Saturday, 20 October 2012

SUITCASE THAT CARRY ITSELF

SUITCASE THAT CARRY ITSELF:


Tired of lugging your stroller in and out when going somewhere.Now help is at hand.This hand-free luggage will follow you whenever you go.It works on the prototype that connects to a bluetooth signals from your mobile and rolls after you.If the signal is lost,the suitcase will locks itself securely so that no one can take it away.It also makes a call on the mobile alert you.Desgined by RODRIGO GARICA Gonzalez,the case is ready to hit the market and will cost around $160(Rs 8,800) only!!

Friday, 19 October 2012

Bed clean it itself


 Bed clean it itself for you:

After a full day of operating mill machinery in Spain's Basque country, Ascensio Zubeldia used to fall into bed drained. Each morning he mulled over the perfect bed-one that makes itself-and then he finally built it. Sensors under the mattress detect when the sleeper rises, and three seconds later, compartments that contain robotic arms open.
The arms secure cords along each side of the duvet cover between two rollers, then move forward, pulling the duvet to the top of the bed. As this occurs, cords attached to the pillowcases straighten them. Trays holding the pillows then lift, allowing the duvet to pass beneath them. The whole process takes less than a minute.

Thursday, 18 October 2012

Sleep fearless


Sleep fearless:  remove all Bad Memories:


Erasure Lab mice administered a drug can forget fear-inducing memories in their sleep WikimediaSleep-based therapy could provide more effective treatment for PTSD.

Memory-erasure technology is finally starting to follow Eternal Sunshine canon. In the latest breakthrough, Stanford University researchers announced at the Society for Neuroscience meeting that they are manipulating fearful rat memories. Like the University of Puerto Rico study involving injection that cause rats to forget fears, this research is chemical-based, but the magic happens while the rats sleep. The team at Stanford hopes that sleep-based therapies will expand options for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
First, researchers conditioned mice to fear the scent of jasmine by administering a shock every time the mice sniffed the scent. The mice showed the characteristic sign of fear the next day when the scent was present--they froze up anticipating the shock. One group of mice got the conventional treatment of extinction therapy-- repeated exposure to to the scent without the shock. The fear dissipated, but returned when they were placed in different environments.
The experimental group received a drug treatment to block the protein synthesis of the basolateral amygdala, the part of the brain that we think stores fearful memories as they went to sleep, when they once again sniffed the jasmine scent. When they woke up, they had diminished fear even when they left the cage where they initially learned the fear. The results show that with the administration of the drug, fearful memories are less likely to resurface after therapy.

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

MUTATION IN RATS

FAST MUTATION IN RATS:

Rats
An increasing number of rats in areas of the west of England are mutating to become more resistant to commonly sold poisons, a university study has found.
Scientists at Huddersfield University said about 75% of rats in Bristol, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire had built up a resistance.
The most serious mutations have affected rats in Bath and Wiltshire.
Experts have blamed the rise on the incorrect use of poisons where dosages which are too low have been used.
Rats which are resistant to the poison are fattened up by the bait. Those that survive then mate with other resistant rats, allowing a generation of rats resistant to existing poisons to build up.
Mutations have previously been found in many parts of the UK but the Huddersfield University study is the first time the extent of resistance has been measured in the West.

PLANET WITH FOUR SUNS


PLANET WITH FOUR SUNS:Gas giant

Astronomers have found a planet having four different suns - the first known of its type.
The distant world orbits one pair of stars which have a second stellar pair revolving around them.
The discovery was made by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website along with a team from UK and US institutes; follow-up observations were made with the Keck Observatory.
The planet, located just under 5,000 light-years away, has been named PH1 after the Planet Hunters site.
It is thought to be a "gas giant" slightly larger than Neptune - more than six times the radius of the Earth.

