Technology

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 Ernest Gill, DPA, Hamburg (Germany) : Hitchcock was right: birds do cooperate to solve tasks which no individual bird could master alone, says a team of German scientists. Until now, such group problem-solving efforts have been thought to be restricted to humans and other primates, such as chimpanzees. But the team of scientists headed by Amanda Seed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, discovered the same group techniques used among pairs of rooks.

By Xinhua Washington : Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collect in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, are reported in the latest issue of the Geophysical Research Letters Wednesday.

By Fakir Balaji, IANS, Bangalore : India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has captured the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface during the July 22 total solar eclipse, an Indian space agency official said Tuesday. The images were captured by the special terrain mapping camera (TMC) on board the spacecraft.

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 IANS, Agra : AstroSageIndia, said to be the country's first multi-language astrological YouTube channel was launched Wednesday, on the special date of the century - 12.12.12 at 12:12 p.m.

By IANS Buenos Aires : A group of Argentine scientists has discovered a "master gene" that determines why carcinogenic tumours survive. Scientists of the Exact and Natural Sciences Faculty at the University of Buenos Aires and the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina carried out the research, reported Spanish news agency EFE. For four years, the team studied tumours of the pituitary gland located at the base of the skull.

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 IANS, New Delhi: Over 2.5 crore owners of cheap handsets, that stood to be banned in India as these did not have the regulatory unique 15-digit identity code, can breathe a sigh of relief -- help is on the way. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), the organisation representing GSM service operators, Monday said it has developed a software that can embed the code - known as International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) - in these handsets. COAI in collaboration with handset body Mobile Standard Alliance of India (MSAI) has developed the software.

By DPA, Hamburg : The most intense X-ray beam of its type in the world has been generated inside a 2,300-metre circular tunnel under the German city of Hamburg, the Desy research institute said Monday. The machine, which cost 225 million euros ($297 million), was switched on in April, but unlike a light bulb it takes weeks to tune up. The X-ray light came Saturday. More months will now be spent adjusting measuring devices. Next year, scientists can begin actually using the machine to peer at atomic structures in proteins, cancer cells and the like.

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, San Francisco : Microsoft Wednesday issued a patch for its Word software to comply with a court ruling Tuesday that it infringed on patents relating to the use of XML or extensible markup language in its flagship word processing software. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word programs containing the infringing code from Jan 11, 2010. It also upheld jury-imposed damages of $290 million.

By IANS, New Delhi : Scientists from prestigious Yale University of the US have discovered the earliest black holes ever detected, a statement from the university said Thursday.

By IANS, Washington : NASA is scheduled to launch five rockets in just over five minutes Wednesday night as part of a study of the high-altitude jet stream, the US space agency announced Monday.

By IANS New York : Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, was forced to apologise after a print ad circulated by the company around blog-land invited wrath from around the world over its racist connotation. The ad shows six black sprinters crouched in the start position in front of a white man wearing a shirt and chinos (khaki pants) in an office. In a statement on its website Friday, Intel said: "We made a bad mistake. I know why and how, but that simply doesn't make it better."

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 Venkatachari Jagannathan, IANS, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : The GSLV rocket mission that failed Thursday was the sixth launched by India. Of the six, only two were successes and one a partial success. The rest could not accomplish their missions. The two successful launches by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) were in 2003 and 2004 - and put into space GSAT-2 and Edusat, an educational satellite.

BY RIA Novosti Moscow : Russia Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the world's first-ever satellite, Sputnik 1, an event which changed the world forever. The world entered the space age on Oct 4, 1957, when the USSR won the race to put the first satellite into orbit. Sputnik 1 was launched aboard a Soviet R-7 rocket from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan.

By IANS, New Delhi : India's software major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Monday called upon the central government to institutionalise e-governance and launch a portal that would act as a single window for the public to interact with various government agencies. "This will make governments more efficient and help people get access to government departments through one window without being physically present there," TCS CEO and managing director S. Ramadorai told reporters after releasing here a white paper on 'Roadmap for e-governance in India'.

By Prensa Latina Hanoi : Vietnam will soon launch its first telecommunications satellite from South America, Deputy Director Nguyen Quang Hung of State Vinast Agency's Satellite Information Center informed on Wednesday. The device arrived today at the Kourou launch base in the French Guiana Overseas Department and will be launched by the European Arianespace consortium at the end of March or early April, to be transferred to the National Post and Telecommunication Agency of Vietnam, indicated Hung.

By Prensa Latina Washington : US intelligence bought Google data base to enhance espionage on the Internet through restricted Intellipedia network for the 16 intelligence agencies. San Francisco Chronicle says several branches within the community, among them the National Security Agency, the CIA and FBI, are now able to process information collected from Google. The contracts are part of the accords the company sales team promoted with the Feds that already signed similar pact with the Coast Guard, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

By Bernama, Taiyuan : China launched two satellites for monitoring ecological environment and natural disasters at around 11:25 a.m. here on Saturday. China's Xinhua news agency reported that the two satellites, launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi Province, were carried by a Long March 2C rocket. They were expected to enhance the country's capacity to prevent and reduce natural disasters, according to Bai Zhaoguang, a leading scientist and designer of the satellites.

