Hoped for Particle just a 'Blip'

                A great “might have been” for the universe, or at least for the people who study it, disappeared Friday. Last December, two teams of physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reported that they might have been traces of what could be a new fundamental constituent of nature, an elementary particle that is not part of the Standard Model that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century. A bump on a graph signaling excess pairs of gamma rays was most likely a statistical fluke, they said. But physicists have been holding their breath ever since. If real, the new particle would have opened a crack between the known and the unknown, affording a glimpse of quantum secrets undreamed of even by Einstein. On Friday, physicists from the same two CERN teams said that under the onslaught of more data, the possibility of the particle had melted away.

Vitamin-driven battery for cheaper electronics

                Scientists have created a new vitamin-driven battery that is long-lasting and has a high voltage, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment. The battery is similar to many commercially available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode – the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device. “We have been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronic applications,” said Dwight Seferos from University of Toronto in Canada. While bio-derived polymers – long-chain molecules – for one of the electrodes, allowing battery energy to be stored in a vitamin-created plastic, instead of costlier, harder to process and more environmentally-harmful metals such as cobalt.

An App to magnify phone screen

An application that can magnify a smartphone screen to potentially benefit low-vision users has been developed by researchers. The smartphone application projects a magnified smartphone screen to GoogleGlass, which users can navigate using head movements to view a corresponding portion of the magnified screen, researchers said.

The technology can benefit low-vision users, many of whom find the smartphone’s built in zoom feature to be difficult to use. “When people with low visual acuity zoom in on their smartphones, they see only a small portion of the screen, and it is difficult for them to navigate around – they do not know whether the current position is in the centre of the screen or in the corner of the screen,” said Gang Lou from Harvard Medical School. People with low vision often have great difficulty reading and discerning fine details. Magnification is considered the most effective method of compensation for visual loss, researchers said.

SpaceX successfully landed its rocket on a floating ship for the first time

On 9 April 2016, American aerospace company SpaceX achieved the historic feat of successfully launching Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket landed on a drone ship at sea after being launched into space. This was the first time that the company succeeded in landing the rocket in Ocean. The feat was achieved after the company failed to do so in its four previous attempts. This feat also is important because the landing proved that SpaceX can land its rocket both on solid ground and Ocean. This was the second time SpaceX successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch, the first time was on 21 December 2015, when the company’s Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space.