The Higgs Boson.

" Not only is the truth stranger than we can understand, it is stranger then we are capable of understanding." - Unknown

The Higgs Boson, possibly the most important particle and dubbed the 'God Particle' - even though this saying came from a book - "The God Particle: If The Universe Is The Answer, What Is The Question?". According to most people, the author wanted to call it the 'Goddamn' particle because it is so hard to find.

The ironic part about calling it the 'God particle' is that it has nothing at all to do with religion, well it had a part in creating the universe as we know it.

Even though we think we have found it (apparently with 5sigma precession, which is about 1/1,000,000 chance of being a 'fluke') it is still classed as hypothetic, until is it actually found, and proven. 

The Higgs Boson, many people expect its name to be Latin, or Greek, its actually just the man who discovered/predicted it's second name. Peter Higgs.

Finding the Higgs has proven difficult. We can never observe it directly, but we know/predict what it will decay into. So we smash protons together at 99.9% of c and observe the collision, we look for the trail of particles it should leave behind and try ad find it from there.

The hardest part about finding the Higgs is that the standard model (see previous posts) doesn't predict its mass, so we basically have to guess where it could be. 

The Higgs allows particles to what you could say gain mass. The Higgs field is a medium of Higgs'. But how does it act? I'm going to use one of Brain Cox's analogies for this explanation.

Imagine a room full of people (these are the Higgs Bosons, the floor is the Higgs medium), and someone who is very 'unpopular' walks in, the room will split in two, and everyone will avoid this person, right?

This is what a Higgs does to massless particles such as a photon etc.

But... If someone very popular walks in, people will crowd round, as they like him. And he will gain mass, due to these Higgs'. This is why we have mass in a very basic analogy.

The Higgs is on of the most important particles in the TOE (theory of everything) and if we find it, we will learn so much about the universe. Why photons are massless, why we have mass, why the forces (electromagnetic, strong, weak, gravity) act like the do and we will have a better understanding of the early universe. How quarks were made, how protons were formed, then nuclei and now, well... us.

Thanks for reading, Ben.

Particles as Waves: λ=h/p

Particles as Waves: λ=h/p

After people like Einstein demonstrated the particle nature of light; or photons, in 1923 Louis De Broglie came up with the theory that electrons also have a wave/particle duality, thus the electron should also have a wavelength. This theory was based on the fact that since a photon takes its momentum from it's wavelength then shouldn't a particle like an electron take it's wavelength from it's momentum?

This is the formula: λ=h/p

where λ (lambda) is the wavelength,
h is plancks constant :  6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s
and p is momentum which can be determined by mass times velocity.

Let's say that in this hypothetical experiment the electron moves at 6*10^6 m/s and electrons weigh about 1*10^-30 kg.
This means the electrons have a momentum of 6*10^-24.

So 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s divided by the momentum (6*10^-24) would be 0.0000000001m (λ).

This theory gave a new light to matter - instead of only photons and light behaving as a particle/wave duality now other particles light electrons did.

But can we try it for bigger things?

Let's use a football for an example.

Say a football is kicked at about 60mph by a professional footballer (which is around 26.8 m/s).
Now lets say this football weighed 0.43 kg.
So it's momentum would be 11.524.

So 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s divided by 11.524 = 6.1*10^-35m. So yeah - pretty damn small.

Since objects like these on a macroscopic scale (e.g. a football, a human etc.) move extremely slowly to things such as subatomic particles and they weigh so much more the wavelength of these objects is always extremely small. EXTREMELY SMALL.

But according to De Broglie's theory these objects essentially still have a wave. Though this comes in handy with small things like subatomic particles, atoms or molecules rather than things like human beings.

But anyway, enjoy your wave-like nature.

Thanks for reading, Chris.

1000 page views.

In the month or so me and Chris have been doing this [I did it for about a week by myself]  we have finally reached our first true milestone; our first true goal, as aspiration as you may say.

1000 views.

I [Ben] started this off to be what I would say 'a diary' at the least, I'd have a thought, ponder about it and then write down my ideas on the subject. People started to read the blog though and I was actually told good things about it, so I asked Chris to post on here too - which was inevitable me and him are best friends share a love of physics and other sciences.

I could see our views pick up and our followers [on Twitter] rise so I thought I'd start posting it, reminding people to read. This has proved quite useful and helped us gain readers, and allow usual readers to be notified when the latest post up.

