Technology

NASA scientists today said they were testing a prototype of a robot the US space agency hopes to send to Mars in 2020 in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

NASA hopes to use this kind of rover to explore life- friendly sites found by Curiosity, the rover already searching for signs of life on Mars. It has been there since last August.

The researchers say the desert, the driest spot on Earth, mimics the conditions of the Red Planet, and the agency has used it in the past to test space-bound equipment.

The robot, controlled remotely from the US, will continue testing through Sunday.

Telecommunication Company Blackberry has recently revealed its adjusted quarterly loss and disappointing profit margins which sent the company’s stock careening 25 percent in the red.

According to Fox News, Blackberry’s much anticipated Blackberry 10 launch has gone poorly and has impacted its ability to compete with market leaders Google and Apple.

Researchers have shown that mice’s pancreas have cells, which are capable of being converted into insulin-producing beta cells.

They also demonstrated that all pancreatic beta cells can be regenerated several times and that chemically-induced diabetes in mice can thus be “treated” repeatedly.

Type I diabetes, characterised by the selective loss of pancreatic, insulin-producing beta cells, is a condition that affects more than 30 million people worldwide.

Software manufacturer Apple is testing motion control feature of ‘head movements’ which will allow users to control their iPhones. The feature has been discovered in Apple”s latest mobile operating system, iOS 7 and will be available for public update in the fall. It is an option in the accessibility menu that overrides the usual touchscreen controls, reports CNN. According to the report, the feature works by using the front-facing iPhone or iPad camera to detect head movements.

Britain is set to become the world’s first nation to allow babies to be born with three genetic parents.

A landmark decision by the Department of Health opens the door to treatments for diseases that make use of donated DNA from a second donor “mum”.

New regulations to fertility law allowing the procedures will be issued for public consultation later this year and then debated in Parliament, the Mirror reported.

If MPs find them ethically acceptable the first patients could be treated within months.

An American motorcycle and electric plane racer is planning to make history by a trans-Atlantic flight in an electric airplane, in the style of Charles Lindbergh, who managed the same feat in 1927. According to the Discovery News, Chip Yates, who will be going at a speed of 100 mph over the Atlantic, has revealed that he has his eyes on repeating Lindbergh”s much-remembered flight from New York to Paris in an electric plane that is modeled like a glider with a 100-foot wingspan.

Software for processing satellite pictures taken from space may help medical researchers to establish a simple method for wide-scale screening for Alzheimer’s disease.

Used in analysing magnetic resonance images (MRIs), the AlzTools 3D Slicer tool was produced by scientists at Spain’s Elecnor Deimos.

The researchers drew on years of experience developing software for European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite to
create a programme that adapted the space routines to analyse human brain scans.

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the Salk Institute have found a way to untangle the complex neural networks of the brain by using an innovative brain-tracing technique.

Their findings offer new insight into how specific brain regions connect to each other, while also revealing clues as to what may happen, neuron by neuron, when these connections are disrupted.

LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) network has reportedly launched most advanced and fastest ever 4G network to consumers in South Korea. The LTE-A network allows users to download data up to a speed of 150 megabits per second which is twice as before and 10 times the speed of 3G service, BBC reports. According to the report, SK Telecom said that its LTE-A network will be fast enough to start offering a full-HD1080p video streaming service from July.

Three women pilots created history when they flew a maritime reconnaissance aircraft over the Arabian Sea making their sortie a first all-women flight in the Indian Coast Guard.

“Recently, a Dornier reconnaissance aircraft had taken off in the skies of Daman and adjoining Arabian Sea with all women crew comprising assistant commandants Neetu Singh Bartwal, Neha Murudkar and Shristi Singh. This flight was a maiden all-women flight in the force,” a Defence Ministry release said.

Sony has launched a giant waterproof Android smartphone to challenge Samsung dominance of giant handsets.

According to the BBC, Director of Xperia marketing, Calum MacDougall said that at the moment, most consumers are looking at the Galaxy Note in the large-screen segment but their company is offering something that is really distinct with a stronger screen, greater portability, waterproofing and something different around the stylus and the pen.

Older adults who regularly use a brain-fitness program on a computer demonstrate improved memory and language skills, a new study has found.

The UCLA team studied 69 dementia-free participants, with an average age of 82, who were recruited from retirement communities in Southern California. The participants played a computerized brain-fitness program called Dakim BrainFitness, which trains individuals through more than 400 exercises in the areas of short- and long-term memory, language, visual-spatial processing, reasoning and problem-solving, and calculation skills.

