Technology

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : A Russian rocket is set for a seaborne launch Sunday to put a US telecom satellite into orbit, a spokesman for the Sea Launch company said.

By IANS New York : The long-running Ulysses mission, which was launched to study the sun's poles and its influence on surrounding space, is coming to an end. After more than 17 years in space - almost four times its expected lifetime - the mission is finally running out of power and is likely to finish sometime in the next month or two, a release by the European Space Agency (ESA) said. A joint mission by ESA and NASA, Ulysses was launched in 1990 from a space shuttle. The data it sent has forever changed the way scientists view the sun and its effect on the space surrounding it.

By IANS, Mumbai : Norway's Telenor has acquired another 15.5 percent stake in Unitech Wireless, the telecom arm of realty major Unitech, for Rs.1,130 crore (Rs.11.3 billion/$237 million), taking its shareholding in the Indian company to 49 percent, it was announced Wednesday. "Unitech Wireless on May 19, 2009, received an amount of Rs.1,130 crore in aggregate from Telenor Asia Pte Ltd for acquisition of further 15.5 percent stake in Unitech Wireless by way of issuance of fresh shares," the Indian telecom operator said in a regulatory statement.

By IANS, Sydney : Australia has acquired the dubious distinction of being the fattest on earth - with four million people classified as obese and another 5.4 million as overweight. New research by Victoria University's Erin Pearson shows that when it comes to changing people's exercise behaviour, having the right messenger is as important as having the right message. "What we have found is that the person delivering the message needs to be someone the audience identifies with and respects in order to bring about a desired change in behaviour," Pearson said.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow: A Russian website with a special register of "blacklisted" sites came under attack shortly after it went online Thursday, said the federal agency which runs it.

By IANS/EFE, Brasilia : Scientists have found bones in Brazil that belonged to a 20-foot-tall sloth that lived some 10,000 years ago.

By IANS, Washington : Social networking website Facebook, which offers its subscribers only a "like" button for anyone's updates, is now faced with a fake "dislike" button, which is spreading like a virus across the site. The fake dislike button is followed with a link that takes people to a fake application. Instead of installing a dislike button, the application uses the person's network to continue spreading the fake programme. Graham Cluley of the British security firm Sophos wrote in a blog that the fake dislike buttons "are going viral" on Facebook.

By NNN-PTI Banglore : India plans to launch a reusable rocket for the first time by 2010, says its space agency chief. "Our target (for the first launch) is before 2010," Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), G Madhavan Nair, told PTI. The space scientists have already designed a "demonstrator" to measure parameters of the vehicle and further work is in progress, Nair, also Secretary in the Department of Space and Chairman of Space Commission, said.

By DPA, Darmstadt (Germany) : The European Space Agency (ESA) said Monday it hoped to set up its own detection system for space junk instead of relying on US radar to track the chunks of shattered satellites and spent rockets in earth orbit. Last week a US satellite accidentally hit an out-of-commission Russian satellite, scattering a trail of debris in space.

By Xinhua Beijing : NASA will broadcast next Monday the Beatles' song "Across the Universe" across the galaxy to Polaris, the North Star, to celebrateds the 40th anniversary of the song and the 50th anniversary of NASA, according to media reports Saturday.

By IANS, Chennai : India's second largest commercial vehicle manufacturer Ashok Leyland is looking to spin off its design engineering unit Defiance Technologies into a group company, Defiance Tech Ltd, an official has said. Defiance Technologies offers virtual engineering services, ranging from basic design to high-end predictive analysis for auto makers.

By SPA Houston : Atlantis maneuvered toward a rendezvous with the international space station on Saturday, bringing a new US$2 billion (¤1.4 billion) lab that European scientists can't wait to see installed, reported ap. The shuttle had been on a two-day, high-speed chase to catch up with the station. The meeting will give NASA engineers another chance to search for launch damage to the shuttle's thermal shielding, the problem that doomed Columbia in 2003.

