Artificial Embryos

In a breakthrough that redefines how life can be created, embryologists working at the University of Cambridge in the UK have grown realistic-looking mouse embryos using only stem cells. No egg. No sperm. Just cells plucked from another embryo. Without using eggs or sperm  cells, researchers have made embryo-like structures from stem cells alone, providing a whole new route to creating life.Artificial embryos will make it easier for researchers to study the mysterious beginnings of a human life, but they’re stoking new bioethical debates.

“We know that stem cells are magical in their powerful potential of what they can do. We did not realize they could self-organize so beautifully or perfectly,” Magdelena Zernicka­-Goetz, who headed the team, told an interviewer at the time.

Zernicka-Goetz says her “synthetic” embryos probably couldn’t have grown into mice. Nonetheless, they’re a hint that soon we could have mammals born without an egg at all.

That isn’t Zernicka-Goetz’s goal. She wants to study how the cells of an early embryo begin taking on their specialized roles. The next step, she says, is to make an artificial embryo out of human stem cells, work that’s being pursued at the University of Michigan and Rockefeller University.

Synthetic human embryos would be a boon to scientists, letting them tease apart events early in development. And since such embryos start with easily manipulated stem cells, labs will be able to employ a full range of tools, such as gene editing, to investigate them as they grow.

Artificial embryos, however, pose ethical questions. What if they turn out to be indistinguishable from real embryos? How long can they be grown in the lab before they feel pain? We need to address those questions before the science races ahead much further, bioethicists say. —Antonio Regalado

https://www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies/2018/

Green Data Centers

One of the main concerns of cloud data-centers  is the consumption of huge amount of electrical energy which results in  emission of carbon dioxide. Almost, fifty percent of the electrical energy consumption is for cooling the devices rather than using it for computing resources. The generation of heat and the cooling leaves a huge amount of foot prints of carbon on the atmosphere, which is a serious social issue - global warming. Gartner 2007 says that about 2% of the global carbon dioxide emissions are done by Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry. This necessitates the construction of zero emission data centers - Green Data Centers.

Individually, our everyday browsing has a relatively minuscule impact. Google, in response to claims that each search on its site generated as much CO2 as boiling half the water for a cup of coffee (7g), calculated the true figure was much lower, at 0.2g. Watching a YouTube video of cats was higher – 1g for every 10 minutes of viewing – while using Gmail for a year produced about 1.2kg a user.

Not to be outdone, Facebook put a figure on its average user’s annual footprint – 269g of CO2, roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee.

Google and Amazon are among the companies using an obsolete tool to calculate their data center emissions from the electricity they purchase from the power grid, according to Lux Research.The research firm has developed a new analytical tool that finds data centers underestimate coal usage by 30 percent or more, and thus have much higher emissions than they report.

Google misses the mark in four out of its seven data centers. Google uses eGRID to estimate its electricity emissions, but four of Google’s seven major US data centers rely more on coal than the data reported by eGRID implies. As a result, Google’s emissions are likely larger than they estimated by 42,000 MT CO2e per year, Lux Research says.

Amazon estimates are off in more than 20 centers. Amazon is less transparent about how it calculates its emissions, but its 23 Virginia-based cloud services data centers use about 43 percent electricity from coal — not 35 percent as estimated using eGRID. This difference amounts to 85,000 MT CO2e per year more.

Apple gets the worst ratings in a Greenpeace report that claims cloud computing companies are perpetuating the use of fossil fuels.

The report, How Dirty is Your Data?, compares energy choices made by Apple, Google, Facebook, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon.com and Akamai – described by Greenpeace as ten of the top “global cloud companies”.

Facebook, Apple, Google, eBay, and Microsoft have pledged to move their new data centers toward all-green operations. At some point, others may be forced to follow.

A modest 1 MW data center facility can easily consume more than 4.4 million liters (1.2 million gallons) annually, according to Emerson Network Power’s Jack Pouchet from, who also sits on the board of directors of The Green Grid, a nonprofit that promotes IT resource efficiency. As cloud computing skyrockets and water scarcity worsens in many places globally, data centers are increasingly competing for a limited resource.

Project to Use Data Center Waste Heat to Farm Fish
The Foundry Project in will recycle waste heat generated from an underground data center and then use it to warm the Northcoast Fish Farm, reported ZDnet.

India and Data Centers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) appears to be planning to build at least one cloud data center in India in 2016, following announcements by Microsoft and IBM.

Gartner Says Data Center Infrastructure Market in India to Reach $2 Billion in 2016

References

1)   http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/12/17/undertaking-challenge-reduce-data-center-carbon-footprint/

2)      http://www.environmentalleader.com/tag/data-centers/

3)       https://www.google.co.in/about/datacenters/

4)      http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3162823

Transistion to the CLOUD

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 16.5 percent in 2016 to total $204 billion, up from $175 billion in 2015, according to Gartner, Inc. The highest growth will come from cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is projected to grow 38.4 percent in 2016. Cloud advertising, the largest segment of the global cloud services market, is expected to grow 13.6 percent in 2016 to reach $90.3 billion (Ref:Gartner.com)

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the software industry and we are witnessing an exponential change in the way we use the IT services.It allows us to buy and sell IT as a service from a web portal.International markets believe in cloud virtualization and in the near future most of all information technology will be in the cloud.The established front runner in this technology are the Amazon web services,Google cloud Platform,Microsoft Azure followed by IBM,Salesforce and Rackspace. Though cloud computing will bring down the  software, hardware and the platform costs it has adverse effects on the career requirements. The concepts that one must be aware of are 

1. Fundamental Cloud Computing Terminology and Concepts 
2. Basics of Virtualization 
3. Understanding Elasticity, Resiliency, On-Demand and Measured Usage 
4. Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
5. Cloud Delivery Models

The following courses are useful to know about the technology

 1. Coursera

 2. edx

 3. Google developers academy
 4. Microsoft research
 5. MIT opencourseware
 6. Alison
 7. Lynda

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high..
Where knowledge is free... Rabindranath Tagore

The life we live is dominated by our fears.Today, we are not living our dreams We are living our fears. Fear is a choice....The fearless mind eliminates all interference's in the mind and maximizes the performance capability of an individual.The clear thought about the Creator, who is in charge eliminates all our worries and fears ...Let our FAITH in this Creator be bigger than our fears....

Live Fearlessly !!!!Let out your ideas....Explore Life.....