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European company develops mobile robots that are autonomous and multi-tasking

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Madrid (Spain), September 19 (ANI): An European company has developed innovative robots which are mobile, multifunctional, collaborative, autonomous and polyvalent, suitable for a wide range of work from street cleaning and rubbish collection to accompanying elderly people.

According to a report carried out in www.basqueresearch.com, this new generation of robots have been developed by TECNALIA Technological Corporation, and are a part of the European DUSTBOT research project under the remit of the VI European Framework Programme and in which TECNALIA is participating.

These latest generation robots are suitable for the monitoring of large spaces (open and closed), as guides for persons in large shopping areas (indicating to them where a particular shop or product is within a shopping centre), for accompanying elderly people or those with certain disabilities (both at home and outside), thanks to their functions of orientation, navigation, communications with others or tele-assistance centres.

They can also be used as guides in teaching spaces (museums, visitor centres), and for transport, storage and transport and goods deliveries, besides the cleaning of both open and closed surfaces, which have either difficult or easy access.

DUSTBOT has collaborative, multifunctional and autonomous robots that are capable of operating in partially destructured environments/situations based on information provided by a map.

The robots can also facilitate working in large areas, stations, airports and other types of public buildings, without being any obstacle for the activity of these places, given its reduced size, and without being a danger for members of the public, thanks to the novel system for the detection and avoidance of obstacles.

The rail station of the Euskotren company in the Bilbao neighbourhood of Atxuri in Spain was chosen for the public presentation of these devices.

The demonstration of two robot models was undertaken: the DustCart and the DustClean.

The DustCart robot, measuring 1.45 metres high and 70 Kg in weight, has a humanoid form and is designed to interact with the user and for the collection of low demand waste.

The DustClean robot, in the form of a small vehicle and measuring 96 cm high and 250 Kg in weight, cleans streets of dirt and dust. Moreover, both control the quality of air in real time.

“These robots are the solution for cleaning areas of difficult access and for the collection of rubbish at the very front door of, above all, persons who have mobility problems when moving the rubbish to the communal waste containers,” said Inaki Inzunza, Director of the Business Unit at the Tecnalia Technological Corporation. (ANI)

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Mystery of odd rotating stars solved by scientists

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 18 (ANI): A team of scientists has solved a longstanding mystery about a pair of stars called DI Herculis whose peculiar rotation had remained a mystery for three decades.

The shift in the orbit of DI Herculis was a mystery till now.

Now, MIT (Massachusetts Institute Of Technology) researchers and colleagues have determined that the stars are rotating tipped over on their sides, relative to their orbits around each other.

This produces tidal effects that counteract the expected rate for the orbits to shift orientation over time (called precession), finally explaining the mysterious anomaly.

The discrepancy in the rate of precession had been seen as a possible refutation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, so finding a conventional explanation means that relativity has withstood another possible challenge.

This discovery could also help to shed light on how binary stars (about half of all known stars) are formed and how their rotation and orbits evolve over time.

The mystery was solved by postdoctoral researcher Simon Albrecht and assistant professor of physics Joshua Winn and others, who used a high-resolution spectrograph called Sophie on a 1.93-meter telescope at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France to make highly detailed observations that revealed the unexpected tilt – one of more than 70 degrees from vertical, the other more than 80 degrees – of the stars’ rotation axes.

The team now hopes to study other unusual binary stars to try to determine how unusual this tipped-over configuration is. (ANI)

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New blast-proof glass would be less vulnerable to small-scale explosions

September 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 11 (ANI): University of Missouri (MU) researchers are developing and testing a new type of blast-proof glass that will be thinner, lighter and less vulnerable to small-scale explosions.

“Currently, blast-resistant window glass is more than 1 inch thick, which is much thicker than standard window glass that is only one-fourth of an inch thick and hurricane-protected window glass that is one-half of an inch thick,” said Sanjeev Khanna, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the MU College of Engineering.

“The glass we are developing is less than one-half of an inch thick. Because the glass panel will be thinner, it will use less material and be cheaper than what is currently being used,” he added.

Conventional blast-resistant glass is made with laminated glass that has a plastic layer between two sheets of glass.

MU researchers are now replacing the plastic layer with a transparent composite material made of glass fibers that are embedded in plastic.

The glass fibers add strength because, unlike plastic, they are only about 25 microns thick, which is about half the thickness of a typical human hair, and leave little room for defects in the glass that could lead to cracking.

