UAE hotel erects 11-million-dollar Christmas tree

The USA being a country where Christian values are predominant yet, it has a problem of saying Merry Christmas. They prefer Happy Holidays.

However, a Moslim country, the UAE specifically the emirate of Abu-Dhabi has unveiled a Christmas tree which is 40 feet in height and bejeweled with 11 million dollars worth of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires.

How on earth is this possible? The whole world seems to know the importance of Christmas except the morons in the United States. A lesson to be learnt here.

Read on.

Christmas came in extravagant fashion to the Muslim desert emirate of Abu Dhabi as a glitzy hotel unveiled a bejewelled Christmas tree valued at more than 11 million dollars on Wednesday.

It is the "most expensive Christmas tree ever," with a "value of over 11 million dollars," said Hans Olbertz, general manager of Emirates Palace hotel, at its inauguration.

The 13-metre (40-foot) faux evergreen, located in the gold leaf-bedecked rotunda of the hotel, is decorated with silver and gold bows, ball-shaped ornaments and small white lights.

But the necklaces, earrings and other jewellery draped around the tree's branches are what give it a record value.

It holds a total of 181 diamonds, pearls, emeralds, sapphires and other precious stones, said Khalifa Khouri, owner of Style Gallery, which provided the jewellery.

"The tree itself is about 10,000 dollars," Olbertz said. "The jewellery has a value of over 11 million dollars -- I think 11.4, 11.5."

"Probably, this will be another" Dubai entry into the Guinness book of world records, Olbertz said, adding that Emirates Palace planned to contact the organisation about the tree which is to stay until the end of the year.

Asked if the tree might offend religious sensibilities in the United Arab Emirates, where the vast majority of the local population is Muslim, Olbertz said he did not think it would. "It's a very liberal country," he said.

Like other hotels in the United Arab Emirates, it has had a Christmas tree up in previous years. But this year, "we said we have to do something different," and the hotel's marketing team hatched the plan, said Olbertz.

The tree is not the first extravagant offering from Emirates Palace -- a massive, dome-topped hotel sitting amid fountains and carefully manicured lawns.

The hotel, which bills itself as seven-star, in February introduced a package for a seven-day stay priced at one million dollars.

Takers of the package have a private butler and a chauffeur-driven Maybach luxury car at their disposal during their stay, as well as a private jet available for trips to other countries in the region.

And in May, the hotel opened a gold vending machine, becoming the first place outside Germany to install "gold to go, the world's first gold vending machine," said Ex Oriente Lux AG, the German company behind the machine.

REAL-TIME HOLOGRAMS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK

Real-Time Holograms Beam Closer to Reality

by Robert F. Service on 3 November 2010, 2:00 PM

. A new holographic setup is capable of recording, displaying, and updating this image of an F-4 Phantom Jet every 2 seconds.

Credit: Gargaszphotos.com/University of Arizona

It's not quite the flickering blue projection of Princess Leia begging, "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!" from the classic sci-fi movie Star Wars, but holographic projection has just beamed a bit closer to reality. Researchers in Arizona have devised a novel plastic film that can be used to generate holographic 3D images sent electronically from one location to another. The new telepresence setup doesn't work yet at full video speed—it can update images only every 2 seconds—but the technology opens the door for everything from holographic surgery to movies that literally surround the viewer.

Holograms are more than just fancy photographs. Shift your head to the side while looking at a photo, and the image doesn't change. Do that with a hologram, and instead of staring at the front of an image of, say, a fighter jet, you're looking at the side (see video). Lasers are the key: When recording a hologram, one beam of laser light illuminates the target. This light is combined with light from a second "reference" beam, creating an interference pattern akin to the one seen when two sets of ripples overlap on a pond. When this light strikes a photographic plate, the interference pattern is recorded. Later, shining a light back on the photographic plate causes light to diffract off the interference pattern, reconstructing the 3D image.

