Why science is failing us?

Science stands above all. Had it been failing, no one would ever miss Albert Einstein, Newton or respect Stephen Hawking's. Science is everywhere in today’s world. It is part of our daily lives, from cooking and gardening, to recycling and comprehending the daily weather report, to reading a map and using a computer. Advances in technology and science are transforming our world at an incredible pace, and our children’s future will surely be filled with leaps in technology we can only imagine. Being “science literate” will no longer be just an advantage but an absolute necessity. We can’t escape from the significance of science in our world.

Albert Einstein'Theory of Relativity is yet discussed among the Physicist but can be critically analysed. Science, especially that of Physics is the tough of all. Biology is itself the science of exception and nothing can be predicted in organic chemistry. 

Science does not work on hypothesis and it accounts the experimentally verified facts only. You can not simply predict things in science without mathematical logic. So what are areas where science is important? The first is in everyday human life. Thanks to advances in the biomedical fields there are fewer infectious or lethal disease than ever before. Some illnesses that would be death sentences even just twenty years ago with advanced research into the study of bacteria and viruses are now becoming manageable and in some cases have even eradicated. People are now living longer as we understand more about aging and the nutrients need to keep the body healthy and active long into our sunset years.

This is video from MinutePhysics which tells you why there is no fourth dimension.

So, earth is round

It must be at grade five or something so you must have read earth to be round. Of course earth is round. And, this concept came from the Greek Civilization. Except for the Flat Earth Society, the science asserts earth to be round at all which is of course a truth. If you look into this MinutePhysics, you will be given with ten reasons why earth is round.
Of course, the Earth isn't perfectly round. Because it’s turning on its axis approximately once every 24 hours, the Earth’s equator bulges outwards. The same effect of which you have your weight different at different places. Because weight (w) = mass (m) * acceleration due to gravity (g), and the value of g is inversely proportional to the radius of the earth. The radius of the earth at the equator is more than that of the poles. Hence, you have your weight more at the polar regions. This conversely suggests that the earth is spherical, one of the round structure of course.

Also, when an object has the gravity to pull itself into a sphere, astronomers say that it’s in hydrostatic equilibrium. And that’s why the Earth is round.

Hence, earth is round. Aren't you convinced?

See these still images from NASA, which cannot be wrong and hypothetical at all. 

Everything OKAY with Curiosity rover?

Curiosity Rover Goes Solo on Mars for First Time. Image source: NASA/JPL

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will be on its own for the first time over the next four weeks, thanks to an unfavorable alignment of the Red Planet, Earth and the sun.

Curiosity's handlers don't plan to send any commands to the car-size robot from April 4 through May 1. The sun comes between Earth and the Red Planet during this time, in a formation known as a Mars solar conjunction.

"The [communications] moratorium is a precaution against possible interference by the sun corrupting a command sent to the rover," NASA officials wrote last week in a Curiosity rover mission update.

While some mission team members may take advantage of the break to lie on a beach somewhere, Curiosity itself won't necessarily be idle. The 1-ton rover can continue doing stationary science work at a site known as Yellowknife Bay using commands sent up in advance, officials have said.

NASA's other active Mars spacecraft — the Opportunity rover, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey orbiter — will also go solo during conjunction, though for shorter periods of time. These robotic explorers won't receive any new commands from April 9 through April 26.

MRO and Mars Odyssey help relay data from Opportunity and Curiosity to Earth. MRO goes into a four-week-long record-only mode today, but Odyssey will keep sending rover information home throughout conjunction, helping engineers keep tabs on Opportunity and Curiosity.

"We will maintain visibility of rover status two ways," Torsten Zorn, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement last month. Zorn is conjunction planning leader for Curiosity's engineering operations team. "First, Curiosity will be sending daily beeps directly to Earth. Our second line of visibility is in the Odyssey relays."

Mars solar conjunctions come around every 26 months, so veterans of NASA's various Mars campaigns are used to dealing with them. Opportunity is weathering its fifth conjunction, for example, and Odyssey its sixth.

But this will be the first conjunction experience for Curiosity, which landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater this past August to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.

The Curiosity team has already achieved its main mission goal, announcing last month that the Yellowknife Bay area was a wet, habitable environment — perhaps a lake — billions of years ago. Researchers came to this conclusion after studying analyses Curiosity performed of material drilled from deep within an outcrop in early February.

The rover team wants to drill another rock to confirm and extend what Curiosity has already observed. But this second drilling operation won't take place until after conjunction, officials have said.

This article originally published at Space.com here

Which one is dangerous? AC or DC?

An AC has a pulsating nature, but a DC is always steady. The green line shows the AC and the red one for a steady DC. 

