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Science Simplified!

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JAI VIGNAN

All about Science - to remove misconceptions and encourage scientific temper

Communicating science to the common people

'To make them see the world differently through the beautiful lense of science'

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WE LOVE SCIENCE HERE BECAUSE IT IS A MANY SPLENDOURED THING

THIS IS A WAR ZONE WHERE SCIENCE FIGHTS WITH NONSENSE AND WINS

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

"Being a scientist is a state of mind, not a profession!"

"Science, when it's done right, can yield amazing things".

The Reach of Scientific Research From Labs to Laymen

The aim of science is not only to open a door to infinite knowledge and wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.

"Knowledge is a Superpower but the irony is you cannot get enough of it with ever increasing data base unless you try to keep up with it constantly and in the right way!" The best education comes from learning from people who know what they are exactly talking about.

Science is this glorious adventure into the unknown, the opportunity to discover things that nobody knew before. And that’s just an experience that’s not to be missed. But it’s also a motivated effort to try to help humankind. And maybe that’s just by increasing human knowledge—because that’s a way to make us a nobler species.

If you are scientifically literate the world looks very different to you.

We do science and science communication not because they are easy but because they are difficult!

“Science is not a subject you studied in school. It’s life. We 're brought into existence by it!"

Links to some important articles :

1. Interactive science series...

a. how-to-do-research-and-write-research-papers-part 13

b. Some Qs people asked me on science and my replies to them...

Part 6, part-10, part-11, part-12, part 14 , part- 8,

part- 1, part-2, part-4, part-5, part-16, part-17, part-18 , part-19 , part-20

part-21 , part-22, part-23, part-24, part-25, part-26, part-27 , part-28

part-29, part-30, part-31, part-32, part-33, part-34, part-35, part-36, part-37,

part-38, part-40, part-41, part-42, part-43, part-44, part-45, part-46, part-47

Part 48, part49, Critical thinking -part 50 , part -51, part-52, part-53

part-54, part-55, part-57, part-58, part-59, part-60, part-61, part-62, part-63

part 64, part-65, part-66, part-67, part-68, part 69, part-70 part-71, part-73 ...

.......306

BP variations during pregnancy part-72

who is responsible for the gender of their children - a man or a woman -part-56

c. some-questions-people-asked-me-on-science-based-on-my-art-and-poems -part-7

d. science-s-rules-are-unyielding-they-will-not-be-bent-for-anybody-part-3-

e. debate-between-scientists-and-people-who-practice-and-propagate-pseudo-science - part -9

f. why astrology is pseudo-science part 15

g. How Science is demolishing patriarchal ideas - part-39

2. in-defence-of-mangalyaan-why-even-developing-countries-like-india need space research programmes

3. Science communication series:

a. science-communication - part 1

b. how-scienitsts-should-communicate-with-laymen - part 2

c. main-challenges-of-science-communication-and-how-to-overcome-them - part 3

d. the-importance-of-science-communication-through-art- part 4

e. why-science-communication-is-geting worse - part 5

f. why-science-journalism-is-not-taken-seriously-in-this-part-of-the-world - part 6

g. blogs-the-best-bet-to-communicate-science-by-scientists- part 7

h. why-it-is-difficult-for-scientists-to-debate-controversial-issues - part 8

i. science-writers-and-communicators-where-are-you - part 9

j. shooting-the-messengers-for-a-different-reason-for-conveying-the- part 10

k. why-is-science-journalism-different-from-other-forms-of-journalism - part 11

l. golden-rules-of-science-communication- Part 12

m. science-writers-should-develop-a-broader-view-to-put-things-in-th - part 13

n. an-informed-patient-is-the-most-cooperative-one -part 14

o. the-risks-scientists-will-have-to-face-while-communicating-science - part 15

p. the-most-difficult-part-of-science-communication - part 16

q. clarity-on-who-you-are-writing-for-is-important-before-sitting-to write a science story - part 17

r. science-communicators-get-thick-skinned-to-communicate-science-wi thout-any-bias - part 18

s. is-post-truth-another-name-for-science-communication-failure?

t. why-is-it-difficult-for-scientists-to-have-high-eqs

u. art-and-literature-as-effective-aids-in-science-communication-and teaching

v.* some-qs-people-asked-me-on-science communication-and-my-replies-to-them

** qs-people-asked-me-on-science-and-my-replies-to-them-part-173

w. why-motivated-perception-influences-your-understanding-of-science

x. science-communication-in-uncertain-times

y. sci-com: why-keep-a-dog-and-bark-yourself

z. How to deal with sci com dilemmas?

