Life in outer space

Many people fail to understand how life originated here on Earth, or in the Universe, for that matter. They attribute the beginning to someone they believe has supreme power and capability.
This only tells us about one basic character of human nature, that we human yearn for protection. We want someone to be there who can be held responsible for what we do. We want someone who listens to us, who will hear when we ask him to get us what we want. In other words, we want a parent. That is why every religion calls him the father. Or the mother.

The existence of life is a mere coincidence. The Earth was just at the right place at the right time. It could have happened with any planet anywhere in the whole universe. Then the life on that planet would have given itself and the planet a name, and would have tried to advance technologically.
This process could have happened anywhere. It might have happened at some other place too!

Drake's Equation predicts that given the uncertainties, there are probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
How come we didn't find them , you might ask. The answer is very simple. The distance. All kind of communication methods require some time, which depends on the distance the carrier has to cover. Also, other civilizations may not be advanced enough to detect, let alone interpret any signal we send.

VLC hidden tips and tricks

Most of us use VLC media player to play our media files in our computers, but we still fail to make use of it to it's full potential. This is a list of the features of VLC which mostly go unnoticed :

1)Convert Media Files
2)Stream Media Over the Network or Internet
3)Record Your Desktop
4)Watch YouTube Videos
5)Apply Video and Audio Effects
6)Record Directly From Webcam

The human brain: Top 7 Myths

1) Your Brain Is Gray

2) We use only 10 percent of our brains.

3) You Get New Brain Wrinkles When You Learn Something

4) The Human Brain Is the Biggest Brain

5) A conk on the head can cause amnesia. 

6) Brain damage is permanent.

7) Drinking alcohol kills brain cells.

The more you know...

Myths about Dreams and Sleep

1) Everyone Needs Eight Hours of Sleep a Night

Eight hours has long been touted as the gold standard of sleep time, but this number is an average: Most people need seven to nine hours. Some can get by on four hours a night, but others need as many as 12.

Some People Are Fine With Only a Few Hours of Sleep.

2) You can catch up with your sleep on weekends
No and no. Individuals who get too little sleep during the work or school week but try to catch up on weekends may not realize that they are accumulating a chronic sleep debt.

3)Teenagers like to stay in bed because they are lazy

 During the years of adolescence, a change occurs in the body clock. During the years of puberty, a 2-3 hours delay occurs in the circadian rhythms and children of this age, particularly males, gradually become more ‘evening types’. This phenomenon is known as delayed sleep phase disorder, and is characterized by a delayed sleep-wake timing.

4)Dreaming has no Importance/Significance

REM sleep, aka dreaming is of very high significance for the brain and the body. It prepares the brain of emergency conditions, and provides stimulation to the nervous system during development.

5) Stay at one place and you will drop off again
This might happen, but a better way is to get out of bed and try some relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, meditation or listen to some soothing music.

6)Sleep is a passive activity
Some brain activities, such as delta waves actually increase when we are asleep. Also sleep is a time when the endocrine system increases production of human growth hormone and prolactin.

7) Sleeping pills are harmless
Receiving hypnotic prescriptions was associated with greater than threefold increased hazards of death even when prescribed <18 pills/year.

8) Day naps are a waste of time

It has now been scientifically proven that Day Dreaming can improve your performance at your workplace.

9) Yawning is an indicator of Tiredness
Even after so many years of research in this field, the real causes of yawning remain a mystery even after continued scientific scrutiny. Although, it is now known that it is not even remotely related to tiredness

10) Don't drink coffee 
 Research in recent years suggests that caffeine could actually help in preventing serious conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s disease.

Intelligence and IQ

"One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts." —Albert Einstein

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. And quite contrary to what most believe, it can be taught. Most of the people think that you don’t have much control over your intelligence. It is genetic—determined at birth. 
However, Intelligence can be increased in children by a variety of methods, while following these five basic principles.

These five primary principles are:

1. Seek Novelty
2. Challenge Yourself
3.  Think Creatively
4.  Do Things The Hard Way
5.  Network

Effect of Video Games on you chid's mind.

Video games are frowned upon by parents as time-wasters, and worse, some education experts think that these games corrupt the brain.  Video games are easily blamed by the media and some experts as the reason why some young people become violent or commit extreme anti-social behavior.  But many scientists and psychologists find that video games can actually have many benefits – the main one is making kids smart.  Video games may actually teach kids high-level thinking skills that they will need in the future.

"Video games change your brain," according to University of Wisconsin psychologist C. Shawn Green. Playing video games change the brain’s physical structure the same way as do learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating using a map. Much like exercise can build muscle, the powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine strengthen neural circuits that can build the brain.

Playing games will have both positive and negative effects on your child's imagination and brain development. 

Positive effects:

• Following instructions
• Problem solving and logic
• Hand-eye coordination, fine motor and spatial skills.
• Planning, resource management and logistics.
• Multitasking, simultaneous tracking of many shifting variables and managing multiple objectives.
•   Accuracy
• Strategy and anticipation
• Pattern recognition
• Perseverance
•  Developing reading and math skills
• Video games make players’ vision become more sensitive to slightly different shades of color

Negative Effects:

• Too much video game playing makes your kid socially isolated
• Games can confuse reality and fantasy
• Some video games teach kids the wrong values.
• Kids can become more aggressive with his siblings or friends

The more you know....

How Life Started on Earth

Recently, a very famous Astrologist said the first "seeds of life" were deposited on our plant from space 3,800m years ago.

He claimed microbes from outer space arrived on earth from comets, which then "multiplied and seeded" to form human life.

