MIT’s new app, Immersion, uses your Gmail metadata to draw a digital footprint of your email-centric life. It also shows how small apps are well poised to commercialize metadata, especially by its backers posing as research institutions instead of as commercial organizations. In the post-Snowden era, such apps comprise a vast jurisdiction where the use of metadata is still unregulated, and is especially well-poised to stall consumer-level technology. Here’s my OpEd on this for The Hindu.
Most of the principles of the MIT Media Lab I think can be adopted by young professionals looking to make it big. It’s not safe, it’s not sure either, but it definitely re-establishes the connection with intuitive thought (“compasses”) instead of the process-entombed one (“maps”) that’s driving many good ideas and initiatives – like the newspaper – into the ground.
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or waters road?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fools’ triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
W.B. Yeats, To a Child Dancing in the Wind
Today feels like such a day…
“Lucasfilm and Mondo commissioned me to create a new set of screen-printed posters
for the original Star Wars trilogy.” – Olly Moss
Evolution’s got everything going for it. Without a doubt, it’s the most powerful and efficient computing algorithm ever conceived – rather to have computed itself into existence. I don’t forget that it’s an axiomatic phenomenon, but humankind has struggled to recreate the same degree of complexity and energy efficiency with the same resources. However, humankind doesn’t fail to be inspired, either – like with a strange type of joint neurobiologists have found in grasshoppers and locusts. Looking like a hinge joint, it automatically applies passive forces succeeding active ones. These help weaker muscles in the insects’ hind legs counteract the stronger ones, facilitating a longer jump without being as metabolically costly as a bigger muscle – something only evolution has accomplished. The inspiration? Simpler prosthetics for humans. My piece for The Hindu on this.
“About the graphic novel, it’s true. Chelsea Cain has been introducing me to artists and creators from Marvel, DC and Dark Horse, and they’re walking me through the process. It will likely be a series of books that update the story ten years after the seeming end of Tyler Durden. Nowadays, Tyler is telling the story, lurking inside Jack, and ready to launch a come-back. Jack is oblivious. Marla is bored. Their marriage has run aground on the rocky coastline of middle-aged suburban boredom. It’s only when their little boy disappears, kidnapped by Tyler, that Jack is dragged back into the world of Mayhem.
It will, of course, be dark and messy. Due to contract obligations it can’t come to light for a while. Next year is “Beautiful You,” followed by the story collection. But since the Fight Club sequel will appear serialized in graphic form, my book publisher might allow me to launch it earlier than 2015.
Feel free to release any or all of this information. We haven’t started to court a specific publisher, not until I hammer out the complete story.”
Thus spake Chuck Palahniuk at Comic-Con 2013.
Source here.
Research in lithium-ion batteries (LIB) is booming because the industries that use it widely are growing in number and expanding in scale. There’s been a steady march toward increasing the charge-capacity of LIBs, and apart from uniquely innovative solutions, the prevalent tendency has been toward replacing graphite anodes with nanoparticulate or nanoporous silicon ones, increasing charge capacity by 400,000%. Manufacturing either isn’t especially difficult, but researchers from South Korea have found that nanoporous silicon dioxide exists naturally in rice husk. Treated properly, they were able to extract nanoporous silicon and use it as anodes in a high-performance LIB (CE 99.7% after 500 cycles). Here are more details.
The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that has been pieced together over the last 40 years after careful experiments. It accurately predicts the behaviour of various subatomic particles across a range of situations. Even so, it’s not complete: it can explain neither gravity nor anything about the so-called dark universe.
Physicists searching for a theory that can have to pierce through the Standard Model. This can be finding some inconsistent mathematics or detecting something that can’t be explained by it, like looking for particles ‘breaking down’, i.e. decaying, into smaller ones at a rate greater than allowed by the Model.
The Large Hadron Collider, CERN, on the France-Switzerland border, produces the particles, and particle detectors straddling the collider are programmed to look for aberrations in their decay, among other things. One detector in particular, called the LHCb, looks for signs of a particle called B_s (read “B sub s”) meson decaying into two smaller particles called muons.
On July 19, physicists from the LHCb experiment confirmed at an ongoing conference in Stockholm that the B_s meson decays to two muons at a rate consistent with the Model’s predictions (full paperhere). The implication is that one more window through which physicists could have a peek of the physics beyond the Model is now shut.
The B_s meson
This meson has been studied for around 25 years, and its decay-rate to two muons has been predicted to be about thrice every billion times, 3.56 ± 0.29 per billion to be exact. The physicists’ measurements from the LHCb showed that it was happening about 2.9 times per billion. A team working with another detector, the CMS, reported it happens thrice every billion decays. These are number pretty consistent with the Model’s. In fact, scientists think the chance of an error in the LHCb readings is 1 in 3.5 million, low enough to claim a discovery.
However, this doesn’t mean the search for ‘new physics’ is over. There are many other windows, such as the search for dark matter, observations of neutrino oscillations, studies of antimatter and exotic theories like Supersymmetry, to keep scientists going.