By DPA, Washington : Internet Protocol or IP addresses are common in today's world of networked computers. That's because every computer connected to a single network has an IP. An IP address is a number that uniquely identifies a computer on a network. Every computer that's connected to a network, whether that network is the Internet or a private home or office network, has a unique IP address.

By IANS Washington : It's been happening a lot in recent times: a warming which suggests an end to winter that even fools spring flowers and birds, followed by a sudden freeze. Some scientists say this unusual weather pattern is a fallout of global warming - and, worryingly, a new study says the 'thaw and freeze' syndrome is causing widespread damage to plants. In a report in the latest issue of the journal Bio-Science, researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory studied plants after a similar 'thaw and freeze' in eastern US last winter.

By IANS, Washington : There is a significant link between mercury emissions and increased incidence of autism, according to latest research. Researchers Raymond F. Palmer of the University of Texas, Stephen Blanchard of Our Lady of the Lake University and Robert Wood found that community autism prevalence is reduced by one to two percent with every 10 miles of distance from the pollution source. "This is not a definitive study, but just one more that furthers the association between environmental mercury and autism," said Palmer.

By RIA Novosti Washington : There is no need to conduct repair work on the space shuttle Endeavour heat shield during the fourth spacewalk, scheduled for Aug 18, a NASA has said. The damage to the heat shield occurred during Endeavour's launch Aug 8 when a small piece of insulating foam or ice from the shuttle fuel tank struck the spacecraft's underside shortly after lift off.

By DPA, San Francisco : Troubled internet giant Yahoo saw quarterly profits plunge 64 percent and announced Tuesday that it would cut 10 percent of its estimated 14,300 staff to help control costs. The internet pioneer reported net income of $54 million, or 4 cents a share, compared to $151 million, or 11 cents a share, in the same period last year. The company said revenue rose slightly to $1.78 billion compared to $1.76 billion in the year-ago quarter. The results were in line with analysts' expectations, while the layoffs had also been widely reported in recent days.

By Xinhua Washington : Global warming will speed up in the next decade and at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year on record, reported a UK team of scientists in their climate predictions. The next-decade prediction results by scientists at Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in the UK is published Thursday in the U.S. academic journal Science.

By IANS, Copenhagen : The capital of Denmark has set itself the ambitious target of becoming the world's first carbon-neutral capital by 2025 by bringing its net carbon dioxide emissions down to zero. The target was announced by the seven mayors of Copenhagen here Tuesday, while they launched the city's new climate plan. The plan has 50 specific initiatives to achieve the city's target of a 20 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2015.

By IANS, Washington : Once upon a time, shiny surfaces and mirrors were credited with magical powers that could look into the future. Now two centuries later, NASA is relying on them to look into the past. The agency is developing a primary mirror 21.3 feet across, for use on the James Webb Space Telescope, to tell us about our beginning in the universe. The primary mirror will serve as the telescope's eye and peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own solar system.

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.

By IANS, Washington : The US Wednesday launched a spy satellite into space.

By Xinhua, Washington : US scientists have created the smallest iron oxide nanoparticles to date for cancer detection by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The research team from Brown University created peptide-coated iron oxide nanoparticles, about 8.4 nanometers in overall diameter. They then injected the particles into mice and successfully tested their ability to locate a brain tumour cell called U87MG, the university announced Tuesday.

By RIA Novosti Washington : The Atlantis space shuttle will return to Earth on February 20 after its mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was extended, NASA said on Thursday. "The space shuttle Mission Management Team, at the request of the International Space Station Program, has extended the STS-122 mission to 13 days. Atlantis will undock from the space station on Monday, Feb. 18, and land at 9:06 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20, Kennedy Space Center, Fla," the NASA website said.

By NNN-Prensa Latina Buenos Aires : Argentina and Italy have launched the second of a group of six satellites for scientific use for monitoring natural disasters and agriculture, Telam official agency informed Friday. Argentina is a pioneer in the use of satellites, allowing advanced scientific achievements in areas like health, particularly the detection of epidemiological diseases, affirmed Conrado Varotto, executive director of CONAE (National Space Activities Commission).

