The Mathematical Pool Table Pots Every Hit

By Anupum Pant

Everyone knows a circle. Consider a circle and think about its center for a minute. Now, imagine that the center of the circle actually has another center below it, overlapping. The interesting thing about a circular pool table would be that if you kept a ball in the center and hit it, it would come back to the center, no matter where you hit on the table’s edge. (Assuming perfect physics is happening on that table)

Now imagine these centers are pulled apart. You have an ellipse. A figure that’s more or less a circle with two centers separated by some distance. If a pool table was shaped that way and you hit a ball kept at one of the centers, the ball would bounce back from the edge, no matter where you hit, and go back to not the initial center, it would go back to the other center. Each of these center is called a focus of an ellipse. Don’t call them centers when your mathematician friend is around, you’ll put yourself in unnecessary danger.

Only if pool tables like these could exist, so thought the mathematician too and actually made it. Here’s the demonstration…

Jellyfish vs. Nuclear Powerplants

By Anupum Pant

Nuclear power plants need have a massive intake of water to cool down their scorching hot interiors like fuel rods and turbines. So, they are preferably built near the coast where water can be sucked up from the sea in big quantities.

The intake valves located at the coast create a suction that can make tiny and simple, yet menacing creatures like jellyfish and sea salps can clog the pipeline very easily. Especially when there’s a group of them hanging around the intake.

This has caused several nuclear power plants around the globe to shutdown several times and is often detected when there’s a serious difference in pressure at the intake pipelines.

It happened to a nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, California in the year 2012 [Link]

In Japan’s Reactor #3 of the Ooi nuclear powerplant, in 2012 [Link]

An Israeli nuclear power plant at the coast in 2011

Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in southern Sweden in the year 2013.

And probably many others around the world…

Coober Pedy – Underground Town

By Anupum Pant

850 kilometres south of Adelaide is a town called Coober Pedy which looks mostly like a desert from the outside. A birds eye view of it would look something like this.

outside That is because besides a few establishments on the surface like the police station, schools and hospitals, a majority of the town lives underground. Underground they have bars, homes, churches and what not. People walking outside are often cautioned to not walk without looking where they are walking because it is apparently very easy to fall into a pit there…

They live underground mostly because it is too hot on the surface. Temperatures easily reach 40 degrees centigrade and there’s almost no humidity – about 20%.

Here are some images from Amusing planet. Do visit them to see more…

 

Redesigning the Wheel

For 130 long years we’ve moved on wheels that have air filled inside. These are called pneumatic tires and they come with a lot of hassle just because they need to be filled with air. You have to keep checking them if they have enough air, they can get flat and cause a big headache, even a bad accident sometimes and what not. Some time back people thought they could change this. That was when the NPT or non-pneumatic tires came into picture.

At first they were seen on military hummer vehicles and now are slowly becoming mainstream. Michelin now offers a tire called tweel that can be used for slow moving vehicles like those used in agriculture. They need not make sharp and fast turns and don’t care much about speed. So Tweel works.

Hankook however started to dream of NPT tires for vehicles on the road. A concept of their tire from some time back looked like this.

Hankook has apparently found a way to make their manufacturing process scalable. That means there’ll be lesser steps involved in their manufacturing and that signals these tires could soon come to road.23

The Magnus Effect

By Anupum Pant

This new video by Veritasium has been hiding from almost no one who’s been online in the last few days. I saw it even trending on Facebook. And is clearly enlightening. What impresses me the most is that simple science is being demonstrated in a very interesting way and it is making a mark. Happy about that.

Magnus effect is when a ball or a cyllinder moving in a fluid like air deviates away from it’s predicted path because of the spin. You can see it happening all the time if you carefully see soccer balls, cricket balls and baseballs being thrown with a spin.

Now who’d think there’d be any applications to thsi effect. That is where the genius of Veritasium comes in. There are ships with big rotating cylinders on the top which use the flowing air to make them more energy efficient.

In fact, the flettner aircraft has no wings and it uses the magnus effect to fly around. It was interesting to see the toy fly with a cylindrical wing. Sadly, embedding seems to have been disabled…

[Applications of magnus effect]

The Wonders of Sound

By Anupum Pant

Sound can do wonders, especially ultrasound – which is basically nothing but a very high frequency sound. It’s also the basis for a popular technique to image growing fetuses inside pregnant women.

Back in the year 2011, the same ultrasound, with a slightly different pulse was used on a patient Gary Denham’s ankle when he came in with a broken ankle. A water-based gel was applied to the ultrasound transducer moved over the broken bone area. There’s no pain or any other undesirable feelings involved here.

