Geekopedia

Covid-19 Treatment and protocols -A general confusion among the masses -How pateints are recovering if there is no vaccine?(interview with a doctor)

2020-06-29T13:18:00.001+05:30

A General interview with a doctor from Chennai-Common FAQs among the masses
COVID-19 patients come in different age groups and with varying health conditions. As a result, doctors are unable to follow a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment. They have adopted a wide range of protocols. The fundamental division is between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients, says doctor Ravi, nodal officer for treatment at the Stanley Hospital.

“Asymptomatic patients are kept in observation. They don’t need much treatment. We check their oxygen level in blood once a day during daily rounds,” says Ravi. The focus is on patients with symptoms, and among them those with co-morbid conditions. “We provide customised treatment for these patients.”
“Blood tests and chest x-rays are regularly conducted, and blood sugar levels are monitored for patients with co-morbid conditions.

For instance, oxygen supply is provided and renal output tests are conducted for patients with kidney ailments.” Ravi says the key to fighting the infection is boosting immunity level. “Measures in this regard include providing patients with protein-rich food.” Stanley’s dietician in-charge of COVID-19 patients, Karthika, says the hospital follows a three-type high-protein. Asymptomatics are given doses of HCQ and other Anti viral doses.

“The diet plan includes nuts, fruits, and pulses. For children, milk and curds are included.” Main course includes idlies, pongal, and rotis. “Most patients lose taste with the onset of the disease, so we have been giving them flavoured juices.” Karthika claims fresh juices and the government recommended Kabasura Kudineer are good for immunity. Apart from food, doctors say the mental state of the patients are also crucial to fighting the disease. To ensure this, the Institute of Mental Health has been tasked with appointing counsellors across the State and prescribe a protocol.

IMH director doctor Poorna Chandrika says they have proposed access for patients to music, books, phones, and streaming of daily news. “We also provide them counselling to help them avoid fear and anxiety.” Chandrika also suggests breathing exercises and yoga to keep the mind in control. “The stigma has turned from the diseases to the patients. People need to understand that this is only a passing phenomenon.”

Thus, vaccine will be used for those who fall in co-morbid conditions or under 5% critically ill of all covid patients and also to eradicate the disease by immunization of population.

Prescribed protocols-

Where are all The Aliens? Are we alone ?Or close to finding an ET ?

2020-06-28T19:48:00.001+05:30

The question as it has been unchanged and not modified -Still remains
"Are we alone ?"
At this point of time when technological advancements are at peak ,we tend to ask What is out there in the "Dark"? Is it empty or has some deep unsolved mysteries and questions remaining to be solved by Humans ?
In the recent times ,news had been that US Department of Defence has released press photos of UFO sightings by one of their Airforce Pilot and proved the existence of "Aliens" (ET) .It so happened in the year of 2005.
Now here's a very interesting Paradox stating the same -The Fermi Paradox,
which will surely be very answerable to all such questions.Though it's a sought out proposition ,but still is the only one way of understanding of what we are looking for in the Deep Space.
The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability (such as some optimistic estimates for the Drake equation).

The following are some of the facts that together serve to highlight the apparent contradiction:

There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets.

Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the sun. If the Earth is typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.

Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now.
Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
And since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.
However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.

Sort out propositions-
There have been many attempts to explain the Fermi paradox, primarily suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are extremely rare, that the lifetime of such civilizations is short, or that they exist but (for various reasons) we see no evidence.

Some historical context-
An earlier implicit mention was by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in an unpublished manuscript from 1933.He noted "people deny the presence of intelligent beings on the planets of the universe" because "-

If such beings exist they would have visited Earth,
If such civilizations existed then they would have given us some sign of their existence."

This was not a paradox for others, who took this to imply the absence of ETs. But it was one for him, since he believed in extraterrestrial life and the possibility of space travel. Therefore, he proposed what is now known as the zoo hypothesis and speculated that mankind is not yet ready for higher beings to contact us.That Tsiolkovsky himself may not have been the first to discover the paradox is suggested by his above-mentioned reference to other people's reasons for denying the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
In 1975, Michael H. Hart published a detailed examination of the paradox, one of the first to do so. He argued that if intelligent extraterrestrials exist, and are capable of space travel, then the galaxy could have been colonized in a time much less than that of the age of the Earth. However, we see no evidence they have been here, which Hart called "Fact A".

Fermi's name is associated with the paradox because of a casual conversation in the summer of 1950 with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski. While walking to lunch, the men discussed recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The conversation moved on to other topics, until during lunch Fermi allegedly said suddenly, "But where is everybody?" (although the exact quote is uncertain).

A graphical representation of the Arecibo message, humanity's first attempt to use radio waves to actively communicate its existence to alien civilizations

The Drake Equation-

	=	number of civilizations with which humans could communicate
	=	mean rate of star formation
	=	fraction of stars that have planets
	=	mean number of planets that could support life per star with planets
	=	fraction of life-supporting planets that develop life
	=	fraction of planets with life where life develops intelligence
	=	fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop communication
	=	mean length of time that civilizations can communicate

Evidences showing The Paradox-

There are two parts of the Fermi paradox that rely on empirical evidence—that there are many potential habitable planets, and that we see no evidence of life. The first point, that many suitable planets exist, was an assumption in Fermi's time but is now supported by the discovery that exoplanets are common. Current models predict billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy.

The second part of the paradox, that we see no evidence of extraterrestrial life, is also an active field of scientific research. This includes both efforts to find any indication of life,and efforts specifically directed to finding intelligent life. These searches have been made since 1960, and several are ongoing.

Although astronomers do not usually search for extraterrestrials, they have observed phenomena that they could not immediately explain without positing an intelligent civilization as the source.

Why haven't we encounter any "ET"?

It takes a lot of time in space

One common explanation for the Fermi paradox is that it simply takes lots of time for any decipherable signals to travel across the cosmos.

Technical difficulties:Why can't we read their signals ,if sent by them ?

Most sci-fi and Hollywood blockbusters have traditionally depicted extraterrestrial beings as very human-like, often with vertebrate features or similarities to other species on Earth. However, we have no reason to assume that life elsewhere in the universe will have taken the same pathway of evolution as ours.To anthropomorphize the idea of extraterrestrial beings is a failure of intelligence.

While organizations like SETI have focused on sending and detecting radio signals, it could be that extraterrestrial species have taken a completely different technical approach. Other advanced civilizations may be sending out signals, but we don’t have the technology to detect or decipher them as they are beyond our current understanding of physics

The Transcension Hypothesis: They Are Already Here

One of the major assumptions of the ideas discussed so far is that all advanced civilizations will be motivated to explore and colonize the observable universe. It could be, however, that the species that venture out into a seemingly cold, hostile, and dark universe are the ones that are doomed for failure

The Zoo Hypothesis , Simulation Hypotheses and Planetarium hypothesis

In contrast, proponents of the zoo hypothesis suggest that aliens who are more advanced than we are are not only observing us from afar, but have us locked into a kind of “celestial cage,” leaving us off-limits from any other advanced civilization. They may be doing doing so in order to allow humanity’s natural biological and social development.

The simulation hypothesis makes a similar proposition: that we are living in a computer simulation being run by a post-human civilization.

The planetarium hypothesis posits that our understanding of the universe represents a mere illusion that has been created by civilizations that have the ability to manipulate matter and energy at cosmic scales. In other words, what we consider an objective understanding of the universe could be a subjective species-wide illusion.

Summing Up-

It could very well be that we are one of the first species to make it this far. After all, 99 percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, and we are the only species that has ever been able to leave the planet.

We could allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by an intergalactic loneliness. On the other hand, this insight could contribute to a positive transformation of how we perceive and treat one another as living beings. It can motivate us to treat our planet and all life that lives on it with the recognition that we will not find such prosperity elsewhere in the cosmos.

As Carl Sagan famously put it, “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

Fifth State of Matter (Bose-Einstein-Condensate) created at home- Dr Amruta Gadge's breakthrough

2020-05-26T16:28:00.001+05:30

Did you know that there also exists a fifth state of matter apart from its four states: solid, liquid, gas and plasma? Well, in fact, there does exist a fifth state of matter, known as the Bose-Einstein Condensate(BEC). Its existence was predicted by the renowned scientists Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose in 1924. It remained as a theoretical prediction for several years, until 1995, when the research groups of Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA at Boulder experimentally produced the first such condensate at the University of Colorado.

As you may have already guessed, the properties of this state are pretty unique too. In a BEC, matter stops behaving as independent particles, and collapses into a single quantum state that can be described with a single, uniform wavefunction. A Bose–Einstein condensate is "colder" than a solid, and may occur when atoms have very similar quantum levels, at temperatures almost nearing absolute zero, −273.15 °C (−459.67 °F).

BEC is typically formed when a gas of bosons at low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero. Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point microscopic quantum phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically. A BEC is formed by cooling a gas of extremely low density, about one-hundred-thousandth (1/100,000) the density of normal air, to ultra-low temperatures.

In a recent breakthrough, Dr Amruta Gadge, an Indian born physicist who works in the Quantum Systems and Devices Laboratory at the University of Sussex, has reportedly been successful in creating the Bose-Einstein Condensate or the fifth state of matter remotely, working from her home, amid the global coronavirus(COVID-19) lockdown.

Dr Amruta Gadge (Image Credits: SheThePeople)

In an interview, Dr Amruta has told the Telegraph: "The Bose Einstein Condensate has been achieved in the lab in 1995 in the US. And there has been a Nobel Prize (for that work). So, BEC is not new, but you have to understand the effort that is required to achieve this Condensate given that the theory was developed in 1920s and the first time they were able to achieve it in the lab was in 1995…. But now what’s new is that we are able to do it remotely.”

The Mumbai-born physicist first attended St Xavier’s College in Mumbai and then did her masters at the University of Pune. She also worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. She resides two miles away from the lab where she works.

Dr Amruta has reportedly made use of the technology on her computer to control lasers and radio waves and create the BEC. Now, researchers believe that this achievement could provide a blueprint for operating quantum tech in space or underwater. They claim this is an important feat in modern science as it could help them to operate quantum tech remotely in otherwise inaccessible environments like space or underwater.

A "Stay Home-Stay Safe" breakthrough by Dr Amruta

Achieving such a feat while not working in a lab is really impressive, and when asked about her complex experiments and calculations, and how she managed to do it from her home, Dr Amruta explained to Lab News, “The research team has been observing lockdown and working from home and so we have not been able to access our labs for weeks. The process has been a lot slower than if I had been in the lab as the experiment is unstable and I’ve had to give 10 to 15 minutes of cooling time between each run.”

She concluded, “This is obviously not as efficient and way more laborious to do manually because I’ve not been able to do systematic scans or fix the instability like I could working in the lab. But we were determined to keep our research going so we have been exploring new ways of running our experiments remotely.”

Researchers have achieved the fastest ever Internet speed of 44.2 Tbps!

2020-05-24T14:40:00.001+05:30

Australia recorded an internet speed of 44.2 Tbps (Terabits per second), which is almost a million times the speed of the average Internet connection, globally.

Researchers based out of Australia’s Monash, Swinburne, and RMIT universities say they’ve set a new internet speed record of 44.2 Tbps, according to a paper published in the open-access journal Nature Communications. That’s theoretically enough speed to download the contents of more than 50 100GB Ultra HD Blu-ray discs in a single second.

What’s interesting about the research is that it was achieved over 75km of standard optical fiber using a single integrated chip source, meaning it has the potential to one day benefit existing fiber infrastructure.

The test fiber connection ran between RMIT’s Melbourne City campus and Monash University’s Clayton campus, and the researchers say it mirrors infrastructure used by Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN). The findings represent a “world-record for bandwidth,” according to Swinburne University Professor David Moss, one of the team members responsible.

The technology that made it possible :

For achieving this incredible speed, the researchers used a new device that replaces 80 lasers with one single piece of equipment known as a micro-comb.

A micro-bomb is much smaller and lighter than existing telecommunications hardware. The micro-comb was planted and tested - outside the laboratory - using existing infrastructure, similar to that used by Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN).

Interestingly, it is also for the first time any micro-comb has been used in a field trial and possesses the highest amount of data produced from a single optical chip. During their study, the researchers were able to send maximum data down each channel, simulating peak internet usage, across 4THz of bandwidth.

The Significance of such an outstanding achievement :

The team’s finding assumes significance as it comes at a time when the world’s internet infrastructure is under tremendous pressure mainly due to the isolation policies as a result of coronavirus pandemic.

While today’s users probably don’t need a 44.2 Tbps connection, that speed could be leveraged by businesses, especially as companies adopt trends like IoT and cloud computing. Plus, as web content becomes richer and more consumer industries shift online, it’s only a matter of time before the average user needs faster speeds.

The team is hopeful that their findings offer a glimpse into how internet connections could look 25 years from now.

“What our research demonstrates is the ability for fibres that we already have in the ground, thanks to the NBN project, to be the backbone of communications networks now and in the future. We’ve developed something that is scalable to meet future needs,'' Dr Bill Corcoran, co-lead author of the study and Lecturer in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University, was quoted saying.

Earth losing its magnetic strength, which has adverse effects -The South Atlantic Anomaly

2020-05-23T22:44:00.001+05:30

EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD IS MYSTERIOUSLY WEAKENING, CAUSING SATELLITES AND SPACECRAFT TO MALFUNCTION

The Earth's magnetic field is weakening between Africa and South America, causing issues for satellites and space craft.

Scientists studying the phenomenon observed that an area known as the South Atlantic Anomaly has grown considerably in recent years, though the reason for it is not entirely clear.

Insights - Earth's magnetic field is weakening in an area between Africa and South America, scientists with The European Space Agency (ESA) say. Also known as the geomagnetic field or the surface magnetic field, this field forms the Earth's magnetosphere and spans tens of thousands of kilometres into space.

This behaviour of the earth's magnetic field in the area between Africa and South America is being termed the 'South Atlantic Anomaly'.

Using data gathered by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm constellation of satellites, researchers noted that the area of the anomaly dropped in strength by more than 8 per cent between 1970 and 2020. "The new, eastern minimum of the South Atlantic Anomaly has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing vigorously," said Jürgen Matzka, from the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

"We are very lucky to have the Swarm satellites in orbit to investigate the development of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth's core driving theses changes."

One possibility, according to the ESA, is that the weakening field is a sign that the Earth's magnetic field is about to reverse, whereby the North Pole and South Pole switch places.

The last time a "geomagnetic reversal" took place was 780,000 years ago, with some scientists claiming that the next one is long overdue. Typically, such events take place every 250,000 years.

The South Atlantic Anomaly has been captured by the Swarm satellite constellation (Division of Geomagnetism, DTU Space)

The repercussions of such an event could be significant, as the Earth's magnetic field plays an important role in protecting the planet from solar winds and harmful cosmic radiation.Telecommunication and satellite systems also rely on it to operate, suggesting that computers and mobile phones could experience difficulties.

Top 14 Discoveries and inventions that Revolutionized the World

2020-05-23T18:46:00.000+05:30

Here is a list of the top discoveries and inventions that revolutionized human lives:

Computers

Computers are, by far, the most important invention of all time, which finds some application in every aspect of human life. A computer is a machine that can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations automatically via computer programming. Modern computers have the ability to follow generalized sets of operations, called programs. These programs enable computers to perform an extremely wide range of tasks. A "complete" computer including the hardware, the operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment required and used for "full" operation can be referred to as a computer system. This term may as well be used for a group of computers that are connected and work together, in particular a computer network or computer cluster.

Computers are used as control systems for a wide variety of industrial and consumer devices. This includes simple special purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls, factory devices such as industrial robots and computer-aided design, and also general purpose devices like personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones. The Internet is run on computers and it connects hundreds of millions of other computers and their users.

Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element, typically a central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) microprocessor, along with some type of computer memory, typically MOS semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information. Peripheral devices include input devices (keyboards, mice, joystick, etc.), output devices (monitor screens, printers, etc.), and input/output devices that perform both functions (e.g., the 2000s-era touchscreen). Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source and they enable the result of operations to be saved and retrieved.

Penicillin

penicillin core

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. People began using it to treat infections in 1942. Its a group of antibiotics, derived originally from common moulds known as Penicillium moulds. Penicillin antibiotics were among the first medications to be effective against many bacterial infections caused by staphylococci and streptococci. They are still widely used today, though many types of bacteria have developed resistance following extensive use.

Radioactivity

Radioactivity refers to the spontaneous emission of energy and subatomic particles by certain types of matter. It was discovered in 1896 by the French scientist Henri Becquerel, while working with phosphorescent materials. These materials glow in the dark after exposure to light, and he suspected that the glow produced in cathode ray tubes by X-rays might be associated with phosphorescence. He wrapped a photographic plate in black paper and placed various phosphorescent salts on it. All results were negative until he used uranium salts. The uranium salts caused a blackening of the plate in spite of the plate being wrapped in black paper. These radiations were then given the name "Becquerel Rays".

Radioactive decay is a property of several naturally occurring elements as well as of artificially produced isotopes of the elements. The rate at which a radioactive element decays is expressed in terms of its half-life, that is, the time required for one-half of any given quantity of the isotope to decay. The product of a radioactive decay process—called the daughter of the parent isotope—may itself be unstable, in which case it, too, will decay. The process continues until a stable nuclide has been formed.

Hook-and-loop Fasteners(Velcro)

Hook-and-loop fasteners consist of two components: typically, two lineal fabric strips which are attached (sewn or otherwise adhered) to the opposing surfaces to be fastened. The first component consists of tiny hooks and the second component features smaller loops. When these two are pressed together, the hooks catch in the loops and the two pieces fasten or bind temporarily. When separated, by pulling or peeling the two surfaces apart, the strips make a distinctive "ripping" sound.

The original hook-and-loop fastener was conceived in 1941 by Swiss engineer George de Mestral. The idea came to him one day after returning from a hunting trip with his dog in the Alps. He took a close look at the burs of burdock that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur. He examined them under a microscope, and noted their hundreds of "hooks" that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing, animal fur, or hair. He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion if he could figure out how to replicate the hooks and loops. Hook-and-loop is viewed by some like Steven Vogel or Werner Nachtigal as a key example of inspiration from nature or the copying of nature's mechanisms (called bionics or biomimesis).

The Artificial Cardiac Pacemaker

St Jude medical pacemaker in hand

A cardiac pacemaker is a medical device that generates electrical impulses delivered by electrodes to cause the heart muscle chambers (the upper, or atria and/or the lower, or ventricles) to contract and therefore pump blood; by doing so this device replaces and/or regulates the function of the electrical conduction system of the heart.

The princaipal purpose of a pacemaker is to maintain an adequate heart rate, either because the heart's natural pacemaker is not fast enough, or because there is a block in the heart's electrical conduction system. Modern pacemakers are externally programmable and allow a cardiologist, particularly a cardiac electrophysiologist to select the optimal pacing modes for individual patients. A specific type of pacemakers called defibrillator combines pacemaker and defibrillator functions in a single implantable device, which should be called only defibrillator, for clarity. Others, called biventricular pacemakers have multiple electrodes stimulating differing positions within the lower heart chambers to improve synchronization of the ventricles, the lower chambers of the heart.

The first clinical implantation into a human of a fully implantable pacemaker was in 1958 at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, using a pacemaker designed by inventor Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Åke Senning (in collaboration with Elema-Schönander AB, later Siemens-Elema AB), connected to electrodes attached to the myocardium of the heart by thoracotomy. The device failed after three hours. A second device was then implanted which lasted for two days. The world's first implantable pacemaker patient, Arne Larsson, went on to receive 26 different pacemakers during his lifetime. He died in 2001, at the age of 86, and most interestingly, outliving the inventor as well as the surgeon!

Saccharin

Sodium Saccharin

Saccharin was produced first in 1879, by Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist working on coal tar derivatives in Ira Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste on his hand one evening, and connected this with the compound benzoic sulfimide on which he had been working that day. Fahlberg and Remsen published articles on benzoic sulfimide in 1879 and 1880. In 1884, then working on his own in New York City, Fahlberg applied for patents in several countries, describing methods of producing this substance that he named saccharin. Two years later, he began production of the substance in a factory in a suburb of Magdeburg in Germany.

Sodium saccharin (benzoic sulfimide) is an artificial sweetener with effectively no food energy. It is about 300–400 times as sweet as sucrose but has a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations.

Although saccharin was commercialized not long after its discovery, until sugar shortages during World War I, its use had not become widespread. Its popularity further increased during the 1960s and 1970s among diet maintainers, since saccharin had little to no calories unlike sugar. In the United States, saccharin is often found in restaurants in pink packets; the most popular brand is "Sweet'n Low".

Because of the difficulty of importing sugar from the West Indies, the British Saccharin Company was founded in 1917 to produce saccharin at its Paragon Works near Accrington, Lancashire. Production was licensed and controlled by the Board of Trade in London. Production continued on the site until 1926.

Microwave Ovens

Microwave Oven

Microwave ovens, these days are pretty common in home kitchens and are popular for reheating previously cooked foods and cooking a variety of foods. They are also useful for rapid heating of otherwise slowly prepared foodstuffs, which can easily burn or turn lumpy when cooked in conventional pans, such as hot butter, fats, chocolate or porridge. In restaurants, a considerable number of food items are prepared with the help of microwave.

A microwave oven, or simply a microwave, is an electric oven that heats and cooks food by exposing it to electromagnetic radiation in the frequency range of microwaves. This induces polar molecules in the food to rotate and produce thermal energy in a process known as dielectric heating. Microwave ovens heat foods quickly and efficiently because excitation is fairly uniform in the outer 25–38 mm (1–1.5 inches) of a homogeneous, high water content food item.

American engineer Percy Spencer is generally credited with inventing the modern microwave oven after World War II from radar technology developed during the war. Named the "Radarange", it was first sold in 1946. Raytheon later licensed its patents for a home-use microwave oven that was first introduced by Tappan in 1955, but these units were still too large and expensive for general home use. Sharp Corporation introduced the first microwave oven with a turntable between 1964 and 1966. The countertop microwave oven was first introduced in 1967 by the Amana Corporation. After Sharp introduced low-cost microwave ovens affordable for residential use in the late 1970s, their use spread into commercial and residential kitchens around the world. In addition to their use in cooking food, microwave ovens are used for heating in many industrial processes.

Teflon

A non-stick Pan

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), commonly known as teflon, is a synthetic fluoropolymer of tetrafluoroethylene that has numerous applications. The well-known brand name of PTFE-based formulas is Teflon by Chemours, a spin-off from DuPont, which originally discovered the compound in 1938. Another popular brand name of PTFE is Syncolon by Synco Chemical Corporation.

PTFE is used as a non-stick coating for pans and other cookware. It is nonreactive, partly because of the strength of carbon–fluorine bonds, and so it is often used in containers and pipework for reactive and corrosive chemicals. Where used as a lubricant, PTFE reduces friction, wear, and energy consumption of machinery. It is commonly used as a graft material in surgical interventions. It is also frequently employed as coating on catheters; this interferes with the ability of bacteria and other infectious agents to adhere to catheters and cause hospital-acquired infections.

