Breaking News :
Dr. Rajkumar Released (Posted on 15-NOV-2000 1220 IST)
PadmaBhusana Dr. Rajkumar has been released by notorious bandit Veerappan.
Dada Saheb Phalke award winner Dr. Rajkumar spent in jungles under the captivity
of Veerappan for 109 days.
Reuter's Online Report
Indian Movie Star Released by Jungle Bandit
Story Filed: Wednesday, November 15, 2000 1:52 AM EST
BANGALORE, India (Reuters) - Indian film star Rajkumar who was held captive by a jungle bandit for more than 100 days was released on Wednesday, a senior government official in the southern state of Karnataka said.
``We have heard that he has been set free and he has been taken to a guest house near Erode town,'' the official in the state chief minister's office told Reuters.
Erode is in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, at the edge of the dense jungle in which India's most-wanted bandit, Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, had held the 72-year-old movie icon.
Rajkumar, a veteran of 210 Kannada-language films, was seized with three others by Veerappan from a remote farmhouse in Tamil Nadu on July 30.
Efforts to secure the cult hero's release by freeing 56 jailed comrades of Veerappan failed after India's Supreme Court ruled that the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu governments could not swap the bandit's allies for Rajkumar.
Reuter's Online report at NorthernLights
Snippets of Bill Gates visit to India(Posted on 15-SEP-2000)
Bill Gates, Chairman & Chief Architect of Microsoft (well known to
the world as the richest man) was in India on a 24 hour visit enroute
to Sydney Olympics. He was launching the celebration of 10 years of
Microsoft in India and 25 years worldwide.
Related LinkSite Dedication
- Visits polio clinic at Delhi
- Launches msn.co.in
- Announces partnership between Infosys & Microsoft
- Announces setting of dotNet (.Net) lab in Bangalore
- Says Indian politicians are more IT savvy
- Discusses with various CMs & IT Minister
GrandMaster Viswanathan Anand wins FIDE Championship(Posted on 13-SEP-2000)
GrandMaster Viswanathan Anand defeated Bareev Evgeny to clinch the FIDE World Chess Championship.
CONGRATS to GM V.Anand!
More details at
Computer Designs & Makes Robots(Posted on 31-AUG-2000)
News extract from Associate Press News release August 30, 2000 2:00 PM EDT
A computer programmed to follow the rules of evolution has for the first time designed and manufactured simple robots with minimal help from people.
The 8-inch automatons did not take over the world or even vacuum the lab. Instead, they crawled across a tabletop, exactly as they were digitally bred to do, said Jordan Pollack, a Brandeis University computer scientist.
"It's not what our robots do that is so surprising," he said. "They're not humanoid robots -- they don't raise their eyebrows and make you giggle. But what they did do was autonomously designed and manufactured."
By having a computer create designs using natural selection, researchers edged closer to solving two of robotics' biggest obstacles: robots' lack of versatility and their high cost of development.
Robots engineered by people typically function only under specific conditions with limited ability to adapt to changing situations.
A simple robot that vacuums a home, for instance, could cost millions to develop and sell for $5,000 after engineers figured out a way to make sure it doesn't crash into furniture or fall down stairs, Pollack said.
"Then again, you could just hire a minimum-wage worker with a $100 manual vacuum,'' he said. ``The cost of building an intelligent humanoid robot is so high, we just can't get the economics going."
Ultimately, the Darwinian approach could revolutionize everything from manufacturing to space exploration.
"Down the road, if we could have a thing like this in space, you could send the building blocks and let them evolve themselves,'' said Yoseph Bar-Cohen, director of a robotics lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ``That would be fascinating."
Pollack and colleague Hod Lipson merged automatic manufacturing techniques with evolutionary computing. Their results appear Thursday in the journal Nature.
The computer that evolved the designs was told only what parts it would be working with, the physics of the environment in which its offspring would be moving, and the goal of locomotion.
Over several days, the computer thought up different designs and methods of movement, creating traits that worked and failed. Like dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and dodo birds, the failures were cast into the dustbin of history.
The most promising designs survived and passed their success to future generations. Hundreds of generations later, three robots were manufactured by a prototyping machine.
"It evolved various kinds of locomotive mechanisms -- all surprising, given there was no human coming up with how to do it,'' Pollack said. ``We got ratcheting motions. We got rolling motions. We got swimming motions."
The little white robots were made of bars, actuators, ball joints, motors and circuits. People intervened only to insert the motors into the plastic parts spit out by the prototyping machine.
The next step will be to incorporate sensors into the robots so that success or failure in the physical world can be built into future generations.
It could be a difficult project, said Maja J. Mataric, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the USC Robotics Research Labs.
