Technology

By DPA, Washington : After months of dust storms and severe cold, NASA's Phoenix Mars lander has been declared dead by mission scientists, who celebrated the probe's success as the first to touch ice on the red planet. Mission managers said Monday that Phoenix had lasted long after its planned 90 days, and they celebrated the success of the spacecraft. "It's really an Irish wake and not a funeral," said Peter Smith, Phoenix mission principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a teleconference call with reporters.

By IANS, London: Police in Germany are warning people about a computer virus that accuses victims of viewing "juvenile pornography", BBC reported.

By IANS, Washington : Researchers have discovered a way to detect explosives based on the physical properties of their vapours and are readying the technology, which utilises micro-sensors, for field testing. "Certain classes of explosives have unique thermal characteristics that help to identify explosive vapours in presence of other vapours," said Thomas Thundat, Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) and University of Tennessee researcher who conducted the study with colleagues at ORNL and the Technical University of Denmark.

By RIA Novosti, Washington : The launch date for space shuttle Atlantis to service the Hubble Space Telescope has been postponed from October 10 to 14, NASA said in a statement. The 11-day mission, originally scheduled for launch on August 28, was previously postponed until October 10-11 to complete work on an external fuel tank. This time NASA said the final preparations for the mission were hampered by hurricane Ike.

By IANS, New Delhi: Mobile telephony provider Vodafone Essar has crossed the landmark of 100 million subscribers in India, the telecom operator said Thursday. After Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications (RCom), Vodafone is the third company in India to reach the milestone of 100 million customers. In terms of revenue, it is India's second largest operator.

By IANS, New Delhi : There was excitement in the air as a shaded sun peeped from an overcast sky at dawn Wednesday with tens of thousands of people across the country gathering at rooftops, planetariums and parks to watch the century's longest total solar eclipse. The eclipse started at sunrise in Surat in Gujarat at 5.28 a.m. when the moon started covering the sun and reached its peak at around 6.23 a.m. when the sun was completely obscured by the moon. The eclipse ended at 7.25 a.m.

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

By IANS, Washington : As explosive volcanoes produce tremors at similar frequencies for minutes, days or weeks before they erupt, researchers have developed a way to predict these eruptions.

By DPA, Washington : US space agency NASA announced a further delay Sunday of the planned landing of the space shuttle Endeavour due to weather conditions, and shifted the landing site from Florida to California. The shuttle is now set to land at 1.25 p.m. (2125 GMT) at Edwards Air Force Base, reported NASA, about three hours later than originally scheduled. Storms and rain at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida made a landing there too risky, reported the agency.

By IANS, London : How much spam you get depends on the first letter in your e-mail address, a Cambridge study reveals. Analysis of more than 500 million junk messages has found that addresses that began with more common letters were likely to receive 40 per cent of their mail from spammers. Those starting with less common letters, by contrast, would receive less than a fifth of their mail as spam.

By IANS New York : The inevitable has happened - as the use of nano particles grows, scientists have sounded a warning on their impact on the environment and on human health. Take, for instance, the case of nanoparticle silver. Known for its antibacterial and odour-fighting properties, this nanoparticle is now being extensively used in products ranging from socks to bandages to washing machines. Now, concerned scientists are urging a closer look at the unforeseen consequences of ordinary laundering washing off substantial amounts of the nanosilver particles into natural waterways.

By Ras H. Siddiqui, TwoCircles.net, San Francisco: The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) held its annual conference known as TiEcon in Silicon Valley, the technology world way beyond just the South-Asian Diaspora noticed. Over 4000 people attended TiEcon 2014 at the Santa Clara Convention Center with many of the heavyweights in the technology arena present. Those who presented Grand Keynotes included Steve Mollenkopf (CEO Qualcomm), Michael Rhodin and Manoj Saxena (IBM), Steve Lucas (President SAP), Romesh Wadhawani (Chairman & CEO Symphony Technology Group), Sanjay Poonen (EVP and GM of VMware) and Shahid KhanPresident of Flex-N-Gate and owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL football team.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : India Friday moved a step closer to setting up its own satellite navigation system when in a copy-book...

By IANS, Sydney : Scientists have stumbled on the first ever dinosaur footprints in New Zealand, going back some 70 million years. Geologist Greg Browne of GNS Science said the footprints shed considerable light on how fast dinos moved, how big they were as well as how soft the sediment was when they moved through the area. Browne made the discovery while investigating the properties of the rock and sediment formations in the northwest Nelson region of the country.

Kolkata : Female train commuters in distress can now seek immediate police assistance at the touch of a button -- courtesy a mobile...

