This is how cats drink milk

To know the physics behind a cat seeping in milk click here

More on light's ability to generate lift and thrust

An article posted in NewScientist online magazine describes in greater detail the ability of light to steer and thrust objects.

To go to the article clickhere

Light can generate lift to keep objects aloft

PUSHED ASIDE from Science News on Vimeo.

Beamsteering Could Cut Mobile Power Consumption By Half

--Kindly find the original paper @ http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.2830

Switch on your mobile phone, netbook or tablet and it'll start hunting for another node to connect to. Once this connection is established, however, your device will broadcast to the world, sending data in every conceivable direction even though most of it falls on deaf ears.

Surely there's a better way of communicating. There sure is, say Hang Yu and buddies at Rice University in Houston: broadcast only in the direction of the next node. Simple really.

The challenge, of course, is to do this in a way that saves power and that doesn't dramatically increase the size of the device. Today, Yu and co show us how.

Electrical engineers have long known how to steer radio beams by broadcasting with several antennas. The trick is to make the signals from all the antennas interfere and combine so that they form a narrow beam. Fairly straightforward changes to these signals then steer the beam.

There are two problems with this method that have prevented it being used in mobile devices. First, having two or more antennas is bulky. Second, each antenna circuit requires its own power and although there is a drop in the transmitted power, it's not always clear that the overall power budget is lower.

So beamsteering has only really been used with bulky transmitters connected to the mains.

Yu and co say it needn't be like this. They point out for a start that antenna technology has shrunk to the point that an extra two or three could easily be incorporated into a device the size of an iPad, Kindle or netbook.

They go on to show that the tradeoff between power eaten up by the extra antenna circuits and the transmitted power works in favour of the mobile device. That's an important consideration.

There's another problem too. A netbook beaming a signal with four antennas at a nearby wifi node could drown out other users. So there's also a trade-off that needs to be made between all the users and that's harder to manage.

But Yu and pals have a solution to this problem too, in the form of a piece of software called BeamAdapt. This sits on all the mobile devices, negotiating between them to discover the broadcast settings that achieves the best transmission for everyone.

They've tested BeamAdapt on small network and on a larger simulated one and believe it works well. "BeamAdapt can reduce client power consumption by 40% and 55% with two and four antennas, respectively, while maintaining the same network throughput," they say.

That's a significant power reduction, which will turn the heads of more than a few mobile device makers. Yu and pals also show that the beamsteering works while the devices are moving and rotating (although it's not clear how robust it would be in practice).

The problem, of course, is that the benefit is hard to realise unless everyone uses this software. And it only takes a few refusals to ruin the airwaves for others.

The way round this is build this technology into a future comms standard. That's feasible but it'll require significantly more testing to ensure the technique can work in the real world, perhaps combined with various other potential standards being lined up for the future. Bottom line: don't hold your breath.

Memory and processor need not be separate any longer

We all know computing devices with physically separate processors and memories. Anyone ever imagined that a single device could do both? Oh yeah!! It is infact possible says the researchers at the University of Fribourg physics department.The technique involves controlling the spin of electrons with electric fields.

For more details visit
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208130052.htm

Navigation in Outer Space-Now u cannot lose ur way-part 2

Here is an article from the Science News magazine on navigation by means of pulsars published earlier this week. Go through it to see the unseen!! Cheers!!

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/66442/title/How_to_use_a_pulsar_to_find_Starbucks

Leo Tolstoy in his work "What is Art?"

"I know that most men-not only those considered clever, but even those who really are clever and capable of understanding the most difficult scientific, mathematical or philosophical problems, can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with great difficulty-conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."

Navigation in Outer Space-Now u cannot lose ur way

If you are unsure of your location on this planet, one of the many things that occur to your mind is a GPS system which can help you spot your location on globe. Thanks to United States govt for the idea and implementation. All we need is a GPS receiver and an unobstructed Line Of Sight to four of 31 GPS satellites in operation and there you go!

One of the most interesting questions is how to keep track of oneself if one were traveling in extra terrestrial space? Certainly it is far from possibility to launch GPS satellites that cover the universe.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of radio waves. The rotation rate is amazingly coherent to striking precisions. It is no longer a mere possibility but a transparent truth that such radio beams can be used for navigational purposes. And what more? They penetrate boundlessly in this very universe which enables one to navigate with precision in free space.

Thus radio waves from pulsars enables us to navigate in free space with no difficulty. Now u cannot lose ur way!!

I hope you have seen the unseen.

Dark matter-The hunt for invisible

Have you ever wondered what you are running through when you wave your hand out there in free space or air for that matter. Well you are here to know a possible answer to it. Some say it is air, some say it is ether and some say it is nothing. Science is something that is governed by laws and all observations and their relevant theories should complement one another. If the answer to the question at the outset is nothing then, one has to explain how that 'nothing' is able to hold up 'something' around it.

Well well!! Iam certainly not here to confuse you all, so don't worry. I put up a small little hypothesis which will make you think and rethink or possibly accept it.

Law of Gravitation, a very famous law, governs everything in this universe. You can realise this fact on the large scale very easily. Attraction among planets hold them to orbits, attraction among celestial objects making them cling around a mass and what not.

Well the outer space as generally perceived consists of no 'real' matter and is hugely 'empty'. If one googles the word spiral galaxies or cosmic clusters or asteroids and look at their relative shapes over a period of time, it is not hard to recognise that they donot change much.

It is very puzzling to all of us about the apparent lack of mass out there in cosmos. The trouble is that galaxies donot have enough visible mass to hold them together by gravitation. Hence they ought to fly apart.

This is where the idea of dark matter comes from. Some kind of force must be holding galaxies together. So astrophysicists imagine that galaxies must be filled with invisible, dark matter that provides the necessary extra tug. But to generate enough gravity, dark matter must be vastly more common than the stuff we can see. We must be swimming in it but unable to detect it for some reason. At least not easily.

Now that dark matter has been proposed, start skimming through the free space and see if you can see the unseen!!

Satellite based mobile phones

Those of you who still think that mobile phones always existed with cell towers and cell networks, i would like to make it a point that you have ignored history. Yes, phones with wireless connectivity was the primary idea. THe obvious choice for most of the engineers those days was satellite broadcast. During the 1990s, many believed satellite phones were the future of mobile communications. But the cost constraint always haunts us ain't it? Satellite networks proved to be too costly especially for nations which hardly had any satellites to their name. Rapidly expanding terrestrial cellular networks gobbled up most of the market instead. Also, the cost of setting up a cellular network(though few subsystems in it communicate through satellites) was cheaper than a pure satellite based network. Still, satellite phones retained some technical advantages over cellular ones, principally in remote or rugged areas that are difficult to cover economically with cell towers. Mobile device manufacturers(MDMs) still exist in some parts of the globe who fabricate equipment that can connect and switch between satellite and cell networks.

I hope you have certainly seen the unseen!!