Technology

By IANS Sydney : Global warming might have wiped out ancient species like mammoths and bison, warning us about the potential impact of climate change. Study of ancient DNA indicates that extinction of such species from the northern hemisphere 11,000 years ago was largely due to climate change. Human impact through hunting and overkill were only incidental, said lead researcher Alan Cooper. He retrieved remains of genetic material from a variety of sources, including bones and teeth, preserved seeds and sediments, to examine evolution and environmental change, reports Sciencedaily.

By IANS Washington : Laser based chemical sensors currently under development will sniff out TNT and take the hazard out of bomb detection. The remote detection scheme relies on highly sensitive, low-cost, battery-free, thin-film sensors that require no electronic equipment or excitation source at the sites where they are installed. Conventional chemical TNT sensors have no remote capability and must be used close to the site of the suspected bomb, risking the lives of military personnel.

By IANS, Abu Dhabi : A team of archaeologists from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) has discovered the skeletons of at least 40 ancient wild camels dating back to over 6,000 years. The team made the discovery at a place called Al Gharbia in the western region of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the state-run Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported.

New Delhi, Aug 1 (IANS) Mahendra Ved, a senior journalist here, was stunned after receiving a call from his Bahrain-based daughter a few days ago, sounding distressed and enquiring after his whereabouts and well-being. "She was crying and desperately wanted to reach me after reading an e-mail, which was sent to her by someone who had hacked my gmail account and forwarded a troubling message to all my friends and relatives," Ved says. "Since Sunday, I have received at least 60 such calls," adds Ved.

By IANS, New Delhi : Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal Monday asked state governments to set up scientific innovation councils within a month and promised to set up seven top-class research institutes in states that did not have them. “The states should take the initiative in promoting science, and we appeal to all states to set up scientific innovation councils modelled after the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR),” Sibal said after a science minister's conference here.

By IANS, Hyderabad: The work on Tata Advanced Systems' facility on the outskirts of Hyderabad to manufacture Sikorsky helicopter cabins formally began Thursday as Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy unveiled a plaque for the project. The facility to assemble fuselages of Sikorsky S-92 helicopters is coming up at the Aerospace and Precision Engineering Special Economic Zone (SEZ) being developed by the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (APIIC) in Adibatla.

By Xinhua Beijing : The "Lx86" capability, to be included in IBM's PowerVM virtualization software, allows x86-based Linux applications to run on IBM's System p and Power-based Unix systems without modification, media reported Thursday. "The capability will simplify the consolidation of Unix and Linux server sprawls," said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems. "Running Linux applications in the Unix environment can reduce the cost of server consolidation and energy consumption and increase asset utilization."

By RIA Novosti Moscow : A European carrier rocket took off from French Guiana early on Sunday on a mission to bring supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), a spokesman for Russia's mission control said. The Ariane-5 rocket lifted off at 04:03 GMT from the Kourou space center to bring a 20-ton unmanned cargo module into orbit.

By IANS Geneva : Engineers have lowered a 9.3-metre wheel down a 100 metre shaft to complete what has been described a the world's largest scientific instrument - a nuclear particle accelerator that will run around a 27 km long tunnel deep under the Swiss-France border. The accelerator has been built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, popularly known by its French acronym CERN, as part of a 20-nation collaborative exercise and is expected to begin functioning this summer.

By Gulshan Luthra New Delhi : Construction of the first lot of six VH 92 Super Hawk helicopters that transport the US president...

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 : Uneasy about ongoing tropical storms, the US space agency NASA Sunday announced a two-day delay in launching the Atlantis shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Atlantis will launch Oct 10 instead of Oct 8 from the Kennedy Space Centre on the Florida Atlantic coast, NASA said. The mission is complicated because a second shuttle must be ready on the launch pad immediately after Atlantis takes off to serve as a back-up in case of problems with the mission.

By IANS, Washington : Imagine a squad of soldiers who can pinpoint out-of-sight enemy snipers and identify the calibre and type of weapons being fired, with the help of software embedded in their helmets. Engineers at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that can give soldiers just such an edge by turning their combat helmets into "smart nodes" in a wireless sensor network.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Magicians use smoke and mirrors to create mystery, whereas Jupiter uses dust and shadow to conceal the mystery of its faint rings. Jupiter's rings are now known to be made mostly of dark dust. They were discovered in 1979 by Voyager 1. Not until the Galileo spacecraft, orbiting Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, did scientists realize the rings were made of dust dispersed by meteoroids slamming into Jupiter's inner moons.

