Mercedes launches new C-Class sedan

Further enhancing the portfolio of its luxury cars in India, Mercedes-Benz has introduced the advanced version of its flagship C-Class sedan even as the German auto major plans to launch new products in the next two months.

Priced between Rs.29.75 lakh and Rs.32.30 lakh, the ‘C 200BE AVANTGARDE' comes with petrol engine with 7-speed automatic transmission that enables reduced fuel consumption while delivering high output and torque for better driving pleasure.

The new C-Class now has panoramic sunroof and is equipped with comprehensive safety package like ‘Attention Assist' and ‘Parktronic' including parking guidance.

Loaded with latest luxury and comfort features, the new C-Class also has intelligent light system, while LED daytime running lights add to its exterior design.

“Setting new standards in its segment, this new C-Class will occupy an excellent position in the competitive line-up,” said Mercedes-Benz India Director (Sales and Marketing) Debashis Mitra. Stating that the company was targeting young executives and businessman for the new car, he said it planned to sell 250-300 units of the new C-Class as against about 200 units of the outgoing version. Notably, the C-Class is the cheapest model from the company's stable that contributes 40-45 per cent of the carmaker's total sales in India.

On the company future plans, Mr. Mitra said it would introduce 3-4 new products, comprising upgrades and new variants of the existing models, in the next couple of months.

Keywords: Mercedes C-Class

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WikiLeaks: US felt Telengana 'surrender' harmed Congress'

New Delhi:  By ''surrendering'' to the Telangana statehood demand, the Congress opened a can of worms and came across as a party that appeared ''weak and feeble'' and one that can be ''easily bullied and intimidated by threats.'' This was allegedly the US assessment of the situation in 2009.

In a secret cable written on December 10, 2009, released by WikiLeaks, then US ambassador to India Timothy Roemer said the ramifications of the "Telangana surrender" may go beyond Andhra Pradesh as similar demands that were simmering are likely to get a fresh impetus from the Telangana movement's "overnight success".

Roemer who allegedly wrote the cable a day after Home Minister P Chidambaram announced the formation of a Telangana state, said the Congress is likely to be faced with a floodgate of similar demands from other statehood movements across the country. He added the decision has created a split within the party.

The cable also stated that the Congress appeared to come across as weak and feeble, a party that can be easily bullied and intimidated by threats. This was just six months after winning a decisive electoral mandate.

Roemer also allegedly termed the Government's decision as a "huge success" for the then fasting K Chandrasekhar Rao and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) a party with ''just two members currently in the Lok Sabha and only six in the state assembly, picking and winning the confrontation with the UPA represents a huge success."

The cable added the government ''abruptly caved'' on December 9 and gave the go-ahead for formation of Telangana on the 11th day of Rao's hunger strike.

By conceding on Telangana, Roemer wrote, the Congress has potentially opened up a can of worms which was just emerging from the crisis it faced following the death of its Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy in September, 2009. The US diplomat said the Telangana decision could trigger similar demands from the Vidharba region of Maharashtra, Bundelkhand and the Poorvanchal regions of Uttar Pradesh and more obscure nascent statehood movements in other parts of the country.

"The Congress Party (and the UPA government) may already be regretting its Telangana decision as more demands for statehood have come out of the woodwork. The party is split in its stronghold of Andhra Pradesh, and as it is portrayed in the media as weak and spineless, caving at the first signs of trouble at the hands of a politically desperate has-been regional politician,'' the cable says.

Roemer also said Rao's demand for Telangana split the Congress in Andhra with many state legislators and members of parliament supporting his demand and others opposing it. ''Contacts tell us that also at play behind the scenes was
an intense battle for the top spot in the state government between the incumbent chief minister, K. Rosaiah, and his rival Y S Rajasekhara Reddy's son.

"The latter, not unhappy that Rao's fast was creating discomfort for his rival, has encouraged the split within the party on the Telangana issue," the cable says.

Dwelling further on the issue, Roemer also allegedly said the Telangana carving out also raises the "thorny question" of the status of Hyderabad, which falls in Telangana.

"The TRS has clearly said that there could be no Telangana without Hyderabad.  However, Hyderabad is a hub for major businesses of the state including software and pharmaceuticals.

"Hyderabad business is dominated by the Reddy and Khamma communities of the state but their base is the non-Telangana region of the state.

