The arrival of human beings in the Pacific including New Zealand led to a rapid mass extinction of about 10 percent of the world’s bird species, a new study has revealed.
In New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii most of the 1300 bird species wiped out were eaten by the people or were destroyed when the new arrivals burnt out forests, Stuff.co.nz reported.
The region was the last part of the Earth colonised by human beings, about 4000 years ago.
Supernovae were always thought to occur in two main “flavors” – a core-collapse supernova that is the explosion of a star about 10 to 100 times as massive as our Sun and a Type Ia supernova, which is the complete disruption of a tiny white dwarf.
Now, astronomers are reporting their discovery of a new kind of supernova called Type Iax. This new class is fainter and less energetic than Type Ia. Although both varieties come from exploding white dwarfs, Type Iax supernovas may not completely destroy the white dwarf.
Delivering the key note address at the 3rd International Conference on Renewable Energy here today, former advisor to the Prime Minister P S Deodhar advocated a proper mix of conventional as well as non-conventional energy.
There was ample opportunity to generate solar energy from small roof top projects to avoid high losses in grid
processing as well transmission, he said.
He said that the current policy of subsidising large solar projects must be replaced by encouraging small solar
projects at lower costs.
———PTI
Finland mobile maker Nokia and Internet search giant Google have clashed over software that is part of free-to-use video encoding technology.
Google wants its video coding program, called VP8, to be a core part of the WebM project that is making web-centred video production tools.
Nokia, howver, says it owns key patents that define parts of VP8 and has filed an official objection to Google”s plan.
According to the BBC, the independent WebM project was started to create video production and playback software specifically designed for use online.
Software giant Microsoft is likely to release an update to its new operating system Windows 8.
The company first unveiled the tablet-centric Windows 8 OS at a conference on Sept. 11, 2011.
At the upcoming event, scheduled for June 26-28 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the company will discuss the future of the software, said one Microsoft veep, Fox News reports.
According to the report, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft”s corporate vice president and chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post that “a Build, we’ll share updates and talk about what’s next for Windows.’
A Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) Dragon spacecraft successfully completed the company’s second cargo flight to the International Space Station on Tuesday, with a 12:36 pm EDT splashdown in the Pacific Ocean a few hundred miles west of Baja California, Mexico.
“The scientific research delivered and being returned by Dragon enables advances in every aspect of NASA’s diverse space station science portfolio, including human research, biology and physical sciences,” Julie Robinson, International Space Station Program scientist, said.
A co-dependent relationship with your iPhone could be contributing to anxiety in more ways than most people realize, a study has revealed.
A 2011 study found that when youngsters are unplugged from technology for just 24 hours, most of them experience physical and mental symptoms of distress, the Huffington Post reported.
The six signs that your smartphone might be majorly stressing you out are:
Venus’ South Polar Vortex has a much more chaotic and unpredictable nature than previously thought, a new study has found.
The analysis reveals that the center of rotation of the vortex wanders around the pole differently at different altitude levels in the clouds of Venus. In its stroll around the pole, in layers separated by 20 km, the vortex experiences unpredictable changes in its morphology.
If you have wondered whether there is another planet similar to Earth out there in space, the answer is absolutely yes.
According to Sara Seager, a professor of physics and planetary science at MIT, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy and upward of 100 billion galaxies in our universe.
“So the existence of a planet similar to Earth somewhere is, in my mind a certainty,” she told CNN Light Years.
“Less certain is if such a planet is near enough to us that we can find and identify it sometime in the future,” she said.
Long-distance social networks existed long before the advent of the Internet, a new study has revealed.
The finding sheds light on the transformation of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic American Southwest and shows that people of that period were able to maintain surprisingly long-distance relationships with nothing more than their feet to connect them.
A South African neuroscientist is building the world’s first digital brain in order to uncover new information on mental disorders.
“What we are developing is a new foundation, a new instrument – a telescope – that will allow one to look deep into the brain, offering a more systematical approach to any disease,” Professor Henry Markram told the Sunday Times.
Online call service Skype is constantly exposes users’ Internet addresses to the entire world, giving criminals chance to better target cyber attacks and rivals to locate people.
The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets had warned about research that showed it was possible to coax Skype into revealing the IP addresses of individual Skype users.
Since then a number of services have emerged to help snoops exploit this vulnerability to track and harass others online.
A speeding comet, rather than an asteroid, slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago and sparked the extinction of the dinosaurs, scientists claim.
Many scientists believe the 180 km Chicxulub crater in Mexico was made by the impact that caused the extinction of dinosaurs and about 70 percent of all species on Earth.
