Science

Sydney, August 12: AMMONIA is a colourless, highly irritating gas with a pungent, suffocating odour.

Eighty per cent of ammonia produced by industry is used in agriculture as fertiliser.

Ammonia is also used as a refrigerant gas, which was the case in yesterday’s incident in Tanjung Karang where six people died after a leak at a refrigeration facility.

Other uses of ammonia are to purify water and in the manufacture of plastics, explosives, textiles, pesticides, dyes and other chemicals.

It is also found in many household and industrial-strength cleaning solutions.

Washington, August 12: Google has lifted the lid on a new version of its search engine, allowing users to look at the results it will generate.

The new engine, available at a separate address, looks the same as the current one but ranks results differently, which could affect businesses that rely on Google results to drive traffic.
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In a blog posting, Google says the new engine, code-named Caffeine, will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive.

Moscow, August 12: Russian companies are working on radically novel models of aircraft, including hypersonic jets that will be able to develop speeds of up to 6M, Colonel General Alexander Zelin, Chief of Staff of Air Force said.

“The Russian Air Force is doing research in this area and our institutes engage in the development of radically novel vehicles and systems,” Gen Zelin said on Tuesday in a press conference.

Washington, August 12: In the first significant outcome of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to India, the US has given clearance to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to launch Algerian satellites with American components.

This follows the signing of a Technical Safeguards Agreement covering launches of satellites, having US components on Indian launch vehicles, during Hillary Clinton’s New Delhi visit.

Bangalore, August 12: India would, by the second-half of September, launch Oceansat-2 into the space, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman G Madhavan Nair said.

The integration of the spacecraft, Oceansat-2, designed to identify potential fishing zones, assist in sea state forecasting and coastal zone studies and provide inputs for weather forecasting and climate studies, has been completed, Nair said.

Berlin, August 12: Germany should try to launch an unmanned mission to the moon by around 2015, the government official in charge of aerospace matters said on Wednesday.

In an interview with ZDF television, Economy Ministry State Secretary Peter Hintze said a German moon landing could be feasible “within the next decade, around 2015,” and urged cooperation with other European countries and the United States.

New Delhi, August 10: Ford has launched the new Ikon iKool. According to the US Company its sophisticated design is matched with features and performance.

Nigel Wark is the executive director for marketing, sales and service at Ford India. He says, “The Ikon iKool is a fun to drive yet economical car. Its new feature rich persona along with legendary driving characteristics will appeal to the upwardly mobile and ambitious customers who want their car to complement their active lifestyles.”

Washington, August 11: Computer scientists have demonstrated how criminals could hack an electronic voting machine (EVM) and ‘steal’ votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed.

The team of scientists from the Universites of California, San Diego, Michigan and Princeton employed “return-oriented programming” to force an electronic voting machine to turn against itself.

Washington, August 11: University of Minnesota researchers say that certain industries may be a significant source of plant-based oestrogens, called phytoestrogens, in surface water.

Civil engineering experts at the university’s Institute of Technology say that some of these phytoestrogens can be removed through standard wastewater treatment, but in some cases, the compounds remain at levels that may be damaging to fish.

Washington, August 11: Scientists have revealed that underground water plays a key role in triggering powerful earthquakes, an insight they claim could help seismologists to save human lives.

An international team has examined the role of water crushed out of the Earth’s crust deep below the surface in triggering powerful earthquakes, changing the dynamics of the fault and eventually causing volcanoes to form.

Washington, August 11: A new supercomputer simulation designed to track the fate of the universe’s first black holes has found that the mysterious cosmic objects couldn’t efficiently gorge themselves on nearby gas, and thus had to keep themselves on a strict diet, starving in the process.

“The first stars were much more massive than most stars we see today, upwards of 100 times the mass of our sun,” said John Wise, a post-doctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and one of the study’s authors.

Mumbai, August 11: Nokia plans to be a game changer in the Indian handset market. The change will be by moving from a la carte mobile music offering to an all-you-can eat buffet experience.
The Finnish mobile company has more than one reason to make music the core of its marketing strategy in India.

