Category Science & Technology

Now, after 13 years Japanese scientists have created a genuinely blue chrysanthemum. This could be applied to other species and could mean that florists will no longer have to dye flowers.

True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins – pigment molecules in the petals, stem and fruit – consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple or blue depending on what sugars or groups of atoms are attached.

Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, first put a gene from a bluish flower called The Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene’s protein modified the chrysanthemum’s anthocyanin to make the bloom purple. A second gene from the blue-flowering butterfly pea was then added. This gene’s protein added a sugar molecule to the anthrocyanin which turned the flowers blue. The two-step method was unexpected as the scientists believed multiple genes were required in a more complicated process. Chemical analyses showed that the blue colour came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colourless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue colour.

True blue flowers are rare in nature, occurring only in select species like morning glories and delphiniums. According to the Royal Horticultural Society’s colour scale, most “blues” are really violet or purple.

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Scientists have created a smart t-shirt that monitors the wearer’s respiratory rate in real time, without the help of any wires or sensors. The innovation paves the way for manufacturing clothing that could be used to diagnose respiratory illnesses or monitor people suffering from asthma, sleep apnea or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Created at Universities Laval in Canada, the t-shirt has an antenna sewn in at chest level that is made of a hollow optical fibre coated with a thin layer of silver on its inner surface. The fibre’s exterior surface is covered in a protective polymer. As the wearer breathes in, the smart fibre senses the increase in both thorax circumference and the volume of air in the lungs. The data is then sent to the user’s smartphone or a nearby computer.

To assess the durability of the invention, the researchers washed the t-shirt, and found that after 20 washes, the antenna withstood water and detergent and was still in good working condition.

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The Saraswati supercluster of 43 galaxies is 4 billion light years away from Earth and roughly more than 10 billion years old. It spans 600 million light years and many contain the mass equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.

Superclusters are a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters bound by gravity, often stretching to several hundred times the size of clusters of galaxies, consisting of tens of thousands of galaxies. The Milky Way, the galaxy we are in, is part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

The Shapley Concentration or the Sloan Great Wall superclusters are comparatively large, but the Saraswati supercluster is far more distant.

The supercluster was discovered by Shishir Sankhayan, of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, Pratik Dabhade, IUCAA research fellow, Joe Jacob of Newman College, Kerala, and Prakash Sarkar of the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur.

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How do you carry your music? You probably have it stored in your mobile phone or use music apps to stream them and listen. If you still don’t have your own smartphone, then you might be using a music player or the radio to listen the songs whenever you want. What if none of these options was possible? What if you had to gather around a device that played music, paying for every time you used the service?

A jukebox is a semi-automated music-playing device popular in the middle of the 20th century. Usually a coin-operated machine, it played a user’s selection from available self-contained media. If the idea doesn’t seem relatable to you, wait till you hear about a nickel-in-the-slot phonograph.

First jukebox

The nickel-in-the-slot phonograph is seen by many as the first jukebox, even though it was never known by that name (the word “jukebox” seems to have originated only after the 1930s). it was first installed on November 23, 1889 in the Palais Royale Saloon, Sutter Street, San Francisco, meaning it appeared nearly four decades before the word “jukebox” started doing the rounds.

Before we look at the nickel-in-the-slot machine, we will have to understand the phonograph. The brainchild of American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison, it was first demonstrated by him in 1877. Even though Edison firmly believed that his phonograph – a device for mechanical recording and reproduction of sound – would be put to use in offices, it was the music industry that benefited most from it.

Phonograph at its core

Among those who made the most of the phonograph were two men, Louis T Glass and William S Arnold. Glass worked with the Pacific Phonograph Company during that time and Arnold was his business associate. Glass was struck with the idea that if he could get people to part with money to listen to music, he might make it big in a new business. He soon got to work along with Arnold, and he proved to be absolutely right about his ideas.

Glass and Arnold came up with the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph, an inventions that placed on Edison Class M electric phonograph inside a wooden cabinet. With loudspeakers yet to be invented, the phonograph was attached to four tubes that looked like stethoscopes that were used to listen to the only song stored in the device.

