Let your home blossom this Eid

Cleaning and preparing the house for Eid day can be a frantic and frenzied task, especially if you are a busy mum with loads to do both at home and beyond. As the hectic days of Ramadan pass by in a mad rush, one is seldom left with time to think about ways of making their homes look appealing during Eid day. For such individuals, shortcuts to home d�cor for Eid are the way to go.
One such element that can readily transform your home from a dull and drab dwelling to a colourful and lively abode is flowers. Flowers are one of the most natural ways to embellish your home, and has the added advantage of going easy on your workload as well. All you have to do is visit a flower shop nearby that offers a wide range of flowers and select the ones you like to create a perfect combination for some bouquets.
You can also string flowers into garlands and roll them around in staircase handles or on walls to spread their fragrance and enhance the festive mood. Use of colour can also drum up the jollity, so use red, yellow, pink and golden as the colour theme for this occasion.
We now get to find many flower shops in the city that offer a wide range of flowers to choose from, both local and imported. One such flower shop is Pushpo Bitan, situated in Shimanto Square Shopping Mall in Dhanmondi. The shop specialises in imported flowers, ones that you rarely get to see in other shops. They have their own bouquet designer who has his own catalogue of designs from where you can select the desired one. He will also help you create your own customised flower bouquet by taking your suggestions. The flowers in their display this Eid includes Carnation, Rose, Lilly, Chrysanthemum, Emilia, Orchid and many more. Also, if you want to add a unique touch to your home this Eid, you can grab one of their miniature bonsai trees or cactus plants. The price for the bouquets ranges from Tk.500 to 6000, depending on the type and quantity of flowers. You can decorate your bouquet with the various accessories they offer, like nets, ribbons, cellophane, etc.
Flowers can be very easy to work with and even easier to get hands on at a reasonable price. It adds dollops of splendour to your dwelling and makes it smell good. So, give your home a touch of festivity with flowers this occasion and bring out the designer in you.

Bidding invited for oil, gas exploration in Bay

Petrobangla, the state-run Oil, Gas and Minerals Corporation, has invited international bids for exploring oil and gas in the Bay of Bengal.
The bidding was invited for exploring oil and gas in nine shallow-sea blocks and three deep-sea blocks, Petrobangla Director Muhammad Imaduddin told reporters on Sunday.
The international companies will have to submit bids between December 17, 2012 and March 18, 2013, the director added.

A new timeline of Stonehenge's construction reveals that the massive megaliths came first, while the smaller bluestone oval came later. Source: Live Science

Mars Struck Why we're mad for Mars

An excited comment by a NASA scientist set off a bout of feverish online speculation last week about what new discoveries might be coming from the surface of Mars.
John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for NASA's Mars Curiosity rover mission, told an NPR reporter that the rover's soil sampler analysis had turned up something exciting.
"This data is gonna be one for the history books," he said. "It's looking really good."
Populate Mars!
The comments kicked off immediate online speculation on what the finding could be, but NASA immediately began to manage expectations, with a spokesperson telling CBS News that the discovery was "nothing earthshaking."
But try as it might, NASA likely can't tamp down enthusiasm about the Red Planet. Earth's neighbor has long fascinated the public for its potential to have a history of life, or even to one day support a future human colony.
The lure of Mars
Until the first spacecraft flybys of Mars in the 1960s, scientists believed the planet might have liquid water and sustain life. That possibility was enough to fascinate the public, Bob Crossley, author of "Imagining Mars: A Literary History" (Wesleyan, 2011),told LiveScience in August.
"Somewhere deep in my own psyche, and maybe for other people as well, there is a desire for another world," said Crossley, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Massachusetts.

Mini Caller Why do parrots talk?

