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At 8:08 a.m. on October 24, NASA took a revolutionary step with the launch of the New Millennium Program’s Deep Space One (DS1) mission. DS1 will fly by asteroid 1992KD in July 1999 and will then be on a trajectory toward comet 19P/Borrelly (see Figure 1). The target bodies are not what makes DS1 revolutionary, however. NASA has flown missions past comets and asteroids before. Rather, the pioneering role of DS1 is in paving the way for future, even more exciting, science missions by testing a host of new, advanced technologies that are unproven in deep space.

Artist’s conception of the DS1 spacecraft. The color of the xenon gas rocket plume in the drawing reasonably approximates the true color of the plume as observed in laboratory test facilities.

The primary objective of the New Millennium Program is to identify and validate in flight the technologies that hold great promise for revolutionizing observations both in deep space and in Earth orbit. However, because these technologies have not been demonstrated in space they are perceived to have a fairly high risk to missions that use them for the first time. So to help reduce the costs and risks to future missions that might use them, the program will send a series of dedicated “technology demonstration” missions into deep space and around Earth.

The program’s solicitation of advanced technologies for space flight demonstration also stimulates their development and will strengthen the nation’s technological infrastructure, making it more competitive in the global market. Many of these technologies also will have commercial spinoffs that will benefit the public in its daily life. The innovations to be demonstrated on DS1 are among the foundation technologies expected to support the next generation of deep space missions. Foremost among these is solar electric propulsion (SEP). In the next century, it is expected that SEP will make possible a whole class of ambitious missions that are simply impractical or unaffordable with standard chemical propulsion systems. DS1 will also test 11 other technologies including a multispectral imager and an integrated space physics ensemble.

The ion drive was started first on November 10, and after performing successfully for 4 « minutes, it autonomously shut down. Engineers familiar with ion drives had seen this behavior 20 times before when starting similar systems in space. It was also seen in laboratory experiments. In all 20 cases, the drive successfully resumed operations after remedial actions were taken. In most cases, these start-up problems involve minute particles that become jammed between the electrodes which make up the grid. On November 23, the ion drive started again and has been running continuously ever since. The DS1 spacecraft is slowly accelerating on its trajectory to its next target Asteroid 1992KD

At 8:08 a.m. on October 24, NASA took a revolutionary step with the launch of the New Millennium Program’s Deep Space One (DS1) mission. DS1 will fly by asteroid 1992KD in July 1999 and will then be on a trajectory toward comet 19P/Borrelly (see Figure 1). The target bodies are not what makes DS1 revolutionary, however. NASA has flown missions past comets and asteroids before. Rather, the pioneering role of DS1 is in paving the way for future, even more exciting, science missions by testing a host of new, advanced technologies that are unproven in deep space.

Artist’s conception of the DS1 spacecraft. The color of the xenon gas rocket plume in the drawing reasonably approximates the true color of the plume as observed in laboratory test facilities.

The primary objective of the New Millennium Program is to identify and validate in flight the technologies that hold great promise for revolutionizing observations both in deep space and in Earth orbit. However, because these technologies have not been demonstrated in space they are perceived to have a fairly high risk to missions that use them for the first time. So to help reduce the costs and risks to future missions that might use them, the program will send a series of dedicated “technology demonstration” missions into deep space and around Earth.

The program’s solicitation of advanced technologies for space flight demonstration also stimulates their development and will strengthen the nation’s technological infrastructure, making it more competitive in the global market. Many of these technologies also will have commercial spinoffs that will benefit the public in its daily life. The innovations to be demonstrated on DS1 are among the foundation technologies expected to support the next generation of deep space missions. Foremost among these is solar electric propulsion (SEP). In the next century, it is expected that SEP will make possible a whole class of ambitious missions that are simply impractical or unaffordable with standard chemical propulsion systems. DS1 will also test 11 other technologies including a multispectral imager and an integrated space physics ensemble.

The ion drive was started first on November 10, and after performing successfully for 4 « minutes, it autonomously shut down. Engineers familiar with ion drives had seen this behavior 20 times before when starting similar systems in space. It was also seen in laboratory experiments. In all 20 cases, the drive successfully resumed operations after remedial actions were taken. In most cases, these start-up problems involve minute particles that become jammed between the electrodes which make up the grid. On November 23, the ion drive started again and has been running continuously ever since. The DS1 spacecraft is slowly accelerating on its trajectory to its next target Asteroid 1992KD

So your cell phone can take and send pictures, even video. You can text message and download ringtones and games. Maybe you can even watch a little television and do some limited web browsing. But if you’re a person who’s been using mobile phones for a number of years, you can appreciate just how far they’ve come since the early days when we carried around bricks in dubiously bright neoprene covers, and simply trying to get a phone and service required the kind of stringent credit checks associated with entry to Fort Knox - or being able to rent a video in the early days.

