04-08-11
- Hominin is what we used to call a Hominid; a creature that paleoanthropologists have agreed is human or a human ancestor. These include all of the Homo species (Homo sapiens, H. ergaster, H. rudolfensis), all of the Australopithecines (Australopithicus africanus, A. boisei, etc.) and other ancient forms like Paranthropus and Ardipithecus.
- The 20-million-year-old skull was discovered at an excavation site called Napak XV, Uganda
05-01-2012
- African leaping lizards inspire robot design - African Agama Lizard - Robots and lizards have to adjust the angle of their tail just right to counteract the effect of the stumble
- Intercropping: when rice breeds fish breeds rice - this year's Indian Science Congress at Bhubaneswar, Orissa (04-01-2012). The rural, tribal belt of Koraput, Orissa which is rich in floral and faunal diversity would have been formally declared as the eleventh “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System” (GIAHS) by the FAO-UNDP-GEF group.
Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System:
- Remarkable land use systems and landscapes which are rich in globally significant biological diversity evolving from the co-adaptation of a community with its environment and its needs and aspirations for sustainable development
(Worldwide, specific agricultural systems and landscapes have been created, shaped and maintained by generations of farmers and herders based on diverse natural resources, using locally adapted management practices.
Building on local knowledge and experience, these ingenious agri-cultural systems reflect the evolution of humankind, the diversity of its knowledge, and its profound relationship with nature. )
- Each GIAHS is a remarkable land use system or a landscape, rich in globally significant biological diversity. It ranges from the Andean mountain agriculture of Peru, the Ifugao rice Terraces of the Philippines, the Rice-Fish intercropping or co-culture system of inland central China to the Maghrab landscape of Algeria/Tunisia. And, while Koraput is recognized now, the Seppina Bettas system of the use of foliage and leaf-litter system of the Western Ghats in India is waiting to join the GIAHS family.
- key feature in each GIAHS is the people living there. The community has, over the centuries understood, appreciated, respected and preserved the surrounding biodiversity of plants and animals.
- Right here in India, intercropping of pigeonpea with sorghum, or pearl millet with groundnut has been successful (thanks to ICRISAT), and coffee with pepper has been successful in Karnataka and at the Araku Valley in Andhra Pradesh.
more: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sci-tech-and-agri/article2776013.ece
- Cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing.
IDN:
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Tamil or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics, such as French.
gTLD:
A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet.
The core group of generic top-level domains consists of the com, info, net, and org domains. In addition, the domains biz, name, and pro are also considered generic; however, these are designated as restricted, because registrations within them require proof of eligibility within the guidelines set for each.
IANA:
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers. IANA is a department operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as ICANN.
IPv6:
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) intended to succeed IPv4, which is the protocol currently used to direct almost all Internet traffic.
The Internet operates by transferring data between hosts in packets that are routed across networks as specified by routing protocols. These packets require an addressing scheme, such as IPv4 or IPv6, to specify their source and destination addresses. Each host, computer or other device on the Internet requires an IP address in order to communicate. The growth of the Internet has created a need for more addresses than are possible with IPv4.
Like IPv4, IPv6 is an internet-layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks. While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an IP address, and therefore has 232 (4,294,967,296) possible addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, for an address space of 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.
Regional Internet registry(RIR):
A regional Internet registry (RIR) is an organization that manages the allocation and registration of Internet number resources within a particular region of the world. Internet number resources include IP addresses and autonomous system (AS) numbers.
Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)[3] for Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring countries.
APNIC provides number resource allocation and registration services that support the global operation of the Internet. It is a not-for-profit, membership-based organization whose members include Internet Service Providers, National Internet Registries, and similar organizations.
APNIC's main functions are:
- allocating IPv4 and IPv6 address space, and Autonomous System Numbers,
- maintaining the public Whois Database for the Asia Pacific region,
- reversing DNS delegations,
- representing the interests of the Asia Pacific Internet community on the global stage.
Autonomous system (Internet):
Within the Internet, an Autonomous System (AS) is a collection of connected Internet Protocol (IP) routing prefixes under the control of one or more network operators that presents a common, clearly defined routing policy to the Internet.
