SciTech

Space shuttle Endeavour wraps-up mission

megha — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:44:35 +0530

Space shuttle Endeavour and its seven astronauts safely returned to Earth on Sunday, taking a detour to sunny California after storms hit the main landing strip in Florida.

Endeavour wrapped up a 16-day trip that left the international space station freshly remodeled and capable of housing bigger crews.

The shuttle dropped off all kinds of home improvement equipment, including a new bathroom, kitchenette, exercise machine, two sleeping quarters and a recycling system designed to convert astronauts' urine and sweat into drinking water.

But the mission wasn't without its problems. Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper let go of a $100,000 tool bag during the first spacewalk, muttering "Oh, great" as it floated away. And Endeavour's astronauts also had to put in extra effort to get the urine processor working.

About seven liters of recycled urine and condensation were coming back aboard Endeavour for extensive testing. No one at the space station will drink the recycled water until the equipment runs for 90 days and ground tests ensure it's safe. More samples will be returned on the next shuttle flight.

The shuttle crew also conducted four spacewalks to clear metal shavings from a solar wing rotary joint at the space station. The joint had been jammed for more than a year and hampered energy production at the orbiting outpost. Initial tests indicated the repairs on the joint were successful.

The space station additions - and a few more scheduled to go up on the next shuttle flight in February - should enable NASA to double the size of the space station crew by June.

On Sunday, NASA ordered the detour to California after dangerously high wind and a stormy sky prevented a Florida landing. "Welcome back. That was a great way to finish a fantastic flight," Mission Control radioed.

"And we're happy to be here in California," shuttle commander Christopher Ferguson replied.

Congratulations also came down from the space station. "Wow," said skipper Mike Fincke, who watched the landing broadcast live. Returning home from a six-month mission was former space station resident Gregory Chamitoff, who had rocketed away from the planet at the end of May.

The space shuttle's journey, short by comparison, spanned 6.6 million miles and 250 orbits of Earth.

After landing, the astronauts inspected the shuttle's underbelly. Accompanied by three crew members, Ferguson spoke briefly on the tarmac. He said Endeavour "fared entry pretty well" and called the mission extremely successful.

He noted that Chamitoff wasn't present because it takes longer for a person who has been in space so long to reacclimatize to gravity, and said the other two astronauts - Stefanyshyn-Piper and Donald Pettit - were just keeping an eye on him.

"The crew members who are not with us are doing just fine," he said.

NASA always prefers to land the space shuttles at their home base in Florida. It takes about a week and costs $1.8 million to transport a shuttle from California to Florida, atop a modified jumbo jet. The astronauts also had been rooting for a Florida touchdown; that's where their families were waiting.

As Endeavour soared over Houston, home to Mission Control, Ferguson could see all the bad weather in Florida. "I think you made a good call," he radioed.

It was the first space shuttle landing at Edwards in more than a year. When Endeavour hurtled over metropolitan Los Angeles, firefighters responded to a report of an explosion that turned out to have been the spacecraft's signature sonic booms.

Ferguson landed on a temporary runway that's shorter and more narrow than the Kennedy landing strip. Edwards' main runway - which parallels the temporary one - just underwent maintenance and upgrades, and has yet to be equipped with all the necessary navigation equipment.

NASA officials said both Ferguson and his co-pilot, Eric Boe, had practiced on the temporary runway in training aircraft. Endeavour's crew members were expected to be reunited with their families on Monday in Houston.

Early on Sunday morning, a Russian supply ship arrived at the space station with Christmas presents, food, clothes and other items.

Pakistani bloggers show solidarity with Mumbaikars

manoj — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:04:09 +0530

As tensions mount between Pakistan and India, Pakistani bloggers are going the extra mile to show solidarity with Mumbaikars.

"And so, in prayer and in solidarity, I stand today with Mumbaikars everywhere. In shock at what has happened. In fear of what might happen yet. In anger at those who would be so calculated in their inhuman massacre," wrote Adil Najam, who blogs at All Things Pakistan.

"In sympathy with those whose pain so hurts my own heart but whose tears I cannot touch, whose wounds I cannot heal, and whose grief I cannot relieve."

Najam, who once visited the Taj and Oberoi hotels in a bid to spot "Bollywood bigwigs", wrote: "The first time I ever visited the Taj Mahal Hotel was with my wife. We had been married just weeks and were not staying at the Taj but went to the historic 'Sea Lounge'.

"We went to the Oberoi Hotel (too) on the same visit in the naive and mistaken belief that we would find Bollywood bigwigs hanging out there. My words of condemnation will not change the actions of those who have committed such heinous murder and mayhem. Nor will my words of sympathy diminish the agony of the victims. But speak out I must...And, so, to any Mumbaikar who might be listening, I say: I stand with you today. In prayer and in solidarity," Najam wrote.

Nearly 200 people were killed and hundreds injured in a string of coordinated terrorist attacks in Mumbai. India has linked Pakistan-based elements to the attacks, a charge denied by Islamabad.

Another avid blogger wrote an "Ode to Bombay" on the popular e-zine "Pak Tea House".

"Once again they have attacked, at the heart of Bombay. Bombay is everything which they hate. Bombay is Freedom, Bombay is Life, Bombay is Music, Bombay is Light. This is the attack on (the) city of Lights," Ali Shahryar wrote.

"They will fail to destroy India, they will fail to destroy the thousands of years-old tradition of culture of tolerance and wisdom. Bombay lives, united and whole, full of lights and music, it will once again be. Prophets of darkness can never defeat Light. Because Light is eternal," he wrote.

Following Najam's post, a blogger known as BrassTacks wondered if Najam was an Indian agent.

"Why did you never write about the blasts in Islamabad and Lahore? Why only worry about India? I think this is an Indian agent website," BrassTacks comment read.

