Slouching towards Eureka

Today might be Eureka day, i.e. CERN might announce the discovery of the Higgs particle.  Or instead, they may announce better bounds and non- Standard Model physics! Fermilab yesterday confirmed that a detailed analysis of their Tevatron data supports strongly (2.9 sigma) all the indications that the Higgs is lurking in the expected range (115-135 GeV) via b-b-bar decays , but no one has the magic 5 sigma result yet.


Meanwhile particle physicists are all excited and waiting for the web-cast from CERN. Hopefully it will be a faster than the December one. In case you want a blow by blow account, here is the link to the Cosmic Variance blog from Discover magazine.


More later today, when we find out  the real score.

5 sigma result at 125 GeV! Is this it? 


This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Half the sky

Once again, one of those who hold up half the sky, has reached the skies. Liu Yang becomes the first Chinese woman to go up in space, in a Shenzhou-9 space craft that blasted off the Gobi desert. Thirty three year old Liu is a member of the Chinese air force, and is a crack fighter pilot, and once safely piloted home a jet, whose engine blades got smashed in a bird hit. She is supposed to carry out medical experiments in the current mission, and hopefully the ice-cold composure she demonstrated in the bird hit emergency won't be put to a test.

The elite roll-call of women who have been to space now stands at 57, with three Russians, one Iranian, two Canadians, two Japanese, one Korean, one Frenchwoman, and all the rest being Americans, including two women of Indian origin, Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. The roll call is pretty long, and the best remembered ones include Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman, as well as the first civilian, and also the first Soviet woman in space, in 1963; and Sally Ride (`Ride, Sally Ride'), the first American woman in space,  in 1983. Everything was not a triumphal ride, Judith Resnick and Christa McAuliffe, who was not an astronaut, but a school teacher, were two of the seven who died in the Challenger disaster in 1986, and Kalpana Chawla, more recently in the Columbia disaster in 2003. This post is a tribute to their memory, as well as a toast to Liu Yang, the latest addition to this illustrious list. All the best, Major Liu, and a safe journey home.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi rao.

How to get the girls

This post, as the title says, provides useful input on how to get the girls, provided you are an orangutan, of course! A recent study of orangutan strategies for success with lady orangutans, indicate that male orangutans who prolong their years of puberty, sometimes by as much as a decade, develop their physical strength to a point where they can easily displace the dominant males, and thereby acquire all the females. This conclusion is backed by years of field data as well as a simple but solid mathematical model developed by Gauri Pradhan, an alumnus of the University of Pune, who now works at the University of South Florida, and co-workers. However, before all the teenage boys start figuring out how to delay the onset of chest hair, (the orangutans delay the onset of cheek flanges), a few caveats are necessary. The model works for Sumatran orangutans where the societal structure is such that the dominant male can monopolise many females, and does not extend, for example,  to  Bornean orangutans, where the society is structured differently. Secondly, males who have taken recourse to this strategy are shorter lived. Therefore, extensions to Homo Sapiens society should be carried out with care!

For those who wish to pursue this subject further, the original article can be found in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, as well as in news shorts by the New Scientist, and, of course, Monkey News.



This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The land of kings

Just back from the land of kings, the fabled castles and palaces of Rajasthan, to be more exact, Jodhpur. Modern day Jodhpur is a neat, sweet, and surprisingly clean city. It must be one the very few Indian cities of any size where there are no high rises, the  tallest building seen had no more than two floors. The roads are wide and good, especially after Chennai's pot holes, and there's a surprising number of trees, given that the desert starts just outside.


The two highlights of the city are the Umaid Bhavan palace, a modern day sandstone pile, built in the 1930s for a few crores, as a kind of employment guarantee scheme from the Maharaja to the locals, and the Meherangarh fort. Before you start turning up your noses at the age of the palace, and its consequent modernity, it should be told that it constitutes a beautiful example of decoration in the art deco style. Since a part of the palace is a hotel, and another the private residence of the erstwhile Maharaja, the most spectacular rooms are out of bounds to the public. However, what is on display provides a tantalising teaser to the riches within.  Notable items include matkas made of beautiful Murano glass, perhaps made specially for the Maharaja, the shape is rarely seen in Europe, and some of the Maharaja's collection of vintage cars, with Rolls Royces, Daimlers, Chryslers and Bentleys on display, all in immaculate shape, as is the rest of the domed and turretted building.

Unlike the modern palace, Meherangarh fort, is authentically old, being founded in the 15th century, with all the associated blood and gore of antiquity. Right near the entrance, (with the usual door studded with the nails built to discourage attacking elephants), is the memorial stone dedicated to Raj Singh Meghwal, who volunteered to have himself walled up in the castle rampart as the sacrifice demanded by the local goddess, as well as the little hand prints so often seen in Rajasthan, the marks of the sati, the queens who had immolated themselves at the death of the king. Unlike most monuments in India, the fort, a typical example of Rajasthani medieval architecture, is beautifully conserved, with help of the Germans, and provides an informative audio commentary.

