Category: Science and Tech

Mercury Tales

What’s closest to the sun must be hot. Yes, being 58 million kilometers away makes it pretty hot. And mercury, as the guy in this video says, is also super cool. One way it’s cool that I know is because one day on mercury the sun rises, stops in mid day and goes back to where it came from. Now if that’s not cool, there’s more.

Mercury zips past pretty fast. If you are able to locate it, you’ll see that it moves past the stars pretty quickly, as you keep an eye on it. It makes a complete orbit in just 88 days. That’s about 1.5 mercury days in a year. Imagine having a birthday almost every other day!

That’s because it is so close to the sun. That means it takes a much faster movement to prevent it from collapsing into the sun. Interestingly, the mercury, when seen through a good telescope, with a great amount of patience can be seen to change phases, just like the moon does. But it’s not easy to make that kind of an observation.

It also has the most elliptical orbit. And through out the year it can move from just 40 million kilometres away from the sun to more than 70 million kilometres away. That’s some change of seasons. More in the crashcourse video below:

When Life Gives You Lemons

India has a problem of men zipping open their pants and starting to pee on random walls on a street. That’s not to demean my country, but I’m sure most developing countries face a problem similar to this one. It is a fact and I can’t deny that. These people sure had one interesting way to deal with it. But there’s another one.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade is a common thing people like to say. So, when a country gives you a lot of under educated men peeing on the streets, give them lemon trees.

Yes, it works. Of course it comes with a flavour no one would like to have, it sure does nourish the citrus trees. Human urine is more than 90% water and rest of it, besides the bad odour of it is mostly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Definitely a better thing to give to citrus plants, than your pet’s pee. Just make sure you do not contaminate the fruit, or the leaves themselves. Rest, the tree will take care.

Here’s what Tangurena has to say:

Urine is very high in nitrogen. One can observe how plants handle the quantities humans would produce by observing the yards of people with large dogs. Plants usually get “burned” from the quantity of nitrogen deposited by the dogs.

If your compost heap has a lot of straw/cellulose, then it probably needs more nitrogen. If you want to use your own stuff to fertilize plants, mix it about 50% with water in a bucket (or watering can) then apply it to plants. Fill the bucket/watering can indoors, and wash it out afterwards.

Interesting Ping-Pong Balance Question

By Anupum Pant

Experimentation gives you so many answers that you couldn’t have known otherwise! Consider a simple experiment like this one. There’s a balance. Both the sides have exactly the same kind of beakers and both the beakers have been filled by exactly the same kind of water, to exactly the same level. The balance is still balanced.

Now, the balance is clamped to the balanced position and the following is done:

One beaker’s base is tethered to a ping-pong ball which is completely inside the water.

The other beaker, on the right has an acryllic ball of the same size, submerged at the same level, but is tethered from the outside, suspended from the above into the water.

The balance is then released. Predict which way the balance will tip. Or will it even tip to any side? Do have an answer ready with your own explanation for it. Even the greatest physicists would get stumped here.

Once you are done.

Here is the [Answer]

The Crooked Forest

By Anupum Pant

In a part of Poland there’s a forest called the crooked forest which has about four hundred pine trees which grow with their bases crooked at about 90 degrees. These pine trees are surrounded by several other pine trees which grow fine. There have been several theories about what might have caused the weird bent in only about 400 of these trees. Some seem bizarre, others seem quite plausible. But there’s not a single one which absolutely explains the whole phenomenon.

crooked-forest-5[2]

 

[Unusual places]

World’s Simplest Electric Train

By Anupum Pant

To make a simple electric train you just need a very long copper wire, a pencil cell and a few magnets. Making the train itself is as simple as sticking the magnets at both the ends of the cell. The track is the wound copper wire with an internal radius that is just enough to fit the “train”. If you make it into a loop and send in your train, it just keeps running till the cell runs out.

Owl Eye Colours

By Anupum Pant

Owl eyes aren’t spheres, or even near spheres like that of us humans. Their eyes are slightly longer, or you could say tube-shaped. This shape doesn’t allow a good movement of eyes like our shifty eyes. So they see around turning their heads. And since they can turn their heads about 270 degrees, looking around isn’t a problem.

The colour of owl eyes is a vague indicator of at what time of the day they prefer hunting. It’s not a totally accurate indicator, but they do give an idea.

