Ten things you should know about the Ice Cream Sandwich OS

Ice Cream Sandwich is the fourth incarnation of Google’s Android operating system (OS) for smartphones and tablets – the successor to previous versions Gingerbread and Honeycomb (a tablet-only version)

This increasingly nippy time of year seems an odd choice to be discussing ice cream sandwiches – unless said confection is the latest in a tasty-sounding software series from Google.

Ice Cream Sandwich is the fourth incarnation of Google’s Android operating system (OS) for smartphones and tablets – the successor to previous versions Gingerbread and Honeycomb (a tablet-only version). It’s not yet in wide release, but software developers are already hard at work adapting their apps to this major redesign.

Phones supporting Ice Cream Sandwich will be available from Bell and Virgin Mobile from early December. Rogers gets it in January.

Here are 10 things you need to know about Ice Cream Sandwich:

Google's goal was to unify the OS for smartphones and tablets, so regardless of screen size, Android will look the same. Because of this, the user interface has had a makeover, migrating the best of Honeycomb’s tablet features to phones and adding resizable widgets and a new, more readable font.

You will be able to unlock your phone by looking at it, thanks to Face Unlock, a new facial-recognition feature. However, Google does warn that this is not as secure as other authentication methods, such as passwords or PINs, since “someone who looks similar to you could unlock your phone.”

There’s no Flash player available for Ice Cream Sandwich yet. Adobe says it should arrive by year end, but that’s it – there’ll be no more mobile Flash after that.

New feature Android Beam uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to transfer data between devices – you can swap information by holding phones a short distance (maximum about 20 cm) away from each other. In addition, you can receive information from NFC-enabled displays, and Beam allows for e-commerce payment by simply waving the phone over a reader – or tapping it, as with PayPass. The phone must, of course, contain an NFC chip.

The redesigned calendar lets other apps add events and reminders. Multiple calendars and colour-coding let you keep business and personal schedules separate, yet you can still see what’s happening in your life at a glance.

Like Windows Phone 7, Ice Cream Sandwich now imports details from your social networks into contact records. When you first start up your phone, you’re prompted to join Google’s own social network, Google +.

Need a screenshot of a smartphone app? Ice Cream Sandwich includes the ability to take snapshots of the display, store them locally, edit and share them.

With all of these features, it’s all too easy to blow your data plan out of the water. Ice Cream Sandwich includes new monitoring tools so you can see how much data you’ve used, what application used it, and whether it was over cellular or Wi-Fi. You can set alerts to warn you if you’re approaching your plan’s limit, to help avoid expensive charges, and can define how much data apps are allowed to consume in the background (updating maps or sharing location data, for example).

Android’s camera system has had some serious polishing, too. Google says there’s now zero lag-time from shutter to shot, stabilized zoom while recording, and time-lapse settings. Face detection finds and focuses on faces in frame, and you can grab a still snapshot while recording a video by simply tapping the screen. The icing on the cake: There’s now a built-in photo editor, so you can tweak those shots before sharing them.

Audio file management is now much easier thanks to the new visual voicemail, which integrates messages, voice transcriptions and audio files into a single app. Third-party apps will be able to integrate with it as well.

There’s more, of course, for both work and play. Check out the Android site for your own taste of the Ice Cream Sandwich.

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Atom-smasher shut down for two months

The world's largest atom-smasher has been shut down for two months following a helium leak, just 10 days after it was switched on amid great fanfare to probe the secrets of the universe.

“There has been an incident in a test. One section of the machine will have to be repaired,” James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), said Monday.

CERN said in a statement that a fault occurred Friday afternoon, resulting in a “large helium leak into the tunnel.”

“Preliminary investigations suggest that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure,” it said.

There was no risk to people, the centre added, saying that a full probe is under way.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was started on Sept. 10, with physicists cheering the successful testing of a clockwise beam, comprising strings of protons, and then an anticlockwise beam in preparatory testing ahead of first collisions.

But the LHC had to be shut down a week later due to an electrical hitch that affected a cooling system for high-powered magnets designed to steer beams of particles around the LHC's 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel.

The cooling system is important as the steering magnets in the LHC tunnel are chilled to as low as -271 degrees Celsius (-456.25 degrees Fahrenheit), which is close to absolute zero and colder than deep outer space.

At this extreme temperature, electrical currents overcome resistance, thus making it easier and cheaper to power electro-magnets.

The LHC was only turned back on again on Friday, but the latest setback has once again forced operations to halt.

