The automatic download button for Youtube Videos.

Isn't it true many times you like a youtube video very much but have no option to download it. The same thing happened with me. I really liked songs with videos but you don't get them for free anywhere on the net, so the only option was to download it from Youtube but how. After a long time I came across "Streaming Video recorder". Its a really nice tool to download media from any, yes any website.
For this all you need to do is paste the url into the software or start that media on your web browser. As the media starts loading the software prompts you to download it. If you want to download press yes or no. You can even convert the video file to any other format using the convert option. And the greatest thing is that it is FREE. Yes absolutely free. Though you can buy it but I don't find any point in it (You need to buy it to use the convert option). You can download it from the website for free.

AVG Free - A really appreciable free Antivirus

Some weeks ago my laptop had virtually, nearly stopped working. Nearly all my softwares were infected by viruses and all the setup files would refuse to startup. I also had Kaspersky 2010 installed on my Laptop and even it would not startup due to the virus. However I had a lifeline yet left with me - My Safari web browser.

Now on as I googled Free Antivirus this Avg Free was the first link and so I decided to try it out. I downloaded(101 MB) and run the setup and quickly it started scanning my Lap. After about an hour it could successfully detect 676 viruses in about a some hundred thousand files scanned. After that all the softwares could run properly without any problems and some softwares even reinstalled themselves again.

So in a condition the #2 Antivirus : Kaspersky did not work a free AVG antivirus worked. But however I do not blame Kaspersky for anything. Now I have started using Kaspersky again and it manages the viruses quite well. But thanks to AVG for the Free Antivirus which saved my Lap. The AVG antivirus can be downloaded from this website : AVG official website

Google 's new OS

Google's upcoming Chrome operating system - a new OS that will, according to the search giant, arrive on netbook computers sometime later this year - is also going to offer a feature Google engineers have dubbed, unofficially, "chromoting." Now what's chromoting ? It's remotely accessing your PC applications via the browser. In other words it an be called a remote desktop app for your new cloud computer.

This was first uncovered by U.K. tech news site 'The Register' earlier in this week, this news comes directly from a Google engineer who posted the following on the Chromium Google Group, an online message board for discussing the open-source project behind the Chrome browser and Chrome operating system:
We're adding new capabilities all the time. With this functionality (unofficially named "chromoting"), Chrome OS will not only be [a] great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser.
When requested for more details, the engineer also told that its functionality would indeed be "something like" Remote Desktop Connection, a Windows technology that allows you to connect to a remote computer from the computer you're currently using.

For more info : Google Blog

Apple's Safari 5 hits Mac and Windows

Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone 4 was not the only news emerging from Apple’s WWDC. Apple also declared the launch of their Safari 5 web browser which they expected to offer Mac users a 30% performance increase as compared to its previously released version. It comes with the Safari Reader and allows users to select Google, Bing or Yahoo! as the search service supplementing Safari’s search field. The download is now available on the Apple's website.

The browser has many new cool things aimed to 'Improve the way you view the web. And powerful new tools to help developers enhance and customize the browsing experience altogether.' 

The new Safari 5 includes the following new features :-

Safari Reader

Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article — whether two or twenty. Onscreen controls let you email, print, and zoom. Change the size of the text, and Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader.

Even Greater HTML5 Support

Web standards are the future of the Internet. The world’s most innovative browser, Safari continues to lead the way in support for HTML5. Safari 5 supports over a dozen new HTML5 features that allow developers to create interactive content and media experiences that work right in the browser — without the need for third-party plug-ins.

Better Performance

The world’s fastest web browser gets an engine upgrade. Enhancements to the Nitro Engine in Safari 5 mean you experience web browsing at greater speeds than before. Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript up to 30 percent faster than Safari 4, 3 percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.

The all new iPhone 4

On Monday, Apple unveiled the latest version of its popular iPhone which is a thinner and more powerful device than the earlier versions and is better suited for media consumption.

