Latest news with #AlbertEinstein
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Hidden animal in this optical illusion tricks almost everyone who sees it
Discover whether you're in the top 1% of Brits by taking on this mind-boggling brainteaser that's leaving most people utterly stumped. Seriously, only those with a sky-high IQ can crack this one Find out if you've got the mind of a modern-day genius with this baffling optical illusion that most Brits fail. Brainteasers and riddles are a great way to pass the time on those mundane morning commutes, and make for easy entertainment when your little one is moaning they're bored for the 100th time today. However, research has also found that regularly solving these kinds of puzzles can help bolster your attention span and improve your concentration levels. In many ways, they're like a mini-workout for your brain. However, only those with a sky-high IQ will have any chance of solving this devilishly difficult optical illusion. The image above may look like a bunch of black-and-white squiggles at first, but there is actually an animal hiding in plain sight. As previously reported, while some managed to locate the animal concealed in the zig-zag photograph, other users suggested all they could see were 'balls'. Advice from those who had solved the puzzle also came pouring in online, as they revealed how to spot the creature. One user suggested you should "shake the screen" to see the outline of the animal while another said looking down from a certain angle with your phone would help. Feeling stuck, or reckon you've finally cracked it? Scroll down to the bottom of the article to reveal which animal you need to find. If you spotted the animal straight away - well done. But now, it's time for something a little more challenging. Below are 10 seemingly bog-standard questions you'd expect to hear at your local boozer on quiz night. However, each one of these questions has been strategically designed to trick you. Get too cocky and rush through the quiz, and you'll inevitably fail. But, you can only spend three seconds on each question before you have to move on to the next. You also need to score at least eight out of 10 to prove you're the next Albert Einstein. Once you're done, you can check your answers here - but no cheating. What is the world's most popular social media platform by monthly active users? What is the smallest country in the world? How many planets are in our solar system, excluding Pluto? What is the name of the world's longest river? How many hearts does an octopus have? What is the chemical symbol for gold? What is the largest living organism on Earth? What element forms the majority of the world's atmosphere In what year was the first iPhone released? What is the scientific name for the name by which plants convert sunlight into energy? CLUE: The optical illusion is concealing the face of a panda. Can you find it now?
The Hindu
2 days ago
- Science
- The Hindu
New microscope reveals molecular jostling faster than ever before
More than a century ago, a 26-year-old Albert Einstein explained Brownian motion in one of four papers he published in his annus mirabilis, the miraculous year, called because these papers shot him to fame. Brownian motion is the random jittering of small particles in a fluid, caused because they're constantly colliding with molecules around them. Now, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a breakthrough imaging technique that enables real-time filming of these molecular motions. Their findings were published in Nature Communications. 'Surreal experience' Conventional microscopes are invasive and have limited fields of view. Other microscopes still can't distinguish individual molecules, which are around tens of angstroms in size (1 angstrom = 0.0000000001 m). To compare, one human hair is about a million angstrom thick. The Caltech team has now found a way to indirectly detect molecules by observing their interactions with light. Their technique also taps into the Brownian motion of particles. Using the device they have reported that they can see down to tens of angstroms. 'It was a surreal experience to visualise molecular sizes in real-time at the angstrom scale,' Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, who co-led the study when at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who is now an assistant professor at IIT-Jodhpur, said. 'Even more remarkable was the realisation that no existing technique can achieve this level of detail.' Need for speed The more massive a particle, the slower its Brownian motion. '[It] is like watching how much a spinning object twists after being nudged by light. Small molecules spin fast and scramble the light more. Big molecules spin slowly and keep it aligned,' Lihong Wang, director of the Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory and who supervised the study, said. So by measuring how fast a molecule changes the properties of light, they could determine its size. The Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail from Caltech was the first to measure particle motion at super-short time scales. This work allowed his team to observe chemical reactions as they happened for the first time. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1999. 'While traditional techniques often rely on time-consuming point-by-point scanning, our approach captures the scene in a single shot,' Wang said. 'We also achieved imaging speeds of hundreds of billions of frames per second, making it possible to observe molecular interactions in unprecedented slow motion.' The device is thus the world's fastest single-shot microscope. 'Finally, unlike [traditional methods] which require extensive sample preparation and often damage the specimen, our method is non-intrusive, enabling direct, in-situ measurements,' Wang added. 'Some of the most exciting features of this microscope include its wide-field imaging capability, offering an image area of a few square centimetres, an order of magnitude larger than conventional microscopes,' per Mishra. 'To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first ever to achieve the feat of single-shot 2D molecular sizing.' Playing jigsaw They tested their microscope using a molecule called fluorescein-dextran. Fluorescein is a food colouring dye. Fluorescein-dextran is used to monitor blood flow, drug delivery, and tissue and cell labelling. These fluorescent molecules come in the form of powders. The scientists blended them with water and used clean pipettes to pour drops of these samples into cuvettes (clear, short, rectangular tubes for holding liquid samples). Then they turned to ultrashort pulses from a laser. These lasers aren't unlike those used in LASIK and cataract surgeries. The laser sheet slices through the sample in the cuvette. As it does, the sample emits light that falls on an array of small square mirrors making up a digital micromirror device (DMD). The DMD's job is to shape the light beam. Researchers use software code to tilt each individual mirror in this light-crafter depending on the corresponding pixel in the input image. 