Modular Snake Robot!

Now this is a cool project J

 

http://youtube.com/watch?v=T62E-_pQt3c

 

TU Delft tests windmill for seawater desalination

TU Delft tests windmill for seawater desalination
29 February 2008 by M&C

Press release – A traditional windmill which drives a pump: that is the simple concept behind the combination of windmill/reverse osmosis developed by the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands. In this case, it involves a high-pressure pump which pushes water through a membrane using approximately 60 bar. This reverse osmosis membrane produces fresh water from seawater directly. The windmill is suited for use by, for instance, small villages in isolated, dry coastal areas.

The combination of windmills and desalination installations is already commercially available. These windmills produce electricity from wind power, the electricity is stored and subsequently used to drive the high-pressure pump for the reverse osmosis installation. The storage of electricity in particular is very expensive. Energy is also lost during conversion.
In the TU Delft installation, the high-pressure pump is driven directly by wind power. Water storage can be used to overcome calm periods. The storage of water is after all a great deal cheaper than that of electricity.

Robust
The chosen windmill is normally used for irrigation purposes. These windmills turn relatively slowly and are also very robust. On the basis of the windmill’s capacity at varying wind speeds, it is estimated that it will produce 5 to 10 m3 of fresh water per day: enough drinking water for a small village of 500 inhabitants. A water reservoir will have to ensure that enough water is available for a calm period lasting up to five days. Three safeguards (in the event of the installation running dry, a low number of revolutions or a high number of revolutions) are also performed mechanically so that no electricity is needed.

Prototype
The first prototype has been built and is already working at a location near the A13 motorway near Delft. This prototype is to be dismantled and transported to Curaçao the first week of March. There the concept will be tested on seawater.

More information
The research is being sponsored by Mr Grootscholten, Aqua-for-All, Hatenboer and SenterNovem. Please see www.drinkingwiththewind.nl for more information.
Bas Heijman, Drinking Water research group, faculty of Civil Engineering & Geosciences, +31 (0)15-278 4282, s.g.j.heijman@tudelft.nl
Evgenia Rabinovitch, e.n.rabinovitch@gmail.com
TU Delft Science Information Officer Roy Meijer, +31 (0)15-278 1751, r.e.t.meijer@tudelft.nl

 

He Fainted, why? :)

He Fainted, why?

A well-known cardiologist died, and was given an elaborate funeral. A huge heart covered in flowers stood behind the casket during the service. Following the eulogy, the heart opened, and the casket rolled inside. The heart closed, sealing the doctor in the beautiful heart forever. At that point one of the mourners burst into laughter. When confronted, he said, "I'm sorry, I was just thinking of my own funeral; “I'm a gynecologist." at that point, the proctologist fainted.

 

Anyone interested in moving to New Zealand?

 

No dating, thanks, just sex

By KAREN ARNOLD - Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 02 March 2008

ON THE TOWN: Does alcohol fuel one-night stands among Kiwi women?

Dating culture is dead - instead, young New Zealand women are regularly getting drunk and cruising around in packs looking for men to have sex with.

That's one of the findings of a TVNZ Sunday investigation into the sexual behaviour of New Zealand women. The programme makers did the story after Kiwi women last year topped the Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey as the world's most promiscuous.

They are reported to have an average of 20 sexual partners, double that of their Australian and British counterparts and almost three times the global average of seven.

TVNZ Sunday correspondent Janet McIntyre said there was anecdotal evidence from the five women on the show that the Durex survey findings were valid.

"There's a new kind of mating ritual sex is the point of entry into the relationship."

If the first-up sex wasn't any good women weren't prepared to waste their time progressing the relationship.

"There's no dating culture any more." In candid interviews about their sexual experiences some of the women who are all in their twenties felt empowered by having sex and wanted to celebrate and enjoy it.

McIntyre said all the women who had experienced one-night stands had been affected by alcohol, a term described by at least one expert in a report as "getting pissed and hooking up".

Men are also feeling the impact from the new sexual tactics being employed by women.

The Sunday Star-Times' Being a Bloke survey last year found that 29% of the 5000 men surveyed felt they had been pressured into having sex or had had sex unwillingly. 

 

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4422794a11.html

 

AMD opens up its cores-hopes to stimulate development of multi-threaded software

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2210036/amd-opens-cores

 

AMD's announcement that it is making its performance library available as open-source code should stimulate the development of multi-threaded software.

 

The library contains more than 3,200 software routines which can be used by developers to tailor software to take advantage of multi-core chips. The open source version of the library will be known as Framewave 1.0.

 

The library will also be compatible with Intel's libraries, meaning that developers can write one set of code which will be optimised for CPUs from both companies.

 

By allowing full access to the library, AMD hopes that developers will more readily integrate multi-threading capabilities into their applications to allow software to take better advantage of the latest quad-core chips.

 

Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions and software strategy at AMD, told vnunet.com that, while some developers have easily adapted their code to the new chips, others have not been so eager to embrace multi-threading.

 

Lewis explained that applications written for large multi-processor systems are much easier to optimise.

 

"A lot of applications that come over from the server world have been written for multi-core systems," she said. "When you get out of that range you get into code that is not multi-threaded by nature and it becomes a challenge."

