Technology

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By IANS, New Delhi: India's telecom density rose to 52.74 percent in March this year as the country added 20.3 million subscribers during the month, the telecom regulator said here Monday. "The number of telephone subscribers in India increased to 621.28 million at the end of March 2010 from 600.98 Million in February 2010, thereby registering a growth rate of 3.38 percent. With this, the overall teledensity in India reaches 52.74 percent," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in a statement. In February, the teledensity stood at 51.05 percent.

By IANS, Washington : Over 350 new species, including the world's smallest deer, a "flying frog" and a 100 million-year-old gecko, have been discovered in the Eastern Himalayas, according to a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report. A decade of research carried out by scientists in remote mountain areas endangered by rising global temperatures brought exciting discoveries such as a bright green frog that uses its red and long webbed feet to glide in the air.

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

By Arun Kumar, IANS, Washington : The United States India Business Council (USIBC) has hailed the launch of India's maiden moon with two US instruments on board as the beginning of long "relationship promoting the opening of the frontier of outer space."

By IANS, Washington : Soot from the burning of fossil fuels contributes far more to global warming than has been thought. But, unlike carbon dioxide (CO2), soot lingers only a few weeks in the air, so cutting emissions could have a significant and rapid impact on the climate. If soot emissions were eliminated, more than 1.5 million premature deaths from soot inhalation could be prevented worldwide each year, reports the Journal of Geophysical Research.

By IANS, Washington : Hardening of arteries detected in Egyptian mummies as early as 3,500 years shows that heart attacks and strokes had ancient origins. "Atherosclerosis... despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles... was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socio-economic status living as much as three millennia ago," says Gregory Thomas, co-principal investigator. "The findings suggest that we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand the disease," says Thomas, University of California-Irvine (UC-I) professor of cardiology.

By NNN-PTI, Thiruvananthapuram, India : India's space agency ISRO is confident of carrying out a man mission to outer space within six to seven years, its Chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair said here Saturday. A detailed report on this had already been submitted to the Union Government by ISRO, Nair said at the 'Space Salute' programme organised by Asianet television channel jointly with ISRO to felicitate the scientists associated with the PSLV-C9 mission here.

By IANS, Sydney : A reworked design of fuel cells used in the latest hybrid cars will help make vehicles more reliable and cheaper to build in the future. The breakthrough is based on the inclusion of a specially-coated form of popular outdoor and sporting clothing material Goretex in the fuel cell. Monash University scientists have designed and tested an air-electrode, where a fine layer 100 times thinner than human hair of highly conductive plastic is deposited on the breathable fabric. The conductive plastic acts as both the fuel cell electrode and catalyst.

By IANS, Washington : The quantity of methane in the air surged last year, ending a decade of stability in levels of potent greenhouse gas, according to MIT team. Methane levels have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, accounting for around a fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming. Given that, kilo for kilo, methane is 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the situation will require careful monitoring in the near future.

By Aroonim Bhuyan, IANS, Ajman : A small United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based company owned by an Indian, that produces raw materials for the paint industry, is among this year's list of winners of a top nanotechnology award given by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US. Gold Valley Chemical Company (GVCC), based in the emirate of Ajman in the UAE, figures among the 50 winners of the 2008 Nano 50 awards announced this month by Nanotech Briefs, the digital publication forum of NASA.

By Xinhua Beijing : Chang'e I, China's pioneering lunar probing satellite, came through its first lunar eclipse yesterday and has regained full operations. The moon orbiter was temporarily hidden from solar rays and lost contact with Earth for two-and-half hours during a blackout that started at 10 am, Ye Peijian, chief commander and designer in charge of the satellite system, said. Chang'e I had to switch off some of its equipment and rely on onboard batteries during this challenging time, when it was blocked from solar energy, Ye said.

By IANS, New Delhi : Two days before the launch of India's first lunar orbiter, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) G. Madhavan Nair said Monday that India will plant its flag on the moon to help establish its presence on the earth's only natural satellite. India will drop its flag on the moon to establish its presence, Nair told NDTV in an interview. This will make India the fourth country after the US, Russia, and Japan to have its flag on the moon.

