The camera behind Virtual Earth Birds eye view

In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual Earth's Birds eye view. One of the reasons this was possible was due to new camera used for these excellent high resolution images - Ultracamx. UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420 pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.

Seating for Squares: The Box Bench ...

Not necessarily inviting unless you like testing your balance, the Box bench nonetheless offers some cutting-edge design and uncomplicated style. Designed by Cread Estudi for the Spanish firm Ferfor, this square-inspired seating might work best in public places where you know the wait time is short and you won't be gingerly balanced atop a thick bar for very long. Who knows? They might actually be comfortable (sure). Perhaps the designer incorporated the desired ergonomic angle for the perfect lean back (looks doubtful, though).

skinny mini

Comfort aside, I think the gaping hole where support usually exists might need to be addressed for safety's sake, especially if kids are involved. They might just fall right through! As for the more cushioned booties, the scenario is equally grim. I can see this news of the weird now: "While waiting for their flight, passenger gets stuck in newfangled airport seating, with rear end dangling out one end, limbs flailing wildly through the other. Authorities are summoned with power tools for rescue..."

Regardless of my wild imaginings, this futuristic seating arrangement is definitely slick, but in terms of comfort the proof is in the pudding of testing it out.

Novate via the design blog

Brake-Lights of the Future

When a car's brake lights come on in front of you, especially at night, your mind has to process quite a few things. Are they coming to a complete stop? Are they slowing abruptly or gradually? Will I have enough space? A new design from Virginia Technical Institute takes almost all of the guess work out for you and should hopefully make the roads a little safer.

The new concept has been dubbed "Smart Brake Lights." By using a pressure sensor on the braking system, the computer can determine how hard you are applying the brakes. This information is the transmitted to the control unit for the light bar.

Only Image I Could Find

When you apply the "expected" amount of pressure on the pedal, the inside portion of the bar will illuminate orange. When a threshold of pressure has been reached, the outside portions of the bar will illuminate bright red. If you are making an emergency stop, the entire bar will flash red in an attempt to get your attention.

Team leader, Professor Mehdi Ahmadian, hopes to find a more cost effective way to produce the system and eventually see them standard on new vehicles. All I can say is, if everything does go through, driving at night will be much more fun.

Source : VirginiaTech

It's a Bird, It's a Plane ... No, It's a Camera!

If you see something that looks like four hula hoops attached together with some sort of weird contraption in the middle hovering in the sky, don't automatically assume that it's a UFO.

Sure, the aliens have probably been slowly infiltrating our unsuspecting planet for many years now, but for a moment, put that thought aside. That device you see buzzing about might just be the Aeryon Scout, a new product from Aeryon Labs of Waterloo that is actually a flying camera.

The Aeryon Scout

The device consists of four connected foam rings with a roter inside. Attached to its bottom is a camera.

Why would anyone make such a weird thing, you ask? Well, the makers of the Aeryon Scout say the intent is to fly the camera via remote control to take pictures of places where it's too difficult, dangerous or time consuming to go.

The company hopes to sell its invention to police forces, security companies and surveying and engineering firms. No doubt the paparazzi will also be lining up to buy the product so they can snap those hard-to-get photos of Beyonce or Salma Hayek. For the ladies, how about George Clooney or Brad Pitt?

Aeryon was founded by Steffen Lindner, 39, Dave Kroetsch, 28, and Mike Peasgood, 34. "I've always liked engineering and building stuff," Kroetsch, Aeryon's president, told The Record newspaper, based in Ontario. "As rewarding as it was to build chips for DVD players, it's not as fun as building something that flies around."

Source: The Record and Aeryon Labs

Brilliant Idea! A Cell Phone Defibrillator - Innovation for saving lives

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is responsible for more deaths every year than AIDS, breast cancer, lung cancer and stroke combined. Sudden cardiac arrest means that, without warning, the heart stops beating. If the heart is not defibrillated (therapeutically shocked) within a few minutes, the victim dies. Imagine how difficult it is to reach the victims of SCA in time to save their lives. In fact, 95 percent of victims die as a direct result of SCA.

But suppose we all carried our own personal defibrillators? What if defibrillators became a feature of our cell phones?

Just that brilliant idea is addressed in Benjamin Sacketkhou's international patent application entitled "Wireless Communication Device With Integrated Defibrillator," published in December 2007.

Sudden cardiac arrest is caused by an interruption in the heart's electrical system, causing the heart to stop beating, or pumping blood. If the heart is not "jump started" within a few minutes after SCA, the victim will die. Automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) can be used with minimal training by most adults to restart the victim's heart, and many public buildings and transportation systems have them, but access to them may be too late.

