Category: Science and Tech

The Mind Controlling Green Banded Broodsac

By Anupum Pant

green banded broodsac

While you are in the USA and you see a really conspicuous snail with two green banded horns growing out of its head that seem to make a periodic motion (as you’ll see in the video below), just try to stay away. That’s because this snail isn’t what it is supposed to be. It’s being controlled by a mind controlling parasite.

A snail is a snail and it isn’t supposed to have those amazing horns on its head, right? You know that now, but birds can’t read this. So when they see a snail like this one, they assume it to be a caterpillar – bird’s favourite food. In fact, they see two of them and swoop down to have a good brunch. Little do they know, they are infecting themselves with an evil creature, and in the process are also helping a parasite achieve its life goal.

Leucochloridium paradoxum or the green banded brood sac is a parasite that lives in the bird poop. Of course, they live in the poop of birds that were infected by it at some point. If you ask me how did the parasite get into a bird in the first place, it’s like asking what came first, the egg or the chicken. May be it went into a caterpillar when it first started. And then a bird ate that caterpillar.

So the reason larvae of this parasite live in bird poop is because their ultimate goal in life is to go live in the warm interiors of a bird and feed off of it for the rest of its life. And inject babies in bird poop to keep their race alive. Yes, at least they have their meaning of life figured out.

But that doesn’t explain how bird poop goes back into a bird. So, you have to dig deeper. And when you do that, the “double horned snail” comes into the picture.

Snails love eating bird poop. Don’t ask me why. They do. So when they eat it, the green banded broodsac gets into the snail, gets bigger, moves towards its eyes and starts protruding out by swelling the eyes. Once it has done that it goes on to develop green bands like a caterpillar and starts moving in a periodic fashion like a caterpillar would appear to do. That fools the birds into thinking it’s a caterpillar.

But the evil parasite doesn’t stop there. It goes on to hack into the snail’s brain and rides it like go-cart to the top of a tree canopy, or somewhere noticeable like that. So the birds would notice it and eat it. And if they do, the larva moves into the birds interior and another parasite accomplishes its life goal.

Wow nature!

Virus Helps Boiling Water Faster

By Anupum Pant

If you’ve been following awesci for some time now, you must remember the leidenfrost effect. The effect is clearly demonstrated by dropping some water on a really hot pan. The layer of water in contact with the hot pan vaporises and gets trapped there as an air cushion. The drop of water then is free to move around on the air cushion and it dances on the pan.

When you boil water in a vessel, something similar happens. Although a similar air cushion tries to form at the hot inner surface of the vessel (where the water is in contact), these bubbles become bigger, more buoyant and move to the surface. However, for whatever little time they remain in there, and meanwhile new ones keep forming, they create an insulating gap of air. So, the heating of water is much less efficient. How great it would have been if these bubbles never formed.

Well, scientists have accomplished that. And they propose doing it by creating extremely tiny hair like features on the inner surface of the vessel which prevent those insulating bubbles from forming and in turn decrease the time in which the water boils. In fact, by this method of surface modification, they have managed to boil water about three times faster.

The most amazing thing about these tiny hair like features they create on the surface is that they are made using a special kind of virus called the tobacco mosaic virus. Using the hooks on this virus, it is made to stick to the surface and is then coated with a thin film of nickel. And there you have your new modified surface which makes boiling water much more efficient.

Here is how it works…

We Move and Stop Together

By Anupum Pant

The miscellanies of the world are amusing. Phil Torres, an etymologist who loves spending most of his time in the Amazon rain forest, recently came across a weird insect, or more specifically a group of insects, which move and stop together. Why they do it and how they do it is still unknown. But people do have some plausible theories to explain the whys.

The group of insects called barklice have been seen to do this. First Phill saw them moving in haphazard directions, and then they stopped, and started moving again. Each one of these seemed to be moving in a random direction a couple of inches from each other. How this coordination was taking place, he had no idea. It was probably due to the silky web they were moving on, which was able to carry the information. But then, later he came across a video where they weren’t moving on a web.

Some say that they do this to look like a single big organism to the predator. While others say that they do this to stop and listen for a while and detect predators, because moving makes a lot of excess undesirable noise.

This is what they do the almost-perfect coordinated movement…

The Tomtato Plant

By Anupum Pant

Grafting can do wonders. This new commercial product proves it. The upper part of the plant that Thompson and Morgan now sells for a mere 10 GBP can produce quality tomatoes, while at the roots of it you’ll find the best potatoes. Yes, all of it in a single plant called the tomtato plant. This is achieved using a fairly simple technique that can produce as many as forty different fruits from a single tree. It can be achieved at home with enough practice. For now, you could just spend a bit to get this marvellous plant home.

