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.

Washington, Aug 7 : That constant cribbing about the antivirus software in your computer may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a new "cloud computing" approach to malicious software detection developed at University of Michigan that tackles computer bugs seamlessly on the Internet.

Named CloudAV, the new approach moves antivirus functionality into the "network cloud" and off personal computers.

It analyses suspicious files using multiple antivirus and behavioural detection programs simultaneously.

The researchers say that antivirus software from popular vendors are not very effective, and that new threats go undetected for an average of seven weeks.

Srinagar, Aug 7 : Security forces this morning recovered a powerful improvised explosive device (IED), weighing 80 kg, on the airport road in Haidarpura during a search operation in Srinagar.