Much to the awe and success of the science fiction action game Mass Effect , the game producers Bioware have released a stunning sequel. The game is already creating ripples among those nerdy geeks for using out-of-box sci-fi in the game’s plot and some stunning VFX. Even the wallpapers of this game at this site look very unassumingly stunning and gorgeous. Every geekie and ‘xtreme gamer’s desktop should get donned of these atleast once !

The game takes place in the year 2183, with the player assuming the role of an elite human soldier named Commander Shepard, set out to explore the Galaxy on a starship, the SSV Normandy. What gets our attention in the game is the use of a highly futuristic concept in weapon system - “the dark energy”. The mysterious and pervasive force suspected of speeding the universe’s expansion could be channeled by the players in the game to dodge bullets, create gravity vortices to suck up enemies.
Now wat are you waiting for, go get it quickie ! Watch the awesome trailer of mass effect 2 here !

For those meeky ones staring at all those dudes with Google Maps on their geeky GPS smart phones here is a cheap man’s alternative - the Zoomable Paper Map ! Confusing ? Well, it really is.

Apart from a regular street map containing ndex for streets, stations and places of interest, useful numbers, etc this  map² is an innovative paper design Map from thezoomablemap.com which has been adeptly crafted in such a way that you would feel a virtual zoom-able pocket size paper map on your hands for just £ 8.00.

The cool patented design of this street map is folded on four corners in a four-square fashion which can be unfolded to open a zoomed area of the unfolded square. More confused and still not able to visualize how it would be ? If so please see the video below to understand how it looks !

Even after the advent of digital maps, the legacy of cartography is still the paper maps that has become a symbol of a vintage geographer ! This  pocket size (10 cm x 10 cm ) stylish and useful map is printed on a tear resistant paper and it is currently developed as a street map for city of london only, and if you wish it for your city, please do contact them at their website for any customised maps !

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , the largest, the most complex and the most expensive particle accelerator on earth dubbed as the “The God Machine” for its ability to unlock the secrets of this universe is back in action after a hiccup due to an accident that occurred last September.

Amid much fanfare from the particle physicists and fears from some sections of media for an apocalypse in disguise, the LHC started its journey to unlock mysterious questions that pose the scientific community for decades. Yet due to a small soldering error in one of the cables that carry power to the LHC, there was a huge meltdown which is notoriously known as the “World’s most expensive short circuit”. It was indeed a disappointing display for the CERN engineers who built the machine for more than a decade and the scientific community around the world who were very anxiously waiting for the LHC to fire up and produce ‘Godly results’.

It took almost a year for the CERN engineers to analyse, redesign, repair and get ready for yet another kick start. Now CERN scientists have started firing protons round one small section of the collider as they prepare for its re-opening. Over the next few weeks, more and more bunches of protons will be put into the machine until, by Christmas, beams will be in full flight and can be collided. The aim of the experiment is to see the higgs-boson dubbed as the God Particle that’s said to have the secrets locked for eternity about the beginning of space and time.

Apocalypse Now ?

With a section of media and physicists deeply divided on the notion that LHC would deem us nothing but an apocalypse, and that it is capable of producing miniature black holes that can eventually eat up everything on their way sounds eerie. Another strange prediction from some physicists is that since producing Higgs-boson is against nature so the very effort in producing them itself will cause ripples in space-time that go back in time to stop the collider from creating one. But the CERN scientists deny this and they say that LHC is more controllable after the revamp this year.

Let us wait to see what’s in store for us - either an answer to all life’s key or the dead-lock to our very existence  !

MAVs, short for Micro Aerial Vehicles, like these ones in the video from MIT’s Robust Robotic Group, a research wing of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, are a marvel in the robotics research which can fly without GPS through unmapped indoor environments, and Dude, this is no comic book super fantasy or Hollywood Sci-fi but exists in cemented reality !

These robots can be used for military as well as civil aerial reconnaissance, search and rescue operations, civil engineering inspections, and a multitude of tasks where in sending a human is difficult and dangerous. These MAVs have a high level of autonomous behavior in difficult terrains armed with an array of sensors working on a gamut of artificial intelligence algorithms.

With a little bit of googling one can easily find an array of these technologies that exist in paper and reality. Several types including the ones called Ornithopters (that has flapping wings) are bio-inspired and modelled by engineers by carefully involving the huge range of science and technology trends in decision-theoretic planning, statistical inference, and artificial intelligence.

The above is a research headed in the Robust Robotics Group which specializes in areas of Micro-Air Vehicle Navigation and Control and Human-Robot Interaction for Assistive Robots.

Guess what, TU Delft had earlier designed a micro sized 3 gram Ornithopter christened ‘DelFly‘ last year. The silver lining here is, it is the world’s smallest Ornithopter equipped with a camera !! Well I just remember my high school Principal’s golden words - Tomorrow the world will be dealing with - more and more about less and less ! How true it is !

An interesting note: The Washington Post has referred to insect-like versions of MAVs as Robobugs ;)

We’ve gone past the mechanical and electrical ages and  are now in the advent of electronics age - accepted; But are we really ready to replace every device known into some form of electonic gadget ? Computers were once mechanical devices; so are the numerous scientific instrumements- from thermometer to steam engine.

