SciTech Bulletin 2.2

Your fortnightly digest of bite-sized news from the world of science and technology

Angels as classical representations of virtue and love. Source: minnesotacenterchorale

Science and technology move at the speed of light. With discoveries and inventions being made at an exponential rate, the onus is on us to keep you updated on the fresh and intriguing news.
The Pragyan SciTech Bulletin 2.2 brings you highlights from the fields of Quantum Physics, Biotechnology, Energy and Space.

‘Angel’ particle, a new breakthrough in Quantum Physics

Source: spgirolamo/Depositphotos

The universe began with the Big Bang, which created fundamental particles. Each fundamental particle has its own antiparticle, which has identical properties except for its charge. In 1937, Ettore Majorana, a theoretical physicist predicted that in a class of fundamental particles which includes the proton, neutron, electron, neutrino and quark, there should be particles that are their own antiparticles. These particles are now referred to as Majorana particles.

Recently, scientists from the University of California and Stanford University designed an experiment using superconducting material and a magnetic insulator, and found convincing evidence for the existence of the Majorana particles.

Majorana particles can help build more robust computers which are not affected by environmental noise. A single quantum bit of information could be stored in two separate Majorana particles. So even if the noise affected information in one, the other would certainly keep it safe.

The Majorana particles have been named as ‘Angel’ particles, inspired by the Dan Brown novel, Angels and Demons, in which a time bomb based on anti-matter annihilation was described.

Learn more about the discovery from the Guardian article, Stanford News or the New Atlas article.

Scientists double-up living cells as memory devices

Source: ScienceDaily

It’s a stretch to claim that physical memory devices are becoming obsolete. But a recent phenomenal discovery is proof that this might become a reality soon. Two Harvard geneticists, Seth Shipman and Jeff Nivala, have devised a way to inscribe data into living bacterial cells. It involves using the natural ability of a bacterial cell to remember information about viruses that attack them. This unique ability is called the CRISPR-Cas system. By introducing faux-viruses, which carry the data to be written, the scientists have made use of this pattern found in bacterial cells and recorded up to 100 bytes of data. Before scientists were only able to ingrain a meager 11 bytes of data in a living cell. This new-found technique is being heralded as an influential discovery for technology to progressing terms of developing memory devices and capabilities.

Learn more about the living hard drives with the popularmechanics article.

Foraying into the future with battery-free mobile phones

Source: Washington.edu

Soon, we may no longer need to go hunting for a phone charger or a power bank, as researchers from the University of Washington, USA have managed to design a mobile phone, which is not powered by a battery. Rather, the prototype, made using commercial off-the-shelf components, utilizes the few microwatts of power it harvests from light or radio signals and is powered by a base station. The mobile phone’s capabilities are varied, as the prototype was tested to transmit and receive speech through video calls and communicate with the base station, which is placed 31 feet away. This device has a lot of scope for extending the features of the standard mobile phone in the market, by way of limited energy consumption and improving the overall technology behind the basic smartphone.

Learn more about the battery free phones from the official website.

Saraswati Supercluster: new galaxies and new insights

Source: ibnlive.com

Astronomers from IUCAA (Pune), IISER (Pune), NIT Jamshedpur and Newman College (Thodapuzha) discovered a massive supercluster of galaxies and have named it Saraswati.

Galaxies are the basic units of which the universe is made up of. The sun and the solar system of which the earth is a part of comes under the Milky Way galaxy. Large groups of galaxies, which can contain many hundreds of galaxies, are called as clusters. A supercluster is a group of clusters. The Saraswati supercluster comprises of 42 clusters.

This supercluster spans a distance of 600 million light years across, which is huge as compared to the span of the Milky Way — 150,000 light years across. It is located at a distance of 4 billion light years away from the earth.

The universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. The image we have now is what it would have looked like 4 billion years ago. It is believed that there are thin “filaments” that connect galaxies, forming a cosmic web with large voids in between. New galaxies form in these filaments and then drift to nearby areas. The Saraswati supercluster challenges this theory, because it had formed so early and building such a big structure far back might have been difficult.

Scientists are now looking towards dark matter and dark energy to find an explanation for the nature of formation of the universe.

Read more about the supercluster with The Hindu, or Hindustan Times.

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The Pragyan Blog

News. Art. Comics. Stories. Fact and fiction. Pragyan explores and celebrates Technology.

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