“I feel extremely lucky considering the magnitude of the accident – Martin Baker is my new best friend!” said Capt. Brian Bews, 36, in his first public statement since Friday’s crash in Lethbridge, Alta.

Martin Baker is the brand name of the ejection seat in the CF-18 Hornet that Bews was piloting. He was making a low-speed pass at low altitude on a practice run for the Alberta International Airshow when he had to eject from the jet seconds before it smashed into the airstrip at the Lethbridge airport.

Bews suffered compression fractures in three vertebrae and will be wearing a back brace for a few months, the Department of National Defence said Monday.

“Given the incredible amount of force in the ejection sequence, this type of injury is very common in aircrew who eject,” said Maj. Rachel Morrell, a military surgeon. She said Bews will likely make a full recovery but there’s no timeline on when he will be able to return to flying duties.

“I will be concentrating on rest for the next while,” Bews said Monday. The pilot thanked first responders for their quick reaction after the crash and the staff at the Lethbridge hospital where he was taken.

I would also like to thank my family, friends, my demo team and my air show family for their amazing support since the accident,” said Bews, who is from Eatonia, Sask.

The pilot learned how to fly in Okotoks, Alta., and joined the Canadian Forces in 1999. Five years later, he achieved his dream of being assigned to fly a CF-18 Hornet, according to Bews’s military biography.

The cause of the crash is under investigation. Bews was flying a CF-18 Hornet designated for air shows and demonstrations.

The seven members of this holy order of cyber security hail from around the world and recently received their keys while locked deep in a U.S. bunker. But the team isn’t military in nature. The Internet safety program is overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit watchdog group that has access to a security system designed to protect users from cyber fraud and cyber attacks.

Part of ICANN’s security scheme is the Domain Name System Security, a security protocol that ensures Web sites are registered and “signed” (this is the security measure built into the Web that ensures when you go to a URL you arrive at a real site and not an identical pirate site). Most major servers are a part of DNSSEC, as it’s known, and during a major international attack, the system might sever connections between important servers to contain the damage.

A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect eveything once again. We’re imagining a large medieval chamber filled with techno-religious imagery where these knights cyber must simultaneously turn hybrid thumb drive/skeleton keys in a massive router, filling the room with the blinking light of connectivity.

The immaculate, 148 ft. wide crater was likely excavated by a fast-moving iron meteorite, a few thousand years ago, scientists said Thursday.

Dubbed Kamil, the crater is remarkably preserved when compared with most of the other craters on the Earth’s surface, many of which are partially eroded.

The Kamil crater, by contrast, has retained much of its structure, and includes even the rays of ejected debris that were disbursed from the center as the meteorite made impact.

“This crater is really a kind of beauty because it’s so well-preserved that it will tell us a lot about small-scale meteorite impacts on the Earth’s crust,” study leader Luigi Folco, meteorite curator at the Museo Nazionale dell’Antartide in Siena, Italy, told SPACE.com.

“It’s so nice. It’s so neat. There is something extraordinary about it,” he said, adding that craters as pristine as Kamil are typically found only on Mars or on the moon, where there are fewer environmental and atmospheric forces to degrade them.

Vincenzo de Michele, a former curator of the Civico Museo di Storia Naturale in Milan, Italy, first identified the bowl-shaped Kamil crater in Google Earth satellite photographs.

Based on its size and characteristics, researchers believe Kamil was formed by the impact of an iron meteorite roughly 4.3 feet in diameter traveling at nearly 8,000 mph.

A team of geophysicists, including Folco, visited the site in Egypt’s Sahara desert in February to confirm the discovery.

“The first real impression when we were in the field — we could see with our eyes that it was really well preserved and a potential source of detailed information about this kind of event,” Folco told SPACE.com.

Although researchers do not know the precise moment the meteorite hit the Earth, they estimate it was likely a few thousand years ago, which is fairly recent in geological terms.

There are approximately 175 confirmed impact craters on the Earth’s surface, most of which are worn away.

Space rocks the size of large television sets routinely reach the Earth’s atmosphere every month, but most burn up before they reach the surface. Many of the resulting fireballs are not observable because they occur over remote land areas or over the oceans, which cover two-thirds of the Earth’s surface.

“This [the Kamil discovery] is important because small impacts are rather frequent on Earth — on the order of one event every 10 to 100 years,” Folco explained.

“Studying this crater is a good opportunity for scientists to get to a correct assessment of the hazard small impacts pose to the Earth and to devise mitigation strategies.”

I, personally am quite proud to see this happen, and I will tell you the reason why – While the private entities and corporates had given up on this idea, professors and experts from IISc & IIT’s went ahead and devised this concept. While B.tech & M.Tech students were guided to produce the motherboard and other key components.

Even though this device has been unveiled today, the development & research is currently on-going on at various different levels connected with HR Ministry. The ministry is quite confident of bringing down the cost of this device further.

Ultimately the goal of such devices is to spread education in Rural India, by offering such devices with educational courses / materials embedded inside them.

Minimum Functionalities expected:-

The 324m-long bridge, which is 190m-tall at its highest point, will be the third major road crossing taking traffic in and out of the city centre and has cross-party backing from city councillors.

In a report by the council’s highways committee, ahead of a planning meeting on Thursday, the bridge was described as a “genuinely striking gateway into central Sunderland”.

“It is likely to be an attraction in itself as the tallest bridge in the country, providing the city with an impressive landmark,” the report added.

Architect Stephen Spence said the practice has completed three-quarters of the detailed design work and added: “We hope to complete detailed design work in late summer.”

The practice beat Frank Gehry, Wilkinson Eyre and Marks Barfield to the deal back in 2005, but the scheme has run into planning and cost wrangles.

The entire project, which includes building approach roads and associated infrastructure, has been budgeted at £133 million, with nearly £100 million of that coming from the government.

A city council spokesman said it was confident the money would not fall victim to upcoming spending cuts.

“Subject to the project meeting certain conditions, funding of £98 million will be provided by the Department of Transport.”

The remaining money is being stumped up by the council regeneration body One North East.

Using X-ray techniques, a team “unpeeled” the layers of the famous painting to see how the Italian master achieved his barely perceptible graduation of tones from light to dark.

The technique used by Da Vinci and some other Renaissance painters to achieve this subtlety is called “sfumato,” and unraveling it allowed the scientists to determined the composition and the thickness of the paint layers.

Philippe Walter, a senior scientist at the Paris-based Laboratoire du Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musees de France, told CNN: “This will help us to understand how Da Vinci made his materials… the amount of oil that was mixed with pigments, the nature of the organic materials, it will help art historians.”

Walter and his colleagues used X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry to determine the composition and thickness of each painted layer of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum in Paris, where the painting is normally kept behind bulletproof glass. Art historians believe it was painted by Da Vinci in 1503.

They found that some layers were as thin as one or two micrometers and that these layers increased in thickness to 30 to 40 micrometers in darker parts of the painting. A micrometer is one thousandth of one millimeter.

They believe this characterizes a technique of painting that uses a glaze, or very thin layer, to build up shadows in the face.

The manner in which Da Vinci painted flesh, “his softened transitions,” were pioneering work in Italy at the end of the 15th century, say the researchers, and were linked to his creativity and his research to obtain new paint formulations.

Walter said it is almost impossible to see any brushstrokes on the Mona Lisa.

The research, which is reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, also looked at several other Da Vinci paintings and could eventually help to determine when and how he painted some of his masterpieces.