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AlpInvest owners seek to sell firm -report

July 10, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

AMSTERDAM, July 9 (Reuters) – Dutch asset managers APG and PGGM want to sell AlpInvest, one of the world’s largest private equity investors with up to 46 billion euros at its disposal, newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad reported on Friday, citing sources. The asset managers want to free up their capital to invest elsewhere, the paper said, citing its sources. Spokespeople for the two firms were not immediately available to comment.

APG and PGGM each own 50 percent of AlpInvest, which has recently floated or made plans to float media company Nielsen Holdings, fund manager Jupiter (JUP.L) and chip maker NXP [NXP.UL], among others.

In its annual review, AlpInvest said it had 1.7 billion euros ($2.14 billion) in total investments in 2009 and 1 billion euros in realisations. It calls itself the largest European private equity investor.

It employed 121 people as of the end of last year at offices in Amsterdam, New York, Hong Kong and London.

APG is the asset manager for ABP, the world’s third-largest sovereign pension fund. Last year APG committed 5.3 billion euros for a new 2009/2010 mandate for AlpInvest.

PGGM is the asset manager for PFZW, the pension fund for the Dutch care and welfare sector. (Reporting by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Mike Nesbit) ($1=.7939 euros)

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Newly discovered exoplanet may have water

March 19, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, March 19 (ANI): Scientists have suggested that the newly discovered planet Corot-9b is temperate enough to allow the presence of liquid water.

Corot-9b was found on 16 May 2008 and orbits its star every 95.274 days, a little longer than Mercury takes to go round the Sun.

It is the first transiting planet to have both a longer period and a near-circular orbit.

A transit is a kind of eclipse and occurs when a celestial body passes in front of its host star and blocks some but not all of the star’s light.

Corot-9b’s orbit is slightly elliptical but at closest approach to its parent star it reaches a distance of 54 million kilometers.

Although that is only about the distance of Mercury in our Solar System, it is by far the largest orbit of any transiting planet found so far.

Because it orbits a star cooler than our Sun, calculations estimate that Corot-9b’s temperature could lie somewhere between -23 degrees C and 157 degrees C.

Corot-9b has a radius around 1.05 times that of Jupiter but only 84 percent of the mass. This leads to a density of 0.90 g/cc, or 68 percent that of Jupiter.

“Corot-9b is the first exoplanet that is definitely similar to a planet in our Solar System,” said Hans Deeg, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

The similarity is caused by the fact that Corot-9b is sufficiently far from its star to prevent tidal forces from heating its interior.

Tidal forces are created by the strength of gravity weakening from the front to back of the celestial body.

When the difference between the near side and the far side is great, the tidal force can prevent the planet from spinning quickly, forcing it to only show one face to the star.

It can also provide heat to the interior of the planet, changing its physical condition.

Based on calculations, neither of these is possible in this case.

“Although we don’t know, because we can’t see the planet directly, there is reason to believe that this planet has a normal day-night cycle,” said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA Project Scientist for Corot.

It means that lacking a tidal heat source, Corot-9b’s interior is likely to have remained similar to the gas giants in our Solar System. (ANI)

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Scientists find meteorite that came from innermost asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 18 (ANI): In a very rare finding, scientists have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered that it came from the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our Solar System.

However, information about where individual meteorites originated, and how they were moving around the Solar System prior to falling to Earth, is available for only a dozen of around 1100 documented meteorite falls over the past two hundred years.

According to Dr Phil Bland from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, the lead author of the study, “We are incredibly excited about our new finding. Meteorites are the most analysed rocks on Earth, but it’s really rare for us to be able to tell where they came from.”

The new meteorite, which is about the size of cricket ball, is the first to be retrieved since researchers from Imperial College London, Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, and the Western Australian Museum, set up a trial network of cameras in the Nullarbor Desert in Western Australia in 2006.

The researchers aim to use these cameras to find new meteorites, and work out where in the Solar System they came from, by tracking the fireballs that they form in the sky.