The Eurasian eagle owl and the great horned owl are two of the many owls which have orange coloured eyes. The colour orange means that they are active around dawn and dusk.

The ones with dark brown or black eyes like to hunt at night. It is believed to be an evolutionary trait which helps them to blend well in the dark.

The great gray owl, for instance, has yellow eyes. And that colour is a fairly accurate indicator that the owl prefers hunting during the day.

Fastest Tongues on the Planet

By Anupum Pant

Slow-mo studios have decided to capture the fastest tongues on the planet. These are chameleon tongues we are talking about. Tongues so fast that they accelerate at about 41Gs. That’s many times more than what a human body can sustain. And much faster than the fastest jets we’ve been able to make. So hold your breath and witness the natures amazing creations. It might be a little gross. Be warned…

Ask a Friend

By Anupum Pant

Halitosis wasn’t considered an ailment until very recently. Thanks to listerine for that. But now that it is, and is also a serious turn off for everyone who has to be around several feet from you, you should consider taking a deep breath and asking a friend if you really have a smelly mouth. That’s because two things.

1. No one whose considerate enough would ever tell you that your breath smells bad. And even if they do they’ll put it in a very subtle manner – which will make you underestimate how bad it really is.

2. Secondly, you can almost never tell yourself that your breath smells bad because you’ve probably become so acclimatized to it that it doesn’t even smell odd to you any more.

Most times, parting ways with the bad breath problem off halitosis isn’t as hard as you think. You just have to spend more conscious time flossing, bushing and cleaning your tongue. If you’re missing any of these in your daily schedule, if not now, halitosis will strike some time soon. So, take care. Be prepared to hear it and ask a friend.

Hawkmoth’s Anti-bat Ultrasound

By Anupum Pant

Bats use echolocation to navigate and to zero-in on their prey. That’s one good technique of sound to catch prey in complete darkness or low-light conditions. But their preys aren’t fools either.

Moths are one of the many kinds of insects that a bat would love to have for dinner. But moths, for millions of years, have engaged in an evolutionary battle with the bat. So, when the bats evolve with one good technique to catch them better, their preys evolve something else to evade it. It’s sort of a million year old arms race – and they’ve come up with what researchers believe, is genius. Although, let’s give it up for humans here. Our arms race has produced nuclear bombs in a few hundred years since it started.

Several species of moths, as researchers from University of Florida and Boise State University found, have an ability to produce loud ultrasonic sounds by scraping scaly parts of their genital with their abdomen. Both males and females can do it. This loud sonic disruption produced from the genitalia of certain kinds of moths is enough to block, or jam the bat’s primary navigation signal.

From what I know, no other insects which can do this have been found, but scientists are somewhat certain that several other potential bat preys must have developed this technique to disrupt the bat’s ultrasound, and must be saving their own lives.

This is how the moths do it…

via [Nature]

Chasing, Avoiding, Attracting and Dancing Droplets

By Anupum Pant

These droplets intentionally coloured differently are different, not because of their colours, but because of different concentrations of propylene glycol and water. In this beautiful video coming from a team of researchers in Stanford demonstrates how a droplet with more propylene glycol seems to chase a droplet with more water etc. For instance, in the one where this chasing happens, which looks more like the droplets have brains of their own, the droplet with more water actually exerts a higher surface tension tug, pulling the propylene droplet along.

The Hairy Ball Theorem

By Anupum Pant

At any point in time, there’s at least one such place on earth where the wind isn’t blowing. It sounds like a deep thing to think about. And you might even endeavour to prove it wrong, but you shouldn’t try. That’s because a theorem in algebraic topology called the hairy ball theorem proves that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on even-dimensional n-spheres. Oh wait, that’s a bit too much jargon.

In simple words, if you have a hairy ball and tried to comb the hair on it such that the hair is neatly folded everywhere on the surface of that ball, well, that wouldn’t happen. It’s impossible to do it in 3D spheres (not donuts). Not just spheres, you won’t even be able to do it on a banana shaped hairy ball. Nor would you accomplish it on any 3D shape that can be squished into a ball shaped, to picture it.

So how is it even related to the earth and the wind? Well, if you think about it, say earth is that ball and the hair on that ball is the wind (with a direction and a specific length – magnitude). According to the hairy ball theorem, there’d be at least one point on earth where the tangential vector (hair) would be zero – or in other words, standing up.