Eye movement controls digital music player~~>> THE FUTURE IS HERE !!!

A researcher for Japanese mobile communication giant NTT docomo, wears electro-oculogram (EOG) sensors during a demonstration of the advanced technology in Tokyo. By moving his eyes, he is able to control a digital music player .

Dye coating harvests more sunlight ~~>watch out ~~>>

Magic dyes: The dyes can double the efficiency of solar cells used today.

A simple sheet of glass coated with dye could be enough to cut the costs of solar power. That’s the claim from researchers who have created a ‘solar concentrator’ that harvests photons and funnels them into photovoltaic devices.

The device allows relatively small solar cells to harness rays from a much larger area.

Mirrors that track the Sun are already used to deliver extra light onto solar panels and maximize their electricity output.

But these mirrors can be costly to deploy and maintain, and the solar cell is prone to overheating. In the 1970s, scientists tried to develop alternatives that used light-absorbing dyes.

The alternative

But the research stalled because many of the dyes were unstable in sunlight, or because the photons didn’t get very far through the plastic before being reabsorbed.

Researchers led by Marc Baldo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have now come up with an alternative that uses a mixture of dye molecules in a thin film coated onto glass.

Each dye absorbs light of a different wavelength to make the most of sunlight’s spectrum.

By fine-tuning the dye mixture and adding an extra compound controls the re-emission process, ensures that most of the photons get trapped inside the glass.

The team thinks they can boost the power efficiency of a cadmium telluride cell from 9.6 per cent to 11.9 per cent, and a CIGS cell (copper-indium-gallium-selenide) from 13.1 per cent to 14.5 percent. The research is published in the journal Science.

Baldo thinks that the efficiency can still be vastly improved. “We could ultimately double the efficiency of 90 percent of solar cells used today,” he predicts.

Solar cells are very sensitive to defects in the material, but that doesn’t apply for these thin films, says Baldo. That means it could help solar cells to produce electricity at a mere $1 per watt, which is essential if the solar industry is to be economically sustainable.

Lawrence Gasman, principal analyst at NanoMarkets of Glen Allen in Virginia, is impressed that Baldo’s system seems to be so easy to manufacture, and says that commercial interest in innovations such as these is blooming.

But dye-based systems still face stiff competition from conventional concentrators.

In May, IBM claimed to have used mirrors to concentrate 230 watts of the Sun’s power onto 1 square centimetre of solar cell. This is a much higher concentration than would be possible with Baldo’s dyes.

Educating more students, the modern way~~>>the right way to go further !!!

Videoconferencing increases the number of students who can be educated

Wide reach: Videoconferencing technology is available and can be cost-shared among multiple institutions.

A week ago, many of us at the L V Prasad Eye Institute took part in an exciting event — a live lecture by the world-renowned glaucoma expert from Johns Hopkins University, Professor Harry Quigley. A clinician-scientist with over three decades of experience, he is also an outstanding speaker.

This was a special event since it was live and interactive. He was at Baltimore in the U.S., talking to us at 8 AM his time and we were all listening to him here in India at our local time of 1830 hours. Plus, it was not just 170 of us at Hyderabad, but also colleagues at our GMRV campus at Vizag and the BEI campus at Bhubaneswar.

Altogether, Quigley lectured to over 250 people across the globe, spread in three cities quite apart from each other. He was occasionally interrupted by the audience for clarifications and questions. And at the end of the fifty-minute lecture, we had a twenty-minute question-answer session.

It was a specialized topic, namely, clinical aspects of the eye disease glaucoma in which he is an acknowledged authority.

Four major points

He distilled his talk around four major points.

One: chase the family. Glaucoma runs in families. Thus if an elderly member is brought to the clinic, check the accompanying family member too — even if he/she has no complaints. Precautionary steps could be started so as to prevent or take early steps. Glaucoma, the second major cause of blindness, is a ‘silent’, progressive killer of eyesight.

Second: Just do not assume that the eye pressure has to rise to 21 units. This is a myth. Intra-ocular pressure is a person-specific number, depending on several factors. It is thus important to check more details — the size of the ‘disc’, the ‘cup to disc’ ratio, corneal thickness so forth.

Third: Make sure that the patient complies with your advice and uses the drug regularly. Given that the glaucoma patient has to use drops and/or pills regularly, daily, chances of his/her getting ‘fatigued’ over this regimen are high. The doctor has to be after the patient to ensure compliance.

Fourth: Do not depend overly on the new, fancy equipment and technologies. They focus on one or two particular features or parameters. Depend more on your ‘gut feeling’. The latter comes out of the experience of having treated many patients, each an individual in his/her own right.

Cost involved

When I checked the cost involved in putting up this video-conferencing facility, with access to the four sites mentioned above, I was given the number of about two crore rupees at today’s price. Each one of us remembers a teacher or two from our school and college days, who were so good that they even changed the career we chose later.

It was my chemistry teacher at Pilani, Mr Raja Rao, who made the subject come so alive and exciting that I chose chemistry as my career.

How exciting it would be to recall many of these great teachers, request them to teach through this video-access mode on a live, interactive basis, to a large number of students!

The Quigley example

It is not just these. As the Quigley example shows, the best teachers from anywhere can be requested to teach in this mode. And if there is one thing that a good teacher loves, it is to teach and teach more — and just for the asking.

A good teacher gets as much “high” when he teaches, just as some of his more receptive students do. And they love to teach under graduates and high school students.

Long years of teaching and research make them better and better with time. Nobel Prize winners Linus Pauling of Chemistry, Richard Feynman of Physics and Salvador Luria of Biology, always wanted to teach undergraduates and did so until they reached heaven at ripe ages.

Our own Professor C.N.R. Rao loves to teach college and high school students, and they love it too.

India is set to open 8 more IITs and 16 more national universities. These are in addition to the expansion of existing ones, and about an equal number in the private sector. One major problem they face is the lack of teachers, and a dearth of good and inspiring ones at that.

The solution

What is the solution? Use technology: identify outstanding, experienced teachers who have retired from service because they turned 58/60/62 or 65, but are available and willing, and request them to teach in the video-conferencing mode.

Cost-shared

The technology is available, can be cost-shared among multiple institutions, each of which will have access to the facility. Each lecture can thus be heard by several hundred or even thousand students, who can interact with the teacher in real time, ask questions, clear doubts and benefit. As my primary school English teacher told us: Where there is a will, there is a way. And to the cell phone company’s question: “how many students can a teacher educate?” The answer is: Technology expands the limit.

China quake: topography can reveal tectonic activity~~>lets see ~~>>

Changes in river channel steepness were seen in the area where the quake had struck

Terrain Tales: The May 12 quake provides compelling evidence that landscapes can encode information about the rates and patterns of tectonic activity.

The May 12 earthquake that struck the Sichuan Province in China appears to indicate that topography, or more specifically, changes in landscape gradients can be used to reveal seismic hazards of a region. Geophysical methods have traditionally been used to study tectonic activity and earthquakes.

When two continental plates push against each other, as in the case of the Indian and Eurasian plates, the crust crumples, resulting in the formation of mountain ranges.

Sudden steepness

But even in such rugged mountainous regions, there can be places where the ranges suddenly become hundreds of metres steep. Tectonic geomorphology, as it is called, is based on the premise that such sudden change in gradients reflects the underlying tectonic activity.

This is particularly derived by studying the relief and elevation of bedrock-based river channel network.

Dr. Eric Kirby, in a paper published online in the Nature Geosciences journal, reported systematic changes in river channel steepness and topographic relief in the area where the quake had struck.

The anomalous steepness of the river-channel profile “coincides almost exactly with the surface trace of the Yingxiu-Beichuan fault” that ruptured on May 12, reports the paper.

