Vanishing Calorie Density

By Anupum Pant

Companies which make delicious potato and corn snacks like chips and puffs are huge corporations who have an army of hundreds of psychologists, chemists and other technicians who do science experiments on equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars and spend millions every year to create and improve the snack. To make it taste, smell, sound and feel better. After hundreds of tests and iterations, these companies now probably have been able to construct a marvellous food item which is no less than any other feat of engineering that mankind has endeavoured.

One such food item is cheetos corn puffs. A food scientist,  Steven Witherly, after having tested a sample of Cheetos once said:

This is one of the most marvellously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.

And it really is. The corn puffs are designed to go into your mouth, smell and taste amazing and are carefully mastered to give you that satisfying crunch and melt inside. Melt inside, as if making your brain say, that was hardly anything I ate. Before you know, you finish off a whole party pack while watching your favourite movie. And it still doesn’t make you full.

Being full, or not is something your stomach tells your brain (after about 20 minutes it has been full). But the brain is the ultimate master. It can choose to make you feel full, or not.

With Cheetos, you are almost never full. You can keep eating. This ability of this marvellous snack to go in and melt into nothing is seen by your brain as a “vanishing calorie density”. And that is the reason you can keep eating it forever.

More about it [NYTimes]

Cosmic Rays

By Anupum Pant

Cosmic rays aren’t really rays, like rays of light as you would say. Rather, they are a stream of particles like protons travelling at extremely high speeds. Some times their speed can reach almost the speed of light (of course lesser, but almost that much).

Now, if you imagine something travelling at that speed, the kinetic energy that it would carry would come from a totally different physics that deals with everyday objects. And with a proton travelling at almost the speed of light, the kinetic associated would almost be as much as a tennis ball travelling at 100 kilometres per hour.

Millions of these particles pass through you every day. And they can be detected pretty easily with a simple test I mentioned some months ago.

If a tennis ball could move that fast (without destroying itself), the energy that it would have been enough to wipe off the dinosaurs on earth. Or it would have been 10 times the energy produced from the largest nuclear bomb ever exploded.

Writing or Playing Sports, Almost Same

By Anupum Pant

Writing physically, with your pen and paper can be called an art form now, which is dying off. Who, besides students and a few others, write any more? It’s tough for me to pick up a pen and actually write. I’d rather type it out.

Even though you don’t, you probably should. Because when you write, a lot happens in the brain and recent MRI scans of people writing a creative passage have revealed brain activity which looks like that of sportsmen when they are playing.

If nothing, your whole brain works when you write, it is a great exercise for the brain.

The Best Explanation of the Coriolis Effect

By Anupum Pant

The video sharing part of the internet came much later and since people have been sharing awesome videos. And then not a few years from now, the videos demonstrating cool science became very popular. And now, two channels on youtube have done something no one has done ever before. If you really think about it, it is big!

Derek, the host and owner of Veritasium, lives in Australia. Destin owns the smarter everyday and he’s from Alabama. Together, they did a collaboration science experiment to demonstrate the coriolis effect. It could only have been done by two people, one of whom was in the southern hemisphere and the other was in Northern. So, that’s what happened.

Play the two videos below in sync, as it will be instructed. You’ll learn science and be the part of history in the making.

Another Intelligent Octopus

By Anupum Pant

The octopus is an incredibly intelligent creature, like the crow. Their brains are literally all over the place. And let me not even start talking about how well they can blend into their surroundings.

Julian Finn, a researcher from the Victoria Museum in Australia, a few years back, observed an octopus displaying amazing foresight. It was seen scooping up a halved coconut shell and carrying it around, walking on the bed of the water body. It wasn’t clear as to what it was planning to do with it. The researcher laughed so bad, he almost drowned when he saw this happen.

As you’ll see in the video below, the octopus uses this shell as a makeshift shelter and carries it to places where it might not find good places to hide.

The carrying around isn’t as simple as it seems, it takes a lot of processing power. And to expect it from a octopus isn’t normal. The octopus first digs them out, arranges then so the open halves are facing up, then blows jets to clean the mud inside them, scoops them with its arms and walks away with them. Later it sits down and lets the coconut shells make a shelter for itself.

via [BBC]

You Can See UltraViolet

By Anupum Pant

Last semester I took a course, some part of which dealt with the optical properties of materials. There I learnt a lot about how saying something is transparent and something else is opaque is meaningless unless you mention the particular wavelength you are talking about.