Though a parrot might not understand any words it's saying toward you, there's a good chance its aim is to address you individually, new research suggests.
A study indicates that at least some parrots' talent for mimicking sounds, which underlies their "talking" skill, functions in nature to let them communicate with individual parrots they encounter.
Thorsten Balsby of the University of Aarhus, Denmark and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen studied one parrot species, the orange-fronted conure.
In the wild, these birds live in dynamic flocks where individuals flit in and out, so each parrot encounters many different individuals daily, the researchers noted. Each bird also has its own unique call.
Both in the wild and in the researchers' experiments, parrots that heard an imitation of their own calls responded more often and faster to the calling individual than parrots that didn't hear this imitation, according to the scientists.
Based on these observations, they suggest that the parrots may have evolved their abilities as mimics so they could start "conversation" with a specific individual by mimicking their call. The findings were published Nov. 21 in the research journal PLoS One.
"Given that orange-fronted conures frequently communicate within large communication networks with many potential receivers, which may be from several different flocks, the ability to selectively address specific individuals may be of particular importance" to them, the scientists wrote.

The Higgs discovery

On the flight to Melbourne, Australia, I close my eyes and reflect on the day. What a day! July 4, 2012 will be a day to remember: another one like this may not come in my career. Essentially, we have announced the discovery of the Higgs boson today. I think back on the scene.
The seminar at CERN is due to start at 9 in the morning. The seating is limited, so we have lined up outside the Main Auditorium since 1 am. Mostly young people, students and postdocs, who have the stamina to stay up all night; some of us working on our laptops, because the work never stops, others drinking, chatting, playing cards; everybody wondering what the other experiment has. A discovery must be confirmed by both of the major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: ATLAS and CMS. I am a member of ATLAS, and we have kept our results carefully hidden from CMS. CMS has tried to do the same, but there are rumors that they also have a '5-sigma significance', which is the statistical threshold needed for discovery in this field.
The auditorium door opens at 7:30 am. We troop in. Almost half of the auditorium is reserved for VIPs, who include political hotshots from the CERN member countries as well as some of the biggest names in high-energy physics. There comes Peter Higgs, who hypothesized the scalar boson back in 1964. 48 years of relentless search is about to bear fruit. The atmosphere is tremendous, with people trying to hide the inner excitement and look grave for the occasion.
Joe Incandela presents the CMS results: excesses in both diphoton and four-lepton decay channels. Combined significance: 5 sigma. Yes! Then Fabiola Gianotti steps up to present the ATLAS results. This is one of the most influential women in the world, the spokesperson for a 3400-people collaboration. The same picture is seen by ATLAS: excesses in diphoton and four-lepton channels. Combined significance: 5 sigma. So this is it, the discovery is confirmed! Standing ovation in the auditorium, the applause goes on for 3 minutes, my palms are all pink. Rolf Heur, CERN's Director General, makes the formal statement: 'we have it'.
Now I think back on all the work that has gone in. I decided to be a particle physicist all those years ago in high school, standing beside the ping-pong table in Scholastica. Later, in my second year at Harvard, I dubbed myself a Higgs Hunter and resolved to be part of the Higgs discovery, if the boson exists at all. Since I completed my PhD, I have been working on the WW channel, which is the most sensitive Higgs decay mode in the low mass range. That is only my personal story; extremely hard work by hundreds of people over years has gone into the making of this morning. Notwithstanding, I am proud of the moment, proud of representing my country here at the pinnacle of science, of knowledge and of human achievement.
The next phase is to measure the properties of this particle: couplings, spin, parity. Is this really the Standard Model Higgs boson, or something more exotic? The latter possibility is definitely the more exciting one. So there is much work to be done. But for now, I am off to Melbourne to attend the International Conference for High-Energy Physics, a few days of relative leisure away from CERN.

Dr. Kashif did his undergraduate studies at Yale University, received a PhD in Physics from Harvard University, and is now a postdoctoral researcher with CERN/University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Crimes of Galileo!

