Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive shows off the new MacBook Air at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, Tuesday, Jan. 15.

Apple boss Steve Jobs has unveiled the world’s thinnest laptop, called the MacBook Air.
The computer, which is 0.76 inches (1.93cm) at its thickest point, was unveiled at an event in San Francisco.
The Apple head also launched online film rentals for iTunes users in the US from almost every major film studio, including Disney and Fox, BBC wrote.
“We’re dying to get this international as well,“ said Jobs, saying it would roll-out worldwide later in the year.
Of the laptop, Jobs said, “It’s an amazing feat of engineering.“
It does not have a CD or DVD drive in order to save space. “It was built to be a wireless machine,“ he added.
The laptop will compete with a range of portable devices, from companies such as Sony, Dell and Asus, which are already building so-called sub-notebooks, designed to be lighter and more mobile.
The machine goes on sale in two weeks and costs from $1,799 in the US (1,199 pounds in the UK) and comes with either an 80 gigabyte hard disc drive as standard or 64 gigabyte solid state drive for an added $999.
Apple worked with chip maker Intel to produce a smaller version of its Core2Duo processor for the laptop.
Movie rentals from the key Hollywood movie studios will be available in the US immediately. Until now customers have had to buy movies outright but now they rent them for up to 30 days, or for 24 hours once viewing has started.
Movie lovers will be able to download films to their computers, and transfer them to the latest iPods and iPhone, in standard and high-definition, for between $3 and $5.
The company also announced it was revamping the Apple TV device so that it can now download content independently of a computer and display it on a widescreen TV.
Jobs admitted that Apple’s first attempt to put online video in the living room had failed.
“[Apple TV] was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer.
“It is not what people wanted. What people really wanted was movies, movies, movies.“
He added, “We weren’t delivering that. We’re back: With Apple TV Take Two.“
He announced the firm had sold 125 million TV shows and seven million movies via iTunes.
“It’s more than everyone else put together, but it didn’t meet our expectations,“ said Jobs. “I think we’ve got it right this time.“
Jobs also announced a wireless back-up system called Time Capsule, offering a combined wi-fi router and hard drive.
New software for the iPhone was unveiled, including an update to Maps, which can plot the phone owner’s spot on a map without using GPS.
Apple announced it had sold four million iPhones in the first 200 days on sale, putting it on target to sell 10 million by the end of 2008.

Older women who take calcium supplements to maintain bone strength may have an increased risk of heart attack, researchers in New Zealand said.
The researchers cautioned that they do not consider their findings the definitive word on the subject, but said the higher heart attack risk they saw merits further study, according to Reuters.
“This effect could outweigh any benefits on bone from calcium supplements,“ researchers led by Ian Reid of the University of Auckland wrote in the British Medical Journal.
Many women take calcium supplements to try to prevent osteoporosis, a condition in which bones become weak and brittle, leading to fractures.
The study involved 1,471 healthy post-menopausal women, average age 74, who already had participated in a study on the effects of calcium on bone density and fracture rates. Of them, 732 were given a daily calcium supplement and 739 were given a placebo. They were followed for five years.
Heart attacks were more common in the women taking the calcium supplements, with 31 women who took supplements experiencing a heart attack compared to 21 women who got a placebo, the researchers said.
The researchers noted that previous research had suggested that taking calcium supplements might protect against vascular disease by lowering levels of bad cholesterol in the blood.
They said that because calcium supplements raise blood calcium levels, this possibly accelerates the formation of deposits in the arteries that could lead to heart attack.
The new results “are not conclusive but suggest that high calcium intakes might have an adverse effect on vascular health,“ the researchers wrote.
“In the meantime this potentially detrimental effect should be balanced against the likely benefits of calcium on bone, particularly in elderly women,“ they wrote.

This robot in Japan walks via signals responding to the brain activity of a monkey in the US.

It may walk like a Japanese robot, but it’s thinking like a monkey in the United States. Japanese and US researchers said they have created a humanoid robot that acts according to the brain activity of a monkey all the way across the Pacific, Physorg.com reported.
The experiment was part of efforts to develop prosthetic limbs which can be mentally controlled by people with disabilities.
A laboratory in the western Japanese city of Kyoto unveiled a 155-centimeter (62-inch) tall humanoid, with a friendly-looking face including bulging black eyes, who walked via signals coming into its legs through wires.
Researchers said the robot was responding to the cortical brain activity of a monkey that was walking attached to wires on a treadmill at Duke University in North Carolina. The signal was sent via the Internet.
“We were able to detect the monkey’s brain activity while walking on the treadmill and relay the data from the United States to Japan,“ the state-backed Japan Science and Technology Agency said in a statement.
“For the first time in the world, we were then able to make our humanoid robot in Japan walk in real-time in a similar manner as the monkey,“ it said.
The robot was designed by the Japanese agency and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to move by responding to brain activity signals.
Duke University had trained two monkeys to walk on two feet on treadmills. The activity of the animals’ hundreds of neurons was recorded from their cortex and converted into data that could be transmitted online.
“We can say that we have made another big step to the realization of a neural prosthetic device that could one day restore lower limb motor functions for paralyzed patients,“ the statement said.

