On the U.S.-Mexico border, a massive CPV solar project will rise

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SolFocus announced today it will help build a 50-megawatt concentrating solar photovoltaic power plant near Tecate, Mexico, just a few clicks from the U.S.-Mexico border. The project, which will be developed in phases by Mexican land and real estate developer Grupo Musa and U.S.-based Synergy Technologies, is expected to eventually reach 450-megawatt capacity, making it the largest CPV solar farm in the world.
Construction on the first 50-megawatt phase will begin in late 2012, according to the announcement. The power plant will use SolFocus’ concentrator photovoltaic equipment. It will be owned and operated by SolMex Energy, a new company formed by Grupo Musa and energy developer Synergy Technologies. Most of the initial 50MW installation will meet energy demands of various facilities located in the area.
SolFocus CEO Mark Crowley said in a statement the first year of operation should deliver at least 120,000 megawatt hours of electricity to Baja California. The power plant will contain 3,850 SolFocus systems on the 300-acre site. International corporation FINEXIM has allocated $720 million to the first four of nine 50-MW phases of the solar project.
Until now, Mexico’s renewable energy market has been comprised primarily of wind power. But the country also is an ideal locale for solar, and more specifically CPV.
Conventional photovoltaic panels don’t perform as well in hot temperatures. CPV does, making it a suitable technology for the high-heat borderlands. CPV is essentially a mashup of two more common technologies: photovoltaic solar (PV) and concentrating solar thermal (CST). With conventional PV, sunlight hits a solar panels that usually contains silicon-based cells and turns it into electricity. With concentrating solar thermal, mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight onto a tower containing a fluid such as oil. The fluid gets hot and generates steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity.
CPV, on the other hand, uses mirrors and lenses to concentrate light from the sun onto super-efficient cells to produce electricity. CPV manufacturers, which includes Amonix, Soitec and SolFocus, serves a small, niche market. The technology doesn’t require water like solar thermal to produce power and performs especially well in areas like the Southwest that have high percentage of direct sunlight.

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TRAI Introduces Telecom Consumers Protection Regulations 2012

TRAI Introduces Telecom Consumers Protection Regulations 2012

Telecom Consumers Protection Regulations 2012

TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority Of india) Introduces telecom consumers protection Regulations 2012 across telecom operators in the country.This regulations are introduced to increase quality of services and also this increases simplicity in plans and services offered by the telecom operators.
BSNL is the first telecom operator who implements all these guidelines and all other network providers will follow the guidelines soon..

Following are the benefits the new guidelines bring to consumers:

Simplicity & standardization of tariff vouchers across operators.

Transparency for Value Added Services activated on the account.

Information on premium rate VAS.

Changes which would be ‘seen’ by consumers from now onwards:

New Start Up Kit:

Will contain only the SIM with no rate plan attached (no confusion of tariffs for the customer).

New Vouchers :

Only 3 voucher types will exist (Plan Voucher, Top-up, STV) (easy to differentiate between talktime vouchers against tariff benefits).

Plan Vouchers :

These would offer only the basic plan, with no talktime attached.

Top-Up Vouchers :

These would provide only talktime (in Rupees) with main account validity.

STV Vouchers :

These would provide only rate cutters, and no talktime.

Colour Coding :

The 3 vouchers would be segregated by different colours, for ease of understanding by consumers.

Usage information :

Consumers would be informed of the usage after every call / data session / VAS activation. While this may be already available with several operators, the same has been now made mandatory.

Past Usage information:

Consumers can now avail their usage over the last 180 days by paying a fee of Rs. 50 per request. Details that would be made available are Calls / SMS / VAS / Roaming.

Account related information:

Consumers can also avail information about their accounts – Tariff plan activated / Account Balance / Active VAS details are now available via SMS to the customer.

Premium VAS Service:

Consumers will be informed that the number they are calling is chargeable, and after a ‘beep’ the VAS service would be connected, thereby offering consumer greater awareness of the tariffs.

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World’s smallest .45 caliber pistol

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You’re looking at what’s perhaps the world’s most compact .45 caliber pocket pistol.
Despite sporting dimensions similar to a standard smartphone (5/8ths of an inch thick) and weighing only 14 ounces, the DoubleTap features a no-snag, hammerless design (firing mechanism is internal) that’s capable of the kind of precision and efficiency offered by high-performance .45 caliber handguns. And, according to the manufacturer, Heizer Defense, you won’t find a slimmer and lighter pocket pistol anywhere on the market.
For gun enthusiasts, here’s a rundown of the handgun’s features as highlighted on Heizer’s website:

• Available in .45 ACP or 9MM

• A patent-pending progressive barrel porting option that cuts muzzle rise and recoil.

• A one-of-a-kind double-action trigger system that utilizes ball bearings for a smooth action and crisp trigger pull.

• Designed to hold two rounds in the chamber and two additional spare rounds inside the handle

Buyers can choose between an aluminum model that starts at $500 or one made out of titanium with a MIL-STD finish, the same used on military aircraft, for a protection against corrosion and wear damage for $730.
The DoubleTap is slated to go on sale in the first quarter of 2012.

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How to make your own tricorder

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Take one part open-source code, two parts OLED display, mix in a generous helping of curiosity and serve with a side of extra-delicious geekiness. That’s your basic recipe for a real-life tricorder, as envisioned and modeled by Dr. Peter Jansen. The result is a handheld device with sensors for reading atmospheric, electromagnetic and spacial properties in the surrounding environment. Dr. Jansen’s tricorder won’t necessarily detect alien life-forms, but there’s plenty of room to expand on his open-source design. Your mileage may vary.

