Here comes the question: why should we recycle the handbags?

Firstly, recycling handbags could release the pressure of resource shortage. Those materials of the handbags such as the leather and canvas could be separated from the old bags and put into reprocessing. As there are thousands of handbags discarded every year, if they are recycled, they could turn out to be a precious resource.

Secondly, recycling handbags could help to be environmental friendly. As the earth is more and more crowded, the trash each day generated is nearly immeasurable. If having been thrown away, the handbags would just become the load to the earth while if they are recycled, the bags would just take the load off the earth. So why not recycling them?

Then, how can we have our bag recycled?

It’s pretty simple. You could put the bags to the recycle workshop nearby or put them in the recycled garbage-can. Sometimes we could even donate those usable bags to the poor who may even be not able to afford a bag. This is a way of recycling handbags that are ignored by many people.

So, let’s act now and be green with the world.

The market of handbags is very competitive. Both men and women buy bags for different purposes. They are not only accessories, but also tools for them to look nice. Thus, it is not strange to see a woman has several handbags at the same time.

Suppose you love fashionable bags. You are satisfied with the latest one when you are shopping in the market. You can’t wait to buy it. After carrying it home, you find some of the old bags are not beautiful at all. Then, you decide to throw two or three of them away as you have a new one now. But wait, why not have these handbags recycled to create a new one? You may ask questions like “Are they suitable for recycling”. Well, if you try it, you will find how great it is to do so. It is necessary to recycle old handbags.

It is one of the most economic ways for people to get a new bag by recycling the old. Firstly, it saves you money. Secondly, it saves you time and energy to shop for a new one. And it is good for the environment. Why not recycle them?

Search online about “Do it by yourself” and you will find thousands and millions of people who are interested in it today. And they like to show good-looking things online that are made by them through recycling. And you can also find some people who are good at recycling handbags. It becomes a fashion trend for people to create their own bags. Some of them look extremely chic and fashionable. You can do it too if you recycle old handbags!

It is meaningful to recycling old bags to create a new one. You can be the designer as well as the manufacturer! Such a bag must be meaningful for you. If the one that is created by you looks great in style and design, you are sure to be a person who is ingenious from many people’s point of view.

Don’t throw the old handbags away next time when you get a new one. They are still useful ever though they are no longer fashionable. You can use the materials and patterns of them to create a fashionable handbag! They should be recycled!
Article:  bagzer.com

http://www.igosgeohazards.org

There are many positive effects of using a hybrid car on the environment, and this is one of the main reasons why many people have chosen to buy a hybrid over a conventional gas-powered automobile. Here are some of the ways that buying a hybrid can help save the environment:

1. A hybrid car burns less gasoline and thus, emits fewer toxic emissions. Although the amount of the reduction varies depending on the car model as well as the user’s driving style, in general it is estimated that hybrids can reduce emissions by as much as 90% (under ideal conditions) compared with regular cars. And the adoption of future hybrid technology such as plug-in hybrids, diesel hybrids and fuel cell-powered hybrids are expected to lower emissions even further and bring hybrids closer to the eventual goal of zero-emission automobiles.

2. It also emits less greenhouse gases. Studies have shown that hybrid cars emit substantially less carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, compared with conventional automobiles. And the recent emergence of clean diesel technology promises to reduce emissions even further as car manufacturers work to bring diesel-powered hybrids to the market that also promise even greater fuel efficiency as well as more powerful hybrid cars.

3. Less noise pollution is one of the least discussed hybrid car environment benefits. In general produce less noise than conventional automobiles, particularly when they are using the electric battery. And plug-ins can lower noise levels even further, as larger battery packs allow driving for lengthier distances using just electric power.

4. These cars have improved fuel efficiency, resulting in less gas used and cutting overall demand for fossil fuels. This means that there is less pressure to drill in environmentally-sensitive areas such as Alaska, in which oil exploration activities are currently proscribed by the government. These areas contain some of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems, which would surely be disrupted by the presence of oil drillers.

Unfortunately, one of the main factors against wider adoption of these cars among consumers remains price, as a hybrid car can cost thousands of dollars more compared with a conventional automobile. However, prices are expected to go down in the future as the technology becomes more widespread and older models begin entering the secondary market. Tax incentives for plug-in hybrids at the Federal and state level also help make the cost of shifting to a hybrid more affordable. Ultimately, however, as the effects of global warming worsen, the bottom line for most buyers may be that a hybrid car is more environment friendly.