PTFE is a fluorocarbon solid, as it is a high molecular weight compound consisting wholly of carbon and fluorine. PTFE is hydrophobic: neither water nor water-containing substances wet PTFE, as fluorocarbons demonstrate mitigated London dispersion forces due to the high electronegativity of fluorine. PTFE has one of the lowest coefficients of friction of any solid.

Vulcanized Rubber

Natural rubber extracted from trees in the form of latex is soft and has less desirable properties. When natural rubber undergoes vulcanization it hardens and develops desirable properties making it ideal for various applications.Vulcanization refers to a range of processes for hardening rubbers. The term originally referred exclusively to the treatment of natural rubber with sulfur, which remains the most common practice; however, it has also grown to include the hardening of other (synthetic) rubbers via various means. Examples include silicone rubber via room temperature vulcanizing and chloroprene rubber (neoprene) using metal oxides.

Vulcanization can therefore be defined as the curing of elastomers; with the terms 'vulcanization' and 'curing' sometimes used interchangeably in this context. It works by forming cross-links between sections of polymer chain which results in increased rigidity and durability, as well as other changes in the mechanical and electrical properties of the material.

The word vulcanization is derived from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and forge.

Bakelite

Bakelite Products

Bakelite, a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin, formed from a condensation reaction of phenol with formaldehyde was the first plastic made from synthetic components. It was developed by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland in Yonkers, New York, in 1907.

Bakelite was patented on December 7, 1909. The creation of a synthetic plastic was revolutionary for its electrical nonconductivity and heat-resistant properties in electrical insulators, radio and telephone casings and such diverse products as kitchenware, jewelry, pipe stems, children's toys, and firearms.

It finds a variety of applications, especially in the manufacture of electrical switches and other non-conducting devices. It is also used to make bottles, plastic dishes, etc.

Corn Flakes

Corn flakes, or cornflakes, is a breakfast cereal made by toasting flakes of corn (maize). The cereal was created by William Kellogg in 1894 for his brother John Kellogg. John Kellogg wanted a food that would be healthy for the patients of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan where he was superintendent. The breakfast cereal proved popular among the patients, but Will Kellogg wanted to add sugar to increase the popularity. However, John Kellogg did not approve this, so Will Kellogg started his own company-Kellogg Company to produce corn flakes for the wider public. A patent for the process was granted in 1896, after a legal battle between the two brothers.

With corn flakes becoming popular in the wider community, a previous patient at the sanitarium, C. W. Post, started to make rival products. Kellogg continued to experiment and various ingredients were added and different grains were used. In 1928, he started to manufacture Rice Krispies, another successful breakfast cereal.

There are many generic brands of corn flakes produced by various manufacturers. As well as being used as a breakfast cereal, the crushed flakes can be a substitute for bread crumbs in recipes and can be incorporated into many cooked dishes.

Cyanoacrylate (Super Glue)

Super Glue

Cyanoacrylates are a family of strong fast-acting adhesives with industrial, medical, and household uses. They are various esters of cyanoacrylic acid. The acryl groups in the resin rapidly polymerize in the presence of water to form long, strong chains. They have some minor toxicity.Cyanoacrylates are mainly used as adhesives. They require some care and knowledge for effective use: they do not bond some materials; they do not fill spaces, unlike epoxies, and a very thin layer bonds more effectively than a thicker one that does not cure properly; they bond many substances, including human skin and tissues. They have an exothermic reaction to natural fibres: cotton, wool, leather, see reaction with cotton below.

Cyanoacrylate glue has a veryr low shearing strength, which has led to its use as a temporary adhesive in cases where the piece needs to be sheared off later. Common examples include mounting a workpiece to a sacrificial glue block on a lathe, and tightening pins and bolts. It is also used in conjunction with another, slower, but more resilient adhesive as a way of rapidly forming a joint, which then holds the pieces in the appropriate configuration until the second adhesive has set.

Cyanoacrylate-based glue has a weak bond with smooth surfaces and as such easily gives to friction; a good example of this is the fact that cyanoacrylates may be removed from human skin by means of abrasives (e.g. sugar or sandpaper).

Glass

Glassware

Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent amorphous solid, that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. It finds a variety of applications from the ancient times. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling (quenching) of the molten form; some glasses such as volcanic glass are naturally occurring. The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of manufactured glass are "silicate glasses" based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand. Soda-lime glass, containing around 70% silica, account for around 90% of manufactured glass. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, although silica-free glasses often have desirable properties for applications in modern communications technology. Some objects, such as drinking glasses and eyeglasses, are so commonly made of silicate-based glass that they are simply called by the name of the material.

Naturally occurring obsidian glass was used by Stone Age societies as it fractures along very sharp edges, making it ideal for cutting tools and weapons. Glass-making dates back to at least 6000 years, long before humans had discovered how to smelt iron. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first true synthetic glass was made in Lebanon and the coastal north Syria, Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt. The earliest known glass objects, of the mid third millennium BCE, were beads, perhaps initially created as accidental by-products of metal-working (slags) or during the production of faience, a pre-glass vitreous material made by a process similar to glazing. Early glass was rarely transparent and often contained impurities and imperfections. During the Late Bronze Age there was a rapid growth in glassmaking technology in Egypt and Western Asia. Archaeological finds from this period include coloured glass ingots, vessels, and beads. Much early glass production relied on grinding techniques borrowed from stone working meaning that glass was ground and carved in a cold state.

Insulin

Human Insulin

Insulin is a peptide hormone that is secreted by beta cells of the pancreatic islets. It is considered to be the main anabolic hormone of the body, which regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and protein by promoting the absorption of glucose from the blood into liver, fat and skeletal muscle cells. Circulating insulin also affects the synthesis of proteins in a wide variety of tissues. It is therefore an anabolic hormone, promoting the conversion of small molecules in the blood into large molecules inside the cells. Low insulin levels in the blood have the opposite effect by promoting widespread catabolism, especially of reserve body fat.

Beta cells are sensitive to blood sugar levels so that they secrete insulin into the blood in response to high level of glucose; and inhibit secretion of insulin when glucose levels are low. Insulin enhances glucose uptake and metabolism in the cells, thereby reducing blood sugar level.

Decreased or loss of insulin activity results in diabetes mellitus, a condition of high blood sugar level (hyperglycaemia).

The human insulin protein is composed of 51 amino acids. It is a heterodimer of an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by disulfide bonds. Insulin's structure varies slightly between species of animals. Insulin from animal sources differs somewhat in effectiveness (in carbohydrate metabolism effects) from human insulin because of these variations. Porcine insulin is especially close to the human version, and was widely used to treat type 1 diabetics before human insulin could be produced in large quantities by recombinant DNA technologies.

Insulin was the first peptide hormone discovered. Frederick Banting and Charles Herbert Best, working in the labaratory of J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto, were the first to isolate insulin from dog pancreas in 1921. Frederick Sanger sequenced the amino acid structure in 1951, which made insulin the first protein to be fully sequenced. Insulin is also the first protein to be chemically synthesised and produced by DNA recombinant technology. It is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, the most important medications needed in a basic health system.

Coca Cola

A can of Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by The Coca-Cola Company. It is one of the most common soft drinks in the present day. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton and was bought out by businessman Asa Griggs Candler, whose marketing tactics led Coca-Cola to its dominance of the world soft-drink market throughout the 20th century. The drink's name refers to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves, and kola nuts (a source of caffeine). The current formula of Coca-Cola remains a trade secret; however, a variety of reported recipes and experimental recreations have been published.

The Coca-Cola Company produces concentrate, which is then sold to licensed Coca-Cola bottlers throughout the world. The bottlers, who hold exclusive territory contracts with the company, produce the finished product in cans and bottles from the concentrate, in combination with filtered water and sweeteners. The bottlers then sell, distribute, and merchandise Coca-Cola to retail stores, restaurants, and vending machines throughout the world. The Coca-Cola Company also sells concentrate for soda fountains of major restaurants and foodservice distributors.

Quinine

Quinine Hydrochloride Tablets

Quinine is a medication used to treat malaria and babesiosis. This includes the treatment of malaria due to Plasmodium falciparum that is resistant to chloroquine when artesunate is not available. Malaria resistance to quinine occurs in certain areas of the world. Quinine is also the ingredient in tonic water that gives it its bitter taste.

Quinine was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of a cinchona tree, which is native to Peru. Bark extracts had been used to treat malaria since at least 1632 and it was introduced to Spain as early as 1636 by Jesuit missionaries from the New World. Quinine is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system.

Common side effects include headache, ringing in the ears, trouble seeing, and sweating. More severe side effects include deafness, low blood platelets, and an irregular heartbeat. Use can make one more prone to sunburn. While it is unclear if use during pregnancy causes harm to the baby, treating malaria during pregnancy with quinine when appropriate is still recommended. Quinine is an alkaloid, a naturally occurring chemical compound. How it works as a medicine is not entirely clear.

Parallel Universe -Will 2020 be the year of biggest interesting discovery so far?

2020-05-23T10:50:00.000+05:30

Fountain of high-energy particles detected in Antarctica may be proof of a parallel universe.

A group of NASA scientists have claimed that `a fountain of high-energy particles erupting from the ice` in Antarctica may be proof of a parallel universe -- where the rules of physics must be the opposite of our own.

A Look as to how a parallel universe would look -Bubble Universe

In what may be called a rejig from sci-fi TV shows and comics of the early 1960s, a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported.

The experts, in an experiment being carried out in Antarctica, used a giant balloon to carry NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, high above Antarctica, where there would be no radio noise to distort its findings.

In the Antarctic, things happen at a glacial pace. Just ask Peter Gorham. For a month at a time, he and his colleagues would watch a giant balloon carrying a collection of antennas float high above the ice, scanning over a million square kilometres of the frozen landscape for evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space.

NASA's Anatartic's Research Lab

When the experiment returned to the ground after its first flight, it had nothing to show for itself, bar the odd flash of background noise. It was the same story after the second flight more than a year later.

NASA's ANITA

While the balloon was in the sky for the third time, the researchers decided to go over the past data again, particularly those signals dismissed as noise. It was lucky they did. Examined more carefully, one signal seemed to be the signature of a high-energy particle. But it wasn’t what they were looking for. Moreover, it seemed impossible. Rather than bearing down from above, this particle was exploding out of the ground.So ,some scientists have bizarrely proposed that the particles could be flowing into our world from a parallel universe where the fundamentals of physics are different to ours.

That strange finding was made in 2016. Since then, all sorts of suggestions rooted in known physics have been put forward to account for the perplexing signal, and all have been ruled out. What’s left is shocking in its implications. Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards. It is perhaps the most mind-melting idea ever to have emerged from the Antarctic ice – but it might just be true. …

According to a report by a Famous Science journal , a parallel universe where everything is mirrored could have been created during the Big Bang.

Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, has proposed the particles are right-handed neutrinos moving back in time.

Scientists are baffled by the particles in Antarctica because they appear to be streaming from the ground up, a feat normally considered impossible for high-energy particles.

Lead researcher and University of Hawai's Physics Professor Peter Gorham said the particles resemble an upside-down cosmic ray shower.

He said: "What we saw is something that looked just like a cosmic ray, as seen a reflection off the ice sheet but it wasn't reflected.It was as if the cosmic ray had come out of the ice itself. A very strange thing"

NEUTRINOS- are subatomic particles with a neutral charge and a mass smaller than any other known elementary particle.The particles were created in the Big Bang and were wrongly thought for a long time to travel faster than the speed of light.

Why India would be the worst-affected country in the world by the coronavirus(COVID-19)

2020-05-21T15:06:00.000+05:30

The novel Coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) is by far the most dangerous biological virus that has already taken the lives of many, mainly in Europe and the US. As of 21 May 2020, the number of cases of COVID-19 worldwide is approximately 4.97 million with a whopping 327000 deaths already. The major contribution to thee numbers comes from the US, with more than 1.5 million confirmed cases and close to a hundred thousand deaths.

Why India?

On examining the numbers, it might seem that COVID-19 cases are fairly controlled in India considering its population, and the number of deaths is also quite low as compared to some other nations. The number of new cases per day is getting high pretty fast, and its would be very soon to reach two hundred thousand cases here. Currently, the number of confirmed cases stands at a little higher than a hundred thousand, with around 3,500 deaths.

However, there are certain things listed below, which, if not addressed by the government and the people, would affect India really bad.

1. Relaxation of Lockdown:

Streets during lockdown

It is the forth phase of lockdown here in India, but there are very little to no restrictions imposed on the people. Pretty much every shops in the towns are open, and streets are filled with people. It seems everything is being carried out normally and in some places, even without precautions and safety measures. The government doesn't seem to be bothered at all and the pandemic situation is being taken very lightly. The Ministers and the officials offer only one explanation: "Everything cannot remain closed forever, so we must learn to live with the Coronavirus". This is what is extremely dangerous, as most countries, including the US has tried so treat the pandemic situation in a similar way in the beginning and they regret now. Now, with so many cases of COVID-19 across the country, the government has started treating the pandemic this way. This is a really big threat to the country. Complete lockdown for at least 3-4 months or even more had been the only way to control the coronavirus outbreak. With such flaws in administration, "a normal day where one could visit a shopping mall, eat street food and roam with friends", isn't expected soon.

2. Corruption in all Aspects

Here in India, corruption exists everywhere, in some way or the other, especially at the local level. There have been several cases where COVID-19 cases were mishandled by the officials at the local level. Several scams are being run too, by hotels, local taxis, buses, and even the testing centres. In West Bengal, a state in India, there have been cases in which ambulance drivers are illegally operating across districts, to transport goods, people, and charging high amounts of money. They also manage to produce fake COVID-19 negative reports, in which they are being helped in some way by hospitals and test centres. Thus, one can safely say that there are several COVID-19 cases and even deaths(probably) that haven't come to highlight!

3. Goverment permits to carry out pending exams

Representative Image

Students are the most important section of the society. They are the future generation whose careers and health should not be compromised. Carrying out examinations in the present situation(which shall get even worse in a month) would be extremely risky, even with proper measures. Apart from this, a major section of students would also face hassles in travelling during the exam days. During entrance exams, interstate traveling would be required and students may be quarantined in that process, thus, leading to the loss of precious time, and creating hassles for them. There is in fact, no reason to carry out the exams haphazardly amid the pandemic as the new academic session for most universities won't start until the country is COVID-19 free.

4. Irresponsible Citizens

The spread of the Coronavirus mainly depends how people maintain social distancing and take proper precautionary measures in their daily lives. It seems that most people here in India are irresponsible in social aspects. There aren't many who wear masks while roaming outside, nor they use sanitizers or maintain social distancing. Many seem not no care at all. The pandemic situation cannot be controlled if the people aren't conscious, and don't take proper precautions.

Thus, its time to be aware of the fact that the Coronavirus isn't a joke. It can have far reaching consequences if the pandemic scenario is not handled properly, considering how it has affected even the well-developed countries of the world.The way it is being handled here in India would bring us a Doom's Day.

Long-lived artificial pionic Helium atom created for the first time!

2020-05-19T14:49:00.000+05:30

Pionic helium: In this experiment, a pion – shown here with one orange and one blue particle representing its quark and anti-quark – replaces one of the two electrons in the helium atom. This new metastable atom is then excited with laser light (shown here in red) to probe its properties. (Courtesy: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics/Thorsten Naeser)

After eight years of ongoing research, a group led by Masaki Hori, senior physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has now succeeded in a challenging experiment: In a helium atom, they replaced an electron with a pion in a specific quantum state and verified the existence of this long-lived "pionic helium" for the very first time. The usually short-lived pion could thereby exist 1000 times longer than it normally would in other varieties of matter. Pions belong to an important family of particles that determine the stability and decay of atomic nuclei. The pionic helium atom would enable scientists to study pions in an extremely precise manner using laser spectroscopy.

How was the pion-Helium achieved?

To achieve this, the Helium atom was cooled to almost absolutely Zero Temperature. At this temperature, Helium becomes a superfluid and is able to climb the walls of the container. Then, to create the pionic Helium, researchers shot the Helium atom with pions.

Pions are similar to protons and neutrons but are composed of only one quark and antiquark. They can be either positive, negative or neutral depending on the different compositions of the quarks and antiquarks. While it is not possible to swap a negative quark for an electron and get a stable atom, researchers have now shown that it is possible dor a very short amount of time.

The challenge that the team faced :

The challenge the team struggled with for eight years was proving that such a pionic helium atom exists in a tank filled with extremely cold, superfluid helium. In the helium atom, the pion behaves like a very heavy electron. It can only jump between discrete quantum states, like climbing steps on a ladder. The team had to find a long-lived state and a very special quantum leap which they could excite with a laser and which would kick the pion into the helium nucleus and destroy the atom. Then the team could detect the debris from the breakup of the nucleus as a "smoking gun" (see figure). However, the theoreticians couldn't exactly predict at which light wavelength the quantum leap would occur.

So the team had to install three complex laser systems, one after the other, until they were successful.

Research advantages it could provide:

The ability to make artificial atoms containing exotic particles in place of electrons is giving physicists a new way of probing fundamental interactions. This recent work could shed light on the nature of both pions and neutrinos – tiny, neutral particles for which certain attributes, including mass, remain relatively poorly understood.

The Strangest Objects in the Universe ever Discovered

2020-05-19T14:21:00.001+05:30

The universe is an unsolved mystery which is beyond the scope of human beings to resolve. Still, humanity is trying hard to discover new and unique objects lying somewhere in the space. In this process, numerous strange and unexplainable things have been found, that have left many in great confusion.

Here is a small list of such strange things that will definitely intrigue you!

Nuclear Pasta

Image Credits: Livescience

Nuclear pasta is a theoretical type of degenerate matter that is postulated to exist within the crusts of neutron stars. If it does in fact exist, nuclear pasta is the strongest material in the universe. Between the surface of a neutron star and the quark–gluon plasma at the core, at matter densities of 10^14 g/cm^3, nuclear attraction and Coulomb repulsion forces are of similar magnitude. The competition between the forces leads to the formation of a variety of complex structures assembled from neutrons and protons. Astrophysicists call these types of structures nuclear pasta because the geometry of the structures resembles various types of pasta.

Neutron stars are formed as a result of a phenomenon called supernova, and these do not possess a gaseous plasma. In fact, the gravitational force of attraction is so intense that the compact mas overcomes the electron degenaracy pressure and results in electron capture to occur within a star. As a result, a very compact sphere of almost pure neutron matter is formed.

At the surface, the pressure is low enough that conventional nuclei, such as helium and iron, can exist independently of one another and are not crushed together due to the mutual Coulomb repulsion of their nuclei. At the core, the pressure is so great that this Coulomb repulsion cannot support individual nuclei, and some form of ultradense matter, such as the theorized quark–gluon plasma, should exist.

The presence of a small population of protons is necessary to the formation of nuclear pasta. The nuclear attraction between protons and neutrons is greater than the nuclear attraction of two protons or two neutrons. Similar to how neutrons act to stabilize heavy nuclei of conventional atoms against the electric repulsion of the protons, the protons act to stabilize the pasta phases. The competition between the electric repulsion of the protons, the attractive force between nuclei, and the pressure at different depths in the star result in the formation of nuclear pasta. Further, the strength of nuclear pasta is estimated to be 10 billion times the strength of steel.

Mysterious Radio Signals(FRB)

FRB, which stands for fast radio burst, refers to a transient radio pulse of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds, caused by some high-energy astrophysical process which is yet to be understood. Although they are really high energy pulses emitted from various sources, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon. The first FRB was discovered by researcher Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic in 2007 when they were looking through archival pulsar survey data, and it is therefore commonly referred to as the Lorimer Burst. Many FRBs have since been recorded, including several that have been detected to repeat in seemingly irregular ways. Nonetheless, one FRB, as of February 2020, has been detected to repeat in a regular way: particularly, FRB 180916 seems to pulse every 16.35 days. Although the exact origin and cause is uncertain, most are extragalactic. The first Milky Way FRB was detected in April 2020.

When the FRBs are polarized, it indicates that they are emitted from a source contained within an extremely powerful magnetic field. The origin of the FRBs has not beenidentified; proposals for their origin range from a rapidly rotating neutron star and a black hole, to extraterrestrial intelligence.

The localization and characterization in 2012 of FRB 121102, one of the three repeating sources, has improved the understanding of the source class. FRB 121102 is identified with a galaxy at a distance of approximately 3 billion light-years and is embedded in an extreme environment. The first host galaxy identified for a non-repeating burst, FRB 180924, was identified in 2019 and is a much larger and more ordinary galaxy, nearly the size of the Milky Way. In August 2019, astronomers reported the detection of eight more repeating FRB signals. In January 2020, astronomers reported the precise location of a second repeating burst, FRB 180916. One FRB seems to have been in the same location as a known gamma-ray burst.

On 28 April 2020, a pair of millisecond-timescale bursts consistent with observed fast radio bursts, with a fluence of >1.5 million Jy/ms, was detected from the same area of sky as the magnetar SGR 1935+2154. Furthermore, the dispersion measure was too low to have originated anywhere outside of the Milky Way. Although it was thousands of times less intrinsically bright than previously observed fast radio bursts, its comparative proximity rendered it the most powerful fast radio burst yet observed, reaching a peak flux of either a few thousand or several hundred thousand Janskies, comparable to the brightness of the radio sources Cassiopeia A and Cygnus A at the same frequencies. This established magnetars as at least one ultimate source of fast radio bursts, although the exact cause remains unknown.

The Rings of Dwarf Planet Haumea

Haumea

Haumea is a very unique dwarf planet orbiting the Sun in the Kuiper belt beyond Pluto. It was discovered in 2003 by a team of American astronomers at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.

Originally called 2003 EL61, Haumea is named after the Hawaiian goddess of birth and fertility. In September 2008 the International Astronomical Union declared Haumea as the fifth dwarf planet and the fourth plutoid. Haumea is an elongated object, unlike a dwarf planet. Unlike most objects in the Kuiper belt, Haumea is not an equal mixture of ice and rock but likely has a thin water ice crust covering a rocky interior. It is one of the densest Kuiper belt objects, with a density of 1.885 grams per cubic centimeter. Haumea has a surface feature, the Dark Red Spot, which may be an impact crater that has revealed the dwarf planet’s interior.

In 2017 astronomers discovered a ring around Haumea. The ring is about 70 km (40 miles) wide and is at a radius of 2,287 km (1,421 km) from the dwarf planet. The ring is in the same plane with Haumea’s equator and the orbit of Hi‘iaka. Particles in the ring are in a 3:1 resonance with the dwarf planet’s rotation; that is, ring particles make one revolution for every three times Haumea rotates. Haumea is the most distant solar system body with a ring and the only dwarf planet and Kuiper belt object to have one.

Dark Matter Less Galaxy

The galaxy NGC1052-DF2 observed with the help of the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, a telescope array specially crafted to investigate low-brightness targets that are often otherwise overlooked, has been found to comprise mostly of luminous or visible matter. Although it is seen that most of the mass of a galaxy is contributed by dark matter, but this galaxy's mass mostly consists of visible matter.

In other galaxies, dark matter is far more prevalent than “normal” matter, usually by a factor of 30 times or more. In fact, some galaxies like Dragonfly 44 (also identified by the telephoto array, as the name suggests) are almost made up entirely of dark matter. Dark matter is key for defining the structure of these galaxies; it drives most of the motion for the stars found within them, and it holds galaxies together in larger groups called galaxy clusters.

