Know Some And Tell Some

Tool

2009-09-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Open Organisation Of LockPickers (TOOL), is a club in the Netherlands, dedicated to picking locks for fun. It has several branches in Germany and U.S.

Lock picking is a sport for the members of this club. Annual competitions are organized in varios categories, like padlocks, mechanical, and freestyle, a special category in which the contestants confront any lock with any tools they choose, as long as they do not damage the lock.

Internet enabled pacemaker

2009-08-11T20:27:00.001-07:00

This wireless pacemaker is made by St Jude Medical Inc, Minnesota, USA .
It has a wireless home monitoring system, that transmits critical information to a doctor via the internet, at least once a day, to download all the relevant information and alerts the doctor and the patient, if there is anything unusual.

It helps to evaluate any problems with the patients pacemaker and certain other rhythm disorders, that could be potentially dangerous or life threatening. This new technology helps to treat patients better and is likely to become the new standard in pacemakers.

e-learning tools

2009-06-28T20:42:00.000-07:00

Moodle, its a learning management system. It can accomodate a large number of students right from the school to university level. Institites use this software to augment face to face coursesthrough forums and to assess learning.

Drupal, its a free content management system software. With Drupal there is no need to know programming or HTML to build a website. One can easily piblish manage and organise a content like computer files image media audio files video files electronic documents and web content for students. The software comes with several modules like gradebook,conference, blog,forum,help,books,comment polls.

Audacity is used for audio recording and editing files for more effective language teaching.
Gimp is photo editing softwarewhich is easier to operate than Adobe's Photoshop.

Strange facts about Antarctica

2009-05-28T05:39:00.000-07:00

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and driest place on earth.
Antarctica is 10% of the earth's land area.
Only 2% of Antarctica's land is not covered in ice.
Antarctic ice which at its thickest reaches 5 km in depth, comprises almost 70% of the earth's fresh water.
If all of the ice in Antarctica melted, sea levels would rise between 50 and 60 m.
Due to its ice cap, Antarctica is the highest continent average approximately 2,300 m above sea level.
Antarctica is the driest place on earth.
The weight of the glaciers in Antarctica are compressing the land under them, if the glaciers were removed the land of Antarctica would slowly rise over the period of hundreds of years.
There are at least 2 active volcanoes in Antarctica, one of which has a permanent molten lava lake.
There are no trees or bushes in Antarctica.
Dogs have been banned from Antarctica to protect the seal population .
D'Urville was the first man to set foot in Antarctica.
The temperature in Antarctica once dropped 65° F in 12 minutes.
The center of Antarctica is the largest desert in the world.
There are 28 airport landing facilities in Antarctica and all 37 Antarctic stations have helipads.
There are more than 40 flying bird species that spend their summers in Antarctica.
The world's lowest temperature of -128 degrees F was recorded at the Russia Vostok Station in Antarctica.
The ozone hole above Antarctica covers 27 million km2.
During the summer, more solar radiation reaches the South Pole than is received in an equivalent period at the equator.

Wolfram Alpha

2009-05-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

This is a computational knowledge engine developed by a British-born physicist Stefan Wolfram. Unlike the Google search engine, it doesn't give you a link to other pages where you will find the results that you are searching for.

It gives direct answers to the queries that you have entered. The results it returns are annotated pages of data, rather that simple list of other sites.

It can handle complicated mathematical queries, plot statistics and produce charts of natural events. This engine can also return results about known facts such as height of mountains or a nation's GDP.

The computational horsepower behind the main site, works out answers to question, as they are put by grabbing data from databases and consulting feeds of information. The data it consults, is chosen and managed by staff at Wolfram Research who ensure that it can be displayed by the system. This engine has about 10,000 CPU's spread across 5 data centres, that it draws on when generating answers.

Stink-free clothes

2009-03-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

These stink-free clothes are called "J-Ware", created by textile experts at Japan women's university in Tokyo.
These new line of odourfree clothes are comfortable and stylish.

They have special features that make them distinct and unique. They are flame resistant and anti-static. They can kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body and dry quickly. These clothes can stay fresh for weeks at a time.
J-Ware, specially designed for astronauts, who don't have any laundary facilities in space station.

Downadup

2009-01-20T04:58:00.000-08:00

It is a worm that infects PCs. It is also known as "Conficker". It exploits a bug in the windows server service, used by Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

It does not spread over email or the Web. It mostly spreads through USB sticks and via network shares. It mostly infects machines that have not installed a patch from Microsoft known as MS08-067. This virus has a unique design which can receive further orders to wreak havoc. This worm has affected some of the corporate networks in Europe, Asia And US.

