May 29, 2009 Your dream of taking a ride into space just took a big step forward with Virgin Galactic announcing the completion of phase one testing on the rocket motor that will propel SpaceShipTwo into suborbital space। The Virgin Galactic project to provide sub-orbital spaceflights to the paying public will also act as a stepping stone to the company’s plans for future orbital flights and will almost certainly lead to a dramatic decrease in long haul international flight times – a couple of hours from Sydney to London anyone?

The innovative rocket motor uses the largest hybrid Nitrous Oxide system of its kind in the world to achieve speeds over 2,500 mph (4,000 kmh) and send amateur astronauts to heights over 65 miles (110km) above the Earth’s surface. Virgin points out that, although the rocket motor is extremely powerful, it is also completely controllable – a nice attribute to have when you’re when traveling at over Mach 4.

Since the SpaceShipTwo will be launched from the Virgin MotherShip Eve (VMS Eve) in the upper atmosphere, the rocket also boasts a low environmental impact when compared to the current solid rockets used in most ground-based systems. This is due to the reduction in fuel needed for a mid air launch, and the fuel burn is more environmentally benign.

Thousands of confidential files on the U.S. military’s most technologically advanced fighter aircraft have been compromised by unknown computer hackers over the past two years, according to senior defense officials.


The Internet intruders were able to gain access to data related to the design and electronics systems of the Joint Strike Fighter through computers of Pentagon contractors in charge of designing and building the aircraft, according to the officials, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

In addition to files relating to the aircraft, hackers gained entry into the Air Force’s air traffic control systems, according to the officials. Once they got in, the Internet hackers were able to see such information as the locations of U.S. military aircraft in flight.

The Joint Striker Fighter plane is the military’s new F-35 Lightning II. It designed to become the aircraft used by all of the branches of service.

Most of the files broken into focused on the design and performance statistics of the fighter, as well as its electronic systems, officials said. The information could be used to make the plane easier to fight or defend against.

Additionally, the system used by the aircraft to conduct self-diagnostics during flight was compromised by the computer intrusions, according to the officials.

However, the officials insisted that none of the information accessed was highly sensitive data.

The plane uses stealth and other highly sensitive electronic equipment, but it does not appear that information on those systems was compromised, because it is stored on computers that are not connected to the Internet, according to the defense officials.

The Joint Strike Fighter’s main contractor is Lockheed Martin Corp., and Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems PLC are major subcontractors in the plane’s production.

Lockheed Martin’s chief financial officer denied that there was any breach of classified information, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

“The U.S. government doesn’t talk a whole lot about this, and neither do we. But in response to the [Wall Street Journal] report, we think it’s incorrect,” said Bruce Tanner of Lockheed Martin. “There’s never been any effective attack. We have measures in place, and there’s never been a successful attack.”

In a statement released later, the company reiterated its position that no classified information had been accessed.

Ford explores the future of the family car - the Transit Connect Family One concept

April 9, 2009 As part of the lead up to the release of the Transit Connect utility vehicle this year Ford has unveiled the Family One Concept. Packed with added extras that will appeal to the whole clan, the Concept showcases the versatility of the platform and explores what's possible in designing a car specifically for one purpose. Innovations include digital entertainment screens, in-dash technology that is programmed with all the family's requirements and even sunscreen and hand sanitizer dispensers. Kids are sure to love the door-mounted scooters and the walkie-talkie radios while Moms are catered for by the inclusion of a stroller stored under the floor, in-built rear awning and an integrated first aid kit.Keep the kids entertained. A transparent sunshade is mounted on the bulkhead behind the driver’s area. This sunshade transforms into an entertainment center by becoming a pair of projected, floating high-resolution screens which can display digital media entertainment, three-dimensional gaming and web surfing.

“Transit Connect is a versatile vehicle that can be adapted to a wide variety of applications,” said Mark Fields, Ford’s president of The Americas. “The Family One concept delivers fun with function. This fun, cool space is for parents and small children alike, combining fuel efficiency with advanced technologies that can help keep families connected on the go.”

Handy extras
Other features include a built-in hand sanitizer and sunscreen dispensers, family walkie-talkie radios, an integrated first-aid kit and cargo door-mounted folding twin scooters. A folding stroller is contained beneath the rear floor and when you need some shade, an integrated awning extends from the open rear cargo doors.

