Mercedes-Benz revised styling

 Mercedes-Benz has revealed its significantly updated E-class. The mid-life makeover includes revised styling, updated engines, a higher level of standard equipment, new safety features and hi-tech options. The changes are described as the most complete in Mercedes’ history. The heavily revised E-class is set to get its first public outing at the Detroit motor show in January.

The main thrust of Mercedes’ efforts to increase the appeal of the E-class centres around its styling, which has been altered more significantly than is usual for a mid-life face lift, most particularly at the front. The courtyard headlamp treatment, which had been a key design feature of the E-class since 1995, is gone, to be replaced by more conservative, famous single-assembly headlights that feature LED
 [ light emiting  diode ]daytime running lights as standard.

additional changes have been made to the grille, where there are now two options, one active and the other more traditional. The front bumper and cap are also revised.

The heavily set rear wheelarches have been smoothed to give the car a more unified appearance. A new crease line runs from the rear door through to the tail lights, which retain the same shape but receive new LED-imbued graphics, whose horizontal stress is meant to widen the car visually. There is also a re-profiled rear bumper.

Globally, the standard E-class range will be offered with just one petrol engine in two states of tune. The turbocharged 2.0-litre unit is available with 181bhp in the E200 and 208bhp in the E250. A third petrol option will be offered in the yet to be revealed E63 AMG, which is tipped to offer an incremental increase over the 518bhp of the current twin-turbo 5.5-litre V8.

Two carried-over diesels are planned: a 2.1-litre four-cylinder with 134bhp in the E200 CDI, 168bhp in the E220 CDI and 201bhp in the E250 CDI, and a 3.0-litre V6 with 248bhp in the E350.

Among the new safety systems incorporated on the revised E-class is Collision avoidance Assist, a radar-based collision warning system with the ability to brake the car in order to reduce the severity of an impact.

Datas from www.autocar.co.uk
Thanks For : autocar

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Wi-Fi in offer - London cabs to free in 2013

London taxis are already the best in the world, and soon they'll also be the most connected.

From March 2013, passengers in the city's iconic Hackney Carriages will have access to a free high-speed Wi-Fi service called CabWifi, as reported by The Next Web.

The plan, launched by Eyetease Limited, will be one of the first to offer in-cab Wi-Fi.

"London is the first of several major cities we are launching CabWiFi," said Richard Corbett, founder and CEO of Eyetease.

"Our ultimate goal is to make CabWiFi a standard service in all London black cabs," he added.

The model offers “ads for access”  for every 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi access, passengers must first sit through a 15-second advert. Seems like a reasonable demand.

“This is really great news for London. With dwell times averaging 15 minutes in the back of a taxi, what better way to pass the time than to use your laptop, tablet, book reader or phone with guilt free internet access,” Corbett said in a company press release.

Close to 1,000 of London's 24,000 Black Cabs have signed up so far. "We have been amazed by the sheer volume of interest," Corbett said.

Tourists and travelers keen to avoid data-roaming charges will be able to access the Internet without worrying about a huge phone bill awaiting them on their return home.

The taxi drivers will also benefit, according to Eyetease.

Eyetease said that CabWiFi will enable them to “offset the high cost of data charges incurred from using taxi apps, which some drivers claim have doubled their phone bills in recent months.”

London buses are also becoming more high-tech with the introduction of a contactless payment system this week. No need to panic if you are out of coins.

Passengers can pay for their journey quickly and easily with their credit, debit or charge card.

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Trying to make sites more dependable with users' personal information

There's a lack of trust between Internet users and the websites that collect their private data.

These sites aren't going to stop gathering personal information anytime soon, but one company hopes to make the exchange less strange when people sign on to a site using a social media profile.

Logging in to third party sites or commenting systems with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ ,Yahoo, and other social profiles is common - 53% of people have done it, according to a recent study by Gigya, which handles these social logins for major sites such as Pepsi, CBS and Verizon. But Gigya is more interested in the other 47% who don't use social logins and what it can do to change their minds.

In theory, signing in to a third-party site with an existing social-media account should make life a bit easier. There are no forms to fill out, no new passwords and login names to memorize. 

Just enter two bits of information you're already intimately familiar with from checking Facebook or Twitter a million times. Once logged in, you might even like how easy it is to share content on your profile, or enjoy seeing what your friends bought, read, listened to or watched.

In exchange for these benefits, you give that company access to personal information telling them who you are, such as your age, gender, location, e-mail address, list of friends and what your interests are. That data is very valuable, and is used to adapt the site or app experience to individual visitors. 

People who log in with a social-network profile are better customers. They stick around longer and are more busy.

The holdouts who avoid signing in with social profiles don't want to give third-parties the keys to their personal data. They believe companies will take their profile information and sell it, spam their friends or post to their social networks without permission, according to the Gigya survey.

