Category: Science and Tech

Origami the Great

By Anupum Pant

There’s much more to origami than you must have thought. Origami has contributed so much to engineering that it would to tough for me to enumerate all of its practical applications here.

It has been used to determine the best way to flatten an airbag – origami played a part in developing the algorithm for it. Self assembling robots coming from researchers at MIT and harvard were inspired by origami too. Here’s how they work.

Now, in another fantastic engineering application where an object was too huge to fit into a rocket, mirrors of the James webb space telescope have been designed to fold into a much smaller package.

Besides that origami has greatly contributed to architecture, nano-devices and retinal implants.


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Solar Power For Humanity

By Anupum Pant

This is a solar collector developed by the engineers at IBM which you could call a concentrated solar collector. It consists of a huge mirror for concentrating sun onto a semiconductor chip and can convert it to electricity. Of course solar panels do the same, but this one can sustain the deathray and make an extremely high power density source. So much that if 2% of the sahara gets covered by this device, it could power the whole humanity (2% of sahara BTW is 188,000 km²).

Also, the device produces intense heat which can melt the semiconductor chip. So it has to be cooled. The water which is used to cool it takes away the heat and this energy is used to desalinate water. And that’s just the by-product of this awesome device.

A Material That Does not Burn Even When it is Red Hot

By Anupum Pant

HRSI tiles are an amazing feat of engineering. HRSI, or High-temperature Reusable Surface Insulation tiles are pieces of ceramic made from extremely pure form of silica and is about 94% air – which is also the reason it is very light, can weigh as less as 9 pounds per cubic foot. But that’s not what the most amazing part about this material.

These tiles dissipate heat extremely quickly. Also, they don’t expand or contract a lot on heating and cooling. So, even if a red hot tile is quenched in water, it doesn’t get damaged. The best part is you can pick these tiles up with your bare hands even after they are freshly out of a 2300 degree F furnace. Imagine picking up red hot ceramic tiles without burning your hand.

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Liquid Nitrogen on the Streets of NYC

By Anupum Pant

Liquid Nitrogen, also known as LN2 is an odourless, colourless, non-flammable nitrogen. It’s extremely cold with a boiling point of -196°C and has great dangers associated with it if it is not handled properly.

And yet, 2 huge pressurized canisters of Liquid nitrogen can be seen at one of the very important public places. In Manhattan, at the intersection of 6th avenue and the 50th street, in front of the well known radio city music hall, sit these 2 big canisters of Liquid Nitrogen. Probably thousands pass by these potentially dangerous cryogen containers everyday. Still, never has an accident occurred there.

Why these containers are there is a good question to ask. And they have been kept there for a very good reason. These canisters belong to a phone company and are used to keep the underground phone cables cool, dry and free from oxygen. Because these wires getting wet from the underground municipal system, isn’t very desirable to the phone company. The nitrogen continuously keeps circulating and finishes off in about three days. The canisters are then replaced.

Here’s a Google street view image I captured where these Liquid Nitrogen canisters can be seen on the sidewalk.

50th street

Tom Scott talks about them.

The Taxicab Number

By Anupum Pant

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a natural genius and had his own way with numbers. With no formal training whatsoever, and immense hard work, he  got his work noticed by the mathematical community. What Ramanujan could do with numbers, indeed was extraordinary. G.H. Hardy a famous English mathematician paid attention to Ramanujan’s letter, invited him to work with him and began a partnership with him. However, Ramanujan was a strict vegetarian and couldn’t sustain a healthy stretch there in England. He often fell sick and passed away at a very young age. In his short time during which he was here, he contributed a lot to the mathematical community.

Ramanujan is not a very well known personality. People from the mathematics community, Indians and others know about him, yet most people haven’t ever heard of him. Some people however still do remember him and have their own way of paying personal tributes to this born genius. One such man is a famous producer and writer, Dr. Ken Keeler – Also an Applied mathematics Ph.D from Harvard. In the popular animated show Futurama, he often brings pseudo-hidden references to certain numbers which are his clear ways to pay tribute to Ramanujan.

One number that often appears in the show is the number 1729. Here’s a story that illustrates Ramanujan’s genius, the importance of this number and the hidden tributes from the writer of Futurama –

G.H. Hardy once rode a taxi to visit Ramanujan at a hospital. Ramanujan was sick and upon the arrival of his advisor, he asked him the number of this cab on which he travelled. Hardy told him it was a rather uninteresting number, the number 1729. Ramaujan didn’t find it uninteresting and said:

No! It is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two [positive] cubes in two different ways.

