WE ARE ON LY 4% OF WHAT WE KNOW AS OUR UNIVERSE. AND WE GET JUST ONE LIFETIME TO EXPLORE THIS 4% .

BUT WITHOUR BUSY LIFESTYLE, WE OFTEN FORGET THE GRAND PICTURE!

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

MOON'S MAGNETIC 2 UMBRELLAS HOTTEST STUFF EVER MADE IMPOSSIBLE BUBBLESIN-DEPTH WILL COMPUTERS OR HUMANS FLY AIRLINERS? FASTER-THANBOLT ROBOT? HOW ACTIVE OUR 'JUNK' DNA IS FOOD FOR THOUGHT

PEN INK PROVES SURPRISE KEY TO POWERFUL SUPERCAPACITOR

Standard pen ink is the surprise component in a flexible carbon fiber supercapacitor which can be bent in a full circle with barely any loss of performance. Supercapacitors are devices that can unleash large amounts of charge very quickly and are useful in situations where electricity is required to charge or discharge fast: to balance loads on power grids, for instance. Just a few millimeters in diameter, the new ink-based supercapacitor outdoes the performance of other carbon fibre-based devices, and can hold up to 10 times more charge. tic casing, filled with electrolyte. The pen ink was used in the supercapacitor after the same team discovered that it contains carbon nanoparticles Researchers from Peking University in Beijing, China, built the device by coating two long thin carbon fibres with the ink, then wrapping them in a flexible plasperfect for storing charge. When applied to the carbon electrode it provides an enormous surface area for holding charge: 27 square meters per gram of ink. Where standard batteries store power via charged ions separated from their chemical partners at the negative electrode, supercapacitors use the flow of current to force electrons directly from one electrode to another, creating an electrical potential which can be harnessed later. The researchers suggested that their flexible supercapacitor will find applications in wearable electronics.

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UNUSED SMARTPHONE POWER FOR IMMENSE COMPUTING POWER

lems? SMARTPHONE owners carry around more processing power in their pocket than a 1970s-era supercomputer, but most of the time it languishes unused. Our phones' processing power is going to waste in our pockets, so why not link lots of them together and solve some probThat could now change thanks to a plan to combine the unused potential of groups of nearby phones, creating clusters capable of everything from weather modeling to Wi-Fi cracking. Cluster computing is not a new idea, having found success on desktop computers with projects like SETI@home, which uses idle PCs to search for signs of alien life. It is yet to take off in smartphones, however, because of their poor battery life. That (continued to page 2)

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...IMMENSE COMPUTING POWER

shouldn't be a problem when phones are being charged, says Felix Bsching at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany. Bsching and colleagues joined six low-powered Android phones into a network. Each can carry out 5.8 million calculations per second, or megaflops. When connected via Wi-Fi the phones could carry out a combined 26.2 megaflops, about 75 per cent of the theoretical maximum. Connecting the phones together via USB upped this to 29 megaflops. These numbers, first presented at a computing conference in Macau, China, in June, are low - around a thousandth of the processing power of a modern desktop computer but suggest that larger smartphone clusters could be useful. Current high-end smartphones are capable of nearly 100 megaflops on their own and are constantly improving. The system would be most useful when there are large groups of phones charging at the same time. Imagine boarding a train, for example, and plugging in your phone, along with hundreds of other passengers. Connecting everyone's phones via the on-board Wi-Fi could allow the train to calculate an extremely detailed local weather forecast using environmental sensor data from the destination, letting you know whether it will be raining when you arrive. Or hacking flash-mobs could team up to try to crack the encryption on a nearby Wi -Fi network. Bsching points out that smartphones now outsell PCs, meaning there are an increasing number of devices available to join into clusters. Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK, says it could be another way to bring phone users together. "It's a way of further extending the social aspect of events, beyond just Facebook and Twitter," he says. "The more people show up, the more computer power you potentially have available." But what if you don't want to put your smartphone to work for free? Bribery might help. "A business model could be developed to provide incentives for users to join," says Bsching, such as receiving subsidized phones if you contribute time to the cluster.

