Dell bets big on India

Leading computer manufacturer Dell plans to invest more in India to expand its operations besides hiring more people in the next one year.

The second largest PC-maker globally also hopes to cross the $2 billion annual revenue mark in India soon.

“India today offers a fantastic opportunity to use technology for a wide range of applications. We see a tremendous opportunity for growth of the PC segment in this country…$2 billion is the milestone that our India team is now working on,” Dell CEO Michael Dell told journalists at an event organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry here on Tuesday.

Dell already has around 23,000 employees in India and looking at adding a ‘few thousand' more people in its Indian workforce, which is now the second largest employee base outside the U.S. Dell's business activities in the country include research and development and manufacturing in Sriperumbudur near Chennai (Tamil Nadu).

Three focus areas

Pointing out that the company sees good growth for its business in India as the PC penetration level hovers around just 20-30 PCs per 1,000 people, Mr. Dell said in India, the company had adopted three focus areas — growing its India presence in the hardware business; entering into education and healthcare segment for the production of customised products and services; and managing and servicing offerings sold in India.

Dell saw its revenues in India grew by 37 per cent last year, while its consumer business grew by 41 per cent. Dell's small and medium businesses unit and public sector vertical grew by 52 per cent and 41 per cent, respectively. Speaking at the event, Prime Minister's Adviser on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovation Sam Pitroda said India was starting to build four IT data centres in Poona, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar and Delhi, while the government had agreed to set up a data centre in each State capital. This initiative would help in providing IT solutions for realising social and economic welfare gains for the people.

“Innovation holds the key to India's ability to compete and solve problems for people at the bottom of the pyramid. With that in view, the Centre has set up a National Innovation Council. We have decided to request the State chief ministers to create State-level innovation councils and are asking Central ministries to constitute industry-related innovation councils,” Mr Pitroda added. 

‘Supermoon’ to be visible on Saturday

An exceptional celestial treat is in store for sky gazers as ‘supermoon’, the biggest and brightest full moon of the year which will be closest to Earth in 18 years, will be seen in the night sky on Saturday.

“The ‘supermoon’ will be closest to the Earth in 18 years tomorrow and will appear to be the biggest and brightest of 2011, Director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) C.B. Devgun said on Friday.

Saturday’s full moon will be around 10 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter as compared to other full moons during the year, he said.

The term ‘Supermoon’ was first coined by Astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979. According to him, it is a situation when the moon is slightly closer to the Earth in its orbit than average, which is 90 per cent or more of its closest orbit, and the moon is a full or new moon.

On Saturday, the moon will be only 3,56,577 km away from the Earth, the closest while at the full moon phase in 18 years.

Earlier, there were supermoons in 1955, 1974, 1992 and 2005.

Regular situations of full moons coinciding with the moon’s closest point to Earth in fact happen after about every one year, one month and 18 days when it is about 3,63,104 km away from the Earth, Mr. Devgun said.

“This is because the moon’s orbit is an ellipse with one side 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other. In the language of astronomy, the two extremes are called ‘apogee’ (far away) and ‘perigee’ (nearby),” Mr. Devgun said.

At the closest, our natural satellite moon lies roughly 3,56,630 km from the Earth compared to its average distance of 3,84,800 km from the planet.

“The moon will not only shine brighter but will also appear bigger as compared to other full moons during the year,” he said.
The full moon will be at its best at around 3:30 a.m. R.C. Kapoor, a retired professor of Indian Institute of Astrophysics said.A perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system or "supermoon" is a full or new moon that coincides with a close approach by the Moon to the Earth. The Moon's distance varies each month between approximately 357,000 kilometers (222,000 mi) and 406,000 km (252,000 mi) due to its elliptical orbit around the Earth (distances given are center-to-center.The name SuperMoon was coined by astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979, defined as:

    ...a new or full moon which occurs with the Moon at or near (within 90% of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit (perigee). In short, Earth, Moon and Sun are all in a line, with Moon in its nearest approach to Earth.

(The phrasing "within 90% of its closest approach" is unclear, but an example on Nolle's website shows that he means that the Earth–Moon distance is in the lowest tenth of its range.)

The term supermoon is not widely accepted or used within the astronomy or scientific community, who prefer the term perigee-syzygy. Perigee is the point at which the Moon is closest in its orbit to the Earth, and syzygy is a full or new moon, when the Earth, the Moon and the Sun are aligned. Hence, supermoon can be regarded as a combination of the two, although they do not perfectly coincide each time. Syzygy may occur within a maximum of 12 hours from perigee during a supermoon, and 1 hour from perigee during an extreme supermoon.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100421111353

NASA spacecraft becomes first to enter Mercury orbit

 Washington: A NASA spacecraft, after over six years of space travel, has become the first to enter the orbit of Mercury, the agency said Friday.

