Have a flying Car?

London, A flying car which usually finds its mention in children books or animated cartoon movies, may soon become a reality in Britain.

Aviation experts are saying a flying car could be in regular use in Britain within five years after a model was formally approved by US authorities, Daily Mail reported Monday.

The $250,000 Terrafugia Transition is a two-seater aircraft, which has a top speed of 115 mph, a range of 500 miles on a tank of fuel and requires just 20 hours training to fly.

The car, at the touch of a button, takes just 15 seconds for its wings to fold up automatically and the power to be re-routed from the propeller to the rear wheels.
It can then be driven at up to 65 mph and will comfortably fit in a standard size garage.

'It's like a little Transformer,' said Terrafugia founder Carl Dietrich, referring to the children's toys that were turned into a blockbuster movie franchise.

Although aimed primarily at buyers in the US where there are plenty of airstrips and 600 'fly-in'
communities - Boeing 707 owner John Travolta being the best-known fan - more than 20 Britons have already declared an interest in the carbon-fibre vehicle.

India's another communications satellite

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists on Friday successfully launched the GSAT-12 communications satellite which will help meet India’s increasing demand for services like tele-education, telemedicine and e-governance.

The 1410 kg satellite, which costs Rs 80 crores, was launched on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SHAR) in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.

The PSLV-C17 rocket launched the GSAT-12 satellite into a
sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit of 284 km perigee and an apogee of 21,000 km. The satellite with Extended C-band transponders will augment communication services in the country, the ISRO said.

With this launch, the PSLV, referred to as the Indian space agency’s trusted workhorse, completed its eighteenth successful mission in a row. Two more launches of the rocket are expected later this year.

Use of Internet affecting our memory

Researchers have found that the widespread use of search engines and online databases is affecting the way people remember information.

To know whether people were more likely to remember information that could be easily retrieved from a computer, Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged different memory experiments, reports the New York Times.

In one experiment where participants typed 40 bits of trivia, the team found that the subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later.

"Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read," wrote the authors.

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember.

"If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one colour in their flag, for example," the researchers wrote, "do we think about flags - or immediately think to go online to find out?"

In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder.

"That kind of blew my mind," Dr. Sparrow said.

The experiment explores an aspect of what is known as transactive memory - the notion that we rely on our family, friends and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us.

The Internet's effects on memory are still largely unexplored, Dr. Sparrow said, adding that her experiments had led her to conclude that the Internet has become our primary external storage system.

"Human memory is adapting to new communications technology."

Top Ageing Myths Busted

We are a lot which is obsessed with anti-ageing.

People are in a mad pursuit of foods, exercises, products, drugs, short-cuts and what not which can help slow down aging. But let's come to terms with the fact that however much we try (or wish) we cannot reverse the process of ageing. Yes, we can slow it down, but that too, to an extent. We at MensXP have always maintained that what really counts is ageing the graceful way.

Due to this hoopla surrounding this entire ageing/anti-ageing affair, lot of myths have cropped and are always lurking around us. While some people have a belief that hair loss comes from the mother's side, the other lot thinks that use of moisturizing products can slow down aging. So it's time to debunk some ageing myths here.

Hair Loss Comes from Mother's Side

Hair loss is dictated by several genetic factors. But the belief that the gene for the hair loss comes from the mother's side is untrue. Baldness is a hereditary trait to a large extent but you should examine the both sides of your family tree if you want to have an idea of what lies ahead for your hair.

Diet Supplements Can Slow Down Ageing

We come across many such products which claim to be the fountain of youth. Well, that's what the advertising guy has figured out for them. Scientific evidence that such products magically down ageing is lacking. And not only can these products be just “marketing gimmicks”, they might even have a negative effect on your health. So you must never just pick up these dietary supplements. It's extremely important that you take them under the supervision of a qualified doctor. And rather than popping pills, try and improve the quality of food you consume.

No Sunscreens Required in Winter

Even if the skies are cloudy, sun's UV rays pierce through them to reach the earth and then penetrate your skin. This can lead to premature ageing. True that we have to be more careful during the summer but it's also advisable to use an SPF 30 sunscreen during the winter as well and also during the days it rains.

Moisturising Products Reverse the Signs of Ageing

At present, there is no scientific proof available which suggests that moisturizing products can help you travel back in time. What these products actually do is that they make the upper layer of the epidermis look fresher, and thus, younger. Apart from this, they smooth the skin and reduce the dryness which in turn makes the lines on the skin less visible.

Losing Weight Gets Harder as you Grow up

While our metabolism may plunge as we add years, the resulting weight-loss is not necessarily associated with that. Losing weight is hugely dependent on your diet and physical routine. However, older adults might gain weight due to the sight-effects of medicines prescribed to them. In such a case, speak to your doctor at the earliest

Live forever!!!!

LONDON (Reuters) - If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" ageing -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing ageing under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.

"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."

De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance", which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.

De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.

He describes ageing as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.

"The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.

CHALLENGE

Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.

To date, the world's longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.

Some researchers say, however, that the trend towards longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.

De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" was never won.

The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as "pseudo science".

They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS "exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt."

CELL THERAPY
For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.

