Technology

By DPA, Washington : The launch of the space shuttle Discovery planned for Wednesday was abruptly cancelled just hours ahead of blast off. NASA called off the launch after it discovered a leak in a hydrogen vent line between the shuttle and its external fuel tank. The US space agency made the decision ahead of a planned 9.20 p.m. launch. Technicians had been filling the tank with fuel and would now have to completely drain it. A new launch time was set for 8.54 p.m. Thursday, depending on what repairs were deemed necessary. Officials were to meet to discuss the problem.

By IANS, Washington : Particles called excitons that emit a strong pulse of energy as they decay could soon enable a new and faster mode of computing, according to a study. Transistors - the building blocks for all electronic devices - use electrons to ferry signals needed for computation. But almost all computation devices use light, or photons, to send signals. The need to convert the signalling language from electrons to photons limits the speed of electronic devices.

By Xinhua Beijing : A vault dubbed "Noah's ark of plant life" has been launched in the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain to protect the world's crop seeds from man-made and natural disasters. An opening ceremony was conducted Tuesday at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries were placed inside. The first day's deposits comprised 268,000 samples and filled 676 boxes.

By Xinhua, Yiwu, Xinjiang : Eclipse tourists who swarmed to small towns in west China's Xinjiang and Gansu were happy to be greeted by bright sunshine on Friday. "The weather would be favorable for the eclipse observation," said Carolyn Ng, a program manager and science education specialist from NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of America).

By IANS, Bangalore: Global software major Microsoft late Thursday unveiled its Windows 8 version of the operation system in India as part of its worldwide launch.

By RIA Novosti, Tehran : Iran plans to put its first domestically made communication satellite into orbit by March 20, the head of the Iranian space agency has said. "If we do not run into problems, the first domestic satellite will be put in orbit by the end of this (Iranian solar calendar) year," Reza Taqipour said. Technical experts were working to complete the preparations, he said, adding that the precise launch date for the Omid, or Hope, satellite would be announced as it drew nearer.

By IANS, Washington : Swiss and South African scientists have outlined a method to potentially overcome hearing defects, even remedying substantial hearing loss. The method could help restore functional regions of the damaged ear to be able to recognise frequencies originally associated with them. Existing hearing-aid and cochlear implant technology have only been partially successful in recreating the experience of the fully functioning ear.

By IANS, New Delhi: Noted TV host and India TV co-founder Rajat Sharma is set to launch a new 24X7 news channel. Called India TV Wiz, the channel will be a bilingual in Hindi and English and is the first channel to have got an approval after the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) returned to power. "Wiz will be up in six months, perhaps earlier in the beta form. You will see a truly unique bouquet of content that will make it a nationwide phenomenon. Thanks to its ideator, Wiz will break the mould," Sharma said in a statement released here Wednesday.

By DPA, San Francisco : Apple is ready to launch a subscription service for newspapers on its Pad tablet computer, according to a report by a Silicon Valley newspaper Wednesday.

By IANS, New Delhi : The first solar eclipse of the year was partially visible in some parts of India and observed by various people Monday afternoon. The eclipse started at 2.15 p.m. and ended at 4.20 p.m. “The eclipse was visible only from southern parts of India, eastern coast, most of northeast India, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep,” Nehru Planetarium director N. Rathnasree told IANS here. She said people in north and west India couldn't see the celestial activity.

By IANS, Washington : People with severe disabilities will soon be able to operate a computer or control a powered wheelchair simply by moving their tongues, thanks to a new magnetic device. This device could help individuals "with high-level spinal cord injuries, return to rich, active, independent and productive lives", said Maysam Ghovanloo of Georgia Tech School who developed the new system with graduate student Xueliang Huo.

By DPA, Isfahan (Iran): Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Thursday inaugurated the country's first nuclear fuel manufacturing plant (FMP) located near this central Iranian city. The FMP, reportedly based solely on work by Iranian experts, is to provide the Arak 40-megawatt research reactor with fuel, producing nuclear fuel tablets, rods and assemblies for the plant, which is to be launched within the next two or three years. Iran says that with the launch of the FMP, it has de-facto mastered the final stage of the nuclear fuel production process.

By IANS, London : Scientists have discovered a tiny dinosaur tailor-made for running, according to a new Chinese-Canadian-British study. The fossil skeleton of the tiny animal, named Xixianykus Zhangi, is incomplete but would probably have been half-a-metre long. The specimen comes from Xixia County in Henan province, China.