By injecting tiny magnets into your body, doctors hope to treat diseases without using chemicals or hormones. Don’t worry about sticking to the refrigerator--the nano-sized magnets are only strong enough to affect your cells.
For the first time, doctors created bead-shaped magnets that bind with receptor molecules on cell walls, LiveScience.com reported.
When a magnetic field is applied, the beads are attracted to each other and pull together, dragging the receptors with them. As they cluster, the receptors release biochemical signals that trigger cell functions.
“This technology allows us to control the behavior of living cells through magnetic forces rather than chemicals or hormones,“ said biologist Don Ingber of Children’s Hospital Boston, who devised the technique.
The researchers used the magnets to stimulate an influx of calcium into immune system cells, proving the beads can trigger an important signal common to many cells.
The results of the study will be published in the January issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The technique could be used in different types of cells, and acts almost instantaneously, instead of taking minutes or hours as drugs do. Ingber said he envisions using the nanomagnets to create a pacemaker that could be controlled externally or to treat diabetes without the need for injections of insulin.

Astronomers from Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have detected for the first time the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide--two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids--in a galaxy some 250 million light years away.
When combined with water, the molecules form glycene, the simplest amino acid and a building block of life on Earth, ScienceDaily reported.
The Arecibo astronomers focused on the distant galaxy Arp 220, an ultra-luminous starburst galaxy, because it forms new stars at a very high rate. They used the 305-meter, or 1,000-foot diameter, Arecibo radio telescope, the world’s largest and most sensitive, to observe the galaxy at different frequencies.
The observations, made in April 2007, were the first use of the 800 megahertz wide-band mode of the telescope’s main spectrometer.
The molecules were found by searching for radio emission at specific frequencies. Each chemical substance has its own unique radio frequency, much like people have unique fingerprints.
“We weren’t targeting any particular molecule, so we didn’t know what we were going to find--we just started searching, and what we found was incredibly exciting,“ said Tapasi Ghosh, an Arecibo astronomer.
“The fact that we can observe these substances at such a vast distance means that there are huge amounts of them in Arp 220,“ said Emmanuel Momjian, a former Arecibo astronomer, now at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, N.M. “It is indeed very intriguing to find that the ingredients of life appear in large quantities where new stars and planets are born.“
The astronomy team, led by Arecibo astronomer Christopher Salter, announced the discovery Jan. 11 in a poster presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

New software lets waving a cameraphone control onscreen objects, a bit like a Nintendo Wii controller.

Camera-equipped cell phone can be used to control a computer as if it was a three-dimensional mouse, thanks to prototype software developed by UK researchers.
The software makes it possible to move and manipulate onscreen items simply by waving a handset around in front of a screen, a bit like the motion-sensitive Nintendo Wii controller, NewScientist.com wrote.
“It feels like a much more natural way to interact and exchange data,“ says Nick Pears, of York University, UK, who made the system with colleagues from Newcastle University, also in the UK. “Most people who see it think it is really cool.“
Pears says the current prototype, which can be used to control a desktop computer, is just the first step.
“The invention really comes into its own when you realize that modern large public displays are really just computers with big screens,“ he says. For example, the software could let people interact with video advertisements.
To control a screen, a user simply aims their cell phone’s camera at it. The handset then connects, via Bluetooth, to the computer that operates that screen.
Once a connection is established, the computer knows exactly where the phone is pointing because it places a reference target on top of the normal video feed and compares this to the phone’s picture.
The distance between the cell phone and the screen is based on the way the screen’s size changes due to perspective.
The computer translates the phone’s movement and rotation in three dimensions into the actions of an onscreen cursor. It is possible to use the phone like a 3D mouse, interacting with objects by pressing the phone’s buttons or rotating the phone.
In testing, volunteers were asked to resize an image on a screen. They selected the picture using a button and manipulated it by moving or rotating the phone. Moving the phone closer to the screen enlarged the photos, and drawing it away made them smaller.
Another trial involved sketching a house using the phone.
“I like this because connecting phones and computers is just such a pain right now,“ says Mark Dunlop, who works on user interaction and mobile phones at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. “You should be able to see something on screen and just get hold of it.“
Mobile phones may be ubiquitous, but people are only now starting to use them for more than just calls and messages. “We’re still looking for more natural ways of using them to interact with other devices,“ Dunlop says.