Although many persons, including professional athletes in their seeming "physical primes," have no advance warning before an sudden cardiac arrest, almost half of SCA victims have had episodes of cardiac arrhythmia or heat attacks. Cardiac arrhythmias can be curtailed by defibrillator implants (formerly "pacemakers"), but they are not advised for all cardiac patients.

What Mr. Sacketkhou describes in his patent application is a GPS device, such as a cell phone, with a component part of an automatic external defibrillator, that a user could

1) attach, by electrical pads, to his or her chest to detect any occuring arrhythmia.

2) Such device would automatically check for the necessity of a therapeutic shock,

3) automatically deliver the therapeutic shock to the heart,

4) and automatically notify the nearest emergency professionals as to the victim's whereabouts though the cell phone (GPS system).

If the defibrillator wires are not attached to the victim, a passerby could observe the cell phone, quickly employ the defibrillator, and set the same system into motion.

When you consider that just a few minutes is all you have to revive an SCA victim, a portable personal cell phone/defibrillator is just what the doctor ordered... and fast! Mr. Sacketkhou, please develop this invention!

via Register Hardware. Sources: "Wireless Communication Device With Integrated Defibrillator," Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Great Invention Idea? A New Twist on Skating and Water-Sking

The advancements of the last thirty years have raised the invention stakes for everyone. What's wrong with that, you ask? Nothing, except that this often results in the less creative among us churning out mediocre or bad ideas when they could be doing something much more productive, like removing shopping carts from the parking lot at a local Wal-Mart! In my opinion, the following two patented inventions illustrate this point exactly.

The kneeling skates, designed by a fellow who loves to skate but was put off by the fact he couldn't wear his skates in restaurants or shops, enables skaters to enjoy their favorite activity and when the time comes simply stand up and walk into any establishment. As for shoes, you can wear any ordinary pair of shoes because the skates come with rubber pads to protect your shoes, which also serve as your brakes. Sounds good to you? Maybe. But I have to wonder why this clever guy didn't just outfit a pair of shoes to resemble those sneakers kids are wearing with the retractable wheels?

Not as Cool as Inline Skates

Of course, from a practical perspective I get the United States patent for Propulsion Sticks: these motorized paddles are used for water skiers who don't have access to a ski boat. The trouble is I've actually water-skied and I don't see how these things could ever really work. First of all, they'd have to go really fast to lift a skier out of the water. As a result, they'd have to be pretty heavy or the speed of the sticks would cause them to come out of the water and fly out of the skier's hands. And who wants to go to the beach carrying a couple of anchors anyway?

Looks like Ethel Merman, not Ethel Mermaid

Besides, water-skiing is a social sport. It's something we do in groups. We all pitch in, get a boat and some beers, then laugh and make fun of the person bobbing in the water like a buoy because the person driving the boat has got a sense of humor! If you've got to ski solo it's just not worth it. And it's a little sad too.

Skating, on the other hand, is a solo sport. Although it can be done in pairs or groups, skating with equipment that makes you look like Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," practically guarantees the skater a solo status, which I suspect they are already accustomed to.

I admit, both of these ideas aren't bad, they just seem self-serving. What do you think?

Scientists Find Mixing is Key to Turning Manure into Biogas

Researchers have taken another step toward turning animal waste into biogas on a large scale.

Farmers have long called the odor of farm waste "the smell of money" in hopes of converting it into a practical energy supply. Animal waste can produce methane, which can be used directly for energy or converted to either methanol or a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This synthetic mix can then be converted to clean fuels.

In the new study, led by Muthanna Al-Dahhan of Washington University, researchers have found that the manure must be thoroughly mixed when being treated in large reactors called anaerobic digesters. In anaerobic digesters, bacteria is used to break down organic matter without oxygen. Lack of adequate mixing may be one of the main reasons why more than 75% of the 100 anaerobic digester facilities in the US have failed.

As Al-Dahhan explained, turning waste into energy could have a double benefit of minimizing the amount of toxic methane that enters the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas considered 22 times worse than carbon dioxide.

"Each year livestock operations produce 1.8 billion tons of cattle manure," Al-Dahhan said. "If it sits in fields, the methane from the manure is released into the atmosphere, or it can cause ground water contamination, dust or ammonia leaching, not to mention bad odors. Treating manure by anaerobic digestion gets rid of the environmental threats and produces bioenergy at the same time. That has been our vision."

The final goal, Al-Dahhan says, is to both scale up and simplify the conversion process in order to develop a system that farmers can use on-site for bioenergy production and farm waste management.

Darwins - On the Origin of Species - Audio Exert....

On the Origin of Species
Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. 1st edition, 1st issue. Text Image Text & Image F373 In 21 mp3 files: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.