"The authors very cleverly figured out a way to design a body and then actually manufacture it, which is an amazing feat,'' she said. ``What is not at all clear is how to come up with a sensor design and manufacture it."
Scientists create first DNA motors(Posted on 12-AUG-2000)
News extract from Associate Press News release August 10, 2000 10:24 AM EST
Scientists from Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU), and the University of Oxford have created the first DNA motors. The devices, which resemble motorized tweezers, are 100,000 times smaller than the head of a pin, and the techniques used to make them may lead to computers that are 1,000 times more powerful than today's machines.
The DNA motor research, described in the August 10 issue of the British journal Nature, is part of a burgeoning field known as nanotechnology, where dimensions are on a nanometer scale - a billionth of a meter. Scientists believe nanoscale devices may lead to computer chips with billions of transistors, instead of millions - which is the typical range in today's semiconductor technology. The more transistors crammed on a chip, the more powerful it is.
Scientists discover 9 new exo-planets
News extract from Associate Press News release August 07, 2000 3:22 PM EDT
Scientists trying to connect the dots that make up the universe filled in key pieces of the puzzle Monday, announcing the discovery of nine new planets that orbit stars outside our solar system.
Scientists say the discoveries provide further evidence that the Earth and its neighbors may not be as special as we like to think, boosting the potential for life elsewhere in the universe.
Scientists have now found 50 exoplanets, 41 of them in the last five years. Too far away to be seen with even the most high-powered telescopes, they are detected by observing how the gravitational pull of a circling planet can cause a wobble in a star's movement. By measuring the size and frequency of the wobble, scientists can calculate the mass and orbit of the planet.
The planet detected by the McDonald Observatory team orbits a star, Epsilon Eridani, that is near enough to be seen with the naked eye. That makes Epsilon Eridani the closest star to our solar system known to have a planet circling it. Epsilon Eridani is also similar in size to our sun.
Kannada Superstar Dr. Rajkumar kidnapped by Sandalwood Smuggler Veerapan (31-JUL-2000)
Padmabushana Dr.Rajkumar and three others were kidnapped by Sandalwood smuggler on Sunday night 2130 (IST.
Karnataka Chief Minister SM Krishna is in touch with Union Home Minister LK Advani and Tamil Nadu Chief
Minister M Karunanidhi.
Dr. Rajkumar is the most revered Kannada filmstar. He has won several national awards. He is also the
winner of Dada Saheb Phalke award.
More Details at
Indian Sprint Queen PT Usha retires. (26-JUL-2000)
PT Usha dominated the Asian track and field in the eighties. In her last international appearance at the Asian meet in Fukuoka, Japan in 1998, Usha surprised a young field to return with a creditable haul of one gold in the 4x100m relay, a silver in the longer relay and a bronze each in the 200m and 400m.
"I miss my family when I am away training, particularly my young son. I want to give him more time and also train youngsters so that they may bring a good name for the country," Usha said.
PT Usha, we are PROUD of you. CONGRATS for all your achievements. And BEST WISHES for your efforts to train youngsters.
White House announces Indian PM's official visit to US
(26-JUL-2000)
Prime Minister Vajpayee has accepted President Clinton's invitation for an Official Visit to Washington on September 15 and 17. Their meeting will help strengthen bilateral relations between the United States and India and follow up the President's visit to India in March.
The two leaders look forward to broadening cooperation across a wide range of common interests.
Congratulations to Aruna Roy (Community Leadership) and Jockin Arputham (International Understanding) on winning Magsaysay Award
Court dismisses Maharastra Government's case against Thackeray(25-JUL-2000)
The case against Shiv Sena Chief Thackeray for the Saamna newspaper editorial has been dismissed.
First Gastrobot to make debut in August (24-JUL-2000)
First Gastrobot (robot to be completely powered by food) named
Chew Chew will make debut in August, at a robotics conference in
Hawaii.
Chew Chew's "stomach" is a microbial fuel cell (MFC), a device
that enslaves a population of bacteria, in this case E. coli, to
break down food and convert chemical energy into electricity.
More details from
Scientific American
Light's speed accelerated (21-JUL-2000)
Scientists using lasers and specially prepared atoms have managed
to make a pulse of light exceed its own top speed of 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second,
appearing to leave a laboratory tube before it had fully entered.
This feat might seem more like wizardry than physics to some
scientists, who have long assumed that nothing in the universe could go
faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
More (scientists view on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, etc) from
Reuters
Indian Income Tax Dept. raids Cricketers' (Kapil Dev, Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja, Nayan Mongia, etc), bookies, etc houses nationwide.(20-JUL-2000)
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