Appreciating Ants and Their Counting Skills

By Anupum Pant

Success = Ants

Ants are arguably the most successful multi-cellular organisms to have ever existed on earth. The first ants on earth started appearing long before humans, even before dinosaurs – about 120 million years from now. Since then, they have even survived a mass extinction event (Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event) which wiped off all the dinosaurs from the face of our planet.

Sheer Number

Except Antarctica, the Arctic, and some other remote islands, ants have spread into almost every other part of the land. In fact, today, there are so many ants in the world that for each human being on the planet, at any point of time, there are about 1.5 billion living ants – about 10 thousand trillion ants in total! Of these 8000 kinds of ants that exist, only 10% of the species have been studied.

Collective intelligence

Ants, individually aren’t very bright. But they live in vast colonies that can include upto 50 million individuals in a single colony. Each one of them can contribute their own intelligence to the group, to form a huge brain – a “collective intelligence” of a super-organism. Just like each of our neurons in our brains work individually to form an intelligent brain.

For example, it is known that each of the fire ant’s exoskeleton is made up of a material that repels water. Together, these ants can take advantage of this blessing to survive floods. It has been seen that several hundreds of ants can, within seconds, assemble into a raft that floats on water for a long time. They don’t need your boat Dexter.

Their homes

Ants are able to build massive underground cities. Some scientists have tried pouring molten aluminum or concrete, and digging into their underground cities to study their structure. The results were incredible. A colossal network of well ventilated highways and side-roads was found connecting their colonies. It seemed as if the whole structure was designed by a single master-mind. [Video]

And they can also count

In the arid deserts where the winds are powerful enough to blow away the chemical trails marked by ants, they use their in-built pedometers (step counting machines) to find their way back home. [Video]

The Tarahumara People Can Run for 400 Miles Non-Stop

By Anupum Pant

The marathon is one of the most popular long-distance running events and is followed by people from around the world. An athlete, to even finish the ~42 km race, has to go through a training that lasts several months (or years).The training is designed to develop the slow twitch muscle fibers which enables athletes to run for a long distances without getting tired. But, lacking access to all the hi-tech training equipment, there are people who can run fifteen times that in one session.

Tarahumara people or ‘Running people’ are a group of Native American people living in the north-western Mexico who can run 400+ miles in around 50 hours! Sounds impossible, but it is true. Astonishingly, the entire tribe consisting of men, women, old and young, every one of them is capable of running at least 250+ miles in a single run, without shoes. Such extreme feat of endurance has never been seen among humans anywhere else in the world.

They are the kind of people who run to live. They have running events lasting more than 200 miles regularly. They run to send messages and they run for food; Like Michael Stevens from Vsauce says, as hunters humans who can run persistently, can outrun even horses.

In fact, I thought about writing this after I watched a very interesting video on Vsauce and was feeling uneasy that Michael had missed the Tarahumara people. – [Video]

Where do they get the energy? – Unlike athletes who last on energy gained from Gatorade (or other drinks), these people run on copious amounts of a beverage made from corn, to keep up with the amount of calories they burn in a single event – around 43,000 calories. A great workout indeed!

One thing that has confused me: If they can run 400 miles with ease, why don’t they take part in the marathon events? I’m guessing that they run for long but don’t run as fast as a marathon runner. If you know why, tell me in the comments section below.

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#StopTheMyth Saving Lives Leads to Overpopulation

By Anupum Pant

It only seems logical to think that spending millions of dollars to save lives of poor children must be aggravating another problem that Earth is facing today – Overpopulation. Fortunately, that isn’t the case. In fact the complete opposite of what seems logical, happens.

Saving lives of the poor is a necessity for stopping population growth. It doesn’t aggravate the problem. Saving lives is one big thing that will help in dealing with overpopulation.

Professor Hans Rosling explains how:

Other 2 common myths

  • Poor countries are doomed to stay poor for ever – This is not true.
  • Foreign aid is a waste – No! Foreign aid is important. Most poor countries that received aid 20 years ago are doing better than before.

A better place

Also, the earth is turning into a better place despite what the media has to say. As Bill gates puts it in the 2014 Gates Annual letter:

If you read the news every day, it’s easy to get the impression that the world is getting worse. There is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on bad news, of course—as long as you get it in context. Melinda and I are disgusted by the fact that more than six million children died last year. But we are motivated by the fact that this number is the lowest ever recorded. We want to make sure it keeps going down.

