Technology

By IANS,

By IANS, Washington : Ice core and ocean deposit comparisons show complex links between carbon dioxide levels, ocean currents and climate and may help explain past, present and future climate trends. Researchers presented new data from their analysis of ice core samples and ocean deposits dating as far back as 90,000 years ago and suggest that warming, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and ocean currents are tightly interrelated.

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

By IANS, Washington : Mountains can double their heights within two to four million years - many times faster than the existing tectonic theory surmises, a new study has found. The rapid uplift implies that the current theory of plate tectonics will have to be modified to include a process of “delamination”, according to Carmala Garizone of the University of Rochester. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore collaborated in the study.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Moscow: Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, has launched a new project enabling registered users to post videos, according to the portal's press service.

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

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

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

By IANS Toronto : Dogs greet their masters with the same warmth after a five-minute absence - or five hours. Does this mean they do not possess a sense of time? This question led William Roberts of the University of Western Ontario to experiment with rats. And he found that the rodents did keep track of time after discovering a piece of cheese, but without forming memories of its discovery. These results suggest that episodic-like memory in rats is qualitatively different from human episodic memory, which involves retention of the point in past time when an event occurred.

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

By IANS New York : A new category of computer attacks may compromise memory systems touted as foolproof, particularly in laptops, a recent study has found. The study, by researchers at Princeton, found these attacks overcome "disc encryption", a broad set of security measures meant to protect information stored in a computer's permanent memory. The researchers cracked widely-used technologies like Microsoft's BitLocker, Apple's FileVault and Linux's dm-crypt. They described the attacks in a paper and video published Thursday on the web.

By IANS, Bangalore : The saffron-white-green of the Indian flag will adorn the moon from Friday night when the tricolour-painted moon impact probe (MIP) of Chandrayaan-1 lands on its surface to begin a two-year investigation of the earth's only natural satellite. The 375 mm x 375 mm x 470 mm MIP is a honeycomb structure housing the subsystems and three instruments - radar altimeter, video imaging system and mass spectrometer. It weighs 35 kg.

By IANS, New Delhi : Come Gandhi Jayanti (Oct 2), solar rickshaws will replace man-pulled pedicabs in the Chandni Chowk area of old Delhi. Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal, who also represents the constituency in parliament, Friday advised Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit to introduce these green vehicles from Oct 2. The rickshaw would weigh 210 kg and would be able to run at a speed of 15 to 20 km per hour. It would be run by a solar battery, which would suffice for a journey of 70 km.

By Sam Pitroda, IANS, This month marks the 25th anniversary of what is now widely acknowledged to be India's first defining steps towards an information and communications revolution. It was in August 1984 that the Centre for Development of Telematics or C-DOT was set up with the specific intention of indigenising digital switching technology to meet India's unique requirements.

By Xinhua, Washington : Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have found a bizarre ring of material around the magnetic remains of a star that blasted to smithereens, NASA reported Wednesday. The stellar corpse, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. These are the cores of massive stars that blew up in supernova explosions, but unlike other dead stars, they slowly pulsate with X-rays and have tremendously strong magnetic fields.

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, New Delhi: Google is surfing new places in the remote northern outposts of the Canada's Arctic region with its mapping device, the search engine said in a statement Thursday.

By IANS, New Delhi : The millennium's longest annular solar eclipse began in the national capital Friday but fog and cloudy skies marred a clear view of the celestial spectacle. Although seen only partially from here, it nevertheless enthralled enthusiastic onlookers who gathered to watch the celestial phenomenon at the Nehru Planetarium and other places where special arrangements were made to view the event.

By IANS, Washington: Scientists from China are developing a cotton fabric that can clean itself of stains and bugs when exposed to ordinary sunlight.

By IANS, Hyderabad: The information technology industry in India has a challenging and an uncertain year ahead, feel the business leaders in the sector in this technology hub.