As the sector where the fault occurred would have to be warmed up from its extreme temperature for repairs to take place, the LHC would now be halted for “a minimum of two months,” resulting in further delays to the first collisions.

The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss francs ($5.46 billion U.S.) is one of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.

It aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged in the “Big Bang” that created the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Counter-rotating beams are whizzed around the tunnel and then are smashed together in four huge laboratories.

Over the 10-15 years in which the LHC will operate, masses of data will spew from these collisions and will be scrutinised by physicists around the world.

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NASA spots Earth’s twin (or closest match yet) outside solar system

Bill Borucki, Kepler principal Investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, speaks during a news conference about the newly discovered planet Kepler-22b on Monday in in Moffett Field, Calif.

A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside our solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, expect for one hitch. It’s a bit too big.

The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard-to-find place that’s not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, doesn’t freeze or boil. Its surface temperature is near 22 C, scientists say.

The planet’s confirmation was announced Monday by NASA along with other discoveries by its Kepler telescope, which was launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

That’s the first planet confirmed in the habitable zone for Kepler, which had already found Earth-like rocky planets elsewhere. Twice before astronomers have announced a planet found in that zone, but neither have been as promising.

“This is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history,” Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside our solar system, said in an e-mail.

The new planet – named Kepler-22b – has key aspects it shares with Earth. It circles a star that could be the twin of our sun and at just about the same distance. The planet’s year of 290 days is even close to ours. It likely has water and rock.

The only trouble is the planet’s a bit big for life to exist on the surface. The planet is about 2.4 times the size of Earth. It could be more like the gas-and-liquid Neptune with only a rocky core and mostly ocean.

“It’s so exciting to imagine the possibilities,” said Natalie Batalha, the Kepler deputy science chief.

Floating on that “world completely covered in water” could be like being on an Earth ocean and “it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that life could exist in such an ocean,” Ms. Batalha said in a phone interview.

So far the Kepler telescope has spotted 2,326 candidate planets outside our solar system with 139 of them potentially habitable ones. Even though the confirmed Kepler-22b is a bit big, it is still smaller than most of the other candidates.

Chief Kepler scientist William Borucki said he thinks the planet is somewhere between Earth and gas-and-liquid Neptune, but that it has a lot of rocky material.

The planet is 600 light years away. Each light year is 5.9 trillion miles. It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.

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Yahoo to weigh deals for Asian assets

The "Yahoo" sign, which overlooks the I-80 freeway from 6th St. is dismantled,2011 in downtown San Francisco.

Yahoo Inc.is discussing a plan to slash its stakes in China’s Alibaba Group and a Japanese affiliate in a complex deal worth roughly $17-billion (U.S.), sources familiar with the matter said.

The deal – the latest proposals put forth in recent months to resuscitate the once high-flying Internet company – is expected to be considered by Yahoo’s board on Thursday, one of the sources said.

The board was uninterested in entertaining offers for the entire company at this point, the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added.

Yahoo’s increasing difficulty in competing with Internet heavyweights such as Google Inc. (GOOG-Q629.703.880.62%) and Facebook have forced it to explore proposals to revamp its business. The former Internet powerhouse, which fired its Chief Executive Carol Bartz in September, has a market value of around $18.5-billion.

The company’s board has come under fire from prominent shareholders for its seeming lack of movement and for putting its own interests ahead of those of shareholders.

Alibaba chief Jack Ma has said several times he would like to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his company, one of Asia’s largest Internet corporations. Investors have long said Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba, along with its 35 per cent slice of Yahoo Japan, are far and away the U.S. company’s most prized assets.

Last week, sources told Reuters a consortium consisting of private equity group Silver Lake, Microsoft Corp. and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz were reworking a bid for a minority stake in Yahoo.

In the latest deal, Yahoo would effectively transfer most of its 40 per cent of Alibaba back to the Chinese company and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan to Softbank Corp. in return for cash and assets, one of the sources said.

The exact value of the deal would depend on how the assets are valued, one source said.

Yahoo shares, which languished in the red along with much of the technology sector on Wednesday, reversed course and ended the session almost 6 per cent higher at $15.99. It inched further upward in after-hours trading to $16.09.

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China passes U.S. as top patent filer in 2011

Published applications from China’s patent office have risen by an average of 16.7 per cent annually from 171,000 in 2006 to nearly 314,000 in 2010, data from Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index showed. Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province in this May 26, 2010 file photo.

China became the world’s top patent filer in 2011, surpassing the United States and Japan as it steps up innovation to improve its intellectual property rights track record, a Thomson Reuters research report showed on Wednesday.