Each can carry out 5.8 million calculations per second, or megaflops. When connected via Wi-Fi the phones could carry out a combined 26.2 megaflops, about 75 per cent of the theoretical maximum.

MOON'S MAGNETIC UMBRELLAS MAY SHIELD FUTURE SPACESHIPS

Lunar watchers have been crying over spilt milk for decades. But now the mystery of milky splotches on the moon's surface might finally be solved: sections of soil are being protected by weak but effective magnetic bubbles. The work could help spaceship builders devise magnetic shielding to protect astronauts on future missions from harmQUANTUM PULSE

ful radiation. Unlike Earth, the moon has no global magnetic field to shield it from the solar wind the constant flow of charged particles from the sun. These particles interact with lunar soil, darkening it over thousands of years. But a closer look shows some light regions that are appar-

ently unrelated to the local terrain and so have no obvious source. "It very quickly became quite a mystery as to what it was," says plasma physicist Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.
Apollo-era missions matched the splotches to magnetic (continued to page 3)

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...SHIELD FUTURE SPACESHIPS

field bubbles a few hundred meters across. Some scientists thought these "mini magnetospheres" could be deflecting solar particles. Further measurements, though, showed the fields are so weak that positively charged protons should slip right through them. In the new lab test, Bamford and colleagues shot a beam of protons and electrons representing the solar wind at a small magnet. Sure enough, the charged particles parted over the magnet like rain flowing over an umbrella. "As far as I know, this is the first time that anybody's done an actual experiment," says Georgiana Kramer of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. The team thinks that negatively charged electrons follow the field lines of the mini-magnetospheres, while the protons initially glide through. The separation between negative and positive charges creates an electric field that is stronger than the magnetic field. This pulls the protons back so that both particles slide over the bubble. Bamford says her team has been working on magnetic "deflector shields" for spacecraft, but critics said running them would take too much energy to be practical. By understanding the moon bubbles, researchers can potentially make an artificial system that would work at lower energies.

As far as I know, this is the first time that anybody's done an actual experiment.

LHC PRIMORDIAL MATTER IS HOTTEST STUFF EVER MADE

gether in atoms as they are today. This almost frictionless quark-gluon plasma has been recreated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, by smashing gold ions together. Their plasma reached 4 trillion C. It was the ultimate phase change. Two particle smashers are homing in on what caused the seething primordial soup of the early universe to evolve into the protons and neutrons that make up ordinary matter today. In the process one has set a new record: the hottest temperature ever created by humans. Microseconds after the big bang, the hot universe consisted of a kind of soup in which quarks roamed free instead of being bound toNow a team at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which smashes lead ions together, have made a plasma almost 40 per cent hotter. At the Quark Matter 2012 conference in Washington DC on 13 August, they reported that their quark-gluon plasma had reached over 5 trillion C, the hottest temperature ever created in an experiment. "In this field records are made to be broken," says Jurgen Schukraft at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. The first hint of a record came in November 2010, when the LHC first collided lead ions, but it took two years to actually measure it, Schukraft says. The RHIC researchers aren't out of the game, though. What they really want to know is at what energies the quark-gluon plasma switches to normal matter. At the Quark Matter conference, RHIC's Steven Vigdor described how his team systematically varied the energy to create primordial plasma under a broad range of conditions. He says initial measurements are delineating a boundary between ordinary matter and primordial stuff. "We are looking further back into the universe than ever before," says Vigdor.

...they reported that their quarkgluon plasma had reached over 5 trillion C, the hottest temperature ever created in an experiment.

