NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly), currently on a one-year mission to the International Space Station, took this photograph of Tropical Storm Bill in the Gulf of Mexico as it approached the coast of Texas, on June 15, 2015. Kelly wrote, “Concerned for all in its path including family, friends & colleagues.”
Image Credit: NASA
Source….www.nasa.gov
THE annual Skytrax awards for the world’s best airline has been announced, with a shuffle of key players on this year’s list.
Qatar was voted the best airline for 2015, bumping last year’s winner Cathay Pacific to third place.
It’s not the first time Qatar has claimed the top spot. It won in 2011 and 2012 and has twice been voted runner up. It also took home best airline in the Middle East and best business class seat.
The presitigous Skytrax awards are judged by 18.9 million passengers in 110 countries around the world who vote on factors such as comfort, friendliness of cabin crew and in-flight food.
Qatar CEO Akbar Al Baker told CNN it was a reflection of their staff.
“It’s a very clear accolade on behalf of the staff — they are the real recipients, I’m just their leader”, he said.
AirAsia won the best low-cost airline category for 2015 despite the tragic and fatal crash of flight QZ8501 last year.Source: Getty Images
The top ten airlines included Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Turkish and Emirates. Qantas came in at number 10 on the list.
In the low-cost airline category AirAsia was voted the world’s best for the seventh year in a row, despite the tragic accident in the Java Sea last year that killed all 162 people on-board flight QZ8501.
Reported in CNN, co-founder and group CEO Tony Fernandes said the award “meant a lot, after all we’ve been through. I wouldn’t normally say the airline industry is sweet, but today it felt sweet.
“We’ve won it seven times, but this one means the most, because of what happened in the early part of this year.”
Other awards included Garuda Indonesia for best cabin crew, Air France for most improved airline, EVA Air for cleanest aircraft cabins and Cathay Pacific for best transpacific airline.
The list of the world’s top 100 airlines for 2015 can be viewed here.
The best airlines for 2015
1. Qatar Airways
2. Singapore Airlines
3. Cathay Pacific Airways
4. Turkish Airlines
5. Emirates
6. Etihad Airways
7. ANA All Nippon Airways
8. Garuda Indonesia
9. EVA Air
10. Qantas Airways
source….www.news.com.au
Natarajan
Mount Everest moved three centimetres during the recent devastating earthquakes in Nepal but contrary to earlier reports the height of world’s tallest mountain has not been affected, Chinese official monitoring agency said.
Mt Qomolangma, the Tibetan/Chinese name for Mt Everest, has moved 40 cm to the northeast over the past ten years, including 3 cm during the April 25 and May 12 quakes, China’s National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation said.
Observers with the department, which has monitoring equipment on the mountain, found that Mt Everest shifted 3 cm after the devastating earthquake, while the height of the world’s tallest mountain at 8,848 metre was left unaffected, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. This is contrary to reports by Europe’s Sentinel-1A radar satellite that world’s tallest peak may have shrank about 2.5 cm after the quake.
The first good view from a satellite in the aftermath of Nepal’s deadly earthquake showed that a broad swath of ground near Kathmandu lifted vertically, by about one metre causing severe damage to the city, Live Science reported last month.
The data also indicated Mt Everest might have, got a bit shorter, the report said. But the Chinese data contradicts this.
The devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25 and another measuring 7.3 on May 12, claimed over 9,000 lives and injured another 21,000 people.
Monitoring data collected by China’s National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation from 2005 to 2015 shows that the mountain has been moving at a speed of four cm per year and has been growing by 0.3 cm annually.
The mountain is located on the collision belt for the boundary between the Indian and the Eurasian Plates, where the crustal movements are active.
Geographical changes in the area have great influence on the climate, environment and ecology of East and South Asia, the Chinese experts said. The administration set a satellite monitoring system on Mt Everest in 2005 and has been observing the movement of the mountain since then.
Photograph: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Twenty years ago, two astrophysicists – Jerry Bonnell and Robert Nemiroff – created Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). The website is simple and harkens back to the days of the early web: Every post is just one image and a bit of text describing the photo, with links out to sources of information.
During its first year, in 1995, the site received about 12 visits a day. Today they’re way past a million daily visitors, according to The Verge.
The two are active researchers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. How did they become guardians of the treasured website?
“So we were getting these emails that had these image attachments, sometimes about the Hubble Space Telescope, sometimes from something else, and the people sending these emails had no idea what that was. It would say, ‘Look at this, it’s colorful and something astronomical. Isn’t that cool?’ So we thought maybe something we could do was take these images and explain them one after the next,” Nemiroff told The Verge’s Sean O’Kane.
How do they chose what to feature on the site? Well, it’s a bit of personal preference:
Robert Nemiroff: I just like the stuff where you look at it and say “Wow, what’s that!” I’m somewhat jaded after 20 years. It has to work for me before I try to make it work for other people.
Jerry Bonnell: I seem to be a sucker for the big, beautiful spiral galaxy images.
Back in those days cameras with high-enough quality to take great space pictures weren’t as plentiful. They were genuinely worried that they’d run out of images to post.
As Nemiroff said:
Before we posted our first image we debated this, Jerry and I, as to whether we were going to run out of images in a few days and then say, “Well that was stupid.” But actually there were many images around even back then. And NASA’s Ranger series took tens of thousands of images of the lunar surface, so if we had to we could just start putting up other pictures of the lunar surface. “Here’s another crater that’s a little bit different than yesterday’s crater.” But we never ran out of images.
And Bonnell:
I used to have to be more proactive. I would explore what was online and available in the NASA archives online, and I would also make occasional trips to photo libraries that I could find at Goddard and NASA headquarters and look at the prints.