By Dr Syed Zafar Mahmood The 13 year American Ahmad Mohamed, inventor of home-made clock with digital display, was expecting a pat on the back...

By IANS, London : Researchers are fabricating the world's smallest silicon sensor that will be extremely powerful and yet consume very little power. The sensor, with applications in bio-sensing and ecological monitoring, is being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton. “Power consumption is a big issue at the moment as devices use current whether they are switched off and on,” said Hiroshi Mizuta, project head.

By IANS,

By IANS, London : A 300-million-year-old fossil of an amphibian that roamed the planet 70 million years before the dinosaurs has been found, a media report said. Daily Express reported Tuesday that scientists have found the well preserved five-inch long skull of an invertebrate named Fedexia striegeli, which is one of the earliest amphibian fossil discoveries. Researchers said that the creature lived more than 70 million years before the first dinosaurs.

By IANS, Bangalore : By finding water on the lunar surface, India's maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has completed "110 percent of the objectives", Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair said here Friday. Disagreeing with a section of the media, which dubbed the moon mission a 'failure' when it was abruptly aborted Aug 30 after Chandrayaan lost radio contact with the earth, Nair maintained that it was a wonderful mission.

By IANS New Delhi : Two-wheeler major Bajaj Auto Saturday said that it would sue its rival TVS Motors for allegedly violating its patented digital twin spark ignition (DTSi) technology, even as the latter denied any such alleged infringement. The charges by Bajaj, two days after TVS launched its 125 cc bike 'Flame' with controlled combustion variable timing intelligent (CCVTi) technology, said its intellectual property right (IPR) on a digital twin spark ignition technology had been infringed.

By IANS/EFE, Sydney: Australia's High Court ruled in favour of Google Inc Wednesday in a case over the search-engine giant's responsibility for deceptive advertising in sponsored links.

By IANS, Sydney : Scientists have sounded the alarm bells over impending global catastrophe as existing governments and institutions are too powerless to head it off. The world faces a compounding series of crises - from energy, food shortages, to climate change, to new diseases and increasing anti-biotic resistance - all driven by human activity, which is beyond the capacity of existing institutions to cope with, warns a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists.

By NNN-APP

Islamabad : Ministry of Information Technology (MOIT) is in process of providing e-services for Ministry of Population Welfare to eliminate the redundant steps of collecting the information from the districts and provincial offices of the Ministry.

Under the project which is expected to be completed by October this year, an online integrated web-based MIS is being developed, sources at Electronic Government Directorate, MoIT said here Saturday.

By IANS, New Delhi : Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates Friday said he is a 24-hour technology person and rarely feels drained. "I am a 24-hour technology person. I am not that big text messaging and I am impressed with the young people doing that," said Gates, on visit here for overseeing the philanthropic activities of the foundation he has formed with his wife Melinda. However, Gates said, he reads random articles in silence whenever he feels drained. Calling social networking sites "irritating", Gates said he is flooded by "friend requests" everyday on Facebook.

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

By IANS, New Delhi : Terming the unique identity project as a "great initiative", Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates Friday said the software giant wanted to partner with India in the ambitious project that will give a unique identity number to each of its citizens. "Microsoft wants to be a part of the unique identification project," Gates told a conference organised by the IT industry lobby, National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom).

TwoCircles.net presents “Agenda for India”. Series editor is Charu Bahri. Challenges & Solutions Information technology professionals Amin Ismaili and his wife Shahin Ismaili, both of whom work as Assistant Systems Engineers with TATA Consultancy Services Ltd., identify India’s heavy dependence on markets in the USA as the greatest challenge presently facing the Information Technology (IT) and IT enabled services (ITES, more commonly spoken of as outsourcing) industries.

By IANS, London : A new software can now stop you writing e-mails or posting messages when you are drunk.

