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. 

China's Newest Supercomputer Uses Homegrown Chips

China has built its first supercomputer based entirely on homegrown microprocessors, a major step in breaking the country's reliance on Western technology for high-performance computing .

China's National Supercomputer Center in Jinan unveiled the computer last Thursday, according to a report from the country's state-run press. The supercomputer uses 8,704 "Shenwei 1600" microprocessors, which were developed by a design center in Shanghai, called the National High Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center.

Details of the microprocessors and the design center were not immediately available.

The supercomputer has a theoretical peak speed of 1.07 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), and a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops when measured with the Linpack benchmark. This could place it at number 13 in the world's top 500 supercomputing.

China's Shandong Academy of Sciences built the computer. Officials of the academy could not be immediately reached for comment on Monday. 

A report from The New York Times said the supercomputer's name in English was the Sunway BlueLight MPP.

China is increasingly investing in supercomputing technology. Last November, its Tianhe-1A supercomputer briefly grabbed the spot as the world's most powerful, but the computer used chips from Intel and Nvidia. The Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak speed of 4.7 petaflops and a sustained performance of 2.5 petaflops.

China currently has 61 supercomputers on the top 500 list. In comparison, the U.S. has 255 on the list. Japan's "K Computer" is currently ranked first in the top 500 list, after bumping Tianhe-1A to the second place. 

Experts have been anticipating that China would build its own supercomputer, using domestically developed chips. Chinese state-run press hailed the new supercomputer as a symbol of China's strength. 

Courtesy PCWORLD

World Heaviest Gold Coin 1,012kg

World Heaviest Gold Coin 1,012kg

PERTH(BullionStreet) : Australia's Perth Mint unveiled world's largest , heaviest and inherently most valuable gold coin with acurrent value of nearly $55 million.
The coin weighing 1012 kilograms and is more than a tonne of 99.99 per cent pure gold . The giant coin is 80 centimetres wide, 12 centimetres deep, took 18 months to create
The obverse of the coin features Ian Rank Broadley portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and carries the face value of AU$1,000,000. The reverse design features the classic kangaroo design by Dr. Stuart Devlin AO CMG, goldsmith and jeweller to Queen Elizabeth II. The inscriptions include the "2012″ date and "1 Tonne 9999 Gold".
Perth Mint said the coin was a showpiece of the Australian kangaroo gold bullion coin program, and would coincide with the release of several smaller gold coins this week.
The weight and purity of each issue is guaranteed by the West Australian government.
Previous holders of the title of world's largest gold coin include a 31 kilogram Gold Philharmonic coin struck by the Austrian Mint in 2004, which carried a €100,000 denomination. This was followed by a 100 kilogram Gold Maple coin struck by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2007, which carried a face value of CA$1,000,000.

Courtesy- Billion street

NASA Launches Multi-Talented Earth-Observing Satellite

NASA Launches Multi-Talented Earth-Observing Satellite

WASHINGTON -- NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite soared into space early today aboard a Delta II rocket after liftoff at 5:48 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. 

NASA's National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, or NPP, successfully separated from the Delta II 58 minutes after launch, and the first signal was acquired by the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. NPP's solar array deployed 67 minutes after launch to provide the satellite with electrical power. NPP is on course to reach its sun-synchronous polar orbit 512 miles (824 km) above Earth.

"NPP is critical to our understanding of Earth's processes and changes," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. "Its impact will be global and builds on 40 years of work to understand our complex planet from space. NPP is part of an extremely strong slate of current and future innovative NASA science missions that will help us win the future as we make new discoveries."

NPP carries five science instruments, including four new state-of-the-art sensors, which will provide critical data to help scientists understand the dynamics of long-term climate patterns and help meteorologists improve short-term weather forecasts. The mission will extend more than 30 key long-term datasets NASA has been tracking, including measurements of the ozone layer, land cover, and ice cover. 

NPP serves as a bridge mission between NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) of satellites and the next-generation Joint Polar Satellite System, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program that will also collect weather and climate data. 

Scientists will use NPP data to extend and improve upon EOS data records. These satellites have provided critical insights into the dynamics of the entire Earth system, including clouds, oceans, vegetation, ice, solid Earth and atmosphere. NPP will allow scientists to extend the continuous satellite record needed to detect and quantify global environmental changes.

"The measurements from NPP will benefit science and society for many years to come," said Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division. "NPP will help improve weather forecasts, enable unique scientific insights, and allow more accurate global environmental predictions. I'm confident that the strong partnerships forged in the NPP program between NASA and NOAA, industry, and the research and applications communities will ensure the success of the mission."

The satellite will be operated from the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Md. NASA will operate NPP for the first three months after launch while the satellite and instrument are checked out. NPP operations will then be turned over to NOAA and the JPSS program for the remainder of the mission.

NPP data will be transmitted once every orbit to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and to direct broadcast receivers around the world. The data will be sent back to the United States via fiber optic cable to the NOAA Suitland facility. NPP data is then processed into data records that NASA and NOAA will make available through various data archives.

The Delta II launch vehicle that delivered NPP into orbit also deployed auxiliary payloads within 98 minutes after launch. The five small "CubeSat" research payloads are the third in a series of NASA Educational Launch of Nanosatellite missions, known as ELaNa missions.

The NPP mission is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The Joint Polar Satellite System program provides the NPP ground  system. NOAA will provide operational support for the mission. Launch management is the responsibility of the NASA Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Courtesy NASA

HAPPY DIWALI TO ALL

HAPPY DIWALI TO ALL FROM KRISHNA KUMAR M IYER "VENU"

FAMILY