Space Odyssey on your PC

How would you like to zoom across Venus, sail by the pole star and finally drop your anchor at the moon? Well as Microsoft and Google take their battle for digital supremacy up in the galaxies your vehicle to cruise amongst the stars is set to only get better. To start your space expedition, you could take your pick from three 3D virtualization programs for the sky from Microsoft, Google or Stellarium, all of which are currently offering free services.
Google’s service, Google Sky—which initially came as an ‘extra’ for Google Earth and let you look up at the sky, virtually, from the ground—now also comes as an online destination at www.google.com/sky.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s brand new offering with WorldWide Telescope www.worldwidetelescope.org comes with rich graphics and special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. Cruising with World-Wide Telescope, however, requires downloading a hefty piece of software, which of course, runs only on Microsoft Windows.
The third option is Stellarium www.stellarium.org , which is a free open-source program that lets you examine the universe from anywhere in the world, and works in a bunch of languages (no Hindi however).
The experience with these services is as close to visiting an actual galaxy with a visually appealing image-rich environment. These sites let you zoom into an area of the sky as far as the telescope image allows, thus giving you the feeling of actually being there. A simple mouse click can land you on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter as well as the various moons of Jupiter in complete 3D environment. You can also check out panoramas of the sky or the planets taken by spacecraft that have flown there, such as panoramic views of Mars taken by the Rover. Also available are collections of images taken from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the world.
WorldWide Telescope also lets you move back in time to the beginning of the common era or move forward another 2,000 years, and view the sky as it was or will be seen from any point on earth, complete with labels on what you’re looking at (stars, constellations and such).
Both Microsoft and Google projects run with many parallel features, however World-Wide Telescope claims that their images are taken from the Hubble Telescope and 10 major earthly satellites, while Google Sky relies mostly on the Hubble.
Microsoft’s services also come with the ASCOM (AStronomy Common Object Model) driver that lets you attach supported hardware—like a telescope—to your computer and record your own images, which you can add to WorldWide Telescope and integrate into your virtual universe. And by the way, while you are on your space journey, you can build your own ‘guided tours’ of the universe and save them. Similarly, with Stellarium you can install user scripts of events that occurred in the past, record presentations, as well as set the earth time for future or past cosmological events.
There is one caveat however: these services might be as wonderful as they sound, but don’t even think of logging on with a low-end configuration. You need a video card capable of accelerated 3D graphics (to display DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics) with over 2 GB RAM at least with WorldWide Telescope.
The easiest way to find out if your computer is ready for WorldWide universe is to check out Microsoft’s terms for the program. If your computer doesn’t meet the standards they’ve set for use, then it’s not for you.
Also, unlike Stellarium and Google Sky, where everyone can feel right at home, the community in WorldWide Telescope claims to be associated with prestigious groups, such as the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. So it might just be a humbling experience to be able to tap into the knowledge provided by these groups while you continue your journey into the universe.

Rewards of experimentation...

Science whizkid makes plastic biodegradable

16-Year-Old Canadian Discovers Microbes That Cause Polyethelene To Decompose Faster

It’s pretty much common knowledge that plastic bags take 1000 years to decompose, if they do at all, but that fact just wasn’t good enough for 16-yearold Daniel Burd. He’s found a way to make plastic bags decompose in about three months by his estimation.
The Waterloo, Ontario, high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.
According to a report in the Waterloo Record, Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.
He was able to degrade 43 per cent of some plastic within six weeks.
Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.
The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide—each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.
The young student’s accomplishment has not gone unnoticed. He won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. This prize is prestigious as well as tangible. He received $10,000 as well as a $20,000 scholarship.Burd, a Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life. “Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”
The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.
A researcher in Ireland has uncovered the capability of pseudomonas to decomposs polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know—and they’ve looked—Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.
To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.
“This is a huge, huge step forward... We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.” Burd would like to take his project further and see it in use. AGENCIES BACTERIA LUNCHES ON GROCERY BAGS
To help polyethelene decompose faster, Daniel Burd mixed a landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew
After experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas
It should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic. The bacteria provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste from the procedure is H 2 0 and a bit of CO 2

Virtual study for real education...