But the most interesting part was that the ultrasound made the broken ankle bone heal much faster. The ankle which otherwise would have healed in about 6-12 months got healed completely in 4 months flat.

According to the Orthopedic surgeon Angus MacLean:

We use it for difficult fractures, the ones with problems with healing, and it’s a very simple, painless treatment that we can give.

“It’s a very interesting scientific development and there’s good evidence that it just vibrates the cells a little which then stimulates healing and regeneration in the bone.”

Link – [BBC]

Much before that development, in 2007, there were a few Engineers from the University of Washington who had designed a way to utilize a similar technique to seal lung punctures.

Traditionally, to heal lung punctures pressure was used to stop bleeding. And god forbid, if the puncture was big, a long incision had to be made, ribs separated to sew up the damaged area. Ultrasound proved to be a much better option because it was completely non-invasive after all.

link [Popsci]

And then it was found that ultrasound could be used to skip brain surgery. InSightec, an Israeli company created a tool that could focus ultrasound to a small point inside the brain where the problem was. No damage done to the skull.

The only other two methods, to remove say clots inside the brain, were drugs, or to physically open it up and retrieve the clot. The helmet-like InSightec’s device could sit on top of your head and focus a high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) inside to burst those clots instead.

Link [Technology review]

Another Ultrasound technique recently targeted towards brains again by Australian scientists reported that it could reverse the damage done to the brain because of the evil Alzheimer’s disease. By stimulating a particular kind of cell called microglia, they were able to break down the plaque in mice brains. They achieved retrieval of memory in their brains!

Link [Popsci]

Just a few days back, researchers at the University of Bristol figured that a low-intensity ultrasound could help in decreasing the healing time (increase the rate of healing) of wounds on the skin in diabetic and aged mice by a 30 percent.

Their findings were published in Journal of Investigative of Dermatology. They predict that among the old people, this technique could be used to help diabetic people’s skin heal faster. Also limb amputation that had to be done due to the presence of things like chronic ulcers could soon be a thing of the past.

Link [Popsci]

 

A New State of Matter

By Anupum Pant

There’s yet another state of matter that has gotten added to the list of the other unconventional states which are almost never mentioned in science classes at school. Some of these are plasmas of course, Bose–Einstein condensates, degenerate matter, Supersolids and Superfluids, and Quark-Gluon plasma…

This one is called Jahn-Teller metals. A research team led by Kosmas Prassides of Tokohu University in Japan discovered, or more like invented, this new state of matter which depending on the conditions can be an insulator, metal or superconductor…

The most interesting part about this discovery is that these substances have been seen to show superconductivity at much higher temperatures than what has been seen is substances before. If every thing goes as per plan, this discovery has the potential to offer us new materials which would conduct electricity with zero resistance and wouldn’t require out of the ordinary cooling to do so.

A simple picture about what exactly is this substance can be explained as follows.

It is a crystalline arrangement of these large molecules called the buckyballs – which are basically ball like shells made up of of 60 atoms of carbon arranged uniformly on the surface of a ball. Now, think of these individual balls getting arranged in an orderly fashion, to form a repeating lattice. And then introduce Rubidium in between them to change the distance between them.

Now, when pressure is applied to this system, it undergoes different amount of distortion at different pressures and hence the electronic properties change, depending on how much pressure is applied and how many Rubidium atoms were there in the first place.

more about it on [Vice]

 

Extreme Gear Reduction Toy

By Anupum Pant

The host of this channel called “OskarPuzzle” has created a toy, which is not exactly a toy but an engineering marvel. This amazing contraption is a gear reduction device which can achieve a whopping 1:11 million gearing ration in an extremely compact package.

To be exact the ratio achieved here is exactly 11373076:1 – slightly more than what is advertised. He calls it extreme gear reduction and achieves it using basically 3 stages:

The first stage has two sets of planetary gears with a reduction of 24 : 1 and 25 : 1, respectively.
Second one has two subtractions, 26×26-25×27=1 and 25×25-24×26=1, respectively.
And the third is also a subtraction, namely (25×26+1×25)-(24×27+1×26)=1.

Watch the video here where he explains what he has done…

The Horrors of Chlorine Trifluoride

By Anupum Pant

Chlorine Trifluoride has to be one of the nastiest substances known to man. It has a nasty, explosive reaction with almost every substance known to us. Glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth are just some of the things that would start burning vigorously if a drop of it were to drop on them.

One substance, probably one of the only known ones, however that doesn’t react with chlorine trifluoride is your average candle wax.