By DPA Washington : Hurricane Dean may force NASA to cut short by one day the mission of the space shuttle Endeavour, space agency officials said Saturday. With astronauts on the shuttle preparing for their fourth and final space walk later Saturday, officials were keeping a wary eye on the path of hurricane Dean and the possibility that the flight control centre in Houston, Texas might have to be evacuated. The Endeavour is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) Monday and land at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida Wednesday.

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

By Richa Sharma, IANS, New Delhi : The night sky will be streaked with light in a celestial spectacle put up by the Perseids meteor showers Aug 12. Sky gazers can look out for it before dawn when over 100 meteors will sparkle in the night sky. "Perseids are the most famous and beautiful of all meteor showers that approach from the horizon. They are long, slow and colourful," Nehru Planetaruim director N. Rathnashree told IANS.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, IANS, Kalpakkam (Tamil Nadu) : As India readies to seal the nuclear deal with the US to further consolidate its nuclear energy programme, a group of scientists here looked back nostalgically to the time the country indigenously developed its first reactor - using skid rollers to move heavy items and jacks and railway sleepers for lifting the heavy generator. But it was not always so.

By IANS, Toronto : In a discovery which may hold clues to the origin of comets, astronomers have found an object that orbits the sun backwards and tilts at an angle of 104 degrees - almost perpendicular to the orbits of the planets in our solar system. They have named this unique object 2008KV42. Canadian astronomer Brett Gladman, who is a part of the international team behind the discovery, said in a statement Friday that this unusual object with backward and tilted orbit around the sun may clarify the origins of certain comets.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : The Indian space agency is developing Astrosat - an astronomical satellite to study stars and other celestial bodies...

By DPA Washington : Let's face it - If you're a PC user, sooner or later you'll have to switch to Windows Vista. Microsoft routinely drops support for older operating systems and Windows XP's days are numbered. Vista will ultimately be the only option for many. But that doesn't mean you have to go to Vista cold turkey. You can install the operating system and set it up to work the way you want it to - even making it look like the operating system you're used to. All it takes is a little time and a bit of know-how.

By Xinhuanet Beijing : The melting of the Arctic is accelerating and scientists estimate that the summer sea ice would disappear in five years, media reported Wednesday referring to new NASA satellite data. Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

By RIA Novosti Tehran : A spokesman for Iran's government gave assurances on Tuesday that the country's achievements in space technology and research pose no threat to peace and stability in the world. Gholam-Hossein Elham's comments come a day after Tehran's successful launch of the Explorer-1 research rocket, which is reportedly capable of carrying a satellite into orbit, and the unveiling of the country's first domestically built satellite, named Omid, or Hope.

By IANS, Washington : A new software, based on real clinical data, will give patients a more accurate 3D before-and-after picture, before the scalpel comes down in a cosmetic surgery.

By DPA, Kuala Lumpur : Malaysia's fledgling space programme will be temporarily shelved due to a lack of funds, six months after sending its first astronaut to space, a news report said Tuesday. Science minister Maximus Ongkili said the initial plan to send a second astronaut to space could not be carried out due to a problem of budgeting. "There's zero money. The ministry will have to look for money if it wants to continue with the programme," Ongkili was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times daily.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : The Arctic region, a strategic area for Russia, is heavily polluted and needs "major cleaning", Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday. Putin visited Alexandra Land, one of the islands in Russia's far north, and found that over 40,000-60,000 tonnes of used lubricants in thousands of barrels as well as plane, car and other wreckage had been piled up in the Arctic for years. "The reduction of military cooperation after the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in this scrap heap," the premier said.

By DPA, Washington : Two astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis ended the mission's third and last spacewalk after successfully installing an oxygen tank on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS). The spacewalk on Monday lasted five hours and 42 minutes for astronauts Robert Satcher Jr and Randy Bresnik, who also performed other maintenance upgrades. Atlantis is scheduled to begin its return journey to Earth on Wednesday, with touchdown at Cape Canaveral expected on Saturday.

By IANS Washington : A leading global innovator and researcher has called for a radical new approach to science, combining the potential of digital connectivity with lab research methodology, static since Francis Bacon promoted it about 400 years ago. University of Maryland's Ben Shneiderman calls it Science 2.0 and believes the new approach would help vastly improve use of new human networks spurred by digital connectivity. He feels they can be applied to homeland security, medical care and the environment, according to a university press release.

By DPA, Washington : Two astronauts from the Discovery space shuttle began a spacewalk Sunday to carry out further work on the International Space Station (ISS). Discovery astronauts Mike Fossum and Ron Garan were set to spend more than six hours installing a new nitrogen tank on the ISS and to carry out further work installing a robot arm on the Japanese module Kibo. It is the third and final spacewalk scheduled during the current 14-day Discovery mission.