Another blogger Babar asked if Najam would be welcomed in Mumbai.

Some others condemned the act of terrorism but were upset at the "finger-pointing at Pakistan".

A blogger wrote: "Unlike Adil Najam, I am really not too keen to be a Mumabite, Delhite...or whatever Indian especially when the Indian PM points a finger at my country, Pakistan, for this crime without rhyme, reason or solid proof."

But some bloggers frankly admitted that Pakistanis were not as "innocent" as they were being made out to be.

"I am also a Pakistani but frankly I am not too sure of (the) innocence of our people. Let us face it. It is not just current attack in Mumbai, but several other terrorist attacks carried out in other countries including those in Pakistan have shown linkage to Pakistan," wrote Bunty.

"Such elements are (the) scourge of any civilized society and need to be flushed out without regard to their nationality. Pakistan government should give full cooperation (in the) Mumbai investigations and if any Pakistani is found involved in this, he should be punished as any criminal," he added.

One post by a Pakistani blogger known as "I, Me, Myself" read: "Words that heal are perhaps the need of the hour! Yours definitely are! Thank you!"

Scientists find meteor debris in Canada

megha — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:50:15 +0530

Scientists said on Friday that they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month.

University of Calgary scientist Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley found several meteor fragments near the Battle River along the rural Alberta-Saskatchewan border, near the city of Lloydminster late on Thursday.

They said there could be thousands of meteorite pieces strewn over a 7-square-mile area of mostly flat, barren land, with few inhabitants.

Residents in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have been buzzing about the huge fireball that lit up the night sky over the three provinces on November 20. Witnesses reported hearing sonic boom rumblings and said the fiery flash was as bright as the sun.

Hildebrand, who also coordinates meteor sightings with the Canadian Space Agency, estimated the meteor could have been seen from as far as 434 miles away, into the northern United States.

Widely broadcast video images of the meteor showed what appeared to be a speeding fireball that became larger and brighter before disappearing as it neared the ground.

The meteor contained about one-tenth of a kiloton of energy when it entered the earth's atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of 100 tons of the chemical explosive TNT.

"It would be something like a billion-watt light bulb," said Hildebrand. The meteor has captured the imagination of sky watchers around the world.

Robert Haag, a space rock collector from Arizona, offered up to $9,700 for the first one-kilogram chunk of the meteor that is found.

Astronauts await permission to land Endeavour

megha — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:48:23 +0530

Their work in orbit accomplished, space shuttle Endeavour's astronauts got the green light to return to Earth, but were warned that bad weather at the main landing site could send them across the country or keep them up an extra day.

On Saturday afternoon - 24 hours before the planned landing - Mission Control informed the seven astronauts that Endeavour had been cleared for re-entry following analysis of data beamed down from a final thermal survey of their ship.

The space shuttle was found to be free of any serious defects caused by space junk that could jeopardize the descent.

The astronauts noticed a small strip of material floating away as they checked out their flight systems, but Mission Control told them not to worry. It was merely a 3-inch label.

Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff was especially eager to come back: He's been off the planet, away from his wife and 3-year-old twins, since the end of May.

"My watch is telling me that it will be 182 days for me today away from home," Chamitoff said on Saturday. "A lot of people have to spend time away from home, but I've been lucky to have a really spectacular place to live for the last half year.

"I'm very proud that all of us here are leaving the space station a better, more spectacular place than it was when we arrived."

Endeavour and its crew left the international space station on Friday, ending a nearly two-week visit that set the stage for population growth next year.

The astronauts furnished the orbiting outpost with a new bathroom, kitchen, exercise machine, sleeping quarters and recycling system designed to convert urine and sweat into drinking water.

NASA to send solar-powered mission to Jupiter

megha — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:44:51 +0530

US space agency NASA is to send a solar-powered mission to Jupiter to view the planet's unseen parts.

The $1 million mission, Juno, will be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in August 2011; after reaching Jupiter in 2016, it will orbit 32 times over the course of its year-long mission, the NASA said.

In fact, Juno will take up a polar orbit around the planet, skimming the poles at an altitude of 5,000 kilometres. The probe will also fly between Jupiter's atmosphere and the intense radiation belts that girdle the planet.

Juno will carry a suite of 11 science instruments, some of which will be used to measure the planet's gravity, magnetic field, and chemical makeup, according to the US space agency.

"We're really looking at composition. We're going after the ingredients of Jupiter so we can reconstruct the recipe," the 'New Scientist' quoted Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute as saying.

In fact, Juno will be the second orbiter to study Jupiter. The first such probe, Galileo, encircled the planet's equator for eight years before finally plunging into Jovian atmosphere in 2003.

Since oxygen is the third-most abundant element in the Universe and in the Sun, many planetary scientists expect to see a fair amount of water in Jupiter. But Galileo's probe, which entered Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995, saw very little evidence of water.

Juno will attempt a more global search. The probe will use radio antennae to measure light absorbed by water and ammonia at six different depths in the atmosphere.

It water is present, it could fill out the photo of how the planet formed, the scientists hope.

Maldives' battle for survival in face of climate change

megha — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:14:05 +0530

The future fate of The Maldives stands out as a genuine doomsday scenario. Photo Courtesy: AFP.

Maldives' battle for survival in face of climate change

Wed-Nov 26, 2008

Male / Agence France-Presse

Among the many grim predictions of climate change experts, the future fate of The Maldives stands out as a genuine doomsday scenario with the island chain nation facing nothing short of extinction.

A one-metre (3.3-foot) rise in sea level would almost totally submerge the country's 1,192 coral islands scattered off the southern tip of India. Experts predict a rise of at least 18 centimetres is likely by the end of the century.