Also, this substance is very easy to produce but thanks to how hard it is to handle it, no one wants to do it. So, while its price should be about a dollar for 1 kg, it now costs 400 dollars for a 50 gram vial – I’m not sure what the vial is made of.


[more about it]

 

Sharks Living in a Volcano

By Anupum Pant

Science gets really interesting when you go posing one question and come out with a ton of other new questions. This kind of a chest of questions opened up when this team of NatGeo researchers decided to lower a camera into an active volcano which has a summit that’s 66 feet under water – Kavachi submarine volcano. What they found was nothing less than extraordinary.

The acidic sea, as they thought, would be interesting to see around here, they never expected to see a variety of sharks and other fish living in the crater of this active volcano which keeps bursting out every now and then.

No one had ever though there can be animals living inside active volcanoes. They apparently have no reason to take a risk like that because it would blow them to bits if it erupted, and that can happen any time. How do they know when to leave? and so many more questions…

Billion Year old Stromatolites

By Anupum Pant

Billions of years ago, yes, with a ‘B’, just about when life had started on earth, some very interesting kinds of fossils started forming which can be found even today.

Mats of algae which had mud trapped in them layered over one another and over time formed into a hard fossil which we see several Billion years later. Some of these fossils can be as old as 3.5 billion years. These rock like fossil structures give us a peek into the far past when the earliest organisms started forming.

In  1999 in Western Australia, near the town of Marble Bar, the oldest one of these was found and was about 3.46 billion years old..

incredible-complete-cambrian-stromatolite-head-found-near-roanoke-virginia-the-boxley-stromatolite-720x340As rare as these may sound, the fragments of stromatolites are in fact not that hard to find. But the intact heads like the on in this image are extremely rare.

[Read more]

Trekking on Mars

By Anupum Pant

Now just like Google let’s you move around with you having a bird-eyes view of the whole world, NASA has released an interactive map of the surface of Mars. This map lets you see the red-planet in 2D or 3D and you can zoom around to explore areas in a better detail.

The Darien Gap

By Anupum Pant

It’s the year 2015, with so much technology and advancement around us, it’s almost impossible for us to imagine that there is no real road connecting the northern and the southern part Americas.

The pan american highway spanning from Alaska in the north to the southern most part of Argentina, is the longest highway in the world and is about 48,000 km long. But somewhere in between this road is a gap which is next to impossible to traverse by land. This gap of 60 miles in reality is so long that only a few enterprising adventurers have been able to cross it in a land vehicle. Everyone else has to either take the sea-route or an international flight to the other side. The gap is called “The Darien gap.”

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The region spanning the southern part of Panama that borders Colombia and is exactly where this gap lies. Theoretically, the gap can and has been crossed by great adventurers after months of hard-work, hacking the dense parts of this dangerous tropical forest, but there still isn’t a normal road for others to do it. Besides the dense, untouched and dangerous rainforest, this area of about 10,000 square miles is dotted with guerilla rebel groups and several natives who don’t make it easy to cross.

[read more]

 

Plutonium Doesn’t Stick to Magnets

By Anupum Pant

We have known why Plutonium would not stick to a magnet for quite some time now. But since this is one of those metals which are hard to get and tough to deal with, the experimental proof had not existed till date. A research group from the Los Alamos National Laboratory has the answer.

To test the magnetic properties of Plutonium, basically to check how it existed in the ground state using a beam of neutrons helped them understand the configuration. They found that Plutonium had three super imposed ground states, all existing at the same time, where 4, 5 or 6 electrons could exist in the outermost valence shell of Plutonium.

Now since this configuration doesn’t allow it to have any unpaired spin electrons in the outermost orbit, Plutonium isn’t like the metals which are magnetic.

It blows my mind that even in the year 2015 when findings like these make great advances in the fundamental sciences. We still have so much to find out about even the most fundamental things…

[Paper]

Pee Shivers

By Anupum Pant

Post-micturition convulsion syndrome is a pretty normal things and almost every guy knows what I’m talking about when I say, that phrase means “pee shivers”.

For ladies, not that you MUST know, when men pee, or just finish peeing, an involuntary convulsion, or a shudder of some sort rushes through their bodies. Why this happens is not very clear to science yet. However there are 2 major hypotheses which explain this.

1. When you let out a lot of warm pee, you drop your body’s temperature by some amount which causes you to shudder, to react to the lower temperature.

2. The other one explains this with neurotransmitters – chemicals, basically. When you pee your body gets flushed with certain chemicals like dopamine. So, it is thought that these released chemicals make you shudder.

But, then this doesn’t happen to women. There might be some other explanation to it…

[More about it]