How Birds Navigate Their Path ? | Quantum Compass

Understanding how birds navigate has fascinated scientists for generations. We finally cracked that odd egg. Its turn out that they have Quantum Compass in their eyes. Like they have sixth-sense kind of thing, but its all can be explained by science.

Half of all bird species migrate to find food as the season turns cold. The exact pathway and location change between species, but they all follow a more or less North-South pattern. That's incredible and it is even true for those that hunt on land. Birds will take the most direct route even that means flying over Big bodies of Water to conserve energy.

But how do these birds know where to go! They don't know how to follow roads or to turn at any landmark. Also, they are a bird, how a bird even know what's a landmark is! They are birds not human. But Birds do have one advantage a built-in compass.

New evidence from two separate studies, one looking at Zebra Finches and the other one European Robins, found that some migrating birds have proteins in their eyes that gives them a sort of " Sixth Sense". It allows them to detect the Earth's magnetic field. That's pretty amazing, right?

In both species, the researchers studied the proteins Cry1, Cry2 and Cry4. These three proteins are called Cryptochromes that are associated with their bodies' internal Circadian Clock. They found that Cry1 and Cry2 levels rise and fall in regular circles during the day. But the level of Cry4 is constant. The simplest explanation is that birds need to produce this protein all the time for some reason. So they look more closely at Cry4.

This protein Cry4 is a peculiar one. It is clustered in a part of the bird's retina, which is very sensitive to blue light. This protein is made from a kind of molecule that some time has an odd number of electrons. The scientists theorize, that as incoming light enters the eye, a photon hits the Cryptochrome proteins and that excites the electron on it. That energy is then transferred between two molecules within the protein yielding two free electrons that are Quantum entangled and therefore, correlated. Scientists theorize the electron's spin form a coherent Quantum state reacts to a weak external magnetic field, for example, the Earth's magnetic field.

Basically, if they are right, these two electrons are reacting to the birds fly through the Earth's magnetic field. As the bird turns or moves, the electrons spin differently, causing different messages to be sent to the bird's brain. The chemical signals that are sent to the bird's brain, allow it to detect the magnetic field within 5-degree accuracy. Theoretically, if they are right.

The Cry4 protein essentially acts like a magnetic compass. Birds always get enough blue light that hit the retina to trigger the electrons' spin to release that chemical any time of a day. Which is insane if you think about it. Because when we humans study Quantum particles it requires supper cooling atoms in a lab environment and not to forget those complex huge machinery. But the inside of a birds eye is warm yet chaotic. So How the heck does they work out Quantum entanglement?

 We really don't know. We also don't know how the chemical signal part of the compass sends messages to the brain or how the birds perceive the magnetic field. We need a bird's eye view, to feel this final piece of the puzzle. More research is obviously needed.

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Sand Crisis

It's time we talk about a new global crisis the Sand Crisis. Only a few of us think about the role sand plays in our daily lives. Sand is used to make glass, electronics and in fracking. Huge quantities of sand have been dumped into the sea to reclaim land for development, while other cities need it to shore up islands against rising sea levels. But it mostly used in construction.

Sand is the remains of pulverized and weathered rock mixed with shell fragments and other bits and pieces that washed up and left as sediment from a body of water. Because of that sand is unique to Where You Find It, its composition depends on the rocks and minerals in that part of the world, some of which are sturdy and last longer than others.

With populations rising, sand is quickly becoming a hot commodity. Because not all sand is created equal. The fine-grained sand of the Sahara, for example, does not make an appropriate building material. Instead, coarser sand must be mined Usually, from the banks of local rivers and coastlines. This brings a whole host of environmental and human problems, but also makes for a valuable export. You think SAND is everywhere, but it's NOT.

Modern cities use a lot of sand in construction. The global total for sand mining in 2010 was about 11 billion metric tons. Sand is a globalized commodity, whose trade value has increased sixfold in the last quarter-century. For Sand! Some cities are built on sand-heavy foundations but mostly it's used to make concrete and asphalt. The nation like Dubai import the right kind of sand for construction even though Dubai is surrounded by desert, desert-sand is not strong enough for concrete. So the necessary sand is imported from Australia.



Cities experiencing incredible growth rates are using a lot of sand. According to estimates, China used more concrete from 2011 to 2014 than the US used through out the entire 20th century and their rate is not slowing down. Because of this booming urbanization, sand mining has increased with some pretty negative consequences.

Sand for construction in Shanghai, sand was originally dredged from the bottom of the Yangtze River. But bridges were damaged, the river bank collapsed and the shipping industry was disrupted so much that dredging the river bottom was banned. Now nearby Lake Poyang is dredged. But it's not just structural.

Sand dredging is taking a toll on the environment too. Dropping water levels can damage nearby wetlands, destroy the habitat for migratory birds and putting animals that rely on that water source on endangered species lists. Sand extraction in Kenya damaged coral reefs. In India, it's a threat to rare crocodiles. In Indonesia, sand mining wiped out whole islands.

So, what can we do about this SAND CRISIS?
One solution could be developing new materials with all the properties of sand for use in construction. Another could be to find an alternative to concrete for building.

Whatever the case, this is soon to be something we can't ignore. Recycling concrete could help, but some might not be able to set up the infrastructure to do that. Finding an alternative to sand is ideal, but difficult, it would be hard to replace something that has been so abundant and cheap until now.

So, next time you are shaking the sand out off your shoes at the beach, remember, this material is important. It's a natural resource. it's not renewable. Like a lot of nature, it's got a lot of value. We are finally recognizing our insane use of the sand as a problem and that is the first step to find a solution.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious And Thank You

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The Van Allen Belts | Its Effect On Astronauts

There is an invisible magnetic force field surrounding our planet, protecting us from harmful solar winds that could annihilate Earth. But, this protective blanket is also a swirling ring full of deadly radiation and to leave Earth's atmosphere astronauts have to pass through it.

The Van Allen belts are rings of energetically charged particles that have been captured by Earth's magnetic field. They got their name from the Physicist named James Van Allen. Back in the 1950s, Van Allen launched a rockoon, a rocket lifted by a balloon above the atmosphere and it detected the first hint of radiation at higher altitudes. Then Explorer 1, the first American satellite to orbit Earth, launched on January 13, 1958, confirmed that Earth's magnetosphere was trapping the subatomic particles.

The Van Allen belts were the first major scientific discovery of early Space Age and they posed a serious challenge for space travel. High-speed subatomic particles can tear through DNA, increasing the risk of cancer and other desires. So sending astronauts through these particles is not ideal and even though they are flying in a shielded spacecraft, doses of radiation can still seep through. But there is no way around the Van Allen belts. In order to reach space, astronauts have to fly through them.

There are Two belts, First the inner belt which is comprised of protons and then the outer belt which has mostly high energy-electrons. One solution, proposed by Mr Van Allen himself, suggested detonating a nuclear boom in the inner belt to clear out some of the subatomic particles. Van Allen's plan never executed, but in 1962, the United States did carry out a nuclear test in space, dubbed StarFish Prime. They wanted to see if detonating a 1.4 megaton boom in low-Earth orbit could augment and expand the Van Allen Belts, but the explosion actually ends up adding more radiation around our planet.

