Science

In a new study, scientists have attempted to estimate how long the chemical factory in Saturn’s giant moon has been operating in the atmosphere.

Titan hides within a thick, smoggy atmosphere that’s well-known to scientists as one of the most complex chemical environments in the solar system.

It’s a productive “factory” cranking out hydrocarbons that rain down on Titan’s icy surface, cloaking it in soot and, with a brutally cold surface temperature of around minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit, forming lakes of liquid methane and ethane.

Carrying on the current trend for ever-thinner and more unobtrusive sets, the television of the future could be a see-through panel which “vanishes” on being turned off, it has been claimed.

The technology – TOLED – actually exists, although it’s still fairly crude, and producing panels of this size is not currently possible.

A Loewe television using a TOLED screen, designed by Michael Friebe, was shortlisted in the 2011 iF Concept Design competition.

Using the Herschel Space Observatory, a McGill-led research team has discovered a giant, galaxy-packed filament ablaze with billions of new stars.

The filament connects two clusters of galaxies that, along with a third cluster, will smash together and give rise to one of the largest galaxy superclusters in the universe.

In a new study, scientists have identified the countries that are most likely to be worst hit by the catastrophic damage caused by asteroids.

Research from the University of Southhampton have identified for the first time those which will suffer catastrophic loss of life or be so crippled it will be almost impossible for them to recover.

NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer has sampled 107 “potentially hazardous” asteroids near Earth – 330ft wide or larger – to make estimates about how many are out there – and the figure is a terrifying 47,000.

Over half of the world’s personal computer users, 57 per cent to be precise, admit to pirating software, according to a new study.

According to the ninth annual global software piracy study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) in partnership with IDC and Ipsos Public Affairs, 31 per cent say they do it “all of the time”, “most of the time” or “occasionally” and another 26 per cent admit to having stolen software but only “rarely”.

These are among the findings of a survey of nearly 15,000 computer users across 33 countries conducted as part of the study.

Seven young scientists from India have been selected for the Intel world high school science research competition, which began in the US’ Pittsburgh this week.

The contest is seeing 1,549 young scientists from around the world vying for the top award, that carries a USD 75,000 grand prize from the Intel Foundation, sources in Intel said.

The awards ceremony will take place on May 18. The scientists have been selected through 446 affiliate fairs in 68 countries, regions and territories.

NASA is training a team of astronauts to land on asteroids, which are three million miles from the Earth.

The mission, planned for the next decade, would land on an asteroid travelling at more than 50,000 miles an hour.

The astronauts will drive vehicles on the surface – and pick up skills necessary to destroy ‘planet killer’ asteroids that may approach our planet in future.

The journey to the asteroid and back could take up to a year, according to a newspaper.

The crew members at the International Space Station (ISS) will make a photo report about life onboard the orbital complex, with a 3D camera sent by Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

“Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin who on Tuesday left for the ISS onboard Soyuz TMA-04M space shuttle, took a special stereo camera to make a 3D report about their life and work on the orbital complex,” said Vladimir Baranov, chief of the news agency’s image department.

Computer giant Apple has contracted specialists from Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky Lab to analyse the vulnerabilities of its Mac OS X operating system and improve its security.

The OS X security issue became important in early April, when Dr. Web, a Russian computer security company, reported finding botnets — or networks of compromised computers controlled by hackers — that included more than 500,000 infected Macs.

Contrary to popular belief that sharp rings of dust around stars are always carved by planets, a new study has suggested that the rings can even form on their own.

It certainly may be a bad news for those who use the structures to direct them to stars that host planets.

The discovery also has implications for the existence of a contentious candidate exoplanet.

Moon is often considered as a geologically dead fixture in our sky.

However, new images returned from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggest that our natural satellite isn’t dead at all. It’s actually pretty active having both shrank and grown fairly recently in its history, Discovery News reported.

The first evidence of an active moon came in 2010 when LRO’s camera returned high-resolution images of landforms called lobate scarps.

Scientists including one of an Indian origin have made a breakthrough that could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs.

The team from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

They tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display.

A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way, says a study.

The idea is being propounded by an international team of astronomers led by Chandra Wickramasinghe, professor and director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham.

Yahoo chief executive officer (CEO) Scott Thompson has resigned and the company has named Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO, Yahoo said Sunday.

The company said its board of directors also appointed Fred Amoroso as chairman. Both appointments were effective immediately, Xinhua reported.

