San Francisco: Google Inc is exploring a major expansion of super-fast cable TV and Internet web to deliver its content and services by extending its nascent fibre network to 34 more cities across the United States.

The search giant said in a blogpost on Wednesday it has reached out to cities from nine metropolitan areas around the country, including San Jose, Atlanta and Nashville, to discuss the feasibility of building out fibre, which Google says delivers the Internet at speeds up to 100 times faster than average existing networks.

Google currently provides fibre service, at a rate of up to $120 a month, in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Last yea

  Washington: A space-based observatory to search for planets orbiting alien stars has been selected as ESA's third medium-class science mission, and is planned for launch by 2024.

The PLATO - Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars - mission was selected by ESA's Science Programme Committee for implementation as part of its Cosmic Vision 2015-25 Programme.

The mission will address two key themes of Cosmic Vision: what are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life, and how does the Solar System work.

PLATO will monitor relatively nearby stars, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets t

  New York, Feb 12 : Do you live up north? You may have gut microbes associated with obesity.

Researchers have found that people living farther north in colder climates have more of the bacterial group 'Firmicutes' and fewer of the group 'Bacteriodes' within their guts.

People with more Firmicutes bacteria tended to be heavier while people with leaner bodies had more Bacteriodes, says new research.

"My 'gut feeling' is that the latitude trend reflects differences in dietary intake that in turn affects the structure of the microbiome," said Seth Bordenstein, a biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,

  Washington, Feb 12 : Yahoo has reportedly acquired social diary 'Days' app maker Wander to bolster its mobile team.

Wander's acquisition is the latest in the line of start-up that Yahoo has purchased under CEO Marissa Mayer's revival plans.

According to Cnet, Wander would join Yahoo, with its five-member crew joining a growing fleet of Yahoo mobile engineers in New York , but its ' Days' app would continue to function as a standalone app while its team would work on future projects.

Wander released a statement saying it was 'excited to bring their work on daily habits to Yahoo'

The report add

  Google users in France might have noticed something a bit different about the search engine's homepage this weekend.

Last month, France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the country's data and privacy protection watchdog, fined Google $200,000 (150,000 euros), maintaining that the company's privacy policy violated French privacy laws and did not provide sufficient information about how user data was collected.

In addition to the fine, which is the maximum amount that can be incurred, Google was forced  to post a notice to its French homepage that alerted visitors to the ruling and fine for 4

Google users in France might have noticed something a bit different about the search engine's homepage this weekend.

Last month, France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the country's data and privacy protection watchdog, fined Google $200,000 (150,000 euros), maintaining that the company's privacy policy violated French privacy laws and did not provide sufficient information about how user data was collected.

In addition to the fine, which is the maximum amount that can be incurred, Google was forced  to post a notice to its French homepage that alerted visitors to the ruling and fine for 48 hours f

  Young Sara Julio now has a strange -- yet formidable -- opponent to help improve her air hockey game: a robot that her dad engineered from 3-D printer parts.

Jose Julio recounted the months-long construction process on his blog -- all which began with a simple question: “How could I hack the components of a 3-D printer to make something different?”

The result, seen in action below, is a remarkable achievement in that it can detect the puck (by color) and smack it back to opponents at extreme speeds.

Though technically complex, Julio noted that the robot is composed of “cheap and easily available” parts, including a

  Washington, Feb 11 : Nokia is reportedly set to introduce a new low-end handset with Google's Android mobile operating system, at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona on February 24 this month.

For months, rumours were rife about Nokia working on a device that used the open source Android operating system.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the device will not be able to access the Google Play application store, however, it will run services created by Nokia and Microsoft, including Here maps and Mix Radio, Cnet reported.

The device code-named Normandy, aims at developing markets and could be released by the name of Nokia X.

New York, Feb 9 - A nutritional supplement high in antioxidants and other natural components can help boost the speed at which the brains of older adults process information.

A decline in the underlying brain skills needed to think, remember and learn is normal in ageing.

The nutritional supplement, containing extracts from blueberries and green tea combined with vitamin D3 and amino acids - including carnosine - is developed by researchers at the University of South Florida.

The researchers tested the supplement, named NT-020, in a clinical trial enrolling 105 healthy adults aged 65 to 85.

"After two months, test results showe

  New Delhi: London: Researchers have found that rats could evolve, over time, into super-sized rodents that are bigger than sheep and weigh as much as a person.

Geologist Dr Jan Zalasiewicz, from the University of Leicester, said that given enough time, rats could probably grow to be at least as large as the capybara, the world's largest rodent, which can reach at least 12.5 stone, the Daily Express reported.

Zalasiewicz asserted that if the ecospace was sufficiently empty, then they could get larger still.

Zalasiewicz explained that animals will evolve, over time, into whatever designs will enable them to survive and to produce offspr

Washington: The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) will get more time to explore the Moon than primitively planned after getting approval for a 28-day extension from the US space agency, NASA.

The LADEE spacecraft is expected to impact the Moon on or about April 14, 2014.