Since the advent of micro chips, better called the ‘Silicon revolution‘, we’re seeing everything going hay-wireless, with today’s a digital autonomy over the internet being just a tip of an iceberg. With the massive advancements in  the silicon industry over the past decade, researches are on the way to replace the mechanics and hydraulics in automotives to electronic gadgets. This technology of replacing hydro-mechanical moving parts of a car with electrical wires and electronic circuitry is called ‘Drive by Wire’ (’DbW‘ in short) or ‘X by wire‘- X denoting various types of replacements like - ‘Steer by Wire‘, ‘Brake by wire‘,  ‘Throttle by wire‘, etc. So the complete amalgamation of all these terms is ‘Drive by Wire’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you wanna be a proud owner of the piece of a moon rock ? Just step yourself into the shoes of Neil Armstrong and say your own “buzz” liner about the landing, similar to what armstrong said, ” One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind !”. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landings by the Apollo 11 mission, New Scientist has come with an online competition where in readers are asked to suggest a better statement  what Neil Armstrong could have said. All this for a piece of rock from the very lunar neighbour.

The piece of moon rock is part of a lunar meteorite found by French collector Luc Labenne, in the Dhofar region of Southern Oman, on the eastern border of Yemen.

The deadline to submit your entries to New Scientist website is 5pm GMT on 29 June. The details of the winning entry/entrant would be published in the 18th July issue of New Scientist.

Now, what are you waiting for ? Go grab this chance here

Japan aerospace agency JAXA’s lunar orbiter probe Kaguya (formerly SELENE) is all set to impact the surface of the moon on June 11, thursday, completing its two year long mission with a daunting final task of impact landing on moon’s southern hemisphere near the Gill crater (shown in pic).

Kaguya is set to crash into the moon at a lunar latitude of 63° south and longitude of 80° east. Its projected impact site is circled in red in this mosaic of images taken by Europe’s SMART-1 spacecraft, which itself smashed into the moon at the end of its mission in 2006

The mission is to seek and shed light on the formation and evolution of the moon by studying its composition, gravitational field and surface characteristics. Kaguya deployed two smaller satellites (’Baby Probes’) after reaching lunar orbit that allowed it to relay data to Earth while it was on the moon’s far side and to better measure anomalies in the moon’s gravitational field.

Kaguya has its own ‘firsts’ too. The gravity field mapping of the far side of the moon and also of making the first HD video of the lunar surface.

How it began :

Late 2004 — a Boeing anti-missile airborne laser achieved first light;

Oct’ 2006 — a laser-equipped 747-400F was deemed ready for testing;

Jan’ 2007 — an MD-10 with Northrop Grumman’s Guardian anti-missile system took off;

Mar’ 2009 — read on >>

Northrop Grumman, a leading global security services cum defense research company has announced the developing of a first-of-its-kind and State-of-art Solid-state Laser that can do more harm than blinding the enemy. The Project dubbed JHPSSL for ‘ Joint High Power Solid State Laser’ achieved a remarkable milestone in laser weaponry segment breaking the 100 Kilo watt barrier.

“Our modular JHPSSL design makes it straightforward to scale laser weapon systems to mission-required power levels for a variety of uses, to include force protection and precision strike missions for air-, sea- and land-based platforms,” said Dan Wildt, vice president of Directed Energy Systems for Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector.

He also said, “This achievement is particularly important because the 100kW threshold has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for ‘weapons grade’ power levels for high-energy lasers. In fact, many militarily useful effects can be achieved by laser weapons of 25kW or 50 kW, provided this energy is transmitted with good beam quality, as our system does. With this milestone, we have far exceeded those needs.”
With the advent of laser it was predicted that the next big thing in wars would be lasers. That day is fast approaching with these ground shattering innovations. Who knows - the distant imaginative apocalypses proclaimed by the ‘Terminator’ and the ‘Matrix’ may soon become a reachable reality ! Gosh, We can only bemoan that to happen !

Hey crazy math geeks out there - a good piece of news for ya ! Today is commemorated as the ‘Pi’ or π day . Confused ? today’s date - 3/14. got it now ? Yes, the mathematical constant pi = 22/7 roughly equals 3.14. Know what ? The US House of Representatives has recognised 14 March as Pi Day officially.

This may seem silly and weird with the US bureaucrats having a hell lotta problems to address in reality, but let’s not ignore the special place π shares in the world of mathematics. The ratio of of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius - π has taught a lotta things to us. I seriously doubt any other mathematical constant playing such a basic role for the building blocks of all known science to mankind ! Though pi is irrational, we should indeed be rational towards its importance :) !

Being an irrational number, it cannot be expressed purely by a fraction m/n where m and n both are integers. Also the decimal representation never ends or repeats. Such a peculiar number has made us all this technological innovations possible. And so, dude - we gotta do the honors for the number. or let us take this opporunity to pay respect for all those greatest mathematicians who transformed our lives to see the technology growing but hardly got the due ! Hail mathematics aka mathemagic ! Happy Pi day !

Remembering Pi :

There are some real geniuses out there who can recite  pi to some tens of thousands of  decimal places. For meeky-geeks like us, remembering even to the tenth digit is a big achievement. So how do those ‘highly intellects’ remember to such a big numeral to such high order of accuracy ? The method follwed is mnemonics, where in one remembers strange and catchy phrases and tries to relate with the numbers. Here’s an example : Say you wanna recite Pi to its 14 decimal places. Here it goes,

“How I want a drink? Alcoholic, of course. After the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.”

One can easily remember the above sentence. The hint and relation to pi here is the number of letters in each word. Each word relates to one decimal andt the number of letters equals the number => 3.14159265358979 So, give a try impressing others with mnemonics ! happy Pi Day dear geeks !