Science

Scientists have received the clearest evidence yet of carbon dioxide snowfalls on Mars based on data provided by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA reported Tuesday.

Frozen carbon dioxide, known as “dry ice”, requires temperatures of about minus 193 degrees Fahrenheit. The report is being published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, NASA said.

“These are the first definitive detections of carbon dioxide snow clouds,” the report’s lead author, Paul Hayne of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said.

The Delhi government has decided to impose a blanket ban on the manufacture, storage and usage of plastic bags in the capital.

“Any kind of plastic will be banned now, whether it is thin or thick. However, the ban has not been imposed on woven plastics,” Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said after a cabinet meeting Tuesday.

The use of plastic to pack magazines, invitation and greeting cards will also be prohibited once the order is notified.

“Plastic bags choke drains and spoil the environment,” said Dikshit.

A Haryana-based rice exporter today claimed he has developed a new technology for parboiling of rice which results in less usage of water, brings down the cost for heating, steaming, water treatment and save underground water table.

A new technology ‘Novel Process’ has been developed for parboiling rice process under which significantly lesser
amount of water, heat energy, steam and fuel are spent and will lead to saving of huge some of money,” Chaman Lal Setia Export, Director, Vijay Setia who invented the technology told reporters here today.

A computer is being taught to interpret human emotions based on lip-reading, one which could improve our interaction with these machines and perhaps allow disabled people to use voice synthesizers, more effectively and efficiently.

Karthigayan Muthukaruppan of Manipal International University in Selangor, Malaysia, and co-workers have developed a system using a genetic algorithm that gets better and better with each use to match irregular ellipse (lip shapes) fitting equations to the shape of the human mouth displaying different emotions.

One in nine Facebook users admit to spending a daily average of eight hours on the social networking site and checking their accounts over 20 times a day, according to a new UK research.

The research by a UK based e-commerce website examined the social media habits of 18-25 year olds in Britain and found that most obsessed Facebook users log onto the site over 20 times a day and spend a daily average of eight hours on the social networking site the equivalent of a full working day.

Huge numbers of youngsters admitted to worrying about their ‘online appearance’, a newspaper reported.

The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has suggested inclusion of Goa as a part of the Tiger Reserve complex complimenting the sanctuaries in Maharashtra and Karnataka, which would help the coastal state in conserving wild cats.

The Dehradun-based Institute, which submitted its report on the status of wildlife in Goa to the state forest department has established that tiger occupancy in Goa is about 322 square kilometres.

The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has suggested inclusion of Goa as a part of the Tiger Reserve complex complimenting the sanctuaries in Maharashtra and Karnataka, which would help the coastal state in conserving wild cats.

The Dehradun-based Institute, which submitted its report on the status of wildlife in Goa to the state forest department has established that tiger occupancy in Goa is about 322 square kilometres.

Union environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan today said the Centre is committed to promoting eco-tourism and has set up a committee to review guidelines for it.

“We are committed to promoting eco-tourism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke about (setting up of a) National Board for Wildlife,” she told reporters here.

The committee had been set up keeping in mind the need to ensure that forest dwellers were not affected by eco-tourism, she said.

To a query on Supreme Court banning tourism in Tiger reserves, she declined comment saying the matter is subjudice.

Human-induced activities may be destabilising desert ecosystems across the world, a new study has claimed.

Researchers from the Argentinian Institute of Arid Lands Research analysed the human impact on dryland ecosystems and found it was “drastically changing” mammal communities.

Scientists believe that activities such as overgrazing livestock are behind increasing local extinctions and a reduction in desert diversity, the BBC Nature reported.

All Jharkhand departments have been have been asked to ready their websites within a fortnight and upload all welfare schemes to enable total transparency.

Total transparency is necessary for development. So all the departments should ready their websites and upload all
government welfare schemes,” Chief Minister Arjun Munda said here today.

District-wise information on all programmes, schemes, expenditure, beneficiaries and others should be uploaded on
the websites, he said.

The 51-hour countdown for the 100th mission of the Indian space agency, slated for Sep 9, is progressing smoothly at the Sriharikota satellite launch centre in Andhra Pradesh, an official said Saturday.

Sriharikota is around 80 km from here, an official said.

The countdown for the launch of the rocket – Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV)- began Friday at 6.51 a.m.

Carrying French and Japanese satellites, an Indian rocket – Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) – will blast off at 9.51 a.m. Sunday.

The rocket weight at the time of lift off will be 230 tonnes.

Have a vision for the perfect app, a laptop and some comfy clothes for a marathon coding session? Well, that’s all the weapons needed to attend perhaps the world’s largest app fest for Windows 8 in Bangalore Sept 21-22.

It’s an opportunity to develop apps with global mentoring and technical resources at hand to drive the biggest digital innovation marathon in history and is open to the entire highly talented developer community in India and across the globe.