Never forget homework again
The in-dash computer technology is designed to help keep a family organized. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is used to ensure that you never forget important items by using predictive algorithms to “learn” based on past usage, meaning it can it prompt the driver to collect missing instruments or sporting equipment. RFID tags can be attached to any number of items such as backpacks, homework folders or sports equipment. The system is easy to operate, minimal menu scrolling is required and the system integrates with sensors so the driver is warned if a child’s seat is not correctly attached.

Fuel efficiency
The Family One concept is powered by a 2.0-liter engine delivering 22 city and 25 highway miles per gallon – and features SmartGauge to help parents drive more efficiently via an easily understood graphic interface. In future, the global Transit Connect platform will be able to host other efficient engine alternatives, including battery electric propulsion.

Research
In October 2008, the Ford Transit Connect Family One concept team arranged a display of five family vehicles from Ford's global product portfolio outside the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Guest respondents, representing 200 participating families, were questioned regarding their likes and dislikes and asked to describe the type of driver who would drive each car. The research team found (not all that surprisingly) that families like to have lots of functional extras and would prefer the car to be fuel-efficient.

Source: Gizmag

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Western Digital increases MyBook HDD’s capacity to 2TB

With people’s hoarding of digital media, both legal and illegal, reaching epidemic proportions, capacities of storage devices to store all this digital goodness have steadily increased. Probably the most popular means of storing large amounts of data has been external hard drives. They are portable, relatively cheap and offer a fuss free way to increase a system’s storage capacity. So in an inevitable move Western Digital has expanded its My Book family of external hard drives to include a 2 TB capacity, the largest available capacity in a single-drive system.

The new 2 TB My Book family is designed to keep everyone from creative power users on a Mac to home users on a PC happy with the range including the My Book Studio Edition, My Book Mac Edition, My Book Home Edition and My Book Essential Edition models. The My Book Studio Edition and My Book Mac Edition are aimed at creative professionals and video editors working on Macs coming preformatted in HFS+ with the My Book Studio Edition equipped with high speed FireWire 400/800 and eSATA interfaces on top of the standard USB 2.0 interface. The My Book Studio Edition carries a five year limited warranty while those purchasing the USB only My Book Mac Edition will have to bit a bit more careful as it carries only a one year limited warranty. Aimed at home PC users the My Book Home Edition comes equipped with continuous backup software and high-speed eSATA and Firewire 400 as well as USB 2.0 interfaces, and carries a 3-year limited warranty while the My Book Essential Edition is USB2.0 only and carries a one year warranty.

All drives in the new 2TB range include SmartPower features that turns the drive on and off with the computer and Safe Shutdown that prevents the drive from being powered down until all the data has been written when connected via USB or FireWire. The units also save power by going into standby mode after 10 minutes of inactivity while a Kensington Security Slot allows users to secure the drive to a desk with the separate purchase of a Kensington lock kit. All drives except the My Book Essential Edition also include a capacity gauge to see at a glance how much capacity is available on the drive.

Western Digital’s My Book Studio Edition, My Book Home Edition and My Book Essential Edition 2 TB external hard drives are available now while the My Book Mac Edition 2 TB external drives will be available next month. Prices range from USD$329.99 to USD$379.99, depending on drive model and capacity.

Source: gizmag

IIS: Scholars Addresses Muslim Perspectives on Bioethics

Dr. Amyn B. Sajoo was invited to speak on bioethical choices and Islam at a training session for clinicians, ethicists and counsellors, convened by the London Research Ethics Committees of the British National Health Service (NHS).

The central theme of Dr. Sajoo’s presentation was the role of maslaha or the ‘public interest’ in Muslim ethical reasoning, and how this has shaped particular choices in biomedicine, past and present. Five key narratives were offered to illustrate how maslaha allowed departures from traditional legal rules in order to serve a larger public interest. These involved decisions on organ donations, stem cell research, autopsies and dissection – followed by a final narrative on the classical emergence of maslaha itself as an avenue for social change in matters of public health. It usually comes as a surprise to western publics that supposedly ‘traditional’ societies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia have some of the most exciting and innovative programmes in health research, including on stem cell therapies for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The use of embryonic cells in such research has incurred strong opposition in several western countries on religious grounds. Muslim ethicists, however, have successfully addressed such concerns by balancing them against the public benefit derived from innovative therapies.