The report said the world’s second-largest economy aimed to transform from a “made in China” to a “designed in China” market, with the government pushing for innovation in sectors such as automobiles, pharmaceuticals and technology.

However, legal experts said China would need to do more before it can lead the world in innovation as the quality of patents needed to improve.

The government provided attractive incentives for companies in China to file patent applications, regardless of whether a patent was eventually granted, they said.

“The idea of subsidizing patents is not bad in itself, however it is a blunt instrument because you get high figures for filings, but it does not tell you anything about the quality of the patents filed,” said Elliot Papageorgiou, a Partner and Executive at law firm Rouse Legal (China).

“One thing is volume, quality is quite another. The return, or the percentage of grants, of the patents is still not as high in China as, say, in the U.S., Japan or some places in Europe,” he said.

The Thomson Reuters report said published patent applications from China were expected to total nearly 500,000 in 2015, following by the United States with close to 400,000 and Japan with almost 300,000.

Published applications from China’s patent office have risen by an average of 16.7 per cent annually from 171,000 in 2006 to nearly 314,000 in 2010, data from Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index showed.

During the period, Japan had the highest volume, followed by the United States, China, Korea and Europe, the report said. It did not give figures for 2011.

“The striking difference among these regions is China – it is experiencing the most rapid growth and is poised to lead the pack in the very near future,” it said.

Of total patents filed in China, the percentage of domestic applications rose to nearly 73 per cent in 2010 from less than 52 per cent in 2006, indicating that Chinese companies have outpaced foreign entities in the patent boom.

In terms of patents overseas, Chinese companies have also been climbing in the rankings, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).

In 2010, China’s No.2 telecommunications equipment maker ZTE Corp was second on the list of applicants, ranking just behind Japan’s Panasonic Corp.

U.S. chip maker Qualcomm Inc. came in third, while China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, the world’s second-largest telecom gear maker, was fourth, according to WIPO.

Chinese companies have been trying to be more innovative as they transform from contract manufacturers to regional and global brand names producing higher end products to improve margins.

Patent filings have also increased among Chinese companies due to legal battles that they have had to fight, especially in the telecommunications sector. For instance, Huawei and ZTE have been embroiled in patent disputes over fourth-generation wireless technology.

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Twitter unwraps advertiser-friendly redesign

A new Twitter experience is rolling out over several weeks; access it now by getting the iPhone or Android apps released today. Feedback on the changes? Share your thoughts with @feedback using the hashtag #newlook. If you need help, pose any questions to @support.

Twitter revamped its website on Thursday in an effort to make the microblogging service easier to use and to help companies better showcase their brands.

The new version of Twitter, which the company is gradually making available starting on Thursday, features a redesigned look as well as technological improvements that it said will speed up the service.

Twitter allows people to send 140-character messages, or “tweets,” throughout the network of over 100 million users. It is one of the Web’s most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and Zynga.

The company faces competition from Google Inc., which introduced a social networking service with capabilities similar to Twitter.

The new version of Twitter features a revamped profile page, in which a company can highlight a specific feature, such as videos or photos. Previously, the profile pages displayed a chronological list of the company’s most recent Tweets.

With the changes, it will be easier to find people and companies with Twitter profiles. All it will take is typing an “at” symbol in front of a user's handle. Entering a subject with a hash tag — the pound symbol — in front of it will show everything on Twitter related to that topic. And clicking on a specific tweet will display any other exchanges tied to the message to provide further context about the discussion.

Twitter is taking steps to build a profitable business on top of its popular service. The company began showing ads on limited parts of the service in 2010 and is expected to generate about $140-million in ad revenue this year, according to estimates by industry research firm eMarketer.

The company said it has more than 3,400 advertisers and it expects to launch an advertising system early next year that will allow companies to quickly create marketing campaigns on Twitter.

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Smartphones dialling up new business for stores

The meteoric rise of smartphones and tablets is revolutionizing the way people shop, but it’s also breathing new life into an unlikely place: the traditional bricks-and-mortar store.

For years, a growing number of shoppers have opted to do their buying on the Web rather than in the mall. But now, the digital and the physical retail worlds are intersecting as new devices – and the software available for them – are helping shoppers do everything from finding discounts to finding parking.

These devices represent a huge opportunity for merchants, who have been struggling to keep up with technological changes since consumers started to tap into their mobile phones for shopping information over the past year. While shoppers continue to do more of their browsing and buying online, enticing them into real stores would also give retailers a chance to push even more products, bolstering profits in both digital and real-life avenues.

