Paris, September 28: New UNESCO chief Irina Bokova of Bulgaria said Sunday that she would make visiting Arab countries a priority in a bid to ease tensions over her battle with Egypt’s Faruq Hosni for the job.
Bokova insisted she was “a friend of the Muslim world” after her defeat of the Egyptian culture minister to become the UN’s cultural head triggered a storm of protest in his home country over the interference of pro-Israeli lobbying.
Brussels, September 28: The European Commission issued new volume standards for MP3 players on Monday to help prevent music lovers damaging their hearing.
The new standards will require small technical changes to I-Pods and other MP3 devices so they play at a safe volume by default. There will also be a health warning so consumers who choose to override the default settings know the risks.
Denver, September 28: Amid the din of all the other music-based games being released this fall comes a unique twist on the convergence between music and videogames: “Brutal Legend.”
Brussels, September 28: Norwegian browser maker Opera urged European Union antitrust regulators on Monday not to rush to close its antitrust case against Microsoft before ensuring a level playing field among browsers.
Hong Kong, September 28: Chinese researchers have unearthed the fossil of a bird-like dinosaur with four wings in northeastern China, which they suggest is a missing link in dinosaurs’ evolution into birds.
In a paper in the journal Nature, they said they found the well-preserved fossil of the “Anchiornis huxleyi,” which roamed the earth some 160 million years ago, in a geological formation in China’s northeastern Liaoning province.
Oslo, September 28: Dismayed by ice and storms, British explorer Captain James Cook had no regrets when he abandoned a voyage searching for a fabled southern continent in 1773.
Finding only icebergs after he was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, he wrote ruefully that if anyone ventured further and found a “land doomed by nature…to lie for ever buried under everlasting ice and snow”:
“I shall not envy him the honor of discovery, but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by it.”
Things may be worse than he thought.
Denver, September 28: The mobile music landscape is very much a study in good news, bad news.
The bad news is that mobile music has failed to live up to the expectations that the early success of ringtones had inspired. Combined ringtone and ringback tone sales have fallen almost 23 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen RingScan. And Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi estimates that only one-third of U.S. mobile subscribers with music-capable phones use their devices to listen to music.
New York, September 28: Apple Inc said on Monday that downloads from its iTunes applications store had passed 2 billion and that it now has more than 85,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
It did not say how many of the applications delivered were sold and how many were free. The store has inspired rival stores and helped boost iPhone sales since the summer of 2008.
Apple said it has sold more than 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices in 77 countries. AT&T Inc is the exclusive U.S. provider for iPhone.
Berlin, September 29: Officials at a German zoo say that a male brown bear attacked and killed a female bear in front of horrified onlookers.
Christoph Langner, the director of the zoo in the northern coastal German city of Stralsund, said the incident occurred on Saturday afternoon.
He said Sunday that zoo officials are still trying to determine why the male, a Syrian brown bear named Balou, attacked the female, Klara.
Zoo spokesman Peter Koslik said that Klara arrived at the zoo two years ago and Balou about half a year later.
Tibet, September 28: Chinese researchers have unearthed the fossil of a bird-like dinosaur with four wings in north-eastern China, which they suggest is a missing link in dinosaurs’ evolution into birds.
In a paper in the journal Nature, they said they found the well-preserved fossil of the Anchiornis huxleyi, which roamed the earth some 160 million years ago, in a geological formation in China’s north-eastern Liaoning province.
London, Septmeber 28: Apple has claimed downloads from its iTunes applications store had passed two billion and that it now had more than 85,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
It did not say how many of the applications delivered were sold and how many were free.
The store has inspired rival stores and helped boost iPhone sales since the summer of 2008.
Apple said it has sold more than 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices in 77 countries.
AT&T Inc is the exclusive US provider for iPhone.
Beijing, September 28: Chinese experts Monday announced that the country’s space scientists have completed the world’s highest-resolution three-dimensional map of the moon.
The map, covering the whole surface of the moon, is based on image data obtained by a charge-coupled device (CCD) stereo camera carried by Chang’e-1, China’s first lunar probe vehicle, launched Oct 2007.
The spatial resolution of the map – measured by the distance of two features within an image that can be clearly defined – is 500 meters.
London, September 27: Zero is the hero which can give you back hours of your life by reducing time spent on hold by as much as 70 per cent.
Despite dwelling at the bottom of the keypad, it has been revealed that the humble 0 is at the top of the dial pile when it comes to fighting the dreaded automated phone “services”.
It was in researching a cheat sheet to help readers beat interactive voice response (IVR) systems that The Daily Telegraph discovered the Power of None.
