Download EasyPhys app!

Finally this day came. I am very pleased to announce a smartphone application perfect for thousands of Physics students, especially at school level. Nevertheless everyone can find something useful in it. This app was developed for a year and most of functions were thought off during programming, so the application became even better than planned. 

Yes, there are some applications like this in the market, but neither of them are so good, and most of them are priced. The variety of equations is huge, as well as a variety of units, so in one click you can change your result from meters to miles or from seconds to hours. It also contains most of the constants you will need in your life, so while solving equation, you won't need to look for constants in various books or internet, because you will always have it in your hand. In addition, Realcalc scientific calculator is implemented, so it contains everything you could ever need. If you get bored, within couple seconds you will be able to check some fascinating science videos or watch very interesting Khan Academy lessons.

We are not planning to stop at this point as we want to make it better, so check it regularly and maybe next time it will also have graph drawer. Just imagine how much easier your homework would be with this feature. 
We would love to hear feedback from you, so email us EasyPhys@gmail.com with any suggestion and we will definitely consider it.

Another good news is that this post should also help to reach 1000 visitors, so it is a double feast!

Finally, you definitely know someone who would need this app, so spread the word!   

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.easyPhys.begin#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDIxMiwiY29tLmVhc3lQaHlzLmJlZ2luIl0.

The pain is gone!

When you have been a kid were you scared of needles? Were you scared of going and seeing a doctor because of pain then medicine is injected? Well this pain is the past. You won't need to worry about your kids as they simply won't feel it! And it is not because their pain genes will be changed but due to physics stepping into medicine. In the nearby future drugs will be injected without a pain at all. How will they do this? It is extremely hard to believe but lasers will be used for this reason. You may think that lasers will burn a hole in you to inject medicine, but this is not so straight forward. Anyway mechanism actually is not too hard. To form 150 millionths of a meter, just slightly thicker than a hair, diameter jets of drugs a micronozzle is used. It is attached to the water chamber by a flexible membrane. Process starts when laser heats water which vaporises so the pressure builds up as water vapor needs more space compared than it is in liquid phase. After pressure reaches a certain value, flexible membrane is pushed into the micronozzle. This happens so quickly that drugs are pushed out with a very big velocity. Due to speed and thickness jets passes through the protective layer of skin. Depending on the power of the laser everything changes: the time how quickly water is vaporized, speed of the jet of drugs and its penetration depth in the skin. Scientists had to overcome a lot of challenges to get proper results. They had to choose laser with right energy, duration of the laser pulse, diameter of the nozzle and hundreds of other parameters to make this perfect for use. For example diameter of the nozzle should be as small as possible to make penetration easier. At the same time if it is too thin there will occur some unwanted effects. Sadly this won't be applied for taking blood as it requires a constant withdrawal and this new method helps only for single injections. Hopefully in the future giving blood will become easy as these shots of medicine and everyone will donate it. This could make possible to heal everyone who got into any kind of accident, lost a lot of blood and prevent a lot of deaths.

You can't hide!

During these times here are a lot of discussions about people losing their privacy, as websites like Facebook allow programs to access all your data. Only more and more of these discussions may appear after invention described in this post. After few years it won't be possible to hide anywhere as researchers found a way how to see what is around the corner! This sounds like it is from science fiction movie but it becomes truth. To successfully complete this, scientists used very advanced devices like a camera which captures images more than a billion times per second! I can bet every sport photographer would be jealous about this as every single moment of basketball match could be captured. Second device used is a femtosecond laser, which emits very very short pulses. Duration of every pulse, which left the laser, is thousand million million times shorter than a second! The brilliance of this idea is that the pulse is shot to the surface (let it be the door in this case as seen in the picture), which allows light to reflect around the corner we need. After reflection light goes into the room or other environment and starts bouncing from all surfaces. Some of these photons reflect back to the door and hits sensor of the camera. This camera can make not only images around the corner but 3D images as well. Mentioned feature is possible because of its capturing speed. It allows capturing photons which travels for different duration of time due to reflection of surfaces at different distances from the door. This looks to be a very simple technology but it really requires a lot of work, especially to write logarithms which could convert received signals into a real picture. And it is a long way till we will be able to use it, but it is coming!  This would be a very useful technology in war because lives could be saved, as soldiers could see if someone is waiting around the corner. It could also be used in cars to see if someone is coming and you can't see it. Believe me this would be very useful in small streets of Crete! I could continue with writing about different uses but there isn’t enough of space for it. Hopefully it just won't be used to stalk people so let's not allow that this very useful technology would go to hands of bad guys.

If you have any suggestions write to EasyPhys@gmail.com

Even Superman would be powerless against this...

