Science

Berlin, September 29: Officials at a German zoo say that a male brown bear attacked and killed a female bear in front of horrified onlookers.

Christoph Langner, the director of the zoo in the northern coastal German city of Stralsund, said the incident occurred on Saturday afternoon.

He said Sunday that zoo officials are still trying to determine why the male, a Syrian brown bear named Balou, attacked the female, Klara.

Zoo spokesman Peter Koslik said that Klara arrived at the zoo two years ago and Balou about half a year later.

Tibet, September 28: Chinese researchers have unearthed the fossil of a bird-like dinosaur with four wings in north-eastern China, which they suggest is a missing link in dinosaurs’ evolution into birds.

In a paper in the journal Nature, they said they found the well-preserved fossil of the Anchiornis huxleyi, which roamed the earth some 160 million years ago, in a geological formation in China’s north-eastern Liaoning province.

London, Septmeber 28: Apple has claimed downloads from its iTunes applications store had passed two billion and that it now had more than 85,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It did not say how many of the applications delivered were sold and how many were free.

The store has inspired rival stores and helped boost iPhone sales since the summer of 2008.

Apple said it has sold more than 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices in 77 countries.

AT&T Inc is the exclusive US provider for iPhone.

Beijing, September 28: Chinese experts Monday announced that the country’s space scientists have completed the world’s highest-resolution three-dimensional map of the moon.

The map, covering the whole surface of the moon, is based on image data obtained by a charge-coupled device (CCD) stereo camera carried by Chang’e-1, China’s first lunar probe vehicle, launched Oct 2007.

The spatial resolution of the map – measured by the distance of two features within an image that can be clearly defined – is 500 meters.

London, September 27: Zero is the hero which can give you back hours of your life by reducing time spent on hold by as much as 70 per cent.
Despite dwelling at the bottom of the keypad, it has been revealed that the humble 0 is at the top of the dial pile when it comes to fighting the dreaded automated phone “services”.

It was in researching a cheat sheet to help readers beat interactive voice response (IVR) systems that The Daily Telegraph discovered the Power of None.

Johannesburg, September 27: New Zealand defeated Sri Lanka by 38 runs in a Group B match of the Champions Trophy at the New Wanderers Stadium here Sunday.

Chasing a target of 316, Sri Lanka were all out for 277 in 46.4 overs.

–Agencies

New Delhi, September 26:Move over passport and PAN card! Identity authentication at banks, gas connection centres or while providing rural jobs will just be an SMS away, Unique Identification Authority chief Nandan Nilekani said Saturday.

“Our project will provide a unique identification (UID) number, not a card. The authentication will be made by using mobile phones,” Nilekani said.

London, September 26Google on Friday said it has enhanced its popular Internet search engine to dig deeper into pages to uncover the exact tidbits of information people seek.

While typical search results provide links to websites deemed relevant to queries, Google now weaves in direct connections to spots on pages with snippets of information that might be of interest.

“We’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page,” Chris Kern of Google’s Snippet Team wrote in a blog post.

Bangalore, September 26: A day after the ground-breaking discovery of water on the moon hit the headlines, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) G. Madhavan Nair on Friday said the Chandrayaan-1 detected water on the lunar surface as early as June 2009.

The indigenously developed Moon Impact Probe (MIP), which crash-landed at a designated site on the lunar south pole on November 14, 2008, picked up “clear signatures” of water during its 25-minute descent, Mr. Nair said at a press conference here on Friday.

Washington, September 26: Engineers have observed and tracked the movement of E. coli in a liquid medium, which is similar to that of a kayak paddle.

Their findings will help lead to a better understanding of how bacteria move from place to place and potentially, how to keep them from spreading.

Scientists have long theorised that the cigar-shaped cell bodies of E. coli and other micro-organisms would follow periodic orbits that resemble the motion of a kayak paddle as they drift downstream in a current.

Until now, no one had managed to directly observe or track those movements.

Washington, September 26: Want a PC full of free software? To get it, you don’t need to adopt Ubuntu or any of the other Unix-based operating systems. Nor do you have to rely on the sometimes risky freeware you find scattered around the Internet.

New Delhi, September 25, 2009: Gmail outage puts a question mark on reliability of cloud computing. When Gdrive was announced earlier this year many tech honchos said that it was the end of Hard disk or desktop computer. They said when whole data will be available on the net who will go for hard disk.

But with spate of gmail, Facebook and Twitter outages, many people have started questioning the feasibility and reliability of cloud computing.

New Delhi, September 25: Water does exist on lunar and it can be extracted but in less quantity, confirmed Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair on Friday. Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan’s historic discovery has given wings to the hopes about a permanent lunar base.

An elated Madhavan Nair said on the occasion that the Chandrayaan-1 was a complete success. “The Chandrayaan mission performed wonderfully. Earlier I said it had completed 95% of its mission objectives, today I say it has done 110%,” he quipped.

