An Israeli geneticist, Avigdor Cahaner, created the world’s first featherless chicken at the genetics faculty at the Rehovot Agronomy Institute near Tel Aviv, Israel. The bare-skinned bird was created by cross breeding a broiler with a species that has a featherless neck.
The idea behind the development of this naked bird is that it will create a more ‘convenient’ and energy efficient chicken which can live in warm countries where feathered chickens don’t do well and cooling systems are too expensive to be commonly affordable. And of course, the bird doesn’t require plucking, saving additional money in processing plants.
Amazon today unveiled a new storage service called Amazon Cloud Drive that gives you 5 GB of free online storage space to store your documents, photos, music and other files securely in the cloud. All you need is a free Amazon.com account to upload your files which you can then access from anywhere using a web browser.
Amazon Cloud Drive is purely an online file storage solution and the only client that you can use to upload or download files from your Cloud Drive account is your web browser.
Thus, for example, if you plan to copy your entire My Documents folder from the computer to Amazon’s cloud, you’ll have to upload files manually from the browser, one by one. Or, to save time, you could zip the entire folder into a single file and upload it in one go as Cloud Drive supports files as large as 2 GB in size. (Dropbox has a file size limit of 300 MB).
Amazon offers a handy desktop client that will scan your hard drive for music related files and will automatically put them to Cloud Drive - you then listen to your music from anywhere using the browser itself without having to download anything to that computer. Other than that, I think the Cloud Drive service is also good for manually backing up some of your really bulky files online - like those Outlook PSTs.
Amazon S3 vs Amazon Cloud Drive
There’s however one part about Cloud Drive that has surprised me a bit – the pricing structure. The service internally uses Amazon S3 for storage but if you compare the storage cost of these two services, you’ll find that Amazon S3 is nearly 80% more expensive than Cloud Drive.
Amazon charges 14¢ per month per GB for S3 which converts to around $1.78 per year (including the 10¢ data transfer fee) while Cloud Drive is available for a flat $1 per GB per year with no transfer-in or transfer-out fees. S3 is one of the popular choices for online backup but going forward, Cloud Drive could be a more cost-efficient option.
Bonus Tip – Upgrade to 20 GB for less than $1 All Amazon Cloud Drive users get 5 GB of free online storage space or you can pay $20 to upgrade to the 20 GB plan.
There’s another option as well. Amazon will upgrade your storage to 20 GB if you buy any MP3 Album from them. Now there are quite a few music albums on Amazon.com that are available for less than $1 – buy any one and you’ll be upgraded to 20 GB.
The only downside is that while Cloud Drive is available to everyone worldwide, Amazon’s music store is only for residents of the United States with a U.S. billing address.
10) Tysons Corner Center, Annual Visitors: 22.1 million
Year Opened: 1968
Size: 2.2 million square feet
It’s just outside the Beltway, but Tysons Corner is still the place where Washington insiders cruise for Brooks Brothers, Build-A-Bear, and bargains. In addition to more than 300 shops and restaurants, the northern Virginia mall has a large movie complex and a number of community programs, from business classes for high school students to the Tysons Trekkers walking club that encourages local residents to keep fit.
Gurnee Mills (Courtesy of Gunree Mills)
9) Gurnee Mills,
Annual Visitors: 23 million
Year Opened: 1991
Size: 1.8 million square feet
Another of Chicagoland’s mega-malls, Gurnee Mills was also a pioneer of mixing retail and entertainment. Ice-skating, laser tag, miniature golf, and a 20-theater Cineplex count among its many nonshopping attractions. There’s even an indoor zoo called Serpent Safari, where various snakes, lizards, turtles, and crocodiles can be viewed and sometimes handled. Get ready to have a photo snapped with a Burmese python draped around your neck.
Palisades Center (Courtesy of Railyn Mest)
8) Palisades Center, West
Annual Visitors: 24 million
Year Opened: 1998
Size: 2.2 million square feet
One of the nation’s newer mega-malls, Palisades sprawls on the west side of the Hudson River about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan. Even those who loathe shopping can find something to draw them here, whether it’s the large cinema complex, the bowling alley, the carousel, the ice rink, or the 40-plus food and beverage options. Its most unusual claim to fame is historic Mount Moor Cemetery, founded in 1849 as a burial place for local African Americans and now surrounded by a parking lot on the mall’s south side.