“The use of a transparent composite interlayer provides us the flexibility to change the strength of the layer by changing the glass fiber quantity and its orientation,” Khanna said.

In tests, researchers are observing how the glass reacts to small-scale explosions caused by a grenade or hand-delivered bomb.

They tested the glass by exploding a small bomb within close proximity of the window panel.

After the blast, the glass panel was cracked, but had no holes in the composite layer.

“The new multilayered transparent glass could have a wide range of potential uses if it can be made strong enough to resist small-scale explosions,” Khanna said.

“The super-strong glass also may protect residential windows from hurricane winds and debris or earthquakes,” he added.

Future tests will be done on larger pieces of glass that are equivalent to standard window size, and researchers could potentially test the glass on large-scale explosions. (ANI)

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Lack of sunlight can cause ‘brain drain’ in depressed people

July 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 28 (ANI): Depressed people are less able to think clearly when there’s a short-term lack of sunlight, a new study has found.

Writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Environmental Health, researchers used weather data from NASA satellites to measure sunlight exposure across the United States and linked this information to the prevalence of cognitive impairment in depressed people.

The team of US researchers, which was led by Shia Kent, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, used cross-sectional data from 14,474 people in the NIH-NINDS-funded REGARDS study, a longitudinal study investigating stroke incidence and risk factors, to study associations between depression, cognitive function and sunlight.

He said, “We found that among participants with depression, low exposure to sunlight was associated with a significantly higher predicted probability of cognitive impairment. This relationship remained significant after adjustment for season.

“This new finding that weather may not only affect mood, but also cognition, has significant implications for the treatment of depression, particularly seasonal affective disorder”.

Kent and his colleagues speculate that the physiological mechanisms that give rise to seasonal depression may also be involved in sunlight’s effect on cognitive function in the context of depressive symptoms.

Cognitive function was assessed by measurement of short-term recall and temporal orientation. As well as regulating the hormones serotonin and melatonin, light has been shown to also affect brain blood flow, which has in turn been linked with cognitive functions.

The researchers write, “Discovering the environment’s impact on cognitive functioning within the context of seasonal disorders may lead not only to better understanding of the disorders, but also to the development of targeted interventions to enhance everyday functioning and quality of life.” (ANI)

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How news stories rise and fall in popularity

July 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, July 14 (ANI): Cornell computer scientists say that they have successfully managed to track and analyse how news stories rise and fall in popularity, by mapping the flow of articles appearing on the Internet.

Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, postdoctoral researcher Jure Leskovec and graduate student Lars Backstrom tracked 1.6 million online news sites, including 20,000 mainstream media sites and a vast array of blogs, over the three-month period leading up to the 2008 presidential election.

The researchers have revealed that their study included a total of 90 million articles, something that makes it one of the largest analyses anywhere of online news.

They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence, and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media.

In mainstream media, according to them, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly.

In the blogosphere, say the researchers, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth.

Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer, they add.

“The movement of news to the Internet makes it possible to quantify something that was otherwise very hard to measure-the temporal dynamics of the news. We want to understand the full news ecosystem, and online news is now an accurate enough reflection of the full ecosystem to make this possible. This is one (very early) step toward creating tools that would help people understand the news, where it’s coming from and how it’s arising from the confluence of many sources,” said Kleinberg.

The researchers believe that the slow rise of a new story in the mainstream results from imitation-as more sites carried a story, other sites were more likely to pick it up. But the life of a story is limited, they say, as new stories quickly push out the old.

They say that a mathematical model based on the interaction of imitation and recency predicted the pattern fairly well, while predictions based on either imitation or recency alone couldn’t come close.

They admit that their mathematical model needs to be refined, and suggest further study of how stories move between sites with opposing political orientation.

“It will be useful to further understand the roles different participants play in the process, as their collective behavior leads directly to the ways in which all of us experience news and its consequences,” the researchers concluded. (ANI)

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Legislators snooze off as Meira Kumar addresses them

July 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Bhopal, July 5 (ANI): An orientation programme for state legislators turned out to be a ‘sleepy affair’ in Bhopal.

The two-day orientation programme was aimed to make the legislators aware of the nuances of lawmaking.

Even as Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar was explaining the various aspects of lawmaking and responsibilities associated with the executive, many of the deputies were seen dozing off.

However, Kumar tried to downplay the incident, saying all the listeners were “awake”.

