World’s Largest Building Has a Climate of Its Own

By Anupum Pant

A place where planes like the Boeing 747, 767, 777 and 787 are built, has to be huge. But this Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, home to 30,000 workers (working in 3 shifts), is so huge that the inside of the building has a climate of its own. It is the largest building on Earth. If you get a chance, you must not drop a chance to take the 90-minute tour of this factory (it costs $15 per adult). Here are a few things to note about it…

The size: The volume of this factory is 472 million cubic feet or 13.3 million cubic meters. That is enough to fit the whole Disney land and still be left with a 12 acre place to park the vehicles. In other words, it could fit 800 standard sized hockey rinks. Or it could fit in 75 football fields. Or it can hold about 12 empire state buildings! You get an idea how huge it is, right?

Largest Digital Mural: Being huge comes with its own side effects – another world record. The doors, like the building, are huge too. The factory has 6 doors, where each of them is 82 feet in height and 300-350 feet in width! You could bring in an NFL field (as in, fit the length of it) in through one of these. But what is more interesting about these doors is that they are covered with a 100,000 square feet of digital graphic. This is the largest digital mural in the world – printed by SuperGraphics, Seattle. It took the workers 27 days to install the digital mural.

Small City: Had this place been slightly larger, it could have had enough space to fit in a country – The Vatican city. Still, it isn’t small. The building is like a small city with it’s own fire department, security force, fully equipped medical clinic, electrical substations and water treatment plant. To move around in this little city, the employees use 1,300 bicycles.

Its own Climate? Now, since it is like a small city, it has to have its own climate, right? Yes. When the building was first built, clouds got formed inside and some say it even rained inside (mostly, not true). But rainbows have definitely been seen inside.
The temperature inside the building is controlled by those 1 million bulbs that are used in there. During winters, the bulbs bring warmth and during summers the doors are opened and air circulating fans are switched on to let the fresh Everett breeze come in.

Bonus fact: The network of 26 overhead cranes have about a total of 39 miles of ceiling rails inside the factory!

This Green Slime Like Thing is a 3000 Year Old Plant

By Anupum Pant

It looks like moss, but it isn’t. Nor is it slimy.

This gooey or slimy looking thing is actually a plant which grows in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Peru, up in the Andes at altitudes between ten to fifteen thousand feet. Believe it or not, some of these plants are more than 3000 years old. Yes, they are one of the oldest living organisms on the planet earth – older than the golden age of Greece.

Even though the plant looks slimy goo-like from a distance, when you go closer, it is actually solid and dry to the touch. The surface of the plant consists of densely packed tens of thousands of tiny buds and flowers which make the surface feel like a pillow. That is the reason it is also  known as the Andes Pillow. In fact the surface is so stiff that a person can lie on it and the plant won’t get crushed.

It is sort of a cousin to parsley and carrots. And it is interesting to note that the plant smells like mint. Locals often boil it in water and use it to cure muscle pain.

Llareta grows extremely slowly. It grows about 1.5 cm every year. The ones which are about 2.5 to 3 meters in size can be said to have grown for hundreds of years to reach that size.

Since Llareta is dense and dry, it burns like wood, and has been known to be used by the climbers/hikers to make fire. Some say that it was also used in steam engines instead of coal. This careless burning of the extremely slow-growing living museum has endangered their long-term survival.

via [RadioLab]

This 50-Second Clip Proves Your Brain is Amazing

By Anupum Pant

There was a post I made in the past, about a popular email forward which mentioned a paragraph and it seemed like gibberish at first. But when you actually tried to read it, you were able to read is at a very normal pace. It was as if the totally mixed up spellings did not matter. Now, that wasn’t a very scientific way of going about claiming something – through an email forward. No one really knows where it came from. Certainly not from Cambridge. And right at the end of that article, the claims of that email were convincingly challenged.

What we see today is something similar, just that, it about listening, not about reading. Plus, this one, unlike the “spelling does not matter” claim, comes directly from a very reliable source – Jayatri Das, Chief bioscientist at Franklin Institute.

In an audio broadcast uploaded on soundcould, she demonstrates a very strong and fundamental trait of the human brain.

In the 50 second sound clip, she first plays a sound that is heavily distorted by a computer. You aren’t able to make any sense out of that sound. What happens next is amazing.

The sound plays again – the distorted R2D2-ish sound. Next, she plays the actual sentence which was distorted to make it sound like gibberish. The real sentence (which I won’t reveal in the text because it would ruin it for you if you read this first) is totally clear. Now, when she plays the gibberish again, somehow you are easily able to understand it!

