India to launch $45 tablet computer

India to launch $45 tablet computer

  9:48:00 AM    Science Lover

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India is set Wednesday to launch its long-awaited low-cost computer, a $45 tablet device designed to bring the information technology revolution to tens of millions of students.

Indian customers visit the computer section at the Croma electronics mega-store in Mumbai in September 2011. India is set Wednesday to launch its long-awaited low-cost computer, a $45 tablet device designed to bring the information technology revolution to tens of millions of students.

The touchscreen computer has a seven-inch (18-centimetre) screen, Wi-Fi Internet access, a media player and 180 minutes of battery power, according to official specifications.

Called the "Akash" ("Sky"), the locally-made device will be launched in New Delhi by Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal after years of delays.

"It will cost 2,200 rupees ($45) and the first batch of 500 tablets will be handed over to students after the release," ministry spokeswoman Mamata Varma told AFP.

"Initially, 700 Akash tablets will be made every day and we expect the production to pick up when more companies join in to manufacture the device," she said.

The commercial marketing strategy for the Akash remains unclear, but most of the computers are likely to be sold through universities and colleges rather than shops.

Canada-based Datawind, the current manufacturer, said the tablet used an Android 2.2 operating system, had video-conferencing capability, two USB ports and a 32GB expandable memory.

But experts warned its 256-megabyte random access memory (RAM) would limit performance.

Commercial manufacturers are hoping Indian customers will leapfrog personal computers to buy tablets, as millions did by buying mobile telephones instead of waiting for a landline.

Apple's internationally-popular iPad computers costs a minimum of $600 in India, with competitor Reliance Communications selling a rival tablet device at about $290.

The Akash is part of a push to increase the number of students in higher education and to give them the technological skills needed to further boost the country's recent rapid economic growth.

India, where the 61 percent literacy rate lags far behind many other developing nations such as China with 92 percent, is making major efforts to improve its education system.

The government had promised to release the first 100,000 Akash computers by January 2011, but uncertainty over the level of government subsidy is thought to have delayed mass production.

The much-hyped "computer for the masses" was said to be on the brink of release in both 2005 and 2009 -- only for it never to materialise. Industry observers say rising labour charges, cheap imports, and more sophisticated tablets could undermine the Akash among India's tech-savvy youngsters.

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New Force Driving Earth's Tectonic Plates

New Force Driving Earth's Tectonic Plates

  7:54:00 PM    Science Lover

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Bringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have identified a new mechanism driving Earth's massive tectonic plates.

Reconstruction of the Indo-Atlantic Ocean at 63 million years, during the time of the superfast motion of India which Scripps scientists attribute to the force of the Reunion plume head. The arrows show the relative convergence rate of Africa (black arrows) and India (dark blue) relative to Eurasia before, during and after (from left to right) the period of maximum plume head force. The jagged red and brown lines northeast of India show two possible positions of the trench (the subduction zone) between India and Eurasia depending on whether the India-Eurasia collision occurred at 52 million years or 43 million years. (Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego)

Scientists who study tectonic motions have known for decades that the ongoing "pull" and "push" movements of the plates are responsible for sculpting continental features around the planet. Volcanoes, for example, are generally located at areas where plates are moving apart or coming together. Scripps scientists Steve Cande and Dave Stegman have now discovered a new force that drives plate tectonics: Plumes of hot magma pushing up from Earth's deep interior. Their research is published in the July 7 issue of the journal Nature.

Using analytical methods to track plate motions through Earth's history, Cande and Stegman's research provides evidence that such mantle plume "hot spots," which can last for tens of millions of years and are active today at locations such as Hawaii, Iceland and the Galapagos, may work as an additional tectonic driver, along with push-pull forces.

Their new results describe a clear connection between the arrival of a powerful mantle plume head around 70 million years ago and the rapid motion of the Indian plate that was pushed as a consequence of overlying the plume's location. The arrival of the plume also created immense formations of volcanic rock now called the "Deccan flood basalts" in western India, which erupted just prior to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. The Indian continent has since drifted north and collided with Asia, but the original location of the plume's arrival has remained volcanically active to this day, most recently having formed Réunion island near Madagascar.