Ferrocement technology:
A highly varsity form of reinforced concrete mode of wire mesh sand, cement & water in which closely spaced wire meshes are impregnated with high strength cement sand mortar.
Advantages The most notes worthy properties are:-
Strength: High compressive and tensile strength.
Durability: Ferrocement will last for a long time as it does not rust corrode or crack easily
Plasma Pyrolysis Plant - A&N , Goa, H.P., Sikkim: plasma assisted thermal. disintegration of plastic bags to overcome the plastic menace facilitating environment friendly disposal, can also treat hospital waste
STEALTH TECHNOLOGY
Stealth technology also termed LO technology (low observable technology) is a sub-discipline of military tactics and passive electronic countermeasures, which cover a range of techniques used with personnel, aircraft, ships, submarines, and missiles, to make them less visible (ideally invisible) to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods.
Designers turned to develop a particular shape for planes that tended to reduce detection, by redirecting electromagnetic waves from radars. Radar-absorbent material was also tested and made to reduce or block radar signals that reflect off from the surface of planes. Such changes to shape and surface composition form stealth technology as currently used on the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit "Stealth Bomber".
Radar-absorbent material, or RAM, is a class of materials used in stealth technology to disguise a vehicle or structure from radar detection. A material's absorbency at a given frequency of radar wave depends upon its composition. RAM cannot perfectly absorb radar at any frequency, but any given composition does have greater absorbency at some frequencies than others; there is no one RAM that is suited to absorption of all radar frequencies.
Types of RAM:
Iron ball paint
It contains tiny spheres coated with carbonyl iron or ferrite. Radar waves induce molecular oscillations from the alternating magnetic field in this paint, which leads to conversion of the radar energy into heat. The heat is then transferred to the aircraft and dissipated. The iron particles in the paint are obtained by decomposition of iron pentacarbonyl and may contain traces of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen.
A related type of RAM consists of neoprene polymer sheets with ferrite grains or carbon black particles (containing about 30% of crystalline graphite) embedded in the polymer matrix. The tiles were used on early versions of the F-117A Nighthawk, although more recent models use painted RAM. The painting of the F-117 is done by industrial robots with the plane covered in tiles glued to the fuselage and the remaining gaps filled with iron ball paint
Foam absorber
Foam absorber is used as lining of anechoic chambers for electromagnetic
radiation measurements[citation needed]. This material typically consists of a fireproofed urethane foam loaded with carbon black, and cut into long pyramids.
Jaumann absorber
A Jaumann absorber or Jaumann layer is a radar absorbent device.[citation needed] When first introduced in 1943, the Jaumann layer consisted of two equally-spaced reflective surfaces and a conductive ground plane. One can think of it as a generalized, multi-layered Salisbury screen as the principles are similar.
Carbonyl iron is a highly pure (97.5% for grade S, 99.5+% for grade R) iron, prepared by chemical decomposition of purified iron pentacarbonyl. It usually has the appearance of grey powder, composed of spherical microparticles. Most of the impurities are carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.
An anechoic chamber (an-echoic meaning non-echoing or echo-free) is a room designed to stop reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves.
08/03/2012:
Gigantic meadows of tubeworms have been found living 5,900-feet below the ocean surface off the coast of Costa Rica
Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California dived down in a submersible and were not only staggered by the size of the tubeworm clusters – but the conditions they were living in.
The marine ecosystem not only contained hydrothermal vents, where hot water surges from the seafloor, but also cold areas containing cracks that seeped large quantities of methane into the water
The site, called Jaco Scar, lies at a tectonic plate margin off Costa Rica.
The animals range from those that inhabit hot vents or cold seeps, to species that exist in both settings.
However, the most interesting for the researchers were the tubeworms.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2112070/Gigantic-clusters-deep-sea-tubeworms-near-Costa-Rica.html#ixzz1ocP6qqk3
- Hominin is what we used to call a Hominid; a creature that paleoanthropologists have agreed is human or a human ancestor. These include all of the Homo species (Homo sapiens, H. ergaster, H. rudolfensis), all of the Australopithecines (Australopithicus africanus, A. boisei, etc.) and other ancient forms like Paranthropus and Ardipithecus.
