Solar energy is supposed to be the savior of our generation. The pace at which we are consuming our natural resources is not sustainable and the day is not far when we would be left which none of the natural resources known to mankind. Based on current resources and consumption levels we have probably 60 years worth of oil to burn. That is at the point where a large number of people in developing countries have still not been connected to the grid. The number of people who are going to get connected to the grid is going to increase from here on and so will their consumption of resources. This image here shows the current consumption of electricity, in the coming years the image is going to get brighter but do we have enough resources to fuel these light bulbs? I don’t think so. And this is where Solar Energy comes in.

The total solar power generation capacity in the world is around 65 GW and this is going to expand considerably in the next few years. Especially in countries like India and China, which are constantly looking to break the records for the biggest solar power plants in the world. This should be great news for the future of this planet. The solar power skeptics will tell you why we should stick with coal and natural gas and how solar power is not reliable. All of it is unfortunately true to some extent. It all depends on how you look at it. The biggest issue with solar power, or any power production facility in general is that power cannot be stored for a long period. You might argue that it can be stored in photovoltaic batteries but unfortunately the world we live in economics matters more than the future of the planet and therefore a lot of electricity goes to waste without being stored in batteries. All these issues though are changing and power generation utilities in Arizona and California are changing them. This New York Times report here talks about it.  

The issue I want to explore in this blog though is storing the energy produced, which was till now theoretically possible and is finally being implemented. You can store as much energy in a coffee thermos as in a laptop battery, which costs 10 times as much. That’s essentially what the thermos is doing, storing the heat of that coffee. And heat generates electricity in a solar-thermal power plant, so storing heat is a way to pause the process: Let the sun heat something up, keep that thing hot until the sun goes down, and then use that heat to generate the steam that turns the turbine. Of course, as relatively easy as it is to store heat, you’ve got to find the right substance for a solar-power application. To store the extreme heat that runs a solar-thermal power plant, the substance has to remain stable at high temperatures — in the area of 750 degrees F, otherwise you’d run into problems with vaporizing and pressure changes. It’s also helpful is the substance is cheap and readily available. Enter that white, crystalline stuff in your cupboard that you probably put on your scrambled eggs, your margarita glass and your edamame: salt. Salt melts at only very high temperatures, vaporizes at very, very high temperatures and it’s available in virtually unlimited, low-cost supply. Plus, it only loses about 7 percent of the energy put into it. Actually, the first salt-storage-equipped solar power plant isn’t using table salt. It’s using a different salt mixture often applied as fertilizer, a combination of sodium and potassium nitrate. This makes storage of solar power a possibility and solves one of the biggest questions in the energy security of this planet. More on this can be found here .

A new drug that deals with stage fright has recently been released in the market. The drug called Inderal LA plays with the functioning of the brain by inducing beta-blockers. These beta-blockers are related to their blockade of receptors outside of the brain. Beta-blockers will not help the emotional symptoms of stage fright like nervousness or negative inner voices. So what the drug basically deals with are issues of stage fear, which might be due to multiple issues like lack of confidence, lack of experience and fear of big crowds. This is where I feel the drug companies are fooling us.

Stage fright is something that everyone experiences. May that be a seasoned politician used to speaking in front of hundred thousands of people or a comedian known to thousands of people attending his gigs. Stage fright is something which is a human tendency, humans fear being in the spot light and this drug exactly plays on that. One thing about stage fright that is very true is it goes away once a person starts speaking to the audience and gets on with its act. Having done a lot of public speaking in school it is my experiences, the initial 20-30 seconds is all you need to get comfortable with the audience and after that the content is the one that carries you through. In fact out of the causes of stage fear listed here only Anxious Expectations is something that could be dealt with by taking medication. The rest are self-confidence issues, which can be worked on with a simple public speaking class. I agree that there are extreme cases of anxiety and stage fear for which this drug might be useful but the way it is being sold and prescribed by drugs companies and physicians is very harming to the practice of medical science.

This drug has extremely dangerous side effects. Beta-blockers can significantly worsen some medical conditions. As a general rule, beta-blockers should not be used in asthmatic people. Beta-blockers can worsen congestive heart failure, Raynaud’s syndrome, and diabetes. This further gives an idea about these beta-blockers and though the FDA, for anxiety and stage fright issues does not approve them the majority of its multi-million dollar sales are coming from patients who are taking these pills for issues of anxiety and stage fright which is extremely dangerous for the life of these patients. Apart from these there are other anti-anxiety drugs, which I feel are much worse for the human nervous system. These are called Benzodiazepines, which slow down the nervous system and in many cases would also be fatally dangerous.  The link above gives a great explanation of their side effects.

