Teens capture images of space with Rs 4,000 camera and balloon

Teenagers armed with only a Rs 4,000 camera and latex balloon have managed to take stunning pictures of space from 20-miles above Earth. Proving that you don’t need Google’s billions or the BBC weather centre’s resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere

Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.

Ground-breaking research finds way to convert CO2 into clean-burning biofuel

Scientists at the Singapore-based Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have made an unprecedented breakthrough in transforming carbon dioxide, a common greenhouse gas, into methanol, a widely used form of industrial feedstock and clean-burning biofuel. Using “organocatalysts”, researchers activated carbon dioxide in a mild and non-toxic process to produce the more useful chemical compound.

Security at your finger tips

Online services for password management.

Today, you bank, you shop, you communicate, you do business and many other activities online. And this means having many different passwords. You know that passwords are important in order to ensure security of your information. Passwords are like the keys to the locks on the Internet.

Many of us keep one password for all our web accounts. This can be dangerous! If a prying eye catches this password, then the access to all your information is easy for him. That’s why it is advisable not to keep one single password for all accounts. Now the question arises – how can one remember different passwords? Remembering all these passwords can become a daunting task for you. You might have saved these passwords in a text document and kept that on your desktop or you might have written them down somewhere. Highly unsafe!

Rajkhowa’s journey from a student leader to India’s most wanted

Guwahati/Dhaka: For 30 long years till his arrest, Arabinda Rajkhowa remained a fugitive much sought after by Indian security forces, staying the better part of that period abroad, mainly in Bangladesh under various aliases.

United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) militants hide their faces, as they sit before the arms they surrendered during a ceremony organised by the Indian army Red Horns Division headquarters in Rangiya, about 55 kilometers (34 miles) west of Gauhati, late last year.

His real is name is Rajib Rajkonwar, son of late Uma Rajkonwar and Damayanti Rajkonwar, of Lakwa village in eastern Assam’s Sivasagar district. His both parents were ardent followers of Mahatma Gandhi and believed in his philosophy of non-violence. On April 7, 1979, Rajkhowa and four others, including the outfit’s self-styled commander-in-chief Paresh Baruah, met at the historic Rang Ghar, an amphitheatre of the 16th century Ahom royalty, in eastern Assam’s Sivasagar town and founded the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). It is said the ULFA was an offshoot of the anti-foreigners movement launched same year by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) – a violent agitation against illegal Bangladeshi migrants in Assam. Ironically, Rajkhowa found refuge in Bangladesh in his later years when on the run from Indian authorities.

EagleTec Flash Drive Is Smallest Ever For The Next 5 Minutes

Looky here, it’s yet another smallest flash drive ever! The EagleTec Nano flash drive measures a minuscule 19 x 15 x 6mm and weighs only 3 grams. It manages to stuff as much as 8 gigs of memory in there somewhere… To be fair, I can’t really see how a flash drive could get much smaller than this without being totally impractical and an accidental inhalation risk. But, I have faith that those issues aren’t going to prevent it from happening anyway. The EagleTec Nano flash drives comes with 4 gigs for $22, or 8 gigs for $33.

Are passwords safe?

They may soon be, with other ways of authentication and identity protection making their presence felt.

The fact that passwords are not the securest of authentication techniques is well known. Most of us use passwords that are easy to remember, and therefore, easy to crack. Phishing threats and a lot of malware are focused on stealing your online identity—your usernames and passwords.

Security experts think that protecting your online identity is far easier if the ‘human’ element in remembering that identity is minimized. The time, it seems, has come for moving beyond passwords to other authentication techniques that are easier to use and provide adequate protection against identity theft.

Two initiatives here are gaining importance—the OpenID initiative and Information Cards. Some experts state that both can work in tandem, while others are of the opinion that they represent two distinct approaches to authentication.

All-electric Tata Indica getting ready for Norway, then the world

Although the all-electric Tata Indica on display at the SAE World Congress in Detroit this week is not the soon-to-be-released model, there’s a lot we can learn from the vehicle – and from TM4’s Eriz Azeroual – about how the technology will be implemented when the new model goes on sale in Norway either later this year or in early 2010 (yes, this is later than previously expected). Tata Motors showed off the Indica EV at the Bologna Motor Show in December, but the hatchback is making an appearance in Detroit because of the work that TM4, a subsidiary of Hydro Québec, did providing the permanent magnet motor and the inverter.

Windows XP Set to Leave “Mainstream Support”

Windows XP is set to enter the Extended Support phase of its life, moving out of Mainstream Support, as planned, Microsoft said on Monday. In an email, Microsoft said: “On April 14, Windows XP will transition from the mainstream support phase to the extended support phase, as planned and previously announced.”

Ultrasound imaging now possible with a Windows smartphone

Computer engineers at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.

William D. Richard, Ph.D., Washington University Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and David Zar, Washington University Research Associate in Computer Science and Engineering, have made commercial USB ultrasound probes compatible with Microsoft Windows Mobile-based smartphones, thanks to a $100,000 grant Microsoft awarded the two in 2008.

Acer Expects To Introduce Android Phone In 2009; Gunning For Top Five

Taiwanese computer vendor Acer is planning to introduce an Android-based smart phone by the end of the year to add to the ten phones based on Windows Mobile already in the works for 2009, reports Bloomberg. Acer’s head of mobile-phone products Aymar de Lencquesaing said that the world’s third largest computer maker had made no formal announcements around Android, though “it’s likely that we’ll have one in 2009.”