I used to wonder why i never heard of any fossil excavation in India (May be because I am such a lazy newspaper reader ).  Shivalik Hills in the Markanda valley, Himachal Pradesh, is the only fossil park in Asia which houses preserved remains of prehistoric animals. A rediff report says, Tribals in parts of India are selling dinosaur fossils to foreigners at a fraction of its value in the international market [^], Are we that ignorant to such valuable treasures?
But wait, The latest discovery by the scientists in south india is ground breaking. They found a treasure of hundreds of fossilized dinosaur egg clusters from a site in Tamilnadu. It is believed that these eggs belongs to one of the largest species of dinos.  [Read the BBC Article about this to know more..]

A mail forward about India’s humble space program.
Pics: that say…we may not be as successful as the US or Russia…but we are there nevertheless…so watch out for us…

This was how the Rocket Cone was transported to the Launch Pad at Thumba !!

November 21, 1963: The Nike Apache rocket being readied for launch

Try Identifyin the person on the left…most probably you wont be able to identify…He is our very own…Dr. A.P J. Abdul Kalam…

Early days at the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. Readying equip ment to be carried by a sounding rocket into the atmosphere are Kalam and R. Aravamudan

The present day Launch Station at SriHarikota

Now you can launch your own satellite to orbit! Interorbital Systems is now selling TubeSat personal satellite kits for $8000 (including the price of  launch).

The Kit Includes batteries, solar panels, transmitters, antennasand few  other tools, to help you run experiments in space on your own. You can also order TubeSats in bigger sizes.

The Neptune-30 rocket will put your TubeSat into a low earth orbit of 320Km. After one month, the orbit will decay and the small satellite will burn up on reentry. The company plans to launch 32 TubeSats per month.

Want to give it a try? Here is the link to Tubesat Brochure

For more details visit: http://interorbital.com/TubeSat_1.htm

Another mind boggling optical illusion. It reminds me of, how easily our brain can be fooled.

PS:I don’t know the genius who made this image to give the credit.

Take a look at this  Gigapan. Open the Gigapan page and scroll through the amazing panorama of lunar environment. The panorama is made from the images of Apollo 17 landing site!

Apollo 17  remains both the most recent manned moon landing and manned flight beyond low earth orbit.

8:30AM Taiwan                                                           9:30 AM Taiwan

A totally different view of July 22, 2009 eclipse. This two images from the Japanese geostationary satellite MTSAT show the view of Earth at 8:30 a.m in Taiwan.

However this is not the image i mentioned in the title . Because of the Star Sensor failure in Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft ( The Indian Spacecraft orbiting moon ), an unnecessary media hype has followed. People started started worrying about its life and mission. It is possible to maintain the operation of the spacecraft even with the failure of one sensor. As if to silence critics, Dr Nair announced that Isro will turn Chandrayaan-1’s cameras towards the earth during the total solar eclipse of July 22 to conduct a unique study of the moon’s shadow on the earth from close to the moon[Source: Deccan Chronicle]. Keep an eye on the Chandrayaan web page, if you are interested to see the eclipse image taken from moon itself.

Update 1:

_{(Source: IANS)}
^{Published: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 at 20:26 IST}

Bangalore: India’s first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 captured the shadow of the moon on the earth’s surface during the July 22 total solar eclipse, an Indian space agency official said Tuesday.

The images were captured by the terrain mapping camera (TMC) on board the 514-kg spacecraft, which is orbiting at 200 km above the lunar surface. [more]….

Update 2:

Beautiful images of moon’s shadow on earth, taken from moon itself are published. Here is two of those pictures from isro website.  More images are available in http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm

An interesting article (published recently) inJournel of Clinincal Investigation says, high doses of cannabis promote embryonic and adult hippocampus neurogenesis. which means it enables hippocampus to generate new neurons in brain throughout a human’s lifespan. This is really a good news! (link: Cannabinoids promote embryonic and adult hippocampus neurogenesis and produce anxiolytic- and antidepressant-like effects)

But wait. Another study published by University of Leicester researchers has found “convincing evidence” that cannabis smoke damages DNA in ways that could potentially increase the risk of cancer development in humans (link: Cannabis alters human DNA)
Let us hope someone will filter out the bad thing out of good things.

This amazing gas storm is in the gas giant in out solar system Jupiter. These cloud bands are rotating in opposite direction of planet’s rotation. The gif image is made from the collection of time laps images from approach of Voyager 1 spacecraft to Jupiter. You can also see the circulation of great red spot.

The recent vote fraud issue in Iran is surprising! Iran’s election monitoring commission has declared the result invalid and called for re-election.

One story is, when the ballet boxes arrived for counting, most of the seals were broken. The official explanation was seals were broken because of the transportation problems! Also it appears most of the votes in those broken boxes were for the current Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran has already gained popularity by banning orkut. Now they blocked all the satellite TV, internet sites like you tube, face book etc. and reduced the internet bandwidth. But they almost failed to block twitter because of its nature. Now the inside story of iran is streaming through twitter

The news surprised me because very recently I received an email forward saying the Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a simple humble person, who does not have security officers, does not fear losing his chair etc. Have a look at this attachment. How well an email forward can deceive us.

Did you notice something wrong with the TV ads? When you watch your favorite program with a comfortable volume level, suddenly a commercial comes and the volume rises like hell.

Do you think this is some accident or unavoidable error? No! This is an understanding between the TV channel and ads company to drag more attention to ads.

This is a serious violation of our rights to set the TV volume according to our comfort. As a matter of fact there is a law in US which says, the volume of ads should not exceed the maximum volume in the show.

It may take few more years for us to raise our voice against silly (?) violations like this.