Google has released next version of Android mobile operating system

Google has released a developer preview of the next version of its Android mobile operating system.

The update introduces new application programming interfaces (APIs) along with other useful features, according to Google software engineer Xavier Ducrohet.

"Android 1.5 introduces APIs for features such as [on-screen] soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders and speech recognition," he said in a blog post.

Google's own applications on the platform, including Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube and Picasa, have all been tweaked and

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World First Netbook with DVD-burning

Asus' new Eee PC 1004dn steps up in style and features, boasting a DVD-writer, expresscard slot and scrabble-tile keyboard.

Sometimes it seems like every week, there's a new Eee PC model to take a look at. That might sound like it gets dull after a while, but Asus keep innovating and giving us new things to get excited about.

Take the Eee PC 1004dn, for example. Somewhere along the way, scrabble-tile keyboards become the marker of class in laptops (I blame the Apple MacBook, though it certainly helps that Sony has followed suit with a swag of VAIO laptops), and here were have a scrabble-tile keyboard on an Eee PC.

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Microsoft Office announced "Next version" coming in 2010

Microsoft Corp.'s next version of its Office desktop programs will reach consumers next year, though not likely in conjunction with the Windows 7 operating system.

Microsoft is set to announce Wednesday that Office 2010 will be finished and ready to send to manufacturers in the first half of next year.

From there, it can take six weeks to four months or more for the programs to reach PC users, said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president in the Microsoft group that makes Office. The timing will differ for big businesses and individual consumers, and for people who buy packaged software versus those who download it.


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Scientists start to unlock secrets of bird flight

WASHINGTON – For millennia, people have watched the birds and bees and wondered: "How do they do that?"

Thanks to high-speed film and some persistent scientists, at least one of the secrets of flight is now revealed.

When birds, bats or bugs make a turn, all they have to do is start flapping their wings normally again and they straighten right out.

That came as a surprise to researchers who thought turning and stopping took more steps.

Lead researcher Tyson L. Hedrick of the University of North Carolina compared it to sitting at a desk chair and turning left. It's a three-step process, launch the turn by pushing with one foot, turn, then stop by pushing with the other.

It's a simpler, one-step process for flying animals, he explained in a telephone interview, launch a turn and then simply flap normally to end it and fly away.

The findings are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

"We didn't expect things to fall out this neatly," he said, particularly since the process is the same for animals of all sizes from the fruit fly to the bat to the cockatoo.

"It's sort of unusual" to find a general rule to cover six orders of magnitude in size, he said.

The findings should help in the development of robotic flying machines, he said.

But, of course, this study focuses only on one type of maneuver, turning left or right, which is known as yaw in aviation.

There's still pitch, nose up or nose down, and roll, which is tilting left or right, to be dealt with.

"We picked basically the simplest turn you can imagine to make comparison," Hedrick said.

The situation does become more complicated with more complex maneuvers, "and that is clearly the next step," he said.

The report was welcomed by Bret W. Tobalske of the University of Montana, who said "the results will inform all future research into maneuvering flight in animals and biomimetic flying robots."

"Now that technology has developed to the point where detailed measurements of flapping maneuvers have become feasible, a world of comparative research is opening," Tobalske, who was not part of the research team, said in a commentary on the paper.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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YouTube, Universal Music Group form music venture

YouTube and Universal Music Group are teaming up on an online music video venture that will launch later this year with Universal's entire catalog of nearly 10,000 music videos.

The companies will share ad revenue on the Vevo.com site, on a Vevo channel on YouTube and on a tailor-made video player that can be placed on social-networking pages and other sites. The free-to-view package will carry ads, including video spots of up to 15 seconds preceding the music video.

"We believe that video is the best opportunity for revenue generation right now," said Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of Universal's eLabs digital business strategy unit.

"The advertisers and brands are more comfortable with video as a vessel for their message and their advertising spend. Streaming audio is harder to monetize under an ad-driven model right now."

As an added incentive to Universal, the player will feature a button enabling users to easily buy the tunes digitally through Apple Inc.'s iTunes and Amazon.com Inc., which send most of the revenue from music sales to the labels. For now, videos will not be for sale.

