Delhi Police rally behind Rayleigh for red beacons

Posted on by

The Delhi Police on Monday banked on early 20th Century English physicist Lord Rayleighs theory of elastic scattering of light to convince the Supreme Court that police, armed forces and ambulances need to have red beacons to make their presence felt on the roads and battle odds like fog, dust and unearthly hours of the night.

In its application for a modification of a December 2013 Supreme Court judgment restricting the number of VIPs using red beacons in their cars, the Delhi Police said the blue lights don't match up to the red ones in intensity and presence.

The Capital's police explained the Rayleigh theory in Physics, chapter and verse, to make a bench led by Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu see their point that red light has maximum penetration even in low visibility conditions such as fog, dust and night time. Whereas the blue one has least penetration, minimum wavelength and maximum scattering, making it unsuitable.

Historical use of red light is as that of a cautionary sign, the Delhi Police pressed their case. The police was successfull to get the bench to modify its 2013 verdict, pronounced in a public interest litigation filed by Abhay Singh.

Two year ago, Supreme Court had directed States to amend the Motor Vehicles Rules and limit red beacons to only heads of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, constitutional post-holders and further impose an exemplary fine on violators.

The apex court had then traced the origin of the red beacon to the British era.

What we have done in the last four decades would shock the most established political systems. The best example is the use of symbols of authority, including the red lights on the vehicles of public representatives from the lowest to the highest and civil servants of various cadres. The red lights symbolise power and the stark differentiation between those who are allowed to use them and the ones who are not, the Supreme Court had observed then its judgment.

COMMENTS

Please Wait while comments are loading...

1. Comments will be moderated by The Hindu editorial team. 2. Comments that are abusive, personal, incendiary or irrelevant cannot be published. 3. Please write complete sentences. Do not type comments in all capital letters, or in all lower case letters, or using abbreviated text. (example: u cannot substitute for you, d is not 'the', n is not 'and'). 4. We may remove hyperlinks within comments. 5. Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name, to avoid rejection.

Read more here:

Delhi Police rally behind Rayleigh for red beacons

Red Cross Wants To Diversify Blood Supply

Posted on by

Griz Softball Ready For Spring Season to Begin Griz Softball Ready For Spring Season to Begin

Updated: Tuesday, January 20 2015 12:22 AM EST2015-01-20 05:22:49 GMT

The Montana Softball team is in the midst of their inaugural season, as things pick up in difficulty for the spring.

The Montana Softball team is in the midst of their inaugural season, as things pick up in difficulty for the spring.

Updated: Monday, January 19 2015 11:58 PM EST2015-01-20 04:58:03 GMT

The Governor declared a state of emergency in an eastern Montana city, following a weekend oil spill.

The Governor declared a state of emergency in an eastern Montana city, following a weekend oil spill.

Updated: Monday, January 19 2015 10:49 PM EST2015-01-20 03:49:46 GMT

Residents in Missoula, like so many communities across the nation, gather and celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Junior.

Residents in Missoula, like so many communities across the nation, gather and celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Junior.

Continued here:

Red Cross Wants To Diversify Blood Supply

Why humans should go to Mars and other places in space

Posted on by

Reusable, modular space systems could make human Mars missions more affordable and eliminate one long-running objection to them. (credit: J. Strickland)

In a recent op-ed published in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, titled Why humans shouldnt go to Mars, University of Virginia biology professor Michael Menaker argues that human exploration of Mars doesnt make good sense. We are already exploring Mars with robotic spacecraft, he states, and there are urgent Earth-bound problems to solve.

However, he has not made his case, which is based on several wrong fundamental assumptions. Its possible he may be reacting to the blatant Mars Hype that was recently put out by some people within NASA who support the SLS and Orion programs, since the article does mention the Orion test launch. What the article really represents, however, is the zero sum game attitude by a few within the science community, some of whom depend on government science programs for their employment. I must emphasize that this point is not meant to denigrate the vast majority of scientists, many of whom work on valid and important research and struggle every year to maintain their labs financial survival. I suspect the majority of those who work on robotic spacecraft programs do strongly support the human space program, but those who do not sometimes get more media attention when they speak out, since taking such a position is controversial. Their attitude is that funding for a human Mars mission would take money away from their science. What Menaker forgets is that any human spaceflight program uses funding that could possibly go to the robotic or pure science programs instead, so that opposition to Mars programs is also in effect opposition to all human spaceflight. His comments later in the essay, about urgent Earth-bound problems, confirm that this is his position.