Cell phones have become an essential gadget in every one’s life and they play a major role in transferring important messages at the right time. It enables people to communicate with the world from mountain tops or even jungles. Thus, it has made Earth a global village!

Technology has been constantly improving, leading to newer models of mobile phones and people crave continuously for them. Thus thousands of newer models are bought by people and similarly thousands of older models are discarded. Scientists have come up with the idea of recycling these mobile phones which in fact is a great idea to help save our environment.

In mobile phone manufacturing, lots of chemicals are involved which endangers the environment. These chemicals include arsenic, antimony, etc. Thus there is a great threat to the environment with every cell phone manufactured. There are many minerals that are used in mobile phone manufacturing. These minerals are found in the deep forests of Africa and continuously extracting these minerals expose the earth to a greater risk. The only solution to reduce the risk to the environment is the recycling of the used mobile phones.

Recycling of the older phones reduces the excavation of the minerals which in turn reduce the environmental risk. This idea is appreciated by environmentalists. Recycling of the phones have become very easy and if one wishes to sell their old phones they can do it online. These sites provide a great opportunity for people to sell their old mobile phones at a good price. This website guides the user through four easy steps to sell their old phones. The first thing that one has to do is to decide the make and model that they would like to sell and add this phone to the shopping cart. The next step is to fill in the details that are necessary to sell the phone. This includes the contact and shipping details which are necessary for any transaction. Once the details are sent they can receive pre-paid shipping materials or print their own free shipping label, right from the website. Thus, with these easy steps one can easily sell their used cell phones at a great price and also help the environment at the same time.

Vince Miriello

Stargazers from across the globe gathered together to watch one of the rarest astronomical spectacles today.

From the U.S. and UK to South Korea, people around the world turned their attention to the daytime sky to make sure they caught the planet Venus passing directly between the sun and Earth – a transit that won’t occur again for another 105 years.

The transit of Venus happens in pairs eight years apart – but then with more than a century between cycles.

During the pass, Venus appears as a small, dark round spot moving across the face of the sun, like a bug on a dinner plate.

2004 AND 2012 TRANSITS OF VENUS

Transits of Venus across the disk of the Sun are among the rarest of planetary alignments. Indeed, only six such events have occurred since the invention of the telescope (1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882). The next two transits of Venus will occur on 2004 June 08 and 2012 June 06.

The principal events occurring during a transit are characterized by contacts. The event begins with contact I which is the instant when the planet’s disk is externally tangent with the Sun. The entire disk of the Venus is first seen at contact II when the planet is internally tangent with the Sun. During the next several hours, Venus gradually traverses the solar disk at a relative angular rate of approximately 4 arc-min/hr. At contact III, the planet reaches the opposite limb and is once again internally tangent with the Sun. The transit ends at contact IV when the planet’s limb is externally tangent to the Sun. Contacts I and II define the phase called ingress while contacts III and IV are known as egress. Greatest transit is the instant of minimum angular separation between Venus and the Sun as seen from Earth’s geocenter.

NASA

Astronomers know how massive stars collapse to form black holes but it is not clear how supermassive black holes, which can weigh billions of times the mass of our sun, form in the cores of galaxies. One idea is that supermassive black holes may build up through the merger of smaller black holes.

Sean Farrell of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia discovered a middleweight black hole in 2009 using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope. Known as HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), the black hole has an estimated weight of about 20,000 solar masses. It lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49, 290 million light-years from Earth.

Farrell then observed HLX-1 simultaneously with NASA’s Swift observatory in X-ray and Hubble in near infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. The intensity and the color of the light may indicate the presence of a young, massive cluster of blue stars, perhaps 250-light-years across, encircling the black hole. Hubble can’t resolve the stars individually because the suspected cluster is too far away. The brightness and color is consistent with other clusters of stars seen in other galaxies, but some of the light may be coming from the gaseous disk around the black hole.

“Before this latest discovery, we suspected that intermediate-mass black holes could exist, but now we understand where they may have come from,” Farrell said. “The fact that there seems to be a very young cluster of stars indicates that the intermediate-mass black hole may have originated as the central black hole in a very-low-mass dwarf galaxy. The dwarf galaxy might then have been swallowed by the more massive galaxy, just as happens in our Milky Way.”

