Category: Science and Tech

Journey to Pluto

By Anupum Pant

NASA’s new horizon spacecraft will reach close to the icy dwarf planet pluto in July 2015, and when it does, it will be huge. That’s because pluto is astoundingly far away. To comprehend how far it is, consider this.

It is 5 Billion kilometres away. That means it would take 4.6 hours for a signal sent from here to reach that distance. And if the spacecraft wishes to send us back a reply to that, it would take 4.6 hours to travel back. That’s how much time it takes light to travel.

This spacecraft travels way faster than any human is travelling right now. That’s faster than the ISS going around the earth. And still it would take 9 years to reach the dwarf planet, since it was launched in the year 2006.

New 3D Printing Technology

By Anupum Pant

This new printing technology by Carbon 3D can print 3D objects out of a pool of gooey liquid. It’s pretty fascinating to see things emerging from a liquid. It seems like backwards melting.

But the msot amazing part of this is that the technology makes 3D printing much faster now. The video is in real time and it makes the tiny effiel tower in a matter of minutes. That’s about 25 to 100 times faster than the technology we use today for 3D printing.

Operation Popye

By Anupum Pant

In the year 1966, the Vietnam war was in full swing and back then the US was doing things you’d only think would happen in science fiction, even today. Controlling weather – bringing the power of nature to the battlefield.

The operation Popye involved planes dropping huge amounts of silver iodide crystals into the clouds to seed them. That’d create rain, more than what naturally happens in that area.

College Dropout Turned into a Math Prodigy

By Anupum Pant

Jason Padgett was a community college dropout at the age of 31 and was raising a daughter by being a furniture salesman. He had no interest in numbers. In 2002, one night in Tacoma, Washington, near a Karaoke bar, he ran into a few thugs who were there to mug him. From them, he suffered serious head injuries and somehow survived. But something changed.

An ordinary furniture salesman, and a drop-out now had turned into a mathematical prodigy and started seeing geometrical shapes all around. He now started to comprehend the meaning of pi, and much more. He became the first recorded case of acquired savant syndrome – something that has been historically seen in only 40 people across the world.

Stories like these make me question if there’s immense brain power naturally granted to us, and it’s just a matter of some mysterious event to unlock those powers.

Sneezing While Sleeping

By Anupum Pant

Have you ever sneezed when you were asleep? Or have you seen someone do it? I haven’t. So, is it really possible for a person to sneeze while they are asleep?

Well, as expected, the answer is no. That’s why you never see people sneezing in their sleep.

Sneezing is a reflex action, that happens when some particulate matter or irritant gets inside your nose. It’s nature’s way to keep unwanted stuff out. But when you sleep, your body produces something called G.A.B.A, or gamma-Aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter which suppresses reflex.

But that’s scary, right? What if stuff goes in while you are asleep. Well, the body has a way to deal with that too. So, if you are sleeping and you are no longer prone to sneezing if anything enters your nose, there’s still a point at which too much irritation is deemed too much by your body. At this point, you wake up first and you then sneeze. Wow!

Making Your Dream Come True With Science

By Anupum Pant

Haven’t people told you this, visualize what you want to achieve and if you think about your final state enough, your chances of achieving it will sky rocket? Okay, go ahead and do it now. So, if you want to lose weight, think of a slim you doing 3 backflips back to back.

There, sorry for being a prick, but you just decreased the odds of you being that slim. Scientists at the university of Pennsylvania have found that visualizing a happy ending decreases your chance of reaching the goal. That’s because you feel more satisfied with the image of a happy ending in mind, and when obstacles come along, which they always do, you lose hope and quit.

Instead, to make your dreams come true, or rather to increase the chance of your dream coming true, visualize the path, the process of you getting there. A path filled with all kinds of obstacles. That’d make your odds much better.

Richard Wiseman explains…

Reaching Near Absolute Zero

By Anupum Pant

Reaching temperatures really cold, at the point where Nitrogen is a liquid is relatively simple. Just use the liquid Nitrogen you have stored in a nice insulated container. Like that, you could attain temperatures of about 77K (or about -196 degrees centigrade). Going cooler is also simple, use liquid Helium (or about -269 degrees centigrade). Now you’ll reach 4K.

But what if you need to go colder than that? A few experiments like one that measures the extremely tiny change in dimensions of a metal ball due to the gravitational waves needs temperatures like these. That’s because these extremely tiny  changes due to the gravitation waves have to be larger than the movement of atoms in the metal ball itself. And this happens at very low temperatures (in the range of millikelvins). So how do we reach temperatures like those? Dr. Morello explains.

Mapping WiFi Signal in Your Flat Using Physics

By Anupum Pant

People with big homes must have had trouble placing their WiFi router in a place so perfect that everyone at home gets good signal. With a small flat and a fairly powerful router, I don’t have that problem. However it’s still fun when it’s physics.

A PhD student, from the Imperial College London in the UK who goes by the name Jason Cole has made a brave attempt to model the intensity of electromagnetic radiation emitted from the router across his flat. For this he first mapped his floorplan, assigned refraction values to the walls, and then used the Helmholtz equation to create a simulation.

