Author: Anupum Pant

The Great Molasses Flood of Boston

By Anupum Pant

Molasses is a thick dark liquid that is obtained while refining of sugarcane into sugar. It can be fermented to produce rum and ethanol, and is also a key component in the manufacturing of munitions. Now who would have thought that something so sweet, before having put into ammo, could actually be deadly.

Just after the Redsox had won the world series in the year 1918, and Boston was full of energy, something unexpected happened.

It was January 15th 1919, the weather was pleasant and there wasn’t any snow. On Copp’s hill a massive steel tank 240 feet in diameter and 50 feet in height had been filled with fresh molasses which would later be used for what it was used – making rum and ammo.

At 12:30PM a loud roar was heard. It was the sound of that tank exploding. 2.3 million tonnes of molasses, which was chilled before had expanded and exploded the tank. The tank too probably wasn’t very well built. According to researchers, the steel used to make it had a bit too much manganese in it and the walls were just too thin to hold that much molasses.

A 50 foot wave crushed everything in its way. It destroyed about 2 city blocks of everything. 21 victims stuck in there got crushed and suffocated.

more [onenewengland]

 

The Third Eye

By Anupum Pant

Some lizards like Iguanas and bearded dragons have an eye in the back of their heads. This is almost like a third eye and is called the parietal eye. However, despite being called an eye, it actually isn’t an eye in the traditional sense because unlike a normal eye, this doesn’t let the lizard see images.

green-anole-08-parietal-eye

The eye, although still mostly a mystery, has two main purposes. It is basically a photosensory organ, or a biological photodetector which is used by iguanas to detect light and dark. Probably, just that.

The eye helps them sense if it is dark or bright for thermoregulation. Also, since it is in the back of their heads, it can help them detect a predator coming towards them from the back by detecting dark shadows.

Igg girl reports that her iguana seems to duck when she takes it in the car and they enter a tunnel. A defensive mechanism. Also, it’s not unheard of pet iguanas getting scared when you swoop down on them to pick them up.

Un-extinct for 7 Minutes

By Anupum Pant

Celia was the last Pyrenean ibex – one of the four subspecies of the Spanish ibex or Iberian wild goat, a species that is endemic to the Iberian Peninsula. She died from a fallen tree on January 6th 2000. A year before she died, in National Ordesa Park in Huesca, Spain, scientists had thought forward and captured tissues from her ear, for a potential cloning in the future.

Although it was known that a cloned Ibex would have a shortened lifespan due to the aged DNA and shortened telomeres, they did not know that this one would live for only 7 minutes. Also, had it even survived, there wouldn’t have been a pure Pyrenean ibex male which could have made the sub-species un-extinct for a longer time.

After having received a green flag from the Spanish government, Advanced Cell Technology, Inc in collaboration with other scientific partners went ahead to try to use nuclear transfer cloning technology to clone the ibex. 285 embryos were reconstructed and transferred to several domestic goat surrogate mothers. Most of the attempts failed. However, one succeeded and one new pyrenean ibex was born in the year 2003. The world’s only!

Sadly, it survived for only 7 minutes because of a defect in its lungs. This was the first attempt to revive an extinct subspecies and it was successful, to some extent.

Tooth in Eye Surgery

By Anupum Pant

Back in the 60s a very odd technique was developed by doctors in Italy, as a desperate measure to restore vision in a damaged eye. Their process involved using a tooth from the person’s mouth and putting it in the eye for them to be able to see again. That was in the 60s. The procedure has since been done on hundreds of patients successfully and is still being done. In the US, this procedure was done only in the 2009 for the first time. Sounds weird, but true.

Also known as modified osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis (or MOOKP) among doctors, is done in 3 basic steps. First, a tooth is removed from the patient’s mouth and a hole is drilled into it. A section of the cheek is then removed to form the soft, mucus tissue around her pupil. The hole is then used to support a prosthetic lens which is used in the eye. Basically, the tooth is used as a framework to put the artificial prosthetic lens in the eye.

It is rarely used, only in desperate cases where there are no less invasive alternatives to fix the eye. Other times donated cornea transplant from a deceased donor can be used. But the tooth in eye surgery has a major advantage over that because in this technique, the cheek and tooth tissue used both belong to the same person and there is very less chance of the immune system rejecting the composite.

via [ABC news]

Learning from the Survivors of Katrina

By Anupum Pant

Katrina, the 5th hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. It destroyed everything in its way, except hundreds of those oak trees which bore the full brunt of it. What made these trees survive such a massive storm has revealed to us that these trees are like whole living blueprints of how to survive hurricanes – inspiring hurricane resistant houses.

The trunks can flex in the wind, their branches flex and their leaves spiral into a Fibonacci sequence in the wind so as to bear the minimum damage. The whole family of oaks nearby have an underground connection which makes their foundation really networked and solid.

We sure have a lot to learn from nature.

