Did you know that if the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt because the earth is getting warmer, sea levels would rise by 215 feet enough to drown all of us? Or that 26 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide is added every year to the atmosphere, where it can stay for 200 years? "Melting Ice- A Hot Topic!" was the theme chosen by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for this year's World Environment Day that was celebrated in the city on Tuesday.

At the Centre for Environment Education (CEE), various interactive games were organised for the children.

Gopal Kumar Jain, Youth Programmes Co-coordinator, CEE said: "The idea is to inform the young ones about the disastrous consequences of global warming in an informal and fun filled manner."

Painting competition, treasure hunt, computer games were organised keeping this is mind. Another event that was a big hit was the snake show, in which live snakes were used. It was aimed at dispelling the common myth about snakes and their importance in the ecosystem.

Dharia, a seventh standard student, said: "I just loved the snake show and now I know they are not as dangerous as I thought them to be."

Movies were also screened as a part of the programme. Al Gore's "The Inconvenient Truth", dubbed in Hindi, was a major draw. To make the event more colourful, a face painting kiosk was set up and colourful faces thronged the campus.

Similar events were also organised at Science City. School students participated in poster making competition and a Green Quiz competition.

A workshop was also conducted for more than 300 primary and secondary school teachers from across the state on "Climate Change: A concern for the future."

Perhaps the day can best be summed up in the sight of a little girl, with cat's whiskers painted in shiny red on her face, telling her mother: "Mama don't use plastic, it will make the earth hot."

With kids like her a less warmer future may just be possible.

Courtesy : Expressindia.com

Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, has distributed laptops to children in developing countries for years, but has yet to put them into the kind of mass production planned by another group, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

Intel and Asustek's low-cost PC would be a fully-fledged, low-end notebook, while the OLPCs are green-and-white plastic, kid-friendly laptops that can be powered with hand cranks when electricity is not available. They cost about $180 each.

"It's another way of solving the same problem," said Sean Maloney, head of Intel worldwide sales and marketing in a telephone interview ahead of his keynote speech at Taiwan's Computex, the world's No. 2 computer fair. "The world is a big place and there's room for lots of these things."

Intel's and Asustek's move comes after the OLPC Foundation said last month it expected to start delivering millions of its low-cost notebooks in October. It is the foundation's most ambitious attempt yet to provide the devices, which analysts say could shape PC industry growth in developing countries.

Maloney said the laptop will use a lower-end microprocessor as the brains of the notebook, but declined to give further details. It will likely have 7- or 10-inch diameter screens, either a traditional hard disk drive or a flash memory hard drive and wireless Internet.

One model will cost about $200, with others going up to around $400 or $500 for the PC, Maloney said. Asustek is also the world's largest maker of notebook PCs. The PC, available later this year, will use either a variant of the freely available Linux operating system or it will run Microsoft Corp's Windows XP.

Maloney also introduced its 3-Series chipset family, which is designed from the ground up to run Intel's upcoming 45 nanometer processors, code-named Penryn, that are expected later this year. Chipsets are a collection of memory, input- output and other chips that connect the processor to the motherboard.

"These chipsets will be the basis for most of the PC industry for the next 18 to 24 months," Maloney said. "They're not just 45 nanometer ready, but they're much more energy efficient than previous versions."

The Penryn processors are made with circuitry as small as 45 nanometers, about 1/2000th the width of a human hair and can have higher performance at the same power consumption, or the same performance at lower power consumption, or various combinations of the two.

Intel said that the 3-Series chipsets enable better PC performance, clearer definition video and give home-theater- like sound and video quality.

There will be a range of chipsets that can go into entry-level PCs, media PCs, as well as super high-end gaming PCs that can cost thousands of dollars each.

Intel is introducing the chipset family as it regains ground lost over the last two years to smaller, scrappy rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

AMD's market share in the first quarter of this year slipped more than 5 percentage points to less than 20 per cent for the first time since 2005 as Intel revamped its own product line with its Core and Core 2 processors. It also slashed prices on older chips as it ramped up production of faster microprocessors.

Intel's Maloney also detailed plans for Intel's Core 2 Extreme mobile processor that it expects to ship in the third quarter of this year. Notebook PCs have for some time been the fastest-growing part of the PC market.

"You are seeing an emergence of notebook gaming," Maloney said, noting that PC makers are now selling laptop PCs that boast 22-inch-diameter screens.


Courtesy : Expressindia.com