Your Second Brain

By Anupum Pant

You have a second brain and it is in your gut. It’s called the enteric nervous system, or the second brain. It is something that of course is not capable of having concious thoughts, but has a great influence in your life. Along with trillions of bacteria living in there, the second brain influences you as a person, much more than you may have thought…

Creepy Creatures on Your Face

By Anupum Pant

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you must know that really creepy creatures live on your skin. As we’ve seen, we’re more bacteria than we are ourselves,  probably also a stupidity virus somewhere in there, there are also other macroscopic creatures which live ON you. You don’t have to know these exist, because it may ruin the rest of your life for you. You can never get rid of them. So leave if you think you should.

Didymium Glasses

By Anupum Pant

Praseodymium is a chemical element with symbol Pr and atomic number 59. Most have never heard of it. But it is something that’s essential for glass blowers to work their magic. It seems odd to link praseodymium to the art of glass making. However, a strong link exists and here is how it works.

Praseodymium and neodymium (the element used to make really strong magnets) come together in glass to give it a kind of amazing property. These elements when incorporated into glass, gives it a typical green-blue colour, which is used by a glass-blower to see through the yellow sodium flame.

Well, the yellow flame of sodium comes from the sodium that is present in soda glass. And when it is being worked with a hot torch, it vaporizes sodium and makes a bright yellow flame which conceals the details on the soft glass. These have to be seen to be worked properly.

These glasses just block out the yellow light from the sodium and gives the glass-blower a sort of super human ability to see through the flame. What enables these glasses to do block out the yellow is a lot more complex physics. For now, that’s the story of an unheard element, which deserves to be known. An unsung hero element – praseodymium.

Solar Eclipses Every Month

By Anupum Pant

Ever wondered why we don’t have solar eclipses every month, given the moon makes a full circle of earth in a month? Shouldn’t there be an eclipse every month at least at one place on earth? And the same goes for lunar eclipses too. That’s because the orbit of moon is slightly tilted, at about 5 degrees. And that’s pretty huge when it comes to big distances of the space.

Also, by some bizarre coincidence, a moon 400 times smaller than the sun is also 400 times closer to earth than the sun. That crazy coincidence gives it the ability to block out the sun’s light during a full solar eclipse, even when it is much smaller than the object it is blocking. Like your thumbnail, smaller than the sun, but much closer than it can block the sun’s light.

But the moon isn’t at the same distance from earth all the time. So, when it is far, you get these annular solar eclipses, which block the suns inner part, and you still can see a ring of brilliant light.

And since the moon is slowly going away, about 600 million years from now, there’ll be only annular solar eclipses. Of course we won’t be around to miss the complete solar eclipses.

About Stars in the Universe

By Anupum Pant

How many feet in a mile? Asked a stranger to me on the street today. I quickly made a metric to imperial conversion in my head and told him a rough answer. That wasn’t what he wanted, but was fairly impressed. The answer is 5,280 feet by the way.

The point is, you don’t necessarily take exams in the class. Tests could happen anywhere. And you got to be ready all the time. So here are a few stats to remember. Of course, it may seem like you don’t have a use for them. Trust me, just keep them in the back of your head.

Out of all the trillions of stars out there, even from the best places on earth, only about 9,096 stars can be seen with the naked eye.

If every galaxy was the size of a grain of sand, the total sand that you’d have now would fill up a massive tank 3 meters high, wide and thick. Remember, each one of them consists of billions of stars. On the other hand, if each star was a grain of sand, the whole sand on earth won’t be enough to count the number.

And more, from smarter everyday.

The Whitest Whites

By Anupum Pant

Florescence is a physical phenomena in which light (electromagnetic radiation) is absorbed by a substance with certain properties and is instantly emitted back in a different wavelength. Most times the absorbed light of a certain wavelength is emitted back by the substance with a greater wavelength. This leads to one interesting phenomenon in which the smaller wavelength UV radiation (which is invisible to the human eye) gets converted to a visible light by the substance. Applications of this particular phenomenon are numerous, in the modern world.

The white fluorescent lamps we see lighting up most of the things these days (getting quickly replaced by white LEDs) contain a fluorescent substance which does the same thing. The vapour inside these lamps gets excited and produces a UV light, had the fluorescent phosphor coating not been there in these lamps, you wouldn’t have seen any bright light come out of them.

