What is Mammatus Clouds ?

Mammatus clouds are pouch-like protrusions hanging from the undersides of clouds, usually thunderstorm anvil clouds but other types of clouds as well. Composed primarily of ice, these cloud pouches can extend hundreds of miles in any direction, remaining visible in your sky for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

 People associate them with severe weather, and it’s true they can appear around, before or after a storm. Contrary to myth, they don’t continue extending downward to form tornados, but they are interesting in part because they’re formed by sinking air. 

Most clouds are formed by rising air. Mammatus clouds can appear ominous. But, in a way that’s so common in nature, their dangerous aspect goes hand in hand with a magnificent beauty.

Mammatus are pouch-like cloud structures and a rare example of clouds in sinking air. Sometimes very ominous in appearance, mammatus clouds are harmless and do not mean that a tornado is about to form; a commonly held misconception. In fact, mammatus are usually seen after the worst of a thunderstorm has passed.

Although mammatus most frequently form on the underside of a cumulonimbus, they can develop underneath cirrocumulus, altostratus, altocumulus and stratocumulus. For a mammatus to form, the sinking air must be cooler than the air around it and have high liquid water or ice content.

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Google Doodle marks Kannada writer Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa aka Kuvempu's 113th birthday

Munjane manjinolu/ Pasuralli nadevaaga/ Anjisuva sanjeyolu/ Usirannu yelevaaga/ Yele poove aalisuve/ Naa ninna geeteyanu/ Yele poove solisuve/ Naa ninna preetiyanu!

(Amidst the early morning dew/ Walking across the greenery/ And in the evening that is scary/ While taking a breath, Oh flower, I listen to your song/ Oh flower, I defeat your love!)

Such are the verses of the poem titled Poovu (The Flower) by Kuvempu. The Kannada writer and poet (full name Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa) is the subject of today's Google Doodle, which commemorates his 113th birthday.

Kuvempu is considered among the greatest writers in the Kannada language. As indicated in the poem above, Kuvempu's writings reflected the wonders of the natural world, which is why, when illustrator Upamanyu Bhattacharyya and letterer Swati Shelar were working on the doodle, they chose to portray him surrounded by nature

Kuvempu was born in 1904 in Kuppalli, Karnataka. In 1929, he graduated from the Maharaja College of Mysore, having majored in Kannada. He would begin his academic career there as a lecturer, and after a stint at a Bengaluru university, return to Maharaja College as a professor in 1946. He became principal of the college less than a decade later, and when he retired in 1960, it was as the vice-chancellor of Mysore University.

Throughout his time in academia, Kuvempu also wrote prolifically. He published 25 collections of poetry, two novels, in addition to biographies, literary criticism, story collections, essays and about 10 plays. His epics — Sri Ramayana Darshanam (in two volumes) and Chitrangada — and his autobiography (Nenapina Doniyali; published in 1980) remain among his noted works.

Kuvempu won the Jnanpith Award for Sri Ramayana Darshanam (in 1968, for the year 1967) — the first Kannada writer to receive the honor. He was also only the second Kannada poet to be named 'Rashtra Kavi' in 1958. Apart from these, he was conferred several other honors, including the Padma Vibhushan (1988), Padma Bhushan (1958) and Karnataka Ratna (1992). Kuvempu passed away in 1994, aged 89.

Kuvempu wrote his first-ever poetry collection in English; most of his other works that followed were written in Kannada. He remained a lifelong advocate for the language, especially as a medium of instruction in state educational institutions. He was also a staunch champion of gender equality, anti-casteism, and anti-superstition.

Incidentally, this week also marks the golden jubilee of Kuvempu's Jnanpith Award, and his birthplace is the site of a two-day symposium (over 29-30 December) where scholars will discuss the significance of Kuvempu's work. The Google Doodle honoring Kuvempu couldn't have come at a better time.

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Bone conduction: Get used to the voices in your head

Long established as the premier portal for sound, your ears are facing increased competition from emerging techniques for transmission through your skeleton.
Bone conduction has rapidly become a critical asset for treatment of hearing loss. While a new generation of cochlear implants has had spectacular success in recent years, they rely on air conduction and the patient possessing a functional pathway from outer to inner ear. For patients with severely damaged pathways, such implants offer no solution.


Baha (bone anchored hearing aids) units work by passing sound from a microphone to a magnet or implant beneath a patient's skin, which is converted into vibrations in the skull and eventually arrives at the inner ear. This process extends the miracle of restored hearing to victims of such conditions as microtia or atresia, where the ear or canal is closed or deformed.

"It's the natural spectrum of sound compared with traditional hearing", says Brian Walshe, spokesperson of hearing treatment company Cochlear. "Even with amplification it's the same, there's no distortion."

The company recently launched a wireless Baha set, an indication of the technology's progress and growing popularity. Implants have become smaller and less invasive, while cosmetics have improved so that the system can be worn without advertising it.

Bone conduction is not a new discovery. Ludwig Van Beethoven overcame deafness by biting a metal rod attached to his piano to hear his work. Neither do they need to be compensation for disability - such systems have been used by the military in environments that require awareness as well as audio instructions. A member of the SEAL team which killed Osama Bin Laden wrote in his autobiography that bone conduction communication was critical to coordinating the raid.

