Science

Bangalore, February 04: Two Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, one of the six planes in the fray for the IAF’s 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft deal, arrived here today to take part in the Aero India show here, beginning February nine.

“The Typhoons from the Italian Air Force landed safely today at Bangalore’s Yelahanka air base for participation in the Aero India 2011 show,” company officials said.

Eurofighter is one of the six fighter aircraft producing companies which has pitched in for the MMRCA deal, estimated to be worth a whopping USD 11 billion.

Washington, February 03: Nasa has announced the discovery of a new solar system that has six planets orbiting around their star.

And an orbiting space telescope has pointed scientists to more than 1,200 other possible exoplanets, planets outside our own solar system, the space agency NASA said.

The solar system discovery, published in the journal Nature, is mystifying astronomers for the time being and illustrates just how much variety is possible in the universe.

London, February 03: The internet will run out of numerical IP (Internet Protocol) addresses by Friday. But the web will not ground to a halt. A new system, Internet Protocol version 6 or IPv6, will replace version 4.

Every device connected to the net is assigned a number. But with millions of web enabled phones now online, the numbers are running out.

The system, set up in the 1980s with a maximum of 4.1 billion addresses, was supposed to never run out. The original creators of the web initially thought it would be used only for academic purposes.

London, February 02: Talking with your hands can trigger images that help solve complex problems bearing on spatial visualisation, an important skill for both students and professionals.

Spatial visualisation is the ability to mentally rotate or move an object to a different position or view. An air traffic controller uses spatial visualisation to mentally track planes in the air based only on a two-dimensional radar screen, reports the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

San Francisco, February 02:Hoping to circumvent the blackout of the internet and social networking in Egypt, Google and Twitter announced a new service Tuesday that allows anyone to send tweets over the phone.

People can use the service by leaving a voicemail at one of three international numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855). The service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt.

No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet, Google said in a blog posting.

London, January 31: Artificial petrol that costs 19 pence per litre could be available in as little as three years.

Scientists in Britain are refining the recipe for a hydrogen-based fuel that will run in existing cars and engines at a fraction of the cost of petrol.

With hydrogen at its heart rather than carbon, it will not produce any harmful emissions during combustion, making it cleaner, greener and cheaper, the Daily Mail reports.

The first road tests are due next year and, if all goes well, the cut-price “petrol” could be on sale in three to five years, the report says.

Chennai, January 30: Missile makers BrahMos Aerospace will manufacture the cryogenic engine once the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) perfects the technology, said a senior official Sunday.

The company is also hoping to induct its supersonic cruise missile into the Indian Air Force and develop hypersonic missile in six years’ time, chief executive and managing director A.Sivathanu Pillai told reporters here.

New Delhi, January 25: After a long 13 years of ban, United States of America removed the shackles which bound Indian space research centres like ISRO, DRDO and defense-related companies so far from international trading.

ISRO and other space and defese-related companies were confronted with the ban after the nuclear test that was carried out by India in May 1998.

San Francisco, January 22: Google on Friday said it has made it harder for spam-packed websites to rank high in results at the world’s top Internet search engine.

While the amount of “webspam” in query results is less than half of what it was five years ago, the California-based Internet firm has seen a “slight uptick” in recent months, according to Google principal engineer Matt Cutts.

London, January 22: Holding a simple chat could be just as effective as playing popular “brain-training” games that have spawned a multi-million pound industry.Researchers from the University of Zurich in Switzerland compared 36 studies on memory exercises conducted between 1970 and 2007.

They found some studies suggested both healthy older adults and those with mild cognitive impairment could remember words better after some memory training, the journal Cochrane Library reports.

Moscow, January 22: Two Russian astronauts Friday began their first spacewalk of the year to install new high-speed data transmission system outside the Russian Pirs compartment at the International Space Station (ISS).

Dmitry Kondratyev, 41, and Oleg Skripochka, 41, will spend six hours in space as part of the 27th Russian space station spacewalk, the Russian mission control centre said. It will be the first time in open space for Kondratyev and the second time for Skripochka.

Hyderabad, January 21: IMImobile, end-to-end enabler of mobile value-added services for mobile operators, media companies and enterprises, has launched an innovative service Make My Tunes on its Ringback Tone (RBT) platform.

The service was launched Thursday by service provider Aircel as Dialer Tune – Song Edit.

Aircel customers in Chennai and Tamil Nadu circle can select their favourite section of the song as their RBT.

The same service can be made available to operators across the country.

New Delhi, January 21: The Supreme Court Friday slammed Communications Minister Kapil Sibal for his remark that the official auditor’s report was ‘utterly erroneous’ in assessing the loss on award of telecom spectrum at Rs.1.76 lakh crore ($40 billion).

‘It is unfortunate,’ said the apex court bench of Justice G.S. Singhvi and Justice A.K. Ganguly.

