The Underwater Vacuum Cleaners

By Anupum Pant

If you didn’t know, most white sand you see on some beaches around the world, has at some point in time, passed through a fish called the parrot fish. It’s an amazing ecological role the parrot fish plays.

An interestingly similar ecological role is served by a marine animal with a very leathery skin called the sea cucumber. Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg explains why these organisms have such an important role in the marine environment.

Basically, while scavenging for algae or minute aquatic animals, sea cucumbers ingest a lot of sand. As it passes through their bodies, the digestive system increases the pH of the sand, making it more basic. When this comes out, the sand is clean and turned basic. This way it plays a chief role in countering the negative effects of ocean acidification.

It also helps coral reefs survive by supplying them with calcium carbonate (a by product of its digestion process) and helping them maintain a net inflow of calcium carbonate.

The ammonia that comes out also makes the bed more fertile, making it much more suitable for coral reefs to grow.

Watch these underwater vacuum cleaners in action below.

Faking Sleep Affects Performance

By Anupum Pant

A couple of days back I talked about how standing for a few seconds in a superman position could increase your level of confidence and could help you ace interviews. Today it’s time again to look at a technique to increase performance by fooling your body.

First of all, you need to stop thinking you didn’t sleep well today. That is because the mere act of thinking you slept well makes you perform well. It’s been proven.

In a group where everyone got equal sleep, half of the people were just told by “experts” that they had 29% REM sleep (which is better) and the other half were told that they had only 16% REM sleep (that actually decreases performance). The catch was, they all had slept for equal times and everyone would have had more or less equal percentages of REM cycles. Only, they were told wrong things by “experts”.

This word of mouth coming from the “experts” actually affected the performance of these two groups. The group that was told they had a greater percentage of REM sleep performed well. And the group that was told they did sleep as well as the first group didn’t perform as good. I’m assuming both the groups were first informed about how the percentage of REM sleep affects performance.

So, stop cribbing about how tired and sleepy you  are.

Estimating the Distance of a Lightning Strike

By Anupum Pant

Everyone who’s studied basic science at school knows that light travels much much faster than sound. Light can travel about 300,000 km in a single second. Sound, in the same time would cover about 0.3 km. That’s a huge difference.

Considering that, it is fairly easy to calculate how far a lightning strike happens by measuring the time it takes the sound to reach you after you see the lightning. In that case, taking into account the enormous speed of light, you assume that the light instantly reaches you and you just count the seconds it takes for the sound to be heard at the place you are.

Then multiplying the seconds with 0.3 would give you, in kilometres, how far it happened – an estimation of, course.

So, if there isn’t a mess of lightning strikes happening somewhere, which usually isn’t the case, and if you can clearly tell which sound came from which lightning strike, which you can’t in most cases, you can actually estimate the distance of a strike very easily.

If you think that’s great. You might be interested in:
How to estimate the temperature.
and How to estimate the time to sunset.

Hornets are Able to Harvest Solar Energy

By Anupum Pant

Wasps are active during the day time, and hornets too. It is during the morning (and the day time, when the sun is out) when they carry out most of their activities like digging into the ground. In fact, there’s a reason why they do it all mostly during the time when the sun is out.

The brown and yellow coloured stripes they have on their bodies are good to warn predators. Besides that they also serve one other interesting purpose – to harvest solar energy!

Researchers have figured that the brown and yellow stripes on the bodies of hornets and wasps have special kinds of gratings that help them to absorb most light, without reflecting much of it. With these gratings they are able to funnel in light from the sun by increasing the surface area for more efficient absorption.

It is believed that when the sun is out, the yellow and brown bands wasps and hornets have on their bodies are able to absorb sunlight and are then able to convert it into electrical energy – which they, purportedly, use to conserve energy and carry out metabolic functions. Researchers also believe that they use up this energy to dig up nests and fight other insects.

