India's Mars Mission Enters 2nd Stage.......

India's first mission to Mars left Earth's orbit early on Sunday, clearing a critical hurdle in its journey to the red planet and overtaking the efforts in space of rival Asian giant China.

The success of the spacecraft, scheduled to orbit Mars by next September, would carry India into a small club, which includes the United States, Europe and Russia, whose probes have orbited or landed on Mars.

India's venture, called Mangalyaan, faces more hurdles on its journey to Mars. Fewer than half of missions to the planet are successful.

"While Mangalyaan takes 1.2 billion dreams to Mars, we wish you sweet dreams!" India's space agency said in a tweet soon after the event, referring to the citizens of the world's second-most populous country.

China, a keen competitor in the space race, has considered the possibility of putting a man on the moon sometime after 2020 and aims to land its first probe on the moon on Monday.

It will deploy a buggy called the "Jade Rabbit" to explore the lunar surface in a mission that will also test its deep space communication technologies.

A New Monster Discovered...

A new discovery in  the field of Archealogy......
                 A new species of The Giant Monsters is discovered in Utah's Cedar Mountain.....
Scientists from Chicago Field Musem annonced the discovery  of Siats Mekarorum ,a dinosaur that streched more than 30 feet long and weighing more than 4 tons.
          Based on the size and characteristics of this massive creature,it is expected to be on the top of the food chain,and assumed to rule the time so called "The Last Age Of Dinosaurs"

   

Now Park Your Car From Outside.... ;)

You dont believe it...check this out....
Ford can now park cars in spaces so tight you couldn’t get out of the door even if you could get the car in the space. The Fully Assisted Parking Aid for backing into perpendicular and angled parking spaces .
              The Full Assisted Parking Aid (FAPA) is a follow-on to Ford’s Active Parking Assist  for automated parallel parking, done with the driver in the car. As with APA, FAPA uses ultrasonic sensors to scan for an open parking space at speeds as high as 19 mph (30 kph). When the car finds a suitable spot it alerts the driver, who can stay in the car or get out and use a remote to finish the parking job. The car then backs itself in to the parking space.It then switches gears and accelerator automatically.The driver’s function is to keep his or her finger on the button during the maneuver.
Watch this video...here

The Mummification......

•  Belief in after life of Egyptians led to the process of Mummification.  
• They believed that the only way to have an after is to possess the body after death.
• It is possible only if we preserve it some how.

These are the steps of mummification...

1)Pull brain out of nose using a hook

2)Make a cut on the left side of the body near the tummy

3)Remove all internal organs

4)Let the internal organs dry

5)Place the lungs, intestines, stomach and liver inside canopic jars

6)Place the heart back inside the body

7)Rinse inside of body with wine and spices

8)Cover the corpse with  salt for 70 days

9)After 40 days stuff the body with linen or sand to give it a more human shape

10)After the 70 days wrap the body from head to toe in bandages

11)Place in coffin(box used for funerary)

12)If the person had been a Pharaoh, he would be placed inside his special burial chamber with lots of treasure!

Healing Batteries?

Researchers at Stanford University think they have come up with a solution to improve the lithium-ion battery, which could lead to improvements in the next generation of mobile phones and electric cars.

Currently lithium-ion batteries contain silicon electrodes. Although silicon is a great material because it has a high capacity for absorbing and releasing lithium ions during charging and discharging, it also swells to three times the size and shrinks again during a charge-discharge cycle. This means they often don’t last very long.

A poor service life may not be a big issue if it is in a smartphone as people tend to replace them frequently anyway but it becomes a much bigger problem when someone has purchased something more pricey, like an electric car for example. When a person wants to sell the car on, they expect it not to need any major component replacements and in an electric car, the battery is a pretty major component.

This is one of the reasons why the motor industry is so reluctant to produce more battery cars. Even Tesla Motors, who is well-known for electric cars, has admitted that battery life could be a major problem for the company as its cars get older.

