A team of scientists have developed a robotic rat that could eventually help rescue people from man-made and natural disasters.

Researchers from the Bristol Robotics Lab and the University of Sheffield have developed the SCRATCHbot, which can find objects using its sensory whiskers in dark or smoky rooms. And unlike previous rodent-like machines, SCRATCHbot adapts the way it moves its whiskers when it makes contact with an obstacle.

The project was inspired by the use of touch in the animal kingdom – specifically how rats explore their environments using whiskers in poorly-lit places.

Watch the robot rat at work:

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson’s death. Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service. Full Story : BBC.com….

New study in the journal Science that is coauthored by University of Notre Dame physics doctoral student Pu Wang and researchers from Northeastern University suggests that the risk of mobile phone virus attacks will increase as a few operating systems gain more market share. The study also analyzes the pattern and speed of the spread of infection for Bluetooth and multimedia messaging services (MMS). Smart phones, which can share programs and data, could attract virus writers at a level more disruptive than computer viruses. Mobile viruses can be spread by either Bluetooth or MMS communications protocols. Bluetooth viruses can infect phones with the technology within a local area, comparable to the spread of contact-based disease. The infected phone must be moved into another tower’s range in order to infect a new set of phones. The slow spread provides time to develop protection from the virus. Full Story : Physorg.com…..

The most simple method is to send a trojan via email. So you receive a message saying that a wonderful file is attached and it will coerce you to click on it. This one is for dumb heads. I assume you are not one of those who click every attachment without scanning it with an up-to-date AV.

Secondly, you may receive a file from someone you know and the file looks harmless enough. On clicking you find a small application running, so you rest assured that the file was not a trojan. Here is where the ingenuity of the hacker comes into play. What he does is that he joins the trojan horse with an harmless application. . Such joiners are widely available on the Net. (If you want one, try Joiner). He designs a new icon for it using Micro Angelo. If he uses sub 7, the best and the most dangerous trojan according to me, then the latest version comes with an inbuilt icon changer. So one can easily assign a mp3 icon to a sub 7 server. (More on sub seven later)

If you are an experienced net user, you can easily restrict yourself from falling prey to above methods. But can you resist the feminine charm? . So you get an incoming file request, say pic.jpg. Now you know that trojan has to be an .EXE file, so this cannot be one. So you receive it and click it.

The file is indeed a Jpg file joined with a trojan. But it is a fact that though you can bind an exe file to a Jpg one, the final file has to be an exe. What the hacker does is that he renames the file as pic.jpg.exe. ICQ shows this as pic.jpg. So you end up making a fool of yourself.

These are not the only ways. New ingenious ways are being designed by thinking minds to get better of you. So keep your senses wide awake when dealing with someone unknown on the Net.

he Chandrayaan II mission will be far more complicated as compared to the first one because of the Moon Rover landing that this mission involves. Landing a rover on the moon is a complicated task, as the moon does not have an atmosphere that can slow down the descent of the rover with parachutes. The ISRO is working on alternatives that will endure a safe landing for the rover.

With the Chandrayaan I continuing to dazzle scientists with fresh data being received from the craft everyday, it is only natural that the Chandrayaan II needs to be launched later to supplement data received from its predecessor. ISRO will also launch a geostationary, weather satellite in the near future for recording monsoon patterns and cloud shifts in the next few years.

India is also planning a mission to Mars, which has been stalled owing to the lack of qualified personnel. Nair, in what seems to be an indirect call to the student community, has requested young students to take up careers that would help the country achieve success in missions like these. Currently, there seems to be dearth of ideas and most students it seems do not seem to take up research activities as a career option.