Coldplay and Norah Jones Play at Memorial for Jobs

Removing incorrect reference to Randy Newman, whose music was played at the event but who did not appear.
The memorial for Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters on Wednesday was, like so many of the Apple product introductions that Mr. Jobs presided over, a musical affair.

According to multiple Twitter posts from people at the event, the British band Coldplay performed “Fix You,” “Yellow” and other songs in an outdoor amphitheater in an interior courtyard on Apple’s campus. The singer Norah Jones covered the Bob Dylan song “Forever Young.”

Samsung and Google unveil Galaxy Nexus smartphone

Samsung Electronics unveiled its newest Galaxy Nexus smartphone Wednesday, the first to use the latest version of Google's Android operating system.

The new phone is seen as the Samsung-Google partnership's answer to Apple's iPhone 4S, which in less than a week on the market has already sold more than 4 million units.

At a glitzy unveiling in Hong Kong, Google executive Andy Rubin said Android's latest "Ice Cream Sandwich" operating system demonstrates innovation "that works on phones and tablets and everything in between."

Rubin said features like Android Beam and Face Unlock showcased Ice Cream Sandwich's capabilities

Countries Struggling to Eradicate Malaria

About one-third of all countries across the globe which are alarmed by the health dilemma brought about by malaria are doing its way to eradicate the said disease by the year 2021, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease which is caused by a protozoon called Plasmodium. This parasite multiplies in the liver, and then infects red blood cells. Malaria is endemic in about 108 countries.  The Anopheles mosquito which is the vector mosquito of the disease usually thrives in mountainous area where there are shades and humidity is high.

As per the WHO, symptoms of malaria include fever, headache, and vomiting, and usually appear between 10 and 15 days after the mosquito bite.

Apple Stores to close for hour during Jobs memorial?

Apple Stores will reportedly close for an hour Wednesday so that employees can watch a live webcast of a company-wide celebration of the life of co-founder Steve Jobs.
The webcast and store closings are scheduled for 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Wednesday, according to 9to5Mac. We've asked Apple to verify the time, and will update that post if we hear back.
After Jobs died Oct. 5, Apple CEO Tim Cook notified employees the company would hold its own "celebration of Steve's extraordinary life for Apple employees" at its Cupertino campus on Oct. 19.
Apple's website home page continues to show a black-and-white photo of Jobs with his name, birth and death dates.
Meanwhile, at a private gathering Sunday at Stanford University, many of Silicon Valley's elite, as well as politicians, musicians and artists gathered to remember Jobs, who died Oct. 5 at age 56.
The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal noted that security was "tight," and that the guests included "Google CEO Larry Page, former Vice President Al Gore, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Dell CEO Michael Dell, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, Adobe Systems co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock," as well as "actor Tim Allen, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, U2 singer Bono, former President Bill Clinton and Maria Shriver.

Slow International Response To Pakistan Floods

Pakistan’s monsoon floods have devastated millions of lives, but one month on, the international response remains sluggish, raising fears of a worsening humanitarian situation.
“The international community is not coming forward to provide funds,” said Joe Cropp of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC.) “Interest just isn’t there,” he told IRIN.
Oxfam, for its part, says that while humanitarian aid will be needed for months to come, relief activities so far “have barely scratched the surface”.
UN agencies have repeatedly called for funds over recent weeks, warning that the situation could deteriorate rapidly if new aid is not forthcoming.
Only 18 percent of the US$357 million Pakistan Flood Response Plan appeal has been funded to date. “It is really too little and it is cause for concern,” said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA.)
“Winter is about to set in, and with the cold the situation will become unbearable, notably in Sindh [Province] where 850,000 people live in temporary shelters,” Byrs told journalists in Geneva.
An estimated 5.8 million people have been struggling to survive in Sindh and Balochistan provinces since torrential monsoon rains pounded southern Pakistan in September, triggering serious flooding.
Over 1.5 million houses were damaged, three million acres of crops were destroyed and one third of cattle were lost, while three million people are still in need of food assistance, according to UN figures.
Many of those affected were still recovering from the disastrous 2010 floods, which affected 18 million people in Pakistan.

