Day: 09/01/2015

Magnetic fields provide a new way to communicate wirelessly: A new technique could pave the way for ultra low power and high-security wireless communication systems .

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Electrical engineers have demonstrated a new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body. The new technology could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices, providing an improved alternative to existing wireless communication systems, researchers said.
This is a prototype of the magnetic field human body communication, developed in Mercier’s Energy-Efficient Microsystems Lab at UC San Diego, consists of magnetic-field-generating coils wrapped around three parts of the body, including the head, arm and leg.

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego demonstrated a new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body. The new technology could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices, providing an improved alternative to existing wireless communication systems, researchers said. They presented their findings Aug. 26 at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.

While this work is still a proof-of-concept demonstration, researchers envision developing it into an ultra low power wireless system that can easily transmit information around the human body. An application of this technology would be a wireless sensor network for full-body health monitoring.

“In the future, people are going to be wearing more electronics, such as smart watches, fitness trackers and health monitors. All of these devices will need to communicate information with each other. Currently, these devices transmit information using Bluetooth radios, which use a lot of power to communicate. We’re trying to find new ways to communicate information around the human body that use much less power,” said Patrick Mercier, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego who led the study. Mercier also serves as the co-director of the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors.

Communicating magnetic signals through the human body

The new study presents a solution to some of the main barriers of other wireless communication systems: in order to reduce power consumption when transmitting and receiving information, wireless systems need to send signals that can easily travel from one side of the human body to another. Bluetooth technology uses electromagnetic radiation to transmit data, however these radio signals do not easily pass through the human body and therefore require a power boost to help overcome this signal obstruction, or “path loss.”

In this study, electrical engineers demonstrated a technique called magnetic field human body communication, which uses the body as a vehicle to deliver magnetic energy between electronic devices. An advantage of this system is that magnetic fields are able to pass freely through biological tissues, so signals are communicated with much lower path losses and potentially, much lower power consumption. In their experiments, researchers demonstrated that the magnetic communication link works well on the body, but they did not test the technique’s power consumption. Researchers showed that the path losses associated with magnetic field human body communication are upwards of 10 million times lower than those associated with Bluetooth radios.

“This technique, to our knowledge, achieves the lowest path losses out of any wireless human body communication system that’s been demonstrated so far. This technique will allow us to build much lower power wearable devices,” said Mercier.

Lower power consumption also leads to longer battery life. “A problem with wearable devices like smart watches is that they have short operating times because they are limited to using small batteries. With this magnetic field human body communication system, we hope to significantly reduce power consumption as well as how frequently users need to recharge their devices,” said Jiwoong Park, a Ph.D student in Mercier’s Energy-Efficient Microsystems Lab at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and first author of the study.

The researchers also pointed out that this technique does not pose any serious health risks. Since this technique is intended for applications in ultra low power communication systems, the transmitting power of the magnetic signals sent through the body is expected to be many times lower than that of MRI scanners and wireless implant devices.

Another potential advantage of magnetic field human body communication is that it could offer more security than Bluetooth networks. Because Bluetooth radio communicates data over the air, anyone standing within 30 feet can potentially eavesdrop on that communication link. On the other hand, magnetic field human body communication employs the human body as a communication medium, making the communication link less vulnerable to eavesdropping. With this technique, researchers demonstrated that magnetic communication is strong on the body but dramatically decreases off the body. To put this in the context of a personal full-body wireless communication network, information would neither be radiated off the body nor be transmitted from one person to another.

“Increased privacy is desirable when you’re using your wearable devices to transmit information about your health,” said Park.

Demonstrating magnetic communication with a proof-of-concept prototype

The researchers built a prototype to demonstrate the magnetic field human body communication technique. The prototype consists of copper wires insulated with PVC tubes. On one end, the copper wires are hooked up to an external analyzer and on the other end, the wires are wrapped in coils around three areas of the body: the head, arms and legs. These coils serve as sources for magnetic fields and are able to send magnetic signals from one part of the body to another using the body as a guide. With this prototype, researchers were able to demonstrate and measure low path loss communication from arm to arm, from arm to head, and from arm to leg.

Researchers noted that a limitation of this technique is that magnetic fields require circular geometries in order to propagate through the human body. Devices like smart watches, headbands and belts will all work well using magnetic field human body communication, but not a small patch that is stuck on the chest and used to measure heart rate, for example. As long as the wearable application can wrap around a part of the body, it should work just fine with this technique, researchers explained.

