THE GOVERNMENT took a call in the matter more than 18 months ago. Now, it has deciphered the mechanics of enabling security agencies to police the one million- strong exclusive preserve of BlackBerry Messenger ( BBM) users in India.
Consequently, BlackBerry smartphone owners — who were interception- secure all these days — will have to brace for an invasion of their privacy. Their messenger service can be lawfully tapped citing security concerns.
Scientists have created a working quantum computer inside a diamond that includes protection against ‘decoherence,’ noise that prevents it from functioning properly.
Researchers of the University of Southern California, Iowa State University, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands used the diamond to create a protocol for controlling quantum information.
Although the tiny system is not very powerful and only has two qubits, it shows the viability of producing functioning solid-state quantum computers.
Conventional wisdom says there is no F (as in Facebook) in e-commerce.
But some enterprising firms — small-time merchants who would have just signed up with eBay Inc a few years ago — are now enjoying early success on the world’s largest social network.
These e-commerce startups, some backed by major financiers, are betting Facebook can become an e-commerce power to rival Amazon.com Inc and eBay. BeachMint, Yardsellr, Oodle and Fab.com are coming up with novel ways to persuade Facebook users to not just connect with friends on the social network, but to shop as well.
One in five American adults read an electronic book in the last year, as gift-giving sped the shift away from the printed page, a Pew Research Center survey showed on Wednesday.
In a sweeping survey of e-books’ impact on reading habits, the Pew report said that four times more U.S. readers, or 15 percent, were reading e-books on a typical day now compared with less than two years ago.
But when it comes to reading in bed, the verdict is split. Forty-five percent of those surveyed preferred e-books and 43 percent gave the nod to old-fashioned print.
India is set to launch an indigenous satellite with the “unique” capability to capture images in all-weather conditions that will facilitate agriculture and disaster management, ISRO said today.
India currently depends on images from a Canadian satellite as domestic remote sensing spacecraft cannot take pictures of the ground during cloud cover.
Austrian and Japanese researchers today unveiled solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk that are flexible enough to be wrapped around a single human hair.
The thin-film device, comprising electrodes on a plastic foil, is about 1.9 micro-metres thick, a tenth the size of the thinnest solar cells currently available, the researchers said.
One micro-metre is one millionth of a metre. “The total thickness of this device is less than a typical thread of spider silk,” the researchers said in a report carried by online science journal Nature Communications.
Converting farmland to grow bio-energy crops could be ruinous to wildlife, says a study.
“The Skylark is an indicator species for agricultural areas because it occupies many habitats…,” noted Jan Engel, from Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig in Germany, who led the study.
“Improving the habitat suitability for Skylark, accordingly, would improve conservation of natural vegetation, insects, and other ground breeding farmland bird species,” added Engel, the journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy reported.
Research In Motion (RIM.TO) on Tuesday launched software that enables its large “enterprise” customers to manage Apple and other rival devices through the same servers as they use for the BlackBerry smartphone and Playbook tablet.
The new Mobile Fusion software, first announced in November, is a recognition by RIM of a growing preference by many users inside big corporations and government to access professional communications over their personal devices, often the Apple iPhone or iPad, or devices running Google’s Android.
The early days of our solar system might look quite different than previously thought, claim physicists.
In its research, a team at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used more sensitive instruments to find a different half-life for samarium, one of the isotopes used to chart the evolution of the solar system.
“It shrinks the chronology of early events in the solar system, like the formation of planets, into a shorter time span,” said team leader Michael Paul in the ‘Science’ journal.
A Spanish palaeontology foundation has presented the fossilized skull of the biggest dinosaur yet found in Europe.
Turiasaurus riodevensis, a sauropod that lived 145 million years ago, measured more than 30 meters long and weighed some 40 tonnes.
More than 35 bones of the skull and seven teeth, presented last Wednesday at the Paleontological Laboratory of Teruel’s Dinopolis Foundation, were found during the 2005 excavation campaign in the Barrihonda-El Humero deposits in the Riodeva municipality.
A solar Kindle case lets readers “top up” their gadget simply by leaving it in the sun.
The case has a built-in solar panel and battery, which is guaranteed to provide three months of reading time in “normal” sunlight, without dipping into Kindle’s own power.
The gadget goes on sale this week, priced at $80, Daily Mail reported Tuesday.
Once the gadget’s topped up, the SolarKindle diverts power to a backup battery.
Eight hours will fully charge the backup, which offers roughly three weeks’ use. The battery also powers an LED light, which can run for 50 hours.
After a gap of two decades, India is all set to join the elite club of nations having nuclear-powered submarines with the induction of the Russian-origin ‘Nerpa’ into the Navy Wednesday.
Defence Minister AK Antony will formally commission the Akula II class Nerpa rechristened INS Chakra into the Navy at the Ship Building Complex here, Defence Ministry officials said here.
India has earlier leased and operated Charlie Class Russian nuclear submarine from 1988 for training its personnel on such submarines.
