Atul k

In 1976, on this day, U.S. spacecraft Viking 1 landed on Mars to test and determine whether life exists on the planet. In August this year, NASA’s rover called Curiosity will land near the Martian equator to assist man’s relentless search for life on the Red Planet.

We’ve learned a lot more about Mars since 1976. With each mission the evidence for life has grown. We know that Mars has the energy, water and the chemical resources for supporting life.
Mounting geologic evidence points to Mars starting out as a habitable planet. But it grew colder and drier as its water froze, much of the atmosphere was ablated away by the solar wind, and a protective magnetic field fizzled away. Darwinian evolution should have ensured that primeval life, perhaps spawned in a great polar ocean, would find innovative ways to adapt and survive on a slowly dying world. Has it?

A handout picture taken by Mars Express, January 15 from a height of 273 km shows a channel (Reull Vallis) once formed by flowing water east of the Hellas basin on Mars January 23, 2004.
Scientists in the past have launched various Mars missions to know if microbial “alien” life existed or exists on Planet Mars.
In 2006, Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which began orbiting Mars in 1997, provided images of two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them.
In 2008, laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander identified water in a soil sample.
In July 2011, scientists claimed to have found traces of water under a thin varnish of iron oxide.
More recently, NASA scientists on Thursday revealed that they have found flowing salt water on the red planet.
The water appears in spring and summer on a slope inside Mars’ Newton crater, as observed by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 30, 2011.

Does this photograph really prove that we are not alone in the universe? Images beamed back from Mars would suggest so — although to skeptics, it could just be a strange rock formation.
NASA’s Mars Explorer Spirit sent back images from the surface of the Red Planet four years ago. Space and science fiction enthusiasts are convinced there is more than meets the eye, and after years of studying the images, have found what appears to be an alien figure walking downhill.
The discovery of the life-like figure ambling across the surface of the planet is likely to further boost intrigue in our nearest neighboring planet. An earlier rock formation, dubbed “the face of Mars” showed what appeared to be a human head staring into the night sky.

A portion of the west rim of Endeavour crater sweeps southward in this colour view from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity released by NASA August 10, 2011.

source: Indian express/ fb

the purple light shows the path of electrons in the magnetic field in a gaseous medium

Charged particles in magnetic fields have a force that acts perpendicular to its motion, thus resulting in circular motion of the charge. This photo shows this in action. The purple lines show the trajectory of electrons within an applied magnetic field. The purple colour is generated by the excitation of gas within the bulb, giving rise to an ethereal, glowing hoop.

source: Quantum Mechanics/ fb

Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam visited Harvard University last year in September. He saw there cutting edge research and inventions. This is from one of his encounters from many geniuses there. It was Prof. Hongkun Park. This is what he has to say about that encounter.

Last year 27 Sep 2011, I was in the Harvard University where I visited laboratories of many eminent professors from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

I recall, how Professor Hongkun Park, showed me his invention of nano needles/Wires, which can pierce and deliver content into individual targeted cells. That’s how nano particle sciences are shaping the bio sciences.

He is using his nanoscience expertise to develop new nano- and microelectronic tools that can interface with live cells, cell networks, and living organisms. Specifically, he is investigating vertical nanowire arrays as a platform to perturb cellular functions in a massively parallel, arrayed fashion, and patch-clamp and nanowire arrays for recording real-time dynamics of in vitro and in vivo neuronal ensembles.

These tools will impact a broad range of high-throughput discovery efforts in biology and help scientists to unravel the design principles of complex cellular networks.

Nanoscale Electronics, Optoelectronics, and Plasmonics
Nanometer-sized materials represent a natural size limit of the miniaturization trend of current technology, and they exhibit physical and chemica lproperties significantly different from their bulk counterparts. The Park group is developing cutting-edge experimental methods to incorporate individual molecules and nanostructures into electronic, optoelectronic, and plasmonic devices. Using these methods, he is characterizing their behaviors in detail to gain insights about their behavior and exploring the potential of these devices for future technological applications.

Hongkun Park thinks small to get big results.