The ultimate goal is to find one theory that can explain all phenomena observed in the universe – from subatomic particles to supermassive black holes to dark matter – because they are all part of one nature.
In fact, physicists are fond of Sypersymmetry, a theory that posits that there is one as-yet undetected particle for every one that we have detected, because it promises to retain the naturalness. In contrast, the Standard Model has many perplexing, yet accurate, explanations that is keeping physicists from piecing together the known universe in a smooth way. However, in order to find any evidence for Supersymmetry, we’ll have to wait until at least 2015, when the CERN supercollider will reopen upgraded for higher energy experiments.
And as one window has closed after an arduous 25-year journey, the focus on all the other windows will intensify, too.
(This blog post first appeared at The Copernican on July 19, 2013.)
Tau Bootis A is a Sun-like white-dwarf star about 51 light-years from Earth. Its magnetic field changes polarity once every year as opposed to the 11 years it takes our Sun. While astronomers don’t really know why this is the case, they have a pretty interesting hypothesis: Tau Bootis A has a giant planet orbiting really close to it, and its gravitational field could be ‘dragging’ on the outer, convective layers of its host star to speed up its polarity reversals. Here’s an explanation of how this could work. It’s pretty fascinating that while we had the Sun’s cycle figured, just the second star we study that shows this behaviour defies most of our expectations.
I wrote a shortened version of this piece for The Hindu on July 4, 2013. This is the longer version, with some more details thrown in.
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Scientists and engineers from 27 countries including India are pitching for a next-generation gamma-ray telescope that could transform the future of high-energy astrophysics.
Called the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the proposed project is a large array of telescopes to complement existing observatories, the most potent of which are in orbit around Earth. By building it on land, scientists feel the CTA could be much more sophisticated than orbiting observatories, which are limited by logistical constraints.
Werner Hofmann, CTA spokesperson of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Germany, told Nature, a comparable orbiting telescope would have to be “the size of a football stadium”.
The CTA’s preliminary designs reveal that it boasts of greater angular resolution, and 10 times more sensitivity and energy-coverage, than existing telescopes. The collaboration will finalise the locations for setting up the CTA, which will consist of two networked arrays in the northern and southern hemispheres, by end-2013. Construction is slated for 2015 at a cost of $268 million.
One proposed northern hemisphere location is in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir.
Indian CTA collaboration
Dr. Pratik Majumdar, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, said via email, “A survey was undertaken in the late 1980s. Hanle, in Ladakh, was a good site fulfilling most of our needs: very clear and dark skies throughout the year, with a large number of photometric and spectroscopic nights at par with other similar places in the world, like La Palma in Canary Islands and Arizona desert, USA.”
However, it serves to note that the Indian government does not permit foreign nationals to visit Hanle. “I do think India needs to be more proactive about opening up to people from abroad, especially in science and technology, in order to benefit from international collaboration – unfortunately this is not happening,”said Dr. Subir Sarkar, Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, Oxford University, via email. Dr. Sarkar is a member of the collaboration.
Each network will consist of four 23-metre telescopes to image weaker gamma-ray signals, and dozens of 12-metre and 2-4-metre telescopes to image the really strong ones. Altogether, they will cover an area of 10 sq. km on ground.
Scientists from SINP are also conducting simulations to better understand the performance of CTA.
Led by it, the Indian collaboration comprises Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). They will be responsible for building the calibration system with the Max Planck Institute, and developing structural sub-systems of various telescopes to be fabricated in India.
Dr. B.S. Acharya, TIFR, believes the CTA can add great value to existing telescopes in India, especially the HAGAR gamma-ray telescope array in Hanle. “It is a natural extension of our work on ground-based gamma-ray astronomy in India, since 1969,” he said in an email to this Correspondent.
Larger, more powerful
While existing telescopes, like MAGIC (Canary Islands) and VERITAS (Arizona), and the orbiting Fermi-LAT and Swift, are efficient up to the 100-GeV energy mark, the CTA will be able to reach up to 100,000 GeV with the same efficiency.
Gamma rays originate from sources like dark matter annihilation, dying stars and supermassive black holes, whose physics has been barely understood. Such sources accelerate protons and electrons to huge energies and these interact with ambient matter, radiation and magnetic fields to generate gamma rays, which then travel through space.
When such a high-energy gamma-ray hits atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere, a shower of particles are produced that cascade downward. Individual telescopes pick these up for analysis, but a network of telescopes spread over a large area would collect greater amounts, tracking them back better to their sources.
Here, CTA’s large collection area will come to play.
“No telescope based at one point on Earth can see the whole sky. The proposed CTA southern observatory will be able to study the centre of the galaxy, while the northern observatory will focus on extragalactic sources,” said Dr. Sarkar.
Gamma-ray astronomy has seen global interest since the early 1950s, when astronomers began to believe some cosmic phenomena ought to emit the radiation. After developing the telescopes in the 1960s to analyse it, some 150 sources have been mapped. The CTA is expected to chart a 1,000 more.
