A bevy of celebrities, including 50 Cent, Will.i.am, and Kelly Clarkson, stopped by to add glitz to the proceedings —but they were hardly the stars of the show. Here are some of the more significant gadgets that shined at CES:

1. Cheaper tablets

The industry’s enthusiasm for tablets was considerably tempered this year compared to last, when more than a hundred manufacturers thought they could capitalize on the iPad’s success with their own models based on Google Inc.’ Android software. Sales were disappointing, in large part because Apple prices the iPad relatively low compared to the cost of making it. Then, late last year, Amazon.com Inc. demonstrated that you can take on Apple by selling a smaller, barebones tablet for $199. Analysts believe Amazon sold millions of Kindle Fires in little more than a month.

Now, Asian manufacturers are hoping to jump on Amazon’s bandwagon. One of those companies, Taiwan’s AsusTek Computer Inc., showed off a tablet with a Fire-sized screen and said it would sell it for $249. It’s considerably more powerful than the Fire, sporting a premium “quadcore” processor. Still, one of the things that made the Fire a success — Amazon’s library of e-books, music and movies — will be missing.

2. Nokia Lumia 900

In recent years, the world’s largest phone maker, Finland’s Nokia Corp., has practically been a no-show in the U.S. market. That’s hurt the company badly. Now, it hopes to come back with smartphones that run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone software. The Lumia 900 is its first such phone for the AT&T network, and the first Nokia phone to use AT&T’s faster wireless “LTE” network. In a sign of how much is riding on these phones, both the Microsoft and Nokia CEOs showed up for Monday’s announcement. The companies didn’t announce price or availability. T-Mobile USA, a smaller carrier, started selling a more modest Lumia this week.

3. Lenovo K800

While Nokia’s been shut out of the U.S. phone market, Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, has been shut out of phones entirely. Its PC chips use too much power to go into a smartphone: they’d drain the battery in no time. That’s a big problem for the company, since PC sales are flat in the developed world, while smartphone sales are exploding. Now, Intel says a new line of chips is ready for smartphone use, and Lenovo Corp. of China is the first to take them up on it, with a smartphone to be sold in China in the second quarter. Outwardly, it’s indistinguishable from any other touchscreen phone, and it runs Android.

Motorola Mobility, the phone maker that’s being bought by Google, also committed to making phones and other devices with Intel chips. Without offering many details, the company said the new devices will be on the market in the second half of the year.

4. OLED TVs

Both LG and Samsung showed off 55-inch TVs with screens made from organic light-emitting diodes rather than the standard liquid crystals or plasma cells, and said they’ll on sale this year. They didn’t say what they would cost, but analysts expect the price to be upwards of $5,000.

The sets are long-awaited. OLED TVs have been on the horizon for some time, but they’re difficult to manufacture in large sizes. They provide a high-contrast picture with highly saturated colors. They can also be very thin: LG’s set is just 4 millimeters thick, or one-sixth of an inch.

5. Ultrabooks

Intel created the “ultrabook” as a marketing term for thin, light and powerful laptop computers. They’re essentially the Windows versions of Apple’s MacBook Air. PC makers have embraced the term enthusiastically. As a result, there were scores of ultrabook models on display at the show.

Two that stood out were the Lenovo Yoga, which has a touch-sensitive screen that bends backward to fold over completely, turning the device into a large tablet. It will launch with the new Windows 8 operating system later this year. The HP Envy 14 is a more conventional luxury model, and goes on sale Feb. 8, but has two details that set it apart: a sensor for Near-Field Communications Chips (which means you can transfer information from a similarly equipped phone by tapping it to the PC) and an audio chip that can communicate with some headphones to provide much better audio quality than Bluetooth. The Envy 14 will cost $1,400.

Bob O’Donnell, an analyst with research firm IDC, believes ultrabooks are “not a fad.” ”We absolutely see ultrabooks as being the future of notebooks,” he said. However, O’Donnell thinks ultrabooks will really take off once they are priced at about $800, closer to the price of regular laptops.

6. Canon G1 X

The Japanese camera maker revealed a compact camera that pushes into professional camera territory. Its G line of relatively large compact cameras has been popular among enthusiasts, and the G1 X extends the range by including an image sensor that’s more than six times larger than other models in the range. Sensor size is the most important factor for a camera’s image quality, far more than the number of megapixels — 14, for the G1 X. It’s the first camera to use a sensor of this type, which is only 20 percent smaller than the “APS-C” sensors used in single-lens reflex cameras, or SLRs (though some luxury compacts from other manufacturers use APS-C sensors).

The G1 X will have a 4x zoom lens that retracts into the metal body, and will sell for $800.