By IANS, London : Space is littered with black holes that collapsing giant stars leave in their wake, but a miniature version could be passing through the Earth daily.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, IANS, Chennai : India was Tuesday set to launch its historic unmanned flight to the moon, the sixth to do so after the US, former Soviet Union, European Space Agency, China and Japan. A heavy downpour at the spaceport did not affect the countdown for the early Wednesday morning launch, scientists said.

By DPA, Vienna/Tehran, Nov 9 (DPA) The US is willing to give Iran time to come up with a response to a proposed multinational nuclear fuel deal, the US ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Glyn Davies, said Monday. "We want to give some space to Iran to work through this. It's a tough issue for them, obviously," Davies told reporters in Vienna, adding, however, that Washington hopes for a response soon.

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By IANS, London : In popular perception, playful pachyderms are perceived as stiff gaited, but latest research has established that they are almost as mobile as trotting horses. For example, John Hutchinson of The Royal Veterinary College visited several zoos in Britain and had even been to Thailand to study how Asian elephants moved their legs as they walk and run. Keepers of Colchester and Whipsnade Zoos in Britain were keen to know more about the animals' natural limb movements in order to develop training programmes and prevent the onset of arthritis.

By IANS, Bangalore : Buoyed by the successful launch of the country's maiden unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is all set to start an institute to train astronauts for its planned first manned space mission by 2015, said a top official.

By IANS, Washington : Some plants are discarding elaborate defences against predatory caterpillars and evolving more favourable stratagems to ensure survival, according to a study. The latest example is the milkweed plant, which, according to genetic analysis, instead of resisting predators, is now putting greater efforts into repairing themselves faster than their foe monarch butterfly caterpillar can eat them.

By DPA, Kuala Lumpur : More than 100 government officials and cyber security experts from around the world gathered Tuesday in Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur for a summit aimed at discussing policies to ensure tighter security on the internet. "Just as there are malicious individuals bent on causing harm to societies and nations in the real world, governments around the world must prepare to deal with similar threats in cyberspace," Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi 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 DPA, Hamburg : German scientists have invented a wireless bionic eyeball that can restore vision to patients who have become blind due to retina damage or disease. The new prosthetic device caps 12 years of research to help these patients. This work has resulted in a unique system - a fully implantable visual prosthesis. The scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems in Duisburg, Germany, say that the bionic eye can bypass the damaged retina. The system comprises an implant and an external transmitter integrated in an eyeglasses-frame.

By IANS, Washington : Your fingers start to burn after picking up a hot plate; should you drop the plate or save your meal? New research suggests it is your consciousness that resolves these dilemmas by serving as the brain's Wi-Fi network. "If the brain is like a set of computers that control different tasks, consciousness is the Wi-Fi network that allows different parts of the brain to talk to each other and decide which action 'wins' and is carried out," said Ezequiel Morsella. Morsella, who led the study, is professor of psychology at San Francisco State University (SFSU).

By Xinhua, Beijing : Chinese taikonaut Zhai Zhigang slipped out of the orbital module of Shenzhou-VII spacecraft Saturday afternoon, starting China's first spacewalk or extravehicular activity (EVA) in outer space. Donning a $4-million homemade Feitian space suit, Zhai waved to a camera mounted on the service module after pulling himself out of the capsule in a head-out-first position, the video monitor at the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre (BACC) showed. "I here greet the Chinese people and people of the world," the 42-year-old taikonaut reported to ground control.

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, Hyderabad : Tishman Speyer, one of the world's leading developers of real estate, Tuesday unveiled its first property in Asia, commissioning the first phase of the Waverock IT Park here. The US-based developer also launched the second phase of the project, a joint venture between Tishman and ICICI Ventures, which has come up at a special economic zone at Nanakramguda, Gachibowli, an IT district on the city's outskirts.

