SpaceX's Falcon 9 Boosts into space

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida Wednesday morning, marking what could become a significant step in commercial space travel.The craft lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 10:43 a.m. ET.The launch and a successful re-entry would be steps toward commercial space ventures that could eventually ferry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. NASA's shuttle fleet is set to retire in the coming year.After breaking off from the earth's atmosphere the craft deposited a mock-up of its Dragon space capsule in orbit.One of the objectives of the SpaceX is to to make flying space crafts cheaper and with more efficiency than what NASA has been doing for the past 30 years.

XM-25 THE GAME CHANGER

Throughout the history of modern warfare, one of the best ways to survive incoming enemy fire has been to take cover behind a wall or large impenetrable object. Until now. Say hello to my little friend, the US Army’s game-changing ‘revolutionary‘ rifle that guarantees you’ll win at ‘hide-and-seek‘ every time you play.The XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, a high-tech rifle that can be programmed so that its 25-mm ammunition detonates either in front of or behind a target, meaning it can be fired just above a wall before it explodes and kills the enemy.

It also has a range of roughly 2,300 feet — nearly the length of eight football fields — making it possible to fire at targets well past the range of the rifles and carbines that most soldiers carry today.

Supercomputer en route to becoming super hero

With the help of their 1.8 petaflop supercomputer, Jaguar, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are sifting through internet traffic in search of suspicions patterns that will lead police to the perpetrators of child pornography.

In standard police work, checking a suspect's hard drive will show whether they have been downloading illegal content such as child pornography. But catching the criminals that produce such material in the first place is even more important, because they can often lead police to the children who are being abused. It is far from easy, since you can't necessarily tell who took the illicit images stored on a hard drive.

The problem with policing child pornography online is that there is simply too much of it, says Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children. "We could quadruple our law enforcement dedicated to this problem overnight, and they'd still be overwhelmed," he says.

He approached the computer scientists at Oak Ridge in search of a solution, "They were genuinely stunned and moved by what they'd heard," he told New Scientist. "And within a week they were making a visit to the Knoxville Internet Crimes Against Children task force".

A RENEWED EFFORT

WHEN I FIRST STARTED THIS BLOG,I NEVER HAD THOUGHT ANYONE WOULD CARE FOR MY ARTICLES.BUT I WAS DUMBFOUNDED TO SEE THAT SOME OF THE COMMENTS THOUGH SAID IN LANGUAGES I CANNOT COMPREHEND(THANKS TO GOOGLE TRANSLATE,I UNDERSTAND THEM NOW)WERE SUPPORTIVE AND DEEPLY ENCOURAGING.THANK YOU GUYS..I MAY NOT KNOW YOU..BUT YOUR WORDS ARE TRULY ENCOURAGING.SO I HAVE DECIDED TO UPDATE MY BLOG...BREATHE IN TO IT NEW LIFE......BRING TO YOU THE LATEST IN TECH NEWS..AND HOPEFULLY SUCEED AT THAT...LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR VALUABLE SUPPORT!!!

BREAKTHROUGH IN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY

WASHINGTON: An Indian-American rocket scientist has invented a little power plant, which is being hailed as an important breakthrough in the energy sector as it is believed to replace the big power plants and transmission lines.Christened 'Bloom Box', it was be unveiled by K R Sridhar in the Silicon Valley , a preview of the product was given at the CBS's popular show '60 Minutes' before the launch of the machine.It is just like a laptop of the power sector, the CBS reported.Sridhar has formed the company Bloom Energy, which has raised some USD 400 million from venture capitalists of the Silicon Valley at a time when it is extremely difficult to churn out money due to the extreme grip of economic recession.Among its board of directors is the former Secretary of State Collin Powell, who became part of the effort last year.Formerly a rocket scientist and served as advisor to NASA, Sridhar says in a span of 10 years or so 'Bloom Box' will be available for residential areas at a nominal rate USD 3,000 to produce electricity in a small home round the clock year after year.Having earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras, earlier he was a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as well as Director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the University of Arizona.The key to this unique Bloom Box is the "fuel cell device" which consists of a stack of ceramic disks coated with secret green and black "inks." These disks are separated by cheap metal plates.
for more info on the company visit www.bloomenergy.com

EARTH HOUR

TO EVERYONE OUT THERE
LETS MAKE THIS COMING EARTH HOUR A HUGE SUCESSS AND SAVE OUR PLANET
HAPPY EARTH HOUR EVERYBODY

LIVE LONG PLANET EARTH!!!!!!!!!!!

HARVESTING HUMAN ENERGY

The human body is a store house of energy and contains as much energy as a one ton battery which fuels our day to day activities. Now innovators around the world are conducting research to harness this energy to power the hi tech gadgets we heavily rely on.Movement produces kinetic energy, which can be converted into power. In the past, devices that turned human kinetic energy into electricity, such as hand-cranked radios, computers and flashlights, involved a person’s full attention but what if we could the same without giving as much notice as it requires.The countless hours that are spent at the gym or the jogging park could be utilised to drive a generator and produce electricity. This is the idea behind the Green Microgym in Portland, Oregon, where machines like stationary bikes harvest energy during workouts. Pedaling rotates a generator, producing electricity that helps to power the building. For now, body energy supplies only a small fraction of the gym’s needs, but the amount should increase as more machines are adapted. “By being extremely energy-efficient and combining human power, solar and someday wind, I believe we’ll be able to be net-zero for electricity sometime this year,” says the gym’s owner, Adam Boesel. His bikes, by the way, aren’t the first to put pedal power to work. In some parts of the world, cyclists have been powering safety lights for years with devices called bicycle dynamos, which use a generator to create alternating current with every turn of the wheels. Dance clubs are also getting in on the action. In the Netherlands, Rotterdam’s new Club WATT has a floor that harnesses the energy created by the dancers’ steps. Designed by a Dutch company called the Sustainable Dance Club, the floor is based on the piezoelectric effect, in which certain materials produce an electric current when compressed or bent. (The most common example is a cigarette lighter, in which a hammer causes a spark to be emitted when it strikes a piezoelectric crystal.) As clubgoers dance, the floor is compressed by less than half an inch. It makes contact with the piezoelectric material under it and generates anywhere from two to 20 watts of electricity, depending on the impact of the patrons’ feet. For now, it’s just enough to power LED lights in the floor, but in the future, more output is expected from newer technology. In London, Surya, another new eco-nightclub, uses the same principle for its dance floor, which the owners hope will one day generate 60 percent of the club’s electricity.