The new meteorite was found on the first day of searching using the new network, by the first search expedition, within 100m of the predicted site of the fall.

The meteorite appears to have been following an unusual orbit, or path around the Sun, prior to falling to Earth in July 2007, according to the researchers’ calculations.

The team believes that it started out as part of an asteroid in the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It then gradually evolved into an orbit around the Sun that was very similar to Earth’s.

The new meteorite is also unusual because it is composed of a rare type of basaltic igneous rock.

According to the researchers, its composition, together with the data about where the meteorite comes from, fits with a recent theory about how the building blocks for the terrestrial planets were formed.

This theory suggests that the igneous parent asteroids for meteorites like today’s formed deep in the inner Solar System, before being scattered out into the main asteroid belt.

Asteroids are widely believed to be the building blocks for planets like the Earth, so the new finding provides another clue about the origins of the Solar System. (ANI)

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Jupiter made comet its temporary moon for 12 years in mid-20th century

September 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 14 (ANI): An international team of astronomers has discovered that Jupiter had captured the comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu as its temporary moon in the mid-20th century, in an irregular orbit for about twelve years.

There are only a handful of known comets where this phenomenon of temporary satellite capture has occurred and the capture duration in the case of Kushida-Muramatsu, which orbited Jupiter between 1949 and 1961, is the third longest.

The phenomenon was detected by an international team led by Dr. Katsuhito Ohtsuka that modeled the trajectories of 18 “quasi-Hilda comets”, objects with the potential to go through a temporary satellite capture by Jupiter that results in them either leaving or joining the “Hilda” group of objects in the asteroid belt.

Most of the cases of temporary capture were flybys, where the comets did not complete a full orbit.

However, Dr. Ohtsuka’s team used recent observations tracking Kushida-Muramatsu over nine years to calculate hundreds of possible orbital paths for the comet over the previous century.

In all scenarios, Kushida-Muramatsu completed two full revolutions of Jupiter, making it only the fifth captured orbiter to be identified.

According to Dr. David Asher, “Our results demonstrate some of the routes taken by cometary bodies through interplanetary space that can allow them either to enter or to escape situations where they are in orbit around the planet Jupiter.”

Asteroids and comets can sometimes be distorted or fragmented by tidal effects induced by the gravitational field of a capturing planet, or may even impact with the planet.

The most famous victim of both these effects was comet D/1993 F2 (Shoemaker-Levy 9), which was torn apart on passing close to Jupiter and whose fragments then collided with that planet in 1994.

Previous computational studies have shown that Shoemaker-Levy 9 may well have been a quasi-Hilda comet before its capture by Jupiter.

“Fortunately for us Jupiter, as the most massive planet with the greatest gravity, sucks objects towards it more readily than other planets and we expect to observe large impacts there more often than on Earth,” said Dr. Asher.

“Comet Kushida-Muramatsu has escaped from the giant planet and will avoid the fate of Shoemaker-Levy 9 for the foreseeable future”, he added. (ANI)

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NASA all set to launch infrared eye to hunt for dark asteroids

September 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Sydney, September 3 (ANI): NASA is preparing to launch an infrared telescope that will hunt down dark asteroids that have slipped beneath our radar.

According to a report by ABC Science, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft recently arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California ahead of its launch later this year.

With a quartet of infrared sensors and a wide view, WISE is designed to survey the whole sky in infrared light.

It’s not the first telescope to do so, but scientists expect WISE’s observations will be 500 times sharper than a survey conducted in 1980s by IRAS, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, according to astronomer Martin Cohen of the University of California at Berkeley.

The data will be complied into an all-sky infrared atlas, a tome that is expected to include about 300 million objects, including around 100,000 asteroids.

Many of the asteroids seen by WISE will be known objects.

Scientists hope to use the new observations to nail down details, such as an asteroid’s diameter and surface reflectivity.

“With ground-based scopes, it’s just a point source. You can’t tell size directly,” said University of Texas astronomer Dr Robert McMillan who leads Spacewatch, an asteroid-survey project.