Researchers have been creating holograms for decades—yet they've struggled to make them practical. Among the biggest challenges: the traditional crystalline photographic materials used to capture holographic images are expensive and have trouble covering large areas. Two years ago, Nasser Peyghambarian, an optics researcher at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and his colleagues overcame these limitations when they devised a polymer-based holographic film that was potentially far cheaper than the conventional materials and also easier to grow in large areas. Moreover, the researchers were able to write new images every 4 minutes. But that was hardly a moving picture. So Peyghambarian and his colleagues continued to search for improvements.

In their new paper, published online today in Nature, Peyghambarian and colleagues at Arizona and the Nitto Denko Technical Corp. in Oceanside, California, describe a holographic display that can depict a scene in another location and update the image nearly in real time. The setup starts with 16 cameras arranged in a semicircle around a target. The cameras take simultaneous pictures of the target every second. The camera views are processed by a computer and sent via an Ethernet cable to the photographic recording site, which conceivably can be in the next room or half way around the globe. There, a laser setup receives the image data and shines a steady stream of pulses encoding the images as well as laser light from a reference beam at an improved polymer film, which in turn records the resulting interference pattern. A separate light is then shown from an angle on the other side of the polymer film, generating the hologram as it does so.

Among the advantages of the current setup, Peyghambarian says, is that images can be recorded on one side of the photographic film and viewed on the other. As a result, three people gathered around a table housing the holographic film wouldn't see the laser setup under the table. Rather, they would be able to see a holographic image of, say, a car, and, depending on where they were standing, either the hood, trunk, or doors.

That ability could lead to holographic movies that allow viewers to walk around the scene, for example. It could also bolster the budding field of telemedicine by allowing specialists from around the world to see a patient from all angles, offering their opinions to doctors on site.

"It certainly has got my attention," says Eric van Stryland, an optics expert at the University of Central Florida, Orlando. Stryland notes that Peyghambarian's team has already improved the speed at which his system can refresh images by about 100-fold, and it needs only another improvement by a factor of 10 to approach the 30-frames-per-second speed required for full motion video. "About another order of magnitude and they'll be there," he says. Peyghambarian says there are no physical showstoppers preventing his photorefractive polymers and lasers from reaching that goal, although he says that doing so will require the use of faster pulse lasers, among other things.

Light sabers—those might take a little more work.

the upside of recessions

Hungry but healthy. A new study suggests that economic downturns are good for human health. 

You've lost your job, your house, and your savings. But, hey, you still have your health, right? Actually, you probably do--and it may even be improving. Researchers have found that, historically, Americans were healthier during the Great Depression and other economic downturns than they were during periods of prosperity. And they say the trend may still hold true today.

For many, the Great Depression conjures up images of wan, rail-thin men waiting in bread lines. At its peak in 1932, unemployment hit 22.9% and U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), a standard measure of economic performance, had shrunk by 14%. Despite these hardships, the average American was healthier during this period than during the economic booms that preceded and followed it, according to social researcher José Tapia Granados and his co-author Ana Diez Roux, both of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The pair looked at historical life expectancy and mortality data as well as GDP growth and unemployment rates. They focused on the years 1920 through 1940, a period that included the Great Depression (1930 to 1933), a couple of less severe recessions, and several years of strong economic growth. The top-six causes of death at that time were cardiovascular and renal disease, flu and pneumonia, cancer, tuberculosis, motor vehicle accidents, and suicide.

Tapia Granados's team found an inverse association between economic health and population health: Life expectancy fell during economic upturns and increased during recessions. Mortality, meanwhile, tended to rise during economic upturns and fall during recessions. Deaths related to flu and pneumonia, for example, fell from about 150 per 100,000 people in 1929 to roughly 100 per 100,000 people in 1930, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Suicide was the only cause of death that increased during times of economic turmoil. For life expectancy, the patterns were particularly obvious among nonwhites: Between 1921 and 1926, a period of economic growth, life expectancy declined 8.1 years among nonwhite males and 7.4 years among nonwhite females. During the Great Depression, on the other hand, life expectancy among nonwhites increased by 8 years.

