BERMUDA TRIANGLE

The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil’s Triangle, covers about 500,000 square miles of ocean off the southeastern tip of Florida. When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his first voyage to the New World, he reported that a great flame of fire (probably a meteor) crashed into the sea one night and that a strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks later. He also wrote about erratic compass readings, perhaps because at that time a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.

Woodrow Wilson later said. In 1941 two of the Cyclops’ sister ships similarly vanished without a trace along nearly the same route.

A pattern allegedly began forming in which vessels traversing the Bermuda Triangle would either disappear or be found abandoned. Then, in December 1945, five Navy bombers carrying 14 men took off from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airfield in order to conduct practice bombing runs over some nearby shoals. But with his compasses apparently malfunctioning, the leader of the mission, known as Flight 19, got severely lost. All five planes flew aimlessly until they ran low on fuel and were forced to ditch at sea. That same day, a rescue plane and its 13-man crew also disappeared. After a massive weeks-long search failed to turn up any evidence, the official Navy report declared that it was “as if they had flown to Mars.”

BERMUDA TRIANGLE THEORIES AND COUNTER-THEORIES

By the time author Vincent Gaddis coined the phrase “Bermuda Triangle” in a 1964 magazine article, additional mysterious accidents had occurred in the area, including three passenger planes that went down despite having just sent “all’s well” messages. Charles Berlitz, whose grandfather founded the Berlitz language schools, stoked the legend even further in 1974 with a sensational bestseller about the legend. Since then, scores of fellow paranormal writers have blamed the triangle’s supposed lethalness on everything from aliens, Atlantis and sea monsters to time warps and reverse gravity fields, whereas more scientifically minded theorists have pointed to magnetic anomalies, waterspouts or huge eruptions of methane gas from the ocean floor.

In all probability, however, there is no single theory that solves the mystery. As one skeptic put it, trying to find a common cause for every Bermuda Triangle disappearance is no more logical than trying to find a common cause for every automobile accident in Arizona. Moreover, although storms, reefs and the Gulf Stream can cause navigational challenges there, maritime insurance leader Lloyd’s of London does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an especially hazardous place. Neither does the U.S. Coast Guard, which says: “In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.”

OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE..

During the first three minutes of the universe, the light elements were born during a process known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Temperatures cooled from 100 nonillion (1032) Kelvin to 1 billion (109) Kelvin, and protons and neutrons collided to make deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. Most of the deuterium combined to make helium, and trace amounts of lithium were also generated. For the first 380,000 years or so, the universe was essentially too hot for light to shine, according to France's National Center of Space Research (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales,or CNES). The heat of creation smashed atoms together with enough force to break them up into a dense plasma, an opaquesoup of protons, neutrons and electrons that scattered light like fog. Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for atoms to form during the era of recombination, resulting in a transparent, electrically neutral gas, according to NASA. This set loose the initial flash of light created during the Big Bang, which is detectable today as cosmic microwave background radiation. However, after this point, the universe was plunged into darkness, since no stars or any other bright objects had formed yet. About 400 million years after the Big Bang, the universe began to emerge from the cosmic dark ages during the epoch of reionization. During this time, which lasted more than a half-billion years, clumps of gas collapsed enough to form the first stars and galaxies, whose energetic ultraviolet light ionized and destroyed most of the neutral hydrogen. Although the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity, about 5 or 6 billion years after the Big Bang, according to NASA, a mysterious force now called dark energy began speeding up the expansion of the universe again, a phenomenon that continues today. A little after 9 billion years after the Big Bang, our solar system was born.

The Big Bang

The Big Bang did not occur as an explosion in the usual way one think about such things, despite one might gather from its name. The universe did not expand into space, as space did not exist before the universe, according to NASA Instead, it is better to think of the Big Bang as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe. The universe has not expanded from any one spot since the Big Bang — rather, space itself has been stretching, and carrying matter with it. Since the universe by its definition encompasses all of space and time as we know it, NASA says it is beyond the model of the Big Bang to say what the universe is expanding into or what gave rise to the Big Bang. Although there are models that speculate about these questions, none of them have made realistically testable predictions as of yet. In 2014, scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that they had found a faint signal in the cosmic microwave background that could be the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, themselves considered a "smoking gun" for the Big Bang. The findings werehotly debated, but the search for these mysterious ripples continues. The globular cluster NGC 6397 contains around 400,000 stars and is located about 7,200 light years away in the southern constellation Ara. With an estimated age of 13.5 billion years, it is likely among the first objects of the Galaxy to form after the Big Bang. Credit: European Southern Observatory This estimate came from measuring the composition of matter and energy density in the universe. This allowed researchers to compute how fast the universe expanded in the past. With that knowledge, they could turn the clock back and extrapolate when the Big Bang happened. The time between then and now is the age of the universe.

