Washington, October 10 : A pair of Penn State researchers has come up with a statistical approach that may one day make Internet searches for photographs quite easier.

The tool they use for this purpose is called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR), which works by teaching computers to recognize the contents of photographs, such as buildings, people, or landscapes.

The procedure is very different from searching for keywords in the surrounding text, as is done with most current image-retrieval systems.

The team recently received a patent for an earlier version of the approach called ALIP, and is in the process of obtaining another patent for the more sophisticated ALIPR.

New York - In a rare piece of positive economic news, IBM shares jumped as much as 4.9 per cent Thursday morning after the company reported that its third-quarter earnings rose 22 per cent to 3.9 billion dollars.

Shares in the technology powerhouse gave back some of the gains as analysts focused on-less-than expected growth in revenue, which inched up 2 per cent to 25.3 billion dollars, falling short of the 26.53 billion dollars expected by analysts.

London, October 9 : Ultrafast, power-saving electronic devices may have come a step closer to reality with American researchers producing superconducting thin films.

Scientists at the U. S. Department of Energy''s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory say that they have successfully created two-layer thin films where neither layer is superconducting on its own, but which exhibit a nanometre-thick region of superconductivity at their interface.

London, Oct 9 : A new phase change material with the potential to change the design of future memory storage devices has been invented by scientists at Singapore ASTAR''s Data Storage Institute (DSI).

Phase change materials can modify their structure between amorphous and crystalline at high speed.

The materials, these days, are used to make Phase change memory (PCM), considered to be the most promising alternative to replace FLASH memory.

Usually, PCM is worked by changing phase change materials'' structure through applying an electric current. But now, phase change can be initiated by means of switching the new phase change materials by using magnetic fields, reports Nature.

Berlin - Global warming calculations have been too optimistic, and the sea level round the globe is likely to rise a full metre this century, two senior German scientists warned Wednesday.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and Jochem Marotzke, a leading meteorologist, said UN-backed data on climate change, predicting a rise of 18 to 59 centimetres, was out of date.

"We now have to expect that the sea level will rise by a metre this century," said Schellnhuber in Berlin.

London, Oct 9: The longer you stay inside a shop, the more likely you’re to spend, reveals a new mobile tracking system, called FootPath.

The software, developed by UK company, Path Intelligence, can track movements of mobile users over specified periods of time.

FootPath works by reading an anonymous identification number, called temporary mobile subscriber identity, or TMSI, that mobile phones transmit and can then track their movements.