So, for the Apollo mission, NASA  had to create a radiation barrier within the spacecraft and figure out a trajectory that avoided the thickest, most radioactive parts of the belts while travelling as fast as possible. Scientists determined that if the speed of the Apollo spacecraft was about 25,000 kilometres per hour, it would take a spacecraft about 52.8 minutes to pass through the belts. Based on that information scientists found that the radiation doses received during that amount of time would be, at most, 11.4 rads and that's without the protection of a spacecraft. Since a lethal radiation dosage for a human is 300 rads in one hour, so NASA deemed the missions a go. After all that, it turned out that during the Apollo missions the average radiation doses on the skin of the astronauts came out to be 0.38 rad which is about the same radiation you would receive by getting two CT scans of your head.

So while the Van Allen belts are lethal, they could really only kill an astronaut if they were to spend several days in their radioactive vicinity and despite the challenges the belts create when leaving Earth, we should actually be thanking them for protecting life on our planet from utter annihilation.

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NASA’s Cryosleep Chamber | Is long-term Snoozing like Ripley In Alien Even Possible?

Space travel takes a really long time and as much as I love Netflix and Pizza, hanging out and eating snacks may not be the best strategy for killing time on our way to the red planet. That's because being awake for that long means we are gonna need to eat and drink and all of those normal human things, which means bringing a lot of supplies with us. That's not super practical. But if we have learned anything from movies, the solution is to sleep our way through space. But is long-term snoozing like Ripley in Alien even possible?

To tackle this space sleep conundrum, let's start with the basic, without the assistance of sedatives or fancy chambers, we have to know how long humans can sleep on our own. Typically we only sleep about eight hours per night and though that can vary, it's unusual for healthy adults to regularly sleep over 10 hours. But in the 1960s two volunteers put sleep duration to the test. They were monitored as they lived, isolated, underground for several months. In the absence of daylight, their sleep cycles got real crazy. One guy fell asleep for 30 hours and woke up thinking it was just a short nap! 30 hours!




In following years researchers did more organized, controlled studies and they found that when isolated from light and other external markers of time, it's not that uncommon for us to fall into longer sleep cycles. All of this could be a great natural starting point for hacking our sleep to fit our space travel need. But it won't get us all the way there since extended sleep periods are often followed by extended waking periods. So we are gonna need something a little more sophisticated than a dark room to get us into Deep Space.

Luckily for future Mark Watney out there, there are lots of scientists trying to figure this out.  One of the most exciting projects is in the work at a company called SpaceWorks Enterprises and yes, that is the name of a real company that actually exists. They have been working with NASA to develop a stasis chamber that could keep astronauts asleep for 2 weeks at a time and possibly longer. Now, I know what you are thinking, two weeks that's not enough to get me to Mars and you are right. But SpaceWorks has a plan for that they suggest stacking these shorter hibernation periods back to back with a couple of days in between to walk around and stretch out. The crew can rotate waking and sleeping shifts and Voila. You will be in deep space before you know it.

First, this design isn't for an individual sleep pod, but a shared sleeping chamber. The chamber works by lowering a group of astronaut's body temperatures to 32 degrees Celsius, then it sedates them to suppress the body's reactions to the cold. The low temperature would put their bodies into a mild hypothermia, slowing down your metabolic rate and preventing injury from lack of oxygen. Robotic arms will check up on the astronauts while they slumber and any bodily waste will be.. well, let's just say there are catheters involved. Sounds like hypersleep to me.

Aside from greatly reducing the necessary food and water for the mission these stasis chambers could also have some other major benefits, like requiring a smaller area to be thoroughly protected from radiation. The researchers also want to equip the chambers with artificial gravity which could prevent a lot of the negative health effects associated with long-term space travel.

But, Danger Alert!, don't try taking one of these bad boys to Proxima Centauri. We still have not figured out how to slow down ageing, so even though you would not have to be entertained and fed on the 81,000-year journey, you would still be very Dead by the time you get there. Sadly, these don't exist yet, so if we send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s they probably just have to sleep like normal humans.
In the meantime as a person who enjoys a good cold nap, I hope they make an earth version of this soon.




Also Read:-Aeolus: Monitoring Weather And Wind Pattern With Laser From Space

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What Kind Of Sound You Should Listen To When You Want To Focus?

Some people prefer to listen music to focus and some prefer silence over music to study, write or to be productive. So which one is better for our brain and our body? Let's start by finding out what noise the opposite of silence does our bodies.

Studies were conducted by the World Health Organization that linked noise pollution, like loud city sounds, with higher blood pressure and a higher chance of a fatal heart attack. All right don't panic that neighbour playing Loud music at 4.am is not going to kill you. But prolonged exposure to a noisy environment can lead to cognitive deficits as well. Studies have shown that students in schools near airports and train stations have suffered negative effects on long-term memory and reading comprehension, leading some cities to require soundproofing in schools. So noise may not kill you, but it increases your stress levels, which is no Bueno for brain long-term.

Silence, on the other hand, has been correlated with lower stress hormones. Also, studies done on mice in 2013 found that those exposed to silence over white noise or even Mozart expressed higher rates of neurogenesis or the productions of neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes memory. Further studies found more evidence that the brain is processing and evaluating new information faster in time of silence over the sound. So less stress, new neurons, new synaptic connections and memory formation sounds good for productivity.

I know what you are thinking but I do my best work when listening to Passenger. Me too love " Let Her Go". But be patient, we are geting there.

Music permeates all parts of the brain, not just the temporal lobe or auditory cortices. If the song slaps or if it is trash, it will activate your Amygdala and parts of your Limbic system responsible for emotional response. what's more, both music and language are auditorily processed both are forms of communication and I don't know about you all but I consider music like a language.

New research shows that there may be neurons in the auditory cortex that activate specifically for music, not language or other random sounds. So if your brain is bussy processing emotions, lyrics and now there are these new other neurons firing, how much attention is left to remember Co-ordinate geometry. Remember that gem from Highschool, Huh?

Science says it depends. A 2010 study found that music may impair cognitive abilities if you are trying to memorize a specific order, it could be thrown off by a key change, a lyrical choice or Drake getting you deep down in your feelings. Even if you are not distracted, a 2006 study measured the effect of tempo on cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Slow meditative music can get us to relax slowing booth your heart rate and breathing, but these study found that we are the most relaxed when there is a "silence". So Silence wins?

Well if your goal is complete Zen relaxation while you write that final then yeah try silence. But again, this all depends on a lot of variables lyrics, tempo and genre have all been shown to have various effects on focus, mood and productivity. Anyway if you have a study-music playlist and its work for you then go for that, don't worry much.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious And Thank You

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Self-Healing Technology

Researchers in China have developed a smart coating that behaves like skin which heals itself from damage and is as hard as tooth enamel. This development represents a big step forward in materials science, but self-healing technology isn't a new Technology. There are three main general types of self-healing tech available right now.

• Embedded - One where the healing agents are embedded in the material
• Vascular Network - One where a vascular network, which is kind of like your body's veins brings healing agents to the site of damage
• Stimulus - One where the material is intrinsically capable of healing itself when exposed to certain stimuli.

Some use ionic conduction, some use covalent bonding and conductive silver nanoparticles and then comes the way Chines team do which takes inspiration from the human body. Say your phone screen cracks, with something like this new technology the softer cushy bottom layer reacts to the trauma and provides material to fill in the broken bits of the top layer, while the hardness of the top layer provides a protective coating to allow the healing to take place. The harder top layer is also apparently antimicrobial meaning it could have future implications for biomedical devices.

