elaborate process in order to integrate them in a component.

Washington, December 10 : A new chromium-free coating can help protect cars against rust, reveals new study.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Silicate Research ISC in Würzburg and for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Chemnitz, developed an alternative anti-corrosion method based on nanocomposites as against the long-standing chromium plating prohibited since 2007.

The boffins along with colleagues at the Institute for Corrosion Protection Dresden GmbH had submerged steel sheets into a coating sol, applied a power coating and exposed them to various tests to produce the new nanomaterials.

Washington, Dec 10 : A new research has determined that contrary to earlier projections, few developing countries will be able to afford more efficient technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades.

The study, by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado, warns that continuing economic and technological disparities will make it more difficult than anticipated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it underscores the challenges that poorer nations face in trying to adapt to global warming.

Many developing countries, such as Mexico, are failing to adapt technologies that are substantially more efficient and could result in reduced carbon dioxide emissions.

Washington, Dec 11 : Researchers in Nevada, US, are reporting that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks.

In the new study, Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi note that the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing that new energy source.

Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight, which is about as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil.

Washington, Dec 11 : The first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions, has suggested that natural sources like wind, water and the Sun are much better than biofuels, nuclear and coal for clean energy.

The evaluation was done by Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

London, Dec 11 : A team of scientists has theorized that nanoparticles from melting glaciers can help slow global warming, by trapping CO2 from the atmosphere.

According to a report in New Scientist, Rob Raiswell of the University of Leeds, UK and colleagues trained high-resolution microscopes on ice sampled from icebergs in the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic glaciers from which they are born.

They found nano-sized particles of iron, between five and 10 millionths of a millimetre across.

London, Dec 11 : Engineers in Israel are hoping to develop roads into power stations, by using crystals to harvest energy from passing vehicles.

According to a report in New Scientist, the crystals have been developed by Haim Abramovich at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in Israel.

He recommends placing piezoelectric crystals under the asphalt that convert vibration into electricity, which would help to harvest energy from passing vehicles.

Abramovich said that the crystals can produce up to 400 kilowatts from a 1-kilometre stretch of four-lane highway.

Washington, Dec 12 : Engineers at U. Va.''s Center for Biomechanics are creating a new "virtual" dummy, which will live entirely within computers and will be more realistic than any physical dummy ever subjected to a crash test.

For decades, automobile manufacturers have been crashing test dummies to gain insight to how various auto safety systems protect — or fail to protect — people during car accidents.

However, those dummies are made of plastic and steel, not tissue and bone. They can teach only so much.

Washington, Dec 12 : A team of scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the U. S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Pittsburgh has demonstrated a molecular chain reaction on a metal surface – a nanoscale process with sizable potential in areas from nanotechnology to developing information storage technology.

The researchers said that a single electron caused a self-perpetuating chain reaction that rearranged the bonds in 10 consecutive molecules positioned on a gold surface.

As each molecule''s original bond was broken by the reaction, the molecule rearranged itself to form a new molecule.

Washington, Dec 12 : Physicists at the MIT have built a calibration tool that will aid in the search for dark matter, by revealing when hypothetical particles are detected.

Several research projects are underway to try to detect particles that may make up the mysterious “dark matter”, believed to dominate the universe’s mass.

But the existing detectors have a problem.

They also pick up particles of ordinary matter - hurtling neutrons that masquerade as the elusive dark-matter particles the instruments are designed to find.

Washington, Dec 16 : The boundary between the Earth''s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes, observations made by NASA instruments onboard an Air Force satellite have shown.

The observations were made by the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI) instrument suite, which was launched aboard the U. S. Air Force''s Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite on April 16, 2008.

Washington, Dec 16 : A new model has revealed that one-third of all solar systems may contain super-Earths, which indicates that life may be abundant in the Universe.

Cold "Super-Earths", which are giant, "snowball" planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems, could potentially support some kind of life, they have found.

"We know there are a lot of super-Earths out there, and the next generation of telescopes will be even better at spotting them," said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University.

Washington, Dec 16 : Researchers from Tel Aviv University suggest that older fathers are likely to have boys with poor social abilities.

The study revealed that older dads are more likely to have boys with autism and lower IQs.

"There is a growing body of data showing that an advanced age of parents puts their kids at risk for various illnesses," said lead researcher Dr. Mark Weiser from TAU's Sackler School of Medicine.

"Some illnesses, such as schizophrenia, appear to be more common the older parents get. Doctors and psychologists are fascinated by this, but don't really understand it. We want to know how it works," he added.

London, Dec 16 : A team of astronomers have reported that a new camera is giving them the sensitivity they need to spot habitable extrasolar planets, which are nearly as small as Earth.

According to a report in Nature News, the team observed a planet - WASP-10b, which is around three times the mass of Jupiter orbiting the star WASP-10.

The team determined that the star is about 300 light years from Earth, and measured precisely how much the star dimmed as the planet passed in front of it.

Washington, Dec 16 : NASA has outlined its top ten science, exploration and discovery stories of 2008, the year in which the agency celebrated its 50th birthday.

The top ten accomplishments are:

Washington, Dec 16 : A new project, led by a University of Virginia (U. Va.) professor, is all set to survey more than 100,000 Milky Way stars, in an attempt to know more about the history of our galaxy.

The project, the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, or APOGEE, is one of four experiments of the new Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, using the astronomical facilities at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.

Washington, Dec 16 : New calculations have shown that eating goose eggs may help polar bears weather climate change, as it would provide the animals with an alternative source of food.

Polar bears, Ursus maritimus, are listed as a threatened species under the United States' Endangered Species Act and are classified as "vulnerable with declining populations" under IUCN's Red List.

The new calculations show that changes in the timing of sea-ice breakup and of snow goose nesting near the western Hudson Bay could provide at least some polar bears with an alternative source of food.

Washington, Dec 16 : Scientists at the California Institute of Technology, US, have observed one of the strongest solar flares of the past 30 years.

Solar flares are the most powerful explosions in the solar system. Packing a punch equal to a hundred million hydrogen bombs, they obliterate everything in their immediate vicinity.

London, December 16 : A probe by security experts has revealed that cyber criminals tend to work up a fortune by selling stolen Facebook profiles for an amount as low as 89p.

According to Trend Micro specialists, hackers break into social networking accounts to steal personal information of users to sell them off to criminal groups who then use the details to send "spam" messages to million others.

The wrong-doers tend to send an invitation to account holders to view videos or pictures of family and friends, which on being clicked allow access to the victims' computer, reports the Sun.

Geneva - The year so far has been marked by weather extremes across the planet and low levels of ice in the Arctic Sea, the World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday.

The overall ice volume in the sea during the melt season was the lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979. At the opposite pole, the Antarctic ozone hole was larger than in 2007.

San Francisco - Microsoft was forced to issue a rare emergency patch Wednesday for its Internet Explorer browser.

The software giant announced the move late Tuesday after numerous security experts advised people to switch to rival browsers until Microsoft fixed the problem.

The recently discovered flaw is considered critical. It allows attackers to take control of computers by steering them to infected websites without the users having to download anything.

Washington, December 17 (ANI): Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have joined forces with Portuguese scientists to create a pilot-scale device that will capture significantly more energy in ocean waves than existing systems.

The researchers say that their objective is to use such a device to power an electricity-generating turbine.

Chiang Mei, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has developed numerical simulations that can predict wave forces on a given device and the motion of the device that will result.

London, Dec 17 : Scientists have developed a bioelectronic sensor, the size of a postage stamp, which uses cell mitochondria to sniff out bombs and other explosives.

Common explosives detectors are not only expensive, but bulky and complex as well and thus become difficult for use in the field.

However, now the new sensor invented by Shelley Minteer and her colleagues at St Louis University in Missouri might reform the way detection of explosives is conducted.

Washington, Dec 17 : Scientists from Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh have found that tiny crystals found inside bacteria provide a magnetic compass to help them navigate through sediment to find the best food.

They believe that the research may provide vital clues explain biomagnetism - a phenomenon in which some birds, insects and marine life navigate using the magnetic field that encompasses the Earth.

The researchers focused their study on magnetotactic bacteria, which contain chains of magnetic crystals, called magnetosomes. They exist all over the globe, living in lake and pond sediments and in ocean coastal regions.

New Delhi, Dec 17 : Tejas, India's indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), has achieved a major milestone when its prototype landed at Leh air base in the high-altitude Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Tejas (LCA) programme reached a major milestone when the prototype vehicle PV-3 landed at Leh on December 13 this year at 1326 hours," Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) officials said on Tuesday.

London, Dec 18 : New statistical research has supported the theory that thirteen of the hottest years, since records of global temperatures began in 1880, have clustered in the last 17 years.

According to a report in New Scientist, new statistical research indicates that the recent glut of unusually hot years is incredibly unlikely to happen in a stable climate.