From the signature of the X-rays, Farrell’s team knew there would be some blue light emitted from the high temperature of the hot gas in the disk swirling around the black hole. They couldn’t account for the red light coming from the disk. It would have to be produced by a much cooler gas, and they concluded this would most likely come from stars. The next step was to build a model that added the glow from a population of stars. These models favor the presence of a young massive cluster of stars encircling the black hole, but this interpretation is not unique, so more observations are needed. In particular, the studies led by Roberto Soria of the Australian International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, using data from Hubble and the ground-based Very Large Telescope, show variations in the brightness of the light that a star cluster couldn’t cause. This indicates that irradiation of the disk itself might be the dominant source of visible light, rather than a massive star cluster.

“What we can definitely say with our Hubble data is that we require both emission from an accretion disk and emission from a stellar population to explain the colors we see,” said Farrell.

Such young clusters of stars are commonly found inside galaxies like the host galaxy, but not outside the flattened starry disk, as found with HLX-1. One possible scenario is that the HLX-1 black hole was the central black hole in a dwarf galaxy. The larger host galaxy may then have captured the dwarf. In this conjecture, most of the dwarf’s stars would have been stripped away through the collision between the galaxies. At the same time, new, young stars would have formed in the encounter. The interaction that compressed the gas around the black hole would then have also triggered star formation.

Farrell theorizes that the possible star cluster may be less than 200 million years old. This means that the bulk of the stars formed following the dwarf’s collision with the larger galaxy. The age of the stars tells how long ago the two galaxies crashed into each other.

Farrell proposed for more observations this year. The new findings are published in the February 15 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Soria and his colleagues have published their alternative conclusions in the January 17 online issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

For more images and information about HLX-1, visit:

http://hubblesite.org/news/2012/11

More than 100 people have been killed and many are missing after a tsunami triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Scores of houses were destroyed by waves after the 7.7 magnitude quake, which struck 20km (13 miles) under the ocean floor near the Mentawai islands.

Ten villages on the islands were swept away by the tsunami, a disaster official told the AFP news agency.

Damage and rough weather are delaying efforts to reach the affected area.

Hendri Dori Satoko, a lawmaker in the Mentawai islands, told Metro TV: “Our latest data from crisis centre showed that 108 people have been killed and 502 are still missing.”

He said some of the missing could have fled to higher ground and were afraid to return to their homes.

Health ministry officials said 113 bodies had been recovered in the area so far, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The search and rescue operation is being seriously hampered by bad weather, officials have told the BBC’s Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta.

Heavy rain is preventing helicopters from accessing the area and boats cannot reach the islands either because the dock on the island of South Pagai has been destroyed.

Poor communications have also made it hard for officials to gain accurate information, our correspondent adds.

The disaster comes as thousands of people are being evacuated from the area around the Mt Merapi volcano in central Java, after it began erupting.

But seismologists say there is very little chance that the two events are connected.

Body bags

The quake hit late on Monday off the west coast of Sumatra. There is no tsunami warning system in place around the Mentawai islands, but the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued an alert of a local tsunami.

It later said a “significant tsunami” had been generated. The alert has now been cancelled as no further waves are expected, although the area is still experiencing strong aftershocks.

Eyewitnesses say a huge wave was created by the quake, which seriously damaged villages or even washed them away entirely.

The islands of South Pagai and North Pagai were reported to be particularly badly affected.

Waves reached 3m (10ft) high and the water swept inland as far as 600m on South Pagai island, said Mudjiharto – the head of Indonesia’s health ministry crisis centre, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name.

He said 200 body bags were being sent to the region in case they were needed.

“Ten villages have been swept away by the tsunami,” National Disaster Management Agency spokesman Agolo Suparto told AFP.

Most buildings in the South Pagai coastal village of Betu Monga were destroyed, Hardimansyah, an official with the regional branch of the Department of Fisheries, told the Reuters news agency by phone.

“Of the 200 people living in that village, only 40 have been found – 160 are still missing, mostly women and children,” he said.

“We have people reporting to the security post here that they could not hold on to their children, that they were swept away. A lot of people are crying.”

Heri Suprapto, the head of Kepuhargo village in the Mentawai islands, told the BBC’s Indonesia service that 372 “very weak” people from three villages had been evacuated.

“Transportation has also been prepared for villagers who are in good health whenever evacuation needs to be done. Preparations are also under way to evacuate individuals by using motorbike and small cars.”

