A city-based social website, has tied up with mobile service provider Airtel to provide a unique career guidance programme to the students. The founder of website R K Mahapatra said, ?In this module, Studentindia.com shall use the Airtel customer care centre for career guidance
Wednesday, 29 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)
via a short-range 5.9GHz frequency band.
(Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
V2V would use onboard dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) transceiver boards, which are only a little bit larger than a credit card. Operating in the 5.9GHz frequency band, the boards would communicate with other vehicles, as well as traffic lights, stop signs, municipalities, government agencies, and traffic control centers.
The big question, of course, is how such technology would enable the country to save more than 25,000 lives per year. The NHTSA and Consumer Reports say the technology would help in a number of ways. An "intersection assist" feature would alert drivers if a car is about to blow a red light or stop sign. A "left turn assist" feature would let drivers know if there's enough time to turn left into oncoming traffic. Other features would include forward collision warnings, do-not-pass warnings, lane-change warnings, and blind spot warnings.
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 example, or give a speech - they start paying more attention to positive information and discounting negative information. "Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback," Mather says.
This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they're considering and less to the downsides. So someone who's deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the decision might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute.
The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. "The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they're less able to resist it," Mather says. So a person who's under stress might think only about the good feelings they'll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.
Stress also increases the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more willing to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative about risk. Mather links this to other research that finds, at difficult times, men are inclined toward fight-or-flight responses, while women try to bond more and improve their relationships.
"We make all sorts of decisions under stress," Mather says. "If your kid has an accident and ends up in the hospital, that's a very stressful situation and decisions need to be made quickly." And, of course, big decisions can be sources of stress all by themselves and just make the situation worse. "It seems likely that how much stress you're experiencing will affect the way you're making the decision."
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 example, or give a speech - they start paying more attention to positive information and discounting negative information. "Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback," Mather says.
This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they're considering and less to the downsides. So someone who's deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the decision might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute.
The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. "The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they're less able to resist it," Mather says. So a person who's under stress might think only about the good feelings they'll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.
Stress also increases the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more willing to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative about risk. Mather links this to other research that finds, at difficult times, men are inclined toward fight-or-flight responses, while women try to bond more and improve their relationships.
"We make all sorts of decisions under stress," Mather says. "If your kid has an accident and ends up in the hospital, that's a very stressful situation and decisions need to be made quickly." And, of course, big decisions can be sources of stress all by themselves and just make the situation worse. "It seems likely that how much stress you're experiencing will affect the way you're making the decision."
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, cheekbone, and a broken leg.
Barter says he does not remember the fall at all. He says he probably broke his leg when he fell onto a brick wall that temporarily broke his fall, and then must have landed on his face after he carried on falling.
Rob Bentley, a Craniofacial Surgeon at King's, told Barter that to ease the swelling in his brain from the haemorrhage, they had removed part of his skull.
Barter learned that he would also need further surgery to reconstruct his cheekbone, eye socket and leg.
In a statement released from King's this week, he says:
"My head felt really strange. I only had skin over where the skull had been removed so it was very soft to touch, particularly when the hair had started to grow back."
Barter was in hospital for several weeks, while he had titanium plates fitted to shape his shattered eye socket and hold the bone together. These were inserted through his mouth so as not to leave scars on his face.
He then went home, but couldn't go outside much: doctors told him to stay indoors to rest and repair. Barter was worried that he would not be able to work again.
"Life stopped for a number of months. I couldn't work and I had double vision. I was frightened that my eyesight would never go back to normal and that I would have to give up my job for good," he said.
Eventually, in December 2009, some six months after his fall, surgeons at King's fitted a titanium plate to replace the removed piece of skull in Barter's head.
Up until having the plate fitted, simple things like going to the toilet gave him intense headaches, explained Barter, "Bending down to do anything was agony," he said.
Experts at King's had made the plate from a mirror image of the other side of Barter's skull, modelled using computer technology.
Bentley, who is also Director of Trauma, said:
"Tim came to us with significant head and facial injuries and was treated here both in the initial phases and also for his secondary reconstruction."
