Hillary clinton sets history

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appears on a large monitor to thank delegates

She will be the first woman to run for the most powerful office in the world on the ticket of either of the two major parties in the country.

"Madam, President,” chanted supporters, as Hillary Clinton sealed the Democratic Party nomination for the president of the U.S on Wednesday night. The 68-year-old former First Lady and former Secretary of State will be the first woman to run for the most powerful office in the world on the ticket of either of the two major parties in the country.

“She is the best change maker I have known in my whole life,” her husband and former President Bill Clinton said, in a speech in which he narrated the story of his arduous efforts to woo Hillary – she rejected his marriage proposal twice – in the early 1970s as she pursued her passion for social change.

'i married my best friend'

“The third time was the charm,” Mr. Clinton recalled. "You remember that house you like?" I said, "While you were gone, I bought it, and you have to marry me now." We were married in that little house on October 11, 1975. I married my best friend,” Mr. Clinton said.

Charm, he does best, and Mr. Clinton hardly had to strain to electrify the crowd. Still popular 15 years after he left office, Mr. Clinton recalled his days in office as an era of prosperity and hope for all Americans and credited his wife for a lot of it. The former president also praised his wife for her work as the Secretary of State.

“She flew all night long from Cambodia to the Middle East to get a ceasefire that would avoid a full-out shooting war between Hamas and Gaza, to protect the peace of the region. She backed President Obama's decision to go after Osama Bin Laden.”

'She is the only option'

The camaraderie at the Democratic convention was unmistakable through the nomination process as the array of speakers itself was a show of the Democratic Party’s vision of America. A former black attorney general, a serving white police chief, disability and women activists, black mothers who lost their children to violence – all told the same story in different ways – electing Ms. Clinton was the only option for them.

The group of black kids who were born in crime prone in neighborhoods in New York, but educated through a special effort supported by Ms. Clinton recited William Henley’s poem 'Invictus,' which inspired Nelson Mandela.

“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” “Black Lives matter,” slogans boomed in the arena as Pittsburgh police Chief Cam McLay spoke about the need for better relations between the police and communities.

National security vision

Ms. Clinton’s national security vision was emphasised as much as her idea of an inclusive America, by several survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks who spoke. She was a Senator from New York in 2001 when the terrorists brought down the World Trade Center towers.

The unity stage was set by Bernie Sanders who called for a suspension of the voting process as it was underway and suggested that the convention elect Ms. Clinton unanimously.

He had the final word

When Larry Sanders, a delegate representing overseas Americans, rose in support of his brother Mr. Bernie Sanders, it was a poignant moment. "I want to bring before this convention the names of our parents Eli Sanders and Dorothy Sanders. They did not have easy lives and they died young. They would be immensely proud of their son’s accomplishments. They loved him." But many other Bernie Brothers were dejected and disappointed as the night wound down.

Photos: AP

Keywords: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clintonhttp://www.thehindu.com/news/international/clinton-wins-historic-nomination-says-glass-ceiling-cracked/article8905197.ece?ref=topnavwidget&utm_source=topnavdd&utm_medium=topnavdropdownwidget&utm_campaign=topnavdropdown

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Facebook’s Aquila takes off

Full-scale test of solar-powered drone that’s set to beam free internet for billions in remote parts of the world

After revealing that it wants to use unmanned drone airships to beam the internet down to the estimated four billion people worldwide without it two years ago, social media giant Facebook on Thursday announced the first full-scale test flight of its solar-powered craft Aquila.

“After two years of engineering, I’m proud to announce the successful first flight of Aquila — the solar-powered plane we designed to beam internet to remote parts of the world,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post.

Zuckerberg added, “On June 28th, we completed the first successful flight of Aquila — our solar-powered plane that will beam internet to remote parts of the world and eventually break the record for longest unmanned aircraft flight.”

According to the post, the flight took place before dawn in Yuma, Arizona. Facebook’s original mission was to fly Aquila for 30 minutes, but things went quite well for the company and it decided to keep the plane up for 96 minutes.

We gathered lots of data about our models and the aircraft structure — and after two years of development, it was emotional to see Aquila actually get off the ground, Mr. Zuckerberg noted

He said that, “Our goal is to have a fleet of Aquilas flying together at 60,000 feet, communicating with each other with lasers and staying aloft for months at a time — something that’s never been done before.”

The company is working on to make the aircraft more efficient and doing necessary changes in that direction...

“Over the next year we’re going to keep testing Aquila — flying higher and longer, and adding more planes and payloads. It’s all part of our mission to connect the world and help more of the 4 billion people who are not online access all the opportunities of the internet, Mr. Zuckerberg concluded. 

