The Best Games for Your New Android Phone

There are lots of arguments pertaining to the lack of games on Android based phones and tablets when compared to the ones with iOS. Even though Android is working hard to get these gaps filled, still there are lots of games which are worth playing and having on the phone. The games for android range from monster-punch madness to a Zen like strategy games. The list is endless. Some of the favorites among market experts and players are:

1 Rymdkapsel: - This game is a space-age strategy game, which has been set in a strange, pixel-perfect world. In this game, the player has to control many white rectangles as they keep on gathering resources, food stores, fire lasers at intruders and research unexplained monoliths.

2 Smash Hit: - This game is known to elevate itself into a total art form and is well known method of stress relief. The players have to go through a path wherein they have to face Glass walls, pyramids, windows, and even DNA-like helixes in their path. The players have to destroy these obstacles before they can do any damage to them. This game is very simple and addictive and can be a player’s delight.

3 Badland: - This game explains more or less about the evolution of human genome through time. In this, the untitled protagonist species keeps on shrinking or multiplying many times in a single level. The immersive 2D aesthetic and the puzzles make this game a pleasure to play.

4 Plants vs. Zombies: - The game is about strategically positioning the plants on the game board to avoid the legion of zombies, which are ready to overtake the game board. New challenges and increased number of zombies make this game more than one can handle.

5 Hearthstone: - At present this game is accessible on phones and tablets with more than 6 inches screen. This can be full of thrill of one on one fight and quickly made the player addicted.

6 Jetpack Joyride: - The game is all about getting the highest score through some of the basic cartoon animations of the game.

7 Super Hexagon: - In this game the player is in the form on a triangle and moving across on a pulsating hexagon, which keeps on throwing obstacles at the player. It is difficult for the players to be alive for more than 60 seconds but, this is what makes the game so addictive.

8 The Room 2: - This is a sequel to The Room and the developers have already taken the game to a new level and made it even more exciting. The puzzles are much more complex this time and it will not be easy for a player to get out of the room so easily.

9 Kingdom Rush Origins: - This is one of the best tower defense game that anyone can get on their phone or tablet. Origins are the latest additions to the Kingdom Rush series and it has everything to excite the fans of the previous game.

10 Minecraft:- Pocket edition: - This game carries out the essence of the main mine-craft game very well and sure to keep a beginner happy.

Evolvable Internet Architecture

When it comes to the future Internet research, making improvement in the existing architecture so that it meets different types of requirements becomes the key topic. Professor Xu Ke and his group from Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList), Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University have set out together to find a solution to this problem.

The team has been able to develop a novel evolvable Internet architecture framework under the evolvability constraint, the manageability constraint and economic adaptability constraint. According to them, the network layer can be used to develop the evolvable architecture under these design constraints. Their teamwork has been published SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences.2014, Vol 57(11), with the title, "Towards evolvable internet architecture-design constraints and models analysis".

The total concept: 

With nearly 1/3 of the total world’s population having access to internet, it has become one of the strongest and the global means of communication. However, in a deeper sense, internet is no longer a communication channel but now it has been extended to become a communication and data processing storage area. Looking at the changes it is difficult for the existing Internet architecture to adapt.

Even though there are corresponding researches about future Internet research depending on the dirty-slate approach and the clean-slate approach, for more than years the two mainstream architecture development ideas have been conducted in many countries but still these approaches cannot fully solve the current Internet architectures problem efficiently.

As far as the dirty-slate approach is concerned, it can only solve a small range of local issues on the Internet but it also makes the internet architecture evolve into a complex and cumbersome structure. But when it comes to the clean-slate approach, there is serious deployment and transition issues, which becomes totally uncontrollable in the current architecture.

The evolvable Internet architecture combines the advantages of both the clean-slate approach and dirty-slate approach also ensures that the core principal is not hampered.

The evolvable architecture is more flexible when compared to the dirty-slate approach. Even the evolvable architecture becomes more stable when compared to the clean-slate approach. There are three different types of layers in the evolvable architecture.

Apart from ensuring that the construction of the evolvable architecture is in conformity with the design principles, three constraints are required during the development stages. They are the economic adaptability constraint, evolvability constraint, and the management constraint. This is all about the next generation of the internet.