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THE WONDER-WORKING BUBBLES THAT PHYSICS CAN'T EXPLAIN

Nanobubbles can revive polluted lakes, clean computer chips and might even make wonder drugs. Not bad considering they shouldn't exist! FROM a distance, it is an idyllic scene. The small boat floats idly, its oars aloft. Sheltered from the sun by a blue-andwhite striped awning, passengers busy themselves around a large silver tea-urn. Move a little closer, though, and things don't look - or indeed smell - so rosy. The waters of the lake are fluorescent green, and the stench of decay wafts from its surface. Pleasure trips have been a rarity on Lake Tai since 2007, when the Chinese government declared the lake, some 100 kilometres west of Shanghai, a disaster area. A year of unusual drought following decades of unchecked pollution had choked the lake with cyanobacterial blooms. These are no pleasure-seekers on the boat. Nor is the urn for making tea. On closer inspection it is connected via hoses to the oars, which are themselves sprayer arms dousing the lake's surface with a frothy slurry. Pan Gang and his team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing are attempting to revive the lake. That was in 2007. Just a few years earlier, they would have been told they were on a fool's errand. Quite apart from anything else, basic physics said that the "nanobubbles" at the heart of Pan's magic brew simply don't exist. Yet he and others scattered around the world are proving something very different. Not only are nanobubbles there, they seem to be everywhere. Basic physics was wrong. Consider this next time you are busy blowing bubbles: each of these pockets of air represents a significant, if fleeting, victory against the forces of physical correctness. The spherical film of liquid surrounding a soap bubble, for example, is sustained only because gas pressure inside the bubble is higher than on the outside, so the gas pushes out against the surface tension of the liquid molecules. As gas gradually leaks out through a bubble's thin, porous walls, this excess pressure is gradually reduced, and when it drops enough, the bubble bursts. That higher internal pressure also does for bubbles in a glass of fizzy drink when they reach the top of the liquid and meet the lower pressure of the surrounding air. Bubbles, sadly, just aren't built to last. That's especially true of small bubbles. The smaller a bubble is, the more tightly curved its skin is and the more concentrated the inward force that the pressure has to counterbalance. Below a certain size, which depends on the liquid enveloping the bubble and other factors, the internal pressure needed to counter that surface tension simply becomes too great. Would-be nanobubbles collapse even before they can form. Or do they? An inkling that things aren't that straightforward came in 1994, when John Parker at the Institute for Surface Chemistry in Stockholm, Sweden, was measuring the repulsion between two waterresistant surfaces immersed in water. As Parker forced them together, the repulsive force between them first increased as expected. Then, at a distance of a few hundred nanometres, it suddenly dropped off. It was a few years before Phil Attard, then at the University of South Australia in Mawson Lakes, provided a semiplausible explanation. If the surfaces were populated by nanoscale bubbles, he suggested, these would join forces to minimize their surface tension as the surfaces neared each other, just as two soap bubbles blown in air merge. This effect would draw together surfaces that would otherwise repel each other. For bubbles that small to exist, the internal pressures would have to be around 100 atmospheres the sort of pressure (Continued to page 5)

basic physics said that the "nanobubbles" at the heart of Pan's magic brew simply don't exist. Yet he and others scattered around the world are proving something very different. Not only are nanobubbles there, they seem to be everywhere. Basic physics was wrong.