Scientists identify protein that will help treatment of arthritis .

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Scientists have identified a protein that regulates the severity of tissue damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis.

Researchers have found that the protein, C5orf30, regulates the severity of tissue damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an autoimmune disease that causes pain, inflammation, stiffness and damage to the joints of the feet, hips, knees, and hands.

Following the discovery, rheumatoid arthritis patients most likely to suffer the severest effects of the condition can now be identified early and fast-tracked to the more aggressive treatments available, researchers said.

Although there is no cure for RA, new effective drugs are increasingly available to treat the disease and prevent deformed joints.

To conduct the research, scientists from University College Dublin and the University of Sheffield, analyzed DNA samples and biopsy samples from joints of over 1,000 Rheumatoid arthritis patients in the UK and Ireland.

“Our findings provide a genetic marker that could be used to identify those RA patients who require more aggressive treatments or personalised medicine,” said Gerry Wilson from the University College Dublin’s School of Medicine and Medical Science in Ireland, who led the research.

“They also point to the possibility that increasing the levels of C5orf30 in the joints might be a novel method of reducing tissue damage caused by RA,” Wilson said.

“These exciting findings will prompt us to further explore the role of this highly conserved protein that we know so little about, and its significance in human health and disease,” said co-author Munitta Muthana from the University of Sheffield.

One of the biggest difficulties with treating rheumatoid arthritis is early diagnosis. With early diagnosis and aggressive treatment, it is possible to reduce the damage to the joints caused by RA.

Deciding the most appropriate treatment for each patient at the earliest possible stage is central to effectively tackling the condition, researchers said.

Diabetes Drug Class May Cause Joint Pain, FDA Warns

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Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors for type 2 diabetes may cause severe and disabling joint pain, the FDA has warned. In response, the agency added a new Warning and Precaution about this risk to the labels of all DPP-4 inhibitors, including sitagliptin (Januvia), saxagliptin (Onglyza), linagliptin (Tradjenta), and alogliptin (Nesina). In addition to the joint pain risk, an FDA panel previously recommended adding a warning about the potential risk for heart failure to a few of these DPP-4 inhibitors’ labels. DPP-4 inhibitors are used alongside diet and exercise to lower blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes. Now, the FDA is advising health care professionals to consider the drug class as a potential cause of severe joint pain and discontinue the treatment if appropriate. Patients already taking DPP-4 inhibitors should not stop treatment, the FDA said, but they should contact their health care professional immediately if they experience severe and persistent joint pain. This warning stems from a search of the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database and medical literature, which identified patients who started having severe joint pain from 1 day to several years after they began taking a DPP-4 inhibitor. Their symptoms were relieved usually within a month of discontinuing the drug, though some patients developed severe joint pain again when they restarted the same medication or another DPP-4 inhibitor. In addition to joint pain, less severe side effects associated with some DPP-4 inhibitors include upper respiratory tract infection, nasopharyngitis, headache, and urinary tract infection. The FDA urges health care professionals and patients to report any side effects from DPP-4 inhibitors to its MedWatch program.

Wasp Venom Selectively Assassinates Cancer Cells

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The Brazilian wasp Polybia paulista. (Credit: Prof. Mario Palma/Sao Paulo State University)

Many wasp species have chemicals in their venom that kill bacteria. In the last few years, researchers have found that some of these chemicals also kill cancer cells, though exactly how they work has remained a mystery.

Now a new study has described exactly how one of these chemicals works its cancer-fighting magic: by tearing holes in the cancer cells’ outer layer.

Marked for Destruction

The venom of the Brazilian wasp Polybia paulista contains a molecule called MP1. It’s been previously found that MP1 can inhibit the growth of prostate and bladder cancer cells, as well as multi-drug-resistant leukemia, but it doesn’t harm healthy cells.

But the question was how. Researchers suspected that the answer lay in the cells’ membranes. That’s because the cancer cells that MP1 targets have two fatty molecules, or lipids, in their external membrane that normal cells don’t have.

These lipids – phosphatidylserine (PS) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) – now seem to be the signposts that mark a cancer cell for destruction.

Two-Pronged Attack

To test how MP1 assassinated cancer cells, researchers João Ruggiero Neto and Paul Beales created cell membranes in the lab with PS, PE, or both on their surface. Then they exposed the membranes to MP1.

