science – Page 5 – Awesci

Superstitious Pigeons

By Anupum Pant

B.F. Skinner was an American psychologist, a behaviorist, and a social philosopher. He was also the inventor of the operant conditioning chamber – A.K.A the Skinner box, is a box which is used to study animal behaviour. For example, you can use it to train an animal to perform certain actions in response to some input, like light or sound.

Using one of his favourite animals, he designed an experiment where he trained a pigeon in order to examine the formation of superstitious beliefs in animals. Here’s what he did.

He placed a couple of pigeons in his setup which was designed to deliver food to them after certain intervals. Of all the things, the timing of food delivery by this apparatus wasn’t related to one thing for sure – behaviour or actions of the bird.

And yet, after some time in this automated setup, the pigeons developed certain associations which made them belief that the food came when they did something. They had developed superstitious beliefs.

For instance:

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. – Wikipedia

The bird behaviour isn’t much different from what humans do…

The pigeons started believing in a causal relationship between its behaviour and delivery of food, even when there was nothing like that.

It’s almost like the humans blowing on the dice, or throwing it harder to make a favourable number appear. Even when blowing or throwing a dice harder doesn’t hold any causal relationship with the event of good numbers turning up.

During other times, when people bowl down a bowling ball and twist their bodies towards right to make the ball go right, they have in fact unknowingly developed a superstitious belief, just like the pigeons that there’s a causal relationship between turning their bodies and curving of the bowling ball. In reality, there’s nothing like that. The ball goes where it has to, irrespective of how they turn their bodies.

Just like in the superstitious pigeon’s case, the food would have appeared anyway. The pigeon didn’t have to do something to get it.

via [Wikipedia]

The Hottest Place on Earth – Not Death Valley!

By Anupum Pant

For years I’ve known that the death valley was the hottest place on earth. Of course, not counting the lava, laboratory furnaces, hot springs and other such smart-ass answers, the death valley has always been, in textbooks and beyond, the hottest place on our planet.

On July 10th 1913, the temperature there was measured to be around 56.7 degrees centigrade. Nowhere else has the mercury risen to such high levels since then. Or so we thought…

Until, like always, a science channel from YouTube – MinuteEarth – decided to dive in a little deeper.

This is what the weather statistics do when they measure the temperature – The temperature outdoors are measured in shade at about 1.5 meters above the ground. Of course they had a standard procedure set to do that, and there must be a solid reason for that.

But, practically, who are we kidding. Anyone who has been on a beach, barefoot on a sunny day knows how hot the surface of sand can get in the sun, right?

The data from NASA’s satellites equipped with spectroradiometers has a different story to tell. A place somewhere in the Lut desert in Iran is the winner. The temperature averaged in a 1 square kilometre by the satellite shows that temperatures here have reached a whooping 70.7 degree Celsius. The place is somewhere inside the blue circle I made on Google maps.

You could literally cook eggs in the open there. Anyway, that isn’t totally new. Mr. Sargunaraj claims to have cooked an egg on the streets of Tirunelveli District in Tamil Nadu, India too. And I’ve also seen a video of a restaurant serving eggs cooked in the open (without fuel).

An 8000 km Long African Man-Made Forest

By Anupum Pant

The only desert larger than Sahara is a whole continent which is a desert – Antarctica. But Antarctica, unlike Africa’s desert, isn’t becoming bigger every year. It’s only the Sahara among these two which grows as time passes.

So, the expanding Sahara desert poses a great problem for the future generations of the southern nations (Sahel region) towards which it comes creeping. At least the ones just south of the Sahara desert, as the UN suggests, must be ready to face a hard life in the future.

Unless, an extremely ambitious and selfless plan being pushed for the good life of future generations, by a group of eleven African nations becomes a success.

The eleven nations across the African continent which stand to face the peril with a solid plan in place are Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.

They have all come together and decided to create a massive Great Green Wall of Africa – a 15 km (9 miles) wide wall of man-made forest home to millions of drought resistant trees, stretching across the continent for about 8000 km (~5000 miles)! If complete, this is what it will look like.