It’s a testament to this brave new world of digitally-assisted shopping that one of the most important weapons in many customers’ arsenals this holiday season is a smartphone app designed by a firm in Calgary.

For years, Poynt has been one of the most popular apps on almost every smartphone, giving users the ability to search for businesses, look up movie listings or even reserve tables at nearby restaurants. But this holiday season, the app maker has seen its users take advantage of their smartphones to supercharge their bricks-and-mortar shopping experience.

“They’re not just looking up a store listing – they’re calling the store, they’re checking inventory, they’re mapping directions to get there, and then they’re setting their search location from that store to go to the next one,” said Margaret Glover-Campbell, Poynt’s vice-president of marketing. “We’re definitely seeing more and more of that as people are starting to understand what their phones can do.”

Pam Stone, a 31-year-old real estate broker in Vancouver, is one of a growing cohort of customers standing at the junction of digital and physical shopping. Ms. Stone recently used a Future Shop mobile app to hunt down and buy a video game. She said the process was painless because her package was ready for pickup at the store when she arrived.

“It was much faster this way,” she said. “You know how the stores are these days. It’s kind of overwhelming.” When searching for the $69 game as a gift for her cousin, she was able to find out that there were six of them left at the store close by, where she headed soon after to fetch it. “It’s the new thing,” she said. “It’s the new wave.”

Future Shop and its sister chain Best Buy, both owned by Best Buy Co. Inc. were early adopters of mobile strategies, having launched iPhone apps more than a year ago and extending them to all mobile devices this month. Shoppers are able to browse their websites, find a store where a product is available, take advantage of special promotions and make the purchase on the spot.

The early signs point to momentum building for the retailer’s mobile payments. On Cyber Monday – the big Nov. 28 e-shopping day because of the bargains offered – 11 per cent of shopper visits to FutureShop.ca were made on mobile devices, double the proportion of a year earlier, said Thierry Hay-Sabourin, director of commerce at Future Shop. What is more, 8 per cent of revenue on Cyber Monday was generated from mobile devices, up from 1.4 per cent the previous year, he said.

“It’s a good representation of the growth we’re seeing from the mobile devices,” he said. “We’re seeing that trend continue in December.” On Dec. 24 at 8 p.m., when the online retailer starts offering Boxing Day sales, the company expects a rush of mobile purchases.

Part of the appeal for consumers and retailers is access to the “endless aisle” of e-commerce. “ Retailers can stock many times more product offerings online than they can cram into their stores. Electronics chain Future Shop, for instance, carries four times as many items on its website as in its stores, he said.

Other retailers, such as Loblaws, Tim Hortons and McDonald’s, are starting to offer mobile payments, enabling their checkout scanners to process transactions with devices equipped with a “near-field communication” (NFC) chip. While NFC is expected to eventually be embedded more universally in cellphones – making mobile payments more common – café giant Starbucks Corp. hasn’t waited for NFC technology to take off: It started allowing U.S. customers last January – and Canadian customers in November – to use a phone app as a mobile wallet.

Individual retailers aren’t the only ones taking advantage of mobile devices. A number of malls, such as the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, have developed apps that let users not only navigate the stores, but even find a parking spot. The Yorkdale app quickly pinpoints where a user is in the mall, and can be used to find directions to other stores. In the U.S., startups such as FastMall have taken that idea one step further, launching an app that contains maps of more than 1,250 different malls.

The Yorkdale, FastMall and countless other shopping apps are also increasingly incorporating digital discount coupons into their services. Such coupons have been around for years, but with mobile devices, companies can tailor them to a user’s precise location, making it far more likely that user will walk into a nearby store to cash in on the deal.

Indeed, the U.S. version of the Poynt app recently incorporated coupons into its app – something the company hopes to bring north of the border soon.

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Chinese microbloggers mock latest round of state controls

China further tightened rules on microblogs on Thursday, requiring new authors on seven websites in southern Guangdong province to register their real names, state-run Xinhua news agency reported, in a move users decried as ineffective.

Microblogs such as Sina’s Weibo allow users to issue messages of a maximum of 140 Chinese characters that can course through tens of millions users everyday, defying censors with posts on sensitive topics such as human rights and the foibles of the top leadership.

The new rule was quickly mocked by microbloggers whose posts in many cases have sparked off national online protests against official corruption and reported events such as the deadly collision of a bullet train this year quicker and more accurately than official media.