Aventura Mall (Courtesy of Aventura Mall)
7) Aventura Mall,
Annual Visitors: 24 million
Year Opened: 1983
Size: 2 million square feet
The greater Miami area’s largest mall is an integral part of a super-posh coastal enclave that includes the Turnberry Isle resort and championship golf course, Gulfstream Park thoroughbred horse track, and the upscale Golden Beach/Golden Isles residential area. Cashing in on south Florida’s tourism bounty, the mall organizes shopping experiences for visiting conventions and hosts special events like the Chocolate Festival, Great American Bake Sale, Miami’s Most Photogenic Baby contest, and a regular farmers’ market.
America’s Most-Visited Shopping Malls
Houston Galleria (Courtesty of Houston Galleria)
6) Houston Galleria,
Annual Visitors: 24 million
Year Opened: 1970
Size: 2.2 million square feet
The largest mall in the Lone Star State is one of Houston’s leading tourist attractions. An oasis of air-conditioning during the sweltering summers, the mall also lures with its upscale tennis and athletic club, an indoor ice rink, the Little Galleria interactive play area for kids, and 50 restaurants. The Galleria’s vaulted glass ceilings were inspired by Italian Renaissance arcades.
King of Prussia Mall (Courtesy of King of Prussia Mall)
5) King of Prussia Mall,
Annual Visitors: 25 million
Year Opened: 1963
Size: 2.6 million square feet
The monarch of Pennsylvania malls is located in upscale Chester County, not far from Valley Forge on the western fringe of Philadelphia. It’s one of the oldest mega-malls, and the original core has evolved into two distinct indoor malls (the Plaza and the Court) and more than half a dozen large peripheral stores. With around a quarter of the patrons hailing from outside the Philly metro area, several nearby hotels (like the Radisson Valley Forge) offer “sleep and shop” packages that include KOP gift cards, discounts, and complimentary transportation.
Sawgrass Mills (Courtesy of Sawgrass Mills)
4) Sawgrass Mills,
Annual Visitors: 26 million
Year Opened: 1990
Size: 1.8 million square feet
Like Del Amo on the left coast, this Florida landmark is one of the anchor properties of the Simon Property Group, the nation’s largest mall owner. Sawgrass takes its name from the nearby Everglades, located just across the expressway from the mall on the western outskirts of Fort Lauderdale. In addition to the core enclosed area, Sawgrass includes an outdoor entertainment area called the Oasis and an outlet component dubbed the Colonnade.
Woodfield Mall (Courtesy of Woodfield Mall)
3) Woodfield Mall,
Annual Visitors: 27 million
Year Opened: 1971
Size: 2.2 million square feet
Located just outside of Chicago, Woodfield is the number one tourist destination in the State of Illinois. Its name pays posthumous tribute to two of the greatest retailers of all time: General Robert E. Wood of Sears fame and the legendary Marshall Field. Many of the specialty stores are the largest of their kind in the U.S., and Woodfield is often used to test new store design and marketing concepts. Its trademark stainless-steel sculptures were fashioned by artist Robert Engman.
Del Amo Fashion Center (Courtesy of Del Amo Fashion Center)
2) Del Amo Fashion Center,
Annual Visitors: 27.6 million
Year Opened: 1975
Size: 2.2 million square feet
The prototypical L.A. mall, Del Amo has appeared in movies like Valley Girl, Bad Santa, and Beverly Hills 90210. It attracts a mixed bag of well-heeled Palos Verdes residents, surfer dudes from nearby Redondo Beach, and inner-city patrons from Compton and Long Beach. Del Amo’s most popular entertainment attractions are an 18-theater Cineplex and a Lucky Strike Lanes bowling alley.
Mall of America (Courtesy of iStockphoto)
1) Mall of America,
Annual Visitors: 40 million
Year Opened: 1992
Size: 4.2 million square feet
The history of modern mall development is divided into two distinct eras: everything that came before Mall of America and everything after. With more than 400 shops, MOA changed the playing field radically, not just in terms of size (for years it was the world’s largest mall) but also that heady blend of retail, entertainment, and “Wow!” factor that subsequent malls have tried to achieve. MOA continues to lead them all with 40 million visitors — nearly as many as Italy’s foreign tourist arrivals last year.
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WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun.
Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system.