I never thought I'd stick to doing a blog of this sort, not at all. I expected to give up after a week but me and Chris have carried on. Thanks for the 1000 views. 2500 is the next milestone for us. Here's to 1500 more.

Thanks for reading, Ben.

Graviton.

"When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility." - Gilbert Chesterton 

The graviton is proving to be the toughest particle to find.


So hard in fact, that some physicists have annulled its existence.


As you can tell by the name, it exerts gravity. Or is basically a force carrier, but for gravity. Even using gravitons in equations are proving hard, well in the classical mechanics. String Theory is one of the answers for the graviton. I will be going over the basics of String Theory soon.

Even in a detector the size of Jupiter, it would take around 10 year for the machine to detect just one graviton. Physicists today are looking for the losses of energy in collisions at the LHC, to show the graviton has took some away, but it has not yet proven to be anywhere near successful. 

Not many theories can even show the graviton might exist, not even String Theory has a solid, believable Theory of Gravity. - so proving that the graviton exists will  be a mammoth task.

If it is proven though, it will cement our current knowledge of gravity - which according to classical physics is just the manifestation of space time due to a large mass. It will also be added to the standard model, a huge equation [and picture] that has organised what you could call a particle zoo. Gluons, W+ bosons etc

There is not much to be said about the graviton, as it has not been discovered, but I will say this - it is mass less, so it must travel at c [speed of light] in a vacuum, if it travels slower than c, than it must have mass. But it is expected to be mass less as gravity has an unlimited range.

Thanks for reading, Ben.

A crash course in Gravity and 1000 Views!

"It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet." Wernher von Braun

Gravity.

Gravity is what keeps us stable, down on the ground. Without it things would ... well float. Everyday objects would not stay down. Your coffee would not be drinkable out of an everyday cup (it requires gravity to tip into your mouth.). People wouldn't stay on the earth like they do today, the earth would not orbit the sun and the sun would not have even been created. So much universal processes require gravity ... and some times we just take it for granted that it's even there.

Gravity is the attractive force between a body and another body each with masses. The amount of gravity is affected by the distance between the two bodies and can be described in this equation:

Where F is the force of gravity between the two bodies,

G is the 'Universal Gravitational Constant' which equals: 6.67300 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2

^{M1 and M2 are the two bodies for which the attractive force is being measured between,
and r is the distance between the two objects.}

Through this equation we can measure the average gravitational attraction between the Earth and it's moon:

The Earth's mass is: 5.9742*10^24 kg.

The Moon's mass is: 7.36*10^22 kg.

The distance between the two is 384400 km.

So the gravitational attraction is: 1.985*10^26 N (Newtons)

Pretty cool huh?

This is how scientists can find out things like the weight of the Earth, or the weight of the moon by re-arranging such equations.

This has been a fairly short post about gravity but I'll continue on the topic of gravity over the next few posts.

For now I want to say thanks for reading our blog since we have reached a milestone of 1000 views!

Thanks for reading everyone and I hope you'll continue reading in the future, Chris.

Particles we think exist but have no proof.

"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows. " - Aristotle Onassis

We live in a world in which people think we know everything, that there is nothing left to know. This is quite a dumb claim, in my opinion we can never know everything... but we can at least try.

Physics falls into this category, except I believe we can know everything [or at least 99% of it]. Many people tell me physics is a dead subject, that theres nothing more to be found. 

"You couldn't be more wrong"

Like a boxer, physics is just getting warmed up - waiting for the big fights.

The Higgs and the Graviton.

Possibly the most important particle in physics, the Higgs boson [and the Higgs field, a Higgs boson medium] which i will discuss more in my next post, which is directly aimed at the Higgs. This is briefly an introduction into what I'm going to be discussing.

Many particles are still needed to be found, even particles that govern laws we have thought to have understood for years. Something that governs your everyday life.

Gravity and mass.

Many people think gravity is controlled by a particle, like mass. Mass is gained in a sense. Gravitons [gravity particles] are thought to exchange.

You may have heard of the LHC [Large Hadron Collider], one a quick side note a hadron is a "composite particle made up of quarks in a bound state". At the LHC, they smash together Hydrogen nuclei [protons] and recreate the conditions billionths of a second after the big bang, and record the particles created in the process.

LHC's [not the LHC] have proved useful, we've found gluons, tau's, muons and tau neutrons, and theres more.

