“Of its size, it is small, compact, and directly compatible with existing power sources. Brother says that it can produce enough power at reasonably low frequencies, around 4-8Hz – this is impressive.

“Walking with a device in your pocket would vibrate with a frequency of around 2Hz. You’d need to shake the remote quite briskly, but it would work.”

There are no plans to commercialise the batteries as yet. “Currently the cells are still in the trial phase and so far we do not have a clear business plan for this item. However, we will continue to monitor the market to make a business plan when needed.”

Camping and outdoor activities is great idea but the very first thing that tourists can benefit from their eco tour is to enjoy plenty of excursion. Recreational eco activities like wild animals spotting, birding, angling, trekking, rock-climbing, mountain-biking, river rafting, para-gliding, hills and lakes viewing, boating, nature walk and etc are worth making one’s getaway full of unforgettable fun.

During the tour, there is immense possibility that you get wider opportunity to learn from the local culture and historical significance of the places you are traveling. Exchange of cultural, historical and geographical information is quite enriching during one’s eco tour.

More the footfalls better the condition of resources are. Increase of eco traveler brings funds to resources/places where one is visiting, which definitely helps making the condition of resources (wildlife places, beaches, forests, and other eco places) better.

The innate intention of ecotourism is to involve the local business in itself. Involvement of local business provides employment to local people, which ultimately lead to building the nation’s economy better.

Ecotourism helps motivating the conservation policy of government and local bodies. Better fund due to more eco traveler will tend to make government and local bodies understand the true value of resources, which, consequently, will demand better protection and strong conservation policy helping resources to live long.

The thoughts grow there as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful. It’s all right, but… there is nothing grows there without doing work -from planning a garden through harvest, for all types of gardens.

If you try to keep your backyard eco-friendly it helps eco global living, then you do a great deal. Besides that gardening has many advantages, first of all it can be a great workout. There is nothing like a day spent outdoors, it has certain healthy phisical and psychological benefits. The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.

Stay as safe as possible during an earthquake. Be aware that some earthquakes are actually foreshocks and a larger earthquake might occur. Minimize your movements to a few steps to a nearby safe place and stay indoors until the shaking has stopped and you are sure exiting is safe.

If indoors
DROP to the ground; take COVER by getting under a sturdy table or other piece of furniture; and HOLD ON on until the shaking stops. If there isn’t a table or desk near you, cover your face and head with your arms and crouch in an inside corner of the building.
Stay away from glass, windows, outside doors and walls, and anything that could fall, such as lighting fixtures or furniture.

Stay in bed if you are there when the earthquake strikes. Hold on and protect your head with a pillow, unless you are under a heavy light fixture that could fall. In that case, move to the nearest safe place.
Use a doorway for shelter only if it is in close proximity to you and if you know it is a strongly supported, loadbearing doorway.

Stay inside until shaking stops and it is safe to go outside. Research has shown that most injuries occur when people inside buildings attempt to move to a different location inside the building or try to leave.
Be aware that the electricity may go out or the sprinkler systems or fire alarms may turn on.
DO NOT use the elevators.
If outdoors
Stay there.
Move away from buildings, streetlights, and utility wires.
Once in the open, stay there until the shaking stops. The greatest danger exists directly outside buildings, at exits, and alongside exterior walls. Many of the 120 fatalities from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake occurred when people ran outside of buildings only to be killed by falling debris from collapsing walls. Ground movement during an earthquake is seldom the direct cause of death or injury. Most earthquake-related casualties result from collapsing walls, flying glass, and falling objects.
If in a moving vehicle
Stop as quickly as safety permits and stay in the vehicle. Avoid stopping near or under buildings, trees, overpasses, and utility wires.
Proceed cautiously once the earthquake has stopped. Avoid roads, bridges, or ramps that might have been damaged by the earthquake.
If trapped under debris
Do not light a match.
Do not move about or kick up dust.
Cover your mouth with a handkerchief or clothing.
Tap on a pipe or wall so rescuers can locate you. Use a whistle if one is available. Shout only as a last resort. Shouting can cause you to inhale dangerous amounts of dust.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is looking for clean and tidy design when it is about saving energy or protecting the environment. NYSERDA has started a new contest online on their website, by entering into it you can advantage great chance to win things for yourself, two types of contests are onsite, one is Video competition and the other one is Essay Writing Contest and the contestants can win stuff of ‘Energy Star’ qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) home makeover, a free home performance assessment. An opportunity to get marked in NYSERDA’s next television commercial more prizes. Only New Yorkers can participate in this Contest, of all ages.

