Friday, June 13, 2014


Extracting Pure water From Atmospheric Humidity

Pure water, not only pure but usable surface water is going to be, or is a big threat to the existing living system on earth. That is the reason now we are spending considerable amount of time and money to find an alternate planet with water and other livable conditions. The scenario may different like, we can migrate to new space or we can transport water from there to our reservoirs. But my gut feeling is, we have spent more time to think, how we can reduce the use of water, how we can avoid wastage of water, and more importantly how we can produce water.




Production of water from air humidity

 

Production of water from atmospheric air



This is a very hot topic to discuss and a lot of research and investment is going on this topic. Even in hot and dry area, there is a lot of moisture available in air. And due to increasing in global warming, the moisture content in the air is going to more in future and surface and ground water availability will go down.

This idea will succeed only if the production cost is nominal and the technology is simple and affordable. In future our main target is developing a renewable source of water and fuel production.

There are mainly two process involve in water production from atmospheric air.

1.    Absorption of humidity from air


2.    Separation and condensation (desorption)


 

Absorption of water from atmospheric air

 

Absorption of atmospheric humidity

In order to make the absorption of the air humidity in the saline solution as efficient as possible, a large interface with the air and a long contact time are necessary. This is done by allowing the saline solution to flow slowly down sorption strings in tower-shaped, naturally ventilated plant modules and to absorb the water from the air. By means of a special design of the sorption strings an efficient mass transfer is achieved and the saline solution is diluted by the substantial absorption of water.

Desorption : distillation and condensation


The water has to be separated from the circulating saline solution (desorbed), and so a distillation process follows. The distillation is effected by means of gravity-assisted, multiple-stage vacuum evaporation. To do this, the saline solution, diluted with water, is subjected to a vacuum, which considerably reduces the evaporation temperatures. The advantage of this is that these temperatures can be achieved with simple solar thermal collectors or also with waste heat. Since the plant works with a negative pressure, it is also possible to use the thermal energy employed several times in various evaporation stages with different pressures. The water vapor produced in the distillation is condensed and can be used as high-quality drinking water.

A combined tower-construction for the sorption and desorption makes it possible to use the gravity of the process flows to create the required vacuum. Energy-intensive vacuum pumps are no longer needed.
This is an exaple of pracal application of the technology Biilsboard that produce water in Peru.

Production Of water from atmospheric air

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Human Retina Developed From Genetically  Reprogrammed Human Stem Cells




Retina grown from human stem cells


In new findings listing John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore published the creation of immature retina in dish from human stem cells. It is believed to be sensitive to lights that mean the cultured retina is sensing the light. That simply means one day in future this development will helps us to restore our vision.

Retinal cells are a type of photoreceptor which respond to lights. This is the first step of converting light in to images. Simply this photoreceptive retinal cell can be compared with the CMOS sensor of your digital camera. The researchers developed a 3D compliment of human retinal tissue in their lab. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed back to their most primitive state. Such cells are capable of developing into most of the 200 cell types in the human body, the team explains, and for their latest study, they were able to turn them into retinal progenitor cells that form light-sensitive retinal tissue lining the back of the eye.

In the experiment, the cells growth resembles the fetus growth in stage and duration. When the cells growth period attained 28 week equivalent, the researchers tested the cell for its photo sensitivity to check whether these cells can sense and transform the light to visual signals. The team tested the retinas by putting an electrode into a single photoreceptor cell and sending a pulse of light to the cell. This reacted in a biochemical pattern similar to the behavior of photoreceptor in humans exposed to light.

It is true that a stem cell cannot grow completely into a retinal cell by their own , but this experiment show at least what they can do. We hope someday we can use this research to lighten the life of many.

 

 

Retina Grown In Lab from Human Stem Cells

FIFA World cup Brazil Get Schedule In your Phone or any Device through Google Calender

 
 
The FIFA World Cup is only days away and, if you’re just as excited as we are, you’ll want to know when all of the matches kick-off.
So here’s a super-quick guide for adding all of the legendary tournament’s fixtures to your Google Calendar account:
1) Open up the web version and hit the arrow icon just next to the ‘Other Calendars’ option in the sidebar. Select ‘Add by URL’ and then paste the following URL into the dialog box:

https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/vdmtdcektajkqjk51vvda4ni4k%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

Screen Shot 2014 06 10 at 14.53.47 730x548 How to instantly get the entire World Cup schedule in your Google Calendar
2) Alternatively, you can head to this page and click the ‘+ Google Calendar’ button in the bottom right-hand corner. You’ll then be whisked across to your personal online calendar, where you can confirm the new additions.

