“The difference between the impossible and possible lies in a man’s determination”
~Tommy Lasorda
This is the inspiring story of a 77 year old man who travels 7 days a week covering 170 kms daily to make a living and support his family. You might already have come across his photographs floating around Facebook, but Varun made an attempt to connect to him directly & share the story of his life.
Source:::: You Tube and Story Pick
Natarajan
நாம் பார்க்கும் எல்லா புகைப்படங்களும் நம் மனதில் நிற்பதில்லை. புகைப்படத்தில் இருப்பவர்களைவிட, அந்தப் புகைப்படம் நமக்குள் ஏற்படுத்தும் தாக்கமே அதனை மற்றவற்றில் இருந்து வித்தியாசப்படுத்துகிறது.
‘தி இந்து’ நாளிதழின் ஃபேஸ்புக் பக்கத்தில் நம் புகைப்படக் கலைஞர்கள் எடுக்கும் சிறந்த புகைப்படங்களை பகிர்வது உண்டு. அப்படி பகிரப்படும் புகைப்படங்கள் மக்கள் மனதை எந்த அளவுக்கு கவர்ந்திருக்கிறது என்பதை உடனுக்குடன் வரும் பின்னூட்டங்கள், விருப்பங்கள் (லைக்) மூலமாகவும் அது எத்தனை முறை பகிரப்பட்டுள்ளது என்பதிலும் தெரிந்துகொள்ளலாம்.
சமீபத்தில், அதிக கட்டணம் வசூலிக்கும் பள்ளிகளுக்கு எதிராக கோவையில் நடந்த கண்டனப் போராட்டத்தில், நமது புகைப்படக்காரர் ஜெ.மனோகரன் எடுத்த ஒரு புகைப்படம், ‘தி இந்து’ ஃபேஸ்புக் பக்கத்தில் பகிரப்பட்ட ஒரு சில மணி நேரங்களிலேயே மக்களின் ஏகோபித்த ஆதரவைப் பெற்றதாக அமைந்தது.
விலைவாசி உயர்ந்த நேரத்தில் குறைந்த விலையில் தரமான உணவை ‘அம்மா உணவகம்’ மூலம் வழங்கிய தமிழக முதல்வர் ஜெயலலிதா, அதேபோல குறைந்த கட்டணத்தில் கல்வி வழங்க ‘அம்மா பள்ளிக்கூடம்’ தொடங்குவாரா என ஒரு சிறுவன் கேட்பதுபோல இருந்தது அந்த படம்.
பதிவேற்றிய 3 மணி நேரத்தில், 7600 நேயர்கள் அதைப் பகிர்ந்தனர். 19,000 நேயர்கள் லைக் செய்தனர். தற்போது வரை மொத்தமாக 38,726 பேர் லைக் செய்துள்ளனர். 27,418 நேயர்கள் பகிர்ந்துள்ளனர். 1,324 பின்னூட்டங்களை அந்தப் புகைப்படம் கண்டுள்ளது. லைக், பின்னூட்டங்கள் தொடர்ந்து வந்தவண்ணம் இருக்கின்றன.
Tel Aviv will introduce a network of sky-high cars by 2016, BBC reports. If successful, the prototype will become the basis for a larger, commercial transit system.
The 500-meter loop of hovercraft rail is a collaboration between Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and California-based company skyTran. It will be constructed on IAI’s Tel Aviv campus.
skyTran Cityscape renderingThe system will include computer-controlled, two-person hover cars gliding along elevated railways through magnetic levitation (maglev) technology.
According to The Telegraph, this will be the most substantial trial of skyTran to date. And although the cars in the test will only go 43 miles per hour, they are capable of “much higher speeds.”
Inside the carSilicon Valley-based skyTran’s mission is to “transport passengers in a safe, green, and economical manner,” intending to “revolutionise public transportation and, with it, urban and suburban commuting.”
Individual tickets for the Tel Aviv system will be about $5 per rider, which locals and visitors can book through their smartphones.
skyTran above traffic renderingIf the prototype succeeds, skyTran says the network be implemented throughout 125 miles of urban and suburban landscape of central Israel.
They plan to build more routes in France, India, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn
Source::: Business insider Select AU
Natarajan
The Curiosity rover mission team celebrates the landing of the car-size robot on the surface of Mars at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California on Sunday, Aug. 5, 2012.On Aug. 5, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on the surfaceof Mars. Its mission: To find out if Mars could have once supported life. Nearly two years later, the car-size rover’s prime mission officially came to an end on Tuesday, June 24.
That doesn’t mean Curiosity will be put out to pasture. She’ll still be doing science on Mars and returning crucial data about the atmosphere and surface of the cold, red planet.
As the main investigation comes to a close, we spoke to chief scientist John Grotzinger, who has been directing the mission from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He talked about Curiosity’s biggest discoveries and one of the darkest moments during the mission.
[A lightly edited transcript of the interview follows]
Business Insider: How are you feeling now?
John Grotzinger: We feel really great about what we’ve been able to do. We’re hopeful that NASA will continue the mission. We are in the stretch of the fastest driving that we’ve done the entire mission so far. Now we’re trying to get toward Mount Sharp. We’ve had 16 papers published and two papers in Science magazine. We met all of the goals in advance. It doesn’t feel like mission over.