Dr. Kirby is from the Department of Geosciences, Penn State University, Pennsylvania, U.S., and is the first author of the paper.

The May 12 quake provides the “most compelling evidence to date that the landscape itself encodes information about the rates and patterns of tectonic activity,” the paper states.

First observed in 2003

The sudden change in topography in the Sichuan Basin was seen by Dr. Kirby and others way back in 2003. Their findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, in 2003 noted that the Yingziu-Beichuan fault was more active than the surrounding faults.

Despite reservations by those relying on traditional methods in interpreting topography to understand tectonics, the researchers insist that the May 12 event “makes clear that landscape analysis can help with initial identification of active structure.”

Global positioning system (GPS) is one of the tools used for understanding the rate at which two plates move towards each other.

But the precision of GPS is highly dependent on the nature of the measurement and the length of time that an instrument occupies a position.

Campaign mode

Though the Sichuan Province has more than 20 GPS stations that were installed in the early 1990s, the measurements were not taken continuously.

“Measurements were all conducted on a campaign mode,” Dr. Kirby noted in his email communication to this Correspondent. In a campaign mode, a marker is installed in the ground, and is measured by GPS for 24-72 hours to obtain a precise position. It is then remeasured several years later, to see how that position has changed.

Dr. Kirby notes that measurements were taken 3-4 times after they were installed in the 1990s. “As far as I am aware, there are no continuous stations in this region,” he pointed out.

The GPS had recorded that the plate convergence was occurring at a slow rate of 2 mm per year. When the lateral movement of the plates is small, the vertical motion of the crust is even smaller.

Though GPS can detect both lateral and vertical movement, it becomes challenging to detect very small movements, particularly the vertical component.

Uncertainties magnified

“It is simply difficult [for the GPS] to detect rates of vertical motion of the crust that are less than 1 mm/year,” noted Dr Kirby. And when done on a campaign mode the uncertainties become larger, and the vertical uncertainties are in the order of many centimetres.

And because GPS is not able to resolve differential vertical motions of the crust (because of large uncertainties), the geomorphic analysis provides a clue to where this is happening.

Unlike GPS that provides very precise estimates of the position at a single point where the GPS station is located, digital elevation models provide an estimate of the topography across an entire region. And this helps in identifying the seismic hazard areas.

PFBR: main vessel to be installed soon

The main vessel of the 500 MW Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor that is being constructed at Kalpakkam will be installed anytime during the second half of September, according to Dr. Baldev Raj, Director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR).

The main vessel will house some of the main components of the reactor, like the grid plate (on which the subassemblies containing the fuel will be placed), core support structure, and the primary pipes that will bring the coolant to the grid plate.

Fast breeder reactors have three vessels — the innermost is the inner vessel where the sodium coolant is present, followed by the main vessel and finally the safety vessel. The safety vessel is the outermost vessel. The safety vessel is to contain the sodium coolant in case of any leak in the main vessel.

The main vessel is about 13 metres in diameter, 13 metres in height and about 25 mm in thickness. The small thickness is sufficient because it has to only bear the weight of the coolant (1150 tonnes) and other structures (about 700 tonnes). Also, the pressure inside the main vessel will be low.

This is because the fast breeder reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant. Sodium becomes liquid at about 100 degree C, and being a metal, the heat transfer property is very good.

Robots for checking

The PFBR reactor is designed to have a gap of 30 cm between the main vessel and safety vessel. “This gap is required for checking the health of the main and safety vessels,” said Dr. Raj.

Highly mechanised robots will be used to check the vessels for any signs of a crack in the vessels through which the sodium can leak. The robots will not be a permanent part of the reactor but will be lowered as and when required. “These must be one of the high tech robots developed in the country,” he said.

Scientists to explore Russia’s Lake Baikal

Russian scientists recently outlined plans for a submarine expedition this month that will for the first time probe the depths of Lake Baikal, a unique ecosystem and the deepest lake in the world.

The expedition is being organised by Artur Chilingarov, a pro-Kremlin member of parliament and an Arctic explorer who led the team of scientists that planted a flag at the bottom of the North Pole in August last year.

“It’s technically very complex,” Chilingarov told reporters in Moscow, explaining that the bottom of Lake Baikal at 1,600 metres (5,249 feet) has never been explored, with previous missions only going down hundreds of metres.

Scientists will collect samples at different depths and hope to document the effects of global warming on the lake, as well as drawing the attention of the Russian government to the need for greater environmental protection.

The mission to Lake Baikal — a UN World Heritage site — will begin on July 29 and will carry out dozens of dives by the Mir-1 and Mir-2 mini-submarines. The mission is being funded by environmental organisations.

Lake Baikal contains around a fifth of the world’s freshwater reserves.

Extraordinary finding of fossilised animals

Extraordinary finding of fossilised animals

Fossilized jaw of a crocodile is displayed at the Smithsonian Research Institute in Panama City. More than 500 fossils of various animals that lived before a land bridge linked North and South America were uncovered recently.

Videogames are now more sophisticated~~>>wath out~~>>

Videogames are getting smarter and more sophisticated. Now virtual enemies improvise during battles, storylines shift based on moral choices and in-game characters send players text messages for help.

Preserving mangroves for fisheries’ health~~~>>it`s a FACT !!

A new study on the Gulf of California concludes that coastal mangroves are essential for the survival of juvenile aquatic organisms. The health of fisheries and the economic well-being of fishermen depend on this.

Train speed >> still guessing ~~~>read this ~~>>

Why are we unable to guess the speed of a train when we stand on the track facing the oncoming train?

When we see a moving train side ways, we guess its speed by the swiftness with which our eyes move along the object by tagging our sight to a point of reference (mostly the engine).

If we see the moving train not necessarily fully sideways but at an angle (say, while approaching), still we can guess its speed by the change in its depth from us because of the binocular vision we have which manifests more effectively at closer distances than at longer distances.

To summarize, we can guess the relative speed of an object by the quickness of change in its position on an ‘apparently’ rigid frame of reference (in the case of a train, it is the distant natural backdrop).

The problem comes when we are directly facing the oncoming train in the line of sight. The initial and final positions of the engine (object) are on the same line of sight.

There is no need for the lateral movement of our eyes. Further, the train might be too farther from us to provide us the binocular vision of the changing depth of engine’s position. In the absence of a need to move our eyes sideways because of the lack of changing positional parameter of the engine over a frame of reference lateral to us and due to poor possibility for the binocular estimation of the positional depth of the engine from us, we are unable to evaluate the speed of the on coming train when we face it in its line of motion.

Managing root wilt in betelvine >> see it ~~>

In India betelvine is grown in an area of 40,000 hectares, of which Tamil Nadu occupies about 6,000 hectares. The annual revenue earned from the crop is estimated to be around Rs. 700 crores. Betelvine leaves are exported to United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt, Pakistan, Kenya and Bangladesh.

In India annual betelvine leaf production is estimated to be around 25,314 million leaves, of which Tamil Nadu's production is around 11,766 million leaves.

Number of diseases The crop is attacked by diseases such as root wilt, leaf rot, vine seedling wilt, bacterial leaf blight, alternaria, anthracnose, rust and powdery mildew.

Among these root wilt is a serious infestation which causes 30-100 per cent loss to the crop.

Occurrences of root wilt are found throughout the year and are severe during October to February. Varieties Karoora Vellaikodi and Pacchaikodi are most susceptible.

Symptoms

The leaves and shoots turn yellow, wither and finally dry. In newly disease affected plant vines, young shoots are infested first. Gradually, the disease spreads through older roots and ultimately reaches the foot or collar region of the plant. In a disease affected plant, the whole underground portion gets completely rotten.

Management

-Growing moderately resistant varieties of betelvine such as Sirugamani-1 (SGM-1).