The services available now couldn’t even be imagined by most of us 10 years ago. Nor could the numbers of people using cell phones, as a generation grows up with them as a normal, essential tool of life, as much as computers or DVD players.

Perhaps surprisingly, in general the U.S. has lagged behind Asia and Europe in the way its adopted phones. It’s really only in the last three years that there’s been a huge burgeoning in the numbers using them, whether on contract or pay as you talk. Nowadays though it seems like everyone has them – and loves to use them. They’ve become so pervasive that many countries (and a number of states) have passed laws preventing motorists from using handsets as they drive, creating the eerie hands-free conversationalist who looks to be talking to himself.

Yes, we’ve come a long way baby, but as far as phone technology goes, the simple fact is that you ain’t seen nothing yet.

What is 3G?

In Japan, always the leader of the pack, you can have a wrist videophone – about as Dick Tracy as you can get – watch all manner of television, use your phone for downloading and listening to music and browse the Web freely. Welcome to the third generation of mobile technology, or 3G as it’s known. Think of it as the cell phone equivalent of broadband. And it’s not so much the future as the present.

With 3G data can be transferred at rates between 64 and 384 kilobytes per second, a blazing speed compared to most phones whose transfer speed is slower than the old 14.4 kbps (many services aren’t at 3G yet, but at 2.5G, a sort of interim stage, with transfer of 114kbps). It will create a unified global phone standard (anyone who’s travelled outside the U.S. with a dual-band phone will understand the frustration in trying to get your cell phone to work in, say, Europe). But above all, it’s going to transform your phone into a multimedia center.

3G is already widespread in Japan and it’s hitting Europe (Finland is a leader) and America. By way of illustration of 3G’s possibilities, British mobile service O2 has replaced its own mobile phone Internet service which it introduced with a flourish only three years ago for i-mode, from Japan’s NTT DoCoMo – and this after its O2 Active has been a runaway success, as had Vodafone’s Live mobile Internet service. But with the ability to access more sites (over 100), more customers will use the service, spending more money. i-mode currently has about 55 million subscribers in 22 countries. The cost is quite cheap – about $5 for every hundred pages browsed. But of course you’ll want a new phone to be able to use it fully, buying into the British love of replacing handsets, which happens on average every 18 months.

Did you know that electric cars are not a thing of the future, but rather have been around for centuries (

their invention in the late 1700’s. Inventors then dreamed of a “horseless carriage”, a vehicle that could travel under its own power. The cars in 1700 were but mere steam-propelled road vehicles, and were extremely unreliable - they made noise, destroyed roads and even exploded in your face.

Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, and give cybersex new meaning. Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire. Kim, a leading authority on technology and ethics of robotics, said: “Christians may not like it, but we must consider this the origin of an artificial species. Until now, most researchers in this field have focused only on the functionality of the machines, but we think in terms of the essence of the creatures.” That “essence” is a computer code, which determines a robot’s propensity to “feel” happy, sad, angry, sleepy, hungry or afraid. Kim says this software is modelled on human DNA, though equivalent to a single strand of genetic code rather than the complex double helix of a real chromosome. Kim said: “Robots will have their own personalities and emotion and - as films like I Robot warn - that could be very dangerous for humanity. If we can provide a robot with good - soft - chromosomes, they may not be such a threat.” Although he admits his ideas sound fantastic, Kim is no crank. In the mid-1990s, the professor launched the robot football world cup, which has since become one of the most popular means for robotics researchers to measure their progress against competitors from around the world.

As China, India and even Vietnam increase their automobile manufacturing capacities, traditional makers such as Thailand are starting to feel the pinch as low cost competitors undercut existing markets. Thailand has been surviving largely on the back of its one-ton pickup trucks, mostly for export, for which it is the world’s second-largest producer after the USA. However, this is just the kind of low-cost, relatively low-technology sector that is particularly vulnerable to competition from low wage cost rivals. So, there is a need for expansion in new areas, preferably through using technology that cannot be easily replicated by those rivals.

