Category: Science and Tech

Big Fat Surprise

By Anupum Pant

It’s hard to find real butter in grocery stores these days. Scan the aisles and you’ll only see spreads like “You won’t believe this  is not BUTTER”, with butter written in huge letters, to deceive people into buying it. I somehow don’t like these. I can’t trust margarine to substitute my breakfast bread butter with it. Of course it has no cholesterol and has higher “good” fats. Today everyone is convinced enough by the fake food industry to consume margarine. Remember, the industry once told us that even cigarettes are good for your health. Could you really trust them after that? I still don’t like it and will never buy it. I trust the good old butter made from real milk. Even the worst real butter I think is better than margarine.

I could talk about Conjugated Linoleic Acid, Butyric acid, vitamin k2, fat-soluble vitamins and the Wulzen factor. But what’s better than a simple story which led to a genius newyork times best seller book called The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

In the year 2000 Nina Teicholz, a journalist got a job at a small newspaper which offered her a great deal – Free meals. During this stint she ended up consuming good amounts of fatty foods like creamy soups, foie grass, steaks and what not. All the things that she had avoided for decades, and all the things that every diet book in the world had prevented her from consuming was being eaten in good amounts now. Surely, she must have gained 10 lbs and a whole lot of cholesterol after this, right? No, she lost 10 lbs and her cholesterol remained at the right levels.

From this revelation, she went into several years of investigation and discovered some amazing things that she has elaborated in her book. The whole debate of fake butter vs. real butter most definitely originated from a research study done by a pathologist Ancel Keys…

He compared the health and diets of 13,000 individuals from Japan, U.S and Europe. And concluded that people who consumed more of saturated fats in meat and dairy had high levels of heart disease, but the people who ate more grains, fish, nuts and vegetables did not. However, it is now clear that he cherry picked data to exclude countries like France where the food is rich in saturated fats and still hear diseases are relatively rare. A more comprehensive study which ensued, considered all the data and found that the culprit was sugar, not fat. It all started from this cherry picking of data to prove fat is bad. Similar thing happened with MSG, which led to a widespread belief that MSG was too bad a substance.

Also, read how some fats are just too good, and have exceptional health benefits, like whale fat.

more about it at [Time]

The Ant Mill

By Anupum Pant

We’re talking about a deadly circle of ants today – deadly to the same ants which make up the circle. There’s a funny software bug in army ants which makes their instincts act wrong and makes them go round in circles till they exhaust and collapse.

These ants are blind. So, to move around they are programmed to follow the scent trail left by the ant walking ahead of it. When an ant is alone and is made to move around in a circle, it can often keep circling for sometime and will eventually find it’s own scent. This now acts as the guiding line and it keeps following it indefinitely.

In fact doing this to army ants is as easy as enclosing it in a circle, or making it go round at the edge of a dinner plate. It’d pick up it’s own scent and start making indefinite circles. It’s funny, but you shouldn’t trouble these poor little creatures with this. Plus, it’s not just a harmless prank on them. It is a prank that kills them because the ants keep circling, hoping to reach their destination, and collapse out of exhaustion eventually.

That’s just one ant. This might happen to a massive bunch of ants too. And they are all caught up in a deadly circle of death.

A circle of about 1200 feet is the largest indefinite circle that has been ever seen. It was so huge that it took each ant two hours to complete the circle.

Halitosis Never Existed

By Anupum Pant

Halitosis is a medical term today for a symptom in which extremely bad breath comes out of someone’s mouth. It is usually a sign of tooth decay or gum disease. Usually the origin of bad breath is in the mouth when there’s bad bacteria below the gumline or at the back of the tongue. But can also come from the  nasal cavity, sinuses, throat, lungs, esophagus, stomach or elsewhere.

Initially when the word was coined, it was done only for the bad breath coming from the mouth and it wasn’t even a medical symptom then. In fact, where the word came from is a funny story.

Halitosis was invented by the Lambert company to sell one of their products that was invented in the 1880s. Back then, Listerine wasn’t very popular. It was only an antiseptic that was a prescription medicine used for, well, killing bacteria everywhere. Since this is something which didn’t attract a lot of attention, the company knew they weren’t marketing their product well.

Gerard, son of Jordan Wheat Lambert, owner of the company came up with a word by twisting latin to sound like a medical condition. Halitus meant breath and osis made it sound like a medical condition that would get people’s attention. Now, about 20% of the people had a medical condition that they had been concerned about for a long time (without a name before) and had access to a cure for it. Who would have not bought this!