But de Grey says that's not what he's working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.

"This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," he told Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."

De Grey divides the damage caused by ageing into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.

He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it's already almost there.

"Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.

Stem cell therapies are currently being trialled in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.

NO AGE LIMIT

Cardiovascular diseases are the world's biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.

Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls "molecular garbage" -- byproducts of the body's metabolic processes -- which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.

"The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell's workings," he said.

De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells -- and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.

"If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease," he said.

De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.

In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150.

"I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on," he said.

"What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents," he said.

"But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."

How to Use Strong and Secure Passwords

How we can come up with string and secure passwords. Explains the methods hackers use for breaking into the accounts and also tells about a few password managers.

In all probability, most of us would be aware that using obvious or guessable passwords such as “password” or your pet's name isn't a good idea at all.
But then what options do you really have to come up with astrong and secure password?

First things first, you should have a different, fairly long and very strong password for each account. It's tempting to use the same password for all of your online accounts, but doing so puts every account in jeopardy if one of them gets hacked.

To break into accounts, hackers often employ a method called “dictionary attack”, which involves using words straight from the dictionary to guess the passwords. So it is strongly recommended that you don't use standard words as your passwords; rather try creating meaningless words from a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. And don't just replace letters in a word with a simple (e.g. 'A' with the @ symbol) because that's a very common trick. The password can be strengthened by using a blend of lower and uppercase letters.

The password should be quite complicated. But still, try and use something which you would be able to remember. Come up with something which incorporates various alphanumeric characters. Ideally, it should be a mnemonic sort of thing which you can instantly memorise. But if you see that this is not happening then spend some time in memorizing that password.

Now remembering more than one passwords can be a daunting task. This is where a password manager comes into the picture. KeePass is a fairly good, free password-management tool that runs on Windows and Mac OS X. It stores all the passwords in one encrypted database which can be accessed by a single master password.

Then there's a multi-platform password manager called LastPass which comes with the capability of auto-syncing different computers and browsers, thereby, giving you the access to your encrypted database from any device. However, the catch here is that you sacrifice the security of keeping your password list combined to a single drive. These password managers are great but not 100% safe. The best password is the one you generate yourself, which is highly complicated with a mix of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers. The trick lies in picking up a short phrase or a long word and get creative with it.

A deep and dreamy sleep

Sleep has always been a somewhat magical state with a mysterious purpose. In Hindu scripture, the world itself is considered the dream of a sleeping Vishnu.
Why do we need sleep?There is no good answer to this question, but it is an ancient biological process. Two stages of sleep, the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage, and the Delta-wave, or slow-wave sleep each have distinctive effects on different types of memory and decision making. Sleep is also a general healer. It promotes the rejuvenation of the immune, skeletal, muscular and nervous systems, and a healer of wounds.

Body Chemistry There is a particularly strong effect of sleep on body chemistry. The important anabolic (body-building) hormones, growth hormone, and insulin are secreted preferentially during sleep and reduced by poor sleep. Reductions in sleep duration result in prediabetic chemistry-even a single disrupted night of sleep can alter insulin response in young, healthy people. Similarly, in one's youth, up to 70% of daily growth hormone is secreted during the deepest part of sleep. With ageing, this decreases with a fall in deep sleep. If we could increase deep sleep in the elderly, we might induce a younger hormonal pattern. Exercise and meditation both increase deep sleep.

How much is enough?The amount of sleep one gets seems to correlate with longevity; seven hours is the 'sweet spot'. A lack of sleep (5 hours or less) more than doubles the risk of cardiac death while too much (8 hours or more) seems to be associated with non-cardiac death. Too little sleep seems to be a particular risk factor for weight gain, hypertension and type 2 diabetes.

Naps As India lurches towards a more Westernised life, the mid-afternoon nap may become rare. That would be a shame. A study from Greece confirms that regular napping (three times a week, 30 minutes) decreased the risk of coronary disease by 37%!

Factors that influence sleepCaffeine In the West, caffeine is one of the major culprits in the sleep disruption of modern life- even more so in recent years. Tea has far less caffeine than coffee.

Exercise Aerobic exercise that lasts for an hour will help you get to sleep and stay asleep. However, it may take up to three weeks for the full effect to be noticeable.

Alcohol Alcohol at night reduces the healing benefits of sleep. While people fall asleep faster, alcohol increases lighter REM sleep and shortens slow-wave sleep and overall sleep time. As a result, it can cause more sleepiness the next day.

Melatonin The body creates a chemical called melatonin, which may be a helpful sleeping aid in certain situations like jet lag, shift work, and general insomnia. I sometimes recommend it, particularly for post-surgical patients.

While some take melatonin nightly and tout it as an anti-ageing cure-all, I generally advise my patients to use it sparingly in specific settings until we know more about long-term effects. For jetlag, the optimal dose appears to be 5 mg, taken at bedtime in the new timezone; for insomnia, a dose less than one-tenth of that (0.3 mg).

The bottomline Folk wisdom about the healing properties of sleep is absolutely correct. Too often it is neglected by physicians in their advice to patients. With a systematic approach and some discipline, you can improve your sleep, feel better and live healthier and longer!