Technology

New apps are looking to pair Google Glass with cars in an effort to help drivers even as state and local governments have banned texting or using handheld cell phones while driving.

The New York Daily News reports that a new app released last week will allow users to make phone calls, send emails, click pictures and record video while wearing a Google Glass during driving.

Lawmakers in West Virginia and Delaware have introduced bills banning such electronic devices citing safety concerns. (ANI)

The 160-year old telegram service in the country will operate for the last time on Sunday. “Sunday is the last day for telegram services. The service will start at 8 am and close by 9 pm,” BSNL CMD RK Upadhyay told PTI. “The service will not be available from Monday.”

State-run telecom firm BSNL has decided to discontinue telegrams following a huge shortfall in revenue. The service generated about Rs 75 lakh annually, compared with the cost of over Rs 100 crore to run and manage it. The use of telegrams has declined with the spread of mobile phones and the Internet in the country.

A Brazilian restaurant has come up with a perfect solution to make Facebook birthday wall post personal – a creepy chair with arms, hooked up to the birthday girl or boy’s account and programmed to dish out a real hug for every wall post they receive.

In a video ad for the restaurant, Outback Steakhouse, produced by ad agency ProXXIma Plataforma, they declare that it’s time to take the birthday hug back from electronic messages.

“Facebook has killed the happy birthday hug, replacing those warm hugs with cold messages,” the video says.

Scientists have developed a digital pen to help clean up handwriting and spelling errors.

The brainchild of two German entrepreneurs, Lernstift is a regular pen with real ink, but inside is a special motion sensor and a small battery-powered Linux computer with a WiFi chip.

Together those parts allow the pen to recognize specific movements, letter shapes and know a wide assortment of words.

If it senses bad letter formation or messy handwriting, it will gently vibrate.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Japanese Hinode spacecraft have observed a solar tsunami to provide the first accurate estimates of the Sun’s magnetic field.

Solar tsunamis are produced by enormous explosions in the Sun’s atmosphere called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

As the CME travels out into space, the tsunami travels across the Sun at speeds of up to 1000 kilometres per second.

Similar to tsunamis on Earth, the shape of solar tsunamis is changed by the environment through which they move.

The next big thing in biometrics will be a thermal imaging scan that maps the blood vessels under the skin of your face for instantaneous face recognition that would be almost impossible to spoof, it has been revealed.

A team at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, explains how the pattern of blood vessels just beneath the skin of our faces is as unique as a fingerprint, iris or other characteristic.

It can be revealed easily with an infra-red thermal imaging camera.

Nokia has reportedly come up with its latest Nokia Lumia smartphone with a ‘smarter camera’ that tops many point-and-shoot imaging devices.

According to Stuff.co.nz, Nokia Lumia 1020 phone has a 41-megapixel sensor and image-stabilizing technology which is otherwise not common in smartphones.

Nokia’s marketing executive Chris Weber said that this new phone will make point-and-shoot cameras obsolete.

According to the report, the new phone runs Microsoft”s Windows Phone system, which is far behind the iPhone and Android devices in usage.

Nokia has reportedly come up with its latest Nokia Lumia smartphone with a ‘smarter camera’ that tops many point-and-shoot imaging devices.

According to Stuff.co.nz, Nokia Lumia 1020 phone has a 41-megapixel sensor and image-stabilizing technology which is otherwise not common in smartphones.

Nokia’s marketing executive Chris Weber said that this new phone will make point-and-shoot cameras obsolete.

According to the report, the new phone runs Microsoft”s Windows Phone system, which is far behind the iPhone and Android devices in usage.

The next big thing in biometrics will be a thermal imaging scan that maps the blood vessels under the skin of your face for instantaneous face recognition that would be almost impossible to spoof, it has been revealed.

A team at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, explains how the pattern of blood vessels just beneath the skin of our faces is as unique as a fingerprint, iris or other characteristic.

It can be revealed easily with an infra-red thermal imaging camera.

Software manufacturer Microsoft has reportedly claimed that hackers have launched ‘ targeted attacks ‘ on its Windows OS.

According to Daily Express, Google’s security engineer Tavis Ormandy had revealed technical information about bug in Microsoft’s Window operating system in May.

Microsoft officials did not comment if Ormandy’s controversial revelations led to the vulnerability of Windows being hacked but experts believe that the information could help malicious hackers launch such attacks.

Leading technology companies have reportedly predicted the future of wearable technology to move from external devices and become embedded in human bodies.

According to the New York Daily News, tech executives at the annual VentureBeat MobileBeat conference, discussed the future of ‘wearable’ devices, and said that ‘ Google Glass’ is just the beginning adding that smartphone will continue to remain central to consumers’ digital lives and soon people would be carrying devices inside their bodies.

The Goa government has opposed two floating hotel projects being pushed by the Mormugao Port Trust (MPT), a central government undertaking, claiming that the projects would cause “ecological and environmental” damage.

