New Webb Telescope Technologies Already Helping Human Eyes

Even while construction of the James Webb Space Telescope is underway on the most advanced infrared vision of any space observatory, its technologies are already proving useful to human eye health here on Earth.

"The Webb telescope program has enabled a number of improvements in measurement technology for astronomy, mirror fabrication, and measurement of human eyes, diagnosis of ocular diseases and potentially improved surgery," said Dr. Dan Neal, Research Fellow at Abbott Medical Optics Inc. in Albuquerque, N.M.

The Webb telescope will be the most scientifically powerful telescope NASA has ever built -- 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Webb telescope will find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. It will also peer through dusty clouds to see stars and planets being born, connecting star formation in our own galaxy with the solar system. 
"Wavefront sensing” is used to measure shape of the mirrors during fabrication and control the optics once the telescope is in orbit.

Ophthalmologists routinely use wavefront technology to measure aberrations of the eye. Those measurements help with diagnosis, research, characterization and planning treatment of eye health issues.

"The technology also provides more accurate eye measurements for people about to undergo Laser Refractive Surgery," Neal said. "To date 10-12 million eyes have been treated with Lasik procedures in the U.S. alone. As technology improves, so does the quality of these procedures."

A new "scanning and stitching" technology developed for the Webb telescope led to a number of innovative instrument concepts for more accurate measurement for contact lenses and intra-ocular lenses. Another benefit to eye health is that this technique can help "map" the topography of the eye more accurately.

Think of the surface of your eye as being as dented as the surface of the moon. Precise measurements of your eye's surface are helpful when assessing eyes for contact lenses. The scanning and stitching technology improvements have enabled eye doctors to get much more detailed information about the shape and "topography" of your eye, and do it in seconds rather than hours. Four patents have been issued as result of innovations driven by the Webb telescope program. "These tools are now used to align and build the next generation of measuring devices for human eyes," Neal said.

"The lasting impact of the Webb telescope may go beyond the vision of astronomers seeking to see the distant universe; the impact may be a better national technology base and better vision for people everywhere," Hull said.

NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program Office (IPPO) is making available wavefront sensing and adaptive optics technologies, procedures and lab equipment to private industry through its "Can you See it Now?????" campaign.All new things can be searched on http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/wavefront.

QUOTES ABOUT INDIANS.

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
Albert Einstein.

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition.
Mark Twain.

If there is one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India .
French scholar Romain Rolland.

India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.
Hu Shih
(former Chinese ambassador to USA )

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG, THE LIST COULD BE ENDLESS.
BUT, if we don’t see even a glimpse of that great India in the India that we see today, it clearly means that we are not working up to our potential; and that if we do, we could once again be an evershining and inspiring country setting a bright path for rest of the world to follow.
I hope you enjoyed it and work towards the welfare of INDIA .

PROUD TO BE AN INDIAN.

 I DIDN'T KNOW THAT.......

Q. Who is the GM of Hewlett Packard (hp) ?
A. Rajiv Gupta

Q. Who is the creator of Pentium chip (needs no introduction as 90% of the today’s computers run on it)?
A. Vinod Dahm

Q. Who is the third richest man on the world?
A. According to the latest report on Fortune Magazine, it is Azim Premji, who is the CEO of Wipro Industries. The Sultan of Brunei is at 6 th position now.

Q. Who is the founder and creator of Hotmail (Hotmail is world’s No.1 web based email program)?
A. Sabeer Bhatia

Q. Who is the president of AT & T-Bell Labs (AT & T-Bell Labs is the creator of program languages such as C, C++, Unix to name a few)?
A. Arun Netravalli

Q. Who is the new MTD (Microsoft Testing Director) of Windows 2000, responsible to iron out all initial problems?
A. Sanjay Tejwrika

Q. Who are the Chief Executives of CitiBank, Mckensey & Stanchart?
A. Victor Menezes, Rajat Gupta, and Rana Talwar.

Q. We Indians are the wealthiest among all ethnic groups in America, even faring better than the whites and the natives.
There are 3.22 millions of Indians in USA (1.5% of population). YET,
38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians.
36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.
28% of IBM employees are Indians.
17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.
13% of XEROX employees are! Indians.

Some of the following facts may be known to you. These facts were recently published in a German magazine, which deals with WORLD HISTORY FACTS ABOUT INDIA.
1. India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.
2. India invented the Number system. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.
3. The world’s first University was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4 th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
4. According to the Forbes magazine, Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software.

5. Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans.
6. Although western media portray modern images of India as poverty striken and underdeveloped through political corruption, India was once the richest empire on earth.