Source: Yahoo News

This handout illustration provided by San Diego State University, shows a newly discovered planets

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society‘s conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

“We’re finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn’t even think could exist,” said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror “Star Wars” Luke Skywalker’s home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

“We’re awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren’t even sure there were planets” outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Astronomers are finding other worlds using three different techniques and peering through telescopes in space and on the ground. Confirmed planets outside our solar system — called exoplanets — now number well over 700, still-to-be-confirmed ones are in the thousands.

This 2011 handout photo provided by the European Southern Observatory, shows the Milky Way above the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

NASA’s new Kepler planet-hunting telescope in space is discovering exoplanets that are in a zone friendly to life and detecting planets as small as Earth or even tinier. That is moving the field of looking for some kind of life outside Earth from science fiction toward plain science.

One study in Nature this week figures that the Milky Way averages at least 1.6 large planets per star. And that is likely a dramatic underestimate.

That study is based on only one intricate and time-consuming method of planet hunting that uses several South American, African and Australian telescopes. Astronomers look for increases in brightness of distant stars that indicate planets between Earth and that pulsating star. That technique usually finds only bigger planets and is good at finding those further away from their stars, sort of like our Saturn or Uranus.

Kepler and a different ground-based telescope technique are finding planets closer to their stars. Putting those methods together, the number of worlds in our galaxy is probably much closer to two or more planets per star, said the Nature study author Arnaud Cassan of the Astrophysical Institute in Paris.

Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at the University of California Berkeley’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence program and who wasn’t part of the studies, was thrilled: “It’s great to know that there are planets out there that we can point our telescopes at.”

Kepler also found three rocky planets — tinier than Earth — that are circling a dwarf star that itself is only a bit bigger than Jupiter. They are so close to their small star that they are too hot for life.

“It’s like you took your shrink ray gun and you set it to seven times smaller and zap the planetary system,” said California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson, co-author of the study presented Wednesday at the astronomy conference.

Because it is so hard to see these size planets, they must be pretty plentiful, Johnson said. “It’s kind of like cockroaches. If you see one, then there are dozens hiding.”

It’s not just the number or size of planets, but where they are found. Scientists once thought systems with two stars were just too chaotic to have planets nearby. But so far, astronomers have found three different systems where planets have two suns, something that a few years ago seemed like purely “Star Wars” movie magic.

“Nature must like to form planets because it’s forming them in places that are kind of difficult to do,” said San Diego State University astronomy professor William Welsh, who wrote a study about planets with two stars that’s also published in the journal Nature.

The gravity of two stars makes the area near them unstable, Welsh said. So astronomers thought that if a planet formed in that area, it would be torn apart.

Late last year, Kepler telescope found one system with two stars. It was considered a freak. Then Welsh used Kepler to find two more. Now Welsh figures such planetary systems, while not common, are not rare either.

“It just feels like it’s inevitable that Kepler is going to come up with a habitable Earth-sized planet in the next couple of years,” Caltech’s Johnson said.

Source: Yahoo News

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After the failure, Chinese rocket engineers “started all over again,” putting an all-out effort to solving the problem. As a result of their diligence, the modified rocket carrying Shenzhou-8 was launched at its originally scheduled time and put the spacecraft into orbit in a “near perfect” fashion, said Jin Muchun, chief rocket system designer for the mission.

This rapid and successful correction of a design flaw reflects the quest for perfection and dedication of Chinese space engineers. It may also explain how China’s space program has achieved such success.

“We never push ahead for the sake of speed and we don’t turn our back on problems,” said Li Jie, a senior official with China’s manned space program. “At meetings, instead of praising each other, we always put forward questions, one after another.“

Compared with the United States and Russia, China came late to manned space exploration. However, since the start of the country’s manned space program in 1992, China has sent six astronauts into space and completed the country’s first space walk and space docking.

“China has steadily pursued a solid space program by making incremental steps,” Canadian space expert Erik Seedhouse told Xinhua.

Phillip Clark, a long-time observer who has been following the Chinese space endeavors since the launch of Dongfanghong-1 in 1970, said China is making impressive progress and is following its own pace without racing against anyone.

“Although there have been long gaps between Chinese manned flights, each mission has been a greater progression than we saw in the 1960s,” Clark said.

For example, he said, when Lieutenant Colonel Yang Liwei flew in 2003 China’s first manned space adventure he was in orbit for nearly a day. In contrast, the United States didn’t have such a long flight until its sixth manned mission.

China sent three men into space and completed a space walk on Shenzhou-7, the country’s third manned flight. China hit these important milestones during earlier missions than did either the Soviet Union or the United States.

Neither of the latter countries achieved a space walk until its eighth space mission. As for three-man space flights, the Soviets had their first during the seventh mission and Americans achieved this feat on its 17th mission, according to data collected by Clark.

“This shows how China has progressed in greater leaps from one flight to the next,” Clark said.

The success of the Nov. 3 docking procedure makes China the third country in the world, after the United States and Russia, to master the technique, moving the country one step closer to establishing its own space station.