Now, the two-person team gets hundreds of submissions of images from their millions of fans. They still do all the work just the two of them, though:
I usually do the beginnings of the weeks and Jerry does the ends of the weeks, and Wednesday can go either way.
I will do several in a row. I’ll do most of my week maybe on Thursday or Friday, sometimes on Saturday or Sunday. Sometimes I’ll leave Wednesday to the night before in case there’s some kind of breaking news. Jerry will do the ends of the weeks, he usually waits until the night before, and works on it during the afternoon.
To celebrate the anniversary, the two re-created Johannes Vermeer’s paintings The Astronomer and The Geographer using more than 5,000 APOD images that have appeared during the last 20 years.
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2015 June 16
If you like space you can follow the APOD stream in many ways: Twitter account; Google+ page; on Facebook; on Instagram, in apps, and asubreddit.
source….Jennifer Welsh in .www.businessinsider.in
Natarajan
The E LifeIn this world of E-mails, E-ticket, E-paper, E-recharge, E-transferand the latest, E-Governance…Never Forget “E-shwar ( God )”
who makes e-verything e-asy for e-veryone e-veryday.
“E” is the most Eminent letter of the English alphabet.
Men or Women don’t exist without “E”.
House or Home can’t be made without “E”.
Bread or Butter can’t be found without “E”.
“E” is the beginning of “existence” and the end of “trouble.”
It is not at all in ‘war’, but twice in ‘peace’.
It is once in ‘hell’, but twice in ‘heaven’.
“E” is represented in ‘Emotions’
Hence, all emotional relations like Father, Mother, Brother,Sister,wife & friends have ‘e’ in them.“E” also represents ‘Effort’ & ‘Energy’
Hence to be ‘Better’ from good both “e” ‘s are added.Without “e”, we would have no love, life, wife, friends or hope
And ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’, or ‘taste’ as ‘eye’ ‘ear’, ‘nose’ & ‘tongue’
are all incomplete without “e”.Hence GO with “E” but without E-GO.
Source….input from a friend of mine..NATARAJAN
LIGHTER SIDE OF OF A SCHOOL MESSAGE …a joke to be relished and appreciated in the right spirit
source…..www.ba-bamail.com
Natarajan
Explaining the characteristics of a devotee, Rama said to Narada, “Whoever with discrimination and renunciation (viveka andvairagya), and humility and wisdom (vinaya and vijnana) is aware of the knowledge of Reality, whoever is always immersed in the contemplation of My play (leela), whoever dwells on My name at all times and under all conditions, and whoever sheds tears of love whenever the Lord’s name is heard from any lip — these are My genuine devotees.” When the infant grows up into an adult, the mother won’t pay so much attention to its safety. The Lord doesn’t pay much attention to the wise one (jnani). For the jnani, their own strength is enough. Therefore, until one can rely on one’s own strength, one must be an infant in the Lord’s hands, as a devotee of the form, right? No one can become a devotee of the Formless Supreme (Nirguna bhaktha) without having been a devotee of the form (Saguna bhakta).
Lord Krishna declares in the Bhagavad Gita, “There is nothing in the three worlds that I am obliged to do, nothing unaccomplished that I have to accomplish, but I am still engaged in activity (karma)”. Lord Krishna says this, for, if God is inactive, the Cosmos will come to a grinding halt. You too, must take the lead and follow it. Translate your strength into activity along the path of duty. The young follow the lead of elders. So elders must consistently hold on to ideals and work towards their realization so that the entire universe can attain prosperity and peace. Mother Earth teaches her children this lesson of service and sacrifice. Good conduct must be the main key to the life of every being. Remember, it is the ‘way of living,’ the path of virtue, that keeps you in the memory of people long after death.
This card trick will blow your mind…
Andrew Kelly has an awesome trick up his sleeve. Can you figure it out? Source: YouTube
PREPARE to be dazzled.
Magician Andrew Kelly has recently posted a new card trick to his YouTube page and he’s so quick with his hands it’s almost impossible to spot.
Close-up magicians love to wow their audience members by making strange things happen before their eyes and Andrew is no different.
Hailing from the UK, Andrew’s talents have led him to perform in front of some of the world’s top celebrities, including on the Ellen DeGeneres show.
There is no stage, smoke or mirrors in his performances.
He interacts with groups of people at events creating illusions up close with just a pack of cards and borrowed objects such as mobile phones or coins.
This impressive card trick, taught by John Bannon, showcases his skill.
Can you figure out how he does it?
Source….www.news.com.au and http://www.youtube.com
Natarajan
IT has to be seen to be believed.
In the lead-up to the Paris Air Show, which begins on June 15, Boeing has set the bar high after releasing a video of its newest version of the Dreamliner aircraft — the 787-9 — performing some impressive aerial moves.
But it’s the takeoff which has everyone talking as the passenger jet makes an almost vertical ascent seconds after leaving the ground.
The steep climb looks impressive, though it has its doubters.
Boeing 767 pilot Patrick Smith told CNN: “It looks like the takeoff is at a near vertical 90 degree angle — trust me it’s not.”
He said a 787 with passengers making a 20 degree pitch-up on takeoff would be pretty strong.
“Presumably the plane was very light because it wasn’t carrying any passengers, probably had a very light fuel load, no freight, so it would have been able to perform a steeper than normal ascent — but not to the extent the video seems to show,” Smith said.
That’s steep … the Boeing Dreamliner 787-9 takeoff Source: Supplied
video clip..
Source….www.news.com.au and http://www.youtube.com
Natarajan
Take off with Natarajan 