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Chand
Nagar: Indian design for moon Indian
challenges Einstein’s theory New
products & discoveries
UNDERSTANDING THE UNIVERSE |
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Chand Nagar: Indian design for moon
Moon
may soon be invaded by the humankind. This time forever! This is what US space agency NASA’s plan is. And to make it a reality our own Indian students from Patiala (Punjab) have given a plan to NASA, which has been selected during a world level competition held at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, from July 16 to 19. The Indian team topped the contest entitled Space Settlement Competition. It was organised by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and
sponsored by NASA and Boeing. It all started with Mr Abhishek Aggarwal, a BE, 1st year Electrical & Instrumentation Engineering Department (EIED) student of Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology (TIET), Patiala, and the brain behind the whole project. He has been trying to participate in this competition for the last four years when he was studying in 10th standard at Lakshman Public School, New Delhi. Mr Aggarwal formed a six-member team at that time and sent his proposal to NASA but somehow couldn’t qualify. He nurtured his dream for years together and after taking admission in TIET, shared it with his professor, Dr Maneek Kumar, the leader of the winning team and both of them as Teacher Advisors went on to participate in the contest with their 11-member team to bring laurels to their country. Dr Maneek Kumar elaborated that after sending their entries for the competition in March this year, they got a request for submitting their proposal for the first space settlement on the moon. They were assigned Request for Proposal (RFP) with an assumption that they were contractors in the year 2029, applying for a contract to build a settlement on the moon. The structural design proposed consisted of seven domes named after the astronauts, including Mrs Kalpana Chawala, who died in the recent Columbia crash. The domes are designed to cater to 21000 residents and transients. The span of seven domes was 3.16 km. Three additional uninhabited domes (one for agriculture and two for industry) were also proposed along with the residential domes. The domes have to be constructed using material available on the moon like regolith, titanium etc. Lunar concrete shall be used for providing the foundations and other components. Lunar glass is provided to protect the exposed parts from the harmful radiations. A lunar research lab is also proposed to carry on research on reduced gravity and shall aid in discovery of new applications for widely abundant lunar materials. The settlement was proposed to be located close to the Equator at Copernicus 10 degree North by 20 degree East. The proposal also takes care of electrical power distribution using solar powered satellites (SPS), surface transportation as well as internal and external communications. Atmosphere, climate and weather conditions as exist on earth are proposed to be simulated using different techniques besides taking into account the management of waste materials and water. Creating recreational facilities for tourism and business purposes was also proposed. Mr Abhishek said that the proposed settlement, which would be in the shape of a wheel known as “Torus” in scientific terminology, would cost a whopping $ 277 billion, including $ 13 billion as the labour cost. It is to be completed within a span of 15 years and 43 days from the date of commencement. Theirs was the third team from Asia, which went for this competition and qualified for the final round, but first one to win it. Earlier, teams from Pakistan made it twice to the final round in 1995 and 1997 but did not succeed. Mr Pierre Jean Harrison, husband of Indian-born astronaut Late Ms Kalpana Chawla, supported and encouraged their team to a great extent. The members of the winning team, which was named Dougeldyne Astrosystems & Flechtel Constructors include seven students of Budha Dal Public School, Patiala, and four students from TIET. Besides Teacher Advisors, other assistant advisors are Mr Ankur, Mr Varun, Mr Parikshat Sharma, Mr Ankit Aggarwal and Mr Rahul Kumar from TIET. However, these budding confident scientists are not going to bask under the glory of victory, which they have earned through their arduous hard work and knowing well that NASA would keep their project for future planning of a space settlement. They will again participate in the competition, to be held next year. |
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Indian challenges Einstein’s theory
A
Canadian journal is publishing a research paper by a scientist in Himachal Pradesh that claims to find shortcomings in Einstein’s theory of relativity. “I have suggested in a 40-page paper a new alternative for changes in Einstein’s theory,” Ajay Sharma, the scientist, told IANS. He produced a letter sent by “Physics Essays, an international journal dedicated to fundamental questions in physics”, which is publishing his paper. “I have seriously analysed Einstein’s 1905 research paper and have found conceptual mistake while deriving E=mc2,” says Sharma. “This theory is valid for nuclear reactions only, but hasn’t been confirmed in the burning of fuels. I have suggested a new equation,” he said. “I am currently writing a book “E=mc2 After 100 Years’,” he said. “Even though I have so far been invited to 30 international conferences to present papers, I feel neither Indian scientists nor foreign scientists give due consideration to scientific work published in Indian journals,” he lamented.