 

AMD hopes that by giving developers unfettered access to the performance library, a new base of open source code will be developed which can be plugged into future applications.

 

However, Lewis does not see the move to multi-threaded code being a quick and painless process.

 

"I do not think anyone thought this was going to be instantaneous," she said. "It is easier for developers to create new code that is multi-threaded, so we think there is going to be a migration."

Guantanamo Comes to Main Street U.S.A.

(You got to watch this video!)When will we realize that if we allow the rights of some to be ignored, we ultimately harm ourselves? Today we are all at risk.The video is extremely disturbing and shows a female crime victim forceably stripped of her clothes by several police officers, including at least two male officers.

read more | digg story

Guantanamo Comes to Main Street U.S.A. (disturbing vodeo of police brutality)

(You got to watch this video!)When will we realize that if we allow the rights of some to be ignored, we ultimately harm ourselves? Today we are all at risk.The video is extremely disturbing and shows a female crime victim forceably stripped of her clothes by several police officers, including at least two male officers.

read more | digg story

Artificial sweeteners linked to weight gain

Cutting the connection between sweets and calories may confuse the body, making it harder to regulate intake

WASHINGTON — Want to lose weight? It might help to pour that diet soda down the drain. Researchers have laboratory evidence that the widespread use of no-calorie sweeteners may actually make it harder for people to control their intake and body weight. The findings appear in the February issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Psychologists at Purdue University’s Ingestive Behavior Research Center reported that relative to rats that ate yogurt sweetened with glucose (a simple sugar with 15 calories/teaspoon, the same as table sugar), rats given yogurt sweetened with zero-calorie saccharin later consumed more calories, gained more weight, put on more body fat, and didn’t make up for it by cutting back later, all at levels of statistical significance.

Authors Susan Swithers, PhD, and Terry Davidson, PhD, surmised that by breaking the connection between a sweet sensation and high-calorie food, the use of saccharin changes the body’s ability to regulate intake. That change depends on experience. Problems with self-regulation might explain in part why obesity has risen in parallel with the use of artificial sweeteners. It also might explain why, says Swithers, scientific consensus on human use of artificial sweeteners is inconclusive, with various studies finding evidence of weight loss, weight gain or little effect. Because people may have different experiences with artificial and natural sweeteners, human studies that don’t take into account prior consumption may produce a variety of outcomes.

Three different experiments explored whether saccharin changed lab animals’ ability to regulate their intake, using different assessments –the most obvious being caloric intake, weight gain, and compensating by cutting back.

The experimenters also measured changes in core body temperature, a physiological assessment. Normally when we prepare to eat, the metabolic engine revs up. However, rats that had been trained to respond using saccharin (which broke the link between sweetness and calories), relative to rats trained on glucose, showed a smaller rise in core body temperate after eating a novel, sweet-tasting, high-calorie meal. The authors think this blunted response both led to overeating and made it harder to burn off sweet-tasting calories.

“The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with a higher-calorie sugar,” the authors wrote.

The authors acknowledge that this outcome may seem counterintuitive and might not come as welcome news to human clinical researchers and health-care practitioners, who have long recommended low- or no-calorie sweeteners. What’s more, the data come from rats, not humans. However, they noted that their findings match emerging evidence that people who drink more diet drinks are at higher risk for obesity and metabolic syndrome, a collection of medical problems such as abdominal fat, high blood pressure and insulin resistance that put people at risk for heart disease and diabetes.

Why would a sugar substitute backfire? Swithers and Davidson wrote that sweet foods provide a “salient orosensory stimulus” that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isn’t followed by lots of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would.

The good news, Swithers says, is that people can still count calories to regulate intake and body weight. However, she sympathizes with the dieter’s lament that counting calories requires more conscious effort than consuming low-calorie foods.

Swithers adds that based on the lab’s hypothesis, other artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame K, which also taste sweet but do not predict the delivery of calories, could have similar effects. Finally, although the results are consistent with the idea that humans would show similar effects, human study is required for further demonstration.

 

Saudi woman arrested for meeting man

Do you think Laura Bush will start a campaign to support the women of Saudi Arabia now? I don't thinks so==========================================================A BUSINESSWOMAN was detained and strip-searched by Saudi Arabia's religious police for sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop with an unrelated man, taboo in the country.Yesterday's incident came just days after a UN report blasted the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom for widespread discrimination against women and as a UN expert on women's rights began a visit to the country.It also came as a Saudi princess announced a scholarship to promote women in journalism, saying "women journalists are best placed to promote cultural communication between men and women in Saudi society".The English-language Arab News today quoted a 40-year-old financial consultant, named only as Yara, as saying she was arrested by members of the powerful Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.She said she was holding a business meeting with the man in a branch of Starbucks in Riyadh, in a section reserved for families.

read more | digg story

Fwd: Want a bigger baby-maker?

Of all the smaps I have received, this one was the funniest one. I really don't understand what these guys were thinking, but sure it is funny.

gautam_fms@straightteeth.com wrote:

From: <gautam_fms@straightteeth.com>
To: <ny_farhad@yahoo.com>
Subject: Want a bigger baby-maker?
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 14:02:13 +0530

Our experts advise <web site removed>

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