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Salinity power as renewable energy

Green energy comes in many guises these days, from wind-power to wave-power. One of the more compelling of the new kids on the eco-energy block is salinity power, which uses the concurrence of salt-water and freshwater in estuaries and marries it with the natural, effortless process of osmosis. March 12, 2009 In 1748 the monk/physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet exploded a wine-filled pig’s bladder when he submerged it in a trough of water (What did he think would happen?). The resulting discovery was of course, osmosis, and two teams of clever Europeans think they can use this natural process to give the world clean, green and perpetual electricity by exploiting the chemical difference between salt-water and fresh water.

A quick science lesson:Osmosis is, according to Donald Haynie, author of Biological Thermodynamics (1) “a physical process in which a solvent moves, without input of energy, across a semi-permeable membrane (permeable to the solvent, but not the solute) separating two solutions of different concentrations”. In this case, the low-concentrate solvent is fresh water, the solute is sodium chloride (salt) and the high concentration solution is salt-water. The two teams, Wetsus (The Centre for Sustainable Water Technology) in the Netherlands and Statkraft in Norway, are racing against the clock to be the first to make salinity power a viable alternative to traditional methods. And while they’ve based their energy solutions (pun intended) on similar science, their approaches to generating electricity are quite different.

Statkraft: Pressure retarded osmosis (PRO)The Norwegians at Statkraft are putting their hopes in Pressure Retarded Osmosis or PRO for short. Invented by American/Israeli researcher Sidney Loeb in 1973, the science is fairly straight forward: two chambers, one with salt-water and one with fresh water are divided by a semi-permeable membrane.This membrane is like a one-way valve, which draws the ‘dilute’ fresh water through it into the ‘concentrate’ of salt-water. This increases the pressure in the salt-water chamber, and this resulting pressure can be used to drive a turbine, thereby generating electricity. The only waste product is ‘brackish’ (slightly salty) water, which flows back into the sea. Statkraft have estimated that salinity power could eventually provide around 10 per cent of the Norway’s electricity needs, or in other words, around 12 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.

The company is building the world’s first complete facility for osmotic power generation and believes a full-scale commercial plant could be up and running as early as 2015. Wetsus: Reverse electrodialysis (RED)Wetsus is batting on the Reverse Electrodialysis (RED) team. Wetsus believes it can use salt-water from the North Sea and fresh water from the Rhine (where the waters meet and form an estuary) to make a kind of battery using osmotic principles they’ve dubbed “Blue Energy”. With enough “Blue Energy” batteries, Wetsus feels the estuary could generate more than a gigawatt of electricity - or to put it another way - enough to supply around 650,000 homes. The Blue Energy method works much like a car battery and employs two types of membranes - in this case, both are impermeable to water, but are permeable to ions. One for sodium ions, the other for chloride ions (both of which are abundant in salt-water - of course). So in flows the sea-water, where the positively charged sodium ions move through one membrane into a fresh water channel, and the negatively charged chloride ions move through the other membrane - and in the opposite direction. This separation of charged particles results in an electrical difference between two electrodes at either side of the device and this gives us our chemical battery.

The pros:This is as green as energy gets, the only waste product is brackish water, which flows into the sea and mixes harmlessly with the sea water. It’s also a weather-proof technology (barring the odd tsunami) as it’s not reliant on erratic forces such as sunshine or wind. Wind-farms average about 3,500 operational hours per year, whereas salinity power plants could arguably churn out power for 7,000+ hours per year - and at a fairly constant rate. Statkraft estimate that the global potential for salinity power is about 1,600 to 1,700 terrawatt-hours each year, which works out as roughly 1 per cent of the planet’s energy needs.

The plants could be easily be combined with existing power-plants, built underground, in basements etc. reducing cost, and visual pollution. Basically, anywhere salt-water and fresh water coincide is a potential green power station just waiting to happen. The cons:The biggest obstacle for both teams is that membrane development isn’t up to the level they’d both like. The technology needs to advance, and soon. Bio-fouling of the membrane - with silt and algae - is also a big issue. The ionic membranes used by Wetsus for their Blue Energy technology are less prone to fouling, but efficiency and durability are still issues to resolve. Statkraft are looking at anti-fouling coatings and considering option like occasionally reversing water flow to flush the system. Of course, salinity power isn’t as egalitarian as say, wind power. While it can be implemented in any situation where there’s an abundant supply of salt-water and fresh water it clearly suits countries with extensive coastline and a lot of rivers - which means plenty estuaries where the power plants can be established.

By their own estimates, Salinity power only has the potential to meet around 1 per cent of global energy. That’s actually a lot of juice, but it’s no great white (salty) hope. Still, if they can improve efficiency, salinity power will be a welcome addition to the growing green energy family.

Source: Gizmag