Other teams around the world have been exploring similar technologies. In last few years we have seen the beginning of soft, self-healing robots that can perform delicate tasks and fit into small spaces and flexible self-healing electronic skin that could attach to a person's body and monitor their health as well as a whole host of other potential applications, like human-robot interaction and prosthetic limb enhancement. These most recent developments are also recyclable which means that while they are promising new technology, they don't promise to create a lot of excess wast in the process.

In 2016, one particularly exciting breakthrough came when a team published research demonstrating a material that was conductive, stretchy and self-healing providing major implications for extending the life of lithium-ion batteries. The big takeaway from this topic is not just a science fiction like tech advancement, but also major environmental implications. Imagine never having a broken electronic that you had to replace because the one you have is Self-healing!

The top layer of this new coating from the Chinese researchers is so had and durable that the team hopes that their self-healing technology will last longer and produce less waste than options that may wear out faster after fewer injuries. But that's getting little ahead of ourselves.  For now, the Chinese engineering team is trying to improve their production process to make it more efficient and less expensive, so that they can hopefully bring a commercial prototype to market in the next few years. They say it would likely be applicable in areas like consumer electronics and maybe even construction. Self-healing building would be pretty sweet.



We may still be a couple of years away from seeing self-healing technologies in stores or in the doctor's office and when they do come around experts say consumers are gone have to pay a premium, cause that's going to be expensive. But it's exciting to see researchers taking the longevity of their technology and the environmental impact of any potential products into account.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious And Thank You

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Terraforming Venus and Mars with Sun-Shields & Nukes. Crazy Right?

There is a reason why Venus is often called the hell planet, It's average surface temperature is 864^o Fahrenheit which is hot enough to melt lead. Its Airs are suffocating stew of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide. Its atmosphere is 90 times thicker than Earth's which would literally crush you. Even so Venus as a potential candidate for terraforming which is a process that turns an inhospitable planet into one that could support life.

As we continue to over saturate resources on earth scientists at NASA and Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are looking to turn other planets into our homes. So what are Some of the Crazy Ideas to terraform our nearest neighbours Venus and Mars?

Let's start with Venus this wild world is a terrestrial planet with the similar size(Radius-6051km), mass(4.87*10²⁴KG) and density (5243 KG per meter cube). It's also pretty close 67 miles away. we can get there by spacecraft in about 5 months, where to reach mars it takes 9 months which is 104 million miles from Earth. While Venus's atmosphere is a total hellscape it does give us something to work with. At about 30 miles above the surface, Venus's atmosphere is pretty Earth-like, with the atmospheric pressure similar to our planet, So some scientists believe building cities high above Venus's smouldering surface could be an option. This Idea is Known As HAVOC High Altitude Venus Operational Concept.




NASA's evolutionary plan would involve sending piloted aeroshells into  Venus's atmosphere. Once in place, the shells would release folded airships that look like blimps. The airships would then use Venus's Carbon Dioxide atmosphere to float. Another Terraforming idea suggests cooling Venus down with a giant Sun blocker. A Sunshade mirror would be placed in between the Sun and Venus. It needs to be slightly larger than Venus's diameter to fully shade the planets. Over time it will cool the atmosphere down and block from the solar wind. As stellar these sound these ideas are just ideas. and they are both far from executable.

So how about the plans to terraform Mars. Well, the red planet is super cold and has a very thin unbreathable atmosphere comprised of 95% of carbon dioxide. Yet its structure and presence of water are similar to Earth. To retrofit Mars one idea proposes importing huge amounts of Ammonia or Hydrocarbons to create a livable atmosphere. These Gases could potentially be mined from icy moons in the outer solar system like Titan. Infusing Mar's atmosphere with Methane and other Hydrocarbons could increase the atmospheric pressure raise surface temperature and produce Water and Carbon Dioxide. This next terraforming idea takes us back to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. He proposed melting Mars as polar ice caps by dropping Thermonuclear booms on. The explosions would release carbon dioxide that would thicken the Martian atmosphere at that point liquid water might be able to flow on the surface and it could start a Greenhouse Effect.

So yeah when you compare terraforming ideas thermonuclear booms might be just as unrealistic as a massive sun shield. It's pretty clear we are far from a perfect terraforming scenario. But even if we do find a plausible plan it will still likely take thousands of years and incredible resources before we see humans living on Venus or Mars. But it's Fun to Dream so which planet do you want to see terraformed?

Also Read:- The Thick Atmosphere Of Venus Increases The Rotation Rate By Up To About Two Venus Minutes ( i.e 350,000 Earth Minutes ) Each Venus Day.

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How Science Community Stick Together Even If Respected Country or Religion Don't?

Science asks Big Challenging Questions about the Nature Of The Universe.

Answering these questions often requires collaboration across scientific disciplines and national borders. But what happens when countries are isolated, at war or just don't get along. What do scientists do then?

In some areas of science, it's impossible to do research without collaborating with another country. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization or UNESCO reported that in 2015 an average of 1 in 4 published scientific paper listed some form of collaboration with foreign scientists and that number continues to grow.

 For instance, the high altitude, lack of atmosphere and dry conditions in certain parts of Chile make it one of the best places on Earth to view activity in outer space. This is one reason that it is estimated by 2020, 70% of the global infrastructure for astronomical observation will be located in Chile. With the rest of the world's astronomers dependent on their facilities for sensitive measurements, good relations are critical if research in astronomy is to advance.

But consider what happens if countries have a challenging political relationship. India's relationship with Pakistan or China. US relationships with Cuba, for instance, have been famously strained since the 1960's. While the exchange of scientific information was never expressly forbidden, US embargos on everything from travel to trade between the two countries has made it difficult for Cuban scientists to access instrumentation and equipment that scientists outside the country take for granted. This is because modern reagents and scientific equipment are often manufactured in, or contain parts from the United States which exempts them from sale to Cuba. Even with this challenges, Cuba is a superstar of science. They are the first country to receive validation from the World Health Organization for eliminating mother to child transmission of HIV and their lung cancer vaccine was an early success for cancer immunotherapy.

These innovations made formalized scientific collaboration between the United State and Cuba politically more attractive. In 2014 the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Cuban Academy of Science signed a historic agreement to seek opportunities for sustained cooperation. In order for them to fulfil that promise, the two countries had to agree to work together outside of the laboratory and this new found scientific relationship coincided with a general easing of restrictions between the US and Cuba, including a relaxation of travel restrictions and historic visit to Havana by President Obama himself.



Anyway, the public may perceive hostility, but scientific collaboration still thrives because scientists find greater value in science. International collaborations like the Human Genom Project and the Particle Accelerator SESAME in the Middle East (which includes unfriendly countries like Iran, Pakistan, Israel) are pushing humanity's knowledge of universe forward and creating havens of cooperation in a time of increasing nationalism.

When it comes to highly visible international Moon Shot projects like CERN's Large Hadron Collider or the International Space Station, A project reliant on cooperation Russia, The US and others. The whole world is watching. The sheer scale of investment puts these massive collaborations in a delicate diplomatic position that can make them critical points of de-escalation and compromise in otherwise gridlocked negotiations. They can also inspire us to acknowledge that we are all just bunch of humans stuck on a rock racing around the sun all day and night.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious And Thank You

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What Is Ten Times Stronger Than Nuclear Fusion! | Quark Fusion

The particles that make up the neutrons and protons inside of atoms are known as Quarks. From a new study, researchers found that when Quarks bind together energy is produced. Scientists have already been smashing together particles at the Large Hadron Collider but that's been with Hydrogen atoms, not Quarks.

