100 Billion Frames Per Second

By Anupum Pant

Couple of months back there were researchers unveiling the trillion frames per second camera, which actually didn’t capture real-time image. This time it is different.

Researchers from Washington University say they’ve built a camera that can capture 100 billion frames per second. It is faster than anything ever made and works on a completely different principle – which they call the compressed ultrafast photography (CUP).

This camera is so fast that it can capture a light photon in motion. Here’s a slow motion video of light bouncing off a mirror. The amount of time taken for this event to happen spanned only 300 trillionth of a second.

via [ScienceAlert]

The Long Face Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Mouth breathing is the root cause of several other problems. Worsening of sinus blockages is probably the best known among them all. Besides that when you are not breathing through your nose, you are not giving a chance for the air to move through your mucous membrane which produces nitric oxide in the body – Lack of which is a bad news for your heart and blood vessels. And the list goes on.

But the other unusual and lesser known problem associated with mouth breathing is this. It can make you look uglier! Which as the name suggests, is an ugly facial feature – long and narrow face. And then, if their tonsils swell due to this, their jaws start to adjust into a weird position in order to gather the maximum amount of oxygen into their bodies. This happens mostly to kids when they start breathing through their mouth early in life. However, it isn’t only limited to kids. Also, it’s easier to fix this on kids.

So, if your kids uses his/her mouth to breathe, it is a very good idea to correct it right away.

Kids who end up being chronic mouth-breathers are likely to have something called the long face syndrome.

via [Link]

Birds to the Moon

By Anupum Pant

A few species of bird seem to disappear during the winter and this is something which has made people think in the past. Charles Morton was one of those people who pondered about it and came up with a theory. According to his paper (birds in the moon) published in the year 1703, birds go for a vacation to the moon during winters. Yes, he estimated the moon was 200,000 miles away and said that the birds were able to complete this feat within 60 days. [more]

One thing he wasn’t wrong about was the amount birds travel. Arctic tern for instance is the bird that covers the maximum distance during migration. They literally fly from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and back in a single year. In one year they travel about 50,000 miles. Considering the amount they fly, it proves to be a good form of exercise for them.

Aristotle believed that a kind of bird changed into some other type during winters. Others thought they grew on trees and blossomed only during spring.

But that obviously isn’t true. This is where they actually go and how they do it…

The Scientifically Right Way to Pee

By Anupum Pant

Any man who has used a common urinal knows how splashy urinating in them can be. Men have tried for ages to do it the right way, but the right way has remained elusive. Now, science has stepped in to save the day.

Splash lab, Brigham Young University’s famous fluids lab studied the physics of urinal usage and presented their learnings in a conference recently. To reduce the significant splash back that is produced, they suggest some scientifically proven techniques of aiming.

1. Aim for the vertical surfaces. Horizontal ones will produce a much bigger splash back.

2. At closer distances the stream remains continuous. However, turbulence kicks in quickly and the stream separates into individual droplets. (which also is the reason peeing on an electric fence won’t kill you). You don’t want these separated droplets to hit the surface of water. So go closer, as close as you can get.

3. Try to make low angles with the surfaces at which the stream hits surfaces.

4. Splash reducing inserts are put in there for a reason. Aim there.

As splash lab puts it – always remember “Haphazard urinal usage can have devastating consequences.”

Origami the Great

By Anupum Pant

There’s much more to origami than you must have thought. Origami has contributed so much to engineering that it would to tough for me to enumerate all of its practical applications here.

It has been used to determine the best way to flatten an airbag – origami played a part in developing the algorithm for it. Self assembling robots coming from researchers at MIT and harvard were inspired by origami too. Here’s how they work.

Now, in another fantastic engineering application where an object was too huge to fit into a rocket, mirrors of the James webb space telescope have been designed to fold into a much smaller package.

Besides that origami has greatly contributed to architecture, nano-devices and retinal implants.


[Read more]

The Fencing Response

During the first few years, human babies display interesting reflex actions. One such reflex action is the moro reflex. That is, when a baby’s head is lifted a few inches up and then is dropped, the baby extends its arms outwards as if trying to find a support and is reaching out to stabilize itself. Here’s a video of a baby’s moro reflex.