Global warming blamed for smaller species

From the mighty polar bear to the tiny house sparrow, many of Earth's species appear to be shrinking in size, a new study reports - and its authors think that's probably due to global warming.

But other experts say that conclusion goes too far, blaming global warming for what may be natural changes.

The new research was published online on Sunday in the journal, Nature Climate Change.

It's based on a review of other studies and found that 38of 85 animal and plant species showed a documented reduction in size over decades, including a type of Scottish sheep that is five per cent smaller than in 1985.

Those studies looked at species over different time periods and in varying numbers.

The shrinking specimens, according to the study, include cotton, corn, strawberries, bay scallops, shrimp, crayfish, carp, Atlantic salmon, herring, frogs, toads, iguanas, hooded robins, red-billed gulls, California squirrels, lynx and wood rats.

Black Death mapping reforms disease study

Canadian researchers have genetically mapped the bacterium known as the Black Death, one of the deadliest pathogens in history that wiped out onethird of Europe's population in only four years during the Middle Ages.

Mapping Black Death marks the first time an ancient pathogen has been reconstructed in its entirety and will allow researchers to track changes in its evolution and virulence over time.

The study, published in the science journal Nature, sheds light on how epidemics develop and suggests a killer pandemic will not be caused by a deadly pathogen alone, but by a "perfect storm" of circumstances, said Hendrik Poinar, one of the lead researchers, from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

He said the findings mark a new era of research into infectious diseases.

"For so many years, people focused on the pathogen," said Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research. "It's one thing to talk about the pathogen, but it's another thing to talk about the disease

Black death DNA unravelled

Scientists used the degraded strands to reconstruct the entire genetic code of the deadly bacterium.
It is the first time experts have succeeded in drafting the genome of an ancient pathogen, or disease-causing agent.
The researchers found that a specific strain of the plague bug Yersinia pestis caused the pandemic that killed 100 million Europeans - between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the total population - in just five years between 1347 and 1351.

Ohio Senator Asks NASA to Wrest Shuttle From Intrepid Museum

The tussle on Capitol Hill over the space shuttle Enterprise continued on Tuesday with a senator from Ohio demanding that NASA rescind its award to New York City.

Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, sent a letter to Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, asking him to reconsider his decision to give Enterprise to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.

Mr. Brown cited the Intrepid’s plan — first reported in The New York Times — to place the shuttle in a new building across the West Side Highway from the aircraft carrier that houses the museum.

The museum uses the property as a parking lot but does not own it. The lot, which is designated for manufacturing uses, would have to be rezoned.

BlackBerry service issues spread to U.S. and Canada

BlackBerry subscribers throughout the world continued to experience disruptions in service for a third consecutive day as problems with Research In Motion's equipment in its data centers appears to now be affecting North American subscribers as well.

Customers using Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa experienced an email, messaging and Web surfing outage on Monday. The problems continued Tuesday with only spotty access to email, BlackBerry Messenger, and Web. At first the problems only affected subscribers mainly in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.
But the issues spread to other parts of the world including parts of South America. And on Wednesday morning customers in the U.S. and Canada also began complaining of emails being delayed and sent in batches. One user in the Boston area said he began seeing email delays early Wednesday morning. And when batches of email arrived, they were about three hours old.
Earlier RIM blamed the disruption to service that affected Europe, the Mideast, India, Latin America and Africa on a failed switch and backup. The company said the problem had been fixed. But it also added that it might take some time to work through the backlog of data, which had not yet been sent to subscribers' devices. Email started to trickle in for some users late Tuesday.
"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested," the company explained in a statement on Tuesday. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

Environmental Pollution: PIA encountered 30 bird-hit incidents

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan International Airlines’ (PIA) aircraft have met 30 bird-hit incidents mainly due to environmental pollution around the airports in the last six months.
The bird-hit incidents took place since most of the airports are situated in the middle of thickly populated areas ripe will air pollution.
Official sources in PIA informed that in bird-hit cases, the aircraft is thoroughly checked as per the airline’s standard operating procedure and released after necessary repair and maintenance

Drilling deep into Antarctic's lost world

An ambitious mission to search for life that has been buried beneath 3km of ice in an Antarctic lake for hundreds of thousands of years begins in earnest this week.