They don’t know cricket, but know their business

Geoffrey Hampson doesn’t know much of the rules of cricket. But, as the CEO of the Vancouver-based Live Current Media group, he pulled off a major coup by upstaging many mainstream media companies and bagging a $50 million (Rs 200 crore) contract to host the IPL’s online content.
“I don’t understand the sport completely but I do have some good tutors,” the 50-year old Hampson said on a lighter note when asked how he got interested in his company's biggest ever single deal.
“I’m picking up the basics of the game and have some people of Indian descent in the company to help me understand the nuances,” he told the Hindustan Times in a phone interview. Until Thursday, the 22-employee company was unknown in India. It was quite a surprise when the IPL and the LCM announced they had inked a 10-year-deal on online content.

The LCM will manage and run two websites to generate revenue, IPLT20.com and BCCI.tv. The IPLT20.com was launched on Friday.

According to the LCM, now fans from around the world can have complete access to the 44-day long season. The site offers access to official league content including audio-visual content, photographs, live scoreboards and summaries, match results, Fantasy Cricket, player interviews, profiles, schedules, statistics, ticketing and fan interaction through polls, contests and newsletters.

As per the terms of the deal, LCM will make a guaranteed payment of $5m a year — $3m for the BCCI and a separate $2m for the IPL — for the online rights. After that, revenue will be shared between the partners based on advertising, sponsorship and merchandise sales through the two websites.

It will be a social networking site revolving around the cricket sport. It would also have a fantasy cricket application for Facebook. The video footage and pictures of the IPL fixtures will be for sale on the website, however no live streaming of games will be offered.

Hampson said that the big numbers of $5 million a year made business sense. “We are very confident of the commerce part of the deal.” He added that there was a tough bidding process involved in clinching the deal but LCM's ownership of cricket.com definitely played a positive role. The LCM thrives on its assets — some of the most sought after web addresses online. The company owns about 800 web addresses, of which 30 are premium names, including cricket.com, boxing.com, karate.com, brazil.com, indonesia.com, greatbritain.com, malaysia.com, vietnam.com, body.com, number.com, leisure.com, call.com, electronic.com and one of the largest e-commerce sites, called perfume.com, which alone generates $10 million revenue a year.

Hampson said that the LCM's major focus is “building destination hubs for passionate people. When we were expanding our horizons, the passion in India about cricket led us to the country. It was at a time IPL was shaping up. We approached them and the rest is history.”

This is the company's first foray into the Indian market and it hopes to bring the North American model of e-commerce — by which online shoppers pay a premium to buy memorabilia and autographed items through a licensed vendor, to India.

Men from Mars, women from Venus? Not really

London (PTI): They say men are from Mars and women from Venus, but new research at Oxford says they may both actually be both from the same planet.

While males and females might sometimes act as though they come from different planets, the new study in flies suggests they are both equipped with a largely unisex brain.

Remote control of fruit flies' sexual behaviour has revealed that male courtship tricks lie dormant in the female brain.

Male fruit flies 'sing' to attract females, vibrating one wing to produce a distinctive sound which females react to by allowing copulation.

Professor Gero Miesenbock of Oxford University has shown that female fruit flies can be made to 'sing' too, using a revolutionary technique that he developed whilst at Yale which allows the remote control of brain circuits with light.

"You might expect that the brains of the two sexes would be built differently, but that does not seem to be the case," says Miesenbock.

"Instead, it appears there is a largely bisexual or 'unisex brain' with a few critical switches that make the difference between male and female behaviour," he adds.

Miesenbock and colleagues had previously pioneered a powerful new research method that allowed them to trigger certain actions in flies from a distance by shining a laser beam on them.
The flies were genetically engineered so that only the neurons of interest were made responsive to light. When the laser flashed it activated these neurons, thus provoking certain behaviours, such as jumping, walking, and flying away.

In the recent research, Miesenbock and colleagues used the technique to investigate the 'singing' courtship behaviour.

The set of neurons that control this behaviour make the products of the fru (or 'fruitless') gene a key sex-determining factor in the nervous system. Using the laser method, the researchers could 'switch on' the specific neuronal circuits responsible for this courtship behaviour (the fru neurons) and cause the males to go about their wooing.

Miesenbock was interested to see whether they could do the same in females. If they could, it would show that the neuronal circuitry for male behaviour exists in female brains and simply lies dormant.

The researchers could indeed produce the behaviour in females although the 'song' was not quite as good as the males.

"The fact that we could make females vibrate one wing to produce a courtship song a behaviour never before seen in female flies shows that the brain circuits for this male behaviour are present in the female brain, even though they are never used for that purpose," says Miesenbock.

"One obvious question is why females possess this brain circuitry at all. It's possible that the circuitry overlaps with circuitry used for other behaviours," he says. "But the mystery at the root of our study is the neuronal basis of differences in male and female behaviour. Anatomically, the differences are subtle. How is it that the neural equipment is so similar, but the sexes behave so differently?

