My Science School

The number of Indian space enthusiasts who submitted their names to NASA to be carried to Mars onboard the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heart Transport) mission to the Red Planet, which launches on 5 May 2018. They were provided online ‘boarding passes’ for the mission.

The names are being etched on a silicon wafer microship using an electron beam to form letters with lines one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. The chip is affixed to the InSight lander deck and will remain on Mars forever.

The US had the most number of people (6,76,773) sending their names followed by China with 2,62,752 names. India stands at number three. Space experts attribute India being ranked among the first three nations to the excitement and interest in Mars flights triggered by India’s ground-breaking Mangalyaan mission.

“Mars continues to excite space enthusiasts of all ages,” said Bruce Banerdt, the Insight mission’s principal investigator. “This opportunity lets them become a part of the spacecraft that will study the inside of the Red Planet.”

Insight will be the first mission to look deep beneath the Martian surface, studying the planet’s interior by listening for marsquakes. These quakes travel through geologic material at different speeds and give scientists a glimpse of the composition and structure of the planet’s inside.

 

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Two species of miniature peacock spiders have been found to use an entire rainbow of colours while courting females, in the first known instance of such a display. Scientists call the spectacle “nature’s smallest rainbow”.

Maratus robinsoni and Maratus chrysomelas have two types of visually distinct abdominal scales: rainbow-iridescent scales and velvet black scales. The black scales are brush-like and randomly oriented, while the rainbow-iridescent scales are more orderly aligned, cling to the cuticle surface and have bulky 3D shapes. Each of these bulky, iridescent scales contains a series of three-dimensional, parallel grates used to split different wavelengths of light a different angles.

 By studying the remarkable patterns packed into the 5 mm small body of the rainbow peacock spider, scientists say it could be possible to harness similar ‘super iridescent’ qualities for new colour technology.

 

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Does music give you the chills? Have you got a few favourite songs that leave you with goose bumps? There’s scientific name for it: ‘frisson’. And not everybody gets it. If you do, it means your brain works a little differently.

University of Southern California scientists examined the brain scans of 20 students, half of whom had intense reactions to music and half didn’t. Researchers found that those who experienced the ‘chills’ have more neural connections between their auditory cortex, in charge of emotional processing centres, and the prefrontal cortex, involved in ‘higher-order cognition’ such as listening and understanding music.

More fibres and increased efficiency between the two regions means that there is more efficient processing between them. This means if you do get chills from music you are more likely to experience stronger and more intense emotions.

 

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Ascidians, also known as sea squirts, sit in one place all their life and filter the water, like a pump. They filter tiny particles from the ocean and store them in their soft tissue. As a bonus, sea squirts are related in evolutionary terms to human beings. Studying them and the plastic inside them could be more insightful than looking at creatures like fish or clams.

A staggering amount of plastic flows into the ocean each year; the U.N. says it is as if a garbage truck full of plastic was dumped into the water every minute; a rate that could lead to oceans carrying more plastic than fish in 30 years!

Over time, plastic breaks down into microplastics, ranging from the size of a grain of rice on down.  They mix with microbeads, tiny plastic beads that are added as exfoliants to cleansers and toothpastes that are flushed away. These are eaten by wildlife, filling their bellies, exposing them to chemical additives and, potentially, entering the food chain.

 

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Teenagers who spend hours watching TV, using the computer or playing video games while eating unhealthy snacks are at increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome – a cluster of risk factors including increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels – that elevate the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

The study involved 33,900 teens aged 12-17. Researchers measured their waists, blood pressures, blood glucose, HDL cholesterol and triglycerides and found that 2.5% of the teens had metabolic syndrome. Those who spent six or more hours a day in front of screens were 71% more likely to have metabolism syndrome compared to those who spent less time in front of screens.

Heightened risk was only seen in those who usually ate snacks in front of screens. There was no association between screen time and metabolic syndrome among teens who reported no snacking in front of screens. Among teens who reported habitually eating snacks in front of screens, the risk for metabolic syndrome rose the longer teens spent in front of screens.

 

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Researchers from Newcastle University’s School of Natural and Environmental Sciences found out what gardeners around the world have known for generations – that marigolds repel tomato whiteflies.