Tabby's Star

Tabby's Star (also known as Boyajian's Star and WTF Star, and designated KIC 8462852 in the Kepler Input Catalog) is an F-type main-sequence star located in the constellation Cygnus approximately 1,470 light-years (450 pc) from Earth. Unusual light fluctuations of the star, including up to a 22% dimming in brightness, were discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters project. In September 2015, astronomers and citizen scientists associated with the project posted a preprint of an article describing the data and possible interpretations. The discovery was made from data collected by the Kepler space telescope, which observed changes in the brightness of distant stars to detect exoplanets.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the star's large irregular changes in brightness as measured by its light curve, but none to date fully explain all aspects of the curve. One explanation is that an "uneven ring of dust" orbits Tabby's Star. In another explanation, the star's luminosity is modulated by changes in the efficiency of heat transport to its photosphere, so no external obscuration is required. A third hypothesis, based on a lack of observed infrared light, posits a swarm of cold, dusty comet fragments in a highly eccentric orbit, however, the notion that disturbed comets from such a cloud could exist in high enough numbers to obscure 22% of the star's observed luminosity has been doubted. Another hypothesis is that a large number of small masses in "tight formation" are orbiting the star. Furthermore, spectroscopic study of the system has found no evidence for coalescing material or hot close-in dust or circumstellar matter from an evaporating or exploding planet within a few astronomical units of the mature central star. It has also been hypothesized that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm; however, further analysis based on data through the end of 2017 showed wavelength-dependent dimming consistent with dust but not an opaque object such as an alien megastructure, which would block all wavelengths of light equally.

Tabby's Star is not the only star that has large irregular dimmings, but all other such stars are young stellar objects called YSO dippers, which have different dimming patterns. An example of such an object is EPIC 204278916.

4-Billion-year-old Neutrino

A single, high-energy neutrino struck Earth on Sept. 22, 2017. It came from a distant galaxy, wrapped around a supermassive black hole.

For 4 billion years, this neutrino soared through space undisturbed. It might have passed stars, chunks of rock, or other galaxies. It might even have passed through them; neutrinos can usually stream through matter without leaving any trace. So, for most of the time it took life on Earth to emerge, to form bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, and for one of those animals (us) to discover their existence, this neutrino traveled undisturbed.

Then it crashed into an atom in a block of ice in Antarctica, spat another high-energy particle called a muon into the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive particle detector buried under the Antarctic ice, and it disappeared forever.

Planet Nine

Planet Nine refers to a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the unusual clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (eTNOs), bodies beyond Neptune that orbit the Sun at distances averaging more than 250 times that of the Earth. These eTNOs tend to make their closest approaches to the Sun in one sector, and their orbits are similarly tilted. These improbable alignments suggest that an undiscovered planet may be shepherding the orbits of the most distant known Solar System objects.

This hypothetical super-Earth-sized planet would have a predicted mass of five to ten times that of the Earth, and an elongated orbit 400 to 800 times as far from the Sun as the Earth. Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown suggest that Planet Nine could be the core of a giant planet that was ejected from its original orbit by Jupiter during the formation of the Solar System. Others propose that the planet was captured from another star, was once a rogue planet, or that it formed on a distant orbit and was pulled into an eccentric orbit by a passing star.

7968 Elst- Pizarro

Elst Pizzaro

Comet Elst–Pizarro is really unique, as it is a body that displays characteristics of both asteroids and comets, and is the prototype of main-belt comets. Its orbit keeps it within the asteroid belt, yet it displayed a dust tail like a comet while near perihelion in 1996, 2001, and 2007. As a comet it is formally designated as 133P/Elst–Pizarro and as an asteroid it is designated as 7968 Elst–Pizarro.

Elst–Pizarro was reported in 1979 as minor planet 1979 OW7, with its image on a photographic plate being completely stellar in appearance. Its orbit remains entirely within the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, with eccentricity 0.165, typical of a minor planet in the asteroid belt. However, the images taken by Eric W. Elst and Guido Pizarro in 1996, when it was near perihelion, clearly show a cometary tail. Since this is not normal behaviour for asteroids, it is suspected that Elst–Pizarro has a different, probably icy, composition. The cometary nature of Elst–Pizarro was first discovered when a linear dust feature was observed with the ESO 1-metre Schmidt telescope at La Silla Observatory on 7 August 1996.

Subsequently, around the next perihelion in November 2001, the cometary activity appeared again, and persisted for 5 months. It again came to perihelion on 8 February 2013. The outgassing was found to happen only on small part of the surface measuring less than 600m in effective diameter, likely being the relatively recent (younger than 100 million years) impact crater.

Hoag’s Object

Hoag's Object

Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. The galaxy is named after Arthur Hoag who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy with eight billion stars, spanning roughly 100,000 light years.

In the initial announcement of his discovery, Hoag proposed that the visible ring was a product of gravitational lensing, which was later discarded because the nucleus and the ring have the same redshift, and because more advanced telescopes revealed the knotty structure of the ring, something that would not be visible if the ring were the product of gravitational lensing. Many of the details of this galaxy still remain a mystery, most important of which is how it formed.

The Bermuda Triangle of space

There's a place more than 500 kilometers above the Atlantic Ocean where the computer systems of the Internationsl Space Station suddenly crash, space telescopes can't operate and satellites shutdown. Some people have termed this zone as the "Bermuda Triangle of Space." Because of its shape, some researchers nicknamed it "the Duck." But there's nothing really mysterious about the South Atlantic Anomaly. It's a region of space where the Earth's magnetic field is off center and lets in space radiation to especially low altitudes. Now a team of Italian researchers have re-crunched the data from a decade-old satellite to get a clearer picture of this space hazard.

The anomaly is part of the Van Allen Radiation Belts, a ring of trapped solar radiation between about 1,000 and 6,000 kilometers above the planet's surface (there's a second ring that starts about 13,000 kilometers out). However the rings are a little bit off-kilter because the middle of Earth's magnetic field doesn't align straight through the center of the Earth. That brings one sliver of the ring closer to the planet's surface, centered off the coast of Brazil.

The Italian researchers scoured archived radiation data from the BeppoSAX satellite that flew from 1996 through 2003. The satellite carried with it a particle monitor which recorded whenever it flew through a cloud of high-energy protons and electrons like the SAA. Using this data, scientists were able to build a clearer picture of this radiation zone, or at least the northernmost section of it which the satellite passed through.

Upcoming Technologies that are about to change the world!

2020-05-17T19:13:00.000+05:30

No one can doubt the fact that the most important factor that influences our life is technology. It is also expected that there shall be some really significant technological development in the current decade, that's going to have a huge impact on our lives.

Here is a list of all such technologies which have the potential to revolutionize the world, explained in detail:

GOOGLE GLASS

Google Glass

Google Glass, or simply Glass, is a brand of smart glasses—an optical head-mounted display designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses. It was developed by X (previously Google X) with the mission of producing a ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displayed information in a smartphone-like, hands-free format. Wearers communicated with the Internet via natural language voice commands.

Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified "Glass Explorers" in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014. It had an integral 5 megapixel still/720p video camera. The headset received a great deal of criticism amid concerns that its use could violate existing privacy laws.

On January 15, 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype, to be continued in 2017 tentatively. In July 2017, Google announced the Google Glass Enterprise Edition. In May 2019, Google announced the Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2.

Google Glass applications are free applications built by third-party developers. Glass also uses many existing Google applications, such as Google Now, Google Maps, Google+, and Gmail. Many developers and companies built applications for Glass, including news apps, facial recognition, exercise, photo manipulation, translation, and sharing to social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

It also finds use in the field of medicine.

HYDROGEN POWERED VEHICLES

Hydrogen Powered Car

A hydrogen vehicle is a vehicle that uses hydrogen fuel for motive power. Hydrogen vehicles include hydrogen-fueled space rockets, as well as automobiles and other transportation vehicles. The power plants of such vehicles convert the chemical energy of hydrogen to mechanical energy either by burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, or, more commonly, by reacting hydrogen with oxygen in a fuel cell to run electric motors. Widespread use of hydrogen for fueling transportation is a key element of a proposed hydrogen economy.

There are only a few hydrogen cars publicly available in select markets: the Toyota Mirai, the world's first mass produced dedicated fuel cell electric vehicle, the Hyundai Nexo, and the Honda Clarity. Several other companies are working to develop hydrogen cars.

As of 2019, 98% of hydrogen is produced by steam methane reforming, which emits carbon dioxide. It can be produced by thermochemical or pyrolytic means using renewable feedstocks, but the processes are currently expensive. Various technologies are being developed that aim to deliver costs low enough, and quantities great enough, to compete with hydrogen production using natural gas. The drawbacks of hydrogen use are high carbon emissions intensity when produced from natural gas, capital cost burden, low energy content per unit volume at ambient conditions, production and compression of hydrogen, the investment required in filling stations to dispense hydrogen, transportation of hydrogen to filling stations and lack of ability to produce or dispense hydrogen at home.

Artificial Intelligence(AI)

Artificial Intelligence(AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals.It the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving".

As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require "intelligence" are often removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the AI effect. A quip in Tesler's Theorem says "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from things considered to be AI, having become a routine technology. Modern machine capabilities generally classified as AI include successfully understanding human speech, competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go), autonomously operating cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, and military simulations.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1955, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism, followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an "AI winter"), followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding. For most of its history, AI research has been divided into sub-fields that often fail to communicate with each other. These sub-fields are based on technical considerations, such as particular goals (e.g. "robotics" or "machine learning"), the use of particular tools ("logic" or artificial neural networks), or deep philosophical differences. Sub-fields have also been based on social factors (particular institutions or the work of particular researchers).

The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence is among the field's long-term goals. Approaches include statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional symbolic AI. Many tools are used in AI, including versions of search and mathematical optimization, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, probability and economics. The AI field draws upon computer science, information engineering, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and many other fields.

The field was founded on the assumption that human intelligence "can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it". This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence. These issues have been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity. Some people also consider AI to be a danger to humanity if it progresses unabated. Others believe that AI, unlike previous technological revolutions, will create a risk of mass unemployment.

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding; and AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in computer science, software engineering and operations research.

In the near future it is of no doubt that AI shall become an integral part of human lives.

SELF DRIVING CARS

Google Self Driving Car

A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous vehicle (AV), connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV), driverless car, robo-car, or robotic car,is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving safely with little or no human input.

Self-driving cars combine a variety of sensors to perceive their surroundings, such as radar, lidar, sonar, GPS, odometry and inertial measurement units. Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage.

Long-distance trucking is seen as being at the forefront of adopting and implementing the technology.

There are different systems that help the self-driving car control the car. Systems that need improvement include the car navigation system, the location system, the electronic map, the map matching, the global path planning, the environment perception, the laser perception, the radar perception, the visual perception, the vehicle control, the perception of vehicle speed and direction, and the vehicle control method.

The challenge for driverless car designers is to produce control systems capable of analyzing sensory data in order to provide accurate detection of other vehicles and the road ahead. Modern self-driving cars generally use Bayesian simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms, which fuse data from multiple sensors and an off-line map into current location estimates and map updates. Waymo has developed a variant of SLAM with detection and tracking of other moving objects (DATMO), which also handles obstacles such as cars and pedestrians. Simpler systems may use roadside real-time locating system (RTLS) technologies to aid localization. Typical sensors include lidar, stereo vision, GPS and IMU. Control systems on automated cars may use Sensor Fusion, which is an approach that integrates information from a variety of sensors on the car to produce a more consistent, accurate, and useful view of the environment. Heavy rainfall, hail, or snow could impede the car sensors.[citation needed]

Driverless vehicles require some form of machine vision for the purpose of visual object recognition. Automated cars are being developed with deep neural networks, a type of deep learning architecture with many computational stages, or levels, in which neurons are simulated from the environment that activate the network. The neural network depends on an extensive amount of data extracted from real-life driving scenarios, enabling the neural network to "learn" how to execute the best course of action.

In May 2018, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they had built an automated car that can navigate unmapped roads. Researchers at their Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system, called MapLite, which allows self-driving cars to drive on roads that they have never been on before, without using 3D maps. The system combines the GPS position of the vehicle, a "sparse topological map" such as OpenStreetMap, (i.e. having 2D features of the roads only), and a series of sensors that observe the road conditions.

Tesla Autopilot

5G is the fifth generation technology standard for cellular networks, which cellular phone companies began deploying worldwide in 2019, the planned successor to the 4G networks which provide connectivity to most current cellphones. Like its predecessors, 5G networks are cellular networks, in which the service area is divided into small geographical areas called cells. All 5G wireless devices in a cell are connected to the Internet and telephone network by radio waves through a local antenna in the cell. The main advantage of the new networks is that they will have greater bandwidth, giving faster download speeds, eventually up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). Due to the increased bandwidth, it is expected that the new networks will not just serve cellphones like existing cellular networks, but also be used as general internet service providers for laptops and desktop computers, competing with existing ISPs such as cable internet, and also will make possible new applications in IoT and M2M areas. Current 4G cellphones will not be able to use the new networks, which will require new 5G enabled wireless devices.

The increased speed is achieved partly by using higher frequency radio waves than current cellular networks. However, higher frequency microwaves have a shorter range than the frequencies used by previous cell phone towers, requiring smaller cells. So to ensure wide service, 5G networks operate on up to three frequency bands, low, medium, and high. A 5G network will be composed of networks of up to 3 different types of cell, each requiring different antennas, each type giving a different tradeoff of download speed vs distance and service area. 5G cellphones and wireless devices will connect to the network through the highest speed antenna within range at their location:

Low-band 5G uses a similar frequency range as current 4G cellphones, 600 - 700 MHz giving download speeds a little higher than 4G: 30-250 megabits per second (Mbit/s). Low-band cell towers will have a similar range and coverage area to current 4G towers. Mid-band 5G uses microwaves of 2.5-3.7 GHz, currently allowing speeds of 100-900 Mbit/s, with each cell tower providing service up to several miles radius. This level of service is the most widely deployed, and should be available in most metropolitan areas in 2020. Some countries are not implementing low-band, making this the minimum service level. High-band 5G uses frequencies of 25 - 39 GHz, near the bottom of the millimeter wave band, to achieve download speeds of 1 - 3 gigabits per second (Gbit/s), comparable to cable internet. However millimeter waves (mmWave or mmW) only have a range of about 1 mile (1.6 km), requiring many small cells, and have trouble passing through some types of building walls. Due to their higher costs, current plans are to deploy these cells only in dense urban environments, and areas where crowds of people congregate such as sports stadiums and convention centers. The above speeds are those achieved in actual tests in 2020, speeds are expected to increase during rollout.

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be defined as a system that fulfills three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects. The overlaid sensory information can be constructive (i.e. additive to the natural environment), or destructive (i.e. masking of the natural environment). This experience is seamlessly interwoven with the physical world such that it is perceived as an immersive aspect of the real environment. In this way, augmented reality alters one's ongoing perception of a real-world environment, whereas virtual reality completely replaces the user's real-world environment with a simulated one. Augmented reality is related to two largely synonymous terms: mixed reality and computer-mediated reality.

The primary value of augmented reality is the manner in which components of the digital world blend into a person's perception of the real world, not as a simple display of data, but through the integration of immersive sensations, which are perceived as natural parts of an environment. The earliest functional AR systems that provided immersive mixed reality experiences for users were invented in the early 1990s, starting with the Virtual Fixtures system developed at the U.S. Air Force's Armstrong Laboratory in 1992. Commercial augmented reality experiences were first introduced in entertainment and gaming businesses. Subsequently, augmented reality applications have spanned commercial industries such as education, communications, medicine, and entertainment. In education, content may be accessed by scanning or viewing an image with a mobile device or by using markerless AR techniques.

Augmented reality is used to enhance natural environments or situations and offer perceptually enriched experiences. With the help of advanced AR technologies (e.g. adding computer vision, incorporating AR cameras into smartphone applications and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulated. Information about the environment and its objects is overlaid on the real world. This information can be virtual or real, e.g. seeing other real sensed or measured information such as electromagnetic radio waves overlaid in exact alignment with where they actually are in space. Augmented reality also has a lot of potential in the gathering and sharing of tacit knowledge. Augmentation techniques are typically performed in real time and in semantic contexts with environmental elements. Immersive perceptual information is sometimes combined with supplemental information like scores over a live video feed of a sporting event. This combines the benefits of both augmented reality technology and heads up display technology (HUD).

Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience. It is seen as a subset of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms build a mathematical model based on sample data, known as "training data", in order to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so. Machine learning algorithms are used in a wide variety of applications, such as email filtering and computer vision, where it is difficult or infeasible to develop conventional algorithms to perform the needed tasks.

Machine learning is closely related to computational statistics, which focuses on making predictions using computers. The study of mathematical optimization delivers methods, theory and application domains to the field of machine learning. Data mining is a related field of study, focusing on exploratory data analysis through unsupervised learning. In its application across business problems, machine learning is also referred to as predictive analytics.

IOT

The Internet of things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

The definition of the Internet of things has evolved due to the convergence of multiple technologies, real-time analytics, machine learning, commodity sensors, and embedded systems. Traditional fields of embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, control systems, automation (including home and building automation), and others all contribute to enabling the Internet of things. In the consumer market, IoT technology is most synonymous with products pertaining to the concept of the "smart home", covering devices and appliances (such as lighting fixtures, thermostats, home security systems and cameras, and other home appliances) that support one or more common ecosystems, and can be controlled via devices associated with that ecosystem, such as smartphones and smart speakers.

There are a number of serious concerns about dangers in the growth of IoT, especially in the areas of privacy and security, and consequently industry and governmental moves to address these concerns have begun.

A growing portion of IoT devices are created for consumer use, including connected vehicles, home automation, wearable technology, connected health, and appliances with remote monitoring capabilities.

Smart home

IoT devices are a part of the larger concept of home automation, which can include lighting, heating and air conditioning, media and security systems. Long-term benefits could include energy savings by automatically ensuring lights and electronics are turned off.

A smart home or automated home could be based on a platform or hubs that control smart devices and appliances. For instance, using Apple's HomeKit, manufacturers can have their home products and accessories controlled by an application in iOS devices such as the iPhone and the Apple Watch. This could be a dedicated app or iOS native applications such as Siri. This can be demonstrated in the case of Lenovo's Smart Home Essentials, which is a line of smart home devices that are controlled through Apple's Home app or Siri without the need for a Wi-Fi bridge. There are also dedicated smart home hubs that are offered as standalone platforms to connect different smart home products and these include the Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple's HomePod, and Samsung's SmartThings Hub. In addition to the commercial systems, there are many non-proprietary, open source ecosystems; including Home Assistant, OpenHAB and Domoticz.

Elder care

One key application of a smart home is to provide assistance for those with disabilities and elderly individuals. These home systems use assistive technology to accommodate an owner's specific disabilities. Voice control can assist users with sight and mobility limitations while alert systems can be connected directly to cochlear implants worn by hearing-impaired users. They can also be equipped with additional safety features. These features can include sensors that monitor for medical emergencies such as falls or seizures. Smart home technology applied in this way can provide users with more freedom and a higher quality of life.

The term "Enterprise IoT" refers to devices used in business and corporate settings. By 2019, it is estimated that the EIoT will account for 9.1 billion devices.

RPA

Robotic process automation (or RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers.. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics (not to be confused with robot software).

In traditional workflow automation tools, a software developer produces a list of actions to automate a task and interface to the back-end system using internal application programming interfaces (APIs) or dedicated scripting language. In contrast, RPA systems develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and then perform the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI. This can lower the barrier to use of automation in products that might not otherwise feature APIs for this purpose.

RPA tools have strong technical similarities to graphical user interface testing tools. These tools also automate interactions with the GUI, and often do so by repeating a set of demonstration actions performed by a user. RPA tools differ from such systems that allow data to be handled in and between multiple applications, for instance, receiving email containing an invoice, extracting the data, and then typing that into a bookkeeping system.

BLOCKCHAIN

A blockchain, originally block chain, is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree).

By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of the data. It is "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way". For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for inter-node communication and validating new blocks. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires consensus of the network majority. Although blockchain records are not unalterable, blockchains may be considered secure by design and exemplify a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Decentralized consensus has therefore been claimed with a blockchain.

Blockchain was invented by a person (or group of people) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to serve as the public transaction ledger of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is unknown. The invention of the blockchain for bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server. The bitcoin design has inspired other applications, and blockchains that are readable by the public are widely used by cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is considered a type of payment rail. Private blockchains have been proposed for business use. Sources such as Computerworld called the marketing of such blockchains without a proper security model "snake oil".

SWEAT POWERED SMARTWATCHES

A typical Smartwatch

Researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have built a technology that may use sweat to substitute traditional batteries in devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers. It operates by collecting the sweat naturally produced by the body and causing the ions in it to respond to polymers from the technician, leading to a reaction that creates electricity.

Depending on the results of the experimentation, the sweat-powered technology works, but it does not seem like it generates enough power to allow you to forgo conventionally charging your wearable apparatus entirely. Instead, the sweat tech could be used to supplement regular charging, which means that you’d need to charge your fitness tracker or smartwatch far less often than you have to.

Sweat-powered smartwatches and exercise trackers could be hugely valuable, as it would save you charging your device regularly. And for the ecological ramifications of reducing our power usage and battery consumption. Lets hope that the tech comes to markets pretty soon.

FLYING CARS

Flying cars may seem fictional, but after some years, they are going to be a significant part of the automobile market. Major brands like Toyota, Uber, Hyundai, Airbus and Boeing have promised to whisk riders through the skies in flying taxis, thus, bringing them out of fiction to reality. The goal is to link urban centers with suburbs while leapfrogging traffic — air taxis could cruise at 180 mph at altitudes of around 1,000 ft to 2,000 ft. But NASA has reported they can go at an altitude up to 5,000 ft.

It’s a market that should continue to mature during this decade and then boom globally. The autonomous urban aircraft market may be worth $1.5 trillion by 2040, according to a Morgan Stanley Research study. Another urban air mobility (UAM) study, by Frost & Sullivan, sees air taxis beginning in 2022 in Dubai and expanding with a compound annual growth rate of about 46% to more than 430,000 units in operation by 2040. Driving this trend is a confluence of technologies, including autonomous vehicles such as drones and self-driving cars, more efficient batteries and advanced manufacturing techniques.

It’s not surprising that companies — from venture-backed start-ups and Uber to major auto and aviation companies — are rushing to grab a foothold in this nascent market. The business has the potential to significantly disrupt the landscape of urban mobility, and investors are pouring millions into commercialization efforts.They are attracted to the fact that electric air taxis have the potential to lower operating and maintenance costs dramatically.

For, us the common people, its going to be really beneficial as it would help in saving time that would be lost sitting in traffic jams, and thus, increase our productivity.

Some crazy chemical reactions that will fascinate you!

2020-05-16T19:50:00.000+05:30

Science has always be fascinating, and the major contribution to this fascination comes from chemical reactions. So, we have come up with a list of a few crazy and unique chemical reactions that will definitely satisfy your eyes!