His said his evidence, published in Cambridge University's International Journal of Astrobiology, showed humans, and all life on Earth, came from aliens brought to the earth by comets hitting the planet.

"Each time a new planetary system forms a few surviving microbes find their way into comets.

"These then multiply and seed other planets."

He added: ""We are thus part of a connected chain that extends over a large volume of the cosmos. Evidence is pointing inexorably in this direction."

Prof Wickramasinghe believes life is transferred from planet to planet over billions of years.

He believes comets hit planets and pushed living matter out into space.

He said some survived and got transferred to new planets over a timescale of millions and millions of years.

But he accepts this model still does not explain how life actually began in the first place.

(source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7136269/All-humans-are-aliens-from-outer-space-scientist-claims.html)

Dreams

Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.

1) You forget 90% of your dreams within 10 minutes of waking up

2) Blind people can dream too, with their other senses

3) Whether you remember or not, you dream 5-7 times every night ( In a normal 8 hour sleep)

4) Our brain cannot construct new faces. The faces we see is a dream are of the people who we have seen earlier sometime in our life

5) Almost 11% people dream in black and white

6) In dreams, negative emotions tend to occur twice as often as pleasant feelings. Fear and anxiety are the most commonly expressed emotions  in dreams, followed by anger and sadness.  

7) Lucid Dreaming is not a myth. You can have lucid dreams, and you can even train yourself for them

8) You experience Sleep Paralysis each and every time you have REM sleep. If you wake up during it, you might feel like you are being pushed downwards by an invisible force, and you won't be able to move your hands and legs.

9) Animals have dreams too.

10) Sometimes our brain can interpret external stimuli, like sound and make it a part of the dream.

11) Dreams are indispensable.  A lack of dream activity may imply some protein deficiency or a personality disorder.

The More you know...

The Toothpaste Theory

Having a religion is like having a toothpaste. Different people use different brands, right?! If someone likes brand A for it's mint flavor, he can't force it on someone else. People might be using the same toothpaste because their parents used it too. Because their parents told them that this toothpaste will take care of all their dental hygiene problems. Because they themselves found out by experience that this toothpaste suits them best. Every toothpaste has some characteristic feature which the others don't have. It has it's own formula. This formula is almost equivalent to the holy books. The formula gives the idea, on how to make the perfect toothpaste as seen by the original CREATOR. It doesn't mean that the new generation of manufacturers must follow the formula line by line. They can change a few things to make it suit them the best. But, they essentially keep the idea alive.

Having a religion is like having a toothpaste, in the sense that everyone actually has something which they think will protect them. It doesn't matter if your teeth are shining white or dull yellow. The toothpaste serves everyone equally. All that matters, is that there is a belief.

Having a Religion can also be compared to having a Television. It doesn't matter if you own a flat screen, or a simple box. At the end of the day, you'll be watching the same news and the same shows. The only difference is that some can afford luxuries, and some can't.

It's a well known fact that still, most people follow only the literal meaning of what's written there in the Bhagwad Gita, The Bible or the holy Quran. Those texts tell you what the writer wanted to tell you. Everyone who has read Harry Potter, visualizes the castle of Hogwarts in a different way. Everyone visualizes the Great hall in a different way. But people who've watched only the movies can only see what the director wanted them to see.

Opening up to new and different ideas is not bad. Keeping your old beliefs with you isn't bad too. If someone tries to force their opinion on someone, that is bad.

The More you know...

The God Misapprehension

The idea that God is an over sized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.- Carl Edward Sagan

What you know, and what you believe, is not only necessarily your own opinion. It might have been formed by reading, or by observation, or by being spoon fed ''facts''. No religion says that you need to love a god in order for him to love you. No religion wants you to become god fearing. A religion can never, and should never force you to do something undesirable. A religion is a unified system of beliefs, a set of ideas and ideals on how to live prosperously while taking care of everyone you care about.The notion of god exists because it is only human to want a father figure watching over us and our mistakes all the time. There can be different gods for everyone. The Christians have their god, the Muslims have their and the Hindus have their own gods too. It Doesn't Matter! At the end of the day, every god and every religion wants the same thing. Prosperity. Bright Future. Taking care of everyone.

The latest theories of the unity of matter, motion, space and time, the unity of the discontinuous and continuous, the principles of the conservation of matter and motion, the ideas of the infinity and inexhaustiblity of matter were stated in a general form in philosophy.

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically"

- Albert Einstein

Anti Matter and Dark Matter

Antimatter is NOT dark matter. Dark matter is something that we have yet not discovered , but we have theoretical proof of it's existence . We know it exists because it affects light and other properties in the universe in a way that currently known matter cannot describe.
The most widely accepted explanation for these phenomena is that dark matter exists and that it is most probably composed of weekly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) that interact only through gravity. Alternative explanations have been proposed, and there is not yet sufficient experimental evidence to determine which is correct. Many experiments to detect proposed dark matter particles through non-gravitational means are under way.

 Dark energy is used to describe the accelerated expansion of the universe. We expect expansion to be slowing down but it’s actually increasing so there must be some energy we don’t know about. Einstein’s equation E=mc^2 tells that energy and mass are interchangeable, so dark energy and dark matter are essentially the same thing.

So antimatter is a broad term for a whole bunch of particles called antiparticles. Every particle theoretically has an antiparticle with the same mass but opposite charge, therefore when they come into contact with each other they annihilate each other and cause decay (into other forms of energy/particles). Carl Anderson discovered the POSITRON. It is the antiparticle of the ELECTRON. Both are known to exist and scientists can create them at will. No, it’s not the end of the world. Positrons ONLY annihilate electrons. All elementary particles have a known antiparticle. 


The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
- Albert Einstein