By IANS, New Delhi : Look towards the east after sunset Sunday and you will see upper part of moon's disk darkened as parts of India witness a partial lunar eclipse. The lunar eclipse is visible in eastern Asia, Australia, Antarctica, parts of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean, a statement from Ministry of Earth Sciences said Wednesday. This eclipse would be the last one in 2010 for India. "Visibility in India will be at the end of the eclipse. The ending of the eclipse is visible from the extreme northeastern states at the time of moonrise during the eclipse," it said.

By IANS, New York : With a huge Christmas-eve surge in its stock Thursday, Apple Inc. has almost reached market parity with Google and Wal-Mart. The 3.4 percent or $6.94 rise in Apple's stock during the day took its market value to $188 billion. The Apple stock sold for $209.04, surpassing the previous high of $207 last month. The stock surge brought Apple within striking distance of Google Inc. ($196 billion) and Wal-Mart ($204 billion).

By IANS, Jerusalem: An Israeli firm has invented a stick-on film that would protect cell phone users from the dangers of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the device, a media report said.

By IANS, Washington : A common contaminant present in consumer products, including cosmetics, may be causing an alarming rise in premature births, according to a new study. Phthalates are commonly used compounds in plastics, personal care products, home furnishings (vinyl flooring, carpeting, paints etc.) and many other consumer and industrial products. Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health (SPH) found that women who deliver prematurely have, on average, up to three times the phthalate level in their urine compared to women who carry to term.

By IANS, London : NASA will somehow have to accomplish its most ambitious mission - landing on an asteriod within 15 years, after a presidential directive.

By IANS, Washington : Unfavourable climatic changes might have hastened the decline of Roman and Byzantine empires more than 1,400 years ago. Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly from 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.

By IANS Washington : The racket that rockets make may be causing them to self-destruct, according to a new study that seeks to explain a phenomenon that has puzzled engineers and scientists for years. One reason the inexplicable destruction of rocket engines remained a mystery was because scientists were unable to replicate or investigate the problem under controlled lab conditions. They, however, believed that powerful and unstable sound waves, created by the combustion process, caused failures in several US and Russian rockets.

By IANS, Washington : Some 40,000 existing spider species are thought to be strict predators that feed on insects or other animals. Now, scientists have stumbled on what may be the world's first vegetarian spider that feeds on plants. The research, led by Christopher Meehan of Villanova University and Eric Olson of Brandeis University, has revealed the extraordinary ecology and behaviour in a small specimen known as Bagheera kiplingi, found throughout much of Central America and southern Mexico.

By IANS, Sydney : E-mentoring has been found to be more convenient, more direct and better than face-to-face mentoring, according to a study. “E-mail-based communication is almost instant and helps overcome one of the major obstacles to traditional mentoring - participants finding a suitable time to meet,” said Kim Rickard of Victoria University, who conducted the study. By using e-mail, participants can go straight to the issues without the need to engage in “polite conversation” beforehand, the study found, ScienceDaily reports.

By IANS, London : Is there anybody out there? The odds of finding life on other planets are low, given the time it has taken for earthlings to evolve and the ebbing lifespan of our planet. Complex life is separated from the simplest forms by several very unlikely steps and therefore will be much less common. Intelligence is one step further, so it is still much less common," Andrew Watson of University of Anglia said Saturday.

By IANS, Washington : Astronomers have detected the largest water body in universe whose volume is enough to fill the earth's oceans by more than 100 trillion times.

By IANS, Kolkata: A US-based Indian engineer has designed and patented three waste disposal units that "match architecture and road systems" of India.

By Xinhua Beijing : The Ulysses solar probe, after 17 years of studying the sun and solar system, is about to die by freezing to death, NASA and the European Space Agency have announced. The satellite had long outlasted the five-year mission it began in 1990, but it continued to transmit useful data on solar winds. More recently, its plutonium power source had slowly weakened and its fuel was freezing as the probe made a wide circle of the sun, traveling as far as Jupiter.

Tokyo : The Swiss-made solar-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2, on Monday started its second bid at a record-breaking flight across the Pacific Ocean. According to...

By IANS, Washington : A powerful solar flare has triggered the largest space weather storm in four years, disrupting some ground communications on earth.

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 DPA, Wellington : Humans first settled in New Zealand around the late 13th century and not more than 2,000 years ago as had been thought, according to research published Tuesday that used radiocarbon dating on rat bones. The research in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rejected earlier radiocarbon dating suggesting the first migrants arrived about 200 BC.

By IANS, London : Visualise a smart system that enables you to negotiate sharp, treacherous bends, blind spots and sudden dips on the road ahead, with perfect ease and safety. The technology being developed by a European project on road safety will keep you updated on geographical database. It can even communicate with other vehicles in the vicinity. This is the future of in-car maps, going way beyond directions and entering the zone of pro-active hazard detection. It is one of the key strands of the PReVENT project.