It’s right here and you can experience it for yourself by listening (and participating) in the 50-second clip. It is a sound you literally “cannot un-hear”.

However, I had forgotten the real sentence after a couple of days, so the clip seemed to me like what it would to a fresh test subject when I listened to it again after a week. That means technically, you are able to un-hear it.

As this article from the Atlantic – where I first read about it – puts it. It is a lot like this visual experiment.

Did you happen to notice the following image that made fun of the FIFA Worldcup 2014’s logo? I’ve attached it below, if you haven’t seen it.

The image makes the logo look like a facepalm. Before this, you must have never thought of the logo to be a facepalm. But, after you see this, every time you see the actual logo, you’ll see a facepalm.

It’s amazing what the brain can do. world cup 2014 facepalm meme

Video: Change Blindness

By Anupum Pant

There’s so much happening around you that if your brain doesn’t have this ability to see and skip processing most of the useless information the eyes send it, you’d probably go mad in a day. That is change blindness. In that way, It is good for you. But you must not have realized how narrow your attention of focus can be. This video demonstrates it better than anything else.

By the way, when you watch the first clip where the camera pans with the Pacman, try focussing on the Pacman only. Or you won’t be able to appreciate the effect as much.

Eyes of the Mantis Shrimp – Colours and Hexnocular Vision

By Anupum Pant

Of course there’s a lot of other things to talk about the Mantis Shrimp. But today, I’m going to only talk about its eyes.

Colours

The eyes of a Mantis Shrimp are one of the most advanced eyes on the planet. To realize how extraordinary their colour vision is, you need to have some perspective on what we are talking about.

Colour is just a trick of our mind. What we see is really out there, there’s no way to know for sure if it is the reality. Or, there’s no way for us to explain what we really see.

For instance, imagine how we see the world, say particularly, the colour red and all its derived colours. Now, what you see is very different from how a colour blind person or a dog sees it. Dogs and about 10% of men who are colour blind can’t see colours like we do. That is because, instead of 3 cones (red, blue and green sensitive ones), they just have two. If you and a dog would point their eyes towards the same rainbow, both of you would see a very different image (if you are not colour blind).

A dog probably would see a rainbow which would start with a blue colour and then there’d be green in it for a dog. Nothing else. That is because it has no red sensitive cones. A single difference in the number of types cones can make such a huge difference in the colour vision. Addition of the single red sensitive cone enables us to see a whole set of new colours.

Some women (estimated to be about 2-3%of the world’s population!) have a super-human ability that makes them able to see a whole set of new colours. Like we see a million different colours, these women can probably see 100 Million different colours. It’s hard to imagine what they really see. Probably that is why they say men are so bad at colours.

Similarly, consider a butterfly. They have 5-6 different kinds of cone receptors. So, when they look at a rainbow, they probably see a range of colours between the blues and the greens and the greens and the yellows. Of course, it can also see an ultraviolet beyond the violet. Incredible enough.

mantis colour range

The Mantis Shrimp, an animal of the size of your finger, has one of the most amazing colour visions. It has 16 different types of cones. You can’t even start to imagine how the world looks to them. And suppose they try and see a rainbow, they’d see a really rich set of colours. No other animals we know have even a visual system that is half as advanced.  There’s no reason they must have this ability.16 is just too many cones!

Needless to say, these technological marvels can see ultra-violet light, infra-red light, and some can even see polarised light.

Hexnocular vision

tumblr_ljijxhMzSC1qfcmjd

Now, we see with our two eyes and call it a binocular vision. We have 2 eyes and 1 focal point each. So, to see in 3-D, we need both out eyes.

Mantis Shrimp, however, has 2 eyes with 3 focal points each. Each of its eye is divided into 3 sections and can see 3 different images, using the 3 different sections. It doesn’t need 2 eyes to see in 3-D. One is enough. Besides that, it is able to judge depth much better than we are able to do it. Think of an image stitched out of 6 different eyes.

Cutting a Round Cake on Scientific Principles

By Anupum Pant

Background

For years the phrase “cake cutting” has conjured up just one image in my brain – A triangular section of the cake. This way of cutting a cake is so normal that even the tools (especially the spatula) that are made for cake cutting are made in a way that’d work with best when you are making that traditional triangular cut. Turns out, this method of cutting a cake which we’ve all know for years is totally wrong.