That is to say, it can be written as (10)^3 + (9)^3 and also as (12)^3 + (1)^3 and also is the smallest number which can be written like that – as sum of 2 cubes in 2 different ways. It was incredible for Ramanujan to have suddenly conjured up such a mathematical visualization out of a seemingly uninteresting number. Since then the number 1729 has been known as the taxicab number and is denoted as  denoted Ta(n) or Taxicab(n) in mathematics.

There are also other taxicab numbers (smallest numbers of that sort) of higher orders which can be written as the cubes of 2 numbers in 3 ways, or even 4 ways…or more. Here are some of them. 1729 is a taxicab number of order 2. 87539319 is of order three. 6963472309248 is of the order four and so on…

taxicab numbers

I first found out about this from Author Simon Singh. He talks about 1729, Ramanujan and other taxicab numbers in the numberphile video below.

600 Miles Per Hour Tape

By Anupum Pant

The next time you are flying to your home town, you look out of the plane window only to find a flaw in the wing that has been repaired using a tape, do not panic. Patches of engine housing and other tiny external flaws are often corrected using a tape – also known as the speed tape.

The speed tape (more expensive than your normal scotch tape), or the 600 miles per hour tape, is a specially designed adhesive tape that can be used to correct minor aerodynamic (dents, dings etc.) flaws on the body of a plane. It of course is used only for a quick temporary correction, which is often replaced by permanent corrections. Airliners use it regularly. In fact it is also legal because FAA allows high speed tape as a temporary patch for punctures, scrapes, or surface damage.

The tape is made up of Aluminium and is resistant to water, solvents, and flames. It also reflect heat and expands with the body of the plane for a wide range of temperatures. It is applied to a clean surface and is so strong that it doesn’t come off till it is removed manually. However it should not be used as a fastener to stick loose parts. Neither should it be used in line with the engine inlet.

[Source]

Changing the Eye Colour

By Anupum Pant

Just like the colour of our skin is determined by the presence of melanin in it, the colour of your eye is also determined by the same thing. The presence of melanin makes your eyes black or brown coloured and the absence of it makes them blue. So, every one on the inside is white and has blue eyes.

Now, for most people the colour of their eye is not a problem. But for people who have heterochromia – a difference in colouration, usually of the iris but also of hair or skin – it’s a different story. Who’d want to have their eyes of different colours. They sure would like to get this difference corrected.

Strōma Medical, a company from California though of exactly that. In the year 2011 they announced a device that could help patients get their irregular eye colouration corrected. Changing brown eye colour to blue is really a breeze with their method. However, changing from green to blue is tougher. Theoretically, green can be changed to blue too. All of it by vaporizing pigments of your iris using a laser.

More about it here [Link]

[Video] Size of an Atom

By Anupum Pant

Atoms are very very tiny. So tiny that it is very hard for us to picture it in our minds. This video illustrates how small atoms really are. That’s not all. You’ll be surprised by how incredibly small the nucleus is. So small, that most of the atom is only empty space…

Everything is made up of atoms. And, considering the extremely tiny size of a nucleus, that means everything is made up of mostly empty space.

What Makes Rivers Curvy

By Anupum Pant

Rivers are never straight. What makes them curvy is something I never questioned in the first place.

What’s really fascinating is, how these curves form. They are almost always in pairs, alternating curves, unless there’s some geographical feature messing with the natural flow. From a hypothetical straight line river, these curves start forming when there’s even a slight aberration in the bank.

Besides that thicker a streams make bigger curves. And smaller tributaries meander in tighter turns. This is what makes rivers (with their smaller tributaries turning tighter and bigger ones in bigger curves) look like fractals on the surface of the earth.

Minute earth explains…

Stopping Bleeding Cuts in Seconds

By Anupum Pant

Be it in the battle field or somewhere else, severe bleeding can cause death in seconds. And until now we had nothing to stop bleeding instantly. At least not in 10 seconds flat. Here’s a gel that stops bleeding and merges into the extracellular matrix within a few seconds. It’s almost the end of 2014 and we’ll have it by the year 2015 starts. This is how science addresses practical problems like a boss…

Jack Barnes and Irukandji Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Irukandji Syndrome is a condition which is so painful that even when the patient suffering from it is given the maximum dose of morphine, will still be in absolute agony. The victim also can’t be made unconscious because to ensure survival doctors have to monitor the victim while they’re conscious. It can also cause cardiac arrest, but is rarely fatal. This is how Wikipedia puts it:

One unusual symptom associated with the syndrome is a feeling of “impending doom”. Patients have been reported as being so certain they are going to die, they beg their doctors to kill them to get it over with.

Mysteriously, until the year 1964, Australians would go into the sea and occasionally come back in extreme agony, not knowing what caused it. The mystery was then solved by Jack Barnes, a medical doctor and a former military commando. How he did it is more interesting than anything else.