Dr. Jansen’s Tricorder Project is a self-professed labor of love. In his spare time, Jansen built his first tricorder, the Science Tricorder Mark 1, with a goal of bringing to life “phenomena that we can’t normally see.” These include things like the release of particles from a car’s exhaust pipe, or the process of photosynthesis in a single leaf from a neighbor’s tree. With measurements showing the presence of pollution or chlorophyll, Jansen believed the Mark 1 could tell a great deal about the world around him, and maybe get other people excited about environmental learning too.

The Mark 1 quickly led to the Mark 2, and as Jansen continues to innovate on his original concept, he hopes others will join his quest of discovery. Anyone can download Jansen’s open-source tricorder plans and build their own prototypes. Jansen himself is at work on Mark 4. He apparently wasn’t happy with version three of his device and has moved on to the next model.

Tricorders, meanwhile, are a popular hobby these days. The X Prize Foundation launched a contest earlier this year asking innovators to design tricorders with health diagnostic capabilities. The winning team will get a $10 million prize.

You can imagine the implications of putting tricorders into daily use around the world. Beyond individual discovery, there is also the possibility of collecting mass data for analysis. Combine tricorders with web connectivity, and you have a new layer of information for mapping the world in real time. That’s boldly going where no man has gone before.

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UK Biobank: world’s biggest biomedical database opens today

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Information on 500,000 Brits is now available for medical research.
At 20 terabytes – the equivalent of 30,000 CDs stacked over 100 feet high – the UK Biobank is the world’s biggest and most detailed biomedical database.
The resource is expected to advance research into the causes, prevention and treatment of a huge variety of chronic, painful and life-threatening illnesses: from cancer and heart disease to dementia and depression.
“For years, people have asked about nature versus nurture but now, with the data we have, we can tease out the contributions of what you’re born with versus the environment you grow up in,” says Wendy Ewart of the UK Medical Research Council, one of several backers of the project.
The volunteers were between 40 and 69 years old (thus chosen because they won’t keep researchers waiting too long before developing interesting conditions).
Among them: 26,000 people with diabetes, 50,000 with joint disorders, 41,000 teetotallers, and 11,000 heart attack patients.
By the end of this year, 10,000 are expected to have developed diabetes and 2,500 will develop breast cancer. By 2022, an estimated 10,000 will have breast cancer, 9,000 will have Alzheimer’s, and 28,000 will have died from heart disease.
More than 1,000 pieces of information about each participant are be available:

• Results of genetic tests, and tests on donated blood, urine and saliva samples.
• In addition to medical history, lifestyle details and standard measurements, there are also less obvious assessments like hand grip strength, bone density, and psychosocial events.
• Changes in health are recorded via electronic records (hospital statistics, cancer and death registers).
• Some participants will be completely retested every couple years, and additional details will be added (such as diet, work and residential questionnaires, body scanning, and physical activity tracked with accelerometers).
• Results from studies using UK Biobank are put back into the resource for other researchers to use.
• And it will keep growing. Plans are afoot to include fMRI scans, ultrasound scans, and X-rays of bones and joints.

“It’s the biggest, most detailed collection of data that’s ever been put in place,” says founder Rory Collins. Its impact on dissecting the causes of disease, he says, will be as profound as the invention of the telescope was to astronomy, or the microscope to microbiology.
It cost nearly £100 million (about $160 million). And about 15 million biological samples are stored in a giant freezer facility in northern England.
The US National Institutes of Health had plans to set up a similar resource, but the $2 billion pricetag was too high. China has a similar database, China Kadoorie Biobank, also with 500,000 volunteers.
The Biobank doesn’t have any research projects… it’s up to researchers to register on the website and send in applications to use the data.

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Mobile YouTube Downloader free download

Mobile YouTube Downloader free download

Youtube downloader

Finally we got a good mobile YouTube downloader. So download the software and enjoy downloading YouTube videos into your mobiles..

android mobile users can download tube mate application from Google play store and enjoy downloading videos. have fun..



Click here to download

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Crystals “grow” in Los Angeles brick walls

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Cities are, by definition, densely populated. With so many people roaming city streets, why aren’t public art interventions more popular? Who doesn’t want to find old telephone booths regaled with crystal-like ‘bling’?
Graphic designer and artist, A Common Name,  indulges our childlike nature with the “Geode” Street Art Project.

Rather than using traditional paint or wheat paste methods in a 2D platform, I’ve been using paper in 3D. These sculptures come in all sizes and fit in the holes of buildings and pipes found while walking around. The finished shapes represent geodes, crystal, quartz, or any mineral formation that you would normally find in nature, now in our planned out cities.

Cities are also, by definition, landscapes that lack the chaotic spontaneous aesthetic of the wilderness. It is very difficult to find spaces in urban environments that are not constructed. But highly constructed design interventions can breath new life into the inevitably drab style of a brick wall or out-of-commission parking meter.

A parallel aspect of these “geodes” in nature and in the city is they are always unexpected treasures. You might go hunting for treasures but you generally happen upon them during your adventures or casual interaction with the environment. I enjoy the fact that many people will not notice these, but some astute people will; that these will not last forever and the weather will affect them as naturally as it might in nature.

So far, nine geodes speckle Los Angeles’ streets. Some have been stolen, some have been trashed, and others have crumbled away in the rain.
Even crystals don’t last forever - especially if they’re made out of paper.

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