About 5.4 million Australians were targeted by cyber crimes, which cost the country 1.65 billion Australian dollars ($1.68 billion) in the past 12 months, according to Norton’s Cybercrime report 2012 released Thursday.

Hackers and cyber criminals were diverting their attention to new platforms such as smart phones and social networking, the report by the anti-virus company revealed.

Globally, there were more than 556 million victims and the cost were $110 billion, reported Xinhua.

Alien life beyond our solar system could be discovered within the next 40 years, a top British astronomer has said.

According to Lord Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society of London, developments in astronomy mean that astrophysicists could be able to view images of distant planets outside of our solar system as soon as 2025, and potentially discover whether there is some form of life on them, the Daily Mail reported.

The question of whether earth is alone in supporting living organisms has puzzled scientists, philosophers for centuries.

Maharashtra will identify and categorise its more than 200 large or small wetlands and make a bid for UN recognition in order to get more funds for their conservation.

Increased precipitation and river discharge in the Arctic Ocean has the potential to speed climate change as it can lower salinity and cause warmer surface temperatures, says a US study.

“As the Earth’s climate continues to change, the high-latitude North is becoming even wetter than before,” says study author Xiangdong Zhang, scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks International Arctic Research Centre (IARC).

Online retail giant Amazon Thursday introduced a new suite of its Kindle devices, from e-reader Kindle Paperwhite with front-lit display to 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet computer.

Kindle Paperwhite is a black-and-white e-reader with a front-lit display. The redesigned screen allows users to read easier in the dark and offers more contrast as well as brightness, reported Xinhua.

The Paperwhite technology enables the new Kindle to have as much as eight weeks of battery life, making the device highly power-efficient.

A hacking group today said it has obtained a million identification numbers for Apple mobile devices after breaking into the laptop of an FBI agent, a claim which the federal probe agency said has “no evidence”.

Anonymous affiliate – AntiSec – released a file on the internet which allegedly contained a million identification numbers for the Apple devices.

The group said they obtained the data by hacking into the computer of an FBI agent in March.

One of the world’s rarest species of turtle has hatched at a British zoo.

The tiny seven-week-old Vietnamese box turtle is so precious that it is being kept in a climate-controlled room at Bristol Zoo Gardens and is hand-fed chopped worms to give it the best possible start in life, a newspaper reported.

It is the first time a British zoo has ever bred this critically endangered species and is only the second in Europe, after a zoo in Germany, to have done so.

The youngster, which keepers have named Vernon, weighs just 28 g and measures around 5 cm long.

Software security provider McAfee on Wednesday said spread of malware was the fastest in the last four years and there were 1.5 million more of such malicious software in the April-June quarter of this year.

“Unique malware samples in our ‘zoo’ collection number 1.5 million more this quarter than last. At this rate we will almost certainly see 100 million samples by next quarter and possibly the first 10-million-sample quarter,” McAfee threats report said.

Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams and her Japanese colleague, will again venture outside the International Space Station o Wednesday to complete the maintenance tasks they were unsuccessful in during their last outing.

In the wake of the unsuccessful attempt to install a replacement power-switching unit on the truss of the International Space Station, NASA’s Williams and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Engineer Akihiko Hoshide, will venture outside for a second time in six days to complete the work.

This unexpected spacewalk has been scheduled to take place today morning.

The Press Information Bureau (PIB) has launched a mobile version of its website to help cellphone users seamlessly access information on the move.

“The URL of the mobile website is pib.Gov.In/mobile. Mobile users who want the full functionality and display of the regular website can access it through the URL pib.Gov.In,” a PIB official said.

The new site has been customised to display latest press releases on the home screen and offers links to other matters on the website, he said.

India is like the “historic father” of the Higgs boson project, the search for what could be the basic building block of the cosmos, says CERN chief Rolf-Dieter Heuer, ruing that Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose, from whose surname the word ‘boson’ is derived, did not get the Nobel Prize.

“India is like a historic father of the project. I am really very impressed seeing the immense talent pool that the country has,” the director general of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), the world’s premier particle physics laboratory.

Mobile phones are actually filthier than toilet seats because they are never cleaned even after being handled by different people, thus swarming with germs, say researchers.

Tests showed that up to 10 times the amount of pathogens which cause nausea and stomach upsets were present on a mobile phone than a toilet seat.

Charles Gerba, professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona, said during his ongoing experiments he has found that bugs get onto a phone because it is so close to our hands and mouths.

Researchers have discovered how genes trigger manic symptoms of bipolar disorder.

People suffering from bipolar disorder alternate between two extreme states, depressive phase which includes depression, diminished drive and suicidal thoughts and manic phase, marked by restlessness, euphoria, and delusions of grandeur.

Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim Germany, have now discovered, based on patient data and animal models, how the NCAN gene triggers manic symptoms of bipolar disorder.