Science

Scientists have discovered new species of sea slugs, feather stars and amphipods in the Madang Lagoon on the north coast of Papua New Guinea.

An international team of researchers led by Jim Thomas discovered the new species of sea slugs (nudibranchs), feather stars (crinoids) and amphipods (genus Leucothoe).

There was more variety of these indicator species found than there is in the entire length of Australia’s 2,574-kilometres Great Barrier Reef, researchers said.

US private company SpaceX will launch its Dragon space freighter on a second resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said on its website.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to lift off Friday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

“The Dragon spacecraft will ferry 575 kg of supplies for the space station crew and for experiments being conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory,” NASA said.

Environmental concerns rank surprisingly low on people’s priorities both in the US and globally, according to a survey, carried out in 33 countries between 1993 and 2010.

“One reason for the relatively low ranking of climate change is that people often believed it did not directly affect them. Climate change is seen more as a country-level problem than as a personal problem,” said Tom W. Smith, director general of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which conducted the programme.

The development and security of the nation are two sides of the same coin and India has achieved its rank among the top atomic countries on its own, says S. Kailas, director, physics division of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai.

Addressing at the National Science Day programme in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) here Thursday to honour Nobel Laureate, Sir C.V. Raman for the discovery of Raman Effect, Kailas said the shortage of energy resources is a major challenge and India would need to generate nuclear energy to fulfill the need.

A coal-powered car that produces nearly no polluting emissions, including carbon dioxide, could be manufactured in the near future through new technological advances, experts have said.

Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of Ohio State University’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory, said that researchers have found a way to release the heat from coal without burning it.

Fan told Fox news that the new method would use iron-oxide pellets as an oxygen source, and contain the reaction in a small chamber from which pollutants cannot escape.

Washington, February 28 (ANI): Tiny moons that can barely be seen hide inside Saturn”s majestic rings, according to researchers.

Like Jupiter, Saturn is orbited by a large number of moons — 62, at last count — ranging in size from the gigantic 3,200-mile-wide Titan, wrapped in thick clouds, to the barely 2-mile-wide Methone, smooth as a river rock.

But now scientists say there are even more moons in the ringed planet’s retinue – tiny worlds embedded inside the icy rings themselves – according to Discovery News.

Scientists have developed a flexible lithium-ion battery that can stretch up to 300 per cent of its original size and still function.

Northwestern University’s Yonggang Huang and the University of Illinois’ John A Rogers have demonstrated the battery that continues to work – powering a commercial light-emitting diode (LED) – even when stretched, folded, twisted and mounted on a human elbow.

It’s yet another bid to draw attention to a dying and polluted river that not just sustains life in the Braj region but is also a heritage treasure and a religious symbol for millions of Indians.

At least “100,000 bhakts (religious devotees)” will turn out for a 10-day march to Delhi that begins from here Friday to demand that the river Yamuna be cleaned up.

The outer reaches of a ‘supermassive’ black hole, more than two million miles across, or eight times the earth-moon distance, is spinning at nearly the speed of light.

The gigantic object is at the centre of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. Astronomers measured its jaw-dropping spin rate using new data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellites.

Scientists have developed a stretchable lithium-ion battery — a flexible device capable of powering their innovative stretchable electronics.

No longer needing to be connected by a cord to an electrical outlet, the stretchable electronic devices now could be used anywhere, including inside the human body. The implantable electronics could monitor anything from brain waves to heart activity, succeeding where flat, rigid batteries would fail.

After the recent meteor strike in Russia, two Grants Pass residents have revealed that they witnessed an unidentified flying object hovering over the Southern Oregon night sky.

Heather Scherffius and Gregory Soldner recorded the UFO sighting on camera and claimed what they saw was not an asteroid or a meteor.

According to the two witnesses, they just happened to be outside of their home at about 10:30 pm when the UFO appeared, International Business Times reported.

US biologists have studied the behaviour in the swamp sparrow species by creating a robot from a dead bird.

Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina worked with engineering students and a taxidermist to operate the wings of a deceased swamp sparrow.

They programmed simple Picaxe computer chips, and built a tiny linear motor to fit inside the cavity of the bird they named Robosparrow.

They were studying male aggressive behaviour among the species.

Over 10,000 students across India joined forces Tuesday to unleash their creativity at the Microsoft Student AppFest, a unique coding event enabling students from colleges to develop their ‘dream app’ ideas alongside professionals using the latest Microsoft technologies.