"There's a real question of transparency and trusting, and confusion as to what's happening," said Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer. He believes much of it is a "perception issue" and that increased transparency between companies and customers would be mutually beneficial.

That's where the Gigya's new SocialPrivacy Certification program comes in. In exchange for publicly promising to use data responsibly, sites can sport a seal proclaiming that they are certified as trustworthy. 

The companies must follow these rules: they will not sell your data or your friends' data, spam you with e-mails, post on your social networks or contact your friends without permission.

Gigya is training a team of 35 employees in its client-services department to audit companies to ensure they adhere to the criteria. The companies are vetted when they first request certification and audited regularly after they're signed up to make sure they're still sticking to the rules.

 Gigya has not settled on a price for the certification yet. Any site can apply for the program, and Gigya plans to develop a similar code of conduct for apps in the future.

In theory the certification will assuage consumers' fears, and in turn boost the usage of social logins across the web. To increase the program's credibility, Gigya consulted privacy experts and collaborated on the final product with the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank in D.C. supported by companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Currently there aren't any laws regulating what sites and apps can do with your personal information, and companies are hoping to stave off any government regulation by taking matters into their own hands with initiatives like SocialPrivacy Certification.

"There's no obligation to be a good privacy citizen unless it's health or banking information," said Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum.

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Ray Kurzweil would join Google starting Monday as director of engineering

Ray Kurzweil, the famed discoverer and futurist, said today that he would join Google, starting Monday, to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science."

Kurzweil's title will be director of engineering. In a long statement on his Web site, he said he would focus on machine learning and language processing:

"I've been interested in technology, and machine learning in particular, for a long time: when I was 14, I designed software that wrote original music, and later went on to invent the first print to speech reading machine for the blind, among other inventions. I've always worked to create practical systems that will make a difference in people's lives, which is what excites me as an inventor.

"In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self driving cars, and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.

 Fast forward a decade  Google has established self driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones. It's easy to shrug our collective shoulders as if these technologies have always been around, but we're really on a remarkable trajectory of quickening innovation, and Google is at the front position of much of this development.

"I'm delighted to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade's 'unrealistic' visions into reality."

Google confirmed the news and said Kurzweil's long history of creation would prove useful.

"Ray's contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an huge impact on society," Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, said in a statement. 

Norvig cited the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others for having words read aloud to them. "We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we're working on at Google."

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Unlocking Saturn's moon, Secrets & Gallery : Eclipsing a Moon

Eclipsing a Moon
Saturn's moon Enceladus is partially eclipsed by the planet in this Cassini spacecraft view which also features the moon Titan in the distance.

Cassini flew by Enceladus, shown in the center of the view, at a distance of about 16,000 miles (26,000 kilometers).

The terminator between the day and night sides of Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) can be seen on the far left of the moon, while the shadow of the eclipsing planet runs across the bottom.


Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute 


Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is in the bottom right of this image and is about 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. See PIA11508 to see Titan eclipsed by the planet.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing sides of Enceladus and Titan. North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Oct. 1, 2011. The view was obtained at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 29 degrees. Scale in the original image was 2 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus. The image was contrast enhanced and magnified by a factor of 1.5 to enhance the visibility of surface features.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Thanks For NASA
Scourec:www.nasa.gov
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini 

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Astronomers Catch Jet from Binge-Eating Black Hole

Back in January, a new X-ray source flared and rapidly brightened in the Andromeda galaxy (M31), located 2.5 million light-years away. Classified as an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), the object is only the second ever seen in M31 and became the target of an intense observing campaign by orbiting X-ray telescopes -- including NASA's Swift -- and radio observatories on the ground. These efforts resulted in the first detection of radio-emitting jets from a stellar-mass black hole outside our own galaxy.

A ULX is thought to be a binary system containing a black hole that is rapidly accreting gas from its stellar companion. However, to account for the brilliant high-energy output, gas must be flowing into the black hole at a rate very near a theoretical maximum, a feeding frenzy that astronomers do not yet fully understand.

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 (This image composites XMM-Newton X-ray data onto an optical view of the Andromeda galaxy; the ULX is circled. Colors in the XMM image correspond to different X-ray energies: 0.2 to 1 keV (red), 1 to 2 keV (green) and 2 to 4.5 keV (blue). 

Credit (background): Bill Schoening, Vanessa Harvey/REU program/NOAO/AURA/NSF

Credit (inset): ESA/M. Middleton et al.)

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"There are four black hole binaries within our own galaxy that have been observed accreting at these extreme rates," said Matthew Middleton, an astronomer at the Anton Pannekoek Astronomical Institute in Amsterdam. "Gas and dust in our own galaxy interfere with our ability to probe how matter flows into ULXs, so our best glimpse of these processes comes from sources located out of the plane of our galaxy, such as those in M31."