This is what is behind the Thai government’s attempts to promote the eco-car project, which is based on the provision of incentives for automobile firms to invest in the company to produce more environmentally-friendly vehicles. The Board of Investment, which regulates incentives for foreign investors, has offered to reduce the excise tax on the sale of such vehicles from the current 30-50% to a more modest 17%. This figure is chosen to ensure that only serious contenders apply, while keeping out smaller companies which might be motivated primarily by short-term financial rewards. In return, investor companies must undertake to sell no fewer than 100,000 units annually, invest at least 5 billion baht (approximately US$150 million) and also comply with various technical requirements.

To date, only Honda has taken advantage of this opportunity. It may be just as well because the demand for automobiles is finite in Thailand and too many new entrants would be likely to spoil the broth for everyone. Of course, individual automobiles are never likely to live up to the environmentally-friendly label that is so easily bandied about these days: even if the carbon emissions issues could be resolved, there are still the many other materials which are used in manufacturing which are scarce resources that cannot be replaced, as well as the fact that individual travel (no matter how convenient) is very unlikely ever to be as resource-efficient as mass public transportation, in addition to the societal effects. If the Thai government were really committed to environmentally friendly transportation policies, then it would be more likely to teach schoolchildren how to walk in the street safely and insist on people driving on the proper side of the road, even if they prefer just to scoot the wrong way for the sake of convenience. And that is not to talk about the endless millions of baht wasted by all those people stuck in Bangkok’s legendary and very tedious traffic jams.

Research carried out in the late 1980’s showed that genuine time travel is not forbidden by the known laws of physics. This means that it may be possible to build a time machine, but not that it may be easy. Help may be at hand though, it is possible there are naturally occurring objects in the universe that act as time machines.

There are at least two ways to build a time machine. Frank Tipler published a possibility in the highly respected journal Physical Review in 1974. This involves making a naked singularity, a singularity that is not concealed from view behind the event horizon of a black hole. To make a naked singularity involves rotating a singularity extremely rapidly, and if rotated sufficiently fast it would fling away the event horizon and exposes the singularity. We know that spacetime is extremely distorted by the singularity’s strong gravitational field and the effect of this rotation would be to twist spacetime, and tip it over so that one of the dimensions of the space dimensions is replaced by the time dimension. A carefully piloted spaceship taken close to the singularity would enter the time dimension and journey through time instead of space, although to the astronauts all would appear as normal. When the spaceship moved away from the distorted area around the singularity, it would be in a different time from when they had entered the area.

According to Tipler’s calculations, the same effect could be achieved with a cylinder about 100 km long and about 10 km across, made of material compressed to just over the density of a neutron star, and rotating twice every millisecond. It would be like ten neutron stars joined pole to pole and given a strong twist. Curiously, there are objects in the universe which nearly fulfill the other requirements - so-called millisecond pulsars are known which contain almost the right density of matter and spin once every 1.5 milliseconds, at one-third the speed needed to make a time machine. Such objects are so close to being time machines that they hold out the tantalising possibility that an advanced civilisation might be able to tweak them up in the right way to allow time travel.

That such things as naturally occurring time machines exist in the universe, with only a little tweaking needed, raises the prospect that an advanced civilisation may have already done the trick! This raises the interesting possibility that such a civilisation would have the capacity to travel between the galaxies; a journey of a few million light years would be as nothing. Something for the UFO brigade to mull over!

The other possibility for building a naturally occurring time machine involves worm holes - tunnels through spacetime which may, according to relativity, connect a black hole in one part of the universe to a black hole in another part of the universe. Before the mid-1980’s physicists believed that such objects as wormholes could not ‘really’ exist, and that a better understanding of Einstein’s equations would prove this. They were forced to change their minds as a result of careful investigation of wormholes carried out by Kip Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech in 1985. It is interesting to note that this research was triggered by Carl Sagan, a well known scientist, who was writing the science fiction novel ‘Contact’, a best seller that went on to become a highly successful film. Sagan wanted his wormhole to be as scientifically accurate as possible and approached Thorne to check out the idea as presented in the book. What neither Sagan nor Thorne first realised from the results of Thorne’s study was that this short-cut through space would also work as a short-cut through time. In 1988 Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever (Morris and Yurtsever were students of Thorne) published their conclusions in the journal Physical Review Letters, that Einstein’s equations really did allow for the existence of wormholes that link different times, and could be used as time machines.