“I say a couple of things, and they’re going to come get me?” said one, using the name Pan Gui. “China has more than a billion people; if a few hundred million complain are they going to have a place to put them all away?”

“What’s this about?” wrote another, posting as Wang Weijin. “They want to control our freedom of speech???”

It is not clear how many microbloggers there are among China’s nearly half-billion Internet users. Some estimates say 300 million.

But Xinhua quoted Tong Liqiang, executive deputy director of the Beijing Internet Information Office, as putting the number at 63 million – with 600 million microblog IDs in Beijing alone. But many are unused dummy accounts.

Websites in Guangzhou and Shenzhen cities in Guangdong including Tencent Holdings Ltd., China’s biggest Internet company by revenue, will only require newly registering users to provide their real names, the report said.

Users will continue to be allowed to post using their real names or pseudonyms.

The new regulation is intended to “foster healthy Internet culture” and “strengthen management and guide social networking services and instant-messaging tools,” Xinhua quoted a statement from Guangdong province as saying.

“Experts claim the new rules will purify the Internet environment, as fake and fraudulent information is often seen spreading through microblogs, which are gaining popularity among users.”

Last week Beijing authorities gave all Weibo users 90 days to register their real names or face unspecified consequences.

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BlackBerrys to clock off alongside VW workers

The working day is over and the Christmas holiday has officially begun, but the blinking red light or vibration of a BlackBerry is still maddeningly hard to ignore.

Angered by the blurring of the dividing line between the workplace and home, Volkswagen’s powerful works council has struck an agreement with management that employees who use a BlackBerry and whose pay is governed by a collective wage tariff agreement will be subject to new e-mail restrictions.

So from now on, VW’s e-mail server will cease routing messages 30 minutes after the end of an employee’s shift and will only begin sending e-mails again half-an-hour before the next working day begins.

The agreement is expected to affect more than 1,000 VW employees who have a company BlackBerry. It is unclear if other heavily unionized German companies are considering such a rule.

“The new possibilities of communication also contain inherent dangers,” Heinz-Joachim Thust of VW’s works council told the Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.

A VW works council spokesman confirmed the existence of the BlackBerry agreement but explained that the rule did not apply to senior management or other workers who fall outside trade union-negotiated pay brackets.

The works council sought the restriction in response to the tendency for BlackBerry users to be contactable by employers at all hours and amid a growing awareness in Germany of the risks of employee burnout.

BlackBerrys began life as toys for executives but have since become a staple of corporate life. So great are their perceived addictive powers that the e-mail devices quickly earned the monicker “CrackBerries.” But employees have long been forced to trade the convenience of owning a BlackBerry with being “always available.”

The works council said that so far there had been very positive feedback to the new e-mail rules, which came into force earlier this year. Workers will still be able to make phone calls using their BlackBerrys at any time.

Volkswagen workers have been working flat out this year as the company bids to overtake Toyota and General Motors as the world’s biggest car maker by sales.

At a recent employee rally in Wolfsburg, Martin Winterkorn, chief executive officer, congratulated workers on completing 38 extra shifts and producing 50,000 additional vehicles, putting the company on track to sell more than 8 million cars this year.

Mr. Thust did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment. It is unclear if his BlackBerry was switched off.

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RIM says BBM Music now available

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion says its music-sharing application for its popular messaging service is available for downloading in Canada, and in the U.S. and Australia within a day.

BBM Music allows BlackBerry users to select 50 songs from a catalogue of millions of tracks for their personal playlists. BBM users can share those songs from that list with friends who use the instant messaging service, meaning the size of the music library for listeners is limited only by the tastes of their BBM contacts.

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China's unmanned spacecraft Shenzhou 8 blasts off

China's unmanned spacecraft Shenzhou 8 blasted off Tuesday morning, in the latest step in what will be a decade-long effort by the country to place a manned permanent space station in orbit.

The spacecraft took off from a base in the far western city of Jiuquan, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Minutes later, Xinhua cited Chang Wanquan, who leads China's space program, as announcing the launch a success.
China launched its own space station program after being rebuffed in its attempts to join the 16-nation International Space Station, largely on objections from the United States. The U.S. is wary of the Chinese program's military links and the sharing of technology with its chief economic and political competitor.

Earlier Chinese news reports did not specify a launch date for Shenzhou 8. Chinese space officials rarely speak to foreign media.

The Shenzhou 8 will attempt to dock with an experimental module, carrying out maneuvers to couple with the Tiangong 1 module now in orbit. The 8.5-ton, box car-sized Tiangong 1 launched last month.