Universal will spend tens of millions of dollars on the project and Vevo will be a wholly owned Universal subsidiary, Caraeff said. YouTube, a subsidiary of online advertising and search leader Google Inc., will provide the technology.

Universal, a unit of France's Vivendi SA, is the world's largest recording company and already has the most watched channel on YouTube with some 3.8 billion views since August 2006.

Doug Morris, Universal's chief executive, is in talks with the other major recording labels — Warner Music Group Corp., Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Group Ltd. — about participating in the venture.

David Eun, Google's vice president of strategic partnerships, said that previously, YouTube's relationship with major content creators like recording labels has been "fraught with tension and animosity and sometimes lawsuits."

"There hasn't been a genuine partnership that I think this model represents," he said.

In December, Warner Music pulled all of its music from YouTube, saying the payments it received did not fairly compensate the label or its artists and songwriters.

Even Neil Young jumped into the fray, arguing on his Web site that YouTube had underpaid Warner compared with other labels, resulting in a shutdown that "penalized" artists like himself.

Viacom Inc. is also suing YouTube for $1 billion, saying the site infringes on copyrights of its shows, including Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" cartoon.

YouTube will continue to host and generate ad revenue off user-generated content, including recorded music accompanied by minimal original video, but those items won't be hosted on Vevo unless they stand out in some way, Caraeff said.

Vevo will also create other music video programming to give the service personality and edge, much like video disc jockeys, or VJs, have done on MTV, Caraeff said.

"It has to have soul," he said. "I'm not going to say we'll have VJs, but it will have a particular voice."

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US wages war on bugs afflicting troops abroad

Fluorescent rodent feces, a promising new mosquito repellant and a better flytrap are all part of a war on bugs designed to protect U.S. troops around the world.

Researchers in the Pentagon's Deployed Warfighter Protection Research Program highlighted pest-fighting innovations this week at the American Mosquito Control Association convention attended by some 800 scientists and insect control experts. Their aim: to take no prisoners among disease-carrying flies, mosquitoes and other bugs that threaten Americans in uniform abroad.

Even the common fly is counted among the enemy.

"When you're deployed, I would say 90 percent of all soldiers, service members, are going to have issues with filth flies," said Army Lt. Col. Jason Pike, executive officer of the 65th Medical Brigade's Force Health Protection and Preventive Medicine program headquartered in South Korea.

"Filth flies carry many organisms which cause diarrhea ... It might not be fatal, but one soldier out of commission affects a lot of other people," he said.

Begun in 2004, the Deployed Warfighter Protection Research Program dispenses $5 million a year to find new ways to combat disease-carrying insects that threaten the troops — applications that ultimately could protect the public at large.

Military-driven research has produced past innovations against malaria and dengue and helped develop DEET, a key ingredient in most modern repellants. It even has led to chemical-treated fabrics that ward off ticks and mosquitoes.

Fighting bugs is a "global perpetual need," said program coordinator Graham B. White of the Armed Forces Pest Management Board. "Even if nobody went to war for a long time, these things would still need to be developed."

He said small insecticide sprayers developed through the program are now in use. The program also backed testing that secured recent Environmental Protection Agency approval of an insecticide spray that is highly toxic at low doses to adult mosquitoes but safe for mammals.

Now Navy Corpsman Joe Diclaro II is taking aim at the housefly. "I like to think of it as a death device," Diclaro said of a fold-up flytrap designed to ship flat and be rolled into bug-catching tubes in the field.

For starters, he changed the color of the trap.

"Almost everything on the market is yellow," said Diclaro, who is working on a doctorate in medical entomology at the University of Florida in conjunction with the Agriculture Department's Mosquito and Fly Research Unit.

When Diclaro released house flies in a dark tunnel between boxes lit in different colors, he found flies prefer blue or white over yellow.

So his trap is made of blue signboard. Tests show it has killed about 3,000 flies in 24 hours. Diclaro said his university's technology office has applied for a patent.

The research is among nearly three dozen studies funded by the Pentagon program since 2004.

