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Blue-Tooth Technology
Er. Neeraj Dubey
Blue tooth
technology is an Industry specification standard for use
in various devices for short-range communications. As a
radio-based technology it allows devices to share
information's over a maximum range of 10m. Blue tooth
enables mobile computers, mobile phones, portable
handheld, and the Internet to "talk the talk"
without cables. With blue tooth, devices do not need to
be looking at each other unlike other wireless
technologies (i.e infrared). As long as two blue tooth
devices are close enough to each other, it is possible to
make a connection. With Blue tooth technology getting
connected takes on a whole new meaning.
Blue tooth wireless technology is a short-range
technology. Blue tooth wireless technology makes it
possible to transmit signals over short distances between
telephones, computers and other devices and thereby
simplify communication and synchronization between
devices. It is global standard that:-
* Eliminates wires and cables between both stationary and
mobile devices.
* Facilitates both data and voice communication
* Offers the possibility of Adhoc Networks and delivers
the ultimate synchronicity between all your personal
devices.
The Blue-tooth Wireless technology comprises hardware,
software and interoperability requirements. Beyond
unleashing devices by replacing cables, Bluetooth
wireless technology provides a universal bridge to
existing data network, a peripheral interface and a
mechanism to form small private adhoc groupings of
connected devices away from fixed network
infrastructures.
Blue radio uses a fast acknowledgement and
frequency-hopping scheme to make the link robust, even in
noisy radio environment.
One would wonder how bluetooth got its name. It has an
interesting heritage. Bluetooth is named after the 10th
century Viking King Herald Blatand (Blatand meaning
Bluetooth). He was instrumental in uniting the countries
in the Baltic region like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and
thus emerging as a powerful force. Bluetooth aims at
uniting the computing and telecommunication World and so
achieving the same greatness.
Now the question arises. Is Bluetooth a technology, a
standard or an application?
Bluetooth is all about a world with no wires.
Functionally, it is no different from physical cable. The
key difference is that Bluetooth uses a radio link to
connect devices instead of a cable, thus idea behind
Bluetooth is that we should be able to connect different
devices that are equipped with Bluetooth, so that can
communicate and exchange information without any wires.
It is low Power, high-speed microwave technology.

The Invention that Changed our Minds
G V Joshi
The geocentric
theory which maintained that the Earth on which we live,
was the center of the universe, dominated ancient and
medieval science. It seemed evident to early astronomers
that the rest of the universe moved about a stable,
motionless Earth, which appeared like a huge flat disk.
The Sun, Moon, the then known five planets, and stars
could be seen moving about Earth along circular paths day
after day year after year.
It appeared logical to believe that Earth was stationary,
for nothing seemed to make it move. Finally, geocentrism
was in accordance with the theocentric (God-centered)
world view, dominant in the Middle Ages, when science was
a part of theology.
The geocentric model created by Greek astronomers assumed
that the celestial bodies moving about the Earth followed
perfectly circular paths. Greek mathematicians and
philosophers regarded the circle as the perfect geometric
figure and consequently the only one appropriate for
celestial motion.
To explain this motion of the planets (called retrograde
in astronomy), Greek astronomers like Ptolemy (90 A.
D.-168 A. D.), devised complicated models in which
planets moved along circles (called epicycles) that were
superimposed on circular orbits about the Earth. These
geocentric models were able to explain, for example, why
Mercury and Venus never move more than 28° and 47°
respectively from the Sun.
As astronomers improved their methods of observation and
measurement, the models became increasingly complicated,
with constant additions of epicycles. Nonetheless, the
geocentric theory persisted.
In 1514, Copernicus first suggested a replacement for the
geocentric system. According to Copernicus, a
heliocentric theory could explain the motion of celestial
bodies more simply than the geocentric view. In the
Copernican model, the Earth orbits the Sun along with all
the other planets. Such a model could explain the
retrograde motion of a planet without resorting to
epicycles, and could also explain why Mercury and Venus
never stray more than 28° and 47° from the Sun.
However, Copernicuss work did not spell the demise
of geocentrism.
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), a
brilliant experimental scientist whose measurements of
the positions of the stars and planets surpassed any that
were made prior to the invention of the telescope,
proposed a model that attempted to serve as a compromise
between the geocentric model and the Copernican model .
According to Dr A. L. Basham, the ancient Indian
astronomers also knew of seven members of the solar
system - the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter
and Saturn. Ancient astronomers followed the geocentric
theory - that the earth was the centre of the universe -
though, in 497 A.D. Aryabhatta had suggested that the
earth revolved round the sun and rotated on its own axis.
To spread his new knowledge about the objects in the sky,
Galileo arranged the worlds first star-gazing
parties with his telescope, to the rich and powerful in
Venice and elsewhere.
For the first time, people saw that the Moon was
pockmarked with craters, that Saturn had strange rings
around it and that Jupiter had moons of its own, and that
even the sun had ugly spots.
All this annoyed the Pope. Galileo had to pay dearly for
his so called sins, ultimately dying in disgrace under
house arrest, a lonely, broken man. He had to publicly
acknowledge that he had been wrong to have said that the
Earth moves around the Sun. It is said that after his
confession, Galileo quietly whispered And yet, it
moves.
The very year that Galileo died, a child (Isaac Newton)
was born who finally completed the geocentric to
heliocentric revolution. In the mean time another
astronomer Kepler had developed his three laws of
planetary movement around he Sun.
Newton even invented a new type of telescope, the
reflecting telescope, which is the basis of modern
telescope technology.
With the passage of time it was accepted that the Earth
was not the center of the Universe. But only on 31
October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how
Galileo was treated, and officially conceded that the
Earth was not stationary.
United Nations has scheduled 2009 to be the International
Year of Astronomy

Stem Cell Research
Dr. K S Parthasarathy
Stem cells are
"blank slate" cells which can divide and renew
over long periods. They can develop into a specialized
cell, tissue or organ. They can serve as a sort of repair
system for the body. Past few years have seen
unbelievable advancements in the field of stem cell
research.
Medical specialists believe that stem cells have
unlimited potential which can be used to return memory to
Alzheimer's patients, to enable wheelchair bound patients
to walk or to replace damaged skin of patients. The
possibility of such miracle cures lies in tweaking the
cells to develop into desired types.
Recently, researchers grew prostate glands in mice by
using a single stem cell transplanted from the prostates
of donor mice. The findings may pave the way to new
therapies for prostate cancer (Scientific American,
October 22,2008). Stem cells are capable of dividing
indefinitely. Cancer cells multiply uncontrollably. So it
is reasonable to assume that stem cells may have a role
in the induction of cancer.
The researchers Wei-Qiang Gao and his colleagues from
Genetech, a Californian biotechnology firm reported their
success in identifying stem cells in mouse prostates in
the British Journal Nature on October 22 this year. They
transplanted a stem cell below the kidney in laboratory
reared mice and found 14 functioning prostates from out
of the 97 single cell transplants.
Scientists have developed techniques to generate stem
cells in vitro. It provides invaluable opportunities to
study human embryology.
In 1998, scientists at the University of Wisconsin
isolated and cultured human embryonic stem cells. This
year scientists at the Universities of Granada and Leon
confirmed that they can use stem cells from human
umbilical cord blood to treat liver diseases.
In August 2008, researchers from Harward Medical School
and Children's Hospital in Boston, USA used a new method
to re-program ordinary cells from patients with ten
incurable genetic diseases and conditions. These
virtually immortal cells may be grown in the lab;
researchers can closely watch the progress of the
diseases; it offers an opportunity to develop treatment
for them.
The ICMR guidelines address ethical and scientific
concerns to encourage responsible practices in the area
of stem cell research and therapy. " Since the
latter is being contemplated with greater vigour in
India, it was necessary to formulate guidelines for
development of clinical grade stem guidelines for
development of clinical grade stem cells" Dr. M.K
Bhan (Secretary, Department of Biotechnology) and Dr. N.K
Ganguly (Director General, ICMR asserted in the foreword
to the guidelines.
According to them, ICMR prepared the guidelines for stem
cell research and therapy, for adult, cord blood and
embryonic stem cells in response to the support provided
by the Government to facilitate stem cell research in
India so as to improve understanding of human health and
disease, evolve strategies to treat serious diseases.
According to Department of Biotechnology (DOB),
Government of India, over 30 institutions, hospitals and
industry are involved in stem cell research in India.
Clinicians and scientists are collaborating in a few
institutions.
Stem cells are routinely used to repair corneal surface
disorders at L.V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad. In the
January 30, 2008 issue of the Scientific American, Larry
Greenemeier described the pioneering work carried out by
this institute.
In an article published in 2006 in the Asian
Biotechnology and Development Review, Alka Sharma of DOB
summarized some of the other Indian developments in the
field: Christian Medical College, Vellore has established
technology to collect, isolate and purify stem cells for
haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. An institution
set up by industry has characterized 10 stem cell lines,
including two neuronal cell lines.
The National Centre for Cell Science, Pune, which
received one cell line, has its research focus on
embryonic stem cells; haematopoietic stem cells;
treatment of leukaemia; sickle cell anemia and skin and
tissue engineering.
Though currently the annual investment for stem cell
research in India is only very modest, at a few million
US$, the Central Government has plans to create centers
of excellence, generate adequate human embryonic stem
cell line and to develop human resource through training,
short and long term overseas fellowships etc. to support
this nascent field. - (PTI)
Professor Virginia Shepherd knows it isn't
easy being green in the world of physics: she's a plant
neurobiologist who wants to reinstate the idea that
plants have a sophisticated electrical signaling system
similar to the human nervous system. It is a
controversial idea, first proposed by the multifaceted
physicist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose nearly a century ago.
