SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Everybody knows "Lucy." For nearly four decades, this famous partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, dated to 3.2 million years ago, has been an ambassador for our prehistoric past, and her species has stood as the most likely immediate ancestor of our own genus—Homo. But in a spate of new studies, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, and a team of collaborators have put forward a controversial claim that another hominin—Australopithecus sediba—might…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Jason Koger is happy to be alive. In 2008, the young husband and father was riding his four-wheeler on his grandfather's farm when he came in contact with a downed power line. His body was jolted with 7,200 volts of electricity. "I remember waking up from an induced coma a few days later and being told that they had to amputate my both hands in order to save my life," said Koger, now 34.…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Twenty-five year-old student Greg Dash was frustrated. He wanted to take "fisheye"-style camera pictures without having to pay for an expensive lens, or fiddle around with a smartphone app. He wanted something light and small that he could pull from his pocket at a moment's notice. Unfortunately such a device did not exist. So, he went ahead and invented it. Measuring just four centimeters long and two centimeters high, the "Little Cyclops" has only…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) NASA wants to identify an asteroid in deep space, figure out a way to capture the spinning and hard-to-grab orb, nudge it into our planetary region, and then set it into orbit around the moon, the agency announced Wednesday. The capture would be performed robotically, and the relocated asteroid would become a destination for astronauts to explore—and, possibly, for space entrepreneurs to mine. The idea may sound more like science fiction than national policy, but…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Could this be the deadliest smartphone app ever? A German security consultant, who's also a commercial pilot, has demonstrated tools he says could be used to hijack an airplane remotely, using just an Android phone. Speaking at the Hack in the Box security summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Hugo Teso said Wednesday that he spent three years developing SIMON, a framework of malicious code that could be used to attack and exploit airline security…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Considering the virtual mapping program a Western spying tool, Iran is planning to create an Islamic alternative to Google Earth to provide information to users worldwide, The Guardian reported. "We are doing our best to launch the Islamic Google Earth in the next four months as an Islamic republic's national portal, providing service on a global scale," Mohammad Hassan Nami, minister of information and communication technology, was quoted as saying by Mehr news agency.…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – We came across a couple of iPhone designs which we haven't seen before. The first appears to be made out of plastic and closely resembles the popular iPod Touch. It will allegedly be the rumored cheaper new iPhone. It also appears to have a slightly smaller screen than the current 4" Retina on the iPhone 5. The second device is the more interesting one and is slated as the iPhone 5S (or maybe even…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) Twenty-five years after Prozac was introduced, the name has entered the cultural lexicon and helped define how people think of mental illness. Back in the 1990s Prozac achieved what few prescription drugs ever do. It was trendy. The drug found fame among laymen, fuelled in part by Elizabeth Wurtzel's bestselling book Prozac Nation. Now it is part of the everyday lexicon. The drug was introduced in the US in 1988 and in the UK the…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The group of 17 calls itself FairSearch and is led by Microsoft. It is already awaiting the outcome of a long-running European Commission investigation of Google’s dominance of the general web search market. On Tuesday it said Google was using Android to “deceive” smartphone and tablet manufacturers into cementing its hold on the burgeoning mobile internet. FairSearch made a formal complaint to Joaquín Almunia, the competition commissioner, calling on him to investigate Android. The…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The biggest thing in operating rooms these days is a million-dollar, multi-armed robot named da Vinci, used in nearly 400,000 surgeries nationwide last year - triple the number just four years earlier. But now the high-tech helper is under scrutiny over reports of problems, including several deaths that may be linked with it and the high cost of using the robotic system. There also have been a few disturbing, freak incidents: a robotic hand…