As gas spirals toward a black hole, it becomes compressed and heated, eventually reaching temperatures where it emits X-rays. As the rate of matter ingested by the black hole increases, so does the X-ray brightness of the gas. At some point, the X-ray emission becomes so intense that it pushes back on the inflowing gas, theoretically capping any further increase in the black hole's accretion rate. Astronomers refer to this as the Eddington limit, after Sir Arthur Eddington, the British astrophysicist who first recognized a similar cutoff to the maximum luminosity of a star.

"Black-hole binaries in our galaxy that show accretion at the Eddington limit also exhibit powerful radio-emitting jets that move near the speed of light," Middleton said. Although astronomers know little about the physical nature of these jets, detecting them at all would confirm that the ULX is accreting at the limit and identify it as a stellar mass black hole.

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory first detected the ULX, dubbed XMMU J004243.6+412519 after its astronomical coordinates, on Jan. 15. Middleton and a large international team then began monitoring it at X-ray energies using XMM-Newton and NASA's Swift satellite and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The scientists conducted radio observations using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the continent-spanning Very Long Baseline Array, both operated by the National Science Foundation in Socorro, N.M., and the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager Large Array located at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge, England.

In a paper published online by the journal Nature on Wednesday, Dec. 12, the scientists reveal their successful detection of intense radio emission associated with a jet moving at more than 85 percent the speed of light. VLA data reveal that the radio emission was quite variable, in one instance decreasing by a factor of two in just half an hour. 

"This tells us that the region producing radio waves is extremely small in size -- no farther across than the distance between Jupiter and the sun," explained team member James Miller-Jones, a research fellow at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, Western Australia. 

Black holes have been conclusively detected in two varieties: "lightweight" ones created by stars and containing up to a few dozen times the sun's mass, and supermassive "heavyweights" of millions to billions of solar masses found at the centers of most big galaxies. Astronomers have debated whether many ULXs represent hard-to-find "middleweight" versions, containing hundreds to thousands of solar masses. 

"The discovery of jets tells us that this particular ULX is a typical stellar remnant about 10 times the mass of the sun, swallowing as much material as it possibly can," Middleton said. "We may well find jets in ULXs with similar X-ray properties in other nearby galaxies, which will help us better understand the nature of these incredible outflows."

Commenting on the findings on behalf of the Swift team, Stefan Immler at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., noted that it was almost exciting enough for astronomers to witness a new ULX so close to home, even if "close" is a few million light-years away. "But detecting the jets is a real triumph, one that will allow us to study the accretion process of these elusive black hole candidates in never-before-seen detail," he said.

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Thanks For NASA

Images and news : www.nasa.gov

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Flights of Flames for Fire Safety in Space

In today’s A Lab Aloft guest blogger, Sandra Olson, Ph.D., reveals some of the mysteries of how flames burn in microgravity, as well as how flame studies on the ground and aboard the International Space Station help with fire suppression and safety in space.

Whether dropping through a hole in the ground as part of a drop test or zipping through space aboard the International Space Station, flames behave in fascinating ways in microgravity! In the Zero Gravity Research Facility, or ZGRF, at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, I get to study solid fuel combustion behavior first hand. ZGRF is a historic landmark and the deepest drop tower in the world with a freefall of 432 feet. Drop test experiments, like the one pictured below, look at material flammability during the brief, 5.18-second period of microgravity achieved as the sample package falls.

During a Zero Gravity Research Facility tour, Facility Manager Eric Neumann (far left) shows International Space Station Program Scientist Julie Robinson (front center) and her colleagues one of the drop packages used in the facility. The top of the white vacuum drop shaft is in the background. (NASA/Marvin Smith)

The drop test was remotely run from the ZGRF control room. Controllers activated the miniature wind tunnel apparatus to establish a spacecraft ventilation flow environment, then ignited the material and dropped the experiment. Once the sample releases into freefall, the experiment is completely automated. The drop vehicle lands in the catch-bucket at the end of the 5.18 second test.

Experiment images (left) and catch-bucket facility images (right) appear on the ZGRF control room screen. (NASA/Marvin Smith)

We have performed many drop tests studying how materials burn in microgravity compared to how they burn in normal gravity, or 1g. What we have found is that many materials actually burn better in the spacecraft flow environment than in 1g. This is because on Earth the buoyant flow—created when less dense materials rise within greater density environments—is strong enough to blow the flame out with oxygen reduction. In low ventilation, however, the slow flow provides the oxygen at an optimum rate, so the flame can survive to lower oxygen levels than in 1g. To learn more about the concepts of microgravity and combustion in the space environment, watch this "NASA Connect" video.

