The European Space Agency said Thursday it had lost contact with Envisat, the biggest Earth-monitoring satellite in history.

Designed to operate for only five years, Envisat was launched in March 2002, carrying 10 instruments to monitor the planet's oceans, ice, land and atmosphere.

The world's largest solar energy facility, built with Austrian technology, has opened in Saudi Arabia and will provide Riyad's Princess Noura Bint Abdulrahman University with warm water.

The facility, built by Austrian firms GREENoneTEC and AEE Intec, consists of 36,000 square meters (387,500 square feet) of solar panels and cost 3.6 million euros ($4.7 million).

Apple on Thursday denied a charge that it schemed with publishers to hike prices for e-books, portraying itself as a hero for prying Amazon's "monopolistic grip" from the market.

"The DOJ's accusation of collusion against Apple is simple not true," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said in an emailed statement a day after a Department of Justice antitrust suit was filed.

Barnes & Noble Inc. said Thursday it is tackling one of the shortcomings of black-and-white e-readers with a screen that lights up so it can be read in the dark.

E-readers with black-and-white screens, made by Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Sony and others, are easily readable in bright light but don't come with their own light sources and can't be read in darkness. The ones with color screens, such as the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, do have their own light sources but are barely legible in sunlight.

China has closed 42 websites and deleted more than 210,000 posts since mid-March in a crackdown on online "rumors", state media said Thursday, as a major political scandal rocked the country.

The announcement on the official Xinhua news agency came as Chinese authorities ramped up efforts to control online speculation about the purge of a top leader whose wife is suspected in the murder of a British businessman.

Japanese high-tech firm Hitachi Wednesday unveiled an electric motor that does not use "rare earths", aiming to cut costs and reduce dependence on imports of the scarce minerals from China.

The prototype 11 kilowatt motor does not use magnets containing rare earths and is expected to go into commercial production in 2014, the company said.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. previewed its "Disc to Digital" service for converting DVDs into an online library on Wednesday. Based on my experience, I'd give it a six out of 10.

That's the number of discs I was able to convert from a completely unscientific sampling of my personal DVD library.

Poor Instagram users.

First, their beloved photo-sharing application moves from iPhone-only exclusivity to the Android phone masses. A week later, Facebook swallows up the tiny startup behind the app for $1 billion. The purchase sparked worries that Facebook might shutter Instagram or change it for the worse by harvesting their personal information or shoving ads into their carefully curated photo streams.

A week after announcing a painful round of job cuts, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson unveiled a plan Tuesday that will reorganize the company into three main divisions focused on users, advertisers and technology.

Thompson unveiled the plan at an "all hands" meeting for employees at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. It will take effect on May 1.

Microsoft is counting down the days until it is through with the Windows XP operating system for personal computers.

The U.S. software titan used a blog post to remind the world that in two years it will no longer support the generations-old operating system that people have clung to despite the releases of successors Vista and Windows 7.