Saraswati Puja 2017

Saraswati Puja on 1st Feb 2017

Prayers to Goddess Saraswati on the occasion of Saraswati Puja

Dear Goddess Saraswati,
Please Forgive me for all the mistakes made during the puja and pushpanjali
Please accept the humble offerings
Please grant our wishes, gracious Goddess

How Money grows in stocks

The picture below represents very accurately how wealth can be created in stocks which grow surely and steadily when invested in a good company over the years

Salary  Growth in Private Sector

 Starting with Rs9500 in 2001, a salaried person will make Rs50,000 in 2015.

The Fermi Paradox

When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, “Is there other intelligent life out there?” Let’s put some numbers to it—

As many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 – 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe—so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxyout there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 1022 and 1024 total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.

The science world isn’t in total agreement about what percentage of those stars are “sun-like” (similar in size, temperature, and luminosity)—opinions typically range from 5% to 20%. Going with the most conservative side of that (5%), and the lower end for the number of total stars (1022), gives us 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion sun-like stars. 

There’s also a debate over what percentage of those sun-like stars might be orbited by an Earth-like planet (one with similar temperature conditions that could have liquid water and potentially support life similar to that on Earth). Some say it’s as high as 50%, but let’s go with the more conservative 22% that came out of a recent PNAS study. That suggests that there’s a potentially-habitable Earth-like planet orbiting at least 1% of the total stars in the universe—a total of 100 billion billion Earth-like planets.

So there are 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you’re on the beach.

Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative. Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life (if that’s true, every grain of sand would represent one planet with life on it). And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe.

Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we’d estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.1

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If we’re right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn’t SETI’s satellite dish array pick up all kinds of signals?

But it hasn’t. Not one. Ever.

Where is everybody?

It gets stranger. Our sun is relatively young in the lifespan of the universe. There are far older stars with far older Earth-like planets, which should in theory mean civilizations far more advanced than our own. As an example, let’s compare our 4.54-billion-year-old Earth to a hypothetical 8-billion-year-old Planet X.

If Planet X has a similar story to Earth, let’s look at where their civilization would be today (using the orange timespan as a reference to show how huge the green timespan is):

The technology and knowledge of a civilization only 1,000 years ahead of us could be as shocking to us as our world would be to a medieval person. A civilization 1 million years ahead of us might be as incomprehensible to us as human culture is to chimpanzees. And Planet X is 3.4 billion years ahead of us…

There’s something called The Kardashev Scale, which helps us group intelligent civilizations into three broad categories by the amount of energy they use:

A Type I Civilization has the ability to use all of the energy on their planet. We’re not quite a Type I Civilization, but we’re close (Carl Sagan created a formula for this scale which puts us at a Type 0.7 Civilization).

A Type II Civilization can harness all of the energy of their host star. Our feeble Type I brains can hardly imagine how someone would do this, but we’ve tried our best, imagining things like a Dyson Sphere.

A Type III Civilization blows the other two away, accessing power comparable to that of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

If this level of advancement sounds hard to believe, remember Planet X above and their 3.4 billion years of further development. If a civilization on Planet X were similar to ours and were able to survive all the way to Type III level, the natural thought is that they’d probably have mastered inter-stellar travel by now, possibly even colonizing the entire galaxy.

One hypothesis as to how galactic colonization could happen is by creating machinery that can travel to other planets, spend 500 years or so self-replicating using the raw materials on their new planet, and then send two replicas off to do the same thing. Even without traveling anywhere near the speed of light, this process would colonize the whole galaxy in 3.75 million years, a relative blink of an eye when talking in the scale of billions of years:

Source: Scientific American: “Where Are They”

Continuing to speculate, if 1% of intelligent life survives long enough to become a potentially galaxy-colonizing Type III Civilization, our calculations above suggest that there should be at least 1,000 Type III Civilizations in our galaxy alone—and given the power of such a civilization, their presence would likely be pretty noticeable. And yet, we see nothing, hear nothing, and we’re visited by no one.

So where is everybody?

_____________________

Welcome to the Fermi Paradox.

Acoustic Waves Move Fluids at the Nanoscale

From Controlled Environments

A team of mechanical engineers at the University of California San Diego has successfully used acoustic waves to move fluids through small channels at the nanoscale. The breakthrough is a first step toward the manufacturing of small, portable devices that could be used for drug discovery and microrobotics applications. The devices could be integrated in a lab on a chip to sort cells, move liquids, manipulate particles and sense other biological components. For example, it could be used to filter a wide range of particles, such as bacteria, to conduct rapid diagnosis.

