The bluetongue virus is spread by insects, and if a sheep or cow is bitten by an infected insect it can kill. Cases of bluetongue used to be very rare, but changes in climate make it easier for the virus to survive and some experts believe it could become a significant threat to livestock farming in the coming years. To help combat this virus you need to know what it looks like first. Rather than create a normal 3D computer graphic of the virus, researchers at Warwick University used computer technology to create a plastic model of it that researchers can touch. The molecular data about the virus is sent to a 3D printer, which then uses a laser to melt plastic powder into the correct 3D shape. Having the bluetongue virus in scientists’ hands will hopefully help in finding the cure.

You may have watched the animated movie “The Bee Movie”. Bees are really, really important! As they travel around to collect nectar they pollinate the flowers they land on. Without bees, life on Earth could become very bleak. Unfortunately bees in Europe are vanishing. It’s little to do with Dalek invasion plans; it’s probably because the habitats where they nest and forage for nectar are becoming damaged and polluted. Only in Britain three species of bees are now believed to be extinct and another eight are in serious trouble. Understanding how bees behave in the wild would help conservation efforts, but how do you follow a bee? One answer from scientists at Queen Mary, University of London is to use RFID technology (Radio Frequency IDentification). This is the same technology that is used in the Oyster cards that have replaced tickets on buses and trains in London. These devices store an ID on a tag. It can be read just by holding the tag near a special reader. Tags can be stuck on a bee without hurting it, but it lets the researcher know when that bee is around. Bee readers can be set at the entrance to the hive, or out in the fields so that each time the bee goes by, click! The computer records it. Using this information may help us make life better for these hard working and useful insects.

Nature doesn’t get much bigger than the planet Earth, and as challenges go you can’t get much bigger that getting to grips with global climate change. Computer is helping sift through all kinds of data to try and understand what’s going on. Looking at how temperatures, ocean gulf streams, ice shelves or sea levels might change requires the ability to predict from the present to the future. Satellites, expeditions, weather stations and so on collect massive amounts of important data about our planet, and feed these into computer simulations. The simulations are complex mathematical descriptions of the world that help predict, given the past and current data, how future events could unfold. Computer scientists are applying techniques called data mining and machine intelligence to pull together all these different sources of data, often from very different databases, and automatically extract the important information. They’re also helping the simulations run faster by spreading them over networks of machines, allowing results in days rather than months.

Sourec: cs4fn.com

Now, there are geostationary satellites. These satellite stays still in relation to a fixed position on Earth. The latest way to communicate with satellites for Internet service is over something called the Ka band. The Ka band is a set of frequencies that are between 18.3 GHz and 31 GHz. More specifically, the uplink (that part of the call that is going from your home to the satellite) is in the range of 27.5 GHz and 31 GHz. The downlink (that part of the call that is coming from the satellite to your home) is in the range of 18.3 Ghz and 20.2 Ghz. For those of you who don’t know, the lower frequencies transmit longer distances with less power, but aren’t capable of carrying a lot of information.

Because of the high frequency rates, that signal has to be stepped down and lose a bit of power before it hits our Computer. This is done using a device that is on the dish itself as well as having a minimum of 150 feet of high-quality RG6 coax cable connecting the dish to PC. Something else you should know about is that Ka band satellite uses spot beams. A spot beam covers a specific area that really isn’t that big – about a third the size of Alberta. Each spot beam can support only so many users. You can’t move your service from spot beam to spot beam unless you are a certified installer. You will also need a clear line of sight to the satellite.

The data travels from the satellite equipment at the customers location to the satellite, and then to the teleport for routing to the Internet. Teleport is a secure facility where many large aperture satellite dishes are operated and is connected to Network Operations Center (NOC).At the NOC, routers are connected to the Internet. Proprietary acceleration and advanced spoofing technology is employed to provide IP transparency and increase throughput speed. Spoofing is what makes the service capable of very high speeds.

Why is spoofing important? The entire Internet is based on TCP/IP. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) manages and controls transmissions using IP (Internet Protocol). TCP sends data and looks for acknowledgments (receipts) sent back from the receiving end to indicate that everything was received. Because of the long round-trip (90,000+ miles) that the packets must travel over the satellite link and back, the acknowledgments are delayed by several hundred milliseconds. If uncorrected, this delay would cause TCP to throttle back its speed dramatically.

