Paralysed man takes a virtual walk

Uses Brain Waves To Imagine His Character Walking, Talking In Second Life

Tokyo: A paralysed man using only his brain waves has been able to manipulate a virtual internet character, Japanese researchers said on Monday, calling it a world first.

The 41-year-old patient used his imagination to make his character take a walk and chat to another virtual person on the popular Second Life website. The patient, who has suffered paralysis for more than 30 years can barely bend his fingers due to a progressive muscle disease so cannot use a mouse or keyboard in the traditional way.

In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking. He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan’s Keio University.

It is the first time a paralysis patient has succeeded in meeting a person and having a conversation in an internet virtual world, they added. Researchers are now studying a system that would let patients create text messages by mentally selecting certain letters, said Junichi Ushiba, associate professor at the biosciences and informatics department of Keio University’s Faculty of Science and Technology.

“In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves... and click to make a purchase,” Ushiba said.

Second Life is an increasingly popular virtual world in which people—and animals—are represented by animated avatars and do everything from social activities to shopping. AFP

HOPE FROM TECH: A paralyzed man enjoys a virtual walk in ‘Second Life’ with his character being controlled via sensors recording the electrical activity of his brain.

The power of nature???

Mushroom hits new high

Himachal’s Guchhis Sell For Rs 11,000 A Kg At Kullu Fair

Ashwani Kumar | TNN

Kullu: Wrapped in mysticism and hailed as an aphrodisiac, Morchella esculenta, an edible mushroom also known as the Common Morel, sold for Rs 11,000 per kg at the recently held Banjar fair in Kullu. Locally known as guchhi, it was arguably the hottest attraction at the mela, its main trading centre, that saw buyers from across the region. While last year this natural wonder, demanding a premium, went for Rs 8,000 per kg, this year, due to less production and greater demand, the price simply peaked.

Believed to sprout in dense woods when it thunders, guchhi elicited a great deal of curiosity. Sonia, an NRI from America, visited Banjar valley around the same time to unearth its mystery. ‘‘The natural phenomenon definitely leads to the genesis of this fungus,’’ said Sonia, of the mushroom credited with growing only in this part of the country abounding in innumerable deities and spiritual experiences.

Radha Krishan, an oldtimer naturopath of the valley, said, ‘‘Guchhi generates heat and wonderfully increases sexual power in men and women.’’ At the fair, even as it remained the fancy of all, it could only be bought by the rich and those who didn’t mind shelling out the price to increase their libido. And, of course, wholesalers from as far as Delhi. It is mostly exported to European nations, with France as its chief importer, and is in great demand due to its meaty flavour.

‘‘Earlier, its production was up to 100 quintal, but this year it has been very less,’’ said prominent gucchi businessman Chaman Lal. Other old-timers says it was a delicacy served at weddings, but now rue the fact that it can only be found at weddings of the rich, who can afford it. Most locals now collect the mushroom, which is increasingly scarce, to sell to the five-odd traders operating in the Kullu valley to make some quick money during the season.

Known to grow at altitudes higher than 1,500 metre, it is abundantly found during April-May and July-August. ‘‘It is found in cedar forests,’’ said one local who gathers mushrooms. Unwilling to buy stories of its aphrodisiac qualities, G K Khullar of department of biochemistry at PGI, said, ‘‘There is no research to substantiate claims that the mushroom can increase sexual pleasure.’’ Even though it may just be a placebo, the faith in its ‘powers’ seem unshakeable. While alluding to China’s failed attempts in trying to cultivate it, Banjar divisional forest officer B S Rana said, ‘‘With royalty rights lying with panchayats, guchhi draws Rs 10,000 per quintal.’’ But the middlemen make a killing at Rs 11,000 per kg.

MAGICAL GUCHHI
Morchella esculenta or Guchhi, as it is popularly known in Himachal, belongs to the Helvellaceae family. The mushroom grows wild in dense forests of Himachal and Jammu & Kashmir
Guchhi has two seasonal crops: March to May — the main season with better yield and quality; and the second in Sept & Oct. It has a meaty flavour, is rich in protein and generates heat in the body. The guchhi is believed to be an aphrodisiac. Abundant at one time, with an annual produce of 900 quintals; by 2008, its quantities have fallen to mere 10 quintals a year 99% of the produce exported to European nations, with France as chief importer. Experts say guchhi grows only when it thunders. As climate has changed in the region, there has been a fall in production.

All attempts by Himachal govt and scientists across the world to cultivate guchhi under artificial conditions have failed .

WILD DELICACY: Locals in Kullu Valley swear guchhi, also known as morel, is a magical aphrodisiac.

ACADEMIC ROADS LESS TRAVELLED......

Colleges Are Going All Out To Advise Students On Lesser-Known Degree Programmes That Have Healthy Career Prospects

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: Parmesh Gandhi followed his best pal and enrolled for the traditional Bachelor of Commerce degree. Halfway through the course, faculty members realised he had strong fundamentals in banking. However, nothing could be done to shift him as the seats for banking and insurance were already full.

Gandhi is an example of how little students know of the specialised courses that degree colleges have begun to offer of late. A principal said, “Parents of today’s 18-year-olds were not exposed to courses in infotech or accounts and finance. As parents have mostly studied the traditional science or commerce, their children tend to either take up the vanilla packet or, in the case of science, go in for IT or biotech.’’

Several colleges across the city are now going all out to counsel students and parents on selecting a course based on the candidates’ strengths and interests. D G Ruparel College’s principal and vice principal will speak to parents and students who may be undecided about what to take up, said principal P Kulkarni.

Another top institution for science, Ruia College, has installed plasma screens to display information about courses being offered as also the faculty member who can dole out more
information on each programme. Said principal Suhas Pednekar, “We have faculty members and heads of departments who talk to students about curricula and job prospects in various streams.’’