- The 20-million-year-old skull was discovered at an excavation site called Napak XV, Uganda
05-01-2012
- African leaping lizards inspire robot design - African Agama Lizard - Robots and lizards have to adjust the angle of their tail just right to counteract the effect of the stumble
- Intercropping: when rice breeds fish breeds rice - this year's Indian Science Congress at Bhubaneswar, Orissa (04-01-2012). The rural, tribal belt of Koraput, Orissa which is rich in floral and faunal diversity would have been formally declared as the eleventh “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System” (GIAHS) by the FAO-UNDP-GEF group.
Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System:
- Remarkable land use systems and landscapes which are rich in globally significant biological diversity evolving from the co-adaptation of a community with its environment and its needs and aspirations for sustainable development
(Worldwide, specific agricultural systems and landscapes have been created, shaped and maintained by generations of farmers and herders based on diverse natural resources, using locally adapted management practices.
Building on local knowledge and experience, these ingenious agri-cultural systems reflect the evolution of humankind, the diversity of its knowledge, and its profound relationship with nature. )
- Each GIAHS is a remarkable land use system or a landscape, rich in globally significant biological diversity. It ranges from the Andean mountain agriculture of Peru, the Ifugao rice Terraces of the Philippines, the Rice-Fish intercropping or co-culture system of inland central China to the Maghrab landscape of Algeria/Tunisia. And, while Koraput is recognized now, the Seppina Bettas system of the use of foliage and leaf-litter system of the Western Ghats in India is waiting to join the GIAHS family.
- key feature in each GIAHS is the people living there. The community has, over the centuries understood, appreciated, respected and preserved the surrounding biodiversity of plants and animals.
- Right here in India, intercropping of pigeonpea with sorghum, or pearl millet with groundnut has been successful (thanks to ICRISAT), and coffee with pepper has been successful in Karnataka and at the Araku Valley in Andhra Pradesh.
more: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sci-tech-and-agri/article2776013.ece
- Cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing.
IDN:
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Tamil or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics, such as French.
gTLD:
A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet.
The core group of generic top-level domains consists of the com, info, net, and org domains. In addition, the domains biz, name, and pro are also considered generic; however, these are designated as restricted, because registrations within them require proof of eligibility within the guidelines set for each.
IANA:
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers. IANA is a department operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as ICANN.
IPv6:
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) intended to succeed IPv4, which is the protocol currently used to direct almost all Internet traffic.
The Internet operates by transferring data between hosts in packets that are routed across networks as specified by routing protocols. These packets require an addressing scheme, such as IPv4 or IPv6, to specify their source and destination addresses. Each host, computer or other device on the Internet requires an IP address in order to communicate. The growth of the Internet has created a need for more addresses than are possible with IPv4.
Like IPv4, IPv6 is an internet-layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks. While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an IP address, and therefore has 232 (4,294,967,296) possible addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, for an address space of 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.
Regional Internet registry(RIR):
A regional Internet registry (RIR) is an organization that manages the allocation and registration of Internet number resources within a particular region of the world. Internet number resources include IP addresses and autonomous system (AS) numbers.
Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)[3] for Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring countries.
APNIC provides number resource allocation and registration services that support the global operation of the Internet. It is a not-for-profit, membership-based organization whose members include Internet Service Providers, National Internet Registries, and similar organizations.
APNIC's main functions are:
- allocating IPv4 and IPv6 address space, and Autonomous System Numbers,
- maintaining the public Whois Database for the Asia Pacific region,
- reversing DNS delegations,
- representing the interests of the Asia Pacific Internet community on the global stage.
Autonomous system (Internet):
Within the Internet, an Autonomous System (AS) is a collection of connected Internet Protocol (IP) routing prefixes under the control of one or more network operators that presents a common, clearly defined routing policy to the Internet.
Ferrocement technology:
A highly varsity form of reinforced concrete mode of wire mesh sand, cement & water in which closely spaced wire meshes are impregnated with high strength cement sand mortar.
Advantages The most notes worthy properties are:-
Strength: High compressive and tensile strength.
