Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Microsoft: Work and Travel Do Mix
Talk about getting creative. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Talk about Microsoft’s innovative move to start employees’ working time the moment they step into the company bus to work.
According to sources, Microsoft started bus service for employees at Bangalore, India. The bus is obviously equipped with computers and connectivity which allows employees can start work from the bus. Their office hours counts from the time they switch on their computers in the bus. Needless to say, the time they spend working in the bus counts toward their stipulated working hours for the day.
So what gave birth to this gem of an idea? Well, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes a crisis can be, too. The crisis in this case was the infamous traffic Bangalore jam. Stuck? Work! Apparently, the management wasted no tie in accepting this idea which was proposed by an employee through their suggestion scheme.
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How REALLY Big is the Big Bang Experiment?
Most of us are aware that something extraordinarily BIG is happening inside a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) long tunnel on the Swiss-French border. We also know that a $10 billion dollar machine is smashing protons at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.
We can also try to appreciate that the detectors on a collider in the tunnel, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN*, will look for signs of new physics, including origins of mass and extra dimensions, hunt for the Higgs boson (dubbed “The God Particle” for its potential to answer the most basic questions about existence, such as how anything came into existence), investigate what happened to the “missing” anti-matter that was created in parallel with matter as well as attempt to study ’some kind of liquid’ that theoretically existed shortly after the Big Bang.
Anyways, I’m not here to talk physics or the origin of the universe nor to discuss whether this experiment will soon mean the ends of days (or nights) as we know them. With the media raising so much hue and cry about the ‘mega’ project, I wanted to dig in and find out, within the confines of my limited ability to envision, just how big this so-called Big Bang Experiment REALLY was.
Whatever it was that I expected to find out, I certainly was not ready to take THIS in:
| Be sure to CLICK on the thumbnails below (opens in new Window) |
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| Aerial view of CERN and the surrounding region of Switzerland and France . Three rings are visible, the smaller (at lower right) shows the underground position of the Proton Synchrotron, the middle ring is the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) with a circumference of 7 km and the largest ring (27 km) is that of the former Large Electron and Positron collider (LEP) accelerator with part of Lake Geneva in the background. (© CERN) |
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| The Globe of Innovation. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland ’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) |
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| View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of particle physics. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide. (Roy Langstaff, © CERN) |
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| ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment @ CERN) will study the physics of ultrahigh-energy proton-proton and lead-lead collisions and will explore conditions in the first instants of the universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| View of the LHC cryo-magnet inside the tunnel. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| Insertion of the tracker in the heart of the CMS detector. (Maximilien Brice, © CERN) |
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| Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1. (Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) |
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| View of the Computer Center during the installation of servers. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) |
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| Installation of the world’s largest silicon tracking detector in the CMS experiment. (Michael Hoch, © CERN) |
*The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), known as CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, situated in Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, established in 1954. The organization has twenty European member states, and is currently the workplace of about 2600 full-time employees, as well as some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities).
You’d Have to Go Nude to be More Eco-friendly Than This
How eco-friendly can you get? In the words of EcoGear founder Robert Hii, “you’d have to go nude to be more eco-friendly” than the world’s first 100% recycled clothing.
Incredible EcoGear is just about to change forever the way we think about our clothes. Robert Hii, a 20-year veteran of Toronto’s garment industry, began researching the possibility of creating a 100% recycled fabric in 2007, following a string of devastating natural disasters around the world. His research led to the possibility that a wide range of clothes could be created for even the fashion-conscious, and that was when Hii struck out with Incredible EcoGear.
The fabric is created from leftover cuttings from the floor of clothing factories. The cuttings are separated by color and shade, then cut into ultra-fine fibers and attached to a continuous strand of polyester thread made from recycled plastic bottles. The resulting yarn is then spun into EcoGear clothing products. The process is free of dyes, bleaches and other harsh chemicals. To top it, the inks used on EcoGear labels are organic, and garments’ hang tags are printed in soy inks on recycled paper.
“EcoGear clothing is the first 100% recycled clothing available to consumers,” said Hii. “We realized that any difference in climate change will have to start with you and me, and that is the founding principle of EcoGear.”
Incredible EcoGear’s commitment to environment doesn’t end with producing eco-friendly clothing. It also donates 1% of sales to environmental organizations, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the Toronto Zoo to name a few.
SOURCE Incredible EcoGear
Push Button Orgasm
Hey guys, pretty soon your responsibilities at home may be reduced to taking out the garbage — women are relying more on technology to achieve the ultimate sexual climax.
Enter Slightest Touch (pun unintended), the groundbreaking device that is claimed to be able to actually assist a woman reach pre-orgasmic plateau at the touch of a button.
Okay, here’s all the lady needs to do:
1. Have an electrolyte sports drink 20 minutes before using the device.
2. Apply two white electrode pads inside the ankles.
3. Start the device, which is about the size of a Walkman.
4. Relax and expect to feel the sensation within the first 30 seconds.
Slightest Touch stimulates the body’s sexual nerve pathways by sending gentle pulses up the woman’s leg for between 10 and 30 minutes leaving women on the verge of climax.
“From there, gentle stimulation can then effect the orgasm,” said Cherisse Davidson, the company’s director of customer support. “The Slightest Touch does not provide an orgasm.”
The ‘handy’ gadget has been available in the US since 2004, but is now available in European countries as well. Reports are in that it’s selling hot… cakes. A surefire way to stimulate global happiness, I guess (once again, pun unintended).
Cool. (Or hot, as you may.) Any other benefits? Sure, women could wear this at work, dinner or a movie and no can tell what’s happening unless the woman has a very expressive face. And… freedom from faking.
Is the Invisible Man Sitting Right Next to You?
It’s not sci-fi any more. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a material that can bend visible light around objects. It just means that if you’re wearing a cloak made out of that material, light waves would curve around your cloak and an observer would see the light from behind you, making you disappear.
This range of material that can control light’s direction of travel are known as “meta-materials” and have the power to “grab” electromagnetic radiation and deflect it smoothly. They are capable of manipulating matter at atomic and molecule levels, and have been created with nano-scale engineering. The researchers say they constructed a material whose elements were engineered to a confounding scale of within about 0.00000066 of a metre (like 0.0000001 of an inch).
Wonder if you can see yourself? I mean, how would you know if your hair styling is right? Then again, that shouldn’t matter. Hmmm. And oh no, I don’t think you can’t find it at Wal-Mart, not yet.
Now, how does it work again?
“In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock,” explains Xiang Zhang, chief researcher. And lo, you–or the objects–are ‘invisible’.
Still don’t believe it? Come on, now–can you see the picture of the Niagara Falls above?
Firm Offers Laptop at $28 to School Kids
Against the hot winds of inflation, this must come as a cool breeze of relief: an Indian-based firm is offering laptops to schoolchildren at Rs 1200 ($28.33 at today’s rates).
A small-scale unit based in the state of Gujarat in India calls it an ‘electronic school bag’ (ESB), and will have a two-GB flash memory, runs on Linux operating system and has basic features,including a B&W LCDs.
“These ESBs can be modified as per the class in which the children are enrolled. For instance, a student enrolled in class III won’t have to carry books and guides to schools as all such study material can be stored in the ESB. Similarly, ESB for other children enrolled in higher classes can be modified as per their study material,” said Jagdish Bharwad, Recourse Group chief.
The ESB, while providing a writing facility for students to complete their homework, can also be attached to a printer.
The company, which employs ten software engineers and eight hardware engineers, has spent Rs 1.20 crore (approx $2.8 million) on R&D and purchase of equipment to develop the model ESB.