By DPA Washington : The Space Shuttle Discovery touched down at the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida after a 15-day mission that focussed on construction of the International Space Station. Discovery, with a seven-member crew led by Pamela Melroy, the second woman to command a shuttle, landed at 18:01 GMT Wednesday. "Well hello there, it's nice to be back in Florida," Melroy, who steered the craft to the runway, said over the radio after the safe landing.

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

By IANS, Washington : The discovery of a parrot fossil in Scandinavia dating back some 55 million years, indicates that they were once common in colder climes like Norway and Denmark. Parrots today live only in the tropics and the southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the north, much earlier than had been suspected.

By IANS, Toronto : Facebook, which agreed last August to implement new privacy safeguards ordered by Canada's privacy commission, is again under investigation over its handling of users' data. The world's biggest social networking site, which claims to have 350 million users worldwide, was hauled up before Canada's Privacy Commission by Canadian law students in 2008 for violating the country's privacy laws. Indicting the networking site last August, the privacy commission had ordered Facebook to comply with its recommendations within a month.

By IANS, London : Britons are being duped to buy malicious software in the guise of anti-virus protection by criminals posing as legitimate IT experts, officials warned Monday.

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 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 Jay Dougherty, DPA, Washington : Google releases so many products - most of them free - that it's easy to overlook one that's really special. Google Voice qualifies.

By Xinhua Geneva : The United States said on Friday that it would compensate countries whose territory might be hit by debris of an inoperable U.S. spy satellite that the Pentagon plans to shoot down. Christina Rocca, U.S. ambassador for disarmament affairs, said the United States had recently modified three SM-3 missiles and three U.S. Navy ships to try to shoot down the satellite, which is currently in a decaying orbit.

By IANS, Washington : A new theory about why black holes become so hugely massive has been put forth by astronomers from University of Leicester, UK and Monash University, Australia.

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

By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS, New Delhi : As small and medium businesses in India struggle to stay afloat during the global economic slowdown, they are opting for cheaper computing services, and a Boston-based entrepreneur is here to promote his solution, cloud computing, in which software is shared over a wide network of computers.

By Xinhua Beijing : NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Monday flew within 200 kilometers above the surface of Mercury, making the first pass of the planet since 1975, media reported. The car-sized probe traveled at about 25,800 kilometers miles per hour as it passed over Mercury on a mission designed to resolve some of the mysteries about the solar system's innermost planet, officials said.

By IANS, Washington : An Indian-American professor of engineering has programmed a robot that can sense your head turning left a fraction of a second before your body makes that left turn. That turn of the head is the cue it will pick up to keep following. While negotiating a highway or sauntering down the street, people pick up cues about what other people are going to do and act accordingly.

By IANS,

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 IANS,

By IANS, Washington : Although the Internet provides scientists an instant access to thousands of academic journals and research papers, they are citing fewer papers and that too from more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories, said James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, who, focussing on the nature of research, analysed a database of over 34 million articles. He compared their online availability between 1998 and 2005 to the number of times they were cited from 1945 to 2005.

By IRNA, New Delhi : A warning that most of the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 owing to climate change is likely to be retracted after the United Nations body that issued it admitted to a series of scientific blunders. Two years ago, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) headed by India's Rajendra Pachauri, issued a benchmark report that claimed to have incorporated the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was that world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

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 Fakir Balaji, IANS Hyderabad : The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is working on a new device to drastically reduce the cost of satellite phone usage and enable access to remote areas of the country, a top space agency official said here Monday.

By DPA, Munich : BMW is refining a car-to-car communication system that offers more pedestrian protection by "sensing" situations and persons that cannot normally be seen by motorists, according to the car maker. In a typical situation a child could suddenly jump onto the road from between two parked vehicles. In such a case the moving vehicle would communicate with an electronic transponder carried by the child or cyclist for protection.

By Shubha Singh, IANS, At an age when people begin to lose interest in many aspects of the world around them, 96-year-old Randall Butisingh not only mastered the intricacies of the internet but also began his own blog, which describes him as one of the world's oldest bloggers and shows him as a man with a remarkable catholicity of interests. The grandson of indentured workers who were taken to Guyana to work on sugar plantations, Butisingh has watched the world transform many times over in the past nine decades and has adjusted himself to the changes.

