Science

The Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) would take up with European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) chief Rolf-Dieter Heuer the case of sub-atomic particle boson, derived from an Indian scientist’s name, being rendered in lower case.

Heuer, director-general of the Geneva-based institute, would be on a two-day visit here from Sep 3 to address an international science conference organised by the Centre for Natural Sciences and Philosophy and the Critical Issues Forum. On Sep 4, he would also deliver a lecture at the SINP.

Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, who holds the record of the longest space flight (195 days) for a woman, has completed her fifth spacewalk lasting a near record eight hours and 17 minutes.

Williams and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide set out from the international space station at 5:46 p.m. Thursday (India time) and returned at 2:03 a.m. Friday, the US space agency NASA announced.

The longest spacewalk of 8 hours and 56 minutes was undertaken by US astronauts Susan Helms and James Voss in 2001.

Russia is planning to launch two space laboratories within the next four years, according to a space company.

An x-ray observatory, Spektr-RG, will be launched in 2013, said the Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Manufacturing.

It will study the large scale structure of the universe and super-massive black holes, among other things.

Spektr-UF, a UV space observatory, to be launched in 2016, will be an international project with Russian, Spanish, German and Ukrainian participants.

The federal judge presiding over challenges to Google Inc.’s plans to create the world’s largest digital library has refused to delay the 7-year-old case while Google appeals his decision to grant authors class certification.

US Circuit Judge Denny Chin’s order was put in the court file yesterday in Manhattan, where he ruled in May that class action was “more efficient and effective” than requiring thousands of authors to sue individually. His order was dated Tuesday.

India is to widen the scope of its cyber-security coordinator in the wake of incendiary internet data that swept the country earlier this month and forced an exodus of northeastern people from Pune and Bangalore but there is no move to take up the issue with Pakistan, a senior official said Tuesday.

India has also reiterated a demand made three years ago to toughen cyber laws to prevent such hate campaigns, the official said.

India is to widen the scope of its cyber-security coordinator in the wake of incendiary internet data that swept the country earlier this month and forced an exodus of northeastern people from Pune and Bangalore but there is no move to take up the issue with Pakistan, a senior official said Tuesday.

India has also reiterated a demand made three years ago to toughen cyber laws to prevent such hate campaigns, the official said.

The fourth vulture census conducted in Gujarat shows 36.2 per cent rise in the population of the critically endangered long-billed species between 2010-12.

The head count of long-billed vultures in Gujarat has gone up from 265 in 2010 to 361 in 2012, official statement said.

However, the white-rumped vulture population has decreased from 793 in 2010 to 577 this year.

The census puts the total vulture population at 1,043, in the state including the globally threatened species like Egyptian vulture (97) and Red-headed vulture (8), enumerated during the exercise for the first time.

Here’s good news for mobile users. Researchers have developed a way to turn body heat into electricity. So the next time your cell phone runs out of battery, you can charge it by just grabbing it with your hand.

One can also sit on one’s phone to pass electricity through their body to the device.

The technology has been created by Professor David Carroll of Wakeforest University’s Centre for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials in the US. It is the most inexpensive way to produce electricity.

After devoting 12 years to the project, scientists have fabricated the first-ever device to measure molecules one at a time.

California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers said it would eventually help doctors diagnose diseases, enable biologists to study viruses and probe molecular machinery of cells, and even allow better measurement of nanoparticles and air pollution.

Scientists are closer to demonstrating that DNA can form spontaneously from chemicals thought to be present on the primordial Earth suggesting that DNA could have predated the birth of life itself.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is essential to almost all life on Earth, yet most biologists think that life began with Ribonucleic acid (RNA). Just like DNA, it stores genetic information.

Prebiotic chemists have so far largely ignored DNA, because its complexity suggests it cannot possibly form spontaneously, the New Scientist reported.

Neil Armstrong, the legendary US astronaut, who in 1969 took “one giant leap for mankind” by becoming the first man to set foot on the moon, has died at the age of 82, his family said on Saturday.

Armstrong died just weeks after he underwent a heart surgery, and his family said in a statement that he passed away following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures, according to US media reports.

Mexican environmental authorities are demanding that state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos clean up a crude spill that occurred when a loading buoy sank nearly two weeks ago and polluted six beaches.

The sinking of the buoy (used to load crude onto tankers in deep water) happened off the coast of the southern state of Oaxaca, near the Salina Cruz refinery in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Media reported Thursday that a boat collided with the buoy because it lacked signaling lights, causing it to sink and spill the crude it was storing.

In what can be called as one of the biggest patent cases in decades, Apple Inc scored a sweeping legal victory over Samsung on Friday that could have huge market repercussions.

