San Francisco - Apple unveiled a new line of Macbook laptop computers Tuesday, bringing prices down at the same time as improving function and design.

The two most prominent new features of the new line-up are powerful new graphics capabilities provided by Nvidia chips that replace integrated Intel graphics chips that were used previously. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the new chips improved graphics performance by a factor of five.

Jobs also touted a new manufacturing process that allows the laptop cases to be made from a single block of aluminium.

Washington, Oct 14 : New images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed a giant cyclone at Saturn’s north pole, and show that a similarly monstrous cyclone churning at Saturn’s south pole is powered by Earth-like storm patterns.

The new-found cyclone at Saturn’s north pole is only visible in the near-infrared wavelengths because the north pole is in winter, thus in darkness to visible-light cameras.

Washington, Oct 14 : Observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the computer simulations used to explain them, hint at weather patterns on distant planets that are truly alien to what are found on Earth.

Approximately 300 planets have been discovered around other stars, and for most of those planets, scientists know little more than the mass and orbital properties of the planet.

However, for a handful of the brightest planets, temperatures have been inferred from observations carried out with spacebased platforms such as NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Washington, Oct 14 : A population survey of West African chimpanzees living in Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) has revealed that this endangered subspecies has dropped in numbers by a whopping 90 percent since the last survey was conducted 18 years ago.

The few remaining chimpanzees are now highly fragmented, with only one viable population living in Taï National Park.

Washington, Oct 14 : A new study has offered the first direct evidence of wild bonobos hunting and eating the young of other primate species, despite their “make-love-not-war” kind of image.

While chimpanzee males frequently band together to hunt and kill monkeys, the more peaceful bonobos were believed to restrict what meat they do eat to forest antelopes, squirrels, and rodents.

But now, a new study offers the first direct evidence of wild bonobos hunting and eating other primates as well.

Washington , Oct 14 : NASA is planning to launch a spacecraft that for the first time will be able to examine the heliosphere, the solar wind-filled bubble that delineates our solar system from intergalactic space.

Not much is known about this boundary, except that the meeting is far from sedate - something akin to a boat slamming through water at 50,000 mph.

So far, only the Voyager probes have crossed into the boundary zone, some eight to nine billion miles from Earth, with surprising results.