Here’s what the paper says:

The complex structure of the cuticle is produced by extracellular secretion from the epidermis. It is constructed as a composite consisting of chitin filaments, structural proteins, lipids, catecholamine derivatives, and minerals. The Oriental hornet cuticle (the exoskeleton) exhibits a brown-yellow pattern…The yellow segments protect the cuticle from potentially harmful solar UV radiation, similar to the role of melanin in the brown color segments of the hornet’s body…The yellow segments contain xanthopterin, which is housed in an array of barrel-shaped granules…the voltage between the hypocuticle and the exocuticle of the yellow stripe showed a negative potential at the hypocuticle with respect to the positive exocuticle. In response to illumination of the yellow stripe, the difference in potentials between light and darkness increases…The fact that the Oriental hornet correlates its digging activity with insolation, coupled with the ability of its cuticular pigments to absorb part of the solar radiation, may suggest that some form of solar energy harvesting is performed in the cuticle.

– (Plotkin et al. 2010:1075)

Source [AskNature]

Jellyfish Stings and The “Pee on it” Myth

By Anupum Pant

I haven’t been ever stung by a jelly fish, but from how Destin says it in the video, and other people I’ve seen getting bitten, tells me that it is something no one would want to experience in their life. If you did not know, the sting is awfully painful.

A jelly fish uses venom, not poison. They are two different things. Which means that a jellyfish stings you and uses extremely tiny hypodermic needle like things to inject toxins in your body.

But doesn’t jellyfish seem like a bunch of jelly floating around with no visible prickly parts? how does something so soft actually go about inserting something sharp into your skin?

Turns out, on the surface of those long tentacles these fish have, there are microscopic organelles called nematocysts which it uses to sting you. Even a tiny brush with those tentacles can trigger them. The more interesting part is that these tiny needles act very fast, and like I said, they are also very tiny. So, to see them you need a really high frame-rate camera attached to a microscope.

That is exactly what Destin does in the video below. It’s fascinating to see those tiny stingers do their work so fast under a microscope. Not many get a chance to see something like this.

Just FYI. In case you ever end up getting bitten by a jellyfish, please don’t ask your friend to pee on it. There’s a word going around that this helps, but in reality it doesn’t. In fact it can make it worse. Instead try washing it off with sea water. And then use a credit card to scratch the sting to remove any nematocysts stuck in your skin.

Don’t believe me? Please watch this…

[Video] Making a Perfect Ice Sphere

By Anupum Pant

Ice cubes are too mainstream. Moreover, considering the greater surface area cubes have (as compared to spheres), they melt too quickly. Who’d want that in their drink?

So, here’s a device that can make ice spheres using just gravity, in under a minute.

The simple aluminium mold isn’t powered by any heat engine. It simply works by pressing the ice cube and conducting heat really fast. Also, using the perfect amount of pressure so that it doesn’t crack the cube. It works because aluminium has a high thermal conductivity. 

The end result is a perfect ice sphere made out of an ice cube in under a minute. No heating involved.

Galileo’s Paradox

By Anupum Pant

Here’s an image of a contraption. It is basically a long stick hinged at one end and is free to move about the other. At the end of it rests a ball. Near the ball there’s also a cup fastened to the stick. The big stick is lifted up high and is temporarily supported by a small stick.

galileo paradox

Now, what do you think would happen when the temporary support is removed? Normally, it would be very intuitive to think that the cup and the ball would fall at the same speed. In other words, nothing fascinating would happen. Both would fall and the ball would roll away…no?

However, something very unexpected happens when the support is removed. Something that, in a jiffy demonstrates some very important concepts of physics like centre of mass, torque and acceleration.

The big wooden stick (with the fastened cup) falls and it falls faster than the ball. Actually it falls and also rotates. As a result of the swing, the cup comes under the ball just before ball reaches it and the ball ends up inside it.