Durability: Ferrocement will last for a long time as it does not rust corrode or crack easily
Installation of Hydrams(Hydraulic Ram pump) - H.P : an appropriate cost effective and practical technology to harness irrigation potential of streams in hilly regions, integrated with ferrocement technology and community irrigation concepts for optimised performance.
[A hydraulic ram, or hydram, is a cyclic water pump powered by hydropower. It functions as a hydraulic transformer that takes in water at one "hydraulic head" (pressure) and flow-rate, and outputs water at a higher hydraulic-head and lower flow-rate. The device uses the water hammer effect to develop pressure that allows a portion of the input water that powers the pump to be lifted to a point higher than where the water originally started.]
Plasma Pyrolysis Plant - A&N , Goa, H.P., Sikkim: plasma assisted thermal. disintegration of plastic bags to overcome the plastic menace facilitating environment friendly disposal, can also treat hospital waste
STEALTH TECHNOLOGY
Stealth technology also termed LO technology (low observable technology) is a sub-discipline of military tactics and passive electronic countermeasures, which cover a range of techniques used with personnel, aircraft, ships, submarines, and missiles, to make them less visible (ideally invisible) to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods.
Designers turned to develop a particular shape for planes that tended to reduce detection, by redirecting electromagnetic waves from radars. Radar-absorbent material was also tested and made to reduce or block radar signals that reflect off from the surface of planes. Such changes to shape and surface composition form stealth technology as currently used on the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit "Stealth Bomber".
Radar-absorbent material, or RAM, is a class of materials used in stealth technology to disguise a vehicle or structure from radar detection. A material's absorbency at a given frequency of radar wave depends upon its composition. RAM cannot perfectly absorb radar at any frequency, but any given composition does have greater absorbency at some frequencies than others; there is no one RAM that is suited to absorption of all radar frequencies.
Types of RAM:
Iron ball paint
It contains tiny spheres coated with carbonyl iron or ferrite. Radar waves induce molecular oscillations from the alternating magnetic field in this paint, which leads to conversion of the radar energy into heat. The heat is then transferred to the aircraft and dissipated. The iron particles in the paint are obtained by decomposition of iron pentacarbonyl and may contain traces of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen.
A related type of RAM consists of neoprene polymer sheets with ferrite grains or carbon black particles (containing about 30% of crystalline graphite) embedded in the polymer matrix. The tiles were used on early versions of the F-117A Nighthawk, although more recent models use painted RAM. The painting of the F-117 is done by industrial robots with the plane covered in tiles glued to the fuselage and the remaining gaps filled with iron ball paint
Foam absorber
Foam absorber is used as lining of anechoic chambers for electromagnetic
radiation measurements[citation needed]. This material typically consists of a fireproofed urethane foam loaded with carbon black, and cut into long pyramids.
Jaumann absorber
A Jaumann absorber or Jaumann layer is a radar absorbent device.[citation needed] When first introduced in 1943, the Jaumann layer consisted of two equally-spaced reflective surfaces and a conductive ground plane. One can think of it as a generalized, multi-layered Salisbury screen as the principles are similar.
Carbonyl iron is a highly pure (97.5% for grade S, 99.5+% for grade R) iron, prepared by chemical decomposition of purified iron pentacarbonyl. It usually has the appearance of grey powder, composed of spherical microparticles. Most of the impurities are carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.
An anechoic chamber (an-echoic meaning non-echoing or echo-free) is a room designed to stop reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves.
08/03/2012:
Gigantic meadows of tubeworms have been found living 5,900-feet below the ocean surface off the coast of Costa Rica
Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California dived down in a submersible and were not only staggered by the size of the tubeworm clusters – but the conditions they were living in.
The marine ecosystem not only contained hydrothermal vents, where hot water surges from the seafloor, but also cold areas containing cracks that seeped large quantities of methane into the water
The site, called Jaco Scar, lies at a tectonic plate margin off Costa Rica.
The animals range from those that inhabit hot vents or cold seeps, to species that exist in both settings.
However, the most interesting for the researchers were the tubeworms.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2112070/Gigantic-clusters-deep-sea-tubeworms-near-Costa-Rica.html#ixzz1ocP6qqk3
