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Friday, December 11, 2009 NEW YORK: A Roman sarcophagus panel that once belonged to French writer Emile Zola sold for well over its estimated value Thursday, going for 1.5 million dollars, auction house Sotheby's said.The third-century marble relief panel, a rare piece representing Dionysiac scenes with satyrs and bacchants, had been expected to fetch between 150,000 and 250,000 dollars.Sotheby's vice president and senior specialist in antiquities, Florent Heintz, said that only four or five such panels exist in the world.Six bidders competed for the piece before it sold to an anonymous telephone bidder. Sotheby's called it the "highlight" of its antiquities sale, which totaled 5.8 million dollars.Zola, who penned the "J'accuse" open letter in 1898 blasting the French government for its handling of the Alfred Dreyfus Affair, was only linked to the panel in recent days."We are thrilled with the 1.5 million dollars achieved today for the Roman Sa...

Friday, December 11, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Thursday unveiled a tool that lets scientists and defenders of the environment use the Internet to keep an eye on what is left of the Earth's forests."We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests," Rebecca Moore and Amy Luers of the US Internet giant's philanthropic arm Google.org said in a blog post.The technology lets scientists analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract information such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of forest.The system is hosted in the Google "cloud," the technology firm's Internet-linked data centers, and has the potential to reveal in seconds when forests are being chopped down, burned or bulldozed."Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening," Moore and Luers wrote.Emissions...

Friday, December 11, 2009 WASHINGTON: An estimated 10,000 people including 1,100 children died of swine flu in the United States in the seven months after the new strain of flu was first detected in April, a top US health official said Thursday."By November 14th, many times more children and younger adults unfortunately have been hospitalized or killed by H1N1 influenza than happens in a usual flu season," Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told reporters."Specifically, we estimate there have been nearly 50 million cases, mostly in younger adults and children; more than 200,000 hospitalizations... and sadly, nearly 10,000 deaths including 1,100 among children and 7,500 among younger adults," he said.The number of hospitalizations was around the same as for an entire year when only seasonal flu is circulating, and the estimated death toll, which is based on a new methodology for calculating fatalities from (A)H1N1 flu that w...

Friday, December 11, 2009 LONDON: Valentino LoSauro, a hairstylist, has aped the character of Edward Scissorhands in real life - he has invented a set of razor sharp ‘clawz’ which according to him will revolutionise hair cutting.LoSauro claims that his invention can crop hair twice as fast as normal scissors. He spent 150, 000 pounds and two years in making the ‘clawz’.“The idea came to me in the late 90’s,” the Telegraph quoted LoSauro as saying.LoSauro added: “I am a pianist as well as a hairdresser and wanted to combine that light fingered touch with my styling.“So the ‘Clawz’ were born as a simple idea to bring a musicality to hair styling.“When I cut the hair I use methods I call ‘Flight of the Bumblebee and ‘Zap’.”He says it took him a while to use his new device as he needs to bend his fingers to contract the razor in the claws.He explained: “It took me a couple of years from the launch of the prototype in around 2001 to become really proficient with them.“Now though I can moto...

Friday, December 11, 2009 NEW YORK: Regal Entertainment Group's movie ticket prices will rise at least 4 to 6 percent in 2010, twice the typical yearly hike, due in part to the advent of 3-D films such as "Avatar," Chief Executive Amy Miles said on Tuesday. Miles, who runs the world's largest theater operator, said "Avatar" could make more than $250 million in the U.S. and Canada, drawing new audiences to 3-D films and helping to ring in a strong fourth quarter for the movie industry. The film, which will be released on Dec. 18, cost News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox $280 million to make, according to a source familiar with the matter. Directed by James Cameron, "Avatar" uses breakthrough 3-D technology and tells the story of a U.S. Marine soldier who visits an extraterrestrial globe with exotic inhabitants. Cameron's 1997 "Titanic" is the highest-grossing movie of all time, with $1.7 billion sales worldwide. "Avatar" w...

Friday, December 11, 2009 WASHINGTON: Ordinary paper could one day be used as a lightweight battery to power the devices that are now enabling the printed word to be eclipsed by e-mail, e-books and online news.Scientists at Stanford University in California reported on Monday they have successfully turned paper coated with ink made of silver and carbon nanomaterials into a "paper battery" that holds promise for new types of lightweight, high-performance energy storage.The same feature that helps ink adhere to paper allows it to hold onto the single-walled carbon nanotubes and silver nanowire films. Earlier research found that silicon nanowires could be used to make batteries 10 times as powerful as lithium-ion batteries now used to power devices such as laptop computers."Taking advantage of the mature paper technology, low cost, light and high-performance energy-storage are realized by using conductive paper as current collectors and electrodes," the scientists sai...