"Bose had argued all along the importance of
electrical signaling in plants, and the world has now
come around to this view. I consider him my guru,"
said Shepherd, a biophysicist at Sydney University in
Australia, while delivering a lecture - titled
Reflections on the Many-in-ones: J.C. Bose and the roots
of Plant Neurobiology - to commemorate the scientist's
150th birth anniversary last week at the Bose Institute,
Calcutta. Bose had shown that electrical activities are
associated with the dipping of mimosa leaves and the
rhythmic movement of desmodium leaflets, and that these
plants have an electromechanical pulse, a nervous system,
a form of intelligence and are capable of remembering and
learning. "The idea was not well received and even
ridiculed by the contemporary scientific establishment --
perhaps because of a colonial or a racist bias against
his work," she suggested. Said Sibaji Raha, a
physicist and the director of Bose Institute, "Bose
extended his specialist knowledge of physics of
electromagnetic radiation - which first made radio
communication possible - into insightful experiments on
the life processes of plants."
Shepherd first got to know about Bose's
electrophysiological experiments 16 years ago when she
stepped into the world of biophysics in her university.
Ever since then she's been trying to decipher how plant
cells communicate with one another, how they sense touch,
and how they transmit electrical signals.
Soon after she took up research, Shepherd discovered that
she was not alone in the emerging field of plant
neurobiology. "I found a growing body of research
showing how plants perceive their circumstances and
respond to their environment in an integrated fashion.
And some sort of a structure of information network
operates within the plants," said Shepherd. Indeed,
scientists around the world began discovering how the
tiny strangle weed can sense the presence of friends,
foes, and food, and make adroit decisions on how to
approach them. Siblings of the sea rocket can recognise
other plants that have grown from its own mother's seeds
and don't compete with each other as fiercely as
unrelated plants do. The ground-hugging mayapple was
found to plan its growth two years into the future, based
on computation of weather patterns. "The most
remarkable finding, however, was the parasitic dodder
vine's ability to sniff out victims," said Shepherd.
Last year, in a symposium on plant neurobiology,
researchers at Pennsylvania State University showed a
chilling video footage in which a dodder vine (Cuscuta
pentagona) sinisterly sniffed for its prey and grabbed a
succulent tomato plant. "It was amazing to watch
that given the choice of wheat and tomato, the dodder
picked the tomato," she said.
However, in spite of such definitive evidence, most plant
biologists are loath to believe that such responses to
the environment are the result of active intentional
reasoning. "Bose had proposed way back in the 1920s
that plants are sensitive explorers of their world,
coordinating movements and responses like intelligent
organisms. The recent findings vindicate his work,
reaffirming that plants have an integrated communication
system. They have also been found to use the hormone
auxin, akin to serotonin - a human neurotransmitter that
transmits nerve signal," says Shepherd.
Yet sceptics say it's less a product of intelligence than
mechanical directives. "For centuries, plants have
been regarded as passive creatures. Their development is
thought to be predetermined, with only temporary
interruptions in response to stress," Anthony
Trewavas, a plant biochemist at the University of
Edinburgh and a prominent scholar of plant intelligence,
wrote in the journal Nature. The root of the problem is
the assumption that plants have, or should have,
human-like feelings in order to be considered intelligent
life forms.
Shepherd believes that further damage was done by the
1970s hit book The Secret Life of Plants and the film
based on it, which propagated quite unscientifically that
greenery had feelings and emotions. Ever since then many
scientists started avoiding discussions on plant
intelligence. "Basically it was a clash of
philosophies between materialistic and holistic thoughts,
exactly like what happened in Bose's time,"
expounded Shepherd.
"But the attitude of scientists is changing quite
substantially," added Shepherd. Three years ago the
Society for Plant Neurobiology was established to discuss
research on plant signaling and behaviour at the
molecular, genetic, cellular and electrophysiological
level. "The society holds an annual meeting every
year to discuss both sides of the controversy," she
added. Their heated arguments reiterate how Bose's
research is relevant till this day. "Intelligence
isn't only about having a brain, or eyes or ears,"
she clarified. "If you define intelligence as the
capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach
us," she added. INAV

The Future
Lights
G V Joshi
A new way of making
cheap Gallium Nitride (GaN) light emitting diodes (LED)
may see household lighting bills reduced by up to 75%
within the next five years.
Gallium Nitride (GaN), a man-made semiconductor used to
make LEDs, emits brilliant light but uses very little
electricity. Until now high production costs had made GaN
lighting too expensive for wide spread use in homes and
offices.
Now, the scientists working at the Cambridge University,
UK have developed a new way of making GaN LEDs for a
tenth of current prices. Since the 1990s, GaN is made in
laboratories on expensive sapphire wafers, but it can now
be grown on silicon wafers. This low-cost method could
mean that cheap mass produced GaN LEDs might become
widely available for lighting homes and offices in the
next five years.
This could cut the proportion of electricity used for
lights from 20% to 5%. That means that the power shut
periods experienced by us routinely could be a thing of
the past.
A GaN LED can work for 100,000 hours so, on average, it
only needs replacing after 60 years. And, unlike
currently available energy-saving tube lights or compact
fluorescent lamps (CFL), GaN LEDs are also eco-friendly
because they do not contain harmful mercury. GaN LEDs
also have the advantage of turning on instantly and being
dimmable. They are totally silent.
According to Professor Colin Humphreys, lead scientist on
the project, "This could well be the holy grail in
terms of providing our lighting needs for the future. We
are very close to achieving highly efficient, low cost
white LEDs that can take the place of both traditional
and currently available low energy light bulbs."
The dynamo invented by Michael Faraday ushered the age of
electricity. This was followed by the invention of
filament lamp announced on December 21, 1879. However,
the filament lamp delivers only a fraction of 1 percent
of its electricity in the form of light and the rest is
wasted as heat.
The fluorescent lamp called as tube light or Mercury tube
light in India was perfected in the first quarter of the
20th century. Tube lights consume less electricity and
yield more light. They are more efficient than the
filament lamps, but are bulky and fragile and require
starter or ballast circuits that sometimes give out a
buzz which can be heard.
The modern Compact Fluorescent lamp (CFL), introduced in
mid 1990s, also works like a tube light, and is very
compact. There is no flicker and it starts quickly. CFL
lamps are being made in India by a number of
manufacturers. The initial cost is high, but they are
very long lasting and consume much less electricity, even
less than tube light and give out a pleasant white light.
A LED is a semiconductor diode that emits light when
charged with electricity. LEDs are used for display and
lighting in a whole range of electrical and electronic
products.
The first known report of a light-emitting solid-state
diode was made in 1907 by the British experimenter H. J.
Round of Marconi Labs, USA. Russian Oleg Vladimirovich
Losev independently created the first LED in the mid
1920s, but his research was ignored, and no practical use
was made of the discovery for several decades.
The first practical red LED was developed in 1962 by Nick
Holonyak Jr., while working at General Electric Company.
Holonyak is seen as the "father of the
light-emitting diode". Yellow, red and red-orange
LEDs followed in 1972. However, they were extremely
costly, and so had little practical application.
The Monsanto Corporation of the US was the first company
to mass-produce red LEDs suitable for indicators in 1968.
Hewlett Packard (HP) introduced LEDs for alphanumeric
displays and they were integrated into HP's early
handheld calculators in 1968.
GaN was first produced over 30 years ago. GaN LED was
first developed by Jacques Pankove at RCA in 1969.
However, his devices were too feeble to be of much
practical use. Over the next 25 years, many other people
tried to make blue diodes, without much success.
In January 1993 Shuji Nakamura working at a small
Japanese company called Nichia Chemicals made GaN LED,
not just blue, but bright blue 100 times brighter than
the feeble blue glow other devices emitted then.
For the electronics industry, blue light is attractive
for many reasons. Blue light can be combined with red and
green - the other primary colors of the light spectrum -
to produce any other color, including white. All colour
LEDS mean a radically new type of lighting - the end of
the light bulb.
The invention of a bright-blue LED by a little known
Japanese company surprised everybody. From his
experience, Nakamura already knew that making blue was
the big challenge. Nakamura chose to work on gallium
nitride not because he was confident of success, but he
chose a material that almost no one else was working on.
The existence of blue LEDs quickly led to the development
of the first white LED, which employed a phosphor coating
to mix yellow light with blue to produce light that
appears white.
Nakamura was awarded the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize
for his invention. If all of the world's light bulbs were
replaced with LEDs for a period of 10 years, economists
estimate that there would be massive reduction in
Electrical energy consumption, crude oil consumption and
carbon dioxide emissions.
Research to develop GaN LEDs should be taken up seriously
in India, for white light lamps based on GaN LEDs are
going to be future lights.
Mouse and
Medical Research
G V Joshi
A mouse (plural
mice) is a small animal that belongs to one of numerous
rodent species. The best known mouse species is the
common house mouse. It is found in nearly all countries
and serves as a guinea pig in biology. The average mouse
lives only 1 - 2 years. A fully-grown mouse weighs
between 15 to 30 gm. Mice are prolific breeders,
producing six to ten litters continuously throughout the
year.
Mice are common experimental animals in biology and
physiology primarily because they are mammals.
