Author: Anupum Pant

DARPA’s Self-Steering Bullets

Think Angelina Jolie shooting curved trajectory shots with her gun in the movie Wanted. Well, the end result is not exactly fictional anymore (the technique is). I recently stumbled upon the following video demonstrating DARPA’s new self-steering bullet technology and it blew my mind.Here’s the video:

The video shows new missile-like self-steering projectiles hitting a moving target, only this time these are not missiles but 0.5 caliber sized sniper bullets (0.5 inches internal diameter of the gun’s barrel). As seen in the video, enabled by technology, a novice-sniper seems to be able to make a fairly good shot. On a funnier note, I see it like the autotune technology that helps music artists to fit their out of tune recording to a perfect tune.

Jokes aside, watching this smart bullet change its path mid-air, stirred up the curious cat that lives in my head. I would have had a tough time sleeping without knowing how DARPA’s self-steering bullet actually works. So, armed with free journal access (being a Ph.D. student has its perks), I fired up my google scholar and started looking for white papers with some mention of these keywords. With this technology being developed under DARPA, it’s of course one of those hush-hush things and was sure I won’t find much. Still, I was happy to glean a tiny hint of its inner workings.

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New Technology Could Change Our Approach to Space Exploration

by Megan Ray Nichols

NASA and other space agencies continue to work tirelessly on finding new technology to make deep space exploration a possibility. The Korean Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST, as well as NASA are currently working on a new technology involving self-healing silicon chips for spacecraft that will make the interstellar trip in the near future.

NASA will present the technology at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco in December 2016. The largest hurdle scientists have faced in regards to sending deep space probes is the intense radiation from the other stars and planets. This new technology will allow the silicon chips to heal after radiation exposure using a transistor made from nanowire technology.

How Self-Healing Chip Technology Works

As a deep space probe travels, its exposure to large amounts of radiation causes degradation before the probe can reach the end of its journey. Although a space shuttle or probe may run into other challenges such as heating and cooling or fuel issues, scientists believe the destruction from radiation scenario is avoidable by using a gate to surround the nanowire transistors.

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Pet Food Tasters

Food tasting has been a serious profession since the times of kings. Kings and other important people used to have their personal food tasters who were responsible to determine if the food was safe to eat. From ancient Rome to the present date – Romans used slaves as food tasters, Olympics chose mice for the job, Hitler had an army of 15 women who used to taste his food before him and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president has a food taster among the security staff. I’m sure the US president has one too, but the secret service refuses to confirm any details or even the existence of a person with such a job in his security staff.

Since ancient times the job of a human food taster has turned into a professional job which has a much widened application today. Professional food tasters can be a part of a sensory/consumer or expert panel, are employed by labs and food testing companies to evaluate and improve certain food products for their taste, nutrition etc. Most such jobs require you to have a distinctly evolved sense of taste, a previous professional experience or a degree in something like food science.

At first, getting paid to eat food sounds like a great idea. Well, it doesn’t even sound good if you are going to taste pet food. Anyway, even human food tasting can be hard. It can be a repetitive job. Food flavorists working to test the flavors of teas for instance might have to taste more than 500 cups of tea a day. Plus you might not even qualify for it because of lack of sensory sharpness which is usually a rare genetic trait, or is usually developed by years of training.

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Mountain Dew vs. Coke – Which One is Worse

Here’s the quick and hard truth – Mountain Dew is worse for your teeth when compared to Coca Cola. As interpreted by a young scientist, from a simple yet sharp experiment he conducted, there are two main reasons why Mountain Dew is worse thank Coke.

Firstly, Mountain Dew uses citric acid, while Coke uses phosphoric acid to give them their tangy zing. So, since citric acid is an organic acid, it can breakdown organic matter more easily than the inorganic acid used in coke. This is due to the buffering capacity of citric acid (and similar low molecular weight organic acids).

Secondly, even though as a whole Coke has a lower pH of 2.5 as compared to that of Mountain Dew (pH 3.1), which means Coke is six times more acidic owing to the logarithmic nature of this measurement, there’s more to it than just that.
pH measures the strength of the acid in a solution. pH does change due to dilution, but it needs massive dilution to change the pH.

Thus it is more appropriate here to measure the amount of acid actually present in the drink. Which can be done by measuring the Titratable Acidity (TA). TA is the amount of acid molecules present (both protonated and unprotonated) in milligrams or grams per liter of solution available for interaction with the tooth surface.