Spoofing is accomplished by special NOC equipment (Hybrid Gateway) that causes TCP acknowledgments to be returned to the sender very quickly. It does this by spoofing (pretending to be the remote site) and acknowledging the packets instantly, at the same time as it forwards the packets to the remote site. TCP sees rapid acknowledgments and therefore ramps up its speed quickly. The Hybrid Gateway also looks for the real acknowledgments and discards them. If an acknowledgment is missed, the Hybrid Gateway resends the packet from its buffer. It is in this manner that multi-megabit speeds are made possible over satellite.

In Satellite Internet its important to know latency and Fair Access Policy. Latency is the time when your signal is going between your house and the satellite. Typically, it’s about 230 milliseconds or more. That doesn’t seem like much considering the signal is covering about 45,000 miles in that time. However, when it comes to things like VoIP or online gaming, it makes it nearly impossible to do.Fair Access Policy or FAP is the limit that your Stellite Internet Service Provider will put on how much you can download over a period of time, usually 24 hours. If you exceed that, they will automatically slow your speed down to something close to dial-up, to give other users fair access to the satellite. So, if you are a chronic downloader, you’ll have to change your ways for satellite Internet.

All this for about $800 for the hardware and $50 a month for ongoing service. Not bad, when you consider bringing in a phone line down a logging road will cost about $10,000 a pole. However, if you want to put a self-pointing dish on your RV, you’re going to need to dig a little deeper as the hardware will run you about $10,000. You could try to take a stationary dish with you, but pointing the new dishes can take up to eight-hours to aim, and you must be a certified installer.

Source : Author, Guy McDowell, Vsat Systems

Not officially implemented, but Google Docs’ OCR API is still available for use. The tool is able to analyze JPG, GIF, and PNG image files that are 10MB in size or smaller. Google cites a couple other limitations, suggesting that images must be a fairly high resolution with characters about 10 pixels in height.

Assuming your image meets the ideal conditions, the OCR operation will take about 15 seconds for a 500KB file and 40 seconds for a 2MB file. While all of this might seem impressive but Web-based OCR services are not entirely new. Google’s solution is pretty handy, especially if you’re already an avid Google Docs user, but services like OnlineOCR, FineReaderOnline, Free-ORC and OCRTerminal offer additional features. Some offer wider language support, file type import and exports, and others are simply less restrictive with the file size. Google definitely have to provide all those features to compete in market.

There are also numerous ways to OCR for free on your desktop. Traditional OCR desktop software like OmniPage obviously come at a cost, but if you are looking for a more definitive desktop based OCR solution you may have one already without knowing it. Microsoft Office’s Onenote 2007 comes with a simple OCR function that can be activated by right-clicking on an image and selecting “Copy Text from Picture”. Also, if you look within Office’s program menu, you will find Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Document Imaging, which also works albeit with certain limitations. But as the world is moving fast towards Cloud-Computing and ease to mobality the web based OCR are the more prefered solution then desktop softwares.

Source: TechSpot

The image below comparises the potential habitable space available on Earth, Mars, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. The green spheres represent the global volume with the right physical environment for most terrestrial microorganisms.Earth’s biosphere includes parts of the atmosphere, oceans, and subsurface. The potential global habitats of the other planetary bodies are deep below their surface.

According to Mendez Mars and Europa would be the best compromise between potential for life and accessibility. To assess the current state of terrestrial habitability, Mendez developed a Quantitative Habitability Theory. This theory establish a baseline for relevant comparisons with past or future climate scenarios and other planetary bodies including extrasolar planets. This theory is based on two biophysical parameters: the habitability (H), as a relative measure of the potential for life of an environment, and the habitation (M), as a relative measure of biodensity. Within the parameters are physiological and environmental variables which can be used to make predictions about the distribution, and abundance of potential food (both plant and microbial life), environment and weather.

“It is surprising that there is no agreement on a quantitative definition of habitability,” said Mendez. “There are well-established measures of habitability in ecology since the 1970s, but only a few recent studies have proposed better alternatives for the astrobiology field, which is more oriented to microbial life. However, none of the existing alternatives from the fields of ecology to astrobiology has demonstrated a practical approach at planetary scales.”