Professor Hongkun Park of chemistry and of physics recently made an electronic switch the size of a molecule, too tiny to see directly or even to visualize in your mind. One of his goals is to determine how minute you can make an electronic device and still have it do useful work. He talks about sizes measured in atoms and gadgets millionths of an inch in size.

He is trying to couple his molecule-size switches to functioning brain cells to see how a memory or thought is made, or a sensation felt. In other words, he wants to get down to the basics.
He had already made his mark in the nanoworld when he wired an individual molecule so that it serves as an electronic switch, a transistor that turns the flow of electricity on or off. Harvard Magazine noted that this device is so small that it wiggles when a single electron, one of the lightest particles in the universe, passes through it.

Now Park is trying to modify such molecules so they can emit or detect a single photon, or unit of light, a thing even more ethereal than an electron. There’s no doubt that circuits of light will handle more information more quickly in the future than electric circuits do today.

Park also researches the peculiar properties of nanowires made from certain metal oxides that change their physical characteristics as they become smaller. Such wires may hasten the day when nanoscale devices will be found in every room in your home.

By William J. Cromie, Harvard News Office says that Prof. Park is trying to connect his molecular detectors and switches to functioning networks of brain cells. He aims to track exactly what kind of chemistry and physics occurs when a memory is made, a face is recognized, an emotion is felt. That’s an unnerving goal that Park is not sure he can attain. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he admits, “but it will be a lot of fun to try.”

Kalam

source: APJ Abdul kalam’s fb page

A man dies & goes to hell. There he finds that there is a different hell for each country.

He goes to the German hell and asks,

“What do they do there?”

He is told “First they put you in an electric chair for an hour..
Then they lay you on bed of nails for another hour.
Then the German devils comes in and beats you for the rest of the day.”

The man doesn’t like it, so he moves on and checks out the American hell, the Russian hell and hells of other countries.

He finds that they are all more or less the same as the German hell.

Then he comes to the Indian hell and finds that there is a long queue of people waiting to get in.

Amazed, he asks “What do they do here ?”

He is told “First they put you in an electric chair for an hour..
Then they lay you on bed of nails for another hour.
Then the Indian devils comes in and beats you for the rest of the day.”

“But that is exactly the same as the other hells, so why are so many people waiting to get in here? “. Wonders the man

He is told, “Because the maintenance here is so bad that the chair doesn’t work,
Someone has stolen all the nails from the bed
And the Indian devil is a former Government servant,

So he just comes, signs the attendance register and then goes to the canteen.”

SOURCE: bhad me ja/fb

On this day in 1969, the spaceflight Apollo 11 landed the first humans, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the moon. People watched worldwide as Armstrong took that momentous first step onto the moon, declaring, “This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Neil Armstrong on his maiden moonwalk

Though there have been no manned U.S. moon landings since 1972, it has not stopped those of us here on earth from dreaming of traveling worlds beyond our own — utilizing telescopes and lenses to capture images of distant planets, stars, and satellites.

source: quantum mechanics/ fb

Everything we can see and touch only makes up about 5% of the observable universe, and the rest is made up of 70% dark energy and 25% dark matter. Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light, heat or energy, so we can’t “see” it in normal ways—but we can detect its presence by its gravitational interactions with visible matter.

In the 1930s, scientists observed that galaxies were rotating much faster than they should be. They should have been flung apart, because they didn’t seem to have enough matter to produce the gravitational pull needed to hold together, and so scientists inferred that there must be a large quantity of invisible mass. We can also detect it through the effect of gravitational lensing, which is the process of light being bent and distorted by matter. The image shows the distribution of dark matter in the centre of galaxy cluster Abell 1689, 2.2 billion light-years from Earth. The light from galaxies behind Abell 1689 are distorted by dark matter within the cluster—it’s like looking at a shell on the sea floor, distorted by ripples on the surface. We don’t yet know what dark matter is made of, but there are two popular hypotheses: MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects), made of ordinary matter, or WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), an entirely new type of matter made up of exotic elementary particles.

source: quantum mechanics/fb