Hong Kong boat crash off Lamma Island kills 36

One of the boats was carrying more than 120 people to a fireworks display when it half-sank following Monday night's collision near Lamma Island. Twenty-eight people were pronounced dead at the scene. About 100 others have been taken to hospital, eight of whom were later said to have died.A large-scale air and sea search for survivors is still continuing.

A Hong Kong government statement said: "Over 100 people were sent to five hospitals during the incident; nine of them have sustained serious injuries or are in critical condition."

Rescue work would continue, the statement added, because the fire department could not rule out that there were still people inside the vessel or missing.

The collision occurred during a busy period for passenger travel in Hong Kong, at the end of a long holiday weekend to mark the mid-autumn festival that this year coincides with China's National Day on 1 October. Power company Hong Kong Electric has confirmed to the BBC that it owned the boat which sank. It was taking staff and family members to watch National Day fireworks in Victoria Harbour.

The vessel and another boat - reportedly operated by Hong Kong and Kowloon Ferry - collided, causing the HK Electric vessel to list, a company official was quoted as saying. The other boat reportedly had about 100 people on board. It was slightly damaged in the crash but returned safely to port, according to Radio Television Hong Kong. A number of passengers on board were treated for minor injuries.

Fish size may shrink by 24% as oceans get warmer

Global warming may shrink fish species in size by up to 24%, with the largest decreases in the Indian and Atlantic oceans, scientists have warned. Researchers from the University of British Columbia modelled the impact of rising temperatures on more than 600 species between 2001 and 2050. The scientists argued that failure to control greenhouse gas emissions will have a greater impact on marine ecosystems than previously thought.

Warmer waters could decrease ocean oxygen levels and significantly reduce fish body weight. Previous research has suggested that changing ocean temperatures would impact both the distribution and the reproductive abilities of many species of fish. This new work suggests that  fish size would also be heavily impacted.

The researchers built a model to see how fish would react to lower levels of oxygen in the water.

iPhone 5 camera complaints flood Apple

Users of the new Apple iPhone5 have bombard the US tech giant with complaints over a flaw in the phone camera that gives images a 'purple haze'.
Users are reporting that images taken on the camera are ringed with a 'purple haze' on any image containing a bright light.

The issue adds to a number of criticisms with the new phone, including light 'bleeding' from the edge of the screen, some phones rattling due to loose internal components, and the removal of Google Maps in favour of Apple's seemingly unfinished in-house Map app.

According to the Daily Mail, some users hope this is a software bug that can be fixed with an update.
 But some blame the sapphire crystal lens, in which case a fix would be unlikely without a product recall.According to the report, some users have taken images of the same location with the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 to highlight the drop in image quality.

Suzuki Motorcycle sales up nearly 32%.

Two-wheeler maker Suzuki Motorcycle India today reported 31.53 per cent increase in its sales at 38,267 units in September.

The company had sold 29,094 units in the same month last year, Suzuki Motorcycle India Pvt Ltd (SMIPL) said in a statement.

Commenting on the sales growth, SMIPL Vice-President (Sales and Marketing) Atul Gupta said: "We have received a good response from the market for all our products. The growing customer satisfaction has led to positive word-of- mouth in the market."

Protein can kick-start male fertility.

The team from Cardiff University's School of Medicine first found that sperm transfers a vital protein, known as PLC-zeta (PLCz), to the egg upon fertilisation. Then it initiates a process called 'egg activation,' which switches on all the biological processes necessary for development of an embryo.

The team has found that eggs that don't fertilise because of a defective PLCz, as in some forms of male infertility, can be treated with the active protein to produce egg activation. The added PLCz kick-starts the fertilisation process and significantly improves the chance of a successful pregnancy.

"We know that some men are infertile because their sperm fail to activate eggs. Even though their sperm fuses with the egg, nothing happens," said Tony Lai, professor at Cardiff, who with professor Karl Swann, led the team at Cardiff University's Institute of Molecular and Experimental Medicine and funded by the Wellcome Trust, according to a Cardiff statement.

"These sperm may lack a proper functioning version of PLCz, which is essential to trigger the next stage in becoming pregnant," Lai added. "What's important from our research is that we have used human sperm PLCz to obtain the positive results that we had previously observed only in experiments with mice," Lai said.

"In the lab we have been able to prepare human PLCz protein that is active. If this protein is inactive or missing from sperm, it fails to trigger the process necessary for egg activation the next crucial stage of   embryo development," Lai said.

Floods, landslides displace 1 million in India; 33 dead

At least 21 people were killed in landslides and another eight were missing in the mountainous state of Sikkim, said state government spokesman A.S. Tobgay.In Assam, still recovering from deadly floods that hit the tea-growing state in July, eight people were killed and 20 were missing.

Floods displaced nearly one million in that state alone, and many were now sheltering in camps or beside roads, which tend to be built above the land they pass through, a senior official in Assam's disaster management authority said.Four people were buried and killed in mudslides in the state of Arunachal Pradesh.

The military and federal disaster response teams have launched operations to move people to higher ground by helicopter or in rubber boats. Nearly 100 shelters have been opened to accommodate the displaced.In July, at least 110 people were killed and more than 400,000 people were left homeless in Assam during floods which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said were among the worst in recent times.

Over the past 60 years, successive governments have built levees along most of the Brahmaputra, which is Assam's main river and is fed by Himalayan snow melt and some of the world's heaviest rainfall.But experts say the embankments are not only poorly maintained but are a discredited form of flood management.Floods have inundated three national parks in Assam including Kaziranga National Park, where two-thirds of the world's Great One-horned Rhinoceroses live. Some animals have been forced out of the park to nearby hills.

Five Indian Americans among Forbes 400 richest

Five Indian-Americans figure in the Forbes magazine's annual list of the richest people in America with Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates  retaining his top spot with $66 billion, up $7 billion from 2011.

He is followed by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett (No. 2) with $46 billion, also up $7 billion from last year, and Oracle Corp's Larry eEllison (No. 3) with $41 billion, up $8 billion - and the biggest dollar gainer this year. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been pushed down in the rankings to the no. 36 spot with his estimated net worth falling by about $8 billion to $9.4 billion since Facebook went public in May.

The Indian-Americans' list is topped by Bharat Desai and family with a net worth of $2 billion in the 239th place. Kenya-born Bharat Desai started as a programmer for Tata Consultancy Services, only to leave the company four years later to start Syntel with his wife. Next comes Romesh T Wadhwani (No. 250), founder and chairman, Symphony Technology Group, with a net worth of $1.9 billion. Landing in the US with only a few dollars in his pocket, he developed business software firm Aspect Development. Today his portfolio includes more than 10 different enterprise software companies.

Third on the Indian-American list is Kavitark Ram Shrirm (No. 298), managing partner, Sherpalo Ventures, with a net worth of $1.6 billion. He was one of the first people to write a check to Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998. Next comes Indian-born Manj Bhargava (No. 311) with a net worth of $1.5 billion. His two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir, 5-Hour Energy, promises to keep users alert without crashing -- and claims a 90 per cent-plus market share in the energy shot sector

Last on the Indian-American list is Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla  (No. 328) with a net worth of $1.4 billion. With a firm belief that the future lies in developing cleaner energy sources, the Khosla Ventures founder was a big backer of biofuel producers Kior and Gevo, both of which went public in 2011, according to Forbes.