Science

China will continue developing its high speed rail network in the face of rising public demand for travelling efficiency and for future economic development, a railway official said.

“I have confidence in the future of China’s high-speed railway,” Xinhua quoted Huang, a chief researcher with the China Academy of Railway Sciences, as saying.

Huang, a member of China’s top political advisory body, said he favoured the railway ministry’s plan to develop high-speed railway “moderately in advance” to the current market demand and in line with economic development.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has landed robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, sent probes to outer planets and operates a worldwide network of antennas that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft.

Its latest mission is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist who claims he was demoted — and then let go — for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone.

After foraying on microblogging site twitter, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Office has made its debut on popular video-sharing website Youtube.

The PMO said it will now be communicating with the people “more” through videos.

“PMOIndia is now also on Youtube at pmofficeindia. We will be communicating more with you through videos,” PMO sources said.

The PMO has started foraying into the new media after TV journalist Pankaj Pachauri took over as Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister.

Google is almost everyone’s favorite search engine, despite misgivings about data-collection and advertising practices that are widely seen as intrusive.

A survey of released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found 83 percent of U.S. search engine users rated Google as their preferred search engine. That was up from 47 percent in 2004, the last time that Pew gauged people’s attitudes about Internet search engines.

Yahoo’s search engine ranked a distant second at 6 percent, according to the latest numbers, down from 26 percent in 2004.

NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has captured the month-long fusillade of a unique neutron star near the centre of our galaxy erupting with hundreds of X-ray bursts, that were powered by a barrage of thermonuclear explosions its surface, in extreme detail.

A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city.

Fearing that climate change could wipe out their entire Pacific archipelago, the leaders of Kiribati are considering an unusual backup plan: moving the populace to Fiji.

Kiribati President Anote Tong said on Friday that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could provide an insurance policy for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.

Planetary scientists claim to have discovered a distant young galaxy cluster located 10.5 billion light years away from Milky Way.

Galaxy clusters are the “urban centres” of the universe and may contain thousands of galaxies.

An international team says that it identified the new galaxy cluster, which is made up of a dense concentration of 30 galaxies that is the seed for a much bigger “city”, using the Magellan 6.5-metre telescope in Chile. The galaxy cluster is located in a region near the star constellation Leo.

Ray Ozzie, the man who succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) tech visionary, believes the world has moved past the personal computer, potentially leaving behind the world’s largest software company.

The PC, which was Microsoft’s foundation and still determines the company’s financial performance, has been nudged aside by powerful phones and tablets running Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Google Inc (GOOG.O) software, the former Microsoft executive said.

NASA will be launching a series of rockets to learn more about the little-understood jet stream winds that circle the Earth at the edge of space.

On a clear night between March 14 and April 4, NASA plans to launch five rockets in five minutes from its Wallops Island facility in coastal Virginia.

Each rocket will release a chemical leaving a long, milky-white cloud to track the winds that scientists will monitor from cameras on the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia and New Jersey.

The clouds should be visible to the human eye along much of the Eastern seaboard.

Scientists said they have gotten even closer to proving the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that supplies mass to matter and would complete Albert Einstein’s theory of the universe.

Analyzing data from some 500 trillion sub-atomic particle collisions designed to emulate conditions right after the Big Bang when the universe was formed, scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago produced some 1,000 Higgs particles over a decade of work.

Apple is holding an event on Wednesday in San Francisco, and has hinted that it will reveal a new iPad model. Rumors speak of an updated tablet with a speedier processor, a sharper screen and an option for faster wireless broadband access.

If last year’s launch of the iPad 2 is any guide, the new iPad model will go on sale in the U.S. next week, likely on Friday.

The upgrade from the iPad 2 to the iPad 3 will be less significant than the upgrade from the original iPad to the iPad 2, which added two cameras while cutting both the thickness and the weight of the device.

Intel Corp (INTC.O) took the wraps off its newest “Xeon” server chip on Tuesday, seeking to capitalize on an explosion of Internet traffic sparked by Web-based cloud computing, social networking and growing smartphone and tablet computer use.

The company’s “Xeon E5-2600” family of processors delivers up to 80 percent better performance than previous platforms while consuming less energy, Diane Bryant, in charge of Intel’s data center business, told reporters.

Sawfish senses electric fields to find prey, contrary to the widely held perception that they only feed from the bottom of the ocean, says a new study.

An international team, led by the University of Western Australia, says the findings dispel the myth that sawfish are purely bottom feeders who use their saw to rake up the sandy bottom. It provides evidence that the fish, which develop in freshwater river systems, also feed closer to the surface.

Russia has built an android — a robot resembling a human being — to work in orbit.

