Technology

By IANS,

By IANS, Washington : Researchers have discovered a new species of fish, a grouper that grows to more than six feet and weighs almost 500 kg. These Atlantic goliaths are not the same groupers that swim in Pacific waters, though they look identical. "For more than a century, ichthyologists have thought that Pacific and Atlantic goliath grouper were the same species, and the argument was settled before the widespread use of genetic techniques.

Hyderabad, Sep 28 (IANS) International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) of the US are a major hurdle in the growth of new space industry actors in the global market, said speakers from emerging space nations at the 58th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2007) here. They also made a strong case for change in the rules to facilitate cooperation and healthy competition in the global space industry. The speakers were unanimous that both cooperation and competition were necessary to ensure growth of the space industry, especially among emerging nations and new players.

By IANS, New Delhi : In a path breaking development, India and Brazil Thursday inked a deal to jointly develop an airborne early warning and control system (AEWCS) for the Indian Air Force to supplement a larger eye-in-the-sky system it will induct later this year. The agreement was signed here by S. Christopher, director of the Centre for Airborne Systems (CABS) of the Defence Research and Development Organistion (DRDO) and Luis Carlos Aguiar, Embraer's executive vice president for defence and government markets. The project is believed to be valued at Rs.18 billion ($415 million).

By IANS, Thiruvananthapuram : Rain Concert Technologies Pvt Ltd, a leading IT company in Kerala, has developed a new Arabic video sharing portal that has become a hit in Saudi Arabia, a company official said Thursday. M.S. Vinod, the managing director of the company, said their new video sharing portal www.ma8ta3ee.com, is hugely popular in Saudi Arabia. "This is similar to Youtube but more advanced. In our programme anyone can upload from their mobile and it first goes into an administrator who checks if it is fit for display. Then it is put up on the portal," said Vinod.

By IANS Hyderabad : Scientists at a Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONE) here are continuing their efforts to clone a rabbit and hope to get assistance from Iran to fulfil their ambitious goal - to clone a cheetah. This is the country's first animal cloning bid, and the LaCONE scientists, of the prestigious Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), want to clone a laboratory animal before working on their dream project.

By IANS, Washington : Teaching robots to understand enough about the real world to allow them to act independently has proved to be more difficult than first thought. The technologies developed on the iCub platform - such as grasping, locomotion, interaction, language-action association - are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics.

By IANS, London : An array of previously "invisible" space objects have been discovered by one of NASA's newest space telescopes, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), in just six months. In what has left scientists at the space agency "elated", the $320 million sky-mapping spacecraft has for the first time identified previously thousands of unseen space objects including stars, asteroids, dust clouds, comets and even a new galaxy.

By IANS New York : The youngest known pulsing neutron star - or pulsar - is behaving altogether like another type of star, a magnetar, forcing a rethink among astronomers. One kind of neutron star literally changes into another, and scientists studying this pulsing neutron called PSR J1846-0258 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre wonder whether they have stumbled on the long-sought missing link between different types of pulsars.

By DPA, San Francisco : Google Tuesday launched a set of social networking tools for Gmail users, hoping to coax them to share photos, links and status updates without the need to visit sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Called Google Buzz, the new features were rolled out to a small number of Gmail account holders Tuesday and to the majority of users within the week. It allows users to share photos, videos, web links, conversations with "friends" - defined as pre-existing Gmail contacts. Google said it may open Buzz up to outside users in the future.

By IANS, Washington : Carbon dioxide released from the Antartic Ocean due to shifting wind patterns may drastically increase global warming, say scientists. Many scientists think that the end of the last ice age was triggered by a change in earth's orbit that caused the northern part of the planet to warm. This partial climate shift was accompanied by rising levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, ice core records show, which could have intensified the warming around the globe.

By IANS, London : Social networking site Facebook may announce its e-mail service as early as Monday, if online buzz is to be believed.

By Ernest Gill, DPA, Hamburg (Germany) : Compact robots that scuttle across the landscape like enormous armour-plated beetles may one day help humans fight deadly forest fires in remote areas, according to a team of German scientists. Looking for all the world like old-fashioned Volkswagen beetle cars - except with multiple legs where the wheels ought to be - a brigade of these robots could carry water or foam extinguishing agents to the most dangerous firefighting locations, places where humans would face certain peril.

By DPA, Tokyo : Naoko Yamazaki was selected to become the first mother and the second Japanese woman to travel into space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said Tuesday. Yamazaki, 37, was chosen to board the US space shuttle Atlantis on a planned two-week mission in February 2010 to transport components to add on to the International Space Station, where Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi is to stay for six months starting around November next year.