Heating Calcium Gluconate

Calcium gluconate is a mineral supplement and medication. As a medication it is used by injection into a vein to treat low blood calcium, high blood potassium, and magnesium toxicity. Supplementation is generally only required when there is not enough calcium in the diet.

When Calcium Gluconate is heated, it breaks down into Calcium oxide, carbon, water vapor and carbon dioxide. The water vapor and carbon dioxide froth the carbon and calcium oxide, turning them into enormous gray “snakes”.

Sodium Polyacrylate and Water

Sodium polyacrylate is an example of a super-absorbing polymer. It is a cross-linked (network) polymer that contains sodium atoms. It absorbs water by a process called osmosis. When the (sodium-containing) polymer is placed in contact with water, there is a tendency for the sodium to distribute equally between the network and the water. That means, some of the sodium atoms want to leave the network and move to the water. When these sodium atoms leave, they are replaced with water molecules. Water swells the polymer network to try to keep the sodium concentration balanced between the polymer and the water. The cross-links that connect the chains together prevent them from dissolving/breaking apart in the water. Sodium polyacrylate can absorb 800 times its weight in distilled water, but only 300 times its weight in tap water, since tap water contains some sodium, calcium and other mineral salts.

The Pharaoh's Snake

The reaction was discovered by Wöhler in 1821, soon after the first synthesis of mercury thiocyanate: "Winding out from itself at the same time worm-like processes, to many times its former bulk, of a very light material of the color of graphite" . For some time, a firework product called "Pharaoschlangen" was available to the public in Germany, but was eventually banned when the toxic properties of the product were discovered through the deaths of several children that had mistakenly consumed the resulting solid.

The Pharaoh's Snake experiment is conducted in the same manner as the sugar snake experiment; however, the former uses mercury(II) thiocyanate (Hg(SCN)2) instead of powdered sugar with baking soda. This must be done in a fume hood, because all mercury compounds are hazardous.

After igniting the experiment, mercury(II) thiocyanate breaks down to form mercury(II) sulfide (HgS), carbon disulfide (CS2), and carbon nitride (C3N4).

Diethylzinc and Air

Diethylzinc (C2H5)2Zn, or DEZ, is a highly pyrophoric and reactive organozinc compound consisting of a zinc center bound to two ethyl groups. This colourless liquid is an important reagent in organic chemistry. It is available commercially as a solution in hexanes, heptane, or toluene, or as a pure liquid.

Diethylzinc is pyrophoric, meaning is ignites spontaneously on contact with air. Like most organometallic compounds, the carbon is much more electronegative than the metal center. This causes the Carbon-Zinc bond to be highly polarized toward the carbon(s). The result is a carbon atom with a (sort of) negative charge called a "carbanion." Carbanions are not stable, and react violently with water, air, and just about anything that can either accept a pair of electrons or donate a proton.

Caesium and Water

Caesium (cesium in USA) metal reacts rapidly with water to form a colourless solution of caesium hydroxide (CsOH) and hydrogen gas (H2). The resulting solution is basic because of the dissolved hydroxide. The reaction is very exothermic. The reaction is so fast that if the reaction is carried out in a glass vessel, the glass container will shatter. Although not known for certain, the reaction is probably slower than that of francium (immediately below caesium in the periodic table). The reaction is faster than that of rubidium (immediately above caesium in the periodic table).

2Cs(s) + 2H2O → 2CsOH(aq) + H2(g)

Nitrogen triiodide

Nitrogen triiodide is the inorganic compound with the formula NI3. It is an extremely sensitive contact explosive: small quantities explode with a loud, sharp snap when touched even lightly, releasing a purple cloud of iodine vapor; it can even be detonated by alpha radiation.

NI3 has a complex structural chemistry that is difficult to study because of the instability of the derivatives. The instability of NI3 and NI3 · NH3 can be attributed to the large steric strain caused by the three large iodine atoms being held in proximity to each other around the relatively tiny nitrogen atom. This results in a very low activation energy for its decomposition, a reaction made even more favorable due to the great stability of N2.

Nitrogen triiodide has no practical commercial value due to its extreme shock sensitivity, making it impossible to store, transport, and utilize for controlled explosions. Whereas pure nitroglycerin is also greatly shock-sensitive (although not nearly as much so as nitrogen triiodide, which can be set off with the touch of a feather) and powerful, it was only due to phlegmatizers that its shock sensitivity was reduced and it became safer to handle and transport in the form of dynamite.

Vesuvian Fire

Ammonium dichromate is an inorganic compound with the formula (NH4)2Cr2O7. In this compound, as in all chromates and dichromates, chromium is in a +6 oxidation state, commonly known as hexavalent chromium. It is a salt consisting of ammonium ions and dichromate ions.

Ammonium dichromate is sometimes known as Vesuvian Fire, because of its use in demonstrations of tabletop "volcanoes". However, this demonstration has become unpopular in schools due to the compound's carcinogenic nature. It has also been used in pyrotechnics and in the early days of photography.

Elephant's Toothpaste

Elephant's toothpaste is a foamy substance caused by the rapid decomposition of hydrogen peroxide using potassium iodide or yeast and warm water as a catalyst. How rapidly the reaction proceeds will depend on the concentration of hydrogen peroxide. Because it requires only a small number of ingredients and makes a "volcano of foam", this is a popular experiment for children to perform in school or at parties; the experiment is also known as the "marshmallow experiment", but is unrelated to the psychological Stanford marshmallow experiment.

About 50 ml of concentrated (>30%) hydrogen peroxide is first mixed with liquid soap or dishwashing detergent. Then, a catalyst, often around 10 ml potassium iodide solution or catalase from baker's yeast, is added to make the hydrogen peroxide decompose very quickly. Hydrogen peroxide breaks down into oxygen and water. As a small amount of hydrogen peroxide generates a large volume of oxygen, the oxygen quickly pushes out of the container. The soapy water traps the oxygen, creating bubbles, and turns into foam. About 5-10 drops of food coloring could also be added before the catalyst to dramatize the effect. How rapidly the reaction occurs will depend on the concentration of hydrogen peroxide used.

Potassium Chlorate and Sugar

When potassium chlorate and ordinary table sugar are combined, and a drop of sulfuric acid is added as a catalyst, the two react violently with each other, releasing large quantities of heat energy, a spectacular purplish flame, and a great deal of smoke. (The purple hue of the flame is presumably due to the heating of the potassium.)

Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction

A Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, or BZ reaction, is one of a class of reactions that serve as a classical example of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, resulting in the establishment of a nonlinear chemical oscillator. The only common element in these oscillators is the inclusion of bromine and an acid. The reactions are important to theoretical chemistry in that they show that chemical reactions do not have to be dominated by equilibrium thermodynamic behavior. These reactions are far from equilibrium and remain so for a significant length of time and evolve chaotically. In this sense, they provide an interesting chemical model of non-equilibrium biological[clarification needed] phenomena; as such, mathematical models and simulations of the BZ reactions themselves are of theoretical interest, showing phenomenon as noise-induced order.

Barking Dog Reaction

The "Barking Dog" is an exothermic chemical reaction that results from the ignition of a mixture of carbon disulfide and nitrous oxide. When ignited in a cylindrical tube, the reaction produces a bright flash and a loud "woof" - reminiscent of a barking dog.

In simple terms, the ‘Barking Dog’ reaction is a combustion process, in which a fuel (carbon disulfide, CS2) reacts with an oxidizing agent (nitrous oxide, N2O), producing heat and elemental sulfur. The flame front in the reaction is a zone of very hot, luminous gas, produced by the reactants decomposing.

Sodium Potassium Alloy and water

Sodium-potassium alloy, colloquially called NaK, is an alloy of two alkali metals, sodium (Na, atomic number 11) and potassium (K, atomic number 19), and which is usually liquid at room temperature. Various commercial grades are available. NaK is highly reactive with water (like its constituent elements) and may catch fire when exposed to air, so must be handled with special precautions.

Isopropyl Alcohol Fire Bottle

Low-boiling alcohols vaporize readily, and when alcohol is placed in a bottle, it forms a volatile mixture with the air. A simple match held by the mouth of the jug provides the activation energy needed for the combustion of the alcohol/air mixture. Only a small amount of alcohol is used and it quickly vaporizes to a heavier-than-air vapor. The alcohol vapor and air are all that remain in the bottle. Alcohol molecules in the vapor phase are farther apart than in the liquid phase and present far more surface area for reaction; therefore the combustion reaction that occurs is very fast. Since the burning is so rapid and occurs in the confined space of a bottle with a small neck, the sound produced is very interesting, sounding like a “whoosh.”

Reaction between Caesium and Fluorine

Since Caesium is the most reactive of the alkali metals and fluorine is the most reactive of the halogens, the exothermic reaction which occurs produces a bright (kind of lilac), vigorous explosion.

The reason why this occurs is because caesium is a group one element which means that it has to lose one electron to have a complete outer shell whilst fluorine which is a group 7 element has to gain one to complete its shell. Caesium’s outer shell is far away from the nucleus as it has so many other shells in the way therefore the electrostatic forces holding the negative electron to the positive nucleus are weak. For fluorine ,as it is a non metal one period down the table, the opposite occurs where fluorine’s outmost shell is very close to the nucleus with only one being in the way creating strong electrostatic forces meaning it can get one negative electron very easily. The reaction produces an ion between the two elements with a strong electrostatic bond as caesium gives one electron to fluorine creating a positive caesium ion and a negative fluoride ion.

Aluminum meets bromine

Liquid Nitrogen and Water

When you pour the liquid nitrogen into water, you get a big burst of mist, frantic boiling (the liquid nitrogen, not the water!), and a wash of fog pouring from the water container. It's not nearly as much fun.

Gallium in hot Water

Gallium is a soft, silvery blue metal at standard temperature and pressure.

It has a very low melting point of 29.76 degrees celsius which allows it to melt in the human hand, and then refreeze if removed.

The video above shows a Gallium spoon immersed in a glass of hot water. The way it melts is quite satisfying!

Glycine-nitrate reaction with precursors of barium nitrate, zirconyl nitrate and yttrium nitrate to form BaZr0.8Y0.2O3

Explosive Polymerization

Will Interstellar Travel ever become a reality?

2020-05-16T19:31:00.002+05:30

Credits : wallup.net

Right from the time humanity evolved, about 300,000 years ago, human beings have dispersed far and wide, to every corner of the planet. The curiosity and the desire to explore new lands have been fundamental to human kind. So much so, that the aspect of interstellar travels seems like a genuine scientific possibility in the recent times!

The quest to conquer and explore new places have led to the emergence of the era of space exploration in the present times. In the past years, human beings have achieved significant milestones of space exploration from setting foot on the moon to sending probes to the outer edge of the solar system. The recent developments towards the exploration and possible colonisation of Mars is no exception.

But what happens after we have explored each and every part of our solar system? Do we still have something to explore?

The answer is yes - absolutely! Keeping in mind the vastness of our universe, you can be pretty sure that there will always be a new place for humanity to explore! But, what do we expect in the near future? Interstellar exploration could be a thing, right? But will it ever be possible? Believe it or not, its probably only a matter of time before interstellar travel becomes a reality!

Curious? You might be wondering if interstellar travel is possible with present day technology? Or if it is possible when are our going to board our spaceships to explore the vastness of the universe that lies beyond our solar system? Where should we go in our first ever interstellar mission?

Don't worry, this article will help you find the answers to all the questions you might presently be wondering about! Let's get started!

Is Interstellar space travel possible?

Though the very thought of interstellar Travel seems to be a scene from a far-fetched science fiction movie, recent discoveries have showed that interstellar explorations should indeed be possible someday in the future.

Several crazy and interesting ideas and theories have been proposed by scientists for deep space exploration in the recent times, from Fusion rockets to wormholes, antimatter drives and, of course, the Futuristic "Alcubierre Wrap Drive".

Yeah, the last one is extra interesting! But, we will get to that after sometime.

Now that we know that interstellar travel may not be a thing too distant in the future, you may ask, where do we go in our First ever interstellar space mission? Let's check out.

What Would be Humanity's First Interstellar Travel Destination?

There are 59 known stellar systems within 40 light years of the Sun, containing 81 visible stars. In some of these systems, certain planets have been found to be located in the habitable zone of its star which could be the prime destination for future interstellar space missions.

Proxima Centauri - B
Credits : futurism

But, the destination for humanity's very First Interstellar Space Mission would probably be the Planet - Proxima Centauri B, an exoplanet located in the habitable zone of its star - Proxima Centauri, in the Alpha Centauri System about 4.3 light years away.

Now that we have chosen our destination, let us find out what are the challenges that we would need to overcome before we think of ways to make interstellar space flight a reality!

Present Challenges to an Interstellar Mission :

‌Even though the aspect of interstellar explorations have been speculated to be possible in a near future, it cannot be denied that even our nearest star system is at an abominally large distance to scale in a human lifetime. The fastest outward-bound spacecraft yet sent, Voyager 1, has covered 1/600 of a light-year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000 the speed of light. At this rate, a journey to Proxima Centauri would take 80,000 years.

‌A second factor in this aspect is the efficiency of the fuel. Propellent is a big limiting challenge in space travel. If we want to reach proxima Centauri in our lifetime, it is calculated that we would need a speed of about 10% the speec of light. And to achieve that with traditional rocket fuel, we would need a fuel tank larger than the observable universe. Not too efficient! So we would need a fuel with maximum energy density and almost 100% efficiency.

‌The key to interstellar travel would be to find the correct balance between the speed of the starship and the time it takes for us to develop the starship. No point in launching a starship in 20 years, if a starship launched in 50 years overtake it. This factor, known as the Wait Calculation is a huge issue to address .

‌Severe possible biological hazards to the crew is also a big problem. The crew of an interstellar ship would face several significant hazards, including the psychological effects of long-term isolation, the effects of exposure to ionizing radiation, and the physiological effects of weightlessness to the muscles, joints, bones, immune system, and eyes.

After looking at the challenges that we would need to overcome, Let us now finally explore the different ways we could possibly overcome these challenges using technologies of the present time or of the near future.

Some proposed Interesting Methods for interstellar explorations :

‌ Fusion Rockets :

The orion project.
It was a project based on the use of fusion engines
Credits : Wikipedia

Since we need high energy density of the fuel for our interstellar space flight, using fusion as a fuel source, as in the sun, could be a good option. We already have the tech. We would just need to scale up our production of nukes!

According to a calculation, we would have to launch with about 300000 of 1 megaton hydrogen bombs, nuke them behind our spaceship one by one and we woulid end up at 10% speed of light in 1 month. A trip to Alpha Centauri would theoretically take us 45 years. But since we would need to slow down our speed when we are near our destination, this would lead to half the fuel efficiency and we would take about 90 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

Although it would probably mean, we would need three generations of human beings on board, it is by far the most achieveable Method using present day technologies.

An upgrade to this method could be the contained thermonuclear reactions, but the tech still in the infant stages and could be a viable option in the near future.

‌Antimatter Drives :

The meeting of Matter and Antimatter results in the annihilation of both particles liberating huge amounts of enery with an efficiency of almost 100% ! It would take probably only a few kilograms of anti protons to take us to Alpha Century in just a few years !!

Seems like a solid plan to scale the universe? Well, Don't start packing too early for this method too comes with some major drawbacks!

We can create antimatter in a particle accelerator, but the catch here is that it is enormously time consuming and hugely expensive. We would need to increase our production to more than trillion trillion times to produce the kilograms of antimatter required for our expedition.

But, considering how fast technology is developing, it is only a matter of time before this becomes a plausible option.

The pion rocket
Credits : wikipedia

Pion rockets could very well be a possibility. The annihilation of a proton and an antiproton releases pions, which on channelising with a suitable electric field, could be an extremely efficiency fuel in the future. Using such rockets, it is possible to reach 50% of speed of light meaning a trip to Alpha Centauri would take only 9 years.

With slight modifications, 80% of the speed of light could be possible cutting short fhe time taken to reach Alpha Centauri to only 3.3 years from the astronauts' perspective as a direct consequence of time-dilation! Fascinating!

‌The interstellar light sail :

The light sail

What if we didn't want to carry any fuel at all? Is Interstellar travel possible without any fuel?

In theory, yes, it is possible! Joking? No! It is actually possible to sail in a "highway" of powerful laser in space as you would in a sea using a sailboat!

For the purpose of interstellar voyages, this is actually a pretty plausible method even in present days. Giant lasers have to set up, harnessing power from the sun or through Helium - 3 Reactors from the moon which would drive gigantic sapphire sails of over a kilometer in diameter. As for speed, 10% lightspeed can be easily achieved using modern day materials. But with a laser light effective for over a large distance, it could even be possible to achieve furthur more speed.

The lightsail 2 project.

The only drawback to this technology is that it would be absolutely difficult to slow down at the destination star. Also the factor of wait calculation needs to be taken into account before this can be seen a s a viable option.

But the best part? This technology is not even a theory anymore. This is actually a technology being currently under testing for unmanned space missions! This is probably the only technique, other than the fusion engine, which is plausible in our lifetime.

‌The Black Hole Drive :

The Schwarzschild Kugelblitz
Credits : space.com

Another interesting way of creating a spacecraft for the interstellar expeditions, could be the "Schwarzschild Kugelblitz" , Kugelblitz is German for "Ball Lighting", or the blackhole drive! A black hole of the right size would be able to radiate enough hawking radiations, which when channelised properly could be used as a highly efficient source of energy.

The Kugelblitz black hole is not formed out of mass but out of light. A high powered beam of light focus on a single point would lead to the formation of the singularity. The optimal size of the black hole would be about the size of a proton with a mass of 600 Billion tons. It would radiate an energy equivalent of 160 Petawatts and would have a life of about 3.5 years.

The Kugelblitz
Credits : space.com

This technology could take us to 10% the speed of light in only about 20 days! It could be possible to even reach more than 90% the speed of light. It is indeed one of the fastest methods for interstellar space missions.

The drawback to this method is that the lasers producing the black hole would have to be more powerful than the blackhole itself! This is possible but only with the technology of the distant future. It would probably be a few thousand years before the right technology would allow us board blackhole powered star ships!

‌The Alcubierre Wrap drive :

The wrap field.
Credits : researchgate

This is probably the craziest and the most phenomenal theory for reaching to speeds beyond our imagination.

Inspired by science fiction, the idea was first introduced by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. He used the theory of special relativitiy to derive a mathematical form of a "wrap field" or "wrap bubble", which is a region of extreme curvature in space time in the form of a bubble. The fundamental idea was that a starship placed inside a wrap bubble would have space time bending inward in front of it and bending outward at its back. This would allow the starship to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light while effectively remaining steady in its local frame. So the ship itself doesn't move, but the bubble of spactime around it does and takes the ship with it.

The Alcubierre Wrap Drive concept
Credits : popsicle.com

And no, this theory doesn't break the laws of physics as the cosmic speed limit applies to things, such as mass, energy, information etc but the relative velocity between two points in space could be many times greater than the cosmic speed limit.

There are massive drawbacks and challenges in this idea which could quite possibly make the existence of wrap fields impossible.

There are many other interesting facts about this idea discussing which would unfortunately lead to this post getting too long, but we promise, we would bring a dedicated post to the Alcubierre wrap drive shortly.

Conclusion :

From everything we have discussed, it is clear that humanity is not only bound to the solar system and there are immense possibilities of interstellar travels in the near future.

Humanity, could indeed possibly become an interstellar civilisation in a few million years!!

Don't know what an interstellar civilisation is? Check out our blog about the different types of civilisations here.

One in a million rare -Super Earth found 25,000 light years away!

2020-05-16T10:41:00.000+05:30

One in a million: Super Earth found 25,000 light years away from our planet!

The Super Earth has been found in the Milky Way 25,000 light-years away from us.The Astronomers from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand have found a new planet in the galaxy that bears several similarities to our planet Earth & said that it is huge and bigger than Earth in size & can be considered to be as big as Neptune. The planet is reportedly called 'One In A Million planet', as mankind has always been searching for a planet similar to Earth. It is unclear if the planet can host any type of life as the temperature of its star is unknown.

The researchers further explained that if the star emits high levels of radiation, then the planet will most likely be unfavourable for life.This new planet orbits around a dim dwarf star or a brown dwarf which is located 25,000 light-years away from us, in the centre of the Milky Way. The planet takes around 617 Earth days to complete a full orbit around its host star. However, in comparison to the sun, the dwarf star is only about one-tenth of the mass of the sun. The distance between the newly found alien planet and the host star is similar to between where Earth and Venus orbit around the sun.

The Scientists & the group of Astronomers have observed the alien planet using the gravitational microlensing technique. This means that the scientists watched how the dwarf star and the Super-Earth warped and magnified light. The technique is used by aligning the telescope in a certain way that a large object and a target are lined up properly so that the light coming from the target becomes warped due to the presence of the large object. However, this is considered to be an extremely rare event. A statement released by the University of Canterbury in New Zealand also said that this is a 'one in a million' occurrence.

Dim Dwarf Stars -Dwarf star, any star of average or low luminosity, mass, and size. Important subclasses of dwarf stars are white dwarfs and red dwarfs. Dwarf stars include so-called main-sequence stars, among which is the Sun.But the super earth has been orbiting around a brown dwarf which is a very rare cosmic findings

An artist presentation based on light intensity of brown dwarfs

Astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovered an intermediate-mass brown dwarf orbiting a young star about 841 light-years from Earth on Oct 7,2019. Named TOI-503b, the object is the first brown dwarf discovered by TESS.

Brown dwarfs are cool, dim objects that have a size between that of a gas giant, such as Jupiter or Saturn, and that of a Sun-like star.Sometimes called failed stars, they are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, yet they have star-like attributes.

Top 12 most mysterious & bizzare sites spotted via Google Earth

2020-05-15T17:55:00.002+05:30

12 of the most mysterious sites spotted via Google Earth

Google Earth gives people the power to search remote areas of the globe, and those virtual treks have resulted in some rather intriguing discoveries.

You’ve no doubt already come across some interesting finds on Google Earth. The post below attempts to compile the most fascinating sites others have stumbled upon browsing Google Earth. From natural formations to human structures, the world is a different place when viewed from above.

If you’re interested in seeing any of the places yourself, I’ve included the coordinates for every image shown below. Just copy and paste into Google Earth/Maps and explore for yourself

Here are 12 mysterious sites spotted via Google Earth.

Mysterious Desert Pattern

27°22’50.10″N, 33°37’54.62″E, Red Sea Governorate, Egypt

Giant Triangle

33.747252, -112.633853, Wittmann, Arizona, USA

Shipwrecked SS Ayrfield with Trees

-33.836379, 151.080506 ,Homebush Bay, Sydney, Australia

The Badlands Guardian

50° 0’38.20″N 110° 6’48.32″W ,Walsh, Alberta, Canada

Firefox Logo

45° 7’25.87″N 123° 6’48.97″W, Dayton, Oregon, USA

Guitar-Shaped Forest

-33.867886, -63.987, Córdoba, Argentina

Mysterious Desert Pattern

40.452107, 93.742118 ,China

Giant Target

37.563936, -116.85123 ,Nevada, USA

Mysterious Pattern

37.629562, -116.849556,Nevada, USA

Island in a Lake in an Island in a Lake

69.793° N, 108.241° W ,Northern Canada

Strange Symbol

37.401573, -116.867808,Nevada, USA

The Atacama Giant

19°56’56.96″S 69°38’1.83″W ,Huara, Tarapacá, Chile

Mysterious pyramid?

