OTHER PRODUCTS LAUNCHED

1)MAC MINI

The mac mini got a boost with new versions that featire Intel's third-generation iCore (i5 and i7) range of processors. The new Mac Mini will be available in authorised stores across the country from today. Prices starts at Rs 39,900 in India going up to Rs 65,900. They will come with no optical drive like the previous generation and will ship with the latest OS X Mountain Lion.

2)13-INCH MACBOOK PRO

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro features a retina display with a LED-backlit display with IPS technlogy and a resolution of 2560X1600. The device also features the third generation iCore processors, 8GB DDR3 memory and Intel HD graphics 4000. It is only 1.9cms thick and features Wifi-n, Bluetooth, two thunderbolt slots, 2 USB-3 slots, SDcard reader and HDMI out. Apple claims the battery provides 7-hours and upto 30days standby time. The MacBook starts at Rs 1,14,900 and is available from today.

3)IMAC

The company also announced new all-in-one iMac desktop computer. The redesigned iMac has an edge which measures just 5mm thin, and also features a completely re-engineered display that reduces reflection by 75 per cent. The new iMac will be available in two sizes 21.5-inch and 27-inch both will feature Intel's iCore processor and nVidia GeForce graphics. The device features four USB-3 slots, two Thunderbolt solts, Gigabit LAN port and an SDcard reader slot. The new iMac has done away with the optical drive. The price for the 21.5-inch iMac is Rs 99,900 and will be available in November. The 27-inch will start at Rs 1,22,900 and will be made available in December.

Real-time phone call translation

Japan's biggest mobile operator said it will launch a translation service that lets people chat over the telephone in several different languages.
     The application for NTT DoCoMo subscribers will give two-way voice and text readouts of conversations between Japanese speakers and those talking in English, Chinese or Korean with a several-second delay, the firm said.
     "Hanashite Honyaku" will be a free application that can be used on smartphones and tablet computers with the Android operating system, DoCoMo said.
     Customers will also be able to call landlines using the service, it said, adding that voice-to-text readouts will soon be available in French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai.
     "We hope that with this application, our subscribers will be able to widen the range of their communication," a company spokeswoman said.
     However, she conceded the service does not offer perfect translations and has trouble deciphering some dialects.
     DoCoMo also said it has launched a separate service that lets users translate menus and signage using the smartphone camera.

Dung beetles use dung balls to stay cool

Dung beetles roll their feasts of dung away to avoid other competitos at the dung pile. But now researchers from South Africa and Sweden have discovered that they also use their balls in another, rather clever way. The moist balls keep the beetles cool even as they push a weight up to 50 times heavier than their own bodies across the hot sand.

     "The beetles climb on top of their moist balls whenever their front legs and heads overheat," said Marcus Byrne from Wits University. "We stumbled upon this behaviour by accident while watching for an 'orientation dance' which the beetles perform on top of their balls to work out where they're going. We noticed that they climb their balls much more often in the heat of the midday sun."
      This phenomenon only held true when the beetles were crossing hot ground, beetles on hot soil climb their balls seven times as often as those cooler ground. To show that it was the beetle's hot legs that made them climb the ball, the researchers applied some silicione boots to their front legs as protection from the heat. "To our great surprise, this actually worked, and beetles with boots on climbed their balls less often," said Jochen Smolka from Lund University. 

How bridges 'sing' reveals their health

The sound of rain drops hitting the concrete on a bridge can indicate its overall stability and condition. This technique is cheaper and less invasive than currently used methods

A team of Brigham Young University engineers has found that by listening to how a highway bridge sing in the rain they can determine serious flaws in the structure.

     Employing a method called impact-echo testing, professors Brain Mazzeo and Spencer Guthrie can diagnose the health of a bridge's deck based on the acoustic footprint produced by a little bit of water.
     Specially, the sound created when a drop let makes impact can reveal hidden dangers in the bridge.
      "There is a difference between water hitting intact structures and water hitting flawed structures," Mazzeo said. "We can detect things you can't see with a visual inspection; things happening within the bridge itself."
     The study presents a more efficient and cost-effective method to address the mounting safety concerns over bridge corrosion and aging across the world.

     While impact-echo testing for bridges is nothing new to engineers, the researchers are the first to use water droplets to produce acoustic responses. Current testing relies on solid objects such as hammers and chains.
      The idea is to detect delamination, or the separation of structural layers, in a concrete bridge deck.
     The most common method involves dragging a chain over a bridge and marking spots where dull, hollow sound is produced.
    However, this method can take hours to carry out for a single bridge and requires lane closures that come with additional complications.
    The study results, published in the non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation International could help transform deck surveys into rapid, automated and cost efficient exercises.
    The method is as simple as dropping droplets of water on the material and recording the sound. The acoustic response indicates the health of the concrete.
    "The response gives you an indicaton of both the size and the depth of the flaw," Mazzeo said.
     Mazzeo said the method could be used to test materials beyond bridges, including aircraft composites, which are susceptible to delamination.
     Though the current research is preliminary, the researchers envision a day where bridge deck surveys would take only a few moments.
     "We would love to be able to drive over a bridge at 25 or 30 mph. spray it with water while we're driving and be able to detect all the structural flaws on the bridge," Mazzeo said. "We think there is a huge oppurnity, but we need to keep improving on the physics."