Following Shenzhou 8, two more missions — at least one of them manned — are to meet up with the module next year for further practice, with astronauts staying for up to one month.

Plans call for launching two other experimental modules for more tests before the actual station is launched in three sections between 2020 and 2022.

At about 60 tons when completed, the Chinese station will be considerably smaller than the International Space Station, which is expected to continue operating through 2028.

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Print decline outpaces online gains for Yellow Media

Advertising in the Yellow Pages and Canpages print directories is drying up at a faster rate, but Yellow Media Inc. (YLO-T0.42-0.01-3.41%) chief executive officer Marc Tellier says it’s only temporary.

“We’re pretty much near or at the peak of the print erosion,” Mr. Tellier told analysts on a conference call Thursday to discuss the company’s third-quarter results.

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Google changes search algorithm, trying to make results more timely

Google is changing the way it looks at the Internet, as the company tries to keep its search engine relevant at a time when Web users want up-to-the-second search results.

The world’s most popular search engine announced on Thursday it will alter some of the algorithms it uses to determine what search results it shows to its users. In a move that affects roughly 35 per cent of all Google searches, the company will now put more emphasis on the most recently-created results – news articles and social media posts that can be just a few minutes old.
The new version of Google’s algorithm will attempt to figure out whether the user’s search query is suited to the most recent results, such as a search for “Occupy Wall Street,” or not, such as a search for a cookie recipe.

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,” said Amit Singhal, a software engineer who heads up Google’s search-ranking team.

For certain recurring events, such as a company’s quarterly earnings or a presidential election, the search engine will now assume the user is looking for the most recent iteration.

The new algorithm changes are based on a major search engine overhaul Google performed in the summer of 2010. Called Caffeine, the overhaul rearranged the company’s search algorithms to put far more emphasis on scouring the Web faster for more recently-created results, and focusing more on social media.

By a wide margin, Google is still the world’s most popular search engine, and even big-name competitors such as Microsoft’s Bing have not come close to overthrowing the website. However in recent years, social media have largely changed the definition of a Web search. For many users, asking their friends on Facebook or Twitter to recommend a Mexican restaurant in Vancouver is much more useful than performing a blanket search for the topic on Google.

In an attempt to tap in to the social media sphere, Google previously signed a deal to incorporate Twitter results into its main search. However that contract ended this summer, and Google did not renew it – a move that appears to have been prompted in part by the launch of Google’s own competing social media service, Google+. The company will likely try to leverage Google+ content as it once again tries to offer real-time social media results on its core search engine.

While this week’s algorithm changes still don’t incorporate Twitter content, they do ensure that, for about a third of all Google search results, the most recent results will show up near the top of the page. Whether that alone is enough to convince users to choose Google over Twitter and Facebook for real-time results remains to be seen.

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After 520 days in isolation, space researchers emerge from Mars 'mission'

Pale but smiling, an international crew of researchers on Friday walked out of a set of windowless modules after a gruelling 520-day simulation of a flight to Mars.

The all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese slowly emerged from the western Moscow facility, which simulated the confinement, stress and fatigue of interplanetary travel — minus the weightlessness. Dressed in blue track suits emblazoned with the mission emblem, they carefully walked down a metal ladder to a greeting crowd of officials and journalists.
“The crew has completed the experiment,” team leader Alexey Sitev reported to Russian space officials. “The mission is accomplished, the crew is in good health and is ready for new missions.”

Psychologists said long confinement put the team members under stress as they grow increasingly tired of each other's company. They said that psychological conditions can even be more challenging on a mock mission than a real flight because the crew won't experience any of the euphoria or dangers of actual space travel.

Despite that, the crew showed no sign of stress as they walked to microphones to speak before cameras. “We hope that we can help in designing the future missions to Mars,” Frenchman Romain Charles said with a smile.

His Italian-Colombian crewmate Diego Urbina said the crew felt proud to achieve the longest-ever imitation of space flight, so that “humankind can one day greet a new dawn on the surface of distant but reachable planet.”

The crew communicated with the organizers and their families via the Internet, which was delayed and occasionally disrupted to imitate the effects of space travel. They ate canned food similar to that offered on the International Space Station.

The organizers said each crew member will be paid about $100,000, except the Chinese researcher whose reward hasn't been revealed by Chinese officials.

A real flight to Mars is decades away because of huge costs and massive technological challenges, particularly the task of creating a compact and relatively lightweight shield that will protect the crew from deadly space radiation.

