UAE Residents wake up to lightning and rain on Sunday morning

UAE residents woke up to overcast skies, lightning and slight rain on Sunday morning. The roads are wet and motorists are warned to drive carefully.

 

The weather is expected to be partly cloudy in general today, with the cloud cover increasing over the islands and some northern and eastern areas.

According to the National Center for Meteorology and Seismology (NCMS), the amount of clouds will increase over scattered areas, with a chance of rain. A slight fall in temperatures is also expected over some areas .

Winds will be moderate in general, fresh at times. However, it may kick up dust in some internal areas.

Sea will be moderate becoming rough gradually by night .

Meanwhile, the maximum temperature in some internal areas will hit 44 degree C, with a minimum of 23 degree C.

Humidity is also expected to touch 95 per cent in coastal areas.

 Rain in forecast for the next couple of days in the emirates.

Future Chinese Naval Bases Overseas – What Would They Be Like?

The recently realized but long in its planning, transition of the Pakistani port of Gwadar to the Chinese management company has led to a series of negative reactions from the Indian experts. India is concerned about a gradual increase of the activity of the PLA Navy in the Indian Ocean and the transition to Chinese port authorities in countries such as Pakistan or Sri Lanka and sees it as a move to encircle India within a chain of Chinese military bases. But in reality, the creation of permanent military bases here is unlikely, says the expert of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, Vasily Kashin.

According to the expert, military bases, located in the neighboring countries of India will be almost useless in case of a military confrontation between China and India. Being isolated from its mother country, the bases will be within range of Indian aviation and cruise missiles and therefore be quickly destroyed. On the other hand, the presence of a constant and a large military base in Pakistan would in turn make China a hostage of the unstable Pakistani domestic politics.

At the same time, the growing global presence of Chinese Navy will sooner or later raise the issue of establishing an appropriate global infrastructure. Already Chinese naval ships that are involved in anti -pirate patrolling off the coast of Somalia are actively using the ports of Oman, Yemen and Djibouti for restocking. Each Chinese squad, along the Somalian coast, also includes transport logistics. Usually these cargo ships restock fuel and other supplies at the local ports and then transport these to the warships at sea .The Chinese navy pays a great deal of attention to the detailed procedures involved in the transfer of fuel, food and water in the open sea.

In 2011, the Government of Seychelles directly proposed China to create a permanent military base in the islands. In response, China’s Defense Ministry stressed that the database will not be created so as not to damage the unique ecology of the islands. Although some Chinese military experts, such as Rear Admiral Wu Shengli, directly called for the establishment of foreign military bases to support operations of the fleet, the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry of China have always denied the existence of such plans. At the same time they do not exclude the possibility of overseas supply points, without deployment of troops on the territory of other countries.

So, we can assume that China will adhere to a step by step approach to the creation of an infrastructure of global military presence. For the start, probably, they will follow the tried and tested tactic of the USSR- to start with the development of infrastructure of the bases overseas by creating logistics points.

An example of such an object can be considered the similar Russian point in the Syrian city of Tartous. It consists of a few warehouses and workshops onshore and a pier to which a floating workshop can be docked. Only a few permanent ground staff members are required to maintain this point. The creation of such structures avoids attracting too much attention and also avoids accusations of expansion.

This work can be developed after the implementation of some of the more important programs of the Chinese navy, in particular the formation of battle ready aircraft carrier groups. It is unlikely that for the supply bases, ports in friendly countries in the region that are already under the control of Chinese companies, such as Gwadar, will be used. Already, The Chinese Navy has no obstacles in using these ports. On the other hand, the creation of special infrastructure for the Chinese navy may be more practical in the less developed countries on the eastern coast of Africa.

Unique Eco-Sculptures from an Indian Design Student

 

The Eco-Lamp

Satish Behera is a design student in India who has been exploring the ancient craft of paper maché as an ecological design material.  His style is so unique, his designs so impressionable that they are hard to forget.  His has created a style that is very professional and objects that are very desirable. (Pics)

 Using nothing more than newspaper, glue and varnish, Behera’s medium winds around and around itself as it becomes both base and cover, while Behera molds each strip into an elegant cultural work of function and art.  Each work has a patina of its own created by the blend of varnish, glue, and paper ink, adding even more distinctiveness to Behera’s style.

 

Eco-Ganesha is a modern, ecological sculpture of an ancient Hindu god, a god who, legend has it, has an elephant head.  It is exquisitely formed with rich detail that’s astounding when you consider the designer’s medium.

Eco-Ganesha

The Eco- Lamp or the Paper Table Lamp was a challenge for Behara who writes that the unusual form resulted from his placement of the lamp’s center of gravity.  Though Behara uses every strip of newspaper he acquires in his exploration, he acknowledges that he had to use “alien” products like wire, a bulb and the bulb holder.  This is a functioning lamp with a 60 watt bulb.

Wanting to design something more interesting than a box for a speaker, Behara created the Eco-Speakers to look like large snail shells/  Again, you see his meticulous craftsmanship.

Eco-Speaker

Of course, these works were simply explorations Mr. Behara undertook as part of his design coursework, but they’re awfully interesting and I should think marketable as well!