The Concept Of Healing Polymer

So what have the experts at Stanford University come up with? Well, they have been able to develop a strong and stretchy polymer which can be used to coat a silicon electrode. As cracks form during the charge and discharge process, the coating is able to “heal” the cracks.

“Self-healing is very important for the survival and long lifetimes of animals and plants,” says Chao Wang, a postdoc researcher at Stanford. “We want to incorporate this feature into lithium ion batteries so they will have a long lifetime as well.”

At the moment the researchers have been only been able to get this marriage of silicon and polymer coating to last for 100 charge cycles before it starts to lose performance. There is still ground to cover, with the goal being to reach 500 cycles for a phone and 3,000 for an electric vehicle. But as Professor Yi Cui points out “the promise is there, and from all our data it looks like it’s working.”

New Method That Can Revolutionize The Solar Energy Harvesting........

Solar cells offer the opportunity to harvest abundant, renewable energy. Although the highest energy light occurs in the ultraviolet and visible spectrum, most solar energy is in the infrared. There is a trade-off in harvesting this light, so that solar cells are efficient in the infrared but waste much of the energy available from the more energetic photons in the visible part of the spectrum.
                                                 Researchers a Cambridge and Mons have found that there can be a process in which the initial electronic excitation can split into a pair of half-energy excitation. This can happen in certain organic molecules when the quantum mechanical effect of electron spin sets the initial spin 'singlet' state to be double the energy of the alternative spin 'triplet' arrangement.

                                                             
                                                  A Study published in journal Natural Chemistry shows that this process of singlet fission of triplet pairs depends on interaction of molecules...When the material is very dilute, the distance between molecules is large and singlet fission does not occur. When the solution is concentrated, collisions between molecules become more frequent. The researchers find that the fission process happens as soon as just two of these molecules are in contact, and remarkably, that singlet fission is then completely efficient -- so that every photon produces two triplets.
                 

Beware Poachers!!!

Yes the need for a robot deer has really come.
It is now being used in taking aim at illegal hunters.
Apparently, the police in Florida have been having a tough time lately catching hunters who are hunting deer out of season.  So what did they decide to do about it? They created a robot deer.To create the robot deer, they partnered with a local taxidermy to make sure the animal looked just right, and judging from the picture of a robot deer below, it seems they can get pretty accurate with all of the details.

Once the deer was properly “outfitted”, police set it up in a location they felt was sure to attract poachers. And the best part is that the robot deer did not just stood there, either. Using a remote control, the police were able to control the deer from a distance to make it act like an actual deer. All their hard work paid off too, because a certain hunter decided to shoot it through the neck from his vehicle. As soon as the shot was fired, police came out of hiding and arrested the hunter. This particular man could face a year and jail and a $2500 fine if he is found guilty.

So poachers be aware this new technology is really going to be tough on you!!!

Maybe that robotic deer would be embedded with cameras and sensors so that there is no need of police people same as that of traffic cameras,cctv,etc..

Also do not think that they are just in Florida and you can continue your poaching.They can come to your place also.

Also be aware that this is just the first step.Maybe next animal maybe tiger,rhino,etc...!!!

How And Why Chameleons Change Colour.....

There is this myth that chameleons change colour to blend in with their surroundings, but this is actually not true.  Most of the reason chameleons change colour is as a signal, a visual signal of mood and aggression, territory and mating behaviour.

The way that chameleons actually do this is really molecular – they're molecular masterminds, really.  If you look at the skin of a chameleon, you find that they have several layers of specialised cells called chromatophores and these are cells that can change colour.  On the outer surface of the chameleon, the skin is transparent and just below that is the first layer of these cells, and they contain various pigments.  These are xanthophores, containing particular specialised pigments that have a yellow colour.  Beneath that are pigment cells which are called erythrophores which have a red colour in them.  Beneath that, another layer of cells called iridiphores have a blue coloured pigment called guanine, which is actually also used in making DNA.  And underneath that is another layer of cells called melanophores which have a brown pigment – melanin – in them. 

