Buffett’s firm buys more than 5% of IBM

Investor Warren Buffett says his company bought $10.7 billion of IBM stock this year, about a 5.6 per cent stake.

Mr. Buffett revealed the new investment during an interview on CNBC on Monday. Mr. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, will file a full quarterly update on its U.S. stock portfolio on Monday afternoon.

Mr. Buffett has long refused to invest in high-tech companies because he has said it’s too difficult to predict which technology businesses will prosper in the long run.

But he said he recently changed his view of IBM based on what he read in the company’s annual reports. He said he should have realised years sooner that the heart of IBM’s business is providing service and equipment to information technology departments.

“There’s a fair amount of presumption in many places that if you’re with IBM, you stay with them,” Mr. Buffett said.

So Berkshire bought about 64 million shares since March, or about 5.6 per cent of IBM. Mr. Buffett says he believes IBM has a sound plan for the future.

IBM shares rose $1.39 to $188.77 in premarket trading after rising as high as $190.55 earlier.

Berkshire’s investments are closely watched in the market because of Mr. Buffett’s successful record. Mr. Buffett has said that Berkshire has been buying aggressively during the recent market turmoil.

Mr. Buffett said on Monday that Berkshire had been adding to its already sizable stake in Wells Fargo, but he didn’t say how many more shares had been bought recently. At the end of June, Berkshire held 352.3 million Wells Fargo shares. That was up from 342.6 million shares Berkshire held at the end of March.

Monday afternoon’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission may not reveal a full picture of Berkshire’s investments because regulators often allow the Omaha-based company to conceal new investments for a time while building a position.

Mr. Buffett said that the third-quarter report that will be filed on Monday won’t show all of Berkshire’s new IBM stake because some of the shares were bought in the fourth quarter.

Besides investments, Berkshire owns roughly 80 subsidiaries including insurance, railroad and utility firms.

Courtesy The Hindu

Does Nuclear Power Plants are Nuclear Arms

The study happen in Germany and other nuclear weapon production countries has answered to this questions. The Nuclear Power Plants are equivalent to 100 Nuclear bombs and 1000 atom bombs. We have seen the bad conditions of Japan durng the second world war.

IF WE CANT CONTROL THE FUSION (Collision of atoms ) PROCESS WE CANT COUNT THE LOSS HAPPEN TO THAT. 

Disadvantages of Nuclear power plants
1) Waste management
2) Accidents
3) Proliferation
4) Fuel

Nasa announce 2014 test flight of its Orion deep space capsule

Nasa will launch a test flight in 2014 of a new deep-space capsule designed to send astronauts to asteroids, the Moon, Mars.

The Orion capsule, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin Corp, would fly aboard a Delta 4 or Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, said Nasa spokesman Josh Byerly.

The test capsule would be launched into an orbit that soars as high as 5,000 miles (8,000 km) above the planet.

Courtesy Dailymail

Space Station Astronauts Connect Live With D.C. Students

Washington- To highlight International Education Week (IEW), NASA and the U.S Department Education will host a live, long-distance call for students with international Space Station resident and Expedition 29 Commander Mike Fossum. Schools and students Participating have strong military connections and were selected in collaboration with the U.S Department Defense Education Activity.


Courtesy NASA 

Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth

Cape Canaveral: A huge asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the moon on Wednesday morning, giving scientists a rare chance for study without having to go through the time and expense of launching a probe, officials said.

Earth's close encounter with Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will occur at 8:28 AM IST on Wednesday November 8 (6:28 PM EST Tuesday), as the space rock sails about 201,000 miles from the planet.

"It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great - and rare - chance to study a near-Earth object like this," astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.

The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon," Yeomans said.

Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55's approach, which will be visible from the planet's northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States," Yeomans said. "It is going to be very faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent-sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by."

Scientists suspect YU 55 has been visiting Earth for thousands of years, but because gravitational tugs from the planets occasionally tweak its path, they cannot tell for sure how long the asteroid has been in its present orbit.

"These sorts of events have been happening for most of the lifetime of the Earth, about 4.5 billion years," Fisher said.

Computer models showing the asteroid's path for the next 100 years show there is no chance it will hit Earth during that time, added Yeomans.

"We do not think that it will ever impact the Earth or moon (but) we only have its orbit calculated for the next 100 years," he said.

Previous studies show the asteroid, which is blacker than charcoal, is what is called a C-type asteroid that is likely made of carbon-based materials and some silicate rock.

More information about its composition and structure are expected from radar images and chemical studies of its light as the asteroid passes by the planet.

"I've read that we will be able to see details down to a size of about 15 feet across on the surface of the asteroid," Fisher said.

NASA is working on a mission to return soil samples from an asteroid known as 1999 RQ36 in 2020, followed by a human mission to another asteroid in the mid-2020s.

Japan also plans to launch an asteroid sample return mission in 2018.

Courtesy IBN live

ALMA'S VIEW Antennae galaxies

ALMA'S View of Antennae galaxies, created measuring from 16 of the dishes installed on the chajnanator Plateau in the Atacamma desert CHILE. The distance of Antennae galaxies are 70million light years from Earth.