Aestus Ajith

Scientists in Germany said Wednesday they had made the most precise measurement yet of the mass of the electron, one of the building blocks of matter.  PLAY VIDEO LHC Collides At Record Speeds The Large Hadron Collider is breaking records by smashing protons together at record energies. Discovery News' James Williams and Ian O'Neill explain what's going on and why it matters. GETTY IMAGES The feat should provide a useful tool for scientists testing the "Standard Model" of physics -- the most widely-accepted theory of the particles and forces that comprise the Universe, they said. ANALYSIS: Higgs Boson Discovery = Cosmic Doomsday? Electrons are particles with a negative electrical charge that orbit the nucleus of an atom. They were discovered in 1897 by Britain's Joseph John ("J.J.") Thomson, who dubbed them "corpuscles" -- a name later changed to "electron" because of its connection with electrical char...

The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are highly regular and are commonly found in nature. Since Plato’s work, two other classes of equilateral convex polyhedra, as the collective of these shapes are called, have been found: Archimedean solids (including truncated icosahedron) and Kepler solids (including rhombic polyhedra). Nearly 400 years after the last class was described, researchers claim that they may have now invented a new, fourth class, which they call Goldberg polyhedra. Also, they believe that their rules show that an infinite number of such classes could exist. Platonic love for geometry Equilateral convex polyhedra need to have certain characteristics. First, each of the sides of the polyhedra needs to be of the same length. Second, the shape must be completely solid: that is, it must have a well-defin...

It's been tested on only a handful of kids, but using MRI with a diagnostic dye to look for cancer may work just as well as using PET and CT scans. This computer illustration shows a tumor in the brain linked to a tumor-killing gel outside the brain. (Credit: Video screenshot by Michael Franco/CNET) Using whole-body scans to screen for cancer presents such a catch-22, especially in kids. While traditional radiation scanners like PET and CT are good at finding cancer, they expose patients to radiation that can be harmful and even induce cancer later in life -- more so in younger patients, because their cells are still dividing quickly and because, with more years ahead of them than adults, children also have a higher chance of being exposed to more radiation down the line. The good news is that scientists have managed to  reduce radiation exposure  over the past several years without sacrificing image quality. But now there's a potential alternative that involves c...

The Nicaraguan government has granted a concession to a mysterious Chinese company owned by  Jing Wang , a little-known Hong-Kong based businessman, to build an inter-oceanic canal. This would provide an alternative to the  Panama Canal  that, 99 years after it first opened, is struggling to cope with shipping. Despite being one of the most  important decisions  in Nicaragua's history, the legislative bill in question appeared virtually overnight and was approved as law only three days after it was sent to the  parliament , with no serious national consultation or opportunity to hear the opposition from some of the country's leading scientists. The company is the Hong Kong Nicaraguan Development Group ( HKND ), which has no experience with major construction projects. With an estimated cost of US$40 billion, the canal was slated to start in June 2014, but has been  delayed to the end of the year The Nicaraguan government claims the project wil...

Minoan pottery from Crete. The Minoan civilization flourished from 3,000 to 1,100 B.C. (Agon S. Buchholz/Wikimedia Commons) ) Swastika from a 2nd century A.D. Roman mosaic. (Maciej Szczepańczyk/Wikimedia Commons A srivatsa (swastika) sign at Nata-dera Temple, Japan. (Cindy Drukier/Epoch Times) From the Sican/Lambayeque civilization in Peru, which flourished 750 to 1375 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons) Ancient Macedonian helmet with swastika marks, 350-325 B.C., found at Herculanum. (Cabinet des Medailles, Paris/Wikimedia Commons) A Buddha statue on Lantau Island, Hong Kong with a swastika symbol on the chest. (Shutterstock*) A 3,000-year-old necklace found in the Rasht Province of Iran. (Wikimedia Commons) The aviator Matilde Moisant(1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators. (Wikimedia Commons) A mandala-like swastika, composed of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a circle and a mystica...

Has someone ever said to you “Your eyes are beautiful?” I think if they saw them up this close they may not say it quite like that. That is unless odd looking surfaces of other worlds is beautiful. I think these pictures give eyes a look that pushes them into the world of weird and yet fascinating. Eyes are amazing organs both in their function and their physical formation, may these pictures to tell that story!

