Science & Technology World

Planet-hunters have discovered two "super- Earths" orbiting two nearby
Sun-like stars. These rocky planets are larger than the Earth but
much smaller than ice giants such as Uranus and Neptune. Scientists
say the discoveries are a step towards finding potentially habitable
planets - smaller planets that are comparable to the Earth. Details
of the new planets are described in two papers in the Astrophysical
Journal. Two US-based scientists led the international research
effort - Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution's Department of
Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington and Steven Vogt of the University
of California, Santa Cruz. They combined several years' worth of data
from the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Anglo-Australian
Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. " The discovery of
potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away "
Steven Vogt University of California, Santa Cruz By detecting the
subtle "wobbling" of the stars, caused by the gravitational tug of
orbiting planets, the researchers were able to determine each
planet's size and orbit. The scientists saw evidence of three of these
" low-mass planets" orbiting a star called 61 Virginis, which is just
28 light-years from Earth and is visible with the naked eye in the
constellation of Virgo. The smallest of the three was five times the
mass of Earth, and orbited the star once every four days. Dr Butler
said that the signal produced by this planet was one of the smallest
ever detected. "One has to be very cautious when you claim a
discovery," he said. "What gives us confidence is that we see the
signal from two separate telescopes, and the two signals match up
perfectly." The other newly-discovered system was orbiting the star
HD 1461 , which is 76 light-years from Earth. The researchers found
clear evidence for a planet 7.5 times the mass of Earth, and possible
indications of two others. Both stars resemble our Sun in size and
age. The planets have orbits too close to their stars to support life
or liquid water. But, according to Dr Butler, they point the way
toward finding other planets in similar orbits around nearby "M-
dwarfs" - stars that are typically less than half the mass of the
Sun. "These sorts of planets around M-dwarfs actually would be in a
liquid water zone," he said. "So we are knocking on the door right
now of being able to find habitable planets." Professor Vogt said:
"These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common
around nearby stars. "The discovery of potentially habitable nearby
worlds may be just a few years away."

Microsoft has indefinitely suspended its Chinese microblogging
service MSN Juku after admitting that it "copied" code used to create
the site. A vendor contracted to work for the software giant was
caught lifting code from a rival Canadian start-up, Plurk. According
to Plurk as much as 80 % of the basecode was "stolen directly".
Microsoft apologised to Plurk, saying "we are obviously very
disappointed but we assume responsibility for this situation".
Microsoft China launched Juku in November. Bloggers and Taiwanese
users of rival service Plurk first alerted the Canadian firm to the
fact that a large amount of the base code appeared to have been
stolen. Plurk responded: "We were shocked and outraged when we saw
with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering
had with Plurk....Microsoft China's offering ripped off our service."
'Daylight robbery' It was not just the look and feel of the site, that
was the same. "On closer inspection we found that much of the
codebase and data structures... are identical snapshots of our code.
That it is Microsoft doing the copying in broad daylight makes it
even more incredulous," Plurk said. Microsoft was quick to issue an
apology. "The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code
they provided was indeed copied," it said in a statement. "We are a
company that respects intellectual property and it was never our
intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that
others in the industry have done," it said. "We will be reaching out
to them [Plurk] directly to explain what happened and the steps we
have taken to resolve the situation," it added.

Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to
websites containing criminal content. The banned sites will be
selected by an independent classification body guided by complaints
from the public, said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. A seven
month trial in conjunction with ISPs found the technology behind the
filter to be 100 % effective. However, that claim has been questioned
and there has been opposition from some internet users. Twitter
users have been voicing their disapproval by adding the search tag "
nocleanfeed" to their comments about the plans. "Successful technology
isn't necessarily successful policy," said Colin Jacobs, a
spokesperson for Electronic Frontiers Australia, a non-profit
organisation that campaigns for online freedom. "We're yet to hear a
sensible explanation of what this policy is for, who it will help,
and why it is worth spending so much taxpayers' money on." Mr Conroy
said the filters included optional extras such as a ban on gambling
sites which ISPs could choose to implement in exchange for a grant.
"Through a combination of additional resources for education and
awareness, mandatory internet filtering of RC (refused
classification)- rated content, and optional ISP-level filtering, we
have a package that balances safety for families and the benefits of
the digital revolution," he said. The filter laws will be introduced
in parliament in August 2010 and will take a year to implement.
'noble aims' "Historical attempts to put filters in place have been
effective up to a point," Dr Windsor Holden, principal analyst at
Juniper Research, told BBC News. The "noble aims" of the filter could
be lost in its implementation, he warned. "Clearly there is a need to
protect younger and more vulnerable users of the net, but one
concern is that it won't just be illegal websites that will be
blocked," he added. "You have to take extreme caution in how these
things are rolled out and the uses to which they' re put."

