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 !

Hey all ya viewfinders out there ! Tired of zoomin’ on earthlings and landscapes under the sun ? Here is a thrilling chance - Wake up and jump - Now you can try your hand on the red planet ! I can hear you say, ‘We ain’t got a telescope, damn it’ ! Wait, lemme finish - NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission carried a very powerful camera aboard called High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE which has been doing the clicking all these years photographing every possible inch it can, yet covering only less than a percent of total martian surface !

Now NASA and University of Tucson , Arizona’s team for HiRISE have decided to give the public this opportunity to propose imaging targets and share the excitement of seeing your favorite spot on Mars at people-scale resolution ! The idea to take suggestions from the public follows through on the original concept of the HiRISE instrument, when its planners nicknamed it “the people’s camera.” By involving public, the team expects to raise more awareness among the general public for the exploration of the red planet.

All you need to do is to login to the HiRISE team page at http://www.uahirise.org/suggest/ where the team has developed an online mapping tool called ‘HiWish’ to locate the areas of the martial surface where to click next ! You have to give your ‘point of interest’ or target observation a title, explain the potential scientific benefit of photographing the site and put the suggestion into one of the camera team’s 18 science themes. The themes include categories such as impact processes, seasonal processes and volcanic processes.(see below for some of the astonishing Mars images from HiRISE)

Public suggestions will get into a priority queue after evaluation by HiRISE team. Thousands of pending targets from scientists and the public will be imaged when the orbiter’s track and other conditions are right.

Kudos to NASA for proving once again that it is not only the most technically advanced Space research wing but also the most public friendly scientific research organization.

Inspite of being the first person on Space, Russian Cosmonaut is definitely less popular than Neil Armstrong as the world still remembers Neil Armstrong better as the first person to land on the moon’s surface. So how many would remember Astronaut T.J. Creamer for any good reason ? Well, the obvious reason seems to be a ‘packet of data’ a.k.a ‘tweet’ sent from space to the micro-blogging site Twitter. This happened after the NASA crew has been given wireless intenet connecitvity in the International Space Station.

The first tweet from space by NASA’s Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J.Creamer under twitter account name @Astro_TJ has received tremendous response with a huge 19,000 followers until this afternoon.

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s,”

To be frank, I aint no great fan of this tweet revolution in the internet, yet here I am compelled to end it this way - One small tweet for Twitter and a giant leap for NASA !

A latest news buzz from telegraph.co.uk says that an amateur astronomer Peter Shah, 38, staying in the English Hillside town of Meifod has been able to capture stunning shots of the galactic signatures from his own backyard with a modest 8-inch telescope.

What the multi billion dollar tech baby of NASA - the Hubble space telescope has been doing all this while has been acheived at a lesser scale (but with good quality) from a modified backyard garden shed that cost Peter a modest £ 20,000 for buying a good telescope and mounting it on the roof.

What is so baffling and incredible is that the images caught on tape through his telescopes attached to his computer are no mean feat. You will understand what I mean if you visit his gallery at his webpage here . Though it is an amateur astronomer’s effort, the results look as good as any professional astronomer’s clicks.

Peter Shahs telescope at his backyard

Peter Shah, an office worker and a hobbyist astronomer says he has been fascinated at being an astronomer at a very tender age of seven when his mother got him a tiny £ 5 telescope and this legacy still lingers as his hobby of sky watching and star gazing. Images in his collection include the Monkey’s head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula.

This is what he had to say about his feat in an interview to the site opticstar.com

“On my seventh birthday my folks got me my first telescope which started my interest in astronomy, I sat for hours looking at the moon as a child. I remember pointing my scope at a bright star to the east, I put my eye to the telescope and saw Jupiter for the very first time, and I felt like I had discovered something and ran around telling everyone. I pointed a camera at the sky in my early teens, when my uncle, who was a keen amateur photographer, gave me an old SLR camera and tripod, which I did simple exposures of the constellations and experimented with star trailing.”

His images have been brought together for the first time in a book called Mirror Image. Images from the book and other photographs can be viewed at http://www.astropix.co.uk

Well, contrary to the adage, for persons like Peter Shah, even sky is not the limit !!

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 !

Markets are flooded with GPS-enabled devices in a swarm these days, a majority of them being Mobile phones that catch the fancy of an average consumer. Though technological innovations are a boon for value add to the consumer , there many things unsaid about the usability and the hidden chargers they are being levied. All GPS enabled smart phones do not work the same. There are phones with only a built-in GPS receivers, and  phones that have a built-in GPS coupled with Assisted GPS technology or A-GPS for short.

The topic of our discussion today pertains to A-GPS, yet for the benefit for those who do raise their eyebrows in a puzzled fashion, here is a quick nutshell information about ‘What is GPS’

GPS or Global Positioning Systems is a system of satellites revolving around the earth which can communicate with the receiver antenna (a.k.a GPS Receiver) to have a lock over their geometry in a process called ‘trilateration’. This process, coupled with some highly sophisticated atomic clock measurements in the satellites for measuring the time distance between the satellites and the receiver can give the exact location in all three geographic co-ordinates, namely, Latitude, Longitude and Altitude.

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To sit in a idle room and do a think-tank  inside your skull of how to do something different without getting out of your cozy couch ? For all those couch-potato geeks  here is a chance to be part a adventure and discovery - be a part of Planetquest.org’s distributed computer platform Planet discovery Project.

Are you still thinking that there are just nine planets known to mankind ? Huh, this NASA site for Planetquest count for number of planets discovered takes its tally at a whopping 424. Can’t believe ? Well its gotta be difficult to do all this discovery all by NASA, so they devised a grid computing project involving interested netizens who can dedicate a part of their CPU time for processing the enormous amount of data from NASA’s dedicated planet hunting missions like Kepler as well as other ground based telescope data.

Planetquest.org is a non-profit research organisation involved in projects for finding exo-planets and they have developed what is known as ‘Transit Detection Algorithm‘ or TDA for short to automatically detect planets during transit ahead of stars.

To become an amateur astronomer all you need is a computer with a decent internet connection. Log on to Planetquest.org, sign up and download their sophisticated distributed computing software based on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform. With this you become an astronomer and your comp your vitual observatory. Cool Ain’t it ?

P.S: Though its exciting the alpha testing is going on for this software and the beta release is expected to be on floors very soon. Planetquest is in search of funds to organise the necessary infrastructure to handle the tremendous response expected. Of course you can be a proud donor by spending a penny or two for this great scientific breakthrough to happen soon.