But why? The researchers don't yet have enough data to say. Previous studies have suggested some plausible mechanisms. Economic booms are associated with more smoking and drinking, less sleep, and more work-related stress--all factors that can affect health. In addition, traffic-related deaths and industrial injuries tend to increase during periods of economic growth. Another factor, Tapia Granados says, may involve social support. Recessions tend to bring people together, and people with stronger social support networks tend to be healthier.

One of the reasons that the findings may seem so counterintuitive, says Christopher Ruhm, a health economist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, is that it's easy to come up with examples of individuals who have gotten sicker during recessions. "Someone loses their job, they take to the bottle, their health suffers," he says. But these dramatic narratives don't say anything about the overall effect of recessions on the whole population.

Other studies have also suggested that health improves during economic downturns, says Stephen Bezruchka, a physician and public health expert at the University of Washington, Seattle, but this is by far the most all-encompassing study to look at the Great Depression. Taken together, he says, all of the studies suggest that GDP is a flawed measure of societal well-being.

WANT TO DEMOLISH THE EARTH??

Want to demolish Earth? A new Web site allows you to choose the form of the destructor. Just type in a few variables such as diameter, density, and velocity and Impact: Earth! will send a comet or asteroid hurtling toward our planet. Lest you be unsatisfied with a simulation of a massive rock barreling down on us, the Web site also provides data on the aftermath, including the size of the crater, the extent of the fireball, and even the height of the tsunami wave, should the object crash into the ocean. The Web site is an update of an impact calculator created in 2002 for use by NASA and homeland security. The new version is more visual and user-friendly, allowing even average Joes to smash up the planet.

Just go to the following website/link and insert your parameters.

http://www.purdue.edu/IMPACTEARTH

can google predict the stock market??

Whoever figures out how to predict the stock market will get rich quick. Unfortunately, the market's ups and downs ultimately depend on the choices of a massive number of people—and you don't know what they're thinking about before they decide to buy or sell a stock. Then again, maybe Google knows. A team of scientists has shown a strong correlation between queries submitted to the Internet search giant and the weekly fluctuations in stock trading. But it's unlikely to make anyone wealthy.

The stock market is a famously complex and jittery system. In any given week of trading, the price of shares in companies might stay the same, rise steadily, or suddenly crash. The causes of these patterns have evaded researchers, though not for lack of trying. An army of "quants"—many of them poached from academic math and physics departments—has studied data from stock indices such as the S&P 500 for decades. But within any given week, the time scale that matters to traders, the movement of the market seems random.

The reason, says Tobias Preis, a physicist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, is that people decide to buy or sell stocks based not only on personal motivations but on the collective decisions of others. This "herding behavior" makes the stock market so chaotic that the pattern of trading in one week is nearly useless for predicting what will happen the following week. To predict the market, you need data on what is going through people's minds before they make their financial decisions. One such source of data is the total weekly volume of Internet search queries, now available to researchers through Google Trends.

Researchers led by Preis compared the week-by-week fluctuations in two sets of data: The number of times that the name of a company in the S&P 500 was included in a Google search query, and the price and trading volume of that company's stock. They focused on the 6 years from 2004 to 2010.

The findings, to be published 15 November in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, aren't going to make anybody rich. The Google data could not predict the weekly fluctuations in stock prices. However, the team found a strong correlation between Internet searches for a company's name and its trade volume, the total number of times the stock changed hands over a given week. So, for example, if lots of people were searching for computer manufacturer IBM one week, there would be a lot of trading of IBM stock the following week. But the Google data couldn't predict its price, which is determined by the ratio of shares that are bought and sold.

At least not yet. Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida, says that if researchers could drill down even farther into the Google Trends data—so that they could view changes in search terms on a daily or even an hourly basis—they might be able to predict a rise or fall in stock prices. They might even be able to forecast financial crises. It would be an opportunity for Google "to really collaborate with an academic group in a new area," he says. Then again, if the hourly stream of search queries really can predict stock price changes, Google might want to keep those data to itself.

ANOTHER DISASTER UNDER OBAMA- THE END OF NASA??