Search for alien life gets serious

Aliens remain part of science fiction for now, but the discovery of a new planet just four light years away has reignited the race to find a planet that may host extraterrestrial life

The search for alien life has intensified as the most powerful telescopes ever built are about to enter into service and as ideas about where life could exist are being turned on their head. At the same time. scientific discussion about the possible existence of alien life is becoming more main-stream.
    "I think scientists are very happy having a rational conversation about the likelihood of life out there," said Bob Nichol, an astronomer at Portsmouth University in Britain.
     Nichol said this was partly driven by the discovery of new planets such as one identified this week in the Alpha Centauri star system, the closest yet outside our solar system.
     Over 800 of these so-called exoplanets have been discovered since the early 1990s.
     "An explosion in the number of planets makes it so much more likely,' said Nichol, adding that the many formats in which life appears on Earth is indirect evidence, though not proof, that life is out there.
     Researchers from the Geneva Observatory said the newest planet to be found was too close to its own sun to support life. But previous studies have suggested that when one planet is discovered orbiting a sun there are usually others in the same system.
     Rival astromoners are now likely to start scouring Alpha Centauri for more planets, possibly in the habitable zone around its stars.

A NEW SET OF EYES
The technological eyes and ears that scientists have at their disposal are about to take a leap forward too, broadening and deepening their search.
     Barring a surprise discovery of microbes on Mars, we will see alien life long before we are ever able to touch it.
     "I think it is realistic to expect to be able to infer within a few decades whether a planet like Earth has oxygen/ozone in its atmosphere, and if it is covered with vegetation," said Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal.
     The next decade will see two record-breaking telescopes come on line; the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a huge radio telescope sited in South Africa and Australia, and Europe's Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) that will sit on a mountain top in Chile's Atacama desert and be the largest optical telescope ever built.
     Their main tasks will be to probe the origins and nature of galaxies, but they will also look for signs of life on planets that can now only be seen in the roughest detail.
     "I think the capabilities of new telescope means that the detection of an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) is more likely in the next few decades, than it was in the last," said Mike Garrett, general director of Astron, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
     With a mirror almost 40 metres in diameter, The E-ELT will be able toreveal planets orbiting other stars and will produce images that are 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
     "The ELT should also allow us to study the atmospheres of extra-solar planets and look for 'bio-markers' such as water, carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules in their spectra," she said.
     With the right equipment, Hook said the ELT may be able to use spectroscopy, the study of the particular wavelenghths of light reflected by an object, to detect signs of vegetation on distant planets.

NEW THEORY
    
The search for alien life has long been framed by the dogma of a 'goldilocks zone' around faraway suns that is just the right temperature - neither too hot nor too cold - to allow liquid water, essential for life as we know it. That theory is now being challenged, expanding the potential area in which life could exist.
     Othersources of heat have been identified and scientists have come up with radically new ideas about the forms life could take after studying organisms that live in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
     Earlier this year, Xavier Bonls of the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics in Grenoble estimated there could be tens of billions of rocky planets in our galaxy alone with the right temperature to support life.
     Meanwhile, researchers at Aberdeen University in Scotland are working on a computer model which suggests astronomers should sharply increase the number of planets they regard as capable of hosting life.
     A team from Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid led by Felipe Gomez studied organisms in the sun-baked Chott el Jerid salt pan in Tunisia, the acidic Rio Tinto in Southern Spain and the permafrost on Deception Island in Antarctica.
     Another team from North Carolina State University recently published research on a single-celled organism that lives in a hot spring near Mount Vesuvius in Italy and is able to eat uranium and draw energy from it. But at roughly 1,00,000 light years across, the galaxy is a big place and even if there is intelligent life else-where sending out signals astronomers say the chances of not hearing them are still considerable.

Secondhand smoke can cause harm in 20 mins

Researchers have waned that heavy concentrations of secondhand smoke, such as those found in smoke-filled bars and cars, can lead to airway restriction for bystanders within minutes of exposure. A study showed that after 20 minutes of exposure to highly concentrated secondhand smoke, participants experienced near immediate physiologic changes, including airway resistance and impedance.
    "Bars and cars are places where high concentrations of fine particles usually occur because of smoking. Nonsmokers are then forced to inhale extreme amounts of particulates directly into their lungs,' said Panagiotis Behrakis, of the University of Athens, Greece. "The observed short-term effects of secondhand smoke tell us that even a short exposure is indeed harmful for normal airways."
    Although exposure to secondhand smoke appears to be slightly less harmful than direct smoking, Behrakis believes secondhand smoking should be recognised as a global health issue.