The robot, S-400, will be Russia’s first space robot in more than two decades, the Izvestia daily said.

It can perform simple tasks such as screwing bolts and searching the spacecraft for damage.

The robot will be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) within two years’ time, and will also be joining future missions to the Moon and Mars, the paper said.

Cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev said S-400’s trip to the ISS will be a “test” before “more interesting tasks”.

NASA will attempt to lower a probe onto the surface of Mars for the first time as it continues its search for signs of life on the red planet, The Telegraph reported on Tuesday.

The new approach to landing a rover on the planet, to be attempted in August, will involve winching it slowly to the surface using nylon ropes attached to a spacecraft overhead.

Once the probe, named Curiosity, has safely reached the ground the 25 feet-long cords will be cut and the parent ship will use rockets to fire itself well away from the probe for a crash landing.

Twitter on Tuesday launched Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and Urdu versions of its website, further localizing of the popular one-to-many text messaging service.

Twitter users have long been able to fire off messages, referred to as “tweets,” in those languages but will now be able to visit Twitter.com home pages with local-language notices and instructions, a spokeswoman told AFP.

“Twitter is now available in right-to-left languages,” Twitter said in a blog post, crediting the accomplishment to the work of thousands of volunteer translators who began working on the project in January.

IMImobile, a global mobile data technology infrastructure and solutions provider to telecom operators, media companies and enterprises, has deployed IBM software to enhance its existing service and cloud infrastructure management processes.

Hyderabad-based IMImobile is a leading provider of cloud-based mobile data services for revenue generation and customer lifecycle management across Asia, Europe, Americas, Africa and the Middle East.

A four-legged robot known as the Cheetah lived up to its name on Monday, setting a new land speed record for legged robots by running at 18 mph on a treadmill at a laboratory in Massachusetts, its developer said.

The Cheetah, being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is part of a program aimed at achieving theoretical and experimental advances in the science of robotics.

Scientists have confirmed that a two-inch-long, worm-like sea creature is the ancestor of all vertebrate life forms.

This means human beings, as well as fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals are all descended from this creature.

The creature identified as that earliest-known animal to have the beginnings of a backbone is Pikaia gracilens, which evolved more than 500million years ago.

The discovery by Cambridge University scientists also put an end to a debate about whether Pikaia gracilens is the first member of the chordate family, the Daily Mail reported.

China’s third lunar probe, Chang’e-3, is expected to be launched next year and it will conduct moon landing and lunar explorations, a top space official has said.

Different from the previous two orbiters, Chang’e-3 has “legs” to support the spacecraft in landing, Ye Peijian, chief commander of Chang’e-3 at China Academy of Space Technology, said.

The orbiter will carry a lunar rover and other instruments for territory surveys, living conditions assessment, and space observations, Ye, a member of China’s political advisory body was quoted by the state-run Xinhua news agency as saying.

When at least 80 tornadoes rampaged across the United States, from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, last Friday, it was more than is typically observed during the entire month of March, tracking firm AccuWeather.com reported on Monday.

According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms.

“As spring moves up a week or two, tornado season will start in February instead of waiting for April,” said climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Here is something that can make you even more addicted to Facebook. The social networking giant, Facebook, has now officially launched Facebook Messenger for Windows, which is a standalone app that lets you IM friends via Windows 7.

The newly introduced app lets you chat, receive notifications, and read your news feed from your desktop. In other words, the messenger lets you use Facebook without being on www.facebook.com. However, missing elements from the app are video chat (through Skype) and group chat, which are there inside its web interface.

China is planning to launch is next generation Long March-5 carrier rocket in 2014.

Chinese experts have succeeded in developing the hydrogen box that will store fuel for the Long March-5 rocket. It will more than triple its carrying capacity.

China is also developing a Long March-7 rocket for launch in the next five years, said Liang Xiaohong, deputy head of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

China has sought to develop non-toxic, low-cost, reliable and safe carrier rockets to build a space station, the Shanghai Daily reported Sunday.

IANS

A US senator has urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate reports that applications on the Apple Inc and Google Inc mobile systems steal private photos and contacts and post them online without consent.

Democrat Charles Schumer’s request comes after iPhone maker Apple tweaked its privacy policies last month after prodding from other lawmakers.

The distribution of third-party applications on iPhones and phones running on Google’s Android system has helped create a surge in the popularity of those devices in recent years.

Palaeontologists claim to have discovered the world’s oldest fleas, dating back to 40 million years, which were big in size and might have fed on dinosaurs.

Fleas are hardly preserves as fossils like other ectoparasitic insects. Therefore, the evidence suggesting the origin and early evolution of fleas has been lacking so far. Not any more.