In my view, both robotic and human programs are both important and interdependent. The robotic program gets part of its support from interest in future human exploration, while that future human program will rely heavily on the data from the robotic programs to determine good landing sites and allow safe landings. As a very strong supporter of science in general, and space science and planetology in particular, I find it sad that some people have such a limited vision of how tightly linked science and exploration are. Professor Menaker works at the University of Virginia, whose first president was Thomas Jefferson. As US President, Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition across two-thirds of a continent and back. That expedition contributed tremendously to understanding the geography and biology of the American West. In like manner, future exploration of Mars by robots and humans will help us understand planets in general, even our own Earth. The exhortation by Menaker to stay home on the Earth would, if followed, greatly impede both our ability to understand the Earth and to protect it.

Menaker agonizes over the stress on crews on such long voyages, but these are nothing new, and in turn will contribute greatly to humanitys future. Previously, several nations, such as Portugal, Spain, and England, have sent crews of sailors on very long voyages of exploration, some lasting for three years, as long as a Mars expedition would last (just getting to Mars takes six to eight months.) The results of these voyages included finding an economical route to the Far East around Africa, proving yet again that the world was round by circumnavigation, and the discovery of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. Furthermore, expeditions to Mars will be in constant contact with their families on Earth, even though there will be a time delay. The isolation and stress of a Mars mission will be nothing like such maritime crews withstood, in an age before good food and good health could be provided at sea.

Menakers take on the high cost of Mars expeditions and the risk to astronauts is also based on wrong and outdated assumptions. With current and past technology, as represented by the expendable SLS booster and Orion programs, the cost, the risk to crews, and the potential radiation doses would in fact be very high. If Mars missions were mounted using the current NASA plans, the cost would probably be in the hundreds of billions of dollars and radiation doses could exceed current lifetime safety limits. However, it is very unlikely that such huge amounts would ever be approved by Congress, and since just one of the unmanned programs, the James Webb Space Telescope, will cost almost $10 billion all by itself, complaining about only the current human space budget seems misplaced. It is also worth pointing outfor probably the millionth timethat the entire NASA budget is one half of one percent of the federal budget. All of the existing social programs vastly outspend it.

So it is much more likely that Mars expeditions will actually be conducted with reusable boosters and reusable spacecraft designed and built by private companies. Much of the space community is coming to share this view. In addition to reducing the cost, such boosters will allow the use of heavy and effective radiation shielding on the crew habitats, making the radiation issue moot. By the time we are ready for Mars expeditions, sometime after 2025, such boosters and spacecraft will be operating.

With these, a continuing program of Mars exploration will be possible within annual NASA budget limits. The cost of an initial human NASA Mars program would probably be in the tens of billions of dollars, but that is trivial compared to the vast sums spend on the inefficient shuttle program. The more that private companies are involved, the lower the cost will be. If the cost is shared by developing standardized vehicles to also support a lunar base, the overall cost will be lower still. In any case, total costs of a program are misleading, since it is the annual cost that is more important to an exploration program run by a government. Over a 15-year time framefive years for development and ten years for operationsthe cost of a $30-billion program would be roughly comparable to what is now being wasted on the SLS.

A program will also not run out of vehicles quickly if they are all designed for reuse, so the program can be continued at a lower cost. With a robust Mars mission architecture, the issue of whether crew members stay at Mars or come home after one expedition becomes moot. Since the vehicles that would take crew members to Mars are reusable, we would want them back at Earth to use for another expedition. This means at least some of the crew members would return after the first expedition was over. The high amounts of mass that a robust mission can land on the surface would allow other crew members to remain on Mars and augment the next crew to arrive, with food and supplies sufficient for many years. A larger crew would provide more hands to do work such as enlarging the base and its pressurized habitat volume. Thus a flexible policy on who returns and who stays could allow a larger crew to do useful work at a Mars science base with each succeeding mission.

Read the original:

Why humans should go to Mars and other places in space

Nasa report on Global warming – 2014 the Warmest year since 1880 (19-01-2015) – Video

Posted on by


Nasa report on Global warming - 2014 the Warmest year since 1880 (19-01-2015)
Nasa scientists reported that 2014 was the most warmest year, with global average temperature increasing about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880. Watch first ever a 24/7 Telangana news Channel...

By: V6 News Telugu

Excerpt from:

Nasa report on Global warming - 2014 the Warmest year since 1880 (19-01-2015) - Video

NASA’s Robots May Head to Mars Via Earth’s Volcanoes – IGN News – Video

Posted on by


NASA #39;s Robots May Head to Mars Via Earth #39;s Volcanoes - IGN News
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher #39;s development of robots to study terrestrial volcanoes may be be used to explore volcanoes on other planetary bodies like Mars in the future. Read...