Johannesburg, September 27: New Zealand defeated Sri Lanka by 38 runs in a Group B match of the Champions Trophy at the New Wanderers Stadium here Sunday.
Chasing a target of 316, Sri Lanka were all out for 277 in 46.4 overs.
–Agencies
New Delhi, September 26:Move over passport and PAN card! Identity authentication at banks, gas connection centres or while providing rural jobs will just be an SMS away, Unique Identification Authority chief Nandan Nilekani said Saturday.
“Our project will provide a unique identification (UID) number, not a card. The authentication will be made by using mobile phones,” Nilekani said.
London, September 26Google on Friday said it has enhanced its popular Internet search engine to dig deeper into pages to uncover the exact tidbits of information people seek.
While typical search results provide links to websites deemed relevant to queries, Google now weaves in direct connections to spots on pages with snippets of information that might be of interest.
“We’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page,” Chris Kern of Google’s Snippet Team wrote in a blog post.
Bangalore, September 26: A day after the ground-breaking discovery of water on the moon hit the headlines, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) G. Madhavan Nair on Friday said the Chandrayaan-1 detected water on the lunar surface as early as June 2009.
The indigenously developed Moon Impact Probe (MIP), which crash-landed at a designated site on the lunar south pole on November 14, 2008, picked up “clear signatures” of water during its 25-minute descent, Mr. Nair said at a press conference here on Friday.
Washington, September 26: Engineers have observed and tracked the movement of E. coli in a liquid medium, which is similar to that of a kayak paddle.
Their findings will help lead to a better understanding of how bacteria move from place to place and potentially, how to keep them from spreading.
Scientists have long theorised that the cigar-shaped cell bodies of E. coli and other micro-organisms would follow periodic orbits that resemble the motion of a kayak paddle as they drift downstream in a current.
Until now, no one had managed to directly observe or track those movements.
Washington, September 26: Want a PC full of free software? To get it, you don’t need to adopt Ubuntu or any of the other Unix-based operating systems. Nor do you have to rely on the sometimes risky freeware you find scattered around the Internet.
New Delhi, September 25, 2009: Gmail outage puts a question mark on reliability of cloud computing. When Gdrive was announced earlier this year many tech honchos said that it was the end of Hard disk or desktop computer. They said when whole data will be available on the net who will go for hard disk.
But with spate of gmail, Facebook and Twitter outages, many people have started questioning the feasibility and reliability of cloud computing.
New Delhi, September 25: Water does exist on lunar and it can be extracted but in less quantity, confirmed Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair on Friday. Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan’s historic discovery has given wings to the hopes about a permanent lunar base.
An elated Madhavan Nair said on the occasion that the Chandrayaan-1 was a complete success. “The Chandrayaan mission performed wonderfully. Earlier I said it had completed 95% of its mission objectives, today I say it has done 110%,” he quipped.
New Delhi, September 25: iPhone MMS update iPhone MMS release date AT&T mms. AT&T is all set to switch on MMS facility in iPhones across the US. Though it is not going to happen in one and it will be done in several shifts, most probably Friday itself.
AT&T’s been feeding us a story that it’ll offer MMS on the iPhone only “once [it completes] some system upgrades that will ensure our customers have the best experience,” but here’s the thing: it seems that it works right now — if you’ve got a build of OS 3.0 that’ll let it.
New Delhi, September 25: Samsung has launched its first android touchphone Galaxy I7500in India partnering with Tata DOCOMO. Priced at Rs 28,990, the smartphone has a metal detector, magnetic compass and more.
Samsung Galaxy 17500 packs with a 3.2 amole touch-screen, Wi-Fi connectivity, and preloaded Google mobile services such as Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Chrome, Google search and YouTube.
Galaxy is the first of the block of Android handsets the company plans to roll out in India later this year, said Asim Warsi, General Manager (Marketing) of Samsung India.
San Francisco, September 25: Internet messaging sensation Twitter is to close a new funding round of $100 million from investors who value the company as high as $1 billion, the New York Times reported Thursday.
The privately held company, which is yet to register a profit, intends to use the funds to beef up its system as it tries to grow fast to compete with Facebook.
Twitter, which allows users to blog short messages from their cellphones, currently has about 50 million users and hopes to match Facebook’s 300 million users worldwide.
Bangalore, September 25: By finding water on the lunar surface, India’s maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has completed “110 percent of the objectives”, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair said here Friday.
Disagreeing with a section of the media, which dubbed the moon mission a ‘failure’ when it was abruptly aborted Aug 30 after Chandrayaan lost radio contact with the earth, Nair maintained that it was a wonderful mission.