At the Large Hadron Collider, particles are zooming through a 27 Km long ring at near the speed of light. When particles collide scientists are poised to collect lots of data and sometimes in the data strange particles emerge. Totally unexpectedly! This is precisely what happened when what's known as a "Doubly Charmed Baryon" emerged in 2016. It was made up of two Charm Quarks.

The publishing of their paper leads other researchers to draw up the calculation of just how much energy would be needed to fuse these Quarks together and how much energy would be released. They found it would take about 130 MeV to fuse the collision of Charm Quark. But wait there is more...

More researchers theorized that if they fused a different type of Quark, a heavier Bottom Quark, it may produce around 138 MeV which is about 8 times more energy than fusing hydrogen. No need to worry about someone creating a boom out of Quark because the scientists say these type of Quarks won't live long enough after a collision for a chain reaction to happen. In other words, they decay too quickly and won't be usable for weapons. 

Scientists do say it's technically possible to create this fusion with the Large Hadron Collider and there may be a good chance that in the next couple of years this study will do into action. But before you dream about a fusion future Many scientists don't think this will ever work. Also, the amount of energy it will take to even combine these together is so high that the energy getting out of it won't be significantly much more. 

Current clean energy systems are generating a good amount of energy but with quark fusion, if scientists can develop a technology to make it the reality. Well, then we will be talking. 

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Do We Need Large Computer Cases Anymore?

The ATX standard that's so common for the motherboards came out all the way back in 1995 and while modern ones have become packed with features, our technology back then was so primitive that we needed sound chips networking drive controllers etc.that often required separate adapter cards. Drives these days don't need as much space anymore both because single drives are much higher capacity than they were 20 years ago and also because physically smaller SSDs have taken off in popularity.
SO WHY IT IS STILL SO EASY TO BUY A LARGE MID AND FULL TOWER CASES?
I MEAN WHY SOMEONE NEEDS THESE THINGS?

Well believe it or not there are still a number of reasons that you might want to consider an impressively big size case. If you are building a powerful rig that needs more components, like using your computer as a home server such as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for storing videos or as a big-time editing workstation a PC can require multiple high capacity hard drives, especially if you are using a raid array to backup your work or to speed up your performance. Video footage tends to take up lots of space and bulky hard drives do hold more footage more cheaply than smaller SSDs and more drives mean you might need more Drive headers to connect them too,. Which will mean a higher end motherboard with more of them built-in or more likely an inexpensive add-in cards that have an extra header on it.

But what if you are not video editing or running a server? Well even though many smaller cases can hold up to two graphics cards no problems, you might still consider a bigger case if you still need to add more adapter cards such as a sound card, a video capture card, PCI Express, SSDs or legacy i/o cards that can add older-style ports to a new system for old devices you still like to use.



Scientific instruments are notorious for this and even if none of this applies to you, you still may have components that run hot and a larger case may be able to help you cool things off. The large cases not only will give you more room for both air and water cooling accessories like pumps radiators and fans they can provide more breathing space for your components especially if you are a tinkerer and you are into overclocking your CPU or GPU. On the subject of cooling, larger cases usually offer more flexibility in terms of how you configure them with some of them allowing you to relocate components like pimps or drive cages in a matter of minutes.

Well, everything apart, There are two main straightforward reasons. One, the large case gives you more space to work in making building and upgrading easier and to aesthetics. Some people just like the look of an imposing beefy case. Second, you will get more room to trick it out with RGB fans, custom lighting or even fancy designs etched onto the side panel.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious And Thank You

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Most Galaxies Spiral-Shaped,Why?

When you think of the Milky Way, you probably picture that familiar spiral shape we all have come to know and love. That spiral structure is very common for galaxies, Over three-quarters of the one's we have observed, are in this pinwheel shape. Our own galaxy is actually in a subgroup called barred spiral galaxies. But how exactly spiral galaxies get their shape is still up for debate.

Most galaxies spin around a central point, it's usually a supermassive black hole. It is tempting to think that those spiral arms are practically solid structures, with the same stars all sticking together as they revolve around the centre of the galaxy. If that were true, that would mean that the stars on the tip of the arms have to move faster than the stars near the centre to keep up. 

This doesn't jive well with the laws of physics. In reality, objects move faster when they are closer to the point they are orbiting around, otherwise, they would lose the battle with gravity and fall in. This is Kepler's third law and that is why Earth's orbit takes a year while Mercury's is just 88 days.

This means though that if the arms were made up of the same stars then as the galaxy rotates, the arms would get stretched out and wound up like they were in a cosmic taffy machine. Our Sun takes around 250 million years to do a lap of the galaxy, which sounds like a long time but on an astronomical timescale, it's pretty quick.

At those speeds, spiral galaxies should wind their arms into oblivion before any appreciable length of time and we shouldn't be observing as many of these galaxies as we do. Astronomers call this THE WIND-UP PROBLEM and they have come up with two explanations for the arms.

One is that the arms are not material, but are actually the product of a density wave. As stars travel around the galaxy, they will come to areas where they will bunch up for a while and then areas were they are more spread out. This means that even though the stars are moving inside the arms, the arms themselves look pretty stationary. You can think of it as a traffic jam from a distance the jam appears to stay in one place on the highway, but the cars that make up that jam are actually flowing through it.

What would cause these density waves in the first place is still hotly debated. Astronomers have found that spiral arms could be caused by other nearby galaxies or driven by the large bar shape at the centre of some galaxies. But bars and companion galaxies are not universal, so explaining galaxies that have nither with the density wave model is tricky.

The other popular explanation is Stochastic Self-Propagating Star Formation, but its friends call it SSPSF. The basic idea behind it is Star formation in a galaxy, causes a shock wave, that kicks off more star formation. The rotation of the galaxy stretches the bright new stars into the familiar spiral arms and they burn out and die as the chain reaction propagates and arms move on.It is possible SSPSF and the density wave model actually work together and stars are formed in the denser areas, making the arms look brighter with their hot new stars.

So those are the most accepted explanations of spiral information, but confirming them can only be answered after hundreds of millions of years of observation. So if you are looking for a career with job security, might I suggest Astronomy?

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A Family Tree For The Stars In Our Galaxy

A Biologist and an Astronomer go to dinner. That's not the start of a joke, but it is actually how that astronomer got the inspiration for a new way of thinking about stars. That astronomer was the University of Cambridge's Dr.Paula Jofre and she realized that she could chart stars in the Milky Way the same way we chart the family tree of animal species.

Dr.Paula Jofre and her team picked 22 stars (including our sun) and observed their chemical makeup, their age and their movement to plot them on a stellar " tree of life." They found that the stars they looked at could be plotted on three branches of the tree, with a few miscellaneous ones that didn't fit with the others.

They can tell which stars are related based on their chemical makeup, almost like their Stellar DNA. If they were born in the same gas cloud then their makeup would be similar. This study found 8 of stars they looked at were the Sun's siblings.

The researchers also suggested some of the stars may have originated from another galaxy that was absorbed by the Milky Way. Of course, they only looked at 22 of 100 billion stars. So maybe those 6 that didn't feet with the others have some long lost brother and sister out there. The more they look, the more complete our galaxy's tree of life will be.

Jofre's goal is to get astronomers to think about the history of stars in a new way, so if you are an astronomer don't be afraid to take a scientist from a different field out to dinner. It's not so much a tree of life as maybe a spiral, which is appropriate considering we do live in a spiral galaxy.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious And Thank You.