Before you get confused between a DC and an AC, just think why do you have a voltage stabilizer for a refrigerator. Hmm, well let me tell you because it stabilizes the voltage received. Why does it do so? Because for alternating current, or simply AC, the one that travels through all your appliances at your home, have a change in current, or voltage or emf varying with respect to time. Meaning, AC goes sinusoidally and increases or decreases with respect to time. Then what's a DC? It's simple, boy! A DC is when you light a bulb from a emergency lamp. Or, in your schooling you must have lighted a bulb with a battery.

Okay let's get back to the point. An AC is dangerous. For the illustration, lets take an arbitrary magnitude of voltage, say 200 volts. This value of DC is much less dangerous than an AC. Because an AC would give greater voltage than this, about 311 volts. This is because the peak value is under root of twice greater than the indicated value. The peak value for DC is 220 volts but for an AC its under root 2 multiplied by 220 volts which equals about 311 volts. Now think why would you get shocked when you touch household circuits with hands! Thus an AC provides more shock than DC!

Voltage given out by AC = 0.707 * Indicated Value 

 You can see this Youtube video for further details

Antibody and HIV?

Observing the evolution of a particular type of antibody in an infected HIV-1 patient, a study spearheaded by Duke University, including analysis from Los Alamos National Laboratory, has provided insights that will enable vaccination strategies that mimic the actual antibody development within the body.


The kind of antibody studied is called a broadly cross-reactive neutralizing antibody, and details of its generation could provide a blueprint for effective vaccination, according to the study’s authors. In a paper published online in Nature this week, the team reported on the isolation, evolution and structure of a broadly neutralizing antibody from an African donor followed from the time of infection.

The observations trace the co-evolution of the virus and antibodies, ultimately leading to the development of a strain of the potent antibodies in this subject, and they could provide insights into strategies to elicit similar antibodies by vaccination.

Patients early in HIV-1 infection have primarily a single “founder” form of the virus that has been strong enough to infect the patient, even though the population in the originating patient is usually far more diverse and contains a wide variety of HIV mutations. Once the founder virus is involved in the new patient’s system, the surrounding environment stimulates the HIV to mutate and form a unique, tailored population of virus that is specific to the individual.

The team, including Bette Korber, Peter Hraber, and S. Gnanakaran, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, led by Barton Haynes of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, with colleagues at Boston University, the National Institutes of Health, and other institutions as part of a large collaboration, showed that broadly neutralizing antibodies developed only after the population of viruses in the individual had matured and become more diverse.

“Our hope is that a vaccine based on the series of HIV variants that evolved within this subject, that were together capable of stimulating this potent broad antibody response in his natural infection, may enable triggering similar protective antibody responses in vaccines,” said Bette Korber, leader of the Los Alamos team.

The research, “Co-evolution of a broadly neutralizing HIV-1 antibody and founder virus,” is online.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and by intramural National Institutes of Health (NIH) support for the NIAID Vaccine Research Center, by grants from the NIH, NIAID, AI067854 (the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology) and AI100645 (the Center for Vaccine Immunology-Immunogen Discovery). Use of sector 22 (Southeast Region Collaborative Access team) at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by the US Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, under contract number W-31-109-Eng-38.

First Mobile Phone Call Was Placed Exactly 40 Years Ago

Hello world! 

Today is exactly the same day when a mobile phone cell was placed by Motorola. With inputs from With inputs from Stan Schroeder, Mashable, do read the following piece of article. 

On April 3, 1973 — exactly 40 years from today — Motorola employee Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call.

Marty used a Motorola DynaTAC to call Bell Labs (then a division of AT&T), reportedly saying "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end."

The device that Marty used to place the call was a prototype which would later become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x. It was the first commercially available mobile phone, and despite its meager specs for today's standards — it weighed 2.5 pounds and only had a one-line, text-only LED display — it cost a whopping $3,995.

The DynaTAC phone can be seen in action in several Hollywood films, including "Wall Street," where Gordon Gekko uses it to place a call from the beach, and "American Psycho," with Patrick Bateman using it to place a fake dinner reservation call.

My divorce from Google - One year later

A year ago, I divorced Google. In any divorce, friends go with both sides. Most friends went with Google, but a few stayed with me. I'm in a much happier place. It can be done. The co-dependency is over.

Much has happened a year later, most of it good. I still have a few moments when strange things happen because of my lack of anything Google. But I'm happy I made the choice. Should you use a search engine, you'll find much more criticism of my divorce using the search string, “henderson ITworld divorcing google". It's been tough to find starkly negative criticism. Some of the criticism applauds, while other raises the spectre of what privacy has become, and if Google is the savior and protagonist we all once thought they were. I still use Search, but even Search has changed.

Observations and lessons learned

There are some observations that I've made, post-divorce, of just how pervasive online data gathering has become and how Terms of Service privacy invasion and data sharing are now so wide-spread and out-in-the-open. Online sites don't blush about what your use of the site means in terms of your privacy. From your phone, your credit cards, even your car must willingly give up what you've been doing, where you've been (correlating this with where your friends have been), how long you spent doing something, perhaps ownership of the pictures taken, and we're not even talking web surfing yet. All of this information might be sold to someone you don't know, and will be kept long after you're dead. This situation, imposed rejection problems when I surfing for replacement apps.

