Tips Choice Helmets Motorcycle

 If you are purchasing a motorcycle helmet for the first time, there are certain steps you need to take to make sure that it is safe for use. First, keep in mind that having your helmet fit properly is crucial for it to work in the way it is intended to. You cannot simply go by manufacturer size charts, as a small from one manufacturer may not fit the same as a small from another. The best way to determine which helmet is the best fit for you is to try on multiple models. However, before you even start your search for the best motorcycle helmet for you, you need to begin by measuring your head. To do this, use a cloth tape measure and measure your head's circumference at about one inch above your eyebrows. If you wear hats, you should also keep your hat size in mind as you start your search for the perfect helmet.
Once you know the circumference of your head, you are ready to start trying out helmets. However, keep in mind that even though two people may have the exact same head circumference measurement, the shape of their head may still vary enough that one helmet may not fit both individuals properly.
As you start looking at helmets, you can easily disqualify unsuitable helmets based on the knowledge you now have about your measurement by looking at the sizing tag printed on the helmet. Once you have found a helmet that seems to be a suitable candidate, your next step is to try it on and check the fit. The helmet should be snug on your head and all the pads should tough the appropriate spots. You should try moving the helmet on your head with your hands. If it is fitted properly, your skin should move with the helmet. If it moves easily on your head, it is too loose. You will actually want the helmet to be quite snug when you purchase it, since over time, as it breaks in, the fit will loosen up a little bit.
You also want to make sure you test the chin strap on the helmet. The purpose of the chin strap is to make sure the helmet does not come off during a collision, so once you have the chin strap fastened, try reaching over the top of the helmet and pulling it off. If it comes off, you need a smaller helmet.
Although it is often preferable to try a helmet on in physical stores, you can often get quite good deals on helmets online. If you are purchasing a helmet online, be sure that the site displays all the measurements for the helmet before you purchase it. You also want to check out the refund policy as well, since you do not want any hassles if you need to return it.

By following these tips, you should be able to find a motorcycle helmet that fits great. There are also many other great motorcycle accessories that can be purchased online.

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Motorcycle Exhaust

There are many considerations when choosing which motorcycle exhaust to buy for your vehicle. You must consider cost. So your budget must be decided on. Once this decision has been made you can then start to look at which different styles of exhaust will fit onto your motorcycle. Depending on your level of motorbike ownership experience, you may decide to consult the advise of a local expert and you can go on the specialist motorbike modification forums that are scattered around the internet. Just do a quick internet search in one of the popular search engines and you'll be sure to find a motorbike modification forum with active members who will be more than happy to help you discover which types of exhaust will be compatible with your vehicle.
If, however, you prefer to speak to people person, then ask your fellow motorbike riders who they recommend to help them decide which exhausts will fit your motorbike. If you're new to the area and, therefore, do not know many people in and around your local area yet then don't despair - you can always scan the local newspapers to find the local motorbike spare parts dealers, bike modification experts and even general local garages who might have the skills and knowledge to help you.
Once you've gathered an idea of which types of exhaust will fit your make and model of motorcycle the next step is to start doing some research into which type of exhaust you actually want. Are you looking for improved brave horse power (BHP), a certain gurgling sound, a certain look or a combination of all of these criteria. Ultimately, the decision of which type of exhaust to fir to your vehicle will come down to personal taste. That is the reason why we modify our bikes at the end of the day isn't it? To add a bit of our own personality to that extension of ourselves.
So once you've decided what you're looking for, you need to fit yourself a supplier and fitter who to provide you with the exhaust system and fit it for you (assuming you aren't fitting it yourself). As with any kind of purchasing decision, always choose a reputable business who comes highly recommended from past clients. Always make sure that the exhaust that you are about to have fitted is going to be road legal and it's a good idea if the exhaust comes with some kind of warranty.

For more info Motorcycle Exhaust

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Lightning Unleashes Antimatter Storms

 

Some high-powered lightning strikes produce unusual forms of matter.

