UFO Files

               An unidentified flying object (usually abbreviated to UFO or U.F.O.) is any unusual apparent object in the sky whose cause cannot be identified by the observer, or (in a narrower definition) by investigators; though in popular usage it more loosely means alien spacecraft, being one explanation (among several) offered for such sightings. Though UFO sightings have occurred throughout history, modern interest in them dates from World War II, since when governments have investigated UFO reports, often from a military perspective, and UFO researchers have investigated, written about and created organizations devoted to the subject.

Studies have established that the majority of UFOs are observations of some real but conventional object—most commonly aircraft, balloons, noctilucent clouds, nacreous clouds, or astronomical objects such as meteors or bright planets – that have been misidentified by the observer as anomalies, while a small percentage of reported UFOs are hoaxes. However, after excluding these incorrect reports, between 5% and 20% of the total remain unexplained, and so can be classified as unidentified in the strictest sense. Many such reports have been made by trained observers such as pilots, police and the military; some involve radar traces, so not all reports are visual. Proponents of an extraterrestrial hypothesis believe that these unidentified reports are of alien spacecraft, though various other hypotheses have been proposed.

While UFOs have been the subject of extensive investigation by various governments, and some scientists support the extraterrestrial hypothesis, few scientific papers about UFOs have been published in peer-reviewed journals. There has been some debate in the scientific community about whether any scientific investigation into UFO sightings is warranted.

UFOs have become a prominent theme in modern culture, and this cultural phenomenon has been the subject of academic research.

The Global Seed Vault

Svalbard Global Seed vault was established to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds in an underground cavern. It is an assurance to reduce of hunger & poverty due to the national disaster. Construction of the Seed Vault, which cost approximately 45 million Norwegian Kroner (9 million USD), was funded entirely by the Government of Norway. The seed bank is constructed 120 meters (390 ft) inside a sandstone mountain at Svalbard on Spitsbergen Island. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened officially on February 26, 2008. The first seeds arrived in January 2008. This vault can storage 4.5 million samples of different seeds in the dry temperature of 0° F (-18° C). This storage process can protect the seeds for the thousands of years. Svalbard Global Seed Vault ranked no.6 on Time's Best Inventions Of 2008.

Computers Powered By Poop

Today almost everything runs on electricity. We use electricity to run trains, cook, lighting and so much more. Thus it is very important that people are able to know where they can get all the required electricity. People are able to tap energy from alternative sources of energy to help relieve the common sources of electricity.

Many companies are trying their best to try and cut down their electricity consumption. A good example would be Google. Google consumes a lot of energy. Google searches require the same energy that an 11 watt bulb requires when it's on for an hour. So one can be able to estimate how much energy is required for the Google servers and all other equipment to run. Thus Google has tried to cut their energy costs by developing advanced cooling methods and using energy saving techniques.

Others companies are also following the same trend. For example HP. It presented a paper to the 4th international conference on energy sustainability that describes how HP plans how they will use manure of cows to power their data centres. The title of the paper is design of Farm Waste-Driven supply Side Infrastructure for Data centers.

The manure that would be used will be from midsized dairy farms. Electricity will be derived form it by putting it through an anaerobic digester. The heat that is derived from this process would be used to power the turbines of the data centers cooling system. The electricity that is derived from this process will be used to power the data center. The temperature of the anaerobic digester would be regulated by the waste heat that is generated by the data center. This process ensures that there is maximum efficiency. This process also produces enough energy to be able to run the dairy farm. Thus one not only saves power use by the data centers but also the dairy farm.

According to HP, a dairy farm with about 10000 cows produces approximately 200000 tones of manure in a year. The manure produces methane gas. According to research this gas is more detrimental to the environment than carbon dioxide. The manure also pollutes the environment by polluting the rivers and streams. Thus HP using this manure to produce electricity will greatly improve the environment as it gets rid of this pollutant.

Other than reducing pollution, this process will also help boost the economy of the farms. The farms will be able to use this same electricity to run their farms and also earn huge chunks of money by selling the manure to be used elsewhere to produce the electricity. The farms can earn approximately two million dollars annually from selling the power that they produce.

