Category: Science and Tech

The Principles of Building Indestructible Sand Castles

Introduction

If you had a formal education that touched even a little bit of composite materials in the course, you will immediately be able to recall what these amazing materials can do. For others, Composite materials, as the name suggests, are materials that are composed of two or more different kinds of materials.

In a simple case think of your body, which is, in a broad sense, a combination of skin material and bone material. These materials are designed to take advantage of the contrasting properties of, say two different materials. For simplicity’s sake, skin is soft and bone is hard. The bone gives body a solid structure, while the skin and muscle tissues enables this hard skeleton to make fluid movements – flex or bend – and still be together.

Individually the materials that make up a composite material are not very capable. But when they come together, composite materials can blow your mind. To appreciate how this simple coming together of two humble materials can create a super material, and to appreciate the mind blowing properties it can have, let us first look at what most of us have heard of – “Carbon Fiber”. We will get into the more mind bending aspect of composites after that.

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP)

Now carbon fiber itself isn’t a composite material. As the name suggests, it is a fiber of carbon. The fiber is composed of strands of carbon each of which are much thinner than a single human hair. Hundreds of these come together to form a thicker fiber. This fiber can be woven to make sheets or the carbon fiber itself can directly be used in a composite material.

Continue reading The Principles of Building Indestructible Sand Castles

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Water Repellent Technology

Water repellent technology has advanced a lot since it was first introduced. Durable water repellent is a coating which is received by the products to make them water resistant and is made from nano structures. These nano structures are the result of the advancement in the modern chemicals and thus offer far more protection than any other thing. Here are some of the facts which makes explains how this new water repellent technology uses the concept of nano technology to help your car remain cleaner:

The Lotus Effect

The nano structures are byproducts of nanotechnology which are used to give protection to your car’s windows, windshields, rims and to the whole body. The main function of the hydrophobic coating is to act as water repellent agent making your car waterproof and increase the car’s auto wash cycles. The mechanism from which it was inspired is itself found in nature and therefore called as “Lotus effect”. This is named after lotus leaf which has self cleaning properties and insects such as butterflies and dragonflies also exhibit such properties.

Continue reading 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Water Repellent Technology

The Cocktail Party Effect

Introduction

The term cocktail party effect was coined by a British Cognitive scientist Colin Cherry, in the 1950s. He was interested in understanding how people listened, by conducting a few experiments. In his first experiment, he played two different overlapped messages recorded in the voice of the same person, through headphones. The participants were asked to listen carefully and try to write one of the messages on paper. If they put in enough concentration, the participants usually succeeded.

Now, if someone asks you to describe the cocktail party effect. The formal Cocktail Party effect definition is as follows:

Cocktail Party Effect Definition:

The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Continue reading The Cocktail Party Effect

Everything You Should Know About Machine Learning

Programming Computers: Then and Now

I find it fascinating that today you can define certain rules and provide enough historical data to a computer, reward it for reaching closer to the goal and punish it for doing bad, which will get it trained to do a specific task. Based on these rules and data, the machine can be programmed to learn to do tasks so well that we humans have no way of knowing what steps it is explicitly following to get the work done. It’s like the brain, you can’t slice it open and understand the inner workings.

The days when we used to define each step for the computer to take are now numbered. The role we played back then, of a god to the computers has been reduced to something like that of a dog trainer. The tables are turning from commanding machines to parenting them. Rather than creating code, we are turning into trainers. Computers are learning. It has been called machine learning, for quite a while now (defined in 1959 by by Arthur Samuel). Other names being artificial intelligence, deep simulation or cognitive computing. However now, it really has picked up and based on the amazing things it can help computers do now, it is clearly going to be the future of what the IT industry will transform into.

Continue reading Everything You Should Know About Machine Learning

Making 3D Plots in OriginLab OriginPro

When I first wanted to use OriginPro to make 3D plots for my Raman and photoluminescence data I struggled to find a solution for little problems for hours. It was not like I had no one to consult, but I wanted to figure it out myself because the same philosophy with learning things previously has helped me immensely in learning things with authority and developing my own characteristic style, by putting in an extra amount of time and hard work.

Check with your university, there’s a big chance that they offer you students a free copy of OriginPro. It is an amazing piece of software, easy to learn and can make plots beautiful enough to be published in Science or Nature.