Eduardo Zorita of Germany's Institute for Coastal Research and colleagues calculated the probability of this happening in a range of scenarios.

Washington, Dec 18 : A new research has determined that ocean acidification could result in broader disruptions of biological processes in the oceans.

The research was conducted by Donald Potts, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US.

Ocean acidification is one of the side effects of the rising concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth''s atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Washington, Dec 18 : A new analysis by researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has found that global climate change could dramatically affect water supplies.

The research was conducted by Gene-Hua Crystal Ng, King Bhumipol, Professor Dennis McLaughlin, Professor Dara Entekhabi, from MIT, and Bridget Scanlon, a senior researcher at the University of Texas.

The analysis has found that the changes in groundwater may actually be much greater than the precipitation changes themselves.

Washington, Dec 18 : Scientists, environmental groups and policymakers are advocating the use of an ancient soil replenishment technique used by former inhabitants of the Amazon Basin, in the fight against global warming.

Former inhabitants of the Amazon Basin enriched their fields with charred organic materials known as biochar, and transformed one of the earth's most infertile soils into one of the most productive.

These early conservationists disappeared 500 years ago, but centuries later, their soil is still rich in organic matter and nutrients.

Washington, Dec 18 : Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, US, have described a method for using sugar-producing microalgae for making biofuel.

The researchers have explained a way to genetically modify the tiny organisms, so as to minimize the number of chlorophyll molecules needed to harvest light without compromising the photosynthesis process in the cells.

With this modification, instead of making more sugar molecules, the microalgae could be producing hydrogen or hydrocarbons.

Washington, Dec 18 : Embryonic stem cells could be a viable and effective alternative for testing drugs for dangerous side effects, according to a leading British researcher.

Christine Mummery, Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands, has predicted that what is currently a small and sparsely funded research area will boom in coming years under US President-elect Barack Obama, who is an ardent supporter of stem cell research.

Washington, Dec 19 : A new research, from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has indicated that the orientation of Stone Age graves at the Danish passage could have an astronomical explanation.

According to the research, the Danish passage graves are most likely oriented according to the path of the full moon, perhaps even according to the full moon immediately before a lunar eclipse.

There are many Stone Age graves in Denmark, where archaeologists estimate that around 40.000 large stone graves were built from around 3500 to 3000 BC.

Only about 500 of the large passage graves, called `giant tombs' are preserved today, but one of the great mysteries is their orientation in the landscape.

Washington, Dec 20 : A computer model has successfully reproduced the birth of two real tropical cyclones that formed in the Indian Ocean in December 2006 and January 2007.

The model, called the Nonhydrostatic ICosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM), was developed for the supercomputer Earth Simulator at JAMSTEC (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology).

London, Dec 20 : Engineers at the University of Nevada in the US have tested a new design for a flexible bridge that can bounce back after an earthquake.

According to a report in New Scientist, the engineers used three large shake tables to test a 33.5-metre-long, 181-tonne (200-ton) bridge sporting an exotic new design.

The bridge, a quarter-scale replica of its projected real-life size, was subjected to 10 seconds of shaking like that created by an earthquake of magnitude 8.0.

The concrete used in the bridge was reinforced with "smart" nickel titanium - Nitinol - a "shape-memory" alloy commonly used in bendable spectacle frames.

London, Dec 20 : In order to overcome problems of speed and range encountered with micro air vehicles, scientists have now developed a vertical-takeoff micro aircraft.

Micro air vehicles (MAVs) are uncrewed aircraft with a wingspan of 15 centimetres (5.9 inches) or less and are commonly used by the military or police forces for surveillance.

Most of the MAVs, just like a full-sized airplane, are controlled by conventional moving aerodynamic surfaces such as flaps.

Washington, Dec 20 : Using the controller from the popular Nintendo Wii gaming system, scientists from the Idaho National Laboratory, working with engineers from the U. S. Army, Foster-Miller, and iRobot, are developing novel ways to control military robots.

"If a soldier wants to find a bomb (with a robot), 95 percent of their attention has to be focused on the screen," Doug Few, an engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) working on the project, told Discovery News.

London, December 20 : The BBC has come up with a new version of the iPlayer that works with Mac and Linux computers.

The BBC, which had developed the service to extend its existing RealPlayer-based "Radio Player" and other streamed video clip content, had come under fire for producing a version that only worked with Microsoft''s Windows XP.

The online service, that had gone live on 25 December 2007, used to use Microsoft''s digital rights management (DRM) system to enforce viewing restrictions, reports the Telegraph.

Washington, December 20 : A Cornell researcher has adopted a new way to study exactly how birds communicate-recording their songs and then playing them back to other birds of the same species.

Behavioural ecologist Sandra Vehrencamp records bird songs in Santa Rosa National Park, Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

She says that her aim is to decode which elements of bird songs enable them to communicate about mating and reproduction, territorial boundaries, age, and even overall health.

London, Dec 23 : Surfing the net has become a lot more easier since wireless internet has come into being, and now Wi-Fi has rightly topped the poll for the greatest technological advance of the last decade, according to a survey.

With 35.5 percent votes, Wi-Fi has beaten Sky+, Sat Navs, iPods and Blackberries to win the poll conducted by a leading gadget magazine.

In the survey by `Stuff' magazine, the readers were asked to choose the greatest technological innovation of the past ten years.

More than a third voted for Wireless Internet.

New Delhi, Dec 24 : India''s Space Research Organisation (ISRO) today said that the design for the country''s second moon mission Chandrayaan II is ready.

Talking to the mediapersons here on the sidelines of a function organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to felicitate the members of the Chandrayaan I team, ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair said that it is all set for a 2012 launch.

"Chandrayaan II, the design is complete, we hope by 2012, we will be ready for the launch," he added.

The launch of Chandrayaan-2, approved by the Indian government will include a rover that will land on the moon.

London, Dec 26 : Chinese scientists have devised new low cost platinum-free fuel cells that promises to offer cheaper green power.

These cells use alkali membrane and may make it possible to replace the expensive platinum metal with low cost nickel catalyst.

In a standard fuel cell, a platinum catalyst at one electrode breaks down hydrogen into protons and electrons.

The protons pass through a proton exchange membrane to a second electrode where they react with oxygen to produce water. The electrons are syphoned off as electric current.

Washington, Dec 26 : Physicists at the University of Toronto (U of T) have cracked the mystery behind the strange and uncannily well-ordered hexagonal columns found at such popular tourist sites as Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway and California's Devil's Postpile, using water, corn starch, and a heat lamp.

"The size of the columns, which varies from site to site between a few inches and a few yards, is primarily determined by the speed at which lava from a volcanic eruption cools," said U of T physics professor Stephen Morris.

Cooling lava sometimes forms strange column-shaped formations with a remarkable degree of order.

The most famous of these hexagonal columns are found at the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.

New Delhi, Dec 27 : China has officially started construction of a Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), which when completed, would be the world's largest radio telescope.

The dish-like telescope, as large as 30 football fields, will stand in a region of typical Karst depressions in Guizhou Province in China, when it's completed in 2013.

Chinese scientists and officials selected Dawodang, Pingtang County as the site, where a Karst valley will match the shape of the huge bowl-like astronomical instrument.

London, Dec 29 : In what is being considered as an embarrassing series of incidents for the British Government, nearly 3,000 Government computers have been nicked or reported lost since 2002, along with other electronic equipments.

This means that the government has lost a laptop every single day over the course of seven years

According to a report in The Sun, the huge haul includes 1,774 laptops, plus a further 1,035 large desktop computers.

Washington, Dec 30 : NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity are all set complete the fifth anniversaries of their memorable landings on Mars in January 2009.

While Spirit had landed safely on Mars on January 3, 2004, Opportunity touched down on the surface of the Red Planet 21 days later.

"The American taxpayer was told three months for each rover was the prime mission plan," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Berlin, Dec 30 : The world is gearing up to celebrate 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) has been launched by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under the theme, "The Universe, yours to discover".

Thousands of IYA2009 events are described on the national websites, as well as on astronomy2009. org.

The official IYA2009 Opening Ceremony will take place in Paris on 15 and 16 January 2009.

London, Dec. 31 : Five of the world''s deadliest conventional weapons have been revealed, and according to Fox News, some of them are terrifying, while others are silent but very effective.

All five are part of the U. S. Armed Forces'' arsenal. Some date back to World War II in concept, but they are still lethal and continue to be used in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fearsome five are:

London, Jan 1 : Housewives in Britain spend almost half their free time online - more than any other social group in the world, a new study has shown.

The survey of more than 27,000 web users in 16 countries has shown that the Chinese spend the largest fraction of their leisure time online. However, UK housewives spend even more than China''s average - 47percent.

Germans are the most likely to meet someone in real life that they first met online; more than three quarters have done so.