The innovation is beginning to seep into consumer electronics. In the early 2000s, headphone sets appeared that played music via the user's bones, but the systems were hamstrung by high cost and low quality, with common complaints about muffled and distorted sound. The makers of Aftershokz believe they have solved those problems with a unit that retails for $79.

"The difficulty for bone conduction has been transmitting vibrations through bone with enough power for music, you need to be on the 20 - 20,000 Hz frequency range," says CEO Bruce Borenstein. "We have been able to power dual transducers with enough vibration to make the sound musical, which has been our big breakthrough."

The bone conduction system offers key safety advantages over traditional earphones, by leaving the user's ears free so that they are not distracted from their environment. It is even possible to drive wearing them, as they comply with the legal requirement to be able to hear on the road. The Audiology Foundation of America has also supported the concept, stating that it causes less damage to the ears than earbuds.

A flood of competitors are entering the market and innovation is not limited to headphones. Google Glass is

using bone conduction rather than earbuds for their speaker system, although there have been teething problems. Multiple patents are emerging for underwater and deep sea communication systems, and the technology has become cheap and accessible enough to be viable for novelty items such as talking pillows.

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Belle Gibson, fake wellness blogger, fined $410,000 over false cancer claims

Fake wellness blogger Belle Gibson has been ordered to pay a fine of $410,000 after being found guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct earlier this year.

The Federal Court in Melbourne found she misled her readers when she claimed her brain cancer was cured through alternative therapies and nutrition.

It was later revealed she never had the disease

.

Ms. Gibson made $420,000 after building a social media empire and releasing The Whole Pantry cookbook and app, based on the claims.

Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) launched an investigation, and in June 2016 brought a civil case against Ms. Gibson and her company Inkerman Road Nominees, which has been shut down.

The court heard Ms. Gibson made false claims about donating a large portion of her profits to charities.

In March, Federal Court Judge Debbie Mortimer upheld "most but not all" of CAV's allegations against Ms. Gibson.

Ms. Gibson has been fined for five separate contraventions of the Australian Consumer Law Act.

The fine includes:

• $90,000 for failing to donate proceeds from the sale of The Whole Pantry app, as publicly advertised
• $50,000 for failing to donate proceeds from the launch of The Whole Pantry app
• $30,000 for failing to donate proceeds from a 2014 Mothers Day event
• $90,000 for failing to donate other company profits
• $150,000 for failing to donate 100 percent of one week's app sales to the family of Joshua Schwarz, a boy who had an inoperable brain tumor

Justice Mortimer described the failure to donate to the Schwarz family as the "most serious" contravention of the law.

"Ms. Gibson expressly compared the terrible circumstances of young Joshua to her own, asserting she had the same kind of tumor as he did; a statement which was completely false, " Justice Mortimer said.

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The hottest thing in the known universe is actually on Earth 👀

IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE

Every atom in the universe likes heat. They like heat so much that atoms and subatomic particles vibrate and move around when they’re hot. The hotter they are, the faster they move. Along these same lines, the colder they are, the slower they move. In fact, at absolute zero (0 Kelvin, −273°C, or −460°F), all movements from atoms completely stop. You can’t get colder than that. It’s like trying to go south from the South Pole or north from the North Pole; not only won’t it happen, it can’t.

In fact, at absolute zero (0 Kelvin, −273°C, or −460°F), all movements from atoms completely stop. You can’t get colder than that. It’s like trying to go south from the South Pole or north from the North Pole; not only won’t it happen, it can’t.

The hottest thing that we know of (and have seen) is actually a lot closer than you might think. It’s right here on Earth at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When they smash gold particles together, for a split second, the temperature reaches 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hotter than a supernova explosion.

BUT CAN WE GO HOTTER?

Theoretically, yes. The first contender for the hottest temperature is the Planck Temperature, which equals 100 million million million million million degrees, or 1032 K. You just can’t put this kind of temperature into perspective. There’s simply no way to wrap your head around this number. Saying that 1032 K is hot is like saying that the universe takes up some space.

This is as hot as you can get in normal physics because, once it gets any hotter, conventional physics just doesn’t work. Weird things happen. Gravitational force becomes as strong as the three other natural forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces), and they merge together into one unified force. Understanding how this happens is referred to as the “theory of everything”—the holy grail of modern theoretical physics…something that we currently don’t understand.

The Hagedorn temperature is the highest temperature that we think we could actually reach. This is the point at which hadronic matter (all the normal, ordinary matter in the universe) is no longer stable and utterly breaks down. We reach this point at about 2 x 1012 K. Notably, some theoretical physicists posit that, at this point, hadronic matter doesn’t “evaporate” but, instead, transitions into quark matter, which can then be further heated. However, quark matter is a theoretical phase, and we aren’t sure if it actually exists.

Another contestant for the hottest temperature in the universe comes courtesy of string theorists, who say that the hottest temperature is 1030 K, a little cooler than the contestant above. This is because string theorists believe that the most basic things in the universe aren’t the normal particles that we are all familiar with, but vibrating strings, which have a different Hagedorn temperature than hadrons.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to test the predictions made by string theorists (and a lot of other predictions that exist at such extremes). As a result, we don’t know exactly what the highest temperature really is. But those mentioned above are the best contenders, according to physicists.

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