By IANS, Washington : Genetically modified plants will open up ways to make cheaper, greener biofuels, besides helping turn agricultural waste into food for livestock. Lignin, a major component of plants, is woven in with cellulose and provides plants with the strength to withstand strong gusts of wind and microbial attack. However, this protective barrier or "plastic wall" also makes it harder to gain access to the cellulose.

By Sharon Thambala Bengaluru : A key part of the "Digital India" initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the free government scheme that...

By IANS, Washington : Astronomers have stumbled on the most massive black holes, each as big as 10 billion suns, in two separate galaxies about 300 million light years away from earth.

By IANS, London : NASA is planning to build hypersonic jets that would travel at five times the speed of sound and bring in a new age of aircraft.

By IANS, Washington : Taking already proven technology to grow carbon nanotubes of record lengths, researchers have now found new applications in communications for these fibres by spinning them into strong threads. David Mast, an associate professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati's (UC) McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, took a 25-micron carbon nanotube thread and created a dipole antenna using double-sided transparent tape and silver paste. He was immediately successful in transmitting radio signals.

By IANS, New Delhi : India has only two unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses per 1,000 people. But a just-released study says the country's net penetration could "significantly increase in the coming years", with its economic boom and growing IT adoption. Every machine that is permanently connected to the Internet has a unique identifying number, called an IP address. A typical IP address looks like this: 59.95.29.46.

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By DPA, Geneva : Polyester fibres covered by tiny silicone filaments can create clothing that when dunked in water will still remain completely dry, a Swiss scientist discovered. The nanotechnology structure allows the surface to be covered in chemicals which make the clothing hydrophobic to the point that water simply bounces or slides off. Stefan Seeger, a lead researcher on the project at the University of Zurich, said the technology could have many purposes, including producing improved swimsuits, making industrial clothing and even for protecting outdoor furniture.

By IANS, Bangalore : India's own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on board the country's maiden lunar craft had discovered water on the moon, a finding confirmed by US space agency NASA's probe that was also aboard Chandrayaan-1, India's top space scientist G. Madhavan Nair said here Friday. India's first lunar mission had made a "path-breaking and real discovery" by establishing the presence of water on the moon, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman Nair said.

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, 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.

Washington, Feb 14 (DPA) Checking your e-mail has become a dangerous business. The number and types of e-mail borne threats that can cause harm to your computer or your privacy are growing. Sometimes the actual danger imposed by these threats can be over hyped, but you still need to know what could constitute a dangerous e-mail message and how to respond to the threat. Q: Can I get a virus just by reading an e-mail message?

By IANS, Washington : A new nanotechnology will help make computers much smaller, faster and more efficient. A team led by Craig Hawker, materials professor at California University Santa Barbara, (UCSB) with professors Glenn Fredrickson and Edward J. Kramer, has developed a novel process for creating features on silicon wafers that are between five and 20 nanometres thick. (A nanometre is as thin as a thousandth of human hair). The new process has been described in Science Express, the online version of Science.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : A 400-metre-wide asteroid will Tuesday fly past earth, closer to it than the moon's orbit.

By IANS, London : Scientists in Canada have spotted the largest molecules existing in space called buckyballs. The roughly spherical molecules consist of a "third type of carbon", after graphite and diamond, which occur widely on earth. Buckyballs, on the other hand, have only been created in labs and have never before been proven to exist elsewhere, reports The Telegraph. The BBC reported that a research group used an infrared telescope owned by Nasa to spot the buckyballs in "a cloud of cosmic dust surrounding a distant star".

By Xinhua Washington : A defunct U.S. spy satellite is falling from orbit and could hit the Earth in late February or March, agencies reports said Saturday. "Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters.

By Xinhua Beijing : China plans to launch its second lunar probe, Chang'e-2, around 2009, according to a top satellite scientist. Ye Peijian, chief commander and designer of China's first moon probe satellite system, revealed the plan during an interview program on CCTV, China Central Television. However, Ye did not elaborate on the plan with more details. He said Chang'e-1, the country's first lunar probe, had resumed contact with the control center after it moved out of the shadow area caused by an eclipse of the sun at about 14:10 on Thursday.