STABILITY FACTOR:

"All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit.
Binary stars - systems with pairs of stars - are not uncommon. But only a handful of known exoplanets (planets that circle other stars) have been found to orbit such binaries. And none of these binary systems are known to have another pair of stars circling them.
Dr Lintott said: "There are six other well-established planets around double stars, and they're all pretty close to those stars.

PLANET IDENTIFIED SIMILAR TO EARTH

PLANET IDENTIFIED SIMILAR TO EARTH:

A planet similar to the size of earth has been observed orbiting Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the earth at over four light years away, but which would still take us 40,000 years to reach with the latest technology.

However, this new mystery world circling Alpha Centauri B is thought too be much hotter in order to support, with surface temperatures of around 1,500 dgrees Celsius.
Tthe astronomers say it could be probably the part of a more extensive solar system consisting of other planets, one or more of which might be habitable.
At a distance of just 4.3 light years from the Sun, Alpha Centauri B is only a step away in astronomical terms; but still, with the present propulsion technology, it would take a probably 40,000 years to get there.
Xavier Dumusque, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, said: "This result represents a major step towards the detection of a twin Earth in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. We live in exciting times."
The planet was identified by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers who measured tiny wobbles in the motion of Alpha Centauri B caused by a gravitational tug of war with the orbiting planet.
-With inputs from IANS

Tuesday, 16 October 2012

3-D Printer


A New Breed Of Robotic 3-D Printer Lets You Change Design In Mid-Print


Phantom Geometry 3-D printing from the top down.
Blending a light-sensitive resin, an ultraviolet projector, and robotics to turn 3-D printing upside down.A husband-and-wife team has taken home the first Gehry Prize from the Southern California Institute of Architecture for exceptional thesis projects (named for the architect Frank) not for a particular architectural design but for creating a unique method of 3-D printing that allows the user to alter the design in progress, creating a physical model of streaming information.
Conventional 3-D printing generally works by precisely depositing thin layers of heated, extruded plastic or resin one atop the other based on a 3-D digital model of the desired object. Another kind of additive manufacturing, known as stereolithography, builds objects using light-sensitive resins and some kind of light source (a laser, a UV projector, etc.) that precisely cures the liquid resin into a solid (generally creating objects from the top down rather than the bottom up). Liz and Kyle von Hasseln's project, known as Phantom Geometry, is of the latter mode, but its also executed on a huge scale. And where most printers stick firmly to a digital 3-D model of the desired object, Phantom Geometry allows the user to print outside the specifications of a given 3-D model. As a printed product emerges, the designer can alter the design in-progress, in turn altering the downstream architecture of the printed product.
The system is comprised of a UV light projector, a special photo-sensitive resin, and precision-controlled robotic arms borrowed from SCI-Arc's Robot House. The projector is mounted on a robotic arm just below a shallow vat of resin that hardens when exposed to UV rays, much like the stuff dentists use to create molds of patients' teeth. The projector can beam UV rays up into the bottom of the transparent vat in any shape or form the programmer desires. Layer by layer this hardens the resin, fixing each new layer to the previous one. Leftover liquid resin continues to flood into the print area to be cured with the next burst of light (this is perhaps better explained visually in the video below).
As a result, the finished product appears to be slowly extracted out of the vat, emerging as a series of eerily beautiful tendril-like structures that appear almost organic. And as with living things, the development of each object can be impacted by external influences--in this case, by a change in the stream of data inputs dictating the shape and design of each layer. In that light, you might think of Phantom Geometry as a classic case of technology and art teaming up to imitate life.

