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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.