Science

San Francisco, November 13: Intel is to pay smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices $1.25 billion to settle claims that the computer-chip giant violated antitrust and patent laws, the companies said.

The move comes just days after Intel was sued by New York state for antitrust violations and follows a $1.5-billion fine slapped on Intel by the European Commission for antitrust offences. Regulators in Europe and the US said the civil settlement would not derail their legal actions against the Silicon Valley pioneer.

New Delhi, Nov 12: Carol Bartz’s mantra for positioning Yahoo! at the ‘centre of people’s online lives’ is simple: “Go where the Internet population is growing.” And India is ‘central’ to her plans to revamp the struggling Internet giant’s operations after signing a long-term search deal with once arch-rival Microsoft.

Hong Kong, Nov 12: Face-recognition technology might be used to screen the residents at Hong Kong border checkpoints, Security Secretary Ambrose Lee said Thursday.

The wealthy city of seven million already uses fingerprint checks to allow permanent residents to pass through unmanned checkpoints using ID cards at its airport and land border crossings.

Now the city is considering introducing face-recognition technology similar to that being put into use at Beijing’s international airport, Lee said in a written answer to the legislators.

Washington, Nov 12: A group led by the head of the United States’ biggest science organization is in Cuba this week to discuss ways to rekindle scientific cooperation as U.S.-Cuba relations slowly improve under U.S. President Barack Obama.

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Agre, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told Reuters on Wednesday the group had met with government officials and Cuban scientists, all of them enthusiastic about doing science together.

Sydney, Nov 12: A large iceberg was spotted off an island about halfway between Antarctica and Australia, a rare sight in waters so far north, Australian scientists said on Thursday.

Australian Antarctic Division researchers working on Macquarie Island, about 1,500 kilometres southeast of Tasmania, first saw the iceberg last Thursday about 8 kilometres off the northwest coast of the island.

Washington, November 11: A maths model will peer into foetal health and heart accurately, giving the unborn baby better chances of survival and a healthy life.

Ofer Barnea, biomedical engineer at Tel Aviv University (TAU), with Jacob Bar from the Wolfson Medical Centre has developed a tool that combines powerful algorithms with ultrasound to probe foetal physiology.

The foetus fails to grow during pregnancy possibly due to a poorly developed heart, which can also cause brain damage.

Mumbai, Nov 11: Environment-friendly and energy – efficient buildings are increasingly becoming popular and may grow over three times in the next five years, thereby offering new opportunities to the beleaguered construction industry, a government official said on wednesday.

“Today, India has close to 30 million square ft of green buildings; an amazing achievement given the fact that we had only about 20,000 square ft in 2003 when the movement started here,” Ajay Mathur, Director General for Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) under the Ministry of Power, said in a release here.

Los Angeles, Nov 11: Backers of a failed mission to launch the world’s first solar-sail spacecraft unveiled plans on Monday to try again five years later with a smaller, swifter satellite to test the limits of sunlight propulsion.

The privately funded venture, organized by the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society, is based on the premise of spaceflight powered not by rocket fuel or chemical propellants but by streams of photons — light particles — pushing against a sail in the vacuum of space.

Washington, November 11: The US space agency NASA has released a unique composite image of the center of the Milky Way galaxy in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

The composite image commemorates the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.

NASA’s Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.

Ludhiana, Nov 11: In order to combat the power crisis and also to lose the extra kilos, city-based industrialist Gurwant Singh has made an exerciser which can generate electricity as well. The model priced at Rs 18,000 is being sent by Punjab government to the India International Trade fair being held at Pargati Maidan in Delhi from November 14.

Singh said, “Magnetic coils have been been fitted in the battery attached in the fly-wheel of this exerciser and hence it works on simple principle that mechanical energy converts into electrical energy.”

London, Nov 11: Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula.

This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. The blooms absorb carbon and as they die, phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store it for millennia.

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) estimate that this new natural ‘sink’ is taking an estimated 3.5 million tonnes of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere each year.

London, November 10: A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down’s Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

To find out, Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences launched a study Tuesday to look at the use of animals containing human material in scientific research.

Chicago, November 10: Injecting tiny polymer spheres into rats right after a spinal cord injury helped the animals recover movement and prevented secondary nerve damage that often follows such injuries, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

The experimental treatment uses spheres called copolymer micelles that fuse with injured nerve fibers and prevent inflammation from doing more damage to surrounding nerves.

Moscow, November 10: Vitaly Ginzburg, a Russian physicist who survived Stalin’s purges by working on the Soviet atomic bomb project and later won the Nobel Prize for physics, died in Moscow late on Sunday after a long illness. He was 93.

Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel physics prize for developing the theory behind superconductors, materials which allow electricity to pass without resistance at very low temperatures. He shared the prize with British-American Anthony Leggett and Russian-born U.S. scientist Alexei Abrikosov.

Los Angeles, November 10: Backers of a failed mission to launch the world’s first solar-sail spacecraft unveiled plans on Monday to try again five years later with a smaller, swifter satellite to test the limits of sunlight propulsion.

The privately funded venture, organized by the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society, is based on the premise of spaceflight powered not by rocket fuel or chemical propellants but by streams of photons — light particles — pushing against a sail in the vacuum of space.

London, November 10: Internet giant Google has been ordered to pay $500,000 in damages to Formula 1 racer Rubens Barrichelo for hosting fake online profiles of him on its social network Orkut.

The decision by the court in Sao Paulo was published in the Brazilian state’s official government gazette yesterday.

The damages could be raised to $700,000 because of the case was lodged in July 2006, and that Google risked a daily fine of $590 until the pages referring to Mr Barrichelo were removed.

San Francisco, November 10: The open source internet browser Firefox marked its fifth anniversary Monday, celebrating its rise from an unknown challenger to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to a formidable competitor that has been downloaded over one billion times by 330 million users around the world.

“Over the last five years we’ve been setting ourselves up for the next five. The web is moving faster, not slower, and modern browsers are set to handle it,” said Chris Blizzard of the Mozilla Foundation.

Hamburg, Nov 09: A new nasal spray boosts short-term memory while you sleep, according to a team of German scientists at a sleep research lab.

In a research report in The FASEB Journal, the researchers show that a molecule from the body’s immune system (interleukin-6) when administered through the nose helps the brain retain emotional and procedural memories during REM sleep.

New Delhi, November 08: Eleven professionals, working for the past two years through a model of self help and corporate governance, have come out with a coffee table book, which is arguably India’s first literary work to be promoted on Youtube.

According to the writers, “this is the first coffee table book on Assam, portraying everything about the state in a positive manner and targeting the world readership that has very little or distorted opinion about our beautiful state.”

The aim of the writers is to “use the coffee table book as the right medium to put Assam on the world map”.

Frankfurt, November 08: Dell has released two new laptops from the nascent ULV class. The 13z and 15z are members of the Inspiron series and cost $550 and $580 respectively. ULV stands for Ultra Low Voltage and refers to processors designed to work at lower voltages and use less power.

In the case of the new Dell laptops, that translates into respective battery lives of 11 hours (13z with a 13.3 inch monitor) and 10 hours (15z with 15.6 inch monitor).

Hamburg, November 08: Ever wonder where you stored a certain file on your computer? If you have the new Windows 7 or even Windows Vista on your computer, you won’t need any extra software to answer that question. The functionality already built into Windows 7 and Vista beats the performance offered by four free search programmes, the experts at Germany’s Computer Bild magazine found.

Dammam, November 07: The giant Ukrainian Antonov 225 cargo airplane landed at King Fahd International Airport in Dammam Thursday night before departing on a six-hour flight to Tanzania Friday morning.

The plane took off loaded with 123 tons of oil drilling equipment worth SR 3.75 million for a private Tanzanian oil company.

New Zealand, November 07: Scientists have discovered the first evidence that dinosaurs roamed the South Island of New Zealand with 70-million-year-old footprints found in six locations.

They are the first dinosaur footprints found in the country although bones, mostly vertebrae, have been discovered in two North Island locations.

The footprints were found by scientist Greg Browne in the remote Whanganui Inlet in the northwest of Nelson at the top of the South Island.

They are spread over 10 kilometres and in one area there are up to 20 footprints, Mr Browne said.

Bangalore, November 07: Chandrayaan-II moon mission, which will help in analysis of mineral composition and undertake terrain mapping of the moon, will be completed by 2012-13, Project Director of Chandrayaan Dr M Annadurai said today.

“The Rs 425 crore project will be completed by 2012-13. As opposed to Chandrayaan-1 which was a moon orbiter, in Chandrayaan-2, the two moon rovers will actually land on the moon surface,” he said inaugurating the sixth National Student Conference at University Visveswaraya College of Engineering.

Washington, Nov 07: Contrary to popular belief, the Internet and mobile phones are not isolating people but enhancing their social worlds, according to a U.S. survey.

The survey was sparked by a 2006 study by U.S. sociologists who argued technology is advancing a trend seen since 1985 — Americans becoming more socially isolated, their social networks shrinking, and the diversity of their contacts decreasing.