All the membranes were affected by the treatment, but it turned out that having both PS and PE was the secret combination that made cancer cells vulnerable to MP1. PS allows MP1 to bind to the cell, while PE lets it tear big holes in the cell membrane.

So MP1’s destruction of a cancer cell, researchers say, has two stages. First, MP1 bonds to the outer surface of the cell, and then it opens holes or pores in the membrane big enough to let the cell’s contents leak out. PS is crucial for the first part: seven times more MP1 molecules bound to membranes with PS in their outer layer. And PE is crucial for the second: Once the MP1 molecules worked their way into the membrane, they opened pores twenty to thirty times larger than in membranes without PE.

“Formed in only seconds, these large pores are big enough to allow critical molecules such as RNA and proteins to easily escape cells,” said Neto in a press release. When that happens, the cell dies.

Future Chemotherapy

The results suggest that MP1 might be a good candidate for a future cancer treatment. If it works, it would be the first cancer drug on the market which targets the cells’ lipid membranes. Neto, Beales, and their colleagues say it could be especially useful as part of a combination of drugs, each of which targets a different part of the cancer cell.

Of course, it will be a while before MP1 is ready to fight cancer in humans. First, researchers need to understand more about how it works, and they need to be sure it will be safe for patients.

The results are encouraging so far, however. Antimicrobial peptides like MP1 usually don’t differentiate between cancer cells and healthy cells well enough to be considered as treatments, but in the lab, MP1 killed cancer cells and bacteria without harming normal cells from rats.

“As it has been shown to be selective to cancer cells and non-toxic to normal cells in the lab, this peptide has the potential to be safe, but further work would be required to prove that,” said Beales in a press release.

What Breaking the Sound Barrier Looks Like

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NASA has found a way to make the sonic boom created when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier—flying faster than the speed of sound—visible.

NASA researchers at Edwards Air Force Base and Moffett Field in California have spent five years working on using a photographic technique calledschlieren imagery , a method of visualizing fluids and air currents invented by a German physicist in 1864, to image the shock waves associated with supersonic jets. The photo above of the shock wave created by a supersonic NASA research plane breaking the sound barrier was created with special image-processing software and is a combination of multiple frames taken by cameras located on the underside of another plane.

Being able to visualize shock waves can help scientists collect data about the location and strength of the shock waves associated with supersonic aircraft, aiding in the development of new high-speed planes.

Salt Water Treatment

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We can benefit greatly from getting used to some ancient spiritual practices. There are many such practices that exist only for our benefit, but because we are always busy taking care of our comfort in our existence, that we forget to let ourselves live. Such practices have gone under the name of alternative medicine or such – only because the science behind it is not as tangible as the science behind traditional medication. We don’t have to be so skeptical when it comes to natural remedies. They can’t harm us.

One such natural remedy is Salt water treatment. It is a cleansing method for our spiritual healing. It sounds so simple that we tend to judge it as ineffective, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It contains water – which is such a big component in our body, which we use for cleansing, and salt – a mineral which is known for its capability to extract. These two, combined, create a tool that is capable of removing the black, negative energy that is so harmful.

Watch the video. URL: https://youtu.be/93J6e179US8

 

Fossils show big bug ruled the seas 460 million years ago .

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Earth’s first big predatory monster was a weird water bug as big as Tom Cruise, newly found fossils show.

Almost half a billion years ago, way before the dinosaurs roamed, Earth’s dominant large predator was a sea scorpion that grew to 5 feet 7 inches (170 centimetres), with a dozen claw arms sprouting from its head and a spike tail, according to a new study.

Geologists at the Iowa Geological Survey found 150 pieces of fossils about 60 feet (18 meters) under the Upper Iowa River, part of which had to be temporarily dammed to allow them to collect the specimens. Then scientists at Yale University determined they were a new species from about 460 million years ago, when Iowa was under an ocean

Then, all the action was in the sea and it was pretty small scale, said James Lamsdell of Yale, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

“This is the first real big predator,” Lamsdell said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be swimming with it. There’s something about bugs. When they’re a certain size, they shouldn’t be allowed to get bigger.”

Technically, this creature — named Pentecopterus decorahensis, after an ancient Greek warship — is not a bug by science definitions, Lamsdell said. It’s part of the eurypterid family, which are basically sea scorpions.