By DPA, Nuremberg (Germany) : Germany's first driverless mass-transit train went into operation Sunday without fanfare in the southern city of Nuremberg, with a computer in charge for the whole day. Driverless trains are already in use in other nations, including the Singapore's North East Metro Line (NEL) operating since 2003, but Nuremberg says its system is unique because it mixes human-driven and computer-controlled trains on the same track.

By IANS, Washington : A computer model developed by researchers can generate faces that display emotions and moods according to personality traits. "The aim of this work has been to design a model that reveals a person's moods and displays them on a virtual face," said a co-author of the study, Diana Arellano from University of Balearic Islands (UIB) Artificial Intelligence Unit. "In the same 3-D space we have integrated personality, emotions and moods, which had previously been dealt with separately," Arellano explained.

By Arun Kumar, IANS, Washington : Four leading academics have questioned a warning by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035, as wildly inaccurate. The IPCC has also retracted the warning, which had appeared in its 2007 report.

By Xinhua Beijing : Yahoo will introduce new features for its popular web-based e-mail program, taking six weeks to become available to all 254 million Yahoo mail subscribers in 21 languages worldwide, media reports said Monday. The new version allows users to click on a contact and then select whether to send that person an e-mail, instant message or text message. "You could send an e-mail or instant message if you know the recipient is at the computer — or a text message if the recipient is on the road with a cell phone," the reports added.

By Hidayath Ansari India launched its first mission to the moon – Chandrayaan-1 (Sanskrit for moon craft) – on Wednesday morning (October 22) from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota off the Andhra Pradesh coast. It has had a flawless week travelling through space so far (orbiting at an altitude of 267,000 kms as of Wednesday), and in another 10 days, it is expected to reach the moon's orbit to conduct several long-term studies related to the moon's surface and atmosphere.

By IANS,

By DPA

Washington : E-mail users today can't afford to ignore spam. The unwanted e-mail that clogs inboxes everywhere costs people time, and time, of course, is money.

If you're curious about exactly how much spam is costing you on either a personal level or a corporate level, you can check in at Computer Mail Service's handy Cost of Spam Web site (http://www.cmsconnect.com/Marketing/spamcalc.htm).

There you'll be able to break down how much you lose in salary and productivity by dealing with average amounts of spam.

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 Devirupa Mitra, IANS, New Delhi : India's first e-passport, which will make travel easy, is expected to be issued next month. It will be issued to diplomats and officials first. Others may have to wait for about 10 months -- or even more. If all goes well, the first e-passport will be issued around June 15 to President Pratibha Patil or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh -- or both. The e-passport project is on a roll. A recent test conducted in a US government laboratory was so impressive that American officials remarked that they would need to study the Indian technology.

By IANS Sydney : Global warming might have wiped out ancient species like mammoths and bison, warning us about the potential impact of climate change. Study of ancient DNA indicates that extinction of such species from the northern hemisphere 11,000 years ago was largely due to climate change. Human impact through hunting and overkill were only incidental, said lead researcher Alan Cooper. He retrieved remains of genetic material from a variety of sources, including bones and teeth, preserved seeds and sediments, to examine evolution and environmental change, reports Sciencedaily.

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 Xinhua London : British scientists have discovered a molecule that appears to play a key role in triggering allergies. Researchers from Barts and the London School of Medicine managed to stop allergic attacks in mice by targeting the molecule - P110delta, BBC reported Friday. The researchers said the method did not interfere with the rest of the body's immune defences, and it may offer the chance to prevent allergies, not just relieve symptoms.

By IANS, London : In a major breakthrough, scientists have found over 10 new species under the Atlantic Ocean, including creatures close to the missing evolutionary link between backboned and invertebrate animals. The bizarre creatures, oddly-shaped, brightly-coloured or even transparent, that scientists have uncovered during a new study has "revolutionised" thinking about deep-sea life. Scientists believe they have discovered more than 10 new marine species by using the latest diving technology, Daily Mail reported.

