BLACKBERRY UNVEILS NEW PHONES FOR CDMA USERS.

In the news released by "The Economic Times" It is said "BlackBerry handset maker Research In Motion (RIM) today announced the launch of its new dual-screen 'Style' smartphone for CDMA customers in India, to be sold in the open market.

The earlier BlackBerry phones launched for CDMA customers were bundled with the services of Tata Teleservices and Reliance Communications .

The new smartphone has a compact flip design with dual high-resolution displays and a QWERTY keyboard. The phone has a 2-inch (diagonal) external screen for quick viewing of notifications and messages along with a 2.7-inch (diagonal) internal screen.

"The CDMA segment represents a significant portion of the overall mobile subscriber base in India and we are pleased to further our commitment to Indian consumers with the introduction of this powerful and stylish BlackBerry smartphone," RIM India Managing Director Frenny Bawa said in a statement.

It also comes with multimedia features which include a 5 mega pixel camera with flash. The handset will support video recording, offers built-in GPS for location-based applications and geo-tagging, Wi-Fi access and an expandable memory slot for up to 32GB of additional storage.

The BlackBerry Style smartphone will offer an optical trackpad for navigation. It will support applications like YouTube , BBM, Facebook , Twitter and MySpace.

The phone is now available in the market and distribution of the smartphone is being managed by Brightpoint India, RIM's national retail distribution partner for CDMA-enabled BlackBerry smartphones, the statement said."

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NEW MICROCHIP FOR BIONIC EYE IN AUSTRALIA

Researchers have unveiled a microchip which is expected to power the first functional bionic eye. BIONIC Vision Australia’s researchers have developed a breakthrough microchip which is bringing the bionic eye closer to human trials.

Bionic Vision Australia has taken delivery of a prototype microchip that would power a “bionic eye” implant intended to restore partial vision to the blind.

The five-square-millimetre chip was designed to be implanted in a patient’s eye, communicating wirelessly with an external camera and stimulating retinal cells to elicit vision.

Bionic Vision Australia announced on Friday that the chip – manufactured via the 65nm CMOS process in the US – was performing well in preliminary lab testing.

"This is a remarkable new microchip that has brought a retinal implant much closer to reality," said Gregg Suaning, project leader and associate professor with Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, University of New South Wales.

At only five square millimetres, the device is tiny but represents a significant advance in nerve stimulation technology.The design team incorporated never-before attempted features with this design and absolutely nailed every aspect.

The device is five square mm in size, but is said to be a significant advance in nerve simulation technology. The microchip is at the heart of the retinal implant, which stimulates the retinal cells to elicit vision.

While the current microchip announcement pertains to the first prototype (the wide-view system), work is very much advanced on this prototype, which has progressed through a series of preclinical studies to test the safety and efficacy of the technology.

A safe surgical technique has also been developed for implantation.Clinicians are now screening people with retinitis pigmentosa to develop a selection protocol for the first group of patients who will participate in tests of the device.

The wide-view bionic eye consists of a camera, attached to a pair of glasses, which captures images and sends them to a body-worn processing unit. A wireless transmitter feeds the data and power from this unit to a microchip in the retinal implant.

The microchip decodes this information and drives the electrical stimulation in the retina. These signals are then passed along the optic nerve to the brain where they are interpreted as vision

A system demonstrated by consortium member NICTA in February featured a wearable webcam that transmitted information to the implanted chip via a 402 to 405 MHz wireless link.

Bionic eye demonstration at NICTA TechFest 2011.

The chip featured 1024 electrodes to decode images using object and facial recognition algorithms from NICTA.NICTA researchers also intended the implant to feature electromagnetic coils that would detect eye movement and adjust the camera accordingly.

Researchers planned to perform the first full implant of the system in a patient in 2013.

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SEA LEVEL RISES THE FASTEST IN 350 YEARS DUE TO MELTING MOUNTAIN GLACIERS IN CHILE

According to research by Welsh scientists, Melting mountain glaciers are making sea levels rise faster in the last 350 years.The world's glaciers are melting up to 100 times faster than any time during the last 350 years.

The amount of ice lost from the 270 Patagonian glaciers is equivalent to filling Windermere in the Lake District more than 1,700 times.They mapped changes in 270 of the largest glaciers between Chile and Argentina since the "Little Ice Age".

Studies showed glaciers have lost volume on average "10 to 100 times faster" in the last 30 years.The rapid melt rate is linked to their contribution to global sea level.The researchers analysed the rocky debris left by glaciers on the sides of mountains to work out how big they once were - and how much ice has vanished.

Since the Little Ice Age ended in Patagonia in the middle of the 17th century, the 270 glaciers that now cover an area of at least 0.4 square miles have lost 145 cubic miles of ice.Because water is denser than ice that is equivalent to about 130 cubic miles of water.

Over the same period temperatures have gone up by around 1.4 C in the region, the scientists report in the journal Nature Geoscience.Their survey centred on remotely sensed images of outlet glaciers of the south and north Patagonian icefields, but used longer timescales than previous studies.The northern icefield extends for nearly 200 km and covers a surface of 4,200 square km, while the southern icefield is more than 350km long, covering 13,000 square km.

The scientists mapped changes in the position of the glaciers since the "Little Ice Age".The team calculated the volume of ice lost by the glaciers as they have retreated and thinned over the past 350 years and compared these volume losses to rates of change over the last 30 years.

"They cover only the last 30 years or so when satellite images can be used to calculate rates of glacier volume change.The study, which has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience, concludes the mountain glaciers have rapidly increased their melt rate in recent years and consequently their contribution to global sea level.

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