INCREASED THINNING OF WEST ANTARCTIC GLACIERS

Glaciers in West Antarctica are shrinking at a rate substantially higher than observed in the 1990s. They are losing 60 percent more ice into the Amundsen Sea than they accumulate from inland snowfall.

The study was conducted by a science team from NASA, U.S. universities and from the Centro de Estudios Científicos in Chile. It is based on satellite data and comprehensive measurements made in 2002 by a science team aboard a Chilean P-3 aircraft equipped with NASA sensors. Science Express published the findings today.

The ice loss from the measured glaciers corresponds to an annual sea-level rise of .008 inches (.2 millimeters) or more than 10 percent of the total global increase of about .07 inches (1.8 millimeters) per year.

For a balanced glacial system, the amount of glacier ice melting or flowing into the sea roughly equals the ice formed from snow accumulations further inland. The scientists report the Amundsen Sea glaciers are not in balance.

Bob Thomas, a science team member with EG&G Services at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va., commented that as the glaciers flow to the ocean, they become afloat to form ice shelves. "The ice shelves act like a cork and slow down the flow of the glacier," Thomas said.

The scientists noted the earth underneath the ice is further below sea level than had been assumed, so the ice is thicker than once thought. This increases the amount of ice each glacier can discharge into the ocean as its speed increases. It makes it easier for the thinning glacier to float free from its bed, and thus further 'loosen the cork'," Thomas said.

Thomas said in the last 10 years the ability to accurately measure glaciers worldwide has greatly improved. Measurements from aircraft and satellites like NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), launched in 2003, have greatly improved accuracy.

Source-NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0923westglaciers_prt.htm

Evolution of the computer keyboard

The creation of the present computer keyboard began with the invention of the typewriter. A few important technological developments created the change of the typewriter into the computer keyboard. The teletype machine was introduced in the 1930s; this technology combined the technology of the typewriter (used as an input and a printing device) with the telegraph. Elsewhere, punched card systems were combined with typewriters to create keypunches. Keypunches were the basis of early adding machines and IBM was selling over one million dollars worth of adding machines in 1931.

Early computer keyboards were first equipped from the punch card and teletype technologies. In 1946, the Eniac computer used a punched card reader as its input and output device. In 1948, the Binac computer used an electromechanically controlled typewriter to in cooperation input data directly onto magnetic tape and to print results. The emerging electric typewriter additional improved the technological tie-up between the typewriter and the computer. There were many electromechanical steps in transmitting data between the keyboard and the computer that slowed things down. With electric keyboards, the keyboard's keys might now send electronic impulses straight to the computer and save time. By the late ‘70s and early on ‘80s, the entire computers used electronic keyboards and VDTs

Saturn

Saturn (pronounced /'sæt?n/) is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Along with the planets Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune it is classify as a gas giant (also known as a Jovian planet, after the planet Jupiter). It was named after the Roman god Saturnus, equate to the Greek Kronos (the Titan father of Zeus) and the Babylonian Ninurta. Saturn's sign represents the god's sickle (Unicode: ?), The day in the week Saturday gets its name from the planet.

The planet Saturn is calm of hydrogen, with small proportions of helium and trace elements. The interior consists of a small core of rock and ice, bounded by a thick layer of metallic hydrogen and a gaseous outer layer. The outer atmosphere is normally bland in appearance, although long-lived features can appear. Wind speeds on Saturn can reach 1,800 km/h, considerably faster than those on Jupiter. Saturn has a planetary magnetic field intermediate in strength among that of Earth and the more powerful field around Jupiter.

Grapefruit

The grapefruit is a subtropical citrus tree grown for its fruit which was initially named the "forbidden fruit" of Barbados.
These evergreen trees are frequently found at around 5-6 m tall, even though they can reach 13-15 m. The leaves are shady green, long up to 150 mm and thin. It produces 5 cm fair four-petalled flowers. The fruit is yellow-skinned, mainly oblate and ranges in diameter from 10-15 cm. The flesh is segmented and acidic, unreliable in color depending on the cultivars, which include white, pink and red pulps of varying sweetness. The 1929 US Ruby Red (of the Red blush variety) has the first grapefruit patent.
The fruit has only become popular from the late 19th century; before that it was only grown as a decorative plant. The US quickly became a major creation of fruit, with orchards in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. In Spanish, the crop is known as toronja or pomelo.

