Aestus Ajith

Earth may seem like it has a lot of diversity, and I suppose that it does. There are organisms that are smaller than the tip of a needle, and there a few that are the  size of a building  (like the blue whale), or a person (like the  Nomura’s jellyfis h ) . But in truth, many things on our planet are really rather tame. At least, they are tame as far as our experiences go. Take temperature. This may vary by fifty degrees from winter to summer, give or take a little, but this really isn’t much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. For example, the hottest temperature, known as “Planck Temperature,” hits more than 100 million million million million million degrees, or 10 32  K. As it  has been noted , “You just can’t put this kind of temperature into perspective. There’s simply no way to wrap your head around this number. Saying that 10 32  K is hot is like saying that the universe occupies ...

There’s a fine line between being hailed as a visionary and being denounced as a crank, as Iraq-born physicist Jim Al-Khalili is only too aware. Seated in his office at the University of Surrey in the U.K. on a sunny day, he recalls a less tranquil time in his career, almost 15 years ago. Back then, he and his Surrey colleague, biologist Johnjoe McFadden, explored a strange mechanism to explain how DNA — the molecule that carries our genetic code — may mutate. Their theory caused a stir because it invoked quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the behavior of particles in the subatomic realm. Their idea gave some insight into the origins of genetic mutations, which over the centuries have given rise to the variety of species in the biological kingdom, and in the short term can lead to the development of diseases like cancer. The proposal was scoffed at, however, sparking incredulity from both biologists and physicists because quantum effects supposedly hold sway...

Spider silk is pretty amazing. It has the tensile strength of a  high-grade steel alloy , and about half that of the synthetic woven material,  Kevlar . It also has just a sixth of the density of steel, which means you could take a strand that’s long enough to wrap around the whole Earth, and  it’d weigh less than 500 grams . This quality means that spider silk would be five times as strong as the same weight of steel. And while we can’t take away from its incredible properties, we just might have to take away its title of ‘strongest natural material’, because researchers have figured out just how strong the teeth of  limpets , a type of marine snail, are. “Until now, we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bullet-proof vests to computer electronics,” lead author Asa Barber, from the School of Engineering at Portsmouth University in the UK,  said in a pr...

(Phys.org)—Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior. Quantum mechanics tells us that  light  can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in  Nature Communications . When UV light hits a metal surface, it causes an emission of  electrons . Albert Einstein explained this "photoelectric" effect by proposing that light – thought to only be ...

Scientist Christopher Lavelle of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, together with a team of researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has successfully shown that boron-coated vitreous carbon foam can be used in the detection of neutrons emitted by radioactive materials—of critical importance to homeland security. Lavelle is lead author of the paper "Demonstration of Neutron Detection Utilizing Open Cell Foam and Noble Gas Scintillation" released today in the journal  Applied Physics Letters . Detecting  neutrons  is key to counterterrorism activities, such as screening cargo containers, as well as other vital applications in nuclear power instrumentation, workplace safety and industry. The demand for detectors has risen dramatically over the past decade while at the same time the usual detection material, helium-3, has become harder to obtain. An advantage of the approach outlined in the...

The components of our universe. Dark energy comprises 69% of the mass energy density of the universe, dark matter comprises 25%, and “ordinary” atomic matter makes up 5%. Three types of neutrinos make up at least 0.1%, the cosmic background radiation makes up 0.01%, and black holes comprise at least 0.005%. Credit: Science/AAAS It's a beautiful theory: the standard model of cosmology describes the universe using just six parameters. But it is also strange. The model predicts that dark matter and dark energy – two mysterious entities that have never been detected—make up 95% of the universe, leaving only 5% composed of the ordinary matter so essential to our existence. In an article in this week's  Science , Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel reviews how cosmologists came to be certain that we are surrounded by matter and energy that we cannot see. Observations of galaxies, supernovae, and the  universe 's temperature, among other things, have led researchers to co...