NASA's CURIOSITY rover lands safely on Mars

After a 352 million mile journey NASA's latest rover - CURIOSITY - landed safely on Mars on 5-AUG-2012. The rover did experience a harrowing plunge, as expected, through the planet’s atmosphere dubbed “7 Minutes of Terror.”

Amazing Video(s) here:

CURIOSITY - LANDING:

CURIOSITY - REAL:

CURIOSITY - CARTOON:

More Images here: Click here for more Images

Courtesy: Washington Post

New Tree Ring Study ---> Global Chilling ?

The tree rings "prove [the] climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now," the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported last week, "and [the] world has been cooling for 2,000 years.". That and other articles suggest the current global warming trend is a mere blip when viewed in the context of natural temperature oscillations etched into tree rings over the past two millennia.

The tree rings do help fill in a piece of Earth's complicated climate puzzle. However, it is climate change deniers who seem to have misconstrued the bigger picture. Instead of using the width of trees' rings as a gauge of annual temperatures, as most past analyses of tree rings have done, Wilson (, a paleoclimatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a co-author of the study) and his fellow researchers tracked the density of northern Scandinavian trees' rings marking each year back to 138 B.C. They showed that density measurements give a slightly different reading of historic temperature fluctuations than ring width measurements, and according to their way of reckoning, the Roman and medieval warm periods reached higher temperatures than previously estimated.

Sources:
Yahoo
Incompetent people too ignorant to know about it
What Are Climate Change Skeptics Still Skeptical About?

Discovery of Higgs Boson-like subatomic particle

On American Independence Day, July 4, physicists working in Geneva at CERN, the world’s biggest particle-physics laboratory, announced that they had found the Higgs boson. Like the uncovering of DNA’s structure by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953, the discovery of the Higgs makes sense of what would otherwise be incomprehensible. Its significance is massive. Literally. Without the Higgs there would be no mass. And without mass, there would be no stars, no planets and no atoms. And certainly no human beings. Indeed, there would be no history. Massless particles are doomed by Einstein’s theory of relativity to travel at the speed of light. That means, for them, that the past, the present and the future are the same thing.

BOSON was named after an Indian Scientist !!!
The 'boson' in the Higgsboson particle, whose search and ultimate detection was one of the longest and most expensive in the history of science, owes its name to Satyendra Nath Bose who was an Indian Scientist. In 1924, the city-based physicist had sent a paper to Albert Einstein, describing a statistical model that led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. The paper laid the basis for describing the two classes of subatomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
Info on Satyendra Nath Bose
Info on Bose-Einstein condensate

Finding the Higgs, though, made looking for needles in haystacks seem simple. The discovery eventually came about using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a machine at CERN that sends bunches of protons round a ring 27km in circumference, in opposite directions, at close to the speed of light, so that they collide head on. The faster the protons are moving, the more energy they have. When they collide, this energy is converted into other particles (Einstein’s E=mc2), which then decay into yet more particles. What these decay particles are depends on what was created in the original collision, but unfortunately there is no unique pattern that shouts “Higgs!” The search, therefore, has been for small deviations from what would be seen if there were no Higgs. That is one reason it took so long. The LHC, sustained by a consortium that was originally European but is now global, cost about $10 billion to build.

The discovery puts the finishing flourish on the Standard Model, the best explanation to date for how the universe works—except in the domain of gravity, which is governed by the general theory of relativity. The model comprises 17 particles. Of these, 12 are fermions such as quarks (which coalesce into neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei) and electrons (which whizz around those nuclei). They make up matter. A further four particles, known as gauge bosons, transmit forces and so allow fermions to interact: photons convey electromagnetism, which holds electrons in orbit around atoms; gluons link quarks into protons and neutrons via the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. And then there is the Higgs.

The Higgs, though a boson (meaning it has a particular sort of value of a quantum-mechanical property known as spin), is not a gauge boson. Physicists need it not to transmit a force but to give mass to other particles. Two of the 16 others, the photon and the gluon, are massless. But without the Higgs, or something like it, there is no explanation of where the mass of the other particles comes from.

For fermions this is no big deal. The Standard Model’s rules would let mass be ascribed to them without further explanation. But the same trick does not work with bosons. In the absence of a Higgs, the rules of the Standard Model demand that bosons be massless. The W and Z are not. They are very heavy indeed, weighing almost as much as 100 protons. This makes the Higgs the keystone of the Standard Model. Slot it in and the structure stands. Take it out and it topples. Little wonder that physicists were getting impatient.

How is Higgs particle created ? (Click to view larger image)

Courtesy: NyTimes Economist

First Apple Store in Glendale !!!

The first two locations for APPLE STORE were Tysons Corner, Virginia and Glendale Galleria [I live in Glendale :-) ]. The Virginia location opened 3 hours before the Glendale store due to the time zone difference, but the Glendale location is numbered "Store 001" by Apple. May 19th, 2011 was the tenth Anniversary of the first opened stores.

My Dance @ UTA

Wanna tickle a tiger cub ... Yes you can using XBOX 360 :-)

My Latest Google Home Page

Windows 7 Touch Demo

More information @ http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080527/gates_ballmer/.

If you cant c the video goto the "courtesy" link below!!!
Courtesy : http://d6.allthingsd.com/

Interview With MySpace CTO (video)

A small incite into my company :

Earth Hour

I was looking for something over the net and typed "google.com" and I found the whole web page in black background!!! (click on the bottom image for bigger view) on Mar 29 8.31pm. On March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m., millions of people around the world made a statement about climate change by turning off their lights for Earth Hour, an event created by the World Wildlife Fund. I have also provided a link below for more information.

Earth Hour Link

Psycho Monkey

The Kid tries to fool the monkey by handing it an empty bag.
(Watch Till The End)

Courtesy: Kiran

Viewing Unmanaged Code in VS.NET

Well I found this wonderful blog [Check this link out], (thanks to my friend Durga), which helps us understand the actual scenario BEHIND loops in the DOTNET world.

Japanese Robots ... dance ...

Awesome Sony robots in Japan! They move really smoothly and quickly for machines :-)

About my company ...

sculpture worth $57 million dollars...

The above sculpture is worth $57 million dollars. Check out
this link for more info.


Courtesy : Yahoo News

No Smoking

The following picture is taken from a no-smoking room in an IT firm in India (Click on image for a bigger view)!!!

MINWIN - A new Mini-Me of Windows???

Check out this video...

Choice...

This simple word changes our everyday life whenever we make use of it.

Many of us struggle to get pass through in life while making choices. The "successful" finds the right one even in the midst of greatest complexity.

There is even a saying :
"Choices You Make, But Not The Chances You Take, Determines Your Destiny".

Life is like a car ... you need to drive it ... you can't let some one else drive it. That person to the maximum can be your navigator...

Will add more... Start Making Right Choices ... :-)

The REAL Transformer ...

Video of a real transforming robot!

Hi folks...

Well ... Itz beeen an exhausting work month ... couldnt blog out much... My life is out of control. I was really not happy so decided to take a break! Went to West VA and had a wonderful time doin white water rafting...Thank you GOD for getting me back ALIVE...

Any of you folks did something exciting this memorial day weekend??? Leave a comment.