In 1961, Jack Handyside Barnes, nine year-old son of Jack Barnes, developed Irukandji syndrome and was rushed into a local hospital. Thus started the detective work of Jack Barnes. Following is an extract of what he did.

He perused through the logs of ambulances and hospitals and found that 85% of such reports were coming from victims at 2 beaches – Palm and Ellis beaches.  By analysing wind directions and sea currents at different times of the year, he concluded that it was a jelly fish that was causing this. However, finding the jelly fish which caused the Irukandji syndrome was another task. He, by putting to use his detective skills finally was able to zero on a small jellyfish that was the size of a thumbnail (more detail on the detective work here).

The jellyfish later came to be known as Carukia barnesi, named after Jack Barnes himself. The story which tells us why it got his name is fascinating.

As a totally conclusive test that this particular jellyfish’s sting caused Irukandji syndrome, he decided to “perform an experiment that would challenge even John Hunter’s auto-inoculation with venereal disease for sheer bravado.”

So, he stung himself with it. Twelve minutes later, remarkable restlessness, constant movement, stamping about aimlessly winging their arms, twisting and writhing ensued. Then came abdominal and back pain, pain in the anterior chest wall and great difficulty in breathing, vomiting and what not. But he was finally able to conclude that it was this tiny thumbnail sized monster which caused it.

A New Glow Worm

By Anupum Pant

While walking across a dirt wall in the rainforest of Tambopata in Peru in 2011, a wildlife photographer Jeff Cremer noticed a few glowing creatures embedded in the wall. He clicked a few pictures and posted them on Reddit to ask the internet if anyone knew what these were.

Entomologists Aaron Pomerantz and his colleagues at the University of Florida went there to see these insects for themselves. They found that the insects were larvae with huge mandibles – which indicated they were predatory. Also, the larvae were bioluminiscent and could control when they wanted to glow.

So, now it can be said that a predatory ‘Glow Worm’ has been discovered in the Peruvian Rainforest.

via [perunature]

The Apocalypse of 1910

By Anupum Pant

Halley’s Comet is a short-period comet and is visible from Earth every 75–76 years.In fact it is the only short-period comet that can be viewed without any telescopes from the surface of earth.Since it comes close every 75-76 years, a human can either see it only once or twice in their life time (or zero times, for really un lucky people).It last appeared in 1986 and is set to come back in the year 2061. Before 1986, it was going to enter the inner solar system in the year 1910. That was when it created a great turmoil among mankind.

Back in 1910 when it was predicted that Haley’s comet would pass very close to the earth, it was a matter of concern for everyone who read this in the newspaper. Later, astronomers realized that the 25 million kilometre trail of the comet would be passed by the earth. That was apparently too dangerous.

Using spectroscopy, Yerkes Observatory reported that the comet’s trail contained a lethal gas called cyanogen. New York times and other popular newspapers created headlines that suggested, humans would have to deal with this deadly gas when earth passes through the trail of Haley’s comet. An apocalypse was, sort of, predicted. Scientists tried to quell this unfounded fear among the people, but like always, it wasn’t really effective.

People rushed to buy gas masks to protect themselves from this deadly gas. Even “comet pills” were sold in abundance.  As smithsonian puts it…

people in Georgia were preparing safe rooms and covering even keyholes with paper. (One man, the paper said, had “armed himself with a gallon of whiskey” and requested that friends lower him to the bottom of a dry well, 40 feet deep.)

comet pillsObviously, nothing of that sort happened. And it was just one of those notable apocalypse predictions that never happened. Though it was interesting that people were convinced enough to buy “comet pills” – I never knew these things even existed.

The Peanut Butter Test

By Anupum Pant

What better way to detect Alzheimer’s than to make the subjects smell a table-spoon of peanut butter. It works and could be the next-gen low-cost and non-invasive way to test for Alzheimer’s.

Researchers at University of Florida designed a test where a subject was asked to close their eyes and one of their nostrils at a time. Once that was done, a cup full of peanut butter was continually moved towards their open nostril. At the point where they said they could detect the odour, the distance of the cup from their nostril was measured. The same was done next for the other nostril.

They found that the people who were affected with Alzheimer’s had a significant asymmetry in their ability to smell from the left and right nostril. On an average the right nostril of an Alzheimer’s patient could detect the peanut butter from about 20 cm, while the left could do it from about 10 cm. That’s is an asymmetry they consider significant. Their experiment was based on this…

The ability to smell is associated with the first cranial nerve and is often one of the first things to be affected in cognitive decline.

In the future, this could be a great and cheap way to screen for Alzheimer’s. Here is how it is done.

via [UFL news]