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Science teachers at the Delhi University (DU) have decided to follow the English and Mathematics departments in refusing to teach the new course module introduced with approval from the Academic Council under the new semester system.

A General Body meeting took place on Wednesday which was attended by around 350 teachers of DU from various science departments such as Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology, Electronics and Computer Science. It was unanimously decided by them to reject the new course.

The Academic Council had met on May 13 and decided that the semester system would be implement in all science courses except B.Sc.(H) Mathematics and B.Sc.(H) Chemical Sciences. continue reading…

An exotic type of symmetry — suggested by string theory and theories of high-energy particle physics, and also conjectured for electrons in solids under certain conditions — has been observed experimentally for the first time.
An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University, report in a recent article in Science how they spotted the symmetry, termed E8, in the patterns formed by the magnetic spins in crystals of the material cobalt niobate, cooled to near absolute zero and subject to a powerful applied magnetic field.

The material contains cobalt atoms arranged in long chains and each atom acts like a tiny bar magnet that can point either ‘up’ or ‘down’.

When a magnetic field is applied at right angles to the aligned spin directions, the spins can ‘quantum tunnel’ between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ orientations. At a precise value of the applied field these fluctuations ‘melt’ the ferromagnetic order of the material resulting in a ‘quantum critical’ state.
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