The farthest Galaxy of our universe...

Making it a breakthrough the astronomers, powered with NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature’s own natural “zoom lenses” in space, have discovered the most distant Galaxy ever seen in the Universe.

The galaxy appears as a diminutive blob that is only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. It offers a peek back into a time when the universe was 3 per cent of its present age of 13.7 billion years.

This galaxy named as MACS0647-JD, was observed 420 million years after the big bang, the theorized beginning of the universe. Its light has traveled 13.3 billion years to reach Earth. This finding is the latest from a program that uses natural zoom lenses to reveal distant Galaxies in the early Universe.

Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, light from MACS0647-JD took a detour along multiple paths around the massive Galaxy cluster. Without the cluster’s magnification powers, astronomers would not have seen this remote Galaxy. Because of gravitational lensing, The Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH) research team was able to observe three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with the Hubble telescope. The cluster’s gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear about eight, seven, and two times brighter than they otherwise would that enabled Astronomers to detect the galaxy more efficiently and with greater confidence. As per Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,“This cluster does what no man-made telescope can do. Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy,”

MACS0647-JD is so small it may be in the first steps of forming a larger galaxy. An analysis shows the galaxy is less than 600 light-years wide. Based on observations of somewhat closer galaxies, astronomers estimate that a typical galaxy of a similar age should be about 2,000 light-years wide. For comparison, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy companion to the Milky Way, is 14,000 light-years wide. Our Milky Way is 150,000 light-years across.

Matured Android now occupies 3 out of 4 smartphones in market

Ever since the inception of this revolutionary mobile platform, Android have always been on the peak of buyer's mind. Now after a few years, when Android has become a matured platform across the markets, the total market occupancy has increased even further making it almost 75%.

As per the latest report, almost three out of four of smart phones around the world are now running the Android mobile operating system. Here are the detailed analysis of this report.

According to IT market research firm Gartner, Google's mobile OS now has a 72.4% share of the market for mobile operating systems, a massive increase from the 52.5% it held a year ago. Samsung's wildly popular smartphones accounted for a big portion of that gain, with the South Korean tech giant shipping 55 million units, the majority of which run on Android.

According to the survey, Apple, whose devices run on its own proprietary iOS software, sold around 23.5 million phones over the same period, the third quarter of 2012. That was up from 17.3 million a year ago, but the rise was not enough to stop the market share of the Silicon Valley company's operating system slipping from 15% to 13.9%. The survey also said that the fall in Apple's market share could have been a result of users around the world waiting for the release of the iPhone 5 in their countries.

Though, with the recent launch of iPhone 5, Gartner analysts expect iOS share will grow strongly in the fourth quarter of 2012 because users held on to their replacements in many markets ahead of the iPhone 5 wider roll out.

Think before you do, you are being Googled!

Google, the search giant introduced its first transparency report in 2009 and since then the number of inquiries across the globe has risen by around 37 percent. Governments all around the world are increasingly using Google as a key surveillance tool.

According to Google :

Government surveillance is on the rise... Government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts.

Google surveillance is definitely a global issue, but even here the US government is in the forefront. Brazil, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom each generated more than 1,000 government-related requests for user data. India was more inquisitive, with 2,319 requests. The US issued almost as many requests as those countries put together: 7,969.

With the introduction of transparency, the charge is also on when it came to requesting the removal of content from Google, with a total of 273 removal requests, including a number of being court orders.

Before completely despairing of user privacy, it's worth putting these figures in context. Google claims to have more than 400 million Gmail users alone. If the total number of Google accounts is, say, half a billion, then your chances of being subject to a request for user data is still only 25,000 to one.

Of course, most of us lead lives of much less interest to government authorities. For enterprises, the concern should probably be less about spying, and more about negligence. If Google, Microsoft, or Amazon complies with an agency's request to hand over enterprise data, what becomes of it? Is it securely protected in the hands of law enforcement? Is it securely disposed of once the investigation is over? If it's obtained without a warrant, will you even know that your data is being examined?

These are just further questions for individuals and organizations to consider before committing sensitive and confidential information to what is, in effect, the cloud. The government across the globe might be having an eye on all you commit.