Saturday 1 January 2011

What a Way to Start the New Year!

In many places around the world New Year was not as happy as people would have liked.

From what I heard on CNN and BBC, there has been an explosion outside a church in Egypt, killing about five people. A bomb exploded in a public area in Nigeria, with an estimated but disputed death toll of 30.

To cap it all, huge flood has put quite a damper on New Year celebrations in Queensland, Australia.

Due to the idiosyncrasies of the International Date Line, calendars North America is still read 31 December 2010. The whole world is watching and waiting for the New Year Ball Drop in Times Square New York, one of the most famous New Year's Eve celebrations in the World.

I will now take a moment to highlight my favourite Scientific Discovery of 2010. Put your hands together for the amazing, the versatile, the exotic Graphene!



With it's exotic and wonderful electrical and physical properties, graphene has won the hearts of thousands of physicists and physics lovers around the world. It is arguably one of the most important scientific breakthroughs since the invention of the integrated circuit. It is therefore not surprising that the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for the discovery of wonder material. Scientists around the globe are still discovering new and wonderful properties of graphene. It could be this two dimensional sheet of material that fuels the next wave of technological development. Hats off to graphene!

On a completely different note, the morning news revealed that the social networking site called Facebook has overtaken Google as the most visited website in the US. What an alarming trend! Why are people so obsessed with this thing? What is so great about this website?

2 comments:

Srikanth said...

Information or random pointless activity?

That's a hard one.........I'll go for random pointless activity. Its so random and pointless.

I guess that is how people think these days

Kian Seng said...

You will never know "what is so great about this website" until you experience it yourself.