Say good bye to those slow download speeds

Bemoaning the poor load speed of Web pages or the crawl of media downloads could soon become a thing of the past following news that a team of Australian scientists have developed a technology capable of making the Internet up to 100 times faster than the current top-end performance offered by leading network providers.After some four years of development, which was spawned by the idea of a small scratch on a piece of glass, a team working out of the University of Sydney claims to have created a near-instantaneous and error-free method of providing online users with unlimited Net access anywhere in the world.“This is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there,” commented Professor Ben Eggleton, director of the “Centre for Ultra-high bandwith Devices for Optical Systems” (CUDOS), which is based within the University of Sydney’s School of Physics. “We are talking about networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any more,” than they already pay.According to Professor Eggleton, whose scientific team beat its own deadline for completion by a full year in developing the new circuit technology, the recent advancement of optical fibre delivery has meant that online data has the capacity to travel at much greater speeds than those currently achieved, which is where the scratched glass comes into play.“The scratched glass we’ve developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit,” he explained in a University of Sydney statement. “This circuit uses the ‘scratch’ as a guide or a switching path for information -- kind of like when trains are switched from one track to another -- except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks.“This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times,” he added. “We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity.”An initial demonstration of the photonic technology has revealed it as capable of providing speeds around 60 times faster than today’s networks, which rely on electric switching, but the team is confident that further development will glean even quicker performance.

Not limited to just the University of Sydney, a contributing CUDOS team from the Australian National University played a significant part in the development of the Photonic Integrated Circuit. Further support was provided by the Technical University of Denmark while funding was made available through the Australian Research Council (ARC).

CO2-to-Fuel Technology

Carbon Sciences(CABN) is developing a breakthrough technology to transform CO2 emissions into fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel. Innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering disciplines, it is developing a highly scalable biocatalytic process to meet the fuel needs of the world.The fuels we use today, such as gasoline and jet fuel, are made up of chains of hydrogen and carbon atoms aptly called hydrocarbons. In general, the greater the number of carbon atoms there are in a hydrocarbon molecule, the greater the energy content of that fuel. To create fuel, hydrogen and carbon atoms must be bonded together to create hydrocarbon molecules. These molecules can then be used as basic building blocks to produce various gaseous and liquid fuels.Due to its high reactivity, carbon atoms do not usually exist in a pure form, but as parts of other molecules. CO2 is one of the most prevalent and basic sources of carbon atoms. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most stable molecules. This means that it may require a great deal of energy to break apart CO2 and extract carbon atoms for making new hydrocarbons. This high energy requirement has made CO2 to fuel transformation technologies uneconomical in the past. However, Carbon Sciences is developing a proprietary process that requires significantly less energy than other approaches that have been tried. Also, with the global demand for fuel and price of oil projected to rise continuously in the foreseeable future, the economics have changed in favor of certain innovative lower energy approaches, such as Carbon Sciences' breakthrough technology.

Some of the known approaches for CO2 to fuel transformation such as direct photolysis, chemically reacting carbon dioxide gas (CO2) with hydrogen gas (H2) to create methane or methanol are not economically viable in creating transportation fuels for global consumption.By innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering, they have discovered a low energy and highly scalable process to transform large quantities of CO2 into gaseous and liquid fuels using organic biocatalysts. The key to our CO2-to-Fuel approach lies in a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process. Instead of using expensive inorganic catalysts, such as zinc, gold or zeolite, with traditional high energy catalytic chemical processes, the process uses inexpensive, renewable biomolecules to catalyze certain chemical reactions required to transform CO2 and water (H2O) into fuel molecules. Of greatest significance is that the process occurs at low temperature and low pressure, thereby requiring far less energy than other approaches.The energy efficient biocatalytic processes which the technology makes use of actually occur in certain micro-organisms where carbon atoms, extracted from CO2, and hydrogen atoms, extracted from H2O, are combined to create hydrocarbon molecules.The technology allows these processes to operate on a very large industrial scale through advance nano-engineering of the biocatalysts and highly efficient process design.

Nanotechnology Breakthroughs : Gold Nanoparticles

University of Missouri scientist Kattesh Katti recently discovered how to make gold nanoparticles using gold salts, soybeans and water. Katti's research has garnered attention worldwide and the environmentally-friendly discovery could have major applications in several disciplines.Gold nanoparticles are tiny pieces of gold, so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. Researchers believe gold nanoparticles will be used in cancer detection and treatment, the production of "smart" electronic devices, the treatment of certain genetic eye diseases and the development of "green" automobiles.While the nanotechnology industry is expected to produce large quantities of nanoparticles in the near future, researchers have been worried about the environmental impact of typical production methods. Commonly, nanoparticles have been produced using synthetic chemicals. Katti's process, which uses only naturally occurring elements, could have major environmental implications for the future. Since some of the chemicals currently used to make nanoparticles are toxic to humans, Katti's discovery also could open doors for additional medical fields. Having a 100-percent natural "green" process could allow medical researchers to expand the use of the nanoparticles.

Link : www.scientistlive.com