In the early 17th century, the great Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had to face the wrath of the Catholic Church for his endorsement of Copernicus' heliocentric model of the cosmos. The church believed that the model was contrary to the teachings of the Holy Scriptures and branded it as heresy. It hit at the very core of the church's belief in the geocentric cosmos of Aristotle.
In 1616, officials of the Roman Inquisition, which is an institution in the Catholic Church responsible for eradication of heresies, warned Galileo to stop preaching the Copernican model as truth. At the same time, his book On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres was placed on the list of Index of Forbidden Books. Galileo, however, was steadfast in his belief and tried to enlighten the church about scientific truth as opposed to “revealed” truth. It was an exercise in vain and it eventually led to his downfall.
In 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a friend of Galileo and a patron of the arts and sciences, was elected pope and assumed the name Urban VIII. Believing that a friend was at the helm of the church, Galileo mustered courage and wrote the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Though he claimed Dialogue was neutral, it was in fact a veiled polemic in favor of the Copernican model. He had to face the Inquisition again in 1633. This time he was charged with “vehement suspicion of heresy.” After a short but swift deliberation, a guilty verdict was pronounced. Out of compassion for an old friend, the pope spared Galileo the fate of Giordano Bruno, a contemporary scholastic philosopher and Copernican astronomer, who was burned at the stake. Instead he was condemned to a life under house arrest in Florence where he died as a blind man in 1642.
Did the two trials of Galileo diminish his stature as a scientist and thinker? If we confine ourselves to the few decades following the trials, the answer is yes. In 1758, the church regretted for not accepting the truth in science, and lifted the ban on most of Galileo's works supporting Copernican theory. In the 20th century several popes acknowledged the great work of Galileo. In October 1992, Pope John Paul II took the extraordinary step to revoke the condemnation, saying that “the denunciation was a tragic error,” but fell short of admitting the mistake of the church. In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI, who condones heresy, admitted “understanding of the laws of nature could stimulate appreciation of God's work.”
After three and a half century, how are Galileo and Urban VIII remembered? Galileo is called the “father of modern observational astronomy.” Urban VIII is known as an authoritarian pope, a champion of nepotism. Galileo is admired for his unflinching devotion to seek the truth. The pope is known for his efforts to establish the Barberini Dynasty he crowned his nephew as the Prince of Palestrina. There is an epigram about Urban VIII: What the barbarians did not do the Barberini's did. Among other things, Galileo has a space probe named after him; Urban has nothing of importance named after him. Galileo's bust adorns the halls of hallowed institutions all over the world; Urban's bust erected after his death was destroyed by angry crowd.
The greatness of a person never goes unrecognized. Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time described Galileo as “perhaps more than any other single person who is responsible for the birth of modern science.” Albert Einstein considered him the father of modern physics. Even Pope Pius XII described him as one of the “most audacious heroes of research.”
The church may have silenced Galileo's voice, but it could not crush his conviction that science is independent of religion. He did not budge an iota from the credo, which in his own words is: “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” He also lamented, “It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.”
While under house arrest, he completed his other major work on the science of motion which was published in 1634 as Mathematical Discourses and Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences. It was a precursor to Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion which unlocked the secrets of nature and revealed the mysteries of the Universe.

The writer is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics, Fordham University, New York.

The anti-social network :(

recently conducted a social experiment and gave up my compulsive texting habit for a while. Instead, I had to pick up the telephone and actually ring people. It had a curious effect. Most people answered in a panic, assuming that I’d only make a phone call if it was to announce big news, such as a death, birth or imminent appearance on Big Brother. They were baffled by the truth – that I just wanted to know if they fancied a drink, and that I expected a definite answer as to where and when it would take place.

What I was encountering was people in the grip of the new sociological phenomenon of “micro co‑ordination”, as Professor Richard Ling at the IT University of Copenhagen has dubbed it. This is the idea that smartphones have revolutionised how we communicate, allowing us to make fluid and quickly changeable arrangements digitally. Gone are the days when we made plans verbally and stuck to them. Is this a good thing, though, or has it turned us into a bunch of liars and flakes?

