The Zincan Slate

The last refuge for Martian life, if it exists, might be deep below the planet’s surface–and beyond the reach of any currently planned missions, according to a new study.

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Kaprekar’s Constant is 6174. Now lets have some fun with this number.

Follow this simple algorithm to see the magic of this number.

1. Pick a four digit number. Each digit should be unique; no repeating digits. ex. 4367
2. Order the digits from largest to smallest. This is your large value. ex. 7643
3. Order the digits from smallest to largest. This is your small value. ex. 3467
4. Subtract the small value from the large value. ex. 7643-3467=4176
5. Return to step two unless the result is 6174 ex. 7641-1467=6174

The process can take up to seven iterations and will always give a result of 6174.

Once 6174 is reached, the answer will always be 6174.

Why is this so? Plus magazine! has the detailed explanation.

The Sun is midway through its stable hydrogen burning phase known as the main sequence. But when the Sun enters the red giant phase in around 5 billion years things are going to get a lot rougher in the Earth-Moon system…..

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Researchers are reexamining the data from the Mars Viking mission. Once again they are looking for signs of life, but it’s not the kind the probes were originally designed to find. Most of us have read or heard about researchers recently studying organisms in extreme environments. Any organisms that would have evolved and survived to present day on Mars would have had to adapt to a relatively extreme environment. The researchers believe that organisms on Mars may have developed a water/hydrogen peroxide solution instead of the water/salt solution that organisms on Earth developed.The original test that the Viking probe used would not have detected signs of life if the organisms were made of a water/hydrogen peroxide solution.

New Analysis of Viking Mission Results Indicates Presence of Life on Mars from PhysOrg.com
We may already have ‘met’ Martian organisms, according to a paper presented Sunday (Jan. 7) at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

How long would man’s trace on the earth remain if we would all disappear today? This hypothetical timeline, from Times Online, outlines the decay of our impact on the world if such an event would happen.

An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics* may have found definitive proof of a super-massive black hole (Sagittarius A) at the center of our galaxy. They used the Paranal Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other instruments to photograph the galactic core for ten years. One star near the core, designated as S2, came within 17 light-hours of the core at its perihelion (in relation to the core). The Sagittarius A’s gravity was directly detected by the movement of S2. This amazing video shows the influence of S2 by Sagittarius A’s gravity.

(*That just sounds cool, doesn’t it?)

It looks like the Japanese have made another leap in the world of robotics. Researchers at Tsukuba University have built a battery-powered suit that emulates a person’s movement and amplifies their strength. I wonder how long the battery’s power lasts under that kind of load.

I’d love it if my girlfriend could get one of these because she has a mild case of Spina Bifida. A powered suit would give her the strength to do many of the things that she’s always wanted to do. I’d love it if she could join me on my hiking trips. But with my luck, she’d probably just use the powered suit to beat me up when I make her mad. : )

Hibernation has always been a classic sci-fi plot device for long distance space travel. Interplanetary travel is problematic. Travel time is measured in months or years, ships need to carry enough food for their passengers, and the passengers need keep themselves entertained. All of these problems could be solved if the travelers could be placed into hibernation.

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have successfully placed mice into a state of hibernation and revived them with no ill effects. The mice were placed in a chamber filled with 80 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide. This compound is naturally produced in animals and helps regulate body temperature and metabolic activity. After a few minutes, the mice’s heartbeat and temperature were drastically reduced.

Medical researchers see this kind of hibernation as a way to give them more time and options to treat patients. They predict that human trials may begin within five years.

I wonder if a method like this could be used keep people in hibernation for extended periods of time. All people have bacteria within them. If a person is placed in hibernation for an extended period of time, how can their body fight off harmful organisms? Sterilization isn’t an option, because we live as symbionts with many of these bacteria. For example, there are bacteria within our intestines that help produce vitamins for us. It’ll be interesting to see this technology turns out in ten years.

The scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory may have created a small black hole at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The collider smashes two heavy gold ions together at relativistic speeds to detect their constitute quarks and gluons. The researchers believe that they’ve detected a black hole, because a collision created a fireball that is absorbing energy and it may be emitting it back as hawking radiation.

There was some controversy several years ago that this same collider might create a black hole. A handful of scientists argued that the creation of these black holes could potentially lead to devastating consequences. This created enough public pressure to launch a scientific inquiry. The panel concluded that the gravitational forces at that scale would not be the dominant force, so there was no danger of a runaway black hole. If our universe was that unstable, then the high energy cosmic rays that collide with our earth everyday would cause the same effect.

I hope that they are right. If I see the horizon condensing to a point, at least I’ll know what happened. Who knows, maybe that’s why don’t see any signs of intergalactic civilizations.

My copy of Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe arrived in the mail last Wednesday. The first thing that I noticed about this book is its size; it’s 1099 pages long, divided into thirty-four chapters. Most popular science books shy away from showing the math behind the theories. Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time, “Someone told me that each equation that I included in the book would half the sales.” Penrose defied his publisher’s warning and included equations in his book, a lot of them. The first sixteen chapters of the book are a math primer for the rest of the text.

I bought this book because I had read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and I wanted more. It was a good book, but it was written conceptually. Metaphors can only take you so far. There were many parts of The Elegant Universe where I was left knowing that the theories presented couldn’t be seen outside the mathematical perspective.

Chapter one has already provided me with a satisfying paradigm shift. Several years ago I was reading a mathematics book that had a section describing mathematics and its connection to reality. The author described mathematics as a tool made by man and that no mathematical concept was real except for the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4…). One can’t have ½ or 1.56745 of something. If you cut something in half, then it becomes two objects. If you combine objects into a group they are now seen as one.

Penrose allowed me to see the reality of mathematics in a different way. He presents mathematics as more than just a tool, but as something that exists in a world congruent to the material world. The Pythagorean theorem (a^2+b^2=c^2) was discovered during the time of the ancient Egyptians. If this mathematical relationship was only a tool created by man, then it didn’t come into existence until man first wrote it down. This is absurd because we know that someone could have discovered this relationship even earlier, because it holds true independent of its time of discovery. He describes this “world” as the Platonic Mathematical World. It is timeless and without space. Dimensionless, but it is nevertheless real.