- Selection of disease free seedling vines for planting. - Treating the seedlings by dipping them in Bordeaux mixture (0.25 per cent) + 0.5g streptocycline for 10 minutes. - Drenching the soil with 0.5 per cent Bordeaux mixture in the planted rows of vines.

-Applying biocontrol agents such as Trichoderma viride at 1 kg mixed in 100 kg of FYM + 10 kg neem cake once in three months per year to the vines.

- Spraying with 0.25 per cent Bordeaux mixture at 15 days interval at four times to check leaf rot.

-Avoid over usage of groundnut cake in the vine garden and remove all the infested leaves fallen on the ground. This practice should be continued because these leaves act as a source of disease spread.

Earthen pot offers a bounty of benefits for Kanyakumari ryots

The timing is very important for spraying this formulation

Easy practice: Women farmers being trained to manufacture the mud pot nutrient in Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu.

The farmers of Kozhikodupothai in Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu, have a traditional knowledge base regarding bio-pest repellent formations and also plant growth promotion formulations.

One such traditional formulation called Manpannai sedi thailam in Tamil (Mud pot formulation) combines the effects of both fostering nutritional growth as well as being a pest repellent.

Field experiments

Initially the formulation was experimented with in a small area owned by a rose cultivator Ms. S. Thangam, and was found to completely obviate the need for chemical fertilizers. In addition, Panchagavya was also used for her rose plants.

“The mud pot formulation on my rose plants had a good effect on the size, yield and growth of flowers. In fact all the flowers had a deep colour and a longer shelf life. The flowers after plucking remained fresh for 2-3 days when kept at room temperature,” said Ms. Thangam.

Natural farming

In fact she was featured in a video at London for the Ashden Award presentations that showcased Vivekananda Kendra-Natural Resources Development Project (VK-Nardep)’s efforts at increasing food production through natural farming practices.

Ms. Thangam’s adoption of this innovation encouraged other farmers to try it. Though initially reluctant to stop using chemical fertilizers, they experimented on a small scale first.

The economic benefits that each farmer incurred created a cascading effect. For example, two years ago, Ms. Thangam was spending about Rs.3,500 for an acre of rose cultivation. At present her expenditure for an acre has come down to Rs. 1,300.

Decreasing expense

“Using this mud pot formulation and following organic practices has greatly decreased the expenditure I was regularly incurring when using chemical fertilizers,” she said.

Who was responsible for developing this mud pot plant nutrient?

Mr. Aravindan, social scientist, of the kendra said, “an eminent organic farmer and retired agricultural officer, S. Murugan, is responsible for developing this formulation. He had developed a local plant formulation method with a traditional technique practised in Madya Pradesh.”

“Once this formulation was tested successfully in Ms. Thangam’s rose field, we decided to give training to more farmers in making this formulation, which has almost been forgotten.”

According to Mr. Aravindan, about 100 gms of Vitex, Neem and Calotropis leaves each, 50 gm of powdered pulses (any pulse), one litre of curd or thick butter milk, and 1.5 litres of water are the basic items required for making this formulation.

The leaves are first ground into a fine paste. The paste is then mixed with the powdered pulses (any pulse).

This mixture is then added to one litre of curd. To this is added 1.5 litres of water. The mixture is kept in a mud pot and the mouth covered with a cloth.

The mixture is stirred every day in a clockwise and anticlockwise direction. After 15-20 days the formulation is ready for use. The formulation is diluted in 20 litres of water and sprayed in one acre of crop. The spraying is done on the foliage. The timing is very important for spraying this formulation. The best time is just before dawn and after dusk.

Effective control

The spraying effectively controls several pests and serves as a growth promoter and nutrition provider for the plants.

“Organic inputs have multiple advantages. Apart from reducing input costs, they also keep the environment safe from toxicity.

If one compares a field where chemical fertilizers have been used to grow the crops and a field where organic inputs such as farmyard manure, vermicompost and panchagavya have been used, one can clearly see the presence of earthworms, millipedes and ants is more in an organic field,” Mr. Aravindan explained.

Useful organisms

“Our kendra conducted studies for the presence of earthworms and ants in different fields. We found that chemical inputs greatly disturbed the presence of these useful organisms and in several fields where chemical fertilizers were used these organisms were totally absent.

“Once some of the farmers started switching over to organic practices, we were able to observe the presence of these organisms again in the soil,” he said.

Readers can contact Mr. S. Aravindan, email. ngc_vknardep@sancharnet.in and vknardep@gmail.com, mobile: 9443748714, phone: 04652 246296 and 04652 -247126.

World’s first bird discovered >>>gr8 news !!

A group of scientists, including one of Indian ethnic origin, have discovered the ‘world’s first bird’ that lived 235 million years ago.

In the landmark study, published by the Paleontological Association, experts unveiled an extraordinary prehistoric lizard-like ‘flying’ reptile which lived 235 million years ago.

The scientific community believes that birds descended from reptiles 50 million years later making the kuehneosaurs the world’s first ‘bird’, The Mail online said.

The long-extinct species, which inhabited the warm late Triassic period from 235 to 200 million years ago, was first discovered in the UK inside an ancient cave system near Bristol, the report said. According to experts, the kuehneosaurs, which grew up to 2 feet long, used extensions of their ribs to form large gliding surfaces on the sides of their body.

Earlier this year, experts from Bristol University built life-size models of the two types of kuehneosaurs found in the UK — kuehneosuchus and kuehneosaurus.

“Surprisingly, we found that kuehneosuchus was aerodynamically very stable. Jumping from a tree, it could easily have crossed 9m (29ft) before landing on the ground,” said German palaeobiologist Koen Stein, who led the study.

Stein, who now works in the German Institute of Palaeontology at Bonn, conducted the research with Colin Palmer, Pamela Gill and Michael Benton from Bristol University’s Department of Earth Sciences, the report said.

Icebergs scouring Antarctic seabed

Cushion stars are seen in the shallows of South Cove, Antarctica. Shrinking sea ice is increasing the rate at which icebergs scour the Antarctic seabed. These scours crush animals and plants living up to 500 metres below the surface.

500-metre diameter synchrotron of JAEA

The world’s largest scale synchrotron is at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency Tokai Research and Development Center. It produces neutrons and neutrinos to be used for research materials and life science.

Touching teraflops — graphically ++>>really too advanced !!!!

The graphics arena is in a reprise of a classic contest

Terrific speed: The ATI Radeon HD4870 card takes graphics computing to the teraflop era

Some 45 years ago, the world’s second biggest car rentalcompany, Avis ( it was second to Hertz), launched a highly successful campaign build around the slogan. “We’re only no. 2. We try harder.” The public loved it — and helped narrow the gap.

The graphics and visual processing arena is seeing a reprise — albeit unstated — of that classic contest: The US Silicon Valley company nVidia has long been recognized as a leader in the business of graphics accelerators : the additional cards one slips under the hood of the personal computer if one wants to ‘play’ ( literally!) with visually rich and computationally demanding games.

ATI used to be the ‘other’ graphics card player — till it was acquired by mainstream PC processor maker AMD. The advantage is obvious: ATI’s graphic products can now be fuelled by processors from AMD’s considerable line of multi core PC chips, and can draw on AMD resources to create new graphics-intensive processors.

The result of the synergy was obvious last week when AMD showcased in Mumbai, two new graphics cards in the ATI Radeon catalogue that demonstrated performance at least three times better than ATIs best offerings till six months ago.

Ceiling broken

More significantly, the 4850 and the faster 4870, (both fuelled by the RV 770 processor) broke a virtual performance ceiling and booted graphical processors into the teraflop era.

The 4850 hit one teraflop with a core clock speed of 625 MHz. It consumed just 110 watts of power. The 4870 was rated to deliver 1.2 TFlops clocking 750 MHz and used 160 watts.