Indian company to build a resort on a natural lake in Macedonia

Indian billionaire and head of a business corporation “Sahara” Subroto Roy, during a visit to Macedonia announced plans to build a resort “Sahara of Macedonia” on the shores of the Ohrid lake in Ohrid city. It is expected that investments in the project will comprise at least 100 million euro. It will be one of the largest lake resorts in Europe. This planned project, which is tentatively scheduled to be completed by 2020, will have a number of first class hotels, 4000 luxury villas and apartments, as well as a casino and golf and spa facilities, convention halls and shopping malls.

Subroto Roy purchased a hotel in Ohrid to host the team of engineers, designers and planners. The billionaire did not disclose the price of the purchased property, but as per unofficial estimates, the amount is equivalent to 3 – 4 million euro.

Ozone hole second smallest in 20 years

Bringing great reprive to scientists monitoring ozone hole over the Antarctic, the the average area covered by the hole this year is smallest in the last 20 years. 

 

The ozone hole reached its maximum size Sep 22, covering 8.2 million square miles (21.2 million sq km), or the area of the US, Canada and Mexico combined, according to data from NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites.

 

The average size of the 2012 ozone hole was 6.9 million sq miles (17.9 million square km). The Sep 6, 2000 ozone hole was the largest on record at 11.5 million square miles (29.9 million sq km). 

 

Ozone layer acts as Earth’s natural shield against ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer. The ozone hole phenomenon began making a yearly appearance in the early 1980s. 

 

“The ozone hole mainly is caused by chlorine from human-produced chemicals, and these chlorine levels are still sizable in the Antarctic stratosphere,” said atmospheric scientist Paul Newman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, according to a NASA statement. 

 

“Natural fluctuations in weather patterns resulted in warmer stratospheric temperatures this year. These temperatures led to a smaller ozone hole,” added Newman. 

 

The Antarctic ozone layer likely will not return to its early 1980s state until about 2065, Newman said. The lengthy recovery is because of the long lifetimes of ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere. 

 

Overall atmospheric ozone no longer is declining as concentrations of ozone-depleting substances decrease. The decrease is the result of an international agreement regulating the production of certain chemicals.

Girl Frozen For 500 years

Girl Frozen For 500 years

Girl who was killed as an offering to the Inca gods sometime between 1450 and 1480, at approximately 11–15 years old.best-preserved mummy ever found, with internal organs intact, blood still present in the heart and lungs, and skin and facial features mostly unscathed. No special effort had been made to preserve her and 500 years later still looked like sleeping children

Phew! Asteroid to miss Earth in 2040, NASA says

On a day when global doomsday predictions failed to pan out, NASA had more good news for the Earth: An asteroid feared to be on a collision course with our planet no longer poses a threat.

Uncertainties about the orbit of the asteroid, known as 2011 AG5, previously allowed for a less than a 1% chance it would hit the Earth in February 2040, NASA said.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• The asteroid previously had a 0.2% chance of hitting the Earth

• More observation by astronomers in Hawaii shows no risk of collision

• A collision would have released about 100 megatons of energy

• Observing the asteroid wasn’t easy

To narrow down the asteroid’s future course, NASA put out a call for more observation. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa took up the task and managed to observe the asteroid over several days in October.

“An analysis of the new data conducted by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the risk of collision in 2040 has been eliminated,” NASA declared Friday.

The new observations, made with the Gemini 8-meter telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, reduce the orbit uncertainties by more than a factor of 60. That means the Earth’s position in February 2040 is not in range of the asteroid’s possible future paths.

The asteroid, which is 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter, will get no closer to Earth than 890,000 kilometers (553,000 miles), or more than twice the distance to the moon, NASA said.

A collision with Earth would have released about 100 megatons of energy, several thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II, according to the Gemini Observatory.

Observing the asteroid wasn’t easy, said David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.

The asteroid’s position was very close to the sun, so astronomers had to observe it when the sky was dark. Tholen told CNN there was about a half-hour between when the asteroid got high enough in the sky for the telescope to point at it and before the sky became too light to observe it.

Because the astronomers were looking at the asteroid low in the sky, they were viewing it through a lot of atmosphere, which scattered some of the light and made the object fainter, he said.

“The second effect is the turbulence of the atmosphere makes things fainter,” Tholen said. “We had to keep trying over and over until we got one of those nights when the atmosphere was calm.”

Tholen and the team also discovered the asteroid is elongated, so that as it rotates, its brightness changes. That was another challenge for the astronomers: Because they didn’t know the asteroid’s rotation period, they didn’t know when it would wax and wane, and when it would grow too faint to see.

“This object was changing its brightness by a factor of three or four — it was just enormously variable,” Tholen said. “It was hit and miss depending on which night you observed it.”

Many predicted the end of the world would come Friday, the day on which a long phase in the ancient Mayan calendar came to an end. Some believe the day actually comes Sunday.

Modern-day Mayans say the end of the calendar phase doesn’t mean the end of the world — just the end of an era, and the start of a new one.