In these next few posts I will inform you of particles that are unfound but, expected to exist. I will also explain how we are trying to find them and how close we are to finding them, truly a fascinating thing.

Thanks for reading, Ben.

Ten Things the Future will hold! (10)

10. Intergalactic Domination Mwahahaha ... well sort of.

The final thing I'd like to see - and maybe one of the things I'd most like to see is humans travelling to the far reaches of the universe and colonising many planets; hopefully abundant in life.
I'm sorry but I'd just adore it if the world turned of like it did in science fiction.
I want to visit Pandora.
I want to go to Omicron Persei 8.
I guess that I think about this too much.
Anyway for the human race to survive and flourish we will need more than one place we can call home and possible candidates need to exist in a place called the 'goldilocks zone'. The 'goldilocks zone' or habitable zone is the position the planet is away from the system's star compared to it's size. This is compared relative to our Sun but can still work with other star systems as long as we know the stars strength relative to our own star.
When we find exo-planets this method is useful to determine is the planet is habitable ... or even habitted.

An artists impression of Gliese 581 g, which could support
liquid water and a structure like Earth's.

An example of one of these is 'Gliese 581 g' which is approximately 20.5 light years away from Earth. Finding planets like these could be useful to us if we ever develop advanced methods of intergalactic travel.

One predicted method of intergalactic colonisation is a space ship which can divide itself into individual pods. The spaceship is made up of these individual units - each with it's own crew, and when the time is right to divide and go to the designated planet the pods separate. Sorry for the extremely short post but not much is planned for intergalactic travel. When our earth starts to be more polluted than it already is we may need to find a new home and maybe something more suitable than a planet in our Solar System might be necessary. Thanks for reading, Chris.

Uncertainty Principle.

So then, to the world of the small; the quantum world.


The world where nothing is as you seem - its different to the world of big.


This equation (located below) is the equation that basically proves the theorem i'm going to explain, since most people don't like math, I wont go over the math inside it.

This is the Uncertainty Principle equation.

This principle states that the more you know about an electrons position the less you know about its momentum and vice versa, etc. To view an electron you must bounce a photon off of it, and when you do this, it disturbs the electron, causing a change in its momentum.


So the more you know about one, the less you know about the other.


This really isn't a long post, and I am sorry for that, but if I were to make it longer, I would have to introduce mathematics, and everyone I know who reads this basically hates math.


... Bar me and Chris of course.


So you now know what this equation looks like and what it proves/stands for, but you don't know the math, if you would like to know about the math, just leave a comment.


Thanks for reading, Ben.

Ten Things the Future will hold! (9)

9. A theory of everything.

Today I'm going to be talking about the grand answer to physics 'The Theory of Everything'.

First of all what do we mean my a theory of everything? Well physicists are working on a theory which can answer all universal phenomena and be able to know the outcome of an experiment without even doing it. It's basically a cheat sheet to life, once we have a working theory so much money will be saved from repeating and even just doing experiments. Research will not have to be undergone to work out what new findings mean as this supposed theory could also predict them. This would mean the ultimate advancement of physics and science.

So the theory of everything isn't a theory which could predict your every move - it doesn't mean 'everything' in that sense but rather a prediction of physical events which happen in our universe and how to explain them - say the behaviour of 'particle x'.

The problem is, two branches of physics - Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, are hard to unify and these aspects of physics need to be used in the 'Theory of Everything'. They're like the friends that fell out and physicists are trying to get them talking again.

Since physics' ultimate goal is to create a grand theory of everything capable of describing all the physical phenomena all branches and aspects of physics need to work together but more importantly be compatible.

Current contenders for the 'Theory of Everything' includes Garrett Lisi's theory 'An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything' wrote by a part time surfer/part time physicist and the interesting thing about this theory is that the maths is considered generally simple compared to similar theory's.

Another contender is simply the Standard Model, which is just the list 12 particles of matter and 4 forces of nature that govern the universe. Without really going into a formula of sorts this jumbled theory attempts to answer the calling for 'Theory of Everything' however some physicists disagree.

Some people just want a simple formula to describe the entirety of the physical universe but it's a little more complicated than that.

In the near future physics will greatly advance and even if we aren't able to come up with a all-in-one theory we may still be close to unifying some existing ones.

Thanks for reading, Chris.

Progress.

