Author: Anupum Pant

A Thermal Surprise

By Anupum Pant

The people, cattle and every other living being in Spearfish, South Dakota was stunned by an event that happened in the morning of January 22, 1943. It was 7:30 in the morning and there was a lot of snow around. The temperature was touching -20 degrees centigrade. In a span of just 2 minutes (by the time it was 7:32) the temperature suddenly rose up to 7 degree centigrade above zero! in Fahrenheit scale, the one used in US, this was a 49 degree rise in temperature in just 2 minutes. This was the fastest temperature change ever witnessed in the history of man kind.

The thermal shock wasn’t just a surprise to the living beings. The rapid temperature change was enough to crack the windows of cars and apartments too.

The “high” temperature, or a balmy temperature if you may call it that, did not last too long. Just like it came, it went back to being -20 in less than an hour. But by that time, people say that the snow on one side of the buildings was melted, while the other side was full of snow.

This change happened due to something called the Chinook wind – which means “snow eater.” These warm winds apparently poured down a nearby mountain and raised the temperature of the place very rapidly. Once it was past the town, the temperatures dropped back to natural levels.

via [Wikipedia]

A Low Density Black Hole

By Anupum Pant

Imagine you have two equal sized balls of clay. You mix both of them together to get a bigger ball of clay. Now as simple math dictates, the mass of this new ball will be twice the mass that you had in each ball initially. However, the radius of this new ball is clearly only slightly more than the initial ball. Had you wanted to make a ball with the radius twice as much as the initial ball, you would have needed to club 8 of the small balls.

Black holes do not work that way. The event horizon, a kind of one-way membrane from which not even light can escape is like a boundary for the black hole. Let’s say this defines the size of a black hole.

The funny thing about the size of a black hole is that if you double the mass of a black hole, the size doubles. The physics of it is complex, unlike anything of a clay ball. So, just believe me when I say that doubling the mass doubles the radius.

When such things happen, there are weird results. That means, if you keep adding mass to a black hole, and at some point it reaches a really massive mass, say as much as Billion times that of our sun – That’s not unheard of, it happens. If you get your calculations right, you’ll find that in a black hole like that one, the density will be really low. A black hole of that size would span from the center of the sun to the orbit of Neptune. And the density of it would be around 1/1000 of a gram per cc. That, if you did not know, is also the density of air. That’s how low density black holes can be. Probably even lower, if they are bigger…

A very very big sphere of a radius 2.7 billion miles filled with air would be a black hole. Hard to believe, but it’s true.

via [BadAstronomy]

Spider Web Bandage

By Anupum Pant

Despite how far we’ve come in our endeavors, what a little spider can achieve has never been achieved by humans. A spider is capable of turning the proteins poured out in liquid form, from its own body, into a solid silk which is the world’s strongest material for its weight. Yes, stronger than a steel wire of the same thickness. That’s not all. These fibers are also incredibly elastic. That is to say they can stretch to great amounts and come back to the same length without losing the elasticity.

The spider webs are also unbelievably the perfect things to form your gauze pad out of. They have a remarkable healing property.

If you are in midst of a forest, and get cut by a machete and there’s profuse bleeding, what do you do? You find a cobweb. Funny as it may sound, putting a bunch of cobweb on your wound will make the blood coagulate much faster. Thanks to those thousands of strands of nanowires which act as nucleation lines.

Besides that, since the cobwebs are proteins basically, they are good places for fungi and bacteria to grow. So, the spider knows that and has evolved to keep these bacterial and fungi growths away from its web. Cobwebs are in fact antiseptic and antifungal too. As long as the web is clean, it will not cause any kind of infection if you put it on an open wound.

This was a popular method to tend to open wounds among Ancient Greeks and Roman in the battleground.

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The Porcupine’s Dilemma

By Anupum Pant

The porcupine’s dilemma is a metaphor about the challenges of intimacy among human beings. This explains perfectly the situation in which couple of porcupines need to feel watmer during a cold winter night, so they have to come closer to each other. And yet not so close that would hurt the other porcupines with the spikes they have on the back of their bodies.