The funny part is that these drugs are known to induce depression and other such psychological disorders. So while trying to deal with a situation that is purely temperament based a drug might be making the patient worse off in other ways. It is a very sad to realize the way doctors and drug companies are fooling the patients and in the process increasing their sales. The sadder part is that patients are not realizing is they actually need something that is being prescribed to them or if it is pure opportunism. 

The recent phase four trials for a malaria vaccine by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals called RTS,S/AS01E has generated a lot of news about the possibility of dealing with malaria once and for all. A blog post by one of our friends, the link for it is here, made me look into what exactly the fuss was about. So I decided to look into the vaccine and the Random Control Trials performed by the company in Sub-Saharan Africa. Turns out the vaccine are not a one for all cures for malaria. It is more like a vaccine that deals with the severe cases of malaria as through the RCT the subjects who were administered the vaccine reported cases of clinical malaria. The complete report for the RCT’s can be found here.

The Randomized Control Trial was performed in Africa for 3 months on babies between the ages of 5 months and 17 months. The children were randomly administered three doses of the malaria vaccine or three doses of rabies vaccine and were randomly administered among 1600 kids.  The trail conductors agreed an analysis plan on before the data was unblinded. It was agreed that the primary analysis would be an estimate of the hazard ratio for the first episode of malaria involving fever and a parasite density above 2500 per microliter for the group given the vaccine compared with the control group. The secondary analysis included episodes of malaria involving fever. The results according to me are pretty astonishing.

In the first or only episode of malaria, 8% of those who were given the vaccine reported cases of malaria as opposed to 17% of those who were given the rabies vaccine. There were also kids who were not given the vaccine and this around the end of the transmission season so that’s a great plus for the vaccine makers. Another interesting analysis of the study was the happening of clinical malaria. While a number of kids reported clinical malaria for the first time, the number of kids reporting clinical malaria for the second time was 1% and 3% for the groups respectively. It shows that the vaccine is one that works because after the malaria parasite hit the body for the first time, the pathogens in the body developed immunity them come second time and that’s a big positive. 82 of the 447 children receiving the rabies vaccine had one or more serious adverse events, whereas only 42 of the 447 children receiving the RTS,S/AS01E vaccine reported adverse events.  This is most important part of the study as the vaccine deals very well with severe cases of malaria including cerebral malaria and anemia because these severe cases are much lower in children given the vaccine as a percentage. This clearly makes the vaccine really promising in dealing with severe cases of malaria and is something from where further work for complete eradication of malaria can be done. 

This is one of the most Frequently asked questions at Science Conferences held for amateurs. Being an amateur in Science with not much liking for it I finally decided to find out if its practically possible to travel back in time or is just one of the many things Hollywood has been feeding us. This is what I found:

For a really longtime it was believed that it is possible to travel back in time. Or atleast roughly something on those lines based on Sir Issac Newton’s theory of Absolute Time. According to his theory of Absolute Time someone sitting on the North Pole will experience the same time as someone on Mars. He also accepted the fact that human measurement of time is inaccurate and he therefore named that as Relative Time. According to Newton time throughout the universe was same and therefore by that logic time was the Fourth Dimension of the universe. This discovery was one of the greatest of its time and gave the later generations a framework to work on around Physics and formed the basis of Classical Mechanics. As we can go back and forth in the three dimensions, Newton assumed that we would be able to do that in the fourth dimension too. The difference is that the dimension of time is unidirectional and therefore one cannot go back and forth in it and another great Scientist later proved this. 

Albert Einstein in one of his papers put forward the Special Theory of Relativity. This article on How stuff works explains Special Relativity really well. The main postulate of the theory was that no information could travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. It also put forward the second postulate that all laws of physical world show remain the same in any inertial reference frame.  What this basically means is that irrespective of which reference frame a person is in the time for two reference frames can never be the same. This is exactly opposite of what Newton said. According to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity time is not absolute but rather it is relative. This idea and through applicable physics Einstein forced the world to abandon the idea of Absolute Space and Time and brought in the idea of Relative Time.

As I said earlier time is a unidirectional Dimension unlike any other dimensions and one can only travel forward than backward in it. This protects the idea of causality that cause should precede effect and not other way around. This is called the Law of Cause and Effect. Therefore traveling back in time is not possible because you cannot have an effect and than have the cause of it felt. For now and maybe for eternity traveling back in time will be just one of those Sci-fi things we would want to do but cannot. 

