No WhatsApp behind the wheel please!

New York: Using social media or calling people while driving is a common sight nowadays but even the simplest distraction behind the wheel can put a young driver at risk.

Dialling cell phones, checking SMSs, eating and talking to passengers - this multi-tasking among teens while driving greatly raise their risk of crashes and/or near-crash incidents, says a new study.

“Novice drivers are more likely to engage in high-risk secondary tasks more frequently over time as they became more comfortable with driving. The increasingly high rates of secondary task engagement among newly-licensed novice drivers are worrisome as this appears to be an important contributing factor to crashes or near-crashes,” warned Charlie Klauer, group leader for teen risk and injury prevention at the transportation institute's Center for Vulnerable Road User Safety in Virginia, US.

Traffic studies show that drivers from 15 years to 20 years of age represent 6.4 percent of all motorists on the road, but account for 11.4 percent of fatalities and 14 percent of police-reported crashes resulting in injuries, said the study conducted by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.

“Any secondary task that takes the novice driver's eyes off the road increases risk. A distracted driver is unable to recognise and respond to road hazards, such as the abrupt slowing of a lead vehicle or the sudden entrance of a vehicle, pedestrian, or object onto the forward roadway,” added the study, published in the journal New England Journal of Medicine.

Klauer and her team compared the results of a one-year, 100-car study with drivers between 18 and 72 years of age with an average of 20 years' experience and an 18-month study of 42 teens who had drivers' licenses for less than three weeks.

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Skype says user data safe after cyber attack

Washington: Internet calling and messaging service Skype said that user data is safe after the Syrian Electronic Army momentarily took control of the company's Twitter feed and Facebook page.

The SEA, a group of hackers who support Syrian President Bashar Assad, launched a cyberattack Wednesday to protest against Skype owner Microsoft's cooperation with the National Security Agency's mass surveillance efforts.

"Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook), they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments. More details soon. #SEA," read a message posted on Skype's official Twitter feed.

Though Skype quickly regained control of its accounts on social networks and its blog, the hackers had time to send several messages.

Documents leaked last year by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden said that Skype was part of the NSA programme to track communications through the biggest internet companies in the US.

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Pioneering Indian astronomer welcomes India's telescope quest

Panaji: An expat Indian astronomer in Texas, who was one of the first humans to glimpse the Universe's most distant galaxy, is hopeful about the future of science in India and about India pitching in to build the world's largest telescope.

"I am optimistic about the future of science and education in India," Goa-born Vithal Tilvi told in an e-mail interview, adding that investing in these spheres always reaped prosperity.

A post-doctoral research associate at Texas A&M University, Tilvi also lauded the Indian government's initiative to invest, along with Canada, Japan, China and the US, in large facilities like the world's largest optical and infra-red telescope that spans 30 metres.

Tilvi was part of a team headed by noted astronomer Steven Finkelstein which sighted the new galaxy z8_GND_5296. They caught sight of it in infra-red light, after its light bounced off the orbiting Hubble Space telescope and a Hawaiian observatory after travelling 13.1 billion years.

The implications of this discovery are huge, says the astronomer, who hails from Betki, a pastoral Goan village 30 km from here.
"Apart from making a world record as the most-distant galaxy in the universe humankind has ever seen, such galaxies give us a glimpse of the universe when it was young. Because light takes some finite amount of time to travel, we are seeing this galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago," Tilvi said.

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