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Sunday, February 23, 2014
by Yahoo! New
Freetown (AFP) - Sierra Leone
said on Saturday it had discovered a diamond worth $6.2 million,
declaring it one of the most precious finds of the past decade.
The
stone, dug up last week in the eastern district of Kono, was measured
at 153 carats, making it significantly bigger than the largest find of
2013, a 125-carat diamond unearthed in the same area, the state-run
National Minerals Agency said.
"This
153.44-carat diamond is one of the finest diamonds to be found in
Sierra Leone in the last 10 years," the agency said in a statement.
It
was graded as D+ on the D-to-Z diamond colour scale, meaning that it
has almost no yellow tint caused by nitrogen impurities, and the agency
said it "could only be matched or surpassed by fancy diamonds such as
blue or pink in terms of price".
"The diamond is a cleavage in terms of shape and the clarity is of very high quality," the statement added.
"In
other words, this is a premium stone as a result of its colour and
clarity, and had it been an octahedron-shaped stone, it could have
almost doubled the price of $6 million."
Sierra
Leone remains one of the world's poorest countries after a brutal
11-year civil war which ended in 2002 -- a conflict that left the world
with images of feared rebel leaders armed from the sale of "blood
diamonds" recruiting drugged-up child soldiers and hacking the limbs off
thousands of civilians.
But
the country's mineral riches -- which include gold, bauxite, titanium
ore and magnetite iron-ore, as well as diamonds -- have attracted
massive investments.
Small-scale
artisanal mining has sustained the country's eastern region since
diamonds were discovered in 1930, and it was here that the 968.9-carat
Star of Sierra Leone -- the largest alluvial diamond ever found -- was
mined in 1972.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
by Denise Chow, Yahoo! News
A 12-year-old student from California has created a Braille printer by repurposing parts from a Lego set.
Shubham Banerjee, a seventh-grade student from Santa Clara, Calif., developed the Braille printer using toy construction Lego pieces. The low-cost invention could be an accessible solution for blind and disadvantaged people across the globe, Banerjee said.
The printer, dubbed Braigo (short for Braille with Lego), was created from the Lego Mindstorms EV3 set, which retails for $349. Banerjee also added $5-worth of additional materials, which means the finished product costs about $350. This makes Braigo much more affordable than other Braille printers, which can retail for more than $2,000, according to Banerjee.
The innovative youngster developed Braigo to prove it is feasible to make an inexpensive Braille printer, he said. Banerjee now plans to make the project open-source, by releasing the design free-of-charge to the online community.
"I'll make this Braille printer and make the steps and the program software open to the Internet, so anyone who has a set can make it," Banerjee said in a YouTube video about the Braigo project.
The printer is programmed to produce the letters "A" through "Z" in Braille. It takes roughly seven seconds to print each letter, according to Banerjee. In a video uploaded to YouTube, Banerjee demonstrates how to print the letter "Y," and then shows how simple it is to combine letters to form words, like "cat."
"This is so easy even my little sister can do it," he said.
Enhancements can be made to the printer's software, and Banerjee said he now plans to program Braigo to print the numbers one to 10.
The Lego Group has already voiced their praise for the project, tweeting: "We're very proud. Impressive work for a great cause!"
An estimated 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide, and 90 percent of these individuals live in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization. An inexpensive Braille printer could bring affordable, 21st-century computing to millions of people facing visual impairment, Banerjee said.
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