So pressing has the danger become that the new Maldivian President Mohamed Anni Nasheed has said his government will begin saving now to buy a new homeland for his people to flee to in the future.

"We are talking about taking insurance - if the islands are sinking we must find high land some place close by. We should do that before we sink," Nasheed said following his recent election victory.

"I don't want Maldivians to end up as environmental refugees in some camp," he said.

The new Maldivian government says it has already broached the subject of new land with a number of countries and found them to be "receptive". India and Sri Lanka are targets because they have similar cultures and climates, while Australia has also been mooted as an option.

The fate of the pristine white beaches of the Maldives, South Asia's most expensive tourist destination, is set to be one of the features in discussions at a UN climate conference in the Polish city of Poznan from December 1-12.

The country's land area is only about 300 square kilometres, while its sea area is nearly 100,000 square kilometers. Over 80 percent of the land is less than one meter above mean sea level.

"Climate change and associated sea level rise represents a catastrophe in the making for Maldives," the Maldivian environment ministry said.

For some Maldivians, such as fisherman Ali Usuf, the impact of climate change can already be felt. Like all his fellow tuna fisherman, Usuf is wholly dependent on livebait to reel in his daily catch.

The bait is taken from small schooling fish varieties that breed and live on the Maldives' 9,000-square-kilometre network of coral reefs that are highly vulnerable to climate change.

Warmer waters have already taken their toll on the health of the reefs and, as a result, on livebait stocks.

For Usuf, no bait means no catch and therefore no livelihood "Because of global warming it's difficult to get bait. This affects our life," Usuf told AFP.

"Just today, one boat turned back because they didn't catch any bait." Around one kilogram of livebait is required to catch 10 kilos of tuna.

Former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom launched a book in April to highlight the threat to the Maldives posed by global warming.

He said at the time that they could only adapt to the problem by relocating citizens to safer islands. The alternative, building protective walls on the 193 inhabited islands, was too expensive.

Gayoom himself was nearly washed into the Indian Ocean in April 1987 when giant tidal waves swept the capital island of Male.

"While I was inspecting the damage, a large wave reared up suddenly and buffeted the vehicle I was in," Gayoom wrote later. "It was a moment of fear, not for my own safety, but for the safety of the people of Maldives."

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Search on for meteorite that lit Canada

megha — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:47:35 +0530

Scientists and amateur astronomers have been combing the prairies in western Canada for a 10-ton meteorite that lit the sky and exploded with the force of 300 tons of dynamite, according to experts from the Canadian Space Agency.

The meteorite, seen on Thursday by thousands of people in a 700 kilometer radius, fell southeast of Lloydminster, near the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces, astrophysicists Alan Hildebrand and Peter Brown said in a statement.

At the moment it entered the atmosphere, the asteroid fragment weighed approximately 10 tonnes, from an energy estimate derived from infrasound records, said Brown, professor of meteor physics at University of Western Ontario.

"The indicated energy is approximately one third of a kiloton of TNT," he added.

Hundreds of fragments of the meteorite weighing more than 50 grams were likely strewn over a wide area since its the speed of entry, some 14 kilometers per second, was well below the average 20 kilometers per second of most meteorites, said University of Calgary researcher Hildebrand.

Most meteorites fall to earth at such a high speed that they burn up completely before reaching the ground.

The fireball enveloping the chunks of meteorites, which Hildebrand likened to a billion-watt lightbulb shining in the sky, was filmed by several people, whom researchers have been tracking down since Friday in the area.

"We are now trying to get all the transient information about the fireball before it is lost," Hildebrand said.

"Many motels and gas stations only keep their security recordings for one week or less, so we urge everyone to check their systems to see if they recorded the fireball or the moving shadows that it cast," he added.

Hildebrand and Brown are members of the Small Bodies Discipline Working Group that is funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

Indian, Pak hackers deface govt websites

manoj — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:41:46 +0530

Indian and Pakistani hackers are engaged in a round of tit-for-tat defacing of government-run websites of the two countries, targeting such major organisations as India's oil and gas major ONGC and its Pakistani counterpart OGRA.

The cyber warfare began in mid-November when an Indian group of hackers known as HMG or "Guards of Hindustan" defaced the website of Pakistan's Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority and deleted all its data.

The move created a buzz in cyberspace as HMG had earlier hacked a number of Pakistani communities on the social networking website Orkut.

Apparently acting in retaliation, a group calling itself the Pakistan Cyber Army (PCA) on Tuesday hacked five Indian websites, including those of ONGC, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), Indian Railways and the Kendriya Vidyalaya in Ratlam.

While the websites of ONGC and Indian Railways were quickly restored, the IIRS website is still blank. In a message posted briefly on the ONGC website, PCA said the hacking was carried out in retaliation for the hacking of the OGRA website.

"Back off, go read some course books, else you will lose both, your name and this game. We will literally smoke your doors off like other groups did before," said the message from PCA.

Responding quickly to the actions of the PCA, HMG took control of the website of Kendriya Vidyalaya in Ratlam. The website still features a message from HMG asking the site owner to fix its "flaws."

"Ur site was hacked by Pakistani hackers, now ur site is in our Indian hackers' control," said the message from HMG.

After internet usage became popular in the Indian subcontinent in the early 1990s, Indian and Pakistani hackers including those based in the West often engaged in tit-for-tat defacing of websites of both countries.

Those activities subsided after a few years. Hackers cannot control a website permanently even if they break into it.

They usually post a fake page on a hacked website.

Ironically, PCA has asked Indian authorities to take action against HMG for hacking Pakistani websites "or get ready for more action."

