Category: Biology

Beware of the Watermelon Snow

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What is Watermelon Snow?

Watermelon Snow, exactly as the name suggests, is a pink colored watermelon slushy like snow. It has been spotted in a number of snow covered regions of the earth which are permanently covered with snow. Although the pink color may look like it comes from some sort of a mineral deposit, or some other inorganic source such as meteorite debris, interestingly it is due to living organisms – Algae. Its other names are – snow algae, pink snow, red snow, or blood snow.

How does it get that color?

One of the widely found algae species in these pink snow patches contains a red pigment (called carotenoids) in addition to the green chlorophyll component. The alage itself is called Chlamydomonas nivalis.

Continue reading Beware of the Watermelon Snow

The Cocktail Party Effect

Introduction

The term cocktail party effect was coined by a British Cognitive scientist Colin Cherry, in the 1950s. He was interested in understanding how people listened, by conducting a few experiments. In his first experiment, he played two different overlapped messages recorded in the voice of the same person, through headphones. The participants were asked to listen carefully and try to write one of the messages on paper. If they put in enough concentration, the participants usually succeeded.

Now, if someone asks you to describe the cocktail party effect. The formal Cocktail Party effect definition is as follows:

Cocktail Party Effect Definition:

The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Continue reading The Cocktail Party Effect

Nine Principles to Living 100+

By Anupum Pant

In his ted talk, Dan shares the story of Ellsworth Wareham, a 100 year old multi millionaire who lives in Loma Linda, California. The story goes…

One day Mr. Wareham wanted to get a fence made. And to get it done professionally, he began talks with a contractor who asked for a hefty price of $6000. This wasn’t agreeable to him. So he decided to go ahead and do the arduous task of carrying heavy wooden raw material and building it himself – all alone. The next day, he ended up in the ICU. The twist in the story comes when you find out that he wasn’t in the ICU as a patient, instead as the 100-year old heart surgeon. Dr. Ellsworth Wareham is one of the first persons to ever have performed open heart surgery and his experience still is invaluable.

Continue reading Nine Principles to Living 100+

The Largest Ape that Ever Lived

By Anupum Pant

An ape as big as a polar bear, about 10 feet tall and weighing about 1200 pounds existed about 300,000 years from now. Thankfully, it no longer exists. The historical existence of this ape came to be known in 1935 when researchers found an unusually large molar being sold in a pharmacy in Hong Kong. This ape is called the Gigantopithecus and is believed to have lived in a region which is now India, China and Vietnam.

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Shark Skin Patterns in the Hospital

By Anupum Pant

Hospitals are a place where super bugs are forming. Since a lot of antibiotics are used there, more and more resistant forms of microorganisms start forming on surfaces at the hospitals. To combat this we look at the sea…

To deal with bacteria without even trying to kill them, they looked at a very slow moving shark called the Gallapagos shark. Scientists expected a lot of microorganisms on its body because it moved so slow. But when they looked carefully, they didn’t find any. That was because of the nano ridges they have on their skins which doesn’t let the microorganisms stay. Hence a surface free of microbes!

By mimicking this surface researchers have been able to make artificial surfaces for making thin films that can be put on surfaces at the hospitals. Just shapes repelling bacteria!

Trees Changing Colors in the Fall

By Anupum Pant

Little did I know that the yellow, orange or red coloring of tree leaves during the fall is actually something trees do to be more efficient. Instead of just shedding their green leaves during the winter, they try to prepare for the shedding by making the colors yellow, orange or red. This allows them to recycle all the valuable nutrients they had laboriously gathered and put in leaves earlier in the year to make the leaves!

So, leaves are disassembled and all the nutrients are carried from leaves to the branch to store them. But this process is tricky and these details are well illustrated in the video below.

Babies Learning

By Anupum Pant

When babies first start crawling, irrespective of how big a drop is, they’ll just crawl over the edge, not knowing they’d fall. That’s pretty natural. And after a few weeks of crawling they learn that crawling over the edge is not a good thing to do and automatically stop when they see a visual cliff. This works even if there is a visual cliff, but a pane of transparent glass over it. The baby, if it has learned not to crawl over the edge, wont crawl on to the pane of glass because it sees a dangerous cliff.

The interesting part is that the babies do not learn about the cliff at all. They learn about crawling. Doesn’t seem very different, does it? The difference is clear when a baby first starts walking. A newly walking baby would step over the cliff happily, and get hurt. Even when it had learned not to do so while crawling. But after a few weeks of walking they learn not to do it. Just like they learned while crawling.

The Large Egg of a Kiwi bird

By Anupum Pant

Kiwi is a strange creature. Although a bird, it’s a lot like a mammal. Some biologists even call it a honorary mammal. That all said, it does lay eggs like a normal bird. But the egg it lays is again strange. Strange because of its size.

The weight of a kiwi’s egg is usually about quarter of its own weight. If you compare that proportion to humans, it would mean giving birth to a fully grown 4 year old kid. Or a chicken that lays an egg that weighs half a kilogram!

Here’s how it would look if you could look through the skin of a Kiwi carrying an egg. Quite bizarre…

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The Sensing Limits of Your Finger

By Anupum Pant

How tiny features do you think can your fingers detect? Well, absolutely those tiny bumps on a smooth glass table. But do you think they can actually detect things that you can’t even see with your eyes?

Researchers of Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden decided to study this. In a paper they published in a reputed journal, they show how human fingers are capable enough to detect features in the nanoscale – features as small as 13 nanometers.

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The Poison Garden

By Anupum Pant

In the town of Alnwick, Northumberland, just next to the Alnwick castle is a beautiful garden which for a long time has had some really beautiful places for tourists to visit. However, in february 2005 this changed when the Duchess of Northumberland started a new place in the garden – the poison garden.
This is a place guarded by large iron gates and has some of the most poisonous and intoxicating plants. It has about a hundred deadly and hallucinogenic varieties of plants.

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“I wondered why so many gardens around the world focused on the healing power of plants rather than their ability to kill… I felt that most children I knew would be more interested in hearing how a plant killed, how long it would take you to die if you ate it and how gruesome and painful the death might be.”

-The Duchess of Northumberland

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iPhone Circling Ants

By Anupum Pant

Remember the Ant mill? Here’s some ants doing the same routine around an iphone. What makes them do this can be easily explained. And it isn’t very abnormal for ants to do this for no reason at all too…

Ants use the earth’s magnetic field as cues to orient themselves and find directions when they are travelling long distances. When a phone is rung, the radio waves it uses to communicate interferes with their sense of direction and makes them go round. The very specifics of this are not known. However, that is what it is…

HIV Infecting in Real-Time

By Anupum Pant

Scientists from Yale have been able to image HIV infecting a mice in real time by using florescent markers on the virus. A special technique called the two photon laser scanning microscopy  to image what was happening under the skin was used. The virus appears in green colour and helps them understand how it spreads.

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