Limonene, released by marigolds, is the chemical responsible for keeping tomato whiteflies at bay. Its strong odour slows down whiteflies and repels them from hosting on tomato plants. To protect the plants, gardeners do a ‘companion planting’ where marigolds are interspersed around the tomato foliage.

The findings pave the way for developing safer and cheaper alternatives to pesticides. Limonene is inexpensive and less risky than pesticides that kill everything that they are sprayed on including organisms beneficial to the plant.

Limonene makes up about 90 per cent of the oil component in citrus peel. It is a common ingredient in mosquito repellents and household air fresheners.

 

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22 feet the length to which the giant African earthworm (Microchaetus rappi), found in South Africa, can grow.

Other varieties of large earthworms include the Giant Gippsland earthworm of Australia, which grows about 3 feet long, but can stretch up to 12 feet and weigh as much as 1.5 pounds.  These almost never surface. However, on Australian farms that have this worm, you can hear gurgling sounds coming from the ground as they move through the soil, processing about 1/2 to 1 times their body weight in dead organic material per day.

There also used to be a variety of earthworm in Washington State that grew to an average length of two feet long, but this type of worm hasn’t been spotted since 1978.  Just south of Washington, in Oregon, there is a species of earthworm that grows to about 3 feet long and, if you handle it, will give off a strong smell of lilies.  It has not been spotted since around 1980.

Another fascinating earthworm is a variety found in New Zealand, the North Auckland Worm, which typically grows about 4-5 feet long and glows; with several of them around, you’ll supposedly have enough light to read by in the dark.

 

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NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has photographed the sensational effect of a hot supergiant star screaming through space at a terrifying 1,100 kilometres per second!

This rogue star is known as Kappa Cassiopeiae or HD 2905 to astronomers. Such is its speed and so massive is its size, that a streaky red glow created by ‘winds’ from the star colliding with inter-stellar material, was observed four light years ahead of the runaway star. This is called a bow shock, often seen in front of the fastest, most massive stars in the galaxy. These stars tend to blow out a fast wind of subatomic particles. As the star ploughs through space, its wind rams into the material around it, creating a vast shock wave. How these shocks light up tells astronomers about the conditions around the star and in space. Slow-moving stars like our sun have bow shocks that are nearly invisible at all wavelengths of light, but fast stars like Kappa Cassiopeiae create shocks that can be seen by Spitzer’s infrared detectors.

 

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Boeing Co. has developed a smartphone straight out of a James Bond movie. In addition to encrypting calls, any attempt to open the casing of the Boeing Black Smartphone deletes all data and renders the device inoperable.

The phone is aimed at people working in defence and homeland security who need to keep communication and data secure. Hardware media encryption and configurable inhibit controls are embedded to protect the device, its data and the transmission of information, reducing the risk of mission compromise due to data loss.

The phone runs on Android operating system. The 5.2” x 2.7” handset, slightly larger than an iPhone, uses dual SIM cards to enable it to access multiple cell networks instead of a single network like a normal cell phone. The phone can be configured to connect with biometric sensors or satellites.

 

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Harvard scientists have developed an army of autonomous termite-like robots that can build complex structures such as towers and pyramids without any supervision. Inspired by termites’ resilience and collective intelligence, the system needs no supervisor, no eye in the sky, and no communication: just simple robots that cooperate by modifying their environment.

The TERMES system demonstrates that collective systems of robots can build complex three-dimensional structures without the need for any central command or prescribed roles. The TERMES robots can build towers, castles, and pyramids out of foam bricks, autonomously building themselves staircases to reach higher levels and adding bricks wherever they are needed.

Each robot executes its building process in parallel with others, but without knowing who else is working at the same time. If one robot breaks or has to leave, it does not affect the others. This also means that the same instructions can be executed by five robots or five hundred.

In the future, similar robots could lay sandbags before a flood or perform simple construction tasks on Mars, researchers said.

 

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The saying that friends are the family you choose may be more accurate than you thought. A study shows that people are likely to pick friends who are genetically similar to themselves – so much so that friends tend to be as alike at the genetic level as a person’s fourth cousin (people who have great-great-great grandparents in common).