This metaphor originated from a short explanation writte by a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. The parable goes like this…

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness and fine manners; and those who transgress it are roughly told—in the English phrase—to keep their distance. By this arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

A Vomit Robot

By Anupum Pant

Microbiologists, in an effort to prevent infection are interested in studying how vomit splashes around a room when someone spews it out unprepared. Even tiny droplets of vomit, as they’ve found, can contain enough amount of microbes to infect others. This demonstration is fairly dangerous to do with actual vomit.

So, they’ve created a robot called vomitting larry which can spew fluorescent liquid (which is harmless). This fluorescent liquid can be seen in black light. Look at how even after good amount of cleaning dangerous amounts of infection containing vomit can still stay around.

Taste and Temperature

By Anupum Pant

Unlike what is popularly believed, specific areas on your tongue do not actually sense different tastes. That part of science taught in elementary school is absolutely wrong. Different areas do have some kind of specialization, but essentially all of them can sense all kinds of taste because of the presence of clusters of specialized cells which sense all of the flavors together.

However, the temperature of your food greatly determines how the taste of it will be perceived by your tongue. A study published some time back studied and found this.

An increase in the temperature of food was responsible to send better electrical signals from the tongue to your brain. That’s the reason why warm beer tastes bitter and ice cream tastes much sweeter when it is molten.

Now, since ice cream is supposed to be consumed cold, it means that the perceived sweetness of it is much lesser. So, ice cream manufacturers have to add a significantly greater amount of sugar to it to make it taste sweeter at even lower temperatures. That extra sugar is definitely bad.

Crackers, as discussed in the podcast below actually taste extra salty when you cool them. That’s because saltiness perception is more sensitive when something is colder. A cold soup would definitely taste saltier.

Sweetness works opposite. Hotter it is, more sweeter.

Asbestos Filter Cigarettes

By Anupum Pant

Today we know that asbestos is an evil substance. One of the direct diseases it causes is lung cancer. When asbestos fibers get inside the body, they cause genetic damage in cells which grows gradually and cancerous cells start developing. But that’s not it. There’s an increasing agreement among scientists that asbestos exposure is linked with several other kinds of cancers.

Asbestos, when it’s wickedness wasn’t know, used to be a very common substance lying around here and there, is now being replaced with other benign substitutes.

It’s like those times when cigarette smoking used to be advertised on the TV as being healthy. The ads of those times also had doctors recommending a particular brand of cigarettes. Watch some of the videos here.

So, obviously, during the time when smoking and asbestos were cool, they were combined in a single product which had a cumulative coolness coefficient of both asbestos and cigarettes.

There was this brand of of Kent micronite cigarettes which used fibers of asbestos for the filter part of it. These were made by a company called Hollinsworth & Vose Company. The ads said that these filters offered “the greatest health protection” in the history. Apparently, these filters could filter 30% extra tar. About 12 Billion of these cigarettes were sold.

Slowly, the production of these filters was stopped and asbestos was replaced by something benign, in something evil that’d still cause cancer. This brand is sold even today, without the “dangerous part” of asbestos.

I always wonder what all is considered “safe” by the scientists today. It’s only a matter of time that we’ll realize how something very common, ordinary and safe we use every day in our life is a seriously life threatening thing.

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Evil Pineapples

By Anupum Pant

Everyone knows pineapples and everyone who has eaten a lot of it in a single go knows how it can make your tongue sore. Pineapples, the sweet/sour tropical fruits, are evil. They contain protein digesting enzymes that can divide the proteins in your tongue, as well as in steak – which makes it tender.

One of the two protein breaking enzymes found in pineapples is Bromelain. The concentration of it is relatively high in the central stem and that’s one good reason we skip the stem when we eat a pineapple. Because bromelain can breakdown amino acids, the organic compounds found in living cells. This makes the muscle cells lose their shape and also makes your raw meat just tender enough.