Why is it wrong?

It’s wrong mostly for mathematical loners. People who, on their birthday, have no one around to share the cake with, and cannot finish off the whole cake. For them and the ones who have to store the cake after cutting it, are extremely careful about how moist the edges remain when they next eat it, this right way to cut a cake might be of great importance.

The way we’ve always know is “wrong” because when you cut off, say a single section of the cake and decide to store the larger piece in the fridge, some internal part of the cake remains exposed and it dries off. So, the next time you cut off a piece near the area where you started, you’d get a freshly cut moist wall of cake on one side, and a repulsively hard dried up wall on the other. That, some think, is extremely unpleasant.

What’s the Right way?

About 100 years back, a brilliant Polymmath (and a mathematician), Sir Francis Galton, faced a similar annoyance. So, instead of cursing others for having invented an absurdly inefficient way to cut a cake, he decided to develop his own. He ended up developing a very simple and efficient cut which helped him keep the cake wall relatively moist. Here’s how the cut works. (Cut along the dotted line)

the right way to cut a cake

Describing his new way of cutting cakes, he got an article published in the Nature magazine (dated December 20th, 1906). “Cutting a Round Cake on Scientific Principles”

Alex Bellos from the Numberphiles describes it in a video below:

Revolutionary – A Simple Yet Much Stronger Artificial Muscle

By Anupum Pant

Background

Some things are just too simple to be noticed by most adults, rather a child would notice it better. Scientists are the ones who manage to hone their ability to  look at things like a child would see it – Children of course are the best scientists. That is what makes scientists different from most other people. And that is what helps them make elegant discoveries, like the one we are seeing here today.

Now, this may seem like a useless thing to some, but in reality the simple fishing line muscle is a huge step towards creating affordable personal robots, exoskeletons and a host of other earth changing devices. I can’t stop thinking how massive this simple thing could end up being.

The Discovery

A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, did exactly that. In a simple nylon fishing line, these researchers saw something that everyone till date has failed to notice. They noticed that, by twisting a nylon line into a coil (and heat treating), they could turn it into an artificial muscle. Later it was learnt that a simple artificial muscle made in this manner is about 100 times stronger than a human muscle and can go through millions of cycles without failing.

It’s actually so simple to do that you could make an artificial muscle in your own home. In fact, it works with a variety of other kinds of materials too, but better stick to the tested fishing line for now.

All you need to do is to hold one end of a long fishing line and start twisting the other end (a hand mixer could come in handy here). At some point the line reaches a point where it can’t twist any more, and then it starts getting coiled into a telephone wire kind of a spring. Now it can be heated in an oven (carefully, without melting) and cooled to lock it in this coil shape. There, you’ve got your own artificial muscle.

Working

Unlike what you think it would do when heated, the coil actually contracts and can lift a good amount of weight. An array of such artificial muscle fibres could lift a much heavier weight. as shown in the video below.

At first I found it confusing. It was hard for me to understand, what physics goes inside that makes the coil contract as a whole when it is heated. From the words of a wise scienitist, I found that it works like a chinese finger trap (and then I had to look what this piece of origami was). Whatever the coil does is absolutely elegant. It’s almost impossible for me to explain in words how it works. You might have to watch the video below…

The catch is that the nylon muscles made in this manner are very inefficient, but that can be worked upon.

Killer Lakes – A Very Weird Natural Disaster

By Anupum Pant

In the Northwest Cameroon (Africa) there’s a lake which is commonly  known among the locals as “The Bad Lake”. The official name of this lake however is, lake Nyos. This is one of those three or four special lakes in the world which are mostly know for their mass killings. The locals living near the lake Nyos in particular have a very grim story to tell from the past.

The Story

A seemingly innocuous landslide occurred on August 21st, 1986. This created a mini tsunami and sent red water (due to iron) flying 300 feet in the air. There was nothing really dangerous about the flying water. But, as a result if this landslide, it is believed that about 1.2 cubic kilometres of carbon dioxide from the lake Nyos got released. The trigger could have been something else, but the gas that got released was carbon dioxide for sure.

This rare kind of a natural disaster is known as a Limnic Eruption or Lake overturn. There are just 2 other lakes known where scientists think this can happen – Lake Monoun, Cameroon, and Lake Kivu of Congo

The huge amount of CO2, being heavier than air, spread into the nearby low-lying villages in a range of 25 km. People had nowhere to escape and nearly everyone died. Only a few hundreds who acted quick, and escaped to higher ground on vehicles could save themselves. That day, 1,700 people and 3,600 livestock got suffocated to death.

