ONGC discovers new oil field in Iran

DUBAI: India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has discovered a new oil field in Iran, the website of Iran State television said.

“India’s ONGC has discovered a new oil field in the Farsi oil block of the Persian Gulf,” Mahmoud Zirakchianzadeh, the managing director of Iran’s State offshore oil company was quoted as saying.

“The Indian company will undertake the development of the newly discovered field upon determining that its development is economically feasible,” he observed. Based on the ONGC’s technical studies, the capacity of the new oil field would also be announced, the official said.

Mr. Zirakchianzadeh pointed out that the new field could be developed concurrently with the Farzad B gas field, which is also located in the Farsi block. This gas field has estimated reserves of 12 trillion cubic feet.

The ONGC and the Indian Oil Corporation each have a 40 per cent participating interest in the Farsi block, while the Oil India Ltd. has a 20 per cent stake. The ONGC’s overseas arm, the ONGC-Videsh Ltd. (OVL) is involved in executing projects abroad. The ONGC had earlier announced plans to invest $3 billion with its partners to develop gas fields in the Farsi block. The consortium has reportedly already invested $ 90 million in the block.

Midas touch: Scientists discover gold nanoparticles

Scientists have for the first time discovered gold nanoparticles, setting to rest speculation about whether they existed at all.

Scientists of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said that they discovered these particles in western Australia.

“In the southern areas of the state, groundwater is very salty and acidic. This water dissolves primary gold and re-deposits it as pure gold crystals on fracture surfaces and in open pore spaces,” said Rob Hough, who led the search for the nanoparticles.

“On investigation of these crystals, there appeared to be a dark band across them. However, high magnification imaging showed the band was in fact, a mass of gold nanoparticles and nanoplates," he added.

These gold nanoparticles are in fact identical to those being manufactured in laboratories around the world for their unique properties.

The research team concluded that gold nanoparticles imaged represented the 'invisible' gold in the clay, and that this nanosized gold was common in similar environments.

“The gold nanoparticles have not been identified earlier because they are transparent to electron beams and effectively invisible,” Hough said.

“However, they are probably a common form of gold in this type of natural environment worldwide, where saline water interacts with gold deposits. They also provide the first direct observation of the nanoscale mobility of gold during weathering," said the researcher.

With gold fetching around Australian $950 an ounce and expected to rise, this study is good news for Australia's gold explorers.

The findings of the study have been presented in a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Geology.

New internet domain names in 2009: ICANN

Internet users should soon be able to use new domain names such as .love, .paris or .bank if one of the world wide web's biggest shakeups is approved this week as expected by the web regulator ICANN.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which opened its annual general meeting Monday in Paris, was due to vote on the new names this week.
"Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city or proper names," ICANN president Paul Twomey told French newspaper Les Echos.
The meeting has gathered more than 1,300 delegates from 130 countries.
ICANN, a non-profit organization based in southern California, oversees the assignment of domain names and internet protocol addresses that help computers communicate.

The Brightest X-Ray source

The x-ray has just got 100 million times brighter, thanks to next-generation light sources like free electron laser oscillator - or the X-FELO.

X-FELO will open up breakthrough scientific opportunities in various research fields. Its characteristics are ideally suited for bulk-sensitive, hard x-ray photo-emission spectroscopy.

Existing technology uses undulators to create bright x-ray beams of spontaneous emission at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne.

Much of the research for x-ray free electron lasers has been concentrated on self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE), which would amplify them by a factor of a million or more in a single pass.

A user of SASE will see x-ray brightness that is about 10,000 times brighter than what the APS is delivering, Argonne's Kwang-Je Kim said.

X-FELO, devised by US Department of Energy scientists, the electron pulse enters an undulator and generates an x-ray that is reflected back into the undulator entrance by crystals and connects with the next electron bunch and again travels back along the undulator. This pattern is repeated indefinitely with the x-ray intensity growing each time until equilibrium is reached.

An X-FELO will enhance the flux by six to eight orders of magnitude, shortening the data collection times by the same factor.

