Technology

By DPA, San Francisco : Google is teaming up with Taiwanese phone-maker HTC and the largest US cellphone carrier Verizon to launch a challenger to Apple's iPad in time for the holiday season, PC World reported Wednesday. The as-yet-unnamed tablet would run on Google's Chrome operating system, and is likely to be heavily subsidized for buyers who opt to purchase the device along with a monthly data plan from Verizon, the report said.

By IANS, London : Religious organizations can now place anti-abortion advertisements on Google after a lawsuit by a British pro-life charity forced it to lift the ban. Google settled out of court Wednesday with The Christian Institute, a UK-based charity, and will now allow religious groups to place factual and campaigning ads about abortion. The new policy will apply world-wide with immediate effect. The Institute lost no time in placing its first advertisement on the website.

By Xinhua

Xichang, Sichuan : Chinese press and thousands of tourists have gathered at China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern Sichuan Province to witness the launch of the nation's first moon orbiter, which is scheduled to take place at 6:05 p.m. on Wednesday.

By P. Vijian, NNN-Bernama, New Delhi : Indian astro scientists have become starry-eyed. They are looking to the stars to heal heart patients. While it may sound out of this world (pardon the pun), scientists at the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi have resorted to doing exatly that. They are boldly taking the science of astrology to a new dimension. The scientists are busying calculating the movements of stars and planets of patients to understand how they can reduce or avert the increasing heart-related diseases -- merely using their horoscopes.

By IANS, Washington : Robots may possibly play more complex roles in future such as performing surgeries in remote or dangerous locations like the battlefield or in space. Duke University engineers have taken the first concrete step towards realising this space age future, based on feasibility studies conducted in their lab. On a more immediate level, the technology that they have developed could make existing medical procedures safer and better for patients.

By IANS, London : In a major discovery, geophysicists have identified a vertical hole they believe is a skylight on the surface of the moon that could serve as a lunar base for astronauts. The dark pit in an intact lava tube is located in the Marius Hills region, a volcanic area on the Moon, a report published in Geophysical Research Letters said. The discovery was made using images from the moon-orbiting Japanese SELENE (also known as Kaguya) spacecraft. It was led by Junichi Haruyama of the NTT DATA CCS Corporation, Japan.

By Prensa Latina, Caracas : Venezuela has joined the space club nations by launching its first satellite, built with Chinese technology, into orbit successfully earlier this week. Named after Simon Bolivar, the hero of South American independence, the communications satellite Venesat-1 was launched from China Wednesday. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who monitored the launch along with his fellow leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales from the eastern town of Luepa, described it as a "construction of socialism" and a "symbol of Latin American integration".

By DPA Karlsruhe (Germany) : After seven months of writing day and night, a robot in Germany clutching a fountain pen has completed a "manuscript" Bible in cursive handwriting. The exercise was a piece of performance art by the Centre for Art and Media in the German city of Karlsruhe, which uses state funds to explore new art ideas. The machine, dubbed "Bios (Bible)", began copying the Bible in June onto a 900-metre-long roll of paper, with its arm forming each letter with the pen after all 66 books of scripture had been loaded into its memory.

By DPA Washington : New evidence has surfaced of an underground ocean on Saturn's moon Titan, based on data sent back to Earth by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the US space agency said. "Titan has one of the most varied, active and Earth-like surfaces in the solar system," Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement Thursday.

By Xinhua, Taiyuan (China) : China Saturday launched two satellites into orbit for monitoring the environment and forecasting natural disasters. The two satellites, launched from the Taiyuan satellite launch centre in the northern province of Shanxi and carried by a Long March 2C rocket, were expected to enhance the country's ability to forecast natural disasters, according to Bai Zhaoguang, designer of the satellites. The satellites, called "Environment-1", are China's first ecology monitors in space.

By IANS, London : Scientists are observing distant earthquakes by 'listening' to them to reveal new clues about the top of the earth's core. The approach is akin to hearing a conversation across a whispering gallery, such as those in the domes of some large cathedrals. Using a novel digital processing approach, researchers at the University of Calgary (U-C) analysed faint signals produced by 44 earthquakes. They were able to measure the sound speed at the top of earth's core with unprecedented accuracy.