iStockphoto

The powerful blasts of particles and light energy known as gamma-ray bursts come from violent cosmic events in deep space, such as stellar explosions and black hole collisions. But smaller-scale bursts called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) can occur much closer to home, erupting thousands of times a year in association with lightning strikes during storms in Earth’s atmosphere. Two satellites originally designed to observe gamma rays from space recently caught the atmospheric flares in action, revealing that they emit far more energy than previously thought and release streams of antimatter particles, which bear a charge opposite that of their normal counterparts.
In a study of 130 TGFs recorded by 
the AGILE satellite, Italian Space Agency physicist Marco Tavani and colleagues report that the most energetic particles released carry four times as much energy as previous measurements detected, and hundreds of times as much as those produced by normal lightning strikes. In fact, Tavani describes a storm hurling photons into AGILE’s detectors as basically a giant particle accelerator in the sky. “It’s the equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider acting in the atmosphere for a fraction of a second,” he says. Next, Tavani plans to evaluate how TGFs might affect aircraft flying nearby.
Researchers working on another mission, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, announced in January that about 10 percent of the particles fired off by TGFs consist of positrons—the positively charged antimatter twins of electrons. Because gamma rays can convert into electrons and positrons, physicists had predicted the anti­particles’ presence in the bursts, but until now they had never been directly observed. Astrophysicist Michael Briggs, a Fermi team member based at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, hopes such findings will aid in modeling how TGFs form. Currently, he says, scientists do not understand why some lightning strikes produce such mayhem while others do not

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20 Things About Computers

1  Hacker originally meant “one who makes furniture with an ax.” Perhaps because of the blunt nature of that approach, the word came to mean someone who takes pleasure in an unconventional solution to a technical obstacle.
2  Computer hacking was born in the late 1950s, when members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, obsessed with electric switching, began preparing punch cards to control an IBM 704 mainframe.
3  One of the club’s early programs: code that illuminated lights on the mainframe’s console, making it look like a ball was zipping from left to right, then right to left with the flip of a switch. Voilà: computer Ping-Pong!
4  By the early 1970s, hacker “Cap’n Crunch” (a.k.a. John Draper) had used a toy whistle to match the 2,600-hertz tone used by AT&T’s long-distance switching system. This gave him access to call routing (and brief access to jail).
5  Before they struck it rich, Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs made and sold “blue boxes,” electronic versions of Draper’s whistle.
6  Using a blue box, Wozniak crank-called the Pope’s residence in Vatican City and pretended to be Henry Kissinger.
7  Hacking went Hollywood in the 1983 movie WarGames, about a whiz kid who breaks into a Defense Department computer and, at one point, hi­jacks a pay phone by hot-wiring it with a soda can pull-ring.
8  That same year, six Milwaukee teens hacked into Los Alamos National Lab, which develops nuclear weapons.
9  In 1988 Robert T. Morris created a worm, or self-replicating program, purportedly to evaluate Internet security.
10  The worm reproduced too well, however. The multi­million-dollar havoc that ensued led to Morris’s felony conviction, one of the first under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (PDF).
11  They all come home eventually. Morris now researches computer science at...MIT.
12  British hacker Gary McKinnon broke into 97 U.S. Navy, Army, Pentagon, and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002.
13  McKinnon’s defense: He wasn’t hunting military secrets; he was only seeking suppressed government files about space aliens.
14  According to rumor, agents of China’s People’s Liberation Army attempted to hack the U.S. power grid, triggering the great North American blackout of 2003.
15  It took IBM researcher Scott Lunsford just one day to penetrate the network of a nuclear power station: “I thought, ‘Gosh, this is a big problem.’”
16  Unclear on the concept: When West Point holds its annual cyberwar games, the troops wear full fatigues while fighting an enemy online.
17  Think your Mac is hackproof? At this year’s CanSecWest conference, security researcher Charlie Miller used a flaw in Safari to break into a MacBook in under 10 seconds.
18  Cyborgs beware: Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington recently hacked into a wireless defibrillator, causing it to deliver fatal-strength jolts of electricity.
19  This does not bode well for patients receiving wireless deep-brain stimulators.
20  The greatest kludge of all? Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has proposed building a giant sunscreen in space to hack the planet’s climate.

