Category: Science and Tech

Making Diamonds in the Microwave

By Anupum Pant

If you have the right equipment, making a diamond is a straightforward but an extremely time consuming process. Here’s how it works…

A microwave chamber is filled with a gas like methane – which has one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. Now, since diamonds are crystalline forms of carbon, the gas is then turned into a hot ball of plasma, breaking down the methane atom into carbon and hydrogen. The carbon atoms go and sit on top of a diamond seed, one atom at a time. If you let this happen for several weeks, you have your diamond ready to go.  Video

Or, you could do something like this person does. It’s quite close to the real diamond, however if tests are carried upon it, the difference can be told from the natural diamonds that are formed several hundred feet below the earth’s surface…

Telescope on the Moon

By Anupum Pant

When the Chinese unmanned lunar exploration mission Chang’e 3, landed its first lunar rover on the moon in 2013, not many people knew this. But it’s coming to light just now with a new report published that shows they’ve have had a UV telescope on the moon all along.

The telescope has recorded thousands of hours of observations. And has also been able to record an impressive UV image of a galaxy that is 21 million light years away – Pinwheel Galaxy.

The robotic telescope has worked for an impressive 2 years now and has captured some really good data which couldn’t have been possible from any telescope on the earth. That’s mostly because of two reasons.

1. Earth’s atmosphere is too thick to allow detectable UV light from distant celestial objects.

2. Moon spins 27 times slower than the earth so it is possible to make the telescope focus at a single object and collect light for a lot more time than it can do on earth.

Precision Metal Cutting by EDM

By Anupum Pant

Metal machining is a common term. Almost everyone knows about it. It’s simple and a cost efficient way to cut simple shapes out of metal. However, very close tolerances are hard to achieve unless the  machine is absolutely state of the art.

Wire EDM or wire electrical discharge machining is something that can cut metal extremely precisely into very complex shapes and achieve tolerances that are in the order of a few microns – about 100 times thinner than your. Its called a wire EDM because it uses a wire that is extremely thin, as thick as a human hair, to cut into a metal. The metal powder removed from the cutting process is so small , you could consider it smoke. This is how it works – LINK

In the right hands, this is what it can do…

Plastic to Oil

By Anupum Pant

Plastic is a huge problem. It’s filling up the landfills, causing problems to the animals and what not. But did you know, there’s a very simple method you could use to convert plastic to a general purpose oil – something you could burn for heat. The same oil can even further be distilled to separate gasoline, kerosene and diesel. All you need to do is to construct an apparatus like the person uses in the video below.

An apparatus that would heat the plastics in an oxygen free atmosphere to at least 400 degrees centigrade. This would cause the long polymer chains of plastics to breakdown due to a process called pyrolysis. The end product would be vapors of oil which can be cooled down and collected for general burning. A kilogram of plastic used would produce almost a liter of oil. If you’d rather burn the plastic, it would produce about 3 times as much carbon dioxide in weight. Considering it’d get burnt anyway if you make the oil, at least you’d now have a far more richer and cleaner source of heat.

iPhone Circling Ants

By Anupum Pant

Remember the Ant mill? Here’s some ants doing the same routine around an iphone. What makes them do this can be easily explained. And it isn’t very abnormal for ants to do this for no reason at all too…

Ants use the earth’s magnetic field as cues to orient themselves and find directions when they are travelling long distances. When a phone is rung, the radio waves it uses to communicate interferes with their sense of direction and makes them go round. The very specifics of this are not known. However, that is what it is…

HIV Infecting in Real-Time

By Anupum Pant

Scientists from Yale have been able to image HIV infecting a mice in real time by using florescent markers on the virus. A special technique called the two photon laser scanning microscopy  to image what was happening under the skin was used. The virus appears in green colour and helps them understand how it spreads.

[Read more] [Paper]

Mushroom Batteries get Better as they Age

By Anupum Pant

Researchers from UC Riverside are definitely onto something here when they say they have found that your humble Portobello mushrooms may have the answer to batteries that might actually get better with age. Yes, you heard it right. Better as you keep using them, and have electrodes made out of Mushrooms!

Using nanostructures from a mushroom and treating it with KOH and high temperature, the researchers made anodes from this natural highly porus structure which can hold a lot more number of lithium ions than your traditional synthetic graphite, thereby increasing capacity.

Moreover, since mushrooms are rich in potassium salts, as the batteries get used, more number of pores open up, thereby increasing the capacity more. Imagine having phones whose batteries improve charge times as they age!

The batteries made right now are no where close to what commercial batteries are, however this might be a great stepping stone for amazing batteries of the future.

[Paper]

Lifting Boats Efficiently

By Anupum Pant

The fallkirk wheel in Scotland is probably one of the engineering’s most ingenious designs. It is the world’s only rotating boat lift. It is a massive piece of equipment which harnesses the basic laws of physics to drastically reduce the energy input used to lift boats from one canal to another, 80 feet up. Tom Scott explains…

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

By Anupum Pant

As hard as it may sound and the very fact that there hasn’t been a good one commercially available yet, actually making a holographic display is not very hard if you have a few pieces of plastic (an old CD case) lying around. Yes, that is all you need. Here’s how you can do it at home…

When you are trying to prove someone wrong on the internet, you might not be arguing properly because of a simple fallacy which might be undercutting your own claims. It’s better understood through this parable – That is how it gets its name.

Let’s say a Texan randomly shoots some rounds on a wooden wall. Then he goes to the wall and finds a small area with maximum number of holes and draws a bulls-eye around it. This makes him look like a sharpshooter who shot a couple of shots right in the bulls-eye.

A Bat’s Tongue

By Anupum Pant

A bat’s tongue, as she says in the video, is a phenomenally strange work of nature. It’s just a long tongue, there’s no tube inside of it. And still, it manages to somehow put it inside a long jar full of honey and slurp in the honey water. How does it do it? Well, scientists do not seem to have understood it yet, but it looks like there is some sort of capillary action going on here, due to the special grooves on the tongue of this bat.

Nitrocellulose or Guncotton

By Anupum Pant

Nitrocellulose is an interesting material, an explosive of sorts, which burns very fast with little heat and leaves a very little residue. That’s the reason magicians use it in the flash paper. It can be made at home. Cody shows how…

For this, you’ll need a cotton tighty-whitey underwear…
And of course a few chemicals like potassium nitrate and sulphuric acid.

Mechanics of a Retractable Ball point pen

By Anupum Pant

The three main parts of a retractable ball point pen work in unison to produce 4 clicks for every cycle of retraction. Here’s a great explanation of how all of it works. The engineer guy breaks down the process into eight steps and reveals the interior workings of a click pen in the following video.

Fold and Cut Theorem

By Anupum Pant

Cutting a square off the center of a paper is easy. Jab a scissor into the paper and start cutting. But there’s an easier way. Fold it in half and you can do it in two turns, no jabbing required. Fold it two times and you need just two turns. Fold it thrice and you don’t need any turns at all. You then can just cut a straight line and you’ve got a square when you open it up. If you fold at the diagonal first, you won’t even have to do three folds to reach just one cut to get a square.

The most amazing thing about this is that there’s a theorem in mathematics about this which says, as long as a shape is made up of straight lines, there is always a way to fold it properly such that you get that shape with a single straight cut.

As long as you avoid curvy letters, you can do this for every letter in the English alphabet. Here’s an example…