Scientists Discover an 'Instant Cosmic Classic' Supernova |
 A supernova discovered August 24 is closer to Earth -- approximately 21 million light-years away -- than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools.The finding of such a supernova so early and so close has energized the astronomical community as they are scrambling to observe it with as many telescopes as possible, including the Hubble Space Telescope. Joshua Bloom, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, called it "the supernova of a generation." Astronomers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, who made the discovery predict that it will be a target for research for the next decade, making it one of the most-studied supernova in history. The supernova, dubbed PTF 11kly, occurred in the Pinwheel Galaxy, located in the "Big Dipper," otherwise known as the Ursa Major constellation. It was discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which is designed to observe and uncover astronomical events as they happen. "We caught this supernova very soon after explosion. PTF 11kly is getting brighter by the minute. It's already 20 times brighter than it was yesterday," said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who first spotted the supernova. Nugent is also an adjunct professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. "Observing PTF 11kly unfold should be a wild ride. It is an instant cosmic classic." He credits supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy supercomputing center at Berkeley Lab, as well as high-speed networks with uncovering this rare event in the nick of time. The PTF survey uses a robotic telescope mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California to scan the sky nightly. As soon as the observations are taken, the data travels more than 400 miles to NERSC via the National Science Foundation's High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network and DOE's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). At NERSC, computers running machine learning algorithms in the Real-time Transient Detection Pipeline scan through the data and identify events to follow up on. Within hours of identifying PTF 11kly, this automated system sent the coordinates to telescopes around the world for follow-up observations. Three hours after the automated PTF pipeline identified this supernova candidate, telescopes in the Canary Islands (Spain) had captured unique "light signatures," or spectra, of the event. Twelve hours later, his team had observed the event with a suite of telescopes including the Lick Observatory (California), and Keck Observatory (Hawaii) and determined the supernova belongs to a special category, called Type Ia. Nugent notes that this is the earliest spectrum ever taken of a Type Ia supernova. "Type Ia supernova are the kind we use to measure the expansion of the Universe. Seeing one explode so close by allows us to study these events in unprecedented detail," said Mark Sullivan, the Oxford University team leader who was among the first to follow up on this detection. http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Reports_of_Google_acquiring_Slide_emerge-nid-70410-cid--sid-.html |
Sunday, 28 August 2011
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Famous Scientist
Famous Scientist Christopher Kelk Ingod Sir Christopher Kelk Ingold FRS (28 October 1893 – 8 December 1970) was a British chemist based in Leeds and London. His groundbreaking work in the 1920s and 1930s on reaction mechanisms and the electronic structure of organic compounds was responsible for the introduction into mainstream chemistry of concepts such as nucleophile, electrophile, inductive and resonance effects, and such descriptors as SN1, SN2, E1, and E2. He also was a co-author of the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. Ingold is regarded as one of chief pioneers of physical organic chemistry.Ingold began his scientific studies at Hartley University College at Southampton (now Southampton University) taking an external BSc in 1913 with the University of London. After a brief time with Imperial College, London and some war service, as a scientist, Ingold earned an MSc degree, again with the University of London. He returned to Imperial College for work with Jocelyn Field Thorpe, and was awarded a PhD in 1918 and a DSc in 1921. Ingold married Dr. Hilda Usherwood, a fellow chemist with whom he collaborated, in 1923. They had two daughters and a son, the chemist Keith Ingold. In 1924, Ingold moved to Leeds University where he spent six years as Professor of Organic Chemistry. He returned to London in 1930, and served for 24 years as Head of the chemistry department at University College London, from 1937 until his retirement in 1961. During his study of alkyl halides, Ingold found evidence for two possible reaction mechanisms for nucleophilic substitution reactions. He found that most secondary and tertiary alkyl halides underwent a two-step mechanism (SN1) while most primary alkyl halides underwent a one-step mechanism (SN2). This conclusion was based on the finding that reactions of most secondary and tertiary alkyl halides with nucleophiles were dependent on the concentration of the alkyl halide only. Meanwhile he discovered that primary alkyl halides, when reacting with nucleophiles, depend on both the concentration of the alkyl halide and the concentration of the nucleophile. |