At that time listerine wasn’t even a normal bottle of mouthwash you could pick up from the grocery store. You needed to have a prescription for it. But as their medical symptom caught people’s attention, its popularity exploded and it started selling without prescription.

via [io9] [Listerine]

Your Pet Might not Be Dead

By Anupum Pant

Ok, so you have a hamster as a pet, a Syrian Hamster maybe. One fine winter morning you wake up and find your pet frozen to death. Is it really dead? That shouldn’t have happened, it wasn’t even a month old, right? Right.

If you stumble upon a hamster, especially a Syrian hamster that looks like it has died, it probably hasn’t. Before starting its funeral process, please check well.

Hamsters have a nice furry coat but they feel the cold too. And come on people, Syrian ones are from a warm part of the world. They haven’t already evolved to adjust to the seasonal changes in your part of the world. When it’s too cold, it can be dangerous for them and their bodies can react in a very odd manner.

When it gets cold hamsters, like many other animals are hard-wired to go into a power saving mode where their metabolism slows down. This is called hibernation. Most of you already know what hibernation is, but it’s important to connect the extremely slow heart beat and breathing rate and dead-body-like features of your pet to this phenomenon. Or you’d be all sad on that unfortunate winter morning when you find your pet is “dead”.

Even lack of food can trigger hibernation. And hamsters can move into this state in a matter of few hours. What you could do if you have a hamster is to keep it in a heated room during winters, or invest in cage heating, or use a heating pad at least. If it still falls into hibernation, just warm it up a bit. Get it rehydrated and wait for it to wake up.

Remember, it will not be in full working mode the instant it wakes up. It will slowly start moving and then limp around for a while. That’s normal. Hamsterific says…

As his body temperature rises closer to normal, the muscle tissue begins to twitch or spasm awake. It may take as much as an hour to get to this point, but as long as some progress is being made, and you continue with the constant warming, rubbing, and feeding, he should continue to improve. It may take three hours or more before he is able to walk around again, but rest assured, he will be himself again very soon, as if nothing had happened.

For the next few days, just make sure it gets a lot of water and food. And keep checking it every hour or so…

 

The Natural Lemonade

By Anupum Pant

LemonadesIn the past we’ve seen the chocolate pudding fruit. Today, it is the lemonade fruit – A fruit that right off the tree tastes like lemonade. It is a popular tree in  New Zealand and Australia, and is also seen growing in some orchards of the USA. However, it is not very commercially popular yet.

A lemonade fruit looks a lot like lemon. That is because it is a cross between a navel orange and a lemon, first grown fairly recently, in the 80s. When ripe, it turns yellowish and is nicely segmented inside. Also, they have soft skins and can be peeled with great ease. So it’s easy to eat. Besides, it has lower acid content gives it a sweet taste, with the flavour of a lemon. It’s never bitter like some lemons. It’s one fruit they say you must try. I can’t wait to try it some time.

They ripen in winter, and stay for only a short time. So, only if you are at the right place and right time, can you grab a piece of this juicy natural lemonade. You could call them rare…

Like I said, it’s been spotted in the US too. If you are around Santa Monica, California, you could go to the Santa Monica Farmers market to buy some.

Liquid Telescopes

By Anupum Pant

Take a glossy black ceramic bowl and fill it with water. Now place it in the middle of a rotating wheel. What do you get?

Thanks to the complex play of centrifugal forces creating a gradient of forces as the function of radius, with earth’s gravity also doing its part, you get a parabolic shaped water surface. If this liquid you use is a liquid metal like mercury, or Gallium (at slightly higher temperatures), you’d have a parabolic mirror in a bowl.

Depending on the speed of your rotation, you can adjust the focal length of the mirror. That’s because the faster you rotate this wheel, the deeper mirror you have and the focal length is smaller. There, you have your own adjustable parabolic mirror.

A great thing about such mirrors is that they can focus parallel rays to a focal point. And this is what telescopes rely on. Large telescopes have large lenses, and it gets incredibly expensive to make these mirrors. So there are telescopes which use a liquid parabolic mirror like the one described above. However, their mirrors are huge.

This idea originated from Issac Newton, but he wasn’t successful in making a smoothly rotating platform. Quoting wikipedia…

The concept was further developed by Ernesto Capocci of the Naples Observatory (1850), but it was not until 1872 that Henry Skey of Dunedin, New Zealand constructed the first working laboratory liquid mirror telescope.