Indeed, Netflix, the most popular application for the iPad, said at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference that it will debut a free iPhone application this summer. Online game FarmVille, with 70 million users, will also be hitting the iPhone by the end of June.

Users will be able to record video in HD and make video calls on an application called FaceTime . And a higher resolution display will mean a much better picture -- so Chinese characters, for example, appear razor sharp(WoW).

Some other highlights:

• Price: It will retail at $199 for 16 gigabytes and $299 for 32 gigabytes of data. Available June 24.
• Search: iPhone 4 will also include Bing, Microsoft's search engine.
• Camera: flash and 5 megapixels versus 3 megapixels in old version
• Video: HD video recording and LED light

Just Like Humans, Cockroaches also 'recommend eating joints' to each other

Researchers, in an experiment, have found that the majority of the cockroaches fed only on one piece of food until it was all gone, and did not split into groups to attack the whole pile of food at the same time. It was also seen that the more number of cockroaches were on one piece of food, the more longer each one would stay to feed on that piece of food.

New rover to find out life on Mars

British scientists on 5/6/10 have announced the start of work on a new mission to Mars in 2018 that will explore the possibility of life on the planet. 
    ExoMars will be the first mission for attempting to obtain samples at a depth of 1-2 metre below the surface of Mars where they are protected from radiation and oxidants thought to exist on the surface, and both of which would destroy/ heavily degrade complex organic compounds. 
    The scientists from the university are involved in five instruments on board the ExoMars mission, including building the hardware for three of the instruments on board the craft. 
    ExoMars is a robotic mission to Mars, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. Data from the mission will also provide invaluable input for broader studies of exobiology – the search for life on other planets. 
    The mission to Mars also has major Earth-bound applications with spin-offs in collaboration with industry bringing environmental benefits as well as technologies that can be applied in the fields of health and crime detection. PTI

Australian restaurant going the iPad way.

SYDNEY: An Australian restaurant has now removed printed menus and now and have gone for the latest tech-craze, the Apple's touchscreen iPad computer, to choose and order their meals."One of the points of difference for our restaurant was to have a unique menu," says the hotel's general manager Craig Simpson on Friday "Everyone's excited about the iPad and so we're jumping on the back of that."

They are currently using an iPad application developed ahead of the tactile device's launch that allows diners at the restaurant to browse the menu – complete with photographs and tasting notes – easily with a flick of a finger.
Ordering is now very simple like - Order a steak and the application asks how you would like the meat cooked, and the placing of the order can now be done with the press of a button. The later planned features also include pop-up boxes that will suggest wines to match meals, and stockcontrol mechanisms to delete sold-out items from the menu and much more.

Food and beverage manager Fareid Taheri said the menu has been well received. "It's something to play with while you order," he said.

What does Google TV do for Sony?

Quick, which company is bigger: Google or Sony?

If you answered Google, you'd be wrong -- at least when it comes to sales. Google pulled in $23.7 billion in revenue last year compared with Sony's $77.6 billion.

But if one judges it by the amount of press generated by Thursday's announcement that Sony would be the first to come out with a television set incorporating the Google TV platform, the reverse is true. News hits generated by a (Google) search for "Sony Internet TV" yielded 2,190 stories in the last 24 hours, whereas "Google TV" came up with 5,300 results.

So what does the Japanese consumer electronics giant get from the alliance, if not press? As it turns out, potentially quite a bit, said Jonathan Gaw and Danielle Levitas, two technology analysts with IDC. They boil it down to three crucial benefits:

1. Sony gets to set itself apart from the pack, for a short time. Television makers have been waging a battle against commodity pricing, particularly from savvy upstarts such as Vizio. While this has been a great boon to shoppers, it's annihilated company profits, especially for premium players such as Sony. Being first to have Google TV gives Sony a chance to differentiate its TV sets with snazzy apps, bite-sized software and services that can be delivered to the TV straight from the Internet without a computer. But all TV makers will eventually have access to Google TV, Levitas said, so the window of opportunity will be brief.