"Our findings suggest that flies must harbour key nodes or 'master switches' that set the whole system to the male or female mode. Our next goal is to find those controls," he says

Interact with Microsoft Surface through AT&T

At AT&T’s Experience Store in San Bruno, the network operator has announced the availability of the latest outstanding innovation in the field of computing, called Microsoft Surface. Users can explore and interact with devices by using the sense of touch.

People in the United States are invited to interact with Microsoft surface in four different cities that includes Atlanta, San Antonio, San Francisco, and New York.

It includes a 30-inch screen embedded in an acrylic tabletop and has the ability to recognize and display the information of gadgets that are placed on the Surface. Mobile Phones, Camera and many other devices can be placed for multi-touch gestures recognition. To make it simple to understand, when you place a gadget on the place surface, it shows barcode-like tags to identify and present information about it.

With the included camera, the Surface has the capability to read gestures and also respond to different hand motions and movements like push/pull (dragging), zoom, rotate.

“We are thrilled to bring this groundbreaking new technology to our stores so we can introduce customers to their mobile worlds in a very personal and easy way. We look forward to working with Microsoft to continue developing new ways for our customers to learn about the ever-growing lineup of mobile devices and applications,” explained Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T mobility.

Interestingly, it ensures multiple users, multiple simultaneous gestures along with different viewing angles utilizing a 360-degree UI and object sensing functionality.

AT&T is the first company to present Microsoft Surface in its stores. In AT&T stores, there are 22 devices installed.

Darwin’s theory goes online - AFP

LONDON - The original version of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has been published online among a "treasure trove" of the scientist’s papers, photographs and other documents.

Some 20,000 items contained in around 90,000 images were published on the Internet, according to a spokesman for Cambridge University, the scholar’s old academic home.

Chief among them was the first draft of Darwin’s "The Origin of Species", produced in the 1840s, which eventually led to the publication of his most well-known work in 1859.

"This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free," said John van Wyhe, the director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online project.

"The release of his papers online marks a revolution in the public’s access to - and hopefully appreciation of - one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science," he added, describing the collection as a "treasure trove".

Along with "The Origin of Species" and other scientific papers, the collection includes photographs of him and his family, reviews of his books, newspaper clippings, as well as material revealing his home life, notably a recipe for boiling rice, inscribed in Darwin’s own handwriting.

Among the scientific papers available are notes from his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle, a five-year journey which started in 1831 and took Darwin to South America and Australia, where he collected huge numbers of samples of fossils and living organisms.

It provided the basis for much of his future work and brought him success and celebrity on his return to Britain.

Darwin produced evidence to show that mankind originated through evolutionary change effected by natural selection and his findings are now considered central to our understanding of biology.

The collection can be found at http://darwin-online.org.uk/.

Greenland's ice largely unmoved by melt water - By Alok Jha, science correspondent

Guardian News Service: Fears that the rapid draining of water from the top of Greenland's ice sheet may be contributing to the rise of global sea levels have been allayed by new research. Though scientists confirmed that the water can drain away faster than Niagara Falls, it did not seem to accelerate the movement of the ice sheet into the ocean as previously thought.

Receding ice sheets are of major concern to climate scientists because the melting water could lead to a rise in sea levels. In addition, the melting can encourage feedback mechanisms that amplify the warming effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: ice and snow reflect sunlight, so less of them means more heat is absorbed by the Earth. Observations have already shown that the speed at which glaciers at the edge of Greenland are moving into the sea has doubled in the past two decades.

Thousands of lakes form on top of Greenland's glaciers every summer due to the increased sunlight and warmer air. Satellite observations have shown that these lakes often disappear, often in as little as a day, but no one knew where the water was going or how quickly it moved.
When these lakes were first discovered in recent years, experts became concerned that the melting water might make its way to the base of the ice and lubricate the Greenland ice sheet's passage into the sea, which would contribute to a global sea-level rise. In a warming world, more lakes are expected to form on Greenland, raising the possibility that the entire ice sheet will melt more quickly than expected.

But the new research, published today (APRIL18) in the magazine Science, has cast doubt on that theory.

Sarah Das, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, led a study that monitored the evolution of two surface lakes on Greenland in the summers of 2006 and 2007. Using aerial surveys and satellite imagery, they monitored the lakes and tracked the progress of glaciers moving toward the coast.

She said the most impressive drainage event occurred in July 2006, when most of a 5.6 sq km lake holding 11.6bn gallons of water emptied in just 90 minutes. The scientists estimated the average flow rate to be more than that of Niagara Falls. Underneath the lake, the ice sheet was raised and began moving horizontally at twice the average daily rate.

But her team also found that, when considered over the whole year, the surface meltwater was responsible for only a few per cent of the movement of the glaciers that they monitored. Even at its peak, it appeared to contribute only 15%, and often less, to the annual movement of the outlet glaciers at the edge of Greenland.