Since 2008, after spending about 6 million dollars, the enterprising leaders of Senegal, were able to finish a 330 mile long man-made forest. However in other nations where “short-termism” (to feed the present families) has taken priority over long-term good (of the future generations), the project faces a problem. Other problems like rebel groups, drought and famine doesn’t let this happen very easily.

The world bank has pledged 2 billion dollars for this massive project. If this great African dream does succeed, it will carry a huge lesson for all humans across the world to learn.

I earnestly hope it does succeed.

via [AtlasObscura]

Ants and Their Friends

By Anupum Pant

Background

If you consider the habits, social organization, communities, network of roadways, possession of domestic animals, and counting skills of ants, they are not very different from humans. Yes, ants even domesticate animals. And we’ve talked about their counting skills in the past. Then, I came across a very interesting experiment sir John Lubbock decided to do on ants.

Experiment

He had in his captivity a number of varieties of ants living in different colonies. One day he saw a group of ants feeding on honey together. He picked twenty five of them and managed to intoxicate them by some method, others were left there, feeding on honey.

Next, he picked twenty five other ants of the same species, from a different colony and intoxicated them too. He then placed all of these 50 intoxicated ants near the honey, in the path which the ants were using to move to and fro from the honey.

He watched them for hours and it was an amazing thing he found. The twenty five ants which belonged to the same colony of ants that were feeding on honey were treated much differently by them, than the other 25 ants of the same species that belonged to a different nest! Somehow they were able to identify the ants of their own nest – differentiate friends from strangers.

Twenty out of the twenty five friend ants (which belonged the same nest) were carried by the honey feeding ants to their home. While about 18 of the other intoxicated stranger ants were picked up and thrown into water.
There were just 5 friend ants which were thrown into water (probably accidentally) and 6 stranger ants which were carried back to home (probably accidentally, again)

Nevertheless, most ants were correctly identified as friends and strangers. Moreover, I think their reaction to drunk friends and drunk strangers was so much like what human beings would do!

Next Experiments

In an experiment which he did later, the researcher tried separating friend ants (of the same nest) for about 4 months. And when they met after 4 months they were able to clearly identify each other. They caressed each other with their antennae.

In other experiments when he introduced a stranger ants in a nest, the strangers were evicted immediately and sometimes even killed.

There are a couple of other interesting experiments he has mentioned in his article here. Do read it whenever you find time. [link]

10% of Our Brains? Oh, Come on Lucy!

By Anupum Pant

Have you ever heard people say that we use just 10% of our brains and 90% of it is lying dormant waiting to get awakened? I’ve heard this all the time, from parents, teachers and “self-help” gurus. And that what I believed too, until a couple of years back when I read it on the internet that it was so not true! Later, I came across an informative science video (shared below) which explained otherwise. Of course it came from someone whose authority we can trust in – TED education.

The 10% thing is a myth has already hit most well-informed people, and yet I’ve heard it once again now. This is coming from an upcoming Hollywood movie trailer. I just watched it and it made me uneasy that people are still propagating it. This was the reason I wanted to make it clear to every one who reads my blog that “we use just 10% of our brains” is a pure myth.

Well, if you haven’t heard people say that, you will, in a couple of days, when the sci-fi movie Lucy will hit the theatres. Or you probably have already seen its trailer. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it below. I was totally flabbergasted by the concept, I think this movie is based on. Pay attention at the 1:11 mark.

But, then it’s only a movie. When other sci-fi movies can show reverberating explosions in space making huge sounds, and people talking in space, it is only normal for Morgan Freeman, a neuroscientist in the movie, to say:

It is estimated most human beings only use 10 percent of the brain’s capacity. Imagine if we could access 100 percent. Interesting things begin to happen.

No!