"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." - Martin Luther King Jr

Progress, the reason we succeed, the reason we fail. Sometimes motivation, sometimes it demotivates us. "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again" - this is progress in a sense, you cant jump into a pool of water and know how to swim, you need to learn everything before you can do it.

So does this mean math is like music and swimming because in the sense that you cannot complete your goal until you have the knowledge to do what you wish?

you cant write a fancy solo because you haven't learnt how to write music yet, you can only put down the basics, which would most likely be chords. You wont be able to change time signature, its like experimenting with Phi in math, you just don't know what it is yet, you can't adapt to using it. Phi being the golden ratio, or 1.61803399 to be precise, and it is found all over nature itself. 

Is everything in life an obstacle of some sort? A test? A hurdle only to knock us down?

With physics you cant jump in and tackle equations that look like this:

Schrodinger's equation.

You need to acquire a knowledge of mathematics and basic physics principals, like thermo and chromodynamics. We cannot do what we want in life with sacrifice.

Next time you think to yourself "I can't be bothered" remember this, your future could depend on that one instance of wellbeing, you could never get the chance to learn it again - and that is why you should cherish every moment you have to gain knowledge.

I wasn't feeling very 'science-y' today, but my next blog will incorporate more science! Please vote on out poll, thanks!

Thanks for reading, Ben.

Doomsday, again.

“So the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. So what? My calendar ends in December. It just starts again.” 

- Generic saying.

So as i've done about before, 2012 is approaching - and pretty fast. 

Many people just think that the Mayans predicted 2012, they are wrong. Many different cultures had actually predicted the end of the world around this time.

"They had no technology, they couldn't work it out"

The Mayans didn't have the technology we have today, that is correct - they didn't even have metal tools. But they were astonishing astronomers, they had the Universes age relatively close to what we think. They had the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun basically exact and they had a good knowledge of the axial precession of Earth. 

The atomic clock says that the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun is 365.2422 days whereas the Mayans said, thousands of years ago, its was 365.2420 days. That is astonishing in my opinion, even today we're unsure of the 4th decimal, is it 2 or 0?

They knew about cycle the Earth goes though called 'Axial Precession'; a 30,000 (give or take a few thousand year) cycle in with the Earth axis completes its cycle of moving.

In 2012 the Mayans say a 'snake man' (could be a man, a snake or just a man in a rocket - a rocket could of been misunderstood) called Kukulkan will return in 2012, he is the 'creator' of the Maya, and man themselves. 

A snake, seem familiar?

The story of Adam and Eve, the snake? The ancient chinese 'snake like' dragons? What they knew as snakes are all involved in stories of creation, there has to be some significance in it.

The Mayans had a written language, a complex math system and this may not seem like much but, the number 0. This is quite amazing considering this is back a few thousand years.

Doomsday is coming, do you think we'll go through a huge cataclysm?

Even the Bible predicted something in 2012, it predicted a war between The Arch Angel Michael and guess what? The Giant Dragon (a snake like being). Could this just be what we know as 'extra-terrestrials' coming back to us, like the Maya said? Which could even lead to a war.

The Maya were an amazing civilisation, with great knowledge. They weren't as dumb as everyone says they are. Everything they did back then had a significance, why would they have a 5,125 year cycle? Or temples in the shape of the Pleiades? They had an ancient knowledge, things lost in history - that we don't understand. 

Thanks for reading, Ben.  

Ten Things the Future will hold! (8)

8. Future Energy

Today I'm going to write about ways in which energy could be produced in future.

1. Space Energy:

Space Energy plants could be used in the future and would be a real innovation in the production of energy. Companies out there are already planning to supply people with energy produced in space as early as 2016. Orbiting solar cell plants can generate power, transmit it back to earth as microwaves where it can be converted to electricity.

Orbiting Solar Panels

Almost like oil rigs in space with out the need of oil these power plants would be in space with no worry of emissions of any kind damaging the atmosphere.
Another concept of this is giant mirrors in space which could bounce back concentrated sunlight to earth where it could be picked up by a solar farm, however if a mis-hap occurred this could turn into a giant solar death ray ...

Thorium

2. Thorium Power:

Thorium is an element which is slightly radioactive however far more abundant than elements used in power plants like Uranium, this means with the right technology to harness thorium's radioactivity at an optimum level these power plants could become more common. This way of producing nuclear power is also far safer.
Estimates for Thorium Power are five years away.