Friday, December 11, 2009 MOSCOW: Russia admitted on Thursday another failed test of its much-touted Bulava intercontinental missile, after unusual lights were spotted in Norway across the border from the launch site.The submarine-based Bulava (Mace) missile has been billed as Russia's newest technological breakthrough to support its nuclear deterrent, but the repeated test failures are an embarrassment for the Kremlin.The missile failed in its 13th test on Wednesday morning, Russia's leading economic dailies Vedomosti and Kommersant reported on Thursday, quoting sources in the military-industrial complex.Hours later, the Defense Ministry admitted the failure, saying the launch had been made by the Dmitry Donskoi nuclear submarine from a submerged position in the White Sea."It has been established ... that the missile's first two stages worked as normal, but there was a technical malfunction at the next, third, stage of the trajectory," a Defense Ministry spokesm...

Friday, December 11, 2009 LONDON: Prime Minister Gordon Brown admitted Tuesday he should oversee the family computer more closely, after his young son posted a string of gobbledegook on his wife's Twitter page.Followers of Sarah Brown's popular feed on the micro-blogging site -- received by more than a million people -- were startled last week to see her apparently exclaim "fvdfzsrsazxzzxcvbnmadgfhjjkqwrtyuuuiop".Brown explained Tuesday that it had been his three-year-old son Fraser who grabbed the chance to express himself on the computer while his mother was briefly out of the room."Last week, the people who follow Sarah, my wife, on Twitter received a message of gobbledegook which my younger son had bashed out on the keys and then pressed 'send' while she was out of the room," he told the audience."Within an hour, the Downing Street press office was called to ask if she had been the victim of a hacker, the BBC was reporting a mysterious ...

Friday, December 11, 2009 BERLIN: Germany Thursday unveiled the world's most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Weighing in at 35 tonnes and using 50 kilometres (31 miles) of cables, the supercomputer named "Blizzard" is capable of 158 TeraFlops, or 158 trillion calculations, per second.Scientists said that in addition to tracking reactions in the atmosphere and the oceans, "Blizzard" should be able to work out the influence of ice and plants on greenhouse gases and climate change.Blizzard is "60 times faster than its predecessor and one of the world's largest supercomputers," the German climate research centre in Hamburg said in a statement."The new supercomputer should be in a position to model even tornados and very small eddies," added the centre, whose data are also being used at the UN climate conference in Copenhag...

Friday, December 11, 2009 TALLINN: An Estonian pastor has struck it rich after a DNA test proved that he was the son of one of the Baltic state's wealthiest men, according to a news report Thursday.The weekly Eesti Ekpress said a local court formally had recognised Riho Pors as an heir of the late Aadu Luukas, who was a high-profile figure in Estonia.Luukas died aged 67 in 2006, leaving reported assets of hundreds of millions of kroons (tens of millions of euros, dollars).Indrek Luukas, who on paper was Luukas' only son and heir, was reportedly unaware that he had a half-brother. Pors, a pastor in the Estonian Pentecostal Church, went to court to prove his claim.Luukas, who made his fortune in the transit business, was well-known in this country of 1.3 million people and highly respected for his charity work.

OSLO: President United States Barrack Hussain Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize here at a prize distribution ceremony on Thursday.Speaking on the occasion, the U.S. President said, “I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.”He said the most profound issue surrounding his receipt of this prize is the fact that he is the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down, he added. He continued:A decade into a new century, (the) old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale. Moreover,...

Friday, December 11, 2009 SALTA: Pakistan booked berth into semifinals of Champions Challenge Hockey Tournament after beating South Africa by 4-1.Pakistan will take on archrival India in the semifinal on Saturday. Experienced fullback Sohail Abbas converted a penalty-corner to give Pakistan the lead in the 20th minute but South Africa’s Norris Jones restored parity in the 33d minute, ending the first half with a 1-1 score line. However, the second half saw Pakistan’s frontline attacking well with Shakeel Abbasi (49th minute), Haseem Khan (53rd minute) and Akhtar Ali (63rd minute) scoring goals to seal the fate of the match.