3) Refresh the page and after a few minutes you should see the schedule appear across all of your devices. If you used the first option, the calendar should also update automatically as teams progress and get knocked out.

How to Add Schedule of FIFA 2014 to Your Calender

Monday, June 9, 2014

This one of my ever lasting questions. May be I asked the same to many.. Or I may hear the answer several time. But still now I am not able to get a clarity on it. The question remains the same.. Why there is a complementary strand? Yes of cause I am talking about the DNA.
We are all having double stranded DNA compliment to each other.
Is it really true that only one strand of these DNA get expressed?
Of only. One strand why there is two? OK it is true that it can increase stability. Ya well ,it act as a proof reader to eliminate mismatches during replication. The stability of the structure and function. I really wonder is that the only function of the complimentary strand. What it actually complimenting.
Nearly 70 to 80% genome of guinea pig and human are. Same. Ho! then the so called 30% is responsible for the variation. Is that really means the 70% is some level of basic genetic constitution of all livings. Not may be but its really confusing... More than 30% really.
I need to learn a lot basics.

Why there is a complementary strand?

 Electronic Skin: Store ,send and receive data

 

Develop an artificial skin is one of the major challenge. And we are almost achieved the goal by nanotechnology. A wearable synthetic skin that can sense touch , temperature , movement and can response to it. Now we moved little bit ahead with a wearable skin which can store, send and receive data, Nature published the success in their latest edition .

 

The application of this technology is very vast. The initial target is to  use  this synthetic skin with data  to aid patients with movement disabilities. The new improved version of skin can store data, drug, it can receive diagnostic information and can release drug, monitor movement, temperature and send data. The so called 'electronic skin' is a 0.3 mm thick 4 cm long and 2 cm wide stretchable nanomaterial.

 

The trade-off for that memory milestone is that the device works only if it is connected to a power supply and data transmitter, both of which need to be made similarly compact and flexible before the prototype can be used routinely in patients. Although some commercially available components, such as lithium batteries and radio-frequency identification tags, can do this work, they are too rigid for the soft-as-skin brand of electronic device. Even though the data is transmitted  wirelessly, there should be a device that can read the data. The thought of using human body temperature or electric charge is also a thinkable approach to solve the energy requirement.

The electronic skin can also do things that conventional medical sensors cannot. When placed on the throat, for example, it senses spoken words well enough to control a simple computer game. The device might be used to help people with laryngeal diseases communicate, to monitor premature babies, or to enhance the control of prosthetics. Use the skin to induce muscle contractions in regions of the body that have degenerated.

 

More scientific reads :

http://www.nature.com/news/electronic-skin-equipped-with-memory-1.14952

http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanotechnology/electronic-skin-patch-could-treat-diseases-140401.htm

 

 

 

 

       

 

Wearable electronic skin that can store,send and receive data

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Artificial Leaf: the new ways of producing energy

At the very beginning of the human race, concurring the energy source was the ultimate target. And still we are racing behind a renewable, affordable energy source. We already witnessed wars and fight for capturing energy sources and witnessed the rise of economical power of the world  from scratch  just becuse of having the natural energy resources.

The world is and will be highly worried about the avaialbility of the natural resources. The depresiation of the resources is really an unforgatable thoughts. But still we are not able to come up with a replaceble source for natural resources. One advantage of liquid fuel is propotrion of stored energy in it  and storage space required.  To use elctric current insted of liquid fuel to fly a flight, just imagine the amount for batteries required to store the power. So the real though is to come up with a real alternate energy source  which is to be efficient, cheap and robust. And it is the ultimate challenge for the existance of the entire humnity.

In recent publication of Nature, discused about a concept of Artificial leaf. This leaf is just not a leaf made of synthetic material, the artifical part is the functionality of the leaf. Yes we are trying to mimic the function of a leaf 'the photosysnthesis'. Ultimately the energy source we are looking for the solar energy.


The concept of artificial photosynthesis goes back to 1912, but the push to achieve it did not start until 1972, when Japanese researchers outlined what a device would need to take in sunlight and use it to split water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel2. Progress was slow. In 1998, Turner reported3 a complete system that showed a major advance — it stored 12% of the incoming solar energy as fuel, compared with 1% of energy stored as biomass in real leaves. But it cost more than 25 times too much to be competitive, and its performance dropped off after 20 hours of sunshine.

