Kapil Sibal, India’s Minister for Human Resource Development, unveils a prototype tablet on Thursday. Five years in development, the cheap device is being called India’s answer to Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC laptop.
(Credit: AFP Photo/STR)
India on Thursday unveiled a prototype tablet computer that would sell for a mere 1,500 rupees, or $35, with the price possibly dropping even further as R&D efforts continue.
Kapil Sibal, the country’s Minister for Human Resource Development, showed off the super-cheap touch-screen device in New Delhi as part of a push to provide high-quality education to students across the country. The tablet also comes with a solar-power option that could make it more feasible for rural areas.
The Linux-based computer at first glance resembles an Apple iPad and features basic functions you’d expect to see in a tablet–a Web browser, multimedia player, PDF reader, Wi-Fi, and video conferencing ability. It has 2GB of RAM (but no hard disk, instead using a memory card) and USB ports and could be available to kids from primary school up to the university level as early as next year.
Students from several branches of the Indian Institute of Technology co-designed motherboards for the computer, which the ministry would like to see dropping to $20 and possibly getting as low as $10.
Sibal called the as-yet-unnamed device India’s answer to MIT’s famed OLPC laptop aimed at children in developing nations, which started off five years ago with a projected cost of $100, but ended up going for $200. In May, Marvell Technologies announced that it would partner with the OLPC foundation to create the hardware for a proposed OLPC tablet, currently named the XO-3, that would go for around $100.
But while the extremely low price of India’s newly unveiled tablet is generating much hoopla, the gadget still faces hurdles before it lands in the public’s hands.
“This is just a prototype,” education expert Zubin Malhotra told Newsxlive. “We need to find people who will be able to manufacture these devices at these price points and continue to develop them going forward.”
The tablet is part of a larger initiative aimed at improving India’s educational system through technology. Nearly 8,500 colleges in the country have already gotten broadband connectivity, according to the Ministry for Human Resource Development, and some 500 Web-based and video courses are available for upload on YouTube and other online portals, with more in the works.
Space boffins believe they may be on the verge of discovering a vast, hidden network of tunnels beneath the surface of the Moon.
Collapsed pit-crater shaft leading down to a sub-selenean tunnel?
The tunnels aren’t thought to be the work of long-extinct (or perhaps still surviving) intelligent moon aliens, perhaps driven to adopt a subterranean existence by a notional disappearing atmosphere aeons ago. Nor is any involvement by Tibetans, Elvis or others seeking a secluded dwelling far from prying human eyes suspected.
Instead, top moonologists think that they may be on the track of “lava tubes” not dissimilar to those of Earth. A lava tube, unsurprisingly, is a tube in solid surrounding rock along which at some point liquid lava has flowed (or is still flowing, in some Earthly cases).
View down into an Earthly lava tube.
When the lava cools and solidifies, there is often an open space left above its surface, forming a tunnel.
In some cases, parts of the roof of such a tunnel will collapse, forming a so-called “pit crater”. If the pit crater forms while the lava is still flowing, it will have a smooth bottom. If the collapse happens once the lava has hardened, the bottom of the pit crater will be home to a pile of rubble.
Scientists analysing results from our old friend the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), placed into a very low Moon orbit by NASA so as to map our satellite in great detail, believe they may have found such pit craters – so pointing the way to subterraneanselenean lava-tube tunnels.
“To date, we have about ten candidate pits awaiting confirmation,” report boffins at the LRO Camera team.
“Do these pits provide access to open lava tubes?” they ask.
That’s a question which the LRO scientists will attempt to answer by snapping pics from the LRO at such angles – and with the Sun at such a position in the sky above – that they could spot overhangs indicating whether or not the possible lava-tube tunnels are still “open and accessible”.
President Obama has lately stated that there will be no manned return to the Moon, as had formerly been planned (indeed without the Moon-return plans it is unlikely that NASA would have bothered to send up the LRO).
However there are less ambitious plans for robotic visits to Earth’s satellite – some of them even, perhaps, featuring a tunnelling mole-cruiser subselenean probecraft.