New York : Will you call 911 if Facebook goes off the radar? This is exactly some users in Los Angeles did when the...

By IANS, Washington : History and geography shape our genome, according to a new study. The movements of humans within and among continents, expansions and contractions of populations and vagaries of genetic chance, have influenced the distribution of genetic variations. In recent years, geneticists have identified a handful of genes that have helped human populations adapt to new environments within just a few thousand years - a strikingly short time scale in evolutionary terms.

By Arun Kumar, IANS, Washington : The confirmation of elevated water molecules in the moon's polar regions by India's maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 raises new questions about its origin and effect on the mineralogy of the moon, US scientists say. "Water ice on the moon has been something of a holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

By IANS, Muscat : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Saturday congratulated scientists in the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for successfully putting India's first unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1 into lunar orbit. The prime minister, who arrived here Saturday afternoon on a three-day visit to the Gulf, sent his congratulatory message after receiving the news. Chandrayaan-1 has travelled more than 380,000 km in 12 days after its launch from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh Oct 22 to enter the lunar orbit Saturday.

By IANS, New Delhi : India's poor will have enormous problem in arranging their livelihood due to climate change, and it will be better the country stops being a climate sceptic, a government official said Thursday. "There is enough scientific evidence to corroborate the fact that climate change poses unprecedented risks to both human life and in fact, to human civilisation," New and Renewable Energy Secretary Deepak Gupta said at a conference on climate change. He said the climate change will have catastrophic "effect on livelihood, particularly of the poor".

By IANS, Washington : The x-ray has just got 100 million times brighter, thanks to next-generation light sources like free electron laser oscillator - or the X-FELO. X-FELO will open up breakthrough scientific opportunities in various research fields. Its characteristics are ideally suited for bulk-sensitive, hard x-ray photo-emission spectroscopy. Existing technology uses undulators to create bright x-ray beams of spontaneous emission at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne.

By DPA, Washington : Two astronauts from the space shuttle Discovery completed a more than six-hour-long spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) Friday, installing a new ammonia tank used in the cooling system, NASA said. US astronaut John "Danny" Olivas and Swede Christer Fuglesang ended their mission successfully at 0451 GMT. They got started nearly an hour later than planned because of problems with a communications device in Olivas' spacesuit.

By IANS New York : Scientists have listed 11 factors that will help doctors predict if a postmenopausal woman is going to suffer hip fractures over a period of five years. A hip fracture is a common injury for elderly people. A broken hip can lead to more serious problems, even death. For older women, a hip fracture can mean continuing ill health.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : Russian amateur astronomer Artyom Novichonok, a student of Petrozavodsk university, has discovered a new comet, website Astronet said.

By IANS Thiruvananthapuram : From three-year-old Unnikuttan to 95-year-old Gangadharan, a dozen elephants queued up as the Kerala government Saturday launched its programme of implanting a microchip in them in place of registration papers. The chip is placed under the skin of the elephant by way of an injection. The initiative, the first for Kerala that has almost 1,000 captive elephants, was launched from the capital district.

By IANS, London : There could be nearly 38,000 intelligent civilisations in our galaxy - and some of them could be trying to contact us even as you read this, British scientists say. If that sounds too far-fetched, rest assured that there are at least 361 such civilisations out there, say scientists from Scotland. Be warned though - these Extra Terrestrials are likely to be clever than you.

By IANS, London : The London Eye gives you a bird's eye-view of the city at 440 feet. How would you like to go higher, say, 440,000 feet? A prototype of the craft you would ride for such a space venture was unveiled in Salford Tuesday. The rocket maker, Steve Bennett, says it is possible in the very near future for tourists to take a ride in outer space.

By Arun Kumar, IANS Washington : Yahoo Inc says it's "going to take time" to thoroughly evaluate Microsoft Corp's unsolicited $45 billion offer keeping in mind its strategic options, including keeping the company independent. It was undertaking a deliberate review of Microsoft's offer to pay Yahoo shareholders either $31 in cash, or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock, Yahoo said in a media release posted on the company Web site.

