San Francisco, May 26: Facebook has called a press conference today to discuss “enhanced, simpler” privacy controls designed to appease concerns about safeguarding information at the social-networking service.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives are slated to take part in the briefing, which will be at the firm’s headquarters in the city of Palo Alto, California.
New Delhi, May 25: Environmental NGO Greenpeace today termed the proposed environment ministry’s e-waste rules as the “most progressive and fundamentally robust framework” created by a range of stakeholders to tackle the menace.
“This draft E-waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2010 ensures that the vulnerable from unorganised sector are not left in the fringe and offers a clear procedure on regulating import of e-waste for reuse purposes”, said Abhishek Pratap, Greenpeace India Toxics Campaigner.
Washington, May 25: The debate about whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded or hot-blooded has long intrigued palaeontologists.
Now, an international team led by California Institute of Technology, claims to have unveiled a new method to measure the body temperature in extinct vertebrates by analysing rare isotopes in the animals’ bones, teeth, and eggshells.
“This is not quite like going back in time and sticking a thermometer up a creature’s back end. But it’s close,” Prof John Eiler, who led the team, said.
Washington, May 25: A robotic lander that confirmed the presence of ice on Mars was confirmed dead by NASA scientists Monday.
The Phoenix Mars lander was damaged by harsh conditions during the Martian winter and repeated attempts to contact it have been unsuccessful, the US space agency said.
The lander had wrapped up its mission in 2008 and had not been expected to survive the harsh winter, which is twice as long as that on Earth. But scientists needed to make last attempts to contact it in good weather before officially writing it off.
Washington, May 24: In a major breakthrough which may pave the way for super fast computers, scientists claim to have created the world’s smallest transistor from a “quantum dot” of just seven atoms.
An international team has claimed that despite its incredibly tiny size — a mere four billionths of a metre long — the quantum dot is a functioning electronic device, the world’s first created deliberately by placing individual atom.
Thiruvananthapuram, May 24: Palmyrah trees are slowly disappearing from the landscape of Thiruvananthapuram and Palakkad districts, the only districts where they grow in numbers in Kerala. Though the State Palmyrah Products Development and Workers Welfare Corporation make efforts to revive Palmyrah cultivation and products, strong economic factors are pushing the palms towards near extinction in Kerala.
New York, May 24: India’s electronic voting machines (EVMs) with chips made in Japan and the US were designed to stop fraud and accelerate the voting process, but computer scientists say these paperless machines are vulnerable to fraud.
Professor J Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan and his computer science students say they were able to hack into the EVMs to manipulate results.
Chennai, May 23: The city-based, Nasdaq listed consumer Internet company Sify Technologies Limited has agreed to provide the Qatar-based Gulf Bridge International, a submarine cable landing station in Mumbai.
Gulf Bridge is the Middle East’s first privately owned submarine cable operator.
The company’s cable system, which will connect all the countries of the Gulf region to each other, will provide onward connectivity to India and beyond with the help of the landing station.
Toronto, May 22: Typhoid adware, a virus, is a potential threat lurking in cyber cafés, according to computer science researchers.
Adware is a software that sneaks onto computers often when users download things, for example, fancy tool bars or free screen savers, and it typically pops up lots and lots of ads.
The menace Typhoid adware, as it is called now, works in a way similar to Typhoid Mary, the first identified human carrier of typhoid fever who spread the disease to dozens of people in the New York area in the early 1900s.
Tokyo, May 21: Japan launched a new probe Friday on a two-year mission to study Venus. A rocket carrying the Venus orbiter Akatsuki, meaning Dawn in Japanese, lifted off from the Kagoshima space centre in southern Japan, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.
“Akatsuki was lifted into orbit according to our plan, so it was perfect,” Teruaki Kawai, chief of the aerospace business operations of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, was quoted by Kyodo News as saying.
San Francisco, May 21: Web search king Google Inc on Thursday showed off a risky attempt to marry the Web to television and reach the $70 billion TV advertising market, chasing a dream that has eluded even archrival Apple Inc.
Developers at a conference applauded ‘Google TV’, and a slew of tech industry titans, including microchip maker Intel Corp and TV maker Sony Corp, sent their chief executives to announce that they had joined the project and that TV sets would be ready in time for Christmas buying.
Tokyo, May 21: Japan has launched a rocked carrying an experimental space kite, which uses a technology that only requires solar energy to propel itself.
The H-2A rocket blasted off at 6:58 a.m. Friday (2158 GMT Thursday) from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, after its original launch date on Tuesday was postponed due to bad weather.
Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said that “the rocket is flying normally.”
Los Angeles, May 21: Polluted groundwater can find its way to the sea, indicating a direct link between septic systems and coastal contamination, a new study suggests.