EDUCATION +VE
| EDUCATION +VE |
Online Enterprises Gain Foothold as Path to a College Degree  ThHarvard and Ohio State are not going to disappear any time soon. But a host of new online enterprises are making earning a college degree cheaper, faster and flexible enough to take work experience into account. As Wikipedia upended the encyclopedia industry and iTunes changed the music business, these businesses have the potential to change higher education. Ryan Yoder, 35, a computer programmer who had completed 72 credits at the University of South Florida years ago, signed up with an outfit called Straighterline, paid $216 to take two courses in accounting and one in business communication, and a month later transferred the credits to Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, which awarded him a bachelor’s degree in June. Alan Long, 34, a paramedic and fire captain, used another new institution, Learning Counts, to create a portfolio that included his certifications and a narrative spelling out what he had learned on the job. He paid $750 to Learning Counts and came out with seven credits at Ottawa University in Kansas, where he would have had to spend $2,800 to earn them in a traditional classroom. And Erin Larson, who has four children and works full time at a television station but wanted to become a teacher, paid $3,000 per semester to Western Governors University for as many classes as she could handle — plus a weekly call from a mentor. “Anywhere else, it would have cost three arms and legs,” said Ms. Larson, 40, “and as a certified procrastinator, I found that weekly call very useful.” For those who have the time and money, the four-year residential campus still offers what is widely considered the best educational experience. Critics worry that the online courses are less rigorous and more vulnerable to cheating, and that their emphasis on providing credentials for specific jobs could undermine the traditional mission of encouraging critical thinking. |
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Famous Scientist
Famous Scientist
William Lipscom
William Nunn Lipscomb, Jr. (December 9, 1919 – April 14, 2011)[2] was a Nobel Prize-winning American inorganic and organic chemist working in nuclear magnetic resonance, theoretical chemistry, boron chemistry, and biochemistry. Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920,[1] and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1946.
From 1946 to 1959 he taught at the University of Minnesota. From 1959 to 1990 he was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, where he was a professor emeritus since 1990.
Lipscomb resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2011 from pneumonia. In grade school Lipscomb studied somewhat independently, collecting animals, insects, pets, rocks, and minerals. Interest in astronomy led him to visitor nights at the Observatory of the University of Kentucky, where Prof. H. H. Dowing gave him a copy of Baker's Astronomy. Lipscomb credits gaining many intuitive physics concepts from this book and from his conversations with Dowing, who became Lipscomb's life long friend.
The young Lipscomb undertook other projects, such as morse-coded messages over wires and crystal radio sets, with five nearby friends who became physicists, physicians, and an engineer.
At age of 12, Lipscomb was given a small Gilbert chemistry set, He expanded it by ordering apparatus and chemicals from suppliers and by using his father's privilege as a physician to purchase chemicals at the local drugstore at a discount. Lipscomb made his own fireworks and entertained visitors with color changes, odors, and explosions. His mother questioned his chemistry hobby only once, when he attempted to isolate a large amount of urea from the natural product.
Lipscomb credits perusing the large medical texts in his physician father's library and the influence of Linus Pauling years later to his undertaking biochemical studies in his later years. Had Lipscomb become a physician like his father, he would have been the fourth physician in a row along the Lipscomb male line.Lipscomb's high-school chemistry teacher, Frederick Jones, gave Lipscomb his college books on organic, analytical and general chemistry, and asked only that Lipscomb take the examinations. During the class lectures, Lipscomb in the back of the classroom did research that he thought was original (but he later found was not): the preparation of hydrogen from sodium formate (or sodium oxalate) and sodium hydroxide. The work was careful, including gas analyses and searching for probable side reactions.
