For us, who have a minimal knowledge of biology, understanding how Ebola works is tough. This makes it so much easier.
Here’s another one of Kurzgesagt‘s amazing explanation of how things work. This time the channel explains Ebola – A 5 minute crash course. It’s always good to know…
When a bowling ball and a feather, or anything for that matter, is dropped under gravity, in theory, they should come down at the exact same time. However, due to the air resistance experienced by a feather, that doesn’t really happen. A feather takes far longer to come down because the air resistance it experiences is much greater than a falling bowling ball.
What happens when you take the air out – drop both of them in vacuüm. Until now, no one had endeavoured to do this in such a scale. Brain Cox visited the world’s largest vacuüm chamber to conduct this seemingly silly, but profound experiment. 30 tons of air was evacuated from the huge vacuüm chamber, which actually is a 50+ year old nuclear test facility. And then the bowling ball and the feather were dropped in high vacuüm. Here’s what they found…
If you know your electrical sciences well, you must be knowing that it is not the voltage that kills, the current does. It doesn’t matter if you experience a shock of 750 volts or 75 volts, as long as the current is tiny. Both can be equally deadly depending on the current that flows – which depends on the resistance of the part of your body through which it passes. So, even the voltage at home can be deadly if certain conditions are met. It is the measure of current that counts.
Current above 0.01 Amperes can produce a severe shock. And since it is a popular belief that tiny currents are less deadlier than higher currents, and the fatality rises as the current increases, it is not so. There’s a sweet-spot somewhere in between. Currents in the range of 0.1 to 0.2 Amperes are the most deadly. Anything greater than 0.2 Amperes has much less chances of causing death if quick action is taken. But a current less than 0.2 Amperes is almost certain death.
That is because when the current is above 0.1 Amperes an uncoordinated twitching of the walls of the heart ventricles happens and it causes death. This is known as ventricular fibrillation. However, when the current is more than 0.2 Amperes, the current is high enough to forcibly clamp the heart. This is the human body’s way of protecting the heart from getting fibrillated. So, the chances of survival are much greater.
It is believed that for centuries in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountain region villagers have been practising something called glacier growing (or glacier grafting). Yes, literally making their own new glacier. This is done in order to increase the water supply for crops, for survival.
In order to encourage the growth of a glacier local farmers acquire ice from naturally occurring glaciers, and carry it to high altitude areas where the ice is put inside a small cave dug out in a scree-slope. Along with the ice other ingredients such as water, salt, sawdust, wheat husks and charcoal are also placed at the site.
It is believed by the local people that there are male and female glaciers. The male ones, they believe, are covered in soil or stones and move very less. While the female glaciers are whiter, grow faster and yield more water. It is also believed that to grow a glacier, equal amounts of both sexes are needed.
Look at the picture above and take a moment to think which one of them is a bouba and which one is kiki. It’s very likely we selected the same shapes for both bouba and kiki, so did 95 to 98% of the people who came here to see this. Scientists call this the bouba/kiki effect – a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects.
Even if the sounds bouba and kiki mean nothing at all, people from all over the world, or from countries speaking varied languages, select the same shapes more than 95% of the time. Irrespective of the languages they spoke, the human brain somehow attached abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way. Children as young as 2.5 years start doing this.
This is how Wikipedia explains it:
The rounded shape may most commonly be named “bouba” because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to make the sound “kiki”. The sounds of a K are harder and more forceful than those of a B, as well.
Just like for bouba and kiki, there is a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with “takete” and the rounded shape with “baluba”.
Caesium is a soft, silvery-gold coloured alkali metal with a melting point of 28 °C. Like the other alkali metals, it reacts vigorously with water – it explodes when it is put in water. Even in air, it catches fire – due to a spontaneous reaction with the oxygen and water vapour in the air. To store it, an atmosphere of noble gas surrounding the metal has to be used. In all, it is a very interesting metal. And like always, interesting things come at a price.
