Category: Science and Tech

The Mysterious Lake

By Anupum Pant

Lac de Gafsa of “Mysterious lake” just like it is named, mysteriously appeared in the Tunisian town of Gafsa in 2014. In a place where there was only sand and was suffering from a major drought, this 2 acre lake, 10 meters deep, came as a surprise for locals and tourists as well. People started flocking it and taking dips in this young mysterious lake.

It’s said that seismic activity gave birth to this lake. Some said that the water in it was radioactive due to the phosphate mining that was going around that place. When it first appeared it was turquoise and then soon turned green due to uncontrolled algae growth.
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Some Inventions That Caught my Eye

By Anupum Pant

1. The tethered drone which follows you like a kite and keeps filming you. It uses the tension in the tether to determine where you are and where you want it to move to.

2. A 3D pen which can be used to write things in 3D. But those are many, you’d say. The twist with this one is that it comes with a soldering attachment, a burning attachment and a foam cutting attachment!

3. A smart halo which attaches to your bike permanently and connects to your smartphone. Finds you the best bike path for you. It points you at every turn and warns you for other things. Also tracks all of your workout. Also alerts you if someone tries to steal your bike. The phone remains in the pocket. Oh, and it also has a smart light!

4. A special 3D printer which can also engrave and do PCB milling. It can also scan things in 3D and recreate them for you.

5. The last one is a hi-tech backpack that has places for a technophile, from USB ports to speakers to charger or a place 3G to wifi device.

Making a Light Bulb was Never Easier

By Anupum Pant

Who’d have thought that making a real light bulb was so easy. Yes, the one with a filament that glows red hot due to the resistance. For this project the major things you’d need are, a power source (couple of D batteries), leads to connect them and a pencil lead as the filament. Go ahead and just put them together like this…

Curiosity Kills the Cat

By Anupum Pant

Booby traps play with your mind. They cause fear and uncertainty and can be hidden in anything. For these psychological traps to be the most effective, they are often hidden in the most familiar or the most ordinary things. Especially something that a soldier would decide to move for some random reason.

During the world war one and two the Germans probably demonstrated the most creative booby traps. The most interesting one was booby trapping a framed picture on the wall. The Germans would make the picture skewed and booby trapped it. Knowing that the gentlemen soldiers would come in and straighten the picture without even thinking that it could be a trap, they’d trigger the bomb.

Shark Skin Patterns in the Hospital

By Anupum Pant

Hospitals are a place where super bugs are forming. Since a lot of antibiotics are used there, more and more resistant forms of microorganisms start forming on surfaces at the hospitals. To combat this we look at the sea…

To deal with bacteria without even trying to kill them, they looked at a very slow moving shark called the Gallapagos shark. Scientists expected a lot of microorganisms on its body because it moved so slow. But when they looked carefully, they didn’t find any. That was because of the nano ridges they have on their skins which doesn’t let the microorganisms stay. Hence a surface free of microbes!

By mimicking this surface researchers have been able to make artificial surfaces for making thin films that can be put on surfaces at the hospitals. Just shapes repelling bacteria!

How do Shock Absorbers of a Car Work?

By Anupum Pant

A lot happens under your car when you are driving – the area which you never get to see doing its job. Chris put a video camera under the car to show a detailed review of what happens under your car. To add to that he also compares how old worn out and new suspensions are different and which clearly tells you why you should replace your shock absorbers when they go bad.

Trees Changing Colors in the Fall

By Anupum Pant

Little did I know that the yellow, orange or red coloring of tree leaves during the fall is actually something trees do to be more efficient. Instead of just shedding their green leaves during the winter, they try to prepare for the shedding by making the colors yellow, orange or red. This allows them to recycle all the valuable nutrients they had laboriously gathered and put in leaves earlier in the year to make the leaves!

So, leaves are disassembled and all the nutrients are carried from leaves to the branch to store them. But this process is tricky and these details are well illustrated in the video below.

