In 1888, came a treat for the mystery lovers when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided to put his imagination to words. Sherlock Holmes was modeled on Monsieur Dupin, an inspector created by Edgar Allan Poe for his stories 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Purloined Letter'. Yet Sherlock appealed to the British readers more because he confronted the messy, changeable world they dwelled in.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859, a time that fell twenty two years into Queen Victoria’s reign. Also recognized as the time of unparalleled growth in Britain due to labour and resources pouring in from colonies. Businesses flourished and London grew. But, overpopulation, homelessness, drug abuse and crime deemed their way. London became a place of disturbing contrasts. Where the rich comfortably sipped tea in the comfort of their homes, cholera ravaged ones with limited means.

                                                                   

                                                                       London 1888

The rampant contrast provided the perfect backdrop during this fascinating time, where Sir Doyle based Holmes, a man of science, undistracted by the gentler passions of the world, who moved through the dank vapors and dark alleyways of London using logical observational deduction and elimination to solve dilemmas. He embodied the ideals of Victorian manhood.

Described as a ‘thin, wiry, dark man with a high nosed acute face’ by his creator, Holmes was a kind of exemplary gentleman in his restraint. The image of a man with a deerstalker cap and a cape were firmly etched into our minds first due to illustrator Sidney Paget, who added much to our image of the character.

Sidney Paget's illustration of Sherlock Holmes, signed 'SP'

In 1897 Conan Doyle wrote a play about Holmes, and an actor, William Gillette, became a sensation playing the detective on Broadway in New York City. Gillette added another facet to the character, the famous meerschaum pipe. An aspect synonymous with Holmes till today.

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

Doyle’s original readers began to identify their city and recognize their time in the Holmes stories. It was easy to imagine that he was just around the corner, riding in the next cab.

Yet, England saw a drastic upheaval since the first Sherlock Holmes. The British colonies regained their independence, old, mysterious London melted away. The problems faced by modern British society would have left the Victorian detective behind. But quite contrarily, Holmes manages to strike a chord with modern audiences and readers alike.

Guy Ritchie’s Holmes comes off as high caliber entertainment. His Holmes has changed, with the world around him. The introspective, contemplative Holmes gives way to a street smart, martial arts expert.

The Holmes produced by BBC has played historical parallels neatly. A cosmopolitan city with teeming money and crime, a doctor recently back from an inglorious war in Afghanistan and a huge technological leap.

(Left) Guy Ritchie's Sherlock. (Right) BBC's Sherlock 

The Sherlock for every generation is developed according to how they would like to see him. Creators change him yet cling on to the attributes that define him. (In which case, I would happily dwell in 1888, Thank you.)

This graphical representation shows the layers of the 2-D LED and how it emits light.

Most modern electronics, from flat-screen TVs and smartphones to wearable technologies and computer monitors, use tiny light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. These LEDs are based off of semiconductors that emit light with the movement of electrons. As devices get smaller and faster, there is more demand for such semiconductors that are tinier, stronger and more energy efficient.

University of Washington scientists have built the thinnest-known LED that can be used as a source of light energy in electronics. The LED is based off of two-dimensional, flexible semiconductors, making it possible to stack or use in much smaller and more diverse applications than current technology allows.

"We are able to make the thinnest-possible LEDs, only three atoms thick yet mechanically strong. Such thin and foldable LEDs are critical for future portable and integrated electronic devices," said Xiaodong Xu, a UW assistant professor in materials science and engineering and in physics.

Xu along with Jason Ross, a UW materials science and engineering graduate student, co-authored a paper about this technology that appeared online March 9 in Nature Nanotechnology.

Most consumer electronics use three-dimensional LEDs, but these are 10 to 20 times thicker than the LEDs being developed by the UW.

"These are 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, yet the light they emit can be seen by standard measurement equipment," Ross said. "This is a huge leap of miniaturization of technology, and because it's a semiconductor, you can do almost everything with it that is possible with existing, three-dimensional silicon technologies," Ross said.

The UW's LED is made from flat sheets of the molecular semiconductor known as tungsten diselenide, a member of a group of two-dimensional materials that have been recently identified as the thinnest-known semiconductors. Researchers use regular adhesive tape to extract a single sheet of this material from thick, layered pieces in a method inspired by the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to the University of Manchester for isolating one-atom-thick flakes of carbon, called graphene, from a piece of graphite.

