The Beginning of the End…!

If you feel something precious is missing in a family life, then it would be none other than “Happiness”, but most of us are not recognizing it and are deeply searching for some materialistic aspects to fill that gap. Some of us even isolate completely from our family life and work hard to find the missing happiness.  The same was happening in my life too, one fine day in my office, I got stuck up with huge amount of work due to a small confusion which made me sit the whole night in my home to complete the same. As I was working I got tired and went upstairs to have some fresh air at that instant I saw my lovely daughter who is currently practicing as a nurse in a famous medical firm, writing something in her personal diary with tears in her eyes at that midnight. The next day I was totally worried for my daughter, wanted to know the reason for her tears, out of anxiety I went to her room while she was not in home and took the diary I was really shocked to read the things written in it. It stated that how much she loves her family and no one has wished her for getting promoted in her career. Just by that time I realized how much my family missed me, after reading her diary I went to a shop to buy Medcouture Lab coats for my daughter for her Medical Uniforms and presented her as she returned home. The happiness I saw in her at that instant was priceless and promised her this will never happen again.

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The US space agency (Nasa) has succeeded in placing two new satellites in orbit around the Moon.Both spacecraft were put in elliptical paths around the lunar body over the weekend after performing braking manoeuvres following their more than 100-day journey from Earth.

These gravity differences are the result of an uneven distribution of mass. Obvious examples at the Moon’s surface include big mountain ranges or deep impact basins, but even inside the lunar body the rock will be arranged in an irregular fashion, with some regions being denser than others.

All this will have a subtle influence on the pull of gravity sensed by the over-flying spacecraft.

The Grail twins will make their measurements by carrying out a carefully calibrated pursuit of each other.As the lead spacecraft flies through the uneven gravity field, it will experience small accelerations or decelerations. The second spacecraft, following some 100-200km behind, will detect these disturbances as very slight changes in the separation between the pair – deviations that are not much more than the width of a human red blood cell.

When the gravity map is combined with comparable-resolution topographical information showing the surface highs and lows, scientists should be able to deduce the Moon’s probable internal structure and composition. This is fundamental knowledge that will play into theories of how the lunar body formed and how it has changed through time.

“We believe the Moon formed from the impact of a Mars-sized object into Earth, but we understand little really of how this happened and how the [lunar body] cooled off after the violent event,” said Dr Zuber. And she described as “shocking”, the continued inability of science to explain why the rugged far-side of the Moon looks so different from that of the nearside with its great swathe of dark volcanic plains, or maria.

“Given that we’ve sent so many missions that have studied the outside of the Moon, it seems that the answer is not on the surface. The answer is locked in the interior,” she said.

One fascinating idea to emerge recently that will come under scrutiny from Grail is the suggestion that the highlands on the far-side were formed as a result of a low-velocity impact by a second, much smaller moon. A research team published a paper in the journal Nature last August that showed how such an impact could have added material to the crust on the far hemisphere.

It made very clear predictions that the Grail data will be able to test.Grail’s mapping phase will last for 82 days until early June. The Moon then goes into shadow, into eclipse, behind the Earth.If the satellites can survive the hours of darkness on their batteries, it is likely they will be tasked with a second mapping cycle in the second half of 2012.

This would be at a much reduced altitude, perhaps as low as 25km from the surface. Getting lower would improve the resolution of the gravity maps yet again, and enable scientists to study even the structure of relatively small, shallow craters.

“Simple bowl-shaped craters, which on the Moon have diameters up to about 15km or so, are the most common landforms on the surfaces of the terrestrial planets, and this is a whole new area of science that will open up to us if we’re able to do the extended mission,” Dr Zuber explained.

Grail is an acronym for Gravity Recovery and Internal Laboratory. The satellites will be given more engaging names than just A and B once the weekend’s orbit insertion is confirmed. The names are being chosen via a public competition.

The Grail twins are very compact spacecraft. They each weighed little more than 300kg at launch.The identical Grail twins are to map gravity variations across the lunar body in unprecedented detail.This will help scientists refine our theories for how the Moon formed.