2. Sony potentially gets access to a new revenue stream -- search referrals. While Google and Sony would not talk about what, if any, revenue-sharing arrangements they've agreed to, Gaw thinks Google will do what it typically does with partners: share the wealth.

"That’s what Google does with everyone,” he said. “If you send them a search, they give you a cut of the revenue. The consumer electronics guys have never had that before.” 

3. Sony gets a software platform. Apart from video games, Sony has gotten a steady diet of criticism over the years for its software. Instead of insisting on doing all of its own software, Sony is starting to call in outside partners. Google is the most high-profile partner, but not the first. Earlier this year, Sony worked with a small software company, Chumby Industries, to develop its Dash device.

"Software plays an increasingly important role in devices, but it's not Sony's forte," Gaw said. "So they partner with whoever they can to give them a leg up."

For now, that leg up is coming from Google.

Wedding conducting Robot

TOKYO: Almost everyone stood when the bride walked down the aisle in her white gown, but not the wedding conductor, because she was bolted to her chair.

The nuptials at this ceremony were led by "I-Fairy,'' a 4-foot tall seated robot with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails. Sunday's wedding was the first time a marriage had been led by a robot, according to manufacturer Kokoro Co. "Please lift the bride's veil,'' the robot said in a tinny voice, waving its arms in the air as the newlyweds kissed in front of about 50 guests.

The wedding took place at a restaurant in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, where the I-Fairy wore a wreath of flowers and directed a rooftop ceremony. Wires led out from beneath it to a black curtain a few feet away, where a man crouched and clicked commands into a computer. 

Link between Mobile Phone and Brain Cancer

Cell phone users worried about getting brain cancer aren't off the hook yet.

A major international study into the link between cell phone use and two types of brain cancer has proved inconclusive, according to a report due to be published in a medical journal on Tuesday.

A 10-year survey of almost 13,000 participants found most cell phone use didn't increase the risk of developing meningioma -- a common and frequently benign tumor -- or glioma -- a rarer but deadlier form of cancer. 


There were ``suggestions'' that using cell phones for more than 30 minutes each day could increase the risk of glioma, according to the study by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer. But the authors added that ``biases and error prevent a causal interpretation'' that would directly blame radiation for the tumor.

Longer call times appeared to pose a greater risk than the number of calls made, the study found. 

Low Attention in kids due to Pesticides

A new study of US health data reveals that children's attention-deficit disorder is due exposure to common pesticides used on fruits and vegetables. 

While the study couldn't prove that pesticides used in agriculture contribute to childhood learning problems, experts said the research is persuasive. "I would take it quite seriously," said Virginia Rauh of Columbia University, who has studied prenatal exposure to pesticides and wasn't involved in the new study.

Children may be especially prone to the health risks of pesticides as they're still growing and they may consume more pesticide residue than adults relative to their body weight.

In the body, pesticides break down into compounds that can be measured in urine. Almost universally, the study found detectable levels: The compounds turned up in the urine of 94% of the children. The kids with higher levels had increased chances of having ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, a common problem that causes students to have trouble in school.

The kids may have eaten food treated with pesticides, breathed it in the air or swallowed it in their drinking water. Experts said it's likely children who don't live near farms are exposed through what they eat.

As Ash Cloud Advances the British Airports are getting Affected

Europe's busiest airport was set to close early Monday morning as a dense crowd of volcanic ash drifts across England from Iceland, aviation authorities said.

The airspace over London's Heathrow Airport will be closed at 1 a.m. Monday (0000 GMT; 7 p.m. EDT), Britain's National Air Traffic Service said in a statement late Sunday night.

The restrictions affecting Heathrow — as well as Gatwick, Stansted, and London City airports - will be in place until at least 7 a.m. Monday, the aviation authority said.