Interestingly both offerings came aggressively priced — at approximately Rs 12,000 and Rs 16,000, which was almost half of what competing cards in this category used to cost...till some of them revised their prices to compete.

AMD may not remain alone for long; indeed nVidia simultaneously launched its own new range of cards, the GTX 200 series consisting of the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 cards. The GTX280 has 240 processors, while the GTX260 comes with 192 of nVidia’s G 200 processors.

A comparison of specification shows that the new nVidia cards might work to faster processor clocks ( 1.24 GHz for the 260) than the AMD/Radeon offerings. However they are known to be using DDR 3 (Double Data Rate) RAM while Radeon claims to be the first graphical cards with the new DDR5 memory which is supposed to triple the memory bandwidth.

Fairly obvious

Interestingly nVidia has been explicit in saying what is becoming fairly obvious: these heavy weight entrants in the graphical lists are not merely tools for fun and games.

They have computing clout to say: we can give you New Age graphics, we can help you smoothly transition to the high definition video viewing; we can also crunch your numbers better, faster in your scientific and high performance computing (HPC) applications. Enter a new combo buzzword: GP-GPU or General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit.

It is highly unlikely that mainstream processor leaders like Intel will roll over and allow this invasion of its turf to happen unchallenged. It is already committed to integrating graphics into its CPU in the new series Larrabee.

Back in the present, graphics processors of the teraflop class shown by AMD can make mincemeat of compute-intensive tasks like rendering: generating an image from 2-D or 3-D models using computer programmes.

Typical computer-generated scenes could take up to 30 hours to render each from using the CPU of the computer. Such games typically ran at 25-30 frames per second, marginally faster than the speed of cinema (24 fps).

To achieve cinema-like realism in games seemed like a goal that was a decade away. But it seems that cards such as Radeon 4800 are going to make it happen today.

The obverse

The obverse of cinema-reality in games, is games-like interactivity in cinema. Not too far away is the day when the movie experience might include the ability to control the narrative, to choose from a selection of alternative plot lines.

We may no longer mock at such instances of creative confusion and might even demand the right to remake the director’s vision in any which way we please.

Teraflop graphics processors will facilitate such a blurring before the twin, but hitherto separate, worlds of cinema and gaming, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer for graphical processing, Raja Koduri told me.

One has to wait and watch to see which of the two industry embraces this technology earlier... unless of course even this distinction vanishes in a few years, in a new synergy of sight and sound that will make today’s movie experience as well as gaming consoles seem like crude street side peepshows.

lightning makes X-rays ==+> see for yourself !!

Unravelling: X-rays were used to understand how lightning travels

Martin Uman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, said, “Nobody understands how lightning makes X-rays.”

“Despite reaching temperatures five times hotter than the surface of the sun, the temperature of lightning is still thousands of times too cold to account for the X-rays observed,” he said.

That said, Uman “It’s obviously happening. And we have put limits on how it’s happening and where it’s happening.”

High energy radiation

The New Mexico Tech researchers detected high-energy radiation from natural lightning. The UF/FIT’s International Center for Lightning Research Laboratory, located on a military base in Clay County, triggers lightning using wire-trailing rockets fired into passing storm clouds.

In the 2002 paper, the UF/FIT researchers confirmed that X-rays are produced by the stepped leader in natural lightning. In the latest paper, they narrowed the production of X-rays to the beginning of each step of the step leader, based on data gathered from one natural lightning strike and one triggered strike, Uman said.

Same with X-rays

“We could see when the electric field arrived at the sequence of stations, and it was the same with the X-rays,” Uman said.

“We then went back and calculated what the source location was for the field and the X-ray.”

Dwyer said the research is one more step toward using X-rays to understand how lightning travels.

Uman said the current research will continue with more expensive, faster and more sensitive X-ray detectors.

Reef-building coral species threatened ++>>take kare of nature ^*^

Approximately one-third of the major reef-building coral species have been found to be vulnerable to extinction. There are also indications that the extinction risk of corals has increased over the past decade.

Rice: more silica in soil reduces arsenic uptake ++> interesting !!

Two proteins in rice are responsible for transporting arsenite from soil

Carcinogen: Arsenic present in the groundwater and in paddy fields irrigated by the groundwater causes skin cancer.

Scientists in Japan have cracked the reason why rice is particularly efficient in assimilating arsenic from paddy soils. The findings reported in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal have particular relevance to West Bengal and Bangladesh where arsenic poisoning is seen.

Arsenic is a carcinogen and is present in the groundwater. It is also taken up by rice plants grown in paddy fields irrigated by the groundwater.

Apart from explaining the reason for rice being highly efficient in assimilating arsenic, the scientists have also put out a possible way of preventing rice plants from taking up arsenic in the first place.

Affinity for arsenic

The paper states that “Arsenic concentrations in rice grains are often high enough to cause concern even in uncontaminated soils containing background levels of arsenic.” This is because rice has a particular affinity for and efficiency in arsenic assimilation compared with other cereal crops.

The scientists have found two plant proteins that primarily transport arsenite from the soil. Both transporter proteins are expressed in the roots.

While one protein (Lsi1) is the port of entry for arsenite from the soil to the roots, the other protein (Lsi2) controls the flow of arsenite from the roots to the stalk and grain.

The scientists, who used mutant paddy, found that when the Lsi1 transporter was knocked out, the arsenite in the shoots and roots were 71 per cent and 53 per cent lower respectively when compared to wild-type rice.

Similarly, when the Lsi2 transporter was knocked out, the arsenite in the shoots was 75 per cent lower compared with the wild-type rice.

Silica transporatation

Both the proteins that transport arsenite are primarily meant for transporting silica from the soil to the shoots via the roots. And the scientists found that in the presence of silica in the soil, uptake of arsenite by rice was reduced. “Since silicic acid and arsenite are transported by the same transporters, they have competition during uptake. When silica is rich, the uptake of arsenite will be decreased. We did not compare the preference,” noted Dr. Jian Feng Ma in an email communication to this Correspondent.

Dr. Ma is from the Research Institute for Bioresources, Okayama University, Japan, and is the lead author.

“We have not done soil experiment, but we did water culture. We found that when silica is present in the nutrient solution, the arsenite accumulation was significantly decreased,” she added.

After finding that silicic acid interferes with arsenite uptake, the authors suggest that “…ensuring sufficient silicon availability in soil is likely to suppress arsenite accumulation in rice.”

Silica is normally taken up by the roots in the form of silicic acid. It gets accumulated in the form of silicon in the leaf blades and sheaths.

Its accumulation in the husk of the grains helps protect the husk from diseases and excess transpiration.

Nanotech to replace shock treatment

Recent research in psychiatry using nanotechnology would revolutionise treatment in the field, said Dr. A. Shivathanu Pillai, Chief Controller (R&D), DRDO. Localised electric field

The present practice of painful electric shocks for treatment of the mentally challenged would be eliminated and would be replaced with specific localized electric and magnetic stimulation of the parts, using magnetic nano particles with minimal pain for the patients, Pillai said. Delivering the 3rd convocation of Karunya University, Pillai said Nano Bio medical sensors would play a major role in early detection of dreaded diseases like AIDS, as ‘immuno assays’ can be used for detecting antigens in blood samples by introduction of nanoshells attached to anti-bodies while sampling blood.

Nanotechnology offered a wide range of opportunities such as synthetic scaffolding and nanoceramic coatings for tissue repair and implants respectively, he said.

Evidence of water found on the moon ==>> now i can live on moon !!

Water has been discovered on the moon for the first time. The new study suggests the water came from the moon’s interior to the surface via volcanic eruptions over three billion years ago.

Producing bio-fuel from microscopic seaweed >> wonderful !!

A computer-generated image of seaweed ‘photobioreactors.’ These, if built, could reduce CO{-2} while producing more energy. Microscopic seaweed use up a lot of CO{-2} and are rich in lipids, which can be used to produce biofuel.