By Xinhua Washington : After a two-month delay, U.S. space shuttle Atlantis finally blasted off on Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on a mission to deliver the European Space Agency's Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS).

By IANS, Washington : Penn State University researchers have developed a statistical approach, called ALIPR, that one day could make it easier to search the net for photographs. The public can participate in improving ALIPR or automatic linguistic indexing of pictures in real-time accuracy, by visiting www.alipr.com, uploading photographs, and evaluating whether the keywords that ALIPR uses to describe the photographs are appropriate.

By IANS, Washington : The world's fastest and most powerful supercomputer, named Novo-G, has become operational at the University of Florida. Novo-G gets the first part of its name from the Latin term for "make anew, change, alter" and the second from "G" for "genesis." A "reconfigurable" computer, it can re-arrange its internal circuitry to suit the task at hand.

By Xinhua Paris : A European supply vessel carrying over 5 tons of cargo successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday. According to a NASA news release, the European supply vehicle established communication with the ISS at 1000 GMT Thursday and the docking was ordered at 1440 GMT. The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) was built by a consortium led by the space unit of aerospace group EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space company). It carries three times the cargo of Russia's Progress vehicle and will play a key role in supplying the ISS.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : Russia's Proton-M carrier rocket with US telecom satellite Intelsat-23 blasted off Sunday from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan.

By RIA Novosti, Korolyov (Russia) : The wreckage of the US and Russian satellites that collided Tuesday poses a serious threat to other satellites on the same orbit, a Russian Mission Control official told journalists Friday. "The 800 km is a very popular orbit for remote Earth sensing and telecommunications satellites," said Vladimir Solovyov, head of the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

By Xinhua Moscow : A Russian spaceship with a first South Korean female astronaut along with two Russian cosmonauts onboard blasted off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, the mission control outside Moscow said. The Soyuz TMA-12 lifted off from the space center in the barren steppes of northern Kazakhstan at 15:16 Moscow time (1116 GMT) and is going to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on 17:00 Moscow time (1300 GMT) Thursday.

By Xinhua, Jiquan (China) : China launched Friday a manned spacecraft carrying three astronauts on its first-ever spacewalk mission. The spacecraft Shenzhou VII blasted off from the Jiuquan space centre in the northwestern province of Gansu at about 9:10 p.m. onboard a Long March-2F carrier rocket. Onboard pilots Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng are expected to orbit the earth for three days, when one of them will float out of the cabin about 343 km above the earth Friday.

By IANS/RIA Novosti,

Bangalore: India's fourth largest IT bellwether HCL Technologies bagged a $400-million (Rs.2,400 crore) deal to run the IT operations of DNB Bank ASA, Norway's...

By IANS, Washington : Researchers are developing an air traffic decision-making system that is not dependent on human controllers, but will act autonomously to optimise flight operations. The computer model that Constantine Caramanis, professor at Texas University, lead researcher Cynthia Barnhart and other colleagues from MIT are developing, will monitor weather conditions as well as current airplane locations and probable routes.

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

By IANS, Washington : Extreme solar eruptions could disrupt communications, power grids and other technology on earth by 2012. These eruptions are expected to increase in frequency and intensity towards the next solar maximum cycle which peaks in 2012, up from the current minimum of its 11-year activity cycle.

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 IANS, Kolkata: Tobacco-to-hotels major ITC Ltd is planning to set up a $1-billion greenfield paper plant and expand its hotel business, a top company official said here Friday. "We are looking at an investment of Rs.4,000-5,000 crore for paper plant. The paper plant is likely to require 1,500-2,000 acres," ITC chairman Y.C. Deveshwar said. The company is scouting for land in three states - Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh - but has not been successful in bagging any plot yet.

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

By DPA, Washington : NASA planned to launch a solar probe Wednesday to help unlock more secrets about the sun, whose massive storms affect earth's weather and can pose danger to earth dwellers. The Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) is the "crown jewel" of a fleet of NASA satellites planned to collect more details about what's going on underneath and above the surface of the sun, said Michael Luther, a NASA official who is overseeing the programme, in a webcast briefing.

By V. Jagannathan, IANS Chennai : The government should allow the generic use of irradiation technology - a process of exposing food to controlled radiations like gamma rays, X-rays, and accelerated electrons that kill harmful organisms - to prevent diseases and increase shelf life of food, says a top atomic scientist. "The Prevention of Food Adulteration Act should be amended to allow irradiation of food products on a generic basis," Arun K. Sharma, head of the Food Technology Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), told IANS here.

