Previews from Interesting Recent Scientific Advances

1) The World of Wonderful Mathematics

Source: cliffmass.blogspot.com

This one I happened to see on Scientific American blog and is quite interesting. Starting from a comment on an Onion News (Satirical News Emag) article on 27 new functions in trigonometry, author Dr. Evelyn Lamb, University of Utah introduces to 10 unheard functions of trigonometry.

After such a long time I came by some superb blog on trigonometric function and log scales, maths to be precise. It
reminded me of my school days, thanks to my father when he used to ask us to solve trig and
log problems via conventional means i.e. using log tables
and papers. Feeling proud of the fact that I still know how to make my
own trig table out of nothing. I don’t know if our calculator/computer
dependent generation has any idea how much fun is math.

Here is an excerpt from the blog,


“We’re very lucky now that we can multiply, square, and take square
roots so easily, and our calculators can store precise information about
the sines, cosines, and tangents of angles, but before we could do
that, we figured out a work-around in the form of a ridiculous number of
trig functions. It’s easy forget that the people who defined them were
not sadistic math teachers who want people to memorize weird functions
for no reason. These functions actually made computations quicker and
less error-prone. Now that computers are so powerful, the haversine has
gone the way of the floppy disc.”

You can reach the article here.

2. Graphene from DNA

Both are beautiful and romantic structures from the world of Science. And guess what, they are connected now. You can make Graphene from DNA as a starting material. Ah, don’t worry, any DNA; even of plants. The great thing about this discovery published recently in the Nature is that you can produce Graphene at large scale; a very serious challenge, we the nanotechnologists face. And the beauty is that you get well arranged honeycomb structure of Graphene, only 20-50 nanometers thick. As a part of Science and Energy program of Stanford University, the discovery can revolutionize the future of electronics. You can have 1×1 mm2 processor which will be manifolds faster than your Core i-7. Here is what EurekAlert has to say about the structure, quoting co-author Yap;

“Our DNA-based fabrication method is highly scalable, offers high
resolution and low manufacturing cost. All these
advantages make the method very attractive for industrial adoption.”

 The fabrication method is quite easy. You just have to dip the DNA in copper solution and then heat and bathe it in Methane environment. The DNA and embedded Cu ions provide the template to the carbon atoms from Methane for assisted layer formation of the Graphene honeycomb by Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) technique. It is just the matter of a moment and the creativity of Idea that works to bring wonders. The same happened here.

You can read the news here and the paper over here 

3. Get ready to be Teletransported (Source: IFLS)

Remember Scotty from Star Trek; the guy who discovered the teleportation equation in the series; Simon Pegg starring in the movie as Scotty. The part of fiction has now started taking leaps when scientists have achieved 100% Quantum teleportation of information (so much to do for the actual human to transport though.) 🙁 Unless it is an alien conspiracy like that one in the movie The World’s End, 2013 (coincidentally also written by and casting Simon Pegg.) This is great and promising milestone to the future of quantum computing (forget about these Quad Core, i9 and shit.) But let’s talk about a bit of science fiction to explain quantum entanglement process.

Here is a link to the history of teleportation experiments, explaining the quantum entanglement process by Captain Kirk’s example.

In performing the experiment, the Caltech group was able to get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,
the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a photon.
This principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location
and the speed of a particle. But if you can’t know the position of a
particle, then how can you teleport it? In order to teleport a photon
without violating the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists used a
phenomenon known as entanglement. In entanglement, at least three photons are needed to achieve quantum teleportation:

• Photon A: The photon to be teleported
• Photon B: The transporting photon
• Photon C: The photon that is entangled with photon B

If
researchers tried to look too closely at photon A without entanglement,
they would bump it, and thereby change it. By entangling photons B and
C, researchers can extract some information about photon A, and the
remaining information would be passed on to B by way of entanglement,
and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the information from
photon A to photon C, they can create an exact replica of photon A.
However, photon A no longer exists as it did before the information was
sent to photon C.
In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to
an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure is passed through
the transporter room to his desired location, where a replica of Kirk is
created and the original is destroyed.