#StopTheMyth

Source: [Gates Foundation]

Blood Falls – A Strange Place Home to Strange Creatures

By Anupum Pant

Red colored water, which gives it name blood falls, emerges continually from the edge of a glacier in east Antarctica. The source of this red-colored-water is said to be a lake that is buried 400 meters under a glacier. The water of this lake is extremely salty and is about 3 times saltier than sea water. It is so salty that even at temperatures that Antarctica experiences, it doesn’t freeze. The lake is estimated to be around 5 million years old!

5 million years ago, this part of Antarctica was under sea water. Gradually glaciers started collecting around and over the lake. This made the water body isolated from the main sea and it became a lake eventually. Over time, as it got separated – like the Taal lake – it grew saltier (Taal lake got isolated too, but it turned less saltier). With this lake, the organisms living in it got trapped in this natural time capsule too.

What gives it the color red?

The falls are not red due to some mysterious spores that were found in the red rains of Kerala. What gives it that color, is a popular chemical phenomenon – iron rust.

The lake gets its supply of iron from the bedrock below it. As the water leaks out from the edge, the iron present in water gets oxidized. This oxidized or rusted iron gives the water its red color.

And since the lake has almost no supply of oxygen from around it, the water underneath is probably still like…water – not red (I’m not sure about it).

But that isn’t even anything interesting I’ve talked about the blood falls yet. The most incredible thing is the creatures that have been found living in those waters.

For millions of years, in the extremely salty waters of the lake with almost no oxygen or sun light, scientists have found a kind of micro-organism that has survived there. The kind of process they use to live has dazed scientists.

The microbes living there have been surviving on iron and sulfur! By breaking sulfates to get oxygen. And iron has been restoring the sulfates. It is a beautiful cycle that has never been seen anywhere else. This strange cycle has widened our view on how life could exist on other planets without oxygen in native state.

Source – SciShow by Hank Green.

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Nuclear Powered Pacemakers for the Heart

By Anupum Pant

Heart and Pacemakers

Your heart is a complex device. It comes with its own sophisticated electrical system that controls the rate and rhythm of your heartbeats. The electrical system is responsible to make the heart contract and as a result pump blood into your body. It is required to keep a proper rate and rhythm. There is a whole lot to learn about how the human heart works. But that is for some other day. Or, you can read it here – [Link]

As years pass, like any other electrical system, even the heart is prone to electrical faults. Faulty signals can make the rhythmic beating, non-rhythmic. This can make life difficult for a person. Enter pacemaker…

Pacemakers are small devices that are placed in the chest. They use low energy pulses to maintain the rate and rhythm of your heartbeats by overcoming the faulty electrical signals. Sometimes Permanent pacemakers have to be used to control long-term heart problems. For this, they are required to run for a long time without replacement. Who’d want their chest dug every two months to replace the pacemaker battery?!

Nuclear powered

Nuclear batteries work due to a nonstop radioactive decay of certain elements. They can last for incredibly long times. Due to their extremely long lives and high densities they are used in space devices and other underwater systems; basically, in systems where replacement of batteries is not an option. So, scientists from the past thought – why not use them to power pacemakers too!

In the 1960s, scientists at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico began exploring the feasibility of being able to use nuclear power for pacemakers. The idea was to develop a penny sized battery that could be used with a pacemaker and could be implanted in a human body. It was made. And they decided to call it an atomic battery or Radioisotope battery or simply a nuclear battery.

Despite bearing the name “nuclear” battery, they were not really little nuclear reactors as they didn’t use chain reactions to produce energy. So, there was no danger of a meltdown. They were safe devices. No radiation related issues were ever reported.

The Problem

Agreed these batteries were costly and weighed a lot, but that was not the problem. The big problem was that they contained hazardous material which had to be recovered once a patient died. There were several instances when a person had died; the living relative had returned the nuclear battery, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission never received it.

However, later in the year 1988 last of the nuclear batteries were used. Now they were being replaced with long lasting (~10 years) lithium batteries.

Even today Los Alamos National Laboratory has a fact sheet on their website that mentions what to do in case you find a nuclear battery.

Tiger Fish Jumps Out of Water and Catches Flying Birds

By Anupum Pant

It is normal for birds to swoop down and catch fish from water. But, since 1940s, stories about a meter-long-demonic-African-fish leaping out of water to catch birds in mid-air have been told. They were only stories; no one had seen the actual occurrence…Until now.