Initially, it was Google's Terms of Service and Privacy Statement that motivated me to give up over 3,000 Google+ Friends, and to stop using the Google search engine and the rest of their products, attractive as they were. I've listed some of what I used at Google, and the replacements below. Some friends followed my example onto other social media sites. Not many. Perhaps they weren't really friends. Others took my lead in their own ways.

I must admit that for purposes of my research and testing (and my Android phone) that I still have a Google account under ExtremeLab's name. Full disclosure also says that I occasionally spin up a Windows 7 virtual machine that doesn't use script blockers, solely to use the AirBNB site, which doesn't work without them. Google is interwoven into the code of AirBNB's site, and it's a necessary evil. AirBNB is a little paranoid, in my opinion, but given the crux of their business, I suppose I'm ok with that. I spin down the Windows 7 instance, logon to AirBNB, and move on. I could make it easier, procedurally. I don't. Even Apple knows the problems of divorcing Google Maps.

But that's about it. I was slowed down, temporarily. No longer.

How I've replaced Google

Search is DuckDuckGo. Has some strange features in it, and reminds me of the value of using Boolean logic in queries, like the old days of search. On a rare day, I might use Yahoo! I'm still looking for an actual Craigslist search engine that doesn't sputter.

Mail. I always had my own email server, and use it primarily. You'll find me using Yahoo! Classic, too, although they've just discontinued the Classic version.

Maps. Mapquest is ok. Yahoo! Maps are my go-to, either choice with script-blocking. The Yahoo! Maps UI isn't very good, but the maps are quite usable. The map apps don't care that I block their scripts. I kill their cookies afterwards, although I doubt this helps.

Music and Videos. YouTube was the best, and for non-music how-to videos, too. Gone. Spotify is my new music source, and they're heaven sent, with 99%+ of the music I want, which is admittedly often older stuff. Vimeo has some videos, and I often use DuckDuckGo to search for videos if I simply must, which usually entails looking at Terms of Service, Privacy Notices, and even then, blocking scripts and erasing cookies. I erase cookies on almost a daily basis.

Images. I maintain a Flickr and Shutterfly account, both of them entirely bolted down for private, invitation-only viewing.

Social Networking. Facebook is for friends/family; Linked-In is public. Facebook can be privatized, and will be audited for the next couple of decades as an FTC settlement. That doesn't mean I trust them. Most people's Facebook identities are poorly protected, and I avoid posting there. Linked-In is public and my participation is fully public as my public life. Twitter? I tweet once in a while.

GPS. I don't use it, even in a car. I'm old-school as I like printed maps.

Google Translation. Babelfish is ok. Others do well, too. None are as good as I would like.

Apps. Amazon is an alternative to the GooglePlay app retailer, but I'm not very big on apps. I don't use Google Books at all. I rarely use digital books. I usually obtain books in whatever format, from the local public library, which is excellent. I rarely use online “office-like apps”.

Aftermath observations: Search and content have changed

Seeing Google's presence is now odd. It's kind of like seeing your ex at a shopping mall. There's a perfunctory and polite hello, how's the folks, and you move on. There are a few pangs. Memories. But I've moved on, and there is nothing in the Google app cavalcade that I need at all. Not a thing.

Indeed Google's been keen to cut away applications that it believes are barnacles on its bow. I once felt Google was a bunch of barnacles on my bow. As Slate points out, there are many dead bodies in the Google Graveyard. I'm reminded of New Orleans, and the mausoleums there, some highly ornamented, others more like a potter's field. People put time and effort into the development of them, and some caught on, if only to comparatively small audiences -- and perhaps ones that didn't cause heartburn at Microsoft or Apple's DevOps. Don't fall in love; they die young.

Never again

Google's services and apps have a lot of competition these days, ranging from Google Docs through Google+ to Google's user storage variants. In my original divorce description, I needed seven days to make Google go away. Finding alternatives is definitely do-able. It's worth the effort, in hindsight. Google is gone.

What I've concluded is that I'm happy, and I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to the detriment of us all.

Products like Ghostery, no-script, FlashBlock, are all heros to me. Why? Courage. The bottom line here is the quid pro quo of free app use versus loss of privacy. It is the foundation of the models that fuel the web today, and starving that fuel is going to be the only way to change them, as rules of conduct are often mitigated by the fuel needs of legislators and thought leaders.

There might be alternate financial models in the near future to anything Google. Subscription-based models are a possible alternative revenue stream, in terms of changing the underlying business model used by many on the web to fuel web pages. But when users consider actually shelling out money for a service, rather than using a free service, they'll go a long way towards personal exposure and its tawdry erasure of personal privacy. What must be raised is the common denominator, as the current model is a race towards entropy of the web.

With inputs from Tom Henderson, ITworld. Copright Material from Reuters.