“Mr. Levinsohn replaces Scott Thompson, former chief executive officer, who has left the company,” Yahoo said in a statement.

Thompson, former president of eBay’s subsidiary PayPal, was appointed as CEO in January 2012.

There is an urgent need to save the Ganges, Water Resources Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal said here on Saturday after undertaking an aerial survey of the river with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

Bansal arrived here on Friday on a two-day visit to the state to discuss with Nitish Kumar flood and drought management.

The two surveyed the river from Chausa in Buxar district to Piparpanti in Bhagalpur district, an official said.

Bansal said he would also survey the Kosi and Farraka barrage to assess the impact of siltation and flood management schemes.

An Indian origin computer programmer living in US has written an algorithm that turns millions of tweets into poetry.

Ranjit Bhatnagar’s algorithm scans millions of Twitter postings to find rhyming couplets in Shakespearean-style iambic pentameter and turn them into sonnets.

“There are great tidal waves of language sloshing around the planet all the time, and Pentametron is just picking out a few shiny seashells,” News.com.au quoted Bhatnagar as saying.

The Indian space agency will Saturday conduct a crucial test on an indigenously built cryogenic engine for launching its heavier rockets from its spaceport, a top official said Friday.

“The cryogenic acceptance test will take place Saturday in our Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre at Mahendragiri in Tamil Nadu. If it succeeds, we will use the cryogenic stage in the geostationary satellite launch vehicle (GSLV) rocket later this year,” state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K. Radhakrishnan told reporters here.

Highlighting the need for research and development in the area of basic sciences, former President A P J Abdul Kalam today exhorted scientists and technocrats to work towards bringing India in the list of top 10 countries in the world under this category.

Addressing a gathering of scientists and technocrats here, Kalam along with Minister of Science and Technology Vilasrao Deshmukh and Minister of State for S&T Ashwani Kumar listed out the priority areas which need technological intervention.

With the breeding season of estuarine crocodiles fast approaching, Bhitarkanika National Park authorities in Odisha’s Kendrapara district are in a spot of bother.

Frequent intrusion of crocodiles into places of human habitations has triggered man-animal conflict in a number of villages, official sources said.

On Wednesday, an intruding crocodile killed a 13-year-old boy at Balichandrapur while angry locals had beaten to death a rogue crocodile last week in sanctuary-side Rajasahi village, the sources said.

For the past few decades, space scientists have usually thought that the bubble of gas and magnetic fields generated by the sun – called heliosphere – moves through space, creating three distinct boundary layers that culminate in an outermost bow shock.

This shock is similar to the sonic boom created ahead of a supersonic jet. Earth itself certainly has one of these bow shocks on the sunward side of its magnetic environment, as do most other planets and many stars.

Archaeologists in Guatemala have reported the striking discovery of a small building, whose walls exhibit not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that obliterate any notion that the Mayans envisaged the end of the world in 2012.

These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who’s counting), thus predicting the end of the world.

Agni-V, India’s most powerful ballistic missile with a strike range of over 5,000 kms, is set to get substantially higher destruction capabilities as the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) plans to equip it with multiple warheads.

Comparing Agni-V missile to the best in the world, DRDO chief Dr VK Saraswat said, “It is a game changer missile… It has taken the missile technology to the highest level and matches with the best and the current world standards. We are working in this area. It will take time for us to develop but our work is on.”

A Congress MP Thursday called for internet to be “purified” and “abusive” and “filthy” comments on celebrities and politicians, often found in the comments sections of online news websites, censored.

Speaking during zero hour in the Rajya Sabha, Shantaram Naik, a member from Goa, cited “vile” comments, such as the ones below a news item about Jharkhand Chief Minister Arjun Munda’s helicopter crash-landing at Ranchi Wednesday, as reason enough for “purifying” internet.

A Japanese company has come up with a robot vacuum cleaner that can talk to people as it cleans. The gadget can be controlled with an iPhone and it also sends back photos of the home while it does its job.

The Cocorobo – created by Sharp – speaks three languages, English, Japanese and Chinese. It comes with more than 30 phrases, including “Long time no see” and “Hello”, a newspaper reported.

Using the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers have shown that the number of stars that form during the early lives of galaxies may be influenced by the massive black holes at their hearts.

This helps explain the link between the size of the central bulges of galaxies and the mass of their central black holes.