By Arun Kumar, IANS, Washington : Scientists have found Moon's minerals may have at least 100 times more water than previously indicated by remote sensing data from the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 and other lunar sample analysis. In March 2010, a US space agency NASA radar experiment aboard Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar spacecraft launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation in October 2008, found thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.

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 Thiruvananthapuram : It is now uncertain whether a space institute of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will actually come up on a plot in the Ponmudi hill station of Kerala, with a minister Thursday calling the land deal shady. "It is now clear that the individual who sold the land to ISRO was shady, but the Kerala government is clear that it will go ahead with the proposed institute, clearing all the issues that have cropped up," Forest Minister Binoy Viswam told reporters. He said this in the presence of ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair here.

By IANS,

By DPA, Washington : US space agency NASA has said it is ready to send two missions to the moon in a launch next month that will set the course for the resumption of human lunar exploration. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) are to launch aboard a single rocket June 17. Together they will send data back to NASA to help scientists find the best location for a spacecraft landing to bring humans to the moon.

By IANS,

By IANS, Kolkata : After a string of successes, a confident Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is ready to offer its capacities on a commercial basis and ring in its cash registers, after meeting the domestic requirement that calls for four to five launches a year. "ISRO launch vehicles are efficient, reliable and cost-effective. Our launch vehicles cost nearly 25 percent less than what international agencies demand," ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair Thursday said.

By IANS, New Delhi : A group of 10 students from various schools of the country are among the lucky few chosen to watch the 21st century's longest solar eclipse from Anqing in China, one of the best places in the world to view the spectacle July 22, apart from a village in Bihar. The students will leave for China Saturday on an eight-day scientific expedition called 'heliodyssey' to watch the eclipse that will last for six minutes and 44 seconds, making it the longest eclipse till 2132.

By IANS, Toronto : While most people have gut reactions to websites, a group of scientists is developing software that can actually measure those emotions and more. Aude Dufresne, professor at the University of Montreal (UofM) Department Of Communications, led a team of researchers that are designing a new software to evaluate the biological responses of Internet users. Simply put, the new software measures everything in web users from body heat to eye movements to facial expressions and analyses how they relate to online activities.

By IANS, Beijing : Technology experts in China have warned internet users to be alert against computer viruses based on the Valentine's Day theme.

By Prasun Sonwalkar, IANS London : In a unique scientific study, British researchers have used the Punjabi script Gurmukhi to help narrow down the identity of writers and develop a technique that could profile criminal authors of documents. Forensic experts at the University of Derby believe that a Punjabi equivalent of the English pangram 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' could help profile the criminal authors of documents.

By IANS, London : Scientists are a step closer to resurrecting extinct animals after successfully cloning living mice from the cells of frozen animals, according to findings published Wednesday. A team of Japanese scientists at the Centre for Developmental Biology, at the RIKEN research institute in Kobe, produced the clones after thawing mice that had been frozen at minus 20C for up to 16 years, British newspapers reported.

By IANS, Anjali Ojha,

By IANS, Washington : Scientists have identified a tiny asteroid before it hit the earth, helping computers pinpoint its origins and predict the arrival of its shattered parts. The four-metre-diameter asteroid, called 2008 TC3, was initially sighted by the automated Catalina Sky Survey telescope at Mount Lemmon, Arizona, on Oct 6 last year. Numerous observatories, alerted to the invader, then photographed the object. Computations correctly predicted impact would occur 19 hours after discovery in the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan.

By IANS, Moscow : Russia Wednesday launched a US communications satellite into space from the Baikonur Space Centre in Kazakhstan, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

By IANS, New Delhi : Sky gazers are up for a treat this week as five planets of our solar system will be visible in the night sky for the next few days. According to scientists, four planets - Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn - will be visible in the evenings while Jupiter can be seen in the morning. "Mercury, which is always hidden in sun's glare would be visible up to April 10 whereas other four planets can be spotted for many months to come," said N. Sri Raghunandan Kumar, general secretary of Planetary Society of India.

Moscow: Moscow wants arms embargo on Tehran lifted as soon as possible, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday, adding that no insurmountable...

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 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).

By IANS, Bangalore : India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 Wednesday reached its intended operational orbit at about 100 km from the lunar surface for a two-year rendezvous with the moon. “Chandrayaan has reached its home in the final orbit. The spacecraft is orbiting at an altitude of 100 km above the lunar surface. It will spin around the moon once in two hours,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) director S. Satish told IANS here.

By IANS, London : We appreciate beautiful women, but they tend to trigger envy and dislike in other women of childbearing age. A survey of 97 middle-aged women rated such beauties way below their menopausal counterparts, looks-wise, which Aberdeen University psychologist Benedict Jones said was like putting them down. Researchers turned their attention to examining how fertility triggered competition within sexes for potential partners, informed Jones, who led the study.