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...you would experience a kilometer down in the ocean. That sounds implausible, and yet in 2001, with the help of a scanning probe microscope, Attard and his colleague James Tyrrell spotted hemispherical nanoscale structures growing like mushroom caps on hydrophobic silicon surfaces immersed in water (Physical Review Letters, vol 87, p 176104). Subsequent spectroscopic measurements showed the structures were filled with gas. Nanobubbles, it seemed, did exist. No one can say how. Perhaps in some situations the presence of contaminants might create particularly strong bubble walls able to counteract high pressures. Or perhaps imperfections on the surfaces the bubbles cling to could somehow change the dynamics of the situation. So far none of the proposed explanations quite has the ring of truth. "There are now a few lines of argument as to why nanobubbles exist," says Vincent Craig, who researches the phenomenon at the Australian National University in Canberra. "And I have a problem with all of them." Things got even stranger last year when James Seddon and Detlef Lohse of the University of Twente in the Netherlands used an atomic force microscope to took more closely at the structures. If they were filled with gas, the pressures inside should have been forcing molecules out through the walls at a rate of knots. And indeed they were: a fast flow of molecules from the bubble's apex could be felt pressing against the microscope's probing tip. "The bubble has maybe a thousand molecules inside it, and it's losing approximately 1 billion gas molecules per second," says Seddon. How can that be? The researchers could only suggest that something must be recycling the molecules back into the bubble, perhaps at the join where the bubble wall meets the surface on which it sits (Physical Review Letters, vol 107, p 116101). Observing such a flow directly would require getting inside the bubble, which is impossible without destroying it. And Seddon readily admits there is a problem with the explanation: to counter the higher internal pressure of the bubble something needs to be pushing the gas back in, requiring an energy source that is not obviously present. "There are laws of thermodynamics that you're not allowed to break," Seddon says. And yet nanobubbles persist and not just fleetingly. "They last for as long as you want to look at them for," says Seddon. So far, five days is the longest anyone's bothered to wait. In June, the journal ChemPhysChem published a special issue on the mystery (vol 13, p 2171). There seemed little doubt that nanobubbles do in fact exist, an accompanying editorial said, but questions about how they form and stay stable remain "awkward". On his lake in China, Pan has no time for awkwardness. He is deputy chief scientist of a huge project funded by the Chinese government to clean up Lake Tai. Since his first tests in 2006, his quaint boat with the stripy awning has been replaced by a sleeker, modern version that sprays clay out of deck-mounted water cannons. He has a simple plan to revive waters that have been deprived of oxygen by bacteria decaying on their surface: pump the lake full of oxygen again. Conventional ways of doing this are extremely inefficient. "It takes lots of energy to pump gas into the water and most of it will escape into the air," says Pan. This problem becomes even more acute when the water is under pressure at the bottom of a lake. Pan's patented mechanism for solving this problem involves putting a suspension of lakeside clay in chilled water and saturating it with oxygen bubbles. All but the smallest bubbles float away, but microscopic imaging confirms the presence of oxygen bubbles just 10 nanometres in diameter in the clay. Spraying the resulting slurry on the lake's surface pushes the polluting cyanobacterial blooms to the lake bottom within minutes. (Continued to page 6)

"The bubble has maybe a thousand molecules inside it, and it's losing approximately 1 billion gas molecules per second,"

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The chilled water warms up in the body of the lake, allowing larger oxygen bubbles to form at the interface between the clay and water. These bubbles break free and break down the algae, re-oxygenating the water. The process is energy efficient and non-polluting, involving only native soils from the lake's own edge. The results seem impressive. Experiments in a 50,000square-metre area of the lake cleared the whole centimetrethick algal bloom in half an hour. The following day, concentrations of ammonia, nitrates and phosphorus compounds in the lake water products of the cyanobacterial metabolism and the source of the foul smell - had fallen dramatically. Four months later, underwater vegetation was growing prodigiously and plankton populations were thriving again (Ecological Engineering, vol 37, p 302). Pan says that researchers given the job of restoring lakes left behind after tar sand extraction in Canada have come calling, as have people looking to improve water quality in the Baltic Sea and the UK's Lake District. Not bad for something that shouldn't exist. But this is not the only context in which an appreciation of nanobubbles' apparent scrubbing properties is making itself felt. Large ships such as oil tankers waste a huge amount of fuel each year because organisms such as barnacles attach themselves to the ship's outsides, "fouling" the surface and creating drag. "If you could paint a large oil tanker with anti-fouling paint, you'd save a million dollars a year in fuel alone," says Craig. Together with Chinese colleagues, Craig is pursuing an alternative: using nanobubbles created on an electrified surface in water to take up biological molecules deposited there, sweeping the surface clean. His idea is to turn a ship's hull into a giant electrode and so prevent it from ever becoming fouled (Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, vol 328, p 10). In lab tests the technique seems to work, with nanobubbles being the key to success, but Craig himself is far from understanding exactly how. "The simple answer is I don't know," he says. The same goes for cleaning the silicon wafers that go into making computer chips. The presence of any nanoscale contaminants on these wafers' surfaces - things like quartz, iron, stainless steel or aluminium, all common in a manufacturing environment - is enough to cause defects in the extremely precise etching process used to print circuits on them. Ensuring the right level of cleanliness requires many cycles of cleaning, often using environmentally hazardous chemicals. Or you can use nanobubbles. By allowing them to form on the wafer surface, contaminants are gently lifted up and washed away. "We did some investigation of nanobubbles as a mild method for cleaning, and have some very nice results," says Jacques van der Donck of the TNO research consultancy based in Delft in the Netherlands, which is working with ASML, the company that makes most of the machines Intel uses to fabricate its silicon wafers. A halfhour, multi-cycle cleaning routine might be curtailed to just a minute or so, with no harmful chemicals to dispose of later, says van der Donck. In "labs on a chip", nanobubbles could also be attached to the walls of the tiny channels in which multiple reactions take place for genomic analysis or assessing candidate drugs, reducing friction and therefore cutting the energy needed to force the reacting chemicals through. But perhaps the most controversial claim for nanobubbles' properties comes from a drugs company called Revalesio based in Tacoma, Washington. In May 2010, the US Food and Drug Administration gave approval for Revalesio to investigate the properties of a "novel antiinflammatory product" that the company calls RNS60. If nanobubbles do exist, then it (Continued to page 7)

