Cheapest 3G Phone From Nokia

Nokia has launched its most affordable 3G handset, Nokia 2730 classic, in the Indian market.

The device is equipped with Nokia’s Ovi Mail, Nokia Messaging, Nokia Life Tools and browsing. The phone also comes with an integrated Opera mini browser.

Vineet Taneja, Director Marketing Nokia India said, “Nokia has always had a holistic approach towards driving the adoption of 3G in India, both at the infrastructure and at the handset level.

Available in black and dark magenta colours, the handset measures 109.6 mm x 46.9 mm x 14.4 mm and weighs 87.7 grams.

The battery life offers maximum of 7.4 hours talktime and 16.5 days standby time. The handset is priced at Rs 4,499.

Sex addiction - a disorder?

Psychiatrists are examining what is commonly referred to as sex addiction, a controversial and often misunderstood condition that has most recently garnered news media attention because of the travails of golfer Tiger Woods .




Sex addiction is not recognised by any official diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), considered the definitive word on psychological disorders, reports the Courier Mail .



However, the term 'hypersexual disorder' is being proposed for the fifth edition of DSM, due out in 2012.



The proposal is being put forward by Dr Martin Kafka, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in the US, who says the disorder has been neglected for years.



He says it causes everything from marital dysfunction and divorce to increased risk of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.



To be diagnosed with the disorder a patient would have to meet four of the following five criteria:



• Spending a 'great deal of time' consumed by sexual fantasies and urges.

• Using sexual behaviour to deal with stressful life events (or anxiety, depression, boredom or irritability).

• Disregarding the 'physical and emotional harm' to those involved.

• Patients must have tried but failed to curb the behaviour.

• Patients must have suffered distress and harm to their everyday life.



However, the controversial proposal has critics worrying that the criteria are too vague, and the chances for misdiagnosis and bogus pharmaceutical treatment are too great.



Dr Paul Fedoroff, director of the Sexual Behaviours Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, is a critic of Kafka's hypersexuality criteria.



He questions whether sex in response to stress is unhealthy, and what is meant by 'a great deal of time' consumed by sexual fantasies.



But Dr Dan Zucker, of the University of Toronto, who heads a working group dealing with the next edition of DSM, expects 'hypersexuality disorder' to be listed.



He admits the proposal is controversial but says the issue is about where to draw the line on what is normal, and what is not.

Nexus One is the Google Phone!

Washington: Nexus One is the Google Phone: Google is reportedly going to launch its branded cell phone, naming Nexus One.


Reports say that, though, HTC Corp. has designed the phone, but Google would sell it under its own brand.

According to the reports, the phone may be available into the market from first quarter of 2010. Various reports say that it would come with a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android.

Not only this, it would be looking like the HTC Passion, which everyone was including in their posts earlier, reports The Washington Post.

Now a Triple Sim Phone From INTEX

Kolkata: Intex is please to announce the launch of its first triple handset in India. This handset called the IN 5030 comes with a triple SIM facility (2 GSM + 1 CDMA).


Simultaneously it has also launched its Dual SIM handset—IN 4220. This handset comes with a dual SIM facility (2 GSM).

The IN 5030 is equipped with features like 2” TFT screen, mobile tracker, auto call record facility, dual LED torchlight, 1.3 mega pixel camera, Bluetooth, webcam, video and audio player and wireless FM radio.

All these features come in one single handset and that too at a very reasonable price–Rs 4,700.

Charles Darwin's genetic history unlocked by DNA project

Scientists have used DNA from Charles Darwin's great-great grandson to map the ancestry of the world's most famous naturalist.




Published almost 200 years after the birth, the results reveal that the father of evolutionary theory, who struck upon the theory that all humans are descended from one common ancestor, comes from a long line of adventurers, his forbears being some of the first modern humans to leave Africa for the Middle East.



The ambitious Genealogy Project, a five-year initiative backed by National Geographic and IBM, uses powerful new technology to examine DNA, allowing scientists to see back to the very earliest days of the human species and map how and when they moved around the globe.



One of the 350,000 members of the public tested so far was Chris Darwin, a tour guide and adventurer who lives in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.



Because genetic information is passed from father to son via the Y chromosome, Mr Darwin would share a large part of his genetic data with his great-great grandfather, who wrote The Origin of The Species.



Tests on Mr Darwin's DNA, collected from a swab of his saliva, showed that his ancestors, and those of Darwin himself, were among the first wave of modern humans to leave Africa for the Middle East about 45,000 years ago.



From there, they travelled into Europe, surviving the Ice Age by migrating south to Spain, before moving north to England about 12,000 years ago.



The tests revealed that Charles Darwin belonged to the Haplogroup R1b, direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people who dominated the human expansion into Europe and heralded the demise of the Neanderthals.



Mr Darwin, who migrated to Australia from England in 1986, said his great-great grandfather would have been fascinated by the results of the study.



"He would have been amazed by the amount of detail you can get looking at your genes and the fact that you can tell where your ancestors were at a certain time," he said.



"Back then genetics was not understood at all, so he would have been fascinated to have seen that he got it basically right and that data like this is available."



Mr Darwin, whose great-grandfather was Darwin's astronomer son George, said the test showed that the desire for knowledge and thirst for discovery was in his genetic makeup.



"I was always a bit concerned that I hadn't inherited Charles Darwin's scientific abilities, but I hoped I had inherited his adventurous abilities, his desire to go over the hill and see what was on the other side," he said.