The crater was probably blasted out by a faster, smaller object than previously thought, according to the new study presented at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
Ninety-two Asiatic lions have died, including 83 of natural death, in the past two years in Gujarat’s Saurashtra region while there has been no case of poaching.
In a written reply to a question asked by Congress MLA from Lathi, Bavku Unghad, Minister of State for Forest and Environment Govind Patel told the state assembly recently that nine lions died of accidents, including by falling in open wells.
As per the government data, 46 lions each died in 2011 and 2012. Out of the total 92 lions dying in the past two years, 43 were cubs, 29 female and 20 male felines.
The most-detailed map of the universe created through the observations made by Planck space telescope has an Indian element to it.
Three Indian scientists– Sanjit Mitra, Tarun Souradeep and their graduate student Aditya Rotti — from the Inter- University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, were a part of the team.
On March 21, the most-refined picture of the early cosmos after the Big Bang, measured by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, was released in ESA headquarters, Paris.
Improved version of the Aakash tablet is on the anvil after the successful launch of three versions, a “fantastic initiative” of the HRD ministry, HRD minister M M Pallam Raju said here today.
It is a fantastic initiative by the ministry to develop Aakash Tablet, a mobile device that can be utilised by
students anywhere.It was successfully tried out.
The second and third versions have come out and the fourth version is on the anvil,” he said.
More than 150 Indian cities will participate in the Earth Hour Saturday, joining over 7,000 of their counterparts across the world in raising awareness about climate change and its impact.
“We expect to increase the number of cities in India this year from last year’s 150,” said Andy Ridley, CEO and co-founder of the Earth Hour Global of the WWF International, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).
The Earth Hour, which began in 2007 in Sydney, appeals to people and businesses to switch off lights for an hour to raise awareness about climate change.
US tech giant Microsoft has disclosed that it and its main video chat service Skype received more than 75,000 requests last year from government law enforcement agencies in the US and four other countries to provide customer user data.
“In recent months, there has been broadening public interest in how often law enforcement agencies request customer data from technology companies and how our industry responds to these requests,” Brad Smith, a Microsoft executive vice president and the company’s general counsel, said in a blog post Thursday.
NASA has applauded India’s success in its space endeavours, saying the growing relationship with Indian Space Research Organisation holds great future.
“It is wonderful to see how the relationship between NASA ISRO has grown and evolved, the agreements we have signed since this group last convened, and the great promise our relationship holds for the future,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in his address to the fourth US-India Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting here on Thursday.
London, March 21 (ANI): One in ten people have revealed that they are addicted to their smartphone, according to a new study.
The US study conducted on 2,000 college students has found that ten per cent respondents have claimed to have a full-blown addiction to the gadgets, the Sun reported.
The study found that 85 per cent people constantly checked their phones for the time, while three-quarters slept beside it.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal today said internet which has emerged as a powerful medium should be used for empowerment and not disruption.
“This is the ultimate analysis, the medium is for empowerment, it is not for disruption. Any technology can be used in any way, like an atom can create electricity or have Hiroshima. It’s the atom that provides the solution.
“The Internet is that kind of energy of millions of atoms. Those atoms should be used for the good of mankind,” he said while speaking at Google’s Big Tent Activate Summit here.
Hewlett-Packard Co. has developed a method that will allow users to view 3-D videos on mobile phones without using glasses.
The method is such that the viewing angle will be so wide that viewers can see an object more fully just by tilting the screen.
The researchers found a way to make images viewable in 3-D from angles up to 45 degrees from center in any direction, up, down, side-to-side or diagonally.
This means viewers can see a person’s face with one ear blocked from view, but reveal the ear by swiveling the screen.
Natural swings in the climate have significantly intensified Northern Hemisphere monsoon rainfall, indicating that they must be taken into account for climate predictions in the coming decades.
Monsoon rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere impacts about 60 percent of the World population in Southeast Asia, West Africa and North America.
Given the possible impacts of global warming, solid predictions of monsoon rainfall for the next decades are important for infrastructure planning and sustainable economic development.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is back in action, after engineers have fixed the software snag which put the robot on a precautionary ‘standby’ mode earlier this week.
“We expect to get back to sample-analysis science by the end of the week,” said Curiosity Mission Manager Jennifer Trosper of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California.
Curiosity went into a precautionary ‘safe mode’ on March 16, after being sidelined by a computer glitch for the second time in three weeks.
A private expedition led by the founder of Amazon.com has successfully raised two massive Apollo Saturn V rocket F-1 engines, which launched astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Jeff Bezos, the online retailer”s CEO, said in an update posted Wednesday on the Bezos Expeditions website that his team has seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, CBS News reported.