One Wonder…

The accelerator, cheekily named Electron Machine with Many Applications or EMMA, is a ring particle accelerator, capable of accelerating electrons to about 10 or 20 MeV. That means that it can drive an electron through a voltage difference of 10 to 20 million volts, which, though large by everyday standards, is modest in terms of the particle accelerators of today. However, this is all that’s needed and the portability allows for diverse usage.

… And Another…

Scientists have long looked at a radioactive element other than Uranium as a potential candidate for producing nuclear power Thorium. Thorium research is, however, at its infancy, given that the focus of all nuclear research has focused on Uranium. Thorium is found widely, easily refined, extremely safe to handle and leaves no residue after fission.

Thorium produces about 200 times the energy produced by Uranium and produces no carbon dioxide. The only catch is that, for fission, it needs to be initiated by bombardment with charged particles, such as electrons. This is a happy handicap, since a Thorium reactor would be incapable of a meltdown. After Fukushima, this maybe the new global fool-proof safety standard.

… Get Married

Enter EMMA. EMMA can deliver the required accelerated electrons onto a Thorium core, producing energy in a process that is much more controlled than Uranium fission. It’s a free lunch, as a nation powered by only Thorium based nuclear energy would leave no carbon footprint or nuclear waste and would not run out of energy in the next 10,000 years.

Getting Slightly Technical

The miniature machine is lined with quadrupole magnets (magnets with four parts) in order to keep the particles in the beam focussed in a narrow region. It’s also a Fixed Field Alternating Gradient Accelerator (FFAG), meaning it has an alternating gradient quadrupolar magnetic field to constraint the beam to a ring. As the particles are accelerated, they tend to move in orbits of slightly larger radius, but they encounter higher magnetic fields further out.

This keeps the particles confined in a narrow beam in the orbital ring. EMMA is in conjunction with a particle injector named ALICE. ALICE (no relation with the detector at LHC, CERN) produces copious amounts of electrons and then injects them into EMMA using an injector or ‘septum’ tube at an angle of 65 degrees to the ring, which accelerates them to prescribed energies and allows it to impinge on a Thorium target.

Further, EMMA could be used for medical purposes, as envisioned in the Particle Accelerator for Medical Application (or Pamela, don’t you love these abbreviations?) project. It will focus on Cancer research.

Future?

EMMA could usher in new-generation, clean and danger-free nuclear power plants, something that is considered an oxymoron today. EMMA, developed (and currently housed) by researchers at Daresbury science park in Manchester, Britain, is also a research prototype, paving the way for more such miniature, but powerful, accelerators for heavier particles such as protons and helium nuclei.

In order to unleash the thunder in an element named after the Norse God of Thunder, Thor, what is needed is a non-polluting non-energy guzzling, miniature particle accelerator of moderate energy. Sometimes, Nature is simpler than you think.

The post Miniature Particle Accelerator Can Solve World’s Energy Crisis (And Cure Cancer) appeared first on Techie Buzz.

Yesterday, Opera software didn’t release a UNIX build of Evenes simply because, it wasn’t polished enough to be usable. Opera has long been criticized due to the lack of a native interface for UNIX and Mac. With Opera 10.5 for Mac, the developers have tried to address this issue by switching to the Cocoa framework. Similar treatment is planned for the Linux build too.

With Evenes, Opera Software will be ditching the QT framework. Yes, you would no longer need to have QT libraries installed in order to use Opera. This is expected to make Opera smaller and faster.

Opera 10.5 will be using X Window (X11) drawing primitives. However, it will also support native styling for both Gnome and KDE. The KDE build isn’t yet ready but we do have a few screenshots for GNOME users.

So, when will Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Linux be released? When it’s ready.

The post Opera 10.5 For Linux: What We Know appeared first on Techie Buzz.

Both Rovio and GetJar are fighting to keep up with the demand one of the most popular iPhone game and soon to be one of the most popular game on Android too.

If you visit GetJar right now, you will see just this message

The tremendous load on both Rovio’s website and GetJar goes on to show how popular this game is. Go birds go.

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In a post to the ext4 developer’s mailing list, Senior Engineer Michael Rubin explains that Google had been deciding upon a filesystem upgrade to their existing filesystem, and after a lot of performance testing of the available filesystems, including   xfs, ext4 and jfs, they came to a conclusion that ext4 was best suited to their needs. Although xfs performed close to ext4, the deciding factor on ext4 was that it provided an easy upgrade path from their existing ext2 filesystem to ext4.