In addition to light-emitting applications, this technology could open doors for using light as interconnects to run nano-scale computer chips instead of standard devices that operate off the movement of electrons, or electricity. The latter process creates a lot of heat and wastes power, whereas sending light through a chip to achieve the same purpose would be highly efficient.

"A promising solution is to replace the electrical interconnect with optical ones, which will maintain the high bandwidth but consume less energy," Xu said. "Our work makes it possible to make highly integrated and energy-efficient devices in areas such as lighting, optical communication and nano lasers."

The research team is working on more efficient ways to create these thin LEDs and looking at what happens when two-dimensional materials are stacked in different ways. Additionally, these materials have been shown to react with polarized light in new ways that no other materials can, and researchers also will continue to pursue those applications.

Co-authors are Aaron Jones and David Cobden of the UW; Philip Klement of Justus Liebig University in Germany; Nirmal Ghimire, Jiaqiang Yan and D.G. Mandrus of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe and Kenji Kitamura of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan; and Wang Yao of the University of Hong Kong.

The research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong, the University Grant Committee of Hong Kong and the Croucher Foundation. Ross is supported by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship.

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Washington. The original article was written by Michelle Ma. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jason S. Ross, Philip Klement, Aaron M. Jones, Nirmal J. Ghimire, Jiaqiang Yan, D. G. Mandrus, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Kenji Kitamura, Wang Yao, David H. Cobden, Xiaodong Xu. Electrically tunable excitonic light-emitting diodes based on monolayer WSe2 p–n junctions. Nature Nanotechnology, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2014.26

Most physicists foolhardy enough to write a paper claiming that “there are no black holes” — at least not in the sense we usually imagine — would probably be dismissed as cranks. But when the call to redefine these cosmic crunchers comes from Stephen Hawking, it’s worth taking notice. In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.In its stead, Hawking’s radical new proposal is a much more benign “apparent horizon”, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory,” Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, “enables energy and information to escape from a black hole.” A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that's a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. “The correct treatment,” Hawking says, “remains a mystery.”Hawking posted his paper on the arXiv preprint server on 22 January 1, and it has yet to pass peer review. He titled it, whimsically, “Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes”.The paper is an attempt to solve the so-called black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years, after it was discovered by theoretical physicists Joe Polchinski at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, and colleagues (see 'Astrophysics: Fire in the hole!').In a thought experiment, the researchers asked what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole. Event horizons are mathematically simple consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity that were first pointed out by German physicist Karl Schwarzschild in 1916. In that picture, physicists had long assumed, the astronaut would happily pass through the event horizon, unaware of his or her impending doom, before gradually being pulled inwards — stretched out along the way, like spaghetti — and eventually crushed at the 'singularity', the black hole’s hypothetical infinitely dense core.But on analysing the situation in detail, Polchinski’s team came to the startling realization that the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern particles on small scales, change the situation completely. Quantum theory, they said, dictates that the event horizon must actually be a transformed into a highly energetic region, or 'firewall', that would burn the astronaut to a crisp.This was alarming because, while the firewall obeyed quantum rules, it flouted Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to that theory, someone in free fall should perceive the laws of physics as being identical everywhere in the Universe — whether they are falling into a black hole or floating in empty intergalactic space. As far as Einstein is concerned, the event horizon should be an unremarkable place.Now Hawking proposes a third, tantalizingly simple, option: Quantum mechanics and general relativity remain intact. But black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause spacetime to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist.In place of the event horizon, Hawking invokes an “apparent horizon”, a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended. In general relativity, for an unchanging black hole, these two horizons are identical, because light trying to escape from inside a black hole can only reach as far as the event horizon and will be held there, as though stuck on a treadmill. However, the two horizons can, in principle, be distinguished. If more matter gets swallowed by the black hole, its event horizon will swell and grow larger than the apparent horizon.Conversely, in the 1970s Hawking also showed that black holes can slowly shrink, spewing out 'Hawking radiation'. In that case, the event horizon would, in theory, become smaller than the apparent horizon. Hawking’s new suggestion is that the apparent horizon is the real boundary. “The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” Hawking writes.“The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable,” says Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who collaborated with Hawking in the 1970s. “You could say that it is radical to propose there’s no event horizon. But these are highly quantum conditions, and there’s ambiguity about what spacetime even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon.”While Page accepts Hawking’s proposal that a black hole could exist without an event horizon, he questions whether that alone is enough to get past the firewall paradox. The presence of even an ephemeral apparent horizon, he cautions, could well induce the same issues an event horizon does.Unlike the event horizon, the apparent boundary can eventually dissolve. Page notes that Hawking is opening the door to a scenario so extreme “that anything in principle can get out of a black hole”. Although Hawking does not specify in his paper exactly how an apparent horizon would disappear, Page speculates that when it has shrunk to a certain small size, where the effects of both quantum mechanics and gravity combine, it is plausible that it could vanish. At that point, whatever was once trapped within the black hole would be released (although not in good shape).If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter would be only temporarily held behind the apparent horizon, which would gradually move inwards due to the pull of the black hole, but would never quite crunch down to the centre. Information about this matter would not destroyed, but would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form and it would be almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were.“It would be worse than trying to reconstruct a book that you burned from its ashes,” says Page. In his paper, Hawking compares it to trying to forecast the weather ahead of time: in theory it is possible, but in practice, it’s too difficult to do with much accuracy.Polchinski, however, is sceptical that black holes without an event horizon could exist in nature. The kind of violent fluctuations needed to erase it are too rare in the Universe, he says. “In Einstein’s gravity, the black hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space,” says Polchinski. “We never see spacetime fluctuate in our own neighborhood: it is just too rare on large scales.”Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Hawking's, says that Hawking’s latest contribution highlights how “abhorrent” physicists find the potential existence of firewalls. However he is also cautious about Hawking’s solution. “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls,” says Bousso. “But the fact that we’re still discussing this issue 40 years after Hawking’s first work on black holes is testament to its enormous significance.”This story originally appeared in Nature News.Source: Huffington Post