By DPA, Bangkok : Solar energy has found a unique outlet in Thailand with one innovator using the sun's rays to roast chicken at his roadside stall, drawing the attention of Japanese researchers and hungry motorists, news reports said Monday. With temperatures and fuel prices rising around the globe, Sila Sutharat's solar-seared chicken, sold at a roadside in Phetchaburi town, 90 km southwest of Bangkok, recently attracted a team of Japanese researchers keen to learn his cooking techniques, the Bangkok Post newspaper reported.

By DPA Tokyo : Tired of smelly public toilets? Check out a prototype Japanese bio-toilet that emits no foul smell and helps the environment at the same time. A bio-toilet developed by a Japanese non-profit organisation is designed to activate microorganisms living in cider chips and decompose excrement. In the decomposition process, only nitrogen gas and water are left. The water can be reused for toilet flushing.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : Russia's Soyuz spacecraft put six US communications satellites into orbit Tuesday, an official said.

By IANS, Abu Dhabi : A young inventor here has developed a solar-powered car - the first in the Middle East - that can run at 50 km an hour, WAM news agency reported Saturday. Saqar Bin Saif exhibited the first model of his car earlier at the Dubai Motor Show, evoking curiosity and interest of many global car manufacturers. The inventor, who has a degree in business administration, said he had been busy upgrading the car and improving the solar panels for producing more power.

By IANS, Washington : Scientists are designing a new kind of optical sensor that uses unmanned aerial vehicles to track suspected terrorists on foot or in vehicles. "The Air Force has clearly recognised the change in the threat that we have," said John Kerekes, associate professor in Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Chester F. Carlson Centre for Imaging Science.

By Xinhua, Moscow : A Russian Proton-M rocket Tuesday sent a US telecommunications satellite, the Inmarsat-4 F3, into Earth orbit, a spokesman for a Moscow-based producer of space launch systems said. The rocket was launched from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan at 2.43 a.m., said Alexander Bobrenyov, spokesman for the Khrunichev state research and production space centre.

Washington, Dec 12 (DPA) Thirty-five years after the last man stood on the moon, the US space agency remains focused on returning humans to Earth's satellite as a launching pad for future exploration of Mars. Never mind that the US public seemed more fixated on the high-profile arrest earlier this year of an astronaut caught in a jealous love triangle with a colleague, or that the long-delayed installation of a European module on the International Space Station (ISS) was again pushed back with the postponement of the Atlantis shuttle launch Sunday.

By IANS Jammu : Before venturing out on a journey in this season of heavy snowfall and rain in Jammu and Kashmir, a peek into the SMS inbox of your mobile would be useful. An SMS Thursday informed mobile subscribers here about the status of the Jammu- Srinagar national highway - the major road link between the Kashmir valley and the rest of India. The message also informed about the depth of snow at various points on this 294-km land route that winds its way through the Pir Panjal range of the Himalayas.

By IANS, New Delhi : India Wednesday announced the schedule for auctioning radio frequency spectrum to private players for third generation (3G) telephony, with the process due to begin Thursday by issuing a general notice to interested players. The schedule calls for the process to end April 10. The government also said auction for spectrum for broadband services will also be held two days after the process concludes for 3G spectrum.

By SPA, Washington : The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has decided to proceed with plans to launch a big new rover to Mars next year. Friday’s decision came after concerns were raised about the budget and technical progress for the Mars Science Laboratory. The head of the Mars exploration program at NASA’s Los Angeles office said the space agency will examine the mission’s progress again in January.

By DPA, Hong Kong : A Hong Kong-based animal welfare charity Thursday criticised China's space programme for serving dog meat to its astronauts. Yang Liwei, China's first man in space, revealed in his recent autobiography that dog meat was included in the special diet for astronauts preparing for missions. The Hong Kong-based charity Animals Asia Thursday hit out at the revelation by Yang, who made history when he orbited earth in the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft in October 2003.

By DPA, San Francisco : Microsoft said Tuesday that it will debut its new operating system Oct 22 as it seeks to block a growing challenge from Google, Apple, and the open-source Linux operating system. The world's largest software company is releasing Windows 7 just 33 months after launching Windows Vista which has been widely panned for its demanding hardware requirements and slow response time.

By Andy Goldberg, DPA Las Vegas : Think that cellphone in your pocket is pretty neat? Think again. Spurred by the phenomenal launch of the iPhone, the prospect of a Google phone and open networks, inventors and entrepreneurs around the world are feverishly developing plans to expand what mobile phones can do. "They want to combine the computing power of the latest phones with social networks and location-tracking technologies to create a new generation of cell phones," says Simon Blitz, who runs a large cell phone wholesale company in the US.

By IANS, Washington : As if global warming was not alarming in itself, add one more sinister threat to the list -- mercury pollution. It has already spurred public health officials to advise eating less fish, but it could become a more pressing concern in a warmer world. Sue Natali, postdoctoral associate in botany at the University of Florida in a paper she co-authored compared mercury levels in soils under trees growing in air enriched with carbon dioxide to soil beneath trees in ambient air.

By A Mirsab, TwoCircles.net, Solapur (Maharashtra): In an attempt to highlight the great work that Muslims have done in the field of science, an...