In fact, huge solid mirrors used in telescopes are also made using a similar method. That is to say, the melt is spun like this and is solidified.

via [Wikipedia]

The Deadly Grapefruit

By Anupum Pant

You won’t believe me if I said that a grapefruit can be lethal. It’s true and there’s absolute scientific proof that drinking a glass full of grapefruit with some drugs can cause some serious complications, and even sudden death.

The number of drugs that make a lethal combination with grapefruit was only 17 till a few years back, but the number is rapidly rising. In 2012 the number went up to 43.

Taking in these 43 drugs with a glass full of grapefruit juice can all have some serious side effects – ranging from stomach bleeds, altered heart beat, kidney damage and sudden death. Researchers say that taking a tablet of something with grapefruit juice can be as much as taking ten of them with water. So these drugs can easily reach toxic levels with this fruit’s juice. Also, it isn’t just grapefruit that has these effects. Even milk, orange juice, marmalade and lime can be lethal with drugs. However, not as much. So you definitely do not want to mix tablets with anything other than water.

Chemicals present in these fruits called furanocoumarins will wipe out an enzyme which breaks the drugs down. That means more of the drug goes through the digestive system without getting broken down. Much more than the body can handle.

You should know.

via [BBC]

The Lightbulb Conspiracy

By Anupum Pant

Rising technology brings with it a series of strange quirks and cartels, in this case. It’s important that we be aware of these things, not to save ourselves from them, but just for the sake of knowing how strange secrets remain secrets for decades. Wonder what all must be happening out there right now.

In 1924 a group of people from around the world met in Geneva to make a decision that would shake the whole world for years, without it even having a tiny idea about what had happened. These were representatives from the world’s top lightbulb making companies, Osram, Phillips, Compagnie des Lampes and General electric who had met to decide on the life of an electric bulb – To shorten the life of a lightbulb to such an extent that their profits would be optimised and their bulbs would still remain the best ones in the market. According to them 1000 hours would have been a perfect lifetime for the filament of their bulbs.

As you know lightbulbs don’t last for ever, their filament gets burned at some point. But fixing a lifetime for it isn’t very easy. Especially shortening the lives of already technologically advanced bulbs, to a certain time-limit was a massive engineering feat.

Their bulbs were doing 2,500 hours at that time. And that wasn’t very profitable for them. So this had to be done. Deciding on something too less would have made their bulbs inferior. And engineering of this shortening had to be done as seriously as the research that had been done to make it bigger, to shun competition in the past.

Now we know why there’s this bulb which has lasted for a century and it still keeps glowing, and at homes our bulbs get fused all the time.

via [IEEE]

The ShotSpotters of DC

By Anupum Pant

In most cities when gunshots are fired, the police firstly never hear them go off. Even if they do, they try and go everywhere to see where it came from. By the time they reach the actual spot where it was fired, it is too late. The perpetrator has left.

But the police department of DC uses a 1.8 million dollar system called the shotspotter which comprises of several microphones dotted all over the place which can detect gunfire. But that’s not all.

A gunfire almost always has three microphones which are closest to it. So these three microphones work in harmony, detect the difference in time it took the sound to reach them and triangulate the exact spot where the gun shot was fired. They can do it with an accuracy of 25 metres. That I think, is money well spent.

The shotspotter system has several other features built in. It, after facing initial problems, can now say for sure if it was a gunfire, and not a firecracker. Besides that it can also tell officers the direction towards which it was fired. And the kind of gun it was fired from and so on…

via [WashingtonPost]

Biohack – Seeing Infrared

By Anupum Pant

You can’t even imagine what it’d be like seeing infrared through your naked eyes. The spectrum of colours assigned to different wavelengths would now expand, and there’d be some new “colours” visible to you, which no one can describe or even imagine. That’s not me talking from an ivory tower. Of course I couldn’t imagine these new colours too. But a few scientists, who were not contended with the width of spectrum their eyes could detect, decided to widen it to be able to see infrared too.

Peyton Rowlands, Jeffrey A Tibbetts, Gabriel Licina, Ian Galvin, after having gone through enough literature and with a solid academic background in the relevant field of science, were clearly equipped enough. They were confident enough that they had developed a technique which could help humans to widen their spectrum, literally. And what did that technique involve?

A simple dietary plan, of course a prohibitively expensive one, in their experience could change how humans look at their surroundings.