A flame burning in microgravity at the end of a 5.18-second drop from the Zero Gravity Research Facility. The material for this test was cotton fabric burning in 5 centimeter per second air flow, which is the typical International Space Station atmosphere. Crew clothing is often made of cotton. (NASA)

Enhanced flammability in space was recently proven in longer duration burn experiments aboard the space station as part of the Burning and Suppression of Solids, or BASS, investigation. For this study, the crew of the space station gets to play with fire. As a co-investigator, I get to observe via video on the ground and directly talk to the crew as they ignite a flame in the controlled area of the Microgravity Science Glovebox, or MSG, filming the behavior of the burn.

After his recent return to Earth, Astronaut Don Pettit, who worked on the BASS flame study in space, testified to a Senate subcommittee about the investigation and the importance of combustion experiments in microgravity.

“If you look at fire, fire and its either discovery or learning how to tame fire is what literally brought us out of the cave and allows us to have our civilization in terms of what we know now,” said Pettit. “Fire gives us our electricity. Fire allows us to have vehicles, airplanes and cars, and machines. It literally turns the wheels of our civilization...space station now offers us the ability to dissect deeper down into what the processes are in combustion… by looking at it in an environment free from gravity, free from the gravitational-driven convection. And this allows us to look at things and figure out what’s going on at a level that you could never see without taking it to space…and what we found is that things are more flammable than what we thought.”

(Left) Astronaut Joe Acaba runs BASS in the Microgravity Science Glovebox, or MSG. (Right) Astronaut Don Pettit holds up a burned acrylic sphere to show the science team on the ground how a fine layer of soot coats the wake region of the material, while the front part of the sphere looks like a meteorite with the surface marred with many craters. (NASA)

These experiments so far have confirmed that when the air flow is turned off, the flame extinguishes rapidly as it runs out of oxygen, with no fresh air flow. The MSG provides an enclosed work area, sealed to contain fluids, gasses and equipment for the safe running of combustion experiments. The crew views the burning material through the front window. The flame can be seen through this window in the picture with Joe Acaba (above). You also can see Don Pettit working on a previous run of BASS aboard station in this video.

This finding reaffirms the space station fire alarm protocol to turn off any forced air flow in the event of a fire alarm. Surprisingly, though, when the astronauts used a small nitrogen jet built into the flow duct for fire suppression testing, the flame did not go out when the air flow was turned off, if the nitrogen jet was on. In fact, the flame appeared to get brighter. Researchers intend to continue to study this unexpected discovery in which the nitrogen jet was able to entrain air all by itself, as the finding has important implications for gaseous fire suppression systems like the

CO2 suppression system currently employed on station.

 Acrylic sphere burning as part of the Burning and Suppression of Solids, or BASS, investigation aboard the International Space Station. (NASA)

BASS results also catch the attention of future spacecraft designers. One of the sample materials burned in BASS is acrylic, also called Plexiglas. This material is under consideration for spacecraft windows because of its excellent strength, mass and optical properties. However, it also burns quite well in the space station air environment. BASS payload summary reports mentioning acrylic have spurred a number of recent inquiries to the investigator team about the flammability of this material. After all, you don’t want your spacecraft windows to catch on fire

A wax candle flame in very low air flow is nearly spherical with an inner sooty layer near the wick, and an outer blue layer. This blue is due to chemiluminescence, which is when a chemical reaction emits light. (NASA)

The BASS investigation has direct applications to spacecraft fire safety and astronaut wellbeing. A combustion experiment, BASS was jointly designed by scientists and engineers at NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, or USRA. BASS operations are scheduled to begin again aboard the space station in the spring of 2013.

The best part of my job as a researcher is the thrill of discovering new phenomena unique to microgravity. It is exciting to work with something as beautiful and powerful as fire, especially in these unique microgravity environments. The fire images have inspired me to create art images from them. 

 2009 Art “Fire's Ribbons and Lace”
The delicate and fractal nature of charring cellulose is amplified here in repeated magnified images of a flame spread front over ashless filter paper. (Sandra Olson)

2011 Art “Flaming Star”

Microgravity flames converging toward the center of the starburst ‘implode’ against an outflow of wind, creating a diffusion flame ‘supernova.’ (Sandra Olson)

The more we understand the behavior of flames with given materials and conditions, the better prepared we will be to harness their potential and contribute to fire safety in future space exploration. What’s next will depend on what we discover from these ongoing tests, building on the knowledge already gained from these important combustion studies.

Sandra Olson, shown here with the microgravity wind tunnel drop apparatus.

Sandra Olson, Ph.D., is a spacecraft fire safety researcher at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, as well as the project scientist and co-investigator for the BASS investigation. She has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. She has worked at NASA since 1983, most of that time studying microgravity combustion.   

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Thanks For NASA

Images and News From: www.nasa.gov 

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