Airports across Britain and Ireland were closed for much of Sunday because of the drifting ash. The shifting of the no-fly zone southward will allow airports in northern England — including the key cities of Manchester and Liverpool — to reopen after 1 a.m.

In Ireland, Dublin's international airport closed early Sunday evening until at least 12 p.m. Monday (1100 GMT, 7 a.m. EDT). Some airports in Ireland's west were closed and will reopen at different times Monday, but Shannon and southern Cork were open "until further notice."

German authorities sent up two test flights Sunday to measure the ash cloud, one from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the other from Lufthansa, the country's biggest airline.

The DLR plane flew to southern England then continued north, collecting data from between 10,000 to 23,000 feet (3,000 to 7,000 meters). The Lufthansa Airbus A340-600, equipped with special scientific gear, left Frankfurt to fly over northern Germany, the United Kingdom and parts of Scandinavia.

All the data from both flights was immediately sent to aviation authorities in the U.K, the Netherlands and Germany, said aerospace center spokesman Andreas Schuetz.

In southern Iceland, activity at the volcano fluctuated Sunday but did not get more intense, civil protection official Agust Gunnar Gylfason said. He blamed the closures on shifting winds.

"What really changes the situation is the weather pattern," he said.

The Icelandic weather service said "presently there are no indications that the eruption is about to end."

"The closing of Manchester airspace once again is beyond a joke," Branson said in a statement. He said test flights have "shown no evidence that airlines could not continue to fly completely safely."

British Airways, facing cabin crew strikes beginning Tuesday, said it had canceled a small number of flights out of Manchester. The airline's chief executive, Willie Walsh, is to meet with British Transport Secretary Philip Hammond on Monday.

Eurostar, which runs trains between Britain and continental Europe, said it was adding four extra trains — an additional 3,500 seats — between London and Paris on Monday.

Google admits its wi-fi data collection blunder

Google has admitted that for the past three years it has wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks.The is a issue came to picture after German authorities asked to audit the data the company's Street View cars gathered as they took photos viewed on Google maps.

Google said during a review it found it had "been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks". This will increase concerns about potential privacy breaches.

In a blogpost Google said as soon as it became aware of the problem it grounded its Street View cars from collecting wi-fi information and segregated the data on its network.

It is now asking for a third party to review the software that caused the problem and examine precisely what data had been gathered.

"Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short," wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research.

"The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust - and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here."

Spain under high pressure to Curb Digital Piracy

In the last decade, a surge of music and movie sharing online in Spain has thrilled fans, but it has also increased pressure from as far away as Hollywood to clamp down. Spanish lawmakers are expected to vote this year on a measure that would allow the swift closing of sites suspected of facilitating file-sharing.


The people who are trying to sell the movies and music are a lot less enthusiastic. Sony Pictures Entertainment warned in March that it was considering halting altogether the sale of its DVDs in Spain.


“Spain is a very young democracy, a country where rock songs got censored until 1978, so we’re still going through adolescence in relation to intellectual property,” said the Spanish rock singer known as Loquillo. “But we cannot get stuck in a fight between authors and Internet users while, much more importantly, our music industry is allowed to disappear or gets absorbed by outsiders.”

2 Billion Youtube visitors daily (Impressive)!!

YouTube say it now gets over two billion hits daily which is nearly double the number of people who tune into the US's three prime time TV stations combined.

The news comes as the site celebrates the day five years ago when the first beta version of YouTube was launched.

"We are a stage and we give everyone in the world an opportunity to participate and that is being a video platform for creating a solution for people to not only upload and distribute their videos on a global basis but to find and share videos."

He also said that while the two billion downloads marked a real milestone "I feel we have much further to go.
From cat videos to political videos to "how to" videos to entertainment - that is YouTube
-Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder

"Two billion video streams is a large number but on average people are only spending 15 minutes a day on the site compared to five hours a day watching TV.