Kids learn in Web worlds

London: Virtual worlds can be valuable places where children rehearse what they will do in real life, reveals research.
They are also a “powerful and engaging” alternative to more passive pursuits such as watching TV, according to a BBCsponsored study.
The research was done with children using the BBC’s Adventure Rock virtual world, aimed at those aged 6-12. Carried out by Professor David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson of the University of Westminster, the research surveyed and interviewed children who were the first to test Adventure Rock.
Children explore the world alone but it uses message boards so children can share what they find and what they make in the various creative studios dotted around the virtual space. The research looked at the ways the children used the world and sought feedback from them on its good and bad aspects.
Gauntlett said the research revealed that children assumed one of eight roles when exploring a virtual world and using the tools they put at their disposal. At times children were explorers and at others they were social climbers keen to connect with other players. Some were power users looking for more information about how the workings of the virtual space.
Gauntlett said online worlds were very useful rehearsal spaces where children could try all kinds of things largely free of the consequences that would follow if they tried them in the real world. For instance, he said, children trying out Adventure Rock learned many useful social skills and played around with their identity in ways that would be much more difficult in real life.
Gauntlett said what children liked about virtual worlds was the chance to create content such as music, cartoons and video and the tools that measured their standing in the world compared to others. “Virtual worlds can be a powerful, engaging and interactive alternative to more passive media,” he said.
He urged the creators of virtual spaces for children to get young people involved very early on. “They really do have good ideas to contribute and they are very good critical friends,” he said. AGENCIES

The sound of music...

ISC topper has music on mind

Jaskiran Chopra | TNN

Dehradun: Gaurav Sood, a student of Doon School, loves western music and wants to have a band one day. Incidentally, Sood topped the national charts of ISC exams by scoring 99%! Clearly not a bookworm, Sood, who scored 100% in Maths and Chemistry and 98% in English and Physics, was in Mumbai jamming with some friends when the results were declared on Tuesday. This is the first time that a student of the region has topped.

“He is expected back home soon and we will give him a grand reception,’’ say proud parents Amar and Jyoti Sood. “He plays the guitar extremely well,’’ says younger brother Rishi, also a student of Doon School. Though Gaurav wants to be an engineer, he will be a musician at heart always, add his parents. They say he is still contemplating whether to do Economic Hons or Engineering.

In Mumbai, Gaurav and his friends were meeting with various musicians including ones from Bollywood. Jyoti says the group had last year recorded an album called Hiatus.

Skand Goyal, another Dosco, topped the school in the Commerce stream by scoring 97.83%. Skand says he is not yet sure about the career he should pursue but it would definitely be something that will contribute to the knowledge economy. He writes poetry in Hindi and was the chief editor of the school’s Hindi journal.

Despite being in boarding school, Skand says he got a lot of support from his entire family.

Third generation Solar cells

Cheaper solar cells from fruit dyes

WASHINGTON: Chemistry students at Rowan University (RU) in the US are developing a process by which dye from fruits can be used to create solar cells to capture the energy from the Sun.
The team plans to use dyes from fruits like blackberries, blueberries, oranges and grapes to create the solar cells, under guidance of Dr Darius Kuciauskas, an assistant professor of chemistry at RU.
Currently, commercially available solar cells are efficient and robust, but expensive to produce.
“To develop efficient and inexpensive solar cells, scientists are following the design of photosynthetic systems,” said Kuciauskas. “We are researching on the so-called ‘third-generation’ solar cells.”
The Rowan researchers are working to refine a process in which they extract dye from a range of fruit and blend it into a kind of scientific ‘smoothie’.
The process leaves the researchers with sugar and a dye. The components are then separated to obtain pure, brightly coloured dyes in an acidic solution.
From there, they place the dye on a conductive glass coated with a porous film of titanium dioxide, which bonds the dye to the glass.
Finally, they add iodine and potassium iodide electrolyte for dye regeneration.
When light hits the processed fruit dye on the glass, it “excites” the electrons, which mobilises or “frees” them. The electrons then travel to a conductive glass electrode, which, in turn, produces electricity.
According to Green, though there is less output from these organic solar cells than a traditional silicon cell, the production from fruit is quite cheap.
“Construction of the cells is so simple and inexpensive that anyone can build his or her own using fruit, white paint, iodine and glass,” said Antonelli. ANI

The latest Indiana Jones....

