An electronic spy network linked to China has infiltrated the computers of government offices, NGOs and activist groups in more than 100 countries, say researchers.

A science textbook writer details her experience testifying during hearings on science-education standards before the Texas State Board of Education.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Google on Monday launched free downloads of licensed songs in China, while sharing advertising revenue with major music labels in a market rife with online piracy.

Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com.

"We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads," Lee told reporters. "We were missing one piece ... we didn't have music."

The service offers downloads of some 350,000 songs — from Chinese and foreign artists — a number that will rise to 1.1 million in the coming months, said Gary Chen, chief executive of Google's partner www.Top100.cn, a Chinese music website co-founded by basketball star Yao Ming.

Music from artists signed by Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music will be available on the service, which Google has no current plans to expand beyond China, said Lee.

"This is the first serious attempt to start (monetizing) the online market in China. I can't overestimate how important this is," said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia Pacific and Asia chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Users will be able to search by musical measurements such as the level of "beat" in a song and "instrumentality," as well as by artist and song name.

IFPI said last year that more than 99 percent of all music files distributed in China are pirated, and the country's total legitimate music market, at $76 million, accounts for less than 1 percent of global recorded music sales.

The new service will attract users away from illegal download sites because the music and service will be of a higher quality, said Warner's Rutherford.

Downloads of unlicensed music and videos are rampant in China, the world's biggest Internet market by number of users.

While Google dominates the global web search market, in China Baidu holds more than 60 percent of the market, more than double Google's share.

($=6.83 yuan)

(Reporting by Kirby Chien, Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

Around the world, geeks have banded together to create nearly 100 "hacker spaces" where they can share tools and information, and work on projects collaboratively.

240 B.C. Chinese astronomers observe a new broom-shaped "star" in the sky. It's the first confirmed sighting of Halley's Comet.

Some have made the case that a sighting in 2467 B.C. is responsible for the alignment of the Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Interesting. Even a supposed Chinese sighting in 613 B.C. would be seven years later than the calculated 620 B.C. for a Halley's passage. Was that a record-keeping error or a different comet?

The 240 B.C. observation coincides with Halley's computed orbit, but its exact date is a matter of some imprecision. The existing Chinese record is the Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji (or Shi Chi), written more than a century later around 100 B.C. What the Chinese called a "broom star," because of its bristly tail, appeared first in the east and then later in the north.

The text adds that it was also seen in the west during the lunar month of May 24 to June 23. Several astronomers calculated in the 1980s that the comet's closest approach to the sun was between March 22 and May 25 of 240 B.C. Those calculations also confirmed its apparent motion from east to north to west. March 30 is frequently given as the likely date for its first, though not necessarily the brightest, sighting.

Every subsequent passage of the comet was observed and recorded by astronomers in the Middle East, Asia and, eventually Europe. The 1066 appearance coincided with the Battle of Hastings, and an image of the comet was woven into the Bayeux Tapestry. Contemporary accounts say the comet looked to be four times bigger than Venus.

So, Halley: How did this guy get his name on what's probably the world's most famous comet? Edmond Halley was the British astronomer who first realized that some of history's recorded comets were in fact the same darn comet periodically returning to visibility from Earth.

Halley was using a newly discovered mathematical tool: Newton's calculus. He computed the parabolic orbits in 1705 for 24 comets that had been seen from 1337 until 1698. Hmm. The comets of 1531, 1607 (observed by Johannes Kepler) and 1682 moved in almost identical orbits, about 75 years apart.

Halley tried to account for variations in the orbit that would be caused by the comet passing the large outer planets, and then he predicted its return in 1758. He was right, but just barely, with the comet first seen on Christmas of that year.

Other astronomers took up the cudgels and discovered the same comet had in fact been seen and recorded on most of its 26 previous visits since 240 B.C., every 75 to 76 years. It reappeared in 1835, 1910 and 1986.

So, Halley: How do you pronounce that name, anyway? The conventional pronunciation rhymes with valley. Many Americans rhyme it with daily, thanks largely to the classic 1950s rockers, Bill Haley and the Comets. But if you really want to rock around the orbital clock, linguists and the dude's descendants agree it's pronounced Hawley, rhymes with folly.

See you in 2061.

Source: So various, so beautiful, so new

An American solider was blinded in one eye, and three others have required medical evacuation out of Iraq, in a series of laser "friendly fire" incidents, the U.S. military has disclosed. These injuries to be the result of the misuse of green laser dazzlers –- and because the lasers being used are dangerous.

The California Energy Commission is going forward with a proposal that will ban the sale of TVs not considered energy efficient starting in 2011. The approach would regulate power consumption of a TV that is turned on — not just in standby mode, as is currently the case.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Skype is planning to launch its service for iPhone users on Tuesday and for BlackBerry in May as part of its effort to expand beyond desktop computers.

Skype has been pushing to make its service work on the most popular advanced phones with an aim to expending its more than 400 million users who were mostly lured by the promise of cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application.

Skype Chief Operating Officer Scott Durchslag said he has high hopes for the application's success on Apple's popular iPhone as he expects Skype's most feature-rich mobile offering to appeal to new and existing customers.