Now, how does the chameleon change colour?  Well those chromatophores are wired up to the nervous system.  They are also sensitive to chemicals that are washing around in the blood stream of the chameleon.  What happens is that the colours are locked away in tiny vesicles, little sacs inside the cells that keep them in one place, so the cells don't look coloured.  But when a signal comes in from the nervous system or from the blood stream, the granules or vesicles can discharge, allowing the colour to spread out across the cell, and this alters the colour of the cell.  It’s rather like giving the cell a coat of paint.  By varying the relative amount of activity of the different chromatophores in different layers of the skin, it’s like mixing different paints together.  So if you mix red and yellow, you get orange for example, and this is how chameleons do this.  They mix different contributions of these chromatophores.  It’s a bit like on your television screen.  When you mix different colours together on the screen to get the colour that the eye ultimately perceives and so, that’s how the chameleon changes colour, and usually does so to convey mood.

So a calm chameleon is a pale greeny colour.  When it gets angry, it might go bright yellow, and when it wants to mate, it basically turns on every possible colour it can which shows that it’s in the mood.  This is not unique to chameleons.  Other animals also have these chromatophores. Cuttlefish are another very elegant example of how this works.  So it’s not so much to do with camouflage.  It’s more to do with communication.

Why Do People Stammer.......

What are the causes?

We don't really know yet. Scientists have been working for years to try and find out whether there is a cause and whether there is a cure. So far all that has been agreed is that the problem is highly complicated.

It probably isn't caused by one single thing. It's more likely that it is the result of a combination of things. More importantly the "ingredients" of stammering are probably different for every person who has a stammer and that the things that help stammering may be slightly different for everyone too.

Different factors may be impacting on the stammering:

Physical/biological factors

Family history of stammering in blood relatives

The organisation of the brain for speaking

The co-ordination of the speech mechanism
These are all probably inter-related.

Speech and language development 

There seems to be some link between the way in which a child develops speech and language which is important. This may either be that a child is quicker or slower than his age group, or that there were some earlier, sometimes quite subtle, difficulties

There may still be some minor, often unrecognised, difficulties. An example would be in 'word retrieval' or 'word finding' - here the filing system for vocabulary is not very efficient. It's the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon! The person knows exactly what they want to say but the exact word they want to use escapes them for a second or two

The person's instinctive or natural rate of talking also may be influential

Environment - past and present 

Family life

Rapid pace of life - lots of commitments, activities and demands

Everyone speaking quickly

Everyone talking at once

Expectation to speak up - whenever

Personality - the sort of person you are can make a difference

High achievers

Sensitive

Perfectionist (or self-critical)

Worriers

Each person has a different set of factors that makes them vulnerable to stammering in the first place. But perhaps it is now more important to consider what is keeping it going.

Oldest big cat fossil found in Tibet

The oldest big cat fossils ever found - from a previously unknown species "similar to a snow leopard" - have been unearthed in the Himalayas.

The skull fragments of the newly-named Panthera blytheae have been dated between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old.

Their discovery in Tibet supports the theory that big cats evolved in central Asia - not Africa - and spread outward.

The findings by US and Chinese palaeontologists are published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B

Read More.

Have A Belief In Ghosts?...You are Not alone...Check This Out....

If you believe in ghosts, you're not alone: A 2005 Gallup poll found that 37 percent of Americans believe in haunted houses, and about one-third believe in ghosts. Tens of thousands of people around the world actively search for ghosts as a hobby.
              The idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is an ancient one, and one that offers many people comfort; who doesn't want to believe that our beloved but deceased family members aren't looking out for us, or with us in our times of need? Most people believe in ghosts because of personal experience; they have seen or sensed some unexplained presence.
 Science Behind Ghosts:
Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is not one universally agreed-upon definition of what a ghost is. Some believe that they are spirits of the dead who for whatever reason get "lost" on their way to The Other Side; others claim that ghosts are instead telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds.

Why Many Believe:

Many people believe that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts; if energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body's energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?
           It seems like a reasonable assumption — unless you understand basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms' energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily "energy" that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.

