Sci&Tech, Medical and Envir.: 29th, 30th and 31st Oct, 2011

The website of the West Bengal's Criminal Investigation Department has been hacked by the “Muslim Liberation Army,” which is supporting the cause of freedom of Kashmir.
After 9 p.m. on Saturday, visitors saw, instead of the homepage of the West Bengal CID, slogans such as “Free Kashmir,” “Freedom is our Goal” and “End the Occupation.”

Accessing each of these applications one after the other, in the usual linear fashion, is certainly inefficient and rather unwieldy. For instance, to send a message across networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus), posting the message separately on each of the services is a sheer waste of time.
A generic tool that can synergistically connect and combine different on-line services and accomplish certain specified tasks automatically could be a better solution — synergy and automation is the key. The mysteriously named service IFTTT (If This Then That) is an attempt in this direction. This innovative service allows you to tap into a specific on-line service and transfer its output to another service for accomplishing a desired goal.
IFTTT (http://ifttt.com/) can be configured to access your account with an on-line service, look for a specific feature and aspect (called trigger in IFTTT parlance) and based on the signal from this activity IFTTT can be used to trigger another action from a different application.

Five months after the World Health Organisation classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as only “possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B),” the findings of a study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) suggest no risk of brain tumour from mobile phone use.
It was found to be true even among those who used mobile phones for more than 10 years.
For various reasons, even the most robust study to find a link based on usage pattern over the last 10 years or more will not be able to arrive at a correct conclusion. For instance, older analog phones used more energy than the currently available digital versions. Moreover, the energy given off by all the latest phones is not the same, and it also varies according to the strength of the signal — more energy is emitted when the signal is poor.
Studies looking at effects from long-term usage will have little relevance to children, whose use of mobile phones has grown dramatically in recent years. Therefore, the need to adopt a precautionary approach to the use of mobile phones, especially by children, becomes extremely important.
This, despite the fact that developed countries have witnessed no sudden spurt in brain tumour incidence, and the radiowaves, unlike X-rays and gamma rays, are non-ionising in nature and do not have the energy to damage cellular DNA.

Efforts were on to increase the speed of BrahMos missiles to counter future threat from high speed cruise missiles.
‘Poorva Drishti 2011', a national seminar on India's Look East Policy
Efforts were being made to increase the speed of BrahMos-II from Mach 3 to Mach 7.
Dr. Pillai, who is also the CEO and Managing Director of BrahMos Aerospace Centre, said that the collaboration with Russia would continue. BrahMos missile was one of the most advanced in the world. He felt that the technological advances would help in countering the growing dominance of China in the South East Asian region.

The U.S. space agency on Friday launched a first-of-its kind satellite that will send back data on weather and climate to help forecasters predict major storms and other changes in the environment.
The $1.5-billion National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) took off aboard a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California
The satellite will carry five instruments to study temperature and water in the atmosphere, how clouds and aerosols affect temperature, and how plants on land and in the ocean respond to environmental changes.
It is one of 14 Earth observation missions currently being managed by NASA.
The NPP — which will circle the Earth at a height of 820 km in a polar orbit — will help fill in data gaps left by European weather observatories

China has made its first supercomputer based on Chinese microprocessor chips, an advance that surprised high-performance U.S. computing specialists.
The new machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province in eastern China.
it is composed of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai.
Currently, the Chinese are about three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by world leaders such as the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Last fall, another Chinese based supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, created an international sensation when it was briefly ranked as the world's fastest, before it was displaced in the spring by a rival Japanese machine, the K Computer, designed by Fujitsu.
But the Tianhe was built from processor chips made by U.S. companies, Intel and Nvidia, though its internal switching system was designed by Chinese computer engineers. Similarly, the K computer was based on Sparc chips, originally designed at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley.
To build such a computer from existing components would require immense amounts of electricity roughly the amount produced by a medium-sized nuclear power plant.