Lateral Volcanic Blast

By Anupum Pant

The massive eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18th 1980 was the worst volcanic event in the history of US ever. As wikipedia puts it,

Fifty-seven people were killed; 250 homes, 47 bridges, 15 miles (24 km) of railways, and 185 miles (298 km) of highway were destroyed. A massive debris avalanche triggered by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale caused an eruption that reduced the elevation of the mountain’s summit from 9,677 ft (2,950 m) to 8,363 ft (2,549 m), replacing it with a 1 mile (1.6 km) wide horseshoe-shaped crater.

This event was like giving a vigorous shake to a champagne bottle and then disturbing the cork. As soon as the avalanche took place, the steam and gasses trapped in cracks and magma inside got released suddenly and caused a massive explosion. However the thing about this blast was that it happened towards the north direction. That is to say, it was kind of a lateral blast, it did not go directly upwards.

A radial sector towards the north of the mountain, where the blast was pointed at, an area of about 230 square miles got completely devastated by the hot gases and ash.  This lateral blast resulted in a very peculiar phenomenon.

Capture

The blast was, interestingly, heard for miles in the northern side of  Skamania County, where the mountain is located. Even in the other country as far as British Columbia it was heard and felt. While
Montana, Idaho heard it happen too. But only a few miles south, in Portland, the blast wasn’t heard.

[Gruesome] Human Cadavers in Crash Tests

By Anupum Pant

People voluntarily donate their own bodies and the bodies of their family members to science all the time, in a hope of ultimate service, by hoping to be of good use for the advancement of science even after death. However, when releases are signed, people usually are told that the bodies would be given away for medical or educational uses. In reality, the papers don’t say much if the body will carefully get dissected in a medical institution, or will go somewhere else.

It has been reported that automakers often used to, even until very recently (2011), with the help of universities (who have access to bodies) have been making their cars safer by conducting crash test on real human bodies.

These gruesome tests logically make sense because the artificial dummies which have to be made for such impact tests have to rely on data that’s captured using real bodies. So, real bodies are basically used for calibration.

Cadavers are used for several other such kinds of research too…

More about it at [Wired]

If it sounds too unbelievable, there was a story on NBC too…

Deer Killer Squirrels

By Anupum Pant

Stories of seemingly harmless little creatures killing other larger, or animals apparently higher in the food chain, have been heard time and again. Like the bird-killing tiger fish is one thing that comes to my mind when I hear something like this. This time we have a squirrel which purportedly kills deer in the woods. Or probably not…

We are talking about the vampire squirrels A.K.A fluffy-tailed tufted ground squirrels of Borneo. The distinctive features of this squirrel is its tail, which I’ll talk about soon. Let’s first see what the local hunters have to say about them.

tufted-squirrel-feat

While the squirrel is not seen a lot, has been photographed only some times and have not been studied extensively, they do have frightening tales tied with their names. Locals who live near the jungles around Borneo tell the terrifying tales of these squirrels.

They say that these relatively tiny rodents have been seen lurking on low hanging branches waiting for their prey. Just when an unsuspecting Muntjac (a small variety of deer) comes grazing, they jump onto them and attack them at their jugular veins. Thereby killing the relatively larger animal and then they feast on their internal organs. Gosh! No wonder they are called Vampire squirrels.

But then these are just stories for now. I excitedly hope they are true though.

The most distinctive parts of their bodies as it can clearly be seen in the image above are their tails. These squirrels now officially have the fluffiest tails of all the animals known to man. On an average, their tails are 30% larger than their whole bodies. That is like having a ~1.5 times sized tail. It is, as researchers say, an “anti-predator mechanism.”

Do Not Disturb

By Anupum Pant

Nitrogen tri-iodide (NI3) is a contact explosive. It’s like nitroglycerin but much more sensitive than that. Unlike nitroglycerin, this doesn’t require to be hit by a hammer to explode. That means, the compound is so unstable that even a slight touch will make it explode. It’s so sensitive to disturbance that a mosquito flying off of this powder will detonate it.

Here’s a demonstration in the video below…

Now one thing that comes to mind when you see something like this is that how must have the person in this video handled it and put it on paper. How is it even made in the first place. The video doesn’t tell you that part.

The answer is fairly simple. A more stable solution of this substance is allowed to stand while the liquid evaporates. It leaves only the powder on the table. And when it is touched, it goes off. The making part of it can be seen here.

Pet Dog’s of Baboon Families

By Anupum Pant

Big packs of Baboon family kidnap young puppies. These puppies then end up growing with the family and ultimately become the part of their group. These pet dogs move with the family wherever it goes, sleep, feed and play with them.

Having pets like these has a mutual benefit in the sense that the dogs protect the family from other feral dogs and in return get food, grooming and a nice family.

Whale’s Earwax

By Anupum Pant

Unlike us, whales never clean their ears. And when they die, all of the ear wax they collect through out the span of their lives can be extracted from the skull. This is usually a column of wax which is icky to look at, consists of fibers and is pretty rigid. It might look like a roughed up candle to an untrained eye. Also, these ear wax columns can be as much as 1 to 4 feet in height. But all of that is not even the most interesting thing about whale’s earwax.