A large water source region on Mars imaged >> gr8 news !!

The High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the European Space Agency’s Mars Express has returned images of Echus Chasma. Echus Chasma is one of the largest water source regions on the Red Planet.

Remains of Woolly mammoths on display ==>> wow !!

The remains of two woolly mammoths are displayed in a refrigerated viewing box. The long extinct elephants in the Ice Age, found in Siberian permafrost, are kept at the Taiwan National Democracy Memorial Hall.

Light sources for next generation lithography ++hi fi !!

A breakthrough discovery may help aid the semiconductor industry’s quest to squeeze more information on chips to accelerate the performance of electronic devices.

So far, the semiconductor industry has been successful in its consistent efforts to reduce feature size on a chip.

In an effort to help create faster, better and cheaper light sources for chips, UC San Diego researchers are developing laser-produced light sources for next generation Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL).

Mark Tillack and his team found that employing a long pulse in a CO{-2} laser system used in an EUVL source could make the system significantly more efficient, simpler, and cheaper compared to that using a shorter pulse.

Their research findings were recently published in Applied Physics Letters. “CO{-2} lasers, which we use in our lab, have two advantages — they are inherently cheaper to build and operate, and they give better conversion efficiency from the laser to EUV light,” he said.

Less expensive

“Our discovery that long pulses work well enough means that the CO{-2} laser system can be built and operated more cheaply.”

Tillack pointed to possible future applications for EUVL, such as flash memory chips, which will become denser and denser. “Imagine in the future being able to make a 200 gigabyte flash disk memory stick cheaply,” he said.

A formula to grow organic paddy successfully ++ great news !!

Traditional varieties are resistant to drought and infestations

Low input big yield: Mr. Balaji Shankar of Srikazhi in his paddy field.

Organic farming is not something new to the farmers. Several types of organic farming are being practised all over the country. But, in recent years it has been getting a lot of attention from researchers, policy makers, scientists, and farmers.

Paddy farmers in the delta districts of Tamil Nadu predominantly use chemical fertilizers for cultivating their crops during the Kharif and Rabi seasons.

Several hardships

Of late, many of these farmers have been facing several hardships from unpredictable monsoon, decreasing or stagnant prices, ground water depletion, increasing labour and chemical fertilizer costs.

According to Mr. Balaji Shankar, an organic paddy farmer in Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu,in chemical farming, farmers increase fertilizer application hoping for a higher yield and profit.

They do not realize that by applying urea and potash, the soil becomes hard and loses its porous nature.

The same land requires more water for cultivation to make it loose and farmers dig deeper bore wells for getting water (deep borewells and urea increase soil and water salinity).

Reducing input costs

“What our farmers need to know is a success formula which reduces input cost and at the same time gives good yield,” he argues.

Outlining his paddy cultivation Mr. Balaji says, “I plant only Kharif (during Aug-Jan) and rice fallow gram. I do not plant Rabi. From April to August, the land is ploughed two times and Daincha is planted and used for in-situ ploughing,” he explains.

Only native varieties such as kitchidi samba or ponni (these are Tamil names) are cultivated.

These varieties are resistant to diseases and can withstand drought as well as floods and also give a good yield of 1,200 kg-1,400 kg per acre with very little inputs, he noted.

About 15kg of seeds are required for sowing in the nursery. The seedlings are transplanted early (when around 21 days-old instead of the traditional 30-40 days).

About two seedlings are planted in the main field at a spacing of 15x18 cm. (This reduces both seed and labour cost, while transplanting, according to Mr. Balaji.)

“Since I plant only Kharif, this allows me to plan my transplanting early before the monsoon.

Once traditional varieties are well established in the soil, even the worst flood cannot damage them. There may be some yield loss, but never a crop loss,” he says.

Manual weeding

After the seedlings stabilize, the field is allowed to dry (to facilitate tillering). Manual weeding is done once after 30 days of transplanting and whenever necessary. After harvest, the produce is not sold as paddy, but dried, stored, milled on a monthly basis and sold as raw rice to customers.

Organic paddy has higher out turn (60 per cent) and about 900 -1000 kg of raw rice is milled from an acre’s produce.

“I am selling my organic rice at Rs. 29 per kg, which gives me a gross revenue of Rs.29,000 per acre. My expenditure for an acre is: cultivation: Rs. 3,000, harvesting: Rs. 2,000, processing & despatch etc: Rs. 4,000.

This gives me a net income of Rs. 20,000 per acre. If a farmer has six acres, he can sell500 kg of raw rice per month, and get a monthly income of 10,000 per month,” he says.

Marketing

Other crops such as maize or sunflower are cultivated during the rabi season. The organic rice is sold though the several organic outlets in and around the districts, according to him.

Balaji Shankar can be reached at No 2/12 Tirupura Sundari Nagar, Then Pathi, Sirkali: 609 111, Nagapattinam District, Tamil Nadu, email: balaji@earth.org.in, Phone: 04364-271170.

Insitu mulching technique for rainfed orchards

More fruit yield in trees was noticed

To meet the growing demand for food, the scope for further addition to area under agriculture and horticulture are possible only through the exploitation of drylands under wasteland environment.

Wastelands are degraded and undulated lands. And they have low water holding capacity.

Rainfall in wasteland is generally low and highly erratic and largely vulnerable to runoff and seepage losses.

Rainwater harvesting

The innovative approaches on rainwater harvesting and management could enhance agricultural production potential in rainfed wastelands.

The challenges of rainfed wasteland management mainly lie in devising strategies to integrate the efficient harvesting, conservation and utilization of scarce rainwater resources.

Application of insitu mulch helps to retain the infiltrated rainwater near the rootzone and utilize it for the crop during dry spell.

Hence a comprehensive package on rainwater harvesting and insitu moisture conservation is essential for orchard crop grown under sloppy degraded lands.

Micro catchment

An experiment was conducted at Horticultural College and Research Institute, Periyakulam to evaluate the insitu mulching technique in combination with and without micro catchment in sloppy rain fed sapota plantation.

Two micro catchment areas in the shape of a semicircular bunding and trapezoidal bunding were tested by applying raw coirwaste (composed with plurotus fungi) at the rate of one bottle per tonne for 30 days.

The composed coconut coirwaste was applied at 100 kg per tree as insitu mulch below the soil surface with a thickness of 50 cm at 30 cm depth.

The experiment revealed that even during severe prolonged drought the adaptation of the insitu moisture conservation system recorded more fruit yield in trees in trapezoidal bunding than the semi circular (or) crescent bunding.

Australian scientists find invisible gold ===>> NOW I WILL BE RICH !!!

The total quantity of gold that is available for mining has increased with the latest discovery by Australian scientists. Scientists in Australia claim to have discovered for the first time traces of nanoparticles of gold, too tiny to see with the naked eye, in nature.

Until now, nanoparticles of gold too small to be seen with the naked eye have been created in laboratories.

Gold nanoparticles

But, now an Australian team, led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), found hard evidence that gold nanoparticles have finally been seen in the natural world.

“In the southern areas of the state, groundwater is very salty and acidic. "This water dissolves primary gold and re-deposits it as pure gold crystals on fracture surfaces and in open pore spaces.

Dark band

“On investigation of these crystals, there appeared to be a dark band across them. However high magnification imaging showed the band was in fact, a mass of gold nanoparticles and nanoplates.

“These are identical to those being manufactured in laboratories around the world for their unique properties,” lead scientist Dr Rob Hough said. Clays from the fracture surface were then analysed.

There was no gold visible, but analysis showed the clays contained up to 59 parts-per-million of gold.

The research team concluded that the nanoparticles of gold they had imaged represented the “invisible” gold in the clay, and that this nanosised gold was actually common in similar environments.

