SOLAR CAR

A solar vehicle is an electric vehicle powered by a type of renewable energy, by solar energy obtained from solar panels on the surface (generally, the roof) of the vehicle. Photovoltaic (PV) cells convert the Sun's energy directly into electrical energy. Solar vehicles are not practical day-to-day transportation devices at present, but are primarily demonstration vehicles and engineering exercises, often sponsored by government agencies. Solar cars combine technology typically used in the aerospace, bicycle, alternative energy and automotive industries. The design of a solar vehicle is severely limited by the energy input into the car (batteries and power from the sun). Virtually all solar cars ever built have been for the purpose of solar car races (with notable exceptions).
Like many race cars, the driver's cockpit usually only contains room for one person, although a few cars do contain room for a second passenger. They contain some of the features available to drivers of traditional vehicles such as brakes, accelerator, turn signals, rear view mirrors (or camera), ventilation, and sometimes cruise control. A radio for communication with their support crews is almost always included.
Solar cars are often fitted with gauges as seen in conventional cars. Aside from keeping the car on the road, the driver's main priority is to keep an eye on these gauges to spot possible problems. Cars without gauges almost always feature wireless telemetry, which allows the driver's team to monitor the car's energy consumption, solar energy capture and other parameters and free the driver to concentrate on driving.
Solar cars depend on PV cells to convert sunlight into electricity. While the sun emmits 1370 +/-3.4% watts per square meter of energy, 51% of it actually enters the earth's atmosphere and therefore approximately 700 watts per square meter of clean energy can be obtained. [1]Unlike solar thermal energy which converts solar energy to heat for either household purposes, industrial purposes or to be converted to electricity, PV cells directly convert sunlight into electricity. [2]When sunlight (photons) strike PV cells, they excite electrons and allow them to flow, creating an electrical current. PV cells are made of semiconductor materials such as silicon and alloys of indium, gallium and nitrogen. Silicon is the most common material used and has an efficiency of 15-20%.

PLANET OF THE WEEK : mars

MARS

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and is commonly referred to as the Red Planet. The rocks, soil and sky have a red or pink hue. The distinct red color was observed by stargazers throughout history. It was given its name by the Romans in honor of their god of war. Other civilizations have had similar names. The ancient Egyptians named the planet Her Descher meaning the red one.
Before space exploration, Mars was considered the best candidate for harboring extraterrestrial life. Astronomers thought they saw straight lines crisscrossing its surface. This led to the popular belief that irrigation canals on the planet had been constructed by intelligent beings. In 1938, when Orson Welles broadcasted a radio drama based on the science fiction classic War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, enough people believed in the tale of invading Martians to cause a near panic.
Another reason for scientists to expect life on Mars had to do with the apparent seasonal color changes on the planet's surface. This phenomenon led to speculation that conditions might support a bloom of Martian vegetation during the warmer months and cause plant life to become dormant during colder periods.
In July of 1965, Mariner 4, transmitted 22 close-up pictures of Mars. All that was revealed was a surface containing many craters and naturally occurring channels but no evidence of artificial canals or flowing water. Finally, in July and September 1976, Viking Landers 1 and 2 touched down on the surface of Mars. The three biology experiments aboard the landers discovered unexpected and enigmatic chemical activity in the Martian soil, but provided no clear evidence for the presence of living microorganisms in the soil near the landing sites. According to mission biologists, Mars is self-sterilizing. They believe the combination of solar ultraviolet radiation that saturates the surface, the extreme dryness of the soil and the oxidizing nature of the soil chemistry prevent the formation of living organisms in the Martian soil. The question of life on Mars at some time in the distant past remains open.
Other instruments found no sign of organic chemistry at either landing site, but they did provide a precise and definitive analysis of the composition of the Martian atmosphere and found previously undetected trace elements.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere of Mars is quite different from that of Earth. It is composed primarily of carbon dioxide with small amounts of other gases. The six most common components of the atmosphere are:
Carbon Dioxide (CO2): 95.32%
Nitrogen (N2): 2.7%
Argon (Ar): 1.6%
Oxygen (O2): 0.13%
Water (H2O): 0.03%
Neon (Ne): 0.00025 %
Martian air contains only about 1/1,000 as much water as our air, but even this small amount can condense out, forming clouds that ride high in the atmosphere or swirl around the slopes of towering volcanoes. Local patches of early morning fog can form in valleys. At the Viking Lander 2 site, a thin layer of water frost covered the ground each winter.
There is evidence that in the past a denser martian atmosphere may have allowed water to flow on the planet. Physical features closely resembling shorelines, gorges, riverbeds and islands suggest that great rivers once marked the planet.
Temperature and Pressure
The average recorded temperature on Mars is -63° C (-81° F) with a maximum temperature of 20° C (68° F) and a minimum of -140° C (-220° F).
Barometric pressure varies at each landing site on a semiannual basis. Carbon dioxide, the major constituent of the atmosphere, freezes out to form an immense polar cap, alternately at each pole. The carbon dioxide forms a great cover of snow and then evaporates again with the coming of spring in each hemisphere. When the southern cap was largest, the mean daily pressure observed by Viking Lander 1 was as low as 6.8 millibars; at other times of the year it was as high as 9.0 millibars. The pressures at the Viking Lander 2 site were 7.3 and 10.8 millibars. In comparison, the average pressure of the Earth is 1000 millibars