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STARQUAKES

We often look up to stars and feel peace, but stars are actually insanely turbulent and chaotic celestial things and we use that chaos to learn more about how our universe works. We have known of stars eating other stars, witnessed stellar flares and white dwarves on the verge of a supernova. But we have not fully grasped what's actually going inside the core of a star.

Observing the interior of a star is pretty much impossible at the moment. So scientists are looking at a phenomenon happening on the surface of stars to better understand their internal structure: STARQUAKES.

Similar to earthquakes here on our planet, starquakes are tremors or waves that occur on neutron stars and other massive bodies. Most stars are balls of plasma, but neutron stars are super dense so they have a crust. Neutron stars crusts are Ten billion times stronger than steel. With this Huge dense body and crust, their magnetic field are interconnected. So when a star rotates quickly, the crust is under pressure from gravity and that fast rotation, causing it to bulge out. If the structure keeps twisting, it can rip the crust open and that creates a starquake.

The resulting release of energy is vast beyond our wildest imaginations. Starquakes are the reminder that space is violent and metal as hell. The biggest starquake ever detected was from a magnetar. Magnetars are a class of neutron star with the most intense magnetic field in the entire Universe.




One starquake on a magnetar released more energy in a tenth of a second than our Sun does in 150,000 years. If the explosion had been within 10 light years of us, experts say Earth could have suffered a massive extinction. Those starquakes emit frequencies that can be detected by the Kepler Space Telescope and scientists interpreted them for our ears.

The reason astronomers looked into this because of some cosmologists believed stars were just out there not really organised. Starquakes were used to prove otherwise. In a recent paper, An international team of astronomers studied starquakes from 48 Red giants in two ancient star clusters. By measuring the waves from these starquakes, they found 70% of the stars had spins that were aligned with one another. It proved asteroseismology can be a successful tool to understand the conditions of stars and discredited these theories that stars were randomly oriented.

Studying the vibrations from stars is very similar to what seismologists do to understand the core of our own planet. For example, if you want to study the earth's interior, we can't just drill a hole into the centre and find out what's going on. Something goes with stars, We can't go in and grab a piece of a star's centre and study it. But the waves created by those quakes can be measured. By measuring the oscillations coming to and from the centre of the star, we can understand it's physical conditions, the size of its centre and more about its origin story.

It's pretty wild that we can use the internal hum of stars that are light years away to figure out how our Universe formed billions of years ago. More research is happily needed. So next time you look up to stars, remember you have actually got front row seats to a celestial Concert.

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The Very First Stars That Brought Light Into The Universe

Millions of years after the Big Bang, some stars formed. These could have been the first stars that brought light into the universe. These stars formed right after the DARK AGES, which by the way is the time after the Big Bang but before there was any light, where the universe was filled with just dark gas.

Astronomers found very first stars by using a radio telescope out in Western Australia.

 Radio telescopes are amazing because of their ability to detect radio waves, which are the longest wavelength known to exist in our universe, meaning it can detect stuff that's travelled great distances to get to us. 

Based on changes detected in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, astronomers were able to create models suggesting that 180 million years after the Big Bang, these first stars formed. This adds to previous research and now we are lead to believe that these first stars were probably Blue stars. Based on the spectral classifications of stars we know that these blue stars are hot, young and short-lived. Its believed that these stars might die naturally by a supernova explosion or a collapse of its core into a black hole.

By using instruments at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory, astronomers picked up dips in the frequency received from the early universe and this represents the moment when stars first formed and began interacting with the matter around them. Not only this leads us to a better understanding of our early universe and its evolutionary stages, But according to the scientists, this could possibly be the work of cold dark matter particles pulling energy away from the hydrogen gas and cooling it down.

Fun Fact  The Data Collected From This Research Came From Giant Radio Telescope Antennas That Are Not Much Different Than Those On Your FM Radio.

Now, This is a speculation of course, since we still don't have confirmation of dark matter existing, but this new information could help. So let's see what more research there is to come out of this finding because understanding the early universe means getting closer to find the meaning of life.

If You Have Any Queries Then Feel Free To Ask Us Down In The Comment Section And Visit To The Science Thinkers Again. As Always Stay Curious.   

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Memory| How To Improve Your Long Term Memory

I feel like I have a completely useless memory. I can barely remember a phone number when someone reads it off to me and I have to read OTP Four times to write it down without looking back to the message. One thing for sure I will never be any good at cards because I have no recollection of which cards I already had and what's been discarded. That's why When I read about memory athletes and people who can memorize any book by reading it once, I just sought at me why can't I? So I research into this and found that maybe I can't be good at memorizing OTP at once and also I can be good at memorizing in general.

There are lots of different kinds of memory For example when you hear a phone number and dial that number yourself you need working memory. Working memory kind of like a CATCH memory in a RAM of a computer. Working memory is the place where the data is kept and processed in the front of your mind spontaneously And it's not a place where you can keep a lot of data. Back in 1956 George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard University,  published a famous psychology paper called " The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity For Processing Information". This paper suggests that there is a limit to what working memory can handle i.e somewhere around Seven Items at a time. You can test that, First take a paper and write down seven random number for example 7873549 then pick some friends of yours and ask them to read it to you, now, take that paper away and ask them to repeat those numbers. You will most likely find that they can only recite 4 to 5 digits correctly.

Since 1956 a lot of research has sort of muddied this claim of the magical number seven. But it is safe to say there is a hard limit on working memory that is SEVEN. If that's true then how memory athletes can memorize entire decks of shuffled cards or even bigger sets of data?

For that kind of task, we are talking more about long-term memory and long-term memory storage is enormous. It's really huge. But it is hard to take advantage of long-term memory, I mean try to memorize this whole article, it would take days to memorize it and it is pretty boring too right?

Here the catch it's all about how we memorize things. With the help of some technique, you can improve your power of using long-term memory. So you can learn to have better memory but you have to train yourself the right way. Researchers wanted to figure out if you could train someone to have a better memory. So they scanned the brain of people like you and me and a bunch of people who compete in memory athletics. Surprisingly they found nada nothing all brains are similar. Meaning, maybe this was a learned skill. So Researchers took some regular people and half of them were trained like the memory athletes do. After two months the people who were trained like memory athletes could remember almost as many words as memory athletes do.





So how memory athletes train them self? How you could learn them

For starter, you want to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards. This is a common task for memory athletes, they use a method called the memory palace. First, assign every card an object. The 10 of clubs is an Apple. The Ace of hearts is a light bulb. The four of diamonds is a phone. One object for each 52 card. Now think of a place you are familiar with, like your apartment. Now say you have got a fresh deck of shuffled cards to memorize. Deal them out and as you do imagine each card's object in a striking memorable place within your home. For example Apple on the head of your brother, the light bulb in the pocket of your pent and the phone in a sink. Again, The weirder the better. Do that 52 times and you are done.

I know that doesn't sound like science and honestly, there is a ton we just don't understand about the neuroscience of all of this. But techniques like the memory palace seem to co-operat memory networks that you wouldn't ordinarily use in a card game. One way or other it gets results. Memory athletes use tricks like this to memorize decks of cards, names and faces. That means that it's not about being born with any sorts of special memory gift. It means that you can learn to have a better memory if you train the right way.

All The Science Thinkers Out There Or Who Ever Reading This You Can Improve Your Brain Power And As Always Stay Curious.

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Self-Driving Cars | What Kind Of Problem We Are Facing To Develop A Self-Driving Cars?