Structure

Scientists think that in the earliest moments of the universe, there was no structure to it to speak of, with matter and energy distributed nearly uniformly throughout. According to NASA, the gravitational pull of small fluctuations in the density of matter back then gave rise to the vast web-like structure of stars and emptiness seen today. Dense regions pulled in more and more matter through gravity, and the more massive they became, the more matter they could pull in through gravity, forming stars, galaxiesand larger structures known as clusters, superclusters, filaments and walls, with "great walls" of thousands of galaxies reaching more than a billion light years in length. Less dense regions did not grow, evolving into area of seemingly empty space called voids.

Content

Until about 30 years ago, astronomers thought that the universe was composed almost entirely of ordinary atoms, or "baryonic matter," According to NASA. However, recently there has been ever more evidence that suggests most of the ingredients making up the universe come in forms that we cannot see. It turns out that atoms only make up 4.6 percent of the universe. Of the remainder, 23 percent is made up of dark matter, which is likely composed of one or more species of subatomic particles that interact very weakly with ordinary matter, and 72 percent is made of dark energy, which apparently is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. When it comes to the atoms we are familiar with, hydrogen makes up about 75 percent, while helium makes up about 25 percent, with heavier elements making up only a tiny fraction of the universe's atoms, according to NASA.

Shape

The shape of the universe and whether or not it is finite or infinite in extent depends on the struggle between the rate of its expansion and the pull of gravity. The strength of the pull in question depends in part on the density of the matter in the universe. If the density of the universe exceeds a specific critical value, then the universe is "closed" and "positive curved" like the surface of a sphere. This means light beams that are initially parallel will converge slowly, eventually cross and return back to their starting point, if the universe lasts long enough. If so, according to NASA, the universe is not infinite but has no end, just as the area on the surface of a sphere is not infinite but has no beginning or end to speak of. The universe will eventually stop expanding and start collapsing in on itself, the so-called "Big Crunch." If the density of the universe is less than this critical density, then the geometry of space is "open" and "negatively curved" like the surface of a saddle. If so, the universe has no bounds, and will expand forever. If the density of the universe exactly equals the critical density, then the geometry of the universe is "flat" with zero curvature like a sheet of paper, according to NASA. If so, the universe has no bounds and will expand forever, but the rate of expansion will gradually approach zero after an infinite amount of time. Recent measurements suggest that the universe is flat with only a 2 percent margin of error. It is possible that the universe has a more complicated shape overall while seeming to possess a different curvature. For instance, the universe could have the shape of a torus, or doughnut.

Expanding universe

In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was not static. Rather, it was expanding, a find that revealed the universe was apparently born in a Big Bang. After that, it was long thought the gravity of matter in the universe was certain toslow the expansion of the universe. Then, in 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope's observations of very distant supernovae revealed that a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. In other words, the expansion of the universe was not slowing due to gravity, but instead inexplicably was accelerating. The name for the unknown force driving this accelerating expansion is dark energy, and it remains one of the greatest mysteries in science.

Oh-my-god particle

One of the most entertaining names that I’ve come across in the physics sector is the “Oh My God Particle.” Scientists also refer to this  particle as the “ermahgerd particle” (kidding, kidding. It’s not really called that, but it is called the “Oh My God Particle”).  Now, the first thing that may pop into some of your minds is the Higgs Boson, which was discovered in 2012. This isn’t too surprising as the media went around calling it the “God Particle.” However, these two particles are very different.

 

So what is the Oh My God Particle? Well it is a simple, lowly proton. So why the name?