Smellepresence


Forget Telepresence! Smellepresence Is Here At Last



A Japanese invention allows you to send smells via phone. Sort of.According to the news site RocketNews24, the Japanese company Chaku Perfume has "developed a new communication service in the way of an iPhone application and device called "Chat Perf," which can send smells across cyber space. Amazing!"
Yes! We think this sounds amazing, too! Wouldn't it be great to be able to share the scent of a bakery you just walked past with a friend hundreds of miles away? Or capture the smell of autumn? Or be like, "What is that smell? I'll share it with my friends; maybe they can tell me."
Except, Chat Perf is not quite going to make that possible. Based on the story's description, it seems that the new app is only capable of releasing, upon a remotely issued command, whatever odor has been stored in the smell tank attached to a person's phone. So, you could potentially purchase a bakery-scented smell tank, give it to a friend, travel hundreds of miles away, instruct your friend to plug their bakery smell tank in, and then "send" the smell to them through the Chat Perf app. Which is, frankly, probably not worth the effort.
Chaku Perfume may have anticipated that problem, because they provided RocketNews24 with a few ideas to get developers started:
・You could send a smell that matches a favorite scene from one of your games while your playing with a friend.
・A tourist attraction could give gift-smell tanks to guests of aromatic yaku cedar, sure to get them to come again.
・You could receive the sweat smell of your favorite idol during a concert, fans caught up in the moment would go wild! [emphasis added]
・You could include a pleasant scent with a news letter.
Does anyone really want to smell the sweat of anyone while watching a concert? Chaku Perfume thinks someone might. Someone outside of Japan, according to the article: "Japan is a relatively odor-free culture...With this in mind, the Chat Perf might prove to be compatible with foreign markets."
Hm.
Despite our overall disappointment with the new app, it did get us thinking about what it would take to bring real, true, bona fide smellepresence to fruition:
First, researchers would have to develop a true electronic nose--one capable of analyzing odors in the same way that the human brain does. (Despite over thirty years of research, that achievement is still a long way off.) Assuming we're talking about a cell phone app, the electronic nose would have to be at least as small as our real human ones.
Next, the code for the odor would be transmitted from the user's electronic nose to the scent recipient's cell phone. This would be the easy part.
Finally, the scent recipient would need to be carrying a device containing--in an organized fashion--the 10,000 or so odor molecules that humans are capable of smelling. We're not even going to wager a guess as to the size of that contraption, but you can bet it would be clunkier than the clunkiest iphone device anyone's made yet.
In short, we're a long way off, and Chat Perf is a tiny first step.

Monday, 15 October 2012

Lunar Water


Scientists: Solar Wind, a Newly Discovered Source of Lunar Water 



Samples from Tranquility Base suggest solar wind brings water to lunar soil. Photo Credit: NASA
The solar wind is a likely contributor to widespread surface level  water deposits in lunar soil churned by micrometeoroid impacts over billions of years, according to an analysis of tiny glass-like features called agglutinates extracted from samples of the moon gathered by the Apollo 11, 16 and 17 astronauts.
A similar process could be at work on other airless solar system bodies, including Mercury and the large main belt asteroid Vesta, according to the study "Direct Measurement of Hydroxyl in the Lunar Regolith and the Origin of Lunar Surface Water" led by geologist Yang Liu, of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and published Oct. 14 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
"Because agglutinates make up a major proportion of lunar soils, often reaching 50% volume of a mature soil, the detected OH in agglutinates represents an unanticipated, abundant reservoir of OH/H2O in lunar regolith," according to the research team "The exposure age of a soil at the lunar surface is proportional to its agglutinate content. Therefore, our results indicate that older lunar soils might contain higher OH than younger lunar soils."
The sample analysis, conducted using Fournier transform infrared spectroscopy and secondary ion mass spectroscopy, provides a traceable transfer mechanism: hydrogen ions carried by the solar wind reach and are implanted in the lunar soil and perhaps other planetary bodies where there is no atmosphere or magnetic field to act as shields. On the moon, the solar wind hydrogen ions are subsequently transferred to the agglutinitic features through steady energetic pelting of the upper lunar surface by micrometeorites.
A "large fraction" of the examined agglutinates registered 200 to 300 parts per million of hydroxyl, OH, and water, according to the study.
A half-dozen researchers from Cal Tech, the University of Michigan as well as the University of Tennessee claim they are first to provide evidence for a solar system water distribution process previously attributed largely to comet and large meteorite impacts. On the moon, those impacts are believed responsible for ice deposits detected in permanently shadowed regions of craters at the lunar South Pole.
The study pieces together findings from Apollo as well as subsequent NASA missions, including Genesis, which launched in 2001 and returned three years later with a harvest of solar wind particles for constituent analysis. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, both launched in 2009, mapped the moon's surface in new detail, while permitting LCROSS to make direct observations of lunar South Pole ice. Lunar Prospector, a 1998 orbital mission, looked for evidence of polar ice, with neutron and gamma ray mass spectrometers.