By: IGN News

Continue reading here:

NASA's Robots May Head to Mars Via Earth's Volcanoes - IGN News - Video

Ceres in sight: NASA's Dawn spacecraft eyes mysterious dwarf planet

Posted on by

It's the home stretch for NASAs Dawn spacecraft, which after a 3-billion-mile journey has finally got the dwarf planet Ceres in its sights. Now, Dawn's newest images reveal fascinating features on Ceres' surface that will only grow clearer in the run-up to the spacecraft's arrival March 6.

Dawn's newly released images of Ceres are 27 pixels across; that may not sound like much, but its about three times better than the images it took in December. Those were being used for calibration; these, which cover more than half the planetoid's surface, will be used for navigation as Dawn closes in on its target.

At 590 miles across, Ceres is the largest asteroid in the belt of rocky debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and one of five dwarf planets (a list that includes Pluto). Its nature has long remained a mystery. The best images of Ceres were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope more than a decade ago, and those are still quite blurry.

But the Dawn spacecraft, set to enter orbit March 6, is soon to change that. These just-released navigation images, taken Tuesday, are about 80% of the resolution of the Hubble portraits. Taken when the spacecraft was about 238,000 miles from the surface (close to the average Earth-moon distance), Dawn's fuzzy images reveal surface structures that could be craters.

A few of the dwarf planet's features -- a bright spot in the northern hemisphere, and two larger dark spots in the southern hemisphere have been identified by Hubble before. But the images also feature extensions near the dark spots upper edges that hadnt been previously seen.

When Dawn takes its next set of images in late January, the quality should surpass that of Hubble's images, according to officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Ceres is not Dawns first target. That honor goes to Vesta, another asteroid in the main belt, which the spacecraft circled from July 2011 to September 2012. Vesta is the second most massive asteroid after Ceres, but the two heavyweights are very different in character: Vesta is dry and elongated in shape, while Ceres is round and thought to be very wet and icy.

Follow @aminawrite for more science news from outer space.

See the original post:

Ceres in sight: NASA's Dawn spacecraft eyes mysterious dwarf planet

NASA Probe Closes in on Dwarf Planet Ceres

Posted on by

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is closing in on the dwarf planet Ceres and the space agency today released new photos showing what the gigantic cosmic mass looks like up close.

Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has an average diameter of 590 miles. The images released today are relatively grainy compared to the power of the Hubble Telescope, however they will be used to help guide Dawn closer to the dwarf planet.

The photos, which were taken on Jan. 13 but released today, show Dawn's view of Ceres from a distance of 238,000 miles, according to NASA.

The space agency said the images will continue to get better as Dawn gets closer to Ceres, with the eventual goal of placing the satellite in orbit on March 6. It will be the first time the spacecraft has visited a dwarf planet.

The mission is expected to continue for 16 months as researchers analyze data about Ceres, which is thought to be icy and possibly contain an ocean. Researchers said the current images already show what appear to be craters -- something they're eager to get a closer look at as Dawn edges toward its destination.

IDA/DLR/MPS/UCLA/JPL-Caltech/NASA

PHOTO: This processed image, taken on Jan. 13, 2015, shows the dwarf planet Ceres as seen from the Dawn spacecraft. The image hints at craters on the surface of Ceres. Dawn's framing camera took this image at 238,000 miles from Ceres.

Read more from the original source:

NASA Probe Closes in on Dwarf Planet Ceres

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Begins First Stages Of Pluto Encounter

Posted on by

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft recently began its long-awaited, historic encounter with Pluto. The spacecraft is entering the first of several approach phases that culminate July 14 with the first close-up flyby of the dwarf planet, 4.67 billion miles from Earth.

NASA first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankinds first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system, said Jim Green, director of NASAs Planetary Science Division at the agencys Headquarters in Washington. The New Horizons team worked very hard to prepare for this first phase, and they did it flawlessly.

The fastest spacecraft when it was launched, New Horizons lifted off in January 2006. It awoke from its final hibernation period last month after a voyage of more than 3 billion miles, and will soon pass close to Pluto, inside the orbits of its five known moons. In preparation for the close encounter, the missions science, engineering and spacecraft operations teams configured the piano-sized probe for distant observations of the Pluto system that start Sunday, Jan. 25 with a long-range photo shoot.

The images captured by New Horizons telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) will give mission scientists a continually improving look at the dynamics of Plutos moons. The images also will play a critical role in navigating the spacecraft as it covers the remaining 135 million miles (220 million kilometers) to Pluto.

