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Showing posts from February, 2012

Auto Vehicle-to-Vehicle Comms Viewed as Life Saver

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications technology received a big vote of confidence this past week, when Consumer Reports came out in support of it. For many, the term V2V may elicit little more than a puzzled scratch of the head, but the magazine's support is one more sign that, ready or not, all of us are going to be hearing more about the nascent technology in the near future. "We believe there are potential safety benefits to a system like this," Liza Barth of Consumer Reports told us. "And that makes it worth pursuing." In a vehicle-to-vehicle scenario, cars and trucks would "talk" to each other via a short-range 5.9GHz frequency band. (Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) Consumer Reports isn't the only organization that thinks it's worth pursuing. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which recently hosted a Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot Program event, has said V2V will save more live...

How People Make Decisions Affected By Stress

Trying to make a big decision while you're also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome. It's a bit surprising that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California, who cowrote the new review paper with Nichole R. Lighthall. "This is sort of not what people would think right off the bat," Mather says. "Stress is usually associated with negative experiences, so you'd think, maybe I'm going to be more focused on the negative outcomes." But researchers have found that when people are put under stress - by being told to hold their hand in ice water for a few minutes, for...

Man's Head Reshaped With Fat From His Stomach

Hang onto that belly fat, it may come in useful! In a UK first, surgeons at King's College Hospital in London, have taken fat from a man's stomach and injected it into his head to help reshape it. The patient had had some of his skull removed, and surgery to reconstruct a shattered eye socket, cheekbone, and leg, following injuries sustained when he fell while climbing up a drainpipe outside his house. The patient is Tim Barter, a visual effects supervisor on the Dr Who television series. In June 2009, Barter, then 32, fell 25 ft (over 7.5 m) off a drainpipe onto a brick wall as he tried to gain entry into his house in Brixton, through an upstairs window. He had lost his keys the night before on a night out. His neighbours found him a short while later, and he was taken by ambulance to the Major Trauma Centre at King's College Hospital. Barter was in a coma for 10 days. When he woke up, he discovered he had a brain haemorrhage, a shattered eye socket, ch...

India’s economy grew 6.1 per cent in December quarter

According to the latest official data released, the Indian economy grew 6.1 per cent in the third quarter of the current financial year compared to a growth rate of 6.9 per cent growth recorded in the second quarter. The Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council expects the Indian economy to grow at 7.1 per cent in the financial year till March 2012. On the other hand, Central Statistics Office estimates show that the country's economy will grow at 6.9 per cent. In the third quarter, the sectors that showed strong performance included "electricity, gas and water supply" growing at 9 per cent, construction at 7.2 per cent, "trade, hotels, transport and communications" at 9.2 per cent and "financing, insurance, real estate and business services" at 9 per cent. Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has said that India needs to target a double-digit economic growth in the near future. He blamed the tight monetary policy measures by ...

Government to increase health expenditure to 2.5 per cent of GDP

The central government is planning to increase the total expenditure on health to the level of 2.5 per cent of GDP by the end of the 12th five-year Plan, which is from 2012 to 2017. The total expenditure on health is at 1.4 per cent of the national GDP at present. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh headed a high level meeting in which it was decided that the Planning Commission of India will be asked to make available adequate resources for the health sector in order to achieve the new target . The Planning Commission can also ask for assistance from the states for providing required resources to the sector to improve the quality of the services and enahce the overall well being of the population . It was also recommended in meeting held at the PMO that the Planning Commission can prepare an appropriate mechanism in consultation with the Health Ministry to encourage states to allocate more resources to the health sector. The Prime Minister said, that "though funds for...

VIRUS ATTACK

Moon's Reflected 'Earthshine' May Aid Search for Alien Life

Astronomers have managed to detect the telltale fingerprints of organic life on Earth using a new technique that examines sunlight reflected onto the moon by our planet. The so-called "earthshine" observations may pave the way for a similar tool to help spot signs of alien life in the universe, scientists say. "With earthshine observations, what we do is use the moon as a giant mirror," said study lead author Michael Sterzik, deputy director of the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory. "The sun illuminates the Earth, and that light is reflected onto the moon — but the side of the moon that we usually see as the dark portion." The researchers then analyzed this reflected light using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to look for signs of life, or biosignatures. These markers include specific combinations of gases in Earth's atmosphere that could only exist in tandem with some form...

Mozilla tackles walled gardens, demos 'Boot to Gecko' mobile OS

Related Stories: Mozilla to unveil Boot to Gecko developer... Firefox 8 released Firefox Tablet edition builds now available... BARCELONA - Browser maker Mozilla is here at Mobile World Congress this week to show off the progress made on its Boot to Gecko project, which is the development of a "complete, standalone operating system for the open Web.' The concept, first announced in July, is intended to do away with the "walled garden" approach of today's modern mobile operating systems, like Apple's iOS and Google's Android, Johnathan Nightingale, senior director of Firefox engineer, said today in an interview with PCMag.   Nightingale likened today's mobile OS situation to the closed nature of Macs and PCs 10 years ago. "It was kind of annoying and [you were] locked into whatever platform choice you made," Nightingale said....

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