Why it Happened

volcanoLake Nyos like only a few other lakes in the world was formed about 400 years ago on a huge crater. Far below the lake there’s magma and it spews CO2 continuously into the lake, forming huge amounts of carbonated water (a good thing for Coke lovers). The CO2 doesn’t usually release in a single go all the time. It happens gradually, and the pipes now installed to fix this keep releasing CO2 all the time (The pressure of gas also carries water along to form a beautiful fountain).

Sometimes however, due to some triggers, the CO2 can get released in a single go and cause the absurd natural disaster which ends up killing thousands.

The Lake Kivu which is in Congo probably holds a much worse headline for the future. This one is about a 1000 times larger than lake Nyos and is surrounded by heavily populated towns. There’s magma below it too and any sort of disruption could cause massive amounts of carbon dioxide to release into the nearby towns. To add to the fears, researchers have found that the massive lake Kivu’s life goes extinct every 1000 years. We can only wait and watch what happens…

A Bizarre Weight Loss Story – Year Without Food

By Anupum Pant

Background

What this grossly obese man did in the year 1965 is probably one of the most stupidest things you could emulate to lose weight. Doctors, and I would advice you totally against it. Yet, I felt that it’s good to know a stupid thing once in a while, in order to avoid it (maybe). Luckily, the man who did it, ended up fine and also lost several dozens of kilograms in the process. Here’s what happened…

Story time

A man who weighed 207 kg decided to go on a fast to lose weight. His fast lasted for 382 days. For the whole 1 year and 17 days, this man ate nothing. He only consumed “non-energy-containing fluids”, multi-vitamin tablets and potassium tablets. It’s important to know that he whole thing was monitored closely. It’s probably the longest reported fast. (A much much longer claimed fast – which they say lasted more than 70 years – is probably fake and pretty interesting too)

By the end of his fast, the man had lost around 126 kg of weight. That’s about 61% of his initial body weight! For the whole time, his body had used up the stored fat to power him. It was incredibly lucky for him that he did not face any adverse conditions while he was doing this. A slightly gross thing to know is that, since he wasn’t eating anything, he felt a need to use the bathroom only once in 40-50 days.

The Science of it

Normally if you don’t eat for a couple of hours, the human body is able to extract energy from the glucose in your bloodstream and liver. After about 8 hours, you no longer have any of the glucose left in your body.

Once the glucose is finished, the body starts burning a bunch off glucose molecules stuck together – known as glycogen, stored in muscles and liver. This source finishes off in about 2 days’ time. After that the body starts breaking down muscles. But that can be avoided by taking up a few defined exercise routines.

Next the body starts using up fat molecules into glycerol and free fatty acids. Everything in your body can run from this good source of energy. And that is how the fat gets lost. Surely, you don’t want to do that because you’ll end up sick, weak, depressed and cranky. You might even die if you try this.

[Source]

Bonus

Here’s an account of a person, who recently tried fasting for 11 months. Below is an image of what the fast did to him. Yes, he’s the same person (with a gap of 11 months of course). It was clearly a very bad experience. [Link]

before after

An Incredibly Simple Way to Kill A Tree

By Anupum Pant

Background

Of course, killing a tree is something I’d never want to do. I see them as old and wise people who have grown and matured for years. Plus they give us so much in return. And yet sometimes, they say, there are good reasons to kill a tree. I’ll probably never understand.

Anyway, I thought it’s good to know, just for the sake of knowing that there is an incredibly simple technique that is often used to kill trees (for legit reasons) and is widely known among horticulturists. I learnt about it just today, and I felt it was worth sharing.

It’s called Girdling (also known as  ring barking or ring-barking). Or, a technique which involves removal / peeling of a ring of bark from a tree, and the phloem layer (Like shown in the picture above). Yes, that’s it, this kills a tree. And it’s slow death. A tree which gets girdled dies gradually in about a year or more.

This is why it works…

The central part of the tree trunk (wooden part) is involved in taking the nutrients and water up to the leaves. The leaves then get exposed in the sun and mix in carbon dioxide to make sugar and other reduced carbon compounds. Most of us know that. But this is what not many know…

The outer part of the trunk – the bark and the phloem layer – also has a solid function that sustains growth and function. It’s responsible to carry the sugar (and other stuff) made by the leaves, back to the root. That is basically food to sustain growth and function of the roots. If that doesn’t reach the roots, the roots don’t receive what is required for their growth and function. Girdling does exactly that – cuts off the down-flow of food. As a result, the root dies and with it dies the whole tree. All of this happens very slowly.