New Delhi, September 25: iPhone MMS update iPhone MMS release date AT&T mms. AT&T is all set to switch on MMS facility in iPhones across the US. Though it is not going to happen in one and it will be done in several shifts, most probably Friday itself.

AT&T’s been feeding us a story that it’ll offer MMS on the iPhone only “once [it completes] some system upgrades that will ensure our customers have the best experience,” but here’s the thing: it seems that it works right now — if you’ve got a build of OS 3.0 that’ll let it.

New Delhi, September 25: Samsung has launched its first android touchphone Galaxy I7500in India partnering with Tata DOCOMO. Priced at Rs 28,990, the smartphone has a metal detector, magnetic compass and more.

Samsung Galaxy 17500 packs with a 3.2 amole touch-screen, Wi-Fi connectivity, and preloaded Google mobile services such as Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Chrome, Google search and YouTube.

Galaxy is the first of the block of Android handsets the company plans to roll out in India later this year, said Asim Warsi, General Manager (Marketing) of Samsung India.

San Francisco, September 25: Internet messaging sensation Twitter is to close a new funding round of $100 million from investors who value the company as high as $1 billion, the New York Times reported Thursday.

The privately held company, which is yet to register a profit, intends to use the funds to beef up its system as it tries to grow fast to compete with Facebook.

Twitter, which allows users to blog short messages from their cellphones, currently has about 50 million users and hopes to match Facebook’s 300 million users worldwide.

Bangalore, September 25: By finding water on the lunar surface, India’s maiden lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has completed “110 percent of the objectives”, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair said here Friday.

Disagreeing with a section of the media, which dubbed the moon mission a ‘failure’ when it was abruptly aborted Aug 30 after Chandrayaan lost radio contact with the earth, Nair maintained that it was a wonderful mission.

Bangkok, September 25: A gecko with leopard-like spots on its body and a fanged frog that eats birds are among 163 new species discovered last year in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia, an environmental group said on Friday.

WWF International said that scientists in 2008 discovered 100 plants, 28 fish, 18 reptiles, 14 amphibians, two mammals and one bird species in the region. That works out to be about three species a week and is in addition to the 1 000 new species catalogued there from 1997 to 2007, the group said.

Johannesburg, September 25: South Africa’s natural water resources are declining, the Cape Times reported on Friday, quoting from a study released this week.

“With each of the national water studies carried out since the 1950s, our estimate of the country’s total natural water resources has declined,” project director Brian Middleton told the newspaper.

“If we were allocating water according to the higher estimates made in previous studies, we would find that there is simply not enough water available to meet our needs.”

Washington, September 25: Millions of Monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico for the winter and scientists have long speculated on how the insects find their way. It turns out their antennas are the key.

How do we know? Well, researchers painted butterfly antennas black, and the insects got lost.

Managing to fly south may not sound like a big deal to people armed with maps and satellite receivers, but all butterflies have for navigation is the sun in the sky.

And the sun keeps moving, so the butterflies have to constantly adjust to stay on course throughout the day.

Pasadena, September 25: A spacecraft orbiting Mars has spotted water ice in several impact craters midway between the north pole and equator – the first time ice so close to the surface has been discovered so far south on the red planet.

Instruments on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter estimated that the newfound ice is 99% pure.

Previous spacecraft have spied ice lurking below the Martian surface. Before the Phoenix lander froze to death last year, it dug trenches and touched ice specks at its arctic landing site.

Paris, September 25: The stunning remains of a “four-winged” dinosaur have confirmed that birds owe their ancestry to two-footed dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago, the world’s most famous fossil-hunter said.

Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing is staking the claim thanks to an astonishingly-preserved fossil of a bird-like dinosaur called Anchiornis huxleyi.

Until now, A. huxleyi was thought to be a primitive bird. It was presumed to have been a near-contemporary of Archaeopteryx, the first recognised bird, which flew around 150 million years ago.

Bangalore, September 25: India on Friday hailed the discovery of water on the moon as a triumph for its lunar programme as the country aims to cement its reputation as a serious player in the space industry.

The mood among India’s space scientists has gone from disappointment last month when its Chandrayaan-1 satellite mission was prematurely aborted to jubilation with news of a major discovery made in partnership with Nasa.

Tokyo, September 25: Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game console outsold Nintendo’s Wii nearly fivefold in Japan in the three weeks to September 20, helped by the launch of a new cheaper, slim version, a survey said on Friday.

Sony sold 257 254 PS3s in its home market in the three-week period, while Nintendo sold 52 229 Wii consoles, the research by video game publisher Ascii Media Works showed.

Paris, September 25: French archaeologists have discovered the oldest known place of worship dedicated to the dugong, or sea cow, on an island just north of Dubai, two research centers said on Thursday.

The sanctuary believed to date back to 3 500 to 3 200 years BC was discovered on Akab island in the United Arab Emirates, 50km north of Dubai.