Sunday, October 18, 2009

NASA’s IBEX (or Interstellar Boundary Explorer) satellite, released into orbit last October, has provided the data for the first “all sky map” showing the boundary between the Solar System and Interstellar Space. IBEX mapped the sky using two sensors, gathering information about the particle structure within the Milky Way. This map should help researchers better understand relationships between the Sun and our Galaxy.

The particles which IBEX looks for are energetic neutral atoms, atoms with a neutral charge that release large amounts of energy in most directions. The best place to find these particles is in the Sun’s Heliosphere, where forces from outside our solar system interact with the Sun’s magnetic field, causing these particles to become highly energetic. Two sensors on IBEX detect and catalog this. After six months of repeating this cycle over the entire night sky, IBEX acquired enough data to create the all sky map.

This map goes beyond the capacities of the Voyager missions, giving an insight into the Sun’s interaction with the rest of the galaxy. As Cosmic rays approach the solar system, the heliosphere prevents them from crossing into the heart of the solar system, thereby effectively stopping these harmful rays from reaching Earth. This new energy is released from electrically neutral atoms, and when scientists look at the energy given off by these atoms they have a general view of what energy is coming from what area.

Knowing the place in the galaxy where certain rays come from help scientists understand the way our galaxy functions, from star positioning to globular clusters. “For the first time, we’re sticking our heads out of the sun’s atmosphere and beginning to really understand our place in the galaxy,” said David J. Comas of NASA.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

File:Google Wave.jpg

Google has decided to retire the Google Wave social-networking service after one year, citing lack of user adoption.

Urs Hölzle, Google senior vice president for operations, said in a blog post that “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product.” Hölzle also said that as a “web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a Web browser. We weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication.” Google says that it will continue the service until the end of the year.

In May 2009, Google launched Wave as a private beta. A year later, it became open to the public. Wave is an email service that integrates social media features and capabilities into emailing. It integrates IM-like features into its service. The company released components of Google Wave as open source for those to create a similar service. “The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users easily “liberate” their content from Wave,” Google said.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005A team of Australian surgeons yesterday reattached both hands and one foot to 10-year-old Perth boy, Terry Vo, after a brick wall which collapsed during a game of basketball fell on him, severing the limbs. The wall gave way while Terry performed a slam-dunk, during a game at a friend’s birthday party.

The boy was today awake and smiling, still in some pain but in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery, according to plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love.

“What we have is parts that are very much alive so the reattached limbs are certainly pink, well perfused and are indeed moving,” Mr Love told reporters today.

“The fact that he is moving his fingers, and of course when he wakes up he will move both fingers and toes, is not a surprise,” Mr Love had said yesterday.

“The question is more the sensory return that he will get in the hand itself and the fine movements he will have in the fingers and the toes, and that will come with time, hopefully. We will assess that over the next 18 months to two years.

“I’m sure that he’ll enjoy a game of basketball in the future.”

The weight and force of the collapse, and the sharp brick edges, resulted in the three limbs being cut through about 7cm above the wrists and ankle.

Terry’s father Tan said of his only child, the injuries were terrible, “I was scared to look at him, a horrible thing.”

The hands and foot were placed in an ice-filled Esky and rushed to hospital with the boy, where three teams of medical experts were assembled, and he was given a blood transfusion after experiencing massive blood loss. Eight hours of complex micro-surgery on Saturday night were followed by a further two hours of skin grafts yesterday.

“What he will lose because it was such a large zone of traumatised skin and muscle and so on, he will lose some of the skin so he’ll certainly require lots of further surgery regardless of whether the skin survives,” said Mr Love said today.

The boy was kept unconscious under anaesthetic between the two procedures. In an interview yesterday, Mr Love explained why:

“He could have actually been woken up the next day. Because we were intending to take him back to theatre for a second look, to look at the traumatised skin flaps, to close more of his wounds and to do split skin grafting, it was felt the best thing to do would be to keep him stable and to keep him anaesthetised.”

Professor Wayne Morrison, director of the respected Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery and head of plastic and hand surgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, said he believed the operation to be a world first.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Sixteen-year-old student Ang Chuang Yang of Singapore has earned a place in the record books, thanks to his fast thumbs.

Yang typed a 160-character SMS message in just 41.52 seconds, beating the previous record by seven-tenths of a second. The student was competing in a competition organized by SingTel.

The record was first set by 18-year-old Ben Cook of Utah, two years ago. He soon lost the record to a girl in Asia, then won it back last July, “significantly besting his own previous typing speed”, says the website impulse.