London, Jan 1 : Thanks to an innovation from British engineers, cement, a vast source of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2), could be transformed into a means of stripping the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

According to a report in the Guardian, Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based Novacem, made the invention.

The new environment friendly formulation means the cement industry could change from being a significant emitter to a significant absorber of CO2, said Vlasopoulos.

Making the 2 billion tonnes of cement used globally every year pumps out 5 percent of the world's CO2 emissions, which is more than the entire aviation industry.

London, Jan 3 : New evidence, uncovered by oceanographers, is all set to challenge one of the most long-standing theories about how species evolve in the oceans.

Most scientists believe that allopatric speciation, where different species arise from an ancestral species only after breeding populations have become physically isolated from each other, is the dominant mode of speciation both on land and in the sea.

The key to this theory is the existence of some kind of physical barrier that operates to restrict interbreeding (gene flow) between populations, so that, given enough time, such populations diverge until they are considered separate species.

Washington, Jan 5: The face of war is all set to transform, with American armed robots predicted to patrol on the battle ground in a matter of few years, killing without any remorse.

According to a report in the Washington Post, this advancement in American military prowess is a fact that comes under Moore's law.

Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, noticed nearly half a century ago that computing power seemed to be doubling about every two years.

Washington, Jan 5 : Scientists have determined that biofuel development is shifting from soil to sea, specifically to marine algae.

Referred to as "green bullet", marine algae is considered as science and society''s best hope for a clean bioenergy source that will help loosen broad dependence on fossil fuel, counteract climate warming, and power the vehicles of the future.

London, Jan 6 : Scientists from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) have devised an ultra-hard vehicle armour with an array of holes to protect military personnel.

According to a report by BBC News, details of the steel armour, called Super Bainite, were outlined during a seminar at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Peter Brown from the MoD team claims that the array of holes has given the armour a protective advantage, as the perforations help deflect incoming projectiles.

London, Jan 6 : Rumours are abuzz that Apple may launch a ''big screen'' version of its popular iPod touch device to make it even easier to surf the Internet and watch movies.

A report from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, a popular technology industry blog, says that Apple has developed an iPod touch device with a 7- or 9-inch display.

Sources have told that blog that prototypes of the device are already being shown to Apple's manufacturing partners in Asia, reports the Telegraph.

The gadget would enable users to listen to music, watch films and surf the Internet on a more comfortably sized screen than the 3.5in display currently used.

London, Jan 6 : Scientists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, US, are preparing to fire the most powerful laser in history at a tiny target on the ground, in order to understand what conditions are like at the centre of the Earth.

According to a report in the Telegraph, the laser, which is as powerful as 10 billion lightbulbs, would alter the composition of the soil sample, making it represent the conditions at the core of the planet.

On Monday, the Twitter accounts of US president-elect Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears and other prominent figures were hacked which further led to sending of fake messages from their accounts to the micro-blogging service.

It was confirmed by Twitter founder Biz Stone, in a post on the official company blog that a total of 33 Twitter accounts had been hacked including those of Obama and Rick Sanchez, a CNN television anchor with tens of thousands of followers.

HTC, a leading Tiwan based mobile company has announced the introduction of its HTC Touch HD handset, which is basically an internet and entertainment focused mobile.

This newly launched sleek looking gizmo comes packed with 5 mega pixel camera that not only offers unparalleled video viewing experience but also has an auto focus capability.

The handset also features 3.5mm headphone jack for audio-out. Through this jack users can connect the mobile to any headset of their choice or other audio equipment.

London, Jan 8: Chemical engineers in the US have created the world''s smallest working fuel cell, which may lead to the development of environmentally-friendly portable gadgets in future.

At just 3 millimetres across, future versions of the tiny hydrogen-fuelled power pack will be able to store more energy than batteries and that too in the same space.

Still, it's easier to make batteries at the small scale than the pumps and control electronics of a fuel cell.

In fact, small pumps tend to utilise more energy than they generate.

London, Jan 8: The safest way to stop fraudsters stealing information from old computer hard drives is to "destroy the PC with a hammer", a consumer magazine has said.

The computing magazine Which? recovered 22,000 "deleted" files from eight computers purchased on eBay.

They then used specialist software to recover files that the original owner had deleted, reports the Daily Express.

Sarah Kidner, editor of Which? Computing, warned that the risk of becoming a victim was increasing.

London, Jan 8 : A team of scientists has observed a quantum effect that causes objects to repel one another, which could be used to lubricate future nanomachines.

According to a report in New Scientist, the team detected the weak repulsive force when they brought together a thin sheet of silica and a small gold-plated bead, about half the diameter of a human hair.

The force is an example of the Casimir effect, generated by all-pervasive quantum fluctuations.

London, Jan 8 : Samsung Electronics has launched a new line of LCD televisions, which is being hailed as the world''s slimmest television ever created.

The wafer thin television includes a LCD (liquid crystal display) screen as well as an LED (light emitting diode) backlighting system.

In the face of global economic downturn, the South Korean company is hoping to capitalize on consumer interest with its ultra slim TVs, reports the Telegraph.

A prototype of the new flat-panel television is to be displayed during the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which opens on Thursday.

Sydney, Jan 8 : Climate porn, flashpacking, toxic debt, wellness tourism and fanta pants-these are just some of the new words and phrases that have made it to the Macquarie Dictionary''s online edition.

According to the editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, Susan Butler, there was a big influence of America quite large on the list of words she selected, owing to the recent elections in the country.

"There were two big things that happened in 2008. One you can''t use because it''s a proper noun, and that''s Obama. The second was subprime," The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Butler as saying.

London, Jan 8 : To guard New Delhi against any possible nuclear threats in the future, the United States is planning to sell a missile shield system to India.

The US is in preliminary talks with India over the sale of missile shield systems, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

Citing officials at the US Embassy in New Delhi, the Financial Times said talks took place mainly at a scientific and technical level, and US defence officials had conducted computer simulations with their Indian counterparts.

With the motive to help New Delhi face any nuclear threats from Pakistan and other "volatile" countries in the region, the US and India are engaged in talks over sale of missile shield systems which is also a part of their overall strategic partnership.

The media reports which quoted unnamed US diplomats said, "The preliminary talks took place mainly at a scientific and technical level and American defense officials had conducted computer simulations with their Indian counterparts."

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has approached Union Law ministry to get legal aid on the issue of increasing base price for 3G and broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum allocation.

Interestingly, the telecom department is not is the favor of increasing base price of 3G spectrum as it can discourage companies to participate in the auction process. Low participation by companies may decrease competitiveness that can lead to significant losses to state exchequer.

London, Jan 14 : Microsoft has warned computer users against downloading the latest test version of Windows, for it might harm their computers.

The firm today released a "beta" version of Windows 7, which allows expert users to try the product and highlight any glitches.

However, owing to the soaring demands for the new version, Microsoft has put a 2.5 million limit on the number of copies available until January 24.

And today, the firm has made it clear that the product is not meant for every user, but is only aimed at computer experts.

London, Jan 15: While all of us have experienced surprises in our lives, scientists have now created a computer model that has actually defined it-surprise is a change in expectation caused by the arrival of new data.

Making use of a rather aptly named unit of measurement- the "wow"- Pierre Baldi at the University of California, Irvine, and Laurent Itti at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles developed the model while investigating human attention.

According to a popular 1950s theory, what is unknown catches more of our attention till the time we understand it completely, for example our attention should hover over intricate patterns longer than over a plain surface.

Washington, Jan 15 : NASA has successfully completed its third round of testing for a technology development engine that may help astronauts to safely return to the surface of the Moon.

The goal of these tests is to reduce risk and advance technology for a reliable and robust rocket engine that could enable America''s next moon landing.

The tests by Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne in West Palm Beach, Florida, helped gather data on this concept engine that might play a role in the next stage of human exploration of the moon.

The goal of a lunar lander descent engine is to slow the vehicle so astronauts can land safely.

Prague - The European Union's plan for a new database to monitor the fingerprints and photographs of people entering the bloc has already cost more than double its budget, experts said at a meeting of EU interior ministers on Thursday.

And the project was so far behind schedule that a crisis was looming, the ministers told the press at the informal talks in Prague.

Experts at the meeting estimated that the second-generation Schengen Information System (SIS II), originally expected to cost 23 million euros (30 million dollars), had already cost between 60 and 80 million euros, diplomats told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

London, January 16 : A team of Japanese researchers says that it has designed an Iron Man-style robotic suit that can give even the most infirm farmer new-found strength.

Project leader Shigeki Toyama, a robotics professor at The Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, describes the prototype robot suit as the latest technological advance designed to assist Japan''s rapidly ageing farmers.

"I have been working on this for about 10 years now because few young people want careers in agriculture now and older farmers need help to do their work," the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

London, Jan 17 : Ultrasound canes and voice-enabled GPS devices that help blind and partially sighted people in navigation may soon be history, for scientists have created a new intelligent fingertip ''eye''.