This proton had the effective mass-energy of a baseball traveling at 90 km/h (56 mph)! This type of particle is known as a cosmic ray, they’re generally just protons but can sometimes be a Helium atom or even an electron. What makes them so interesting is that they’re traveling very near the speed of light, and the Oh My God Particle is the fastest ever found.

 

Discovered back in 1991 in Utah, this very high energy particle is likely to have originated from around the Supermassive Black Hole in the galaxy Centaurus A before it made its journey to the Earth. Now we mentioned that it was traveling near the speed of light… Well how near? Well this proton had a energy level of about 50 joules of energy, which is enough to briefly light up a 50 Watt light bulb. This may not seem like much energy, but since a single proton weighs 1.67e-27 kg (or 0.167 with 26 zeroes before it), it must have had an incredible speed. And that speed has been calculated to being about 99.9999999999999999999995% of the speed of light! That means that, per a second, it was traveling only 1.5 quadrillionths of a meter slower than the speed of light.

 

Not to worry though, even though this particle had the mass-energy of a baseball, if you were to be hit by one of these in the head while walking down the street, you wouldn’t be knocked unconscious.

I hope now you can appreciate why it is called the Oh My God Particle…the scientists that detected this particle probably yelled that out when they worked out how fast that single proton was traveling.

Credits: futurism

ALL ABOUT NEUTRINO..

Neutrinos are subatomic particles produced by the decay of radioactive elements and are elementary particles that lack an electric charge, or, as F. Reines would say, "...the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being"."The name neutrino was coined by Enrico Fermi as a word play on neutrone, the Italian name of the neutron."Of all high-energy particles, only weakly interacting neutrinos can directly convey astronomical information from the edge of the universe - and from deep inside the most cataclysmic high-energy processes and as far as we know, there are three different types of neutrinos, each type relating to a charged particle as shown in the following table:

Neutrino	ve	vµ	vτ
Charged Partner	electron (e)	muon (µ)	tau (τ)

Copiously produced in high-energy collisions, travelling essentially at the speed of light, and unaffected by magnetic fields, neutrinos meet the basic requirements for astronomy. Their unique advantage arises from a fundamental property: they are affected only by the weakest of nature's forces (but for gravity) and are therefore essentially unabsorbed as they travel cosmological distances between their origin and us.Where are they coming from?From what we know today, a majority of the neutrinos floating around were born around 15 billions years ago, soon after the birth of the universe. Since this time, the universe has continuously expanded and cooled, and neutrinos have just kept on going. Theoretically, there are now so many neutrinos that they constitute a cosmic background radiation whose temperature is 1.9 degree Kelvin (-271.2 degree Celsius). Other neutrinos are constantly being produced from nuclear power stations, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, general atmospheric phenomenae, and during the births, collisions, and deaths of stars, particularly the explosions of supernovae.

NEW BIOFUEL FROM GRASS..

It takes millions of years for natural processes to convert plants into gasoline, but researchers at Ghent University have figured out how to do it much faster. By pre-treating grass to make it break down quicker, and then adding Clostridium bacteria similar to that found in your gut, they produced decane, one of the main ingredients of gasoline and jet fuel. While decane is a polluting fuel, commercial jets will need it for at least the next few decades, and the researchers believe their process is efficient enough to make it commercially feasible.

For their system to work, the scientists first treated the grass with a compound that broke it down and made it easier for bacteria to digest. They then treated it with an enriched Clostridium bacteria from the family that makes up the good bacteria in your gut, rather than the one that kills you. Fermentation much like that used for beer produced lactic acid and its derivatives, and further treatment yielded caproic acids. With further processing, that was converted into decane, a primary ingredient of gasoline and jet fuel.

As mentioned, decane and similar products aren't very clean fuels (they produce CO2 when burned), but they still have a much higher energy density than, say, lithium batteries. As such, be the main fuel used in aviation for the foreseeable future, as jet planes need to be relatively light to get aloft.

For now, the process can only yield a few drops of biofuel, but the researchers claim the process is already relatively efficient, and with some more work, could possibly be made commercially feasible. Unlike corn, grass grows pretty much anywhere, so the ability to convert it into fuel on the cheap would be a huge step.

INCREASING GLOBAL WARMING..

