On Monday, Sotheby’s New York previewed the vivid blue diamond, which is slightly smaller than a dime and shaped like a cushion. It will be sold in Geneva on May 12.

The conditions that are required to form a colored diamond seldom occur in nature, making them extremely rare. Sotheby’s said the gem was also notable for its clarity.

The diamond was unearthed last year in the Cullinan diamond mine, northeast of Pretoria, South Africa. The stone was cut from a 26.58-carat diamond in the rough.

The couple’s cremated remains will be sealed into specially made capsules designed to withstand the rigors of space travel. A rocket-launched spacecraft will carry the capsules, along with digitized tributes from fans. The Roddenberrys’ remains — and the spacecraft — will travel ever deeper into space and will not return to earth, company spokeswoman Susan Schonfeld said.

After Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, his wife commissioned Celestis to launch a part of his remains into space in 1997. She died Dec. 18, 2008.

TOKYO – She is big-busted, petite, very friendly, and she runs on batteries.

A Japanese firm has produced a 15-inch tall robotic girlfriend that kisses on command, to go on sale in September for around $175, with a target market of lonely adult men.

Using her infrared sensors and battery power, the diminutive damsel named “EMA” puckers up for nearby human heads, entering what designers call its “love mode.”

“Strong, tough and battle-ready are some of the words often associated with robots, but we wanted to break that stereotype and provide a robot that’s sweet and interactive,” said Minako Sakanoue, a spokeswoman for the maker, Sega Toys.

“She’s very lovable and though she’s not a human, she can act like a real girlfriend.”

EMA, which stands for Eternal Maiden Actualization, can also hand out business cards, sing and dance, with Sega hoping to sell 10,000 in the first year.

Japan, home to almost half the world’s 800,000 industrial robots, envisions a $10-billion market for artificial intelligence in a decade.

WASHINGTON — A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armor and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago — intimidating enough that scientists who unearthed its fossils dubbed the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad.

But its size — 10 pounds and 16 inches long — isn’t the only curiosity. Researchers discovered the creature’s bones in Madagascar. Yet it seems to be a close relative of normal-sized frogs who today live half a world away in South America, challenging assumptions about ancient geography.

The discovery, led by paleontologist David Krause at New York’s Stony Brook University, was published Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This frog, if it has the same habits as its living relatives in South America, was quite voracious,” Krause said. “It’s even conceivable that it could have taken down some hatchling dinosaurs.”

Krause began finding fragments of abnormally large frog bones in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, in 1993. They dated back to the late Cretaceous period, roughly 70 million years ago, in an area where Krause also was finding dinosaur and crocodile fossils. But only recently did Krause’s team assemble enough frog bones to piece together what the creature would have looked like, and weighed.

The largest living frog, the Goliath frog of West Africa, can reach 7 pounds. But Krause teamed with fossil frog experts from University College London to determine that Beelzebufo isn’t related to other African frogs.

It seems to be a relative of South American horned frogs, known scientifically as Ceratophrys. Popular as pets, they’re sometimes called pacman frogs for their huge mouths.

Like those modern frogs, Beelzebufo had a wide mouth and powerful jaws, plus teeth. Skull bones were extremely thick, with ridges and grooves characteristic of some type of armor or protective shield.

The HD DVD is now the Highly Dead DVD.

Toshiba Corp., creator of the HD DVD, dropped out of the battle Tuesday over the next generation of movie-disc technology and conceded to Sony’s rival Blu-ray format.

It was the biggest battle between two video formats since Betamax lost out to VHS in the 1980s.

In the long run, the end of the latest format war is expected to be good for consumers, who will no longer have to agonize over which technology to choose for high-definition movies, and won’t have to go to the trouble and expense of buying two players.

But in the short term, Toshiba’s defeat not only leaves 1 million HD DVD customers worldwide with dead-end hardware but also ends a rivalry that kept down prices for players and pushed the Blu-ray group to match the features available on HD DVD players.

Analysts say people interested in getting a Blu-ray player would do well to wait. For one thing, it will take 12 to 18 months for Blu-ray players to become as cheap and full-featured as HD DVD players, which have been selling for just over $100, according to ABI Research.