The device may change how such people interact with their environment.

London, Jan 17 : British and American helicopters pilots on the frontline in Afghanistan are to get a new "super ears" device that helps them dodge enemy bullets that could save hundreds of troops' lives.

Dozens of helicopters have been shot down by small arms fire in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the new Hostile Fire Indicator will be a major advance in protecting the aircraft.

Bangalore, Jan. 19 : Global IT company Mindtree Limited announced its results today for the third quarter ended December 31, 2008 as approved by its Board of Directors.

The company announced that its software revenues had grown by 16.6 percent Quarter over Quarter (QoQ) and 93.4 percent Year over Year (YoY) to Rs 3,638 Million.

In rupee terms, EBITDA for the quarter was 30.5 percent against 27.8 percent in Q2 2008-09 and 16.8 percent in Q3 2007-08. This reflects a QoQ growth of 28 percent and a YoY growth of 251.6 percent, a company statement said.

http://www.topnews.in/files/BrahMos.jpg " alt="BrahMos " title="BrahMos Missile" width="172" height="135" align="left" />New Delhi, Jan 20 : In a move to assure its accuracy for future battles, the Army, on Tuesday, tested the land-attack version of BrahMos supersonic cruise missile near Pokhran in Rajasthan.

The test was declared as successful, having met all the parameters.

Earlier, on December 18, an air-breathing missile, with a strike range of 290-km, was tested for the first time from a vertical launcher fitted on a moving warship in the Bay of Bengal.

The government inducted the first battery of the BrahMos land-attack cruise missile (LACM) in July 2007.

Mumbai, Jan 22, : Indian Naval Ship Trishul, a state-of-the-art multi-role Stealth Frigate is now affiliated with one of the most decorated infantry regiments of the Indian Army, Jat Regiment.

Commanding Officer of INS Trishul, Captain Ajendra Bahadur Singh and Brigadier RK Sharma, Commandant of the JAT Regimental Centre, signed the agreement of Affiliation.

Rear Admiral Surinder Pal Singh Cheema, Flag Officer Commanding Western Fleet and Lieutenant General BS Nagal, Colonel of the JAT Regiment were present during the occasion.

For all the users looking for affordable and compact solution for portable storage, Transcend has good news.

Transcend has come out with its latest launch of the stylish SSD18M 1.8-inch SSD, which you should opt for since it would be quieter and also it will not use as much power.

London, Jan 23: Not sure that the security guards in your office would be able to protect you in case of an invasion? Well, then get ready for "robocop"-a prototype security android equipped with heat sensors that can detect intruders and armed with a net to hurl over suspects.

Developed by a Japanese robot maker Tmsuk Co in collaboration with security firm Alacom Co, the T-34 moves on four wheels at a speed of 10 kmh.

The robocop can be controlled by a person who can see real-time images of its location through video link to a security centre or even a mobile phone.

Washington, January 26 : A laser-based system called LightLane, which can help keep cyclists safe from fast moving vehicles, is being proposed as one of the newest technologies that can improve that morning commute.

The system clearly mark, in bright red lights, where car lanes end and bike lanes begin, helping keep cyclists safe even at night when reflective devices don''t quite cut it.

Second top new technology in the same field is for the benefit of commuters who have to choose between breakfast and catching the bus, reports Fox News.

London, January 26 : Science experts have predicted that X-Ray vision and Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks may be among some of the inventions that will become part of everyday life by 2039.

Compiled by News Scientists experts, the list of predicted inventions also includes an affordable and readily-available jet pack, like that used by James Bond in the film Thunderball.

It would allow users to travel short distances quickly and to avoid roads.

The experts believe that X-Ray vision's realisation could be possible because of an extention of existing research on ultrasound. They say that it would allow people to see through walls.

Berlin, Jan 27 : The results of a recently conducted study by scientists have indicated that climate change can lead to enhanced grass productivity.

The study, by researchers at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ), the University of Bayreuth and the Helmholtz Center in Munich, Germany, has found that more frequent freeze-thaw cycles in winter can increase biomass production.

For their experiment at the Ecological-Botanical Garden of the University of Bayreuth, the researchers installed underground heating on their plots, thereby enabling five additional thawing periods to take place in the winter of 2005/2006.

Washington, Jan. 29 : A new study published in The American Naturalist suggests that mammals that hibernate or that hide in burrows are less likely to turn up on an endangered species list.

The study''s authors -- Dr. Lee Hsiang Liow of the University of Oslo and Mikael Fortelius of the University of Helsinki - claimed that the ability of such "sleep-or-hide" animals to buffer themselves from changing environments may help them avoid extinction.

In the study, Liow and his colleagues wanted to see if this trend holds for mammals living today.

Vienna/New Delhi  - India is set to sign its nuclear inspection agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday, bringing the country a step closer to enlarging its nuclear power sector, a diplomat said Thursday in Vienna.

Nuclear exporting countries decided last September to supply India, even though the country has not signed the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, on the condition that its civilian nuclear facilities come under IAEA controls.

Madikeri, Jan 31 : The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to establish 15 weather forecasting units by next month at a cost of 20 lakh rupees.

Addressing the media in Madikeri in Karnataka on Saturday, Meteorology Programme Director of ISRO T G K Murthy informed, that the organisation is searching for a suitable place where the units could be set up to help farmers in the district monitor daily weather through a satellite.

ISRO owns 750 forecasting units across the country and 600 units have been set up by the central government.

Brussels/San Francisco  - Academics and armchair explorers were as of Monday offered a unique insight into the world's seas through a new release of Google Earth, which now also features satellite imagery, photos and videos of the planet's oceans.

The 5.0 version of the popular downloadable software was launched in San Francisco. The project was also presented in a number of European cities, including Brussels, where the European Commission is contributing by providing its own marine data.

London, Feb 4 : Scientists from National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have developed a novel speech prediction software that can complete half-formed words or sentences.

The new software looks fragments of words and other signs of hesitation such as filler sounds that Japanese speakers use when searching for their next phrase, just as English people use "um" and "er".

"Although the concept of completion is widely used in text-based interfaces, there have been no reports of completion being effectively applied to speech," New Scientist quoted the researchers as saying.

London, Feb 4 : Scottish scientists have come a step closer to making the use of silicon chips for repairing damaged tissue a reality.

The team from University of Edinburgh have taken the conventional silicon chip design and used it to grow neurons - the basic cells of the human nervous system.

It is believed that the new technology would soon be used to make chips to replace damaged nerve or muscle fibre.

During the chip manufacturing process, researchers printed patterns on the smooth silicon surface.

San Francisco  - Google announced a new mapping feature Wednesday that allows people's locations to be featured on Google maps in 27 countries. While the new application could be helpful in locating friends, or for parents keeping track of their teenagers, it also raises serious privacy issues, experts say.

The new feature, called Latitude, allows people-tracking via the internet and smartphones such as Blackberry, Google Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia. It will soon be available via the iPhone.

Berlin - Germany factory orders plummeted by a hefty 6.9 per cent in December, the Economics and Technology Ministry said Thursday, as the global economic crisis tightened its grip on Europe's biggest economy. The seasonally adjusted fall in the nation's key industrial orders in December was far more than the 2.5 per cent that analysts had forecast and represented the 12th consecutive monthly fall in German order books.

The decline in December followed a revised 5.3 per cent drop in November.

London, Feb 06 : Brit UFO experts went into orbit on Thursday in search of a `Thunderbird', which was recently photographed flying high above Bournemouth.

The picture was taken by a professional photographer named Mark Wild.

The mystery craft, bright orange-red like Thunderbird 3, was caught in a head-on shot on camera hovering above the resort on the Dorset coast.

The stunning snap emerged on the day when it was revealed that a dossier made public by the Ministry of Defence showed UFO sightings doubled last year.

Excited alien-spotters hailed the picture as one of the best they had ever seen.

Washington, Feb 6 : Large organisations can now save up to 13,000 pounds in electricity costs each month, all thanks to PowerDown, a computer programme that automatically shuts down systems after usage.

Systems experts at University of Liverpool embarked upon the idea of developing the software after realising that universities with PC centres in 24-hour libraries could be losing more than one million hours of unused computer power each month.

They found that 1,600 library-based PC''s alone were using 20,000 kW each week unnecessarily, which make up for approximately 2,400 pounds in current electricity prices.

And, to date, PowerDown has recovered 24 million hours of PC inactivity within the University.

London, February 6 : Materials scientists at Pennsylvania State University in University Park have successfully used sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water vapour into a range of fuels faster than ever before.

Lead researcher Craig Grimes has revealed that his team used hollow titania (titanium dioxide) nanotubes-around 135 nanometres wide and a tenth of a millimetre long-to catalyse the reaction.