By Azera Rahman, IANS New Delhi : Check the scribbles in your phone scrapbook, send friend requests on the wireless, have discussions in as many as eight different languages...all on India's social networking site, BigAdda, which could give Orkut and Facebook a run for its money. With an estimated 1.24 million users so far, this five-month old networking site is fast catching up among Indian youth, especially in tier 2 cities like Guwahati, Nashik, Surat, Tuticorin, Bhilai and Amritsar.

By IANS, Patna : Peter Toby, who had come to Bihar's Taregna village from Britain to watch the century's longest solar eclipse, lost his passport, money and all other valuables but still left with a smile after getting unexpected help from a priest who had given him shelter in his school. The London-based computer programmer was unhappy Wednesday morning as thick clouds hid the celestial spectacle that he had come so far to see. He was in for further disappointment when he returned to his room at the St. Mary School.

By IANS London : Scientists have for the first time detected a storm of shooting stars on Mars. And they are now confident of predicting meteor showers on the planet - just as they do on earth. The Martian meteor shower was detected, indeed predicted, by scientists at the Armagh Observatory when they calculated when the orbit of Mars would intersect with debris from the comet 79P/du Toit-Hartley.

By IANS, New Delhi : Scientists from prestigious Yale University of the US have discovered the earliest black holes ever detected, a statement from the university said Thursday.

By IANS, Tehran : Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has complimented Iranian scientists for their success in sending the first domestically-produced satellite into orbit, IRNA reported. In a message Tuesday in response to a letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khamenei expressed appreciation for the efforts of Iranian officials and scientists "for their efforts which made such a praiseworthy move possible". "This is another sign that the hope that the Islamic Revolution has brought to hearts is true," he stated.

By IANS, Beijing : China Friday asked the US to "respect facts and stop unreasonable accusations in the name of so-called Internet freedom". Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu made the remarks while responding to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comment in Washington. "Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation," DPA quoted Clinton as saying in a speech on internet freedom.

By DPA, San Francisco : Tired of flipping through hundreds of cable channels to find something to watch? Google may be able to help you. The web search giant has teamed up with Intel, Sony and Logitech to develop a new television platform that the company hopes will extend its dominance from computers and cellphones to televisions, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

By IANS Kozhikode : Scientists have discovered a new plant species, named Miliusa Wayanaddica and belonging to the Annonaceae family, in Kerala's Wayanad district. The new plant was discovered by M.K. Ratheesh Narayanan of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Kalpetta, Wayanad, and P. Sujanapal of the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI). It was found in the Meppadi forest range in the Western Ghats at an altitude of 1,400 metres above the sea level. "The plant is endemic to the area, but has no known local name," Narayanan said.

By IANS, Chicago : A US company is developing a gun that can fire bullets with variable speed and can be set to kill, wound or just cause a bruise. Lund and Company Invention, a Chicago-based toy design studio, which makes toy rockets that are powered by burning hydrogen, is receiving funding from the US army to adapt the same technology for firing bullets as the army is interested in weapons that can be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes, NewScientist reported.

By IANS, Sydney : Roads, the most visible symbols of progress, are the biggest threat to the world's tropical rainforests, says a new study. "Clearing wide paths in any forest has a strong effect on the ecosystem, but these impacts are particularly acute in tropical rainforests," said William Laurance, study co-author and biology professor at the Smithsonian's Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

By IANS/RIA Novosti,

By DPA, Washington : A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two US astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut arrived Thursday at the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). The Soyuz lifted off Tuesday from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan with Americans Doug Wheelock, Shannon Walker and Russian Fyodor Yurchikhin aboard. The 2221 GMT docking occurred over Argentina. It was the combined 100th flight to the ISS by US space shuttles and Russian Soyuz capsules.

By SPA, Los Angeles : NASA's Phoenix Mars spacecraft regained contact with Earth more than a day after falling silent, but its days operating on the red planet are still numbered, mission managers said, according to AP. Waning sunlight and a dust storm this week drained the lander's power, forcing it to go into safe mode. It failed to respond to two wake-up calls from Earth but sent a signal late Thursday when the orbiting Odyssey spacecraft passed overhead.

By K.S. Jayaraman, IANS, Bangalore : Indian media should stop criticising the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for abruptly terminating Chandrayaan-1 and instead applaud the success of its moon mission, a European space scientist has said. Although its life was cut short, ISRO's Chandrayaan-1 was a "fantastic success", Detlef Koschny, European Chandrayaan-1 project scientist, said in an e-mail interview. Chandrayaan-1 had carried three scientific payloads of the European Space Agency (ESA).

By IANS, New Delhi : The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is short of 230 scientists and engineers, the Lok Sabha was told Wednesday.

