Technology Effect

Moon shrinking, say scientists Astronomers have declared that the moon is shrinking after spotting wrinkles all over the lunar surface. The tell-tale contraction marks were discovered by U.S. scientists who examined thousands of photographs of the moon’s surface taken by a Nasa orbiter. Some of the wrinkles are several miles long and rise tens of metres above the dusty terrain. Researchers believe they arise from the moon decreasing in size by around 200 metres across its diameter. The moon’s mean diameter is generally calculated to be 3,474 kms. The prospect of a shrinking moon is not new to planetary experts. When the moon formed it had a hot core, much like that of the Earth, which caused it first to expand and then contract as it cooled down. The latest findings suggest the moon could still be cooling, a process that causes the surface to compress and form the wrinkle-like features, known as lobate scarps. A team led by Thomas Watters at the Smithsonian Institution in Washi...

The desktop in your palm: Nokia N900 With the Nokia N900, the Finnish company dumps Symbian for this chunky, hugely powerful ‘pocket computer' that runs the Maemo OS. Nokia has broken the mould with the N900 replacing the company's usual Symbian OS with Maemo, which is a more advanced system.The hardware is similarly powerful, with a pull-out QWERTY, a 600MHz ARM A8 processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a touch screen that's lushly high resolution, even if it is sadly only resistive rather than capacitive. As a result, it's uncommonly wide and chunky, but it is excellent for viewing video and browsing the web, and Maemo is easy to use, despite a sometimes unresponsive touch screen – and this is one of the dwindling band of phones that still comes with a stylus. Nokia has added a little kickstand for hands-free video viewing. Despite the open-source nature of the OS, the Maemo application portal is somewhat short of options, and while Facebook is incl...

India's first e-reader Wink unveiled Mumbai: Bangalore-based digital publisher EC Media International has launched its multi-function e-book reader Wink that not only supports 15 languages but will also offer over 200,000 book titles on debut.Wink will offer consumers a one-stop e-store to access e-reading content of choice via www.thewinkstore.com that would enable access not just to e-books, but also journals, newspapers, magazines and selected articles, EC Media said.Many of the titles have been acquired from international aggregators, giving Indians access to a whole lot of books not available in the country. "With the launch of Wink, we aim to revolutionise the way people read," said Ravi DeeCee, founder and chief executive of DC Group, which has promoted EC Media and the Kerala-based publishing house DC Books. "Wink will allow readers to access their favourite content anytime, anywhere, that, too, in the language of their choice," he said. ...