DIAMOND IN THE SKY

Looking for a perfect wedding ring? Well, how about a planet made almost entirely of natural diamond!!

A team of astronomers  led by Professor Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia reported on Aug. 25, in the journal Science that they might have found a planet made entirely of diamond orbiting an unusual star called pulsar.

The planet, about five times the size of the earth is just a little heavier than jupitar. It orbits the pulsar in just two hours and ten minutes, and the distance between the two objects is said to be 600,000 km – a little less than the radius of our Sun and is probably the remnants of a once-large dead star. 

The pulsar and the diamond planet lie 4,000 light-years away from earth in the constellation of Serpens (the Snake). Though it might be made of diamond, the astromers don’t really expect the planet to be all shiny and sparkling.

This interesting piece of discovery gives one of my favourite nursery rhymes a whole new meaning.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
   How I wonder what you are.
  Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

WHAT’S ON HER MIND??

This post is dedicated to all the guys out there who never had a clue as to what’s on her mind. Many have tried and all have failed. Though the present looks really bleak in solving this mystery, the future is quite promising. Enter MIND READING. And no, this post in no way teaches you how to read minds.

Scientist have found a way to read minds through brain scans. Our brain processes what our eyes see in visual cortex, a part of our brain. Through a fMRI scan scientists can deduce the images stored in this part of our brains. Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, is a leading researcher in the field of brain imaging and vision research aka visual mind reading. His method involves his test subjects to see a series of images and later they are shown some new images which Jack and his team can predict by monitoring the subjects brain activity. But according to Jack Gallant, the existing model of the brain, the brain monitoring device i.e the fMRI and the current understanding of how brain processes shapes and colors in complex images are not enough to decode the visual contents of dreams, memory and the complex images that we see in our daily life, though with better understanding of the brain model and better and more powerful brain monitoring devices it might just be possible.

Researchers at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have also developed a new brain analysis technology that reconstructs the images inside a brain and displays it on a computer screen. It is, more or less based on the same principle as Jack Gallant’s technique.

Mind reading could become a powerful tool of the future. It could help doctors in diagnosis of diseases and the effect,the treatment has on the patients. It could quite possibly become the error proof lie detector and can be used by the judiciary against criminals and corrupt politicians (don’t think corrupt is really necessary here). On the other side, this technology raises serious concern over safeguarding the privacy of an individual. But, this is one technology to surely look forward to.

Ten years down the line, we might have this technology on our smartphones as an app and quite possibly an anti-brain hacking cap or maybe another app on your smartphones  that would try to prevent others from reading your mind.