By IANS, Washington : Astronauts may now be able to satisfy their sweet tooth as researchers have found a strawberry that can grow in space with little maintenance and energy. Cary Mitchell, professor of horticulture, and Gioia Massa, a horticulture research scientist at Purdue University in the US, tested several cultivars of strawberries and found one variety named Seascape, which seems to meet the requirements for becoming a space crop.

By DPA Hamburg : Two German physicists from the University of Koblenz claim to have done the impossible by finding photons that have broken the speed of light. If their claims are confirmed, they will have proved wrong Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which requires an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen say they have possibly breached a key tenet of that theory.

By IANS, Chennai : India will launch three satellites next month and two more by the end of this year, said a senior official here.

By IANS Ranchi : The Jharkhand police plans to set up a Geographical Information System (GIS) centre to track the movement of Maoists in the state. The state police would seek the help of the Jharkhand Space Application Centre (JSAC) to get a detailed report of the topography of the state. "We will set up a GIS centre which will help officials to crack down on criminals and Maoist rebels," a senior police official told IANS.

By IANS New York : Using a mobile phone while driving could be as dangerous as being under the influence of alcohol, according to a new study. In fact, the study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that drivers under the influence of alcohol and those speaking on cell phones tend to commit the same errors. Using brain imaging, the study has documented how mobile phone use alone reduces 37 percent of brain activity engaged in driving. For instance, drivers using a simulator while on the phone were found to zigzag out of their lanes.

By DPA, San Francisco : Google is teaming up with dozens of publishers to index old magazines and make them available online, according to a blog posting by the company. The move is another facet of Google's ambition to organize the world's information and comes two years after the tech search giant embarked on a scheme to scan and index millions of books. In September, the company launched a project to digitize newspaper archives, making millions of old newspaper articles searchable online.

By IANS Abu Dhabi : Dolphin Energy Limited, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) based natural gas company, is conducting the first artificial coral reef growth study in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Qatar, WAM news agency reported Friday. The project is being implemented by the Continental Shelf Associates International (CSA) of the US. The CSA will use 'EcoReef' technology in the project that includes construction of complex reef habitats using ceramic modules that mimic natural branching corals. The ceramic is non-toxic, pH neutral, food-grade stoneware.

By DPA Washington : Scientists have drastically reduced the chances of a 50-metre-wide asteroid striking Mars later this month, saying the rock will likely keep a distance of about 26,000 km. The US space agency NASA said Thursday it was "effectively ruling out" a collision, reducing the probability to 1 in 10,000. Ten days ago the odds stood at 1 in 25 - nearly 4 percent.

By DPA, Washington : Problems with a spacesuit has caused NASA to cut short a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. Problems with a system that removes carbon dioxide from the air in astronaut Chris Cassidy's spacesuit caused mission control to end the spacewalk at 2031 GMT Wednesday after five hours and 59 minutes. Carbon dioxide levels were beginning to rise in his suit, but he was not in any imminent danger, NASA said. The spacewalk was to have lasted about six and a half hours.

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 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 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) being developed by the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (APIIC) in Adibatla.

By Xinhua Beijing : China's first lunar probe, Chang'e-1, completed its nearly two-million-km journey to the moon successfully Wednesday and entered its working orbit. The probe, following instructions of the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre (BACC), started its third braking at 8.24 a.m. and entered a 127-minute round polar circular orbit at 8.34 a.m. "It marks success of the probe's long flight to the moon," said Luan Enjie, chief commander of China's lunar probe project.

By Xinhua, Beijing : The planned launch date of Shenzhou VII, China's third manned spacecraft, may be brought forward from next month to sometime this month, Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po newspaper said. A source reportedly told the paper the launch date will be between Sept 17, the closing day of the Beijing Paralympics, and Oct 1, China's National Day. "Now it is fairly certain it will be before National Day, because the best launch window for Shenzhou VII will be before Oct 1," the newspaper quoted the source as saying.

By Ernest Gill, DPA, Hamburg (Germany) : Grazing cows tend to face the North and South Poles, according to German scientists who studied 308 herds using Google Earth satellite photos. The Boreal bovine orientation suggests that they, like migratory birds, sea turtles and monarch butterflies, tune into the Earth's magnetic fields, says Hynek Burda, a biologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

By IANS

Washington : Think twice if you are about to forge a signature. A newly developed technology will help forensic specialists find out when you signed a cheque, the pen you used, and the origin of the ink.

The technology that is used at present can only trace the ink if a piece of the document is soaked in certain solutions.

By IANS/EFE,

By Xinhua, Paris : An Ariane 5 ECA launcher carrying a British military satellite and a Turkish telecoms satellite lifted off from Europe's Spaceport at Kourou, in French Guiana, Thursday night. The rocket carrying Skynet 5C and Turksat 3A blast off at 2205 GMT Thursday night and the satellites were accurately injected into the geostationary transfer orbits about 30 minutes later, said a statement posted on the website of the European Space Agency. The launch, which had been slated for May 23, has been postponed twice due to technical hitches.