Weve completed the longest journey any spacecraft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring, said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

LORRI will take hundreds of pictures of Pluto over the next few months to refine current estimates of the distance between the spacecraft and the dwarf planet. Though the Pluto system will resemble little more than bright dots in the cameras view until May, mission navigators will use the data to design course-correction maneuvers to aim the spacecraft toward its target point this summer. The first such maneuver could occur as early as March.

We need to refine our knowledge of where Pluto will be when New Horizons flies past it, said Mark Holdridge, New Horizons encounter mission manager at Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. The flyby timing also has to be exact, because the computer commands that will orient the spacecraft and point the science instruments are based on precisely knowing the time we pass Pluto which these images will help us determine.

The optical navigation campaign that begins this month marks the first time pictures from New Horizons will be used to help pinpoint Plutos location.

Throughout the first approach phase, which runs until spring, New Horizons will conduct a significant amount of additional science. Spacecraft instruments will gather continuous data on the interplanetary environment where the planetary system orbits, including measurements of the high-energy particles streaming from the sun and dust-particle concentrations in the inner reaches of the Kuiper Belt. In addition to Pluto, this area, the unexplored outer region of the solar system, potentially includes thousands of similar icy, rocky small planets.

See the original post here:

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft Begins First Stages Of Pluto Encounter

NASA's hunt for alien life reaches New Zealand

Posted on by

NASA'S Spaceward Bound project, established in 2006, is an outreach initiative aimed at educating people around the world.

A team of NASA scientists travels to different countries, involving educators in real planetary exploration fieldwork here on Earth. For the first time the team has come to New Zealand, bringing prototype rover Junior with them.

"This is a huge feather in our cap and it's really going to help put New Zealand on the map in terms of astrobiology and also space research in general," says Prof Steve Pointing of AUT.

"This is very exciting," says Haritina Mogosanu, head of the New Zealand Astrobiology Initiative. "I heard about spaceward bound in 2011 and I dreamt [of] having it in New Zealand, and been thinking ever since, and really it's a historical day for me."

The goal is to pass on knowledge from professional NASA scientists to tertiary students, and eventually to schoolchildren.

"Science is one of those subjects that we're really trying to encourage children to take part in more, and astrobiology is a great platform for that because what it does is it brings together different scientific disciplines - everything from physics, to chemistry, to biology, and even robotics and engineering," says Prof Pointing.

While Junior's here he'll be used for tests on Rotorua's hot springs, similar to the testing rovers Curiosity and Opportunity are doing on Mars as they search for signs of life.

"We're really excited to be in New Zealand because of all the geological and microbiology features," says NASA astrobiologist Jan Blank. "New Zealand's a great setting for a lot of planetary analogue environments, and we can find them in such a close geographical area, so that's exciting."

NASA mechanical engineer David Wilson is the brains behind Junior.

"On Mars you could be up to 50 million miles away from your robot. Commands take at least 20 minutes or more sometimes to get from here to there and back again. In that 20 minutes if your rover is driving too fast, it could hit a rock, turn over, fall into a crater, fall off a cliff."

Excerpt from:

NASA's hunt for alien life reaches New Zealand

NASA's Dawn Mission Status: Probe Closes In On Dwarf Planet Ceres

Posted on by

NASAs Dawn spacecraft has taken new images of dwarf planet Ceres. The photos show the planet at 27 pixels across, three times better than the calibration images the spacecraft took in early December. These images will be the first in a series that will be taken for navigation purposes during the approach to Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Dawn will deliver more precise images of Ceres in the next several weeks leading up to the devices entrance into the planets orbit March 6. The images will continue to improve as Dawn travels closer to the surface.

"We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that," Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, said in a statement Monday.

So far, the clearest photos of Ceres were taken by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope more than a decade ago. The most recent images taken Jan. 13 did not surpass the Hubble photos, but will at Dawns next imaging opportunity, which will occur at the end of January.

Already, the [latest] images hint at first surface structures such as craters," said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany.

Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system and was discovered in 1801 by Guiseppe Piazza. It is the largest body in the main asteroid belt and has an average diameter of 590 miles. Scientists believe it contains a significant amount of ice and that its surface may conceal an ocean.

Dawns arrival at Ceres will be the first time a spacecraft has visited a dwarf planet.

Continue reading here:

NASA's Dawn Mission Status: Probe Closes In On Dwarf Planet Ceres

This Ingestible Microbot Is Powered By Stomach Acid

Posted on by

There's tiny revolution afoot in medicine, where micro- and nano-sized robots will someday cruise around inside our bodies, zeroing in on cancerous cells or repairing damaged but otherwise healthy ones. But before those ideas all become reality, those bots need a power source inside our bodies. That power source could be stomach acid.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have created micro missiles that fire inside the stomachs of mice. As New Scientist reports, the 20 micrometer-long polymer tubes were coated in zinc, which reacts with stomach acid to form hydrogen bubbles. That gives it enough power to lodge into the stomach lining of mice, depositing its payload of gold nanoparticles. This is the first time a self-propelled machine has been tested in a living animal rather than cells in a petri dish.