Ships could be in and out of European ports much quicker thanks to
smart software that monitors their movements. Developed for Dutch
firm Royal Dirkzwager, the monitoring system tracks ships almost in
real time. It will be used to tell ships to speed up or slow down to
ensure there is a berth for them to unload. As use of the system
increases, it hopes to cut costs, reduce fuel consumption and allow
ports to unload and service ships much faster. Ship spotters Founded
in 1872 , Royal Dirkzwager began by only monitoring ships that pass
in and out of Rotterdam in Holland. Information about ship movements
is valuable to governments, cargo handling companies and maintenance
firms. Paul Wieland, Dirkzwager's manager of logistics and ICT, said
it used to employ people equipped with binoculars to spot which
vessels were in port, which were waiting to unload and which had
just appeared over the horizon. The advent of automatic identification
systems ( AIS) made that job easier, he said, but still limited
Dirkzwager's ability to monitor movements. "We used to have
visibility of shore-to-sea of about 20 miles away from the receiving
station," said Mr Wieland. "But it was very short visibility of a
geographically limited part of the world." As ships move to adopt
space-based identification systems the view that Royal Dirkzwager
has of shipping has opened up enormously. "By interconnecting
networks and using space- based IS we can suddenly see the whole
world," said Mr Wieland. "That's an incredible increase in the
amount of data we can theoretically track and process with our
systems." It has meant a shift from 200 position reports every
second to more than 1 ,000. "We're going to monitoring every few
seconds rather than once a day," Mr Wieland told BBC News. "We were
simply not able to handle that amount of data." To help it cope Royal
Dirkzwager has just turned the key on a monitoring system that
automatically analyses a stream of data to pick out related events.
It is based on the work of former academic Giles Nelson who developed
the Apama software. Dr Nelson originally developed Apama for
financial institutions who had a need to swiftly route information to
key traders no matter where they were. Mr Wieland said Royal
Dirkzwager's monitoring system would help Rotterdam and other
European ports handle ships far faster. Rotterdam handles more than 30
,000 ships per year, he said, and any delay can be very costly.
"We're monitoring the journey of a ship to make sure it is going to a
port that has available berth space to accommodate that ship," said
Mr Wieland. "By following a ship we know when it's passed through
the Suez Canal and we can see it's going to arrive one day early and
that berth will not be free until the next day," he said. "If it's
too early you can, for example, slow it down instead of burning fuel
and arriving too early and taking up anchor space outside the
harbour." "Logistic processes in ports have speeded up." said Mr
Wieland. "The stay becomes shorter and shorter so information about
the arrival of a ship is absolutely critical." It is not just
businesses and governments that are keen to track ship movements,
said Mr Wieland. Royal Dirkzwager was also using it to drive an SMS
alert service for ship spotters who want to know when a particular
cruise liner is in port.

The UK's Guardian newspaper has launched a paid-for news app,
charging users a one-off fee of £2.39. The application, which allows
readers to access content via an iPhone, comes as newspapers around
the globe grapple with how they offer digital content Despite
charging for the app, the Guardian's website and mobile platform will
remain free. The app, by UK developer 2 ergo, will offer news,
comment, features, audio and photos but currently no video. Writing
in his blog about the application, The Guardian's mobile product
manager Jonathon Moore answered criticism of the decision to charge
for it. "At an early stage we decided to set the bar high, which
hopefully means the app has been planned, designed, tested and
developed to offer a truly engaging experience," he said. "The
investment involved in this requires us to ask a small fee in
return," he said. Martin Garner, director of mobile internet at
research firm CCS Insight sees the app as an " experiment". "The app
provides a better user experience but there are still a lot of
substitutes online and via other mobile platforms," he said. "We will
probably see a lot of people move to a more charged-for model over
the next few years but whether users will pay or not remains to be
seen," he said. The debate about how newspapers manage their digital
content is a hot topic at the moment. Earlier this month, Google
agreed to close the backdoor on users entering subscription-based
websites via its search pages by limiting the number of free clicks
they could make.

We waited so long for this device that we waited even more to test it
and write a review. But after using it we found out that there are so
many things to write that we cannot cover everything in a single
review article. But still we gave it a shot. The Nokia N97 , the
flagship Nokia N-series device, is undoubtedly among the best
smartphones that came out in 2009. It is one of the most powerful,
smartest and fully featured phones that Nokia came out till date.
When we first heard about the N-97 , we could not wait to get our
hands on the product and in this review, we shall tell you how we
used it and how it performed. Nokia N97 , with its large touch screen
display has created craze and additionally the slide out full QWERTY
keyboard just makes the experience even better. Having a physical
keyboard makes it great for heavy texters. When camera phones first
came out it made photography very easy. Then we needed to transfer
the images to a PC and upload them on our Facebook accounts. Image
qualities of N-97 are just brilliant with the 5 Megapixel camera
having Carl Zeiss lens. Its Facebook and Ovi application made photos
uploading and sharing very handy. The Facebook application also lets
you stay connected all the time with friends and the home-screen
Widgets make them even better. The N97 has the best homepage widgets
implementation that we have seen so far. On many phones, widgets are
messy, but Nokia has done a good job at maximising the use of screen
space and the best part is that you can customise it according to your
taste. The outlook of the phone is amazing. The big touch-screen is
resistive and quite responsive to finger presses. The screen is large
measuring 3.5 in diagonally. On the outer side, there's a lock button
on one side of the casing, as well as a camera button, volume key
and micro-USB connector for mains power. There's a converter to both
standard round pin Nokia mains power chargers in the box that it
comes with. The best part is that there's a 3.