Nasa satellite discovers new planet

Nasa's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet named Kepler-10b, reports Nasa.com.

Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system. The discovery of this 'exoplanet' is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.

"All of Kepler's best capabilities have converged to yield the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our sun," says Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team lead at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California, and primary author of a paper on the discovery accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. "The Kepler team made a commitment in 2010 about finding the telltale signatures of small planets in the data, and it's beginning to pay off."

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is venturing into the cloud, says Baselinemag.

“We believe the cloud is an emerging technology that will help us in the near future, and we're looking at a number of cloud-related issues,” says Johan Goossens, head of Nato's Allied Command Transformation Technology and Human Factors Branch. The report states that ACT is working with IBM to pilot a private cloud at the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation in Vancouver, Canada.

There are two main goals, as outlined in the report: to make ACT's data centres more cost-effective and to increase interoperability and data sharing among its 28 member nations. Goossens says with dwindling budgets, data centre costs are a major concern. He adds that the member nations, which have agreed to conduct a study on clouds, all have their own private infrastructures, but “if we can consolidate some of this, we can improve the interoperability between the data centres.”

NanoLambda, an advanced nano sensor start-up, revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas that its spectrumsensor sample is now available to potential customers and development partners for alpha test, with more broad availability expected in H2 2011, writes ElectroIQ.

The spectrumsensor, claimed to be the world's smallest spectrometer-on-a-chip, can be used for bio-chemical detection and wearable health monitoring, as well as accurate colour and light measurement of consumer electronics devices. Examples include, but are not limited to, camera, TV or LED lightings to enable accurate and consistent colours across devices and applications.

"As a very powerful non-invasive material analysis tool, the optical spectroscopy technology has been widely used in a variety of scientific or industrial applications. But the bulky size and expensive cost of the equipment, spectrometer, have prohibited its use in consumer applications," says Bill Choi, CEO of the company.