By Dinesh Abrol and Purnima Rupal, IANS, New Delhi : Growing strategic science and technology cooperation between China and India promises a new outlook for the South. China and India are two of the fastest-growing economies in the world; they face similar opportunities and challenges, and could maximise benefits by sharing research and development (R&D), according to Scidev.Net.

By RIA Novosti Washington : Discovery shuttle planners have rescheduled a spacewalk to Saturday for fixing a ripped solar wing of the International Space Station (ISS), US space agency NASA's website said Thursday. The spacewalk, originally due to take place Thursday, will be undertaken by Scott Parazynski and Doug Wheelock. The two astronauts plan to use the space station's robotic arm to fix the damaged solar wing.

By IANS Bangalore : CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corp and a provider of industry-specific enterprise software applications and business services, plans strategic acquisitions in India to expand its presence and scale up its client base, a senior company official said here Wednesday.

By IANS,

By IANS

Los Angeles : A tech firm owned by an Indian American has developed a software that combines speech-recognition and text messaging to provide free directions to motorists.

Dial Directions, a California based firm, began its services early this week in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York with the promise of turning a cell phone into a global positioning system (GPS) and search-enabled device.

The software can work on any mobile phone, the online edition of San Francisco Chronicle reported.

By DPA, Bonn : Users of Adobe Flash Player are advised to update the latest version of the software after security gaps were discovered in early releases of the media viewer. Those gaps have been sealed with the new version of the programme, according to Germany's BSI Federal Office for Security in Information Technology. The problems with the old version could enable hackers to access a person's computer with only one visit to an insecure website.

By IANS Mumbai : Eminent space scientist G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has been honoured with the M.M. Chugani Memorial Award of the Indian Physics Association for the year 2006. Nair, secretary with department of space, will be presented the award March 18 by Ashok Misra, director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, the association said in a statement here Friday. The award is given for excellence in applied physics and carries a citation, gold medal and cash prize of Rs.100,000.

By IANS, London : The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has announced the discovery of a spectacularly coloured snake from a remote area of Tanzania in East Africa.

By Xinhua London : Britain's astronomers from the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), a leading planet-hunting team, have announced the discovery of three new planets, according to a press release issued by Keele University. These extra-solar planets named WASP-3, WASP-4 and WASP-5 were seen to transit their host star. WASP-3 is the third planet that the team has found in the northern hemisphere, using the SuperWASP camera sited in the Canary Islands.

By IANS, New Delhi : Did you ever realise that the shafts of light emanating from your house could actually be impacting the night-sky visibility? If that sounds far-fetched, the Nehru Planetarium here has decided to study just that phenomenon and quantify light pollution in Delhi. A satellite map made available by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) clearly shows how much 'night sky pollution' the dazzling lights are causing across India.

By IANS, London : People need to stop stamping on cockroaches, as one of the most despised of all insects is essential to our planet for converting nitrogen into fertiliser, experts have said.

By DPA, Panama City : Scientists have discovered two new frog species in Panama's rainforests at a time when many of the amphibians are threatened by a fungal disease driving them toward extinction. Pristimantis educatoris was discovered in the Omar Torrijos nature reserve in Cocle province, scientists from the US Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute said Thursday. The frog is two to four centimeters long, varies from dark purple to dark grey in its colouring, and has red or yellow eyes. Its fingers and toes also end in bulbous disks.

By IANS,, Washington : Full-body scanners used at airports can damage the insulin pump or continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) device used by diabetics, caution experts.

By DPA, Washington : A robotic lander that confirmed the presence of ice on Mars was confirmed dead by NASA scientists Monday. The Phoenix Mars lander was damaged by harsh conditions during the Martian winter and repeated attempts to contact it have been unsuccessful, the US space agency said. The lander had wrapped up its mission in 2008 and had not been expected to survive the harsh winter, which is twice as long as that on Earth. But scientists needed to make last attempts to contact it in good weather before officially writing it off.

By IANS, Sydney : BlackBerry users can't agree on whether they love or hate the device, but they are sure of one thing: it gives them very little time off work, or what is known as “corporate downtime”. The use of BlackBerry has grown rapidly in the past six years, evolving from a a senior management status symbol to a basic tool of trade, according to a University of Sydney study on how the device is being used.

By DPA, Washington/Moscow : A US satellite was destroyed in an unprecedented collision with a spent Russian satellite, raising fears of danger to other satellites, a report said Thursday. The collision between Iridium-33, a commercial US communications satellite and Russia's Cosmos 2251 satellite, which had been turned off for years, occurred Tuesday at 04:55 GMT above Siberia at a height of 790 km, the space.com site said, quoting a statement by US space agency NASA.

By IANS, Washington : Marrying ultrasound technology with a smartphone, computer experts have created a compact, mobile, palm-sized medical imaging device. William D. Richard, associate professor and research associate David Zar at the computer science and engineering department of Washington University have made commercial ultrasound probes compatible with Microsoft Windows mobile-based smartphones, thanks to a $100,000 Microsoft grant.