It is a motivated and go-getting online contest and is one way that NYSERDA is gathering New Yorkers to save more than 1 million megawatt hours of electricity by setting up 16.9 million CFL’s statewide. New York has been the most electricity consuming state and also the making more efforts than any other in setting up to condense energy usage, to put together a positive system for future. Only by switching to ‘Energy Star’ qualified CFLs can save hundreds and millions of dollars in energy cost to improve the environment.

This Contest is looking for New Yorkers not only to win stuff, but also who can dictate a real action to make others follow them. To come in the ‘Shining Example’ Competition to win stuff from NYSERDA’s competition, you will have to submit a 90-second video or at least 250 words essay in which describing why they have moved over to ‘Energy Star’ and what does this will be helpful to them.

Here is some of cost-efficient and environmentally friendly solutions for eco-gardening and large-scale landscaping projects, offered by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Make your garden a place for good conservation and environmental savings, getting economic at he same time. If yard waste is managed properly, a garden environment can not be enhanced but also help you save money.

Use shredded untreated wood and leaf wastes converted into chips as mulch on garden beds. This would help prevent weed growth, retain moisture, regulate soil temperature, and add nutrients back to the soil

You can use recycled materials – like wood scraps and cardboard – for building a backyard fort or tree-house for your children, giving them an eco-friendly atmosphere.

Purchase recycled-content gardening equipment and tools. Some fo such equipments are like,

– garden hoses made from old tires.

– stepping stones made from old glass bottles.

– hand tools made with recycled plastic.

– plastic lumber made from recycled plastic bottles and bags — to make flower beds, trellises, decks and birdhouses.

Recycle used oil and tires from lawn and garden equipment.

Maintain your lawn mower and other gardening equipment regularly. Always keep them in efficient operating condition. When refilling your lawn mower, use a nozzle that prevents fuel spills and get wasted unused. To save fuel and protect the air quality, use manual tools.

Don’t bag the grass clippings; leave them on your lawn instead. You can also use a mulching mower. The clippings will return nutrients to the soil rather than take up space in landfills.

Protect young seedlings from frost, wind, heavy rain, and roving animals by reusing plastic milk jugs, just by cutting the bottoms off, or else use small paper bags for the purpose. And, once the seedlings have grown, recycle the bags and jugs for sure.

Donate healthy plants to community gardens or schools, or gift them to neighbors.

Introduce ladybugs as they will eat aphids.

Plant marigolds to ward off beetles.

Look for quick-sprouting plants that help block weed growth.30647

The Gaia hypothesis was first scientifically formulated in the 1960s by the independent research scientist James Lovelock, as a consequence of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars.[4][5] He initially published the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in the early 1970s[6][7] followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth.

The theory was initially, according to Lovelock, a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth. Lovelock suggested using such combinations detected in other planets’ atmospheres would be a relatively reliable and cheap way to detect life, which many biologists opposed at the time and since. Later other relationships such as the fact that sea creatures produce sulfur and iodine in approximately the quantities required by land creatures emerged and helped bolster the theory. Rather than invent many different theories to describe each such equilibrium, Lovelock dealt with them holistically, naming this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time (Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). The Gaia Hypothesis has since been supported by a number of scientific experiments[8] and provided a number of useful predictions,[9] and hence is properly referred to as the Gaia Theory.