A slice of pineapple in liqiuid jelly when you are making jelly will prevent the jelly from forming that wiggly solid. It will remain liquid. The enzyme breaks down gelatin too.

It does breakdown aminoacids in your tongue too, but then your tongue has a self-healing mechanism. Or you would no longer have a tongue after eating a couple of pineapples. The same damage, more than the body can repair, happens to the hands of people who have to keep cutting pineapples in a factory, or somewhere else. But it’s a myth that it erases fingerprints.

[Source]

The Smell of Freshly Cut Grass

By Anupum Pant

Freshly cut grass certainly smells nice, doesn’t it? So does the smell of rain and the musky odor of books. There’s a reason why the freshly cut grass smell feels so good to humans, but first let’s see why does it even exist.

Some incorrectly believe that the freshly cut grass smell is a distress signal for other nearby plants to communicate to them that there’s something, either a plant eating insect or animal, coming towards them and that they need to move their nutrients to the root as soon as possible. That’s not quite right, or that is what science believes. Although there might be some truth to it because these things haven’t been extensively studied due their complexity. Researchers however have a strong feeling that this smell might not even be detectable by other plants.

But that smell, as studies have shown, definitely sends down signals that other insects can react to. This smell that comes from the fatty volatile substances released by plants is in fact really is a distress signal, however not for other plants to detect directly, it serves two purposes.

  1. It is a plant’s way of repelling the insect that’s eating it by making itself smell less appetizing to the insect.
  2. It’s  also a way for plants to call the parasitic insects to protect them from these plant eating creatures. Parasitic insects like wasps are expected to come and lay eggs inside herbivorous insects like caterpillars. And that ultimately saves the other plants from being eaten.

Another study conducted by Department of Physiology, Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine says that this odor, composed of a mixture of  trans-2-hexenal and cis-3-hexen-1-ol, both of which can be bought from a chemical supplier, is called green odor and has a psychological effect among apes.

It can in fact heal the psychological damages caused due to stress. The mixture of these two chemicals causes local blood flow in the part of your brain that processes information for you to be able to smell it, obviously. But it also does the same in some other parts which isn’t usually effected by other common smells. That, they think indicates that the smell of freshly cut grass does in fact explains the healing effect. So, it’s good for apes and they like the smell.

It also reduces stress among rats and decreases the sensation of pain to some extent among humans. The smell also does help us tap into deep touching memories too, often referred to as the Proust Effect.

[Audio for more]

Lamp Runs on Water and Salt

By Anupum Pant

Remember the gravity light I told you about a few months ago? Well, now it has a tough competition in the market. Although I still think gravity light is slightly better than this one, this one still is a very innovative utility that works pretty well in real life.

There are too many places things like these are needed and too less of these innovative pieces of technology that people have been able to make really work. This is one of those few.

earhxxogslhdasru0vs4I’m talking about a light, a table lamp of sorts, that runs on just on water + salt. Instead, a glass full of seawater works just fine too. They call it SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting). It’s one great thing for the 1 billion people out there who have no access to electricity.

It works because it uses a galvanic cell (with electrodes inside) and no electrolyte. That salty water you put in is the electrolyte. One pour of salty water gives out 8 hours of light. It can run for 8 hours every day for about 6 months. It has nothing burning inside of it that might cause a leakage and then a fire, just your average LED lights.

What’s more?

The contraption is so designed, that while giving you light, it can also charge your phones. However, not a very thoughtful facility to put into something that will be tested among the poor who don’t have access to electricity, forget smartphones.

Calculating Lego Combinations

By Anupum Pant

When Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was the third son of Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of LEGO went to the patent office to get a patent for lego blocks, he was asked a question by the patent officer to which he had no good answer. He only had an estimate. The question was – “How many combinations can 6 of the lego blocks be used to make different compound objects.”

