The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years,  according to research published in Nature Geoscience. 

If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it has been moving north, then some Pacific islands near the equator – even those that currently enjoy abundant rainfall – may be drier within decades and starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner.

Global warming?  Maybe.  But if it is, the arid event could happen even sooner than current projections.  

Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory have discovered a black hole they labeled HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), which lies towards the outskirts of the galaxy ESO 243-49, approximately 290 million light-years from Earth and weighs more than 500 solar masses, making it a 'missing link' between lighter stellar-mass and heavier supermassive black holes. This discovery is the best detection to date of a new class that has long been searched for: intermediate mass black holes.
 
The discovery has been made by an international team of researchers working with XMM-Newton data, led by Sean Farrell from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, now based at the University of Leicester. 

LONDON, July 1 /PRNewswire/ --

- KT, SK Telecom and LG Telecom join forces to provide new enhanced services for customers incorporating GSMA's Rich Communication Suite key features

The GSMA today announced that the world's first interoperable enhanced communication service incorporating key elements of the GSMA's Rich Communication Suite (RCS) specifications is now a live commercial service in South Korea. The GSMA's RCS initiative is supported by some of the world's leading handset vendors, core network vendors and mobile operators including KT, and SK Telecom, who joined the initiative to provide an interoperable service solution in South Korea.

The biomedical community has become too risk-averse, according to a recent NY Times piece. I agree, although I don't agree with the dramatic presentation (it's not some dirty scientific secret - it's not hard to find scientists, and the leaders of the funding agencies themselves talking about it). Here are the basic issue:

Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.

LONDON, June 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- Frost Sullivan to Host Analyst Briefing on IFE Hardware and Content Markets on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 at 15.00 BST

IFE Markets have seen a list of new product introductions over the last 5 years, ranging from high capacity portable media players, to mobile telephony enabling technologies and fiber optic-based embedded systems. Nonetheless we are now at the bottom of a global recession that has affected all airlines and has pushed the implementation of far-reaching cost cutting measures, effectively restraining any growth potential for IFE suppliers.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081117/FSLOGO)

NEW YORK and BERLIN, June 30 /PRNewswire/ --

artnet Auctions sale of Icons: 20th-21st Century Photographic Portraits showed strength in the photographs market as the ten-day online photographs auction concluded June 25 with outstanding results. The sale featured over 200 original fine art photographs of legends of fashion, film, music, politics, sports, arts and literature from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna.

Top Lots Sold

I spent last week in Boston, attending the Open Mobile Alliance meeting. Whenever one goes to meetings, one does the dance of the business card exchange. Because it was my first OMA meeting, I had more of it going on than usual, as I met a lot of people for the first time. So I’ve collected a batch of 2-inch × 3.5-inch cards, which I then have to copy information from and put it into my address book. And there’s no hope of reading these things without my reading glasses.

They’re inconvenient, to be sure, but they do work, and we’re used to them. Everyone has them.

SUNNYVALE, California, June 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- Spirent NoCode(TM) Delivers Industry's First Comprehensive Solution Set to Address the Entire Gamut of Test Automation Challenges

DALLAS, June 30 /PRNewswire/ --

BancTec, a leading global provider of advanced, high-volume document and payment processing services and solutions, has made image quality assurance (IQA) a seamless component of its IntelliScan(R) high-speed document scanning solutions, thus meeting the dual requirements of verifiable image quality and high-speed processing. The result is an ability to generate time and cost savings - without sacrificing image quality - for organizations with large document processing operations.

WAALWIJK, The Netherlands, June 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Technology company IAI industrial systems in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, a subsidiary of the stock listed company DOCDATA N.V. in Waalwijk, the Netherlands, will supply over thirty units of two systems for de-centralized personalization of passports and ID-cards to Bulgaria. The majority of the systems will be supplied within 2009.