"I don't think we could have ever planned or imagined we would get to the scale or the size we are today. We were mostly trying to create a video solution for ourselves based on our own frustrations. We are proud of what we have achieved so far but we have a lot of work ahead," said Mr Hurley.

The site was bought by Google near the end of 2006 for $1.65bn.

The slogan for YouTube is "Broadcast Yourself" which Mr Hurley said was a play on "be yourself and also captured in my mind the essence of the site which was to let people express themselves."

The first person to express themselves on the platform was fellow co-founder Jawed Karim who posted a 19 seconds long video called "Me at the Zoo". It was uploaded on April 23, 2005 and can still be viewed on the site.

Among the other videos that have made YouTube history is that of a wounded girl dying in front of a crowd during the Iranian election protests, a YouTube interview with President Barack Obama, Ronaldinho's Nike advert and singer Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent competition on TV.

"Maybe early on people only recognised us or explained YouTube by placing it in a box but there are so many people on our site and we receive so much content over a 24 hour period, it can't be about one thing.

Today it hosts channels for everyone from Queen Elizabeth to the Pope and from President Barack Obama to the Iraqi government.

"YouTube really is a phenomenon and is very much part of popular culture," said Catharine P Taylor, media blogger at news website BNET.com.

"It really is a game changer because it gives everybody a platform to broadcast from. There are many examples where an average citizen has become a big hit on YouTube and that is something that would have been impossible to contemplate five, six years ago."

"We are trying to create opportunities for everyone and this is not just about making big deals with major networks," said Mr Hurley.

Android phones beat Apple iPhone

US sales of smartphones running Google's Android mobile operating system surged past those of Apple for the first time in the first quarter of the year, industry research firm NPD said.

Android-powered smartphones accounted for 28 per cent of US consumer sales in the first three months of the year compared with 21 per cent for the iPhone, NPD said.

Canada's Research in Motion, maker of the popular Blackberry, retained the top spot with 36 per cent of US smartphone sales in the quarter, NPD said. 


NPD also said the average selling price for all mobile phones was $88 in the first quarter, five per cent higher than a year ago. Smartphone prices on the other hand decreased three per cent over the previous year to 151 dollars. 


Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhones since introducing the device in 2007.

Google adds language translation to Android smartphones (That's Awesome !)

Google released free software that lets smartphones based on its Android operating systems be used as language translation tools.

Google enhanced its Goggles application to read and translate English, French, Italian, German, or Spanish after pictures of words are taken with cameras built into smartphones such as the Internet giant's Nexus One.

"We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages," Google software engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said in a message posted at the California firm's website. "Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well."

Goggles is "computer vision" software that lets smartphone users do Internet searches based on pictures taken with the gadgets instead of typed in search queries.

Along with translation, the latest version of Goggles was enhanced to better read bar codes and recognize a larger array of artwork, products, and logos.

Dents have been found in the Earth's gravitational field which are due to plumes

Ancient pieces of continental crust that are falling to the bottom of the Earth's mantle could explain mysterious dents in our planet's gravitational field.

When you sail towards the centre of the Indian Ocean and you will find yourself losing weight because the Earth's gravitational field is weaker in this region. Similar dents in field strength are found in the north-east Pacific Ocean and the Ross Sea.

These weaknesses are believed to be created by "slab graveyards" – ancient pieces of crust and sediment that were pushed down into the Earth when plates collided and are now falling through the mantle. The slabs are denser than the surrounding mantle, so they have a stronger gravitational pull. As they fall, however, their effect on the gravitational field at the Earth's surface decreases.

But surrounding these areas are even weaker, unexplained dents in the field. Now Sonja Spasojevic from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues say this could be because the movement of the slabs through the mantle forces plumes of less dense material to rise towards the surface. The distribution of the unexplained weak spots simply reflects the pattern of these plumes, they say.

Bahamas islands were giant labs for lizard experiment

Wrapping entire islands in the Bahamas with netting, introducing snakes to two other islands and measuring the fitness of hundreds of lizards using treadmills: one of the most ambitious ecological field experiments ever conducted has resolved a long-standing question about the evolution of lizards.