“A big object that is dark and a small object that is bright are going to look like they have the same brightness,” he added.

The solar system contains several million asteroids, most of which reside in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

About 7000 asteroids have been identified that cross or come close to Earth’s orbit.

WISE will be able to spot asteroids emitting heat due to direct exposure from the Sun, as opposed to visible-light searches that find asteroids that are reflecting sunlight.

“Those are two different physical effects,” said McMillan. “An asteroid that has very dark colour in invisible light is going to get heated up more, just like a black car in a parking lot is going to get heated up more than a white car,” he added.

Scientists hope to get enough positioning information to follow up targets with ground-based observations.

McMillan expects that WISE will discover a few hundred new asteroids.

The information will be folded into ongoing surveys to map asteroids that could impact Earth and cause widespread damage.

Other WISE targets include brown dwarfs, which are Jupiter-sized stars that never got their nuclear fusion engines running, and ultra-luminous galaxies, which pump out the equivalent of about 1000 Sun-sized stars every year. (ANI)

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Galileo’s telescope was more commercial in nature than scientific

August 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 26 (ANI): Historians have said that Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei’s invention of the telescope was more commercial in nature than an attempt to contribute in scientific progress.

Galileo’s telescope is today remembered as a revolutionary stargazing tool that changed Earth’s standing in the heavens.

According to a report in the National Geographic News, historians have said that when Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei presented his version of the telescope to officials in the Italian city-state of Venice, he was simply seeking a career boost.

Galileo needed a pay raise, in part to support several illegitimate children, according to science historian Alan Chapman of the University of Oxford in the UK.

“He was a rather obscure professor on the make showing a novelty invented by somebody else to his bosses,” Chapman said.

A math professor at the University of Padua, Galileo based his optical instrument on spyglasses developed the previous year by Dutch spectacle makers.

The Venetian Senate was about to purchase one of the popular gadgets when Galileo stepped in with his own version.

Made of wood and leather, Galileo’s telescope had eight-times magnification, a convex main lens, and a concave eyepiece that-unlike other telescopes of the period-presented the image the right way up.

Venice’s interest in the telescope was commercial rather than scientific, according to science historian Alan Chapman of the University of Oxford in the UK.

“The maritime city’s wealth and power was based on overseas trade, and at the time its vessels were being attacked by the Turks,” Chapman said.

To demonstrate the enemy-spotting potential of his telescope, “Galileo took a number of senators up to one of the bell towers in Venice where you can see ships out in the lagoon,” he said.

In 1609, most Europeans accepted the Christian account of creation, which placed our planet at the center of the universe.

Galileo’s telescope overturned this idea by allowing the scientist to observe moon-like phases in the planet Venus, which could only be explained by a sun-centered solar system.

Galileo likewise discovered that Jupiter was orbited by its own moons.

“This established beyond a doubt that the Earth was not the only center of motion in the universe,” said Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

Galileo’s telescope and astronomical observations also showed the surface of the moon wasn’t smooth, as was believed, and he was the first person to reveal that the Milky Way was composed of stars. (ANI)

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First planet that orbits “backward” around its star found by scientists

August 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 18 (ANI): Scientists have found the first planet that orbits “backward” around its star, an eccentricity likely caused by a collision with a larger neighbor early in its life.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the planet, dubbed WASP-17b, orbits a star about a thousand light-years away.

In addition to its exceptionally low density, the planet is one of the largest yet found.

“When I first saw that this thing might have a radius twice that of Jupiter, I was really astounded,” said David Anderson of Keele University, a member of the UK-based Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) consortium.

WASP-17b probably got so big because of its unusual orbit, Anderson and colleagues said in a new paper describing the find.

The planet is also the first found to orbit “backward” around its star, an eccentricity likely caused by a collision with a larger neighbor early in WASP-17b’s life.

That planetary crash may have nudged WASP-17b into an elongated orbit, which led to variations in the gravitational pull exerted on the planet by its host star, according to Anderson.