79°58’39.25″S 81°57’32.21″W,Antarctica

Phantom (Sandy ) Island

19.22°S 159.93°E,Sandy Island,New Caledonia (French territory)-The island which emerged mysteriously out of nowhere over New Caledonia in 2012 ,near Australia.In reality it doesn't even exist !

Most Popular and Remarkable Scientific Theories of all time

2020-05-15T15:23:00.000+05:30

Representative Image

A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can be repeatedly tested and verified in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment.

Here is a list of a few Scientific Theories that revolutionized Scientific progress and research:

The Grand Unified Theory

A Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics in which, at high energies, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model that define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, or forces, are merged into a single force. Although this unified force has not been directly observed, the many GUT models theorize its existence. If unification of these three interactions is possible, it raises the possibility that there was a grand unification epoch in the very early universe in which these three fundamental interactions were not yet distinct.

Experiments have confirmed that at high energy, the electromagnetic interaction and weak interaction unify into a single electroweak interaction. GUT models predict that at even higher energy, the strong interaction and the electroweak interaction will unify into a single electronuclear interaction. This interaction is characterized by one larger gauge symmetry and thus several force carriers, but one unified coupling constant. Unifying gravity with the electronuclear interaction would provide a theory of everything (TOE) rather than a GUT. GUTs are often seen as an intermediate step towards a TOE.

The novel particles predicted by GUT models are expected to have extremely high masses of around the GUT scale of 1016 GeV —just a few orders of magnitude below the Planck scale of

1019 GeV—and so are well beyond the reach of any foreseen particle collider experiments. Therefore, the particles predicted by GUT models will be unable to be observed directly and instead the effects of grand unification might be detected through indirect observations such as proton decay, electric dipole moments of elementary particles, or the properties of neutrinos. Some GUTs, such as the Pati-Salam model, predict the existence of magnetic monopoles.

GUT models which aim to be completely realistic are quite complicated, even compared to the Standard Model, because they need to introduce additional fields and interactions, or even additional dimensions of space. The main reason for this complexity lies in the difficulty of reproducing the observed fermion masses and mixing angles which may be related to an existence of some additional family symmetries beyond the conventional GUT models. Due to this difficulty, and due to the lack of any observed effect of grand unification so far, there is no generally accepted GUT model.

Models that do not unify the three interactions using one simple group as the gauge symmetry, but do so using semisimple groups, can exhibit similar properties and are sometimes referred to as Grand Unified Theories as well.

Historically, the first true GUT which was based on the simple Lie group SU(5), was proposed by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow in 1974. The Georgi–Glashow model was preceded by the semisimple Lie algebra Pati–Salam model by Abdus Salam and Jogesh Pati, who pioneered the idea to unify gauge interactions.

The acronym GUT was first coined in 1978 by CERN researchers John Ellis, Andrzej Buras, Mary K. Gaillard, and Dimitri Nanopoulos, however in the final version of their paper they opted for the less anatomical GUM (Grand Unification Mass). Nanopoulos later that year was the first to use the acronym in a paper.

String theory

In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. It describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries gravitational force. Thus string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.

String theory is a broad and varied subject that attempts to address a number of deep questions of fundamental physics. String theory has been applied to a variety of problems in black hole physics, early universe cosmology, nuclear physics, and condensed matter physics, and it has stimulated a number of major developments in pure mathematics. Because string theory potentially provides a unified description of gravity and particle physics, it is a candidate for a theory of everything, a self-contained mathematical model that describes all fundamental forces and forms of matter. Despite much work on these problems, it is not known to what extent string theory describes the real world or how much freedom the theory allows in the choice of its details.

String theory was first studied in the late 1960s as a theory of the strong nuclear force, before being abandoned in favor of quantum chromodynamics. Subsequently, it was realized that the very properties that made string theory unsuitable as a theory of nuclear physics made it a promising candidate for a quantum theory of gravity. The earliest version of string theory, bosonic string theory, incorporated only the class of particles known as bosons. It later developed into superstring theory, which posits a connection called supersymmetry between bosons and the class of particles called fermions. Five consistent versions of superstring theory were developed before it was conjectured in the mid-1990s that they were all different limiting cases of a single theory in 11 dimensions known as M-theory. In late 1997, theorists discovered an important relationship called the AdS/CFT correspondence, which relates string theory to another type of physical theory called a quantum field theory.

One of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances. Another issue is that the theory is thought to describe an enormous landscape of possible universes, which has complicated efforts to develop theories of particle physics based on string theory. These issues have led some in the community to criticize these approaches to physics, and to question the value of continued research on string theory unification.

In the 20th century, two theoretical frameworks emerged for formulating the laws of physics. The first is Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, a theory that explains the force of gravity and the structure of spacetime at the macro-level. The other is quantum mechanics which is a completely different formulation to describe physical phenomena using the known probability principles at the micro-level. By the late 1970s, these two frameworks had proven to be sufficient to explain most of the observed features of the universe, from elementary particles to atoms to the evolution of stars and the universe as a whole.

In spite of these successes, there are still many problems that remain to be solved. One of the deepest problems in modern physics is the problem of quantum gravity. The general theory of relativity is formulated within the framework of classical physics, whereas the other fundamental forces are described within the framework of quantum mechanics. A quantum theory of gravity is needed in order to reconcile general relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics, but difficulties arise when one attempts to apply the usual prescriptions of quantum theory to the force of gravity. In addition to the problem of developing a consistent theory of quantum gravity, there are many other fundamental problems in the physics of atomic nuclei, black holes, and the early universe.

String theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to address these questions and many others. The starting point for string theory is the idea that the point-like particles of particle physics can also be modeled as one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how strings propagate through space and interact with each other. In a given version of string theory, there is only one kind of string, which may look like a small loop or segment of ordinary string, and it can vibrate in different ways. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string will look just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In this way, all of the different elementary particles may be viewed as vibrating strings. In string theory, one of the vibrational states of the string gives rise to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries gravitational force. Thus string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.

One of the main developments of the past several decades in string theory was the discovery of certain 'dualities', mathematical transformations that identify one physical theory with another. Physicists studying string theory have discovered a number of these dualities between different versions of string theory, and this has led to the conjecture that all consistent versions of string theory are subsumed in a single framework known as M-theory.

Studies of string theory have also yielded a number of results on the nature of black holes and the gravitational interaction. There are certain paradoxes that arise when one attempts to understand the quantum aspects of black holes, and work on string theory has attempted to clarify these issues. In late 1997 this line of work culminated in the discovery of the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence or AdS/CFT. This is a theoretical result which relates string theory to other physical theories which are better understood theoretically. The AdS/CFT correspondence has implications for the study of black holes and quantum gravity, and it has been applied to other subjects, including nuclear and condensed matter physics.

Since string theory incorporates all of the fundamental interactions, including gravity, many physicists hope that it will eventually be developed to the point where it fully describes our universe, making it a theory of everything. One of the goals of current research in string theory is to find a solution of the theory that reproduces the observed spectrum of elementary particles, with a small cosmological constant, containing dark matter and a plausible mechanism for cosmic inflation. While there has been progress toward these goals, it is not known to what extent string theory describes the real world or how much freedom the theory allows in the choice of details.

One of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances. The scattering of strings is most straightforwardly defined using the techniques of perturbation theory, but it is not known in general how to define string theory nonperturbatively. It is also not clear whether there is any principle by which string theory selects its vacuum state, the physical state that determines the properties of our universe. These problems have led some in the community to criticize these approaches to the unification of physics and question the value of continued research on these problems.

Quantum Theory

Quantum mechanics, including quantum field theory, is a fundamental theory in physics describing the properties of nature on an atomic scale.

Classical physics, the description of physics that existed before the formulation of the theory of relativity and of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at ordinary (macroscopic) scale. Quantum mechanics explains the aspects of nature at ordinary (macroscopic) scales but extends this description to the small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale. Quantum mechanics differs from classical physics in that energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other quantities of a bound system are restricted to discrete values (quantization), objects have characteristics of both particles and waves (wave-particle duality), and there are limits to how accurately the value of a physical quantity can be predicted prior to its measurement, given a complete set of initial conditions (the uncertainty principle).

Quantum mechanics arose gradually, from theories to explain observations which could not be reconciled with classical physics, such as Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem, and the correspondence between energy and frequency in Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which explained the photoelectric effect. Early quantum theory was profoundly re-conceived in the mid-1920s by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and others. The modern theory is formulated in various specially developed mathematical formalisms. In one of them, a mathematical function, the wave function, provides information about the probability amplitude of energy, momentum, and other physical properties of a particle.

Scientific inquiry into the wave nature of light began in the 17th and 18th centuries, when scientists such as Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens and Leonhard Euler proposed a wave theory of light based on experimental observations. In 1803, English polymath Thomas Young described the famous double-slit experiment. This experiment played a major role in the general acceptance of the wave theory of light.

In 1838, Michael Faraday discovered cathode rays. These studies were followed by the 1859 statement of the black-body radiation problem by Gustav Kirchhoff, the 1877 suggestion by Ludwig Boltzmann that the energy states of a physical system can be discrete, and the 1900 quantum hypothesis of Max Planck. Planck's hypothesis that energy is radiated and absorbed in discrete "quanta" (or energy packets) precisely matched the observed patterns of black-body radiation.

In 1896, Wilhelm Wien empirically determined a distribution law of black-body radiation, called Wien's law. Ludwig Boltzmann independently arrived at this result by considerations of Maxwell's equations. However, it was valid only at high frequencies and underestimated the radiance at low frequencies.

The foundations of quantum mechanics were established during the first half of the 20th century by Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Compton, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, Max von Laue, Freeman Dyson, David Hilbert, Wilhelm Wien, Satyendra Nath Bose, Arnold Sommerfeld, and others. The Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr became widely accepted.

Max Planck corrected this model using Boltzmann's statistical interpretation of thermodynamics and proposed what is now called Planck's law, which led to the development of quantum mechanics. After Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem (reported 1859), Albert Einstein offered a quantum-based explanation of the photoelectric effect (1905, reported 1887). Around 1900–1910, the atomic theory but not the corpuscular theory of light first came to be widely accepted as scientific fact; these latter theories can be considered quantum theories of matter and electromagnetic radiation, respectively. However, the photon theory was not widely accepted until about 1915. Even until Einstein's Nobel Prize, Niels Bohr did not believe in the photon.

Among the first to study quantum phenomena were Arthur Compton, C. V. Raman, and Pieter Zeeman, each of whom has a quantum effect named after him. Robert Andrews Millikan studied the photoelectric effect experimentally, and Albert Einstein developed a theory for it. At the same time, Ernest Rutherford experimentally discovered the nuclear model of the atom, and Niels Bohr developed a theory of atomic structure, confirmed by the experiments of Henry Moseley. In 1913, Peter Debye extended Bohr's theory by introducing elliptical orbits, a concept also introduced by Arnold Sommerfeld. This phase is known as old quantum theory.

Theory of Relativity

Einstein's Mass Energy Equation

The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. Special relativity applies to all physical phenomena in the absence of gravity. General relativity explains the law of gravitation and its relation to other forces of nature. It applies to the cosmological and astrophysical realm, including astronomy.

Albert Einstein

The theory transformed theoretical physics and astronomy during the 20th century, superseding a 200-year-old theory of mechanics created primarily by Isaac Newton. It introduced concepts including spacetime as a unified entity of space and time, relativity of simultaneity, kinematic and gravitational time dilation, and length contraction. In the field of physics, relativity improved the science of elementary particles and their fundamental interactions, along with ushering in the nuclear age. With relativity, cosmology and astrophysics predicted extraordinary astronomical phenomena such as neutron stars, black holes, and gravitational waves.

Albert Einstein published the theory of special relativity in 1905, building on many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others did subsequent work.

Einstein developed general relativity between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. The final form of general relativity was published in 1916.

The term "theory of relativity" was based on the expression "relative theory" (German: Relativtheorie) used in 1906 by Planck, who emphasized how the theory uses the principle of relativity. In the discussion section of the same paper, Alfred Bucherer used for the first time the expression "theory of relativity" (German: Relativitätstheorie).

By the 1920s, the physics community understood and accepted special relativity. It rapidly became a significant and necessary tool for theorists and experimentalists in the new fields of atomic physics, nuclear physics, and quantum mechanics.

By comparison, general relativity did not appear to be as useful, beyond making minor corrections to predictions of Newtonian gravitation theory. It seemed to offer little potential for experimental test, as most of its assertions were on an astronomical scale. Its mathematics seemed difficult and fully understandable only by a small number of people. Around 1960, general relativity became central to physics and astronomy. New mathematical techniques to apply to general relativity streamlined calculations and made its concepts more easily visualized. As astronomical phenomena were discovered, such as quasars (1963), the 3-kelvin microwave background radiation (1965), pulsars (1967), and the first black hole candidates (1981), the theory explained their attributes, and measurement of them further confirmed the theory.

Evolution by Natural selection

Charles Darwin

Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which in his view is intentional, whereas natural selection is not.

Variation exists within all populations of organisms. This occurs partly because random mutations arise in the genome of an individual organism, and their offspring can inherit such mutations. Throughout the lives of the individuals, their genomes interact with their environments to cause variations in traits. The environment of a genome includes the molecular biology in the cell, other cells, other individuals, populations, species, as well as the abiotic environment. Because individuals with certain variants of the trait tend to survive and reproduce more than individuals with other less successful variants, the population evolves. Other factors affecting reproductive success include sexual selection (now often included in natural selection) and fecundity selection.

Natural selection acts on the phenotype, the characteristics of the organism which actually interact with the environment, but the genetic (heritable) basis of any phenotype that gives that phenotype a reproductive advantage may become more common in a population. Over time, this process can result in populations that specialise for particular ecological niches (microevolution) and may eventually result in speciation (the emergence of new species, macroevolution). In other words, natural selection is a key process in the evolution of a population.

Natural selection is a cornerstone of modern biology. The concept, published by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in a joint presentation of papers in 1858, was elaborated in Darwin's influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. He described natural selection as analogous to artificial selection, a process by which animals and plants with traits considered desirable by human breeders are systematically favoured for reproduction. The concept of natural selection originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity; at the time of Darwin's writing, science had yet to develop modern theories of genetics. The union of traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical genetics formed the modern synthesis of the mid-20th century. The addition of molecular genetics has led to evolutionary developmental biology, which explains evolution at the molecular level. While genotypes can slowly change by random genetic drift, natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution.

The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang theory is a cosmological model of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of very high density and high temperature, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, large-scale structure, and Hubble's law – the farther away galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from Earth. If the observed conditions are extrapolated backwards in time using the known laws of physics, the prediction is that just before a period of very high density there was a singularity. Current knowledge is insufficient to determine if anything existed prior to the singularity.

Georges Lemaître first noted in 1927 that an expanding universe could be traced back in time to an originating single point, calling his theory that of the "primeval atom". For much of the rest of the 20th century scientific community was divided between supporters of the Big Bang and the rival steady-state model, but a wide range of empirical evidence has strongly favored the Big Bang, which is now universally accepted. Edwin Hubble concluded from analysis of galactic redshifts in 1929 that galaxies are drifting apart; this is important observational evidence for an expanding universe. In 1964, the CMB was discovered, which was crucial evidence in favor of the hot Big Bang model, since that theory predicted the existence of a background radiation throughout the universe.

The known laws of physics can be used to calculate the characteristics of the universe in detail back in time to an initial state of extreme density and temperature. Detailed measurements of the expansion rate of the universe place the Big Bang at around 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe. After its initial expansion, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements – mostly hydrogen, with some helium and lithium – later coalesced through gravity, forming early stars and galaxies, the descendants of which are visible today. Besides these primordial building materials, astronomers observe the gravitational effects of an unknown dark matter surrounding galaxies. Most of the gravitational potential in the universe seems to be in this form, and the Big Bang theory and various observations indicate that it is not conventional baryonic matter that forms atoms. Measurements of the redshifts of supernovae indicate that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, an observation attributed to dark energy's existence.

Chaos Theory

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focusing on the study of chaos—states of dynamical systems whose apparently-random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary theory stating that, within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization. The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning that there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions). A metaphor for this behavior is that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in Texas.

Small differences in initial conditions, such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation, can yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction of their behavior impossible in general. This can happen even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior follows a unique evolution and is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as:

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

Chaotic behavior exists in many natural systems, including fluid flow, heartbeat irregularities, weather and climate. It also occurs spontaneously in some systems with artificial components, such as the stock market and road traffic. This behavior can be studied through the analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps. Chaos theory has applications in a variety of disciplines, including meteorology, anthropology, sociology, physics, environmental science, computer science, engineering, economics, biology, ecology, pandemic crisis management, and philosophy. The theory formed the basis for such fields of study as complex dynamical systems, edge of chaos theory, and self-assembly processes.

Atomic Theory

Atom

In chemistry and physics, atomic theory is a scientific theory of the nature of matter, which states that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms. It began as a philosophical concept in ancient Greece and entered the scientific mainstream in the early 19th century when discoveries in the field of chemistry showed that matter did indeed behave as if it were made up of atoms.

The word atom comes from the Ancient Greek adjective atomos, meaning "indivisible". 19th century chemists began using the term in connection with the growing number of irreducible chemical elements. Around the turn of the 20th century, through various experiments with electromagnetism and radioactivity, physicists discovered that the so-called "uncuttable atom" was actually a conglomerate of various subatomic particles (chiefly, electrons, protons and neutrons) which can exist separately from each other. In fact, in certain extreme environments, such as neutron stars, extreme temperature and pressure prevents atoms from existing at all.

Since atoms were found to be divisible, physicists later invented the term "elementary particles" to describe the "uncuttable", though not indestructible, parts of an atom. The field of science which studies subatomic particles is particle physics, and it is in this field that physicists hope to discover the true fundamental nature of matter.

Plate Techtonics Theory

Map of Major Techtonic Plates in the World

Plate tectonics is a scientific theory describing the large-scale motion of seven large plates and the movements of a larger number of smaller plates of the Earth's lithosphere, since tectonic processes began on Earth between 3.3 and 3.5 billion years ago. The model builds on the concept of continental drift, an idea developed during the first decades of the 20th century. The geoscientific community accepted plate-tectonic theory after seafloor spreading was validated in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The lithosphere, which is the rigid outermost shell of a planet (the crust and upper mantle), is broken into tectonic plates. The Earth's lithosphere is composed of seven or eight major plates (depending on how they are defined) and many minor plates. Where the plates meet, their relative motion determines the type of boundary: convergent, divergent, or transform. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation occur along these plate boundaries (or faults). The relative movement of the plates typically ranges from zero to 100 mm annually.

Tectonic plates are composed of oceanic lithosphere and thicker continental lithosphere, each topped by its own kind of crust. Along convergent boundaries, subduction, or one plate moving under another, carries the lower one down into the mantle; the material lost is roughly balanced by the formation of new (oceanic) crust along divergent margins by seafloor spreading. In this way, the total surface of the lithosphere remains the same. This prediction of plate tectonics is also referred to as the conveyor belt principle. Earlier theories, since disproven, proposed gradual shrinking (contraction) or gradual expansion of the globe.

Tectonic plates are able to move because the Earth's lithosphere has greater mechanical strength than the underlying asthenosphere. Lateral density variations in the mantle result in convection; that is, the slow creeping motion of Earth's solid mantle. Plate movement is thought to be driven by a combination of the motion of the seafloor away from spreading ridges due to variations in topography (the ridge is a topographic high) and density changes in the crust (density increases as newly formed crust cools and moves away from the ridge). At subduction zones the relatively cold, dense oceanic crust is "pulled" or sinks down into the mantle over the downward convecting limb of a mantle cell. Another explanation lies in the different forces generated by tidal forces of the Sun and Moon. The relative importance of each of these factors and their relationship to each other is unclear, and still the subject of much debate.

Oxygen Theory Of Combustion by Antoine Lavoisier

Oxygen Supports Combustion

The oxygen theory of combustion resulted from a demanding and sustained campaign to construct an experimentally grounded chemical theory of combustion, respiration, and calcination. The theory that emerged was in many respects a mirror image of the phlogiston theory, but gaining evidence to support the new theory involved more than merely demonstrating the errors and inadequacies of the previous theory. From the early 1770s until 1785, when the last important pieces of the theory fell into place, Lavoisier and his collaborators performed a wide range of experiments designed to advance many points on their research frontier.

Cell Theory

Cell

In biology, cell theory is the historic scientific theory, now universally accepted, that living organisms are made up of cells, that they are the basic structural/organizational unit of all organisms, and that all cells come from pre-existing cells. Cells are the basic unit of structure in all organisms and also the basic unit of reproduction.

The three tenets to the cell theory are as described below:

All living organisms are composed of one or more cells.

The cell is the basic unit of structure and organization in organisms.

Cells arise from pre-existing cells.

There is no universally accepted definition of life. Some biologists consider non-cellular entities such as viruses living organisms, and thus reasonably disagree with the first tenet.

With continual improvements made to microscopes over time, magnification technology advanced enough to discover cells in the 17th century. This discovery is largely attributed to Robert Hooke, and began the scientific study of cells, known as cell biology. Over a century later, many debates about cells began amongst scientists. Most of these debates involved the nature of cellular regeneration, and the idea of cells as a fundamental unit of life. Cell theory was eventually formulated in 1839. This is usually credited to Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann. However, many other scientists like Rudolf Virchow contributed to the theory. It was an important step in the movement away from spontaneous generation.

The discovery of the cell was made possible through the invention of the microscope. In the first century BC, Romans were able to make glass, discovering that objects appeared to be larger under the glass. In Italy during the 12th century, Salvino D’Armate made a piece of glass fit over one eye, allowing for a magnification effect to that eye. The expanded use of lenses in eyeglasses in the 13th century probably led to wider spread use of simple microscopes (magnifying glasses) with limited magnification. Compound microscopes, which combine an objective lens with an eyepiece to view a real image achieving much higher magnification, first appeared in Europe around 1620. In 1665, Robert Hooke used a microscope about six inches long with two convex lenses inside and examined specimens under reflected light for the observations in his book Micrographia. Hooke also used a simpler microscope with a single lens for examining specimens with directly transmitted light, because this allowed for a clearer image.

Extensive microscopic study was done by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a draper who took the interest in microscopes after seeing one while on an apprenticeship in Amsterdam in 1648. At some point in his life before 1668, he was able to learn how to grind lenses. This eventually led to Leeuwenhoek making his own unique microscope. His was a single lens simple microscope, rather than a compound microscope. This was because he was able to use a single lens that was a small glass sphere but allowed for a magnification of 270x. This was a large progression since the magnification before was only a maximum of 50x. After Leeuwenhoek, there was not much progress in microscope technology until the 1850s, two hundred years later. Carl Zeiss, a German engineer who manufactured microscopes, began to make changes to the lenses used. But the optical quality did not improve until the 1880s when he hired Otto Schott and eventually Ernst Abbe.