Recently, a video of it happening was captured by a team of researchers from North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa, and was posted on YouTube. As expected, the video went viral. Who wouldn’t love watching a fish-eating a bird! I put it on repeat and must have watched it 10 times already.

In the video you see a Tiger fish (Hydrocynus vittatus – literally means a ‘spotted water dog’) that lives in African fresh waters. It is one of the largest predators there and lives with a larger cousin, the Giant Tiger fish (Hydrocynus goliath). The Tiger fish can measure as much as 1 meter in length. On the other hand, giant tiger fish (not seen here) can reach up to 1.5 meters in length.

Taking shots around the South African lake in the Mapungubwe National Park, they were not really expecting to record a video in which a fish would fly out of the water and catch a swallow. Rather they were there to study migration and habitat at the lake. The team was surprised to see this. The director said:

“The whole action of jumping and catching the swallow in flight happens so incredibly quickly that after we first saw it, it took all of us a while to really fully comprehend what we had just seen.”

Given that a fish in water, or even human beings for that matter, cannot see beyond a specific window (The Underwater Optical Man-hole), this fish does an amazing job of tracking and striking a bird in mid-flight with so much precision. Cheers for that Mr. Tiger Fish.

Agreed the video isn’t clear, but it the first of its kind. Soon, I hope, we’ll see HD, NatGeo quality videos. Watch it on video here: [Video]

Productivity: A Doze of Cuteness is good before Work

By Anupum Pant

If you like to secretly surf the /r/aww page at work, well, science says, it no longer has to be a secret activity. An experiment conducted by researchers at Hiroshima University is a perfect scientific document to convince your boss to allow you a dose of cuteness at work. So here’s a picture of a bunny with a backpack. bunny with a backpack

Note: Cuteness also causes “cute aggression”

According to the study conducted by scientists at Hiroshima University, looking at cute pictures could make you work better. More specifically, cute pictures inspire fine tuned attention and careful behavior.

The study conducted three experiments to check the effects of cute pictures on tasks performed afterwards:

1. A few university students were asked to perform tasks which required a careful coordination of small muscular movements (eg: small finger movements), before and after viewing images of baby or adult animals; performance was measured. It was found that performance measured using the number of successful trials increased after viewing cute images. A performance increase of about 45% was measured. “Less cute pictures” had a positive effect too. But this was found to be much lesser than the performance increase measured after watching cute pictures – around 12% increase.

2. The second experiment was conducted on the same lines, except that the performance task was changed. This time subjects were asked to perform counting tasks. For example, they were given an array of numbers and were asked to count the number of times the number 3 appeared in it. Again, cute and less cute pictures resulted in a performance increase of 15% and 2% respectively.

3. In the third experiment a global-local letter task (more about it here) was given to the subjects. The results showed that the students performed tasks requiring focused attention more carefully after viewing cute images.

Explanation

The study propelled the lead researcher, Hiroshi Nittono, to find an proper reasoning for this effect; he implies that since humans are hard-wired to speak & deal slowly & carefully when they are around little babies, they are inclined to do the same with other tasks after looking at cute things.

Gravity Defying Chain of Beads

By Anupum Pant

Chain of Beads

Suppose, you have a neat pile of a really long chain of beads in a beaker (Newton’s beads) and you give one end of the beads a tug and let it drop on the floor, what do you think will happen?

Steve Mould, a YouTuber, did the same with a 8000 bead chain. It was 50 meter long chain of beads placed neatly in a container. Then, after he tugged it out and let it drop, the chain mysteriously formed an arc above the beaker and continued to self-siphon away till the end. Just like a water-siphon.

Watch it in video to see what happens. [Video]

What keeps it going?

To figure out what was actually going on here and to understand the exact physics of it, a group of physicists recorded the “gravitational defiance” using a hi-speed camera. Here is a five-minute long video-bliss, brought to you by the Earth Unplugged channel. [video]

As Steve explains, it is like a tug-of war between the outer chain and the inner chain. The inner chain has to keep up with the fast-moving outer chain. As a result, it [the inner chain] goes up fast. It builds up momentum and is unable to stop itself. So, it ends up forming that arc while it is trying to slow down and change direction.