This week, the text message is celebrating its 20th birthday. But cast your mind back to a time before smartphones. You couldn’t text a last-minute apology: “Aargh got flu, in bed, c u soon”, and settle down with a glass of wine to watch Strictly Come Dancing instead. You couldn’t email: “Meeting overrunning – can’t make lunch”, when you’d received a more appealing offer.

So ubiquitous has this fluid behaviour become that the old lie “the cheque’s in the post” has been replaced by “sry cant make it, spk soon x”. And if you wish to opt out of these new social mores, you haven’t a hope. As Prof Ling makes clear in his recent book, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society, we are all governed by the new behaviour.

“Everybody takes it for granted that we are constantly available on [mobiles],” says Ling. “So you are effectively coerced into this kind of communication… We used to structure our plans around time and location when organising our social life. Now we just use our phones, which enables us to change and manipulate what we do.

Samsung Galaxy S III to top mobile Christmas list

Samsung dominated the smartphone market in Britain in November, with its products occupying five of the top ten positions in the monthly uSwitch.com Mobile Tracker chart.

The Samsung Galaxy S III remains popular due to its reputation for matching the iPhone's specifications without the prohibitive price tag, and for a host of innovative features that are fast becoming industry standards.

Samsung's Galaxy S III, S II, Galaxy Ace, Galaxy Ace II and Galaxy Note II all feature in the top ten.

Second and third places are taken by Apple's iPhone, though perhaps surprisingly the iPhone 4S beats the recently released iPhone 5.

This is due in part to iPhone 5 contracts, which require customers to pay £47 a month in order to get the phone for free on the Vodafone network, for example, dropping to £42 a month for the iPhone 4S. It would appear smartphone users are not convinced there is enough of value in the iPhone 5's larger display and improved camera to warrant the extra money.

Wii U review

By Tom Hoggins, Video Games Editor

7:00AM GMT 30 Nov 2012

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It's been a difficult couple of years for Nintendo. Last year saw the Kyoto video games giant post the first annual loss in their history, as their new portable games console, 3DS, initially struggled and sales of their record-breaking Wii console finally began to decline. It was the Wii that, for many, catapulted video games to the heart of the living room. Its motion-control revolution appealing to those who had never played a video game before with an easy to understand concept: swing the remote, and your character on screen will duplicate it. 97 million consoles sold around the world confirming that its simple language was universal.

Nintendo's new home console, Wii U, arrives under a heavy burden and without the simplicity that made its predecessor so easy to sell. Communication has been a problem for Nintendo since the Wii U and its tablet-esque Gamepad controller was revealed. Was the Gamepad an add-on for Wii? Was it a portable attachment?

No and no. Wii U is a brand new home console that connects to your telly and the Gamepad is its fascinating controller. The new console itself is high-definition enabled and far more powerful than the Wii. The Wii U will come in two packages, the basic 8GB white version and the 32GB black premium edition, though the console is equipped with an SD card slot for you to add to your memory space. The black Premium console we tested is a lovely piece of kit too, the physical unit a sleek refinement of the Wii's compact form. It's longer, but discrete and more pleasing on the eye than its competitors.

Few will be too interested in what's on the outside, of course, preferring to focus on the Wii U's inner-workings. The Japanese company have been coy about releasing detailed specifications --their philosophy is to let their unique control system do the talking for them-- but the Wii U is largely on par with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 in terms of raw power, meaning most games will have visual parity. However, the CPU is reportedly slower and initial testing bears that out. The main hub-screen of the Wii U is slow to load, and stuttering on a playtest of the Wii U version of FIFA 13 does cause concern. However, this could be poor optimisation for the game itself and as developers become au fait with the Wii U's specs, we should see a marked improvement.

There's enough visual splendour in the games made specifically for Wii U to leave room for optimism too. New Super Mario Bros. U has gorgeous, bright and crisp visuals, while Ubisoft's ZombiU makes excellent use of light and shaders to build their grimy vision of London. It's quite possible that multi-format games will continue to look and run better on Xbox 360 and PS3, as developers are more familiar with the hardware, but the Wii U exclusive titles will have some of the best visuals around.