INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE On Resource Development and Environmental Change: Emerging Issues and Challenges

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

Department of Geography,Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh,India is
organising an INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE On Resource Development and
Environmental Change: Emerging Issues and Challenges on 27th to 29th
January, 2009. Detail info can be found on

http://www.amu.ac.in/shared/sublinkimages/inter_geog.pdf

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Microsoft launches Live Search Maps for India

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

Microsoft India on Monday launched Live Search Maps for India that offers users access to detailed listings and street maps for 9 Cities, business listings across 29 Cities and access to highway networks to 20,000 cities and towns. Live Search Maps for India is on Microsoft’s Live Search Service, thereby allowing users to search for geographical information, places of general interest and business listings both on the PC and Mobile at http://maps.live.co.in and http://m.live.co.in. This is the first version of its local mapping service for India with the key features developed by the Microsoft India Development Centre (MSIDC) based in Hyderabad.

Speaking on the launch, Rishi Srivastava, Consumer & Online Marketing Operations Head, Microsoft India, said, “We are proud to launch Live Search Maps for users in our country. This is the first version of Live Search Maps for India and Microsoft will continue to introduce new features and improvements in the near future to meet emerging needs of consumers. Over the last two years, Microsoft has made significant investments into research and development for Live Search, acquired global resources and introduced several new features which we believe are extremely relevant and will deliver great value to our users. Live Search Maps will be accessible on the PC and the mobile, thus ensuring that users get the information they need anytime”.

Users can now access on their PC or Mobile —
Addresses, roads, localities, landmarks, detailed street maps and places of general interest like monuments, restaurants, hotels and other places of interest across 9 Indian cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur.

Business listings across 29 major Indian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Agra, Allahabad, Amritsar, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Cochin, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mangalore, Nagpur, Nasik, Patiala, Patna, Rajkot, Surat, Vadodara and Vishakapatnam.

Basic geographical information on the national road network of India across 20,000 cities and towns.

Key features of Live Search Maps for India include Street Maps, Location Search, Business Listing Search, Routing or Directions for Navigation and options for users to print, share collections through email, blogs on Windows Live. “After recent innovations for Live Search such as Image Search, Video Search, Local Search, xRank and Instant Answers, we have rolled out Live Search Maps on our search platform to enable people to learn, discover, and explore specific locations in India”, said Rishi Srivastava.

Source

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India’s Desi Google Earth on cards

Posted on November 10, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

India will soon have a desi version of Google Earth — the popular satellite-mapping tool that allows you to zoom in on any spot on the planet by using just a PC.

ISRO chief G. Madhavan Nair announced this in Gandhinagar yesterday, while inaugurating the Indian National Cartographic Association (INCA)’s International Congress on Collaborative Mapping and Space Technology. Christened “Bhuvan”, the new program will focus on the sub-continent, mapping the upper land surface and the mineral content beneath.

“This will provide the latest information on our natural resources,” said Dr. Nair, adding “and will be useful in addressing local problems like floods, famines, infrastructure development, education and much more”.

Bhuvan will show images 20 times closer than those taken by Google Earth, and they will be upgraded every year. ISRO officials say the requisite software and infrastructure of Bhuvan are already in place and they hope to have it operational by next March.
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A Rock in Oman Can Help Slow Global Warming

Posted on November 8, 2008 by Rashid Faridi

A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.

When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite.

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year.

Their study will appear in the November 11 edition of the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth’s mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

“To be near all that oil and gas infrastructure is not a bad thing,” Matter said in an interview.

They also calculated the costs of mining the rock and bringing it directly to greenhouse gas emitting power plants, but determined it was too expensive.

The scientists, who are both at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, say they could kick-start peridotite’s carbon storage process by boring down and injecting it with heated water containing pressurized carbon dioxide. They have a preliminary patent filing for the technique.

They say 4 billion to 5 billion tons a year of the gas could be stored near Oman by using peridotite in parallel with another emerging technique developed by Columbia’s Klaus Lackner that uses synthetic “trees” which suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

More research needs to be done before either technology could be used on a commercial scale.

Peridotite also occurs in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea and Caledonia, and along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and in smaller amounts in California.

Big greenhouse gas emitters like the United States, China and India, where abundant surface supplies of the rock are not found, would have to come up with other ways of storing or cutting emissions.

Rock storage would be safer and cheaper than other schemes, Matter said.

Many companies are hoping to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by siphoning off large amounts of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and storing it underground.

That method could require thousands of miles of pipelines and nobody is sure whether the potentially dangerous gas would leak back out into the atmosphere in the future.

source

Posted in Environment, Global Warming | Leave a comment