Russia's Soyuz soon to be only lifeline to space

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — As a Soyuz spacecraft slowly rolls to its launch pad on the icy cold steppes of Kazakhstan, even the most seasoned space fan cannot help but be spellbound by the sight.

With NASA finally retiring the shuttle program next year, the venerable Russian workhorse is now set to become the world's only lifeline to the International Space Station. That predicament is provoking mixed feelings of concern over excess reliance on Russia's space program and enduring admiration for the hardiness of the Soviet-designed Soyuz.

"The vehicle is a rugged 'one trick pony,' no frills or luxuries, and can take any licking and keep on ticking," said James Oberg, a veteran of NASA Space Shuttle Mission Control in Houston.

The next Soyuz mission begins Thursday, when NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman, Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev and European Space Agency's Paolo Nespoli of Italy lift off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan.

In a procedure polished over more than four decades of Soyuz launches, the carrier rocket was horizontally rolled out of its hangar on a flatbed train at 7 a.m. local time Monday and carefully carried to the blastoff site in the winter darkness.

In contrast to NASA's distinctive winged shuttle, which is reusable albeit exorbitantly expensive to operate, the Soyuz can only be used once. It is a relatively streamlined craft consisting of a tiny capsule sitting atop powerful booster rockets.

The name, which comes from the Russian word for "union," was both a tribute to its Soviet design and a reference to the Soyuz's ability to dock with other modules. That detail was an absolute must even to begin thinking about long-term space missions or possible travel beyond the Earth's orbit.

Whereas the shuttle's viability has been hamstrung by countless delays, the last time a Soyuz launch was postponed was as far back as 1971.

Yet for all its trustworthiness, the first Soyuz launch in April 1967 ended in tragedy when Col. Vladimir Komarov, the sole cosmonaut onboard, died on re-entry.

Soviet authorities had grown alarmed at U.S. strides in the space race and had pushed for hasty deployment of the Soyuz before the United States could get its Apollo rocket off the ground.

That Soyuz disaster led to an immediate postponement of manned flights and injected a new spirit of caution into the Soviet space program. A minute attention to detail, most evident in Russian space officials' obsession with running operations on a timetable counted in seconds, has earned the Soyuz a well-deserved reputation for safety.

"My biggest dream in life has always been to fly in orbit someday, but I can tell you that I would feel a hell of a lot more at ease in a Soyuz than in a shuttle," space historian Bert Vis said.

Despite such oft-heard endorsements, a clutch of incidents in recent years has aroused concern. Most notably, problems with the Soyuz capsule's service module during a landing in April 2008 caused a perilously steep re-entry trajectory, which placed crushing gravitational pressure on its three-person crew.

Ahead of watching the Soyuz being winched into place at the launchpad Monday, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who traveled onboard that capsule, said the luxuries afforded by the shuttle would indeed be missed.

"The Soyuz is kind of a gentler launch, but I'd much rather land in a shuttle, because it's much more civilized," Whitson said.

Critics also complain that by leaving themselves so heavily reliant on the Soyuz, the United States could fall victim to costly price gouging at the hands of Russian space authorities.

"Moscow already uses it for leverage and has raised the price to NASA repeatedly over the years, to $50 million now," said Brian Harvey, an expert on the history of the Russian space program. "But a shuttle launch costs $550 million a go, so it's still good value."

And while the Russian space program is set to enjoy almost a complete monopoly on ferrying people to space for the next few years, things might change. The successful test launch last week of a privately developed rocket from Cape Canaveral is a clear example of how the market could breed viable space competitors.

"If new, commercially developed space transportation systems in the West leapfrog the tried-and-true Russian booster stable in the next decade, Russia will be left with no significant capability of interest to foreign customers," Oberg said.

The politics and economics of space travel is usually far from astronauts' minds, however, and while in Baikonur, most relish the pleasure of witnessing the ingenuity that goes into assembling the rockets.

"It was Michelangelo that said the sculpture was always inside the rock, I just have to take away the unnecessary pieces. The Soyuz is one of those sculptures," said Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who plans to fly to the International Space Station onboard a Soyuz spacecraft in 2012.