Science

Notorious Internet hacking collective Anonymous has launched a citizen journalism site that aims to collect breaking reports and blogs.

The site, Your Anon News, will include feeds for livestream events “as they are taking place instead of the 10-second sound bites provided by the corporate media”.

The group has raised 54,798 dollars to get the site up and running, the BBC reports.

According to the report, the aim of the site is to bring together and expand its Your Anon news (YAN) service that currently runs on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Texting just got a lot easier!

Researchers claim to have developed a new keyboard for touchscreens that allows superfast thumb-typing, enabling you to type 34 per cent faster than on a QWERTY layout.

The research team used computational optimisation techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement to search among millions of potential layouts before identifying one that yields superior performance.

Scientists have discovered two Earth-like planets in the habitable orbit of a Sun-like star.

Using observations gathered by NASA’s Kepler Mission , the team, led by William Borucki of the NASA Ames Research Center, found five planets orbiting a Sun-like star called Kepler-62.

Super slow-motion footage of a moth in flight has revealed how insects use their bodies to hover.

The moth moves its body by pivoting its abdomen up and down to fine-tune the forces that keep the insect airborne, the BBC reported.

The researchers are studying insect flight in order to “distil the biological principles of flight control “.

This, they say, will help them to accurately engineer flying robots that use these same principles.

As an insect’s wings move through the air, they are held at a slight angle, which deflects the air downward.

Carbon dating of a wooden beam from a Guatemalan temple has confirmed the end date of the Mayan Long Count calendar.

It validated that the calendar did end on December 2012, leaving no room for further doomsday prophecies and miscalculations claims, the Fox News reported.

The Long Count is a complex system of bars and dots that consists of five time units: Bak’tun (144,000 days); K’atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K’in (one day).

Melbourne, Apr 18 (ANI): In a first for the Australian market, Jeanswest has launched innovative denim called Thermolite – a lightweight fabric made with hollow-core fibres, enabling it to trap air for greater insulation, creating a layer of warmth between fabric and skin.

Wrangler is also offering denim with a difference this season with its radical Spa Denim jeans, News.com.au reported.

Wrangler, stocked on e-store ASOS in Australia, recently released a range of denim infused with aloe vera and olive oil.

Washington, Apr 18 (ANI): Foxconn and Microsoft have signed a deal that will give the software giant a cut of every Android device that the electronics contract manufacturing company makes.

The terms of the deal weren”t disclosed, but Microsoft did say it would be getting royalties from Hon Hai, the parent company of Foxconn, under the agreement.

According to Mashable, it follows in the steps of other contract manufacturers, notably Pegatron, that also have deals with Microsoft to build devices that run Android and Chrome operating systems.

Washington, April 18 (ANI): Using sea snail nerve cells, neuroscientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) reversed memory loss by determining when the cells were primed for learning.

The scientists were able to help the cells compensate for memory loss by retraining them through the use of optimized training schedules.

With this they have taken a major step in their efforts to help people with memory loss tied to brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

A study of the remains of the creature nicknamed the “hobbit” shows that there may have been a dwarf version of an early human species.

The diminutive species of human whose remains were found on the Indonesian island of Flores could have shrunk as a result of island dwarfism as it adapted to its environment, the BBC reported.

The hobbit co-existed with our species until 12,000 years ago.

Since its discovery in 2003, researchers have struggled to explain the origins of these metre-high, tiny-brained people, known scientifically as Homo floresiensis .

Messaging app WhatsApp now has more users than Twitter, company founder and CEO Jan Koum said at the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference in New York.

Declining to cite a specific figure, Koum said WhatsApp has more than 200 million monthly active users who generate an average of 8 billion inbound messages and 12 billion outbound messages per day.

Twitter has 200 million monthly active users.

The WhatsApp Messenger, which is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia, allows users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS.

Drawing inspiration from pinecones, which close their scales when wet and open them again once they have dried out, researchers have produced synthetically a composite material with comparable properties.

Andre Studart, a professor of complex materials at ETH Zurich’s Department of Materials, and his group knew from the literature how pine cone scales work: two firmly connected layers lying on top of each other inside a scale are responsible for the movement.

A crucial report on Western Ghats prepared by K Kasturirangan-led high-level working group (HLWG) has recommended prohibition on development activities in 60,000 sq km ecologically sensitive area spread over Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The 10-member panel, constituted to examine the Western Ghats ecology expert panel report prepared under the leadership of environmentalist Madhav Gadgil, has also moved away from the suggestions of the Gadgil panel.

Like many of his colleagues, Indian origin deep space navigator Shyam Bhaskaran devotes a great deal of time to crafting, and contemplating, computer-generated 3D models of asteroids.

