Science & Mathematics Questions & Answers

Blue Gene is an ambitious project to expand the horizons of supercomputing, with the ultimate goal of creating a system that can perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second, or 1 petaflop. IBM expects a machine it calls Blue Gene/P to be the first to achieve this computational milestone. Today’s fastest machine, NEC’s Earth Simulator is comparatively slow — about onethirteenth …

The British economist Kenneth Boulding used to explain many economic phenomena as similar to the accumulation or depletion of water in a bathtub due to a difference in the rate of inflow (injections) and outflow (leakages) of water. Such an explanation of an economic phenomenon popularly came to be termed by economists as the application of the Bathtub Theorem. This …

Gunnar Myrdal in 1956 said that regional differences are the natural outcome of economic development and the inevitable result of market forces. No one region can prosper, he said, without adversely affecting the prosperity of another. Economic growth takes place initially where there are such natural advantages as a source of fuel or a supply of raw materials. Once in …

The Aufbau Principle states that in the ground state of an atom, an electron enters the orbital with lowest energy first and subsequent electrons are fed in the order of increasing energies. The word ‘aufbau’ in German means ‘building up’. Here, it refers to the filling up of orbitals with electrons.

The name of the element is ‘Einsteinium’, its symbol is Es and the atomic number is 99. Named in honour of Albert Einstein, it is the seventh transuranic element and does not occur naturally in any measurable quantities. Einsteinium was first identified in December 1952 by Albert Ghiorso, with co-workers at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was examining …

The term anti-sense comes from the fact that messenger RNA is synthesized from one of the two strands of the DNA double helix – that strand is called the template, or sense strand. The complementary strand of DNA is called the anti-sense strand. The two DNA strands – sense and anti sense – are complementary to each other and form …

The greenhouse effect occurs when the atmosphere lets sunlight in and blocks infrared radiation from escaping. If it is not so, then the temperature on Earth which is 15 degrees Celsius would be -15 degrees Celsius. Imagine a layer that stops light from getting in and lets infrared out. An anti-greenhouse effect does the same thing to heat — it …

The alphabet of genetics consists of four letters ATC and G each representing the corresponding nitrogenous base, e.g., A for adenine, T for thiamine, C for cytosine and G for guanine (in case of RNA, T is replaced by U which stands for uracil). These are constituents of a nucleotide monomer along with pentose sugar and phosphoric acid. In the …

It is a technique developed by F M Alexander, who utilised the self-observation and reasoning methods to enhance the physical performance of human body like sitting, standing, walking and speaking. It is utilised to overcome unwanted physical habits developed over the years through refined strategies borne out of empirical reasoning. It is a helpful tool for traditional methods of medication.

This model was proposed by JJ Thomson, who had also discovered the electron. It was put forth before the discovery of the nucleus. In this model, the atom is a sphere of positive charge, and negatively charged electrons are embedded in it to balance the positive charge. The electrons are like plums in a pudding. This model was rejected when …