By SPA Houston : Spacewalking astronauts will work on assembling a Canadian robotic system on Saturday following the successful installation of the first segment of Japan's lab on the International Space Station. According to Reuters, Saturday's spacewalk will be the second of five planned during space shuttle Endeavour's busy 16-day mission in space. The plans had been in doubt until late on Friday when power was restored to the robotic system. But Friday was Japan's moment of space glory.

New York : Would you like to imprint your name on the surface of the Red Planet? NASA is giving you a chance to...

By DPA Beijing : It may be decades into the future but lunar scientists from China and other nations are already eyeing the immense potential of nuclear fusion from a precious mineral found on the moon's surface, a top scientist said Wednesday. "To explore the moon is to solve the resource issues of the Earth," Qiao Xiaolin, an adviser to China's lunar exploration programme, told DPA over telephone. "Nuclear energy is the most hopeful form," said Qiao, a professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology in north-eastern China.

By K.S. Jayaraman, IANS, Bangalore : The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest atom smasher commissioned Wednesday in Geneva, has the strong "support" of India - literally. The 88,000 tonne 27 km underground magnetic ring through which the protons race at lightning speed are propped up by 7,080 jacks supplied by the Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).

By DPA, San Francisco : Social networking site Facebook introduced a new set of privacy controls Wednesday in an attempt to quell criticism that it was lax about protecting users' personal information. The new controls are featured in a streamlined privacy panel that allows users much easier management of who can access their information. "We believe in privacy. We believe in giving people control," Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg said at a press conference to announce the overhaul.

By Xinhua, Moscow : A Russian cargo spaceship has docked with the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver food, water, fuel and equipment for the crew, the Mission Control said Saturday. The Progress M-14 spaceship docked with the station at 1.39 a.m. Moscow time Saturday. The spaceship delivered some 2.5 tons of cargo as well as gifts from the crews' families to Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko and NASA astronaut Garrett E. Reisman.

By Gurmukh Singh, IANS, Toronto : Auction for thousands of wireless technology patents belonging to failed telecom giant Nortel began Monday.

By Jay Dougherty, DPA, Washington : Business people send out some six trillion e-mail messages each year, according to US-based Ferris Research. That's probably not much of a surprise to most office workers today, who have seen e-mail usurp meetings and face-to-face conversations as a primary form of communication.

By IANS, London : Like soldiers guarding their posts in hostile territory and keeping comrades informed by radio that all is well, birds too are just as conscious about discharging similar "responsibilities", according to a study. Researchers from the University of Bristol have demonstrated that by warbling a distinctive "watchman's song", birds scanning for danger ensure their larger feathered family can focus on foraging, and so get more food.

By IANS London : Food produced organically have up to 40 percent more disease-fighting properties than non-organically grown produce, researchers have found. Scientists at Newcastle University in Britain raised cattle and grew fruits and vegetables on 725 acres of organic and non-organic farms situated next to each other over a period of four years.

By IANS, Washington : Trapping carbon dioxide at the source like coal burning power plants and then injecting them underground could be one of the options to cut emissions levels. MIT engineers have come up with a new software tool to determine how much can be sequestered safely in a geological formation.

By DPA, Washington : A solar flare can release the destructive equivalent of a 100 million hydrogen bombs, obliterating everything in its neighbourhood, including every single atom, according to scientists. "We've detected a stream of perfectly intact hydrogen atoms shooting out of an X-class solar flare," said Richard Mewaldt of the California Institute of Technology. "If we can understand how these atoms were produced, we'll be that much closer to understanding solar flares," he added.

By IANS, New Delhi : Watch out for Mars shining brightly in the sky around midnight Monday, as the red planet will be closest to the Earth.

By Xinhua, Washington : NASA has for the fourth time delayed the launch of its space shuttle Discovery due to technical reasons, the US space agency has announced. After meeting all Friday at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, shuttle managers decided against launching it in a week. The launch date for Discovery is currently "under review", NASA said in a statement. The launch had been targeted for no sooner than Feb 27.

By IANS, Washington : Employing a powerful supercomputer, researchers screened 140,000 prospective drug compounds to identify one that dramatically lowers blood pressure, improves heart function and prevents damage to the organ. These findings could spur development of a new class of anti-hypertensive drugs to overcome two major problems associated with cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure (BP) and tissue damage or fibrosis.

By IANS Agartala : India could meets its food grain demand of 220 million tonnes in the next five years if farmers adopt the Madagascar model of cultivation instead of the conventional method, scientists Thursday said.