But the most interesting application that I had not known until today is them being used in optical brighteners or fluorescent whitening agents in detergents that are commercially available to help you make your whites appear more white than they actually are. When you treat your clothes with these brighteners, the clothes now have this substance clinging to it which can absorb the UV in sunlight and emit a blue light. So, the yellow from your whites mixes with this blue and you see your clothes are more white in the sun outside.

If people in the military decide to wear whites washed with detergents like these, they’d be in big trouble. It would make them glow in nightvision goggles.

Rice Grain sized Creature Destroying Whole Forests

By Anupum Pant

If you take a helicopter ride over a pine forest in a region spanning the Rocky Mountains toward Canada’s Boreal Forest, you’d probably see thousands of fallen trees and several other trees turning brown. There’s an epidemic that has been the woe of these forests. A tiny creature, that’s destroying millions of acres of pine forests and is disrupting the carbon balance of massive regions. The mountain pine beetle is the tiny creature I’m talking about.

A mountain pine beetle is a tiny dark insect sporting a hard exoskeleton and is the size of a rice grain approximately. And yet, its size doesn’t limit it in the amount of destruction it causes. It’s like a cancer. The beetle infestation on a pine tree spreads like a wild fire. Once spread, the only thing that can be done is to cut the trees and burn them to stop the infestation from spreading.

In a very simple manner, these beetles feed on the phloem tissue and kill the tree by girdling it – a very effective way of killing a huge tree with a few small cuts. Or they introduce fungi into the bark,

Hardwired Roosters

By Anupum Pant

Cock-a-doodle-do is what has been a symbol for the break of dawn since a long long time now. If you live in the countryside, that’s what you’d hear in the morning, a rooster crying out loud. Been there long enough and yet we hadn’t known for long if roosters do it when the see the sunlight or if they are hard-wired in their genes to crow like that.

Takashi Yoshimura of Nagoya University and his team decided to conduct a study on this, to uncover how a rooster really works. Because it has been noted that even a bright light from a car could trigger a rooster to do it. So what was it?

So they kept a well fed rooster indoors, in dim lights. That means, it could see the sun come out. And even then, the constant dim lights of the room failed to fail the rooster. Despite being kept away from the sun, the rooster cried out at the break of dawn. Turns out roosters are genetically hard-wired to crow when it’s dawn time.

It’s a behaviour that’s tuned to something called the circadian rhythm – physical, mental and behavioural change in an organism that follows a 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness. We humans, other animals and plants have these internal clocks that operate based on when the sun comes and goes. For instance, you get tired at night, sleep and wake up in the morning. That’s your circadian clock talking. Roosters have it too, and their voice is wired to this rhythm, not the external stimuli of light.

$761 Jar of Peanut Butter

If you have been active on the internet, there’s a great chance that you noticed this image of a peanut butter jar which had its price labelled as $761. That’s too expensive for a jar of peanut butter. Especially for a jar of it which has no added precious metal powder, or diamonds or anything else either. It is a standard ordinary form of the most popular american spread – the peanut butter.

If you are interested, you can buy it here on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s website, as a standard material of reference. It’s up to you to decide because for 761 dollars you would only get around 500 grams of it. Or you probably can’t even buy it because it is meant as a standard material for scientists, governmental regulatory agencies and manufacturers around the world. According to NIST, it is perfectly homogeneous. That is to say that any part of it you take, you’d get the same composition.

This is one of the 1400 such items you can buy on that website. Others are lake Michigan fish tissue, spinach slurry, new york waterway sediment, SPAM (meat homogenate) and more… all of these for around 700 dollars or more.

More about it on [Smithsonian]

Giant Worms Use Jet Streams to Navigate

By Anupum Pant

Pyrosomes are very interesting creatures, or better, a collection of thousands of these tiny creatures. These are worm like creatures found in the shallow depths of oceans, shaped like cylinders or butterfly nets. What appears like a huge worm, which can range from a few centimetres to the size of a sperm whale, are in reality a massive colony of tiny little creatures called zooids. All of them tied together in kind of a tunic.

These zooids have openings on both side of the cylinder, outside and inside. This acts like a huge filtration system, which takes in water from the outside and sends jets from the inside. And it’s been recently found that when brushed by an object, these zooids light up in different colours to coordinate a series of water jets, in order to drift away in a specific direction. So it’s being said that they may coordinate their jet-like propulsion system by flashing lights at each other