The intensity of individual x-ray pulse from an X-FELO is lower by about three orders of magnitude. However the X-FELO pulse has extremely narrow bandwidth, three to four orders of magnitude narrower than the SASE.

Accordingly an X-FELO user will see a brightness which is about six to eight orders of magnitude brighter than any previously created and three to four orders of magnitude brighter than proposed SASE technology.

The Double heads

A telescope that spans over four continents

Astronomers have set up a radio telescope which spans over four continents, a feat they claim is the first in the world.

Scientists have long combined observations from individual telescopes through interferometry, a process that produces the same resolution as a single dish as wide as the distance between the antennas.

Now, an international team, led by Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has developed the integrated telescope.

Its size gives it ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing the array to image objects, like the bright 'afterglow' formed when a high-speed jet of matter from a gamma-ray burst slams into its surroundings, that just look like points to individual radio telescopes

In an observational run, it was found that antennas in North America, South America, Europe and Africa all pointed in the same direction. Signals were fed by fibre optics in a bid to create real-time images at a hub in the Netherlands.

Previously, data from each telescope was recorded on discs and mailed to a central location. Now, data is sent via fibre optic cables to produce real-time images of celestial objects

For the astronomers, the telescope will allow them to plan follow-up observations for rapidly changing phenomena, such as supernovae.

Such observing plans, which can change quickly depending on what the target does, were hard to justify when the data was still in the mail. These are very expensive telescopes. They don't just give away time on the off-chance that something will happen

Inflammation of arteries causes blindness, says study

Inflammation of arteries in the brain is likely to cause blindness, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Geisinger Health System came to this conclusion after examining a disorder known as temporal arthritis -- a condition where arteries swell and restrict blood flow to the brain.

Temporal arthritis can cause headaches, jaw soreness and flu-like symptoms. Untreated, the disease can lead to blindness or stroke. The average age for disease onset is 70.

A giant version of white blood cells that destroy bacteria are often found in patients with the disease, and these make them far more vulnerable to blindness, as compared to healthy patients.

Besides, patients with these giant cells are three times more likely to experience Polymyalgia rheumatica, an inflammatory disorder that causes muscle aches and stiffness primarily in the arms, thighs and neck.

US military makes world's fastest supercomputer

A US military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

It has out beaten the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California

Thomas P D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop - one thousand trillion calculations per second - has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organisations in the US, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the EU.

The Roadrunner

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics."

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the US in supercomputing.

Scientists develop wonder glass that regenerates bones

A new kind of glass will enable patients to re-grow bones by dissolving and releasing calcium into the body, possibly making bone transplants redundant.

The porous glass, developed by scientists at Imperial College here, dissolves in the body and stimulates bone growth, without leaving any toxic residue.

Specific concentrations of soluble silica and calcium ions in the glass activate genes that encode proteins controlling the bone cell cycle and differentiation of the cell to form bone matrix and rapid mineralization of bone nodules.

The gene is activated only when the timing sequence of a cell cycle is matched by that of the glass surface reactions and controlled release of ions.

“To allow people to remain active, and to contribute to society for longer, the need for new materials to replace and repair worn out and damaged tissues becomes ever more important,” the researchers said.

Canada first in the world to pass climate act

The Canadian House of Commons has become the first parliament in the world to pass a climate act, which commits the country to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.

The House passed the Climate Change Accountability Bill Wednesday(June 4 2008). It was moved by the leader of the opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) Jack Layton.

The two other opposition parties - the Liberal party and the Bloc Quebecois - supported the bill.

"This is a world first," Layton said in a statement later.

"Our legislation sets tough but achievable targets that will ensure Canada does its share to avoid the dangerous two-degree increase in average global temperature that scientists warn us about," he said.

To ensure that Canada meets long-term pollution reduction targets, short and medium-term targets are also enshrined in the law, the opposition leader said.

The bill sets an interim target of 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 and requires progress reports from the government every five years.

However, the minority Conservative party government is adamant on its own environment plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, below 2006 levels, by 2020.