We have seen that the laws of physics do not preclude the possibility of time travel, and further, that it may be possible to construct a time machine by tweaking naturally occurring objects in the universe. It would appear that we only need the technology to make time travel a reality.

In one of the wildest developments in serious science for decades, researchers from California to Moscow have recently been investigating the possibility of time travel. They are not, as yet, building TARDIS lookalikes in their laboratories; but they have realised that according to the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity (the best theory of time and space we have), there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent time travel. It may be extremely difficult to put into practice; but it is not impossible.

It sounds like science fiction, but it is taken so seriously by relativists that some of them have proposed that there must be a law of nature to prevent time travel and thereby prevent paradoxes arising, even though nobody has any idea how such a law would operate. The classic paradox, of course, occurs when a person travels back in time and does something to prevent their own birth — killing their granny as a baby, in the more gruesome example, or simply making sure their parents never get together, as in Back to the Future. It goes against commonsense, say the sceptics, so there must be a law against it. This is more or less the same argument that was used to prove that space travel is impossible.

So what do Einstein’s equations tell us, if pushed to the limit? As you might expect, the possibility of time travel involves those most extreme objects, black holes. And since Einstein’s theory is a theory of space and time, it should be no surprise that black holes offer, in principle, a way to travel through space, as well as through time. A simple black hole won’t do, though. If such a black hole formed out of a lump of non-rotating material, it would simply sit in space, swallowing up anything that came near it. At the heart of such a black hole there is a point known as a singularity, where space and time cease to exist, and matter is crushed to infinite density. Thirty years ago, Roger Penrose (now of Oxford University) proved that anything which falls into such a black hole must be drawn into the singularity by its gravitational pull, and also crushed out of existence.

But, also in the 1960s, the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr found that things are different if the black hole is rotating. A singularity still forms, but in the form of a ring, like the mint with a hole. In principle, it would be possible to dive into such a black hole and through the ring, to emerge in another place and another time. This “Kerr solution” was the first mathematical example of a time machine, but at the time nobody took it seriously. At the time, hardly anybody took the idea of black holes seriously, and interest in the Kerr solution only really developed in the 1970s, after astronmers discovered what seem to be real black holes, both in our own Milky Way Galaxy and in the hearts of other galaxies.

This led to a rash of popular publications claiming, to the annoyance of many relativists, that time travel might be possible. In the 1980s, though, Kip Thorne, of CalTech (one of the world’s leading experts in the general theory of relativity), and his colleagues set out to prove once and for all that such nonsense wasn’t really allowed by Einstein’s equations. They studied the situation from all sides, but were forced to the unwelcome conclusion that there really was nothing in the equations to prevent time travel, provided (and it is a big proviso) you have the technology to manipulate black holes. As well as the Kerr solution, there are other kinds of black hole time machine allowed, including setups graphically described as “wormholes”, in which a black hole at one place and time is connected to a black hole in another place and time (or the same place at a different time) through a “throat”. Thorne has described some of these possibilities in a recent book, Black Holes and Time Warps (Picador), which is packed with information but far from being an easy read. Now, Michio Kaku, a professor of physics in New York, has come up with a more accessible variation on the theme with his book Hyperspace (Oxford UP), which (unlike Thorne’s book) at least includes some discussion of the contribution of researchers such as Robert Heinlein to the study of time travel. The Big Bang, string theory, black holes and baby universes all get a mention here; but it is the chapter on how to build a time machine that makes the most fascinating reading.

“Most scientists, who have not seriously studied Einstein’s equations,” says Kaku, “dismiss time travel as poppycock”. And he then goes on to spell out why the few scientists who have seriously studied Einstein’s equations are less dismissive. Our favourite page is the one filled by a diagram which shows the strange family tree of an individual who manages to be both his/her own father and his/her own mother, based on the Heinlein story “All you zombies –”. And Kaku’s description of a time machine is something fans of Dr Who and H.G. Wells would be happy with:

[It] consists of two chambers, each containing two parallel metal plates. The intense electric fields created between each pair of plates (larger than anything possible with today’s technology) rips the fabric of space-time, creating a hole in space that links the two chambers.

Taking advantage of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which says that time runs slow for a moving object, one of the chambers is then taken on a long, fast journey and brought back: Time would pass at different rates at the two ends of the wormhole, [and] anyone falling into one end of the wormhole would be instantly hurled into the past or the future [as they emerge from the other end].