Experiments in a 50,000-squaremetre area of the lake cleared the whole centimetrethick algal bloom in half an hour.

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is not too implausible that they might pop up in biological contexts, and perhaps also be harnessed to alter biochemistry. Proteins and other biological molecules can have the kinds of hydrophobic surfaces that nanobubbles like to cling to. Revalesio does not talk explicitly about nanobubbles in its presentations. RNS60, the firm says, contains "charge-stabilised nanostructures" generated by "controlled turbulence". By pumping highpressure oxygen into a saline solution flowing in a spiral pattern between two spinning coaxial cylinders, vortices are generated - and perhaps more. "The current research is showing that devices like ours produce nanobubbles," says Richard Watson, Revalesio's director of clinical science. In March this year, researchers presented preliminary in-vitro studies showing that RNS60 inhibits the production of chemicals that cause inflammation in glial cells, the support scaffolding for neurons. Last October, Revalesio published results of phase I clinical trials in which inhaling RNS60 in aerosol form "significantly" improved the amount of air some people with asthma can exhale. The implication is that it might make an alternative to steroid-based treatments. That would be controversial, not least because it would require the existence of nanobubbles not just on surfaces, where most of the evidence so far has been found, but freely floating in a liquid. The company's hypothesis is that since saline is composed of water and dissociated sodium and chlorine ions, those ions form a scaffold

...the nanobubbles to interact with anything charged, such as

containing oxygen bubbles of around 50 nanometres in diameter. The double layer of charged particles that make up the scaffold predispose the nanobubbles to interact with anything charged, such as the ions that carry signals into and out of biological cells. That might provide a route to new drugs for some neurodegenerative conditions and others in which these signaling channels are thought to be disturbed. Such claims invite skepticism. "When I first heard about [Revalesio], I thought they might be crazy or quacks," says Craig. "But I've spent some time working with them, and I'm quite impressed with them as scientists." Seddon, who has received samples of the company's solutions to analyze, is similarly impressed with the company's openness - although it is proving hard to determine what, if anything, lies at the heart of their product. "We don't have experimental techniques that can look at its internal structure," he says. Attard is less convinced that there is anything to explain. He says that nanobubbles can only be survive in an environment that can sustain a continued excess gas pressure, which is not the case in biological fluids, and there is no evidence that the bubbles could influence biological processes such as the opening and closing of ion channels. Of course, if RNS60 does have some powerful anti-inflammatory property, the researchers' inability to work out whether or not the nanobubbles are there won't stop it working. Just like physics forbidding their existence won't stop them cleaning lakes, or scrubbing computer chips. But for those who like their physics in good order, the mystery continues to bubble beneath the surface.

the ions that carry signals into and out of biological cells.

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WILL COMPUTERS OR HUMANS FLY AIRLINERS IN FORMATION?