Humanity may yet one day gaze upon the mysteries lying hidden in the Moon’s unseen, cavernous tunnel complexes – if only by proxy
British scientists believe they have found the answer to an ages-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Scientists cracked the puzzle after discovering that the formation of eggs is possible only thanks to a protein found in chicken’s ovaries. That means eggs have to be formed in chickens first.
The protein — called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) — speeds up the development of the shell. Researchers from Sheffield and Warwick universities in England laid out their findings in the paper “Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein.”
They used a supercomputer to zoom in on the formation of an egg and realized the protein is vital in kick-starting the crystallization process. It works by converting calcium carbonate into the calcite crystals that make up the egg shell.
Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University’s Department of Engineering Materials, said “it had long been suspected that the egg came first — but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first.”
“The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation, but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process,” Freeman said.
“It’s very interesting to find that different types of avian species seem to have a variation of the protein that does the same job.”
It is hoped the discovery leads to the invention of new materials.
ScienceDaily (July 12, 2010) — It is predicted that 80% of active Internet consumers and Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community, including social networks, by the end of 2011.
A new article in the journal Psychology & Marketing investigates the role avatars play in the virtual and consumer environment, how well avatars reflect the personality of their creators, the psychology behind self-representation, and how these virtually made identities are perceived by other members of the virtual community. According to the study, avatars can portray a very lifelike and accurate depiction of a person’s true personality, within the virtual world.
Dr. H. Onur Bodur of Concordia University and his colleagues used the sophisticated avatar-based community Second Life as their model for the study, which has its own economy and facilitates real-money transactions. The membership of Second Life has increased more than 20 fold between 2006 and 2009 to reach 15 million, and many real-world companies (e.g., Adidas, American Apparel, Dell, Nike, and Toyota) have appeared in Second Life.
Members of the community use particular avatar traits or visual cues, such as attractiveness, gender, stylish hair, or expression (“babyfaceness” is associated with cooperation), to form impressions or opinions about the human behind the avatar. The researchers argue that well-known psychological principles such as Social Response Theory (SRT) and anthropomorphism come into play at this stage of discovery and discernment. Bodur’s study finds that these impressions, based solely on fairly limited or superficial traits of the avatar, may accurately match the true personality of the real person behind the avatar.
Dr. Bodur says, “This research, which aligns with other research that says that accurate impressions can be formed through access to very limited information, such as images of someone’s dorm room, work space, or website. This and future research can show whether online presentations of consumers (e.g., avatars) can be used to identify and segment consumers.”
This article is part of the relatively new field of research surrounding the use of this new graphic media, and plays a major role in analyzing its impact on social psychology and marketing practices.
The Obama Administration’s failure to lock-down the southern border is now costing Americans more than just their lives, it’s costing them money-a lot of money. The Examiner has more on the shocking story:
On April 17, 2009, the Orange County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay $3.75 million, plus an additional $900,000 in medical expenses to an illegal alien who was severely beaten by other inmates in the Orange County Central Jail. The Mexican national filed a lawsuit shortly after the incident.
Fernando Ramirez, 24, was in jail after being charged with molesting a 6-year-old girl at a local park. He eventually pled guilty to the lesser charge of battery against a child.
According to his attorney, Ramirez suffered brain damage and now needs help walking. Attorney Mark Eisenberg also claims that his client has been left with an intellect of a 4-year-old child.
Despite the dire financial crisis facing Orange County, Ramirez received the largest settlement ever awarded by the county for an in-custody incident. The Board of Supervisors made their decision in a closed-door session and have refused any comment on the matter.
This story has yet to be covered by the main stream media.
Here are three examples of what possibly point to life on the Moon. Why have these findings been brushed under the carpet? The discovery of life even in microbial form has profound implications in the understanding our origins and life in the universe as a whole.
1. According to the Journal of Cosmology, in 1970 lunar soil samples were returned to Earth by the Luna 16 spacecraft in a hermetically sealed container and photographed. These photographs were later examined by Drs. Stanislav Zhmur, and Lyudmila M. Gerasimenko, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences who identified what they believed to be microfossils of Coccoidal bacteria which resembled Siderococcus or Sulfolobus.
Lunar mirofossils resembling Siderococcus.