You have probably heard that self-driving cars are coming soon. But people have been saying that for at least a decade and still I can't buy a car that will drive me to work while I nap in the passenger seat.

Some cars already come with partial autonomy, systems like tesla's Autopilot, that assists drivers or sometimes even take control. But they still need a human driver who can grab the steering and pedals on short notice if things get capricious or unpredictable, which is why Bhavesh Patel from London gets arrested in April 2018 for trying the passenger seat thing. There are some fully driverless vehicles that might be released in next few years, but they are only meant for very specific uses like long-haul trucking or taxis confined to certain streets and neighbourhoods.

General purpose driving is hard. Because to do that the software has to work out a lot of really tricky questions to turn information from its sensors into commands for the steering and pedals. Despite all the money and brainpower that's being poured into research, there are still major challenges at every step along that path.

The first thing a self-driving car has to do is to figure out what's in its surrounding. It's called the PERCEPTION stage. Humans can do this at a glance, but a car needs a whole cornucopia of sensor data, like cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and lidar (lidar is basically a detailed 3D radar that uses lasers instead of radio ). Today's autonomous vehicles do pretty well at interpreting all that data to get a 3D digital model of their surroundings i.e the lanes, cars, traffic lights and so on. But it's not always easy to figure out what is what. For example, if lots of objects are closed together in a big crowd of people it is hard for software to separate them. So to work properly in pedestrian-packed areas like major cities the car might have to consider not just the current image but also the past few milliseconds of context too. That way, it can group a smaller blob of points moving together into a distinct pedestrian about to step into the street. But this has not been done yet.

Some things are just inherently hard for computers to identify, think of a situation where a plastic bag drifting on air looks like as solid to the sensors as heavier and more dangerous bag full of trash. That particular mix-up would just lead to unnecessary braking, but mistaken identities can be fatal. In a deadly Tesla crash in 2016, the autopilot cameras mistook the side of a truck for a washed out sky. You also need to make sure the system is dependable, even if there are surprises. If a camera goes haywire, for example, the car has to be able to fall back on overlapping sources of information. It also needs enough experience to learn about dead skunks, conference bikes, backhoes sliding off trucks and all the other weird situations that might show up on the road.

Academics often resort to running simulations in Grand Theft Auto, yes, you heard it correct. Some companies have more sophisticated simulators, but even those are limited by the designer's imaginations. So there are still some cases where perception is tricky. The really stubborn problem, though, comes with the next stage PERDICATION.

It is not enough to know where the pedestrians and other drivers are right now. The car has to predict where they are going next before it can move on to stage three, PLANING its own moves. Sometimes prediction is straightforward like a car's right blinker suggests it's about to merge right. That's where planning is easy. But sometimes computers just don't get their human overlords. For Example, let's just say an oncoming car slows down and flashes its lights as you wait for left. It's probably safe to turn, but that's a subtle thing for a computer to realize. What makes prediction really complicated, though, is that the safety of the turn is not something you just recognize it's a negotiation. If you edge forward like you are about to make the left, the other driver will react. So there is this feedback loop between prediction and planning. In fact, researchers have found that when you are merging onto the highway, if you don't rely on other people to react to you, you might never be able to proceed safely. So if a self-driving car is not assertive enough, it can get stuck. This is called the freezing robot problem.

Freezing robot problem is just more than a problem it's a nightmare for consumers and researchers. But there is some solution to problems like this. There are two main ways programmers try to work around all this. One option is to have the car think of everyone else's actions as dependent on its own. But that can lead to overly aggressive behaviour, which is also dangerous. People who drive that way are ones who end up swerving all over the highway trying to weave between the cars. Another option is to have the car predict everyone's actions collectively treating itself as just one more car interacting like all the rest and then whatever fits the situation best. The Problem with that approach is that you have to oversimplify things to decide quickly.

Finding a better solution to prediction and planning is one of the biggest unsolved problems in autonomous driving. So between identifying what's around them then interpreting what other drivers will do and figuring out how to respond, there are a lot of scenarios self-driving cars are not totally prepared for yet.

That does not mean driverless cars won't hit some roads soon. There are plenty of more straightforward situations where you just don't encounter these type of problems.

Also Read:-MIT Researchers Have Developed A Completely Passive Solar-Powered Way Of Combating Ice Buildup

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AI | How AI Learn

When a newborn baby enters the world as a clean slate He/She learn and develop to be an adult. Babies have an innate knowledge that helps them to voraciously learn and rapidly adapt. But that's not what AI does. In case of AI, it's machine learning. That's when a computer learns everything it needs to know from a giant dataset using trial and error. As a human or babies, there are just somethings you can learn from trial and error. But many computers scientists argue that most human skills are learned and AI could learn them too, without the need for pre-loaded rules. Still, a growing number of researchers are attempting to encode AI with a bit of common sense.

The current craze in AI are neural networks, collections of simple computing elements, loosely modelled as neurons in the brain, that adjust their connections as they encounter more data. They have produced incredible achievements in the past few years, from facial recognition to beating humans at chess or poker games. But neural networks require thousands of training examples to reliable from associations. Even then they can produce some embarrassing blunders. Compare this to a child who can see an image just once and after that instantly recognize it in other contexts.

Some AI can play classic Atari games with superhuman skill, but when you remove all the aliens but one the player inexplicably become a sitting duck. Different labs are categorizing human instincts and then they try to encode them into AI. These systems sit somewhere between pure machine learning and completely programmed.




One team developed an AI called interaction network. They have embedded the rule that such a thing as objects and relationships between those objects exist. This is like a babby's innate parsing of the world into objects. In tests, once the AI learns the specifics properties and relationships, it is able to predict the behaviour of falling strings and bouncing balls in a box. Another group's " neural physics engine" beats less structured neural networks for predicting ball collisions in containers. A lab created an AI which has an embedded rule to treat letters as objects and separate them from their background. This allowed it to solve CAPTCHAs better than other neural networks that were trained with 50,000 times more data.

We are far away from AI that can truly think like humans, but with these latest attempts to reproduce a common sense artificially. Researchers believe they will get closer to creating robots that can fully interact with the world the way we do.

Machines that start like a baby and learn like a child. What Do You All Think The Science Thinkers, How You Will Feel In A World With AI, Tell Us In The Comment Box.

Also Read:-Self-Driving Cars | What Kind Of Problem We Are Facing To Develop A Self-Driving Cars?

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Blood | A Brief History Of Blood

Do You Know Your Blood Type?

Most of us who have not been in any medical situations where blood type is important might have no idea what their blood type is. Anyway, I was in Red Cross when I was in HighSchool, That's where I got to know that I have O positive blood.  Tell us about your story in the comment box. How you got to know your blood group. If you don't know yours then get some time out of your life and go to the nearest hospital. Ok?

Well, We all know what is blood, But lets me brief you again. Blood is a mixture of cells suspended in a slightly yellowish liquid called plasma. Plasma is made up mostly of water, but it also contains proteins sugars hormones and salts, the three different types of cells you will find in plasma are RBC (Red blood cells or erythrocytes), WBC ( White blood cells or leukocytes) and Platelets or thrombocytes. Red blood cells give the blood its colour and makeup to 40% to 45% of your blood.

Anyway, There is a lot of mystery around blood. We know that there are eight main blood groups that make up most of the world's population A, B, AB, O, their positive and negative combine. But it turns out that scientists still don't know why we evolved different blood types. But for now, science can at least tell us a little bit.