He explained that Barter's case highlights an area of expertise that he has developed at King's over the last nine years, during which time they have inserted over 250 such prostheses with the lowest infection rates in the world.
Later, the surgeons then also took fat from Barter's stomach and injected it into his temple to fill a hole that had appeared when some inactive muscle collapsed.
This is the first time a patient has undergone such a procedure in the UK.
Bentley and his team at King's developed the new and unique cosmetic technique to restore the face after injury.
Since the surgery, Barter has completely changed his life. He is keeping fit (he sees a personal trainer four times a week), is improving his diet (he has consulted a nutritionist), has had his teeth reconstructed and his eyes lasered so he does not have to wear glasses.
And the trauma of the fall has not put him off heights: if anything it has given him a love of tough sports, including sky-diving, rock climbing, fencing and kayaking.
He says he is now "simply making the most of everything" and even loves the sensation of falling in the extreme sports he is practising, and jokes that the "split second" at the end is only "an occasional problem".
Bentley and his patient Barter, will be talking about the methods used at King's to repair Barter's injuries on BBC Breakfast at 08:10 am on Thursday 1 March.
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, cheekbone, and a broken leg.
Barter says he does not remember the fall at all. He says he probably broke his leg when he fell onto a brick wall that temporarily broke his fall, and then must have landed on his face after he carried on falling.
Rob Bentley, a Craniofacial Surgeon at King's, told Barter that to ease the swelling in his brain from the haemorrhage, they had removed part of his skull.
Barter learned that he would also need further surgery to reconstruct his cheekbone, eye socket and leg.
In a statement released from King's this week, he says:
"My head felt really strange. I only had skin over where the skull had been removed so it was very soft to touch, particularly when the hair had started to grow back."
Barter was in hospital for several weeks, while he had titanium plates fitted to shape his shattered eye socket and hold the bone together. These were inserted through his mouth so as not to leave scars on his face.
He then went home, but couldn't go outside much: doctors told him to stay indoors to rest and repair. Barter was worried that he would not be able to work again.
"Life stopped for a number of months. I couldn't work and I had double vision. I was frightened that my eyesight would never go back to normal and that I would have to give up my job for good," he said.
Eventually, in December 2009, some six months after his fall, surgeons at King's fitted a titanium plate to replace the removed piece of skull in Barter's head.
Up until having the plate fitted, simple things like going to the toilet gave him intense headaches, explained Barter, "Bending down to do anything was agony," he said.
Experts at King's had made the plate from a mirror image of the other side of Barter's skull, modelled using computer technology.
Bentley, who is also Director of Trauma, said:
"Tim came to us with significant head and facial injuries and was treated here both in the initial phases and also for his secondary reconstruction."
He explained that Barter's case highlights an area of expertise that he has developed at King's over the last nine years, during which time they have inserted over 250 such prostheses with the lowest infection rates in the world.
Later, the surgeons then also took fat from Barter's stomach and injected it into his temple to fill a hole that had appeared when some inactive muscle collapsed.
This is the first time a patient has undergone such a procedure in the UK.
Bentley and his team at King's developed the new and unique cosmetic technique to restore the face after injury.
Since the surgery, Barter has completely changed his life. He is keeping fit (he sees a personal trainer four times a week), is improving his diet (he has consulted a nutritionist), has had his teeth reconstructed and his eyes lasered so he does not have to wear glasses.
And the trauma of the fall has not put him off heights: if anything it has given him a love of tough sports, including sky-diving, rock climbing, fencing and kayaking.
He says he is now "simply making the most of everything" and even loves the sensation of falling in the extreme sports he is practising, and jokes that the "split second" at the end is only "an occasional problem".
Bentley and his patient Barter, will be talking about the methods used at King's to repair Barter's injuries on BBC Breakfast at 08:10 am on Thursday 1 March.
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 the country's central bank and continuing uncertainties in the global economy for a slowdown in the Indian economic growth.
Mr. Mukherjee has earlier said that that country might have to settle for GDP growth of 7 per cent this year. He said while speaking to a television channel that the country's GDP growth has been 7.3 per cent and the two quarters are unlikely to have substantial improvement and thus the GDP growth for the year is expected to be around 7 per cent.
