Things are changing quickly in science. There have always been changes, but they seem to be coming faster than they have in the past. This is quite understandable, since we have far more advanced instruments for scientific discovery than we have ever had in the past. Scientific theories are sometimes not very permanent. An example of this is Newtonian Physics. It gave us a lot of answers to the world around us and then when we started to get into the microscopic world and atomic world it just didn’t work very well. Scientists decided they needed two sets of physics, one for the macro world, that is the world around us and another set of rules for the tiny stuff like the micro or atomic level world to explain the behavior of things. I have always wondered how small we can go. Physicists thought the God particle or Higgs-Boson was the particle responsible for everything, but now some think there might be other smaller particles. One has to wonder if we will find out things just keep getting infinitely smaller as we look for the smallest particle.

There is just so much we have yet to learn. Neutrinos are very strange. They were said to have no mass and billions of them zip right through us every second. They are hitting the earth from everywhere and passing through it. We know they exist, because detectors have picked them up. Huge tanks full of a fluid similar to cleaning fluid are set deep into mines and as the neutrinos pass through the fluid they leave cloudy trails, proving they exist. These particles carry an electrical charge. It does seem that the entire universe is based on electricity in one way or another. Until now it was thought there were three types of neutrinos and they were electron, muon and tau. This may not be true and at least one more type may exist and this one is said to probably be even stranger if that is possible. Here is the problem, if at least one more type of neutrino does exist, it violates the standard theory of physics and could send us looking for a completely new physics theory. When a detector was employed about six percent of neutrinos created were missing and some scientists believe they changed into a different types which they cannot detect yet.

If you are a regular reader on my site or science sites, you have no doubt heard about the entanglement of atoms. That is where one atom instantly changes the property of another, no matter how far away it is. Scientists were very excited when they found this out and dreamed of all sorts of uses for this, including instant communication no matter what the distance is, but they never thought there was even more to this. Scientists have found if they if they take three photons and add a corkscrew motion, multiple recipients will simultaneously receive information securely encoded in one transmission. As you can guess this was never expected and the more information which can be instantly transferred at once the greater the use for something like this. Can you imagine receiving instant downloads on your computer or even better, getting communication transmissions instantly from spacecraft no matter what the distance from earth? Perhaps in the future this could be applied somehow to propulsion and spacecraft could instantly travel from one place to another. A photon is an elementary particle. It is defined as the quantum of all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including light. When a telescope is aimed at the sky it gathers photons and this is what created the image.

Telescopes mirrors are getting into the huge size range and that is why they are being built in sections, but I think it is safe to say some other method has to come along to gather the light of distant objects. We are in an observing age which is equivalent to the evolution of the steam engine. They were fine until the diesel engine came along. The same is true for telescopes. Somehow photons need to be gathered in some way, perhaps by electronic means and sorted by computer to create an image. Presently we have light gathering instruments attached to telescopes but they are far from being powerful enough to replace a telescope. Once we have accomplished this we may be able to see things we never thought existed at distances well beyond what we believe to be the limit of the universe today.

There are plenty of places on earth which are in desperate need of water. Scientists have been working on this problem for years. They know there is water in the atmosphere and recently have created small tower like devices called Warka Water. They are structures which are very easy to build and are capable of extracting 25 gallons of fresh water per device, from the air every day. The towers are 30 feet tall and they rely on the right combination of structure and materials to perform their magic. The outer layer is woven juncus stalks. The weave offers stability from strong winds and yet it allows air to flow through. There is a mesh net of nylon or polypropylene which hangs inside. The mesh collects droplets of dew which form along the surface. The water passes through a tube which acts like a faucet. The devices are in use in at least one country so far and that is Ethiopia. It is said the towers work great even in the hot deserts of the world.

There is new research coming out which suggest certain types of black holes could break the theory of relativity. This is a real brain burner, but scientists are talking about 5 dimensional black holes. The human brain really cannot visualize anything in the fifth dimension. The model of a 5 dimensional black hole is just that, a model and scientists say as far as they know no 5 dimensional black holes exist in reality. Some scientists are saying the reason we live in a 4 dimensional world, the fourth dimension being time, is there would be utter chaos if we didn’t. Hey we have been wrong so many times about things relating to science, perhaps we will find out we live in a world with much higher dimensions, but we just can’t detect them.

It seems computers are getting closer to humans every day. First it was Artificial Intelligence, then neural networks and now scientists want to power the next generation of computers with the same thing which powers our cells and that is adenosine triphosphate also known as ATP. This means we may be headed toward biological super computers. When I hear things like this I have to wonder how long it will be before cyborgs are common and artificial beings will exist. Cyborgs are physically enhanced humans. I think we can safely say we have some cyborgs among us already. I am thinking of those who lost limbs and such and received replacements which might be stronger than their natural ones.