PLANET OF THE WEEK : earth

EARTH

Earth, also known as Tellus, is the third closet planet to the sun. It is largest of the solar system's terrestial planets and the only planetary body that modern science confirms harbors life. It has a single moon, dubbed 'the moon'.
The Earth's crust varies in thickness, usually thinner at the oceans and thicker under the continents. The inner core and crust are solid; outer core and mantle layers are plastic or semifluid.
Earth is the densest major body in the solar system.
Unlike other terrestial planets, the Earth's crust is divided into several seperate solid plates which float around independently on top of the hot mantle below. This theory is described as plate tetonics.
There are (at present) eight major plates:
North American Plate - North America, western North Atlantic and Greenland Earth's Plate Boundaries delineated by earthquake epicenters
South American Plate - South America and western South Atlantic
Antarctic Plate - Antarctica and the "Southern Ocean"
Eurasian Plate - eastern North Atlantic, Europe and Asia except for India
African Plate - Africa, eastern South Atlantic and western Indian Ocean
Indian-Australian Plate - India, Australia, New Zealand and most of Indian Ocean
Nazca Plate - eastern Pacific Ocean adjacent to South America
Pacific Plate - most of the Pacific Ocean (and the southern coast of California!)
The Earth is belived to be fairly young.
71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water. Earth is the only planet which water can exist as a liquid form on the surface. Liquid water, of course, is essential for life as we know it.
The Earth's atmosphere is made up of 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with traces of argon, carbon dioxide and water.

WINDOWS 7 IN ITS CORE

While Microsoft is still mute when it comes down to communicating details related to the first Beta of Windows 7, reportedly due either at the end of October or in mid-December 2008, the company is addressing issues such as the high definition model of the operating system.

However, taking into consideration display hardware data gathered from end users as well as the limitations imposed by GDI applications which are not DPI aware, Ryan Haveson, program manager lead on the Desktop Graphics team, revealed that establishing a default high definition model for Windows 7 is not as simple as it might appear. “Our thinking for Windows 7 was that if we enable high DPI out of the box on capable displays, we will enable users to have a full-fidelity experience and also significantly reduce eye strain for on-screen reading. There is even infrastructure available to us to detect a display’s native DPI so we can do a better job of configuring default settings out of the box. However, doing this will also open up the door to expose some issues with applications which may not be fully compatible with high DPI configurations,” Haveson explained. The high DPI infrastructure is nothing new to Windows 7. In fact, it has been around for several Windows versions, and thus a high fidelity experience would indeed be possible. Still, the implementation of the model of high definition TV could have resulted in shortcomings in relation to applications that fail to perform well under high DPI. “What we found was that one of the most significant issues was with clipped UI. Looking into this deeper, it became apparent that most of these cases were in configurations where the effective screen resolution would be quite low (800x600 or lower). Based on this, we were able to design the configuration UI in such a way that we minimized the number of cases where users would configure such a low effective resolution. One by one we looked at the categories of issues and when possible, we came up with mitigations for each bucket,” Haveson added. Microsoft indicated that Windows Vista and Windows XP had so far managed to stay away from the benefits of high DPI. Haveson's conclusion is that the fault is with the Windows operating system and not with the hardware or end users. In fact, the Redmond giant is committed to delivering a high fidelity experience with Windows 7 (1080p) in order to take advantage of the hardware capabilities already available. “We saw clearly that we had an opportunity to help users easily configure their display such that they would enjoy a high fidelity experience for media as well as crisp text rendered at an appropriate size. With that said, anytime we invest in a feature that can potentially impact the ecosystem of Windows applications we want to be careful about bringing forward your investments in software. We also want to make sure that we engage our community of ISVs early and deeply so they can take advantage of the platform work we have done to seamlessly deliver those benefits to their customers,” Haveson concluded.