Thorium

3. Nuclear Fusion:

Nuclear Fusion is the process of the nuclei of two atoms fusing together to form a heavier atom. This process releases huge amounts of energy and an example of this can be found in ... oh maybe our sun? Yes, stars 'run' on converting atoms (in the case of the sun) from hydrogen to helium but even bigger stars can fuse more complex elements. If we ever harnessed this type of technology we would be able to produce incomparable amounts of energy but this process would be expensive. Estimates for Nuclear Fusion power plants are 2050.

 

4. Perpetual Motion:

Perpetual Motion is the study of machines which could produce free energy, basically energy from nothing. However most of these machines are hoaxes, fakes or just do not work - the idea of perpetual motion defies the first and second laws of thermodynamics. So unless their is a way to bypass these by introducing an original source of power the device generally does not count as free energy/perpetual motion.
So unfortunately the estimated date for these devices is never. Unless of course our technology becomes refined enough were we could possibly make a device like this but not in the near future.

Thanks for reading, Chris.

One concept showing the
an imaginary perpetual motion device.
The water continues to pour and re-pour etc.

Ten Things the Future will hold! (7)

"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

7. Universal Translator

If humans ever do make contact with alien beings the reality of the situation is that we won't really know what to do as we won't be able to understand their language. I think this is quite a problem and if intergalactic travel is ever an option for the human race a Universal Translator may come in handy ... if of course the universe is abundant with life.

A 'Babel Fish'

The Universal Translator isn't a recent topic either, it has been discussed widely in science fiction. The TARDIS of Doctor Who uses a 'telepathic field' to translate it's languages, Futurama has it's own Universal Translator which only seems to work in French and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy uses the remarkable Babel fish to translate the Universes language.

Aside from the Universe would it be nice if we could just translate all Earth languages?
It is estimated that the Earth has 6,912 languages that are actually used today but what can we really count as a language? Languages branch out into different dialects which can also branch out so it can be hard to keep these languages accessible to people on a global scale. Lets go back to methods of translation, but this time non fictional.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with Googles translator which can translate 63 common world languages. But Internet translators have their flaws: This website translates a phrase of your choice though 10 languages and back again and gives you the phrase back in English so 'This blog post is about a Universal Translator.' becomes 'This blog published in the "global translator".' Giving a new meaning to the phrase 'Lost in Translation'.
Another common method of translation is through hired translators however the problem with actually hired translators is they need to have a working knowledge of both languages to translate them over and can be expensive.
So it seems we need a futuristic way of translating. Companies all over the world are trying to make one of these real life 'Babelfish' and the race has already begun. It is most likely that the device will comprise of speech recognition which will process the words of the language needing to be translated through a way like Google Translate.

This device created in 2006 is capable of translating Japanese into English in real-time with a 90% accuracy. Devices like this, which could slip into your pocket on your multi-lingual journey could be just what the future holds for languages.

No need for a hired translator.

 No need for a translate app on a smart phone which may provide inaccurate translations.

Thanks for reading again, Chris.

How Humans adapt to their Environment.

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." - Mahatma Gandhi

So i'm finally back, and i'm going to carry on my so called 'mini-series' of adaptations - and we're onto the subject you should be most familiar with...

Yourself!

Humans adapt in the most simplest ways. Most of the time its too simple to even acknowledge it. If its cold what do you do? Well, you put a coat on! That is a human simply adapting to their environment, and if its warm what do you do? Well you take clothes off. Simple as that. These are the most basic of adaptations in humanity.

Another is the ability to drink milk. Seems weird, right? But seriously, being lactose intolerant was the actual gene for an ancient human. We could not drink milk/dairy. People would drink it, but would get sick from it. This carried on happening until someone had a mutation that made them able to drink milk etc. They would them go on to survive longer (due to more food, milk) than the humans with lactose intolerance, so eventually most people who cannot have milk will die out, and lactose tolerance will prevail!

We also do it in places like Chernobyl, or radioactive places. Even outer space. We wear radioactive suits, and space suits to protect us from what is out there. Radioactive suits protect us from getting radiation poisoning, which could lead to cancer, and then death. And the space suit protects us from the vacuum of space, protects us from choking and even suffering from 'The Bends.' Which is basically when bubbles form in your blood. (I will go over this in my next post)

Thanks for reading, Ben.

Ten Things the Future will hold! (6)

"Great acts are made up of small deeds."

