Washington, December 2 : The U. S. National Science Fioundation (NSF) is funding an initiative at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that has been designed to help prepare visually impaired middle school and high school students participate in computer science programs at the collegiate level.

The objective behind Enter Project Accessible Computing Education (ACE) is to increase the number of visually impaired students pursuing degrees in computer science, and give them the foundations they need to be fully successful in their studies and beyond.

Stephanie Ludi, a professor of software engineering at RIT and the principal investigator for the project, says that encouraging such students will benefit every computer user in the long run.

London, Dec 2 : A new research has suggested that a chemical reaction in rocks in landslides may be responsible for starting wildfires.

According to a report in New Scientist, in August 2004, fire crews attending a wildfire near Santa Barbara, California, traced the source of the blaze to a recent landslide, but they had no idea how the fire got started.

A few weeks later, Robert Mariner of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and his colleagues visited the site.

Washington, Dec 2 : The study of a rare mineral, which can be used to track ancient climates, will help scientists estimate what will be the condition of the world over the next century or two, as global warming begins to crank up the heat.

Binghamton University geologist Tim Lowenstein is doing the study.

Lowenstein and his colleague Robert Demicco at Binghamton University have discovered that nahcolite, a rare, yellowish-green or brown carbonate mineral, only forms on earth under environmental conditions marked by very high atmospheric CO2 levels.

That establishes it as both a marker and a benchmark that can be used by scientists as they consider the likely climatic implications of ever-increasing CO2 levels in our atmosphere today.

Washington, Dec 2 : A new study has determined that keeping tropical rain forests intact is a better way to combat climate change than replacing them with biofuel plantations.

It was undertaken by an international research team of botanists, ecologists and engineers from seven nations.

The study revealed that it would take at least 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through forest conversion.

If the original habitat was carbon-rich peatland, the carbon balance would take more than 600 years.

London, Dec 2 : Archaeologists have uncovered rare sculptures from the late Stone Age at Zaraysk, 150 km south-east of Moscow in Russia.

According to a report by BBC News, the findings have yielded figurines and carvings on mammoth tusks, including a cone-shaped object whose function “remains a puzzle” to the archaeologists.

Such artistic artefacts have been found in the nearby regions of Kostenki and Avdeevo, but this is the first such discovery at Zaraysk.

The new artefacts, discovered by Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, include a mammoth rib inscribed with what appear to be three mammoths, a small bone engraved with a cross-hatch pattern, and two human figurines presumed to be female.

London, Dec 1 : One computer device could be called as being most ‘in touch’ with humans –the mouse, which celebrates it’s 40th birth anniversary today.

The first computer mouse, developed 4 decades ago, was a little wooden box with a single red button on top and a wire hanging from the back, because of which it was likened to a rodent.

And while computers have transformed from big white boxes to cool flat screens and laptops, the mouse has, more or less, stayed the same.

But, its designer, Douglas Engelbart, is not a rich man giving orders in a huge IT firm.