Ninety-nine percent of human genes share a comparable
version in the mouse, and many of them appear in the same
order in our chromosomes. Humans also have similar
reproductive and nervous systems.
The mouse genome has been sequenced, and virtually all
mouse genes have human homologs. In evolutionary biology,
homology has come to mean any similarity between
characters that is due to their shared ancestry.
They can also be manipulated in ways that would be
considered unethical to do with humans. About 25 million
mice are used in labs around the world each year and the
number is on the rise.
The use of animals in physiological scientific
investigations, also called vivisection in medical
language, has been a very old practice. The first
extensively documented practice of vivisection was done
by Galen of Pergamum (130-200 A.D.) who performed
dissections and vivisections on pigs, monkeys and dogs to
study the physiology of the human body, since dissection
of the human corpse was prohibited by Roman law.
Since then, the use of animals in medical research has
yielded a lot of knowledge, both about the anatomy and
physiology of the subject animals and the human body in
all branches of medicine.
In fact, the mouse might have got off to a much earlier
start if Gregor Mendel - the father of genetics - hadn't
been thwarted by his bishop. In the 1850s, Mendel began
his investigation of inheritance by studying coat -
colour traits in mice. But he was a monk and his bishop
decreed that a monastery was no place to experiment with
mice Mendel switched to a study of peas.
Biologists were not the only people to experiment with
mice. Breeders of fancy mice had tinkered with mouse for
centuries. In the seventeenth-century Japanese bred and
collected unique varieties, creating albinos and mice
with spotted coats.
They also bred "waltzing mice" that seemed to
dance.
By the 20th century, such breeders had established clubs
and exhibited their prize specimens at mouse shows.
One hundred years ago in a lab at Harvard University, a
young zoology student was busily overseeing the breeding
of pair after pair of brother and sister mice. He was
trying to create the first inbred lab animal -a strain of
mouse whose genes would be stable and identical.
Such a mouse would allow biologists to reliably replicate
their experiments for the first time. His professor said
it couldn't be done, but he proved him wrong. We are all
indebted to those inbred mice and their descendants,
which have helped researchers, develop treatments for a
wide range of human diseases.
Mice gained their new significance not long after the
completion of the human genome project in 2001.
Scientists rushed to finish sequencing the mouse's DNA
sequence the following year, and when they put the two
genetic codes side-by-side they found something they'd
always suspected the genes of mice and humans are
virtually identical.
The obvious differences between us and them lie not in
the genes themselves but in where, when and how those
genes are activated. "It means that the anatomy and
physiology of a mouse is pretty much similar to what you
see in a human."
Hardly a week goes by without some new findings about
heart disease, cancer, obesity, anxiety, or the
life-prolonging benefits of red wine and like, all based
on studies and experiments on mice.
There are many mice farms in the US. The Jackson
Laboratory, a nonprofit supplier in Bar Harbor, Maine,
sells more than 2 million a year. Charles River
Laboratories of Wilmington, Mass, makes about $500
million annually selling and caring for lab animals, most
of them mice.
Depending on the specific genetic manipulation, the cost
to create a custom mouse is usually in the tens of
thousands of dollars. Once the line has been established,
individual animals can run into the hundreds.
The blind mice cost about $250. And for your own custom
designed mouse, with the genetic modification of your
choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.
India scientists have one lab for breeding transgenic
mice at the center for Cellular and Molescular Biology
(CCMB) at Hyderabad, (AP). The lab, which houses
transgenic mice for biomedical research, has been funded
by the Department of Science and Technology and the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.
Although transgenic mice facilities exist in a few other
laboratories in India for in-house research, the new
facility is available for use for any research group in
India in the public or private sector. It would procure
transgenic mice strains for important human diseases and
make these available to researchers wanting to develop
new drugs.
However, the most well-known mouse is Mickey Mouse, the
brainchild of the famous American motion picture wizard
Walt Disney. He gained success in 1928, when he released
the first short cartoons that featured Mickey Mouse.
10 yrs of
International Space Station
G V Joshi
The concept of an
International Space Station (ISS) was first suggested by
one Edward Everett Hale, in 1869, when he described the
"Brick Moon," a satellite 60 meters in diameter
with the crew of 37, to help ships to navigate at sea.
This was nearly ninety years before the launch of Sputnik
I and 100 years before Neil Armstrong landed on our Moon.
At the turn of the 20th century, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
in Russia envisioned many elements of future spaceflight,
including a space station. By 1923, Hermann Oberth wrote
"The Rocket to Planetary Space," a theoretical
study, discussing among other things the roles and the
design of a space station. By 1929, H. Noordung advanced
the idea of the station further in his work "The
Problems of Navigating the World."
The ISS is a research facility currently being assembled
in outer space, the construction of which began in 1998.
The space station is a joint project among the space
agencies of the United States, Russia, and Japan, Canada
and eleven European countries (ESA) and the like.
The ISS weighing nearly 300 tonnes is 58 metres long 44
metres wide, 27 metres high. The span of solar power
arrays is 73 metres. It is in a Low Earth Orbit and
sometimes can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It
orbits at an altitude of approximately 350 km above the
surface of the Earth, and travels at an average speed of
27,700 kilometres per hour, the orbital period is 91.34
minutes i.e., it makes 15.7 orbits in a day.
One of the main goals of the ISS is to provide a
laboratory to conduct experiments that require one or
more of the unusual conditions present on the station.
The main fields of research include biology, physics,
astronomy, and meteorology.
Research in the station's six laboratories will lead to
discoveries in medicine, materials and fundamental
science that will benefit people all over the world.
The research that will be performed aboard the station
includes, protein crystal studies, tissue culture and
life in low gravity
Through its research and technology, the station also
will serve as an indispensable step in preparation for
future human space exploration.
Scientists also plan to create better metal alloys and
more perfect materials for applications such as computer
chips. Some experiments aboard the station could study
the space environment and how long-term exposure to
space, the vacuum and the debris in space would affects
materials.
Some experiments will study fundamental Physics, where
experiments take advantage of weightlessness to study
forces that are weak and difficult to study when subject
to gravity on Earth.
Observations of the Earth from orbit help the study of
large-scale, long-term changes in the environment.
The ISS is a continuation of several other previously
planned space stations; Russia's Mir , the US Space
Station Freedom, the European Columbus laboratory and the
Japanese Kibo laboratory.
This project was first announced in November 1993 and was
called Space Station Alpha. It was planned to combine the
proposed space stations of all participating space
agencies. US administration then started negotiations
with international partners like ESA, Russia, Japan and
Canada to build a truly international space station.
India has no participation.
Assembly began in November 1998, and as of July 2008 the
station is approximately 85% complete.
The assembly of the International Space Station is a
major aerospace engineering enterprise. When assembly is
complete the ISS will have a pressurised volume of
approximately 1,000 m3.
The projected completion date is 2011, with the station
remaining in operation at least until 2016.
As of 2008, the ISS is larger than any previous space
stations. The ISS has been continuously occupied since
the first resident crew entered the station on November
2,2000, thereby providing a permanent human presence in
space.
To mark the level of cooperation that the project is
fostering between nations, in 2001, the station received
the Prince of Asturias Award for International
Cooperation. By November this year ISS has spent 3652
days in orbit and has been occupied for nearly 2900 days.
Did life
come from Space?
G V Joshi
Indian scientists have discovered three new
species of bacteria, which are not found on the earth and
are highly resistant to ultraviolet radiation in the
upper stratosphere (more than 15 km above the earth).
While one of the species has been named Janibacter hoylei
after well-known astrophysicist Sir Fre Hoye, who along
with Dr Nirmal Chandra Wickramasinghe from Sri Lanka, a
mathematician working at Cardiff University in the UK,
proposed that micro-organisms are being continuously
brought in by debris from comets and meteorite showers
from space.
The second has been christened Bacillus isronensis
recognising the Indian Space Research Organisation's
(ISRO) contribution in balloon experiments which led to
the discovery. The third has been named Bacillus
aryabhata after the Indian astronomer after whom, one of
the early Indian designed satellites had also been named.
The precautionary measures and controls operating in this
experiment inspire confidence that these species were
picked up in the stratosphere. While the present study
does not conclusively establish the extra-terrestrial
origin of microorganisms, it does provide positive
encouragement to continue work in our quest to explore
the origin of life.
The experiment was conducted using a very large balloon
and carrying 459 kg of scientific payload soaked in 38 kg
of liquid neon.
The balloon was flown from the National Balloon Facility
in Hyderabad and operated by the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research, Mumbai.
The payload consisted of a cryo-sampler containing 16
sterilised stainless steel bottles designed by Dr P
Rajaratnam of the ISRO. .
After these bottles collected air samples from different
heights, ranging from 20 to 41 km they were parachuted
down and retrieved. The samples were analysed by
scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular
Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, and the National Centre for
Cell Sciences (NCCS), Pune.
In all, 12 bacterial and six fungal colonies were
detected. Of these, three bacterial colonies were totally
new species and highly resistant to ultraviolet
radiation.
This is the second experiment of its kind. The first
balloon launched from the TIFR in April 1999 returned
with an air sample from the stratosphere.
According to Dr J.V. Narlikar, Retired Director of Inter
University centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA)
based at Pune, and an internationally famous
astrophysicist from Pune, it is tempting to speculate
that the collected microorganisms have come from space.
Though their terrestrial origin seems unlikely,
scientists cannot rule it out completely.
As principal investigator, Dr Narlikar headed the team of
scientists from ISRO, CCMB and NCCS.
