Airbags Do Not Have Air

By Anupum Pant

One important thing about the airbag is that it has to get deployed within milliseconds to save lives during an accident. A pellet of a very poisonous compound called Sodium Azide, or NaN3, does the trick.

The airbag system consists of a deceleration detecting device. Mostly this is a cylindrical tube with a metal ball inside whose movement is dampened by a spring or magnets. This prevents the ball from sliding the other side when the car goes on potholes etc. So, when the car hits something and stops suddenly, the ball goes to the other side of the cyllinder and completes the circuit.

Sodium azide decomposes at 300 degrees centigrade. The completed circuit supplies enough heat for sodium azide to burn/decompose and form the Nitrogen gas at a very rapid rate. The expanding Nitrogen gas blows out at about 200 miles per hour and inflates the bag within miliseconds.

The reaction also produces sodium which could cause a fire. So, we have two other compounds KNO3 and SiO2 with the sodium azide pellet. These are only to remove the dangerous sodium from inside the airbag.

Now, since the bag come out so fast and inflates into a rock hard balloon, it isn’t exactly soft enough for a face to hit it. So, after it is inflated, the bag is programmed to deflate a little. And it has to be quick enough to expand before the face even reaches it. Or the bag surface travelling towards you at a speed of ~200 miles per hour isn’t a good thing to hit when you have an other accident to deal with. That’s the reason sodium azide is used.

And that’s the reason an airbag does not have what its name says it has – air. It has Nitrogen. Which of course is almost air, because air is about 70% nitrogen. But it still isn’t the same thing.

The Kissing Bugs

By Anupum Pant

A fatal disease called Chagas disease is transmitted to humans from an insect bite. Presently it affects about 15 million people and causes 50,000 deaths every year.

Pgeniculatus2The disease is carried around by the triatominae family of bugs, or also known as kissing bugs (kissing because they like to bite the face of humans, as it is the part of the body that is usually uncovered during the night). The insect looks like this and usually dwells in old homes or in the wild.

At home, it can be spotted with feces marks on the walls or by spotting the insect itself. If you live in the southern part of USA or somewhere between there and Argentina, you could be close to these insects.

Acute-phase symptoms of Chagas disease may be swelling and/orredness at the skin infection site (termed chagoma), rash, swollen lymph nodes, fever, head and body aches, fatigue, nausea, vomitingand/or diarrhea, liver and/or spleen enlargement, and the Romaña sign.

The Orphan Planets of Space

By Anupum Pant

Call them the orphan planets, isolated orbs or lone planets, scientists estimate that there are so many of these undetected moving around in space that they may be double in number than the number of stars.

Planets of the size of Jupiter, as astronomers from a Japan-New Zealand based survey note, have been roaming around without any parent star to revolve around. They first observed about 10s of them when they were looking towards the centre of the milky way galaxy. These new planets they found are about 10,000 to 20,000 light years away from earth, and there are probably many more around.

via [JPL news]

Largest Molecule Synthesised

By Anupum Pant

Previously polystyrene was considered to be the largest single molecule that was synthesized artificially. A single molecule of it could weigh as much as 40 million hydrogen masses.

It was hard to make bigger molecules in the lab because they tend to break as you reach a certain limit.

dn19931-1_800

However, in 2011, Dieter Schlüter and his collegues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich synthesized an artificial molecule that weighed as much as 200 million hydrogen atoms. It’s called the PG5. The molecule was so huge that it spanned 10 nanometres and had so many bonds that it could hide other substances (like drugs) inside of it.

It had to be done by taking a carbon backbone and adding other molecules and atoms to it. It took about 170,000 such new bonds to create this massive tree like molecule.

via [Scientific American]

Robert Condit’s Spacecraft

By Anupum Pant

In the year 1928, a resident of Baltimore, Robert Condit made plans to leave earth by making a blueprint for a spacecraft that would fit exactly one person, food tablets, water, and was planned to fly all the way to venus. Oh, for safety purposes it had a first-aid kit and a couple of silk parachutes too.

With the help of brothers Harry B. and Sterling Uhler, the 24 foot spacecraft was constructed. It looked like a over sized bullet and had 8 steel pipes (read engines) attached all around it. The inside of pipes each had a spark plug to burn sprayed gasoline and create a lift. It took them 8 months to complete Condit’s design.

50 gallons of gasoline was filled in it and it was aimed carefully towards venus. The target speed was 25000 miles per hour. That, as Condit estimated, would allow him to reach 40 miles above the earth and then it would be an easy journey ahead.

Unfortunately, the spacecraft didn’t leave ground, Robert left for Florida and was never seen again.

via [io9]

Catching Russian Spies With Science

By Anupum Pant

Consider this. You have the following line and you are asked to read out loud the colour of the word. It’s a rather easy exercise.

1

However, if the letters read of one colour and appear in some other colour, like the word “blue” appears in red colour, as shown below, it takes a slightly greater amount of time to process it inside and churn our the colour.

