::: Star Weekend Magazine :::

Sci-tech

Waterless Dishwasher
University of New South Wales students have won a 7,000 Euro first prize for developing a revolutionary dishwasher that uses carbon dioxide instead of water. The trio won a world-wide design competition held by electronic appliance giant Electrolux that asked students to design a product consumers might need in the year 2015. The Rockpool dishwasher, designed by Douglas Nash, Oystein Lie and Ross Nicholls, beat back competition from products developed by students from Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. The judging panel was impressed with the environmental qualities that the waterless, chemical-free dishwasher could provide consumers in the future. "It uses carbon dioxide to clean the dishes. Under pressure the carbon dioxide takes on special properties of a liquid and a gas so it dissolves grease and oil and it has no surface tension so it will cover everything, like a gas. It's ideal because there are no moving parts in the machine so it's great for quietness," said Nash, one of the students. "All the products entered in the competition were compact, multi-functioning and multi-tasking and also they took into account environmental issues.

Bill Gates' Inbox Spammed
Rush of spams in the email box irritates one and all. When you are irritated the next time just imagine how Bill Gates tolerates. The Microsoft Corp. Chairman is the world's most spammed person with 4 million emails flooding in his inbox each day, most of them spams. But practically an entire department at the company he founded is dedicated to ensuring that nothing 'unwanted' gets into his inbox, the company's Chief Executive said. In most offices, including Prime Minister Paul Martin's, spam is filtered out. But so much is coming in that it's jamming up systems, causing even software moguls like Gates to take notice. Spammers are constantly finding ways to get around efforts to block their messages, which are sent out in the millions. Fighting spam is also big business. Spam or junk e-mails, regarded as perhaps the biggest threat to the internet, are unsolicited messages sent to many e-mail accounts simultaneously, often indiscriminately.

News versus Chatting
According to a survey conducted in Britain, one in three Internet browsers is likely to have a news site as his/her home page rather than a chat site. According to the Daily Mail, a research for broadband provider Pipex found that a third of computer users had a news or current affairs site as their home page. The top three home page items for men were news, sports and weather, while for women it was more likely to a photograph of their partner or children. The poll of 1,000 adults found that people in Wales and the South West were most likely to have a family picture on their screen when they log on to the internet.

Scientists Finds a Substitute for Oil
Scientsists at New Zealand's state-owned Industrial Research Ltd (IRL) have found a method of purifying hydrogen, using ironsands, which may help the world to develop a clean-burning replacement for oil. The process uses the North Island west coast's unique volcanic ironsands to extract pure hydrogen from water. The hydrogen could eventually replace oil in both cars and electricity generation. The process of splitting water to extract the hydrogen needs a lot of energy, but scientists believe the energy could be supplied by sawdust and other biomass wastes from the forestry industry. According to IRL hydrogen project manager Ian Brown, "People have had ideas about using iron oxides but as far as we can tell they have never figured out how to make it happen. No one has got it to demonstration plant stage. No one has contemplated using ironsands. No one has contemplated combining it with biomass technologies. It's the whole package of ideas that is unique." "All the existing fuel cell technologies internationally demand high-purity hydrogen because they have components that respond badly to contaminant gases. That is one of the difficulties of developing a fuel cell economy," he added. He also said that New Zealand had millions of tonnes of ironsand and had already developed an infrastructure to extract it for the steel mill at Glenbrook and for exports to Japan. There would be no need to extract large amounts, as the ironsand could be reused many times over.

Mobile Phones to Oust Land Phones Soon
A survey conducted by polling firm Mori, has revealed that people prefer to use their mobile phones more than their land line. According to the BBC, a research by electronics giant Nokia shows that more and more people use their mobile phone for every call they make or take. More than 45 million people in the UK, Germany, US and South Korea now only use a mobile. The research showed that people keep their fixed line phone because call charges are lower, but most of those questioned said the future was definitely mobile. While Home phones were used for longer calls, conversations on mobiles tended to be shorter, between mobiles and to friends. In the UK 69 percent of those questioned said they turned to their fixed phone because it was still cheaper to use than a mobile. The survey also showed that it is not just voice calls that are going wireless. Some of those questioned said they were looking to use a mobile or wireless service to get net access within the next couple of years.

Source: Webindia123.com / Google