To be noted

Jumping the Girdle: Some times, trees are able to repair this damage. It’s called a jumped girdle. To prevent that from happening, often smear herbicide over the girdled area.

Better Fruits: This technique is also used by some farmers to force the tree to bear better fruits – as no sugar goes down into the roots – the fruits are usually bigger and better if they come from a girdled tree. Of course these better fruits come with a price.

Girdling is particularly a good way to end trees like Aspens because as we know from Pando, many other Aspens can sprout up from the roots and cause a bigger mess if just the top part of this tree is cut off.

Girdling is a better way to kill a tree because it gives the environment time to adjust, also it is cheaper and prevents damage to the other delicate plants around the tree.

[Source]

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The Leaping Shampoo Trick – Kaye Effect

By Anupum Pant

This is really interesting and I can’t explain why. You’ll have to see it for yourself.

Long time back, researchers at the University of Twente in The Netherlands thought of something very weird. They decided to drop a thin stream of shampoo from a height of about 20 cm, ended up discovering an absurd physical effect and winning great accolades for it – The Kaye effect.

The seemingly weird effect can fairly easily be achieved at home by dropping a thin stream of shampoo on a relatively hard surface. In individual steps, this is what happens when you do it:

  • As the stream gets collected, it forms a little shampoo heap.
  • Amazingly, and counter-intuitively, a secondary stream ejects off the heap.
  • The mythical secondary stream becomes bigger, shoots further.
  • And finally hits the incoming stream – this collapses the Kaye effect.

Of course, everything happens really fast. But, if you look at it on extremely slowed down film, you’d see the individual steps happening one after the other.

True, the secondary stream collapses too quickly, scientists weren’t happy about that either. So, they tried tilting the hard surface slightly to achieve a stabler version. Lo! And they had a stable Kaye effect.

This happens because due to certain physical forces the viscous liquid becomes slightly less viscous temporarily – they call it shear thinning. As a result, it causes a new stream to emerge. May be the same effect could be achieved with other thicker liquids like lava, ketchup, whipped cream, blood, paint, and nail polish. But, then lava is too dangerous, and others (barring blood and paint) seem to be too thick. I’m guessing, dropping thicker ones from a higher place could make this happen.

If you find this interesting,you’d definitely love the egg and milk effect, also the chain of beads defying gravity.

Here, watch it on video.

Eye of the Sahara – A Geological Mystery

By Anupum Pant

Unlike the great wall of China, this huge eye-like geological formation in the Sahara desert is actually visible from the space. In fact, it wasn’t even discovered before the space age.

The Richat Structure, or as some say, eye of the Sahara, is a deeply eroded and a slightly elliptical formation in the Sahara desert near Ouadane, west–central Mauritania. The whole structure is approximately 50 km wide and has several concentric formations. Since it is so large, it wasn’t identified till the astronauts saw it from the space. Here’s a google satellite image of the structure.

Some other times, people have also called it the Blue eye of Africa. That is because in some images taken by the NASA, the geological formation looks blue in colour.

Although the formation itself is an incredible thing to watch, there’s something more astounding about it. No one till date has been able to explain the reason behind the formation of this huge blue eye in the centre of the desert.

Since the formation is very circular (not too elliptical), some say that it was formed due to a asteroid strike. That theory however has been debunked and  it was said that it was probably formed due to a volcanic eruption. And as there is no evidence of any igneous or volcanic rock in that place, the volcanic eruption theory doesn’t work too.

Other interesting point of view is that the almost equidistant concentric rings from the centre might be so symmetrical because they were probably man-made. Also, the whole formation seems to fit the description of Atlantis given by Plato. Although it seems highly improbable that this was the city of Atlantis, it is still a very interesting way to look at it.

Anyway, there’s a lot to be studied about it, but the inaccessibility of the place makes it harder. Maybe in the near future, scientists might be able to find what actually caused this geological formation.

via [GigalResearch]

Australian Bird Makes Camera Shutter Sounds

By Anupum Pant

Until now I hadn’t even heard about, probably the most well-known bird of Australia, the Lyrebird. These birds are there on the 10 cents coins in Australia. Their feathers are beautiful, but what these birds can do is truly astonishing – The R2D2s of the real world.