"These politically powerful communities are unlikely to cede Hyderabad to Telangana easily," the cable said.

Astronauts to grow own food in Mars?

Astronauts travelling to Mars are mulling growing their own food in a “kitchen garden” in space and should also need adequate chef skills, according to a NASA scientist. Maya R Cooper, a senior research scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in the Space Food Systems Laboratory in

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Houston, Texas, says that feeding astronauts could be one of the greatest challenges to the first manned mission to Mars.
Cooper explained that the challenges of provisioning space vehicles and Martian surface bases begin with tangible factors, such weight and nutrition, and encompass psychological nuances, such as providing a varied, tasty menu that wards off boredom.
The solutions envisioned now include requiring astronauts to grow some of their own food and engage in much more food preparation than their counterparts on the International Space Station.
The major challenge is to balance weight, food acceptability and resource utilization, said Cooper. Astronauts currently dine on pre-packaged foods that are quick and easy to prepare and include everything from scrambled eggs to brownies.

Unfortunately, for flights on the space shuttles and the International Space Station, astronauts are currently allocated 3.8 pounds of food per day. The five-year round-trip mission to Mars would therefore mean almost 7,000 pounds of food per person.

“That's a clear impediment to a lot of mission scenarios,” said Cooper.
“We need new approaches. Right now, we are looking at the possibility of implementing a bioregenerative system that would involve growing crops in space and possibly shipping some bulk commodities to a Mars habitat as well. This scenario involves much more food processing and meal preparation than the current food system developed for the space shuttles and the International Space Station,” added Cooper.
“The NASA Advanced Food Technology project is currently working to address the issues of food variety, weight, volume, nutrition and trash disposal through research and external academic and commercial collaborations,” said Cooper.
Ten crops that fit those requirements have emerged as prime candidates for the Mars mission’s ‘kitchen garden’. They are lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, green onions, radishes, bell peppers, strawberries, fresh herbs and cabbages.
Cooper explained the concern at the 242nd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

East Coast battens down as Hurricane Irene hits

New York City's subway system shut down at midday today, as the city prepared for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, which made landfall in North Carolina early this morning and began its expected journey up the East Coast of the United States.
Despite it's having been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane--the least threatening on the Saffir-Simpson scale--Irene remained hazardous, with wind gusts in some places as high as 115 mph. North Carolina's Raleigh News & Observer reported that one man had been killed by a falling tree limb.
"Watching the TV folks on the beach reminds me; Don't do what they do. Stay inside during the storm, & off the roads," tweeted Craig Fugate, an administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Fugate has been sending regular updates via Twitter at @CraigatFEMA.
Nearly 500,000 people in Virginia and North Carolina had lost power, over 13,000 people hunkered down in Red Cross shelters in six states Friday night, and major airlines had scrubbed thousands of flights through Monday. More than 2 million people along the coast have been told to evacuate their homes.

FEMA administrator Craig Fugate has been sending regular updates via Twitter

The transit shutdown in New York marked the first time the country's largest such system had been closed owing to a natural disaster. Yesterday, the city's mayor called for a mandatory evacuation of the metropolis' lowest-lying areas, including the southern tip of Manhattan Island, a move that directly affected some 370,000 residents. It was the first time such an evacuation had been ordered.
Irene is expected to hit New York sometime Saturday or Sunday, bringing winds of 55 to 70 mph, along with power outages and flooding.
"This is not a joke. Your life could be in danger," the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said today at a briefing on Coney Island. "It isn't cute to sit there and say, 'I'm tougher than any storm.' They don't know what they're talking about." Despite such cautions, the Associated Press reported that many residents of the Brooklyn beach neighborhood that's home to the famous boardwalk were planning to duck the evacuation.
For the latest on Hurricane Irene, check out CBS News' complete coverage, and for a tech take on the storm, see our roundup.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20098259-93/east-coast-battens-down-as-hurricane-irene-hits/#ixzz1WHTJFwEe

British atomic clock is world's most accurate

(Credit: National Physical Laboratory)