It infects by searching for an executable file called "services.exe" and then becomes a part of that code. Once it becomes a part, it generates a list of possible domains and then uses one of the domain to reach a malicious server, from which it downloads additional malware to install on the hijacked PC.

Experts find it difficult to shut it down as it uses a complicated algorithm to create hundreds of new domains.
Its new version has infected more than 6 million Windows PCs in this week.

You can remain unaffected by downloading Windows latest security patches.

Ice Slurry

2008-09-30T21:06:00.000-07:00

Ice slurry is an equal mix of ultra-small ice particles and a salt water liquid carrier. Originally, it was developed in the mid-1980s for industrial applications, particularly to replace the chilled-water cooling systems in building complexes.

Ice slurries contain ice particles that have a very high cooling capacity which is five to seven times the cooling capacity of chilled water. People suffering from cardiac arrests outside of the hospital have a lower recovery rate as their brain cells start dying rapidly 10 to 12 min after an arrest, because of the lack of blood flow to the brain. Beyond this time, the person cannot make a full recovery, even if the heart can be restarted, the person is brain dead.

Recovery rate can be improved if we are cooling the brain, using ice slurry. An ice slurry fills the lungs and if necessary, the area surrounding the carotid arteries. The blood passing through these is rapidly cooled. Chest compressions send the cooled blood to the brain. Ice slurry is injected in the body to induce rapid internal cooling.

Research shows that the ice slurry can cool the brain by 10.8 degree Fahrenheit within 10 minutes thus reducing or even stopping the damage done to the brain. Ice slurries have thus gained vital importance in the field of medicine.

Pykrete - "The Ice Concrete"

2008-09-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

Pykrete, also known as Ice Concrete, is an unusually strong substance made from sawdust and water. It was invented by Max Perutz. It is named as pykrete, in honour of Geoffrey Pyke, a British scientist. It is made by mixing approximately 14% sawdust or wood pulp and 86% water by weight and then frozen.The resulting material is strong and non-brittle. It has some interesting properties over pure ice.

It has a slow melting rate. Vastly improved strength and toughness, which is closer to concrete. It can float on water. It is also resistant to flame. It has a crush resistance of greater than 21 megapascals. Even a 25 mm column could support the weight of a typical car. The wood pulp makes the pykrete stable at higher temperatures and imparts it so much strength that even if a .303 caliber bullet is fired at the pykrete, it will penetrate only 16cm.

The biggest use of pykrete was made in World War II, in the construction of a 2 Million Ton Aircraft carrier. The concept was to use reinforced ice to cheaply construct ships that would be virtually unsinkable and relatively resistant to submarine attacks. The project was named as "Project Habbakuk". Unfortunately the project was never put into action due to the lack of funds. Since WWII pykrete has remained a scientific curiosity, unexploited by research or construction of any significance. New concepts for pykrete however crop up occasionally among architects, engineers and futurists, usually regarding its potential for mammoth offshore construction or its improvement by applying super-strong materials such as synthetic composites or Kevlar.

LHC - The atom smasher

2008-09-09T01:58:00.000-07:00

LHC stands for "Large Hadron Collider". It is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. It is a 27-kilometer ring buried deep below the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

This huge project is being managed by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research.

"LHC" is designed to produce head on collisions between two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. These beams will be made to travel through a vacuum, comparable to outer space. A proton in a beam will make thousands and thousands of turns per second, thus generating about 800 million collisions per second.

The collisions can lead to extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the physical universe and can also shed some light on some of the science's most controversial topics the origins of mass, dark matter,hidden symmetries of the universe and new dimensions of space.

It is estimated that about 12-14 petabytes of data will be generated each year. Thousands of scientists around the world will collaborate, on the analysis of such huge amount of data, through a distributed computing network called the Grid, which will consist of tens of thousands of computers located around the world.

The first collision will take place on September 10, may 2008. There are rumors that the Cern's atom-smasher could create "mini black holes" that will grow exponentially and eat the planet from inside.

Digital Photo Frame

2008-09-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

DPF (Digital photo frame) is a picture frame that displays digital photos. It can display JPEG pictures, multimedia content and text files. It can also play MP3 audio files. Sizes may range from 5 to 10 inches.

A digital photo frame consists of three main parts, the LCD-panel, the PCB and the outside frame. The panels can vary in size. The PCB includes the device's software.

DPF's today come with an internal memory of up to 1GB-2GB, allowing you to store more snaps. They also support USB ports for PC connectivity and for inserting pen drives. They also offer memory card slots, for SD cards, CMF, MS, MMC, XD, CompactFlash and Memory Sticks too.