Effectively invisible

“The gold nanoparticles have not been identified earlier because they are transparent to electron beams and effectively invisible.

“However, they are probably a common form of gold in this type of natural environment worldwide, where saline water interacts with gold deposits.

"They also provide the first direct observation of the nanoscale mobility of gold during weathering,” Dr Hough said.

Trakr, the canine hero of 9/11, to be cloned ==>> GR8 NEWS !!

Trakr, a German shepherd, is the dog that sniffed out survivors from under the rubble of New York’s World Trade Center after the 2001 terror strikes. It is to be cloned, the California-based firm conducting the procedure said.

Prototype of a new walking assist device ===>> GR8 DEVICE !!

Prototype of Honda Motor Co.’s new walking assist device. The electric-powered device is designed for people whose leg muscles are weakened.

Clues to climate change from the ocean bottom =>CHECH THIS OUT ==>>

A box corer is lowered from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent in the Davis Strait. The box corer is a device that gathers mud and sediment from the bottom of the ocean floor. This will help in studying climate change.

Automatic insect removal bin == HAVE A LOOK =>

An insect removal bin developed by the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu promises to remove insects automatically from stored food grains.

The structure has four major parts namely outer container, inner perforated container, collection vessel and the lid.

Special container

The grains are held in the specially designed inner perforated container.

The space between inner and outer container provides good aeration for the insects.

Insects, while moving, enter the perforation to reach the aerated part and while doing so, slip off and fall into the collection vessel through a pitfall mechanism provided in the collection vessel.

In order to quickly collect the insects, as and when they emerge from grains, perforated (2 mm) rods are fixed in the inner container.

Observation period

Representative samples (generally 1 to 2 kg) can be taken out by random sampling procedure from the fumigated commodity, immediately after fumigation and stored in the bin and observed for a period of 40-50 days, as generally it takes around 40 days for majority of the stored product insects to complete the life cycle.

Collection unit

Any free living mobile forms of insects if present in the commodity can be trapped immediately and easily be observed in the collection unit.

If the insect is an internal feeder and if present in the commodity then, after 40 to 50 days, the adults, may emerge and then enter the perforation of the TNAU air bin and get trapped.

If there are no insects collected in the collection vessel after this period under normal storage condition, then it means that fumigation has been carried out properly and effectively.

Good practice

TNAU has successfully validated the fumigation done by export firms using the above technique.

This sort of self assessment will be a good practice for better insect management leading to better quality produce (insect free) both for domestic as well as export market.

Getting full mileage from small acreage through diversified farming == WOW !!

The farmer is able to get an income of rupees two lakhs a year

Space utilization: Mr. Sharma, of Samastipur district in Bihar in his vermicompost unit.

Indian agriculture may be undergoing a difficult phase today.

Shortage of fertilizers, absence of proper marketing facilities, difficulty in getting electricity connection for irrigation and the lackadaisical attitude of policy makers in some States in addressing the farmers’ problems have been identified as causes for an increased agrarian frustration.

Basic infrastructure

Especially in Bihar, where basic infrastructure such as good roads and continuous electricity supply are lacking even in some parts of the major towns, and the situation is even worse in rural areas, where life comes to a virtual stand still after 6 pm.

But despite all these problems, there are some farmers who are able to grow and market their crops successfully. These successful farmers serve as role models for others.

Annual income

For example, Mr. Bhagwan Prasad Sharma of Kalyan Gaura village in Samastipur district of North Bihar is not a big farmer.

He is growing different crops in his half hectare land and has been able to generate an annual income of Rs. 2 lakh from his land.

“Initially I was only into crop-based farming. But now I have adopted mixed cropping and diversified into growing cereals, vegetables, flowers, tuber crops as well as animal husbandry and dairying,” said Mr. Sharma.

According to Mr. Ramadhar, Chairman, Bihar Farmers Commission, Patna, farmers need to be made aware of the positive impact different cropping systems and animal husbandry can have on their income.

Especially in a country like India, there are several crops and animal species which are ideally suited for farm agriculture.

“There is a slow and steady trend among our farmers, who, instead of depending on food crop production alone, are now gradually shifting to mixed, integrated farming by growing several crops and integrating animal husbandry practices,” said Mr. Ramadhar.

This has been possible because the farmers are moving from mono-cropping and/or double cropping to mixed cropping and integrated farming, he explained.

Whenever a crop, especially monocrop (growing only one crop) fails, small and marginal farmers turn towards private money lenders (as bank loans are a far-fetched dream for many of them) for loans with a hope that they can get a good yield next time and clear their debts.

Reason for loss

“But failure to get a good yield a second or third time makes many desperate and creates suicidal tendencies in their minds. If one observes closely, it will become clear that farmers who have faced losses are the ones who had relied heavily on mono-cropping and have not taken up crop diversification and livestock based agriculture such as dairying, bee keeping, poultry rearing,” he elaborated.

Safe from debt

Organic methods of cultivation, doing multiple cropping and rearing poultry, cattle, goats and sheep definitely save a farmer from sinking into debt.

Not much expense

It is ideally suited for small farm holdings, as not much expenditure is involved and practically all the basic material required for making organic inputs such as vermicompost, vermiwash, and farmyard manure are available in the farm itself.

Mr. Sharma relies only on organic farming practices such as vermi-composting, vermi-wash and neem cakes for growing his crops.

“I have my own diesel pump and irrigate my crops as electricity is a major problem in our State.

Particularly, for small farm holdings, space utilization is very important. Unlike farmers who own big farms, those with small farms cannot afford to waste space. With a little thinking and innovation every inch of space can be used effectively to grow crops, explained Mr. Sharma.

Natural resources

Mr. P.N. Jha, Member of the Commission, said, “Our State is giving much priority to conserving natural resources. We are fully aware of the harmful effects of chemicals on soil fertility and are encouraging our farmers to use vermicompost and bio-pesticides to tackle low soil fertility.”

Readers can contact Mr. Bhagwan Prasad Sharma, Kalyan Gaura, Po- Dighara, Samastipur district, Bihar and Dr. P.N. Jha, Member, State Farmers Commission, Pant Bhawan, Bailey Road, Patna, Bihar, email: kisanayog@gmail.com, mobile no- 09431459559, Phone: 0612-2206169.

Performing art preceding plastic art == OH !! GR8

Favourite locations: Most paintings were drawn near resonant locations.

Professor Iegor Resnikoff of the University of Paris is an expert in acoustics. His specialization is the study of the acoustics of concert halls, auditoria and churches.

The latter are of particular interest because many of them have been planned with great care with respect to their acoustics.

Indeed, when you sit inside a centuries-old church and hear the organ playing, or the chorus singing, you are transported into a world of grand auditory joy.

Recall that in the days the churches were built, we had no microphones, amplifiers or even electricity. Yet the resonance of the building and the space within the prayer hall is so perfect that when you sit there and hear a composition by Bachthe experience is thrilling.

Professor Resnikoff has recently turned his attention to the acoustics of not just church halls, but the caves that Stone Age man lived in and used. He presented his results at a recent professional gathering of European and American acoustics experts. Writing about it, Ms. Jennifer Viegas says that he reports that when he visited prehistoric (12,000 years old) caves in some parts of France, he was struck by the paintings on the walls.

But he also wondered why these were drawn on certain locations in the cave and not others. Most pictures were placed in clusters around certain places, while elsewhere there were red lines — all drawn by the cave men (and not any latter day graffiti). Why?

Viegas quotes him as saying: “The first time I happened to be in a prehistoric cave, I tried the resonance in various parts of the cave, and quickly the question rose: Is there a relationship between resonance and locations of these paintings?”

Resonant locations

Puzzled, he did some sound checks, by humming and singing at various parts of the caves. He found that most paintings were drawn near resonant locations. The better the resonance at a location, the more the number of paintings on the wall around that area.