The myth that humans are only capable of using around 10% of their brain capacity has floated around for a very long time. So much that more than 65% of the people believe that it’s true! There are a number of levels on how this statement is wrong, I cannot even begin to explain. TED makes it easier for me to put across the argument…

Some time ago, a MythBuster Tory Belleci, hooked himself up to a neuroimaging device (magnetoencephalogram) which is able to measure the feeble magnetic fields generated by the brain’s electrical activity. During this time, he involved himself in some memory drills, math calculations, word associations and image comparisons. 35% of his brain showed activity. But again, in order to prove the 10% myth wrong (which they did), it meant that only a certain percentage of the brain was lighting up.

35% might mean to someone that removing 65% of the unused brain shouldn’t make a difference in our cognition. But we know how even tiny lesions can impair normal function. So, myth busters didn’t mean that.

35% in only what we can measure. There’s a lot that happens in there without us having figured it out (yet). Or like the video puts forward a solid argument – “by now evolution would have gotten rid of 90% of the parts which the myth says we don’t use.”

However, not completely relying on what the myth busters “proved”, you might want to have a look at this insightful answer by a computational neuroscientist, Paul King. Turns out myth busters were not totally right. Again, that doesn’t make the 10% myth true.

We do not use all of the different areas of the brain at the same time because they have different functions. The closest the brain gets to being completely active is during a seizure. At any time there is only a percentage of the brain active. – [Source]

Bad news for people looking to unlock the full potential of their brain by some mystical methods, one thing is for sure, the following is definitely not true.
we use only a certain percentage of our brain at one time, meaning we are not using it to its full potential. No!

This Tiny Sponge is Probably Set to Change The World

By Anupum Pant

Background

Things absorbing water from the air is nothing new. Hygroscopic substances – or substances which have ability to attract and hold water molecules from the surrounding environment – have always been around. Coffee powder for instance is one great example – leave the dry coffee powder in the open and it will turn into a mushy matter within hours. Thanks to the moisture present in the air that it absorbs.

Hygroscopy in Nature

In the nature too, hygroscopy – the ability to extract water from thin air – has some peculiar functions. One fantastic example is the seed of the needle-and-Thread grass. This seed, with the help of a hygroscopic awn attached to it, can twist and untwist the screw like structure by releasing and absorbing moisture from the air. This way, it is able to dig its way into the ground. But that’s just one of the many examples of how hygroscopy is all around us. Here’s another one…

Thorny devil – an Australian lizard – lives in the arid scrubland and desert that covers most of central Australia. It has a hard time finding water in this dry place. So, blessed by the evolutionary forces of nature, the lizard has developed tiny hygroscopic channels between the spines on its back. These channels, working in tandem with a capillary action mechanism, are able to draw water from the air. Then their precise design makes the water move into the mouth of the lizard. Fascinating!

Other Ways

Although not exactly using hygroscopy, the Namib desert beetle, also does something similar – drawing water from thin air. Unlike the hygroscopic grooves of the thorny devil’s back, the desert dwelling beetle has developed some patterns on its hard wings which help it in drawing water from the air. These patterns include an array of hydrophobic and hydrophilic materials which are able to trap water from the foggy morning air and are able to channel it to the beetle’s mouth.

The Nanotube Sponge Mat

This particular beetle’s hard wings with magical patterns on it, intrigued a couple of researchers. They took cue from this natural material and were able to create an artificial mat which could absorb water from the air.

Although we do have commercial Atmospheric Water Generators (AWG) which can harvest water from the air and supply drinking water, the sad thing is that these things run on electricity. This new mat that was fabricated recently, using an array of carbon nano tubes sandwiched between hydrophilic and hydrophobic layers, doesn’t need any electricity to extract water.

This mat they’ve fabricated is smaller than your thumbnail, but it still works, and is able to extract about 1/4th of it’s weigh in water within a few hours. The researchers are working on it to make it more efficient. [more information] [Original Paper]

A couple of years back a US based startup, NBD Nano, was inclined on developing a water bottle based on the same Namib desert beetle principle. The much touted water bottle, they said, would be able to fill itself! I’m not sure where their project is headed today, but an auto-filling water bottle sure would be a product just too cool to not own by every kid at school!

