Berlin - Germany factory orders plummeted by a hefty 6.9 per cent in December, the Economics and Technology Ministry said Thursday, as the global economic crisis tightened its grip on Europe's biggest economy. The seasonally adjusted fall in the nation's key industrial orders in December was far more than the 2.5 per cent that analysts had forecast and represented the 12th consecutive monthly fall in German order books.

The decline in December followed a revised 5.3 per cent drop in November.

San Francisco  - Google announced a new mapping feature Wednesday that allows people's locations to be featured on Google maps in 27 countries. While the new application could be helpful in locating friends, or for parents keeping track of their teenagers, it also raises serious privacy issues, experts say.

The new feature, called Latitude, allows people-tracking via the internet and smartphones such as Blackberry, Google Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia. It will soon be available via the iPhone.

London, Feb 4 : Scottish scientists have come a step closer to making the use of silicon chips for repairing damaged tissue a reality.

The team from University of Edinburgh have taken the conventional silicon chip design and used it to grow neurons - the basic cells of the human nervous system.

It is believed that the new technology would soon be used to make chips to replace damaged nerve or muscle fibre.

During the chip manufacturing process, researchers printed patterns on the smooth silicon surface.

London, Feb 4 : Scientists from National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have developed a novel speech prediction software that can complete half-formed words or sentences.

The new software looks fragments of words and other signs of hesitation such as filler sounds that Japanese speakers use when searching for their next phrase, just as English people use "um" and "er".

"Although the concept of completion is widely used in text-based interfaces, there have been no reports of completion being effectively applied to speech," New Scientist quoted the researchers as saying.

Brussels/San Francisco  - Academics and armchair explorers were as of Monday offered a unique insight into the world's seas through a new release of Google Earth, which now also features satellite imagery, photos and videos of the planet's oceans.

The 5.0 version of the popular downloadable software was launched in San Francisco. The project was also presented in a number of European cities, including Brussels, where the European Commission is contributing by providing its own marine data.

Madikeri, Jan 31 : The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to establish 15 weather forecasting units by next month at a cost of 20 lakh rupees.

Addressing the media in Madikeri in Karnataka on Saturday, Meteorology Programme Director of ISRO T G K Murthy informed, that the organisation is searching for a suitable place where the units could be set up to help farmers in the district monitor daily weather through a satellite.

ISRO owns 750 forecasting units across the country and 600 units have been set up by the central government.