In the process, to create a system that is much cheaper than just splitting water with electricity from a solar panel. At the heart of JCAP's artificial-leaf design are two electrodes immersed in an aqueous solution. Typically, each electrode is made of a semiconductor material chosen to capture light energy from a particular part of the solar spectrum, and coated with a catalyst that will help to generate hydrogen or oxygen at useful speeds (see 'Splitting water'). Like many other artificial-photosynthesis devices, JCAP's system is divided by a membrane to keep the resulting gases apart and reduce the risk of an explosive reaction.

Once the water has been split, the hydrogen is harvested. It can be used as a fuel by itself — perhaps in hydrogen-powered cars.

Making any one of the artificial leaf's components work well is a challenge; combining all of them into a complete system is even harder. Much of the difficulty comes down to finding the right materials. Silicon, for instance, makes a good photocathode — the electrode that produces hydrogen gas — but is stable only when the solution around it is acidic. Unfortunately, the situation is reversed with photoanodes, which produce oxygen: the good ones are stable only when the solution is basic, not acidic. And the best catalyst for the oxygen-producing electrode, iridium, is both rare and expensive, which makes it unsuitable for commercial-scale devices.


Light industry

Another entrant in the artificial-photosynthesis field is the Japan Technological Research Association of Artificial Photosynthetic Chemical Process (ARPChem), a consortium of universities and companies that has government funding comparable to JCAP's grant — although over ten years rather than five — to develop a bag-based approach. Kazunari Domen, a chemist at the University of Tokyo and leader of ARPChem's water-splitting group, says that one of the companies in the consortium has been working on a membrane to separate the hydrogen and oxygen products.
Other projects are making photoabsorbers from organic molecules, rather than semiconductors. Some are building molecular assemblies inspired directly by the photosynthetic apparatus of plants. And in the past few years, a class of materials called perovskites has drawn the attention of the solar-photovoltaic community for its high energy-conversion efficiency; some researchers think that the materials also have potential in artificial photosynthesis.
Daniel Nocera, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched Sun Catalytix to develop his work on a low-cost catalyst. But the company announced last year that it has put that research on hold to pursue a less challenging product with prospects of turning a profit for investors sooner. The decision underscores the challenges of bringing a commercially viable artificial-photosynthesis system to market.


 

Artificial Leaf. Will it be the Energy source of the future ?

Phage Terapy gets revitalized

 
The century old virus treatment is on high interset on the increasing drug resistance bactereia. Reports says the rastic mutaion in bacterial genome againt the antibiotics and reserches are spending a lot of time and resource on developing new drugs each and every time to tackle the diseases.


Bacterio Phage



Now the thoughts of using the century old virus treatment- use of bacterio phages- phages are virus which infects on bacteria- to treat for bacterial diseases. bacteria — to treat infections. Phage therapy is still widely used in Russia, Georgia and Poland, but never took off elsewhere. Pages are viruses and peoples are afrid of viruses.

Now, faced with the looming spectre of antibiotic resistance, Western researchers and governments are giving phages a serious look. In March, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases listed phage therapy as one of seven prongs in its plan to combat antibiotic resistance. And at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) meeting in Boston last month, Grégory Resch of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland presented plans for Phagoburn: the first large, multi-centre clinical trial of phage therapy for human infections, funded by the European Commission.

Previous lack of Western interest to clinicians’ preference for treating unknown infections with broad-spectrum antibiotics that kill many types of bacterium. Phages, by contrast, kill just one species or strain. But researchers now realize that they need more precise ways to target pathogenic bacteria, says microbiologist Michael Schmidt of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Along with the rising tide of strains resistant to last-resort antibiotics, there is growing appreciation that wiping out the human body’s beneficial microbes along with disease-causing ones can create a niche in which antibiotic-resistant bacteria can thrive. “Antibiotics are a big hammer,” Schmidt says. “You want a guided missile.”



Finding a phage for a bacterial target is relatively easy, Young says. Nature provides an almost inexhaustible supply: no two identical phages have ever been found. As a bacterium becomes resistant to one phage — by shedding the receptor on the cell surface that the virus uses to enter — the Eliava Institute researchers simply add more phages to the viral cocktails that patients receive. Kutateladze says that they update their products every eight months or so, and do not always know the exact combination of phages that make up the cocktail.

In initial trials, the researchers found that their phage could kill more than 99% of the E. coli cells that contained specific anti­biotic-resistance gene sequences, whereas it left susceptible cells alone. Giving the phage to waxworm larvae infected with resistant E. coli increased the worms’ chance of survival. The researchers are now starting to test the system in mice (human trials are a long way off).