But Layton said his bill enshrines "targets endorsed by world leaders".

"Instead of looking back and dwelling on past targets, missed because of the inaction of previous governments," he said his party was looking forward to a sustainable future for Canada's economy.

What's new in Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft has kept development of Internet Explorer 8 pretty quiet, but already the next major version of the most widely-used browser is available for downloading in a beta version.

While the focus of IE 7 was on security and the incorporation of a tabbed interface, version 8's main features centre on stability and usability.

In terms of stability, IE 8's new automatic crash recovery feature is designed to solve one major problem that most IE users know all too well. Today, when an IE window or tab freezes or crashes, other browsers instances or tabs will likely become inoperable as well.

Automatic crash recovery does a better job of isolating instances of the IE browser - or separate tabs within the same browser - so that one stalled browser or tab can be terminated without affecting any other.

If a crash does bring down the entire browser, automatic crash recovery will attempt to restore the browser to its previous state - including all open tabs - the next time you open it.

Greater stability is fine - but ultimately boring. Luckily, that's not all IE 8 has going for it. The new browser's usability features will generate the most buzz - and are likely to tempt lots of folks to give IE 8 a try.

The new Activities feature, for instance, attempts to save you a lot of time by cutting down on the number of separate sites that you have to visit to accomplish a task. In essence, the Activities feature allows you to invoke the essential services offered on separate sites without ever leaving the page you're currently on.

Let's say, for example, that you're reading a web page and you see an address for a restaurant you'd like to visit.

Activities feature

Today, in order to get directions to that address, you would probably go to a mapping site and type or paste the address in and then wait for the service to provide you with a map from, say, your apartment to the restaurant.

The process is time-consuming and involves at least two browser windows and tabs, plus a bit of copying a pasting.

With IE 8's Activities feature, when you select the address, a small Activities button appears next to your mouse cursor. Clicking that Activities button brings up a context-sensitive menu of possible activities, with one of the options being the ability to map the tool using your favourite mapping site.

Selecting that mapping option actually invokes the mapping site in a smaller preview window inside the current browser tab.

Another Activity might pull from a review site of restaurants, allowing you to see what others have said about the restaurant without your having to visit another site.

The Activities feature was also created with a nod toward the growing popularity of social networking sites. Just as you can pull services from other sites, the Activities feature also allows you to push information to popular networking sites such as Facebook and Digg.

If you want to refer a friend to the page from which you got the address for the restaurant, for instance, you can select the Send to Facebook option on the Activities menu, and IE 8 will log you into Facebook, send the URL to Facebook, and present you with the Facebook page that allows you to add an entry.

A set of default Activities comes with the IE 8 browser, but you easily customise the service providers that appear on your Activities list.

Web Slices

Another time-saving feature of IE 8 is called Web Slices, which are designed to allow you to subscribe to frequently-updated portions, or "slices," of certain websites.

Instead of spending your time visiting three or four websites to get updated information from a portion of each of those sites, you would simply use Web Slices to pull that information into a single location in IE 8.

A site such as eBay, for instance, lends itself to the Web Slices feature.

Say, for instance, that you are running or watching several auctions on eBay. Typically, you would visit eBay multiple times per day to check the status of those auctions.

With Web Slices, you can instead simply subscribe to a section of the auction page by clicking a Web Slice icon that appears when you allow your mouse cursor to hover over a portion of a site that is frequently updated.

Clicking the Web Slice icon adds a new button to a Favorites bar that appears above your browser tabs. Clicking the newly-created Web Slice button on the IE 8 Favourites bar will pull the latest data from your subscribed page and show it to you in a preview window.

You can visit the page itself merely by clicking a link within the preview window.

As with Activities, Web Slice-enabled sections of sites must be made available by web site owners themselves. The code for doing so is fairly simple and non-proprietary, however, so it will likely simply be a matter of time before many sites become "IE 8 aware" and users start seeing the Activities and Web Slices icons as they surf their favorite sites.

Click here to download IE 8 Beta