The Most Dangerous Spider

By Anupum Pant

9 times out of the 10 times they attack you, they’ll inject an extremely toxic venom in your body which will make you literally cry for air – it will asphyxiate you within seconds. It can cause paralysis or even kill you. Another interesting thing about the venom is that it can cause an erection that lasts for hour.

This is the world’s most dangerous spider and it is called the Brazillian wandering spider, A.K.A the banana spider.

This spider is usually found in the south american tropical forests, especially living in banana bunches. During the day time it hides under rocks and inside trunks and starts roaming around on the ground, wandering, when it is dark. If it manages to invade your home, it is pretty big (about 15 cm) to spot, but it likes to hide in tiny dark spaces. Like the inside of your shoes.

Cryoconite

By Anupum Pant

There’s green house gases and then there’s this nasty substance called cryoconite which not many of us have heard about. I certainly heard about it for the first time in a documentary I was watching the other day called chasing ice.

The texture and colour of this substance intrigued me and I wanted to find out more about it.

Cryconite is a dark sooty substance formed due to many man-made and natural pollutants coming together. Dust from as far as Asia, various rock particles, soot and microbes contribute to the formation of this substance. It comes and sits on the ice at and around the poles. A dark patch on the pristine white ice.

As it is dark, it absorbs the heat of the sun much better than the white ice. As a result, it melts ice much faster. So, wherever you have these black marks in the ice, they melt and go down to form certain patterns in the ice which look like the following.

Besides the green house gases we are making, this evil sooty substance is another one of those things that is making the ice at the poles and around it melt much faster.

Global warming is real. Take my word for it, or the statements of thousands of acclaimed scientists around the world. Don’t let anyone else convince you otherwise.

The Biggest Garbage Dump on Earth

By Anupum Pant

Somewhere in the Pacific ocean lies a massive island of filth – That’s the largest garbage dump in the world. And it’s called the great pacific garbage patch.

The whole science of why this garbage dump got naturally created there can be attributed to the rotation of earth and certain winds which cause the ocean to turn in certain ways at certain places. These big rotational movements in the oceans around the world are called gyres.

Actually there are two of them in the pacific ocean. One is in between Japan and Hawaii. And the other is in between California and Hawaii. But the ocean turn in a certain way that connects these two massive dumps with a highway of filth.

The one between California and Hawaii is about the size of Texas! Captain Charles Moore found this great pacific garbage patch in the year 1997…

More about it from brain stuff.

Bikes Staying Up

By Anupum Pant

I had always thought that the only mechanism which kept bicycles upright is the gyroscopic effect from the spinning wheels. Turns out, there’s a lot more to bikes staying upright than it seems. Basically three separate mechanisms dictate this effect. One of which is the gyroscopic effect.

The other important thing that keeps a bike balanced is the fact that the rod joining the handle and the centre of the front wheel is at a slight angle. This makes the front tire touch at a point slightly behind the point that is vertically lowest… And then there are so many other things, the combination of precise ones even science hasn’t been able to figure out yet.

Laser Cooling

By Anupum Pant

The navy is using laser to burn stuff and destroy stuff. They have laser guns to fry enemies in almost every sci-fi movie. But did you know that a laser can be used to cool stuff to the temperatures much much lower than anything else can cool them to. Where refrigerators, liquid nitrogen or liquid helium do not work, laser cooling does. And this is how scientists have been able to achieve temperatures to within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero (–273.15°C or –459.67°F). That’s the closest to the lowest temperature we can get to, theoretically.

This is how it is done.

Ability to Smell the Asparagus Pee

By Anupum Pant

A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour – Benjamin Franklin

Asparagus transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume. – Marcel Proust

It’s a long known fact that your pee smells bad when you eat an asparagus. However not many must have realized this had they not known that this actually happens. That is because, after a lot of rigorous study it has been found that only about 22% of the world’s population can smell asparagus in the pee.

At first it was a debated fact that its either that not everyone’s body produces this bad smell in their pee because of the difference in the way their body digests asparagus. Later someone thought that maybe most people do produce this smell but only a few have the ability to smell it. The second hypothesis turned out to be true.

Most people actually digest asparagus in a way that it produces bad smelling urine. But only about 22% of the people have the ability to detect the smell.

Koko the Speaking Gorilla

By Anupum Pant

Koko is a female western lowland gorilla who is named after the day on which she was born – 4th of July 1972. Koko is short for Koko Hanabiko which literally means “fireworks child” in Japanese – a reference to the American independence day. She is known for having learned about 1000 different hand signs from a modified form of American Sign Language (ASL). She even has a website. [Koko.org]

Francine Patterson, her trainer has been teaching Koko with english since a very young age and now it is thought that Koko understands spoken english quite well (about 2000 english words).

Koko once made good friends with Robin Williams, they shared wonderful moments and laughed together.

Koko often gets visited by kittens and she loves them.

Koko knows how to have a fine breakfast, eating veggies with a spoon. And she likes them.

Koko has favourite movies, loves watching them and she responds to the sad moments.

Koko can even have conversations…

Rabbit’s Panoramic Vision

By Anupum Pant

Animals which hunt usually have eyes in the front. Both the eyes have the same field of view. However, since they are separated by some distance, there’s a parallax – information which their brain uses to calculate the three dimensional depth. This 3D vision is a boon for the animals who hunt because it helps them to exactly gauge the prey’s depth.

