Category: Science and Tech

Not All Living Things Die

By Anupum Pant

One thing is for sure, crocodiles do not die. But you hear about dead crocodiles all the time, right? There’s more to it than just saying they do not die. You must check that link out to see what I’m trying to say.

Hydra, a simple freshwater organism is another one of those interesting animals that do not die – or rather, are biologically immortal. Of course they’d die if you took them out of water.

Now, you can’t get a hydra, keep it in water and keep it observing for years. Then it’d beat the world’s longest continuously running experiment. But Daniel Martinez, after hearing that Hydras have this extraordinary power which makes them literally immortal, decided to test what he had heard. Of course he couldn’t keep watching them not die forever. So, he did it for about four years.

At first, four years doesn’t seem like a long enough to say that the animal doesn’t ever die. But if you look closely at a pattern all organisms follow, a hydra surviving for four years is a solid enough proof to say that it can last for ever.

The rule says – the sooner an animal has babies, the sooner it dies. A fly for instance, has babies after about 2 weeks, so it dies after about 2 months. Elephants on the other hand have babies after 13 years and they die when they turn years. This linear trend is something which all the animals follow.

So, since hydra has babies after a couple of days, it must not survive for more than a few weeks, according to this trend. But it does, and beats the curve by a massive margin. Four years is several times their expected lifespan. It’s be like an elephant living for 2,500 years.

How it does it explained by this. Hydra is a simple organism, with almost all of its cell doing very basic functions. These keep dividing endlessly and before they get very old, these cells fall off and are replaced by new cells. In four years, the organism changes all its cells about 60 times! That’s 60 new Hydras in four years.

Quantum Entanglement Explained

By Anupum Pant

Does quantum entanglement make faster-than-light communication possible?

We know the entangled particles must have undefined spins before we measure them because if they didn’t they would sometimes give the same spin when measured in a direction perpendicular to their well-defined spins (and they never do).

We know the entangled particles can’t have hidden information all along about which spin they will give in different directions because if they did we would measure different results at the two detectors >5/9ths of the time and we don’t – we only get different results 50% of the time.

We can’t use this behaviour to communicate faster than light because we can only pick the direction to measure in, we can’t force the spin to be up or down – and it will be random with 50/50 probability. When the two detectors pick the same direction to measure in the results at one detector will be random but the opposite random of those measured at the other detector, which is a bit spooky. – via Veritasium

Rainfall Spews Aerosols

By Anupum Pant

Remember the time I mentioned petrichor? No one at that time was totally sure about what caused this. The constituents which made it up certainly were known, but the mechanism was hidden.

There’s a good chance that mechanism is no longer a mystery. A team of MIT researchers, using hi-speed cameras seemed to have found something which has never been directly observed till date. It’s amazing that rain falls all the time, everywhere, and so many people have access to hi-speed cameras, yet only the ones who are observant enough have first seen it.

When a raindrop falls on a porous surface, very tiny bubbles get trapped under it. Pretty soon, like the bubble rising from the bottom of your coke, these rise up to the surface of the bubble and escape. These escaping tiny bubbles spew a fizz of aerosols into the air – which probably is constituted of several compounds and gives the rainfall its signature smell. This could be the mechanism, or not. It’s a hypothesis for now.

What amazes me the most that no one thought of looking through a hi speed camera to see what causes petrichor. A simple thing to be discovered, yet a major discovery. I can’t think over enough, wondering how many simple things around us are happening every minute and are still waiting to get discovered.

via [MIT News]

Swimming with Jellyfish

By Anupum Pant

About 12,000 years from now, when there was a rise in the sea levels after the ice age ended, the water from seas filled up several places on the land, and with that water came in several marine organisms too. Lakes were formed with marine animals in them.

Out of these several lakes formed this way, there was one which got its own stock of jellyfish. This lake is now in a rock island off the coast of Koror in Palau. Today, after centuries of isolation from predators and having great amounts of algae to consume, the lake almost overflows with jellyfish.

These golden jellyfish, unlike their marine counterparts have stingers that are too small to cause any harm. So it is safe to swim with them.

Millions of them are there. These teacup sized jellyfish in this saltwater lake keep moving to and fro in the lake, so as to follow the sun. In the morning they move to the east side where there’s more sunlight, while in the evening they move towards the west – serves 3 purposes.