Changes in the star’s pull would have generated powerful tidal forces, which in turn would have created friction that got dissipated as heat.

The planet’s heated gases would have then expanded, causing the world to bloat. (ANI)

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‘Noisy’ stars mask planet’s true size

July 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Sydney, July 10 (ANI): A German study has suggested that astronomers observing exoplanets around other stars may be underestimating their size because of active stars that add ‘noise’ to the observation of exoplanets using the transit method.

The transit method detects exoplanets as they pass in front of their parent star, reducing the amount of light reaching telescopes on, and orbiting, Earth.

Although the transit method isn’t the best method for detecting exoplanets, it provides a reliable estimate of its size and mass.

According to a report by ABC News, PhD student Stefan Czesla of the Hamburg Observatory in Germany, and colleagues, examined the giant exoplanet Corot-2b, using data from the French COROT satellite.

Discovered in 2007, Corot-2b is three and a half times the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star in just 1.74 days.

After closely examining the light curves recorded by COROT, which involved splitting them into their red, green and blue components, the researchers determined that the exoplanet is 3 percent bigger than previously thought.

Czelsa and colleagues believe this discrepancy may be true for other exoplanets around active stars.

“For planets found around active stars, the determination of their exact physical parameters is considerably complicated by stellar activity,” said Czesla.

“Bright and dark spots on the star can modify the transit light curves, something that isn’t accounted for in models currently used to calculate an exoplanet’s size,” he explained.

According to Dr John Greenhill of the University of Tasmania, the research also highlights the limitation of the transit method in detecting exoplanets, particularly those smaller than Jupiter.

“The two techniques that have netted the most planets, the radial velocity technique and the transit method, are limited by the noisiness of stars,” he said.

“In principle, it looks like we won’t be able to detect planets the size of Neptune and Uranus, and even Saturn using these methods because of that limit,” he added. (ANI)

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Saturn’s moon Enceladus may host a salty ocean

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 25 (ANI): A new research by European scientists has provided evidence that an enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is fed by a salty ocean, a discovery that may have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

The Cassini spacecraft made a surprising discovery about Saturn’s sixth largest moon, Enceladus, on its exploration of the giant ringed planet in 2005.

Enceladus ejects water vapor, gas and tiny grains of ice into space hundreds of kilometers above the moon’s surface.

Enceladus orbits in Saturn’s outermost “E” ring. It is one of only three outer solar system bodies that produce active eruptions of dust and vapor.

Moreover, aside from the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter’s moon Europa, it is one of the only places in the solar system for which astronomers have direct evidence of the presence of water.

New understanding of how this plume is produced was revealed in 2008 by Juergen Schmidt of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Nikolai Brilliantov of the University of Leicester, and colleagues.

They explained how the water vapor jets are blasted out much faster than the dust particles. To work their theory required that Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water below its surface.

The same team, working with Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, in Heidelberg, has now found the direct experimental evidence for the presence of this ocean, which was previously lacking.

Current theories of satellite formation suggest that should a moon have a deep liquid ocean in contact with the body’s rocky core, for many millions of years, then it should be a salty ocean.

The team now reports the detection of sodium salts among the dust ejected in the Enceladus plume.

Postberg and colleagues have studied data from the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) onboard the Cassini spacecraft and have combined this data with laboratory experiments.

They have shown that the icy grains in the Enceladus plume contain substantial quantities of sodium salts, hinting at the salty ocean deep below.

The theory, proposed by Brilliantov and Schmidt, has allowed the team to relate the detected salt in the CDA with the likely concentration in the water vapor above the ocean, which proves the consistency of the experimental data.

The results of the study imply that the concentration of sodium chloride in the ocean can be as high as that of Earth’s oceans and is about 0.1-0.3 moles of salt per kilogram of water. (ANI)

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Planets too have “fat days”

June 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 21 (ANI): Humans are not the only ones cribbing over weight issues, some planets too go through a “fat” stage that swells their waistlines temporarily.

