Defending the increase of milk prices and bus fares as a 'painful'

Chennai: Defending the increase of milk prices and bus fares as a 'painful' decision taken by her government, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa today slammed opposition parties, including her erstwhile allies, for criticising it out of 'political reasons'

 Jayalalithaa also came down on her archrival and DMK chief M Karunanidhi for flaying the state Cabinet decision, saying he was "shedding crocodile tears" and people were aware of it.

Various political parties including DMK, actor-politican Vijaykant's DMDK and Left parties have criticised the steep increase in the prices of milk sold by state-owned Aavin and bus fare announced by Jayalalithaa.

In a statement here, she said her Cabinet on November 17 took 'the painful decision' to increase the prices to save the PSUs -- Aavin and state transport corporations, left in 'bad health' by the previous DMK Government.

"We were forced to hike prices as we had no other choice. People should realise this and not give into the statements (by opposition leaders)," she said requesting their cooperation.

Jayalalithaa dismissed as a 'bag of lies' Karunanidhi's statement that despite officials' request, he had not allowed hiking the prices of milk and bus fares. "He is only pretending to speak for the people. They are aware of his crocodile tears," she added.

Taking a dig at DMDK and the Left parties, which had contested the April assembly polls in alliance with AIADMK but parted ways ahead of last month's civic polls, Jayalalithaa accused their leaders of adopting 'double standards' saying they had earlier expressed concern over the state of the PSUs.

Prior to the assembly polls, these parties had conveyed to her their concern over DMK's administrative 'mismanagement' and other issues affecting people."They had said only I can fix these issues by virtue of bold, tough measures," she said.

"Let their conscience decide if it is right for them to issue statements condemning the hike now," she said.

Intelligence is a very difficult concept

Intelligence is a very difficult concept to define. Intellect is described as “the power of the mind to think in a logical manner and acquire knowledge” [1]. Even psychology experts have not agreed upon what this actually means [2]. Intelligence can be divided into various subcategories such as reasoning, problem solving, and memory, and so creating a consistent scale by which one can measure intelligence is quite difficult.

Scientists Use Gold Nanorods to Flag Brain Tumors

ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2011) — "It's not brain surgery" is a phrase often uttered to dismiss a job's difficulty, but when the task actually is removing a brain tumor, even the slightest mistake could have serious health consequences. To help surgeons in such high-pressure situations, researchers from Prof. Adam Wax's team at Duke University's Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics and Biomedical Engineering Department have proposed a way to harness the unique optical properties of gold nanoparticles to clearly distinguish a brain tumor from the healthy, and vital, tissue that surrounds it.


Current techniques for outlining brain tumors vary, but all have limitations, such as the inability to perform real-time imaging without big, expensive equipment, or the toxicity and limited lifespan of certain labeling agents. Gold nanoparticles -- which are so small that 500 of them end-to-end could fit across a human hair -- might provide a better way to flag tumorous tissue, since they are non-toxic and relatively inexpensive to manufacture.

The Duke researchers synthesized gold, rod-shaped nanoparticles with varying length-to-width ratios. The different-sized particles displayed different optical properties, so by controlling the nanorods' growth the team could "tune" the particles to scatter a specific frequency of light. The researchers next joined the tuned particles to antibodies that bind to growth factor receptor proteins found in unusually high concentrations on the outside of cancer cells. When the antibodies latched on to cancer cells, the gold nanoparticles marked their presence.

The team tested the method by bathing slices of tumor-containing mouse brain in a solution of gold nanoparticles merged with antibodies. Shining the tuned frequency of light on the sample revealed bright points where the tumors lurked. The tunability of the gold nanoparticles is important, says team member Kevin Seekell, because it allows researchers to choose from a window of light frequencies that are not readily absorbed by biological tissue. It might also allow researchers to attach differently tuned nanoparticles to different antibodies, providing a way to diagnose different types of tumors based the specific surface proteins the cancer cells display. Future work by the team will also focus on developing a surgical probe that can image gold nanoparticles in a living brain, Seekell says

Tamil Nadu Local Body Election Results

 Chennai Corporation ADMK Mayor candidate Saidai Duraisamy Leads

Chennai, Oct 21: Tamil nadu local body elections took place all over tamilnadu on 17th and 19th.. Counting started today.