The US jury found that Samsung had copied critical features of the hugely popular iPhone and iPad and awarded Apple USD 1.051 billion in damages.

The verdict — which came much sooner than expected — could lead to an outright ban on sales of key Samsung products and will likely solidify Apple’s dominance of the exploding mobile computing market.

A new type of bio-sensor can detect minute traces of glucose in saliva, tears and urine, doing away with pinpricks for diabetes testing.

“It’s an inherently non-invasive way to estimate glucose content in the body,” said Jonathan Claussen, former Purdue University doctoral student and now a research scientist at the US Naval Research Lab.

“Because it can detect glucose in the saliva and tears, it is a platform that might eventually help to eliminate or reduce the frequency of using pinpricks for diabetes testing,” said Claussen, the journal Advanced Functional Materials reports.

Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde today said only those social media accounts which have posted objectionable and inflammatory content are being blocked and there is no need for others to be concerned.

“We are taking action only against those sites which can cause damage. We will not level charges unnecessarily on others be it SMS or Facebook or Twitter. Be assured of that. Only those who are involved in this and who have done this job of inciting people will face problems and nobody else,” Shinde told reporters.

A one-horned rhino died in the Kaziranga National Park in Assam’s Golaghat district when a forest guard fired at it in self defence, an official said Friday.

The incident took place in the Bagori range Thursday night. The dead rhino was a male adult.

“The rhino charged at a group of forest guards who opened blank fire to stop it. The bullet hit the rhino and it died on the spot,” Principal Chief Conservator of Forest Suresh Chand told IANS.

“It is a very unfortunate incident,” he said.

A robot being developed in Finland will be capable of recognising human emotions and understanding speech and gestures.

Being created at the University of Oulu in Finland, the technology could prove beneficial in nursing homes and in the fields of security and logistics, reported goodnewsfinland.com.

Research groups working on the project, led by Matti Pietikäinen and Juha Roning, have developed the new technology in speech animation, navigation and what is described as machine vision.

Government has given an ultimatum to social networking site Twitter to block nearly 30 of its webpages which continue to host morphed and inflammatory contents or face punitive action.

The move comes after Union Home Secretary R K Singh asked the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT) to serve the ultimatum on Twitter as it failed to comply with the government order to block 28 webpages in its site.

Singh told DEIT to take appropriate action if the offending webpages are not blocked immediately by Twitter.

Archival storage of the world’s ever-increasing volume of information is reaching a point where it will require a breakthrough technology to meet the enormous need.

Although flash drives and external hard drives have become remarkably efficient and eminently affordable, the speed of vast data creation on a daily basis could make them impractical. What also makes them impractical over the long term is the sheer physical wear and tear.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured a strange white light dancing across the horizon of Mars and four blobs hovering in the sky, which UFO hunters claim are alien ships monitoring humans’ baby steps into the universe.

While the images are certainly a curiosity, NASA and photography experts insist they are nothing more than blemishes on the images, picked up by the camera lens sitting on the rover at a distance of 350 million miles away.

A new shrew like rat species, unearthed in a remote rainforest, cannot chew or gnaw but lives exclusively on earthworms.

The species Paucidentomys vermidax, found in the remote rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, has fang-like upper incisors which are useless for gnawing and no back teeth. It feeds on earthworms which it sucks out of the ground at the foot of the jungle with its long snout.

It shares something in common with insectivorous shrew rats from the Philippines but has completely dispensed with chewing molars, the journal Biology Letters reported.

In a first-of-its-kind effort, a USD 25 million Wi-Fi-like technology that will allow vehicles to “talk” to each other to help reduce crashes and improve traffic congestion, has been launched in the US.

The technology that allows vehicles and highway infrastructure to communicate with each other is undergoing trials in a giant experiment on the streets of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The United States has been hit hard by the largest ever outbreak of West Nile virus, spread mostly by mosquito bites, that has killed 47 people and infected an estimated 95,000 in 38 states.

The number of cases so far this year is the highest recorded through August since the disease was first detected in the United States in 1999, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Internet companies Google and Facebook today said they are working with Indian authorities to remove “inflammatory and hateful content” on their websites.

“We understand the gravity of the situation, strongly condemn acts of violence and continue to work closely with relevant authorities.

Content intended to incite violence, such as hate speech, is prohibited on Google products where we host content, including YouTube, Google+ and Blogger,” Google said in a statement.

Oceans which are a rich source of uranium may soon hold the future of nuclear power as scientists are developing a cost-effective way to extract the precious metal from the waterbodies through special mats.

A team of researchers led by Dr Robin Rogers, from the University of Alabama are involved in making cheaper and efficient mats and compounds that latch onto uranium.

The standard extraction technique, developed in Japan, uses mats of braided plastic fibres embedded with compounds that capture uranium atoms.