The court said the minister must be more responsible and directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to proceed with the probe on the basis of the report sumbitted by the Comptoller and Auditor General (CAG).

London, January 21: A new generation of pesticides could explain why honeybees are vanishing worldwide.

According to a study, the chemicals, which are routinely used on farms and garden centres, attack the central systems of insects and make bee colonies more vulnerable to disease and pests.

The claims in a study, carried out at the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Bee Research Lab, add to the evidence that pesticides are partly responsible for the mysterious decline of one of the world’s best loved insects, the Daily Mail reports.

Hyderabad, January 21: Holding copies of identity proofs, 22-year-old MTech student, N Geethika was busy filling in application form for Mobile Number Portability (MNP) at a mobile store in Somajiguda.

Welcoming the government’s move, Geethika said, “My mobile network is frequently interrupted during a call. MNP is a nove l service which will help me to change my network whenever I want to.” A mobile store executive, Imam said they had received as many as 35 application forms from customers to activate the MNP service.

San Francisco, January 21:Google co-founder Larry Page is to take over the day-to-day operations of the web search company as chief executive, Google said Thursday.

Current CEO Eric Schmidt will assume the role of executive chairman and will focus on deals and external relations. Sergey Brin, the other Google co-founder, will focus on new products, the company said.

“We’ve been talking about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making for a long time,” said Schmidt in announcing the decision.

London, January 20: Many experts believe that biological raw materials were carried to our planet as lumps of asteroid rock.

The molecular structure of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins and living organisms – does provide a clue.

The molecules come in two mirror-image varieties, the left and right-handed. But only left-handed amino acids are found in nature.

Recently, NASA scientists reported finding the amino acid isovaline in samples of meteorites that came from asteroids, the Daily Mail reports.

Thiruvananthapuram, January 18: Three major satellite launches are planned during the first quarter of this year by ISRO, whose recent mission to launch the GSAT-5P communication satellite onboard homegrown GSLV-F06 rocket failed.

‘Resourcesat-2’, an advanced remote sensing satellite, ‘Youthsat’, a participatory scientific mission with payloads from Russia and India and X-sat, Singapore’s first indigenous satellite, would be launched on board PSLV C-16 in February, March and April, ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan said here.

Mumbai, January 17: Nearly 40 percent of Indian respondents of a global online poll said they used the internet to search for health-related information, a statement said Monday.

Findings of the 12-nation poll, released by Max Bupa Health Insurance, said that the high cost of face-to-face consultations with medical professionals may be one reason for the trend.

Washington, January 17: A new article in the New York Times detailing the damage done to Iran’s civilian nuclear program by the Stuxnet computer worm not only confirms Israel’s role in the development, but adds that the US played a role in its development and testing.

Though officials have declind to confirm this directly, the article describes Stuxnet as a “joint American and Israeli effort” and details its testing at Israel’s Dimona site, where they use “virtually identical” centrifuges in the creation of their own massive nuclear arsenal.

Frankfurt, January 16: Never store unencrypted passwords on a computer’s browser. Doing so makes it too easy for hackers to access the data with tools like Trojans and then access private accounts, warns German computer magazine c’t.

The magazine recommends that people who insist on storing passwords on a browser at least use some kind of master password, which means that all stored access data is safely encrypted. However, that option is only available with Firefox and Opera.

Washington, January 14: If your house seems dustier than usual, it may have nothing to do with your housekeeping skills. The amount of dust in the atmosphere has doubled over the last century, according to a new study, and the dramatic increase is influencing climate and ecology around the world.

The study, led by Natalie Mahowald, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University in the US, used available data and computer modeling to estimate the amount of soil particles in the air throughout the 20th century.

Caledonia, January 14: A 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck off New Caledonia’s Loyalty Islands in the South Pacific, the US Geological Survey has said, but there was no tsunami warning in effect.

There were no immediate reports of damage from the quake, which hit at 3.16 am (1616 GMT Thursday) at a shallow depth of 7.2 kilometres (4.5 miles), 125 kilometres (77 miles) northeast of Tadine in the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, and 135 kilometres southwest of Vanuatu.

The Pacific tsunami Warning Center said there was no warnings or advisories in effect following the latest quake.

Washington, January 14: During the biannual event called the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), hackers worldwide develop software that can help identify and reduce risks from natural hazards.

It’s a far cry from the darker side of hackers who recently disrupted the computer operations of companies trying to shut down WikiLeaks, says Christian Science Monitor.

During these events, hackers develop and improve tools aimed at helping emergency managers respond more effectively to disasters.

London, January 14: Indian youngsters seem to be less tech-savvy as they lag behind their global counterparts when it comes to mobile internet use, according to a study by market researcher Nielsen.

The research on youth and cellphone usage has found that less than 10 per cent of young Indians used their mobile devices to access the web in the last month while 73 per cent of Chinese aged between 15 and 24 used mobile internet in the last 30 days, ‘The Independent’ reported.