Helmholtz - physiologist, physicist, philosopher

August 31, 1821 - birthday of Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions in several scientific fields.

As a young man, Helmholtz was interested in natural science, but his father wanted him to study medicine at the Charité because there was financial support for medical students.

Trained primarily in physiology, Helmholtz wrote on many other topics, ranging from theoretical physics, to the age of the Earth, to the origin of the Solar System.

In physiology and psychology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism in the physiology of perception.

In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics.

As a philosopher, he is known for his philosophy of science, ideas on the relation between the laws of perception and the laws of nature, the science of aesthetics, and ideas on the civilising power of science.

Students and research associates of Helmholtz included Max Planck, Heinrich Kayser, Eugen Goldstein, Wilhelm Wien, Arthur König, Henry Augustus Rowland, Albert A. Michelson, Wilhelm Wundt, Fernando Sanford and Michael I. Pupin.

Helmholtz is known for -

• Studies in the conservation of energy
• Helmholtz condition
• Helmholtz decomposition
• Helmholtz equation
• Helmholtz free energy
• Helmholtz free entropy
• Helmholtz layer
• Helmholtz pitch notation
• Helmholtz reciprocity
• Helmholtz resonance
• Helmholtz temperament
• Helmholtz classical theorem
• Helmholtz's theorems
• Helmholtz minimum dissipation theorem
• Generalized Helmholtz theorem
• Gibbs–Helmholtz equation
• Helmholtz-Ellis notation
• Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect
• Helmholtz-Smoluchowski eqn.
• Kelvin–Helmholtz instability
• Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism
• Young–Helmholtz theory
• Additive synthesis
• Efference copy
• Hydrodynamic stability
• Keratometer
• Pure tone
• Supercapacitor

How did he get so much time!?

Earth's Oldest Color Was Pink

What color is the ocean? Well, blue, of course.

But this wasn't always the case. If you assume that prehistoric oceans were blue just like they are today, you'd be wrong. Scientists recently discovered ancient oceans were actually a rosy hue, making pink the world's oldest-known color.

Researchers found the mighty little pink pigment in bacterial fossils from the Sahara Desert in Mauritania, West Africa. The cyanobacteria were thought to have survived on sunlight and, more than 650 million years ago, they became the dominant life form in Earth's oceans for eons. Cyanobacteria probably even predated algae, which has long been thought to be one of the earliest building blocks of the evolutionary life of larger animals.

So what made these little microbes think pink? Well, it wasn't their fashion sense. The fossilized chlorophyll inside the bacteria was dark red and purple in its concentrated form, which means that when diluted by water or soil, it would have lent a pink cast to earth and sea. This is unlike modern chlorophyll, which today gives plants their green color.

While it is rare for ancient chlorophyll to be preserved, these samples were probably formed when a bloom of cyanobacteria quickly sank to the sea floor where it was free from the oxygen molecules that bolster decay. Once it sank, the microbes eventually fossilized and the rock they became part of remained motionless — and in one piece — for a billion years.

Source - HowStuffWorks.com

Do You Need Soap to Get Your Dishes Clean?

It is estimated that the consumers in the USA alone will spend nearly $3.7 million on dish-washing detergents in 2018 to get their dishes clean. That's a whopping statistic that begs the question: Do we really need dish-washing soap to get our dishes clean?

The short answer is: No, we can get along without it.

So what does it take to remove all the grease and food particles and kill the pathogens that are left behind on our dishes and cookware after a sumptuous meal?

Common sense tells us that water plays a major role in the process. Thermal sanitizing using hot water is an effective and time-tested method to remove debris and kill a broad range of dangerous bacteria. A lot of what we eat can simply be rinsed away with very hot water. Carbohydrates like sugars and starches are water-soluble, and all that's required to clean them off dishes is hot water. So if you only eat carbs and emulsified fats you can clean your dishes with hot water and a little elbow grease.

Animal fats and proteins, however, are not water-soluble and need an alkali to break them down. So, if you're out of dish soap and have a greasy pan to wash you'll need to make your own soap by adding an alkali like baking soda or ashes from wood-burning stove to steaming hot water and scrub your pan clean. While wood ashes and an improvised grass or shrub scrubber may not win the good housekeeping seal of approval, they'll clean your pan and get it ready for rinsing and sanitizing in boiling water and, finally, air drying.