NASA is aiming for a nearby asteroid around 2025 and then on to Mars in the 2030s.

Vitaly Davydov, a deputy head of the Russian space agency, said the experiment completed Friday will help pave the way for a real Mars mission. He added that it's not expected until mid 2030s and should be done in close international cooperation.

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NASA finds 90 per cent of potential Earth-killer asteroids

If you’re worried about a killer asteroid wiping out Earth, NASA has some good news.

The U.S. space agency said Thursday it has identified more than 90 per cent of giant, potentially Earth-threatening asteroids, including ones as big as the one thought to have killed the dinosaurs eons ago.
“We know now where most of them are and where most of them are going. That really has reduced our risk” of an impact, said Amy Mainzer of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA researchers also downgraded their estimate of the number of medium-sized asteroids, saying there are 44 per cent fewer than previously believed. The downside is that scientists have yet to find many of these mid-sized asteroids, which could destroy a metropolitan city.

“Fewer does not mean none,” Ms. Mainzer said. “There are still tens of thousands out there that are left to find.”

The updated census comes from data from NASA’s sky-mapping spacecraft named Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, which launched in 2009 to seek out near-Earth objects, galaxies, stars and other cosmic targets.

Unlike previous sky surveys, WISE has sensitive instruments that can pick out both dark and light objects, allowing it to get the most accurate count yet of near-Earth asteroids. The spacecraft takes a small sample of asteroids of varying sizes and then estimates how large the population would be.

For the largest asteroids – bigger than 1,000 metres across – NASA said 911 of the 981 thought to exist have been found. None poses a threat to Earth in the near future, the space agency said.

Previous estimates put the number of medium-sized asteroids at 35,000, but WISE data indicate there are about 19,500 between 100 and 1,000 metres wide. Only about 5,200 have been found and scientists said there is still a lot of work left to identify the potentially hazardous ones.

Results were published in the Astrophysical Journal.

WISE is not equipped to detect the more than one million smallest asteroids that could cause damage if they impact Earth. The spacecraft recently ran out of coolant and is currently in hibernation.

By locating most of the giant asteroids, NASA has fulfilled a goal set by Congress in 1998. More recently, the space agency has been asked to find 90 per cent of asteroids that are at least 140 metres in diameter by 2020.

Don Yeomans, who heads NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office, said that goal is about 35-per-cent complete.

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Astronomer captures image of planet being born

Astronomers have captured the first direct image of a planet being born.

Adam Kraus, of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, said the planet is being formed out of dust and gas circling a 2-million-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth.

The planet itself, based on scientific models of how planets form, is estimated to have started taking shape about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Called LkCa 15 b, it's the youngest planet ever observed. The previous record holder was about five times older.

Kraus and his colleague, Michael Ireland from Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, used Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea to find the planet.

“We're catching this object at the perfect time. We see this young star, it has a disc around it that planets are probably forming out of and we see something right in the middle of a gap in the disc,” Mr. Kraus said in a telephone interview.

Kraus presented the discovery Wednesday at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland. Mr. Kraus and Ireland's research paper on the discovery is due to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Observing planets while they're forming can help scientists answer questions like whether planets form early in the life of a star or later, and whether they form relatively close to stars or farther away.

Planets can change orbits after forming, so it's difficult to answer such questions by studying older planets.

“These very basic questions of when and where are best answered when you can actually see the planet forming, as the process is happening right now,” Mr. Kraus said.

Other planets may also be forming around the same star. Mr. Kraus said he'll continue to observe the star and hopefully will see other planets if there are in fact more.

Scientists hadn't been able to see such young planets before because the bright light of the stars they're orbiting outshines them.

Mr. Kraus and Mr. Ireland used two techniques to overcome this obstacle.

One method, which is also used by other astronomers, was to change the shape of their mirror to remove light distortions created by the Earth's atmosphere.

The other, unique method they used was to put masks over most of the telescope mirror. The combination of these two techniques allowed the astronomers to obtain high-resolution images that let them see the faint planet next to the bright star.

The astronomers found the planet while surveying 150 young dusty stars. This led to a more concentrated study of a dozen stars.

The star LkCa 15 — the planet is named after its star — was the team's second target. They immediately knew they were seeing something new, so they gathered more data on the star a year later.

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Microsoft to launch Mango smartphones with Nokia, Samsung

The smartphone sector is currently dominated by Apple and Android phones, which together make up about half of the market, with Microsoft seen as slow to react to the rapidly rising popularity of mobile devices.

