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Solar
plane’s maiden flight
This Universe 10 million
mini-Big Bangs in one week Trends
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A solar-powered airplane took off on its first major test flight Wednesday morning, from an airfield in western Switzerland.The flight of the plane, named Solar Impulse, comes ahead of plans to use a similar solar-powered plane to fly around the world in 2012. "We want to demonstrate what can be achieved with renewable energy," Bertrand Piccard, the man behind the project, was quoted by the Swiss ATS news agency as saying. The plane has the wing span of an Airbus A340, the weight of an average car, and is powered by some 12,000 solar cells. The Solar Impulse — also the name of the project behind the plane — is "the first aircraft designed to fly night and day without fuel or polluting emissions". The flight, aimed at testing the plane and discovering its vulnerabilities, was expected to last for about an hour and a half. "With such a large and light plane never having flown before, the aircraft's flight behaviour remains unexplored," the project officials said in a statement before the flight began. Previous tests of the plane have been on much smaller scales, involving seeing if the plane could get off the ground, but no extended airtime at significant altitude was attempted.
— DPA
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This Universe Why is ice nearly white, whereas water is
colourless? Pure water ice, without any dissolved air is also colourless. Even large blocks of ice are transparent. I should perhaps qualify this statement. Because of molecular scattering these ice blocks might be slightly bluish, pretty much like large volumes of clean water. When a mosquito bites us, then there is an outgrowth on our body. Why? I think the reason has some thing to do with the fact that mosquito needs to ensure that the blood it is sucking does not coagulate in its narrow pricking and sucking needle. For this it first injects a chemical which stops the blood from coagulating. Our body has an immune response to that chemical which results in that boil, or out growth, we ascribe to a mosquito bite. The bite in itself would not produce that boil, just as we do not get a boil after a sterilised needle punctures our skin to draw blood. I watched a movie in which a girl says that people working in tall buildings reduce
their weight. What does “reducing their weight” mean? A simple physical answer to your question would be the following: On a very tall building the value of earth gravity is less than on the surface of the earth. The force of gravity is inversely proportional to square of distance from the centre of the earth. Less the gravitational force, smaller would be your weight! Of course, the building you climb would have to be very tall to make a significant reduction of your weight.
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10 million mini-Big Bangs in one week Physicists at the CERN research centre said on Wednesday they had created 10 million mini-Big Bangs in the first week of mega-power operations of their marathon probe into the secrets of the cosmos. Spokesman James Gillies said the subterranean Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in which tiny particles of matter are smashed together at a fraction of a second under the speed of light, was functioning extremely well. "It's all looking pretty good. We are getting a mass of data for the analysts in laboratories all round the world to get their teeth into, even if it could take months or years for anything really new to emerge," said Gillies. Officials at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, are keen to get through the first two weeks at high power, recalling that in 2008, an earlier launch of the LHC at a lesser power was halted by a major coolant leak after 10 days. Scientists keeping watch over the LHC's 27-km oval-shaped ring under the Swiss-French border near Geneva said collisions were now being recorded at 100 per second, twice as many as on the first mega-power day last week. Particle beams were first injected into the LHC and then collided at a previously unattained total energy of 7 tera-or 7 million million-electron volts (TeV) on March 30 in what scientists said was a huge step forward in cosmic research. The collisions create simulations on a tiny scale of the Big Bang, the primeval fireball 13.7 billion years ago out of which the entire cosmos-galaxies, stars, planets and eventually life as well as the universal laws of physics-emerged. By tracking how the particles behave after colliding, CERN researchers hope to unveil secrets of the cosmos such as the make-up of dark, or invisible, matter, why matter gained mass, and if there are more dimensions to the four already known. There could also be clues, but not before the middle of the decade after collision impact energy is doubled to 14 TeV in 2013, on whether ideas even more reminiscent of science fiction like parallel universes have any basis in reality. This, like the additional dimensions proposition, figures marginally in the postulates of string theory-which suggests the basic ingredients of the cosmos are tiny strings of matter -- over which scientists have argued for some years. The theory also proposes the idea of super symmetry, under which every particle has a massive unseen or shadow particle- a phenomenon that could explain why dark matter makes up nearly 25 percent of the universe while visible matter accounts for around only 5 per cent. Proponents say string physics, if shown to be correct, could provide the long-sought "general theory of everything" which would resolve contradictions between modern quantum theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity.
— Reuters
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Trends LONDON: They may be a little wrinkly, and there may not be many of them, but centenarians are the fastest growing demographic in the developed world. Scientists believe people who live to 100 years or more hold valuable secrets in their genes that can reveal targets for medicines to tackle a wide range of age-related diseases, as well as improving longevity itself.
Dragon-sized lizard is a new species
WASHINGTON, DC: A dragon-sized, fruit-eating lizard that lives in the trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been confirmed as a new species, scientists reported on Tuesday. Hunted for its tasty flesh, the brightly colored forest monitor lizard can grow to more than six feet in length but weighs only about 22 pounds (10 kg), said Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose team confirmed the find.
Crew docks at space station
MOSCOW: A U.S.-Russian crew in a Russian Soyuz space ship docked at the International Space Station on Sunday, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said. The Soyuz TMA-18 docked successfully two days after blasting off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe with a crew of three onboard.
Arctic thaw frees
greenhouse gas
OSLO: Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday. The report in the journal Nature Geoscience indicated that emissions of the gas surged under certain conditions from melting permafrost that underlies about 25 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere.
— Reuters
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