TOBACCO ATTACK !!! DRUGS

BEETLES

In nature, you will come across a huge variety of beetles. They are the largest and diverse group of insects. There are a large number of species of beetles found throughout the world. Let’s know more about types of beetles.

There are about 800,000 species of insects existing on the earth. Beetles are the biggest group of insects. They can be classified as: Kingdom-Animalia (Animals), Phylum-Arthropoda (Arthropods), Class-Insecta (Insects) and Order-Coleoptera (Beetles). A meaning of Coleoptera is ‘sclerotised/sheathed wings’. Order Coleoptera is subdivided into various suborders such as Adephaga, Archpstemata, Polyphaga and Myxophaga. There are several families categorized under these suborders. There are about 30,000 known species of beetles found in USA and Canada. Beetles are found in all types of habitats including terrestrial and freshwater environments. However, they are not found in the sea or Polar Regions. Most beetles are predators, while some are scavengers and some are parasites. They generally feed on fungi and plants, parasites of vertebrate animals and other invertebrates. They break down plant and animal debris. Almost all leaf beetles are the leaf feeders and all ground beetles are mostly predaceous. Most members of the lady beetle family (family-Coccinellidae) are predators. However, few species (including the pestiferous Mexican bean beetle) are plant feeders and rests are fungus feeders. Some species of beetles are a prey of birds and mammals. Characteristics of Beetles The size of beetles is variable, ranging from 5 1/8 inches (tropical insects) to less than 1/16 in length. They can be found in water and on the land. Some species of beetles can fly and they can be identified by their rough, armor-like fore wings. These fore wings cover and protect their membranous hind wings, which are used for flying. Like all arthropods, a beetle has a segmented body. The beetle’s body is divided into three sections such as head, abdomen and thorax. From thorax, three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings arise. They have compound eyes and antennae. Beetles are characterized by a hard exoskeleton and fore wings (elytra). The exoskeleton is made from several plates, sclerites. They are separated by thin sutures, which maintains flexibility as well as creates the armored defense for the beetles. The fore wings/elytra are not used for flying, but to cover the hind body part and protect the second pair of wings called alae. The ground beetles (family-Carabidae) and true weevils (family-Curculionidae) as well as some cave and desert dwelling species are not able to fly. These species have two elytra combined together to form a solid shield over the abdomen.

VIRUS HACKING

A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the permission or knowledge of the owner. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, adware, and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability. A true virus can only spread from one computer to another (in some form of executable code) when its host is taken to the target computer; for instance because a user sent it over a network or the Internet, or carried it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB drive. Viruses can increase their chances of spreading to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer.[1][2]
The term "computer virus" is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to include all types of malware. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware, and other malicious and unwanted software), including true viruses. Viruses are sometimes confused with computer worms and Trojan horses, which are technically different. A worm can exploit security vulnerabilities to spread itself to other computers without needing to be transferred as part of a host, and a Trojan horse is a program that appears harmless but has a hidden agenda. Worms and Trojans, like viruses, may cause harm to either a computer system's hosted data, functional performance, or networking throughput, when they are executed. Some viruses and other malware have symptoms noticeable to the computer user, but many are surreptitious.
Most personal computers are now connected to the Internet and to local area networks, facilitating the spread of malicious code. Today's viruses may also take advantage of network services such as the World Wide Web, e-mail, Instant Messaging, and file sharing systems to spread.