US space agency Nasa is seeking coders who could help prevent a global catastrophe by identifying asteroids that may crash into Earth.

Its Asteroid Data Hunter contest will offer $35,000 (£21,000) to programmers who can identify asteroids captured by ground-based telescopes.

The winning solution must increase the detection rate and minimise the number of false positives.

Scientists are increasingly calling for help to make sense of vast data sets.

The new improved asteroid hunting code must also be able to ignore imperfections in the data and run on all computer systems.

"Protecting the planet from the threat of asteroid impact means first knowing where they are," said Jenn Gustetic, executive of the programme.

"By opening up the search for asteroids, we are harnessing the potential of innovators and makers and citizen scientists everywhere to solve this global challenge."

Current asteroid detection is only tracking one percent of the estimated objects that orbit the sun, according to asteroid mining firm Planetary Resources, which is partnering with Nasa in the contest.

Zooniverse is one of the leading online platforms for citizen scientists, working on a range of projects including classifying galaxies.

In February it racked up one million volunteers.

"Nasa takes these detailed pictures but there is a lot of noise out there from stars and other things and we need to write code that can find patterns in the data," said Zooniverse team member Robert Simpson.

"This is not necessarily Nasa’s area of expertise. It is a technology problem rather than a space problem."

He thinks that increasingly citizen scientists can contribute to important scientific discoveries and breakthroughs.

"Computers don’t have curiosity. People often find things in the data that computers can’t," he told the BBC.

"We are creating these huge data sets but we don’t have enough scientists to analyse them," he added.

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Second PU exam begins from March 12

Bangalore: Second PU exam will be commenced from March 12 in Karnataka and about 6,15,770 students will write exam this year.
 
The exams will be ended on March 26, 2014.
 
“Around 2,41,539 students from Arts, 2,05,002 students from Commerce and 1,73,829 students from Science will be appearing for the exams in this year,” said Narasimha Nayak, department of examination, joint director, Department of Pre-University Education.

Exams will be held in 984 centres across the state and the authority designated 3 and 4 members of special squad to look after the sensitive centres, he added.

Naxals attack CRPF convoy in Chhattisgarh, 20 jawans feared dead

Authorities searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have said a "yellow object" spotted off the coast of Vietnam was not a

At least 20 CRPF jawans were feared dead on Tuesday after Maoists attacked a search party near Jheerum Ghati in Chhattisgarh.

The CRPF has officially confirmed only one death.

However, the local sources have told The Indian Express that the causalities can be as high as 20.

It was an IED blast followed by firing.

According to reports, the attack took place at around 10.30 am. The firing is still on between the Maoists and the jawans.

The attack was not far from the spot where Congress convoy was attacked.

Intelligence reports said that the Maoists were camping around Dharbha ghati.

(More details awaited)

 no clue - the ’mystery’ of the Malaysia Airlines crash

lift raft from the missing plane.

Earlier the crew from a Vietnamese jet reported seeing a "possible life raft" floating in the sea around 250 miles off the country’s southern coast, but were unable to get close enough to describe it in any more detail, the Vietnamese transport minister said.

Search and rescue teams from Vietnam were dispatched to the area in helicopters, and a ship sent from Malaysia, to investigate the area around 90 miles southwest of Tho Chu Island.

But this morning the Vietnamese Civil Aviation Authority said one of its crews had "salvaged the object... identified as a moss-covered cap of cable reel".

Officials had earlier quashed previous rumours that objects from the plane had been found, and said they were struggling with an "unprecedented aviation mystery".

Family members comfort Chrisman Siregar (left) and his wife Herlina Panjaitan, the parents of Firman Siregar, one of the Indonesian citizens thought to have boarded the Malaysia Airlines jetliner

Members of Fo Guang Shan rescue team offer a special prayer for passengers aboard a missing plane, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia

Speaking at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur, the director-general of Malaysia’s own Civil Aviation body, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said samples of oil from a slick on the ocean were still being tested to see if had come from flight MH370.

"As far as we are concerned, we have to find the aircraft, we have to find a piece of the aircraft if possible," he said.

Earlier, Malaysia’s interior minister had suggested two passengers travelling on stolen European passports, had "Asian" features. Investigators said at the weekend that the passengers using those passports were the focus of their inquiry.

"I am still puzzled how come the immigration officers cannot think ’an Italian and Austrian but with Asian facial features’," Interior Minister Zahid Hamidi was quoted as saying by Bernama, Malaysia’s national news agency.

Asked about this on Monday, Mr Rahman said investigators were still assessing CCTV footage of the passengers checking in for the flight. "We have to get a report from the investigation team. They are doing the investigation," he said.He also said that five passengers who checked-in for the flight but who did not board, had had their luggage removed and checked. Nothing untoward was found.

More than two days after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing, the final minutes before its disappearance remain a mystery. The plane lost contact with ground controllers somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Malaysian military officials said on Sunday that the plane, a Boeing 777-200ER, may have turned back from its scheduled route shortly before vanishing from radar screens.

Mr Rahman said officials had set no time-frame for the search and referred to the search for Air France flight 447 which went missing in 2009 on route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 aboard.

It took investigators two years to locate the black box recorders and three years to piece together what happened. A report eventually blamed a combination of technical failure and pilot error.

"The experts have said this is a very big area for us to cover," Mr Rahman said of the area currently being searched. "We all have to work together to find this aircraft... It will take as long as it takes to find the aircraft."A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States have been deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane, the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, two-thirds were Chinese, while the rest were from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America. Five Indians were among the passengers.

The thefts of the two passports - one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy - were entered into Interpol’s database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said.

But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere checked the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents before the Malaysia Airlines plane took off.

Meanwhile, Malaysia Airlines said it was working to provide relatives of those on board the flight visas and flights to enable them to travel to Kuala Lumpur, if they wished

"Malaysia Airlines’ primary focus at this point in time is to care for the families," it said in a statement. "This means providing them with timely information, travel facilities, accommodation, meals, medical and emotional support. The costs for these are all borne by Malaysia Airlines."

Missing Malaysia Airlines plane crashes into sea off S Vietnam: Chinese news agency

239 people onboard; Malaysia, Vietnam and China helping in search efforts