Science

American scientists have built a device that can generate electricity from waste water.

BBC said the team from Pennsylvania State University said the technology would simultaneously also treat the water. The scientists suggested the process could be adopted in developing countries to provide clean water as well as power for homes.

The study has been published in the journal Science.

Researchers in the Netherlands have for some years been exploring the idea of generating power along the country’s coastline, where fresh water from rivers meets the salt water of the sea.

British-Indian firm DataWind has won the Smart UK Project award from UK government for nation’s ‘Most Innovative Mobile Company’, beating competition from the other three finalists blippar, P2i and QRpedia. The competition run by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), began its search for UK’s most innovative mobile company in November 2011. The winner was announced at Mobile World Congress at Barcelona this week.

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) is a government department that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy.

NASA said hackers broke into its computer systems 13 times last year, stealing employee credentials and gaining access to mission-critical projects in breaches that could compromise US national security.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration spends only $58 million of its $1.5 billion annual IT budget on cyber security, Paul Martin, the agency’s inspector general, told a Congressional panel on NASA security earlier this week.

Barcelona It is the nightmare of the wired world — a smartphone low on battery. Now Swedish group myFC says its water-powered charger could be the fix anywhere while battery giant Duracell is championing a push for cars and even stadiums to be built with energy ‘mats’ that would power up phones.

A Californian firm, meanwhile, has launched a phone that it claims can remain charged for up to 15 years, making it the perfect spare in emergencies or disasters.

A new asteroid, identified by NASA, could potentially hit the earth on February 5, 2040, even though it is much smaller than the one – nine miles across – which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The UN Action Team on near-Earth objects, which has taken note of the 460-ft asteroid, placed the odds of its hitting the earth at one-in-625, though that could change nearer the time.

Yahoo Inc has threatened action against Facebook if the the social networking giant does not pay licence fee for using technologies which the Internet search major claimed come under its intellectual property rights.

“We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights,” Yahoo said in a statement.

Yahoo, however, did not disclose which are the specific technologies, for which Facebook should pay.

Yahoo Inc has threatened action against Facebook if the the social networking giant does not pay licence fee for using technologies which the Internet search major claimed come under its intellectual property rights.

“We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights,” Yahoo said in a statement.

Yahoo, however, did not disclose which are the specific technologies, for which Facebook should pay.

Scientists have identified an asteroid, which has a one in 625 chance of hitting Earth on February 5, 2040.

The width of the space rock, called 2011 AG5, is 460 feet.

The United Nations Action Team on near-Earth object has started their discussions on how to divert the asteroid, amid fears that the probability of a collision could increase over the next few years.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt predicted that rapid advances in technology will soon transform science fiction into reality — meaning people will have driverless cars, small robots at their command and the ability to experience being in another place without leaving home.

Schmidt said the introduction of books available online, Internet translation of languages and voice recognition for computers all happened much faster than anyone envisioned and that technological research into even more previously unheard of advances is progressing at a fast clip.

Apple on Tuesday sent out official invitations for a media event to be held next Wednesday, March 7, in San Francisco where it is expected to introduce its next-generation iPad.

The March 7 event will be held at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Calif., the same place the last two iPad unveilings have been held. The invitation features a finger pushing down on an iOS calendar icon with March 7 as the date.

“We have something you really have to see. And touch,” the invitation reads.

Researchers have discovered a new species of fish in Kalpangi River in Yazali under Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh.

The new species, Garra Kalpangi, was named after the river from where it was discovered, officials said today.

The team included K Nebeshwar from Manipur University, Kenjum Bagra Research Officer at Arunachal Pradesh Biodiversity Board and D N Das of Rajiv Gandhi University.

The discovery of the new species was mentioned in an article published in the February, 2012 edition of the Journal of Threatened Taxa, a wildlife and conservation journal.

NASA has said it is not giving up on Mars, but it will have to get there later and at a lower price.

President Barack Obama’s announced this month budget cancelled joint US-European robotic missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018. Now top science officials say they are scrambling to come up with a plan by the end of the summer for a cut-rate journey to the red planet in 2018.