"The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There's a pent-up demand," Durchslag said in an interview before the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas, where Skype plans to launch the service on Tuesday.

In May it will launch Skype for Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, which popularized mobile email. It has already announced Skype for Nokia phones and for phones based on Android, Google Inc's mobile system, and Windows Mobile, from Microsoft Corp.

CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood said the new applications give Skype a chance to boost its mobile phone position, which has been weaker than that of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or News Corp's MySpace.

One of Skype's unusual iPhone features is the fact that it allows subscribers use to the phone numbers in their existing iPhone address book so they do not need duplicate lists.

"Whether you're Twitter, MySpace or Facebook you want to be embedded in the address book," said Wood. "This puts Skype firmly into the game."

Skype's iPhone application will be free to download and will allow free calls between Skype users. As with Skype on the desktop, fees will be charged for calls to traditional phones.

The service will also work on later versions of Apple's latest iPod Touch device, which has Wi-Fi links but no cellular connection. The iPod Touch launched September 2008 has a microphone, unlike the first iPod Touch launched in 2007.

While Skype video is very popular with desktop customers, Durchslag said that the company is still considering whether it will offer video for the iPhone or other phones.

"We're considering video carefully but we have a really high bar on the quality," and how the user interaction will work with other applications on iPhone, he said. "If we do it we will have to do it incredibly well."

CCS's Wood said that if Skype can replicate the popularity of its desktop video feature on the cellphone it would help a mobile category that has been slow to take off, as well as boost its own status in cellphones.

"I'm firmly convinced that if Skype could find a way to bridge all those cellphone cameras and laptop cameras it might kick start a video telephony opportunity," he said.

While mobile Skype has been available for some time in other countries such as the United Kingdom, it has been slow to catch on in the United States partly due to carrier concern that it would cannibalize their phone call revenue.

In the United States for example, AT&T Inc has had a monopoly on calls made from iPhones, as it is the exclusive carrier here.

But Wood said that Skype has actually shown that it can boost consumer spending on cellphones as it encourages use of the phones for other services such as data.

For example he said that its success on networks such as 3 UK, owned by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, suggests that carrier fears have been unfounded.

"The only area where I think there are some question mark is that it could erode roaming revenues," he said, noting that some consumers particularly in Europe hesitate to use their phones while outside of their carrier territory because of notoriously high roaming fees.

"The carriers will be suspicious of this service but what we've learned from other markets is that (Skype) did not have the detrimental effect feared," he said.

(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

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With $55 million, a collection of frozen human brains and robots capable of processing 192 brain slices a day, the Allen Brain Institute is attempting to do the impossible: systematically map out the expression patterns of more than 20,000 genes that make our grey matter tick.

The science behind the techniques isn't new. Researchers have probed neurons with specific RNA bits in a revealing game of genetic hide-and-seek for 40 years. But the speed and scope with which they're tackling the problem with specially-constructed robots that automate most of the data-gathering and analysis is unprecedented. When the Atlas is finished in 2012, scientists will start untangling the whys and hows of our neural network.

Left: This is the ventral view of a fresh specimen before it is processed at the Allen Institute. Fewer than 15 highly distinct individual human brains will provide the data for the Allen Brain Atlas.

A researcher dissects the brainstem and cerebellum from a human brain. The Allen Brain Atlas attempts to move beyond typical anatomical descriptions of brain regions, and map the cortex at the cellular and genetic level.

Specimens must be processed within hours after the donor's death. The brain begins to break down immediately and scientists have a small window of time to prep and freeze each sample.

Scientists delay the breakdown of brain tissue, such as this brain stem, by freezing the samples on dry ice. At warmer temperatures, nucleic acids unravel and cell membranes quickly dissolve.

The large human cerebrum must be cut into small pieces, 1 centimeter thick, before it is frozen.

A slice of human cerebrum freezes in dry ice, embedded in a stabilizing coat of blue carboxymethylcellulose.

Once a brain slice is frozen, technicians shave it into transparent slices only a few microns thick.

Frozen brain slabs are kept at cryogenic temperatures until they are further sliced and eventually probed with RNA to look for specific gene expression. The method, called "in situ hybridization," reveals which snippets of DNA are turned on in each cell.

Lab-automation company Tecan constructed five robots, each capable of running in situ hybridization on 192 samples per day. The Allen Brain Institute can produce more than a terabyte of data every 24 hours.

These brain slices were cut in a coronal plane: Imagine looking from the front of the head through to the back. The top is colored with silver stain, and the bottom treated with thionine.

A coronal section of a human brain is stained with hematoxylin and eosin. Each slide is photographed automatically by modified Leica 600B microscopes, complete with slide-loaders and barcode readers.

The coronal section of a whole human brain stained with silver stain. Every two seconds, a new slice image is added to the database; more than 85 million photographs have been made with these microscopes.

A coronal section of a human brain is stained with modified silver stain. Once an image enters the database, an algorithm converts the image to a "heat map" of gene expression.

A coronal section of a whole human brain stained with thionine. Analysis of all slides and samples will be completed by 2012.

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich tells us why he sucks at Guitar Hero, and whether the videogame is the new album.

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