The Lyrebird has been seen mimicking the sounds of at least twenty other birds. That’s not all. Some of these captive Lyrebirds have been seen mimicking sounds of human technology like a camera shutter, car alarm and a chainsaw too – as seen in the video below.

In 1969, as observed by an ornithologist in New England National Park, these birds were able to reproduce sounds of a flute, singing two famous songs of the 30s “The Keel Row” and “Mosquito’s Dance.”  They had learnt it from a farmer who used to play these tunes on a flute.

A word of caution

Although the video would lead you to believe that wild birds have started mimicking sounds of human technology, it isn’t totally true. The birds that has been shown in the video, in reality, are captive birds from Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary and from the Adelaide Zoo. While Attenborough makes it seem like the bird is mimicking “sounds of the forest”. these clips are not typically what these wild birds do in the wild.

Maybe it happens in the wild too, but it’s highly unlikely because the human technology sounds are usually lost amidst the forest sounds. Moreover, never in the past has there been a recording of this bird mimicking human technology sounds in the wild. Maybe they do, but science requires evidence.

Brass Doorknobs of Public Restrooms

By Anupum Pant

I remember my grandma telling me to keep some water overnight in a copper pot, and in the morning, she used to drink it. I never understood why she did that. Backed by solid science, today I’m able to appreciate her age-old wisdom.

Today, to get rid of the problem causing bacteria, trusting brass doorknobs is better than trusting those triclosan lad anti-bacterial soaps. Yes, brass can kill bacteria very effectively.

Doorknobs are probably the most touched objects, especially the ones that are on the doors of a toilet at the mall. A doorknob probably even beats smartphones because a doorknob is accessible to anyone and everyone, whereas a smartphone is usually touched by a single individual.

Although, I’m not totally sure that a doorknob is really one of the most touched objects, one thing is for sure – Door knobs are the places where an incredible amount of sickness causing germs get collected. Thanks to the thousands of unclean hands coming straight from the toilet and touching the knob for the day.

And yet, you don’t often get sick after touching public restroom knobs. That is because doorknobs are normally made of brass. Brass and a couple of other metals have an ability to clean themselves – in a given amount of time these metals are able to sterilize themselves! This is called the Oligodynamic effect. Sounds like a cool name to remember because it’s easy to remember and nothing else would annoy your friends more than you bringing it up amidst conversations…

It has been tested and found that brass is able to sterilize itself in the span of eight hours. While some have tried to explain how it works, no one has been able to explain the effect in a satisfactory manner.

Other metals like silver, copper and copper alloys are able to kill bacteria better. Silver, purportedly is a very robust disinfectant. But, not many would be able to afford doorknobs made out of silver or pure copper. Instead, a far cheaper alloy consisting of copper and zinc (brass) is used to make bacteria zapping doorknobs.

Stainless steel and aluminium metals aren’t able to do this. Be careful when you have to twist doorknobs made of Steel or Aluminium. These are metals that could get you sick.

[Wikipedia]

2000 Year Old Extinct Tree is No Longer Extinct

By Anupum Pant

At Herod the Great’s palace in Masada, Israel, from the year 1963 to 1965 an excavation was carried out. It was an excavation which blew everyone’s mind. As a result of this archaeological endeavour, an ancient jar containing date palm (Judean Palm) seeds was unearthed. The radio dating of these seeds confirmed that they were about 2000 years old. Like all other excavated material, the seeds too were sent into a safe storage at the  Bar-Ilan University. For the next 40 years, these seeds remained in the storage.

The seeds which were unearthed belonged to a plant which in its time had flourished for thousands of years. Around 150 AD the tree went extinct. None of them remained. However, the seeds did…

In the year 2005, a researcher, Elaine Solowey, decided to plant the seed. Elaine was pretty sure that a 2000 year old seed would be totally dead by now, and there’s a little chance it would even sprout. She went ahead anyway.

Elaine did a deep research on how to revive old seeds. Then, she first soaked them in hot water. And then in a nutrient rich solution. Finally they were put in contact with an enzymatic fertilizer.

To her surprise the seed did germinate. But when it did come out, Elaine was pretty sure that the sapling would die out. It didn’t. Although there were claims of a 32,000 year old germinated seed later in the year 2012, in its time, the Judean palm’s name had gone into the record books as the oldest seed to have ever sprouted…

The tree has been named Methuselah after the oldest person named in the Old Testament of the Bible. Today the plant still continues to grow and has even made its first flowers.

[More about it]