'Imagine you're trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle, but instead of having all the pieces, you only have a few of them — and surprisingly, you can still figure out what the full picture looks like,' Wang said. This idea underpins the team's technique, which can reconstruct the full picture from very few measurements provided the structure is repetitive. The DMD converts the transient scene into a random jigsaw pattern from which researchers can extract information about the full picture. The light finally passes through a streak tube that converts the photons in light to electrons. A phosphor screen collects these electrons as they sweep across it and creates a pattern of streaks. The streak pattern reveals the pulse duration from which scientists can infer the sizes of the molecules. Ensemble of molecules 'It is an interesting piece of work. The key in this work is the use of the streak camera to detect dynamics in nanoseconds. This is within the actual lifetimes of the molecules and wouldn't be possible with slow detectors or photodetectors,' Basudev Roy, an associate professor at IIT Madras who works on super-resolution microscopy and wasn't involved in the recent study, said. The size of molecules measured using their technique concurred with previous estimates. 'It still sees an ensemble of molecules inside a detection region — it still doesn't see a single molecule yet. But the dynamics indicate chemical compositions and also chemical reactions,' Roy said. 'Surprisingly, we found out that the technique also works in gas phases. … Initially, we assumed it would be challenging to apply [it] in turbulent environments, such as within a flame,' said study co-lead Peng Wang of Caltech. The team observed black carbon nanoparticles in flames through the microscope. 'Our data in the gas phase turned out to work excellently and the molecule size matches … experimental observation well,' Peng said. This new imaging technique could help better visualise processes and transform biomedical research, disease detection, drug design, and nanomaterial fabrication, among others. Unnati Ashar is a freelance science journalist.
Express Tribune
2 days ago
- Express Tribune
Knowledge, imagination, morality
Listen to article It always feels so good to listen to students' questions during an informal discussion. In such an environment, I have found students speaking their heart out to relieve themselves of the suffocation caused by the unasked question which becomes more suffocating if it remains unanswered. The questions vary on a wide range of topics — some academic, some personal and occasionally philosophical. Among these questions, sometimes, lands a question that begs deep thought and productive debate. One such question was asked, though very casually: "Is there any relationship between intelligence and morality?" And such questions can never be expected on a Procrustean bed. I told students that if they could think up solutions to their daily problems, if they knew how to deal with urgencies, or if they felt the pain when they saw people around in distress, they were intelligent by all means. They possess what the grade seekers don't: empathetic imagination. Only imagination can turn intelligence into moral thinking. Albert Einstein said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." A morally responsible person is always in possession of a beautiful imagination. Generally, morality is associated with dos and don'ts. Morality, when misconstrued, clips the wings of imagination. On the other hand, imagination is the power we have to put things to ourselves in images. In the moral sphere, imagination gains a more active role if it is stimulated to arouse the feeling of empathy leading to sympathy, which, according to David Hume, is the fountainhead of those actions that make us civilised beings. Without using imagination, we can't understand how somebody feels in a given situation. Fanatic and pedantic adherence to creeds and credos always puts imagination on flight mode. Only then can such an inhuman act of murdering a couple in Quetta be perpetrated. To imagine is to put oneself into somebody else's shoes. Morality without imagination breeds dogmatism and extremism. Imagination makes it easier to inculcate moral values in children. For example, if a child snatches or steals a classmate's pencil, instead of punishing him, he should be asked to imagine what pain and problem he would face if he were deprived of his own pencil. The first seed of empathy is sown in his fertile mental landscape. To trigger the recessive imagination, the study of literature is essential, as it provides a 'vicarious social interaction' whereby we learn the unspoken rules of understanding other people. Visual media, particularly film, through its multimodal format, helps us identify with the characters and their emotions. PL Harris, in his book, The Work of the Imagination, writes that children don't just watch or read stories — they actively simulate and reenact them in the theatre of their minds. This practice builds up their imaginative muscle. Imagination comes into play when, to be moral, we have to imagine the consequences of our decisions and actions. Absence of imagination makes us focus only on our world, our needs and our pains. Morality, contrarily, demands us to treat others considerately even though they are not like us. That's impossible without a little stretch of imagination. In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the main character, Atticus Finch, tickles his daughter Scout's imagination and also lays the very foundation of moral understanding: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Moral imagination never plays by the book. We have to go out of the way, riding on the flight of our imagination, to help a person in distress. The selfish part, the dumbest part of our mind, would lure us away from enjoying the ride. After a long period of recessiveness, our imagination forgets how to take flight, making us obtuse, insular and immune to all pricking and prodding of our inner voice. To imagine is to feel. For instance, we know that kindness is a good act - that's our knowledge. Imagination helps us to feel how our kind act can put a smile on an anguished face. This very feeling starts a chain reaction of good acts — that's what morality demands and imagination aims at.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Politics