By IANS, Washington : A research team has embarked on deep sea exploration to study hydrothermal vents. The team, which will be conducting research on scalding heat, high pressure, toxic chemicals and total darkness, is part of the National Science Foundation-funded "Extreme 2008: A Deep-Sea Adventure." The scientists are being joined by students from around the world who have signed up for an exciting virtual field trip. More than 20,000 students from 350 schools in the United States, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Great Britain and New Zealand are participating.

By IANS Toronto : Why do humans differ so much from chimpanzees despite having genes that are almost 99 percent identical? The answer, according to researchers at the University of Toronto, lies in the different ways in which humans and chimpanzees splice genetic materials to create proteins. Splicing is the process by which the coding regions of genes are joined to generate genetic messages that specify the production of proteins, the key element of cells.

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, New York : In a rare honour, Indian-American physicist Mani Bhaumik has been chosen as the sole patron for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) 2009. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are observing 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's astronomical telescope. Announcing his appointment Wednesday, the IAU said ``it is proud to have Dr. Mani Bhaumik as dedicated supporter of IYA2009's global activities.''

By IANS, Beijing : China will launch its first space laboratory module Thursday, a step which will pave the way for its own space station, China Daily reported.

By IASN/EFE, Havana: The government has launched an overhaul of Cuba's communications and information technology sectors, the Communist Party daily Granma said.

By IANS, London : An active compound, plectasin, from fungi and lower animals may well be suitable as an effective weapon against dangerous bacteria. Plectasin is a small protein molecule that can even destroy highly resistant bacteria. Researchers at the University of Bonn, Utrecht, Aalborg and of Danish company Novozymes AS have shed light on how the substance does this. The authors see plectasin as a promising lead compound for new antibiotics.

By IANS, New Delhi : The government Thursday approved the release of airwaves for two state-run companies for the launch of third generation (3G) mobile services in the country. The airwaves, also referred to as radio frequency or spectrum, have been released for Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) that offers telecom services in Mumbai and the national capital, and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), which operates in all other parts of the country. "We have approved the release of one block to MTNL and another block to BSNL," Communications Minister A. Raja told reporters here.

By Xinhua Beijing : Space shuttle Endeavour was poised for a rare nighttime liftoff Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center to the international space station, U.S. media reported. Technicians at the center began fueling the shuttle late Monday afternoon with more than 500,000 gallons (1.9 million liters) of supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for the 2:28 a.m. EDT blast off as there were no major problems reported. It will be the first shuttle launch in darkness since 2006. Only a quarter of all shuttles have been launched at nighttime.

By Xinhua Washington : Two U.S. astronauts are conducting the fourth spacewalk of shuttle Endeavor's mission to test a heat shield repair method, NASA TV reported on Thursday. Spacewalker Robert Behnken and Mike Foreman floated out of the Quest airlock and began their work outside the International Space Station at 6:04 p.m. local time (2204 GMT) on Thursday. Their excursion will last into midnight, said NASA.

By IANS New York : Mother's care is important even for plants, a new study says. A study by researchers at the University of Virginia shows that maternal plants give cues to their offspring that help them adapt to their environmental conditions. Findings of the study have been published in the latest issue of the journal Science. The researchers found that plants grown in the same setting as their maternal plant performed almost three-and-half times better than those raised in a different environment.

By DPA, San Francisco : The new version of the Firefox browser was downloaded over eight million times in its first 24 hours of release in what organisers claimed was a world record. But the success was tempered by reports from a software security company that Firefox 3.0 contained a serious security flaw that potentially lets an attacker take over a PC if a user clicks on a booby-trapped link. According to the Mozilla foundation that released the new browser, the software was downloaded 8.3 million times in its first 24 hours of release starting Tuesday morning.

By Xinhua, Wenchang (China) : China Monday began construction of its new space launch centre in Wenchang city, on the northeast coast of the tropical island province of Hainan. It is scheduled to be completed by 2013. The launch centre would allow China to take part in more international commercial space launches, said Wang Weichang, director of the Hainan Space Center Project Headquarters. He said the new launch site will be mainly used for launching synchronous satellites, heavy satellites, large space stations, and deep space probe satellites.