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 the Health sector will not be a constraint, there is a need to create adequate capacity at the Centre and the states to meaningfully absorb the increased outlay."
It was also decided in the meeting that the Health Ministry can establish a Central Procurement Agency for providing 'free medicine for all through public health facilities' under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). The Health Ministry, which is also working on its goal of Universal Health Care, has been asked to set up Standard Treatment Protocols earlier to improve the quality of health services in the country.
The implementation of recommendations of the National Commission for Macroeconomics & Health (NCMH) and the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on Health set up by Planning Commission was also discussed in the meeting.
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 of organic life, the researchers said.
"In our atmosphere, there are several gases, like oxygen and ozone, that we observe and which we have in the atmosphere, but which would not exist on their own because they are far out of chemical equilibrium," Sterzik told SPACE.com. "They would chemically react and disappear if they are not replenished by living processes. This is one of the signatures that we saw — atmospheric signatures of elements like oxygen that are far out of equilibrium." [Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Top to Bottom]
Earthshine observations have been done before, but Sterzik and his colleagues took it one step further, and developed a new approach to take into account the polarization of the light, which enabled them to make more detailed and sensitive measurements.
"All light is polarized, but the most primitive way to measure light is to take its intensity, or its strength, but that's just one part of the information," Sterzik explained. "Light also carries information about its polarization state and information about how it is generated or scattered."
The researchers used this method, known as spectropolarimetry, to examine the earthshine, and found that biosignatures on Earth showed up very strongly in the reflected light.
The researchers studied the color and degree of polarization of the light that was reflected from the surface of the moon. They were able to distinguish details and changes on the planet's surface, and also observed that Earth's atmosphere is partly cloudy.
"On the surface, we can distinguish land surfaces and ocean surfaces," Sterzik said. "We even see signatures of vegetation, which is an interesting and unique marker of biological activity. We could essentially see the greenness of the vegetation canopies."
And while the existence of life on our planet is no great surprise, spectropolarimetry could be a valuable tool in the ongoing search for life on worlds beyond Earth.
"We believe that precise usage of these spectropolarimetric techniques has promise for exoplanets," Sterzik said. "It's currently being applied to giant exoplanets, not because we expect to find life, but just to inspect the atmospheres. With giant telescopes and more dedicated instrumentation, the technique may be a pathway toward finding primitive biosignatures on other planets in the future."
In fact, the approach has its advantages, because of how difficult it is to directly observe light signatures from distant alien planets.
"The light from a distant exoplanet is overwhelmed by the glare of the host star, so it's very difficult to analyze — a bit like trying to study a grain of dust beside a powerful light bulb," study co-author Stefano Bagnulo, of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, said in a statement. "But the light reflected by a planet is polarized, while the light from the host star is not. So polarimetric techniques help us to pick out the faint reflected light of an exoplanet from the dazzling starlight."
Powerful next-generation telescopes, such as the European Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently being constructed in the mountains of Chile's Atacama Desert, could one day be used to pick apart the atmospheres of exoplanets for telltale signs of life, the researchers said.
"Finding life outside the solar system depends on two things: whether this life exists in the first place, and having the technical capability to detect it," study co-author Enric Palle, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, said in a statement. "This work is an important step towards reaching that capability."
"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 of organic life, the researchers said.
"In our atmosphere, there are several gases, like oxygen and ozone, that we observe and which we have in the atmosphere, but which would not exist on their own because they are far out of chemical equilibrium," Sterzik told SPACE.com. "They would chemically react and disappear if they are not replenished by living processes. This is one of the signatures that we saw — atmospheric signatures of elements like oxygen that are far out of equilibrium." [Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Top to Bottom]
Earthshine observations have been done before, but Sterzik and his colleagues took it one step further, and developed a new approach to take into account the polarization of the light, which enabled them to make more detailed and sensitive measurements.
"All light is polarized, but the most primitive way to measure light is to take its intensity, or its strength, but that's just one part of the information," Sterzik explained. "Light also carries information about its polarization state and information about how it is generated or scattered."