Ever wondered why cheese tastes saltier when eaten from a knife? Our perception of how food tastes is influenced by the size, shape and colour of the cutlery we use, a new Oxford research suggests.

Food tastes saltier when eaten from a knife, and denser and more expensive from a light plastic spoon. Taste was also affected by the colour of the cutlery, researchers said.

Fires in Indonesia that have blanketed Singapore and Malaysia in thick smog eased Wednesday after heavy rain, boosting hopes of an end to Southeast Asia’s worst air pollution crisis for years.

The news came as a report said the crisis had claimed its first victim with the death of an asthmatic woman in southern Malaysia, which has been badly affected.

The smog from slash-and-burn agricultural fires on Sumatra island pushed haze levels to a record high in Singapore last week, shrouding residential buildings and downtown skyscrapers.

BlackBerry has introduced a new service called “Secure Work Space,” that will allow iPhone and Android users to switch between personal and corporate mode.
Companies can have control over data that flows through their networks, even on a user”s personal phone through Secure Work Space as corporate email, calendars, contacts and intranets are sealed off and IT departments can add or remove other apps from that corporate section without affecting any personal information.
Malware infecting the personal side of the phone won”t make its way into corporate data with Secure Work Space.

One of Apple”s pioneering Apple-1 computers is up for sale at Christie”s auction house with an opening bid of 300,000 dollars.

Software corporation Microsoft will launch an update to its latest version of OS at its annual developers” conference addressing all the problems that customers faced with the launch of Windows 8 last year. The free downloadable preview of the update called Windows 8.1 will be launched today but will be released to the general public later this year, New York Post reports.

A team of astronomers has discovered a new solar system packed full of planets.

The star Gliese 667C is orbited by between five and seven planets, the maximum number that could fit in stable, close orbits.

A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths found in the so-called habitable zone around the star—the zone where liquid water could exist. This makes them good candidates for the search for life.

Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. It is just over one third of the mass of our Sun, and it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667.

Researchers at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan have reportedly designed ‘anti-Glass’ specs which can block Google’s high tech eye wear Google Glass’ face recognition technology.

The specs are fitted with 11 near infrared LEDs, which shine brightly making the camera unable to recognize a face, Fox News reports.

NII associate professor Isao Echizen explained the technology and said that the light from the LEDs is otherwise not visible to the human eye but when it passes through the camera’s imaging device it appears bright and confuses the lens in recognizing a face.

Facebook users have demanded an apology from the social media giant for the reported leak of their email addresses and phone numbers due to a bug.

Although Facebook’s security team is embarrassed and has ensured that nothing like this will happen again, people are upset that Facebook did not apologize for leaking their information.

Acoording to the Huffington Post, this bug impacted 0.5 percent of Facebook’s 1.1 million users.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that the ability to move planets throughout the solar system at our choosing is possible.

Tyson was asked a question by a person that is it possible that by using the same methods that scientists theorize will help move meteorites, we can move uninhabitable planets, like Mars or Venus, to regions of Goldilocks Zone – where the distance from the sun makes it a habitable planet, the New York Daily News reported.

Tyson replied that this type of planet-moving is indeed 100 percent theoretically possible.

A new blood test is showing very promising results for detecting colon cancer before it develops.

The results of the test that was developed in the Gastrointestinal Cancer Research Lab at Baylor Research Institute, are exciting and promising because this simple blood-based test examines the levels of a single microRNA – a small RNA molecule that can be readily identified in a wide variety of bodily fluids, including blood.

Doctors have reported a major medical breakthrough in the development of ‘artificial pancreas,’ a device, which will constantly monitor blood sugar in diabetics and also automatically supply insulin as needed.

A key part of such a system – an insulin pump that is programmed to shut down if blood-sugar level drops down dangerously while people are asleep – worked as it was intended in a three-month study of 247 patients suffering from Type 1 diabetes, Fox News reported.

A newly developed technology, embryoscope, has revolutionised in-vitro fertilization (IVF) by allowing pictures to be taken of embryos every few minutes without disturbing them in their incubators.

Traditionally the problem with IVF was that doctors had to check embryos once a day to see if they are viable, however, the process is very tricky, as embryos have to be kept at 37 degrees and in an environment with proper concentration of gases in order to survive, Fox News reported.

NASA has asked amateur astronomers to help them identify the smaller asteroids that are capable of wiping out a city or worse when they impact with Earth.

NASA has reportedly coined the initiative, ‘The Asteroid Grand Challenge,’ which focuses on asteroids that are just 30 to 40 meters in size, and not the bigger, planet-busting asteroids most of which have already been found, Fox News reported.