However when I was toiling through things, I also wished someone who had gone through the same thing could have documented it somewhere. Not surprisingly, no one had. So I wanted to. Here it goes.

Continue reading Making 3D Plots in OriginLab OriginPro

A Layman’s Guide to Photonic Crystals

The first time I heard the word “Photonic Crystal” in a seminar, I was stumped. So I decided to read about it, understand and then write about it to make it explain better to me, and you of course. Even though it is a whole graduate level class to explain, it does not hurt to quickly look at how Photonic crystals work. I have not taken the relevant graduate class. However, after reading this amazing answer on Quora, and from a range of other literature out there, I was able to make some good sense out of it. My idea was that at least by doing a little reading you get to throw around a fancy word like “photonic crystal”. Moreover, if someone decides to test you on what it means, you even explain it to them. These kind of examinations, where it is incumbent upon you to perform well, happen all the time, everywhere. That’s why it is important to learn. And well, then there’s that whole argument of expanding your mind to exercise your creative muscle by reading and listening carefully to things and people that are out of what you do.

Featured image credit: Flickr, Steven & Courtney Johnson & Horwitz (Picture)

Continue reading A Layman’s Guide to Photonic Crystals

Nine Principles to Living 100+

By Anupum Pant

In his ted talk, Dan shares the story of Ellsworth Wareham, a 100 year old multi millionaire who lives in Loma Linda, California. The story goes…

One day Mr. Wareham wanted to get a fence made. And to get it done professionally, he began talks with a contractor who asked for a hefty price of $6000. This wasn’t agreeable to him. So he decided to go ahead and do the arduous task of carrying heavy wooden raw material and building it himself – all alone. The next day, he ended up in the ICU. The twist in the story comes when you find out that he wasn’t in the ICU as a patient, instead as the 100-year old heart surgeon. Dr. Ellsworth Wareham is one of the first persons to ever have performed open heart surgery and his experience still is invaluable.

Continue reading Nine Principles to Living 100+

The Illusion of Transparency

By Anupum Pant

Imagine learning something whilst a very experienced person speaks about a subject that he’s been working on for 35 years. Let’s say, we’re talking about a professor here. It’s pretty annoying to listen to them using mysterious abbreviations, jargon and what not. This is a very normal thing for humans to do. Because we are basically not smart. Our brains have their own ways to fail us.

I’m doing my graduate studies and it’s not very rare that I come across very learned professors who aren’t very good teachers. Being a good teacher, speaker or a textbook author isn’t the same as knowing stuff, and is possible to be one when you know one thing, and just one thing.

Continue reading The Illusion of Transparency

The Largest Ape that Ever Lived

By Anupum Pant

An ape as big as a polar bear, about 10 feet tall and weighing about 1200 pounds existed about 300,000 years from now. Thankfully, it no longer exists. The historical existence of this ape came to be known in 1935 when researchers found an unusually large molar being sold in a pharmacy in Hong Kong. This ape is called the Gigantopithecus and is believed to have lived in a region which is now India, China and Vietnam.

[Read more]

How massive is Jupiter?

By Anupum Pant

If you combined the masses of all the planets in the solar system, that would still weigh almost less than half of Jupiter’s mass. That’s heavy. So heavy, that effectively when it tries to revolve around the sun, it also makes the sun revolve around it a little. That is to say, both these massive bodies revolve around a common point, called a barycenter. The barycenter for the sun and the Jupiter lies just outside of the sun! Almost on the surface. At about 1.068 times the radius of the sun.

“Jupiter’s mass is 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined—this is so massive that its barycenter with the Sun lies above the Sun’s surface at 1.068 solar radii from the Sun’s center. Jupiter is much larger than Earth and considerably less dense: its volume is that of about 1,321 Earths, but it is only 318 times as massive.”

Wikipedia

The Boat Puzzle

By Anupum Pant

I remember solving this problem when I was in the twelfth grade. However, I no longer remember how I did it. Nor do I remember the answer. The boat puzzle goes like this.

What if you are in a boat that’s floating in water (a small body of water) and have a rock in your hand. You choose to drop the rock into the water. The rock, as they all do, sink to the bottom. Did you just make the level of water rise, or make it drop, or did not change it at all. How? Try to answer and watch this for the explanation…