"Considered together, the new findings indicate that while surface melt plays a substantial role in ice sheet dynamics, it may not produce large instabilities leading to sea level rise," says Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington. "There are still other mechanisms that are contributing to the current ice loss and likely will increase this loss as climate warms."

"To influence flow, you have to change the conditions underneath the ice sheet, because what's going on beneath the ice dictates how quickly the ice is flowing," said Das. "If the ice sheet is frozen to the bedrock or has very little water available, then it will flow much more slowly than if it has a lubricating and pressurised layer of water underneath to reduce friction ... It's hard to envision how a trickle or a pool of meltwater from the surface could cut through thick, cold ice all the way to the bed.

For that reason, there has been a debate in the scientific community as to whether such processes could exist, even though some theoretical work has hypothesised this for decades."

Glacial ice is second only to the oceans as the largest reservoir of wateron the planet, and 10% of the Earth's glacial ice is found in Greenland.

The west Antarctic ice sheet is also increasing the rate at which it is losing mass. In a recent interview with the London-based Guardian, leading Nasa climate scientist Jim Hansen said the ice sheets' increased shrinking meant that the world's targets for reduction of carbon emissions were not stringent enough. "If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century," he said.

Hansen said recently that the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02, already the most stringent in the world, should be cut to 350ppm if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed".

Space station astronauts land off-target, but safely

By Tariq Malik, SPACE.com


Smoke rises where the Soyuz capsule, carrying South Korea's first astronaut, Yi So-yeon, astronaut Peggy Whitson, cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko, landed in northern Kazakhstan. The capsule landed 295 miles off course, but safely.

The International Space Station's (ISS) first female commander and two crewmates are safely back on Earth, but landed well short of their intended landing site as they capped a marathon mission to the orbiting laboratory.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft ferrying Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson, of NASA, and her crew to Earth touched down about 295 miles short of its target zone on the central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan.

"The crew is alive and well. The landing was nominal, but by a backup design," said Anatoly Perminov, chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency, after the 4:30 a.m. ET landing on Saturday. "It was a ballistic descent and all the cosmonauts are feeling fine."

A ballistic re-entry is one in which a Soyuz re-enters at a steeper than normal angle that subjects astronaut crews to higher forces of gravity, NASA officials said.

Cosmonauts returning from the space station last fall also experienced a ballistic re-entry, as did the crew of Expedition 6 in 2003.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Texas Europe Japan Houston South Korea Columbus Kazakhstan Discovery International Space Station Peggy Whitson Kibo Yuri Malenchenko Expedition Garrett Reisman Steve Lindsey Federal Space Agency Anatoly Perminov Oleg Kononenko Sergei Volkov
Whitson returned home alongside Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, an Expedition 16 flight engineer, after a six-month mission that added new science and living space to the $100 billion station. South Korea's first astronaut, 29-year-old bioengineer So-yeon Yi, also accompanied the Expedition 16 crew to conclude her own 10-day spaceflight to the ISS.

Malenchenko, as Soyuz commander, used a satellite phone to contact recovery forces to relay that the crew was in good health.

"We went through the same thing on Expedition 6," said Steve Lindsey, NASA's chief astronaut who planned to greet Whitson at the original landing site. "Of course we didn't hear from them for awhile, so we were concerned. But eventually we got word that they were located so that's real good news."

Recovery teams located the Soyuz crew about 45 minutes after its scheduled landing with a complement of flight surgeons to begin traditional post-landing health checks, Lindsey added.

Back on Earth

Russian space officials promised an in-depth investigation to hunt down the source of the ballistic landing. Meanwhile, Expedition 16 crewmembers were eager to readapt to life on Earth.

"We've really had a very exciting mission," Whitson said this week. "And to have done so much, it was more than we could have asked for."

While she was not looking forward to returning to Earth's gravity after months of weightlessness, Whitson said she was eager for a wider variety of food at mealtimes and getting back to her roots, literally, at her home in Houston, Texas.

"I really like working in my garden and planting flowers," Whitson said. "It's about the right time in Houston to be doing that."

Whitson set a new spaceflight record on Expedition 16 for the most cumulative time spent in space by an American.

Today's landing ended a 192-day flight to the station, giving Whitson a career total of 377 days in space during Expedition 16 and her Expedition 5 flight in 2002. She is now 20th in the ranks of the world's most experienced spaceflyers, though Malenchenko — with 515 days across four spaceflights — now ranks ninth on the list.

"It was a wonderful time," he said of the mission.

Space station expansion

Whitson and her crew began Expedition 16 at a sprint, hosting the first of three visiting NASA shuttle crews about two weeks after their October launch. By late November, shuttle and ISS astronauts had moved a massive solar power tower, performed seven spacewalks and some tricky robotic crane work to attach a new module to space station.