Better 'Photon Loops' May Be Key to Computer and Physics Advances
Better 'Photon Loops' May Be Key to Computer and Physics Advances
The advent of optical fibers a few decades ago made it possible for dozens of independent phone conversations to travel long distances along a single glass cable by, essentially, assigning each conversation to a different color-each narrow strand of glass carrying dramatic amounts of information with little interference.
Ironically, while it is easy to send photons far across a town or across the ocean, scientists have a harder time directing them to precise locations across short distances-say, a few hundred nanometers-and this makes it difficult to employ photons as information carriers inside computer chips.
"We run into problems when trying to use photons in microcircuits because of slight defects in the materials chips are made from," says Jacob Taylor, a theoretical physicist at NIST and JQI. "Defects crop up a lot, and they deflect photons in ways that mess up the signal."
These defects are particularly problematic when they occur in photon delay devices, which slow the photons down to store them briefly until the chip needs the information they contain. Delay devices are usually constructed from a single row of tiny resonators, so a defect among them can ruin the information in the photon stream. But the research team perceived that using multiple rows of resonators would build alternate pathways into the delay devices, allowing the photons to find their way around defects easily.
As delay devices are a vital part of computer circuits, the alternate-pathway technique may help overcome obstacles blocking the development of photon-based chips, which are still a dream of computer manufacturers. While that application would be exciting, lead author Mohammad Hafezi says the prospect of investigating the quantum Hall effect with the same technology also has great scientific appeal.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
quote 24-8-11
"Always bear in "MIND", that your own resolution to "SUCCEED",
is more important than any one thing"
Famous Scientist
Irwin Rose
Irwin A. Rose (born July 16, 1926) is an American biologist. Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.Rose attended Washington State University for one year prior to serving in the Navy during WWII. Upon returning from the war he received his B.S. in 1948 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1952, both from the University of Chicago. He served on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine's department of biochemistry from 1954 to 1963. He then joined Fox Chase Cancer Center's division of basic in 1963 and stayed there until he retired in 1995. He joined University of Pennsylvania during the 1970s and served as a Professor of Physical Biochemistry. He is currently a distinguished professor-in-residence in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.
Irwin (Ernie) trained several postdoctoral fellows while at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where the groundbreaking Ub work was done. These included Art Haas, the first to see Ubiquitin chains, Keith Wilkinson, the one to first identify APF-1 as Ubiquitin, and Cecile Pickart, a world class enzymologist in many parts of the Ub system.Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines. Among the most important topics are five unifying principles that can be said to be the fundamental axioms of modern biology:
1. Cells are the basic unit of life
2. New species and inherited traits are the product of evolution
3. Genes are the basic unit of heredity
4. An organism regulates its internal environment to maintain a stable and constant condition
5. Living organisms consume and transform energy.
Subdisciplines of biology are recognized on the basis of the scale at which organisms are studied and the methods used to study them: biochemistry examines the rudimentary chemistry of life; molecular biology studies the complex interactions of systems of biological molecules; cellular biology examines the basic building block of all life, the cell;
physiology examines the physical and chemical functions of the tissues, organs, and organ systems of an organism; and ecology examines how various organisms interact and associate with their environment.
INSPIRATION & MOTIVATION
To live as gently as I can;
To be, no matter where, a man;
To take what comes of good or ill
And cling to faith and honor still;
To do my best, and let that stand
The record of my brain and hand;
And then, should failure come to me,
Still work and hope for victory.
To have no secret place wherein
I stoop unseen to shame or sin;
To be the same when I'm alone
As when my every deed is known
To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or sham
Exactly what men think I am..
To be, no matter where, a man;
To take what comes of good or ill
And cling to faith and honor still;
To do my best, and let that stand
The record of my brain and hand;
And then, should failure come to me,
Still work and hope for victory.
To have no secret place wherein
I stoop unseen to shame or sin;
To be the same when I'm alone
As when my every deed is known
To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or sham
Exactly what men think I am..
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