Category: Science and Tech

Shark Skin

By Anupum Pant

If you ever get a chance to pet a shark, remember to not pet it with a stroke from its belly to its spine. Any other direction is fine. But that one will get you into trouble. There’s a reason for this…

Shark skin is a lot like any other fish’s skin. Full of scales. However, shark scales come with a twist. Their scales, called the dermal scales are made up of thousands of miniature shark teeth.These look like bristles macroscopically and help shark move better in water by pushing water down.

Much more about sharks in Robert Hueter’s talk below…

Sounds of the Atmosphere

By Anupum Pant

Some graduate students, running a NASA experiment captured a series of strange sounds about 36 km above the earth’s surface. They had sent a balloon equipped with a recorder that could record sounds much below our hearing range (in frequency).

The origin of these sounds isn’t known yet. They say it might be coming from crashing ocean waves, wind turbulence, gravity waves, clear air turbulence, and vibrations caused by the balloon cable.

Now since you can’t hear it, you have to speed it up so you can hear it. Here’s the recording sped up about 1000 times.

DOS Attack on Your Brain

By Anupum Pant

Denial of service attack is a hacker’s way of shutting down a website by flooding it with useless traffic. It is literally creating a traffic jam with useless traffic that doesn’t allow the good, genuine traffic to pass by. You do a similar thing with your brain all the time, without knowing that you are doing it. Nikola explains how…

Burning Calories While Thinking

By Anupum Pant

When you are at rest, about 10-20% of the energy you consume is consumed by the brain. That’s how much fuel it burns! Also, thinking hard can actually burn more calories than not working up your brain. But before you may think that this could be the best way to lose weight, you should consider again.

“Levels of Blood-glucose levels dropped when people were asked to perform intellectually challenging tasks than those who did simple tasks.”

That’s because, as compared to an average idle mind, which burns about 0.2 calories a minute, the brain burns about 1.5 calories per minute when it is thinking hard. That’s still not enough to keep you fit, considering a single chocolate chip cookie adds about 150-200 calories to your body.

Vanta Black

By Anupum Pant

When you say you see something, you mean that you sense the photons that are being reflected by the object you “see”. What if the object emits hardly any photons? At least not enough for you to see anything?

The answer is, you see black. Remember that this isn’t the average black sharpie colour you see almost everyday. In that case, you see something. Vanta black, is the blackest substance ever created. It absorbs 99.9% of light. That means when you look at it, you actually are not seeing anything. Rather, your brain is looking at objects around it and concluding that there has to be something in the dark part, so let’s make it look black.

Accuracy vs Precision

By Anupum Pant

There’s a subtle difference between both the things, accuracy and precision. Which in reality is not so subtle for scientists and engineers to produce best results.

Accuracy is how close you can get to the perfect result. It improves as you get trained better, or you make more measurements, or your tool remains the same, but it is calibrated properly.

Precision is different. It is a measure of how often you can get the perfect result using the same method. It improves as you invest in better, high-precision tools.

Ted Ed explains it with an interesting story…

Learning Learned Helplessness

By Anupum Pant

Achieving things that seem totally out of reach, the very things that seem impossible, can actually be accomplished if you learn to get around the state of mind that is called learned helplessness.

Timothy Ferris, the author of 4-hour work week tells a story when he visited Princeton. He challenged the students with something that seemed impossible. The goal of this seemingly arduous task was to make them move out of their comfort zones. So, he offered them a roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the world, but didn’t tell them what the challenge was. They had to come meet him after the lecture. A third of the students came.

This was what they were asked to do. He wanted them to contact J Lo., Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton, J.D. Salinger and get a reply from at least one of them. No one even tried. Clearly, it did not look like a task that an average person could complete.

He did this again the next year and also told the students about what had happened last year. And after hearing the story of faliure of last year students, among the 17 guys, 6 finished the challenge in 48 hours.

The students last year had learned helplessness. And the people who came over this psychological hurdle accomplished a seemingly impossible task with flying colours.

Just knowing about this effect is enough to change the way you look at your life and opportunities. One great way to take away for the people who come here every day to read things.