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Trilobite Eyes: Calcite Eyes Last Forever

It makes great sense to us today that we, or for that matter, so many other living beings around us, have eyes that are made up of organic matter. I’m specifically talking about the lenses of our eyes which are made up of organic material like crystallin. These are squishy, jelly-like biological materials which can change shape as muscles pull them and can focus on objects at different distances. Totally makes sense. But these won’t last long.

Imagine getting extinct, organisms finding our fossils a million years later wouldn’t have the slightest idea of how exactly our eye lenses worked.

Eyes of stone

Whereas the earliest creatures which started seeing, about 400 million years ago, had eyes literally made of stone. Their eyes, unlike any of our eyes would ever be able to do, have been preserved in the fossils we uncover today. [NCBI]

Some of the earliest Arthropods that we know of, belonging to a fossil group called Trilobites had eye lenses that were made up of this transparent mineral Calcite (Calcium carbonate). The closest existing relative of these creatures today are the blue blooded Horseshoe crabs.

The kinds of eyes

Broadly, they were of two types.

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On Not Knowing

That someone out there would point out, you do not know something, something which is widely popular and somehow you missed it, is a great social fear we live by today.

The fear of missing out on something, snubs some part of you that prevents you from coming out honestly and laying your guts out in the open. There simply is only a negative social incentive for you to be honest about your unawareness, because of the fear.

Like try telling someone that you have never heard of this thing called GoT everyone is talking about. Or Pokemon Go, or the Apple’s latest iPhone model. “Do you live under a rock?,” they will say.

Trust me, there for sure is someone out there who has never heard of it.

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The Great Pyramid is not Your Average Square Pyramid

Over the years, I have been fed with one shocking new fact a time about the Pyramids the Egyptians built over 3,800 years ago. Although not anywhere even close to being a new fact, this is the latest fact I have uncovered about the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the Pyramid of Khufu – The largest and the oldest of all the three pyramids in the Giza pyramid complex.

When observed carefully, what actually looks like an average square pyramid with four visible sides, that actually isn’t the case. Technically, there are eight visible sides. Here’s an exaggerated cartoon of what I mean by the eight sides.

concave2

In fact, the Menkaure, the third pyramid at Giza and the Red Pyramid at Dahshur have also been observed to have a similar concavity to each of their faces!

I know it is hard to believe, just because not many a people talk about it. For that, here are a few images of what it looks like from up above.

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The Kiss that can make you go Deaf

With youngsters blaring Spotify on their headphones loud enough for the whole bus to hear, it is only natural for elders to advice you to keep your iPods turned down. Forget that for a minute and listen to this.

Little do we know that a simple and innocent kiss can do a far worse damage to your ears. It is something that sounds like fiction, more like an urban legend and seems like a story I understand, is tough to believe.In case you do not believe me, I have included references at the end of the article. It is weird, but I believe it is important for people to be informed about it.

Symptoms:

Kissing on the ear, a kiss that involves suction, has the ability to create a negative pressure on your ear drum and can cause serious injury to it. It can cause intense pain due to the pulling of ossicular chain and due to the ear drum getting dislodged. The symptoms may vary anything from a constant ringing sound, hearing loss to certain kind of sounds, distortion or even complete hearing loss.

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Beware of the Watermelon Snow

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What is Watermelon Snow?

Watermelon Snow, exactly as the name suggests, is a pink colored watermelon slushy like snow. It has been spotted in a number of snow covered regions of the earth which are permanently covered with snow. Although the pink color may look like it comes from some sort of a mineral deposit, or some other inorganic source such as meteorite debris, interestingly it is due to living organisms – Algae. Its other names are – snow algae, pink snow, red snow, or blood snow.

How does it get that color?

One of the widely found algae species in these pink snow patches contains a red pigment (called carotenoids) in addition to the green chlorophyll component. The alage itself is called Chlamydomonas nivalis.

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The Principles of Building Indestructible Sand Castles

Introduction

If you had a formal education that touched even a little bit of composite materials in the course, you will immediately be able to recall what these amazing materials can do. For others, Composite materials, as the name suggests, are materials that are composed of two or more different kinds of materials.

In a simple case think of your body, which is, in a broad sense, a combination of skin material and bone material. These materials are designed to take advantage of the contrasting properties of, say two different materials. For simplicity’s sake, skin is soft and bone is hard. The bone gives body a solid structure, while the skin and muscle tissues enables this hard skeleton to make fluid movements – flex or bend – and still be together.