By DPA, San Francisco : Microsoft Wednesday issued a patch for its Word software to comply with a court ruling Tuesday that it infringed on patents relating to the use of XML or extensible markup language in its flagship word processing software. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word programs containing the infringing code from Jan 11, 2010. It also upheld jury-imposed damages of $290 million.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Debris from the U.S. intercept of a spy satellite in February and from China's anti-satellite test in Janaury 2007 is still orbiting Earth, according to a space debris expert. T.S. Kelso's CelesTrak satellite tracking software shows some 15 pieces of the busted up USA 193 spysat are still flying around, although when the successful intercept was reported, estimates were that all pieces would re-enter Earth's atmosphere within 40 days. A recent analysis shows the last piece of clutter will decay about 100 days post-intercept, Kelso reported.

By IANS, New Delhi : Delhi witnessed the year's first partial solar eclipse Tuesday but cloudy skies prevented many people from having a clear view of the celestial spectacle.

By DPA Hamburg : A new function in Google Earth has opened up the cosmos to Internet viewers. The new "sky" portion of the software allows users to view the starry skies, navigating through the galaxies with the click of a mouse, says Google spokesman Stefan Keuchel from the company's Hamburg offices. Constellations, planets, and nebulae are all offered alongside information about their position, size and orbits.

By RIA Novosti, Moscow : Russia is set to launch its first weather satellite, Meteor-M1, in the fourth quarter of 2008, the satellite's manufacturer said Wednesday. Russia currently has no weather satellites and gets its information from foreign sources. The Russian state research and development company VNIIEM said its specialists had assembled the satellite and launched "the final stage of complex tests". The 2.7-tonne Meteor-M1 will be put into a 830-km orbit by a Soyuz-2 launch vehicle and a Frigate upper stage. Its service life will be five to seven years.

By IANS, Washington : Fine as flour and rough as sandpaper, moon dust gave Apollo astronauts a tough time by causing 'lunar hay fever', problems with space suits, and dust storms in the crew cabin. Larry Taylor, director, Planetary Geosciences Institute, University of Tennessee and other scientists will present their research on lunar dust at the joint Oct 9 meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) and American Society of Agronomy (ASA), among others.

Agartala : The much awaited passenger train service between Tripura and the rest of India is likely to start in April, a railway official...

By IANS, Sydney : Like humans, little fish also diet - not to look more presentable, but out of dire necessity. They don't want to get on the wrong side of more dominant fish and risk being gobbled up. A new study, by researchers at James Cook University, has also found that bigger fish use the threat of punishment to keep competitors in line.

By IANS, Bangalore : The autonomous National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) has become a state-run body and brought under the Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO), the space agency said Monday. Renamed the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), the Hyderabad-based entity will be integrated with other ISRO centres for the development and operations of the ground segment under India's remote sensing programme. “The society has been merged with ISRO in view of the allied activities carried out in aerial and satellite remote sensing,” ISRO said in a statement.

By IANS, Auckland : A Russian computer hacker is suspected to have set up an underground nexus in New Zealand for selling secret details of people using online social networking site Facebook. Police are hunting the hacker who may have set up shop in New Zealand, selling the account details of millions of Facebook users, tvnz.co.nz reported. Detectives from the National Cyber Crime Centre are investigating whether the hacker Kirllos is using New Zealand as a base. He is offering to sell Facebook user names and passwords on an underground hacker forum.

By IANS, London : A life-like robot, which speaks more than a dozen languages and has a pawky sense of humour, has been bought by NASA to become a robotic tour guide.

By IANS, Washington : The human eye has inspired a new technology that is likely to push the limits of photography by producing vastly better images over a wider field of view. The remarkable imaging device has been made possible by combining stretchable optoelectronics and biologically inspired design like the layout of the eye. University of Illinois and Northwestern University researchers have developed a high-performance, hemispherical "eye" camera using an array of single-crystalline silicon detectors and electronics, configured in a stretchable, interconnected mesh.

By IANS, Washington: NASA's solar observatory caught for the very first time on camera a comet's fiery end as it flew too close to the sun's blazing surface.

By IANS, Washington : OMG! LOL. TTYL. For many past the age of 40, these groupings seem like meaningless jumble, but for Generation Next, they embody a world of meaning. “Instant messaging, or IM, is not just bad grammar or a bunch of mistakes,” said Pamela Takayoshi of Kent State University. “IM is a separate language form from formal English and has a common set of language features and standards.”

Hyderabad: With the central government set to launch its ambitious 100 smart cities project later this month, Telangana plans to develop a national repository...