Not many students specialise in statistics, chemistry or pure physics, he said. “We are going to talk about the dearth of research analysts and statisticians across the globe. We are going to tell parents that with many companies outsourcing chemical manufacturing, chemistry experts or chemists are going to be in great demand,’’ said Pednekar.

Mulund College of Commerce, which produced last year’s university topper, is counselling for
the first time. “We are setting up counters to guide students about courses they can take up. The orientation programme is being conducted because we have seen that students mainly take courses their friends join,’’ said principal Sandhya Divanji.

Not every college is making a start now. Jai Hind College principal Kirti Narayan said her college guides students at various levels. Principal scientific advisor to the government of India, R Chidambaram, who regularly complains about the “pilferage’’ that happens at Class XII, where students get into either medicine or engineering despite being good at pure science, would be satisfied to know this. “Few students are showing interest in pure science. But if we do notice some bright sparks who are cut out for specific subjects, we keep giving them information about prospects in those areas,’’ she said.

Colleges are ready to talk about relatively uncharted areas to students who have not opted for biotechnology, engineering or medicine, or commerce aspirants looking for something besides the chartered accountancy or company secretariat courses.

Gandhi was probably not lucky enough to know all this. Students, say college principals, must speak to staff and faculty members before freezing their options.

SPECIALISATIONS
SCIENCE: Horticulture | Statistics | Zoology | Botany

COMMERCE: Business management | Cost accountants | Accounts and finance | Banking and insurance | Auditing

ARTS: Economics | Journalism | Foreign languages (French, German, etc) | Psychology | Sanskrit | Political

Time to be Captain Planet

Want your kids to fight global warming and save the environment? Here's how to get them going

1 BE INNOVATIVE.
If your child can't stop scribbling at every possible surface, fill your child's table with used printed paper and empty cereal boxes. They make for great scribbling surfaces and give complete freedom to your child's creative instincts.

2 WATER THERAPY
During monsoons, place empty container or a bucket in the balcony and watch your child's excitement as the small drops of rain fill it up to the brim. The same collected water can then be used to sail small paper boats or even water plants in the garden.

3 ON THE VIGIL
Get your kids involved. Make them in charge of checking if all the lights and fans are off when there's nobody in the room. Moreover, give them the authority to fine you, in case you forget to switch them off. This will not only make kids vigilant but also teach them the importance of saving power.

4 BEST OF WASTE
Play with waste. Get your kid and his friends together and arrange a treasure hunt in your locality. The one who is able to collect the most number of waste plastic bags and cans will be the winner. This will not only clean the neighbourhood but also teach them the importance of keeping your surroundings clean.

5 NEW CREATION
Is your kid asking for a new toy? Well, then collect your trash, put all of it in a box, get a bottle of glue and ask your kid to make the toys they want. Brownie points if they make something out of the box and innovative.

They may not come up with something interesting every time but there's nothing to lose. It will teach your kid that even the smallest thing, after it’s been used, can be utilised for something else.

6 LIGHTS OFF
Once a week, have no electricity days. These are the days when you voluntarily switch off your power and engage the kids in playing games that do not require electricity. This will make sure your child doesn't take electricity power for granted and will also give them the opportunity to explore new and varied interests, something that they may have not known otherwise.

7 GET IT EXCHANGED
Kids grow up real fast, don't they? So, get together with your neighbours once a month and organise a kid's clothes exchange program.

The logic is simple. Instead of letting the clothes go waste, you exchange them. You give away outgrown clothes to those who can wear it and you take clothes that in turn fit your kid. It's easy on the wallet and teaches your kid to save rather than splurge.

Foreign teachers may soon leave Indian classrooms

IF YOU think that McLuhan’s global village is becoming a reality and boundaries are shrinking, it’s at a huge cost. The Government of India is planning to substantially cut down on the number of foreign nationals that can be employed in Indian schools which have affiliations with different foreign national boards.

From a 50% ceiling on foreign nationals, the committee, which has been constituted by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), to frame a policy to regulate these international schools, is now proposing to allow such schools to hire maximum 20% of their total number of teachers from foreign countries. Any number beyond this will be allowed on proper justification on a case to case basis.

“At present, the requests for appointment of foreign teachers in schools affiliated to foreign boards in India are being considered on a case-to-case basis. Since India has a vast pool of competent teachers, allowing foreign teachers to work in India in such schools needs a clear policy,” said an MHRD official.

Over the past few years, there have been a considerable growth in the number of schools affiliated to the foreign boards in India, particularly those affiliated to International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) and Cambridge International Examination (CIE). The number of schools affiliated to IBO has grown from two in 1998 to 33 in 2006. The number of schools affiliated to CIE stood at 148 in 2006. This has forced the government to come up with a clear policy regarding these schools.

The demand for these schools have been growing because of increasing willingness in pursuing undergraduate studies from abroad. These schools also increase the potential of employment opportunities abroad as well as ease the process of transfer of students in case their parents are shifting base from one country to another.

The committee also recommends that the schools need to obtain permission from the Central government before declaring itself an international school. A standing committee, consisting of representatives of Central Board of Secondary Education, Council for Indian School Certification Examination, Council of Board of School Education, Association of Indian Universities and state governments and eminent educationalists will be constituted by the Central government to look at the applications.

This committee will stipulate conditions relating to curriculum, fee structure, facilities to be provided as well as the number of foreign teachers to be appointed in such schools. The committee will prepare a list of international boards, which can be permitted to affiliate schools in India. The schools will also be required to publish their annual reports in a prescribed manner to ensure accountability and transparency. According to the proposal, the existing schools will also have to obtain the approval of the Central government within a stipulated period.

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