Category: Science and Tech

Making Caesium at Home

By Anupum Pant

Caesium is a soft, silvery-gold coloured alkali metal with a melting point of 28 °C. Like the other alkali metals, it reacts vigorously with water – it explodes when it is put in water. Even in air, it catches fire – due to a spontaneous reaction with the oxygen and water vapour in the air. To store it, an atmosphere of noble gas surrounding the metal has to be used. In all, it is a very interesting metal. And like always, interesting things come at a price.

Caesium is expensive. A gram of it costs about as much as the same weight of gold. So, Thunderf00t – a youtuber – who wanted to be able to go about watching it explode in water, or burn in air all the time, decided to make Caesium at home – using a soap dispenser and a barbecue grill.

Since Caesium boils at a relatively low temperature (of about 700 °C), in theory it can be distilled out when two relatively cheap reactants – Caesium chloride and Lithium – react. Here’s how it can practically be done at home. Amazing!

B-Flat Note and Alligators

By Anupum Pant

Logically thinking, why on earth would an alligator – an ancient reptile – respond to music playing on a Tuba. Well, they do. And why they do it, is not totally clear. Specifically, they respond to a note called the B flat note (musicians would know).

Some time during the 1940s when the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York was at the american museum of natural history, the note B flat was played. Eerily, a seemingly innocuous vibration in the air, created by a musical instrument disturbed Oscar – a resident alligator in the museum. It seemed that after hearing the note Oscar started moving a lot. Since there were a bunch of scientists there, they got interested. And devised an experiment to recreate this reaction in the alligator. Here’s what they found [Link to the paper]

Several years later, at Gator land in Kissimmee, Mickelsen played a deep B flat on a Tuba to a male alligator named Toxic. The decades old experiment was recreated. For the first few tries the gators proved to be a tough audience and then it worked. After a few tries, with the B flat note the Tuba maestro was able to make the gators bellow vigorously. Here’s a video of what happened.

That’s not all, there’s something very universal about this particular note. Interestingly, there’s a lot to the note B-flat than it meets the eye. Listen to a musical Robert Krulwich’s report which is discussed in the following NPR talk. Blackholes hum the B-flat and GI tracts can be resonated using the same magical frequency.

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Chinese Restaurant Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a salt of Glutamic acid and is common among natural products like tomatoes, potatoes and mushrooms. MSG is also a popular flavour enhancer used to enhance the umami spectrum of a particular dish. In it’s artificial powder form MSG looks like a bunch of white crystals (powder). Also, like Gluten, everybody is scared of MSG.

The scare has been around for a long time and almost everybody knows this. It’s called “monosodium glutamate symptom complex” or the “Chinese restaurant syndrome”. This term, actually an elaborate public cry, comes from a single letter that was sent to the New England Journal of Medicine by a man named Robert Ho Man Kwok. He wrote:

I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food. The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations.

Even though it is popularly believed that MSG in food gives people weird symptoms, it has actually never been demonstrated under rigorously controlled conditions. All of it originated from the letter above! The US FDA has given MSG a generally recognized as safe designation.

There’s an interesting experiment which went like this. To a group of people that had adverse affects from MSG, researchers gave them two meals. One of the meals was Chinese food without MSG in it. And the other was an Italian meal with huge amounts of MSG in it. The “MSG symptoms” were reported by most of them after they had the chinese meal, and the italian meal was apparently all good, caused no symptoms.

Artificially made powder MSG can be absorbed by the GI tract very quickly (unlike glutamic acid-containing proteins in naturally occurring foods), it can create a spike in the blood plasma levels. Theoretically this could cause mild damage to some areas of the brain and kinds of chronic diseases could result from this neurotoxicity. Also, this.

But again, it has been given a green flag by the FDA. So the scare that is going around, has not been proved scientifically.

Carrot Addiction is Real

By Anupum Pant

Apparently, it’s been known for about a hundred years that excessive consumption of carrots can cause your skin to turn orange/yellow. I didn’t know that. Well, now I know.

Also, carrots don’t make your eyesight better. I’ve written about that in the past. But here’s another thing that’s really interesting about carrots. Carrots are addictive!

In the year 1992 Czech researchers Ludek Cerný and Karel Cerný  published a paper in the British Journal of Addiction (BJA) described 3 cases in their paper. All of these cases involved men and women who had developed a strong addiction towards carrots, an addiction which they claimed was stronger than an addiction towards cigarettes. The men and women described in the paper knew that the addiction was stronger than that of nicotine because all of them were smokers.

Ironically, one of these cases described a man who was eating 5 bunches of carrots each day. And he had started eating them to get rid off his addiction of tobacco.

