Microsoft Acquires Nokia’s Devices & Services Business

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"Microsoft Acquires Nokia’s Devices & Services Business"

             Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation Tuesday announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents, and license and use Nokia’s mapping services.
             Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will pay EUR 3.79 billion to purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, and EUR 1.65 billion to license Nokia’s patents, for a total transaction price of EUR 5.44 billion (approximately $7.2 billion or Rs. 47,000 crores, as per Tuesday’s exchange rate) in cash. Microsoft will draw upon its overseas cash resources to fund the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014, subject to approval by Nokia’s shareholders, regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.

“It’s a bold step into the future – a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies. Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft’s share and profits in phones, and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive officer. “In addition to their innovation and strength in phones at all price points, Nokia brings proven capability and talent in critical areas such as hardware design and engineering, supply chain and manufacturing management, and hardware sales, marketing and distribution.”

             Microsoft also announced that it has selected Finland as the home for a new data center that will serve Microsoft consumers in Europe. The company said it would invest more than a quarter-billion dollars in capital and operation of the new data center over the next few years, with the potential for further expansion over time.

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3D-printed toothbrush ‘perfectly’ cleans your teeth in just six seconds

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"3D-printed toothbrush ‘perfectly’ cleans your teeth in just six seconds"

             No, it isn’t the misshapen genitalia of the eponymous creature from the Alien movies: It’s a 3D-printed toothbrush that promises to give you “perfectly clean teeth” in just six seconds, with optimum plaque removal and protection of gums.
             Called the Blizzident, it is essentially a custom-made toothbrush that’s perfectly formed to the shape of your teeth. You go to your dentist, get a 3D scan of your mouth, and then upload the model to the Blizzident website. The company uses a 3D printer to create an inverse mold of your mouth, and then attaches “soft, ultrafine bristles” to the mold to turn it into a toothbrush. (See: What is 3D printing?) To brush your teeth, you apparently just insert the Blizzident and then bite and grind your teeth 15 times — which takes roughly six seconds. Because the toothbrush is so perfectly formed, and because there are so many bristles, it cleans your teeth perfectly.
             Rounding out the technical details, the Blizzident costs $300, and you’ll need to replace it every year ($160 for a new one, or $90 to have your current one refurbished with new bristles). Getting a scan from your dentist will probably cost between $100 and $200. To brush your teeth, you put toothpaste on your tongue, move it over your upper teeth, and then the act of biting and grinding will let the toothpaste flow over your lower teeth. The Blizzident apparently cleans your tongue, too, and the cleaning process (the Bass technique) is so perfect that you apparently don’t need to speed much time flossing. Blizzident is also usable by kids (but their teeth move around, so it’ll cost you dearly to get new molds made regularly).




Source: Extremetech.com
             The appeal of the Blizzident, of course, beyond having perfectly clean teeth, is the massive time saving. If you brush and floss your teeth properly, it should take you around 10 minutes per day; with Blizzident and some basic flossing, it takes a total of 60 seconds per day. Saving nine minutes per day equates to 3285 minutes — just under 55 hours — per year. If you’re the kind of person who wished that days were a bit longer, the Blizzident may be exactly what you’re looking for.
             At this point we should note that the makers of Blizzident haven’t yet published any clinical trials for the new toothbrush, but they’re coming “soon.” Not that you really need FDA approval for a toothbrush, but in case you’re concerned, the plastics used in the production process have FDA approval. Some comments made by dentists elsewhere on the internet suggest that the Blizzident might be good at cleaning your teeth, but the short brushing duration might not give the fluoride in your toothpaste time to sink into your teeth. Mostly, though, the overwhelming reaction towards Blizzident is that people want to see it in action, with some real-world testing, before they spend $300 of their hard-earned dollars.

Pictures

Source: Extremetech.com

10 Coolest Non-Planetary Objects In Our Solar System

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"10 Coolest Non-Planetary Objects In Our Solar System"

10. The Asteroid With Its Own Moon

             Logic would dictate that anything smaller than a planet doesn’t have the gravitational pull to hold onto a moon, but that's not always the case. Enter 243 Ida, an asteroid that’s only 30 kilometers (19 mi) across when you measure it the longest possible way. Ida has a tiny,1.6-kilometer (1 mi) moon orbiting it (Dactyl). It’s the first binary system of asteroids that we found and the only one we’ve done a close enough flyby of to get clear pictures, but we’ve since discovered over a dozen binary asteroids.

9. lo

             If ever there was a world that should remind you of Hell, it’s Jupiter’s moon Io. Seeming more like something out of Middle Earth than reality, Io has more volcanic activity than any body in our solar system. This geologic activity is caused by the intense tidal forces between Io and Jupiter, which are constantly pulling and stretching the moon.The eruptions on Io can be enormous, coating over 30 square kilometers (11.6 sq mi) in volcanic material, and they can be seen from space. Io’s route through Jupiter’s magnetosphere causes it to generate great amounts of electricity that make lightning storms in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. But don’t think Jupiter gets the worst of this interaction—its intense magnetic belts strip 1,000 kilograms of material off of Io every second. This has the added effect of supercharging Jupiter’s magnetosphere, effectively doubling its size.

