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TECHNOLOGY SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2013
Samsung appeases EU
Petrobras makes new find RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil’s oil giant
BlackBerry loses $965mn
BRUSSELS: Samsung has answered
Petrobras announced a new crude find off the country’s northeastern coast. The state-run company’s president Graca Foster did not provide detailed production estimates, saying only that the discovery was “relevant.” The find was located in the Sergipe-Alagoas Basin about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the coast.
MONTREAL: Canadian tech pioneer
accusations that the company abused its dominant market position by taking out unfair injunctions against Apple. In the fight between the giants over the smartphone and tablet market, the Commission believes legal manoeuvres launched by Samsung would unfairly prevent Apple from access to crucial shared patents.
BlackBerry, which earlier this week agreed to a $4.7 billion buyout, said Friday that it lost $965 million in the second quarter. The company, formerly a leader in mobile phone technology, has been squeezed by rivals Android and Apple, steadily losing market share, a trend which continues according to its latest earnings report.
Curiosity finds ‘abundant’ water in Martian soil
WASHINGTON: The first scoop
of soil analysed by the Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the Martian surface may contain “abundant” water, Xinhua reported Thursday citing US researchers. Curiosity touched down Mars last August and began its 100-day mission of collecting and analysing samples of all kinds in Gale crater, which is near the Martian equator, with its high-tech lasers and scoops. In this study, researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute used the rover’s scoop to collect dust, dirt and finely grained soil from a sandy patch known as “Rocknest”. The researchers then fed portions of the fifth scoop into an instrument onboard Curiosity called the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) to heat them to 835 degrees Celsius. “One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil,” said lead author Laurie Leshin, dean of science at the institute. “About two percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water, which is a great resource, and interesting scientifically,” Leshin said.
CURIOSITY TOUCHED DOWN MARS LAST AUGUST AND BEGAN ITS 100-DAY MISSION OF COLLECTING AND ANALYSING SAMPLES. The sample also released significant carbon dioxide, oxygen, and sulfur compounds when heated, the researchers reported in the journal Science. Baking the sample also revealed a compound containing chlorine and oxygen, likely chlorate or perchlorate, previously known only from high-latitude locations on Mars. This finding at Curiosity’s equatorial site suggests more global distribution, the researchers said. In addition to determining the amount of the major gases released, SAM also analysed ratios of isotopes of hydrogen and carbon in the released water and carbon dioxide. Isotopes are variants of the same chemical element with different numbers of neutrons, and therefore different atomic weights. The analysis found that the ratio of isotopes in the soil is similar to that found in the
atmosphere analysed earlier by Curiosity, indicating that the surface soil has interacted heavily with the atmosphere. “The isotopic ratios, including hydrogen-to-deuterium ratios and carbon isotopes, tend to support the idea that as the dust is moving around the planet, it’s reacting with some of the gases from the atmosphere,” Leshin said. The results shed light on the composition of the planet’s surface, while offering direction for future research, said Leshin. “Mars has kind of a global layer, a layer of surface soil that has been mixed and distributed by frequent dust storms. So a scoop of this stuff is basically a microscopic Mars rock collection,” said Leshin. “If you mix many grains of it together, you probably have an accurate picture of typical martian crust. By learning about it in any one place, you’re learning about the entire planet.” These results have implications for future Mars explorers. “We now know there should be abundant, easily accessible water on Mars,” said Leshin. “When we send people, they could scoop up the soil anywhere on the surface, heat it just IANS a bit, and obtain water.”
Olympus pays US investors $2.6mn over accounting scandal TOKYO: Japanese camera giant Olympus said Friday it has agreed to pay $2.6 million to settle a US investor lawsuit stemming from a huge accounting scandal that hammered its shares. The claim was filed two years ago by an investor who claimed that a loss cover-up by Olympus executives was responsible for its plunging stock price. The scandal also battered the country’s corporate governance image, and sparked probes by regulators in Japan, Britain and the United States. Olympus stock dived in the wake of the scandal, but is now about 25 percent higher than before the loss cover-up was exposed. The firm’s Tokyo-listed shares closed 1.60 percent lower to 3,060 yen on Thursday.
The US investors who sued the company bought American Depositary Receipts, which hold shares in a foreign company but are priced in US dollars. Olympus said Friday it was embroiled in about 20 other lawsuits in Japan and overseas that had yet to be settled. The company reportedly agreed to pay its whistleblowing chief Michael Woodford 10 million pounds ($16 million) in a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit. Woodford, the company’s first foreign leader, exposed the scheme in late 2011 after he was sacked for questioning the firm’s past conduct. Earlier this month, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office said it would prosecute Olympus and a subsidiary over the huge loss cover-up scandal.
In July, a Japanese court handed suspended jail sentences to three former Olympus executives for engineering the scheme to hide about $1.7 billion in losses that had accumulated since the 1990s by using outsized consulting fees and buying unrelated companies. The firm has also been slapped with millions of dollars in penalties. Olympus has since undergone a major overhaul that included cutting about seven per cent of its workforce and forging a capital tie-up with electronics giant Sony, which is seeking to tap the lucrative medical equipment market. Although better known as a camera maker, Olympus is a world leader in medical endoAFP scopes.