In another paper by Dr. Robert Kaplan, in the year 1996, a similar case came around. It was about a 49-year-old woman who was a compulsive carrot eater and ate about 2-3 kg of carrots everyday.

According to these papers, the psychological dependence on carrots arises basically from the carotene contained in it. However it is believed that it is also a result of some other active ingredient contained in carrots.

The withdrawal symptom is so intense that the afflicted persons get hold of and consume carrots even in socially quite unacceptable situations.

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Kangaroo Care

By Anupum Pant

Often apocryphal stories get posted around and go viral on social media. And most times it is hard to discern the real from the fake. This story, of a newborn coming back to life from being clinically dead, seems like one of those posts which are made with a sole aim in mind – make it go viral on social media. But trust me, even if it seems unreal, it’s actually true.

Kate Ogg prematurely gave birth to twins, one of which was announced clinically dead after doctors couldn’t get him to breathe. Her son Jamie who was born after just 27 weeks of pregnancy languished within twenty minutes of birth. His twin sister however survived the premature birth.

After about five minutes after doctor had pronounced him dead, Jamie started displaying random, startled movements. According to doctors, it was normal a normal reflex and did not mean that Jamie was alive.

The mother was devastated and wanted to hold her son. She held him tight and caressed the body for about two hours. Miraculously, the baby’s movements started becoming more pronounced after the mother’s magical touch. And soon he opened his eyes!

It was later understood that the mother unknowingly did something called “kangaroo care” – named after kangaroos of course, in which the just born’s body generates heat just like a newborn kangaroo does when it’s held in its mother’s pouch.

The medical benefits of skin-to-skin contact have been long known among the scientific community, but it is not encouraged, and also not allowed at many hospitals in developed countries. It’s very common for mother’s in poorer countries to do this where incubators may not be available for premature babies.

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Seaborgium

By Anupum Pant

Until now I hadn’t even heard about an element called Seaborgium. That is because it is one of the most unstable elements which don’t usually exist naturally. Since it doesn’t last for too long, to study Seaborgium, it has to be artificially made (which itself is very difficult) and then studied in the laboratory very quickly before it goes away. Here’s is more about it, “periodic videos” explains.

[Video] Producing Electricity From Falling Droplets

By Anupum Pant

If you could set this up in your shower, you could probably generate about  5,000 to 10,000 volts of electricity (but not so much current). Based on Kelvin’s Thunderstorm, Derek from Veretasium explains how this can be done. It’s fairly easy and is a very innovative method to generate electricity.

Cosmic Ray Detector at Home

By Anupum Pant

Cosmic rays are a very interesting form of radiation. They are a stream of extremely high energy particles, travelling at almost the speed of light, originating from very high energy events in our universe. It is believed that supernovae are a major source of cosmic rays. However, a lot about these particles is still a mystery.

An incredible three million of these particles, each with energy as much as a fast baseball, go through you every day. And yet, we are never aware of something like that happening. The earth magnetic field protects us from the full brunt of these rays, still a significant number of them are able to pass.

Another interesting thing about them is that when they strike the earth’s atmosphere, they form particles called pions which decay into muons. Muons have a very short lifespan. They don’t exist for more than a few micro seconds. Which means they shouldn’t be able to travel more than a few hundred meters.

Yet millions of them, travel great distances, and go through each of our bodies everyday. That is because, since they travel at almost the speed of light, relativistic effects come into play. Time is slowed down for them. So, from our frame of reference they are able to exist for a far longer time and reach us.

They are far too small to be seen or noticed. But did you know, the foot prints of these particles raining through your body can actually be seen? In fact, they can be seen using a simple $30 spark chamber constructed at home. See the video below.

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Rivers That Meet But Do Not Mix

By Anupum Pant

Manaus is the capital city of the state of Amazonas in northern Brazil. The city is situated at about a 10 kilometre distance from the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers – two big tributaries of the Amazon river. While these are two names which you must haven’t probably heard of, the place where they meet is a very interesting place.

The first river, Rio Solimões is a water body full of sediments that wash down with it from the Andes mountains. Thanks to the sand, mud and silt that comes washing with it, the river looks muddy, the colour is light brown, nearly. The locals call it the white river.

On the other hand, we have the Negro river (or Rio Negro). It has significantly darker coloured water due to the presence of humic acid from incomplete breakdown of phenol-containing vegetation from sandy clearings. Although the locals call it the black river, it isn’t exactly black. The colour is very similar to a black tea concoction. However, the colour of Rio Negro is very different from Rio Solimões. Here’s how they look from up above.

encontro-das-aguas-em-manaus-9 solimoes and negro meeting

At the place where they meet, the rivers don’t mix. They leave a fairly clear boundary and flow side by side without mixing for about six kilometres. That happens because of the big difference in their flow speed, density and temperature.