Meet a 12-year-old Scientist – Peyton Robertson

By Anupum Pant

Today we meet a 12-year-old ‘man’ who has been on an invention spree since he was just 8 years old. If I may use a pop-culture reference, this adorable boy is a Sheldon Copper in the making.

Peyton Robertson from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, presently has 3 patents pending:

  1. A case (box) to maintain a resting golf ball’s temperature – Peyton loves golf. And on one cold day, when he observed that his golf balls weren’t bouncing the way they should have been, he, instead of sleeping on the problem, thought of finding a solution.
  2. Retractable training wheels: This one is a pair of retractable training wheels connected to a lever mechanism on the handle of a bicycle – you press the lever and the training wheels rise up. A perfect solution for kids who want to experience the joy of biking while they are learning to ride. He invented this to help his sister when she was learning to ride a bicycle. Today, bike manufacturers are flocking around him to buy his idea.
  3. A sand-less sand bag: When the super-storm Sandy struck 24 US states in October last year, the entire eastern sea-face from Florida to Maine suffered great losses. It caused a damage of around $65 billion. Peyton saw this and figured that the sand bags that were being used for flood defense contributed to a lot of inefficiency. These bags were 40 pounds each; moving them from one place to another was tough. But they had to be heavy to stop the water. Besides that, the bags when stacked left undesirable gaps in between, which caused a leakage. Peyton felt a need to contribute to make people better equipped for floods in the future.

His solution – A sand-less sand bag – is better than the traditional bag in two ways. Firstly, weighing around 4 pounds, it is significantly lighter than the sand bag. It contains a mixture of, a polymer that expands when it comes in contact with water, and salt which makes it heavy when it wets. Secondly, this bag comes with an interlocking fastener which keeps the bag in place when it expands – Removing any gaps which could create a leak during the floods. Moreover these bags can be dried later to be reused.

The witty sandbag made him the youngest ever person to win the Discovery Young Scientist Challenge. The prize – $25,000 and a trip to Costa Rica!

In an interview with TED blog he said:

Failure is progress and a normal part of the process. Whether it’s science or life, you have to start, fail and just keep pushing. In a football game, time runs out, and a golf match ends after the last hole. But when you are working on something and it doesn’t work, you just extend the game – and give your experiment or your prototype another go.

It was a delight to watch the charming boy speak on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Sadly, that video no longer exists, here’s a replacement with the guy’s own pitch:

Benford’s Law Will Make You Wonder For a While

By Anupum Pant

Benford’s law is a fairly simple law to grasp and it will blow your mind. It deals with the leading digits of numbers.

So, for example, you have the number 28 – The leading digit for it would be 2. Similarly, the leading digit for 934 would be 9. Just pick the first digit. Now…

In a data set you’d say – it is common sense to assume that the probability of leading digit one (1) appearing would be more or less equal to that of leading digit nine (9).
As there are 9 possible leading digits, you’d think that the probability of each leading digit would compute to something around 0.11
You’d imagine that it would be normal to assume a nearly straight graph of probability vs. leading digit. But this isn’t true.

Benford’s law says

Your common sense fails. What actually happens is that the likelihood of 1 appearing as the first digit in a data set is around 0.3
For the following digits, the probability keeps decreasing. And the following graph appears. You’ll see that the numbers rarely start with nine!

Benford2

When does it work?

This counter-intuitive result applies to a wide variety of natural data sets. It works the best if your set spans quite a few orders of magnitude. Natural set of data like stock prices, electricity bills, populations, which could range from few single digit values to several digits work the best. Other data like the heights of people doesn’t work because it does not span “quite a few orders of magnitude”. Also, artificially tampered data fails to comply because the person who tampers does the same mistake everyone does. Therefore, Benford’s law is also used to detect frauds in data.

Example:

  1. Count the number of data points in a data set which have the leading digit 1 and write the number next to the number 1 in a table.
  2. Then, keep repeating it for all the numbers 2, 3, 4 and so on.
  3. Calculate the probabilities for each. In the end you’ll be left with a table that would look something like this. (Probability = Number of Data Points for that  digit / Total Data Points)
Leading Digit Digit Probability
1 0.301
2 0.17
3 0.125
4 0.097
5 0.079
6 0.067
7 0.058
8 0.051
9 0.046

How does it work?