A+. sci-com-what-makes-a-story-news-worthy-in-science

B+. is-a-perfect-language-important-in-writing-science-stories

C+. sci-com-how-much-entertainment-is-too-much-while-communicating-sc

D+. sci-com-why-can-t-everybody-understand-science-in-the-same-way

E+. how-to-successfully-negotiate-the-science-communication-maze

4. Health related topics:

a. why-antibiotic-resistance-is-increasing-and-how-scientists-are-tr

b. what-might-happen-when-you-take-lots-of-medicines

c. know-your-cesarean-facts-ladies

d. right-facts-about-menstruation

e. answer-to-the-question-why-on-big-c

f. how-scientists-are-identifying-new-preventive-measures-and-cures-

g. what-if-little-creatures-high-jack-your-brain-and-try-to-control-

h. who-knows-better?

i. mycotoxicoses

j. immunotherapy

k. can-rust-from-old-drinking-water-pipes-cause-health-problems

l. pvc-and-cpvc-pipes-should-not-be-used-for-drinking-water-supply

m. melioidosis

n.vaccine-woes

o. desensitization-and-transplant-success-story

p. do-you-think-the-medicines-you-are-taking-are-perfectly-alright-then revisit your position!

q. swine-flu-the-difficlulties-we-still-face-while-tackling-the-outb

r. dump-this-useless-information-into-a-garbage-bin-if-you-really-ca re about evidence based medicine

s. don-t-ignore-these-head-injuries

t. the-detoxification-scam

u. allergic- agony-caused-by-caterpillars-and-moths

General science:

a.why-do-water-bodies-suddenly-change-colour

b. don-t-knock-down-your-own-life-line

c. the-most-menacing-animal-in-the-world

d. how-exo-planets-are-detected

e. the-importance-of-earth-s-magnetic-field

f. saving-tigers-from-extinction-is-still-a-travail

g. the-importance-of-snakes-in-our-eco-systems

h. understanding-reverse-osmosis

i. the-importance-of-microbiomes

j. crispr-cas9-gene-editing-technique-a-boon-to-fixing-defective-gen

k. biomimicry-a-solution-to-some-of-our-problems

5. the-dilemmas-scientists-face

6. why-we-get-contradictory-reports-in-science

7. be-alert-pseudo-science-and-anti-science-are-on-prowl

8. science-will-answer-your-questions-and-solve-your-problems

9. how-science-debunks-baseless-beliefs

10. climate-science-and-its-relevance

11. the-road-to-a-healthy-life

12. relative-truth-about-gm-crops-and-foods

13. intuition-based-work-is-bad-science

14. how-science-explains-near-death-experiences

15. just-studies-are-different-from-thorough-scientific-research

16. lab-scientists-versus-internet-scientists

17. can-you-challenge-science?

18. the-myth-of-ritual-working

19.science-and-superstitions-how-rational-thinking-can-make-you-work -better

20. comets-are-not-harmful-or-bad-omens-so-enjoy-the-clestial-shows

21. explanation-of-mysterious-lights-during-earthquakes

22. science-can-tell-what-constitutes-the-beauty-of-a-rose

23. what-lessons-can-science-learn-from-tragedies-like-these

24. the-specific-traits-of-a-scientific-mind

25. science-and-the-paranormal

26. are-these-inventions-and-discoveries-really-accidental-and-intuitive like the journalists say?

27. how-the-brain-of-a-polymath-copes-with-all-the-things-it-does

28. how-to-make-scientific-research-in-india-a-success-story

29. getting-rid-of-plastic-the-natural-way

30. why-some-interesting-things-happen-in-nature

31. real-life-stories-that-proves-how-science-helps-you

32. Science and trust series:

a. how-to-trust-science-stories-a-guide-for-common-man

b. trust-in-science-what-makes-people-waver

c. standing-up-for-science-showing-reasons-why-science-should-be-trusted

You will find the entire list of discussions here: http://kkartlab.in/group/some-science/forum

( Please go through the comments section below to find scientific research reports posted on a daily basis and watch videos based on science)

Get interactive...

Please contact us if you want us to add any information or scientific explanation on any topic that interests you. We will try our level best to give you the right information.

Our mail ID: kkartlabin@gmail.com

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 6, 2020 at 6:23am: 3 win Nobel medicine prize for discovering hepatitis C virus

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine this year for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough that led to cures for the deadly disease and tests to keep the scourge out of the blood supply.

Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and Michael Houghton were honoured for their work over several decades on an illness that still plagues more than 70 million worldwide and kills over 400,000 each year. Their work led to .... in the words of Nobel committee 'for the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world'.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 6, 2020 at 6:15am: The principle of superhabitable planets

Some planets may be better for life than Earth

Earth is not necessarily the best planet in the universe. Researchers have identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life than our own. Some of these orbit stars that may be better than even our sun.

The details characteristics of potential "superhabitable" planets published: planets those that are older, a little larger, slightly warmer and possibly wetter than Earth. Life could also more easily thrive on planets that circle more slowly changing stars with longer lifespans than our sun.

While the sun is the center of our solar system, it has a relatively short lifespan of less than 10 billion years. Since it took nearly 4 billion years before any form of complex life appeared on Earth, many similar stars to our sun, called G stars, might run out of fuel before complex life can develop.

systems with K dwarf stars, which are somewhat cooler, less massive and less luminous than our sun. K stars have the advantage of long lifespans of 20 billion to 70 billion years. This would allow orbiting planets to be older as well as giving life more time to advance to the complexity currently found on Earth. However, to be habitable, planets should not be so old that they have exhausted their geothermal heat and lack protective geomagnetic fields. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, but the researchers argue that the sweet spot for life is a planet that is between 5 billion to 8 billion years old.

Size and mass also matter. A planet that is 10% larger than the Earth should have more habitable land. One that is about 1.5 times Earth's mass would be expected to retain its interior heating through radioactive decay longer and would also have a stronger gravity to retain an atmosphere over a longer time period.

Water is key to life and the authors argue that a little more of it would help, especially in the form of moisture, clouds and humidity. A slightly overall warmer temperature, a mean surface temperature of about 5 degrees Celsius (or about 8 degrees Fahrenheit) greater than Earth, together with the additional moisture, would be also better for life. This warmth and moisture preference is seen on Earth with the greater biodiversity in tropical rain forests than in colder, drier areas.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch et al, In Search for a Planet Better than Earth: Top Contenders for a Superhabitable World, Astrobiology (2020). DOI: 10.1089/ast.2019.2161

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-planets-life-earth.html?utm_source=nw...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 6, 2020 at 6:06am: Squeezing light: Developing an integrated nanophotonic device to generate squeezed light

Scientists can generate squeezed light via strongly driven spontaneous four-wave mixing below threshold in silicon nitride microring resonators. The generated light can be characterized with homodyne detection (to extract phase- or frequency-encoded information) and through direct measurements of photon statistics.
In a recent report published scientists measured the quadrature-squeezed vacuum and photon number difference generated within an integrated nanophotonic device. The results will impact applications in quantum technology.

The concept of squeezed light is relevant in quantum optical processing, where the associated architectures of continuous variable photonics demand high-quality, scalable devices to generate squeezed light for many fundamental photonic quantum information processing applications. Examples include continuous variable (CV) quantum computation and Gaussian boson sampling, which is a promising avenue to achieve near-thermal quantum advantage and accommodate a range of intriguing concepts, including molecular vibronic spectrum simulations, graph isomorphism, perfect matchings and graph similarity.

Most of these quantum applications require a scalable source of squeezed light to implement and enhance optical sensing near the quantum limit. Integrated photonics is a natural platform to explore these scalable squeezed light sources, where the stability and high-throughput manufacturability offered by modern lithographic (patterning) methods present promising pathways to realize useful quantum technologies at scale. However, progress to date on chip-integrated squeezing is limited. In the present study, therefore, Vaidya et al. used spontaneous four-wave mixing (SWFM) in silicon nitride microring resonators to provide a readily accessible and mature technology on commercial fabrication platforms.

V. D. Vaidya et al. Broadband quadrature-squeezed vacuum and nonclassical photon number correlations from a nanophotonic device, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba9186

Craig S. Hamilton et al. Gaussian Boson Sampling, Physical Review Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.170501

David J. Moss et al. New CMOS-compatible platforms based on silicon nitride and Hydex for nonlinear optics, Nature Photonics (2013). DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.183

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-nanophotonic-device.html?utm_source=n...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 6, 2020 at 5:58am: prediction errors that can influence human perceptions of time

Humans can sometimes perceive the passing of time differently, for instance, feeling as though an hour passed very quickly or that a few minutes went by extremely slowly. This suggests that the human perception of time is subjective and can be affected by many factors that can cause people to perceive the same amount of time as longer or shorter than it actually is.