And all this, it is worth spelling out, has been published by serious scientists in respectable journals such as Physical Review Letters (you don’t believe us? check out volume 61, page 1446). Although, as you may have noticed, the technology required is awesome, involving taking what amounts to a black hole on a trip through space at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. We never said it was going to be easy! So how do you get around the paradoxes? The scientists have an answer to that, too. It’s obvious, when you think about it; all you have to do is add in a judicious contribution from quantum theory to the time travelling allowed by relativity theory. As long as you are an expert in both theories, you can find a way to avoid the paradoxes.

It works like this. According to one interpretation of quantum physics (there are several interpretations, and nobody knows which one, if any, is “right”), every time a quantum object, such as an electron, is faced with a choice, the world divides to allow it to take every possibility on offer. In the simplest example, the electron may be faced with a wall containing two holes, so that it must go through one hole or the other. The Universe splits so that in one version of reality — one set of relative dimensions — it goes through the hole on the left, while in the other it goes through the hole on the right. Pushed to its limits, this interpretation says that the Universe is split into infinitely many copies of itself, variations on a basic theme, in which all possible outcomes of all possible “experiments” must happen somewhere in the “multiverse”. So there is, for example, a Universe in which the Labour Party has been in power for 15 years, and is now under threat from a resurgent Tory Party led by vibrant young John Major.

How does this resolve the paradoxes? Like this. Suppose someone did go back in time to murder their granny when she was a little girl. On this multiverse picture, they have slid back to a bifurcation point in history. After killing granny, they move forward in time, but up a different branch of the multiverse. In this branch of reality, they were never born; but there is no paradox, because in he universe next door granny is alive and well, so the murderer is born, and goes back in time to commit the foul deed!

Once again, it sounds like science fiction, and once again science fiction writers have indeed been here before. But this idea of parallel universes and alternative histories as a solution to the time travel paradoxes is also now being taken seriously by some (admittedly, not many) researchers, including David Deutsch, in Oxford. Their research deals with both time, and relative dimensions in space. You could make a nice acronym for that — TARDIS, perhaps?

Black holes, according to relativity theory, warp spacetime with their enormously powerful gravitation field. The effect of this gravitational field is that if an astronaut were to cross the event horizon of a black hole, time would slow down on board his spacecraft as he approached the singularity and eventually come to a stop. Similarly time slows down in proportion to speed, the faster our astronaut travels the slower time runs. The closer the astronaut travels to the speed of light the more time slows, until at the speed of light, time would stop. Both these effects of time being affected by speed and gravity have been discussed in the previous section, all of which illustrates that time is not a fixed constant, but is affected by gravitational fields and relative speed in the same manner as the other three dimensions of space.

The solutions to particular equations of the Special Theory of Relativity can be expressed mathematically in any direction of time without running into any problems. Does this mean that time travel is possible? There is nothing in relativity that rules out time travel, it would appear to be theoretically possible

What do you think about time.This is our greatest enemy.We fight the time all the ”time” and eventually we always lose.Can we say that the people who own the time own the world as well ? What if there was a machine that helps us own the time..

The idea for building a time machine has been  ”disturbing” many scientists and physicians.People all over the world dream for travelling ”around the time” and meet some dinosaurs or maybe witness the birth of Jesus Christ.According to some scientist this can be possible,but if you ask other ones-”that is impossible”

But what if some time travel becomes true.What if you can just go back 100 years ago and kill your grand grand grand mother.Won`t this cause a paradox that leads to the end of the world ?Or maybe it is completely  redicilous to  discuss the possibility of time travel,even in sci-fi related website.I will try to answer this in the next post,which actually seems to be pretty long..

Electric cars, hybrid cars: Difference between electric and hybrid cars. Why hybrid car is better then all electric cars.

Batteries: Hybrid car batteries recharge while you are driving. There is no need for plug in where, as after certain miles, electric vehicle batteries need recharge. Most electric cars need a recharge every 50-100 miles.
Speed: Electric cars could go only up to 50-60 miles/h  where as hybrid cars can go much faster then that.
Size: For maximum efficiency electric cars are small whereas we have SUVs in hybrid cars.
Price: Electric cars are cheaper then hybrid cars

Since long, people have been working hard to improve the batteries for electric cars. Still electric cars can only travel a fraction of distance traveled by gasoline cars. Hybrid car is the result of efforts put by people in developing electric cars and having faith in cars powered by electric motors. Hybrid car development is only a change in tactics due to failure in improvement of efficient batteries. Hybrid cars could be defined as an electric car assisted with a gasoline engine.