By RIA Novosti Moscow : Russian-American joint venture International Launch Services (ILS) has signed a contract to launch two U.S. commercial satellites, the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center said on Monday. ILS, owned by the Khrunichev Center, RSC Energia, and U.S. firm Space Transport Inc. provides spacecraft launch services on board Proton-M carrier rockets. The company received $1.5 billion in new launch orders in 2007. "The contract is for the launch of two satellites for the SIRIUS Satellite Radio constellation," a Khrunichev spokesman said.

By DPA Berlin : Chunky, heavy tube monitors appear to have reached the end of their long run as the king of the computer workspace. A hefty competition is under way among flat monitors. The goal: bigger, broader and more handsome. "Seventeen-inch monitors are already becoming extinct, and 19 inch has become the standard," says Dirk Lorenz from the German consumer-testing organisation Stiftung Warentest in Berlin. As monitors get bigger, more of them come in wide screen format. That means a 16:10 size ratio instead of the old fashioned 4:3 ratio.

By Bernama Los Angeles : Yahoo has become the first major search engine to let people search the Internet by talking to a mobile device, China's XINHUA news agency quoted a newspaper, as saying on Thursday. Through the technology from a Massachusetts start-up, Yahoo's mobile search engine, known as oneSearch, could allow users of popular PDAs like BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series to scour the Web with their voice, the San Jose Mercury News daily reported.

By IANS, London : Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate the same amount of harmful carbon dioxide as boiling an electric kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research quoted Sunday. A typical search generates about seven grammes of CO2 whereas an electric kettle generates about 15 gm, The Sunday Times quoted a Harvard University physicist as saying. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact,” says Alex Wissner-Gross, whose research due out soon.

By IANS Washington : Do not be misled by the size of the rivers. Small rivers can be as efficient as the longer ones when it comes to cleansing themselves - provided they are allowed to maintain their natural flow. Scientists at Michigan State University found this after studying several streams and rivers in an effort to understand what happens to the nitrogen that is washed into the water.

By RIA Novosti, Baikonur : A Soyuz-FG carrier rocket lifted off Sunday from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan with a crew of three, one of them the sixth space tourist, to the International Space Station (ISS). The three-stage carrier rocket was launched at 11.01 a.m. Moscow time (701 GMT) as planned, with the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft subsequently removing from the rocket.

By IANS, London : In an invention that could go a long way in helping the disabled, students have developed a computer game that can be operated by eye movement. The students, from Imperial College London (ICL), have developed an open source game called 'Pong', where a player uses his eye to move a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. To play the game, the user wears special glasses containing an infrared light and a webcam that records the movement of one eye. The webcam is linked to a laptop where a computer programme syncs the player's eye movements to the game.

By NNN-IRNA Tehran : Deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation for International Affairs Mohammad Saeedi has expressed hope that Iran and the IAEA would finalise the issue of P1 and P2 centrifuges in this round of negotiations. Saeedi was speaking to reporters at the Mehrabad International Airport here Monday following the arrival of Deputy Chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for Safeguards Olli Heinonen. Heinonen is to hold a fresh round of talks with Iranian officials within the framework of Iran-IAEA Aug 21 agreement.

By IANS, Beijing : Archaeologists in China have found the ruins of two 5,000-year-old villages in Mongolia. The ruins in Hamin'aile village in Tongliao city in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have been identified as possibly originating from Hongshan culture, dating back 5,000 years, said Ji Ping, a researcher at the Institute of Cultural and Historical Relics and Archaeology. About 1,200 square metres have been excavated, and houses and tombs had been found, China Daily reported.

By Xinhua, Moscow : A Russian spaceship, carrying tonnes of food, water and fuel was on its way to the International Space Station (ISS) Wednesday, Itar-Tass news agency reported. The Progress M-65 spaceship took off from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan at 11.50 p.m. (1950 GMT) Wednesday, the report said. The unmanned spaceship will deliver two tonnes of food, water, fuel and equipment, to the ISS. The spaceship is to dock at the ISS Sep 13, the report said. The ISS's orbit was adjusted Aug 13 to prepare for the docking of the cargo module.

By IANS, Gandhinagar : Indian space scientists are hopeful that Chandrayaan-1 will Saturday start orbiting the moon. "If everything goes right, by Nov 8, Chandrayaan-1 will start circling the moon," said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman Madhavan Nair here Tuesday. The last orbit-raising manoeuvres to enter the lunar transfer trajectory were completed Tuesday by the Spacecraft Control Centre at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bangalore, he said.

By RIA Novosti, Moscow : The development of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, has involved over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes, a project coordinator said Monday. The $5.8 billion international project, which will be officially unveiled on October 21 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN, has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984.

By IANS, New York : Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and colleagues at Oxford never envisioned the strange object amateur astronomer Hanny van Arkel found in archived images of the night sky. The Dutch school teacher, volunteer in the Galaxy Zoo project, co-founded by Schawinski that allows public participation in astronomy research online, discovered a mysterious object some are calling a 'cosmic ghost'.

