AskME app Review-The Baap of all Apps

AskMe.com is the next generation mobile app which serves as a one-stop solution destination that offers it’s users local search option, deals, online classifieds, buy now and voice features.

AskMe.com provides a simple solution to the user by eliminating the need to switch between different platforms like JustDial, OLX, Snapdeal, Groupon and more. All these options are available on one place i.e. AskMe.com and it does not end here it can turn out to be a boon for users particularly on mobile as they don’t need to switch
back and forth.

Once you Download AskMe App, You can start you local search like never before within seconds even standing by roadside. It has become even easier to use this service from a mobile phone than from a desktop PC.

You can also review items on the the AskMe.com platform before making a final decision and that is something which completes your search from start to end on the AskMe.com

How to use this App? Go to the home screen of AskMe.com app,just type in what you are searching for and there you go.

The ease and convenience of the AskMe.com app gives you the power to search “on the go” in your local area. It does not matter what you may be looking for, you can find it all on AskMe.com. So if you are on a road trip or away from your desktop, don’t just wait.

The AskMe.com mobile app is available for smartphone users as AskMe.com for Android and iOS

First time a woman has won mathematics’ top prize

The Fields Medal, officially known as the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, is given out every four years to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40.

Iranian-born Maryam Mirzakhani is the first female winner out of all the 52 previous recipients of the prize. She’s a professor at Stanford University in California, US, and an expert on the behaviour of dynamical systems.

As Dana Mackenzie from New Scientist explains, she “studies the geometry of moduli space, a complex geometric and algebraic entity that might be described as a universe in which every point is itself a universe.”

The other winners this year are Artur Avila, a researcher in a dynamical systems from the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil and the National Centre for Scientific Research in France; Manjul Bhargava from Princeton University in the US, who was recognised for new methods in the geometry of numbers; and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in England, who studies the effect of random noise on partial differential equations, which includes the effect of turbulence on ocean currents or the flow of air around airplane wings.

It’s a fantastic achievement for all the winners, but given that 70 percent of the PhDs in mathematics still go to men, this is also good news for the field.

“This is a great honour. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Mirzakhani said in a Stanford University press release. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke University in North Carolina, US, and president of the International Mathematical Union, which awards the Medal, told Kenneth Chang from the New York Times over email:

“All researchers in mathematics will tell you that there is no difference between the math done by a woman or a man, and of course the decision of the Fields Medal committee is based only on the results of each candidate … That said, I bet the vast majority of the mathematicians in the world will be happy that it will no longer be possible to say that ‘the Fields Medal has always been awarded only to men.’”

New smartphone prototype can be charged by sound

A team of scientists from the Queen Mary University of London has teamed up with Nokia to create a sound-powered smartphone. About the size of a Nokia Lumia 925 phone, the device is filled with energy-harveting ‘nanogenerators’ that can react to sound vibrations and create electricity.

The technology is based on a concept proposed by Korean scientists four years agocalled the piezoelectric effect, which describes how nanowires made from zinc oxide produce an electrical current when they’re subjected to some kind of mechanical stress, such as being squashed, stretched or bent. The Korean researchers discovered that these tiny nanowires were so sensitive, they’d bend in response to the pressure of sound waves. 

With this in mind, the UK team started off by spraying a coating of liquid zinc oxide onto a plastic sheet, says Ben Coxworth at Gizmag, which they placed into a mixture of chemicals and heated to 90ºC (194ºF). This made the liquid zinc oxide grow into tiny nanorods that spread all over the sheet.

"In order to harvest the voltage generated, the nanorod sheet was sandwiched between two electrical contact sheets,” Coxworth adds. "Whereas these contacts would typically be made from gold, the researchers developed a cost-cutting technique that allowed them to use ordinary aluminium foil instead."

The team found that when they installed this device in their smartphone prototype, and exposed it to sounds like traffic, human voices, and music, it was able to generate five volts, which is enough to charge a mobile phone.

"Being able to keep mobile devices working for longer, or do away with batteries completely by tapping into the stray energy that is all around us is an exciting concept,” said one of the team, engineer Joe Briscoe, in a press release. "We hope that we have brought this technology closer to viability."

World’s fastest camera shoots 4.4 trillion frames per second

This new camera is around 1,000 times faster than any other camera in the world, and is powered by a brand new technique for capturing images, known as Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography, or STAMP.

The former fastest cameras in the world create images via the so-called 'pump-probe process', in which light is ‘pumped' at the object it's photographing, and then ‘probed' for absorption. But this new camera has employed the STAMP technique, which works by shooting ultra-fast, single-shot bursts of light at an object to capture its image. This process is so much faster and more efficient because it can map an object over time very quickly, therefore skipping the repetitive measures that the pump-probe process relies on to create its images.