To augment human sight to see into the near infrared range, they said that you’d have to go through a stringent Vitamin A1 restricted diet, supplemented with Vitamin A2 for a couple of months. And that would grant you this amazing superpower. But it came with a catch. You’d go blind if you made the smallest of mistakes.

As far as the science goes, it’s all real and in their own words, for the well informed ones, it goes like this…

We have developed a protocol to augment human sight to see into the near infrared range through human formation of porphyropsin, the protein complex which grants infrared vision to freshwater fish.

Retinal, or Vitamin A (A1), which is found bound to opsin proteins is a keystone of the visual pathway. The cone cells are granted sharp color vision by the complex photopsin. The rod cells which provide us with night vision and recognition of movement do so utilizing rhodopsin. Both of the complexes consist of a type of protein bound to retinal. Porphyropsin differs from this in that it doesn’t use retinal, but rather a derivation called 3,4-dehydroretinol, or Vitamin A2 (A2).

The human body is fully capable of metabolizing and using A2; unfortunately the proteins which allow for transport through cell membranes have nearly 4 times the affinity for A1 compared to A2. We theorize that this can be overcome through a stringent Vitamin A1 restricted diet, supplemented with Vitamin A2.

They did test this on themselves and it did work.

via [PopSci]

Check Valve With No Moving Parts

By Anupum Pant

A check valve is a no return valve. That means a fluid flowing through it in one direction flows well, but it doesn’t flow in the other direction. Check valves are parts of several household items. They are also used widely in many many places in the industry. Cranes, pumps, and even your heart couldn’t work without a check valve.

All check valves have a moving part called the obturator which closes the valve when there’s a flowing in the reverse direction. Or that is what most people think. But there’s a check valve that Tesla patented which had no moving parts.

Agreed, it is not the best of check valves and has also has turbulence issues which is not good for any hydraulic system. But it sure is an awesome idea.

A Woman Who Cannot See Faces

By Anupum Pant

The brain is a powerful piece of mushy mass and it works in mysterious ways. Not until very recently, thanks to a woman suffering from an unfortunate condition, we have figured a new way the human brain pays games.

A woman named Milena Channing could see like everybody else. But then, at the age of 29 she suffered from a stroke that damaged her visual cortex – the part of a person’s brain which is responsible for processing whatever information the eyes send it.

When she woke up in the hospital, everything had gone dark. Very slowly she began realizing that she could see ghostly figures in the air. Then when she heard the rain falling, she could actually see the rain, and nothing else. Then she noticed she could see the steam rising from a hot cup of coffee, and other things which moved, but nothing else.

Doctors figured that these things she was seeing were only hallucination. It was only later when she visited a group of neuroscientists in Canada, she found out what really was happening. They explained that only the part of her brain which was responsible for detecting motion was getting fed information from the eye and she was able to see just the motion – as if stationary things didn’t exist!

The sad part is that the part of her brain which is responsible to process slightly complex imagery like faces was damaged. So she can’t see faces. But she can see her daughter move around. Call it a curse, or a blessing.

via [NPR]

Nuclear Bomb Cigarette Lighter

By Anupum Pant

Ted Taylor was a celebrated theoretical physicist and a great nuclear bomb designer. It’s not very well known, but he was also the first person ever to light a cigarette using a nuclear bomb. How is that even possible you might think. But geniuses like Ted are quick to figure their own ways…

On June 1st 1952, a 15 kiloton nuclear bomb was to be tested in a northern Nevada town, Elko. At 3:50 in the evening, all the troops and researchers were tightly snuggled in trenches, waiting for the fission bomb to go off. Ted however had a plan to do his own little test.

He had a cigarette, and a parabolic concave mirror that he found a few days back and decided to bring along in the trench. Using a tiny wire, he suspended the cigarette and aimed the parabolic mirror towards the intense bright light that would come out of the fission reaction when the bomb would go off. It was all arranged in such a way that the bright spot would concentrate on the tip of that cigarette.

The bomb went off, sent a 37,000 feet tall mushroom cloud and a 41 mph wind in all directions. The intense heat from the fissile material, as calculated by Ted the last day, got focussed on the tip of that cigarette and lit it within a second or two.

Ted was now known as the man who lit a cigarette using a nuclear bomb. That little personal project of his brought him great reputation and he went on to do other great projects.

The cigarette, as soon as it was lit, got stubbed by Ted, and was preserved to be displayed on his table. It indeed was a pioneering work – a nuclear bomb powered cigarette lighter. However, while working on some other project, not paying much attention to what was going around, he smoked the reminder of his great feat.

via [Under the Cloud]