Whale’s blubber is interesting for scientists because it carries a lot of information about what kind of toxins/chemicals a whale was exposed to in the ocean. This tells them about the kind of toxins that are being put into the sea. However it doesn’t give them any information about when the whale was exposed to these toxins. The earwax helps here.

The columns of earwax of a whale have rings when you cut them, just like the rings of a tree. And just like the rings of a tree, they carry the information related to the time. Each ring usually corresponds to 6 months of a whale’s life and by studying the composition of these rings scientists can tell what kind of chemicals the whale was exposed to, and when…

 

Gabriel’s Horn and the Painter’s Paradox

By Anupum Pant

If you take the plot of y=1/x and plot it from 1 to infinity, you’ll see that the plot seems to never meet the x axis. Now, take this plot and spin it fast with the x axis as the axis of rotation. You’ll then have a horn shaped solid object which is endlessly long. A mathematical object also known as the Gabriel;s horn or Torricelli’s trumpet.

GabrielHorn

Mathematically, this object is interesting because it can contain a finite amount of volume, but it’s surface area is infinite. That is to say, you can fill the horn/trumpet with a finite amount of paint, yet the whole paint it contains would not be enough to paint the inside surface of the object – known as the painter’s paradox. However, there’s a catch about painting the inner part of this horn. As WIkipedia puts it.

In fact, in a theoretical mathematical sense, a finite amount of paint can coat an infinite area, provided the thickness of the coat becomes vanishingly small “quickly enough” to compensate for the ever-expanding area, which in this case is forced to happen to an inner-surface coat as the horn narrows. However, to coat the outer surface of the horn with a constant thickness of paint, no matter how thin, would require an infinite amount of paint.

Buy a Potato Clock

By Anupum Pant

Did you know? You can actually go to Amazon right now and buy a potato clock for just $4. The science experiment kit includes electrodes, wires and a digital clock with all the instructions you’ll need to assemble it. Of course the kit doesn’t include potatoes. You’ll have to get them separately.

Instead of using batteries to power the digital clock, this little science kit allows you to use two potatoes. On two good potaotes this clock will work for about two months, by that time your potatoes will start growing shoots too. When the potatoes become dry, your clock stops. Then you replace the potatoes. Here’s how it works.

Dolphin Outwits Humans

By Anupum Pant

Encephalization quotient (EQ) is something that measures the relative brain sizes of animals. Humans of course are at the top with an EQ of ~7.4. That means they have brains much larger than what you’d expect to have in an animal of that size. This quotient, by some, is considered to be a rough estimation of how intelligent that animal is. Larger it is, the more intelligent – or that is what is hypothesized.

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After humans, in this list, are dolphins. Some bottle-nose dolphins have been observed to have a EQ of even more than 5. Which is topped only by humans. Even intelligent primates have it in the range of 1.5-3. Some days ago we saw how dolphins justify their high EQ.

Another story which caught my attention was about this dolphin named Kelly who lives in the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi.

Kelly lives in a pool that gets rubbish thrown by the people who come to see her. So, she was trained by her trainer to collect all the pieces of garbage it could find. These pieces of collected garbage would then act as coupons and could later be exchanged for a fish. Good dinner right there.

Kelly started doing this very soon. An incredible thing for a dolphin to learn in the first place. But what is more amazing is that Kelly found a big piece of paper one day, went down to the bottom of the pool and hid the piece of paper under a rock. One by one she tore pieces off the paper got it up, and exchanged it for a fish, every time. One paper, many fish. That’s one unbelievable trick for a dolphin to figure out on her own! It actually trained the human.

Now, remember that Kelly got many more fish if she could find gulls and exchange them.

So this is what happened. One other time, she took the fish from her trainer and hid the fish under a rock and when there were no trainers around, she used the fish to woo a gull, caught it and exchanged it for many more fishes. Isn’t that what even our human kids fail at doing? Delayed gratification – see marshmallow test.

Once this started working good for Kelly, she taught her calves and other dolphin kids in the pool to do the same and trick the trainers into rain fish upon them.

via [TheGuardian]

Koala Fingerprints

By Anupum Pant

Several hundreds of million years ago, humans and koalas started their own evolutionary journeys. But even after millions of years of independent evolution, even when both the species have almost nothing in common, there’s one thing Koalas have that have been troubling forensic experts for years (or potentially troubling).

Koalas have fingerprints that are eerily similar to human fingerprints. They are so similar that a koala could easily fool a forensic expert if it ever came down from a tree to a crime scene before they came in for collecting evidence.

Certainly other closer cousins have fingerprints like that of humans too. Chimps and Gorillas do, but then they are far too close to humans, genetically. That’s not very hard to believe. However, Koalas, who split pats several million years ago and evolved completely independently having them is something that stuns evolutionary biologists till date.

koala fingerprintsvia [io9]