Since 1971, the noted microbiologist Dr. Lynn Margulis has been Lovelock’s most important collaborator in developing Gaian concepts.[10]

Until 1975 the hypothesis was almost totally ignored. An article in the New Scientist of February 15, 1975, and a popular book length version of the theory, published in 1979 as The Quest for Gaia, began to attract scientific and critical attention to the hypothesis. The theory was then attacked by many mainstream biologists. Championed by certain environmentalists and climate scientists, it was vociferously rejected by many others, both within scientific circles and outside them.

Also Gaia is a global space astrometry mission. Its goal is to make the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by surveying an unprecedented number of stars – more than a thousand million.

Gaia is a mission that will conduct a census of one thousand million stars in our Galaxy. It will monitor each of its target stars about 70 times over a five-year period, precisely charting their positions, distances, movements, and changes in brightness. It is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs. Within our own Solar System, Gaia should also identify tens of thousands of asteroids.
Additional scientific benefits include detection and characterisation of tens of thousands of extra-solar planetary systems, a comprehensive survey of objects ranging from huge numbers of minor bodies in our Solar System, through galaxies in the nearby Universe, to about 500 000 distant quasars. It will also provide stringent new tests of Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory.

What’s special?

Gaia will rely on the proven principles of ESA’s Hipparcos mission to solve one of the most difficult yet deeply fundamental challenges in modern astronomy: to create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than one thousand million stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. In the process, Gaia will also map the motions of stars, which encode their origin and subsequent evolution. Through comprehensive photometric classification, Gaia will provide the detailed physical properties of each star observed: characterising their luminosity, temperature, gravity, and elemental composition. This massive stellar census will provide the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.

Gaia will achieve this by repeatedly measuring the positions of all objects down to V=20 magnitude. On-board object detection will ensure that variable stars, supernovae, burst sources, micro-lensed events, and minor planets will all be detected and catalogued to this faint limit. Final accuracies of 24 microarcsec at 15 mag, comparable to measuring the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1000 kilometres, will provide distances accurate to 20% as far as the Galactic Centre, 30 000 light-years away.

Gaia’s expected scientific harvest is of almost inconceivable extent and implication. Its main goal is to clarify the origin and evolution of our Galaxy, by providing tests of the various formation theories, and of star formation and evolution. This is possible since low-mass stars live for much longer than the present age of the Universe, and therefore retain in their atmospheres a fossil record of their detailed origin. The Gaia results will precisely identify relics of tidally disrupted accretion debris, probe the distribution of dark matter, establish the luminosity function for pre-main sequence stars, detect and categorise rapid evolutionary stellar phases, place unprecedented constraints on the age, internal structure and evolution of all stellar types, and classify star formation and kinematical and dynamical behaviour within the Local Group of galaxies.

Gaia will pinpoint exotic objects in colossal and almost unimaginable numbers: many thousands of extra-solar planets will be discovered, and their detailed orbits and masses determined; brown dwarfs and white dwarfs will be identified in their tens of thousands; some 20 000 supernovae will be detected and details passed to ground-based observers for follow-up observations; Solar System studies will receive a massive impetus through the detection of many tens of thousands of new minor planets, and even new trans-Neptunian objects, including Plutinos, may be discovered. Amongst other results relevant to fundamental physics, Gaia will follow the bending of star light by the Sun, over the entire celestial sphere, and therefore directly observe the structure of space-time.

Spacecraft

At its heart, Gaia contains two optical telescopes that can precisely pinpoint the location of stars and split their light into a spectrum for analysis. The spacecraft itself can be divided into two sections: the payload module and the service module. The payload consists of the telescopes and three instruments which focus light on one common focal plane. The service module contains the propulsion system and the communications units, essential components that allow the spacecraft to function and return data to Earth. Beneath the service module and the payload module is the sunshield and solar array assembly.

The payload module is housed inside a geometrical, dome-like structure called the thermal cover. Inside are two telescopes, each telescope consisting of three curved, rectangular mirrors, followed by a beam combiner and two rectangular flat folding mirrors to focus the starlight onto the common focal plane. The largest mirror in each telescope system is 1.45 metres long. The focal plane features three different zones associated with the astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic instruments. Each instrument uses a set of electronic detectors (CCDs). The photometric instrument uses prisms to create a spectral distribution of the light received from the telescope. The spectroscopic instrument uses a grating with prisms to disperse star light.