Babies Learning

By Anupum Pant

When babies first start crawling, irrespective of how big a drop is, they’ll just crawl over the edge, not knowing they’d fall. That’s pretty natural. And after a few weeks of crawling they learn that crawling over the edge is not a good thing to do and automatically stop when they see a visual cliff. This works even if there is a visual cliff, but a pane of transparent glass over it. The baby, if it has learned not to crawl over the edge, wont crawl on to the pane of glass because it sees a dangerous cliff.

The interesting part is that the babies do not learn about the cliff at all. They learn about crawling. Doesn’t seem very different, does it? The difference is clear when a baby first starts walking. A newly walking baby would step over the cliff happily, and get hurt. Even when it had learned not to do so while crawling. But after a few weeks of walking they learn not to do it. Just like they learned while crawling.

Argon Ice

By Anupum Pant

Like you can heat water enough to make steam, you can cool a gas enough to make it into a solid. Although it’s pretty hard to do it for most gases, some gases like argon can be solidified fairly easily (using liquid nitrogen). Here’s how an Argon ice looks like and how it melts, or more appropriately how it sublimes because the liquid state is to small to be perceptible. At some angles you do see some liquid argon dropping and immediately turning into it’s native gaseous state.

The Large Egg of a Kiwi bird

By Anupum Pant

Kiwi is a strange creature. Although a bird, it’s a lot like a mammal. Some biologists even call it a honorary mammal. That all said, it does lay eggs like a normal bird. But the egg it lays is again strange. Strange because of its size.

The weight of a kiwi’s egg is usually about quarter of its own weight. If you compare that proportion to humans, it would mean giving birth to a fully grown 4 year old kid. Or a chicken that lays an egg that weighs half a kilogram!

Here’s how it would look if you could look through the skin of a Kiwi carrying an egg. Quite bizarre…

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The Sensing Limits of Your Finger

By Anupum Pant

How tiny features do you think can your fingers detect? Well, absolutely those tiny bumps on a smooth glass table. But do you think they can actually detect things that you can’t even see with your eyes?

Researchers of Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden decided to study this. In a paper they published in a reputed journal, they show how human fingers are capable enough to detect features in the nanoscale – features as small as 13 nanometers.

Capture

The Marvels of Samsung’s S Pen

By Anupum Pant

It’s amazing how far technology has come. The S pen you get with a Samsung note device has no battery in it, and yet it is powered because it can somehow communicate with the device. The communication is obvious because the pen has a button and if you press it, the phone knows.

So how does this work? What kind of sorcery is this.

The pen actually pulls energy wirelessly from the device itself with the help of electromagnetic waves. It is something like a device bremen-based designer dennis siegel built in the year 2012. He showed us how he could charge his batteries by harvesting the omnipresent electromagnetic energy. Although it used to take about 24 hours to charge a normal AA battery, now a similar tech is encapsulated in a tiny device, actually even thinner than a real pen!

Electromagnetic Harvester from Dennis Siegel on Vimeo.

The Poison Garden

By Anupum Pant

In the town of Alnwick, Northumberland, just next to the Alnwick castle is a beautiful garden which for a long time has had some really beautiful places for tourists to visit. However, in february 2005 this changed when the Duchess of Northumberland started a new place in the garden – the poison garden.
This is a place guarded by large iron gates and has some of the most poisonous and intoxicating plants. It has about a hundred deadly and hallucinogenic varieties of plants.

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“I wondered why so many gardens around the world focused on the healing power of plants rather than their ability to kill… I felt that most children I knew would be more interested in hearing how a plant killed, how long it would take you to die if you ate it and how gruesome and painful the death might be.”

-The Duchess of Northumberland

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Atoms Scream When They Die?

By Anupum Pant

At a state of the art fusion reactor at MIT, special machines heat up gasses at really high temperature, to about million degrees hotter than the sun’s surface. This makes them move around so fast that they are able to smash together and fuse. This right now doesn’t work as it should in theory. But when it does, it would be a great clean source of energy.

For now, what is interesting is a kind of noise atoms make just before they are about to fuse. The sound is like a shrieking baby. Here is what they sound like when they die…