He said he had calculated a number which was close to 102,981,000 combinations. He wasn’t quite right.
The question was so hard, that it took years to get to the exact answer. Soren Eilers, a professor of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen put his mind to work and figured out the answer. In fact, his mind did not do him much service here. It was a computer which spit out the answer to him after a week long calculation.
He found that the actual answer to this mathematical conundrum is – 915,103,765

His computer can now calculate this number in a matter of minutes. But as you increase the number of blocks, the time needed to arrive at the answer increases hundred folds. So, the number of combinations from 7 blocks takes 2 hours. 8 blocks – around 20 days. But calculating the same for 9 blocks might take hundreds of years.

Aluminium Plus Bromine

By Anupum Pant

Aluminium reacts vigorously with Bromine. The reaction of a piece of aluminium put in Bromine is a spectacle to watch. Aluminium can be seen burning with a red flame and vapors of aluminum bromide (a solid at room temperature) can be seem going away. These vapors can be cooled on a surface for them to condense and coat the surface with solid aluminium bromide.
Here is the visually fun reaction, as seen on Chemtoddler’s channel on youtube.

Strongest Magnets in the World

By Anupum Pant

Magnets are everywhere. They are in your headphones, phones, computers and what not? In fact, the whole planet, although a much weaker one, is a humongous magnet too. A simple bar magnet has a magnetic field that is about 200 times stronger than our planet’s magnetic field. And it only gets stronger from there.

Then there are neodymium magnets. They can get so powerful, they can destroy things by just getting attracted to each other.

Then come the electromagnets. Some of these kinds are used to handle metallic scrap. They can get magnetized to really high strengths and lift huge amounts of iron scrap and then when the current is switched off, they lose all of the magnetization. These scrap handling cranes can be 200 times more powerful than your average bar magnet.

But the world’s strongest magnets are found in the national magnet lab in Tallahassee, Florida. Besides being thousands of times more powerful than any other magnet around it in miles, these magnets are also built to be compact by utilizing essentially the same principle as the scrap handling magnets, with extremely dense winding which takes months to build.

One such beast is the strongest one there which can boast a field as strong as 45 Tesla. Trust me, that’s huge. Huge enough to pull you apart even if you are in the same building as this magnet while it is running. Being around the building probably gives you hallucinations. Don’t even think about having computers anywhere around it, their memories will get washed for ever.

Water Fireball

By Anupum Pant

A single milliliter of water when heated to a high temperature produces enough steam to fill 2000 times the volume of liquid, which is about 2 liters. Another interesting thing about water is that it doesn’t dissolve in oil, rather when it is put in oil, it goes under the oil and sits there.

Now to put these fact together and create an amazing display of science is what the Royal institution Channel did…

They put about 150 ml of oil into a beaker and heated it to quite a high temperature. Then when the oil caught fire, they dropped in a milliliter of water in the big beaker of oil. A massive water fireball ensued. Of course all of it was done inside a giant cylindrical chimney. The safety part of it in setting this dangerous experiment apparently took away most of their time.

Savior Dolphins

By Anupum Pant

A group of researchers lead by  Maddalena Bearzi of Ocean Conservation Society were doing their routine logs of behavior of feeding Dolphins near the shores Los Angeles, California. Suddenly, one of the dolphins turned around from the feeding circle and in a seemingly unusual fashion started rushing off shore. Researchers were quite confused, but they decided to follow. So did the other dolphins.

The dolphins reached a place some distance away from the shore and started circling what looked like a dark object floating in the sea. Upon moving closer, the researchers understood that the dark object was actually the body of a young girl towards which dolphins had moved.

The lifeguards were alerted and they were on the way. The girl seemed lifeless, but then one of the lifeguards on board their boat ventured out to get her, despite knowing that life guards were on the way. The girl survived and it was only dolphins to thank for pointing the researchers towards the drowning girl.

Later it was found that the drowning was from Germany, had come to LA for vacationing and it was a suicide case, as indicated by a letter in a sealed pack that hung from her neck.

via [dodo]