Social networking website Facebook today announced a facility for its users to access the site in eight Indian languages from mobile phones.
This will be rolled out in phases over the next few weeks, it said.
“With over 50 million people in India on Facebook, we want to make sure that everyone has a great Facebook mobile experience regardless of the device that they choose to use,” Facebook’s Country Growth Manager Kevin D’Souza said in a statement.
Students in a Chinese school may soon carry iPads instead of books to their classrooms as the management is planning to allow the use of the gadget.
The Jinling High School in Nanjing city has already allowed three students to bring iPads to their classrooms on a trial basis once their new term begins in September.
The policy has been discussed extensively and will possibly be extended to all students, the management said.
The iPads can set students free from the burden of carrying school bags, said Xin Qihua, vice director of the school’s international department.
After 13 years of operation, INSAT-2E, the last of the five satellites in the INSAT-2 series, has successfully completed its mission life.
INSAT-2E was built with a planned mission life of 12 years and continued to function beyond that, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement here today.
Launched on April 3, 1999 by the European Ariane-5 launcher, INSAT-2E was positioned at 830 East longitude in the geostationary orbit.
A one-click online payment system using Facebook and Twitter that could boost Internet sales for newspapers, music vendors and other low-priced goods and services is being tested by a major European media company, according to its developer.
The Internet poses an increasingly urgent problem for newspaper publishers who want to make money from the articles they put on their websites, but who are worried they will deter visitors by asking them to take out a full subscription.
Now, you can easily spot if someone is lying to you, with the help of a computer, say scientists.
A team at the University of Buffalo has developed a new software that focuses solely on the subject’s eyes, monitoring the movements of the pupils, which determines if someone is telling you the truth or lying.
For their study, the scientists recorded a series conversations in which a number of lies were told. And having tested their program against a trained human interrogator, they found that the software had a higher success rate.
AS Kiran Kumar, Distinguished Scientist and Associate Director, Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, assumed office of its Director, taking over the charge from Dr R R Navalgund.
Kiran Kumar joined SAC/ISRO in 1975. He has made immense contribution to the design and development of Electro-Optical Imaging Sensors for Airborne, Low Earth Orbit and Geostationary orbit satellites starting from Bhaskara TV payload to the latest Terrain Mapping Camera and Hyperspectral Imager payloads for Chandrayaan-1 mission, according to an Indian Space Research Organisation statement.
Revised estimates of the potential impact from an earthquake off Japan’s southern coast show much of the country’s Pacific shore could be inundated by a tsunami more than 34 meters (112 feet) high.
A government-commissioned panel of experts says a tsunami unleashed by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake in the Nankai trough, which runs east of Japan’s main island of Honshu to the southern island of Kyushu, could top 34 meters.
An earlier forecast in 2003 put the potential maximum height of such a tsunami at less than 20 meters (66 feet).
Jon McBride, the NASA astronaut who is in the city, visited Science City on Thursday. He was the guest speaker at a science lecture.
McBride spoke about his visit to India and interacted with the children present there. He said, “My focus is on education as it is my passion. I want the youth of today to avail of the opportunity which I had availed of.”
During the interaction, McBride spoke on different phases of his life-his selection in NASA, his role models and experiences during his tenure in NASA, among others.
It is not a carnival in the truest sense, but the four-day defence exposition in progress at the Pragati Maidan, India’s major trade exhibition venue, is attracting both young and old, with love for all things military.
The biennial exposition, said to be the largest in Asia, is in only in its seventh edition, and it mainly focuses on land and naval military systems, be it the hard, rugged weapons and vehicles, to the soft and trendier electronics and communications equipment.
Online travel agency Expedia on Friday accused Google of breaching EU rules with a formal complaint to EU antitrust regulators as it joined a dozen other firms that have taken their case to the European Commission in the last two years.
The EU watchdog is now investigating the world’s most popular search engine after rivals, including Microsoft, accused Google of abusing its dominant position in the market for Web search engines.
A lightweight satellite thruster can go to the Moon on just 100 ml of fuel, slashing cost of space missions.
The mini motor uses electricity to expel ions and generate thrust, built to manoeuvre spacecraft in space, which previously required bulky, expensive engines.
The first prototype is to be unveiled by EPFL (École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) lab and the scientists hope it could ‘usher in a new era of low-cost space exploration’. EPFL is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Honey bees are clever than you thought. They “self-medicate” when their colony is infected with a harmful fungus, bringing in increased amounts of antifungal plant resins to ward off the pathogen.
“The colony is willing to expend the energy and effort of its worker bees to collect these resins. So, clearly this behaviour has evolved because the benefit to the colony exceeds the cost,” Michael Simone-Finstrom at North Carolina State University, who led the study, said.
The UN will observe Earth Hour Saturday by turning off the lights for one hour at its facilities around the world.
The world body, headquartered in New York, will join scores of other landmarks around the globe that are participating in the Earth Hour event.
Earth Hour, launched in 2007 in Australia by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which is a global conservation group, calls on people, organisations and cities to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour starting at 8.30 p.m. local time.