Space radar techniques for land mapping

Posted on August 2, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

Entrepreneurs at ESA’s Business Incubation centre in the Netherlands have used radar technology from the agency’s Envisat remote-sensing satellite to develop a compact, high-resolution radar that can monitor land and buildings from small aircraft. The radar can monitor structures such as dams, harbours, canals and buildings, leading to maps for urban planning, territory surveillance and cadastral updating. Several flights over the same location can spot changes between pictures, revealing ground movements that could affect structures. The sensor’s main advantage is that it can be flown on small, readily available and inexpensive aircraft. In comparison, conventional bulky radar requires large, costly planes, while laser systems need more time to take high-resolution pictures, and are therefore often flown on costly helicopters.

Source : http://www.esa.int

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Energy efficiency could save U.S. $600 billion -McKinsey

Posted on August 2, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

According to renowned business consultants McKinsey,  United States could save about $600 billion in energy costs by 2020 if it hiked annual efficiency spending about five-fold, business consultants McKinsey and Co said in The United States could save about $600 billion in energy costs by 2020 if it hiked annual efficiency spending about five-fold .

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Mines Could Provide Geothermal Energy

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

Mines  could be used to provide geothermal energy to local towns according to two engineers from the University of Oviedo, whose research is being published in the journal Renewable Energy. The method they have developed makes it possible to estimate the amount of heat that a tunnel could potentially provide.

Using geothermal energy also helps to reduce CO2 emissions, and is not dependent upon climatic conditions (unlike other renewable energies such as solar or wind power). Other advantages are that these facilities make use of a country’s own resources, do not require new developments on large sites, do not pollute the immediate environment, and are believed to be profitable over the long term.

Geothermal energy can be used directly in family homes, housing developments, swimming pools, fish farms, industrial units and other buildings.

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‘Brain-reading’ Methods Developed

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Rashid Faridi

Scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles  have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness. With this new window into the brain, scientists now also are provided with the means of developing  accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

Over the last several years, much of neuroimaging has focused on pinpointing areas of the brain that are uniquely responsible for specific mental functions, such as learning, memory, fear and love. But this  research shows that the brain is more complex than that simple model. In their analysis of global brain activity, the researchers found that different processing tasks have their own distinct pattern of neural connections stretching across the brain, similar to the fingerprints that distinctively identify each of us. Rather than being a static pattern, however, the brain is able to arrange and rearrange the connections based on the mental task being undertaken…..

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