By IANS, Sydney : A snip of human hair, recovered from a crime site, would now be enough to nail its perpetrator, thanks to a new technique developed by researchers. Called Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS), the portable tool has the advantage of being readily available and could be used for forensic analysis. Sarina Brandes, a chemistry masters researcher at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) who adapted this technique, said it was independent of analysis of DNA, which could break down quite quickly, especially during disasters.

By DPA Moscow : Russia has opened a new Arctic polar research station in a bid to reinforce its claims to Arctic gas and oil deposits, Interfax news agency reported Friday. The drifting station research unit, North Pole-35, was set up in the Arctic Friday, the agency reported, citing a spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute. The report said the Russian flag would also be hoisted at the research unit, where 22 researchers and scientists would work, most of them Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) staff.

By IANS, New Delhi : As the world looks forward to the millennium's longest annular solar eclipse Friday, there are superstitions galore in India. But science experts have urged people to shed "false beliefs" and watch the celestial spectacle the right way. "People have various false beliefs regarding solar eclipse. Some think that during eclipse 'bad rays' come to earth and they lock themselves up in their homes to avoid it. This is really rubbish and people should shed such superstitions," Nehru Planetarium director N. Rathnashree told IANS.

By IANS, Washington : Men appear more enthused or active in sharing creative work online than women, though both engage in Net-based creative pursuits almost equally. In a new study, almost two-thirds of men surveyed reported posting their work online while only half of women said they did. “Sharing information on the Net is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men's voices are being disproportionately heard,” said Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University and co-author of the study.

By IANS, Toronto : To pitch itself in direct competition with Apple's iPhone3 and woo general consumers, Canadian wireless giant Research in Motion (RIM) Tuesday unveiled its much-expected first clickable touch-screen BlackBerry Storm. The Waterloo-based wireless major said the new device would be available exclusively to Verizon customers in the US and Vodafone customers in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand in the autumn. The announcement comes within days after RIM shares took a massive hit on the Toronto Stock Exchange after it reported less-than-expected profits.

By DPA Erlangen (Germany) : German scientists have developed a way of harnessing heat from the body to generate electricity. The method uses the difference between the body's surface temperature and that of the surrounding environment, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits said. Energy produced this way can be used to power medical equipment, such as sensors attached to the body of a patient in an intensive care ward, the institute said.

By IANS, London : Web browser Google Chrome, which emerged in mid-2008, has hit Internet Explorer hard and stalled the rise of Mozilla Firefox.

By IANS New Delhi : Indian applicants will now have to wait longer to obtain a visa for the United Kingdom, as Britain will start collecting fingerprints and digital photographs of all visa seekers at its application collection centres in the country from Wednesday. While Britain already has biometric data centres in around 130 countries, it encountered a legal problem in India due to restrictions on the transmission of the data electronically.

By IANS,

By DPA Los Angeles : Apple has released a new operating system for its ever more popular Mac computers. The upgraded OS 10.5, nicknamed Leopard, was released Friday and includes some 300 improvements including a 'time machine' that tracks and resurrects lost data, and improved video-conferencing abilities. The eagerly awaited system was delayed by several months while the company's engineers worked on developing the iPhone. Rival Microsoft, whose software powers 90 percent of the world's computers, released its newest operating system, Vista, in January.

By IANS, Washington : As more and more news appears on the internet as well as in print, it becomes possible to map the global flow of news by observing it online. Using this strategy, computer scientists have managed to track and analyze the "news cycle" -- the way stories rise and fall in popularity. Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science at Cornell University, Jure Leskovec and Lars Backstrom tracked 1.6 million online news sites, including 20,000 mainstream media sites and a vast array of blogs.

By Madhulika Sonkar, IANS,

By EFE, Caracas : Venezuela has began a project to grow rice using Vietnamese technology, a method that replaces chemical fertilisers with fish in water channels between the rice plots. Officials hope the crop yields would increase by as much as 30 percent after using the method. In a national broadcast, President Hugo Chavez Wednesday praised the "great advances" in agriculture achieved by the Vietnamese, whom he called a "fighting people". The pilot project will be carried out in a 65,000-hectare area in Apure state.

