EducatioN


Space Hotel  Set to Open in 2012 

How would you like to head off on a weekend getaway 
into space? One company is planning to launch a trip 
to the first “space hotel” in 2012. At that hotel -- the 
Galactic Suite Space Resort -- guests will live aboard 
a pod that connects to a central space station. Each 
pod will hold about four guests.  
Galactic Suite plans to send its guests into space aboard a rocket that will take off from 
an island spaceport. Before the launch, passengers will take part in eight weeks of 
training. They will learn what it will be like to travel in space and be weightless. They 
will be taught important lessons about space safety too. 
The trip from the spaceport to the space hotel will take about 1-1/2 days. On their flight, 
guests will orbit Earth once every 90 minutes. That means they will orbit Earth about 
15 times a day. They will see the sun rise 15 times!  
   
NEWS WORD BOX 
galactic    passenger 
reserved    schedule 
destination    experience 
Once travelers arrive at their hotel destination, they 
will dress in Velcro suits. They will crawl around 
their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls 
like Spiderman does. There will be no tour guides 
aboard the space hotel. Travelers will just enjoy the 
views and the experience. This trip will be like 
spending a weekend at a quiet mountain cabin, 
resort owners say. 
So how much will a trip to the space hotel cost? Travelers will pay $4.4 million for their 
three-night stay at the Galactic Suite Space Resort. So far, 43 guests have reserved a 
spot. More than 150 others have said they are interested in traveling to the space 
hotel. The first test flight will carry just a few passengers who will stay in one hotel pod.  
Some people say there is no way the space hotel can be built and open for business 
by 2012. That plan is “pie in the sky,” they say. But resort owners insist the hotel will 
open up on schedule. 
THINK ABOUT THE NEWS 
Imagine you are one of the first guests in the space hotel.  
Write a journal entry that describes your trip and your hotel stay.  


Injections gin up antibodies that limit drug's effects, study in mice shows
By Nathan Seppa
Web edition : Thursday, January 20th, 2011
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Antibodies generated by a new vaccine can capture molecules of cocaine in the precious few seconds that lapse before the drug reaches the brain, a study in mice shows. Although the antibody brigade doesn’t snag all the cocaine, it seems to collar enough to greatly subdue the agitation that mice exhibit when given the drug.
Based on these findings, the researchers are moving on to studies in rats and monkeys in hopes of testing the vaccine in people. The new report will appear in the MarchMolecular Therapy.
“When someone takes cocaine — whether snorted, smoked or injected — you don’t have much time,” says study coauthor Ronald Crystal, a pulmonary physician at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.  “It takes about six second to pass from the lungs to the blood to the brain.”
A vaccine would need to elicit a standing army poised to intercede.  “You need avid antibodies, at high levels,” Crystal says.
In the new study, Crystal and his colleagues gave mice three injections over six weeks. Some of the animals received a placebo while the others got the experimental vaccine, which combines a cocainelike substance with noninfectious portions of an adenovirus that stimulate an immune response but don’t cause disease. Four weeks later, all the mice were exposed to cocaine by injection.
Antibodies elicited by the vaccine kept about three-fifths of the cocaine from reaching the brain in vaccinated animals, according to examinations of the mice, which were given the maximum dose of cocaine. This effect translated into behavioral changes:  Cocaine makes mice hyperactive, Crystal says, and in this study the unvaccinated mice were running around much of the time. In contrast, vaccinated mice ran half as much and performed repetitive motions one-third as much, behavior similar to that of mice not given cocaine at all.
Crystal says the vaccine might be ready to test in people in a year or two. “The most obvious strategy is to use it in people who are addicted but who want to stop and have enrolled in a program. This would help them,” he says.
Cocaine dependence accounts for more than one-third of illicit-drug-related emergency room visits, according to the U.S. Drug Abuse Warning Network.
About 40 percent of cocaine users are in denial about their addiction, and another 40 percent are not yet willing to take on the challenge of quitting, says Stephen Ross, an addiction psychiatrist at New York University. “The other 20 percent are ready to make a change,” he says. Such people need behavioral therapy and all available support. “The more tools we have, the better,” Ross says. “A vaccine could be part of that arsenal.” Vaccination might also prevent cocaine addiction in young adults and adolescents who are at high risk, he says.
Any prospective anticocaine vaccine needs a lot of testing, in part because it isn’t clear whether just taking more of the drug might overwhelm a vaccine’s effect, says Frank Orson, a physician and immunologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Also, the researchers in the new study used an additive called complete Freund’s adjuvant to boost the immune reponse in the mice. The adjuvant cannot be used in people because of side effects, he says.
Other researchers have sought to build vaccines using adenoviruses, which normally cause the common cold and other ailments, Orson says. These efforts include work on vaccines for HIV, influenza, malaria and other ailments. Adenovirus particles are good at triggering an immune response, he says, which is important for vaccines against addictive drugs because the drugs otherwise go largely unnoticed by immune forces, which are geared up to catch infectious microbes, he says.
Nevertheless, Orson says, “I think there is a good chance we will have vaccines against some of these agents — cocaine being pretty high on the list because of its properties of being fairly short-lived.” Since cocaine is naturally degraded in the blood stream more rapidly than some other illicit drugs, such as methamphetamine, cocaine might make a better target, he says. Orson and his colleagues are currently working on vaccines against cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.