British and U.S. scientists have confirmed that an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) near London is the most accurate long-term timekeeper in the world, the NPL said.
The NPL-CsF2 is a cesium fountain clock that's used as a standard for International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time.
The machine is apparently accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second. Not bad, I guess.
The NPL's Krzysztof Szymaniec joined scientists from Pennsylvania State University in evaluating the clock. The team published its results in the journal Metrologia.
The analysis concludes that the clock will lose only a billionth of a second every two months, and represents an unprecedented accuracy. Cesium clocks are usually expected to lose or gain a second over tens of millions of years.
"Together with other improvements of the cesium fountain, these models and numerical calculations have improved the accuracy of the U.K.'s cesium fountain clock, NPL-CsF2, by reducing the uncertainty to 2.3 × 10^-16--the lowest value for any primary national standard so far," Szymaniec was quoted as saying by the NPL.
In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which as of summer 2010 had an uncertainty of 3 x 10^-16, meaning it would take more than 100 million years to lose or gain a second.
That will be billions of years before the sun dies, taking the Earth with it, so I expect an update on this from a future blogger.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20098039-1/british-atomic-clock-is-worlds-most-accurate/#ixzz1WHSMPnxh

IBM goes for really, really, really big data

According to an article in this week's MIT Technology Review, IBM researchers are working on a new 120 petabyte data repository made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around 1 trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.
The new system benefits from a file system known as General Parallel File System (GPFS) that was developed at IBM Almaden to enable supercomputers faster data access. It spreads individual files across multiple disks so that many parts of a file can be read or written at the same time.
GPFS leverages cluster architecture to provide quicker access to file data, which is automatically spread across multiple storage devices, providing optimal use of available storage to deliver high performance. It's also the storage engine for IBM's Watson, which could easily beat me at Jeopardy.
Here's the interesting part: 120 petabytes equals roughly 24 billion 5 megabyte MP3 files, which sounds like a lot. But contrast it against the enormous volume of data being amassed from sites such as Facebook that in 2009 were already storing 25 terabytes of logs a day and you see that only 4,915 days could be stored.
With the volume of data online and offline growing exponentially, I have a feeling that 120 petabytes won't sound so crazy in five years or less. It also goes to show that there's room for innovation around storage and file systems, despite the maturity of the market.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20098312-62/ibm-goes-for-really-really-really-big-data/#ixzz1WHR63LYb

New Porsche 911 revealed

 

New Porsche 911 revealed

26 August 2011

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These are the first official pictures of the all-new Porsche 911.

Known internally as the 991, the new 911 — the sixth truly independent model in an illustrious 48-year history — is set to make its world debut at next month’s Frankfurt motor.

The new 911 will initially be sold in rear-wheel drive Carrera and Carrera S coupé guises. Cabriolet and four-wheel-drive variants will follow in 2012, and pave the way for a range-topping Turbo packing 523bhp in 2013.

Developed under Porsche design boss Michael Mauer, the visual changes are subtle but effective enough to set the new car apart from its predecessor.

The traditional round headlamps are set on the front of a wider, slightly higher front bumper. The lights have been made bigger and house more complex internal graphics than before, and are complemented by new LED daytime running lamps on the leading edge of a reshaped bumper. The rear is distinguished by new, thin LED tail-lamps. They sit underneath a prominent lip that forms the trailing edge of the engine lid and wrap further around the rear bumpers than before.

As with the outgoing 911, the new model has a choice of two standard naturally aspirated, horizontally opposed six-cylinder engines mounted aft of the rear axle line.

The big news concerns the downsizing of the base unit in the Carrera. It drops in capacity from 3.6 litres to 3.4 litres — the same as the Boxster S and Cayman S. But while the Boxster/Cayman S engine delivers 316bhp, the new Carrera packs a sturdier 345bhp at 6400rpm — up by 4bhp over the old 3.6-litre engine. It also has 280lb ft of torque.

The Carrera S continues with a 3.8-litre unit, but it has changes to the induction and exhaust which liberate an extra 14bhp at 394bhp at 7000rpm and this version boasts 324lb ft. At the rear, the Carrera continues to feature two oval exhaust pipes, while the Carrera S gets four round pipes.

The new model receives a new seven-speed manual gearbox — a first for a series production road car.

There have been significant chassis changes as a result of the lengthened wheelbase in the quest to further improve the handling, grip and ride.

Expect the new 911 to reach our shores soon after the global launch.

Images

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• 2012 Porsche 911
• 2012 Porsche 911
• 2012 Porsche 911
• 2012 Porsche 911