The origin of life on Earth is perhaps the most
fundamental and at the same time, the least understood
biological problem. It is central to many scientific and
philosophical questions and to any consideration of
extraterrestrial life.
To begin with, people thought that life started as a
result of a supernatural event -spontaneous generation
that is, one permanently beyond the descriptive powers of
science.
During the mid-17th century, while studying the
reproduction and development of the deer, the British
physiologist, William Harvey, made the basic discovery
that every animal comes from a fertilised egg. However,
the idea of spontaneous generation died hard.
In the late 1970s Sir Fred Hoyle, British mathematician
and astronomer, best known as the foremost proponent and
defender of the steady state theory of the universe, and
Dr Wickramasinghe proposed that micro-organisms are being
continuously brought in by cometary debris and meteorite
showers.
They descend on Earth from above the atmosphere. Hoyle
and Wickramasinghe say that the microbes are deposited
throughout space by dust in the stream of debris of
comets or metrorities. As Earth passes through the
stream, while revolving in its orbit around the Sun, dust
(and perhaps the bacteria and virus) enters our
atmosphere, where it can lodge for two decades or more,
until gravity pulls it down.
Wickramasinghe explained that in lower levels of the
atmosphere, the particles along with microbes condense,
ultimately coming down in raindrops. They have quoted
previous global epidemics as evidence that only contact
between human beings does not account for the spread of
influenza.
In 1918, an outbreak of influenza occurred on the same
day in Bombay and Boston, yet took another three weeks to
spread to New York
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe think that as the microbes can
float down in patches they can strike different places at
slightly different times. However, other researchers say
the idea is totally wrong.
There is scant evidence of any thing like that going on.
However, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have also their
followers who support the idea. Recently, there has been
considerable re-thinking on the issue of how life
originated on the Earth.
Today the concept of implantation of life, through
bacteria and viruses of extraterrestrial origin is not
considered as outlandish today, as it was two decades
ago. According to Dr Narlikar, the focus next would be on
determining the origin as well as the nuclear
characteristics of the three new species of bacteria.
Even if Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are proved right, the
question (origin of life) remains unanswered. It shifts
the origin to some other planer or comet or something
like that.
What is a living life form? The answer is not clear cut.
Life was defined as any system capable of performing a
number of such functions as eating, metabolizing,
excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing and
being responsive to external stimuli. But many such
properties are either present in machines that nobody is
willing to call alive, or absent from organisms that
everybody is willing to call alive.
A lot of in depth research is necessary to
answer the questions: What is Life? Where did it
originate, on Earth or elsewhere? If elsewhere, how did
it come to Earth?
C-DAC and
the Super Computing
G V Joshi
In India, the name
C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) has
become synonymous with supercomputing or High Performance
Computing (HPC) as it is also called.
The reason for that lies in the history of C-DAC. In late
1980s, India, faced with a technology non-cooperation
regime that denied its scientific community access to
supercomputers, in particular Cray systems, set up C-DAC
in March 1988 with the clear mandate to develop an HPC
system to meet high-speed computational needs in solving
scientific and other developmental problems where fast
computing is absolutely necessary.
Following a specific recommendation to that effect, C-DAC
was established at Pune, as a scientific society of the
then Department of Electronics (now the Department of
Information Technology (DIT) under the Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology).
C-DAC achieved its primary target of developing a
supercomputer with a capability of one giga, or one
billion, floating point operations a second in the early
1990s. Christened PARAM 8000, it set the platform for a
whole series of computers, called the PARAM series, over
the years, with PARAM 20000, or PARAM Padma, breaking the
teraflop (Tflop) (thousand billion flops) barrier in 2002
with a peak speed of 1 Tflop.
The latest in the series is called PARAM Yuva, which was
developed in 2008 and was ranked 68 in the TOP 500 list
released in November 2008 at the Supercomputing
Conference in Austin, Texas, USA.
A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of
current processing capacity, particularly the speed of
calculation.
Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive
tasks such as problems, involving weather forecasting,
climate research, computing the structures and properties
of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules,
polymers, and crystals, simulation of airplanes in wind
tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons,
and research into nuclear fusion, secret code braking and
the like. Major universities, Defence establishments and
scientific research laboratories are its heavy users.
C-DAC has also set up a National PARAM Supercomputing
Facility (NPSF) in Pune, to allow researchers access to
HPC systems to solve their computer - intensive problems,
C-DACs efforts in this strategically and
economically important area have thus put India on the
supercomputing map of the world along with select
developed nations of the world.
As of 2008, 52 PARAM systems have been deployed in the
country and abroad, eight of them at locations in Russia,
Singapore, Germany and Canada.
Having thus fulfilled its primary goal, C-DAC broadened
its spectrum of activities to give true meaning to the
phrase Advanced Computing embedded in its name.
C-DAC now has 11 R&D centres, which are located in
Pune, Bangalore Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mohali,
Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida and Thiruvananthapuram, and the
number of highly skilled employees exceeds 2,500.
C-DAC's language technology mission was initiated to
create a framework to support various Indian languages
with diverse scripts on standard computers. C-DAC's
innovation in language technologies began with its widely
acclaimed Graphics and Intelligence based Script
Technology (GIST), whose inventor initiated its
development at IIT Kanpur and later joined C-DAC in the
early 1990s.
In fact, this led to the creation of a GIST group within
C-DAC, which developed several applications using GIST.
C-DAC has also developed a Real Time Weather System
(RTWS) called Anuman, a fully automated flexible,
portable, web-based software for simulations of weather.
C-DAC's Avanced Computing Training School (ACTS) is
dedicated to creating high quality manpower for C-DAC in
particular and the IT industry in general through the
designing and delivering various courses. The courses are
offered through a network of more than 100 authorized
training centres in India, besides the C-DAC's own
centres in Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad & Bangalore.
C-DAC's work on Machine-Assisted Translation System,
MANTRA, got the Computerworld Smithsonian Award and is
the part of the "1999 Innovation Collection" in
the National Museum for American History.
The newest initiative of C-DAC is LILA - Learning Indian
Language through Artificial Intelligence - a multi-media
based intelligent self-tutoring application for learning
Hindi as a second language through southern Indian
languages. Users can study for the Hindi Prabodh, Praveen
and Pragya examinations through the medium of Kannada,
Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu through their PCs and
INTERNET.
Facilities include reading and writing of Hindi
alphabets, a speech interface to enable correct
pronounciation and intonation; an online bilingual
dictionary, a tool to record and compare one's own voice
with standard pronounciation as well as grammar notes,
interactive exercises and tests.
Through such services, C-DAC continues to help Indians
surmount the barriers of Languages. Its mission:
Dissolving language barriers we strive to reach out to
place the power of computing in the hands of the people
of India. C-DAC thus continues to bring computers closer
to millions of people for whom lack of English language
skills still remains an obstacle.
C-DAC also invented LIPS (Language Independent Programme
Subtitles/Dubbing) which is used by the Doordarshan.
C-DAC's citizen ID card technology was used to make ID
cards for voters.
The motto of C-DAC is "If anybody can do it, C-DAC
should do it." (PTI)
Forty yrs of moon landing
G. V. Joshi
On July 20, 1969, the
human race accomplished its single greatest technological
achievement of the 20th century, when a human being first
set foot on another celestial body, Earth's natural
satellite "The Moon".
Neil A. Armstrong then
took the "Small Step" into humanity's greater
future when he stepped off the Lunar Module, named
"Eagle," onto the surface of the Moon, from
which he could look up and see Earth in the heavens as no
one had done before him. "Buzz" Aldrin joined
him soon afterwards.
He and Aldrin spent 21
hours on the lunar surface and collected 21-kg of lunar
rocks. After their historic walks on the Moon, they
successfully docked with the Command Module
"Columbia," in which Michael Collins was
patiently orbiting the Moon and returned to Earth safely,
ending the successful Apollo XI launch and recovery
Russians created history on October 4, 1957, when they
launched the football size earth-orbiting satellite
Sputnik I. This had a massive impact all over the world
particularly America.
Sputnik I was followed by
Sputnik II, which carried a dog named Laika into orbit.
Americans got worried about the R-7 Intercontinental
Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that was used to launch Sputnik
I and II. The R-7 was also capable of propelling a
nuclear bomb from the USSR to any spot in the world,
including USA.
The Sputnik launch led
directly to the creation of National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) in July 1958.
In November 1960, John F.
Kennedy was elected President after a campaign that
promised American superiority over the USSR( Soviet
Union) in the fields of space exploration and missile
defence or in short 'space race'.
On May 25, 1961, President
Kennedy said, "I believe that this nation should
commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade
is out, of landing a man on the Moon and bringing him
back safely to our Earth."
But Landing humans on the
moon and getting them back safely to Earth again is
easily said than done. At first a method of doing it had
to be discussed in depth and evolved.
In 1916 a Russian mechanic
called Yuri Kondratyuk had described how a small landing
craft could leave a mother-ship in lunar orbit to ferry
its crew to the surface and back - a technique later
referred to as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR. The small
landing craft could then be discarded, leaving a much
smaller and lighter mother-ship to be propelled back to
Earth.
Kondratyuk died in 1942.