Needless to say, it would probably make a huge difference by lowering greatly the number of people who don’t find clean drinking water every day – Just for the record, about 1/7th of the world population didn’t have access to clean water today.

A Massive 3200 Year Old Tree in a Single Picture

By Anupum Pant

If there’s one place I’d like to visit, it is the part of California where you find giant sequoia trees. The Giant forest is one such grove in the western Sierra Nevada of California. It is home to five of the ten most massive trees on the planet.

With a tree trunk measuring 36.5 feet in diameter, the Giant Sherman in the Giant forest grove, is the largest of the trees in this grove. It is 275 feet tall! (and yet there are taller trees in existence – Hyperion – again in California, which is about 379 feet tall)

While the President tree, 3200 years old, is another one of these Giant sequoia. It has seen hundred generations of humans pass by. Throughout its life it has survived a number of storms, fires, winters, earthquakes, and climate changes. And even today it grows faster than most other trees on the planet, adding one cubic meter of wood every year.

Its trunk measures around 27 feet in diameter. In height, its topmost point measuring at 247 feet, is slightly shorter than the Giant Sherman. Still, the tree is massive. Its huge branches hold about 2 billion needles (leaves), which is more than any other tree on earth.

It is so huge that until recently it hadn’t been captured in a single photograph (excluding satellite shots and other such smart ideas). A team from National geographic magazine joined scientists to study and photograph the tree.

[Video] Stunning Animation of How HIV Works

By Anupum Pant

Sorry, it was the FIFA WC finals, my favourite team (Germany) won, and I was too excited to write a lot today. So I searched my notes for something interesting to share quickly.

I found this 3D medical animation that I had bookmarked a long time from now. It is an animation of how the HIV replicates. It’s one of those videos with a lot of jargon where not everyone would understand what’s really happening, unless they are a lot into biology. If you are not, then I’d suggest muting the sound (don’t actually) and just watching the biological machines at work.

Still, it is amazing to see how things work at a very very tiny level and it’s an immense pleasure to appreciate how little biological machines work around in bodies to accomplish so much.

Moreover, it makes me very happy that we’ve come so far in science to understand so many things that we are now able to make mesmerizing animations of the extremely complicated and seemingly abstract biological mechanisms.

Script, Storyboard, Art Direction by: Frank Schauder, MD
Animation: MACKEVISION
Publicity: Dr.Rufus Rajadurai.MD. | D.DiaDENS

Subtle Differences

By Anupum Pant

Who’d have thought that a fun website like 9gag could teach you something useful. This is an artwork that I first saw on 9gag and wanted to find where it originated from (to give the artist its full credit). I believe, I Raff I Ruse is the blog which published it first. I could be wrong, but then the apparent source itself attaches no text that could confirms anything. And then it probably went on NPR, and consequently spread all over the web.

The artwork illustrates subtle physical differences between certain kinds of animals which look very similar to the untrained eye. It’s a very simple thing to know and you should definitely know it. The whole list includes differences between:

Ape and Monkey
Frog and Toad
Dragonfly and Damselfly
Ant and Termite
Wasp and Bee
Turtle and tortoise
Alligator and Crocodile

The Turtle and tortoise difference was one of these seven differences which I knew for sure. Then, I can definitely tell a wasp from a bee, an ape from a monkey, and an ant from a Termite, I still wasn’t very confident about the others. I bet you also knew at least one of these differences. And I hope you didn’t know at least one because I wish you learn something from this post.

via [9gag] and [NPR]

The Best Illusion of the Year 2014 Award

By Anupum Pant

You probably know the static Ebbinghaus illusion – where a circle appears bigger around smaller circles even when it is of the same size. It’s static because it works without moving. Well, if you don’t know, you should because it helps you lose weight in a very subtle manner.

A slight variation involving movement of the Ebbinghaus illusion won the best illusion award for the year 2014. Yes, there are annual awards for the best illusions (I never knew that!). This one which won the award was submitted by researchers from the University of Nevada Reno.