Phge therapy never replaces antibiotics . But it definitly gives and added advantage over the drug resistance strains of bacteria.

Phage Therapy -Drug resistant bacterial diseases

Evolutionary relationships among some of the organisms

The branches of the evolutionary tree show paths of descent but do not indicate by their length the passage of time. (Note, similarly, that the vertical axis of the diagram shows major categories of organisms and not time.)

Evolutionary relationships among some of the organisms

Evolutionary relationships among some of the organisms

Stem cell approch is gaining momentem in Parkinson’s disease curation

 
  Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a degenarative disorder of central nervous system. PD is often described as idiopathic - means no known causes- , although some atypical cases have a genetic origin. The motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease result from the death of dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra, a region of the midbrain, the cause of this cell death is unknown.

Mid Brain Cross Section
Early in the course of the disease, the most obvious symptoms are movement-related; these include shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement and difficulty with walking and gait. Later, thinking and behavioral problems may arise, with dementia commonly occurring in the advanced stages of the disease, whereas depression is the most common psychiatric symptom. Other symptoms include sensory, sleep and emotional problems. Parkinson's disease is more common in older people, with most cases occurring after the age of 50.

The Stem Cell Approch

Penelope Hallett of Harvard University and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and colleagues studied postmortem brain tissue from five people with advanced Parkinson’s. The five had received stem cell transplants between four and 14 years earlier. In all five people’s samples, neurons that originated from the transplanted cells showed signs of good health and appeared capable of sending messages with the brain chemical dopamine, a neurotransmitter that Parkinson’s depletes.    
                                                                      
Results are mixed about whether these transplanted cells are a good way to ease Parkinson’s symptoms. Some patients have shown improvements after the new cells stitched themselves into the brain, while others didn’t benefit from them. The cells can also cause unwanted side effects such as involuntary movements

 

Stem cell Approch for Parkinson’s disease

Twisting og Helix, Hemihelix with Single and Multiple Perversion 

 
Helix is a well known structure in biology. There are different types of helices structures exisits in the universe. The nature always choose for stable structure. Helix is the basic structure of DNA. But helix formation can get complicated, as helix grows. The rotation of helices may get reversed and the resulting structure has een dubbed hemihelix. And we can create it very simply by untwisting a part of our telephone cord.


Katia Bertoldi, a professor of applied mechanics at Harvard University, and her colleagues wanted to see how hemihelices form on their own. So they stretched a strip of silicone rubber, glued it to a second, unstretched strip and let the pair go. The researchers reported April 23 in PLOS ONE that they could get a range of shapes to form by tuning the dimensions of the glued rubber pieces.

Strips that were much thicker than they were wide spiralled gently to form helices. Those with squarer cross sections relaxed themselves with a strong twist, forming hemihelices with one or many regularly spaced changes in direction.
“It’s sort of a competition between bending and twisting,” Bertoldi says. She and her colleagues are now experimenting with rectangular patches of rubber to see how this same stretch-and-release approach can be applied to make other three-dimensional shapes.

Spiral-bound

To create helical structures, one silicone strip (red) is stretched to match the length of a longer strip (blue). The pair is glued together and then released. Depending on the dimensions of the strands, a helix or hemihelix (one shown right) forms as the pair relaxes.

Shape matters

The number of changes in direction, or “perversions,” in a hemihelix depends on the cross section of the bonded strips (shown actual size below). Keeping width constant (blue = 3 mm, red = 1.89 mm), researchers decreased the thickness of the strips (shown as height) for more perversions.







 

The Twist of Twisted Helix

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Students Build the First Eukaryotic Chromosome from Scratch