Keeping in mind that dish-washing soap as we know it has only been around since the middle of the 20th century, it's interesting to note that people throughout the ages used all sorts of ordinary things found in the natural world around them – sand, animal fats, ash, alkaline salts, cuttlefish bone, plants like horsetail, mare's tail and soapwort, hay mixed with ash, baking soda, maple sap debris known as sugar sand, along with that major component – hot or running water – to scour and clean their dishes.

So whether you find yourself down to the last drop at home, forgot to bring it along on your camping trip or just want to try an eco-friendly, off-the-grid alternative to performing the age-old chore of washing dishes, here's a quick old-school how-to for modern times -

Baking Soda and Vinegar

Don't let the dishes sit – clear and scrape them promptly after your meal. Be sure and sterilize anything that came into contact with raw meat in boiling water for 5 to 10 minutes. Add 1 tablespoon of baking soda to 3-4 litres of very hot water. And in a separate container add 1 tablespoon of white vinegar to 3-4 litres of very hot water. Wash dishes in baking soda water and rinse in the vinegar water. Rinse again in clear, running water and allow dishes to air dry.

Vinegar

You can also run your dishwasher without detergent using only the rinse cycle. Simply scrape and prerinse your dishes thoroughly by hand and load as usual. Add white vinegar to the detergent cup and a rinsing solution to the rinsing cup. The acid in the white vinegar will disinfect the dishes and the rinsing aid will keep them from spotting. Set your dishwasher on the rinse cycle and voila: clean, disinfected dishes – and you're conserving water too.

Chlorine Bleach

Remove stuck-on food and let dishes soak 10-20 minutes in hot water. Take 3-4 litre of COOL water (hot water will inhibit bleach from sanitizing effectively) and add 1 tablespoon of unscented chlorine bleach. Soak dishes for 1 minute per dish. Soak dishes that came into contact with raw meat longer. Rinse in clear water and let air dry. 

Wood Fire Ashes

Slowly pour hot water over the ashes, just enough to make a paste and stir thoroughly. The hot water dissolves the potassium salts from the ashes to create a heavy-duty alkali solution which reacts with the fatty acids in the grease on your cookware and dishes to make soap.

And remember that UV light from sunshine is also a good disinfectant, killing bacteria without the use of chemicals.

So, whether you’re feeling the pioneer spirit, summoning your inner chemist or you simply find yourself wide awake at midnight hankering to wash some dishes and there’s not a dollop of dish soap in the house – just remember that germs don't play – so isn’t it good to know that in a pinch there are old-school alternatives that will kill germs and make your kitchen wares sparkly clean?

Source - HowStuffWorks.com

Perelman's Tryst with Unsolved Problems and the Big Prizes (which he rejects)

August 22, 2006 – Grigori Perelman is awarded the Fields Medal for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture in mathematics but refuses to accept the medal.

Who is Grigori Perelman?

Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician. Grigori's mathematical talent became apparent at the age of ten, and he was enrolled in the Leningrad Secondary School #239, a specialized school with advanced mathematics and physics programs. Grigori excelled in all subjects except physical education.

In 1982, as a member of the Soviet Union team competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad, an international competition for high school students, he won a gold medal, achieving a perfect score.

What is the Poincaré conjecture?

Originally conjectured by Henri Poincaré, the theorem concerns a space that locally looks like ordinary three-dimensional space but is connected, finite in size, and lacks any boundary (a closed 3-manifold). The Poincaré conjecture claims that if such a space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a three-dimensional sphere. The analogous conjectures for all higher dimensions had already been proved.

The Poincaré conjecture was one of the most important open questions in topology. In 2000, it was named one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1,000,000 prize for the first correct solution.

After nearly a century of effort by mathematicians, Grigori Perelman presented a proof of the conjecture. Perelman's work survived review and was confirmed in 2006.

What is the Fields Medal?

The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years.

The Fields Medal is regarded as one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive, and has been described as the mathematician's "Nobel Prize.” The name of the award is in honor of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.

Perelman’s Tryst with the Awards

In August 2006, Perelman was offered the Fields Medal for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow", but he declined the award, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo."