Lao Tzu

6. Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the engineering of tiny, microscopic systems which are able to manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic scale. Today I'm going to describe Nanotechnology through the best analogies I can think of of along with listing it's possible uses.

First of all we'll need to know about the scales that we're talking about. Nanotechnology usually relates to sizes measured in nanometres.
What's a nanometre?
Well take a centimetre ruler.
Find a millimetre on there ... no divide that by one million.
Yeah, so small our brains can't really fathom it. The width of a human hair is about 100,000 nanometres wide and you can think of one nanometre as 10 hydrogen atoms long.
If you'd like to visualise this scale easier there's an interactive 'journey' into the scales of the large and small available here.

*Credit to Cary and Michael Huang for Scale of the Universe 2

I'd really suggest you check this out, really amazing.

Right to back to the nanometres, right?
At this small scale you'd think making a few changes here and there would not really make a difference at all ... well you'd be wrong. Think of the saying attributed from Aesop 'United we stand, Divided we fall'
Well think of this more or less, changing round the structure of the microscopic does not make all matter crumble but rather it makes it behave in different ways.

For example lets look at carbon. A rather 'basic' atom - basic in the sense it makes up all life around us, the organic element so to speak.

One of the forms you can find carbon in is coal, nowadays if we found a lump of coal just lying there we would just walk straight past it right?

But you wouldn't walk straight past a diamond.

Now if you have a knowledge of atomic structure or even a bit of chemistry you're going to know what I'm going on about but if you don't bare with me ...

You see, coal and diamond are both made of carbon

  but by changing it's structure we get two very different things.

This is one of the many uses of nanotechnology - manipulating matter in order to change what it is.

 Another use is in medicine. Scientists that work on nanotechnology want to create self replicating nanotech' like, similar to bacteria. Nanotechnology with a specific goal could be inserted into a person and become almost like anti-bodies which could self-replicate. Again when treating people with a certain disease if we think about the small scale we could eradicate it much faster. By thinking in the scale of the small we ca get almost anything done.

Nanotech' will also be big in production. Battery's could be made more effective if they had nanotechnology components, material such as carbon nanotubes can be made with the use of nanotechnology and certain components for circuit boards can be made this way to.

If we can truly master the world beyond the microscope the possibilities to what we could do are ... again endless.
Thanks for reading, Chris.

Ten Things the Future will hold! (5)

5. Cryonics.

Cryonics is the process of maintaining the human body by preserving it in extremely cold temperatures once it has died so that one day future medicine may be able to treat it. You may have seen the TV series Futurama where the main character Fry falls into one of the cryogenics pods and wakes up thousands of years later in the 31st Century, this in essence is cryogenics however it is a little more complicated.

 

For starters, cryonics isn't used as a way of skipping through time - today it is used to preserver people that die with the hope of reviving them in the future. Also there's a process which needs to be undergone before the subject is frozen in order for them to be hopefully revived in the future.

When the person that has signed up to be cryogenically frozen is pronounced dead, their body is taken by a team of people which aim to ready it for freezing. It is made sure that the brain is looked after with blood and oxygen supplied, the body is packed in ice to try and prevent as little decay as possible and an anticoagulant is given so that the blood in the body does not clot. It's easy to think of this as like when crops are picked to be sent to the supermarket; they try to make them as fresh as possible with the least time from picked to shelf - this is essentially what this part of the process is for.

After this vitrification must take place before cooling so that the water in the cells does not freeze, expand and break the cells completely. To do this the water in the body's cells is replaced with a 'cryo-protectant' which makes sure tissue in the body does not for ice crystals and is well preserved - it is brought to extremely low temperatures without freezing.

The body is cooled on dry ice, inserted into a individual container and then the container is put into a tank of liquid nitrogen along with approximately 3 other bodies and six brains. You in the mood to be cryogenically frozen yet?

 

Oh and if you think this is another plan - it isn't. Tonnes of people sign up to be cryogenically frozen once dead, but no one has ever been revived yet. I guess we'll just have to wait for our frozen friends some time in the future ... and this could be as earlier as 2040.

The fact is it is unsure if we'll have a cure for the causes of death of these people anytime soon. I'm glad they don't do this to people when they are alive as it could be just selling them a lie. I do however think it would be amazing to one day be woken up from death itself cured of whatever 'killed' you. Scientists are starting to wonder when a person is actually dead. People used to be buried alive in the past when medical science wasn't able to fully pronounce a person as dead and now we have such technology like defibrillators which can bring a person back from the brink of death - or even after they are 'dead'.