Why Do We Snore....??????

When you sleep, muscle tone throughout your body decreases. All the muscles in your body relax.

Your upper airway is lined with muscles that keep the airway open. When those muscles relax during sleep, the diameter of the airway decreases and, in some people, this partially blocks the airflow, leading to turbulence.

Instead of air flowing smoothly down the airway into the lungs, it flows with gusts and bursts. As the air travels through the airway, it picks up speed and gets whipped around in all different directions.

As the air bounces around, it hits the relaxed, floppy tissues lining the throat and causes them to vibrate, kind of like a flag in the wind. This is the snoring sound.

People don’t make a snoring sound when they are awake because the muscles in the throat hold the airway open wide enough for a smooth flow of air into the lungs.

We snore more as we get older because our muscles become increasingly flaccid with age. Gaining weight can increase snoring because fat deposits accumulate in the tissues of the airway, making them heavier so they fall more into the line of airflow

Changes In Brain When You Are under Stress.....

Your body’s stress response kicks in when you perceive you are under threat.

Mammals have evolved this superb mechanism to ensure we have the best possible chance of survival when faced with a life-threatening situation.

Imagine you are in the jungle and you hear movement behind you. You stop still, heart pounding and turn your head to orientate your eyes and ears to the sound. You see the undergrowth trampled as you hear an animal pounding towards you – then you hear the lions roar.

At times like this you’d want every muscle in your body to work to the peak of its ability – and your brain to be super-alert.

Evolution has obliged, and given you the stress response.

                                 

Once your brain has decided there’s a danger, it sends immediate nerve signals down your spinal cord to your adrenal glands telling them to release the hormone adrenaline. Once released, adrenaline increases the amount of sugar in your blood, increases your heart rate and raises your blood pressure (and has many other actions). Your brain’s remarkable hypothalamus also sends signals to your pituitary gland at the bottom of your brain, telling it to release factors that within a few minutes have travelled through your blood stream and stimulated your adrenal cortex to produce a stress hormone – cortisol.

Cortisol is very important in your stress response - keeping your blood sugar and blood pressure up to help you escape from danger.

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What is the "shva" in the gmail URL.....?????

Ever since Google launched a new version of Gmail, back in 2007, some people wondered why Gmail's address includes a parameter called "shva".

"Just curious, what does the SHVA parameter in the new gmail URL stand for? Is it an acronym? I'm not really asking about the technical usage or the functionality; I'm just interested in the choice of name," asked BRKR. "I know GMail is not an Open-Source program so we can trace the code. But every website tries to make the URL shorter so they ideally shouldn't add redundant data to the URL," thinks Omar Dolaimy.
                

According to Mike Sego, a former Gmail engineer, "shva" is an acronym for "should have valid authentication". Apparently, the parameter is only included after a successful authentication.

Prescription Lenses for Google Glass Coming in January

Despite having its fair share of skeptics, Google Glass continues to accrue enhancements that could make it a mainstream hit when it officially debuts next year. The latest is from New York-based company Rochester Optical, which promises to release a special prescription lens add-on for the device in early 2014 (above image is not of the unreleased product).
                                      The Google Glass-ready prescription lenses will be priced in the same range as standard prescription lenses, according to Moore. Customers will be able to visit a website where they can choose a matching color for their existing device, and enter their prescription information. Lenses will be shipped within two business days.
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Theory Behind Volcano Formation.............

Volcanoes form when hot material from below rises and leaks into the crust. This hot material, called magma, comes either from a melt of subducted crustal material, and which is light and buoyant after melting, or it may come from deeper in the interior of a planet and is light and buoyant because it is *very* hot.