Watch the  following video for the explanation:

Try it yourself: [Kirix]

Gompertz Law – The Dreadful Law of Death

By Anupum Pant

There is no astrologer in the world that can tell you for sure if you’ll die this year or not. But, thanks to Gompertz Law, if you ask me, there is one thing I can tell you for sure – Whatever may be the odds of you dying this year, in 8 years, the likelihood of you dying will double.

This dreadful law of death was named after the first person who noted it – Benjamin Gompertz, in the year 1825. The law rests on a general assumption that a person’s resistance to death decreases as he ages. The Gompertz Law of mortality, put simply in a sentence would compute to this:

Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years.

It is amazing, and no one knows how it works exactly. Why does nature pick the number 8, to double our likelihood of death? We’ll probably never know.

There is a whole table which relies on census data, and statistically notes the probabilities of people dying at different ages. And when it is plotted on a Probability of death vs. Age graph, you get an exponentially increasing mortality rate with age. That is death coming faster as you get older.

Gompertz Law can be verified for real-life data – the 2005 US census data. The following graph and the probability vs. age plotted using the law match almost perfectly. Amazingly, the law holds true for several other countries too.

gompertz law graph

That means, the probability of me, a 25-year-old dying during the next year is very small — about 1 in 3,000. When I become 33, this probability will grow to something around 1 in 1,500. In the next 8 years, the probability of me dying will be 1 in 750, and so on…At the age 100, the probability a person’s death will be about 1 out of 2 – fat chance of successfully moving on to 101!

Theoretically, using this data, it can be said with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130 (of course only if medicine doesn’t start tampering with human genes, or some other artificial factor). There is one thing for sure – there is almost no chance that you are going to beat Mr. Ming.

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15 Craziest Ways to Charge Your Phone [Part 1]

By Anupum Pant

What was considered a remarkable method some years back, today, using solar cells to charge your phone has gone too main stream. How about doing it with a flamethrower, or moon light maybe? Brace yourselves up for an unusually long and interesting compendium of some the most craziest things you could use to charge your phone. And of course, I thank science for bringing these things into the world.

Here, I’ve compiled a few crazy ways to charge your phone. Feel free to contribute any others you know and point out ignorance in the comments section below.

Note: The absurd methods I’ve collected here may set your phone on fire, or worse. So, please do not try them at home. If you do, and succeed in melting your phone, do not blame me for it. Or rather, read whatever you can find about it, before experimenting.

1. Moon Light

What if photovoltaic cells were so efficient that they could draw electricity from the moon-light all night? Well, here you go.
A German architect named André Broessel worked on a project for 3 years to put together a novel process of drawing solar energy that would be far more efficient than the existing ones. In the end, he came out with this perfectly spherical glass ball filled with water, which can use up whatever minimum light it receives to create electricity. So, on a cloudy day or even at night (using light from sun reflected by the moon), with this set up on your terrace you’ll be making electricity 24X7. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about the sun or moon moving in the sky. It comes with a tracking system which adjusts itself to capture the light.
It is basically a super-refined version of one of those solar death rays I talked about a few days back.

Your phone is small; this is something which could make whole skyscrapers go off-grid. So, go and give it away on Indie GoGo whatever little you can contribute to the project.

2. Hand Cranked

ku-xlarge

With the amazing moon light capture device for the future, now let us move on to this hand cranked variant of a mobile power bank, you can buy right now. For everyday use, this backup battery pack comes with a hand turbine power generator that will keep you all charged up all the time. It contains a rechargeable 2000 mAh lithium battery for power which can be cranked up for about a minute to create 4 minutes of battery life out of thin air. If you were expecting free energy, in the end, it is important to know that with this device, to bring your phone from completely dead to 100% battery would require nearly an effort equivalent to a full-body workout.
Also, I found a cheaper variant, which works on a similar principle but isn’t documented well on the internet. It got “India talking” for obvious reasons (costs only $7). They call it the RotoCharger.
If you are looking for an easier way, read on.

3. Lightning

Yes, the same thing that Raijin (雷神) drops on earth 100 times every seconds,  is 3 miles long and carries a current of 10,000 Amps at 100 million Volts, was used to charge a Nokia phone. Last year, scientists from the University of Southampton teamed up with Nokia to try and harness the energy of a lightning bolt to charge a phone. They succeeded in charging a Nokia Lumia 925 with a 200,000 volt lightning bolt, created in the laboratory.