Continuing to burn fossil fuels at the current rate could bring atmospheric carbon dioxide to its highest concentration in 50 million years, jumping from about 400 parts per million now to more than 900 parts per million by the end of this century, a new study warns.

And if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated beyond that point, the climate could reach a warming state that hasn’t been seen in the past 420 million years.

Some research suggests that, if humans burned through all fossil fuels on Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could hit 5,000 parts per million by the year 2400.

The new study speaks to the power of human influence over the climate. It suggests that after millions of years of relative stability in the absence of human activity, just a few hundred years of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are on track to cause unprecedented warming.

Metallic hydrogen..

Nearly a century after it was theorized, Harvard scientists have succeeded in creating the rarest - and potentially one of the most valuable - materials on the planet.

The material - atomic metallic hydrogen - was created by Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Isaac Silvera and post-doctoral fellow Ranga Dias. In addition to helping scientists answer fundamental questions about the nature of matter, the material is theorized to have a wide range of applications, including as a room-temperature superconductor. The creation of the rare material is described in a January 26 paper published in Science.

"This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics," Silvera said. "It's the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so when you're looking at it, you're looking at something that's never existed before."

To create it, Silvera and Dias squeezed a tiny hydrogen sample at 495 gigapascal, or more than 71.7 million pounds-per-square inch - greater than the pressure at the center of the Earth. At those extreme pressures, Silvera explained, solid molecular hydrogen -which consists of molecules on the lattice sites of the solid - breaks down, and the tightly bound molecules dissociate to transforms into atomic hydrogen, which is a metal.

While the work offers an important new window into understanding the general properties of hydrogen, it also offers tantalizing hints at potentially revolutionary new materials.

"One prediction that's very important is metallic hydrogen is predicted to be meta-stable," Silvera said. "That means if you take the pressure off, it will stay metallic, similar to the way diamonds form from graphite under intense heat and pressure, but remains a diamond when that pressure and heat is removed."

Understanding whether the material is stable is important, Silvera said, because predictions suggest metallic hydrogen could act as a superconductor at room temperatures.

STAR DUST...

Stardust... what is it?Dust from star? or else 'tis a kind of tiny dust particles?Not exactly.. 'tis something which is interesting..Stardust may be defined as something like a type of comic dust composed of particles in space.Some used to say we all were came from and also made up of stardust.. I'm not damn sure 'bout this.But here is a little piece of information picked for you..

The early universe expanded after the big bang for only 3 seconds before it cooled to a state where subatomic particles assembled into atoms. Hydrogen atoms formed first since they are the simplest type of atom. Hydrogen atoms contain only one proton in its nucleus which makes it number one on the periodic table of elements. After the universe aged a little (roughly 300 million years) the hydrogen atoms started to clump together under the force of gravity. As these clumps grew in size, the pressure at the center grew larger. When the temperature reached 15 million degrees F, the pressure caused the hydrogen to fuse their nuclei together. This process is known as nuclear fusion. The positively charged nuclei naturally repel each other. However under high temperatures and pressure, the nuclei are moving fast enough to smash together and fuse.  When the two proton nuclei of the hydrogen atoms fuse, they form a nucleus consisting of two protons. Some electrons also combine with protons to form neutrons and neutrinos. These neutrons also bind to the nucleus helping it to remain more stable under the nuclear forces. An atom with two protons in its nucleus is Helium. That’s why helium is number two on the periodic table of elements. The fusion process also releases a lot of energy in which some of the hydrogen mass converts into light energy. This conversion of mass in to energy uses Einstein’s famous equation: E=mc2.

At this point, our universe has a bunch of large clumps of hydrogen fusing together to create helium while releasing large amounts of light. This is what we commonly call a star! In fact our sun is doing this right now as we speak (or read).  As a star ages, it then fuses the helium with hydrogen to form lithium which has three protons in its nucleus. Take a look at the periodic table to see which number it is. This fusion process continues to create larger and larger nuclei. The forth, the fifth and all the way up to 26.

This is the general idea but it’s not exactly this easy.  We have to remember that this is in fact nuclear physics that we’re dealing with here.  It looks like a pretty simple picture as we just described but up close it is actually an intricate jigsaw puzzle.  