By IANS, Los Angeles : Google has threatened to close its operations and offices in China after hacking of email accounts of many human rights activists. In a statement on its blog Tuesday, the world's second biggest corporate said it has detected in December "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.''

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow : Russia Saturday launched a Proton-M rocket to put a US telecommunications satellite into space, the defence ministry said. The rocket blasted off from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan at 11.19 GMT. The satellite was due to separate from the carrier rocket at around 20.19 GMT. The 2.6-tonne satellite has a lifespan of about 15 years. The satellite will provide digital television services for customers in the US and the Caribbean. This was the fifth Proton-M rocked launched by Russia this year.

Washington: In a bid to stop snooping on its users, Google has overhauled its Gmail service in a big way - encrypting every single...

By Arun Kumar, IANS Washington : India and the US plan to cooperate in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes, including in the area of human space flights, under a new agreement between their space agencies. A framework agreement establishing the terms for future cooperation between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was signed Friday at the Kennedy Space Centre by ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair and NASA administrator Michael Griffin.

By IANS Washington : India will be able to send manned space flights in seven to eight years, G. Madhavan Nair, head of India's space programme, said here. "We have sensitised the government on manned space flights. In seven to eight years, we will be able to carry crew to orbit and back," Nair, chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Space Commission, said Wednesday. He said India believes that space is the next frontier and international cooperation rather than competition in this field will be the future.

By Bernama, Hanoi : Telecommunications industry insiders are predicting that 3G (third generation) technology will be introduced in Vietnam this year, the Vietnam news agency (VNA) reported. With 3G technology, mobile providers in Vietnam will be able to provide more value-added services for their mobile users such as videophone, on-line video streaming and high-speed internet and music download.

By DPA, San Francisco : Google's online video site YouTube now gets a billion hits a day, the site's founder Chad Hurley said in a video posted Friday. "Three years ago today (YouTube co-founder) Steve (Chen) and I stood in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the 'burger kings' of media," read the post, which was titled Y,000,000,000uTube.

By IANS, Washington : Researchers have created the most detailed and comprehensive map of the moon's complex landscape thanks to data provided by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

By Xinhua London : Britain's astronomers from the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), a leading planet-hunting team, have announced the discovery of three new planets, according to a press release issued by Keele University. These extra-solar planets named WASP-3, WASP-4 and WASP-5 were seen to transit their host star. WASP-3 is the third planet that the team has found in the northern hemisphere, using the SuperWASP camera sited in the Canary Islands.

By DPA, San Francisco : Yahoo has entered an agreement to run some Google's ads on its search pages after acquisition talks with Microsoft ended in failure, the web pioneer has said. The deal reached Thursday may add $800 million a year to Yahoo's sales, but the companies will delay implementation till October to give the US Justice Department time for review, Yahoo said.

By IANS, Kolkata: The percentage of digitisation of cable televisions in Kolkata has currently reached 90 percent, leading multi-service operator (MSO) Siticable said Tuesday.

By IANS, Chennai : India, already a leader in the remote sensing data domain, is poised to become a major collaborative space power, says an international space competitiveness index study. According to the study, conducted by the US-based Futron Corp, the space race that has witnessed major developments like the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch, the first man-made satellite to orbit and the US' successful moon mission is now a $100 billion-plus industry.

By Jay Dougherty, DPA, Washington : With each new version of Windows, Microsoft promises that you'll have to restart your computer less often. But that promise never seems to materialise. Restarting a Windows PC is not only a dreaded task - thanks to the amount of time required to load Windows - but always seems to be required when you least desire it. What's behind all of this restart madness, anyway, and is there a way to cut down on the number of times you need to restart? Read on for some answers.

By Prashant K. Nanda, IANS New Delhi : The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India's oldest and largest scientific institution, has not just been headless for nine long months, but in 2007, to go by its website, it has a vision for 2001! The vision document flashing on its website, the institute's global interface, says: "CSIR in 2001 would be a model organisation for scientific industrial research and path setter in the shifting paradigms of self financing research and development (R&D).

By IANS, Washington : Scientists have found the interaction between shock waves created by high-pressure supersonic fuel jets. The discovery may lead to cleaner and more efficient internal combustion engines as well as advances in high-speed jet cleaning, machining and mining. Shock waves have been studied in the past but high-pressure liquid jets created by micrometre sized nozzles can also reach supersonic speeds.

By Pupul Dutta, IANS, New Delhi : When most sectors are bearing the brunt of global economic slowdown, India's telecom industry is continuing with its high growth saga, thanks to the expanding subscriber base in the rural areas. India last month saw the highest number of subscriber addition, 15.87 million, about three times the population of countries like Finland, Denmark and Singapore.

By IANS, London: Photographers will soon be able to charge their camera batteries with the rays of the sun. A team of Chinese researchers are developing solar panels to straps that would make the charging easy. Inventor Weng Jie’s idea, of which a prototype may be ready in months, could spell the end of wall-socket charging, reports dailymail.co.uk. But there is a downside: In case there is not enough sunlight, regular batteries can not be used as a substitute.