By DPA, Jakarta : A tsunami early warning system developed and funded by five donor countries began operations Tuesday in Indonesia, nearly four years after the Asian tsunami of December 2004, which claimed 230,000 lives. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who attended the launch ceremony in Jakarta, expressed pride over the development of the technology in Indonesia but reminded the country that the equipment was not an end-all, be-all but would only provide help. The German government financed the 45-million-euro ($58-million) project.

By RIA Novosti St. Petersburg : The collapse of a part of the Wilkins ice shelf in the Antarctica will not cause sea levels to rise, Russian experts have said. A 41-km iceberg split off from the Wilkins ice shelf in the southwestern part of the Antarctica late February, destroying a large part of the ice shelf's edge, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in Russia's second largest city said in a press release.

By DPA, Mountain View (US) : Google has started up a portal for downloading extensions and web applications to its Chrome internet browser.

By IANS Washington : Imagine a camera that sees the world through thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself. Now stop imagining and start imaging. Researchers at Stanford University already have the prototype of just such a gadget: a 3-megapixel chip, with all its micro-lenses adding up to a staggering 12,616 cameras. The multi-aperture camera looks and feels like a small cell phone camera. And the final product may cost less than a digital camera, the researchers say, because the quality of its main lens is no longer of paramount importance.

New Delhi : Google is celebrating the birth centenary of renowned Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain who died in London on June 9, 2011...

Luxembourg, Sep 17 (DPA) In a landmark ruling with key implications for European Union (EU) competition policy, a court in Luxembourg Monday backed the bloc's decision to inflict a multi-million-euro fine on Microsoft for abusing its dominant position in the software market. With a sentence read out in a packed court by presiding judge Bo Vesterdorf, the EU's Court of First Instance overturned almost the entire content of Microsoft's appeal against a 2004 ruling by the European Commission (EC).

By IANS, Washington : Researchers have identified a gene which is linked with Labradors collapsing soon after an intense hunting or retrieving exercise, in a condition known as exercise-induced collapse or EIC. In most cases, their legs get wobbly and hind limbs give out, and in rare cases they may die. Labradors are the commonest dog breed in the world. An estimated three to five percent have EIC.

Washington: A team of Columbia Engineering researchers led by an Indian-American scientist Latha Venkataraman has created a single-molecule electronic device which has a potential...

By IANS, Washington : The notion that forests remove carbon dioxide from the air and prevent global warming has some complications, says a new study. There's a kind of forest that does remove carbon dioxide, but does not help prevent global warming because it heats up so much itself. Forests can directly absorb and retain heat, and, in at least one type of forest, these effects may be strong enough to cancel out a good part of the benefit in lowered carbon dioxide, says a discovery by chemistry researchers at the Weizmann Institute (WI), Israel.

By RIA Novosti Moscow : Russia will need an additional $5 billion to complete construction of its segment of the International Space Station (ISS) by 2015, the head of Russia's rocket and space corporation Energia said. The ISS is a joint project of space agencies from the US, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan. The orbital station is likely to remain operational until 2020.

By Fakir Balaji, IANS Hyderabad : Indian space programmes for education, healthcare, management of natural resources and weather forecast and disaster management are in great demand the world over due to their domino effect on living standards, a top Indian space agency official said here Thursday. "Nations across Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific are making a beeline to seek our expertise and resources for replicating the success of our space programmes and applications.

By IANS, New Delhi : “The successful launch of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, India's first unmanned scientific mission to the moon, marks the first step in what we hope will be a historic milestone in India's space programme," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Wednesday.

By Arun Kumar, IANS, Washington : The American space agency NASA is sending two instruments to map the lunar surface on India's maiden moon voyage on its robotic Chandrayaan-1 mission Wednesday. The Moon Mineralogy Mapper will assess mineral resources, and the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar, or Mini-SAR, will map the polar regions and look for ice deposits, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA.

By IANS, Washington : Researchers led by an Indian American are "reverse engineering" the brain to design the first working model of the complex interplay between the mind and body. For example, when you puick up an ice-cold drink out of the fridge this summer, how do your brain, eyes and hands interact? "It is still a mystery, really," said University of British Columbia computer scientist Dinesh Pai. "No one has ever completely mapped out the processes at the level of specific neurons, muscles and tendons."

By IANS

London : Fingerprint could help identify a smoker, drinker, an avid coffee drinker or even a drug addict, scientists say.