Saturn pictures seen from near and far
In a few weeks, after a seven-year journey across the solar system, a robot spacecraft bristling with British instruments will plunge into the atmosphere of the mysterious, methane-shrouded world of Titan.
11/28/2004
News : Nasa ready to smash hit and crumble up a comet!
You can learn something about a rock by looking at it. But what most geologists really want is to smack it with a hammer.
And that's just what planetary scientists will do July 4 when NASA's Deep Impact mission reaches the comet Tempel 1 after a trip of six months and 80 million miles.
11/27/2004
Japanese experts develop 3D phone communication technology
Three dimensional images may be commonplace at the movies nowadays, popularised in Hollywood's classic sci-fi movie "Star Wars" in which Princess Leia made an inter-galactic plea for help by sending a 3-D hologram.
Moon gas could meet earth’s future energy demands
UDAIPUR: A potential gas source found on the moon’s surface could hold the key to meeting future energy demands as the earth’s fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades, scientists said on Friday.
11/25/2004
Arctic nations agree to fight glacial melting
Eight nations having Arctic territory have agreed together to fight the glacial melting and other effects of climate change in the region. The Arctic Council including United States, Russia, Canada, and several Nordic countries have issued a policy report seeking countries to adopt ''effective measures" to combat climate change without elaborating on what that would entail.
11/24/2004
Kazaa Offers Unlimited Free Internet Phone Calls - Reuters
Kazaa has geared up to offer unlimited free internet phone calls anywhere in the world… one has to download the latest version of kazaa and update the pc with the new version. With this new version of kazaa, harman Networks Ltd., distributor of the Kazaa, intends to offer a trial weblog system to the users too…
VHS Format Is A History
The likely death of the video recorder - as reflected in the decision of Dixons not to stock them any more because of the popularity of DVDs - will come as a post-dated relief for millions of adults who claimed never to be able to programme them in the first place.
Sales of DVD players have outstripped VCRs by 40-to-1 recently.
11/22/2004
Volcanic Eruption In South Columbia
The Galeras volcano in southern Colombia erupted on Sunday, spraying rocks and starting short-lived forest fires, but no injuries were reported, the government said.
NASA launches black hole hunter…
NASA launched the observatory — named Swift for its speedy pivoting and pointing — following weeks of delays caused by hurricanes and a three-day postponement due to rocket trouble. The unmanned rocket climbed smoothly through a cloud-flecked midday sky, and delighted flight controllers wished the spacecraft a successful mission.
11/21/2004
Handheld Games On The Move!
Nintendo Co., the world's biggest maker of portable game consoles, begins selling its newest hand- held player today, accompanied by a $40 million advertising push aimed at taking customers away from Sony Corp.
11/19/2004
NASA Jet Sets Record for Speed
With a defiant streak across the sky, the fastest plane in the world broke its own speed record before plunging into the sea for the last time.
Read the whole story.
11/16/2004
Smart Folders Magic by Blinkx
By Juan Carlos Perez
Blinkx released over the weekend an improved version of its search software that now creates special folders in users' PCs about specific topics and automatically populates them with documents grabbed from users' hard drives and from the Internet.
The feature, called Smart Folders, is the highlight of Blinkx 2.0, the newest version of this Internet and desktop search tool, which is available as a free download from the start-up company's Web site at http://www.blinkx.com. Blinkx 2.0 also has a feature called SIS, an acronym for the phrase Stuff I've Seen, which maintains a record of viewed files. Blinkx 2.0 also adds support for querying peer-to-peer networks.
The first version of Blinkx was launched in July and generated significant interest among users and industry watchers because of its unique approach to search. Instead of relying only on keyword-based queries, Blinkx reads users' screens and, based on that contextual information, flags documents from their PCs and from the Internet. Blinkx works unobtrusively in the background and displays search results when prompted by the user.
Blinkx also gained attention for its ability to index files on a user's hard drive, the so-called desktop search capability that big vendors such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are also pursuing.
Blinkx 2.0's Smart Folders are automatically populated with PC and Internet documents that are contextually related. Users can configure Smart Folders in various ways to narrow the types of documents and files that can be included. Smart Folders can contain pictures, music and video clips, text and Web pages. Blinkx 2.0 also can alert users when it has updated the content of a Smart Folder.
Hard-drive files Blinkx 2.0 can index and retrieve include Microsoft Office documents, such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel worksheets; Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat documents; text documents; images; HTML pages; MP3 files; and e-mail messages and attachments from Microsoft Outlook and Qualcomm Inc.'s Eudora e-mail applications, according to information on the company's Web site. On the Internet, Blinkx 2.0 can index and retrieve things such as Web pages, blogs and video clips.
Blinkx 2.0 is available only for Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Mobile phone use increases brain tumor risk
By Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service
Ten or more years of mobile phone use can dramatically increase the risk of developing a benign tumor on the auditory nerve, according to a study conducted by the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.
The Institute found that the risk of developing the tumors, known as acoustic neuromas, almost doubled for persons who started using their mobile phone at least 10 years before diagnosis. What's more, the risk increase was confined to the side of the head where the phone was usually held, according to results of the study released Wednesday.
The study of around 150 acoustic neuroma patients and 600 healthy control patients could be used to confirm long-held fears that cell phones are bad for users' health.
Researchers pointed out, however, that only analogue phones had been in use for more than a decade at the time the study was conducted, and that they could not determine if the same results would apply to the long-term use of digital phones.
The institute's report was released as part of a larger international study known as Interphone, coordinated by the World Health Organization's cancer research institute. The results of the Swedish study need to be confirmed in additional studies before final conclusions can be drawn, the researchers noted.
The results, although preliminary, are concerning. In addition to a doubling of acoustic neuroma risk for long-term cell phone users, researchers said that when they took into account the side of the head, they found that the risk was almost four times higher on the side where the cell phone was normally used.
Acoustic neuromas usually grow over a period of years before being diagnosed and occur in less than one adult per 100,000, per year, the researchers said.
The Interphone study will take into account the study on acoustic neuromas, along with a number of other types of brain cancer in assessing the risk of low-level exposure to radio frequency magnetic fields. The research is being concentrated in countries that have the longest and highest use of mobile phones, such as Sweden, the U.K., Denmark, Norway and Germany.
New Domain Transfer Policy of ICANN takes effect
With the new ICANN domain transfer policy, domain name owners will now be able to choose their domain registrar much in the same way as telephone numbers can be moved between carriers. The prime objective of this policy is to allow users to find the services and prices that best suit their needs. The prime objective is to increase competition between domain registrars and to drive down costs.
This new policy has also moved in the direction of providing protection againsts unauthorized domain trasnfers. Now domain registrars require registrants to verify their identity using a clear standardized form of authorization as a way of prior consent from that person or group before the changes are made.
New anti-spam technology on the way
EarthLink and Yahoo say they will start tests of a new anti-spam technology that encodes digital signatures into customers' e-mail to separate legitimate messages from unwanted spam.
DomainKeys is a sender validation technology that relies on public/private key cryptography to verify the sender of an e-mail message at the domain level, Yahoo said. A sending system uses a private key to generate a signature and inserts it into the e-mail header. The receiving e-mail system then uses the public key, published in the Domain Name System, to verify the signature.