White Coal - A good idea !!!

Guys ! if we talk about conserving our nature, we would surely think of pollution. And if talk about pollution a word comes in our mind 'smoke'. Have you ever thought how to reduce the smoke emission from burning of fuels.....

No, but I have.. You might have been heard of 'white coal' . It's a form of fuel produced by drying chopped wood over a fire. It was used in England something about seventeenth century. It produces more heat than green wood and less than charcoal and thus prevent lead emission. White coal can also be made from Ground nut husk.

Benefits of White Coal over Non Cooking coal: - -

* White coal is cheaper than heavy furnace oil ,coal & fire wood etc
* High sulphur content of oil and coal, when burnt pollutes the environment.
* There is no sulphur in the white coal, therefore no toxic gases
* Moisture contents nil because white coal is totally dry.
* Have high burning efficiency.
* Combustion is more uniform compared to coal.
* There is no fly ash when burning briquettes.
* The Calorific Value of the Finished Briquettes is Approx 3800 to 4400
K.cal/Kg.
* We are using Ground Nut Shell as raw material for the production of white coal
which gives highest i.e. 4000 to 4200 K.cal/K.G calorific value in comparison.

So, now what you think... which is best !!!

Charge Coupled Device (CCD)

This year's Nobel prize for physics was partly awarded to Willard Boyle and George Smith for inventing the charge-coupled device (CCD), the sensor that acts as the retina of digital cameras. But long before it reached consumers, the technology was used in astronomy.

Asteroid blast reveals holes in Earth's defences

As the US government ponders a strategy to deal with threatening asteroids, a dramatic explosion over Indonesia has underscored how blind we still are to hurtling space rocks.

On 8 October an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That's about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed.

However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth's surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada.

Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.

The explosion was heard by witnesses in Indonesia. Video images of the sky following the event show a dust trail characteristic of an exploding asteroid.

Multiplying universes: How many is the multiverse?

HOW many universes are there? Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that the number dwarfs the 10500 universes postulated in string theory, and raise the provocative notion that the answer may depend on the human brain.

The idea that there is more than one universe, each with its own laws of physics, arises out of several different theories, including string theory and cosmic inflation. This concept of a "multiverse" could explain a puzzling mystery - why dark energy, the furtive force that is accelerating the expansion of space, appears improbably fine-tuned for life. With a large number of universes, there is bound to be one that has a dark energy value like ours.

Calculating the probability of observing this value - and other features of the cosmos - depends on how many universes of various kinds populate the multiverse. String theory describes 10500 universes, but that just counts different vacuum states, which are like the blank canvases upon which universes are painted. The features of each canvas determine what the overall painting will look like - such as the laws of physics in that universe - but not the details.

Thanks to the randomness of quantum mechanics, two identical vacuum states can end up as very different universes. Small quantum fluctuations in the very early universe are stretched to astronomical scales by inflation, the period of faster-than-light expansion just after the big bang. These fluctuations lay down a gravitational blueprint that eventually determines the placement of stars and galaxies across the sky. Small differences in the form of these fluctuations can produce a universe in which the Milky Way is slightly bigger, or closer to its neighbours.

So just how many of these different universes can inflation's quantum fluctuations produce? According to Linde and Vanchurin, the total is about 101010,000,000 - that's a 10 raised to a number ending with 10 million zeros . Suddenly string theory's multiverse of 10500 universes is looking rather claustrophobic.

It might be, however, that this number is irrelevant, and that in a world ruled by quantum physics what matters is how many universes a single observer can distinguish. "Before quantum mechanics," says Linde, "we thought that 'reality' was a well-defined word." In classical physics, observers are irrelevant - we simply want to know how many universes exist.

My Quotes......

What you are having is not what you achieved, what you don't have is what to achieve...

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See in the mirror, you'll find something...

New camera promises to capture your whole life

A camera you can wear as a pendant to record every moment of your life will soon be launched by a UK-based firm.

Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer's disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create "lifelogs" that archive their entire lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1 gb memory.

First black hole for light created on Earth

An electromagnetic "black hole" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time.

The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards.

Narimanov and Kildishev reasoned that it should be possible to build a device that makes light curve inwards towards its centre in a similar way. They calculated that this could be done by a cylindrical structure consisting of a central core surrounded by a shell of concentric rings.