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 Prensa Latina

Beijing : China and Brazil will launch in September a jointly developed third earth resources satellite, equipped with high resolution cameras for agricultural, mining and environmental use.

According to China National Space Administration, the Satellite 02B, of Brazilian manufacture, will orbit the earth in September or October 2008.

The takeoff will take place in a launching centre in Taiyuan, capital of the northern Chinese province of Shanxi.

By IANS, Chandigarh : The union territory of Chandigarh is all set to become a "solar city" and reduce its dependence on conventional and non-renewable energy resources, officials said here Wednesday. The administration here has nearly finalised the draft plan for extensively utilising solar energy in collaboration with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). To finalise the modalities of this project, a meeting was held between officials of the union territory and TERI Tuesday evening.

By Mohammed Shafeeq Hyderabad, Sep 27 (IANS) Top space organisations of Europe are keen to outsource sub-systems and components for their space missions to India but are unable to do so due to political hurdles. Under the European Space Agency (ESA) rules, the 17 member organisations cannot outsource the work but some of them wished they were allowed to do this to leverage on the cost benefit and reliable Indian research and development.

By IANS, London : A perfectly preserved 5,500-year-old leather shoe has been found by a team of international archaeologists in a cave in Armenia. The cow-hide shoe dates back to 3,500 BC (the Chalcolithic period) and is in perfect condition. It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot.

By DPA, Geneva : The World Health Organisation Tuesday said the death toll from swine flu had risen to 700 globally. By comparison, seasonal flu, the common variety of influenza which normally hits during the winter months, kills about 500,000 people each year. An official at the WHO headquarters in Geneva said the organisation did not have a death ratio for the virus and was still compiling data. The disease was first reported to have broken out in mid-April in North America, which remains the hardest-hit region.

By IANS, Washington : A Princeton-led team of researchers has discovered an entirely new mechanism for making common electronic materials emit laser beams. The finding could lead to lasers that operate more efficiently and at higher temperatures than existing devices, and find applications in environmental monitoring, homeland security, medical diagnostics and other areas that require extremely sensitive detection of different chemicals.

By IANS, Washington : Astronomers have detected an extrasolar planet with a mass just four times that of Earth. The planet, which orbits its parent star HD156668 about once every four days, is the second-smallest world among the more than 400 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system) that have been found to date. It is located approximately 80 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Hercules.

By IANS, Sydney : Two scientists are one step closer to explaining the nature of glass and its transition from liquid to solid, says a study. Peter Harrowell and Asaph Widmer-Cooper, theoretical chemists from the School of Chemistry along with colleagues from Columbia University, have been studying the transition of a fluid into a rigid glass in an attempt to understand stress relaxation in a disordered state.

By RIA Novosti, Moscow : A Russian carrier rocket has successfully put into orbit a fifth German SAR-Lupe reconnaissance satellite, a Russian Space Forces spokesman said Tuesday. "A Cosmos 3M carrier rocket, launched at 0240 GMT from the Plesetsk space centre in northern Russia, has successfully orbited a German SAR-Lupe satellite," Lt. Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said. The German SAR-Lupe satellite is designed to provide high-resolution radar images to NATO military commanders in Europe. It offers spatial resolution of less than one meter, and allows imaging at night and through clouds.

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By IANS, Beijing : China successfully launched a fifth orbiter into space Sunday as a part of its indigenous satellite navigation and global positioning network. The satellite was launched at 5.30 a.m. from the Long March 3I carrier rocket, Xinhua reported. The satellite will join other four satellites in orbit to form a network that will eventually consist of 35 satellites.

Bangalore : Google, the world's largest search engine provider, Thursday unveiled a new tool to search, navigate and explore Indian cities, streets, landmarks, restaurants...