Optical microscopes can focus on objects the size of a wavelength or larger, giving restrictions still to advancement in discoveries with objects smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. The development of the electron microscope in the 1920s made it possible to view objects that are smaller than optical wavelengths, once again opening up new possibilities in science.

Evidences of Extraterrestrial Life: Aliens

2020-05-14T14:39:00.000+05:30

To most of all, the term Alien refers to a class of fictional characters depicted in films. But what if they were real?

We have come up with a few mysterious happenings that took place during space explorations, indicating the presence of aliens in the Universe. These will definitely get you gosebumps!

1. Russian scientists spot something moving on a photo of Venus

The Soviet Union snapped pictures of Venus (Image: GETTY/QUEST)

Venera 13 was a probe launched by the USSR in 1981, to explore Earth’s “sister planet,” touching down a year later into the harsh atmosphere. The details of the mission were kept under wraps, as it came at a time of incredibly heightened tensions with the US, after their Apollo 11 mission put the first two men on the Moon in 1969. But, 30 years later, Russian scientist Leonid Ksanfomaliti published an article in the journal Solar System Research, claiming snaps collected contained proof of life on Venus.

Quest TV’s documentary “NASA's Unexplained Files” revealed how the story unfolded.

The series said in 2019: “A Soviet space probe reaches the hottest planet in the Solar System.

“A lander packed with a payload of cameras and scientific instruments plunges more than 48km through clouds of sulphuric acid to reach the surface.

“The probe sends back images that seem to show something moving on the surface.

“In the Cold War era, the Soviets kept the findings of the probe a closely-guarded secret.

“It takes three decades before a Russian scientist, Leonid Ksanfomaliti, reveals astonishing images from the archives.”

In one image, the Venera-13 landing probe is seen parked on the rocky Venusian foreground, and an object shaped somewhat like a crab stands inches from the probe.

In another image, also taken by Venera-13, this crab-like object appears to be in a different location.

Mr Ksanfomaliti stated in his paper: "Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.”

1. 1976, The Viking Mars landers detect chemical signatures indicative of life

The Viking lander

In 1976, two Viking landers became the first US spacecraft from Earth to touch down on Mars. They took the first high-resolution images of the planet, surveyed the planet's geographical features, and analyzed the geological composition of the atmosphere and surface. Perhaps most surprisingly, they also performed experiments that searched for signs of microbial life in Martian soil.

One of the tests performed on Martian soil samples by NASA’s Viking landers, which involved an analysis of a mixture of soil with radioactive carbon- labeled nutrients, hinted at chemical evidence of life.

The test reported a positive result, and the production of radioactive methane suggested that something present in the soil was metabolising the nutrients and producing radioactive gas. But other experiments conducted on board failed to find any evidence of life, so NASA declared the result a false positive.

Despite that, one of the original scientists – and others who have since re-analysed the data – still stand by the finding. They argue that the other experiments on board were ill-equipped to search for evidence of the organic molecules – a key indicator of life.

2. The unexplained extraterrestrial “Wow!” signal is detected by an Ohio State University radio telescope in 1977

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal received on August 15, 1977 by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.

Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the anomaly a few days later while reviewing the recorded data. He was so impressed by the result that he circled the reading on the computer printout, "6EQUJ5", and wrote the comment "Wow!" on its side, leading to the event's widely used name.

The entire signal sequence lasted for the full 72-second window during which Big Ear was able to observe it, but has not been detected since, despite several subsequent attempts by Ehman and others. Many hypotheses have been advanced on the origin of the emission, including natural and human-made sources, but none of them adequately explain the signal.

Although the Wow! signal had no detectable modulation—a technique used to transmit information over radio waves—it remains the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected.

The precise location in the sky where the signal apparently originated is uncertain due to the design of the Big Ear telescope, which featured two feed horns, each receiving a beam from slightly different directions, while following Earth's rotation. The Wow! signal was detected in one beam but not in the other, and the data was processed in such a way that it is impossible to determine which of the two horns received the signal.

3. the Allan Hills 84001 in 1984

Allan Hills 84001 (commonly abbreviated ALH84001) is a fragment of a Martian meteorite that was found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica on December 27, 1984, by a team of American meteorite hunters from the ANSMET project. Like other members of the shergottite–nakhlite–chassignite (SNC) group of meteorites, ALH84001 is thought to have originated on Mars. However, it does not fit into any of the previously discovered SNC groups. Its mass upon discovery was 1.93 kilograms (4.3 lb).

In 1996, a group of scientists claimed to have found evidence for microscopic fossils of bacteria in the meteorite, suggesting that these organisms also originated on Mars. The claims immediately made headlines worldwide, culminating in then-U.S. president Bill Clinton giving a speech about the potential discovery. These claims were controversial from the beginning, and the wider scientific community ultimately rejected the hypothesis once all the unusual features in the meteorite had been explained without requiring life to be present. Despite there being no convincing evidence of Martian life, the initial paper and the enormous scientific and public attention caused by it are considered turning points in the history of the developing science of astrobiology.

Careful analysis revealed that the rock contained organic molecules and tiny specs of the mineral magnetite, sometimes found in Earth bacteria. Under the electron microscope, NASA researchers also claimed to have spotted signs of “nanobacteria”.

4. The formulation of the Drake Equation

Dr. Frank Drake

The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

The equation was written in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The equation summarizes the main concepts which scientists must contemplate when considering the question of other radio-communicative life. It is more properly thought of as an approximation rather than as a serious attempt to determine a precise number.

Criticism related to the Drake equation focuses not on the equation itself, but on the fact that the estimated values for several of its factors are highly conjectural, the combined effect being that the uncertainty associated with any derived value is so large that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions.

5. 2003, Galileo mission detects Sulphur traces on Jupiter's moon Europa

Galileo Spacecraft

Galileo was an American uncrewed spacecraft that studied the planet Jupiter and its moons, as well as several other Solar System bodies. Named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, it consisted of an orbiter and an entry probe. It was delivered into Earth orbit on October 18, 1989 by Space Shuttle Atlantis. Galileo arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, after gravitational assist flybys of Venus and Earth, and became the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. It launched the first probe into Jupiter, directly measuring its atmosphere. Despite suffering major antenna problems, Galileo achieved the first asteroid flyby, of 951 Gaspra, and discovered the first asteroid moon, Dactyl, around 243 Ida. In 1994, Galileo observed Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9's collision with Jupiter.

Jupiter's atmospheric composition and ammonia clouds were recorded, the clouds possibly created by outflows from the lower depths of the atmosphere. Io's volcanism and plasma interactions with Jupiter's atmosphere were also recorded. The data Galileo collected supported the theory of a liquid ocean under the icy surface of Europa, and there were indications of similar liquid-saltwater layers under the surfaces of Ganymede and Callisto. Ganymede was shown to possess a magnetic field and the spacecraft found new evidence for exospheres around Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Galileo also discovered that Jupiter's faint ring system consists of dust from impacts on the four small inner moons. The extent and structure of Jupiter's magnetosphere was also mapped.

On September 21, 2003, after 14 years in space and 8 years in the Jovian system, Galileo's mission was terminated by sending it into Jupiter's atmosphere at a speed of over 48 kilometers per second (30 mi/s), eliminating the possibility of contaminating local moons with terrestrial bacteria.

The compounds detected by the Galileo mission have been conjectured to be endogenic, most likely of cryovolcanic origin, due to their non-uniform distribution in patches. The Galileo space probe first detected the sulphur compounds, as well as revealing that this moon almost certainly has a volcanically heated and potentially habitable ocean hiding beneath a surface layer of ice. In planning future exploration of Europa there are options for sorting out the source of the surficial sulphur. For instance, one possibility is searching for the sulphur source in the context of the study of the Europa Microprobe In Situ Explorer (EMPIE), which has been framed within the Jovian Minisat Explorer Technology Reference Study (ESA). It is conceivable that sulphur may have come from the nearby moon Io, where sulphur and other volcanic elements are abundant. Secondly, volcanic eruptions in Europa's seafloor may have brought sulphur to the surface. Can waste products rising from bacterial colonies beneath the icy surface be a third alternative significant factor in the sulphur patches on the Europan surface? Provided that microorganisms on Europa have the same biochemical pathways as those on Earth, over geologic time it is possible that autochthonous microbes can add substantially to the sulphur deposits on the surface of Europa. We discuss possible interpretations of the non-water-ice elements (especially the sulphur compound mercaptan) in the context of the studies for future missions. To achieve reliable biosignatures it seems essential to go back to Europa.

6. In 2003, Italian scientists made an hypothesis that sulphur traces on Europa might be a sign of alien life. The compounds were first detected by the Galileo space probe, along with evidence for a volcanically-warmed ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust.

The sulphur signatures look similar to the waste-products of bacteria, which get locked into the surface ice of lakes in Antarctica on Earth. The bacteria survive in the water below, and similar bacteria might also thrive below Europa’s surface, the researchers suggest. Others experts rejected the idea, suggesting that the sulphur somehow originates from the neighbouring moon Io, where it is found in abundance.

6. 2004, Methane in the Martian atmosphere indicating microbial metabolism

The reported presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars is of interest to many geologists and astrobiologists, as methane may indicate the presence of microbial life on Mars, or a geochemical process such as volcanism or hydrothermal activity.

Since 2004, trace amounts of methane (range from 60 ppbv to under detection limit (< 0.05 ppbv)) have been reported in various missions and observational studies.

The source of methane on Mars and the explanation for the enormous discrepancy in the observed methane concentrations are still unknown and are under study. Whenever methane is detected, it is rapidly removed from the atmosphere by an efficient, yet unknown process.

Methane (CH4) is chemically unstable in the current oxidizing atmosphere of Mars. It would quickly break down due to ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun and chemical reactions with other gases. Therefore, a persistent or episodic presence of methane in the atmosphere may imply the existence of a source to continually replenish the gas.

The first evidence of methane in the atmosphere was measured by ESA's Mars Express orbiter with an instrument called the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer. In March 2004, the Mars Express science team suggested the presence of methane in the atmosphere at a concentration of about 10 ppbv.This was confirmed soon after by three ground-based telescope teams, although large differences in the abundances were measured between observations taken in 2003 and 2006. This spatial and temporal variability of the gas suggests that the methane was locally concentrated and probably seasonal. It is estimated that Mars must produce 270 ton/year of methane.

In 2011, NASA scientists reported a comprehensive search using ground-based high-resolution infrared spectroscopy for trace species (including methane) on Mars, deriving sensitive upper limits for methane (< 7 ppbv), ethane (< 0.2 ppbv), methanol (< 19 ppbv) and others (H2CO, C2H2, C2H4, N2O, NH3, HCN, CH3Cl, HCl, HO2 – all limits at ppbv levels).

7. 2004, SETI project receives mysterious radio signals on three occasions – from the same region of space.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a collective term for scientific searches for intelligent extraterrestrial life, for example, monitoring electromagnetic radiation for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other planets.

Scientific investigation began shortly after the advent of radio in the early 1900s, and focused international efforts have been going on since the 1980s.In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a well-funded effort called Breakthrough Listen.

In February 2003, astronomers with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project, used a massive telescope in Puerto Rico to re-examine 200 sections of the sky which had all previously yielded unexplained radio signals. These signals had all disappeared, except for one which had become stronger.

The signal – widely thought to be the best candidate yet for an alien contact – comes from a spot between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there are no obvious stars or planets. Curiously, the signal is at one of the frequencies that hydrogen, the most common element, absorbs and emits energy. Some astronomers believe that this is a very likely frequency at which aliens wishing to be noticed would transmit.

The Different types of Civilizations in the Universe: A Detailed Look

2020-05-14T00:35:00.001+05:30

Types of Civilisation in The Universe

Three schematic representations: Earth, Solar System and Milky Way; Energy consumption estimated in three types of civilizations defined by Kardashev Scale

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy they are able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. The scale has three designated categories:

Type I civilization, also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet & also able to terraform solar system’s planet.

Type II civilization, also called a stellar civilization—can use and control energy at scale of its planetary system.

Type III civilization, also called a galactic civilization—can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy

Usage of Power

In 1964, Kardashev defined three levels of civilizations, based on the order of magnitude of power available to them:

Type I

Technological level of a civilization that is "close to the level presently attained on Earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec" (4×1012 watts).[1] Currently, the civilization of Type I is usually defined as one that can harness all the energy that falls on a planet from its parent star (for Earth–Sun system, this value is close to 1.74×1017 watts), which is about four orders of magnitude higher than the amount presently attained on Earth, with energy consumption at ≈2×1013 watts. The astronomer Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as a level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts.

Type II

A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star—for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere—with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec.Lemarchand stated this as a civilization capable of using and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy use would then be comparable to the luminosity of the Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts).

Type III

A civilization in possession of energy at the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ≈4×1044 erg/sec.Lemarchand stated this as a civilization with access to the power comparable to the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy, about 4×1044 erg/sec (4×1037 watts).

Kardashev believed that a Type 4 civilization was impossible, so he did not go past Type 3. However, new types (0, IV, V, VI) have been proposed.

Current status of human civilization-

Average Power Consumption

View Point of Famous Astrophysicist Carl Sagan-

According to the Astrophysicist Carl Sagan, humanity is currently going through a phase of technical adolescence, "typical of a civilization about to integrate the type I Kardashev scale."

Carl Sagan

He suggested defining intermediate values (not considered in Kardashev's original scale) by interpolating and extrapolating the values given above for types I (1016 W), II (1026 W) and III (1036 W), which would produce the formula:

where value K is a civilization's Kardashev rating and P is the power it uses, in watts. Using this extrapolation, a "Type 0" civilization, not defined by Kardashev, would control about 1 MW of power, and humanity's civilization type as of 1973 was about 0.7 (apparently using 10 terawatts (TW) as the value for 1970s humanity).

In 2018, the total world energy consumption was 13864.9 Mtoe (161,249 TWh),equivalent to an average power consumption of 18.40 TW or 0.73 on Sagan's interpolated Kardashev scale.

View Point of Physicist & futurist Michio Kaku-

Michio Kaku

According to the physicist and futurist Michio Kaku, at the current time, humanity has not yet reached Type 1 civilization status. He suggested that, if humans increase their energy consumption at an average rate of 3 percent each year, they may attain Type I status in 100–200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in 100,000 to a million years.

Dyson sphere- It is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output.

Dyson sphere

A video on types of civilisation in the universe

Most Dangerous Malwares of all time- Most dangerous Cyber Viruses

2020-05-13T15:15:00.001+05:30

Representative Image

Did you know that there had been numerous cyber attacks in the past which had led to the damage of millions of dollars?Here, we have come up with a list of the most dreadful malware attacks in the history of cyber crimes that will definitely intrigue you!

WannaCry Ransomware - 2017

Wanna Decrypter

The WannaCry ransomware attack was one of the recent and the most dangerous cyber attacks in the history of cyber crimes. It was a May 2017 worldwide cyberattack by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which mainly targeted the machines based on the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the form of Bitcoin. It propagated through EternalBlue, an exploit developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for older Windows systems. EternalBlue was stolen and leaked by a group called The Shadow Brokers a few months prior to the attack. Although Microsoft had released patches to fix these vulnerabilities, there were still a lot of computers which did not update their software, as hence, became a victim of the deadly virus attack.

The attack was halted within a few days of its discovery due to emergency patches released by Microsoft and the discovery of a kill switch that prevented infected computers from spreading WannaCry further. The attack was estimated to have affected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries, with total damages ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Security experts believed from preliminary evaluation of the worm that the attack originated from North Korea or agencies working for the country.

It was in December 2017 that the United States, United Kingdom and Australia formally asserted that North Korea was behind the attack.

Cryptolocker

The CryptoLocker ransomware attack was a cyberattack using the CryptoLocker ransomware that occurred from 5 September 2013 to late May 2014. The attack utilized a trojan that targeted computers running Microsoft Windows, and was believed to have first been posted to the Internet on 5 September 2013. It propagated via infected email attachments, and via an existing Gameover ZeuS botnet. When activated, the malware encrypted certain types of files stored on local and mounted network drives using RSA public-key cryptography, with the private key stored only on the malware's control servers. The malware then displayed a message which offered to decrypt the data if a payment (through either bitcoin or a pre-paid cash voucher) was made by a stated deadline, and it threatened to delete the private key if the deadline passes. If the deadline was not met, the malware offered to decrypt data via an online service provided by the malware's operators, for a significantly higher price in bitcoin. There was no guarantee that payment would release the encrypted content.

Although CryptoLocker itself was easily removed, the affected files still remained encrypted in a way which researchers considered unfeasible to break. Many said that the ransom should not be paid, but did not offer any way to recover files; others said that paying the ransom was the only way to recover files that had not been backed up. Some victims also claimed that paying the ransom did not always lead to the files being decrypted.

CryptoLocker was isolated in late May 2014 via Operation Tovar, which took down the Gameover ZeuS botnet that had been used to distribute the malware. During the operation, a security firm involved in the process obtained the database of private keys used by CryptoLocker, which was in turn used to build an online tool for recovering the keys and files without paying the ransom. It is believed that the operators of CryptoLocker successfully extorted a total of around $3 million from victims of the trojan. Other instances of encryption-based ransomware that have followed have used the "CryptoLocker" name (or variations), but are otherwise unrelated.

GameOverZeus

GameOverZeus is a peer-to-peer botnet based on components from the earlier ZeuS trojan. The malware was created by Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev of Russia. It is believed to have been spread through use of the Cutwail botnet.

Unlike its predecessor the ZeuS trojan, Gameover ZeuS uses an encrypted peer-to-peer communication system to communicate between its nodes and its command and control servers, greatly reducing its vulnerability to law enforcement operations. The algorithm used appears to be modeled on the Kademlia P2P protocol.

Scammers control and monitor Gameover ZeuS via Command and Control (C&C) server. The virus establishes the connection to the server as soon as its malicious executable installs on the computer, at which point it can disable certain system processes, download and launch executables, or even delete essential system files, easily bricking the device.

According to a report by Symantec, Gameover ZeuS has largely been used for banking fraud and distribution of the CryptoLocker ransomware.

Stuxnet

Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm, first uncovered in 2010, thought to have been in development since at least 2005. Stuxnet targets supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and is believed to be responsible for causing substantial damage to the nuclear program of Iran. Although neither country has openly admitted responsibility, the worm is widely understood to be a cyberweapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.

Stuxnet specifically targets programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which allow the automation of electromechanical processes such as those used to control machinery and industrial processes including gas centrifuges for separating nuclear material. Exploiting four zero-day flaws, Stuxnet functions by targeting machines using the Microsoft Windows operating system and networks, then seeking out Siemens Step7 software. Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian PLCs, collecting information on industrial systems and causing the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart. Stuxnet's design and architecture are not domain-specific and it could be tailored as a platform for attacking modern supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and PLC systems (e.g., in factory assembly lines or power plants), most of which are in Europe, Japan, and the US. Stuxnet reportedly ruined almost one-fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Targeting industrial control systems, the worm infected over 200,000 computers and caused 1,000 machines to physically degrade.

Stuxnet has three modules: a worm that executes all routines related to the main payload of the attack; a link file that automatically executes the propagated copies of the worm; and a rootkit component responsible for hiding all malicious files and processes, to prevent detection of Stuxnet. It is typically introduced to the target environment via an infected USB flash drive, thus crossing any air gap. The worm then propagates across the network, scanning for Siemens Step7 software on computers controlling a PLC. In the absence of either criterion, Stuxnet becomes dormant inside the computer. If both the conditions are fulfilled, Stuxnet introduces the infected rootkit onto the PLC and Step7 software, modifying the code and giving unexpected commands to the PLC while returning a loop of normal operation system values back to the users.

In 2015, Kaspersky Lab noted that the Equation Group had used two of the same zero-day attacks prior to their use in Stuxnet and commented that "the similar type of usage of both exploits together in different computer worms, at around the same time, indicates that the Equation Group and the Stuxnet developers are either the same or working closely together".

Mydoom Virus

Mydoom, also known as W32.MyDoom@mm, Novarg, Mimail.R and Shimgapi, is a computer worm affecting Microsoft Windows. It was first sighted on January 26, 2004. It became the fastest-spreading e-mail worm ever (as of January 2004), exceeding previous records set by the Sobig worm and ILOVEYOU, a record which as of 2019 has yet to be surpassed.

Mydoom appears to have been commissioned by e-mail spammers so as to send junk e-mail through infected computers.[2] The worm contains the text message "andy; I'm just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry," leading many to believe that the worm's creator was paid. Early on, several security firms expressed their belief that the worm originated from a programmer in Russia. The actual author of the worm is unknown.

Speculative early coverage held that the sole purpose of the worm was to perpetrate a distributed denial-of-service attack against SCO Group. 25 percent of Mydoom.A-infected hosts targeted www.sco.com with a flood of traffic. Trade press conjecture, spurred on by SCO Group's own claims, held that this meant the worm was created by a Linux or open source supporter in retaliation for SCO Group's controversial legal actions and public statements against Linux. This theory was rejected immediately by security researchers. Since then, it has been likewise rejected by law enforcement agents investigating the virus, who attribute it to organized online crime gangs.

Initial analysis of Mydoom suggested that it was a variant of the Mimail worm—hence the alternate name Mimail.R—prompting speculation that the same people were responsible for both worms. Later analyses were less conclusive as to the link between the two worms.

Mydoom was named by Craig Schmugar, an employee of computer security firm McAfee and one of the earliest discoverers of the worm. Schmugar chose the name after noticing the text "mydom" within a line of the program's code. He noted: "It was evident early on that this would be very big. I thought having 'doom' in the name would be appropriate."

MyDoom is the most devastating computer virus to date, which caused more than $38 billion in damage.

Sasser and Netsky

Sasser is a computer worm that affects computers running vulnerable versions of the Microsoft operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000. Sasser spreads by exploiting the system through a vulnerable port. Thus it is particularly virulent in that it can spread without user intervention, but it is also easily stopped by a properly configured firewall or by downloading system updates from Windows Update. The specific hole Sasser exploits is documented by Microsoft in its MS04-011 bulletin, for which a patch had been released seventeen days earlier.

Netsky is a prolific family of computer worms which affect Microsoft Windows operating systems. The first variant appeared on Monday, February 16, 2004. The "B" variant was the first family member to find its way into mass distribution. It appeared on Wednesday, February 18, 2004. 18-year-old Sven Jaschan of Germany confessed to having written these, and other worms, such as Sasser.

Although individual functions vary widely from virus to virus, the Netsky family perhaps is most famous for comments contained within the code of its variants insulting the authors of the Bagle and Mydoom worm families and, in some cases, routines that removed versions of these viruses. The "war" as it was referred to in the media caused a steady increase in the number of variant viruses produced in these families. As of June 2004, Bagle had approximately 28, Netsky approximately 29, and MyDoom approximately 10.

Other symptoms of Netsky included beeping sounds on specified dates, usually in the morning hours.

The worm was sent out as an e-mail, enticing recipients to open an attachment. Once opened, the attached program would scan the computer for e-mail addresses and e-mail itself to all addresses found.