By IANS Sriharikota/Bangalore/Chennai : India's space agency ISRO Monday successfully placed an Israeli "spy satellite" in the polar orbit after a textbook launch and reaffirmed its position among the elite group of nations capable of commercial launches - with three more orders in the queue. The 300-kg Israeli satellite, Tecsar, was launched as scheduled at 0915 IST (Indian Standard Time) using the `core alone' configuration of the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C10), that is, the rocket without its usual six strap-on booster motors.

By IANS, London : Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle smasher, have turned masses of data produced by the collider into sound for the first time.

By IANS, New Delhi: Over 80 people were arrested in Delhi in cyber crime related cases during 2009-11, the Lok Sabha was informed Tuesday.

By NNN-WAM WAM Dubai : Sun Microsystems has deployed one of the most advanced super grid computers in the world at the UAE University. The system is the regions biggest grid computing system and places the UAE University in the Top 500 list of high performance computing grids worldwide. The super grid is deployed in service of the community at large, and will support the teaching and research missions of the University by providing students and faculty with unprecedented computing power.

By IANS, London : Plants remain an effective way of tackling global warming, despite emitting small amounts of methane, an important greenhouse gas, says a new study. Research led by the University of Edinburgh (UE) in Scotland suggests that plant leaves account for less than one percent of methane emissions - which is considered to be about 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide.

By IANS, Panaji : In a considerable downer for space conspiracy theorists, Chandrayaan-1's terrain-mapper camera has recorded images of the landing site of US spaceship Apollo 15 and tracks of its lunar rovers that were used by astronauts to travel on moon's surface nearly four decades ago, a scientist said Wednesday. Prakash Chauhan of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said the images captured by the hyper-spectral camera on board Chandrayaan-1 debunked conspiracy theories that have claimed that the Apollo 15, the fourth US mission to land on the moon was a hoax.

By IANS, New York: Apple's stocks closed higher than $700 per share for the first time after Tuesday's trading, as orders for its new iPhone 5 hit a new record.

By IANS,

By Xinhua Beijing : The website of China's National Bureau of Corruption Prevention (NCBP) crashed just hours after it was launched, as a huge number of people logged on to the site to lodge their complaints against corrupt officials. The website "yfj.mos.gov.cn" launched Tuesday was inaccessible by afternoon due to the large number of visitors, Beijing Youth Daily reported.

By NNN-Xinhua Beijing : China is planning to conduct its first spacewalk in October from a Shenzhou VII spacecraft, senior space engineers said. They also said a research team had been set up to conduct a feasibility study for a space station. Wang Yongzhi, former chief designer of China's Manned Space Program, said the launch date had originally been scheduled for after the Olympics (Aug 8 to 24) and Paralympics (Sept 6 to 17).

By IANS, Washington : Whenever the US manned Mars mission materialises, the whole world can watch live TV coverage of the event, thanks to the knowhow provided by an Australian outfit. John Bunton, senior member of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) ICT Centre Wireless Technology lab has designed a novel 'beamformer' capable of providing a live video link from Mars, for which he will be honoured by NASA with its Space Act Board Award Oct 28 in California.

By DPA, Washington : Two US spacewalkers left the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday to remove an empty ammonia tank that is crucial for keeping the station cool. John "Danny" Olivas and Nicole Stott left the ISS at 2149 GMT for the planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. They will disconnect lines that transfer ammonia and nitrogen in the tank, unhook the electricity and unbolt the tank before lifting it away from the station and placing it on the robotic arm to be moved out of the way.

By IANS,

By Neelam Mathews, IANS Hyderabad : With joint plans for new satellites, manned space flights and missions to the moon, India and Russia are entering a new phase of bilateral cooperation in space. The chiefs of the space agencies in the two countries met during a global conference here last week to decide on a road map for future missions. "We discussed programmes with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)," Anatoly Perminov, Head of Russian space agency, Roscosmos, told IANS on the margins of the International Astronautical Congress here.

By IANS, Bangalore : Networking major Cisco Tuesday unveiled a social learning network platform for the global IT community aimed at talent development to meet the growing demand for networking skills. The platform will enable networking professionals and those aspiring for a career in IT to share, discuss and exchange ideas in an online environment, the company said here in a statement.

