An Indian origin researcher at the University of Maryland's Institute of Advanced Computer Studies has unveiled software that may facilitate faster analysis and forecasting of terrorism.

V S Subrahmanian, a computer science professor who heads that project, calls the new programme the SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP).

He says that the new programme will allow analysts to query automatically learnt rules on terrorist organization
behaviour, forecast potential behaviour based on such rules, and, most importantly, to network with other
analysts examining the same subjects.

SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents) is a formal, logical-statistical reasoning framework that uses data about past behaviour of terror groups in order to learn rules about the probability of an organization,
community, or person taking certain actions in different situations.

In collaboration with computer scientists and political scientists, SOMA has generated tens of thousands of rules about the likely behaviour of each of about 30 groups, which include Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hezb-I-Islami.
“SOMA is a significant joint computer science and social science achievement that will facilitate learning about and forecasting terrorist group behaviour based on rigorous mathematical and computational models,” he said.

New drug to stop smoking

Pfizer has announced the launch of Champix (varenicline), a unique non-nicotine smoking cessation
prescription drug. Managing Director Kewal Handa said, ‘’Champix has been developed specially to act on reducing nicotine craving as well as the pleasure of smoking. Research shows that the odds of quitting smoking on Champix are twice that of buproprion and four times that of placebo.’’

All champix users can avail the ‘’Champs Club’’ support programme that together with the medication will help smokers, desiring to quit, to overcome their addiction. The 12-week Champix prescription course, with cost of around Rs 9,500 treatment per head, will be available across 17 cities in India, he said.

Pliosaurs, largest reptile

Scientists have claimed that a fossilised sea monster discovered on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science till date.

Nicknamed ‘The Monster’, the 150 million-year-old Jurassic-era leviathan was found on Spitspergen in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard by the Norwegian scientists nearly two years back.

Expedition team leader Jorn Hurum of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum said, “We have carried out a search of the literature, so we now know that we have the biggest (pliosaur). It’s not just arm-waving anymore.”
Pliosaurs were a short-necked form of plesiosaur, a group of extinct reptiles that lived in the world’s oceans during the age of the dinosaurs. A pliosaur’s body was tear drop-shaped with two sets of powerful flippers which it used to propel itself through the water.

Galaxy ablaze with stars

NASA's Swift satellite has captured images of a nearby galaxy 2.9 million light years from Earth, which is ablaze with star formation. Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) took the images of the galaxy known as the "Triangulum Galaxy" or "M33", through three separate ultraviolet filters from December 23, 2007 to
January 4, 2008.

"This is the most detailed ultraviolet image of an entire galaxy ever taken," said Stefan Immler of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

M33 is a member of our Local Group, the small cluster of galaxies that includes our Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Despite sharing our Milky Way's spiral shape, M33 has only about one-tenth the mass.

M33's visible disk is about 50,000 light-years across, half the diameter of our galaxy.

Viagra given thumbs down

Women have snubbed erection drug, Viagra, in an attempt to seek longer-lasting erections.

A recent study by New Zealand researchers revealed that an increasing number of women are not satisfied with the results of Viagra, and thus want their men to use anti-impotence medication that lasts longer.

For the study, the researchers road-tested two of the biggest-selling drugs on 100 couples affected by erectile dysfunction. They found women preferred Cialis, which can help men achieve erections during arousal for 36 hours, over Viagra which works for about four hours.

The couples tested each drug for three months, with 80 per cent of the females concluding they preferred the newer generation drug, tadalafil, branded as Cialis.