In Chennai Corporation ADMK mayor candidate Saidai Duraisamy leads by 2060 Votes against DMK candidate M. Subramanian.
Candidate NameVotes

S.SAIDAI DURAISAMY (AIADMK) 68,439
MA.SUBRAMANIAN (DMK) 41383
G.VELMURUGAN (DMDK) 6564
N.MANOHARAN (MDMK) 2348
A.K.MOORTHY (PMK) 2929
SAIDAI RAVI (Congress) 3055
P.G.PARAMESH BABU (BSP) 695

Col Gaddafi killed

Muammar Gaddafi is the latest in a long line of despots, tyrants and global terrorists to be captured or killed.
He died just five months after the most wanted international fugitive of the 21st Century, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, met his end.
Bin Laden survived on the run for a decade before a group of US Navy Seals burst into his hideaway and shot him dead on May 2, 2011.
Rather than a remote mountain cave, where many assumed him to be, bin laden was discovered living in a large house with members of his family in the garrison town of Abbottabad in Pakistan.
His body was flown to Afghanistan so buried at sea within 24 hours of his death.
Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein lived less well than Osama bin Laden while evading an intense manhunt for eight months following the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
Saddam was found and captured by US forces at a farm house near his former power base in Tikrit in December of that year.
He was dragged from a hole looking dishevelled having grown long straggly hair and a bushy beard.
Saddam was tried in Iraq and found guilty of crimes against humanity before being executed by hanging in December 2006.
Radovan Karadic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, remained on the run for 12 years.
During that time he worked under an alias at a private medical clinic in Belgrade before finally being arrested in 2008.
After years on the run Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military leader and accused war criminal, was captured in May this year at a house in a village in northern Serbia.
In 1989 Nicolae Ceaucescu, who ruled Romania for more two decades, died at the hands of his own people.
He was captured and put to death by firing squad, along with his wife, after a two hour trial.
In 2006 former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, known as the "Butcher of the Balkans," was found dead from a heart attack in his cell in The Hague.
He had been handed to the UN war crimes tribunal but died mid-trial.

Microring Device Could Aid in Future Optical Technologies

Microring Device

 Researchers at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a device small enough to fit on a computer chip that converts continuous laser light into numerous ultrashort pulses, a technology that might have applications in more advanced sensors, communications systems and laboratory instruments.

"These pulses repeat at very high rates, corresponding to hundreds of billions of pulses per second," said Andrew Weiner, the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The tiny "microring resonator" is about 80 micrometers, or the width of a human hair, and is fabricated from silicon nitride, which is compatible with silicon material widely used for electronics. Infrared light from a laser enters the chip through a single optical fiber and is directed by a structure called a waveguide into the microring.

The pulses have many segments corresponding to different frequencies, which are called "comb lines" because they resemble teeth on a comb when represented on a graph.

By precisely controlling the frequency combs, researchers hope to create advanced optical sensors that detect and measure hazardous materials or pollutants, ultrasensitive spectroscopy for laboratory research, and optics-based communications systems that transmit greater volumes of information with better quality while increasing bandwidth. The comb technology also has potential for a generation of high-bandwidth electrical signals with possible applications in wireless communications and radar.

The light originates from a continuous-wave laser, also called a single-frequency laser.

"This is a very common type of laser," Weiner said. "The intensity of this type of laser is constant, not pulsed. But in the microring the light is converted into a comb consisting of many frequencies with very nice equal spacing. The microring comb generator may serve as a competing technology to a special type of laser called a mode-locked laser, which generates many frequencies and short pulses. One advantage of the microrings is that they can be very small."

The laser light undergoes "nonlinear interaction" while inside the microring, generating acomb of new frequencies that is emitted out of the device through another optical fiber.

"The nonlinearity is critical to the generation of the comb," said doctoral student Fahmida Ferdous. "With the nonlinearity we obtain a comb of many frequencies, including the original one, and the rest are new ones generated in the microring."

Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing online this month in the journal Nature Photonics. The paper is scheduled for publication in the Dec. 11 issue.

Although other researchers previously have demonstrated the comb-generation technique, the team is the first to process the frequencies using "optical arbitrary waveform technology," pioneered by Purdue researchers led by Weiner. The researchers were able to control the amplitude and phase of each spectral line, learning that there are two types of combs -- "highly coherent" and "partially coherent" -- opening up new avenues to study the physics of the process.

"In future investigations, the ability to extract the phase of individual comb lines may furnish clues into the physics of the comb-generation process," Ferdous said. "Future work will include efforts to create devices that have the proper frequency for commercial applications."

The silicon-nitride device was fabricated by a team led by Houxun Miao, a researcher at NIST's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the Maryland Nanocenter at the University of Maryland. Some of the work was performed at the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue's Discovery Park, and experiments demonstrating short-pulse generation were performed in Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The effort at Purdue is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Nano fuel Used to Generate Extreme Ultraviolet Light Pulses

 If you want to avoid spilling when you are pouring liquids in the kitchen you may appreciate a funnel. Funnels are not only useful tools in the kitchen. Light can also be efficiently concentrated with funnels. In this case, the funnels have to be about 10.000-times smaller.