BIRDS CAN TALK



mynah-bird





BIRDS CAN TALK

Did you know that parrots can be trained to say up to 200 words and short phrases. In fact their ability to mimic human language is so well known that many parrot owners initially purchase the bird for this reason alone.
The truth however is that like most talking birds they’re not really talking but mimicking the sounds they hear around them. They certainly don’t have any real understanding of the words they repeat and what’s more interesting is that parrots as a species are not the best of the bird mimickers.

Mynah Bird

Yes that’s right the top word mimic is actually the Mynah bird. Their ability to create amazingly realistic human and non human sounds such as words, coughs, sneezes and even cell phone ring tones is well documented.
Other birds that are extremely intelligent and known to mimic human words are crows, ravens and jackdaws. Although their abilities are less publicizedjackdaws.

Moon water could have solar source


Moon water could have solar source: study
PARIS — Scientists on Sunday said they had found water molecules in samples of lunar soil, and their unusual signature points to the Sun as the indirect source.
Samples returned to Earth by the Apollo missions carry molecules of water and a precursor of water called hydroxyl, according to their study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Researchers led by Yang Liu at the University of Tennessee theorise that the molecules developed from a reaction between hydrogen ions in the solar wind -- the blast of particles from the Sun -- and a loose surface soil called regolith.
The Sun was formed around 4.5 billion years ago from a cloud of gas, a reaction in which all the deuterium in the nebula reacted with hydrogen to form helium.
As a result, unlike all other objects in the Solar System, the Sun is deuterium-less. Sure enough, the samples were tellingly poor in deuterium, the investigators found.
The tests used infrared spectroscopy to get a chemical signature of regolith grains from the Apollo 11, 16 and 17 missions. Two samples came from plains locations, and one from the lunar highlands.
Although the molecules are dissolved within the grains and do not exist as liquid water, the findings powerfully boost the notion that the Moon is not the utterly arid place it was once thought to be, say the authors.
Since 2009, when NASA found water crystals in a deep crater near the Moon's southern pole, evidence has suggested that the Moon was once a pretty moist place and may still have frozen water at depth.
Until now, the source of water in the inner Solar System, the region extending to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is believed to be comets and other water-rich rocks which whack into planets and other bodies.
So if the study is right, hydrogen from the solar wind could be a second, hitherto unimagined source.
The solar wind whacks into the lunar surface at 1.6 million kms (a million miles) per hour, penetrating the lunar soil to a depth of up to 100 nanometres (100 billionths of a metre), according to some calculations.
The impact is so brutal that the Moon's mass diminishes by around million tonnes per hour, a figure that however is tiny when compared to the size of our satellite.
Hydroxyl is a bond between one hydrogen and one oxygen atom, while water (H20) comprises two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
How the solar hydrogen combines with oxygen in the regolith grains to make the molecules is unclear.
But the phenomenon could occur in other places in the inner Solar System, the authors suggest.
"A similar mechanism may contribute to hydroxyl on the surfaces of other airless terrestrial bodies where the solar wind directly interacts with the surface," says the study.
Examples of this could be Mercury, the rocky planet that is nearest the Sun, and Vesta, the second biggest (and the brightest) object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
On Earth, we are shielded from the solar wind thanks to the atmosphere and the planet's magnetic field
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