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

By IANS, London: A special underwear has been designed to jolt the buttocks with electricity so it can help prevent bedsores, the BBC reported Monday.

By IANS Washington : Insights derived from how rats sense objects could enable a better understanding of hearing and touch in all mammals, including humans. A high-speed video of rats using their whiskers to explore different surfaces has provided researchers with a window into the subtle mechanics of their tactile sensory system. The information is significant because the rat's tactile machinery is a widely used lab model for studying how energy from sound or touch is translated into neural activity.

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 New York : Climate change caused by global warming has plunged the earth into a crisis but fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist has alleged. "We've already reached a dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," said James Hansen, 67, director of the space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies here. "But there are ways to solve the problem" of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the "tipping point" of 385 parts per million.

By IANS, Washington : Researchers are outlining key advances in developing new fuels to help supply a future energy-hungry world. The advances include green gasoline, designer hydrocarbons and "ice that burns". Automobile pioneer Henry Ford foresaw that cars of the future would run on ethanol. Researchers are now looking at grass to produce ethanol that would be more sustainable than corn-based ethanol.

By Arun Kumar, IANS, Washington: Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams is all set to return to to the International Space Station, where she spent a record six months in 2006.

By RIA Novosti, Baikonur (Kazakhstan) : A Soyuz-FG carrier rocket due to lift off Sunday to take a crew of three to the International Space Station has been moved to the launch pad at Kazakhstan's Baikonur space center. The three-stage rocket with the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft was transported from an assembly facility to the launch site Thursday evening for pre-flight preparation procedures.

By Frederick Noronha, IANS, Panaji : Free software and open source solutions offer a huge potential to link your computer to the mobile phone and the inexpensive Skype networks -- that allows you to make international calls over the internet -- and for sending out SMSes too. This could help significantly narrow the digital divide "at the social level between rich and poor and geographical levels, between city and village", says Giovanni Maruzzelli, an Italian expert in the field currently touring India.

New Delhi : First splashy full page ads in major Indian newspapers and now a personal piece by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a...

By ANTARA News Washington : Two astronauts from the US shuttle Endeavour stepped into space Thursday in the first of a series of spacewalks to install Japan's maiden laboratory at the International Space Station (ISS), NASA television showed. Mission Specialist and lead spacewalker Rick Linnehan and Flight Engineer Garrett Reisman emerged at 8:18 pm Central Daylight Time (0118 GMT Friday), according to NASA, to begin the task of maneuvering phase one of the laboratory out of Endeavour's payload bay and attaching it to the orbiting station.

By Jatindra Dash, IANS, Bhubaneswar : It may now be possible to bring down the cost of emulsified fuel and also reduce India's dependence on crude imports, thanks to a new technology invented and tested by the Chennai-based Hydrodrive Systems and Controls. "The technology we have developed does not use any additives or surfactant," Hydrodrive managing director and inventor Srinivasan Gopalakrishnan said.

By IANS, Beijing : China has now set its sight on planet Venus, where it hopes to land a space probe by 2015. A probe to Mars and the country's first moon landing have also been chalked out.

By Xinhua Tokyo : Japan Friday launched an H-2A rocket carrying the Selenological and Engineering Explorer, the country's first lunar probe satellite, from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Kagoshima prefecture. The rocket, which is named Kaguya after an ancient Japanese fable, lifted off as scheduled at 10.31 a.m. from the centre on the Pacific off Japan's southern Kyushu island. The satellite and the launch vehicle successfully separated at 11.16 a.m.

By IANS, Washington : Scientists have found the apparent role of carbon dioxide in the intensification of the Ice Ages and corresponding temperature changes in the tropical oceans. The research, led by a team of Brown University, has established that the climate in the tropics over the last 2.7 million years changed with the cyclical spread and retreat of ice sheets thousands of miles away in the Northern Hemisphere.

By IANS, London : NASA will launch a spacecraft Friday to unravel the secrets of Jupiter, the largest planet in the universe.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : The Indian space agency is working at preparing a business model to partner with industries - public and...

Chennai : Gujarat-based Adani group on Saturday signed an agreement with the Tamil Nadu government to supply 648 MW of solar power from...

By NNN-IRNA Tehran : President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has inagurated here Iran's first space terminal for launching satellite. Speaking at the ceremony, he urged the people to make ultimate use of all the existing scientific potentials and capabilities to achieve the zenith of progress and development. The country's first space terminal comprises of the Omid satellite, Iran's first locally developed research satellite which has been designed and constructed by Iranian experts. The Omid satellite will be launched in the near future.

By IANS, New Delhi: Global software giant Microsoft Monday unveiled a portfolio of services in India that will help companies share software and storage facilities, called cloud computing, that can bring down their total IT spend by as much as 50 percent. Windows Azure -- the company's latest offering in the area of cloud computing -- is now available commercially in India, said Microsoft India group Director Vikas Arora. "Some 3,500 applications for Azure have been developed out of India alone," Arora told IANS.

