Good Bye/Allah Hafiz/ Fi Amanillah For 50 Days

Dear Readers,
I am proceeding today at 16 hours to Makkah for performing Hajj. I will be back to blogging during the last week of November Insha Allah. Allah Hafiz, Good Bye and Fi Amanillah till then.

China Sussessfully Lauches An Experimental Aircraft

China successfully launched an experimental craft on Thursday paving the way for its first space station amid a blaze of national pride, bringing the growing Asian power closer to matching the United States and Russia with a long-term manned outpost in space.
The Tiangong 1, or "Heavenly Palace," blasted off from a remote site in the Gobi Desert at 9:16 pm (1316 GMT), adding a high-tech sheen to China's National Day celebrations on October 1.
Premier Wen Jiabao watched as the small, unmanned "space lab" and the Long March rocket that heaved it skyward from a pad at Jiuquan in northwest Gansu province, lifted off under clear skies, in images shown live on state television.
It is the latest show of China's growing prowess in space, and comes while budget restraints and shifting priorities have held back U.S. manned space launches.
"Its name speaks for a dream home the Chinese have long envisioned in the sky. In Chinese folklore, a heavenly palace often refers to the place in outer space where deities reside," the official Xinhua news agency said.
The big test comes weeks after its launch, when the eight tonne craft attempts to join up with an unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft that China plans to launch.
Space docking tests conducted with the Tiangong 1 will provide experience for the building of a permanent manned space station around 2020, mission spokeswoman Wu Ping said.
China's government will hope to set a successful Tiangong mission alongside other trophies of its growing technological prowess, including the launch of a trial aircraft carrier.
And the launch, just before China's National Day holiday, was accompanied by an outpouring of proud support for the country's technological achievements.
"I feel great pride in being Chinese today. This is another great step forward for China in space," wrote Shi Zhongshan on the popular Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo.
However, some wondered why all the fuss considering recent problems on another engineering feat China had lauded, the rapid development of its rail system.
In July, 40 people died in a collision on a high-speed rail line in eastern China, and
this week more than 200 people were injured when two subway trains ran into each other in Shanghai.
"I'd prefer more attention be paid to the high-speed train and Shanghai subway crashes than to Tiangong 1. The later is related to face, but the former is to do with our lives," wrote "Weixiao Xiaoran," also on Weibo.
Engineers had been watching launch preparations nervously, after another Long March rocket malfunctioned and failed to send an experimental satellite into orbit last month.
Beijing is still far from catching up with space superpowers. The Tiangong launch is a trial step in Beijing's plans to eventually establish its own space station.
Russia, the United States and other countries jointly operate the International Space Station, to which China does not belong.
But the United States will not test a new rocket to take people into space until 2017, and Russia has said manned missions are no longer a priority for its space program, which has struggled with delays and glitches.
Earlier this month, NASA unveiled plans for a deep-space rocket to carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. President Barack Obama has called for a human expedition to an asteroid by 2025 and a journey to Mars in the 2030s.
China launched its second moon orbiter last year after it became only the third country to send its astronauts walking in space outside their orbiting craft in 2008.
It plans an unmanned moon landing and deployment of a moon rover in 2012, and the retrieval of lunar soil and stone samples around 2017. Scientists have talked about the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.
China is also jostling with neighbors Japan and India for a bigger presence in space, but its plans have faced international wariness. Beijing says its aims are peaceful, and military involvement natural given the enormity of the undertaking.
"The military enjoys unique advantages in organizing and coordinating such large-scale activities, and its involvement in aerospace missions is an international practice," Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said this week.

Great Game Of Asia

It is two months ago that India warship NIS Arvitas went to Vietnam on a good will visit. After a week when it was returning back to India through the Southern China Sea, its captain received a message on open radio, "get lost from here. this sea is not yours". The first suspect was China that this threat would have been given by it but China denied. However, this was a hot news in the media for a few days.
This event indicates that though India and China are posing themselves to be friends but confrontation is on the rise internally. This confrontation has been named as new Asian great game by the experts. The first Asian great game was played between Russia and Britain.
Question is that what the Indians were doing in a sensitive region in southern china ocean. Experts say that China is tightening its circle around India through making sea ports from Burma to Pakistan that are equipped with most latest facilities. This strategy of China has been termed as "string of pearls". The seaports include, Gwadar (Pakistan), Chittagong (Bangladesh), Satwi (Burma), Lamo(Kenya) and Humba Latona(Srilanka). all these seaports are situated in Indian Ocean.
It is interesting too that some of the ports are out of the military or trade way routes of China neither have extra ordinary financial benefits, then why these have been built.? The experts say that it is the military strategy of China because now a day land war has become a complicated problem when both the confronting nations are equipped with latest and atomic weapons and war can destrot both the countries.. But , in waters there are no such hindrances that can stop war between the two confronting counties.

Sunlight Will Be Conveted Into Chemical Fuel By "Artificial Leaf"

US scientists have developed an "artificial leaf" that converts sunlight into a chemical fuel that could be stored and used later, according to a study published Friday.
When placed in a container of water, the silicon solar cell with catalytic materials on each side generates oxygen bubbles on one side and hydrogen bubbles on the other, which can be separated and collected.
The gases could then be fed into a fuel cell that recombines them into water while producing an electric current, according to lead researcher Daniel Nocera, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The device is the subject of a paper in the journal Science co-authored by six researchers from Sun Catalytix, a solar-energy firm founded by Nocera.
Nocera says the "leaf" is made entirely of abundant, inexpensive materials.
The sheet of semiconducting silicon is coated on one side with a cobalt-based catalyst, which releases the oxygen, and on the other with a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy, which separates the hydrogen.
"I think there's going to be real opportunities for this idea" Nocera said in a statement accompanying the article.
"You can't get more portable, you don't need wires, it's lightweight, and it doesn't require much in the way of additional equipment, other than a way of catching and storing the gases that bubble off."
The device will not be ready for commercial production, however, until systems are developed that can collect, store and use the gases, he said.
"It's a step," Nocera said. "It's heading in the right direction.

Gilani Feared Of Riots Due To Electricity Load Shedding

WikiLeaks has revealed that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani feared that the electricity shortage in the country could lead to riots as well as political insecurity.
A diplomatic cable sent to Washington by then US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson on November 2, 2009 discussed the meeting between PM Gilani and US Secretary’s Advisor on Energy and the head of the US delegation to the US-Pakistan energy dialogue David Goldwyn.
During the meeting Gilani told Goldwyn the energy shortage along with terrorism and stabilising the economy were the main challenges Pakistan was facing.
Goldwyn conveyed to Gilani that if Pakistan wanted to deal with the energy crisis then the country would have to make difficult decisions.