Where resonance was poor, as in narrow passageways, there were no paintings but just red lines. Did cavemen first check out zones within the caves for their sound quality, and then choose where to paint and where not, asks Ms. Viegas. If yes, it would suggest that rock painting was inspired by rock music (the pun is accidental).

Music came first and determined where the painting should be, so that there is maximal, synergistic effect. Performing art preceding plastic art in Paleolithic people?

That we are moved by musical resonances is well known. It does not just have to be listening to an oratorio in a church.

The simple act of listening to a well-tuned tanpura could be pleasing. And when we hear Smt. N. Rajam on the violin, accompanied by Ustad Zakir Husain on the tabla, playing Raga Gorakh Kalyan, we can go into a trance. Yet, we know little about the science of musical resonance, and the factors that govern it. Acoustical engineers are thus like architects — in part scientists and in part artists. The field itself is in part empirical and experimental. The word used in such context is heuristic.

Some of the best violins in the world were made by the 17th century Italian Antonio Stradivari. What made them the best is still an unsolved puzzle. The latest clue appears to the density of the wood chosen to make them. Could well be, since Indian musicians say that the best tanpuras are made in the Miraj-Sangli area of Maharashtra. The gourd or pumpkin shells used there appear to be of a special, unique, variety.

And Pandit Ravi Shankar admired Shri Nodu Mullick, who made some of the best sitars. Called the Stradivari of sitars, he seemed to have made no more than 36 of them, each a prized possession. The key appears to be the resonance generated by the materials used to make these instruments.

It does not have to be wood or plant products alone. Even hollow stones and bones, when chosen and worked upon, generate remarkable resonances.

The musical pillars of Meenakshi Temple at Madurai, or at Hampi bear testimony to this plasticity aspect of rock. Going way back to the Neanderthal age, the Croatian/Slovenian flute of 50,000 years ago was made of a hollowed out bone.

We seem to be able to make music out of any material available near by — the Jamaicans use tin cans, aluminium lids, leather, soda bottle tops and produce lilting music. Jennifer Viegas concludes her report of the Resnikoff study on cave paintings as: “It is possible that all of music could have resulted from an ingrained human memory of the acoustics of caves”.

But the more striking result of Resnikoff is that painting was inspired by music. What kind of music did the Stone People create, and what themes would it have evoked in their paintings — hunting? war? Grandeur of the animals around? The prehistoric caves of Adamgad and of Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh would be worth studying for their sound resonances, since they too have several paintings on their walls.

Are these paintings different in content and themes than those in France? Do the sounds here differ from there? This would be of interest to a musician with a flair for archaeology.

Music and painting

There are some contemporary examples of combining music and painting; these turn out to be no value. The duet of Bhimsen Joshi singing and M.F. Husain painting on the same stage was more of a gimmick.

Perhaps someone should study the interiors of the Tanjore and Rameswaram temples, and the sculptures around the musical pillars of Hampi and Madurai, and study what kinds of images (non-devotional of course) are found there, and what themes they have.

Colour of milk = DO U KNOW ?

What gives milk its white colour?

An emulsion is a dispersion of one liquid in another immiscible one (e.g. oil in water). Emulsions are used in all walks of life (e.g. paints, creams, syrups etc). Oil droplets are dispersed in water by fragmenting it in presence of a surface-active species such as surfactants or polymers. The diameter of the disperse phase varies from a few nanometre to several microns. Now, colloidal scientists claim that they have been working in nanoscales for several decades.

Milk is a natural emulsion where each fat globule is stabilized by a membrane of phospholipids and proteins. Milk contains 88 per cent water, 3.3 per cent protein (casein protein is the largest in milk that amounts 82 per cent), 3.3 per cent fat, 4.7 per cent carbohydrate and 0.7 per cent ash. The percentage of disperse phase in milk is very low compared with some of the industrial products, which contain up to 70 per cent of disperse phase.

The casein micelles, which are typically a hundred nanometre in diameter, contain aggregates of protein molecules and are bounded with the help of calcium phosphate. The white colour of milk is due to scattering of light from the fat globules and casein micelles. Skimmed milk appears slightly blue because casein micelles scatter the shorter wavelengths (blue compared to red).

DID U KNOW ==Flatfish fossils fill in evolutionary link

Amphistium species were early flatfishes The evolution was indeed gradual in nature

Hidden away in museums for more that 100 years, some recently rediscovered flatfish fossils have filled a puzzling gap in the story of evolution and answered a question that initially stumped even Charles Darwin.

Asymmetrical skulls

All adult flatfishes have asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes located on one side of the head. Because these fish lay on their sides at the ocean bottom, this arrangement enhances their vision, with both eyes constantly in play, peering up into the water.

This remarkable arrangement arises during the youth of every flatfish, where the symmetrical larva undergoes a metamorphosis to produce an asymmetrical juvenile. One eye ‘migrates’ up and over the top of the head before coming to rest in the adult position on the opposite side of the skull.

Opponents of evolution, however, insisted that this curious anatomy could not have evolved gradually through natural selection because there would be no apparent evolutionary advantage to a fish with a slightly asymmetrical skull but which retained eyes on opposite sides of the head. No fish — fossil or living — had ever been discovered with such an intermediate condition.

But in the 10 July 2008 issue of Nature, Matt Friedman, graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago draws attention to several examples of such transitional forms that he uncovered in museum collections of underwater fossilized creatures from the Eocene epoch, about 50 million years ago.

A new genus

Friedman examined two primitive flatfishes, Amphistium and a new genus that he named Heteronectes.

Close examination of Amphistium fossils yield clues that they are indeed early flatfishes."

The most primitive flatfishes known, both Amphistium and Heteronectes have many characteristics that are no longer found in modern flatfish.

Partial displacement

But the one that caught Friedman’s attention was the partial displacement of one eye, evident even in the first Amphistium fossil discovered over two centuries ago, according to a University of Chicago press release.

“What we found was an intermediate stage between living flatfishes and the arrangement found in other fishes,” he said.

These two fossil fishes “indicate that the evolution of the profound cranial asymmetry of extant flatfishes was gradual in nature.”

Spray cooling in zero-gravity = WOW !!!

Seven students from the UW-Madison ZeroG team worked at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, designing and testing an experiment of their choice in varying gravity conditions. The results from the UW-Madison experiment show a particular spray cooling method is not dependent on gravity — a significant finding that means spray cooling could be used in airplane and other high-heat electronics.

Circuits on a computer chip have temperature-dependent performances — when chips get too hot, they slow down. Air-cooling methods, which use fans to blow air across the chips, are not ideal for supercomputers or large server banks. The team had developed a system that sprays dielectric liquid in a linear array directly onto the chips. The direct contact maximizes the amount of heat transferred from the chip to the liquid. Traditional methods direct the liquid upward, relying on gravity to drain the liquid away.

However, this won’t work in airplanes or spacecraft, which go through varying gravity conditions. To be reliable, spray cooling has to be not gravity dependent.

Linear spray array could be the answer, but testing was difficult. That is where Zero G came in. The team found that linear spray cooling is effective in both zero gravity and double gravity conditions.

uranium supply lowers capacity factor BUT=>

Supplies worldwide are adequate for energy needs for at least 100 years

Growing demand and higher prices have spurred greater investment in exploration

Twenty countries mine uranium now. Iran is the latest to enter the field

Currently, the mismatch between uranium supply and demand is lowering the capacity factors (CF) of Indian pressurized heavy water reactors. The average CF stabilized to about 60 per cent in mid 90s and steadily increased to nearly 90 per cent during 2003.

It was only 50.4 per cent in 2007-08. In June 2008, Tarapur 3 & 4, each operable at 540 MWe operated at about 247MWe. Hopefully, it is a temporary phase.

