There is no conflict in believing in God and having some "extraterrestrial kinsmen'. It's not Steven Spielberg saying this but Jose Gabriel Funes, Vatican's chief astronomer. "The possibility of life

London: For decades, astronomers have pictured our galaxy as sporting four major, spiral arms, however new images effectively sever two appendages, revealing the Milky Way has just two major arms. An astronomer is calling for demoting two entire arms of our galaxy, after they failed to turn up in a sensitive new map of the Milky Way's stars. According to a report in New Scientist, the astronomer in question is Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, US.

Cape Canaveral (Florida): With astronauts hustling inside and out, the international space station got its biggest live-in addition yet, a Japanese lab stretching 37 feet that opens for business on Wednesday. Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide had the honor of installing the billion-dollar lab, named Kibo, which means "hope', just as two crewmates were winding up a spacewalk on Tuesday. He used the space station's robot arm to nudge the bus-size lab into place.

It might be a rather tiny piece in an ambitious mission but without a semiconductor chip, a satellite or any other communication device cannot transmit or receive data. Though developed Western countries have imposed complex restrictions on the supply of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) chips to India, a Defence Research and Development Organization lab has, despite US sanctions, developed and supplied GaAs devices for military and space technology purposes.

infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered "rasp' to scrape ice. Cool! Whoever thought a Nasa spacecraft could be so adept at social networking and internet? For users of Twitter, a web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news "tweets' to the cellphones and computers of interested "followers.' As of Friday night, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.

The U.S. spacecraft that plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday night has begun 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life. Less than two hours after finding its feet, the Phoenix Mars Lander beamed back four dozen black-and-white images including one of its foot sitting on Martian soil amid tiny rocks. Others included the horizon of the arctic plain and ground with polygon patterns similar to what can be found in the earth's permafrost regions.

FIGURE

The three-legged NASA spacecraft

Capa Canaveral (Florida): Nine months ago, Nasa's Phoenix probe blasted off for Mars with an unprecedented mission to sample water on another world. Before that can happen, however, the space agency faces a formidable challenge: landing. The odds are not great. Historically, 55% of all attempts to land on Mars have failed and the method being used for the touchdown of the Phoenix spacecraft on May 25 hasn't been attempted in 32 years.

New York: His new book, Physics of the Impossible, has been on the New York Times Best Seller's list for more than four weeks now. Michio Kaku, co-founder of string field theory and professor of theoretical physics at City University, New York, talks to Narayani Ganesh about the future potential of cutting-edge science: Why do you say we're in transition between the Age of Discovery and the Age of Mastery?