Those type of creatures “are really cool,” said Joe Hannibal, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Hannibal wasn’t part of the study, but praised it for being well done, adding “this species is not particularly bizarre — for a eurypterid.”

Unlike modern land scorpions, this creature’s tail didn’t sting. It was used more for balance and in swimming, but half this creature’s length was tail, Lamsdell said.

There were larger sea scorpions half way around the world at the same time but those were more bottom feeders instead of dominant predators, he said.

Lamsdell could tell by the way the many arms come out of the elongated head how this creature grabbed prey and pushed it to its mouth.

“It was obviously a very aggressive animal,” Lamsdell said. “It was a big angry bug.”

10 mind-blowing facts about the CERN Large Collider you need to know .

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A general view of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment is seen during a media visit to the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, near Geneva in Switzerland © Pierre Albouy
A general view of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment is seen during a media visit to the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, near Geneva in Switzerland © Pierre Albouy / Reuters
In September, Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will smash together sub-atomic particles at nearly the speed of light, an unprecedented experiment that has some of the leading voices in the world of science – and religion – sounding the alarm on the risks involved.

CERN is perhaps most famous for its discovery in 2012 of the elusive Higgs Boson [named after British physicist Peter Higgs who predicted its existence in 1964], the so-called ‘God particle,’ which allows other particles to build up mass as they pass through the Higgs field.

Today, however, CERN is more famous – or perhaps infamous is the better word – for an upcoming experiment in which scientists will play God in an effort to recreate the conditions immediately following the ‘Big Bang’ event that gave birth to the Universe millions of years ago.

For those who are in the dark about CERN and the controversial objectives it hopes to achieve, here is a quick primer.

10. CERN is the world’s biggest machine

Straddling the French-Swiss border, the $9 billion CERN collider complex is buried at a depth of up to 575 feet (175 meters). The tunnel complex runs along a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circuit. Scientists involved in the project say the laboratory was built underground because the Earth’s crust provides protection against radiation. They also say it was buried out of respect for the natural landscape, which sounds slightly ironic considering the massive damage the collider could possibly cause down the road.

Technicians are seen working in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), during a media visit to the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva in Switzerland © Pierre Albouy

Technicians are seen working in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), during a media visit to the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva in Switzerland © Pierre Albouy / Reuters

9. Massive gravitational pull

The CERN collider is composed of some 9,600 super magnets – which are 100,000 times more powerful than the gravitational pull of Earth – that fire protons around a circular track at mindboggling speeds. A beam might rotate for up to 10 hours, travelling a distance of more than 10 billion kilometers, enough to make it to the far reaches of our Solar System and back again. Travelling just below light-speed, a proton in the LHC will make 11,245 circuits every second.

No less amazing are the magnet’s coils, which are made up of 36 twisted 15mm strands, each strand comprised in turn of 6000-9000 single filaments, each filament possessing a diameter as small as 7 micrometers. The 27km length of the LHC demands some 7,600 km (4,100 miles) of cable, which amounts to about 270,000 km (145,000 miles) of strand — more than enough to circle the Earth six times at the Equator. According to the CERN website, if the filaments were unraveled, they would “stretch to the Sun and back five times with enough left over for a few trips to the Moon.”

8. CERN generates extreme temperatures

There may be another reason for the CERN super collider being buried hundreds of feet underground: The unbelievable hot temperatures it can reach. How hot you ask? Well, about as hot as conditions in the Universe after the Big Bang, or more than 100,000-times the temperature at the center of the Sun. This will be achieved, CERN says, by accelerating and colliding together two beams of heavy ions, an epic scientific event that will take place next month.

7. But Stephen Hawking is worried

Although it may require some mental gymnastics to wrap one’s brain around exactly what the CERN scientists are attempting to achieve in their underground lab, the average layman may instinctively understand that such an experiment may be wrought with unforeseeable pitfalls. Stephen Hawking, the eminent physicist, seems to agree.

“The God particle found by CERN could destroy the universe,” Hawking wrote in the preface to a book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists. The Higgs Boson could become unstable at very high energy levels and have the potential to trigger a “catastrophic vacuum decay which would cause space and time to collapse and… we would not have any warning to the dangers,” he continued.