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Opera Mini usage trends in India
NEW DELHI, INDIA: Opera software has announced the trends in mobile web behavior of Opera Mini users in India.
The top 10 sites continued to be similar to 2009, where Google and Orkut continue to lead the list. For the first time, Facebook overtook Orkut and is placed at #2 in the most visited domains since October 2010
According to the release, the global stats showed a clear increase in the number of visits to Amazon.com using Opera Mini towards the end of the year, compared to earlier in 2010.
In India, Amazon.com stands tall at #17 in the most visited domains of 2010. It was not present in the top 50 most visited domains from India list in 2009. In the past one year, traffic towards Amazon.com by Indian Opera Mini users has increased by 150 percent.
“It is not hard to imagine the benefits of the full Web right at your fingertips when shopping in a crowded store,” said Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder, Opera Software
Tetzchner added, “'Is this TV on sale really a good offer, or can I get a better deal online? What are people saying on the Web about the advantages of this computer model compared to the more expensive one?' Full access to the Web via Opera Mini--even under difficult conditions such as crowded cellular networks--puts power back in the hands of the consumers.”
Opera Mini global statistics:
In December 2010, Opera Mini had over 85.5 million users, a 6.8 percent increase from November 2010. Since December 2009, the number of unique users has increased 84.7 percent.
Opera Mini users viewed over 46.7 billion pages in December 2010. Since November, page views have gone up 4.6 percent.
Since December 2009, page views have increased 125.5 percent. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 6.5 petabytes of data in December.
Shoppers are returning to the mobile Web after a long decline. In March 2010, Opera Mini users reversed the downward trend shopping sites have seen in the later years, and usage spikes are easily seen on the big shopping days of the year.
Top 10 sites in India (unique users) for December 2010 according Opera listed below:
* Google.com
* Facebook.com
* Youtube.com (up from 4)
* Orkut.com (down from 3)
* Getjar.com
* Zedge.net
* Yahoo.com
* Wikipedia.org (up from 9)
* Songs.pk (down from 8)
* Vuclip.com

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London: Old-fashioned ways of teaching like reciting times-tables and verb conjugations are better than trendy new teaching methods, say researchers.

Researchers believe that reciting facts shortly after learning them is better than many new-style educational [^] methods.

The "simple recall" seems to cement the knowledge "in memory" so it is more permanently embedded for use later, the Telegraph reported, citing a study in the journal Science.

Many modern teachers rely heavily on learning techniques like concept or mind mapping to help students retain the most from the texts they read, the study said.

This involves drawing elaborate diagrams to represent relationship between words, ideas and tasks.

But two experiments, carried out by Jeffrey Karpicke at Purdue University, Indiana, US, concluded that this was less effective than constant informal testing and reciting.

Karpicke asked around 100 college students to recall in writing, in no particular order, as much as they could from what they had just read from science material.

Although most students expected to learn more from the mapping approach, the retrieval exercise actually worked much better to strengthen both short-term and long-term memory, the study said. IANS

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