The Cray XT, called Jaguar, has been ranked first in the list of the world’s top 500 computers, released at an annual international supercomputing conference in Austin on Tuesday.

Besides, the microlight-like plane is scheduled to take off for a round-the-world flight in May 2011, project communication head Phil Mundwiller said.

The pollution-free plane would fly with zero fuel on the strength of solar power both day and night, whose prototype was displayed here as part of the 60th ceremony of India-Switzerland Friendship Treaty.

Phil said two aircraft with the investment of $100m are being designed by a team of 60 engineers. Its commercial production is expected to start by 2011.

Hundreds of climbers flock to the world’s tallest peak at 8,850 metres every year, with many simply squatting in the open or hunching behind rocks as the Everest base camp has no proper toilet facilities.

Dawa Steven Sherpa, who led an eco-Everest expedition in May to collect trash dumped by previous climbers, said his team used a plastic bucket as well as a gas-impervious bag designed to safely contain and neutralise human waste and keep in odour.

The storm that hit Spirit came less than two weeks after similar weather in the far north sent NASA’s Phoenix Lander to an early grave.

Rover team members were awaiting a sign this week that the craft had survived the storm, which blanketed Spirit’s solar panels with dust.

According to a report in New Scientist, during the storm, the amount of energy available to the craft dropped to an unsustainable 89 watt-hours, the lowest level seen since Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, landed on Mars with about 10 times that amount in January 2004.

But as the NASA rocket thingy shot up to the skies last night for another interesting mission, the only thing on my mind was the water they will drink.

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A satellite has to withstand the icy cold and the intense heat and radiation of a solar flare in space, which ranges between a super-hot 127 degrees Celsius and a frigid minus 243.

Besides, the ‘Sunshield’ will be bombarded with sand-like grains and radiation in space. It has to stand up against those things, as well as tension and ageing under the extreme space environments.

Formed as a result of burning of fossil fuels and biomass, the Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), made of soot and other manmade particles, are more than three km-thick, said a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The layer that stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China and the western Pacific Ocean, are in some cases and regions aggravating the impacts of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, a team of experts drawn from research centres in Asia, including China and India, said.

If you are someone who always think like the guy on right hand site in the Pic then it’s the time you do some thinkover

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

BERLIN – An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said Wednesday.

While researchers — and the doctors themselves — caution that the case might be no more than a fluke, others say it may inspire a greater interest in gene therapy to fight the disease that claims 2 million lives each year. The virus has infected 33 million people worldwide.

Dr. Gero Huetter said his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he no longer shows signs of carrying the virus.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Huetter said.

It has not come. Researchers at Berlin’s Charite hospital and medical school say tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues have all been clean.

According to a report by ABC News, an archiving error by NASA in the 1960s resulted in 173 data tapes being misplaced, which hold information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science’s understanding of the moon.

The Apollo 11, 12 and 14 missions of the late 1960s carried “dust detectors” that were invented by Perth physicist Dr Brian O’Brien. This information was beamed back to earth and recorded onto tapes.

Mission managers said Monday that Phoenix had lasted long after its planned 90 days, and they celebrated the success of the spacecraft.

“It’s really an Irish wake and not a funeral,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix mission principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a teleconference call with reporters.

Barry Goldstein, project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the last message from Phoenix had been heard Nov 2.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft lifted off in clear weather from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppes just after 1.00 p.m. (3 a.m. EDT).

A video game developer from Texas, Garriott paid $35 million to fly into space alongside U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov.

France’s National Museum of Natural History said it was the first time a new lizard species has been catalogued based on an individual raised from an egg.

Given the Latin name Lepidodactylus buleli, the gecko makes its home near the tops of the trees that line the west coast of Espiritu Santo, one of the larger islands of the Vanuatu archipelago east of Australia, the museum said.

A team at RMIT University here in collaboration with the Fachhochschule Ingolstadt in Germany has designed the car which will be bidding for the title of the world’s fastest hydrogen-powered racer in 2009 when it attempts to break the Guinness World Records for speed by a vehicle of its class.

The Pacific Ocean Hagfish has a disgusting way of defending itself. When under attack, it oozes a suffocating slime from its many pores that envelops its predator in a fatal mass of fibrous goo. The hagfish, unfortunately, sometimes falls prey to its own defense mechanism, but normally it twists itself into knots to escape the gelatinous goop.

The first images, taken at an altitude of 9,000km, show the northern coast of Australia while others, snapped at a height of 70,000km, show Australia’s southern coast. The Terrain Mapping Camera is one of the eleven scientific instruments aboard Chandrayaan 1. The camera takes black and white pictures at a resolution of about 5m.

Once Chandrayaan reaches the Moon, it will slip into orbit to compile a 3D atlas of the lunar surface and map the distribution of elements and minerals. ISRO says that all systems have been performing well.

Catch the video and the science behind the technology

Researchers led by Professor Janaka de Silva, from the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka, said snake bites posed an important yet neglected threat to public health.

They believe that between 1.2 million and 5.5 million snake bites may occur annually, but only a quarter of these result in “envenoming”, when poison enters the blood stream from a snake’s fangs.

Two international collaborations have sampled the sediments in Thailand and Sumatra to examine tsunami history.

According to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which released a report last month on mental health, morbidity on account of mental illness is all set to take over from cardiovascular diseases as the number one health risk in India in the next two years.

According to a report in Telegraph, the guidebook is titled “Frommer’s 500 Places To See Before They Disappear”.

The book will look at places to visit that feature endangered landscapes, ecosystems, buildings, cultural spots and animal species.

“The devastation wrought by climate change and direct man-made interference is familiar to all of us,” said o-author Holly Hughes, a former executive editor of Fodor’s Travel Publications.

It is hoped the new audit will show customers how much CO2 has been emitted during the production, consumption and disposal of a range of products.

Some schemes that measure carbon emissions have been criticised in the past for being inconsistent, confusing or lacking transparency.

The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.

The Living Planet Report is the work of WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network.

It says that more than three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries where consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal.

“This is a disaster,” Ken Balcomb, a senior scientist at the Centre for Whale Research on San Juan Island, said on Friday. “The population drop is worse than the stock market.”

While the official census won’t be completed until December, the total number of live “southern resident” orcas now stands at 83.

Among those missing since last year’s count are the nearly century-old leader of one of the three southern resident pods, and two young females who recently bore calves. The loss of the seven whales, Balcomb said, would be the biggest decline among the Puget Sound orcas since 1999, when the centre also tracked a decline of seven whales.

They say that at least one and probably three or more planets are orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years — about 63 trillion miles — from Earth. Only eight stars are closer.

The host star, slightly smaller and cooler than our sun, is in the constellation Eridanus — the name of a mythological river — near Orion in the northern sky.

Epsilon Eridani is much younger than the sun, about 850 million years old compared with 4.5 billion years for our system.

“This really is a system like our solar system was when it was five times younger than it is now,” said one of the discoverers, Massimo Marengo , an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s like a time machine for our solar system.”

Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.

But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.

The Kopernikus programme is dedicated to acquiring and collating satellite data on the health of the planet.

Although Britain says it recognises the project’s high value, especially for monitoring the climate, it has so far declined to take a lead in the venture.