Ants offer clues to improve traffic flow: Experts

tejas — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:46:55 +0530

Ever wonder how hundreds of ants are able to go up and down a narrow twig without bumping into each other? A team of German scientists wants to find out how ants avoid collisions so that they can use the same principle for traffic control.

The scientists built an ingenious super "ant farm" complete with roads, and bridges and a veritable city of ants. Then they observed the traffic patterns of the ants and fed their findings in to a computer.

The Dresden Institute of Technology collective intelligence expert Dirk Helbing and his team set up an ant highway with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup, according to their findings, published in New Scientist.

Unsurprisingly, the narrower route soon became congested. But to the amazement of the scientists, they found that just before the shortest route became completely clogged, outgoing ants diverted incoming ants to another route and traffic jams along the sugar syrup meal corridor never formed.

The German researchers then applied what they learned by studying the insects and created a computer model of more complex networks of routes of varying lengths.

They discovered that ants continued to do the same thing, redirecting incoming ants to less congested corridors and even if the incoming ants were pushed into a longer route, they still managed to get to the food quickly and efficiently.

The trick now is to find out how ants pass on these "traffic reports" to each other.

The scientists say that when they have unlocked that mystery, the day may not be far off when human drivers travelling in opposite directions could pass congestion information to each other in this same way.

Random House to digitilize books

megha — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:44:25 +0530

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc announced on Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement that "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books."

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000.

The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.

Random House's vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, says e-book sales have increased by triple digit percentages in 2008, thanks in part to Amazon.com's Kindle reader, but he declined to offer specific number.

E-books remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1 percent or less.

Coal-addicted Poles mull turning green

megha — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:57:50 +0530

Standing in the shadow of a massive windmill, Mayor Tomasz Koprowiak thinks part of the answer to Poland kicking its coal habit is blowing in the wind and growing in farmers' fields.

"Our new straw-fired heating plant serves 80 percent of the community and is saving everyone money," Koprowiak says of Kisielice, a poor north-eastern rural municipality of 6,500.

He is something of a pioneer in Poland, where green energy is still rare in a rapidly growing economy almost entirely reliant on coal for electricity and heat.

The fossil fuel is largely responsible for the 2004 EU member's annual 300 million tons of CO2 greenhouse gas emissions - 1.1 percent of the global annual total and nearly twice the annual EU per capita average.

But Kisielice's enterprising mayor insists he is more interested in saving money than the environment.

"You don't have to be an ecologist to go green," he says. "People are interested in cheaper heat, promoting ecology wasn't really a factor in our decision to go green - it just really paid-off."

The switch in 2004 from imported oil and Polish coal to plentiful local straw to fuel a three megawatt central heat and hot water plant has brought 1.3 million zlotys (340,000 euros) in annual savings, Koprowiak boasts.

Extra cash raked-in by farmers from annual sales of the 3,000 tons of straw burned in the biomass furnace, is ploughed back into the local economy, he adds.

Solar panels to heat water during the summer for even greater savings are Koprowiak's next step. But this is just the tip of the ... haystack.

Thanks to his early planning, Kisielice has attracted two Spanish wind farms, generating an additional 1.3 million zlotys per year in property taxes on 27 windmills.

Koprowiak expects an extra million zloty annual windfall in 2009 when blades begin to spin on 20 new 85 meter-high (279 feet) turbines.

Farmers earn a handsome 5,000 euros annually in lease fees for each windmill on their land. "Nobody's complaining," Koprowiak says of the wind farms, oft slammed in the West as noisy eye-sores.

For Roman Adamski, principal at the local public school, hooking up to the municipal straw-fired heating plant in 2005 has saved his chronically underfunded school an average 51,000 zlotys each year. With the extra cash he installed energy efficient windows, further boosting savings.

"It's economically viable, environmentally friendly and, especially important for us, it has educational value for the children," Adamski says.

Indeed, at 15, pupil Ewka Okonska is lobbying her parents to install solar panels, but laments that "it's still too expensive."

CO2 emissions from biomass plants like the one in Kisielice are up to 60 percent lower than those produced using fossil fuels, says Antoni Faber, an academic and Polish biomass expert. But he cautions that the price of biomass like straw could skyrocket as demand grows.

With 30 percent of Poland's total annual emissions coming from small coal or oil furnaces in households and small businesses, Kisielice could serve as a blueprint for emissions reductions in small communities, says Grzegorz Wisniewski, head of the Warsaw-based think tank, the Institute for Renewable Energy.

"It's important to reduce coal use in small furnaces, because it's impossible to filter emissions for CO2," he says. "On the other hand it's in these small systems that it's easiest to introduce renewables and increase energy efficiency."

The European Union's planned climate package sets industrial targets of giving renewables a 20-percent stake in the electricity market, reducing CO2 emissions by 20 percent and increasing energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.

Poland will host the United Nations' December 1-12 climate conference in Poznan, although its liberal government has threatened to torpedo the flagship EU climate deal should costly auctions of CO2 emission quotas risk stunting its developing economy.

According to World Coal Institute figures for 2007, Poland and South Africa are the most coal-dependent countries in the world. An estimated 150 years of reserves also make comparatively clean-burning hard coal Poland's number one conventional energy resource.

Its 105 industrial coal-fired power and heating plants produce 60 percent of its annual CO2 emissions.

"We need to invest billions of euros in the modernization of our energy sector and we want to combine this process with reducing emissions," Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Poland's Secretary of State for European Affairs told AFP in comments on the mammoth task of upgrading the communist-era energy infrastructure to curb CO2 emissions through improved efficiency.

"Poland's economy is based on coal and any real alternative like nuclear, is a long way off," says Tadeusz Skotnicki, production chief at the 110-year-old Wujek coal mine in the heart of southern Poland's Silesian coal basin.

"At the moment our company and really Poland's entire coal sector is having a hard time just keeping up with rapidly growing demand."