When the baby grows, this response usually goes away because the brain starts to learn to suppress reflexes. But they sometimes still do appear. For instance in the case of a minor head injury – usually during sporting events. In this case, even adults can reactivate the infantile reflex due to a trauma to the brain stem. When this happens the person extends his arm in a peculiar position – like the “en guarde” position – and falls down. Wikipedia describes it as:

The fencing response is a peculiar position of the arms following a concussion. Immediately after moderate forces have been applied to the brainstem, the forearms are held flexed or extended (typically into the air) for a period lasting up to several seconds after the impact. The fencing response is often observed during athletic competition involving contact, such as American football, hockey, rugby and martial arts.

Here’s a video compilation of players in sporting events falling down with a fencing response after an injury to their head. This of course is rare, but when it does happen, a referee is trained to stop the play because it is an overt indicator of serious injury to the head. It’s nice to know and it will be fun to notice this in the upcoming superball.

Solar Power For Humanity

By Anupum Pant

This is a solar collector developed by the engineers at IBM which you could call a concentrated solar collector. It consists of a huge mirror for concentrating sun onto a semiconductor chip and can convert it to electricity. Of course solar panels do the same, but this one can sustain the deathray and make an extremely high power density source. So much that if 2% of the sahara gets covered by this device, it could power the whole humanity (2% of sahara BTW is 188,000 km²).

Also, the device produces intense heat which can melt the semiconductor chip. So it has to be cooled. The water which is used to cool it takes away the heat and this energy is used to desalinate water. And that’s just the by-product of this awesome device.

A Material That Does not Burn Even When it is Red Hot

By Anupum Pant

HRSI tiles are an amazing feat of engineering. HRSI, or High-temperature Reusable Surface Insulation tiles are pieces of ceramic made from extremely pure form of silica and is about 94% air – which is also the reason it is very light, can weigh as less as 9 pounds per cubic foot. But that’s not what the most amazing part about this material.

These tiles dissipate heat extremely quickly. Also, they don’t expand or contract a lot on heating and cooling. So, even if a red hot tile is quenched in water, it doesn’t get damaged. The best part is you can pick these tiles up with your bare hands even after they are freshly out of a 2300 degree F furnace. Imagine picking up red hot ceramic tiles without burning your hand.

[Read more]

Liquid Nitrogen on the Streets of NYC

By Anupum Pant

Liquid Nitrogen, also known as LN2 is an odourless, colourless, non-flammable nitrogen. It’s extremely cold with a boiling point of -196°C and has great dangers associated with it if it is not handled properly.

And yet, 2 huge pressurized canisters of Liquid nitrogen can be seen at one of the very important public places. In Manhattan, at the intersection of 6th avenue and the 50th street, in front of the well known radio city music hall, sit these 2 big canisters of Liquid Nitrogen. Probably thousands pass by these potentially dangerous cryogen containers everyday. Still, never has an accident occurred there.

Why these containers are there is a good question to ask. And they have been kept there for a very good reason. These canisters belong to a phone company and are used to keep the underground phone cables cool, dry and free from oxygen. Because these wires getting wet from the underground municipal system, isn’t very desirable to the phone company. The nitrogen continuously keeps circulating and finishes off in about three days. The canisters are then replaced.

Here’s a Google street view image I captured where these Liquid Nitrogen canisters can be seen on the sidewalk.

50th street

Tom Scott talks about them.

The Taxicab Number

By Anupum Pant

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a natural genius and had his own way with numbers. With no formal training whatsoever, and immense hard work, he  got his work noticed by the mathematical community. What Ramanujan could do with numbers, indeed was extraordinary. G.H. Hardy a famous English mathematician paid attention to Ramanujan’s letter, invited him to work with him and began a partnership with him. However, Ramanujan was a strict vegetarian and couldn’t sustain a healthy stretch there in England. He often fell sick and passed away at a very young age. In his short time during which he was here, he contributed a lot to the mathematical community.

Ramanujan is not a very well known personality. People from the mathematics community, Indians and others know about him, yet most people haven’t ever heard of him. Some people however still do remember him and have their own way of paying personal tributes to this born genius. One such man is a famous producer and writer, Dr. Ken Keeler – Also an Applied mathematics Ph.D from Harvard. In the popular animated show Futurama, he often brings pseudo-hidden references to certain numbers which are his clear ways to pay tribute to Ramanujan.