This is the first self-portrait Curiosity took after landing on Mars. It’s a bit fuzzy, but the pictures got better as the mission progressed.BI: The last two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, also outlived their prime mission, by many, many years. Why is the main investigation so short if you know the machines can beat these expectations and how long do you expect Curiosity to last?
JG: NASA defines a set of objectives that the spacecraft is supposed to achieve within a timeframe, which was one Mars year or a little less than two years for Curiosity. The warranty on Curiosity expires in June, but we can see Curiosity’s vital signs working really well so we expect it to keep going. Curiosity is different than past rovers because it doesn’t have solar power, it has nuclear power. The way we generate power is that the radioactive device generates heat. There’s a device called the thermocouple, which converts heat to electricity. We can monitor its lifespan. We know we are going to get another good five years. After another seven years, we are going to be generating enough power to keep vehicle going, but not too much more. In 10 years, we expect to see significant degradation.
BI: What is the Curiosity team going to do now?
JG: A lot of team is now going to transition over to the Mars 2020mission. That’s the year it’s going to launch. I’m going to stick with Curiosity and make sure we make it to the base of Mount Sharp.
BI: How do you feel attached to Curiosity besides being the lead investigator?
JG: You can’t help but become emotionally attached to these robots even though they are mechanical devices. When something happens to Curiosity we not only feel the impact of the vehicle on Mars, but also on collective collaboration here. We watch everything she does. We watch the previous Mars rover, Opportunity, as she gets older and the same thing will eventually happen to Curiosity.
BI: Can you sum up the top three discoveries of the prime mission?
JG: The number one thing would be discovering evidence of habitability, meaning that we found an ancient environment where microorganisms could have lived and reproduced. If life ever evolved on Mars, this would have been place of it.
The second would be discovering and confirming something that had been guessed at in the 1970s: Mars lost a lot of its atmosphere billions of years ago. It became the planet it is today probably around 3 billion years ago.
Third, the place that we discovered that was habitable was younger than what we thought. What we though had been the “goldilocks window,” the time when the planet was habitable, was broader than what we thought before.
BI: Is there one day throughout the mission or challenge you faced that you would never want to relive again?
JG: Back in December, we had just published a series of papers that had proven the evidence of habitability early on. It even made the cover of Science. Two days later, I was alerted of pictures that showed thewheels had holes in them. The place we had landed in was very hazardous to the wheels. We got a flat on Mars. We developed a strategy to work around it and now are safely driving. But I would not want to go through that again. We had to stop driving when what we wanted to be doing was driving. We went from the greatest emotional high to the greatest emotion low in two days. It would have been nice to bask in glow of success a little longer.
The red circles highlight tears in one of Curiosity’s tires.BI: In the first year of the mission you said something to a reporter about a discovery that Curiosity made, which got picked up by other media (including us) and somewhat blown out of proportion. What have you learned about the power of social media in this process?
JG: Social media is a wonderful thing. The overwhelming majority is so positive because the things you discover can be shared. We made the decision to return all images so people get to enjoy Mars the way they want. You do have to learn to be careful and explicit about what you mean.
BI: How soon do you think we’ll be able to put a person on Mars?
JG: The first thing we have to do is figure out how to bring rocks back. The difference between the moon and Mars is that the moon is a small body. With propulsion, it doesn’t take much energy to get off he surface. But Mars is big and it has gravity. You have to learn how to build a vehicle that can go to Mars, land successfully, and then lift off. But first we have to figure out the simple challenge of taking a 20 kilogram rock and lifting it off the surface of the planet.
BI: Do believe in programs like Mars One?
JG: In principle it’s possible.
BI: How are celebrating the end of the prime mission?
There’s going to be a big celebration on June 26. Engineers feel like they have delivered on their promise and built a vehicle that lasted a long time. Yes, there will be champagne.
Curiosity weighs about 1 ton and is around the size of SUV.BI: Where is Curiosity going now?
We have 4 to 6 months of driving and are making great progress. We’re going to try to get to Mount Sharp by the end of the calendar year.
Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn
Source::::Business Insider AU
Natarajan
Google just unveiled Android Auto at its annual developers conference in San Francisco.
With cars compatible with Android Auto, you simply connect your Android phone to your car, and your car’s screen will display a modified version of Android with simplified features that are easy to use at-a-glance.
You can use Android Auto to play music from your phone, send and receive text messages, and use other applications like Google Maps.
So that means you’ll be able to see traffic updates, navigation, etc. in your car. And since Android Auto is fully voice-enabled, you’ll never have to take your hands off the steering wheel.
Android Auto will be available later this year. Already, over 40 car makers like Acura, Ford, Audi, and Chevrolet will have Android Auto. The first cars with Android Auto will be available at the end of this year.
Google will soon release an Android Auto SDK so that developers can build additional audio and messaging apps for your car.
Here’s how it works.
YouTube
Once it’s connected, you’ll be able to tap a button and speak commands for navigation, search, and messaging.