Here is a YouTube video posted by Nokia’s official YouTube channel demonstrating the same:

4. Wind/Air

IfanBlog

In a recent development, researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington have developed a micro-windmill made up of a nickel alloy. It is so small that you could put 10 of them could on a grain of rice. According to them, in the future, hundreds of these tiny windmills could end up in the housing of your smart phones and power them using wind energy.

Earlier, undergrads from Nirma University of Ahmedabad in India had developed an eco-friendly headgear that used a little fan for harnessing wind energy. As it also uses solar energy, at just $22, it is indeed a great device for charging your phone on the move.

Talking about devices that can harness wind energy on the move, the iFan is one ingenious device that comes to mind. It can be mounted on a bicycle or can be held outside a car window to charge your iPhone.

Lung Power: Talking about air, there is this clever gadget that transforms the air from your lungs into energy to charge your phone. Created by Inventor Joco Paulo Lammoglia, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, AIRE mask can harnesses the wind power created by breathing and converts it into electricity to run anything from your iPod to your mobile.

5. Body Heat

body heat phone charger

Working on the same principle as the flashlight without batteries, a jacket developed by Stephen Beeby, Professor of Electronic Systems at the University of Southampton, uses thermoelectricity to power your phone. According to the professor, you have to sleep for quite some time to find a fully charged phone:

Eight hours in the sleeping bag, roughly speaking, will provide 24 minutes of talk time and 11 hours of standby time. That’s assuming the inside of the sleeping bag is 37 degrees – human body temperature.

6. Sound

soundcharge tee

In theory, talking to your can generate energy to charge a phone. Although to win a substantial amount of battery life from this prototype, you’ll have to scream at the top of your voice. According the lead researcher, Sang-Woo Kim of Sungkyunkwan University’s nanotechnology institute who invented it, it requires 100 decibels to generate 50 milli-volts of electricity. That’s enough to give a Smartphone battery a little support, is still far from what a normal wall plug charger could give you. The researchers are really confident about taking this technology to the next level and making it viable for practical use.

Another one: GotWind’s Sound Charge t-shirt converts sound into electricity. A person wearing this can charge a device battery while thrashing around in the mosh pit. A textbook sized panel of Piezoelectric film in the front acts like a microphone. It absorbs sound waves and converts them into electricity through the compression of interlaced quartz crystals. This electricity is then fed into an external power bank. [Video]

7. Shake

There was a time when kinetic wrist watches were the fad. Today, how cool would it be if you could shake up your phone for an extra boost?
So, Researchers at Virginia Tech tried to make a charger that draws energy from a piezoelectric material and could convert vibrations into energy. They say, when it is done, simple taps on the phone screen or keyboard would produce enough energy to deal with emergencies.

But, long before the researchers announced this, the world had seen nPower PEG. Apparently, it is the world’s 1st human-powered charger for hand-held electronics. It gives you access to backup battery power even when you’re away from home by using the energy you generate while walking, running, or biking to charge your smart phone, music player, GPS, or other devices.

Ah! I’ve written too much for the day. Remember to check back next week for the 2nd part of this post. 

Cassowary – The Most Dangerous Bird on Earth

By Anupum Pant

Cassowary

Flightless like the largest bird that ever lived on earth, there is a bird which looks like a turkey-ostrich crossbreed and is significantly smaller than the former. Yet it is one of the largest birds still alive. Unpredictable and aggressive are the two words that describe it. Zoo keepers find it extremely hard to deal with it, as handling it without getting injured in the process is difficult.

Casuarius casurarius, or simply Cassowary has been named the world’s most dangerous bird in the Guinness Book of Records. Found in the rain forests of Australia and New Guinea, these shy birds can slice you into two pieces with a single fatal kick (slightly exaggerated). Despite its stellar self-defense kicks, it has been unsuccessful in protecting itself from humans. It remains on the endangered species list.

The main reason for its population decline is the clearance of its habitat. Other things that contribute to the decline are deaths from motor vehicles, dog attacks, hunters and wild pigs.

How does it kill? – 3 ways

1. It will chase you down: Cassowary can run at speeds up to 50 kph.

2. 12 cm long claws will rip you:

“The inner or second of the three toes is fitted with a long, straight, murderous nail which can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease. There are many records of natives being killed by this bird.” – Wikipedia

3. High Jump: A Cassowary can jump up to a height 1 meter. Remember, at this point, its 12 cm claws can reach a very vulnerable point.