Ext4 has become the default filesystem for several of the popular Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE and had become an official part of Linux kernel since Linux 2.6.28 kernel. ext4 features several improvements over its predecessor, amongst which include support for files upto 16 tebibytes ( 1 tebibytes equals 1,024 gibibyes , with 1gibibyte equal to 1.074 gigabytes) and a maximum volume size of upto 1 Exbibyte. Other features of the ext4 are backwards compatibility with ext2/ext3 filesystems, and a subdirectory limitation of upto 64,000 subdirectories, and an online defragmentation tool which is still under development stages, however.

Interestingly, one of ext4’s lead developer, Theodore Ts’o is also a Google employee, notes SJVN indicating that Google would most likely use his expertise in further getting even more performance out of an already fast filesystem.

The post Google Implements Ext4 Filesystem on Their Servers appeared first on Techie Buzz.

The Operation Satyagraha took place in 2008 and the investigation has been continuing ever since. Apparently, the Brazil was investigating the drives initially but they were handed over to the FBI only when they could not handle it anymore. However, the FBI has returned the drives saying it failed to decrypt the drives.

The hard drives are using an AES and TrueCrypt. The FBI has been trying a dictionary attack on the files and has failed so far. The failure to decrypt these hard drives has brought immense shame to the FBI and has exposed its weakness at dealing with the technological advancements of modern times. Funnily enough, there exists no law in Brazil to force the banker give up his passwords.

A few months ago, there was news of the FBI director missing the fact that Google earth is not real time and does not show live data. See this hilarious news  here. This proves how the security agencies in various countries are lagging behind in technology.

The post Did the FBI Fail to Decrypt a Hard Drive Encrypted with TrueCrypt? appeared first on Techie Buzz.

An Israeli company has come up with a vaccine against cancer that is both safe in terms of no side-effects and can be administered as a drug. Vaxil BioTherapeutics has developed a vaccine that is now undergoing clinical trials and not yet available in the market. It is being tested at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem and the trials could take as long as six years to conclude.

A vaccine that is also a drug

The vaccine also acts like a drug, i.e. it can be administered to a sick person as a cure. The vaccine is being tested against a form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma and it is generating enough success. Vaxil says that it could be used against other types of cancer as well, including the common prostrate and breast cancer. The primary immune technology, called VaxHit, can then be developed for other forms of cancer.

How the drug works

The problem with cancer is that the immune system of the body doesn’t know what exactly it should do. The Vaxil product, called ImMucin, trainsthe immune system to act in a specific way. Cancer cells have a marker called MUC1 that is unique to cancer cells only. ImMucin trains T-cellsof our immune system to attack only those cells that are marked by the MUC1 marker. The success rate of the vaccine has not been revealed, but it is supposedly phenomenal. The diversification of the vaccine stems from the fact that MUC1 marks more than 90% of the different cancer cells. Furthermore, since only those cells marked with MUC1 are targeted, the drug has no side-effects and is completely safe to use.

This may be the ultimate magic bullet that scientists have been working towards for a long time. However, there are still a few clinical tests to go.

The post Eureka: World’s First Vaccine and Cure For Cancer Developed by Israeli Medicine Company appeared first on Techie Buzz.

Today the world leading file sharing service 4shared.com announced its 4shared App for cell phones with Symbian S60 OS and for iPhone. Now it’s available for free download.

4shared mobile app lets its users get new possibility to access and work with data directly from their mobile phones.  It gives better connectivity and new opportunities to manage files from users’ phones from anywhere with Internet connection.

Access & download files from 4shared web account to your mobile, view and work with it anytime when needed.

The new version for mobile phones allows users to:

• Access & manage documents, music, photo, video files on 4shared web account directly from your mobile phone
• Upload files from mobile phones directly to 4shared account
• Create, rename and delete folders on your account
• Download any files from your account to your phone

4shared service has taken care of users’ need of data mobility and fast accessibility. As Michael Wilson, 4shared’s manager says:

Our App for mobile phones gives users better opportunity to easily reach their web content on 4shared account, work with data more efficiently & get access to their data when they need.

4shared focuses the attention on satisfying the fast growing need of mobile phone users to get their data from the web to personal mobile phone from any place with Internet connection. So they can view it, move & share with others in seconds.
Company has plans to release 4shared app for Windows Mobile in the nearest future too.