So, take your average glass for instance. It’s fairly transparent in the visible spectrum. So you see it as transparent, and nothing more. If you go ahead and increase the energy of light, thereby decreasing the wavelength, at some point the glass will become opaque. Similarly, a typical metal would look opaque to you because it is opaque in the visible spectrum. However, as you increase the energy of em radiation and move into the ultraviolet region, metals start becoming transparent.

The lens of your eye works like a typical glass. It’s transparent in the visible region, but becomes opaque as the energy increases and goes to the UV range. That’s the reason UV doesn’t get inside and you don’t see in UV. Had there not been a lens there,  your retina would have received UV and you would have been able to see some part of UV (from 400-300 nm wavelength).

This actually happens to people who, due to complications in the eye, like cataract and other diseases, have to get their natural lens out. This absence of lens is called Aphakia. These people start seeing a part of UV, usually from 400 to 300 nm and see the normal white light as a bluish white or a violet white light. That is because, due to the UV being detected by the blue cones in their retina, their blue cones get excited more than the others.

A Slime Stronger Than Steel

By Anupum Pant

A new study published in Nature communications discusses about the make up of this slime a hag fish produces. This slime is probably used by them to make their bodies more slippery so the predators find it hard to grab on, also they sometimes block the predator’s gills.

But what looks like slime actually, the researchers say, is composed up of thousands of fine strands, each only 12 nanometres in thickness. Despite the delicate appearance, these strands are able to stretch by about 15 centimetres. They keep this biological thread tightly coiled up inside a gland and it never tangles inside. The stress that this amazing biological material can take is about 5 times more than that a normal steel can take.

more at [Nature Communications]

Bladeless Wind Turbines

By Anupum Pant

In a fluid (air in this case), when there is a blunt object obstructing the flow, there is a beautiful and dangerous pattern of turbulence created behind the blunt object. It’s called the Von Karman vortex street. And it has been considered a problem in civil engineering because it has caused failure of many designs of bridges and high-rises.Vortex-street-animation

But a company from Spain, vortex bladeless has vowed to utilize this effect to create a technology for a more efficient production of wind energy than the traditional windmill.

Engineers at Vortex Bladeless have designed a turbine to take advantage of this effect. The design consists of a thin, cone-shaped turbine which is made of carbon fiber. It has a motor at the bottom instead of the top (like traditional turbines) to improve sturdiness.

Surinam Toad Give Birth Through its Skin

By Anupum Pant

In the tropical rainforest waters of South America live a variety of toads called the Surinam toads (pipa pipa). The way their females give birth is pretty weird, almost as much as the frog we saw a couple of days ago.

During the mating season these toads find mates and the female lays about a hundred eggs. The male catches these eggs, fertilizes them and puts them on the back of the female. The eggs go under the skin through the tiny holes on the back of the female toad. As them go in, a protective layer of skin grows on top. When the eggs get hatched the young ones start punching up to break the protective layers and literally come out of the skin of their mother.

Kodak’s Underground Nuclear Reactor in a Bustling City

By Anupum Pant

Under the building 82 of Eastman park (Kodak park) in Rochester, New York, for about 30 long years, there existed a secret nuclear reactor which contained 3.5 pounds of weapons grade Uranium (highly enriched uranium) to produce neutrons for research. Of course, when it was under a building that belonged to Kodak, the reactor belonged to Kodak as well – to an American technology company focused on imaging solutions and services for businesses.

It may come as a surprise as to why would an imaging company have something like that in their basement. But this device, called the Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier (or CFX) was something Kodak had a perfect justification to own. The device was used to check materials and chemicals for impurities.

The 14 by 24 foot cavity in the ground where it was kept was very nicely shielded with several feet of concrete and earth on all sides, so safety was never a problem. In its full 30 year period for when it was there, there wasn’t a single safety issue.

The reactor was quite a well guarded secret because it used weapons grade uranium, although in not a quantity enough to make a big bomb. However, it operation was done with permission from the federal regulators.

In the year 2007 the highly enriched uranium was safely removed, with armed guards and was taken to a nuclear facility in South Carolina.

