Washington, April 30 : A new report from the National Research Council has determined that the current policy and legal framework regulating use of cyber attack by the US is ill-formed, undeveloped, and highly uncertain.

The United States should establish clear national policy on the use of cyberattack, while also continuing to develop its technological capabilities in this area, it says.

The US policy should be informed by open national debate on the technological, policy, legal, and ethical issues of cyberwarfare, according to the committee that wrote the report.

Washington, April 30 : New calculations by scientists suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.

The calculations have been made by Ryan O’Leary and Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Though the research indicates that rogue black holes may roam the Milky Way, the good news is that the Earth is safe, as the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away.

Astronomers are eager to locate them, though, for the clues they will provide to the formation of the Milky Way.

Washington, Apr 30 : In a breakthrough study, researchers from University of East Anglia (UEA) have developed a novel computer, which can distinguish between different languages.

The researchers hope that the discovery could have practical uses for deaf people, for law enforcement agencies, and in noisy environments.

Lead researchers Stephen Cox and Jake Newman of UEA’s School of Computing Sciences developed the novel system by statistical modelling of the lip motions made by a group of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers.

The study showed that the computer was able to identify which language was spoken by an individual speaker with very high accuracy.

London, April 30 : Scientists have demonstrated the fastest imaging system ever devised, a camera that snaps images less than a half a billionth of a second long, capturing over six million of them in a second continuously.

According to a report by BBC News, a research team from University of California, Los Angeles, US, designed the world’s fastest camera, which has been dubbed Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging, or Steam.

It works by using a fast laser pulse dispersed in space and then stretched in time and detected electronically.

London, April 30 : NASA's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, has told lawmakers that the agency will probably not build an outpost on the moon as originally planned.

According to a report in New Scientist, Scolese's comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid.

NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there.

Washington, April 22 : The Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 19th anniversary by detecting a peculiar galactic system that contains several galaxies, along with a “cosmic fountain” of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years.

Known as Arp 194, the northern (upper) component of the system of galaxies appears as a haphazard collection of dusty spiral arms, bright blue star-forming regions, and at least two galaxy nuclei that appear to be connected and in the early stages of merging.