“Astronomers have found a lot of planets whose sizes cannot be explained by standard theory,” says Laurent Ibgui of Princeton University.

The difference between predicted and measured widths of so-called “hot Jupiters” can be 30 per cent or more, reports New Scientist.

According to the study, which used a computer simulation, the effect can be temporarily halted in hot Jupiters that begin life in highly elliptical orbits.

Alternatively the planets are squeezed and stretched as they circle their stars, resulting in “tidal heating” that warms the gas inside the planet.

This, thereby, counteracts the cooling effect, inflating the planet.

Eventually, though, the planet’s orbit will become more circular, and the hot Jupiter resumes shrinking.

Ibgui presented the research at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, California, last week. (ANI)

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Flowers may bloom on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

May 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 6 (ANI): Scientists have suggested that spacecraft should hunt for signs of life on Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa, since it would be detectable there in the form of blooming flowers.

Europa, which is thought to have an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell, has long been a target for astrobiologists, who suspect the interior could be salubrious for life.

But, digging deep into the moon’s icy shell could be difficult. Estimates of the thickness of the ice have ranged between less than a kilometre to more than 100 km.

Life could be visible from orbiting spacecraft, however, if it made a home in cracks in Europa’s shell that connect the surface to the interior, Physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson told New Scientist.

Such life might take the form of flowers with a parabolic shape that focuses the dim sunlight falling on Europa on the interior of the plant.

Flowers with such shapes are found in Arctic climes on Earth, where the plants have evolved to maximize solar energy.

According to Dyson, Europa flowers could be detectable through a phenomenon called retroreflection, in which light gets reflected back to its source.

This optical effect is seen in light reflected from animals’ eyes, and was used in the design of road signs and mirrors left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts.

Although Dyson’s ‘sunflowers’ may get their start on Europa, they could conceivably spread elsewhere in the solar system.

“You can imagine once you have flowers that get nourished from below, they could evolve in the direction of being independent,” Dyson said.

“If plants spread to smaller, more distant objects in the solar system’s two cometary reservoirs, the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, they would be less subject to gravity and could easily grow in size to maximize solar collection,” he added.

Europa will be one of two moons explored in depth by a planned collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency beginning in 2026,when a pair of orbiters are set to reach Jupiter. (ANI)

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Astronomers discover youngest and lowest mass dwarf stars

April 23, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 23 (ANI): Astronomers have found three brown dwarfs with estimated masses of less than 10 times that of Jupiter, making them among the youngest and lowest mass sub-stellar objects detected in the solar neighborhood to date.

The observations were made by a team of astronomers working at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de l’Observatoire de Grenoble (LAOG), France, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).

The dwarfs were found in a star forming region named IC 348, which lies almost 1000 light years from the Solar System towards the constellation of Perseus.

This cluster is approximately 3 million years old – extremely young compared to our 4.5 billion year old Sun – which makes it a good location in order to search for the lowest mass brown dwarfs.

The dwarfs are isolated in space, which means that they are not orbiting a star, although they are gravitationally bound to IC 348.

Their atmospheres all show evidence of methane absorption which was used to select and identify these young objects.

“There has been some controversy about identifying young, low mass brown dwarfs in this region. An object of a similar mass was discovered in 2002, but some groups have argued that it is an older, cooler brown dwarf in the foreground coinciding with the line of sight,” said astronomer Andrew Burgess.

“The fact that we have detected three candidate low-mass dwarfs towards IC 348 supports the finding that these really are very young objects,” he added.
The team set out to find a population of these brown dwarfs in order to help theoreticians develop more accurate models for the distribution of mass in a newly-formed population, from high mass stars to brown dwarfs, which is needed to test current star formation theories.

The discovery of the dwarfs in IC 348 has allowed them to set new limits on the lowest mass objects.

According to Burgess, “Finding three candidate low-mass dwarfs towards IC 348 backs up predictions for how many low-mass objects develop in a new population of stars.”