Lizards of the genus Anolis are found throughout the American tropics, where they vary widely in size and shape depending on ecological conditions. It has long been thought that predation is the most important evolutionary force for continental lizard populations, whereas on islands competition between lizards themselves is more important. Until now, though, no one had tested this experimentally.

Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, cut no corners in their experiment. They excluded predators from two small, uninhabited islands in the Bahamas by wrapping the islands – about 1000 square metres each – with netting to keep out predatory birds. Meanwhile, they enhanced predation on two other islands by introducing lizard-eating snakes.

To vary the amount of competition, they seeded one of each pair of islands with high densities of Anolis sagrei lizards, and the other with lower densities of the animals.

Wanna fly home guys!!

Yes now you can :-)

iPad global launch date confirmed by Apple

Apple has announced that its iPad tablet computer will go on sale in nine countries outside the US on 28 May.

Review: Nikon Coolpix S8000 super-zoom camera

There's a relatively new category of point and shoot cameras -- I call it the "Mini super zoom," -- bigger than the traditional 3x zoom that comes standard with most point and shoots, yet smaller than the 20x to 24x found on the bulky and more expensive "Super Zoom" models.

I recently spent a week with Nikon's Coolpix S8000, which sells for around $260, and has a 10x zoom. That will be bring you substantially closer to the action, but nowhere with the range of the true super zoom.

I brought the S8000 to Hawaii, where I didn't want to walk around with a bag to lug a camera. In fact, I also had a digital SLR with me, and I'm so lazy, I left it in the room most of the time.

But on to the images. As with most point and shoots, in good light, I got great results. In lousy light, not so good.

This shot of exotic fruit at the Hilo Farmer's Market was shot in daylight, and I couldn't be happier. Beyond the zoom, the S8000 has a nice wide lens (which frankly is more important than a big zoom, in my opinion -- especially for group shots) and I left it on wide most of the time.

For the above shot of Kona coffee beans, again in natural light, I just got in real close and captured the action. The detail on the beans -- even with a little point and shoot, came in clear and crisp.

This sunset, from the deck of Michel's restaurant in Honolulu, had the potential to fall apart. On point and shoots, sometimes the automatic sensor wants to override, expose for the bright sun, and darken the image to the point of ot being recognizable. Didn't happen.

The surfer shot (above) is a good example of what you get with a mini-super zoom. It got me a little closer, but not good enough. With a super-zoom, we'd be seeing the surfer's face. Not so here.

All in all, it's a really nice camera for vacation. Downsides: the "High Def" video recording is 720p, not the higher 1080p. Also, the flash, like most point and shoots, wants to nuke folks in low light to the point where they resemble light bulbs.

Not Your Average Gamer: Women Play To Socialize

Many women are using online games to connect with friends and relatives whom they otherwise may not have time to socialize with. The games have tapped into a new market through mobile devices and Facebook.

Most-downloaded iPhone game sets the bar very low

A cartoon game called Ow My Balls has skyrocketed in demand since the developer listed it as free last weekend. The app stars an average-looking guy in jeans and a sweater, who the player guides toward, you guessed it, repeatedly getting hit in the crotch.

"I find the whole game genuinely entertaining," developer Josh Michaels said in an e-mail. "Our goal for the game was to make people laugh, and I think we accomplished it."

There are no stats on how many people chuckled, but the audience was certainly huge. On Monday alone, it was downloaded 233,000 times and has remained in the top spot practically ever since, Michaels wrote. In its first four days as a free download, the game added half a million new players, he said.

Google gives its search results and homepage a makeover

Some of the most sought-after real estate on the Web, Google Inc.’s search-results page, is getting a major makeover.

The Mountain View, Calif., giant, which runs the world’s most popular search engine, says it wants millions of users to more quickly and easily find what they are looking for. So it’s rolling out a new permanent fixture on the left-hand side of the search-results page.