  1. Enough food to eat where there’s sunlight.
  2. Predators are less likely to be present in the bright areas.
  3. And the fish enjoy basking in the sun.

Nice Guys

By Anupum Pant

Last year, an article published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin showed how men usually get attracted to women who seem nice. However,that doesn’t seem to be the case with women. So, nice guys seem to finish last.

But it’s not about attraction all the time. ASAP science explains how nice guys certainly finish first…

[Video] Sticky Feet

By Anupum Pant

An ant and other such insects have an incredible ability to stay  stuck to a flat surface, even when the surface is really smooth. Also, the weight these super sticky feet can support while sticking upside down on a smooth surface like glass is approximately 100 times their own weight. So, that is like you holding a truck while you are sticking upside down on a smooth glass surface – wonder how much glue that would take!

The best part is that even if their feet are so sticky, they still are able to disconnect them from the surface, lift them up voluntarily when they want to and move. Here’s a nice video that explains how these amazing engineering feat (yes, a pun) works.

Microwave Room Heater

By Anupum Pant

If you think about it, wouldn’t it be a great idea to make a home heater that would make humans feel hot without wasting energy to heat the air that surrounds them. Just like a microwave oven cooks meat without heating the surrounding air, this should in theory work to warm humans with smaller intensities, so they don’t get cooked. I know people are just too paranoid about microwaves, but trust me they are not that bad. But how safe can a microwave home heater possibly be?

This is what a Harvard physicist suggested in the 80s. At that time, according to Professor Robert V. Pound, microwaves could certainly be used to just make the humans feel the warmth, without heating the whole air in the house. This according to him, would cut electricity costs greatly and might serve as a great tool to deal with the world energy crisis. This article of his got published in the journal of science.

He said:

If a microwave oven is installed in a house, the waves would heat the people and not the air. So with the surrounding air remaining at low temperatures, the humans would still feel toasty.

A Harvard physicist said that. How wrong could an accomplished person like that be? Well, doctors urged you to smoke cigarettes in the old times. So, there is a lot he could have gotten wrong at that time. Also, since I haven’t come across any homes installed with microwave heating, even if they purportedly could offer a much cheaper alternative, there must definitely be something wrong with the professor’s idea.

This is what I think. Firstly, if anything like that was even possible, the whole house would have to be covered with metal foils to keep the waves in. Also, every thing in the house would have to be microwave safe. With electronics and silver ware of all sorts, that possibly doesn’t seem like a very good idea any more.

That is not even what could be the most wrong thing about it. The microwaves wouldn’t heat the whole human body uniformly. With the body containing different amounts of water, they’d certainly get heated differently, with different rates. In my view, if there’d be something like that, due to the high water content, your eyes would pop first.

And then all your tech, made of metal etc. would have to be microwave safe. No, that’s not happening.

via [Freelance star]

Burying Heads in Sand

By Anupum Pant

So you’re in a fix and you if try hiding from it to remain in a state of denial, what would others, in a popular cultural metaphor, say about that? They’d say you’ve buried your head in the sand. Where do you think this phrase came from?

This phrase has been used since ancient times and comes from an observation made by some person whose name seems to have been lost in the sands of time. It was probably Pliny The Elder – a roman scholar – who first came up with the idea.

Anyway, from what we’ve been told for decades now, it originates from the observed behaviour of an ostrich – a bird though to be so stupid, with a brain so small, that it buries its head in sand and feels safe from the danger, or approaching predators. As if it would help in any way. You get the drift.

It’s true that ostriches have very tiny brains. In fact the volume of their brain is smaller than their eyeballs. Does that really mean the bird is stupid enough to think that immersing its head in sand would make them invisible to predators? No.

Actually, cognition in organisms isn’t directly related to the size of their brains. Smaller brain doesn’t imply an animal is plain stupid. Also, ostriches have never been seen dipping their heads in the sand to avoid being seen by predators. In a study, lasting over a period of 80 years, two hundred thousand ostriches were observed. Not once was an ostrich seen doing that. So why did the observant Roman scholar get it wrong?