Indonesia’s vice-president and health minister are preparing to travel to the affected region on Wednesday.

A group of Australians caught up in the tsunami have described how their boat was destroyed by a wall of water.

Captain Rick Hallet told Australian media that his boat was anchored off the shore when the waves came.

“We felt a bit of a shake underneath the boat… then within several minutes, we heard an almighty roar,” he said.

“I immediately thought of a tsunami and looked out to sea and that’s when we saw the wall of white water coming at us,” he said.

The wave brought another boat crashing into them and sparked a fire, forcing them to jump into the sea.

Some of those on board were swept up to 200m inland by the wave, he said.

Meanwhile, the crew of another Australian boat, the Southern Cross – which went missing for nearly 24 hours after the quake – have been found safe and well, Australia media report.

The nine Australians and a Japanese man on board had lost their radio signal but made contact with their tour company late on Tuesday, Australia’s AAP news agency reported.

The vast Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the world’s most active areas for earthquakes and volcanoes.

More than 1,000 people were killed by an earthquake off Sumatra in September 2009.

In December 2004, a 9.1-magnitude quake off the coast of Aceh triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed a quarter of a million people in 13 countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

Read More:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11626242

Woman receiving a mammogram.

Credit: National Cancer Institute/Rhoda Baer

NASA software used to enhance Earth Science Imagery could one day aid in the interpretation of mammograms, ultrasounds and other medical imagery.

The new MED-SEG system, developed by Bartron Medical Imaging, Inc., a Connecticut-based small company, with satellite offices in Maryland, relies on an innovative software program developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to help doctors analyze mammograms, ultrasounds, digital X-rays, and other medical imaging tests.

“The use of this computer-based technology could minimize human error that occurs when evaluating radiologic films and might allow for earlier detection of abnormalities within the tissues being imaged,” said Dr. Thomas Rutherford, a medical doctor and director of gynecologic oncology at Yale University.

he FDA recently cleared the system to be used by trained professionals to process images. These images can be used in radiologist’s reports and communications as well as other uses, but the processed images should not be used for primary image diagnosis.

The entire indications for use: MED-SEG is a software device that receives medical images and data from various imaging sources (including but not limited to CT, MR, US, RF units), computed and direct radiographic devices, and secondary capture devices, (scanners, imaging gateways or imaging sources). Images and data can be stored, communicated, processed and displayed within the system or across computer networks at distributed locations.

The core of Bartron’s MED-SEG system is a computer algorithm — Hierarchical Segmentation Software (HSEG) — developed by Goddard Computer Engineer James C. Tilton, Ph.D.

Tilton began working on his algorithm more than 25 years ago. His goal was to advance a totally new approach for analyzing digital images, which are made up of thousands of pixels. Like a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a pixel often does not provide enough information about where it fits into the overall scene. To overcome the deficiency, Tilton focused on an approach called image segmentation, which organizes and groups an image’s pixels together at different levels of detail. But Tilton’s approach to image segmentation was different than other approaches in that it not only finds region objects, but also groups spatially separated region objects together into region classes.

For example, an Earth satellite image may contain several lakes of different depths. Deep lakes appear dark blue, while shallow lakes are a lighter shade of blue. HSEG first finds each individual lake; then it groups together all shallow lakes into one class and the deeper lakes into another. Because lakes are more similar than they are to trees, grass, roads, buildings, and other objects, the software then groups all lakes together, regardless of their varying colors. As a result, HSEG allows the user to distinguish important features in the scene accurately and quickly.

Since Tilton developed the algorithm, scientists have used it to analyze Earth-imaging data from NASA’s Landsat and Terra spacecraft, using it to improve the accuracy of snow and ice maps produced from the data. Scientists also have used it to find potential locations for archeological digs, the premise being that vegetation covering a long-abandoned human settlement would look different than the surround flora.

“My original concept was geared to Earth science,” Tilton said. “I never thought it would be used for medical imaging.” In fact, he initially was skeptical; that is, until he processed cell images and was able to see details not visible in unprocessed displays of the image. “The cell features stood out real clearly and this made me realize that Barton was onto to something.”

Bartron learned of the software through Goddard’s Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP) Office, and in 2003 licensed the patented technology to create a system that would differentiate hard-to-see details in complex medical images.