Many new advanced DPF's support wireless (802.11) connections or Wi-Fi. With this they can transfer data to the onboard memory, they can load pictures over the Internet from RSS feeds or other photo sharing websites like Flickr.

Beware of low cost digital frames as they might contain a computer Trojan Horse, a virus, embedded in their firmware.

Google Chrome

2008-09-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

Finally Google has launched the beta version of its new free web brower, Google Chrome. It is the first true Web 2.0 brower. Chrome is a very pure browser design because of its completely modular architecture,that gives it an edge over other browsers. It is a browser with sophiscated technology to make web, faster, safer and easier.

Earlier browers were designed to handle only text and graphics, but Chrome can handle video rich and other complex web programs.This browesr uses simplicity and some clever new features to bring web surfing into the 21st century.

Chrome eats more memory because of its each-tab-is-separate design. It opens a separate instance of the browser for each tab, a design that is used used to segregate tabs, and the sites on them, so that if one crashes the browser as a whole does not.

Chrome is only available for PCs, efforts are being made to make versions for Apple Macintosh users and for Linux devices.

MOSES

2008-08-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

It is a $7bn government-funded scheme, to save the magnificent city Venice, the pride of all Italy.

Venice is a city on stilts. Built on 117 small islands in the middle of a lagoon, that flows into the Adriatic Sea. Venice has sunk around 23cm into the surrounding lagoon during the past 100 years and high waters are submerging the city's streets and piazzas with increasing frequency.

This huge responsibility of keeping Venice from drowning, is on the shoulders of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (CVN), a private consortium of engineers and architects. The CVN's solution to this problem,is the Mo.S.E. (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico or Experimental Electromechanical Module) Project. It involves the construction of a set of 79 mobile floodgates. These steel barriers are up to five metres wide and 28 metres high.

These 300-ton gates are designed to lie flat on the seabed, to let normal tides in and out. They are inactive, filled with water and hidden from view. When a tide of one meter is forecast, air will be injected into these gates, pushing out the water and causing the gates to rise. As a result the gates will separate the lagoon from the Adriatic sea. As the tide drops, the gates will be refilled with water and return to rest on the seabed.

There were fears that closing the lagoon for long periods will cause it to stagnate, thus damaging marine life. To overcome such environmental challenges many new complementary projects were implemented by the CVN to defend the city.

Ice Cube

2008-08-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

The Ice Cube is a $272 million project carried out by an international team of scientists, engineers and technicians, working under the harsh Antarctic conditions, at the South Pole. It is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through the planets.

When the novel telescope is completed in the next several years, a cubic kilometer of ice at the “bottom of the world” will provide a new eye into the heavens and some of the most distant and violent events in the cosmos. The telescope, is an international effort involving more than 20 institutions.

It is an unusual telescope in many respects. It is buried a mile down in the Antarctic ice sheet, rather than situated at the surface. IceCube looks down, into the earth, rather than up into the sky. Finally, the "light" seen by this telescope is composed of individual fundamental particles called neutrinos.

IceCube will search for neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.

The Ice Cube telescope is a powerful tool to search for dark matter, and it could reveal new physical processes associated with the enigmatic origin of the highest energy particles in nature.

Knol

2008-07-24T00:36:00.000-07:00

It is an online-publishing service, launched by Google. It allows users to write an authoritative article about a specific topic. The topics may range from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.

They will provide all the easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and will also provide free hosting of the content. The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors. All the editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. Here you can also collaborate with other authors and contribute. You also get an oppurtunity to make money by selecting the show ads option.

This service is likely to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia, whose articles tend to rank highly in Google search results. Knol is a potential competitor to Wikipedia.

Frog that breathes through skin

2008-04-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

This aquatic frog, known as Barbourula kalimantanensis, is found in a remote Borneo stream in Indonesia. It doesn't have any lungs.It absorbs the oxygen through the skin. It is an endangered frog, because of the excessive mining, in the area, that has destroyed all suitable habitat, in the vicinity. Normally amphibians are more prone to lunglessness, as they have developed, other methods of gas exchange.

Two faced miracle

2008-04-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

This cute little baby girl is born in saini village near noida, New Delhi, India.This child is the rarest of the rare case, having conjoining on the brain, nasal cavity, spine, abdomen, kidneys and bones. She is born as a healthy normal child, with no complications. Doctors, still couldn't believe, that the child was born normal, with no complications. They are checking out her conjoined parts, to avoid any sort of danger in the future. Born with such special features, the senior members of her village believe that the child possesses divine powers.