Perelman was awarded the Millennium Prize on March 18, 2010. He turned down the prize saying that he believed his contribution in proving the Poincaré conjecture was no greater than that of Richard S. Hamilton, the mathematician who pioneered the Ricci flow with the aim of attacking the conjecture.

On December 22, 2006, the journal Science honored Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first time this honor was bestowed in the area of mathematics.

As of 2018, the Poincaré conjecture is the only solved Millennium problem.

Read an interesting article in The Guardian

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Nikolay Bogolyubov and the Bogoliubov Approach

August 21, 1909 - birthday of Nikolay Nikolayevich Bogolyubov, a Soviet mathematician and theoretical physicist known for a significant contribution to quantum field theory, classical and quantum statistical mechanics, and the theory of dynamical systems.

In 1924, at the age of 15, Nikolay Bogolyubov wrote his first published scientific paper “On the behavior of solutions of linear differential equations at infinity”. In 1925 he entered Ph.D. program at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and obtained the degree of Kandidat Nauk (Candidate of Sciences, equivalent to a Ph.D.) in 1928, at the age of 19.

In 1930, at the age of 21, he obtained the degree of Doktor nauk (Doctor of Sciences), the highest degree in the Soviet Union, which requires the recipient to have made a significant independent contribution to his or her scientific field.

Nikolay Bogolyubov received several high USSR honours and international awards for his path-breaking work. He won the Dirac Prize, Max Planck Medal, Franklin Medal, Heineman Prize, two Stalin Prizes, six Orders of Lenin, USSR State Prize, Lenin Prize among many more.

Nikolay Bogoliubov was a scientific supervisor of several noted physicists and mathematicians like Yurii Mitropolskiy, Dmitry Shirkov, Selim Krein, Iosif Gihman, Tofik Mamedov, Kirill Gurov, Mikhail Polivanov, Naftul Polsky, Galina Biryuk, Sergei Tyablikov, Dmitry Zubarev and Vladimir Kadyshevsky.

His method of teaching, based on creation of a warm atmosphere, politeness and kindness, is famous in Russia and is known as the "Bogoliubov approach".

Hottest of 'ultra-hot' planets is so hot its air contains vaporized metal

Artist’s impression of the hot planet KELT9b with KELT-9 in background

New observations of the hottest known planet have revealed temperatures similar to those typically seen at the surface of a star, as well as an atmosphere of vaporized iron and titanium. The findings add to the diverse and, in some cases, extreme conditions seen on planets far beyond our own solar system.

Kevin Heng, a professor at the University of Bern, and co-author of the latest work, said: “The temperatures are so insane that even though it is a planet it has the atmosphere of a star.”

“The main lesson that exoplanets are teaching us is that we can’t just look in the solar system,” Heng added. “There are really weird things out there.”

The planet, called Kelt-9b, was discovered last year by an American team. It is in orbit about a star 650 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus, the swan. The ultra hot planet is about 30 times closer to its host star than the Earth is to the sun – and its star is also twice as hot as the sun. As a result, temperatures on Kelt-9b reach 4,000 C on the side that faces the star. This is not as hot as our Sun, which is almost 6,000 C, but hotter than many stars.

Due to its proximity to the star, the planet orbits the star every 36 hours, with the same side always facing inwards. This means there is constant daytime on one side and constant night on the other, creating extreme temperature variations across the planet. The temperature of the night side is probably still about 2,000 C. Detailed measurements of the orbit suggest the planet is gaseous, probably mostly hydrogen and possibly with a small solid core.

The team used the Galileo National Telescope in La Palma, Canary Islands, to observe the planet precisely as it was moving in front of its host star. By detecting the tiny fraction of light from the star that filters through the planet’s atmosphere, the astronomers were able to detect components in the atmosphere and show that these included iron vapor and titanium. This is the first time that metals have been spotted on planets beyond the solar system.

In future, the same techniques could be used to detect hints of life elsewhere in the Universe.

Galileo National Telescope

Source - The Guardian

India aims to send astronauts into space by 2022, PM says

India will send an astronaut into space by 2022, the country’s prime minister has claimed during an annual independence day speech.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the target from the ramparts of the 370-year-old Red Fort in Delhi on Wednesday morning. “We have decided that by 2022, when India completes 75 years of independence, or before that, a son or daughter of India will go to space with a tricolour [Indian flag] in their hands,” he said.

