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China had over 600 million mobile phone users by June this year, which means every one in five mobile phone users in the world is a Chinese.

According to Xie Feibo, vice director of the Radio Administration Bureau of the Ministry of Information Industry, the number included 80 million personal handy phone (PHS) users.

London, Sept 17: Fires like those that ravaged Greece in August would be easier to combat if more and bigger aircraft could be used, unmodified, to drop water, a US timber company has said.

Weyerhaeuser has said it is developing 1.2-metre-wide PVC bags - each of which can hold 900 kilograms of water and fire retardant.

Each bag is packaged in a box whose lid becomes a parachute when the bag is pushed from a plane's cargo ramp.

London, Sept 17: A new research has revealed that a human peptide called LL37, when coupled with body’s own DNA, works as a natural antibiotic against invading microbes.

The research team, led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, reported their finding in an early online publication of Nature.

Washington, Sept 17: Richard Gere used to check his compatibility with potential girlfriends by showing them photos of body parts and severed heads.

The Pretty Woman star confessed that he used to accumulate Joel Peter Witkin's eerie photographs and used to hang them all over his apartment.

"It clearly was a litmus test about the women who came into my apartment - how they related to this work,” Contactmusic quoted him, as saying.

London, Sept 17: Scientists at the National Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany are developing a Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS) that works in real time to quickly warn of potential tsunamis.

The new ground-based system takes real-time measurements of vertical ground motion – the type of fault movement to produce tsunamis and issues warning.

Scientists say this is very different from a GPS method, which detects seismic waves transmitted through the Earth's crust to distant receivers.