Tuesday 16 September 2014

Why the Apple Watch marks the beginning of a customizable revolution

There’s no doubt that people love standing out. Whether it’s using fashion sense, personality or technology, people want to be different.

I’m by no means an apple fan, I don’t own any apple products, but I can’t deny the huge influence that apple has on the technology market. The IPhone revolutionised smart phones, the Macintosh having a giant impact on the customer market, turning people that use computers from people who invested a huge amount of time to get it working, with limited options for the average consumer, to putting computers in the “mainstream” so to say.

I’m not excited by the watch itself, I’m not rich enough to buy it, and the Apple Watch “Edition” which includes a 18 carat gold casing is just a better way of putting a giant  “I’m Rich, Mug Me” target on you then wearing a giant gold medallion saying exactly that. What I am excited for however is the prospects that it brings to the table.

Sure, there’s been smart watches before, Samsung released the galaxy gear earlier this year to a very modest (to say the least) reception. The problem with it was that it looked, well it looked like something a cut and paste business man wears to his meeting, to match with his Bluetooth headset.



 
 

Apple have been really clever in how customizable the watch is. Similar to IPhone cases, you can customize the watch straps in a wide variety of apple owned mechanisms, through classic leather straps to magnetic straps, similar to IPad cases, and the clever thing that they have done is allowed it to be removable, meaning that if you get bored with your normal leather brown strap, you can just replace it with a better looking metallic one, or however you like. You can even customize the clock face.

And if there is anything people want, it’s to look unique. You don’t want to be another face in the crowd, you want to have something that says you. This is why I think that the Apple Watch is marking the start of a great revolution in personalised electronic equipment. Sure there have been others before, but usually personalisation is kept to a minimum, sure you can change the layout of your computer, but it’s still the same, sure you can have a new case for a phone, but you’ll only show it off to your friends once or twice and then they’ll forget about it, and unless you’re extremely unsociable, they won’t see it a lot.

The Apple Watch is the start of a personalised revolution in the both physical and online media. Whether it’s the best Smart Watch it’s left to see, but I’m expecting a lot more customizability in future brand new electronics, and who knows? Maybe soon enough we’ll have complete customizability, set any layout, icon; start up sound, even shape that you want, all it needs is an easy way to do it.

If you’re listening google, I’m expecting a share of the profits. 

Damian Bemben
Columnist

Thursday 11 September 2014

Cousin of Higgs Boson observed in Superconductors

By Damian Bemben

A relative of the Higgs Boson, one that inspired the long hunt for the Higgs Boson in the first place, has been observed properly for the first time.
The Higgs Boson itself was first proposed to exist in the 1960s, and only appeared in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in 2012, 50 years later. Peter Higgs and François Englert theorised the existence of the particle, and received the Nobel Physics prize for their hard work and dedication in 2013.

However their ideas were actually inspired by how photons (Particles of Light) behave in superconductors. Metals, when dropped to an extremely low temperature (around -234 Degrees Celsius), allow electrons to move around them with little to no resistance. This produces a lot of extremely cool effects, for example the Meissner effect, which allows a magnet to levitate above a superconducting surface.

However, when the metal reaches around zero degrees kelvin (Absolute Zero, which is the lowest temperature that can possibly be reached) , vibrations are made in the superconducting metal, which in turn slow down photons, making light act as if it has a mass.

This effect is linked very closely to the Higgs Boson, and Ryo Shimano at the University of Tokio who led the team making the new discovery has said that they are the Mathematical equivalent of Higgs particles.
In order to find this new effect, Shimano and his team shook the superconductor with a beam of light, which is a similar method to how particle physicists created the actual Higgs Boson in the Hadron Collider in the first place.

This could prove to be an amazing discovery in physics as by comparing the similarities between the Hadron Collider and the absolute zero superconductor could prove to be very useful in studying the actual Higgs Boson. This is because "One can really do the experiments in a table-top manner, which would definitely reveal new physics and hopefully provide some useful feedbacks to particle physics." Shimano has said.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Blue Whales Bouncing Back

By Damian Bemben

A new study shows that the population of blue whales in California are starting to yet again reach a sustainable level.

Blue whales are big. They weigh on average 190 tonnes, to put that into perspective you would need to stack up at least 3 large tanks on a giant scale in order to compare with the size of a blue whale, and even then you would need to add another 10 tonnes onto it.

Their large size could explain why at least 11 blue whales are struck every single year by ships along the U.S. West Coast.
Doesn’t seem like much does it? But only 3 whales on average die every year through natural threats, which is another reason why this is such a huge success story.

The study itself has shown that along the eastern side of the Pacific Ocean, there are now about 2,200 Blue Whales, this is decades after the hunting the whales was banned by the IWC (The International Whaling Commission).
This might seem as a very small number, however before the ban took place, around 3,400 California blue whales were killed between 1905 and 1971. “It’s a conversation success story” said Cole Monnahan, one of the publishers of this study.

It’s not all good news however, as although the California Blue Whales have managed to recover, they are the only known population of blue whales that have managed to get back to a sustainable population after the global whaling ban.


“California blue whales are recovering because we took actions to stop catches and start monitoring. If we hadn’t, the population might have been pushed to near extinction” explained Monnahan.

The conservation of blue whales off the California coast could prove to set an example for other countries, showing that it is very possible to help get a population of animals back to sustainable standards.
Although blue whales are still threatened, this shows the gigantic effect that people can have on animal populations, for better or worse.