A New Step Toward Artificial Photosynthesis

From Controlled Environments newsletter

Plants and other photosynthetic organisms use a wide variety of pigments to absorb different wavelengths of light. MIT researchers have now developed a theoretical model to predict the spectrum of light absorbed by aggregates of these pigments, based on their structure.

The new model could help guide scientists in designing new types of solar cells made of organic materials that efficiently capture light and funnel the light-induced excitation, according to the researchers.

“Understanding the sensitive interplay between the self-assembled pigment superstructure and its electronic, optical, and transport properties is highly desirable for the synthesis of new materials and the design and operation of organic-based devices,” says Aurelia Chenu, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the study, which appeared in Physical Review Letters on Jan. 3.

Photosynthesis, performed by all plants and algae, as well as some types of bacteria, allows organisms to harness energy from sunlight to build sugars and starches. Key to this process is the capture of single photons of light by photosynthetic pigments, and the subsequent transfer of the excitation to the reaction centers, the starting point of chemical conversion. Chlorophyll, which absorbs blue and red light, is the best-known example, but there are many more, such as carotenoids, which absorb blue and green light, as well as others specialized to capture the scarce light available deep in the ocean.

These pigments serve as building blocks that can be arranged in different ways to create structures known as light-harvesting complexes, or antennae, which absorb different wavelengths of light depending on the composition of the pigments and how they are assembled.

“Nature has mastered this art, evolving from a very limited number of building blocks an impressive diversity of photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes, which are highly versatile and efficient,” says Chenu, who is also a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

These antennae are embedded in or attached to membranes within cell structures called chloroplasts. When a pigment captures a photon of light, one of its electrons becomes excited to a higher energy level, and that excitation is passed to nearby pigments along a network that eventually leads to the reaction center. From that center, the available charge travels further through the photosynthetic machinery to eventually drive the transformation of carbon dioxide into sugar through a cycle of chemical reactions.

Chenu and Jianshu Cao, an MIT professor of chemistry and the paper’s senior author, wanted to explore how the organization of different pigments determines the optical and electrical properties of each antenna. This is not a straightforward process because each pigment is surrounded by proteins that fine-tune the wavelength of the photon emitted. These proteins also influence the transfer of excitation and cause some of the energy to dissipate as it flows from one pigment to the next.

Chenu and Cao’s new model uses experimental measurements of the spectrum of light absorbed by different pigment molecules and their surrounding proteins. Using this information as input, the model can predict the spectrum of light absorbed by any aggregation, depending on the types of pigments it comprises. The model can also predict the rate of energy transfer between each aggregate.

This technique has a long history in physics, and theorists have previously applied it to studying disordered solids, dipolar liquids, and other systems.

“This paper represents a novel extension of this technique to treat dynamic fluctuations arising from the coupling between pigments and protein environments,” Cao says.

The model provides, for the first time, a systematic link between the structure of antennae and their optical and electrical properties. Scientists working on designing materials that absorb light, using quantum dots or other types of light-sensitive materials, could use this model to help predict what kinds of light will be absorbed and how energy will flow through the materials, according to the antenna structure, Chenu says.

“The very long-term goal would be to have design principles for artificial light harvesting,” she says. “If we understand the natural process, then we can infer what is the ideal underlying structure, such as the coupling between pigments.”

The researchers are now working on applying the model to a photosynthetic antenna known as the phycobilisome, which is the light-harvesting complex found in most cyanobacteria, as well as to nanostructures such as polymers, thin films, and nanotubes.

Source: MIT

Balcony Gardens

Growing indoor plants is difficult but rewarding. I even have a christmas tree in my balcony garden as well as a lemon tree which has not yielded any fruits till now. These are some pics of how I would like my garden to be, and the last one of my plant in the house. I have a kari patta trees, which become dormant in the winter. I have hibiscus plants, which need fertilizers like tea leaves to flower well.

Spectacular Cloud - Patterns in Nature

A plane passenger has photographed a spectacular cloud formation in the skies above Australia.

Ilya Katsman, 22, saw the weather phenomenon from a window on a flight from Perth to Adelaide.

Neil Bennett, from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, said it was likely to be a wave cloud. 

"It's like skimming a stone across a lake. The air is rising up and down in a wave motion," Mr Bennett said.

"Where it's going up you're getting the cloud, and where its going down you're getting the clear lines."

Mr Katsman said he initially thought it was a rare type of wave cloud known as the "morning glory", which occurs in the country's north.

"The cloud is definitely impressive," Mr Katsman told the BBC.