The researchers, who sought to discover the underlying cognitive processes, examined the search habits of 72 participants, spread over 426 such tasks.

The only catch is that users of the service need to have an open profile with Google that includes personal contact data.

Once those conditions are met, the user can access the service at the Google Labs. Typing in “New York” will yield a list of friends in the user’s social network who have posted items from the Big Apple. Settings can be altered so that only postings from close friends and acquaintances are included in the “social graph.”

Only 17% of the total 610 educational institutes, organizations etc have used the latest internet addressing technique. This new technique is called IPv6.

This commission had conducted survey on institutes and organizations in the following global regions: Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Though theaddresses we are talking about here are not the names used on the url bar. These are the addresses behind the url names you put to browse your favorite institute’s website.

“The application is equipped with speech recognition technology to understand Indian accents. Its software enables users of Nokia S60 handsets to access information on the internet by voice search,” Google India said here in a statement.

The Sandora Prototype 1.0 is a tracking system which sends live timetable information and a Google Map showing the location of the vehicle, direct to mobile phones by SMS. Commuters can obtain the information either before their trip or while waiting at a stop.

Major telescopes around the world were aimed at the Caebus crater on the moon’s south pole for the 1130 GMT impact of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS).

Ramakrishnan and Steitz are US citizens, Yonath is from Israel.

The trio were cited “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome” one of the core processes in life, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Instruments aboard three separate spacecrafts, one of them the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, a NASA instrument onboard Chandrayaan-I revealed water molecules in amounts that are greater than predicted, but still relatively small, it added. “Water ice on the moon has been something of a holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time,” said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organisation,” he said.

From its perch in lunar orbit, NASA said M3’s state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the moon’s surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colours of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team analysed data from the instrument, they found the wavelengths of light being absorbed were consistent with the absorption patterns for water molecules and hydroxyl. She added that by ‘water on the moon,’ they did not mean lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface.

These women go in for regular gynaecological checks-ups or performing self-examinations, says the study by the Centre for Sexual Health Promotion (CSHP), Indiana University.

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 study, conducted by Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) doctoral candidate Marcus Squirrell, surveyed over 1,300 net users.

The people frequented online sex, fetish and swinging sites to engage in online sexual activities – ranging from downloading erotic pictures and chatting online to using webcams to interact with others.

The Swinburne study also found that cybersex participants are mostly male, well educated and with an average age of 41 years.

The PSLV would also carry six other nano satellites. The 51-hour countdown for the sixth flight of PSLV’s core alone version (rocket without its six strap on motors) started Monday 9 a.m.

This new generation of mobile and autonomous robots is part of the DUSTBOT research project under the VI European Framework Programme.

A team at University College London hopes to track the habitable moons within the next five years, using a telescope launched by US space agency Nasa earlier this year to hunt out other planets.

New analysis by Tel Aviv University (TAU) zoologist and evolutionary biologist Oren Hasson shows that while tears signal distress, they also function as an evolution-based mechanism to bring people closer.

“Crying is a highly evolved behaviour,” explains Hasson.

According to a report by BBC News, the study shows that the rate of decay of isotopes can now be relied upon to give accurate measures of time for that period.

With just a few minutes to go, Nasa control called a halt to Tuesday’s launch due to rain and thunderstorms at Cape Canaveral.

Some reports say there was a lightning strike only a few miles from the pad.

The 13-day flight will deliver science equipment and is now set to launch at 0110 local (0510 GMT) on Wednesday.

The mission will be the 30th flight dedicated to station maintenance.

“It is a challenge but we have the potential and the capacity to overcome challenges. Who would have thought Ratan Tata would develop a car for Rs 1 lakh?” Purandareswari said in Hyderabad on Tuesday.

The minister was addressing e-India 2009, the country’s largest information and communication technology (ICT) seminar which began on Tuesday.

The detector, developed by a team of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is based on photo-induced acoustic spectroscopy (PIAS).

Using PIAS, the military and law enforcement agencies will have an instrument that is one-tenth the size of competing products.