According to a Soundbuzz-PricewaterhouseCoopers report on entertainment, India’s mobile music industry will be the world’s largest at Rs 3,600 crore by 2009-10, with the demand for full-track downloads and true tones increasing.

Washington, August 10: Climate change will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, The New York Times reported.

Citing military and intelligence analysts, the newspaper said climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilise entire regions.

Tuktoyaktuk, August 10: The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square kilometres of ice in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap.

From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada’s far northwest, about 2 414km north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay about 128km at sea.

“Forty years ago, it was 64km out,” said Gruben, 89, patriarch of a local contracting business.

Seoul, August 10: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday that climate change is the greatest challenge facing a world beset by crises and called on governments to reach a deal on the environment at a meeting in Denmark later this year.

Ban said the world has “less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet”.

“It is, simply, the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family,” Ban said in a keynote speech at a gathering in Seoul of the World Federation of UN Associations.

Kathmandu, August 10: A flying frog, the world’s smallest deer and the first new monkey to be found in over a century are among 350 new species discovered in the eastern Himalayas in the past decade, the WWF said on Monday.

But the environmental group said the vital habitats of the mountain range were facing growing pressures from unsustainable development in the region, which spans Nepal, China, India, Bhutan and Myanmar.

Bangalore, August 10: India is embarking on opening new uranium mines and boosting nuclear power generation capacity as fuel supplies are expected to get a major push from domestic and international sources, a top scientist said.

Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission Anil Kakodkar told PTI here that the first consignment of 120 tonnes of uranium pellets had already landed in India, and the government was engaged in a dialogue with international vendor countries to get more such supplies.

Tuktoyaktuk, August 10: The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square miles (square kilometres) of ice on Sunday in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap.

From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada’s far northwest, 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay some 80 miles (128 kilometers) at sea.

Washington, August 10: A changing rainfall pattern may deprive a billion people of fresh water in the tropics and subtropics in the coming decades, according to the latest research.

The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of such fresh water has been creeping northwards for more than 300 years.

Washington, August 10: Scientists have created the first comprehensive visual atlas of global rainfall, which they claim shows the projections of downpour around the world over the next century.

An international team, led by the Australian National University, has created the Atlas of the Global Water Cycle based on all of the models used by India’s RK Pauchuri-headed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its report.

Tuktoyaktuk, August 10: The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square miles (square kilometres) of ice on Sunday in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching through satellite eyes for a possible record low polar ice cap.

From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada’s far northwest, 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend the ice edge lay some 80 miles (128 kilometers) at sea.

New Delhi, August 09:Telecom major Bharti Airtel Sunday launched its wireless data card for prepaid users in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR) that will enable Internet connectivity for laptops and other computing devices while on the move.

The data card can work on all the partner networks of Airtel when on national roaming and is compatible with GSM network while on international roaming, the company said in a statement.

Washington, August 09: Sony has planned a new technology ‘Exmor R’ sensor in its newest Cyber-shot cameras — DSC-TX1 and DSC- WX1 which offers the best result even in the dim-light photography.

As the “Exmor R” image sensors technique just gather more and more light will be available in conventional sensors. This technology improves shooting in low-light scenarios, enhancing image clarity and drastically reducing grain.

Hamburg, August 09: Spending the summer in a dark basement isn’t everyone’s idea of a perfect summer. Then again, not everyone is a hard-core computer gamer with a predilection for spending time in online dungeons, immersed in the newest role-playing games.

For those people, August has a new crop of potential reasons to stay inside. Action is the name of the games, though developers have opted to give them titles like Dawn of Magic 2 and Ice & Blood, the sequel to Sacred 2.

Berlin, August 09: Ideally, every computer should have an anti-virus programme installed and every computer user should be vigilant about using and updating it.

But, it’s not a perfect world, which means people need to rely on early warning signals should something go awry with their computer.

Unfortunately, that approach is also starting to lose its effectiveness as modern computer viruses become even more pernicious.