Many people who did buy HD DVD players did so recently. In fact, Toshiba said the holiday season was its best ever. The fact that the PlayStation 3 console included a Blu-ray drive is one reason the format eventually won out. Sony Corp. sold 10.5 million PS3 machines since its 2006 debut.

But the real death knell for HD DVD was the last month’s decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to drop the format and release only Blu-ray discs and DVDs.?”That had tremendous impact,” Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said Tuesday in Tokyo. “If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win.”

Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox in shunning the HD DVD, leaving Universal and Paramount Studios in the HD DVD camp. Universal on Tuesday said it would “focus” on releasing Blu-ray discs, but did not say if it would cease putting out HD DVDs.

After Warner’s announcement, Toshiba was initially defiant. It cut player prices and kept touting the format’s benefits. But the bad news kept rolling in. Last week, Netflix Inc. said it would cease carrying rentals in HD DVD. On Friday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would stop selling HD DVD players and discs.

Even with the HD DVD out of its way, Blu-ray isn’t likely to be the success that the DVD was, given the many viewing options consumers have.

The big advantage of the DVD over broadcast and cable has been that the viewer can choose when to watch what. But that advantage has been eroded by video-on-demand from cable companies, many of which are now in high definition. Comcast Corp., the country’s largest cable company, plans to offer more than 1,000 high-def movies this year.

Just last week, Apple Inc. upgraded its Apple TV set-top device to enable downloads of high-definition rental movies from the Internet. Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 game console also shows downloaded HD rentals.

“Blu-ray Disc has passed its first real test by beating HD-DVD,” wrote David Mercer, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in London. “But a much bigger challenge now lies ahead if BD is to become as successful as DVD, and content owners, retailers and manufacturers must now demonstrate that they can work together to promote BD effectively.”

Taking a page from Hollywood science fiction, the Pentagon said Thursday it will try to shoot down a dying, bus-size U.S. spy satellite loaded with toxic fuel on a collision course with the Earth.

The military hopes to smash the satellite as soon as next week — just before it enters Earth’s atmosphere — with a single missile fired from a Navy cruiser in the northern Pacific Ocean.

The dramatic maneuver may well trigger international concerns, and U.S. officials have begun notifying other countries of the plan — stressing that it does not signal the start of a new American anti-satellite weapons program.

Military and administration Other Top officials said the satellite is carrying fuel called hydrazine that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it hits the ground. That reason alone, they said, persuaded President Bush to order the shoot-down.

Left alone, the satellite would be expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. About half of the 5,000-pound spacecraft would be expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would scatter debris over several hundred miles.

If the missile shot is successful, officials said, much of the debris would burn up as it fell. They said they could not estimate how much would make it through the atmosphere. They said the largest piece that would survive re-entry would be the spherical fuel tank, which is about 40 inches wide — assuming it is not hit directly by the missile.

The goal, however, is to hit the fuel tank in order to minimize the amount of fuel that returns to Earth.

A Navy missile known as Standard Missile 3 would be fired at the spy satellite in an attempt to intercept it just before it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere.

Known by its military designation US 193, the satellite was launched in December 2006. It lost power and its central computer failed almost immediately afterward, leaving it uncontrollable. It carried a sophisticated and secret imaging sensor.

?iPod represents a wide array of moveable media players which have been designed and are sold by Apple Inc. It was first launched in October 2001. iPod models generally cover digital audio players with a central click wheel to iPod Shuffle that uses various buttons because of its small size. iPod Nano, a fifth generation, was launched in September 2006. This led to discontinuation of iPod mini, which it stored the data on an internal hard disk. iPod Shuffle and Nano employ flash type of memory for smaller size. These devices also act as an external medium for data storage.

iPod was inspired by the shortcomings of existing digital music players, which were not physically compact and the user interface were not very friendly. Apple assembled a group of engineers and within a year, it unveiled the iPod. It was launched as a product which was Macintosh compatible with a hard drive of 5 GB. Apple used PortalPlayer`s reference for its software. The company Pixo helped iPod for developing user interface. But these were refined by Apple after development. The naming of the device as `iPod` was suggested by Vinnie Chieco, who is a freelance copywriter. Coincidently, Apple had the name registered for `internet kiosks`, but it never used it for this purpose.

