Brussels  - The European Commission on Thursday invited companies which want to offer satellite-based communications and entertainment services to mobile receivers across Europe to apply for a licence to do so.

Traditionally, the European Union's broadcasting market has been divided into 27 national systems, making it difficult for satellite companies to offer services across the bloc.

But a law which came into force this week mandates the commission, as the EU's executive, to handle the approval process for the whole bloc.

The commission has therefore called on EU-based companies interested in offering services such as mobile satellite internet and TV to apply for permission to offer such services before October 7.

London, Aug. 7 : Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) could soon be hovering over many British cities to spot people inside their homes and to eavesdrop on their conversations.

According to the Daily Express, British lawmakers have backed the use of the eight million pound machines by police forces and other agencies including MI5.

Crowd control, anti-terror surveillance, maritime searches and support for the Coastguard, police, fire and intelligence services are all uses being considered.

Washington, August 7 : Scientists have said that the drivers of tropical deforestation are changing from poverty-driven to industry-driven deforestation, which threatens the world’s tropical forests, but offers new opportunities for conservation.

This has been highlighted in “New Strategies for Conserving Tropical Forests” - an article by Rhett Butler of Mongabay. com, a leading tropical-forest Web site, and, William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The researchers argue that the sharp increase in deforestation by big corporations provides environmental lobby groups with clear, identifiable targets that can be pressured to be more responsive to environmental concerns.

London, August 7 : German researchers have written a piece of software that enables robots to “learn” to move through trial and error.

Ralf Der, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI-MIS) in Leipzig, has revealed that the software mimics the interconnected sensing and processing of a brain in a so-called "neural network".

Washington, August 7 : A new research has shown that aphids are emerging as sentinels of climate change.

The scientists, who carried out the research, are from the BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) supported Rothamsted Research in the UK.

One of the UK’s most damaging aphids – the peach-potato aphid (Myzus persicae) – has been found to be flying two weeks earlier for every 1 degree Celsius rise in mean temperature for January and February combined.

London, Aug 7 : Digital cameras would soon be more humanised, what with a new technology that can produce images with a wider field of view, just like the human eye.

In a collaborative study, Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering have created array of silicon detectors and electronics that can be conformed to a curved surface.

Thus, just like the human eye, the curved surface can act as the focal plane array of the camera, which captures an image.