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20 Things About Sport

 1  Engineers with the U.S. Olympic Committee keep improving timing and measurement technology. Light beams now record racers’ times to within a thousandth of a second.
2 Even John McEnroe can’t complain: Not to be outdone, professional tennis has adopted a computerized tracking system that shows whether a ball is in or out.
3 Who doesn’t want bigger balls? Unlike most other sports, tennis is looking to slow down. Blistering serves and short volleys can bore spectators, so game organizers have looked at using larger balls on slower surfaces to keep fans’ interest alive.
4  Length isn’t everything. By 1984, improvements in javelin technology had resulted in throws so long that the event was nearly moved out of stadiums. Instead, a redesign shifted the javelin’s center of gravity forward for a shorter flight.
5  Still dangerous: French long jumper Salim Sdiri was skewered in the ribs by an errant javelin while waiting to compete at a July 2007 meet in Rome.
6  Pole-vaulting technology keeps hitting new heights, with poles moving from wood to light metal and finally to fiberglass composites, resulting in amazing 120 to 160 degree bends during a vault.
7  Time’s arrow: Modern archery bows made from aluminum, magnesium fiberglass, and Kevlar can shoot arrows faster than 150 miles per hour with pinpoint accuracy.
8  Luge racers go crazy-fast, lying feetfirst on tiny sleds that barrel down an ice track at speeds that can top 90 mph. And they crave aerodynamic advantage. Today’s lugers squeeze themselves into tight rubber suits and wear sleek, wind-slicing helmets, riding sleds that are built with the lowest possible center of gravity to improve stability.
9  Cooking the results: At the 1968 winter Olympics, the East German women’s luge racers were stripped of their medals after it was discovered they had preheated their sleds’ runners to make them faster on the ice.
10  Designer speed: Speedo introduced a new racing swimsuit this year, the LZR Racer, featuring ultra­sonically bonded seams and water-repellent fabric to reduce drag.
11  Swimming in sweat? Hockey goalies, once forced to wear leather padding that absorbed up to 7 pounds of perspiration during each game, breathe easier now with lighter, less absorbent synthetic padding introduced in the late 1980s.
12  The layers of protective gear modern American football players wear had their genesis in 1905, when 18 players died from injuries in the game. President Teddy Roosevelt ordered rule changes to make the game less brutal.
13  Happy fans: Adding a yellow, computer-generated first-down line in National Football League television broadcasts has been a resounding success.
14  Not-so-happy fans: Fox Sports angered many hockey buffs with its ill-fated glowing FoxTrax puck, complete with a digitally created tail to track the puck’s path during passes and shots.
15  Technology can make players grumpy too. According to a 1996 NFL Players Association survey, 93.4 percent of football players believed they were more likely to be hurt on artificial turf than on natural grass.
16  For the 2006–07 season, the National Basketball Association switched to a microfiber-composite ball, replacing traditional leather.
17  After complaints that the new basketball was too slick and cut players’ hands, the NBA switched back to leather just two months into the season.
18  Think a baseball moves fast? Badminton shuttlecocks have been clocked at more than 150 mph, far outpacing the swiftest pitch.
19  Maybe wood isn’t so shabby after all. Top skateboarders turn up their noses at the sports-wide popularity of fiberglass and epoxy resins, sticking with seven-ply boards made of maple.
20  Skateboarders are not alone. The fastest ball sport in the world is jai alai, in which a ball is caught and thrown at speeds of around 188 mph, using a scoop made of good, old-fashioned wicker.

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20 Things About Spiders

1  The venom of the Australian funnel-web spider can kill a person in less than an hour, and its fangs can bite right through a shoe.
2  But for most people, fear of spiders is a far greater problem than the spiders themselves. Researchers at the University of São Paulo have developed an improbable way to undo arachnophobia by having patients stare at pictures of “spiderlike” objects—a tripod, a carousel, a person with dreadlocks.
3  Quackery? Apparently not. In a 2007 study, the scientists reported a 92 percent success rate.
4  And there is an upside to spider bites. Take the Brazilian wandering spider, Phoneutria nigriventer, whose venom causes painful penile erections that last for many hours (that’s the bad news).
5  The good news: The responsible toxin could yield new treatments for erectile dysfunction.
6  The venom of the South American tarantula Grammostola spatulata might be used to treat atrial fibrillation. It contains a peptide that can calm an irregular heartbeat brought on by stress.
7  Back in Australia, Glenn King at the University of Queensland is studying the Blue Mountains funnel-web spider (Hadronyche versuta) with an eye toward developing eco-friendly pesticides. Proteins in this spider’s venom target the nervous system of insects but leave humans unharmed.
8  First, though, there’s the unpleasant matter of getting the venom. Workers at the Spider Pharm in Yarnell, Arizona, “milk” up to 1,000 spiders a day.
9  The bugs are anesthetized with carbon dioxide, then zapped with electricity, which makes them release venom into minuscule glass capillaries connected to their fangs.
10  Web master: Todd Blackledge at the University of Akron finds that spider silk could be used as synthetic muscle. Adjusting humidity up and down causes the silk to expand and contract with 50 times the punch of the equivalent mass of human muscle.

