Archive for March, 2010

New treatment for Cancer-Cryosurgery!

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

The days, a century ago, are gone when a large tumor inside the liver may have remained unnoticed and eventually would have caused death. Medical imaging has now given way to physicians to use ultrasound to view the image of the tumor deep inside the liver on a screen with the help of a medical technique called “imaging monitored cryosurgery”. In one method, a needle like the tube is inserted into the core where the tumor is present. Liquid nitrogen is fed into the needle and hence the tip of the needle cools to a temperature of about -180 centigrade.

As a result, a ball of frozen tissue starts to propagate from the tip of the needle towards the outer edge of the tumor. Now, when the outer edge of the frozen tissue has safely encompassed the tumor, the needle is removed. The heat of the body thaws the frozen lesion. Thus the freezing has destroyed the cells and the body immune system removes the dead tissue left behind.

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Significance of a thought

Friday, March 19th, 2010

From the several experiments’ and the studies shows that fundamental to monastic training, worse, these audacious monks often seemed to treat the scriptures with downright disrespect. In addition, they are almost never represented as engaging in meditation, in spite of the central role that practice, those regarded as masters or teachers generally responded to queries from apparently earnest seekers in what seems a most illogical, dismissive, or even abusive manner. To appreciate who they were and what the significance of their behavior and thought was, it is useful to understand something of the medieval world they were a part, the political, social, and religious institution that called forth their unconventional behavior. The sound of tolling the great temple balls and caroms were omnipresent around these establishments. The smell of incense imported from Central Asia filled the air. Chan monks appear to have been peripheral to much of this power and wealth in the beginning. It might be assumed that religious knowledge, such as that set forth by Buddhists, through perhaps philosophically demanding at times.

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Chan

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Do you know about the chan? Chan came to public attention in china as a distinct form of Buddhism sometime around the end of the seventh century. There appeared a group of monks at that time acting and talking in ways that challenged the kinds of knowledge and technologies that Chinese Buddhists and the society at large had held in highest esteem for generations. Their religious practices and modes of discourse bore little resemblance to those of either their predecessors or fellow Buddhists. Not only did they not do what was expected, they often engaged in actions that would have been regarded by Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike as quite shocking. Almost nowhere in this literature do we read that they studied, recited or expounded that Buddhist as nothing less than the words and fundamental insights of the Buddha scriptures known as sutras. Yet those very scriptures were regarded by almost all Buddhist as nothing less than the words and fundamental insights of the Buddha himself.

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The more the merrier

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Though engineers want more and more an input, they do not want more and more sensor packages. As with most aspects of electronics there is a push to integrate multiple sensors in a single package, a technique commonly called sensor fusion. We are trying to combine as many as possible into one component. If you need to understand the pressure and temperature of a fluid you’d like to combine both sensors into one device to reduce space. It is quite common to combine sensors for measuring parameters such as temperature, and pressure combination is always the best way to go. Discrete components sometimes offer more flexibility and lower costs. Although it is attractive to a conceptual standpoint, there are quite some hurdles for a large-scale adoption of sensor fusion. The associated networking costs often outweigh the cost of a standalone sensor.

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ICUMSA45-The safest and highly refined sugar!

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

If you talk about sugar, the first thing that comes to your mind is Brazil. Brazil has set standards for the production of sugar. Among the brands, ICUMSA45 is the benchmark product which is not only the world’s leading consumer sugar but also the safest form of sugar. The refining process of ICUMSA45 is a very complex one and involves the removal of bacteria and other contaminants present in raw sugar. ICUMSA is an acronym for the International Commission For Uniform Methods Of Sugar Analysis, who rate sugar based on its quality.

ICUMSA ratings are genuinely done based on results from a number of tests, which determined the precise color of the sugar. This is converted to a numerical value. This is possible as the color is directly proportional to the amount of refining. You can identify highly refined sugar with its sparkling white color, whereas the raw sugar with a dark color.

There are 3 stages in refining sugar, especially the ICUMSA45 brand.

  • Affination-Mixing the raw sugar with a syrup to form ‘Magma’. Then the liquid content is removed and light brown sugar crystals are left behind.
  • Carbonation-With the help of this, you have only a high purity solution of sucrose and water left behind by making use of lime.
  • Boiling- It is done to remove excess water and to encourage sugar crystal growth.

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Dominant factions in the monasteries.

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The eyes of the medieval Chinese who for hundreds of years were recipients of what must have seemed an endless stream of Buddhist texts and teaching flowing out of India.
It no doubt appeared utterly overwhelming. Their knowledge dealt with a wide range of topics from a variety of standpoints that were often in conflict with each other. The problem was threefold. First, the texts had to be translated from periodic languages, radically different in structure and style from Chinese. Second, once translated the great number and variety of Buddhist scriptures made available in Chinese could be read only by the literal few, an ambiguities in the teachings. China’s Confucian traditions had long elevated the role of the scholar as interpreter of difficult and arcane knowledge. This the obvious solution to this threefold problem was to create and fund research complexes with certain of the elite monasteries in which highly trained scholar monks could translate, study and interpret these scriptures. Many of the monks who devoted much of their lives to work within these institutes rose to the highest status within the Chinese Buddhist establishment. Their output was prodigious and highly regarded in elite society. These monks were one of the dominant factions in the monasteries of changan.

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