The researchers used this method, known as spectropolarimetry, to examine the earthshine, and found that biosignatures on Earth showed up very strongly in the reflected light.
By observing earthshine astronomers can study the properties of light reflected from Earth as if it were an exoplanet and search for signs of life.
CREDIT: ESO/L. Calçada
CREDIT: ESO/L. Calçada
"On the surface, we can distinguish land surfaces and ocean surfaces," Sterzik said. "We even see signatures of vegetation, which is an interesting and unique marker of biological activity. We could essentially see the greenness of the vegetation canopies."
And while the existence of life on our planet is no great surprise, spectropolarimetry could be a valuable tool in the ongoing search for life on worlds beyond Earth.
"We believe that precise usage of these spectropolarimetric techniques has promise for exoplanets," Sterzik said. "It's currently being applied to giant exoplanets, not because we expect to find life, but just to inspect the atmospheres. With giant telescopes and more dedicated instrumentation, the technique may be a pathway toward finding primitive biosignatures on other planets in the future."
In fact, the approach has its advantages, because of how difficult it is to directly observe light signatures from distant alien planets.
"The light from a distant exoplanet is overwhelmed by the glare of the host star, so it's very difficult to analyze — a bit like trying to study a grain of dust beside a powerful light bulb," study co-author Stefano Bagnulo, of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, said in a statement. "But the light reflected by a planet is polarized, while the light from the host star is not. So polarimetric techniques help us to pick out the faint reflected light of an exoplanet from the dazzling starlight."
Powerful next-generation telescopes, such as the European Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently being constructed in the mountains of Chile's Atacama Desert, could one day be used to pick apart the atmospheres of exoplanets for telltale signs of life, the researchers said.
"Finding life outside the solar system depends on two things: whether this life exists in the first place, and having the technical capability to detect it," study co-author Enric Palle, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, said in a statement. "This work is an important step towards reaching that capability."
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.
"What we've seen over the last 10 years is that the Web broke a lot of that down," he continued. "If you talk to people, they'll tell you that their operating system is mostly just a way to get them into their Web browser."
With the advent of smartphones, however, the platform took a step back. "You make your choice. If you buy an Android phone and you buy a bunch of apps for it and you get on iPad 2, you're out of luck," he said. "You need to buy those things again. And that doesn't feel great to us."
Still, Nightingale suggested, "when you peel back the covers, most of those apps are actually HTML5 Web apps" with an added veneer for iOS, Android, or whatever store to which you're submitting.
"So we said, and this is what Boot to Gecko is, what if we just didn't do that? What if we just blow away that middle layer and say, the Web runs directly on the phone?" he said.
And that's what Mozilla did. Here at MWC, Telefonica announced plans to support the creation of B2G-based open Web apps, as did Qualcomm, Adobe, and Deutsche Telekom.
Telefonica has pledged to build a phone based on the B2G platform, which will likely come to market by year's end, Nightingale said, pointing to the fact that a B2G phone will be 1/10th the price of an iPhone to produce.
There were reports recently that LG was also planning a B2G device, but a Mozilla spokeswoman said that is "just a rumor."
"It's all moving really fast, but because we're open there are so many people playing with Boot to Gecko," she said. "It's up on GitHub, so people are kind of testing things themselves, [but] Telefonica has customized their own UI to it."
But despite the push the company is giving to B2G, Nightingale insisted "we're not trying to make a Mozilla platform."
"The Web's not a new platform; the Web's been around for a very long time, and it's what's actually powering a lot of the apps that are already on these existing platforms," Nightingale said. "All we're doing it getting rid of that intermediate layer."
There are a few things that the Web can't do on its own, like send text messages and dial a phone. But, Nightingale said, "we built an API for it and now the Web can do it."
"At that point, it's just engineering and we've been building the Web for a long time so we're pretty good at building new APIs to do new things," he continued.
Something else they might have to fiddle with, however, is privacy-related permissions. "We think there are opportunities to not just say when you first install an app, 'Here are the 74 permissions that it requires' because we think that peoples' eyes tend to glaze over there and they just click OK," he said. "Then they end up surprised in hindsight that apps are doing things they didn't expect."