The team also recognized that this "plume-push" force acted on other tectonic plates, and pushed on Africa as well but in the opposite direction.



"Prior to the plume's arrival, the African plate was slowly drifting but then stops altogether, at the same time the Indian speeds up," explains Stegman, an assistant professor of geophysics in Scripps' Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. "It became clear the motion of the Indian and African plates were synchronized and the Réunion hotspot was the common link."

After the force of the plume had waned, the African plate's motion gradually returned to its previous speed while India slowed down.

"There is a dramatic slow down in the northwards motion of the Indian plate around 50 million years ago that has long been attributed to the initial collision of India with the Eurasian plate," said Cande, a professor of marine geophysics in the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps. "An implication of our study is that the slow down might just reflect the waning of the mantle plume-the actual collision might have occurred a little later."

Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation.

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Liquid Phone with Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor

Liquid Phone with Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor

  6:15:00 AM    Science Lover

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Acer has brought a new liquid phone in India. It’s really liquid due to its unique feature which differentiates it from the other phones. This phone has the world’s first Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and is based on the first Android 1.6 high definition smart phone. It delivers real time communication as well as content which are location aware. This smart device brings forth a unique combination of high quality performance as well as bold style.

This high defining smart phone combines the cutting edge technologies; software innovation as well as ultra-fluid user interfaces so that users can get a completely new experience with this phone. Unique set of features developed by Acer and its partners would include a new user interface as well as improved power management systems. This enhanced power management system would help the user to achieve longer battery autonomy.

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How The Moon Produces Its Own Water

How The Moon Produces Its Own Water

  6:48:00 PM    Science Lover

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The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-1 SARA measurements of hydrogen flux recorded on the Moon on 6 February 2009. (Credit: Elsevier 2009 (Wieser et al.), ESA-ISRO SARA data)

It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System.

The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Incoming particles should be trapped in the spaces between the grains and absorbed. When this happens to protons they are expected to interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water. The signature for these molecules was recently found and reported by Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument team.

The SARA results confirm that solar hydrogen nuclei are indeed being absorbed by the lunar regolith but also highlight a mystery: not every proton is absorbed. One out of every five rebounds into space. In the process, the proton joins with an electron to become an atom of hydrogen. “We didn’t expect to see this at all,” says Stas Barabash, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, who is the European Principal Investigator for the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument, which made the discovery.

Although Barabash and his colleagues do not know what is causing the reflections, the discovery paves the way for a new type of image to be made. The hydrogen shoots off with speeds of around 200 km/s and escapes without being deflected by the Moon’s weak gravity. Hydrogen is also electrically neutral, and is not diverted by the magnetic fields in space. So the atoms fly in straight lines, just like photons of light. In principle, each atom can be traced back to its origin and an image of the surface can be made. The areas that emit most hydrogen will show up the brightest.

Whilst the Moon does not generate a global magnetic field, some lunar rocks are magnetised. Barabash and his team are currently making images, to look for such ‘magnetic anomalies’ in lunar rocks. These generate magnetic bubbles that deflect incoming protons away into surrounding regions making magnetic rocks appear dark in a hydrogen image.

The incoming protons are part of the solar wind, a constant stream of particles given off by the Sun. They collide with every celestial object in the Solar System but are usually stopped by the body’s atmosphere. On bodies without such a natural shield, for example asteroids or the planet Mercury, the solar wind reaches the ground. The SARA team expects that these objects too will reflect many of the incoming protons back into space as hydrogen atoms.

This knowledge provides timely advice for the scientists and engineers who are readying ESA’s BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The spacecraft will be carrying two similar instruments to SARA and may find that the inner-most planet is reflecting more hydrogen than the Moon because the solar wind is more concentrated closer to the Sun.

