A Thought for Today-147: November 18, 2007

The best way to forget your problems is to help someone solve his - God's Little Devotional Book

A Thought for Today-146: November 17, 2007

The heart is the happiest when it beats for others - God's Little Devotional Book

A Thought for Today-145: November 16, 2007

Language is the expression of thought. Every time you speak, your mind is on parade - God's Little Devotional Book

A Thought for Today-144: November 15, 2007

Laziness and Poverty are cousins - God's Little Devotional Book

A Thought for Today-143: November 14, 2007

You can win more friends with your ears than with your mouth - God's Little Devotional Book

A Thought for Today-142: November 13, 2007

Don't be afraid of pressure. Remember that pressure is what turns a lump of coal into a diamond - God's Little Devotional Book

A Thought for Today-141: November 12, 2007

Age is a matter of living, not of years - Cicero

A Thought for Today-140: November 11, 2007

The greatest truths are the simplest and so are the greatest men - Hare

A Thought for Today-139: November 10, 2007

Yesterday is a cancelled cheque; Tomorrow is a promissory note; Today is the only cash you have. So spend it wisely - Kay Lyons

A Thought for Today-138: November 9, 2007

Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plain living and high thinking, the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man's happiness really lies in contentment - Mahatma Gandhi

A Thought for Today-137: November 8, 2007

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds - Mark Twain

A Thought for Today-136: November 7, 2007

If you restore confidence in the hearts of people, they can work wonders - Napoleon

A Thought for Today-135: November 6, 2007

A sincere, balance and kind attitude towards ourselves as well as others is the key to happiness and success in life's all avenues - Janos Selye

A Thought for Today-134: November 5, 2007

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions - Chanakya

A Thought for Today-133: November 4, 2007

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful - Dr.Samuel Johnson

Letters-3: What Progress?

"..... Impatience, impatience, impolite behaviour seems to be the order of the day. "Might is right" is followed on the roads and other public places. Though our brains have progressed, our "hearts" have not. The need of the hour is periodic refresher courses in moral science!" - From a letter from N.R.Archana (by e-mail) to the Editor, The Hindu, Madurai, April 1, 2007.

Grateful thanks to Ms Archana and The Hindu.

Facts and Figures-11: Salt and Fresh Water

97% of all the water on earth is salty. Only 3% is fresh water. Of that 3%, over 2% is frozen in ice sheets and glaciers. And that means that less than 1% of that 3% fresh water is found in lakes, rivers and underground.

Courtesy: Adyar Talk, August 18-24, 2007

Eyecatchers-44 : Striking Back at Fear - AP

Science is getting a grip on people's fears. Scientists say they now know better what is going on inside our brains when a spook jumps out and scares us. Knowing how fear rules the brain should lead to treatments for a major medical problem: when irrational fears go haywire.

Millions of people suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A Harvard Medical School study estimated the annual cost to the U.S.economy in 1999 at roughly $ 42 billion.

Fear is a basic primal emotion that is key to the evolutionary survival. It is something that human beings share with animals. Genetics plays a big role in the development of overwhelming - and needless - fear, psychologists say. But so do traumatic events.

Scientists figure they can improve the fear-dampening process by learning how fear runs through the brain and body.

The fear hot-spot is the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the deep brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the deep brain. The amygdala is not responsible for all of people's fear response, but it is like the burglar alarm that connects to everything else, said Elizabeth Phelps, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University - AP

With grateful thanks to: AP and The Hindu (Madurai edn, November 1, 2007)

Eyecatchers-43 : The Nano-race Hots Up! - AFP

A revolution ahead in data storage, say IT experts.

The world's smallest hard drives have already shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, but nanoscale computing may soon make that achievement look elephantine, say some of the stars of information technology.

Breathtaking change is on the horizon in personal and industrial data storage, the experts say in a review of the vanguard technology, being published in the journal, NATURE MATERIALS.

The latest developments in "spintronix", for example, are poised to go beyond the electrical charge of classic electronics to harness the quantum "spin" state of electrons, writes Albert Fert, co-winner last month of the Nobel Prize for Physics. That could usher in dramatic advances in hard disk storage capacity and retrieval, says Professor Fert.

Along with Peter Gruenberg of Germany, Frenchman Professor Fert was lauded for discovering the principle called giant magnetoresistance(GMR), that lies at the heart of the past decade's most popular electronic devices, from iPods to cell phones to Blackberries.

Professor Fert's new holy grail - called Magnetic Random Access Memory(MRAM) - could essentially collapse the disk drive and computer chip into one, vastly expanding both processing power and storage capacity.

"MRAM potentially combines key advantages such as non-volatility, infinite endurance and fast random access - down to five nanoseconds read/write time - that make it a likely candidate for becoming the 'universal memory' of nanoelectronics," forecast Professor Fert and his colleagues.

Experimental engineers at IBM, which was the first company to commercialise GMR devices, are already hard at work on this new generation disk-drives, which promise to boost data storage by a factor of a hundred.

The race for space is driven by consumer hunger for data-rich formats such as on-demand television and high-definition video.

But keeping pace with demand depends on a constant stream of technological breakthroughs, and until recently it seemed that certain chokepoints - such as the size of transistors - were finally going to disprove Moore's Law.

More than forty years ago, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double roughly every 24 years, a prediction that has largely held true ever since.

"We literally got to the stage where we could not make it any smaller," Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner said in an interview with Nature.

The transistor, which is used as an amplifier or as an electrically controlled switch, is the fundamental building block of the circuitry in computers and most consumer electronic devices.

But an innovation in materials - a nanoscale changeover from silicon to metals inside transistor "gate" - has given rise to "the dawn of a new era," Rattner said.

Nature's review of state-of-the-art storage technology includes a survey of advances in the materials used for making rewritable optical disks, giving rise to the development of high-definition DVDs and Blu-ray.

Blu-ray is an optical disk format jointly developed by many of the world's leading consumer electronics and media manufacturers including Apple, Dell, Hitachi and a dozen others.

The format enables recording and rewriting and playback of high-definition video, as well as five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs.

Finally, Charles Lieber and Wei Lu of Harvard University discuss the so-called "bottom up" assembly of nanotubes and nanowires in electronic circuits that could one day possibly replace silicon technology in nanoelectronics - AFP

With grateful thanks to: AFP and The Hindu (Madurai edn, Nov.1, 2007)

Eyecatchers-42 : Record-setting Black Hole - AFP

American astronomers have discovered the biggest black hole orbiting a star 1.8 million light years from earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. It has a record-setting mass 24 to 33 times that of the sun.

Stellar-mass black holes have such powerful gravity fields that not even light can escape them. Astronomers estimate their mass by measuring their gas emissions and the gravitational effect on the stars they orbit.

Excerpt from The Hindu, Madurai, November 1, 2007

Grateful thanks to: AFP and The Hindu