The feat is a landmark achievement in synthetic biology






Credit: Science Source
In March undergraduate students in Johns Hopkins University's Build a Genome course announced they had made a yeast chromosome from scratch—and history, too. It is the first time anyone has synthesized the chromosome of a complex organism, a landmark achievement in the field of synthetic biology. It is also a triumph for the movement known as DIY biology.
The target was chromosome 3, which controls the yeast's sexual reproduction and has 316,617 base pairs of the DNA alphabet—A for adenine, G for guanine, C for cytosine and T for thymine. To synthesize it, the students took a shortcut: they built only the sections considered essential or nonrepetitive. The resulting chromosome had a more manageable 272,871 base pairs. And as reported in Science, the yeast with the new genes thrived just as well as regular yeast did in terms of size and growth.
“They are going strong,” says biologist Jef Boeke of New York University, who helped lead the research as part of the Synthetic Yeast 2.0 project—an effort to build a synthetic genome for yeast that would give scientists nearly complete control of it. Boeke and others plan to grow this batch for thousands of generations over the next several years to see how they evolve over time, which will give scientists a better understanding of fundamental biology, from the role of “junk DNA” to the absolute minimum of genetic code necessary for survival. “The questions are endless,” Boeke says.
The current work is just 3 percent of the way toward creating an entirely synthetic yeast genome (there are 16 chromosomes in total) and will take many more years to finish. If finished, synthetic yeast could be second on the list of organisms with genomes built from scratch—the J. Craig Venter Institute built a bacterium's genome in 2010.
It could also be a breakthrough in humanity's millennia-long cohabitation with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is responsible for bread and wine. Yeasts today churn out human proteins for medicines, biofuels and other specialty products. Being able to fine-tune the microscopic fungus's genetics could lead to better beer or sustainable chemicals, according to Boeke. And after yeast? “The fruit fly? The worm? We're not sure what is next.”

 

Students Build the First Eukaryotic Chromosome from Scratch

"Beast" Asteroid to Fly by Earth on Sunday

What might be the effects if a large asteroid collided with Earth?


The orbit of near-Earth asteroid 2014 HQ124, first discovered on April 23, 2014, is shown in this NASA graphic. The asteroid will fly by Earth Sunday, June 8, at a safe distance of three times the Earth-moon distance.NASA/JPL-Caltech
 

Humanity should be thankful "The Beast" doesn't have Earth in its crosshairs.


This Sunday (June 8), the near-Earth asteroid 2014 HQ124—which some observers have nicknamed "The Beast"—will give the planet a relatively close shave, coming within 777,000 miles (1.25 million kilometers) at its closest approach, or about 3.25 times the distance from Earth to the moon.
There is no chance of an impact on this pass, researchers stress. But at 1,100 feet (335 meters) wide, 2014 HQ124 could do some serious damage if it slammed into us. [
Potentially Dangerous Asteroids (Images)]
"This one would definitely be catastrophic if it hit the Earth," asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said during a June 5 webcast produced by the online
Slooh community observatory that previewed 2014 HQ124's upcoming flyby.
"If it hit a city, it would definitely wipe out an entire metropolitan area," Boslough added.
Asteroid 2014 HQ124 is currently traveling about 31,000 mph (50,000 km/h) relative to Earth, Boslough said. But if the asteroid were on a collision course, our planet's gravity would boost its speed up to about 40,000 mph (64,000 km/h) at the time of impact.
If 2014 HQ124 is one solid piece of rock—its composition isn't known for certain—the strike would unleash an explosion with a yield of about 2,000 megatons, Boslough added. For comparison, the atomic bomb the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II packed about 15 kilotons. (One megaton is equivalent to 1,000 kilotons.)
"You'd end up with a crater about 3 miles across," Boslough added. "An event like that would break windows over 100 kilometers away."
Asteroid 2014 HQ124 was discovered on April 23, just six weeks ago—not nearly enough time to deflect the asteroid if it were on a collision course with Earth. But that doesn't mean the
asteroid would kill millions of people if it struck New York City or Tokyo.
"Once it's within radar distance, the precision is remarkably good on its position and speed," Boslough said. "So the folks at JPL [NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory] would be able to predict its impact point to within the nearest kilometer and its time to within the nearest second."
There would thus probably be plenty of time to organize an effective evacuation campaign if 2014 HQ124 were headed straight for us. But that isn't always always the case, as some (smaller) space rocks slam into the planet without ever being detected.

In February 2013, for example, a 65-foot-wide (20 m) asteroid detonated without warning in the sky above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, shattering thousands of windows and
injuring more than 1,200 people. And there are many more objects out there like the Chelyabinsk asteroid—small space rocks cruising unnamed through the dark depths of space.
Scientists estimates that they've found about 95 percent of the potential "civilization-enders" out there—mountain-size asteroids at least 0.6 miles (1 km) across. But there are probably more than 1 million near-Earth asteroids at least 100 feet (30 m) wide, and less than 1 percent of them have been discovered.
Originally published on Space.com.