Journal of Cosmology
2.
A third fossilized impression from the lunar surface resembles a spiral filamentous micro-Ediacaran, a species which became extinct over 500,000 years ago. In 2009, Dr. Rhawn Joseph showed this photograph to five world-renowned experts in Cambrian and Pre-Cambrian fauna, and four of the 5 identified it as a microfossil.
Lunar mirofossil resembling a micro-Ediacaran.
Journal of Cosmology
3. In 1971, the TV camera of the Surveyor space craft was recovered by Apollo 12 astronauts, after being on the Moon for three years. A single bacterium (Streptococcus mitis) was found. It was also revealed that the lunar camera was covered with a film of “organic material of unknown origin”.
The Counter Claims
•
It is not possible for Streptococcus mitis, which is a common bacterium from the human mouth, to have survived for two and a half years on the Moon inside the Surveyor 3 camera, to be detected when it was returned to Earth on board the Apollo 12. Streptococcus mitis lives in the mouth; there is no evidence that it can survive for long even in terrestrial environments outside the human body. Further, it cannot survive outside of a narrow temperature range and therefore it isn’t possible that it could survive on the moon.
• According to NASA’s Leonard D. Jaffe, a Surveyor program scientist and curator of the Surveyor 3 components brought back from the Moon, somebody on his staff who had witnessed the biological test (which gave positive results), reported that a “breach of sterile procedure” took place at just the right time to produce a false positive result. He further claims that one of the tools being used to study the samples was inadvertently placed on a non-sterile lab bench, which was then used to collect the samples. It was that sample set which showed the presence of Streptococcus mitis.
To quote Jaffe, “It is, therefore, quite possible that the microorganisms were transferred to the camera after its return to Earth, and that they had never been to the Moon.”
So let’s analyse Jaffe’s contentions:
The possibility of contamination prior to sending the camera to the moon, or after it was returned, was ruled out by the scientists who made this discovery. Was Mr Jaffe, present when the discovery was made? No! Further, he was not even associated with the analysis! He has attempted to discredit this discovery by making false statements that have no basis in reality. The hoax perpetrated by Jaffe is easily disproved.
The fact is that a dirty work bench would have contained millions of diverse bacteria. Nor could the microbe be the result of some other form of contamination, such as a sneeze or cough.
Since a droplet of saliva contains an average of 750 million organisms, if contamination of the lunar TV camera was due to a scientist’s inadvertent cough or sneeze, a multitude of related bacteria, and a “representation of the entire microbial population would be expected,” rather than a single species and a single organism (Mitchell & Ellis, 1971). Moreover, this Streptococcus mitis was dormant, but came back to life.
But according to Dirk Schulze-Makuch of the Department of Geology, Washington State University, Streptococcus mitis can exist only in moist environments.
So what about the Moon? It has now been established beyond doubt that there is water on the moon as confirmed by India’s Chandrayaan spacecraft. Not just buckets full, but there’s tons of it! And what about the requirement of atmosphere on the Moon for microbes to survive? Well there exist MASCONS (Massive Concentrations of gravity) on many areas on the Moon leading to the possibility of pockets of atmosphere however tenuous, held in place by these MASCONS.
But how could microbes have appeared on the Moon? In the 1970s, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe began to suspect that life on Earth could have come from space. Brig Klyce, who studies cosmic ancestry and panspermia notes that several studies point to the presence of complex organics in space. If they could survive the harsh conditions of deep space, then why can’t they survive on the Moon and Mars that have comparatively a more conducive environment? It is quite possible that micro-organisms exist in the deep craters of the Moon hidden in moist crevices that shield them from radiation and cosmic particles.
What About Mars?
As mentioned earlier, one of the prerequisites for life is water. So how could life exist on Mars in the absence of water? But wait! Here’s what Viking I and II discovered:
Hydrogen Densities (Probably Water) on Mars with Viking 1 and 2 Landing Sites Located (VL1 & VL2).
Where there’s water, there a possibility of life!
Courtesy: LANL
For those of you who are interested, heres’ an interesting thread I found on ATS… Scientific Evidence Of Life On Mars!! Why is NASA Obfuscating The Truth?