It will also enable them to test new ideas, such as the provocative suggestion made earlier this year that there were probably two moons in the sky above Earth billions of years ago.Lead scientist Dr Maria Zuber is certainly hoping for some dramatic discoveries.

“Grail is a journey to the centre of the Moon and it will use exceedingly precise measurements of gravity to reveal what the inside of the Moon is like,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher said.

“This information will be combined with the plethora of remarkable observations of the Moon that have been taken by other satellites before, and together they will enable us to reconstruct the Moon’s early evolution.”

The 300kg Grail spacecraft were launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, last September, and took a long spiral out to their destination.This weekend, they approached the Moon over the south pole, 25 hours apart. Each satellite in turn fired its main engine to slow it and put it in an elliptical orbit around the lunar sphere.This orbit has a period of 11.5 hours and must now gradually be reduced in size and circularised before any science can begin.A series of further burns on each spacecraft should achieve this goal by March.The twins will then map the small variations in gravity across the lunar surface from an altitude of 55km.

Source: bbc.co.uk

SEATTLE: Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen is planning to build a spaceship that could replace the Space Shuttle and put paying passengers into orbit this decade.

Lifelong space enthusiast Allen is hoping to launch unmanned rockets from a massive flying carrier plane to put government and commercial satellites into space and eventually evolve to human space missions.

The initiative comes only months after the United States retired the Space Shuttle program after 30 years, opening the door to private enterprise to supply space vehicles.

Allen’s rocket will be launched from what will be the world’s biggest plane, a massive carrier aircraft powered by six jumbo jet engines, to be constructed by Scaled Composites, a unit of defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp.

Its wingspan will be about 385 feet, bigger than a football field and 70 per cent longer than the wings of a Boeing 747.

The rocket itself will be made by private space company SpaceX, created by Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal. The rocket and carrier will be integrated by aviation and missile specialists Dynetics.

The first test flight is targeted for 2015 with the first commercial flight the year after.

“I have long dreamed about taking the next big step in private space flight,” said Allen. “To offer a flexible, orbital space delivery system.”

The new company to manage the project, called Stratolaunch Systems, has the slogan “Any orbit. Any time.”

Allen, the sole funding source for development, did not say how much he would spend on the project, but indicated it would be $200 million or more, an “order of magnitude” greater than the $20 million he spent backing the first privately funded, manned space flight in 2004.

Space fan

Fifty-eight-year-old Allen – listed by Forbes magazine as the world’s 57th-richest person, with a fortune of $13.2 billion – is the latest in a line of tech billionaires with interests in the privatization of space travel.

His space ambitions put him alongside Musk and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to put people into space at an affordable price, rather than the millions of dollars it has cost up to now.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also looking to transport passengers into sub-orbital space in the next two years, for about $200,000 a trip. It already has nearly 500 reservations.

Allen said he has long harbored space fantasies.

“I dreamed of becoming an astronaut,” he said at the company’s launch at his offices in downtown Seattle. Poor eyesight ruined his dreams of becoming a pilot, but he said his ambitions for space travel never died.

Initially, Stratolaunch will aim to fly unmanned rockets to put mid-sized satellites into orbit, and perhaps fly cargo to the International Space Station, if permitted.

Since the space shuttle’s retirement this summer, the United States is dependent on partner countries to ferry cargo and crew to the outpost, although NASA is investing in some private enterprise options.

After that, Allen’s target is to fly paying customers into space, which he said had a massive potential market.

His former Microsoft colleague Charles Simonyi paid about $20 million for a trip aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, but now the US space shuttle is defunct, the tab could be three times as high.

Big spender

Allen, who made up the name Microsoft, co-founded what became the world’s biggest software company with Bill Gates in 1975.

Lacking Gates’ single-minded drive for business success, he left Microsoft in 1983, as he dealt with a first battle with cancer. He recently completed a second course of treatment for a different type of cancer, but says he is healthy now.