Google says the column will contain navigational tools to help that particular search, sorting results by content type or date, drilling more deeply into them or suggesting relevant links or ways to refine the search.

NASA: Titan's lake revealed by reflection

A suspected sea on Saturn's haze-shrouded moon appears liquid, suggests NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
n a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by Katrin Stephan of Germany's Institute of Planetary Research reports a July 8, 2009 flyby may have answered the question of whether Titan's lakes are liquid or frozen.

More info...

NASA picks May 14 launch for Atlantis' last flight

Space shuttle Atlantis is set to blast off on its final flight next week.
NASA's top managers voted Wednesday to set May 14 as the launch date. Liftoff would be at 2:20 p.m.

Atlantis will fly to the International Space Station, carrying up a crew of six and a load of supplies. It's scheduled to be the last mission for Atlantis. NASA is retiring its three shuttles at the end of this year.

But Atlantis won't be dismantled and head to a museum when the flight is over. Instead, the spaceship will be prepped for a potential rescue mission for NASA's very last shuttle flight. That final trip, by Endeavour, is scheduled for November at the earliest.

After Atlantis, there are only two flights left.

Oil slick reaches Louisiana's barrier islands

As an orange slick of oil washed onto sandy barrier islands prized as a historic wildlife refuge, crews on Thursday worked to lower a containment vessel over a leak 5,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico, and federal officials extended a temporary freeze on new offshore drilling nationwide.

"We have now had reports of oil ashore," Coast Guard Petty Officer David Mosley said. Overflights found the sheen that marks the advancing edge of the massive slick hovering off the Louisiana coast, as well as heavier oil on both sides of the Chandeleur Islands, about 60 miles east of New Orleans.

Cleanup crews were dispatched to the crescent-shaped string of islands, which are part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge created in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Inconspicuous Consumption: The Case of the iPad

Last night, on the subway ride home from work, I noticed that the passenger sitting directly across from me was thoroughly engrossed in answering e-mail on her BlackBerry. The woman on my right was thumbing through pages of a New Yorker article she’d printed from the Web. There were several riders with creased newspapers and magazines and as I exited from the subway car, I noticed a couple of Kindle readers hunched over their slim screens.

Noticeably absent from the mix? The iPad.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to my commute. Peering into the windows of various coffee shops around Brooklyn hasn’t resulted in many sightings, either.

We know people are buying them. Apple recently said it hit the one million mark last week, a mere 28 days after the tablet first went on sale, indicating it was selling twice as fast as the first-generation iPhone when it was new.

So where are they? When the original iPhone came out, friends of mine who forked over the $500 to own one couldn’t wait to show it off at every opportunity. Although the iPad is not as easy to slip out of a pocket and demonstrate to friends, I still expected a similar showmanship from proud new owners.

Google Maps Is Fine for Finding Subways

Thursday’s Phone Smart column, on apps for New York City commuters, alludes to the dearth of subway-related apps for Android phones.

Some Android users sent e-mails suggesting the cause: Google Maps. That free app, a Swiss army knife of location-related services, sniffs out your location and offers you directions and travel times to the nearest mass transit stations and guidance on which trains and buses to take.

While it doesn’t suggest which door to choose for the fastest exit, as the Exit Strategy NYC iPhone app does, Google’s software is generally good enough to stave off iPhone envy. Plus, it works in cities other than New York, and you can add Exit Strategy to your Android device to further speed your commute.

Readers from outside the New York area who don’t have an Android device should consider the OpenMaps app ($3), which lets you download high-resolution maps of nearly any major city to your device, for those times when you have no cell connection. Because the maps are high-resolution, you can enlarge the image to the point where you can see street level detail.

It's awesome to sleep in the car with the AC on, but what if you are on the driving seat and driving :-(

Good news guys - Now scientists are all set to develop a car which can navigate on its own. Yes. In the car you tell the car where to go, sleep, and you are at your destination.