But while many of his coworkers are calculating asteroids’ past, present and future locations in the cosmos, zapping them with the world’s most massive radar dishes, or considering how to rendezvous and perhaps even gently nudge an asteroid into lunar orbit, Bhaskaran thinks about how to collide with one.

Sistema Shyam Teleservices (SSTL), which operates under the MTS brand, on Monday said it will start 4G services in India with fresh investments of around USD 200 million (about Rs 1,093 crore).

The Indian arm of Russian conglomerate Sistema said, however, that it will not start investing in the 4G LTE (long- term evolution) services this year.

Creatures as little as butterflies and moths are bio-indicators and can be used as an effective tool to monitor the health of our forests, says a new book.

“Of special interest in assessing the health of a forest would be the local species that are found year after year in a limited area at a fixed time of year. Some butterflies and moths are found only in a particular ravine in a forest,” writes naturalist Peter Smetacek in “Butterflies on the Roof of the world”.

Unidentified group of hackers have reportedly launched a large-scale attack against WordPress blogs.

The attacks began last week, and have affected more than 90,000 blogs so far.

The hackers behind the attacks have combed through WordPress accounts and attempted to guess passwords via brute force.

According to the report, the ultimate goal of the botnet is a mystery; having administrative access to a number of blogs is not that useful in and of itself.

NASA scientists think that hydrocarbon methane at Saturn’s moon Titan could be gone in tens of millions of years.

By tracking a part of the surface of Titan over several years, NASA’s Cassini mission has found a remarkable longevity to the hydrocarbon lakes on the moon’s surface.

A team led by Christophe Sotin of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, fed these results into a model that suggests the supply of the hydrocarbon methane at Titan could be coming to an end soon (on geological timescales).

Welcoming the Supreme Court’s decision to shift Asiatic lions from Gujarat to Palpur Kuno wildlife sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said here on Monday that the move would not only result in creation of a new home for the lions but also ensure a rise in their numbers.

“Madhya Pradesh has made adequate arrangements to shift and rehabilitate Asiatic lions and took all steps for their conservation. I hope that the new home will result in enhancement of their population in the country, Chouhan said.

Hawc gamma-ray telescope, which aims to capture the Universe’s highest-energy particles and light, has snapped its first-ever image.

The picture of the shadow cast by the Moon as it blocks the light and particles was presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (Hawc), located on flanks of the Sierra Negra volcano near Puebla, Mexico, now holds the record for the highest-energy light it can capture.

Female birds may be socially connected to one male for its entire life, but they are not always faithful to the same mate.

In some cases, scientists have found that up to 70 percent of the eggs found in some nests were fertilized by a male other than the primary occupant, protector, and supplier of the nest, the ABC News reported.

This provides two advantages: greater genetic diversity in her chicks, and thus more resistance to disease, and yet the man of the nest will remain around to help raise the brood, probably unaware that some of the chicks aren’t his.

A new research has shown that glaciers at the edge of the icy continent of Antarctica have been thinning rapidly in the last few decades and it has contributed significantly to sea level rise.

The new ice core research suggested that, while the changes are dramatic, they couldn’t be attributed with confidence to human-caused global warming, said Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences.

Ecuador will send its first domestically produced satellite into orbit in late April from a launch centre in China, said the Andean nation’s President Rafael Correa.

“At the end of the month, the first Ecuadorian satellite will be launched, not a satellite bought from a foreign country (but) a satellite made in Ecuador,” Correa said in his weekly radio address Saturday.

He noted that the initiative was carried out by the Ecuadorian Civil Space Agency, which is headed by the country’s first astronaut, Ronnie Nader.

London, Apr. 14 (ANI): Google head Eric Schmidt has called for regulation of civilian drone technology, warning about privacy and security concerns.

He told the Guardian that the cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into wrong hands.

According to the BBC, he suggested that fighting neighbours could end up using private surveillance drones against each other.

He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology.

New York, Apr 13 (ANI): A hospital in Turkey is anticipating what may be the first successful pregnancy and birth for a woman with a transplanted uterus.

Derya Sert, 22, was born without a womb and had one transplanted in August 2011, the New York Daily News reported.

Specialists at Akdeniz University Hospital placed an embryo into Sert’s womb earlier this week in hopes she will become the first woman with a uterus transplant to give birth.

Washington, Apr 13 (ANI): To help read information encoded in the gut lining, a new technique based on atomic force microscopy was developed at the Institute of Food Research.

The lining of our gut is an important barrier between the outside world and our bodies.

Laid out, the gut lining would cover the area of a football pitch.

It must let nutrients from our foods through, but prevent invasion by disease-causing bacteria, at the same time hosting the trillions of beneficial bacteria needed for proper digestion and immune function.