People were most similar to their friends in olfactory genes, which involve the sense of smell, and least similar in immune system genes. People who like the same smells tend to be drawn to similar environments, where they meet others with the same tendencies. The opposite was true for genes controlling immunity; friends were more likely than strangers to have different genetic defences against various diseases. This may be because it helps to reduce the likelihood of epidemics if friends are resistant to different illnesses.

Researchers suspect that this trait, called ‘functional kinship’, is rooted in human evolution. Early human beings may have formed groups if they were genetically suited to certain environments, or had similar likes and dislikes, e.g., those with a similar susceptibility to the cold may have helped each other build a fire. It may have also been because some genetic attributes only work if you have someone to share it with. The first, most intelligent humans to develop speech would have grouped together with others with the small skill.

 

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A computer comparable to the human brain would need to be able to perform more than 38 thousand trillion operations per second and hold about 3,584 terabytes of memory! IBM’s BlueGene supercomputers, one of the world’s most powerful, can manage only 92 trillion operations per second and 8 terabytes of storage.

In addition to boosting computer performance, enhanced understanding of the brain will enable people to communicate directly with machines, whether they are robots or mechanized prosthetic limbs. Primates have already proved that such brain-machine interfaces are possible, Miguel Nicolelis, co-director of Duke University Medical Center's Center for Neuroengineering, said during the conference. The researcher and his colleagues last year successfully implanted electrodes in the brain of a monkey in North Carolina that enabled him to control a robot on a treadmill in Kyoto, Japan.

Nicolelis and his team have developed a microchip they expect will allow human brains to communicate with robots using only brain signals and enables the bots to return messages directly to the brain, without the use of sight or touch. Nicolelis said that he hopes the technology will be sophisticated enough to implant into a human brain by 2012 and enable a completely quadriplegic patient to walk again.

 

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A strip of “smart” highway with glow-in-the-dark road markings has opened in The Netherlands. About 500 metres of highway have been treated with a special photo-luminizing powder which absorbs light or “charges” during the day and then emits a soft green light at night which lasts for about 10 hours. The goal is to develop a more sustainable method of illuminating roads. Dutch engineers also plan to test other paints that would show symbols when serve weather hits, e.g., displaying snowflakes when it starts to snow so drivers know the roads are slippery.

The concept itself has been developed through several iterations and has been tested for durability and user experience. As such, the Oss pilot should primarily provide information on how well it works on a day-to-day basis in a real-world setting.

There are a number of other concepts under the Smart Highway umbrella yet to be piloted. Dynamic Paint envisages the use of temperature sensitive paint on the roads to provide contextual information. For example, if it were to be very cold, then the usually transparent paint would become visible and display warning messages.

 

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The DeepFlight Super Falcon, developed by California-based Hawkes Ocean Technologies, is a winged submersible designed to dive below the surface, swim amongst marine animals, navigate through underwater canyons, and even perform aquatic barred rolls. The submarine is 21 feet long with a wingspan of nearly 9 feet, and can dive to a depth of about 394 feet. It dives underwater like a whale, using thrust to generate “downward lift” to help the vehicle descend below the water’s surface. Essentially, it uses ‘lift and drag’ – the principles of regular flight – to “soar” underwater. If the vehicle loses power underwater, it will simply float back to the surface. The Super Falcon currently retails for $1.7 million.

 

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A new earthworm species developed by the Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI) can get rid of the wild aquatic plant Jal Kumbhi (Pistia Stratiotes) growing on the banks of river Brahmaputra. The plant is a menace as it spreads its tentacles right up to the river bed and impairs the movement of fisherman besides causing widespread pollution.

Jai Gopal (Perionyx ceylanesis) eats wild vegetation very fast and converts it into organic fertilizer that can be used in farming. It can withstand different temperature variations and survive temperatures ranging from 0 degree Celsius to 43 degree Celsius. The fertilizers produced will be used by tea gardens in the Assam valley. The earthworm will also benefit the sugarcane industry – waste products rich in phosphorous, calcium, potassium and other minerals can be transformed into organic fertilizers once they become fodder for the earthworm.

 

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