Magma, rising from lower reaches, gathers in a reservoir, in a weak portion of the overlying rock called the magma chamber. Eventually, but not always, the magma eruptsonto the surface. Strong earthquakes accompany rising magma, and the volcanic cone may swell in appearance, just before an eruption, as illustrated in this picture. White arrows in the picture show the volcano getting bigger as magma rises inside. Scientist often monitor the changing shape of a volcano, especially prior to an eruption. The different reasons why a volcano forms are

• via plumes or hot spots in the lithosphere
• as a result of subduction of the nearby lithosphere
  
  
  
  Click here to know more

The Parkinson's.....Beware

Parkinson's disease is a disorder of the brain that leads to shaking (tremors) and difficulty with walking, movement, and coordination.
    
Causes

Parkinson's disease most often develops after age 50. It is one of the most common nervous system disorders of the elderly. Sometimes Parkinson's disease occurs in younger adults. It affects both men and women.

In some cases, Parkinson's disease runs in families. When a young person is affected, it is usually because of a form of the disease that runs in families.

Nerve cells use a brain chemical called dopamine to help control muscle movement. Parkinson's disease occurs when the nerve cells in the brain that make dopamine are slowly destroyed. Without dopamine, the nerve cells in that part of the brain cannot properly send messages. This leads to the loss of muscle function. The damage gets worse with time. Exactly why these brain cells waste away is unknown.

  

 Symptoms

Symptoms may be mild at first. For instance, you may have a mild tremor or a slight feeling that one leg or foot is stiff and dragging. Symptoms may affect one or both sides of the body, and can include:

Symptoms include:

• Slow blinking
• Constipation
• Difficulty swallowing
• Drooling
• Problems with balance and walking
• No expression in the face (like you are wearing a mask)

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Why Do We Get Hiccups...........

Most of us have experienced hiccups, an uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing, but usually short-lived experience. But sometimes hiccups persist for a long period of time and can be a sign of serious underlying disease.
                             Hiccups are bursts of inspiratory (breathing in) activity. The muscles we use when we take in a breath are the intercostal muscles situated between the ribs, and the diaphragm - a sheet of muscle below the lungs. 
                                                        Most simple cases of hiccups come after eating or drinking too much or too quickly. The stomach, which is situated right below the diaphragm, becomes distended and irritates it. This will cause the diaphragm to contract, as it does when we breathe in. 

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Reason Behind Yawning....

So what's behind this mysterious epidemic of yawning? First, let's look at what this bodily motion is: Yawning is an involuntary action that causes us to open our mouths wide and breathe in deeply. We know it's involuntary because we do it even before we're born: According to Robert Provine, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, research has shown that 11-week-old fetuses yawn. And while yawning is commonly associated with relaxation and drowsiness, your heart rate can rise as much as 30 percent during a yawn, and yawning is a sign of arousal, including sexual arousal [sources: Alexander, The Stress of Life].

Many parts of the body are in action when you yawn. First, your mouth opens, and your jaw drops, allowing as much air as possible to be taken in. When you inhale, the air taken in is filling your lungs. Your abdominal muscles flex, and your diaphragm is pushed down. The air you breathe in expands the lungs to capacity and then some of the air is blown back out.

Now that we know what a yawn is, let's look at what causes us to do it. On the next page, we'll discuss four popular theories that explain why we open wide and breathe deep.
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Why Do We Dream In Sleep????????????????????

Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have dreams been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. Chances are that you’ve often found yourself puzzling over the mysterious content of a dream, or perhaps you’ve wondered why you dream at all.

First, let’s start by answering a basic question – What is a dream? A dream can include any of the images, thoughts and emotions that are experienced during sleep. Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid or very vague; filled with joyful emotions or frightening imagery; focused and understandable or unclear and confusing.

Why do we dream? What purpose do dreams serve? While many theories have been proposed, no single consensus has emerged. Considering the enormous amount of time we spend in a dreaming state, the fact that researchers do not yet understand the purpose of dreams may seem baffling. However, it is important to consider that science is still unraveling the exact purpose and function of sleep itself.

Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. Ernest Hoffman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., suggests that "...a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events."

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What Exactly is A Malware......................

