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It was just last January 11 when the elegant car manufacturer showcased their latest convertible during a car show held in Detroit. The E-Class has become the highlight of the event now that car fanatics are already aware that it is now part of the dealerships.
According to Dieter Zetsche, he is very confident that the E-Class will be the most luxurious-looking automobile that anyone can see around the state of Detroit. With its cozy and classy interior, there is no doubt that this convertible would be pricy.
But it is not just the interiors of the E-Class that gives it the edge. It allows four passengers to travel all together while the driver enjoys the V-8 and V-6 engines. It would only take as much as 20 seconds before the insulated top closes or opens. Other than that, you can also speed as fast as 25 mph hoping that you won’t get caught.
They also designed it with the latest wind deflector which they call as the Aircap. Since you can drive on such speed, needless to say that you need a decrease in cabin turbulence. On the other hand, the Airscarf system allows the warm air coming from the car’s head rest to be vented out on the front seats.

A Russian rocket blasted off from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and hurtled spaceward Monday, shuttling an American, a Russian and a Japanese to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-17’s three astronauts will take the orbiting laboratory’s permanent crew to five following the early-hours launch, the first-ever blastoff of a Soyuz rocket on a winter night.

Timothy J. Creamer, Soichi Nohuchi and Oleg Kotov are to join current inhabitants, American Jeff Williams and Russian Maxim Surayev, who have been alone on the space station for three weeks.

A NASA television Webcast showed the crew giving a thumbs up sign as the vessel thundered skyward.

The Soyuz will travel for about two days before docking with the space station 220 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth.

Striking a festive mood, the space station this week beamed a video Christmas greeting to Earth.

On its Web site, the U.S. space agency NASA has created a series of virtual postcards for members of the public to send to the space station with their holiday greetings.

The first space station crew arrived in 2000, two years after the first part was launched.

Until this year, no more than three people lived up there at a time, although there were as many as six people aboard for short periods when a space tourist would go up with one crew, spend a week or so aboard and come back with another crew.

With the U.S. shuttle fleet set to be grounded soon, NASA and other international partners will have to rely on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to ferry their astronauts to the space station and back.

via ddinews.com

Copehagen: Hours before the world leaders will arrive for the Copenhagen summit’s final day, negotiators from about 30 countries in Denmark have worked on an outline draft accord regarding the climate change.

The draft is expected to call for preventing global temperatures from going up more than 2.0 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.

Many world leaders have been pushing for delegates meeting in the Danish capital to limit the rise to between 1.5 and 2C.

According to scientists, such a rise would be disastrous, condemning hundreds of millions of people to worsening drought, floods and storms.

A long list of world leaders, including many from nations most at risk from rising sea levels, have been pushing for delegates meeting in the Danish capital to limit the rise to between 1.5 and 2C.

Barack Obama, the US president, is on his way to Copenhagen for the climax of the summit on Friday.

Copenhagen: In his second trip to Europe in two weeks, US President Barack Obama leaves Thursday for the Danish Capital. He is hopeful that by traveling to Copenhagen he can help push nations towards a breakthrough on a climate deal.

“The president is hopeful that his presence can help,” said spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Obama will be in Copenhagen for only a few hours, but advisors insist his presence symbolizes a huge U-turn by the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which until he took office had put the climate debate on a back-burner.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meanwhile join the UN climate summit on Thursday, the day before Obama arrives.

A NASA spacecraft that blasted into space early Monday “will give us literally a new window on the universe,” says Paul Delaney, an astronomy expert and professor at York University in Toronto.

Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will survey the sky for 10 months to search for hidden comets, asteroids and other astrophysical objects. The spacecraft lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Maria, Calif.

“Its main aim is to give us a better view of the cooler regions of the entire universe surrounding us,” Delaney said.

“There’s a whole range of objects that are at the cool end of the spectrum that we can’t see very easily from Earth.”

Citing asteroids as an example, Delaney describes cool objects as those that are “nearby, near-Earth — the ones that potentially could wipe out life on this planet.”

“We’re trying to get a better understanding of where they are, their distribution, how close they’re coming and so on,” he said.

Delaney added that WISE will be looking for failed stars, such as brown dwarfs, which scientists will be able to see for the first time.

The spacecraft will also be searching for proto-planetary disks, which Delaney describes as the regions around stars where new planets are forming.

“WISE is going to find some of those stars where we haven’t yet looked, but we’d like to, to give us a leg up…a handle on (the question), ‘Will those planets be there?’”

Thanks to Canadian contributions, the spacecraft has the ability to detect objects that give off infrared energy, or heat.

“A lot of the infrared detector technology has been pioneered in this country,” said Delaney.

“I don’t think we actually built any of this satellite per se, but the science behind the satellite, Canada and its astronomical community have been involved in now for decades.”

The $320-million project is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

On Monday NASA started off a new extraterrestrial observatory in order to scrutinize for new celestial objects in infrared emission.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or known as WISE blasted off atop a Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base that is situated in California.

The rocket was launched on Monday at 6:09 a.m. PT (9:09 a.m. ET).

Primarily it was planned to launch WISE on Friday, but because of some problems NASA postponed it.

But the problem was solved when engineers fixed a glitch on the rocket’s booster steering engine. As a result the launch was held without any problems.