The new variation is called the Dynamic Ebbinghaus effect. This is what happens in it…

There’s an arrangement of circles, exactly like the Ebbinghaus illusion, but there’s just one of the sets from the static illusion discussed above. While this arrangement of circles move, the central circle remains of the same size and the surrounding circles change in size.

Now, if you look into the central circle, you’ll see that it changes size too. In reality, it doesn’t. This effect is weaker when you look directly into the central circle. To make it more pronounced, you can shift your focus to the side and look at it through your peripheral vision. It’s totally mesmerizing. No wonder it won.

It works even when you know about it.

An Elegant Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem by a Former US President

By Anupum Pant

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was probably a math whiz. Doesn’t it sound like an extremely rare combination of things a person could possibly be? – a president and a math whiz. And yet, he was not the only one. James Garfield, the 20th president, was very much into mathematics too.

Garfield wasn’t a professional mathematician. He was a president. But, much like Abraham Lincoln, he was very much into geometry! Before he went into politics, he wanted to become a mathematics professor.

While he was a member of the US house of representatives, five years before he was elected president of the US, he came out with a very elegant and unique proof of the Pythagorean theorem (yes, another one of those Pythagorean theorem proofs). Here’s how he did it with the help of a congruent flipped triangle…

Doing it with a piece of paper is really easy…

Fold a paper and cut 2 exactly same right-angled triangles out of it. Now, put them together as shown in the image here (click the image). Next, write down the area of the trapezium – (a + b) . ½(a + b) – 1

Now write the area of all the 3 triangles and add them. This is what you’d get – 2 x ½ ab + ½ c² – 2

Since both these areas are same, just written in a different way, equate them and solve. You’ll end up with the Pythagorean theorem!

a² + b² = c²

Or, simply watch the video to understand better…

Calculating Sunset Time With Your Fingers

Did you know, estimating sunset time with the help of your fingers is really very easy. This is one thing every person going for a trek should remember. I know you have smartphones which tell you the exact sunset time these days. In that case, learn it to show it off to your friends. By the time their smartphones come out of their pockets, and get unlocked, you’ll have an estimate ready.

Here’s what you do…

Stretch your arm as much as you can and count the number of fingers that can come in between the sun and the horizon. That’s it.

Each finger is about 15 minutes of remaining sun time. If four of your fingers, or one hand fits there, you can directly say that it’s one hour to sunset.

Another thing to note is – where you are on Earth roughly. Good news for people near the equator. The estimate near the equator is very close to 15 minutes per finger. However, for people trekking nearer to the poles, you might have more time than what you just estimated using this technique. Very near to poles, it is a completely different story.

When pros have 2 hands (8 fingers or 2 hours) of time left for sunset, they start searching for a shelter to spend the night.

But again, smartphones can give you really an accurate time. This simple farm trick, like the one I shared a few days back – telling temperature with cricket sound. It is just a rough estimate. So make sure you don’t completely rely on this to get back home before it gets dark.

via [Groovy Matter] and [Lifehacker]

Wiping Sparrows Resulted in 20 Million Dead People in China

By Anupum Pant

Background

Starting from the year 1958, Mao Zedong wanted to rapidly transform the People’s Republic of China from an agrarian economy to a communist society through rapid industrialization. So, he introduced a huge economic and social campaign which aimed to make this transformation possible. It was called the Giant Leap Forward. However, the campaign ended in a massive catastrophe which resulted in the death of about 10 Million people (estimates range from 18 to 45 Million deaths). Mostly because Mao decided to mess with mother nature and created a serious ecological imbalance.

One integral part of the campaign was called the four pests campaign. The aim of this campaign was to exterminate four kinds of pests identified by Mao Zedong which would have, according to him, fixed their poor grain output in China. The identified pests were – Mosquitoes, Flies, Rats and Sparrows.

The Great Sparrow Campaign

Of all, Sparrows were considered as pests because the bird species was responsible for pecking on the grains produced by hard-working peasants. That was completely unacceptable to them. The Chinese solution – Kill all birds.

