Washington, September 16 : A new study has shown that oil palm plantations are no substitute for tropical rainforests, which makes the protection of the rainforests all the more important.

Emily Fitzherbert from the Zoological Society of London and University of East Anglia carried out the study.

The continued expansion of oil palm plantations will worsen the dual environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, unless rainforests are better protected, warn scientists.

“There has been much debate over the role of palm oil production in tropical deforestation and its impacts on biodiversity. We wanted to put the discussion on a firm scientific footing,” said Fitzherbert.

London, September 16 : A new study has reported an object that brightened intensely and then faded back into obscurity over a period of about seven months, which is unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

According to a report in New Scientist, the Hubble Space Telescope first spotted the object, called SCP 06F6, in the constellation Bootes in February 2006 in a search for supernovae.

Nothing had been seen at its location before it started to brighten, and nothing was spotted after it dimmed, which suggests it is normally too faint to observe and that it brightened by at least 120 times during its firefly-like episode.

Washington, September 16 : Two University of Southern California researchers have written a piece of software that can help create a musical accompaniment in the style of any chosen artist, or even the particular style used in select pieces by the artist.

Elaine Chew, an accomplished pianist and professor at the USC Viterbi School Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and graduate student Ching-Hua Chuan have revealed that they started developing the system called ASSA (Automatic Style Specific Accompaniment) two years ago.

San Francisco - Hewlett Packard, the world's largest computer maker, is to cut 24,600 jobs over three years as part of its plan to integrate enterprise technology firm Electronic Data Systems Corp, the company announced Monday.

The cuts represent about 7.5 per cent of HP's workforce and will force HP to take a 1.7-billion-dollar charge.

HP bought EDS in March for 13.2 billion dollars. The combined company had a workforce of 320,000 employees.

Washington, September 15 : An Indian-origin mechanical engineer and his colleagues at the University of Utah have developed a new approach to slice thin wafers of the chemical element germanium, so that they can be used in the most efficient type of solar power cells.

Dinesh Rakwal, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, believes that the new method can lower the cost of such cells by reducing the waste and breakage of the brittle semiconductor.

Microchip, a highly developed integrated circuit, used in almost all modern electronic gadgets and gizmos completed 50 years on last Friday.