BK Modi-promoted HotSpot has launched 'Mobi SafeGuard', a unique, all-inclusive warranty for mobile handsets in the domestic market. However, the facility becomes applicable, only when purchased with new handsets.

The company official stated that Mobi SafeGuard will covers repair of all kinds of handset faults including liquid and physical damage for a 2 year period.

In addition, the facility also provides a 2-year extended warranty that adds to the average life of the phone, and moreover if the handset is not repairable, the company will provide a refund equivalent to 50% of the existing market value of the particular mobile handset model.

The cost slab for Mobi Safe Guard will be as under:-

Reliance Communications, part of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, has finally launched its GSM services in over 50 towns and more than 5,000 villages in Jammu and Kashmir.

With the launch, the subscribers in J&K can now experience best-in-class telephony services at the most friendly price points, including local calling and SMS, STD, ISD, roaming and Value -Added Services.

Washington - Windows 7 - with its commendable performance improvements - may be on the horizon. But for now, most of us have to live with Windows Vista, which can make even the fastest computer seem slow.

But you don't have to put up with Vista's sluggishness without a fight. In fact, most of what ails Vista when it comes to performance can be remedied by adjusting some settings and eliminating some features.

And the good news: The whole process need not take more than half an hour. Afterwards, you'll be rewarded a computer that feels a lot faster.

---Turn off window animation.

Washington, Feb 7: A brewing company in the US is adapting a new system that will make its own high-quality ethanol fuel from discarded beer yeast.

According to a report in Live Science, the company, known as the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., in Chico, California, has developed the new system, in collaboration with E-Fuel Corporation.

The company will start testing the system in the second quarter of this year, and hopes to move to full-scale ethanol production in third quarter.

"This has the potential to be a great thing for the environment and further our commitment to be becoming more energy independent," said Ken Grossman, founder and president, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

London, Feb 9 : It's the CEOs who are responsible for any data that has leaked because of unprotected networks in offices, say technology experts.

In order to prevent the network from viruses and hacker attacks, most companies insist their computers are "locked down" so that employees can''t run unauthorised software or CD and DVD content.

But the same rule doesn't apply to the senior leaders of a company.

"But woe betide the lowly IT director that would inconvenience the CEO with such restrictions," New Scientist magazine quoted Glenn Zimmerman, a technology expert with the Pentagon''s cyberspace task force, as saying.

Washington, Feb 11: Hate waiting for your bus? Take heart, for two University of Washington students have developed a new tool that can allow you to keep a track of the vehicle using a cell phone, iPhone or computer.

OneBusAway, created by Brian Ferris, a UW doctoral student in computer science and Kari Watkins, a UW doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering since a year, already helps bus riders in Seattle to keep tabs on their buses.

OneBusAway has processed 20,000 automated phone calls since June, and the Web site gets an average of 1,000 hits a day.

People have found out about the tool on blogs, from stickers posted at a few UW campus bus stops, from a mention in a Seattle magazine and by word-of-mouth.

Taipei  - Taiwan on Wednesday lent its support to the proposed merger of Japan's top producer of computer chips - Elpida Memory Inc - with three Taiwan firms, but said details are still being discussed.

Economics Minister Yin Chi-ming made the statement to the Central News Agency (CNA) after Japanese press reported that Elpida and the three Taiwan chip makers would clink the deal Wednesday.

Los Angeles  - A law firm has released details of what was supposed to be a confidential 65-million-dollar payoff by Facebook to plaintiffs who claimed the social networking site was based on their ideas.

The payment was made by Facebook last year to smaller rival ConnectU, which had accused Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, a fellow Harvard University graduate, of stealing their ideas to create his site. The ConnectU founders claimed to have hired Zuckerberg while all were students at Harvard University to create a college dating site.

The ongoing world financial crisis impacted PC sales with leading computer manufacturers Intel and AMD estimated about 40 per cent decline in PC sales in the quarter ended December 31, 2008.

Earlier, Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (MAIT) and IDC forecasted steep decline in PC sales, clearly due to decline in demand in IT segment under the impact of global slowdown.

Bhubaneswar, Feb 12, : Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh on Thursday missed the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bhubaneswar in Orissa's Khorda District.

Singh could not come and the ceremony was held in his absence at Kansapada.

IIT, Bhubaneswar is among the eight new IITs that are to established in the country by the Human Resource Development Ministry.

Patni Computer Systems announced financial results, reporting 9 per cent decline in net profit, for the period ended December 31, 2008.

Patni's net stood at Rs 483.01 crore in the reporting period, due to decline in demand in Information Technology segment under the impact of global slowdown, as compared to Rs 483.63 crore in the same period last year.

Patni Computer Chairman and CEO, Mr. Narendra K Patni said, "The effect of the global meltdown has been more than expected for everyone and this is impacting our business in the short run."

Indian public sector undertaking Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Italian defence company Selex Galileo and Astra Microwave Products, a Hyderabad based company, have signed memorandum of understandings (MoU) for cooperation and sharing their expertise in the fields of electronic warfare and microwave components.

Munich, Feb 13 : The latest image by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has detected strong winds and powerful radiation coming from an armada of massive stars in the Carina Nebula.

The large and beautiful image displays the full variety of this impressive skyscape, spattered with clusters of young stars, large nebulae of dust and gas, dust pillars, globules, and adorned by one of the Universe's most impressive binary stars.

It was produced by combining exposures through six different filters from the Wide Field Imager (WFI), attached to the 2.2 m ESO/MPG telescope at ESO''s La Silla Observatory, in Chile.

New Delhi, Feb 13 : The wreckage of US and Russian satellites that collided over Siberia poses a threat to Chinese satellites in orbit, but the latter's space plan will proceed as scheduled.

A privately owned US communications spacecraft collided with a defunct Russian military satellite about 800 km above northern Siberia at 4:55 pm GMT on Tuesday, the China Daily reported.

The 560-kg US satellite, of Iridium Holdings LLC, was launched in 1997 and the Russian Cosmos-2251, weighing almost a ton, was sent in space in 1993.

London, February 17: Techies have come up with a super console that can read original formats of every computer game ever unveiled.

Experts at the University of Portsmouth, along with assistance from across Europe and America, have invented KEEP that can save a huge amount of digital information including both classics and new games.

The 2-million-pound console has been expected to contain, in 2010, the equivalent of 18 million times the information in all the books ever written, all with a single click, reports the Daily Star.

Dr Janet Delve said: "People don't think twice about saving files digitally, from snapshots taken on camera phone to national or regional archives.

Bangalore, Feb 17 : IT major Infosys Technologies on Tuesday announced that it has set up a fund `Infosys Science Foundation', for awarding outstanding achievements in various fields.

This foundation would be funded by a corpus of 210.5 million rupees, contributed by the firm''s board members and an annual grant from Infosys Technologies Limited.

The trust would honour an annual award of five million rupees to the countrymen for their exceptional contribution in the arena of physical and mathematical sciences, engineering, life science and social sciences and economics.

Washington, Feb 18 : NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will seek water ice on Moon, is enroute from Northrop Grumman's facility in Redondo Beach, California, to the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for a spring launch.

The satellite's primary mission is to search for water ice on the moon in a permanently shadowed crater near one of the lunar poles.

LCROSS is a low-cost, accelerated-development, companion mission to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO.

Washington, Feb 18 : Scientists undertook a study on a 5-day space mission on the shuttle Columbia, which showed sweet potato can regenerate its roots in microgravity.

The study was undertaken by Desmond G. Mortley and colleagues from the Center for Food and Environmental Systems for Human Exploration of Space, G. W. Carver Agricultural Experiment Station, and the Kennedy Space Center.

Seeds of several crops have been grown in microgravity, but this was the first test for plants grown from cuttings.

Cuttings grow roots faster than do seeds, and sweetpotato cuttings regenerate very easily.

The domestic abuse advocates are getting really angry about the latest technology, which eliminates anonymous callers by exposing their phone numbers and sometimes even their addresses, as they are of the viewpoint that the product may put victims at risk.

The basic aim of TrapCall, which was launched Tuesday, was to unblock and reveal callers' identities and numbers even after individuals have tried to block the information.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, HTC and Vodafone announced the second major Google Android phone and the audience even were able to receive a demo of the HTC Magic.

The new phone dubbed as Magic has a 3.2-inch, 320-by-480 screen, and is all-touch-screen device with a track ball similar to the one on the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. The phone also features a 3.2-megapixel camera, a built-in compass and GPS.

If adhered to HTC, "The Magic runs on a 528-MHz Qualcomm processor, has 3G and Wi-Fi, and its 3G radio absolutely, and positively does not work at all in North America."

Wellington - Internet users staged a protest outside the New Zealand Parliament Thursday to draw attention to an amendment to the country's copyright laws due to come into effect next week.