If you are reading this post you probably read part one of Do People Prefer Social Order Over Civil Liberties? Through the blog and amazingly large number of repressed yet peaceful countries in the world (Axis of Evil), it is clear that people prefer Stability to Freedom. That still does not explain the reason behind the uprisings in the few countries and what are the chances of those uprisings happening in the 50 odd countries still under repression. Especially also ran superpowers Russia (Commies)!

The fear of people against repression is usually what stops them from going out and protesting against the regime. It also has been noticed that if the chances of facing repression were minimized there would be more people going out and fighting for freedom. This is clearly seen in Egypt and Tunisia where the military refused to follow the orders and shoot on the protesters. What this does not explain though is why is there another military dictatorship back in Egypt and people there are cherishing it and hailing it as a savior.  Some might try to pass it off as the incompetence of the civilian government. But the problems, which the country faces, were the same problems that it faced under the dictatorship.  So why would they want to go back and live under a tyrannical government after fighting for freedom. A possible explanation that my Political Science Professor Dr. Joe Wright gave was: “Humans feel more secure when they have a person with authority telling them what to do” (does not sound like Merica). This will probably the biggest question that we face in respect to human behavior. 

“Kerry Saving Face After Syria Deal?” That’s the headline on FOX News. I will rewind the chain of events. Obama decided to not attack Syria after a deal brokered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin, which places Syrian Chemical Weapons arsenal under international scrutiny. That means I can afford college for hopefully one more semester! YAYY! Why exactly does Obama think he needs to bomb Syria though? And why aren’t there more uprisings in the 50 odd dictatorial regimes present in the world?

In a recent poll in Syria 55% of the population varying through different sects wanted Bashar Al-Assad (that well dressed butcher) to say on as the President. Among the reasons given were the ongoing civil war and the fear of the unknown. But wait isn’t the whole civil war being fought for democracy and more civil liberties. So are people really read to give up on civil liberties for stability?

“Many Classical studies from Soviet and post-Soviet societies have found that when given the choice between liberty and social order, those who support democratic principles tend to choose liberty in preference to order. Yet in results from our two sample surveys conducted in Beijing, China in 1995 and 1997 directly contradict their findings. We find that those who support democratic principles are more likely to choose order over liberty. ”  – (Chen, Zhong 00)

That clearly means that people prefer social order to civil liberties. It is human tendency to prefer order. Chaos is something we are not very comfortable with. Let that be in a democratic society or a dictatorial regime. Humans tend to respect authority and power. That’s the reason that after a riot once the police come in people go home instead of trying to fight their way out. Though the numbers of policemen to rioters maybe in the favor of rioters they still tend to go home. That is because the police command the authority, which is engrained in the subconscious of the rioters. It still does not explain the reason behind the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. I will explore those uprisings in the part two of this blog.

There was a incident recently during New York’s Electric Zoo EDM festival where four ravers died of exhaustion and excessive blood thinning, The organizers put out a statement saying “The incident was a result of excessive overdose of Ecstasy or Molly”, which are different forms of the drug MDMA.

I personally am a big fan of EDM and am a frequent goer to such concerts and I know from first hand experience that the use of MDMA and its different forms is very prevalent in these circles.  MDMA gives a sense of freedom and superiority, its makes a person more social able and people lose their self-inhibitions. Its gives a false sense of high and in the club environment surrounded with a lot of people on the drug, it becomes a ravers paradise. The after effects of the drug include mild depression and anxiety and tiredness. Some users even claim to experience loss of memory after mixing alcohol with the drug.

So how exactly does MDMA work? According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse ‘MDMA affects the brain by increasing the activity of at least three neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Like amphetamines, MDMA causes these neurotransmitters to be released from their storage sites in neurons resulting in increased neurotransmitter activity.’ In simple words it stimulates the brain and makes it work extra hard to produce these neurotransmitters which stimulate the brain. Unfortunately the supply of neurotransmitters to the brain is limited and therefore the user experiences after effects like anxiety and depression. In an ideal universe controlled supply of neurotransmitters would be of great use to humans. It would deal with psychological issues like lack of confidence, etc. But the current level of science has not been able to completely understand the different functions of the brain. Hopefully in the future we will have drugs that can get rid of fear and anxiety from people and make it really easy to make friends of the opposite sex at the bar. Till then the men need to do it the hard way and the women. Well just be yourself!!