Under the influence of the same gravitational force, irrespective of the mass, the cup and the ball must have fallen at the same rate, as predicted by Galileo? What really happens? The video explains…

Double Pendulum and Why We Can Never Predict Weather

By Anupum Pant

A single weight, if suspended from the ceiling, forms a pendulum – A simple device whose position at any point in the future can be predicted fairly easily if the initial conditions are known.

Now, if another pendulum is attached to the bottom of this first pendulum, preferably using a rod (not a string), and is then given a good amount of initial energy, things move from a simple single pendulum to a very complicated two pendulum system.

The system turns so chaotic that it is impossible to make two of such exactly same systems, forget keeping them synchronised. Even if every mass and ever little distance is carefully calculated and two such systems are constructed, it would be impossible to drop them from the same height and see them move in the exactly same manner.

That is because even if they are really dropped from the same position, they’d in reality have a very tiny difference in some parameter, which would eventually become so huge that the two systems would soon go out of sync. Initially they might really seem like they are moving in a synchronized motion, but that doesn’t stay for too long.

This is also the reason why we’ll never be able to predict the weather perfectly. Nikola explains…

A Scientist’s Way of Making Super-Strong iPhone Cases

By Anupum Pant

Bulk Metallic Glasses (BMGs) A.K.A Amorphous metals, give you the goodness of both metals and glasses. They literally are glasses made out of metal. Unlike the most crystalline metals, BMGs are made by cooling certain liquid metals very quickly to lock the disordered glassy structure in place. They aren’t crystalline like your everyday metals and instead have a structure like that of glasses – disordered.

Some of these BMGs have amazing properties. Like super high hardness, about 3 times the hardness of steel is one of the most alluring properties they have.

They’ve been around since the 60s, and mass producing them has always been tough. Until now, BMGs were never used for something as ordinary as a smartphone case. But the recent innovation in manufacturing coming from a Materials scientist at Yale will probably soon bring to the market these new iPhone covers that’d be 50 times harder than plastic, or 10 times harder than Aluminium, and almost three times the hardness of steel.

A Simple and Elegant Cloaking Device

By Anupum Pant

In the year 2011, UTD NanoTech unveiled their carbon nanotube invisibility cloak, making us move one more step closer to realizing a piece of magical cloth which fictional characters often use to turn themselves invisible. And then there was a 3D printed invisibility cloak too.

A few researchers at the University of Rochester have now created their own elegant version of an invisibility cloak. It’s, in principle, a fairly simple optical device which uses just four lenses to cloak objects behind it, keeping the image behind it still visible.

In fact, whatever it does, it does it in 3 dimensions. That means, the viewer looking through the device can actually pan to change the viewing angle and can still see the image of the background, undistorted, as if there were no lenses in between, in real-time. And it is probably the first ever cloaking device to be able to do that.

The device has a blind spot (sort of). In a way that It doesn’t cloak anything that lies in the axis of the lens system. The cloaking area is in the shape of a dough nut. Any part of the object that accidentally enters the axis area becomes visible and conceals the background. The device is simple and cheap enough to be easily scaled to cover greater area, as long as lenses of that size can be made. The video explains it better.

via [Quarks to Quasars]

Cockroaches and Activation Theory

By Anupum Pant

Robert Zajonc, a Polish-born American social psychologist proposed an activation Theory for social facilitation. Sounds tough, but read on. His first theory, in simple words, tried to explain the way our performance at some tasks increases in the presence of others, while the performance at some other tasks decreases.

According to him, the presence of other individuals around you serves as a source of “arousal” and affects performance (in good ways some times and bad ways the other times).

When this happens, he said, humans tend to do well at tasks which they are inherently good at, or tasks which they’ve practised well, or easy tasks which involve very little conscious cognitive effort. While the performance at other complex tasks, which aren’t well-learned is affected negatively, when there are other people watching you.

More interestingly, he also pointed that this change in performance isn’t only seen among humans.  An experiment that involved several cockroaches effectively proved this.