By Xinhua Rio de Janeiro : Brazil expressed its opposition to the US control over the Internet, saying a new international agency composed of civil representatives should govern access. The coordination, inspection and legislation of laws on access to the Internet is currently in the hands of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is under the influence "of the US", said Brazil Minister of Strategic Affairs Roberto Mangabeira Unger Wednesday.

By DPA Singapore : Automobile behemoth BMW is ready to introduce its hydrogen-fuelled 7 Series limousine in Singapore but it won't be for sale, the company said Wednesday. The car, called Hydrogen 7, will be part of a BMW Clean Energy Exhibition to be held in the city-state next month. Representing 20 years of research and development, the Munich-based carmaker has developed the first emission-free liquid hydrogen-powered luxury saloon suitable for everyday use, according to BMW.

By IANS, Beijing : China has installed the country's first domestically-made supercomputer capable of doing 1,000 trillion operations per second. Tianhe-1 is scheduled to begin operations this month, according to the National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin. The supercomputer, developed by the National University of Defence Technology in 2009, enabled China to become only the second country after the US capable of developing a device with a speed of 1,000 trillion operations per second.

By Venkatachari Jagannathan, IANS, Chennai : The Indian space agency is likely to launch its rocket, Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C15), carrying its cartography satellite Cartosat-2B and couple of other payloads, sometime in June. Originally scheduled for launch May 9, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Thursday decided to postpone the flight to a future date as it found "a marginal drop in the pressure in the second stage of the vehicle during mandatory checks".

By DPA, Washington : Space shuttle Discovery docked Monday at the International Space Station after the day-and-half journey from Earth, carrying an enormous Japanese-made research module and a small Russian-made pump for a malfunctioning lavatory. "Capture confirmed," said a Discovery crew member to Earth control officials. At the time of docking at 1803 GMT, the station was orbiting over the South Pacific, 350 km above Earth's surface.

By RIA Novosti, Moscow : The debris from the collision Tuesday involving two communications satellites poses no threat to the International Space Station (ISS), a spokesman for Russia's space agency Roscosmos said Thursday. Alexander Vorobyov said that while Roscosmos could not confirm the origin of the satellites, the risk to the ISS and its crew was minimal. "There are no registered losses in the Roscosmos satellite grouping," Vorobyov added.

By IANS, London : That nice neighbourhood park is apparently not all that inviting. A new study, in fact, contends that people with more greens around them walk and cycle less often and for shorter periods. The Dutch study involved 5,000 people and sought answers to questions on physical activity and self-perceived health. “In this study we investigated whether a green living environment encourages people to undertake physical activity,” said Jolanda Maas, who led the study.

By Xinhua Los Angeles : Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea, may have rings, according to images from a spacecraft managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Los Angeles. The finding was described in a study published in the March 7 issue of the journal Science. Scientists at NASA believe the rings may be the remnants of an asteroid or comet collision, which circulated large quantities of gas and solid particles around Rhea.

By IANS, Beijing : Scientists in China claimed to have found a breakthrough in acupuncture therapy which would help detect cancer and brain tumours in patients at an early stage through a super powerful X-ray beam. The researchers working on synchrotron have detected evidence that acupuncture points differ from other parts of the body.

By IANS Hyderabad : SatNav Technologies, a city-based IT products company, has added laptop and desktop navigation to its range of global positioning system (GPS) products, which are available under the brand SatGuide. The company Monday announced the launch of its SatGuide turn-by-turn navigation and planning solution for laptops and desktops, focused on corporate houses. "This is the first time in the country that such a solution is being launched," said a company statement here.

By IANS/RIA Novosti, Dushanbe: The European Union has called on Tajikistan to respect the independence of the internet amid concerns of a crackdown against freedom of expression.

By IANS,

By DPA

Munich : Smartphones can now enjoy plus size screens and keyboards thanks to a new gadget from Palm.