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IT at the ends of Earth Leaving a camera in an unheated area means you’ll come back to a gadget with a ruined display Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE Trends |
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IT at the ends of Earth IF you thought that setting up your home PC was tough and that persuading IT support to sort out your desktop almost impossible, spare a thought for the engineers, astronauts and explorers trying to keep their computers working in the most inhospitable places on the Earth and beyond. A blue screen of death is more than just annoying if you are floating somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean or orbiting the earth. Computer advice is a luxury if you’re working in extreme conditions like these. With winter temperatures plummeting to -80 Celsius, Antarctica has some of the harshest conditions on the earth. Desktops kept in the sealed and heated bases work fine, but the extreme cold outside cracks screens, immobilises moving parts and renders batteries almost completely useless. Brendan Pope ran a computer repair business in the US before moving to Antarctica where he worked in construction at Palmer research station, and blogged about his experiences on Frozennerd.blogspot.com. “Batteries do not last very long in the cold at all,” he says. “We had some Panasonic Toughbooks and while they may last for two or three hours on the battery normally, when you take them outside in those conditions you are lucky to get 20 minutes. At the South Pole, where it gets ridiculously cold, you just can’t use anything battery-powered outside. People I knew there would often carry cameras inside their jackets and only whip them out to take a picture and then quickly stuff them back in.” Then there are the moving parts to worry about. Like most consumer goods, laptops are built to work optimally at room temperature. Below freezing, moving parts in the hard drive and motor start to seize up. Screens can be particularly susceptible to the cold too: sharp contractions caused by the cold air make glass crack, with LCD screens on laptops, phones or cameras being particularly vulnerable. Leaving a camera in an unheated area means you’ll come back to a gadget with a ruined display. Bringing it inside too quickly can be a problem as well because the sudden change in temperature can cause the screen to shatter too. It’s rapid temperature change that causes another of the biggest problems for computers in the Antarctic—condensation. Coming in from an outside world that could be on average -40 Celsius to a station which would be heated to about 15 to 20 Celsius means a temperature shift of 60 degrees. Warm air hitting a cold laptop can cause condensation to form on its surfaces, a massive problem when the condensation forms on the inside too. The accumulation of water droplets inside will make the computer short circuit. “Condensation is a big problem,” explains Pope. “What you usually have to do is keep laptops in some sort of insulating material, like a styrofoam case, which will let it warm up again slowly so it doesn’t condense. Otherwise, it will eventually short it out. That kills the laptop. It happens with cameras too.” The research base keeps spare parts on hand for laptop first aid, but if your laptop shorts or cracks, the only option is to watch penguins for several weeks because the small station is only supplied by ship once a month. Even harsher conditions can be found on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. And there a broken computer doesn’t just mean a tedious wait; it can cost lives. Fujitsu provides the computers and IT systems to the British Army and the Navy. Add bomb blasts, dust, heat, water and unreliable power supplies, and you get an idea of the challenges facing military computers. The computers used in these conditions have to be “ruggedised” models: that means toughened screens, aluminium or magnesium body casing, shock-protected hard drives and spill-proof keyboards designed to take much more than a spot of cappuccino froth. When it comes to IT in the face of adversity, there’s one place with the harshest conditions of all—space, the final frontier. Having working computers in space is essential for the lives of astronauts, for satellite TV and communication, and for space exploration. You might assume that the computers in space would be the most powerful and hi-tech models available, but surprisingly they’re anything but. “The fundamental thing about the computers used in space is that they are always using computers that are 10 years out of date because they know they work,” says Richard Hollingham, editor of Space:uk, the UK Space Agency’s official magazine and BBC science presenter. “The technology has to be tried and tested. You don’t send them up there with the latest version of Windows because you don’t know what glitches are on it.” There is a satellite link to the Earth for technical help, but sending a technician up to fix a laptop is impossible, so each astronaut on the manned International Space Station will have had training in how the computers on board work, and one will be an IT specialist. On the space stations, standard PCs are used, but on the satellites that provide TV, GPS and communication for us back on the Earth, computers are built to perform very specific tasks, one to run the ship and one to perform the function it has been put up there to do: broadcast television for example. Then there are the meteorites. Conditions in space make Afghanistan seem positively welcoming. As Richard Hollingham explains: “The Sun is a big danger for anything sitting just outside the Earth’s atmosphere. There is a constant stream of charged particles from the Sun called the solar wind, there’s the threat of tiny meteorites—they’re minute but they are moving at thousands of miles an hour. The worst thing is space junk, a cloud of space debris that’s orbiting the Earth. So, the satellite has to be able to cope with that and the computer on board has to be able to cope with that.” The shock-proofing a computer on a satellite uses to withstand a meteorite is very similar to the technology used in military computers to withstand bomb blasts. However, while most people can hope their office computer will be safe from both meteorites and bombs, all PCs should be built to survive. As Ellett insists, it’s not just astronauts and commandos who require reliable computers. “For us it’s very similar, whether we are providing support for a computer system on an oil rig or for an office worker in a city company in London,” he says. “A company could lose thousands of pounds for every second the computer system is out of action. No one wants their computers to go down.” —