NASA seems to have screwed up this one!
Artist’s impression of a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan. Photo: NASA
Researchers at the space agency believe they have discovered vital clues that appeared to indicate that primitive aliens could be living on the moon.
Data from Nasa’s Cassini probe has analysed the complex chemistry on the surface of Titan, which experts say is the only moon around the planet to have a dense atmosphere.
They suggest that life forms may have been breathing in the planet’s atmosphere and also feeding on its surface’s fuel.
Astronomers claim the moon is generally too cold to support even liquid water on its surface.
The research has been detailed in two separate studies.
The first paper, in the journal Icarus, shows that hydrogen gas flowing throughout the planet’s atmosphere disappeared at the surface. This suggested that alien forms could in fact breathe.
The second paper, in the Journal of Geophysical Research, concluded that there was lack of the chemical on the surface.
Scientists were then led to believe it had been possibly consumed by life.
Researchers had expected sunlight interacting with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene gas. But the Cassini probe did not detect any such gas.
Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at Nasa Ames Research Centre, at Moffett Field, California who led the research, said: “We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth.
“If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth.”
Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University, added: “We believe the chemistry is there for life to form. It just needs heat and warmth to kick-start the process.
“In four billion years’ time, when the Sun swells into a red giant, it could be paradise on Titan.”
They warned, however, that there could be other explanations for the findings.
But taken together, they two indicate two important conditions necessary for methane-based life to exist.
ScienceDaily (June 5, 2010) — Researchers have found a way to pharmacologically induce a memory of safety in the brain of rats, mimicking the effect of training. The finding suggests possibilities for new treatments for individuals suffering from anxiety disorders.
Rats normally freeze when they hear a tone they have been conditioned to associate with an electric shock. The reaction can be extinguished by repeatedly exposing the rats to the tone with no shock. In this work, administering a protein directly into the brain of rats achieved the same effect as extinction training. The protein, brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, is one of a class of proteins that support the growth and survival of neurons.
Prior work has shown that extinction training does not erase a previously conditioned fear memory, but creates a new memory associating the tone with safety. “The surprising finding here is that the drug substituted for extinction training, suggesting that it induced such a memory,” said Dr. Gregory Quirk at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, who led the investigation with support from the National Institute of Mental Health.
The work is reported in the June 4 issue of Science.
Memory formation involves changes in the connections, or synapses, between neurons, a process known as synaptic plasticity. One brain structure critical for extinction memory in rats is the infralimbic prefrontal cortex (ILC). Drugs that block synaptic plasticity impair the formation of extinction memory when injected into the ILC, causing rats to continue freezing at high levels after extinction training.
BDNF, on the other hand, permits a learning experience to increase the size and strength of synaptic contacts between neurons. Previous work from other groups has implicated BDNF in extinction learning. In this study, after rats were conditioned to fear a tone by pairing it with a footshock, BDNF was infused directly into the ILC. The next day, BDNF-infused rats showed little freezing to the tone, as if they had received extinction training.
Experiments showed that BDNF-induced extinction did not erase the original fear memory. Training to reinstate the tone-shock association was just as effective with the rats receiving BDNF as those without. Also, the effect of BDNF was specific to extinction. It did not reduce general anxiety or change the animals’ tendency to move around.
The researchers also found that rats that were naturally deficient in BDNF were more likely to do poorly in extinction trials. These rats were deficient in BDNF in the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays an important role in memory and extinction, and which has connections to the ILC. Failure to extinguish fear is thought to contribute to anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People with PTSD have a smaller than normal hippocampus and ILC.
“Our finding suggests that augmenting BDNF in these circuits may ameliorate PTSD and perhaps other disorders such as addictions,” said Dr. Jamie Peters, the post-doctoral researcher who collaborated with Quirk on this project.
“Many lines of evidence implicate BDNF in mental disorders,” said NIMH Director Dr. Thomas Insel. “This work supports the idea that medications could be developed to augment the effects of BDNF, providing opportunities for pharmaceutical treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders.” The focus now is to look for ways to augment BDNF’s actions in the brain, which might include anti-depressant medications and even exercise.