If your blood type is	You can give to	You can receive from
0+	O+, A+, B+, AB+	GO+, O-
A+	A+, AB+	A+, A-, O+, O-
B+	B+, AB+	B+, B-, O+, O-
AB+	AB+	A+, A-,B +, B-, AB-, AB+, O+, O-
O-	A+, A-,B +, B-, AB-, AB+, O+, O-	O-
A-	A-, A+, AB-, AB+	A-, O-
B-	B-, B+, AB-, AB+	B-, O-
AB-	AB-, AB+	AB-, A-, B-, O-

What Will Happen If You Receive The Wrong Type Of Blood?

Well, some curious minds found that out the hard way. For thousands of years, nobody really understood blood. A Greek doctor from 200 CE believed that it was created from food and liver and This school of thought lived on for nearly 1500 years. It was not until the early 17th century that a British doctor named William Harvey discovered that actually circulated through the body. In 1665, an English physician, Richard Lower, successfully kept one dog alive by transfusing it with the blood of another dog.

After those things kind of kind got weird. Just two year after the Richard Lower's success doctors began experimenting with Xenotransfusions. That is transfusing human's blood with animal's blood such as sheep and those human patients died.

It was not until 1900 that we finally realized people and animals actually have different types of blood that determine whose blood can mix with whose. Among the humans also you can't take any one's blood.

If you are type A, your immune system will perceive type B blood as an intruder and trigger an auto-immune response that can cause kidney failure, extensive blood clotting and even shock. The reverse is true of type B blood. The immune system will attack type A. AB blood, however, can accept both A and B blood without triggering that auto-immune response. Things start to get a little more complicated when you introduce the rhesus factor or the negative and positive part of your blood types. Positive can't accept negatives, but the opposite is extremely dangerous.

To complicate things further, scientists have discovered dozens of more blood types, such as the Duffy blood group, which can determine your susceptibility to malaria and The Hh blood type, which 1 in 10,000 people in India have.

As for why human evolved this complicated system of blood type and compatibility, we don't really know. The original mutations are thought to date back nearly 20 million years. But look, whatever the biology is behind different blood type, it's a real, practical thing that matters and in many parts of the world, knowing your blood type is fairly common knowledge. In Japan, it's linked to your personality. In 2011, former Japanese minister of reconstruction Ryu Matsumoto blamed his irritable and impetuous behaviour on his blood type, Type B, after he was forced to step down from his seat.

Anyway, It's true that we don't know a lot about the Blood. But we all should know our blood Type. In some medical emergency, it could help to speed up the process. In case of any family relative or friend need any specific blood type then you might be able to help them if you know your blood type. If you are type O- then you are an extremely useful universal donor.

Also Read:- AI | How AI Learn

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Green Flash During A Sunset | Is It True?

The Mythical Green Flash during a sunset. It was first made popular by Jules Verne in an 1882 novel LE RAYON VERT(THE GREEN RAY) and it is still leaking into pop culture through an occasional pirate movie sequel. Except, it is not actually a myth.

That's weird right. usually, we are debunking things people think are true, not the other way around.
But the green flash is a real optical phenomenon and it doesn't just happen right after the sun sets. We can see it right before sunrise, too. We can see it from any altitude and from anywhere in the world. But the catch is You have to have the right conditions.

You might think that the Earth's air is pretty uniform, minus the occasional puffy cloud or two. But there are a bunch of invisible layers in the atmosphere, each with slightly different temperatures and densities. As sunlight might travels from one layer to another, the sunlight refracts or bends, just a little bit. It's the same principle that makes your straw look like it's bent below the water in your glass. But the amount of refracting depends on the wavelength and therefore, the colour of the light.

So the different colours end up separating out from the white sunlight that enters the atmosphere. The most obvious way to see this separation is in a rainbow, although that comes from a much more dramatic change in density from air to water droplet, so it is a much more obvious effect. The shorter the wavelength, the more the light is refracted. Bluer light has a shorter wavelength, so as the sun sets, those shades will stay visible longer because they can be bent further around the horizon.

It's kind of weird to think about, but basically, the red image of the sun sets first, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. There is a second or two delay between the last visible red sunlight and the violet. It's not a lot of time, but it is enough if you know when and where to look. It works exactly in the opposite direction too with sunrises.

But if the blue and violet shades of the sun are also above the horizon, why are these flashes green?

Well, shorter wavelengths of light are scattered more after colliding with molecules in the air that's why the sky is blue. But That also means violet and blue light are more likely to be scattered away from your line of sight, so you see the sun as green. If the air is super clear you can see blue flashes. If air is super hazy, enough green might be scattered to make the flash look yellow instead.

But there is a reason we don't see a flash with every sunrise and sunset is that this refraction is not enough for us to actually be able to see the flash with our own eyeballs. The physical separation between the different colours is not large enough. So we also need a mirage to magnify the effect.

Mirages are just multiple images formed by atmospheric refraction. You might think one of those images is real and the rest are fake, but that's not the case. They all come from a single source.

The Mirage, in this case, looks like a second sun. You know those pictures of sunsets where it looks like the sun grows a little stand at the bottom! That's actually two mirage images overlapping and it is what allows us to see green flashes. During sunsets, there is also a physiological component that can amplify the effect. When you look at a reddish sunset, the receptors in your eyes that detect red light get so used to being activated that when the source goes away, everything looks more green than it really is.





The above phenomena do not happen in sunrises, because there is no red sun to look at, the green rises above the horizon first. While Green Flashes can theoretically be seen anywhere on Earth at any time of year, they are best spotted above an unobscured horizon where the air is clean and relatively stable. Which is probably why so many stories of them come from people on boats.

So if you find the right spot, you might just get a glimpse of what Jules Verne described as "The true green of Hope." So The Science Thinkers Do You Have Any Dought Regarding Above Topic? Then Ask Us On Comment Section And Always Stay Curious. 

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Machines That Are About The Size Of A Molecules

It is tricky to go more than a few minutes without running into any machine of some sort. Whether it was the toaster you made breakfast with, the train you took into town or the machine you are staring at now. The idea of machines taking over the world isn't post-apocalyptic friction, it already happened. They have transformed society and improved our quality of life. Advances in engineering have gotten us this far, from mass producing refrigerators to travelling to the moon. So What's Next?

Many chemists are actually thinking a lot about making very tiny small machines out of molecules. But how you can move a machine of microscopic scale, which you can barely touch. Well, you have to have some chemical knowledge to control motion on a microscopic scale machine. Thing is this tiny machines about the size of a molecule could revolutionize everything from medicine to materials science, where molecular processes play a big role.

Let's discuss first thing fast, What is a Machine?

A machine is basically any device that takes some Energy input into at least ONE MOVING PART each with DISTINCT FUNCTION. So, in the end, those parts come together to produce a useful motion as an output, called work.

Now, There are some obvious advantages to making machines smaller, like being able to transport them more easily and make them move more precisely. In 1959 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman talked about THE PROBLEM OF MANIPULATING AND CONTROLLING THINGS ON A SMALL SCALE. By small, we are talking about a few millionths of a millimetre small machines made up of one or few molecules.




Twenty years later, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler came across a transcript of Feynman's lecture on the machine. Then he developed some of the ideas further and in 198, he published a paper called Molecular Engineering An Approach To The Development Of  General Capabilities For Molecular Manipulation.

Eric Drexler imagined molecule-sized machines that could manipulate the reactants of chemical processes on an atomic scale. Not only that he even imagined that those machines could build new materials from the molecules. If you ask me my opinion over that idea I would say That is ASTONISHING, But how to do that?