But two space scientists, Herman Oberth and an Englishman
named Harry E Ross, had kept Kondratyuk's ideas alive in
the intervening years. It took until June 1962, before
NASA scientists were convinced that the LOR was going to
be easier and economic than the alternative methods like
landing a massive rocket on Moon and the like.. After
much deliberations and in depth discussions it was
finally decided that the Apollo program would consist of
designing, constructing and proving space worthiness and
safety of the following three components needed for LOR,
before sending astronauts to Moon and getting them safely
back : The conical Command Module where the crew ate and
slept on its way to the moon and home; the Service
Module, supplying electricity, water , maneuvering power
and thrust to get home from lunar orbit, and; and the
Lunar Module, or LM, a two-part, totally self-contained
spacecraft that used its own rockets to land on and take
off from the surface of the moon, and even served as its
own launch pad.
Thus started the program
from Projects Mercury, Gemini followed by Apollo 1 to
Apollo 11 and then on to Apollo 17. Project Mercury and
Gemini program clearly placed the United States in the
lead over the Soviet Union in manned spaceflight. Apollo
started in tragedy, when a fire on the launch pad in the
Command Module of Apollo 1 claimed the lives of three
astronauts on January 27, 1967, in a routine training
exercise for what had been scheduled to be the first
Apollo mission. There were no crafts named Apollo 2 or 3.
Apollo 4 without any crew was launched November 9, 1967
and splashed down on the same day. The main purpose of
this craft was to take the Apollo Command and Service
Module (CSM) into Earth orbit.Apollo 5 and 6 were also
without any crew. The primary objectives of these were to
verify ascent and descent stages of the propulsion
systems, restart options, spacecraft structure, LM
staging and their performance while in orbit. Apollo 7, 8
and 9 with crew proved the space worthiness of the
equipment to be used in final lunar landing. Apollo 10
came to within 15.6 km of the lunar surface during
practice maneuvers. The Apollo 11 , which was launched on
July 16, 1969, carried Neil Alden Armstrong, Michael
Collins and Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr. On July 20,
Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to land on
the Moon, while Collins orbited above.
The mission fulfilled
President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by
the end of the 1960s. While Kennedy did not live to see
the Apollo Program's success, he is often widely credited
as the driving force behind the inception and funding of
the program.
Following the success of
Apollo 11, Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 - went on to
land on the moon. Apollo 13 had an accident but the
astronauts were brought back to Earth safely. These six
missions returned with almost 400 kilograms of lunar
samples. Experiments on Moon included soil mechanics,
meteoroids, seismic, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic
fields, and solar wind experiments. The importance of
Apollo program in the advancement of planetology is
self-evident. Even if only six manned landing had been
accomplished, the return of samples from another body in
the solar system had established Apollo Program as a
milestone in the history of science.
However, the materials
returned by Apollo have not fulfilled the early hopes of
the most optimistic scientists: that they would yield an
understanding of the origin and evolution of the Moon,
the Earth, and the Solar System.
But whatever its
shortcomings, Apollo Program produced a store of
scientific treasure. The lunar samples were the crown
jewels of the scientific achievement of the Apollo
missions. It seems probable that nothing like those
samples would be available for many years to come.
Since than Japan, China
and India have sent unmanned probes to Moon but another
manned probe or establishing a human colony on Moon is
not in sight. (PTI)
.
10 yrs of Chandra Observatory
G V Joshi
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a
satellite borne telescope launched by National
Astronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US
through Space Shuttle on July 23, 1999. It has now
completed ten years in orbit and is still going
strong.Although Chandra was initially given an expected
lifetime of 5 years. However based on the observatory's
outstanding results, NASA extended its lifetime to 10
years on 4 September 2001. Physically Chandra could last
much longer. A recent study performed at the Chandra
X-ray Center indicated that the observatory could last at
least 15 years.
Chandra Observatory is the third of NASA's four Great
Observatories. The first was Hubble Space Telescope;
second the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in
1991; and latest is the Spitzer Space Telescope.
In 1976, Dr Riccardo Giacconi, Professor of physics and
astronomy and University Professor at Johns Hopkins
University called as "father of Xray
astronomy", along with Dr Harvey Tananbaum of the
Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge,
USA, submitted a proposal to NASA t o initiate the study
and design of a large X-ray telescope. Dr Tananbaum has
been working in X-ray astronomy since his graduate days
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.In
1977, work was begun on the project, which was then known
as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF). In
1998, AXAF was renamed as the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The name "Chandra" was selected as a result of
contest, which attracted 6,000 entries from fifty states
in the US and sixty-one countries.The winning name was
decided by a final elite panel that included prominent
scientists, a space science executive, and nationally
recognized science reporters.In all, 59 people submitted
the name "Chandra." In Jatila's words,"I
propose the name of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who is
famous for the Chandrasekhar Limit of 1.4 solar masses as
the greatest mass possible for a white dwarf star. His
name has not been used on any of the satellites.Chandra
means moon in Sanskrit. I think this connotation, as well
as being part of the name of a very prominent
astrophysicist whose research on high energy
astrophysical phenomena was crucial to our understanding
of neutron stars and black holes, makes Chandra an
appropriate name for the p roposed telescope."
Chandra was assembled and tested by Northrop. Grumman
Space Technology in Redondo Beach, California.X-rays were
first observed and documented in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad
Rvntgen, a German scientist who found them quite by
accident when experimenting with vacuum tubes. Although
the powerful X-rays can penetrate the air for distances
of at least a few meters, the Earth's atmosphere is thick
enough to absorb all the Xrays from outer space.
Therefore to detect X-rays from celestial objects, the
X-ray detectors must be flown above most of the Earth's
atmosp here.There are at present three methods of doing
so, but the best method is to install a detector on a
satellite which is placed in an orbit well above the
Earth's atmosphere. Instruments on satellites are able to
observe the full range of the X-rays.They can collect
data for as long as the in struments continue to operate.
The X-ray detector in the Vela 5B satellite remained
functional for over ten years!
Chandra is one of the most sophisticated astronomical
observatories ever flown in space. It features the
world's most powerful X-ray telescope and a suite of
high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy instruments.
The telescope's array of exquisitely polished and aligned
mirrors allows scient ists to gather X-rays from
celestial sources billions of light years away, revealing
cosmic phenomena not visible to conventional optical
telescopes. Since producing its first X-ray images in
August 1999, Chandra has provided astronomers with a
startling, new look at the high-energy universe of
supernova remnants, pulsars, black holes and clouds of
multi-million degree gas that comprise clusters of
galaxies. It is truly a scientific and engineering
triumph.Dr Chandrasekhar's most famous research was the
astrophysical "Chandrasekhar Limit". The limit
describes the limiting mass of about 1.44 solar masses
above which a star (white dwarf) cannot exist in a stable
state.The limit was first calculated by him in 1930
during his maiden voyage from India to Cambridge, England
for his graduate studies. When Chandra first proposed
this limit during his fellowship at Trinity College in
the 1930s, it was obstinately opposed by Sir Arthur
Eddington and much to Chan dra's frustration none of the
established physicists like Bohr, Fowler, Pauli, and
other physicists in Europe came to his rescue although
they all agreed with his analysis at the time. This
episode had a bitter impact on Chandrasekhar resulting in
his move to the University of Chicago in the US and in
his choice of moving to another research topic.
Dr Chandrasekhar born in 1910 passed away in 1995 after
serving on the faculty at the University of Chicago for
almost 60 years, winning the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics
for his work on explaining the structure and evolution of
stars. He was the nephew of Sir. C. V. Raman, another
Nobel laur eate in Physics from India. (PTI)
Internet
spoofing
Neeraj Dubey
Information security has become a
very critical aspect of modern computing systems. With
the global acceptance of the internet; virtually every
computer in the world today is connected to every other.
While this has created tremendous productivity and
unprecedented opportunities in the world we live in, it
has also created new risks for the users of these
computers. The users, business and organization world
wide have to live with a constant threat from hackers and
attackers, who use a variety of techniques and tools in
order to break into Computer systems, steal information,
change sensitive data and cause havoc.
"Spoofing
is an illegal practice of using someone else's domain
name of e-mail address as the sender or reply to address
on an e-mail note. This has been a common practice used
by spammers and it is illegal as detailed in the Federal
Can Spam Act of Jan - 2004. In spoofing (Fooling,
deceiving), an attacker impersonates someone else. In the
context of network security, a spoofing attack is a
situation in which one person or program successfully
masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby
gaining an illegitimate advantage."
A common
misconception is that IP-Spoofing can be used to hide
your IP-address while surfing the internet, chatting
on-line, sending E-mail and so-forth. This is generally
not true. Forging the source IP-address causes the
responses to be mis-directed, meaning you cannot create a
normal network connection. Internet security can be
challenged due to various types of spoofing attacks i.e.
a) IP- spoofing - In such attacks, attacker uses
IP-address of another computer to acquire information or
to gain access, b) In Web spoofing attacks, attackers
tricks web browser into communicating with a different
web server than the user intended, c) In E-mail spoofing
attacker sends e-mail but makes it appear to come someone
else.
IP-Spoofing
is one of the most common forms of on-line camouflage. In
IP-Spoofing, an attacker gains unauthorized access to a
computer or a n/w by making it appear that a malicious
message has come from a trusted machine by
"Spoofing" the IP-address of that machine.
Computer
system can be exploited for conducting fraudulent
activities and for outright theft. Such criminal acts as
accomplished by "automating" traditional
methods of frauds and by inventing and using new methods
that are constantly being created by enterprising
criminal minds. Computer fraud and theft in most of the
corporate world is being committed by company insiders.
In addition to the use of technology to commit fraud,
computer h/w and s/w resources may be vulnerable to
theft.
