Science

New Delhi, December 28: A partial lunar eclipse, Chandra Grahan, will take place in India during December 31, 2009 and end during the early hours of January 1, 2010.

The partial eclipse time is from 17:17:07 GMT to 21:28:15 GMT. The corresponding India time of the Grahan is from 22:47 hrs on December 31, 2009 to 02:58 hrs on January 1, 2010. According to NASA, this is a partial lunar eclipse and is visible in India, Nepal, Dubai, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Singapore, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and other places in Asia (eastern hemisphere).

New Delhi, December 26: A managing director of a city based software firm, a gold certified partner of Microsoft, and his associate have been arrested for cheating and forgery of Microsoft products, officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said Friday.

“Kamlesh Kumar Jha of K.K. Software Solutions Private Ltd. in Dwarka has been arrested along with his accomplice Kishan Kumar on the complaint of Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd,” a CBI spokesman said here.

London, December 25:An enzyme capable of disrupting bacterial chats offers a novel way of fighting infections, says a new study.

Although bacteria are simple single-celled organisms, they are capable of chatting with one another, by exchanging tiny hormone-like signal molecules.

By means of this ‘quorum sensing’, activities of a large group of bacteria are synchronised, according to University of Groningen (Netherlands) researchers.

Thus, bacteria can adapt quickly to changes in their environment such as the running out of nutrients or the arrival of rival micro-organisms.

Banglore, December 25: An executive of a Chennai-based firm has been arrested for creating a fake e-mail through which an “obscene profile” in the name of a housewife here was posted on a popular social networking site, police said today.

A resident here had lodged a complaint with the cyber crime police station in October about the fake profile in Orkut where her phone number was given inviting for sexual favours, following which the woman started receiving calls regularly from strangers, police said.

London, December 24: Scientists have identified two genes that, when simultaneously activated, spur the most aggressive forms of human brain cancer.

The discovery, by a team of Columbia scientists led by Antonio Iavarone, associate professor of neurology in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Andrea Califano, director of the Columbia Initiative in Systems Biology, may lead to completely novel strategies to diagnose and treat these incurable tumours.

Washington, December 24: Genome scientists from the US and Germany have assembled the first pages of a comprehensive encyclopedia of genomes of all the microbes on Earth, which will help biologists find new genes and fill out the branches of the “Tree of Life.”

“This is a rich sampling of the diversity of microbial genomes,” said Professor Jonathan Eisen of the UC Davis Genome Center and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, and senior author on the paper.

Moscow, Dec 24: Given the difficulties and risks posed to humans, Russia is to prepare a monkey for a space mission to planet Mars.

Russia has been sending monkeys to space for over two decades and this time a short-tailed monkey will be the first to fly to Mars.

The monkey will experience radiation that would have posed risk to astronauts.

The director of an institute that supplied monkeys to the Soviet space program in the ’80s says the facility is in talks with Russia’s Cosmonautics Academy over supplying animals for a simulated Mars mission.

Moscow, Dec 24: Russia will help India build a manned spaceship and send an Indian astronaut to space under a 10-year cooperation programme.

New Delhi had asked Moscow to share with it the technologies to build a manned spacecraft and take an Indian astronaut aboard a Soyuz, chief of the Piloted Programmes of Roskosmos Alexei Krasnov told reporters on Wednesday.

Toronto, December 24: A tiny Canadian IT firm, which won a big patent-infringement victory against software giant Microsoft Tuesday, couldnt have wished for a better Christmas gift. They are hoping the global publicity will spell growth in its fortunes.

Toronto-based i4i Inc, which will also get $290 million in damages from Microsoft for stealing its software Word, says its victory is “a war cry for talented inventors whose patents are infringed” by corporate sharks. Tuesday’s victory will serve as a springboard for growth, i4i executives told the media Wednesday.

Seattle, December 23: A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld a $290-million judgement against Microsoft for infringing on a patent in its flagship product Word relating to the use of XML or extensible markup language.

The US court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit also ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word programmes containing the infringing code from Jan 11, 2010.

The ruling came in an appeal by Microsoft against a Texas jury verdict last August which found that Microsoft had violated patents owned by Canadian software company i4i Inc.

New Delhi, Dec 23: By endorsing the Copenhagen Accord at the just concluded U.N. climate meet, India has failed to protect the interests of the people most affected by climate change not only in India but worldwide, environmental group Greenpeace said on Tuesday.

Reacting to the Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s statement on India’s position at Copenhagen on climate change, it said India had shirked its responsibility to show leadership and let down the most impacted communities in the least developed countries and island states.