Meet: Lunascape 6 Orion, a Japanese browser that connects four main browsers – Opera, Mozilla, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer – into a single platform through triple engines and triple add-ons.
Every Internet browser has its advantages and disadvantages to work with. So almost every Internet user has more than 2 browsers installed just to achieve the necessary functionality working in Internet, or to act with the particular web site.
Are these words about you? So not to loose the time switching between different browsers just to display the same page, you should download quickly Lunascape 6 Orion.
This browser is working with a three-engine platform that is built on most famous browsers’ base. You can switch between Trident, Gecko and WebKit in a one click! You should only to select the corresponding drop in the menu of Lunascape. Also it is able to gather together add-ons of Firefox as well as create own library of add-ons.
Developers, Q&A creatures and web designers are those who will especially appreciate Lunascape 6 Orion. Because it will be easy to check, whether their creations match a browser. Others will enjoy using tweaks with bookmarks, interface and tools from a browser.
But now Lunascape runs only on Windows. Versions for Linux and Mac are in the process of development.

India will not agree to a concept of “peaking” year as there is a huge backlog of development in expanding rural electricity in the country, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said, as he ruled out compromise on previously stated “red lines”.

On his first day at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, Ramesh also said that India’s national voluntary domestic measures to tackle climate change were not up for international scrutiny and progress on these measures would be checked by country’s Parliament.

India was here to facilitate a legally binding deal and “has come here to play a constructive, facilitative, leadership role to ensure and effective and equitable agreement,” Ramesh said.

“But at the same time we will not agree to a concept of peaking year for India because we have huge backlog of development particularly in expanding rural electricity supply.”

The minister highlighted that not only was India announcing voluntary target of reducing carbon intensity by 20 to 25 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020 it was also taking a “nationally accountable mitigation outcome,” which means that implementation and progress on these domestic measures would be checked by Parliament, civil society and media.

“There is no place on Earth that has domestic MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification) as boisterous, intensive an aggressive that in India.”

Ramesh stressed that all action supported by international finance was subject to MRV but unsupported action was exclusively India s business.

Only an hour earlier, the US Chief envoy, Todd Stern, told another press conference that it the mitigation part of the draft text issued today by the Chairman of the Ad Hoc Working Group for Long Term Cooperative Action, Michael Zammit Cutajar was “unbalanced” because it did impose sufficient mitigation obligations on developed nations.

Ramesh expressed confidence about resolving the issue with the Americans stating that options like engaging in national communications once in two years but at the same time he emphasised that India would not make compromises on its previously stated positions including “peaking”.

The Indian minister spent day one at COP 15 meeting with his counterparts – environment minister of Algeria, Cherif Rahmani, US envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern, and UK Secretary of State for Environment Ed Miliband and Zhenhua Xie, Vice Minister, National Development and Reform Committee, and the Danish Environment minister.

Ramesh told journalists in Copenhagen that his discussions were focused on the various drafts of potential treaty from the Working Groups on Kyoto, the African group and Alliance of Island States (AOSIS) that have been circulating today.

“In all these discussions I have had the basic objective was to highlight not only what India has done in recent weeks pro-actively, voluntarily but also to underscore the basic positions India will not compromise on even as it engages in constructive negotiations,” he said.

The minister especially highlighted that he had a good meeting with Rahmani who was also chair of the African group, which is a subset of the G77, and there was a good chance of producing an integrated BASIC draft with the African group.

The four BASIC countries- Brazil, South Africa, India and China have circulated a draft of a treaty text at the start of the conference, which has been contested in the group especially by Least Developed Countries and Small Island States that said that it did not reflect their special vulnerabilities to climate change.

Further, the minister said that while India and China were coordinating very closely at Copenhagen, the two countries should not be compared in terms of emissions with China being number one and India being five. “We are not in the same boat,” he said.

Later today, Ramesh will attend a ministerial meeting with his counterparts from different countries that will continue till tomorrow.

“We will agree to any global goal by 2025 providing that goal makes clear what the equitable burden sharing arrangement is,” he said.

ddinews.com

Thousands of people came to London in order to call for action on climate change. The event was arranged by the Stop Climate Chaos coalition. Such events were held in Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. Various organizations among which the Women’s Institute, aid agencies, trade unions and environmental campaigners took part in the event.

Word leaders among which are Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will have a meeting that will be held in Denmark on Monday, the issue of which will be the agreement on the deal to curtail emissions.

In the demonstration, called “The Wave”, one could see protestors who wore blue clothes and some of them had blue gloves, also there were people with painted heads.

Demonstrators gathered in Grosvenor Square in London before going to Parliament. The coalition consisting of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF Oxfam claimed the UK government to augment its goals for EU-wide exertions to curtail emissions.

Earlier that day religious leaders prompted Christians to alter the way they lived in order to help others. Such incentive was manifested at a special service in Westminster Central Hall.

It is expected that the Met Office is going to publish data to analyze global warming that was accumulated by more than 1,000 weather stations all over the world.

On Tuesday astronauts from Canada and Belgium and a Russian cosmonaut touched down on the Kazakhstan plains. They worked on the International Space Station during six months.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-15 capsule that had on board Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne landed near town of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan’s barren north.

Parachutes slowed the craft made the letdown at 10:15 a.m. Moscow time.

Russian medical teams came in off-road vehicles to assist the crew to get out of the capsule.

“The landing was very soft; we were lucky not to have any wind, “said Romanenko in televised remarks after he left the capsule. He also added that everything was good and there ere no any problems.

One should note that this flight was considered to be the first for Romanenko. After the crew was driven to Arkalyk, they flew to Moscow later that day.

According to a NASA doctor, the three astronauts felt well after that spent 188 days in space and went back to Earth. The astronauts blasted off to the International Space Station on May 27.

One should note that during the mission NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency worked together in the orbit for the first time.