"In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today's reality," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA's science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos."
The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday, Feb. 1. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter.
Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size -- up to twice the size of Earth -- to larger than Jupiter.
The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009, of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler's field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.
"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the mission's science principal investigator. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water."
Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates. Kepler-11, located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth, is the most tightly packed planetary system yet discovered. All six of its confirmed planets have orbits smaller than Venus, and five of the six have orbits smaller than Mercury's. The only other star with more than one confirmed transiting planet is Kepler-9, which has three. The Kepler-11 findings will be published in the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Nature.
"Kepler-11 is a remarkable system whose architecture and dynamics provide clues about its formation," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and Kepler science team member at Ames. "These six planets are mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water. The rocky material accounts for most of the planets' mass, while the gas takes up most of their volume. By measuring the sizes and masses of the five inner planets, we determined they are among the lowest mass confirmed planets beyond our solar system."
All of the planets orbiting Kepler-11 are larger than Earth, with the largest ones being comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune. The innermost planet, Kepler-11b, is ten times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. Moving outward, the other planets are Kepler-11c, Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e, Kepler-11f, and the outermost planet, Kepler-11g, which is half as far from its star as Earth is from the sun.
The planets Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e and Kepler-11f have a significant amount of light gas, which indicates that they formed within a few million years of the system's formation.
"The historic milestones Kepler makes with each new discovery will determine the course of every exoplanet mission to follow," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them. This is known as a transit.
Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.
The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planetary candidates and other objects of interest the spacecraft finds.
The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations help determine which candidates can be validated as planets.
Password Manager, form filler, single sign-on? What is Roboform?
Roboform is described many different ways. Is it a password manager? A form filler? Single sign-on? Yes, it does all that. Honestly, it does a lot of things. Here is a list:
Password management - manage your password for website login and forms
Form Filler - fills out forms with all the common information so you don't have to
Secures passwords - encrypts and secures passwords at a single point of storage with 3DES encryption
Synchronizes passwords with PDAs & other computers
Multiple clients - there are Roboform clients for IE, Firefox, Palm, PocketPC / Windows Mobile, Symbian, and AOL/MSN.
Generates Random Passwords
Supports IE7 & Vista
Backup your passwords - for offsite storage. I mean, what would you do if you lost ALL your passwords?
Portable - with Roboform2Go, you can run Roboform from a USB key with no installation
FREE - Roboform is offered for download in a fully-functioning version with no ads or spyware . Additionally, you can obtain the Pro version of Roboform for $29.95.
Function Many computer users must spend much time and energy creating different users' names and passwords to enter different websites, web accounts. Each of these passwords should be different than the others and contain letters, numbers, and should avoid trite or personal phrases that make a password easy to both remember and be guessed by someone trying to break in. An intelligent password manager and auto form filler is a recommended solution. Roboform offers an efficient solution to the problem. Roboform is a safe and intelligent password manager developed by Siber Systems to manage passwords freely and fill out online forms automatically so that you can complete your login details with just one simple click. After installation of Roboform, the first time you enter a user's name and password for a site, account, forum or any other filling available spot on a web page, the intelligent auto form filler will pop up a dialogue box to prompt you and ask if you would like to save the information and create an identity for it. If you click ok, the auto form filler will memorize the user's name and password for the website and keep them on a passcard. When you log in the website again, the password manager will help you fill and submit your user's name and password automatically. In order to manage passwords securely, you also have to set up a master password in order to encrypt data stored by Roboform. This is the only password that must be remembered. It must be entered when you log into your computer to manage passwords and other data.
Other features
The password manager can easily generate random, distinct, and secure passwords to protect important private information to mitigate hacker's attacks. The password manager also has a portable version, which allows you to carry and run the program and have access to all your data on a USB flash drive. The USB flash drive can be plugged into almost any computer allowing access to the program and data. When the mobile drive is removed from the host computer, the program and data is removed with it. Roboform is a relatively small program, 10.8mb, which can be downloaded and installed easily, securely and quickly. With Roboform simple, intuitive and user friendly interface, users can easily access the function.
. It weighs 800 kilograms and its 120 kilograms frame cover is tinseled with gold and silver. The Quran is 1.5 m by 2 m and 3 m by 2 m if unfolded. The book will be transferred to the town of Bolgar where it will be put on public display at a local museum.