The good 3D vision also comes with its own cons. As both the eyes have the same field of view, the total amount of field they can cover is less. That means they can only see what’s happening in front of them. But can see it well in 3D. To see behind they might as well tilt their heads.

Rabbits on the other hand are themselves prey. The 3D vision wouldn’t have benefited them much. So, they have eyes on the 2 different sides of the head. And the eyes bulge out a lot. This means both the eyes see different things and a greater field of view is covered. However, the 3D stereoscopic vision is compromised. Thanks to the big field of view, they are easily able to spot predators coming down on them from the behind without even turning their heads.

Rabbits actually have a 360 degree vision, a panoramic view of the world. The only 3D vision rabbits have is 30 degrees of view in the front and 10 degrees behind them, because that is the region where the vision from both eyes overlaps.

via [Steroscopic vision]

How do Court Reporters Type Incredibly Fast?

By Anupum Pant

I’ve always heard about short-hand, but I never cared to look it up and how it actually works. I had assumed that it must be very similar to what we type and it was a way to make your tyiping faster. Turns out, I was wrong. It’s very different.

Whatever happens in the court goes on record. There’s no computer doing the speech to text there. It’s humans. These people are trained to type about 200 words per minute and can manage an accuracy of 98.5%. That’s pretty incredible. But how they do it is a different story.

stenoThey use a different keyboard which has just 22 keys. There’s no full body QWERTY keyboard and it looks something like this.

Instead of typing down the whole word, they listen to how it sounds. The context doesn’t even matter to them. They just record the sounds. A long word can be completed in just a few strokes with their technique.

via [todolivas]

Eating Ants

By Anupum Pant

You’d say it’s gross, but then someone would find eating chicken gross. In Australia, you have these green ants called the weaver ants which are green in colour and can be eaten. According the people who’ve tested the taste in the video below, they taste good, like candy. Also, these ants are high in protein, fatty acids and vitamin C. They taste slightly soud because of their Ascorbic acid content.

But you have to careful when you eat them because like any other ants these can bite you while you are trying to eat them.

Making Carbon Nanoparticles at Home

By Anupum Pant

Since you’d have no practical use for them at home, I can’t imagine why you’d want to make carbon nanoparticles at home, but it sure sounds interesting. Grinding a chunk of carbon isn’t the way to go because after a certain point the size of particles stop getting smaller. Buying the nanopowder is definitely expensive. So, what should you do?

Well, scientists from University of Illinois have figured out an incredibly simple way to produce them at home. All you’d need for this is a little honey and a microwave.

The result is very tiny particles, of about 8 nm in size each.

“If you have a microwave and honey or molasses, you can pretty much make these particles at home”

Says Dipanjan Pan

via [UOI]

The Robertson Screwdriver

By Anupum Pant

Flathead screwdrivers are probably the worst kind of screwdrivers, it’s very easy to hurt yourself with them and their design is flawed because they slip very easily. In fact, that is how the square shaped screws intended to be driven by a Robertson screwdriver were invented when Peter L Robertson cut his hand while using a flathead screwdriver.

While this one is arguably the best screwdriver design, it was not and still is not very popular across the world, besides Canada, where Robertson lived

Tapeworms are Gross

By Anupum Pant

As the host of this video suggests, eat before you watch. Tapeworms are gross, and harmful.

Tapeworms infect humans when they eat undercooked meat. They can grow as much as 3 to 10 meters inside you, live there for years and you might never realize that you actually are infected. Other times, the symptoms may be very mild. You might have a stomach ache, lose weight and so on. But a good indication is when you spot proglottids (a segment of a tapeworm) in your poop.

To not get these, you must ensure that the most inner parts of your meats reach at least 63 degrees Celsius (71 C for ground meat) when they are getting cooked.

Flatworms Cross Swords

By Anupum Pant

Flatworms are hermaphrodites. That is, each individual has both male and female reproductive organs. But to make new baby flatworms they still need to find a mate and once they do, it is an interesting thing that ensues.

The process of mating involves two flatworms fighting, over who’d be the father and who the mother. Or more specifically, the flatworms involve themselves in penis fencing. One tries to stab the other with its “double barrelled inseminater.”. While both the flatworms resist getting stabbed.

Cheap Sunglasses Are Dangerous

By Anupum Pant

In the Arizona sun it’s hard for you to walk east in the morning and west in the evening if you aren’t wearing sunglasses. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but sunglasses make life much easier. Add to that a hat and it’s bliss to walk in the sun (not so much). But hats are not the point of discussion today.

Sunglasses come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Of course you get cheap sunglasses that give you the swag. And then there are the expensive ones which might look the same but come with added features.

One such feature of the expensive glasses is UV protection. While cheap glasses rarely give you that. How bad that could be? At least they shield you from the intense light, right? Or so you would think.

Cheap glasses which do not offer are actually affect your eyes negatively. You are better off wearing no glasses at all. That’s because when they shield you from the intense light, due to their tint, they make your eyes relax and your pupils dilate. That allows more radiation inside. That means more UV goes in and damages your cells.

The Royal Institution explains…