That is probably because he must have seen the ostrich lie flat, like they often do when they aren’t able to escape some predator by outrunning them at 70 kilometres per hour. They lie flat, with their heads down and almost merge with their surroundings. They certainly don’t put their heads into the sand. The predators have a good chance of missing that.

Also, ostriches often keep their heads down, near the ground (not inside) while picking stones off it. Keeping their heads down helps them to retain these stones in their gizzards, which then helps them to “chew” the food.

So the next time someone tells you that you’ve buried your head like an ostrich, please inform them that it is just a misconception that has lasted for centuries, and has ultimately turned into an intelligent sounding metaphor to describe human behaviour. It certainly isn’t intelligent. And is very far from the actual scientific truth.

Human Pollinators

By Anupum Pant

A successful fruit production process in a plant starts when the pollen moves to the stigma. When this happens in a single plant, it is called self pollination and if the pollen from one plant’s anther goes to stigma of another plant, it is called cross pollination. Bees and other such insects are responsible for this normally. But in the past there have been human pollinators too.

Apples start as flowers first. And only when bees carry the pollens from one tree to another and pollinate the stigma of the other plant, these flowers get a chance to form into apples. This happens when worker bees sit on flowers and collect nectar. The pollen gets stuck to their feet and moves to the stigma of the other plant when they sit on those flowers later on. Without bees, there wouldn’t be any apples.

In the 90s near the Chengdu city in China, these bees regularly used to show up every season to pollinate the apple blossoms. One unfortunate day, they didn’t come. The reason for their absence was not known. Some said, it were the pesticides, others said it were the greedy honey collectors who drove away all the bees. Anyway, there were no bees to make apples now.

So, human workers were hired to cross pollinate the apple tree blossoms. With the help of chopsticks, brushes and other soft material, these workers worked hard and transferred pollen to the blossoms of each tree. What do you think was the result of this.

The apples grew. The most interesting thing is that this time the produce was 30-40% better than what farmers used to get when bees pollinated these flowers. Clearly, human pollinators were much better (economically) than bees. That was mostly because, humans diligently pollinated every single flower. But bees would accidentally  pollinate. The ones which did not end up getting pollinated would wither and fall eventually. Also, human workers would work in all kinds of weather conditions. While bees weren’t very keen on working while it was raining.

The other way this was economically better for the region was – Human workers would get paid, they’d then go back to the market and spend this money. That in turn created more jobs for people who supplied goods and services to these payers. Economically beneficial.

Biologists and conservationists of course didn’t think that getting rid of critters and insects for economic benefit wasn’t a very good idea.

Winning and Losing

By Anupum Pant

Think about it. A stranger comes up to you while you are queued up for the morning coffee and says this to you – “I’ll toss a coin, you call. If you win, I pay you 10 bucks. If you lose, you pay me 10.”

Would you take the bet? Most wouldn’t. There’s a lot going on here. Firstly, the strange man might have a trick up his sleeve that would tilt the odds in his favour, you’d think. But here’s the deal, even if you are 100% sure that the man is being honest with you and offering you a completely fair coin toss, most still wouldn’t take the bet. Why not? After all it seems like a totally fair deal.

In a social experiment, it has been seen that even if the man offers you a 20 to your 10, most still would not take the bet. Yes, they do have a chance to lose 10, but they might even take home double hat amount. There’s an equal chance, but the gain is clearly in your favour. Mathematically you are getting a great deal. Why wouldn’t people still take it?

That is probably because humans see losing differently as winning. That means, losing 10 would affect you more that gaining ten would. Losing 10 would make you more sad than the amount of happiness you’d experience when you’d ten would make 10. So much that even losing 10 moves you more (downwards) than gaining ten would move you (upwards). So, most people won’t take this bet because throughout the years they’ve been learning (subconsciously) how losing is more painful.

In my view, it has something to do with your attachment to what you own too – materialistic attachment as they’d say. This of course was about money, but as Derek Muller states in the following video, this simple way of how we look at winning and losing affect us is much deeper manner. Or simply, money is just a metaphor here. This comes into play when you make other life decisions also. You’d avoid risks where the difference between the magnitude of gain or loss from the result isn’t much.

10 such bets being offered consecutively is a much favourable choice mathematically, and people mostly would take it, if they had that sort of money in their pockets. When asked to explain why, they base it on intuition. Our minds sure work in a very complex manner.

