Aestus Ajith

Move over, covalent and ionic bonds, there’s a new chemical bond in town, and it loves to shake things up.  It’s taken decades to nail down, but researchers in Canada have finally identified a new chemical bond, which they’re calling a ‘vibrational bond’. This vibrational bond seems to break the law of chemistry that states if you increase the temperature, the rate of reaction will speed up.  Back in 1989 , a team from the University of British Columbia investigated the reactions of various elements to muonium (Mu) - a strange, hydrogen isotope made up of an  antimuon  and an electron. They tried chlorine and fluorine with muonium, and as they increased the heat, the reaction time sped up, but when they tried bromine (br), a brownish-red toxic and corrosive liquid, the reaction time sped up as the temperature  decreased . The researchers,  Amy Nordrum writes for  Scientific American , "were flummoxed”.  Perhaps, thought one of the team...

When it comes to connectivity, unlike the fairly uniform brains of people without autism, the brains of people with autism are entirely unique. Each one functions with an idiosyncratic array of increased and reduced levels of connectivity, depending on where you look. In people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), no two brains are alike when it comes to connectivity between regions, scientists have found, which is in stark contrast to the relatively uniform way the brains of people without autism are arranged. This discovery was made by a team from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and could explain why some studies have found evidence that people affected by autism  have overly connected brains , while others have characterised ASD as the result of  reduced connections in several regions , both inside and outside of the  cortex.  The results of this new study could bring both findings together and uncover a new principal at play in the minds of ...

It’s considered one of the most important constants in the physical universe, but a new study has shown light doesn’t always travel at  light speed  inside a vacuum.  A new experiment conducted by optical physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland presents evidence that light pulses can be slowed down by manipulating their spatial structure.  The results of the study were  posted online at arXiv.org  before being  published  in Science , and suggest that light speed should be considered a maximum limit, rather than an invariable speed applicable to all forms of light passing through free space.  “The slowing is not great, in our specific case 0.001 percent,” principal investigator Miles Padgett  told ScienceAlert. “But that it exists at all disagrees with a simple but wrong notion that we have that light always goes at the same speed.”  “Previously people had recognised that the speed of light was complicated, ...

The world’s oldest continuous fire has been burning beneath an Australian mountain since around 4000 BC. You’ve probably heard of the coal seam gas fire that blazes uncontrollably beneath the now-abandoned town of  Centralia in Pennsylvania , US - the town that the creepy video game and film  Silent Hill  was based on. But, while it’s been disruptive, this fire has only been burning for the past 53 years - a relative blink of an eye when you consider that in Australia a similar blaze has been smouldering for an estimated 6,000 years, long before the country was settled by Europeans. Visible only as some foul-smelling steam, the coal seam blaze is contained 30 metres below the surface of Mount Wingen (which means “fire” in the local Aboriginal language) or Burning Mountain, located in the state of New South Wales. And it’s officially the oldest fire on the planet, that we know of at least. No one is sure what first ignited the coal seam fire, but according to ...

People who are aware, and often in control, during their dreams have one thing in common, researchers have found. Do a quick Google search for lucid dreaming - the phenomenon where someone is aware during their dreams - and you'll quickly be overwhelmed with tips and techniques for unlocking the ability. Despite lucid dreaming being relatively rare in most people, knowing when you're dreaming and potentially even being able to change the course of your dreams is clearly desirable to a lot of people.  Now scientists from Germany believe they may have found the neurological key to the ability. After scanning the brains of regular dreamers and those who are frequently lucid, they've found that the region of the brain that enables self reflection is larger among lucid dreamers. "Our results indicate that self-reflection in everyday life is more pronounced in persons who can easily control their dreams," said Elisa Filevich, a research at the Centre f...

For the first time, scientists have managed to feed a single light particle - or photon - into a graphene structure to produce multiple electrons - a phenomenon that could revolutionise the solar energy industry. In an experiment that could nearly double the rate of solar energy conversion from 32 to 60 percent, scientists in Switzerland have used the super-material graphene to convert a single photon into many electrons to produce an electric current.  The team, from the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), demonstrates how graphene could join cadmium telluride, copper indium gallium selenide/sulphide, and various silicon structures as one of the few known photovoltaic materials - high-efficiency, solar energy-producing materials.  They achieved this by placing a sample of graphene - a thin layer of pure carbon that’s around 100 times stronger than steel and a very efficient heat and electricity conductor - into an ultra-high vacuum chamber. The gra...

Pictures from a spring day in 1955, when photographer  Pictures from a spring day in 1955, when photographer Ralph Morse raced around New Jersey in search of the late, great Albert Einstein. RALPH MORSE—TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES Albert Einstein's office - just as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist left it - taken mere hours after Einstein died, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1955. RALPH MORSE—TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES Not published in LIFE.  Albert Einstein's papers, pipe, ashtray and other personal belongings in his Princeton office, April 18, 1955. RALPH MORSE—TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES Not published in LIFE.  From left: Unidentified woman; Albert Einstein's son, Hans Albert (in light suit); unidentified woman; Einstein's longtime secretary, Helen Dukas (in light coat); and friend Dr. Gustav Bucky (partially hidden behind Dukas) arriving at the Ewing Crem...