It always seems impossible until it’s done. – Nelson Mandela

Drunk Driving Kills?

By Anupum Pant

Well, driving drunk is the worst thing you can do because doing that almost makes it sure you’d get into an accident. The blood alcohol limits are there for a purpose. But the interesting thing about drunk driving is, in the case of an accident due to drunk driving, your odds of survival are much higher than the passenger who’s not been drinking. This is real science and there’s a reason why it works.

Still, this shouldn’t be taken as an encouragement to drive drunk because doing that means you are inviting trouble for sure. Surviving doesn’t always mean a good thing when you have to live without a limb for the rest of your life.

The reason why it works has been evaluated in a study published in the journal called American surgeon. The study looked at 8000 old driving accidents and found that

Seven percent of people who came in sober died of their injuries, while those who were hurt while drunk only died one percent of the time. – [Scientific American]

No one is sure about why it happens, but one thing might be that the alcohol present in your blood during traumatic injuries protects you against nerve damage.

Other theories suggest that being drunk makes your body loose. That means you might actually absorb the force better throughout the time than a stiff conscious body. Think of a soft shock absorber vs a hard sports shock absorber.

Knowledge is Not Understanding

By Anupum Pant

Let’s say you know how to ride a bike. One day, like Destin, you flip the bike’s handle. That is to say, when you turn the handle left, the bike turns right and vice versa. Yes, a welder can easily do that to your bike with help of a tiny gear system.

The thing about knowing how to ride a bike is that you don’t really understand how you do it. Millions of things go running in your mind when you do it. The algorithm is hardwired. So many things happen in there unconsciously, you never realize. Unless…

You do the flipping and try to ride this new flipped bike. You just can’t. Assuming you know your bike well, you think it’s going to be just a matter of time that you learn to ride this new thing. But it’s not that easy. Especially when you are old. Destin goes around the world offering people $200 to ride this thing for 10 feet without putting down their feet. No one has been able to do it. It takes effort.

Destin put in this effort. He unlearned his old way of riding a bike and took 8 months to master this new flipped bike. To his amazement, he learned it suddenly. One minute he wasn’t even close to riding it and the other minute he was gliding past in his new bike. But it took 8 months and a lot of practice.

Now, he took it a level further. He hopped on to a normal bike, and guess what? He couldn’t ride it. His brain had learned to ride the flipped bike too well. The algorithm inside had changed.

And suddenly, like he had learned to ride the flipped bike, after some practice, something clicked and he was back to riding the normal bicycle. He documented all of it in a video below. Which I think has a very deep message for all of us. It can’t be put into words. It’s a realization.

Also, his son, with a much more plastic brain than his could learn to ride the new bike in just two weeks. Learn it young is another direct message this genius experiment gives us.

Evolutionary Anachronism

By Anupum Pant

The mango tree, the avocado tree, and the ginko biloba shouldn’t be here. They should have been long dead.

Trees depend on animals or other such external agents to disperse their seeds. As animals can’t breakdown seeds, they eat the nice fruits and let the seeds out in some other place where a new plant grows.

But the trees I mentioned above have either seeds that are massive, or have stinky seeds like the ginko biloba. These plants depended on animals that no longer exist. The avocado tree, for instance depended on probably a massive ground sloth who could eat the avocados whole without choking to death. Or Ginko biloba probably depended on an animal which loved those stinky seeds. They are long gone. But the trees live by. Thanks to us humans – who plant mango trees and avocado trees because they are tasty. and the Ginko biloba because they give a nice shade.

Genetically Modified Mosquito Factory

By Anupum Pant

A brightly coloured truck originating from a mosquito factory nearby, loaded with millions of mosquitoes, goes by, making a loud announcement through the massive loud speaker system mounted on its top saying something like, “We are releasing millions of genetically engineered mosquitoes in your area.” How would you react to something like that? I’d be stunned. Although it’s no reason for me to be startled, I’d still run for my life. You’d probably do the same, unless you are in the small town of Jacobina, Brazil and you know exactly what’s going on.

Something similar is happening in other places like Cayman and Malaysia too.