“Brown dwarfs cool with age and current models estimate that their surfaces are approximately 900-1000 degrees Kelvin (about 600-700 degrees Celsius). That’s extremely cool for objects that have just formed, which implies that they have the lowest masses of any of this type of object that we’ve seen to date,” he said. (ANI)

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Titan’s squashed shape hints at vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface

April 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, April 3 (ANI): A new study has suggested that Saturn’s moon Titan is surprisingly non-spherical, and is squashed at its poles, suggesting it may hide vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface.

Titan is 5150 kilometers across, making it larger than Mercury and only slightly smaller than the largest moon in the solar system, Jupiter’s Ganymede.

According to a report in New Scientist, by bouncing radar signals off the moon’s smog-enshrouded surface, the Cassini spacecraft has now measured Titan’s shape precisely for the first time.

“What we have are the first actual measurements showing that Titan’s not an exact sphere – this distorted egg-shaped thing best fits the observed shape,” study leader Howard Zebker of Stanford University told New Scientist.

Compared to a perfect sphere, Titan is squashed at its poles, with the ground at the poles about 700 meters lower than at the equator.

Titan, which always shows the same face to Saturn, is also stretched out a little in the planet’s direction, so the elevation around the equator itself varies by about 400 meters.

Titan is more squashed than expected, which may be a sign that the moon was once closer to Saturn.

In a closer, faster orbit, Titan also would have spun faster, assuming it had one face locked on Saturn back then as it does today.

An orbit 23 percent closer than the one Titan occupies today would account for the extra squashing at the poles and bulging at the equator.

The lower elevation at the poles fits nicely with one proposed explanation for why Titan’s lakes of hydrocarbons – made of liquid ethane and possibly also liquid methane – are found only in the polar regions.

If Titan has vast stores of hydrocarbons beneath its surface, the lakes could simply be places where the ground lies low enough to expose some of this liquid.

This is similar to the way digging a well shaft on Earth will expose groundwater.

In this scenario, it makes sense that the lakes appear preferentially at the lower-lying poles, according to Stephen Clifford of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

“There’s this potential for liquid to peek above the top of the solid body at the poles,” he said.

If Titan does conceal large reservoirs of methane and ethane beneath its icy surface, it could also explain why methane is so abundant in Titan’s atmosphere. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: cassini spacecraft, elevation, equator, groundwater, hydrocarbons, jupiter, kilometers, largest moon in the solar system, Liquid Ethane, liquid methane, moon titan, New Scientist, orbit, polar regions, radar signals, saturn, Saturn Moon, Saturn S Moon Titan, Smog, sphere, stanford university, study leader

Origins of ‘Rx’ traced back to 5000 years in Egypt

April 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, April 2 (ANI): In a special report, the Voice of America has traced the origin of the sign ‘Rx’, the history of which goes back to 5000 years in Egypt.

The sign is seen on drug stores and on bottles of pills and other medicines.

The sign is formed by a line across the right foot of the letter “R.” It represents the word “prescription.” It has come to mean “take this medicine.”

The sign has its beginnings five thousand years ago in Egypt.

At that time, people prayed to Horus, the god of the Sun. It was said that when Horus was a child, he was attacked by Seth, the demon of evil.

Folklore says that the evil Seth put out the eye of the young Horus. The mother of Horus called for help. Her cry was answered by Thoth, the god of learning and magic.

Thoth, with his wisdom and special powers, healed the eye of Horus, and the child was able to see again.

The ancient Egyptians used a drawing of the eye of Horus as a magic sign to protect themselves from disease, suffering and evil.

They cut this sign in the stones they used for buildings. It was painted on the papyrus rolls used for writing about medicine and doctors.

For thousands of years, the eye of Horus remained as a sign of the god’s help to the suffering and sick.

Long after the fall of the ancient Egyptian civilization, doctors and alchemists in Europe continued the custom of showing a sign of the gods’ help and protection.

But, over the years, the sign changed from the eye of Horus to the sign for Jupiter, the chief god of the Romans. Jupiter’s sign looked much like the printed number “four.”