SARA was one of three instruments that ESA contributed to Chandrayaan-1, the lunar orbiter that finished its mission in August 2009. The instrument was built jointly by scientific groups from Sweden, India, Japan, and Switzerland: Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Kiruna, Sweden; Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Trivandrum, India; University of Bern, Switzerland; and Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Sagamihara, Japan. The instrument is led by Principal Investigators Stanislav Barabash, IRF, Sweden, and Anil Bhardwaj, VSSC, India.
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Hundreds Of New Species Discovered In Eastern Himalayas

Hundreds Of New Species Discovered In Eastern Himalayas

  8:15:00 PM    Science Lover

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Over 350 new species including the world’s smallest deer, a “flying frog” and a 100 million-year old gecko have been discovered in the Eastern Himalayas, a biological treasure trove now threatened by climate change.

Flying frog (Rhacophorus suffry). The bright green, red-footed tree frog was described in 2007. It is a 'flying frog' because long webbed feet allow the species to glide when falling. (Credit: Copyright Totul Bortamuli / WWF Nepal)

A decade of research carried out by scientists in remote mountain areas endangered by rising global temperatures brought exciting discoveries such as a bright green frog that uses its red and long webbed feet to glide in the air.

One of the most significant findings was not exactly “new” in the classic sense. A 100-million year-old gecko, the oldest fossil gecko species known to science, was discovered in an amber mine in the Hukawng Valley in the northern Myanmar.

The WWF report The Eastern Himalayas – Where Worlds Collide details discoveries made by scientists from various organizations between 1998 and 2008 in a region reaching across Bhutan and north-east India to the far north of Myanmar as well as Nepal and southern parts of Tibet Autonomus Region (China).

“The good news of this explosion in species discoveries is tempered by the increasing threats to the Himalayas’ cultural and biological diversity,” said Jon Miceler, Director of WWF’s Eastern Himalayas Program. “This rugged and remarkable landscape is already seeing direct, measurable impacts from climate change and risks being lost forever.”

In December world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to reach an agreement on a new climate deal, which will replace the existing Kyoto Protocol.

The Eastern Himalayas- Where Worlds Collide describes more than 350 new species discovered - including 244 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, 2 birds, 2 mammals and at least 60 new invertebrates.

The report mentions the miniature muntjac, also called the “leaf deer,” which is the world’s oldest and smallest deer species. Scientists initially believed the small creature found in the world’s largest mountain range was a juvenile of another species but DNA tests confirmed the light brown animal with innocent dark eyes was a distinct and new species.

The Eastern Himalayas harbor a staggering 10,000 plant species, 300 mammal species, 977 bird species, 176 reptiles, 105 amphibians and 269 types of freshwater fish. The region also has the highest density of Bengal tigers in the world and is the last bastion of the charismatic greater one-horned rhino.

WWF is working to conserve the habitat of endangered species such as snow leopards, Bengal tigers, Asian elephants, red pandas, takin, golden langurs, Gangetic dolphins and one-horned rhinos.

Historically, the rugged and largely inaccessible landscape of the Eastern Himalayas has made biological surveys in the region extremely difficult. As a result, wildlife has remained poorly surveyed and there are large areas that are still biologically unexplored.

Today further species continue to be unearthed and many more species of amphibians, reptiles and fish are currently in the process of being officially named by scientists.

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‘Responsible Recycling of E- waste’

‘Responsible Recycling of E- waste’

  10:01:00 PM    Science Lover

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An initiative by Times Grey Cell presented by the Economic Times, together with E-waste recyclers Ecoreco, this seminar intended to get both regulators and spokespersons from the industry on the same platform and thrash out the issues concerning recycling of E-wastes

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The past decade has seen the rapid expansion of technology intensive industry in the country, together with a staggering increase in the use of electronic equipment in households. This explosion of consumption has generated massive amounts of hazardous electronic wastes that have compounded the problems of waste disposal. It is to discuss the scope and solutions of this problem that a seminar was held on responsible Recycling of E-wastes at MIG Club at Bandra on March 17.