More at [Democrat and Chronicle]

The Atacama Humanoid

By Anupum Pant

atacama humanoidIn the year 2003, in a deserted Chilean town in the Atacama Desert, a bizarre looking skeleton was discovered. It was the size of a palm, about 6 inches in length and didn’t look even anything close to a human being. Instead of the normal 12 pair of ribs a human being has, this mysterious skeleton had just 10. The bones were completely real, it wasn’t a prank. Unless someone had access to really alien technology which could make absolutely real bones using an artificial method, they couldn’t have faked something like this.

Initially rumours of this being the skeleton of a creature from some other planet, or it being a skeleton of an unknown species on earth spread pretty quickly. And then about 10 years later scientists from Stanford university ruled out both the possibilities. They confirmed that it was a human. Also 9% of it DNA did not match the human genome reference – which is huge considering that something as different as an ape has the DNA which matches to the human genome much more than that.

No form of dwarfism nor any genetic defect that could explain this thing could be thought of. Nor could they figure out what exactly had caused such a deformity. In fact, that still remains a mystery.

When tests were done to find the age of this mummy, it was found to be only a few decades old. And the skeletal development indicated that it was of a 6-8 year old child, even though the size of it was no larger than a 22 week old foetus.

More about it [ScienceMag] [Snopes]

A 500 Kilometre Flock of Birds

By Anupum Pant

LB_passengerpigeon_1What would it be like if a colossal pack of birds, so large that it took 14 hours to fly by, flew above your head? That’s what happened in the year 1866 in South Ontario.

Not thousands, not millions, but billions of birds in this pack flew over southern Ontario. Estimates say that the flock consisted of about 3.5 Billion passenger pigeons – which was a very big part of the whole population of passenger pigeons which existed in the world at that time. The flock was 1.5 km wide and about 500 km long and took around 14 hours to pass by. As far as you could see, there were birds in the sky, for 14 long hours!

There’s another very interesting thing concerning the population of these birds. Passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird species in North America. So much that, till very recently, these birds accounted for quarter of the whole bird population in North America. And today, there isn’t even a single passenger pigeon alive. They are extinct. Their extinction has a lot to do with the European invasion and the usage of pigeon meat to feed the poor during those times.

Martha was probably the last passenger pigeon which was alive till September 1st 1914, in the Cincinnati zoo.

more about this at [AllAboutBirds]

The Real Meaning of Mass

By Anupum Pant

We’ve always heard mass is a form of energy, mass is frozen energy or mass can be converted to energy. It might sound like you’ve been lied all your life when I tell you all of these statements are not exactly right. Mass is a much more complex thing than it seems.

This channel I recently stumbled upon does a very good job of explaining what mass is by first telling you that the mass of a hydrogen atom is actually slightly less than the sum of masses of it’s constituents – an electron and a proton. The same thing can be applied to a proton too, which is composed of quarks. And so on.

So mass is basically not just a simple indicator of the amount of matter in something. There’s more to it…

Science Says buy Cheap Wine

By Anupum Pant

Taste is a very subjective sense. So, even people trained to taste wine get it wrong (wrong for you), most times. Even if you track the way the judges in a wine tasting decide the winner, you’ll find that the distribution is very close to what you’d get when you do a random distribution.

Expensive wines are often appreciated because it’s known to wine tasters most times that the wine they are tasting is the expensive one. Cost is equated to quality, or taste. While most normal people, who aren’t trained wine tasters, do spot it as expensive, they do it because they don’t like the taste of it. Crux of it all, buy the cheap wines. I personally love Apothic red, which I get it in the grocery store for about $8.

The Only Person who Survived in Vacuum

By Anupum Pant

There was an accident at NASA when they were testing the space suits for the Apollo moon missions. To recreate the situation the suit had to face on moon, a large vacuum chamber, with other chambers on the outside which had successively decreasing pressures, was constructed.

A NASA spacesuit technician, Jim LeBlanc was the test subject to test this suit out on December 14, 1966. Somehow when he was going through the test, the tube which was supposed to pressurize his suit was disconnected. His suit pressure dropped from 3.8 PSI to 0.1 PSI in less than 10 seconds. But in the end, he survived and became the first and only person to survive in near-vacuum pressure.

Normally, to re-pressurize the chamber it would have taken about 30 minutes. But the experimenters had to rush and did this re-pressurization in about 90 seconds, which could have done a lot of damage to LeBlanc’s hearing and other sensitive parts of the body. However, he gained consciousness all fine and everything was perfectly al right.