Science

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to reach outer space. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made it to the surface of the moon. And that is as far as any of us has ventured.

Apart from the mundane problems of budgets and political will, the major roadblock is that our dominant space-flight technology – chemically fuelled rockets – just isn't up to the distances involved. We can send robot probes to the outer planets, but they take years to get there.

The study of the human genome is believed to be the key to learning more about the myriad of diseases that plague humans. The genes hold the keys to everything that makes people who they are from eye color to hair color.

DNA also holds the key to genetic diseases, and learning more about the genes that contribute to disease is part of what researchers need to unlock to be able to find cures for disease. DNA sequencing today is a time consuming and expensive process. Much of the time and expense in sequencing DNA comes from the DNA amplification process.

The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code.

Despite worries about the damaging effects of the digital age on brain development, surfing the internet can, in fact, increase IQ and boost memory in adults, scientists have found.

Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles compared the brains of middle-aged participants who rarely used the internet to experienced internet users, as they conducted web searches for an hour each day. After five days, areas of the prefrontal cortex, which controls the ability to make decisions and integrate complex information, had become significantly more active.

Not so long ago, large, numerate brains got together to create a mathematical formula for choosing the right wife.

Not content with satisfying the need for perfection in human relationships, mathematicians have now dedicated themselves to creating equations for the perfect relationship with the physical world. Yes, according to the Telegraph, a British math professor has created a formula for successfully slipping your car into a parking spot.

The World Wildlife Fund claims that the Earth will become uninhabitable by 2050. Our planet has been badly abused, and it has been dying a slow death. The Earth will face extinction in roughly forty years, which is sooner than a child born today enters midlife crisis.

So, the news is bleak for those who are working hard to build the future of their children, and for all those ambitious people who have grandiose plans for their future. Why bother about interior decoration if the house is burning? There may not be any future left in the future. The Earth is dying.

Squealing tires and the crunch of impact -- when an accident occurs, the steel sheets that form a motor vehicle's bodywork must provide adequate impact protection and shield its passengers to the greatest extent possible. But the strength of the steels that are used throw up their own challenges, for example when automobile manufacturers have to punch holes in them for cable routing.

Good things come to those who wait. But now that the Large Hadron Collider has restarted after undergoing more than a year of repairs, physicists are racing to analyse the data. Just days after the first protons were smashed together at the LHC, the first paper on the results has been accepted to a journal.

The first collisions took place on Monday, 23 November; by Saturday, a paper had been uploaded to the arxiv server, where physicists often publish their results prior to formal publication. Three days later, it had been accepted by the European Journal of Physics.

BM’s Dharmendra Modha has a vision. “Cognitive computing seeks to engineer the mind by reverse engineering the brain,” says Modha, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, just south of San Francisco. “The mind arises from the brain, which is made up of billions of neurons that are linked by an Internet-like network.”

How does our biological system know that it is supposed to operate on a 24-hour cycle? Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that a tiny molecule holds the clue to the mystery.