Author: Anupum Pant

Oceans are Salty Because…

By Anupum Pant

Until very recently, till the year 1979, we humans had no real explanation as to why the oceans were actually salty. If a kid ever asked that to the teacher, the teacher just tried go to the next question.

It was hypothesized that the rivers got in a lot of salts into the ocean and made them salty. However, that was a flimsy argument given the size of all the rivers and the cumulative size of all the oceans.

Later in the year 1979, while researchers were doing their job at around the East pacific rise (a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Pacific Ocean), the were greeted by mysterious vents in the ridge that were spewing big black columns of material into the ocean. These black dust like thing was later found to be a massive amounts of tiny crystals being thrown into the oceans by these hydrothermal vents.

It was found that the whole volume of water in all the oceans across the world cycled in and out of the earth through vents, into the tens of thousands of magma chambers, every 6-8 million years and carries enough chemicals back to the surface for these millions of years.

via [NatGeo]

The Man Who Counted to a MIllion

By Anupum Pant

In the summer of 2007, Jeremy Harper, a software professional took some time off his work to be at home and count to a million for a good cause. Once this started, for 3 long months, counting for 16 hours a day, he kept doing this. While he was doing this, he streamed his performance live over the internet on a website where anyone could see him and donate to the charity for which he was doing this.

By the end of it he was able to raise $10,000 for a charity Push America. He ended up getting his name etched in the guiness book of world records for the largest number ever counted. His record still remains.

Sneakey

By Anupum Pant

As sneaky as the name sounds, sneakey in reality too is a very sneaky piece of software designed by computer scientists at UC San Diego which can use a picture, taken from about 200 feet away, of your keys and create identical keys.

So, the next time you are sitting at some cafe’s table with your keys placed on the table, you might want to put them in your pocket.

[More]

Stoplight Loosejaw

By Anupum Pant

Stoplight Loosejaw is actually the name of a kind of fish that lives really deep in the ocean. Here, the waters are so deep that every single speck of light dies off till it reaches there. In the dark, stoplight loosejaw has a nice light in front of it to spot the prey. But then lights are a problem because they attract predators. So, stoplight loosejaw has, over the years, evolved to throw red light and see red light. Only it can see the red light. And thus, it doesn’t get spotted easily by predators.

Ants Tricked into Carrying Heavy Stuff

By Anupum Pant

Once in a while it is just fun to see what scientists trick these little creatures into doing…

This was a study carried on  longhorn ‘crazy ants’ by the researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to study their behavior. They found that there are two roles played by them. A role of heavy lifting and the other is the role of scouting. Ants keep changing their roles continuously. The ones who scout keep directing their heavy lifting counterparts to the right direction in case they drift around into the wrong path. These roles keep changing in about a time span of 15-20 seconds.

The Messier Catalogue

By Anupum Pant

This might be a prevalent piece of information but like so many other very common things I do not know about, the Messier catalogue, I found, was just one of them. Ignore this if you know what it is…

I realized not knowing about the Messier catalogue, when a friend of mine asked me what the M with a number beside it signify in his Google sky app. We some how collectively chose to blindly predict that this was the way stars are named, with no knowledge whatsoever on the fact why only M was used.

google-sky-map-6

Boy, we were wrong! Of course, M was used because of the “Messier catalogue”.  But it wasn’t for stars.

Charles Messier was a French astronomer who had a decided on a mission for his life. He was to search and find as many comets he could, in his lifetime. He went on to find 15 of them – quite extraordinary for a single man to have done that.

While doing this search for comets Messier, to keep the comets separate from other cloudy objects he discovered, he started keeping a journal of non-comet objects. This came to be known as the Messier catalogue of deep sky objects.

As time progressed, objects were added one by one to the list. Their names on this catalogue start with the letter M – denoting “Messier  objects” (not stars, but nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.). There are a total of 110 objects in this catalogue and is a nice thing for amateur astronomers to do the Messier marathon. This involves watching all of the objects at night spotting the sun rises.

The last object, M110 was added by Kenneth Glyn Jones in the year 1967.

All of these objects have other names too. One other name is the one that comes from the New General Catalogue (NGC). And hence the names are like NGC 1952 for M1.