Nightingale demoed what B2G might look like; he used a Samsung Galaxy S II that had been stripped of Android and re-loaded with the B2G software. After swiping to enter, up popped six tiles with options for things like the Dialer, Messages, Browser (Firefox, naturally), Maps, Cameras, Facebook, and more. The UI was bright and intuitive, and Nightingale easily swiped through the various screens and apps, playing video and launching a game. Click the photos above for larger images.
Nightingale was not concerned that users would have to learn a whole new OS. "I think it's going to feel basically the same," he said. "You're still going to turn on your phone and see a launcher screen with a bunch of apps. You're still going to be able to go to a marketplace, and Mozilla will run a marketplace where you can get these apps, but we're not trying to box that in."
Mozilla announced plans for an app store last week, and said today that the store is now open for submissions. More details are available on Mozilla.org.
NANO
Abstract:
Over the past few years, a little word with big potential has been rapidly insinuating itself into the worlds consciousness. That world is “nano”. It has conjured speculation about a seismic shift in almost every aspect of science and engineering within implication for ethics, economists, international relations, day to day life, and even humanity’s conception of its place in the universe. Visionaries tour it as the panacea for all the woes. Nano research also crosses scientific disciplines. Chemists, biologists, doctors, physicists, engineers and computer scientists are intimately involved in nano development. Nano has fit the pages of such futurised publication as “wired magazine”, found it’s way into science fiction and been the theme of episodes of star trek: the next generation and the x-files as well as a one linear in the movie spiderman. In the midst of all his buzz and activity, nano has moved from the world of the future to the world of the present.
“Nano-scale science and engineering most likely will produce the strategic technology breakthroughs of tomorrow. Our ability to work at the molecular level, atom by atom to create something new, something we can manufacture from the ‘bottom up’, open huge visits for many of us” says David Swain, senior VP of Engineering and Technology, boeing. Nano science and nanotechnology require us to imagine, make measure, use, and design on the nanoscale, because the nanoscale is so small, it is clearly difficult to do the imagine, the making, the measuring and using.
INTRODUTION:
"In the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves"
If we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about
the next decade and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter and more precise. " Nanotechnology "has become very popular and is used to describe many type of research where the characteristics dimensions are less than about 1,000 namometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called "nanotechnology". If we are to continue these trends we will have to develop a new manufacturing technology, which will let us inexpensively build computer systems with mole quantities of logic elements that are molecular in both size and precision and are interconnected in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. Nanotechnology will let us do this. Whatever we call it, it should let us
- Get essentially every atom in the right place.
- Make almost any structure consistent with the laws of physics that we can specify in molecular detail.
- Have manufacturing costs not greatly exceeding the cost of the required raw materials and energy.
CONCEPTS OF NANO TECHNOLOGY:
There are two main concepts commonly associated with nanotechnology:
· Positional assembly.
· Massive parallelism.
POSITIONAL ASSEMBLY:
The need for positional assembly implies an interest in molecular robotics, e.g., robotic devices that are molecular both in their size and precision. These molecular scale positional devices are likely to resemble very small versions of their everyday macroscopic counterparts. Positional assembly is frequently used in normal macroscopic manufacturing today, and provides tremendous advantages. The idea of manipulating and positioning individual atoms and molecules is still new and takes some getting used to.
MASSIVE PARELLELISM:
One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble anything large- so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive parallelism. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self replication, today’s “best guess” is that future molecular manufacturing systems will use some form of convergent assembly. In this process vast numbers of small parts we assembled by vast numbers of small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts, larger robotic arms assemble those larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can go from one nanometers parts ( a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a person) in only 30 steps.
APPLICATION OF NANO TECHNOLOGY:
SUPER-NANOCOMPUTER:
For the past 40 years, the electronic computers have grown more powerful as their transistor has been minimized. However the laws of quantum mechanics and the limitations of fabrication techniques soon will prevent further reduction in the minimum size of todays. Ongoing research uses the following that have shown that electronic nanodevices are possible
· Mathematics
· Computer modeling
A Nanocomputer could be many orders of magnitude more powerful than today’s microcomputers. The future Nanocomputer might be built upon experience with microcomputers, but take advantage of the very same quantum effects that limit current micro-scale transistors. The ultimate choice of technologies and designs will depend on the device speed, power dissipation reliability and ease of fabrication.