Each record is set by typing a standard text chosen by Guinness World Records, the organization to which the record has been submitted. The message reads: “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”

He claims his secret is using a phone with a larger keypad. Speech-to-text software recently introduced by mobile company Nuance is not allowed for use under Guinness rules.

Monday, April 18, 2005

The governments of India and China have declared in an official memorandum on April 11 their intention to jointly construct an Indian-style Buddhist temple on the western side of the historic White Horse Temple, in Luoyang, Henan Province, China. The project is planned as part of an ongoing effort to increase the ties of friendship and shared culture between the two countries.

The memorandum came in a series of agreements between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during Jiabao’s state visit to India April 9-12 at Singh’s invitation.

India is expected to provide the funding, architectural design, landscape planning, a Buddha idol and other materials for the completed temple. China is offering to provide official cooperation and permits, and facilitate the travel of Indian architects and other construction experts to the site. The temple is planned to be located on 2,667 square meters of land provided by the Chinese government.

April 1, 2005

Ebner Anivel Rivera-Paz, a leader of the vicious Mara Salvatruchas, nicknamed the MS-13 gang, issued orders from his prison cell for his followers to teach the American “Minutemen” volunteers a lesson when they begin patrolling the Mexican border today.

MS-13 gang members, considered by some to be America’s most violent gang, is accused of engaging in such acts as cutting off the testicles of their enemies and feeding them to their dogs, and cutting the heads off their opponents to play soccer with. However, such allegations of brutality don’t seem to frighten the “Minutemen”, a group of more than 1,000 volunteers planning to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border beginning April 1st. They have been called vigilantes by President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox. They sometimes sarcastically refer to themselves as “undocumented border patrol agents”. James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran and spokesman for the Minutemen, in response to the MS-13 threat said; “We’re not worried because half of our recruits are retired trained combat soldiers… they [MS-13] are just a bunch of punks.”

The MS-13 gang now has about 20,000 members nationwide. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nicknamed ICE, began to focus on the gang with an initiative called “Operation Community Shield”. The very existence of MS-13 is considered by the “Conservative Voice” to be a direct consequence of the USA government’s 1980’s policies in Central America; “the chickens are coming home to roost. Its MS-13 members are the sons of immigrants from El Salvador and other Central American countries that were forced to flee because of the CIA instigated war during the Reagan Administration that completely destroyed the physical, economic, social, religious and cultural infrastructure of the region. MS-13 was founded in Los Angeles by the offspring of the immigrants for protection.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Controversial and explicit Canadian workplace safety ads have been pulled from television, and paper ads from some bus shelters for the Christmas season. However, the ads will return to air in January.

“It’s totally erroneous to suggest we’re pulling anything,” chairman of the Workplace Safety and Information Board of Ontario, Steve Mahoney said. “Our plan from Day 1 was to stop the ads around the middle of December when most of the advertising that’s in the media is focused on Christmas and purchasing gifts. We just didn’t want to be competing with all that stuff.”

In one of the TV ads a woman accidentally slips on grease on the floor and a large steaming pot falls onto her face, and she starts screaming to death. The ads end with the message “There really are no accidents”.

A paper ads shows a construction worker who is in a pool of blood with a forklift operation manual stuck in his chest. Another with a man who is slit by a “Danger” sign with his leg stuck in a machine. They show the messages: “Lack of training can kill” and the other “Ignoring safety procedures can kill”.

“The critics amount to about 25 per cent rating, and I’m delighted they’re upset about the ads because I wouldn’t want anyone to enjoy watching them.”

The videos have been viewed more than 70,000 times on the Board’s website and are gaining large amounts of views on YouTube.

The transit authorities of Hamilton and Mississauga will show modified advertisements. The transit authority of Guelph will show the ads in bus shelters, but the transit authority of Windsor will not because of the graphic nature.

“We’re not against workplace safety, but this is too graphic,” said Caroline Postma, chair of the Transit Windsor board.

Mississauga city councillour Carolyn Parrish said: “My son-in-law was telling me that they shouldn’t be on in prime time because when [my grandson] watches them he just about bursts into tear. Now he follows his mom around the kitchen to make sure she doesn’t spill grease. And he’s only four. There’s too much of a chance that … people are really badly affected by it, and can’t really do anything about it anyway.” She suggested the ads only be aired to workers with the jobs shown in the commercials.

Mahoney changed the earlier promise to air the ads only after 8:00pm to after 9:00pm at last nights meeting with Mississauga city council.

Mahoney said the commercials and paper ads are not “too graphic at all”. And they are “absolutely appropriate and they’re doing what they’re intended to do, they’re creating what I call a water cooler topic of conversation.”

Ninety-eight Canadian workers so far have been killed on the job this year.