Washington, Decembe 23: A Russian Soyuz spacecraft brought an international group of holiday visitors to the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday, expanding the crew to five just ahead of Christmas.

US astronaut TJ Creamer, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will join American commander Jeff Williams and Russian Maxim Suraev aboard the orbiting space station for six months.

Toronto, December 23: Upholding patent-infringement charges by a small Toronto firm agaist Microsoft Tuesday, a US appeals court ordered the software giant to stop selling Word by Jan 11 and pay $290 million in damages.

Microsoft said it will introduce the copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007 without the offending technology by the court-ordered deadline. Tuesday’s ruling upholds an earlier injunction against Microsoft that banned the technology giant from selling Word.

New Delhi, December 23: Faced with a strident attack from Opposition over the Copenhagen climate deal, the government on Tuesday asserted that the Accord will not affect the country’s sovereignty but admitted digression on the issue of reporting about mitigation actions on tackling global warming.

Bangalore, December 22: Professor C N R Rao has become the first ever Indian to be awarded the highest international medal in chemistry instituted by the German Chemical Society.

Rao has been selected for the August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann Medal for his outstanding contributions in the subject. It is the highest international medal in chemistry awarded once in two or three years, according to the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research here.

Washington, Dec 22: American researchers have discovered a technique that will make genome sequencing faster and cheaper by dramatically reducing the amount of DNA required.

A team of researchers led by Boston University scientist Amit Meller has devised a method which will soon eliminate the expensive, time-consuming and error-prone step of DNA amplification.

In the study, published in journal Nature Nanotechnology, the team developed a way to draw long strands of DNA efficiently through nanopore sensors using electrical fields.

London, Dec 21: Any review of the major technology developments of 2009 would inevitably include copious copy on the Googles, Microsofts and other giants of the tech world.

But it was also a year in which the tiny company called Twitter became a major communications force, and when political, economic, social and technological trends combined to put green technology at the forefront of innovation.

Paris, December 20: A military spy satellite has been shot into space by France in a move to reinforce the country’s capability to develop new intelligent systems.

The Helios 2B satellite was launched on a European Ariane rocket on Friday from the European Space Agency launch site in Kourou in the French Guiana.

The mission, first scheduled to be launched on December 9, had been delayed twice.

The latest delay occurred during countdown on Thursday when an incoherence of records emerged.

Hamburg, December 20: German doctors have implanted a special microchip in the retina of a blind Finnish man, enabling him to see, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday on its website.

The 1,500-pixel sensor chip can mimic the electrical signals sent by a healthy eye through the nervous system to the brain.

The patient, 45, who was identified only by his first name, Miika, was able to orient himself by sight and read letters of the alphabet, according to the magazine.

Los Angeles, December 20: US scientists have discovered fog moving across the south pole of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Titan looks to be the only place in the solar system aside from Earth to have copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) on its surface.

The new discovery suggests that Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog, according to researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

London, December 19: World airline passenger traffic fell 3.1 percent in 2009, the biggest drop in aviation industry history, fuelled by the global financial downturn, the International Civil Aviation Organisation said.

Preliminary figures for airline travel this year showed that international traffic declined by about 3.9 percent and domestic traffic by 1.8 percent, despite sharp growth in some regions.

Iran, December 19: Popular microblogging site Twitter was briefly shut down overnight, its homepage replaced with an image claiming the site had been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.

The website’s official blog acknowledged the disruption but gave no details as to how the site had been disrupted and who was responsible.

“Last night, DNS settings for the Twitter website were hijacked,” the site’s co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the blog.

New Delhi, December 18: With the controversy over India’s nuclear deterrence refusing to die down, top scientists from atomic and other fields today urged the government to quickly set up a high-level and Independent panel of experts to chalk out an effective course of action in development of thermo -nuclear weapons.

The proposed broad-based mechanism is required for getting the country out of the impasse in which it is on the “crucial aspect of our Credible Nuclear Deterrent and hence on the core of our national, military and political security”, the scientists said.

Washington, December 18: MSI, the motherboard and graphics card manufacturer, has launched its new R5770-PMD1G graphics card that is embedded with the over voltage function of GPU.

The card comes with the Radeon HD 5770 GPU, 1 GB of high speed GDDR5 memory and 800 units of stream processors and is made with 40 nm manufacturing process.

Washington, Dec 18: Reading and spelling are complex processes, but researchers have now identified a specific part of the brain – the left fusiform gyrus – which makes sense of the written word as well as their correct spellings.

Kyrana Tsapkini, Neurologist and Brenda Rapp, cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University, studied the reading comprehension and spelling abilities of a patient who had undergone surgical removal of part of his brain due to a tumour.