By Xinhua Beijing : Scientists revealed that the critically endangered Mexican fish Skiffia bilineata might face new threat: male Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) are constantly sexually harassing the endangered females, media reported Saturday. Scientists knew that male Trinidadian guppies sexually assault females of their own species, and were concerned over whether they harassed the endangered fish as well.

By IANS, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : The launch of Chandrayaan-1, India's first mission to probe the moon, from here Wednesday morning marked the 13th consecutive successful score for the India-built polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) which had failed in its very first attempt. The 320-tonne PSLV-C11, which roared into skies at 6.22 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) with the 1,380-kg Chandrayaan, is a modified version of PSLV, described by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as its "trusted workhorse".

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : NASA's Messenger spacecraft, the first ever to enter the orbit of Mercury, has fetched its first photo, the project's website said.

By Xinhua Beijing : SanDisk Corp Wednesday introduced a USB flash drive with automatic online backup, the first of its kind linking up with the Internet to offer new features. The Cruzer Titanium Plus is SanDisk's first USB drive with backup capabilities. The 4Gbyte device will be featured at the International Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas, Nev.

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By IANS, Washington : Relying on fleeting brain waves, a futuristic technology enables people with severe muscle disorder to operate computers and enter a 3-D virtual world to chat or stroll. The technology, demonstrated by Junichi Ushiba of Keio University, opens up a world of possibilities for serious motion-impaired people to communicate with others and to work normally. This marriage of leading-edge technologies in brain science and the Internet also heralds the world's first successful example to help the physically impaired meet people in the virtual world.

By IANS, London : Social networking website Facebook has said it prevents at least 600,000 attempts every day by hackers trying to break into user accounts, using stolen usernames and passwords.

By IANS, London : You are browsing a particular website thinking that it is perfectly secure, but it may not be the case as experts have uncovered chinks in Internet security. For instance, a weakness in the Internet digital certificate infrastructure allows attackers to forge certificates completely trusted by all commonly used web browsers. Consequently, it is possible to impersonate secure websites and email servers and to perform virtually undetectable phishing attacks, implying that secure websites are porous and unsafe.

By IANS Mumbai : Months of fretting after taking the Combined Admission Test (CAT) for admissions to top management institutes may become a thing of the past with the launch of an SMS service that will give the answers within hours of taking the exam.

By Xinhua Beijing : China will set up an umbrella company to integrate the technical and marketing aspects of rocket building, an official with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology said Monday. The planned share-holding company is expected to integrate a number of institutions involved in rocket research, development, manufacturing and testing, and would be listed in the share market, said Liang Xiaohong, the academy's vice-president.

By Prashant K. Nanda, IANS, New Delhi : Twenty-one of the 23 most devastating cyclones worldwide during the last 200 years occurred in the northern Indian Ocean zone popularly know as the Indian region. "Though the Indian region faces only five to six percent of the total number of cyclones erupt every year, the magnitude of these cyclones is very high," said Akhilesh Gupta, scientific advisor to the science and technology ministry. "We have found that 21 of the 23 devastating cyclones across the globe during the last two centuries occurred in the Indian region," Gupta told IANS.

By IANS, Shimla : Partly cloudy sky Wednesday morning in most parts of Himachal Pradesh marred the early moments of one of nature's greatest spectaculars - the century's longest total solar eclipse, weather officials here said. "Clouds in most parts of the hill state remained an intermittent problem, with most areas reporting partly overcast conditions," meteorological office Director Manmohan Singh said. On the historic Ridge in Shimla, a large number of people, especially schoolchildren, have gathered to witness the eclipse through clouds.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, IANS, Chennai : While the preparations for launch of India's ocean monitoring satellite Oceansat 2 and six other nano satellites Sep 23 is on, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is getting ready for the bigger launch slated in the next two months -- that of the communications satellite GSAT 4.

By IANS Hyderabad : Maytas Infra Ltd, a Hyderabad-based construction and infrastructure development company Friday entered into a strategic partnership with BITS-Pilani, a global leader in technology education to offer off-campus work-integrated learning programmes to Maytas employees. The initiative is named as M-BITS. P.K. Madhav, CEO, Maytas Infra and L.K. Maheshwari, vice chancellor, BITS Pilani signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to this effect here Friday.

By IANS, Beijing : The Chinese public will help select the country's 10 best scientists and technicians in a vote that will show "respect for knowledge and innovation".

By IANS, Washington : Personal computers may soon save large amounts of energy by "sleep talking". Doctoral researcher Yuvraj Agarwal of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in collaboration with computer scientists has created a plug-and-play hardware prototype for personal computers (PCs) that induces a new energy saving state known as "sleep talking".