Hawking is not the only voice in the scientific wilderness predicting possible catastrophe if CERN continues in the atomic fast lane. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson told Eugene Mirman on his Star Talk radio program that the experiment could literally cause the planet to “explode.”

“Ask yourself: How much energy is keeping it together? Then you put more than that amount of energy into the object.” Tyson was confident of the result: “It will explode.”

In late 2008, when CERN was first firing up the engines on its atom-smashing machine, Otto Rossler, a German professor at the University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European Court of Human Rights, on the grounds that the facility could trigger a mini black hole that could get out of control and annihilate the planet. The Court tossed out Rossler’s request, but he nevertheless succeeded in generating heated discussion on the possible dark side of the experiment.

British physicist Stephen Hawking © Toby Melville

British physicist Stephen Hawking © Toby Melville / Reuters

6. Opening the door to other dimensions

One year after CERN’s grand opening, Sergio Bertolucci, former Director for Research and Scientific Computing of the facility, grabbed headlines when he told a British tabloid the super collider could open otherworldly doors to another dimension for “a very tiny lapse of time,” mere fractions of a second. However, that may be just enough time “to peer into this open door, either by getting something out of it or sending something into it.”

“Of course,” added Bertolucci, “after this tiny moment the door would again shut; bringing us back to our ‘normal’ four-dimensional world … It would be a major leap in our vision of nature… And of course [there would be] no risk to the stability of our world.”

Naturally, this comment has triggered fears that the CERN collider could unwittingly invite unwanted visitors from other time-space dimensions. Anybody for dinosaurs strolling along the Champs-Élysées, or alien life forms seizing the entire planet? Such scenarios – at least for some scientists – are no longer confined to the fictional world of Isaac Asimov novels; with the ongoing work at CERN, there is even talk of opening up a portal for time travel.

Simply postulating such futuristic scenarios shows how far mankind has traveled in a relatively short expanse of time, and our dystopic future predicted in books like “Brave New World” and “1984” may already be here. Will man be able to control the technology he has created, or will the technology destroy him, his works, and with it the entire planet?

5. CERN’s curious choice of geographic location

Now on top of all the speculation as to what CERN scientists are really attempting to do with their Large Hadron Collider, many observers could not help but notice that the town in France where CERN is partially situated is called “Saint-Genus-Poilly.” The name Pouilly comes from the Latin “Appolliacum” and it is believed that in Roman times a temple existed in honor of Apollo, and the people who lived there believed that it is a gateway to the underworld. It is interesting to note that CERN is built on the same spot.

Religious leaders – always suspicious of the aims of the scientific world – drew a connection to a verse straight out of Revelations (9:1-2, 11), which makes reference to the name ‘Apollyon.’ The verse states: “To him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit… And they had a kind over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

Now try telling a spiritual leader that the Bible is conspiracy theory.

4. Tapping into ‘Dark Matter’

Astonishingly, astrophysical observations have demonstrated that all visible physical matter accounts for only four percent of the Universe. Now the race is on at CERN to find those elusive particles or phenomena responsible for dark matter (23 percent) and dark energy (73 percent). Essentially what the CERN experiment hopes to achieve is to separate – by way of the atom smasher – the invisible dark matter, which has been described as the very glue that holds together, from the visible. There’s just one problem with this experiment: Nobody has any idea what the consequences will be if that goal is achieved. So once again, this ‘dark versus visible’ paradigm has generated a battle that transcends the scientific world, becoming a question involving philosophy and spirituality.

3. CERN logo

I will leave it up to the imagination of the reader to determine if the public relations team at CERN opened up the door to massive conjecture – not to mention a huge amount of ‘conspiracy theory’ – by opting for the particular logo design that they did.

© CERN Publications Section

© CERN Publications Section / Wikipedia

2. Deity of destruction as corporate mascot

Although most corporations shun any connection with religion and the spiritual world, CERN has chosen as its mascot a Hindu goddess. But not just any Hindu goddess. Just outside of its headquarters building sits an ancient statue to Shiva, ancient Apollyon, the goddess of destruction. Strange?

© Kenneth Lu

© Kenneth Lu / Wikipedia

1. No Democratic debate

CERN is presently ramping up the largest atom collider in the world (it takes months for the magnets to get the particles to reach near light-speed) in preparation for their next atomic collision which is scheduled to take place next month – with barely a mention in the media of the risks involved. Since some critics say this scientific experiment poses greater risks than even the tests prior to the introduction of the atomic bomb, it would stand to reason that there should be much more discussion on this ‘dark matter.’ Sadly, and not a little ironically, CERN – which essentially governs itself as its own fiefdom – is operating just as invisibly as the particles they are attempting to study.