More information about each one of the 110 objects can be found here [Link]

 

A Check Valve for Light

By Anupum Pant

Here’s a cool effect you can achieve with just light, olive oil and a few turns of copper wire (or really strong magnets with a larger section of the magnetic field where the magnetic field lines are parallel). This is called the Faraday effect and the physics of it is complicated to be explained on a blog. Not that I know how it exactly works, but it still is cool to just watch a stream of light get influenced by nothing but just a strong magnet!

One interesting application of this effect is faraday rotator, or basically check valve for light – that is to say, a device through which light passes in one direction and not in the other. So, it is transparent if you look at it from one side and opaque from the other side. The video explains this too…

Faraday rotation is an example of non-reciprocal optical propagation. Unlike what happens in an optically active medium such as a sugar solution, reflecting a polarized beam back through the same Faraday medium does not undo the polarization change the beam underwent in its forward pass through the medium. This allows Faraday rotators to be used to construct devices such as optical isolators to prevent undesired back propagation of light from disrupting or damaging an optical system.

Pneumatic Mail Systems

By Anupum Pant

Inherently, the telegraph system had a short coming. Messages had to be transcribed into text and the then the messages ultimately had to be delivered by hand. And like any form of communication, a time had come for telegraph too. It was no longer fast enough.

pneumatic mail system

Then in big cities like London, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Saint Louis a new system of sending across messages started to develop, somewhere in the 1890s. This was the pneumatic tube mail.

The system consisted a network of several miles of subterranean pipelines which were big enough to carry a cylindrical box  full of physical messages across the city. The canisters could travel at about 35 miles per hour with the help of compressed air. It was fast. But then it was an expensive way of communication too.

Nevertheless, it had become a full blown emergency system to carry mail in the aforementioned large cities. This sounded like medivial sci-fi or something taken off a cartoon series. I had no idea these things were real, until today.

In fact, the system was pretty successful. It was used in New York till even the 50s. In Paris the system was used until the 80s!

For further reading – [Source 1] [Source 2]

Even today, much advanced cousins of this system are being used in a wide range of workplaces like hospitals, supermarkets and banks.

Hospital installations are not just pipes from A to B, but networks with junctions and computer-controlled switches. Some are vast: Stanford Hospital in California has 124 stations…

The major advantage of using these in a hospital for instance, is that the canisters, besides just physical letters, can also carry various other objects like blood samples,  specimens, medicines etc. Following is a video explaining the Stanford hospital’s pneumatic mail system…

Thanks to the relatively new developments in extreme sports videography, we can have a first person view of these canisters while they are travelling through one of these tubes.

Little Deep Beauties of Nature – Butterflies

By Anupum Pant

If you have ever handled a butterfly, you must have noticed that the wings of a butterfly leave a kind of dust on your fingers. If you look closely, using a scanning electron microscope of course, you’ll find that these dust like things are in fact scales! Butterfly has scales on in wings. Whatever purpose it serves to the butterfly.

The name Lepidoptera means “scale wing” in Greek.

The scales, so tiny themselves, have much tinier grooves on them. The grooves are so evenly spaced that they match the wavelength of a particular colour of light and that is what gives them their distinctive colour. May be some of it comes from the pigment too, but most of the colour comes only from the grooves, the topology of it. The colour comes from the nano-structure on the surface of a tiny tiny scale. Amazing!

We indeed have a lot to learn from the world around us.

This is clear when you fill the grooves using a liquid like propanol. The colour disappears as the grooves are filled with the liquid. Once the liquid evaporates, the colours come back to life.

These colours that come due to the topology of the scales serve various purposes like camouflage, warning, attracting mates, absorbing heat by looking darker and deceiving predators.

Paper Armour was Real

By Anupum Pant

It has been said that several hundreds of years ago, during the 600 BC, the Chinese had developed a method to construct a battle armour using just paper. Sounds like an implausible myth. But turns out, after a good amount of testing by mythbusters, it can be said that paper armour probably was real.

By folding paper multiple times, and by layering it with shellac or resin like it used to be done in the old days, or even without any kind of resin in between, paper becomes considerably strong and can stop attacks from arrows, stabs etc, just like an armour is supposed to do. In fact, an armour made of paper is much lighter than its steel counterpart and would have added agility to the warrior’s movements. So, technically it outperforms a steel armour.

paper armour

 

Image source: PDF

However, when a paper armour gets wet, like we all know, it becomes heavy. It actually becomes heavier than the steel armour. So, it wouldn’t have been a good choice for the Chinese if the battle was being fought on a rainy day, or if a river had to be crossed.