Two more shuttle flights, in February and March of this year, delivered Europe's $2 billion Columbus laboratory and a storage room for Japan's massive Kibo lab, which is slated to launch May 31 aboard the shuttle Discovery. Whitson and her crew also squeezed in extra spacewalks to inspect one solar wing joint and repair another.

"It's so large that I can actually lose crewmembers at times now," Whitson said of the space station before turning it over to its new skipper, Expedition 17 commander Sergei Volkov. "It's so neat, and I think we're ready for a six-person crew now."

Volkov — a second-generation cosmonaut — and Expedition 17 flight engineer Oleg Kononenko are beginning their own six-month mission alongside NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman. They launched with Yi on April 8.

"I feel confident going into Expedition 17 with Sergei and Oleg," said Reisman, who joined the station's Expedition 16 crew last month and is due to return home in June. "It's going to be an all rookie station. I think that's a first."

Yi, meanwhile, flew to the space station under a reported $25 million commercial agreement between her country and Russia's Federal Space Agency and performed a series of education and science experiments.

She was selected from among 36,000 applicants to serve as backup to South Korea's first astronaut, artificial intelligence expert San Ko, but moved to the prime crew last month after Russian space officials pulled Ko from the flight due to reading rule violations.

"As a woman of Korea, and just a person of Korea, I'm so honored to be the one who flew in space," Yi told reporters this week, adding that she took special care with experiments designed to spark interest in science among Korean youth. "I want to make them dream about space."

A challenging half-year
Despite its ambitious construction work, the Expedition 16 crew was not without challenges.

Whitson, Malenchenko and their crewmates tackled a torn solar wing, damaged solar array gears and shuttle launch delays that ultimately kept one Expedition 16 astronaut — NASA spaceflyer Dan Tani — in orbit while he grieved over the unexpected death of his mother in December. Tani returned to Earth two months later, in mid-February, during NASA's first shuttle mission of this year.

"I actually think some of my proudest moments of this mission have been how we handled the problems that have come up," Whitson said.

In just the last few weeks, Expedition 16 astronauts bid farewell to last month's visiting shuttle Endeavour crew, watched over the arrival of Europe's first-ever unmanned cargo ship Jules Verne, and welcomed their relief crew before preparing for the trip home.

"I was likening it the other day to Grand Central Station," said Reisman, adding that he initially expected some bouts of down time and isolation aboard the outpost. "There hasn't been any tedium up here, it's all been action packed. It's like the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of space missions."

Copyright 2007, SPACE.com Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Nerdic: The new language of geeks

Wimax, dongle and mashup. They might be unintelligible to technophobes, but they are just some examples of the colourful vocabulary of Europe's fastest-growing language: Nerdic.

Some call it "geek speak", others use the term "nerdic". Indeed, Pixmania, one of Europe's largest electronic internet retailers, said on Friday that nerdic is Europe's "fastest growing dialect". It claims more than 100 new words were added to the nerdic vocabulary in the past 12 months—more than three times the number the Oxford English Dictionary added to the English language. Researchers reckon it might be the next Esperanto. Remember Esperanto? The language designed to be a second "international" language for everyone never really took off.

So what is it? It's a catchy name for all that techno jargon that has bubbled up with the internet and which although once the preserve of internet boffins in their bedrooms, has now trickled down to ordinary tech-loving folk.

It's not a new notion that the geeky image of the internet and gadgetry is being eroded. Our consumer driven society has been fast to adopt the slogan "geek chic" and lust after every new iPod and camera phone available in the stores. And, as the technology is pretty new, a bunch of new terminology has sprung up to fill a vacuum in our languages.

Michael Brook, editor of T3 magazine, said: "The Technology Industry creates new words just as quickly as it comes up with new gadgets." But he said it was unlikely the nerdic dictionary was growing rapidly because many words to describe older technology had disappeared.

Stuart Miles, editor of gadget website Pocket-Lint.co.uk, said: "Technology has revolutionised the way we speak. With so many words and phrases being created all the time it's created a whole new way of communicating." Ulric Jerome, managing director of Pixmania.com, said: "It's exciting to see Nerdic bringing Europe together and by recognising Nerdic as an official language the UK will continue to help unite technology fans across Europe."

And some of the quirky terms in the Nerdictionary are—Alpha Geek: the most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group; Bandwidth: your ability to handle an excessive number of jobs at the same time. Cobweb: a website that hasn't been updated in a long, long time; Cube Farm: an office packed with cubicles full of busy workers; Doorstop: a computer no longer considered fast enough and only useful for keeping doors open.

Many Europeans reckon Nerdic has "the three core elements required to define a new language: words, phrases and pronunciation" and have applied to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to reco-gnise it as an official language.

