Science

London, Feb 20 (ANI): A truck in the United Kingdom has been touted as the only vehicle in the world using coffee chaff pellets as fuel, and has also set a speed record in the Guinness World Records to go more than 65 metres per hour (mph). The specially modified Ford P100 pick-up truck is owned by an English conservationist Martin Bacon and is commissioned by a food brand, The Co-operative Food, the Daily Mail reports. The truck had achieved the speed record at the Woodford Aerodrome in Cheshire, England.

A cutting-edge chip can instantly convert your smartphone snapshots into more realistic, professional-looking ones, an American study says.

Built by the MIT’s Microsystems Technology Lab, the chip can instantly create a more realistic or enhanced lighting in a shot without destroying its ambience. The technology could be integrated with any smartphone, tablet computer or digital camera.

London, Feb 19 (ANI): Skype has launched a new video messaging service allowing users to send recorded clips of their conversations to their contacts. The service, which will initially available on operating systems iOS, Android and Mac, will have a clip almost three minutes long and will allow the messages to be played back as soon as the recipient is online, the Telegraph reports. The users will have to upgrade to Skype Premium to access the feature, the paper added. The new feature will work for Android and iOS users by using a front facing camera, with an option to switch to the rear.

Washington, Feb 19 (ANI): China has overtaken the United States as the world”s largest market for active smart devices, according to new data. According to a survey by mobile analytics firm Flurry, China is expected to account for 246 million active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets by the end of February 2013, as compared with 230 million in the U.S, CBS News reports.

London, Feb 19 (ANI): Details of the new Samsung Galaxy S IV phone have been reportedly leaked on the Internet, just weeks before its rumoured launch. According to the leaks, the new Galaxy smartphone, which is rumoured to be released as soon as March, is set for a major screen upgrade that would make it the most high-definition mobile in the market, the Daily Mail reports. According to a document which is said to be leaked by a Korean financial services firm, the Galaxy SIV will boast a 5 inch 1920×1080 display, quad-core processor and will run 2 GB of RAM.

Lasers powered by sun could protect Earth from any threatening-looking asteroids by destroying them before they can get too close, U.S. researchers have suggested.

Academics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, have outlined a plan for solar powered space defences, which could vaporise an asteroid as big as the one which flew past Earth on Friday night in 60 minutes, the Daily Mail reported.

Google launched its indoor maps feature in Singapore Tuesday, making the city state the second country in Asia to have it.

Android phone users will be able to use the online mapping system to help themselves find their way inside shopping malls and large buildings, reported Xinhua citing Straits Times.

Such information includes floor plans and basic walking directions for any building which has submitted its indoor maps to Google. It uses existing Wi-Fi access points to pinpoint a user’s location and follows his movement as he travels across different floors.

Washington, Feb 18 (IANS) Scientists are wiring oceans to track the movements of deep sea creatures that could help protect marine ecosystems by revolutionizing how we understand their function, population structure, fisheries management and species’ physiological and evolutionary constraints.

Barbara Block, marine sciences professor at the Stanford University’s Woods Institute, is using technology to enable live feeds of animal movements relayed by a series of “ocean WiFi hotspots”.

Washington, February 18 (ANI): Researchers have revealed that they have detected traces of water within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions.

The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early Moon. The new findings indicate that the early Moon was wet and that water there was not substantially lost during the Moon’s formation.

Washington, February 18 (ANI): Rats can’t usually see infrared light, but they have “touched” it after Duke University neurobiologists fitted the animals with an infrared detector wired to electrodes implanted in the part of the mammalian brain that processes information related to the sense of touch.

One of the main flaws of current human, brain-controlled prosthetics is that patients cannot sense the texture of what they touch, said Duke neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis, who carried out the study with his team.

Washington, Feb 18 (ANI): Apple’s iPhone 5 ranks fifth behind four Android smartphones in user satisfaction, a new report has said.Mobile research firm OnDevice Research conducted a new survey, which covered 92,000 smartphone users, to determine how satisfied people are were with their devices.

On a scale of 1-10 with the latter being the best, the Motorola Atrix HD ranked highest with a score of 8.57, the survey showed.According to the survey, the Motorola Droid Razr M trailed the Atrix with a grade of 8.5, Fox News reports.

The richer the assortment of amphibian species in a pond, the more protection that community of frogs, toads and salamanders has against a parasitic infection that can cause severe deformities, including the growth of extra legs, a study has found.

The findings support the idea that greater biodiversity in large-scale ecosystems, such as forests or grasslands, may also provide greater protection against diseases, including those that affect humans.

London, Feb. 17 (ANI): British security firms are hunting to find the next generation of computer geniuses in the country to join the fight against cyber crime.

