Washington, Feb 8 : A New York City startup has started tapping into the intense water pressure at treatment plants, reservoirs and factories, converting the excess into electricity.

The idea for the startup, Rentricity, began following 9/11, when president and co-founder Frank Zammataro had to relocate to a conference room that overlooked a rooftop water tower.

Zammataro, who had specialized in information technology for Merrill Lynch, saw opportunity in the towers that maintain water pressure in tall buildings, Discovery News reported.

Washington, Feb 8: Researchers have come up with a new technology that allows graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) on a single chip to combine, thus boosting processor performance by an average of over 20 percent.

Researchers from North Carolina State University also said that this novel technique also cuts manufacturing costs.

"Chip manufacturers are now creating processors that have a `fused architecture,' meaning that they include CPUs and GPUs on a single chip," said Dr. Huiyang Zhou, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who co-authored a paper on the research.

Washington, Feb 8 : The morning-after pills, which are otherwise not available on drug store shelves, can easily be bought by college students at Shippensburg University through a vending machine at the student health centre.

The vending machines will hand out a single dose of emergency contraceptive for 25-dollar, and the university won't profit from the sales.

"The machine is really used as much for privacy as anything else," CBS News quoted Dr. Roger Serr, vice president of student affairs at the university, as saying.

Washington, Feb 8 : The Central Intelligence Agency is expected to maintain a large clandestine presence in Iraq and Afghanistan after the withdrawal of conventional U. S. troops as part of the Obama administration plan to rely on a combination of spies and Special Operations forces to protect U. S. interests in the two war zones, U. S. officials have said.

U. S. officials said that CIA stations in Kabul and Baghdad are likely to remain the agency's largest overseas outposts for years, The Washington Post reports.

Washington, Feb 8 : American authorities want to upgrade one of the charges against a former Indian-origin Rutgers student Dharun Ravi, who has been accused of using a webcam to spy on his roommate's intimate encounter with another man.

According to the Star-Ledger report, the judge said he caught mistakes in the hindering charges, out of which one was a lower grade than it should have been, and two were higher.

Prosecutors had asked to upgrade the charge that was too low but the judge said it might be unfair to make Ravi pay for a mistake detected by him, The New York Post reports.

Washington, Feb 8 : Men spend far more time looking at photographs rather than reading the online profile on dating sites, a new study has revealed.

On the other hand, women give more importance to reading the profile and pay less attention to the pictures.

AnswerLab, a consumer research company, conducted the study in one day at a coffee shop in San Francisco, California.

The study asked 39 patrons who identified themselves as interested in dating the opposite sex to take part in the study, the Discovery News reported.

Washington, Feb 8 : Low biodiversity in oceans may be because of early extinctions in the marine environment which wiped out the earliest of fishes, a new research has found.

Dr John J Wiens, Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, and student Greta Carrete Vega examined the evolutionary and ecological causes of the low species numbers of marine environments by studying the biodiversity of ray-finned fish, the most species rich group of marine vertebrates, containing 96 percent of all fish species.

Washington, Feb 8 : Scientists have shown how zinc supplements drastically improve children's chances of surviving respiratory tract infections including pneumonia.

The study also claims that the increase in survival due to zinc on top of antibiotics, was even greater for HIV infected children.

In a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial, 350 children, aged from six months to five years old, were treated with standard antibiotic therapy at Mulago Hospital. Half the children were given zinc and the other half a placebo.

Washington, Feb 8 : Dermatologists are now discovering new laser therapies for enhancing tattoo removal treatment.

Tattoos, which may affect a person's skin, can be quite difficult to treat or remove.

While lasers have been used to remove tattoos for several years, the procedure requires multiple treatment sessions (typically six to 10 treatments or more) and treatments are painful, requiring a few weeks of healing time between procedures.

Washington, Feb. 8 : A retired general has assailed the commander of the Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Laden for drawing too much media attention to operations that he argued should have been kept under wraps.

Retired Lt. Gen. James Vaught confronted Special Operations Commander Admiral Bill McRaven, as to why the recent raids by the Navy Seals, such as the one to kill Osama bin Laden or to rescue U. S. hostage Jessica Buchanan, were all over the media.

Washington, Feb 8 : Researchers have now come up with an avant-garde technology, which could make future hard drives super quick and record thousands of gigabytes per second.

According to University of York researchers, the new storage method would use heat to write information to the magnetic storage systems, instead of magnetic fields and the drives using the technology will be hundreds of times faster than previous drives.

Washington, Feb 8 : Among postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, increasing age is associated with a higher risk of death from breast cancer, a new study has found.

Willemien van de Water and his colleagues from the Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, conducted a study to assess disease-specific mortality among age groups in postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.

The study consisted of an analysis of 9,766 patients enrolled in the TEAM (Tamoxifen Exemestane Adjuvant Multinational) randomised clinical trial between January 2001 and January 2006.

Washington, Feb 8 - US job openings increased in December 2011, a positive sign of improving job market, the Labor Department reported.

The number of job openings in December was 3.4 million, up from 3.1 million in November 2011, the report said Tuesday.

Although the number of job openings remained below the 4.4 million level when the recession began in December 2007, the job openings rate has shown an upward trend since the end of the recession in June 2009, reported Xinhua.

Washington, Feb 8 : Older male sparrows don't put much of a fight when they hear a young male singing in their territory, it probably means that younger birds aren't considered much of a threat by other sparrows, a new study has said.

However, a male white-crowned sparrow will act much more aggressively if it hears a bird of the same age singing in a territory it claims as its own.

Washington, Feb 8 : Republican presidential candidate and former US Senator Rick Santorum has won Republican presidential contests in Missouri and Minnesota and appeared headed for a strong showing in Colorado.

Santorum's victory broke Republican candidate Mitt Romney's winning streak and his image as an unstoppable front-runner.

Romney came in second in Missouri, though he didn't do as well in Minnesota, where he was in a race for third with former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich.

Ron Paul placed second in Minnesota and third in Missouri, ABC News reports.