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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2011

New solar system found

A study by French scientists has revealed that older people with larger waistlines, high blood pressure
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WEEK’S TOP
MANU PRASAD 5
TECH WRAP FROM THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Kepler, NASA’s space telescope, spots five planets orbiting close to a distant star
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PIC FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSE
DEALS GOING PLACES
Facebook Deals, a way for users to find nearby
deals from businesses, made two significant moves
earlier this week — expansion to
five European countries and find-
ing deals via a webpage.
Facebook’s recent acquisition of
Rel8tion, a hyper local mobile
advertising startup, could also
indicate a move into the group
buying arena. Interestingly,
Facebook is testing a new feature called ‘Buy with
Friends’, currently for virtual goods only, that
allows users discounts on goods already purchased
by their friends.

LINKED BETTER
LinkedIn finally announced its intention to go
public. The business network has also been trying
hard to offer better ways of lever-
aging professional ties. Last
week, it announced a new
LinkedIn Labs product called
InMaps, an interactive visual
representation of one's profes-
sional connections. The groups
or affiliations are colour-coded
which helps understand the dif-
ferent relationships and thus leverage them better.

EGYPT — TECH SUPPORT

While Google teamed up with Twitter and engi-
neers from its own recent acquisition SayNow to

A
stronomers have spotted
a strange new solar sys-
tem with small ‘puffy’
planets packed in close
orbit to their sun.
And an orbiting space tele-
scope has pointed scientists to
ted it. “One of the most striking
features about the Kepler-11 sys-
tem is how close the orbits of the
planets are to one another,” they
wrote in their report.
The star resembles Earth’s own
sun. But five of the planets orbit-
ing it are packed into a space
Centre in California.
“It is clear that such planets
need not resemble the Earth in
any way,” Jonathan Fortney of
the University of California,
Santa Cruz, added in a telephone
briefing. “The low-mass planets
in the Kepler-11 system appear to
hope is to find planets about the
size and composition of Earth,
inside the so-called habitable
zone, where it is warm enough
for liquid water to exist but not
too hot for life.
“We have found over twelve
hundred candidate planets --
release a voice-to-tweet service to 'aid' protesting
Egyptians to transmit informa-
tion around the world, Anonym-
ous, the group famous for its
activities in WikiLeaks, anno-
unced Operation Egypt and took
down government sites. Prote-
stors also found an 'ally' in RIM
— the makers of BlackBerry.
BlackBerry’s secure data transmission allowed users
to bypass the Egyptian government’s crackdown on
communications with the outside world.

ANDROID — BEYOND MOBILE

more than 1,200 other possible
exoplanets -- planets outside our
own solar system -- the space
agency NASA has said.
The solar system discovery,
published in the journal Nature,
is mystifying astronomers for the
time being and illustrates just
how much variety is possible in
the universe.
The team at NASA and a range
of universities has named the sys-
tem Kepler-11, after the orbiting
Kepler space telescope that spot-
equivalent to the distance
between Mercury and Venus in
our own solar system.
And they are bigger and puffi-
er than the rocky inner planets of
our solar system, Earth, Venus,
Mars and Mercury, the scientists
said. However, they are some of
the smallest exoplanets ever seen.
“They are much more closely
packed ... than any other plane-
tary systems known, including
our own,” said Jack Lissauer, a sci-
entist at NASA’s Ames Research
be more like small Neptunes than
giant Earths.”
Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn and
Uranus are the giant gassy plan-
ets that orbit beyond Mars.
Astronomers have now found
more than 500 exoplanets. Most
are giant, because they are so far
away that only the biggest are
detectable.
Kepler, launched in March
2009, is measuring the light from
150,000 stars in the constella-
tions Cygnus and Lyrae. The
that's more than all the people
have found so far in history,”
William Borucki of Ames
Research Centre said.
“Now, these are candidates,
but most of them, I’m convinced,
will be confirmed as planets in
the coming months and years.”
No telescope is powerful
enough to directly visualise a
planet orbiting another star.
Instead, scientists use indirect
means to find them.
Reuters
While Android beat Nokia in terms of smart-
phone handset shipments in Q4 2010 with a 615
per cent YoY increase (as per research firm Canalys),
Google not only launched its
long-awaited Android Market
website, but also unveiled its
Android 3.0 operating system.
Code-named Honeycomb, it
offers enhanced tablet support
with among other things, a new
user interface, and can be seen as
a big step in a market that is dominated by the iPad.

SEARCH WARS

Today, Net will run out of IP addresses On one hand, Google is fighting spam in its
search results and on the other, waging a war against
Bing, for allegedly using Google user data gleaned

T
he internet will run out of numerical IP
(Internet Protocol) addresses by Friday.
But the web will not ground to a halt. A
new system, Internet Protocol version 6 or
IPv6, will replace version 4.Every device con-
nected to the net is assigned a number. But
with millions of web-enabled phones now
online, the numbers are running out.
The system, set up in the 1980s with a
maximum of 4.1 billion addresses, was sup-
posed to never run out. The original creators
of the web initially thought it would be used
from IE and the Bing toolbar to improve its own
results. While the giants are at war,
only for academic purposes. a relatively new entrant is slowly
IP addresses act as phone numbers to making strides. Blekko, which uses
ensure that surfers reach websites and e-mails a 'Slashtag' search to let "users
and find their destination, the Daily Mail slash in what they want and slash
reports. out what they don't" and thus cre-
The authority that governs such addresses ate customised search results, has
will distribute the last batches on Thursday. just made its anti-spam efforts
“It will just be ‘business as usual’ if every- even better with a ban on content farms. With its
one gets their job done,” said John Curran, new apps for Android and iPhone, and a $200k
chief executive of the American Registry for investment from Ashton Kutcher (remember his ‘1
Internet Numbers, one of five regional groups million twitter followers’ challenge to CNN that
that dole out such addresses. They cover the arguably made Twitter mainstream), this service just
US, Canada and the Caribbean. IANS might be the disruptor that search needs.