Allen’s interests and investments range far and wide, but are focused on his native Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

He owns the Seattle Seahawks professional football team, the Trail Blazers basketball team in Portland, and his investment firm developed much of the South Lake Union neighborhood, which is central to Seattle’s re-emergence as a technology center.

He is a generous donor to the University of Washington and is funding new research into the brain.

For leisure pursuits, he owns one of the world’s largest yachts and built the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. Allen’s memoir, titled “Idea Man,” was published earlier this year.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Physicists will have to keep holding their breath a while longer.

Two teams of scientists sifting debris from high-energy proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, said Tuesday that they had recorded tantalizing hints — but only hints — of a long-sought subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson, whose existence is a key to explaining why there is mass in the universe. By next summer, they said, they will have enough data to say finally whether the elusive particle really exists.

If it does, its mass must lie within the range of 115 billion to 127 billion electron volts, according to the new measurements.

The putative particle would weigh in at about 126 billion electron volts, about 126 times heavier than a proton and 250,000 times heavier than an electron, reported one army of 3,000 physicists, known as Atlas, for the name of their particle detector.

Meanwhile, the other team, known as C.M.S. — for its detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid — found what its spokesman, Guido Tonelli, termed “a modest excess” in its data corresponding to masses around 124 billion electron volts. The physicists from the different teams are already discussing whether these differences are significant.

Showing off one striking bump in the data, Fabiola Gianotti, a spokeswoman for the Atlas team, said, “If we are just being lucky, it will take a lot of data to kill it.”

Over the last 20 years suspicious bumps that might have been the Higgs have come and gone — most recently last summer — and the same thing could happen again. Physicists said the chance that these results were a fluke because of random fluctuations in the background of normal physics was about 1 percent, which is too high to claim a discovery, but is enough to inspire excitement.

The fact that two rival teams using two different mammoth particle detectors had recorded similar results was considered good news.

“So CERN is not claiming a discovery, but I am quite optimistic,” said Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, whose 1979 Nobel Prize rests partly on the Higgs.

Greg Landsberg of Brown University, a leader of the C.M.S. group, said that how to characterize the new results depended “on whether you see the glass half empty or half full.” He added, “I believe that these are exciting results, but it is just too early to say whether what we see is a glimpse of Higgs or another statistical fluctuation.”

Trying unsuccessfully to hold back an ear-to-ear grin, Kyle Cranmer, a New York University physicist and member of the Atlas team, admitted he was excited. “A bump is the most exciting thing a particle physicist can see on a plot,” he said.

Physicists around the world, fueled by coffee, dreams and Internet rumors of a breakthrough, gathered in lounges and auditoriums early Tuesday morning to watch a lengthy Webcast of the results at CERN.

“Physicists at 8 a.m.,” exclaimed Neal Weiner, a theorist who organized a gathering at New York University. “That’s really impressive!”

The results were posted on the Web sites of Atlas and C.M.S.

As seen on the Webcast, the auditorium at CERN was filled to standing room only. In New York, at the conclusion of the talks, the N.Y.U. physicists burst into applause. And around the world, physicists also seemed cautiously excited.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University, put it this way: “If the Higgs is discovered, it will represent perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect in recent memory, vindicating 50 years of the building of one of the greatest theoretical edifices in all of science, and requiring the building of the most complicated machine that has ever been built.”

The Higgs boson is the cornerstone and the last missing part of the so-called Standard Model, a suite of equations that has held sway as the law of the cosmos for the last 35 years and describes all of particle physics. Physicists have been eager to finish the edifice, rule the Higgs either in or out and then use that information to form deeper theories that could explain, for example, why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, or what constitutes the dark matter and dark energy that rule the larger universe.

The particle is named for the University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, who was one of six physicists — the others are Tom Kibble, the late Robert Brout, Francois Englert, Gerry Guralnik and Dick Hagen — who suggested that a sort of cosmic molasses pervading space is what gives particles their heft. Particles trying to wade through it gather mass the way a bill moving though Congress gains riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous. It was Dr. Higgs who pointed out that this cosmic molasses, normally invisible and, of course, odorless, would have its own quantum particle, and so the branding rights went to him.