"Beast" Asteroid to Fly by Earth on Sunday

Friday, June 6, 2014

Blind mole-rats are loaded with anticancer genes

Rodent's genome reveals secrets of surviving underground


 
BLIND AS A MOLE-RAT The genome of the blind mole-rat helps explain why the animals lack eyes, live long lives and are champion cancer fighters. The genome also reveals that the rodent is more closely related to Chinese hamsters than to naked mole-rats, from which its lineage split from about 71 million years ago.
Blind mole-rats aren’t exactly lookers — they don’t even have eyes. But the long-lived subterranean rodents do have other charms, including pronounced abilities to fight cancer (SN: 12/15/12, p. 12) and withstand low levels of oxygen and high levels of carbon dioxide.
Now, an international group of researchers has compiled the animal’s genetic instruction book, giving a glimpse into how the rodents perform these feats. The genome of the blind mole-rat, Spalax galili contains more than 22,000 genes, the team reports June 3 in Nature Communications. That’s about the same number of genes as humans have.
The eyeless rodent’s genome contains 259 defunct genes, including 22 involved in building the eye, constructing other parts of the visual system or processing visual signals. But the animals have doubled up on a cancer-fighting gene encoding the immune system chemical interferon-beta1 and have more genes involved in regulating cell death and other tumor-killing mechanisms than their close relatives rats and mice do. The team also found self-replicating pieces of DNA called SINEs that help protect the animals from low-oxygen and high-carbon dioxide conditions.

anticancer genes-Blind mole-rats

Google Invests Billions on Satellites to Expand Internet Access



Google plans to invest more than $1 billion in a new fleet of satellites that will expand Internet access to unconnected regions of the world.

The company's decision to purchase 180 small, high-capacity satellites is just the first step in a project that could cost the search giant over $3 billion, reported The Wall Street Journal. The project's price tag will depend on whether the company decides to embark on a second phase of the project, which would double the number of satellites needed, Google insiders told the WSJ.
The new venture is being led by Greg Wyler, founder of the Google-backed satellite communications startup O3b Networks, Ltd. Wyler and a former O3b chief technology officer recently joined Google to spearhead the effort, reported the WSJ. Wyler's company is also known to be hiring engineers from satellite company Space Systems/Loral LLC. [Video: Google to Spend Billions on Satellites for Internet Everywhere]


The sky's the limit

Google's satellite project is one of several new ventures designed to expand Internet access to remote areas of the world. Last year, the company announced Project Loon, an aerial wireless network that uses high-altitude balloons to provide Internet service to users in underserved and rural areas.
Google also recently acquired Titan Aerospace, a company that develops ultra-lightweight, solar-powered drones that could replace the balloons from Project Loon altogether.
Speaking with the WSJ, Tim Farrar, head of the satellite-consulting firm TMF Associates, said that, for Google, drones and satellites might complement one another nicely. Drones, he said, offer better high-capacity service in smaller areas, whereas satellites offer broader coverage in areas that have less demand.
The satellites currently being developed by O3b Networks for Google are relatively small—weighing roughly 250 pounds (113 kilograms), according to the WSJ. This makes them markedly different from the satellites the company usually produces, which weigh about 1,500 pounds (680 kg) each. Due to non-disclosure agreements, additional details about what Google's new satellites might look like are hard to come by, according to media reports.
However, O3b Networks (the name of the company refers to the "other 3 billion" people worldwide without Internet access) has four of its own satellites currently in orbit, and plans to launch four more next month.

Faster & cheaper coverage?

O3b currently provides Internet connectivity to mobile carriers' base stations, reported the MIT Technology Review. The company's involvement could be good news for people in remote parts of the world, because O3b satellites provide a superior (and cheaper) way to deliver high-speed Internet than do conventional satellites, the MIT Technology Review said.
Compared to conventional Internet companies, whose satellites orbit roughly 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above Earth, O3b's satellites orbit around 5,000 miles (8,000 km) above the planet's surface.
This difference in altitude results in a corresponding difference in delays. While O3b users have to contend with a 150-millisecond delay in their Internet coverage (the time it takes for radio signals to go back and forth between the base carrier station and the satellite), those with other services might experience 600-millisecond delays for the same service. Such a delay, MIT reports, is generally considered excessive, at least for business use.
Google's foray into satellite Internet could speed up coverage for hundreds of millions of people around the world, a Google spokeswoman told the WSJ. The technology company noted that nearly two-third of the world's citizens have no access to the Internet at all.
But despite Google's enthusiasm for the new project, some outside the company are wary of the search giant's journey into the stratosphere. Roger Rusch, who runs the satellite-industry consulting firm TelAstra, Inc., told the WSJ that Google's project is a "pipe dream," and said the company will end up spending much more on the effort than originally planned, perhaps as much as $20 billion

Google's Satellites Plan

 
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