Facebook welcomes court ruling against Canadian spammer

tejas — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:43:05 +0530

Facebook has welcomed a US court ruling against a Canadian spammer ordered to pay $873 million in damages for sending unwanted messages to users of the popular social network.

Max Kelly, Facebook's director of security, called the US District Court ruling in San Jose, California, an "important victory for our users - and against spam and those who create it."

Judge Jeremy Fogel on Friday ordered Adam Guerbuez and his company Atlantis Blue Capital to pay $436.2 million in statutory damages and another $436.2 million in aggravated statutory damages for violations of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).

"Does Facebook expect to quickly collect $873 million and share the proceeds in some way with our users?" asked Kelley in a posting on the Facebook blog. "Alas, no. It's unlikely that Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honour the judgement rendered against them."

"But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users," he added.

"Everyone who participates constructively in Facebook should feel confident that we are fighting hard to protect you against spam and other online nuisances," Kelly said.

"We will continue to invest in this area by improving our technical safeguards and devoting significant resources to finding, exposing and prosecuting the sources of spam attacks."

Facebook began legal action against Guerbuez in August, claiming that he had managed to obtain the passwords of Facebook users and was bombarding them with millions of messages about sexual products and drugs.

After India's Chandrayaan-1 its Britain's MoonLITE

sitansu — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:29:38 +0530

Britain is set to launch its maiden moon mission to study the phenomenon of mysterious moonquakes, weeks after India's spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 successfully entered the lunar orbit.

The 100-million-pound unmanned mission 'MoonLITE' would aim to understand the cause of mysterious quakes that vibrate through the lunar rock and put it into the satellite's orbit before firing a series of probes into the moon's surface, the daily Telegraph reported on Sunday.

The report said that the launch of Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecommunications Experiment or MoonLITE, will be announced by science minister Lord Drayson in December after which engineers would work on the technical designs with an aim to launch the satellite between 2012 and 2014.

Backed by NASA, the spacecraft would also examine the chemical composition of the rocks and even search for water on the moon's surface.

The existence of moonquakes has puzzled scientists as the moon does not have the tectonic plate activity that causes quakes on the earth.

"The moon still holds an awful lot of secrets. Most of what we know about the moon is from a relatively small area on the nearside of the moon and we have no samples or data from the far side," the daily quoted Ian Crawford, from the school of Earth sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Crawford was one of the scientists who first proposed the MoonLITE mission, which would fire four suitcase-sized penetrator probes into different points around the lunar surface.

Japan scientists eye made-to-order bones

manoj — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:45:58 +0530

Japanese hospitals are running a clinical trial on the world's first custom-made bones which would fit neatly into patients' skulls and eventually give way to real bones.

If successful, the Japanese method could open the way for doctors to create new bones within hours of an accident so long as the patient has electronic data on file.

Doctors usually mend defective bones by transplanting real bones or ceramic substitutes. The Japanese implants use a powder of calcium phosphate, the substance that makes up real bones.

The new implants are called CT Bone as they are crafted using the patient's computer tomography (CT) data, a form of medical imaging.

It can match the complicated structures of the jaw, cheek and other parts of the skull down to one mm (0.039 of an inch), a level significant enough to make a difference in human faces, researchers told AFP.

"It can also be replaced by your own bone, which wasn't possible before" with conventional sintered ceramic bones, said Tsuyoshi Takato, an orthopedic surgeon and professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Medicine.

The implants are currently limited to use in the skull because, unlike limbs, they do not have to carry the body weight.

The custom-made bones are created from the calcium phosphate powder and a solidifying liquid which is more than 80 percent distilled water, using computer-assisted design.

In the same way that an ink-jet printer propels droplets onto a piece of paper, a device squirts the liquid on a 0.1-mm-thick layer of the powder to form a desired shape.

The device, which was developed with Tokyo-based firm Next 21, repeats the process and builds up layers that have different shapes. For example, 100 layers create a one-cm thick implant.

Theoretically, a laboratory in Tokyo could one day use CT data to create a custom-made bone within hours for someone hurt in a car accident halfway across the world.

The clinical tests will last for some two years, covering a total of 70 adults at 10 hospitals. Prior to the current project, the University of Tokyo Hospital implanted CT Bone in 10 adults, who showed promising results.

The researchers expect to put it into practical use in three to four years.

The same technology has been used to make prototypes of industrial products.

"But it is the first time in the world to use materials that can and were implanted into the human body," said Chung Ung-il, a University of Tokyo bioengineering professor who is also part of the project.

Chung said previous studies showed the implants are replaced with regenerated real bone after one or two years, depending on the extent of the defects.

Takato said the host bone serves as "an incubator" that helps replace artificial bone as cells invade the implant in what could be called "in-body tissue engineering."

As ceramic implants are brittle, surgeons often have to scrape the patient's host bone instead to help conventional implants fit better, Takato said.

Doctors also often take bone from elsewhere in the body, particularly the hip, for conventional transplants.

"Nearly half of it is often wasted in the process of making an implant that fits. It is very good to be able to reconstruct bone without taking a piece from elsewhere," Takato said.

Takato hopes to use CT Bone for children if the clinical tests go well.

"Even if I want to treat their skeletal damage or development abnormality, I can't take bone from children for grafts. This technology should benefit children," Takato said.

Children usually have excellent bone growth. "Implants would be quickly replaced with their own bone, which would grow as the child grows," he said.

The technology also has narrow holes running through the artificial bones, inviting blood vessels and cells to come and help regenerate bone.

The research team is also working on a second-generation CT Bone, which contains materials that facilitate bridging between the artificial and real bone.

Experiments with implanting it in the skulls of Beagle dogs are underway with good results, he said.