Why the Almighty doesn't produced us all ?

Last night a question crashed in my mind. I want to share it with you.. "Why the Almighty God doesn't produced us all, why he produced only two living creatures and through these living creatures we all are produced? " Have you any answer? No, but I have...

Firstly, I want to ask you that if we were not produced by living beings, would there be any relationship among us as now.. The answer is no. Basically, whatever the God has done to us is very thoughtful. If we were produced by God, then to whom we will call mom and dad, to whom we will call grandpa and grandma... (Think...)

The God has given us the power of reproduction only because to generate unity, society and of course family among us all. He has given the power to make the world one where relationships exists. I am finding it is so much thoughtful...

NASA puzzles over 'invisible' moon impact

In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it – and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact. But scientists remain puzzled about why the event did not seem to generate a visible plume of debris as expected.

As hundreds of telescopes and observers watched, the highly publicised NASA mission to search for water on the moon reached its grand finale at 0431 PDT (1131 GMT) with a pair of high-speed crashes into a lunar crater named Cabeus.

During the crucial moments at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, scientists and engineers with LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) peered in silent concentration as successive images of the crater grew larger on their screens.

Source : NewScientist

Spacecraft kamikaze smashes into moon

As hundreds of telescopes and observers watched, a NASA mission to search for water on the moon has achieved its grand finale with a pair of high-speed crashes into the lunar surface – but there was curiously little to see.

At the Ames Research Center near Palo Alto, California, scientists and engineers with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) peered in silent concentration as successive images of the crater Cabeus grew larger on their screens. Shortly after 4:31 am Pacific time (12:31 BST) there was no telltale flash to be seen from the expected collision of a 2366-kilogram booster rocket into the permanently shadowed crater, located near the moon's south pole.

LCROSS, which was following the booster and guiding it, trained visual and infrared cameras on the impact site for 4 minutes before it too plunged into the crater. In the final seconds before signals from LCROSS were lost, mission controllers announced detection of a heat signature from the rocket impact.

According to Michael Bicay, director of science at Ames, there are at least two possible scenarios that could explain what happened. The first is that the "gain" on the cameras was not set correctly to portray the debris plume. It could be revealed later if the data were displayed differently.

Nobel Prize 2009

Physics -

The 2009 Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to some of those whose work with light laid the foundations of the modern digital age.

The first half of the prize went to Charles Kao, formerly vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who in the 1960s made it possible for the world to talk via the light inside optical fibres.

The second half was awarded to Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor chip – a crucial component in today's digital cameras.



Chemistry -

The 2009 Nobel prize in Chemistry has been awarded to some of those whose work with ribosomes laid the foundations to scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotics.

Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath were working on ribosomes.They used a method called X-ray crystallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosomes.

Indian-born Ramakrishnan, 57, is the senior scientist and group leader at the Structural Studies Division of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Steitz, a 69-year-old born in Milwaukee, is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University and attached to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, both in New Haven, Connecticut. Yonath is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the ninth Israeli to win a Nobel prize.

Largest ring in solar system found around Saturn

A colossal ring of debris found around Saturn is the largest in the solar system. The new ring could be the 'smoking gun' that explains the curious two-faced appearance of Saturn's moon Iapetus, whose leading hemisphere is much darker than its trailing side.

Until now, the biggest known rings in the solar system were Saturn's E ring and faint, gossamer sheets of dust orbiting Jupiter. Saturn's E ring, a diffuse disc of icy material fed by the moon Enceladus, extends from 3 to perhaps 20 times the radius of Saturn.

The newly discovered ring spans from 128 to 207 times the radius of Saturn – or farther – and is 2.4 million kilometres thick. It was found using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which revealed an infrared glow thought to come from sun-warmed dust in a tenuous ring.

The discovery was announced on Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. "This is a unique planetary ring system, because it's the largest planetary ring in the solar system," team leader Anne Verbiscer of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville told the meeting.

The source of the ring's material seems to be Saturn's far-flung moon Phoebe, which orbits the planet at an average distance of 215 times the radius of Saturn. When Phoebe is hit by wayward space rocks, the impacts could generate debris that fills the rings.

source : NewScientist