A Little Device That’s Trying to Read Your Thoughts

  Dr. Stephen Hawking’s

 SAN DIEGO — Already surrounded by machines that allow him, painstakingly, to communicate, the physicist Stephen Hawking last summer donned what looked like a rakish black headband that held a feather-light device the size of a small matchbox. Called the iBrain, this simple-looking contraption is part of an experiment that aims to allow Dr. Hawking — long paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease — to communicate by merely thinking.

 The iBrain is part of a new generation of portable neural devices and algorithms intended to monitor and diagnose conditions like sleep apnea, depression and autism. Invented by a team led by Philip Low, a 32-year-old neuroscientist who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a company based in San Diego, the iBrain is gaining attention as a possible alternative to expensive sleep labs that use rubber and plastic caps riddled with dozens of electrodes and usually require a patient to stay overnight.

“The iBrain can collect data in real time in a person’s own bed, or when they’re watching TV, or doing just about anything,” Dr. Low said.

The device uses a single channel to pick up waves of electrical brain signals, which change with different activities and thoughts, or with the pathologies that accompany brain disorders. 

 But the raw waves are hard to read because they must pass through the many folds of the brain and then the skull, so they are interpreted with an algorithm that Dr. Low first created for his Ph.D., earned in 2007 at the University of California, San Diego. (The original research, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done on zebra finches.) 

 About the Hawking experiment, he said, “The idea is to see if Stephen can use his mind to create a consistent and repeatable pattern that a computer can translate into, say, a word or letter or a command for a computer.” 

 The researchers traveled to Dr. Hawking’s offices in Cambridge, England, fitted him with the iBrain headband and asked him “to imagine that he was scrunching his right hand into a ball,” Dr. Low said. “Of course, he can’t actually move his hand, but the motor cortex in his brain can still issue the command and generate electrical waves in his brain.”

The algorithm, called Spears, was able to discern Dr. Hawking’s thoughts as signals, which were represented as a series of spikes on a grid.

“We wanted to see if there was any change in the signal,” Dr. Low said. “And in fact, we did see a change in the signal.” NeuroVigil plans to repeat the study in large populations of patients with A.L.S. and other neurodegenerative diseases. 

These preliminary results come as Dr. Hawking’s ability to communicate diminishes as his disease progresses. The 70-year-old physicist, whose mind has produced crucial insights in theoretical physics as well as the best-seller “A Brief History of Time,” now needs several minutes to generate a simple message. He uses a pair of infrared glasses that picks up twitches in his cheek. His team in Cambridge, England, has dubbed this the “cheek switch.”

“Dr. Low and his company have done some outstanding work in this field,” Dr. Hawking said in a statement. “I am participating in this project in the hope that I can offer insights and practical advice to NeuroVigil. I wish to assist in research, encourage investment in this area, and, most importantly, to offer some future hope to people diagnosed with A.L.S. and other neurodegenerative conditions.” 

The physicist has also worked with other inventors seeking to better elucidate his thoughts. Engineers at the semiconductor and computing giant Intel recently hooked up a customized computer to communicate with his cheek-reading infrared glasses, along with a voice synthesizer, a webcam for using Skype, and special monitors. Intel is developing new face-recognition software that can monitor subtle changes in expression and may help Dr. Hawking communicate more efficiently. 

 

Scientists not connected with Dr. Low say they are encouraged by the iBrain’s potential. “Philip Low’s device is one of the best single-channel brain monitors out there,” said Ruth O’Hara, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University Medical School. She plans to use the iBrain for autism studies. NeuroVigil has not said what the device will cost. 

“I can’t speak to the veracity of his latest data,” which has not been published, Dr. O’Hara added, “but the preliminary data I have seen is compelling. It could be a significant contribution to the field as a window into brain architecture.” 

Dr. Terry Heiman-Patterson, a neurologist and A.L.S. specialist at the Drexel University College of Medicine, said she was in discussions with NeuroVigil to use the device on A.L.S. patients, to see how they fared with it in comparison with instruments that use multiple channels and electrodes. 