 Keywords: solar-powered drone, Aquila

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/facebooks-aquila-takes-off/article8889933.ece 

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Russian minister shrugged off the accusations by hilary clinton involving the embarrased leak of emails

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shrugged off the accusations by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Russia was involved in the embarrassing leak of emails. File photo http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/email-hacking-claims-absurd-says-russia/article8902663.ece?ref=topnavwidget&utm_source=topnavdd&utm_medium=topnavdropdownwidget&utm_campaign=topnavdropdown

The Kremlin on Tuesday dismissed allegations that Russia was behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails as absurd, mocking what it called obsessive references to Russia in the U.S. presidential campaign. “This absurd news was immediately refuted by the family of the well-known presidential candidate,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, referring to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier shrugged off the accusations by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Russia was involved in the embarrassing leak of emails.

Ahead of meeting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Laos, Mr. Lavrov said: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

Mr. Peskov also rubbished a report that Mr. Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page had met Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov in Russia this month to speak at the graduation ceremony of the New Economic School in Moscow.

Mr. Peskov said he had asked Mr. Ivanov about the allegation, adding that the Kremlin chief of staff had responded that “he does not comment on such delusional reports”. “We are still seeing attempts to obsessively use the topic of Russia during the U.S. electoral campaign,” Mr. Peskov said.

“Unfortunately Russia is being used in the electoral campaign in the U.S. Unfortunately this traditional game is continuing.

Keywords: U.S.-Russia ties, e-mail hacking row

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solar powered plane pilot takes a selfie prior to klanding

In this photo provided by Solar Impulse 2, the solar powered plane pilot Bertrand Piccard takes a selfie prior to landing in Seville in Spain on Thursday June 23, 2016. Photo:Solar Impulse/AP 

The Solar Impulse 2 was on Monday approaching the end of its epic bid to become the first sun-powered airplane to circle the globe without a drop of fuel to promote renewable energy.

When the experimental aircraft touches down in Abu Dhabi in the early hours of Tuesday it will cap a remarkable 42,000-km journey across four continents, two oceans and three seas.

With Swiss explorer and project director Bertrand Piccard in the cockpit, the plane is due to land at Al-Bateen Executive Airport in the UAE capital where it launched its tour on March 9, 2015.

By 1300 GMT on Monday, Solar Impulse 2 had travelled more than 2,200 km in nearly 38 hours on its final leg, flying over Qatar’s northern tip after crossing the vast Saudi desert.

“Thanks to our lovely #sun, #Si2’s batteries are fully charged,” the Solar Impulse team said on Twitter.

“After a turbulent night from extreme high temperatures, the sun rose above a desert of sand dunes above #SaudiArabia,” Mr. Piccard tweeted earlier.

Dubbed the “paper plane,” the Solar Impulse 2 is circumnavigating the globe in stages, with 58-year-old Piccard and his compatriot Andre Borschberg taking turns at the controls of the single-seat aircraft.

Final leg

It took off from Cairo on its final leg early on Sunday, having previously crossed Asia, North America, Europe and North Africa.

Mr. Borschberg, 63, smashed the record for the longest uninterrupted journey in aviation history with the 8,924-km flight between Nagoya, Japan and Hawaii that lasted nearly 118 hours.

“#Si2 is both the 1st airplane of unlimited endurance & the only experimental aircraft allowed to fly over cities!” he tweeted on Monday.

No heavier than a car but with the wingspan of a Boeing 747, the four-engine battery-powered aircraft relies on around 17,000 solar cells embedded in its wings.

Its broad wings and light weight make it particularly sensitive to turbulence.

The plane has clocked an average speed of 80 km per hour.

 http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/solar-plane-nears-end-of-trip/article8898084.ece

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genetic material might become a suitable a suitable format to archive data in future

A gel image of the DNA of 96 horses displayed on a computer monitor at the UC Davis veterinary genetics lab in Davis, California. — Photo: AP

Genetic material might become a suitable format to archive data in the future.

Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her “digital attic” a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.

She’d like to preserve the stuff “as long as I live, at least,” says Ms. Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, “which is a little bit of a headache.”

It would be much better, she says, if she could store it in DNA the stuff our genes are made of.

Ms. Strauss, who works at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, is working to make that sci-fi fantasy a reality.

She and other scientists are not focused on finding ways to stow high school projects or snapshots or other things an average person might accumulate, at least for now. Rather, they aim to help companies and institutions archive huge amounts of data for decades or centuries, at a time when the world is generating digital data faster than it can store it.

It’s not that the data will disappear from the tape. A bigger problem is familiar to anybody who has come across an old eight-track tape or floppy disk and realised he no longer has a machine to play it. Technology moves on, and data can’t be retrieved if the means to read it is no longer available, Mr. Starr says.

So for that and other reasons, long-term archiving requires repeatedly copying the data to new technologies.