By IANS, London : Do you know that Saturday is the 60th birthday of the world's first modern computer? Manchester Baby, a computer that could store a programme, was built in Britain's University of Manchester June 21, 1948. It was the first machine - invented by Frederick Williams and Tom Kilburn - that had all the components now regarded as the characteristics of a basic computer. Most importantly, it was the first computer that could store not only data but also a short user programme in electronic memory and process it at electronic speed.

By IANS, New Delhi: Electronics major Videocon Wednesday launched nine more handsets, including a triple SIM CDMA phone, thus enhancing its current offering from 12 handsets to 21. Other key highlights of the new range are a QWERTY keypad dual SIM with optical track pad, attractive touch screen devices and dual SIM multimedia, camera and music phones, a company statement said.

By Xinhua Beijing : A Japanese astronaut will don special boxer shorts and gym wear during his upcoming mission to see if the newly developed high-tech clothing can increase comfort levels on the International Space Station, Japan's space agency said Friday. The seamless, stretchable boxer shorts, gym wear and socks are made of lightweight fabric woven from anti-bacterial and antistatic fibers to give "high levels of deodorant, antiseptic and antistatic effect" in space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

By IANS, New Delhi : Chant the surya mantra, avoid eating out and postpone work and any major assignments, some astrologers warn about the impending eclipse Wednesday. Others, however, dismiss these warnings as "eclipse hysteria". Astro-pundits are predicting a mixed bag when it comes to the solar eclipse. The solar eclipse hemmed in between two lunar eclipses - one on July 7 and another Aug 6 - will affect those with Cancer in their birth charts, according to some astrologers.

By IANS, London : A new feature for its Gmail service will automatically filter the most important messages from spam, Google has announced. Priority emails will be placed at the top of the inbox - while others will drop to the bottom. The ‘Priority Inbox’ function is designed to help users manage hundreds of emails received daily, reports the Daily Mail. The new application splits the inbox into three sections: 'Important and unread', 'Starred' and 'Everything Else'.

By IANS,

By IANS, London : Technology designed for Mars exploration could hold the key to solving the world's energy problems by boosting solar power efficiency. A self-cleaning system developed for NASA's Mars rover robots could keep solar panels free of dust and grime which hampers energy output. The devices exploring Mars have sensors which detect dust build-ups and zap the surface of their solar panels with an electrical charge to keep them shiny, reports the Telegraph.

By Xinhua Beijing : Scientists said surface features of the Red Planet hint at a watery past where torrents of groundwater carved out deep canyons, formed sweeping fans of sediment and cemented together huge fault lines, media reported Tuesday. "Groundwater probably played a major role in shaping many of the things we see on the Martian surface," said George Postma, a sedimentologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

By IANS New Delhi : Concentrated solar power and thorium-based nuclear power are the ways to generate energy without causing climate change, Nobel laureate and head of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Carlo Rubbia said here Friday.

By IANS, Washington : Decades of drought, alternating with intense monsoon rains, may have sounded the death knell for Cambodia's ancient Khmer civilization at Angkor nearly 600 years ago. Columbia University researchers say this based on an analysis of tree rings, archaeological remains and other evidence. Their findings may also shed light on what drives - and disrupts - the rainy season across much of Asia, which waters crops for nearly half the world's population.

By IANS, Washington : During the biannual event called the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), hackers worldwide develop software that can help identify and reduce risks from natural hazards.

By V. Jagannathan, IANS,

By IANS New Delhi : Can the computer enter the home and the street in a way that helps minimise violence against women? An initiative from Sri Lanka believes that information and communication technology (ICT) can do just that. The Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) has awarded a grant to the Centre for Women and Development for a project to use technology to document violence against women in the north of the country via a database.

By Xinhua, Beijing : A space-based radar aboard a European Mars probe could not only peer under the frozen extraterrestrial seas of moons such as Europa and Titan, but also see beneath the surface of ice sheets on Earth. The space radar would take its cue from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument, which has probed the Red Planet's underground for evidence of water from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft.