Apple iPhone India Launch in September via Vodafone ??

The iPhone’s entry in India has been spoken about since long. And here is yet another - a speculation, a reality or just yet another run-on-the-mill story, you can make your choice!

When the Apple iPhone initially rolled out in June last year, many countries, including India, were said to be next in line to receive the official launch of the highly-anticipated next generation phone.

News about the iPhone’s launch in India is now doing the rounds of the internet. The news states that the iPhone will be out by the first week of September exclusively through Vodafone. The 8GB version of the much-awaited and hyped touch-screen phone might roll out in the country for a price ranging between Rs 27,200 and Rs 28,000.

Depending on the response of the 8GB iPhone, 16GB version of the handset would be made available in mid-2009. This news gained momentum due to Apple retail sources, which apparently stated that the iPhone is expected to launch in India through carrier Vodafone sometime in the first week of September 2008, according to a leading business daily.

When we got in touch with Apple Asia, the reply that we got was “Apple does not comment on rumors or speculation.”

Well if the iPhone officially launches in India, the illegal purchasing of the grey market unlocked version will reduce. However, the case might even get opposite as the locked version is expected to sell for 27,000, whereas the unlocked iPhone comes under Rs. 20,000.

Quote of the Day..

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life - Albert Einstein

Illuminating Change BoGo Lights in the Developing World - by Andrea Verdin

Imagine putting your child to bed and not being able to comfort her with a light in the hall. Imagine trying to help your child after work with his reading and not being able to make out the words on the page for lack of light in the room. In the Western world, a nightlight is nothing more than a source of comfort. Light to read by or to see another’s faces is taken for granted. However, for two billion people around the world, a nightlight is a necessity and the lack of one can be expensive and dangerous. With no other choices other than a kerosene lamp, a candle, or a single-use battery flashlight at their disposal, people in Africa, South America, and the Middle East risk their health and homes while straining their incomes to have access to precious light. And what if they simply cannot afford it? Then they sit in utter darkness.

Mark Bent, a former Marine and oil industry executive, went to Africa and saw the need for a source of light that wouldn’t just last for a few hours nor endanger the people using it. He felt a pull on his heart and said to himself, “I can’t do anything about world hunger; I can’t do anything about racism; I can’t do anything about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. But I can do something about lighting.’’

Bent and his corporation, Sunlight Solar, have come out with BoGo Light, a solar powered flashlight that will work for up to twenty years before it will need any parts replaced or repaired. The way the light works is by absorbing the sun’s energy from its solar side panels during the day, which then is converted into light emitting diodes, or LEDs. The LEDs power the light for two days before it needs to be recharged again.

For people who, in the past, have spent up to thirty percent of their income on kerosene for their lamps or up to half of their income on a flashlight that will only last for sixteen hours, these lamps are a godsend that not only provide light that is cheap, but also provide a safe way to add hours to their day without negatively impacting their health or security. One major group who will benefit from the use of BoGo Lights is school-aged children in the developing world. Kids who have spent an entire day in the fields have only a small amount of daylight in which to study before it gets dark. As a result, many of these children cannot learn to read, and therefore may never be able to escape a life of poverty. With just a little light, now they have a chance.

Kerosene lamps are not only costly, they’re also hazardous to the users’ health. According to the World Bank, 780 million people in the developing world, the majority of whom are women and children, are exposed to kerosene lantern fumes equivalent to ingesting two packs of cigarettes a day. More than two-thirds of lung cancer victims in the developing world are female, as women are the primary homemakers. Accidental fires kill or wound hundreds of thousands of families and countless homes are destroyed because of their widespread use. Now people in Angola, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, South America, Central America, and Haiti are able to have lights in their homes, and Bent has seen the difference this has made in their lives.

“I went to a refugee camp in Ethiopia where they had been using kerosene, and it would take up such a large portion of their incomes,” he said. “It was terrible. Not only for the user, but for the environment too. The BoGo Light has literally changed their lives.” Bent hopes his light will have an impact on people’s lifestyles in the United States as well.

“What we do with single-use flashlights in the United States is just plain stupid. The light industry functions because of planned obsolescence. We buy something knowing that in about fifteen hours, it’s not going to work anymore. The flashlight patent by Eveready Flashlights has not changed since 1984. The light model hasn’t been changed for over a hundred years, and to me, that’s ridiculous.”

According to the Energizer Corporation Website, six billion batteries are manufactured annually worldwide. And with a majority of these batteries being improperly disposed of, it is no wonder the EPA states that “the single largest source of mercury in garbage is household batteries, especially alkaline and button batteries.” Mercury carries the threat of causing brain and kidney damage after long-term exposure.