Understanding
how and why Spoofing and Frauds attacks are used,
combined with a few simple prevention methods; can help
protect your n/w from these malicious cloaking and
cracking techniques. Implementation of efficient access
control methodologies periodic auditing and firewall
usage can, in most cases prevent IP-Spoofing and frauds
from occurring or at least make it more easily detected.
(The author
is Lecturer GCET Jammu)
Understanding
how and why Spoofing and Frauds attacks are used,
combined with a few simple prevention methods; can help
protect your n/w from these malicious cloaking and
cracking techniques. Implementation of efficient access
control methodologies periodic auditing and firewall
usage can, in most cases prevent IP-Spoofing and frauds
from occurring or at least make it more easily detected.
10 Energy Saving Tips
L.P.SINGH
Happy New Year!
Ringing in 2010 means pledging yourself to New Year
Resolutions. Most of us have already made our New Year
Resolutions and now we must stick to them. It is all too
common to make resolutions and within weeks they are
forgotten. This year, make a resolution along with the
personal ones like-get fit, lose weight, give up smoking
and drinking - to conserve energy at homes and in
offices, which is need of the hour : To help you with
that resolution, let me give you some conservation tips*
Turn Out the Lights! - Turn off the lights burning in
unused rooms. Replace your incandescent bulbs with
equivalent compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. CFLs
last longer and use 75% less power. LED based lights are
even more efficient
* Unplug or use power strips that can be turned off for
appliances and electronic devices such as computers,
chargers, printers, televisions, cable set top boxes,
microwave ovens, DVD players and coffee makers, to avoid
energy vampires. Energy vampires can be spotted by
walking through your home at night with the lights off.
If you see the "standby" lights and digital
displays on various appliances and electronic devices,
these devices are using power and act like vampires
silently sucking away energy even when they are turned
"off."
* Use a Power Bar with Timer - Use one to ensure unused
appliances are completely shutdown. Buy Energy Star rated
appliances
* Upgrade Your Old Refrigerator - A refrigerator
purchased in 1980 uses four times the power a new Energy
Star rated one. Purchase a thermometer to ensure the
appliance is running only as cold as needed
* Clean Air conditioner Filter - Dirty A.C filters reduce
required air flow and make the equipment work harder. A
clean filter can help save five percent in
heating/cooling costs. The same is true of dirty clothes
dryer filters
* Take a Shower - A quick shower using a low-flow shower
head will use only half the water required for a typical
bath of 75 liters
* Wrap That Hot Water Heater - You can save ten percent
of power required to operate an electric hot water heater
by installing a tank insulating blanket. Insulate the hot
water pipes exiting your hot water heater to further
reduce energy loss
* Scale Back Appliances - Using small, specialized
appliances like toaster ovens or electric tea kettles
uses less energy that their larger counterparts. Only run
dishwashers when there is a full load and select the
energy-saving cycle.
* Heaters: Use a temperature controlled oil heater or a
gas heater for space heating. Sit near the heater as
possible in order to avoid the need to have both elements
switched on together. Switch off the heater when leaving
the room for any length of time. Curtains help to retain
the heat in a room. Draw the curtains early in the
evening.
* Wash Clothes in Cold Water - Eighty-five to ninety
percent of the energy used by a washing machine is from
heating the water it uses. Washing in cold water saves
energy. Use an outdoors clothesline when it is possible.
E-reader A New World of Reading
Rakesh Bharti
"E- mail, E- gadgets, E- seva,
E- com and it goes on and on and poor Darwin thought E
was for Evolution" ~Anonymous
Man has not evolved much from Darwin days or for that
matter from predator days at least in mind, but the
machines definitely have. The evolution of technology
continues at the speed of light where electronic media
has evolved into computers which have evolved into
notebooks which have evolved into palms. This combined
with evolution of communication technology has resulted
in everything available at your click when on move. If
Darwin was born today he would have written an E-book
called "Survival of the Smallest".
Think of rotten books torn and mauled with contents of
fungi, words that have disappeared into the colour of
brownie paper, you think of old books that was to be
preserved and cherished for Centuries and that was to
live longer than our life carried from our Generations of
forefathers.
It will all change in matter of next few years the way
the tapes have become extinct with the advent of MP3 and
music on move has become universal buzzword, Books on the
move -err E-book on the move will revolutionize our daily
lives the same way mobile phones have become an integral
part of our mind and heart.
Think of carrying the voluminous books and the umpteen
office PDF files, technical manuals which need thousand
turns every time you are on move etc. The digital
revolution answers all your reading rumblings in the form
of E-reader.
E-reader is an ultra slim, light-weight device designed
specially to hold thousands of books in its memory. It
displays each and every page of the book of your choice
by a simple touch of a button. It's an electronic book
which displays entire volume of E-books that you have
downloaded from the Internet through your computer, page
by page with a scroll function. The type of files that
you can read are pdf, xhtml, jpeg, txt, mp3 which makes
it simply the most versatile book that you can hold.
Let me tell you that E-readers are very user friendly and
just require basic digital device (cell phone) handling
knowledge. Imagine children in India carrying just one
electronic reader to school instead of backbreaking
school bags. E-readers will be an ideal fit for academia.
Portability and easy access to books, journals etc.,
could result in students reading more. The built-in
dictionary is a very handy tool. While reading, the
student can take the curser to the word he/she wants
defined and the meaning shows up at the bottom of the
page. 'Text to Speech', when activated, reads your books
aloud and will be useful for students who experience
difficulty in reading and for students who generally tend
to avoid reading their textbooks. Electronic readers are
searchable and students can annotate text, highlight
passages and write in the margins as they read along just
as they would do on paper.With the amazingly simple
operations, you can navigate effortlessly and sort the
books by title, file name and size to retrieve the books
that you want to read. E-reader allows you to personalize
just about everything, from the colours and font to the
line spacing and margins and page turn animations. If you
prefer tapping to turn pages it can, and if you prefer a
gentle swipe it'll do that, too. E-reader's cutting edge
-no back light display - E-ink technology offers high
paper-like contrast which makes it perfectly readable
only under normal light. Thus, E-ink technology just
differentiates between black and white to give paper like
display with no angle distortion nor light distortion
which gives same reading pleasure like a book unlike LCD
palmtops. This Eye Cool display eliminates eye strain.
Since you can't read without light, you experience the
real feel of paper reading. Moreover, it is very handy
and light weight with a very long Battery life. As the
E-ink display technology does not require any power to
maintain display a page, E-reader offers almost 8000
pages refresh, on a single charge.
I have no hesitation to say that electronic readers will
become cheaper and prove to be a real game changer. In
fact, there are a number of highly popular E-readers
available on the market Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Sony Reader
PRS-700 etc. Whether you are interested in the Classics
or the latest bestseller in fiction, thousands of books
are available freely in many websites. You can also buy
and download premium books and updated text books,
journals etc. Connect E-reader with USB cable to any host
computer and drag and drop your files. That's it your new
book is in the reader, ready to be displayed. A
collection of books available in SD card, then just
insert and read.
Let's think over it, it's the perfect time for a trial,
as a pilot programme has already been started in the US
in order to attain a goal of a paperless society or at
least a society that uses less paper to save thousands of
trees. Universities, colleges and schools in US are
trying to consume less paper by using electronic readers
without creating an unfavourable impact on the
traditional classroom experience. In any event, the
result of these pilot programmes will help in the
advancement of electronic readers to adapt better to the
world of education. ..
Internet in India

Dr Deepshikha Jamwal
Since the internet became popular, it is being used for
many purposes. Through the help of the World Wide Web and
websites, the internet has become very useful in many
ways for the common man.
The first and most popular use of the internet is the
email. Almost everyone today has an email account. Many
users even have multiple accounts, with various service
providers. Because these service providers are free, it
is very easy to create accounts and use them. Using this
medium, you can contact anyone in the world within a
matter of a few seconds.
The second most popular use is to get information. The
internet and the World Wide Web has made it easy for
anyone to access information, and it can be of any type,
as the internet is flooded with information.
Next we have business. World trade has seen a big boom
with the help of the internet, as it has become easier
for buyers and sellers to communicate. All kinds of
business have taken shape over the internet as well
besides trading. This also saves a lot of money, and this
is the chosen medium today. Right from web designing to
selling home products, all businesses are flourishing
online.
Shopping is also a favourite especially in countries in
the West. Today all consumers prefer to shop from the
comfort of their homes. Almost anything can be bought
with the use of the internet. People also use the
internet to auction goods. There are many auction sites
online, where anything can be sold.
The next big thing about the internet is entertainment.
One will find all forms of entertainment from watching
films to playing games online. The entertainment caters
to the needs of all age groups. Almost anyone from any
age group can find the right kind of entertainment for
themselves. Today social networking communities have
become an important part of the online community. Almost
all users are members, and they use it for personal and
business purposes.
Internet use keeps climbing, with video being the big
driver in recent years. Google's You Tube, which started
up in 2005, already accounts for about 10 percent of
Internet traffic. According to an active survey being
conducted by NiteCo , the average age of Internet users
is 28.3037 years old as of October 8 2009. As of 2009,
approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide use the
Internet, according to studies by Miniwatts Marketing
Group.
Internet users in India reached 54m ever users and 43m
active users in March 2008. During the same period the
number of active users rose to more than 45m million upto
2009 as per a recently released survey reports from the
Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI-IMRB).
The number of users accessing the Internet primarily for
entertainment was around 9 percent. The research further
showed that online transactions (e-commerce) were
steadily gathering steam. The Young Men, Older Men and
Working Women segments were the ones using it the most.
