London, Jan 17 : British and American helicopters pilots on the frontline in Afghanistan are to get a new "super ears" device that helps them dodge enemy bullets that could save hundreds of troops' lives.

Dozens of helicopters have been shot down by small arms fire in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the new Hostile Fire Indicator will be a major advance in protecting the aircraft.

London, Jan 17 : Ultrasound canes and voice-enabled GPS devices that help blind and partially sighted people in navigation may soon be history, for scientists have created a new intelligent fingertip ''eye''.

The device may change how such people interact with their environment.

London, January 16 : A team of Japanese researchers says that it has designed an Iron Man-style robotic suit that can give even the most infirm farmer new-found strength.

Project leader Shigeki Toyama, a robotics professor at The Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, describes the prototype robot suit as the latest technological advance designed to assist Japan''s rapidly ageing farmers.

"I have been working on this for about 10 years now because few young people want careers in agriculture now and older farmers need help to do their work," the Telegraph quoted him as saying.

Prague - The European Union's plan for a new database to monitor the fingerprints and photographs of people entering the bloc has already cost more than double its budget, experts said at a meeting of EU interior ministers on Thursday.

And the project was so far behind schedule that a crisis was looming, the ministers told the press at the informal talks in Prague.

Experts at the meeting estimated that the second-generation Schengen Information System (SIS II), originally expected to cost 23 million euros (30 million dollars), had already cost between 60 and 80 million euros, diplomats told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Washington, Jan 15 : NASA has successfully completed its third round of testing for a technology development engine that may help astronauts to safely return to the surface of the Moon.

The goal of these tests is to reduce risk and advance technology for a reliable and robust rocket engine that could enable America''s next moon landing.

The tests by Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne in West Palm Beach, Florida, helped gather data on this concept engine that might play a role in the next stage of human exploration of the moon.

The goal of a lunar lander descent engine is to slow the vehicle so astronauts can land safely.

London, Jan 15: While all of us have experienced surprises in our lives, scientists have now created a computer model that has actually defined it-surprise is a change in expectation caused by the arrival of new data.

Making use of a rather aptly named unit of measurement- the "wow"- Pierre Baldi at the University of California, Irvine, and Laurent Itti at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles developed the model while investigating human attention.

According to a popular 1950s theory, what is unknown catches more of our attention till the time we understand it completely, for example our attention should hover over intricate patterns longer than over a plain surface.