The change instructs internet-service providers to block online access to anyone accused of repeatedly flouting copyright regulations by illegally downloading films and music whether they have been convicted or not.

London, Feb. 18 : Despite Pakistan's repeated denials of its airbases being used by US Predators to hit suspected militant outfits inside its territory, a Google Earth image has revealed that its airbases are indeed being put to such use by the US security forces.

According to a report published in the Times of London, a 2006 Google Earth image of the Shamsi airbase, which is situated 200 miles southwest of Quetta, shows three predator drones outside a hanger at the end of the runway.

London, Feb 20 : Scientists have found a unique way of harnessing energy - hamsters fitted with electricity generating jackets!

The jackets are strapped to the animals as they run on their cage wheels, capturing the biomechanical energy they release as they exercise.

Developed by Dr Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia University''s Nano Research Group, the jackets are fitted with wires plugged into a nanogenerator that produces energy when they are bent and stretched.

The study showed that one hamster could produce small amounts of AC power - around one twentieth of the output of an AA battery.

IT major Vishal Information Technologies is planning to issue shares in the international market in order to satisfy its increasing fund requirements amid tight conditions of financial market under the impact of global slowdown.

The company's Board of Directors has already approved Global Depository Receipts (GDRs), fixing price of underlying equity shares at Rs 320 a GDR, as per its filing before the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The firm has decided to issue 6 new shares for every GDR after conversion, hoping substantial increase in earning to overcome its financial needs.

Washington, Feb 21 : Hopes for the discovery of Atlantis by Google Ocean have been shattered, with the criss-crossing lines near the Canary Islands that were presumed by scientists to be a `grid of streets', turning out be boat mapping lines.

Atlantis is believed to be an island civilization sunk by an earthquake and floods around 9,700BC - nearly 12,000 years ago.

Google Ocean captured an image showing a grid that features a rectangular perimeter of the seabed, a possible location for Atlantis.

This particular region, 620 miles off the west coast of Africa near the Canary Islands, is a location for the legendary continent seemingly suggested by the ancient philosopher Plato.

Washington, Feb 21 : Scientists are using the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which they call "Einstein''s telescope", as a scientific "instrument" in their quest to determine the makeup of the universe.

The University of Chicago''s Evalyn Gates''s new book, "Einstein''s Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe", explains how it works.

Although based on Albert Einstein''s general theory of relativity, the effect is easily demonstrated.

London, Feb 23 : Bringing robots closer to humans, scientists have now unveiled humanoid and dog robots that develop unique personalities when they interact with humans in a "robot nursery".

Created by Lola Canamero from the University of Hertfordshire, these robots have learnt social tricks and were unveiled at the Science Museum in London this week.

Now, the researchers are also planning to make an emotional robotic head called Erwin, which communicates using basic facial expressions.

Tehran - Feb. 23 : Iran''s first nuclear power plant is all set to undergo a critical series of tests beginning Wednesday before it starts its full-scale operation later this year, Iranian state radio has aired.

Bushehr plant is a symbolic facet of Iran''s controversial nuclear program. The United States, Israel and some European nations had charged Iran for trying to produce nuclear weapons. However, Iranian leaders have maintained that the country''s nuclear ambitions are peaceful, the Washington Post reports.

Wellington  - Representatives of New Zealand's recording industry and internet service providers are negotiating a compromise copyright agreement after the government postponed a controversial new law, according to news reports on Tuesday.

The law, which instructs internet service providers to block online access to anyone accused of repeatedly flouting copyright by illegally downloading films and music, whether they have been convicted or not, was to have taken effect on Saturday.

Google admitted on Tuesday a technical snag paralysed its email service for the last few days. The problem aggravated on Tuesday as thousands of users, unable to log in, flooded the internet with panic messages. "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting several users," Google said on its support site which is accessed by clicking on the 'help' icon at the top of a Gmail page. 

Over 100 million people use Gmail worldwide. "For the last two days, I am having trouble logging in," Anubhuti Garg, a graphic designer, said. 

A number of users DNA spoke to said they could not log in for most of Tuesday. "I was able to connect only at 6 pm," marketing consultant Sharad Shelar said. 

If all goes well, a new management will take control of fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services in the next six to eight weeks. This is what the top management of the company told staffers in a communication on Wednesday.

The company's board is meeting here today to finalise the terms for bidding.

"The company has made firm and steady progress by securing the Company Law Board's order, which exempts the company from obtaining approval of shareholders to increase the authorised share capital," the communication said.

The pace of adoption of open source software (OSS) among micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) has not gained traction, despite the slowdown and IT costs hitting a downside. “We have about 8,000 MSME members in the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) MSME division and hardly, any of them use the OSS. CII has planned a host of initiatives to promote OSS considering that it can improve productivity considerably,” said a CII official at a seminar on open source software and MSMEs organised by CII on Wednesday.

Washington, Feb 26 : A new study has indicated that small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA's Moon outpost in the future.

The study, by Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon researchers, analyzed mission requirements and developed the design for an innovative new type of small lunar robot under contract from NASA's Lunar Surface Systems group.

London, Feb 26 : A new research by a team led by the University of Nottingham, UK, has identified interstellar space dust from a dead star, which could unlock some of the mysteries of the early universe.

Interstellar dust is found throughout the cosmos. It is responsible for the dark patches seen in the Milky Way on a moonless night.

It consists of carbon and silicate particles, about the size of those in cigarette smoke.

Washington, Feb 26 : Using data from the satellite-based MIPAS and GOME-2 instruments, scientists have for the first time detected important ozone-depleting species in the atmosphere.

These new measurements will help scientists to better understand sources of these bromine species and to improve simulations of stratospheric ozone chemistry.

Despite the detection of bromine monoxide (BrO) in the atmosphere some 20 years ago, bromine nitrate (BrONO2) was first observed in 2008 when scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology discovered the gas's weak signal with data from MIPAS (the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding).

Washington, Feb 26 : In a previously untested method, solar power cells have been produced by printing presses normally used to make Australian dollar bills.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the giant machines arranged and stamped flexible solar panels onto plastic film, in a trial near Melbourne last week.

The cells were only 3 percent efficient, meaning they could convert only a small amount of solar energy into electricity.

But, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) project leader Gerry Wilson told Australian ABC News that he expects the output to more than double by next year and top 10 percent after that.

London, Feb 27 : In response to the furore over Facebook''s revision of user Terms of Service (TOS), the company''s founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the member of the social networking site will now have comment and voting rights over its future policies.

The social-networking giant came under fire after Consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist reported that the revised policy allowed the website to hold a perpetual license to use its members'''' uploaded content to promote itself, even after their accounts had been deleted.

Vienna  - The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Tuesday approved additional nuclear inspection measures for India, which the country has yet to ratify before it can receive imports for its growing nuclear energy sector.

The so-called Additional Protocol will grant IAEA inspectors greater powers to probe India's nuclear exports, in addition to the standard inspections envisioned in the nuclear safeguards agreement that India has signed but not yet brought into force.

Hanover, Germany  - China's trade ministry set up a special office Tuesday at the CeBIT computing trade fair in Germany in a bid to head off disputes over alleged illegal copying of products.

Past fairs have been marred by complaints from western companies that Chinese manufacturers have used proprietary software or product designs without paying royalties to the inventors for intellectual property rights (IPR).

Vienna - The five nuclear weapons states and Germany on Tuesday offered Iran direct dialogue to solve the nuclear spat, while also calling on leaders in Tehran to obey the demands of the United Nations Security Council.

Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - the permanent members on the Security Council - issued their statement together with Germany to the 35-country board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

Washington, Mar 4: Microsoft founder Bill Gates has banned his family from using Apple''s iPhone and iPod gadgets.

In an interview to Vogue magazine, Melinda Gates has revealed that Bill has barred in three kids, Jennifer, 13, Rory,
10 and Phoebe, 7 from using any of the Apple products.

"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don''t get for our kids," the Telegraph quoted her as saying.

Washington, March 4 : NASA and Cisco Inc. have announced a partnership to develop an online collaborative global monitoring platform called the “Planetary Skin” to capture, collect, analyze and report data on environmental conditions around the world.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA and Cisco will work together to develop the Planetary Skin as an online collaborative platform to capture and analyze data from satellite, airborne, sea- and land-based sensors across the globe.

New Delhi, Mar 4 : The second phase of weapon testing on Tejas, India’s indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), is currently underway from an Air Force base in the north-western sector.

The focus of the current phase of two-week testing is safe separation and also accuracy of weapon delivery, a Defence Research and Development Organisation statement said.

The results from the tests would validate aerodynamic interference data as well as complex weapon release algorithms in different modes of release, it said.

Helsinki - The Finnish parliament Wednesday approved controversial legislation allowing employers to track e-mails sent by employees.

The legislation was adopted 96 to 56 while 47 parliamentarians were absent at the final reading of the bill.

