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Hope my article will add much fun to your Face Book chat.

While the Russian capital swelters and coughs through a summer of 40-degree heat and smog from rampant forest and bog fires, six young men live sealed inside a container, at a constant 22 degrees Celsius.

The crew of three Russians, one Italian, a Chinese and a Frenchman have already spent more than two months simulating a flight to Mars and back. The entire “mission” is slated for 520 days, because a round trip to the red planet is estimated at about 15 months. The “Martians” have yet to encounter boredom in their more than 60 days of seclusion so far.

“None of them wants out,” said Peter Graef, Chief of the German Aeronautics and Space Agency (DLR). All six are still enthusiastic about the test of mental endurance, and routines are developing. Italian participant Diego Urbina wrote on Twitter that he is still having dreams about people outside the capsule.

Reminiscent of the Big Brother television show in which contestants are forced to live together in a few rooms under constant, closed-circuit surveillance, the “spacecraft” is packed with cameras that document around-the-clock whether the test subjects are conducting the 100 assigned research projects.

“It’s huge, how the boys participate,” Jens Titze, a medical researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, told the German Press Agency dpa. Titze and his nutrition team developed the meal plan far in advance. All are expected to eat what is on the menu, while not forgetting their regimented urine tests, he said.

One test is the impact of dietary sodium on blood pressure, and the latest technologies are allowing the scientists to precisely follow their patients.

German Army Captain Oliver Twickel spent 105 days under observation in the test capsule in Moscow. He calls the current Mars500 project “the most complicated experiment in the history of spaceflight,” because of the uncertainties that await the six participants in the next 450 days. “Experience grows as the motivation sinks, because you’ve done all the same jobs repeatedly already,” Twickel said, describing his own experience over time.

In these first few months, psychological and physiological tests are keeping the crew busy.

“After waking up, everybody has four or five assignments to complete before breakfast,” Romain Charles of France wrote in a personal journal entry on the website of the European Space Agency. Free time is limited, but the space “travellers” seem to be using it well. Chinese participant Wang Yue has been teaching Charles the complicated art of Chinese calligraphy. Charles recently had a birthday, celebrating with his roommates with thawed cake and powdered wine. He even had the luxury of receiving a telephone greeting – in French – from a friend living in Moscow.

“That’s no longer possible,” Graef said.

In the simulation, the spacecraft has travelled too far from Earth to receive voice transmissions. Getting answers from ground controllers takes ever longer for the crew, as radio signals take 20 minutes from Mars to their home planet.

Dear Readers
The whole world is scared of China made “black hearted goods”
Can you differentiate which one is made in Taiwan or China?
Let me tell! The the first 3 digits of barcode 690.691.692 is made in CHINA. Do not ever buy it for your own health.

* ISSN: International Standard Serial Number for Periodicals

* ISBN: International Standard Book Numbering

* ISMN: International Standard Music Number

It is our rights to know this information, but the government and related department never educate the public, therefore we have to rescue ourselves.

Washington: In a single day, a solitary graduate student at a lab bench can produce more simple logic circuits than the world’s entire output of silicon chips in a month.

So says a Duke University engineer who believes that the next generation of these logic circuits at the heart of computers will be produced cheaply in almost limitless quantities.

The secret is that instead of silicon chips serving as the platform for electric circuits, computer engineers will take advantage of the unique properties of DNA, that double-helix carrier of all life’s information.

Chris Dwyer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, showed that by simply mixing customised snippets of DNA and other molecules, he could create literally billions of identical, tiny, waffle-looking structures.

Dwyer has shown that these nanostructures will efficiently self-assemble, and when different light-sensitive molecules are added to the mixture, the waffles exhibit unique and “programmable” properties that can be readily tapped.

Using light to excite these molecules, known as chromophores, he can create simple logic gates, or switches.

These nanostructures can then be used as the building blocks for a variety of applications, ranging from the biomedical to the computational. “When light is shined on the chromophores, they absorb it, exciting the electrons,” Dwyer said.

Instead of conventional circuits using electrical current to rapidly switch between zeros or ones, or to yes and no, light can be used to stimulate similar responses from the DNA-based switches – and much faster.

“This is the first demonstration of such an active and rapid processing and sensing capacity at the molecular level,” Dwyer said.

“Conventional technology has reached its physical limits. The ability to cheaply produce virtually unlimited supplies of these tiny circuits seems to me to be the next logical step,” said Dwyer.

Customised snippets of DNA can cheaply be synthesised by putting the pairs in any order. In their experiments, the researchers took advantage of DNA’s natural ability to latch onto corresponding and specific areas of other DNA snippets.

Dwyer used a jigsaw puzzle analogy to describe the process of what happens when all the waffle ingredients are mixed together in a container, said a Duke release.

“It’s like taking pieces of a puzzle, throwing them in a box and as you shake the box, the pieces gradually find their neighbours to form the puzzle,” he said. “What we did was to take billions of these puzzle pieces, throwing them together, to form billions of copies of the same puzzle.”

Finally, after a long wait and lot of tests, I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to 9.10, on my laptop. Well, correctly speaking, it wa not a ‘upgrade’ in the actual sense, I did a fresh install.

It does seem faster and after the initial release bugs (that is what I waited it out!), it very stable. It seems to miss the option to change the login screen though so I have to research in this. Lookout for my future posts regarding the Koala!