For us physics amateurs he was kind enough to make get an android app made. It enables everyone with a decently powerful android phone to map their floorplans and simulate the intensity of WiFi signal across their apartments. The app uses what they call it in science, 2D Finite Difference Time Domain method to solve Maxwell’s equation on a Cartesian grid – if you know what I mean. The app can be downloaded for free at the play store.

If you are more of a physics person and would be interested in having a look as to what goes on behind his simulation, go visit Jason’s page here.

Depressed Baboons of a Dutch Zoo

By Anupum Pant

In the year 2013, a whole colony of baboons, consisting of 112 individuals started acting weird suddenly. No one had an idea what had happened, nor does anyone know for sure even now.

Completely opposite to what they usually did, like moving around, grooming each other or getting into tiny fights, they sat still, facing away from the visitors. It seemed as if they had gone on a strike, for no apparent reason. Of course there must have been a reason. But it couldn’t be figured out.

They were brought food by the zoo keepers. Normally they’d have ran towards the person carrying meals, this time they didn’t. Even the apples and other fruits that were placed around in their perimeter remained untouched.

This wasn’t the first time this was seen by the zoo keepers. This had happened three more times in the past. In the year 1994, 1997 and 2007. The 2007 was even more weirder because all of them were facing the same direction during the “strike”.

As always, conspiracy theorists said that they must have seen a UFO, or a snake more realistically. But that couldn’t have happened as the zoo keepers didn’t find any missing snakes in the zoo. Nor were they following the emotions of a depressed leader, as theorized by someone, because in the past years when this had happened, the colony had different leaders. It was also said that some visitor might have scared them by sporting a bright shirt with a print of some predator on it, but in that case they’d have been moving around more, not sitting still like this.

No one knows for sure why this happened.

via [Listverse]

We are Naturally Altruistic

By Anupum Pant

As we get older we become far more selfish, being altruistic then is something that requires extra effort. Although some of us retain the ability to give without expecting anything back, most of us don’t. Something changes while we grow up. It probably has something to do with the kind of environment we’re raised in.

I say we lose this ability as we grow because it has been proven now that we are naturally altruistic. Researchers at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, show in their experiments how little kids have an innate impulse to offer assistance when a person shows that they need it.

In fact, chimps do this too. However they aren’t very enthusiastic about offering help when something seems to be out of reach. But we sure share this spontaneous altruistic motivation with chimpanzees. It certainly has deep evolutionary roots.

Bacteria Powered Machines

By Anupum Pant

Elizabeth Beattie and Denise Wong are two Ph.D students at the University of Pennsylvania are using bacteria as a tool to build very tiny machines – machines powered by bacteria. These students might sound like they are biologists, they are not. In fact, they are roboticist who want to use bacteria to power tiny machines.

The details of how much precision in the moment of machines they’ve been achieve yet has been detailed in this science friday episode below. The amazing part is how blue light can do wonders here. There’s so much to be discovered!

Homer Simpson and the Higgs Boson

By Anupum Pant

The Higgs Boson, first predicted by Professor Peter Higgs and five other physicists is an elementary particle that explains why other particles in the universe have mass. After having spent billions of dollars and what not, scientists were able to discover a solid proof of the existence of such a particle in 2013. But much before scientists had predicted the mass of it, Homer Simpson came very close to it. And this was about more than ten years before scientists.

Homer writes an equation on the chalk board in the episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” which was aired in the year 1998. If you solve this equation, you get an answer which is only slightly larger than the actual higgs boson’s mass – as Simon singh pointed out in his book, “The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets.”

Now, everyone’s going crazy about how Homer did it isn’t actually thinking straight. This is as simple as seeing that the equation being written on the board by Homer Simpson, was actually written by writers of the show. We’ve seen writers like Ken Keeler hiding deep meanings, especially related to numbers in the past. You should know that he was also a writer for this show for a year before this episode was aired.

What I think is that there was some hidden genius hiding behind the veil here. It can’t be just a coincidence.

via [io9]

Tragedy is Funny?

By Anupum Pant

Mark Twain said, “Humour is tragedy plus time.” Although I don’t consider most of them to be funny, people still make jokes about the holocaust, 9/11, world war and other such big tragedies, and they get a lot of attention. You could call them dark jokes. Ultimately, they do seem funny to more people, than not.

But, today that Harrison Ford has got hurt in a plane crash, it’s not the right time to make a pun out of it already.
So if some stand up comedian says “He shouldn’t fly at this age…solo.” Well, he’d be in for a big boo from the audience. As people say, it would be too soon to make a joke about it. So, what makes a tragedy old enough to start making puns out of it that’d get positive attention?

Science has probably has an explanation for this oxymoronic behaviour of people. [Here]

But estimate for the right time to strike such a dark joke comes from a study done by Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and Texas A&M University in 2012.

When the hurricane Sandy came along on October 29 causing mass destruction. During and after the tragedy, separate surveys were taken from groups of participants which asked them to answer how funny they found a tweet which looked like this.

@HurricaneSandy – JUS BLEW DA ROOF OFF A OLIVE GARDEN FREE BREADSTICKS 4 EVERYONE

It was found that the tweet grew funnier as days passed and seemed funniest at just after the 36th day. And it turns out, there was also a late point when the joke became not that funny again. That was 99 days later.

So, comedians, use science and know when to pun.