Researchers have recently carried out a fascinating study exploring if and how prediction errors can bias how different individuals perceive the passing of time. This study shows that time perception can be influenced by both positive and negative prediction errors, while also identifying the putamen as a brain region responsible for biased time perception. Dopaminergic brain activation in a structure called the basal ganglia (BG) is known to be related to reinforcement learning in general, and reward prediction errors processing in particular. BG activation is also related to time perception required for motor functions that our brain controls.

For many years, time perception and human prediction errors were seen as almost entirely independent processes. This study challenges this idea, suggesting that these two elements are, in fact, deeply interlinked.

Ido Toren et al. Prediction errors bidirectionally bias time perception, Nature Neuroscience (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-0698-3

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-exploring-errors-human-perce...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 5, 2020 at 10:12am: A new thermometer measures temperature with sound

An acoustic thermometer takes temperature by listening to the faint hum that objects give off when they get hot.

Hot objects not only glow, but also softly hum. The hum is generated by the rapid jitters of particles that make up the hot object. If human ears were keen enough to hear this noise, “it would sound like radio static”. The hotter [an object] gets, the louder it gets. So scientists created an acoustic thermometer that senses the intensity of heat-generated sound emanating from nearby objects.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.120603

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-thermometer-measures-temper...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 5, 2020 at 9:08am: Meet the real-life superhumans pushing the limits of human ability

These people have abilities far beyond what the average person might be able to do, including seeing underwater, resisting the cold and tolerating pain.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/meet-the-real-life-supe...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2020 at 9:41am: Physicists Have Successfully Connected Two Large Objects in Quantum Entanglement

Physicists have just served up a sharp reminder that even our macroscopic world is subject to the laws of quantum physics - by successfully entangling a millimetre-sized drum with a large cloud of atoms.

They conducted the experiment using a 13 nanometre-thick, millimetres-long silicon nitride membrane (or drum) that buzzed lightly when struck with photons.

Those photons, or particles of light, came courtesy of a thin fog of a billion caesium atoms spinning inside the confines of a small, cold cell.

Despite being two very different objects, the millimetres-long drum and the fog of atoms represent an entangled system - and they push the limits of quantum mechanics. With the new result, entanglement between very different objects has become possible

Entanglement between distant macroscopic mechanical and spin systems

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-1031-5

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 4, 2020 at 6:46am: Metal-ion breakthrough leads to new biomaterials

The elasticity of a biodegradable, metal-ion elastomer is demonstrated. The first-of-its-kind material, developed by engineers, can be used to repair skin, blood vessels and other soft tissue.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 3, 2020 at 6:51am: New research provides clues on optimizing cell defenses when viruses attack

Science’s pursuits of unraveling how human cells fight viral infections kicked into high gear in 2020 with the devastating emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In a study published recently in eLife scientists describe fresh details about the mechanisms involved when individual human cells are attacked by viruses, with possible implications for COVID-19 clinical treatment. The research helps advance science’s understanding of interferons, a key group of immune response proteins released naturally by human cells when a virus is detected.

In response to a viral infection, human cells synthesize and secrete interferon-alpha, a chemical that triggers a series of biochemical reactions in cells, leading to the production of gene products that work to kill viruses or limit their spread. Interferon-alpha has been used clinically for more than 50 years in the treatments of diseases such as hepatitis B and C and HIV.

However such efforts have been limited because interferon-alpha, in addition to inducing antiviral effects, also triggers cell refractoriness—or insensitivity—to further treatments. This stalled effectiveness takes hold within hours after drug administration and lasts for several days, resulting in a low therapeutic response rate.

Looking into the details of these processes researchers used a combination of experimental analyses and mathematical modeling to describe the intricate time-dependent regulatory mechanisms that human cells use to control the duration and strength of antiviral responses triggered by interferon. Their efforts resulted in the identification of a time delay in the production of USP18, an inhibitory factor that triggers cell refractoriness to prolonged interferon treatments.

https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/new-research-provides-clues-...

https://researchnews.cc/news/2820/New-research-provides-clues-on-op...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on October 3, 2020 at 6:44am: How did human butts evolve to look that way?

An evolutionary anthropologist tackles the mystery of the butt

https://massivesci.com/articles/butts-shape-big-anthropologist-evol...

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Astronomers Find Monster Black Hole With 6 Galaxies Trapped in Its Gravitational Web

https://www.sciencealert.com/monstrous-black-hole-has-trapped-six-e...

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** Study provides solid support for wearing face-covering in enclosed environments with poor ventilation

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/78466023.cms?utm_sou...