But some analysts say Microsoft still has time to catch up, especially given uncertainties among handset makers after Google’s planned purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. sparked worries that Google may one day produce its own handsets.

“We’ve seen hardware manufacturers very nervous about what Google is doing. I think anyone who turns around and competes with you is a cause for concern,” Andrew Lees, president of Microsoft’s Windows phone division, told Reuters in an interview in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd.(RIM-T23.000.391.72%)’s recent outage problems might also ultimately help competitors such as Microsoft, analysts said.

Microsoft sees the United States, Europe and China as its top markets for handsets based on its new Mango operating system.

“As the price comes down, emerging markets do become a huge opportunity, but also the existing markets in western Europe and the U.S., because as the price point comes down, more people will get into the smartphone market,” Lees said.

IDC analysts expects Android’s market share to grow to more than 40 per cent this year from above 20 per cent in 2010, while Apple’s iOS is forecast to grow to about 20 per cent from about 15 per cent in 2010.

The expansion comes at the expense of falling market share for Nokia’s Symbian platform, expected to drop to a quarter this year from a third last year.

Lees said there were currently more than 30,000 applications for Windows smartphones, compared with about 500,000 applications in Apple’s App Store.

Microsoft would introduce its Mango handsets in China for the first time next year, he said.

China is the world’s biggest mobile phone market, with more than 900 million subscribers, although only a fraction are smartphone users, many of whom use Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy.

“We’ll be going in for the first time in 2012 and we’ll be building unit volume from there,” Lees said.

He declined to comment on what other vendors in China, such as Lenovo Group Ltd. and Huawei Technologies Ltd , Microsoft was talking to.

“We haven’t announced those, but that will be an extension of what we’re doing.”

Microsoft would launch Samsung and HTC Mango smartphones in the United States and Europe over the next week or so, with Nokia following in various markets, Lees said.

Fujitsu Ltd has already rolled out a Mango smartphone in Japan.

Microsoft’s comments come a day after Samsung and Google held the Hong Kong launch of the first smartphone powered by the new Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.

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Five Galaxy features you won’t find on the iPhone

The Apple iPhone 4S shattered records with 4 million sales in its first weekend, but the popular smartphone may have a little more competition from another new release, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The phone, which Samsung and Google unveiled Wednesday at an event in Hong Kong, will be the first device to run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system (known as “Ice Cream Sandwich”) and boasts several promising hardware features, including a wider 4.65-inch screen and a faster 1.2-gigahertz processor.

Some of the changes with this latest phone are identical to those found on the latest iPhone – recording video in 1080p, providing access to the camera from the lock screen, offering voice-activated typing – but the most striking features on the phone are those that aren’t available on the iPhone 4S.

1. Face recognition unlock

Have you ever wished you could unlock your phone just by smiling at it? Neither have we, but it’s still a cool feature. Rather than password-protect your phone, the Galaxy Nexus uses face recognition technology to let customers lock and unlock the phone just by looking into the camera. Of course, that could pose a problem to users on Halloween – though that likely won’t be an issue this year, since the phone isn’t slated to go on sale until some time in November.

2. A true 4G network

The iPhone 4S has been billed as having a 4G-like network speed, but the device is not actually on a 4G network despite all the rumors in the lead-up to its launch that it would be. The Galaxy Nexus, on the other hand, will have genuine 4G connectivity (LTE or HSPA+), meaning the browsing experience may be faster than on the iPhone 4S.

3. Mobile payments

Google launched the mobile payments option with its previous Nexus model by adding a near-field-communication chip to the phone. The new Nexus sports this same chip, meaning consumers will be able to store virtual versions of their credit and loyalty cards on this phone to use the phone to make purchases. Once again, this was a feature some thought Apple would introduce on the latest iPhone, but it didn’t happen.

4. Automatically respond to calls with a text

It may sound like a minor add-on compared with the others on the list, but it’s one that could prove incredibly useful. With the new “Quick Response” feature, users will have the option to decline an incoming phone call and have an automatic text response sent to the person calling. This feature will come in handy during meetings and movie screenings when you can’t answer the phone but want to let the person calling know what you’re doing in as few steps as possible so you don’t cause too much of a disruption or miss too much of the movie.

5. A wider screen

As mentioned, there’s a wider screen – a potential game-changer for anyone who uses their phone to watch movies or play video games. At 4.65 inches, the screen is more than an inch larger than the one on the iPhone 4S but still small enough it should fit into your pocket. In effect, it’s enough to make the smartphone feel just a little bit more like a tablet.

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