2

It can also be said with firm belief that you’ll take that extra time in the second exercise as compared to the first one only if you speak English. If you are a Russian, for instance, your brain would just skip the English letters and focus on the colour of the words. So, Russians would complete the second exercise in more or less the same time as the first one. This is the Stroop effect.

Thanks to the Stroop effect, it was literally a words play to catch a Russian spy.

Also, depressed people can be spotted using a similar exercise (again stroop effect).

Depressed participants will be slower to say the color of depressing words rather than non-depressing words. Non-clinical subjects have also been shown to name the color of an emotional word (e.g., ‘war’, ‘cancer’, ‘kill’) slower than naming the color of a neutral word (e.g., ‘clock’, ‘lift’, ‘windy’).

Fluid Dynamics of a Floating Screwdriver

By Anupum Pant

Golf balls are dimpled and tennis balls are fuzzy. That makes them travel fast, by preventing a drag that would created behind smooth balls. The screwdriver floating mysteriously in air, when pointed with a jet of air does that because it’s like a smooth ball being held up by a low pressure zone created behind it, counteracting gravity.

Gibbons and Opera Singers

By Anupum Pant

When we picked up speaking as our form of communication several million years ago, gibbons chose singing. We got better at speaking and gibbons mastered singing. Singing like opera takes years of practice, but for gibbons it comes naturally. They are much better than us at it. Plus they do this using precise control of their vocal tract – something which was previously thought could be done by only humans.

Superlubricity – Making Surfaces With No Friction

By Anupum Pant

Superlubricity is a phenomenon where friction completely disappears. It happens when when two crystalline surfaces slide over each other in dry incommensurate contact. Now scientists have managed to recreate it artificially by tuning the spacing of individual atoms on a surface. Of course scaling it to macro objects is going to be next to impossible, but like every impossible thing from the past which is totally possible today, we hopefully will see it happen some time in the future.

Researchers made an optical crystal (lattice) of sort, with peaks and troughs of potential and the other surface of ionic crystal to slide over the potential. They found that when the atoms of the ionic crystal were equally spaced, same as the optical lattice the friction was maxed out. But when this spacing did not match, the atoms simply glided over the optical crystal as if there was no friction at all.

OCD is Not What You Think it is

By Anupum Pant

OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder is a serious psychiatric condition and not some word to throw around for yourself, being proud, just because you like to keep things arranged. The life of a person with OCD is tough. These might be minor OCD tendencies that can be seen among normal people from time to time. But the actual disorder is far too rare.

People who are affected by it have really no control over what they are obsessed with, it being washing hands or something else. It takes up the majority of time in their day and is very debilitating.

Gravity isn’t as Simple as it Sounds

By Anupum Pant

Gravity isn’t exactly as simple as Newton described it in his time. That is not to say his work was a farce, but to say that several decades back, the concept of gravity transformed into something very different from what it is still being taught in schools. What Newton said was of course true to some extent because his laws were valid only if you were measuring things from an inertial frame of reference.

Science’s Quick Guide to Eating Right

By Anupum Pant

Aaron from healthcare triage, one of the many science channels I love, spends most of the time on his videos talking about how most popular dietary plans purported to be the best aren’t really backed by science. Today however, he shares what really is good for you and backed by science. And I completely agree and do what he says.

First Rule: Buy food that hasn’t been prepared, cooked or altered. Yes, anything that is even slightly artificial – as a rule, try to things that come from the earth (grown) to you as fast as possible, without anything happening to it in between – just ingredients. That means an orange is far far better than a glass of100% natural and preservative free orange juice.

Second Rule: You can’t go completely ground to mouth. You do have to rely on artificial foods for some extent. For that, just keep it to the minimum.

Third Rule: Cook at home. That helps you stick to the rule one. You are in control of what you put in.

Fourth Rule: Try not to deep fry very often. Also, that doesn’t mean you cut fat completely – those processed foods saying completely free of any fat, are nothing but the very artificial foods you must avoid. Eat real butter.

Fifth Rule: Drink a lot of water. Which doesn’t mean you have to completely cut on coffee, alcohol and other beverages. Just keep it to a minimum. If you ever plan to go crazy one day and get a meal plan at burger king, instead just get the burger – take the free water instead of the coke.

Sixth Rule: Eat with people and eat slow.

Yes, that is all it takes.

Goats’ Amazing Eyes and Muscles

By Anupum Pant

Goat eyes, like other ungulates, are rectangular in shape. They are pretty alien to look at. These awkwardly shaped pupils actually serve a very practical purpose for them. It enables them to have a great depth perception and great detail perception for a wide angle of the field of vision – for about 280 degrees! That means they don’t have to rely on their peripheral vision to spot a predator coming from behind them. Their peripheral vision is as good as their main vision, is what I’m saying. But the downside of this blessing is that they aren’t able to see very well on the vertical axis.

The other funny thing about goats is them suddenly going stiff and fainting when they are suddenly made to panic, or scared. Actually, when they do this, the goats don’t really faint. But this happens due to a heriditary genetic disorder, like seen in some humans and other mammals too, their muscles aren’t able to relax quickly after they get stiff due to some reason – usually when they go stiff all of a sudden.

And more about on goats here…