By IANS, Agartala: The electronic voting machines (EVM) are secure for the purpose they serve as they cannot be manipulated, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) V.S. Sampath said here Saturday.

By IANS, Sydney : A new process developed by scientists converts low grade animal waste like feathers into plastic products that are bio-degradable. The “bio-plastic”, as it is being called, would be suitable for agricultural plastic sheeting, seedling trays, plant pots and even biodegradable golf tees, ScienceAlert reported.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan and Fakir Balaji, IANS, Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) : A perfect launch sent Chandrayaan-1 on an epic voyage of discovery to the moon Wednesday morning, marking a giant scientific leap for India. “To our luck, rain gods and clouds kept away. They also kept away lightning,” said a jubiliant G. Madhavan Nair, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), after the moon probe took off at 6.22 a.m.

By IANS, Beijing : China Friday launched its second unmanned lunar probe, Chang'e-2. This was the second of the country's three-phase moon mission which will culminate in a landing on the moon.

By Fakir Balaji, IANS, Bangalore : Indian scientists are still trying to restore radio contact with the lunarcraft Chandrayaan-1, but the chances of re-establishing contact are slim, a senior space official said Sunday. "Efforts are still on to restore the signal with the mooncraft though chances are slim. If we fail to establish the link again, we may call off the mission much earlier than the two-year schedule," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) director S. Satish told IANS.

By IANS, Washington : US search engine giant Google is planning to introduce Android-based television software in May which will enable the users to access television through internet. The new software, designed to open set-top boxes, TVs and other devices to more content from the internet, is attracting interest from partners that include Sony Corp., Intel Corp. and Logitech International SA, which are expected to offer products that support the software, according to people familiar with the matter.

By DPA, San Francisco : Google Tuesday launched a set of social networking tools for Gmail users, hoping to coax them to share photos, links and status updates without the need to visit sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Called Google Buzz, the new features were rolled out to a small number of Gmail account holders Tuesday and to the majority of users within the week. It allows users to share photos, videos, web links, conversations with "friends" - defined as pre-existing Gmail contacts. Google said it may open Buzz up to outside users in the future.

By DPA, Washington : NASA's Messenger spacecraft came within 200 km of Mercury Monday, taking pictures of the rocky planet nearest the sun. It was the second of three planned flybys for the craft, which is due to settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011, providing what scientists hope will be the most complete picture yet of the solar system's smallest planet. The 0840 GMT flyby was designed largely to pick up a gravitational boost of energy for the craft. It will begin beaming data back to Earth Wednesday, NASA and university researchers said.

By Xinhua Beijing : Scientists found warmth, water and organic chemicals on Saturn's small moon Enceladus which are the basic ingredients for life, media reported Thursday. Scientists did not say they had detected any actual evidence of life on this moon where geysers at its south pole continuously shoot watery plumes some nearly thousand km off its icy surface into space. But they said the building blocks for life are there, and described the plumes as a surprising organic brew sort of like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas.

By Xinhua, Kathmandu : An ultra-light aircraft built by Nepali engineers is scheduled to take off on Saturday afternoon almost one year since its builders sought permission from the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, according to The Kathmandu Post. "The research team is ready for the test flight as we have already fulfilled all necessary lab-safety requirements," said Bikash Parajuli, leader of the team that built the aircraft. "We are optimistic that the flight will be successful," he was quoted by the Saturday's daily as saying.

By NNN-IRNA Scientists of Iran’s Royan Research Center have successfully produced a mouse using embryonic stem cells. Director of the center's stem cells group, Hossein Baharvand, said that in the next phase, the experts are expected to produce mice with specific characteristics by genetically changing the mouse embryonic stem cells. "The mechanism could be used in studying the performance of a specific gene in a living body," Baharvand said.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Plesetsk (Russia) : Russia Monday launched a navigation satellite from its Plesetsk Space Centre, Space Forces spokesman Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said.

By Xinhua Los Angeles : Researchers in California said Thursday that they have produced human clone embryos from adult skin cells, in an advancement toward developing stem cells which could be used to cure degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Scientists used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). They first removed the nuclei of mature egg cells from healthy young women and then inserted DNA from an adult male donor into the eggs. The DNA used in the experiment was retrieved from skin cells called fibroblasts.

By DPA, Washington : NASA's Discovery space shuttle was launched Monday for a scheduled 13-day mission, one of the last remaining four flights for the ageing shuttle fleet. Discovery took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 6.21 a.m. with seven astronauts on board. The shuttle will be bringing them to the International Space Station (ISS).

By Xinhua, Beijing : The Long March 2F rocket designed to carry China's third manned spacecraft into space will be sent to Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest Gansu province in a few days, officials with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) said here Saturday. The rocket was coated in red, a color to show that it was ready to fulfill its mission, said Jing Muchun, chief designer of the spacecraft, adding that further testing will be conducted to ensure 100 percent safety after the rocket arrives at Jiuquan.

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.