An initiative by Times Grey Cell presented by the Economic Times, together with E-waste recyclers Ecoreco, this seminar intended to get both regulators and spokespersons from the industry on the same platform and thrash out the issues concerning recycling of E-wastes. With 35 per cent of total E-wastes generated in the country, Mumbai’s condition is especially precarious. According to information from the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) Mumbai – Pune region together produce a staggering 50,000 metric tonnes of e-waste in the year 2007

Called WEE or Wastes from Electronic and Electrical equipments, these wastes have grown exponentially over the years and pose a serious threat to our environment. “If improperly disposed by burning or dumping, harmful chemicals like palladium zinc and lead can seep into the environment. Our reasons to recycle should be twin pronged and should, firstly to prevent pollution and secondly to recover metals that could be reused,” says Sanjay Khandare, of the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) that has been working to suggest legislation to curb the menace of hazardous wastes.

In a country where an overwhelming proportion of e-wastes end up with kabbadiwalas and paper marts, the disposal and recycling of these wastes has become a crude process, doing more harm than good. “Recycling of E-wastes is a high margin lucrative business. However in order that it is done in a systematic fashion without any fallout, it needs to be done by professionals. Hopefully the municipal corporation will take cognisance of this fact,” said Noel Thomas chief information officer of Integreon.

The panellists also discussed the woeful lack of awareness about this critical issue. “It is high time that steps are taken to make the future generations aware of the hazards of E-wastes. Including lessons on E-waste in the school curriculum needs to be considered,” said Subhash Thankachan, general manager and zonal head of NIIT.

Although minute steps have been taken to curb the E-waste menace these are insufficient, the panellists pointed out. “In the garb of second hand good, a lot of e-wastes are illegally being transported to India. The government needs to identify gaps in the legal system to plug these holes. Unless the regulatory mechanism is strengthened no headway can be made in binging down the pollution caused by E-wastes,” explained BK Soni, chairman of Eco Recycling Ltd.

In response to this MPCB representative Sanjay Khandare informed, “The central Pollution Control Bureau has already prepared the guidelines as to how E- wastes are to be treated and disposed and what are the parameters and limits that need to be kept in mind while doing the same. We will be following these guidelines stringently from hereon.”

Panellists also highlighted the need to support the fledgling recycling industry. “The recycling of E-waste needs to be made profitable. An entire value chain consisting of users, manufacturers and suppliers needs to come into force if the recycling industry is to survive. The government should do everything to support this industry,” mentioned Kunal Pande, director, IT Advisory Services, KPMG.

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Google Latitude lets you track friends,kids

Google Latitude lets you track friends,kids

  9:57:00 AM    Science Lover

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A new service on Google Maps, called Latitude, allows cellphone users to check their own location, as well as track their friends' whereabouts. The software, which can also be installed on a laptop or PC, plots a user's location - marked by a personal picture on the map - by relaying on cellphone towers, GPS or a Wi-Fi connection. As for privacy concerns, Latitude - functional in India lets the user decide who can monitor his location, and in how much detail.

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Microsoft plans job portal in India

Microsoft plans job portal in India

  5:00:00 PM    Science Lover

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NEW DELHI: Microsoft Corp yesterday announced that it was in talks with partners in government and industry for a job search portal.

The company said that it plans to launch a job search service this year for the country's nearly 400,000 engineers graduating every year. Microsoft's job portal will compete with Info Edge (India) www.naukri.com and Monster Worldwide’s www.monsterindia.com, among others. Its online portal www.msn.com will provide educational content to students.

The company has also entered into an agreement with Advanced Micro Devices and Zenith Computers to make and sell personal computers in India.

The computers, priced at Rs 21,000, would be sold in 10 retail outlets each in Bangalore and Pune from July on a test basis for three months and will be expanded later on the basis of response.

"We don't see any gain in the short term. Our perspective is long term," Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan told reporters.

In 2006/07 the total installed base of PCs in India was 22 million, that is, a PC for about every 50 Indians, industry tracking body IDC said in a recent report.

SOURCE : THE TIMES OF INDIA

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