It seems likely that along the development of molecular-scale manipulation tools, the first practical nanoelectronic circuits will emerge in this decade of the 21st century. The future Nanocomputer will largely transform our electronic computing and the technological infrastructure. It is amazing to see that the multidisciplinary nature of nanotechnology draws on so many talented scientists from different fields, from physics, chemistry, biology and computer science. It is difficult to predict from which traditional discipline will come the key breakthrough necessary to construct these future nanotechnological products.
Diamond Particles:
In biomaterials research, it has been found that even though a bulk material may be well-tolerated by the body, finely divided particles of the same material can often lead to severe and even carcinogenic complications in test animals. Differences in particle size influence histological reaction and cytokine production. Many nanomedical applications will involve "particle" sized diamondoid objects (e.g., micron-scale individual medical naorobots), so it is of great interest to review the experimental data relating to the reactions of specific cells to the presences of diamond particles. We already know that finely divided carbon particles are well-tolerated by the body -the passive nature of carbon in tissue has been known since ancient times, and both charcoal and lampblack (roughly spherical 10-20 nm particles) were used for ornamental and official tattoos.
In earlier people taught that the diamond particle that have been planned to pass in the human body will affect the human body will affect the human cells, the various experiments are done to overcome from this all fears. The given below cell are tested before giving the report.
(1) Neutrophils:
(2) Monocytes and Macrophages
(3) Fibroblasts
(4) Other cells
And they also injected 3-micron diamond crystals in a10 mg/cm3 concentration (~0.3% Nct) injected into canine knee joints produced "little evidence of inflammation" - intra-articlular pressure remained low, along with the local cell count. A study by Dental.[35] observed no detectable hemolysis in vitro by various ceramic powders tested, including diamond, graphite and alumina, after 60 minutes cf exposure to a powder concentration of ~0.5 gm per cm3 of diluted blood (~14% Nct).
THE UTILITY OF DIAMOND:
Great strength and lightweight are the exclusive province of diamond and graphic. Yet all share a common problem a common problem. We can’t yet economically make them in the exact shapes that we want. Great strength is only one property that we prize highly. When we make computers we are more concerned by electrical properties. Here, too, diamond excels. Today’s computers are made of semiconductors predominantly silicon. This is not because silicon is the ideal semiconductor from which to make computers, but because we know how to make devices from it. Diamond has a wider band gap, hence electrical devices will work at higher temperatures. It has greater thermal conductivity, so devices can be more easily cooled. It has greater breakdown field, hence devices can be smaller. It has higher speed. We can’t economically manufacture them ye. Large pure crystals of silicon can be made relatively easily, but large pure crystals of diamond are scare.
LONG RANGE COMPLEX ORDER:
To make the computer the pure crystals must also have an extremely precise and complex pattern of impurities. The exact location of the dopants atoms in the semiconductor lattice controls how device function and where signals can propagate. Logical order and long range complex order is crucial to make highly precise computer components crystals. It is the requirement for complex long-range order that prevents us from making computers of the kind we’d like to make. While it’s plausible we could make high-density memory from crystals and perhaps some types of cellular automatons, we couldn’t make anything that resembled the computers on the market today. Today’s high-speed semiconductor based digital computer has millions of logic elements wired together in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. This is well beyond the capabilities of crystal growth or biopolymer synthesis. It will require a fundamentally new manufacturing technology; molecular manufacturing or Nanotechnology.
A GAP:
Today, there is a gap in our synthetic abilities: we can make complex mechanical machinery and electronic devices (including computers, which have millions of transistors), but we can’t make molecular computers and other macroscopic products as precise as molecules. Molecular manufacturing will let us economically manufacture almost any specified molecular structure that is stable.