“Dr. Low is researching signals that look for intent, which is becoming very exciting because it looks like they may be able to do it — for Stephen Hawking and for others with A.L.S.,” Dr. Heiman-Patterson said.

“Patients want to be able to communicate beyond the yes or no with an eye blink. They want to send an e-mail, and turn off the light and, even more, to have a meaningful conversation.” 

 Monitors like the iBrain are also being used to assess whether experimental neurological drugs are working in clinical trials.

In 2009, NeuroVigil completed a deal with the drug giant Hoffmann-La Roche to test the iBrain. Neither company has released details of their early tests. NeuroVigil’s strategy, Dr. Low said, is to run clinical trials with Roche and other partners in industry and academia, and to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Other companies also make single-channel brain monitors, but unlike NeuroVigil they sell the devices and software directly to consumers online.Zeo, for example, based in Massachusetts, concentrates on measuring sleep patterns through a smartphone app or a clock-radio device — available for $99 and $143, respectively. Emotiv Systems, in San Francisco, offers its Epoc headset for $299 plus a range of apps and add-ons that include neurofeedback, 3-D brain-mapping tools and games like Angry Birds, all using a combination of thoughts and facial muscle movements recorded by several electrodes that are in contact with a customer’s head.

“We have no plans to take an academic route,” said Zeo’s chief executive, Dave Dickinson, who added that his company’s customers had logged one million hours of sleep time. He would not say how many devices had been sold. Emotiv was founded in 2003 and has reportedly shipped 10,000 devices.

Dr. Low plans to team up again with Dr. Hawking this summer in Cambridge to present their initial data at a neuroscience meeting in early July. NeuroVigil will continue to work with Dr. Hawking and his team to refine their technology to decipher signals generated by Dr. Hawking’s thoughts. “At the moment I think my cheek switch is faster” than the brain-computer interface, Dr. Hawking said in an e-mail sent by an assistant, “ but should the position change I will try Philip Low’s system.”

Much work remains, however, including the integration of Dr. Hawking’s brain waves with the computers and devices that allow him to communicate.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” Dr. Low said, “to have a mind like Stephen Hawking’s be able to communicate even a little bit better?”

Tooth Implanted Into His Eye

     Martin Jones, an Englishman had lost his power of vision and remained blind for almost a decade. He has now regained his power of vision. This has been accomplished by implanting a piece of tooth in his eye. The tooth that was implanted was a canine tooth which is also known as the "eyetooth". A living canine was pulled out of Martin Jones' own mouth. They then placed a man-made eye lens into its base and placed it under the lid of his eye and let the tissue grow over the canine. Also a lit flap of his skin was taken from his mouth and implanted over the tooth in his eye which later had access to its own supply of blood. The doctors then cut a hole in the cornea that permitted light to enter the eye. This very procedure gave six hundred people the power of vision.

Living Underground a Reality?

We explored what living underground offers and we found that it is not as bad as it sounds. Living underground resolves various problems that humans face today such as energy efficiency, comfortable temperature, hideout from extreme temperatures, life without noise, natural shelter from wars, tornados and hurricanes. Two problems that we stumbled across were flooding and of course lack of sunlight. Flooding can be solved with water pumps, but it seems that is impossible to penetrate sun rays through the ground.

There is a town in South Australia called Coober Pedy, where people found that living underground can be great alternative for their needs. There are times when temperatures in Coober Pedy reach an amazing high of 43 degrees Celsius (109 F). These temperatures are very uncomfortable for a normal human being and can lead to various skin diseases. The people here try and avoid the sun by living underground during this period.

This area is commonly referred to as the opal capital of the world. One finds homes, churches and even hotels in the disused shaft mines.

The area, as expected, has become a tourist attraction. People travel long distances to come and see this amazing place. The town relies heavily on the income that they get from tourism just as much as they rely on the income that they get from opal mining.

The area also boasts of being the only place that has got an underground bar. So for those that love drinking beer you will have an amazing experience drinking it from below. Interestingly there is a underground Serbian Orthodox church in Coober Pedy. Serbian miners built it for their own religions needs.