By Reino Gevers, DPA, Hamburg (Germany) : Within a decade, most new cars will be equipped with clean-drive technology and a host of easy to serve technical gadgets that will make driving much more comfortable and safer than today. Engineers are currently working on several technologies that were still fiction in the 1980s American television series "Knight Rider" in which David Hasselhoff is partnered by an autonomous car called KITT with artificial intelligence. Like KITT, the car of the future recognises its owner with a mini iris-recognition camera.

By IANS, Washington : The combined land and ocean surface average temperature for February was the ninth warmest since records began in 1880, according to an analysis by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The analysis in NOAA's National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) global reports are based on preliminary data, which are subject to revision. Additional quality control is applied to the data when later reports are received several weeks after the end of the month and as increased scientific methods improve NCDC's processing algorithms.

By Devirupa Mitra, IANS New Delhi : On the icy barrenness of Antarctica, the Indian research station of Maitri has a new voice - the first ever blog by an Indian from the seventh continent. A member of the 27th Indian Scientific Antarctica Expedition, 56-year-old Sudhir Khandelwal, has typed, so far, 39 posts and nearly 15,000 words, with another one and a half months of his stay to go.

By IANS, Washington : A NASA satellite helped astronomers pin down the timing mechanism in a ticking “stellar bomb” some 20,000 light years away. The twin-neutron star, designated as 4U 1636-53, produces between seven and 10 bursts daily, releasing more energy in 10 to 100 seconds than the sun radiates in an entire week. The astronomers said they were equivalent to 100 hydrogen bombs detonating simultaneously on a city-sized surface.

By SPA Beijing : China plans to carry out its first spacewalk in second half of the year, an official of the nation's manned space program said here on Thursday, according to Xinhua. The Shenzhou VII spacecraft will be launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern province of Gansu latein the year and the astronauts will leave their spacecraft for the first time, the official told Xinhua. The spacecraft will also release a small inspection satellite, which monitors its own performance.

By IANS, By RIA Novosti, Moscow: Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin Monday reiterated his appeal for developing a hypersonic aircraft for its PAK-DA long-range bomber requirements.

By IANS New Delhi : Of the people using the Conditional Access System (CAS) for viewing satellite television at least 70 percent are not satisfied with it and want to return to the previous system, reveals a study conducted by the Voluntary Organisation In Interest of Consumers Education (VOICE).

By IANS, Washington : Like charity, the battle against global warming should also begin at home, according to a new study. The study set out to establish that going green, recycling items of daily use and reducing your carbon footprint would be easier if a household's environmental impact is monitored. The study, which enlisted 20 families to assess how well sustainable behaviour might be inculcated among householders, compared fuel, electricity, water costs and waste generation and recommended cost-effective steps to reduce consumption.

By IANS,

By IANS, New Delhi : India is the top spam sender in Asia and the seventh largest in the world, accounting for over four percent of the total global spam, says a study. "India is the leader among Asian countries in spam, accounting for more than four percent of the total global spam and is ahead of other Asian countries such as China (3.39 percent), Republic of Korea (2.57 percent) and Thailand (2.04 percent)," says Trend Micro, a firm that provides Internet content security, focusing on securing the exchange of digital information for businesses and consumers.

By Wang Aihua, Xinhua, Shanghai : Astronomers from China, Japan and South Korea are building the world's largest radio telescope array to study the Milky Way Galaxy and black holes as well as to determine the orbits of lunar probes such as China's Chang'e-1. The array, called the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) consortium, consists of 19 radio telescopes from China, Japan and South Korea that cover an area with a diameter of 6,000 km from northern Japan's Hokkaido Island to western China's Kunming and Urumqi regions.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Dushanbe: The European Union has called on Tajikistan to respect the independence of the internet amid concerns of a crackdown against freedom of expression.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Precious information was found on a melted disk drive from Columbia space shuttle which broke up while returning to the earth on Feb. 1, 2003, media reported on Saturday. The hard drive contained data from the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment, designed to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity.

By DPA, San Francisco: Google is to add automatic captions to the tens of millions of English-language videos it hosts on YouTube, the web search giant said Friday. The move will make the videos more accessible to deaf viewers but will also help Google index the content and supply relevant ads alongside it, analysts said.

By DPA, San Francisco : Microsoft's latest deal proposal to Yahoo envisages the internet portal selling off its valuable properties in Asia and Microsoft buying its search business in the US, media reports said. The Software giant also proposed buying a minority stake in the whittled down Yahoo that would remain after the sell-off, the Wall Street Journal reported late Monday.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Microsoft unveiled a public beta of its WorldWide Telescope (WWT) web application that allows star gazers and astronomers deep into the universe Tuesday. "The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. "Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe."