By arrangement with
The Independent |
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THIS UNIVERSE Why does the Earth spin? If the Earth spins, heavy atoms get settled at its centre and when their number increases, the strength of Earth’s gravitational field also increases, leading to more intense gravity. Why? I think you are a little confused. Let me address the first question: “Why does the Earth spin?” For understanding this, we have to guess how our solar system and the planets came into being. It is believed that stars, solar systems, including their planets, all come from the slow condensation of large clouds of gas and dust. This condensation is the result of mutual gravitational attraction between various parts of the cloud. Such clouds in general might be slowly rotating in one way or another. For a large number of clouds randomly moving in the galaxy, the probability that individually any one of them would have absolutely zero rotation, and therefore zero angular momentum, is extremely small. Let us now follow the happenings as time progresses. Once a cloud starts to condense, it begins to get a little hot inside because condensation meaning that various parts of the cloud are falling on each other. This produces heat. There is also another effect. If the angular momentum of the cloud remains the same but the radius decreases, the period of rotation will decrease and it will begin to rotate faster. Ultimately, the cloud may condense to such a stage that the temperature at its centre rises to millions of degrees and thermonuclear reactions begin, with conversion of hydrogen into helium and generation of lot heat and an increase of internal pressure. At this stage, the internal pressure equals the inward force of gravity and the star stabilises. This is the present state of a star like our Sun. Incidentally, the rotation period of the Sun is about 27 days. But how about the planets? It is believed that they arise in the following way: While the Sun is born, there is a lot of material from the original cloud that has not been incorporated into making the central body, the Sun. This material forms part of the interplanetary clouds that do share some of the angular momentum of the original cloud but they could break up into fragments due to density fluctuations. Condensation of these sub-clouds leads to formation of planets. It is likely that these also rotate because they are residues of the original interstellar cloud. This is supported by the fact that most planets rotate around the sun in a single plane and the direction of their rotation is the same. Their spin has also similar origin and original direction of the angular momentum is generally maintained. This qualitative picture does seem to work. The main point is that in all the chaotic happenings you are unlikely to have a celestial that has zero spin—all planets do rotate. |
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Trends WASHINGTON: A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP’s broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes, scientists reported. The micro-organisms were apparently stimulated by the massive oil spill that began in April, and they degraded the hydrocarbons so efficiently that the plume is now undetectable, said Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
White House mulling ‘all options’ on stem cells VINEYARD HAVEN, Massachusetts: The White House is reviewing all options for responding to a court ruling stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, a spokesman said. A US district judge issued the injunction on Monday, saying the doctors who challenged the policy would likely succeed because US law blocked all federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Drugs protect monkeys from Ebola virus WASHINGTON: US government researchers working to find ways to treat the highly deadly Ebola virus said a new approach from AVI BioPharma Inc saved monkeys after they were infected. Two experimental treatments protected more than 60 per cent of monkeys infected with Ebola and all the monkeys infected with a related virus called Marburg, the team at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland reported.
Private spaceship carrier plane damaged in test CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: An aircraft designed to launch Virgin Galactic's suborbital passenger spaceship was damaged in an accident on a California runway, manufacturer Scaled Composites said. In a statement on its website, Scaled, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, called the incident "minor" and noted that SpaceShipTwo was not attached to the carrier aircraft, known as WhiteKnightTwo, at the time. — Reuters |
Leach meets the extreme tech experts
WASHINGTON: A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP’s broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes, scientists reported. The micro-organisms were apparently stimulated by the massive oil spill that began in April, and they degraded the hydrocarbons so efficiently that the plume is now undetectable, said Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