The extension enables the satellite to collect an additional lunar cycle worth of very low-altitude data, which will help scientists unravel the mysteries of the lunar atmosphere.

“The launch vehicle performance and orbit capture burns using LADEE's on-board engines were extremely accurate, so the spacecraft had significant propellant remaining to en

"I think Facebook is still very popular even though some people might be losing interest," said the 11th-grade student at Alameda Community Learning Center, a charter school in Alameda across the bay from San Francisco.

"There is no talk among my friends saying Facebook is for old people."

Facebook, born on a college campus a decade ago, has grown to 1.23 billion active users worldwide.

But as it prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary, Facebook is now facing challenges in keeping its original base of young users as new social networks vie to be the coolest on the Internet.

A social networking trend set in mot

  New York, Feb 2 : The spectacular, eye-popping beauty of an erupting volcano is not to be missed if it is captured from space.

Crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) got a rare image of the Sarychev volcano as it erupted June 12, 2009.

One of the most active volcanoes in the world, Sarychev Peak is located in the northern part of the Kuril Islands of Russia in northern Pacific.

Large explosive eruptions occurred June 11-19, 2009, sending huge ash clouds up to 14 km in the sky, forcing many flights with routes across the northern Pacific to either be cancelled or diverted.

The ISS happened to be passing over the S

  Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has outlined company's 10-year plan to take it to a greater scale by increasing the resources.

More than 1.23 billion humans are now active on Facebook each month, with the company up 16 per cent year-over-year in monthly average users and 22 percent in daily active users, Cnet reports.

Zuckerberg said the company wants to make progress on providing Internet access to the two-thirds of people on the planet who are not connected.

Facebook's 10-year plan appears to be as follows:

1. Deliver highly personalized, targeted ads in news feeds that greatly increase average revenue per use

  Washington, Jan 31 : GoDaddy has reportedly admitted to its role in the Twitter account hijack, accepting that its employee had fallen victim to a social engineering attack.

The company issued a statement saying that its review of the situation revealed that the hacker was already in possession of a large portion of the customer information needed to access the account at the time he contacted GoDaddy and used it against an employer to extort the remaining information.

Naoki Hiroshima, a software engineer and creator of the Cocoyon location sharing mobile app mentioned in his blog post that a hacker had hijacked his domain names registered at GoDaddy, e

Washington, Jan 31 : Microsoft is reportedly issuing an updated Windows 8.1 version, which will enable users to bypass the tile interface at the Start Screen by default.

The Windows 8.1 Update 1 or version 8.1.1 is Microsoft's another attempt at making traditional desktop users become familiar with the OS more apt as a tablet-like interface.

According to The Verge, the updated OS would have the boot-to-desktop option enabled by default, unlike the previous version in which users had to switch to the mode manually.

Other changes in the Update 1 include shutdown and search buttons on the Start Screen, the ability to pin Windows 8-style ("Me

      New Delhi, Jan 30 : South Korean consumer electronics major Samsung is India’s most trusted brand followed by Sony of Japan and the homegrown salt-to-steel multinational Tata, says a study report released Thursday.

The 'Brand Trust Report 2014' says: “Samsung has grown steadily in trust ranks over the last four years - fifth in 2011, fourth in 2012, second in 2013 and has reached India’s most trusted rank this year.

“When a brand focuses on its trust with intensity, apart from trust the brand gains in market-share, product premium and acceptance of new products as an automatic by-product. Samsung’s

Washington: New online neighbourhoods open Wednesday when a US company starts offering Web addresses ending in ".guru," ".bike" -- and even ".singles."

Donuts Inc. plans to launch seven new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and then roll out more on a weekly basis through most of the year.

In the mix initially are addresses ending in guru, bike, singles, as well as clothing, holdings, plumbing and ventures.

Donuts, based in the northwestern state of Washington, will manage the domains, letting website registry firms such as GoDaddy sell addresses to the public.

A new batch will debut on February 5 with

Washington, Jan 28 : A Chinese analyst has reportedly predicted that Samsung Galaxy S5 may be launched with a fingerprint sensor.

KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that Samsung can sense pressure from the makers of iPhone 5S and the fingerprint-reading HTC One Max.

The analyst also took note of a Samsung's announcement that the company was looking at iris-scanning security technology earlier this month to substantiate his prediction, the Cnet reported.

Kuo also predicted that Galaxy S5 models will use 32-bit hardware from Qualcomm or Exynos . (ANI)   Source: Top News

  Widely popular micro-blogging service Twitter has released an update to its Android client that brings some notable changes, including new tools that promise to make photo editing and sharing easier.

Users of Android version of Twitter can now crop any photo by choosing an aspect. For example, a user can choose a square or a wide aspect to crop a photo. One can also rotate an image to make sure that it fits well with his/her tweet on the network.

After uploading the photo, the user can even receive a @mention reminder to mention friends or relatives so that they can check the uploaded photo.

Better discovery is another new feature that th