Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide expressed hope Friday, Japan time, that he will be able to view his country from the main laboratory component of the International Space Station module "Kibo," which he is scheduled to install in May or June.

Hoshide, 39, made the remarks at a press conference transmitted via satellite from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration`s Johnson Space Center in the United States.

Google has yet to bring its U.S. success to China--only about one in five Chinese Web searches starts at the site. But lately, Google seems to have gained popularity with at least one group of Chinese Web users: some of the country's most successful cybercriminals.

Over the past several weeks, researchers have tracked a hacker exploit that's infected more than half a million pages around the Web, invisibly redirecting visitors to those pages to servers that install malicious software on their PCs. The cybercriminals' exploit uses an increasingly common method to decide which pages to infect: Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) searches that probe sites en masse for hackable weak points.

According to those who have followed the attack at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, a cybersecurity crisis response organization, the infection tool is partially written in Chinese characters and compiled on a computer with Chinese language settings.

Macolytes around the world were buzzing recently with news that an online hardware vendor called Psystar.com is selling a $555 PC called the "Open Computer" that runs the Macintosh OS X Leopard operating system. You can buy the machine with Windows or Leopard installed - or buy it for $400 with the open-source Linux operating system.

For Mac lovers accustomed to paying the Apple premium, this would be a major break - at the very least, a cheap source for the extra computer they can't afford at Apple's regular prices.

If you're a Windows PC user who wants to try the Mac operating system without much risk, this could be a good deal. If Leopard fails to impress, you can replace it with stuffy old Microsoft Windows for $150 or so.

High street chains will be the next victims of cyber terrorism, some of the world's elite hackers have warned. They claim it is only a "matter of time" before the likes of Tesco and Marks & Spencer are targeted.

Criminals could use the kind of tactics which crippled Estonia's government and some firms last year, they warned. The experts were members of the infamous "Hackers Panel" which convened in London this week at the InfoSecurity Europe conference. The panel includes penetration testers and so-called "white hat" hackers, who help companies tighten up their digital security by searching for flaws in their defences.

Previous panellists include Gary McKinnon, known as Solo, alleged by the US government to have hacked into dozens of US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense computers. The "hackers" usually remain anonymous, "for security reasons", but this year's panellists agreed to break cover.

Teaching robots to understand enough about the real world to allow them act independently has proved to be much more difficult than first thought. The team behind the iCub robot believes it, like children, will learn best from its own experiences.

The technologies developed on the iCub platform – such as grasping, locomotion, interaction, and even language-action association – are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics. The EU-funded RobotCub project, which designed the iCub, will send one each to six European research labs. Each of the labs proposed winning projects to help train the robots to learn about their surroundings – just as a child would.

Astronomers are looking to identify Earth-like watery worlds circling distant stars from a glint of light seen through an optical space telescope and a mathematical method developed by researchers at Penn State and the University of Hawaii. "We are looking for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of their star, a band not too hot nor too cold for life to exist," says Darren M. Williams, associate professor of physics and astronomy, Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. "We also want to know if there is water on these planets."

A new test capable of simultaneously detecting 15 respiratory viruses may allow for quicker diagnosis and treatment of potentially deadly respiratory infections in children and adults worldwide.

Acute respiratory infections (RTIs) are responsible for high rates of morbidity and mortality throughout the world, however the cause remains inconclusive in over half of all reported cases. Respiratory viruses are believed to be among the pathogens contributing to a significant number of undiagnosed infections, but clinical presentation of patients with RTIs are generally not pathogen specific. While cell culture is still considered the "gold standard" for laboratory detection of respiratory viruses, slow response time and low sensitivity are suboptimal for routine detection practices.

he tiny mountain pine beetle has transformed British Columbia's vast pine forests into a major source of greenhouse gases, federal scientists say. By the time the unprecedented infestation ends, the rice-sized beetles will have killed so many trees an extra billion tonnes of carbon dioxide will be wafting through the atmosphere, researchers from the Canadian Forest Service report in the journal Nature on Thursday. That is five times the annual emissions from all the cars, trucks, trains and planes in Canada, says lead author Werner Kurz, who warns the beetle's impact goes far beyond the B.C. border.

Forests, along with oceans and grasslands, are critical sinks that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is one of major heat-trapping gas linked to climate change.

When Internet providers hire third-party companies to serve up advertisements on unused Web pages, that creative attempt to make money can open major security vulnerabilities they can't control, a researcher has found. One such vulnerability — described last weekend at a security conference by Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for Seattle-based computer security consultant IOActive Inc. — works like this: Say you mistype the name of a website into your browser. Instead of getting an error message, you get a wall of advertisements whose profits flow back to your Internet provider. A hacker who breaks into the computer system of the company hired to display those ads can cause all kinds of mayhem, injecting code onto the pages you see or altering the pages to trick you into coughing up sensitive personal information.

Fuelled by anti-Western nationalism, patriotic Chinese hackers have come to the defence of the motherland in response criticism of Beijing's handling of recent pro-independence riots by ethnic Tibetans. The hackers are believed to be behind recent attacks on several US websites and a Chinese website run by the French supermarket chain Carrefour.

Scott Henderson, a former US Army intelligence analyst who wrote a book about Chinese hackers called The Dark Visitor, has been tracking developments on his blog and says that what's happened over the past week may be the opening salvo in new cyber war. The hackers, he says, are working independently from the government but with its tacit support. "Once they [the hackers] get started, it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle," he said in a telephone interview. "It does seem to be escalating and it's feeding on itself."