By DPA San Francisco : There's never been a laptop as skinny as the new MacBook Air from Apple. At its thinnest, it measures just about four millimetres. "When you first see MacBook Air, it's hard to believe it's a high-performance notebook with a full-size keyboard and display," gushed Apple CEO Steve Jobs while presenting the new laptop at the keynote speech of the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. "But it is."

By IANS, Toronto : How could a contemporary of the great dinosaurs survive to this day? A rare leatherback turtle, which has existed since the time of the dinosaurs, has been found to be adept at making the longest ocean journey to breed in warmer places. Fitted with a satellite transmitter by Canadian scientists to track its journey, the turtle - which is the also world's largest turtle growing up to two metres long and weighing up to 500 kilogramme - travelled over 7,000 km to be found on the coast of Colombia in South America.

By DPA, Washington : The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a "habitable" zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.

By IANS, Sydney : Australian researchers have developed what is being touted as the first “animal- and human-friendly” technique of masturbating an ostrich. The new technique being used by researchers tasked with collecting semen and artificially inseminating the large and rather fearsome birds - as well as their cousins, the emus - relies on the use of a dummy female.

By IANS, New Delhi : Can you build a micro spying gadget that flies and can transmit real time video information? This challenge was thrown to engineering students Saturday by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Commemorating its 50th anniversary, DRDO has invited engineering students to design and develop the prototype of a lightweight, low cost, electronic aerial surveillance system.

By DPA, Washington : The Phoenix Mars lander is examining a sample of soil from an "intermediate depth" of the Martian earth to determine if it is different from dirt at the planet's surface and from a lower icy layer, NASA said Friday. The lander's robotic arm dug up the sample, called Burning Coals, from a trench dubbed Burn Alive 3 and delivered it to one of the craft's many small ovens early Thursday. Phoenix had earlier confirmed the existence of ice about four centimetres below the surface and is now looking at a layer about one centimetre above the ice.

By Arun Kumar, IANS Washington : Warnings from pundits that the millions of engineers and scientists India and China produce each year would soon challenge the US' technical superiority may be a little premature, according to Newsweek International. While Delhi and Beijing are slowly moving in the right direction to improve their high-tech and science programmes, "yet getting either country up to speed will be an enormous task", said the magazine.

By IANS, New Delhi : As the sun goes down Wednesday evening, two of the brightest objects in the winter sky - Venus and Moon - will get together to bid farewell to 2008. A beautiful conjunction of Venus and the slender crescent Moon will be visible in the southwestern sky for hours after sunset on New Year's Eve. "The winter sky is very clear and you can have a spectacular vision of the celestial activity even with naked eyes," Nehru Planetarium director N. Rathnasree told IANS.

By IANS, Mumbai : Software piracy levels in India dropped by three percent in 2009, but these still remained high at 65 percent of the total software programmes installed on computers in the country, causing losses of around $2 billion to the industry, says a study.

By IANS New Delhi : The union cabinet Thursday gave the go-ahead for a four-year extension in service to the chairman of the Space Commission, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the secretary, Department of Space and Atomic Energy, from the present age of 62 to 66. The cabinet would make the necessary amendment soon, Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi told reporters.

By IANS, New Delhi : The government Wednesday announced guidelines for off-grid solar applications, as well as roof top and other small solar plants. "The guidelines that we have released today are meant to tap into the diverse and enormous potential of solar energy in all applications - rural, industrial as well as urban. The guidelines are flexible, simple and market friendly," union Minister of New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah said here Wednesday.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow: Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of AK-47 assault rifle, has been hospitalised, his assistant Nikolai Shklyaev said Tuesday.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow: A memorial to renowned tech innovator and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was unveiled in Russian city of St. Petersburg Wednesday.

By IANS Washington : India will be able to send manned space flights in seven to eight years, G. Madhavan Nair, head of India's space programme, said here. "We have sensitised the government on manned space flights. In seven to eight years, we will be able to carry crew to orbit and back," Nair, chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Space Commission, said Wednesday. He said India believes that space is the next frontier and international cooperation rather than competition in this field will be the future.

By IANS, London : British researchers have developed a new coating for gun cartridges with pollen and grit to help identify criminals that use firearms. The new technique involves coating batches of cartridges with unique "nanotags" that are invisible to the naked eye and designed to attach to hands, gloves and clothing of anyone that handles such a coated cartridge. Some of the tags also remain on the spent cartridge casing.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Chinese scientists on Sunday successfully directed the accompanying satellite BX-1 to begin circling the Shenzhou-7 spaceship, on an elliptical track of 4 kilometers multiplying 8 kilometers. It is the first time that China has succeeded in maneuvering this kind of space orbiting, official sources say. The accompanying satellite began orbiting the orbital capsule of the Shenzhou-7 at 18:14 pm, under the close monitoring and precise control of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.

