Wish You A Happy (and Science-filled) New Year

Needless to say science is amazing! When it comes to recent scientific breakthroughs, 2015 is full of them. From the first new antibiotic in decades, to lab grown human muscle, and a man-made leaf that can go through photosynthesis, the scientific discoveries made in 2015 will boggle your mind and change your view of the world.

So what were the biggest discoveries in science and tech in 2015? Read on to find out!

Happy Halloween! (from Space)

LET THE UNIVERSE WISH YOU A HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Guessing that you can observe the two eyes, the button nose and the smile, the picture on the left is a snap of a small portion of the universe, as captured by NASA on 31st Oct, 2015, or better known as the night of Halloween.


Now, as easy as it is to assume that witches and ghouls are behind the theatrics, science can explain it neatly: The two eyes are very bright galaxies, the nose is a star and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing.


In this special case of gravitational lensing, a ring — known as an Einstein Ring — is produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer and resulting in the ring-like structure we see here.

The Physics of Snapping Fingers

There are three components to the snapping finger sound:
(1) The “friction” or “sliding” sound between the second (middle) finger and the thumb.
(2) The “impact” sound from the collision of the middle finger onto the third(ring) finger and
(3) The “pop” sound from the rapid compression and subsequent decompression of air, as a consequence of the middle finger’s impact to the palm.This is the most audible of the three.

In order to get the full “snap” sound, the fast-moving second finger must hit both the palm and a small portion of the third finger. If it hits only the palm or the third finger, there will be a significant reduction in the total ‘snap’ sound.

I would strongly suggest that you stop at this juncture and spend some time exploring the finger snap. Only if you arrive at these conclusions independently would you be able to truly marvel at the underlying physics.

Super-Kamiokande

This is a picture of the sun, created by looking through earth.

It wasn’t made with light though. The image visualizes the flux of neutrinoscoming from the Sun. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles created in the nuclear furnace of the sun, and they can pass through nearly anything. Billions of neutrinos shoot through our bodies every second, and they fly with ease through the rocky bulk of the earth.

Scientists have built a giant neutrino observatory in an abandoned mine shaft 3,000 ft below Mount Kamioka in Japan (all that rock shelter the sensors from the noise of cosmic rays). It’s called the Super-Kamiokande - and it’s essentially a 13 million gallon tank of ultra-pure water, rigged with sensors that can detect the extremely weak interaction of neutrinos with other matter.

Work at Super-Kamiokande helped establish that neutrinos have mass. One of scientists on this project, Takaaki Kajita, has just won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Sun image: Robert Svoboda and K. Gordan, Super-K image: courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institue for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo

From Rayleigh to Raman

Rayleigh Scattering is the reason why the sky is Blue, Mars is Red but the martian sunsets are Blue and also why the color of the smoke from a cigarette is colorless, but the puffed out smoke is White and so on.

But, Rayleigh scattering is the elastic scattering of light i.e the energy( and therefore, the wavelength) of the incident photon is conserved and only its direction is changed. You can consider the Newton’s cradle as an analogy.

But this is not the only mode of interaction that can exist. Inelastic collisions are also a possibility. This likelihood brings us face to face with Raman Scattering.

What is 'Time' ?

When we think of time we tend to think of the ways in which we measure the passing of time, such as a clock or watch, or perhaps a measured interval of time such as an hour or minute, but not of time itself. So what is time? Exactly what is it that we are measuring?

Exactly what is it that we are measuring?

We can begin to answer the question with the basic description that we are measuring the interval between events, using units that we have chosen for the purpose. We may say, for example, that the next train will be due in 5 minutes. While this information may be very useful for telling us how late the train is when it eventually arrives, it does nothing to describe just what it is that we are measuring. We want to know exactly what the 'interval' is.

In order to investigate the nature of time it may help to break it down into four main questions.

1) How does time flow?

2) Does time flow in only one direction?

3) Is there a constant 'Universal' time?

4) Is time a 'real' dimension?

The Story of a Schizophrenic

Schizophrenia - a chronic, severe and debilitating mental illness. It is not at all unpopular. Suffering the inability of distinguishing the real from the unreal, hearing multiple voices at the same time when one is alone (otherwise known as auditory hallucinations), and derailment are perhaps just some of the many critical symptoms. With the passage of time, the patient’s condition worsens; the disease will eventually affect his/her thoughts, behaviour and overall social functioning.

Both environmental and genetic factors produce a vulnerability of individuals to this illness. However, sometimes these alarming symptoms tend to take an excessively violent toll on life. At times when it is least expected.