Glass particularly prided himself in the way in which he had devised these four tubes. Each of these tubes was provided with a slot in which a nickel (coin) could be dropped. While dropping a nickel in any of these slots started the machine and played the song, it was only audible in the tube in which the nickel was dropped. If others tried to listen in with the other tubes, they got no sound, unless they dropped a coin to activate that tube as well.

Once installed at the Palais Royale Saloon, it became evident that it was an instant success. With minimal amounts being spent for regular maintenance, it was clear that Glass and Arnold had struck it rich. To add to that, the machines turned out to be so attractive that places that wanted to be buzzing with people took it on lease on regular rentals, while receiving just a 10th of the actual proceedings.

Makes a lot of money

Six months from the time the first nickel-in-the-slot phonograph got going, on May 14, 1890, it had raked in $1,035.25 1(a lot of money at that time). Other machines that had been placed around the city, including some that were placed in close proximity to each other, also did equally well. This prompted Glass to say “that all the money we have made in the phonograph business we have made out of the-nickel-in-the-slot machine,” when he was invited to speak at the first annual convention of local phonograph companies of the U.S. held in Chicago on May 28 and 29, 1890.

Till the advent of radio, phonograph and the various inventions based on it remained the mass medium for popular music and recordings. It was then followed by jukeboxes that dominated the scene until transistors were invented. They might have gone by a different name, but the predecessor to these jukeboxes started out by accepting just a nickel in the slot.

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We have a thing for firsts. Be it the first human being to climb the Mt. Everest, the first to set foot on the moon, or any such feat, they leave an indelible mark in our collective consciousness. The ones who come second, even though achieving an equally significant accomplishment, often fade from our memory. One such second is the X-10 Graphite Reactor, the second artificial nuclear reactor after the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1).

Before we take a look at X-10, we have to understand the circumstances in which it came about. The authorisation of the Manhattan Project by the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II meant that scientists began their research and development to produce the first nuclear weapons. In December 1942, CP-1 became the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor as the experiment led by American-Italian physicist Enrico Fermi achieved the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. 

Need for plutonium

While CP-1 was a success as a scientific experiment and showed that nuclear chain reactions could be controlled, it was built on a small scale, which meant that recovering significant amounts of plutonium wasn’t feasible. As plutonium, a transuranium element that had been recently discovered, was seen as a potential ingredient for atomic weapons, producing it for research was a priority. 

The X-10 Graphite Reactor was thus born as an experimental air-cooled production pile that would help in designing the full-scale helium-cooled reactors that were also being planned. Whereas the X-10 Pile or Clinton Pile was to be built at the Oak Ridge site, the latter was planned to be constructed at Hanford. DuPont company was roped in to work with the University of Chicago to design and build both these reactors. 

Less than a year

Even though the design wasn’t completely ready, DuPont went ahead with the construction of the reactor in early 1943. The X-10 was to be a massive graphite block (24-ft cube), protected by concrete and having 1,248 horizontal channels that were to be filled with uranium slugs surrounded by cooling air. The face of the pile was to be used to push new slugs into the channels, while irradiated ones fell into an underwater bucket at the rear. 

These buckets of irradiated slugs were left to undergo radioactive decay before being moved to a separation facility , where remote-controlled equipment were used to extract the plutonium. Racing against time, the construction of the reactor was completed in less than a year. 

On November 4, 1943, the X-10 went critical for the first time. This meant that the number of neutrons being produced were equal to the number of neutrons being absorbed, which in turn produced the same number of neutrons. A reactor thus operates in a steady-state when it becomes critical. By the end of November, X-10 started producing small but significant samples of plutonium, which were experimentally valuable. 

Important learning

Even though it was decided that water should be used as a coolant for the Hanford reactors while X-10 was still under construction, X-10 provided important results and learning. The X-10 suppled the Los Alamos National Laboratory with the first significant amounts of plutonium, fission studies in which influenced the bomb design. The engineers, technicians, safety officers and reactor operators who worked on X-10 gained great experience, which they were able to apply once they moved to Hanford. 

Once the war was over, the reactor was put to use for peacetime efforts, producing radioisotopes, utilised in industry, medicine and research. It remained in operation until 1963, when X-10 was shut down permanently. By 1965, the X-10 Graphite Reactor was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. government and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Recognised by the American Chemical Society as a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2008, the control room and reactor face are still accessible to the public through tours provided by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

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