MANUFACTURE OF DIAMOND TODAY:
Two fundamental mechanism in the growth process include:
· Abstraction of hydrogen’s from the diamond surface leaving behind reactive sites (dangling bonds, radicals).
· Interaction of carbon species (both reactive CH2, CH3, ETC.) as well as relatively unreactive species (C2H2) with the surface, thus depositing carbon. If we are to synthesize diamondoid structures it is plausible that we begin our search for the basic reaction steps involved in this synthesis by looking at exiting reactions that occur in the CVD growth of diamond. The use of the reactive gas in the synthesis process, however, the gas will interact with the growing surface at random.
POSITIONAL CONTROL:
The ability to remove specific hydrogen atoms from the surface of the diamondoid work piece under construction is likely to be a fundamental unit operation in any attempt to make atomically precise diamondoid structures. It is unclear how to make this process site specific. In particular, the propynyl radical C3H3 has a great affinity for hydrogen, which offers great possibilities for positional control. Further, this radical have two ends: one end is highly reactive radical and second end is a stable sp3 carbon. Thus, we could synthesize a larger molecule with the propynyl radical at its end. The larger molecule would be held at the tip of a positional device.
Handle:
Hydrogen
Abstraction
Tools
OTHER MOLECULAR TOOLS:
If we are to grow diamond, we must also have carbon deposition tools. Drexler has suggested the use of positionally controlled carbenes and alkynes and proposed reaction pathways and surface structure where these tools would apply.
FIG: A Positionally controlled carbine Handle.
FIG: A positionally controlled stained cycle alkine.
In both cases, the tools are positioned at a precise point on the growing diamondoid structure and are used to deposit one or more carbon at a desired location. These deposition reaction parallel proposals in the CVD literature except for the addition of positional control (e.g., at least one portion of the moiety must be part of an extended “handle” which can be held by a positional device.
IN DIAGNOSTICS:
The application of nanotechnology is pushing the barriers of diagnosis even further towards high-speed mass screening of samples for a multitude of diseases. In drug discovery, lab-on-a-chip technology is the basis for combinatorial screening y techniques, which, when combined with powerful computers (which also benefit from components with nanoscale features) can dramatically speed up the new drug discovery process. This enables many 'target' drugs to be quickly assessed and retained or discarded in a fraction of the time normally taken-and at a fraction of the cost.
IN BIOMEDICALS:
The biological system is always looked by the nanotechnologists as the example of the future nanomachines. Prof. nadrian C.Seeman at New York University is the winner of the 1995 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. (The Nobel laureate Feynman died in 1988.The freynman Prize is sponsored by the Foresight Institute, and is given biennially for the scientific work that most advanced the development of molecular nanotechnology.). They also have used DNA to make four topological species - circle, trefoil knots of both signs and a figure-8 knot. They made the RNA knots as well and discovered the existence of a RNA topoisomerase. DNA-based topological control has also led to the construction of Borromean Rings, which could be used in DNA-based computing applications. In the DNA construction, the lack of a rigid molecule was a key feature. However recently they have used the antiparallel DNA double crossover molecules to incorporate in DNA assembles that make use of this rigidity to achieve control on the geometrical level as well as on the topological level
(a) DRUGS:
Since most of the molecular drugs are nanosize, drug development is clearly a nanoscale activity. Because depression is cause by too low or too high a concentration of neurotransmitter molecules, intelligent nanoscale development of antidepressants is focused on increasing this concentration by blocking of decreasing the destruction of these molecules by modifying their binding properties. Since many proposed nanodrugs will work by well-understood and very specific mechanisms one of the major impacts of nanoscience and nanotechnology will be in facilitating development of entirely new drugs with fewer side effects and more beneficial behaviors
(b)PHOTODYNAMIC THERAPY:
In Photodynamic therapy, a particle is placed within the body and is illuminated with light from outside _light could come from laser or from a light bulb.
The light is absorbed by the particle, after which several things may happen. If the particle is simply a metal Nanodot, the energy from the light will heat the dot and, therefore will heat any tissue within its neighborhood. With some particular molecular dots, light can also be used to produce highly energetic oxygen molecules.