8.Pluto Isn’t Anything Like We Thought

             Despite how long we’ve known Pluto existed, we know surprisingly little about the dwarf planet. For example, that photo up there? That’s the clearest image of Pluto we have, and even that is cobbled together from several shots.
             This is because space is big—staggeringly, stupid, crazy big. At its absolute closest, Pluto is 4.2 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles) away, which is a number so big that our brains don’t really know what it means. The most powerful telescopes we have only give us a grainy, out-of-focus image at that enormous of a distance.
             But these images are sharp enough to tell us that Pluto is nothing like we first imagined: a boring hunk of rock. It’s surface is a carbon-rich mixture of white, black, and dark orange, and we’ve observed the poles lightening and darkening over time. Our best guess at present is that these are seasonal changes, spurred on by the distant sun that sublimates surface methane and flings it into the atmosphere (yeah, it has one of those, too).

7.Mimas

             That’s no moon . . . actually, it is. You’re looking at Mimas, a moon of Saturn and one of the most heavily cratered objects in the solar system. It also happens to look just like the Death Star. And before you say, “Well, clearly Mimas was the inspiration for the Death Star,” we’ll just mention that the crater wasn’t discovered until three years after Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
             Mimas is also quite mysterious; its orbit is closer to Saturn than Enceladus (its icy neighbor). Both moons are composed almost entirely of ice, but only Enceladus is tidally heated by Saturn enough to melt the ice and create geysers that shoot water into space. This doesn’t make a lot of sense because Mimas is much closer to Saturn, and its orbit is less circular, which should mean it experiences more heating than Enceladus. We have no idea why it doesn’t.

6.Ganymede

             Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and it’s even larger than the planet Mercury—meaning it’d be a planet if it were orbiting the Sun instead of Jupiter. It has its own magnetic field as well, something that no other moon can claim.
             t also has a thin oxygen atmosphere, but it’s nowhere near thick enough to support life. Ganymede’s craters are very flat when compared to most moons, which suggests geologic activity below the surface—not surprising for something so large and so close to Jupiter.

5.Saturn’s Enormous Ring

             The one thing everyone thinks of when Saturn is mentioned is its vast array of rings. And while it’s certainly not the only planet with a ring system, they’re definitely the most spectacular example. What we didn’t know until recently is that Saturn’s ring system extends much farther than we first thought.
             The ring, made of dust and ice, has eluded discovery for so long because it’s almost invisible, and if you don’t look at it in infrared, it’s easy to miss. The sheer size of the ring is hard to visualize—it begins 6 million kilometers (3.7 million miles) from Saturn and extends all the way out to 12 million kilometers (7.5 million miles). It’s 20 times as thick as the planet’s height, and Saturn isn’t small. You’d have to use one billion Earths to fill the space the ring takes up.

4.The Solar System Limits

             As much as we’ve learned about our solar system, there are still simple questions that we just can’t answer. You know, questions like “how large is this thing anyway?” When you were in school, you probably learned that Pluto was the farthest thing from the Sun in our solar system. But then we discovered Eris, the largest known dwarf planet (and the object that made us revoke Pluto’s planethood), twice the distance Pluto is from the Sun. What’s beyond that? The Oort Cloud, a spherical “cloud” of comets near the edge of the Sun’s reach.
             And beyond that? Well, in 1977, we launched two deep space probes (Voyager 1 and Voyager 2). They’re still in contact with us 36 years later, and we only just realized that Voyager 1 left the solar system. Simply put, the presence of plasma coming from other stars has indicated that the probe finally made it out, and . . . we don’t know a whole lot more just yet. Now we just need to get as much data as possible before it runs out of power (projected to happen around 2025).

3.Hyperion

             Hyperion which looks a lot like a sponge, is the largest moon in the solar system that isn’t spherical. It never rotates quite the same way because Titan, a nearby moon, keeps pulling it in different directions.
             Hyperion’s density is just above half the density of water (so it would float, provided a large enough ocean), which is the reason for its spongy appearance; anything that collides with the moon penetrates deeper because of Hyperion’s low density. A spongy moon that floats on water—now we just need to find one that looks like a bar of soap. Oh, we already found one? Good work, NASA.

2.Ceres

             Ceres (lower-left in the above image) is the only dwarf planet in the “main” part of the solar system. It’s located in the asteroid belt and hogs up all the material in the area (it makes up one-third of all the belt’s matter). Imagine we had the capability to launch the state of Texas into space, and you’ll have a general idea of how large Ceres is, but probably a disproportionate idea of how many guns it has.
             Because of the ambiguous definition of “asteroid,” it’s the only dwarf planet in the solar system that is also an asteroid—the largest in the belt. Ceres likely has more water below its surface than all of the Earth’s oceans combined.