Caesium is expensive. A gram of it costs about as much as the same weight of gold. So, Thunderf00t – a youtuber – who wanted to be able to go about watching it explode in water, or burn in air all the time, decided to make Caesium at home – using a soap dispenser and a barbecue grill.
Since Caesium boils at a relatively low temperature (of about 700 °C), in theory it can be distilled out when two relatively cheap reactants – Caesium chloride and Lithium – react. Here’s how it can practically be done at home. Amazing!
Logically thinking, why on earth would an alligator – an ancient reptile – respond to music playing on a Tuba. Well, they do. And why they do it, is not totally clear. Specifically, they respond to a note called the B flat note (musicians would know).
Some time during the 1940s when the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York was at the american museum of natural history, the note B flat was played. Eerily, a seemingly innocuous vibration in the air, created by a musical instrument disturbed Oscar – a resident alligator in the museum. It seemed that after hearing the note Oscar started moving a lot. Since there were a bunch of scientists there, they got interested. And devised an experiment to recreate this reaction in the alligator. Here’s what they found [Link to the paper]
Several years later, at Gator land in Kissimmee, Mickelsen played a deep B flat on a Tuba to a male alligator named Toxic. The decades old experiment was recreated. For the first few tries the gators proved to be a tough audience and then it worked. After a few tries, with the B flat note the Tuba maestro was able to make the gators bellow vigorously. Here’s a video of what happened.
That’s not all, there’s something very universal about this particular note. Interestingly, there’s a lot to the note B-flat than it meets the eye. Listen to a musical Robert Krulwich’s report which is discussed in the following NPR talk. Blackholes hum the B-flat and GI tracts can be resonated using the same magical frequency.
From weird allergies to mad laughing diseases, Matthew Santoro shares with us 10 of the most mysterious and rare diseases doctors have ever encountered.
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a salt of Glutamic acid and is common among natural products like tomatoes, potatoes and mushrooms. MSG is also a popular flavour enhancer used to enhance the umami spectrum of a particular dish. In it’s artificial powder form MSG looks like a bunch of white crystals (powder). Also, like Gluten, everybody is scared of MSG.
The scare has been around for a long time and almost everybody knows this. It’s called “monosodium glutamate symptom complex” or the “Chinese restaurant syndrome”. This term, actually an elaborate public cry, comes from a single letter that was sent to the New England Journal of Medicine by a man named Robert Ho Man Kwok. He wrote:
I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food. The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations.
Even though it is popularly believed that MSG in food gives people weird symptoms, it has actually never been demonstrated under rigorously controlled conditions. All of it originated from the letter above! The US FDA has given MSG a generally recognized as safe designation.
There’s an interesting experiment which went like this. To a group of people that had adverse affects from MSG, researchers gave them two meals. One of the meals was Chinese food without MSG in it. And the other was an Italian meal with huge amounts of MSG in it. The “MSG symptoms” were reported by most of them after they had the chinese meal, and the italian meal was apparently all good, caused no symptoms.
Artificially made powder MSG can be absorbed by the GI tract very quickly (unlike glutamic acid-containing proteins in naturally occurring foods), it can create a spike in the blood plasma levels. Theoretically this could cause mild damage to some areas of the brain and kinds of chronic diseases could result from this neurotoxicity. Also, this.
But again, it has been given a green flag by the FDA. So the scare that is going around, has not been proved scientifically.
In two episodes of Simpsons, Homer Simpson seems to have found a perfectly valid solution, which shouldn’t have existed. But since that shouldn’t be possible, Numberphile proves how Homer does it.
Apparently, it’s been known for about a hundred years that excessive consumption of carrots can cause your skin to turn orange/yellow. I didn’t know that. Well, now I know.
Also, carrots don’t make your eyesight better. I’ve written about that in the past. But here’s another thing that’s really interesting about carrots. Carrots are addictive!
In the year 1992 Czech researchers Ludek Cerný and Karel Cerný published a paper in the British Journal of Addiction (BJA) described 3 cases in their paper. All of these cases involved men and women who had developed a strong addiction towards carrots, an addiction which they claimed was stronger than an addiction towards cigarettes. The men and women described in the paper knew that the addiction was stronger than that of nicotine because all of them were smokers.