Engineers have managed to shrink electrical components over the last few decades, like turning computers that of the size of a building into cell phones. Shrinking mechanical components could unlock a similar kind of revolution. BUT building NANOSCALE machines come with totally different challenges than the ones that many engineers deal with.

For starters, when you get down to the size of molecules, objects don't act the way we are used to on everyday scales. Like without careful design, a molecular nut and bolt couldn't be twisted apart easily. The electrostatic forces between the molecules, known as Van Der Waals forces, would attract them together a lot more than frictions affects ordinary nuts and bolts. Another problem is that it is trickier to get the components of a molecular machine to move the way you want.




A tiny molecule of air bumping into a piston in your car engine doesn't really change the way it moves, But that same air molecule might send a machine flying or even destroy it. Even if the damage is not that extreme, the constant bombardment from nearby molecules, known as thermal noise, could make the components move around randomly. That could make controlling their motions pretty difficult even though that's what we need to do for molecular machines to be useful.

Finally, most molecules are linked together with chemical bonds, which form because of electrical attractions between molecules. There are different kinds of chemical bonds, but they tend to be fairly rigid and don't allow for free movement between the two parts and that my boy frustrating, because that the kind of moment every machine rely on! For example, imagine a bunch of water molecules locked into the crystal structure of an ice cube or even clumped together in liquid water. Each negatively charged oxygen atom is attracted to the positively charged hydrogen atoms of nearby water molecules forming hydrogen bonds between them. So to build molecular machines engineers have to figure out a way to utilize a mechanical bond, which our basic chemistry textbook maybe didn't mention.

In a mechanical bond, the shape of the molecules links them. The individual parts of each molecule are not strongly attracted to one another, but they can't separate entirely without breaking the chemical bonds between the atoms within one of the molecules. Kind of like how your key can't accidentally come off your keyring even though they are not physically connected. Scientists had created linked molecules like this in the early 1960s. They were called catenanes chains of two or more connected rings of atoms.

Researchers knew that catenanes existed, but they were rare and really difficult to produce for scientific studies. But in 1983 French chemist Jean Pierre Sauvage made an unexpected discovery.  Sauvage was originally studying chemical reactions that were driven by ultraviolet light and one of those processes involved C-shaped molecules that attached themselves to copper ions, While modelling the reaction, he realized that by tweaking the method, he could produce catenanes from those molecules in much larger numbers than ever before.




The whole process starts by getting a copper ion to bond to the inside of a ring-shaped molecule. Then, a C-shaped molecule can thread through the ring and attach to the same copper ion. In the right kind of environment, another C-shaped molecule can chemically bond to the first one creating a second interlocking ring. The final part of Sauvage's chemical process was to pop that copper ion out. And voila: two molecular ring in one mechanically bound structure. Those ring can freely rotate to one another, just like we want in a machine. Sauvage even extended the process to make knotted chemicals and more complicated chains.

To set things in motion, in 1994 Sauvage's team found a way to use that catenane with a sandwiched copper ion to rotate one of the rings around the other. Because the rings are not uniform they will adjust to more electrically stable positions if the charge of that ions changes. So when that copper ion gets an electron ripped off in a chemical reaction, one of the rings will rotate 180 degrees. It will twist back if the copper ion recaptures an electron. This motion is really important to master if we want to build molecular machines with rotating parts, like something with a molecular propeller that can swim through a liquid.

Around the same time, Chemist James Fraser Stoddart was making progress with a different chemical mechanism. James Fraser Stoddart was well acquainted with the laws of attraction, i.e Positively charged chemical structures are attracted to negatively charged ones. With that, Stoddart's team created a molecular machine called a rotaxane, a ring linked onto a thread. Back in 1991, Stoddart's group made a nearly closed ring of atoms with a lack of electrons. They also made a rod-shaped molecule with two electron-rich sites and bulky silicon-based end cap. When they were put together electrostatic attraction made the ring thread onto the axle, where it could be closed off to form a complete ring with a chemical reaction. Although the positively charged ring was attracted to the negatively charged ring was attracted to the negatively charged sites on the axle, it was not locked in place too tightly with chemical bonds. Because we are talking about molecules here, when the ring had a certain amount of heat energy then it had the energy to move around. So the researchers could make the ring hop between the two negatively charged spots on the axle, while those bulky group kept it from sliding off.

In 1994, Stoddart got even more precise and created two chemically different sites on the axle structure based on molecules called benzidine and biphenol group. Those groups have different electric and chemical properties depending on the acidity or the pH of the surrounding environment. In an acidic environment, the benzidine group becomes positively charged, repelling a ring so it sits on the biphenol group.




So basically, this researchers figured out how to control a ring's movement on an axle in multiple ways. Stoddart's group also used the principle behind these axles to make a molecular elevator that can raise itself a few nanometers and even a molecular muscle that can stretch and contract like our muscle cells.

Now lots of components in normal machines like the cogs in a watch or wheels on a car rely on continuously rotating elements. Sauvage's ring could rotate in response to an input, but couldn't provide a continuous controlled output like a motor.

In 1999, the organic chemist Ben Feringa and his group in the Netherlands achieved just that a continuously rotating machine. They developed a double-sided molecule that acted a bit like motor blades. As we have mentioned thermal noise makes it tricky to control how a molecular component moves. But Feringa's molecule was based on two methyl groups that were designed to only rotate one way around. Every time a pulse of UV light hits one of the methyl groups, it absorbs the light and converts it into kinetic energy. The hit methyl group then rotates around an axis and bends over the other methyl group until it snaps past, so it is blocked from spinning backwards. And You Got The World's First Molecular Motor. As if that was not cool enough, in 2011 Feringa and his group took it even further and used this technique to build a nano car with four rotating wheels.

 Fraser Stoddart, Jean-Pierre, Sauvage and Ben Feringa used clever designs and special environment to solve some of the problems we were having with very basic molecular machines. In 2016, Fraser Stoddart, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Ben Feringa collectively awarded The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.




We have just begun exploring other machines, we might be able to make on the nanoscale and we know there are plenty of options because nature has been building them for billions of years. Like right now in your body, supper complex molecular machines made of proteins are doing all kinds of things to keep you going. Like your myosins walk along tracks of muscle fibre pulling them to help you contract your muscles. In other cells like sperms or certain bacteria have built-in molecular motors to make their flagella spin around, so they can move through fluids. Those are two of many examples, so scientists have plenty of inspiration for future inventions.



Some researchers have proposed that molecular machines could be used to deliver drugs in the body. For Example, mesoporous particles have lots of little holes that release their contents in response to ultrasound waves. Filled with the right drugs, we could load these particles onto a molecular transport machine to dose tumour with cancer-fighting molecules.

Other researchers have developed a gel with those molecular motors we mentioned, by attaching them to a tangle of long chains of molecules called polymers. When you shine a light on the material or heat it up, the motors reel in the fibres like fishing line, which shrinks the volume of the gel. Because those motors are storing energy in the form of those bundled up molecules, if we could find a way to extract the energy back out, this could be a step towards a new kind of Solar battery.

All that said, we have a long way to go before we were building molecular machine factories or anything beyond these basic experiments. It's still tricky to make these tiny machines in large quantities and there may be other problems with making a bunch of individually developed components work together. But after more research and with more science thinkers, we might have molecular mechanics in our scientific toolkits and machines to help us at every scale of life.
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