By IANS, Washington : Researchers are combining traditional gassification with high-tech nano-catalysts to extract ethanol from a range of biomass, which includes wood pulp, animal waste and residual distillers' grain. Gasification is a process that converts carbon-based feedstocks under high temperature and pressure in an oxygen-controlled atmosphere into synthesis gas, or 'syngas'. Syngas is made up of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (85 percent by volume) and smaller quantities of carbon dioxide and methane.

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

By IANS, Kolkata : A group of scientists, academicians and farmers observed a day's protest fast at the Kolkata Book Fair Saturday against the possible release of genetically modified crop Bt Brinjal for commercial cultivation. "The volunteers from Green Peace, city-based green body Development Research Communication and Services Centre (DRCSC) and the farmers of an organisation called Seva participated in the fast," Green Peace's sustainable agricultural campaigner R. Jaykrishna told IANS.

By IANS, Surat : Scientists, tourists and school children in Gujarat were left disappointed Wednesday as heavy clouds blocked the view of the total solar eclipse. "Some darkness was felt in Surat around 6.25 a.m. to 6.27 a.m. but the eclipse was not visible due to heavy clouds," said a senior official of the Gujarat Science City, who had arrived here from Ahmedabad to watch the event. The official said that the total solar eclipse could not be seen even in Vadodara and Ahmedabad due to cloudy skies.

By IANS, Washington : Common tree species will survive deforestation and road-building, but half of the rare trees in the Amazon could become extinct, Smithsonian scientists have warned. How resilient will natural systems be as they tide over decades of severe, human-induced global change? The debate is on between proponents of models that maximise and minimise extinction rates.

By IANS,

Bangalore : India's tryst with Mars begins early Wednesday when its inter-planetary spacecraft readies to enter the Martian orbit in a maiden attempt to...

By IANS, Hyderabad : A group of rationalists gathered here Wednesday morning to not just watch the longest solar eclipse of the century but also tuck into breakfast in an attempt to remove superstitious beliefs from the minds of people. While the dark clouds blocked the view of the partial eclipse, they went ahead with their meal on the banks of the picturesque Hussain Sagar Lake in the heart of the city to prove a point. The participants, including women and children, had the breakfast arranged by Jana Vignan Vedika (JVV), a group of rationalists fighting against superstition.

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.

Geneva : The world's largest solar-powered aircraft, Solar Impulse 2, was forced to push back the second half of it's round-the-world flight to...

By DPA, Washington : NASA's newest "eye" to be launched Wednesday is a satellite equipped with unprecedented infrared sensitivity to scope out cosmic objects unseen by other cameras. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Over the next nine months in orbit around the north and south poles, the satellite is to scan the entire sky one and a half times seeking out the "coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies," NASA said.

New Delhi: India on Monday launched its satellite-based air navigation services, thereby joining a select league comprising the US, Europe Union (EU) and Japan...

By NNN-KUNA, Cairo : Egypt has started to manufacture a new satellite in cooperation with France to meet the growing demand for its satellite in the Arab region, especially after NileSat has used up all existing capacities of the existing Nilesat 101 and NilSat 102. The Egyptian Satellite Company (Nilesat) said in a statement Thursday that it will launch its new satellite NileSat 201 in the first quarter of 2010, the first second-generation NileSat satellite based on a contract with a French company.

By Papri Sri Raman, IANS Chennai : Sher Ali hopes that there will never be a nuclear holocaust. But even if there were one, humankind would still survive on earth, says India's Y chromosome man. One of the fallouts of a nuclear holocaust, Ali said, is that the reproductive cells in men are destroyed or genetically so modified that either there are no offspring or they are malformed.

By IANS, Thiruvananthapuram : Kerala has tied up with Google to promote its tourism through search and banner advertisements on the search engine. This is the first time a state tourism department is partnering with the global search engine for such an advertisement campaign, Google officials have said. Narasimha Jayakumar, business head of Google India, told IANS that the three-month campaign started last week and the responses had been "tremendous".

By Xinhua, Jiuquan, Gansu : A panel of six Chinese astronauts arrived at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern Gansu Province on Sunday, making the last-minute preparations for the country's third manned space mission. Taking a special flight to the remote center, three qualified spacemen and three substitutes said they had "full confidence to successfully accomplish the mission" after various trainings and tests. The astronauts will pilot spacecraft Shenzhou-7 to carry out the mission during which one of them will spacewalk outside the capsule.

By Prensa Latina Moscow : A US militarization of outer space will endanger security of the planet, affirmed Friday here an expert on that countrys policy. Professor Pavel Zolotariov, deputy director of a Russian research institute on US and Canada, considered dangerous the initiative recently submitted by Colorado republican senator Wayne Allard at the Annual Space Symposium in that country. The militarization of the cosmos began during the cold war and has never stopped, although after 1991 funding was reduced, explained Zolotariov.