Chikungunya and dengue  fever are very nasty tropical diseases which are spread by the Aedes mosquitoes. These can lead to troublesome syndromes and also cause death. And malaria is already a big killer, taking about 600,000 lives every year. Widespread in Africa, Asia, and India, these diseases have now spread to the Caribbean, and the US too.

Not many people are really putting innovation into making this stop. The usual methods to deal with mosquitoes like poisoning water where they lay eggs and fogging small areas are still the only state-of-the-art methods that are in use. One company, oxitec, wants to do more.

What do you think you need to stop dengue, chikungunya and malaria from spreading? Oxitec thinks, more mosquitoes is the solution. But there’s a catch to it. The more mosquitoes they are putting in the system are actually genetically modified mosquitoes – killer mosquitoes.

Oxitec factories, like one world’s largest mosquito factory somewhere in Brazil is making male mosquitoes that have their genes altered. So, when these are released and they start mating, they produce an offspring that does not survive for very long. So it never grows up to bite. If enough GMO males are released from time to time, and the numbers of females are less, this method works the best.

See how these factories work – Link

There’s still a lot of things this method has to prove to the government to make it a standard method to eliminate mosquitoes.

There are of course some problems associated with the process. Like one being: The method is based on the principle that male mosquitoes do not bite and only the safe kind of gender, genetically modified males will be released. But the process which makes these, makes about 300 females in a 3 million male population. That’s the error. And no one knows what happens when a GMO female mosquito bites you. That’s one reason it is still under review of the food and drug administrations.

via [TheGuardian] [Oxitec]

The Next Mass Extinction

By Anupum Pant

99% of the species that ever lived have now become extinct. Most of this wiping of animal species is caused by certain events that suddenly happen from time to time.

About 440 Million years ago, most species (86% of all the species) were killed when shallow sea waters got frozen due to global cooling because all the carbon dioxide was sucked away by volcanic rock..

347 Million years ago some thing similar happened, but this time all of the oxygen from water was sucked away by algae – too many plants.

250 Million years ago, during the permian extinction, 70% of land and  95% of ocean life was wiped off the face of earth. This was when volcanic gases destroyed the ozone layer, ocean temperatures rose to an average of 40 degree Celsius and acid started raining from the heavens.

Only 50 million years later a huge rift cracked earth, split the america and europe and spewed massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Uncontrolled global warming killed more than 80% of all the species which had tried to recover in these 50 million years.

Soon bigger dinosaurs started roaming the earth and were believed to have been wiped off by a massive asteroid the size of a small town which made such a huge impact that it blew massive amounts of dust in the air, blocked the sunlight and killed all dinosaurs.

Now, human population burst has created an unusual imbalance in the planet. Massive amounts of CO2 is already being thrown into the air – increased 25% in the last 50 years. The population of one species is unusually high. Thanks to the world dominated by us, the rate of species getting extinct is about thousand times higher than the natural rate!! That’s a certain 6th mass extinctions is soon to come – in about the next hundred years. As always, it will hurt us, the species at the top of the chain, worst, and also because the probability of it hitting us would be massively higher than it hitting any other species. It’s coming, and nothing that’s going on now looks like it’s going to stop.

However, on the brighter side, there are so many of us that the probability of some of us not getting killed by the massive extinctions is also pretty high. In that case, for those some of us who manage to escape it, life will be tough. But, they’ll carry our race further? We can only wait and watch.

The Hall of Fame for Longest Migrations

By Anupum Pant

Very recently, Varvara, a gray whale has seem to have broken the world record for the longest migration by a mammal. A study published in the biology letters mentions this gray whale which travelled from Russia to Mexico and then back travelled approximately 14,000 miles in 172 days, beating the previous world record of the humpback whale which was at around 10,000 miles.

But that’s tiny compared to birds. Birds like Arctic Tern, which holds the world record for the longest migration by any creature known, travels from Greenland to Antarctica after a zigzag path that’s about 44,000 miles away.

The final prize however goes to the Alaskan bar-tailed godwit, because when it goes it doesn’t stop. In a flight lasting for about 8 days, the bird goes from Alaska to New-zealand, about 7000 miles with no stops whatsoever!