Enceladus has the smallest volume but the highest habitat-planet size ratio followed by Europa. Surprisingly, Enceladus also has the highest mean habitability in the Solar System, even though it is farther from the sun, and Earth, making it harder to get to. “Various planetary models were used to calculate and compare the habitability of Mars, Venus, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus,” Mendez said. “Interestingly, Enceladus resulted as the object with the highest subsurface habitability in the solar system, but too deep for direct exploration. Mars and Europa resulted as the best compromise between habitability and accessibility. In addition, it is also possible to evaluate the global habitability of any detected terrestrial-sized extrasolar planet in the future. Further studies will expand the habitability definition to include other environmental variables such as light, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nutrients concentrations. This will help expand the models, especially at local scales, and thus improve its application in assessing habitable zones on Earth and beyond.”

Studies about the effects of climate change on life are interesting when applied to Earth itself. “The biophysical quantity Standard Primary Habitability (SPH) was defined as a base for comparison of the global surface habitability for primary producers,” Mendez said. “The SPH is always an upper limit for the habitability of a planet but other factors can contribute to lower its value. The current SPH of our planet is close to 0.7, but it has been up to 0.9 during various paleoclimates, such as during the late Cretaceous period when the dinosaurs went extinct. I’m now working on how the SPH could change under global warming.”

The search for habitable environments in the universe is one of the priorities of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and other international organizations. Mendez’s studies also focus on the search for life in the solar system, as well as extrasolar planets. “This work is important because it provides a quantitative measure for comparing habitability,” said NASA planetary scientists Chris McKay. “It provides an objective way to compare different climate and planetary systems.”

“I was pleased to see Enceladus come out the winner,” McKay said. “I’ve thought for some time that it was the most interesting world for astrobiology in the solar system.”

Source: UniverseToday

Antimatter, in the form of positrons, is used in PET scanners. Radiation is used to cure certain cancers. One of the major spin-offs from the space race is cheap water purification. Pushing the boundaries of science produces countless benefits for everyone, often in unexpected areas. If we didn’t experiment with new ideas, we’d still all be living in caves.

Wirless Electricity:

The theory behind the concept of wirless electricity is to plug your gadgets into the supply switch without using a cable. If cell phones can communicate without wires, why not charge them without wires. Edison thought about wirless electricity in 1875. NiKola Tesla patented a method of “broadcasting” electrical power wirelessly in the early 1900s.  But a science-fiction story of Isaac Asimov in 1941 where a solar power station run by robots transmits energy to Earth,  brought this idea to public. According to scientific knowledge electricity and magnetism are “fields” in space, and can be converted into each other. Electromagnetic radiation is a wave, and can travel from one place to another even without any physical medium like air. Moving a magnet creates an electrical field. And if you move an electrical field, it creates a magnetic one. The two are different aspects of one basic force of nature – electromagnetism. In particular, electrical currents can be transported from one gadget to another over a distance, a process called induction. Electrical generators and motors use this.So in principle wireless transmission of electrical power should be an easy task. Microwaves, which are effectively light with a very long wavelength, are a practical way to transport electrical power. It is also possible to turn electricity into light, using a laser, and then reverse the process at the other end.

In 1975, an American team showed that it’s possible to transmit tens of kilowatts of power using microwaves. A few months ago a Japanese consortium announced a plan to build a $21bn facility in space to beam solar power to Earth – within 30 years it could supply 300,000 homes with electricity. This year, at the TED conference in Oxford, the company Witricity demonstrated a wireless power system that can recharge mobile phones and TV sets. In Tesco in time for Christmas.

Time-Travel:

The theory on the foundation of time-travel is to build a machine that lets you change the past or visit the future. Imagin if time-travel becomes possible, wouldn’t someone come back from the future and tell you by now? Time travel is possible  it’s a fundamental principle of relativity. It may be some what different to how the layman sees time travel. But yes its true that a moving clocks run slowly. The idea of time-travel got public attention by a science fiction story of a Time Machine by HG Wells, where the Time Traveller visits humanity’s far future and doesn’t like what he finds. According to modern sciencific knowledge time travel is possible to some extant , it seems paradoxical, what happens if you go back in time and kill your own grandfather? But current physical theories do not forbid it. Einstein’s relativity allows time travel in extreme circumstances. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics permit particles to travel backwards in time. Two physicists recently suggested that the Large Hadron Collider may have malfunctioned because a Higgs boson particle, travelling back in time from a future experiment, wrecked the machine.