The paper armour made by the mythbusters team was made up of small fragments of folded paper, each of which were about half an inch thick. While just 1mm thick steel did the trick.

The paper did as well as steel in the sword and arrow tests, failing only the blunt-force test, so the team built a full suit of paper armor to match against a period-accurate steel counterpart. – [Mythbusters wikia]

The Incriminating Hum of Audio Recordings

By Anupum Pant

If you go to the Wikipedia’s page for a seemingly banal topic “Frequencies,” at the bottom of the page you’ll find a section that says “Line current.” You may want to read through it, but you won’t have to because I’ll tell you what it says, in short…

This section is particularly interesting because it mentions that when sounds are recorded, a very faint hum that you can’t hear unless you magnify the sound, gets recorded with it. This hum comes from the electricity which powers anything, say a plug socket, which was close to the microphone when the sound was getting recorded.

In the American electricity grids, a 50 Hz AC current produces a different hum in the recording than in 60 Hz European grids. So, sounds recorded in America, and sounds recorded in Europe, or other places which use the 60 Hz frequencies, can be distinguished fairly easily by forensic experts. This gives a great power to forensic experts. And a headache to sound engineers who never want a hum being embedded in their audio.

Now, what the WIkipedia page doesn’t tell you is that this hum carries a greater amount of information than just telling the recordings from continents apart. In fact, there’s apparently enough information to almost know the date on which this recording was done.

There exist laboratories around the world, to assist forensic experts with this task of determining the recording date, which have continuously been recording just the hum of electricity for several years now. They study the tiny fluctuations (in the order of thousandth of a hertz) in these frequency and keep an archive of dates and tags. It has been found that patterns in these hum fluctuations have been varying continuously and in a very systematic fashion over the years.

The recordings sent to the forensic experts can use processing to isolate the hum and match it with the hum of a date from the archives. And then a date on which, or at least a rough date, on which the recording was done.

via [BBC]

Most Densely Populated Place on Earth

By Anupum Pant

Manhattan is a place packed with innumerable skyscrapers and is probably a paradigm that proves how efficiently people can be packed in a city. Or is it? Well, what if I tell you that there is a place which is four times as densely populated as Manhattan and has exactly zero skyscrapers.

square kilometres to square miles

50 kilometres from the coastal town of Baru, amidst the beautiful Caribbean lies an island called Santa Cruz del Islote, so tiny that Google maps detects no land around that place. It’s 0.012 square kilometres in area, or just 0.004 square miles. Just water shows even when you are at the maximum zoom level on Google maps. However, shifting your view to terrain, you’ll see a tiny island dotted with hundreds of houses.

In that small area of land, 2 hours away from the mainland, in between the vast Caribbean sea, live a whopping 1200 people. That is a population density of about 100,000 people per square kilometre (300,000 people per square mile). That’s easily 4 times the density of people in Manhattan.

When fishermen first discovered this island about 150 years from now, they loved it because there were no mosquitoes here. Slowly  homes started filling in and before they knew, the island was absolutely packed. Today there are 90 homes, 2 shops a school and a restaurant in the island. The most open place in the whole island where people can gather is the size of half a tennis court!

The community is tightly knit, there are no crimes, homes are never locked and of course there’s no place for a police station here, literally. Every one who lives here, quite starkly unlike the people of Manhattan, are very happy with their simple lives.

Interestingly, there’s no place for even a cemetery, so people who die are taken to a nearby island to bury.

via [News.com]

Locomotive Diesel Engine Secret

By Anupum Pant

Diesel locomotives have diesel engines, of course. But the overlooked fact about these locomotives is that the diesel engines in them aren’t exactly there to power the wheels. Instead, the diesel engine turns an electric generator with a constant speed and the electricity produced is used to power traction motors. So, in reality these locomotives have hybrid engines, not exactly diesel.

The reason for this is pretty straight forward. The massive diesel engines of a diesel locomotives can only turn at slow RPM. So slow that about 1000 RPM is the red line for these engines. That means to keep producing the maximum torque and horsepower and reach high speeds, in a hypothetical engine like that one, which had to turn wheels directly, there’d have to be about 30+ gears.

30+ gears would make the gearbox massive. And something that could take thousands of units of horsepower would make it a very inefficient one. Hence, hybrid engines…

source [HowStuffWorks]