Also collaborating on the study were Dr. Jamie Peters, Dr. Loyda Melendez, and Laura Dieppa-Perea, all at the University of Puerto Rico. In addition to NIMH, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Center for Research Resources provided funding for this work.
A psychologist at Grant MacWean University in Canada reckons that people who play videogames more often are more likely to be able to control their dreams. Jayne Gackenbach surveyed the dreams of both non-gamers and hardcore gamers, and found that those who frequently played games experienced lucid dreams more often.
“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Gackenbach. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.” While the findings are preliminary, and haven’t been backed up by other studies elsewhere, they have some precedence in that lucid dreamers and gamers have both been reported separately as being less prone to motion sickness and exhibiting better spatial skills.
However, correlation is not causation, so Gackenbach assembled groups of college students and asked them how often they had lucid dreams, where they could actively influence and change their dreams. Those who played videogames were more likely to report lucidity, but interestingly they reported being limited to just controlling to their dream selves — rather than having control over the entire dream world.
Gackenbach has since replicated her findings a few times over, and controlled for factors like the frequency of recalling dreams. “The first time we simply asked people how often they had lucid dreams, looking back over their life and making judgment calls,” Gackenbach told LiveScience. “That’s open to all kinds of bias, [such as] certain memory biases, self-reported biases.”
She also discovered that gamers are troubled less by nightmares than non-gamers, which matches up with Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo’s “threat simulation” theory. That theory suggests that nightmares evolved to help people practice for life-threatening situations in a safe environment. In gamers, the thinking goes, they get to practice those situations in games so have less need of nightmares.
Gackenbach took 35 males and 63 females, and found that gamers experienced less threat simulation in dreams than non-gamers, with fewer “aggresssion” dreams overall. Interestingly, gamers also reported sometimes becoming the threatening presence themselves. Future research, Gackenbach says, will be targeted at studying the violence levels in games, and how they affect this phenomenon. Do kids’ games have the same effect as more mature, violent titles?
The research could help in a number of areas, particularly with helping war veterans troubled by nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder. Virtual reality simulators have already been used to treat some people suffering from nightmares after enduring combat. The question is whether games could have the same effect.
The work will be discussed at the sixth annual Games for Health conference in Boston.
The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives, scientists have claimed.
Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years Photo: ALAMY
Honey bee, (Apis mellifera mellifera), flying and collecting pollen from pussy willow, Germany, Bavaria Photo: ALAMY
Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.
Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.
They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour and productivity of bees in two hives – one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months. The other had dummy models installed.
After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phon, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee. The bees also stopped producing honey.
The queen bee in the “mobile” hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.
They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen. Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank.
Ved Prakash Sharma and Neelima Kumar, the authors of the report in the journal Current Science, wrote: “Increase in the usage of electronic gadgets has led to electropollution of the environment. Honeybee behaviour and biology has been affected by electrosmog since these insects have magnetite in their bodies which helps them in navigation.
“There are reports of sudden disappearance of bee populations from honeybee colonies. The reason is still not clear. We have compared the performance of honeybees in cellphone radiation exposed and unexposed colonies.
“A significant decline in colony strength and in the egg laying rate of the queen was observed. The behaviour of exposed foragers was negatively influenced by the exposure, there was neither honey nor pollen in the colony at the end of the experiment.”
Tim Lovett, of the British Beekeepers Association, said that hives have been successful in London where there was high mobile phone use.
“Previous work in this area has indicated this [mobile phone use] is not a real factor,” he said. “If new data comes along we will look at it.”
He said: “At the moment we think is more likely to be a combination of factors including disease, pesticides and habitat loss.”
The UK Government has set aside £10 million for research into the decline of pollinators like bees, but the BBKA claim much more money is needed for research into the problem, including studies on pesticides, disease and new technology like mobile phones.
According to the University of Durham, England’s bees are vanishing faster than anywhere else in Europe, with more than half of hives
dying out over the last 20 years.
The most recent statistics from last winter show that the decline in honey bees in Britain is slowing, with just one in six hives lost.
This is still above the natural rate of ten per cent losses, but a vast improvement on previous years.
There has been an increase in the number of thefts of hives across the world and in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives.