The fusion process doesn’t actually create the elements in order through the periodic table. In fact, the process jumps around. And some fused nuclei decay down to lower elements that were skipped over. Fusion also creates neutrons which combine with atoms to create isotopes which act like atomic cousins. Overall, we can say that a star produces all of the elements up to iron in the periodic table through the fusion process. The details of this process are fascinating, yet they deter us from answering the question at hand.

The element with 26 protons in its nucleus is iron. It turns out that this is the last element that is created. To create higher elements, fusion requires more energy than it produces. We mentioned earlier that a star glows because the fusing atoms release energy (E=mc2). However, the amount of energy released becomes smaller and smaller as the atoms grow larger. Eventually at iron, there is no energy released at all. And for elements beyond iron more energy is need for fusion than gravitational pressure can provide.

After a star has created enough iron, fusion ceases and the hot burning core begins to cool. Up until this point the hot core of the star erupting outwards and preventing gravity from collapsing the star. Now that the star has cooled, the core no longer expands and gravity quickly collapses the star. The star implodes with enough energy to immediately fuse some of the atoms into higher elements like Nickel, Krypton, Gold, Uranium,… etc. This quick and violent implosion releases an enormous amount of energy that explodes the star. This is what we call a supernova! Astrophysicists are still not exactly certain about the details of how a supernova explodes. Hopefully you can figure it out someday!

The exploded remains from a supernova travel through out the universe only to someday clump together with other stardust and give birth to a new star. This is the life of our universe.

Now that we have established that every element in the periodic table aside from hydrogen is essentially stardust, we have to determine how much of our body is made up of this stardust.  If we know how many hydrogen atoms are in our body, then we can say that the rest is stardust.  Our body is composed of roughly 7x1027 atoms. That is a lot of atoms! Try writing that number out on a piece of paper: 7 with 27 zeros behind it. We say roughly because if you pluck a hair or pick your nose there might be slightly less. Now it turns out that of those billion billion billion atoms, 4.2x1027 of them are hydrogen. Remember that hydrogen is bigbang dust and not stardust. This leaves 2.8x1027 atoms of stardust. Thus the amount of stardust atoms in our body is 40%.

Since stardust atoms are the heavier elements, the percentage of star mass in our body is much more impressive. Most of the hydrogen in our body floats around in the form of water. The human body is about 60% water and hydrogen only accounts for 11% of that water mass. Even though water consists of two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, hydrogen has much less mass. We can conclude that 93% of the mass in our body is stardust. Just think, long ago someone may have wished upon a star that you are made of.

HAPPY NEW YEAR..

HELLO VIEWERS.. IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME AFTER UPDATING THIS BLOG.

THIS ENTRY GONNA BE A NEW ENTRANCE.. HERE THIS BLOG GONNA CHERISH WITH NEWLY UPDATED FACTS ON SCIENCe FROM THIS NEW YEAR.

WISH YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR AHEAD. INDEED I HOPE THIS YEAR GONNA MAKE ALL YOUR REST OF LIFE AS BEST OF YOUR LIFE. MAY GOD BLESS YOU ALL WITH HIS GRACE TO TAKE EACH AND EVERY PERSON  TO THE ZENITH POINT OF UNDISCOVERED WORLD OF SCIENCE. SCIENCE IS THE THING WHICH HAS INFINITE DIMENSIONS TO BE VIEWED. I MENTIONED GOD BEFORE, IT ENTITLES THAT GOD IS SOMETHING WHICH INDICATES THAT THERE IS SOMETHING MUCH BEYOND OUR GUESS WHICH IS YET TO BE DISCOVERED.WHEN MAN COMES TO KNOW EVERYTHING THEN HIS LIFE WILL BECOME NOTHING. SO, KEEP SEARCHING UNTIL YOU FIND THE ANSWER FOR WHAT YOU ARE CREATED AND THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE TO BE DESIGNED IN A SUCH A WAY. PREVAIL AS WHO YOU ARE AND START GETTING INTO SCIENCE DEEPLY.. YOUR LIFE WILL BECOME BEAUTIFUL..

ONCE AGAIN MY HEARTILY NEW YEAR GREETINGS...☺☺☻☺