The GSLV Mark III rocket that will likely be used to send Indians to space 

If successful, India would be the fourth country in the world to conduct a manned space mission, after the US, China and Russia. The Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), K Sivan, has confirmed the timeline and said the pilots and crew, often called vyomanauts – derived from vyom, the Sanskrit word for space – would spend at least seven days in space.

He said the mission, first proposed nearly a decade ago, would cost the famously frugal space agency less than Rs. 12,500 crore. It would be preceded by two unmanned expeditions, the first of which would launch in 2020.

The target echoed that set by John F Kennedy in 1961 to land an American on the moon by the end of the decade. Nasa succeeded more than eight years later, reporting the overall cost of the Apollo programme at about $25.4bn in 1973 dollars – about $147bn today.

India’s space programme was established in 1962 and launched its first lunar probe a decade ago. In September 2014, ISRO successfully guided a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, just the fourth space programme in the world to do so. The Mars mission cost about $73m, nearly a 10th of the cost of a Nasa probe sent to orbit the planet the previous year.

The former air force pilot Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian to go to space, in 1984 as part of a Soviet mission. Several astronauts of Indian origin have been part of Nasa missions, including Kalpana Chawla, who died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion.

The development and early years of India’s space programme were personally overseen by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, who saw an affinity between scientific advancement and the secular, rational worldview he hoped would take root in the new country.

In July, ISRO successfully tested a crew escape system

A prototype of an Indian-made space suit displayed at ISRO's Space Applications Center in Ahmedabad

A prototype of a crew module that would carry humans into space 

Sources - ISRO, The Guardian & India Today

Humans have one copy of a cancer-fighting gene called TP53. Elephants have 20 copies.

Elephants rarely succumb to cancer. That’s surprising given how large the animals grow and how long they can live, which should provide more opportunities for cells to morph into cancer cells. A newly described gene that was brought back from the dead may take part in protecting the animals from the disease.

A deep dive into elephants’ evolutionary history revealed a defunct gene called LIF6 that was somehow resurrected roughly 59 million years ago, around the time that elephants’ ancestors began to develop larger body sizes. Scientists now believe that LIF6 (found only in elephants and their ancestral kin) is triggered by another gene, TP53, to put cells out of commission at the first sign of damage before they turn cancerous.

Previous research on elephants’ cancer-fighting powers focused on TP53, which most animals have. It was known that the gene makes a protein that detects cellular DNA damage and signals for a cell to repair itself or self-destruct, which also helps stop damaged cells from turning into cancer cells. Scientists have found that elephants have 20 TP53 copies, compared with just one for humans and other mammals.

While examining the autopsy data from the San Diego Zoo and a database of nearly 650 elephant deaths, scientists found that just 4.8 percent of the animals die of cancer. For humans, that number ranges from 11 to 25 percent. Understanding the different ways that elephants resist cancer could provide insights into treating the disease in people.

In experiments with elephant connective tissue cells in a dish, scientists at the University of Chicago used a chemical to damage the cells’ DNA. The damage made LIF6 eight times as active in those cells compared with ones not treated with the chemical. And nearly all of LIF6’s activity was wiped out when researchers blocked TP53 from making its protein.

Learning how elephants and other animals resist cancer could help solve a riddle called Peto’s paradox, which describes how the occurrence of cancer across species does not seem to increase with size and life span. Take humans and mice: Humans have 1,000 times as many cells and live 30 times as long as mice, so human cells have more chances to develop DNA errors and damage that might progress to cancer. But epidemiologist Richard Peto observed in the mid-1970s that humans and mice have a similar lifetime risk of developing cancer. Therefore, longer-living, larger-bodied animals must have developed more mechanisms for nipping cancerous changes in the bud than shorter-living, smaller-bodied animals.

More work is needed to figure out how TP53 and LIF6 potentially help elephants fight cancer. But the animals likely wouldn’t be so large and long-lived if these changes in genes that are unique to the elephant hadn’t occurred.

Source - Science News - A resurrected gene may protect elephants from cancer by Aimee Cunningham