In two different cases, a cockroach was put in an easy maze to run around and find an exit. The first case had just the one cockroach running around in the maze. It did fine. But in the second case when there were other cockroaches watching the cockroach who was running in the maze, it ran faster. A clear increase in performance was noted in this easy maze.

Interestingly, when the difficulty of this maze was increased (it was a complex task now), as Robert had predicted, the cockroach’s performance decreased when other cockroaches were watching.

How to Survive for Three Days Under Water

By Anupum Pant

Harrison Okene was a 29-year-old chef on Jascon 4 – a big oil company boat. On one unfortunate day, due to a bad storm in the sea, off the coast of Nigeria, the boat capsized. With the 12 crew members of the ship, Okene went down with the boat. He got trapped under water and survived in there for three days, while none of the other mates survived.

The man found a big air bubble trapped underneath the shipwreck and lived in there for more than 2 and half days. He had nothing to eat or drink except coke. Here’s a full video shot by a rescue diver.

The diver’s voice sounds funny because they use a mixture of helium and air to breathe in their equipment. And Helium makes your voice sound like that.

Singing Sand Dunes

By Anupum Pant

I cannot say why you’d do it, but suppose you were on a hike to the top of a 120 feet sand dune in the centre of some desert, say  near Al-Askharah, a coastal town in Oman. Unfortunately, it’s also the mid summer time, with 50 degree Celsius winds blowing at 50 miles an hour, and the dune you are climbing has a slope of 30 degrees. There’s nothing else (besides sand) to be seen or heard for miles around you.

The numbers are apparently perfect for a very eerie phenomenon to occur. And then the whole desert suddenly cries out a booming chorus of a very low hum (Like someone playing a very low note on the cello). What could have possibly caused that?

For ages such sounds in the midst of empty deserts have been bewildering people. Marco polo mentioned it. Charles Darwin also wrote about the “Bellower” in The Voyage of the Beagle. Moreover, until recently, even modern scientists weren’t sure what caused these sounds. It was only during the year 2009 that things started becoming clear when a group of researchers started experiments with sand on an incline in a laboratory environment.

The low droning hums, now as we know, come from within the sand dunes. The Sand particles are blown by the wind, causing an avalanche. As the sand falls across the 30 degree incline of the dune, they vibrate, synchronise and send the vibrations into the dune. The dunes pick up these tiny synchronised vibrations and amplify them, causing the low droning hum; coherent enough to resemble musical notes.

This only happens at few places around the world. In Morocco the dunes cry out an echoing hum of 105 hertz. Whereas in Oman the sands create a mixture of frequencies ranging from low 90 to slightly less low, 150 hertz. Something similar is also heard in the death valley. The video explains…

The Number of the Beast

By Anupum Pant

666 is probably one of the most infamous numbers and is known by many as the number of the beast. That is because the Bible, as translated in English, mentions 666 as the number of the beast. Revelation 13:18 says this…

Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.

However, it is very interesting to note that, since the Bible wasn’t written originally in English, the number 666 wasn’t actually there in the original form. In the original Greek manuscript, a language (like Hebrew) which uses letters for numbers, the number is written as 3 letters. I did not know this before. That means, all of the Greek and Hebrew text can also be read as numbers!

This is called isosephy – Meaning a practice of writing text where a text can be a number too. Normally the number values associated with each letter of a word are added to form a number.

So, the letters of my name (A, N, U, P, U, M), in order, would be the numbers: 1, 50, 300, 70, 300, 40. Total: 761 – Which is not very close to 666, I’m not a beast. What about yours? You can look at the table below and calculate.

Nero Caesar written in Hebrew can be converted to numbers and the total is 666. A way of saying, by the author, that Nero Caesar is the root of all evil. At the same time, the author doesn’t end up in trouble for writing this.

ris5en

 

Also, all the 36 numbers on a Monte Carlo roulette wheel add up to 666. Watch more in the video below.