“I don’t think any of the legislators was sleeping. They were all awake,” Kumar said.

Newspapers many a times publish pictures of lawmakers dozing off even when serious legislations are being discussed in Parliament. (ANI)

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Meira Kumar to inaugurate MLAs orientation programme in Bhopal

July 4, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Bhopal, July 4 (ANI): A two day orientation programme of the legislatures of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly will be inaugurated by Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar in Bhopal today.

Besides Meira Kumar, Madhya Pradesh Assembly Speaker Ishwar Das Rohani, the state’s Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kailash Vijaywargiya and the Leader of Opposition, Jamuna Devi will also guide the newly elected MLAs.

The BJP’s Deputy Leader in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj will deliver a lecture on how to become an effective MLA while former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh will speak on the role of young MLAs in the empowerment of the parliamentary culture in the programme.

Besides them, former Union Minister Vikram Verma and former Secretary General of the Lok Sabha Subhash Kashyap, Jharkhand Assembly Speaker Inder Singh Namdhari, MP Satyavrat Chaturvedi, MP Sandeep Dikshit, former MP Thavarchand Gehlot and former Lok Sabha general secretary G C Malhotra, and some other experts in parliamentary and legislative procedures will also guide the new members on legislative issues.

Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker Karia Munda will chair the closing ceremony. (ANI)

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Gay community stages rally in Bhubaneswar

June 28, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Bhubaneswar, June 28 (ANI): People belonging to sexual minorities staged a rally in Bhubaneswar demanding their rights.

Gays, lesbians, transgender and bisexuals put up plays and also took to streets to participate in the ‘Rainbow Pride Walk’ to make people aware about their plight.

“The reason for organising this rally is that people look down upon us in the society. There is a stigma attached to sexual minorities in our society. We want to live with respect,” said Tulu.

Members of the sexual minority community said they wanted the society to treat them with respect and wanted equal rights like any other citizen.

“The purpose is to make people aware that the society in India, in Orissa, in Bhubaneswar, – wherever lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender are, – every where, they have equal rights like any other citizen of this country. India is a democratic country. We have the right to express our problems, our concerns to larger society and we expect the civil society, the private sector and even the NGO sector to understand our problems better,” said Pawan Dhall, organiser of the march.

The ‘Rainbow Pride Walk’ held annually aims to draw sexual orientation, gender identity and associated sexual health issues into the larger human rights movement in the country.

It draws its inspiration from the Stonewall Riots held in New York, USA in June 1969.

The riots occurred as a mark of protest by sexual minorities in the US against police harassment that was a daily feature of their lives in those days and sparked off what can be said to be the modern movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the West. (ANI)

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High CO2 levels lead to abnormally large fish ear bones

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 26 (ANI): Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the ocean can cause abnormally large growth in the otoliths, or ear bones, of fish, say researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Considered a fundamental bodily structure in fish, otoliths serve a vital function in fish by helping them sense orientation and acceleration.

In the study, the researchers have described experiments in which fish that were exposed to high levels of carbon dioxide experienced abnormally large growth in their otoliths.

The researchers had hypothesized that otoliths in young white seabass growing in waters with elevated carbon dioxide would grow more slowly than a comparable group growing in seawater with normal CO2 levels.

But, to their surprise, they discovered the reverse and found “significantly larger” otoliths in fish developing in high-CO2 water.

Although the fish in high-CO2 water were not larger in overall size, it was only the otoliths that grew demonstrably bigger.

“At this point one doesn’t know what the effects are in terms of anything damaging to the behavior or the survival of the fish with larger otoliths. The assumption is that anything that departs significantly from normality is an abnormality and abnormalities at least have the potential for having deleterious effects,” said David Checkley, a Scripps Oceanography professor and lead author of the new study.

Now, the researchers are poised to determine whether the otolith growth abnormality exists in fish other than white seabass; to locate the physical mechanism that causes the enhanced otolith growth; and to assess whether the larger otoliths have a functional effect on the survival and the behaviour of the fish.

“Number three is the big one. If fish can do just fine or better with larger otoliths then there’s no great concern. But fish have evolved to have their bodies the way they are. The assumption is that if you tweak them in a certain way it’s going to change the dynamics of how the otolith helps the fish stay upright, navigate and survive,” said Checkley.

The study has been published in the journal Science. (ANI)

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US seniors ‘smarter’ than British counterparts

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 25 (ANI): A new study has shown that older adults in America are mentally stronger than their English counterparts.