Researchers from the University of Surrey have launched a unique campaign that will enable the public to 'travel' to space for the cost of a pair of trainers.

Virtual Ride to Space will use cutting-edge virtual technology and a specially designed spacecraft to deliver a three-dimensional, immersive experience, allowing everyone to see what astronauts experience on an ascent to space.
The experience will be created by capturing HD footage of space, via a weather balloon which will carry a cluster of twenty-four HD video cameras to a height of 20km -- twice the height of a commercial airplane. During ascent these cameras will capture panoramic footage of the balloon's journey to space.
Following the flight, specialised software will stitch this footage together to recreate a panoramic view of the space trip. The subsequent space ride will then be viewed using Oculus Rift, a state-of-the-art virtual reality, head-mounted display. The system is designed to deliver high definition 3D virtual environments that can be explored by the wearer, as if they are in space themselves.
The £30,000 project will be funded by public contributions through the crowd-sourcing funding platform, Kickstarter.
"Only 530 people have ever travelled to space. For most of us it's a distant and very expensive dream but this project is about enabling the remaining 99.999992% to see the world like never before," said lead researcher Dr Aaron Knoll from the University of Surrey.
"Ride to Space will give all aspiring astronauts the chance to be a virtual passenger, riding the balloon to space, and unlike other Galactic flights, it won't cost the earth to be on board!"
The project team are also developing a smartphone application that will allow users to experience the journey using the phones' built-in gyroscope and accelerometer data, as well as a computer programme that will allow users to experience space via their PCs.

Further information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1592839372/virtual-ride-to-space-using-the-oculus-rift




April 2014: Money arrives for the KickStarter project and work kicks-off.
May 2014: Parts and materials are sources and procured.
June 2014: Dry run launch attempt(s). Dummy payload is launched and recovery is attempted. Process iterates until we are confident in our ability to successfully launch and recover our system.
July 2014: Grand launch attempt. Complete payload including all 24 GoPro Hero 3 cameras are launched and recovered.
August 2014: Redundant launch attempt (if needed).
September 2014 onward: Development of Oculus VR, smartphone, and PC software.
April 2015: Project completion.