11  Blackledge envisions spider silk someday being used to operate miniature robotic devices and drug delivery systems.
12  Unlike many sticky things, the glue of orbed web spiders gets stronger in the presence of water, polymer scientists working with Blackledge have discovered, suggesting that it might prove a useful adhesive for surgery or for underwater engineering.
13  Spider-goat, Spider-goat, does whatever a spider can: By manipulating genes, molecular biologists at the University of Wyoming have gotten goats to produce milk containing the protein that makes up spider silk (video).
14  Next, scientists aim to introduce the silk gene into alfalfa, which is far more efficient to mass produce and, frankly, less creepy.
15  Safe sex: The male nursery web spider (Pisaura mirabilis) will bring a silk-wrapped insect to a female prior to mating so she will eat the gift—instead of him.
16  Safer sex: The funnel-web spider Agelenopsis aperta has a different approach, putting the female into a cataleptic state before mating so she won’t cannibalize him.
17  Scientists at Radford University in Virginia say the A. aperta male can disable the female from 4.5 centimeters (about 2 inches), suggesting he maybe deploying a gas to knock out the femme fatale.

18  Cheap date: Certain cobweb spiders dine on 
bugs poached from others’ webs.

19  Others dispense with the killing entirely. The jumping spider Bagheera kiplingi—named in the 1800s after the panther in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book—is mostly a vegetarian.
20  Don’t want one of these things jumping in your salad? Steven Kutcher, spider wrangler on the film Arachnophobia, says a dusting of talcum powder or a spritz of Lemon Pledge makes a tabletop or other flat surface too slippery for the critters to get any traction.

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When Astronomy Met Computer Science

Contrasting views of the Lagoon nebula. Top: Infrared observations from the Paranal Observatory in Chile cut through dust and gas to reveal a crisp view of baby stars within. Bottom: A similar view in visible light appears opaque.

ESO, VVV

For Kirk Borne, the information revolution began 11 years ago while he was working at NASA’s National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At a conference, another astronomer asked him if the center could archive a terabyte of data that had been collected from the MACHO sky survey, a project designed to study mysterious cosmic bodies that emit very little light or other radiation. Nowadays, plenty of desktop computers can store a terabyte on a hard drive. But when Borne ran the request up the flagpole, his boss almost choked. “That’s impossible!” he told Borne. “Don’t you realize that the entire data set NASA has collected over the past 45 years is one terabyte?”
“That’s when the lightbulb went off,” says Borne, who is now an associate professor of computational and data sciences at George Mason University. “That single experiment had produced as much data as the previous 15,000 experiments. I realized then that we needed to do something not only to make all that data available to scientists but also to enable scientific discovery from all that information.”
The tools of astronomy have changed drastically over just the past generation, and our picture of the universe has changed with them. Gone are the days of photographic plates that recorded the sky snapshot by painstaking snapshot. Today more than a dozen observatories on Earth and in space let researchers eyeball vast swaths of the universe in multiple wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays. And with the advent of digital detectors, computers have replaced darkrooms. These new capabilities provide a much more meaningful way to understand our place in the cosmos, but they have also unleashed a baffling torrent of data. Amazing discoveries might be in sight, yet hidden within all the information.

For the first time 
in history, we cannot 
examine all our data,” says Caltech astronomer George 
Djorgovski. “It’s not just 
the volume of data. It’s also the quality and complexity.”

A new generation of sky surveys promises to catalog literally billions and billions of astronomical objects. Trouble is, there are not enough graduate students in the known universe to classify all of them. When the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Cerro Pachón, Chile, aims its 3.2-
billion-pixel digital camera (the world’s largest) at the night sky in 2019, it will capture an area 49 times as large as the moon in each 15-second exposure, 2,000 times a night. Those snapshots will be stitched together over a decade to eventually form a motion picture of half the visible sky. The LSST, producing 30 terabytes of data nightly, will become the centerpiece of what some experts have dubbed the age of peta­scale astronomy—that’s 10^15 bits (what Borne jokingly calls “a tonabytes”).
The data deluge is already overwhelming astronomers, who in the past endured fierce competition to get just a little observing time at a major observatory. “For the first time in history, we cannot examine all our data,” says George Djorgovski, an astronomy professor and codirector of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech. “It’s not just data volume. It’s also the quality and complexity. A major sky survey might detect millions or even billions of objects, and for each object we might measure thousands of attributes in a thousand dimensions. You can get a data-mining package off the shelf, but if you want to deal with a billion data vectors in a thousand dimensions, you’re out of luck even if you own the world’s biggest supercomputer. The challenge is to develop a new scientific methodology for the 21st century.”

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