A history of computer viruses

In the following report, “computer viruses” will be explained in aspect. A lengthy and educational description of the evolution and history on microcomputer viruses will be given; to give you a background of their origin for some understanding of how they came to be. The next segment in the statement is on how to battle computer viruses with the development of anti-virus applications.

The current status of microcomputer viruses will also be discuss, naming the most common types of viruses and the mass harmful type at this present point of time.
Details of the most new outbreaks of computer viruses, such as the “Melissa”, “I Love You” and the most recent “Anna Kournikova” viruses will be explained, and why they are so harmful.

Battery electric vehicle

The electric car, EV, or basically electric vehicle is battery electric vehicles (BEV) that make use of chemical energy stored in rechargeable battery packs. Electric vehicles use electric motors and motor controllers in its place of interior combustion engines (Ices). Vehicles using both electric motors and Ices are examples of hybrid vehicles, and are not deliberate pure BEVs because they operate in a charge-sustaining mode. Hybrid vehicles with batteries that can be thrilling externally to displace some or all of their ICE power and gasoline fuel are called plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and are pure BEVs during their charge-depleting mode. BEVs are normally automobiles, light trucks, neighborhood electric vehicles, motorcycles, motorized bicycles, electric scooters, golf carts, milk floats, forklifts and similar vehicles.

Screen-printing

Screen-printing, silk-screening, or serigraphy is a printmaking system that creates a sharp-edged image using a stencil. A screen-print or serigraph is an image shaped using this technique.

It started as an industrial technology, and was adopt by American graphic artists in the early 1900s. It is currently popular both in fine arts and in commercial printing, where it is generally used to print images on T-shirts, hats, CDs, DVDs, ceramics, glass, polyethylene, polypropylene, paper, metals, and wood. The Printer's National Environmental Assistance Center says "Screen printing is possibly the most adaptable of all printing processes." Since rudimentary screen-printing materials are so affordable and readily available, it has been used normally in underground settings and subcultures, and the non-professional look of such DIY culture screen prints has become a significant cultural aesthetic seen on movie posters, record album covers, flyers, shirts, commercial fonts in advertising, and elsewhere.

Batsman

A batsman in the sport of cricket is, depending on context: Any players will perform for batting. A player whose expert in the game is batting. During the play of a cricket match, two members of the batting team are on the field, although their team-mates wait off the field. Those two players are the existing batsmen. Each batsman stands near one of the two wickets also end of the cricket pitch near the centre of the ground.

The two batsmen have different roles:

The striker stands in front of the wicket nearest him and attempts to protect it from balls bowled by the opposing bowler from the other wicket. The non-striker stands stopped near the bowler's wicket. While protecting his wicket, the striker may also hit the ball into the field and attempt to run to the opposite wicket, exchanging places with the non-striker. This score a run, the two batsmen may continue to exchange places, scoring additional runs, until members of the fielding team gather and return the ball to either wicket.

Gold

Gold is a tinny element with a trait yellow color, but can also be black or ruby when finely alienated, while colloidal solutions are intensely tinted and often purple. These colors are the effect of gold's plasmon frequency lying in the visible range, which causes red and yellow glow to be reflected, and blue light to be engrossed. Only silver colloids show the same interactions with light, albeit at a shorter occurrence, making silver colloids yellow in color.

Gold is a good conductor of temperature and electricity, and is not precious by air and most reagents. Heat, damp, oxygen, and most corrosive agents have very little chemical effect on gold, making it well-suited for use in coins and jewelry; equally, halogens will chemically alter gold, and aqua regia dissolve it.

Pure gold is too soft for ordinary use and is hard-boiled by alloying with silver, copper, and other metals. Gold and its lots of alloys are most often used in jewelry, coinage and as a typical for monetary exchange in various countries. When promotion it in the form of jewelry, gold is calculated in karats (k), with pure gold being 24k. However, it is more commonly sold in lower capacity of 22k, 18k, and 14k. A lower "k" indicates a higher percent of copper or silver assorted into the alloy, with copper being the more typically used metal between the two. Fourteen karat gold-copper alloy will be almost identical in color to definite bronze alloys, and both may be used to produce polish and added badges. Eighteen karat gold with a high copper content is establish in some traditional jewelry and will have a distinct, though not dominant copper cast, giving an attractively warm color. A comparable karat weight when alloyed with silvery metals will appear less humid in color, and some low karat white metal alloys may be sold as "white gold", silvery in exterior with a slightly yellow cast but far more resistant to decay than silver or sterling silver. Karat weights of twenty and higher is more general in modern jewelry. Because of its high electrical conductivity and confrontation to decay and other desirable combinations of physical and chemical properties, gold also emerged in the late 20th century as an vital industrial metal, particularly as thin plating on electrical card associates and connectors.