Wolves and Their Impact on the Physical Geography

By Anupum Pant

Presence, or introduction of wolf population in an ecosystem can actually affect how the rivers flow and the other physical geography of the place. This is probably the most interesting thing I found in recent times. If not more, it is as interesting as the affect wind has on a tree’s life.

The most convincing example of the impact of wolves on the physical geography of an ecosystem is probably what was seen fairly recently in the Yellowstone National Park. It has to be listed among one of the most exciting scientific understandings in the last century. It’s called the Trophic cascade – An ecological process that starts at the top of a food chain and its affect is seen at the bottom of the food chain.

The last wolves of Yellowstone National Park were killed around the 1920s and since then the population of deer had been causing a severe vegetation scarcity in the ecology of the park. A solution was suggested by biologists that wolves be brought back to bring the balance back. Wolves are seen as killers. It isn’t very easy to superficially investigate their role in how deeply they can affect the ecology, even the physical geography of a place.

So, in the year 1995 wolves were brought back to the national park. Like they would in the wild, they started with killing deer for food. Of course it controlled the population of deer, which humans had not been able to do in spite of many efforts, but the cascading affect this introduction had was even more dramatic. They changed how deer population behaved.

Now, to avoid confrontation with the wolves, deer population started avoiding certain areas in the park. The places being avoided now started regenerating. On an average, trees started growing taller. Barren lands in the park started growing into thick forests within a few years. This attracted the birds. And then the beavers came in. And we already have seen in the past how beavers can affect the flow of rivers…

As a result, all kinds of animals bears, mice, eagles etc. started appearing. Ultimately, the introduction of wolves actually changed how rivers flowed there. From more vegetation, erosion became less, rivers started flowing in more fixed straight narrow channels and more pools – perfect for the wildlife.

The Self-Stirring Pot

By Anupum Pant

Unless you stand there and keep stirring your boiling noodles, or pasta, they might stick to the bottom of your pot. Also, lumps of cornstarch are a mess the other times when you are trying to thicken gravy without putting much effort into stirring the sauce. All of that extra effort of standing there and stirring stuff can be eliminated if you incorporate this pot designed by a Japanese dentist, Hideki Watanabe. He calls it Kuru-Kuru Nabe (Round-Round pot).

The dentist designed a pot that can stir up the water inside it without you having to interfere. The interesting part here is that the pot doesn’t have any moving parts, neither it uses electricity to keep your water spinning. It’s the special shape of it that accomplishes this. The abnormal grooves this pot has on its walls keep the water spinning when it is hot.

My theory on what makes it work is – Leidenfrost effect happening at the walls. Like we’ve seen in the past that hot water can climb slopes using the same effect, it probably does the same here. Anyway, here’s what the pot looks like when it’s cooking.

via [InventorSpot]

A Bleeding rock?

By Anupum Pant

Pyura-chilensis-550x416This might look like an alien rock that bleeds when it is cut. In reality, it is a Ascidiacea class of non-moving marine invertebrate which attaches itself to a hard surface made of tunicin. Also, in the rocky coats of Peru and Chile where it is found, they blend with surrounding rocks. But these are collected for commercial reasons.You may wonder, for what? These are eaten, either raw or cooked, preferably with rice. And they say it tastes really good.

Pyura chilensis is the name of this weird marine creature. Unlike what is apparent from first looks, their blood is actually a clear liquid. The more interesting thing about their blood is that it has been found to contain relatively high concentrations of a somewhat rare element called vanadium (an element used to make really strong steels). The Vanadium content is about 10 million times higher than the water that surrounds them. Not much is known about how they are able to concentrate vanadium to such high concentrations.

It is born a male and turns into a female as it matures. As it is a non-mobile creature, this makes sense because it can make both sperm and eggs in a single creature and make them meet in a fertile cloud. The young ones that emerge seem like tadpoles. They go and sit on nearby rocks and grow.

The rock like outer shell has two openings. One for inhaling and the other for exhaling. The act of inhaling involves taking in water, which may also contain forms of algae. The algae gets filtered inside and stays there. While the remaining water is let out from the other opening. Algae is what powers this organism.

via [Scientific American]