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 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, London : A new kind of glass will enable patients to re-grow bones by dissolving and releasing calcium into the body, possibly making bone transplants redundant. The porous glass, developed by scientists at Imperial College here, dissolves in the body and stimulates bone growth, without leaving any toxic residue. Specific concentrations of soluble silica and calcium ions in the glass activate genes that encode proteins controlling the bone cell cycle and differentiation of the cell to form bone matrix and rapid mineralisation of bone nodules.

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 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.

By IANS, Thiruvananthapuram: The 15th Indo-US Air Force Executive Steering Group (ESG) conference will begin Monday at the Southern Air Command Headquarters here. The three-day conference allows the delegations of the two countries to discuss policies and mutual exchange programmes for bilateral defence cooperation, a defence spokesperson said Sunday. The annual conference is held alternatively in the two countries and this year the Southern Air Command has been chosen as the venue.

By IANS, Sydney : The use of palm-sized wireless e-mail devices like BlackBerry can make or break a business, according to an Australian study. The research explores how BlackBerry use can help businesses achieve the newest Holy Grail - organisational ambidexterity (OA). OA is a company's ability to balance conflicting internal and external demands at the same time as balancing the need for flexibility and control, reports Scinecealert.

By DPA, Washington : Two NASA astronauts did not let their distance from Earth deter them from voting in the US presidential election Tuesday. Commander Mike Fincke and Flight Engineer Greg Chamitoff voted from their current home in the International Space Station - 322 km above Earth and orbiting at 28,200 km per hour - and beamed back a message urging others to exercise their franchise.

By IANS Chennai : Targeting a higher share in the $8 billion Indian offshore testing opportunity, Chennai-based independent software testing company Maveric Systems Limited has come out with an automated software testing tool. Developed at an investment of around $1 million, the proprietary software tool called Testac promises to reduce software testing time by 30 percent, CEO Ranga Reddy told reporters. According to him, Maveric Systems is the only Indian software testing company to have such a proprietary tool.

By IANS Sydney : A supercomputer is helping speed up the design of new drugs manifold, doing away with cumbersome, time-consuming procedures. The results are as accurate as those obtained from the lab, saving time and resources, besides calculating the desired 'redox' potential of drugs much faster than existing methods. The 'redox' potential is the ability of drug molecules to exchange electrons, which determine how powerfully they can act on the body, said researcher Mansoor Namazian of Australian National University (ANU).

By SPA Cape Canaveral, Florida : Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven are on their way to the international space station, AP reported. The space shuttle blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, early Tuesday morning to begin what is expected to be the longest space station mission ever. It is a 16-day voyage to build a two-armed robot and add a float-in closet for a future lab. Five spacewalks are planned. Liftoff came in the middle of the night, and it was the first shuttle launch in darkness since 2006.

Washington, Oct 2 (IANS) Search engine giant Google has unveiled a $4.4 trillion plan dubbed Clean Power by 2030 that calls for all energy in the US to come from renewable sources. The web giant in a release posted on its site said: "While this plan will cost $4.4 trillion (in undiscounted 2008 dollars), it will ultimately save $5.4 trillion, delivering a net savings of $1 trillion over the life of the plan".

By IANS, Washington : Steroids often used in treating inflammation caused by bacterial meningitis also speed up recovery from pneumonia, according to a new study. University of Texas (UT) Southwestern researchers have showed that mice infected with a type of severe bacterial pneumonia and subsequently treated with steroids and antibiotics recovered faster, with far less inflammation in their lungs than mice treated with antibiotics alone.

By IANS

Bangalore : Synopsys Inc., a leading US-based semiconductor design software firm, Wednesday announced acquisition of ArchPro Design Automation Ltd, a Bangalore-based power management start-up, to enhance its low-power design and verification solution.