“Completing this in-orbit test is a significant milestone in China’s space program,” said Tim Robinson, editor of the Aerospace International journal.

“The successful docking is another strong sign that underlines the position of strength that is increasingly defining China’s space industry,” space expert Seedhouse told Xinhua in an e-mail message.

“It will also help China’s commercial space business and bring Chinese closer to realizing their own space station; by doing that they will demonstrate just how capable and robust their space program is, and (they) will be well-positioned to realize the goals of landing astronauts on the Moon,” Seedhouse said.

After the first space docking, China will push ahead with its space program with more confidence in the decade to come.

The Chinese manned space program has announced its plan on 20 future space voyages, which will help satisfy demand for indigenous spacecraft manufacturing and launch services.

China also plans to establish its own space lab around 2016 and assemble a 60-tonne manned space station around 2020, when the current International Space Station is estimated to likely retire.

Source: Space Daily | Space News at One Piece Discoveries

According to AFP, he also admitted to hacking into a Fed computer server and installing a malicious software code there.

Lin, who is from Ipoh, travelled to the United States in October last year “for the purpose of selling stolen credit card and bank card numbers” but a purchaser was in fact an undercover US agent, according to prosecutors.

When he was arrested, Lin held over 122,000 stolen bank card and credit card numbers. The US Justice Department said Lin’s “cybercrime activities also extended to the national security sector”, including hacking into the computer system of a Pentagon contractor that provides systems management services for military transport and other military operations.

“Today’s sentence sends the message to hackers around the world that the United States is no place to conduct their business,” US Attorney Loretta Lynch said in a statement on Friday.

Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, founder and chief executive officer of hackers community Hack in The Box, said the stiff 10-year sentence was meant to deter hackers from hacking into government networks.

“Details of the case are not clear to me, but you can argue that 10 years for computer crime is harsh by any standards,” Dhillon told The Star.

“It’s definitely a sentence which is meant to send a message.” Dhillon said the hacker was “asking for trouble” “Hacking is a tool. Just like a knife can be used by a chef to prepare a meal or to stab someone. It is your motives that sets you apart. People who use their skills to commit financial fraud are not hackers, but just criminals,” he said.

Lin, according to a fellow hacker, deserved his punishment.

“Most hackers have the skills to breach a computer security system. But once you use your skills for malice, then you have committed a crime,” said a computer security consultant who wished to be identified as Sam. “If you are caught, you deserve to be punished like any other criminal.”

Sam said most people with hacking expertise, like himself, were hired by companies to “test” their computer security system. “Most of us use our skills to make a decent, legitimate living.”

Source: Yahoo Malaysia

“It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great — and rare — chance to study a near-Earth object like this,” astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.

The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon,” Yeomans said.

Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55′s approach, which will be visible from the planet’s northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States,” Yeomans said. “It is going to be very faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent-sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by.”

Scientists suspect YU 55 has been visiting Earth for thousands of years, but because gravitational tugs from the planets occasionally tweak its path, they cannot tell for sure how long the asteroid has been in its present orbit.

“These sorts of events have been happening for most of the lifetime of the Earth, about 4.5 billion years,” Fisher said. Computer models showing the asteroid’s path for the next 100 years show there is no chance it will hit Earth during that time, added Yeomans.

“We do not think that it will ever impact the Earth or moon (but) we only have its orbit calculated for the next 100 years,” he said. Previous studies show the asteroid, which is blacker than charcoal, is what is called a C-type asteroid that is likely made of carbon-based materials and some silicate rock.

More information about its composition and structure are expected from radar images and chemical studies of its light as the asteroid passes by the planet. “I’ve read that we will be able to see details down to a size of about 15 feet across on the surface of the asteroid,” Fisher said.

NASA is working on a mission to return soil samples from an asteroid known as 1999 RQ36 in 2020, followed by a human mission to another asteroid in the mid-2020s. Japan also plans to launch an asteroid sample return mission in 2018.

Source: Yahoo News

Megavirus nudges out Mimivirus, the former heavyweight champion of the viral world

The virus’ DNA features 1,259,197 base pairs, which encode some parasitic bacteria-like features. Unlike a virus, bacteria is a cellular organism — a virus can only infect and replicate itself within the cells of other organisms. It even has some built-in DNA repairing enzymes which allow the virus to repair damage from ultraviolet light, chemicals, and radiation.

Mimivirus was found in 1992, lurking in an amoeba in Bradford, England. Its capsid, the protein shell housing the virus’ genetic material, was 400 nanometres wide. If that still sounds pretty tiny, most viruses fall in the range between 20 and 300 nanometres, making both Mimivirus and the new Megavirus titans of the microscopic world. Mimivirus and Megavirus are believed to have diverged from a shared viral ancestor somewhere along the evolutionary road, both developing into giant viruses in their own right.

Source: Yahoo News

Source: Melayukini

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Click to Enlarge :O

Source: Fred Espenak