Earth

Earth whose Latin name is Tellus is the third planet in the solar system in terms of distance from the Sun, and the fifth largest. It is also the largest of its planetary system's terrestrial planets, making it the largest solid body in the solar system, and it is the only place in the universe known to support life. The Earth was formed around 4.57 billion years ago and its largest natural satellite, the Moon, was orbiting it shortly thereafter, around 4.533 billion years ago.

Since it formed, the Earth has changed through geological and biological processes that have hidden traces of the original conditions. The outer surface is divided into several tectonic plates that gradually migrate across the surface over geologic time spans. The interior of the planet remains active, with a thick layer of convecting yet solid Earth mantle and an iron core that generates a magnetic field. The atmospheric conditions have been significantly altered by the presence of life forms, which create an ecological balance that modifies the surface conditions. About 71% of the surface is covered in salt water oceans, and the remainder consists of continents and islands.

Polymer

Polymer is a substance collected of molecules with large molecular mass collected of repeating structural units, or monomers, connected by covalent chemical bonds. The word is resulting from the Greek, πολυ, polu, "many"; and μέρος, meros, "part". Well known examples of polymers contain plastics, DNA and proteins.

While the term polymer in popular usage suggests "plastic", polymers consist of a large class of natural and synthetic materials with a variety of properties and purposes. Natural polymer materials such as shellac and amber have been in utilize for centuries. Biopolymers such as proteins (for example hair, skin and division of the bone structure) and nucleic acids take part in crucial roles in biological processes. A variety of other natural polymers survive, such as cellulose, which is the major constituent of wood and paper.

Corporate bond

A corporate bond is a bond issued by a company. The term is usually applied to longer-term debt instruments, normally with a maturity date falling at least a year after their issue date. The term "commercial paper" is sometimes worn for instruments with a shorter maturity.

Sometimes, the term "corporate bonds" is used to include all bonds apart from those issued by governments in their own currency. Strictly speaking, however, it only applies to those issued by corporations.

Bill of Exchange

A bill of exchange is a printed order by the drawer to the drawee to pay money to the payee. The most general type of bill of exchange is the cheque, which is defined as a bill of exchange drawn on a banker and payable on demand. Bills of exchange are used mainly in international trade, and are written orders by one person to his bank to pay the bearer a specific sum on a specific date sometime in the future.

Prior to the advent of paper currency, bills of exchange were a more important part of trade. They are a quite ancient form of instrument: they were used by medieval trade fairs, such as the Frankfurt Trade Fair.

Public good

In financial side, a public good is a good that is non-rival and non-excludable. This means that utilization of the good by one individual does not reduce the amount of the good available for consumption by others; and no one can be successfully excluded from using that good. For example, if one individual eats a cake, there is no cake left for anyone else, and it is probable to exclude others from consuming the cake; it is a rival and excludable good, or a private good. Conversely, breathing air does not considerably reduce the amount of air available to others, nor can people be effectively excluded from using the air. This makes it a public good, These are highly hypothetical definitions: in the real world there may be no such thing as an completely non-rival or non-excludable good; but economists think that some goods in the real world approximate closely enough for these concepts to be meaningful.

A Need for Welfare

There is an old joke that asked where you find a welfare recipient’s check beneath his work boots of course. For a long time now, since the specialist formation of a stable government, the U.S government has had the programs and passed laws that either dealt with issues of or prejudiced family. Many of these family programs and laws at present in place today are often and usually debated. One of the most debate and most difficult over family programs or laws are welfare.This is because there is now a smallest amount of income so the poor no longer have the need to go out and assign crimes to reach such money.

Mobile phone

The introduction of cells for mobile phone base stations, invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T, was further industrialized by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Due to their low establishment expenses and fast exploitation, mobile phone networks have since spread hastily throughout the world, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.

The zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced in 1945. 0G mobile telephones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not officially categorized as mobile phones, since they did not sustain the automatic change of channel frequency during calls, which allows the user to shift from one cell (the base station coverage area) to another cell, an attribute called "handover".

The first marketable cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the beginning to mid 1980s (the 1G generations) with the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in 1981. This was followed by an explosion in mobile telephone habit, particularly in Northern Europe.

The first "modern" network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was launched by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard which also striking the beginning of competition in mobile telecoms when Radiolinja challenged current Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) who ran a 1G NMT network. A decade after, the first commercial commence of 3G (Third Generation) was again in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. However, Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer, is accredited with the innovation of the modern mobile phone in the 1990s. Until the early 1990s, most mobile phones were too large to be carried in a jacket pocket, so they were normally installed in vehicles as car phones. With the miniaturization of digital apparatus, mobile phones have become more and handier over the years.

Funicular

A funicular (from Latin, funiculus, the diminutive of funis, "rope") also called funicular railway, liable railway, inclined plane, or, in the United Kingdom, a rock face railway, is a type of self-contained cable railway in which a cable close to a pair of tram-like vehicles on rails moves them up and down a very steep slope, utilize one ascending and one descending tram cabin to counterbalance each other.
The basic principle of funicular operation is that two cars are attached to each other by a cable, which runs through a pulley at the top of the dispose. Counterbalancing of the two cars, with one ascending and one descending the slope—especially when transporting similar loads, such as passengers —minimizes the attractive effort needed to lift the ascending car.
The usual engineering practice is to splice the cable ends together thereby creating a constant cable loop. The cars are attached equidistantly at differing points on the cable loop. The cable is driven by any resources of winching at one end of the run, and held taut by a tensioning wheel at the other. Other sheeve wheels are employed to guide the cable to and from the drive device and the incline cars. Locomotion is formed by alternately reversing the direction of the drive mechanism so that the cars switch positions on the incline, that is, one up and one down.

Metabolism

Metabolism is the total set of chemical reactions that occur in living cells. These processes are the source of life, allowing cells to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures, and react to their environments. Metabolism is frequently divided into two categories. Catabolic reactions yield energy, an example being the stop working of food in cellular respiration. Anabolic reactions, on the other hand, use this energy to construct mechanism of cells such as proteins and nucleic acids.

The chemical reactions of metabolism are organized into metabolic pathways, in which one chemical is distorted into another by a series of enzymes. Enzymes are vital to metabolism because they allow cells to drive desirable but thermodynamically unfavorable reactions by combination them to favorable ones. Enzymes also agree to the regulation of metabolic pathways in response to changes in the cell's environment or signals from other cells.

Parrot

Parrots or psittacoses pronounced is an order namely Psittaciformes of birds that includes about 350 species. They are frequently grouped into two families: the Cacatuidae (cockatoo), and the Psittacidae (parrots), but one may find many variations. Some sources split parrots into three families. Citation needed the term "true parrot" is not used by the majority of bird keepers, biologists and lay people and is a source of confusion.
All members of the order have a usually erect stance and a characteristic curved beak shape with the upper mandible having slight mobility in the joint with the skull. All parrots are zygodactyls, with two toes at the front of each foot and two at the flipside, and all parrot eggs are white in color.

Adam Sandler: the Funniest man Alive!

With a hazardous brand of humor that has brought him legions of dedicated fans, Sandler's hit as an actor, stand-up comic, writer and producer is matched by his performance and songwriting skills. It is an shocking gift for lyric and melody that is front and center on Adam Sandler's very funny new Warner Bros. Records release What is Your surname featuring 14 new Sandler originals include such classics as The Goat Song, the Lonesome Kicker, Bad Boyfriend and Corduroy Blues.
What is Your Name continues the musical tradition Sandler began with at a standard Pace, Ode to My Carnd the extremely popular The Chanukah Song. With two platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated albums - They're All Gonna Laugh at you and What the Hell Happened to Me - Already to his credit, Sandler goes for a comedy-three peat with what’s Your Name. The move to an all-music format is a normal one, following his 21 city tour last summer, when he perform both creative material and his favorite childhood tunes, backed by a finest rock and roll band.