Detecting life by reflected, polarized light

Is There Life on Earth?: "...the light reflected by a planet is polarized, while the light from the host star is not. So polarimetric techniques help us to pick out the faint reflected light of an exoplanet from the dazzling starlight."

More:
ESO website: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1210/
Research paper: Nature paper

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Swarm of Helicopters playing James Bond and other neat tricks

In this post, I will be presenting two interesting videos. These two nice examples illustrate how one could automate the process by assigning the task to the individuals, and allow them to act as a swarm.

1. In the video shown, small fleet of flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme. Each of them are assigned tasks such as playing keyboard, drums and maracas etc.  These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.

2. Second is an example of swarm of nano robots performing some neat tricks. Courtesy of GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania.

The TED talk:

Planets, Sun and Moon Align

Feb 25th, as I came out of my office I looked into the sky.
Previously, I had read about the alignment of the brightest objects in the night sky in the wired (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/live-feed-planets).

I could see the moon and the Jupiter, bright and clear. Mercury was already below the horizon. So, I pulled out my Google-sky in the cell. And there was the surprise!!!

 Not only three, there were seven members of the solar system:  Jupiter, Venus, Moon,  Uranus, Mercury, Sun and Neptune; aligned nearly on a straight line.  I took the screenshot.
Yes, when you do not have a telescope, this is probably how you do your share of astronomical observation. It was  fun, nonetheless.
See the picture below:

GoogleSky screeshot in android cm7 showing
Jupiter, Venus, (Moon),  Uranus, Mercury, Sun and Neptune are aligned nearly on a straight line.
Please click on the image for bigger picture.

Moreover, Saturn was on the same line... somewhere in the direction below my feet...

I think you may be able to watch the same thing on Feb 26th, just after the sun sets.Try!
 

Color-coded boarding scheme

The airlines board aircrafts in the ascending order of "Zones". Zone 1, 2 and 3 etc are called in order.
Everyone knows how chaotic and time consuming it is. Because the next person in line has to wait for people who are trying to stow their luggage. This creates a long line. So, It does make sense to fill the plane from the back and come progressively front-ward.   People with kids and needing assistance should be boarded first.

Recently there are various ideas being put forward to speed up the boarding airplanes. It seems that boarding from back of the plane and filling window-seat passengers are the best way [see 1 and 2]. I like the Wilma boarding scheme where the window seats are zone 1 and aisle seats are zone 3.

Having seen some of the schemes to speed up the boarding, I am inspired to propose a color-coded boarding scheme. My idea is closer to steffen's method (see figures).
In this scheme, instead of calling zones, the calling is dependent upon the color-codes say blue, green, purple, yellow etc. Blue and green color seats are  the window seats are are called first.  I realized that  in [2] it is similar to the wilma scheme.
If tickets are booked together, in the case of husband/wife/ friend scenario, they can be coded the same color.

The seats are filled from back to front in an alternate seats. As shown in the figure, 1, 2, 3 etc are blue and seats 19, 20, 21 etc are also blue. If 1 and 25 booked together, then they are grouped together as blue. The numbers 13, 14, 15 and 7, 8, 9 are green color. In this way, the passengers get enough space to move around to stow their luggage and should make boarding faster. The assignment of color code can be made while the boarding card is being printed. Alignment of passengers in the gate will make  the boarding smoother. Just an idea.

Steffen method of seating order. See [2 ,3] for details. See text for details on how it might be possible to make it faster by color-coded boarding.

The final result might look like:

Color coded boarded scheme. Blue and green are called  first by the  stewards  in a sequence.
People who booked flights together get the same color code as in #5 or #18.

References:

1. http://physicsworld.com/blog/2011/08/how_to_board_an_aircraft_in_a.html
2. http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5211
3. http://www.citeulike.org/user/eyliu/article/9730619

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This week: Neutrinos still superluminal according to experiments

A lot of things happend this week, so I am pinning few down here...

"The statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1111.3328
http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/137499597688930305

Are neutrinos running faster than light?
http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/137675067193700352
http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/137506258361126913

http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/137595451984711680

http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/137593841875288064

http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/137592914200104960

http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/136812249892401152

http://twitter.com/#!/nabinkm/status/136599314486140928

Automated FarmBots for farmer-less farming:
Recent developments in automated farming the crop field has achieved centimeter level accuracy in localization of the farming UAVs.

http://aerialfarmer.blogspot.com/2011/01/uavs-and-agriculture-4.html
http://www.commoncontrolnow.com/Download/The-Unmanned-Farmer.pdf


Lets just call it "Microwave Maths" or "Lightwaves in your service" instead of that long title
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microwaves-and-the-speed
However, it nicely points out the physics happening inside the microwave.
By measuring the cooked spots in microwave, one could calculate the speed of light. I think it could be a nice textbook entry for high school students in western world.