Inspired by a long break of not writing anything at all, starting internship in laser’s company and appearance of more powerful lasers every day, I decided to present a record achieved few days ago by researchers from Berkley Lab Laser Accelerator called BELLA. This may be useless as with this pace after few days there may appear an article about a new record. And I actually do hope it will happen as this would mean new technological and scientific opportunities. So what have they actually done? They managed to reach one petawatt peak power pulse. It could be compared to the power of million millions of vacuum cleaners or more than 1000 times the power used by United States at any instant time. Why do they use such a huge power for nothing? Where do they get all this energy from? Actually this laser is very short pulsed. Time of the pulse is only 40 femtoseconds (during this time, light traveling at 300 000 000 m/s speed would travel only few micro meters!). So during all this time United States uses almost no electricity and laser usage becomes 40 Watts, just as much as weak light bulb. It looks that scientists are lying about all this enormous power just to get nice numbers but it isn't true as this power is actually achieved due to a very short pulse. And how is it good for us to have such a powerful laser? People won't have a chance to use it in regular activities for decades or even centuries but in science world it is huge news. This would save us billions of dollars as using such powerful laser would make particle accelerators to be only few meter long and still be as powerful as Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Let's just think big. What if instead of few meters the new accelerator would be hundred kilometers (10 000 times more powerful than LHC)? Then it would be easy to find not only Higgs boson but its constituents too. With time these lasers could also be used to ignite fusion which could give cheap electricity to everyone. So let's wait and we will see.

Travel to the Mars in 0 seconds?

Every traveler is always dreaming about ways to make their journey pass quicker. I also realized this after 19 hours journey to France. No one would feel any discomfort if journey lasts only 0 seconds. Very quick isn't it? It's even faster than light if you are traveling over a huge distance, for example going to the Mars. But what device could actually do it? These things are usually met in almost every science fiction movie- they are called teleportation machines. People have fantasized about traveling quick and far from very early days. The first written story appeared as early as 1877 in Edward Page Mitchell's story "The Man Without a Body". After it everyone put only more and more effort to create a real teleportation machine. But did they succeed? Apparently they did! Scientists were studying real teleportation since 1997. Sadly it is really different from teleportation we imagine. It will take decades to transfer the smallest lead ball you could ever imagine as this effect was achieved only for photons. Despite this, scientists are moving forward and teleportation record was broken by Chinese researchers. Instead of 16 km they managed to transfer photons by almost 100 km, which is 6 times more than anyone did it before. So how was this made? Firstly teleportation can appear only between entangled photons which means they have to interact to each other to get the same quantum state and then after separation if one photon changes another becomes the same as well. This leads to the idea of having our avatars in every place of the world in order to be able to teleport, but agree with me, it is better than nothing. I can already imagine transatlantic airplanes (maybe even galactic starships) full of humanoids. We would transfer our minds to them only after the flight. Just imagine comfort of this! I can already see increasing tourism as you can have a truck full of them and no one will complain about it. But let's go back to the topic. The biggest problem till now was laser pulse dispersion, which caused a reduced number of photons reaching the target. It was solved by using very fancy optics with which even this camera couldn't compare http://easyphys.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/digitalizing-universe.html. This is one of the most welcome devices so let's be patient. 

Everything can be found in more details here: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27843/

Hydrogen future

Nowadays every house has a gas pipe and no one could imagine life during winter without it. But not for long as natural gas will be changed by hydrogen. Sounds unexpected? This is not true as such an idea has been developed for years and scientists were putting loads of effort to make this happen. In last year's technology improved really a lot and more research results are still coming. So it is possible to dream about future when all electricity in all private houses will be generated by hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels or wind turbines. Everyone will forget what means gas, coal or wood burner. There will be places to fill your car with hydrogen or sockets to charge it. All these ideas were inspired by an article from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Sadly scientists didn't improve efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells and even reduced it a little, but this didn't stop them to reach a very important goal: reduce the price of required equipment. Till now the most important catalyst in hydrogen industry was platinum as it achieved the best characteristics. Despite that platinum's price is enormous over 50 000 dollars per kilo. For this price you could easily get two very good cars! It is very hard to believe but the new method uses nickel and molybdenum, which are totally opposite to platinum- enormously cheap. For 50 dollars you can get a kilogram of each. This is 1000 times cheaper for a twice bigger quantity! Hydrogen should be rediscovered again especially when using new materials efficiency was reduced only slightly. So what allowed achieving these characteristics? Firstly it was decided to change platinum with nickel. But due to unsatisfying reactivity it was mixed with molybdenum. New material also didn't satisfy scientists so they introduced nitrogen to form sphere like nanoparticles. Results were much better as nanosheet was formed. The door to the future was opened, now we just need to wait what is going to happen.

Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120511122232.htm

Deleting memory as a hard disk?

What is the most powerful thing in the life of the person? Of course it is our memory. It is very hard to imagine society where no one can remember anything. None of the present achievements could be obtained and even daily communication would be different as we wouldn't be able to talk. Today I saw an article that scientists identified a mechanism which is essential for creating our memories. But scientists were happier about finding out that the same mechanism is essential for forgetting as well. This is not everything as forgetting was proved to be active and not passive process as it was thought before. To get these results fruit flies were studied. They were learned to associate smells with negative or positive reinforcement. This showed that small amount of dopamine is responsible for making memories and forgetting the information, but scientists were interested how the same molecule can cause two opposite consequences. The conclusion of the experiment was that dopamine starts to stimulate learning receptor first, but when it is overstimulated, it continues to activate the receptor of forgetfulness. Could this give us a solution how to increase our memory? Yes it does, as mutation of forgetfulness receptor, proved to block forgetting of information. This is a great discovery towards more knowledge about our own body. It can also be instantly used in medicine to cure people who can't forget car crash or any other horrible event. Here we can also start a discussion about people who could use it for bad purposes. They could easily make witnesses to forget important faces or other important information. So how could we protect ourselves? Teach this method only to few people in the world? Leave your opinion below.

More details about experiment: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120509180113.htm