1.Space

             There are so many awesome things in our solar system that we often forget how empty it really is. They call it “space” for a reason. That’s what it mostly is: empty space. (That’s an image of the Earth and the Moon up there—just look at all that room.)
             The Sun itself is 99.8 percent of all the mass in the solar system. Logically, that means that everything else—the enormous gas giants; every asteroid, comet, and meteoroid; and smaller planets like Earth—comprise only 0.2 percent of the matter, most of which is Jupiter.
             The Sun itself, which is so large that its volume is 600 times greater than everything in the solar system combined, is less than one-trillionth of a percent of the entire solar system’s volume. There’s so much empty space in our solar system that it’s impossible for the human mind to truly grasp it.

Source: Listverse.com

NASA releases images of pakistan's "EarthQuake Island"

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NASA releases images of pakistan's "EarthQuake Island"





Amidst the destruction caused by the devastating earthquake in Pakistan
that killed more than 500 people, a new island emerged from the depth of
the sea. NASA has released images of the newly formed islet.


NASA has released before and after photos of a new terrestrial body that was
born on September 24 during a quake that struck Pakistan.


Called Zalzala Jazeera, or a an earthquake island, the terrestrial formation can
now be found 380 kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter in Paddi Zirr Bay near
Swadar, Pakistan in the Arabian Sea.


The first image of the island was taken by NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite on
September 26, while the second snapshot shows the same bay on April 17 with water and
no landmass around the coordinates that the new island now inhabits.








Photo from: Library of most controversial files and NASA







Photo from: Library of most controversial files and NASA



According to scientists, the depth of the water level around Zalzala Jazeera
stands at about 15 to 20 meters, stretching 75 to 90 meters across. It lies
approximately one mile from the shore. Scientists say the island is nothing more
than just a pile of mud, sand and solid rock that was caused by the forces of highly
pressurized gas.


“The island is really just a big pile of mud from the seafloor that got pushed up.
This area of the world seems to see so many of these features because the geology is
correct for their formation. You need a shallow, buried layer of pressurized gas—methane,
carbon dioxide, or something else—and fluids. When that layer becomes disturbed by
seismic waves (like an earthquake), the gases and fluids become buoyant and rush to the
surface,bringing the rock and mud with them,” Bill Barnhart, a geologist at the
US Geological Survey told NASA’s Earth Observatory.


The Earth Observatory says this is not the first island to have surfaced along the
700-kilometer-long coast over the past century. Scientists predict that the
new island will remain above surface for up to a year before sinking back into
the Arabian sea.


The island rose out of the water during a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Balochistan,
just 69 km north-northeast of Awaran - the nearest Pakistani city - on 24 September 2013.
Over 300,000 people were affected by the quake, which caused over 500 deaths, and some 21,000
houses were destroyed.








People use boats as they visit an island that rose from the sea following an earthquake, off Pakistan's Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea September 25, 2013.(Reuters / Stringer)

Invisible alien probes “could already be” in our solar system

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Invisible alien probes “could already be” in our solar system





By Rob Waugh
Fleets of robotic space probes from alien civilisations could already
have arrived in our solar system, a mathematical study has found.


The study quotes scientists who warn that we may not be able to detect
them with our technology – the probes may also be so hi-tech they can
“conceal” themselves.


Earth’s own Voyager probe has only just reached the edge or our solar system
– but older alien civilisations could have launched probes long ago, using
knowledge far beyond ours, “slingshotting” round stars using their gravity,
according to a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology.


Duncan Forgan and Arwen Nicholson of the University of Edinburgh analysed how a
“fleet” of probes could travel through space – and says that probes which
“self-replicate”, building new versions of themselves from gas and dust in space,
would have had time to arrive here already.


But the fact we have not seen any may mean our galaxy is a lonely place,
Dr Forgan warns, “The fact we haven’t seen probes of this type makes it
difficult to believe that probe building civilisations have existed in
the Milky Way in the last few million years”


The probes would only need to travel around 10% of the speed of light to
explore our whole galaxy within 10 million years.

Source: http://usahitman.com/iapcaboss/#more-56743

The Mysterious Cones of the Egyptian Desert Breath

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The Mysterious Cones of the Egyptian Desert

Image from Panoramio is by voutsen

Image from Wikipedia

On March 7, 1997, the construction of Desert Breath was completed.
At same moment the work was turned over to forces of nature to begin the
slow process of its absorption by the landscape.
The systematic documentation of this process is as important to Desert
Breath as the displacement of sand that was used to create it. The installation
becomes through its slow disintegration, instrument to measure the passage of time.


The Desert Breath, located in the Egyptian desert near Hurghada
on the Red Sea coast, is a double-spiral extra-large piece of art.


It was created by a group of three artists - Danae Stratou, Sculptor,
Alexandra Stratou, Industrial Designer, and Stella Constantinides,
architect. The work, completed on March 7, 1997, covers an area of
about 360 metres by 300 metres and consists of 89 protruding cones,
of gradually increasing size, set in a spiral and another 89
depressed (incised) cones set in a second spirals. At the centre
of these two spirals is a pair of two large cones with protruding
cone fitting inside the incised one. When filled with water,
it gives an impression of a micro island in a small circular lake.



The sand dug out from the depressed cones was used to create
the protruding cones. The artwork is subject to natural erosion
and in due course the area will revert to original desert plain.