By IANS, London : A British scientist who helped design a camera on board India's Chandrayaan-1 says he hopes images from it will help answer two tantalising questions about the Moon. “Where did the Moon come from? And could it ever sustain human life?” Maneul Grande of Aberystwyth Universtiy told the Times newspaper. “After the Apollo landings, people thought they knew a fair bit about the Moon - they'd seen people walking around up there,” said Grande, who helped to design the European Space Agency's camera that will take X-ray images of the Moon's surface.

By Andy Goldberg, DPA, San Francisco : Any review of the major technology developments of 2009 would inevitably include copious copy on the Googles, Microsofts and other giants of the tech world. But it was also a year in which the tiny company called Twitter became a major communications force, and when political, economic, social and technological trends combined to put green technology at the forefront of innovation.

By IANS, London : An orbiting NASA space telescope has captured the footage of a planet-sized object flying close to the sun, and extending a "refuelling tube" into the sun's surface.

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

By IANS,

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 IANS, Washington : A nearby star is bombarding its companion planet with a barrage of X-rays, hundred thousand times more intense than the earth receives from the Sun, a NASA discovery says.

By IANS, Shirdi (Maharashtra) : Hindu and Muslim pilgrims visiting the shrine of Sai Baba in this town will be served food cooked with the help of a solar steam system, inaugurated by New and Renewable Energy Minister Farooq Abdullah Thursday, that officials say is the world's largest. The solar steam system can generate 3,500 kg of steam every day - enough to cook food for 20,000 people. It has been designed for cooking food for devotees visiting the shrine devoted to Sai Baba, a 19th century Sufi saint who was revered by Hindus and Muslims alike.

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 : Soaring fuel prices have prompted scientists to look at unconventional energy sources that are cheap, abundant and renewable. And a new study suggests that the common algae could be just such a source. Although ethanol is currently being derived from corn, researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) have dismissed it as a thermodynamically inefficient process. They are, instead, examining the production of hydrogen by photosynthesis in algae as a renewable fuel, ScienceDaily reported.

By DPA, San Francisco : Google plans to build a fibre optic broadband network that will connect customers to the internet at speeds 100 times faster than most existing broadband connections in the US, the company announced on its corporate blog. "Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make internet access better and faster for everyone," two Google product managers, Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, wrote in the blog post Wednesday.

By IANS, Sydney : Thousands of garbage dumps are quietly leaking a toxic brew of old and sometimes deadly chemicals into the water consumed or used by millions of people. Researchers are developing a solution to one of the most urgent problems faced worldwide -- the poisonous fluids which leach out of old rubbish dumps and enter the groundwater.

By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS London : If there were any outer space aliens out there Monday at the crack of dawn Indian time, chances are they were grooving to a song with the words "Jai Guru Deva... Om". The words form the beautiful refrain of a famous Beatles song, "Across the Universe", which was beamed into outer space in a celebration of the band's music at 0530 Indian time (midnight GMT).

By IANS New Delhi : India will spend Rs.7.5 billion ($187.5 million) for carrying out research in oceanography and meteorological science, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said Friday. Presenting the 2008-09 budget, Chidambaram said the total outlay for the Ministry of Earth Sciences would include Rs.2.94 billion for oceanographic research, Rs.4.32 billion for meteorology and Rs.240 million for other scientific research.

By IANS, Lucknow : Scientific institutions and schools in Lucknow have made elaborate arrangements - from acquiring special goggles to installing telescopes - for people to watch the annular solar eclipse Friday. The Indira Gandhi Planetarium has purchased as many as 6,500 special goggles and installed several telescopes so that people can view the eclipse. "We have made enough arrangements to watch the solar eclipse. Only 51.12 percent of the eclipse will be visible in Lucknow," Anil Yadav, officer-in-charge of the planetarium, told IANS Friday.

By Xinhua Beijing : China will have a recoverable moon rover, which will carry back lunar soil samples, by 2017 if technical research "progresses smoothly," said the chief designer of Chang'e-1, the country's first moon probe, here Tuesday. China plans to land a probe on the moon in 2013, said Ye Peijian, chief commander and designer of probe's satellite system, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The milestone Chang'e-1 blasted off last October, marking the first step in China's ambitious three-stage moon mission.