These segments, along with the Non Working Women segment,
were also using applications like jobs and dating sites
in significant numbers.
The survey findings were:
- Time spent on the Internet increases with the
increasing age of the user.
- School going kids spend an average of 322 minutes a
week online.
- College-going students spend an average of 433 minutes
a week.
- Older men spend an average of 580 minutes a week.
- Working women spend an average of 535 minutes online a
week.
- Non-working women spend 334 minutes a week.
Among the study findings is that the Internet has now
penetrated beyond the communication needs of the active
user population and was no longer an avenue for exploring
their curiosity. While email, chat and IM would continue
to pull first-time users, the next round of growth would
be driven by applications such as blogs, P2P,
video-on-demand, online radio, online gaming and
localized content.
The report estimated the number of school-going kids at
1.6 million and college-going students at 3.4 million.
As per the research the usage of internet is growing day
by day as the world total internet usage is 202.90% and
in others countries like Oceania/ Australia is 141.90%
Latin America Caribbean is 391.30% North America 114.70%
idle East is 490.10% Europe is 197.60% Asia 24070% and in
Africa internet usage is 625.80%.
Utility of Internet
It's surprising that 47.5% of Claimed Internet users do
not know how Internet can be a useful tool. Other
barriers to usage include:
* Cost of access cyber cafe charges are high (11.7%)
* Lack of access points - no good cafe nearby (8.9%)
* Dial-up costs are too high (5.5%)
* Need guidance (5.2%)
This effect is noticeable even with just 2-5 Internet
hours/week, and it rises substantially for those spending
more that 10 hours/week, of who up to 15 percent report a
decrease in social activities. Even more striking is the
fact that Internet users spend much less time of talking
on the phone to friends and family: the percentage
reporting a decrease exceeds 25 percent - although it is
unclear to what extent this represents a shift to e-mail
even in communicating with friends and family, or a
technical bottleneck due to a single phone line being
pre-empted by Internet use.
The uses of the internet are highly versatile, and they
will create a great deal of opportunities for anyone
using them. It even helps with education, as there are
many online tutors, and there are sites too which teach
with better methods. Those who need extra coaching may
use the help of this medium to get better results. The
uses of the internet almost make life complete for
everyone.
Now a Paper Battery
Dr. S. S. VERMA
Presently, battery takes up a huge
amount of space and contributes to a large part of the
device's weight. There is strong recent interest in
ultrathin, flexible, safe energy storage devices to meet
the various design and power needs of modern gadgets. To
build such fully flexible and robust electrochemical
devices, multiple components with specific
electrochemical and interfacial properties need to be
integrated into single units. Fuel cells and solar power
have both been floated as promising solutions to the
battery weight/capacity problem, but new research
suggests that carbon nanotubes may eventually provide the
best hope of implementing the flexible batteries and
supercapacitors needed to shrink our gadgets even more.
Researchers say that flexible paper batteries could meet
the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets. A
paper battery is a flexible, ultra-thin energy storage
and production device formed by combining carbon
nanotubes with a conventional sheet of cellulose-based
paper. A paper battery acts as both a high-energy battery
and supercapacitor, combining two components that are
separate in traditional electronics. This combination
allows the battery to provide both long-term, steady
power production and bursts of energy. Non-toxic,
flexible paper batteries have the potential to power the
next generation of electronics, medical devices and
hybrid vehicles, allowing for radical new designs and
medical technologies.
Making of Paper battery
The devices are formed by combining cellulose with an
infusion of aligned carbon nanotubes that are each
approximately one millionth of a centimeter thick. The
carbon is what gives the batteries their black color.
These tiny filaments act like the electrodes found in a
traditional battery, conducting electricity when the
paper comes into contact with an ionic liquid solution.
Ionic liquids contain no water, which means that there is
nothing to freeze or evaporate in extreme environmental
conditions. As a result, paper batteries can function
between -75 and 1500C. A capacitor introduced into an
organism could be implanted fully dry and then be
gradually exposed to bodily fluids over time to generate
voltage. Flow of electrical power or electrons in a paper
battery is governed by the steps as:
* Batteries produce electrons through a chemical reaction
between electrolyte and metal in the traditional battery.
* Chemical reaction in the paper battery is between
electrolyte and carbon nanotubes.
* Electrons collect on the negative terminal of the
battery and flow along a connected wire to the positive
terminal
* Electrons must flow from the negative to the positive
terminal for the chemical reaction to continue.
Developments
Widespread commercial deployment of paper batteries will
rely on the development of more inexpensive manufacturing
techniques for carbon nanotubes. Early prototypes of the
device are able to produce 2.5 volts of electricity from
a sample the size of a postage stamp. One method of
manufacture, developed by scientists at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and MIT, begins with growing the
nanotubes on a silicon substrate and then impregnating
the gaps in the matrix with cellulose. Once the matrix
has dried, the material can be peeled off of the
substrate, exposing one end of the carbon nanotubes to
act as an electrode. When two sheets are combined, with
the cellulose sides facing inwards, a supercapacitor is
formed that can be activated by the addition of the ionic
liquid. This liquid acts as an electrolyte and may
include salt-laden solutions like human blood, sweat or
urine. The high cellulose content (over 90%) and lack of
toxic chemicals in paper batteries makes the device both
biocompatible and environmentally friendly, especially
when compared to the traditional lithium ion battery used
in many present-day electronic devices and laptops.
Applications
As a result of the potentially transformative
applications in electronics, aerospace, hybrid vehicles
and medical science, however, numerous companies and
organizations are pursuing the development of paper
batteries. The paper-like quality of the battery combined
with the structure of the nanotubes embedded within gives
them their light weight and low cost, making them
attractive for portable electronics, aircraft,
automobiles, and toys (such as model aircraft), while
their ability to use electrolytes in blood make them
potentially useful for medical devices such as
pacemakers. The medical uses are particularly attractive
because they do not contain any toxic materials and can
be biodegradable; a major drawback of chemical cells. In
order to be commercially viable, they would like to be
able to make them newspaper size; a size which, taken all
together would be powerful enough to power a car.
iPad unveiled

Supti Dutta
The much-anticipated Apples tablet
PC-cum-cellphone is here. Its named iPad. The tech
giant has unveiled a touch-screen, tablet-style computer
at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. It is another
step toward the convergence between smartphones and
mobile computers.
It's more than a smartphone, less than a notebook, but
just the right personal device for everyday users. It
redefines the tablet computer and threatens with
obsolescence of electronic readers, digital photo frames
and other mono-purpose gizmos.
The gadget has a 9.7-inch (24.6-centimeter) color screen
and resembles an oversized iPhone. It is 0.5 inches (1.3
cms) thick, weighs 1.5 pounds (0.7 kgs) and comes with
16, 32, or 64 gigabytes (GB) of flash memory.
Apple has led the way in conditioning people to pay for
applications, games, and other content for the iPhone and
the iPod Touch. Now, it is to be seen what a
notebook-sized version of iPad could do to revolutionaise
the way we use technology.
There is little doubt that the new Apple tool will
introduce new ways of interacting with the world around
us, simplify the home entertainment experience, give a
whole new gaming platform and make us fall in love with
the printed word again.
People are saying that this iPad could try to do for
newspapers what iTunes did for music and what the App
Store did for mini-programs for smartphones. It will make
us fall in love with the printed word again: Some
industry experts believe the launch of the iPad could
represent an 'iPod moment' for books, newspapers and
magazines; in the same way the iPod changed the way we
consumed music, so too could the iPad reinvigorate.
But no one thinks this device is the messiah for print.
Apple has reportedly been in talks with online news,
magazine and book publishers and Wednesdays event
could include the launch of a version of iTunes for
content generated by those outlets. Digitally frustrated
newspapers or magazines may choose to focus on
fee-for-service electronic readers. It could be there are
some publishers feeling as though they have been buying
into the new media ecosystem, the blogosphere, for 10
years and haven't gotten one thing out of it.
These days, publishers are placing bets on smartphone and
e-reader platforms, which are entrusted to track paid
readership of publications. News publishers are looking
to Apple for a tablet that lets people browse and buy
content in ways that expand on simply reading by adding
interactive multimedia and reference features.
Theres a real opportunity for Apple to raise the
bar here not only by making digital publications
accessible to the mainstream reader, but also seamlessly
interweaving online features, apps and streaming
audio/video content to enhance the general reading
experience.
This will not be the killer device just yet. But it will
certainly point the way. Efforts to lure people into
paying for content on an Apple tablet could be thwarted
if the hardware comes with a high price and is coupled
with monthly telecom service provider charges.
Will Microsoft lose the tablet market to Apple too?
Whether Apple will be successful in the tablet market is
yet to be seen, but with Apples tremendous track
record of the iPhone (100% increase in units sold last
year), the iTouch (also up) and Mac OS X computers (33%
increase in units sold) resulting in an amazing $15.68
billion revenue quarter, Apple has a good chance of
getting the tablet market right.
But Apple may not have the field to itself for long, as
rival Microsoft is planning to get in on the tablet
action. The difference is that Redmond will likely attack
the market through hardware partners like Hewlett-Packard
and Acer, rather than introduce a Microsoft-branded
device. Indeed, CEO Steve Ballmer demonstrated a
prototype HP tablet powered by Windows 7 earlier this
month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The one thing everyone seems fixated on is the effect
that these devices are having or will have
on the book-publishing industry. Amazons Kindle is
currently the leader in the e-book business, but
its widely expected that will change soon.