A team of British scientists and engineers will start transporting the 70 tonnes of drilling equipment needed to penetrate the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and sample the lake's water column and mud-covered floor.

They hope to discover a "lost world" of microbial lifeforms that have survived in solitary isolation from the rest of the biosphere when Lake Ellsworth froze over for the last time between 200,000 and one million years ago.

iPhone 4S roundup: 4G icon, 512MB RAM, preorder blowout

The new Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 4S won't have as much memory as some had hoped. Also, AT&T (NYSE:T) wants to stick a "4G" icon by the bars, even though the network doesn't even meet the ITU's revised definition of 4G. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers also analyze the preorder numbers.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: The latest adventures of Jeremy, the annoying horse..

Tokyo Institute of Technology's Osamu Hasegawa invents robot that can think

ROBOTS that learn from experience and can solve novel problems - just like humans - sound like science fiction.
But a Japanese researcher is working on making them science fact, with machines that can teach themselves to perform tasks they have not been programmed to do, using objects they have never seen before.
In a world first, Osamu Hasegawa, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has developed a system that allows robots to look around their environment and do research on the internet, enabling them to "think" how best to solve a problem.
"Most existing robots are good at processing and performing the tasks they are pre-programmed to do, but they know little about the 'real world' where we humans live,'' he said.
"So our project is an attempt to build a bridge between robots and that real world," he said.
The Self-Organising Incremental Neural Network, or "SOINN", is an algorithm that allows robots to use their knowledge - what they already know - to infer how to complete tasks they have been told to do.
SOINN examines the environment to gather the data it needs to organise the information it has been given into a coherent set of instructions.

Steve Jobs died of respiratory arrest: Report

SAN FRANCISCO: Steve Jobs's death certificate shows he died at home in Palo Alto, California, of respiratory arrest caused by a pancreatic tumor at about 3 p.m. on Oct. 5. His occupation was listed as "entrepreneur" in the "high tech" business.

The Santa Clara County Public Health Department in San Jose, California, issued the document, listing respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with "metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor" as the underlying cause. There was no autopsy performed.

Steve Jobs reportedly died of respiratory arrest, tumor

Steve Jobs died from respiratory arrest and a pancreatic tumor, according to his death certificate released Monday.

The Apple co-founder, chairman and former chief executive died Wednesday, Oct. 5, around 3 p.m. in his Palo Alto home, the certificate noted.

Apple and his family announced Jobs' death Oct. 5 but did not provide any details about the time, place or the cause.

10 things you may not know about the Yeti

1. The Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, is an ape-like creature that is said to inhabit the Himalayan region of Nepal, India and Tibet.
2. The Nepalese believe the Yeti is nocturnal, it whistles and growls, and can kill with a single punch.
3. The first publicised report of a Yeti sighting came from a German photographer in 1925, but many Nepalese claim to have seen it.
4. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reported seeing large footprints while scaling Mount Everest. Sir Edmund later discounted the Yeti reports.
5. Last month, Nikolai Valuev, the so-called 'Beast from the East' and former heavyweight boxing champion, took part in an expedition to track down the Yeti. He is understood to have been unsuccessful.

Research Show Why People Remain Optimistic

A study published on Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience reveals that people who are optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their point-of-view in the world.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London studied 19 volunteers, showing them a series of negative life events while the team scanned brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

The participants were then asked to estimate the probability of each event occurring to them after the scanning sessions were done.  The volunteers were also asked to fill out a questionnaire measuring their level of optimism.

What’s Next for Apple

According to a report in the Daily Mail, before he passed away, Apple icon Steve Jobs planned four more years worth of products, guaranteeing a wealth of new goodies for the foreseeable future.
Jobs spearheaded one of the best corporate turn-around stories of the ages, and built Apple into a brand to rival Sony. So it’s not too soon to ask what will happen to Apple without him, even with all those products in the pipeline -- but it's the wrong question.
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Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs?

Who will save the day now? What other bright thinker could invent a computer interface that makes us all more productive, or finally figures out how to make a smartphone battery last longer than a day? Though it's possible no one can fill Jobs' shoes, these folks might introduce us to a whole new kind of footwear. Sandals, anyone?