In an official statement issued Thursday, state Minister for Forests and Environment Alina Saldanha accused the MPT, which runs Goa’s only major port, of being “colonial” in its mindset and asked it to stop using Goa’s rivers as its “private fiefdom”.

Astrophysicists from the Astronomical Observatory of the Faculty of Physics at University of Warsaw have found that Stellar collisions between the remains of monstrous stars will not occur until billions of years from now.

One might expect that collisions between the remains of monstrous stars , with masses reaching 200-300 times that of our Sun, would be among the most spectacular phenomena in the Universe. Perhaps they are, but we will unfortunately probably never have the chance to find out.

Archaeologists say they have discovered a new form of primitive writing in markings on stoneware excavated from a relic site in eastern China dating back 5,000 years.

That’s about 1,400 years earlier than the oldest known written Chinese language.

Chinese scholars are divided on whether the etchings amount to words or a precursor to words that should be described as symbols, but they say the finding will help shed light on the origins of Chinese language and culture.

A huge chunk of ice broke off on Monday from Antarctic’s Pine Island glacier, the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the frozen continent, and is now flowing as a very large iceberg in the Amundsen Sea.

Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research have been following this natural spectacle via the earth observation satellites TerraSAR-X from the German Space Agency (DLR) and have documented it in many individual images.

The data is intended to help solve the physical puzzle of this “calving”.

Scientists have observed the birth of a massive star within a dark cloud core about 10,000 light-years from Earth.

The team used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope in Chile-the most powerful radio telescope in the world-to view the stellar womb which, at 500 times the mass of the Sun and many times more luminous, is the largest ever seen in our galaxy.

UK’s intelligence agency, GCHQ in its annual report expressed concern over nations allegedly ‘hiring hackers’ in order to launch attacks on enemy states.

According to Fox News, GCHQ described the hackers as skilled cyber professionals undertaking attacks on diverse targets such as financial institutions and energy companies.

The silica-rich husks – mostly turned into fertiliser additives – can be converted into electrodes that have the ability to extend the life of the new generation of batteries.

Currently, lithium ion batteries contain electrodes that consist of graphite, but efforts are on to swap them for silicon electrodes that are capable of holding 10 times more charge, New Scientist reported.

However, the drawback of these electrodes is that they degrade even faster than the batteries that have graphite electrodes, every time the battery is charged and drained, which shortens its lifetime.

Scientists at Columbia University’s Astrophysics Laboratory in New York, have found evidence that magnetic waves in a polar coronal hole contain enough energy to heat the corona and deposit most of their energy at sufficiently low heights for the heat to spread throughout the corona.

The observations help to answer a 60-year-old solar physics conundrum about the unexplained extreme temperature of the Sun’s corona — known as the coronal heating problem.

Search engine Google has reportedly issued a patch to mend the security flaw detected by security firm BlueBox which made almost all Android phones vulnerable to hacking.

As revealed earlier by the security firm, Android uses the cryptographic signature as a way to check that an app or program is legitimate and to ensure it has not been tampered with, however, BlueBox found a method of tricking the way Android checks these signatures so that malicious changes to the apps go unnoticed.

A Scottish designer has revealed a new pair of headphones that can help you do away with the frustrating battery life of phones and tablets by doubling up as a solar-powered charger.

Andrew Anderson, who has launched the OnBeat headphones on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, hopes to have them on sale by early 2014, the BBC reported.

The headphone has a flexible solar cell fitted into the band, which captures energy from the sun and has a charge capacity of 0.55 watts.

The energy generated is stored in two small lithium batteries.

A new type of atomic clock may be a more accurate way to measure time, scientists say.

The French researchers said the new device, called optical lattice clock, lost just one second every 300 million years.

Currently, atomic clocks are used to count the seconds, but the new clocks proved to be more precise in tests and offered a better system for defining the second, researchers said.

The atomic clock has proved to be quite an accurate method of keeping the world on time and since the 1960s has been used to define a second in the International System of Units (SI units).

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) of India has been ranked the top climate think-tank globally by the International Centre for Climate Governance (ICCG), a statement said Wednesday.

TERI won under the category “Absolute Global Rankings” and all its activity outputs produced in 2012 were taken into consideration.

According to the statement, only those think-tanks that are working at the international level were assessed and the ranking was based upon coherent and checkable data.

Astronauts on-board the International Space Station (ISS) successfully completed a 6-hour spacewalk, the first of two to prepare the space lab for a new Russian module and to tackle a backlog of chores.

Two Expedition 36 astronauts wrapped up a successful 6-hour, 7-minute spacewalk yesterday to perform additional installations on the station’s backbone, NASA said.

Yesterday’s spacewalk was the 170th in support of station assembly and maintenance, totalling 1,073 hours, 50 minutes.

As software giant Apple celebrates fifth anniversary of its ‘App Store’, a tracking service has claimed that about two-thirds of the total number of apps are ‘zombie apps’ as they are barely ever installed by the users.

According to BBC, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said that 90 percent of all the apps in the marketplace are downloaded at least once a month and the customers have now downloaded 50 billion apps.