Unless of course, you don’t destroy first Kirk before you are sure of the second one and of course a secure way to destroy Kirk as soon as you are sure, critically before the first Kirk starts realisation of existence of his first self and a threat to his existence oblivious of the other one and turn AWOL like Adam Gibon (Schwarznegger) in the movie “The 6th day.” Well let’s leave those issues for philosophy guys for now giving them due assurance that we will keep in view all the ethical considerations. 🙂

Read the news of 100% teleportation over here and the excerpted article over here.

4. Ages Old Glass Structure Myths Explained (Source: Science Alert)

Here is something more interesting for material engineers. This reminded me of my Postgrad courses of Ceramics and Phase Transformation & Microstructures. This one is also related to Graphene when they were trying to synthesize Graphene in a quartz furnace, an unwanted leak in the furnace caused the quartz elements (Silicon and Oxygen) to fuse on the graphene layer. When investigated they found a 2 atoms thick layer of glass on top of graphene in which you can clearly see individual Silicon and Oxygen atoms with SEM. This accidental (or serendipitous as Muller calls it) discovery explains the ages old mystery on the structure and behavior of glass which scientists always debated as solid/liquid thing. The beauty of scientific process is also evident from the fact that the structure strikingly resembles a diagram drawn in 1932 by W.H. Zachariasen – a
longstanding theoretical representation of the arrangement of atoms in
glass. And guess what this is going for Guiness world records as the thinnest glass ever. There is a great potential for this discovery in the future of semiconductors as the author explains,

What’s more, two-dimensional glass could someday find a use in
transistors, by providing a defect-free, ultra-thin material that could
improve, for example, the performance of processors in computers and
smartphones.

 Read the news here and paper over here.

5.Manipulate your Mind

Time for some “Eternal Sunshine of a Beautiful Mind” thing. Scientists at Scripps REsearch Institute successfully removed selected memories from Mice’s brains. They are calling them traumatic memories but of course they can be used for wide variety of purposes; thanks to the James Bond applications. So, soon coupled with neurocomputing and brain-to-brain interfaces you will be able to experience Total Recall. 🙂

Read the news here and the abstract of the paper over here.

6. The Mad Scientist’s Laser Beams

Mad scientists completely bust the myth of Death Rays and Opponent Vaporiser Guns using Thermodynamics, interesting? I had tried to bust Agha Waqar’s Water Kit fraud the same way sometimes back over here. See what they have to say,

“First, consider the true
vaporization–the complete separation of all atoms within a molecule–of 
water. With a simple molecular structure containing an oxygen atom
bonded to two hydrogen atoms, it takes serious energy to break these
bonds. In fact, it takes 460 kilojoules of energy to break just one mole
of oxygen-hydrogen bonds—around the same energy that a 2,000-pound car
going 70 miles per hour on the highway has in potential. And that’s just
18 grams of water! So as you can see, it would take a gargantuan amount
of energy to separate all the atoms in even a small glass of
water…especially if that glass of water is your analog for a person.

The human body is a bit more complicated
than a glass of water, but it still vaporizes like one. And thanks to
our spies spread across scientific organizations, we now have the energy
required to turn a human into an atomic soup, to break all the atomic
bonds in a body. According to the captured study, it takes around three gigajoules of death-ray to entirely vaporize a person—enough to completely melt 5,000 pounds of steel or simulate a lightning bolt.  ZAP!

With such an energy requirement—difficult to get from even top-of-the-line atomizers—it
may be more efficient for the successful mad scientist to instead
settle for the other kind of vaporization: turning a target into gas.”

“As it would take more than 70 of the world’s most powerful lasers
combined to vaporize the water of just one person, death ray energy
conservation is paramount. Remember: A successful mad scientist is as
efficient as she is devious.”

7. The Uggliest Specie

And for the last thing today, sadly this blobfish is considered as the ugliest specie in the world officially as is put by TIME magazine. However, it surely is an evidence of evolutionary process. The way it is structured is surely a transitional phase of evolution.

Read more here.

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