The gold nanoparticles proved that the zinc-stomach acid system could be used to deliver chemicals straight into the stomach lining. And the "chemicals" we're interested in, of course, are drugs, especially ones that otherwise have to be injected through needles rather than swallowed.

The field of tiny robots in medicine has bloomed in recent years. There's DNA-based nanobots that essentially turn the cockroach they're injected inside into 8-bit computers. And microspiders that could crawl around repairing blood vessels. And magnetically controlled nanopropellors. The zinc-acid system obviously won't work in all these cases, but it is a promising step forward for tiny machines designed to work in the stomach. There's a lot of wild promises out there for nanobots in medicine, some that might even work. [New Scientist]

Here is the original post:

This Ingestible Microbot Is Powered By Stomach Acid

Nanobots travel inside animal for first time

Posted on by

January 19, 2015

Credit: Wei Gao et al./ACS Nano

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

For years, scientists have been working to develop simple miniscule machines that can travel inside the body to deliver medicine, but these experiments have mostly been carried out within cell samples.

Now, according to a new report, researchers at the University of California at San Diego have successfully tested these tiny machines inside the stomachs of laboratory mice.

The machines are made of tiny specially-designed polymer tubes covered in zinc that are about as long as the width of a human hair. When placed into a stomach, the zinc reacts with stomach acid to produce hydrogen gas that propels the tube into stomach lining, where it can deliver medication.

The study team said the tiny machines could be used to treat peptic ulcers and other gastrointestinal issues. They added that additional work might be necessary to further evaluate the performance and functionalities of various man-made micro-motors in living organisms.

This study represents the very first step toward such a goal, the team wrote in their report.

One of the first prominent instances of seriously discussing tiny micro-machines for medicinal purposes was in a lecture to the American Physical Society (APS) given by renowned physicist Richard Feynman in 1959.

Although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon, Feynman said. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and looks around. It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out.

See original here:

Nanobots travel inside animal for first time

New Cellular Pathway Triggering Allergic Asthma Response Identified

Posted on by

Contact Information

Available for logged-in reporters only

Newswise Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, with collaborators in Korea and Scotland, have identified a novel signaling pathway critical to the immune response of cells associated with the initiation of allergic asthma. The discovery, they say, could point the way to new therapies that suppress the inflammatory allergic response, offering potential relief to millions of Americans with the chronic lung condition and potentially other allergic diseases.

The results are published in the January 19 online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Specifically, the scientists demonstrated that T helper 2 (Th2) type inflammation in allergic asthma involves dendritic cells (DC), a type of white blood cell, which trigger a reduction in the production of cyclic AMP or cAMP, a key messenger molecule for signaling inside cells. In mouse models, deletion of the gene that codes for a protein that promotes the production of cAMP resulted in spontaneous bronchial asthma, which shares many similarities with human asthma. Conversely, increasing cAMP levels inhibited the cells inflammatory response that results in asthmas characteristic symptoms.

These findings and the related mechanism are very different from the current residing view of activation of specific T helper cell responses, said principal investigator Eyal Raz, MD, professor of medicine.

The role of cAMP formation and action in dendritic cells in the induction of allergic response was really surprising, added co-author Paul Insel, MD, professor of pharmacology and medicine. It suggested to us that this signaling pathway is involved in other immune-related functions.

The immune response of humans, mice and other vertebrates consists of two fundamental components. The first is the innate immune system, which recognizes and responds to pathogens in an immediate, but generalized, way and does not confer long-lasting immunity. The second is the adaptive immune system in which highly specialized T and B cells eliminate or prevent pathogen growth and create immunological memory in case of future encounters with the same pathogen.

Th2 immunity is one of two major aspects of adaptive immunity. Th1 responses target intracellular pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria that have invaded host cells. The Th2 response is more effective against extracellular pathogens (such as bacteria, parasites and toxins that operate outside of cells) and also plays a major role in allergic reactions and related diseases.

Allergic asthma is triggered by inhaled allergens, such as pet dander, pollen, mold and dust mites. It is characterized by inflammation and narrowing of the airways, resulting in wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath, coughing and other symptoms. The common form of allergic asthma is associated with an exaggerated Th2 immune response. Allergic asthma affects people of all ages, most often appearing in childhood. More than 25 million Americans suffer from the condition.

Read the original post:

New Cellular Pathway Triggering Allergic Asthma Response Identified