Friday, November 19, 2010

Plant communication

I was amazed by the concept of plants and animals communicating with each other in the movie AVATAR. Some scientists claim that this happens not only on fictional planet "Pandora" but also right on our planet EARTH but this network is not extended to animals. Research by the South China Agricultural University shows that plants communicate with each other through a network of colonized fungi below the earth. How the communication takes place is still unknown.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827864.600-fungal-threads-are-the-internet-of-the-plant-world.html

Monday, November 15, 2010

Stuxnet cracked

Stuxnet is cracked finally, Symantec blog says it has discovered that the Stuxnet worm targeted specific motors used, for instance, in uranium enrichment processes. The malware focus on converter which drive the motors and operate between 800-1200Hz. These findings indicate the political motive behind the worm.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/stuxnet-breakthrough

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Thursday, November 4, 2010

LHC's mini Bing Bang experiment

LHC (Large Hadron Collider) which is managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be starting a new experiment which, will reproduce the conditions of the early universe fraction of seconds after Bing-Bang. Scientists predict that the early Universe existed in a special state of matter called Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).
This experiment will re-create QGP. LHC will achieve this by colliding Lead Ions at a very high velocities. At temperatures generated during the collisions, even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of the atoms, will melt, resulting in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. This condition will exist only for a fractions of the second.

Till now LHC has been smashing protons at high energies in order to prove new physical laws like super symmetry and to discover elusive particles like Higgs Boson which exist only in theory.