The Messenger spacecraft began the orbit insertion manoeuvre at 0045 GMT Friday, RIA Novosti reported.

"NASA's Messenger spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury. This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system's innermost planet," the NASA website said. It took the spacecraft more than six years to enter the orbit of Mercury, the least explored planet of the solar system.

To reach its destination point, the spacecraft, launched in 2004, covered over 7.8 billion km. It followed a route through the inner solar system, which included one fly-by of Earth, two fly-bys of Venus, and three fly-bys of Mercury.

Engineers will check how the spacecraft's systems are sustaining in Mercury's harsh thermal environment, and equipment will be turned on March 23. The scientific mission will begin April 4.

Mercury is the smallest and the densest planet among the four terrestrial planets, including Venus, Earth and Mars. Before the Messenger mission, only 45 percent of Mercury's surface had been photographed by a spacecraft. The previous mission was Mariner-10, launched in the 1970s.   

Japan nuclear plant firm gets Twitter

TOKYO: Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which operates the quake-hit Japanese nuclear reactors, opened an official Twitter account, immediately drawing more than 117,000 followers.

"We sincerely apologise for causing serious worries and trouble over the accident at Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant, radiation leak, planned blackouts," TEPCO said in its profile in Japanese on the micro-blogging site.

TEPCO said it planned to provide information about radiation leaks and blackouts through its Twitter blog, which has already attracted 117,838 followers in the first six hours with only two messages.

Its first tweet was about the threat of major power blackouts in the capital unless electricity use was reduced in the aftermath of the massive earthquake and tsunami. Prime Minister Naoto Kan had authorised managed outages to prevent any sudden major supply disruption, as electricity supply has fallen sharply since the quake-tsunami disaster hit power plants.

The Tokyo-based power company follows accounts of local news media, regional authorities, Twitter users offering messages on earthquake alerts and support for quake victims.

TEPCO has been under fire over delays in disclosing information related to the plant, where helicopters dumped tonnes of water in a desperate bid to cool reactors crippled by the earthquake to prevent a catastrophic meltdown.

Its Twitter account is @OfficialTEPCO available only in Japanese.

Bomb Disposal Robot Getting Ready for Front-Line Action

The University of Greenwich has joined forces with a Kent-based company in the design and manufacture of a bomb disposal robot for use by security forces, including the British Army.The organisations have come together to create a lightweight, remote-operated vehicle, or robot, that can be controlled by a wireless device, not unlike a games console, from a distance of several hundred metres.

The innovative robot, which can climb stairs and even open doors, will be used by soldiers on bomb disposal missions in countries such as Afghanistan.

Experts from the Department of Computer & Communications Engineering, based within the university's School of Engineering, are working on the project alongside NIC Instruments Limited of Folkestone, manufacturers of security search and bomb disposal equipment.

Much lighter and more flexible than traditional bomb disposal units, the robot is easier for soldiers to carry and use when out in the field. It has cameras on board, which relay images back to the operator via the hand-held control, and includes a versatile gripper which can carry and manipulate delicate items.

The robot also includes nuclear, biological and chemical weapons sensors.

Measuring just 72cm by 35cm, the robot weighs 48 kilogrammes and can move at speeds of up to eight miles per hour.

Scientists Control Light Scattering in Graphene

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have learned to control the quantum pathways determining how light scatters in graphene. Controlled scattering provides a new tool for the study of this unique material -- graphene is a single sheet of carbon just one atom thick -- and may point to practical applications for controlling light and electronic states in graphene nanodevices.The research team, led by Feng Wang of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, made the first direct observation, in graphene, of so-called quantum interference in Raman scattering. Raman scattering is a form of "inelastic" light scattering. Unlike elastic scattering, in which the scattered light has the same color (the same energy) as the incident light, inelastically scattered light either loses energy or gains it.

Raman scattering occurs in graphene and other crystals when an incoming photon, a particle of light, excites an electron, which in turn generates a phonon together with a lower-energy photon. Phonons are vibrations of the crystal lattice, which are also treated as particles by quantum mechanics.

Quantum particles are as much waves as particles, so they can interfere with one another and even with themselves. The researchers showed that light emission can be controlled by controlling these interference pathways. They present their results in a forthcoming issue of the journal Nature, now available in Advance Online Publication.

Manipulating quantum interference, in life and in the lab

"A familiar example of quantum interference in everyday life is antireflective coating on eyeglasses," says Wang, who is also an assistant professor of physics at UC Berkeley. "A photon can follow two pathways, scattering from the coating or from the glass. Because of its quantum nature it actually follows both, and the coating is designed so that the two pathways interfere with each other and cancel light that would otherwise cause reflection."

Wang adds, "The hallmark of quantum mechanics is that if different paths are nondistinguishable, they must always interfere with each other. We can manipulate the interference among the quantum pathways that are responsible for Raman scattering in graphene because of graphene's peculiar electronic structure."