SMS 2.0

2008-04-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

It is a new short message service application that is launched by Affle, a UK based firm. In this, a banner ad will be displayed at the bottom of the screen, as the user types his message. This banner ad, will be displayed on the entire screen, when the message is being sent. This application, offers some cool features, like colorful SMSes and a stream of emotions along with access to a lot of information like news, jokes, movies and many more
and that to free of charge. This application, is currently being tested by Airtel and is compatible, with only higher-end Nokia handsets. This application, has opened a new door of opportunities, for the telecom giants in the advertising world.

The Moroccan foal

2008-03-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

A mule is the hybrid of a horse and a donkey and should be sterile. Scientifically speaking a horse has 64 chromosomes and a donkey has 62, so a mule is left with 63, an uneven number which cannot divide into chromosome pairs. This should make a mule unable to reproduce. But in this case the 14-year-old mother mule gave birth to a male foal in a hamlet, deep in rural Morocco. The Moroccan foal(young horse or a pony) looks a bit like a baby donkey and a bit like a baby mule - but not exactly like either.

Thomas Beatie

2008-03-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

The dramatic picture of a bearded, apparently pregnant, Beatie has sparked horror in tabloid and conservative circles and some are claiming it is a hoax. Thomas Beatie, 34, is a transgender man, born in Hawaii as Tracy Lagondino. She underwent a sex change, which involved regular injections of testosterone, and having his breasts surgically removed, but keeping his female reproductive organs and legally became a man. He stopped his twice-weekly hormone injections, allowed his periods to return, and tried for a baby. A first attempt, ended in a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. Doctors have expressed concern, at the possible effect of testosterone, on the unborn child. He halted his bi-weekly testosterone, did not take any extra oestrogen, progesterone or fertility drugs to aid his pregnancy and after four months his menstrual cycle began again. Now, following anonymous sperm donation and home insemination,he is pregnant again and is due to give birth to a baby girl in July.

Eyeball Tattoos

2008-02-29T10:18:00.000-08:00

This is the first ever "eyeball tattoo" that has been inflicted on a man in Toronto. The tattooer injected ink into the eyeball of volunteer. Unstoppable using a needle, until his eye was completely blue. The blue substance used is mixed with antibiotic eyewash.
This procedure was extensively researched and done by people who were aware of the risks and possible complications and that it should not be casually attempted.

GEEP

2008-02-22T04:29:00.000-08:00

This rare hybrid, known as "GEEP", was born when a Goat mated with a Sheep. This creature has a lamb's shape and a goat's fur and colouring. This rare hybrid was born in Klaus Exsternbrink's farm in northern Germany. Known as "Lisa the geep", she has the agile back legs and coloring of a goat, but her stature and shape is that of a sheep. The mother has so far been raising Lisa with no hesitation. Scientists still don't know, whether or not, it will produce sheep or goat milk, and if it's drinkable.

Donated Blood and Nitric Oxide

2007-10-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

It is found that, patients who receive blood transfusions, have higher incidents of heart attacks, heart failure, stroke and even death.

This is because, the blood that has been donated to them, from the blood banks, might have lost, some of its life-saving properties, as an important gas nitric oxide, dissipates, as soon as the red blood cells leave the body of the donor.

Nitric oxide plays a key role, in transferring oxygen in the blood, to the tissues. If somehow, the level of nitric oxide is restored, at any point in the blood, the red blood cells will be again able to, open blood vessels and deliver oxygen to the tissues.

Researchers, are finding ways to safely add nitric oxide, back into banked blood, to improve its effectiveness.

Medical Massage Robot

2007-10-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

This is WAO-1(Waseda Asahi Oral Rehabilitation Robot 1), built by researchers of Waseda University in Tokyo and Asahi University in Gifu City.
WAO-1 was built to give therapeutic facial massages, to patients with jaw-related problems, oral dryness and swalloing disorders.
The robot's arms are fitted with, ceramic golf ball-sized spheres, that roll over the skin. The arms' movements, are controlled by a complex set of algorithms, designed to emulate massages, while six sensors at the base of the arms measure and adjust the pressure applied by the spheres.
WAO-1 can also be deployed in spas to give beauty and relaxation massages.

PIVO 2

2007-10-07T02:53:00.000-07:00

This is PIVO 2, Nissan Motor's new concept vehicle. The car is battery powered and its cabin can rotate 360 degrees, making its front door accessible from any direction. The vehicle does not have axles, so it can drive sideways and squeeze into tight parking spaces, due to the 90-degree turning capability of the Pivo2's wheels.
It has a round-eyed robot head, that pops from the dashboard. It is programmed to calm drivers caught in heavy traffic or help motorists stay awake. The robot's sensors detect facial expressions and interpret a person's mood. If the person appears sleepy, the robot can even locate a coffee shop.