Individually the materials that make up a composite material are not very capable. But when they come together, composite materials can blow your mind. To appreciate how this simple coming together of two humble materials can create a super material, and to appreciate the mind blowing properties it can have, let us first look at what most of us have heard of – “Carbon Fiber”. We will get into the more mind bending aspect of composites after that.

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP)

Now carbon fiber itself isn’t a composite material. As the name suggests, it is a fiber of carbon. The fiber is composed of strands of carbon each of which are much thinner than a single human hair. Hundreds of these come together to form a thicker fiber. This fiber can be woven to make sheets or the carbon fiber itself can directly be used in a composite material.

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5 Things You Didn’t Know About Water Repellent Technology

Water repellent technology has advanced a lot since it was first introduced. Durable water repellent is a coating which is received by the products to make them water resistant and is made from nano structures. These nano structures are the result of the advancement in the modern chemicals and thus offer far more protection than any other thing. Here are some of the facts which makes explains how this new water repellent technology uses the concept of nano technology to help your car remain cleaner:

The Lotus Effect

The nano structures are byproducts of nanotechnology which are used to give protection to your car’s windows, windshields, rims and to the whole body. The main function of the hydrophobic coating is to act as water repellent agent making your car waterproof and increase the car’s auto wash cycles. The mechanism from which it was inspired is itself found in nature and therefore called as “Lotus effect”. This is named after lotus leaf which has self cleaning properties and insects such as butterflies and dragonflies also exhibit such properties.

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The Cocktail Party Effect

Introduction

The term cocktail party effect was coined by a British Cognitive scientist Colin Cherry, in the 1950s. He was interested in understanding how people listened, by conducting a few experiments. In his first experiment, he played two different overlapped messages recorded in the voice of the same person, through headphones. The participants were asked to listen carefully and try to write one of the messages on paper. If they put in enough concentration, the participants usually succeeded.

Now, if someone asks you to describe the cocktail party effect. The formal Cocktail Party effect definition is as follows:

Cocktail Party Effect Definition:

The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Continue reading The Cocktail Party Effect

Everything You Should Know About Machine Learning

Programming Computers: Then and Now

I find it fascinating that today you can define certain rules and provide enough historical data to a computer, reward it for reaching closer to the goal and punish it for doing bad, which will get it trained to do a specific task. Based on these rules and data, the machine can be programmed to learn to do tasks so well that we humans have no way of knowing what steps it is explicitly following to get the work done. It’s like the brain, you can’t slice it open and understand the inner workings.

The days when we used to define each step for the computer to take are now numbered. The role we played back then, of a god to the computers has been reduced to something like that of a dog trainer. The tables are turning from commanding machines to parenting them. Rather than creating code, we are turning into trainers. Computers are learning. It has been called machine learning, for quite a while now (defined in 1959 by by Arthur Samuel). Other names being artificial intelligence, deep simulation or cognitive computing. However now, it really has picked up and based on the amazing things it can help computers do now, it is clearly going to be the future of what the IT industry will transform into.

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Making 3D Plots in OriginLab OriginPro

When I first wanted to use OriginPro to make 3D plots for my Raman and photoluminescence data I struggled to find a solution for little problems for hours. It was not like I had no one to consult, but I wanted to figure it out myself because the same philosophy with learning things previously has helped me immensely in learning things with authority and developing my own characteristic style, by putting in an extra amount of time and hard work.

Check with your university, there’s a big chance that they offer you students a free copy of OriginPro. It is an amazing piece of software, easy to learn and can make plots beautiful enough to be published in Science or Nature.

However when I was toiling through things, I also wished someone who had gone through the same thing could have documented it somewhere. Not surprisingly, no one had. So I wanted to. Here it goes.

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A Layman’s Guide to Photonic Crystals

The first time I heard the word “Photonic Crystal” in a seminar, I was stumped. So I decided to read about it, understand and then write about it to make it explain better to me, and you of course. Even though it is a whole graduate level class to explain, it does not hurt to quickly look at how Photonic crystals work. I have not taken the relevant graduate class. However, after reading this amazing answer on Quora, and from a range of other literature out there, I was able to make some good sense out of it. My idea was that at least by doing a little reading you get to throw around a fancy word like “photonic crystal”. Moreover, if someone decides to test you on what it means, you even explain it to them. These kind of examinations, where it is incumbent upon you to perform well, happen all the time, everywhere. That’s why it is important to learn. And well, then there’s that whole argument of expanding your mind to exercise your creative muscle by reading and listening carefully to things and people that are out of what you do.

Featured image credit: Flickr, Steven & Courtney Johnson & Horwitz (Picture)

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