Technology

A series of spacewalks might be necessary to fix a breakdown in the equipment cooling system aboard the International Space Station, NASA said.

A US space agency spokesman told AFP yesterday that NASA will decide by Monday on the appropriate measures to fix the breakdown, which has posed no danger to the six-man crew.

“Station program managers will have further discussions on potential contingency spacewalk planning that could result in multiple spacewalks to replace the pump module beginning as early as late next week,” said a NASA statement.

Nearly 61.5 percent of all website traffic is now generated by bots, a new research has found.

The study by security firm Incapsula said that was a 21 percent rise on last year’s figure of 51 percent.

According to the BBC, some of these automated software tools are malicious, stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections.

But the firm said the biggest growth in traffic was for ‘good’ bots.

The report said that bots are tools used by search engines to crawl websites in order to index their content.

Twitter has reportedly updated its Mac app with a new look and an option for image previews.

The update includes redesigned profiles and main navigation buttons, apart from the banner image along with the main profile for the first time.

According to the Verge, clicking on a tweet pulls up an expanded view that displays which people favorited or retweeted it, along with the replies.

Microsoft is reportedly mulling over the idea of offering free versions of its Windows Phone and Windows RT operating systems to device makers.

Sources have revealed that the free versions are under serious consideration by OS chief Terry Myerson, and might be delivered with the Threshold range of updates that is speculated to bring back the Start Menu feature.

According to The Verge, Microsoft currently licenses Windows RT and Windows Phone software to device makers, and the majority of its Windows revenue comes from OEMs who build systems based on Windows 8 and Windows RT.

Scientists have come up with the formula for a perfect Christmas dinner.

Psychologists Dr David Lewis and Dr Margaret Yufera-Leitch said careful measuring may be the difference between feeling stuffed or pleasantly satisfied due to the best combo of protein and amino acids, carbo­hydrates and vitamins that are commonly found in Christmas dinner ingredients, the Daily Star reported.

According to Sensory Specific Satiety, the ideal serving must have 150g of white roast turkey meat, 110g of chestnut stuffing and 100g of gravy.

Facebook-owned Instagram has reportedly rolled out a new private picture-sharing feature allowing users to share those confidential images with up to 15 people.

The feature is similar to Snapchat that auto-destructs images after a set duration and is considered by many to be used for sending explicit pictures.

According to Fox News, the new feature comes after Snapchat hired Instagram executive Emily White as its new COO, proving speculations of a public debut.

An outage at Yahoo Mail hit its fourth day today, prompting thousands of furious users to ratchet up their criticism on social media.

Many people said they couldn’t retrieve emails from their inboxes or complained that emails were not being delivered.

“We are continuing to work on resolving this and ask that you stay tuned for further updates,” Yahoo said in a message fired off on Twitter.

The California-based firm last day apologized and promised a fix by the end of that day, but problems have persisted.

NASA rushed today to fix a breakdown in the cooling system at the International Space Station that may delay the launch next week of Orbital Sciences’ first cargo mission.

Engineers are still trying to figure out what caused the fault last day in a flow valve that controls the temperature of the equipment aboard the station, said mission team manager Kenny Todd.

The astronauts on board are “in good shape,” and comfortable after the cooling system problem, which NASA has said posed no danger.

A new system has been reportedly devised that allows users to drag and drop files to or from their computer screen, smartphone and tablet.

The head-mounted eye-tracker system, dubbed EyeDrop, records the wearer’s field of view and tracks the eye movement.

According to NewScientist, if the user gazes at an object and then presses a key, the object gets selected, which can then be moved from one screen to the other by just a glance at the recipient device, provided they are connected wirelessly.

A new ceramic material has paved the way to make solar panel design cheaper, more efficient, and requiring less manufacturing time.

The new material has been developed by a team led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.

The tests were conducted, in part, at the Advanced Photon Source housed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

A new app for iPhone creates a daily timeline of pictures that are found on the device, similar to many apps that prepare digital scrapbooks and journals for storing special memories.

The HeyDay app, not only creates a daily timeline based on photos found on the device that are added to a timeline, but also logs venues using the phone’s GPS system and allows users to add personal notes and tag people to the photos.

With so much hype around touch-free gadgets, soon appliances in the house would be connected to the Internet leading to what is dubbed as ‘The Internet of Everything’ and paving way for communicating devices.

A non-profit organization, Linux Foundation has reportedly formed the AllSeen Alliance, including companies like Qualcomm, LG, Panasonic, Haier, Silicon Image and TP-LINK, which is a new communication protocol to get the connected doorbell talking to the lights, microwave, oven and smoke detector.

Scientists have developed an app that allows an ordinary smartphone to capture and display three-dimensional models of real-world objects.

Instead of taking a normal photograph, a user simply moves the phone around the object of interest and after a few
motions, a 3D model appears on the screen.

The technology also allows the 3D capture of faces, giving a third dimension to portraits, profile pictures or
images of loved ones.

Marc Pollefeys, professor at the Institute for Visual Computing and his group at ETH Zurich developed a software

If the smell of buttery popcorn entices you, there is an iPhone game for that, which transmits the tasty smell through a dongle attached to the smartphone.

The Poptopia game has been created by Pop Secret in conjunction with the advertising agency Deutsch LA and the Pop Dongle app exhibits the mouthwatering smell through an attachment to the iPhone.

According to Huffington Post, users first need to play the iPhone game that works with the external Pop Dongle attachment and based on how many kernels land in ‘The Almighty Mouth God’, the more delicious popcorn smell is emitted.

Apple apparently does not take defeat with good spirit, as it has been revealed that if users ditch their iPhones for some other brand, the tech giant refuses to accept that they have moved on by not disabling their iMessages feature.

The iMessage feature lets iPhone users send each other text messages for free, however, if one of the parties switches to other brand’s device, the messages sent to the number do not arrive on the new handset but reach the discarded iPhone.

NASA engineers are in the process of developing climbing legs for the International Space Station”s robotic crewmember Robonaut 2 (R2).

The legless R2, currently attached to a support post, is undergoing experimental trials with astronauts aboard the orbiting laboratory.

Since its arrival at the station in February 2011, R2 has performed a series of tasks to demonstrate its functionality in microgravity.