They aren’t demons

In case of an encounter, turn your back and It could kill you. But there is a great chance it won’t if you keep facing it.

Cassowary kicks on video:

Moving Light Captured on Camera

By Anupum Pant

The speed of light

In vacuüm, light travels 299,792,458 meters in a single second. In other words, in a single second it travels 186,000 miles. To establish a  perspective, if I could move that fast, I would circumnavigate the world in 0.13 seconds. A hypothetical jet plane would take more than 2 days to do the same. In short, it is fast. It is the fastest – Nothing beats light.

If you try to record moving light on a home camera, you’d fail miserably. That is because normally they can roll only about 30 to 60 frames per second. In fact, you’d not even be able to capture a fast-moving ball without motion blur, forget recording moving light. To record fast things you need fast cameras that can roll several thousands of frames every second.

In the past, high-speed-cameras, rolling film at thousands of frames per second have been able to record bullets moving in slow motion, bubbles bursting, people getting punched and what not! MythBusters use such cameras for almost every experiment they do.

But light travels a million times faster than bullets. Till the year 2011, to capture moving light on film was considered an impossible feat; and then, a team from MIT media lab invented this.

A 1,000,000,000,000 FPS camera

A camera that can record at a speed equivalent to a theoretical one-trillion-FPS camera was invented by a team at MIT media labs in the year 2011. This camera can record light moving through space, in slow motion! To look at what it can do, you’ll have to watch the video below. In the video, the researcher explains its mechanism in detail.

It is theoretically impossible to craft a mechanical device that can roll film at such extremely high speeds. To tackle this physical limit, these geniuses invented a whole setup containing several cameras sensors that work together to make this feat possible.

Note: In reality, the camera doesn’t record the footage of a trillionth of a second. It is a composite video of lines of different pulses of a laser recorded and stitched together. The time it takes to compile enough data for the video, is more than what it takes the light to travel from one end to another.

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The Day When The Whole World Saw Auroras

By Anupum Pant

The record of geomagnetic storms has been kept for around 160 years now and among all the flares observed till date, the Carrington event was the most powerful ever.

The Carrington super flare

The 1859 Solar Superstorm, or the Carrington Event, was an enormous magnetic shock wave sent towards the Earth by the Sun. It caused a massive disturbance in Earth’s magnetosphere. The effects of this super flare observed here on earth were literally awesome.

Effects

Story: While studying sunspots on Sept 1, 1859 Richard Carrington, an astronomer observed a blinding white light that appeared over local parts of the sun. And 5 minutes later, it was all gone. As if nothing had happened.

Before dawn the next day, skies all over planet lit up. The lights in the sky were so brilliant that people said they could read text like they could read it in the daylight. Red, green and purple auroras pulsated even at  tropical areas like Cuba, Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii. The whole world saw auroras that day.

An American newspaper reported:

The phenomenon was very similar to the display on Sunday night, though at times the light was, if possible, more brilliant, and the prismatic hues more varied and gorgeous. The light appeared to cover the whole firmament, apparently like a luminous cloud, through which the stars of the larger magnitude indistinctly shone. The light was greater than that of the moon at its full, but had an indescribable softness and delicacy that seemed to envelop everything upon which it rested. Between 12 and 1 o’clock, when the display was at its full brilliancy, the quiet streets of the city resting under this strange light, presented a beautiful as well as singular appearance. – from Wikipedia.

Telegraph systems all over the world went out of control. Some discharges shocked telegraph operators and fires were reported at few places. Due to the temporary disturbance in the magnetic field, current was induced in the wires and machines disconnected from the batteries still allowed telegraphs to be sent.

Luckily in those times, we did not have any satellites, or more importantly, any humans up in the sky; they would have been fried.

What if it happened now?

Today, electronic technologies have become far more refined and have moved into the common man’s life. If an event of such sizes takes place now, power lines and long-distance telephone cables could get seriously affected by it. A similar event of a little lesser intensity happened in 1989 – It was Friday the 13th and several ill effects were experienced.

Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could get disrupted. Humans in space would be in great danger. Astronauts, after having observed a flash of light would have only minutes to find shelter – probably a properly shielded spacecraft.

Scientists say that there is little we can do to protect our things from a storm like this. It is estimated that re-occurrence of a Carrington class event today, could cost the world economy around $2.6 trillion.

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