iPod can run MP3, M4A/AAC, AIFF, Protected AAC, Audible Audio book and WAV format. It also introduced the displaying of images ability with PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, and JPEG formats. The 5th generation models can even play MPEG 4. From the 2nd generation model, the software also started working with Windows along with Macs. It doesn`t support Microsoft`s WMA audio format. WMA and MIDI files can be changed using iTunes, a service provided by Apple through which you can view and download latest songs and movies on your device player. iPods having colored displays use texts and graphics which are anti-aliased and sliding animations. The operating system is stored in a dedicated storage medium of the device. Each device player has 32 MB Ram, though later ones have 64 MB Ram. Most of it is used to cache songs through the storage medium.

Apple also added PDA type functionality so that text files can be viewed and an address book can be maintained through a computer. Also, some built-in games like brick are also included. In fifth generation iPod, the brightness of the screen can be adjusted and games can be downloaded from iTunes Store. For first and second generation models, as well as Nano and Shuffle, internal lithium polymer batteries are used and for third and fifth generation models, internal lithium batteries are used. Initially, iPods came with a FireWire connection for charging the device, but with introduction of multipurpose USB ports, they became outdated. Recent iPod models can be charged using USB 2.0.

Many accessories, even by third parties, have been made for iPods. Some additional accessories developed by Apple were sound recorders, FM Radio Tuners, Remote Control and Audio-Visual Cables for TV. Other accessories are external speakers, protective cases, and wireless earphones. Third parties manufacturing most of these accessories are Griffin Technology, Belkin, Bose, and SendStation. BMW was the first car company to launch an iPod automobile interface, thus allowing newer vehicles to control iPod through steering wheels. Later Apple made this technology available to many other car brands too. Even certain Airlines started provided iPod connectors in the seat.

Apple markets its own iPod earphones and claims that they are better fitting for ears and provide better sound quality. Since it was launched, iPod has been market leader in digital players because of their high quality, supreme aesthetics and ease of use. With more cash flowing into research every year, there is no reason for this fact to change.

The application, avialable to Nokia phone owners allows users to browse hundreds of online radio stations worldwide based on station name, genre, country or language.? Mobile music lovers can access hourly updates of the most popular stations, and Nokia said the audio will be optimized by selecting the appropriate streaming servers for each user?s network connection.

The service is available for the Nokia N82, N91 and N95, and the firm said the application will be embedded in “selected upcoming” Series 60 devices.? Series 60 is Nokia?s user interface for the Symbian operating system.

This move is Nokia?s latest step in expanding beyond hardware manufacturing into direct to consumer mobile content.? Earlier this year the world’s No. 1 handset producer unveiled Ovi, Nokia?s wide-ranging umbrella brand that comprises a digital music store, the new N-Gage gaming platform, mapping offerings and social networking services.

The equipment to produce T-rays has been large and bulky but the US researchers have been working with researchers from Turkey and Japan and have found a simple was to generate T-rays using special high temperature superconducting crystals in a very compact device.

T-rays or terahertz radiation are part of the eletromagnetic spectrum between mircowaves and infrared radiation.? T-rays do not have enough energy to alter cells which leads to radiation sickness or cancer like conventional X-rays.? They don’t have the penetrating power to see through metals or water but they can penetrate many common materials such as paper, cardboard, leather and fabrics.? They are also sensitive to various chemical characteristics used in weapons and potential harmful chemical formulas something that X-rays cannot do.

But because of numerous setbacks at NASA the first pieces of the space station were not launched until 1998 and the official residence on the station did not begin until 2000.? Additional setbacks with shuttle flights including the loss of the Columbia shuttle in 2003 further stalled Europe’s mission into space.

The Colombus lab will be the second lab and the eighth room added to the International Space Station.? NASA’s lab which is larger than the 23 foot long European lab, was carried to the space station in 2001.? The Japanese? Space Agency is also reading their lab which will be the largest and most elaborate of them all .? Three shuttle flights will be required to transport all the pieces of the Japanese lab Kibo, to the station.? The first of these flights is scheduled to begin in February 2008.