The so-called data protection law does not allow employers to read e-mails, but e-mails and the size of attachments can be tracked on suspicion of corporate espionage.

Vienna  - The atomic bombing of Japan and South Africa's past nuclear weapons programme were brought into play Wednesday as diplomats from these two countries entered the last heat to be elected leader of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA governing board is set to meet on March 26 and 27 to elect the successor to Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, who retires in November after 12 years at the helm of the UN nuclear watchdog.

Washington, March 7: The problem of email overload in busy organizations and companies can be solved with the aid of a new computer model, say two Indian-origin researchers.

Ashish Gupta at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and Ramesh Sharda at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, have described the model called Simulator for Interruptions and Message Overload in Network Environments (SIMONE) in the International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling.

Washington, March 7 : In a new research, chemists at the University of Connecticut, US, have found a way to greatly increase the luminescence efficiency of single-walled carbon nanotubes by 20 percent, a discovery that could have significant applications in medical imaging and other areas.

The research was performed in the Nanomaterials Optoelectronics Laboratory at the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs.

Vienna  - International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei called Monday for Arab countries to help resolve the Iranian nuclear spat, which seems more achievable under the new United States administration.

"The neighbours so far have been sitting on the fence," he said during a speech in the Austrian Parliament in Vienna, hosted by the Austrian Society for Foreign Policy and International Relations.

London, Mar 10: Music lovers who are addicted to watching online videos on Youtube will not be able to do so anymore as Google has blocked viewings after a dispute over licensing.

Google had started blocking UK viewers from watching "premium music videos" from the night of March 9.

But now the Internet giant has said that it will take several days until all professional music videos are covered by the restriction.

Google described the move, as a "painful decision" which it knew would cause "significant disappointment".

Munich, March 11 : Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have, in a way, prepared a unique “history book” of our Universe, with exceptional 3D views of distant galaxies, seen when the Universe was half its current age.

By looking at this unique “history book” of our Universe, at an epoch when the Sun and the Earth did not yet exist, scientists hope to solve the puzzle of how galaxies formed in the remote past.

With the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s, astronomers were able to scrutinize the structure of distant galaxies in some detail for the first time.

London, Mar 12: Apple has launched a tiny iPod that shouts out song titles.

The face-lifted Shuffle, which is half the size of the current version, is believed to be the world’s smallest music device.

However, owning to the toy’s smallness, there is no room for a screen.

The device reads out loud the names of 1,000 songs and artists stored on it, letting listeners choose their tracks.

The device, which costs 59 pounds, has its control buttons on the earphone cord.

London, March 14: Apple has landed in legal trouble after a mother alleged her son endured second-degree burns when the company’s iPod touch music players exploded in his pocket.

Lynette Antrobus, from Cincinnati, is claiming 75,000 dollars plus punitive damage after accusing the multinational corporation of “gross negligence and recklessness” and of behaving “maliciously and fraudulently”.

London, March 16: Electric cars and laptops may soon benefit from a prototype capacitor that can store power as densely as a supercapacitor, and release it rapidly.

The novel capacitor has been developed by a team of scientists from the University of Maryland and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Gary Rubloff, a chemist at the University of Maryland, says that the secret to the prototype''s performance is that it has
10 billion tiny capacitors crammed into every square centimetre.

London, March 16: An International team of scientists have developed an organic material that may one day enable the Internet to work at “superfast” speeds.

Ivan Biaggio, an associate professor of physics at Lehigh University and member of the research team, says that the novel material has been developed with an unprecedented combination of high optical quality and strong ability to mediate light-light interaction.

London, Mar 16: A thief stole 100,000 pounds worth of lead from the roofs of buildings – using Google Earth.

By using the popular Internet tool, which shows aerial photographs of towns across the world, Tom Berge was able to identify museums, churches and schools across south London with lead roof tiles.

After the 27-year-old builder found a potential target on his home computer he would scale its roof, take the valuable roof materials and abseil down the side of the building, before selling the lead to scrap metal dealers.

Melbourne, Mar 17: With virtual assaults going on the rise, a software firm has introduced anew software programme to block out Cyber bullies.

NetBox Blue, the firm, has added the Cyber Bullying Prevention Engine, which can block, quarantine or report offensive emails.

It is already being used by many private schools.

“A lot of the schools were saying to us they needed to lock down the use of email, for the students, trying to prevent them from receiving inappropriate content and anything related to bullying,” News. com. au quoted chairman John Fison as saying.

Schools can implement a dictionary of words that are frequently used by cyber bullies, and the email is intercepted before it reaches the intended victim.

Washington, March 18: German scientists have come up with a technology that can enable windows and doors to sensitise any suspicious movements, and sound an alarm.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP in Potsdam-Golm and for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST in Berlin say that the heart of their technology is a motion sensor and a special coating.

They say that their innovation may one day provide even more security by enabling window panes and glass doors to detect whether and how quickly something is moving.

According to them, if anything changes in front of the pane, or someone sneaks up to it, an alarm signal is sent to the security guard.

Paris, March 20 : Mars Express has uncovered geological evidence suggesting that some depositional process, revealed by erosion, has been at work on large scales in the equatorial regions of the Red Planet, which would shed new light on the past climate of Mars.

The evidence comes from the mineralogical composition of the Aram Chaos region, a crater 280 km in diameter lying almost directly on the Martian equator.

Data from Mars Express’ OMEGA instrument, the Visible and Infrared Mineralogical Mapping Spectrometer, has revealed that this region shows a significant amount of sulphates and ferric oxides.

Washington, March 20 : An international team of scientists has come a step closer to understanding the Universe with the discovery of a fundamental building block of nature.

The recent discovery of a single top quark at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago is a major breakthrough in understanding matter and energy.

Washington, March 20 : A team of scientists has confirmed the origin of supernovae as being produced from dying red supergiant stars.

The scientists are from the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and from Queens University, Belfast.

A star is a large ball of hot gas and in its incredibly hot interior hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, which subsequently forms carbon, other heavier elements and finally iron.

When all the atoms in the centre have turned to iron the fuel is depleted and the star dies.

New York, March 21: All those who tend to get themselves into unpleasant email “situations” every now and then can finally relax, thanks to an “undo send” feature launched by Gmail.

Any user can enable the new feature in ''Gmail Labs'' under ''Settings’.

If a user feels that the email he just sent should be stopped, he or she should hit the ‘undo send’ button.

However, the user intending to stop the mail from being sent would get only five seconds to hit the button, reports the New York Daily News. (ANI)

Washington, March 23 : Scientists working with the Fermilab atom smasher in Illinois, US, have discovered an unexpected new subatomic particle, which may break all known rules for creating matter.

It's long been accepted that six different "flavors" of particles called quarks combine to form larger subatomic particles.

London, Mar 23 : A robot's eyes may not be the windows to its soul, but they can certainly help humans guess the machine''s intentions, according to a new study.

Researchers led by Bilge Mutlu at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, have demonstrated that robots "leak" non-verbal information through eye movements when interacting with humans.

Mutlu said that humans constantly give off non-verbal cues and interpret the signals of others, without realising it at a conscious level.

Washington, March 25: NASA and Microsoft Corporation have announced plans to make planetary images and data available to the public via the Internet under a Space Act Agreement.

Through this project, NASA and Microsoft jointly will develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make the most interesting NASA content, including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon, explorable on WorldWide Telescope, Microsoft’s online virtual telescope for exploring the universe.

Washington, March 26 : In a new research, scientists have suggested that the lizards’ tail-shedding ability has been shaped mainly because of pressure from venomous vipers, which are the number one enemy of the wall-crawling reptiles.

Tail-shedding, known to scientists as caudal autotomy, is a common anti-predator defense among lizards.

When attacked, many lizards jettison the wriggling appendage and flee. The predator often feasts on the tail while the lucky lizard scurries to safety. Later, the lizard simply grows a new tail.

Washington, Mar 26 : The FBI has gone become high tech and is now using 21st-century upgrades like innovative, community-based technological advancements that get the word out in real time.

The 10 Most Wanted lists first appeared on the FBI''s Web site 13 years ago, and now the agency has been working to upgrade the site ever since. There are now more than 400 cases on the site, including wanted fugitives, suspected terrorists and missing persons.

The agency has begun to use some very cool high-tech tools to capture fugitives — and to find missing persons, too, FOX News reports.

London, Mar 28: You can now stop worrying about the way you look while sitting, for iPosture a small gadget, which can be stuck on the skin and buzzes to remind the wearer to sit up straight, helping improve posture, has come to your rescue.

The revolutionary device vibrates discretely when the wearer slouches by more than three degrees for one minute.

Once the posture is corrected the buzzing stops and users have been found to adopt better habits after wearing the device for four hours a day for up to a month.