By IANS, Washington : Engineers have developed a highly efficient new way to fuse a pair of cells to create a hybrid version. The new technique that fuses an adult and embryonic stem cell allows researchers to study the genetic reprogramming that occurs in such hybrids. The researchers were led by collaboration between Joel Voldman, associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rudolf Jaenisch, professor of biology and a member of the Whitehead Institute.

By IANS Mumbai : India's leading scientific research organisation Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has inked an agreement with global packaging solutions major MeadWestvaco Corp (MWV) for developing and packaging applications in consumer, agriculture and transportation sectors. After signing the umbrella agreement for research and development collaboration, S.K. Brahmachari, director general of CSIR, said research partnership would address critical areas in the sponsored research projects in the applications of packaging.

By IANS, Bangalore : "Go green, save planet Earth", "Save planet Earth before it's too late" are some of the appeals a group of Bangalore children has made on a 25-metre long khadi scroll, planned to be sent to the leaders at the ongoing Copenhagen climate summit. "The 25-metre khadi scroll containing messages and signatures of children has been especially designed as an appeal to the world leaders gathered at Copenhagen summit to save the Earth from an imminent environmental crisis," a member of Rotary Green Brigade, a Bangalore-based voluntary organisation, told IANS.

By DPA, Geneva: The number of Internet domain names under dispute saw a rise in 2009, the World Intellectual Property Organisation said Tuesday. The Geneva-based organisation dealt with claims on 4,688 domains last year, up from 3,985 the year before. The total caseload, however, declined by 9.5 percent, as many incidents involve multiple attempts to "squat". Cybersquatting is defined as "the abusive registration of trademarks as domain names."

By IANS, London : Scientists have found a previously unknown human subspecies, distinct from the present day Homosapiens, that may have lived in China 11,500 years ago.

By NNN-WAM Abu Dhabi : Al Yah Satellite Communications Company PrJsc (Yahsat), a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company, has signed a letter of intent with Arianespace, the world's leading launch service and solutions company, to launch the Yahsat 1A communications satellite. The satellite is currently being manufactured by the consortium of EADS Astrium and Thales Alenia Space. The expected launch date is the second half of 2010.

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 Maitreyee Boruah, IANS, Bangalore : The student community in India's tech capital is quite busy these days, not just with preparations for the mid-term exams but with newfound interest to know more about the moon. The credit for generating interest about the moon among the school and college-goers goes to India's lunar explorer, Chandrayaan-1 which is all set to be launched Oct 22 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.

By IANS, New Delhi : Take out some time from new year eve revelry Thursday and look at the sky to catch a glimpse of a rare celestial phenomenon - a blue moon. A partial lunar eclipse will also be observed early Jan 1, 2010. The full moon on Thursday will be a "blue moon". A blue moon has nothing to do with the colour of the moon but when two full moons occur within the same month, the second full moon of the month is called a "blue moon", a term used metaphorically to describe the rarity of an event, as in the idiomatic expression -- once in a blue moon.

By IANS Los Angeles : The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) here will soon have another Indian chair. The chair - to be named Dr Mani Bhaumik Chair of Consciousness Study - will be set up at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology of the UCLA. The university already has the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian History, set up by Los Angeles-based millionaire Navin Doshi in 1999. Beverly Hills-based physicist Mani Bhaumik, who co-invented the laser technology that made LASIK surgery possible, will fund the new chair, named after him.

By RIA Novasti Moscow : Russian Mission Control said on Saturday it had successfully adjusted the International Space Station's orbit in preparation for the docking of a Russian cargo spacecraft and a U.S. space shuttle. Corrections to the space station's orbit are conducted periodically before launches of Russian cargo ships and U.S. shuttles to compensate for Earth's gravity and to ensure successful dockings. The correction started at 3:42 a.m. Moscow time (00:42 a.m. GMT) with the help of thrusters at the Russian module Zvezda.

By DPA, Cape Canaveral (Florida) : Two US astronauts left the safety of the International Space Station Thursday to install spare parts that will help it continue running smoothly in the future. Space shuttle Atlantis crew members Michael Foreman and Robert Satcher spent six hours and 37 minutes on the spacewalk. They installed a backup antenna to the outside of the station and completed other maintenance with extra time to spare, NASA said.

By DPA, Berlin : Global warming calculations have been too optimistic, and the sea level round the globe is likely to rise a full metre this century, two senior German scientists warned Wednesday. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and Jochem Marotzke, a leading meteorologist, said UN-backed data on climate change, predicting a rise of 18 to 59 centimetres, was out of date. "We now have to expect that the sea level will rise by a metre this century," said Schellnhuber in Berlin.