The development and history: 

The collaborative efforts from many researchers from different institutes and universities are behind the discovery and development of this evolvable architecture. This project got the support from a grant from 973 Project of China (Grant Nos. 2009CB320501 & 2012CB315803), NSFC Project (Grant No. 61170292 & 61161140454), New Generation Broadband Wireless Mobile Communication Network of the National Science and Technology Major Projects (Grant No. 2012ZX03005001), 863 Project of China (Grant No. 2013AA013302), EU MARIE CURIE ACTIONS EVANS (Grant No. PIRSES-GA-2010-269323), and the National Science and Technology Support Program (Grant No. 2011BAK08B05-02).

Large-Scale Power Plants Based On Thermoelectric Effects

Large Scale Energy Plants – Generate Electricity Efficiently

New study shows that large scale energy plants using thermoelectric effects like temperature differences in ocean water can generate electricity efficiently at lower costs than solar power plants. According to researchers, these ocean based plants could resemble huge barges which float in tropical oceans that generate electricity using shallow water warmed by the sun to heat cold water which is brought up from the depths.

A paper which had been published in the New Journal of Physics and authored by Liping Liu, Associate Professor of Rutgers University,has analysed the feasibility of these types of floating power plants. Liu has informed Phys.org that the function is regarding the new notion of big scale green power plants which make financial use of the biggest accessible as well as sustainable power reservoir on the earth. It is due to the heating of the sun on the water surface to a temperature which in tropical regions would be 20 K greater than water 600 m deep.

 The surface water, usually acts as a giant storage tank of solar power. He further explains that the thermoelectric energy plants could perform by harvesting power of ocean waves and pump cold water from some of hundred meters deep up through a long channel.

Heat Exchanger – Electric Generator

When the cold water reaches the surface it enters a heat exchanger and is heated by the surface water on the outside where the heat exchangers acts like a electric generator since its tubes are made of thermoelectric material which can transfer heat through its walls and can convert temperature variations in electrical energy.

The ocean based thermoelectric energy plant has a few advantages where for a single, the fuel or temperature differences, are cost free, simply accessible and unlimited. Moreover, the plant does not take up much space on land and have no moving solid parts with low maintenance fees. Besides this, the approach is green since it does not have any emissions.

Small scale thermoelectric generators are presently used commercially for applications like microelectronics, energy generation in remote areas and automobiles. In these cases, the conversion efficiency is an important aspect since the fuel accounts for biggest part of the price.

Commercial devices have conversion efficiency of about five to ten percent of the Carnot efficiency together with state of the art devices targeting efficiencies of about twenty percent though investigation is on its way to completion of additional strengthening the efficiency and there are limits of how higher it could go.

Fuel without Cost/Unlimited Supply

Liu, in the new paper, has showed that the significant scale thermoelectric power plants need not operate at exceptional high efficiencies in order to be economically competitive as alternative, but would depend on engineering uncomplicated structures like laminated composite for mass production support.

Improvements have been aimed on conversion capacity when compared to efficiency and can be improved with regards to orders of magnitude. Since the fuel is available at no cost together with unlimited supply, large scale thermoelectric energy plants could cope up with their size to what they may lack in efficiency.

The cost of creating electricity differs by supply and according to US Department of Power, the yearly expenses of one megawatt of electricity in 2016 is estimated at about $83 million for standard coal plants when compared to $1,84 million for photovoltaic power plants.

NASA Explores Inflatable Spacecraft Technology

At NASA’s Langley Research Centre located in Hampton, engineers have been devising a way to land astronauts on Mars which according to them seems that a simple thing like a child’s toy design would help to solve the problem. The progress is on, in the development of an inflatable heat shield which looks like a super-sized version of a stacking of doughnuts which an infant normally plays with.

The engineers are of the belief that a lightweight, inflatable heat shield could help to slow the craft to enter a Martian atmosphere which is much thinner to the Earth’s atmosphere. Landing safely in a large spacecraft on the Red planet is one of the many challenges faced as they are keen on sending humans, deep into space later this century.

