Drilling the VostoK ice core: search for life in isolated places.

Update: The Russians (may [1, 2]) have reached at the depth of 3768 meters, the surface of the sub-glacial lake. [Sourcehttp://news.discovery.com/earth/they-did-it-curent-status-on-russian-lake-vostok-120206.html]
More: here,
The origin of life is an interesting topic because addressing it affects so many philosophical aspects of present day science. As a computational scientists, we do believe in the Markov Chain Monte Carlo-like trial and error method of evolution[!], whereby the living organism is subjected to several forces of evolution and the chances of evolution depends upon the probability of survival of the evolved beings.

Other views on origin of life are open and are welcome!

The vostok ice core has been compared with other environments such as that of the deep sea of Europa or the ice volcanoes of Enceladus; the moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively. This lake has been isolated for 14 million years. Exploration of such isolated system (without infecting them) could open up possibilities of testing various hypotheses on the origin/possibilities of life on outer/other planets.
A nice article: http://www.cosmonline.co.uk/blog/2012/02/05/vostok-lake-time-forgot 

Lake VostoK src

Quoting BBC:

The Russians have friendly competition from US and British teams. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) are hoping to begin their project to drill into Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica later this year. An American crew is targeting Lake Whillans.

From:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/antarctic-lake-drilling

Coding Practice in MatLAB

I had a post trying to relate a good coding practice in Matlab to the bus resistance of the code.

This week, in mathworks blog,  Brett suggested three nice tutorials for matlab enthusiastic. This is equally useful to  experts as well. They are:

• Michael Robbins' "Good MATLAB Programming Practices"; 
• Pascal Getreuer's "Writing Fast MATLAB Code"; and 
• Nico Schlömer's "Guidelines for writing clean and fast code in MATLAB."

From:

Good MATLAB Coding Practices

Open Access Physical Review X (PRX)

American Physical Society (APS) has opened up for the creative commons (cc) side of it.
Recently it announced the open access journal Physical Review X (PRX) with the aim of "covering all of physics and its application to related fields".

I think by publishing in the open access journals authors have two fold benefits. One, the readers will get unrestricted access to the articles. Second, because the readers get the easy access, the author will ultimately get more readers. Plus the authors retain the copyright of the articles. The cc3.0 license permits anyone, without the need to obtain permission from the author(s) or APS, to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt article content, provided proper attribution is given to the author(s) and to the source of the material.

Currently there is $1500 processing fee supposedly to "cover the expenses associated with peer review, composition, hosting, and archiving."


From http://prx.aps.org/

PRX features

• Publication in a fully open access journal
• Broad subject coverage encouraging communication across related fields
• Validation through prompt and rigorous peer review
• Retention of copyright by authors
• Liberal reuse rights through Creative Commons licensing
• Rapid dissemination via continuous online publication
• Full integration with the Physical Review family of publications through APS's journal platform

A list of open access journals:
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=expand

Today marks the 45th day and I am still thinking...
Did it really happen and what if it would not have happened?
I could not collect enough courage to jot down these words.

We will try our best to continue on the path that you illuminated.

Mom, please rest in peace.








































































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Cleaning the 16inch Telescope Mirror

Thanks to Prof. Delano, we were able to bring the 16-inch lens down.
It requires some cleaning up after about 40 5/6 years. The controller was also not functioning properly. The previous posts on observatory can be found here...
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 The concave reflector. Yes, it needed cleaning!