Most people seem to call every type of malware a “virus”, but that isn’t technically accurate. You’ve probably heard of many more terms beyond virus: malware, worm, Trojan, rootkit, keylogger, spyware, and more. But what do all these terms mean?

These terms aren’t just used by geeks. They make their way into even mainstream news stories about the latest web security problems and tech scares. Understanding them will help you understand the dangers you’ve heard about

 Malware

The word “malware” is short for “malicious software.” Many people use the word “virus” to indicate any type of harmful software, but a virus is actually just a specific type of malware. The word “malware” encompasses all harmful software, including all the ones listed below

Virus

Let’s start with viruses. A virus is a type of malware that copies itself by infecting other files,  just as viruses in the real world infect biological cells and use those biological cells to reproduce copies of themselves.

A virus can do many different things — watch in the background and steal your passwords, display advertisements, or just crash your computer — but the key thing that makes it a virus is how it spreads. When you run a virus, it will infect programs on your computer. When you run the program on another computer, the virus will infect programs on that computer, and so on. For example, a virus might infect program files on a USB stick. When the programs on that USB stick are run on another computer, the virus runs on the other computer and infects more program files. The virus will continue to spread in this way

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The Newly Discovered body Part.....

In an age filled with advanced medical techniques like MRIs, artificial hearts, and laser eye surgery, one could be forgiven for believing doctors are also at least vaguely familiar with every one of your body parts. However, a new discovery by Belgian physicians has proved this assumption wrong.

As Science Daily reports, two surgeons at University Hospitals Leuven have located a new ligament in the human knee, and their findings may mean a revolution in how we treat ACL injuries. Dr. Steven Claes and Professor Dr. Johan Bellemans have spent four years trying to solve a modern medical mystery: in certain cases, patients who have had their ACL repaired still experience “pivot shifts” in their knee, where the joint “gives way” during physical activity.

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Ways to Bypass internet Censorship and filtering......

More and more Internet connections are being filtered, from public Wi-Fi and workplace connection filtering to ISP and country-level censorship. However, there are still ways to get around this filtering and view blocked websites.

Some of these methods may be restricted by harsh filtering. For example, the Great Firewall of China is now interfering with outgoing VPN connections, although VPNs were left alone for years.

   Click here

LADEE's new space communication system

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory said the probe on Thursday night began a limited test of a high-data-rate laser communication system. It's the U.S. space agency's first laser communications test.

If it works as planned, NASA plans to use similar systems to speed up future satellite communications and deep space communications with robots and human exploration crews.

continue reading

Two Indian scientists discover youngest Supernova remnant

Two Indian scientists, Subhashis Roy of NCRA, Pune and Sabyasachi Pal of ICSP, Kolkata, discovered the youngest supernova remnant within the galaxy using Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) near Pune. Their research work has been published in the September 2013 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, by the American Astronomical Society.

"Stars are much heavier than the sun. They die with the phenomenon of supernova explosion. Subsequently, they start emitting radio frequency band. The radiation originates from the high-speed ejecta, expanding in a shell-like structure, with a speed of thousands of kilometers per second. Such shells are usually smaller for new supernova remnants. About thousand supernova remnants are expected to be in our galaxy. In 400 years, about a dozen supernovas should have taken place, but only two have been discovered so far," said an official press release.

"Detailed age analysis suggests that this supernova should have occurred very recently, not older than a few hundred years, making it one of the youngest supernova remnant discovered with GMRT. This rare discovery raises hopes that in future more Supernova remnants can be discovered if done at optimum resolution and sensitivity," added the release.

CryptoLocker: The Ransomware There's No Coming Back From

A ransomware threat known as CryptoLocker is making the rounds, scrambling files in the process. And once it’s triggered, there is no way to recover them.

Ransomware has adapted over the years, becoming more difficult to thwart. “Malware that encrypts your data and tries to sell it back to you, or else, is not new,” noted Paul Ducklin, a researcher at Sophos Labs, in a blog. “In fact, one of the earliest pieces of malware that was written specifically to make money, rather than simply to prove a point, was the AIDS Information Trojan of 1989. That Trojan scrambled your hard disk after 90 days, and instructed you to send $378 to an accommodation address in Panama.”