Until October 2006, the P variant of this virus remained the most prevalent virus being sent in e-mail throughout the world, despite being over two and a half years old.[2] It was surpassed by a variant from the Stration malware family in November 2006.

CodeRed

Code Red was a computer worm observed on the Internet on July 15, 2001. It attacked computers running Microsoft's IIS web server. It was the first large scale, mixed threat attack to successfully target enterprise networks.

The Code Red worm was first discovered and researched by eEye Digital Security employees Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh when it exploited a vulnerability discovered by Riley Hassell. They named it "Code Red" because Code Red Mountain Dew was what they were drinking at the time.

Although the worm had been released on July 13, the largest group of infected computers was seen on July 19, 2001. On this day, the number of infected hosts reached 359,000.

On July 19, the code red worm infected more than 250,000 computer systems in just nine hours and it was estimated that it caused $2 billion in lost productivity. The Pentagon shut down their hundreds of Defense Department Web pages in order to install protection against “Code Red.”

In order to protect your computer, Microsoft has made available a “patch” that is intended to protect computers against “Code Red.” It can be downloaded from the home page of the Microsoft Web site (www.microsoft.com ).

Plug X

The Plug X malware, also known as “Korplug” is a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) , first discovered in 2012. It primarily targeted the government agencies, specific businesses and organizations and it spread via phishing emails, spam campaigns, and spear-phishing campaigns.

The attack started with a phishing email containing a malicious attachment, usually, a specially crafted malicious document and exploits a vulnerability in either Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft word.

In July 2016, a Japanese travel agency, JTB Corp, suffered a data breach compromising almost 7.93 million user records. The data breach was a result of an employee opening a malicious document which he received via a phishing email. The malicious document included the PlugX RAT, which installed the Elirks backdoor trojan, that is designed to steal user information. Furthermore, it was reported that 7.93 million user records from Japanese Travel Agency were compromised.

PlugX contains backdoor modules to perform the following tasks:

XPlugDisk – It is used to copy, move, rename, execute and delete files.

XPlugProcess – It is used to enumerate processes, get process information, and terminate processes.

XPlugKeyLogger – It is used to log keystrokes.

XPlugNethood – It is used to enumerate network resources and set TCP connections.

XPlugService – It is used to delete, enumerate, modify, and start services.

XPlugShell – It is used to perform remote shell on the affected system.

Nimba

Nimda is a computer virus that caused traffic slowdowns as it rippled across the Internet, spreading through four different methods, infecting computers containing Microsoft's Web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and computer users who opened an e-mail attachment. It first appeared on September 18, 2001.

Like a number of predecessor viruses, Nimda's payload appears to be the traffic slowdown itself - that is, it does not appear to destroy files or cause harm other than the considerable time that may be lost to the slowing or loss of traffic known as denial-of-service and the restoring of infected systems. With its multi-pronged attack, Nimda appears to be the most troublesome virus of its type that has yet appeared. Its name (backwards for "admin") apparently refers to an "admin.dll" file that, when run, continues to propagate the virus.

It probes each IP address within a randomly-selected range of IP addresses, attempting to exploit weaknesses that, unless already patched, are known to exist in computers with Microsoft's Internet Information Server. A system with an exposed IIS Web server will read a Web page containing an embedded JavaScript that automatically executes, causing the same JavaScript code to propagate to all Web pages on that server.

As people (those with Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers at the 5.01 or earlier level) visit sites at the infected Web server, they unwittingly download pages with the JavaScript that automatically executes, causing the virus to be sent to other computers on the Internet in a somewhat random fashion.

Nimda also can infect users within the Web server's own internal network that have been given a network share (a portion of file space).

Finally, one of the things that Nimda has an infected system do is to send an e-mail with a "readme.exe" attachment to the addresses in the local Windows address book. A user who opens or previews this attachment (which is a Web page with the JavaScript) propagates the virus further.

ZeroAccess botnet

How a Botnet works

ZeroAccess is a Trojan horse computer malware that affects Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is used to download other malware on an infected machine from a botnet while remaining hidden using rootkit techniques.

The ZeroAccess botnet was discovered at least around May 2011. The ZeroAccess rootkit responsible for the botnet's spread is estimated to have been present on at least 9 million systems. Estimates of the size of the botnet vary across sources; antivirus vendor Sophos estimated the botnet size at around 1 million active and infected machines in the third quarter of 2012, and security firm Kindsight estimated 2.2 million infected and active systems.

The bot itself is spread through the ZeroAccess rootkit through a variety of attack vectors. One attack vector is a form of social engineering, where a user is persuaded to execute malicious code either by disguising it as a legitimate file, or including it hidden as an additional payload in an executable which announces itself as, for example, bypassing copyright protection (a keygen). A second attack vector utilizes an advertising network in order to have the user click on an advertisement that redirects them to a site hosting the malicious software itself. A third infection vector used is an affiliate scheme where third party persons are paid for installing the rootkit on a system.

In December 2013 a coalition led by Microsoft moved to destroy the command and control network for the botnet. The attack was ineffective though because not all C&C were seized, and its peer-to-peer command and control component was unaffected - meaning the botnet could still be updated at will.

ILOVEYOU

ILOVEYOU malware

According to Wikipedia, ILOVEYOU, sometimes also referred to as Love Bug or Love Letter for you, is a computer worm that infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after 4 May 2000 when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and the attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs". The latter file extension ('vbs', a type of interpreted file) was most often hidden by default on Windows computers of the time (as it is an extension for a file type that is known by Windows), leading unwitting users to think it was a normal text file. Opening the attachment activates the Visual Basic script. The worm inflicts damage on the local machine, overwriting random types of files (including Office files, image files, and audio files; however after overwriting MP3 files the virus hides the file), and sends a copy of itself to all addresses in the Windows Address Book used by Microsoft Outlook. This made it spread much faster than any other previous email worm.

On the machine system level, ILOVEYOU relied on the scripting engine system setting (which runs scripting language files such as .vbs files) being enabled, and took advantage of a feature in Windows that hid file extensions by default, which malware authors would use as an exploit. Windows would parse file names from right to left, stopping at the first period character, showing only those elements to the left of this. The attachment, which had two periods, could thus display the inner fake "txt" file extension. True text files are considered to be innocuous as they are incapable of running executable code. The worm used social engineering to entice users to open the attachment (out of actual desire to connect or simple curiosity) to ensure continued propagation. Systemic weaknesses in the design of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Windows were exploited that allowed malicious code capable of complete access to the operating system, secondary storage, and system and user data simply by unwitting users clicking on an icon.

Messages generated in the Philippines began to spread westwards through corporate email systems. Because the worm used mailing lists as its source of targets, the messages often appeared to come from acquaintances and were therefore often regarded as "safe" by their victims, providing further incentive to open them. Only a few users at each site had to access the attachment to generate millions more messages that crippled mail systems and overwrote millions of files on computers in each successive network.

Melissa

The Melissa virus was a mass-mailing macro virus released on or around March 26, 1999. As it was not a standalone program, it was not classified as a worm. It targeted Microsoft Word and Outlook-based systems, and created considerable network traffic. The virus would infect computers via Email, the email being titled "Important Message From", followed by the current username. Upon clicking the message, the body would read: "Here's that document you asked for. Don't show anyone else ;)." Below this was a document titled list.doc. When the user clicked it many pornographic sites would open. It would then mass mail itself to the first 50 people in the user's contact list and then disable multiple safeguard features on Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook.

The virus was released on March 26, 1999, by David L. Smith. The virus itself was credited to Kwyjibo, who was shown to be the macrovirus writers VicodinES and ALT-F11 by comparing Microsoft Word documents with the same globally unique identifier — this method was also used to trace the virus back to Smith.

On April 1, 1999, Smith was arrested in New Jersey as a result of a collaborative effort involving the FBI, the New Jersey State Police, Monmouth Internet, a Swedish computer scientist, and others. David L. Smith was accused of causing $80 million worth of damages by disrupting personal computers and computer networks in business and government.

On December 10, 1999, Smith pleaded guilty to releasing the virus.

On May 1, 2002 he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison and fined $5,000 USD.

SQL Slammer

SQL Slammer is a 2003 computer worm that caused a denial of service on some Internet hosts and dramatically slowed down general Internet traffic. It spread rapidly, infecting most of its 75,000 victims within ten minutes.

The program exploited a buffer overflow bug in Microsoft's SQL Server and Desktop Engine database products. Although the MS02-039 patch had been released six months earlier, many organizations had not yet applied it.

Top fascinating facts About the Universe that will Surprise You!

2020-05-12T22:15:00.001+05:30

Representative Image(credits: Unsplash)

As you all know, the Universe is an ocean of mysteries, and each day our scientists and researchers are finding out crazy facts about it. If you are in a mood to learn intriguing facts about the Universe, then you are in the right place!!

Here are some mind- boggling facts about the Universe you all would love to know:

The most Complex object in the entire Universe is the Human Brain

The human brains are remarkably the most complex objects with a hundred billion neurons, a quadrillion connections, and we still don't know much about how this organic super computer operates. But we do know the human brain is the most complicated thing we have yet discovered. It gives us the power to form language and culture, consciousness, the idea of self, the ability to learn, and understand the universe and reflect on our place within it. We even have an inbuilt “model of gravity“, which is pretty useful.

The Universe Is expanding

In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made the revolutionary discovery that the universe is not static, but rather is expanding. It was long thought that the gravity of matter in the universe would slow this expansion or even cause it to contract.

However, in 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope studied very distant supernovas and found that, a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. This puzzling discovery suggested that an inexplicable force, called dark energy, is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

While dark energy is thought to be the strange force that is pulling the cosmos apart at ever-increasing speeds, it remains one of the greatest mysteries in science because its detection remains elusive to scientists.

The Universe: Its Old

universe

The universe is believed to begin with the Big Bang, and is estimated to be approximately 13.7 billion years old (plus or minus 130 million years).

Astronomers calculated this figure by measuring the composition of matter and energy density in the universe, which enabled them to determine how fast the universe expanded in the past. As a result, researchers could turn back the hands of time and pinpoint when the Big Bang occurred. The time in between that explosion and now makes up the age of the universe.

The rate of growth of the Universe is Increasing

Mysterious dark energy is not only thought to be driving the expansion of the universe, it appears to be pulling the cosmos apart at ever-increasing speeds. In 1998, two teams of astronomers announced that not only is the universe expanding, but it is accelerating as well. According to the researchers, the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is moving away.

The universe's acceleration also confirms Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and lately, scientists have revived Einstein's cosmological constant to explain the strange dark energy that seems to be counteracting gravity and causing the universe to expand at an accelerating pace. [Full Story]

Three scientists won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1998 discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.

There’s a giant cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B

Sagittarius B

The Sagittarius B, a vast molecular cloud of gas and dust floating near the centre of the Milky Way, is 26,000 light-years from Earth, and 463,000,000,000 kilometres in diameter and, amazingly, it contains 10-billion-billion-billion litres of alcohol. The vinyl alcohol in the cloud is far from the most flavoursome tipple in the universe, but it is an important organic molecule which offers some clues how the first building blocks of life-forming substances are produced.

The Universe may be Flat

The shape of the universe is influenced by the struggle between the pull of gravity (based on the density of the matter in the universe) and the rate of expansion. If the density of the universe exceeds a certain critical value, then the universe is "closed," like the surface of a sphere. This implies that the universe is not infinite but has no end. In this case, the universe will eventually stop expanding and start collapsing in on itself, in an event known as the "Big Crunch."

If the density of the universe is less than the critical density value, then the shape of the universe is "open," like the surface of a saddle. In this case, the universe has no bounds and will continue to expand forever.

Yet, if the density of the universe is exactly equal to the critical density, then the geometry of the universe is "flat," like a sheet of paper. Here, the universe has no bounds and will expand forever, but the rate of expansion will gradually approach zero after an infinite amount of time. Recent measurements suggest that the universe is flat with roughly a 2 percent margin of error.

The Universe constitutes massive amounts of invisible stuff

The universe is overwhelmingly made up of things that cannot be seen. In fact, the stars, planets and galaxies that can be detected make up only 4 percent of the universe, according to astronomers. The other 96 percent is made up of substances that cannot be seen or easily comprehended.

These elusive substances, called dark energy and dark matter, have not been detected, but astronomers base their existence on the gravitational influence that both exert on normal matter, the parts of the universe that can be seen.

The Universe Has Echoes of Its Birth

The cosmic microwave background is made up of light echoes left over from the Big Bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago. This relic of the Big Bang explosion hangs around the universe as a pocked veil of radiation.

The European Space Agency's Planck mission mapped the entire sky in microwave light to reveal new clues about how the universe began. Planck's observations are the most precise views of the cosmic microwave background ever obtained. Scientists are hoping to use data from the mission to settle some of the most debated questions in cosmology, such as what happened immediately after the universe was formed.

A Person looking at the Night Sky is looking back in Time

The stars we see in the night sky are very far away from us, so far the star light we see has taken a long time to travel across space to reach our eyes. This means whenever we look out into the night and gaze at stars we are actually experiencing how they looked in the past. For example, the bright star Vega is relatively close to us at 25 light-years away, so the light we see left the star 25 years ago; while Betelgeuse (pictured) in the constellation of Orion is 640 light-years away, so the light left the star around 1370, during the time of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Other stars we see are further away still, so we are seeing them much deeper in their past.

The Hubble telescope looks back billions of years into the past

Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Telescope enables us to look towards very distant objects in the universe. Thanks to this remarkable piece of engineering NASA has been able to create some incredible images, one of which is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Created using images from the telescope from 2003 and 2004, the incredible picture displays a tiny patch of the sky in immense detail; it contains 10,000 objects, most of them young galaxies, and acts as a portal back in time. In one picture we are transported 13 billion years into the past, just 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which is early in terms of the universe’s history.

Sometimes our television displays a glimpse of the Big Bang

Television Disturbance(Credits: Youtube)

Cosmic background radiation is the afterglow and heat of the Big Bang, the momentous event that kick-started our universe 13.7 billion years ago. This cosmic echo exists throughout the universe, and amazingly we can use an old-fashioned television set to catch a glimpse of it. When a television is not tuned to a station you can see the black and white fuzz and clacking white noise, around 1% of this interference is made up cosmic background radiation – the afterglow of creation.

There’s a diamond as big as a planet in Centaurus known as Lucy

Astronomers have discovered the largest known diamond in our galaxy, it’s a massive lump of crystallized diamond called BPM 37093, otherwise known as Lucy after The Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Found 50 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus, Lucy is about 25,000 miles across, so much larger then planet Earth, and weighs in at a massive 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats.

The Sun takes 225 million years to travel round the galaxy

Whilst the Earth and the other planets within our solar system orbit around the Sun, the Sun itself is orbiting around the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It takes the Sun 225 million years to perform a complete circuit of the galaxy. The last time the Sun was in its current position in the galaxy the super-continent Pangaea was just about starting to break apart and early dinosaurs were making an appearance.

Our solar system’s highest mountain is on Mars

Olympus Mons

The Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest mountain in the entire solar system. The mountain is a gigantic shield volcano (similar to volcanoes found in the Haiiwain Islands) standing at 26 kilometres tall and sprawling 600 kilometres across. To put this into scale, this makes the mountain almost three times the height of Mount Everest.

Each pole of Uranus enjoys Summer/Winter for 42 years

Uranus

Most of the planets in the Solar System spin on an axis similar to the Sun’s; slight tilts in a planet’s axis causes seasons as different parts become slightly closer or further from the sun during their orbit. Uranus is an exceptional planet in many ways, not least because it spins almost completely on its side in relation to the Sun. This results in very long seasons – each pole gets around 42 Earth years of continuous summer sunlight, followed by a wintry 42-year period of darkness. Uranus’s northern hemisphere enjoyed its last summer solstice in 1944 and will see in the next winter solstice in 2028.

Duration of a year is more than that of a day in Venus

Venus

Venus is the slowest rotating planet in the Solar System. In fact, it is so slow that it takes longer to fully rotate than it does to complete its orbit. This means Venus has days that last longer than its years. It’s also home to one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable, with constant electronic storms, high CO2 readings, and it’s shrouded by clouds of sulfuric acid.

The fastest spinning bodies in the Universe are Neutron Stars

Neutron stars are thought to be the fastest spinning objects in the universe. Pulsars are a particular type of neutron star that emits a beam of radiation which can be observed as a pulse of light as the star spins. The rate of this pulse allows astronomers to measure the rotation.

A spoonful of a neutron star weighs about a billion tons

Neutron stars spin incredibly quickly and are also incredibly dense. It is estimated, if you could collect a tablespoon of matter from the centre of a neutron star, it would weigh about one billion tons.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is the most distant human-made object from Earth

Voyager 1

The Voyager Program launched two spacecraft, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, in 1977. The probes explored the planets and moons of the outer Solar System over several decades and are now continuing their mission to travel through the heliosphere at the edge of our Solar System and continue to voyage into interstellar space.

On March 20 2013, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the Solar Sytem and is now the furthest human-made object from Earth, currently 124.34 Astronomical Units away. This is a LARGE distance, really large!

The Voyager 1 had captured the most distant photograph of the Earth

In 1990, as part of the spacecraft’s ongoing mission, Voyager 1 turned its camera back on our home planet and took a picture. This became known as The 'Pale Blue Dot'. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who first suggested the idea of the photograph, noted, “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But that's something really unique for us!

Scientists are looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a project to discover whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and how we may contact extraterrestrial species. The search includes looking for life on other planets and moons. For instance, some of Jupiter’s moons (such as Io) are promising places to look for evidence of primitive life, but the search for extraterrestrial life includes scientific research on Earth.

If scientists can discover evidence life has generated independently more than once it would suggest life could occur in more than one place, for more than one time. For this reason scientists are searching for evidence that life could have happened more than once on earth, with intriguing prospects for the universe as a result.

It is estimated there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy

Scientists have claimed that there are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun is essential to us, the centre of our Solar System, and our source of light and energy, but it is just one of many, many stars that make up our home galaxy.

500 million planets may have life in the Milky Way galaxy

Scientists searching for extraterrestrial life focus on “Goldilocks Planets“; these are planets which fall into a star’s habitable zone. Planet Earth seems to have exactly the right conditions for life to exist – its distance from the Sun means the temperature is right, water can exist as a liquid solid and a gas, and there are the right combination of chemical compounds available to build complex life forms. Other planets thought to have similar features are known as Goldilocks planets.

In the Milky Way alone there are estimated to be 500 million potential Goldilocks planets, so if life can exist in places other than Earth there is a huge number of potential planets on which it might thrive. If these numbers are applied to all the galaxies in the universe there could be a staggering variety of planets capable of supporting life. Of course, we have no evidence life exists elsewhere, but if it does there are plenty of places for it to set up home.

It is believed that there are numerous universes

This is more speculative theory than a fact, but several branches of mathematics, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics have all come to similar conclusions: our universe is just one of many and we actually exist in a ‘multiverse’.

There are different ideas of how this could be, one being the concept of atoms only capable of being arranged in a finite number of ways in time and space, ultimately leading to the repetiton of events and people. Other theories propose bubble or parallel universes and ‘braneworlds’ that hover just out of reach of the dimensions we experience. Although these concepts seem like the far-fetched ideas of science-fiction, they are actually proving to be the most elegant solutions to problems thrown up by our discoveries of how the universe works.

We are all a part of some star

This may sound fanciful, but the reality is almost every element found on Earth was created in the burning core of a star, all the stuff that makes up life on Earth, therefore our bodies are made from stardust. NASA have studied stardust extensively, and you can read more about their research on their official website. A NASA stardust canister is pictured above.

In the words of Carl Sagan, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

The International space station is the most expensive object ever built.

International Space Station

Humanity's most expensive single object floats 248 miles above the Earth. It's the $100 billion International Space Station, which houses six astronauts in a modular set of pressurized tubes that span the footprint of one and a half 747 jets.

Tiny, levitating "Nanocardboard flyers" could soon serve as new Mars Probes!!

2020-05-12T18:56:00.000+05:30

A visualization of the "nanocardboard" flyers.

With the Rapid Advancement of technology, several new innovations are being proposed towards space exploration.

Amidst all the speculations regarding Terraformation and landing on Mars, this summer, NASA will launch its newest Mars rover, Perseverance, and a helicopter that will fly over the planet's surface as part of a "high-risk, high-reward" experiment. But even before its launch, researchers are designing much more ambitious aircraft for Mars as well.

Of particular interest are flying aircraft that could, with less risk, more effectively observe and study Mars' surface. In a new study, researchers have demonstrated the abilities of a unique fleet of aircraft that could thrive on Mars: tiny "nanocardboard" flying vehicles. These aircraft each weigh about a third of a milligram, or less than a fruit fly, and have no moving parts. Instead of flying with wings or rotating blades, they actually levitate.

Currently in development at the University of Pennsylvania, the small, flat, rectangular devices aren't actually made of cardboard. Instead, they're constructed from an aluminum oxide plate that has groups of slot-like microchannels running through its mostly hollow interior. These boost its bending stiffness, keep cracks from propagating, and give it a corrugated cardboard-like structure.

They also allow it fly.

When the top surface of the plate is heated by exposure to bright light, the temperature differential between it and the plate's shaded underside causes air to be drawn in through the open top of each channel, and expelled out through its open bottom. This creates a cushion of air beneath the Flyer, levitating it.

It may even be possible to steer them, though close to the ground. If one of the tiny aircraft were to be deployed from a ground-based rover, that vehicle could conceivably track the Flyer with a laser, turning it by selectively shining the laser on different areas of its plate's top surface. Utilizing multiple independently controlled lasers, it's even possible that a single rover could control a whole fleet of Flyers.

This strange method of flight would be particularly advantageous on Mars because the planet's thin atmosphere and weaker gravity would allow the plates to lift more weight and travel over much longer distances than here on Earth.

Researchers tested the "nanocardboard" flyers in a "Mars-like" environment in lab.
(Image credit: Bargatin Group, Penn Engineering)

In a study, the researchers tested "nanocardboard" vehicles in a Mars-like environment in a lab environment. They tested the vehicles in a low-pressure test chamber and experimented with mock payloads by having the little floating plates carry silicone rings.

Additionally, Bargatin is working with other researchers to develop new, tinier chemical sensors that could collect important data and detect substances like methane and water on other planets, according to the statement -

"In addition to carrying sensors," Bargatin said, "our flyers could simply land and have grains of dust or sand passively stick to them, then transport them back to the rover so it doesn't need to travel as far."

Bargatin also suggested in the statement that fleets of these tiny flyers could be used to study our own planet's atmosphere — specifically, the mesosphere.

"The Earth's mesosphere is pretty similar to the Martian atmosphere in terms of density, and we currently don't have anything that flies there, since it is too low for space satellites but too high for airplanes and balloons," Bargatin said. "Ideally, you'd like to have some sensors up there as well. The more knowledge you have about the movement of the atmosphere at that level, the better predictions you can make about Earth's climate and even weather."

The research was published Tuesday (April 21) in the journal Advanced Materials.