The AppFest, an initiative by Microsoft India, was a platform for college students to design applications for Windows 8 operating system. For the students it was an opportunity to apprise themselves of the know-how of applications designing and also find a place to share their ideas with others.

Man-made climate changes may be behind extreme weather patterns that ravage the world such as the US and Russian heat waves in 2011 and 2010 and the unprecedented floods in Pakistan.

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) scientists from Germany have revealed how man-made climate change upsets the patterns of atmospheric flow around the Northern Hemisphere.

Leading IT solutions provider to the global aviation industry, the Technopark-headquartered IBS Software, has signed a multi-million dollar, 10-year contract with Turkish Cargo, the cargo division of Turkish Airlines.

The contract is meant for the implementation of its iCargo solution.

Turkish Airlines is one of the fastest-growing airlines in the world, with a staggering 39 percent growth in air cargo FTK (freight tonne kilometre) against an average of three percent growth for other European airlines.

Aiming to spread the message of saving the planet, a select few youth, among other Indians are embarking on a global expedition to “the last great wilderness on earth” led by noted polar explorer and environmentalist Robert Swan.

Drawn from diverse background ranging from a primary teacher in Pune to a technology analyst in Chandigarh, a team of about five Indians are set to join the main crew on February 28 in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world, before heading to Antarctica on March 3.

The relatively new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, has decided she wants her employees showing up to the offices from June, and not just telecommuting from home all the time.

According to All Things D’s Kara Swisher, in an internal memo, she said that ‘to become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.

US biologists have studied the behaviour in the swamp sparrow species by creating a robot from a dead bird.

Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina worked with engineering students and a taxidermist to operate the wings of a deceased swamp sparrow.

They programmed simple Picaxe computer chips, and built a tiny linear motor to fit inside the cavity of the bird they named Robosparrow.

They were studying male aggressive behaviour among the species.

A human rights group is set to launch a global campaign to highlight the danger of killing machines and wants a ban before they become a reality.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) says that robot warfare is the next step up from unmanned drones, and will be available within the decade, the Sun reported.

HRW, a New York based NGO that spends millions each year raising awareness of human rights, says that the most of public are not aware of the danger they are in.

Mozilla, which is a not-for-profit organization, behind the Firefox web browser has announced handsets based on its operating system for mobile phones.

According to Jay Sullivan, vice president of products at Mozilla, Firefox phones are likely to be sold first in the developing world and Eastern Europe and will be at the cheaper end of the smartphone market.

He said manufacturers LG, ZTE, Huawei and TCL had all committed to building devices, with more firms “to follow”.

A rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius in mercury is likely to melt the permanently frozen ground over a large chunk of Siberia, possibly releasing gigatonnes of carbon from soils that could aggravate global warming, says a study.

“As permafrost covers 24 percent of the land surface of the northern hemisphere, significant thawing could affect vast areas and release gigatonnes of carbon,” said Anton Vaks from the Oxford department of earth sciences, who led the research.

Google has introduced its own high-end laptop Chromebook Pixel powered by its Chrome operating system.

“With the Pixel, we set out to rethink all elements of a computer in order to design the best laptop possible, especially for power users who have fully embraced the cloud,” said Google in its official blog Thursday.

According to the search giant, Chromebook Pixel, with a 4.3-million-pixel touchscreen, has the highest pixel density of any laptop screen on the market today, reported Xinhua.

Findings from fieldwork along the North Yorkshire coast reveal strong parallels between the Early Jurassic era of 180 million years ago and current climate predictions over the next century, according to researchers at Plymouth University, UK.

Through geology and palaeontology, they’ve shown how higher temperatures and lower oxygen levels caused drastic changes to marine communities, and that while the Jurassic seas eventually recovered from the effects of global warming, the marine ecosystems that returned were noticeably different from before.

When it comes to stars in young star clusters the dynamics in these crowded environments cannot be simply explained by the pull of gravity, researchers have found.

After analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images of star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University in Beijing found more binary star systems toward the periphery of cluster than in the center-the opposite of what they expected.

Austrian researchers have developed an entirely new way of capturing images based on a flat, flexible, transparent and potentially disposable polymer sheet.

The new imager, which resembles a flexible plastic film, uses fluorescent particles to capture incoming light and channel a portion of it to an array of sensors framing the sheet.