By IANS, London : A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way, says a study.

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 IANS Dubai : Off-spinner Harbhajan Singh climbed five places to enter top 20 while pacer Ishant Sharma climbed up 96 places to be placed 154th in the latest International Cricket Council (ICC) One-day Internationals (ODI) bowlers rankings. Harbhajan, the only Indian in top 20, is 18th with 618 rating points while the Delhi's Ishant, 19, who has made significant impact on his first tour to Australia. He has claimed six wickets in four matches in the ongoing Commonwealth Bank Triangular Series.

By Xinhua, Los Angeles : Mozilla, the group that oversees scores of volunteer programmers collaborating on the free Firefox Web browser, hopes to attract more visionaries to help change the way people surf the Internet, a newspaper report said on Tuesday.

By IANS, Washington : Lasers beamed from airplanes are greatly sharpening images of streams and rivers and interpreting how well water bodies can help maintain or expand fish stocks, according to a new study. "It's kind of like going from your backyard telescope to the Hubble telescope," says Boston College Geologist Noah P. Snyder. "Restoring fish habitat is just one example. For the fisherman, backpacker, forester, land-use planner or developer - anyone who uses map data - this new technology is the next revolution in mapping."

By IANS, Bangalore : Chandrayaan-1, that lifts off Wednesday morning from Sriharikota, is India's first and the world's 68th mission to the moon, the earth's closest celestial body which has fascinated children, scientists and poets alike. "Through the ages, the moon, our closest celestial body, has aroused curiosity in our mind, far more than any other objects in the sky," says the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on its maiden moon mission.

By DPA, Washington : US astronauts Friday completed a delicate spacewalk to replace three pairs of gyroscopes aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In the second of five planned spacewalks during the mission, astronauts Mike Massimino and Michael Good removed and replaced the gyroscopes that keep the telescope aligned and pointed toward celestial bodies being examined by astronomers.

By IANS, Washington : US space agency NASA Sunday postponed the launch of its space shuttle Endeavour by at least one day due to a low cloud ceiling over Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Launch managers initially plan for a 24-hour turnaround, but will evaluate Monday's weather before making a final decision. Next possible launch attempt is 0914 GMT Monday, Xinhua reported.

By IANS,

By IANS, Chennai : The passage of planet Venus across the face of Sun is once in a life time celestial event and many viewed it here, an official said Wednesday.

By TCN Staff Reporter,

New Delhi: Pitching for a strong cyber infrastructure in the country, Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday stressed that India should work towards developing...

By IANS, London : A bacterium disables the tomato plant's defences stealthily, activating disease and blight, according to a new study. The new finding focuses on a pathogen which causes bacterial speck disease in tomato plants. This bacterial invasion causes black lesions on leaves and fruit. Scientists found the pathogen is very effective at attacking tomato plants because it deactivates and destroys receptors which normally alert the plant to the presence of a dangerous disease - in the same way that an intruder would deactivate the burglar alarm before gaining entry to a house.

By IANS, San Francisco: Mass production of a smaller and cheaper version of Apple's iPad tablet computer has started, media reports said Wednesday.

By IANS, Sydney : You may be ingesting dangerous nano-particles emitted by a car and billions of viruses might be infesting your system especially if you have a virulent infection. qViro is a revolutionary invention that offers the potential to quickly and cheaply answer these questions. The coffee grinder sized, portable desk top instrument can count the number of viruses in a sample in minutes, powered by a computer drive.

By Xinhua Beijing : The world's most powerful optical telescope is now operating on southeastern Arizona's Mount Graham, capturing striking images of objects millions of light years away. The Large Binocular Telescope -- featuring two 27.6-foot-diameter mirrors that together gather more light and have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope -- took its first images using both mirrors last year. The first images were released to the public on Thursday.

By IANS/RIA Novosti,

By IANS, Abu Dhabi : An international meet on space technology will be held in the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) next month to be attended by space scientists from across the world including those from the US, Europe and the UAE, WAM reported Thursday. The three-day Global Space Technology Forum, the first of its kind in the Middle East, will be held Nov 16-18 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre and will focus on new space technology and commercial markets, research and development, environment, energy and climate, among other things.