In the first study of its kind, Stanford University researchers have tracked a plume of polluted groundwater from a septic system to one of Northern California’s top recreational beaches, reported Thursday.
The researchers say their findings could be an important step toward improving groundwater management in coastal communities throughout the US.
San Francisco, May 21: Web search king Google Inc on Thursday showed off a risky attempt to marry the Web to television and reach the $70 billion TV advertising market, chasing a dream that has eluded even archrival Apple Inc.
Developers at a conference applauded ‘Google TV’, and a slew of tech industry titans, including microchip maker Intel Corp and TV maker Sony Corp, sent their chief executives to announce that they had joined the project and that TV sets would be ready in time for Christmas buying.
Washington, May 21: In a major breakthrough, scientists have for the first time created a synthetic cell, controlled by man-made genetic instructions, which can also reproduce itself.
“We call it the first synthetic cell,” said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. “These are very much real cells”.
Developed at a cost of $30 million by the researchers at J. Craig Venter Institute, the experimental one-cell organism opens the way to manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, The Wall Street Journal reported.
San Francisco, May 20: Google “screwed up” by accidentally gathering private wireless data while taking pictures for its “Street View” mapping service, co-founder Sergey Brin has said.
Brin’s remarks came as two US lawmakers asked regulators whether the Internet giant had broken the law by capturing personal wireless data, while Italian and German authorities said they were looking into the matter.
Paris, May 20: Astronomers have discovered a new type of exploding star that spews huge quantities of calcium and defies the two known categories of supernovae, according to a pair of studies.
Only a handful of these novel star bursts have been spotted over the last few years, but they could explain the abundance of calcium observed in galaxies like our own Milky Way, the researchers said.
They could even account for the calcium present in our bones, and in all life on Earth.
Washington, May 20: US astronauts Thursday completed the second of three planned spacewalks from the shuttle Atlantis on its rendezvous with the International Space Station.
Mission Specialists Stephen Bowen and Michael Good completed their seven-hour spacewalk at 1:47 pm (local time), finishing a checklist of housekeeping chores that included tightening up bolts connecting the space-to-ground antenna dish and boom.
They also removed the tether that had been holding the dish and boom together and released the launch locks, allowing the antenna dish to rotate.
Washington, May 19: Try finding out the exact volume of water on the earth and chances are that you will get multiple results and end up confused about which one is correct and accurate.
Inspired by the need to do away with the confusion, scientists have come up with an exact figure, 1.332 billion cubic kilometres.
Matthew Charette, associate scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), is member of a research team that has audited all the water on the planet.
Abu Dhabi, May 19: Fifteen Baboon monkeys and two striped hyenas that were kept illegally for sale were seized from a house in Abu Dhabi Tuesday, officials said.
The seizure comes after a tip-off given to the Environment Agency about these endangered animals being kept illegally inside a house in Abu Dhabi’s Khalidiya Park area.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) prohibits sell of these animals. The owner of the animals was arrested.
Lucknow, May 18: A memory enhancement drug, developed by the Lucknow-based Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), a constituent laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), was today launched in the market.
“The drug developed by the institute is being launched in the market in a capsule form under the brand name of ‘Memory Sure’ by Zaar distributors for medical use,” head of CDRI’s business management Rajendra Prasad told reporters here.
San Francisco, May 18: It’s spawned scandals, spoofs and sensations and is probably the biggest time waster on the planet.
But as video-sharing internet site YouTube celebrated its fifth birthday on Monday, all the signs were that it’s just getting started.
The site, which uploaded its first video in May 2005, now boasts two billion video views per day, and according to industry experts could soon dominate the future of television.
New Delhi, May 18: Cyclone ‘Laila’ has intensified in the Bay of Bengal about 700 km south-east of Chennai. According to India Meteorological Department . Coastal areas of north Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are expected to witness heavy rains and very strong winds.
“The current environmental conditions and weather models suggest that the system is likely to intensify further and move in a west-northwesterly direction towards Andhra Pradesh coast,” an advisory issued by the India Meteorological Department said today.
Orissa, May 17: India’s very own nuclear-capable Agni-II intermediate range ballistic missile was successfully test-fired Monday from the Wheelers Island off the Orissa coast.
A team from the Strategic Forces Command of the Indian Army conducted the “user trial” of the 2,000 km plus range weapon system, which is undoubtedly a significant step forward in context of India’s strategic outreach.
The missile that was test-fired was picked up randomly from the production lot since the missile has already been inducted.
Orlando, May 17: It has applied for federal clearance to enter into a Technical Assistance Agreement
Seeking to expand cooperation with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on its moon mission, the United States is offering assistance through Boeing, which partners with the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) on its space exploration programme.