By IANS, Washington : Trees draw vast amounts of water from their roots up to their leaves hundreds of feet above the ground through capillary action. But now University of Rochester scientists have created a simple slab of metal that lifts liquid using the same principle, but at a much faster speed. The metal may prove invaluable in pumping microscopic amounts of liquid around a medical diagnostic chip, cooling a computer's processor, or turning almost any simple metal into an anti-bacterial surface.

By RIA Novosti, Moscow : The Progress M-65 cargo spacecraft, which undocked from the International Space Station on September 17 and served as a temporary space lab, has been "buried" in the Pacific Ocean, Russia's Mission Control said Sunday. "The cargo spacecraft's remaining fragments fell into the ocean after re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is 11:49 a.m. Moscow time [8:49 GMT] on Sunday," Mission Control said.

By IANS, London : The four huge detectors of the new Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, when fully operational, are expected to generate up to a staggering 15 million gigabytes of data every year. Andreas Hirstius, manager of CERN Openlab and the CERN School of Computing, explained how computer scientists have met the challenge of handling this unprecedented volume of data.

By IANS Bangalore : Wipro Ltd has projected $905 million (Rs.39.97 billion) from its global IT services and products business for the third quarter (Oct-Dec) of this fiscal (FY 2008). In a notification to the stock exchanges here Friday, the IT bellwether said the robust guidance was based on the flagship IT division's performance in the second quarter (July-Sept) of this fiscal, which at $797 million was $20 million more than the projected $777 million.

By IANS, Mumbai/Pune : Pune gears up to see robots co-ordinate as a team as they form a pyramid to enact a high-tech 'dahi handi' (taking butter from a pot hanging high above) sequence at the two-day 7th ABU International Robocon Competition Saturday. The event is the culmination of a yearlong competition among teams from over two dozen colleges spread across 17 countries of the Asia-Pacific region. Nirma Institute of Technology, Ahmedabad and Maharashtra Institute of Technology, (MIT) Pune are representing India at the event.

By IANS, New Delhi : India and France will jointly launch a satellite next year to understand climate change and the tropical weather phenomena including monsoons. The joint working group of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the French Space Agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) met in Goa Saturday and Sunday to review the progress made on this. ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair and CNES president Yannick d'Escatha discussed the various modalities and technicalities involved with the launch of satellite Megha Topiques.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Phoenix lander's first scoop of the Martian soil was delayed Wednesday as a result of a communication malfunction on a spacecraft that relayed commands from Earth to Mars, according to media reports Thursday. The orbiting Odyssey satellite failed to send instructions to the lander to dig into the permafrost to search for evidence of life, said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

By Parveen Chopra, IANS New York : Amar Bose, a pioneer in modern acoustics who is known for the high-end audio products bearing his name, has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the US, which has previously honoured Thomas Edison, Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. Born in the US to a Bengali father and a German mother, Bose's name is in the 2008 list of 18 inventors to be honoured, 11 of them posthumously, by the Ohio-based Hall of Fame in May.

By DPA Washington : You've probably heard of Skype - the Internet telephony application that enables you to make free phone calls with your PC - but you may not know whether it's right for you. Telephoning through the Internet, after all, has been available for years, but most applications that purported to make the process painless were actually difficult to use, unreliable, and impractical.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Jupiter's Great Red Spot appears to have gotten the best of one of its smaller, younger rival as captured in a recent series of images by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Washington(DPA) : Two astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) have completed the first of three planned space walks to start a new construction project vital to adding European elements to the orbiting laboratory. Station commander Peggy Whitson of the US and her Russian colleague, Yuri Malenchenko, completed an almost seven-hour space walk Friday, the first of three to prepare for delivery of the long-awaited European science module Columbus in December.

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By IANS, Washington : Seismologists, using ultra sensitive instruments, have detected minute changes that preceded small quakes along California's famed San Andreas fault by as much as 10 hours. If follow-up tests show that such signal is widespread, then it could be the basis of a robust early warning system for impending quakes, said researchers.

By Xinhua, Los Angeles : An unusually intense swarm of earthquakes has struck beneath a small suburb of Reno in Nevada, leaving residents shaken and scientists puzzling over the cause, the Los Angeles Time said on Thursday. Totaling more than 1,000 over the last two months, more than 20quakes of magnitude 2 or higher have hit on some days, and the intensity and frequency of the quakes have been increasing rather than following the normal pattern of tailing off, according to the paper.

By IANS Bangalore : India's first exploratory mission to moon Chandrayaan-1, scheduled for launch April 9, has been deferred, a top space agency official said here Tuesday. "As a number of pre-launch tests have to be conducted, it is difficult to meet the April 9 deadline," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair told IANS on phone. "The mission payload has 12 instruments. We will decide on the next launch date by this month-end after a review meeting," he said.