"The STAMP has been proposed to improve the study of chemical reactions and heat conduction, which travels around six times slower than the speed of light,” says Chris Higgins at Wired UK. "The teams, split between Keio University and the University of Tokyo, have been working on a STAMP camera for the past three years, and hope to continue to do so now that their findings have been made public.”

The researchers describe their technology in the journal Nature Photonics, and are now working on scaling it down to prepare it for the commercial market. They hope to see it used in several medical applications, and to study fast dynamics in photochemistry, phononics, and plasma physics.

Want to Learn SQL? Here is a Great Tutorial!

Mode Analytics, a recently launched site for collaborative data science in the cloud, has published an excellent tutorial for learning SQL.

The tutorial is named SQL School .

This is one of the best SQL tutorials I have seen. Plus, it has the huge added advantage of not requiring you to setup your own database first (the data is already available). Setting up your own database can be a bit overwhelming when you are first learning. So, if you are looking to learn SQL, now is a great time to start.

Are the Earth's magnetic poles about to flip?

Over the past six months, the Earth’s magnetic field has been weakening 10 times faster than in previous years, reports the European Space Agency (ESA). The recent changes may indicate that the Earth's magnetic poles are about to flip.

The magnetic field, which has been described as a huge bubble that protects the Earth from incoming cosmic radiation and solar winds, is always changing and ESA’s Swarm mission has been tracking these fluctuations since November 2013. 

The magnetic poles flip every few hundred thousand years and changes in the strength of the magnetic field are part of the cycle, but what is striking is the rate at which it is weakening. “Researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought,” explains Kelly Dickerson at LiveScience.

Scientists expect the next flip in about 2,000 years, but at this rate it may happen sooner. What does it mean for humans? Compasses could point south instead of north for the first time in more than a hundred thousand years, and grids and communication may be affected.

According to LiveScience, the biggest weak spots in the magnetic field have been found over the Western Hemisphere, but it has strengthened over the southern Indian Ocean since January 2014. The latest measurements, as ESA states in a news release, suggest the movement of the magnetic North towards Siberia.

Over the next few months, researchers will continue to analyse Swarm’s data to see how the mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere and magnetosphere may be contributing to these change.

Two Earth-like Planets Never Actually Existed

Publishing in the journal Science, lead author Paul Robertson from Penn State University in the US declared that Gliese 581g doesn’t exist, and neither does another planet in the same solar system, known as Gliese 581d.

Discovered in 2009 and 2010 based on signals from their home star, Gliese 581 - which is a dim red dwarf sitting 22 light-years away from Earth and with a third of the mass of our Sun - Gliese 581g and Gliese 581d were at the time a momentous discovery. Gliese 581g in particular, because calculations of what its size and temperature would be suggested that it could potentially be hospitable to life, if it had a rocky surface. Scientists called it within the habitable, or 'Goldlilocks’, zone, because it wasn’t too hot, it wasn’t too cold, it was just right for life. 

Because these planets were assumed to be too close to their star to be seen directly with telescopes, astronomers Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution for Science and Steven Vogt of the University of California, both based in the US, watched for the subtle wobbles created by the gravity of these planets as they orbited around Gliese 581 and tugged back and forth on it.

"The time it took the ‘planet' to complete one orbit (37 days) told them how far it was from the star,” says Michael D. Lemonick at National Geographic. "In the case of this cool star, that was 'just at the right distance to have liquid water on its surface', Butler said at the time. The strength of the tugging, meanwhile, told them the planet was about three times as massive as Earth."

The Known as the 'Doppler Method', this technique of finding planets is not nearly as accurate as another technique used by the Kepler Space Telescope, which is based on the shadows cast by planets on their stars as they orbit around them. The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered over 3,000 planets and planet-candidates since 2009 using this method.

Robertson and his team weren’t convinced by the evidence offered up by Butler, Vogt, and the Doppler Method, so they studied the emissions coming off the red dwarf star to see what clues they could give. 

Jason Koebler at Motherboard explains:

“The team says that the false readings that were originally believed to be planets were actually due to intense magnetic activity on the star itself - much like sunspots on the Sun. This crazy intense activity created false positives for planets d and g. When Robertson studied the sodium and hydrogen emissions coming off the star, that much became obvious.”

Based on what they found, Robertson concluded that the existence of 581d is an "artefact of stellar activity which, when incompletely corrected, causes the false detection of planet g". 

This is because the existence of Gliese 581g was based on the gravity that Gliese 581d exerted on it, which has now proven to not exist, says Koebler. "In fact, Robertson writes that the existence of planet g 'was simply leftover noise created by stellar activity'. Poor guy."

"It's unfortunate that the other planets don't exist," said co-author Suvrath Mahadevan, also from Penn State University. "But the important takeaway is that stellar activity is an important source of contamination, and that we can [now] take it into account."