How is the supply position world-wide? ‘Uranium 2007: Resources, Production and Demand,’ the latest version of the so called ‘Red Book,’ the most authentic public publication on uranium jointly published by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development /Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD/NEA) assures that new discoveries and re-evaluations of known conventional uranium resources show that supplies will be adequate for nuclear energy needs for at least 100 years at present consumption level (IAEA release, June 3, 2008).

As expected, growing demand and higher prices have spurred greater investment in exploration and led to larger identified conventional uranium resources over the past two years (IAEA release, June 3, 2008).

The Red Book estimates the identified amount of conventional uranium resources which can be mined for less than US$130/kg to be about 5.5 million tonnes, up from the 4.7million tonnes reported in 2005.

Undiscovered resources

“Undiscovered resources, i.e. uranium deposits that can be expected to be found based on the geological characteristics of already discovered resources, have also risen to 10.5 million tones”, the report revealed. This indicates an increase of 0.5 million tonnes compared to the previous edition of the report (NEA release, June 3).

New nuclear power reactors in the pipe line in China, India, Korea, Japan and the Russian Federation will influence uranium demand; the phase-out programmes underway in several European countries are another factor.

According to the Redbook 2007, apart from new builds, the planned plant life extensions should increase global installed nuclear capacity in the coming decades. Uranium demand is bound to increase. (IAEA, June 3, 2008)

OECD/NEA noted that at the end of 2006, world uranium production (39,603 tonnes) provided about 60 per cent of world reactor requirements (66,500 tonnes) for the 435 commercial nuclear reactors in operation.

The secondary sources drawn from government and commercial inventories made up the gap between supply and demand.

Long lead time

“Given the long lead time typically required to bring new resources into production, uranium supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner”, the Red Book cautioned. (WNA, July 2008).

The uranium ore mined in India is of low grade (less than 0.1 per cent). The Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research (AMD) continues uranium exploration in virtually hundreds of locations in several states and drilling and geochemical surveys extensively at many sites including those in Meghalaya, A.P., Rajasthan and Karnataka.

In 2007-08, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) updated the uranium resources to1,07,268 tonnes of U3O8 (DAE Annual Report 2007-08). The Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL), which DAE set up in 1967, operates four mines (Jaduguda, Bhatin, Narwapahar and Turamdih) and plans to start a few more.

Installed capacities

The quantity of uranium ore produced and processed by Narwapahar mine and Jaduguda Plant respectively exceeded their installed capacities.

Commissioning of Banduhurang, the first open pit uranium mine in June 2007 is a milestone in UCIL’s endeavour to utilize low grade uranium ore in the country (DAE Annual Report, 2007-08).

New ultra small mobile Net device on the block =LG

The assumed barriers that separated mobile phone and PC are crumbling

The challenge: An ultra-mobile computer from LG (centre) and competing processors.

“Oh East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet!” ran Rudyard Kipling’s ballad about the insurmountable social barriers of his day. Much the same thing could be said of processor chip makers who fuelled the twin worlds of the mobile phone and the personal computer. They had their distinct, separate markets, one demanding very small size and long battery life; the other demanding high processing speed and number–crunching capability.

Shootout

A shootout is all set to take place that will decide who will be Last Man Standing on a cyber-Kurukshetra that is called the Ultra Small Mobile Internet Device.

Major computer processor makers like Intel and AMD, as well as cheeky upstarts like the Taiwan-based Via Technologies, now realize that customers want their PCs to be smaller, lighter, more portable, less power hungry. They also demand a richer computing-and-connecting experience; faster Web access; the ability to smoothly handle rich video and audio content.

The chip makers have responded in different ways. In what was seen as a canny move, AMD acquired the graphics processor company ATI. This will enable it eventually, to tightly integrate video and multimedia capability into its main processors and do away with the customer’s need to buy a separate graphics processing engine.

Intel, in recent months, has moved swiftly to shed its image as a provider of versatile but power hungry processors. With the launch this year of its Centrino ‘Atom’ chip, it has cut power requirements almost ten fold; the next iteration, codenamed ‘Moorestown,’ will reduce the power demand by another factor of ten — but the product is not promised till the second half of 2009.

The hard way

For processor players like Intel and AMD , such reductions have to be achieved the hard way by shifting to finer silicon geometries and reducing leakage losses by innovating in the product chemistry.

Via announced a new chip family in May: The Via Nano is the company’s first 64-bit chip family and promises four times as much data per watt as its predecessor, Via C7. It is available at various clock speeds from 1 GHZ to 1.8 GHz and the aim seems to be to address the same product category as the Atom: Ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs) and hand held Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

AMD has not yet announced its own offering in the power efficient small form factor Net device category, but technology sites and blogs last week were featuring a leaked powerpoint slide that seemed to show that the company was putting together its own low-power chip based on its AMD64 design template.

The rival camp has a fundamentally different approach: While the Intels and the AMDs are having to shrink their offerings to appeal to the MID/UMPC makers, traditional players in the business of chips for mobile phones, are having to scale up with more features, faster math and better graphics to address the same new market. The big names here are Texas Instruments (TI), Freescale, Qualcomm, Samsung and ST Microelectronics(STM) — and they share one characteristic: unlike the PC processor giants, they don’t design their chips bottom up; rather, they license the chip architecture and/or the instruction set from the UK-based ARM and build their distinctive chip offerings on top.

In order to get their silicon into the new generation of smart phones and hand held Internet access devices, these players offer various combos of multimedia, audio/video, as well as multiple radios like 3G cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or WiMax.

An article in the New York Times widely reproduced in the Indian media earlier this week, seemed to suggest that Intel’s dominance will be challenged by a ‘low power upstart,’ Qualcomm. In fact, the particular Qualcomm offering cited, named Snapdragon, was announced seven months ago and has already fuelled some reference designs of MIDs from Asian makers like HTC and Inventec.

Its significance lies in its ability to break the gigahertz barrier in what is essentially a smart phone chipset and to facilitate high definition video on tiny-form-factor devices, even while enabling OEMs to add GPS, a 12 mega pixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and broadcast TV to Qualcomm’s own MediaFlo standard. It runs at 1 GHZ, and integrates a 3G modem, graphics core from ATI and GPS support in the core.

If that reads like the recipe of a chip for all seasons, consider the following announcement just one month ago from nVidia, a company known for its signature gaming and graphics cards for PCs. It has announced what it calls ‘the world’s first single chip computer (SOC) for high definition Internet experience’ hitherto available only with PCs.

Unstated comparison

The nVidia Tegra 650 processor claims 10 times the power efficiency of existing battery-operated computer products (the unstated comparison is probably with Atom), with HD image processing for still camera as well as camcorder, and support for what is called ’1080p’, that is full high definition video at 1920 by 1080 pixels (the ‘p’ stands for progressive scanning).

The world’s smallest full HD computer on a chip is built on an ARM11 MPCore multi-core processor (The Qualcomm Snapdragon, on the other hand, licenses only the ARM v7 instruction and has built its own processor).

Another regular ARM core licensee, TI, has also announced its candidate for the coming battle to gain the high ground in the MID maidan: Its latest OMAP 35x series includes the 3530, a single-chip solution for multimedia smart devices which works with the Windows Embedded CE.OR2 operating system. Other releases in the 35x series are optimized for gaming or super scalar office applications.

Is there a pattern?

Do we see a pattern in these claimants for the new ultra portable PC crown — all with mobile phones as their legacy platforms? They are able to build on their ability to work with very small amounts of power… this is part of their phone DNA. Now, they have swiftly added high end graphics and multimedia functionality and they seem to be daring the traditional PC chip makers to reinvent themselves as the ticking hearts of tomorrow’s handheld, lean-mean and visually exciting computing machines.