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Top sci-tech landmarks of 2004
THE year 2004 was a great year for science and technology news. From outbreak of the H5N1 strain of deadly bird flu to finding of the remains of tiny humans in Indonesia; Google for scientists to Stephen Hawking’s lost wager; and from Mars Rover to Spaceship One, there are amazing stories of science and technology.
This year, a deadly strain of Avian Flu hit Asia serving as warning of a major flu epidemic like the one in 1918, which kill more than 18 million people worldwide.
The virus infected millions of birds, cats, tigers and pigs across south-east Asia. Governments kill hundreds of thousands of birds and domestic fowl that caused huge economic loss to these countries. Canada only killed 19 millions birds.
In the wake of the Avian flu, some countries confirmed human deaths with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Thailand and Vietnam were the first ones among them. WHO announced on Feb 19 that H5N1 virus infected 22 people in Vietnam and killed 15 while 7 were killed in Thailand.
In August last year, the dinosaur hunters announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur. The stocky, 9-metre-long carnivore called Rajasaurus narmadensis, which means “the royal dinosaur from the Narmada,” the river region in western India where the bones were found. It was a horned carnivore that hunted other dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Although the remains of Rajasaurus was discovered some 18 years ago by Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and Ashok Sahni, a paleontologist at the Punjab University during a search for dinosaur eggs and nests. But a team of American scientists sorted bones of different species and discovered some parts of Rajasaurus’s skull.
Scientists consider R-narmadensis as the local counterpart of T-rex and reconstruction of the dinosaur’s skull may shed light on how the continents drifted into their present positions and what might have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. This discovery will also help to understand evolution among the dinosaurs and improve our knowledge about how India separated from Africa, Madagascar and Australia and later collide with Asia to form the Himalayas.
Google has announced surprising search tools and services. First, it offered a tool for searching books. Initially, it offered text searching for 60,000-plus books or their excerpts. Later, Google announced Gmail, offering 1000MB of free space per email account.
Finally, Google for scientist was launched in November.
The http://scholar.google.com/ searches only journal articles, theses, books, preprints, and technical reports across any area of research. It put the most useful reference on top. It works by using algorithms that exploit the structure of the links between web pages. Pages with many links pointing to them are considered authorities, and ranked highest in search returns.
Much of the peer-reviewed material on the Google is available through publishers. It also uses citations at the end of each paper, rather than web links. It automatically identifies the format and content of scientific texts from around the web, extracts the references and builds automatic citation analyses for all the papers indexed.
The 3rd of January 04 was a happy moment when stereo cameras on board Spirit rover transmitted the first picture postcard from Mars. After its seven-month journey from Earth, the Spirit, three hours after hitting the ground, sent Nasa controllers its first pictures of the landing site located near the centre of the Gusev crater. This location is only the fourth place on Mars where a human-built machine has ever landed, and the first that scientists actively wanted to visit. It was a bundle of spectrometers, optical microscope, stereo camera, robotic arm with drill and other state-of-the-art scientific instruments. It discovered olivine mineral and other salts on Mars. The rover also drilled two stones (Sashimi and Adirondack) for detailed observation. Scientists considered that stones as time capsule of Mars.
Spirit’s twin rover, Opportunity, also successfully landed on January 25 and greeted earthlings via a postcard from Mars. Both of these moving machines were designed to investigate water rather than little green men on Mars.
CHB11Cl11 is the formula of the world strongest acid which has been formulated in the United States. It is at least a million times potent than concentrated sulphuric acid but, on the other hand, it is also one of the least corrosive. The compound, carborane acid, dubbed as “super acid” can be stored in an ordinary bottle. Its previous rival, fluorosulphuric acid, is so corrosive that can penetrate through glass. This is a great success story of 2004 of making dream chemicals a reality.
Super acid has been created by Christopher Reed and his colleagues at the University of California. It reacts with a good number of compounds like other acids by donating a charged hydrogen atom. Despite having negative charge, it rejects further reactions. That is why carborane is least corrosive.
The new acid is a good donor of hydrogen ions (or protons). It is 100 trillion times more acidic than water. According to its creator, this acid can be used to acidify atoms of the inert gas Xenon, simply because it never has been done before.
“Information can be escape from a black hole after all” admitted the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking in July. He lost a long standing bet with John Preskil, a theoretical physicist at California institute of technology at Pasadena.
Hawking had believed that anything swallowed by a black hole was forever hidden from the outside universe. Preskill bet that the information carried by an object was not destroyed when it plunged into a collapsed star, and could actually be recovered.
“Stephen has changed his position, and I am expecting him to concede the bet,” Preskill says. His prize is to be an encyclopaedia “from which information can be recovered at will”. Hawking says that he will indeed fulfill the bet. One someone asked Hawking about changing his mind after 30 years; He wrote with smile “”My views have evolved.”
He also presented his latest ideas at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, which was held on July 18 in Dublin.
Over the past year we saw some excellent technolgical advances . The SpaceShip One became the first commercial vehicle to fly to the edge of the space and back and to won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in October 2004. It took off and crossed a height of 100 kilometres and then landed safely at the Mojave desert in California. Brian Binnie was the pilot who successfully reached at altitude of 112 kilometres in just a couple of minutes. Success of privately funded SpaceShip One is a gaint leap in space tourism. Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV) is the sole properietor of its technology.
The Ansari X-Prize was founded in 1996, inspired from Orteg Prize that Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 by flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
The year 2004 was a great year for planet hunters too. A network of small telescopes, TrES (TransAtlantic Exo Planet Survey), discovered an extrasolar planet, TRES-1 in July by looking at the transit of a planet in front of a star. TRES-1 is approximately the size of Jupiter and completes its revolution in just three days.
Another rocky planet was found 50 light years from us. This was discovered by “High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher” or HARPS in Chile.It was discovered by wobbling in a star nearby. Scientist called it “Super Earth” because it has a mass 14 times Earth’s.
In September, US astronomers discovered two planets the size of Jupiter. Eminent scientist Paul Butler discovered one of them 45 light years away. One of them is Gliese436, which has 20 times more mass than our Earth. The other is 55CANCRI and has 18 times more mass than the Blue Planet.
Towards the end of the previous year, evolutionists and cryptozoologists were amazed to see our dwarf relatives - the “Flores” from Indonesia. They lived there 18,000 years ago. Early rearch findings suggest that they were one-third the size of present-day humans.
The new species, reported in weekly Nature, was found by Australian and Indonesian scientists in a rocky shelter called Liang Bua on the island of Flores. They found an almost whole skeleton, thought to be a female, that included skull, jaw and most teeth, along with bones and teeth from at least seven other individuals. At the same site, they also found bones from Komodo dragons and an extinct pygmy elephant called Stegodon.
The writer
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