The government should remove all constraints in the research and development work of biotech crops and lift moratorium on commercial release of Bt-brinjal, agri-biotech scientists and industry bodies said today.

In a day-long conference on Biotech Crops for Food Security in India, the scientists from the US, Switzerland and India noted that biotech crops would play a major role in ensuring food security of India.

Rising temperatures, triggered by climate change, are forcing birds to alter their migration patterns.

The finding is based on data from eBird, a database containing 10 years’ worth of observations from amateur birdwatchers. Since 2002, eBird has collected more than 48 million bird observations from roughly 35,000 contributors.

Allen Hurlbert, assistant professor of biology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and his team analyzed when 18 different bird species arrived at various points across their migration journeys, the journal Public Library of Science reports.

The online advertising business of search engine giant Google is growing faster than anticipated and is expected to surpass Facebook to be the top display ad seller in the US by 2013, a study has said.

Display ad is a form of graphical advertising on the internet usually appearing next to web content as banners or short video clips.

Research firm eMarketer said Facebook crossed Yahoo to be the top display ad-selling internet company in the US last year, and is set to continue the lead in 2012 with a revenue of $2.58 billion, Xinhua reported.

Apple Inc has signed with China Telecom to sell its iPhone in China from next month as it looks to boost its flagging share of the world’s biggest mobile phone market.

While Apple has now signed up with two of China’s big three carriers, the biggest, China Mobile Ltd, with more than 600 million subscribers, doesn’t yet have compatible technology.

Astronomers are using pulsars, superdense neutron stars, throughout our Milky Way Galaxy as a giant scientific instrument to directly detect gravitational waves.

Pulsars are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the Universe.

Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics, to test General Relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves with a “telescope” nearly the size of our Galaxy.

Using powerful X-rays to measure lunar rock densities, a team of scientists have found why our Moon, contrary to Earth, has no active volcanoes, and traces of its past volcanic activity.

The team led by Mirjam van Kan Parker and Wim van Westrenen from VU University Amsterdam suggest that the hot, molten rock in the Moon’s deep interior could be so dense that it is simply too heavy to rise to the surface like a bubble in water.

An Islamist website has spent months publishing letters written by Muslim extremists jailed for serious terror offenses, a British newspaper reported today.

The Sunday Times says the now-defunct site muslimprisoners.com carried dozens of letters written by Islamist radicals involved in what the paper described as “virtually every plot against Britain in recent years.”

In a special report published on Friday, The Wall Street Journal said Google, working together with numerous advertising agencies, placed a special computer code on millions of iPhones that permits the companies to track user behavior.

Google has denied that it monitors the activities of iPhone users and said the imbedded code, or cookies, tracks users and is only made active when users opt-in to one of Google’s services, for example Gmail.

APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) telescope in Chile has captured a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long.

In it, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars. It is one of the regions of star formation closest to us. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at wavelengths of around one millimetre, such as these made with the LABOCA camera on APEX, are needed to detect their faint glow.

Microsoft Friday announced that it was redesigning the logo of Windows software, making a fundamental change to the iconic four-colour Windows logo users have been used to for 20 years.

Meshing with the Metro design of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, the new logo is a slightly-angled blue block with a thin white cross in the middle, making it look like a window instead of the four-colour wavy flag in the past, reported Xinhua.

The phone based interactive voice response systems used by banks are vulnerable to data theft and manipulation of information, warn some cyber experts.

The vulnerabilities of Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) were exposed at the Nullcon– a conference of cyber security personnel attended by ethical hackers, government officials, intelligence organisations and cyber security firms here.

Just like Spotify brings music to Facebook users in the U.S, and certain other countries (hint: not India), Saavn, the music streaming radio service is tying up with Facebook to bring Bollywood music, Indian music and regional South Asian music to the social network.

New York, February 17: Apple has asked online retailer Amazon.com to stop selling the iPad in China, according to a published report.

The Wall Street Journal said Thursday that Apple pulled the iPad 2 from websites of some unauthorized merchants in China. This includes Amazon.com Inc.’s Chinese site.

The report comes amid an escalating trademark dispute between Apple and a company that claims it owns the iPad name in China.