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By IANS, London : The Earth and Moon were created as the result of a giant collision between two planets the size of Mars and Venus, research says. The research from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, shows that the Earth and Moon must have formed much later - perhaps up to 150 million years after the formation of the solar system, 4,567 million years ago.

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 IANS New Delhi : Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil Monday called upon the SAARC nations to use their strength in science and technology to build a robust system of prevention, mitigation and preparedness to reduce the risks of natural and manmade disasters.

By Narayanan Suresh, IANS, This can happen only in India! Even as the nation continues to celebrate the success of Chandrayaan, the country's first space mission to moon, this is not something one of the seniormost scientists in India, Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao, is particularly thrilled about.

By IANS, New Delhi : Microsoft founder Bill Gates Friday said it would be a "big mistake" if the US curbs the entry of skilled workers from abroad, rallying behind the "smart people" from countries like India that has a globally recognised outsourcing industry. He also said Microsoft will like to partner the Indian government in its ambitious plan to give a unique identity number and a biometric card to each of its 1.17 billion people.

By Gurmukh Singh, IANS, Toronto : Canada's famous McMaster University at Hamilton near here is set to become the world leader in nanotechnology with the installation of the world's most advanced and powerful electron microscope. The Titan 80-300 Cubed, installed last summer, has turned the world famous university into a global nanotechnology research. Built by the world nanotech leader FEI Company in the Netherlands at a cost of $15 million, the Titan can examine at the nano level hundreds of everyday products in order to understand, manipulate and improve their efficiency.

By IANS, Washington : Automakers have been crashing test dummies to gain insight into how safety systems protect or fail to protect people during car accidents. But these dummies made out of plastic and steel, not tissue and bone, have their limitations. Now a virtual dummy being developed by two engineering teams with University of Virginia (UVa) Centre for Biomechanics, will make driving much safer.

By IANS, New York : Some insects that live above and below the ground communicate with each other by using plants as "green telephone lines", a new study has found. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, insects above the ground are alerted that the plant is already "occupied", according to the study by Dutch scientists. This messaging enables spatially-separated insects to avoid each other, so that they do not unintentionally compete for the same plant, ScienceDaily reported.

By IANS, Washington : NASA will launch its car-sized Mars rover named Curiosity later this month.

By IANS, Hyderabad : Buddibot, a web applications company, has developed a web-based communication tool to keep distributed families connected. This tool, comprising a mobile webcam, will help elderly people remain in touch with their children studying and working abroad through video and audio streams. Buddibot Thursday launched the subscription-based communication tool, targeting non-resident Indians (NRIs).

By DPA Darmstadt (Germany) : A heavy-duty European spacecraft that will make its maiden flight Sunday has been hailed as a precursor to a spaceship that could one day carry robots to the planet Mars. The Jules Verne, which will haul nine tonnes of food, fuel and other supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), then depart with the station's accumulated garbage, is the first automated transfer vehicle (ATV) in a series of five.

By RIA Novosti St. Petersburg : Scientists have reported substantial changes in the climate of the Arctic Region, a senior official at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) said Thursday. "We have observed global climate changes in the Polar Ocean," said Igor Ashik, acting head of the AARI ocean science department. He said the ocean was clearing itself of drifting ice "for the first time in decades of Polar research".

By KUNA Kuwait : The Kuwaiti leadership places much emphasis on scientific research and provides all means to enrich this important area, said Kuwait University's Deputy Rector for Scientific Affairs Dr. Nouriya Al-Awadhi on Saturday. In a press release, she said that holding the fifth Euro-Asian conference on heterogeneous ring chemistry under the auspices of His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah and with the attendance of His Highness the Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah was proof of this support.

Washington(Xinhua) : NASA will launch its space shuttle STS-122 Atlantis on Dec 6 to deliver the European-built Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA TV reported. The announcement was made at a press conference late Friday, following a two-day flight readiness review at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The shuttle mission management team conducts the traditional review two weeks prior to the launch of each space shuttle mission.

By Xinhua, San Francisco : Dell has officially launched a high-end laptop computer which the company said is the thinnest in the world. The laptop is the first product under Dell's Adamo brand. Adamo is derived from the Latin word meaning "to fall in love". With a thickness of 0.65 inches (1.65 cm) and available in onyx and pearl colours, the new Adamo laptop is thinner than Apple's MacBook Air.

By IANS, Tehran : Iran is building a new space centre to launch satellites, Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Sunday.