In relativity, particles can travel along “closed timelike curves”, going round a time-loop from past to present to future and back to the same past. One theoretical method uses a wormhole, which is a black hole linked to its time-reversal by a tube. If you pull the black hole around near the speed of light, you get a time machine. However, you need a special kind of matter to keep the wormhole open, and we don’t yet have any. Quantum mechanics involves a fundamental symmetry in nature. If you swap positive and negative charges, reflect the universe in a mirror, and reverse the flow of time, then the laws of physics don’t change. So a Higgs boson travelling backwards in time is the same as an anti-Higgs travelling forwards. As understanding science gives you an insight into a lot of things around you. In about 15,000 years at this rate, assuming new laws of physics don’t rule it out.

Teleportation:

The idea behind telepoetation involves, going from here to somewhere else without passing through anywhere in between. You need some transport to get to you school or office as sending a letter form one place to another involves many visibal factors, but what about an SMS that you send from your cellphone. The long dreamed idea of teleportation got public attention from a TV series Star Trek in September 8, 1966. In particle science two particles of light entangled together result in teleportation of quantum information – such as what their spin is – from one to the other, instantaneously. Photons, particles of light, have a property called “spin”. This can be up, down, or a mixture of the two. Alice has a photon, and she wants Bob to have one with the same spin. She can’t send him hers because the Post Office is on strike, and she can’t measure her spin and phone him, because the measurement can change the spin. Fortunately, the last time she met Bob she gave him one photon from an entangled pair, and kept the other. “Entangled” means that the two photons were prepared so that their states were related in a special way. Alice lets her photon interact with her other photon from the entangled pair. This instantly teleports information about the spin to Bob’s half. However, he can’t “read” that information until a message arrives by more conventional means. A quick call on Alice’s mobile, telling him some measurements she has made, now puts his entangled photon into the desired state.

Quantum “teleportation” destroys the original state and can’t be used to send messages faster than light. It doesn’t actually teleport matter – just quantum information.In 1998, the quantum optics group at Caltech used “squeezed light” to teleport the state of a photon in a laboratory. It’s now been done with atoms, too. In 2004 Austrian physicists teleported the state of a photon across the Danube river. Within another century it will be an amoeba. But be warned: when you are teleported, your body will be ripped to shreds and rebuilt at the other end.

Antimatter:

The theory behind idea of antimatter is a special kind of matter which explodes violently on contact with ordinary matter, producing more energy than a hydrogen bomb. Paul Dirac should have predicted antimatter using quantum mechanics in 1928 but he fluffed it. Carl Anderson spotted the first antiparticle, the positron, in 1932. In 1995, the CERN particle accelerator facility in Geneva created atoms of antihydrogen. Matter is made of extremely tiny particles, which have various masses, electric charges, spins, and so on. Associated with each particle is an antiparticle with the same mass but opposite charge. If the two collide, they annihilate in a burst of energy. A small mass produces a lot of energy thanks to Einstein’s famous equation – energy = mass times the square of the speed of light. The Big Bang somehow produced a billion and one particles of matter for every billion particles of antimatter. No one really knows why, but if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here because there wouldn’t be a here for us to inhabit.

You might think of antimatter as a compact source of almost unbounded energy. Put some in a magnetic bottle, a magnetic field that confines the antimatter in a cavity so that it doesn’t touch any normal matter – the only way known to be able to contain it – and then release it very slowly, allowing it to react with normal matter. It would make fusion power seem like a car battery. Positrons are very ho-hum. They occur in radioactive decay and are used routinely in medical PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanners. Beyond those, it gets hard. Expect a few thousand atoms of antihydrogen within the next 50 years, costing the GNP of a small country, and an atom or two of heavier elements. Mass production looks like a long shot.

Source: BBC