In Raman scattering, the quantum pathways are electronic excitations, which are optically stimulated by the incoming photons. These excitations can only happen when the initial electronic state is filled (by a charged particle such as an electron), and the final electronic state is empty.

Quantum mechanics describes electrons filling a material's available electronic states much as water fills the space in a glass: the "water surface" is called the Fermi level. All the electronic states below it are filled and all the states above it are empty. The filled states can be reduced by "doping" the material in order to shift the Fermi energy lower. As the Fermi energy is lowered, the electronic states just above it are removed, and the excitation pathways originating from these states are also removed.

"We were able to control the excitation pathways in graphene by electrostatically doping it -- applying voltage to drive down the Fermi energy and eliminate selected states," Wang says. "An amazing thing about graphene is that its Fermi energy can be shifted by orders of magnitude larger than conventional materials. This is ultimately due to graphene's two-dimensionality and its unusual electronic bands."

The Fermi energy of undoped graphene is located at a single point, where its electronically filled bands, graphically represented as an upward-pointing cone, meet its electronically empty bands, represented as a downward-pointing cone. To move the Fermi energy appreciably requires a strong electric field.

Team member Rachel Segalman, an associate professor of chemical engineering at UC Berkeley and a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, provided the ion gel that was key to the experimental device. An ion gel confines a strongly conducting liquid in a polymer matrix. The gel was laid over a flake of graphene, grown on copper and transferred onto an insulating substrate. The charge in the graphene was adjusted by the gate voltage on the ion gel.

"So by cranking up the voltage we lowered the graphene's Fermi energy, sequentially getting rid of the higher energy electrons," says Wang. Eliminating electrons, from the highest energies on down, effectively eliminated the pathways that, when impinged upon by incoming photons, could absorb them and then emit Raman-scattered photons.

Quantum Pen for Single Atoms Is a Big Step Toward Large-Scale Quantum Computing

Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics succeeded in manipulating atoms individually in a lattice of light and in arranging them in arbitrary patterns. These results are an important step towards large scale quantum computing and for the simulation of condensed matter systems.

Physicists around the world are searching for the best way to realize a quantum computer. Now scientists of the team around Stefan Kuhr and Immanuel Bloch at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching/Munich) took a decisive step in this direction. They can now address and change the spin of single atoms with laser light and arrange them in arbitrary patterns. In this way, the physicists strung the atoms along a line and could directly observe their tunneling dynamics in a “racing duel” of the atoms. A register of hundreds of addressable quantum particles could serve for storing and processing of quantum information in a quantum computer.

In the present experiment, the scientists loaded laser-cooled rubidium atoms into an artificial crystal of light. These so-called optical lattices are generated by superimposing several laser beams. The atoms are kept in the lattice of light in a way similar to marbles being contained in the hollows of an egg carton.

A few months ago, the team of Stefan Kuhr and Immanuel Bloch showed that each site of the optical lattice can be filled with exactly one atom. With the help of a microscope, the scientists visualized the array atom by atom and thereby verified the shell-like structure of this “Mott insulator.” Now the scientists succeeded in individually addressing the atoms in the lattice and in changing their respective energy state. Using the microscope, they focused a laser beam down to a diameter of about 600 nanometers, which is just above the lattice spacing, and directed it at individual atoms with high precision.

The laser beam slightly deforms the electron shell of the addressed (targeted) atom and thereby changes the energy difference between its two spin states. Atoms with a spin – i.e. an intrinsic angular momentum – behave like little magnetic needles that can align in two opposite directions. If the atoms are irradiated with microwaves that are in resonance with the modified spin transition, only the addressed atoms absorb a microwave photon, which causes their spin to flip. All other atoms in the lattice remain unaffected by the microwave field.

The scientists demonstrated the high fidelity of this addressing scheme in a series of experiments. For this purpose, the spins of all atoms along a line were flipped one after the other, by moving the addressing laser from lattice site to lattice site. After removing all atoms with a flipped spin from the trap, the addressed atoms are visible as holes, which can easily be counted. In this way, the physicists deduced that the addressing worked in 95% of the cases. Atoms at the neighboring sites are not influenced by the addressing laser. The method provides the possibility to generate arbitrary distributions of atoms in the lattice.

Starting from an arrangement of 16 atoms that were strung together on neighboring lattice sites like a necklace of beads, the scientists studied what happens when the height of the lattice is ramped down so far that the particles are allowed to “tunnel” according to the rules of quantum mechanics. They move from one lattice site to the other, even if their energy is not sufficient to cross the barrier between the lattice wells. “As soon as the height of the lattice has reached the point where tunneling is possible, the particles start running as if they took part in a horse-race”, doctoral candidate Christof Weitenberg describes. “By taking snapshots of the atoms in the lattice at different times after the "starting signal", we could directly observe the quantum mechanical tunneling-effect of single massive particles in an optical lattice for the first time.”