The research team from Peninsula Medical School, the University of Cambridge and the University of Michigan examined the cognitive function of 8,299 Americans with 5,276 British seniors aged 65 and older and found that US seniors performed significantly better that their English counterparts.

The survey showed that on a population level, the overall difference in cognitive performance between the two countries was quite large and amounted to a decade of ageing.

The cognitive performance of 75-year-olds in the US was as good, on average, as that of 65-year-olds in England.

During the study, the participants took tests of immediate and delayed recall of 10 common nouns including hotel, river, tree, skin, gold, village, baby and table.

Then they completed other survey questions and five minutes later, were asked to repeat as many of the words as possible. During the interview participants were also asked what day, date, month and year it was.

Taken together, their answers (10 points for immediate recall, 10 for delayed recall and four for orientation) made up a 24-point scale of cognitive function.

While comparing the scores, the researchers found that the mean score for the combined cognitive scale was 12.5 (out of 24) for the youngest group of English adults (ages 65-74) and 8.3 for the oldest group (age 85 and older).

The mean scores for the youngest and oldest groups in the U.S. were 13.8 and 10.1, respectively.

Moreover, U.S. adults reported significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms than English adults.

“While we in England may not like the results of this study, there are important lessons to be gleaned regarding the differences in lifestyle and the treatment of cardiovascular diseases between the US and England,” said researchers Dr Iain Lang, from Peninsula Medical School.

“Given the good results achieved by the American oldest-old, we can hypothesise that the more aggressive diagnosis and treatment of hypertension and possibly other cardiovascular risks that occurs in the US, may lead to less cognitive decline.

“US citizens tend to retire later than those in England, and this too can have an effect on cognitive performance – there may be a connection between early retirement and the early onset of cognitive decline,” Lang added. (ANI)

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Risk factor for obsessive-compulsive disorder identified

May 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Melbourne, May 29 (ANI): Kids with impaired thought processes are more likely to develop obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as adults, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by Dr Jessica Grisham from the University of New South Wales, suggests that people at risk of developing OCD could now be identified during childhood.

OCD is an anxiety disorder where sufferers have repetitive and intrusive thoughts or images. The thoughts are often combined with compulsions, such as cleaning, to reduce the anxiety.

For the study, researchers used data from a longitudinal study in Dunedin, New Zealand that has been following 1000 children from birth.

Of the 700 participants who continued with the study, 2 percent developed OCD by age 32.

Grisham says that the study reviewed how the OCD group performed in a series of cognitive tests conducted when they were aged 13.

She says that looking at the children’s performance on these tests predicts whether they will have OCD in adulthood almost 20 years later.

“Children who struggled with certain tasks, particularly visuospatial skills like being able to manipulate in your mind the orientation of different figures, had a much higher risk of having OCD at age 32,” ABC Science quoted her as saying.

In fact all 13 adults who developed OCD performed poorly in these tests as teenagers, the study found.

However, Grisham insists that it isn’t given that any child who doesn’t perform well in specific cognitive assessments will develop OCD.

“There are people who perform poorly on these tests and don’t go onto develop OCD, so we like to think of it as an indicator of vulnerability. Things in the environment or stressful events might activate their vulnerability,” she said.

The study has been published in The British Journal of Psychiatry. (ANI)

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NHRC seminar on “Right to Information, Human Rights ends

May 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, May 22 (ANI): A two day national seminar on “Right to Information, Human Rights: The Present Scenario”, organized by the National Human Rights Commission concluded in New Delhi today.

Addressing the concluding Session, the noted Hindi Litterateur Kunwar Narayan as Chief Guest observed that literature is a mirror to society and in this context it has close links with Right to Information.

He underscored the importance of Hindi in brining awareness about Right to Information.

Renowned Journalist and Special Guest, Prabhash Joshi stated, it is ironical that the country seems to be governed by the age old rules framed by the British and which have orientation for denying the information.

A change in the society cannot be effected with the introduction of a law, first the society has to accept it, he added. Recalling the efforts behind the enactment of Right to Information Act in the country, he observed that it needs to be implemented in a more transparent manner in which no institution remains beyond its purview.

During the two day seminar, several writers, academicians, Senior Government Officers, Members and Officers of the Commission participated in the discussions on the issue of Right to Information and human rights.

It was largely hailed that the Right to Information has brought in a change in the culture of the governance in the country.