While the river Solimões is a fast flowing (6 km per hour), high density (due to the sediments) and cooler river, the other river flows much slower (one third of the speed of Solimões river), is warmer and is less dense (because it is much cleaner). These differences cause the rivers to meet and not mix. Much later, about 6 kilometres later, these differences attain equilibrium and the rivers merge into the main Amazon river.

Ice Circles

By Anupum Pant

Perfect circles of ice have been seen spinning on top of water bodies for quite some time. They aren’t perfectly round most times. Recently, in the month of November last year, a huge 17 meter spinning ice disk was spotted on the river Sheyenne in North Dakota.

Several such ice disks have also been seen in the past in Canada, England and Sweden. Similar ice swirls were also seen in the Charles river, Boston. Some times they are huge, other times you see a number of tiny clusters of such ice swirls.

As always, even ice circles aren’t the work of aliens or government spies. It is completely a natural phenomena which occurs when slowly moving water moves past an obstacle creating a slow moving eddy. In due time, and due to very low temperatures, ice circles form small and keep growing as rings of frozen water on the surface of the water body keeps adding to their diameters. Here’s a video of one such big, and almost perfect, ice circle which was spotted in Rattray Marsh, Canada.

The IKEA Effect

By Anupum Pant

Believe it or not, the liking you have for something is not objectively based on just what the thing is. A great part of it comes from the amount of effort you put in it. The more effort you put in, the more you like something.

To test this out, scientists gave a group of people one sheet each, with instructions on it, teaching them how to fold an origami crane. The people followed instructions well, and did the best they could. Of course, since these people hardly had any experience with origami, their paper cranes didn’t come out too well.

The researchers then showed these cranes to a few independent evaluators and asked them how much they would pay for one of these poorly made origami crane. Evaluator obviously weren’t very interested in buying them and gave the origami cranes a low rating. However, the people who had made these cranes, on an average, rated their work much higher than what the evaluators had rated it. Also, the makers said they’d have paid nice money to buy that poorly made crane, which according to the makers was sufficiently good. [Link to the study]

Ikea is a company that sells furniture parts which buyers themselves have to assemble. Trust me, the assembly is not very easy (of course). Moreover, the instructions they supply with any piece of furniture says nothing in words. There are only illustrations of funny cartoon men putting the furniture together. You sure are able to put together the piece of furniture most times, but there are people I know who after having assembled a bed for hours get frustrated.

But then, in the end comes a strange kind of satisfaction, or a cognitive bias if you’d say, which makes the buyers value their furniture disproportionately more than what they’d have valued the same furniture assembled by someone else (or even a professional maybe).

This is called the IKEA effect.

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Estimating the Radius of Earth at the Beach

By Anupum Pant

For centuries we’ve known that the surface of earth is curved. That means even after the sun sets on land, you could see a second sunset by somehow quickly transporting to a higher place.

Take for example the Burj Khalifa, the tallest object humans have ever constructed. It is so tall that you could watch the sunset at the base of it, at some point in time, and the sun would set about two to three minutes later for someone living on the top floor of the building. So, in theory you could see the sunset once at the base and somehow quickly go up to see a second sunset, on the same day.

But that’s not how much you need to move away from the ground to see the second sunset. You could simply lie down on a beach, watch the sun set once, and could quickly stand up once the last bit goes down, to see it go down again. In fact, if you carefully calculate the time difference between these 2 sunsets using a stopwatch, and take the length of your body into account, you could actually calculate (estimate) the radius of the earth.

All you need is a stopwatch and a trip to the beach to calculate the radius of the earth. This page explains how it’s done.

As seen on a Vsauce video at 4:52 [video]

The Most Strangest Lava on Earth

By Anupum Pant

Common basaltic magmas are red hot. Their temperatures can range anywhere from  1000 to 1200 degrees centigrade. Whereas much cooler ones like Andesitic magma and the coolest silicate magma, Rhyolitic magma, range from 800 to 1000 degrees and  650 to 800 degrees respectively. Sampling these viscous and sticky lavas can be a tough job.

But when it comes to the most strangest lava you could find on earth, things get really strange. Presently, Tanzania’s Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only volcano that erupts the strange natrocarbonatite lava – a type of igneous rock rich in carbonates such as calcite and dolomite.

This magma erupts at about 500 degrees celsius, which is almost half the temperature of those other common basalt lavas, and is cool enough to be sampled using a simple spoon. Still hot, but nothing like even the coolest silicate magmas. Unlike the other common lavas, this one is mostly black, turns white within 24 hours of eruption and is red at night. And has a viscosity lesser than that of water.

What makes it weird is its chemical composition, which unlike those common red lavas found everywhere else, is made up of calcium, sodium and carbon dioxide.

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