One number that often appears in the show is the number 1729. Here’s a story that illustrates Ramanujan’s genius, the importance of this number and the hidden tributes from the writer of Futurama –

G.H. Hardy once rode a taxi to visit Ramanujan at a hospital. Ramanujan was sick and upon the arrival of his advisor, he asked him the number of this cab on which he travelled. Hardy told him it was a rather uninteresting number, the number 1729. Ramaujan didn’t find it uninteresting and said:

No! It is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two [positive] cubes in two different ways.

That is to say, it can be written as (10)^3 + (9)^3 and also as (12)^3 + (1)^3 and also is the smallest number which can be written like that – as sum of 2 cubes in 2 different ways. It was incredible for Ramanujan to have suddenly conjured up such a mathematical visualization out of a seemingly uninteresting number. Since then the number 1729 has been known as the taxicab number and is denoted as  denoted Ta(n) or Taxicab(n) in mathematics.

There are also other taxicab numbers (smallest numbers of that sort) of higher orders which can be written as the cubes of 2 numbers in 3 ways, or even 4 ways…or more. Here are some of them. 1729 is a taxicab number of order 2. 87539319 is of order three. 6963472309248 is of the order four and so on…

taxicab numbers

I first found out about this from Author Simon Singh. He talks about 1729, Ramanujan and other taxicab numbers in the numberphile video below.

600 Miles Per Hour Tape

By Anupum Pant

The next time you are flying to your home town, you look out of the plane window only to find a flaw in the wing that has been repaired using a tape, do not panic. Patches of engine housing and other tiny external flaws are often corrected using a tape – also known as the speed tape.

The speed tape (more expensive than your normal scotch tape), or the 600 miles per hour tape, is a specially designed adhesive tape that can be used to correct minor aerodynamic (dents, dings etc.) flaws on the body of a plane. It of course is used only for a quick temporary correction, which is often replaced by permanent corrections. Airliners use it regularly. In fact it is also legal because FAA allows high speed tape as a temporary patch for punctures, scrapes, or surface damage.

The tape is made up of Aluminium and is resistant to water, solvents, and flames. It also reflect heat and expands with the body of the plane for a wide range of temperatures. It is applied to a clean surface and is so strong that it doesn’t come off till it is removed manually. However it should not be used as a fastener to stick loose parts. Neither should it be used in line with the engine inlet.

[Source]

Changing the Eye Colour

By Anupum Pant

Just like the colour of our skin is determined by the presence of melanin in it, the colour of your eye is also determined by the same thing. The presence of melanin makes your eyes black or brown coloured and the absence of it makes them blue. So, every one on the inside is white and has blue eyes.

Now, for most people the colour of their eye is not a problem. But for people who have heterochromia – a difference in colouration, usually of the iris but also of hair or skin – it’s a different story. Who’d want to have their eyes of different colours. They sure would like to get this difference corrected.

Strōma Medical, a company from California though of exactly that. In the year 2011 they announced a device that could help patients get their irregular eye colouration corrected. Changing brown eye colour to blue is really a breeze with their method. However, changing from green to blue is tougher. Theoretically, green can be changed to blue too. All of it by vaporizing pigments of your iris using a laser.

More about it here [Link]

[Video] Size of an Atom

By Anupum Pant

Atoms are very very tiny. So tiny that it is very hard for us to picture it in our minds. This video illustrates how small atoms really are. That’s not all. You’ll be surprised by how incredibly small the nucleus is. So small, that most of the atom is only empty space…

Everything is made up of atoms. And, considering the extremely tiny size of a nucleus, that means everything is made up of mostly empty space.

What Makes Rivers Curvy

By Anupum Pant

Rivers are never straight. What makes them curvy is something I never questioned in the first place.

What’s really fascinating is, how these curves form. They are almost always in pairs, alternating curves, unless there’s some geographical feature messing with the natural flow. From a hypothetical straight line river, these curves start forming when there’s even a slight aberration in the bank.

Besides that thicker a streams make bigger curves. And smaller tributaries meander in tighter turns. This is what makes rivers (with their smaller tributaries turning tighter and bigger ones in bigger curves) look like fractals on the surface of the earth.

Minute earth explains…