Ironically, one of these cases described a man who was eating 5 bunches of carrots each day. And he had started eating them to get rid off his addiction of tobacco.
In another paper by Dr. Robert Kaplan, in the year 1996, a similar case came around. It was about a 49-year-old woman who was a compulsive carrot eater and ate about 2-3 kg of carrots everyday.
According to these papers, the psychological dependence on carrots arises basically from the carotene contained in it. However it is believed that it is also a result of some other active ingredient contained in carrots.
The withdrawal symptom is so intense that the afflicted persons get hold of and consume carrots even in socially quite unacceptable situations.
We’ve had chillies for more than 6000 years. Over time, by using clever growing techniques people have come up with chillies that are absurdly hot. While others like bell peppers are not hot at all. Capsaicin is the chemical that is present in chillies which makes them feel hot and we found that out only recently (as compared to its 6000 year history).
Capsaicin in theory is actually a neurotoxin which is inherently unpleasant to humans. Most of us who’ve tried quelling the heat from a pepper using water know that Capsaicin doesn’t dissolve in water. On the other hand, it readily dissolves in fats and oils. That is the reason, a traditional remedy to quelling the heat from a pepper is by washing it off using milk, yogurt or cream.
The hottest parts of a chilli is neither its skin nor the seeds. It is the central white flesh to which seeds are attached. When humans, or for that matter, any mammal eats a chilli, their bodies are able to digest the seeds and it doesn’t really serve any purpose for the chilli plant. So, to keep humans and mammals at bay, they are believed to have evolved to produce capsaicin.
Even the hottest chillies produced using clever growing techniques have taken this defensive response of a chilli plant to encourage it to make more capsaicin.
But there’s more. The hotter a chilli is, the better are its defences against harmful fungus and bacteria. So, capsaicin helps chilli plants to deal with, not just mammals, but also fungus and bacteria.
Parrots and other birds however aren’t bothered by capsaicin. Birds also aren’t able to digest the seeds and spread the chilli seeds all around through their droppings. And this serves a great purpose for the parent plant.
Often apocryphal stories get posted around and go viral on social media. And most times it is hard to discern the real from the fake. This story, of a newborn coming back to life from being clinically dead, seems like one of those posts which are made with a sole aim in mind – make it go viral on social media. But trust me, even if it seems unreal, it’s actually true.
Kate Ogg prematurely gave birth to twins, one of which was announced clinically dead after doctors couldn’t get him to breathe. Her son Jamie who was born after just 27 weeks of pregnancy languished within twenty minutes of birth. His twin sister however survived the premature birth.
After about five minutes after doctor had pronounced him dead, Jamie started displaying random, startled movements. According to doctors, it was normal a normal reflex and did not mean that Jamie was alive.
The mother was devastated and wanted to hold her son. She held him tight and caressed the body for about two hours. Miraculously, the baby’s movements started becoming more pronounced after the mother’s magical touch. And soon he opened his eyes!
It was later understood that the mother unknowingly did something called “kangaroo care” – named after kangaroos of course, in which the just born’s body generates heat just like a newborn kangaroo does when it’s held in its mother’s pouch.
The medical benefits of skin-to-skin contact have been long known among the scientific community, but it is not encouraged, and also not allowed at many hospitals in developed countries. It’s very common for mother’s in poorer countries to do this where incubators may not be available for premature babies.
Until now I hadn’t even heard about an element called Seaborgium. That is because it is one of the most unstable elements which don’t usually exist naturally. Since it doesn’t last for too long, to study Seaborgium, it has to be artificially made (which itself is very difficult) and then studied in the laboratory very quickly before it goes away. Here’s is more about it, “periodic videos” explains.
If you could set this up in your shower, you could probably generate about 5,000 to 10,000 volts of electricity (but not so much current). Based on Kelvin’s Thunderstorm, Derek from Veretasium explains how this can be done. It’s fairly easy and is a very innovative method to generate electricity.