An international team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon (South Korea), the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching (Germany), and the Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta (USA) has now managed to concentrate the energy of infrared light pulses with a nano funnel and use the concentrated energy to generate extreme ultraviolet light flashes. These flashes, which repeated 75 million times per second, lasted only a few femtoseconds. The new technology can help in the future to measure the movement of electrons with the highest spatial and temporal resolution.

Light is convertible. The wavelengths composing the light can change through interactions with matter, where both the type of material and shape of the material are important for the frequency conversion. An international team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), and the Georgia State University (GSU) has now modified light waves with a nano funnel made out of silver. The scientists converted femtosecond laser pulses in the infrared spectral range to femtosecond light flashes in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV). Ultrashort, pulsed EUV light is used in laser physics to explore the inside of atoms and molecules. A femtosecond lasts only a millionth of a billionth of a second.

Light in the infrared (IR) can be converted to the EUV by a process known as high-harmonic generation, whereby the atoms are exposed to a strong electric field from the IR laser pulses. These fields have to be as strong as the fields holding the atom together. With these fields electrons can be extracted from the atoms and accelerated with full force back onto the atoms. Upon impact highly energetic radiation in the EUV is generated.

To reach the necessary strong electric fields for the production of EUV light, the team of scientists has now combined this scheme with a nano funnel in order to concentrate the electric field of the light. With their new technology, they were able to create a powerful EUV light source with wavelengths down to 20 nanometers. The light source exhibits a so far unreached high repetition rate: the few femtoseconds lasting EUV light flashes are repeated 75 million times per second.

The core of the experiment was a small, only a few micrometers long, slightly elliptical funnel made out of silver and filled with xenon gas. The tip of the funnel was only ca. 100 nanometers wide. The infrared light pulses were sent into the funnel entrance where they travel through towards the small exit. The electromagnetic forces of the light result in density fluctuations of the electrons on the inside of the funnel. Here, a small patch of the metal surface was positively charged, the next one negative and so on, resulting in new electromagnetic fields on the inside of the funnel, which are called surface plasmon polaritons. The surface plasmon polaritons travel towards the tip of the funnel, where the conical shape of the funnel results in a concentration of their fields. “The field on the inside of the funnel can become a few hundred times stronger than the field of the incident infrared light. This enhanced field results in the generation of EUV light in the Xe gas.”, explains Prof. Mark Stockman from GSU.

The nano funnel has yet another function. Its small opening at the exit acts as “doorman” for light wavelengths. Not every opening is passable for light. If the opening is smaller than half of a wavelength, the other side remains dark. The 100 nanometer large opening of the funnel did not allow the infrared light at 800 nm to pass. The generated EUV pulses with wavelengths down to 20 nanometers passed, however, without problems. “The funnel acts as an efficient wavelength filter: at the small opening only EUV light comes out.”, explains Prof. Seung-Woo Kim from KAIST, where the experiments were conducted.

“Due to their short wavelength and potentially short pulse duration reaching into the attosecond domain, extreme ultraviolet light pulses are an important tool for the exploration of electron dynamics in atoms, molecules and solids”, explains Seung-Woo Kim. Electrons are extremely fast, moving on attosecond timescales (an attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second). In order to capture a moving electron, light flashes are needed, which are shorter than the timescale of the motion. Attosecond light flashes have become a familiar tool in the exploration of electron motion. With the conventional techniques, they can only be repeated a few thousand times per second. This can change with the nano funnel. “We assume that the few femtosecond light flashes consist of trains of attosecond pulses”, argues Matthias Kling, group leader at MPQ. “With such pulse trains, we should be able to conduct experiments with attosecond time resolution at very high repetition rate.”

The repetition rate is important for e.g. the application of EUV pulses in electron spectroscopy on surfaces. Electrons repel each other by Coulomb forces. Therefore, it may be necessary to restrict the experimental conditions such that only a single electron is generated per laser shot. With low repetition rates, long data acquisition times would be required in order to achieve sufficient experimental resolution. “In order to conduct experiments with high spatial and temporal resolution within a sufficiently short time, a high repetition rate EUV source is needed”, explains Kling. The novel combination of laser technology and nanotechnology can help in the future to record movies of ultrafast electron motion on surfaces with so far unreached temporal and spatial resolution in the attosecond-nanometer domain.