Those oxygen molecules are very reactive and will chemically react with and
Therefore destroy, most organic molecules that are next to them, including such nastier as Tumours. Photodynamic therapy does not leave a "toxic trail" of highly is based on
Nanostructures ranging from simple's molecules through molecule/nanoparticle/ biological recognition agent composite structures. Clearly the design and optimization of such structures is matter of medical nanotechnology and holds promise as a noninvasive approach for dealing with many growths, tumors and disease.
DRUG DELIVERY:
Drug molecules should find places in the body where they will be effective. Antidepressants should be in the brain; anti-inflammatory at sites of stress and anticancer drugs at tumor sites. Bioavailability refers to presence of drug molecules where they are needed in body and where they will do most good. Nanotechnology and nanosciences are very useful in developing entirely new schemes for increasing Bioavailability and improving drug delivery. Molecules can be swallowed as part of the tablet and as the polymeric structures opens within the body, the enclosed drugs can be released. This is an effective method for creating time released drugs so that a pill taken once a day or once a week can continue to deliver the drug smoothly over an extended period of time.
NEURO-ELECTRONIC INTERFACES:
Neuroelectronic interfaces involve the ideas of constructing nanodevices that will permit computers to be joined and linked to the nervous system. The construction of a Neuro-electronic interface simply requires the building of a molecular structure that will permit control and detection of nerve impulses by an external computer.
The challenge is a combination of computational nanotechnology and bionanaotechnology. The nerves in the body convey messages by permitting electrical currents to flow between the brain and the nerve centers throughout the body. The most important ions for these signals are sodium and potassium ions, and they move along sheaths and channels that have evolved especially to permit facile, control label, rapid ionic motion. This is the mechanism that allows you to feel sensation such as putting your foot in hot water and feeling heat move from the local nerve through the nervous system into the brain where they are interpreted and processed.
Often this process results in a response being filtered into the muscular system, as is demonstrated when you pupil your foot out of hot water. The aim of Neuro-electronic interface technology is to permit the registration, interpretation and response to these signals to be handles by a computer.
SHEDDING NEW LIGHT ON CELLS: NANO LUMINESCENT TAGS:
Biologists have any number of reasons to be interested in the movement of particular groups of cells and other structures as they move through the body or even sample in a dish. Tracking movement can help them to determine how well drugs are distributed and how substances are metabolized. But tracking a small group of cells as they move through the body is an essentially impossible task.
In the past, scientists got around this problem by dyeing cells. If a sample of cells is green, and all other cells are more or less clear, its easy to spot the sample, organic dyes that have been used in the past can be toxic and must still be excited by light of certain frequency to cause them to fluoresce. Different color dyes absorb different frequencies of light. Consequently, if multiple samples are needed to be tracked at the
Same time, you may need as many lights sources as you have samples. This can become quite a problem. A. Paul Alivisatos, Moungi Bawendi, and their groups addressed with the introduction of luminescent tags. These tags are quantum tags often attached to proteins to allow them to penetrate cell walls. These quantum tags often attached to proteins to allow them to penetrate cell walls. These quantum dots exhibit the nanoscale property that their color is size dependent. They can be made out of bio inert materials and can be made of arbitrary size. This means that we select sizes where the frequency of light required to make another group of tags fluoresce; both can be lit with the same light source. At one stroke, these tags solve two major problems of the old organic dyes; toxicity and ability to use more that one color of tags at the same time with a single light source.
CONCLUSION:
The long-term goal of nanotechnology is to built exactly what we want at low cost. Adding programmed positional control using small robotic manipulators to the existing methods used in synthesis should let us make a truly broad range of macroscopic products. Nanotechnology is not just present in fields that are traditionally high tech. Nano is now illiberally in fashion Advances in molecular scale composite materials have allowed companies like Nano- Tex to create next generation cloth and clothing.
REFERENCES:
- Nanotechnology ---- A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big idea. Mark Ratner, Daniel Ratner.
- Www. Sciam.com/Nanotech
- Www. Smalltimes.com
- Www. Nanotechbulletin.com
- www.nanotech-now.com
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