Some of the best computer brains in the country met on Saturday at the offices of Sophos, an Internet security company, for a cyber war game designed to identify the most talented individuals.

Cyber security firms said that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the best computer minds because the teaching in schools and universities is not sophisticated enough, Sky News reports.

German scientists have designed an intelligent armchair that keeps one active and fit while carrying out basic activities.

Researchers have built an armchair that brings the gym right into your living room at the push of a button, reports Science Daily.

For years, the trends have been clear: not only are people getting older but they are also increasingly left to take care of themselves in their old age. This is why researchers are working on technologies that will assist them in everyday situations later in life.

An analysis of tree-rings can enable scientists to get an insight into the past and forecast extreme weather events.

For instance, tree rings may yield insights into the past 400 years of drought and flood in tropical parts of Queensland, and may help forecast future extreme weather events.

James Cook University’s Nathan English said that it had been believed that because of the rapid growth of trees in the tropics, their rings did not reveal reliable information.

As Russia assesses the damage from the meteorite shower that rained down Friday on the central region of the country, experts in the US said the fragments of space rock could bring a small fortune in hidden treasure to those quick enough to find and scoop them up.

“A relatively small piece is worth maybe a few hundred dollars, but a large chunk can be up to $100,000 or even more,” said Joseph Gutheinz, a specialist on meteorites and a former senior special agent with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in an interview with RIA Novosti.

The massive 2012 DA14 asteroid came closest to the Earth late Friday and is now heading away from the planet, Russian astronomers said.

The asteroid, the size of a 15-storey building, reached its closest point to the Earth at 23.25 Friday, approaching the planet at the distance of 27,700 km, closer than communication and weather satellites.

Washington, February 15 (ANI): Turning out the lights may help restore vision in people with a visual impairment known as amblyopia, according to a new study.

Researchers Kevin Duffy and Donald Mitchell of Dalhousie University in Canada believe that exposure to darkness causes some parts of the visual system to revert to an early stage in development, when there is greater flexibility.

Google is likely to be forced to remove offending posts on its Blogger website after a UK judge ‘opened the door’ for the search giant being required to monitor what users write.

Google convinced London’s Court of Appeal in a libel case that Blogger.com is the equivalent of a blank wall and it cannot be held responsible for what is written there by people.

But the court ruled in the case involving law student Payam Tamiz that it was arguable Google was a ‘publisher’ in defamation law , and therefore responsible for offending comments once told of them, the Daily Mail reports.

A fifth of the world’s reptiles are estimated to be threatened with extinction, scientists have warned.

Out of the 19 per cent reptiles close to extinction, 12 per cent classified as Critically Endangered, 41 per cent Endangered and 47 per cent Vulnerable.

More than 200 world renowned experts assessed the extinction risk of 1,500 randomly selected reptiles from across the globe, according to a paper published by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in conjunction with experts from the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC).

The Indian space agency on February 25 will put into orbit, seven foreign satellites including an Indo-French collaborative satellite SARAL and thus earn the much wanted and required revenue.

“The launch of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-C20 (PSLV-C20) is currently fixed for the evening of February 25,” sources in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told IANS.

“The rocket will blast off from the Sriharikota rocket launch centre (around 80km from Chennai) carrying seven satellites, totally weighing around 700kg,” a source in ISRO said.

The Arctic has lost more than a third of summer sea-ice volume since a decade ago, and is only a fifth of what it was in 1980, according to satellite observations.

“What this new paper shows is that our ice loss estimates may have been too conservative, and that the recent decline is possibly more rapid,” said study co-author Axel Schweiger, polar scientist in the University of Washington (UW) Applied Physics Lab.

“Other people had argued that 75 to 80 percent ice volume loss was too aggressive,” said Schweiger, the journal Geophysical Research Letters reports.

The 2012 edition of NASA’s annual Spinoff publication captures a nation and world made better by advancements originally achieved for space technology.

Spinoff 2012 offers a close-up look at how NASA’s initiatives in aeronautics and space exploration have resulted in commercial technologies with benefits across the economy: health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, energy and environment, information technology and industrial productivity.

Washington: The Middle East has lost 144 cubic km of water between 2003 and 2010, nearly equal to the staggering volume of the Dead Sea, show data provided by the NASA satellites.

Four countries of the region along the Tigris and Euphrates – Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below – alone account for the unprecedented loss. The Middle East is strained by the rapid loss of critical water reserves and mounting political tensions.

A group of American scientists have successfully managed to selectively shut off in mice the ability to feel cold while leaving the sensation of touch and heat intact.

Neuroscientists at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences have isolated chills at a cellular level, identifying the sensory network of neurons in the skin that relays the sensation of cold.