Stephen Duke, of the National Center for Natural Products Research in Oxford, Miss., described possible bug repellents derived from American beautyberry, a shrub common to the Gulf coast. Duke said work began after a botanist remarked that relatives had rubbed farm mules with beautyberry leaves for bug protection.

Two colorless, odorless compounds in the leaves — callicarpenal and intermedeol — seem about as good as DEET against mosquitoes and repel black-leg ticks and fire ants, Duke said. He said a decision on possible commercial uses is still a few years away.

The fluorescent feces are being used at Louisiana State University to learn whether sandflies can be killed by feeding sand rats a chemical harmless to the rodents but lethal to larvae that eat their feces.

Leishmaniasis, which causes disfiguring open sores and is spread by sandfly bites, is an enormous concern in the Middle East, White said. The disease infects an estimated 2 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization.

More than 2,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered from the disease, said Kenneth Linthicum, director of the Agriculture Department's Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology.

To show that something eaten by a rodent could affect a sandfly, LSU researchers fed hamsters a dye that glows hot pink under fluorescent light. Sandfly larvae that ate the rodents' feces glowed, too.

They then fed hamsters two different chemicals known to kill sandfly larvae. Larvae ate their feces and died.

The fluorescent bait is being tested in Kenya and more work is planned on it, said researcher Thomas Mascari, a postdoctoral student in entomology at the LSU AgCenter.

"In 2010, we'll be going to Egypt to work with the Navy," he said.

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Science Today: Edge of Space Found

Hold on to your hats, or in this case, your helmets: Scientists have finally pinpointed the so-called edge of space — the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

With data from a new instrument developed by scientists at the University of Calgary, scientists confirmed that space begins 73 miles (118 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

A lot remains very fuzzy, however, as the boundary is surrounded by a host of misconceptions and confusing, conflicting definitions.

For starters, astronauts can say they've been to space after only passing the 50-mile (80-kilometer) mark.

Meanwhile the boundary recognized by many in the space industry is also a somewhat arbitrary 62 miles (100 kilometers). Scientist Theodore von Kármán long ago calculated that at this altitude the atmosphere is so thin that it's negligible, and conventional aircraft can no longer function because they can't go fast enough to get any kind of aerodynamic lift. This 62-mile boundary is accepted by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which sets aeronautical standards.

The United States, however, has never officially adopted a set boundary standard because it would complicate the issue of overflight rights of satellites and other orbiting bodies, according to NASA.

NASA's mission control uses 76 miles (122 kilometers) as their re-entry altitude because that's where the shuttle switches from steering with thrusters to maneuvering with air surfaces, NASA states. Others point out that the "Now Entering Space" sign should be posted way out at 13 million miles (21 million kilometers) because that's the boundary where Earth's gravity is no longer dominant.

(While astronauts experience weightlessness in space, this isn't because there's no gravity there, it's due to the balance of forces acting on them as they orbit.)

In the new study, an instrument called the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager detected the boundary by tracking the relatively gentle winds of Earth's atmosphere and the more violent flows of charged particles in space, which can reach speeds well over 600 mph (1,000 kph).

The ability to gather data in that area is significant because it's very difficult to make measurements in this region, which is too high for balloons and too low for satellites.

"It's only the second time that direct measurements of charged particle flows have been made in this region, and the first time all the ingredients – such as the upper atmospheric winds – have been included," says project scientist David Knudsen of the University of Calgary.

The instrument was carried by the JOULE-II rocket on Jan. 19, 2007. It traveled to an altitude of about 124 miles (200 kilometers) above sea level and collected data for the five minutes it was moving through the "edge of space."

The finding, detailed in the Journal of Geophysical Research on April 7, could aid the study of space weather and its impacts on Earth.

The data "allows us to calculate energy flows into the Earth's atmosphere that ultimately may be able to help us understand the interaction between space and our environment," Knudsen said.

"That could mean a greater understanding of the link between sunspots and the warming and cooling of the Earth's climate as well as how space weather impacts satellites, communications, navigation, and power systems."

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