By Xinhua Washington : A U.S. aerospace company based in California on Wednesday unveiled a new suborbital spaceship with two seats for private space tourists. The company, XCOR Aerospace announced that its two-seat, rocket-powered Lynx spaceship, is capable of suborbital flights to altitudes of more than 37 miles (60 kilometers) above the Earth. The spaceship, roughly the size of a small private airplane, will first take off in 2010 and is expected to be capable of making several flights a day, according to XCOR.

By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service Bangalore, May 13 (IANS) An Indian expatriate trained at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur is playing a crucial role in taking software to the battlefront. San Jose-based LynuxWorks is chaired by Inder Singh, the IIT alumnus, and produces embedded operating systems and tools for industrial, networking and military and aerospace uses.

Tehran: Tehran will continue supporting Baghdad in its fight against terrorism as Iraq's security was intertwined with that of Iran, President Hassan Rouhani has...

By IANS, Beijing : China plans to send a probe to Mars in the next three years, authorities here said.

By IANS, London: The chilling possibility of a rogue nation using climate change to carry out disastrous geoengineering to modify or minimise its impact could not be ruled out, warn experts.

By Fakir Balaji, IANS, Bangalore : As excitement heightens for the launch of Apple's iPhone in India Friday, two Indian techies from the US have pitched in to offer a free download of their mobile application on iPhone for photo sharing, with value added features to boot. The entrepreneurial techies - Apoorva Ruparel and Keshav Murthy - are part of the team that established AirMe Inc at Colorado Springs a year ago to design, develop and offer AirMe on the Apple applications store for iPhone users.

By Prasanto K. Roy, IANS, You're a Delhi-based wannabe terrorist needing to communicate with your handlers. What do you do? Invisible-ink notes are passe, as are carrier pigeons. You will, of course, use electronic options. Like e-mail. Walk into a cyber cafe, log into a G-mail or Yahoo account. Don't use an account in your own name. And don't send e-mail. Simply read instructions left for you in an unsent mail, saved as a draft in your account. Then, to reply, just edit the unsent e-mail, and save it back as a draft. If e-mail isn't travelling, it can't be intercepted.

By SPA, Washington : The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said it destroyed an unmanned suborbital rocket shortly after a launch failure early Friday from an island off the Virginia coast. There were no injuries or property damage, NASA said in a statement, but the agency warned that debris from the explosion could be dangerous. NASA believes most of the wreckage fell into the Atlantic Ocean off the Virginia coast. The rocket, made by Alliant Tech Systems, was carrying two experiments. NASA said it is investigating why the rocket failed.

By IANS New Delhi : In a rare example of action pre-empting intention, mobile rail ticketing had already been in use for several months before Railway Minister Lalu Prasad announced it as one of the highlights in his budget to modernize train reservations.

By DPA Wiesbaden (Germany) : All of a sudden your arm feels heavy as lead and starts to tingle. You tend to drop objects more frequently than you used to. If you're a frequent computer user, mouse arm may be the culprit. "Mouse arm is a modern form of classical tennis elbow," explains Jan Bernholt, an orthopaedist from Duesseldorf. "Small movements that are constantly repeated can lead to ailments in the upper and low arm. An ergonomic workspace can help prevent this," he said.

By IANS, London : A spaceship that was "20 times the size of a football field" was spotted hovering over Britain's Manchester airport nearly 15 years back, says a secret defence ministry file that was released Thursday. The huge spacecraft was seen by a UFO expert in 1995 and its sketch was sent to the defence ministry, The Sun reported Thursday, citing the secret files. The UFO was described as oblong with a curved front and a series of small nozzles at the rear. That's not the only UFO sighting.

By Xinhua, Washington : NASA engineers are exploring the possibility of nuclear fission to provide the necessary power when its astronauts return to the moon and establish a lunar outpost in the future, the US space agency has said. "Engineers are taking initial steps toward a technology demonstration of this type of system," said a NASA statement released Wednesday.

Ankara : The US has decided to withdraw its border protection mission in Turkey which was deployed against possible threats from Syria, a...