By IANS, Sydney : A new study that said the first human settlers in Australia wiped out its megafauna has been contracted by a newer study. The latest study says there is no evidence to indicate that human activity wiped out more than 60 species of Australia's large prehistoric animals or megafauna, between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. A review of available evidence showed that only 13 species were still alive when humans first arrived in Australia. Those people did not focus on big-game hunting nor cause major habitat change by widespread use of fire.

By SPA Houston : Space shuttle Endeavour headed for home on Wednesday after delivering a Japanese module and a Canadian robot to the International Space Station. Its 16-day mission was scheduled to end with a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT), 33 minutes before sundown, Reuters reported. Weather forecasts looked favorable and the shuttle was in good shape except for a small nick in the windshield, possibly caused by space debris, said flight director Richard Jones.

Washington: In a first such demonstration, an Indian-origin researcher has developed a system that uses Wi-Fi internet signals to beam power to remote devices...

By IANS Bangalore/New Delhi : India's Internet connectivity was disrupted Thursday after two undersea cables were damaged in the Mediterranean, although IT majors reported no impact on business. Smaller companies and individual surfers would, however, have to make do with slower speeds till the cables are repaired. "Slow connectivity, choking and other problems have been caused across India due the cable damage," Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) President Rajesh Chharia said, adding it may take 10-15 days for normalcy to be restored.

By Xinhua Beijing : A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, according to a report in Astrophysical Journal March quoted by media Tuesday. The blazing spiral could destroy the world from thousands of light-years away, which is far more powerful than the moon-sized Death Star, which has to get close to a planet to blast it as we see in Star Wars.

By IANS, Washington : There are limits to how big super gigantic black holes can grow, according to the latest research led by an Indian-American astrophysicist of Yale University. These "ultra-massive" black holes have been shown to have masses upwards of one billion times that of our own Sun, which is where they have set the limit on themselves. Priyamvada Natarajan, associate professor of astronomy at Yale and Ezequiel Treister, a postdoctoral fellow at Hawaii University, have shown that even the biggest of these gravitational monsters can't keep growing forever.

By IANS, Washington : Brawling over women is as old as history, settled with fisticuffs or a verbal spat, but our ferocious ancestors brutally maimed or killed rivals for them. For instance, a mass grave unearthed by a Durham University team indicates that primitive men did their rivals to death to possess their women. The research focused on 34 skeletons found buried in Talheim, in Germany's south-west. Genetic evidence from their teeth suggested they were massacred in a tribal clash around 5000 BC.

By IANS, Beijing : China plans to launch an unmanned space module in 2011. It is expected to complete the country's first space docking which is regarded as an essential step toward building a space station, an official said Wednesday. Tiangong-1, or the Heavenly Palace, would be later converted into a manned space lab after experimental dockings with three Shenzhou spacecraft. The spacecraft are expected to be put into space within two years following the module's launch, said Qi Faren, former chief designer of Shenzhou spaceships.

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, Moscow : A Russian space cargo ship docked with the International Space Station (ISS) Saturday, delivering 2.5 tonnes of supplies to the station, an official said. The Progress M-05M freighter docked successfully with ISS around 10.30 p.m., Xinhua reported citing Valery Lyndin, spokesman for the mission control centre. The space ship lifted off Wednesday night from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

New York: In what could be read as a subtle message to co-founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter said it is looking for a CEO with...

By RIA Novosti Washington : US astronauts will make the first of five spacewalks from the International Space Station (ISS) Friday, to attach a node to the station brought by the Discovery shuttle, NASA said. Douglas Wheelock and Scott Parazynski will leave the ISS at 10:28 a.m. GMT. The second spacewalk to be carried out as part of Discovery's trip to the station will involve Parazynski and Daniel Tani.

By IANS, New Delhi: Former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Tuesday said Technology Day, celebrated every year since 1999, should be a day for young people who can be inspired to take science as a career. Speaking at a function to mark the occasion, Kalam said technology was important for the economic development of the country and building a better nation. "Technology Day should be a day of young people. They should be called at functions like this as it will help them choose a career in science," he added.

By IANS, Chennai: Indian space agency officials are gearing up to make the rocket that would carry seven satellites launch-ready for Feb 25 with a full system check, an official said.

By IANS, Toronto : The University of Waterloo, based in the city of Blackberry near here, has been rated as the top research institution in Canada. In the annual ``Canada Top 50 Research Universities,'' Waterloo edged out many top universities in a survey which tracks sponsored research at these institutions. The university is quite popular with Indian students. It has some prominent Indians on its faculties also. In a release before the publication of the survey at the weekend, the university said its total research ranked in the ``elite $100 million club'' in 2007.