In an attempt to forestall such threats, Amazon last week
boosted the royalty rate it pays to authors and
publishers who offer e-versions of their books for the
Kindle. The new deal gives authors and publishers 70
percent of the price (provided the author/publisher meets
certain criteria). Thats twice the previous rate
the company was paying, and slightly above the 63-percent
rate that Apple is allegedly providing.
Among other things, Amazon is clearly making a play to
authors to convince them to go direct, and cut out the
publisher middleman. But why stop with books? If Amazon
is smart (which it clearly is), the company will use the
Kindle as a distribution mechanism for all kinds of
digital content blogs, independent magazines,
blooks (blog/books) and any other kind of
individually-created media it can get its hands on.
Once the iPad enters the market, the fight will truly be
on between Apple and Amazon: to sign up as many content
creators and distributors as possible. The more exclusive
relationships a tablet maker has with authors and content
creators, the better platform it has to become not just
the iPod of books but of all kinds of digital content.
And then the disruption of the media and content
industries will begin in earnest. (CNF)
Internet marketing
Anil Bhat
Internet marketing, also referred
to as online marketing or E-marketing, is the marketing
of products or services over the Internet. The Internet
has brought many unique benefits to marketing including
low costs in distributing information and media to a
global audience. The interactive nature of Internet
marketing, both in terms of instant response and in
eliciting response, are unique qualities of the medium.
Internet marketing ties together creative and technical
aspects of the internet, including design, development,
advertising and sales. Internet marketing methods include
search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail
marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive advertising,
blog marketing, and viral marketing. Internet marketing
is the process of growing and promoting an organization
using online media. Internet marketing does not simply
mean 'building a website' or 'promoting a website'.
Somewhere behind that website is a real organization with
real goals. Internet marketing strategy includes all
aspects of online advertising products, services, and
websites, including market research, email marketing, and
direct sales.
Search Engine Optimization:
It has been observed and proven by research that more
& more businesses such as yours are seeing great
results with online advertising. Millions of people
search online each day for products, services &
information. Google is the number one choice for all
these searches done.
Between 85% to 90% of all web site traffic comes from the
search engines and directories, use of those handy-dandy
submission services that will submit your site to 980
search engines for a mere $19.95 wont take care of
this traffic. Just because your site is listed in the
search engines wont mean that your customers can
find it. But only search engine optimization and
positioning strategies that are designed to give
the engines what they want and need in order to find your
site among your competitors and other sites related to
your category. Search engine optimization and positioning
is challenging at best. Its not a simple matter of
adding a few tags that contain your important keywords.
It is an art-and a science-since its is applying creative
techniques to an in-depth study of the search engines and
directories.
SEO Company is committed to meeting the search engine
optimization & positioning needs of your web site and
proposes a campaign plan. Meet your SEOP outsourcing
needs thoroughly and professionally. The Scope of Work
should include site optimization and allied web promotion
& development activities, SE-friendly content
writing, and submission and tracking to over all major
and support Search Engines and Directories. On project
completion your web site will be more accessible on the
Internet in terms of Top rankings for specific keywords
across the major search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an online marketing
strategy used to increase a Web site's visibility to the
millions of people who find information and services on
the Internet. Search engine optimization can help
position your firm among the top search results for a
given query, which can dramatically increase traffic to
your Web site and establish a Web presence for your
practice.
Among other things, SEO involves optimizing the structure
of your site and the text that appears on it, as well as
obtaining links to your site from other sites, to help
its popularity rating with search engines. With the
number of Web sites on the Internet increasing at an
exponential rate, gaining primary placements in search
engine rankings allows you to market your firm in a very
powerful and effective way.
Article Submissions
Effective structure and a well thought-out search engine
marketing campaign can be the deciding factor in whether
your Internet promotions succeed.
Writing your article and throwing your mission statement
should be your aim.
You need to think up a mission statement that powerfully
conveys your message to users is most crucial benefit to
a potential client. Your mission statement should be
clear and concise. If anyone wants more we can have
number of options as well.
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to reach your target audience
with your thoughts, opinions, and offerings on relevant
topics.
Blogging makes sense from a marketing perspective. You'll
be leveraging the shift from outbound to inbound
marketing and interacting with your customers in new
ways. A blog lets you meet your customers more directly
than sending out brochures or an email campaign. It
changes your website from a brochure that most people
look at once to something that people interact with and
come back to.
Social Networking
Communities creation to get more traffic is must for any
social media activity
Create communities for your online presence and strive to
exist in web world. And most important having online
presence is not the ultimate target. What is important is
having huge traffic and great page rank. There are lots
of communities which drive traffic to your website.
Finally traffic will produce business for you. Social
Media marketing also engage the customers in generating
traffic.
Plastic currency
G V Joshi
For a common man,
soiled notes of rupee one, two, five and ten are an every
day nuisance. Due to rising costs of day to day
commodities like vegetables and fruits which can not be
purchased from small venders by using a credit/debit
card, even fifty rupee notes are getting soiled very
soon. A lot of money is thus lost due to badly mutilated,
torn notes, which even some banks refuse to exchange.
In addition these soiled notes carry bacteria and germs
that can cause diseases like TB, pneumonia, peptic ulcers
and gastroenteritis. Due to our dirty habit of using
saliva to wet our fingers while counting a wad of notes,
these germs enter our mouth and make some of us with poor
immunity ill.
Reserve Bank of India has been carrying out experiments
with plastic currency notes for some time. They are being
tested in laboratories to see if they could withstand
Indian hot and humid climate and the unusual ways in
which not-so-educated and even educated people handle
presently issued currency notes.
Plastic currency if handled carefully and correctly may
offer a durable alternative. They are Eco-friendly
because no one is going to throw plastic currency notes
into garbage for cows to swallow and recyclers to make
cheap pots and shoes out of them.
The performance of plastic currency notes is far better
than paper notes. If they get soiled they can be washed.
If left in pockets accidentally and washed, they do not
develop wrinkles. Finally after the end of their useful
life, they can be recycled and made into pots and bins.
As a birthday gift to the nation, in the year of
Australian bicentennial (1988), the Government of
Australia introduced ten dollar plastic currency notes
for the first time in the whole world. It took them more
than 20 years to bring out plastic currency notes.
Earlier many other small countries like Haiti, Costa Rica
and the Isle of Man had experimented with plastic
currency notes using Tyrek; a paper like material made of
high-density polyethylene or polythene - the common
plastic used in making carry bags. However, the
experiments failed as the printing began to flake off
very soon.
The technology in printing plastic notes involves highly
sophisticated processes generally used in the manufacture
of integrated circuits - chips - for all computers.
Plastic sheets used in printing notes are much thinner
than paper used in printing currency notes, and
therefore, they could be printed in a much finer print.
Letters only 0.25 mm high could be printed very easily.
These are far, too fine to be duplicated by colour
copying machines. Plastic sheets can also be made clear;
another way to defeat colour copying machines. And
finally many other security features could be
incorporated in plastic sheets used in printing currency
notes.
However, not until 1988, was a method found to produce
long lasting plastic money that could be printed on the
existing printing machines then in use for printing paper
currency.
The notes are made by taking rolls of the biaxially -
oriented polypropylene (BOPP) (another plastic) about 75
microns thick (0.075 mm). This greatly enhances the
durability of the bank notes. This is a common plastic
and is made in abundance in India.
The plastic sheets pass through a four step process that
makes them opaque as a background for printing ink and
also add a shadow mark similar to water mark in paper
notes. The rolls are then sliced into sheets, which could
be printed using the same press as for paper currency.
New inks that adhere firmly to plastic sheets were
developed and used. A raised illustration or intaglio is
printed under pressure using magnetic ink. The result is
an image that can felt by fingers as well as detected
magnetically. For the high denomination notes - a greater
source of attraction for counterfeiters - there are
additional security measures, known as an optically
variable device.
It is an image formed by tiny ridges in ultra-fine
aluminium foil that acts like diffraction grating
scattering white light into its component seven colours
as it happens with a compact disk (CD) is exposed to
sunlight.
The effect is somewhat like a hologram found on share
certificates and bonds and many other items these days.
The image is clear, visible from either side of the note
and it is far more difficult to copy than even a
hologram. Finally the notes are numbered and, given a
protective coat of transparent varnish.
This also reduces the development of static electric
charge common with plastic sheets. And all this is done
at a speed of 8,000 sheets an hour. One sheet contains 8
currency notes. The cost of making them is almost the
same as paper notes, except for optically variable device
used in higher denomination notes.
As of 2009, seven countries have converted fully to
polymer banknotes: Australia, Bermuda, Brunei, New
Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Romania, and Vietnam.
Paper currency was introduced in India in the 18th
century when some parts of India were ruled by English
East India Company (EICO). Among the earliest issues of
paper rupees were those by the Bank of Hindustan
(1770-1832), the General Bank of Bengal and Bihar
(1773-75), the Bengal Bank (1784-91), amongst others.
Queen Victoria took over EICO in 1858. Currency notes
carrying protraits of Victoria and George V were then
issued. The Reserve Bank of India as formally inaugurated
in 1935. The bank issued the first five rupee note
bearing the portrait of George VI in 1938. Other high
denomination noted followed soon. The George VI series
continued till 1947 and thereafter till 1950 when
post-independence notes were issued by Government of
Independent India. What followed is known to most of us.
(PTI)

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