However, it was also felt that unless the people in the governance and the society as a whole are sensitive about the need to be transparent, mere implementation of Right to Information will not be successful. (ANI)

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Miniscule magnets in ant antennae act as internal GPS

May 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 22 (ANI): A new research has led to the discovery of miniscule magnets in ant antennae, which act as an internal GPS (Global positioning system), making these insects aware as to where they are going.

According to a report in Discovery News, while human global positioning systems rely upon receivers that pick up information from a network of satellites, the probable ant system weighs next to nothing, requires little energy to operate and appears to be mostly built out of dirt.

“The ants we studied dwell in tropical soils that are full of very fine-grained iron minerals, so there is plenty of material available,” said researcher Dr Jandira Ferreira de Oliveira of the Technical University of Munich and the Brazilian Center for Physics Research.

“The incorporation of minerals probably starts as soon as ants start getting in touch with soil,” she said.

Her team found ultra fine-grained crystals of magnetic magnetite, maghemite, hematite, goethite, and aluminum silicates in ant antennae.

These particles could make a “biological compass needle” that drives ant GPS.

For the study, published in the latest Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Oliveira and her colleagues collected worker ants from the species Pachycondyla marginata in Sao Paulo.

Prior studies found these ants tend to always migrate at an orientation of 13 degrees relative to Earth’s geomagnetic north-south axis, and that the ant’s strongest magnetic signal comes from its antennae.

High-powered microscopes and chemical analysis revealed the presence of the dirt-acquired magnetic particles in the antennae, intriguingly next to a body part called the Johnston’s organ that may also be part of the ant’s GPS.

According to Oliveira, “Our planet is magnetized, likely due to rotational forces of liquid iron in earth’s core. Although the resulting magnetic field is one-twenty thousandth as strong as a refrigerator magnet, ants appear to perceive the geomagnetic information through a magnetic sensor (the dirt particles), transduce it in a signal to the nervous system and then to the brain.”

The University of Oxford’s Dr Robert Srygley, one of the world’s leading insect experts, said that the new study “is a major advance toward finding the magnetic compass in this nomadic ant.” (ANI)

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Jumping robots may soon find role in military service

May 11, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 10 (ANI): Robots that can leap 8 metres vertically to clear walls or fences may soon find themselves in the military.

Sandia National Laboratories’ prototype Urban Hopper can really do wonders just by hopping.

Now robot maker Boston Dynamics has landed the job of producing a military version with a dash of more self-control.

US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is funding the programme, says it wants the hopper for urban reconnaissance and intelligence gathering – although it admits it could also be fitted with a raft of weapons, reports New Scientist.

Sandia’s shoebox-sized prototype, which is driven by an electric motor, rolls along on wheels. It jumps using a gas piston which is powered by methylacetylene and nitrous oxide.

However, its leaps so far are pretty haphazard.

“The existing hoppers do not maintain a stable orientation during hops, but tumble randomly,” says DARPA spokesman Mark Peterson. (ANI)

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Fish get seasick too, says scientist

April 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Apr 21 (ANI): A German researcher has claimed to have solved the mystery that intrigued the science world for decades: hether or not fish get seasick?

Well, according to Dr Reinhold Hilbig, a zoologist from Stutgart, the answer is yes.

The boffin studied the effects of weightlessness in water as part of research into how humans are affected in space.

To reach the conclusion, forty-nine fish in a mini aquarium were sent up in a plane that went into a steep dive, simulating the loss of gravity astronauts encounter in space flight.

He said eight of the fish began turning around and around in circles.

“They completely lost their sense of balance, behaving like humans who get seasick,” The Telegraph quoted Hilbig, as saying.

“The fish lost their orientation, they became completely confused and looked as if they were about to vomit. In the wild such a “seasick” fish would become prey for others because they are incapable of fleeing from danger,” the expert added.

Later, the eight seasick fish were culled and their brains were analysed to try to determine the exact cause of their sickness.

“It would seem the loss of eye contact with water movement and vibrations plays a large part in their disorientation,” Hilbig said. (ANI)

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Very difficult to change Pakistan’s attention from India to Taliban’

April 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 16 (IANS) With Pakistan army focused heavily on its perceived threats from India, a former US official says it would be very difficult to change its orientation to fight Taliban extremists on its border with Afghanistan.