However, CERN has been the trailblazer on a number of other highly credible projects, which may tempt people to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding CERN, which certainly ranks as one of the most comprehensive and expensive scientific experiments in history.

In 1989, under the guidance of Tim Berners-Lee, CERN began the World Wide Web project, which led to the first webpage in history. On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.

New Cosmic Record Set: Scientists Detect Fastest Neutrino Ever has 1000X Energy of the LHC

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Last week, a team from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is located in the southernmost place on Earth (the Geographic South Pole in Antarctica), announced the highest-energy neutrino ever detected. The event occurred and ended in nanoseconds, but it was enough to trip the sensitive detectors at IceCube.

At a gathering this past week in the Netherlands, the team announced that the latest ultra-high-energy neutrino  was a muon neutrino, and its energy levels were simply out of this world.

To clarify, there are three known kinds of neutrinos: Electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. Ultimately, when muon neutrinos interact, they release a muon. It is this muon that scientists try to detect, and from the data that we gather on it, we can learn about the neutrino that made it.

The energy recorded of this muon was in excess of 2,600 trillion electronvolts (teraelectronvolts, TeV). This breaks the previous record at IceCube, which was set at 2,000 TeV. But where does the neutrino come in? What was its energy?

The team explains, “We have been adding, to our previous analysis, more years of data, and in an extra year we found this spectacular event,” says Francis Halzen, IceCube principle investigator for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Utilizing standard model material science, the vitality of this neutrino is some place around 5,000-10,000 TeV, with the in all likelihood esteem some place in the center,” Halzen clarified. “This neutrino packs around 1,000 times the vitality of the LHC shaft. It is terrific.”

Subatomic Neutrino Tracks: Image credit: CERN

In you aren’t aware, neutrinos are subatomic particles with a mass that is close to zero. They are also electrically neutral, and they rarely interact with normal matter. In fact, they are capable of passing through almost all matter without having any sort of interaction with it. They can even pass through entire planets without changing their course.

So then, how were we able to make this detection?

Thousands of sensors are distributed over a cubic kilometer of volume beneath the dense Antarctic ice, and these sensors are set to detect rapid movements of charged leptons (electrons, muons, or taus) that emit Cherenkov radiation. When the particles travel at nearly the speed of light through the ice, they are are detected by the photo multiplier tubes within the digital optical modules that make up the light sensors employed by IceCube.

IceCube aurora neutrino

Ultimately, this structure was created for exactly this purpose: To capture one of the rarest events in the subatomic world—The interaction of a neutrino with matter. And although we didn’t see the neutrino itself, we were able to process the information on it based on what we recorded from the muon as it bumped into an atom. Ultimately, from this data we were able to determine the speed, energy, and source of the neutrino.

Although IceCube, in comparison, detects far fewer neutrinos than traditional telescopes are detecting photons, the ones that are found help give us insight into such things as the cosmic microwave background and other sources of radiation beyond our own galaxy. In many ways, such events open up a whole new world of physics.

How the Universe Works: Stephen Hawking’s Theory of Everything, Animated in 150 Seconds.

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Legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking is among the greatest scientific minds in human history. In this charming animation for The Guardian’s MadeSimple series, UK-based animation studio Scriberia — who also made the wonderful trailer for Oliver Burkeman’s Antidote — condenses Hawking’s expansive, mind-bending theories down to 150 seconds. Reminiscent in spirit of the RSA animations, though much better-executed creatively, the short video is the visual equivalent of the art of the soundbite.

Though undeniably delightful, I can’t help but wonder whether such quick visual syntheses of the life’s work of boundless genius might be our era’s version of the aphorisms that Susan Sontag worried commodify wisdom. But let’s go with optimism and hope that, rather than exercises in reductionism, formats like this are, as Neil deGrasse Tyson said of the soundbite, triggers for interest which “set a learning path into motion that becomes self-driven.” In other words, let’s hope this gets more people to read A Brief History of Time, one of these seven timeless reads about time.

Watch the video. URL: https://youtu.be/D6lFGJdwRyo