At five pounds, it is one-fifth the weight and is about one-fifth the cost of the competition.

Desertification is spreading by 98,000 acres annually in Tibet, an official at the regional forestry bureau was quoted as saying.

Sangye Drawa said Tibetan authorities were trying to curb the spread with afforestation programmes and by closing some grasslands to herders.

“By 2010, we hope to achieve zero growth in deserts and by 2020, half of the desertified land that can still be reversed will be fixed,” he was quoted as saying.

Global Positioning System doesn’t work in buildings as the satellite signals it uses cannot get through walls.

But, in this system, a cellphone can use nearby Wi- Fi transmitters instead of satellites — it triangulates their signals to calculate its position, which it then displays on a map, the ‘New Scientist’ reported.

In addition to providing documents and information, the site will allow the public to track committee activities, receive regular updates and provide input through Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Flickr, user-submitted questions, polls and RSS feeds.

Additional features and content may be added as the committee’s activities continue.

The revolutionary disc could be on the market within a decade, researchers reported in the journal Nature.

The discs store 1.6 terabytes of data, pipping the capacity of current DVD and Blu-ray discs which hold up to 50 gigabytes.

A standard DVD recorder uses light of a single wavelength to ‘burn’ data onto the surface of the disc, reports ABC Online.

The main objective of the Herschel telescope, which was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) at a cost of 1.1 billion euros ($1.49 billion), will be to study the relatively cool objects in the universe in order to determine how stars and galaxies formed.

Then again, they couldn’t have known because the influenza virus was only identified in 1933, by a British research team.

But how times have changed.

Just over a month after people started falling ill in Mexico, experts have identified the culprit to be a novel H1N1 flu virus, which carries genetic material that is mostly swine with the rest being human and avian.

Scientists in Mexico, the United States and New Zealand have since posted full sequences of its DNA taken from 34 virus samples in an online public library. And the list is growing.

The technique they have developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly.

Rather, it could allow space borne instruments to see a tell-tale sign that life may have influenced a landscape: a preponderance of molecules that have a certain “chirality,” or handedness.

A right-handed molecule has the same composition as its left-handed cousin, but their chemical behaviour differs.

The Indus civilisation flourished in isolation 4,500 years ago along the border of what is now eastern Pakistan, but almost no historical information exists about the people and their long-lost community.

Archaeologists working in the region have unearthed a rich hoard of artifacts, including amulets, seals and ceramic tablets, many of which are embellished with the unusual symbols.

A contoured belt called a B(l)aby boasts a built-in MP3 player. Brainchild of Geof Ramsay, a series of special “speakers” transmit vibrations from the music to the fetus.

“For years scientists have talked about music being a catalyst for an unborn child’s mental growth,” the Sun quoted Geof, as saying.

Although space fare has steadily improved over time, a team of scientists says the best is yet to come.

They look forward to when residents of future lunar or even Martian outposts can dine on luxuries such as fresh vegetables.

The prototypes, brainchild of two faculty members in the Laboratory of Adaptive Technologies at The University of Texas Health Science Centre, are armed with a scissor-like claw that can perform a variety of functions, including moving a glass of water or snatching a pen off the floor.

This was announced by a spokesman of the Xichang Space Launch Center, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

Both the rocket, a Long March-III carrier, and the satellite are in sound conditions and ready for the planned projection, according to the official.

China launched the first satellite, Beidou Navigation System, into geostationary orbit in October 2000, in an effort to build up its own positioning system independent from the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS), EU’s Galileo Positioning System and Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS).

In June, a rocket is scheduled to lift the largest commercial satellite yet into space. In orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth, the satellite will unfurl an umbrella of gold mesh 60 feet across and aim it at the US. That gigantic antenna will let the satellite pick up signals from phones that are not much larger than regular cellphones.

The invention provides researchers with more control over micro-scale manipulation, allowing them to move and place tiny objects with far greater precision, said Waterloo University- where an engineering research team developed the device.