Researchers in Uppsala, Sweden accidentally left a reaction running over the weekend and ended up resolving a century-old chemistry problem. Their work has led to the development of a new material, dubbed Upsalite, with remarkable water-binding properties. Upsalite promises to find applications in everything from humidity control at home to chemical manufacturing in industry. Maria Strømme and colleagues at Uppsala University, whose work appears in the journal PLOS ONE, have modified a procedure dating back to 1908 to make a powdered and dry form of magnesium carbonate (MgCO3). The reaction ingredients are all cheaply available: magnesium oxide (MgO) and carbon dioxide (CO2), dissolved in methanol, a common industrial solvent. The result is pure, dry MgCO3. Dry in this case means very dry. In the chemical sense, it means void of almost any water molecules at all. Crystalline forms of dry MgCO3, which lack the structure needed to absorb water, are readily synthesised at high...

Our planet has come a long way in scientific breakthroughs and discoveries. Mainstream science is beginning to discover new concepts of reality that have the potential to change our perception about our planet and the extraterrestrial environment that surrounds it forever. Star gates, wormholes, and portals have been the subject of conspiracy theories and theoretical physics for decades, but that is all coming to an end as we continue to grow in our understanding about the true nature of our reality. In physics, a wormhole was a hypothetical feature of space time that would be a shortcut through space-time. We often wonder how extraterrestrials could travel so far and this could be one of many explanations. Although scientists still don’t really understand what they have found, it does open the mind to many possibilities. Turning science fiction into science fact seems to happen quite often these days and NASA did it by announcing the discovery of hidden portals in Earth’s magnet...

The sun has undergone a “complete field reversal,” with its north and south poles changing places as it marks the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. “A reversal of the sun’s magnetic field is, literally, a big event,”  NASA’s Dr. Tony Phillips said in a statement issued on the space agency’s website. “The sun’s polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. This is a regular part of the solar cycle,”  Stanford solar physicist Phil Scherrer explained. While it may seem like the event could have catastrophic repercussions for the galaxy, its effects are actually more subtle, mostly interfering with space exploration. “Cosmic rays are a danger to astronauts and space probes, and some researchers say they might affect the cloudiness and climate of Earth,”  said Phillips. Both the aurora borealis and its southern counterpart – the australis – are set to become broader, more frequent, and more visible now that the event has rea...

SCIENTISTS have built the smallest petrol engine, tiny enough to power a WATCH. The mini-motor, which runs for two years on a single squirt of lighter fuel, is set to revolutionize world technology. It produces 700 times more energy than a conventional battery despite being less than a centimeter long not even half an inch. It could be used to operate laptops and mobile phones for months doing away with the need for recharging. Experts believe it could be phasing out batteries in such item within just six months. The engine, minute enough to be balanced on a fingertip, has been produced by engineers at the University of Birmingham, UK . Dr. Y Kyle Jiang, lead investigator from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, said: “We are looking at an industrial revolution happening in peoples’ pockets.. “The breakthrough is an enormous step forward. “Devices which need re- charging or new batteries are a problem but in six years will be a thing of the past.” Other applications for the...

A team of physicists has proposed a way of teleporting energy over long distances. The technique, which is purely theoretical at this point, takes advantage of the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement where two particles share the same existence. The researchers, who work out of Tohoku University in Japan, and led by Masahiro Hotta, describe their proposal  in the latest edition of  Physical Review A . Their system exploits properties of squeezed light or vacuum states that should allow for the teleportation of information about an energy state. In turn, this teleported quantum energy could be made useable. Unlike  teleportation  schemes as  portrayed  in  Star Trek  or  The Fly , this type of teleportation describes entanglement experiments in which two entangled particles are joined despite no apparent connection between them. When a change happens to one particle, the same change happens to the other. Hence, the impression of t...

No one has convinced everyone in the scientific community that extraterrestrial life exists. But almost since space exploration began, research has emerged that seemed to show signs of life on meteorites or on Mars. Several NASA astrobiologists and other researchers have said they found compelling evidence of alien life. Here’s a look at five studies.  1. Meteorite Fossils? NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover has said he found fossil evidence of cyanobacteria on meteorites. In a  post on the NASA website in 2007 , Hoover wrote: “It is concluded that the well-preserved, fossilized filaments and dense mats found in Orgueil [meteorite] represent the remains of a complex aquatic and benthic cyanobacterial mat community that grew on the parent body of the meteorite prior to entry into Earth’s atmosphere.” Skeptics said Hoover’s study was questionable, because cyanobacteria live in water and require sunlight to grow—conditions unlikely on comets. 2. Controv...