The ultimate goal is to be able to construct bone from the living cells of patients, allowing them to take in larger pieces.

YouTube goes live!

manoj — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 12:07:30 +0530

YouTube has broadcast its first live event, an extravaganza which was part concert and part variety show and which drew comments from viewers ranging from "AWESOME!" to "train wreck."

The popular video-sharing Internet site streamed a two-hour live broadcast at youtube.com/live featuring well- to lesser-known singers, dancers and video bloggers who became online celebrities through YouTube.

Filmed before a live audience at the Fort Mason Center near San Francisco's famed Fisherman's Wharf, the show opened with a scantily clad Katy Perry performing her song Hot and Cold, a title which pretty much summed up the evening for the tens of thousands of users of the comments board.

"This is AWESOME! YOUTUBE RULEZ!!!!!!!" wrote twilightmaniac1901.

"GO YOUTUBE!" agreed 4yall.

"Can anyone say train wreck?" shot back tobyw87.

"Who are these guys?" asked hersheyxOxO as one of the more obscure acts took the stage.

"Why does it take so long for it to load?" complained offwithurhead, ending the question with the :( unhappy face.

DONCMG360 had a problem with the live format writing "holy crap i wish i could skip this part."

Other performers included virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani, who jammed with Funtwo, a guitarist whose YouTube video went viral in 2006 and made him into an online sensation, and hip-hop artist Soulja Boy Tell'Em.

Australia's Sick Puppies played onstage while Juan Mann, the man behind freehugscampaign.org who they immortalized in a video of their song All the Same, did what he does, handing out free hugs to members of the audience.

Other acts included the grinding up of a broom handle in a blender by the white lab-coat wearing star of the willitblend.com videos and the firing of more than 1,000 paintballs from a cannon at a man dressed in a suit of armor.

"DO NOT ATTEMPT AT HOME" flashed up on the screen as the broom handle was noisily and spectacularly reduced to kindling in the blender.

Other moments included YouTube tributes to itself and the role it played in the presidential election, serving as a favorite platform for videos by the campaigns and co-hosting debates with the CNN television network.

The star of the show was Grammy-award winning musician will.i.am of the Black-Eyed Peas, whose song Yes We Can in tribute to Democratic candidate Barack Obama has been viewed nearly 14 million times on YouTube.

Will.i.am performed It's A New Day, the song he released following Obama's victory in the November 4 presidential election over Republican John McCain.

Also making an appearance on stage was San Francisco Gavin Newsom while Queen Rania of Jordan appeared in a videotaped message to receive the first YouTube Visionary Award.

Queen Rania, the wife of King Abdullah II, launched her own YouTube channel in April "dedicated to breaking down stereotypes about the Arab and Muslim worlds and to bridging the East-West divide."

YouTube's first foray into live broadcasting comes as the Google-owned website tries to cash in on its popularity by letting advertisers "sponsor" videos and bid on key words people use for searches on the site.

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 but has been moving slowly to "monetize" the site out of concern it might irk notoriously transient Web surfers who could easily switch to rival video-sharing sites.

India fifth in A-Pac on average online spending: Survey

manoj — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:12:27 +0530

Purchasing digital downloads has emerged as the most popular form of consumer e-commerce in India, a survey said.

Seventy six percent of respondents, the highest in the Asia-Pacific, said they had bought a form of digital entertainment over the Internet in the last 12-months, a Visa e-commerce tracking survey said.

Music downloads at 63 percent has emerged as the most popular digital entertainment purchase, the survey said.

India is in the fifth spot as far as average online spending in the past 12-months is concerned, with the figure at $2,147.

According to the survey, nearly 80 percent of Internet users surveyed in the Asia-Pacific said they have made an online transaction and spent an average of over $3,000 each in the past 12-months.

Visa's Asia-Pacific Regional Head, e-Commerce, Mohamad Hafidz, said that in the Asia-Pacific, on an average, a person spent about 20.2 hours a month online.

"Our own survey has revealed that online consumers in Asia-Pacific recognise the convenience of online shopping as reflected in the high percentage of Internet users who buy a wide range of products, from that for everyday use to the occasional high-value item online," Hafidz said.

The top three draws for shopping online were being able to shop at any time (88 percent), at the best prices (83 percent) and being able to shop easily (82 percent), the survey said.

The Visa survey found that the respondents' most commonly made online purchases were digital entertainment (59 percent), travel (51 percent) and fashion (49 percent).

Asia-Pacific online shoppers survey reported that they spent the most on travel services with an average spending of $812 in the last 12-months. Travel items included airline and rail tickets, hotel accommodation and travel packages, the survey said.

The most frequent shoppers in the region are the Japanese and Koreans with 99 percent and 93 percent respectively having made an online purchase over the last 12 months.

However, the biggest online spenders were the Australians with an average online spending of $4,160, followed by Singaporeans at $3,480.

The average online spending in India over the past 12 months stood at $2,147 or fifth in the region, the survey said.

The third and the fourth highest spenders were the Japanese ($3,175) and South Koreans ($3,027), the survey said.

Hong Kong stood sixth, after India, with an average spending of $1,698.

The survey also said that Visa (both credit and debit cards) were their most popular payment method with nearly 60 percent of online shoppers surveyed choosing to pay with Visa.

Endeavour mission's longest spacewalk ends

megha — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:45:08 +0530

Astronauts have finished the third of four spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour's visit to the International Space Station.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper and Stephen Bowen climbed back into an airlock to complete their almost seven-hour trip outside the space station.

The spacewalkers cleaned and lubricated a jammed joint that allows a space station solar wing to track the sun and generate power.

The astronauts weren't able to finish all of their tasks but those chores will be done on a fourth spacewalk set for Monday.