By Prashant K. Nanda, IANS New Delhi : The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Indian universities have become "white elephants" and need to be revamped to achieve successes in science, says eminent space scientist K. Kasturirangan. Many of the laboratories in CSIR, the country's biggest scientific body, need a complete overhaul and their mission, organisational set-up and infrastructure need to change for the better, Kasturirangan said in an interview.

By IANS, Sydney : Recycled water may not be safe for drinking, warn researchers who say such water is usually tested for only one kind of pathogen. Flavia Huygens of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia is part of a team spear-heading a new and innovative water-testing technique that will check for all kinds of pathogens - in hours rather than days. “Pathogens can be bacterial, viral or parasitic micro-organisms like cryptosporidium and giardia which can make people sick if enough is ingested,” Huygens said.

By IANS, Washington : The 2008 ozone hole - a thinning in the ozone layer over Antarctica - is larger both in size and ozone loss than 2007. The ozone layer, 25 km above the earth, filters sunlight, shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays which can increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life.

By IANS, Washington : NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has spotted its first never-before-seen near-Earth object (NEO), the first of hundreds it is expected to find during its mission to map the whole sky in infrared light. NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth's path around the sun. In extremely rare cases of an impact, the objects may devastate the Earth's surface. An asteroid, about 10 km wide, is thought to have plunged into our planet 65 million years ago, triggering a global disaster and obliterating dinosaurs.

Beijing: A new Chinese-language online search engine --Chinaso.com -- was launched Friday, marking China's first search service set up by the country's major news...

By IANS, Sydney : Researchers have isolated an important new link between how we see and the way our mind processes that visual stimulation. Queensland (University) Brain Institute (QBI) scientists Jason Mattingley, Ross Cunnington and their colleagues have demonstrated the human brain does indeed have a mechanism to capture observed and executed actions. "Data gathered from these experiments show that a particular part of the brain encodes specific actions, regardless of whether those actions are executed or passively observed," Mattingley said.

By RIA Novosti, Yekaterinburg (Russia) : Archaeologists in the Sverdlovsk region in Russia's Urals have discovered 9,000-year-old bones of a rhinoceros, a local museum worker said Monday. The excavations during which the bones were discovered were carried out at a site on the bank of the Lobva River, said Nikolai Yerokhin from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology department. It was generally assumed that rhinoceros last wandered the Urals some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

By IANS London : A computer that can interact with humans and react to their non-verbal gestures is being developed by a European team. Known as SEMAINE, the project will build a sensitive artificial listener (SAL) system, which will perceive user's facial expression, gaze, and voice and then engage with the user. When engaging with a human, the SAL will be able to adapt its own performance and pursue different actions, depending on the non-verbal behaviour of the user, reports Sciencedaily.

By IANS, Washington : The world's first 'synthetic tree,' created by Abraham Stroock's lab, mimics the process of transpiration that helps move moisture to the highest branches. The researchers' work bolsters the long-standing theory that transpiration in trees and plants through capilliary action, is a purely physical process, requiring no biological energy. It also may lead to new passive heat transfer technologies for cars or buildings, better methods for remediating soil and more effective ways to draw water out of partially dry ground.

By IANS, Toronto : Canadian astronomers have rejected the new "void models" that say the earth is near the centre of a region of the universe which is almost empty. Researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver said Friday that there is nothing special about earth's location in the universe as proposed by "void theories" that reject the conventional view that the universe is ever-expanding because of an enigmatic dark energy.

By IANS, San Francisco: Google has announced Compute Engine, a cloud-computing service that allows businesses to run their applications on servers in the tech giant's data center.

By IANS, London : Scientists have leaped over a major hurdle in efforts to begin commercial production of a form of carbon that could rival silicon in its potential for revolutionising electronic devices ranging from supercomputers to cell phones. Called graphene, the material consists of a layer of graphite 50,000 times thinner than a human hair with unique electronic properties.

By IANS, Washington : A remote sensing technique could sniff out hidden explosives, chemical, biological agents and illegal drugs from afar. The new system, using terahertz (THz) wave technology, can also "see through" clothing and packaging materials that might conceal explosives or other dangerous materials. In the event of a chemical spill, for instance, remote sensing could identify the composition of the toxic mix. Since sensing is remote, no one will be harmed, reports Nature Photonics.

By Xinhua, Beijing : Astronauts aboard China's Shenzhou VII spacecraft Friday finished assembling a spacesuit for tests before carrying out the country's first spacewalk mission. Two of the three astronauts unpacked the Chinese-made suit inside the orbital module of the spacecraft as the third astronaut waited in the re-entry module. The spacewalk, or extra-vehicular activity (EVA), slated for 4.30 p.m. Saturday will last about 30 minutes, Wang Zhaoyao, spokesperson of the manned space programme said Friday.