Mars- All Information, Important facts, explorations, life

2020-05-12T16:37:00.001+05:30

Mars

Mars is one of the planets of the Solar system. It is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System after Mercury. The name Mars has been derived from the name of the Roman God of war 'Mars' and is often referred to as the 'Red Planet'.The name 'Red Planet', too, has a significance as it refers to the effect of Iron Oxide which is present on the Mar's surface that gives the planet its signature red color.This color is what makes it so distinctive among the astronomical bodies visible to the naked eye. It is a terrestrial planet with a very thin atmosphere, and its surface consists of the impact crators like the Moon, as well as the valleys, deserts and polar ice caps as on the Earth.

When it comes to the duration of the days and nights, it is comparable to that of the Earth. The seasons also resemble those of Earth, because the rotational period as well as the tilt of the rotational axis relative to the ecliptic plane are similar.

Mars bears the Olympus Mons, which is the largest volcano and the highest mountain known in the Solar System. The smooth Borealis basin in the northern hemisphere of this planet covers 40% of the planet and may be a giant impact feature.

Mars' Natural Satellites or Moons

Phobos(left) and Deimos(right)

Mars has two moons, namely, Phobos and Deimos. Both of them are small in size and irregularly shaped. According to space researchers, these may be captured asteroids, similar to 5261 Eureka, a Mars trojan.

Phobos is the innermost and larger of the two natural satellites of Mars. It is a small, irregularly shaped object with a mean radius of 11 km (7 mi) and is seven times as massive as the outer moon, Deimos. Phobos is named after the Greek god Phobos, a son of Ares (Mars) and Aphrodite (Venus) and the personification of fear (cf. phobia).

Phobos orbits 6,000 km (3,700 mi) from the Martian surface, closer to its primary body than any other known planetary moon. It is so close to the planet, that it orbits Mars much faster than Mars rotates, and completes an orbit just in 7 hours and 39 minutes. As a result, from the surface of Mars it appears to rise in the west, move across the sky in 4 hours and 15 minutes or less, and set in the east, twice each Martian day.

Deimos is the smaller and outermost of the two natural satellites of the planet Mars. Deimos has a mean radius of 6.2 km (3.9 mi) and takes 30.3 hours to orbit Mars. Deimos is 23,460 km (14,580 mi) from Mars, much further than Mars's other moon, Phobos. It is named for Deimos who in Greek mythology is the twin brother of Phobos, and personifies terror.

Internal Structure of Mars

Like Earth, Mars has differentiated into a dense metallic core overlaid by less dense materials. Current models of its interior imply a core with a radius of about 1,794 kilometers (1,115mi), consisting primarily of iron and nickel with about 16–17% sulfur. This iron(II) sulfide core is thought to be twice as rich in lighter elements as Earth's.

The core is surrounded by a silicate mantle that formed many of the tectonic and volcanic features on the planet, but it appears to be dormant. Besides silicon and oxygen, the most abundant elements in the Martian crust are iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and potassium. The average thickness of the planet's crust is about 50 km (31 mi), with a maximum thickness of 125 km (78 mi). Earth's crust averages 40 km (25 mi).

Mars is seismically active, with InSight recording over 450 marsquakes and related events in 2019.

Facts about Mars

Here are some interesting facts about Mars that you should know:

Mars is the home of the tallest mountain, the Olympus Mons, in the solar system.

Mars' landmass is approximately equal to that of the Earth.

Even though Mars has only 15% of the Earth’s volume and just over 10% of the Earth’s mass, around two thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. Martian surface gravity is only 37% of the Earth’s (meaning you could leap nearly three times higher on Mars).

Olympus Mons

Olympus Mons, a shield volcano, is 21km high and 600km in diameter. Despite having formed over billions of years, evidence from volcanic lava flows is so recent many scientists believe it could still be active.

Out of several missions to panet Mars from the Earth, only 18 have been successful.

As of September 2014 there have been 40 missions to Mars, including orbiters, landers and rovers but not counting flybys. The most recent arrivals include the Mars Curiosity mission in 2012, the MAVEN mission, which arrived on September 22, 2014, followed by the Indian Space Research Organization’s MOM Mangalyaan orbiter, which arrived on September 24, 2014. The next missions to arrive will be the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission, comprising an orbiter, lander, and a rover, followed by NASA’s InSight robotic lander mission, slated for launch in March 2016 and a planned arrival in September, 2016.

The size of the Sun as viewed from Mars is roughly half of the size as viewed from the Earth.

Mars has the largest dust storms in the entire solar system.These dust storms are really intense and can last for months and cover the entire planet.

The seasons are also extreme as its oval- shaped orbital path around the Sun is more elongated than most other planets in the solar system.

At the closest point to the Sun, the Martian southern hemisphere leans towards the Sun, thus, causing a short, intensely hot summer, while the northern hemisphere endures a brief, cold winter: at its farthest point from the Sun, the Martian northern hemisphere leans towards the Sun, causing a long, mild summer, while the southern hemisphere endures a lengthy, cold winter.

Like the Romans, the ancient Greeks also called the planet by the name Ares, after their God of war, associating the planet’s blood-red colour with Mars, their own god of war. The other ancient cultures too, focused on colour – according to China’s astronomers it was ‘the fire star’, whilst Egyptian priests called on ‘Her Desher’, or ‘the red one’.

Till now, numerous pieces of Mars have fallen to the Earth. Scientists have found tiny traces of Martian atmosphere within meteorites violently ejected from Mars, then orbiting the solar system amongst galactic debris for millions of years, before crash landing on Earth. This allowed scientists to begin studying Mars prior to launching space missions.

One day Mars will have a ring. In the next 20-40 million years Mars’ largest moon Phobos is expected to torn apart by gravitational forces leading to the creation of a ring that could last up to 100 million years.

There are signs of liquid water on Mars. For years Mars has been known to have water in the form of ice. The first signs of trickling water are dark stripes or stains on crater wall and cliffs seen in satellite images. Due to Mars’ atmosphere this water would have to be salty to prevent it from freezing or vaporising, as dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of water. The presence of water on the planet may also indicate the presence of life.

Martian Cliffs

There are several investigations which are assessing the past habitability of Mars, as well as the possibility of extant life. Astrobiology missions are planned, including the Perseverance and Rosalind Franklin rovers.

Due to very low atmospheric pressure, liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than even 1% of the atmospheric pressure on Earth, except at the lowest elevations for short periods. The two polar ice caps on the planet appear to consist largely of water. Studies have revealed that the volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be sufficient to cover the planetary surface to a depth of 11 meters or 36 feet.

In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of underground ice in the Utopia Planitia region on the planet. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in Lake Superior.

Mars Explorations

The Mariner 4 launched by NASA on November 28, 1964, was the first spacecraft to visit Mars, making its closest approach to the planet on July 15, 1965. Mariner 4 detected the weak Martian radiation belt, measured at about 0.1% that of Earth and captured the first images of another planet from deep space.

On July 20, 1976, Viking 1 performed the first successful landing on the Martian surface. The Soviet Mars 3 spacecraft achieved a soft landing in December 1971 but contact with its lander was lost seconds after touchdown.

Viking spacecraft

On July 4, 1997, the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars and on July 5 released its rover, Sojourner, the first robotic rover to operate on Mars.

Pathfinder was followed by the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004 and operated until March 22, 2010 and June 10, 2018, respectively. The Mars Express orbiter, the first European Space Agency spacecraft to visit Mars, arrived in orbit on December 25, 2003.

On September 24, 2014, the Indian Space Research Organization became the fourth space agency to visit Mars, when its maiden interplanetary mission, the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft, arrived in orbit.

New Math Shows that A special kind of Space-time is Unstable

2020-05-12T12:12:00.000+05:30

Georgis Moschidis, a graduate student at the Princeton University was asked by his advisor to mathematically prove that a certain configuration of space time is unstable, that is, in other words, to show that any small change to it would ultimately lead ro a breakdown in the space itself. His adviser, the mathematician Mihalis Dafermos, knew how difficult the task would be.

“You could spend a lot of time banging your head against the wall without getting anywhere,” said Dafermos, who (along with Gustav Holzegel) posed the instability conjecture in 2006. “I didn’t think it could ever be proven.” But he always encouraged Moschidis, now a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, to take a look at it anyway. Moschidis had already done enough work to earn a doctorate, so why not try for something big?

Dafermos’ faith in Moschidis was well placed. In a series of advances that began in 2017 and continue to this day, Moschidis has finally shown that a certain canonical configuration of Einsteinian space-time called anti-de Sitter (AdS) space is unstable. If a tiny bit of matter is throw into AdS space, it will eventually lead to the emergence of a black hole.

The Stanford mathematician Jonathan Luk has described Moschidis’ work as “amazing. … What he’s discovered is a rather general instability mechanism” — one that could apply to other settings, unrelated to AdS, in which matter or energy is cooped up within a physical system that has no escape hatches. Dafermos calls his former student’s work “spectacular” and “certainly the most original thing I’ve seen in the mathematics of general relativity in the last few years.”

And although we do not live in an anti-de Sitter universe (thank goodness for that, as we wouldn’t exist), the work also has implications for our understanding of everything from turbulence to the mysterious connections between theories of gravity and quantum mechanics.

The Swell of Gravity

The instability conjecture — and indeed the whole school of thought from which it sprang — goes back to Einstein’s equations of general relativity, which spell out exactly how mass and energy affect the curvature of space-time. In a vacuum, where there’s no matter at all, space-time can still be curved and gravity can still be present, due to the energy density of the vacuum itself, described by a “cosmological constant.” Thus, it turns out that empty space is not really empty at all!

The three simplest solutions to Einstein’s vacuum equations are the most symmetric ones — those in which the curvature of space-time is the same everywhere. In Minkowski space-time, where the cosmological constant is zero, the universe is perfectly flat. In de Sitter space-time, where the cosmological constant has a positive value, the universe is shaped like a sphere. And when the cosmological constant is negative, you get AdS space-time, which has a saddle shape. In the early days of cosmology, scientists wondered which one of these three space-times describes our universe.

Mathematicians, on the other hand, has always tended to wonder if these space-times were truly stable. That is, if one disturbed a vacuum space-time in any way — say, by injecting some matter into the system or sending in some gravitational waves — would it eventually settle down into something close to the original state? Or would it evolve into something wildly different? It’s the cosmic equivalent of dropping a rock into a pond: Will the waves gradually diminish, or will they build into a tsunami?

In 1986, a mathematician proved that de Sitter space-time is stable. A pair of mathematicians did the same for Minkowski space-time in 1993. The AdS problem has taken longer. The general consensus was that AdS, unlike the other two configurations, is unstable, which meant that mathematicians would have to take an entirely new approach. “A lot of tools in mathematics have been developed for stability problems,” said Dafermos. “But instability is a completely different arena — especially this type of instability,” which is nonlinear in nature, making for an inherently complicated situation, with correspondingly tricky calculations.

Researchers suspected that AdS space-time might be unstable because they believed its boundary would be reflective, thereby causing it “to act like a mirror so that any waves hitting it will come back,” Dafermos explained.

“Reflection at the boundary makes sense from a physical point of view,” said Juan Maldacena, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This is partly due to the curvature of AdS space, but there’s an even simpler explanation: The premise upholds the principle of energy conservation.

If the boundary is, in fact, reflective, nothing can leak out of AdS space-time. So any matter or energy put into the system could potentially get concentrated — perhaps to such an extent that a black hole would form. The question was: Would that really happen, and, if so, what mechanism would cause matter and energy to cluster together to such a degree rather than staying spread out?

Moschidis imagined standing in the middle of AdS space-time, which would be like standing inside a giant ball whose edge or boundary lies at infinity. If you sent a light signal from there, it would travel out and reach the boundary in a finite amount of time. That kind of travel is only possible because of a well-known relativistic effect: Although the spatial distance to the boundary is indeed infinite, time slows down for a wave or object traveling at or near the speed of light. So an observer standing in the middle of AdS space-time would see a light ray reach the boundary in a finite amount of time (though some patience would be required).

Instead of using a light ray, Moschidis dropped into AdS space a form of matter that is commonly used in general relativity models — so-called Einstein-Vlasov particles. These particles create concentric waves of matter in space-time, similar to the water waves that appear in a pond.

Of the many concentric waves created when matter is suddenly plopped into this space-time, the first two will be the biggest. Since they contain the most matter and energy, we’ll focus on them. The first wave — call it wave 1 — will expand outward until it hits the boundary, bounces back, and contracts as it retreats toward the center. The second wave, wave 2, will follow.

When wave 1 rebounds off the boundary and starts contracting toward the center, it will hit wave 2, which is still expanding. One consequence of the Einstein equations, Moschidis determined, is that in an interaction like this, the expanding wave (wave 2 in this case) will always transfer energy to the contracting wave (wave 1).

After wave 1 reaches the center, it will start expanding again, meeting up with wave 2, which is now contracting. This time, wave 1 will impart energy to wave 2. This cycle can repeat many, many times.

Moschidis realized something else: Near the center, the waves occupy less space, and the energy they carry is more concentrated. Because of this, the waves exchange more energy during the interaction near the center than during the interaction near the boundary. The net result is that wave 1 gives more energy to wave 2 at the center than wave 2 gives to wave 1 at the boundary.

Over numerous iterations, wave 2 grows larger and larger, taking energy from wave 1. Consequently, the energy density of wave 2 continues to build. At some point, as wave 2 contracts toward the center, its energy will become so concentrated that a black hole will form.

Here’s the proof of instability: Moschidis showed that when he adds even a minuscule amount of matter to an AdS space-time, a black hole (or black holes) will inexorably form. However, AdS space-time has, by definition, uniform curvature everywhere, which means it cannot harbor space-contorting objects like black holes. “If you perturb AdS space-time and wait a sufficient time,” Moschidis said, “you’ll end up with a different geometry — one that contains black holes — and it’s no longer AdS. That’s what we mean by unstable.”

Moschidis has recently proved AdS instability for a different kind of matter perturbation — a so called massless scalar field — presenting this unpublished work in several academic talks. “Because the waves generated by a scalar field are a proxy for gravitational waves,” Dafermos said, this brings Moschidis one step closer to the ultimate goal — proving AdS instability in a true vacuum, where the space-time is perturbed strictly by gravity without the introduction of any matter.

The Turbulent Future of AdS Space

The instability of AdS space-time has major implications for how we understand our own universe. First, since AdS space-time is unstable, it’s “something you will not see in nature,” Moschidis said.

But “even though AdS is not real,” he said, “it can still lead us to the discovery and study of real phenomena.”

For example, turbulence arises when energy gets concentrated from large scales to small scales — something that Moschidis showed can occur when AdS space-time is perturbed. But turbulence is a widespread (and poorly understood) phenomenon that appears in all kinds of fluid systems. AdS space-time — at least to someone with Moschidis’ skills and inclinations — is a “clean” and relatively simple system to work with, which is why he considers it “a good theoretical test bed” for studying turbulence. In the AdS setting, turbulence is caused by gravity, but Moschidis believes that the mathematical tools he is developing could aid the analysis of the turbulence that crops up in fluid mechanics as well.

AdS also features prominently in the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence — a key clue for how to unite quantum mechanics with gravity in an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity. The correspondence states that a gravitational system in AdS space can be equivalent to a nongravitational quantum system in one fewer dimension. “We can take a quantum mechanical system that does not contain gravity and describe it instead by a theory of gravity — not a theory of gravity in our universe but a theory of gravity in an AdS universe,” said Maldacena, who uncovered the correspondence in 1997. He further noted that the instability of AdS — as recently proved by Moschidis — does not affect the validity of the correspondence.

Moschidis’ work, when combined with the AdS/CFT correspondence, could also help illuminate the more familiar domain of interacting particles. For example, Moschidis used small perturbations of AdS space-time to create black holes. This process correlates, via the correspondence, to the process of thermalization whereby quantum systems achieve equilibrium — an almost ubiquitous real-world phenomenon.“Proving that AdS is unstable,” Moschidis concluded, “doesn’t mean it is uninteresting.”

Information Credits: QuantaMagazine

Whatsapp will make money transactions easier -Loans can be given through whatsapp

2020-05-11T20:50:00.000+05:30

WhatsApp considers loaning MONEY to chat app users, but there's a catch

WHATSAPP is planning to bring quick access to loans within its hugely-popular chat app. But there's a catch - not everyone will be able to access the messaging platform's exciting new feature. Here's what you need to know.

WhatsApp could be planning to significantly step up its payment ambitions. The hugely successful chat app already has ambitious plans to bring peer-to-peer transactions to allow users to send money to one another without leaving WhatsApp, but now it wants to bring loans to the service too. Yes, really.

Like the ability to ping money to friends and family within chat windows or group conversations, this new feature will be limited to India. The new feature was unearthed in a recent regulatory filing which states the Facebook-owned company would like to “advance money or give credit on such terms as may seem expedient, and with or without security, to customers and others.”

Image credits-stock images

Due to regulations, WhatsApp will not be able to hand out the loans itself – so it will have to partner with existing banking businesses to execute this crackpot new idea. Being able to complete the application inside WhatsApp could make it much easier to quickly access cash when you need it.

Earlier this month, Facebook invested $5.9 billion into India‘s top carrier Reliance Jio. As a part of this deal, a pilot programme to allow people to order groceries within WhatsApp. And previous reports suggest Jio is one of the companies looking to help WhatsApp bring its consumer lending business into the chat app.

Image credits -stock images

The National Technology Day 2020, all you need to know

2020-05-11T16:50:00.000+05:30

If you didn't know, today, May 11 is the National Technology Day and our country is observing its 29th National Technology Day today. This day was first observed on May 11, 1999 in order to commemorate the scientific and technological achievements of Indian scientists and engineers.

To mark the occasion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to Twitter to salute all the scientists for their achievements. “On National Technology Day, our nation salutes all those who are leveraging technology to bring a positive difference in the lives of others. We remember the exceptional achievement of our scientists on this day in 1998. It was a landmark moment in India’s history,” he wrote in a tweet.

May 11 is also the day when India conducted its first successful test in Pokhran. It was on May 11, 1998, when India successfully fired the Shakti-I nuclear missile at an Army test range in Rajasthan’s Pokhran. Two days later, the country conducted two more nuclear tests as a part of the same operation, which was followed by India joining the elite club of nuclear power nations.

May 11 also marks the flight of the indigenously developed Hansa-3 which was developed jointly by the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) lab. On the same day, that is, May 11, 1988, the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) completed the final test fire of the surface-to-air Trishul missile.

Every year since 1999, the Technology Development Board (TBD) celebrates this day by awarding individuals for their scientific contributions to the nation.

National Technology Day is being celebrated today, and considering the current situation, views of various industry leaders are centered on how COVID-19 has affected organizations. Although the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact lives and livelihoods across the globe, it has also given rise to several opportunities and is making enterprises and individuals realize the power of digital like never before.

"National Technology Day is celebrated on 11th of May every year to recognize the innovations in technology that is creating a better India. This year, it is more contextual considering the challenges we are navigating due to the COVID-19 outbreak. From enabling remote working and collaboration to empowering banking, healthcare, education to function digitally, the developments have been a strong testimony to India’s Digital Prowess and Capabilities. Post COVID-19, India will be strongly positioned to leverage its IT infrastructure, human capital and internet penetration to create enterprises that will address the most pressing issues using new-age digital technologies,” says Neelesh Kripalani, the senior vice president and head of the Center of Excellence (CoE) at Clover Infotech.

Organizations are also releasing the potential of technology, and all its salient benefits. “Coronavirus has broken the supply chain while rupturing the demand and market trends. As we’re forced to work remotely and use technologies for the first time, we’re realizing the benefits they deliver. Organizations are getting deeper into digital transformation. There is a paradigm-shifting to remote banking, digital payments, and direct financial aid which is further pushing the financial industry to become digital. This transformation will inevitably promote India’s Digital Mission. Policymakers need to support the ways people and organizations are using the internet to come together and deal with new pressures as our lives shift abruptly online. The focal point will be to ensure that critical functions like IT, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and digital services are well protected,” says Shibu Paul, vice president, International Sales, Array Networks.

Digital transformation, which was a common tech jargon, has now become a reality after it received a push through the COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdowns across the world. “The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed us to modernize and harness the power of technology. Stakeholders are using technology to cushion the impact of COVID-19. We see major digital transformation coming up as India gears to establish a sense of normalcy. This shift is bound to drive India’s digital mission. Remote working and e-services have become the new norm. Banking and Personal finance institutions are trying to limit customer walk-ins by augmenting their digital capabilities and extending new online services. We see exacerbated use of hybrid cloud and hyper-converged platforms as people have realized the importance of cloud-based communication-enabled business processing. This has also led to the strengthening of cybersecurity systems to safeguard sensitive data and protect assets from malicious data breaches. Going forward, the industry would need systems that enable remote monitoring of processes and machines. Remote work will play a significant role in business continuity planning and this digital transformation will further aid in fulfilling India’s Digital Mission,” says Gurpreet Singh, managing director, Arrow PC Network Pvt Ltd.

Last but not the least, the payments industry in India has received the necessary impetus India post the COVID-19 pandemic. “Technology has made it all possible”. The pandemic gave us a chance to re-evaluate and push businesses everywhere into an accelerated state of digitalization. COVID-19 has increased the adoption of digital payment solutions significantly. E-payments options are making it possible for people to sit at home and order essentials online be it from Flipkart or Amazon or any of the online ecommerce platforms. The use of digital payments was anyway growing but we have now seen this grown even more exponentially thanks to this COVID-19 situation,” Prashanth GJ, CEO, TechnoBind.

However, with the rapid digitization in the country, there comes the issue of cyber threat and cyber security. Industry leaders also believe that the necessary measures to ensure users educated on the same. “The threat of cyber-crime is a real one – and there are technological solutions like encryption and tokenization which helps overcome this cyber-crime threat. There are government regulations in place but the implementation and the imposition of the guidelines of the same should be taken up seriously – currently, there is a gap,” added Prashanth GJ.

Along the same lines, Ashis Guha, CEO, RAH Infotech “Digital platforms are in general highly secure; however, it is also important how well aware the users are to potential threats reaching out. On the forefront of fighting off digital fraud, the users have to employ caution and security measures. Few basic measures like not using insecure data networks and not opening links to lucrative websites must be strictly enforced. Also, payments must be made only to trusted sources, and payment gateways on phones and other devices must be strongly protected with passwords, fingerprints, or facial recognition too.”

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‌ Fusion Rockets : The orion project.It was a project based on the use of fusion enginesCredits : Wikipedia

‌The Black Hole Drive : The Schwarzschild KugelblitzCredits : space.com

‌The Alcubierre Wrap drive : The wrap field.Credits : researchgate

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Mars- All Information, Important facts, explorations, life

New Math Shows that A special kind of Space-time is Unstable

Whatsapp will make money transactions easier -Loans can be given through whatsapp

WhatsApp considers loaning MONEY to chat app users, but there's a catch

WHATSAPP is planning to bring quick access to loans within its hugely-popular chat app. But there's a catch - not everyone will be able to access the messaging platform's exciting new feature. Here's what you need to know.

The National Technology Day 2020, all you need to know

‌ Fusion Rockets :

The orion project.
It was a project based on the use of fusion engines
Credits : Wikipedia

‌The Black Hole Drive :

The Schwarzschild Kugelblitz
Credits : space.com

‌The Alcubierre Wrap drive :

The wrap field.
Credits : researchgate