This part of the four pests campaign was known as the Great sparrow campaign. To wipe off all the sparrows, masses across the country were mobilized. Some shot birds from the sky. Others just banged metal plates when they saw sparrows. Sparrows were not allowed to rest. As a result, flying sparrows fell down out of exhaustion. There were incentives according to the volume of pests people got rid of. It was brutal.

The Ecological Imbalance

The extermination of “pests” was expected to bring about a better output in grains, but it resulted in something totally opposite. Moreover, the results of this campaign were totally devastating.

As all the sparrows were being killed, there was a serious ecological imbalance. Now, there were no sparrows left to eat the quickly multiplying insects. It resulted in the rise of real pests (insects) like swarms of locusts etc. Instead of seeing a rise in the grain yeild, China saw a drastically decreased yeild.

The Great sparrow campaign ended up being a major factor that contributed towards the Great Chinese famine in which about 20 Million people died out of starvation.

Moral: You don’t mess with mother nature.

The Increasing Land Area of Finland

By Anupum Pant

Tectonic plates float at a certain elevation on Earth. This elevation is decided by what lies on the plate. So, depending on the density and thickness of the matter that is present on a tectonic plate, the plate adjusts its elevation to maintain a gravitational equilibrium between the uppermost solid mantle and the mechanically weak layer – Asthenosphere – which lies just below it. This is call Isostasy.

During the Ice age when the land masses were covered in ice sheets up to 3 kilometres thick, the landmasses got depressed. This was about 20,000 years ago (last part of the last ice age) when the massive ice weight made the mechanically weak mantle below the solid mantle, deform. Under pressure, the semi-solid-ish mantle below, started flowing to other places where the solid mantle was higher and allowed a greater place for the ductiley flowing mantle below the plates.

When this period ended, the glaciers started retreating and the landmasses started rising from depression. Now, since the mantle below is not totally liquid, it took a lot of time for it to rush back into place from where it was displaced by the primitive heavy ice covered land. In fact, at some places on Earth, this rebound is still happening – This is known as the post glacial rebound.

This can be seen in some parts of Finland, where the land around the Gulf of Bothnia rises about 1 cm each year to maintain the gravitational equilibrium between the Lithosphere (solid mass) and the Asthenosphere (the semi-solid-ish stuff below the solid mass)! As a result the land which was previously below sea, rises upwards and Finland expands in area – about 7 Square kilometres annually. This rise has been recorded by the BIFROST GPS network. And is estimated to continue for the next 10,000 years, not necessarily at the same rate.

via [Post Glacial rebound]

Unsolvable Problems – A Math Story With a Moral

By Anupum Pant

True Story

Back in 1939, a first year doctoral student at Berkeley, George Dantzig arrived late for a statistics class one day. On the board, professor Jerzy Neyman, a renowned mathematician, had written two problems, and it wasn’t very clear to George what he had written them were for. As any other student would assume, George assumed them to be homework problems and noted them down.

He went back and started working really hard on those problems. They seemed a little harder than usual to him. Nevertheless, George was determined enough. After a couple of days, when George was satisfied with his solution, he went to his professor and apologized to him for taking so long to finish the homework. Without looking at what he had done, the professor told him to put the work on his table, and he’d see it later. George did exactly that.

Six weeks later, on an unsuspecting Sunday morning, at 8:00 in the morning, George was awakened by a frantic knock on the door. It was professor Neyman. With a pile of papers in his hands, he seemed very excited. It was only then, through professor Neyman, that George came to know what he had done on those papers six weeks back.

Six weeks back, those two problems which George mistook for homework turned out to be two examples of unsolved statistics problems Neyman had written on the board. George had unknowingly noted them as homework, and ended up solving the 2 unsolved statistics problems.

Later the papers on these problems were published. However the second one was published much later, in the year 1950.

Moral: When people are not tied down by prejudice, by putting in good work, they often manage to achieve extraordinary things.

Via [Snopes]