7. The art of navigation was born in the river Sindh 5000 years ago. The very word “Navigation” is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH.
8. The value of pi was first calculated by Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is now k! nown as the Pythagorean Theorem. British scholars have last year (1999) officially published that Budhayan’s works dates to the 6 th Century which is long before the European mathematicians.

9. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India . Quadratic equations were by Sridharacharya in the 11 th Century; the largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106 whereas Indians used numbers as big as 10 53.
10. According to the Gemmological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds to the world.

11. USA based IEEE has proved what has been a century-old suspicion amongst academics that the pioneer of wireless communication was Pr! ofessor Jagdeesh Bose and not Marconi.
12. The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.

13. Chess was invented in India .
14. Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted surgeries like cesareans, cataract, fractures and urinary stones. Usage of anaesthesia was well known in ancient India .
15. When many cultures in the world were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindhu Valley ( Indus Valley Civilisation).
16. The place value system, the decimal system was developed in India in 100 BC. 

WANT TO KNOW MORE ?????

GO DOWN......

Fire Scout – UAV Helicopter

     Research and development dollars are obviously not an object for Northrop Grumman.  From behind closed doors emerges a UAV helicopter attack ship; no doubt the product of an intense development program.  The Fire Scout UAV is capable of autonomous take-off, landing, and flight; but of course it can be controlled remotely as well.  Likewise, I have no doubt that there has also been some engineering man hours put into enabling it for preprogrammed strike missions.  Of course they’ve already equipped some with the Metal storm weapon, the highest round-per-second gun ever built, mounted on the weapons pylons.  Technically, the Fire Scout can be equipped with a multitude of different equipment, from the most deadly weapons to even peaceful observational equipment.

        This bad boy has already been procured by the US Army, whose interest in turn spurred a purchase by the US Navy. It’s also impressive that the Fire Scout  landed on a moving ship, autonomously, during its testing phase, which demonstrated it’s computerized navigation system compensating for the movement of the landing pad.  Deployment plans schedule the Fire Scout to be used at the brigade level, and I’m sure that they are looking forward to having such a weapon added to their already omnipotently superior arsenal. The Fire Scout is also designed to operate as one of the many cogs in the network-centric weapons development program known as Future Combat System.

When a photograph can be heard: Vision activates the auditory cortex within 110 ms

As the makers of silent movies knew well, it is not necessary to provide an actual auditory stimulus to activate the sensation of sounds typically associated with what we are viewing. Thus, you could almost hear the neigh of Rodolfo Valentino's horse, even though the film was mute. Now Evidence is provided that the mere sight of a photograph associated with a sound can activate the associative auditory cortex. High-density ERPs were recorded in 15 participants while they viewed hundreds of perceptually matched images that were associated (or not) with a given sound. So Sound stimuli were discriminated from non-sound stimuli as early as 110 ms. SwLORETA reconstructions showed very common activation of ventral stream areas for both types of stimuli and of the associative temporal cortex, at the earliest stage, only for sound stimuli. The primary auditory cortex (BA41) was also activated by sound images after ~ 200 ms.

INDIA HAS STEALTH TECHNOLOGY

The F 117 a stealth fighter helped the US win the Gulf war. Stealth technology which makes ships and planes invisible to ground radar, has been a closely guarded secret of developed nations. Now some Indian scientists have made a breakthrough in this area.

     Scientists at the indian institute of technology in Roorkee (IIT-R) have developed a special Nanocomposite coating that can absorb microwaves; when applied on specially designed aircraft, they become almost invisible to radar.Radars emit pulses of microwave radiation that are reflected off the body of flying aircraft. But the special coating absorbs most of the incident radiation and reflect very little. The shape of the aircraft must also be such that it deflects the microwaves in every other direction, other than the path back to the radar. And that’s how an aircraft becomes invisible on the radar.  The Nanocomposite coatings have been developed by Rahul Sharma and his team at IIT-R.       

    They unveiled their work at an international nanomaterials conference, held at the Indian Institute of Science Sharma believes their nano-product is a significant step in developing a technology to enable aircraft escape radar surveillance.The IIT team found that crystals of ‘barium hexaferrite’ with particle size of 10-15 nanometres have the ability to absorb microwaves.

     Also the team developed a special process for synthesising the nanopowder and formulating it as a coating. Rahul Sharma said that the nanocomposite coating on aluminium sheet absorbed 89 percent of incident microwaves at 15 GHz–the frequency normally used by radars–reflecting only 11 percent.

GPS MAPTOR

 Maptor , the navigational gadget is the combination of map and projector.

It is used to project maps on any desired surface.

Its really portable due to its small size.

It is a US space based global navigation satellite system.

Advantage using this is that it is easily viewable also in day light.