Milky Way to inevitably merge with Andromeda Nebula – NASA

According to NASA, the merger of two neighbouring Galaxies, namely the Milky Way, of which the Solar System is a part and the Andromeda Nebula, is inevitable, since the Galaxies are approaching each other at some 400,000 kilometres per hour.

But the Earth will not get destroyed, nor will humanity suffer in the process, if humans still inhabit the Earth by then. NASA officials said this during a news conference on Thursday.

The merger will begin in approximately four billion years from now and is due over in six billion years.

The new galaxy that will emerge as a result will have a different, most likely elliptical form, and will be populated by fewer cosmic bodies than today.

World #Nuclear Electricity Generation Down 5 Percent Since 2006

World nuclear electricity-generating capacity has been essentially flat since 2007 and is likely to fall as plants retire faster than new ones are built. In fact, the actual electricity generated at nuclear power plants fell 5 percent between 2006 and 2011.

In 2011, following Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, 13 nuclear reactors in Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom were permanently taken offline. Seven new reactors, three of them in China, were connected to the grid. The net result was a two percent reduction in world nuclear capacity to 369,000 megawatts by the end of 2011. In 2012, the world has added a net 3,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity, with new additions in South Korea and Canada partly offset by more U.K. shutdowns.

© Earth Policy Institute

The United States, with 104 nuclear reactors generating some 19 percent of the country’s electricity, leads the world in nuclear generating capacity. France is a distant second in installed capacity, but its 58 reactors meet more than three quarters of the country’s electricity demand. (President François Hollande has pledged to reduce this dependence to 50 percent by 2025.)

© Earth Policy Institute

China, Russia, South Korea, and India account for 48 of the 64 nuclear reactors the International Atomic Energy Agency lists as under construction worldwide. Although these 64 reactors add up to some 62,000 megawatts of potential new capacity, fewer than one in four has a projected date for connecting to the electrical grid. Some reactors have been listed as “under construction” for over two decades.

© Earth Policy Institute

Plagued by cost overruns, construction delays, and a dearth of private investment interest, the world’s nuclear reactor fleet is aging quickly as new reactor connections struggle to keep up with retirements. The average age of nuclear reactors operating today is 27 years; the 142 reactors that have already retired were just 23 years old on average when they closed. Many nuclear reactors have been granted operating extensions, usually for 20 years, beyond their typical design lifetime of 40 years. But since Fukushima, where the four retired reactors averaged 37 years in operation, this option has become less attractive.

© Earth Policy Institute

In contrast to the decline in nuclear power, electricity generation from the wind and the sun has grown 27 percent and 62 percent, respectively, per year since 2006. Four German states now get close to half of their electricity from wind. By 2015, China plans to increase its current estimated 60,000 megawatts of grid-connected wind power capacity to 100,000 megawatts. More solar photovoltaic capacity was added in the European Union in 2011 than any other source of electricity generation. The list of exciting developments in renewable energy goes on. As this story unfolds, it is becoming increasingly clear that we can design an energy economy that is at once low-carbon and low-risk.

By J. Matthew Roney

 

Meet The 14-Year-Old Girl Who Developed A Low-Cost Water Purification System

Deepika Kurup just won $25,000 for a device that uses the power of the sun to kill bacteria in water.

The next generation of scientists is already hard at work solving our biggest problems. Take Deepika Kurup, a 14-year-old high school student from Nashua, New Hampshire. After seeing children in India drinking dirty water from a stagnant pool, she decided, in her words, “to find a solution to the global water crisis.” And then she actually made some progress towards that goal, developing a solar-powered water purification system.

Kurup’s low-cost invention just won her $25,000 in The Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge–a high-stakes science competition for students in 5th to 8th grade (Kurup entered the competition before she was in high school). This was her second time entering; in 7th grade, she took first place in her state.

This time around, Kurup spent three months toiling away at the project, foregoing vacations and summer camp to leaf through PhD papers about water purification methods. She spoke with her mentor at 3M every day. And she tested the purification system independently in her backyard with contaminated water taken from the Nashua wastewater treatment facility. She ultimately came up with a system that exposes titanium oxide and zinc oxide to sunlight, creating a chemical reaction that generates hydroxyl radicals, which in turn can kill harmful bacteria.

Kurup used her system for one set of testing; the other was a control. She counted bacteria before and after purification (with 3M petrifilms), and discovered that water which had gone through her composite–which costs about half a cent per gram–had significantly fewer coliform units and E.Coli colonies in a matter of hours.

14-Year-old is America’s Top Young Scientist: Her Solar-Powered Jug Purifies

Unlike today’s popular water purification methods–using UV lamps that require electricity or chemicals that give water a nasty smell and taste–Kurup’s method can run off-grid, generating fresh-tasting water. She has competition from innovative water filtration systems like LifeStraw, of course, but this isn’t the last we’ll see of Kurup’s inventions.

The high school freshman hopes to work with Discovery and 3M on developing the water filtration project. She’s also interested in speaking with other companies that could help with funding. “My next step is applying for a patent,” she says. “I want to start a nonprofit organization to deploy my innovation.”

After graduation, Kurup wants to become a neurologist. But first, more science competitions. “Science is really my passion,” she says.