- Forbes
A Little Career Advice From Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein statue in Washington, D.C. Many years from now, historians will look back and see Albert Einstein as much a philosopher as they do a scientist. Here's one example of why. For nearly 40 years years, friends of ours hosted a lovely New Year's Eve party where many local friends, who have known each other for what seems to be forever, celebrate together. We're all well into our seventies and eighties, and parties like that are history, but lessons remain. Get a broad-based education Of all the subjects I've addressed over the 22 years I've been writing, the one that came up most at these parties was my series of articles imploring college students (with the support of their parents) to get a broad-based education, not just an intense, narrowly defined four-year vocational training in chemistry, finance, communications, or anything else. Interesting, no? Here's why this is interesting. By now, all of us are way past putting our kids through school, so we've got a deep perspective on it. Not only that, but as I looked around the sixty or so revelers, what I saw was a house full of very successful people: business executives, entrepreneurs, a published novelist, a judge, a doctor and other healthcare professionals, a creative advertising executive, a former mayor and other elected officials, a film festival executive director, IT professional, a couple of professors, school teachers, and the list goes on. What struck me is, we all had something in common; to a man and woman, we all enjoyed the benefits of great liberal arts educations as underpinnings of our specific areas of success. And decades later, we'd all had interesting, successful careers. Proof of the value of being well and liberally educated was all over the place. As a career coach and teacher, I've been strongly critical of the heavy over-emphasis on narrow training while ignoring broad education, of the rising number of college students who are pressured into selecting a major in their freshman year, of teenagers who are being asked to decide what to do for the rest of their lives and then putting the blinders on, of the loss of the opportunity to fill out as human beings. It's only gotten more extreme. Delay the declaration of a major If I had a magic wand to wave over the higher education system, it would be to delay the declaration of a major until a real education has taken place. To those who argue that graduates with degrees in finance, accounting, engineering, and IT are the ones who get the highest paid jobs out of college, I say you're right – in the short term. I also ask you to take a longer view. From the perspective of a career coach, I can tell you that, after years in the workforce, these things tend to level off, for a very compelling reason. Leadership demands – among other things – perspective, versatility, multi-dimension, a sense of social responsibility, and an identification with global citizenship. So go ahead and get into chemical engineering if that's your interest, but while you're at it, take courses in literature, history, logic, ethics, world affairs, writing, psychology, sociology, and – for sure – a foreign language. Starting a career well is one thing. To keep rising is entirely another. From the perspective of just one person at a great party, I can point to example after proven example of this point. Take it from Einstein, if you must Now let me elevate this point. Coincidentally, I've been reading Ideas and Thoughts by Albert Einstein. Published a year before his death, it's a collection of many of his papers, letters, and lectures. In a 1952 essay entitled 'Education for Independent Thought' published in The New York Times, he wrote: 'It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community. 'These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not – or at least not in the main – through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the 'humanities' as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy. 'Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included. Independent critical thinking 'It is also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening him with too much and with too varied subjects (point system).' Adamant as I've been on this subject, if I haven't made my point well enough or often enough, I should think 'Education for Independent Thought' does. Useful machine, well trained dog, or harmoniously developed person. The choice is all yours.
New Indian Express
3 days ago
- Science
- New Indian Express
The oxygen of co-existence
Teaching children to value all life and care for the vulnerable—human or animal—nurtures this innate empathy. Research also shows that adults can deepen their empathy through loving-kindness meditation and non-violent actions. As American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson envisions, a world where empathy is taught alongside reading, writing and arithmetic would be profoundly different. It will be a world where there are fewer tears than hands to wipe them. Nurturing this innate empathy, rooted in biology, is essential, as it both fuels and measures our spiritual growth. True Measure of Spiritual Growth Universities judge us by performance, not by the hours we invest in preparation for the examinations. Similarly, any divine Overseer would care less about which religion we follow, the pilgrimages we undertake, or the hours we spend worshipping, and more about how empathetic, compassionate, kind and loving we become as a result. Albert Einstein, who perceived our self-centeredness and sense of separation from the rest of living beings as an optical delusion, urged us to 'widen our circle of compassion'. Genuine empathy extends beyond humans to all sentient beings, including animals—our fellow earthlings. Being apathetic to others' pain dims the divine spark within us. Ethical philosophers have long warned that deriving benefit from others' suffering can dull our capacity to care. Pythagoras cautioned: 'As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.' The numbness we cultivate by justifying cruelty in one realm blunts our sensitivity to see it in others. Tolstoy's insight chillingly echoes this: 'As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.'