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New products & discoveries
Mounds
built by highly-evolved African termites could inspire new types of building that are self-sufficient, environmentally friendly and cheap to run. The mounds provide a self-regulating living environment that responds to changing internal and external conditions. A multidisciplinary team of engineers and entomologists is looking at whether similar principles could be used to design buildings that need few or no mechanical services (e.g. heating and ventilation) and so use less energy and other resources than conventional structures. Loughborough University is leading this innovative project, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The initiative will include research in Namibia to digitally scan the structure of the termite mounds. This research will be filmed by the BBC Natural History Unit for inclusion in a new Sir David Attenborough series due to be screened in 2006. The mounds incorporate a complicated network of tunnels and air conduits designed to channel air flow for the control of internal air quality, temperature and moisture levels. Furthermore, the termites have evolved in such a way that they out source some biological functions, for example, digestive functions to a fungus that they farm inside the mound. They supply the fungus with chewed wood fibre which the fungus breaks down into nutritious food. The structure of the mound ensures a constant and optimum environment for the fungus to thrive. The human equivalent of these ‘smart’ mounds would be buildings that meet all energy, waste management and other needs on site. By digitally scanning the mounds, the new project will allow their three-dimensional architecture to be mapped in a level of detail never achieved before. This computer model will help scientists develop an understanding of exactly how the mounds work and so provide a platform for further studies. A new state
of matter
Extreme physical conditions have a way of bringing out the strangest behaviours that nature can muster. Just ask physicist John E. Thomas. Two years ago, he and his colleagues at Duke University in Durham, N.C., were working with intense lasers in a high-vacuum chamber at temperatures next to absolute zero. They were manipulating tiny clouds of lithium gas. When the scientists turned off the lasers, peculiar things began to happen. At first, the microscopic puff of lithium billowed out of the spot where the lasers had held it. But then, instead of expanding evenly in all directions, as any normal gas would, the lithium cloud morphed into a pancake. That was the first glimpse of a new state of matter-a kind of ultrafrigid vapour-with the ponderous label “strongly interacting, degenerate Fermi gas.” Named after the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, these aggregations of particles can behave, according to quantum mechanics, as if they’re a single entity. The sighting of the odd cloud wasn’t a total surprise. For years, research teams around the globe had been on the trail of these exotic gases. |
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UNDERSTANDING THE UNIVERSE Suppose I am standing out in the open with a level ground on all sides up to the horizon. Suppose again the entire “visible” sky (not a bit more or less) is overcast with water-bearing clouds and it starts raining. Approximately how much of the area of the earth will get wet then? Your question belongs in a class I would label as “wonder and fun with simple geometry”. Let us start with the assumption that the globe of the earth is round and locally flat. If you were lying on the ground with your eyes next to the floor your horizon will not extend far - perhaps a few centimeters and even that much because your eye cannot be buried near the surface of the earth. It will be the horizon of a crawling insect. When you stand up your horizon widens significantly. If you were two metres tall your view of the ground would extend to about 5 kilometers, not much beyond. The roundness of the earth shields everything that is further away. You can easily derive this result using simple geometry and feeding in the radius of the earth. [I leave it as an exercise to derive the formula for this. If R is the radius of the earth and ‘h’ the height of the person or the height of the tower, if you are standing on one, then ‘D’ the distance to the horizon is given by D=(2 h R) ½. Remember to use the same units for D, h and
R]. It is easy to calculate the area, which is given by “pi D squared”. This explains why we use high towers for our television broadcast. Ultimately we go to geo-stationary satellites that are at a height of 36,000 kilometers above the surface of the earth. Coming to your question again, I hope you notice that following you I have talked about the earth surface horizon. High altitude clouds will, of course, be visible to much longer distances. If we eat something very sweet and then drink tea or coffee its sweetness seems less than usual. Why is it so? I will hazard an answer even though I am not so certain about its accuracy. Taste buds are receptors that fit in the molecules that give us a sensation of sweetness. After eating things that are very sweet these receptors are saturated with molecules. There are few seats that are vacant. Therefore, the signal of sweetness from things that are less sweet remains weak. Therefore things taste less sweet than they would if we had not taken the sweets beforehand. |
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Regarding
flyash blended concrete and its consumption in cement (article by Amar Chandel and
G.S. Dhillon, September 10), I wish to add that: All the three thermal plants in Punjab have the facility of collection of ash in dry form direct from ESPs. Dry flyash being produced by GGSSTP, Ropar and GNDTP, Bathinda is being used by Gujarat Ambuja Cement Limited for their units located in the vicinity of thermal plants while that produced by GHTP, Lehra Mohabat, is used by Grasim Industries Limited who have set up their ‘Birla Plus’ Cement plant near GHTP. About 13 lakh metric tonne flyash is used by these three plants annually. In addition, GHTP, Lehra Mohabat is supplying about 50,000 M T flyash per annum to small grinding units also. Though use of flyash as a mineral admixture has been permitted, it is not possible for a common user to procure small quantity of flyash from a thermal plant located far away, transport it to his house-site and blend it properly with concrete. Besides ensuring good quality of flyash (as mentioned in the article), it is essential that a good super plasticiser is used in concrete whenever flyash is used as a part replacement of concrete. Flyash being finer than even cement, flyash blended concrete is more prone to shrinkage cracks and thus extra curing is required for this concrete. Further, such concrete gains strength in a slow manner. A study conducted by B. Kameswara Rao, Scientist, CBRI, Roorkee has shown that when 50 to 60 per cent of OPC was replaced by flyash, 28 days strength of concrete was much lower than that of concrete without flyash while 90 days strength was higher by 10 per
cent or so. In view of lower gain of strength in initial days, extra precaution needs to be taken while removing form work under flyash blended concrete. Overall it is opined that in the present scenario, RMC ensures best replacement of OPC by flyash as all the controls in production of RMC are computerised. Thus emphasis should be on switching over to RMC which not only provides cost effective and quality controlled concrete to consumers but utilises a pollutant like flyash also. (The Science Tribune carried an article, ‘Time to Switch over to RMC’
way back in 2000). Jagvir Goyal, Chandigarh. |