Washington, Apr 2: Public announcements in passenger terminals could now be clearer, crisper, and easier to hear—thanks to a new ''Flat, Flexible Loudspeaker'' (FFL) developed by University of Warwick engineers.

Pioneered by University of Warwick spinout company Warwick Audio Technologies, the groundbreaking new loud speakers are less than 0.25mm thick, and could even be hung on a wall like a picture.

London, April 3: In a live 24-hour webcast today, anyone on the Internet will get a unique opportunity to explore some of the most advanced astronomical observatories both on and off the planet, as part of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) initiative ‘Around the World in 80 Telescopes’.

London, Apr 4: Considering that the opening of car doors into the path of oncoming vehicles has been a major cause of road accidents, scientists have now developed a new technology to avoid such mishaps—doors that sense potential impacts and get jammed.

Named the “haptic"—the technology provides tactile feedback to the users, and can thus help reduce both road injuries and repair bills

Invented by Michael Graf at BMW and Michael Strolz''s team at the Technical University of Munich, the current prototype looks like a normal car door.

Sydney - The Australian government on Tuesday scrapped a tender process and announced it would form a new company to build a national high-speed fibre-optic broadband network.

The company would be a public-private partnership with Canberra selling its majority stake when the 43-billion-Australian-dollar (30-billion-US-dollar) project is completed.

"It's the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government," Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.

London, Apr 13: Twitter is not longer the domain of younger generation, for a majority of people who use the chatting site are over
35, according to a new survey.

The research conducted by web monitoring company comScore showed that those aged 45 to 54 are 36 per cent more likely than average to visit the site.

And only 10.6 per cent of American Twitter users were aged 18 to 24.

The study also found that middle aged ''Tweeters'' spend much longer on the site than their offspring.

Washington, April 14 : The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has determined that barring computer reboots, the vehicle is doing fine.

The researchers are studying are diagnosing why the rover apparently rebooted its computer at least twice over the April 11-12 weekend.

Washington, Apr 14 : They might keep you socially happy in the cyberspace, but in real life, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook harm people''s moral values, as they don''t allow time for compassion or admiration, warn scientists.

According to a study from a neuroscience group led by corresponding author Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, emotions linked to our moral sense awaken slowly in the mind.

The finding suggests that digital media culture may be better suited to some mental processes than others.

The third beta of iPhone OS 3.0 has been launched by Apple, though with comparatively minor changes to the developer APIs. However, Ars has reported that the beta includes a rather significant transformation to push notification methods - badge, text alert, and sound.

London, Apr 20: Recession has certainly changed how we surfed web, for instead of buying something, people are searching ways to save money.

Three years ago it was Armani, oysters and buy-to-let mortgages and today its Primark, grow-your-own veg and flat shares among the most searched topics on Internet.

The ongoing credit crisis has reduced people''s interest in organic food and they are now looking for ways to save money by using cheaper cuts of meat.

Washington, Apr 22 : In a breakthrough study, researchers from University of East Anglia (UEA) have developed a novel computer, which can distinguish between different languages.

The researchers hope that the discovery could have practical uses for deaf people, for law enforcement agencies, and in noisy environments.

Lead researchers Stephen Cox and Jake Newman of UEA''s School of Computing Sciences developed the novel system by statistical modelling of the lip motions made by a group of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers.

London, April 22 : A team of seismologists has developed an early-warning system that can gauge how long an earthquake rumbles, thus helping tsunami warnings to reach vulnerable coastlines within minutes.

Most tsunami-warning systems work by measuring an undersea earthquake''s magnitude, because those above magnitude 7.5 are considered highly likely to generate a tsunami.

However, it takes at least 30 minutes to measure this accurately.

Previous studies have shown that quakes that shake for a long time are more likely to produce a tsunami.

Taiyuan (China), Apr. 22 : China is scheduled to launch a new remote-sensing satellite into the space Wednesday, a spokesman with the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north Shanxi Province said.

Both the satellite, "Yaogan VI," and the Long March 2C carrier rocket were in sound condition and the preparation work was well underway, Xinhua quoted the spokesman, as saying.

China has so far launched five remote-sensing satellites.

Washington, April 22 : Scientists in the U. S. hope to bring the minimalist approach to medical care with the use of a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of the hand.

William D. Richard, Ph. D., Washington University in St. Louis associate professor of computer science and engineering, and David Zar, research associate in computer science and engineering, have made commercial USB ultrasound probes compatible with Microsoft Windows mobile-based smartphones.

Washington, April 22 : The Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 19th anniversary by detecting a peculiar galactic system that contains several galaxies, along with a “cosmic fountain” of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years.

Known as Arp 194, the northern (upper) component of the system of galaxies appears as a haphazard collection of dusty spiral arms, bright blue star-forming regions, and at least two galaxy nuclei that appear to be connected and in the early stages of merging.

London, April 30 : NASA's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, has told lawmakers that the agency will probably not build an outpost on the moon as originally planned.

According to a report in New Scientist, Scolese's comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid.

NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there.

London, April 30 : Scientists have demonstrated the fastest imaging system ever devised, a camera that snaps images less than a half a billionth of a second long, capturing over six million of them in a second continuously.

According to a report by BBC News, a research team from University of California, Los Angeles, US, designed the world’s fastest camera, which has been dubbed Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging, or Steam.

It works by using a fast laser pulse dispersed in space and then stretched in time and detected electronically.

Washington, Apr 30 : In a breakthrough study, researchers from University of East Anglia (UEA) have developed a novel computer, which can distinguish between different languages.

The researchers hope that the discovery could have practical uses for deaf people, for law enforcement agencies, and in noisy environments.

Lead researchers Stephen Cox and Jake Newman of UEA’s School of Computing Sciences developed the novel system by statistical modelling of the lip motions made by a group of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers.

The study showed that the computer was able to identify which language was spoken by an individual speaker with very high accuracy.

Washington, April 30 : New calculations by scientists suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.

The calculations have been made by Ryan O’Leary and Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Though the research indicates that rogue black holes may roam the Milky Way, the good news is that the Earth is safe, as the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away.

Astronomers are eager to locate them, though, for the clues they will provide to the formation of the Milky Way.

Washington, April 30 : A new report from the National Research Council has determined that the current policy and legal framework regulating use of cyber attack by the US is ill-formed, undeveloped, and highly uncertain.

The United States should establish clear national policy on the use of cyberattack, while also continuing to develop its technological capabilities in this area, it says.

The US policy should be informed by open national debate on the technological, policy, legal, and ethical issues of cyberwarfare, according to the committee that wrote the report.

Paris - European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company's (EADS) defence and security division and Indian engineering giant Larsen & Toubro (L&T) announced plans Tuesday to form a joint venture for defence electronics in India.

The new company, which is to be based in Talegaon, near Pune, will design, develop and produce products in the fields of electronic warfare, radar, military avionics and mobile systems, the two companies said in a statement.

London, May 10 : Robots that can leap 8 metres vertically to clear walls or fences may soon find themselves in the military.

Sandia National Laboratories'' prototype Urban Hopper can really do wonders just by hopping.

Now robot maker Boston Dynamics has landed the job of producing a military version with a dash of more self-control.

Washington, May 13 : Astronauts aboard NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis have uncovered a long stretch of nicks on their space shuttle, which are the result of launch debris.

They were inspecting their ship for signs of launch damage when they came across the nicks.

Mission Control informed the crew that it’s a 21-inch stretch of nicks over four to five thermal tiles on the right side of Atlantis. The damage is where the right wing joins the fuselage.

Mission Control says it could be related to debris that came off the fuel tank almost two minutes after liftoff.

Washington, May 13 : A web-based self-help intervention program can help problem drinkers give up alcohol in the privacy of their own homes, say researchers.

An international team of researchers has developed a 24/7 free-access, anonymous, interactive, and Web-based self-help intervention called Drinking Less (DL).

The findings revealed that DL could help problem drinkers in the privacy of their own homes.

Berlin  , May 13 : A team of German and Chinese scientists has developed a new catalytic process to convert components of bio-oil directly into alkanes and methanol.

According to a report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the process is based on a “one-pot” reaction catalyzed by a precious metal on a carbon support combined with an inorganic acid.

Bio-oil is an aqueous, acidic, highly oxidized mixture.

However, its high oxygen content and instability turn out to have a negative impact: bio-oil cannot be used directly as a liquid fuel.

With a few changes from its pre-release version, the much-awaited SlingPlayer Mobile application for the iPhone has finally been launched, and is available at the App Store. The most notable of the changes in the released application is that, at AT&T's singular request, the SlingPlayer Mobile will only work through iPhone's Wi-Fi connection, thereby blocking the AT&T's 3G network!

Talking about AT&T's move to block 3G network access of the $30-priced application, AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel told Macworld that the SlingPlayer Mobile client is available for other AT&T network-supported platforms like Symbian and BlackBerry.