In 1967 Dr. Weinberg made the Higgs boson a centerpiece of an effort to unify two of the four forces of nature, electromagnetism and the nuclear “weak” force, and explain why the carriers of electromagnetism — photons — are massless but the carriers of the weak force — the W and Z bosons — are about 100 times as massive as protons.

Unfortunately, the model does not say how heavy the Higgs boson itself — the quantum personification of this field — should be. And so physicists have had to search for it the old-fashioned train-wreck way, by smashing subatomic particles together to see what materializes.

The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crashes them together.

If these crashes have indeed put the Higgs on the horizon of discovery, the news comes in the nick of time. Over the course of the last few years, searches at the CERN collider and the now-defunct Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have come to the verge of ruling the Higgs out.

Perhaps it won’t come to that. Reached in Austin, Dr. Weinberg, who shared the Nobel for coming up with the theory of electroweak unification with Sheldon Glashow, of Boston University, and Abdus Salam, of Pakistan, said: “It’s always a little weird when something that comes out of the mathematics in theoretical work turns out to exist in the real world. You asked me earlier if it’s exciting. Sure is.”

That excitement continues, as Rolf Heuer, CERN’s director general, told the physicists Tuesday. “Keep in mind,” he concluded, “that we are running next year.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com

GENEVA: Scientists said on Tuesday they had found signs of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe after the Big Bang.

Scientists at the CERN physics research centre near Geneva said, however, they had found no conclusive proof of the existence of the particle which, according to prevailing theories of physics, gives everything in the universe its mass.

“If the Higgs observation is confirmed…this really will be one of the discoveries of the century,” said Themis Bowcock, a professor of particle physics at Britain’s Liverpool University.

“Physicists will have uncovered a keystone in the makeup of the Universe…whose influence we see and feel every day of our lives.”

The leaders of two experiments, ALTAS and CMS, revealed their findings to a packed seminar at CERN, where they have tried to find traces of the elusive boson by smashing particles together in the Large Hadron Collider at high speed.

“Both experiments have the signals pointing in essentially the same direction,” said Oliver Buchmueller, senior physicist on CMS. “It seems that both Atlas and us have found the signals are at the same mass level. That is obviously very important.”

Fabiola Gianotti, the scientist in charge of the ATLAS experiment, said ALTAS had narrowed the search to a signal centred at around 126 GeV (Giga electron volts), which would be compatible with the expected strength of a Standard Model Higgs.

“I think it would be extremely kind of the Higgs boson to be here,” she told a seminar to discuss the findings. “But it is too early” for final conclusions, she said. “More studies and more data are needed. The next few months will be very exciting…I don’t know what the conclusions will be.”

HOMING IN Under what is known as the Standard Model of Physics, the boson, named after British physicist Peter Higgs, is posited to have been the agent that gave mass and energy to matter after the Big Bang creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

While its discovery would cement current knowledge about particles such as electrons and photons, results of work at CERN could also prove it does not exist. Such an outcome would undermine the foundations of accepted theories of the make-up of the universe.

“If the first inklings of the Higgs boson are confirmed, then this is just the start of the adventure to unlock the secrets of the fundamental constituents of the Universe,” said Stephen Haywood, Head of the Atlas Group at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The ATLAS results were followed by explanation of the second experiment, CMS.

“We are homing in on the Higgs,” said Claire Shepherd-Themistocleus, Head of the CMS Group at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

“We have had hints today of what its mass might be and the excitement of scientists is palpable. Whether this is ultimately confirmed or we finally rule out a low mass Higgs boson, we are on the verge of a major change in our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter.”

Twitter feeds were choked by the volume of tweets mentioning CERN or Higgs and the webcast from CERN http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

struggling to cope with demand from Higgs-hunters. “It can still happen that it is a fluctuation, but all we see from both experiments is compatible with what we would expect for a Higgs signal to build up,” said Buchmueller.

“But we really need the data from next year to be sure of what we’re seeing.”

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com