That bug used simplistic encryption algorithms, and every computer was scrambled in the same way, so free tools for cleanup and recovery soon became available, Ducklin noted. Not so with the CryptoLocker next-gen ransomware, which uses a public key to encrypt a variety of file types such as images, documents and spreadsheets. The malware searches for files to encrypt on all drives and in all folders it can access from the compromised computer, including workgroup files shared by colleagues and resources on company servers.

“The more privileged your account, the worse the overall damage will be,” Ducklin said.

CryptoLocker installs itself in the Documents and Settings folder, using a randomly-generated name, and adds itself to the list of programs in your registry that Windows loads automatically when the user logs on. It then produces a lengthy list of random-looking server names in the domains .biz, .co.uk, .com, .info, .net, .org and .ru – and then tries to make a web connection to each of these server names in turn, trying one each second until it finds one that responds. Once it has found a server that it can reach, the server generates a unique public-private key pair and sends the public key part back to the computer.

“Remember that public-key cryptography uses two different keys: a public key that locks files, and a private key that unlocks them,” said Ducklin. “You can share your public key widely so that anyone can encrypt files for you, but only you (or someone to whom you have given a copy of your private key) can decrypt them.”

The malware offers to trade money for the private key to unlock the encrypted files. “It pops up a pay page, giving you a limited time, typically 100 hours, to buy back the private key for your data, typically for $300,” Ducklin said. Then a warning comes that the server will destroy the key after a time specified, meaning that the files will never be able to be recovered.

The picture doesn’t get better. “SophosLabs has received a large number of scrambled documents via the Sophos sample submission system,” he said. “These have come from people who are keenly hoping that there's a flaw in the CryptoLocker encryption, and that we can help them get their files back. But as far as we can see, there's no backdoor or shortcut: what the public key has scrambled, only the private key can unscramble.” In other words, unlike other ransomware, there is no remediation.

Worse, the infection vectors make it difficult for consumers to avoid. CryptoLocker arrives via email attachments and botnet – the former is easy to avoid by being wary of unsolicited attachments. Botnets though are a different story.

“Most bots, or zombies, once active on your computer, include a general purpose ‘upgrade’ command that allows the crooks to update, replace, or add to the malware already on your PC,” said Ducklin. “So take our advice: make it your task today to search out and destroy any malware already on your computer, lest it dig you in deeper still.”

Vitamin D Pills Effect on Healthy bones

Healthy adults do not need to take vitamin D supplements, suggests a study in The Lancet which found they had no beneficial effect on bone density, a sign of osteoporosis.

But experts say many other factors could be at play and people should not stop taking supplements.

University of Auckland researchers analysed 23 studies involving more than 4,000 healthy people.

The UK government recommends children and over-65s take a daily supplement.

The New Zealand research team conducted a meta-analysis of all randomised trials examining the effects of vitamin D supplementation on bone mineral density in healthy adults up to July 2012.

The supplements were taken for an average of two years by the study participants.

Continue reading the main storyBone mineral density is a measure of bone strength and measures the amount of bone mineral present at different sites in the body. It is often seen as an indicator for the risk of osteoporosis, which can lead to an increased risk of fracture.

The trials took place in a number of different countries including the UK, the US, Australia, Holland, Finland and Norway.

Although the results did not identify any benefits for people who took vitamin D, they did find a small but statistically significant increase in bone density at the neck of the femur near the hip joint.

According to the authors, this effect is unlikely to be clinically significant.

Free up resources

Prof Ian Reid, lead study author, from the University of Auckland, said the findings showed that healthy adults did not need to take vitamin D supplements.

"Our data suggest that the targeting of low-dose vitamin D supplements only to individuals who are likely to be deficient could free up substantial resources that could be better used elsewhere in healthcare."

Writing about the study in The Lancet, Clifford J Rosen from the Maine Medical Research Institute agrees that science's understanding of vitamin D supports the findings for healthy adults, but not for everyone.