No tools were lost during this spacewalk. A tool bag floated away from Stefanyshyn-Piper during the first spacewalk earlier this week.

Large meteor streaks across Canada

megha — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:38:34 +0530

A leading researcher says one of the largest meteors to streak over Canada in the last decade broke up into pieces that may have landed in central Saskatchewan.

Planetary scientist Alan Hildebrand from the University of Calgary said the meteor that lit up the skies, earlier this week, could likely be seen up to 700 kms away into the northern United States.

A "shooting star" is the common name for the visible path of a meteoroid, which is a small particle of debris from the Solar system that enters the Earth's atmosphere.

Rare surgery performed at Kochi hospital

wali — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:07:47 +0530

Doctors of the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) in Kochi claimed to have set right a problem in a sexagenarian's main blood vessel without an open chest surgery.

A team of 12 doctors, led by cardiologist KK Haridas, set right the 61-year-old patient's main blood aortic arch aneurysm (abnormal gross dilatation of the main blood vessel from where the blood vessels to the brain and arms arise) on November 11 by a keyhole procedure.

Briefing reporters, Haridas said the patient, hailing from Goa, was referred to AIMS with an 8 cm aneurysm of the aorta at the "distal end of the arch".

It was eroding his vertebrae and ribs and compressing his wind and food pipes. There was an imminent threat of rupture of the vessel.

After reviewing his CT scan, the doctors decided to go ahead with the "key hole repair". Normally, the procedure is done by a major surgery lasting up to six hours. It also involves stopping of circulation and the risk of the surgery is said to be about 20 per cent.

It could also result in paralysis, stroke or death. The recovery period of the surgery is also long.

However, the minimally invasive procedure (key hole) takes about two hours and the recovery is also quick, Haridas said.

About 200 million litres of blood flows through the main blood vessel during a person's average life span.

Astronauts face hardest spacewalk to finish repair

sitansu — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:39:28 +0530

Astronauts up on the international space station faced the longest and hardest spacewalk of their mission Saturday, a seven-hour-plus excursion to wrap up repair work on a gummed-up joint.

As the crews of the orbiting shuttle-station complex focused on the greasy outdoor extravaganza, engineers back on Earth struggled to understand a potentially serious problem with a newly delivered recycling system that is supposed to turn astronauts' urine into drinking water.

The $154 million system shut down again on Friday and had managers wondering whether space shuttle Endeavour would bring back any samples of processed urine. The equipment has to work properly and the water has to pass safety tests in order for the space agency to double the size of the station crew next year.

At a news conference on Friday, astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper said her upcoming spacewalk — the third of the mission — would be busier than usual. She and Steven Bowen have to finish cleaning and lubricating a jammed solar wing-rotating joint, and put in new bearings.

"It looks like it's going to be challenging," she said. "We have a lot of work to do."

Late on Friday, Stefanyshyn-Piper and Bowen got permission to take out an extra tool. Mission managers decided a caulking gun set aside for potential repair work on Endeavour's heat shield could double as a grease gun in a pinch.

The astronauts ended up with a grease gun shortage after a $100,000 tool kit floated away during Tuesday's spacewalk. Stefanyshyn-Piper was trying to clean up grease that had leaked all over when the bag and the tools inside got away.

The joint is supposed to keep the solar wings on the right side of the space station pointed toward the sun. It stopped working normally more than a year ago, after grinding parts left it full of metal grit.

Unlike the two previous spacewalks, only joint repair work is on Saturday's outdoor agenda. A fourth and final spacewalk, on Monday, will have astronauts adding grease to a twin joint on the opposite side of the space station that is working fine.

As for the trouble with the water recycling system, no one was surprised.

Space station commander Mike Fincke said it's common for things to go wrong in a flight test and stressed that he wasn't worried — so far. Nor was he concerned about eventually drinking the final product.

"It's just the water that's taken out," Fincke said on Friday.

"It's really clean and purified water. In fact, it's probably more pure than most people's tap water. So I'm not afraid to drink it," he added.

Of all the home-improvement gear delivered to the space station by Endeavour, the water recycling system has drawn the most attention. NASA sees it as the future in deep-space exploration — and also to future life on the home planet.

"This technology of how to reuse our things and be careful with them is really applicable to life on planet Earth," Fincke said.

The system's urine processor was started up as Thursday's spacewalk was ending, but promptly shut down. Flight controllers reactivated the device Friday. It ran for two hours before sensors detected motor problems and shut it down again.

If it's a bad sensor, it might be possible to bypass or repair it, Fincke said. But if the motor itself is at fault, NASA would have to send up a spare part on a future flight.

US developing tiny flying robot spies

manoj — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:53:52 +0530

Wouldn’t it be nice if only we could be a fly on the wall when our enemies are plotting to attack us? Better yet, what if that fly could record voices, transmit video and even fire tiny weapons?

That kind of James Bond-style fantasy is actually on the drawing board, as US military engineers are trying to design flying robots disguised as insects that could one day spy on enemies and conduct dangerous missions without risking lives.

"The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm," said Greg Parker, who helps lead the research project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. "If we know there's a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void," he added.

In essence, the research seeks to miniaturise the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan for surveillance and reconnaissance.

The next generation of drones, called Micro Aerial Vehicles, or MAVs, could be as tiny as bumblebees and capable of flying undetected into buildings, where they could photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.

By identifying and assaulting adversaries more precisely, the robots would also help reduce or avoid civilian casualties, the military says.

Parker and his colleagues plan to start by developing a bird-sized robot as soon as 2015, followed by the insect-sized models by 2030.

The vehicles could be useful on battlefields where the biggest challenge is collecting reliable intelligence about enemies.