Google TV Software Coming Soon – TV Through Internet

Google to introduce Android-based television software to access TV through internet. It is designed to work on open set-top boxes (STB), TVs and other similar device. The service allows users to access and search across programming from the internet as well as Dish’s conventional programming.

Guys time to go into the future !!!!!!!

Stephen Hawking says that humans may one day be able to use time travel to skip generations into the future.

He has suggested humans could build spaceships capable of such high speeds that time itself would slow down for those on board. Such a spaceship could travel thousands of years into the future at close to the speed of light, reaching distant star systems within the lifetime of its crew.

He makes his comments in Stephen Hawking’s Universe, a documentary to be screened by the Discovery channel from next Sunday. A suggestion in another part of the series — that alien life is highly likely to exist but humans should try to avoid it — has already generated global interest.

Einstein found that as objects accelerate through space, the rate at which time passes for them slows down. For objects such as aircraft the effect is negligible, but Hawking’s spaceship would exceed 98% of the speed of light, when such effects would be extremely powerful.

Hawking said such a ship could theoretically reach speeds of more than 650 million miles an hour, but would have to be built on a huge scale simply to carry all the fuel that would be needed.

“It would take six years at full power just to reach these speeds. After the first two years it would reach half light speed and be far outside the solar system. After another two years it would be travelling at 90% of the speed of light,” he said. “After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach full speed, 98% of the speed of light, and each day on the ship would be a year on Earth. At such speeds a trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years for those on board.”

Deep secret uncovered: Ocean bugs can use Sun for energy

Scientists say that they have found the first direct evidence that bacteria in the ocean can harvest light energy from sunlight for survival, thanks to a unique photoprotein.

Wow a new unit for digital measurement :-))

Yes that's right Zettabytes is now the largest unit of digital measurement.

This is because the size of the "digital universe" will swell so rapidly this year that a new unit — the zettabyte — has been invented to measure it. And, it has overtaken petabytes as the largest unit of digital measurement, reports said.

One zettabyte is equal to one million petabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes (WOW). Humanity's total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes — which each represent a million gigabytes — but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year.

The current size of the world's digital content is equivalent to all information that could be stored on 75 billion Apple iPads (Oh man !), or the amount that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on the microblogging site 'Twitter' constantly for a century.

Plasma rocket can reach Mars only in 39 days !

Nasa is looking forward to flying a plasma-powered rocket to survey an asteroid that could take astronauts to Mars in a little over a month’s time.

The rocket called Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is a twin of one being developed for testing aboard the International Space Station.

VASIMR technology uses radio waves to ionize propellants like argon, xenon or hydrogen, and heat the resulting plasma to temperatures 20 times hotter than that on solar surface. It uses magnetic fields instead of metal nozzles to control the direction of the exhaust.

Equipped with an electric propulsion system, the rocket is being built to transport astronauts to Mars in 39 to 45 days someday — a fraction of the six to nine months the trip would take with conventional chemical rockets.

Water Ice Discovered On Asteroid For First Time

Water ice has been found on the surface of a nearby asteroid for the first time – a discovery that could help explain how Earth got its oceans, scientists announced.

Two teams of researchers independently verified that the asteroid 24 Themis – a large rock hurtling through space in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – is coated in a layer of frost.

They also found that the asteroid contains organic material, including some molecules that might be ingredients for life. But scientists have not found any evidence for life itself on this asteroid, or anywhere else in the universe beyond Earth.

Congrats Apple !!

Apple CEO has announced that the company has sold over a million iPads in just a short period of one month. Yes you heard it right - 1 million iPads, that's just the double the number of the first iPhone sold in the first month.

Apple launches new iPhone OS 4 !!

This new update from apple will be very useful for iPhone 3g, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch second and third generation users as it will allow multi tasking and will have 100+ new features. You can get more info from here.