Since Android Auto is fully voice-enabled, you can navigate without ever needing to take your hands off the steering wheel. And it’s all powered by your Android phone, so applications you update through Google Play will update in the car, as well.
Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn
Source::::Business Insider Au
Here’s a satellite view of the 12 Brazilian cities hosting World Cup games.
Hey World Cup addicts … Where are all those cities we’re hearing about?
This satellite view of Brazil at night shows the 12 cities hosting World Cup games this summer: Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Manaus, Fortaleza, Cuiabá, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Natal, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo.
Brazil is big, by the way. It’s the largest country in South America and the fifth largest in the world by area (8.5 million square kilometers). Brazil stretches more than 4,000 kilometers (2500 miles) from north to south and from east to west.
Source:::: earth sky news site
Natarajan
Little Ducklings Encounter the Stairs… |
| These little ducklings are trying to follow their mother, who very easily climbed these stairs. But for her puny offsprings, these stairs are huge, and hard to climb. However, they never give up rejoining their mother, and that is what makes the end of this video so great. |
Source::::You Tube and ba-ba mail site
Natarajan
Coober Pedy is a town located in northern South Australia and is known as the opal capital of the world, as nearly 95 percent of the world’s opal supply comes from the local mines. This small town with a population of around 3000 has a unique way of life – nearly half of them live underground.
Back in 1916 when people moved into Coober Pedy to mine opal, the harsh summer temperature drove them into caves dug into the hillsides. When temperatures outside raged over 40 degree centigrade, underground temperatures remained comfortable and nearly constant year-round. Even today, the town folk prefer to build their homes in underground caves. In fact, many of these homes are abandoned mine shafts dug to search opal.
Coober Pedy has around 250,000 mine shafts and signs like this are common.
Building a new home in Coober Pedy is much cheaper and quicker compared to conventional building methods. The modern homes aren’t the deep caves that people imagine but are dug into the hill sides. The entrance is usually at street level, and the rooms extend towards the back into the hill.
%5B3%5D.jpg "coober-pedy2 (3)")
There is a local golf course – mostly played at night with glowing balls, to avoid daytime temperatures. It’s completely free of grass and golfers take a small piece of “turf” around to use for teeing off. The lack of grass hasn’t discouraged them to put up this sign in the golf course though.
Major attractions in Coober Pedy includes this church.
%5B3%5D.jpg "coober-pedy (5)")
And even underground hotels
%5B3%5D.jpg "coober-pedy (12)")
Thanks Flickr, OffbeatEarth, About.com, Outback Australia
On June 5, astronauts aboard ISS used a beam of laser light to send an HD video to researchers waiting below.
Anyone who remembers dialup internet can sympathize with the plight of NASA mission controllers. Waiting for images to arrive from deep space, slowly downloading line by line, can be a little like the World Wide Web of the 1990s. Patience is required.
A laser on the International Space Station (ISS) could change all that. On June 5, 2014, the ISS passed over the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California, and beamed an HD video to researchers waiting below. Unlike normal data transmissions, which are encoded in radio waves, this one came to Earth on a beam of light. Matt Abrahamson, who manages the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said:
It was incredible to see this magnificent beam of light arriving from our tiny payload on the space station.
Better known as OPALS, the experimental laser device was launched to the space station onboard a Space-X Dragon spacecraft in the spring of 2014. Its goal is to explore the possibility of high-bandwidth space communications using light instead of radio waves. If successful, researchers say OPALS would be like an upgrade from dial-up to DSL, achieving data rates 10 to 1,000 times higher than current space communications.
So far so good.
The entire transmission on June 5 lasted 148 seconds and achieved a maximum data rate of 50 megabits per second. It took OPALS 3.5 seconds to transmit a single copy of the video message, which would have taken more than 10 minutes using traditional downlink methods. The message was sent multiple times during the transmission. Abrahamson said:
The video is an homage to the first output of any standard computer program: ‘Hello, World.’
Because the space station whips around Earth at 17,500 mph, laser-tagging a telescope on the fast-moving ground below can be tricky. To accomplish the precision tag-up, a laser at the ground station illuminated the station. OPALS responded by sending its own 2.5 watt encoded laser signal right back in the same direction, carrying the HD video. During the 148-second transmission, OPALS maintained pointing to the ground station within 0.01 degrees while tracking at speeds up to 1 degree per second. Abrahamson commented:
NASA missions collect an enormous amount of data out in space. Laser communications is a faster alternative for getting those data to the ground.
With this demonstration, we’re paving the way for the future of communications to and from space.
Bottom line: On June 5, astronauts aboard ISS used a beam of laser light to send an HD video to researchers waiting below. The experimental laser device aboard ISS is known asOPALS. Its goal is to explore the possibility of high-bandwidth space communications using light instead of radio waves.
Source::::earth sky news site
Natarajan
On the day of the June solstice, the sun rises and sets farthest north for the year.
Sarah Little-Knitwitz wrote at EarthSky Facebook on June 21, 2014:
Solstice sunrise this morning from Glastonbury Tor, Somerset, U.K.
Happy Summer! Source:::: earth sky news site
Natarajan
Take off with Natarajan 