Bartron’s exclusive license of NASA’s HSEG technologies in the medical imaging field allows the company to contribute to the work of doctors who analyze images obtained from computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, radio frequency, and other imaging sources.

“Trained professionals can use the MED-SEG system to separate two-dimensional images into digitally related sections or regions that, after colorization, can be individually labeled by the user,” explained Fitz Walker, president and CEO of Bartron Medical Imaging.

With the MED-SEG system, medical centers will be able to send images via a secure Internet connection to a Bartron data center for processing by the company’s imaging application. The data are then sent back to the medical center for use by medical personnel during diagnosis. Bartron has installed the system at the University of Connecticut Health Center, with the possibility of installing evaluation systems at New York University Medical Center, Yale-New Haven Medical Center, and the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, Tilton also worked with the company to develop, test, and document a new, three-dimensional version of HSEG, which the company plans to incorporate into the next version of the MED-SEG product.

In the future, Dr. Molly Brewer, a professor with the Division of Gynecologic Oncology, University of Connecticut Health Center, would like to do clinical trials with the MED-SEG system. The goal, she said, would be improving mammography as a diagnostic tool for detecting breast cancer. “One problem with mammograms is they often give a false negative for detecting abnormalities in women’s breasts. Women who either have high breast density or a strong family history of breast cancer are often sent for MRIs, which are costly, very uncomfortable and have a high false positive rate resulting in many unnecessary biopsies. Neither imaging modality can detect cancers without a significant number of inaccuracies either missing cancer or overcalling cancer. In addition, reading these tests relies on detecting differences in density which is highly subjective. The MED-SEG processes the image allowing a doctor to see a lot more detail in a more quantitative way. This new software could save patients a lot of money by reducing the number of costly and unnecessary tests.”

Tilton’s technology is not limited to medical imaging, said Enidia Santiago-Arce, the IPP technology manager for HSEG. “It can be applied to many types of image processing for a wide variety of fields, from monitoring crops to facial recognition to image data mining. HSEG is available for licensing beyond the field of medical imaging.”

NASA is releasing this story in conjunction with Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Read More:   http://www.nasa.gov/topics/nasalife/features/medical-imagery.html

NASA Technology Could Aid in Interpretation of Mammograms

To figure out whether the universe is actually a maze of multiple universes, scientists propose studying strange substances called metamaterials that might replicate the properties of spacetime.

Move over Harry Potter, and take your invisibility cloak with you. Alice’s looking glass may be the latest bit of literary magic worthy of physics laboratories.

Rather than using substances known as metamaterials to hide objects in plain sight, some scientists instead want to use the strange materials to build windows into worlds with fundamentally different physics. Peering in may reveal how other universes operate and how this universe — the one that avid J.K. Rowling and Lewis Carroll readers reside in — could have begun.

Metamaterials can be engineered to have features very different from those of everyday matter. By altering electric and magnetic properties, scientists can make metamaterials that bend, twist or otherwise manipulate light. The power to turn light in unusual ways brought about a cloaking craze and introduced the possibility of superlenses with unprecedented focusing power.

Last year, a group of physicists at the University of California, Berkeley proposed a type of metamaterial that, if built, could trap light the way a black hole does (SN: 10/10/09, p. 10). The math describing processes in that material resembles the equations governing black holes.

Now Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland in College Park has developed additional “strange schemes,” as he calls them. Metamaterials, it turns out, can serve as broader cosmic dio­ramas, manipulating light to replicate the shape of spacetime.

“In metamaterials, we have a situation in which we have optical spacetime,” Smolyaninov says. “And we can engineer the properties of spacetime.”

Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics says he was skeptical after first reading about the work. He is not convinced that the analogs Smolyaninov proposes would include enough detail to probe the questions that he and others in his field really care about. But Polchinski’s doubt soon became tempered by curiosity.

“Without being able to say where this is going, I think it is interesting,” he says. “There is nothing like having a real physical system in your hands to start thinking about things in a new way.”

When Alice stepped through her looking glass, she entered a distorted world. Words appeared backward on the page, clocks had human faces and floating was a reasonable way to get around. Some physicists have proposed that far more bizarre worlds lie beyond the visible universe. These worlds could have different laws of physics, different numbers of dimensions and different curvatures of spacetime surfaces. But because these multiple universes (known collectively as the multiverse) aren’t visible, they would be hard to study.