You can download for FREE new 4shared Mobile Application for Symbian phones from here. iPhone users can get their version of 4shared Mobile Application for FREE from here. To find out more about other benefits 4shared provides visit the official website of the service 4shared.com.

The post 4shared Releases Mobile Version For Symbian Phones And iPhone appeared first on Techie Buzz.

OpenOffice.org and The Apache Foundation

While it is a good thing that the OpenOffice.org assets are in the hands of the open source community, questions will be asked as to why Oracle choose the Apache Foundation. Regarding that decision, Luke Kowalski had this to say:

Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future. The Apache Software Foundation’s model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development.

Jim Jagielski, president, The Apache Software Foundation, has welcomed Oracle’s move to donate OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation:

We welcome highly-focused, emerging projects from individual contributors, as well as those with robust developer communities, global user bases, and strong corporate backing.

Jagielski also added that OpenOffice will be initially an Apache incubator project. Upon maturing into a Top Level Project, a committee will be formed to guide the project on its day-to-day working.

Why Apache Foundation and not The Document Foundation?

If you recall, after Oracle acquired OpenOffice.org, many of the leading OpenOffice.org contributors formed The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation requested Oracle to join them and donate the name “OpenOffice.org” to the community. Oracle snubbed them and asked them to leave OpenOffice.org instead.

They left OpenOffice.org, along with most of the other contributors, and went on to fork OpenOffice.org to form another office suite LibreOffice. LibreOffice has been very successful and most of the major Linux distributions have switched over to LibreOffice as the default office application suite.

So, considering the history between The Document Foundation and Oracle, it is not surprising that Oracle decided to ignore The Document Foundation and gave OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation.

Licensing Issues

A problem with OpenOffice.org becoming an Apache project will be the licensing issue. Apache projects uses the Apache Public License while OpenOffice.org uses the GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL) version 3. The LGPL and Apache Public License are not compatible with each other in matters regarding distribution with software under other license and distribution of derivatives.

The GNU Lesser Public License version 3 allows for the distribution of the software under LGPL with software under other license with certain restrictions. The distributor has to provide the source code of the software under LGPL along with the modifications made to it. The Apache Public License allows the distribution of the software without any such restrictions.

Regarding the derivative works, the LGPL allows their distribution only if the derivative is also under LGPL or GPL. Under the Apache Public License, the derivatives are free to choose any license as long as ‘Apache’ is not included in its name.

It will be interesting to see how this gets sorted out.

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HTC Raider runs on the Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) Operating System and it comes with a large 4.5 inch qHD display, powerful 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, etc. This handset was previously rumored as the HTC Holiday smartphone. Check out the complete specs after the break.

HTC Raider features a 4.5 inch QHD display, sporting a resolution of 540 x 960 pixels, 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) OS, HTC Sense 3.5 UI, 8 megapixel camera with auto-focus and dual LED flash, 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera for video calls, Full HD (1080p) video recording, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, 4G LTE Connectivity, etc.

It also comes with a 3.5 mm headset jack, micro-USB port, HDMI, DLNA, 1 GB RAM, 16 GB internal memory, up to 13 GB available storage, microSD card slot, 32 GB expandable memory, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, built-in GPS antenna, Android Market, up to 460 minutes talk-time, up to 293 hours stand-by time and a 1620 mAh lithium-ion battery.

This handset measures 128.8mm x 67mm x 11.27mm and weighs 163.8g. HTC Raider will be exclusively available to the SK Telecom subscribers in South Korea. The price and release date of this handset will be announced soon. HTC Raider is expected to arrive soon in the US, exclusively for the AT&T customers.

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Called NUAds, which I assume could mean Natural User Ads (NUI or Natural User Interface is something Microsoft has been talking about for quite a while.) A recent trademark application filed by Microsoft explains what NUAds is:

Advertising services, namely, promoting and marketing the goods and services of others through online interactive video games by enabling consumers to interact with third-party advertising content through voice or body gestures via computer game console and sensor devices

As the description explains, NUAds will be in-game advertisements where the user can interact with the products or features being advertised using Kinect’s body tracking and voice control. Even though a lot of us don’t like ads interrupting  our activities, adding gesture control could change the experience.

Microsoft will be having some policies on how game publishers will be using NUAds and we shall share more information as we get it.

This is the future of advertisements, Minority Report style.

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