‘Both Indians and Americans, and Pakistanis for that matter, view the current challenge germinating from the frontiers with Afghanistan,’ says Evan A. Feigenbaum, former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

But ‘The Pakistan army has trained for fifty years to fight India in the plains of the Punjab,’ he says.’So that really requires a change in orientation by the Pakistan army, which is very difficult for them because it’s so different from what they’ve trained and prepared for the past fifty to sixty years.’

The United States and India obviously share a lot of interests in South Asia, Feigenbaum, now Senior Fellow for East, Central, and South Asia at Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview with the Washington think tank’s website, CFR.org

But ‘what’s been interesting and important about the US-India relationship over the last decade is that it has really exploded the boundaries of South Asia in a lot of ways,’ he said when asked about India’s opposition to being included in US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke’s portfolio.

Sceptical voices were raised in India about Holbrooke’s mandate, ‘because many Indians, like many Americans, view the great achievement of the last decade as moving the US-India relationship beyond South Asian issues and beyond Indo-Pak this, and Indo-Pak that,’ he said.

‘From an Indian perspective, linking India and the Kashmir issue into the issues that Ambassador Holbrooke is looking at in Afghanistan, is something that Indians really oppose,’ he said.

In the US too, he said there’s a broad recognition in both Democratic and Republican parties ‘that India is a country that has capacity to work with us on a whole array of global challenges, not just issues within the region.’

‘Thus the focus has really been on building a US-India relationship with a more global orientation,’ Feigenbaum said.

‘When you go down the list of challenges facing the United States, whether it’s forging a deal on climate change or ensuring a successful Doha round or the international trade regime, the United States needs to find a way to work with India.’

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9.9 Media co-founder selected for FORTUNE, US State Dept. Global Women’s Mentoring Program

April 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, Apr 8 (ANI/Business Wire India): Anuradha Das Mathur, one of the founders of 9.9 Media, has been selected for the prestigious FORTUNE magazine and US State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Program.

This unique program combines the study of U.S. business culture with a working mentorship program that enables talented, emerging women business leaders across the globe to spend a month in the U.S. to enhance their capabilities and propel their careers forward.

Top American female executives – FORTUNE’s Most Powerful Women – mentor these emerging leaders to support them in their professional growth. FORTUNE Most Powerful Women Summit and the U.S. State Department established the Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership in May 2006.

Mathur will join 35 rising star women from around the world for the 2009 FORTUNE program slated to take place from April 26 to May 21. The program participants are fully funded by their mentor’s company.

The three-phase program opens with an orientation session in Washington, DC, where the participants meet with senior women in government, academia and business to discuss the importance of public-private partnerships, learn of American best practices in business and government and engage in interactive leadership and communications training sessions.

The international participants are then paired with one of FORTUNE’s Most Powerful Women Leaders from companies like Time, Inc., Avon, Xerox, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Exxon Mobil in cities across the United States.

For three weeks, American and international participants work together in mentoring relationships to share the skills and experiences necessary for strengthening women’s leadership.

Throughout the mentorship process, participants shadow a powerful woman leader and take away best practices that they can apply to their professional lives at home. The program concludes in New York City, where the participants have meetings with Goldman Sachs, Solera Capital, and Good Morning America, and to discuss lessons learned and plans for future activities.

There are now 84 FORTUNE/State Department alumnae around the world.

Mathur co-founded 9.9 Media with four other colleagues in September 2007. She is a graduate of Lady Sri Ram College, University of Delhi, and has an MA in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge University.

She will be mentored by Patricia Fili-Krushel, who is Executive Vice President of Administration of Time Warner Inc. and is one of its senior coporate officers. Before joining Time Warner in July 2001, Fili-Krushel was CEO of WebMD Health and President at ABC Television Network. Last year, Suma Krishnaswamy, founder of Bangalore-based Cambium Biotechnologies, was selected for the program from India and mentored with Diane Gulyas, Group Vice President, DuPont Performance Materials. (ANI)

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Digital screen to aid election campaign in Andhra

April 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Hyderabad, Apr 6 (ANI): Political parties in Andhra Pradesh are using unique mobile digital screen to woo voters.
Designed and manufactured by the Hyderabad-based MIC Electronics Limited, the mobile digital screen enables two-way video conferencing and also displays live images to a large audience within the radius of 200-300 metres.
The huge billboards like digital screens, which are called the LEDs (light emitting diodes), can be installed in 20 minutes and it can rotate 360 degrees.

