Crazy, Cool and Weird Stuff

This is a relatively old article but for what it's worth, this work done by Prof. Lene Vestergaard Hau from Harvard University proves that light can be changed into matter and subsequently changed back into light.

Prof. Lene Vestergaard Hau. Source: Here

They did the experiment by slowing the light pulse using a cloud of cold atom and the light, now travels at a very slow speed will made its imprint onto the cold atom. The experimenters then turned the light pulse off and tried to guide the imprint to a second cold atom cloud and surprising enough, the fingerprint can't be seen but the atom in the atom cloud were found not touching each other.

An illustration of a 'super-photon' created when physicists turned photons into a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. | Jan Klaers, University of Bonn. Source: Here

The distance between the first and second clump is only eight - thousandths of an inch apart but this can be considered a very distance gap. So when they nudge the second cloud with light pulse, then the imprint survives and is turned back to the light which has the same characteristics, shape and wavelength as it entered the first cloud.

From the first to the second clump of atom, the light change from the form of light pulse into an invincible matter wave, a clump of atom that travels through the cloud and behaving as wave. After the light beam was fired to the second clump, this matter wave turned into light pulse again and out it goes.

Well, the application of this light - matter conversion mostly will be in telecommunication as it is believed that light can carry information and it is almost tamper proof. We won't be seeing light be casually turned into matter in near future but the imagination will come true if we search hard enough for it.

Source: Here

I recall to have write something related with wearable technology somewhere in my blog and it turns out the world has gone better than that simple shirt. VTT, a business technology group has now designed several wearable technology in the form of ring, functional fingernail and wristbands.


Through a product they called "inTouch", it allows you to store data temporarily for it to be transferred from source device to a destination device. According to VTT, this technology could also be used in healthcare (well...) and in the future, may serve as an extra layer of security where passwords are stored only in this device and is used for online accounts or even unlocking doors.

Technology has pretty much intrudes everything in our lives. One of the aspects is medicine. Today, the concept of incorporating medicine with technology helps a lot in saving people's lives.

A patch to relieve chronic pain in time of need.

The image shown above is a concept brought by Thimble Bioelectronics and it is used as chronic pain reliever. Current treatment for chronic pain involves some medications (ibuprofen, aspirin, vicodin) or meditations. The patch in this concept will act as pain reliever by method of Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), an electrical shock uses in electric therapy to treat certain types of chronic pain.

Traditional equipment for TENS therapy. Quite scary as compared to above picture.

Normal TENS therapy will need the use of some electrical powered machine to deliver a shock via several electrodes attached to the body. The patch, however, will function like a bandage in which the user can administer their own pain relief when needed (kinda like administering your own drug intake). It will come with Bluetooth connectivity and mobile devices with a special app tracking how the patch is used and managed. Pretty neat, huh?

Source: Here

Now, almost all human beings on Earth will learn mathematics or to simply put it how to count. A lot of people will flunk out of math class and if we look closer a lot of these are mainly girls rather than boys.

A new English study has found that girls suffer from mathematics anxiety more than boys, confirming some previous research. The analysis also found that high math anxiety was a stronger predictor of poor test performance for girls than boys. 

Even though girls have a higher tendency  of  flunking math class but the fact is that girls that performed in math will have a higher and better grades than most boys. This kinda balance out the whole thing.

To better understand the implications of math anxiety, the researchers looked at tests and questionnaires from 4,333 English secondary school children (in their early to midteens).  Some have considered math anxiety a part of another misery familiar to students: test anxiety. In this study, the researchers assessed test anxiety and controlled for it to see if it factored into the results.

They found that test anxiety was also linked to poor mathematics performance, but this link was stronger for girls than boys.

While many, but not all, previous studies indicate girls suffer from higher mathematics anxiety than boys, it is not clear why.

Researchers have offered many speculative reasons for this difference: that it arises from sex roles that assign math to the male domain; that girls may be more willing to admit feelings of anxiety or may be more critical of themselves than boys; that boys have greater self confidence; and that past experience with mathematics is responsible, the researchers write.

Reference : http://www.livescience.com/21470-math-more-likely-to-make-girls-anxious.html

In Marvel movie The Avengers, it is stated that the Tesseract contains an unimaginable power and can be used as weapon of mass destruction if the power can be unlocked. Well, the tesseract that i'm refering to is not in the movie but rather the one in field of geometry.

Tesseract from the movie The Avengers

According to wikipedia, a tesseract is a four dimensional analog of the cube and sometimes is called 8-cell, regular octahoron or cubic prism. Tesseract is a four dimensional hypercube, (cube with dimension higher than 3) and first proposed by Charles Howard Hinton, a British mathematician in the 19th century. 

A tesseract image in Schlegel diagram.

A tesseract can be unfolded into 8 cubes in 3D space, the same as a cube unfolded 6 squares in 2D surface. The image below shows how a tesseract can be build from 1 dimensional space until the first cube projection in 4 dimensional space.

How to draw a tesseract from a single point ie one dimension.

There are other types of tesseract for example truncated tesseract and rectified tesseract in which they have different Schlafli Symbol and Schlegel diagram.  The existence of higher dimension is by far an abstract concept and none have observed these higher dimensions. Nonetheless, the mathematics suggests the possibility and therefore could exist in this vast universe.


p/s: I read somewhere in which lower dimensional object couldn't possibly see the higher dimension but the higher dimensional object can definitely see the lower one. Not sure how this implicates the existence of higher deity though. 

For the past hundred years, many scientists tried to do alchemy, in which the ultimate aim is to create a philosopher's stone, an object powerful enough to convert normal metal to gold or silver. The stone also is believed to hold the secret of immortality through elixir of life. Though not all part from alchemy is understood nowadays, it did provide a foundation for modern science and chemistry.

Nonetheless, people are still trying to find ways to create gold because after all, gold is considered high value item and represents the wealth of an individual. Unfortunately, the status may change due to recent finding at Michigan University. The finding, which is a bacteria named Cupriavidus metalliduransc (right?) is found to be able to produce gold nugget through microbial processes.

"Gold nugget" after the microbial alchemy

Well, the amount, as you can see from the picture is not much compare to the gold that you'll find in nature but with more research, the capability to turn something into gold, though amazing, may bring impact to world's economy.

Gold nugget found in nature

The researchers presented their finding as an art project called The Great Work of Metal Lover by using a portable lab house where the bacterium performs the "microbial alchemy" thingy. And luckily, the researchers said that replicating the bacterium's actions on a larger scale would be impractical and cost prohibitive.

Source: here