"Supplementation to prevent osteoporosis in healthy adults is not warranted. However, maintenance of vitamin D stores in the elderly combined with sufficient dietary calcium intake remains an effective approach for prevention of hip fractures."

The Department of Health currently recommends that a daily supplement of vitamin D of 10 micrograms (0.01mg) should be taken by pregnant and breastfeeding women and people over 65, while babies aged six months to five years should take vitamin drops containing 7 to 8.5 micrograms (0.007-0.0085mg) per day.

2013 Chemistry nobel goes to computer modelling of chemical reaction

By combining quantum and classical mechanics, three researchers could model how electrons jump between elements in a molecule, enabling a deeper understanding of reactions and the design of new drugs
                               What is actually happening at the atomic scale when two elements react? This year'schemistry prize goes to three theoretical chemists who devised a way for computers to model and predict how such reactions take place: Martin Karplus of Harvard University and the Universite de Strasbourg in France; Michael Levitt of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California. Or, as the Nobel Committee put it in awarding the prize: "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

The key was physics—specifically, finding a way to use both a quantum mechanical understanding of individual atoms in the most critical area of a molecule (which requires a great deal of computational power) and then simpler, easier-to-calculate classical mechanics to deliver the rest of the system. That combination enables a computer to model in great detail, say, the catalyst in a particular enzyme as the electrons leap from the orbit of one nucleus to another during the formation of chemical bonds , while allowing simpler calculations for the rest of the complex molecule.

"It's like seeing the watch and wondering how it works," said Warshel via telephone during the press conference presenting the prize. "What we developed is a way that requires a computer to take the structure of a protein and then to eventually understand how exactly it does what it does." Such an understanding of how things work, for example, can then be used to "design drugs or, like in my case, to satisfy curiosity." In other words, chemists no longer only experiment in the lab; they can also experiment in cyberspace.

Such theoretical modeling is already in wide employ in the pharmaceutical industry, helping to deliver drugs and is also being used to help unlock the secrets of photosynthesis—the chemical transformation of carbon dioxide to carbohydrates using only the energy provided by sunlight. A better understanding of that chemical reaction, and the molecules involved—which, after all makes the majority of life on Earth possible—could help deliver clean and abundant energy for human purposes. And Levitt, for one, would like to one day simulate an entire living organism at the molecular level.

Atlas robot refuses to be knocked over

Meet Atlas, a humanoid robot capable of crossing rough terrain and maintaining its balance on one leg even when hit from the side.

And WildCat, the four-legged robot that can gallop untethered at up to 16mph (26km/h).

These are the latest creations of Boston Dynamics, a US robotics company part-funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

The robots are part of Darpa's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation programme.

Darpa says such robots "hold great promise for amplifying human effectiveness in defence operations".

Referring to Atlas's ability to remain balanced despite being hit by a lateral weight, Noel Sharkey, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, told the BBC: "This is an astonishing achievement... quite a remarkable feat."

This version of Atlas is one of seven humanoid robots Boston Dynamics is developing in response to the Darpa Robotics Challenge.

In December, competing robots will be set eight tasks to test their potential for use in emergency-response situations, including crossing uneven ground, using power tools and driving a rescue vehicle.

Darpa wants to improve the manoeuvrability and controllability of such robots while reducing manufacturing costs.

Lake that turns animals to stone??????????

Lake Natron in Tanzania is one of the most serene lakes in Africa, but it's also the source of some of the most phantasmagorical photographs ever captured — images that look as though living animals had instantly turned to stone.

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The alkaline water in Lake Natron has a pH as high as 10.5 and is so caustic it can burn the skin and eyes of animals that aren't adapted to it. The water's alkalinity comes from the sodium carbonate and other minerals that flow into the lake from the surrounding hills. And deposits of sodium carbonate — which was once used in Egyptian mummification — also acts as a fantastic type of preservative for those animals unlucky enough to die in the waters of Lake Natron.