That sign changed, also.

Today, it is the easily recognized capital “R” with a line across its foot. (ANI)

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Chartered helicopter business flies high in India, courtesy election campaigns

March 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Bangalore, Mar 20 (ANI): Despite recession and global economic meltdown, private helicopter companies here are reaping it rich since there is a great demand for their services by various political parties for poll campaigning.

Operators of chartered air services have rented out more choppers this time since the hiring politicians and political parties wish to have their prime attraction of orators and candidates reach out to the maximum number of voters in the shortest span of time.

There has been a huge increase in the demand for helicopters as compared to the 2004 general elections, as commercial aspects are no more a taxing factor for the political parties with planned election campaigns.

“Politicians and candidates concentration is on the programmes and what is to be done at the end of their flight. They are not worried about the flight. It’s only a means of transportation for them,” said M K Chandrasekhar, Director, Jupiter Aviation, Bangalore.

Reportedly, fleet of helicopters operated by various companies had been booked by the political parties, two months prior to the announcement of the poll dates.

Deccan Aviation, an air service provider from Bangalore, has a fleet of 12 choppers and five executive aircrafts, and all of them have been rented out.

However, more than earning handsome amount from the chartered flights, the operators are equally concerned about the safety and security of their flying machines.

Non-scheduled continuous flying takes a heavy toll on the pilots and also the aircraft.

“One has to understand that flying for elections is very demanding both on the machines and on the pilot. A lot of coordination is required from the pilot’s point of view because he would have to fly long hours. He would have to navigate successfully,” said Jayant Poovaiah, Executive Director, Deccan Aviation.

Of course, campaigning with chartered flights is not cheap. A chopper ride can cost a party to the tune of rupees 80,000 for one hour. By Jaipal Sharma (ANI)

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NASA may send fleet of spacecraft to Venus between 2020 and 2025

March 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, March 19 (ANI): A NASA advisory team has said that the agency is planning to send a future fleet of spacecraft to Venus between 2020 and 2025, which would include two high-altitude balloons built to hover in the sulphuric acid clouds over the planet.

According to a report in New Scientist, the multi-billion-dollar mission concept, which is being considered for launch in the next fifteen years, could help reveal more about Venus’s runaway greenhouse effect, any oceans it may once have had, and possible ongoing volcanic activity.

It could be the next flagship mission sent to a planet, after a planned mission to Jupiter and its moons set for launch in 2020.

The Venus mission would cost some 3 billion to 4 billion dollars and would launch between 2020 and 2025, according to NASA, which in 2008 tasked a group of scientists and engineers to formulate goals for the mission.

The team’s study outlines a plan to study the hazy planet, which has more in common with Earth than any other in terms of distance from the Sun, size and mass, but evolved into an inhospitable world where surface temperatures hover close to 450 degrees Celsius and sulphuric acid rains from the sky.

The team’s mission concept includes one orbiter, two balloons and two short-lived landers, all of which would launch into space on two Atlas V rockets.

“Our understanding of Venus is so low, we really need this armada,” said planetary scientist Mark Bullock of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the team leaders.

As an ensemble, the spacecraft could help reveal what happened to Venus’s oceans.

Researchers believe water was once plentiful enough to have been able to cover the entire planet in a layer 100 meters deep.

But Venus’s hothouse climate eventually dried up most of this water, a process that might have also slowed and eventually stopped plate tectonics on the planet.

The landers, which would only last a few hours in the intense heat, could look for evidence of minerals formed by water.

Since such hydrated minerals have a limited lifetime, they could help reveal how long Venus’s oceans might have lasted, a question that could shed light on whether life might have arisen on the planet.

The mission’s two balloons would each carry a gondola full of scientific instruments to sniff the atmosphere at an altitude of 55 kilometers.

The mission could also help reveal more about the origin of Venus’s current carbon dioxide atmosphere, which produces crushing surface pressures 90 times those on Earth. (ANI)

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