The all-round orientation gives the candidate an advantage of literally being in the close proximity of the electorate.

“The leader who is somewhere in north can be shown in south. That is you are taking them almost directly ‘live’ to the people,” said M V Ramana Rao, Chairman and Managing Director, MIC Electronics Limited.

The cost of making the mobile digital screen, the first of its kind in India, varies from rupees three million to rupees 10 million.

MIC Electronics Limited also claims to have introduced these audio-video promotional concepts in Sri Lanka, South Africa and some countries of the Middle East.

“This is a unique TV, which is available for the masses. Audio technology is available for public meeting. This technology came to amplify the video signal, it also amplifies the picture size too. It can be amplified 500 times to cater to so many people,” said V Muthuswamy, Chief Operating Officer (COO), MIC Electronics Limited. By Narendra (ANI)

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Astronomers dissect a giant stellar explosion

April 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Paris, April 4 (ANI): A meticulous analysis of data has allowed astronomers to investigate the initial phases of a giant stellar explosion, which led to the ejection of matter at velocities close to the speed of light.

On 19 December 2004, the blast from an exploding star arrived at Earth.

ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Integral satellite, an orbiting gamma-ray observatory, recorded the entire event, providing information for what may prove to be one of the most important gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) seen in recent years.

As the data was collected, astronomers saw the 500-second-long burst rise to extraordinary brilliance.

“It is in the top 1 percent of the brightest GRBs we have seen,” said Diego Gotz, CEA Saclay, France, who headed the investigation.

The brightness of the event, known as GRB 041219A, has allowed the team to perform a painstaking investigation to extract a property known as the polarization of the gamma rays.

The team has shown that the gamma rays were highly polarized and varied tremendously in level and orientation.

Polarization refers to the preferred direction in which the radiation wave oscillates.

Polaroid sunglasses work with visible light by letting through only a single direction of polarization, blocking most of the light from entering our eyes.

The blast from a GRB is thought to be produced by a jet of fast-moving gas bursting from near the central engine; probably a black hole created by the collapse of the massive star.

The polarization is directly related to the structure of the magnetic field in the jet. So, it is one of the best ways for astronomers to investigate how the central engine produces the jet.

There are a number of ways this might happen.

In the first scenario, the jet carries a portion of the central engine’s magnetic field into space. A second involves the jet generating the magnetic field far from the central engine.

A third concerns the extreme case in which the jet contains no gas just magnetic energy, and a fourth scenario entails the jet moving through an existing field of radiation.

According to Gotz, the Integral results favour a synchrotron model and, of those three, the most likely scenario is the first, in which the jet lifts the central engine’s magnetic field into space.

“It is the only simple way to do it,” he said.

What Gotz would most like to do is measure the polarisation for every GRB, to see whether the same mechanism applies to all. (ANI)

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Gays, lesbians being offered ‘straight’ cure

March 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 26 (ANI): A significant minority of psychotherapists are attempting to help “cure” gays and lesbians of their homosexuality without any evidence that such methods work, says a new research.

The research funded by the Wellcome Trust has been published in the open access journal BMC Psychiatry.

To reach the conclusion, researchers from UCL (University College London) and St George’s, University of London, question over 1,400 mental health professionals on whether they would attempt to change a client’s sexual orientation if requested. Although only one in twenty-five said that they would do so, one in six reported having assisted at least one client to reduce their gay or lesbian feelings, usually through therapy.

Therapists were also asked in what year they had conducted such therapy and there was no sign of a decrease in recent times.

“There is very little evidence to show that attempting to treat a person’s homosexual feelings is effective and in fact it can actually be harmful,” says Professor Michael King from UCL.

“So it is surprising that a significant minority of practitioners still offer this help to their clients,” the expert added.

Professor King and colleagues found that a number of reasons were given by the psychiatrists and therapists for offering assistance, ranging from the counsellor’s own moral and religious views about homosexuality through to a desire to help patients who were stressed by discrimination.

There was also a degree of ignorance about the lack of evidence surrounding such the efficacy of such therapies – in particular, that no randomised control trials have ever been conducted that show that the therapies are effective.

Professor King believes that it is important to raise awareness amongst both therapists and the wider public about homosexuality and its so-called treatments.

“The best approach is to help people adjust to their situation, to value them as people and show them that there is nothing whatever pathological about their sexual orientation. Both mental health practitioners and society at large must help them to confront prejudice in themselves and in others,” he said. (ANI)

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