Indian students design satelite set for launch

A team of engineering students from southern India have been designing a small light-weight satellite that is set to be sent into space soon. The Indian Space Research Organisation is supporting the project in the hope that it will encourage more students to be more interested in space technology.About 40 students, mostly engineering under-graduates from seven top colleges in Bangalore and Hyderabad are working together at Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology in Bangalore.Under the guidance of the research organisation, the students hope to build one of the smallest satellites ever designed. It will be used for remote-sensing applications. It will orbit the earth at an altitude of 700 kilometers and will send 30 minutes of data everyday.The students have already built a master-control ground station to track the location of the satellite in space. The satellite is expected to be launched before the end of the year through the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.Once the satellite is launched and placed in its final orbit, all its systems will be monitored by the students themselves.

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Treatment for Type 2 diabetes available at PGI Chandigarh from next week only for Rs. 20000

After successful tests by a team of doctors of the Department of Endocrinology, PGIMER, a rare technique of curing Type 2 diabetes through bone marrow derived stem cell transplantation will now be available.

It is expected to be a breakthrough in treatment of patients suffering from this more common type of diabetes at a cost of Rs 20,000.

Acknowledging the technology, a research paper ‘Efficacy of Autologous Bone Marrow Derived Stem Cell Transplantation in Patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus’ by a team of doctors, led by Dr A Bhansali will be published this month in an international journal published in the US—Stem Cells and Development.

Of the ten patients on whom this test was conducted in December 2006, two were able to discontinue insulin completely after six months. The insulin requirement came down by 75 per cent for five others while the remaining three did not respond to the treatment.

Source:Indian Express

Rapid Star Formation Spotted In ‘Stellar Nurseries’ Of Infant Galaxies

According to scientists at Durham University the Universe’s infant galaxies enjoyed rapid growth spurts forming stars like our sun at a rate of up to 50 stars a year.The findings show that “stellar nurseries” within the first galaxies gave birth to stars at a much more rapid rate than previously expected, the researchers from Durham’s Institute for Computational Cosmology revealed.The research looked back 12.5 billion years to one of the most distant known galaxies, about one billion years after the Big Bang…

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Humans could become extinct

Humans race could become extinct, a new study concludes, but no single event,  could do us in, and all extinction scenarios would have to involve some kind of intent by people in power.Human race itself will ultimately determine its fate. We will destroy ourselves.

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Assam police officers to get GIS training

A group of officers of Assam police is going to United States to receive training in operating GIS and GPS . Acting on the recommendations of the Enquiry Committee headed by the former Director-General of Police, D.N. Dutt, CCTVs and mobile cameras will be installed in 91 locations as part of the Video Surveillance project for Guwahati. The key locations will be traffic intersections, markets, malls, cinema halls, hotels and designated parking lots.

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ISRO to outsource rocket-work to private companies

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is ready to outsource high-end work to private companies – from building more complicated systems to assembling it. Proposals are being readied wherein private participation will be invited to build and run competing systems. The commercial-aerospace industry is now eager to play a larger role in the space missions and tap the outsourcing work offered by ISRO which has an annual budget of $1.01 billion for 2009-2010. It has a spending blueprint of Rs 12,400 crore ($3 billion) for its manned space exploration and around Rs 425 crore will be spent for the second unmanned lunar mission — Chandrayaan-2. It also has huge spending plans for missions to Mars and various domestic and international satellite launches.

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Rapid Supernova Could Be New Class Of Exploding Star

Artist's impression of an AM-CVn star system. (Credit: Tony Piro)

An unusual supernova rediscovered in seven-year-old data may be the first example of a new type of exploding star, possibly from a binary star system where helium flows from one white dwarf onto another and detonates in a thermonuclear explosion.In a paper first published online Nov. 5 in the journal Science Express, University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) astronomer Dovi Poznanski and his colleagues In a paper first published online Nov. 5 in the journal Science Express, University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) astronomer Dovi Poznanski and his colleagues  and why they believe SN 2002bj is a new type of explosion.

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Alps Growing Or Shrinking?

The Matterhorn, in the Alps. (Credit: iStockphoto)

The Alps are growing just as quickly in height as they are shrinking according to a new study by a group of German and Swiss geoscientists.Due to glaciers and rivers, about exactly the same amount of material is eroded from the slopes of the Alps as is regenerated from the deep Earth’s crust. In the latest volume of the science magazine Tectonophysics ( No. 474, S.236-249) the scientists show that today’s uplifting of the Alps is driven by  climatic variations.The Alps are constantly rising, although they have been deemed “dead” in a tectonic sense. Instead of plate forces it is the strong climatic variations since the beginning of the so-called quaternary glacial before approximately 2.5 million years, to which mountain slopes in particular have been reacting so sensitively. This holds the Alps in motion.

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Sprites

Sprites are large scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to  varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground. Sprites are colored reddish-orange in the upper regions, with bluish hanging tendrils below, and can be preceded by a reddish halo.  Sporadic visual reports of sprites go back at least to 1886, but they were first photographed on July 6, 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota and have subsequently been captured in video recordings many thousands of times.

Sprites have been observed over North America, Central America, South America, Europe, Southern Africa (Zaire), Australia, the Sea of Japan, and Asia and are believed to occur during most large thunderstorm systems. Sprites appear as luminous reddish-orange flashes, last longer than normal lower stratospheric discharges (typically a few milliseconds)(an unconfirmed observation of 4 sprites lasting over 1 hour in Zaire circa 1995), and are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between the thundercloud and the ground. They often occur in clusters of two or more, and typically span the altitude range 50 kilometers (31 mi) to 90 kilometers (56 mi), with what appear to be tendrils hanging below, and branches reaching above.

Sprites are actually clusters of small, decameter-sized (10-100 m, 30-300 ft) balls of ionization that are launched at an altitude of about 80 km and then move downward at speeds of up to ten percent the speed of light, followed a few milliseconds later by a separate set of upward moving balls of ionization.

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African Desert Rift is New Ocean In The Making

New research confirms that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world's oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea. (Credit: Imagery (c) 2009 TerraMetrics. Map data (c) 2009 Europa Technologies / Courtesy of Google Maps)

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region’s future.

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The Red Sea Parts Again