Author: Anupum Pant

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!

How do Shock Absorbers of a Car Work?

By Anupum Pant

A lot happens under your car when you are driving – the area which you never get to see doing its job. Chris put a video camera under the car to show a detailed review of what happens under your car. To add to that he also compares how old worn out and new suspensions are different and which clearly tells you why you should replace your shock absorbers when they go bad.

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.

Argon Ice

By Anupum Pant

Like you can heat water enough to make steam, you can cool a gas enough to make it into a solid. Although it’s pretty hard to do it for most gases, some gases like argon can be solidified fairly easily (using liquid nitrogen). Here’s how an Argon ice looks like and how it melts, or more appropriately how it sublimes because the liquid state is to small to be perceptible. At some angles you do see some liquid argon dropping and immediately turning into it’s native gaseous state.

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.

Capture

The Marvels of Samsung’s S Pen

By Anupum Pant

It’s amazing how far technology has come. The S pen you get with a Samsung note device has no battery in it, and yet it is powered because it can somehow communicate with the device. The communication is obvious because the pen has a button and if you press it, the phone knows.

So how does this work? What kind of sorcery is this.

The pen actually pulls energy wirelessly from the device itself with the help of electromagnetic waves. It is something like a device bremen-based designer dennis siegel built in the year 2012. He showed us how he could charge his batteries by harvesting the omnipresent electromagnetic energy. Although it used to take about 24 hours to charge a normal AA battery, now a similar tech is encapsulated in a tiny device, actually even thinner than a real pen!

Electromagnetic Harvester from Dennis Siegel on Vimeo.

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.

[Pictures]

“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

[Read more]

Atoms Scream When They Die?

By Anupum Pant

At a state of the art fusion reactor at MIT, special machines heat up gasses at really high temperature, to about million degrees hotter than the sun’s surface. This makes them move around so fast that they are able to smash together and fuse. This right now doesn’t work as it should in theory. But when it does, it would be a great clean source of energy.

For now, what is interesting is a kind of noise atoms make just before they are about to fuse. The sound is like a shrieking baby. Here is what they sound like when they die…

Making Diamonds in the Microwave

By Anupum Pant

If you have the right equipment, making a diamond is a straightforward but an extremely time consuming process. Here’s how it works…

A microwave chamber is filled with a gas like methane – which has one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. Now, since diamonds are crystalline forms of carbon, the gas is then turned into a hot ball of plasma, breaking down the methane atom into carbon and hydrogen. The carbon atoms go and sit on top of a diamond seed, one atom at a time. If you let this happen for several weeks, you have your diamond ready to go.  Video

Or, you could do something like this person does. It’s quite close to the real diamond, however if tests are carried upon it, the difference can be told from the natural diamonds that are formed several hundred feet below the earth’s surface…

Telescope on the Moon

By Anupum Pant

When the Chinese unmanned lunar exploration mission Chang’e 3, landed its first lunar rover on the moon in 2013, not many people knew this. But it’s coming to light just now with a new report published that shows they’ve have had a UV telescope on the moon all along.

The telescope has recorded thousands of hours of observations. And has also been able to record an impressive UV image of a galaxy that is 21 million light years away – Pinwheel Galaxy.

The robotic telescope has worked for an impressive 2 years now and has captured some really good data which couldn’t have been possible from any telescope on the earth. That’s mostly because of two reasons.

1. Earth’s atmosphere is too thick to allow detectable UV light from distant celestial objects.

2. Moon spins 27 times slower than the earth so it is possible to make the telescope focus at a single object and collect light for a lot more time than it can do on earth.

Precision Metal Cutting by EDM

By Anupum Pant

Metal machining is a common term. Almost everyone knows about it. It’s simple and a cost efficient way to cut simple shapes out of metal. However, very close tolerances are hard to achieve unless the  machine is absolutely state of the art.

Wire EDM or wire electrical discharge machining is something that can cut metal extremely precisely into very complex shapes and achieve tolerances that are in the order of a few microns – about 100 times thinner than your. Its called a wire EDM because it uses a wire that is extremely thin, as thick as a human hair, to cut into a metal. The metal powder removed from the cutting process is so small , you could consider it smoke. This is how it works – LINK

In the right hands, this is what it can do…

Plastic to Oil

By Anupum Pant

Plastic is a huge problem. It’s filling up the landfills, causing problems to the animals and what not. But did you know, there’s a very simple method you could use to convert plastic to a general purpose oil – something you could burn for heat. The same oil can even further be distilled to separate gasoline, kerosene and diesel. All you need to do is to construct an apparatus like the person uses in the video below.

An apparatus that would heat the plastics in an oxygen free atmosphere to at least 400 degrees centigrade. This would cause the long polymer chains of plastics to breakdown due to a process called pyrolysis. The end product would be vapors of oil which can be cooled down and collected for general burning. A kilogram of plastic used would produce almost a liter of oil. If you’d rather burn the plastic, it would produce about 3 times as much carbon dioxide in weight. Considering it’d get burnt anyway if you make the oil, at least you’d now have a far more richer and cleaner source of heat.

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…