"If we could get inside the buildings and inside the rooms where their activities are unfolding, we would be able to get the kind of intelligence we need to shut them down," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

Google unveils custom search, kills Lively

manoj — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:57:47 +0530

Google has unveiled a new tool which allows users to customise search results and announced it is ending its virtual world experiment, Lively.

Google, in a posting on its official blog, has said a new feature known as SearchWiki allows users to personalize search results by editing them according to their own preferences.

SearchWiki lets users who have a Google Account rearrange their search results, re-ranking websites by moving them up or down in the results page.

Useless search results can be deleted and others can be added.

"With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong," Google said.

The Mountain View, California-company said the modifications will be shown the next time users log on and will not affect searches done by others.

A video explaining the new feature is online at: googleblog.blogspot.com/

SearchWiki marks the first time that Google, which dominates Internet search with more than 70 per cent of all US searches in October according to Hitwise, has allowed users to modify search results.

Google also announced in another blog posting that it was killing off Lively (lively.com), a virtual world website similar to Second Life, at the end of December.

e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right

sitansu — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:01:25 +0530

It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five per cent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 per cent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science yesterday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

But resolving e-mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles - in equations called quantum chromodynamics - has been fiendishly difficult.

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

NASA detects ice glaciers on Mars

manoj — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:04:24 +0530

The American space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed vast Martian glaciers of water ice under protective blankets of rocky debris at much lower latitudes than any ice previously identified on the Red Planet.

Scientists analyzed data from the spacecraft's ground-penetrating radar and report in the November 21 issue of the journal Science that buried glaciers extend for dozens of miles from the edges of mountains or cliffs.

A layer of rocky debris blanketing the ice may have preserved the underground glaciers as remnants from an ice sheet that covered middle latitudes during a past ice age.

This discovery is similar to massive ice glaciers that have been detected under rocky coverings in Antarctica, the space agency, NASA, said.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that is not in the polar caps," said John W Holt of the University of Texas at Austin, who is lead author of the report.

"Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles and up to half a mile thick. And there are many more. In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars," he added.

Scientists, NASA said, have been puzzled by what are known as aprons, gently sloping areas containing rocky deposits at bases of taller geographical features, since Viking orbiters first observed them on the Martian surface in the 1970s.

One theory has been that the aprons are flows of rocky debris lubricated by a small amount ice. Now, the shallow radar instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided scientists an answer to this Martian puzzle, the agency said.

"These results are the smoking gun pointing to the presence of large amounts of water ice at these latitudes," said Ali Safaeinili, a shallow radar instruments team member with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Radar echoes received by the spacecraft indicated radio waves pass through the aprons and reflect off a deeper surface below without significant loss in strength.

That is expected if the apron areas are composed of thick ice under a relatively thin covering.

The radar does not detect reflections from the interior of these deposits as would occur if they contained significant rock debris.

The apparent velocity of radio waves passing through the apron is consistent with a composition of water ice, the report said.

Scientists developed the shallow radar instrument for the orbiter to examine these mid-latitude geographical features and layered deposits at the Martian poles. The Italian Space Agency provided the instrument.

"We developed the instrument so it could operate on this kind of terrain," said Roberto Seu, leader of the instrument science team at the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy.

"It is now a priority to observe other examples of these aprons to determine whether they are also ice," he added.

Holt and 11 co-authors report the buried glaciers lie in the Hellas Basin region of Mars' southern hemisphere. The radar also has detected similar-appearing aprons extending from cliffs in the northern hemisphere.

"There's an even larger volume of water ice in the northern deposits," said JPL geologist Jeffrey J Plaut, who will be publishing results about these deposits in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.

"The fact these features are in the same latitude bands, about 35 to 60 degrees in both hemispheres, points to a climate-driven mechanism for explaining how they got there," he added.

The rocky debris blanket topping the glaciers apparently has protected the ice from vaporizing, which would happen if it were exposed to the atmosphere at these latitudes.

"A key question is, how did the ice get there in the first place?" said James W Head of Brown University in Providence.

"The tilt of Mars' spin axis sometimes gets much greater than it is now. Climate modeling tells us ice sheets could cover mid-latitude regions of Mars during those high-tilt periods," he said.

"The buried glaciers make sense as preserved fragments from an ice age millions of years ago. On Earth, such buried glacial ice in Antarctica preserves the record of traces of ancient organisms and past climate history," he added.

Scientists move closer to 'elixir of life'

manoj — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:15:53 +0530

A team at the Spanish National Cancer Centre in Madrid has found evidence that a naturally occurring substance, which can create "immortal cells," could be the key ingredient in the fountain of eternal youth.

According to the scientists, boosting the amount of the naturally forming enzyme, called telomerase, in the body could prevent cells from dying and thereby slow the process of ageing, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The protein telomerase helps maintain the protective caps at ends of chromosomes which act like ends of shoelaces and stop them unraveling.

As people age and the cells divide, these caps become frayed and shorter and are so damaged that the cell dies eventually.

In fact, the scientists carried out an experiment on laboratory rodents to reach the conclusion.

They found that those mice genetically engineered to produce ten times the normal levels of telomerase lived 50 percent longer than normal.

Those animals also had less fat, had better co-ordination and were better at processing sugar.

Lead researcher Maria Blasco said that the enzyme was capable of turning "a normal, mortal cell into an immortal cell" and a similar approach could eventually lead to extended human lifespans.

She, however, urged caution.

"You can delay the ageing of mice and increase their lifespan. (But) I think it is very hard to extrapolate data from mouse ageing to human ageing," the British newspaper quoted Blasco as telling the New Scientist.

One of the problems with boosting telomerase is that it can increase the risk of cancer. However, she said that the obstacle could be overcome by issuing cancer drugs that could offset the negative effects.