The difference between DNA and digital devices

Into this world comes the notion of DNA storage. DNA is by its essence an information-storing molecule; the genes we pass from generation to generation transmit the blueprints for creating the human body. That information is stored in strings of what’s often called the four-letter DNA code. That really refers to sequences of four building blocks abbreviated as A, C, T and G found in the DNA molecule. Specific sequences give the body directions for creating particular proteins.

Digital devices, on the other hand, store information in a two-letter code that produces strings of ones and zeroes. A capital ‘A’, for example, is 01000001.

How to convert from digital to DNA?

Converting digital information to DNA involves translating between the two codes. In one lab, for example, a capital A can become ATATG. The idea is once that transformation is made, strings of DNA can be custom-made to carry the new code, and hence the information that code contains.

What are the advantages?

* One selling point is durability. Scientists can recover and read DNA sequences from fossils of Neanderthals and even older life forms. So as a storage medium, “it could last thousands and thousands of years,” says Luis Ceze of the University of Washington, who works with Microsoft on DNA data storage.

* Advocates also stress that DNA crams information into very little space. Almost every cell of your body carries about six feet of it; that adds up to billions of miles in a single person. In terms of information storage, that compactness could mean storing all the publicly accessible data on the Internet in a space the size of a shoebox, Mr. Ceze says.

* DNA storage would avoid the problem of having to repeatedly copy stored information into new formats as the technology for reading it becomes outmoded.

Developments in this area

Getting the information into DNA takes some doing. Once scientists have converted the digital code into the 4-letter DNA code, they have to custom-make DNA. For some recent research Ms. Strauss and Mr. Ceze worked on, that involved creating about 10 million short strings of DNA.

Twist Bioscience of San Francisco used a machine to create the strings letter by letter, like snapping together Lego pieces to build a tower. The machine can build up to 1.6 million strings at a time.

Each string carried just a fragment of information from a digital file, plus a chemical tag to indicate what file the information came from.

To read a file, scientists use the tags to assemble the relevant strings. A standard lab machine can then reveal the sequence of DNA letters in each string.

What are the challenges?

Sri Kosuri of the University of California Los Angeles, who has worked on DNA information storage but has now largely moved on to other pursuits, says one challenge for making the technology practical is making it much cheaper.

Scientists custom-build fairly short strings DNA now for research, but scaling up enough to handle information storage in bulk would require a “mind-boggling” leap in output, Mr. Kosuri says. With current technology, that would be hugely expensive. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/scientists-work-toward-storing-digital-information-in-dna/article8894266.ece

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space X launched space docking station for nasa

SpaceX have launched an amazing space station docking port for astronauts at early Monday, along with a DNA decoder for a high-flying genetic research.

As an extra treat, the company brought its leftover first-stage booster back to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for a vertical landing only the second such land landing for an orbital mission and the ultimate in recycling. Twin sonic booms rocked the night, incoming shuttle-style.

The unmanned Falcon rocket streaked through the middle-of-the-night darkness, carrying 5,000 pounds of food, experiments and equipment for the International Space Station. The orbiting outpost was soaring over the North Atlantic at lift-off, its six residents asleep.

It was SpaceX’s second shot at delivering a new-style docking port for NASA. The last one went up in smoke over the Atlantic last year, a rocket accident casualty.

NASA needs this new docking setup at the International Space Station before Americans can fly there in crew capsules set to debut next year. SpaceX is building astronaut-worthy versions of its Dragon cargo ships, while Boeing which makes these docking ports is working on a crew capsule called Starliner. The pair would dock to this ring and another due to fly in a year.

The Dragon and its latest shipment are due Wednesday at the 250-mile-high outpost.

NASA’s space station programmer manager Kirk Shireman are expected to be “sweating bullets without a doubt” at lift-off, as always. He said all the cargo is precious, but really wants this docking port “up there safe and sound.”

SpaceX, meanwhile, have had its sights not only on orbit, but also on the ground.

SpaceX brought its leftover first-stage booster back to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, just a couple miles from where it lifted off. The company has now pulled off five vertical booster landings since December, three on an ocean platform and two on land. SpaceX employees at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheered loudly and applauded when the 15-story booster touched down smoothly.www.nairaland.com

SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk wants to refly his rockets to shave launch costs the ultimate in recycling. The boosters normally are ditched at sea. The company hopes to launch its first recovered rocket this fall.

The station’s two Americans will perform a spacewalk in August to hook up the new docking ring, about 5 feet across and 3 1/2 feet tall. Another port cobbled together from spare parts will replace the one lost in the June 2015 launch accident.

NASA went with private companies to supply the space station in the wake of the shuttle retirement five years ago this week.

the falcon 9 space X rockets lifts off from launch complex

the falcon 9 space X rockets lifts off from launch complex

Keywords: SpaceX, International Space Station, docking port, NASA, Falcon rocket

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