By IANS, London : A British scientist who helped design a camera on board India's Chandrayaan-1 says he hopes images from it will help answer two tantalising questions about the Moon. “Where did the Moon come from? And could it ever sustain human life?” Maneul Grande of Aberystwyth Universtiy told the Times newspaper. “After the Apollo landings, people thought they knew a fair bit about the Moon - they'd seen people walking around up there,” said Grande, who helped to design the European Space Agency's camera that will take X-ray images of the Moon's surface.

By IANS Bhopal : India is considering a manned mission to space soon, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair said Thursday. "We are seriously considering a manned space mission. But we will first have to study and prepare a report within a year on newer technologies to develop capsules to send men to space and bring them back safely," Nair told a press conference here. The study report would be sent to the government for approval, he said.

By IANS, Washington: Engineers have developed a new technology that will enable pilots to peer through fog and doctors to see more precisely into the human body without surgery. Developed by Princeton engineers, the method relies on the surprising ability to clarify an image using rays of light that would typically make the image unrecognisable, such as those scattered by clouds, human tissue or murky water.

By Frederick Noronha, IANS Panaji : Goa-based Rudolf Ludwig's friends started getting frantic e-mail messages about the musician-turned-art gallery owner being stranded in Nigeria and badly in need of money. His wife Yolanda fielded off telephone calls to their Goa home, explaining that nothing of this sort had happened. When more friends started phoning in, Ludwig, who was very much in Goa, realised his e-mail account on the popular GMail network had been hacked into. His password had been changed and he couldn't enter his own account.

By IANS, New Delhi : As the sun goes down Monday, Jupiter, the largest celestial body after the Sun in the solar system, can be seen in the sky with naked eye.

By Prensa Latina Hanoi : Vietnam will soon launch its first telecommunications satellite from South America, Deputy Director Nguyen Quang Hung of State Vinast Agency's Satellite Information Center informed on Wednesday. The device arrived today at the Kourou launch base in the French Guiana Overseas Department and will be launched by the European Arianespace consortium at the end of March or early April, to be transferred to the National Post and Telecommunication Agency of Vietnam, indicated Hung.

By IANS, New Delhi : There was exultation, a feeling that India had arrived, when the national tricolour was placed on the lunar surface Friday night. With India's moon mission Chandrayaan already a reality, people are now wondering if the next step could be a holiday on the moon! The Indian flag was planted on the lunar surface when the 35-kg box-shaped Moon Impact Probe (MIP) landed on the moon at 8.31 p.m. Friday night after being ejected from Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned spacecraft.

By SPA Singapore : The Business Software Alliance (BSA) launched an educational Web resource on Tuesday to help youths across Asia understand and avoid the many risks they face on the internet. According to DPA "The internet has spawned a new generation of youths who spend significant amounts of time in cyberspace, where they are exposed to illegal or unwholesome content, or are lured into unlawful activities," said Jeffrey Hardee, BSA's Vice President for the Asia-Pacific region.

By IANS/RIA Novosti,

By IANS, New Delhi : Global warming is caused by excess of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, but cutting down other pollutants such as soot can help slow climate change in a big way, say the world's leading scientists, including an Indian American.

By DPA Rome : Italian scientists have said they can now predict the destructive powers of an earthquake just seconds after the start of a tremor, thus providing a potentially life-saving advance warning to affected populations. Researchers at the University of Naples and at the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) in Rome analysed more than 200 earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 4.0 to 7.4 on the Richter scale and found that the waves generated in the first few seconds of a tremor carry enough information to determine its destructive potential.

By Xinhua, Beijing : The universe is dustier than previously thought, which is why astronomers now suggest it is twice as bright as it appears. Astronomers have known about interstellar dust for a while, but they haven't been able to quantify just how much light it blocks. Now a team of researchers has studied a catalogue of galaxies and found that dust shields roughly 50 percent of their light.

By IANS, London: A new way of administering oxygen into blood, that could allow people to stay alive without breathing, has been discovered.

By IANS New Delhi : From Aryabhatta's mathematical milestone of working out the value of pi some 1,500 years ago to India's yet-to-be-launched moon mission - India's major scientific developments were proudly displayed aboard the Science Express train that will visit 57 towns across the country over the next seven months. Flagged off by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the Safdurjung Railway Station here Tuesday, the white-coloured train aims to kindle scientific curiosity among the Indian youth.

By IANS, New Delhi : The world has just five years to initiate a low carbon industrial revolution before runaway climate change becomes almost inevitable. But the good news is that it can be done and that the long-term benefits will be immense, according to the WWF. Climate Solutions 2 is the first analysis to put timetables to the industrial transformations needed to limit global carbon emissions below the two degrees Celsius level. Scientists say beyond that there would be unacceptable risks of runaway climate change.