Thanks for reading, Chris.

Adaptations.

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative." - H. G. Wells

Animals, every single one, are all the way they are due to evolution. Not just evolution though - adaptations too. Every animal will have something that helps it thrive in its natural surrounding.

Look at the polar bear, its white coat helps it blend it with its surroundings, to hide from its prey - so it can sneak up, unnoticed, and attack. Due to this adaptation it get more food, and therefore can live longer. It also has a thick layer of fat - it lives in the arctic right?

Its cold there.

Its thick layer of fat helps it stay warm, as well as thick fur. They're well suited for a chilly winter! Ever noticed there large paws? This helps them walk along the snow - its spreads their weight out so they can walk better. They're well suited, arctic machines if anything.

From hot to cold, the camel. What are its adaptations? Well to start off, a more 'subtle' adaptation is its long eyelashes, these help to keep sand out of its eyes - its windy there y'know! They also can for weeks without water! This helps them survive in the desert conditions. They also can go for months without food, this helps on long journeys.A camel's body temperature changes throughout the day from approximately 34°C to 42°C. This helps the camel stop sweating, so it can keep more water. They also have wide feet too! This helps them walk on the sand without sinking in! Their ears are coated with hair, inside and out to help keep sand and dust out, they also have thick lips - so they can eat all the 'prickly' plants and finally they can blend in with the surroundings due to the colour of their bodies!

Many animals are suited perfectly to their environments, even us. They could not survive with there adaptations, they thrive because of them. Next post will be about human adaptations and what we use them for! Sorry for the short post.

Thanks for reading, Ben.

Ten Things the Future will hold! (4)

"Authentication is something you have, something you know, and something you are when you add biometrics."
Charles Kolodgy

4. Biometrics.

Everyone has heard of the high tech gadgets that can scan a persons fingerprint to identify them and give them access to an office, a futuristic laboratory or even just a library account. This is biometrics or identifying a person based on biological characteristics such as fingerprints, retinas or irises or even by identifying their voice. Today I'm going to be discussing some different types of biometrics and their impact on the future.

1. Fingerprint Recognition:

Biometrics isn't such a far off idea as it is already used in so many places around the world, take the fingerprint scan - as I've already mentioned this can be used for the simple task of bringing up a persons library account.

Each persons fingerprint
is unique to themselves
which is a useful way
of identification through
biometrics.

This method of Biometrics is not as much used for identification but more for authenticity; when someone is already identified but can gain access to something like an account without the use of a password.





 I find it fascinating just how much this technology is advancing though - I've even heard of fingerprint scans which scan for heat as well as just the fingerprint itself. This makes sure no craft villain can go around slicing off fingers to get into top secret bases.



2. Iris Scanning

Iris scanning can be used to scan a persons eyes as another method of identification through biometrics. This technology takes a high resolution picture of the eye and looks for variables such as the edge of the iris and edge/centre of the pupil to identify the person to make sure they can gain access to whatever the scan is used for.

This technology is far more precise than fingerprint scans and since fingerprints can change through various things and the iris is less likely to this is a really effective way of authentication and biometrics for security purposes.



3. Voice Recognition

Voice recognition is also a common type of biometrics it can be used over the phone or by a scanner like the ones used for iris/fingerprint. It is good as every person has differently shaped vocal cavities along with environmental characteristics such as accent so our voice is unique to ourselves.

A spectrograph.

Voice recognition can work by measuring the frequencies and acoustic properties of our voice and cross referencing these values (displayed on a spectrograph) with values on a database which can give the person access to what the voice activation was used for. This technology has its downfall like the rest because of identity theft. People could easily gain audio of the person speaking the password and use it to gain access to the information.

The implications of Biometrics are amazing as each quality are often unique to us, I think if we used them in combination with each other then we could properly secure the information withheld as it would be difficult for a person to gain all parts of the biometric scan: voice, eye, fingerprint etc. and gain access to the information rather than a simple password.
Imagine scanning you eye to access your bank account?
Imagine just saying a word over the phone as authentication?
Imagine a biometric passport?

When we look at all the types of biometrics the possibilities are endless! Even handwriting can be measured through pressure, speed and angle - all personal traits that we can use to authenticate ourselves. I think this is a real futuristic piece of tech which could really be a part of our near future.

Thanks for reading again, Chris.