The astrometric instrument is dedicated to the accurate measurement of stellar positions and brightnesses. The photometric instrument will measure the colours and brightness of all stars. This is valuable information which astronomers will use to determine the physical parameters of celestial objects. The spectroscopic instrument will detect whether celestial objects are moving towards or away from us. This information can then be combined with that from the astrometric instruments, to give a full picture of how the celestial object is moving through space.

During its life, the spacecraft spins slowly, sweeping the views of the two telescopes across the celestial sphere. As the detectors repeatedly measure the position of a celestial object over a number of years, they will detect, for example, that object’s motion across the line of sight.

Situated between the sunshield and payload module is the service module. It will be constructed from aluminium, fashioned into a conical framework and clad in carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic panels. Inside will be housed the attitude and control, propulsion, communications, on-board data-handling and power systems, and some electronic units for the payload module.

Gaia is expected to communicate with Earth for, on average, eight-hours every day. During this time, it will transmit its science data and ‘housekeeping’ telemetry signal. Although Gaia’s transmitter is weak, it will be able to maintain the transmission of an extremely high data rate (~ 5 Mbit per second) over a distance of 1.5 million kilometres. ESA’s most powerful ground stations, the 35-metre radio dishes in Cebreros, Spain, and New Norcia, Australia, will be used to intercept the faint signal transmitted by Gaia.

Gaia will always point away from the Sun. After launch, it will unfold a ‘skirt’ that performs two functions. The first is as a sunshade. This will permanently shade the telescopes in the payload module and allows their temperature to drop to -100°C. In this way, the stability of the telescope and its optical system will be maintained at precise levels.

The other function of the sunshield is to generate power for the spacecraft. As the underside of the shield will always be facing the Sun, its surface will be partially covered with solar panels that generate electricity from sunlight. The sunshield ‘skirt’ is the only deployable structure on Gaia. It consists of twelve separate panels that will be folded for launch. Once in space, the spacecraft will unfold these panels into a roughly circular disc, just over 10 metres in diameter.

Journey

Gaia will be placed in an orbit around the Sun, at a distance of 1.5 million kilometres further out than Earth. This special location, known as L2, will keep pace with the orbit of the Earth around the Sun – Gaia will map the stars from here.

This position in space offers a very stable thermal environment, very high observing efficiency (since the Sun, Earth and Moon are behind the instrument field of view) and a moderate radiation environment. An operational lifetime of five years is planned.

History

ESA’s Hipparcos mission exceeded all expectations and catalogued more than 100 000 stars to very high precision, and more than 1 million to lesser precision. Hipparcos was so sensitive that it could have measured the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 20 kilometres. The mission produced 16 volumes of data.

In the meantime, the technology has improved. Detectors are better. On-board data handling, with the advent of more powerful computer processors, offers more possibilities. Optics have improved with the advent of silicon carbide technology.

Scientists realised that another mission could be sent into space with similar cataloguing aims as Hipparcos but with a much more ambitious payback.

A new mission could now catalogue one thousand million stars. It would have the equivalent sensitivity of measuring the diameter of a human hair at 1000 kilometres. The 16 volumes of Hipparcos would instead be 160 000 volumes and instead of filling one normal bookshelf, that bookshelf would have to stretch the equivalent distance of Paris to Amsterdam.

The successor mission to Hipparcos, Gaia, was approved in 2000 as an ESA Cornerstone mission to be launched around 2011.

Partnerships

The Gaia Science Team (GST) provides advice to ESA during the implementation phase of the mission. This committee comprises 12 people with a term of office next expiring mid-2007. The committee members take responsibility for specific tasks, for example, providing advice on the payload design, and coordinating contributions from others as required. The composition reflects scientific competence, but also reflects ESA member state involvement in Gaia.

via http://www.esa.int/