"From what I hear of my background we like looking over the tops of hills.



We were the first people to leave Africa for the crossroads of Asia."



Dr Spencer Wells, The Genographic Project director, said that he hoped to compile data on at least another 100,000 people before the study was completed.



"We all carry a historical document in ourselves that allows us to see back to the very earliest days of our species," he said.



"Through mutations in our genes we can track the migrations of our species all around the world."



The goal of the five-year study was to try to explain the migratory history of the human species, he said.

Role of CORBA in Molecular Biology

CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), as an open standard, is considered to be a good solution for the development and deployment of applications in distributed heterogeneous environements.




This technology can be applied in the bioinformatics area to enhance utlization, management and interoperation between biological resources.



Distributed object technology is considered to be a revolution for software design in heterogeneous computing environments. Using this approach, an application can be abstracted and divided into self-managing objects that can interoperate acros heterogeneous networks and operating systems. The OMG, the largest consortium of more than 700 member organisations, has been focussing on specifying the elegant architecture on which objects written by different vendors can interoperate across networks and operating systems. Its main product is the precise specification of the CORBA.



The specification describes a software bus, called as Object Request Broker (ORB), that provides an infrastructure on which a client can invoke the methods of server objects without the knowledge of where the server objects are located, how they are implemented, whether the object is currently activated and what communication mechanisms are used. Usually, a client only needs to know what types of operations an object can provide, i.e. the object s interface. Object interfaces are defined using OMG s Interface Definition Language (IDL). IDL is a declarative language which helps to define object interfaces separately from their implementation. Thus language independence, which is an essential feature of CORBA, is supported.



The use of CORBA in a biological context was introduced by Hu et al. and Lijnzaad et al.



Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) are cheap, easy, and quick to obtain relative to full genomic sequencing and currently sample more eukaryotic genes than any other data source. ESTs are particularly useful for developing Sequence Tag Sites (STSs for mapping), polymorphism discovery, disease gene hunting, mass spectrometer protemics, and most ironically for finding genes and predicting gene structure after the great effort of genomic sequencing.



Sequence databases are currently the most familiar biological database and a typical source for EST sequences. Traditionally these databases are presented and distributed using "flat file" views of the sequence originally submitted, but these static raw views are being superseded by novel interfaces better suited to the need of academic and industrial researchers. The new browsing interfaces are needed because current research may need to investigate nucleotide or protein sequences grouped by their function, phylogeny, map position, cellular location, expression regulation, disease association, annotation similarity or metabolic pathway etc.



To support these new investigative cross-database clients, it is useful to have standardized API level access to both data and services - a requirement where CORBA is starkly appropriate. In summary, ESTs are inherently difficult data to handle (yet extremely useful) so they are a natural target for new efforts to improve data quality, cross database browsing and novel visualization tools. Of all the biological databases, EST databases have been the most conspicuous in recent years both because of their prodigious growth rates and because of their increase in intrinsic importance connecting different areas of biological research.



ESTs have many problems that stem from their means of production. The cDNA library from which any ESTs are drawn will sample the levels of expression in a particular tissue at a particular time: rare transcipts will be missed and highly expressed genes will be overly abundant. This latter problem, redundancy, is both wasteful and difficult to handle due to the extreme volume of error prone data. Redundancy can be reduced in the laboratory using normalization techniques.



To address the redundancy problem using computer techniques, a variety of EST clustering programs have been implemented. Once clustered, gene fragments can be assembled using sequence assembly programs, or both steps can be combined in large-scale EST assembly and gene indexing protocols. An assembly stage adds two main benefits: first, it produces contigs and consensus sequences which can completely hide EST redundancy and second, it should also improve the length and quality of the gene reconstructions beyond that available from any one EST. For some applications, the clustering is all that is required, for example, the early stages of STS mapping but for others, sophisticated cluster partitioning or complex assemblies are more suitable.

A few hard questions with easy answers

Q.How can you drop a raw egg onto a concrete floor without cracking it?


A. Concrete floors are very hard to crack! (UPSC Topper)





Q.If it took eight men ten hours to build a wall, how long would it take four men to build it?

A. No time at all it is already built. (UPSC 23 rd Rank Opted for IFS)





Q.If you had three apples and four oranges in one hand and fourapples and three oranges in the other hand, what would you have?

A. Very large hands.(Good one) (UPSC 11 Rank Opted for IPS)





Q. How can you lift an elephant with one hand?

A. It is not a problem, since you will never find an elephant withone hand. (UPSC Rank 14 Opted for IES)





Q. How can a man go eight days without sleep?



A. No Probs, He sleeps at night. (UPSC IAS Rank 98)







Q. If you throw a red stone into the blue sea what it will become?

A. It will Wet or Sink as simple as that. (UPSC IAS Rank 2)





Q. What looks like half apple?

A : The other half. (UPSC - IAS Topper )





Q. What can you never eat for breakfast?

A : Dinner.





Q. Bay of Bengal is in which state?

A : Liquid (UPSC 33 R ank ) Interviewer said "I shall either ask you ten easy questions or one really difficult question. Think well before you make up your mind!" The boy thought for awhile and said,"my choice is one really difficult question."



"Well, good luck to you, you have made your own choice! Now tell me this.



"What comes first, Day or Night?"



The boy was jolted in! to reality as his admission depends on thecorrectness of his answer, but he thought for a while and said, "It's theDAY sir!"



"How" the interviewer asked,

"Sorry sir, you promised me that you will not ask me a SECOND difficult question!"