Smolyaninov suggests a solution online at arXiv.org and in an upcoming Journal of Optics. Metamaterials, he claims, can be made to mimic the multiverse. He says the idea is straightforward: Pockets with different properties could be designed to replicate adjacent universes. The pockets could be created so light can’t escape — as in the black hole scenario — or so that light can move among them.

And just as some physicists believe that some dimensions of the visible universe could be compactified — shrunk down really small — the same could be emulated for dimensions in other universes. One pocket universe with two compactified and two extended dimensions could sit next to a space with three compactified dimensions and one extended dimension, for example.

Analog systems have been beneficial to theorists over and over again, says metamaterials expert Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He suspects that something could be gleaned from this system too. “In some areas of theoretical astrophysics, people are just relying on theory,” he says. “They have been relying on theory for a very long time.”

The idea that space can have compactified dimensions has been around for a while. In the 1920s, Polish mathematician and physicist Theodor Kaluza proposed that an extra dimension might exist beyond the three of space and one of time that are typically experienced. Soon after, Swedish physicist Oskar Klein proposed that such an additional dimension of space could be wrapped up into a small loop. Because it would be too tiny to see, the dimension wouldn’t be like those that people know and love, the ones that allow moving forward or back, up or down and side-to-side. Yet particles would notice it. Adding the extra dimension did for electromagnetism what general relativity did for gravity — it gave the field a geometric underpinning.

A common way to think about a compactified dimension is to consider an ant walking along a garden hose. From far away, the garden hose appears one-dimensional — the ant can move only along its length. But zoom in closer, and it becomes obvious that the ant can also loop around the hose’s circumference, so a second dimension is available. Just as this second dimension is hidden from a distant observer, an extra curled-up dimension may be hidden from people in the real world.

Smolyaninov calls the Kaluza-Klein idea “a stone of theoretical physics.” And although his original proposal for a metamaterial multiverse focused on universes with fewer dimensions, he reports online September 6 at arXiv.org that metamaterials could mimic a world with five or more dimensions. Simulating higher dimensional spaces could make the analogs more interesting to string theorists, who propose the existence of many dimensions too small to see.

In the materials that Smolyaninov dreams of creating, photons can occupy an infinite number of quantum states. Some type of change, in temperature perhaps, could make the unusual material — if constructed just right — revert to a state in which photons can’t occupy so many positions. When this transformation happens, the particles have to be emitted, like a bunch of kids getting kicked out of a game of musical chairs all at once. Those emitted photons would create a flash of light.

“It looks like a Big Bang situation,” Smolyaninov says. Such a flash could emulate the birth of the universe.

And the flash could be made in a second way, Smolyaninov argues. Consider the dimensions that people experience (leaving Kaluza-Klein out of the picture for now). There are three of space and one of time; the time dimension behaves differently, so it gets its own special math to describe it. But when what’s called a metric signature change occurs, a timelike dimension can take on spacelike qualities, or vice versa. Metamaterials could also replicate the math behind this type of transformation,

Smolyaninov and Evgenii Narimanov of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., propose in the Aug. 6 Physical Review Letters.

Smolyaninov notes that theorists have discussed the idea of two timelike dimensions before. But, says Leonhardt, these ideas remain controversial in cosmology. “There’s no consensus about what would happen if one spatial dimension became a timelike dimension,” he says. In some ways, this uncertainty makes the proposed analog more exciting. “You can go ahead and try it and see what happens.”

Polchinski agrees: Very few people think that a metric signature change occurred during the Big Bang, and differential equations don’t seem to have meaningful solutions in a world with two times. Still, he notes, if the system can be built, the math must work out.

So can you build it? Christopher Davis, a colleague of Smolyaninov’s at the University of Maryland, says no: “You cannot build what he talks about from real materials.”

Smolyaninov responds, “not yet.” He is betting on advances in nanofabrication and hoping to drum up some excitement for new optical technologies until then.

While the new technologies may lead to practical devices, the metamaterial multiverse is more speculative.

Smolyaninov is careful to emphasize that the similarities he sees between spacetime and metamaterials are mathematical, not necessarily physical. He doesn’t know whether what lies on the other side of his proposed looking glass accurately represents reality.

“Maybe the whole universe is built in the same way,” Smolyaninov says. “If it is true or not, you just don’t know.”

Read More:  http://sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/64085/title/Cosmic_dioramas

Cosmic Dioramas