Microsoft announced on Thursday that it is reducing the price of its three Xbox 360 models from Friday onwards, which would make Xbox 360 the cheapest game console in the market, even from the successful Nintendo Wii console.

The price of the Arcade model of Xbox 360 has now been reduced to $199.99 from initial price of $279.99. This is implanting hope in the company’s mind that lower price would attract more and more customers.

New Delhi, Sept. 4 : External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday said that the UPA Government was not in a position to go beyond its commitment to Parliament on the US-India civil nuclear cooperation deal, even as an atmosphere of uncertainty prevails over India getting a waiver for nuclear commerce from the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

In an interview to All India Radio, Mukherjee said that there was no room for speculation and that the Government would wait for the outcome of the two-day deliberations before initiating the next steps to have the deal operationalised.

Washington, September 4 : A new computer-modelling project has been successful in recreating the sound of the harp-like Epigonion musical instrument from Ancient Greece.

Researchers associated with the project named ASTRA (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) say that they have even performed one of the oldest known musical scores dating back to the Middle Ages.

The experts say that they achieved this fate by using the advanced GEANT2 and EUMEDCONNECT research networks to link high capacity computers together, and thereby sharing information to enable the computer-intensive modelling of musical sounds.

Washington, September 4 : The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which goes into operation on September 10, might lead to the discovery of new dimensions.

Located on the border of France and Switzerland, the LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator complex.

According to Professor Etzion, an experimental physicist in high-energy research, ”It is hard to grasp the dimensions of the practical benefits from this project, but we’re expecting to explore the basic forces that hold the world together.”

Washington, September 4 : Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) may have found a way to overcome a key barrier to the advent of super-fast quantum computers, which could be powerful tools for applications such as code breaking.

Ever since Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman first proposed the theory of quantum computing more than two decades ago, researchers have been working to build such a device.

London, September 4 : Chemists have now developed a new way to transport gases like methane and natural gas, by converting them into a powdered form.

According to a report in Nature News, Andrew Cooper and his colleagues at the University of Liverpool, UK, have found that they can trap methane in a bizarre material dubbed ''dry water'', a mixture of silica and water that looks and acts like a fine white powder.

The methane reacts with the water to produce a crystalline material called methane gas hydrate, in which individual methane molecules sit inside ice-like cages of water molecules.