After all the royalty and antiquity, the Indian Institute of Technology, Rajasthan, the newest baby in the IIT family, comes as a refreshing blast from the 21st century. The IITR differentiates itself from the rest of the IIT-s by taking a mulltidisciplinary approach, being organised around interdisciplinary centres, like systems science and biologically inspired research, rather than into the traditional departments and disciplines. To paraphrase a memorable quote from the director, even if you win the rat race, you are only a rat, if you want to be a cat, you have to be different! The approach sounded like an excellent idea, and we wish the newest IIT all luck for its effective implementation.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Wings of fire

Our apologies for lifting the blog title from Abdul Kalam's autobiography, but the title couldn't be more appropriate. With the successful launch of Agni 5, India has joined the elite group of nations with intermediate range missile capability, admittedly far behind the remaining five, viz. the U.S., Russia, France, U.K.  and China.


Is this an achievement to be proud of? Technologically, surely. This is not the kind of technology that is handed over from one nation to another, unless the two nations do it in a clandestine fashion, with the donor nation extracting its pound of flesh in return. No such trades have ever been associated with the Indian missile programme, and India can justifiably be proud of the technological and managerial skills of its defence scientists. Moreover, Agni 5 is dead on schedule, since it was announced in 2007, with an expected launch date in 2011 or 2012. If only India's civilian scientific programmes like the Indus synchrotron, the Indian Neutrino project, the Hanle telescope could match up to the enviable record of the Agni series!

Is this an achievement to be proud of from other points of view? Are we not adding to the proliferation of missiles? Well, given that this was a missile test, it seems to have raised hardly any hackles. There were a few cracks about how Agni's range had been carefully kept below 5000 kms precisely to avoid raising hackles, and also some apprehensions that the real range of the missile is about 8000 kms, which brings it to the level of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but they seem to be unfounded. Is it ethical on the part  of India to make missiles, on this scale? Our record on nonproliferation has been exemplary, and has been recognised as being so, as is indicated by the remarkable absence of international opproborium on this missile test.On the other hand, independence and sovereignity are hard to sustain without military might to back them up, said George Orwell, in one of his essays. This is especially true given our experience with hostile neighbours and their allies. So perhaps this missile test was necessary, despite these other reservations.

Finally, the mission chief of Agni 5 was a woman,  Dr. Tessy Thomas. Congratulations, Dr. Thomas, on scaling a very macho male bastion, a missile mission. We are very proud of you!


This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.
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A pointer and a tribute

Rahul Siddharthan, a fellow blogger, has requested a pointer to his recent blog post which draws attention to the plight of Dr. Partha Sarathi Ray, a bioscientist at IISER Kolkata, who has been arrested by the Kolkata police last Sunday for peaceful protest and remanded to jail for 14 days. Please see this link for further details, and a petition. See also the Nanopolitan .
This pointer is a singularly appropriate place to homage to the memory of Fang Lizhi(February 12, 1936- April 6, 2012), a Chinese astrophysicist, whose dissident movement was one of the contributors to the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. After the massacre of June 4, Prof. Fang and his family took refuge in the U.S. consulate for nearly 13 months, after which they were allowed to leave for the U.S, ostensibly for medical treatment. Thereafter, he worked as a professor of physics at the University of Arizona, and lived there till his death on April 6, 2012 at the age of 76, remaining active in the human rights movement. One of Prof. Fang's early brushes with authority arose due to an unlikely sounding article entitled “A Solution of the Cosmological Equations in Scalar-Tensor Theory, with Mass and Blackbody Radiation.” This article introduced the Big Bang theory to Chinese physics circles, and was regarded as being heretical as it contradicted Engel's notions of the universe being infinite with respect to space and time.
A more obvious challenge to authority was contained in his speech, made 26 years ago to students at Tongzhi University in Shanghai, where he said, “Human rights are fundamental privileges that people have from birth, such as the right to think and be educated, the right to marry, and so on. But we Chinese consider those rights dangerous. If we are the democratic country we say we are, these rights should be stronger here than elsewhere. But at present they are nothing more than an abstract idea.”
We in India have always fancied we were better off in this respect. We hope we are right, and will be proved right by the response of the Indian people and the state to cases like Dr. Ray's.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

A new day?

Early projections for the recent by-elections in Myanmar predict a sixty percent fraction of the vote, and about 40 seats of the 45 seats contested to the National League of Democracy party of Aung San Suu Kyi. Given that the total number of seats in parliament is 664, of which one quarter are reserved for the military, the victory will be more of a moral and symbolic nature rather than translating into numerical strength for the issues that will face the house. However, the moral strength of the victory which will result in Suu Kyi returning to the house for the first time since 1990, may pave the way to amendments reducing the military strength in the house. Already, key electoral reforms which paved the way to this wekend's ballot went further than the cosmetic measures which were supposedly undertaken to facilitate Myanmar's chair in the ASEAN nations. Once in parliament, Suu Kyi can influence policy and help to tilt the balance of power from the dictats of the military to the wishes of the common people. Of course, the composition of the Myanmar parliament is such that the NLD will hold little legislative power. On the hand, there is no doubt that Myanmar has opened up to an extent which could not have been predicted even a year ago, leading to the hope that sometime in the not too distant future, the country may finally be freed from nearly half a century of military rule.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.