People who are environmentally conscious immediately see the benefits of owning a BoGo, considering the longevity of the LEDs (they last up to two years) and the shelf-life of its other parts. What Bent really wants people to understand, however, is that when they decide to be a little bit greener with their lifestyle, they’re also helping someone else receive the gift of light. For every BoGo Light bought, SunNight Solar will give an international assistance group like Feed the Children, Samaritan’s Purse or Invisible Children a light to give to someone in need along with the money needed to ship the light.

But the best is yet to come from SunNight.

Next month, the company will introduce a new BoGo model that is completely waterproof and has even more battery life. SunNight is also teaming up with the Rockefeller Group to come up with a bigger, stronger product that will light up an entire room and possibly ward off certain malaria-carrying mosquitoes in residences. For Bent, the ability to give people the chance to feel secure in their homes and give them the gift of light is a calling that lights up his life.

“I was in the oil industry, and I was very highly compensated, but I viewed God leading me this way,” he said. “I just had to do it. I had to make a change.”

For more information, visit the BoGo Light website at http://www.bogolight.com/. Andrea Verdin is a writer and San Diego native who’s slowly learning more about the changes that need to be made in the world, and is trying every day to make a difference. She can be reached by email at andeys3@gmail.com.

Quote of the Day and for days to come...

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires.

Albert Einstein

We've Been Changing the Climate for Eons, and That's Reason for Hope

Our epoch needs a new name. You're familiar with, say, the Jurassic? It started 200 million years ago and ended 55 million years later, give or take. For the past 12,000 years, we've been living in the Holocene. But in 2000, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen pitched a new name for our times: the Anthropocene, the epoch affected by people. He dated it to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s — in other words, when we started messing things up. William Ruddiman, a retired climatologist at the University of Virginia, likes the name Anthropocene, too. But he thinks it started much, much earlier — as far back as 6,000 BC, when human beings first discovered agriculture. That's when we started razing forests and burning lots of wood, pumping enough carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere to alter the world's climate.

What's the difference? Scientists still argue — though not as much as deniers would have you believe — about the extent to which climate change is the result of human activity. And they still argue — quite a lot, actually — about how quickly the climate shifts in response to new conditions. As I understand Ruddiman, we humans may have been screwing up the climate for far longer than anyone thought. But that's good — because if we could change things then, we should certainly be able to change them now.

The gist of Ruddiman's argument is that 8,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began their sharpest increase in 350,000 years — a CO2 spike that correlates with the origins of agriculture. Then, 5,000 years ago, methane levels jumped — at roughly the same moment humans started growing rice in paddies (organic matter decomposing in water emits methane). By 2,000 years ago, agriculture and forest-clearing had added as much as 140 billion tons of CO2 to the air, enough to stave off what would likely have been another ice age.

Since then, the climate has wiggled back and forth between warm and cold. Around AD 800, things got weirdly hot; Antarctic ice cores show atmospheric CO2 peaking then at 285 parts per million. Around 1300, CO2 levels started dropping, and by 1600 that number had decreased to as low as 275 ppm. According to Ruddiman, humans caused that nosedive, too — by dying in large numbers: In the 14th century, about one-third of Europe's population died in the Black Plague, and around the same time, some 50 million Native Americans were being wiped out by European germs. The much-reduced surviving population burned less wood and coal, grew less food, and even allowed wooded areas to grow back.

Today things are heating up again. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been on the steep incline of an exponential growth curve since 1800. Today they're at roughly 380 ppm. How high will temperatures rise as a result of so much carbon? We don't know. But the more you mess up the climate, the more feedback effects there are and the more chaotic it gets, until eventually we reach tipping points, when various important climatic systems — Arctic summer sea ice, for example, or the Indian summer monsoon — suddenly disappear or change dramatically.

But I see hope in Ruddiman's conclusions. If humans have been changing the climate for eight millennia, that means we can keep right on doing it. We can steer the climate back on course. (I should add that Ruddiman's hypothesis is controversial, and he himself interprets his findings much more conservatively.)

So what do we do? You already know the drill: Make machines more energy efficient. Use less fossil fuel. Sequester CO2. Protect rain forests. Develop alternative energy sources like wind and solar power. Build more nuclear plants. Maybe even change the planet through geoengineering, the once far-out idea that the greenhouse effect can be reversed by, say, releasing fleets of mirrors or sulfur particles into the atmosphere. Ruddiman suggests we focus on reducing the concentrations of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, by trapping emissions from landfills and changing the fertilizer used by rice farmers.

The point is, exhorting corporations and governments to act now isn't just ringing a rhetorical bell: We can rescue the globe's climatic system as abruptly as we can push it over the edge. And no matter what we call our current epoch, it would be nice if we kept the planet healthy enough to let us live to see the next one.

Peter Schwartz (peter_schwartz@gbn.com) is a cofounder and chair of the Global Business Network.