By RIA Novosti Moscow : The Russian Progress M-62 cargo spacecraft will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) from the Baikonur launch centre in Kazakhstan Dec 23, Russia's space agency said. "The spacecraft will deliver food and water for the crew, as well as fuel to maintain the ISS's orbit and other cargo and research equipment," the Federal Space Agency said Monday.

By IANS/RIA Novosti,

By Xinhua, Berlin : New measurements adopted by an international team of researchers have revealed a much "slimmer" Milky Way compared with previous estimates. According to a press release from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) on Tuesday, the research led by Xiangxiang Xue of the National Astronomy Observatories of China has put the mass of the Milky Way at slightly under one trillion times the mass of the sun.

By Fakir Balaji, IANS, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : India's lunar explorer, Chandrayaan-1, will try to unravel the moon's origins as it scouts for minerals and water there, according to project director M. Annadurai. When Chandrayaan is launched Oct 22 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here, about 80 km from Chennai, it will boost international space cooperation by carrying 11 scientific devices, six of them from European and American organisations, to study the earth's nearest celestial neighbour while it orbits 100 km above the moon.

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 Saurabh Yadav, IANS, New Delhi : As tech companies around the world - and in India - develop smarter robots, it is only a matter of time before the big three of housework - vacuuming/cleaning, dishwashing and cooking - are done successfully by robots, thus liberating urban households from dependence on the almighty housemaid. Japanese auto giant Toyota has announced that it intends to start selling next-generation household robots by 2010 and the South Korean government has said that it aims at having a robot in each home by 2013.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Washington : A NASA spacecraft will move 30 km closer to the moon for a week to take clearer images of the Apollo lunar landing sites.

By IANS, New Delhi : This year's total solar eclipse on Sunday will be missed by sky gazers in India as the celestial phenomenon will not be visible in Asia. The eclipse will be visible from parts of the South Pacific Ocean area and South American countries like Argentina and Chile. A total solar eclipse occurs every 18 months. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and the earth, and the moon fully or partially covers the sun as viewed from the earth.

By IANS Hyderabad : The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has selected Rajya Sabha member and former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K. Kasturirangan for the prestigious Theodore Von Karman award for this year. The award will be presented to Kasturirangan, one of the country's top scientists, here Monday on the first-day of the 58th International Astronautical Congress. The Theodore Von Karman award is the highest distinction of the IAA given annually to recognise outstanding lifetime achievements in any branch of science.

By IANS/RIA Novosti,

Bhubaneswar: India successfully test-fired for the first time an exo-atmospheric missile interceptor at a defence base in Odisha Sunday. The missile operates outside the atmosphere...

By IANS, Panama City : Extensive cultivation of biofuel crops, aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas or carbon emissions, have posed the "risk of ultimately harming the environment", experts have said. Scientists taking part in an ecology conference here said that deforestation and land-use changes for biofuel crops are harming environment as much as fossil fuels like coal and petroleum, EFE reported Sunday. The forum was organised by the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).

By IANS, Washington : Plasmonics may open the way to the next generation of computers that operate faster and store more information than electronically-based systems and are also smaller. "If plasmonics are realised, the future will have circuits as small as the current electronic ones with a capacity a million times better," said Tony Jun Huang, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State University. "Plasmonics combines the speed and capacity of photonic (light based) circuits with the small size of electronic circuits," he added.

By Arun Kumar, IANS Washington : Leading global internet brand Yahoo! Inc. has introduced Yahoo! Buzz, offering the most interesting and relevant content from websites across the worldwide web and bringing more buzz-worthy stories to the homepage of Yahoo! Currently in beta, Yahoo! Buzz measures consumer votes and search patterns to identify interesting and timely stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the web, the firm announced Wednesday.

New Delhi : Zen Mobiles on Wednesday launched a new smartphone named Sonic 1 at a price of Rs.5,999 exclusively on eBay India. The new...

By IANS

Chennai : IT security services major Symantec Corporation will release its next-generation enterprise security software, codenamed Hamlet, in September, a top company official said here Wednesday.