One day "intelligent" passenger aircraft will cruise across oceans in low-drag, energysaving formations, like flocks of geese. So said European plane-maker Airbus at its annual technology look-ahead conference last night. It's a striking idea that media outlets lapped up. Warming to its theme, Airbus added that emissions could be cut by using a superfast ground vehicle to catapult future aircraft into the air, so that it reaches cruising speed and altitude faster. And it could land with the engines switched off, in a long, controlled "free glide" to the runway. But how will this stuff actually work? With computers, of course. "Highly intelligent aircraft would be able to self organise and select the most efficient and environmentally friendly routes," says Airbus. This cozy picture of aviation circa 2050 glosses over the degree to which computers will have to assume control of the finer maneuvers of such planes, rather than pilots. Close-quarters formation flying involves navigating with very little vertical separation. When a decade ago aircraft began flying across the Atlantic with only 1000 feet (305 metres) of vertical separation, rather than the previous 2000 feet, there was an outcry over the safety implications. The room for error is minimal at subsonic cruising speeds. Such formation flying might be fine if software were perfectly designed and infallible - but it is not. So I asked Charles Champion, executive vicepresident of engineering at Airbus in Toulouse, France, if the company's vision for 2050 includes handing more control to computers to allow the formation flying, high-angle fast take-offs and extended, unpowered glides they foresee. Despite the company's line that an "intelligent" aircraft will do the work, he says that's not the full story. "In our business safety is number one," he said. "This is why we would not envisage a system where the pilot is not in control of the aircraft." Champion says the proximitysensing technology that will allow formation flying to take place safely will help the pilot "make the right decisions" in both regular clear sky flying and in a "degraded environment" when some systems fail, perhaps in poor weather conditions such as a storm. Systems and sensor redundancy - which means providing multiple backups for the backups - will be a key safety factor, he says. By 2050, computers will be unrecognizably fast and capable, that's for sure. But they will still be fallible machines so it is encouraging to hear Champion backing the human at the flight controls. I hope they stick to it.

...which computers will have to assume control of the finer maneuvers of such planes, rather than pilots.

SPRINTING ROBOT OUTPACES USAIN BOLT AND HITS 45.5 KM/H

Machines have overtaken humans in yet another activity. Sprinting has gone the way of quiz shows, driving and mining now that a robot has run faster than Usain Bolt. Five months after setting the
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land speed record for a robot with legs, Boston Dynamics's Cheetah has outstripped the fastest of humans, clocking 45.5 kilometres (28.3 miles) per hour over a 20-metre stretch. That's a shade faster than Olympic gold medalist Usain

Bolt. He set the land-speed record for a human back in 2009 by running 44.7 km/h over a 20-metre stretch during the 100-metres final of the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Germany.
Much like a real cheetah, the (Continued to page 9)

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...robot uses a short, hopping gait at low speeds before increasing its stride and pace by flexing its back with each step. But it doesn't take much insight to see that Bolt is still streets ahead of the robot competition in every way that matters. Cheetah ran its time on a treadmill, and needs a tether to supply power and keep it upright, something Usain Bolt does without. Boston Dynamics is developing an outdoor version of the Cheetah, dubbed Wildcat, which is due to begin testing next year.

GLOBAL PROJECT REVEALS JUST HOW ACTIVE OUR 'JUNK' DNA IS

bone cells - and observed which sections of DNA were transcribed to RNA, and what the RNA might be doing.
But only 1.2 per