This designed inflatable heat shield will enable the spacecraft to reach high altitude southern plains of Mars as well as other areas which otherwise would not be accessible under the prevailing technology. According to the experts, the rockets cannot be used to land a large spacecraft on Mars as done on the moon. Moreover, parachutes too would be of no use for a large spacecraft to send humans to the planet Mars.

Rings Filled with Nitrogen/Covered with Thermal Blanket

The inflatable rings would be the most appropriate option which would be filled with nitrogen and then covered with thermal blanket and once deployed to land, the rings could sit atop the spacecraft which resembles to some extent like a giant mushroom.

According to the senior engineer at Langley for advanced entry, descent and landing systems, Neil Cheatwood, he states that they are trying not to use propulsion if not required and will make use of that atmosphere as much as possible since it would mean that they will not have to carry the fuel with them. NASA’s leaders accept that getting humans to and from Mars safely, as early as 2030 would be very challenging. The scientists’ agency also agree that they should design new in-space propulsion systems with advanced spacesuits, long term living habitats abroad spacecraft as well as communication systems for deep space.

Work in Progress and Ready for Operational Use - By2016

This experiments needs to be tested on how second generation inflatable spacecraft technology would perform on re-entry in the Earth’s atmosphere. The testing is important since NASA officials are of the belief that an inflatable heat shield could be helpful for the astronauts to land on Mars and return with larger loads of supplies from the International Space Station and the experiment is scheduled on the next Antares rocket in 2016.

This new technology would be needed to land the astronauts on Mars since the kind of spacecraft which land humans would be larger than that which had landed on the planet earlier. The present heat shield technology is too much on the larger side with regards to weight which means that it cannot land anything larger than the rover which had been sent previously. Since the Viking program in the 1970s, NASA had relied on parachute based deceleration on Mars.

Work on the inflatable technology by the engineers at Langley has been going on for about a decade and is probably close to being ready for operational use.

Giant DDoS Kicks Of North Korea Off The Internet

North Korea was unceremoniously knocked off the internet by DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. This attack has come into limelight soon after the “proportional response” to the Sony Pictures hack promised by the government of the United States of America. According to the rumors, the attack was supposedly carried out by North Korea and this is what even the FBI believes. On one side if this attack was carried out by the US government, it will become too obvious, so it is safe to believe that this attack would have been carried out by some disgruntled hack-activists such as Lizard Squad or Anonymous. At present, internet has been restored in North Korea but the outage lasted for about 9 hours and 31 minutes.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS): 

While there might be some people who are not aware about DDoS, but is no longer unusual for a service to get knocked off by the same. In the last couple of months, both PlayStation Network and Xbox Live have encountered outage issues. But it is quite surprising for an entire country to get knocked off like this. But all this makes sense given to the poor internet connectivity in North Korea.

As far as North Korea is concerned, the state owns the newspapers and TV stations making sure that there is no freedom of information. This clearly indicates the presence of dictatorship and absence of any dealings with democracy. The country has a very tight control over the flow of information.

History has proven that country is easily controllable when all the information/knowledge/dogma generates from a single known point. When it comes to regime of the country, even though internet has all possible required knowledge for humans, it still does not jibe well with the country. Most of the citizens of the country only use intranet and internet is left for higher ups. The country does not depend much on internet but whatever is available is provided by telecommunications giant China Unicom.

Quite frankly, it is very easy to DDoS North Korea. They have a single cable, which connects to the rest of internet. For DDoS a single, low-bandwidth link is trivial but as most of the people in North Korea do not have access to internet, DDoS was not able to achieve what it was meant for.

There are enough speculations doing around about the people or the organization behind the attack. Lizard Squad, seems to have taken the responsibility for the attack on North Korea as they have tweeted, both Xbox Live & other targets have a lot of capacity. They had previously DDoSed the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live services.

The company’s Twitter account has been suspended. Anonymous also has a history of DDoSes but they have openly condemned the whole Sony Pictures/North Korea/The Interview debacle. While we can remember the cyber attack on Sony and the retaliation, which was promised by the US government, such DDoS on North Korea doesn’t make any sense from their side as it hardly makes any impact. While on one side a small period of DDoS will not have any major impact but if it continues for a few weeks or month, it can create serious problems for the country.