Secret of skulls: Story behind latest ‘Indiana Jones’

Cannes: A tale of archeological intrigue as captivating as any Indiana Jones plot is behind his new deathdefying adventure in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, premiered at Cannes on Sunday ahead of its release on May 22.
“We always find an artifact that is real, that people believe in, that archaeologists have looked for or already found and that has a supernatural aspect to it,” George Lucas told journalists at Cannes.
The story began in 1924 when famed British banker-turned-adventurer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, then on a search for the lost continent of Atlantis in the Central American jungle, turned up a sculpted human skull carved in a block of translucent quartz crystal.
His daughter, who toured the world with it until her death at 100 in 2007, claimed experiencing strange sensations on touching it and having dreams of ancient Mayan rituals at night.
Dubbed the “Skull of Doom” due to its supposed supernatural power to bring misfortune, the artifact , Mitchell-Hedges said, was close to 3,600 years old. Subsequently other crystal skulls turned up, some finding their way into prized museum collections, others privately owned — and all giving rise to speculation on their origins and use.
“All of the artifacts that have been looked for have never been proven to exist or have been proven to have the powers that have been ascribed to them,” Lucas added. “But there are a lot of people who believe in it.”
But over the past decade experts voiced growing doubts over the Aztec origin of the crystal skulls, one of which is in the British Museum, another at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute. And last month, a Paris museum acknowledged its own star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be.
One of only a dozen such skulls known to exist, the Quai Branly museum’s piece was acquired in 1878 from another Indiana Jones-type explorer, Alphonse Pinart, as an Aztec masterpiece believed to be hundreds of years old, the remnant of an ancient and mysterious civilisation. The museum now says that rather than dating from the Aztec period, it was probably made in the 19th century.
From May 20 the Paris skull goes on view to coincide with the world release of the fourth installment in Harrison Ford’s archaeologist’s adventures. Legend has it that the Paris skull represents the Aztecs’ Mictlantecuhtli, who reigned over the land of the deceased, Mictlan. Reuniting all 12 existing skulls plus a supposedto-exist 13th could prevent the earth from tipping over, according to fable.
The Quai Branly said results of an analysis of its skull in 2007-2008 by the country’s C2RMF research and restoration centre “seem to indicate that it was made late in the 19th century.” The London skull was examined twice, in 1996 and 2004, and both studies tended to prove it was a fake, though the final conclusions have not been made public. But though no crystal skull yet found at archeological digs has proved to be authentic, the 12 located around the world continue to arouse interest and speculation. AFP

SKULL OF DOOM: A sculpted skull carved out of a block of translucent quartz crystal. The Aztec masterpiece is believed to be the remnant of an ancient and mysterious civilization

Different people different views...

‘Giraffe’ women on show at Thai ‘human zoo’

Bangkok: Thai provincial officials have allowed a new “human zoo” featuring “longnecked” or “giraffe” women to open in Sattahip near Bangkok despite mounting international criticism of the exploitative tourism practice, media reports said on Monday.
The residents are part of an ethnic group whose women wear brass rings around their necks as status symbols and for beauty enhancements. They are called the Padung or long-necked Karen in Thailand, but they consider those terms denigrating and call themselves Kayan.
Seven Kayan villages are already marketed as tourist attractions in Thailand’s northern provinces of Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai, where there is a sizeable population of Kayan, some of whom are refugees from neighbouring Myanmar. But for the first time, a new “village” of Kayans was recently opened in Sattahip in Chonburi province, 100 km south-east of Bangkok and a few kilometres from Pattaya beach resort, the Daily XPress newspaper said.
It charges an entrance fee of 25 baht for Thai visitors and 250 baht for foreigners, the newspaper said. Sattahip district chief Narong Thirachantarangkoon brushed off accusations that he had allowed the establishment of a “human zoo” in his district.
“I don’t think so because the Karen are willingly living here,” he said. “This is better than staying in their home region and starving.”
The rings worn by the Kayan women can weigh 10 kg or more, and over the years, the weight pushes down their collar bones and shoulders, making their necks appear longer and giving the women their nicknames of “long-necked” women. The women, who had originally come to Thailand as refugees, were reportedly lured to a border camp where Thai businessmen created a village to serve as a tourist attraction, or “human zoo”. AGENCIES

HUMAN EXHIBIT: The residents of the province opened for ‘human tourism’ are part of an ethnic group whose women wear brass rings around their necks as status symbols and for beauty enhancement.