They found that, across the genome, about 19 per cent of our DNA may code for RNA switches that turn genes on or off. "We see way more switches than we were expecting, and nearly every part of the genome is close to a switch," project coordinator Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, told New Scientist. The reams of "junk" DNA that make up the majority of our genetic code appear to have a purpose after all, according to the results of a global research project. The DNA within all of our cells makes RNA, which in turn makes proteins. But only 1.2 per cent of our DNA provides the proteinmaking instructions. Exactly what the rest of our DNA is doing has been something of a mystery. The leading theory, although this has been on shaky ground for a while now, has been that the non-coding, junk DNA didn't really do anything at all. But this idea has finally been laid to rest by the new findings of a massive research effort. In 2003, the US National Human Genome Research Institute launched the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project (ENCODE), a consortium of over 400 researchers from 30 or so labs whose aim was to work out exactly what different parts of the human genome do. The researchers' first results based on an analysis of 1 per cent of the human genome - were published in 2007. The group found that some so-called junk DNA appears to be transcribing or making RNA, although this RNA doesn't then make new proteins. Since then, the collaboration has widened its research with the aim of getting to grips with the entire human genome. In the latest study, the group analyzed 147 types of cells - including cancer, liver and The switches also appear to be spread out over the genome, with some being located at a distance from the gene they are controlling. Around 95 per cent of the genome appears to be very close to a switch, suggesting that almost all of our DNA may be doing something important. While the team do not yet know exactly what the switches are doing, the researchers hope that further study might reveal how some diseases are inherited. "Most of the changes that affect disease don't lie in the genes themselves; they lie in the switches," team member Michael Snyder at Stanford University, California, told The New York Times.

cent of our DNA provides the protein-making instructions. Exactly what the rest of our DNA is doing has been something of a mystery

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Age old question. Why are we on earth? In fact, why are we in the universe at all? Lets see the bigger picture. The universe is full of stars clumped together that we call galaxies. On one of the planets of one the stars of one of the galaxies, we breathe in the same elements that rusts iron. I hope the irony is not lost on most people. We have the Hubble Space Telescope to prove that we are on one of the planets of one of the stars of one the galaxies. Well, thats good news. We know where we are. The bad news is, we know where we are without knowing why. No one wants to face bad news, so we complete our graduations and work in order live our life in pure bliss. And apparently, none of the planets around none of the stars in none of the galaxies that we have detected through our many detection techniques have revealed even the slightest hint of other life forms. So we are all alone in the universe. Well, not so alone. The hunger problem and the poverty line of the world is increasing day by day. More important than asking why are we in the universe, is the question, why the universe is here at all. It seems that there are twenty number, twenty units of the universe (the value of pie, the value of the charge of one electron, etc), that if tampered by even the smallest margin, the universe will cease to exist. Somehow, the universe is shaped by these twenty basic units. Who calibrated it? Why? How? Everything about the universe is a mystery. Calculating the red shift of the most distant galaxies, we knew since 1932 that the universe is expanding. Of course, this expansion was still happening before 1932. But then, the startling discovery was that, this expansion is accelerating. What is more astounding, this acceleration is increasing without any hint of stopping. What is the universe expanding into, who knows? Even the content of the universe is a mystery. Sure, everything is made up of atoms, and atoms make up everything in the universe. But that was in class six. And the world is full of doctorate people to show us that there are many more things to do a doctoral thesis on. And so, when scientists were studying the rotation of the galaxies, they found out that the galaxies had far too less mass to explain the speed of their rotation. By their calculations, the mass needed to explain the rotation speed has to be much larger, approximately, about ninety percent more than what we can see. So where is the missing mass? Again, no one knows. Somehow, we cant see, much less detect, the mass that accounts for ninety percent of the mass of a galaxy. And this is the case for every galaxy in the universe. And so we have a universe where we cant detect ninety percent of its mass. Even

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We are just 4%!

Science is advancing at a blistering pace. So much that often, we are not even aware of the numerous fronts science is discovering, inventing, re-engineering! And it is in this pursuit of spreading knowledge that this newsletter was born. The contents of this newsletter focuses on one key aspect - 99% of our readers are not scientists. Because of this reason, the contents are compiled from various sources on the internet, and are rewritten in a simplified manner so that everyone can understand everything. This newsletter came into being on one strong belief I had - although a lot of people are interested in science, there is not a single decent source here in Bangladesh from which people can satisfy their curiosity regarding scientific advancement. And my goal is just that. To satisfy that thirst. I am not an authority on any of the topics covered by the newsletter. I am simple a middlemen of information. I hope you are satisfied with the content of the newsletter. Feedback will be greatly appreciated. And for those who seeks more than what the newsletter covers, please request your topic in this group. I will do whatever I can to find out what you need to know.

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